Oh, by the way, Obama attributed his problems to the press and media. Yes, he always blames someone . He is never responsible. What a pathetic personality.
I prefer Prager to Obama any day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPVDfhXQfw8
Virtually every Obama foreign policy initiative is based on either caving or allowing dictators to thrive and survive. (See 1, ,1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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Lindsay Graham has suspended his campaign. Lindsay told it like it is, he never wavered from a consistent message regarding national security and, though he was never going to be nominated, he was a refreshing voice. He also had a military background, visited The Middle East more than all the other candidates combined and had the guts so many of the other candidates, including our president, lack.
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One of my friends and fellow memo reader challenges my view of Cruz: "Don’t jump the gun on Cruz. The only people I know that have trouble with him are the extreme lefties and they will not vote for anyone we favor. The people on the inside of the party in Washington don’t represent the electorate at this time. He’s very much American and why don’t you ask the folks that showed up in Bloomingdale about him. F------"
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Dick
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1)
Syria’s Yellow Brick Road
The U.S. gives up toppling Assad to win Russia’s support at the U.N.
The U.N. Security Council unanimously endorsed a political road map for Syria on Friday, and in the world of fantasy diplomacy that the Obama Administration inhabits this apparently counts as a victory. Syria is to have a comprehensive cease-fire, a negotiated political transition, “inclusive and non-sectarian” governance, free and fair elections and a new constitution—all within 18 months. As for how these goals will be achieved, those are “modalities” to be worked out.
Good luck. The U.N. spent the early years of the Syrian civil war attempting to arrange cease-fires and political settlements, all of which collapsed in the zero-sum struggle between the Assad regime and its opponents. Two rounds of talks in Geneva between the warring sides collapsed in acrimony—and that was before Islamic State (ISIS) became a major player on the Sunni side.
Today no country is volunteering ground troops to monitor and enforce a prospective cease-fire, and a U.N. peacekeeping mission would be too dangerous. No country is about to make even an indirect approach to ISIS, not that the group is amenable to a negotiated outcome. Bashar Assad is now gloating that he won’t have to leave office, and with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah fighting his battle he has every reason to believe he’ll be able to hold on to power in his rump state.
American Enterprise Institute Critical Threats Project Director Fred Kagan on the futility of the Syrian, Yemeni and Libyan peace talks. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Why then the new diplomatic push? Secretary of State John Kerry boasts that the U.N. agreement was the result of three-months of diplomatic “force-feeding,” and the Administration seems especially pleased that it worked with Russia to get a unanimous resolution. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was more realistic when he said after Friday’s vote that “I’m not too optimistic about what has been achieved today.”
Mr. Lavrov can still take satisfaction in the concessions he extracted from the U.S. Mr. Kerry has effectively given up the Administration’s longstanding insistence that Mr. Assad leave office, saying after a Kremlin meeting with Vladimir Putin last week that “the United States and our partners are not seeking so-called regime change as it is known in Syria.”
The current U.S. position is that Mr. Assad is not a fit leader for Syria, but that’s now a political opinion more than a demand. In theory the Syrian people—including its refugees—will get to decide the matter in an election, as if the Alawite Mr. Assad would honor the result if the Sunni majority won.
Mr. Lavrov must also be pleased that Russia’s intervention in Syria is producing this noticeable thaw in relations with the West. The European Union voted last week to extend its sanctions on Russia for an additional six months for its invasion of Ukraine, but nobody should expect the sanctions to last.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is reluctant to extend the sanctions in part because of ties between Italian energy giant Eni and Russia’s Gazprom. France’s conservatives are also backing away from sanctions, with one Republican parliamentarian asking, “How can we ask help from a country against terrorism and at the same time punish it with sanctions?”
All of which means that Russia’s intervention in Syria is aiding its strategic purposes, never mind President Obama’s assurances that the Kremlin was entering a quagmire. For the U.S., the U.N. vote is another triumph of wishes over facts, much like this month’s climate deal in Paris. At best it gives Mr. Obama a talking point that lets him say the Administration is pressing for a diplomatic solution in Syria.
As for the Syrian people, the U.N. vote is another token symbol of international concern that will do nothing to end the slaughter or defeat their killers in ISIS and the Assad regime. They deserve better, but their deliverance will have to await an American President who believes that foreign policy should be something more than diplomatic misdirection and political vanity.
1a)
ISIS Sets Its Sights on the East
By Vijeta Uniyal
- This month's ISIS manifesto claims India as part of Islamic Caliphate and, referring to the recent resurgence of Hindus in the country, states: “a movement of Hindus is growing who kill Muslims who eat beef.”
- ISIS flags and insignia are regularly displayed at protest rallies and religious gatherings in the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir.
- Indian officials seem just as afraid of calling Islamist terror by its rightful name as their Western counterparts. Instead, they appear to be trying to distract the public by throwing money at ineffective social welfare programs. Perhaps these officials hope the public will think that at least “something” is being done.
The Islamic State (ISIS) is apparently planning to subjugate and conquer the ancient civilizations of the East as part of its worldwide jihad.
The Islamic State's newly-released manifesto contains, among the ideological positions and strategic objectives of the self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate, direct threats to Hindus and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The 130-page English-language manifesto, entitled “Black Flags from the Islamic State (2016),” was uploaded in early December on various online forums sympathetic to the Islamic State. Previously, in July 2015, ISIS had circulated another document declaring its ambitions of expanding its Jihad into India.
This month's ISIS manifesto claims India as part of Islamic Caliphate and, referring to the recent resurgence of Hindus in the country, states: “a movement of Hindus is growing who kill Muslims who eat beef.”
Hindu groups have lately been campaigning for a national ban on the slaughter cows, in keeping with the religious sentiments attached to the animal, which most Hindus consider sacred.
The social and political movement of reviving Hinduism in India was also strengthened by the historic election, 18 months ago, of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his nationalist BJP party.
The ISIS manifesto mentions India's Prime Minister Modi as a “right-wing Hindu nationalist who worships weapons and is preparing his people for a future war against Muslims.”
Modi's government wants to reduce India's dependence on foreign defense suppliers by encouraging foreign firms to set up manufacturing operations in the country. Encouraged by the deregulation of the defense sector, several foreign companies have set up production lines and set up joint ventures with local partners.
Undeterred by the current losses on the ground in Syria and Iraq, ISIS propaganda on social media has repeatedly proclaimed the group's dream of an Islamic Caliphate or theocratic empire ruling the entire Indian subcontinent, parts of East Asia, the Middle Eastern and North and Central Africa.
The new manifesto recognizes the Mumbai 2008 massacre, which targeted tourist, commercial and cultural targets in the city — including a Jewish synagogue — as the blueprint for the Paris attacks. “In the centre of Paris,” the booklet states, “some Mujahideen holding AK-47s copied the Mumbai attacks' style of shooting through the window of a Cafe bar (where alcohol and food was served), then the people fell on the floor, so they threw a grenade into the building.”
After last month's Paris attacks, India issued a nation-wide alert.
Seeking to broaden the 'intellectual' horizon of its sympathetic readers, the manifesto recommends earlier texts published by ISIS such as; “Black Flags from the East,” “Black Flags from Rome” and “Black Flags from Palestine.”
According to India's intelligence agencies, which monitor ISIS activities, at least 20 Indians have joined the ranks of the Islamic State as fighters in Iraq and Syria, and an additional 150 people are being monitored because of suspected involvement in activities related to ISIS. Since 2005, India has lost over 7,400 civilians and 3,200 security personnel to terrorism.
Support for ISIS is not, however, limited to a handful of identifiable operatives. ISIS flags and insignia are regularly displayed at protest rallies and religious gatherings in the Muslim-majority province of Kashmir. In July, the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Fitr was marked by widespread vandalism and stone-throwing, carried out by rioters waving Pakistani, Palestinian and ISIS flags.
The Islamic State's social media operation also bears at least one Indian signature. Last year, police in southern Indian city of Bangalore arrested a 24-year-old engineer who operated one of the main Twitter accounts associated with ISIS. The India-based Twitter account had 17,700 followers and circulated ISIS propaganda, including beheading videos.
The stated ambitions of ISIS to make India part of Muslim empire are not based on the historic Islamic conquest of India, mainly from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, but are rooted in established, mainstream Islamic theology, central to an Islamic end-of-time prophecy in the hadith. Those reports of the sayings and actions Islam's prophet Mohammad — collectively called Ghazwa-e-Hind — predict a final battle with India, and resulting in victory over the Hindus by the invading Muslim armies.
Instead of tackling the problem head-on, Indian Muslim organizations continue to deny the presence of the Islamic State and its affiliates in the country. On December 9, 2015, the umbrella body of Muslim organizations, the All India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat (AIMMM), issued a press release calling the reports of ISIS's penetration into India “baseless and misleading.”
In 2014, this photo of Muslim ISIS supporters in India's Tamil Nadu state went viral on Twitter.
In 2014, this photo of Muslim ISIS supporters in India's Tamil Nadu state went viral on Twitter.
Despite regular video footage broadcast by Indian news channels, showing Muslims regularly carrying ISIS flags during religious gatherings and protests in the Muslim majority region of Kashmir, Muslim leaders maintained their claim that “ISIS does not exist in Kashmir.” Instead, they portray themselves as victims of an elaborate conspiracy hatched by the Indian security forces to “pave the way for their large-scale arrests.”
Prime Minister Modi's government has reacted to the heightened security threat posed by ISIS with a new counter-terrorism strategy. The measures could best be described as an attempt at “social engineering,” with the government pledging more spending on education and employment programs in the hope of keeping Muslim youths away from the influence of radical Islamists. The problem with this approach is that it addresses a problem that is not relevant. Most of the Indian Muslims known to have joined the ranks of ISIS seem to come from affluent families and hold professional degrees. All of them had the means to travel abroad to join ISIS — in a country where majority of people earn less than 3 dollars a day. Poor people are too busy just trying to exist.
If poverty were driving people to commit acts of terrorism, why are Indian's Hindus not lining up to join their version of “jihadi” outfits?
Indian lawmakers and officials are trapped in the same politically correct — if in every other way incorrect — assumption as their Western counterparts. They also seem just as scared of calling Islamist terror by its rightful name. Instead, they appear to be trying to distract the public by throwing taxpayer money at ineffective social welfare programs. Perhaps these officials hope the public will think that at least “something” is being done and fail to see that, instead of countering ISIS, in they are really just fleeing from the problem.
Vijeta Uniyal is an Indian current affairs analyst based in Europe.
1b) Cuba One Year After Obama’s Olive Branch
Thousands of political arrests, migrants flee, and Russia wants in. Sound familiar?
This month marks the first anniversary of President Obama’s unilateral rapprochement with Cuba. Upon making the Dec. 17 announcement, the Obama administration immediately moved to ease restrictions on American travel to the island and, by extension, boost revenues for the owners of its tourist industry: the Cuban military.
In May the U.S. removed Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, even though the dictator Gen. Raúl Castro harbors known terrorists, including the U.S. fugitive Joanne Chesimard, once a member of the now defunct Black Liberation Army and a convicted cop-killer.
In August the U.S. reopened an embassy in Havana. Last week it announced a bilateral agreement to restore direct flights between the U.S. and Cuba.
Cuba’s dissidents have been hard hit. Days after the new U.S. policy was announced,Danilo Maldonado, the Cuban performance artist known as El Sexto, was arrested for mocking the Castros. He spent 10 months in jail, and Amnesty International named him a prisoner of conscience.
The Havana-based Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation documented 7,686 political arrests in 2015 through Nov. 30. On that day Mr. Maldonadosummarized the effects of the Obama détente: “There have been no positive changes. The U.S. has given away too much at the normalization talks, and that has let Cuba continue its repression.”
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, echoes those sentiments. “I was particularly shocked,” he said last week, “that a number of people, including members of the Ladies in White,” a dissident group, “were arrested on Human Rights Day, on 10 December. This shows an extraordinary disdain for the importance of human rights on the part of the Cuban authorities.”
In 2014 Cuba passed a new foreign-investment law to boost capital inflows. Yet the government retained the power to confiscate assets for “public” or “social” ends, and it has gained a reputation for arbitrarily jailing foreign businessmen. Writing in the fall 2015 issue of World Affairs, José Azel, a senior scholar at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, noted that despite the investment law’s “vaulting language, more than a year later only a handful of investments have been approved.”
Perhaps capitalists are not all that important when Russia is itching to get back into Cuba in a big way. In 2014 Russian President Vladimir Putin forgave $32 billion in Cuban debt to the Soviet Union. Then he converted the remaining $3.5 billion due Moscow into a line of credit for energy and industrial projects on the island.
In return, among other things, the Kremlin gets to use Cuba to establish a station supporting Russia’s global navigation satellite system (Glonass), a rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). In a Nov. 17 website post for the Cuban Transition Project at the University of Miami, research associate Hans de Salas-del Valle observed that “the installation of a signals facility in Cuba is part of a broader strategy to integrate Cuba into Russia’s space program.” He added that “Moscow has publicly expressed interest in establishing a satellite launch site in Cuba.”
Mr. Obama agrees with Raúl that the U.S. should lift the embargo. But Cuba can already buy food and medicine from the U.S. and, practically speaking, there are few limits on American travel, though such travel is disguised as “cultural exchange.” What’s left of the embargo is a ban on access to bank credit, and legal claims for almost $8 billion in property stolen by the revolution.
The Castros have a solution to the latter. They claim the embargo cost Cuba over $100 billion since 1959, so the U.S. actually owes them.
That’s laughable. What’s not so funny is Cuba’s credit score. Even after the Russian write-down, Havana is still in arrears to the rest of the world—ex-U.S.—on some $85 billion of debt. Countries are not lining up to lend more. The Castros need a new mark. That’s where Mr. Obama comes in.
Cuba’s economy, heavily dependent on Venezuelan oil and China aid, is unable to support the nation. According to Mr. de Salas-del Valle, “the assumption that economic engagement with the Castro regime will spare the U.S. an immigration crisis across the Florida Straits appears to be the underlying if unstated motivation for the White House’s unprecedented courtship of Raúl Castro.” If so, it’s a gross miscalculation. The policy has emboldened the dictator.
Some 4,000 Cuban migrants trying to get to the U.S. are now trapped in Costa Rica because Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a Castro pal, will not allow them to move north. They’re fleeing tyranny for sure. But they couldn’t have arrived there without, at a minimum, the tacit approval of the Castro regime.
Those refugees are being used as Castro pawns to create a humanitarian crisis and pressure the U.S. for credit and multilateral aid. Havana is betting Mr. Obama will deliver.
1c)At Last Moment, Iran Refuses To Fulfill Its Obligations Under JCPOA, Demands That U.S. Lift Sanctions First, In Complete Contradiction To The Agreement
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8905.htm
At the last moment, Iran is refusing to fulfill its obligations under the JCPOA. According to the agreement, it is now Iran's turn to meet specific obligations, and once the IAEA confirms it has done so, the West will take measures to ease or suspend some of the sanctions.[1] However, Iran is now demanding to make an essential change to the agreement so that the U.S. first acts to lift the sanctions and only then will Iran meet its obligations. In a December 18, 2015 interview with The New Yorker, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that some political issues still need to be resolved, hinting at the sanctions, before Iran fulfills its commitments. He also said that Iran is "not dismantling anything, only uninstalling some centrifuges and reconstructing the Arak reactor."
The following are excerpts from the interview:[2]
"Where does the Iran nuclear deal stand? What is your timetable to complete steps pledged in dismantling part of the program?
Zarif: We're not dismantling anything. We are uninstalling some centrifuges and reconstructing the Arak reactor, modernizing it. . . .[3] The remaining activities that we need undertake will not take more than several days, less than two weeks.
"Is there a projected day for implementation?
Zarif: Well, we need to resolve still some political issues. . . . There are obligations on the other side that we have to make sure are implemented before we start the final stage of our implementation. . . . So once these are finalized, the practical measures that need to be implemented on our side will start. So I'm not saying two weeks from today. I'm saying two weeks from the time we settle all the difficulties.
"What does Iran see as the challenges to implementation that remain?
Zarif: I think the most important challenge that remains is this mentality in Washington that sanctions have been an asset, and some people want to find even an excuse to keep them or an excuse to reintroduce them. I don't know whether they've looked at the record of how sanctions actually produce exactly the opposite of what they wanted to produce."
"About three dozen senators have written a letter to the President and called on him not to lift sanctions.
Zarif: They didn't want the President to accept the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to begin with. There are more than three dozen members of our parliament who do not want us to implement J.C.P.O.A. So I think that we're even."
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