Obama and ISIS. What Is The Truth About Iran's Capture Of Our Naval; Boats?

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ISIS, a creature of Obama's incompetence? (See 1 below.)
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It does not take a rocket scientist to understand this. (See 2 below.)
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We are actually not  rudderless because, I believe,  Obama is purposely steering the ship of state onto the shoals.  (See 3 below.)

Former CIA Director Woolsey has warned us several times and I have reported about this an equal number of times. (See 3a below.)
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The navy encounter with ran is beginning to leak out and clarify itself.  (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)How the Obama Administration Let ISIS Happen

By Luke Coffey /

In 2010, after the White House failed to secure an agreement with Baghdad that would have allowed sizable U.S. forces to remain in Iraq, Obama declared the war in Iraq over. (Photo: OlivierDouliery/CNP/AdMe/SIPA)

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s recent op-ed regarding the campaign against ISIS confirmed what many already knew: When confronting ISIS, the Obama administration does the bare minimum required to make it look as if it is doing something, while in reality it is doing very little.

President Barack Obama entered office with a hell-bent desire to “end wars” with no care as to how he would do this.

President Barack Obama entered office with a hell-bent desire to “end wars” with no care as to how he would do this—or to what the geo-strategic consequences might be if it was done poorly.

In 2010, after the White House failed to secure an agreement with Baghdad that would have allowed sizable U.S. forces to remain in Iraq, Obama declared the war in Iraq over. As subsequent events have shown, a war is not over simply because the president of the United States says it is.

Instead of a responsible phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the U.S. cut and run. The White House says they did not have a choice—that it was Iraq that refused to sign an agreement to allow U.S. troops to remain. But the truth is that Obama did not use all of America’s political, economic, security, and diplomatic clout in Baghdad to secure an agreement for U.S. troops to remain. When the Iraqis said no, Obama was only too happy to oblige.

Five years later, ISIS controls huge swathes of the Sunni heartland, including Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul. Iran has more influence in Baghdad than ever before and calls the shots in the Shia-dominated southern part of the country. The Kurds, who were forced to fight—literally—for their livelihoods, have essentially carved out a de facto nation-state that includes important oil-producing cities like Kirkuk.

Put simply, Iraq is a mess.

Obama’s response to the rise of ISIS and the deterioration of Iraq has been incremental. He has chosen to do the bare minimum required to make it look as though he is doing something, but in actuality he is doing next to nothing at all.

Incremental troop increases to Iraq, a few thousand trainers in Iraq, and an aircraft carrier re-positioned in the Persian Gulf do not constitute a strategy.

The drip of U.S. forces back into the region is absent of a strategy and is the hallmark of a president in denial about the true security challenges the U.S. faces in the region, not only by ISIS, but also by Iran.

Ashton Carter’s recent remarks show how back-footed the U.S. is in fighting ISIS. His answer: the possibility of more U.S. troops in the region. How many troops? What will their mission be? Is there now a strategy?

If Carter knows the answers to any of these questions, he does not say.

Obama has little interest in confronting or desire to confront the threat ISIS poses. Having won his Nobel Peace Prize already and “ended” the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he will ride out the remaining months of his tenure by incrementally positioning U.S. forces in the region. This is a façade.

The next U.S. president will inherit a festering situation in the Middle East that is a result of Obama’s quixotic view of the world coupled with his incessant indecisiveness.

As research from The Heritage Foundation has pointed out, taking on ISIS in Iraq and checking them in Syria will require a significant ground force component. It will also require a strategy to help Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey with the refugee crisis and their security.

It will also require backing the Kurds with more military firepower, getting the Iraqi army back into the fight, and helping the political elite in Baghdad overcome Iraq’s toxic sectarian divisions that push Sunnis to ISIS and Shias to Iran.

More importantly, any new strategy will require U.S. leadership in the region that has been absent for years. Dithering has its consequences.

Until the U.S. decides to get in it to win it and develops a strategy with all the resources needed to implement it, ISIS will continue its march

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Iran’s Atomic Energy Chief Says Deal With World Powers Enabled Acceleration of Nuclear Activities

 David Daoud

A senior Iranian official said that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed with world powers enabled the Islamic Republic to accelerate some of its nuclear activities, Iran’s semi-official state news agency Mehr reported on Wednesday.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that, among other things, the JCPOA has allowed Iran to grow its reserve of “nuclear material” from 550 to 770 tons.

“Exploration, extraction, enrichment, research reactors, and R and D are the major components of the nuclear program; JCPOA did not completely stymie the program, and we have only been slower in terms of progress,” Mr. Salehi told a meeting of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations. “In other activities even we have accelerated the pace, including in the volume of nuclear material which was 550 ton before, now we have 770 tons of nuclear material; this is a fact known to IAEA. With heavy water, we secured the project along with R and D, extraction and exploration.”

Salehi also stressed that claims of a complete suspension of Tehran’s nuclear activities were baseless. He noted that the JCPOA had left the main components of the program intact, in addition to providing Iran’s nuclear activities official UN Security Council recognition.

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3)

The U.S. Has No Global Strategy

The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

New York

Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.

Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.

The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”

Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.

Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”

But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”

In 2008 the Bush administration gritted its teeth and reached a Status of Forces Agreement with Mr. Maliki, keeping U.S. troops in place through 2011. Whether a second agreement was in the cards we may never know. “It was clear from the Bush experience that it was going to take the deep involvement of the president, really working the phones and twisting arms. And my impression is that that didn’t happen.”

Mr. Gates, 72, is making the rounds on behalf of his new book, “A Passion for Leadership,” drawing on his experience reforming large institutions, including the CIA under the first President Bush, the Pentagon and, his favorite job, as president of Texas A&M University from 2002-06.

As we settle at a table at the bar in midtown Manhattan’s London hotel, Mr. Gates, the freshly minted author of a management book, appears less than impressed with the greatest management book of all time (by its author’s own estimate), “The Art of the Deal.”

Donald Trump “brings the same skill set to leadership in the public sector that I would bring to the New York real-estate market,” he says. “The skills don’t transfer. When he talks about making other countries do things, it’s just completely unrealistic.”

Mr. Gates says he likes some of this year’s candidates, but the ones he likes aren’t getting traction. Both parties could learn from Ronald Reagan. “The country was in real trouble in 1980. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. Interest rates were in the high teens. Inflation was in the teens. But Reagan ran on a campaign of optimism—better days are coming.”

The Journal’s own reviewer said Mr. Gates’s book is one all the candidates should read. Mr. Gates himself says, “People are fed up with their daily encounters with bureaucracies. It’s just one hassle after another. The candidate who can say ‘we can fix it’ would be tapping into another deep vein of frustration.”

His book is full of cogent advice and war stories, most testifying to one of life’s less-advertised facts: The higher you go, the more power is about persuading, cajoling and stroking “people you don’t like.” Mr. Gates’s minimal high regard for Congress is evident, as it was in his earlier book, which recorded frequent revulsion at Congress’s partisan pettiness while American troops were dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His own upbringing in 1950s Kansas was “idyllic,” he says. His early life revolved around family, church, school and the Boy Scouts of America (an organization, incidentally, he now heads). He eventually became a grad student, specializing in Russian and Soviet history. He aimed to teach but on a lark signed up for a CIA interview. “I was amazed when they offered me a job.”

The offer was a chancy one. The agency couldn’t dispense draft deferments, but it had an arrangement with the U.S. Air Force: If he survived officer-candidate school and obtained his commission, he would eventually be seconded to the CIA. “If you failed out, you went straight to Vietnam.”

Mr. Gates’s mandatory Air Force stint took him to the “Palm Beach of missile bases,” a Minuteman facility 60 miles from the attractions of Kansas City. Responsibility came quickly, he jokes, because he was the only one who could “pronounce the names of our targets.” Later, as a young CIA analyst, he would earn a Ph.D. in his off-hours, a degree that came in handy exactly once in his career. “I think it helped tip the balance” when Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, chose him to work in the White House.

Mr. Gates has served under eight presidents. He was a protégé of both Mr. Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft. Foreign-policy types would label him a “realist.”

He doesn’t believe the U.S. can solve the world’s problems, but it had better be ready to take the lead in managing them. He laments that, after the first Iraq war in 1991, the Iraqi army didn’t use the opportunity to overthrow Saddam: Instead Shiites and Kurds staged a revolt that the U.S. was not going to assist.

In supporting the second Iraq war, he gave a speech saying that if 100,000 U.S. troops were still in place after six months “we’ve made a disastrous mistake.”

Unbidden, he mentions today that, along with the entire Obama national-security team, he opposed the president’s insistence that Hosni Mubarak of Egypt step down. The White House was also unwise, he adds, to publicly insist that Bashar Assad must go after the Syrian uprising. “I don’t think presidents should commit to things that they have no idea how to make happen,” he says.

“The administration got caught up in the Arab Spring. They misread it pretty badly. There were no institutions to support the kind of reform efforts that the street demonstrators were calling for in the overthrow of these authoritarian governments.” Worse, it sent a message to friendly regimes facing potential instability: “If you have demonstrations in your capital, the U.S. will throw you under the bus. So it disconcerted the Saudis and all our Arab allies.”

Mr. Gates offers a mixed assessment of the Iran nuclear deal, but his biggest complaint is its missing corollary—the lack of a strong signal that the U.S. remains committed to Iran’s geopolitical containment. “We cut deals with the Soviets [on nuclear weapons] but at the same time pursued very aggressive policies” to counter Soviet meddling around the world. “I don’t know why we didn’t do the same things with Iran.” The result, he says, is that allies like the Saudis and Israelis now fear the U.S. is deliberately acquiescing in Iran’s emergence as the new hegemon in the region.

Mr. Gates’s up-close association with nuclear weapons early in his career, and his long professional association with the intelligence community, have not left him in any doubt about the value of either. The presence of Iran, North Korea and Vladimir Putin on the world stage shows why nuclear deterrence remains essential to keeping Americans safe.

Covert capability has proved its worth too, he says. American presidents need to understand that the capability must be maintained so the president is not “just throwing the dice” the next time a hostage rescue is called for. As to the controversial eavesdropping capabilities of the National Security Agency, he says with a laugh, “Google and Amazon know a hell of a lot more about you than NSA does, because they actually care.”

Where he faults the intelligence agencies is their record in failing to anticipate events. “The intelligence community is no better at predicting the future than a crystal ball. During the Cold War, human spies played a big, constructive role in getting us information on enemy weapons systems still in development. Where human spies provide very little help, historically, is on what the other fellow’s intentions are. Through the whole Cold War, we never had a source inside the Kremlin who could tell us what was going on inside Politburo meetings. I don’t think the Soviets had anything comparable on our side.”

Nowadays Russian President Putin, himself a former KGB operative, never tires of claiming that the U.S. is the fount of global disorder—as if Saddam’s 19-year career of making war on his neighbors and his own people was “stability,” as if the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt, Syria and Libya were stimulated by Jen Psaki’s State Department press briefings.

Mr. Gates says the real problem with U.S. policy has been the absence of any clear strategy like the one that guided the U.S. in the Cold War. “We all implicitly accepted [George] Kennan’s view that if we contained the Soviets long enough, their internal contradictions would finally lead to their collapse, even if nobody had any idea when.

“If you accept the premise that we face a generation-long period of turbulence and violence in the Middle East, the lack of an overarching strategy for how you react to a region in flames is a problem. Are there fires we should just let burn out? Who are our friends? Who should we support?”

The answers might not be the right thing to tell a Marine mourning a buddy lost in Fallujah. But if Mr. Gates’s time in the hot seat should have taught us anything, it’s that we need better answers to these questions.

Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal’s Business World column.

3a)

U.S. utilities worry about cyber cover after Ukraine grid attack

By Thomson Reuters

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Photo by APSystem control center operator Ryan Cox sits at his computer workstation at an AEP Transmission Operations Center in New Albany, Ohio. Like most big utilities, AEP's power plants, substations and other vital equipment are managed by a network that is separated from the company's business software with layers of authentication, and is not accessible via the Internet. Creating that separation, and making sure that separation is maintained, is among the most important things utilities can do to protect the grid's physical assets.

(Reuters) — U.S. utilities are looking hard at their cyber vulnerabilities and whether they can get insurance to cover what could be a multibillion-dollar loss after hackers cut electric power to more than 80,000 Ukrainians last month.

The Dec. 23 incident in Ukraine was the first cyber attack to cause a power outage, and is one of just a handful of incidents in which computer hacking has caused physical effects on infrastructure rather than the loss or theft of electronic data.

A similar attack in the United States could cripple utilities and leave millions of people in the dark, costing the economy more than $200 billion, an insurance study estimated last year.

Security experts, insurance brokers, insurers and attorneys representing utilities told Reuters that the Ukraine attack has exposed long-standing ambiguity over which costs would be covered by insurance in various cyber attack scenarios.

"People in the insurance industry never did a great job clarifying the scope of coverage," said Paul Ferrillo, an attorney with Weil, Gotshal & Manges L.L.P. who advises utilities.

Cyber insurance typically covers the cost of attacks involving stolen personal data. Some general property and liability policies may cover physical damage from cyber attacks, but insurers do not always provide clear answers about coverage for industrial firms, said Ben Beeson, a partner with broker Lockton Cos. L.L.C.

That has led to some unease among U.S. utilities.

"When you get these kind of headline-grabbing cyber incidents, there is obviously a flurry of interest," said Dawn Simmons, an executive with Associated Energy & Gas Insurance Services Ltd., or AEGIS, a U.S. mutual insurer that provides coverage to its 300 or so members.

Getting a policy that includes cyber property damage is not cheap.

Sciemus Cyber Ltd., a specialty insurer at the Lloyd's of London insurance market, charges energy utilities roughly $100,000 for $10 million in data breach insurance. The price balloons to as much as seven times that rate to add coverage for attacks that cause physical damage, said Sciemus Chief Executive Rick Welsh.

Industry warnings

Security experts have warned for several years that a cyber attack could cause power outages due to the growing reliance on computer technology in plants that is accessible from the Internet.

In the Ukraine attack, hackers likely gained control of systems remotely, then switched breakers to cut power, according to an analysis by the Washington-based SANS Institute. Ukraine's state security service blamed Russia for the attack, while U.S. cyber firm iSight Partners linked it to a Russian hacking group known as Sandworm Team.

Utilities are now trying to determine if they have insurance to cover these kinds of attacks, and if not, whether they need it, said Patrick Miller, founder of the Energy Sector Security Consortium, an industry group that shares information on cyber threats.

American Electric Power Company Inc., Duke Energy Corp., Nextera Energy Inc. and PG&E Corp. are among publicly traded utility companies that have warned of their exposure to cyber risks in their most recent annual reports to securities regulators, and that their insurance coverage might not cover all expenses related to an attack.

Representatives with AEP, Duke and PG&E declined to disclose the limits of their insurance. Officials with Nextera could not be reached for comment.

The potential costs of an attack in the United States are huge. Last year, Lloyd's and the University of Cambridge released a 65-page study estimating that simultaneous malware attacks on 50 generators in the Northeastern United States could cut power to as many as 93 million people, resulting in at least $243 billion in economic damage and $21 billion to $71 billion in insurance claims.

The study called such a scenario improbable but "technologically possible."

There are precedents, including the 2010 'Stuxnet' attack that damaged centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment facility, and the 2012 'Shamoon' campaign that crippled business operations at Saudi Aramco and RasGas by wiping drives on tens of thousands of PCs.

In late 2014, the German government reported that hackers had damaged an unnamed steel mill, the first attack that damaged industrial equipment. Details remain a mystery.

Ambiguity over coverage

"It's getting a little competitive just to get a carrier quoting your policy," said Lynda Bennett, an attorney with Lowenstein Sandler L.L.P. who helps businesses negotiate insurance. Some insurers have cut back on cyber coverage in response to the increase in the number and types of breaches, she added.

American International Group Inc., for example, will only write cyber policies over $5 million for a power utility after an in-depth review of its technology, including the supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems that remotely control grid operations.

"There are companies that we have walked away from providing coverage to because we had concerns about their controls," said AIG executive Tracie Grella.

AIG and AEGIS declined to discuss pricing of policies. It seems likely they will find coverage more in demand after the Ukraine attack.

"A lot more companies will be asked by their stakeholders internally: Do we have coverage for this type of thing?" said Robert Wice, an executive with Beazley P.L.C., which offers cyber insurance. "Whether they actually start to buy more or not will depend on pricing."

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4)

The European Union Times - World News, Breaking News

Obama "Destroyed" After US Navy Boats Transporting Top ISIS Terror Leader Captured By Iran

The Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reportingtoday that the Obama regimes "master plan" for dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran has been "completely destroyed" after special naval forces belonging to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution (Sepāh) during the past fortnight captured two "highly armed and sophisticated" United States Navy Riverine Command Boats (RCB) under the command of the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) operating from the US Fifth Fleet inBahrain who were transporting toKuwait for transfer to Syria of a "top level" Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/Daesh) terror commander.

[Critical Note: All of the events described in this report occurred on 29 December, NOT 12 January. The Pentagons information release of the capture of these vessels was done without President Obama's permission and was done so by US military leaders intending to embarrass President Obama on the day of his addressing his nation because he had refused permission for US Navy forces to strike the Iranian forces while they were capturing these boats, but who were, likewise, unaware of Obama's secret ongoing negotiations with Iran.]

According to this report, Iranian special forces naval troops utilizing intelligence gathered by the Joint Information Center (JIC) in Baghdad "discovered/unveiled" the Obama regimes "plot/plan" to secret into Syria from Saudi Arabia a "top level" Islamic State commander to replace the once feared Syrian terror leaderZahran Alloush who was killed on 25 December by an Aerospace Forces airstrike.

Once this Islamic State terror leader was in route to Kuwait aboard one of the US Navy's RCB's, this report continues, an "overwhelming" force of Iranian Sepāh naval troops captured both this terrorist, the US Navy boats (including the American sailors aboard them) transporting him and nearly ignited an all out war when Iranian forces were forced to fire "warning missiles" against the US Navy's aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman attempting to intervene.

Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy overseeing this operation, this report notes, stated about this operation to capture this terror leader that the aircraft carrier USS Truman displayed "unprofessional moves" thus causing him to put Iranian naval forces on high alert and warning: "We prepared our coast-to-sea missiles, missile-launching speedboats and our numerous capabilities, to strike if they made a hostile move".

Upon the US Navy "backing down", this report says, the captured Islamic State terror leader and the American sailors accompanying him were brought to Farsi Island whereupon Admiral Fadavi immediately contacted Deputy Foreign Minister for European and American AffairsMajid Takht Ravanchi.

The importance of Admiral Fadavi contacting Minister Ravanchi, this report explains, was due to his, Ravanchi's,months long ongoing secret negotiations with Obama regime representativeWendy Sherman-who, shockingly, the Obama regime put in charge of these negotiations as her prior experience in international diplomacy was her being a social worker and the former director of State of Maryland's office of child welfare.

Once Wendy Sherman was advised by Minister Ravanchi of Sepāh's capture of this Islamic State terror leader and American sailors, this report continues, the Obama regime immediately "caved/relented" to all of Iran's demands relating to "prisoner/detainee" swaps thus securing for the Iranians everything they had asked for, including the immediate release of seven Iranian nationals languishing in US jails and an agreement that the US would no longer pursue extradition of 14 Iranians for their alleged involvement in purchasing arms from the US to Iran.

Iran on its side, this report says, agreed to release the four dual nationality Iranian-American prisoners it held-the two most important being Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spies Nosratollah KhosraviMatt Trevithick-the most important of them being Khosravi whom the Obama regime requested of Iran, and was granted, that his release be treated separately from the other three.

As an added "bonus/incentive" for Iran keeping "confidential/secret" the US Navy's transporting of this Islamic State terror leader, this report further notes, President Barack Obama, also, lifted the American's decades-old ban on selling aircraft and repair parts to Iran's aviation on Friday (15 January) a full day ahead of the United Nations lifting of sanctions under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)-and which Iran put into immediate effect by ordering billions-of-dollars worth of European Union made Airbus aircraft instead of US made ones.

To how the American mainstream propaganda media has covered up this entire sordid affair including changing its date from 29 December to 12 January proving, once again, the Obama regimes direct complicity in directing the Islamic State terrorists in Syrian and Iraq, this report concludes, borders on the "absolute comical" as the many versions of what exactly they keep saying happened has kept changing by the hour/day/week (US Navy boats broke down/US Navy boats had navigational errors) and they have "deliberately decoupled" the capture of these US Navy boats with the firing upon the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier by Iranian naval forces-but which Admiral Fadavi bluntly stated about: "The incident [Iran firing missiles against the USS Harry Truman] occurred during Iran's seizure Tuesday[29 December] of two US naval boats."