SIGNS/HYPOCRISY OF THE TIMES?
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The connection between Hollywood and Democrats is understandable when one thinks about it. Hollywooders have money, "uge" egos, a desire for power and are very liberal. Democrats are moving so far left the party's headquarters will soon be in Hawaii, they are pious, love celebratory and always need the lifeblood of politics - money.
The two make perfect mates and explains Harvey, at least to me. You decide.
And
Time sequence: Took Hillary 5 minutes to attack the NRA and 5 days to respond to Weinstein episode. NRA contributes nothing to Hillary. Weinstein contributed millions to Clinton's.
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More lies about Iran and our inability to monitor. But trust and do not verify is the new watchword that Obama wanted us to buy. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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This "essay" by George Friedman on telling the truth, manners and issues that must be debated, was sent to me by a long standing friend and fellow memo reader. In his investment career he was one of the savviest. portfolio managers I had the pleasure of having as a client.
Friedman is speaking about: "... the aesthetics of debate, of restraint and respect. I am speaking of the ability to believe something deeply, yet hold open the possibility that you have much to learn from those who disagree – or at least pretend to, which is almost as good. " (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)(Mis)Reading the IAEA reports on Iran's nuclear program
BY TZVI KAHN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week admitted an inconvenient truth. The U.N. watchdog, said Yukiya Amano, has proven unable to verify Iran’s compliance with Section T of the 2015 nuclear deal, which prohibits activities that could contribute to the development of a nuclear explosive device.
This disclosure comes as no surprise to critics of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), who have long noted its failure to secure full access to key military sites such as Parchin, where Tehran previously engaged in weaponization efforts. But Amano’s statement also quashes another myth. Contrary to widespread media reporting, the IAEA has never fully certified Iran’s compliance with the JCPOA.
Since the JCPOA’s implementation in January 2016, the IAEA has issued multiple reports that Iran and key world leaders have described as certifications of Tehran’s JCPOA compliance. “All sides are implementing — so far — fully the agreement, as it has been certified by the IAEA eight times,” said Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, last month. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted that the most recent IAEA report, released in late August, affirmed the “verification of Iran(’s) compliance with (the) JCPOA.”
In fact, none of the IAEA’s reports states that Iran has complied with the JCPOA. Rather, as the JCPOA notes, the IAEA’s mandate primarily entails monitoring and reporting on Tehran’s nuclear-related actions (or lack thereof) pursuant to the JCPOA’s provisions. Individual members of the Joint Commission, the body established by the JCPOA to monitor its implementation, determine independently whether Iran’s reported behavior constitutes JCPOA compliance. The Joint Commission consists of representatives from each JCPOA participant state and the EU.
As Amano put it in March 2017, “we are serving as eyes and ears of the international community, we are on the ground 24/7, and we can state that the JCPOA is being implemented.” At the same time, he added, “it is the responsibility” of each JCPOA member to reach an “interpretation” and a “judgment,” based on the IAEA’s reporting, of “whether or not (Iran is) in compliance.”
The distinction between the roles of the IAEA and of the Joint Commission harbors significant policy implications. Misleading claims of IAEA certification of Iranian compliance implicitly bestow an authoritative legal imprimatur on Tehran’s nuclear activities where none exists. In so doing, they obscure not only key omissions in the IAEA’s reporting of Iranian behavior, but also evidence that Iran has violated the deal’s letter and spirit — problems that should have elicited a response by the IAEA and members of the Joint Commission.
Thus, as the Institute for Science and International Security has documented, Tehran has repeatedly violated the letter of the JCPOA by engaging in research and development of advanced centrifuges. Meanwhile, it has routinely defied U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231 — not to mention the JCPOA’s spirit — by launching more than a dozen ballistic missiles, the key delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons.
In this context, the IAEA’s reports have failed to include key information on a range of compliance issues, including centrifuge R&D, nuclear weaponization activities, IAEA access to military sites, illegal procurement efforts, and the exact amount of heavy water under its control. After the release of the latest report, the IAEA acknowledged that the agency had not inspected any Iranian military sites since the JCPOA’s implementation.
Historically, the IAEA has played a vital role in monitoring the spread of nuclear technology worldwide. But these lapses make it impossible for Joint Commission members to reach reliable, fully informed, and independent JCPOA compliance determinations. Moreover, they erode not only the credibility of the IAEA, but also the integrity of the JCPOA itself, which President Barack Obama once defended by hailing its putatively “unprecedented” transparency and verification measures.
What accounts for the IAEA’s silence and the Joint Commission’s failure to demand greater transparency? The answer likely lies in the weakness of the JCPOA’s enforcement mechanism.
As U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley noted in a recent speech, the JCPOA allows for only one penalty for any JCPOA violation, no matter the size: the reimposition of sanctions. “And if sanctions are re-imposed,” she said, “Iran is then freed from all the commitments it made. Think about that. There is an absurdly circular logic to enforcement of this deal. Penalizing its violations don’t make the deal stronger, they blow it up.”
Thus, in late August, an anonymous IAEA official offered another troubling admission. Asked by Reuters about the IAEA’s failure to secure access to Iran’s military sites, the official cited the possibility that President Trump would use Tehran’s refusal as a rationale to abandon the JCPOA. “We just don’t want to give them an excuse to,” the official said. Effectively, the U.N. watchdog acknowledged that political considerations had interfered with its mission of serving as an independent and unbiased monitor of Iran’s nuclear activities.
But the greater danger may lie in the reticence and inadequate transparency of the IAEA and the Joint Commission. If Tehran achieves a covert nuclear breakout capability as a result of their dereliction, the JCPOA would instantly collapse on its own, no matter the wishes of the U.S. president. It’s an inconvenient truth that defenders of the JCPOA might ponder as they continue to ignore Iran’s ongoing defiance of its provisions.
Tzvi Kahn is a senior Iran analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Report: Iran tried to acquire nuke, missile technology 32 times
German intel report exposes possible Iranian violations of 2015 nuclear deal, shows Iranian attempts to acquired banned technology.
By David Rosenberg
The Iranian regime made dozens of attempts to acquire technology critical for its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, Fox News reported Monday night, a possible violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), better known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Fox News cited three German intelligence reports which indicated that agents working on behalf of Tehran made “32 procurement attempts… that definitely or with high likelihood were undertaken for the benefit of proliferation programs.”
The attempted acquisitions, aimed at technology useful for advancing Iran’s military nuclear program and efforts by the regime to manufacture effective medium-to-long-range delivery systems for a future atomic weapon, reportedly took place in 2016 – after the JCPOA took effect in January of that year. Efforts to obtain such technology are prohibited under the JCPOA.
All of the procurement attempts took place in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia – a state in western Germany including major population centers like Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Essen.
In addition, German intelligence officials noted that not only Iran, but Pakistan, North Korea, and Sudan used “guest academics” to attempt to obtain uranium enrichment technology.
“An example for this type of activity occurred in the sector of electronic technology in connection with the implementation of the enrichment of uranium,” one of the German intelligence documents read.
The German intelligence reports also warned that Iranian efforts to acquire long-range ballistic missile technology continued “unabated”, and if obtained would enable Tehran to directly threaten Europe.
1b)
 | Jonathan Schanzer |  |
Ending America's Paralyzed Iran Policy
by Jonathan Schanzer
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President Donald Trump is taking considerable heat for his expected announcement this week that he will "decertify" the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Critics say he is heedlessly discarding a deal that has been working, and needlessly putting America on a collision course with Iran.
As it turns out, Trump is actually not poised to "rip up the deal." By decertifying it, the president and his advisors are, in fact, signaling their intent to strengthen it, with the help of Congress, so that the deal advances U.S. national security interests. Those interests are key criteria for the certification process, which takes place every 90 days, as laid out in the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA) of 2015. Right now, with the
Iranians hindering inspection of military sites, working feverishly on their ballistic missile program, and banking on the nuclear deal's sunset clauses, which all but guarantee Tehran an advanced nuclear program in roughly a decade, it's hard to argue the deal is working for the United States.
Decertification has the potential to change all of that. The move will plunge Iran and the other parties involved in the nuclear deal into a state of limbo. It will prompt all sides to consider what the deal is worth to them, and what further compromises they may be willing to make to satisfy the national interests of the United States, as laid out by the Trump administration.
Under President Barack Obama, whose foreign-policy legacy was anchored to the nuclear deal, the promise of deferring (not preventing) Iran's nuclear ambitions superseded all else. As a result, the fear of Iran walking away paralyzed Washington and prevented the Obama White House from making even reasonable demands of Tehran. The credible threat of a U.S. response to Iranian aggression was effectively off the table. So was the imposition of meaningful new sanctions, for that matter.
The coming decertification announcement provides an opportunity to break this paralysis. Trump is effectively telling Tehran that he sets the terms for the nuclear deal because he is not tethered to its success the way Obama was. The administration will then have a chance to chart its own Iran policy. As the 60-day INARA review period plays out, Trump can regain US. leverage, establish new red lines on Iranian behavior, and (unlike his predecessor) actually enforce them. If he does it right, he can do all of this without exiting the deal.
In response to decertification, Iran's leadership will undoubtedly threaten to walk away from the table. But it's not that simple. There are benefits the Iranians have yet to reap from the deal—beyond the more than $100 billion in released oil funds—ranging from increased foreign investment to greater integration with the global economy after years of economic isolation. In other words, Iran can still cash in considerably, but not if it balks at Trump's calls to fix the deal.
The Europeans, Russians, and Chinese, are also reluctant to go along with Trump's certification gambit. Some are already howling with disapproval But some are already voicing their willingness to work with the White House. As the primary investors in Iran's recent economic rebound, they have little choice but to try to resolve American concerns.
Of course, even the Chinese, Russians, and Europeans understand that they have a daunting task ahead of them. Iran is on a collision course with the West, one that has little to do with the nuclear file. Rather, it is about what the nuclear deal negotiators chose to ignore: Iran's aggression across the Middle East.
Iran has harassed American ships in the Persian Gulf, held American sailors at gunpoint, bankrolled the murderous Assad regime in Syria, supported the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and furnished the majority of Hezbollah's operating budget. And those are just a few of the highlights.
Tehran's broader efforts to dominate the Middle East are also intensifying. From the deploymentof its Revolutionary Guard Corps to far-flung corners of the region to the conscripting of Shiite irregular proxies to fight or hold territory in Syria and Iraq, Iran's footprint continues to grow.
For American policymakers, Iran's bid for regional hegemony is just as troubling as its nuclear ambitions. Together, they represent a dual Iranian strategy that cannot be separated, despite the P5+1's efforts to do so back in 2015. This is why Trump should build on his decertification announcement with the rollout of a new Iran policy that actively counters these activities.
As it happens, the timing is fortuitous. The administration is slated to complete and roll out its Iran Policy Review by October 31st. If the policy lives up to the hints dropped by senior officials, the United States will once again push back on Iran's malign behavior. If done right, it will do so wherever possible, and by using every pressure point available.
Such a policy would include designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group (a move mandated by statute by October 31st), but also new tranches of Treasury sanctions on Iranian bad actors, and other economic pressure. The financial targets figure to be non-nuclear in nature, to ensure that the United States remains compliant with the nuclear deal. But the pressure should be palpable.
From there, Washington is also expected to actively target Hezbollah, Iran's most powerful and active proxy. The Trump administration and Congress have already signaled they will take aim at Hezbollah's economic interests, while also weakening their positions across the Middle East.
Beyond that, Washington can take further steps to strengthen America's allies, such as the Sunni Arab states and Israel, who are also willing to challenge Iranian aggression. This could mean greater intelligence-sharing and bilateral cooperation, but could also include new hardware and military capabilities. More broadly, the United States must signal that Iranian threats to its allies will be seen as threats to the United States itself.
Admittedly, none of this will be easy. The Middle East is a dangerous region that doesn't respond well to change. The same can be said for Washington in the Trump era. But whatever challenges loom will be the cost of shattering the paralysis in Washington that has reduced America's Iran policy to a false binary of either hewing to the nuclear deal or war.
The choices to counter Iranian aggression before the nuclear deal were many. President George W. Bush understood this at the tail end of his presidency. President Obama even understood this at the beginning of his. But Obama then chose to limit his options through the nuclear deal. This has not served America well. It's time to restore those options. Decertification and a new Iran policy, if done right, can potentially put America back in the driver's seat after two years of going along for the ride.
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2)
Manners and Political Life
By George Friedman
I married a woman born in Australia, of that class that emulated English culture. Loving her as I did, I did not understand the British obsession with table manners. For her, eating a bowl of soup was a work of art, a complex of motions difficult for me to master, and to me incomprehensible in purpose. From the beginning of our love, dinner became for me an exercise of obscure rules governing the movement of food to my mouth. It was a time when conversation was carefully hedged by taboos and obligations. Some things were not discussed at dinner.
Meredith, my wife, grew up elegant and restrained. The enormous body of rules she called good manners rigidly shaped and controlled her passions, which were many. She followed the rules she learned as a child partly out of a desire for others to think well of her, partly because she regarded these manners as the laws of nature. Restraint and propriety were the outward sign of a decent life. The dinner table was where children learned that there were rules to a civilized life. For many, the powers of good manners crushed their souls, leaving them with little but the arrogance of having mastered the rules. For the best, manners provided the frame for a life of free will and self-confidence. Good manners allowed her to be both free and civilized, in the English manner. Her obsession with manners imposed a civility that shaped the way in which people disagreed.
I grew up in the Bronx, a place of fragmented cultures, of immigrants under severe and deforming pressure. There were many cultures – few any longer authentic, all in some way at odds with each other. Meredith’s table was a place of restraint. Mine was a place of combat. The hidden message about food was to eat as much as you can as quickly as you can, because who could really know when you would eat again? The table was a place of intellectual and emotional combat, where grievances were revealed, ideas were challenged and the new world we were in was analyzed for its strangeness. The grammar of debate took precedence over digestion.
She and I appear to many to be mismatched. She has never lost her belief that one must show restraint to appear to fit in. I have never lost my belief that the world is a dangerous place that must be confronted vigorously. Yet underneath these differences we formed a bond, based on a will to live as we will, but distinguishing carefully between who we were in private and who we were in public. This distinction is the root of both sanity and civility. I learned from her that there was a time and place for everything. I learned that without manners, however arbitrary they might be, life was chaos. I learned that combat, in speech and deed, might sometimes be necessary, but that it must be bound by the rituals of civility, or everything is destroyed. I am not sure she learned much from me.
Public Life
Manners make it possible to disagree within a framework of ritual that the disagreement does not lead to unhealable breaches. They allow you to live much of your life in unthinking patterns, freeing you to devote your thoughts to matters more pressing than how to greet someone, or whether to put on a tie. A tie is an example of this. It is a pointless piece of cloth. Yet, in putting it on, the act of dressing becomes complex and focuses you on the task ahead. You are putting on a tie because what you will now do has some importance – at least for me.
I grew up in the 1960s, when manners were held to be a form of hypocrisy, the sign of a false and inauthentic time. When Mickey Mantle hit a home run, he trotted around the bases as if his excellence was incidental and required no celebration. His undoubted elation was contained within ritual. Today, success in sports has fewer limits, and success and contempt for the other side frequently merge. When I was very young, courtship and marriage rituals were ringed with things you did not do. Of course, all these things were done, but they were hidden from the gaze of others. Part of it was shame, but part of it was also respect for manners, even in their breach. It had the added and urgent dimension that the most precious parts of growing up were private things.
The argument was that honesty was the highest virtue. Manners restrained honest expression and therefore denied us our authenticity. What came of this was an assault on the distinction between what we are in private and what we are in public. The great icon of this was Woodstock, where the music was less important than the fact that things that had been ruthlessly private had become utterly public. The shame that is attached to bad manners was seen as dishonesty, and unrestrained actions as honesty. The restraint of manners became mortally wounded.
Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower had come to despise each other by the time of Eisenhower’s inauguration. They hid this in public. The press, undoubtedly aware of the tension, chose not to focus on it. The ritual that was at the heart of the republic – the peaceful transfer of power – was the focus, and the personal feelings of each were hidden from view. They were dishonest in their public behavior, and in retrospect, the self-restraint with which they hid their honest feelings was their moral obligation. These were two dishonest men, honoring their nation in their dishonesty.
The U.S. flag flies at half-staff above the White House on Dec. 15, 2012. MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
The press was in on the act. The press is an institution specifically mentioned in our Constitution. Implicitly it is charged with telling the truth. The press minimized the fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt was disabled. The New York Times refrained from publishing that the Soviets had deployed missiles in Cuba. Reporters did not make public the rumors that Eisenhower might have been having an affair in England. All of these might have been true, but the press saw its role as that of an adversary to the state, but not an enemy.
Members of the press saw themselves as carrying out three roles: They were journalists, they were citizens, and they were well-mannered. As journalists, they published “all the news that’s fit to print.” As citizens, they wanted the U.S. to win World War II and would do nothing to hinder it. As ladies and gentlemen, they knew there were things that were true but did not warrant telling. There were always exceptions, but the prestige press, as they were then called, did not see these roles as incompatible.
It is important not to overstate the comity that existed, or neglect the exceptions, but the idea that good manners required certain behavior did matter. It is not clear to me that the republic suffered from the restraint of good manners and the ability of politicians and journalists to feel shame.
Authenticity
Today, we are surrounded by politicians who have decided that honesty requires that they show how deeply they detest each other, and a public that feels free to display its contempt for any with whom it disagrees. Our opponents have become our enemies, and our enemies have become monsters. This has become true for all political factions, and all political factions believe it is true only for their opponents. The idea that it is proper to hide and suppress our malice because not doing so is bad manners has been lost on all levels. With this has been lost the idea that it is possible to disagree on important matters, yet respect and even honor your opponent. Or, put another way, what has been lost is the obligation to appear to feel this way. Manners, after all, do not ask you to lie to yourself, but merely to the rest of the world.
The obsession with honesty over manners hides something important. Depending on who you are, depending on what you say, and depending on why you say it, honesty can be devastating. The idea that manners create inauthentic lives, lives in which true feelings are suppressed, is absolutely true. But it forgets the point that many of the things we feel ought to be suppressed, and many of the truths we know ought not to even be whispered. Indeed, the whisperer, when revealed, should feel shame. Without the ability to feel shame, humans are barbarians. It is manners, however false, that create the matrix in which shame can be felt. When we consider public life today, the inflicting of shame has changed from the subtle force of manners, to the ability to intimidate those you disagree with. As Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.” Today, vice feels little need to apologize.
I am not here speaking of issues. The issues must be debated. I am speaking of the aesthetics of debate, of restraint and respect. I am speaking of the ability to believe something deeply, yet hold open the possibility that you have much to learn from those who disagree – or at least pretend to, which is almost as good.
What I have written here would seem to have little to do with geopolitics. It has everything to do with it. A nation has as its foundation the love of one’s own. That isn’t a saccharine concept. It is the idea that we are born in or come to a country and do not merely share core values with each other, but honor each other for being our fellow citizens, that our mutual bond is the fellowship of the nation. Underneath there may be much malice, but good manners require it be hidden. The collapse of manners undermines the love of one’s own and weakens the foundation of the nation. And since nations rise and fall, this is very much a geopolitical question.
In the end, being well-mannered in the highest sense is a personal obligation. It rests on the desire to be well-thought-of as a human being, and on caring what others think of you. Many of us lack that virtue. We lack the ability to be ashamed, or we have convinced ourselves that feeling shame is a weakness. We appear on television saying things to each other that decent human beings would not reveal they feel, and our viewers applaud. There is no federal program to resurrect pride in our bearing. It flows from each of us doing it. But that requires a common code of behavior, not fully rational but fully respected, and that has been eaten away. This is the place where I should mention social media, but what more is there to say on that, so consider it said. We all know that there is a terrible problem. But most of us think it is the person we dislike who is the problem, not us.
There is a concept worth ending on, which is the principle of intellectual rectitude, the idea that one must be cautious in thought and in speech. That we should know what we know, and know what we feel, and draw a sharp line between the two. There is a place for feelings, but passion can lead to recklessness, and societies crumble over the massive assault of passion. One of the things I try to do – frequently failing – is to exercise intellectual rectitude in my writing. Restraint in public life – that life that you live with others – is not a foundation of civilization. It is civilization.
There is a time to tell the truth, and a time to withhold it. In the Bible, two books are thought to be written by Solomon. One, Ecclesiastes, is about the fact that there is a time and place for everything. It is a book of manners and of despair. Manners and despair are linked, but if you don’t know there is a time and place for everything, then you are not human. Solomon also wrote the Song of Songs. It is a poem about love and the erotic. It allows us to see that while there is a time and place for everything, and eros in the public space is unacceptable, a life without the erotic is not worth living. The Song of Songs is our solace for the rigors of Ecclesiastes.
The loss of time and place is the loss of propriety and proportion. It is the destruction of both the public and the private, of the life of duty and the life of pleasure. Pleasure cannot live without duty nor duty without pleasure. Neither can exist without good manners. And this applies to the relationship of lovers, of citizens and of nations. And the beginning of the path to it is intellectual rectitude.
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