Topic: Barack Obama
The Race Non Sequitur, Iran and Netanyahu
After two weeks of watching the debate over his proposed plans to speak to a joint session of Congress on Iran sanctions next month become increasingly bitter, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be thinking he has no choice but to give the speech. A “senior government official” told the Jerusalem Post today that the prime minister had no plans to back down and postpone the speech until after the Knesset elections later in March. Apparently, Netanyahu thinks waiting until later in the spring to speak would be too late. With reports surfacing that the president has sought to persuade the Congressional Black Caucus to boycott his speech, the willingness of the administration sink so low as to play the race card against Israel illustrates that it no longer matters how right Netanyahu might be. Though his message about the danger from Iran is one that Congress and the American public need to hear, what he and his advisors seem not to understand is that the politics of the controversy have outstripped its content.
After two weeks of watching the debate over his proposed plans to speak to a joint session of Congress on Iran sanctions next month become increasingly bitter, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be thinking he has no choice but to give the speech. A “senior government official” told the Jerusalem Post today that the prime minister had no plans to back down and postpone the speech until after the Knesset elections later in March. Apparently, Netanyahu thinks waiting until later in the spring to speak would be too late. With reports surfacing that the president has sought to persuade the Congressional Black Caucus to boycott his speech, the willingness of the administration sink so low as to play the race card against Israel illustrates that it no longer matters how right Netanyahu might be. Though his message about the danger from Iran is one that Congress and the American public need to hear, what he and his advisors seem not to understand is that the politics of the controversy have outstripped its content.
The reports about the White House signaling the Black Caucus that the speech should be seen as a domestic political issue rather than one about a difference of opinion over foreign policy is particularly ominous. It was bad enough that Democrats construed the decision to accept the invitation of House Speaker John Boehner as a partisan intrusion into an American policy dispute. But if African-American politicians and even ordinary citizens are being told that Netanyahu’s appearance at a joint session is motivated out of disrespect to the first black president of the United States rather than a belief that the administration’s opposition to more sanctions on Iran is bad policy, then the problem Israel is facing is far worse than even some of the prime minister’s critics had thought.
At this point, the informal movement to boycott Netanyahu’s appearance is gaining the sort of momentum that gives it a life of its own. Republicans and Netanyahu’s supporters both here and in Israel may think most congressional Democrats are bluffing and some might be. But even a partial boycott would undo any good that the speech might have done in the first place.
Netanyahu needs to recall that the reason his May 2011 speech to Congress was such a triumph was that the cheers and the dozens of standing ovations he received were bipartisan. It was a humiliation for Obama, who never before and never since has been given such a reception in the Congress, because the thunderous applause demonstrated that the pro-Israel coalition was genuinely bipartisan. The cheers from both sides of the aisle were a sign that both congressional parties rejected Obama’s ambush of Netanyahu on that trip and backed the Israeli’s stand. Perhaps Netanyahu and his advisors believed they could replicate that triumph now when the stakes are even higher with the administration pursuing détente with Iran and seeking a deal that would allow it to become a nuclear threshold power. But with Democrats and blacks now perceiving the speech to be a partisan ploy, any chance of that is gone.
Let’s concede again that this situation is not so much the product of a Netanyahu blunder as it is of a cynical political strategy employed by the administration. There was no breach of protocol in the invitation, as we now know that Boehner’s office informed the White House of the plan before Netanyahu accepted it. Nor was this a matter of the Israelis favoring the GOP over the Democrats, as the Israeli government rightly understood that a majority of the president’s party supported more sanctions. Indeed, the bill Netanyahu favors is co-sponsored by as many Democrats as Republicans and Senator Robert Menendez has publicly and personally challenged the president on the issue without anyone accusing him of being against his own party or showing disrespect to the first African-American president. (In fact, it was Obama who showed disrespect to Menendez and other Democrats by speciously claiming that the only reason they opposed him on the issue was to please donors—a code word for supporters of Israel). Those who are piling on Netanyahu with such criticisms, like Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the head of the Reform movement, are saying more about their own partisan loyalties than telling us anything about Netanyahu.
Netanyahu deserves criticism for not anticipating that a speech during a congressional debate on the issue would be perceived as maladroit. But it is Obama who has politicized Israel and sought to make it a partisan issue, not Netanyahu or the GOP. Even worse, by injecting the non sequitur of race into this mess, Obama seems to be employing the sort of tactics we’d expect from his friend, race hustler Al Sharpton, not the leader of the free world. This is the worst sort of divisive politics that pits not only the two parties against each other but also two minority groups. Historically, most members of the Congressional Black Caucus have followed the example of Martin Luther King Jr. and been strong supporters of the State of Israel. Though many Democrats have drifted away from Israel in recent years, for Obama to play the race card in this way so as to buttress a policy that has nothing to do with the interests of African-Americans is disgraceful.
It is more than obvious that the smartest thing Netanyahu can do is to cease walking into the trap that Obama has laid for him. That this trap is to the president’s discredit, rather than that of Netanyahu, is irrelevant to the question of whether he should change his plans. The race non sequitur and the partisan issue are real even if they shouldn’t be. A veto-proof majority of both houses of Congress in favor of more pressure on Iran and against acceptance of it as a nuclear threshold power exists. Netanyahu needs to take himself out of the debate now so that majority can be re-assembled and that more sanctions can be passed.
The Crusades Weren’t the Grievance Pundits Believe
By injecting moral equivalency into the National Prayer Breakfast by comparing the violence of the Crusades with that of the Islamic State (ISIS), President Obama sparked a storm of controversy. Obama is hardly the first president to step into the mine field of the Crusades, however. President George W. Bush sparked both outrage and considerable self-flagellating in the West when he spoke of a “crusade” against terror.
By injecting moral equivalency into the National Prayer Breakfast by comparing the violence of the Crusades with that of the Islamic State (ISIS), President Obama sparked a storm of controversy. Obama is hardly the first president to step into the mine field of the Crusades, however. President George W. Bush sparked both outrage and considerable self-flagellating in the West when he spoke of a “crusade” against terror.
The irony of the obsession with either apologizing for or avoiding mention of the Crusades is as important as they were to Christians at the time and perhaps even to broader European history, contemporary Muslims considered them little more than minor irritation.
For the Crusaders, the goal was Jerusalem. But for contemporary Muslims, while Jerusalem might have had some religious significance, Palestine—and, indeed, the entire Arab world—was a backwater. Less than three decades after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, the Umayyad dynasty shifted the seat of the Islamic empire to Damascus, and then less than nine decades later, the center of gravity for the Islamic world shifted further east to Baghdad with the establishment of the Abbasid dynasty. The great empires of the Islamic world, however, were non-Arab: The Safavids in Iran, the Ottomans in Anatolia, and the Mughals in India. It may be on the older side, but J.J. Saunders’ History of Medieval Islam is still probably the best-written, detailed, and accessible sketch of the earlier history of the Islamic world out there.
Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095, and the Crusaders managed to conquer Jerusalem four years later. The Second Crusade a few decades later failed to win Damascus. In 1187, Salahuddin—an ethnic Kurd, not an Arab—regained Jerusalem, leading European Christians to launch the Third Crusade with the aim of winning back the Holy City.
Contemporary Islamic historians, however, largely ignored this Christian campaign for a very simple reason: looming on the horizon was a far greater threat. A young Mongol tribesman—Temüjin—had already begun uniting Mongol tribes and would soon take the name Genghis Khan. As word spread of the Mongol hordes, tens of thousands of refugees fleeing ahead of his horsemen started migrating westward, slowly encroaching on the various Islamic entities that had risen up as the Abbasid dynasty. And the Muslims at the time were to be concerned, given how the Mongolian hordes swept through and conquered Baghdad just a few decades later, shortly after the Seventh Crusade.
Now, perception today is more important than reality. The more the West self-flagellates with regard to the Crusades, the more Islamists feign grievance and claim victimization. The historical truth, however, is different. If any group of people should walk on egg shells, they live in Ulan Bator, not Washington, Paris, London, or Berlin. And even those people–as well as their victims–are so many centuries removed that either outrage or guilt would be nonsense.
Context matters in other ways as well. Even if the Crusades have assumed heightened importance in the Islamist narrative only in recent decades, Many histories of the Islamic world begin in the sixth century when Muhammad was born, or the seventh century when Muhammad began receiving revelations. Arbitrarily starting a narrative with the rise of Islam, however, limits context. This is why Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of the Middle East, wrote The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. He consciously wanted to provide rather than ignore Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian context to the region. Islam did not arise upon a blank slate. To begin the narrative of grievance with the First Crusade—and depicting that episode as an unprovoked Christian attack on Islam which started tit-for-tat violence which continues to the present—is artificial and arbitrary. The initial Islamic invasions of Egypt and North Africa were an attack on the Byzantine Empire and other Christian communities. In the centuries before the Crusades, there was constant raiding from Islamic communities into Europe and vice versa. Muslim armies invaded Spain, briefly took Sicily, and tried to take Malta.
So Obama might wring his hands at the violence of the Crusades and might draw comparisons to downplay the malign exegesis which enables the Islamic State to enslave and rape Yezidi girls, burn churches, or burn alive captives. But when it comes to grievances over the Crusades, he and others should remember: Offense over the Crusades is more a modern phenomenon than based in the reality of Islamic history.
Netanyahu’s Counterproductive Theatrics
How can Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be so right and yet be so self-defeating on an issue as important as Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions?
How can Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be so right and yet be so self-defeating on an issue as important as Iran’s nuclear-weapons ambitions?
First, he is absolutely correct that a nuclear weapons-capable Islamic Republic of Iran poses an existential threat to the State of Israel. Let’s dispense with the notion that the red line for the international community should be Iranian production of nuclear weapons rather than nuclear-weapons capability. The difference between the two are a few turns of the screws, perhaps a few days to a week at most, should all the other parts of a nuclear program remain in place, as President Obama appears to accept. And while the intelligence community might be right to say the Iranian government hasn’t decided whether or not to move from capability to arsenal, the simple fact is that the United States does not have the human intelligence capability to know when such a decision is taken until it is too late.
And let’s also dispense with the notion that a nuclear Iran is containable because the Iranian regime isn’t suicidal. The problem with such calculations is that they do not take into account both who within the Islamic Republic would have command and control over a nuclear arsenal and what might happen if the regime becomes mortally ill. What if the Iranians again take to the streets in nationwide protests as they did in 1999, 2001, and 2009 and should some within the security services join in the protests in parallel to the collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime in Romania so that it is clear to the world and to the Revolutionary Guards that Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision has just a day or two to survive? The most ideological pure unit of the Revolutionary Guards, which would control Iran’s nuclear arsenal, might simply decide to launch to fulfill the Islamic Republic’s ambition before its final demise. After all, who would retaliate against a country that already had regime change?
Netanyahu is also right to be concerned about U.S. resolve. Long before Obama showed American redlines to be meaningless with regard to chemical weapons, Hillary Clinton pioneered the notion of the disappearing redline. While secretary of state, she famously suggested to America’s Arab allies that they need not worry about American abandonment should Iran gain nuclear weapons; the United States would extend them a nuclear umbrella. The Gulf sheikhdoms correctly concluded then that American promises were meaningless; after all, why should they trust the new promise when the United States had consistently sworn that it would never allow Iran to go nuclear in the first place?
So the problem is acute, and Israel has every right to fear its future. How unfortunate it was, then, that Netanyahu brought with him to his United Nations General Assembly a silly, cartoon bomb. Netanyahu’s speech was serious, and the topic even more so, but his cartoon became a distraction. Rather than listen to the speech, those undecided or ignorant of the Iranian nuclear threat learned instead that Netanyahu had brought a cartoon bomb. And the media, deferential to the Obama administration and its positions vis-à-vis Iran and Israel, seized upon the incident to debate Netanyahu’s conduct instead of Iran’s illegal covert enrichment program.
Netanyahu’s acceptance of an invitation to address a Joint Session of Congress next month is déjà vu all over again. There was momentum within Congress among both Republicans and Democrats to ratchet up pressure on Iran in order to have leverage for a better deal. Even if tempted to exculpate Netanyahu—Obama and his close aides seem to have manufactured the crisis—Netanyahu is at fault for walking into the trap. Now instead of advancing discussion of the Iranian threat, Netanyahu has helped enable a situation whereby the discussion once again has shifted from Iran to Netanyahu himself.
There is a way out: Netanyahu can come as planned and address AIPAC, and seek to have Speaker John Boehner postpone the address to Congress until after the Israeli elections. It might mean two trips, but it will solve the problem.
Still, that will not be enough. Netanyahu spent much of his boyhood in suburban Philadelphia. He understands American politics, as do his close aides and associates like Israel’s current ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer. Neither Netanyahu nor Dermer can plead ignorance of American politics. That Netanyahu keeps allowing himself to fall into such traps is either an individual failure or a failure of Team Netanyahu. If the fault is not all Netanyahu’s, he must recognize that loyalty to his inner circle of advisors should not trump accountability for such bad advice and decisions.
Can Iran Be Trusted On Nukes? Can Obama?
Though a vote won’t be held on a new Iran sanctions bill is being put off until late March, the question of what is exactly going on in the talks between the West and Tehran deserves more attention. The chattering classes have focused largely on a pointless dispute about whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will speak to Congress in March about Iran. But the real issue is the substance of the current negotiations. As a Washington Post editorial noted yesterday, the clear intent of the Obama administration is to acquiesce to Iran’s demands to be allowed to keep its nuclear infrastructure as well as treat the regime, as a legitimate regional power in the Middle East is no longer in much doubt. That leaves observers asking two very important questions. One is whether Iran can be trusted to keep the terms of any nuclear deal it signs. The other is whether the Obama administration can be trusted to hold the Iranians accountable.
Though a vote won’t be held on a new Iran sanctions bill is being put off until late March, the question of what is exactly going on in the talks between the West and Tehran deserves more attention. The chattering classes have focused largely on a pointless dispute about whether Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will speak to Congress in March about Iran. But the real issue is the substance of the current negotiations. As a Washington Post editorial noted yesterday, the clear intent of the Obama administration is to acquiesce to Iran’s demands to be allowed to keep its nuclear infrastructure as well as treat the regime, as a legitimate regional power in the Middle East is no longer in much doubt. That leaves observers asking two very important questions. One is whether Iran can be trusted to keep the terms of any nuclear deal it signs. The other is whether the Obama administration can be trusted to hold the Iranians accountable.
As the Post points out, the danger inherent in the administration’s Iran policy is that by letting them keep thousands of centrifuges and a nuclear stockpile that could be quickly re-activated to allow it to build a weapon, the terms currently being discussed will, at the very least, allow the Islamist regime to become a threshold nuclear power. Though he continues to insist, as he has since he first started running for president in 2007, that he won’t let Iran get a nuclear weapon, the president doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. Why? The answer is that Obama believes that the U.S. and Iran have common interests that will allow them to cooperate together in the region and that the ayatollahs have too much to gain from a reconciliation with the West in terms of their nation’s economy to want to risk it all by building a bomb.
But the problem with that formulation is that it is fundamentally mistaken. Iran has no interest in America’s need for regional stability and preserving moderate Arab regimes allied with the West, let alone protecting the existence of the state of Israel. To the contrary, it hopes to threaten both the Arab states and Israel via the threat of a nuclear weapon as well as keeping the pressure on them through the use of its Hezbollah terrorist auxiliaries and allied terror groups like Hamas. Yet Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon as well as its progress on ballistic missiles means that this is a problem that concerns the entire West and not just Israel and the Arabs.
That is why the bipartisan sanctions bill proposed by Senators Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez is so important. It provides at least a measure of accountability to the process since it raises the price for Iran for dragging out negotiations or for continuing to refuse to accept even another weak deal with the West like the interim agreement signed in November 2013.
Even more to the point, is the question of whether even a weak deal, such as the one Obama and Kerry embraced in 2013 can be enforced by this or subsequent administrations. To date, the administration has refused to take seriously charges that the Iranians are already cheating on the interim deal. The dynamic of the process is such that the president views any such questions or even threats of more sanctions with hostility because he sees them as a threat to his goal of a rapprochement with Iran.
This is problematic because so long as Iran believes that Washington won’t take violations of a nuclear deal seriously, it will feel free to push the envelope on more cheating. Since the president has already conceded that, as the Post wrote, “a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and restrict that capability,” it is difficult to believe the Islamist regime will think it need worry about the president abandoning a process to which he has become so devoted no matter what they do.
That brings us back to the question of the sanctions bill. Realists must understand that even if the bill is passed and then a threatened presidential veto is overridden, Congress can’t stop Obama from negotiating with Iran and coming up with a bad deal. Nor is it likely that it will be able to force him to put such a treaty to a vote as the Constitution demands since the president will seek to evade that requirement.
Indeed, even if the bill were to become law, the president could also use waivers in the legislation to prevent its enforcement. This is something of a poison pill that was forced on its sponsors by both political expediency (getting more Democratic votes) and legal technicalities (existing sanctions laws also have waivers that could be used by Obama to thwart this bill). But to the credit of both Kirk and Menendez, they have attempted to write their waivers in such a way as to constrict the president from wantonly ignoring the intent of Congress. Though this and other administrations have used waivers to flout the meaning of laws, doing so in this case will involve not merely a desire on the part of the president to ignore Congress but a willingness to lie about Iran’s conduct.
This is a president who has already demonstrated on a host of issues but most notably on immigration that he is not constrained by the normal Constitutional order or even the rule of law. That means that it is difficult to have confidence that any waiver, no matter how carefully it is drafted, will be able to force the president to hold Iran accountable.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Iran talks. It’s not just that given its record as well as its regional and nuclear ambitions, Iran is not to be trusted. It’s that President Obama can also not be trusted to pursue a policy that is aimed at stopping Iran from becoming a threshold nuclear power. Without such accountability, there is no reason for Congress or the American people to trust the outcome of the negotiations.
Give Jordan Drones
Jordan has formally requested that the United States provide it Predators for its fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Alas, true to the Obama doctrine of screwing over allies at every opportunity, the United States has refused the Jordanian request.
Jordan has formally requested that the United States provide it Predators for its fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Alas, true to the Obama doctrine of screwing over allies at every opportunity, the United States has refused the Jordanian request.
This is a mistake. King Abdullah II might have seized the momentum in the current crisis after the Islamic State released a video showing it burning alive Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh, but as Kasasbeh’s crash shows in the first place, flying over enemy territory is always a risky endeavor. If Jordan loses another pilot in as barbaric a manner, all bets could be off with regard to the king. After all, the shifts in momentum in the fight against the Islamic State could give any observer whiplash.
It would be ironic if the Obama administration fell back over concerns regarding Israel’s qualitative military edge, given its increasing hostility to Israel’s security needs. Regardless, the qualitative military edge balance was originally crafted at a time when the security situation in the Middle East was far different: Israel faces far greater threats than a surprise Jordanian attack.
The icing on the cake, of course, is that Iran announced earlier this week that it would begin providing its own unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to its allies, a move calculated to erode regional security whereas providing Jordan with the equipment it needs to push back the nihilistic forces of the Islamic State would do the opposite.
It’s one thing if Obama doesn’t want the United States to lead, but is far more tragic if he actively seeks to tie the hands of American allies who are willing to step up to the plate.
The Crisis of American Strategy
President Obama got a lot of mileage out of his administration’s strategy of speaking in bumper-sticker slogans and easily digestible sound bites. But as the president’s new National Security Strategy makes clear, it backfired badly the moment an administration official told the New Yorker that the president’s approach to foreign affairs was “leading from behind.” Far more than any other, this catchphrase has dogged the president, who is now fashioning entire strategic objectives around the quest to pushback effectively against a phrase that has come to define his time in office.
President Obama got a lot of mileage out of his administration’s strategy of speaking in bumper-sticker slogans and easily digestible sound bites. But as the president’s new National Security Strategy makes clear, it backfired badly the moment an administration official told the New Yorker that the president’s approach to foreign affairs was “leading from behind.” Far more than any other, this catchphrase has dogged the president, who is now fashioning entire strategic objectives around the quest to pushback effectively against a phrase that has come to define his time in office.
The reason “leading from behind” stuck is, plainly, because it is true. “Leading from behind” is another way of saying “following.” And that is precisely what the Obama administration has done. But Obama’s own stubbornness has impeded his attempts to shake this catchphrase. Rather than actually changing strategy to better assert American leadership, he has spent his time and energy finding creative ways to counter it with rhetoric, not action. And he has failed.
This is evident in the administration’s advance PR for Obama’s new National Security Strategy, his second (and almost certainly last) during his time in office, which is being released today. The administration sent deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes out to spin the New York Times, an exceedingly unwise choice, as his comments make clear:
“There is this line of criticism that we are not leading, and it makes no sense,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “Who built the effort against ISIL? Who organized the sanctions on Russia? Who put together the international approach on Ebola?”
He’s right about Ebola. But the administration’s confused and clumsy anti-ISIS effort is thus far a failure, as is the administration’s staggeringly weak approach to Russia. Rhodes wants Obama to take credit for colossal failures, because that’s all they’ve got. It is, however, a kind of clever defense of Obama if taken to its logical conclusion: Do you really want Obama to “lead” when this is what happens?
Meanwhile Foreign Policy magazine chose to focus on the phrase “strategic patience”–another piece of transparent, Orwellian spin. What “strategic patience” means in practice is that the administration thinks letting countries like Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria collapse does no harm to American strategic interests, or at least that the harm it does is outweighed by the benefit of watching the international state system disintegrate. (The administration really hasn’t thought this through.)
But in Obama’s defense, if you stick around on Foreign Policy’s website you can see one reason there is such a lack of strategic vision in America. The magazine conducts an annual survey of “America’s top International Relations scholars on foreign-policy research,” and this year’s shows that the ivory tower, at least with regard to international relations, is experiencing a rather horrid intellectual crisis.
For all you can say about Obama’s National Security Strategy, it stems from a better understanding of events than the field of international-relations scholars. In one question, they were asked to list the top foreign-policy issues for the next ten years. Here’s the result:
1. Global climate change 40.96%
2. Armed conflict in Middle East 26.81%
3. Failed or failing states 22.29%
4. China’s rising military power 21.54%
5. Transnational terrorism 21.23%
6. Renewed Russian assertiveness 17.47%
7. Global poverty 16.42%
8. Global wealth disparities 15.66%
9. China’s economic influence 15.51%
10. Proliferation of WMD 14.01%
10. Transnational political violence 14.01%
As you can see, Foreign Policy appears to have accidentally polled the international-relations scholars on Earth-2, a planet where the sun just invaded Ukraine, economic inequality is beheading prisoners in Iraq and Syria, and poverty just hacked America’s second-largest health insurer.
Is inequality a larger foreign-policy issue than transnational political violence and nuclear proliferation? Yes, according to America’s top international-relations scholars; no, according to anyone with a modicum of common sense and access to a newspaper. When you think of it this way, considering Obama’s academic pedigree, it’s a surprise his foreign policy hasn’t been even more of a disaster.
There are some other fun nuggets in the FP survey. For example, they asked the esteemed scholars of this alternate reality, “Who was the most effective U.S. secretary of state of the past 50 years?” I wish I were kidding when I say this was the list they came up with:
1. Henry Kissinger 32.21%
2. Don’t know 18.32%
3. James Baker 17.71%
4. Madeleine Albright 8.70%
4. Hillary Clinton 8.70%
6. George Shultz 5.65%
7. Dean Rusk 3.51%
8. Warren Christopher 1.53%
8. Cyrus Vance 1.53%
10. Colin Powell 1.07%
11. Condoleezza Rice 0.46%
12. Lawrence Eagleburger 0.31%
13. John Kerry 0.31%
There was much mocking of John Kerry on Twitter for coming in dead last here. But I think the rest of the poll vindicates him. Any survey that finds George Shultz on a lower rung than Hillary Clinton is deserving of exactly zero credibility. (Also, “don’t know” coming in at No. 2? International-relations scholars don’t have opinions on America’s high-level diplomacy? OK then.)
What we’re seeing, both within the Obama administration and in the broader academic world, is a shocking dearth of strategic thinking in favor of the various passing fads of conventional wisdom and political correctness. And as the postwar international system continues its collapse, the consequences are plain to see.
What Obama Should Have Said at the Prayer Breakfast
At first, I was prepared to defend President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast from conservatives who excoriated him for comparing (as the New York Times account put it) “the atrocities of the Islamic State to the bloodshed committed in the name of Christianity in centuries past.”
At first, I was prepared to defend President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast from conservatives who excoriated him for comparing (as the New York Times account put it) “the atrocities of the Islamic State to the bloodshed committed in the name of Christianity in centuries past.”
There are legitimate comparisons to be made. Indeed, just as Southern slaveowners once cited the Bible to defend slavery, so now ISIS cites Islamic law to defend its own form of slavery. Just as the Spanish Inquisition once burned heretics at the stake, so now ISIS burns alive a Jordanian pilot. More broadly the religious zealotry, bloodthirstiness, and intolerance of ISIS is indeed reminiscent in many ways, as Obama noted, of the Crusades.
But then I read the actual text of his speech and saw that his message wasn’t: Christianity was once intolerant but it has now reformed itself and Islam should do likewise. That’s an important message similar to the one that Egypt’s President Sisi recently delivered when he called for a “religious revolution” within Islam.
Alas, that’s not what President Obama said. What he actually said was: “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
He also said: “From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.”
Neither statement is true or helpful.
When we see ISIS beheading and burning hostages, and “selling, crucifying, burying children alive,” I’d say we have every right to get on our “high horse” about that–even if Christians in centuries past committed their share of atrocities. In fact we have an obligation to get on our “high horse”–to make clear that ISIS’s conduct violates every norm of civilized behavior and will not be tolerated. To shrug our shoulders and say “everybody does it” is untrue and immoral.
And it is no more likely to succeed as a rhetorical gambit than Obama’s previous forays into moral relativism, such as his 2009 Cairo speech (which I defended at the time), in which he equated Iranian “hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians” with the role the U.S. played in 1953 “in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” Such comparisons do not win the U.S. any friends–they don’t make the Iranian mullahs (or even the Iranian people) think what a great guy Obama is for disowning the conduct of the Eisenhower administration, just as ISIS (or even the ordinary people of Syria and Iraq) won’t think he is a great guy for disowning the conduct of the Crusaders. They just think he’s weak, that he’s unwilling to stand up and defend the United States, that he can be taken advantage of.
As for Obama’s claim that ISIS’s actions “are betraying” Islam–a claim he has made in the past–that too is a dubious statement and a presumptuous one for a non-Muslim to make. More accurate would be to say that ISIS’s actions are a betrayal of what we want Islam to be–but just as Christianity could be interpreted in centuries past to justify slavery and burning at the stake, so too Islam can be interpreted today to justify beheading of hostages and the enslaving of children. It does no good to deny the fact–indeed it is hard to imagine us fighting and defeating these Islamist extremists if we don’t recognize that their conduct has some grounding in Muslim tradition and has some support in the Muslim world.
No, that doesn’t mean that most Muslims are jihadists; the vast majority are not. But we need to be honest enough to recognize that ISIS’s actions, however reprehensible, have some real appeal to a minority of the Muslim world (see, for example, this article about Tunisia, which is one of the most moderate and stable corners of the Middle East), and we won’t change that fact by denying it away.
Obama’s speech reveals the fuzzy thinking behind his strategy in what used to be called “the war on terror.” Little wonder that across the greater Middle East–in countries such as Nigeria, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen–we are losing the struggle. If the president can’t even think clearly on these major issues, he certainly can’t act effectively.
U.S., Germany, and France to Putin: The World Is Too Weak to Stop You
Vladimir Putin may be reckless, but he seems to be guided by one valuable strategic rule when picking fights in Europe: divide the west to conquer the east. And dividing the west doesn’t just mean dividing Western Europe among itself; it also means dividing Western Europe from the rest of the West. It broadens the (likely apocryphal) Kissinger quote about calling Europe, and updates it for modern times. If you want to talk to “the West,” whom do you call?
Vladimir Putin may be reckless, but he seems to be guided by one valuable strategic rule when picking fights in Europe: divide the west to conquer the east. And dividing the west doesn’t just mean dividing Western Europe among itself; it also means dividing Western Europe from the rest of the West. It broadens the (likely apocryphal) Kissinger quote about calling Europe, and updates it for modern times. If you want to talk to “the West,” whom do you call?
The sudden rush of new peace conferences to solve the conflict in Ukraine prove this point. This New York Times rundown of the various meetings and pressers and conferences is thorough but also thoroughly maddening. It is headlined “U.S. Joins Europe in Efforts to End Fighting in Ukraine,” but good luck finding any semblance of a workable solution in any of the proposals and declarations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande met in Kiev with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. No progress seems to have been made in halting or turning back the Russian invasion in Ukraine’s east. But that’s not surprising when you consider what the aim of the Franco-German trip was in the first place. As the Wall Street Journal noted today:
The trip also comes as political momentum grows in the U.S. to deliver weapons to Ukrainian forces—a step that the German and French leaders oppose because they say it would only lead to more violence.
So the purpose of German and French diplomatic intervention was to stop the U.S. from helping Ukraine too much. Mission accomplished.
Not that the U.S. is ready to take that step anyway. There continue to be Obama administration figures who support arming Ukraine, but until that group includes President Obama, this is all they’re going to get, as the Times reported:
Mr. Kerry, who announced $16.4 million in humanitarian assistance for eastern Ukraine, plans to press for a new cease-fire.
In a joint appearance with Mr. Poroshenko, Mr. Kerry said that France, Germany and the United States were united in supporting a peaceful resolution to the conflict. And he called for Russia to agree to a cease-fire.
“Our choice is a peaceful solution, but Russia needs to make its choices,” Mr. Kerry said.
Russia, in fact, has made its choice–repeatedly. That choice has been a relatively easy one for Putin because no one is willing to defend Ukraine. What would possibly give American officials the idea that Putin would retreat without real resistance? That’s where what is possibly the most damning line in the Times story comes in:
The Obama administration’s hope is that its widely reported deliberations over whether to send defensive weapons to Ukraine and about additional economic sanctions will induce Russia to agree to a halt in the fighting and, ultimately, to a political agreement within the framework of the Minsk accord.
This is strategic ineptitude of the first order. Obama’s defenders like to scoff at the notion of “credibility”–that Obama retreating on a red line in, say, Syria would enter the calculus of someone like Putin when considering American opposition to his invasions of Ukraine. We are told that “credibility” is overrated, but it’s more accurate to say it’s simply unquantifiable.
But you have to ask yourself: why would Vladimir Putin believe Obama’s threats when he doesn’t follow through? You have to make a rational calculation, and right now the smart money will always be on Obama bluffing. It’s just who he is; he says things but doesn’t mean them. The sound of his own voice is pleasing to him, but the content is irrelevant.
Additionally, Obama keeps undercutting any such threat. One way he does this is in the implied threat itself: Obama thinks leaking that the administration is debating arming Ukraine will spook Putin, but that very leak is based on the fact that Obama is personally opposed to arming Ukraine, so it’s toothless.
More importantly, the administration keeps undercutting the idea that the aid would help anyway. On Tuesday, CBS’s Mark Knoller tweeted the administration’s justification for not giving Ukraine military aid. He wrote: “On Ukraine, WH says its (sic) not possible for US to put Ukraine on par militarily with Russia. Stands by objective of diplomatic resolution.”
So here’s Obama’s opinion: Ukraine should not get military aid from the West because even with American help, Russia would still mop the floor with them. And this, according to the Times, is what Obama thinks will intimidate Putin into signing a peace treaty. I’ll offer the president some free advice: telling Putin the world is too weak to stop him isn’t very intimidating.
Yet even if the West got Putin to sign on to a new agreement, nothing will have been accomplished. Putin has been violating the last ceasefire agreement, because there’s no one to enforce it. What Obama, Merkel, and Hollande are working for, then, is a non-solution–an agreement that would allow everyone involved to pretend it’s more than it is, and which would implicitly (if not explicitly) accept Putin’s previous land grabs in Ukraine while asking him nicely–on the honor system–to stop taking more land.
You can see what bothers the Ukrainians about this. They are at war, and high-level delegations from France, Germany, and the United States all flew in to tell them, personally, that they’re a lost cause. They either don’t realize it or don’t seem to care, but three major Western powers just went out of their way to ostentatiously humiliate their besieged ally on the world stage.
The Obama-Bibi Speech Row: Enough Blame to Go Around
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s high-profile speech before Congress has already backfired even before it was delivered. It is designed to rally support in Congress for extra sanctions on Iran in case nuclear talks fall through. But instead the controversy over the speech is driving Democrats to embrace President Obama’s soft-on-Iran position out of party loyalty if nothing else. Some are even talking about boycotting the speech. In a U.S.-Israel relationship that has already been deeply troubled during the Obama administration, this is another low point.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s high-profile speech before Congress has already backfired even before it was delivered. It is designed to rally support in Congress for extra sanctions on Iran in case nuclear talks fall through. But instead the controversy over the speech is driving Democrats to embrace President Obama’s soft-on-Iran position out of party loyalty if nothing else. Some are even talking about boycotting the speech. In a U.S.-Israel relationship that has already been deeply troubled during the Obama administration, this is another low point.
Who’s fault is that? I would ascribe blame both to Netanyahu and Obama.
Start with the prime minister: As Jonathan and others have argued, his decision to accept a speaking invitation from Speaker Boehner without consulting with the administration first was a diplomatic and political blunder. It upset the normal protocol and allowed Obama’s aides to claim that Bibi is (a) posturing for political advantage in Israel just prior to an election and (b) interfering in American domestic politics–even if British Prime Minister David Cameron just did the same thing by lobbying lawmakers, at White House request, against imposing additional sanctions now.
Bibi would have been smart to emulate the Cameron example and limit his own actions and those of his representatives to quiet conversations with senators and representatives–there is no need for a high-profile address to a joint session of Congress when the Israeli government’s views are already known. Bibi has always prided himself on an insider’s knowledge of American politics and a sure touch in getting Israel’s message out. But in this case his political judgment deserted him.
However I believe that Obama also deserves a fair amount of opprobrium for turning this into such a high-profile blowup–indeed Bibi would never have been tempted to do an end-run around the president if didn’t feel that this particular president was inveterately hostile to Israel. The proper reaction for the president, when he found out about the address, would have been to call up Bibi privately and ream him out–while at the same time instructing his aides to leak word that he was perfectly supportive of the speech. That is how allies treat one another: confine differences of opinion to private communications while making a front of unity for public consumption.
But that’s not how Obama and his crew operate. These are, after all, the same folks who last year were quoted calling Netanyahu “chickenshit.” The same folks who are never satisfied with any concession that Bibi makes–whether a freeze on settlements or an apology to Turkey for the Israeli raid on the Gaza Flotilla. The same folks who perpetually apply pressure to Bibi while letting Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, slide by for all his actions undermining the “peace process.”
So it is no surprise that the administration has been leaking word that Israel will pay a “price” for the speech and openly campaigning for the recall of Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer who is accused of being a Republican apparatchik.
As numerous commentators have noted, it would be nice if the famously cool Obama ever showed half the level of anger against Syria, Iran, North Korea, ISIS, or Russia that he routinely displays against Israel.
So I blame Obama for escalating this crisis–and I blame Netanyahu for playing into his hands.
Israel’s close relationship with the U.S. will survive this crisis and will, I predict, become much warmer under whoever succeeds Obama. Even under Obama, the U.S. remains the most pro-Israel country in the world simply because the American people are the most pro-Israel in the world. But there is no question that damage has been done to this “special relationship” and it could turn out to be long-lasting damage if this spat drives more Democratic politicians to become as critical of the Jewish state as many grass-roots leftist activists already are.
Friedman Spreads Anti-Semitic Libels About Netanyahu Speech
The stakes are growing in the debate about the wisdom of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to accept an invitation to address a joint session of Congress about sanctions on Iran. Though the argument can be viewed as just one more spat promoted by an administration with an axe to grind against Netanyahu, with the talk of Democrats, even Vice President Biden, prepared to boycott the event because they see it an as an effort to aid Republican efforts to discredit President Obama’s foreign policy, the potential for real damage is no longer theoretical. But the most troubling development is not the ongoing arguments about whether the prime minister has committed a blunder. Rather, it is the willingness by some to use it to stoke anti-Israel libels. That’s the upshot of the latest column from the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman who claims Netanyahu’s speech will be seen as an attempt to force the U.S. into a war with Iran. That is not only a gross distortion of the truth but also a not-so-subtle effort to plant the seeds of an anti-Semitic libel.
The stakes are growing in the debate about the wisdom of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to accept an invitation to address a joint session of Congress about sanctions on Iran. Though the argument can be viewed as just one more spat promoted by an administration with an axe to grind against Netanyahu, with the talk of Democrats, even Vice President Biden, prepared to boycott the event because they see it an as an effort to aid Republican efforts to discredit President Obama’s foreign policy, the potential for real damage is no longer theoretical. But the most troubling development is not the ongoing arguments about whether the prime minister has committed a blunder. Rather, it is the willingness by some to use it to stoke anti-Israel libels. That’s the upshot of the latest column from the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman who claims Netanyahu’s speech will be seen as an attempt to force the U.S. into a war with Iran. That is not only a gross distortion of the truth but also a not-so-subtle effort to plant the seeds of an anti-Semitic libel.
Supporters of the speech, such as Wall Street Journal columnist and COMMENTARY contributor Bret Stephens, argue that Congress needs an “unvarnished account of the choice to which Mr. Obama proposes to put Israel: either accede to continued diplomacy with Iran, and therefore its de facto nuclearization; or strike Iran militarily in defiance of the U.S. and Mr. Obama’s concordat with Tehran.” I don’t disagree, but as I have written in the last two weeks, I think the decision to give the speech was a grave tactical error on Netanyahu’s part. Congress was in no doubt about Israel’s position and the prime minister could have reached out to members in the same way that British Prime Minister David Cameron has used to back up the president. But by parachuting directly into the debate on Iran sanctions that is taking place in Congress, he ran the risk of being seen as trying to upstage the president in a way that was bound to ruffle the feathers of many pro-Israel Democrats, even those that agree with Netanyahu on the issue. The proposed speech also provided Obama with a heaven-sent chance to divert attention from the administration’s indefensible opposition to strengthening their hand in the nuclear talks with Iran. The prime minister’s alleged chutzpah became the focus of the discussion instead of the president’s clear desire for détente with the Islamist regime, dealing sanctions proponents a clear setback.
But Friedman, who is at least smart enough to seem to harbor some doubts about whether Obama’s diplomacy can succeed, isn’t satisfied with asserting that Netanyahu is making the mistake. Instead, he uses this controversy to return to one of his favorite hobbyhorses: the way pro-Israel political donors, such as billionaire Sheldon Adelson, are trying to buy Congress in a way that runs contrary to U.S. interests. Claiming, without backing the charge up with reporting, that Adelson hatched the idea is one thing. He even says someone should have told Netanyahu and Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer “anti-Semites, who claim Israel controls Washington, will have a field day.” The fact that it is Friedman who has floated this charge in the Times when he complained about the ovations Netanyahu earned the last time he addressed Congress is unmentioned in the column.
Even worse, Friedman then goes on to write that if diplomacy fails and the U.S. is forced to use force to address the Iranian threat, the Netanyahu speech will serve as a smoking gun proving that it was Israel that manipulated America into what might prove to be another disastrous war.
Of course, Friedman frames this as helpful advice intended as advocacy for what is in Israel’s best interests. But by raising the specter of anti-Semitism as well as of what must be considered nothing short of a potential blood libel, Friedman is tipping his own hand.
One can agree with President Obama’s absurd belief that Iran must be appeased on the nuclear issue in order to help it “get right with the world” without raising the specious charge that opponents of this policy who think it will endanger the West as well as Israel are being bought by Jewish money. One can also envision what is at this late date a highly unlikely scenario in which Iran’s refusal to accept Obama’s offers—which would effectively give a Western seal of approval to the Islamist regime becoming a nuclear threshold state—might lead to armed conflict without dropping the hint that the Jews will be the ones who started it.
Yet Friedman can’t avoid those temptations and injects the virus of anti-Semitism into a debate about whether the president is really interested in carrying out his 2012 campaign promise to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. By writing of anti-Semitism when virtually no one outside of the fever swamps of the far left and far right are doing so, Friedman is, once again, seeking to tilt the discussion in ways that do exactly what he claims he wishes to avoid.
Though President Obama has sought to paint advocates of more sanctions as warmongers, the truth is just the opposite. More sanctions that would actually press Iran to give up its nuclear toys are, in fact, the only path to successful effort to halt the threat from Tehran by measures short of war. Though it is hard to imagine a president so intent on normalizing relations with Iran ever considering the use of force, if that ever happened in this administration or his successor, it would be the result of the Islamists courting such a conflict, not Israeli political maneuvering. Iran’s ballistic missile program also means stopping it from going nuclear is as much a matter of U.S. security as the safety of Israel.
Anti-Semites need no prompting from Tom Friedman to promote libels against the Jewish state. But by seeking to frame the argument about Netanyahu as one that would justify their ravings, Friedman has crossed a line that no responsible journalist should even approach. Neither Netanyahu nor the pro-Israel community should hesitate to speak up for fear of giving anti-Semites ammunition. The prime minister’s plan to speak may be a tactical blunder but it is the willingness of Friedman to engage in this sort of incitement that is the real disgrace.
Charting the Arc of Obama’s “Jayvee Team”
“A former deputy director of the CIA said on ‘CBS This Morning’ Wednesday that it would take 100,000 ground troops to effectively respond to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. ‘Unless the coalition is willing to put more ground troops into Iraq and possibly into Syria, there is very little we can do to respond,’ said CBS News senior security contributor Michael Morell, the former No. 2 at the CIA [under President Obama]. Morell made the comments following ISIS’ release of a video Tuesday purportedly showing captive Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh being burned to death. The killing led Jordanian officials to execute two Iraqi al Qaeda-linked prisoners.” — “Fight against ISIS needs troops to be effective, Michael Morell says,” CBS News, February 4, 2015
“A former deputy director of the CIA said on ‘CBS This Morning’ Wednesday that it would take 100,000 ground troops to effectively respond to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. ‘Unless the coalition is willing to put more ground troops into Iraq and possibly into Syria, there is very little we can do to respond,’ said CBS News senior security contributor Michael Morell, the former No. 2 at the CIA [under President Obama]. Morell made the comments following ISIS’ release of a video Tuesday purportedly showing captive Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh being burned to death. The killing led Jordanian officials to execute two Iraqi al Qaeda-linked prisoners.” — “Fight against ISIS needs troops to be effective, Michael Morell says,” CBS News, February 4, 2015
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“The United Arab Emirates, a crucial Arab ally in the American-led coalition against the Islamic State, suspended airstrikes against the Sunni extremist group in December, citing fears for its pilots’ safety after a Jordanian pilot was captured and who the extremists said had been burned to death, United States officials said Tuesday.” — “United Arab Emirates, Key U.S. Ally in ISIS Effort, Disengaged in December,” New York Times, February 3, 2015
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“ISIS is going on the offensive in areas of strategic importance for the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] and Iranian-backed militias to deny such forces freedom of movement between Samarra and its environs and the eastern Anbar front.” — “Iraq Situation Report,” The Institute for the Study of War, February 2, 2015
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“The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has begun to expand its presence in the Syrian central corridor which stretches from the Jordanian border through Damascus to the central cities of Homs and Hama. The ‘central corridor’ is highly-contested key terrain for both the Syrian regime and its armed opposition, while ISIS presence has generally been limited in the area until recently… Over the past two months, ISIS has once again escalated its military and public relations activities in this area, threatening to divert both regime and rebel resources away from active fronts in the Damascus area in order to contend with the ISIS threat. This development may provide an indicator of ISIS’s broader expansion plans in western Syria and the potential response of Syrian opposition fighters to this expansion” — “The Islamic State Eyes Expansion in Damascus,” The Institute for the Study of War Syria Update, January 20, 2015
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‘“The analogy we use around here sometimes [in describing ISIS], and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,’ Obama said, resorting to an uncharacteristically flip analogy. ‘I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.’” — President Obama, quoted in the New Yorker, January 27, 2014
What Is the U.S. Doing to Make Its Case in Iraq?
Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports from Baghdad that the U.S. ambassador has flat out offered to coordinate U.S. air strikes with the Badr Organization, an Iraqi Shi‘ite militia trained and perhaps even directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As Lake writes:
Bloomberg’s Eli Lake reports from Baghdad that the U.S. ambassador has flat out offered to coordinate U.S. air strikes with the Badr Organization, an Iraqi Shi‘ite militia trained and perhaps even directed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As Lake writes:
[Badr Organization leader Hadi al-] Amiri told me that late last month he met with U.S. ambassador Stuart Jones at his home, where the ambassador made the offer of U.S. air support to his ground campaign. “He told me, frankly speaking, ‘We are ready to offer back up in air strikes for the volunteers,’ ” Amiri said, using the term many militia leaders use to refer to the fighters under their command. Amiri said he thanked Jones for the offer, but told him he worried the U.S. Air Force could make a mistake and end up hitting his men instead of the Islamic State. When asked about the meeting, a spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, Jeffrey Loree, told me: “We don’t confirm the details of our conversations. Our policy is that we support the ISF with air strikes and we have urged that the militias be under the command and control of the ISF.”
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse in a way that Lake did not address. Most Iraqis believe that the United States is not only responsible for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS, ISIL, Daesh) but actively supports it. This is not the result of one or two conversations with Iraqis inside the Green Zone, but rather a pernicious belief that the majority of Iraqis harbor, in Kirkuk, Baghdad, Karbala, and presumably elsewhere.
The reason is simple: Iran. The basis of American influence operations is always to be truthful, and through truth build credibility. Iran has a different strategy, however: metaphorically to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Just yesterday, Iranian Foreign Ministry official Hossein Amir Abdollahian called the U.S. fight against terrorism “insincere.” None other than the supreme leader has been preaching, here at a meeting of Islamic scholars, that the Islamic State is an American creation. Speaking about the rise of Islamist extremism in the Islamic State’s mold, Ayatollah Khamenei said:
…It is a few years now that it has been revived and strengthened with the plots of arrogance, with the money of some regional governments and with the schemes of the intelligence services of colonialist countries such as America, England and the Zionist regime… There is an undeniable point which is the fact that the takfiri orientation and the governments which support and advocate it move completely in the direction of the goals of arrogance and Zionism. Their work is in line with the goals of America, the colonialist governments in Europe and the government of the usurping Zionist regime. This movement is at the service of arrogance. It is at the service of America and England. What they do is at the service of the intelligence services of America and England. It is at the service of Mossad and other such intelligence services.
That may sound like the ranting and raving of a tired, old, paranoid dictator. But, alas, it has stuck, especially after one packet in an airdrop meant for the Kurdish resistance in Kobane went array and was recovered by the Islamic State.
The problem isn’t that the Iranian government actively spreads anti-American propaganda. That should be expected of a regime that, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry’s pronouncements aside, remains unrepentant. Rather, the problem is that the U.S. embassy in Baghdad remains silent. The embassy hosts hundreds of diplomats, but few get outside the blast walls surrounding the embassy complex, even to go elsewhere in the Green Zone. Rumors swirl, unrebutted by anyone in the U.S. embassy. Baghdad isn’t known for its security, but millions live outside the Green Zone, and diplomats from Iran, Turkey, and many other states regularly traverse the city. Even before Benghazi, guaranteeing diplomats’ security trumped any sense that they needed to circulate to do their jobs.
Security and effectiveness are always a precarious balance but they are no excuse for the United States to keep from being able to refute rumors and rebuff enemy information operations. There’s no point spending billions on an embassy if it is too afraid to function. That Iran gets away with blaming the United States for the Islamic State when Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s proxy in Damascus, refused for years to use his air force against the group as it grew and gathered strength in Raqqa says a lot about Iranian cynicism. Alas, that the United States refuses to make its case and allows Iranian lies to be the first draft of history says a lot about State Department’s incompetence.
“Compromise” Deal Shows How Iran Wins By Waiting
A question hanging in the air during President Obama’s time in office has been: does he want to prevent Iran from ever getting nuclear weapons, or does he simply want to forestall their nuclear capability until he’s out of office? Obama’s supporters insisted it was the former. Their faith in him is getting yet another test, with the latest report on the two sides mulling a deal that would be quite favorable to Iran.
A question hanging in the air during President Obama’s time in office has been: does he want to prevent Iran from ever getting nuclear weapons, or does he simply want to forestall their nuclear capability until he’s out of office? Obama’s supporters insisted it was the former. Their faith in him is getting yet another test, with the latest report on the two sides mulling a deal that would be quite favorable to Iran.
The Associated Press reports that with time winding down in this overtime period, American and Iranian negotiators are considering how to allow the American side to fold while saving face:
With time for negotiations running short, the U.S and Iran are discussing a compromise that would let Iran keep much of its uranium-enriching technology but reduce its potential to make nuclear weapons, two diplomats tell The Associated Press.
Such a compromise could break the decade-long deadlock on attempts to limit Iranian activities that could be used to make such arms: Tehran refuses to meet U.S.-led demands for deep cuts in the number of centrifuges it uses to enrich uranium, a process that can create material for anything from chemotherapy to the core of an atomic bomb.
Experts warn that any reduction in centrifuge efficiency is reversible more quickly than a straight decrease in the number of machines, an argument that could be seized upon by powerful critics of the talks in the U.S. Congress.
This is the reason opponents of a nuclear Iran have been increasingly frustrated with the White House. Their timeline is configured to estimate when Iran would attain nuclear capability; the president’s timeline, however, has a fixed end date: the day after his last day in office.
It’s worth recalling at this point the last time the president’s negotiating team floated a cloaked surrender. In September, the two sides were stuck on the same dealbreaker: Iran wants to keep its centrifuges. So how do you enable Iran to keep its centrifuges while still offering substantial resistance to Iranian nuclear development, especially after legitimizing their right to enrich? The answer is: you don’t. Which raised the next question: What if you’re an American president who wants to be able to claim you set back Iran’s nuclear quest without actually having done so, and without removing the centrifuges? Call in the plumber, as the New York Times had revealed:
The idea is to convince the Iranians to take away many of the pipes that connect their nuclear centrifuges, the giant machines that are connected together in a maze that allows uranium fuel to move from one machine to another, getting enriched along the way. That way, the Iranians could claim they have not given in to Western demands that they eliminate all but a token number of their 19,000 machines, in which Iran has invested billions of dollars and tremendous national pride.
As our Jonathan Tobin wrote at the time, the pipe proposal showed that “the U.S. has been on a path of constant retreat” throughout the negotiations. It was not a serious idea, and it was not treated as such except by the Obama administration.
Now we have a new proposal–if the AP story is right:
According to the diplomats, the proposal could leave running most of the nearly 10,000 centrifuges Iran is operating but reconfigure them to reduce the amount of enriched uranium they produce.
One of the diplomats said the deal could include other limitations to ensure that Tehran’s program is kept in check.
For one, Iran would be allowed to store only a specific amount of uranium gas, which is fed into centrifuges for enrichment. The amount of gas would depend on the number of centrifuges it keeps.
Second, Iran would commit to shipping out most of the enriched uranium it produces, leaving it without enough to make a bomb. Iran denies any interest in nuclear weapons and says its program is for peaceful uses such as nuclear power and medical technology.
But note that those two “limitations” are not even necessarily part of the deal. So we’re left with an easily reversible timewaster.
But even just the proposal of such an idea is a major concession to the Iranians. That’s because without having to agree to any serious deal, the Iranians have already succeeded in getting the Obama administration to recognize Iran’s “right” to enrich as well as allowing that a deal does not require Iran to give up its centrifuges. So they have a right to keep their centrifuges and a right to enrich.
The terms of the debate, in other words, have favored Iran all along. And the danger in each new proposal is not that the Iranians will accept it. Why would they, after all, when Obama is opposing new sanctions on them and the longer they wait the better the terms they’re offered? The concern, really, is that the Obama administration continues to legitimize major pieces of Iran’s nuclear quest. Pretty soon, there won’t be much left to negotiate over.
ISIS Terror Continues Unabated
Apparently the shock value of televised beheadings is wearing off. Or maybe captured Muslims are marked for especially gruesome treatment. Whatever the case, news has now emerged that ISIS burned alive captured Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kassasbeh. At this rate future captives can expect to be impaled or dismembered. There is simply no end to the evil of ISIS–their depravity and contempt for human life is seemingly infinite.
Apparently the shock value of televised beheadings is wearing off. Or maybe captured Muslims are marked for especially gruesome treatment. Whatever the case, news has now emerged that ISIS burned alive captured Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kassasbeh. At this rate future captives can expect to be impaled or dismembered. There is simply no end to the evil of ISIS–their depravity and contempt for human life is seemingly infinite.
Yet faced with this abomination, the U.S. has blinked. Sure, President Obama has sent a few thousand advisors to Iraq and dropped thousands of bombs in both Iraq and Syria. But, the liberation of the ruined town of Kobani aside, his current strategy isn’t working. As the Daily Beast notes: “The Pentagon has said it has killed 6,000 fighters since coalition strikes began five months ago; the intelligence community estimates 4,000 foreign fighters have entered the fray since September. (A higher estimate, made by The Washington Post, holds that 5,000 foreign fighters have flowed into the two countries since October.)” That kind of math favors the jihadists, because it doesn’t even account for all the thousands of Iraqis and Syrians who have taken up arms under the black banner.
It is high time for a more serious strategy–one that I outlined back in November. Boost the U.S. military presence. Loosen restrictions on bombing. End the prohibition on U.S. boots on the ground. Let U.S. Special Forces accompany Iraqi and Syrian forces into battle and call in airstrikes directly on ISIS positions. Send in the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command to take down ISIS commanders. Do more to train and arm Sunni tribesmen in both Syria and Iraq–work with them directly rather than going through the Iraqi Security Forces and assure Syrians that the U.S. is as opposed to Bashar Assad’s evil as ISIS’s evil.
Yet the White House consistently refuses to get serious. That makes its protests about the murder of ISIS hostages, whether American, British, Japanese, or now Jordanian, toothless. Just empty verbiage. Until the U.S. is willing to do more to stop ISIS, it will continue its reign of terror unabated.
Imad Mughniyah and Iran’s Covert War
Osama bin Laden may have been more famous, but arguably the most influential and successful terrorist of modern times was Imad Mughniyah. A poor Shiite boy from Lebanon, he exploded onto the scene in the early 1980s as a terrorist prodigy. Working for the organization that would become Hezbollah, and cooperating closely with Iran’s Quds Force, he was held responsible for the most significant terrorist attacks of the 1980s and 1990s including the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 (63 dead), the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (241 dead), the torture and murder of William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut (1984), the hijacking of TWA flight 847 and the murder of a U.S. navy diver who was on board (1985), the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 (29 dead), the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 (85 dead), and the bombing of the U.S. Air Force Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (19 dead).
Osama bin Laden may have been more famous, but arguably the most influential and successful terrorist of modern times was Imad Mughniyah. A poor Shiite boy from Lebanon, he exploded onto the scene in the early 1980s as a terrorist prodigy. Working for the organization that would become Hezbollah, and cooperating closely with Iran’s Quds Force, he was held responsible for the most significant terrorist attacks of the 1980s and 1990s including the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 (63 dead), the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (241 dead), the torture and murder of William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut (1984), the hijacking of TWA flight 847 and the murder of a U.S. navy diver who was on board (1985), the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 (29 dead), the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994 (85 dead), and the bombing of the U.S. Air Force Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996 (19 dead).
Mughniyah pioneered suicide bombing, a malignant new trend in terrorism, which has since reached industrial size proportions in Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not only was Mughniyah an innovator, he was a proselytizer–he reportedly taught Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as well as Shiite militias in Iraq which targeted American troops.
Mughniyah was as evil as any man can be, and therefore it was cause for celebration when his reign of terror was cut short in 2008: He was killed by a car bomb in Damascus. His end was fitting since the car bomb was his own weapon of choice, although the attack which killed him had a precision utterly lacking in his own blunderbuss assaults (no civilians were killed around Mughniyah).
It has long been speculated that Mossad was behind Mughniyah’s execution but now the Washington Post reports that the CIA was closely involved as well. It was the CIA which actually developed, tested, and installed the bomb, hidden in the spare wheel of a car, which killed Mughniyah. And a CIA team on the ground surveilled his movements.
The only shortcoming of the operation, according to the Post, was that the CIA-Mossad team could have killed not only Mughniyah but also Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, who is another terrorist mastermind, while the two were walking together. But in an excess of legalism, the CIA declined to pull the trigger because there had been no presidential finding to kill Soleimani as there was for Mughniyah. So Soleimani has been free to plan and carry out numerous atrocities in Syria, among other countries.
Nevertheless the operation was a huge success. It delivered justice for Mughniyah’s victims and it dealt a setback to the Iranian terrorist network. That is an example of effective action that should be kept in mind today when, as Michael Doran argues in Mosaic, President Obama is carrying out a secret strategy to court Iran. Instead of trying to woo Iran, the U.S. should be trying to stop its power grab across the Middle East. It should be waging covert war on Iranian operatives just as they wage covert war on the U.S. and our allies. The Mughniyah operation is only one example of what such a counteroffensive should look like–the U.S. also had a great deal of success in Iraq in 2007-2008 in exposing and uprooting an Iranian network. It’s a shame that this containment policy has been abandoned in favor of what Doran describes as Obama’s misguided determination “to encourage and augment Iran’s potential as a successful regional power and as a friend and partner to the United States.”
Obama’s Budget and Our Potemkin Politics
After President Obama’s State of the Union address, I noted that even partisan-left media outlets were unwilling to play along with Obama’s self-serving framing of his foreign policy. Now Obama’s getting the same treatment on domestic policy as well. It’s a rude awakening for a president so accustomed to being treated with kid gloves by an adoring media, and a sure sign he’s officially a lame duck.
After President Obama’s State of the Union address, I noted that even partisan-left media outlets were unwilling to play along with Obama’s self-serving framing of his foreign policy. Now Obama’s getting the same treatment on domestic policy as well. It’s a rude awakening for a president so accustomed to being treated with kid gloves by an adoring media, and a sure sign he’s officially a lame duck.
Obama has released his proposed budget, and commentators have been mostly unable to stifle their disbelief. To be fair, part of the reason Obama’s budget is so unrealistic is that the Republicans currently control Congress, so it has no chance of passing. But in truth, that probably doesn’t change its chances so much as it gives the president and his party’s populists an excuse to claim Republican intransigence. Many Democrats surely don’t want to be put in a position to vote for the taxman’s anthem that is this budget document.
Here, via the New York Times, are some of the ways it’s being received by the left. A Times reporter’s description of its content:
President Obama presented a budget on Monday that is more utopian vision than pragmatic blueprint. It proposes a politically improbable reshaping of the tax code and generous new social spending initiatives that would shift resources from the wealthy to the middle class.
The same reporter’s take on what it’s missing:
Absent from the plan is any pretense of trying to address the main drivers of the long-term debt — Social Security and Medicare — a quest that has long divided both parties and ultimately proved impossible. The document instead indicates that Mr. Obama, after years of being hemmed in on his fiscal priorities because of politics and balance sheets, feels newly free to outline an ambitious set of goals that will set the terms of a debate between Democrats and Republicans and shape the 2016 presidential election.
A former economic advisor to Vice President Biden’s opinion of it:
“It’s a visionary document and basically says, ‘You’re with me or you’re not,’ and we can have big philosophical arguments about the role of government, and perhaps in 2016 we will,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former top economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Back to the Times reporter on Obama the Bipartisan Healer:
Yet the budget confirms that for Mr. Obama, the era of searching for a “grand bargain” with Republicans on entitlements and spending — an exercise that alienated liberal Democrats who were loath to consider any measure to rein in Medicare and Social Security — is over.
And all this, believe it or not, is still a favorable reading of it. The Times repeats uncritically the president’s propagandistic declarations of “middle-class economics” and that the bill’s tax increases would hit “the rich” without investigating how these taxes and fees would end up on the shoulders of the “middle class”–to say nothing of the president’s own shots at confiscating middle-class cash, like his ill-fated 529 plan.
And it also takes as Gospel the idea that Obama has truly been searching, in good faith, for grand bipartisan solutions. The lesson of Obama’s first six years, with occasional exceptions, is that “bipartisan” to Obama means that Republicans vote for his policies. The Democrats have shown they can file legislation without Republican input and without Republican amendments with a clear conscience. And during the rare times when Democrats and Republicans really were negotiating in good faith for a deal, Obama showed a propensity to sabotage those talks or poison the well.
So it might be more accurate to say that the era of pretending to search for a “grand bargain” is officially over. And that, in its own way, is the one honest aspect of the budget. The rest is theater. And theater is, increasingly, what national politics has become.
There’s the State of the Union itself, which is clear pageantry made all the more intolerable by the orchestrated applause and non-applause, standing and sitting, laughing and scowling from the congressional audience. There are the presidential nominating conventions, which are devoid of drama of any kind. (Though the Democrats’ 2012 convention did have that one hectic unscripted moment when the party’s delegates angrily voted down adding pro-Israel language to the party’s platform.)
And now we have Potemkin budgets, constructed to look pretty but act as a façade to cover the ideological ruins behind it. Except by year seven the press gets tired of playing along, even for Obama.
If Iran Gets Nukes, Will Obama Be Satisfied with Imposing “Costs?”
President Obama’s interview with Fareed Zakaria, aired yesterday on CNN, had been teased out last week with excerpts on the president’s response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress. It was the least important part of the interview; all schoolyard drama, no substance. Which is precisely why CNN used it as viewer bait. But in the full interview, the president actually said something quite important. Though the comment was about Ukraine, it has significant implications for the effort to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
President Obama’s interview with Fareed Zakaria, aired yesterday on CNN, had been teased out last week with excerpts on the president’s response to Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress. It was the least important part of the interview; all schoolyard drama, no substance. Which is precisely why CNN used it as viewer bait. But in the full interview, the president actually said something quite important. Though the comment was about Ukraine, it has significant implications for the effort to stop the Iranian nuclear program.
Admittedly, what the president said wasn’t exactly new. It was a new riff on an old song. But its timing offers a window into how the president approaches conflict resolution around the world. “Would it be fair to say,” Zakaria asked the president, “that with regard to Russia your policy has been pretty effective in imposing real costs on the Russian economy, but it has not deterred Vladimir Putin from creating instability in Ukraine?” The president agreed: “I think that’s entirely fair.” But then he went back to a familiar well: “And I think that is a testament to the bad decisions that Mr. Putin is making on behalf of his country.”
He went on to say this:
There’s no formula in which this ends up being good for Russia. The annexation of Crimea is a cost, not a benefit to Russia. The days, in which conquest of land somehow was a formula for great nation status is over. The power of countries today is measured by your knowledge, your skills, your ability to export goods to invent new products and new services, your influence. And none of those things are provided by his strategy. Now, but what is absolutely true is that if you have a leader who continually drives past the off ramps that we’ve provided, given the size of the Russian military, given the fact that Ukraine is not a NATO country, and so as a consequence there are clear limits in terms of what we would do militarily, Mr. Putin has not been stopped so far.
The obvious takeaway is that what Obama said isn’t true, nor is it close to being true. It is, in fact, an astoundingly silly view of the world, which explains quite a bit about why the president’s approach to foreign policy has been so disastrous. It’s also contradictory; after all, if the “power of countries today is measured” in part by “your influence,” then Russia gets more than a passing grade. Additionally, we should all hope that with an Obama-Biden-Kerry team at the helm, power isn’t “measured by your knowledge.”
But the president’s statement is completed by his next sentence:
To those who would suggest that we need to do more, what I’ve said to them is that we can exact higher and higher costs and that’s exactly what we’re doing, and we can bring diplomatic pressure to bear.
This is the key to understanding Obama’s strategy, such as it is, to these conflicts. Obama’s goal is not to prevent nor reverse the rogue states’ actions. He aims not to turn Russia back nor even really stop what’s going on in eastern Ukraine. He simply wants Putin to one day regret his actions. He wants to exact “costs”–and that’s all.
The administration is reportedly considering giving real support to Ukrainian forces, a development that would be far too late to undo most of the damage but might stop Ukraine from slowly disintegrating. Yet they are still not ready to pull the trigger, apparently, and we all know how well the administration’s plan to arm the Syrian rebels–delayed, bungled, and abandoned–worked out. More likely, the president is simply looking for a way to be able to say he did more than he did.
Which is why the “cost” theory Obama’s so fond of should worry those opposed to a nuclear Iran, among other conflicts. Obama is not generally a fan of sanctions; on both Russia and Iran, he’s been an obstacle to meaningful sanctions. But when he does begrudgingly sign sanctions legislation he’s unable to prevent, he likes to think his work is done.
That’s the point of Obama’s protestation that “we can exact higher and higher costs.” Russia will still get to do what it wants and take what it wants, but Obama hopes it will cost them some cash. What’s alarming about this (as opposed to just insulting, which it is to the Ukrainians) is that if it were applied to Iran, it would mean Obama sees sanctions and penalties as an end in themselves, not as a tactic to help obtain a specific outcome.
That would mean an Iranian nuke (or the Iranians being beyond the point of no return) and Obama would sit there smirking about it on CNN talking about all the costs Iran has accumulated in order to get that bomb. He would admonish Iran that they may have achieved nuclear capability, but great nations aren’t measured by their power and prestige, they’re measured by whether Barack Obama thinks they’ve made prudent financial investments.
If Obama wants to write a column for the Financial Times, he’d still be wrong. But he’d leave a lot less rubble in his wake.
Will Obama Give In to Iran? He Already Has.
Almost all of the coverage about the ongoing controversy about plans for Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress next month about sanctions on Iran has focused on allegations regarding inappropriate behavior from an ally and breaches of protocol. But an exchange of anonymous quotes from administration and Netanyahu government sources in the Israeli press this weekend should serve as a reminder of what is really at stake in the dispute. Israeli sources said the problem was that the deal that President Obama was working to conclude with Iran would allow it to keep several thousand of its centrifuges and allow it to “breakout” to a nuclear weapon in a matter of months. Anonymous American government sources replied that this was nonsense. But anyone who has been closely following informed coverage of the negotiations knows that far from being misleading, the Israelis are doing nothing but stating the obvious about an American willingness to let Iran become a nuclear threshold state. Rather than discussing Netanyahu’s chutzpah, Americans should be asking some of the same questions as the Israelis.
Almost all of the coverage about the ongoing controversy about plans for Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress next month about sanctions on Iran has focused on allegations regarding inappropriate behavior from an ally and breaches of protocol. But an exchange of anonymous quotes from administration and Netanyahu government sources in the Israeli press this weekend should serve as a reminder of what is really at stake in the dispute. Israeli sources said the problem was that the deal that President Obama was working to conclude with Iran would allow it to keep several thousand of its centrifuges and allow it to “breakout” to a nuclear weapon in a matter of months. Anonymous American government sources replied that this was nonsense. But anyone who has been closely following informed coverage of the negotiations knows that far from being misleading, the Israelis are doing nothing but stating the obvious about an American willingness to let Iran become a nuclear threshold state. Rather than discussing Netanyahu’s chutzpah, Americans should be asking some of the same questions as the Israelis.
Though Netanyahu’s fans in the United States and his supporters at home continue to engage in denial about the invitation from House Speaker John Boehner, the longer this debate continues, the more it has become obvious that the prime minister blundered. With even reliably pro-Israel Democrats openly discussing boycotts of the speech and others backing away from support for sanctions, the speech has become a dangerous distraction that has served to rally members of the president’s party to back his position even if many are dubious about its merits.
That’s why it’s vital that we stop talking about protocol and return to the core question at the heart of the debate: whether the president’s efforts will redeem his campaign promise that any deal would result in the end of Iran’s nuclear program.
The answer is, unfortunately, that they won’t and that ought to put Netanyahu’s worries in perspective.
We know that this is no longer the objective of American diplomacy because the terms of the interim nuclear deal agreed to by the United States in November 2013 made it clear that Iran was going to be able to keep its infrastructure. That agreement tacitly recognized Iran’s “right” to enrich uranium even though its terms slowed down their rate of progress. But as even administration defenders acknowledged, the restrictions on the Iranians’ efforts could be easily reversed in any breakout scenario.
The subsequent negotiations for a final deal were supposed to last only six months, but are now in their third overtime with administration sources acting as if a fourth such extension would not be unthinkable if a deal isn’t reached by July. That’s bad enough. But far worse are the terms currently under discussion. What is the Western offer on the table that the Iranians are rejecting? If you want to know, don’t take the word of official Israeli sources; try reading one of the most sympathetic forums for the administration, the AL Monitor website. Back in November when the Iranians wouldn’t accept President Obama’s proposed deal forcing the U.S. to accept another breach of the deadline, here’s what it reported:
The agreement allows Iran to continue researching its most advanced centrifuges. Israeli sources estimate that this research will be completed within two years. Then, within another six months, the Iranians will be able to install an enormous number of new enrichment centrifuges, which operate at six times the speed of the current batch. This capacity will seriously expedite the potential Iranian “breakout to a bomb.”
Under such circumstances, the Israelis explained to their colleagues, the West will be convinced that it stopped Iran one year before it can build a bomb, when the true amount of time needed will be just two months. Two months, the Israelis told anyone who was willing to listen, is not enough time for the world to respond and block Iran should it decide to proceed at full steam. In other words, the agreement that everyone is talking about is one that would turn Iran into a nuclear threshold state in a very brief amount of time, and immediately enable it to make the quick leap forward to nuclear capabilities, before the world can even respond.
As much as the interim deal had been a far cry from the positions that the president had articulated when running for reelection, this potential deal was even worse in that it would allow the Iranians to keep everything they would need to make a bomb but rely on their promises and the West’s shaky intelligence and restricted United Nations inspections to ensure that they wouldn’t do so. But, AL Monitor noted, that wasn’t the extent of the problem:
Iran is not obligated to dismantle its centrifuge infrastructure, but only to disable the centrifuges. Under those circumstances, in any situation in which the Iranians decide to withdraw from the agreement or violate it, they can get the centrifuge system that they ”neutralized” working again within two weeks. All of this proves that Iran will continue to maintain expansive enrichment capabilities, which can easily be restored to previous capacity and even beyond that within just a few weeks.
Seen from that perspective, the Israeli allegations about the direction of U.S. diplomacy seem very much to the point.
How do we explain the discrepancy between what Obama promised and the sort of agreement he seems to be aiming toward?
The first answer is that the Iranians are much tougher negotiators than the Western team that has been trying to get them to give the president a much-needed foreign-policy triumph. Whenever the Iranians have said no to a demand, the Americans have simply given up and moved on to other points. Secretary of State Kerry even defended this practice after the interim deal by saying that it was better to give in and keep talking than to ask for the impossible. But in practice that has meant that years of talks have now taken the U.S. to a point where they are actually disputing how many hundreds of centrifuges the Iranians will be able to keep, a stance that merely reduces the issue to how long it will take for the Islamists to get their bomb.
But even more to the point is the fact that, as President Obama’s comments about the negotiations have made clear, the goal is not so much to end the nuclear threat as it is to work toward a sort of reconciliation with Tehran without requiring it to halt their support for terrorist groups and cease working toward production of ballistic missiles, let alone give up their nuclear ambitions. Though the president wants to help Iran “get right with the world,” what his efforts are really doing is to advance their efforts toward regional hegemony. This position has influenced the U.S. to form an informal alliance with Iran in Iraq and Syria and frightened and alienated moderate Arab nations as well as the Israelis.
So far from being “nonsense,” Netanyahu’s concerns about the president’s diplomatic goals are very much to the point in the debate about sanctions. With the president showing no sign that he will ever admit that the negotiations have failed, the need to toughen the American position has now become imperative. Democrats might be forgiven for rallying around their leader when they perceive he is under attack. But those who care about nuclear proliferation and a potentially genocidal Iranian threat to both Israel and the West need to forget about protocol and start asking tough questions about what kind of a deal the administration is trying to conclude. Unless something drastic happens to change the American position, the problem isn’t that Obama might adopt a position that will let Iran become a nuclear threshold state. It’s that he has already done so.
Even After Speech Fiasco, Israel Will Survive Netanyahu-Obama Feud
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His decision to accept House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session has brought down on his head the scorn of the American political establishment and press. But all is not lost for Netanyahu. There may be no good solution to his dilemma with respect to the speech to Congress and little hope that the Obama administration will do the right thing with respect to Iran, he remains the most likely person to emerge from Israel’s March election as the next prime minister. Though some may think that would be an even bigger disaster for his country considering that administration sources are spreading rumors that President Obama will never again meet with Netanyahu, no one should think such an outcome will be the end of the alliance or even such bad news for the prime minister.
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. His decision to accept House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address a joint session has brought down on his head the scorn of the American political establishment and press. But all is not lost for Netanyahu. There may be no good solution to his dilemma with respect to the speech to Congress and little hope that the Obama administration will do the right thing with respect to Iran, he remains the most likely person to emerge from Israel’s March election as the next prime minister. Though some may think that would be an even bigger disaster for his country considering that administration sources are spreading rumors that President Obama will never again meet with Netanyahu, no one should think such an outcome will be the end of the alliance or even such bad news for the prime minister.
Though Netanyahu’s American supporters continue to defend the idea of him giving such a speech, there’s no way to sugarcoat what has become a disaster for Israel and the prime minister. The blunder has not only made it easier for President Obama to divert attention from his indefensible opposition to sanctions that would turn up the heat on Iran in the nuclear talks. It has also enabled the White House to rally Democrats to oppose more sanctions, causing some to say that they won’t even attend Netanyahu’s speech out of loyalty to the president. Joining the gang tackle, some in the press are floating stories about Ambassador Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s loyal aide and the person who helped cook up this fiasco with Boehner, being frozen out of future contacts with the administration.
But while, contrary to the expectations of some on the right, this hasn’t exactly boosted Netanyahu’s standing at home, neither has it caused his prospects for re-election to crash. Indeed, while his Likud Party seemed to be losing ground to the Labor-Tzipi Livni alliance that now calls itself the Zionist Camp, by the end of the week, polls showed that Netanyahu’s stock had gone up. A review of all the polls showed that Likud was either tied with Labor or edging slightly ahead.
More to the point, any way you look at the electoral math of the coming Knesset, finding a way for Labor leader Isaac Herzog to form a coalition, even one that isn’t particularly stable, seems highly unlikely.
Even if Herzog’s party manages to nose out Likud for the top spot in the March elections giving him the theoretical first shot at forming a coalition, his task seems impossible. A Labor-led coalition is theoretically possible but it would require the sort of coalition of not merely rivals but open enemies. Herzog must build his coalition with the joint Arab list — forcing him to rely on open anti-Zionists to form his “Zionist Camp” government — or the Ultra-Orthodox religious parties. It is impossible to imagine those two polar opposites serving together. But even if he eliminates one or the other, it’s equally difficult to see like Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu or Yitzhak Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, working with the Arabs. It’s equally hard to imagine how Lapid or Meretz, Labor’s natural ally on the far left, co-exist with the religious parties or how either scenario for a coalition could last.
By contrast, it will be far easier for Netanyahu to assemble a coalition consisting of the parties of the right and the center even without the religious parties though it is highly likely that he would opt for a Cabinet that included the ultra-Orthodox this time, giving him yet another strong, albeit quarrelsome government to preside over.
Thus, the odds are that sometime this spring, Netanyahu will be sworn in for a fourth term as prime minister, much to the chagrin of his sparring partner in the White House. But if Obama won’t talk to Netanyahu and is even pledging as one anonymous White House source claimed, to be willing to make the prime minister pay a price for his effrontery in opposing him on sanctions, won’t that be terrible for Israel?
The short answer is that it certainly won’t make for a cordial relationship. But it’s hard to see how it will make things any worse than they have been for the last six years.
After all, Obama has been sniping at and snubbing Netanyahu and his country ever since he entered the presidency. Obama has tilted the diplomatic playing field in favor of the Palestinians, undermined Israel’s claims to Jerusalem in ways no predecessor had done and even cut off the resupply of ammunition during last summer’s war with Gaza out of pique at Netanyahu’s government.
But in spite of this, the all-important security relationship continued. What’s necessary for the alliance to function is that the Pentagon and Israel’s Ministry of Defense communicate regularly, not the president and the prime minister. The same goes for the two security establishments, that continue to work well together.
In fact, it might be a very good thing for the alliance if Obama were to refuse to meet Netanyahu for the remainder of his time in office. Only bad things tend to happen when the two, who openly despise each other, are forced to come together. It would be far better for both countries for the leaders to stay apart, enabling their underlings to do what needs to be done to ensure the security of both nations. Were Obama to try and take revenge on Israel by supporting the Palestinians in the United Nations, it would harm the U.S. as much, if not more than it would Israel.
Netanyahu also knows that whoever wins in 2016, with the possible and extremely unlikely exception of Rand Paul, any of the possibilities to be the 45th president will be friendlier to Israel than Obama.
The issue of Iran’s nuclear threat will continue to hang over Israel and the alliance and Obama’s push for détente with the Islamist regime is a genuine threat to the Jewish state’s security as well as to that of moderate Arab governments. But once the current arguments about sanctions subside, as they inevitably will, Israel will carry on and Obama’s enmity notwithstanding, it will survive. Even a fourth term for Netanyahu will not change that.
Scott Walker Rejects Your Premise
The conventional wisdom after Republicans lost two presidential elections to Barack Obama was that the GOP needed to concede the premise of certain Democratic talking points. Suddenly immigration reform became urgent enough for a prospective GOP candidate to lead the effort in the Senate. And even more suddenly, talk of inequality has emerged in conservative circles. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if, instead, Scott Walker is right?
The conventional wisdom after Republicans lost two presidential elections to Barack Obama was that the GOP needed to concede the premise of certain Democratic talking points. Suddenly immigration reform became urgent enough for a prospective GOP candidate to lead the effort in the Senate. And even more suddenly, talk of inequality has emerged in conservative circles. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if, instead, Scott Walker is right?
The Wisconsin governor is enjoying a bit of a boomlet right now, as Peter Beinart notes in a sharp piece on Walker’s unapologetic conservatism. And he’s earned it. He won three statewide elections in four years, and did so with national media attention and the concerted lunatic tactics of public unions (death threats, violence, compulsive Hitler comparisons) aimed at him and his supporters. He won comfortably and with a smile on his face. Walker never lost his composure and never stooped to the level of his fanatical liberal opponents.
None of this is news. What’s changed is that Walker has, in the last week, gone national. His speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit earned rave reviews, and was followed with what appears to be the first pro-Walker presidential ad. And everyone seems to have noticed what Walker’s opponents in Wisconsin have learned the hard way, repeatedly: he’s a formidable politician. This should worry his GOP rivals not only because of Walker’s win streak, but also because Walker is doing something many of them aren’t: he’s setting the terms of the debate instead of following the terms the Democrats have set.
A good example of how this plays out concerns Mitt Romney, who had been flirting with another presidential run. Romney was hurt by his infamous “47 percent” remark in which he appeared to write off voters he considered contentedly dependent on government. It became a catchphrase for the Republicans’ so-called empathy gap.
Before deciding to pass on running again, Romney had been trying to undo the lingering damage of the Monopoly Man reputation by expressing his concern for the poor. He was rewarded for stepping into this rhetorical bear trap with a giddy President Obama in full class warrior mode, as Politico notes:
“Even though their policies haven’t quite caught up yet, their rhetoric is starting to sound pretty Democratic,” Obama said of the Republicans during a House Democratic retreat. “We have a former presidential candidate on the other side and [who is] suddenly deeply concerned about poverty. That’s great, let’s go. Let’s do something about it.”
Even when trash talking, the president is not exactly a wordsmith. But the point, clumsy and juvenile though it is, shines through: whatever your policies, to simply care about poor people makes you sound “pretty Democratic,” as the intellectually cloistered president sees it.
This helps Democrats because even if Republicans come around to demonstrating the empathy they supposedly lack, it sends the message that the Democrats were right. Walker rejects the premise.
Beinart explains how the media missed this story until now:
Walker’s rise illustrates the pitfalls of media coverage of the GOP race. Not many national reporters live within the conservative media ecosystem. They therefore largely assume that in order to win over the non-white, female, millennial and working class voters who rejected John McCain and Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidates must break from conservative orthodoxy, if not substantively, then at least rhetorically. Journalists are also drawn to storylines about change. Thus, when potential GOP candidates show signs of ideological deviation, the press perks up. After 2012, Marco Rubio garnered enormous media attention for his efforts at immigration reform. Rand Paul’s transgressions—whether on foreign policy, civil liberties or race—make headlines almost every week. In covering the launch of his new Super PAC, journalists made much of Jeb Bush’s discussion of income inequality and his fluent Spanish. Most recently, reporters have lavished attention on Mitt Romney’s new focus on the poor.
The lesson, as I interpret it, is that the press and the Democrats speak the same language. That’s not surprising; the mainstream press, especially during national elections, functions as a messaging office for the Democrats. Because of this, they just assume that in order to be a serious presidential candidate you have to be like them, like the Democrats.
Walker doesn’t agree. And he’s been extraordinarily successful of late by not agreeing.
Part of the media’s terrible coverage of national politics is the reliance on the personal: it matters to them who is saying it more than what is said. Romney got tagged as uncaring because he’s rich. But the classic conservative policies don’t reek of plutocracy when coming from the new crop of Republican stars, many of whom came from modest beginnings or are the children of immigrants, or both. Walker doesn’t even have a college degree, which itself is incomprehensible to modern Democrats, who are elitist and credentialist and genuinely don’t know what life is like in much of the country.
And neither does the media. Which is how someone like Walker could be so successful and still blindside the national press, who would struggle to find Wisconsin on a map. And it’s why Walker is a threat to other high-profile Republicans who have accepted the Democratic/media framing of the issues in order to make a national pitch. Only one of them can be right.
February 2015
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Articles
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The Existential Necessity of Zionism After Paris
The Editors -
I Think That I Shall Never See a Jew As Lovely As a Tree
Tevi Troy -
The ‘Conversation About Race’ That Isn’t a Conversation
Noah RothmanTwenty years of talk about race obscures this country’s remarkable progress.
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Slandering Americans Who Fight for Israel
Daniel FleschLone soldiers face unfounded accusations of unsavory origin.
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The Return of North Korea
Michael Auslin -
Famous Actresses I Have Known
Frederic RaphaelA memoir, featuring Faye Dunaway’s cigarettes, Natalie Wood as Zelda Fitzgerald, and more.
Politics & Ideas
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The Sage of Araby
Sohrab Ahmari -
Father Abraham
Jeremy Rozansky -
Choosing the Chosen
Stephen Daisley -
Uncoupling
Naomi Schaefer Riley
Culture & Civilization
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WASP Without a Sting
Terry Teachout -
Madame Chaja
Jenna Weissman JoselitOn an exhibition about the little beauty giant Helena Rubinstein.
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A Disaster of Biblical Proportions
David Wolpe -
Don’t Kill Us, We’ve Taken Sensitivity Training
Matthew Continetti
John Podhoretz
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The Censors Win
John Podhoretz
Letters
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Why Pasternak Dared
Our Readers -
What FDR Could Have Done for Jewish Children
Our ReadersResponses to “‘Children in Europe are Europe’s problem!’” by Robert Slayton
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Ceding Europe to Extremists on Both Sides
Our ReadersResponses to “A Local Story of Global Jihad” by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein
Threat Assessment
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Will Palestinians Be Held Accountable?
Jonathan S. Tobin
Enter Laughing
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