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The Iran Delusion: A Primer for the Perplexed

July 8, 2015

The Iran Delusion: A Primer for the Perplexed, World Affairs, Michael J. Totten, Summer 2015

Totten_Iran

US foreign policy in the Middle East is focused on two things right now: containing ISIS and preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. These are both worthy goals, but if sanctions are lifted on Iran as part of a nuclear deal, whether or not it gets the bomb, Tehran will certainly have more money and resources to funnel to Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Iraq’s Shia militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and—perhaps—to Saudi Arabia’s disaffected Shia minority. The region will become even less stable than it already is. ISIS and al-Qaeda will likely grow stronger than they already are.

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The chattering class has spent months bickering about whether or not the United States should sign on to a nuclear deal with Iran, and everyone from the French and the Israelis to the Saudis has weighed in with “no” votes. Hardly anyone aside from the Saudis, however, seems to recognize that the Iranian government’s ultimate goal is regional hegemony and that its nuclear weapons program is simply a means to that end.

What do these shatter zones have in common? The Iranian government backs militias and terrorist armies in all of them. As Kaplan writes, “The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it.”

That’s why Iran is a problem for American foreign policy makers in the first place; and that’s why trading sanctions relief for an international weapons inspection regime will have no effect on any of it whatsoever.

Iran has been a regional power since the time of the Persian Empire, and its Islamic leaders have played an entirely pernicious role in the Middle East since they seized power from Mohammad Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979, stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, and held 66 American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

In 1982, they went international. When the Israelis invaded Lebanon to dislodge Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Army, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders forged a network of terrorist and guerrilla cells among their coreligionists in Lebanon’s Shia population.

Hezbollah, the poisoned fruit of these efforts, initially had no name. It was a hidden force that struck from the shadows. It left a hell of a mark, though, for an organization of anonymous nobodies when it blew up the American Embassy in Beirut and hit French and American peacekeeping troops—who were there at the invitation of the Lebanese government—with suicide truck bombers in 1983 that killed 368 people.

When Hezbollah’s leaders finally sent out a birth announcement in their 1985 Open Letter, they weren’t the least bit shy about telling the world who they worked for. “We are,” they wrote, “the Party of God (Hizb Allah), the vanguard of which was made victorious by God in Iran . . . We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih [jurist] who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!”

The Israelis fought a grinding counterinsurgency against Hezbollah for 18 years in southern Lebanon before withdrawing in 2000, and they fought a devastating war in 2006 along the border that killed thousands and produced more than a million refugees in both countries. Hezbollah was better armed and equipped than the Lebanese government even then, but today its missiles can reach Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and even the Dimona nuclear power plant all the way down in the southern part of the country. 

Until September 11, 2001, no terrorist organization in the world had killed more Americans than Hezbollah. Hamas in Gaza isn’t even qualified as a batboy in the league Hezbollah plays in.

Hezbollah is more than just an anti-Western and anti-Jewish terrorist organization. It is also a ruthless sectarian Shia militia that imposes its will at gunpoint on Lebanon’s Sunnis, Christians, and Druze. It has toppled elected governments, invaded and occupied parts of Beirut, and, according to a United Nations indictment, assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Hezbollah is, for all intents and purposes, the foreign legion of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. The parts of the country it occupies—the northern Bekaa Valley, the Israeli border region, and the suburbs south of Beirut—constitute a de facto Iranian-controlled state-within-a-state inside Lebanon. 

After the United States demolished Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime in 2003, Iran’s rulers duplicated their Lebanon strategy in Iraq by sponsoring a smorgasbord of sectarian Shia militias and death squads that waged war against the Iraqi government, the American military, Sunni civilians, and politically moderate Shias. 

Unlike Lebanon—which is more or less evenly divided between Christians, Sunnis, and Shias—Iraq has an outright Shia majority that feels a gravitational pull toward their fellow Shias in Iran and a revulsion for the Sunni minority that backed Hussein’s brutal totalitarianism and today tolerates the even more deranged occupation by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. 

The central government, then, is firmly aligned with Tehran. Iran’s clients don’t run a Hezbollah-style state-within-a-state in Iraq. They don’t have to. Now that Hussein is out of the way, Iraq’s Shias can dominate Baghdad with the weight of sheer demographics alone. But Iran isn’t content with merely having strong diplomatic relations with its neighbor. It still sponsors sectarian Shia militias in the center and south of the country that outperform the American-trained national army. They may one day even supplant Iraq’s national army as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has more or less supplanted the Iranian national army. Iraq’s Shia militias are already the most powerful armed force outside the Kurdish autonomous region and ISIS-held territory.

When ISIS took complete control of the city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, in May of 2015, the Iraqi soldiers tasked with protecting it dropped their weapons and ran as they had earlier in Mosul, Tikrit, and Fallujah. So Iraq’s central government tasked its Iranian-backed Shia militias with taking it back. 

On the one hand, we can hardly fault Baghdad for sending in whatever competent fighting force is available when it needs to liberate a city from a psychopathic terrorist army, but the only reason ISIS gained a foothold among Iraq’s Sunnis in the first place is because the Baghdad government spent years acting like the sectarian dictatorship that it is, by treating the Sunni minority like second-class citizens, and by trumping up bogus charges against Sunni officials in the capital. When ISIS promised to protect Iraq’s Sunnis from the Iranian-backed Shia rulers in Baghdad, the narrative seemed almost plausible. So ISIS, after being vomited out of Anbar Province in 2007, was allowed to come back.

Most of Iraq’s Sunnis fear and loathe ISIS. They previously fought ISIS under its former name, al-Qaeda in Iraq. But they fear and loathe the central government and its Shiite militias even more. They’d rather be oppressed by “their own” than by “the other” if they had to choose. But they have to choose because Iran has made Iraq its second national project after Lebanon.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At least some of the tribal Sunni militias would gladly fight ISIS as they did in the past with American backing. If they did, residents of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul would view them as liberators and protectors rather than potential oppressors, but Tehran and Baghdad will have none of it.

“All attempts to send arms and ammunition must be through the central government,” Adnan al-Assadi, a member of Parliament, told CNN back in May. “That is why we refused the American proposal to arm the tribes in Anbar. We want to make sure that the weapons would not end up in the wrong hands, especially ISIS.”

That may appear reasonable on the surface, but ISIS can seize weapons from Shia militias just as easily as it can seize weapons from Sunni militias. The real reason for the government’s reluctance ought to be obvious: Iraq’s Shias do not want to arm Iraq’s Sunnis. They’d rather have ISIS controlling huge swaths of the country than a genuinely popular Sunni movement with staying power that’s implacably hostile to the Iranian-backed project in Mesopotamia.

The catastrophe in Iraq is bad enough, but the Iranian handiwork in Syria is looking even more apocalyptic nowadays. ISIS wouldn’t even exist, of course, if it weren’t for the predatory regime of Bashar al-Assad, and the close alliance that has existed between Damascus and Tehran since the 1979 revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power.

Syria’s government is dominated by the Alawites, who make up just 15 percent of the population. Their religion is a heterodox blend of Christianity, Gnosticism, and Shia Islam. They aren’t Shias. They aren’t even Muslims. Their Arab Socialist Baath Party is and has always been as secular as the Communist Party was in the Soviet Union (and it was in fact a client of the Soviet Union). A marriage between an aggressively secular Alawite regime and Iran’s clerical Islamic Republic was hardly inevitable, but it’s certainly logical. The two nations had a common enemy wedged between them in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and both have been threatened by the region’s Sunni Arab majority since their inception. 

Hezbollah is their first child, and the three of them together make up the core of what analyst Lee Smith calls the Resistance Bloc in his book, The Strong Horse. The Party of God, as it calls itself, wouldn’t exist without Iranian money and weapons, nor would it exist without Damascus as the logistics hub that connects them. And it would have expired decades ago if Syria hadn’t conquered and effectively annexed Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990.

Every armed faction in Lebanon, including Hezbollah, signed on to the Syrian-brokered Taif Agreement, which required the disarmament of every militia in the country. But the Assads governed Lebanon with the same crooked and cynical dishonesty they perfected at home, and as the occupying power they not only allowed Hezbollah to hold onto its arsenal, but also allowed Hezbollah to import rockets and even missiles from Iran.

“For Syria,” historian William Harris wrote in The New Face of Lebanon, “Hezbollah could persist as both a check on the Lebanese regime and as a means to bother Israel when convenient.”

The Party of God is now a powerful force unto itself, but it rightly views the potential downfall of the Assad regime as the beginning of its own end. The fact that Assad might be replaced by the anti-Shia genocidaires of ISIS compelled its fighters to invade Syria without an exit strategy—with the help of Iranian commanders, of course—to either prop up their co-patron or die.

Rather than going all-in, the Iranians could have cut their losses in Syria and pressured Assad into leaving the country. ISIS would be hiding under rocks right now had that happened. Hardly any Sunnis in Syria would tolerate such a deranged revolution if they had no one to revolt against. But the Resistance Bloc will only back down if it’s forced to back down. If ISIS devours Syria and Iraq as a result, then so be it.

And while the Resistance Bloc is fighting for its survival in the Levant, it’s expanding into the Arabian Peninsula.

The Shia-dominated Houthi movement took control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, earlier this year following the revolution that toppled former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, and its fighters are well on their way to taking the port city of Aden, in the Sunni part of the country.

The Houthis, of course, are backed by Iran.

They’re no more likely to conquer every inch of that country than Iran’s other regional proxies are to conquer every inch of anywhere else. Shias make up slightly less than half of Yemen’s population, and their natural “territory” is restricted to the northwestern region in and around the capital. Taking and holding it all is likely impossible. No government—Sunni, Shia, or otherwise—has managed to control all of Yemen for long. 

And the Saudis are doing their damnedest to make sure it stays that way. Their fighter jets have been pounding Houthi positions throughout the country since March.

Saudi Arabia is more alarmed at Iranian expansion in the region than anyone else, and for good reason. It’s the only Arab country with a substantial Shia minority that hasn’t yet been hit by Iranian-backed revolution, upheaval, or sectarian strife, although events in Yemen could quickly change that.

In the city and province of Najran, in the southwestern corner just over the Yemeni border, Shias are the largest religious group, and they’re linked by sect, tribe, and custom to the Houthis.

Not only is the border there porous and poorly defined, but that part of Saudi Arabia once belonged to Yemen. The Saudis conquered and annexed it in 1934. Najran is almost identical architecturally to the Yemeni capital, and you can walk from Najran to Yemen is a little over an hour. 

Will the Houthis be content to let Najran remain in Saudi hands now that they have Iranian guns, money, power, and wind at their back? Maybe. But the Saudis won’t bet their sovereignty on a maybe.

Roughly 15 percent of Saudi Arabia’s citizens are Shias. They’re not a large minority, but Syria’s Alawites are no larger and they’ve been ruling the entire country since 1971. And Shias make up the absolute majority in the Eastern Province, the country’s largest, where most of the oil is concentrated. 

Support among Yemen’s Sunnis for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—the most dangerous branch of al-Qaeda on earth—is rising for purely sectarian reasons just as it has in Syria and Iraq. Iran can’t intervene anywhere in the region right now without provoking a psychotic backlash that’s as dangerous to Tehran and its interests as it is to America’s.

If Iranian adventurism spreads to Saudi Arabia, watch out. Everywhere in the entire Middle East where Sunnis and Shias live adjacent to one another will have turned into a shatter zone.

The entire world’s oil patch will have turned into a shatter zone.

US foreign policy in the Middle East is focused on two things right now: containing ISIS and preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. These are both worthy goals, but if sanctions are lifted on Iran as part of a nuclear deal, whether or not it gets the bomb, Tehran will certainly have more money and resources to funnel to Hezbollah, the Assad regime, Iraq’s Shia militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and—perhaps—to Saudi Arabia’s disaffected Shia minority. The region will become even less stable than it already is. ISIS and al-Qaeda will likely grow stronger than they already are.

We’re kidding ourselves if we think that won’t affect us. It’s not just about the oil, although until every car in the world is powered by green energy we can’t pretend the global economy won’t crash if gasoline becomes scarce. We also have security concerns in the region. What happens in the Middle East hasn’t stayed in the Middle East now for decades. 

The head-choppers of ISIS are problematic for obvious reasons. Their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said, “I’ll see you in New York,” to American military personnel when they (foolishly) released him from Iraq’s Camp Bucca prison in 2004. But the Iranian-led Resistance Bloc has behaved just as atrociously since 1979 and will continue to do so with or without nuclear weapons.

US involvement in Syria and Iraq is minimal now, but even the little we are doing makes little sense. We’re against ISIS in both countries, which is entirely fine and appropriate, but in Iraq we’re using air power to cover advances by Shia militias and therefore furthering Iranian interests, and in Syria we’re working against Iranian interests by undermining Assad and Hezbollah. Meanwhile, the nuclear deal Washington is negotiating with Tehran places a grand total of zero requirements on Iran’s rulers to roll back in their necklace of shatter zones.

We don’t have to choose between ISIS and Iran’s revolutionary regime. They’re both murderous Islamist powers with global ambitions, and they’re both implacably hostile to us and our interests. Resisting both simultaneously wouldn’t make our foreign policy even a whit more complicated. It would, however, make our foreign policy much more coherent.

Categories: Al Qaeda, Alawites, Cognitive dissonance, Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Islamic State, Israel, Kurds, Lebanon, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions, Saudi Arabia, Shiite, Sunni, Syria war, Talliban
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Steven Salaita Heads to Beirut, While Malcolm Kerr Spins in His Grave

July 8, 2015

Steven Salaita Heads to Beirut, While Malcolm Kerr Spins in His Grave, Middle East Forum, Winfield Myers, July 6, 2015

1132Former Virginia Tech professor Steven Salaita maintains that Israel’s alleged excesses have transformed anti-Semitism “into something honorable.”

In 1980 Malcolm Kerr, the distinguished Middle East studies scholar who served as AUB president, wrote a gentlemanly but devastating critique of Orientalism in which he mentions almost forty excellent scholars whose work Said ignored because noting their contributions would undermine his thesis that Western scholarship on the Middle East was uniformly reductionist and racist. Four years after writing his review, Kerr was assassinated near his AUB office by members of Islamic Jihad.

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How utterly appropriate: Steven Salaita will be the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) for the 2015/16 academic year. A supposed expert on Native Americans whose anti-Semitic attacks on Israel cost him a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, Salaita will assume a chair named for the late Columbia University English professor whose 1978 book Orientalism contributed more than any other work to the systemic intellectual decadence that still characterizes Middle East studies.

Salaita is Said’s equal when it comes to producing polemical revisionist history that relies more upon postcolonial victimization studies than upon rigorous research. Although Illinois expected him to teach American Indian studies and he’ll teach American studies at AUB, all six of his books deal with modern Arab studies, Arab Americans, or Israel.

In the through-the-looking-glass historiography of Salaita and his academic allies, these disparate fields are connected by a typology of the victim that is easily transferred from antiquity to the present, so that Canaanites are Native Americans and ancient Hebrews are modern Zionists. It’s a handy way of attacking the entire history of a people or civilization without having to bother with facts, research, doubt, unanswerable questions, or the human agent at the heart of all genuine historical research.

In 1980 Malcolm Kerr, the distinguished Middle East studies scholar who served as AUB president, wrote a gentlemanly but devastating critique of Orientalism in which he mentions almost forty excellent scholars whose work Said ignored because noting their contributions would undermine his thesis that Western scholarship on the Middle East was uniformly reductionist and racist. Four years after writing his review, Kerr was assassinated near his AUB office by members of Islamic Jihad. If he could know that a chair named for Said now exists at AUB—and that next occupant will be a man as dedicated to politicized, vindictive scholarship as its namesake—he would be spinning in his grave.

Categories: Academia, American University of Beirut, Antisemitism, Ideology, Islamic supremacy, Islamism, Israel, Jews, Middle East, Palestinians
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America’s latest failure in Syria

July 8, 2015

America’s latest failure in Syria, Washington Post, The Editorial Board, July 7, 2015

(Another mild WP Editorial Board Op Ed critical of Obama’s foreign policies (please see also, The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen.) This WaPo editorial does not suggest any linkage between Obama’s opposition to attacks on the Iran-supported Syrian regime and his efforts to get a nuke “deal” with Iran.– DM)

IN MAY 2014, President Obama promised a new U.S. effort to train and equip moderate Syrian rebel forces. The next month, the administration asked Congress for $500 million to fund the effort, with the aim of deploying 5,000 U.S.-backed fighters a year for three years. Numerous analysts quickly pointed out two big flaws in the plan: The new force was too small to make a significant difference on Syria’s multi-sided battlefield, and the administration was hamstringing it by insisting that it target only the Islamic State and not the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. As so often in his handling of Syria, Mr. Obama dismissed proposals for a more robust approach.

Now, once again, the president is reaping the consequences of his half-measures. On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter reported the pitiful result of the training program: After a year, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee, just 60 Syrians were enlisted. Meanwhile, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that Israel and Jordan “very much believe [in] the possibility” that the Assad regime could soon collapse, touching off “a foot race” of al-Qaeda and Islamic State forces “converging on Damascus.”

Since the United States has failed to train or support a moderate Syrian force capable of countering the extremists, it has no ready way to prevent that disaster. “I won’t sit here today and tell you that I have the answer to that,” Gen. Dempsey told the committee.

The latest U.S. failure in Syria is particularly striking because, as Mr. Obama emphasized in an appearance Monday at the Pentagon, the foundation of his policy in Iraq and Syria is to train local forces that the United States can support. The president conceded that “this aspect of our strategy was moving too slowly”; in fact, it has failed in both countries. According to Mr. Carter, the 3,500 U.S. personnel deployed in Iraq since last year had trained just 8,800 Iraqi army and Kurdish militia soldiers. Just 1,300 Sunni tribesmen have been recruited, though Mr. Carter said such Sunni forces were essential to retaking cities captured by the Islamic State.

Administration officials have a penchant for blaming Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis for lacking the “will” to fight, without considering why that might be. A couple of the principal reasons are the product of Mr. Obama’s policies. Sunni leaders don’t trust the United States to defend them against the Iranian-backed Shiite militias that operate in concert with the Iraqi government. They wonder why the White House still refuses to deploy Special Operations forces advisers or tactical air controllers to the front lines with Iraqi units, even though, as Gen. Dempsey testified, that “would make them more capable.”

Syrian Sunni fighters want to join a force that will take on the Assad regime as well as the Islamic State, but the Obama administration won’t even commit to defending the fighters it is training if they are subjected to the regime’s signature “barrel bomb” attacks. “That decision will be faced when we introduce fighters into the field,” Mr. Carter told the Senate panel. Unless Mr. Obama is prepared to make a more decisive commitment to training and defending U.S.-allied forces, there won’t be many of them.

Categories: Assad, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran scam, Iraq war, Islamic State, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Syria war, U.S. Military
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The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen

July 8, 2015

The U.S. response to Iran’s cheating is a worrying omen, The Washington Post, The Editorial Board, July 6, 2015

(The Washington Post, usually supportive of the Obama administration, speaks moderately in this Editorial Board offering. However, it manages to point out a few of the major problems with an Obama-led P5+1 “deal.” Please see also, White House Instructs Allies To Lean On ‘Jewish Community’ to Force Iran Deal. — DM)

Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

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IF IT is reached in the coming days, a nuclear deal with Iran will be, at best, an unsatisfying and risky compromise. Iran’s emergence as a threshold nuclear power, with the ability to produce a weapon quickly, will not be prevented; it will be postponed, by 10 to 15 years. In exchange, Tehran will reap hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief it can use to revive its economy and fund the wars it is waging around the Middle East.

Whether this flawed deal is sustainable will depend on a complex set of verification arrangements and provisions for restoring sanctions in the event of cheating. The schemes may or may not work; the history of the comparable nuclear accord with North Korea in the 1990s is not encouraging. The United States and its allies will have to be aggressive in countering the inevitable Iranian attempts to test the accord and willing to insist on consequences even if it means straining relations with friendly governments or imposing costs on Western companies.

That’s why a recent controversy over Iran’s compliance with the interim accord now governing its nuclear work is troubling. The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but required that amounts over a specified ceiling be converted into an oxide powder that cannot easily be further enriched. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran met the requirement for the total size of its stockpile on June 30, but it did so by converting some of its enriched uranium into a different oxide form, apparently because of problems with a plant set up to carry out the powder conversion.

Rather than publicly report this departure from the accord, the Obama administration chose to quietly accept it. When a respected independent think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, began pointing out the problem, the administration’s response was to rush to Iran’s defense — and heatedly attack the institute as well as a report in the New York Times.

This points to two dangers in the implementation of any longterm deal. One is “a U.S. willingness to legally reinterpret the deal when Iran cannot do what it said it would do, in order to justify that non-performance,” institute President David Albright and his colleague Andrea Stricker wrote. In other words, overlooking Iranian cheating is easier than confronting it.

This weakness is matched by a White House proclivity to respond to questions about Iran’s performance by attacking those who raise them. Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

In the case of the oxide conversion, the discrepancy may be less important than the administration’s warped reaction. A final accord will require Iran to ship most of its uranium stockpile out of the country, or reverse its enrichment. But there surely will be other instances of Iranian non-compliance. If the deal is to serve U.S. interests, the Obama administration and its successors will have to respond to them more firmly and less defensively.

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, IAEA, Ideology, Iran centrifuges, Iranian military sites, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Iranian proxies, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1, Sanctions
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Yes We Can’t Get Other Countries to Defeat ISIS

July 8, 2015

US asked Indonesia to send troops to fight Islamic State, says former Jakarta foreign minister

David Wroe 29 June 2015 Via The Sydney Morning Herald


Indonesia’s former foreign minister Marty Natalegawa prefers the USA do all the heavy lifting. [Source: AFP]

(One rejection among many, I’m sure. Indonesia of all places. The ‘ask’ list must be growing short for boots on the ground. So I ask, why the hell should the US commit our young brave troops to yet another Mideast meat grinder? – LS)

Indonesia was asked by the United States to send troops to join the fight against the Islamic State terror group in Iraq but declined because it feared a backlash among radical Muslims at home, the country’s former foreign minister has revealed.

Marty Natalegawa, the long-serving top envoy under Jakarta’s previous administration, said Indonesia felt it could better contribute by tackling its own domestic extremism problem, whereas sending forces would be “cosmetic”.

Despite Washington’s eagerness to pull together as broad a coalition as possible to fight the terror group, the US had accepted Jakarta’s refusal, Dr Natalegawa said at an event at the Australian National University’s Crawford School.

“When Indonesia was asked to join in the coalition of forces to fight ISIS on the ground at one time, our response at that time was our best contribution to fighting the ISIS menace would be to ensure such an ideology, such a menace, does not proliferate in what is the world’s largest Muslim-populated country,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the group.

“That to us is a more meaningful contribution … Having to join such an effort to simply make up the numbers … makes for a wonderful photo opportunity whenever these friends or groups meet in Geneva or some other European capitals, but it can create a backlash, an unintended backlash, back home.”

Dr Natalegawa did not name the US. But asked which country had made the request of Jakarta, he joked: “Who would be the main proponent of the gathering of [countries]? So that country would be the one.”

The US pulled together a broad coalition including many Muslim countries in the Middle East. While deciding the Islamic State group needed to be stopped, the Obama administration was wary of creating perceptions of another Western invasion of Iraq.

Dr Natalegawa continued: “To be fair, the country concerned got the point that we could do far more by addressing our own internal situation rather than deploying just for superficial, cosmetic, perception purposes of this small number of troops.”

His mention of fighting “on the ground” apparently refers to a request for trainers or advisory troops, as Washington has so far refused to get involved in ground combat in Iraq.

Australia is the second-largest contributor to the fight against the Islamic State after the US, having sent about 500 training and advising troops, as well as about 400 RAAF forces as part of an air campaign.

RAAF Hornets are carrying out bombing raids, while air-to-air tankers are refuelling coalition aircraft and a Wedgetail radar plane is helping co-ordinate the air campaign.

(Excerpts from CNN article dated FEB 14, 2015 – LS)

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/06/world/meast/isis-coalition-nations/

Six months into the conflict, this is the coalition against ISIS:

Australia: Australia has participated in airstrikes and humanitarian missions in Iraq, and has sent special forces and other troops to help train Iraqi security forces in first aid, explosive hazards, urban combat and working dog programs. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND.

Belgium: The country has conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets, according to U.S. Central Command. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND.

Canada: Its warplanes have flown 310 sorties against ISIS targets as of February 11, the Canadian armed forces reported. Canadian aircraft have also flown dozens of aerial refueling and reconnaissance missions in support of the anti-ISIS fight, and its cargo aircraft have been used to deliver military aid from Albania and the Czech Republic, the Canadian military said. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Denmark: It has conducted airstrikes against ISIS targets, according to U.S. Central Command. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Egypt: The country struck ISIS targets in Libya on Monday after the group reportedly executed 21 Egyptian Christians, and called on anti-ISIS coalition partners to do the same, saying the group poses a threat to international safety and security. Egypt had previously agreed to join the anti-ISIS coalition, but details about its role, if any, have been scarce. POSSIBLE BOOTS UNCONFIRMED

France: French planes have taken part in airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq, and the nation has flown reconnaissance flights over Iraq, contributed ammunition and made humanitarian drops over the nation. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Germany: Although it has declined to participate in airstrikes, Germany has provided Kurdish forces in Iraq with $87 million worth of weapons and other military equipment, along with a handful of troops to help with training, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Italy: It has sent weapons and ammunition valued at $2.5 million to Kurdish fighters in Iraq, along with 280 troops to help train them, according to Foreign Policy magazine. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Iraqi Kurdistan: The Kurdish fighting force, the Peshmerga, is battling ISIS on the ground. BOOTS ON THE GROUND!!

Jordan: The country initially joined in airstrikes against ISIS but suspended its participation when one of its aircraft went down in Syria, leading to the capture of pilot Lt. Moath al-Kasasbeh. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Netherlands: The Dutch government sent F-16 fighter jets to bomb ISIS targets and troops to help train Kurdish forces. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Qatar: The small but rich Gulf nation that hosts one of the largest American bases in the Middle East has flown a number of humanitarian flights, State Department officials said. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Saudi Arabia: The kingdom has sent warplanes to strike ISIS targets in Syria and agreed to host efforts to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Turkey: Though the NATO member initially offered only tacit support for the coalition, Turkey’s government in 2014 authorized the use of military force against terrorist organizations, including ISIS, as the militant group’s fighters took towns just south of Turkey’s border. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

United Arab Emirates: Like its ally Jordan, the UAE initially took part in anti-ISIS airstrikes — the country’s first female fighter pilot led one of the missions. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

United Kingdom: The UK began airstrikes against ISIS in October, hitting targets four days after its Parliament approved its involvement. British planes helped Kurdish troops who were fighting ISIS in northwestern Iraq, dropping a bomb on an ISIS heavy weapon position and shooting a missile at an armed pickup, the UK’s Defence Ministry said. Since then, warplanes have struck targets in Iraq dozens of times, and British planes had been involved in reconnaissance missions over that country. The British military is also helping train Kurdish Peshmerga and has sent advisers to help Iraqi commanders. Britain has also pledged more than $60 million in humanitarian aid. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Other nations: Also participating in one way or another are the Arab League and the European Union as well as the nations of Albania, Andorra, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Panama, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Romania, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and Ukraine. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Some countries — such as Kuwait — are providing bases. Some, like Albania, the Czech Republic and Hungary, have sent weapons and ammunition. Others are providing humanitarian support, taking legal steps to curb recruitment or providing other, unspecified aid. NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

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Yes We Can’t Defeat ISIS

July 8, 2015

Yes We Can’t Defeat ISIS

Obama wants to fight ISIS in a battle of wits.

July 8, 2015

Daniel Greenfield

via Yes We Can’t Defeat ISIS | Frontpage Mag.

 

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

On the anniversary of the Battle of Heliopolis, Barack Hussein Obama stopped by the Pentagon to tell everyone there that their big guns couldn’t beat ISIS because “Ideologies are not defeated with guns”.

This would be news to the American GIs that beat Nazism, not with hashtags, but with bullets. WW2 propaganda, much of it of a crude nature that would make a modern sophisticated progressive turn up his nose, helped boost morale, but it was the firepower that took down Adolf’s armies.

On a July 6th, long ago, the Muslim hordes that were the ISIS of the day defeated Byzantium in the Battle of Heliopolis. Since this was the 7th century, it is safe to say that there were no hashtags involved. The outcome of that battle however is the reason why Obama’s middle name is Hussein instead of Harry.

The Battle of Heliopolis gave the Caliphate control of Egypt and opened the gates to Africa. Islam was the last man standing among the ruins of empires and it proceeded to enslave, oppress and convert by force to expand its ranks in a manner quite similar to its modern ISIS successor.

Obama isn’t wrong when he suggests that ideas need to be defeated with ideas. But they’re not the ideas that he has in mind. ISIS’ idea is that its enemies are subhuman cretins and that its victories are inevitable. Obama’s idea is that we are a deeply flawed and racist nation, but still sorta better than ISIS.

The only people inspired by that idea are the Americans converting to Islam and joining ISIS.

The uncertainty of the Byzantine Empire doomed it to defeat at the Battle of Heliopolis. The Muslim invaders benefited once again from a united front while their enemies were divided and quarreling among themselves. Without these divisions among Christians, between Christians and Jews, and the various pagan tribes, Islam would never have become anything other than an obscure silly cult.

At the Pentagon, Obama stated, “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.” He isn’t talking about uniting us behind a better idea. Instead he would like Muslims to unite behind some sort of better idea. It’s not clear what that idea is, but he can tell us that it doesn’t involve accepting the reality that we are being attacked in the name of Islam.

Obama wants to fight ISIS in a battle of ideas without having any ideas. It’s like being unarmed in a battle of wits, except it’s more like the witless trying to fight a battle of ideas while being shot at.

Like the Byzantine Empire, we’re a divided people wearied by war and burdened with poor leaders. The 7th century ISIS that beat them wasn’t so much tactically brilliant as it used daring and deception to exploit opportunities created by the incompetence and demoralization of a falling empire.

Obama is speaking in terms of an ideological thirty years war, saying, “This larger battle for hearts and minds is going to be a generational struggle.” But like the armies of the Caliph pouring through the porous borders of a retreating empire, ISIS is moving far too quickly to wait around that long.

Liberal foreign policy experts give a great deal of credit to its social media presence while misunderstanding its significance. The Islamic State’s use of social media to message, recruit and gloat is part of its larger tactical strength as a mobile and adaptable organization. ISIS isn’t winning the war on Twitter. It’s using Twitter the way that it adapts and uses everything else that it comes across.

ISIS is not winning because it has the better hashtags. It’s winning because it’s utterly ruthless. Arguing about its ideology on social media not only misses the point about ISIS, it misses the point about Islam.

Islam did not build a worldwide empire by winning theological arguments. It won by winning. Islam is not an empire of faith. It is an empire of war that divides the world up into the Dar-al-Islam and the Dar-al-Harb; the House of Islam and the House of War. Harb originally meant sword. When ISIS beheads prisoners, it is meting out the same treatment that Mohammed did to those in the House of War.

Indeed Mohammed’s sword, one of them at any rate as he had quite a few, was named Dhu al-Faqar or “Cleaver of Vertebrae”. This is the same sword that appeared on the war flags of the Ottoman Caliphate which, like Obama’s middle name, would never have existed if the Byzantine Empire hadn’t lost the war.

The Cleaver of Vertebrae, like the House of War, is one of those dividing elements of Islamic ideology. It divides the world between Islam and everyone else and divides heads from bodies. It is the central idea of Islam that we need a better idea to fight if we intend to keep our own heads.

Islamic ideas are simple, rather than sophisticated. They depend on tribalism and terror to mobilize force. They rely on honor and shame to mark defeats and victories. The only way to argue with them is on those same terms. Islam’s only big idea is that power is religion and victory is proof of its rightness.

The theological counterargument to the Islamic State is crushing it on the battlefield.

Obama’s Hearts and Minds strategy tries to win the war by losing it, putting us at a strategic disadvantage with restrictive rules of engagement on the battlefield to win over Muslims while potential ISIS recruits are shipped into the United States by the hundreds of thousands as Muslim immigrants.

If this “generational struggle” for “hearts and minds” fails, as it must, then we will be in the same position as the old Byzantine Empire, exhausted, weary of war, fighting among ourselves and ready for defeat after having filled our countries with enemies while turning our soldiers into social workers.

Not even the worst leaders of the Byzantine Empire were as foolish as that.

Even now the war is on again for Egypt as ISIS fights in the Sinai. The Islamic Caliphate forces that defeated Byzantium passed through the Sinai. Their armies were invigorated by Sinai Bedouins joining them. Today the Islamic State once again wages war in the Sinai using the Bedouin.

Obama speaks of offering “a more attractive, more compelling vision”, but what does he have to offer that can compete with the reunification of the lands of Islam and the dominance of a Caliph? He has already tried offering his ideas in Cairo. Today Egyptians hate both him and his ideas.

The Battle of Heliopolis on a July 6th long ago shows us that the best way to defeat an enemy is not by appeasing it, but by fighting it with a united front. It was the Democrats who shattered the nation’s unity after September 11 by standing up for terrorists. Obama continues that tradition today as he tells us that we can’t win because our enemies are our friends and that we disgusting intolerant bigots.

America does not need to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. It needs to win the hearts and minds of its own people. We do not need the goodwill of those who believe that we are less than human. What we need is confidence in our nation, our values and ourselves. The best antidote to July 6th is July 4th.

A strong and united nation can see off any number of barbarian raiders. A divided civilization struggling over bitter grudges can easily be divided and conquered even by bands of worthless murderous savages.

The ideas for defeating ISIS are those which unite us, which make us stronger and which resist foreign invasion. The ideas that make it easier for ISIS to defeat us can be found in any Obama speech.

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France Drops Pro-Palestinian UN Resolution

July 8, 2015

France is back-pedaling from a UNSC resolution forcing Israel to renew negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

By: Hana Levi Julian

Published: July 8th, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » France Drops Pro-Palestinian UN Resolution.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia

France is back-pedaling from a decision to submit a resolution to the United Nations Security Council forcing Israel to renew negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

PA foreign minister Fiyad al-Maliki told Voice of Palestine radio on Tuesday that France was instead advancing a suggestion to form a negotiations support committee.

The move follows a visit to Israel in early June, during which French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius urged the resumption of final status talks between Israel and the PA.

Netanyahu warned in remarks prior to his meeting with Fabius that the international community’s ideas for peace with the Palestinian Authority ignore the security needs of Israel.

Fabius subsequently discussed the issue in depth with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, President Reuven Rivlin, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and a host of other top government officials.

PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had already rejected out of hand the most recent French proposal for a resolution in the UN Security Council giving both sides 18 months to reach an agreement. The reason: Under the French resolution, the PA would be required to recognize Israel as a “Jewish” state.

“I can say that the idea of the French draft resolution in the Security Council is not a main topic for decision makers in France anymore,” Maliki said, after a meeting with French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in Cairo.

However, said Maliki, a negotiations support committee would only make sense if talks are under way. The committee would be comprised of representatives from the members of the UN Security Council, in addition to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, he added.

U.S.-brokered talks between Israel and the PA collapsed in April 2014 with the decision by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to instead form a unity government with Gaza’s ruling Hamas terror organization, whose charter calls for the annihilation of the State of Israel.

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Goodnight Vienna (6)

July 8, 2015

Goodnight Vienna (6), Power Line, Scott Johnson, July 7, 2015

There are no surprises in Omri Ceren’s latest email update from Vienna, but if you have been following his reports, you will find this of interest (footnoted URLs at the bottom). Omri writes:

The parties missed another deadline this morning, and talks are now expected to go through the end of the week. Mogherini told reporters this morning: “I am not talking about extension. I am talking about taking the hours we need to try to complete our work”(?). The overwhelming consensus from press and analysts here in Vienna nonetheless hasn’t changed: the parties will indeed announce some kind of agreement before they leave, though it will almost certainly have details that will need to be sorted out in future negotiations. How that aligns with the administration’s legal obligation to provide Congress with all final details the deal is anyone’s guess at this point.

Meanwhile the Obama administration and its allies are laying the groundwork for another U.S. collapse, this time on inspections. Couple of indicators:

(1) They’re giving up on promising the most robust inspection/verification regime in history– Here’s President Obama during his April 2 speech about the Lausanne announcement: “Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history” [a]. Here’s White House spokesman Josh Earnest at the beginning of May echoing the boast: “what President Obama has indicated must be part of any nuclear agreement… is the most intrusive set of inspections that have ever been imposed on a country’s nuclear program” [b].

But now here’s White House validator Daryl Kimball talking to Politico a couple days ago: “this particular agreement will establish the most extensive, multilayered system of nuclear monitoring and verification for any country not defeated in a war” [c]. Catch the caveat about wartime defeat? The talking point had already been floated at the beginning of the Vienna talks by RAND’s Alireza Nader talking the JTA: “If the goal is ‘anytime, anywhere’ access and unlimited inspections, it’s not realistic asking a sovereign country not defeated in war.” [d]. Yesterday Jofi Joseph, a former nonproliferation official in the Obama White House, told the LAT that the Iranians can’t be expected to submit to anytime/anywhere inspections for the same reason: “What is forgotten is that Iraq was militarily defeated in a humiliating rout and had little choice but to accept [anytime/anywhere inspections]” [e].

For 20 months the administration promised Congress that Iran had been sufficiently coerced by sanctions that Tehran would accept anytime/anywhere inspections. Many in Congress disagreed and urged the administration to boost American leverage by working with the Hill to pass time-triggered sanctions. The administration responded with two different media wars that included accusations – including some by the President – describing lawmakers as warmongers beholden to “donor” money. Congress was right and the administration was wrong. Why would lawmakers now accept a weaker inspection regime than what the administration said it could secure, and what administration officials smeared lawmakers for doubting?

(2) A new talking point is that the IAEA’s technology makes up for the P5+1 collapsing on inspections – This appeared in two articles yesterday (the NYT [f] and the Daily Beast [g]). The two stories are fantastically geeky reads about the IAEA’s toys, but that’s not what the administration officials and validators wanted to focus on. Instead you had Energy Secretary Moniz telling the NYT that the technology “lowers the requirement for human inspectors going in” and Kimball telling the Daily Beast that the technology meant that the IAEA would be able to “detect [nuclear activities] without going directly into certain areas.”

This argument is terrible and scientists should be embarrassed they’re making it. In its story the NYT quoted Olli Heinonen – a 27-year veteran of the IAEA who sat atop the agency’s verification shop – all but rolling his eyes:

Mr. Heinonen, the onetime inspection chief, sounded a note of caution, saying it would be naïve to expect that the wave of technology could ensure Iran’s compliance with the nuclear deal. In the past, he said, Tehran has often promised much but delivered little. “Iran is not going to accept it easily,” he said, referring to the advanced surveillance. “We tried it for 10 years.” Even if Tehran agrees to high-tech sleuthing, Mr. Heinonen added, that step will be “important but minor” compared with the intense monitoring that Western intelligence agencies must mount to see if Iran is racing ahead in covert facilities to build an atomic bomb.

The most fundamental problem is that IAEA procedures require physical environmental samples to confirm violations. They can use futuristic lasers and satellites to *detect* that Iran is cheating. But to *confirm* the cheating they need environmental samples, and usually multiple rounds of samples. Without that level of proof – which requires access – the agency simply wouldn’t tell the international community that it was certain Iran is violation. If you need a paragraph on the procedure click on this link and ctrl-f to “Yet if Iran tries to conceal what it is doing…” [h]. If inspectors can’t get into a facility, it’s highly unlikely they’d ever be comfortable declaring that Iran was violating its obligations.

That’s before even beginning the discussion about why technology can’t make up for access to people, facilities, and documents – without which the IAEA won’t even know where to point its lasers and satellites.

But is what the administration has left: the Iranians can’t be expected to grant anytime/anywhere access but that’s OK because the IAEA has cool toys.

________________

[a] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/04/02/statement-president-framework-prevent-iran-obtaining-nuclear-weapon
[b] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/05/02/press-briefing-press-secretary-josh-earnest-512015
[c] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/the-iran-watchers-119665.html
[d] http://www.jta.org/2015/06/29/news-opinion/politics/as-iran-deadline-approaches-skeptics-draw-dueling-red-lines
[e] http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-iran-bargain-20150706-story.html
[f] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/world/middleeast/nuclear-inspectors-await-chance-to-use-modern-tools-in-iran.html
[g] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/06/the-spy-tech-that-will-keep-iran-in-line.html
[h] http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/irans-nuclear-breakout-time-a-fact-sheet

Categories: Diplomacy, Dishonor, Foreign policy, IAEA, Iran nuke inspections, Iran scam, Obama, Obama's America, P5+1
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White House Instructs Allies To Lean On ‘Jewish Community’ to Force Iran Deal

July 8, 2015

White House Instructs Allies To Lean On ‘Jewish Community’ to Force Iran Deal

Officials push polling from fringe left-wing J Street organization

BY:
July 7, 2015 3:02 pm

via White House Instructs Allies To Lean On ‘Jewish Community’ to Force Iran Deal | Washington Free Beacon.

 

VIENNA—The White House is targeting Jewish groups in its latest push to blunt congressional criticism of an Iran deal that observers expect to be sealed in the coming days, according to a recording of a strategy conference call obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and experts familiar with the call.

The White House’s liaison to the Jewish community on Monday advised dozens of progressive groups to push a poll commissioned and distributed by the liberal fringe group J Street, which has been defending a deal with Iran.

Matt Nosanchuk, an official in the White House Office of Public Engagement, who also serves as Jewish liaison, cited J Street’s poll and urged liberal activists present on the call to cite its numbers when defending a deal with Iran.

The private strategy call, which included more than 100 participants, was organized by the Ploughshares Fund, a liberal group that has spent millions of dollars to slant Iran-related coverage and protect the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts.

Nosanchuk told participants there is support for the deal “within the Jewish community, where J Street has recently done a poll that shows even in that community when you describe the terms of a deal you have upwards of 78 percent of respondents supporting it.”

Virtually all polling stretching back several months, including polling featured on conservative and progressive outlets, shows that while Americans are divided on the wisdom of negotiations, they believe that a deal would not prevent Iran from constructing a nuclear weapon.

Critics of J Street’s poll have pointed out that it polled respondents on a hypothetical deal that does not actually exist.

J Street, which has received money from Ploughshares, has long been viewed as a pariah in the mainstream Jewish community. The group’s consistent attacks on Israel and criticism of its policies has unnerved and angered many Jewish leaders, including some in Congress.

“The lies this White House and its allies will tell about this deal seem to know no bounds, and now there exists the audiotape to prove it,” said a top official with a leading pro-Israel group. “No matter the facts of the deal, they will send Americans to lie to each other to further Obama’s legacy.”

Nosanchuk went on to tell participants that the issue of Iran has been the president’s chief priority in the Oval Office since day one.

“This has really been on the front burner from a foreign perspective, although not in the public eye necessarily, since the very beginning,” Nosanchuk said. “This is not an issue of the day, this is really an issue of the presidency.”

Robert Creamer, a member of the liberal political shop Democracy Partners who was also featured on the conference call, told participants they need to prepare for “a real war” against skeptics of the White House’s diplomacy.

Nosanchuk’s role in organizing the call is generating controversy and suspicions that the White House is targeting the Jewish community as part of its campaign against critics who accuse the administration of having made excessive concessions to Iran.

“Why is @WhiteHouse “Jewish Liaison” @MattNosanchuk leading #IranDeal charge?” the advocacy group United Against a Nuclear Iran tweeted following the initial Free Beacon report on the call. “Concerns ALL Americans.”

One senior official at a D.C.-based Jewish organization said there was nothing surprising about the White House’s strategy.

“This is a White House that has, from the very beginning of nuclear negotiations with Iran, used whatever Jewish groups it could find as cover for making staggering concessions to the Iranians,” said the official, who would only speak on background, citing concerns that the administration has been known to retaliate against critics in the Jewish world. “Apparently some groups haven’t learned their lesson yet—or, like J Street, don’t seem to want to learn.”

President Barack Obama acknowledged in an interview months ago that the deal would, after roughly a decade, leave Iran months away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon.

Another official with an advocacy group that has been critical of the administration’s Iran policy also expressed displeasure that the administration’s Jewish liaison is coordinating efforts to back the Iran deal.

“It leaves a bad taste in the mouth that the White House Jewish Liaison is leading efforts to sell the Iran deal to the American public,” said the source, who also expressed fear about discussing the issue on record. “This is a matter that concerns all Americans. It seems the administration sees advantages in compartmentalizing this as a Jewish, pro-Israel issue instead of a broader national security one.”

U.S. and Iranian negotiators agreed on Tuesday to extend the talks for a second time as the two sides attempt to resolve key differences and secure a final deal.

Iranian officials continue to insist that the United States “give up their excessive demands.”

Tehran maintains that economic sanctions must be lifted in full before international inspectors are given entry to its military facilities.

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