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Book review: The Islamic War

March 16, 2015

The Islamic War: Book review, Dan Miller’s Blog, March 16, 2015

(The views expressed in this article are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

The Islamic War, Martin Archer, 2014

The novel begins with a terror attack on a residential area in Israel, resulting in multiple causalities. It may, or may not, have involved members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Menachem Begin is the Israeli Prime Minister and Ariel Sharon is the Defense Minister. The story begins immediately after the (postponed?) end of the Iran – Iraq war in 1988.

A massive armor, infantry, artillery and air attack on Israeli positions in the Golan follows the terrorist attack. The Israelis are outnumbered and suffer many thousands of casualties.

Israel had anticipated a simultaneous attack via Jordan, so most Israeli tank, infantry and air resources are deployed there, rather than in the Golan, to conceal themselves and await the arrival of Iranian, Iraqi and Syrian forces. They come and are defeated, most killed or fleeing. The Israeli forces then move into Syria and have similar successes there as well.

As the story evolves, it becomes evident that Israel must have known that the Iran – Iraq war had been allowed to fester to permit Iran, Iraq and Syria to develop a well coordinated plan to dispose of Israel, in hopes that a surprise attack could be made as soon as the Iran – Iraq war ended. Other events also suggest that Israel had prior notice:

Nuclear facilities of several hostile nations explode mysteriously.

The Israeli Navy had managed to infiltrate Iranian oil ports — apparently before the attack on the Golan — without being noticed. Then, at a propitious moment near the end of the fighting elsewhere, they destroyed all oil tankers in, entering or leaving port, along with all Iranian oil storage facilities.

The Israel Navy, which had suffered no losses, then moved to Saudi Arabia to protect her oil ports and ships coming to buy her oil and leaving.

As these events unfold, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey* are negotiating a united front against Iran, Iraq and Syria, much to the displeasure of the U.S. Secretary of State, who wants a cease fire and return to the status quo ante. Fortunately, the U.S. President favors Israel and her coalition and generally ignores his SecState.

I won’t spoil the story by relating what happens at the end, but it’s very good for Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Kurds, and very bad for Iran, Iraq and Syria. The novel is well worth reading, perhaps twice.

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*Historical note: Turkey in 1988 was reasonably secular and also in other ways quite different from now. Egypt under President Al-Sisi is, in some but not all respects, similar to Egypt in 1988 under President Mubarak. Beyond a good relationship with Israel, Al-Sisi is working to modernize and reform Islam by turning it away from the violent jihad which drives both the Islamic State (Sunni) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (Shiite). Egypt remains under fire from the Obama administration due to the “coup” which ousted President Morsi, who had made Egypt essentially an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt now helps to protect Israel with her military presence in the Sinai to oppose Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood activities there. Saudi Arabia and Jordan, like most countries in the Middle East, look out for the interests of their rulers first and are quite concerned about both the Islamic State and Iran.

Categories: Arab nations, Caliphate, Combat troops, Diplomacy, Egypt, Foreign policy, Golan, Gulf states, IDF, Intelligence, Iran, Iran - Iraq war, Iran military, Iraq, Iraqi military, Islamic jihad, Israel, Jordan, Kurds, Mossad, Muslim Brotherhood, Nukes, Obama, Oil, Saudi Arabia, Sisi, State Department, Syria, Terrorism, Turkey
Tags: Arab nations, Caliphate, Combat troops, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Golan, Gulf states, IDF, Intelligence, Iran, Iran - Iraq war, Iran military, Iraq, Iraq military, Islamic Jihad, Israel, Jordan, Kurds, Mossad, Muslim Brotherhood, Nukes, Oil, Saudi Arabia, Sisi, Syria, Terrorism, Turkey

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US intel. scraps Iran, Hezbollah from terrorist threats list

March 16, 2015

US intel. scraps Iran, Hezbollah from terrorist threats list, Iran Daily, March 16, 2015

(True or false? I have seen nothing to confirm the report in the “legitimate media,” but that’s not surprising. Here, thanks LS, is a link to the cited report. Iran appears to remain on the list (at page 14). Hezbollah appears, but as a victim of Sunni “extremists” in Lebanon.– DM)

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The US National Intelligence has removed Iran and the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, from its list of “terrorist threats.”

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper scrapped Iran and Hezbollah from the list in an annual report recently delivered to the US Senate, citing their efforts in fighting terrorists, including the ISIL Takfiri group, Press TV reported.

The unclassified version of the report titled “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Communities,” which was released on February 26, 2015, noted Iran’s efforts to battle extremists, including those of the ISIL terrorist group, who were perceived to constitute the greatest terrorist threat to American interests worldwide.

Highlighting Iran’s regional role, the report pointed to the Islamic Republic’s “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia.”

Iran has “overarching strategic goals of enhancing its security, prestige, and regional influence [that] have led it to pursue capabilities to meet its civilian goals,” the report said.

The report also said that Hezbollah is countering ISIL Takfiri terrorists in Syria and Iraq.

The ISIL Takfiri terrorists have taken control of swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria since last year.

Iran has repeatedly stressed that it will not interfere militarily in Iraq and Syria, but the Islamic Republic continues to provide support to both countries against ISIL in the form of defense consultation and humanitarian aid.

Categories: Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, Hezbollah, Intelligence, Iran, Iran scam, Islamic State, Islamism, Obama, Obama administration, P5+1, Terrorism
Tags: Foreign Policy, Funding terrorism, Hezbollah, Intelligence, Iran, Iran Scam, Islamic State, Islamism, Obama Administration, Terrorism

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Having the U.N. Security Council bless a deal wouldn’t make it binding under our Constitution.

March 15, 2015

Having the U.N. Security Council bless a deal wouldn’t make it binding under our Constitution, National Review online, Andrew C. McCarthy, March 14, 2015

So, as we warned earlier this week, the international-law game it is.

It is no secret that Barack Obama does not have much use for the United States Constitution. It is a governing plan for a free, self-determining people. Hence, it is littered with roadblocks against schemes to rule the people against their will. When it comes to our imperious president’s scheme to enable our enemy, Iran, to become a nuclear-weapons power — a scheme that falls somewhere between delusional and despicable, depending on your sense of Obama’s good faith — the salient barrier is that only Congress can make real law.

Most lawmakers think it would be a catastrophe to forge a clear path to the world’s most destructive weapons for the world’s worst regime — a regime that brays “Death to America” as its motto; that has killed thousands of Americans since 1979; that remains the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism; that pledges to wipe our ally Israel off the map; and that just three weeks ago, in the midst of negotiations with Obama, conducted a drill in which its armed forces fired ballistic missiles at a replica U.S. aircraft carrier.

This week, 47 perspicuous Republican senators suspected that the subject of congressional power just might have gotten short shrift in Team Obama’s negotiations with the mullahs. So they penned a letter on the subject to the regime in Tehran. The effort was led by Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who, after Harvard Law School, passed up community organizing for the life of a Bronze Star–awarded combat commander. As one might imagine, Cotton and Obama don’t see this Iran thing quite the same way.

There followed, as night does day, risible howls from top Democrats and their media that these 47 patriots were “traitors” for undermining the president’s empowerment of our enemies. Evidently, writing the letter was not as noble as, say, Ted Kennedy’s canoodling with the Soviets, Nancy Pelosi’s dalliance with Assad, the Democratic party’s Bush-deranged jihad against the war in Iraq, or Senator Barack Obama’s own back-channel outreach to Iran during the 2008 campaign. Gone, like a deleted e-mail, were the good old days when dissent was patriotic.

Yet, as John Yoo observes, the Cotton letter was more akin to mailing Ayatollah Khamenei a copy of the Constitution. The senators explained that our Constitution requires congressional assent for international agreements to be legally binding. Thus, any “executive agreement” on nukes that they manage to strike with the appeaser-in-chief is unenforceable and likely to be revoked when he leaves office in 22 months.

For Obama and other global-governance grandees, this is quaint thinking, elevating outmoded notions like national interest over “sustainable” international “stability” — like the way Hitler stabilized the Sudetenland. These “international community” devotees see the Tea Party as the rogue and the mullahs as rational actors.

So, you see, lasting peace — like they have, for example, in Ukraine — is achieved when the world’s sole superpower exhibits endless restraint and forfeits some sovereignty to the United Nations Security Council, where the enlightened altruists from Moscow, Beijing, and Brussels will figure out what’s best for Senator Cotton’s constituents in Arkansas. This will set a luminous example of refinement that Iran will find irresistible when it grows up ten years from now — the time when Obama, who came to office promising the mullahs would not be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons, would have Iran stamped with the international community seal of approval as a nuclear-weapons state.

Down here on Planet Earth, though, most Americans think this is a bad idea. That, along with an injection of grit from the Arkansas freshman, emboldened the normally supine Senate GOP caucus to read Tehran in on the constitutional fact that the president is powerless to bind the United States unless the people’s representatives cement the arrangement.

Obama, naturally, reacted with his trusty weapon against opposition, demagoguery: hilariously suggesting that while the Alinskyite-in-chief had our country’s best interests at heart, the American war hero and his 46 allies were in league with Iran’s “hardliners.” (Yes, having found Muslim Brotherhood secularists, al-Qaeda moderates, and Hezbollah moderates, rest assured that Obama is courting only the evolved ayatollahs.) When that went about as you’d expect, the administration shifted to a strategy with which it is equally comfortable, lying.

Obama’s minions claimed that, of course, the president understands that any agreement he makes with Iran would merely be his “political commitment,” not “legally binding” on the nation. It’s just that Obama figures it would be nice to have the Security Council “endorse” the deal in a resolution because, well, that would “encourage its full implementation.” Uh-huh.

Inconveniently, the administration’s negotiating counterpart is the chattiest of academics, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Afflicted by the Western-educated Islamist’s incorrigible need to prove he’s the smartest kid in the class — especially a class full of American politicians — Zarif let the cat out of the bag. The senators, he smarmed, “may not fully understand . . . international law.”

According to Zarif, the deal under negotiation “will not be a bilateral agreement between Iran and the U.S., but rather one that will be concluded with the participation of five other countries, including all permanent members of the Security Council, and will also be endorsed by a Security Council resolution.” He hoped it would “enrich the knowledge” of the 47 senators to learn that “according to international law, Congress may not modify the terms of the agreement.” To do so would be “a material breach of U.S. obligations,” rendering America a global outlaw.

This, mind you, from the lead representative of a terrorist regime that is currently, and brazenly, in violation of Security Council resolutions that prohibit its enrichment of uranium.

Clearly, Obama and the mullahs figure they can run the following stunt: We do not need another treaty approved by Congress because the United States has already ratified the U.N. charter and thus agreed to honor Security Council resolutions. We do not need new statutes because the Congress, in enacting Iran-sanctions legislation, explicitly gave the president the power to waive those sanctions. All we need is to have the Security Council issue a resolution that codifies Congress’s existing sanctions laws with Obama’s waiver. Other countries involved in the negotiations — including Germany, Russia, and China, which have increasingly lucrative trade with Iran — will then very publicly rely on the completed deal. The U.N. and its army of transnational-progressive bureaucrats and lawyers will deduce from this reliance a level of global consensus that incorporates the agreement into the hocus-pocus corpus of customary law. Maybe they’ll even get Justice Ginsburg to cite it glowingly in a Supreme Court ruling. Voila, we have a binding agreement — without any congressional input — that the United States is powerless to alter under international law.

Well, it makes for good theater . . . because that is what international law is. It is a game more of lawyers than of thrones. In essence, it is politics masquerading as a system governed by rules rather than power, as if hanging a sign that says “law” on that system makes it so.

At most, international law creates understandings between and among states. Those understandings, however, are only relevant as diplomatic debating points. When, in defiance of international law, Obama decides to overthrow the Qaddafi regime, Clinton decides to bomb Kosovo, or the ayatollahs decide to enrich uranium, the debating points end up not counting for much.

Even when international understandings are validly created by treaty (which requires approval by two-thirds of the Senate), they are not “self-executing,” as the legal lexicon puts it — meaning they are not judicially enforceable and carry no domestic weight. Whether bilateral or multilateral, treaties do not supersede existing federal law unless implemented by new congressional statutes. And they are powerless to amend the Constitution.

The Supreme Court reaffirmed these principles in its 2008 Medellin decision (a case I described here, leading to a ruling Ed Whelan outlined here). The justices held that the president cannot usurp the constitutional authority of other government components under the guise of his power to conduct foreign affairs. Moreover, even a properly ratified treaty can be converted into domestic law only by congressional lawmaking, not by unilateral presidential action.

Obama, therefore, has no power to impose an international agreement by fiat — he has to come to Congress. He can make whatever deal he wants to make with Iran, but the Constitution still gives Congress exclusive authority over foreign commerce. Lawmakers can enact sanctions legislation that does not permit a presidential waiver. Obama would not sign it, but the next president will — especially if the Republicans raise it into a major 2016 campaign issue.

Will the Security Council howl? Sure . . . but so what? It has been said that Senator Cotton should have CC’d the Obama administration on his letter since it, too, seems unfamiliar with the Constitution’s division of authority. A less useless exercise might have been to CC the five other countries involved in the talks (the remaining Security Council members, plus Germany). Even better, as I argued earlier this week, would be a sense-of-the-Senate resolution: Any nation that relies on an executive agreement that is not approved by the United States Congress under the procedures outlined in the Constitution does so at its peril because this agreement is likely to lapse as early as January 20, 2017. International law is a game that two can play, and there is no point in allowing Germany, Russia, and China to pretend that they relied in good faith on Obama’s word being America’s word.

It is otherworldly to find an American administration conspiring against the Constitution and the Congress in cahoots with a terror-sponsoring enemy regime, with which we do not even have formal diplomatic relations, in order to pave the enemy’s way to nuclear weapons, of all things. Nevertheless, Republicans and all Americans who want to preserve our constitutional order, must stop telling themselves that we have hit a bottom beneath which Obama will not go. This week, 47 senators seemed ready, finally, to fight back. It’s a start.

Categories: Diplomacy, Foreign policy, international law, Iran, Iran scam, Nonbinding agreements, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Sanctions, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, United Nations
Tags: Foreign Policy, International Law, Iran, Iran Scam, Nonbinding agreements, Nukes, Sanctions, U.S. Congress, U.S. Constitution, United Nations

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Do Israelis Really Think the U.S. Will Come to Their Aid? (They Will Be in for a Shock)

March 15, 2015

Do Israelis Really Think the U.S. Will Come to Their Aid? (They Will Be in for a Shock), The Gatestone Institute, Bassam Tawil, March 15, 2015

Many Israelis seem to think that if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, if Israel could just offer up a more friendly face, the current U.S. Administration would, in a crisis, come to their help. They could not be more wrong.

Many Israelis seem to be counting on some deeply wished-for love from the current U.S. Administration. What they may not want to see is that their unrequited love for the U.S. runs far deeper than any disagreement with Israel’s current prime minister. Just ask Syria, ask Iraq, ask Yemen, ask Libya, ask Saudi Arabia, ask Kuwait, ask Egypt. The current U.S. Administration does not even send weapons; it sends meals-ready-to-eat. Israel and the rest of us in the region — as Iran has already encircled all the oil fields and is now taking over Iraq — have no more to look forward to than that.

Hard as it may be for Israelis to believe it, Israel’s survival most likely does not figure into the current U.S. Administration’s calculations at all. No matter who wins the election this week, the U.S. will grant Iran its nuclear weapons. If they end up turned on Israel, no matter who is prime minister, so be it.

No matter who wins the election this week in Israel, if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. To the current U.S. leadership, Israel is just the next Sudetenland. The Israelis will have only themselves to rely on.

There is about to be a mistake. The only country in the region of which all the other countries are envious — for opportunity, equal justice under law, freedom to speak without the 2 a.m. knock on the door — has an election this week. Its citizens are tired of war — right on schedule for its enemies’ plans to destroy it. The Israelis are meant to be tired of war; that is why it is called “a war of attrition.”

Many Israelis seem to be counting on some deeply wished-for love from the current U.S. Administration. What they may not want to see is that their unrequited love for the U.S. runs far deeper than any disagreement with Israel’s current prime minister. Just ask Syria, ask Iraq, ask Yemen, ask Libya, ask Saudi Arabia, ask the Emirates, ask Kuwait, ask Egypt. The current U.S. Administration does not even send weapons to help; it sends meals-ready-to-eat, perhaps with the occasional unserious bombing, and tells others to do any serious work themselves. Israel and the rest of us in the region — as Iran has already encircled all the oil fields and is now taking over Iraq — have no more to look forward to than that.

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Bassam Tawil writes that if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. (Image sources: Israel PM office, PressTV video screenshot)

The Israelis may be conning themselves into thinking that if they could just stay friendly with America, America will not “let Israel down” — whatever that is supposed to mean. Perhaps they think that the U.S. will not let Iran acquire a nuclear weapons capability — as the U.S. has been promising for twenty years. But the U.S. has already made clear that it will fast-track, or slow-track, Iran to nuclear weapons capability.

Or maybe it means that many Israelis think that if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, if Israel could just offer up a more friendly face, the U.S. would, in a crisis, come to Israel’s help.

They could not be more wrong.

Sadly, the current administration in Washington has reportedly already sabotaged several efforts by Israel to address its Iran problem. The current U.S. Administration seems to care about only one thing: making just about any deal with Iran. It does not even care about America, or it would never have enabled Iran to get as far along as it is now.

From some apparent self-infatuated fantasy of “landing a big one” — luring the world’s most medieval, genocidal, terror-promoting state to be a responsible member of the “family of nations” — the current U.S. Administration will help exactly no one.

Hard as it may be for Israelis to believe, Israel’s survival most likely does not figure into the current U.S. Administration’s calculations at all. Israel was excluded from the P5+1 negotiations — they might actually have insisted on not handing Iran a nuclear weapons capability, and ruined the current U.S. Administration’s dream of turning the deadliest enemy of the “Big Satan” into its new-found friend — like the wish of turning a prostitute into a doting wife.

The Israelis, of course, will vote for whomever they wish, but if they are voting with the thought that a new Prime Minister will save their country from being turned onto roadkill by the current U.S. Administration — the world’s next Sudetenland — and that their current prime minister has been the problem, they have a nasty surprise coming. Everyone else has been lied to, misled, double-crossed, and tossed over the cliff – especially the American people themselves. The problem is not in whoever is Israel’s Prime Minister. The problem is three thousand miles away, in a leadership that cares only about following in the footsteps of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich: waving around a dangerous, illusory, non-existent “peace in our time.” To the current U.S. leadership, Israel is just the next Sudetenland.

For its own fantasy of turning a voracious, extremist Islamic regime into the “stripper who becomes the girl next door,” the current U.S. Administration will grant Iran its nuclear weapons. If they end up turned on Israel, so be it. No matter who wins the election this week in Israel, if and when Iran has a nuclear bomb, there is not a thing the current U.S. Administration will do to help Israel. The Israelis will have only themselves to rely on.

Categories: Diplomacy, Elections in Israel, Foreign policy, Iran, Iran military, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Obama, Obama administration, P5+1, Terrorism
Tags: Elections in Israel, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iran military, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Israel, Obama Administration, Terrorism

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Column One: Israel’s next 22 months

March 15, 2015

Column One: Israel’s next 22 months, Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, March 12, 2015

(The article is about more than the elections. The disconnect between Israel and the Obama administration seems likely to continue to worsen regardless of who wins, unless Israel falls completely into line with Obama’s views. — DM)

Given the stakes, the choice of Israeli voters next Tuesday is an easy one.

An Israeli flag is seen in the background as a man casts his ballot at a polling in a West Bank Jewish settlement, north of Ramallah

An Israeli flag is seen in the background as a man casts his ballot for the parliamentary election at a polling in the West Bank settlement of Ofra. (photo credit:REUTERS)

The next 22 months until President Barack Obama leaves office promise to be the most challenging period in the history of US-Israel relations.

Now unfettered by electoral concerns, over the past week Obama exposed his ill-intentions toward Israel in two different ways.

First, the Justice Department leaked its intention to indict Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez on corruption charges. Menendez is the ranking Democratic member, and the former chairman, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also the most outspoken Democratic critic of Obama’s policy of appeasing the Iranian regime.

As former US federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this week at PJMedia, “It is perfectly reasonable to believe that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put it another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”

The Menendez prosecution tells us that Obama wishes to leave office after having vastly diminished support for Israel among Democrats. And he will not hesitate to use strong-arm tactics against his fellow Democrats to achieve his goal.

We already experienced Obama’s efforts in this sphere in the lead-up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the joint houses of Congress on March 3 with his campaign to pressure Democratic lawmakers to boycott Netanyahu’s address.

Now, with his move against Menendez, Obama made clear that support for Israel – even in the form of opposition to the nuclear armament of Iran – will be personally and politically costly for Democrats.

The long-term implications of Obama’s moves to transform US support for Israel into a partisan issue cannot by wished away. It is possible that his successor as the head of the Democratic Party will hold a more sympathetic view of Israel. But it is also possible that the architecture of Democratic fund-raising and grassroots support that Obama has been building for the past six years will survive his presidency and that as a consequence, Democrats will have incentives to oppose Israel.

The reason Obama is so keen to transform Israel into a partisan issue was made clear by the second move he made last week.

Last Thursday, US National Security Adviser Susan Rice announced that the NSC’s Middle East Coordinator Phil Gordon was stepping down and being replaced by serial Israel-basher Robert Malley.

Malley, who served as an NSC junior staffer during the Clinton administration, rose to prominence in late 2000 when, following the failed Camp David peace summit in July 2000 and the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war, Malley co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times blaming Israel and then-prime minister Ehud Barak for the failure of the negotiations.

What was most remarkable at the time about Malley’s positions was that they completely contradicted Bill Clinton’s expressed views. Clinton placed the blame for the failure of the talks squarely on then-Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s shoulders.

Not only did Arafat reject Barak’s unprecedented offer of Palestinian statehood and sovereignty over all of Gaza, most of Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem including the Temple Mount, he refused to make a counter-offer. And then two months later, he opened the Palestinian terror war.

As Jonathan Tobin explained in Commentary this week, through his writings and public statements, Malley has legitimized Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist. Malley thinks it is perfectly reasonable that the Palestinians refuse to concede their demand for free immigration of millions of foreign Arabs to the Jewish state in the framework of their concocted “right of return,” even though the clear goal of that demand is to destroy Israel. As Tobin noted, Malley believes that Palestinian terrorism against Israel is “understandable if not necessarily commendable.”

During Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, then-senator Obama listed Malley as a member of his foreign policy team. When pro-Israel groups criticized his appointment, Obama fired Malley.

But after his 2012 reelection, no longer fearing the ramifications of embracing an openly anti-Israel adviser, one who had documented contacts with Hamas terrorists and has expressed support for recognizing the terror group, Obama appointed Malley to serve as his senior adviser for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Still facing the 2014 congressional elections, Obama pledged that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians. But then last week, he appointed him to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.

The deeper significance of Malley’s appointment is that it demonstrates that Obama’s goal in his remaining time in office is to realign US Middle East policy away from Israel. With his Middle East policy led by a man who thinks the Palestinian goal of destroying Israel is legitimate, Obama can be expected to expand his practice of placing all the blame for the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians solely on Israel’s shoulders.

Malley’s appointment indicates that there is nothing Israel can do to stem the tsunami of American pressure it is about to suffer. Electing a left-wing government to replace Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will make no difference.

Just as Malley was willing to blame Barak – a leader who went to Camp David as the head of a minority coalition, whose positions on territorial withdrawals were rejected by a wide majority of Israelis – for the absence of peace, so we can assume that he, and his boss, will blame Israel for the absence of peace over the next 22 months, regardless of who stands at the head of the next government.

In this vein we can expect the administration to expand the anti-Israel positions it has already taken.

The US position paper regarding Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that was leaked this past week to Yediot Aharonot made clear the direction Obama wishes to go. That document called for Israel to withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, with minor revisions.

In the coming 22 months we can expect the US to use more and more coercive measures to force Israel to capitulate to its position.

The day the administration-sponsored talks began in July 2013, the EU announced it was barring its member nations from having ties with Israeli entities that operate beyond the 1949 armistice lines unless those operations involve assisting the Palestinians in their anti-Israel activities. The notion that the EU initiated an economic war against Israel the day the talks began without coordinating the move with the Obama administration is, of course, absurd.

We can expect the US to make expanded use of European economic warfare against Israel in the coming years, and to continue to give a backwind to the anti-Semitic BDS movement by escalating its libelous rhetoric conflating Israel with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

US-Israel intelligence and defense ties will also be on the chopping block.

While Obama and his advisers consistently boast that defense and intelligence ties between Israel and the US have grown during his presidency, over the past several years, those ties have suffered blow after blow. During the war with Hamas last summer, acting on direct orders from the White House, the Pentagon instituted a partial – unofficial – embargo on weapons to Israel.

As for intelligence ties, over the past month, the administration announced repeatedly that it is ending its intelligence sharing with Israel on Iran.

We also learned that the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is being fingered as the source of the leak regarding the Stuxnet computer virus that Israel and the US reportedly developed jointly to cripple Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

In other words, since taking office, Obama has used the US’s intelligence ties with Israel to harm Israel’s national security.*

He has also used diplomacy to harm Israel. Last summer, Obama sought a diplomatic settlement of Hamas’s war with Israel that would have granted Hamas all of its war goals, including its demand for open borders and access to the international financial system.

Now of course, he is running roughshod over his bipartisan opposition, and the opposition of Israel and the Sunni Arab states, in the hopes of concluding a nuclear deal with Iran that will pave the way for the ayatollahs to develop nuclear weapons and expand their hegemonic control over the Middle East.

Amid of this, and facing 22 months of ever more hostility as Obama pursues his goal of ending the US-Israel alliance, Israelis are called on to elect a new government.

This week the consortium of former security brass that has banded together to elect a leftist government led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s relations with the US. The implication was that a government led by Herzog and Livni will restore Israel’s ties to America.

Yet as Obama has made clear both throughout his tenure in office, and, over the past week through Malley’s appointment and Menendez’s indictment, Obama holds sole responsibility for the deterioration of our ties with our primary ally. And as his actions have also made clear, Herzog and Livni at the helm will receive no respite in US pressure. Their willingness to make concessions to the Palestinians that Netanyahu refuses to make will merely cause Obama to move the goalposts further down the field. Given his goal of abandoning the US alliance with Israel, no concession that Israel will deliver will suffice.

And so we need to ask ourselves, which leader will do a better job of limiting the danger and waiting Obama out while maintaining sufficient overall US support for Israel to rebuild the alliance after Obama has left the White House.

The answer, it seems, is self-evident.

The Left’s campaign to blame Netanyahu for Obama’s hostility will make it all but impossible for a Herzog-Livni government to withstand US pressure that they say will disappear the moment Netanyahu leaves office.

In contrast, as the US position paper leaked to Yediot indicated, Netanyahu has demonstrated great skill in parrying US pressure. He agreed to hold negotiations based on a US position that he rejected and went along with the talks for nine months until the Palestinians ended them. In so doing, he achieved a nine-month respite in open US pressure while exposing Palestinian radicalism and opposition to peaceful coexistence.

On the Iranian front, Netanyahu’s courageous speech before Congress last week energized Obama’s opponents to take action and forced Obama onto the defensive for the first time while expanding popular support for Israel.

It is clear that things will only get more difficult in the months ahead. But given the stakes, the choice of Israeli voters next Tuesday is an easy one.

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* Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Hillary Clinton was reportedly involved in leaking sensitive information related to joint Israel-US operations to the media.

Categories: Elections in Israel, Foreign policy, Ideology, Iran, Iran scam, Islamism, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama, Obama administration, P5+1, Peace process, U.S. Congress
Tags: Elections in Israel, Foreign Policy, Ideology, Iran, Iran Scam, Islamism, Israel, Leftists, Middle East, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama Administration, Peace Process, Robert Malley, U.S. Congress

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Iran’s advances create alarm in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf

March 14, 2015

Iran’s advances create alarm in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the Guardian, Ian Black March 13, 2015

Arabs believe Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sana’a are in effect under Iranian control – and power may shift further if US sanctions are eased.

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Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, visiting Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran this year. Photograph: Presidential official handout/EPA

Iran’s great advantage, suggests Emile Hokayem, an analyst, is its commitment and competence, in Syria and beyond. “The expertise, experience and strategic patience it deployed in support of the Syrian regime to a great extent facilitated Assad’s recovery from serious setbacks in 2012. In contrast, the war in Syria has exposed not only the political and operational limitations of the Gulf states, but also the rivalries among them.”

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The commanders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been working overtime recently, flaunting their achievements across the Middle East and flexing muscles as international negotiations over the country’s nuclear programme enter their critical and perhaps final phase.

On Wednesday it was the turn of Major-General Mohammad Ali Jafari, the IRGC’s most senior officer. “The Islamic revolution is advancing with good speed, its example being the ever-increasing export of the revolution,” he declared. “Not only Palestine and Lebanon acknowledge the influential role of the Islamic Republic but so do the people of Iraq and Syria. They appreciate the nation of Iran.”

Last month a similarly boastful message was delivered by General Qassem Suleimani, who leads the IRGC’s elite Quds force — and who is regularly photographed leading the fightback of Iraqi Shia miltias against the Sunni jihadis of the Islamic State (Isis) as well as against western and Arab-backed rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad in southern Syria. “Imperialists and Zionists have admitted defeat at the hands of the Islamic Republic and the resistance movement,” Suleimani said.

Iran’s advances are fuelling alarm in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, where Tehran has been a strategic rival since the days of the Shah, and which now, it is said with dismay, in effect controls four Arab capitals – Baghdad, Damascus and Beirut and in the last month Sana’a in Yemen – which is uncomfortably close to home.

Iran’s regional position has certainly improved. Its high-profile role fighting Isis in Iraq, Assad’s retention of control in Syria with the help of its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, and the Houthi rebel takeover in Yemen have all been deeply discomfiting for the Saudis. Anti-government protests in Shia-majority Bahrain are also often blamed on Tehran — though that ignores the domestic roots of the unrest.

In Riyadh King Salman has dropped his preoccupation with the Muslim Brotherhood in favour of building a united Sunni Arab front to confront the Iranians, diplomats say, though translating that strategy into action is another matter. The message from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates is that whatever the outcome of the nuclear talks, Iran is bent on expanding its power and influence. “The Iranians have scored major victories but only where there are Shia minorities,” a senior Gulf official told the Guardian. “Our concern is that the nuclear issue will become a tool of their foreign policy.”

Arab alarm is shared by Israel. Binyamin Netanyahu used identical arguments in his recent speech to the US Congress, timed to influence next week’s nuclear endgame in Geneva. “The Saudis will be incredibly worried that we are getting close to a point where the Iranians will be players because of the nuclear issue and the way the Americans have effectively ended up on the same side as the Iranians in Iraq,” said one veteran Saudi-watcher. “But the noise they are making is in inverse proportion to their ability to do anything about it.”

Arab governments are not reassured by the promises of John Kerry, the US secretary of state, that Washington is not seeking a “grand bargain” with Tehran that will allow it to “destabilise” the Middle East, bolstered by the easing of economic sanctions. Saud Al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, warned of Tehran’s “hegemonic” ambitions as the IRGC supported the military operation to retake the Iraqi town of Tikrit from Isis. In Gulf capitals Hassan Rouhani, the emollient Iranian president, is seen as less important than the hardline supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It is hard to disentangle propaganda from reality. But independent analysts argue that Iran is inflating its gains for both foreign and domestic consumption. “If you listen to Suleimani there is a degree of exaggeration,” argues Ali Ansari of St Andrews University. “It’s rhetorical reassurance. He is saying to Iranians: ‘We are powerful and and everyone is worried about this’ – partly to make the point that they are not really under pressure. People outside can see what Iran’s strengths and weaknesses are. But there is this belief that you need to negotiate from a position of strength and that if you are weak you will be trampled on.”

Iran-watcher Hossein Rassam also detects a domestic calculation in the IRGC statements. “Critics of Rouhani’s policy of rapprochement with the international community inside Iran can turn to the supreme leader and say there wasn’t really much need for that softer tone because now we have more bargaining chips in our hands. Iran is the only power in the region which can actually fight Isis and the west needs us for that.”

Meir Litvak, an Israeli expert on Iran, sees both genuine belief and posturing in Tehran’s stance. “The Iranians believe they have been able to save the Assad regime from total collapse and there is at least stalemate in Syria,” he said. “That means they have been able to maintain the link with Hezbollah and maybe open a second front by proxy against Israel on the Golan Heights. The Houthi rebellion in Yemen was initially a genuinely domestic affair but the Iranian regime saw it as an opportunity. And it has become a bonus for it – even if they are not that active inYemen. But if the Saudis are scared that’s a plus for the Iranians.”

Arab diplomatic sources say they expect to see an IRGC and Hezbollah presence in Yemen, helped by a new agreement on regular flights between Tehran and Sana’a.

Iran’s role in Bahrain, where the Shia majority remains locked in confrontation with the Saudi-backed Sunni monarchy, is more about scoring propaganda points than material support – despite claims in Manama about Iran’s sinister role.

Still, in the heartlands of Iranian influence, Iraq and Syria, there have been significant costs as well as benefits, including the deaths of two senior IRGC commanders. Continuing sanctions and low oil prices – seen in Tehran as a deliberate strategy by the Saudis – have also made it harder to shell out billions of dollars to subsidise the Assad regime.

Iran’s great advantage, suggests Emile Hokayem, an analyst, is its commitment and competence, in Syria and beyond. “The expertise, experience and strategic patience it deployed in support of the Syrian regime to a great extent facilitated Assad’s recovery from serious setbacks in 2012. In contrast, the war in Syria has exposed not only the political and operational limitations of the Gulf states, but also the rivalries among them.”

Categories: Caliphate, Diplomacy, Foreign policy, Gulf states, International Community, Iran, Iran military, Iran scam, Iraq, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, King Salman, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Saudi Arabia, Shiite crescent, Syria
Tags: Caliphate, Foreign Policy, Gulf states, International Community, Iran, Iran military, Iran Scam, Iraq, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, King Salman, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Nukes, Saudi Arabia, Shiite crescent, Syria, Yemen

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Bad Lefty Idea Of The Week: Ally With Al-Qaeda

March 14, 2015

Foreign Policy Elite MEME OF THE WEEK: Accept ‘Moderate’ Al-Qaeda

How they learned to love Islamic terror.

By Patrick Poole

March 13, 2015 – 10:55 am

via Bad Lefty Idea Of The Week: Ally With Al-Qaeda | PJ Tatler.

As I’ve said here at PJ Media repeatedly, there are some ideas so profoundly stupid that they can only be taken seriously inside the political-media-academic bubble that stretches along the Washington, D.C.-New York-Boston corridor. These typically populate my annual year-end “National Security ‘Not Top 10′” review.

Such is the case with this week’s foreign policy “smart set” MEME OF THE WEEK: we need to accept “moderate” al-Qaeda in order to defeat “hardline” ISIS.

Understand, this is a continuation of a popular theme amongst the foreign policy “smart set.” See the “moderate Muslim Brotherhood,” which just a month ago declared all-out jihad on the Egyptian government. Or the New York Times, pitching “moderate” elements of the Iranian regime. Or current CIA director “Jihad” John Brennan calling for the U.S. to build up Hezbollah “moderates.” Or hapless academics proclaiming the “mellowing” of Hamas. Or the so-called “vetted moderate” Syrian rebel groups that, as I have reported here, regularly fight alongside ISIS and al-Qaeda and have even defected to those terror groups.

So why are the foreign policy elites now having to talk about engaging “moderate” al-Qaeda, of all things?

Because all of those previous “moderate” engagement efforts have ended in disaster. But rather than abandon the whole “moderate” theme, the foreign policy community seems intent to double-down on failure by continuing to move the “moderate” line.

First out of the gate this week was an article in Foreign Affairs by Harvard’s Barak Mendelsohn, “Accepting Al-Qaeda: The Enemy of the United States’ Enemy,” that argues:

Since 9/11, Washington has considered al-Qaeda the greatest threat to the United States, one that must be eliminated regardless of cost or time. After Washington killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, it made Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new leader, its next number one target. But the instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al-Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri. Destabilizing al-Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.

Here’s how Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, billed this conventional wisdom:

The U.S. is close to destroying al Qaeda, but is better served keeping the organization alive: http://t.co/Saf6GToPIX pic.twitter.com/36JcrzDZAN

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) March 10, 2015

There are several problems with Mendelsohn’s thesis. One problem that he barely acknowledges is that al-Qaeda is still a declared enemy and an active threat to the United States. They have said repeatedly that they intend to kill U.S. citizens and have continued to plot to do so. The enemy of my enemy can still also be my enemy.

A second pragmatic problem with trying to use Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official affiliate in Syria, as a tool against ISIS is that the relationship between the two groups is constantly evolving. Not long ago, ISIS and Nusra were comrades-in-arms. Despite their present falling-out, within recent months they still occasionally worked together: in August they joined forces to attack Lebanese border checkpoints; in September they were engaged in joint operations around Qalamoun. And Nusra appears more interested in wiping out the U.S.-backed “vetted moderate” groups and fighting the Assad regime than going head-to-head with ISIS.

Thus, it is considerably more likely that ISIS and al-Qaeda will engage in some form of reconciliation than al-Qaeda falling into the U.S. foreign policy orbit and serving as an anti-ISIS proxy in Syria.

So what drives the folly of the foreign policy “smart set”? Mostly it is the hubris that only they comprehend the vast and constantly changing complexity of international affairs, but also it is their added belief that their pals in the administration can harness this “smart set” omniscience to manipulate global events to a predicted end.

That rarely, if ever, happens. Just witness the Obama administration’s foreign policy disaster in Syria.

Mendelsohn has not been alone this week in calling for greater “acceptance” of al-Qaeda. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published Yaroslav Trofimov’s “Al-Qaeda a lesser evil? Syria war pulls U.S., Israel apart,” where he makes the following case:

MOUNT BENTAL, Golan Heights — This mountaintop on the edge of the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights offers a unique vantage point into how the complexities of the Syrian war raging in the plains below are increasingly straining Israel’s ties with the U.S.

To the south of this overlook, from which United Nations and Israeli officers observe the fighting, are the positions of the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda that the U.S. has targeted with airstrikes.

Nusra Front, however, hasn’t bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer — and some of its severely wounded fighters are regularly taken across the frontier fence to receive treatment in Israeli hospitals.

To the north of Mount Bental are the positions of the Syrian government forces and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias such as Hezbollah, along with Iranian advisers. Iran and these militias are indirectly allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq. But here in the Golan, they have been the target of a recent Israeli airstrike. Israel in recent months also shot down a Syrian warplane and attacked weapons convoys heading through Syria to Hezbollah.

It would be a stretch to say that the U.S. and Israel are backing different sides in this war. But there is clearly a growing divergence in U.S. and Israeli approaches over who represents the biggest danger — and who should be seen, if not as an ally, at least as a lesser evil in the regional crisis sparked by the dual implosion of Syria and Iraq.

Trofimov’s argument boils down to: “Accept al-Qaeda! See, the Israelis are doing it!!!”

Needless to say, Trofimov’s article quickly received praise from the foreign policy “smart set,” including the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl and The Century Foundation’s Michael Hanna:

Good piece on how Israel and the US disagree on which enemy in the Middle East is the greater evil http://t.co/NIg3syNf7J via @WSJ

— Jackson Diehl (@JacksonDiehl) March 12, 2015

Al Qaeda a lesser evil? Syria War Pulls U.S., Israel Apart http://t.co/MRvDMt0yJq Great piece by @yarotrof. Playing out in US FP debates too

— Michael Hanna (@mwhanna1) March 12, 2015

A couple thoughts on this. First, some have treated the report of Israelis helping injured Nusra fighters in the Golan as some breaking game-changing news, but in fact Vice News reported on this back in December.

Secondly, I reported from the Golan here at PJ Media back in September 2013, and I even stood on Mount Bental and looked over the ruins of Quneitra while fighting raged across the border. And yet, that perspective didn’t help me magically see al-Qaeda as some lesser evil that we needed to engage or accept.

Thirdly, and I know this will strike some as heresy, the Israelis are not infallible and have seen this approach literally blow up on them. Take, for instance, the January 2009 Wall Street Journal article, “How Israel helped spawn Hamas“:

Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric. […]

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

“Nobody thought about the possible results.” Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.

I should note that this is not the first time that the foreign policy “smart set” has taken a run at the “engaging moderate al-Qaeda” meme. In January 2014, Foreign Affairs published an article titled “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham” which contended that the U.S. needed to “befriend” the Syrian jihadist group Ahrar al-Sham as some kind of counter to more extreme jihadist groups, like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. The precedent they cited was the U.S. failure to designate the Taliban (!!!) after 9/11.

Mind you, at the time they wrote this one of Ahrar al-Sham’s top leaders was a lieutenant for al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri who openly declared himself a member of al-Qaeda. After most of their leadership was wiped out in a bombing in September, they gravitated closer to the jihadist groups they were supposed to counter and their positions have been bombed by the U.S. – much to the consternation of other “vetted moderate” rebel groups.

The article was originally subtitled “An al-Qaeda affiliate worth befriending”:

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Al Qaeda, Foreign Policy, Hamas, Syria

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Obama’s Iran scheme is laid bare

March 13, 2015

Obama’s Iran scheme is laid bare, Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin, March 13, 2015

We surmised yesterday that the Obama administration had the idea to go to the United Nations to pass by resolution what Congress would never agree to: a lifting of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a nearly worthless deal in which Iran would keep thousands of centrifuges and get a 10-year glide path to nuclear breakout. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), seeing what was afoot, demanded an explanation from the White House, calling such a scheme an “affront to the American people.”

On Thursday evening, after being pressed by irate Republicans, the National Security Council issued a defensive statement insisting that it would do no such thing. The story was handed to BuzzFeed:

The U.S. has “no intention” of using the United Nations to lock into place any potential deal with Iran over its nuclear program, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.

The United States will not be “converting U.S. political commitments under a deal with Iran into legally binding obligations through a UN Security Council resolution,” Bernadette Meehan, spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, said in a statement emailed to BuzzFeed News.

“Past UNSC resolutions on Iran have called for a negotiated settlement of the Iran nuclear issue, and accordingly we would fully expect the UNSC to ‘endorse’ any deal with Iran and encourage its full implementation so as to resolve international concerns about Iran’s nuclear program,” Meehan continued. “But any such resolution would not change the nature of our commitments under such a deal, which would be wholly contained in the text of that deal.”

What is going on here? For starters, the existing U.N. resolutions obtained by President George W. Bush are much, much stricter than anything President Obama has indicated would be forthcoming. Those resolutions don’t permit Iran to keep thousands of centrifuges. They don’t give Iran a 10-year sunset. They require complete dismantling of Iran’s illicit program, full inspections and an accounting of past illicit behavior. In other words, any new deal negotiated by the administration would be weaker than — and in fact, in violation of — existing U.N. resolutions. That is why Obama would need to go back to the U.N., to water down, to cave into Iran’s demands.

This is not an original thought. For quite some time, former U.N. spokesman Richard Grenell has been warning that this is exactly what is coming down the pike. Last year Grenell wrote: “President Obama’s Geneva proposal to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council allowing Iran to enrich some uranium violates previous UN resolutions demanding the Islamic Republic stop ‘all’ uranium enrichment activity. To avoid a violation of current UN resolutions, the permanent members must ask the entire Security Council to vote to weaken and supersede their previous demands.” He continued, “The UN’s four rounds of hard-fought sanctions on Iran and several other resolutions demanding compliance call for a full suspension of all enrichment activities, including research and development, then full verification of that suspension before negotiations on a permanent diplomatic solution begin. The sequencing was strategic. It was designed to build international confidence in a secretive country’s deceitful past.” But Obama deliberately departed from these restrictions, so he has always planned to go back. Otherwise, his deal would be in violation of existing international law.

That brings us to U.S. law. The U.N. resolutions don’t automatically become law, the administration was forced to concede. But under currentU.S. sanctions law, the president can waive them. And that is just what Obama intends to do. He will get the U.N. to water down international sanctions while he suspends U.S. sanctions. Why is this so dangerous? Mark Dubowitz, whose research and expertise helped lawmakers to construct the sanctions legislation, e-mails me:

President Obama risks undermining the entire sanctions edifice on which continued economic leverage depends. A future US president will need this leverage to enforce an Iran deal so that he can respond to Iranian noncompliance without resorting to either military strikes or surrender. But it increasingly appears that UN, EU and perhaps some US sanctions will be suspended and then reimposed or snap backed if Iran cheats. The snapback is a delusion. Reimposing sanctions is harder than it sounds. Amongst the United States, EU and UNSC, there are bound to be significant disputes on the evidence, differing assessments of the seriousness of infractions, fierce debates about the appropriate level of response and concerns about Iranian retaliation.

It’s also important to remember that when sanctions were first implemented, it took years before a critical mass of international companies terminated their business ties with Tehran. Once strictures are loosened, with so many international companies positioning to get back into Iran, it will be very difficult to persuade these companies to leave again. The Iranian regime will also adopt countermeasures to minimize its economic exposure to Western pressure when it anticipates that it will violate any nuclear agreement.

Obama’s legacy becomes demolition of the sanctions regime and an opening for Iran to either make a dash for breakout or to wait 10 years and get its stamped permission slip. The word for this is “containment.” The next president can reverse the waiver, but the Iranian economy will be on the road to recovery and the next president’s options will be severely limited. Iran might even have a bomb by then. As one conservative wag cracked, “If you like your sovereignty you can keep your sovereignty.” Yes, Obama tells us many soothing things but does whatever he wants.

What can Congress do? Well, it can express bipartisan outrage and pass a resolution deploring the president’s end run. But it must do more. Ideally, one would summon a bipartisan veto-proof majority to fix U.S. sanctions in law with no presidential waiver unless a deal meeting the existing U.N. resolutions was agreed upon. (I suppose Congress could use the power of the purse to defund our U.N. contributions, but let’s not get carried away.) But we also have to consider that this might simply be unattainable or susceptible to the argument that Congress can’t constitutionally eliminate all executive discretion. The next best option would be to increase the threshold for waiving existing and new sanctions — in other words, to narrow severely the president’s ability to waive U.S. sanctions, and require officials in the intelligence community and/or the military to add their certification (and thereby put their own credibility on the line as well). For example, U.S. sanctions would not be waived unless and until Iran gave a complete accounting of past nuclear activities and dismantled the Arak facility, things that the Iranians have refused to do and are objective criteria the president and the intelligence community could not honestly certify have occurred.

We have seen this again and again from this president — the complete contempt for coequal branches of government and determination to act in ways contrary to our constitutional structure and overwhelming public opinion (84 percent of Americans don’t favor a 10-year glide path to Iran getting a bomb). In the case of immigration, it took the form of an executive order overriding existing immigration laws under the theory that the president was using “discretion” to delay deportation of certain illegal immigrants. That is now in the courts. But his dual strategy of sabotaging strict U.N. resolutions and waiving U.S. sanctions is far more dangerous and nefarious. It gives primacy to an international body over Congress and the laws of the United States. It assumes sole authority in foreign affairs, something not envisioned in the Constitution, which divides powers between the two branches. Lawmakers have every right to feel as though they were misled and are being entirely marginalized once again.

A senior Republican on Capitol Hill tells me, “Everyone knows, including Democrats, that Obama and [Secretary of State John] Kerry are dangerously close to cutting a bad deal and lifting sanctions and shutting out Congress. If you don’t believe that just ask Democrats privately. They know it.” He remarks, “Instead of talking about that, we have a parade of faux outrage about Republicans and protocol, first the Bibi [Netanyahu] speech and now the letter. Historians will wonder why we did nothing to curb Iranian expansionism or shut down the nuclear program.”

The American people should demand that Congress affix existing sanctions in non-waivable legislation and tighten them as envisioned under the Menendez-Kirk legislation unless the new deal does what the president and the existing U.N. resolutions originally pledged to do — deprive Iran of an enrichment capacity sufficient to make a bomb.

Moreover, voters must demand that 2016 candidates disclose whether they would continue Obama’s explicit appeasement of Iran. Perhaps if Congress acted and 2016 candidates pledge to refuse to carry out this charade, the president would stiffen his spine and use all that as leverage to extract more concessions from Iran. Former Texas governor Rick Perry issued a forceful statement on Thursday. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has also said “Republicans need to ensure that any deal President Obama reaches with Iran receives congressional review. Unless the White House is prepared to submit the Iran deal it negotiates for congressional approval, the next president should not be bound [by] it. I will continue to express that concern publicly to the President and directly to the American people.” Non-candidate Mitt Romney, who garnered respect for having been right on so many Obama foreign policy debacles, reiterates the Israeli prime minister’s message: “Walk away from a Swiss-cheese agreement; institute even more punitive and crippling sanctions than have been imposed; and remove those sanctions only when Iran agrees to dismantle its nuclear enrichment capability and to submit to unrestricted inspections. Finally, if contrary to reason and expectation those sanctions don’t bring Iran to its senses, prepare for a kinetic alternative.” But where are other candidates? Jeb Bush sounded sympathetic about the circumstances giving rise to Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter but refused to say he would not abide by a rotten deal not approved by Congress. His caution conveys weakness. All the top 2016 contenders need to stand up on this one.

If Congress and the 2016 contenders act forcefully, the White House may have to rethink its gambit. If not, the Iranians will know they won’t have a free ride (relief from sanctions) for very long.

There is one more problem for Obama. Our Sunni allies are not dim. They have every reason to be alarmed. They are already taking steps to “to match the nuclear capabilities Iran is allowed to maintain as part of any final agreement reached with world powers. This could include the ability to enrich uranium and to harvest the weapons-grade plutonium discharged in a nuclear reactor’s spent fuel.” An Obama deal of the type described would set off a Middle East arms race. Perhaps Congress should invite the king of Jordan or of Saudi Arabia to speak.

No wonder the White House was infuriated with Cotton: By suggesting there is a flaw in Obama’s scheme to leave out Congress, he made it less likely that the Iranians will be rewarded for their conduct and more likely that the next president would be able to extract concessions from Iran. He shined a light on what the administration was up to and let Democratic colleagues know they were being entirely left out of the loop by the president of their own party. He alerted the public to Obama’s belief that the U.N., not Congress, will be driving the Iran appeasement train. If the result of Cotton’s letter is to cement sanctions in law so that the president cannot waive them in his quest to appease Iran, the senator will be heralded as a heroic defender of the West’s security. If the result is to set the stage for a massive repudiation of Democratic leadership in both the Senate (should Democrats choose to drag their feet on cementing sanctions) and the White House, we can draw some comfort in the prospect of a large GOP majority in both houses and a Republican in the White House. Maybe they will have the gumption to prevent Iran from going nuclear. In any case, the message to Iran should be clear: The president’s shenanigans will not guarantee your quest for nuclear power; the only real insurance that your regime will survive is a binding treaty — and that is not happening unless you comply with existing U.N. resolutions.

Categories: Diplomacy, Foreign policy, Funding terrorism, Human rights, international law, Iran, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Obama, P5+1, U.S. Congress, United Nations
Tags: Foreign Policy, Funding terrorism, human rights, International Law, Iran, Iran Scam, Iranian nukes, U.S. Congress, United Nations

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It’s Not Just Islam, It’s the Tribal Mentality

March 12, 2015

It’s Not Just Islam, It’s the Tribal Mentality, Front Page Magazine, Bruce Thornton, March 12, 2015

fft-450x253

Islam in part is the “theologizing” of the tribal mentality. Islam’s important innovation was to redefine the “tribe” as the whole umma of believers, creating in effect a “super tribe” that transcends mere blood as the bonding agent. But the tribal warrior ethos persists–– in the doctrine of jihad, tribal atrocities in contemporary terror and its gruesome videos, the privileging of men in polygamy, honor killings, and social restrictions on women, the disdain for the infidel “other” in the Koranic belief that Muslims are the “best of nations,” the betrayal of alliances in the religious sanction of lying to infidels (taqiyya), and the obsession with “honor” that today we find in violent Muslim reactions to “blasphemy” against Mohammed or the Koran.

Ignoring the tribal mentality is as dangerous for our foreign policy as downplaying Islamic doctrine.

The Obama administration’s serial appeasement of Iran––currently the “strongest tribe” spreading its influence throughout the region–– has damaged our prestige among allies like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who are already shopping around for a more reliable and forceful partner. If we want to destroy the jihadists, check Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and protect our interests, we must again become the “strongest tribe.”

********************

The “nothing to do with Islam” mantra took a hit recently in one of the premier organs of liberal received wisdom, The Atlantic. Many have greeted as a revelation Graeme Wood’s article on the Islamic doctrines behind ISIS’s atrocities. Regular readers of FrontPage and Jihad Watch will not be as impressed. For years they have understood the link between jihadism and Islam. In 1994 Andy McCarthy made this connection when he prosecuted the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing the previous year, a connection that the FBI ignored or discounted at the time––a failure, by the way, that has become a pernicious tradition for those charged with protecting our nation’s security and interests. For everyone else who has been paying attention to the rise of modern jihadism, Wood’s article is a dog bites man story.

One can hope that perhaps now, with the truth revealed by one of the Acela corridor’s oracles, the jihad deniers will wise up, though I wouldn’t bet on it. Unexamined opinions comprise the bulk of the progressive mind, and are notoriously resistant to empirical evidence and sound argument. But the current mess in the Middle East results from more than just Islam and its traditional belligerence, supremacist pretensions, and illiberal religious laws and doctrines. These characteristics reflect variations on the mentality of the tribe, one antithetical to modernity and the principles of liberal democracy, and still powerful in the Middle East, the region once described as “tribes with flags.”

For all the differences among tribal peoples, the components of this mentality are consistent, from the ancient Gauls and Germans Caesar conquered and the Vikings terrorizing much of Europe, to the American Indians the U.S. Cavalry fought and the jihadist gangs rampaging in the Middle East.

First, there is little notion of a common humanity that transcends ethnicity or culture. Universal principles are scarce, and personal identity is found solely in the collective customs and traditions of the tribe. Outsiders are to be distrusted, plundered, or conquered when possible. Loyalty is not to principle, but to blood. Most tribal peoples consider their tribe the acme of humanity, the only genuine humans. Hence their word for “human” is usually identical to the name of their tribe. They are literally ethnocentric.

Second, violence, particularly against outsiders, is an acceptable instrument for resolving conflict and asserting tribal superiority. Not just the violence of war, but also the cruel torture and slaughter of outsiders, including women and children, are legitimate for serving the interests of the tribe. Indeed, what we call terrorism was a tactic of tribal warfare to prevent a full-scale war by so terrorizing enemies that they would give up without a fight, a phenomenon common in the various Indian wars of American history. Hence the scary face-paint, tattoos, war cries, bizarre hairstyles, tortures like scalping, mutilation of enemies, or slaughter of their women and children, all of which are meant to frighten and demoralize the enemy. The same intent explains the blustering threats, braggadocio, and insults typical of tribal warfare and diplomacy. These practices can be documented in tribal societies from the Iroquois to the ancient Gauls.

Next, loyalty in tribal societies counts only for those within the tribe. Alliances with other tribes or peoples are ad hoc and contingent on the immediate interests of the tribe. They can be abandoned or betrayed if circumstances or perceptions change. Moreover, respect for others beyond the tribe is based solely on their capacity to inflict violence on their enemies. The “strongest tribe,” a status based on its effectiveness and success in conflict, will attract allies, who will abandon the hegemon once it loses that perception of its strength. Thus during Caesar’s wars in Gaul various Gallic and Germanic tribes would ally with the Romans when they appeared dominant, and betray them in an instant if they thought them weak. Likewise during the U.S. Cavalry’s wars against the Plains Indians, many tribes victimized by the Sioux or Apache or Cheyenne would ally with the Americans if they seemed to be winning, then switch sides the moment they seemed weak.

Finally, tribal societies are centered on the male warrior and his honor. Forget the Women’s Studies fantasies of matriarchal tribal societies. Tribal cultures privilege males, for men fight, and the survival and honor of the tribe depends on martial valor. Women bear children and work, as the skeletons of pre-contact American Indian remains demonstrate. Female bones show much more damage from hard physical labor than do male. This doesn’t mean that women had no status within the tribe, or did not enjoy somewhat more equality than women in more sophisticated civilizations. But warrior males still dominated, and culture in the main centered on men and their prowess in war, which earned honor, what we call prestige, for the whole tribe.

Sound familiar? It should, for Islam in part is the “theologizing” of the tribal mentality. Islam’s important innovation was to redefine the “tribe” as the whole umma of believers, creating in effect a “super tribe” that transcends mere blood as the bonding agent. But the tribal warrior ethos persists–– in the doctrine of jihad, tribal atrocities in contemporary terror and its gruesome videos, the privileging of men in polygamy, honor killings, and social restrictions on women, the disdain for the infidel “other” in the Koranic belief that Muslims are the “best of nations,” the betrayal of alliances in the religious sanction of lying to infidels (taqiyya), and the obsession with “honor” that today we find in violent Muslim reactions to “blasphemy” against Mohammed or the Koran.

Ignoring the tribal mentality is as dangerous for our foreign policy as downplaying Islamic doctrine. The chronic disorder in northern Iraq today is not just about the Sunni-Shi’a divide, or ISIS’s dream of a caliphate. It also reflects the bewildering number of tribes and clans in the region, whose complex alliances and enmities continually shift depending on circumstances and the perceptions of which tribe is the stronger. Our ally today can instantly become our enemy tomorrow. Factions that appear “moderate” today can become jihadist terrorists tomorrow. Our “friends” will tell us what we want to hear today, and then betray their words tomorrow. Most important, anything we do that creates the perception of weakness––especially concessions, or failure to inflict revenge, or acts of mercy––will also damage our prestige as the “strongest tribe” and invite tribes to abandon us.

These tribal practices defined most peoples, including Europeans, before the advent of modernity. They have survived among Middle Eastern Muslims because they were encoded in religious doctrines that promise global power for the tribe of the faithful in this life, and paradise in the next, especially for jihadist warriors. This amalgamation in part explains the spectacular success of Muslim warriors for a 1000 years, a record of martial achievement the memory of which today fuels the resentment and anger of those Muslims who wish to restore that lost honor. It also contributes to the difficulty of many Muslim societies to reconcile with modernity, particularly liberal democracy and its cargo of human rights, confessional tolerance, and equality for women and those of other faiths.

Of course, worldwide millions of Muslims have managed to transcend tribalism and adjust their faith to modernity. But millions more haven’t, and it is they who are fomenting most of the mayhem and murder on every continent except Antarctica. Our tactics and strategies in confronting this threat must indeed be based on a correct understanding of the spiritual imperatives that motivate the jihadists. But they also must take into account the tribal mentalities that respect force and honor the strong.

The Obama administration’s serial appeasement of Iran––currently the “strongest tribe” spreading its influence throughout the region–– has damaged our prestige among allies like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who are already shopping around for a more reliable and forceful partner. If we want to destroy the jihadists, check Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and protect our interests, we must again become the “strongest tribe.”

Categories: Caliphate, Diplomacy, Egypt, Foreign policy, History, International Community, Iran, Iran military, Iran scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Jordan, Middle East, Moderate rebels, Nukes, Obama, P5+1, Saudi Arabia, Theocracy, Tribal mentality
Tags: Caliphate, Egypt, Foreign Policy, History, International Community, Iran, Iran military, Iran Scam, Iranian missiles, Iranian nukes, Islamism, Israel, Jordan, Middle East, Moderate rebels, Nukes, Saudi Arabia, Theocracy, Tribal mentality

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Obama Gives Sisi the Netanyahu Treatment

March 12, 2015

Obama Gives Sisi the Netanyahu Treatment, Commentary Magazine, Jonathan S. Tobin, March 11, 2015

[O]ne of the major changes that took place on President Obama’s watch was a conscious decision to downgrade relations with Cairo, a nation that his predecessors of both parties had recognized as a lynchpin of U.S. interests in the region. The current weapons supply squeeze is not only a blow to the efforts of a nation that is actually willing to fight ISIS and other Islamist terrorists; it’s a statement about what it means to be an American ally in the age of Obama.

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In a Middle East where Islamist terror groups and the Iranian regime and its allies have been on the offensive in recent years, the one bright spot for the West in the region (other, that is, than Israel) is the way Egypt has returned to its old role as a bulwark of moderation and opposition to extremism. The current government led by former general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has clamped down on Hamas terrorists and has been willing to deploy its armed forces to fight ISIS in Libya while also clamping down on a Muslim Brotherhood movement that seeks to transform Egypt into another Islamist state. Yet despite this, the Obama administration is unhappy with Egypt. Much to Cairo’s consternation, the United States is squeezing its government on the military aid it needs to fight ISIS in Libya and Sinai terrorists. As the Israeli government has already learned to its sorrow, the Egyptians now understand that being an ally of the United States is a lot less comfortable position than to be a foe like Iran.

The ostensible reason for the holdup in aid is that the Egyptian government is a human-rights violator. Those concerns are accurate. Sisi’s government has been ruthless in cracking down on the same Muslim Brotherhood faction that was running the country until a popular coup brought it down in the summer of 2013. But contrary to the illusions of an Obama administration that hastened the fall of Hosni Mubarak and then foolishly embraced his Muslim Brotherhood successors, democracy was never one of the available options in Egypt.

The choice in Egypt remains stark. It’s either going to be run by Islamists bent on taking the most populous Arab country down the dark road of extremism or by a military regime that will keep that from happening. The obvious Western choice must be the latter, and Sisi has turned out to be an even better ally than Washington could have dreamed of, as he ensured that the Brotherhood would not return to power, took on Hamas in Gaza, and even made public calls for Muslims to turn against religious extremists.

But rather than that endearing him to the administration, this outstanding record has earned Sisi the Netanyahu treatment. Indeed, like other moderate Arab leaders in the Middle East, Sisi understands that President Obama has no great love for his country’s allies. Besotted as he is by the idea of bringing Iran in from the cold, the American government has allied itself with Tehran in the conflicts in both Iraq and Syria. He also understands that both of those ongoing wars were made far worse by the president’s dithering for years, a stance that may well have been motivated by a desire to avoid antagonizing Iran by seeking to topple their Syrian ally.

But those issues notwithstanding, one of the major changes that took place on President Obama’s watch was a conscious decision to downgrade relations with Cairo, a nation that his predecessors of both parties had recognized as a lynchpin of U.S. interests in the region. The current weapons supply squeeze is not only a blow to the efforts of a nation that is actually willing to fight ISIS and other Islamist terrorists; it’s a statement about what it means to be an American ally in the age of Obama.

As the Times of Israel reported:

On Monday Sisi was asked what he and the other Arab allies thought of U.S. leadership in the region. It is hard to put his response in words, mainly due to his prolonged silence.

“Difficult question,” he said after some moments, while his body language expressed contempt and disgust. “The suspending of US equipment and arms was an indicator for the public that the United States is not standing by the Egyptians.”

It turns out that although the American administration recently agreed to provide the Egyptian Air Force with Apache attack helicopters; it has been making it increasingly difficult for Cairo to make additional military purchases.

For example, the U.S. is delaying the shipment of tanks, spare parts and other weapons that the army desperately needs in its war against Islamic State.

This development raises serious questions not only about U.S.-Egyptian relations but the administration’s vision for the region.

This is, after all, a time when the administration is going all out to make common cause with Iran, an open enemy that is currently the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world. President Obama is pursuing a diplomatic arrangement that will strengthen the Iranian regime and guarantee the survival of a nuclear program that moderate Arabs see as being as much of a threat to them as it is to Israel or the West.

The Egyptians understand that Washington isn’t interested in their friendship. Nor is the administration particularly supportive of Cairo’s efforts to rein in Hamas or to fight ISIS. Indeed, the Egyptians are now experiencing the same sort of treatment that has heretofore been reserved for the Israelis. That’s especially true in light of the arms resupply cutoff against Israel Obama ordered during last summer’s war in Gaza.

Despite flirting with Russia, Egypt may, like Israel, have no real alternative to the United States as an ally. Perhaps that’s why Obama takes it for granted. But if the U.S. is serious about fighting ISIS as opposed to just talking about it, Washington will have to start treating Egypt and its military as a priority rather than an embarrassment.

Categories: Diplomacy, Egypt, Foreign policy, Free world, Funding terrorism, Hamas, Human rights, Iran, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Obama, P5+1, Theocracy
Tags: Egypt, Foreign Policy, Free world, Funding terrorism, Hamas, human rights, Iran, Iran Scam, Islamic State, Islamism, Israel, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Netanyahu, Theocracy

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