Posted tagged ‘Obama’

U.S. Defense Official: ‘No Meaningful Degradation’ In Islamic State Force From Obama Bomb Campaign

July 31, 2015

U.S. Defense Official: ‘No Meaningful Degradation’ In Islamic State Force From Obama Bomb Campaign

BY:
July 31, 2015 1:15 pm

via U.S. Defense Official: ‘No Meaningful Degradation’ In Islamic State Force From Obama Bomb Campaign | Washington Free Beacon.

The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the Obama administration bomb campaign launched last year against the Islamic State has yielded no perceivable degradation of the terrorist organization’s forces.

The Associated Press reported:

The military campaign has prevented Iraq’s collapse and put the Islamic State under increasing pressure in northern Syria, particularly squeezing its self-proclaimed capital in Raqqa. But intelligence analysts see the overall situation as a strategic stalemate: The Islamic State remains a well-funded extremist army able to replenish its ranks with foreign jihadis as quickly as the U.S. can eliminate them. Meanwhile, the group has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan.

An unnamed defense official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, admitted that U.S. intelligence has “seen no meaningful degradation in their numbers.”

U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIL or ISIS) remains between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters strong.

Nevertheless, President Obama spoke earlier this month on the “progress” the United States has witnessed after hitting IS in Iraq and Syria with thousands of air strikes.

John Allen, the retired Marine general tasked with developing the campaign against IS, said, “ISIS is losing” at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado last week. At the same event, FBI director James Comey called IS a “the threat that we’re worrying about in the homeland most of all.”

The Obama administration strategy to thwart IS involves bombing militants and training Syrian and Kurdish fighters on the ground. It bars U.S. troops from engaging in combat with the Islamic State or launching air strikes from the ground.

Only 60 Syrian insurgents have received appropriate training and been vetted by the United States to fight the Islamic State. Still, the U.S. is planning to rely on Syrian rebels–many of whom have connections to Islamic militant groups and are more concerned with toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime–to secure an IS “safe zone” along the Syrian-Turkish border.

Despite the U.S. campaign, the Islamic State has exhibited signs of transforming into a functional state, issuing identification cards and dispersing fishing guidelines in the areas of Syria and Iraq that it controls.

John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the CIA between 2000 and 2004 during portions of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, recently admitted that the idea of IS eventually becoming a legitimate state with working airports and passports is “not inconceivable.”

The Islamic State is also accumulating plenty of money. According to one estimate, IS nets $500 million in annual revenue from oil sales in addition to the $1 billion the terrorist group lifts from banks in areas it controls.

Obama has insisted in July that there are “no current plans” to send more U.S. troops overseas to fight IS.

Palestinian Authority and Kerry freed Muslim terrorists who burned Jewish family to death

July 31, 2015

Palestinian Authority and Kerry freed Muslim terrorists who burned Jewish family to death, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 31, 2015

(Israel is properly distraught when Israeli Jews murder Palestinian children, but at least a smidgen of perspective is needed. — DM)

nathaniel_weiss_3Nathaniel Weiss was 3 years old when Muslim terrorists burned him to death.
m_np_038070_10Ephraim Weiss was 10 months old
adi_moses_and_familyThe Moses children were children.

The EU has demanded that Israel show “zero tolerance” for attacks on Muslims and yet it demands that Israel appease the terrorists who commit atrocities like these as a matter of state policy.

It is time for us to remember who the enemy is and what it does, not once in a blue moon, but day after day as part of a policy of violent genocidal hatred going back to Mohammed.

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The Palestinian Authority called their murderers heroes and Obama and Kerry obtained their release.

While the Israeli government is falling over itself to condemn a supposed arson attack, the government released Muslim terrorists involved in a horrific arson to get the PLO to peace negotiations. It did this under pressure from Obama, Kerry and the European Union.

Here’s the horrific case.

A shocked and angry Israel today buried Rachel Weiss, 26, and her three young sons. They were burned to death in a firebomb attack on an Israeli passenger bus on Sunday night. Seven others were wounded, and three are hospitalized in serious condition.

Israeli soldier David Delarosa also died in the bombing when he attempted to save the family.

The four charred bodies — Rachel Weiss, 26, in a white shroud and her three sons, Netanel, 3, Rafael, 2, and Efraim, 10 months, together in an open pine coffin — were interred in a small hole scratched out of the hard rock on a barren hillside.

Most of the passengers got out of the burning bus in time, but Rachel Weiss and her children remained inside, with the mother throwing herself on her children in a vain attempt to protect them. A soldier tried to get them out but was driven back by the flames.

Besides Weiss, two of the victims were Americans.

The Palestinian Authority terrorists who firebombed an Egged bus in the Jordan Valley in 1988, killing five and wounding five, made sure the wounds would be as painful as possible.

Juma’a Adem and Mahmoud Kharbish mixed glue with the gasoline, causing the flammable liquid to stick to the skin of the victims, two of whom were American-Israelis Sandy Bloom of New York City and her husband Dov of Pittsburgh.

They were walking free at the time they firebombed the bus, after having been previously jailed for attacking Jews with Molotov cocktails.

The terrorists struck at night Bloom told the Jewish Press.

“We left their children with the grandparents at the Kibbutz. We were on the bus when there was a flash and a boom,” he continued. “Within a second, we were covered with a flammable liquid and were burning up. The terrorists threw several firebombs, and one of them smashed through our window.

“The flammable liquid spilled on us, and we later found out that the terrorists mixed glue with the gasoline to cause more pain and more severe burns.

The Blooms were rushed to Hadassah Hospital. It was five weeks before Dov and Sandy could leave. “We also spent years of painful recuperation with more operations and skin grafts,” Dov Bloom added.

Obama and Kerry however backed the PLO’s demands that the terrorists, among many others, had to be freed by Israel before PLO boss Abbas would negotiate with Netanyahu.

When Kerry had first raised the prisoner issue in June, Netanyahu was adamant. “I can’t get that through my Cabinet,” he said. His right-wing Likud Party would never stand for it. Neither would the more hard-line Jewish Home Party. It wasn’t even certain that the coalition’s two centrist parties would.

But it happened anyway. The PLO threw a party for the terrorists it had extracted and the man Obama had described as Israel’s peace partner praised them as heroes.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas held a celebration in Ramallah in honor of the second set of 26 Palestinian terrorists released by Israel as part of Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations, calling the prisoners “heroes” despite their violent history.

At the Ramallah celebration, Abbas told the crowd, “We welcome our brothers the heroes coming from behind the bars to a world of freedom and liberty.”

Every released prisoner will receive a special grant and monthly stipend from the PA, between $710-$1,280, Israel Hayom reported.

American taxpayers end up footing the bill for that. They always do.

The EU has demanded that Israel show “zero tolerance” for attacks on Muslims and yet it demands that Israel appease the terrorists who commit atrocities like these as a matter of state policy. Yair Lapid, currently throwing a tantrum by claiming that any act of violence against Muslims is a declaration of war against Israel… voted to approve the release of terrorists.

Such atrocities were not unique. And as the brilliant Guillio Meotti points out, the PLO state was built on them.

At the entrance to Alfei Menashe there is a monument remembering Ofra Moses and her son Tal. If you look closely, you can make out the figure of Ofra still in her car seat–with Tal closely behind her, burned to death by Arabs. “What else does a man, a terrorist like this, have to do in order to get the death sentence?”, the father, Avraham Moses said, after the sentence of life imprisonment was announced.

Ofra Moses, 35,from the settlement of Alfei Menashe, near Kalkilya, was burned to death and her 5-year-old son, Tal, died of burns three months later. Her husband, Abraham; their two other children, Nir, 15, and Adi, 9; and a friend, Yossi Hilleli, 14, were all badly burned, but they recovered.

Their faces and bodies are still scarred and they are still grieving over their loss. But the surviving members of the Moses family had an impromptu party at their home here Wednesday night to celebrate the capture of Mohammad Daoud of Kalkilya

Mohammed Daoud was another of the terrorists extracted by the PLO and Kerry and Obama.

“You know the story of my family. In 1987 a terrorist threw a firebomb at the car my family was travelling in. He murdered my mother and my brother Tal, and injured my father, my brother, his friend and myself. It is a story you know. But… Me, you do not really know. I was 8 years old when this happened.

While my father was rolling me in the sand to extinguish my burning body, I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes.

This story did not end that day in 1987. This story is the difficult life I have led since then. I am still 8 years old, hospitalized in critical condition. Screaming from pain. Bandaged from head to toe. And my head is not the same. No longer full of golden long hair. The head is burnt. The face, back, the legs and arms, burnt. I am surrounded by family members, but my mother is not with me. Not hugging and caressing. She is not the one changing my bandages. In the room next door, my brother Tal in lying. Screaming in pain. I call out to him to count sheep with me so he can fall asleep. Three months later, little Tal dies of his wounds. I am seated, all bandaged up, on a chair in the cemetery and I watch as my little brother is buried.”

This is what we should be outraged about.

A policy of mass murder whose perpetrators are funded by American and European taxpayers and whose freedom is obtained on behalf of a terrorist group by our governments.

Even though Israel freed most of the terrorists that Kerry and his PLO pals wanted, Kerry blamed Israel when the PLO trashed the negotiations. That is what we are dealing with. It is time for us to stop apologizing and stop appeasing.

It is time for us to remember who the enemy is and what it does, not once in a blue moon, but day after day as part of a policy of violent genocidal hatred going back to Mohammed. And it is time for us to remember that the governments that appease Islamic terrorists and the media that defend them have the blood of children like this on their hands.

The Iran Nuke Documents Obama Doesn’t Want You to See

July 31, 2015

The Iran Nuke Documents Obama Doesn’t Want You to See, The Daily Beast, Tim Mak, July 30, 2015

(Most transparent administration ever.

–DM)

47943959.cachedKevin Lamarque/Reuters

Congress passed a law called the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, also known as Corker-Cardin, requiring the administration to formally submit the Iran nuclear deal, an unclassified verification assessment with any secret annexes, and other relevant materials to Congress.

The intention of that provision was for unclassified materials to be freely available so that an open debate on the public interest could occur. Members of Congress are pointing out that this is not what is happening—and are urging the Obama administration to allow their release.

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Seventeen unclassified Iran deal items have been locked in ultra-secure facilities ordinarily used for top secret info. Why is the Obama administration trying to bury this material?

Scattered around the U.S. Capitol complex are a series of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIFs, which are typically used to hold Top Secret information.But today in these deeply secure settings are a series of unclassified documents—items dealing with the Iran nuclear deal that are not secret, but that the Obama administration is nevertheless blocking the public from reading.

The Obama administration delivered 18 documents to Congress on July 19, in accordance with legislation requiring a Congressional review of the nuclear deal. Only one of these documents is classified, while the remaining 17 are unclassified.

Yet many of these unclassified documents cannot be shared with the public or discussed openly with the press. The protocol for handling these documents, set by the State Department and carried out by Congress, is that these unreleased documents can only be reviewed ‘in camera’—a Latin term that means only those with special clearance can read them—and must be held in various Congressional SCIFs.

Most staffers were hesitant to discuss—let alone share—a number of these documents, even though they’re not classified, because they require security clearances to view. By mixing a classified document with unclassified documents, critics of this arrangement contend, important facts are being kept from the public just as Congress is deciding whether to support or oppose the Iran deal.

“The unclassified items… should be public. This is going to be the most important foreign policy decision that this Congress will make,” a Republican Senate aide told The Daily Beast. “This is the administration that once said it would be the most transparent administration in history. They’re not acting like it.”

“Many in Congress view the administration’s tactic of co-mingling unclassified documents with classified documents and requiring Congressional staffers to have secret clearances just to view certain unclassified documents as an attempt by the administration to limit open debate,” a second senior Republican Congressional staffer said.

Among the 17 unclassified documents are important texts related to the Iran nuclear deal: One document, titled “Elements of Iran’s R&D Plan,” is based on the “safeguards confidential plan [between] Iran and the IAEA,” a State Department official said, and so it can’t be released publicly. The document describes how Iran’s research and development on its nuclear program, including on its centrifuges, could progress over time.

Other unclassified documents may be diplomatically sensitive: One is a letter from the foreign ministers of France, Germany and the U.K. to Secretary of State John Kerry; another is a letter from Kerry to the three foreign ministers and his Chinese counterpart as well.

The set includes a discussion paper written before the final agreement, on how sanctions would be dealt with in the interim. Yet another is a draft statement by the U.S. government, to be issued on a future Iran deal implementation day.

Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake and Josh Rogin previously reported the existence of the 18 documents submitted by the Obama administration to Congress, as well as some descriptions of what the set contained.

The Iran nuclear deal is unlike other arms control agreements “because it’s so complex and has so many moving parts,” said Jeffrey Lewis, Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “It goes into jaw-dropping detail.” So it’s not a complete surprise that there might be some sensitive ancillary documents to go along with the arrangement. Iran might not want the particulars of its nuclear research program in full public view, for instance.

The unreleased, unclassified documents are informative for Congress but not for public consumption, the State Department contends.

“Some of the documents are the types of documents which, like State Department cables and other internal USG documents, we would not post publicly but would share with Congress in appropriate circumstances. Others are documents that, while not part of the [Iran nuclear agreement] itself, pertain to it and we were clear with the other P5+1 members and Iran that we would be sharing those documents with Congress, and we have,” a State Department official said.

Added the official, “Congress has every document that we have, and every Member of Congress and every staff [member] with the necessary security clearance can review all of the documents.”

Some Democrats were supportive of the administration’s hush-hush approach. The documents are part of a sensitive diplomatic process involving Iran’s nuclear program, they argue, so it’s not surprising that there are some restrictions to the level of transparency the government will allow.

“The essential elements to make the decision on the deal are out there,” a senior Democratic aide said. “I don’t think there’s a lack of transparency or discussion on [the Iran deal], because you’ve had very detailed briefings and every member of Congress has been able to view these documents… The way they are stored is consistent and not unreasonable, and I don’t think there’s anything nefarious.”

Open government advocates, on the other hand, were appalled that unclassified documents this important were being kept both from public view—and, in a real way, from serious Congressional scrutiny.

“Keeping unclassified documents in a SCIF is overkill, even if the documents are sensitive or confidential. They simply don’t need the kind of sophisticated protection against clandestine surveillance that SCIFs are intended to provide,” said Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, working to reduce government secrecy.

“The primary obstacle to congressional review that is created by this arrangement is the requirement to physically be present in the SCIF. Members of Congress cannot review the material in their offices, or share it with trusted colleagues or with subject matter experts. It is a significant hindrance to review,” he added.

Congress passed a law called the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, also known as Corker-Cardin, requiring the administration to formally submit the Iran nuclear deal, an unclassified verification assessment with any secret annexes, and other relevant materials to Congress.

The intention of that provision was for unclassified materials to be freely available so that an open debate on the public interest could occur. Members of Congress are pointing out that this is not what is happening—and are urging the Obama administration to allow their release.

“A lot of both documents and discussion that have been held in a classified setting doesn’t have classified characteristics to it… to the extent that many [documents aren’t classified,] they should be made totally public, as far as I’m concerned, so that the public can evaluate for themselves,” Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez told The Daily Beast.

Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agrees. His spokesperson told The Daily Beast that he “believes that the administration should make these unclassified documents available to the public so the American people can see the details of the Iran nuclear deal.”

Column One: Obama strikes again

July 31, 2015

Column One: Obama strikes again, Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, July 30, 2015

ShowImage (5)US President Barack Obama (L) and Vice President Joe Biden. (photo credit:OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY PETE SOUZA)

Most of the antiquities that ISIS plunders in Iraq and Syria make their way to the world market through Turkey. So, too, most of the oil that ISIS produces in Syria and Iraq is smuggled out through Turkey. According to the US Treasury, ISIS has made $1 million-$4m. a day from oil revenue.

Instead of maintaining its current practice of balancing its support for Turkey with its support for the Kurds, under the agreement, the West ditches its support for the Kurds and transfers its support to Turkey exclusively.

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While Israel and much of oficial Washington remain focused on the deal President Barack Obama just cut with the ayatollahs that gives them $150 billion and a guaranteed nuclear arsenal within a decade, Obama has already moved on – to Syria.

Obama’s first hope was to reach a deal with his Iranian friends that would leave the Assad regime in place. But the Iranians blew him off.

They know they don’t need a deal with Obama to secure their interests. Obama will continue to help them to maintain their power base in Syria though Hezbollah and the remains of the Assad regime without a deal.

Iran’s cold shoulder didn’t stop Obama. He moved on to his Sunni friend Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Like the Iranians, since the war broke out, Erdogan has played a central role in transforming what started out as a local uprising into a regional conflict between Sunni and Shiite jihadists.

With Obama’s full support, by late 2012 Erdogan had built an opposition dominated by his totalitarian allies in the Muslim Brotherhood.

By mid-2013, Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood- led coalition was eclipsed by al-Qaida spinoffs. They also enjoyed Turkish support.

And when last summer ISIS supplanted al-Qaida as the dominant Sunni jihadist force in Syria, it did so with Erdogan’s full backing. For the past 18 months, Turkey has been ISIS’s logistical, political and economic base.

According to Brett McGurk, the State Department’s point man on ISIS, about 25,000 foreign fighters have joined ISIS in Syria and Iraq. All of them transited through Turkey.

Most of the antiquities that ISIS plunders in Iraq and Syria make their way to the world market through Turkey. So, too, most of the oil that ISIS produces in Syria and Iraq is smuggled out through Turkey. According to the US Treasury, ISIS has made $1 million-$4m. a day from oil revenue.

In May, US commandos in Syria assassinated Abu Sayyaf, ISIS’s chief money manager, and arrested his wife and seized numerous computers and flash drives from his home. According to a report in The Guardian published last week, the drives provided hard evidence of official Turkish economic collusion with ISIS.

Due to Turkish support, ISIS has become a self-financing terrorist group. With its revenue stream it is able to maintain a welfare state regime, attracting recruits from abroad and securing the loyalty of local Sunni militias and former Ba’athist forces.

Some Western officials believed that after finding hard evidence of Turkish regime support for ISIS, NATO would finally change its relationship with Turkey. To a degree they were correct.

Last week, Obama cut a deal with Erdogan that changes the West’s relationship with Erdogan.

Instead of maintaining its current practice of balancing its support for Turkey with its support for the Kurds, under the agreement, the West ditches its support for the Kurds and transfers its support to Turkey exclusively.

The Kurdish peshmerga militias operating today in Iraq and Syria are the only military outfits making sustained progress in the war against ISIS. Since last October, the Kurds in Syria have liberated ISIS-controlled and -threatened areas along the Turkish border.

The YPG, the peshmerga militia in Syria, won its first major victory in January, when after a protracted, bloody battle, with US air support, it freed the Kurdish border town of Kobani from ISIS’s assault.

In June, the YPG scored a strategic victory against ISIS by taking control of Tal Abyad. Tal Abyad controls the road connecting ISIS’s capital of Raqqa with Turkey. By capturing Tal Abyad, the Kurds cut Raqqa’s supply lines.

Last month, Time magazine reported that the Turks reacted with hysteria to Tal Abyad’s capture.

Not only did the operation endanger Raqqa, it gave the Kurds territorial contiguity in Syria.

The YPG’s victories enhanced the Kurds’ standing among Western nations. Indeed, some British and American officials were quoted openly discussing the possibility of removing the PKK, the YPG’s Iraqi counterpart, from their official lists of terrorist organizations.

The YPG’s victories similarly enhanced the Kurds’ standing inside Turkey itself. In the June elections to the Turkish parliament, the Kurdish HDP party won 12 percent of the vote nationally, and so blocked Erdogan’s AKP party from winning a parliamentary majority.

Without that majority Erdogan’s plan of reforming the constitution to transform Turkey into a presidential republic and secure his dictatorship for the long run has been jeopardized.

As far as Erdogan was concerned, by the middle of July the Kurdish threat to his power had reached unacceptable levels.

Then two weeks ago the deck was miraculously reshuffled.

On July 20, young Kurdish activists convened in Suduc, a Kurdish town on the Turkish side of the border, 6 kilometers from Kobani. A suicide bomber walked up to them, and detonated, massacring 32 people.

Turkish officials claim that the bomber was a Turkish Kurd, and a member of ISIS. But the Kurds didn’t buy that line. Last week, HDP lawmakers accused the regime of complicity with the bomber. And two days after the attack, militants from the PKK killed two Turkish policemen in a neighboring village, claiming that they collaborated with ISIS.

At that point, Erdogan sprang into action.

After refusing for months to work with NATO forces in their anti-ISIS operations, Erdogan announced he was entering the fray. He would begin targeting “terrorists” and allow the US air force to use two Turkish air bases for its anti-ISIS operations. In exchange, the US agreed to set up a “safe zone” in Syria along the Turkish border.

Turkish officials were quick to explain that in targeting “terrorists,” the Turks would not distinguish between Kurdish terrorists and ISIS terrorists just because the former are fighting ISIS. Both, they insisted, are legitimate targets.

Erdogan closed his deal in a telephone call with Obama. And he immediately went into action.

Turkish forces began bombing terrorist targets and rounding up terrorist suspects. Although a few of the Turkish bombing runs have been directly against ISIS, the vast majority have targeted Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria.

Moreover, for every suspected ISIS terrorist arrested by Turkish security forces, at least eight Kurds have been taken into custody.

Then, too, Erdogan has called on AKP lawmakers to begin criminalizing their counterparts from the HDP. Kurdish lawmakers, he urged them, must be stripped of their parliamentary immunity to enable their arrests.

As Erdogan apparently sees things, by going to war against the Kurds, he will be able to reestablish the AKP’s parliamentary majority. Within a few weeks, if the AKP fails to form a governing coalition – and it will – then new elections will be held. The nationalists, who abandoned the AKP in June, will return to the party to reward Erdogan for fighting the Kurds.

As for that “safe area” in northern Syria, as the Kurds see it, Erdogan will use it to destroy Kurdish autonomy. He will flood the zone with Syrian Arab refugees who fled to Turkey, to dilute the Kurdish majority. And he will secure coalition support for the Sunni Arab militias – including those still affiliated with al-Qaida – which will be permitted by NATO to operate openly in the safe area.

Already the Kurds are reporting that the US has stopped providing air support for their forces fighting ISIS in the border town of Jarablus. Those forces were bombed this week by Turkish F-16s.

For their part, despite Erdogan’s pledge to fight ISIS, his forces seem remarkable uninterested in rolling back ISIS achievements. The Turks have no plan for removing ISIS from its strongholds in Raqqa or Haskiyah.

The Obama administration is presenting the deal with Turkey as yet another great achievement.

In an interview with Charlie Rose on Tuesday, McGurk explained that the deal was a long time in the making. It began with a phone conversation between Obama and Erdogan last October and it ended with their phone call last week.

In October, Obama convinced Erdogan not to oppose US air support for the Kurds in Kobani and to enable the US to resupply YPG fighters in Kobani through Turkey. In the second, Obama agreed not to oppose Erdogan’s offensive against the Kurds.

Two years ago, in August 2013, the world held its breath awaiting US action in Syria. That month, after prolonged equivocation amidst mountains of evidence, the Obama administration was forced to acknowledge that Iran’s Syrian puppet Bashar Assad had crossed Obama’s self-declared redline and used chemical weapons against regime opponents, including civilians.

US forces assembled for battle. Everything looked ready to go, until just hours before US jets were scheduled to begin bombing regime targets, Obama canceled the operation. In so doing, he lost all deterrent power against Iran. He also lost all strategic credibility among America’s regional allies.

To save face, Obama agreed to a Russian proposal to have international monitors remove Syria’s chemical weapons from the country.

Last summer, the administration proudly announced that the mission had been completed.

UN chemical weapons monitors had removed Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal from the country, they proclaimed. It didn’t matter to either Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry that by that point Assad had resumed chemical assaults with chlorine-based bombs. Chlorine bombs weren’t chemical weapons, the Americans idiotically proclaimed.

Then last week, the lie fell apart. The Wall Street Journal reported that according to US intelligence agencies, Assad not surrendered his chemical arsenal.

Rather, he hid much of his chemical weaponry from the UN inspectors. He had even managed to retain the capacity to make chemical weapons – like chlorine-based bombs – after agreeing to part with his chemical arsenal.

Assad was able to cheat, because just as the administration’s nuclear deal with the Iranians gives Iran control over which nuclear sites will be open to UN inspectors, and which will be off limits, so the chemical deal gave Assad control over what the inspectors would and would not be allowed to see. So, they saw only what he showed them.

Obama has gone full circle in concluding his deal with Erdogan. Since entering office, Obama has sought to cut deals with both the Sunni jihadists of the Muslim Brotherhood ilk and the Shi’ite jihadists of the Iranian ilk.

His chemical deal with Assad and his nuclear deal with the ayatollahs accomplished the latter goal, and did so at the expense of America’s Sunni Arab allies and Israel.

His deal last week with Erdogan accomplishes the former goal, to the benefit of ISIS, and on the backs of America’s Kurdish allies.

So that takes care of the Middle East. With 17 months left to go till Obama leave office, the time has apparently come for the British to begin to worry.

Iran’s Expendable President Rouhani

July 31, 2015

Iran’s Expendable President Rouhani, World Affairs JournalAli Alfoneh, July 30, 2015

7.30.15.alfoneh_0

In Washington the agreement is being sold in part as an effort to bolster the president against more hardline forces. The opposite, however, may well play out. By achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, Washington may have invested the entirety of its agreement and relations with Iran on an expendable politician.

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While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif celebrate their recent nuclear negotiating triumph, neither they nor their Washington-based fans should pop the Zamzam cola just yet. Back in Tehran, Rouhani and Zarif are encountering increasing resistance. With the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in hand, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei no longer needs the duo and is likely to cease shielding them from domestic criticism as he has in their first two years in office. Worse, fearing their popularity, Khamenei may encourage the Islamic Revolutionary Guards to launch a political attack against the president and his allies.

Rouhani is perhaps in a better position to defend himself than his “pragmatic” forerunners. Today, team Rouhani is not a one-man operation that emerged from nowhere but the product of the large “technocratic” and clerical network built by his mentor, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

Rouhani intends to mobilize the public for his cause. After all, he has come close to delivering his single major campaign pledge — solving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program and eliminating the international sanctions regime. Seeing some economic promise, the average voter may vote Rouhani’s allies into parliament and the Assembly of Experts in February 2016, and eventually re-elect Rouhani in presidential elections the following year.

That scenario, however, would seem optimistic. In the past, Rafsanjani and Rouhani seldom reciprocated the loyalty of their protégés, and nor can they expect their former allies’ support in troubled times. The two mullahs did not lift a finger to save their friends when opponents, which sometimes included Khamenei, began to attack Rafsanjani’s too-powerful network during his presidency in the 1990s. When Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a reformist mayor of Tehran and a Rafsanjani ally, was targeted by a politically-motivated judiciary in 1998, Rafsanjani and Rouhani (then-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council) remained silent. If Khamenei unleashes the Guards against the president, Rouhani’s network of friends is vastly smaller and weaker than was Rafsanjani’s a decade earlier and, thus, would likely scatter in difficult times.

It is also near certain that Rouhani will be incapable of capitalizing on the sanctions relief to liberalize Iran’s economy and improve living standards for the average Iranian. To date, Rouhani has already repeatedly tried, and failed, to push the Guards (upper or lower case. I’m not sure?) out of the economy. Their intransigence probably received the tacit support of Khamenei, who can’t afford to lose his praetorians’ support. After all, it was the guards who brutally suppressed the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009. The money from sanctions relief remains more likely to find its way to the companies owned by the IRGC and the semi-public foundations controlled by Khamenei than to state coffers, and the ordinary citizen.

At the street level, the nuclear deal remains immensely popular. But the Islamic Republic isn’t a democracy, and Khamenei has feared competition from the Rouhani-Rafsanjani camp. He has before successfully curtailed the political power of Rafsanjani, once the major domo of revolutionary mullahs, and occasionally tormented his children to remind the cleric of his place. The Supreme Leader will likely ensure that the Guardian Council, which approves candidates for public office, disqualifies candidates favored by the president and his allies. The purging of candidates will be intended to keep Rouhani’s supporters home, and allow anti-Rouhani forces to score huge electoral triumphs, thus checking the popular power of the executive branch.

Simultaneously, ever more belligerent statements by Khamenei and the hardline elite of the IRGC are gradually drowning out Rouhani and Zarif’s charm offensive towards the United States.

The cumulative impact of these efforts could be disastrous for Rouhani and his team.

In Washington the agreement is being sold in part as an effort to bolster the president against more hardline forces. The opposite, however, may well play out. By achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, Washington may have invested the entirety of its agreement and relations with Iran on an expendable politician.

ObameDeal Exposed: It’s not ‘Secret’ from Congress but not in Writing

July 31, 2015

State Dept. claims Congress is “looped in,” but IAEA head refuse to testify at Senate hearings.

By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

Published: July 31st, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » ObameDeal Exposed: It’s not ‘Secret’ from Congress but not in Writing.

Matt Lee of the Associated Press at the State Department press briefing.

Matt Lee of the Associated Press at the State Department press briefing.
Photo Credit: StateDept.Gov

The State Dept. was caught in yesterday’s press briefing claiming there were not “secret deals” with Iran but admitted that it has no written copy of arrangements it is defending.

Associated Press journalist Matt Lee questioned spokesman Mark Toner at Thursday’s press briefing about many Congressmen’s concerns over IAEA access to Iran’s nuclear sites under the nuclear agreement.

Republican Sen. Bob Corker has said that IAEA director Dr. Yukiya Amano did not accept an invitation to testify at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the deal.

Toner declined to say whether Dr. Amano should testify but added:

There’s [sic] no secret deals, and we heard that expression thrown out constantly over the last couple of days. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. The IAEA, which is the one that verifies – will verify this deal, does create arrangements with countries under what’s called the Additional Protocol.

And Under Secretary Sherman has already had a secure briefing with the House leadership talking about this arrangement, and we’ve continued to provide or we will continue to provide those briefings in a classified setting, as needed….

So the perception that this has somehow been – that Congress hasn’t been looped in on this, and what we know about these arrangements is, frankly, incorrect. But they’ve had to take place in a classified setting.

Fine and dandy, but the reasonable assumption is that someone knows about the arrangements.

Lee told the spokesman:

But the notion – you said the notion that Congress hasn’t been looped in, but you haven’t been looped in because you guys haven’t read it.

Toner admitted:

We haven’t received a written copy of it, but we have been briefed on the contents.

And Lee retorted:

So someone with a photographic memory has looked at it and copied everything down in their brain and then repeated it up on the Hill?

Toner fidgeted and explained that “nuclear experts with much bigger degrees than I can ever attain have looked at this and their comfort level with it is good.”

But that does not answer the question, “If there is no secret deal, why isn’t a written version available?

Know Comment: American-Iranian fairy tales

July 31, 2015

Know Comment: American-Iranian fairy tales, Jerusalem PostDavid M. Weinberg, July 30, 2015

ShowImage (4)iran. (photo credit:REUTERS)

An updated list of the fictions peddled by the Obama administration in support of its pact with Iran.

Here is an updated scorecard of the misrepresentations advanced by the Obama administration in defense of its concordat with Iran. The list grows every day.

1. Iran will be motivated to keep the agreement.

False. Iran already may be plotting its escape from the agreement. Dr. Emily Landau of the Institute for National Security Studies points out that Iran has twice bolted – in 2004 and again in 2005 – when it felt that the agreements it concluded with the EU-3 were no longer serving its interests.

Lo and behold, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has an explicit defection clause, which allows Tehran to exit the deal without any deliberations or warning if it feels that any of the P5+1 countries is reintroducing any form or degree of sanction against Iran.

So, Iran will pocket hundreds of billions of dollars in (almost-immediate and unconditional) sanctions relief, then sign hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and business partnership deals with the major French and German companies that are now in on the gold rush to Iran. Then it can accuse Congress or the next US president of being nasty and use that as the pretext for its “nuclear snapback.”

2. In case of Iranian violations, America can “snapback” sanctions.

The opposite is true. The agreement intentionally embeds the US in a web of time-consuming and complex multilateral processes that place significant and perhaps insuperable obstacles to both a snapback of economic sanctions and resort to an American military strike. Prof. Jeffrey Herf of the University of Maryland has detailed how the deal places sky-high barriers in the way of American enforcement in the event of Iranian violations.

Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has shown that the nitty-gritty of the so-called sanction snapback provisions actually provide disincentives for the US and its partners to confront Iran in the event that Iran does cheat (which it has a long record of doing, and has done even during the recent nuclear talks). Moreover, Iran is supposed to get Western help and technology for defense against nuclear sabotage. So the US is essentially deterring itself from ever acting against Iran, no matter what. Which apparently is exactly what President Obama was after.

3. The deal will moderate or contain Iran’s aggressive ambitions in the Middle East.

Not at all. The nuclear deal seems to be just the first act in a longer drama of American retreat, retrenchment and accommodation as Obama hands the keys to the Persian Gulf and beyond to his new Shia friends.

Obama says that he “hopes” that “we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative, to operate the way we expect nations in the international community to behave.” But, he adds, “We’re not counting on it. So this deal is not contingent on Iran changing its behavior.”

What a damning self-indictment. Is it believable that “conversations” are going to change or contain Iran? What is really needed, instead, says Prof. Walter Russell Mead of the New America Foundation, is a tough regional strategy to counter Iran’s rush for hegemony; an aggressive, anti- IRGC, anti-Assad, anti-Hezbollah policy.

But the White House never intended to contain Iran, says Dr. Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute. It has consistently displayed an aversion to countering Iran. America’s allies in the Middle East (and this list of allies supposedly still includes Israel) “have time and again begged the president to help them curtail Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and time and again Obama has refused.”

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies expands on this in an-depth study published on Thursday.

Under cover of this accord, Iran is likely to greatly strengthen its grip on the Middle East, he writes. It will solidify its control of Yemen, including developing the capacity to block the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea and thus threaten global trade and the Suez Canal, Egypt’s lifeline. It will take complete control of Lebanon.

With the help of other countries (perhaps even including the US) it will “save” the region by fighting ISIS, to become the true ruler of Iraq and of what would remain of Alawite Syria. Hezbollah will be given thousands of precise missiles, while enjoying Iranian backing and silent American approval.

Amidror: “There is little chance that America will follow through on its promise that after signing the agreement it will be more determined in its efforts to contain Iran. This claim is unrealistic and illogical, since once a rival state becomes a partner to an agreement, one does not increase efforts taken against it in other realms. It is the nature of agreements that cover a certain area of relations that they prevent pressure being applied in other areas, rather than increasing pressure. No one in the West will now be interested in jeopardizing either the agreement or trade relations with Iran. It is therefore likely that, despite the messages of reassurance coming from Washington, Iran will become much stronger over the next 15 years, internally, regionally, economically and militarily, with no opposition from the US.”

4. There was no better deal, and the alternative to this deal is war.

Both assertions are absolutely fallacious. More coercive diplomacy could have delivered a better deal. However, Obama refused to put maximum pressure on Iran. He was not willing to impose additional sanctions on Iran (as Prime Minister Netanyahu suggested and Congress wanted), or to threaten the use of military force. When you are in talks with a genocidal, terrorism-sponsoring regime and claim that you have no viable military option, you are not negotiating.

You are begging.

Prof. Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute points out that there is a historical precedent for tougher diplomacy that works. The US Senate refused to ratify SALT II, ending the SALT process, but war between the US and the Soviet Union did not ensue. Both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan instead increased the pressure on the Soviet Union dramatically. The lesson is that walking away from bad deals does not inevitably lead either to war or to the end of negotiations.

Netanyahu: Under nuke deal, Iran has months to hide illicit activity

July 30, 2015

Netanyahu: Under nuke deal, Iran has months to hide illicit activity

Prime minister dismisses claim of 24 days for international inspectors to access suspect sites, confirms Jerusalem not apprised of annexes to deal

By Raphael Ahren July 30, 2015, 5:21 pm

via Netanyahu: Under nuke deal, Iran has months to hide illicit activity | The Times of Israel.

In this Tuesday, July 14, 2015 file photo, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference at his Jerusalem office. (AP/Oren Ben Hakoon, File)

In this Tuesday, July 14, 2015 file photo, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference at his Jerusalem office. (AP/Oren Ben Hakoon, File)

The nuclear deal between the West and Iran gives Tehran up to three months to hide illicit nuclear activity in hitherto undeclared locations, and not 24 days as claimed by the accord’s backers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday.

If Iran honors the agreement, it will be able to build numerous nuclear weapons with the blessing of the international community, he lamented during a briefing for Israeli diplomatic correspondents in his Jerusalem office.

“The inspections regime is full of holes,” Netanyahu said. “This deal is terrible. It’s preferable to have no deal than this deal.”

Under the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action that the world powers signed with Iran earlier this month, Iran has 24 days before it needs to grant international inspectors access to hitherto undeclared sites they suspect host nuclear activity.

But, Netanyahu said, if no agreement has been reached after that time elapses, the deal says that the complaint is to go to another committee trying to bridge the dispute, which will deal with the issue for another 30 days. If Iran still refuses to let inspectors into the site and the United Nations Security Council is involved, it will take another 30 days before any action is taken, the prime minister said.

“It could take a total of three months,” Netanyahu said.

During an in-depth briefing, interrupted by a phone call during which Netanyahu discussed the Iran deal and other regional issues with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the prime minister vociferously attacked the deal, saying it endangers Israel’s existence.

“In another 10 to 15 years, Iran will become a nuclear threshold country with the potential to build nuclear weapons — with permission and authorization,” he said.

If US Congress rejects the deal, “it will avert the greatest danger of Iran becoming a legitimate nuclear threshold power in 10 years,” Netanyahu added.

The opposition to the deal is growing steadily, he said. “With every passing day there are more and more opponents to this deal. The more a person learns about the agreement, the more he opposes it,” Netanyahu said.

He said that Sunni Arab states in the region shared his concerns about the pact.

“Most Sunni Arab states don’t just criticize the deal, they fully reject it. They are outraged by the agreement,” he said. “There are very concrete threats on our existence. We’re not the only ones who understand that. Others understand it too.”

The comments seemed to contradict US Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who earlier this month said Saudi Arabia had offered some support for the accord. In the UN Security Council, Jordan, another Sunni Arab state, voted for the deal.

The prime minister pointed to a critical article by Leon Wieseltier, a frequent critic of Netanyahu’s policies, as proof that Jews and Americans were united in opposition to the deal.

“It shows that you don’t have to be right wing Jew to criticize this agreement. You also don’t have to be a Jew at all to reject this agreement.”

Recent polling has shown Americans, as well as American Jews, split on whether to support the deal. Religious Jews are most likely to oppose the agreement, according to most surveys.

Netanyahu also said that Israel is not privy to all the content of the secret supplements of the agreement signed by Iran and the world powers. “We didn’t receive all the parts of the deal,” he said, refusing to elaborate.

On Wednesday, national security adviser Yossi Cohen told Knesset lawmakers that Israel was being kept in the dark on the annexes.

“Contrary to promises, Israel has not yet received all the written supplements to the agreement signed between Iran and the world powers,” Cohen, a former deputy head of the Mossad, told members of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The nuclear deal is currently being weighed by Congress, which will likely vote on whether to support it in September.

Netanyahu has indicated he will lobby against the deal in the US, even at the cost of ruffling feathers with the White House.

During the talk with Putin, the Russian president said the agreement “provided reliable guarantees” that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful, according to the Kremlin.

Putin said that the agreement would help secure nuclear non-proliferation and “have a positive impact on security and stability in the Middle East.”

Iran orders from China 150 J-10 fighter jets that incorporate Israeli technology

July 30, 2015

Iran orders from China 150 J-10 fighter jets that incorporate Israeli technology, DEBKAfile, July 30, 2015

J-10Chinese Chengdu J-10 for Iranian air force

The scale of Iran’s multibillion acquisitions from China and Russia – 550 warplanes in all so far – indicates that Tehran’s top spending priority upon receipt of the funds released by the removal of sanctions, is to be a spanking new air force.

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Iran is about to conclude a transaction with China for the purchase of the Chengdu J-10 multirole jet fighter, known in the West as the Vigorous Dragon, according to an exclusive report from DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources. Beijing has agreed to sell Tehran 150 of these sophisticated jets.

While the Chinese J-10 is comparable to the US F-16, our sources report that it is virtually a replica of the Lavi, the super-fighter developed by Israel’s aerospace industry in the second half of the 80s. Israel sold China the technology, after Washington insisted on Its discontinuing the Lavi’s production. The US also objected to the sale of the Lavi’s avionics, claiming that it contained some American components.

The Chinese plane comes in two versions – the multirole single-seat J-10A and the two-seat J-10B, which serves for training, ground assaults and electronic warfare.

Iran has additionally weighing the purchase in Moscow of 250 highly-advanced Sukhoi-Su-30MK1 twinjet multirole air superiority fighters, known in the West as Flanker-H.

On Wednesday, July 29, an Indian Air Force Su-30MK1 took part for the first time in a British air maneuver, Rainbow, where it dueled with the European Typhoon fighter.

The sophisticated Flanker has been found to have a major shortcoming. To carry eight tons of ordnance, it must use both of its AL-31FP engines, and the transition from one to two – and the reverse – often causes engine failure.

The Indian Air Force has reported three such malfunctions in a month, as well another shortcoming: The time needed for making the aircraft serviceable is too long. As a result, only half of the Indian fleet can be airborne at one time.

In a confrontation, the Iranian Air Force may find that, because of these drawbacks, the Chinese Su-30MK1 is outmatched by its American and European counterparts in the service of the Israeli, Saudi and UAE air forces.

On July 22, DEBKAfile revealed that Moscow and Tehran had concluded a giant transaction for the acquisition of a fleet of 100 IL78 MK1 (Midas) in-flight refueling planes for extending the range of its warplanes up to 7,300 km and able to refuel 6-8 planes at once.

DEBKAfile: The scale of Iran’s multibillion acquisitions from China and Russia – 550 warplanes in all so far – indicates that Tehran’s top spending priority upon receipt of the funds released by the removal of sanctions, is to be a spanking new air force.

Iran: Obama Admin Lying About Nuclear Deal for ‘Domestic Consumption’

July 30, 2015

Iran: Obama Admin Lying About Nuclear Deal for ‘Domestic Consumption’ Washington Free Beacon, July 30, 2015

( It’s clear that the Obama administration is lying, but what lies do the Iranian officials claim are being told? Do they involve the secret deals? — DM)

AP

Senior Iranian officials are accusing the Obama administration of lying about the details of the recent nuclear accord in order to soothe fears among U.S. lawmakers and Americans about the implications of the deal, which will release billions of dollars to the Islamic Republic while temporarily freezing its nuclear program, according to reports from Iran’s state-controlled media.

As Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior Obama administration figures launch a full-court press to convince Congress to approve the  deal, Iranian leaders are dismissing the rhetoric as “aimed at domestic consumption.”

Kerry and other top administration officials have been defending the deal on Capitol Hill in recent days, claiming that it will rein in the Islamic Republic’s contested nuclear program and fix its nuclear “breakout” period, the time required for it to obtain the amount of highly enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon, at one year.

Critics have noted that the deal provides Iran with billions of dollars in sanctions relief that could be spent on terrorism and lifts bans on Iran’s export of weapons and construction of ballistic missiles.

When addressing claims this week by the administration that the deal shuts down Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, Iranian officials scoffed and said that the Obama administration is misleading the public in order to sell the deal.

Hamid Baeidinejad, an official in the Iranian foreign ministry and one of the country’s nuclear negotiators, scoffed on Wednesday at the Obama administration’s comments, saying that they were meant to placate an American domestic audience.

“The remarks by the western officials are ambiguous comments which are merely uttered for domestic use and therefore we should say that there is no ambiguity in this (nuclear) agreement,” the Fars news agency quoted Baeidinejad saying in an interview with state-controlled radio.

Baeidinejad said that the Obama administration is misleading Americans about the deal in order to “calm opponents in the Congress and Zionist lobbies to soothe the internal conditions prevailing over debates on the nuclear agreement in that country,” Fars, which is also run by the Iranian state, reported.

As Congress spends 60 days reviewing the deal, which it may reject, the Iranian parliament is undertaking the same task.

During a meeting on Wednesday with Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran urged world powers to keep its commitments under the deal.

These includes lifting sanctions on the nearly $100 billion dollar financial empire of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and agreeing to bar American inspectors from all Iranian nuclear sites.

“The Iranian government is standing strong on the path of (implementing) the agreement and we will remain committed to our undertakings as long as the other side remains loyal to its obligations,” Rouhani was quoted as saying during a meeting in Tehran with Fabius, who served as a key negotiator for the French.

Rouhani said the agreement could help Iran become a key player on the international stage.

“This agreement is not against any country and our cooperation and consultations to settle the regional problems, including fight against terrorism, humanitarian aids, and materialization of nations’ demands can prove it,” Rouhani was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Fabius was met at the airport by Iranian protestors who accused him of serving as an Israeli spy.

“The protesters chanted slogans such as ‘Aids, A French Gift to Iran’, ‘We Neither Forgive nor Forget’, ‘Fabius, Servant of the US, Spy of Israel’ and ‘No Welcome to Aids Lord,’” according to Fars.