RUTHFULLY YOURS

Part I
A global threat emerges
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

Pundits are furiously assessing the broader consequences of the Democrats’ upset Senate victory in Alabama on Tuesday, but there is less there than meets the eye. True, the Republican Senate majority now hangs by a thread, forcing even harder fights for every legislative victory.

Nonetheless, Republican chances for major gains in November 2018, perhaps six or seven Senate seats, remain strong. Moreover, Democrat 
Al Franken is resigning his seat any day now because of sexual misconduct charges, bringing another totally unexpected Republican opportunity.

Of course, any statewide Democratic victory in Alabama is stunning, but there were also stunning reasons for it. Republican Roy Moore was a flawed candidate even before allegations of sexual misconduct emerged – and he still lost by just one percentage point.

The winner, Doug Jones, will likely be defeated at the next regular election in 2020. The stakes have unquestionably been raised, but President Trump and Republicans hold a strong hand.

At some point, Democrats will have to declare what they believe in. Just as Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” 2016 victor, fell from grace when she revealed her beliefs, so too will legions of aspiring Democrats.

Trump is also demonstrating how a President can continue to command the national agenda, regardless of the comings and goings of domestic politics. For all these reasons, those who think Alabama marks the beginning of the end for Trump should think again. This is not even the end of the beginning.

There is no better proof of this than his foreign policy moves thus far.

They have not only shown him to be a dogged defender of American interests but an effective one too. Take his announcement that the US will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It is further unassailable evidence that he is not a status quo President.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas says he will no longer accept a role for the United States in the ongoing Arab–Israeli peace negotiations, which have produced little in the way of negotiation and nothing in the way of meaningful peace.

If President Abbas desires to end diplomatic relations with the United States, the United States should think seriously about obliging him.

When the Trump administration announced plans to comply with longstanding U.S. law and move — someday — the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, the country’s capital, the Arabs went nuts, but not quite as nuts as the Turks would have liked: Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has criticized what he sees as a weak Arab response to the Trump administration’s non-initiative initiative. Turkey has its own game, and Palestinian upheaval would suit Erdogan just fine.

There were apocalyptic intimations, but in reality the response was more or less what one would expect, and if the Olympic committee ever recognizes rock-throwing as a legitimate sport, the Palestinian people will finally have found their national calling.

This is a familiar and tedious piece of performance art. The Palestinian statelet is in no way viable, and the Palestinian cause is less and less useful to the Islamic powers with each passing year. The Arab–Israeli conflict was for a time another Cold War proxy, with the Palestinian cause serving as a cat’s-paw for the Soviet Union, which meant that it was a source of real money and real power. Those days are long gone, and the Palestinian cause has in no small part devolved from instrument of civilizational conflict to instrument of ordinary grift, a phony jihad used to fortify the alliance between fanatics and financial interests that is the default model of government throughout much of the Muslim Middle East.

The perfect storm. This is what the situation in the Middle East looks like. More and more events in the region seem to be leading towards an epochal change in the delicate balance of power.

The balance of power in the Middle East was quickly altered following the victory over terrorism in Syria by Damascus and her allies. Moscow’s new role guarantees Iran virtually unlimited space to manoeuvre in the region. The new Iranian military bases in Syria match the agreement between Russia and Egypt for the creation of common areas of cooperation against terrorism.

In this complicated context, Donald Trump emerges as a destroyer of US interests in the region. Observing the cooperation between the Kurdish Syrian Democratic forces (SDF) and the Americans in Syria, we can see the genesis of all the problems between Ankara and Washington. Turkey used to employ political Islam (Muslim Brotherhood) as a way of destabilizing the Middle East and North Africa, once one of the central strategies of Obama and the State Department as well. Turkey now gravitates towards the multipolar milieu of Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. The role conferred by these three nations allows Erdogan to manoeuvre skilfully between allied nations as well as fomenters of Islamic extremism like Qatar.

Turkey is just an example of the delicate balance upon which the region rests. Moscow has become the sole mediator for all parties, and does not appear to have bad relations with any of them. The Saudis are going to buy the S-400 system from the Russians; Netanyahu is forced to try to influence Moscow in order to retain some kind of leverage over Iran, but to little avail. Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) has gone further, thanks to Trump and the green light of his son-in-law, arresting dozens of Saudi authorities and financiers (very close to Clinton and Obama), undertaking a genocide against Yemenis, arming Wahhabist Islamist terrorists in every corner of the region, and cutting off all relations with Qatar in a quasi-war that is turning out to be manifestly ineffective.

In this uncontrolled chaos, and among the factions loyal to the United States, Netanyahu is seeing Israeli missiles, launched from uncontested Lebanese airspace, being shot down in Syria. MBS cannot even force his pupil Hariri to resign; and even Saleh in Yemen was killed after betraying and abandoning the Houthis. Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are finding themselves coming under fire from Houthi forces, facing the consequences of their senseless military choices closer to home. In Israel, the Netanyahu government is drowning under a sea of corruption scandals, demonstrators on the streets demanding his resignation. Are coloured revolutions returning to bite the master’s hand? In order for Saudi Arabia to avoid a similar scenario, made worse by a dearth in welfare as a result of the drop in oil prices as well as the coffers being emptied by wars, MBS has decided to arrest and rob all of his opponents. Trump does not seem to care about the consequences of these actions, taking care to coordinate events at the highest levels with Xi Jinping in Asia and Putin in the Middle East.

Trump has made a wise choice by renouncing the impossible goal of achieving global hegemony, aiming instead to sort out domestic problems. He is committed to the cause of his electors, and to this end seeks to extract as much money as possible from his allies in order to restart the US economy, aiming for re-election in 2020.

Following President Trump’s historic declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, West Bank and Gazan Arabs took to the streets in rage. They burned U.S. and Israeli flags. They cursed America, Israel and the Yahuds (Jews). Their imams cited verses from the Koran and the Hadiths about the usurpers and interlopers and the “descendants of apes and pigs.” In other words, it was business as usual for the Palestinians. Nothing had changed.

At the State Department too, it was business as usual. In a transparent effort to placate the Arab bloc, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the process of moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would take several years. Tillerson is said to have counseled Trump against recognition.

Then, at a Washington DC press briefing on December 7, Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Satterfield was evasive when asked by AP journalist Matt Lee, “what country is Jerusalem in.” Satterfield acknowledged that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel but paradoxically could not say definitively that Jerusalem was located in Israel. Satterfield went on to note that consistent with current State Department policy, U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem would not be able to state their place of birth as “Israel” on their passports. The only options currently available to U.S citizens born in Jerusalem are to note either “Jerusalem” as their place of birth or if born prior to 1948, “Palestine.”

This then is the absurdity that the White House must contend with. It appears that the State Department, staffed with a cadre of career civil servants and employees of the diplomatic corps, is conducting its own foreign policy, one that deviates from the goals of the White House and undermines its objectives. This group is perhaps more fanatical in its opposition to the president’s historic declaration than some Arab leaders.

Their resistance is motivated by a myriad of reasons. Some simply hate Trump and this offers an opportunity to engage in obstructionism. Some are deeply anti-Semitic and their sympathies lie squarely in the Arab camp. Others view change and bold action as a threat and prefer the status quo. Whatever their motivations, they are working in concert to delay and obstruct the president’s bold new policy initiatives aimed at supporting a loyal ally and acknowledging reality while at the same time breaking the deadlock and reviving an anemic peace process based on a foundation of truth.

President Trump last Wednesday announced that the United States formally recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and that work will start on physically moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The uproar over this announcement epitomizes the futility and duplicity that for seven decades has fed the lies lying at the heart of the conflict between Israel and Arabs. But Trump’s announcement should be just the beginning of a radical paradigm shift in how this country deals with the region.

One change is to abandon the appeasing gestures and empty diplomatic formulae that typify our feckless diplomacy. What Trump proposed is not a substantive change, but an acknowledgment of reality. Jerusalem already is Israel’s capital: its parliament, the Knesset, is already there, as are its supreme court, numerous government agencies, and the residence of its president. Visiting dignitaries meet their Israeli counter parts in Jerusalem. In every respect, Jerusalem functions as a national capital, except one: foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.

Keeping embassies in Tel Aviv, then, is an endorsement of the Arab lie that Jerusalem is a particularly sacred Islamic city, and so should be the capital of future Palestinian state. But going along with this canard merely validates propaganda and a revisionist history the purpose of which is to alienate Jews from their traditional homeland in order to achieve the ultimate aim: destroying Israel as a state. The truth is, Jerusalem has been a Jewish city for three thousand years, as documented in historical records and archaeological finds. Even a 1925 Muslim guide-book to Jerusalem said that the Temple Mount’s status as the site of the First Temple and the altar of King David “is beyond dispute.” Conquest, ethnic cleansing, and foreign occupation have not broken that claim, and for most of history Jews have been the majority of occupants––in 1948, more than twice as many Jews lived in Jerusalem than Arabs, and today 120,000 more Jews than Arabs live there.

Nor is the claim that Jerusalem is one of Islam’s holiest site accurate. That notion is a later one, based on a few vague Koranic verses, and it became significant only after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War as a propaganda tool for demonizing Israel and soliciting international support. Before 1967, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater for the Arabs, and the Palestinian’s founding charter, the 1964 Palestinian National Covenant, does not mention Jerusalem at all. But even if Jerusalem does have a special significance for Islam, that happened only by dint of conquest, invasion, and occupation. And yes, Israel recovered their holiest site by conquest during a defensive war. If we want, however, to assign title by adjudicating competing historical claims based on continuing cultural and religious connections, Muslims lose the debate. We need to stop taking seriously the demand that Jerusalem be the capital of some imagined Palestinian state that Palestinian Arabs by their violent deeds, and their serial rejection of four offers of a state, have done nothing constructive to create.

The claim to Jerusalem––like the “right to return” of the ever-metastasizing “Palestinian refugees,” and the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from lands their ancestors had inhabited nearly two thousand years before Islam existed––is a demand meant to forestall any final agreement that doesn’t further the Palestinian Arabs’ eliminationist aims. For states in the West, on the other hand, the claim facilitates doing nothing meaningful to resolve the dispute, and masks with duplicitous diplomacy their scapegoating and often outright anti-Semitic hostility to Israel.

President Trump’s announcement Wednesday that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was both correct and prudent from America’s perspective. Much more remains to be done to relocate the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but this was a vital first step.

What is now critical is implementing Trump’s decision. Will the State Department actually carry out the new U.S. policy — which State’s bureaucracy strongly opposed — or will the entrenched opponents of moving the embassy subvert it quietly by inaction and obfuscation?

In 1948, the United States, under Harry Truman, was the first country to recognize the modern state of Israel upon its declaration of independence. Nonetheless, Truman, at the State Department’s urging, declined to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a mistake continued by his successors. Trump has now corrected this error: Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital since 1948, and the sooner the American flag flies over the American embassy there, the better.

The expected protests and violence from the usual suspects in the Middle East have already begun, and more can be expected. Fear of these protests has deterred prior administrations from moving the embassy to Jerusalem. But it is wrong for America to bend to such efforts to intimidate us. Congressional support will be overwhelming, as it should be; over 20 years ago, the House and the Senate legislated almost unanimously that the president should relocate our embassy to Jerusalem. Given the inevitable bureaucratic obstructionism, however, Congress must continue playing an important role — by constantly prodding the State Department and by providing prompt and adequate funding for building a first-class new embassy.

As far as the New York Times was concerned, it was simply a matter of fact: The only possible explanation for President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was politics, pure and simple. A front-page news article proclaimed as much in its headline: “For Trump, an Embassy in Jerusalem Is a Political Decision, Not a Diplomatic One.”

The piece claimed that the move was more or less hatched in a meeting Trump held ten days before his inauguration with billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson and Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein. At the meeting, Trump reaffirmed the promise he had made during the campaign to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Since all of his predecessors had reneged on the same promise, as far as the Times was concerned, the only possible reason for Trump to even consider keeping it was a fear of disappointing donors like Adelson and fervently pro-Israel base voters.

This thesis makes sense if you believe no rational president would ignore the collective wisdom of the foreign-policy establishment, but it has two basic problems. One is that it fundamentally misunderstands Trump’s view of the world and governing style, as well as the truth about the current standoff in the Middle East peace process. The second is that it ignores an even more obvious element of the new debate over Jerusalem: The president’s opponents are playing politics here as much as he is.

Was there a political benefit to Trump’s keeping his promise on Jerusalem? Of course. But while Trump seems to think more about the need to honor his campaign promises than most career politicians, everything he’s done since entering politics suggests that being broadly popular is not his primary concern.

Instead, it seems far more likely that the decision stemmed from Trump’s contempt for the conventions of policymaking. His instincts almost always lead him to distrust the experts and actively seek out the advice of dissenters from the conventional wisdom. This can often get him in trouble, but in this case, it alerted him to a basic fact that his predecessors’ deference to the experts caused them to ignore: The traditional approach to the Arab–Israeli conflict, which dictated a refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, has been an abysmal failure.