RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran is reacting angrily to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s announcement on Tuesday, and to subsequent comments by U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis Wednesday, about a review of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed between Tehran and world powers in July 2015.

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, a chief negotiator of the nuclear deal, tweeted: “Worn-out U.S. accusations can’t mask its admission of Iran’s compliance with JCPOA, obligating U.S. to change course and fulfill its own commitments.”

Zarif was referring to claims by President Donald Trump’s administration that while it was re-evaluating its Iran policy, it would not walk away from the deal in the meantime.

The part that Zarif and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei have been leaving out of their anti-American rhetoric — and Iranian assertions that the U.S. is the party violating the agreement — is the real reason for Washington’s review of the JCPOA, which in any case merely delays Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

As Tillerson said, it is Iran’s “alarming and ongoing provocations that export terror and violence, destabilizing more than one country at a time” that make it necessary to prevent the regime from traveling “the same path as North Korea.”

Indeed, even while it engaged in talks with representatives of the P5+1 countries (the U.S., the U.K., China, France, Russia and Germany), Iran continued funding and training terrorists across the Middle East, leaving others to do its dirty work.

One of its key proxies is Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiite organization that has also been fighting on the ground in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad.

Though Iran unveiled missiles inscribed with a Hebrew warning about wiping Israel off the map, it nevertheless has been relying on Hezbollah, situated along Israel’s northern border, to carry out this objective, bit by bit, through battles of attrition that involve both limited terrorist operations and all-out war. Hezbollah’s last major military campaign against the Jewish state took place in the summer of 2006. The 34-day Second Lebanon War, during which rockets blitzed northern Israel and even reached the major city of Haifa, culminated in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which was aimed at preventing Hezbollah from re-arming.

Democrats inherit the foreign policy crises of a thousand Republican presidential fathers, but the foreign policy crises inherited by incoming Republicans in the White House are always orphans.

Or at least that’s how the media likes to spin it.

If you believe your random mainstream media outlet of choice, North Korea and Syria were crises freshly spawned by this administration with no prior history. But these ticking time bombs are the direct result of the two terrible terms of his predecessor.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner’s years in the White House were the most dysfunctional, schizophrenic and senseless eight years of our national foreign policy. His domestic policy was a disaster, but it was a radioactive toxic waste dump with clear and consistent goals. ObamaCare, the abuses of the Justice Department, the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency were the naturally terrible outcome of left-wing policies being implemented with inevitably terrible results.

But Obama’s foreign policy was a wildly inconsistent mess. The Nobel Peace Prize winner couldn’t quite decide if he was a humanitarian interventionist or a pacifist non-interventionist. He couldn’t make up his mind if he wanted to take the side of the Sunnis or the Shiites in their Islamic unholy war. He didn’t know if he wanted to appease Russia or sanction it, to pivot to Asia or run the other way, to play another round of golf or replace his defense secretary for the fifth time.

Obama could be consistent on domestic policy because there were few hard choices to make. Government had to be constantly expanded and every arm of it enlisted in pursuing left-wing goals. Republican opposition was largely hapless. The “Irish Democracy” of the public response to ObamaCare was more effective at sabotaging it, but by the time anyone understood that it was far too late.

The world stage was a much more dynamic place with players who didn’t fit into Obama’s ideology. The Islamist democracy proponents got Obama to kick off the Arab Spring. When Gaddafi shot the Islamists in the streets, the interventionists got him to sign on to regime change in Libya. But then Syria boiled down to Sunni and Shiite Islamists shooting each other and interventionism hit a roadblock.

Obama stopped at his own Red Line and couldn’t figure out what to do next. His foreign policy had somehow boiled down to helping Shiites kill Sunnis in Iraq and helping Sunnis kill Shiites in Syria.

He was bombing and arming the same Islamists at the same time to improve relations with them.

“Where are the planes?!” kept crackling over U.S. Navy radios exactly 56 years ago this week. The U.S. Naval armada (22 ships including the Carrier Essex loaded with deadly Skyhawk jets.) was sitting 16 miles off the southern Cuban coast near an inlet known as Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs). The question — bellowed between blasts from a Soviet artillery and tank barrage landing around him — came from commander Jose San Roman.

“Send planes or we can’t last!” San Roman kept pleading to the very fleet that escorted his men to the beachhead (and sat much closer to them than the U.S. destroyers Porter and Ross sat to the Syrian coast this week.) Meanwhile the Soviet artillery barrage intensified, the Soviet T-34 and Stalin tanks closed in, and San Roman’s casualties piled up.

By that date the terrorists who ran (and still run) Cuba had been operating terror-training camps for two years, had kidnapped, tortured and murdered dozens of American (to say nothing of tens of thousands of Cubans.) A year later they wantonly brought Western civilization a whisker from nuclear destruction. If foreign terrorists ever merited a MOAB, it was these– based 90 miles from U.S. shores.

Crazed by hunger and thirst the Cuban freedom-fighters had been shooting and reloading without sleep for three days. Many were hallucinating. By then many suspected they’d been abandoned by the Knights of Camelot.

That’s when Castro’s Soviet Howitzers opened up again, huge 122 mm ones, four batteries’ worth. They pounded 2,000 rounds into the freedom-fighters over a four-hour period. “It sounded like the end of the world,” one recalled later to your humble servant here.

“Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps broke and ran under a similar bombardment,” wrote Haynes Johnson in his book, the Bay of Pigs. By that time the invaders were dazed, delirious with fatigue, thirst and hunger, too deafened by the bombardment to even hear orders. But these men were in no mood to emulate Rommel’s crack Afrika Corps by retreating. Instead they were fortified by a resolve no conquering troops could ever call upon–the burning duty to free their nation from Castroism….

They were mostly civilian volunteers known as La Brigada 2506, an almost precise cross-section of Cuban society of the time. The Brigada included men from every social strata and race in Cuba — from sugar cane planters to sugar cane cutters, from aristocrats to their chauffeurs. But mostly, the folks in between, as befit a nation with a larger middle class than most of Europe.

Short on battle experience, yes, but they fairly burst with what Napoleon and Patton valued most in a soldier: morale. No navel-gazing about “why they hate us” or the merits of “regime change” for them. They’d seen Castroism point-blank.

Their goals were crystal-clear: firing-squads silenced, families reunited, tens of thousands freed from prisons, torture chambers and concentration camps. We see it on the History Channel after our GIs took places like Manila and Munich.

Well, in 1961 newsreels could have captured such scenes without crossing oceans. When those Cuban freedom-fighters hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs, one of every 18 Cubans suffered in Castro Gulag. Mass graves dotted the Cuban countryside, piled with hundreds who’d crumpled in front of Castro and Che Guevara’s firing squads. Most of the invaders had loved-ones among the above. Modern history records few soldiers with the burning morale of the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters.

Camelot’s criminal idiocy of cancelling airstrikes made the Brigada’s lumbering B-26s easy prey for Castro’s jets and fast Sea-Furies — and the troops and supplies below them were even easier prey. It was a turkey shoot for the Castroites.

https://pjmedia.com/video/sec-of-state-tillerson-says-obamas-deal-fails-to-achieve-the-objective-of-a-non-nuclear-iran/

While our President is beating about the Bush policies, Tillerson is on target….rskThe US Secretary of Stare on the threat of Iran’s “provocative actions” to the United States, Israel, and the world:
Sec. of State Tillerson Says Obama’s Deal ‘Fails to Achieve the Objective of a Non-Nuclear Iran’ By Nathan Lichtman

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is confirming our worst fears, saying that Iran is on the verge of becoming a major nuclear threat. He said, “The JCPOA [Obama’s Iran deal] fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran. It only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state. This deal represents the same failed approach of the past that brought us to the current imminent threat we face from North Korea. The Trump Administration has no intention of passing the buck to a future administration on Iran.” Now we wait to see what the administration will do to change our foreign policy…

Amid reports of significant ballot-box stuffing, roughing up dissenters, and other electoral fraud, Turkey’s sharia-supremacist strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hammered the final nail in the coffin of his country’s democracy. Last weekend, he narrowly prevailed in a referendum that formally concentrates in the presidency the autocratic powers he had previously usurped.

Afterwards, Donald Trump called to congratulate him.

You read that right. The president of the United States called to congratulate a terror-supporting Islamist ruler on completing his country’s turn away from Western liberalism.

Five years ago, I wrote a book called Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy. It was largely about Erdogan and Turkey. That story needed telling in order to explain why, far from a democratic revolution, the so-called Arab Spring would result in the ascendancy of political Islam in all its classic totalitarianism. The point was that we knew how the story would end in the Middle East and North Africa because the same story had already played out in Ankara.

And so it did.

Erdogan had seized the reins thanks to a constitutional quirk ironically designed to keep Islamists out of power. Gradually — in many ways, brilliantly — he strengthened his hand until, finally, he succeeded in his goal of eviscerating the secular, Westward-leaning society forged by Mustafa Kemal — Atatürk — out of the Ottoman Empire’s post-World War I collapse.

Spring Fever presaged what happened last weekend. Though he was still prime minister at the time (mid-2012, the height of Arab Spring exuberance), I contended that Erdogan’s goal was “the adoption of a new constitution with a powerful presidency that Erdogan would occupy.” Thus, my rueful conclusion that “‘Islamic Democracy’ begins to sound a lot like Russian ‘democracy.’”

It was always sadly amusing that Western devotees of “Islamic democracy” pointed to “the Turkish model” as proof positive that their oxymoronic fantasy could become Middle Eastern reality.

Even in their rose-tinted telling, the Arab Spring was supposed to be a mass transformation from dictatorships to democracy. Turkey, to the contrary, was already a democracy when Erdogan took over in 2003. He represented a shift from a secular, pro-Western orientation to sharia supremacism. There never was an Arab Spring, but Erdogan is the Turkish Winter, transforming democracy into dictatorship.

Steadily, he accumulated power though starting from a position of weakness. He was shrewd, but the tea leaves were never hard to read. “Democracy,” he proclaimed, “is just the train we board to reach our destination.” Erdogan never saw democracy as a goal, never aspired to adopt a culture of liberty and the protection of minority rights. For him democracy was nothing but the procedural means — mainly, popular elections in a Muslim majority country — to the desired end of imposing sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal system. “I am a servant of sharia,” Erdogan was wont to say when he was Istanbul’s mayor — though he preferred to refer to himself as the city’s “imam.”

As prime minister, his masterstroke was to exploit the con-job known as European integration. Erdogan knew that, for all their flowery rhetoric, Germany, France, and the rest had no intention of welcoming a Muslim country of 80 million into the EU. Moreover, as an Islamist in the Muslim Brotherhood mold, Erdogan despises the West and had no intention of conforming in order to join. To this day, he exhorts Muslims to integrate into the West but resist assimilation. Indeed, he has described Western pressure on Muslims to assimilate as a “crime against humanity.” When it comes to Europe, Erdogan’s long range plan is to extort its accommodation of Islamic norms, not to become a partner.

That didn’t take long did it…..? Back to the idiocy of a two state dissolution of Israel…..rsk
WASHINGTON—Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will meet with President Donald Trump in Washington on May 3, the White House said Wednesday.

Mr. Trump will use the visit to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to reaching a peace deal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters in a briefing Wednesday.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu already visited the White House earlier this year. During a joint news conference, Mr. Trump abandoned Washington’s decades-old push for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, saying the two sides should determine for themselves whether separate states are necessary for peace and hinting at a broader approach to Mideast discord. He also asked Mr. Netanyahu to “hold back on settlements for a little bit.” Mr. Netanyahu declined to agree to that.

Following Mr. Trump’s remarks, Mr. Abbas didn’t acknowledge the shift, and said he would continue to work with the U.S. administration on establishing two states. He also called on Israel to heed Mr. Trump’s call to hold back on settlements.

After 59 Tomahawk missiles landed on a Syrian airfield, followed by the dropping of a 21,600-pound bomb on Islamic State’s hideouts in Afghanistan, the world has begun to ask: What is Donald Trump’s foreign policy? And so the search begins by pressing what Mr. Trump has done so far against various foreign-policy templates. Is he a neoconservative, a Scowcroftian realist or a babe in the woods?

We know this is a fool’s errand. There will be no Trump Doctrine anytime soon, and that’s fine. The Obama Doctrine, whatever it was, left his successor a steep climb in the Middle East and Asia. It is difficult to find doctrinal solutions for issues that everyone calls “a mess.” It is possible, though, to see the shape of an emerging strategy.

The place to look for that strategy is inside the minds of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

During his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Mattis said something that jumped out at the time. He called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization “the most successful military alliance probably in modern history, maybe ever.”

This was in notable contradistinction to the view of his president that NATO was obsolete. Then last week, after meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, President Trump said of the alliance: “I said it was obsolete. It’s no longer obsolete.”

Let’s set aside the obligatory sniggering over such a remark and try to see a president moving toward the outlines of a foreign policy that, for a president who likes to keep it simple, may be described with one word: allies.

NATO emerged as a formal alliance after World War II. Less formally, the U.S. struck alliances with other nations to base troops and ships, as in the Persian Gulf.

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, foreign-policy thinkers began to debate the proper role of the U.S. as the world’s only superpower. Liberals argued that maintaining the U.S. at the apex of this alliance system was, well, obsolete. Instead the U.S. should act more like a co-equal partner with our allies, including international institutions such as the United Nations.

The idea of a flatter alliance structure, or leading from behind, came to life with the Obama presidency. It doesn’t work.

If indeed Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster are the architects of an emerging Trump foreign policy, their most formative experiences, in Iraq, may shape that policy. CONTINUE AT SITE