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With Turkey’s help, Russia is conducting direct negotiations with Syrian rebels, the Financial Times reported on Thursday. The FT wrote that one opposition figure, when asked why he thought Russia would seek a deal with the rebels just as Assad appeared to be winning, said Moscow was “essentially saying: ‘Screw you, Americans.’”

Turkey in effect is saying the same thing to Washington. The London-based newspaper explains:

Four opposition members from rebel-held northern Syria told the Financial Times that Turkey has been brokering talks in Ankara with Moscow, whose military intervention on the side of President Bashar al-Assad has helped turn the five-year civil war in the regime’s favor. Russia is now backing regime efforts to recapture the rebels’ last urban stronghold in Syria’s second city of Aleppo.

“The Russians and Turks are talking without the US now. It [Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara,” said one opposition figure, who asked not to be identified.

This puts into context the kerfuffle over General Michael Flynn’s Election Day recommendation that the United States pay more attention to Turkey’s point of view, especially in relation to a home-grown Islamist movement with terrorist overtones. Flynn, the designated National Security Adviser for the Trump administration, was formerly head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the first senior intelligence official to warn of the emergence of ISIS at a time when President Obama dismissed the Islamist movement as “junior varsity.”

In particular, the general cited the Turkish government’s consternation at America’s refusal to extradite the exiled Islamist leader Fetullah Gülen, who fled a Turkish charge of subversion and has been living in Pennsylvania since 1999. Last July 15 a group of Turkish officers apparently loyal to Gülen attempted to overthrow the government of President Tayyip Recep Erdogan. As early as 2008 Michael Rubin, a Middle East expert now at the American Enterprise Institute, warned that Gülen would use millions of followers and billions of dollars in business assets to launch an Islamist coup. That is what Gülen apparently did last July, and Flynn argued that the United States should back Turkey’s elected leader against the coup plotters.

That seemingly uncontroversial suggestion triggered a sewage storm.
Curiously, Michael Rubin came out as one of the fundamentalist leader’s strongest supporters against the Erdogan government, alongside Commentary Magazine’s Noah Rothman. Both attacked Flynn for supporting the Erdogan government against the Gülenist attempted putsch. Rothman added that Flynn was a “dubious choice” for National Security Adviser because his consulting company had had a Turkish corporate client, suggesting that Flynn’s views on Turkey raised a “conflict of interest.”

Commentary Magazine, formerly a conservative voice in public affairs, backed Hillary Clinton’s candidacy against Donald Trump, and the allegation that Flynn’s views were shaped by a single consulting client might be dismissed as ordinary political slander.

When David Petraeus appeared Monday at Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect, the headlines naturally fixated on whether the retired Army general and former CIA chief would serve as secretary of state for the incoming administration.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s choice here will be one of his most consequential cabinet picks. But the appearance of Mr. Petraeus carries an even more striking implication. Because his presence is a reminder of a painful truth that Mr. Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all found easier to ignore throughout the 2016 election campaign.

The truth is this: America is still at war in Iraq.

All throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump rightly thumped both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton for their refusal to use the I-word—Islamist—when speaking of the terror threat against the American people. But when it came to the W-word—war—Mr. Trump was not much better.

In three presidential debates, neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton used the word war to describe the fighting in Iraq in which our troops are now engaged. When they did use the word, the context was almost always frozen in 2002.

There are political reasons for this. Mrs. Clinton, for example, is well aware that the Bernie Sanders wing of her party regards her as a latter-day Dr. Strangelove. So when she did talk about war and Iraq, it was mostly to declare that her Senate vote to authorize it was a mistake she deeply regrets.

Mr. Trump mostly fixated on the past as well. On almost every occasion the Iraq war came up, Mr. Trump used the opportunity to insist he’d opposed it from the start.

President Trump will soon enough know how inedible they are — and they can’t just be thrown away.

Thanksgiving is four days behind us, which means the leftovers have either been eaten or are ready for the trash. Fifty-three days from now, when Barack Obama finally relinquishes the presidency, he will leave a whole table full of leftovers that our next president will find a lot harder to consume or dispose of.

The sun never sets on President Obama’s leftovers. He entered office promising to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He leaves it with those wars still taking the lives of American servicemen. Wars that didn’t exist in 2009 — Syria, Libya, and Ukraine — continue at the pace prescribed by our enemies. The first American was killed in Syria on Thanksgiving Day.

America has been at war for fifteen years in Afghanistan and thirteen in Iraq. Obama ran as a “peace now” candidate, but — as Gen. James Mattis is quoted as saying — the enemy gets a vote in when a war ends. Worse, as in the Afghanistan conflict, Obama specifically disavowed victory. He continued those wars seeking only to avoid the blame for losing.

Obama has engaged us in new unnecessary wars, such as in Libya, and refused to take timely action to topple Bashar Assad in Syria. His refusal to act created the opportunity for Russia and Iran to seize control of Syria and propel their influence across the Middle East.

Obama never wanted to recognize the most important fact of the Middle Eastern conflicts: that they are religious wars that aren’t going to end. Iraq’s government last week acted to supposedly bring the more than 140,000 Shiite militiamen under its command. Iraq won’t command the Shiite militias, but its alliance with them is more than a formality. Iraq has been an Iranian satrapy for years, as this alliance makes all too clear to Iraq’s Sunni minority.

This past week, the Obama administration advised the incoming Trump team that their number one national security priority should be North Korea. Obama has engaged in a so-called “strategy” of “strategic patience,” which has enabled the Norks to develop and test nuclear weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them. Obama let China off the hook, refusing to pressure them to rein in their client state.

Obama leaves Trump to deal with the Norks and their nukes without any helpful advice except to negotiate with them. Which amounts to no advice that can possibly help deter or even reduce the Norks’ nuke threat to America and its Asian allies.

Those allies, of course, have given up on the idea of American leadership in their region. On Wednesday, South Korea and Japan signed an agreement to share intelligence on North Korean missile and nuclear matters. This agreement is the first real cooperation between the two nations since 1945. They have set aside their historical enmity and decided to eliminate America as a go-between on military matters.

“Millions of Muslims envision Islam as a religion of tolerance, pluralism, and peace. But there is a blunt fact staring us in the face…. For Allah and His Messenger demand that Muslims be on top. They demand that Muslims allow others to live only if they take a role as second-class citizens in a purely Muslim state and pay the jizya, a tax designed to shame. And they demand that Islam rule every inch of land on God’s own speck of dust — the planet Earth.” — Howard Bloom.

“Those who want to ‘annihilate’ or to convert their fellow men in the West are not madmen. They are rational and they are something more — they are idealists. They want to save us…. If we are tricked into following false laws, believing in false gods… we will go to an unspeakably painful hell.” — Howard Bloom.

“It is very unlikely that [Iran’s former president, Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad was proposing a ‘thought experiment.’ He was proposing a reality that Iran and its fellow Muslim states would be able to achieve with their upcoming weaponry — and with the existing 120 Islamic nuclear bombs of Pakistan — bombs that could easily fall into the hands of ISIS.” — Howard Bloom.

“My introduction to Islamic culture came in 1962. In the back of a library file on the Middle East, I found several English-language pamphlets printed by the Arab League, a coalition of twelve leading Arab governments. The pamphlets tried to reach people like you and me with an extremely urgent “clarification” of historical errors. First, the Holocaust, the mass murder of six million Jews by Germany’s Nazis, was a charade, a hoax. It never happened.” — Howard Bloom.

“As hungry replicators eager to remold the world, ideas often turn their ultimate weapon — the superorganism — into a killing machine. And, contrary to the doctrines of some modern critics, they do not engage in this ‘hegemonic imperialism’ only in the purportedly ‘malevolent West.'” — Howard Bloom.

There are only a handful of authors alive today whose ideas about geopolitics have won respect in both the world of Islam and in the West. One of those authors is Howard Bloom.

Bloom’s second book Global Brain was the subject of an Office of the Secretary of Defense symposium in 2010, with participants from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. And the Department of Defense’s SENSIAC Military Sensing Symposium then relied on Bloom to explain how to see the world through the eyes of Osama bin Laden.

The House Rules Committee has voted 7-2 to stop the sale or leasing of a few score commercial Boeing planes to Iran. But President Obama has promised to veto the bill, saying it would “undermine the ability of the United States to meet our JCPOA commitments.”

Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling disputed this:

[Hensarling] reminded the committee that the Treasury Department sanctioned Iran Air in 2011 for using its planes to transport military-related equipment on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Treasury Department removed the sanctions as part of the Iran nuclear deal, but Hensarling says Iran’s behavior “remains unchanged.” Iran Air has continued to use its aircraft to fly weapons and resupply routes to Syria, he said.

“Also last month, Iran conducted military drills using Boeing planes that have been a part of its air force fleet for many years,” he said. “This is not surprising as Boeing itself has posted that its commercial jetliners ‘make an ideal platform for a variety of military derivative aircraft.’”

Denny Heck (D-WA) claimed that the Treasury Department has “minimize[d] [the] risk” that Iran would use the new Boeings for military purposes, and said that if the U.S. doesn’t sell Iran the planes, “a non-U.S. company like Airbus” (a European consortium) may do so instead.

By Heck’s logic, the U.S. should always sell militarily usable items to America-hating, terror-supporting, expansionist regimes, since someone else will anyway.

Iran, of course, does not lack suitors when it comes to selling it military items. Russia’s RT News blares: “Russia, Iran plan $10 bn arms sale to Tehran.” And that deal would occur “following the successful delivery of Russia’s S-300 air defense missile systems to the country in October.”

Under strong pressure from Israel, Putin refrained for years from selling Iran the S-300s, which will be deployed to protect its nuclear sites. But in July 2015, just after the signing of the JCPOA agreement — which, we were told, would usher in an era of peace — Putin approved the sale.

Now, a Russian official says “all the S-300s that had been shipped to Iran will be put into operation by year’s end.”

As for the new $10 billion sale, the same official says it will include “T-90 tanks, artillery systems, and various aircraft” for Tehran.

Because of UN Security Council restrictions, the sale might have to wait — but only until October 2020, when those restrictions will be lifted.

The negative developments since the nuke deal was signed, among others, not only include Russia’s arms sales to Iran, but also the emergence of Russian-Iranian military cooperation in the region. Considering this reality, President Obama’s insistence on the Boeing sale, and on treating Iran as a responsible party in general, can at best be understood as a case of severe strategic irrationality.

And the Boeing sale is not all. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is also seeking to bolster the deal before leaving office by helping more American businesses enter the Iranian market and removing additional U.S. sanctions. CONTINUE AT SITE

The U.S. House of Representatives this week voted overwhelmingly (419-1) to extend sanctions on Iran for the next 10 years. This legislation is meant to ensure the radical Iranian regime complies with the international nuclear agreement. The Iran Sanctions Extension Act needs the approval of the Senate, and President Obama’s signature. If President Obama should refrain from signing the Act, it is more than likely that the Republican dominated House and Senate will submit this piece of legislation to President-Elect Donald Trump for his signature. The Iran Sanctions Extension Act is due to expire at the end of the year.

While President Trump may not keep to his promise to scrap the nuclear deal with Iran, he would certainly seek to use U.S. economic leverage to punish the aggressive regime of the Ayatollahs. According to the official Islamic Republic News Agency, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani informed his cabinet ministers following the U.S. elections last week that the nuclear agreement between the P-5+1 and Iran “Cannot be overturned by one government’s decision,”

During the campaign appearance last March before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Donald J. Trump described the Iran nuclear deal as “terrible,” and used as an example, the Obama administration’s bad negotiating skills. He said, “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Trump also said that he would “police that contract so tough that they (the Iranians) don’t have a chance.” Trump pointed out the deficiency of the nuclear agreement in that it has time-limited restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium and its other nuclear activities. Trump also railed against the excessive concessions made to the mullahs of Iran. But, like many other promises made during the campaign, Trump will probably modify his promise on Iran’s nuclear deal.

In a recent position paper, Trump’s two top advisors on Israel, David Friedman and Jason Rosenblatt stated that, “The U.S. must counteract Iran’s ongoing violations of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons and their noncompliance with past and present sanctions, as well as the agreements they signed, and implement tough, new sanctions when needed to protect the world and Iran’s neighbors from its continuing nuclear and non-nuclear threats.”

It would be difficult to re-negotiate or re-litigate the nuclear deal given that the U.S. is one of the signatories to it, and it is unlikely that the Iranians will be open to such negotiation. The alternative open to Trump is to turn over the nuclear deal to Congress, where the Republican majority voted against the deal. Republicans in Congress are considering options in dealing with Iran. Some such legislative ideas include targeting sectors of the Iranian economy involved with acquiring ballistic missiles, which were not included in the nuclear deal. Congress is certain to consider punitive actions against Iran’s Revolutionary Guards involved in the conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and in sponsoring worldwide terrorism.

In summer 2015 Congressman Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton visited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, where they learned of two secret codicils to the Iranian nuclear deal. The Obama Administration had failed to disclose these side agreements to Congress. When pressed on the details of the codicils, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed never to have read them.

We’re reminded of this episode on news that Donald Trump has asked Congressman Pompeo to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. The Kansas Republican is being denounced by liberals as a “hardliner,” but the truth is that he has shown an independent streak that has allowed him to raise thorny questions and gather vital information that Administration officials want suppressed. Isn’t that what Americans should expect in a CIA director?

That goes double regarding the Iranian nuclear deal, which Mr. Pompeo opposed in part because of the diplomatic legerdemain he and Sen. Cotton uncovered in Vienna. Of the two secret deals, one concerned the nuclear agency’s inspection of the Parchin military facility, where the Iranians were suspected of testing components of a nuclear deal. The other concerned Iran’s non-answers to questions about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program.

Both issues went to the question of whether Iran’s compliance with an agreement would be verifiable, and it’s easy to see why the Administration was so reluctant to disclose the facts. The IAEA was permitted one inspection of Parchin, where it discovered uranium traces, and the agency later issued an exculpatory report on Iran’s military work to facilitate the deal’s implementation.

We’ve since learned much more about the precise terms of the nuclear deal—including the Administration’s willingness to ignore them to placate the Iranians. That includes allowing the mullahs to build and test ballistic missiles and exceed the deal’s 300-kilo limit on low-enriched uranium. The IAEA also reported this month that Iran exceeded its heavy-water limit for the second time this year.

The scope of Iran’s violations was laid out last week in a detailed analysis from the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security. “IAEA reporting is so sparse as to confirm suspicions that compliance controversies are being deliberately omitted from the report,” note authors David Albright and Andrea Stricker. That makes the CIA’s job of investigating Iran’s nuclear programs all the more important, which is another reason to welcome Mr. Pompeo’s nomination.

Reprinted from the American Spectator.

Although Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the White House in part because of lingering public resentment over the 2012 terror attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, history will judge her even more harshly for her decisive role in the preceding U.S.-led military intervention in Libya.

In fact, then-Secretary of State Clinton was instrumental at three critical junctures in convincing President Obama to green-light and escalate the war to oust Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi.

First was her decisive role in the initial U.S. decision to lead a NATO air campaign in Libya. Under intense pressure from European and Arab governments to stop Qaddafi’s forces from stamping out the incipient rebellion, Obama administration officials were deeply divided. Those opposing intervention included Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Those in favor included Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

Although Secretary Clinton ostensibly took no position at first, she worked to pave the way for the intervention Power and Rice were urging by brokering an Arab League resolution calling for an internationally enforced no-fly zone. With that in hand on March 12, she flew to Paris to meet with European officials and Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril, after which she pressed Obama heavily to intervene. Gates later said that Clinton’s advocacy “put the president on the 51 side” of a “51-49” decision to intervene.

So what if the Obama administration had allowed regime forces to win? Qaddafi’s Libya was no democracy, but it was an occasional partner in the war on terror and its human rights record was steadily improving. Indeed, one of the reasons radical Islamists were so well poised to seize control of the revolt is that Qaddafi (unlike other Arab dictators) had freed the large majority of them from his prisons.

LIMA, Peru—President Barack Obama said Saturday he expects President-elect Donald Trump to maintain his administration’s policies in Latin America, including the re-establishment of U.S. relations with Cuba.

Mr. Obama, speaking at a town-hall event with young people in Peru, said Mr. Trump is likely to make changes on U.S. trade policy. But he played down the significance of those changes.

“With respect to Latin America, I don’t anticipate major changes in policy from the new administration,” Mr. Obama said.

But, he added: “there are going to be tensions that arise, probably around trade more than anything else, because the president-elect campaigned on looking at every trade policy and potentially reversing those.”

Yet Mr. Obama said he believes once Mr. Trump’s team reviews those trade policies, he expects those officials will see they are “actually working” and only make “modifications.”

“How you campaign isn’t always how you govern,” Mr. Obama said. “Sometimes, when you campaign, you’re trying to stir up passions. When you’re governing, you’re trying to think of, ‘how do I make this work?’ ”

During his campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“I certainly hope the president is right,” said Luis Alberto Moreno, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, regarding Mr. Obama’s comments on his successor’s policies in the region. “You can go around here or anywhere in Latin America and there are a lot of question marks as to what the new administration will do.”

Mr. Obama also stressed the importance of democracy, in a veiled reference to Mr. Trump. “Democracy can be frustrating,” he said. “The outcomes of elections don’t always turn out the ways you hope. We’re going through that in the U.S.”

He argued that democracy can right wrongs, which also seemed aimed at Mr. Trump.

Democracy also is about more than elections, he said, and involves preserving freedom of religion, freedom of the press and an independent judiciary. CONTINUE AT SITE