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FOREIGN POLICY

Mike Pompeo’s Iran File If he honors the nuclear deal, Trump needs to enforce it vigorously.

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.

The Unrepentant: Hillary, Libya, and History The debacle that will really haunt Clinton’s legacy. C. Gambill and Teri Blumenfeld

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.

Obama Expects Donald Trump to Maintain Policies Toward Latin America U.S. president says he believes president-elect will only ‘modify’ trade policies after reviewing them By Carol E. Lee and Ryan Dube

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

Michael Kile Derailing the Marrakech Express

Another positive in the ascension of Donald Trump is the gloom his impending presidency has cast over the jet-setting catastropharians gathered to promote dire visions of the planet’s future and, of course, their careers, budgets and computer-modelled fabulism.
All aboard the United Nations “last chance” gravy train, COP22. Hurry, you hippies, hucksters and hallucinogenic fellow travellers, hurry. Be quick, if you want a free ride on the Marrakech Express.

Hallucinogen: A drug that causes profound distortions in a person’s perceptions of reality. People often see images, hear sounds, and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist. Some hallucinogens produce rapid and intense emotional swings, as seen last week in certain cohorts in North America, especially after passage (56 to 44 percent) of California Proposition 64 legalising adult use of recreational marijuana in that state.

Could there be a more appropriate location than this exotic Moroccan city — immortalised by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the 1960s — to celebrate the global ambitions of the UN’s Climate Caliphate? The intention is surely noble: two weeks getting high on self-congratulation, other people’s money, junk science and the eco-worrier’s favourite over-the-counter drug, DAGW (dangerous anthropogenic global warming), now rebranded as DACC (dangerous anthropogenic climate change) to entrench public credulity.

Climate-caliphate: 1. Entity led by a climate-caliph, generally an eco-zealot, ex-politician or career bureaucrat turned climate-control propagandist. 2. Global climate-caliphate: theocratic one-world government or de facto government. 3. Any ideology or aspiration promoted by a militant fossil fuel free sect, or ‘champion of the Earth’, such as UNEP. 4. Any radical group intending to behead, disembowel, or otherwise degrade Western economies with the two-edged sword of wealth redistribution (aka ‘climate reparations’) and ‘decarbonisation’, while reciting mantras about sustainability, slow-onset events and saving the planet. Also known as Agenda 21.

Last week’s unscheduled arrival of the US Great Again train has, however, upset the Programme. It was arguably a black swan event– “the biggest FU in human history”, according to Michael Moore (video here).

As the news reverberated around the world, the climate establishment was shocked to discover that not all swans are white and female. So perhaps it also could be the case that not all “extreme weather events”, or global temperature fluctuations, have much to do with a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if anything.

For many COP22 delegates, the clock of catastrophe suddenly shifted much closer to midnight. “A third of the people here are walking around like zombies, like the walking dead, not sure what to do,” said UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, speaking from Morocco. Many believe the honeymoon is over.

Distorting the Iran-Deal Bill A pair of Corker apologists distort the record on Congress’s review of Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement By Andrew C. McCarthy

When a couple of lawyers lecture you about your “fundamental misunderstanding of our Constitution and the relative powers of Congress and the president in foreign policy,” ask yourself this: Have they cited the provisions of constitutional or statutory law they claim you’ve misunderstood? If not, if they’re hiding the ball, you’re probably being conned. Alas, that is the case with the disingenuous defense of Senator Bob Corker’s Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), offered on Thursday by Lester Munson and Jamil Jaffer, two former staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Corker chairs.

The senator’s nose is out of joint over a National Review editorial this week. With his name among those being floated to be appointed secretary of state in the Trump administration, the editors observed that Corker “was last seen facilitating President Obama’s Iran-deal path through Congress, in one of the prime exhibits of GOP fecklessness in recent years.”

Truer words were never spoken. Professors Munson and Jaffer try in vain to paper over this fact, replaying the sleight-of-hand their former boss has spun since first proposing the woeful INARA. They misstate both the law and the position of INARA naysayers — of whom, I am proud to say, I was among the most ardent.

Let’s deal first with the matter of misrepresenting the naysayers. Contrary to the professors’ claim, it is not true that “many people think Congress ought to have ‘forced’ the president to submit the Iran deal as a treaty.” Nor do Corker’s detractors believe “Congress should have ‘made’ the Iran deal a treaty.” Congress has no power to coerce the president to comply with the Constitution’s treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2), a provision the authors take pains to avoid addressing.

What we in the opposition argued is that, if Congress does not undermine it, the Constitution is plenty strong enough to foil the ambitions of a rogue president. True, Congress cannot compel the president to execute our law faithfully. But if the president is derelict in his duty to submit an international agreement to the Senate for its approval, or to the full Congress for implementation as ordinary legislation, then the agreement will not have the force of American law. It remains a mere executive agreement between the president and other chiefs of state. That means it may be rescinded at any time, by either the president who entered it or a successor president.

Obama’s Never-Ending Lecture Tour Walter Russel Meade

WASTED WORDS

President Obama, who has done less for Europe than any American President since Calvin Coolidge, cannot stop telling Europeans what to do. As Obama sets out on his final European tour as President, with his political party back home in a state of near collapse, and with Putin inflicting yet another painful humiliation on the least successful American President in the history of the modern Middle East, nothing seems able to shake his serene confidence that he knows more than other people, sees farther than they do, and that other people are eager to gather up his pearls of insight.
Here is the Wall Street Journal on Obama’s trip to Greece:

President Barack Obama urged Europe to resolve lingering issues from its debt crisis, saying on Tuesday that leaders should favor growth over austerity, as part of their response to the rising populism in Western countries exemplified by the election of Donald Trump.
Mr. Obama made the appeal after meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who said it is time for Greece to receive significant debt relief from Europe.Mr. Obama said European leaders should follow economic policies that ease some of the voter backlash against globalization, as they grapple with political trends similar to those behind Mr. Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election.

Not everything Obama is recommending to Europe is bad, but his words no longer have a significant impact from a continent battered first by his failures in foreign policy and now by the collapse of his legacy at home. Obama will be remembered by historians as the man who turned over the White House to Donald Trump, the man who let Putin unleash the forces of Hell in Syria and Ukraine, and the man who honored European values but made the world steadily less safefor them.
That Putin took the occasion of Obama’s final tour to open a widenew air offensive in Syria and withdraw from the ICC even as his allies celebrated victories in Estonia, Moldova and Bulgaria only underlines what a foreign policy disaster the 44th President has been. Many world leaders like Obama; some pity him; few respect him as a leader (rather than as a man); none fear him. Most are too busy coping with the consequences of his failures to spend a lot of time thinking about him at this point in his presidency. Even Germany, whose cheering crowds once greeted Obama as an enlightened internationalist in the mold of John F. Kennedy, has gradually lost faith in the President.The early signs of struggle and factionalism in the Donald Trump transition, meanwhile, are leading many foreigners to suppose that the next American President will be another inconsequential bumbler. We must hope that they are wrong; not even the power of the United States can survive a long string of failed Presidents unscathed.

White House: Kerry’s ‘Dogged’ Diplomatic Efforts on Syria Have ‘Not Worked’ By Bridget Johnson

Still, Josh Earnest concluded, a diplomatic solution “is our only path.”

The White House admitted today that Secretary of State John Kerry’s effort “working doggedly even in the face of some very difficult challenges to try to bring the parties together to resolve that violence” in Syria has “not worked.”

Russia unleashed a blitz on the besieged city of Aleppo this week, while not striking ISIS-controlled areas of Syria.

On MSNBC this morning, White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked about Russia bombing a children’s hospital in Aleppo. Doctors told an NBC reporter that President Obama has done nothing to help them.

“What is true is that the tactics that had been used by the Assad regime and also have used by the Russians are disgraceful,” Earnest replied. “They are frankly targeting innocent civilians trying to bomb them into submission including by targeting hospitals and playgrounds and other locations that are frequented by innocent civilians including women and children. And it is an outrage.”

“And the moral outrage of the international community has been expressed loudly in opposition to this. The question really is what can the international community do, led by the United States, to try to bring that violence down? And try to make sure that innocent people are not caught in the crossfire?”

Yes, Trump’s Going to Dump the Iran Deal by Fred Fleitz

In the days following Donald Trump’s victory, a variety of experts – mostly Trump critics – pronounced that, despite Trump’s frequent statements during the presidential campaign that the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is one of “the worst deals ever made by any country in history,” he has no choice but to stick with the agreement after he assumes office.

Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif was one of the first to insist as much, claiming a Trump administration cannot back out of the nuclear deal because it is not a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran but “an international understanding annexed to a Security Council resolution.”

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (which The Weekly Standard’s Lee Smith once described as “the tip of the spear of the Iran lobby” in the United States) echoed Zarif’s statement. In a November 11 Foreign Policy article, he argued Trump can undermine the Iran deal but cannot directly dismantle it because the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement “codified by the UN Security Council.” Any attempt by a Trump administration to renegotiate the deal would violate international law and isolate the United States, Parsi said.

Even some conservative experts have suggested Trump probably won’t try to significantly modify or discard the nuclear agreement, but will instead try to goad Iran into withdrawing by strictly enforcing the deal.

But Trump senior national-security adviser Walid Phares poured cold water on speculation that Trump plans to walk back his statements about the Iran deal, when he commented on Facebook over the weekend that the “Iran Deal will be dismantled.”

This firm statement by Phares confirmed previous statements he and Mr. Trump have made that the deal is a dangerous agreement that needs to be either significantly renegotiated or abandoned. As an expert who has followed the Iran nuclear program for many years inside and outside of government, I would like to expand on their statements by offering three key points about the nature of the deal and ten guidelines for renegotiating it.

Winning the Cyber-War Under Trump By Rachel Ehrenfeld

An overflowing plate of urgently needed new policies to act upon will be waiting on President Donald J. Trump’s desk when he takes office on January 20, 2017. Few are as pressing as the need to lead a new national effort for strengthening our cyber-infrastructure resilience and toughening timing and location infrastructure.

President-elect Trump must make this a national priority and issue his new policy now. He should appoint a central authority that would report directly to him. It should direct, oversee and unite all U.S. efforts to develop, build and use new resilient capabilities and devices that would recognize the dependency of the cyber-infrastructure on accurate timing and location data delivered by the GPS. The Obama Administration’s mostly failed efforts focused on cyber, but paid little if any attention to timing and location services that are necessary for undisrupted cyber-activity.

We must now ensure that policies and definitions of cyber include timing and location services such as GPS. Such definition would help to coordinate the efforts to increase resiliency capabilities that could mitigate harmful effects to our cyber-infrastructure, and the ability to respond to them.

The Trump cyberspace security policy should look beyond just “space-based” assets and GPS. It should be looking at the larger cyber-infrastructure. It should be responsible for developing more resilient devices with access to multiple alternative sources for our nation’s cyber-infrastructure, which is dependent on GPS (Global Positioning System) for precise time and location-based services.

The growing dependency on wireless technology and services and lack of adequate security have led to an escalation in cyber-attacks. Substantial segments of the U.S. economy have already been harmed. State- sponsored hackers, as well as lone actors, were able to steal millions of documents detailing the country’s most critical national security and business secrets. Others have stolen untold amounts of money and disrupted out financial markets activities.

It seems that the rapid pace at which cyber-related architectures and wireless technologies are evolving have apparently presented an insurmountable barrier to most of our technologically challenged policymakers. During his two terms President Obama issued some executive orders on critical infrastructure and cyber-security.m But lacking direction, the executive branch, and its agencies have failed to secure the nation’s cyber-infrastructure. The czars and advisors he appointed to oversee different elements of cyber-security failed because of lack of leadership to coordinate the efforts. Thus the nation’s cyberspace security became increasingly vulnerable.

Only after Wikileaks began releasing the email correspondence between Hillary Clinton and her supporters, which were conducted on her private non-secure server, did Obama issue Presidential Policy Directive 41. Called the United States Cyber Incident Coordination, the directive put the FBI in charge of responding to all cyber-threats. This was necessary, said his homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, “because it’s not always clear whether those responsible for a hacking incident are other countries, terrorists or criminals.” The new directive identified the responsible federal agencies, to “help answer a question heard too often from corporations and citizens alike: In the wake of an attack, who do I call for help?” Ms. Monaco noted that “other agencies will also have significant roles in helping to prevent and mitigate the effect of cyber-intrusions.” These include the Department of Homeland Security and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. But this will do little to undo the huge damage that was already done to the U.S. economy, military, and its national security.

A cyber-attack or worse, activating an electromagnetic weapon (EMP), by exploding a nuclear device in the atmosphere above parts of the U.S., as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich described, “would totally devastate our entire electrical grid and cyber-communication networks and disable our critical infrastructure. Such an event would destroy our complex, delicate, high-tech society in an instant and throw all of our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages. Millions would die in the first week one.” This very real threat of an EMP attack on the U.S. has been debated in Congress, discussed in the media and featured in film. Yet, the Obama Administration failed to prepare adequate measures to mitigate the threat.

To better protect our economy, society, and government, we must immediately expand the current policies into a broader “position, navigation and timing” policy with a central authority and holistic approach for:

(1) overseeing, managing, and prioritizing U.S. efforts, (2) centralizing all research and development of location services, and timing solutions and technology, (3) gathering, maintaining, and adapting, in near real-time, civil user-defined requirements, (4) clearly delineating between government and private sector capabilities and responsibilities for provisioning, (5) clearly placing all forms of harmful interference, data manipulation, equipment vulnerabilities, and capability disruption(s) into the cyber-response planning framework, and (6) leveraging cyber-reporting to include GPS and other forms interference and disruptions.

SEE VIDEO OF SEN. TOM COTTON ON TRUMP’S PLEDGE TO DUMP THE IRAN DEAL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL73Mh8gb-8