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FOREIGN POLICY

Daryl McCann: Obama’s War

To combat a threat it is essential to recognise it and this US President simply cannot acknowledge that Islamist terror is a genuine peril, with one source citing him as likening it to the possibility of being killed in a bathroom fall. Is it any wonder the West is losing?
The language of Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address contained passages that were distinctly Churchillian: “Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred.” President Obama, nevertheless, promised victory against the dark forces:

And to those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken—you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. [Applause]

The promise of victory has long vanished from Barack Obama’s agenda. Still, earlier this year, President Obama made a case for the success of the Obama Doctrine in a series of lengthy interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg for the Atlantic magazine. Although the world had turned out to be a “complicated, messy, mean place”, the President reasoned, he had mostly got the balance right between “big-hearted” and “hard-headed”—mission, of a sort, accomplished.

According to Goldberg’s White House interview and background briefings, Barack Obama has always had reservations about Islamic revivalism and the deleterious effect of exported Saudi-style Salafism (Wahhabism):

In a meeting during APEC with Malcolm Turnbull, the [then] new prime minister of Australia, Obama described how he has watched Indonesia gradually move from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation; large numbers of Indonesian women, he observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering.

U.S. Strikes Rebel-Held Sites in Yemen Used in Attacks on U.S. Navy Ships Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from warship, marking new level of U.S. military involvementBy Gordon Lubold

WASHINGTON—The U.S. struck and destroyed three coastal radar sites in Yemen early Thursday in a significant military response to a series of attempted attacks against American warships in recent days, deepening America’s role in the country’s protracted civil war.

U.S. personnel aboard the destroyer Nitze launched a series of Tomahawk cruise missiles against the three separate radar sites along the Red Sea Coast, north of what is known as the Basb-el-Mandeb strait, Pentagon officials said in a statement late Wednesday. Initial assessments by the military indicate all three sites were destroyed, officials said.

The radar sites, all within Houthi-controlled territory in southern Yemen, were used during two separate attempted attacks against U.S. Navy ships, as well as in a third against a UAE-flagged swiftboat, over the last few days, according to Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook. The sites were ground radar installations that U.S. officials believe were used by rebels to track American ship movements.
“These limited self-defense strikes were conducted to protect our personnel, our ships and our freedom of navigation in this important maritime passageway,” Mr. Cook said in a statement issued late Wednesday evening. He added that the U.S. would respond to “any further threat” to American ships and commercial traffic in the area.

The strikes represent a potentially significant step for the U.S. in Yemen, where a bloody civil war has pitted Iranian-backed Houthi rebels against a Saudi-led coalition supported by the U.S. Before now, American strikes in Yemen only have targeted al Qaeda leaders. The U.S. is supporting Saudi Arabia in air operations against Houthi rebels, but hasn’t taken an active military role.

Washington has tried to strike an uncomfortable balance in the war, backing the Saudi-led air campaign but criticizing Saudi officials for excessive violence against civilians, especially after dozens were killed when strikes hit a funeral recently. In the aftermath of that strike, the U.S. said it would reconsider the scope of its support for Saudi’s campaign, which includes aerial refueling and some intelligence-sharing and training, and urged a negotiated settlement. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Naked Truth about Russia and Putin. An “edge of your seat” interview. see note by Janet Levy

The interview below by Frank Gaffney of Russia expert, author, filmmaker and think tank scholar, David Satter, will have you on the edge of your seat. You’ll feel like you’re listening to a great spy thriller. You won’t believe your ears on Beslan, the Moscow theater episode, the war in Chechnya, the Russian apartment bombings of the late 90’s, etc.!
The video is comprised of 5 segments of 9 minutes each (skip the ads). (If you listen to it on Stitcher and increase the time signature to 1.25x, you can hear it all (minus the commercials) in 36 minutes in your car while you’re driving to an appointment).

http://securefreedomradio.podbean.com/e/with-david-satter/

Rhodes Scholar, David Satter, was a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times of London, a special correspondent on Soviet affairs for the Wall Street Journal, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Today, the accomplished author of four non-fiction books on Russia is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow of Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. In 2013, he was expelled from Russia by the government.

Satter’s latest book is The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin. Janet Levy,

Hillary’s Leaked Memo Accuses Saudi Arabia and Qatar of Supporting Terror Groups Clinton’s explosive memo accuses the Saudi and Qatari governments of terror support and refers to past U.S. plans to arm Syrian fighters. By Andrew C. McCarthy

As has been widely reported this week, Hillary Clinton has accused the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar of “providing financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups.” She made this explosive claim in a memorandum outlining what is portrayed as her nine-point plan to defeat the Islamic State (the jihadist network also known as “ISIL” and “ISIS”) in Iraq and Syria.

The allegation against these two regimes is far from the only bombshell in the memo, which Mrs. Clinton sent to the White House in August 2014, a year and a half after she had stepped down as secretary of state. She sent it to John Podesta, who was then a top adviser to President Obama and is now the chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign. The memo is included in the trove of e-mails hacked from Podesta’s accounts and published by WikiLeaks in recent days.

Another passage that has thus far received little attention is this one (the italics are mine):

We should return to plans to provide the FSA [i.e., the Free Syrian Army], or some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian regime.

There has been no small amount of controversy regarding Obama-administration plans to arm so-called rebels fighting Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria — including questions about Mrs. Clinton’s knowledge of those plans. In particular, Congress has inquired about the administration’s participation in the shipment of weapons from Libyan Islamists to the Syrian rebels, including in 2012, while Clinton was still secretary of state.

As I noted in a recent column, one major weapons shipment from Benghazi to Turkey for eventual transit to Syria occurred just days before jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda murdered four American officials in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. One of the officials killed was J. Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Benghazi who reported directly to Clinton — both in that capacity and in his earlier capacity as Obama-administration liaison to Islamist groups the Obama administration was supporting in Libya’s civil war. Siding with Islamists against the regime of Moammar Qaddafi, which was previously touted by the State Department as a key counterterrorism ally, was a policy spearheaded by Secretary Clinton.

The September 2012 weapons shipment was coordinated by Abdelhakim Belhadj, an al-Qaeda–affiliated jihadist with whom Stevens had consulted during the uprising against Qaddafi. Belhadj, one of the Islamists empowered by the Obama-Clinton Libya policy, took control of the Libyan Military Council after Qaddafi was overthrown. The 400 tons of weapons he dispatched from Benghazi arrived in Turkey the week before Stevens was killed. The ambassador’s last meeting in Benghazi, just before the September 11 siege, was with Turkey’s consul general.

While under oath in early-2013 Senate testimony, Clinton denied any personal knowledge of weapons shipments from Benghazi to other countries.

Iranian Cause and Effect Tehran’s Houthi allies fire at U.S. ships after U.S. sanctions relief.

The Obama Administration keeps stretching the limits of the nuclear deal with Iran to provide the type of sanctions relief the mullahs believe they are owed, no matter what the deal says. So what better way to repay White House’s generosity than by firing on U.S. ships?

That’s one way to understand Sunday’s incident off the coast of Yemen, when the USS Mason, a guided-missile destroyer, and the USS Ponce, an amphibious ship, were attacked by two Chinese-built C-802 cruise missiles fired from territory controlled by Iranian-backed Houthi militia. Iran is a major operator of the C-802; its proxy Hezbollah used it in 2006 to punch a hole in an Israeli corvette off the coast of Lebanon.

On Sunday neither missile hit its target, though the USS Mason launched SM-2 air-defense missiles to defend against the threat. The episode could have ended differently: Last week the Houthis scored a direct hit on the HSV Swift, an unarmed transport shift used by the United Arab Emirates to resupply the Saudi-led military coalition that has been fighting the Houthis for 18 months.

The U.S. contributes limited intelligence support to that coalition, part of a grudging effort by the Administration to reassure Riyadh that the U.S.-Saudi alliance could survive the nuclear deal. Tehran would dearly like to dissolve that 71-year alliance, which also has been frayed by Saudi targeting mistakes that have resulted in major civilian casualties. It’s probably no coincidence that Sunday’s attacks on the U.S. ships came a day after a Saudi air strike mistakenly killed more than 140 mourners at a funeral in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

That attack is a tragedy, but the Administration should remember that the U.S. military has committed similar errors before it cuts Riyadh loose. If the U.S. is uncomfortable with Saudi Arabia as a friend, it will find even less to like should the kingdom ever become an enemy.

More significantly, the attack on the Navy ships—with hundreds of American sailors aboard—is another reminder that the nuclear deal has done more to embolden than moderate Tehran’s ambitions, despite a cascade of U.S. concessions.

Hillary’s No-Fly Gaffe and Trump’s Missed Opportunity; David Goldman

he most extreme misstatement of the Oct. 9 US presidential debate was Hillary Clinton’s proposal for a no-fly zone in Syria. The Democratic candidate declared, “I, when I was secretary of state, advocated and I advocate today no-fly zones and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution, unless there is some leverage over them.” Neither Donald Trump nor the debate moderators mentioned the obvious: Russian air defense makes a no-fly zone in Syria impractical.

The broader issue–and one that a Republican challenger might well exploit–is that American superiority in air defense systems has eroded under the Obama administration to the point that Russia well might have the ability to down American stealth aircraft. The Pentagon doesn’t know the answer to this question, and, understandably, doesn’t want to find out. The issue is not whether America and Russia might go to war over a downed American aircraft. That is most unlikely. America’s strategic credibility would suffer a catastrophic humiliation if stealth no longer defeated Russian anti-aircraft missiles.

Russia has already installed an S-400 air defense system in Syria, designed to kill combat aircraft, and announced that it will supplement the S-400 with the S-300V system, expanding the range of Russian air defenses in the region to 250 miles. Military Times Oct. 8 quoted Steve Zolaga, a defense analyst with the Teal Group, warning that “The Russians may have felt that they needed a certain package to deal with a full-blown American air campaign. The Russians sometimes come up with these really paranoid scenarios where they see war being imminent everywhere. If you have a paranoid assessment of what the West’s intentions are, then the S-300V makes a certain amount of sense.” Given Clinton’s proposal, Russia’s deployment seems less paranoid then preemptive.

The Obama administration has already distanced itself from Clinton’s no-fly proposal, on the grounds that it would not stop the killing on the ground. But the former Secretary of State’s insistence on the no-fly zone betrays a basic ignorance of the state of American defenses as well as arrogance about the prospective use of American military power.

More pertinent is the simple issue of capability. American defense experts acknowledge that Russia is working on advanced radar that can identity and target low-observation aircraft. National Interest defense editor Dave Majumdar reviewed the issue in an August 2016 survey. Mike Kofman of CNA Corporation opined to NI, “Russia has invested in low-band early warning radars, with some great variants out there, but can it use these to put a good picture together, and process it to develop a track against low-observation aircraft?”

American experts argue that the top-of-the-line Russian systems probably can take down American fourth-generation aircraft (the variants of the F-15, F-16, and F-18) but may not be able to defeat the F-22 Raptor — yet. Pro-Russian outlets like Russia Insider claim that the next generation of Russian air defense, the S-500 system scheduled for 2017 deployment, will “push the F-35 into retirement.”

The issue is not whether Russian radar can track stealth aircraft, but whether it can do so quickly and accurately enough to target missiles. That remains an unanswered question. A senior Defense Department official said on deep background that the Pentagon does not know the answer, and does not wish to find out the hard way.

Bill Whittle’s Firewall: Debating Hillary, Part 5: Fighting ISIS Everything Hillary has touched overseas has turned into a disaster.

Hillary Clinton says she has a “plan” to “really squeeze ISIS in Syria.” It seems like Syria might be squeezed enough already. In Part 5 of this 6-part series, Bill Whittle lays out the historical facts that show that Clinton and Obama CREATED ISIS.

Transcript below:

CLINTON: I have put forth a plan to defeat ISIS. Our military is assisting in Iraq. And we’re hoping that within the year we’ll be able to push ISIS out of Iraq and then, you know, really squeeze them in Syria.

Hillary, while you continue to “hope” to “squeeze them” in Syria, ISIS is busy murdering people in Paris and Brussels and at home here in Orlando and San Bernardino and almost every week now innocent people are dying BECAUSE OF YOU.

YOU created ISIS, you and Barack Obama. When Obama took office, Iraq had been stabilized and there had not been a single American killed in Iraq in FIVE MONTHS.

You, as Secretary of State, were unable or more likely unwilling to conclude a simple Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq. I say unwilling because we have damn near a hundred of them with countries all around the world.

However, you and the President announced we would be leaving the Iraqis all alone, and within a very short period the defeated, scattered remnants of AQI – al-Qaeda in Iraq – formed ISIS. You could have stopped them at any time but you didn’t because you couldn’t face the political humiliation of putting boots back on the ground in Iraq after you took credit for pulling them out. And they grew, and grew and grew and grew – because you CREATED them by not leaving troops in Iraq. We’ve had US troops stationed in Europe for SIXTY years and in Korea for a little over FIFTY YEARS and you refused to do it for five.

You launched an unauthorized war in Libya. You’ve armed – and have had America fly air cover for – AL QAEDA. You may remember them from their appearance fifteen years ago in lower New York. Your husband, by the way, had at least one chance to kill Osama bin Laden years before that attack, but declined on the advice of White House lawyers.

Under your direction, the State Department has become so incompetent that when you first met the Russian ambassador, you gave him a toy box with a big red button marked ‘”RESET.” Only it didn’t say RESET because you and your State Department were so arrogant and uninformed that you could not correctly translate ONE RUSSIAN WORD in front of the entire world in order make a bad joke.

Everything you have touched overseas has turned into a disaster and given what you have said so far tonight it seems pretty clear that you were given the chance, the same catastrophes would occur here at home.

The Unlearnt Lessons of Iraq, Libya Srdja Trifkovic

Two weeks of atrocity management over Aleppo indicate that the Deep State is still intent on intervening in Syria. Most Americans don’t want another Middle Eastern war, but if Hillary Clinton wins on November 8 it is looks incresingly likely that they will get it.

Writing in Consortiumnews.com on October 5, Robert Parry warned that official Washington’s political/punditry class has developed a new “group think” on Syria that is even more dangerous than the one preceding the Iraq war. Like the “frenzied war fever of 2002-2003,” this new consensus is based on “a mix of selective, dubious and false information,” while excluding from the public forum all discordant voices:

Most notably, there are two key facts about Syria that Americans are not being told: one, U.S. regional “allies” have been funding and arming radical jihadist groups, including Al Qaeda terrorists, there almost since the conflict began in 2011 and, two, the claim about “moderate” Syrian rebels is a fraud; the “moderates” have served essentially as a P.R. cut-out for the U.S. and its “allies” to supply Al Qaeda and its allies with sophisticated weapons while pretending not to… The neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks only talk about stopping the “barbarism” of the Syrian government and its Russian allies as they try to finally wipe out Al Qaeda’s jihadists and their “moderate” allies holed up in eastern Aleppo.

Perry notes that these calls for a U.S. military action against the Syrian government – and implicitly the Russians – are coming from some of the most enthusiastic advocates of the war in Iraq, such as Sen. John McCain, Washington Post’s chief editorialist Fred Hiatt, and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman. He did not name some other influential names urging intervention, such as ex-CIA director and former U.S. Cenral Command chief David Petraeus, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Ashton Carter’s likely successor at the Pentagon if Hillary Clinton wins, Michele Flournoy.

Specific options are actively under consideration. According to a Reuters report of September 29, discussions were being held at “staff level,” and “include allowing Gulf allies to supply rebels with more sophisticated weaponry, something considered more likely despite Washington’s opposition to this until now. Another is a U.S. air strike on an Assad air base, viewed as less likely because of the potential for causing Russian casualties…”

As for the first option, the unresolved problem is that in today’s Syria there are no “vetted moderates” to whom such “more sophysticated weaponry” (presumably including man-portable ground-to-air missiles, MANPADS) can be safely delivered. On the same day the Wall Street Journal warned that some of Syria’s major rebel factions were “doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes.”

Obama’s Russia Epiphany The U.S. blames the Kremlin for attacks on U.S. elections. And then?

It took seven and a half years, but the Obama Administration is finally awakening to the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. On Friday John Kerry said the Syrian and Russian governments should face a war-crimes probe for bombing civilians in Syria, while the U.S. intelligence community announced its belief that the Russian government is behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic Party.

Many readers will recall how President Obama mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for saying in a presidential debate that Russia is America’s main adversary. And don’t forget Mr. Obama’s private whispers to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught unaware on a microphone, that he’d be ready to wheel and deal with Russia again after his 2012 re-election.

The wheeling has all been done by Mr. Putin, who returned as Russian President and proceeded to roll over Mr. Obama as if he were the president of Azerbaijan. The Russian’s affronts include his conquest of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, his military intervention in the Middle East, and now his attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Secretary of State Kerry’s moral dudgeon about Syria reflects his frustration at being gulled by the Kremlin’s fake diplomacy one more time. But it won’t amount to much because Mr. Obama’s abdication in Syria has left the U.S. with little leverage on the ground. If Mr. Kerry took the war-crime issue to the United Nations, Russia and probably China would veto in the Security Council.

The meddling in U.S. elections is another matter. In an unusual joint statement Friday, the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence said that “the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

The U.S. spooks added that “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia,” and that given the “scope and sensitivity” of these efforts “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Senior-most is a euphemism for Mr. Putin.

One question is why the Obama Administration has gone public with this hacking news now. One reason might be to warn Russia against dumping more of the U.S. documents it almost certainly has before Election Day. But then Russia’s hacking habits are hardly new, and Mr. Putin is still harboring the national-security thief Edward Snowden. The timing suggests the White House may also be trying to help Hillary Clinton given her campaign’s portrayal of Donald Trump as a Putin apologist. Sure enough, her campaign issued a statement linking Mr. Trump to the news almost on cue Friday. CONTINUE AT SITE

So much for that Nobel Peace Prize By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Once upon a time, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? First, he was not President Bush. And second, the silly Norwegians behind the prize fell for “hope and change” as bad as anybody.

It’s a little different today, as we see in this post from Kathleen Hennessey:

Seven years ago this week, when a young American president learned he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize barely nine months into his first term — arguably before he’d made any peace — a somewhat embarrassed Barack Obama asked his aides to write an acceptance speech that addressed the awkwardness of the award.

But by the time his speechwriters delivered a draft, Obama’s focus had shifted to another source of tension in his upcoming moment in Oslo: He would deliver this speech about peace just days after he planned to order 30,000 more American troops into battle in Afghanistan.

The president all-but scrapped the draft and wrote his own version.

The speech Obama delivered — a Nobel Peace Prize lecture about the necessity of waging war — now looks like an early sign that the American president would not be the sort of peacemaker the European intellectuals of the Nobel committee had anticipated.

I remember a Canadian friend, who did not support President Bush, sending me an email after the Nobel announcement. He said in so many words: this is silly and it certainly proves the Messiah thing that you’ve talking about.

Well said, Canadian friend.

Obama, the so called man of peace, has actually set the table for more conflicts and wars than any recent U.S. president. The Russians are flying MiGs over our aircraft carriers. Iranian boats bully U.S. warships. President Obama is not welcomed by Raul Castro in Havana and then has to go out what the Chinese called the “you know what” hole of the airplane. And let’s not talk about Iraq, Syria, etc.