RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iran nuclear agreement “was a great example of diplomacy,” stated former American ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, James F. Jeffrey, at an April 12 Middle East Policy (MPEC) Council Capitol Hill panel. While this presentation concerning “The Saudi-Iranian Rivalry and the Obama Doctrine” continued MPEC’s Iran deal promotion, the panelists’ arguments remained as depressingly unconvincing as before.

Jeffrey’s fellow former American ambassador (to Oman) and MPEC’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, Richard Schmierer, proclaimed:

[The] historic nuclear deal…addressed the fundamental and destabilizing challenge of a potential Iranian nuclear weapons capability, but it also opened the possibility of a more deep-seated change in Iran: the possibility that Iran’s leaders would use the economic benefits and the potential renewed economic access to the international community deriving from the nuclear agreement to change the country’s behavior.

For Jeffrey, this diplomatic success resulted from concrete economic and military measures “backed up by really tough sanctions that cut Iran’s oil exports by over 50 percent”; spoken in reference to President Barak Obama’s efforts to end Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation. Additionally, the nuclear agreement was supposedly “backed up with the red line that this one people actually believe, that the United States, including Obama, would act” in case of Iranian proliferation.

Yet Jeffrey’s analysis of the Islamic Republic that took over Iran in the 1979 revolution as a rogue regime made it suspect as a credible negotiating partner willing to sustain agreements. “Iran fundamentally is not happy with, does not accept, and is trying, at least in its own neck of the woods, to overthrow the international order,” he noted. RAND Corporation analyst Alireza Nader stated that while officially supporting the nuclear agreement, Saudi officials fear that “rather than forcing or compelling Iran to modify its behavior, that the agreement will actually embolden it.”

Arab Gulf States Institute fellow Fahad Nazer cited Saudi officials who worried that their regional competitor, Iran, “has had this policy of exporting its ideology and its revolution for some 40 years.” Adding that “Iran is one of the few countries or regimes around the world that has been implicated in the attempts to assassinate” diplomats. He cited the past Iranian plot to kill in Washington, DC, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States, currently the Saudi foreign minister.

Nonetheless, like Schmierer, Nader entertained long-term hopes for Iran, which “has a sophisticated, forward-looking population that wants and demands change.” Nader believes that “one of the trends in Iran is greater nationalism, Iranians who say that they’re Iranian first and are not necessarily followers of the Islamic Republic.” Adding that “increased secularization in Iran” has produced “resentment of the Islamic Republic as an Arab phenomenon.”

In 1939, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier warned Adolf Hitler that if the Third Reich invaded Poland, a European war would follow.

Both leaders insisted that they meant it. But Hitler thought that after getting away with militarizing the Rhineland, annexing Austria, and dismantling Czechoslovakia, the Allied appeasers were once again just bluffing.

England and France declared war two days after Hitler entered Poland.

Once hard-won deterrence is lost, it is almost impossible to restore credibility without terrible costs and danger.

Last week, Russian officials warned the Obama administration about the installation of a new anti-ballistic missile system in Romania and talked of a possible nuclear confrontation that would reduce the host country to “smoking ruins” and “neutralize” any American-sponsored missile system.

Such apocalyptic rhetoric follows months of Russian bullying of nearby neutral Sweden, harassment of U.S. ships and planes, warnings to NATO nations in Europe, and constant threats to the Baltic states and former Soviet republics.

China just warned the U.S. to keep its ships and planes away from its new artificial island and military base in the Spratly archipelago — plopped down in the middle of the South China Sea to control international sea lanes.

Technically speaking though, it’s her husband’s terrible North Korean strategy. Obama used it to help Iran get billions while letting it steam ahead to the bomb. Now Hillary will call it Obama’s strategy so no one remembers how badly her husband botched North Korea.

One of Hillary Clinton’s top priorities as president would be to use sanctions to pressure North Korea to negotiate limits on its nuclear program, according to Clinton’s top foreign policy adviser. The strategy would mimic the Obama administration’s approach to Iran.

Except North Korea already has nukes. Thanks to Bill Clinton. At least the Obamanoids can still claim that Iran won’t get the bomb because it hasn’t officially test donated. North Korea has.

Jake Sullivan, the head of the Clinton campaign’s foreign policy advisory team, was one of two officials who began secret negotiations with Iran in 2012 that eventually resulted in the nuclear agreement that Iran struck last summer with six world powers. He told an audience Monday evening at the Asia Society in New York that Clinton is planning a similar strategy to deal with North Korea’s nuclear program.

If you loved how well Hillary Clinton dealt with Russia and Iran, just wait till you see how she does with North Korea. I assume D.C. will be nuked during her reelection campaign.

“Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.”

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

A blank Word document stares out from the computer screen. An individual sits before it – the essayist at work? Not really. No one sits down to write without some idea – perhaps muddled – of what they want to say. A working title is affixed, along with a date that often proves to be optimistic, and a rubric is sometimes added. The latter adds wit and helps focus wandering minds. The concept, at this early stage, assumes the shape of a globule of mercury or a tube of Silly Putty. Sculpting tangled ideas into something concise and readable requires choosing the right words, having them mean what they were meant to mean. Essayists don’t have the latitude of Humpty Dumpty. In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll has Mr. Dumpty say to Alice, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

We writers of essays don’t want to leave readers puzzled like Alice, so we must be clear in what we write. Obfuscation is the province of politicians, not essayists. The purpose of the latter is to make thoughts intelligible, as they get transported from mind to paper. (The former operate in the hope that they will appeal to those who read carelessly and listen inattentively.)

Periods, colons, semi-colons, commas, dashes and parentheses are not there to look pretty, but to add clarity to what is written. Even the lowly apostrophe is defended by the Apostrophe Protection Society! Lynne Truss wrote in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, that punctuation is “the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape.” Edward Estlin Cummings, better known as e e cummings, chose to write poetry in lower case letters and without punctuation. He was an artist. We are mechanics, not dilettantish virtuosos who obscure the meaning of what they write. We are more like photographers than contemporary artists. The meaning of what we write should be clear, not left to the reader’s interpretation.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Mr. Cutler discussed Obama’s Pathway to the “Borderless World,”unveiling how the Radical-in-Chief is opening America to Islamic terrorists and transnational criminals.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/17/michael-cutler-moment-obamas-pathway-to-the-borderless-world/

The high dudgeon of the Never Trumpsters is so ridiculous. The best they can offer is a sad list of also rans who lost. Do conservatives really want to subvert the popular, democratically chosen candidate when the mother of political evils is the other choice? Puleez! I like and respect Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse. He has a great future in the GOP? Why squander resources on a quixotic quest when he has so much to bring to the Senate?

Andy McCarthy and Roger Kimball are among some conservatives whose disdain for Trump was known. They have both come around to conceding that Hillary Clinton is worse. …Far worse…..rsk

The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable story this week, entitled as follows:”Kerry Tries to Drum Up Some Business in Europe for Iran.”

Mr. Kerry, traveling in Europe, was urging European firms to do business with Iran in the aftermath of last year’s nuclear deal. The story continues:

“If they don’t see a good business deal, they shouldn’t say, ‘Oh, we can’t do it because of the United States.’ That’s just not fair. That’s not accurate,” Mr. Kerry said. The secretary is here through Thursday for an anticorruption summit and diplomatic meetings. He will meet with European banking leaders to “address their concerns about conducting business with Iran” after the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a U.S. official said. In New York last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pressed Mr. Kerry and other U.S. officials to do more to reassure other countries that they could do business with Iran without penalty. “Iran has a right to the benefits of the agreement they signed up to and if people, by confusion or misinterpretation or in some cases disinformation, are being misled, it’s appropriate for us to try to clarify that….”

Iran is the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. It continues to rally its population with shouts of “Death to America.” It supports Hezbollah, a murderous terrorist group with the blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands. It has a nuclear weapons program that has been delayed, one hopes, by the nuclear deal–but continues its ballistic missile program, whose only logical purpose is to deliver nuclear weapons. It is an enemy of American allies such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel.

Why, then, is our Secretary of State trying to assist its economy? The so-called “spirit” of the nuclear agreement? There is no such thing, or Iran would not have captured and abused American sailors in the Gulf in January. Iran’s “rights” to benefits from the agreement? That is nonsense. Iran has the “right” to an end to nuclear sanctions, but has no “right” to additional business. There are many reasons companies may hold back, ranging from American terrorism and human rights sanctions, to uncertainty about future American policy, to fear that entities in Iran with which they may undertake business are also involved in illegal or terrorist activities. Moreover, Iran is not a democracy with a reliable legal system, but a dictatorship run by the ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guard where legal rights cannot possibly be guaranteed. There is simply no defensible reason for an American official, much less our top diplomat, to concern himself with how much investment and profit Iran can eke out of the nuclear deal. The effort to do so betrays America’s real interests in the Middle East, which are challenged by a richer and better resourced Iran.

The White House and congressional Republicans are once again sparring over the Iran nuclear deal, with the House Oversight Committee chairman calling on one of President Barack Obama’s top aides to testify at a hearing about how the administration sold the agreement to the public.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) plans to convene the hearing Tuesday to look at “White House narratives on the Iran deal” and the administration’s public message on the negotiations and final agreement.
Mr. Chaffetz had asked Ben Rhodes, one of Mr. Obama’s top foreign policy advisers who led the White House communications effort, to testify. The request followed a New York Times Magazine story in which Mr. Rhodes discussed the administration’s media strategy, leading to charges the White House misled the public on aspects of the Iran negotiations and eventual agreement.

The White House has said it didn’t provide misleading information on the deal and that the House hearing is politically motivated.

Mr. Chaffetz said later Monday that the White House informed him Mr. Rhodes wouldn’t testify. “Talks to reporters and his ‘echo chamber’ but not Congress. Disappointing but typical,” Mr. Chaffetz said, in a Twitter message.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2016/05/it-didnt-start-with-marx.html An extraordinary book came my way, one which alters to some degree my own focus on the current conflict between socialism and conservatism, between secular political collectivism and religious political collectivism in America. This is George Watson’s The Lost Literature of Socialism, originally published in 1998 and reissued in 2001. Then, as now, it […]