RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iranian firing of a missile within 1500 yards of U.S. aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman in December, and the kidnapping and photographing of a U.S. Navy ship and crew (the photographs were a violation of the Geneva Convention) were test cases. Other than an apparent temper tantrum by Secretary Kerry, there was no American response. Oh, actually, there was. Mr. Kerry absolved his friend Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif of responsibility.

The Iranians were confident that the Americans could be counted on not to collapse the whole discussion over violations along the edges. Their model was American behavior in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The Palestinians violate agreements and understandings with impunity because they know the Administration is more firmly wedded to the process than the specific issues on the table.

Supporters of President Obama’s Iran deal (JCPOA) are starting to worry — but that is because they believed him when his lips moved. They heard “snapback sanctions” and pretended those were an actual “thing.” They are not, and never were. They heard Treasury Secretary Jack Lew say the U.S. would never allow Iran access to dollar trading because of the corruption of the Iranian banking system and Iranian support for terrorism — and they wanted to believe him. And sanctions? The administration said that sanctions related to non-nuclear Iranian behavior — support for terrorism, ballistic missile development, and more — would be retained.

Supporters believed Secretary Kerry when he said sanctions on Iran would be lifted only by a “tiny portion,” which would be “very limited, temporary and reversible… So believe me, when I say this relief is limited and reversible, I mean it.” They all but heard him stamp his loafer.

The mistake was not just listening to the administration say whatever it was Democrats in Congress wanted to hear, while knowing full well that once the train left the station it would never, ever come back. The bigger mistake was not listening to Iran. The Iranians have been clear and consistent about their understanding of the JCPOA.

Days before Congress failed to block the JCPOA, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, outlined Iran’s red lines.

To block “infiltration” of “Iran’s defense and security affairs under the pretext of nuclear supervision and inspection… Iranian military officials are not allowed to let the foreigners go through the country’s security-defense shield and fence.”
“Iran’s military officials are not at all allowed to stop the country’s defense development and progress on the pretext of supervision and inspection and the country’s defense development and capabilities should not be harmed in the talks.”
“Our support for our brothers in the resistance [Hezbollah, Assad, Yemeni Houthis, Hamas, Shiites in Iraq] in different places should not be undermined.”
A final deal should be a “comprehensive one envisaging the right for Iran to rapidly reverse its measures in case the opposite side refrains from holding up its end of the bargain.”
“Iran’s national security necessitates guaranteed irreversibility of the sanctions removal and this is no issue for bargaining, trade, or compromise.”
“Implementation… should totally depend on the approval of the country’s legal and official authorities and the start time for the implementation of undertakings should first be approved by the relevant bodies.”
Iran would not be limited in transferring its nuclear know-how to other countries of its choosing.

The Iranians deliberately and openly conflated what the Administration claimed would be limited sanctions relief related to specific Iranian actions on the nuclear program with the larger issues of sanctions for other Iranian behavior. The Iranians were confident that the Americans could be counted on not to collapse the whole discussion over violations along the edges. Their model was American behavior in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The Palestinians violate agreements and understandings with impunity because they know the Administration is more firmly wedded to the process than the specific issues on the table.

Two years have passed since the Obama administration was tasked by Congress to develop cyber countermeasure policies. But in response to Sen. Joe McCain (R-AZ) question “Is it correct that these are policy-decision that have not been made?” U.S. Cyber Command Commander Adm. Michael S. Rogers responded: “The way I would describe it is, we clearly still are focused more on” an “event-by-event” approach to cyber incidents,”

If one follows the Obama administration has been dragging its feet when it comes to cyber threats that increasingly threaten the U.S. defense capabilities and the country’s economy, it is not difficult to see that even more than other national security related matters, the administration has adopted a slow-knee-jerk policy.

Rogers’ testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as his responses to questions from the members, revealed that the U.S. military cyber defense, deterrence, and offense capabilities are also lacking, as is the staffing of Cybercommand. He urged to “accelerate debate on how to balance security and privacy in the ever-changing digital realm.” Otherwise,Rogers warned, “an enemy could change and manipulate data — rather than enter a computer system and steal — that action would be a threat to national security.

Rogers repeated previous warnings that Russia’s cyber capabilities presented the biggest threat to the U.S. China is not far behind.

Not long ago, I jokingly pointed out that Obama’s secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, who in his holy quest to give his liege lord, Barack, the rainbow-hued, unicorn-mounted force the narcissist-in-chief so desires, has, in naval jargon, run aground.

The problem according to Mabus and his chief enlisted naval adviser is that, try as they might, their naval social justice retitling team can’t seem to come up with a satisfactory gender-neutral replacement for the Navy’s traditional title for a clerk, which, as it has been since the birth of the United States Navy, is yeoman. I kid you not, folks: with all the problems our military faces in this very dangerous world, our secretary of the Navy has his top chief petty officer, Master Chief of the Navy Michael D. Stevens, busy changing the titles of the countless combat specialty ratings in that force, which includes the United States Marine Corps. This quixotic quest is necessitated by the relentless insistence of the Obama administration that women be allowed to serve in all combat units and positions regardless of continuing demonstrations that this is a clearly foolish program with coming deadly consequences.

While my recent piece drew many humorous suggestions for a replacement title for yeoman, one commenter soberly noted that this is no laughing matter when it comes to the Navy’s real budget needs. Barack Obama and the Democratic Party have taken an accounting axe to our military forces, demanding drastic reductions everywhere, across every fleet and every force. In the Navy, that means not only fewer ships, but also fewer sailors to man and support those ships remaining. Because of Obama’s budgets, naval aviators aren’t allowed to fly sufficient training missions to retain their flying proficiency. Even special naval helicopter units that fly SEAL missions are being shut down, with their mission being shifted onto the Army. Point is, money’s tight, and the budget constraints are affecting mission training and performance.

After World War II, the U.S. abandoned the concepts of total and hard war and adopted a more politically correct view of war.

Western civilization is immolating itself on the sword of political correctness. Our leaders fail to recognize the existential threat that we now face and are unwilling to take the decisive actions necessary to combat the threat of radical jihadist Islamists.

Leadership on both sides of the political spectrum refuse to identify how we might counter this threat. This is not necessarily a new type of threat that we have not experienced before. However, what is new is our refusal to properly utilize the tools at our disposal to combat this threat.

We often hear our leadership say that it is against our values as Americans to use some of these ruthless but effective tools. Gen. George S. Patton once said, “War is cruel, ruthless and brutal and it takes a cruel, ruthless and brutal man to fight it!” It was the implementation of this approach that ultimately secured victory in 1945.

Unfortunately, our nation does not presently possess Patton’s “cruel, ruthless and brutal man” in any senior leadership position in our government or military. Politicians and generals alike often state that it is against our long-held American values to target civilians or torture prisoners. However, our country’s history is replete with examples of our leadership doing what is necessary to win. We can only logically extrapolate that those who would refuse to fight hard war would be willing to sacrifice our lives and freedom on the altar of the absurd fallacies of American values crowd.

During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington hanged spies and executed deserters. During the Mexican-American War, Gen. Winfield Scott ordered the execution of fifty members of the St. Patrick’s Battalion in 1847. Many members of this unit were determined to be deserters from the U.S. Army who joined forces with the Mexican army under Santa Ana. Both Union and Confederate generals during the Civil War executed prisoners in retaliation for executions by their counterparts. Gen. William Sherman during his famous march from Atlanta to the sea issued General Order V which stated,

Army Corps commanders alone are entrusted with the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., and for them this general principle is laid down: in districts in neighborhoods where the Army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

Asked about the fight against ISIS today, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter stressed “we need to get this over with.”

Carter was taking questions after a talk on preparing the Defense Department for the future today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Beyond terrorism, we also potentially face future nation-state adversaries with widening geographic reach but also widening exposure, something we may want to take into account in order to de-escalate a crisis and to deter aggression. In other cases, we may have to respond to multiple threats across the globe in overlapping time frames,” Carter said during his speech.

“…We’re not postured to be as agile as we could be. Accordingly, we need to clarify the role and authority of the Chairman, and in some cases the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff.”

In the Q&A, Carter said of ISIS, “We have got to get these guys beaten as soon as possible, which is basically where I’m coming from.”

“We are looking for every opportunity we can take to do that. Of course, our overall strategic approach is not only to defeat ISIL, but to keep them defeated. That means you also have to look ahead to the next stage and who is going to keep the peace afterwards, which is why we try to work with local forces where they can be made capable and motivated, which is difficult in some places but that is a necessary part of the strategy,” he said.

Last week, a fresh political scandal erupted on Capitol Hill over Iran. At issue was a new plan being considered by the Obama administration to provide Iran’s ayatollahs with limited access to the U.S. financial system as a sweetener for their continued compliance with their government’s 2015 nuclear deal with the nations of the P5+1.

Doing so would have effectively reneged on promises made by the White House last summer in selling the nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to a skeptical Congress. Back in July, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew waved away congressional worries over the prospects of Iran’s regime being unjustly enriched as a result of the JCPOA. Lew pledged that — irrespective of the provisions of the new nuclear deal — Iran would “continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

The plan would also have been a potential violation of federal law, since under the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act the White House is required to “block and prohibit” Iranian assets if those funds “come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.” (Similarly, the administration’s proposal would have fundamentally undermined one of the central pillars of post-9/11 counterterrorism law, the USA PATRIOT Act, by allowing Iran’s tainted money to permeate U.S. financial institutions.)

News of the new initiative drew outraged responses from key lawmakers, who promised — among other things — to penalize U.S. companies who used the opportunity to expand their business with the Islamic Republic. The pushback worked, and by the weekend the administration had walked back the dog on its proposed idea. “The administration has not been and is not planning to grant Iran access to the U.S. financial system,” a spokesperson deployed by the Treasury Department insisted to reporters on April 1.

That, however, isn’t the end of the story. While the White House may have stopped short of giving Iran direct access to the American financial system, it still appears to be mulling workarounds that would nonetheless allow the Islamic Republic to take advantage of the U.S. dollar.

Deterrence is lost through lax foreign policy, an erosion of military readiness, and failed supreme command — often insidiously, over time, rather than dramatically, at once. The following random events over the seven years that Barack Obama has been in office have led to the idea abroad that the U.S. is no longer the world’s leader and that regional hegemonies have a golden opportunity to redraw regional maps and spheres of influence — to the disadvantage of the West — in the ten months remaining before the next president is inaugurated.

The otherwise disparate Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, and San Bernardino Islamist bombers had three things in common: First, the killers had all communicated on social media with radical jihadists, or had come to the attention of both U.S. and foreign intelligence, or had expressed jihadist beliefs. Second, their attacks were followed by administration warnings about not embracing Islamophobia, as Obama doubled down on his administration’s taboo against the use of terms such as “jihadist,” “radical Islamist,” and “Islamic terrorist.” Third, after each of these incidents, there was no stepped-up administration vigilance; instead, there was a flurry of sermons about not blaming Islam for inciting such killers. The greatest check on ISIS terrorism may lie in the hands of ISIS itself: If its operatives continue to cull the Western herd by a few dozen murders every few months, the U.S. will likely continue to do little. If they get greedy and seek a repeat of something on the scale of 9/11, then the American public will force this administration to act. Unfortunately, ISIS may not be so much energized by anger over supposed Islamophobia as buoyed by the administration’s inability to say “radical Islam.”

The Bowe Bergdahl swap for five Taliban terrorists — and National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s praise of the deserter Bergdahl’s service — reinforced the global message that the Obama administration did not necessarily see Taliban killers as killers or American deserters as deserters, apparently because such definitions are anachronistically absolute concepts. After all, who would willingly swap five killers for one deserter? Apparently everything is negotiable and political, given that the U.S. does not feel deeply about either terrorist killers or those who have renounced their duty to thwart them.

On March 30, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected Western pressure for Iran to stop testing ballistic missiles and a statement by a former Iranian president favoring negotiations instead of the missile program by warning in a speech: “People say that tomorrow’s world is a world of negotiations and not a world of missiles.” Khamenei added, “If they say this thoughtlessly, it shows that they are thoughtless. However, if this is intentional, then this is treachery.”

Khamenei’s defiant comments came in the midst of growing international concerns about Iran’s missile program. Iran tested two ballistic missiles last fall and several over the last month. Written on the sides of two missiles recently tested by Iran reportedly were the words “Israel should be wiped from the pages of history.” Iran is expected to soon launch a space-launch rocket that most experts believe will be a test to develop an ICBM capable of firing nuclear warheads against Europe and the United States.

Iran has the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East and is the only nation in history to develop missiles with ranges of 2,000 km or more without having a nuclear weapons capability. Although Iran claims its missiles are not intended to carry nuclear warheads, most experts believe they are being developed as a nuclear weapons delivery system. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany said in a joint letter sent this week to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that Iran’s recent missile launches were “inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

The White House said today that interdiction of an Iranian vessel shipping arms to Yemen showed that they’re not ignoring Iran aggression after implementation of the P5+1 nuclear deal.

According to the U.S. Navy, the Cyclone-class patrol craft USS Sirocco first spotted a dhow in the Persian Gulf that was packed with weapons. With the help of the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely, American forces seized cargo including 1,500 AK-47s, 200 RPG launchers and 21 .50 caliber machine guns.

The U.S. 5th Fleet said it was the third time since late February that ships originating in Iran were caught smuggling weapons across the water with Houthi rebels being the “likely” recipient.

On Feb. 27, the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Darwin intercepted a dhow with nearly 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 49 PKM general purpose machine guns, 39 PKM spare barrels and 20 60mm mortar tubes.

On March 20, the French Navy destroyer FS Provence seized nearly 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 64 Dragunov sniper rifles, nine anti-tank missiles and “other associated equipment.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked at the daily briefing if this was “an example of the Iranians following the letter of the agreement, but not necessarily the spirit of it” or “a violation.”