Richard Baehr : Obama Has a War Worth Fighting
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=12665
Pretty much everywhere one looks around the globe, American foreign policy in the Obama administration appears to have produced a disaster area. As Bret Stephens summarized this week in “Everything is awesome, Mideast edition,” Saudi Arabia has concluded it is now on its own versus Iran, the Islamic State group is doing a fine job overrunning both Syria, Iraq, and Libya, and Iran is spitting in America’s face with every announcement it makes. Of course, American officials say this is all for show, and a new Iran will soon burst onto the scene, a full member of “the community of nations,” say, like the new Cuba. Today, Iran announced than inspections of any nuclear facilities would require 24 days advance notice. Of course, no inspections will be allowed of military sites. When all its cash is freed up from the end of virtually all sanctions, Iran presumably will have no reason not to cheat on its nuclear program, but if they do, U.S. President Barack Obama tells us, sanctions will be snapped back quickly. However, Iran will not be returning any of the money, and Russia has made clear that international sanctions will not automatically snapback in any case. So what exactly are the safeguards for our side in this transaction?
The president and his acolytes in the administration, Congress and the press, will argue that he is on the verge of a major achievement — that getting Iran to mothball its nuclear program for a decade, will be a big plus for the region, including Israel, and having $130 billion quickly freed up for Iran is a price we need to pay so that the “moderates” in Tehran can successfully sell the deal to the “hard-liners.” It is easy to forget that the “hard-liners” are the ones who decided which “moderates” would get to run in Iranian elections, sensing probably a unique moment of weakness in the American president, a leader who wants the U.S. out of the region and wants to believe the best about our historic enemies’ intentions. A new face was needed to replace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hassan Rouhani met the central casting requirements.
As Michael Doran argued this week, there are various classes of people who will defend the Obama approach to pursuing a deal and making whatever concessions are needed to get one, including true believers of the approach, of whom there are very few, celebrity journalists in thrall to White House access and hence supportive of anything the White House asks them to defend (think Tom Friedman), the Walt-Mearsheimer “realist” foreign policy crowd, who are excited about America ditching Israel for a “partnership” with Iran and those who see no ability to challenge the deal if the president is committed to doing it, so they go along, since it is easier. This last group includes some of the other members of the P5+1, who at least will get some business deals out of it for their companies very quickly.
Doran argues that the deal, which is likely to be concluded in the next few months, is a disaster. He outlines the three principal problems:
”The emerging deal with Iran has three obvious defects that will be impossible to solve in the final round of negotiations. First, instead of phasing out, over a decade’s time, the existing diplomatic and economic sanctions on Iran, the deal, practically speaking, will lift the sanctions immediately. Second, the president’s assurance that sanctions will ‘snap back’ in the event of Iranian misbehavior is absurd on its face. Re-imposition of sanctions will require concerted action by the United Nations Security Council, a body that no one has ever accused of being either speedy or efficient. Finally, Iranian leaders have asserted, repeatedly and explicitly, that they will never allow the United States and its partners to conduct the kind of ‘anywhere, anytime’ inspections that the Obama administration has disingenuously claimed are part of the deal; without such a guarantee, international inspectors will be incapable of verifying Iranian compliance.”
The president campaigned in 2008 with a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Meeting that goal was far more important for the 2012 re-election campaign than any concerns about what the White House was leaving behind in Iraq. When negotiations with the Iraqi government got tough, Obama caved and walked away. He was not invested in Iraqi security, but in satisfying his troop withdrawal pledge. On Iran, the president refuses to take no for an answer from Iran — every one of our negotiating positions the mullahs reject becomes our side’s next offer. The president also had a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, but given the collapse of the Iraqi regime and the continued gains by Islamic State, the president decided to leave a small force in Afghanistan. That would be consistent with the Obama “narrative” of a good war and a bad war, since the president had forcefully opposed the Iraqi invasion back in 2003 while he had offered some support for the Afghanistan operation after 9/11.
Both Doran and Stephens make clear that a narrative has always been central to the Obama foreign policy mission, and it is not surprising that a novice short story writer, Ben Rhodes, has been central to Obama foreign policy decision making from the beginning. Whatever happens must fit a script. Disasters need to be spun. The president argued we needed to talk to our enemies. But talk is not enough, so he also sought to make these countries our new friends. If that involved giving a very cold shoulder to our former allies threatened by the new initiatives, that price was worth paying.
But now we know that there is a war the president thinks is worth fighting, and he is letting our elite military school students in on the project. Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy yesterday, Obama said the paramount war of our times was fighting climate change caused by global warming. And Coast Guard graduates, presumably like their counterpoints from the U.S. Military Academy, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy, will all have a role to play. Many of these graduates probably thought that there were actual conflicts going on around the world for which they were trained to fight. But climate change is not merely just another issue for the American left and this president, but an article of faith, a religion, a cause. The enemy include skeptics (labeled deniers) as well as carbon based energy sources. Perhaps the next defense secretary could be Tom Steyer, or Bill McKibben, two of the biggest bloviators around warning of the imminent collapse of the planet due to overheating, absent keeping most of the “remaining carbon” in the ground. The president told the Coast Guard graduates that not to fight climate change would be a “dereliction of duty.” This is the commander in chief giving his marching orders to his military. In light of this, it makes sense for some curriculum changes, lightening up on military preparedness, with more courses on carbon sequestration at the service academies.
But it is not enough for the president to argue the seriousness of the problem, it is also a convenient avenue to pass off foreign policy failures.”I understand climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world, yet what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram.
”It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”
Absent the droughts, would the ruthless killers of Boko Haram and Islamic State have been constrained? Is it possible they are committed to killing and to an ideology the president refuses to acknowledge as anything more than a few people giving Islam a bad name? Did climate change make the president decide to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, which opened the floodgates there to the ugly conflict now underway?
The foreign policy scoreboard as seen from the White House is that things are going swimmingly. The Iran deal is close enough to taste. Cuba will remain Cuba, but now we will reward them for their unchanged behavior. We have brought our troops home, and made friends with our enemies. Where the media persists in annoyingly reporting on Iraq, or Syria, or Libya, or the Ukraine, or Russia, or Nigeria, there are bigger issues underlying these situations — such as climate change.
It is a fake narrative that could have come from a short story writer. But a better one is needed than Ben Rhodes. This story is not selling.
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