RUTHFULLY YOURS

Islamic State’s appeal for American women can range from the prospect of romance to idea of joining a meaningful religious movement
The arrests this week of women in New York and Philadelphia who prosecutors say were plotting terrorist attacks or trying to provide support to the Islamic State is focusing attention on jihadist efforts to recruit American women.

From Denver’s suburban sprawl to Chicago’s immigrant enclaves, nearly a dozen young American women have been enticed over the Internet by extremist groups to join their ranks in the past year, authorities say, with promises of marriage, humanitarian efforts on behalf of Muslims and martyrdom.

The arrests of the American women come as law-enforcement officials and U.S. Muslim leaders struggle to counter the jihadists’ social-media savvy and the increasing number of young Western women who have joined groups such as Islamic State, or ISIS. These women, in turn, have become a critical part of ISIS’s recruitment, offering advice to fellow Western women contemplating joining the group and cheering on its attacks via the Internet, experts say.

Officials didn’t lie, and I wasn’t fed a line, writes Judith Miller

I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.

To stamp out cultural dissent, the left is willing to stomp on religious liberty.

The political delirium over Indiana’s law protecting minority religious beliefs doesn’t seem to be abating, and the irony is that it may be illustrating why such statutes are necessary. Much of the modern political left has abandoned the American tradition of pluralism in favor of an all-or-nothing social model that brooks no dissent.

Netanyahu Nuclear pact and White House spat with Israeli prime minister unnerve many Jewish leaders
Many U.S. Jewish leaders are unnerved both by the new Iran nuclear agreement and the public falling out between President Barack Obama and his Israeli counterpart, developments that are creating a rift in the durable alliance between Jews and the Democratic Party in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

Worried that Iran might still develop a nuclear weapon despite the accord announced Thursday, the Jewish leaders say they feel torn between an Obama administration that has pressed hard for a deal and an Israeli government that has repeatedly warned that Iran is a grave threat to the Jewish state and can’t be trusted to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

A group of Jewish Democratic House members met with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough in his office last week and cautioned that for them to help “sell a very unpopular [Iran nuclear] deal to our constituents,” Mr. Obama must “increase his popularity with our constituents,” said a Democratic congressman involved in the meeting.

“Patriotic Betrayal advertises itself as having the “aura of a John le Carré novel.” That is a mischaracterization. The subject of intelligence is intrinsically fascinating; but reading Karen Paget as she traces the comings and goings of dozens upon dozens of long-forgotten student activists (the book comes equipped with a guide to its extensive “cast of characters”) is only slightly more invigorating than reading the white pages of a telephone book.”

A REVIEW OF “Patriotic Betrayal The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism” By Karen Paget

Some 60 million people perished in World War II. Before the embers of that terrible conflagration could cool, a new conflict loomed. Joseph Stalin’s Russia was imposing a cruel dictatorship on the conquered peoples of Eastern Europe and threatening Western Europe by subversion and force of arms. By 1949, the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons in its arsenal. In the event of a clash between the superpowers, many millions more would die.
Patriotic Betrayal The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll Amer

The United States and its allies began to check Soviet expansionism by following George Kennan’s prescription for containment: The “application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” One such shifting political point involved student politics. Here in the United States, student politics had seldom been important. But in some of the embattled countries of Europe, very different traditions prevailed, and student politics were at the center of events.

The Kremlin was ready and quick to exert influence in this arena. Its operatives seized effective control of various international student organizations, set up chapters in the satellite states, and tried to draw in young people from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere around the world. As in other aspects of the Cold War conflict, the United States sought to counter. Veterans of the Office of Strategic Services—our wartime intelligence body, incorporated by 1947 into the fledgling CIA—began to channel funds to (and influence) the international activities of American student groups, preeminently the National Student Association (NSA). The funding and controlling continued into the 1960s, until the operation was blown in a spectacular leak—the first of its kind—in an exposé published in Ramparts magazine.

President Obama’s stories haven’t held up before. How is the Iran deal any different?
President Obama strode to the lectern in the Rose Garden Thursday to announce a “historic” agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The preliminary deal made in Lausanne, Switzerland, the president said, “cuts off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” I hope he’s right.
But I’m not counting on it. The president has a terrible record of initial public pronouncements on national security. He has a habit of confidently stating things that turn out not to be true. Three times in the last four years he has appeared in the Rose Garden and made assertions that were later proven to be false. He and his national security team have again and again described a world that does not correspond to reality. No reason to assume these concessions to Iran will be any different.

The “key parameters” for an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program released Thursday fall well short of the goals originally set by the Obama administration.

None of Iran’s nuclear facilities — including the Fordow center buried under a mountain — will be closed.

Not one of the country’s 19,000 centrifuges will be dismantled. Tehran’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium will be “reduced” but not necessarily shipped out of the country.

In effect, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure will remain intact, though some of it will be mothballed for 10 years. When the accord lapses, the Islamic republic will instantly become a threshold nuclear state.

That’s a long way from the standard set by President Obama in 2012 when he declared that “the deal we’ll accept” with Iran “is that they end their nuclear program” and “abide by the U.N. resolutions that have been in place.” Those resolutions call for Iran to suspend the enrichment of uranium. Instead, under the agreement announced Thursday, enrichment will continue with 5,000 centrifuges for a decade, and all restraints on it will end in 15 years.

It legitimizes and advances Iran’s uranium-enrichment program.

At a press conference this afternoon, President Obama lauded the preliminary agreement reached with Iran to reduce the risk of an Iranian nuclear weapon, saying “this is a good deal.” He claimed it will keep Iran at least a year away from constructing a nuclear weapon and will be subject to intrusive and unprecedented inspections and verification. This preliminary agreement is the outline for a comprehensive agreement due by June 30. The details of the framework agreement as spelled out in a White House fact sheet and President Obama’s speech raise many questions about a final deal. It is troubling that no final agreed-upon text has been released and that Iranian and EU officials were vague in their statements about the framework. Earlier today on National Review, Patrick Brennan wrote about tweets by Abas Aslani, the head of an Iranian government news agency, that show how the Iranian view of the agreement differs from the Obama administration’s view.

Aslani tweeted, for instance, that Iran will continue to develop advanced centrifuges during the duration of the deal and “all economic sanctions by EU, US will be lifted immediately including financial, banking, insurance, oil.” Here are my initial thoughts about the preliminary agreement, based on our knowledge of it at this hour. Uranium Enrichment According to the White House fact sheet, Iran will go from 9,000 operational centrifuges to 6,104. Of these, 5,060 will enrich uranium for ten years. All centrifuges will be Iran’s first-generation IR-1 design. The remaining 10,000 operational and non-operational centrifuges will be put in storage and monitored by the IAEA.

Does every biographical subject need “psychoanalytic treatment?” No, no more than every individual needs psychoanalytic treatment. For any one, contrary to the view prevalent back in the post-war golden age of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic treatment should be the treatment of last resort. Because it is so expensive, time consuming, and labor intensive it is much better if one can get by without it. The same general principles apply to its use in the fields of biography and history.

What are the biographical situations in which psychoanalytic understanding may be useful or desirable? First there is the subject in which overt and extensive psychopathology exists without question; Vincent Van Gogh would be one of the most obvious cases. In such cases one wants to know not only about the nature of the illness and its causes but the relation between the subject’s illness and his art.

Then there are examples of biographical subjects whom some might wish to refer to an analyst—an intermediate group—who are creative and able to function more or less but who seem quite miserable. Such as Poe and Coleridge struggling with their addictions; Charles Darwin, paralyzed with fear about presenting his ideas and obsessed with his crippling psychosomatic symptoms; Herman Melville, lost to his alternating depressive and manic moods.

LUCKY IRAN!

They can’t even coordinate their public descriptions of what the deal entails, that’s how bad it is.

The sort of, kind of nuclear agreement between the P5+1 and Iran makes concrete the previous understanding that U.S. President Barack Obama has been dead wrong about almost every major terrorist threat he has encountered: Al Qaeda is not, as he intoned, “decimated”; ISIS is not a “junior varsity” terrorist network; and Iran is not a partner with whom the west can successfully negotiate.

It looks like the U.S. is the captain of the junior varsity team. And Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu will not sugarcoat his assessment.

This “agreement” which is not a deal, is not even the framework of a deal, is, ultimately, an attempt by the Obama administration to rack up at least one foreign policy “achievement” during its tenure.