RUTHFULLY YOURS

Of all Barack Obama’s costumes, the most ill-fitting is that of the hawk. The guise doesn’t work for all sorts of ideological and historical reasons. Plus there’s the fact that he’s rushing to put on the outfit as he’s heading out the door.

The new sanctions against Russia are fine with me on the merits, even if they are remarkably tardy and being sold in no small part for domestic, political reasons.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undermining American interests for a long time now. From the annexation of Crimea and a shadow war in Ukraine to his unabashed support for the butcher Bashar Assad in Syria, Putin has given the Obama administration every excuse to punch back. But until last week, Obama’s response had been to offer various and sundry diplomatic “off-ramps” and a little bit of tongue-lashing. General dovishness combined with the single-minded pursuit of a deal with Iran led Obama to insist that we should avoid “provoking” Russia.

The satirist who goes by the moniker “Iowahawk” cut to the chase on Twitter:

Russia invades Crimea: oh well

Russia shoots down airliner: mistakes happen

John Podesta falls for phishing scam: RESTART THE COLD WAR

Obama’s volte-face should be seen in the larger context of his last-minute legacy-padding and his widely alleged desire to “box in” his successor. The president is preparing to spend the next few decades as a celebrity in liberal circles.

Oh Puleez…you cannot retrofit an evil deal with tyrants…you call the bad deal null and void and then start from scratch on our defense terms and as our renewed leadership of the free world….rsk

As the bipartisan opponents of President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement prepare to address its many shortcomings, they should beware of unwittingly repeating some of his mistakes.

Instead of relying on more sanctions to dismantle or renegotiate the deal, the most urgent need is restoring U.S. credibility and resolve in opposing Iranian aggression and reshaping the Middle East.

Two fundamental misjudgments led to the disastrous nuclear agreement. First, Mr. Obama eschewed credible military threats and relied on congressionally generated economic sanctions to pressure Iran to negotiate. Second, he focused only on Iran’s nuclear program, ignoring its malignant regional misconduct. Free of pressure and scrutiny, Tehran shaped the agreement’s terms and expanded its aggression and influence.

The current policy debate has ignored these mistakes. Instead, it is focused on using sanctions to enforce and improve the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. This narrow approach is counterproductive. The agreement front-loaded Iran’s economic benefits. But it only mothballed elements of its nuclear program; it did not eradicate it.

The U.S. will need years to rebuild a robust international sanctions regime; Iran requires mere weeks to rebuild its nuclear program. Even if Iran remains within the agreement’s framework, it might respond to sanctions by escalating its regional aggression, exerting its own more immediate and dangerous form of leverage.

A proven necessary ingredient in dealing with Iran is a credible military threat. Two examples: Tehran suspended elements of its nuclear program in 2003-04 following the U.S. overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and it never crossed Israel’s 2012 red line over its nuclear stockpile.

As the Trump administration considers Iran policy, including whether and how to enforce, renegotiate or cancel the nuclear agreement with Tehran, here are five policies it can implement to put Iran on notice and regain the strategic advantage:

First, instruct the Pentagon to update contingency plans for the use of force against Iran, including its nuclear facilities, especially in the event of a significant violation of, or withdrawal from, the nuclear agreement. This will communicate a new robust posture and prepare for what might be necessary. CONTINUE AT SITE

At the end of the Second World War the United States established a liberal international order that included an institutional commitment to free trade and freedom of the seas. It also included unprecedented assistance to weak nations incapable of fending for themselves, through the Marshall Plan, NATO and other alliances. However one describes the U.S. role, it did provide a period of equilibrium, notwithstanding challenges from the Soviet Union.

While the U.S. is not likely to be completely displaced from its dominant position in the twenty-first century, this order will undoubtedly be threatened by a diffusion of power and the complexity of world politics. The openness that enabled the U.S. to build networks, maintain institutions and alliances is under siege. Internally, the populist reaction to globalization and trade agreements illustrate antipathy to the post-war arrangements. Externally, a rising Chinese military presence in the South China Sea and Russian assertiveness in Syria and Crimea challenge assumptions of the past.

In Asia, Beijing seeks to draw American allies such as the Philippines and Thailand into its political orbit. In the Middle East, the U.S. has been unable to guide the region toward a more liberal and peaceful future in the wake of the Arab Spring and has proved to be powerless to halt the killing fields in Aleppo. Russia’s geopolitical influence has reached heights unseen since the Cold War as Putin attempts to roll back liberal advances on his geographic periphery.

For 50 years or more, the European Union seemed to represent the advance guard of a new liberalism in which nations “pool” sovereignty for continental cooperation. But today the EU is fractured. The departure of jobs to Asia and the arrival of migrants from Africa and the Middle East have resuscitated nationalistic impulses. Brexit was merely one manifestation of this trend. After that June vote, the only question that remains is which country is next to leave the EU and how much more contraction can the Union tolerate.

Even though Norbert Hofer of Austria’s Freedom party lost the election to a pro-EU party, his strong showing set off alarm bells throughout the EU. Earlier this year, Hofer said that Islam “has no place in Austria” without explaining what that means for Austria’s Muslims.

Less than three weeks from now President Obama will leave office. One might assume that, as with his predecessors, he will take a back seat in public life, only surfacing to write his memoirs, rake in a few millions on the lecture circuit and work on his golf handicap.

This may be to misunderstand him as badly out of office as in it. After Donald Trump’s election, Mr Obama promised distraught Democrats that “next year Michelle and I are going to be right there with you . . . and we’re going to be busy, involved in the amazing stuff that we’ve been doing all these years before”.

Just vague aspirational waffle? Unlikely. For in his previous life Barack Obama was a community organiser. It sounds benign enough. Organising the community surely means doing good works to alleviate the hardship of the poor and disadvantaged? No.

The term “community organiser” has a specific meaning. It was coined by the radical Chicago activist Saul Alinsky, a Marxist who believed in capturing the culture as the most effective means of overturning western society.

The way to do this, he said, was through “people’s organisations” composed largely of discontented individuals who believed society was fundamentally unjust, and who would take their lead from trained community organisers. These organisers, taught Alinsky, should “rub raw the resentments of the people” and “agitate to the point of conflict” while pretending to be middle-class folk in suits.

Based on the premise that the revolution would come not through institutions but through the masses, the organisers’ role was to galvanise the mob to oppose every institution of the state. In his handbook of sedition, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky describes Lucifer as “the very first radical”.

Last week many of us ink-stained wretches proclaimed Obama’s abstention in the vote on the December 23 anti-Israel UN resolution his last betrayal of our only real ally in the Middle East. We were wrong. Obama isn’t done yet.
Obama is going to use his last three weeks in office to damage Israel in at least one more UN Security Council resolution.

Obama believes that he has accomplished great things through his diplomacy and exercise of our military power. His list includes his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, his military intervention in Libya, the near-emptying of the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and much more. The fact that the world is almost literally on fire — from the South China Sea to Iraq and Afghanistan, from North Korea to the streets of Europe where terrorists run free — doesn’t diminish his belief that he has succeeded almost everywhere.

Everywhere, that is, except in dictating peace terms in the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That conflict began almost as soon as Islam became a religion. It began when Mohammed wrote in the Koran his vision that he had ascended to heaven from the site of the ruined Jewish temple in Jerusalem. The mosques on what is now the Temple Mount were literally built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple as symbols of permanent conquest. It is the holiest site in Judaism and had been for about three thousand years before Islam was established.

The Israeli-Palestinian war is one in which the Palestinians (of which there were none before Israel was declared a nation in 1947) are merely a weapon used by others. Making peace with the Palestinians won’t make peace with the Sunni nations surrounding Israel that use the Palestinians as a tool against Israel or with the Shiite nation of Iran.

Leaders of the Sunni nations learned from the efforts of Anwar Sadat, who signed a peace agreement with Israel and was subsequently assassinated by Islamic terrorists, that peace with Israel is a religious impossibility. Iran has so often proclaimed that it will wipe Israel off the map that it has become a mantra of its kakistocracy.

Those nations — and their Palestinian surrogates — have for almost seven decades made it impossible for Israel to be what the UN created it to be: a Jewish homeland. When Israel was established by a series of UN resolutions, it was established as a Jewish state and other areas around Israel were established as an Arab zone, which became the “Palestinian” territories.

Obama and many European leaders believe that a peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the only way to drive peace in the Middle East. In furtherance of that comprehensively mistaken belief, they will convene a meeting of foreign ministers in Paris on January 15 without Israeli representation. The purpose of the meeting will be to craft another UN resolution to be offered and passed before Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20. Obama and Kerry are heavily engaged in formulating the resolution to be passed in Paris and then in the UN Security Council.

It was the key national-security debate of the 2016 election. Donald Trump won the election, in no small part, because he appeared to be on the right side of it. Appeared is used advisedly: Trump was at least in the general vicinity of the bull’s-eye; his opponent wouldn’t even acknowledge the target existed — except in the most grudging of ways, and only because Trump had forced the issue.

The question boiled down to this: Are you willing to name the enemy?

After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at least a start. We should note, moreover, that it’s a start we owe to the president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump’s outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses. Comparative anonymities (looking down at my shoes, now) could try terrorism cases and fill shelves with books and pamphlets and columns on the ideology behind the jihad from now until the end of time. But no matter how many terrorist attacks Americans endured, the public examination of the enemy was not going to happen unless a credible candidate for the world’s most important job dramatically shifted the parameters of acceptable discourse.

Trump forced the issue into the light of day. And once he did — voilà! — what was yesterday’s “Islamophobia” became today’s conventional wisdom. In reality, it was never either of these things. The former is an enemy-crafted smear (a wildly successful one) to scare off examination of the enemy; the latter is frequently wrong.

What we Cassandras have really been trying to highlight is a simple fact, as patent as it was unremarkable from the time of Sun Tsu until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: To defeat the enemy, you must know the enemy — who he is, what motivates him, what he is trying to achieve. Being willing to name the enemy is a start. But it is just a start — the beginning, not the end, of understanding.

In his major campaign speech on the subject, Trump asserted that the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism.” Terrorism, surely, is the business end of the spear, but “radical Islamic terrorism” is an incomplete portrait. Dangerously incomplete? That depends on whether the term (a) is Trump’s shorthand for a threat he realizes is significantly broader than terrorism, or (b) reflects his actual — and thus insufficient — grasp of the challenge.

The speech provided reasons for hope. For one thing, Trump compared “radical Islamic terrorism” to the 20th-century challenges of fascism, Nazism, and Communism. These were ideological enemies. The capacity to project force was by no means the totality of the threat each represented — which is why it is so foolish to be dismissive of today’s enemy just because jihadist networks cannot compare militarily to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, toward the end of his speech, Trump used “radical Islamic terrorism” interchangeably with “radical Islam.” Ending the spread of radical Islam, he said, must be our objective. He even referred to it as an “ideology” — though he called it an “ideology of death,” which misses the point; it is an ideology of conquest.

Our ineffable secretary of state, John Kerry, delivered another parting shot at Israel today, offering the Obama administration’s “vision” for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. There are many things to be said about it — not least that Kerry’s speech, like last week’s venomous, Obama-orchestrated United Nations resolution on which it builds, is something “pro-Israel” Democrats make sure to do after Election Day.

For now, I just want to highlight one gem (noted by Michael Warren at The Weekly Standard).

Kerry did not mention that Jordan was never subjected to international pressure to grant the Palestinians their own state during the 19 years that Jordan occupied Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem; nor did he acknowledge that the Palestinians would long ago have had their own state if they had recognized Israel’s right to exist and abandoned jihadist terror. Leaving all that aside, Kerry accused the Israeli government of undermining any hope of a two-state solution. In this context of claiming that Israeli policy was “leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation,” Kerry admonished: “If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both.”

Presumably, Kerry was referring to the fact that Israel has a significant Arab-Muslim population. He conveniently did not mention, since it must never be mentioned, the vow of Mahmoud Abbas (the Palestinian leader Kerry sees as Israel’s “peace partner”) that, “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli — soldier or civilian — on our lands.”

Implicitly, of course, if Kerry is saying that a country with a Muslim minority cannot maintain its Jewish character and still abide by democratic principles, then neither can the United States maintain its Judeo-Christian character and still abide by democratic principles — notwithstanding that our Judeo-Christian character is the basis for our belief in the equal dignity of all men and women, a foundational democratic principle. It is a principle one does not find in classical Islam, the law of which explicitly elevates Muslims over non-Muslims and men over women.

I thought it might be interesting, then, to review the Constitution of Afghanistan, which the State Department had a major role in drafting. Here are Articles One through Three:

Article One: Afghanistan shall be an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary and indivisible state.

Article Two: The sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Followers of other faiths shall be free within the bounds of law in the exercise and performance of their religious rituals.

Article Three: No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan.

Then there’s Article Six:

The state shall be obligated to create a prosperous and progressive society based on social justice, preservation of human dignity, protection of human rights, realization of democracy, attainment of national unity as well as equality between all peoples and tribes and balance development of all areas of the country. [Emphasis added.]

A “progressive society based on social justice” that is both Islamic and democratic? According to the State Department, no problem.