RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obamas-foreign-policy-enemy-action/print/

It’s often hard to determine whether a series of bad policies results from stupidity or malicious intent. Occam’s razor suggests that the former is the more likely explanation, as conspiracies assume a high degree of intelligence, complex organization, and secrecy among a large number of people, qualities that usually are much less frequent than the simple stupidity, disorganization, and inability to keep a secret more typical of our species. Yet surveying the nearly 6 years of Obama’s disastrous foreign policy blunders, I’m starting to lean towards Goldfinger’s Chicago mob-wisdom: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times, it’s enemy action.”

Obama’s ineptitude started with his general foreign policy philosophy. George Bush, so the narrative went, was a trigger-happy, unilateralist, blundering, “dead or alive” cowboy who rushed into an unnecessary war in Iraq after alienating our allies and insulting the Muslim world. Obama pledged to be different. As a Los Angeles Times editorial advised him in January 2009, “The Bush years, defined by ultimatums and unilateral actions around the world, must be brought to a swift close with a renewed emphasis on diplomacy, consultation and the forging of broad international coalitions.” Obama eagerly took this advice, reaching out not just to our allies, but also to sworn enemies like Syria, Venezuela, and Iran, and serially bowing to various potentates around the globe. He went on the apology tour, in which he confessed America’s “arrogant, dismissive, derisive” behavior and the “darker periods in our history.” And he followed up by initiating America’s retreat from international affairs, “leading from behind,” appeasing our enemies, and using rhetorical bluster as a substitute for coherent, forceful action. Here follow 3 of the many mistakes that suggest something other than inexperience and a lack of knowledge is driving Obama’s policies.

Russia

Remember the “reset” button Obama offered to Russia? In September 2009 he made a down payment on this policy by reversing George Bush’s plan to station a radar facility in the Czech Republic and 10 ground-based missile interceptors in Poland. Russia had complained about these defensive installations, even though they didn’t threaten Russian territory. So to appease the Russians, Obama abandoned Poland and the Czech Republic, who still live in the dark shadow of their more powerful former oppressors, while Russia’s Iranian clients were emboldened by their patron’s ability to make the superpower Americans back down. As George Marshall Fund fellow David J. Kramer prophesized at the time, Obama’s caving “to Russian pressure . . . will encourage leaders in Moscow to engage in more loud complaining and bully tactics (such as threatening Iskander missiles against the Poles and Czechs) because such behavior gets desired results.”

Obama followed up this blunder with the New START arms reduction treaty with Russia signed in 2010. This agreement didn’t include tactical nuclear weapons, leaving the Russians with a 10-1 advantage. Multiple warheads deployed on a missile were counted as one for purposes of the treaty, which meant that the Russians could exceed the 1550 limit. Numerous other problems plague this treaty, but the worst is the dependence on Russian honesty to comply with its terms. Yet as Keith B. Payne and Mark B. Schneider have written recently, for years Russia has serially violated the terms of every arms-control treaty it has signed, for obvious reasons: “These Russian actions demonstrate the importance the Kremlin attaches to its new nuclear-strike capabilities. They also show how little importance the Putin regime attaches to complying with agreements that interfere with those capabilities. Russia not only seems intent on creating new nuclear- and conventional-strike capabilities against U.S. allies and friends. It has made explicit threats against some of them in recent years.” Busy pushing the reset button, Obama has ignored all this cheating. Nor did Obama’s 2012 appeasing pledge to outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev–– that after the election he would “have more flexibility” about the proposed European-based anti-missile defense system angering Russia––could convince Vladimir Putin to play ball with the U.S. on Iran and Syria. Obama’s groveling “reset” outreach has merely emboldened Russia to expand its influence and that of its satellites like Iran and Syria, at the expense of the interests and security of America and its allies.

Syria

Syria is another American enemy Obama thought his charm offensive could win over. To do so he had to ignore Syria’s long history of supporting terrorists outfits like Hezbollah, murdering its sectarian and political rivals, assassinating Lebanon’s anti-Syrian Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, and facilitating the transit of jihadists–– during one period over 90% of foreign fighters–– into Iraq to kill Americans. Yet Obama sent diplomatic officials on 6 trips to Syria in an attempt to make strongman Bashar al Assad play nice. In return, in 2010 Assad hosted a cozy conference with Hezbollah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah and the genocidal Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, where they discussed “a Middle East without Zionists and without colonialists.” Despite such rhetoric, even as the uprising against Assad was unfolding in March 2011, Secretary of State Clinton said, “There’s a different leader in Syria now. Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371280/print Secretary of State John Kerry spent his weekend discussing climate change in Indonesia: “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists and science and extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts,” Kerry told the audience gathered at a U.S. Embassy-run American Center in a Jakarta shopping mall. “Nor should we allow any […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4729/global_warming_did_not_cause_uk_storms_and_floods_says_expert
With the British media and many high profile scientists and activists blaming the storms and floods on global warming, it is a major embarrassment that a top “mainstream” scientist has said it has nothing to do with it

In a major embarrassment to “consensus” views on global warming in general and the recent storms and flooding in the UK in particular a senior scientist connected with the Met Office and also the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has poured cold water on the widespread notion that recent events have anything at all to do with global warming.

Professor Mat Collins was quoted by the Daily Mail this weekend as saying the storms were driven by the Jet Stream moving south for reasons that are simply unknown:

“There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge,” he said.

Professor Collins’ dramatic intervention flies in the face of a veritable deluge of reports and features from mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and Sky NEWS the thrust of which have blamed the much publicised flooding on human-induced climate change.

Dissenters from what is habitually referred to as the “consensus” on climate change range in their views from those who argue that human induced climate change via CO2 emissions is real but may not amount to much to those who argue that the science has become highly politicised, skewered by the vast amounts of funding it attracts, and is in any case dubious.

The Mail pointed out that: “In 2007, the Met Office said that globally, the decade 2004-2014 would see warming of 0.3C. In fact, the world has not got any warmer at all in this period.”

It is verifiable facts such as these that have caused many people to adopt a sceptical stance in relation to claims about catastrophic climate change. Supporters of the “consensus” say they are dealing with complex phenomena but that the fundamentals of their arguments stand up to scrutiny.

If so, counter the sceptics, why do “consensus” scientists and activists resort to ad hominem attacks on their opponents or even, as in the case of celebrated journalist and climate sceptic Mark Steyn, attempt to use legal means to shut them up?

The “international community” is a shifty and shadowy ideal. Demands and verdicts are made on its behalf. The casualty is usually Israel, which tells you pretty much all you need to know

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4732/the_international_community_a_figment_of_the_mind

In two words we trust. How many people, and how often when they want to make a viewpoint sound like a fact, defer to a bodiless power called the International Community. Legend, we know, is often better than reality, and far more useful than mere facts.

According to legend, then – according to a real power named Wikipedia, the international community is,

“A term used to imply the existence of common duties and obligations between countries. Activists, politicians and commentators often use the term, particularly in the context of calls for action to be taken against political repression and to protect human rights.”

‘Imply’ would be the operative word. Activists and politicians calling “for action…to protect human rights” would be the give-away reference to people and bodies that view Israel and the devil in one frame, and who cloak what ails them by deferring to a ghost community.

Useful ghosts have to be incorporeal. The spectral community “with common duties and obligations” is the epitome of a useful ghost. It has no address, no defined constituents, and can’t be touched or seen.

But this hardly matters. It may even help, considering that a notional body can pack a punch above its weight. With power and concept being what they are – inverted buddies – the less defined and real a concept the greater its power to manipulate the masses.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371249/getting-know-oliver-stone-john-fund

At first, I was appalled that Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone (JFK, Nixon) was appearing on a panel at this year’s conference of Students for Liberty, a nationwide libertarian youth organization. Stone is a conspiracy-monger of the first order whose twisted historical revisionism has deluded millions. He recently told the Daily Beast that the United States is an “international terror” that other nations should keep down.

But I was wrong; the event proved quite educational.

Stone appeared on a panel called “The National Security State,” along with Jeremy Scahill (the national-security correspondent for The Nation magazine) and Peter Kuznick (a history professor who co-wrote Stone’s loopy 2012 Showtime series Untold History of the United States).

The major surprise was just how bitter some left-wingers are with the Obama administration’s national-security record. Scahill tried to feed into the libertarian ethos of the 1,000 students in the audience by declaring that “when it comes to national-security policy, we only have one party: the war party.” But all the panelists reserved their tartest taunts for Democrats.

Scahill zinged Fox News for trying to paint President Obama as a “Muslim Manchurian candidate,” but also dismissed MSNBC as “like a DNC meet-up.” He blamed that network and other liberal outlets for defending Obama policies: “Obama has convinced liberals he is fighting a clean war,” he said, or, alternatively, “Democrats have checked their conscience at the door of the Obama presidency.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371300/lessons-world-war-i-victor-davis-hanson

This summer will mark the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, and we should reflect on the “lessons” we have been taught so often on how to avoid another such devastating conflict. Chief among them seems to be the canard that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that officially ended the war caused a far worse one just 20 years later — usually in the sense of an unnecessary harshness accorded a defeated Imperial Germany.

But how true is that common argument of what John Maynard Keynes called a “Carthaginian peace”?

Carthage, remember, was truly emasculated after the Second Punic War and utterly razed after the Third; in contrast, Germany was mostly humiliated after 1919. Indeed, Versailles was mild compared with what Germany had subjected France to in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian war — and yet a vengeful France did not preempt Germany in pursuit of payback over the ensuing half-century. The humiliating terms that Germany forced upon Russia at Brest-Litosvk in 1918 were far harsher than anything that Germany suffered at Versailles, and yet did it not lead to Russian insurgencies against Germany, much less lasting enmity between the two states. Just 21 years later, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact.

Perhaps the most draconian envisioned treaty in the history of Europe was what Germany might well have intended to inflict on a defeated France and Belgium, had the former won the war in 1914 — the infamous Septemberprogramm proposal, which, if adopted, would have redrawn the entire map of Western Europe. And what the Allies in 1945 demanded of a defeated Germany would have been considered unthinkable in 1919; and yet we have not had a World War III in the ensuing 70 years.

In truth, by the Germans’ own standards of Diktat, Versailles was not harsh. The problem was not so much its terms per se, but its timing, its language, and the methods of its enforcement. By the time the treaty was accepted by the major parties — over seven months after the cessation of fighting (an armistice rather than an unconditional surrender) in the West — many of the Allied forces in the field had stood down. There was certainly less chance of seriously occupying Germany to ensure enforcement. And while the Allied leaders often talked loudly and harshly about German culpability, they failed to grasp that such tough rhetoric without commensurate consequences would only incite a wounded adversary in ways that a combination of quiet and coercion would not. One of the lessons of the aftermath of World War I is that danger mounts when threats go unenforced, and sermons prove both annoying and empty.

There are also myriads of assumed causes of World War I, both immediate and longer-term. The list is well known: arms races, entangling alliances, unchecked nationalism, miscalculation and accidents, lack of diplomacy, ethnic tensions in the Balkans, irrevocable mass mobilizations, the lack of a League of Nations, and on and on.

But the crux is why exactly did Germany believe in late summer 1914 that it could invade neutral Belgium, start a war with France, draw in Britain and Russia (and eventually the U.S.), and expect the Schlieffen Plan to knock out France in a matter of weeks, allowing a redirection to Russia to ensure the same there?

http://spectator.org/print/57833

Like a college student losing a weekend inside a tequila bottle, President Obama is going to lose the next month or more in another diplomatic binge. He has lined up a string of summit meetings with Middle Eastern leaders that will put his best foot back between his molars. Perhaps he will succeed for a time, but only in steering the media’s attention away from Obamacare and the latest rope-a-dope he’s pulled on Boehner and McConnell.

In the next weeks, Obama is going to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, Saudi King Abdullah, and several other Middle Eastern heads of state. There’s little hope that he will do any good on any front, though he seems poised to poison a few more wells.

As even the Obama-friendly Washington Post has reported, Obama’s diplomacy on Syria has failed miserably. In a press conference last week with France’s Hollande, Obama admitted that there was enormous frustration on Syria. He added, “Right now we don’t think that there is a military solution, per se, to the problem. But the situation’s fluid, and we are continuing to explore every possible avenue.” Which, roughly translated, means that neither Hollande nor Obama has a clue of how to resolve the Syrian civil war, now going into its fourth year.

The so-called “Geneva 2” talks on Syria failed last week when Bashar Assad’s regime — who appear to be winning the civil war — stood fast against any “transition plan” that would result in Assad stepping down from power. No one beside Obama and John Kerry was surprised, nor should they have been. Why agree to what is a surrender when you’re winning the war?

That’s a question that pertains to the rest of the Middle East, one that will prevent any success in any other aspect of Obama’s binges of diplomacy.

Russia and Iran, both of which have men, money, and influence invested in Syria, will control the outcome there unless the Saudis can do anything about it. They, according to a Saturday report in the Wall Street Journal, are sending shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to the anti-Assad rebel forces. The Saudis, too, have a lot of people, funds, and influence at stake in what has shaped up to be an Iraq-Iran war in miniature, another Sunni-Shiite conflict that could go on for many years.

The Saudis exemplify the effects of Obama’s previous binges in diplomacy. They have broken with America, signaling very clearly that they will go their own way on foreign policy. They renounced a seat on the UN Security Council last year, saying it was a message to the Americans, not to the UN. Two facts show why Obama cannot bring the Saudis back under his spell.

First is that in Saudi Arabia’s eastern provinces, in which most of their oil facilities are located, the majority of the population are Shiites, and they have little or no loyalty to the Saudi regime. The Saudi royals fear an Iranian-inspired insurgency there more than they fear anything else. So to oppose Iran’s influence in Shiite areas, they have been willing to use their armed forces — an uncharacteristic move for a nation that wants Americans to fight its battles — in Bahrain in 2011 and may soon be sending more than money and arms to the Syrian rebels.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4180/palestinians-religion-id-cards The row that erupted shows that among Palestinians, opposition to recognition of Israel as a Jewish state remains widespread. It also shows what awaits non-Muslims in a future Palestinian state controlled by Sharia Law. Regardless of Abbas’s motives, it is clear that Hamas and other Palestinians continue to seek and Islamic state where non-Musloms […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/mass_destruction_of_science.html Perhaps given the chance to avert public eyes from his lackluster results with containing the deteriorating situation in Syria, nuclear talks with Iran, and the Middle East peace process, Secretary of State Kerry has chosen to flaunt his lack of scientific understanding as a needed diversion.   Kerry described those who do not accept […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/02/a_destructive_president.html President Barack Obama never admits to a mistake. Instead, egregious lawlessness is fluffed away as “not a smidgen of scandal” in relation to the IRS targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups. Instead of being a great leader, Obama distances himself and lets his appointees hide behind the law or simply exempt themselves […]