RUTHFULLY YOURS

When you chance on a book by a former NATO chief, your eyes glaze over. Please, not another “Whither NATO?” or a compendium of boilerplate, stitched together by a ghostwriter. Yet crack open “The Will to Lead” by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who also served as Denmark’s prime minister for eight years, and the glaze will vanish.

This book reads like a letter to an American friend, written by a “European classical liberal who has always counted on American leadership.” On the cusp of a new administration, this European doesn’t pine for yet another pledge of American allegiance. Instead he exhorts the U.S. “not to abandon its vital role as champion of freedom and guarantor of the global order.”

He sees the “global village” burning while its inhabitants bicker. So “we need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.” That sums up the role the U.S. ditched after World War I—and brilliantly reclaimed after World War II.

Why the alarm? Because, as Mr. Rasmussen writes, neo-isolationism, economic as well as strategic, is on a roll on both sides of the ocean. TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is on the way to the morgue, as may be TPP, the Pacific version. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has pulled out of Iraq while downscaling in Afghanistan. He has turned away from old allies in the Middle East, working hard to secure a nuclear deal with the theocrats of Iran. He has given the Russians an all but free ride in Ukraine and in Syria.

When Mr. Obama trumpeted the “audacity of hope,” he forsook the first rule of statecraft: It is better (and cheaper) to man the lines than to return. Being there deters; pulling out suggests indifference, if not an invitation to rivals. “Leading from behind” may work with grazing sheep. It does not in wolf country.CONTINUE AT SITE

Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday faulted the Russian government for continued violence in Syria and for the accompanying collapse of a diplomatic process aimed at eventually solving the more than five-year-long civil war.

“The cause of what is happening is Assad and Russia wanting to simply try to pursue a military victory,” Mr. Kerry told reporters during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian regime, supported by Russia, on Monday pressed ahead in eastern Aleppo with an offensive that has killed hundreds and come under fierce criticism from the U.S. and other world powers.

Mr. Kerry, despite growing frustration, said he would continue to try to repair a cease-fire deal with Russia that took effect Sept. 12 and collapsed about a week later.

“It would be diplomatic malpractice” not to pursue talks, Mr. Kerry said.

The chief U.S. diplomat said Russia and Mr. Assad “seem intent on taking Aleppo and destroying it in the process,” which he said doesn’t create good faith toward a negotiation process.

“We will have to see whether or not anything can develop in the next days that indicates a different approach from the Russians and from the regime,” Mr. Kerry said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that Russia is concerned that “terrorists” are using the truce to regroup, replenish their arsenals and prepare for more attacks. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said the cease-fire “is not dead yet.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon made note of an uptick in violence in and around Aleppo, as well as in Hama and east of Damascus.

“We have unfortunately seen only an increase in hostilities in recent days,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.thepostemail.com/2015/12/11/who-is-donald-trump/ by Don Fredrick, ©2015, blogging at The Complete Obama Timeline Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America great again!” (Dec. 11, 2015) — The better question may be, “What is Donald Trump?” The answer: A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment. Some Trump supporters are like the 60s […]

It was hard to resist the captivating premise of “Designated Survivor,” in which Kiefer Sutherland plays Tom Kirkman, a cabinet member of relatively modest status who finds himself head of the nation after a bomb attack on the Capitol during the State of the Union that kills the president and virtually every other significant member of the government. Among those still alive, there is powerful resistance to a colorless and inexperienced nobody like Kirkman in the role of president. But it’s clear that this Clark Kent will soon be soaring aloft, defiant in his own mild way—he’s determined to lead the country.

Designated Survivor

Wednesdays, 10 p.m., ABC

The problem comes in the second episode, along with a suddenly increased capacity to resist everything about “Designated Survivor.” Here we come up against the show’s message, or more precisely its gross political tendentiousness: its vision of a vicious American nation, in the aftermath of the attack, hunting down its Muslim citizens; its pictures of police racing around Dearborn, Mich., dragging Muslims out of their homes, beating a teenager to death, all at the behest of the Michigan governor.

Not surprisingly, President Kirkman stands firmly against this brown-shirt brutality, a product of fevered writerly imaginations particularly loathsome to behold given the facts of history—in particular the actual terror attacks of 9/11, after which, through all their fear and rage, Americans comported themselves with the utmost dignity.

It’s now probably irrelevant to note that for all his splendid talents, Mr. Sutherland may not have been the best choice for the role of a virtuous milquetoast concealing a heart of steel—the milquetoast part dominates even when the steel is flashed. Something inside may be alerting him to the nature of this enterprise—possibly the Jack Bauer in him.

In the summer of 2013, Iran was sliding into geopolitical, diplomatic, and economic chaos. The Iranian economy was within a few months of a downward spiral that Tehran had no good options for halting. A binding United Nations Security Council resolution had ordered Iran to halt all uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work, and to disclose the full scope of its previous nuclear cheating, or face increasing isolation.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/lets-make-a-bad-deal/

The Iran Wars

By Jay Solomon view book

Then the Obama administration led the P5+ 1 powers in launching negotiations with Iran. In exchange for sitting down and talking, the Iranians would get hundreds of millions of dollars monthly, stabilizing their economy. Eventually U.S. diplomats offered Iran a deal that legalized full-blown uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work on a timeline—with international sponsorship for Iranian work in the meantime—and did not force the country to disclose its previous nuclear cheating.

The deal also immediately released roughly a hundred billion dollars to Iran, shredded the international sanctions regime, would have American officials traveling to drum up business for Iran, removed restrictions on a range of Iranian terrorists, and allowed Iran to keep spinning thousands of centrifuges throughout the deal—and then, to sell all of that, the president and his allies said that American diplomats did the best anyone could have.

In his essential new book, The Iran Wars, Wall Street Journal chief foreign-policy correspondent Jay Solomon chronicles the changing nature of the American approach to Iran following 9/11. As he makes clear, beginning in 2006, officials from the Treasury Department had been traveling around the world systematically building pressure on Iran because of its nuclear program. American officials occasionally cajoled, but just as often they unapologetically deployed American economic power against reluctant foreign entities: businesses, banks, and countries were told they had to choose between having access to the U.S. financial system or doing business with Iran.

Top American officials devoted careers to traveling the globe personally delivering warnings, and then having to back them up. Banks who tested American resolve found themselves facing billions of dollars of fines. So did nations: India faced financial chaos when the U.S. made good on threats to cut off sanctions-busting institutions. There were outcries in almost every case, but U.S. officials used American power and Iran’s toxic reputation—this was the era of Iran’s Holocaust-envying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—to systematically isolate Iran.

Solomon matter-of-factly describes Barack Obama as obsessed with changing the U.S. position toward Iran, and willing to subordinate much of American foreign policy in service of that goal. Obama started his administration sending secret letters to the head of state, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which recognized the prerogatives of the “Islamic republic” and foreswore regime change. He broadly cut funding to anti-regime groups and specifically abandoned Iranian moderates during the early days of the Green Revolution in 2009, after the regime fixed an election. When nuclear talks seemed to be stumbling, he sent another letter to Khamenei effectively offering Syria as within Iran’s sphere of influence.

Walter Ze’ev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Poland in 1929. He is author of may outstanding and prescient books…rsk

For many Europeans of my generation—those who came of age before World War II—Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was not only the most important writer of our time but a beacon of light in a very dark world. Novelist, essayist, dramatist, art historian, humanist, pacifist, idealist without compare, he was our great guide in the battle against philistine obscurantism on the one hand, creeping barbarity on the other.http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/09/romain-rolland-beacon-of-light-or-apologist-for-evil/

Were we right about him? Since his name is now all but unknown, it would be helpful to start with the bare facts.

Born in a small town in Burgundy, France, Rolland was early on recognized as a budding young intellectual star. After attending the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he became a teacher and lecturer in the history of art and music. In those days, he seems not to have had much interest in politics; throughout the furor over the Dreyfus affair, the great political battleground of his thirties, he appeared to favor neither side.

The same irenic (or perhaps non-committal) temperament informs Jean-Christophe, the huge ten-volume novel that made him famous. Appearing in installments from 1904 to 1912, it tells the cradle-to-grave story of a young German composer who makes his way to Paris, what he experienced there—especially his burgeoning friendship with a young Frenchman—and how these experiences influenced him and shaped his life and ideas. For that novel, and for his writings at the outbreak of World War I urging Germany and France to resolve their differences through a shared devotion to the lofty goals of truth and humanity, he was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fittingly, he passed along the prize money to the Red Cross in Geneva. Later on he wrote a series of what would become known as “heroic biographies”; among the passionately admired figures profiled in these books were Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

It was Rolland’s stand in the Great War, and specifically his stirring denunciations of the senseless mass murder that sustained it, that made him so influential at the time, and even more so in later years when that conflict came to be seen as the root from which sprang the subsequent scourges of fascism, Communism, and World War II. In the 1930s, he became the leading intellectual supporter of the anti-fascist cause in Europe.

And here things began to become more complicated. An incurable romantic, Rolland was a fervent admirer of German culture, and the most eminent interpreter of Germany in France. After 1933, although saddened by the rise of Hitler in Germany, he still regarded Italian fascism and Mussolini as a greater danger than Nazism. (The fact that his earlier books were still being published in Germany may have affected that judgment.) At the same time, however, he also came to adore Josef Stalin, going so far as to justify almost all of the Soviet tyrant’s crimes. No Marxist, not even a socialist, he defended the Soviet Union as a leading force in the battle against fascism, and that conviction, together with his impulsive political romanticism, enabled him to suppress any misgivings he might have had about the Moscow show trials of 1936-1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.

Fly the frindly skies of Jihadair…..rsk
Some deliveries may occur as early as this year

The U.S. government has given plane makers Boeing Co. and Airbus Group SE the all-clear to deliver jetliners to Iran Air in one of the highest-profile trade breakthroughs since nuclear sanctions were lifted on the Islamic Republic in January.

Western powers removed sanctions on Iran in return for the country agreeing to constrain its nuclear program. Business has been slow to materialize, though, amid concern among western businesses of running afoul of continued U.S. restrictions on doing business with Iran.

Iran Air announced in January it planned to buy Airbus planes, but the transaction stalled amid a lack of approvals from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control rules. OFAC had to approve the license because a portion of Airbus planes are made in the U.S.

Airbus, which was first to secure a plane deal with Iran, was first to receive the green light to transfer 17 planes to Iran Air, signaling the tide may be turning for doing business with Iran. Hours later Boeing, the world’s largest plane maker by deliveries, said it too had received its corresponding license.

Airbus on Wednesday said some of those deliveries may occur as early as this year, a spokesman said.

Boeing aims to sell 80 jets directly to Iran Air as part of a proposed deal valued at up to $17.6 billion. It would be among the largest by a U.S. firm since the sanctions were loosened. Boeing said Wednesday it remained in talks with Iran Air about an existing tentative deal on plane purchases.

Boeing’s sales team has visited Iran several times this year, though no senior executives have been in attendance.

I could not pass this up. It is one of the dumbest, most politically correct, and insulting pro-immigration ads that has passed my desk. It has appeared on German TV. Paul Joseph Watson reports on Infowars: A television ad currently airing in Germany invites blonde-haired, blue-eyed women to embrace “tolerance” by wearing the Muslim hijab head dress.

The commercial begins with the text “Turkish women wear the hijab,” as a veiled woman is seen with her back to the camera.

However, when she turns around it immediately becomes clear that the woman is a white, blonde-haired German, before she states, “Me too! It’s beautiful!”

“Enjoy difference – start tolerance,” states the woman.

The campaign is funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as well as German taxpayers, who are forced to obtain a state television license or face prison time.

Instead of reversing its suicidal immigration policy, it appears as though Germany is now encouraging its female population to avoid the mass sex assaults committed by Muslim migrants in numerous major cities by submitting to Islam and covering themselves up.

The outfit worn by the model is about as Sharia compliant as a Halloween gypsy costume you might see at a college sorority party. Frankly, it is quite fetching. It is distinctly not Turkish or any style resembling approved Islamic norms. The woman is not wearing a hair-covering hijab. It is definitely an invitation to rape, as she is decidedly “uncovered meat,” to judge by Sharia measures of “modesty.”

If any woman appeared in Germany (or in France, or in Sweden, or in any Muslim conquered or invaded Continental country) in that kind of outfit she would be immediately surrounded by Muslim men, groped, and thrown to the ground and given the Lara Logan Cairo treatment. The costume would be ripped from her body. Then she could “enjoy the difference” and do her bit in “enjoying tolerance.” Right? If she complained, she could be punished by Merkel’s tolerance police and accused of “racism” or “Islamophobia.” “You did not start tolerance!” they’d shout.

You have to ask yourself what possessed the minds of the producers of the ad to turn out such a putrid piece of propaganda. Well, it could not have been sanity. Speaking of Turkish dress, Turks in Germany are especially brutal as they like to disfigure their European victims after the gang rapes. I’ve only seen Turkish belly dancers so attired in movies.

Please note that it is not Muslims or any of those Muslim male adult “refugees” who are being asked to “start tolerance,” although they may, as criminals, “enjoy the difference” in the act of sexual assault. It is German women who are being urged to submit to Islam by voluntarily covering themselves up and staying out of sight. I would be as welcome to an Obama or Hillary Clinton rally dressed as Uncle Sam or sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap. A German woman would stand a similar chance of non-molestation in any Muslim “no-go” neighborhood. I’d be beaten up by #Never Trump morons and social justice warrior thugs.

On another front, “refugee” champion George Clooney, who owns about a dozen million-dollar mansions around the world, including at Lake Como, Italy, is reluctant to allow migrants anywhere near that personal refuge from reality. As with other members of the establishment “elite,” Clooney wishes to insulate himself from the destructive consequences of his policies. Dealing with the rapes, robberies, and other culturally “enriching” habits of savages is not for him, just for the hoi polloi, otherwise known as the “deplorables.” Hillary Clinton unintentionally handed Donald Trump the perfect meme by calling his supporters “a basket case of deplorables.”

Breitbart reported on July 13th:

The migration of hundreds of people from Arab nations, Africa, and Asia was triggered following the Swiss government’s decision to close its southern border with Italy.

Now, waiting for smugglers to lead them into northern Europe, groups of migrants are camping out in tattered tents around the Lake Como resort.Flimsy dwellings, clothes and trash are scattered around the Northern Italian town’s railway station, where dozens of new families and refugees have flocked….

The migrant camp is, oddly enough, just steps away from the front door of immigration activists’ George and Amal Clooney’s multi-million dollar lakeside mansion in Lake Como, according to the Daily Mail.

The couple was recently pictured drinking tequila while watching fireworks on a boat near the property alongside their close friend Bill Murray.

The Clooneys have taken refuge from the Hollywood spotlight in their summer home in Italy for years. Last year, Page Six reported that Clooney was mulling putting his Lake Como villa on the market due to ever-present and intrusive paparazzi.

It is unclear if the recent deluge of refugees pouring into town will have an affect on Clooney’s decision to sell or not.

The power couple has spent some time talking about the migrant crisis. The Clooneys met privately with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February and praised and thanked her for her leadership during the crisis….

George has previously described Trump as a “xenophobic fascist” who wants to “ban Muslims from the country.”

I guess Clooney is hoping we don’t label him as a “xenophobic fascist,” as well, for thinking about selling his Lake Como mansion to put some distance between him and his adopted “children.” No, we won’t call him that. Instead, we’ll call him a hypocritical pull-peddler and social justice warrior who is reluctant to rub shoulders with the “refugees” or risk having Amal groped or worse by other culture “enrichers.”

Amal Clooney, the British-Lebanese human rights attorney who married George in 2014, slammed Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump this past April, saying his immigration stance and promise to build a wall on the Mexican border do not represent “U.S. values.”

George and Amal know as much about “U.S. values” as I do about phrenology or dialectical materialism.

That also goes for the MSM. It has abandoned all pretence of reporting any news concerning Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and adopted a “what we say goes” philosophy of slander and puffery. It may not pass as “truth,” but who’s to say what truth is? It’s whatever we want it to be, and if you don’t believe it then you’re a racist, xenophobic, anti-Islam pig. Never mind that Hillary is sodden with corruption, chargeable felonious offenses, and treason, we, the MSM, believe she knows all about “U.S. values” and we want this beast to sit in the White House and guide this country to the oblivion it so richly deserves, to continue the destruction implemented by Barack Obama. We stick our tongues out at objectivity and truth.

Justin Raimondo of the LA Times reported in his August 2nd article, “To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectiviity.” He asks:

Why are the rules of journalism being rewritten this election year?

At a time of extreme partisanship in our country and in the midst of what may be the most contentious presidential election in U.S. history, a congressional committee did something extraordinary: It issued a bipartisan and unanimous report on an extremely divisive issue. This issue is whether former National Security Agency technician Edward Snowden, who stole 1.5 million classified documents and leaked thousands to the news media, is a true whistleblower or a traitor.

The report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (where I worked for five years) found what many of us have long argued: Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security. Click here to read the unclassified summary of this report.

The House Intelligence Committee report could not be better timed, having come out the day before the opening of Oliver Stone’s hagiographic film Snowden and a new campaign by liberal groups and the news media to persuade President Obama to pardon Snowden for the contribution he supposedly made to the cause of protecting civil liberties.

The five findings in the committee report’s unclassified summary are stunning.

Snowden Caused Tremendous Damage to National Security.

The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to America’s adversaries. Although many experts had already concluded this, the report added that the U.S. government has spent at least hundreds of millions of dollars and will eventually spend billions to counter the damage done by the Snowden leaks.

The most well-known Snowden disclosure concerned the NSA metadata program, which collects phone records but not the contents of phone calls. Although this program has long been overseen by the congressional intelligence committees and helped halt several terrorist attacks against the United States, Snowden’s leaks about it led to a hysterical and uninformed reaction by the press and some members of Congress that led Congress and President Obama to implement major restrictions, which have made this program much more difficult for intelligence officers to use to identify and track terrorist suspects.

Snowden’s defenders claim that since the metadata program violated the Constitution and the privacy rights of Americans, Snowden was justified in leaking information to the press about it and therefore should receive a presidential pardon. Putting aside that Snowden didn’t bother trying to raise his supposed concern about this program through legal channels, the facts are that the vast majority of court decisions on this program upheld it as legal, Congress and the Justice Department have monitored it, and only very minor abuses were discovered. To read more on this issue, see my May 2015 NRO article “NSA Data Collection: Necessary or Unconstitutional.”

While the unclassified report summary does not give specifics of how Snowden’s leaks benefited U.S. enemies and terrorists (that is probably detailed in the classified version available to all House members), U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that Snowden’s leaks have allowed ISIS and al-Qaeda to evade detection by Western intelligence services. Former CIA director James Woolsey has called for Snowden to receive the death penalty because his leaks of NSA monitoring techniques helped the ISIS-inspired terrorists who committed the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks conceal their electronic communications.