RUTHFULLY YOURS

1. The 9th Day of Av (the 11th Jewish month) is the most calamitous day in Jewish history, first mentioned in the book of Zechariah 7:3. It is a day of fasting (one of four fast days connected to the destruction of Jerusalem), commemorating dramatic national catastrophes, in an attempt to benefit from history by learning from – rather than repeating – critical moral and strategic missteps. Forgetfulness feeds oblivion; remembrance breeds deliverance.

2. Major Jewish calamities are commemorated on the 9th Day of Av:
*The failed “Ten Spies/tribal presidents” – contrary to Joshua & Caleb – slandered the Land of Israel, preferring immediate convenience and conventional “wisdom” over faith and long term vision, thus prolonging the wandering in the desert for 40 years, before settling the Promised Land;
*The destruction of the First Temple and Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (586 BCE) resulted in the massacre of 100,000 Jews and a massive national exile;
*The destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem by Titus of Rome (70 CE) triggered the massacre of 1 million Jews and another massive national exile, aiming to annihilate Judaism and the Jewish people;
*The execution of the Ten Martyrs – ten leading rabbis – by the Roman Empire;
*The Bar Kokhbah Revolt was crushed with the killing of Bar Kokhbah, the fall of his headquarters in Beitar (135 CE), south of Jerusalem in Judea and Samaria, the plowing of Jerusalem, and the killing of 600,000 Jews by the Roman Empire;
*The pogroms of the First Crusade (1096-1099) massacred tens of thousands of Jews in Germany, France, Italy and Britain;
*The Jewish expulsion from Britain (1290);
*The Jewish expulsion from Spain (1492);
*The eruption of the First World War (1914);
*The beginning of the 1942 deportation of Warsaw Ghetto Jews to Treblinka extermination camp.

3. Napoleon was walking one night in the streets of Paris, hearing lamentations emanating from a synagogue. When told that the wailing commemorated the 586 BCE destruction of the First Jewish Temple in Jerusalem he stated: “People who solemnize ancient history are destined for a glorious future!”

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Precision-guided medium-range missiles, a relatively new technology, are beginning to proliferate in the Middle East. When they work as designed, they can deliver half a ton of high explosive to within meters of their targets. This means that for many targets, they are almost as effective as nuclear weapons. With their capacity to destroy capital facilities like power plants, the loss of only a few of which would severely harm Israel’s economy, they introduce a new way for Israel to decisively lose a war. Israel will have to get the difficult balance between offense and defense right before the next war or it may not have a second chance.

Throughout history, until 1945, a country was basically safe as long as no enemy army could invade and defeat its army. This basic strategic fact became obsolete with the invention of nuclear weapons, which could be thrown or delivered by plane over a defender’s undefeated army and kill hundreds of thousands of a defender’s population with a single warhead.

The first generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was not accurate enough to present much of a threat to military or strategic targets. They could not reliably hit close enough to destroy an airfield. But large nuclear weapons, each with destructive effects measured in miles, combined with ICBMs whose accuracy was similarly measured, turned the focus of war thinking toward attacks on cities. This represented a new kind of war.

A special kind of “deterrence” thus became the central topic of strategic thinking: deterrence based on the threat of a retaliatory attack that hurts the country to be deterred, but doesn’t necessarily turn the balance of forces in the deterrer’s favor. This new style of deterrence says, “If you hit me, I will hit you back even if I have to do so in a way that does me no good. I will commit myself to hitting you, regardless of its effect on my situation, to stop you from hitting me first.”

This paper is a narrow analysis of strategic concepts in a historical context, omitting diplomatic and arms control considerations as well as several technical issues. Throughout history, countries have faced dangers other than those posed by military attack. And in a nuclear world, there are ways of protecting yourself other than through your own nuclear deterrence.

ICBMs eventually became accurate enough that smaller nuclear weapons could be used, but not so accurate that ballistic missiles without nuclear weapons could be a strategic threat.

More recently, however, technology driven by the computer revolution began to create a new strategic situation for the great powers. This technology controlled a warhead’s accuracy not by improving the precision of the missile’s launch, but by guiding the missile’s warhead as it approached its target.

“Terminal guidance,” as this technology is known, can enable warheads to be delivered over very long distances and to hit within meters of their aim-points. The launch does not have to be perfectly accurate if the final trajectory of the warhead is controlled by guidance that depends not on the initial trajectory of the missile but on equipment on the warhead.

I don’t want to be a broken record on the subject of President Obama’s appalling $400 million cash payment to Iran. I am at a loss, however, to understand how the press — and not just the pro-Obama mainstream media — continues to accept at face value President Obama’s preposterous claim that the transaction had to be structured the way it was (U.S. dollars converted to foreign currency and shipped to Tehran) because the law forbids transferring U.S. dollars to Iran.

The regulations that Obama concedes applied to this transaction do not just forbid sending U.S. dollars to Iran; they forbid exactly what the president did. Specifically, they prohibit Americans from transferring any currency to Iran — including foreign currency. They also prohibit circumventing the ban on sending Iran U.S. dollars by having an intermediary launder the dollars into another asset — such as foreign currency — and then shipping that asset to Iran.

That is common sense. If it were not the case, anyone could get around the anti-terrorism sanctions that prohibit conducting financial transactions with Iran — sanctions the Obama administration swore up and down to Congress it would continue to enforce — by simply converting dollars into, say, euros and francs (like Obama did) and then transferring that foreign currency to Iran. Such transactions are against the law. If you tried to execute one, you could go to jail for a very long time — even if the assets you transferred to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism didn’t come close to $400 million in value.

The principal point of these sanctions is to squeeze the Iranian regime until it gives up terrorism sponsorship. Consequently, the regulations promulgated to enforce the sanctions prohibit transferring value to Iran. The sanctions are simply another iteration of federal law’s criminalization of material support for terrorism: You are forbidden to send the jihadist regime in Tehran dollars, foreign currency, tangible assets, services — anything of value.

President Obama emerged from his White House Utopia to tell Americans his $400 million cash payment to Iran was not a ransom payment for the return of five Americans held hostage. Even if true – a highly dubious truth – there are questions that emerge from the incident that the president has not and will not address.

If this payment is an overdue judgment that goes back to 1979, why now? If this wasn’t a ransom payment, why did the Iranians contend the prisoners would not be released till the plane landed? If this was a legitimate payment, why pallets of cash in foreign currencies? Money could be wired to Iran via a third party rather than sending an unmarked aircraft in the middle of the night. And if this wasn’t a ransom payment, because as President Obama noted “we do not pay ransom for hostages… because if we did we’d start encouraging Americans to be targeted,” how does he explain the three Americans taken hostage since the January payment?

Whether one accepts the improbable legalistic argument Obama offers, what matters for future U.S.-Iranian dealings is what the mullahs believe. It is obvious they believe that arresting and holding Americans pays off. In a country on the brink of bankruptcy, the U.S. has bailed it out.

The larger question remains: Why would Obama do that? Behind the monetary exchange lies the naïve belief that the assistance the president gives Iran will be reciprocated with the claim Obama prevented yet another war in the Middle East. That is to be his legacy.

Iranian imperial ambitious have made a mockery of this claim with the testing of a new generation of long range missiles and an upgrade in the weapons employed in Lebanon, Yemen and Syria. President Hassan Rouhani has called his negotiations with the U.S. “the greatest diplomatic victory in the history of Islam.” He is probably right.

Was the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States a crime or an act of war? In 2009, Rosa Brooks, a professor of law at Georgetown, was brought into Barack Obama’s Pentagon to ponder that question and others like it. Her conclusion about the 9/11 attack: Its legal status is “effectively indeterminate.”

That is a lawyerly finding and not one that is especially useful to policy makers. But such maddening ambiguity is precisely the problem we now face, argues Ms. Brooks in “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything.” Many of the categories with which we think about national security, she says, have become obsolete.

In a world where our enemies do not belong to armies or wear uniforms—where a weapon can be a roadside bomb or a computer virus—confusion reigns. Do the laws of war apply, allowing for the liberal use of force? Or must we adhere to the laws of peacetime, which constrict the application of force within a web of legal procedures? “We don’t know,” Ms. Brooks writes, “if drone strikes are lawful wartime acts, or murders.” We don’t know “when it is acceptable for the U.S. government to lock someone up indefinitely, without charge or trial.” We don’t know “if mass government surveillance is reasonable or unjustifiable.”
ENLARGE
Photo: wsj
How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

By Rosa Brooks
Simon & Schuster, 438 pages, $29.95

Thanks to the haziness of our present situation, Ms. Brooks concludes, we are losing “our collective ability to place meaningful restraints on power and violence.” Decisions taken first by George W. Bush and then by Barack Obama, she writes, “have allowed the rules and habits of wartime to pervade ordinary life.” She cites “the militarization of U.S. police forces,” evident in the proliferation of SWAT teams armed with equipment intended for war zones; the blanket of secrecy thrown over court proceedings; and intensified surveillance that can have “chilling effects” on the exercise of constitutional rights.

Such domestic troubles are matched by what Ms. Brooks sees as a disastrous record abroad. Our invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought chaos, she says; our departure in 2011 brought more. In Afghanistan, “we caused untold suffering for the very population we so earnestly tried to help.” The more we try to fix things around the world, she laments, “the more we end up shattering them into jagged little pieces.”CONTINUE AT SITE

A review of: America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century By Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, Oxford University Press, 2016

Two Dartmouth Professors of Government, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, have written a timely book examining whether it would be wise for the United States to continue with the basic global strategy it has pursued since the end of World War 2 — what the authors call “global deep engagement.” This strategy has been called into question not only by other academics, who propose an alternative strategy of American retrenchment, but also by several prominent candidates for President this year, including the Republican standard-bearer Donald Trump, the Democratic runner-up, Senator Bernie Sanders, and several of the earlier Republicans contenders. President Barack Obama has to some extent retreated from the deep engagement approach in some areas, while adhering to it in others.

To their credit, the authors make their case independent of commentary on the candidates, and stick to an argument for why the long term strategy is still a suitable one for American foreign policy practitioners.

The deep engagement strategy, according to the authors has three principal components:

Managing the external environment in key regions (Europe, Asia, the Middle East) to reduce near and long-term threats to U.S. national security,
Promoting a liberal economic order to expand the global economy and maximize domestic prosperity,
Creating, sustaining and revising the global institutional order to secure necessary interstate cooperation on terms favorable to U.S. interests.

Minivacation….rsk

Under the headline “U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed,” the Wall Street Journal reported on August 3rd the secret transport to Iran of $400 million in Euros and other non-U.S. dollar currencies at around the same time that five American hostages held captive were released by the Iranian regime. The hostages included Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, former U.S. Marine Amir Hekmati and Pastor Saeed Abedini. The Obama administration insists that it was all just a coincidence. It was only paying off the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement of Iranian claims before the Iran-US Claims Tribunal in The Hague, arising from a failed arms deal that had preceded the overthrow of the Shah. There was no quid pro quo or ransom paid to get our hostages back, claims the administration. Everyone else with an ounce of common sense knows the truth – the Obama administration violated the long-held policy of the United States not to pay ransom or make other concessions to hostage takers in order to procure the release of the prisoners detained unlawfully by Iran.

The Obama administration is insulting our intelligence in claiming, as State Department spokesman John Kirby has done, that “the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home.” Even Obama himself had linked the settlement to both the completion of the nuclear deal with Iran and the release of the American captives. “With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” Obama said in his victory lap statement at the White House on January 17th. He also announced that, as “a reciprocal humanitarian gesture,” he granted clemency to six Iranian–Americans and one Iranian serving sentences or awaiting trial in the United States. What Obama left out of his self-serving statement last January was that his administration was also sending cash to Iran around that same time, over and above any sanctions relief or release of frozen assets as required by the terms of the nuclear deal itself.

Consider the shady circumstances of the Obama administration’s payment to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. The exchange of cash to the Iranian regime and release of the hostages were very close in time to one another. The cash, stacked in wooden pallets, was sent secretly on an unmarked cargo plane from banks in the Netherlands and Switzerland. And even U.S. negotiators have admitted, according to the Wall Street Journal article, that “Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.” That’s called a ransom, which is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a consideration paid or demanded for the release of someone or something from captivity.”

“ObamaBomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud” is former CIA Analyst Fred Fleitz scathing condemnation of what he called an “aberration by one of America’s worst and most incompetent presidents.” Written for the one-year anniversary of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on July 14 and presented by the author in Washington, D.C. for the Endowment for Middle East Truth and the Heritage Foundation, this book thoroughly validates that assessment.

In the book’s foreword, Fleitz’s current boss, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney, summarized the Iran nuclear deal as the “worst diplomatic agreement in my lifetime – and, arguably, in American history.” According to Gaffney, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action guarantees that the Iranian government will eventually have nuclear weapons in its possession. “In the meantime, it enriches them and enables them to engage in jihad, terrorism and subversion.” The unsigned JCPOA “is utterly unverifiable and unenforceable,” he added. “It undermines our allies. It will exacerbate nuclear proliferation, not preclude it.”

President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes has called the JCPOA a “legacy achievement” for Obama’s second term, just as the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”) was to his first. CSP has “nicknamed the JCPOA the ‘ObamaBomb’ deal, because it is a legacy agreement of President Obama that is just as deceptive as ObamaCare. [Yet], while ObamaCare may destroy the American healthcare system, the ObamaBomb deal may lead to a nuclear armed Iran that could attack America and its allies.”

The book theorized that the JCPOA’s 15-year lifespan “at best will leave Iran with an industrial-scale nuclear program in 10-15 years with the blessing of the international community.” In Fleitz’s opinion, it is more likely that Iran will exploit the deal’s terms to improve uranium enrichment with advanced centrifuges and produce plutonium at the Arak heavy water reactor. “Iran will use the provisions of the nuclear agreement … to significantly increase its capability to produce greater amounts of weapons-grade nuclear fuel in a much shorter time,” he said.

When Jefferson and John Adams went to call on Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, they asked him by what right his Barbary pirates raided American ships, stole their cargo, killed, enslaved, and ransomed their crews. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress, the ambassador answered

that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

That was in the early 1800s. Seems little has changed regarding the mindset of the leaders of the Ummah. Now it turns out that Obama (Kerry?) clandestinely ransomed four American captives held by Iran.

The Obama administration secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran in January at the same time Tehran was releasing four jailed Americans, payment that a top congressional Republican is calling “ransom.” The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. and European officials and congressional sources, reported that the administration procured the money from central banks in Switzerland and the Netherlands. The money was stacked on wooden pallets and flown to Tehran in an unmarked cargo plane.

The Iranians know desperation when they see it and Obama was desperate for the appearance of success in the Middle East. Seems we have a president more concerned with his image than with the honor and reputation of the U.S. and its citizens. Compare this to Stephen Decatur, the hero of the Tripoli wars: