RUTHFULLY YOURS

Does the United States need nuclear weapons? What role do they play? And if they are valuable, how much should we spend supporting such a nuclear deterrent? In addition, what level of nuclear weapons should we aim to achieve to maintain stability and deterrence? And finally, does the type of nuclear deterrent maintained by the United States bear a relationship to whether nuclear weapons proliferate in the world, especially in Iran and North Korea?

The Center for Strategic and International Studies held a day long conversation on these questions on May 5th. Joe Cirincione, the President of the Ploughshares Fund laid out a four part narrative that the US was (1) maintaining a vastly bloated nuclear deterrent, (2) unnecessary for our security, (3) unaffordable, and (4) in need of at least an immediate unilateral one-third reduction in American nuclear forces to jump start efforts to get to zero nuclear weapons world-wide.

Cirincione further claimed that such an initiative was perfectly sensible because President Ronald Reagan had supported in his second inaugural the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons and had put such a proposal on the table in negotiations with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986. The implication being of course that if such a proposal was made three decades ago by the leaders off the two nation’s with the largest nuclear arsenals during the height of the Cold War, then why not make it again especially in that President Barack Obama in his Prague speech in 2009 called for nuclear abolition as well.

Let first start with getting the history right. President Reagan repeatedly called for getting rid of “nuclear dangers” and considered that central to his defense policy. This was reflected in three areas: support for 50% reductions in ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads; building a missile defense against nuclear attacks; and keeping a strong nuclear deterrent that emphasized stability which was the basis for the proposal to eliminate multiple warheads from being deployed on land based missiles.

In Iceland, the American President did not support getting rid of all nuclear weapons. Reagan supported getting rid of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear warheads which were the most dangerous. They were termed “fast flyers” which because of their speed were considered the most destabilizing in a crisis. Soviet President Gorbachev countered with a proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons but also ban the deployment of missile defenses, which led to the collapse of the negotiations. In reality, Gorbachev had no intention of giving up all of Russia’s nuclear weapons especially the smaller tactical and shorter range nuclear weapons the Russian maintained by the many thousands which they have never agreed to limit or reduce in any arms control deal concluded with the United States.

Stephen H. Balch is the Director of the Texas Tech Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Lubbock, Texas

Moral one-upmanship lifts the preacher and lowers the congregation, and while secularisation has reduced sin’s potential to incite a pulpiteer’s scolding that has not prevented the emergence of new rebukes. Think here of the many PC “isms” said to signify indelible wickedness.
Rarely has so much changed within a lifetime. Yesterday’s outré and outcast recast as inquisitors; great nations in demographic collapse; primal human practices like marriage, veritable specie constants, condemned as iniquitous and beyond rational defence, and most surprisingly, all happening peaceably, with little alteration in surface political forms. No wonder elders scratch their heads, as do those few historically literate young. This essay proposes to settle their confusions by revealing the deepest drivers of these astonishing and revolutionary changes.

Most revolutions have been sudden and explosive—this one is more a continuing burn. One might thus be tempted to mistake its passages for normal cultural evolution—if at an accelerated pace. But they’re not. Their relatively incremental nature does, however, contain the reason why the revolution has been so thoroughgoing, why it has ground so exceeding small. Abjuring the turbulent savagery of its predecessors, it has spared bodies for the sake of a more protracted and promising labour—the remake of souls.

The revolution’s transformations have certainly not just been the cumulative “Hayekian” outcome of individuated choice, social evolution’s signature. Rather, they’ve been substantially managed and top-down; judicial command, legislative rescript, bureaucratic dictate, and, most of all, incessant, intense and self-conscious preachment, indispensable to their unfolding. The revolution has doubtless taken advantage of spontaneous changes, especially those arising from the hedonic culture of mass affluence, but it has channelled their energies, steering rather than drifting on their currents, and by so doing has shifted the weight of social and political power in a unique and decisive way.

Nor is the direction of its changes resulting in a more reality-tested world, as disaggregated, evolutionary choice might be expected to do, but—typical of top-down impositions—one increasingly remote from experiential anchorage; one in which common sense is supplanted by fantasies delusive in most every respect but their correspondence to the interests of the cadres who weave them.

How We Advocated for the Iran Deal

In recent years, few things have been as exhaustively debated or written about than the Iran deal.

That debate reignited this week after a long article about me included a section about the Iran deal. There are many issues raised in an article of this length, and I’m sure I’ll have plenty of opportunities to respond to those topics in the weeks and months to come.

However, given the importance of the questions raised about the Iran deal over the last few days, I want to make several points about one issue: how we advocated for the deal.

First, we never made any secret of our interest in pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. President Obama campaigned on that position in 2008. We pursued several diplomatic efforts with Iran during the President’s first term, and the fact that there were discreet channels of communication established with Iran in 2012 is something that we confirmed publicly. However, we did not have any serious prospect of reaching a nuclear deal until after the election of Hasan Rouhani in 2013. Yes, we had discussions with the Iranians before that, but they did not get anywhere. After the Rouhani government took office, our confidential negotiations with the Iranians accelerated, and quickly led to public negotiations within the P5+1 process that began at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013. Whatever your analysis of the relative weight of moderates or hard-liners in the Iranian system, there is no question that we were able to achieve a deal only after a change in the Iranian Administration.

Second, we did aggressively make the case for the Iran deal during the congressional review mandated by statute last summer, as it was imperative that the facts of the deal be understood for it to be implemented. Opponents of the deal had no difficulty in making their case — through commentary, a paid media campaign, and the distribution of materials making a variety of arguments against the deal. Tough and fair questions were raised; sometimes, there were also inaccuracies about the nature of the deal.‎ Given our interest in making sure that any misinformation was corrected, and that people understood our policy, we made a concerted effort to provide information about the deal to any interested party, including to outside organizations and any journalists covering the issue. This effort to get information out with fact sheets, graphics, briefings, and social media was no secret — it was well reported on at the time. Of course the objective of that kind of effort is to build as much public support as you can — that’s a function of White House communications.

‘So the Obama administration lied about the nuclear deal with Iran. We knew that already.”

That’s the message several conservative friends e-mailed me in response to David Samuels’s New York Times article on May 5 profiling Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.

Although Samuels’s article confirms what many Iran experts have said about the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, his profile of Rhodes is important because it explains the unprecedented incompetence, deceitfulness, and extreme partisanship of Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), and it further reveals that the president has allowed his NSC staff to run his foreign policy.

I have three main observations about the Rhodes profile.

The NSC Was Engaged in Systematic Lying to Ram Through the Iran Nuclear Deal

I have long argued that just about everything the Obama administration has said about the nuclear talks with Iran and the nuclear agreement have been exaggerations or outright falsehoods. Rhodes confirmed one of the most important of these deceptions.

According to Samuels, the Obama administration was “actively misleading” Americans by claiming that the nuclear deal came about because of the rise in 2013 of a moderate faction in Iran, with the election of Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Samuels says this claim was “largely manufactured” by Rhodes to sell the nuclear deal to the American people even though the “most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012.”

Rhodes confirmed what most experts have long known: Rouhani did not represent the rise of a new moderate government in Iran. Supreme Leader Khamenei, a hard-liner, handpicked him to be on a slate of presidential candidates. Rouhani answers to Khamenei.

In November 2013, I wrote at National Review Online that the U.S. had made a major concession in May 2012 to allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium, and that this concession led to the November 2013 interim nuclear agreement with Iran. The White House made this concession before Rouhani won the July 2013 Iranian presidential election. Rhodes has now confirmed this. The Obama administration invented the moderate-Rouhani-faction story to create the illusion that it was taking advantage of a sudden opportunity to get a nuclear deal with a new moderate Iranian government. The White house’s story succeeded in distracting attention from the huge concessions it was offering to Tehran.

The Samuels article also contradicts recent accounts by aides to John Kerry and Hillary Clinton about what roles the two secretaries of state played in forging the Iran deal. In a September 2015 Politico article, Kerry and his aides attributed the deal to two years of intense U.S. diplomacy that included 69 trips across the Atlantic. In a May 2, 2016, New York Times article, journalist Mark Landler described former secretary of state Clinton’s reported leadership and caution on the nuclear talks with Iran; Landler contrasted this with a much more aggressive approach by Kerry while he was still in the Senate.

A recent book in the Yale University Press series on “Jewish Lives,” a biography of the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, opens provocatively: “Does Benjamin Disraeli deserve a place in a series of books called Jewish Lives?” Perhaps not, a reader of the book might well conclude. Disraeli has always been a challenge, to Jews and non-Jews, contemporaries as well as biographers. But rereading the man himself, I was reassured that he was entirely worthy of a place in “Jewish Lives” (and justified the significant space I gave him a few years ago in my The People of the Book).

Though formally Anglican—his father had him baptized when he was 12, before the rite of bar mitzvah—Disraeli identified himself, and was generally identified, as a Jew. He bore a conspicuously Jewish name, changing his father’s D’Israeli only by removing the apostrophe. He made no secret of his heritage in his speeches and writings, and flaunted it in his person, deliberately cultivating a Jewish appearance. And his novels dramatized a politics imbued with Judaism and a “New Crusade” that would restore Christianity to its Jewish origins. All of this in mid-Victorian England, when Jews were the villains of novels and the butt of satirists, when they could not even have a seat in Parliament let alone climb to “the top of the greasy pole,” as Disraeli put it. (Not one has since climbed it; there has been no Jewish prime minister in the nearly century-and-a-half since his death.)

While climbing that pole, Disraeli wrote no fewer than 15 novels, his first in 1826 at the age of 21 and his last the year before his death in 1881, with another, unfinished one published posthumously. His father, Isaac D’Israeli, a writer, scholar, and man-about-town (who never converted), once cautioned his son: “How will the Fictionist assort with the Politician?” But assort they did. In 1833 in a private journal, Disraeli implicitly responded to the familiar charge that the novels were frivolous, unrealistic fantasies. Vivian Grey, he said, “portrayed my active and real ambition”; The Wondrous Tale of Alroy “my ideal ambition”; Contarini Fleming “my poetic character.” The trilogy was “the secret history of my feelings.”

The federal government has a fundamental responsibility to provide for the nation’s defense. Until recently, the government has fulfilled that role almost exclusively through nuclear deterrence and conventional military forces. But a new type of warfare—in cyberspace—is emerging as a top threat to America.

In recent years, foreign actors have used sophisticated technologies to acquire the personal files of millions of federal employees, to gain access to the private information of multibillion-dollar U.S. businesses, and to tap into the control center of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York, among many other known cyberattacks.
Yet Washington has no clear policy for responding to a cyberattack. If an attack against the U.S. occurs through conventional military means, the policies are clear. These guidelines must be broadened to include the cyber domain.

Current U.S. policies permit the Defense Department to respond to a cyberattack against military forces and infrastructure. But the U.S. doesn’t have a clear policy governing the Pentagon’s response to a similar attack against critical civilian infrastructure.

If an attack occurs today, would the U.S. be able to respond in a timely manner? In the cyberworld, an attack can occur in mere milliseconds, requiring an appropriate response in real time. That might not be possible if explicit policies are not in place.

During a Feb. 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, I asked Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, whether it would be helpful to have a definition of what constitutes an act of war in cyberspace. He replied that if the military had a “much fuller definition of the range of things that occur in cyber space, and then start thinking about the threshold where an attack is catastrophic enough or destructive enough that we define it as an act of war, I think that would be extremely helpful.” CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.philoliva.com/issues-1/

The number one job of the federal government is to defend the country against foreign enemies.

The national economy is weak. Over 94 million Americans are out of work, incomes have been stagnant for years and 49% of recent college graduates are underemployed or unemployed.

I co-authored an economic plan that was called “A Plan for New York Revival” by the Wall Street Journal, adding that it would “lift the state’s flagging economy” if enacted. The plan focused heavily on cutting taxes and regulations, investing in infrastructure, accelerating hi-tech start-ups, and modernizing our workforce with the necessary skills and training.

I support an E-Verify system, enhanced surveillance on the border, increased border patrol and a crackdown of sanctuary cities that refuse to comply with federal immigration law.

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‘This is a good, quick read with insightful analysis of strategies needed to defeat global jihad.”

Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, attacks showed that the “totalitarians are back. This time the dictatorship invokes the name of God, as opposed to the working class or the Führer, but they are back, and they will either kill us or enslave us.” So writes Dr.Sebastian Gorka in his new book Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, an excellent strategic primer for the free world’s current struggle against a totalitarian foe, namely global jihadists.

As Gorka recently explained at a Heritage Foundation presentationin Washington, DC, he views jihadism in a broader history of totalitarianisms like the Communism his father fought against in postwar Hungary. “As an immigrant who chose to become an American and the son of parents who had to fight for their freedom, I understand 9/11 differently from those for whom the threat of totalitarianism is purely abstract,” he writes. Given his personal insight, he finds that the “similarities between groups like Al Qaeda or the Islamic State and USSR are too numerous and fundamental to be ignored.”

Discussing Muhammad, Gorka explains that Islam’s “founder was at the same time a political leader, a military commander, a self-proclaimed prophet. Islam, then, is by its nature and its origins a theocracy.” While Jesus famously taught of the distinction between Caesar and God, “this seminal Christian idea finds no counterpart in foundational Islam.” Groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State “are not in fact ‘perverting’ religious texts but skillfully applying those alleged revelations that best support their cause.” Given jihadism’s doctrinal basis in Islam, “our current enemy predates even fascism and communism…we have been at war with the jihadists since at least the Barbary Wars of the eighteenth century.”

Prior to serving in Congress, Representative McSally served 26 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 2010 as a full Colonel. She is the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat and first to command a fighter squadron in combat in United States history.Rep. McSally is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and after training to fly the A-10 Warthog, flew her first combat mission to Iraq while deployed from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in 1995. During that assignment, she flew nearly 100 combat hours in support of Operation Southern Watch in the Middle East.Rep. McSally was next selected to become an A-10 Instructor Pilot in the 358th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to serve in that role.

In 1999, Rep. McSally was chosen to participate in the Air Force’s Legislative Fellowship Program, serving on the staff of Senator Jon Kyl as national security advisor on issues including terrorism, cyber security, and missile defense.After serving as a Legislative Fellow, Rep. McSally was assigned to Saudi Arabia to oversee combat search and rescue operations over southern Iraq and Afghanistan. While there, Rep. McSally was on the leadership team that planned and executed the initial air campaign in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.

In 2001, Rep. McSally became a Flight Commander and then the Director of Operations in the 612 Combat Operations Squadron at 12th Air Force Headquarters at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. She deployed twice back to the Middle East, holding leadership positions at the Combined Air Operations Center for Operations Southern Watch, Enduring Freedom, and then Iraqi Freedom.While stationed in Saudi Arabia, Rep. McSally challenged a discriminatory Pentagon policy that required servicewomen to wear Muslim garb when traveling off-base. She fought for a total of eight years to get the policy changed, eventually culminating with filing McSally vs Rumsfeld in court. She then helped to successfully shepherd legislation that was signed by the President and into law ending the demeaning policy.

In 2004, Rep. McSally took over as commander of the 354th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in U.S. history to command a combat aviation unit. In that role, she was responsible for deploying her squadron anywhere in the world in 24 hours’ notice. As Squadron Commander, Rep. McSally flew for 225 combat hours, leading her A-10 combat team during Operation Enduring Freedom from September 2005 to February 2006. For her combat leadership, Rep. McSally was awarded the Bronze Star and her squadron was awarded the Air Force Association David C. Schilling Award for the most outstanding contribution in the field of flight in 2006.

During her military career, Rep. McSally flew 2,600 flight hours, including over 325 combat hours, earning six air medals. After her time in the military, she taught and mentored senior military officials from around the world as a Professor of National Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany.

Rep. McSally holds Masters Degrees from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the U.S. Air War College in Public Policy and Strategic Studies, where she graduated #1 in her class of 261 senior military officers.

Just for the record….Randy Forbes is a strong supporter of Israel and ranked -6 by the American Arab Institute….rsk
The images from earlier this year are still appalling: ten American sailors, on their knees with their hands behind their head, held at gunpoint aboard a broken-down patrol boat by paramilitary forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The capture and detainment of those ten U.S. Navy sailors on January 12, 2016, came at the start of a year in which America’s foreign policy has been at a crossroads. In the State of the Union address he delivered the very next day, President Obama spoke of living in a time of extraordinary change, with the international system led by the United States under growing strain. In his speech, the president conceded that we are living in increasingly dangerous times but dismissed “all the rhetoric about . . . our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker” as “political hot air.” With humiliating footage of our captured sailors still playing on the news, however, it was hard to deny that our nation faces a number of worrisome problems.

Around the world, we see a number of threatening actors — nation-states and other groups alike — with growing capabilities and diminished regard for international laws and norms. Iran’s illegal detainment of ten U.S. sailors was only the latest malicious action by a rogue regime that continues to brazenly support terrorism, develop and test ballistic missiles, and threaten oil exports from the Gulf. ISIS remains uncontained, and from remote villages in Pakistan to the cultural capitals of Europe, extremists have been successfully plotting and executing horrific terrorist attacks. Putin has annexed Ukraine, buzzed our ships and airplanes, threatened our NATO allies, and elevated Russian submarine activity and nuclear saber-rattling to Cold War levels. In Asia, China is amassing military power and slowly but steadily securing de facto control of the nearby seas, while North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can reach the United States.