RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a Senate hearing last week, the State Department’s third-ranking official issued a stern warning to the Kremlin concerning its planned sale of the S-300 air defense system to Iran. “We have made it very clear to the Russians,” declared Under Secretary for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon, “that we consider this to be a bad move, that we consider it to be destabilizing and not in keeping with what we’ve been trying to accomplish, not only through the JCPOA, but broadly in terms of our engagement with Iran.”

Vladimir Putin begs to differ. Yesterday, to the sound of crickets at Foggy Bottom, Tehran announced that Moscow had delivered the first part of the surface-to-air missile system. The Russian leader’s defiance should come as no surprise. After all, Putin is trying to accomplish very different things from what the State Department wants, not only through the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but broadly in terms of his engagement with Iran.

The Russian and Iranian regimes typically describe the S-300 as a defensive weapon, and so it is. It can shoot down planes or cruise missiles up to 90 miles away and would complicate any American or Israeli effort to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. But the S-300 also constitutes an offensive system, and it harbors the potential to shift the military balance of power in the region, which is yet another reason Tehran wants it so badly — and Moscow, one of its most important allies, remains eager to sell it.

RELATED: Vladimir Putin’s Big Short

For example, Iran could move the truck-mounted and highly mobile S-300 to support its Houthi proxies in Yemen, which could then shoot down Saudi fighter jets. Putin himself has referred to such a possibility, noting last year, during a call-in TV show in Russia, that the S-300 could serve as “a deterrent factor in connection with the situation in Yemen.” Tehran could also export the system to the Assad regime or the terrorist group Hezbollah, which could then use it to deter Israeli air strikes from across the Lebanese or Syrian border. Alternatively, if Iran positioned the S-300 on its southern border, it could detect American and allied military flights in nearby bases and disrupt civilian air traffic.

In effect, the S-300 enables Tehran to threaten the airspace of its neighbors. In this sense, Russia’s own use of the S-300 functions as a model. As Will Cathcart, a former media adviser to the president of Georgia, observed last April at the Daily Beast: “Putin has sent S-300 missile systems to Crimea and just about every breakaway Russia region on the map. This is not to protect those regions, of course. The point of the S-300 is to project power and achieve armed tactical control over the airspace of those territories.”

We’re witnessing a strange spectacle in U.S. foreign policy, one with no obvious precedent: President Barack Obama is trying desperately to protect his cherished nuclear deal with Iran, making one concession after another in response to Iran’s post-deal demands to ensure that Tehran doesn’t walk away from it.

Thus despite the terms to which U.S.-led global negotiators and Iran supposedly agreed in July, the deal is less a firm agreement than a continuing drama with one storyline: Tehran demands a concession, the administration proposes a response, Iran-watchers in Congress and elsewhere voice concerns and U.S. officials offer a middle ground to satisfy Tehran without igniting a revolt in Washington.

But the concessions – the most recent of which involve Iran’s ballistic missiles program and its access to the U.S. financial system – are not just rewriting the previous consensus among government officials, diplomats, nuclear experts and Iran-watchers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East over how the deal would work. They’re also serving to expand Iran’s military capability, strengthen its economy and leave U.S. allies in the region feeling more abandoned.

President Obama has been boasting of his foreign policy prowess, in part by criticizing other world leaders. Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal cited [1] Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent article in The Atlantic based on his interview with the President, in which Obama aimed criticism at Prime Minister David Cameron of England and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, among others:

David Cameron comes in for a scolding on U.K. military spending, as well as for getting ‘distracted’ on Libya. Nicolas Sarkozy, the former and possibly future president of France, is dismissed by Mr. Obama as a posturing braggart.

But according to several officials who served in high level national security positions under President Obama, it is the President himself who has made some major blunders and bad decisions that have damaged our national security and weakened our leadership position in the world.

The Fox News Channel recently aired a special on the state of the military and the challenges it has recently faced titled “Rising Threats-Shrinking Military [2].” It has received almost no coverage from the mainstream media, despite the fact that numerous former Obama administration officials used this opportunity to lambast the President’s policies toward Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and more. Their criticisms span the entire length of President Obama’s two terms in office. Perhaps it is the very fact that these people are speaking out against President Obama’s flawed leadership as commander-in-chief that has led to an almost complete media blackout. And it raises the question, why didn’t they speak out much sooner, when it might have made a difference?

“According to the report, [former Defense Secretary Robert] Gates was told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget after already having slashed it,” reports [3] The Hill. “I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates told Fox News. “After all those years in Washington, I was naïve.”

US News & World Report also briefly highlights [4] how Gates claims that Obama chose to push for Egypt’s leader Hosni Mubarak to leave despite the advice of his national security team.

“Literally the entire national security team recommended, unanimously, handling Mubarak differently than we did,” said Gates. “And the President took the advice of three junior backbenchers, in terms of how to treat Mubarak-one of them saying, ‘Mr. President, you gotta be on the right side of history.'”

As we have repeatedly reported, both Obama and the press regularly try to bolster President Obama’s legacy at the expense of the truth. The truth is that President Obama’s signature legacies, such as his deals with Iran and Cuba, involved reaching out to totalitarian regimes, and making deals that were terrible for the U.S., but great for Cuba [5] and Iran [6].

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his counterparts from Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Italy went to Japan to pay homage to the victims of the Aug. 6, 1945 nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the last days of World War II.

They did this by touring the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum, which displays the horrors suffered by the Japanese people who had been blitzed by the United States. It is estimated that 100,000 to 200,000 people were killed in those bombings, whose justification is being debated to this day.

“Everyone in the world should see and feel the power of this memorial,” Kerry wrote in a guest book at the museum. “It is a stark, harsh, compelling reminder not only of our obligation to end the threat of nuclear weapons, but to rededicate all our effort to avoid war itself.”

That Kerry used the death and destruction depicted in the museum to tout the nuclear deal he had just spent years begging Iran to sign is completely in character — his own and that of the Obama administration he represents. That while he was at it he threw in a good word for pacifism is also not surprising.

The trouble is that his conclusions are always based on false premises and an obfuscation of the facts. Chief among these is his lying about the Iran deal, to the point that Congress is about to launch an investigation into whether the Obama administration purposefully hid or distorted crucial information about it. Legislators on Capitol Hill were already familiar with the overt capitulation on the part of the White House and State Department to the powers in Tehran.

In any case, what is becoming clear to all who didn’t see it before is that the one thing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action did not accomplish was preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It certainly did not contribute to eradicating war. On the contrary.

Which is why it takes true gall for Kerry of all people to hold up the history of Japan as a cautionary tale.

I am not an economist, but it is clear that the path we are on leads to an unhappy place. It is determined by wishes and hopes, not reality and facts. I write about debt. And I write about interest rates that are set by government, not determined in the marketplace. Price fixing, whether by consortiums, monopolies or government and whether for goods, services, wages or money, is generally not wise. Hidden behind Islamic terrorists, the interminable presidential nominating process, corruption, and the hypocrisy of political correctness looms a debt crisis that has been abetted by artificially low interest rates. Approximately eight trillion dollars has been added to our national debt since the financial crisis and the “great recession” ended almost seven years ago.

To put what has happened in perspective: In 2000, U.S. Federal debt was $5.7 trillion. The Ten-year government bond yielded 6.6 percent. That debt and those rates supported a GDP of $10.3 trillion. At the end of 2015, U.S. Federal debt was $18.2 trillion; the Ten-year yielded 2.1%, while GDP was $17.9 trillion. In other words, while GDP expanded at a compounded annual rate of 3.8%, Federal debt grew at 8%, more than double that of economic growth. Despite debt tripling in those fifteen years, federal interest expenses remained about the same – thanks to a compliant (and not so independent) Federal Reserve. Shortly after his inauguration, President Obama caustically noted: “I found this national debt doubled, wrapped in a big bow, waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.” Mr. Obama has returned the favor with interest, pardoning the pun. Since 2009, GDP growth has slowed further, while Federal debt has persisted, increasing at double the rate of economic growth. The situation is untenable. If deficits are not reduced and interest rates not allowed to rise during recoveries, what happens when the next recession hits?

The problem is not limited to the Federal government. State and local municipalities, with tax receipts down, demands on resources up and interest rates low, have increased debt. Making things worse are structural problems within states: Infrastructure is crumbling. Entitlements are ballooning, with the gap between benefits promised and assets on hand nearing a trillion dollars, according to Pew Research. (The Cato Institute puts the federal government’s unfunded liabilities related to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid at $70 trillion.) Corporate debt exceeds $29 trillion, with leverage at a 12-year high. Because of myriad government hindrances, corporate debt has not been used for investment, but for stock-buybacks, dividends and mergers. Consumer debt, at $12.12 trillion, is approaching the levels of 2008, despite mortgage debt being more than a trillion dollars below where it was at that time. Since the federal government took over student loan programs in 2009, student debt has increased from $700 billion to $1.2 trillion, with 43% of debt holders currently in arrears or in default. What will happen to local governments, businesses and individuals when interest rates rise, as is inevitable?

“I know these issues are sensitive, especially coming from an American President. Before 1959, some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption.” (U.S. President Barack Obama, March 22, Havana Cuba.)

“I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime.” (U.S. President John F. Kennedy, Oct 24, 1963.)

It’s understandable that two U.S. Presidents should hail the resourcefulness and guile of American businessmen. But liberal Democrats aren’t exactly renown for that sort of thing. And read right, the above statements imply exactly such praise—if somewhat backhandedly. The (seemingly) apologetic statements also imply condescension for those poor, stupid, corrupt Cuban natives who were such easy marks for sharp Yankee robber barons.

You’d never guess this from the media, Hollywood or your professors (or speechwriters for Democratic presidents), but in 1953 more Cubans vacationed in the U.S. (and voluntarily returned to Cuba) than Americans in Cuba. Yes, pre-Castro Cubans found the U.S. “a nice place to visit, but they certainly wouldn’t want to live there.” All this despite the friendliness and quaint habits of the natives — and despite the ability to emigrate from Cuba virtually at will and obtain U.S. visas virtually for the asking. During the 1950s and based in Florida, Sheriff Joe Arpaio would have been lonelier than the Maytag repairman.

Obama and Kennedy were describing a nation (pre-Castro Cuba) with a higher per capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the Western Hemisphere, the 13th lowest infant-mortality on earth and a huge influx of immigrants. Furthermore, in 1959 U.S. investments in Cuba accounted for only 14 percent the island’s GNP, and. U.S.-owned companies employed only 7 per cent of Cuba’s workforce.

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Barack Obama has made some of the stranger foreign policy decisions in American history such as going into Libya even after the Iraq debacle and making the nuclear deal with (aka billion-dollar hand-out to) Iran. Now we know why. He simply doesn’t care about our national security. He practically said as much on Fox News Sunday this weekend.

As Obama explained to Chris Wallace regarding the contents of Hillary Clinton’s email currently under FBI investigation, “there’s classified and then there’s classified.” He further opined that all Hillary was guilty of was “carelessness.”

What a bizarre and lawless thing for a president to say while a federal investigation is being undertaken by over a hundred FBI agents. Put simply, the president of the United States is a security risk.

According to The Hill, this reckless approach to national security caught the eye of none other than Edward Snowden.

To advocates for government transparency, the remarks stunk of duplicity by suggesting that federal classification rules are arbitrary and don’t apply to the Democratic presidential front-runner.

“If only I had known,” tweeted Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who fled the country in 2013 before leaking reams of classified documents about global surveillance. Snowden is now facing multiple federal charges for his leaks.

Former FBI official Ron Hosko says in that same report from The Hill, “It leaves you with a sense that he [Obama] is reaching his thumb toward the scale. I think it is, as I said, unnecessary and, from an investigators’ point of view, not at all beneficial.”

So why is Obama putting his thumb on the scales of justice in this way? A retired prosecutor of my acquaintance wrote me that Obama deliberately went on Fox (something, as we know, he rarely does) to speak indirectly to FBI Director James Comey (something the president supposedly cannot do overtly or else he’d be guilty of interfering with an active case). The prosecutor thinks Obama was signaling to Comey, telling him to recommend an indictment for Hillary for negligence only, which is a misdemeanor — something for which she could pay a fine, act contrite, and then get elected president.

In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.”

The second part of Obama’s statement is incomprehensible. The intervention was a debacle. No less than Iraq, Libya would have been better off without the U.S. doing “the right thing.” The country has descended into Hobbesian mayhem. It is today a paradigmatic “failed state” ruled by competing militias. Today’s Libya is a safe haven for thousands of battle-hardened jihadists. According to General David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command, the current number of ISIS fighters in Libya is “around 4 to 6,000,” twice the group’s size estimated last year. The North African redoubt of the Islamic State—strongest by far outside Iraq and Syria—has prompted some of Obama’s advisors to press for a second American military intervention in Libya. The country is the greatest threat to the region’s stability—notably in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in Nigeria (Boko Haram) and Mali—and it is the main point of departure for hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim migrants flooding into Europe.

Even more alarming is the possibility that the main architect of the Libyan disaster will be the next occupant of the White House. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last January that he thought then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “influence was pivotal in persuading the President to broaden the goal in Libya beyond just saving the people in Benghazi” from the alleged threat presented by Qaddafi’s army, and “essentially focusing more on regime change. The President told me that it was one of the closest decisions he’d ever made, sort of 51-49, and I’m not sure that he would’ve made that decision if Secretary Clinton hadn’t supported it.” Gates later recalled asking, “Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?” Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”

Since February 2013, Iran has received billions of dollars in sanctions relief as incentives to attend negotiations with the United States and others in Geneva. However, from March 2012, until January 2016, when the U.S. lifted the sanctions, Iranian banks were not connected to the Belgium-based SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) system.
“Nobody could pay the Iranians via normal lines, not even in euros,” a European oil trader was quoted saying. Then how did the regime access the payments and the billions of dollars it was given?
Following Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s complaint that Iran’s banks are still under sanctions (due to its sponsorship of international terrorism), the Obama administration decided to circumvent U.S. anti-money laundering laws to help Iran’s economy.
Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has pointed out that the Obama administration’s plan, allowing Iran “access to U.S. dollars through offshore clearinghouses,” undermines U.S. and international anti-money laundering laws.” His Washington Post article last week argued the “U.S. must not aid and abet Iranian money laundering.”
But under the Obama administration, Americans have been witnessing, and many have accustomed to the president’s disregard to laws governing his own country.