RUTHFULLY YOURS

Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result.

The recent splashdown in the Straits of Hormuz of an Iranian missile near the USS carrier Harry S. Truman, along with the January 2016 detention and humiliation of a U.S. servicemen off Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf, is a reminder that the recent non-proliferation deal in no way mitigates Iranian hatred of the United States. The release of some $100 billion in impounded Iranian funds will only encourage these staged humiliations. Israel and the Sunni bloc fear tepid American reactions to Iranian provocations are harbingers of likely Iranian violations of the nuclear agreement.

Creating distance between America and its traditional ally Israel did not win over either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority. Violence against Jews spiked in 2015. Israel remains silent about its estrangement from America, on the expectation that any elected president in 2017 will be an improvement over Obama’s indifference and occasional hostility to the Jewish state.

Obama’s “special relationship” with Recep Erdogan’s Turkey proved an abject failure. Erdogan interpreted Obama’s coziness as a green light for a new Turkish Islamic state. Turkey itself stealthily is trying to use ISIS and other Sunni terrorists against Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists.

The American estrangement from the Gulf States is a result of near U.S. independence in gas and oil production, the collapse of the global oil market, and the Obama administration’s tilt toward Iran. That American realignment was interpreted in the Gulf as staged indifference to radical Shiite efforts to undermine the Gulf Sunni monarchies. Most Sunni states are prepping for the likelihood of a new Middle-East arms race in a soon to be nuclear neighborhood.

President Obama claims he is leading and inspiring U.S. allies around the world. The opposite is true: The architecture of American-anchored global stability is collapsing, and our adversaries are advancing. Put simply, President Obama’s rhetoric of confidence is at war with a reality of chaos.

Just look at Libya. At a press conference on Tuesday, Obama was asked whether greater U.S. military force was necessary to dislodge ISIS from its Libyan headquarters in Sirte. He responded, “With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al-Qaeda wherever they appeared.” Yet as Nancy Youssef reports today at The Daily Beast, Obama has rejected Pentagon plans to smash ISIS’s Libya outpost. The dichotomy between the president’s rhetoric and reality could not be more dramatically clear.

Ignoring ISIS in Libya is a major strategic error. As I noted here in September 2014, Libya’s collapse into anarchy was a long time coming. But today, with a safe haven on the Mediterranean, ISIS is presenting an undeniable threat. That safe haven gives ISIS the facility to plan, prepare, direct, and launch attacks across the world. Recent ISIS attacks in Jakarta and Turkey, and the FBI’s inability to access Syed Farook’s iPhone in the San Bernardino shootings, illustrate the seriousness of this threat. As does the extreme concern of European governments (including Britain). It’s gambling with reality (or what Obama calls “strategy”) to assume that intelligence services can disrupt attackers. It’s also a gamble to assume that intelligence services have infinite resources to cover the full range of ISIS’s geographic empire.

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake.

Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war, has said so. So has Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate in either party to have actually voted to invade Iraq (though she refused to admit her vote was a mistake until fairly recently).

The only disagreements on the Republican side are about the degree and nature of the mistake. Catch Donald Trump in a glandular moment and he’ll say that George W. Bush knowingly sent thousands of Americans to their deaths based on a lie. Ask Trump when he’s in a more mature mood — or when he gets bad press for his slanders — and he’ll say he doesn’t know whether it was a lie.

The other GOP candidates agree that it was a mistake in hindsight, though most say, rightly, it was defensible at the time. Indeed, some of us believe that we could have turned a mistake into a success had Barack Obama not been in such a hurry to squander the hard-won victories of President Bush’s surge.

On the Democratic side, there’s a lot less nuance. Senator Bernie Sanders insists that Clinton’s vote for the war is all you need to know about her foreign-policy judgment. Clinton’s reply is, “One vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS.”

Clinton is right, of course. But at this point, plans are less important than the will to put them into action. I suspect there’s no shortage of plans to get the job done sitting in Obama’s inbox. What’s missing is a presidential commitment to implementing them.

That was a major policy and defense failure of President Ronald Reagan and his Sec. of Defense Caspar Weinberger…who cut and ran. Furthermore, Weinberger refused to send the injured to nearby Israel- a helicopter ride away- whose truma units in hospitals are the best in the world and dispatched the wounded to Germany…a longer trip that may have caused more deaths….rsk

In 1983 a horrific act of terrorism killed 241 American servicemen (220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers) in Beirut, Lebanon. The bombing marked the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

All the evidence pointed the mastermind behind the crime as Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, then commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and thirty years later in 2013 — under “moderate” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — Hossein Dehghan was appointed Minister of Defense. In other words, Iran instigated one of the most horrendous terrorist acts against America and promoted the man who did it.

This year the same General Hossein Dehghan also seems to be in charge of the recent arrest of Americans sailors in an attempt to humiliate and mock the US. Iranian State TV showed one of the US Navy sailors crying in captivity and later showed Iranians cheering and celebrating in the streets at the humiliation the sailors went through.

Now Hossein Dehghan has shown up this week in Russia — just after the mullahs of Iran received billions of dollars from the Obama’s administration last week from sanction relief — and is spending billions of dollars to purchase offensive weapons that can only be used against conventional enemies like Israel and the United States.

Dehghan points out that Iran needs to “seriously focus on its air force and fighter jets” while adding “We are moving toward a contract. We told them that we need to be involved in the production (of the plane) as well.” According to a Russian source, “Iran would like to buy Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missile system and has made no secret of it.” On the eve of his visit to Moscow Dehghan openly said to the Iranian media they want to purchase the S-400s.

Secretary of State John Kerry got the headline he was looking for last week when the press reported that the United States and Russia agreed on a cease-fire in Syria that would allow the delivery of food and humanitarian aid.

Kerry actually said a “cessation of hostilities” had been agreed to, not a cease-fire. Kerry also referred to this development as a “pause” in hostilities that would begin in one week “after consultations with Syrian parties.”

Kerry’s careful wording reflected the reality that the Syrian government and Syrian rebels have yet to accept this agreement. Kerry also omitted another glaring problem with this so-called cessation of hostilities: it will not apply to Russian air strikes.

The reason for this is that the agreement excludes attacks on ISIS and the al Qaeda-backed al-Nusra Front because they are terrorist groups. Russia is using this exception to justify continuing its bombing of other Syrian rebel groups by falsely claiming they are terrorists.

President Obama objected to Russia’s position by issuing a statement on Sunday calling on Moscow to cease “its air campaign against moderate opposition forces in Syria.”

The cease-fire agreement was the latest in a series of diplomatic initiatives by the Obama administration to make it appear that it is doing something about the Syria crisis. The agreement was in response to the stalled peace process begun by Kerry last fall that produced a vague outline for peace talks. This outline called for a peace process that would lead to “credible, inclusive, non-sectarian governance, followed by a new constitution and elections” to be administered under UN supervision.” It also was agreed that formal peace talks under UN auspices would begin on January 1st.

The peace talks outline left several major issues unresolved. There was no agreement on a cease-fire or the political future of Syrian President Assad. There also were disagreements over which groups would be designated terrorists and disallowed from attending the talks.

Instead of moving toward a peaceful resolution after the November peace outline, Russia and Syria intensified hostilities. Aided by Russian bombers and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army last month began an assault on the rebel stronghold of Aleppo, causing an exodus of 50,000 refugees. The residents of several rebel towns are facing starvation because of a new Syrian army strategy called “surround and starve.”

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July 26, 2014, “Pro-Palestinians” proclaiming love for Gaza wave the black flag of jihad on the pedestal of the Marianne statue, symbol of the French Republic.
Israel was fighting back against a constant barrage of rockets launched from Gaza, one more episode in a genocidal war disguised as a national liberation movement. Hamas résistance, Jihad résistance—that was the battle cry chanted in the summer of 2014 Five months later, in January 2015, jihadis decimated the staff of Charlie Hebdo, executed policemen, assassinated Jews in a kosher grocery store. In Syria and Iraq, mujahidin, raging under that black flag behead journalists, conquer territory, destroy treasures of humanity, persecute Christians, enslave Yazidi women. Thousands of European Muslims join the ranks of Daesh and plot against the lands of their birth. And the free world snuggles up to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Paris 13 November 2015: 129 dead, 352 maimed or wounded

For much of the nuclear age, and certainly after the first arms control agreement between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972, America has sought to balance both arms control and deterrent imperatives by building both nuclear deterrent forces and later missile defenses that in combination make the use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies less and less likely.

As Admiral Richard Mies, the former Commander of US Strategic Command has emphasized, the watchword of nuclear deterrence has been to prevent nuclear war from ever breaking out between the nuclear armed superpowers. Critical to that effort has been to enhance what is known as “strategic stability” which means in a crisis there is no pressure on an American President to use nuclear weapons.

The current geostrategic landscape, however, is fraught with grave concerns which have heightened nuclear dangers. Civilian and military leaders of the Russian Federation just since 2009 have in more than two dozen instances threatened the use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies. China has threatened the use of military force against its East Asia neighbors as well as the United States should its hegemonic moves in the South China Sea be challenged. In North Korea, a rogue regime may now have an arsenal of upwards of 20 nuclear weapons which it routinely threatens to use against the Republic of Korea and the United States. And in Iran, the mullahs seek nuclear weapons while publicly denying any such ambition even as they remain the world’s number one state sponsor of terror while holding the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East.

President Obama missed a Monday deadline to have a Middle East strategy, including his counter-extremism plan, in the hands of lawmakers.

The comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be delivered by the secretaries of State and Defense, was a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama last fall.

The Obama administration has been focused on their Asia pivot over the past several days, as the president hosted a retreat session with ASEAN leaders at Sunnylands in Southern California.

“Unsurprisingly, the administration cannot articulate a strategy for countering violent extremists in the Middle East,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said. “Time and again, the president has told us his strategy to defeat extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda is well underway; yet, months after the legal requirement was established, his administration cannot deliver that strategy to Congress.”

“I fear the president’s failure to deliver this report says far more about the state of his strategy to defeat terrorists than any empty reassurance he may offer from the podium.”

The law requires that the strategy include: “A description of the objectives and end state for the United States in the Middle East and with respect to violent extremism; a description of the roles and responsibilities of the Department of State in the strategy; a description of the roles and responsibilities of the Department of Defense in the strategy; a description of actions to prevent the weakening and failing of states in the Middle East; a description of actions to counter violent extremism; a description of the resources required by the Department of Defense to counter ISIL’s illicit oil revenues; a list of the state and non-state actors that must be engaged to counter violent extremism; a description of the coalition required to carry out the strategy, and the expected lines of effort of such a coalition; an assessment of United States efforts to disrupt and prevent foreign fighters traveling to Syria and Iraq and to disrupt and prevent foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq traveling to the United States.”

One great disconnect afflicting American society is between earning a profit and safeguarding our national security. On one side are those who support free trade in the belief that open markets and shared technology trade strengthen the economy. On the other hand, there is something categorically wrong with the free trade paradigm if free trade means selling or sharing technology critical to national security. Then, the cost of free trade is very high, so much so that it could be fatal to the long-term survival of the state.

The United States is justifiably proud of its technological prowess; in fact, much of our military might is based on our superior technical smarts. But is this an artifact of a fast-evaporating past?

Starting in the early 1970s, or even perhaps a little before, the then-Soviet Union embarked on a massive military buildup, committing a huge portion of their Gross National Product (GNP) to military development and production, starting with nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. The Soviet aim was to shift the balance of power between East and West, and secure for the Soviet Union something better than equality with the United States. By threatening to overrun NATO in a general war, the Soviets were looking for economic and political concessions — principally in Europe, although they also promoted a big push in the Middle East, rich in oil and in markets for Soviet military goods.