RUTHFULLY YOURS

Oh, to have been at John Kerry’s meeting Tuesday with a dozen Hollywood executives at Universal Studios. To have sat in one of the cushy leather chairs beneath a vintage poster for The Phantom of the Opera, sipping bottled water, relaxing in the Mediterranean climate of southern California, and been solicited by the U.S. secretary of state for advice on how to defeat radical Islam. What a confirmation of one’s status in the film industry, of one’s place in the global economy, of one’s importance to the Democratic party. “Great convo w studio execs in LA,” Kerry tweeted after the discussion, “Good to hear their perspectives & ideas of how to counter #Daesh narrative.”

If there is one thing we know about Hollywood executives, it is that they are full of perspectives, have plenty of ideas. You need to tell our story, Mr. Secretary. Fix the plot point in Act Two. The tweets we are sending to convince young Muslim men not to join the Caliphate — do they have character arcs? Are they bankable? We can work with the Chinese on this; they keep telling Jeffrey about their problem with the Uighurs. Perhaps we could enlist actors to speak out against ISIS. A public service announcement, with Hillary Swank gazing sadly into the camera — that might make Ahad al Islam think twice about taking a Yazidi sex slave. Or have Steven Spielberg direct a short film on American efforts to combat Islamophobia. We can get Kushner to write it: “Allah in America”! It won’t be anything big, just 10 or 20 minutes long. A cost effective plan, if we can leverage viral propagation. I know George Clooney will be interested. When we stopped by the villa after Cannes last year Amal said something about how terrible it is, the killing. And it is terrible, awful. And the refugees: We can partner with Go Pro. Give them cameras to tell their stories. We’ll edit them here, in one of our studio bays, and release them via Youtube. They’ll become memes. And the memes can link back to the State Department homepage about all you and the president are doing to show that ISIS has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. No we missed Davos this year because we were getting ready for Sundance. But anyway we have to be sure not to offend anyone. That would be the worst. That would just play into ISIS’s hands. Can you believe what Donald Trump said? Terrible. Sets us back. By the way Mr. Secretary my nephew is a junior at Tufts and is just soooo interested in foreign policy. He wants to write his thesis on the Israel Lobby and would just die if he could intern in your office this summer. Yes, Sam, that is his name — you met him windsurfing in Nantucket last summer — you remember him! Well, he’s just so proud of you. We are all just so proud of you. Of course that’s a brilliant idea: a movie about a government official standing up for diplomacy in the face of bitter opposition from the warmongers at home and abroad. About a man who’s been trying to do the right thing ever since he went to war and saw America lose her sense of morality, and who’s been trying to get it back for her. That’s, well, that’s beautiful. We could get James Cromwell to star. Who wrote it? You? Sure, I’d love to take a look.

Never has an “art film” been so mismatched with its Manhattan venues as “The Witch” at the two popular multiplexes where it can be seen. This is a very small movie, dark both literally and metaphorically, difficult to hear and even more difficult to comprehend both literally and metaphorically. Most of the scenes are shot in obscure and candle-lit interiors; most of the dialogue is either muffled, whispered or foreign-sounding enough for American audiences to have benefited greatly had there been sub-titles. We are in the 17th century with a Puritan family that has been banished from the community plantation for the father’s sin of being prideful and apparently holier than thou. The father is determined to create his own farm at the edge of the woods and since we have already been told that this is a New England folk tale, we know what that portends.

The best scene in the movie occurs very soon after as the blossoming teenage daughter cares for her infant brother; it is genuinely moving, startling and very well done. It sets into motion the rest of the plot which involves calamitous events leading to the mother’s breakdown, the father’s well-intentioned duplicity, the older son’s precipitous coming of age, the younger twins’ taunting of their older sister leading to serious accusations with forseeable and hallucinatory consequences. One reviewer compared this movie to ”The White Ribbon” where the authoritarian nature of German family life and education become a stand-in and precursor for the larger societal implications of obedience to Nazism. In that movie, the metaphoric stretch is clear. What comes through most aggressively in this movie is the zero tolerance that the director shows for religious “fanaticism” which is mostly evident in the family praying together or having a fast day. The children are not lashed for their misdeeds nor does the father seem unmindful of their needs or those of his increasingly grief-stricken wife. His major sin seems to be his abiding belief in God and the devil. The most disturbing scenes in this “horror movie” are filmed so that we have trouble understanding what we’re seeing initially and once the action does come into focus, it’s abruptly over. Both involve pagan rituals with mutilation of children and animals, lots of blood and naked bodies – the work of the devil.

Obama’s War Promises have been easier to make than to keep.

Striking the right balance between justice and security remains the most neuralgic point in American politics. Campaigning for the White House in 2008, Barack Obama insisted that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had gotten it badly wrong: They were trampling on civil liberties with torture, warrantless surveillance, and blanket secrecy, while at the same time violating duly enacted statutes, even the Constitution. Obama was determined to set things right.

How well has he succeeded? That is the question the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage attempts to answer in this comprehensive account of the fierce legal battles within the Obama administration over counterterrorism policy and matters of war and peace. As Savage tells the story, Obama began his presidential tenure with grand promises: He vowed to end two wars, ban torture, close Guantánamo within a year, and run the most transparent administration in American history. But as the new president was soon to discover, talking about change was easier than bringing it about.

Within weeks of assuming office, writes Savage, Obama “had already started to assemble an ambiguous record” in dismantling policies of his predecessor that he had declared illegal, immoral, and unwise. Though he banned torture, his new CIA chief was defending the practice of “extraordinary rendition,” shipping captives off to countries where, despite diplomatic assurances, they might be subjected to less-than-tender methods of interrogation. He retained military commissions for trying terror suspects, promising only to review their rules. His Justice Department was invoking the state secrets privilege to toss lawsuits out of court, including those involving torture and warrantless surveillance.

Writing for the Times early in Obama’s first term, Savage reported that “the Obama administration is quietly signaling continued support for .  .  . major elements of its predecessor’s approach to fighting al Qaeda.” Thanks to that story and a flurry of others like it, civil libertarians and liberal pundits began to squawk about backsliding and betrayal. On the other side of the political divide, supporters of George W. Bush’s counter-terrorism measures began to crow, charging hypocrisy and claiming vindication. Whether the incoming fire was launched from left or right, it plainly hit its target in the White House: “We are charting a new way forward,” insisted a top Obama aide to Savage. But the reality suggested otherwise.

A foiled terror attack on Christmas Day 2009 made jettisoning Bush’s counter-terrorism toolkit a dangerous proposition. Flying aboard an airliner into Detroit, a Nigerian follower of al Qaeda attempted to set off a bomb hidden in his underwear. When it fizzled instead of detonating, passengers were spared a calamity—but the White House was not. Janet Napolitano, in charge of the Department of Homeland Security, elicited derision with her nonreassuring assurance to the public that the “system worked.” It plainly had not worked; only dumb luck and the quick action of Abdulmutallab’s seatmates had saved the day. But Obama did not allow the episode to interrupt his Hawaii vacation. Instead of heading back to Washington, he set off to the Kaneohe oceanfront to play golf. Conservatives were outraged. The public was alarmed.

Under the pressure of politics at home and terror threats abroad, writes Savage, “the reformist side of Obama’s national security legal policy was starting to crack.” Out was transparency about counterterrorism surveillance. Out was the plan to try 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan courtroom. Out was the promised closure of Guantánamo within a year. In was intensified drone warfare. In were more secrets about key decisions. In were leak prosecutions when state secrets got out.

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