RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon published a thorough report last Friday about how President Obama’s Iran deal has strengthened the hand of Iran’s hardliners. What is most breathtaking in the story is the degree to which American policy is divorced from reality.

How could the deal, which injects over $100 billion (probably way over that amount) into the Tehran regime’s coffers, have done anything but strengthened the hardliners’ hand? Of course it could not. Yet Obama’s policy walks an incoherent line between conceding that fact and wishfully thinking it were not so. Thus, Mr. Solomon writes,

The Obama administration’s nuclear deal was intended to keep Iran from pursuing an atomic bomb, and raised hope in the West that Tehran would be nudged toward a more moderate path.

U.S. and European officials had hoped the nuclear accord would broaden cooperation with Tehran, and empower Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to promote democratic change. He was elected in 2013 on a platform to end the nuclear standoff and build bridges to the West.

As much as $100 billion in frozen revenues are expected to return to Iran after sanctions are lifted, which U.S. officials said could happen in coming weeks. The White House hoped the cash windfall would aid Mr. Rouhani’s political fortunes.

To summarize: you are to understand from this that the administration and its allies in the P5+1 negotiations over the deal believed that the deal would (a) moderate the regime’s behavior (notwithstanding that the more aggressively Iran behaved, the more inclined Obama was to appease it), and (b) strengthen the position of the purportedly moderate, reformist president Rouhani (notwithstanding that he is only president because he was allowed to run by the Shiite ayatollahs who actually control the country, and who he has made a career of faithfully serving).

Yet, at the same time, Solomon reports:

Iranian academics close to Mr. Rouhani are increasingly concerned Mr. Khamenei will use the money and diplomatic rewards [from the deal] to entrench hard-line allies, at the expense of the president.

Many of the companies about to be removed from international blacklists are part of military and religious foundations, including some that report directly to Mr. Khamenei. Those firms could be the first to benefit from the rush of international businesses looking to profit from the lifting of sanctions.

Moreover, we learn that:

“The guiding assumption was that Iran would not moderate its behavior,” said Rob Malley, President Barack Obama ’s top Mideast adviser. “The president considered [it] absolutely critical to get this nuclear deal because we had no assessment that in the foreseeable future, Iran would change its approach.”

In the summer of 1776, the celebrated diarist James Boswell visited the Edinburgh home of David Hume, where the philosopher lay dying. Hume, atypically thin and “ghastly” in pallor, was nevertheless “placid.” Interrogated by Boswell, he affirmed his view that the afterlife was an “unreasonable fancy.” With “death before his eyes,” Boswell reported, Hume blithely predicted his own annihilation. “I maintained my faith,” wrote Boswell, but “left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.”

This scene often serves as a miniature representation of Hume’s career. Boswell’s watery piety crashes against Enlightenment reason. Superstition flinches before knowledge. The sang-froid of Hume’s godlessness amazed contemporaries, and modern atheists have treasured the tale.

James A. Harris’s “Hume: An Intellectual Biography” punctures most of this mythology. Though an atheist, Hume was nowhere near as dogmatic as his current admirers. He was certainly not a rationalist. His reputation for philosophical intrepidity, furthermore, has been overblown.

In a climate where just saying “Benghazi” can hint at a political agenda, Michael Bay’s new film “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” seems headed into an ideological skirmish that the director swears he wants no part of.

The movie “doesn’t get political at all,” says Mr. Bay, who directed the “Transformers” movies and “Pearl Harbor.” “We show you what happened on the ground. It was written with the men who were there.”

The drama, which opens Jan. 15, recreates the chaotic Sept. 11, 2012, attack on an American diplomatic compound and a CIA station in Benghazi, Libya. Militants killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens. Inquiries into what went wrong have dogged Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who as the Secretary of State at the time oversaw the diplomatic corps.

The movie isn’t about the aftermath, Mr. Bay says. The 50-year-old director wanted to make a tense film about American military heroes who rose to the challenge of a deadly sneak attack—something he has done before on a bigger budget. “Pearl Harbor” cost around $140 million in 2001 and made the Guinness Book of World Records for its massive explosions.
From left, John Krasinski, James Badge Dale and director Michael Bay on the set of ‘13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.’ ENLARGE
From left, John Krasinski, James Badge Dale and director Michael Bay on the set of ‘13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.’ Photo: Paramount Pictures

“It took 3½ months to set up one explosion, seven hundred events going off on seven ships, 20 planes in the air. The good old days!” he says.

“13 Hours” came in just under $50 million.

“I didn’t want all the expensive toys,” Mr. Bay says. “It was about shooting it very raw, over the shoulder of guys to make it feel like you are really there. Everything that I have learned from many, many soldiers is the confusion of warfare and how everything goes wrong. You kind of feel that in the movie.”

Of course there’s also a commercial aim, that “13 Hours” might follow the path of another January release about modern warfare, “American Sniper.” Made for about $40 million, “Sniper” opened widely last January and reached $350 million in domestic box office, becoming the highest-grossing war movie of all time and the biggest-grossing January movie ever.

The Obama administration appears surprised by the sudden eruption of Saudi-Iranian hostility after the Saudi government executed Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr and the Iranians responded by organizing/sponsoring/approving an attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Both sides have walked the rhetoric back just a bit in the last day or two.

The U.S. administration remonstrated both sides, but its most public worry appears to be that events would get in the way of brokering a peace agreement in Syria. State Department Spokesman John Kirby said, “What we want to see is tensions caused by these executions reduced, diplomatic relations restored, so that the leadership in the region can focus on other pressing issues… We have consistently urged everyone to deescalate tensions.”

“The secretary is very concerned with the direction this thing is going,” said another one senior official. “It’s very unsettling to him that so many nations are choosing not to engage. With so much turmoil in the region, the last thing we need is for people not to be having conversations.”

A former Obama White House Middle East adviser told Al-Monitor. “To the degree that people hopefully wanted to see the Vienna process succeed, it required that Iran and Saudi Arabia be willing to sit at the same table and talk about a cease-fire and political process… Our approach to the region has depended on a Saudi-Iran modus vivendi. That is all blown out of the water, at least for now.”

It is now so easy for the Republicans to blame Clinton and Obama for North Korea’s nuke rattling, and while they certainly deserve plenty of blame, George Bush(2) and his Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice should also share the blame. This is a column written by Rice, who was as deluded as Madeleine Halfbright in facing down the nasty Papa King.

Diplomacy Is Working on North Korea By Condoleezza Rice June 2008
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121443815539505367
North Korea will soon make a declaration of its nuclear programs, facilities and materials. This is an important, if initial, step and we will demand that it be verifiable as complete and accurate.

Amidst all the focus on our diplomatic tactics, it is important to keep two broader points in mind. One, we are learning more about Pyongyang’s nuclear efforts through the six-party framework than we otherwise would be. And two, this policy is our best option to achieve the strategic goal of verifiably eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons and programs.

North Korea now faces a clear choice about its future. If it chooses confrontation ; violating international law, pursuing nuclear weapons, and threatening the region ; it will face serious consequences not only from the United States, but also from Japan, South Korea, China and Russia, as it did in 2006 after testing a nuclear device.

If, however, North Korea chooses cooperation ; by fulfilling its pledge from the September 2005 Joint Statement to “abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs”; a path is open for it to achieve the better and more secure relationship it says it wants with the international community. That includes the U.S. We have no permanent enemies.

Any effort to denuclearize the Korean peninsula must contend with the fact that North Korea is the most secretive and opaque regime on the planet. Our intelligence is far from complete. Despite these inherent limitations, consider what we have achieved and learned thus far through the six-party framework, and how much more could still be possible.

North Korea is now disabling its plutonium production facility at Yongbyon ; not freezing it, as before, but disabling it for the purpose of abandonment. U.S. inspectors are monitoring this process on the ground.

In its declaration, North Korea will state how much plutonium it possesses. We will not accept that statement on faith. We will insist on verification. North Korea has already turned over nearly 19,000 pages of production records from its Yongbyon reactor and associated facilities. With additional information we expect to receive; access to other documents, relevant sites, key personnel and the reactor itself – these records will help to verify the accuracy and completeness of Pyongyang’s declaration. North Korea’s plutonium program has been by far its largest nuclear effort over many decades, and we believe our policy could verifiably get the regime out of the plutonium-making business.

Getting a handle on North Korea’s uranium-enrichment program is harder, because we simply do not know its full scale or what it yielded. And yet, because of our current policy, we now know more about North Korea’s uranium-enrichment efforts than before, and we are learning more still ; much of it troubling. North Korea acknowledges our concerns about its uranium-enrichment program, and we will insist on getting to the bottom of this issue.

Last fall, American pop culture celebrated “Back to the Future Day” — marking the date, 10/21/2015, to which Marty McFly leaps forward from the Reagan ’80s in Back to the Future Part II.

It was a slightly daft commemoration of a pleasant but hardly memorable sequel, and it felt almost like a way for people not to come to grips with the most striking thing about Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary: that we’re now as far from the Reagan 1980s as the teenage Marty was from his parents’ 1950s, and yet the gulf of years separating us from 1985 feels far narrower than the distance from the Eisenhower era that the original film used to such great effect.

The power of the first Back to the Future depended not just on an arbitrary 30-year period, that is, but on how radically America had changed across those decades: Marty’s adolescence and his parents’ courtship lay on opposite sides of (among many other things) rock ’n’ roll, civil rights, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, drug culture, the moon landing, feminism, the apocalyptic ’70s, and, finally, the conservative turn that made this magazine’s 30th anniversary a happy one.

Whereas if you remade Back to the Future now and sent Martina McFly back to ’85, you would have a lot of jokes about life without the iPhone, some shocking shoulder pads, and some sort of “comic” critique of Reagan-era unenlightenment on same-sex marriage. But you wouldn’t have the sense of visiting a past that’s actually another country.

Since National Review spans the same 60 years as the McFly-family saga, Back to the Future offers a useful prism through which to view our situation as the magazine turns (a youthful) 60. For NR’s first 30 years, the history that William F. Buckley Jr. wanted to stand athwart often proceeded at a breakneck pace. But during its second 30, and especially since Communism’s fall, there has been a general slowing, a sense of drift and repetition, a feeling that American society is somehow stuck in place.

‘Things change fast in Benghazi,” we are told near the opening of Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, and the dynamism with which the film presents the events of September 11, 2012, makes the quote ring true.

As the film starts, we land with former SEAL turned private-security-officer Jack Silva (The Office’s John Krasinski) in the middle of a post-Qaddafi Libyan hellscape. Benghazi is dominated by local security forces and militias indistinguishable from one another that can and will switch sides on the turn of a dime. We are reminded constantly that everyone is a bad guy “until they’re not.”

As anyone familiar with the Benghazi attack will know, a disaster is looming for the security contractors and their CIA liaisons on the ground. Only our own State Department remained seemingly unaware of the cauldron of tribal extremism that Benghazi had become — as the film shows, Foggy Bottom had all but abandoned or disavowed knowledge of the CIA outpost in the city. “We have no f***ing support,” one of the few U.S. security personnel on the ground declares as he attempts to talk his way past a militia roadblock.

That doesn’t stop Ambassador Chris Stevens from giving the CIA station chief (played by David Costabile) and Global Response Staff (GRS) forces led by “Rone” (The Departed’s James Badge Dale in a long-overdue leading tough-guy role) a hopeful pep talk about the future of Benghazi and Libya in general. Stevens is an idealist and an optimist, a “true believer” as he’s described during security prep for his arrival on Monday September 10, 2012. What Silva finds is a heavily under-equipped consulate with an under-prepared security detail, “Real dot gov s***,” he laments.

When the assault on Stevens’s compound starts just after sundown on September 11, (and notably, without the film’s showing protests) we are thrown suddenly into the middle of the chaos, with the “Ambo” (as the ex-special forces agents refer to Stevens), Foreign Service officer Sean Smith (Christopher Dingli), and the security personnel at the consulate hunkering down and begging for backup. As the first wave of the attack roars by, Bay is at his kinetic best, like an anxious kid with his hand on the detonator.

Changes of administrations usually mark dicey times in American foreign policy. But transitional hazards will never be greater than in 2016.

Over a span of just a few months in mid 1945, new president Harry Truman lost all trust in Soviet Union strongman Josef Stalin — in a way that Truman’s predecessor, the ailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never had during nearly four years of World War II.

Ensuing American foreign policy jerked from a pragmatic Lend-Lease alliance with a duplicitous Communist superpower to a tense Cold War.

President John F. Kennedy was young, idealistic, cocky — and without the military reputation of his predecessor, the much more experienced former general Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon after JFK’s inauguration in 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev predictably began testing Kennedy’s mettle as commander-in-chief, from Berlin to Cuba.

Kennedy’s eventual restoration of American deterrence during the Cuban blockade marked the scariest phase in Cold War history.

By 1980, as lame duck Jimmy Carter neared the end of his first and only term, the Russians had sought to absorb Afghanistan. Communist insurrections kept spreading in Central America. China went into Vietnam. The new theocracy in Iran still held American diplomats and employees hostages.

Most aggressors had logically accelerated their risk-taking before the newly elected, mostly unknown (but volatile-sounding) Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

Beneath the Treasury building in London is a large underground bunker fortified with over 9ft. of reinforced concrete holding the Cabinet War Rooms used by Winston Churchill and his Cabinet during the Blitz and throughout the duration of World War II. It is now a museum, but in its day it was the nerve center for operations against the Axis powers and the location where Churchill spent many arduous nights and from which he made many of his wartime speeches becoming the world’s symbol of resistance to Nazi tyranny.

Now framed and on prominent display is the letter written to Churchill by FDR in his own hand in January of 1941 quoting a verse from Longfellow’s poem, “The Building of the Ship”. It reads:

Dear Churchill

Wendell Willkie will give you this — He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.

I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us:

‘Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.’

As ever yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It has been seven long years since Barack Obama scrambled into the imperial box and it is impossible to read Longfellow’s lines without thinking of how they apply to America today due not only to Obama’s tragically flawed stewardship based on his devotion to the cultural Marxism of Saul ‘Red’ Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals but also due to the strong sentimental attachment to the Islam of his youth which, disastrously for the security of our republic, still exerts a domineering influence in a nostalgic chamber of his mind.

The arrival of The Big Short in theaters a few weeks ago has reignited interest in the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. If you believe that the crisis was caused by greed and recklessness on Wall Street then you’ll like this film. Paul Krugman, writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times, liked it immensely, apparently thinking a Hollywood version of reality was fact.

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/wall_street_financial_district_bull_market_2020_500x293.jpg
Twenty20 License

We can all agree that the financial crisis was caused by a “mortgage meltdown” mostly among subprime and other risky mortgages. What neither this film nor the greed narrative tells us, is why there were so many of these mortgages in the financial system to begin with. The answer: Sorry Dr. Krugman, it was not Wall Street.

In June 2008, just before the crisis, more than half of all US mortgages—31 million loans—were subprime or otherwise risky. Of these, 76 percent were on the books of government agencies, primarily the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This shows, without question, that the government—a sophisticated buyer—created the demand for these deficient loans.

The remaining 24 percent of these loans were on the books of private sector entities, such as banks, investment banks, insurers, and investment funds of all kinds.

Because of their government backing, Fannie and Freddie were the dominant players in the US mortgage market, and had been for more than a quarter century. They did not make loans themselves, but acquired mortgages from banks and other lenders. These were held in their portfolios or sold off to investors with a GSE guarantee.