RUTHFULLY YOURS

Eight years ago, the late James Schlesinger, who served as CIA Director, Secretary of Energy, and Secretary of Defense, denounced in a Wall Street Journal editorial one of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s most controversial intelligence assessments on Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons as “stupid intelligence.”

In addition to calling this assessment stupid intelligence, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz referred to it in a December 6, 2007 Huffington Post op-ed as “one of the most dangerous, misguided and counterproductive intelligence assessments in history.”

A December 2 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was formally released on December 15, proved Schlesinger and Dershowitz were right.

The Iran intelligence assessment was a national intelligence estimate (NIE) which is supposed to be the U.S. Intelligence Community’s most authoritative analysis of a national security issue. Issued in November 2007, this NIE found that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The IAEA’s new report found that Iran continued its nuclear weapons research at least until 2009.

A December 5, 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial cited an intelligence source who said the NIE’s main authors included three former State Department officials with previous reputations as “hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials:” Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA.

The Obama administration pursued secret communications with elements of Syria’s regime over several years in a failed attempt to limit violence and get President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power, according to U.S. and Arab officials.

Early on, the U.S. looked for cracks in the regime it could exploit to encourage a military coup, but found few.

The efforts reflect how President Barack Obama’s administration has grappled to understand and interact with an opaque Middle East dictatorship run for 45 years by the Assad family.

Unlike the secret White House back channel to Iran, however, the Syria effort never gained momentum and communication was limited. This account is based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including current and former U.S. officials, Arab officials and diplomats. Most of these contacts haven’t been previously reported.

U.S. officials said communications with the regime came in fits and starts and were focused on specific issues. At times, senior officials spoke directly to each other and at others, they sent messages through intermediaries such as Mr. Assad’s main allies Russia and Iran.

Mr. Assad tried at different times to reach out to the administration to say the U.S. should unite with him to fight terrorism.In 2011, as the regime began to crack down on protests and soldiers began to peel away from the army, U.S. intelligence officials identified officers from Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect who potentially could lead a regime change, according to former U.S. officials and current European officials.

As some congressional Democrats fume over the Obama administration’s reticence to confront Iran about its ballistic missile tests — nevermind introduce any real consequences — the Islamic Republic is defiantly expanding its missile programs.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said at a ceremony in northern Iran on Monday that Tehran is not scaling back its program or even keeping production at pre-deal levels.

“We have not halted designing, producing and testing our missiles, (on the contrary) we have even increased our production,” Dehqan said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

The news agency said the defense minister ranked missile production and military upgrades at the top of the country’s agenda “to ensure protection against enemies.”

On Tuesday, the second-highest-ranking commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said that “anti-Iran resolutions” would have no bearing on the IRGC’s determination to increase its “defense and deterrent power.”

President Obama’s foreign policy failures—Iran, Syria, Russia—aren’t accidents. They’re rooted in flawed theories and misguided judgments.

Many thanks to Dennis Ross and Leon Aron for their comments on “Our Man in Moscow.” They’re greatly appreciated.

Dennis Ross is not only an insightful analyst of American foreign policy but a man of affairs with a depth of experience that few can match. In a career that has lasted some four decades, he has advised presidents of both parties, including President Obama. I’m therefore grateful to him for taking the time to respond to my essay, and delighted that he supports my conclusion: namely, that Obama’s approach to the Syrian civil war amounts to a major strategic blunder.

Ross, however, misleads in suggesting that I “should know better” than to explain that strategic blunder as the result of a “conspiracy.” Just to clear the air: I do know better, and I didn’t so explain it. Merriam-Webster defines “conspiracy” as “a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal.” Conspiracies, that is to say, involve both secrecy and collusion. Neither element is critically present in my argument.

President Obama’s final stretch in office — filled, as he promised, with “interesting stuff” — has become an extravaganza of “historic” foreign-policy deals, most of them distinguished for making common cause with despotic regimes that are less than friendly toward the United States:

— The embrace of Cuba.

— The Iran nuclear deal.

— The Paris climate agreement.

— And, enshrined just this past Friday as United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, a grand plan in which, under the United Nations umbrella, the U.S., Russia, Iran and sundry others will all come together to produce peace and democracy by June, 2017, in Syria.

On Friday. Obama congratulated himself for such feats, telling reporters at his end-of-year press conference: “we have shown what is possible when America leads.”

OK, but where is this going? What, precisely, does this brand of leadership make possible?

If we measure success by such UN standards as how many nations have agreed to these deals, Obama can congratulate himself (as he has been doing) on capping his tenure with a bonanza of foreign-policy achievements. Last December, scrapping decades of U.S. policy, he buddied up with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, which got him a historic handshake. This summer, via the long palaver of the P5+1 nuclear talks, he clinched the nuclear deal he had fervently sought with Iran; at U.S. behest this deal was adopted pronto — and unanimously — by the 15-member UN Security Council. On December 12, he got his long-pursued climate deal, the Paris Agreement passed unanimously by more than 190 states. And in the name of ending the havoc in Syria, last Friday he got a UN Security Council resolution which passed — you guessed it — unanimously, decreeing “free and fair elections” in Syria within the next 18 months.

The Obama administration has emphasized that the nuclear deal with Iran was narrowly focused and was not intended to address concerns such as Iran’s support for terrorism or its regional activities. Yet while the U.S. and its allies got a narrow deal, Iran effectively received a far more comprehensive one.

Iran’s actions have made clear that it can be expected, at most, to abide by the letter of the text. As Sen. Bob Corker has noted, since the agreement was signed in July, Iran has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian–who has been in jail for more than a year–and imprisoned another Iranian-American. It has defied United Nations sanctions by exporting arms to Yemen and Syria; by dispatching Gen. Qasem Soleimani, chief of Iran’s elite military Qods Force, and other sanctioned officials to Russia, Iraq, and elsewhere; and by conducting two ballistic missile launches. Iranian hackers have reportedly engaged in cyber attacks on the State Department. Tehran also refused to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear weapons research.

How have the U.S. and its negotiating partners responded to Iran’s actions? Rote condemnation.

Rather than prosecute a genuine War on Terror, our leadership would rather wear a blindfold and play “Pin the tail on the donkey,” the donkey being anything but Islam.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
Page 7, Explanatory Memorandum, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood

I noted in Part I of this review that the “Islamophobia” of Americans is more the enemy recognized by our “defenders” than is the actual enemy, Islam, the enemy that cannot be named. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech, while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines” and the language employed in the War on Terror.

In his magnificent book, The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk cites five cities which have given us our rich heritage and from which we have created an exceptional civilization: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London and Philadelphia. Kirk offers a philosophically panoramic view. From Jerusalem came the order of the soul and leading a purposeful life. From Athens emerged the order of mind and how one ought to live. From Rome came an understanding of personal virtue. From London, our concepts of common law, private property and constitutional order were formulated. And from Philadelphia emerged the protection of individual rights and the understanding of liberty within a framework of law.

Each of these spheres of understanding built on the previous era culminating in a culture called the West. Truths were not invented but discovered over the course of time. And if we are to flourish, we must tend to the roots of these powerful ideas and replenish them.

The Democrats have a plan to crush ISIS. All you have to do is tweet #CrushISIS, make it a trending topic and then ISIS will be crushed. If not, we can always bring back #BringBackOurGirls.

A party that is hesitant to fight ISIS in real life has become a movement of keyboard warriors convinced that the key to defeating the Jihadists lies somewhere in cyberspace.

It doesn’t. The internet is a medium. Dead men can’t tweet. Corpses can’t create hashtags.

But the Democrats are convinced that they can’t defeat ISIS in real life, only on the internet. And they’re probably half-right. They can’t defeat ISIS in real life or on the internet.

Obama told the Pentagon, “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. This broader challenge of countering violent extremism. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

When the USSR wanted excuses for allying with the Nazis, it claimed that an ideology couldn’t be defeated militarily, even though its entire existence was proof otherwise.

As Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov put it, “One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other ideological system; that is a matter of political views. But everybody should understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force, that it cannot be eliminated by war.”