RUTHFULLY YOURS

If there is a single element of consistency in President Obama’s foreign policy it is his desire to end and avoid U.S. military engagements. In 2011 he withdrew the final U.S. troops from Iraq. He had planned to do the same in Afghanistan, but on Thursday the President hit the pause button. For now, 9,800 American boots will remain on Afghan soil.

Mr. Obama is to be commended for changing his mind. He has been building a reputation for being impervious to counterargument, and here he listened to his generals.

Senior officers earlier recommended that the U.S. keep up to 20,000 troops in Afghanistan, warning that a lesser number would put the fledgling Afghan army at risk from the Taliban. Those warnings became reality last month when the Taliban overran Kunduz, a major city in northern Afghanistan. With U.S. air support, the Afghans recaptured Kunduz, but Islamist fighters still threaten elsewhere.

In the third century a.d., external pressures from competing powers along the periphery of the empire, along with growing weakness and incoherence within the imperial government, began to undermine the power of Rome. Externally, the Goths, Franks, and Vandals rose and began to roll back the Roman system of governance and trade. Internally, the Senate became impotent and a series of weak emperors led first to the geographic division of the empire and ultimately its demise. The period of history that followed came to be known as the “Dark Ages” and lasted nearly a thousand years, during which human progress was truncated until the emergence of the Enlightenment.

Today, all along the perimeter of the current global system of governance, the combination of external pressures from authoritarian regimes and a series of questionable internal strategic choices have weakened the defenses of the rule of law, individual liberty, and free trade. These actions have allowed Russia to carve out territorial gains in the Crimea and Ukraine, China to assert sovereignty over a vast area of the ocean through the uncontested creation of artificial islands, Iran to inflate an expanding sphere of influence through acts of terrorism in the Middle East, North Korea to gain nuclear weapons, and Cuba to reemerge as a normal nation within the Western hemisphere despite its long and unapologetic support of Communism and terrorist activities.

It works out that US President Barack Obama’s signature diplomatic achievement, his nuclear deal with Iran, has nothing to do with preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or even with placing restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities.

Just weeks after Obama led the international community in concluding the nuclear pact with Iran, the Iranian regime filed a complaint with the UN Security Council accusing the US of committing a material breach of the agreement.

The US action that precipitated the complaint was a statement by White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest claiming that if Iran violates the deal, “the military option would remain on the table.”

In making the statement, Earnest was responding to a hypothetical question regarding what the US would do if the Iranians breached the deal.

Earnest explained that not only would the US then consider attacking Iran’s nuclear installations militarily, but that its “military option would be enhanced because we’d been spending the intervening number of years gathering significantly more detail about Iran’s nuclear program.”

Unexpectedly, The Middle East Meltdown Continues
It turns out, Iran doesn’t seem to be all that interested in promoting a stable order in the Middle East in cooperation with the United States.

Vladmir Putin isn’t challenging U.S. leadership in the Middle East, President Obama declared in an interview with 60 Minutes filmed on October 6 and broadcast on October 11, “and the fact that [Russia and Iran] had to [send troops to Syria] is not an indication of strength, it’s an indication that their strategy did not work.” In a contentious dialogue that drew repeated, incredulous interjections from interviewer Steve Kroft, the President insisted that those both in the Middle East and Republican Party who questioned his approach wanted to commit “several hundred thousand” U.S. combat troops to “police the region”.

The Commander-in-Chief went on to share that he had always been skeptical of U.S.-backed train-and-equip efforts in Syria. The skepticism seems justified, though the President seems unwilling to acknowledge that many of his critics warned him these efforts were likely to fail. In a truly shambolic series of darkly comic failures, President Obama’s initiative budgeted $500 million and fielded a few dozen fighters, most of whom were quickly captured or neutralized.
Is this a sample of the kind of leadership that poor, bumbling President Putin will never understand? In any case, President Obama cited the Paris climate change accords and the international anti-ISIS coalition as examples of the kind of true leadership that Vlad the Imploder cannot match. “Over time, the community of nations will all get rid of [ISIS]”, the U.S. President intoned, and a “transition”, with buy-in from “key players”, could take care of Syria.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-60-minutes-interview-with-an-unserious-president-obama?f=must_reads

President Obama was widely criticized last year after he claimed Russia intervened in Ukraine “not out of strength, but out of weakness” since it was obvious Russian President Putin decided to meddle in Ukraine because he believed President Obama’s weak foreign policy guaranteed that the United States would do nothing to stop him.
Mr. Obama’s claim that Russia meddled in Ukraine out of weakness was ridiculous. The president doubled down on this nonsensical claim in a “60 Minutes” interview with Steve Kroft broadcast on Sunday when he said Putin’s military mission in Syria is a sign of Russia’s weakness, not a show of Putin’s leadership.
It was a painful interview to watch as the leader of the free world spoke about his disastrous foreign policy as if he lived in a fantasy world.

The movie Truth isn’t yet officially out, but it’s been the subject of enough early reviews to establish that it strongly communicates one great and important truth: that if you want to sell a Big Lie that’s been definitely and very publicly exposed as a lie, just wait a decade or so and then make an all-star Hollywood movie presenting that lie as the unvarnished truth. Promote the hell out of it. Then sit back and watch history get rewritten in the mind of a whole new generation.

In 2004, only weeks before the presidential election, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather and 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes served up a report about President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. The claims they made were conceivably explosive enough to lose the election for Bush. But the documents they presented as proof of those claims were obvious forgeries – correspondence supposedly dating from the 1970s but obviously typed on a modern-day computer.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001563.html

I don’t have time to write a longer dispatch today but for those who haven’t seen it, I recommend watching this video of a sermon from four days ago by a leading Imam in Gaza in which he brandishes a knife in the mosque and urges Arabs everywhere to stab Jews.

This is not the kind of reporting you will see on the BBC and other anti-Israel news media.

The sermon is not an isolated incident and similar incitement to kill Jews is appearing in the Western-funded Fatah media and Fatah controlled mosques.