RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Or maybe we won’t be lucky. Maybe there’s no special providence for nations drunk on hope, led by fools.”

In formal rhetoric, prolepsis means the anticipation of possible objections to an argument for the sake of answering them. So let’s be proleptic about the Iranian nuclear deal, whose apologists are already trotting out excuses for this historic diplomatic debacle.

The heroic case. Sure, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is an irascible and violent revolutionary bent on imposing a dark ideology on his people and his neighborhood. Much the same could be said of Mao Zedong when Henry Kissinger paid him a visit in 1971—a diplomatic gamble that paid spectacular dividends as China became a de facto U.S. ally in the Cold War and opened up to the world under Deng Xiaoping.

President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

WASHINGTON—With the signing of a historic agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, President Barack Obama has effectively shredded the foreign-policy playbook that had guided the U.S. on the world stage for decades.

Now comes another hard part.

He must turn to selling the deal to a skeptical Congress, and to managing relationships in a volatile Middle East, where the notion of an emboldened Iran has rattled longtime U.S. allies, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Some of the core milestones for the implementation of the agreement, sealed in Vienna on Tuesday, will overlap with the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, the one that will choose Mr. Obama’s successor, ensnaring them in an unpredictable political dynamic. And after more than three decades of hostility and mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, American officials are uncertain how compliant Tehran will be over the deal’s time frame.

Desire for agreement “stronger than anything else,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says.

TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the agreement between Iran and six world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program is a “historic mistake.”

“Wide-ranging concessions were made in all of the areas which should have prevented Iran from getting the ability to arm itself with a nuclear weapon,’’ Mr. Netanyahu said. “The desire to sign an agreement was stronger than everything else.”

The comment reflects the Israeli leader’s long-standing public criticism of the U.S. and European negotiators in the talks with Iran.

Would a true Islamic state respect universal human rights? Pakistani-British Anglican Bishop Michael Nazi-Ali would like to believe so – but history has cautioned him otherwise. His presentation “Freedom and a Culture of Intolerance: Will Religious Minorities Survive in the Middle East?” at the Washington, D.C. Heritage Foundation grimly determined that there is precious little evidence of tolerance in the global Islamic faith.

To begin his foray into the exploration of Islamic prejudice, Nazir-Ali explained how much a recent visit to northern Iraq opened his eyes to the pervasiveness of religious intolerance. The “radically disordered society” of Iraq is home to political parties that represent only the sectarian interests of the country’s ethnic and religious groups. In the bishop’s opinion, to continue on as a unitary state, Iraq must seek the “confederal future” of its Shiite and Sunni Arab and Kurdish regions.

The latest United Nations indictment by its so-called Human Rights Council of the Israeli Defense Force for its self-defense in the summer 2014 should not surprise. The record of the United Nations on the world’s only Jewish state, expressed in simple numbers, convicts the UN itself of suffering from a serious obsession with that tiny country.

In 1991, following the Gulf War, known in Israel as the “Scud War,” this writer was hired by the Office of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to do a statistical analysis of voting patterns at the UN some of whose discoveries were jaw-dropping.

The vast preponderance of recent news coverage on Donald Trump has been on his remarks about Mexican illegal aliens, but he also made statements on outsourcing jobs, saying that if he were president, those U.S. automakers who move their manufacturing facilities south of the border would be slapped with a 35 percent tariff on every vehicle they imported into the U.S.

But in my view, the best way to prevent manufacturing jobs from going elsewhere is not to build a tariff fence around the United States. The best way is to examine the forces that make it so much cheaper to manufacture elsewhere. Its not just labor costs. Germany has higher labor costs than we do, but a 2011 Time Magazine article says this:

One of the miracles of the nation of Israel is that Jews from all over the world, with different mentalities and cultures, arrived to the nation state of the Jewish people, Israel, unified and created a modern Jewish-Israeli culture.

Bashert is a word in Yiddish, its meaning destiny, fate. There are times in life when something happened and one can only relate to it as bashert. My meeting Vanessa Paloma Elbaz at a fundraising event in Los Angeles was simply bashert.

What fascinated me about Vanessa is the project she took upon herself to accomplish. She is documenting the Moroccan-Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) music, Haketia*, which is part of the big story about the Moroccan ancient Jewish community colorful and rich history and culture.

July 11, 2015 The following is a faux memo, although its contents are based upon my interviews with people close to Hillary Clinton, including some I’ve known since my years covering the Clintons in Arkansas. These sources spoke on condition of anonymity because attempts to make their case directly to the Democratic front-runner and her campaign team were icily received. Like my December 2013 memo titled “You’re the Problem,” this represents their point of view.

To: Hillary

From: A few of us

Subject: We love you, but you’re still the problem

The last time we wrote as a group, you were deciding whether to run for president. Conventional wisdom pegged you as a dead-certain candidate; we knew better. We knew you were worn from a lifetime of service, personal tension, and the getting-vaster Right Wing Conspiracy. We knew you truly wanted to devote the rest of your years to charity and Charlotte. We also knew you wanted to be president—and we’re not embarrassed to say we thought you’d be a good one.

We had qualms. To review, we warned that an American public buffeted by socioeconomic change has lost faith in Washington, the U.S. political system, and virtually every social institution. We said that would be a particular problem for you in 2016, because you are viewed as a creature of Washington, a calculating politician, and an institution (“not just because of your age,” we wrote, “The Clinton family itself is an institution, one freighted with baggage.”)

People ask me if I ever lack ideas for opinion pieces. Au contraire: Like a Malibu firefighter encircled by blazing brush, I can’t decide where to aim my hose. I spent most of Wednesday trying to pick which of that day’s Obama-fueled infernos to douse.

I awoke to the news that Obama has fallen way behind on his promise to train moderate Syrians to fight ISIS. After budgeting some $500 million to instruct and equip 3,000 anti-ISIS troops by year’s end, Obama, in fact, has unleashed 60 such combatants. That’s 2 percent down, 98 percent to go. But, hey, what’s the rush?

Even before the advent of ISIS, Obama originally touted this effort as a bulwark against the brutality of Bashar Assad, the dictator of Damascus. “We are particularly interested in making sure that we are mobilizing the moderate forces inside of Syria,” Obama declared at a presidential debate on October 22, 2012. Thirty-two months later, Obama’s moderate Syrian force boasts a whopping five dozen members.

Few in the odd coalition of Left and Right pushing for reauthorization of the 81-year-old Export-Import Bank have been louder than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“It’s wrong that candidates for president, who really should know better, are jumping on this bandwagon,” she said at a May 22 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing. . . . The idea that we would remove this relatively small but vital source of funding for our businesses to compete is absolutely backwards.”

Clinton’s defense of Ex-Im may be motivated by more than mere concern for American businesses. Critics have argued that her family’s byzantine network of political and business interests benefits tremendously from the bank’s low-interest loans, and previous investigations have raised questions about the bank’s independence from the Clintons’ political pressure.