RUTHFULLY YOURS

Think of a mistake that we made in international affairs. At the time that we were making it, a phalanx of foreign policy experts was standing behind it. It might be a lonely orphan idea today, but last year you could have thrown a rock at a roomful of PhDs without hitting a single person who disagreed with it.

When the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt were in their heyday, I had trouble finding any foreign policy people who would even entertain the idea that we should continue backing Mubarak. Back then the revolution seemed inevitable. But I correctly predicted Islamist takeovers and counterrevolutions that would topple them because I didn’t see international relations through the lens of a grand theory.

Scott Walker’s claim that foreign policy is about leadership, not expertise, is being mocked now by media types who were relentlessly regurgitating all the expert truisms about the Arab Spring. But he’s right. Foreign policy expertise does not translate into foreign affairs competence. Leadership does.

http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2015/03/01/wapo-walker-hit-piece/
Scott Walker Accurately Remembers History, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! Ed Driscoll

Another day, another hit piece on Walker, this time from Philip Rucker of the Washington Post. (Link safe; goes to Hot Air; I’m not rewarding attack articles with extra traffic):

Walker responded by ticking through his recent itinerary of face time with foreign policy luminaries: a breakfast with Henry Kissinger, a huddle with George P. Shultz and tutorials at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution.

But then Walker suggested that didn’t much matter.

“I think foreign policy is something that’s not just about having a PhD or talking to PhD’s,” he said. “It’s about leadership.”

Lately liberalism has gone from psychodrama to farce.

Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Suddenly we are in a surreal world where off-the-record slurs from the administration against Benjamin Netanyahu as a coward and chickensh-t have gone to full-fledged attacks from John Kerry and Susan Rice, to efforts of former Obama political operatives to defeat the Israeli prime minister at the polls, to concessions to Iran and to indifference about the attacks on Jews in Paris. Who would have believed that Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel? What started out six years as pressure on Israel to dismantle so-called settlements has ended up with a full-fledged vendetta [1] against a foreign head of state.

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to a political grafter [2]. She apparently solicited donations from foreign government officials and wealthy foreign nationals to contribute to the Clinton Foundation — and this was while she was secretary of State conducting the foreign policy of the United States. If those charges are proven accurate, how could she ever be trusted to become commander in chief? Unfortunately, in the last year almost every cause that Hillary Clinton has taken up has been belied by her own actions.

It seems hyperbolic to say that Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran — if Ayatollah Khamenei, in his “wisdom,” allows it to happen — will be the worst deal ever made. But if what we have been learning about it is true, it almost certainly will be.

To begin with, the agreement is said to have a sunset clause of 10-15 years. Whatever the number turns out to be, that tells us that Iran is free to do anything it wants in the nuclear weapons field after a set amount of time, assuming that it hadn’t disobeyed the strictures of the agreement before then — a monumental assumption given past history. (Ironically, in this one way Iran is not unlike other states, all of which, to my knowledge, do their best to hide their nuclear programs, including the U.S.)

The idea — if it can be called that — behind this sunset clause is a kind of bet that Iran will turn into a normal country during the time frame, abjuring the fanatical religious doctrines (global war bringing about the twelfth Imam/Mahdi, etc.) inherent in Khomeinist Shiism that would make allowing Iran the bomb equivalent to giving a loaded gun to a two year old, only with global implications. Of course the more modern view of the world is true for many Iranians now, but will it be true in the future for all or even most? Who will be in power? The ayatollahs — almost all, from what we know, true believers in this apocalyptic ideology or willing to pretend they are — seem to have a stranglehold for now. And what about the Revolutionary Guard, evidently a universe unto itself in Iran, with expansionist goals that already have been largely successful across the Middle East through Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and now into Yemen?

The administration has decided to send two officials to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy ‎conference this week.

One is Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, ‎who once called for a U.N. military operation to drive Israel out of the West Bank. ‎The other is Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser. Rice is best ‎known for lying on five Sunday network news shows in the same morning about ‎who was responsible for the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, blaming it on ‎a video no one in the region had seen. This lie was needed to preserve the ‎mythology of the Barack Obama re-election campaign, that al-Qaida was defeated and on ‎the run. Rice, ever the loyal trooper (a good explanation, really the only one, for ‎her continual advancement up the ranks), made her contribution to ‎the current impasse between Israel and the United States this week by blasting the ‎government of Israel, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be a ‎‎”destructive force” in U.S. Israel relations. As Jennifer Rubin has accurately ‎described it, sending Rice to AIPAC is sticking a finger in AIPAC’s eye.‎

Why are tens of thousands of young Muslims leaving the safety of their homes to join Islamic State and wage jihad in Iraq and Syria? We’ve heard any number of excuses, including the view that it’s a result of poverty, a lack of educational opportunity and the absence of participatory government. But it’s hard to beat the explanations now offered for Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John” for his videotaped beheadings of Western captives.
The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, now in his mid-20s, grew up in London and attended the University of Westminster. As early as 2009 British authorities suspected him of attempting to wage jihad abroad. In a 2009 email exchange with Cage, a U.K. advocacy outfit that campaigns against “state policies developed as part of the War on Terror,” Emwazi complained of rough treatment he allegedly received at the hand of interrogators from MI5, Britain’s domestic-security agency.

Boris Nemtsov threw his big body, big voice and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia.

Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in the middle of Moscow on Friday night. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin ’s deputy prime minister. Photos showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation to come.

Vladimir Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting that the Russian president’s enemies are murdering one another to bring shame upon the shameless. He then brazenly sent his condolences to Boris’s mother, who had often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/26/former-sen-coburn-joins-american-transparency-to-open-govt-books/

Former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who highlighted wasteful government spending throughout his career, is joining the activist group American Transparency as its Honorary Chairman.

“Open the Books is doing the work I envisioned when the Coburn-Obama transparency bill became law,” Coburn says in a statement. “Their work is so important because so few groups – or elected officials – do it, and fewer do it well.”

Coburn’s landmark legislation, the “Google Your Government Act,” co-sponsored by then-Sen. Barack Obama, forced public disclosure of almost all federal government spending. American Transparency’s “Open The Books” project extends this idea through a searchable public database of nearly all federal and state government spending.

The database, which can be accessed through a mobile App, documents “all disclosed federal spending- contracts, loans, grants, farm subsidies, direct payments, insurance payments, salaries and bonuses since the year 2000.” It includes spending from 48 of 50 states and more than 500,000 local units of government.

“During my service I saw how small reforms, and discoveries, can generate huge savings and create greater opportunity and freedom for all Americans,” Coburn said. “I’m encouraged that Open the Books is accepting this challenge.”

The Open the Books project has documented potentially fraudulent farm subsidy payments and Small Business Administration loans.

“At OpenTheBooks.com, we are committed to carrying forward Coburn’s robust legacy,” said Adam Andrzejewski, Chair of American Transparency. “We deeply appreciate Dr. Coburn’s courage, principles and national leadership and are extremely privileged to have him as our Honorary Chairman.”

Did Putin order Boris Nemtsov’s murder? That question risks missing the point. The Russian state is a collection of financial, political and security interests that will do whatever it takes to protect their position. Instilling fear does not require an order from the top.

So, “Will no-one rid me of this troublesome priest”? Or, “Blow his brains out!” We will probably never know what kind of chain of command was at work in Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin concerning the assassination of former Deputy Prime Minister and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov.

But we do know this. If you take on the Russian state in any meaningful way you must reckon with three potential outcomes: prison, exile, or death.

The most famous political prisoner of the Putin era was of course Mikhail Khodorkovsky who spent years in a labour camp on essentially trumped up charges for using his vast wealth — he was once Russia’s richest man — to threaten an alternative to the Putin regime. It is easy to forget that he was once regarded as a potential Russian president.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/01/30/senator-tom-cotton-r-arkansas-as-iranian-nuclear-talks-drag-on-congress-must-act/

Two essential requirements: congressional approval of any deal and new sanctions if the negotiations fail.

Anuclear-capable Iran is the gravest threat facing America today. The Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, the so-called P5+1 talks, were supposed to stop Iran’s rush to a nuclear bomb. Regrettably, what began as an unwise gamble has descended into a dangerous series of unending concessions, which is why the time has come for Congress to act.

Our negotiating “partner,” Iran, is not a rational or peaceful actor; it is a radical, Islamist tyranny whose constitution explicitly calls for jihad. Iran’s ayatollahs have honored the call: Iran has been killing Americans for more than three decades.