RUTHFULLY YOURS

“If Mr. Obama left office today he’d leave the relationships with America’s three most important partners worse than when he found them; and relations with one of Washington’s erstwhile adversaries – Iran — better.”

Life’s about learning, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young famously sang. And it may well be that in the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama is finally learning that imperfect partners in the Middle East are better than no partners at all, particularly for a president disinclined to invest in a large U.S. presence in the region.

None of this means that relations with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel will fundamentally improve before 2017 — too many divergent interests preclude that. But recent U.S. efforts suggest that Mr. Obama may at least want to stabilize them. With the Middle East a mess, he can’t afford to hand to his successor three relationships in crisis.

Mr. Obama’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia – his fourth since taking office (he’s visited Israel and Egypt only once) reflects the continued importance of the Kingdom in U.S. foreign policy, however strained the relationship has become. Declining dependence on Arab hydrocarbons, differences over Iran and Syria, and the famously missing 28 pages in the 2002 Congressional report that might contain damning information on official Saudi knowledge or role in 9/11 have injected tension into the relationship. Still, the president’s visit wasn’t a disaster and led to new areas of cooperation between the U.S. and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Mr. Obama is likely to hand over to his successor a U.S.-Saudi relationship that, while still fraught with significant divides, is functional and working to the advantage of both.

Wait till Putin gets going on the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Since one tribe of cavemen began to observe another, it’s been the norm for one tribe or nation to covertly gather information on another. We live in the age of spy satellites and the interception of telephone, email and social media conversations. But these are (unless Hillary Clinton has access to them) kept secret both from our adversaries and the public.

It’s very rare for a new window on our adversaries to open to the public. For years, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has been giving us a view into the otherwise unavailable, untranslated media of the Arab world and Iran. Its translations of newspaper articles, speeches by nations’ leaders — and in the case of many Islamic nations, their terrorist proxies — has been an enormous gift to journalists who take the trouble to avail themselves of them.

Thanks to MEMRI, we have been able to read and research materials that told us, for example, that while Yassir Arafat was preaching peace to the United Nations, he was also, at home, shouting in Arabic that Arabs would go to Jerusalem as “martyrs by the millions.” We knew that Iran’s ayatollahs demanding that crowds chant “death to America” wasn’t like Americans singing “take me out to the ballgame,” it was a religious statement demanded of their people. The vast majority of the source material of my book In the Words of Our Enemiescame from MEMRI.

Now, our friends at MEMRI have opened another window, this time on Vladimir Putin’s Russia through MEMRI’s “Russian Media Studies Project.” Like MEMRI’s studies of Middle Eastern media, MEMRI-Russia provides a lot more than propaganda published at home to the Russian people. It gives considerable insight into what Russian leaders are arguing to each other and to the Russian oligarchy.

Deployments of U.S. forces continues despite the claims of drawdown and withdrawal. The numbers may be on the decline and the use of Special Forces may be on the rise, but the issue that is emerging is why are our military forces in harms way at all. From Rand Paul to Barack Obama, from Donald Trump to Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, many are asking a fundamental question: What is the benefit to the United States of overseas deployments? It was once a question easily addressed within the context of the Cold War. But at a time when there is a quagmire in the Middle East and modest European expenditures for self-defense, the question emerging directly, and often inadvertently, is why the U.S. is burdened with defending the civilization. Why is President Obama now sending an additional 250 troops into Syria?

Isolationists from Robert Taft to Charles Lindbergh have asked the question and their answer came in Nazi jack booted invasions across Europe and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Today the threat is more complicated and subtle. It does not necessarily rely on nation states. There is also a backdrop of weapons of mass destruction. And much of the enemy’s imperial drive is promoted through religious prescriptions. Hence conventional war may have its place, but it is not likely to be dispositive.

Moreover, the internationalists are also in an odd position. Former Vice President Cheney said we should clean out the “swamp” to prevent attacks here in the United States. The problem, of course, is that attacks have already occurred, “sleepers” are probably in our midst and whatever we do in the Middle East may not forestall future violence at home. The threat has metastasized making it far more difficult to confront. It is also a threat that manifests itself on and off the battlefield. Radicalization of individuals is often as notable a challenge as those firing AK47s.

What has emerged is a void, a giant whole in the foreign policy apparatus. Military officials deploy their troops efficiently and effectively, but they are not engaged in the making of policy. Policy is in the realm of an uninvited guest at a dinner party.

In March, the State Department quietly released records relevant to the Obama administration’s response to the September 11, 2012, Benghazi terrorist attack. Included are transcripts of the telephone call then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had on September 12, only hours after the attack ended, with then-Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Kandil. As explained by Judicial Watch, whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the “most transparent administration in history” forced the belated disclosure, Mrs. Clinton flatly told Mr. Kandil, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack – not a protest.”

Kandil responded, “You’re not kidding. Based on the information we saw today, we believe the group that claimed responsibility for this is affiliated with al-Qaeda.”

Of course, “the film” Clinton was referring to was “Innocence of Muslims,” an obscure anti-Islamic video trailer that she, President Obama, and the administration tirelessly blamed for the attacks despite – let’s quote Clinton again – “know[ing] the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film.”

The al-Qaeda affiliated group to which the Egyptian prime minister referred as having claimed responsibility was Ansar al-Sharia. (On ties between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaeda, and between al Qaeda affiliates and Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the only suspect charged in the Benghazi attack, see Tom Joscelyn’s Long War Journal reports, here and here.) The fact that a jihadist organization tied to al-Qaeda had carried out the attack, in which jihadists killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans working at U.S. government facilities (the purpose of which has still not been adequately explained), was also well known to Clinton from the earliest hours of the siege – while she and the Obama administration were publicly blaming the video.