RUTHFULLY YOURS

But one measure would have.

Critics of President Obama’s recent deal with Iran have rejected the president’s assertion that the only alternative to his deal is war. They think that more aggressive sanctions could have changed Iran’s behavior, given the economic costs the current sanction regime has inflicted. A corollary to this argument assumes that the majority of Iranians are pro-American and sick of the puritanical and corrupt mullahcracy and its willful isolation of the country from the global order. Increase the pressure of sanctions, and this mass of discontent could ripen into regime change or at least a moderation of its behavior.

On the sanctions issue the defenders of the deal have a point. Support for the sanctions has been weakening for a long time, for the simple reason that the member countries of the P5+1 who negotiated the deal are salivating at the chance to profit from the end of sanctions and to access 77 million Iranian customers. Russia wants to sell Iran weapons, China wants to buy its oil, and European countries are already negotiating business deals with Iran. These negotiating “partners”–– except for Germany, all veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council responsible for the sanctions––are loath to maintain, let alone increase them. Nor would unilateral sanctions have much effect. For decades we’ve had restrictions on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with Iran, a ban that did little or nothing to change Iran’s behavior. Going it alone is unlikely to be any more successful.

President Obama thinks he has the U.S. Congress right where he wants it as the Members consider his nuclear deal with Iran. Not only do opponents need a two-thirds majority in both houses to stop it, the President has maneuvered to box them in by having the United Nations approve it first.

That’s the meaning of Monday’s unanimous vote by the U.N. Security Council approving the deal less than a week after negotiations were completed. The various ambassadors blessed the agreement with much self-congratulation but no debate on the substance. The only discouraging word came from Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, who doesn’t sit on the council but pointed out that the deal had achieved the impossible of uniting Israel and the Arab world in opposition.

If Donald Trump weren’t a clown, he’d apologize for saying that John McCain isn’t a war hero.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a long-abiding dislike for McCain. It’s not just that he’s tied with Joe Biden for getting the most things wrong on foreign policy and defense for the past four decades. It’s not just that his politics are abhorrent to conservatives, which McCain proved for all time in 2007 when the Bush-McCain-Kennedy amnesty for illegal aliens bill was his highest priority.

It’s not even his comprehensive arrogance, which helped sink his amateur hour (e.g., Sarah Palin) presidential campaign. It’s the fact that the Republicans can never have sensible defense and foreign policies as long as he’s the chief architect of the Party’s positions. He needs to be retired, and quickly.

Shortly after the UN Security Council (UNSC) unanimously endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the P5+1, on July 20, 2015, Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement reiterating that “the country’s ballistic missile program and capability… fall outside the scope and the jurisdiction of the UNSC resolution and its annexes. Thus it remains untouched and unrestricted by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231.” This was backed up by Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan, who said “Missile-related issues have never been on agenda of the nuclear talks and the Islamic system will resolutely implement its programs in this field.”

The purport of the July 20 Security Council resolution is to override the six UN regulations put in place since 2006 that pronounce Iranian bomb-making immediately illegal and include in four of them sanctions unless and until Iran ceased the development of its nuclear program and stop its terrorist activities.

Last October police in Lima found detonators and TNT in the home of a Hezbollah operative.
In the foreword to the 2014 book “Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America,” former Colombian Defense Minister Marta Lucía Ramírez wrote that Venezuela’s “ ‘axis of unity’ with Iran embodies Latin America’s growing distance” from the U.S. “This is not to distract from the many conflicts the U.S. is engaging in the Middle East or elsewhere,” she noted. But she wanted “to remind our northern neighbors of the kind of disengagement in Latin America that led to a nuclear standoff in 1962.”

Blowing up the Middle East in order to save it—that’s the logic at work.

The Iran deal is supposed to prevent a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East. So what better way to get that ball of hopefulness rolling than by arming our regional allies to the teeth?

“The U.S. is specifically looking at ways to expedite arms transfers to Arab states in the Persian Gulf and is accelerating plans for them to develop an integrated regional ballistic missile defense capability,” the Journal’s Carol Lee and Gordon Lubold reported Monday. The goal, they add, is to prevent the Saudis “from trying to match Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Let’s follow this logic. If the Iran deal is as fail-safe as President Obama claims, why not prove it by giving the Saudis exactly the same nuclear rights that Iran is now to enjoy? Why race to prevent an ally from developing a capability we have just ceded to an enemy? What’s the point of providing the Saudis with defense capabilities they presumably don’t need?

One year before World War Two broke out, members of the British Parliament, save for a tiny few, were cheering Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who had returned from Germany triumphantly proclaiming, “Peace in our Time,” while holding a forlorn and fluttering piece of paper with Adolf Hitler’s name on it.

One man rose in that once august chamber. Turning to face the Prime Minister, who still believed in the spurious terms of the Munich Agreement, he thundered these words:

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor, you chose dishonor and will have war.” That man was Winston S. Churchill.

The Second World War broke out on September 3rd, 1939 and Hitler’s signature on that fluttering piece of paper was proven to be as worthless as all such words uttered by tyrants and despots ever are. Untold millions thus perished needlessly in that most terrible war.

Gerald Walpin is a New York Attorney, formerly a federal Inspector General, nominated by President G.W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate, and is author of The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution (Significance Press 2013).

Chief Justice Roberts’ recent words for a unanimous bench reflect his Court’s protective regard for free speech rights: “the guiding First Amendment principle [is] that the ‘government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content’.”

Yet, a report card for the Roberts Court’s eleven years would reflect only a B+ grade for adhering to that standard: enforced in most, but not all, cases.

This is a crisis that came and went in a wink within twenty-four hours. If you blinked, you missed it.

On July 19th Daniel Greenfield on FrontPage ran a story about Amazon wanting an author to remove his book from its sales platform, with its cover featuring the Confederate battle flag, “I never thought any of my books would be on the banned book list.” Michael Dreese has written several books about the Civil War, and especially about the Battle of Gettysburg, apparently from both sides of that watershed conflict. The book, This Flag Never Goes Down: 40 Stories of Confederate Battle Flags and Color-Bearers at Gettysburg, published by Thomas Publications in 2004, has been up on the Amazon platform for at least eleven years. It has an Amazon best-seller ranking, as of this writing, of 17,006.

Now, I have very, very few bones to pick with Daniel Greenfield. In this instance, I think he erred on the side of enthusiasm in his article. It looked like “censorship.” He jumped the gun. He is probably about as ambivalent about the Confederate battle flag as I am about it and also the Roman Eagle carried by Rome’s armies. They’re old symbols and their time and governments are long past. He wrote:

The rally taking place in New York City’s Times Square on Wednesday, July 22, is being called ‘the Civil Rights fight for American Jewry,’ by at least one of the organizers.

Thousands are expected to show up to hear the more than a dozen headliners explain in detail why the nuclear program deal agreed to by the P5+1, led by the U.S. negotiators, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is a dangerously bad one that must be stopped. Buses are bringing people in from Philadelphia and Delaware, and people from as far away as Chicago have committed to coming.
The NYC rally to stop the Iran deal is still necessary despite the UN Security Council vote because American sanctions can still do severe damage to a transgressing Iran.