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Unable to Be Straight With Himself – Or the American People
President Obama underplays American concessions and overplays Iranian commitments in the nuclear talks.
The Associated Press
A captive of his own illusions
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman March 6, 2015 | 1:15 p.m. EST + More
In the confrontation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, we are seeing the consequences of the long game Obama initiated right in his inauguration six years ago: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he declared, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” A regime might well be tyrannous and murderous, as Iran had been since the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, but the better angels of human nature might reassert themselves if embraced in a web of cooperation. It was a big bet, given the history of Iran where the very word ‘democracy’ was not used in Khomeini’s regime, with many hundreds executed and thousands targeted for assassination in other countries. And the new Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had maintained that monstrous program for a time, even doubling the rewards for assassinations. He interpreted Obama’s gesture as a weakness. Six months later, he was brutal in his suppression of the Green Revolution. He was confirmed in his evaluation when the Obama administration failed to do more than whimper. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he now regrets their restraint; they were advised by the CIA and the State Department that too powerful an American voice might enable the regime to label the protesters as American puppets. Maybe so, but the inertia was also an expression of the new strategy of conciliation. Gates says the suppression of the Green Revolution ended “most support inside the administration.” What it didn’t end was Obama’s infatuation with his illusion of making Iran safe for democracy.
Khamenei’s appreciation of U.S. restraint was another bout of fist-clenching, albeit in secrecy. `Only later did we discover that he had built an underground bunker at Fordow for the enrichment of uranium, in violation of the agreements under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. For a moment there, it seemed as if Obama would follow the angry French lead and react forcefully. Khamenei adroitly forestalled punishment by a sudden bout of reasonableness. He agreed that the Iranians would ship their stockpiles of low-grade fissile material to Russia in exchange for fuel rods for energy. This played brilliantly to the Obama strategy. He resisted the congressional hawks who hadn’t imbibed the Kool-Aid. Doubting Thomases, they thought Iran could not be trusted so by 99 votes to zero enacted the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act. Once the focus on this initial crisis was diverted, Khamenei reneged on the deal. Only recently the Iranians insisted that the transfer the world thought was happening is not. Iran has held on to its uranium, a failure that ought to have reaped headlines, but hasn’t: For the media, the Netanyahu vs. Obama show is more fun.
Obama was not deflected from his strategy by Iran’s second thought. Indeed, his attachment to it was one of the reasons he finally retreated from the red line he had drawn in Syria. The CIA had drawn up a plan to equip Syrian rebels in Jordan and provide assistance once they were back in Syria. Obama stopped it – not because he’d gone soft on Bashar Assad. It was because he was still soft on Iran, Assad’s main benefactor. Subsequently Obama opened a secret bilateral channel to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s regime, according to Mosaic’s Michael Doran. Major concessions were offered on sanctions and permitting the Iranians to continue enriching uranium to levels of 5 percent. Six U.N. Security Council resolutions had ordered Iran to cease all enrichment and reprocessing. Iran demanded the right to enrich. In effect, Obama was prepared to end the economic sanctions on Iran entirely and allow the Iranians to enrich uranium in perpetuity, Doran wrote.
In this Friday, Feb. 3, 2012 file photo released by an official website of the Iranian supreme leader's office, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the worshippers, in front of a portrait of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, before he delivers his Friday prayers sermon, at the Tehran University campus, Iran. Iran's supreme leader Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013 strongly rejected proposals for direct talks with United States, apparently quashing suggestions for a breakthrough dialogue on the nuclear standoff and potentially other issues.
Obama can't continue to coddle Iran.
Obama is such a captive of his own illusions about Iran that he has been unable to be straight with the American people. In reporting belatedly on the November 2013 interim agreement, he boasted it had “halted” Iran’s nuclear program. In fact, major American concessions were traded for Iranian gestures of temporary restraint, concessions that will likely never be reversed. Instead of halting the Iranian program, the agreement froze only American actions. Iranian nuclear engineers continued their work to improve the efficiency of their centrifuges and to master the use of more effective centrifuges.
No nuclear plant is being dismantled. Here, too, the administration has misled the public by underplaying the American concessions and overplaying the Iranian commitment. The Iranian foreign minister blew a hole in the smooth talk by defying an interviewer on television to find a single word in the agreement that even closely resembled dismantling or could be defined as dismantling in the entire text. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani went further. Iran had refused to destroy centrifuges, he said, and would never destroy them under any circumstances, contrary to the implicit suggestion by the administration that the final agreement would force the Iranians to dismantle some 15,000 centrifuges.
Obama thought he was offering a strategic accommodation with the U.S., but Khamenei is betting that Obama will accommodate Iran even if it pursues an industrial-scale nuclear program. Remarkably, Obama retreated even further in agreeing Iran could have $700 million a month in revenues reportedly allowing Iran to retain in one form or another its facilities in Natanz, Fordow and Arak, sites that Iran built in flagrant violation of the non-proliferation treaty, wrote Doran. Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s preeminent Middle East peace envoy, is scathing in his condemnation of the president’s ongoing concessions to the Iranians.
Editorial cartoon on Obama
The people most affected by Obama’s zeal for a strategic grand bargain with Iran see through all this. Netanyahu’s Hail Mary pass before Congress was a devastating indictment boldly delivered. Obama’s successive appeasements, he said, had added up to paving the way to an Iranian bomb (and the unregulated missiles they’re building, too).
And again if Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it behave like one. It trains and arms terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah. Khamenei’s idea of moderation is to channel Pol Pot. In a recent post, he says he doesn’t mean Israel should be annihilated by a bomb but simply abolished as a country inhabited by people there before 1948. Oh, and yes, give weapons to Palestinians on the West Bank. Presumably not to be policemen, but to simply eradicate Jews who don’t want to leave.
None of the Sunni powers in the region see American outreach to Tehran as good news, particularly since Obama has given Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq over the last three years. Obama has allowed Iranian troops to dig on the border of Israel and the border of Jordan. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the U.S. to destroy Iran’s program and thereby “cut off the head of the snake in the Middle East.”
A proposed 10-year ban on Iran’s nuclear work won’t cut off the head. It is too short a time for a transition to a civilized state – and do we really want a nuclear-capable Iran, ever? Not in 10, 20, 100 years. We should abandon the daydream that embracing and enriching Iran will turn it into Switzerland. To date, the efforts to sooth the rogue regime are emboldening it. Iran is thinking like an old-fashioned superpower, yet instead of forcing them to get rid of the Iranian nuclear threat, we’re not even verifying or inspecting it.
The risks of letting Iran get to the one-year threshold of being a nuclear power are too great, given how much religion and ideology dominate their thinking. Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations describes a 10-year timeframe as a “catastrophic mistake”.
Anyway, let’s not get hung up on 10, 11, 12 – Obama talks of “double digits” at one moment and “10” the next. But do we ever want a nuclear-capable Iran in a country as anti-American as the pronouncements of the Iranian leaders suggest they are? As David Brooks of The New York Times put it, “If the Iranian leaders believe what they say, then United States policy should be exactly the opposite of the one now being pursued. Instead of embracing and enriching Iran, sanctions should be toughened to further isolate and weaken it. Instead of accepting a nuclear capacity, eliminating that capacity should be restored as the centerpiece of American policy.” Iran has taken full control of Syria. Revolutionary Guard commanders have taken charge of the front from the Golan Heights all the way down to Daraa in the south. More than 10,000 Shite volunteers have been flown to Syria to repel the Sunnis. This process of Iran-ization is unfolding just 10 kilometers from Israel’s border. Washington, which seems to want a nuclear agreement at nearly any price, has turned a blind eye and is exploiting America’s lack of familiarity with the region. In effect, it has lent its support in transferring control over Damascus to the Iranians. That puts Israel in much greater danger of another broad Iranian front and will present a new regional reality in the form of Iranian power. It is astounding that a country, Iran, that engages in global terrorism that floods the Middle East with blood and surrounds Israel with terror on three fronts, Lebanon, Gaza and the Golan, be given a tool to threaten the region and to have the capacity to launch an existential threat to Israel. America’s key allies across the Middle East are as upset as Israel over the administration’s pursuit of a nuclear bargain with Iran, for they see an America that is about to abandon its long-standing friends to win the favor of their common foe, which is on a rampage across the region. No wonder in a Fox News poll 84 percent of Americans think allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons in 10 years is a bad idea.
This is a life and death issue for Israel. With just one bomb Iran can do to the Jews in 12 minutes what Adolf Hitler did in 12 years. Jews learned from the Holocaust to take fanatics at their word. Nobel prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s invitation is compelling, “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America.”
The great Greek leader and historian Pericles once warned: “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes.” With memories of another rabid leader many years ago whose name was Hitler, it is natural that Israel would consider a nuclear armed Iran as an existential threat. This is a nation, perhaps the only nation, that has been constantly threatened with extinction. Israel is not the enemy. Iran is, especially if it is a nuclear-armed Iran. We should not abandon an ally in the hopes of appeasing an enemy.
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/ ... ar-program
Unable to Be Straight With Himself – Or the American People
President Obama underplays American concessions and overplays Iranian commitments in the nuclear talks.
The Associated Press
A captive of his own illusions
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman March 6, 2015 | 1:15 p.m. EST + More
In the confrontation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, we are seeing the consequences of the long game Obama initiated right in his inauguration six years ago: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he declared, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” A regime might well be tyrannous and murderous, as Iran had been since the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, but the better angels of human nature might reassert themselves if embraced in a web of cooperation. It was a big bet, given the history of Iran where the very word ‘democracy’ was not used in Khomeini’s regime, with many hundreds executed and thousands targeted for assassination in other countries. And the new Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had maintained that monstrous program for a time, even doubling the rewards for assassinations. He interpreted Obama’s gesture as a weakness. Six months later, he was brutal in his suppression of the Green Revolution. He was confirmed in his evaluation when the Obama administration failed to do more than whimper. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said he now regrets their restraint; they were advised by the CIA and the State Department that too powerful an American voice might enable the regime to label the protesters as American puppets. Maybe so, but the inertia was also an expression of the new strategy of conciliation. Gates says the suppression of the Green Revolution ended “most support inside the administration.” What it didn’t end was Obama’s infatuation with his illusion of making Iran safe for democracy.
Khamenei’s appreciation of U.S. restraint was another bout of fist-clenching, albeit in secrecy. `Only later did we discover that he had built an underground bunker at Fordow for the enrichment of uranium, in violation of the agreements under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. For a moment there, it seemed as if Obama would follow the angry French lead and react forcefully. Khamenei adroitly forestalled punishment by a sudden bout of reasonableness. He agreed that the Iranians would ship their stockpiles of low-grade fissile material to Russia in exchange for fuel rods for energy. This played brilliantly to the Obama strategy. He resisted the congressional hawks who hadn’t imbibed the Kool-Aid. Doubting Thomases, they thought Iran could not be trusted so by 99 votes to zero enacted the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act. Once the focus on this initial crisis was diverted, Khamenei reneged on the deal. Only recently the Iranians insisted that the transfer the world thought was happening is not. Iran has held on to its uranium, a failure that ought to have reaped headlines, but hasn’t: For the media, the Netanyahu vs. Obama show is more fun.
Obama was not deflected from his strategy by Iran’s second thought. Indeed, his attachment to it was one of the reasons he finally retreated from the red line he had drawn in Syria. The CIA had drawn up a plan to equip Syrian rebels in Jordan and provide assistance once they were back in Syria. Obama stopped it – not because he’d gone soft on Bashar Assad. It was because he was still soft on Iran, Assad’s main benefactor. Subsequently Obama opened a secret bilateral channel to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s regime, according to Mosaic’s Michael Doran. Major concessions were offered on sanctions and permitting the Iranians to continue enriching uranium to levels of 5 percent. Six U.N. Security Council resolutions had ordered Iran to cease all enrichment and reprocessing. Iran demanded the right to enrich. In effect, Obama was prepared to end the economic sanctions on Iran entirely and allow the Iranians to enrich uranium in perpetuity, Doran wrote.
In this Friday, Feb. 3, 2012 file photo released by an official website of the Iranian supreme leader's office, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves to the worshippers, in front of a portrait of the late revolutionary founder Ayatollah Khomeini, before he delivers his Friday prayers sermon, at the Tehran University campus, Iran. Iran's supreme leader Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013 strongly rejected proposals for direct talks with United States, apparently quashing suggestions for a breakthrough dialogue on the nuclear standoff and potentially other issues.
Obama can't continue to coddle Iran.
Obama is such a captive of his own illusions about Iran that he has been unable to be straight with the American people. In reporting belatedly on the November 2013 interim agreement, he boasted it had “halted” Iran’s nuclear program. In fact, major American concessions were traded for Iranian gestures of temporary restraint, concessions that will likely never be reversed. Instead of halting the Iranian program, the agreement froze only American actions. Iranian nuclear engineers continued their work to improve the efficiency of their centrifuges and to master the use of more effective centrifuges.
No nuclear plant is being dismantled. Here, too, the administration has misled the public by underplaying the American concessions and overplaying the Iranian commitment. The Iranian foreign minister blew a hole in the smooth talk by defying an interviewer on television to find a single word in the agreement that even closely resembled dismantling or could be defined as dismantling in the entire text. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani went further. Iran had refused to destroy centrifuges, he said, and would never destroy them under any circumstances, contrary to the implicit suggestion by the administration that the final agreement would force the Iranians to dismantle some 15,000 centrifuges.
Obama thought he was offering a strategic accommodation with the U.S., but Khamenei is betting that Obama will accommodate Iran even if it pursues an industrial-scale nuclear program. Remarkably, Obama retreated even further in agreeing Iran could have $700 million a month in revenues reportedly allowing Iran to retain in one form or another its facilities in Natanz, Fordow and Arak, sites that Iran built in flagrant violation of the non-proliferation treaty, wrote Doran. Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s preeminent Middle East peace envoy, is scathing in his condemnation of the president’s ongoing concessions to the Iranians.
Editorial cartoon on Obama
The people most affected by Obama’s zeal for a strategic grand bargain with Iran see through all this. Netanyahu’s Hail Mary pass before Congress was a devastating indictment boldly delivered. Obama’s successive appeasements, he said, had added up to paving the way to an Iranian bomb (and the unregulated missiles they’re building, too).
And again if Iran wants to be treated like a normal country, let it behave like one. It trains and arms terrorists in Hamas and Hezbollah. Khamenei’s idea of moderation is to channel Pol Pot. In a recent post, he says he doesn’t mean Israel should be annihilated by a bomb but simply abolished as a country inhabited by people there before 1948. Oh, and yes, give weapons to Palestinians on the West Bank. Presumably not to be policemen, but to simply eradicate Jews who don’t want to leave.
None of the Sunni powers in the region see American outreach to Tehran as good news, particularly since Obama has given Iran a free hand in Syria and Iraq over the last three years. Obama has allowed Iranian troops to dig on the border of Israel and the border of Jordan. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the U.S. to destroy Iran’s program and thereby “cut off the head of the snake in the Middle East.”
A proposed 10-year ban on Iran’s nuclear work won’t cut off the head. It is too short a time for a transition to a civilized state – and do we really want a nuclear-capable Iran, ever? Not in 10, 20, 100 years. We should abandon the daydream that embracing and enriching Iran will turn it into Switzerland. To date, the efforts to sooth the rogue regime are emboldening it. Iran is thinking like an old-fashioned superpower, yet instead of forcing them to get rid of the Iranian nuclear threat, we’re not even verifying or inspecting it.
The risks of letting Iran get to the one-year threshold of being a nuclear power are too great, given how much religion and ideology dominate their thinking. Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations describes a 10-year timeframe as a “catastrophic mistake”.
Anyway, let’s not get hung up on 10, 11, 12 – Obama talks of “double digits” at one moment and “10” the next. But do we ever want a nuclear-capable Iran in a country as anti-American as the pronouncements of the Iranian leaders suggest they are? As David Brooks of The New York Times put it, “If the Iranian leaders believe what they say, then United States policy should be exactly the opposite of the one now being pursued. Instead of embracing and enriching Iran, sanctions should be toughened to further isolate and weaken it. Instead of accepting a nuclear capacity, eliminating that capacity should be restored as the centerpiece of American policy.” Iran has taken full control of Syria. Revolutionary Guard commanders have taken charge of the front from the Golan Heights all the way down to Daraa in the south. More than 10,000 Shite volunteers have been flown to Syria to repel the Sunnis. This process of Iran-ization is unfolding just 10 kilometers from Israel’s border. Washington, which seems to want a nuclear agreement at nearly any price, has turned a blind eye and is exploiting America’s lack of familiarity with the region. In effect, it has lent its support in transferring control over Damascus to the Iranians. That puts Israel in much greater danger of another broad Iranian front and will present a new regional reality in the form of Iranian power. It is astounding that a country, Iran, that engages in global terrorism that floods the Middle East with blood and surrounds Israel with terror on three fronts, Lebanon, Gaza and the Golan, be given a tool to threaten the region and to have the capacity to launch an existential threat to Israel. America’s key allies across the Middle East are as upset as Israel over the administration’s pursuit of a nuclear bargain with Iran, for they see an America that is about to abandon its long-standing friends to win the favor of their common foe, which is on a rampage across the region. No wonder in a Fox News poll 84 percent of Americans think allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons in 10 years is a bad idea.
This is a life and death issue for Israel. With just one bomb Iran can do to the Jews in 12 minutes what Adolf Hitler did in 12 years. Jews learned from the Holocaust to take fanatics at their word. Nobel prize laureate Elie Wiesel’s invitation is compelling, “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America.”
The great Greek leader and historian Pericles once warned: “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes.” With memories of another rabid leader many years ago whose name was Hitler, it is natural that Israel would consider a nuclear armed Iran as an existential threat. This is a nation, perhaps the only nation, that has been constantly threatened with extinction. Israel is not the enemy. Iran is, especially if it is a nuclear-armed Iran. We should not abandon an ally in the hopes of appeasing an enemy.
://.soundclick/band/page_music.cfm?bandID=178805
Google You tube Slacker G Guitar skills (1&2)
The same spirit that ruled over Hitler is headed our way.
Let those with ears to hear understand.
Google You tube Slacker G Guitar skills (1&2)
The same spirit that ruled over Hitler is headed our way.
Let those with ears to hear understand.
