American foreign policy crashes and burns

At the end of a successful negotiation, both sides get something they want. The cave-in to Iran over nuclear weapons is absolute and complete: U.S. Caves to Key Iranian Demands as Nuke Deal Comes Together. What is clear is what Iran gets. What is invisible is what anyone else gets, not the US, not Israel, not the Saudis, not any other nation in the Middle East, not anyone else anywhere that I can see. Basically, Obama said, “stop me if you can”, and it turns out no one could.

The Obama administration is giving in to Iranian demands about the scope of its nuclear program as negotiators work to finalize a framework agreement in the coming days, according to sources familiar with the administration’s position in the negotiations.

U.S. negotiators are said to have given up ground on demands that Iran be forced to disclose the full range of its nuclear activities at the outset of a nuclear deal, a concession experts say would gut the verification the Obama administration has vowed would stand as the crux of a deal with Iran.

Until recently, the Obama administration had maintained that it would guarantee oversight on Tehran’s program well into the future, and that it would take the necessary steps to ensure that oversight would be effective. The issue has now emerged as a key sticking point in the talks.

Concern from sources familiar with U.S. concessions in the talks comes amid reports that Iran could be permitted to continue running nuclear centrifuges at an underground site once suspected of housing illicit activities.

This type of concession would allow Iran to continue work related to its nuclear weapons program, even under the eye of international inspectors. If Iran removes inspectors—as it has in the past—it would be left with a nuclear infrastructure immune from a strike by Western forces.

“Once again, in the face of Iran’s intransigence, the U.S. is leading an effort to cave even more toward Iran—this time by whitewashing Tehran’s decades of lying about nuclear weapons work and current lack of cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy Agency],” said one Western source briefed on the talks but who was not permitted to speak on record.

With the White House pressing to finalize a deal, U.S. diplomats have moved further away from their demands that Iran be subjected to oversight over its nuclear infrastructure.

“Instead of ensuring that Iran answers all the outstanding questions about the past and current military dimensions of their nuclear work in order to obtain sanctions relief, the U.S. is now revising down what they need to do,” said the source. “That is a terrible mistake—if we don’t have a baseline to judge their past work, we can’t tell if they are cheating in the future, and if they won’t answer now, before getting rewarded, why would they come clean in the future?”

The United States is now willing to let Iran keep many of its most controversial military sites closed to inspectors until international sanctions pressure has been lifted, according to sources.

Obama is the international equivalent of the pilot who has crashed the passenger jet into the Alps. Locked into the cockpit at the White House and doing whatever he wants.

WHEN YOU THINK THEY HAVE REACHED THE LOW POINT YOU THEN READ SOMETHING ELSE: This is quite an excellent summary of the unravelling going on in the Middle East: Obama’s Mideast ‘free fall’. It comes with the sub-head, “Mounting chaos in the region puts the administration on the defensive”.

Now the U.S. is in the strange position of fighting ISIL alongside Iran at the same time it backs the Sunni campaign against Iran’s allies in Yemen. . . .

On Thursday, Iran’s foreign minister, who has been meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry in Switzerland to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, demanded an immediate halt to the Yemen incursion.

At the same time, civil war rages on in Syria. On Thursday, Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, sent Obama a letter urging him to respond to charges that the regime of Bashar Assad — a close ally of Tehran — has used chlorine gas against civilians. In late 2013, Obama threatened to punish Assad with airstrikes after his forces deployed nerve gas.

OK, chaotic with the responsibility for most of it the idiocies of the Obama White House. And then the article comes to what it seems to see as upbeat and positive:

The official offered a hopeful note, adding that a nuclear deal with Iran — which some reports say could come as soon as Sunday — could be a turning point for the region.

“The truth is, you can dwell on Yemen, or you can recognize that we’re one agreement away from a game-changing, legacy-setting nuclear accord on Iran that tackles what every one agrees is the biggest threat to the region,” the official said.

There is seemingly no level of stupidity these people are incapable of transcending.

An idiot or pretending to be an idiot

Let me get this right. Obama is in secret negotiations to arrange a deal with Iran to allow it to build nuclear weapons. Iran has said that it seeks to have nuclear weapons so that it can wipe the Jewish State off the map. Israel has been using whatever ports it can to find out what Obama and Iran are up to. Obama is infuriated with Israel because it has been spying.

OK, let’s face it. Obama is either an idiot, or he is pretending to be an idiot. No one in the position that Israel is in would do anything other than stay on top of every manoeuvre now being made by every party in the Middle East.

That the media in the US asks not a question about what is going on is not news. Everything goes on quietly with hardly a murmur while Iran moves closer to nuclear capabilities. It is inexplicable to me. But there it is and it’s not changing soon enough for me.

Iran as understood by Obama as understood by VDH

Here is the conclusion of an article by Victor Davis Hanson on Obama’s Iran strategy which is near enough to my own. Yet once again he won’t say what he obviously thinks, that Obama is an agent for the Iranians and hopes to see them succeed and the West lose. His entire article is as good a short summary as you will find, but this is how it ends. He is explaining how things look from Obama’s perspective:

The Middle East is not a mess, but a place in a needed stage of transition as it frees itself from Western domination and a new order slowly emerges. To the degree that we need a large military, it is preferable to envision it as an executive agency for enacting social change without the clumsy impediment of Congress, especially in terms of race, women’s issues, and gender preferences. It can do the best work for stability abroad by shrinking itself. Terrorism is in the eye of the beholder and always a relative concept that Westerners pathologically insist is absolute. As far as the world abroad goes, China is a more authentic enterprise than Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, which are the products of U.S. Cold War nation-building in our own image, not of indigenous revolutionary self-creation. U.S. Cold War culpability — in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, South America, Cuba — is a burden that must be addressed through various means. The rules of nuclear proliferation are a Western construct. Israel is an abnormality, a Western outpost of capitalism and privilege where it has never really belonged, an irritant that should be treated like any other country as much as politically possible. Latin American grass-roots socialism is not Stalinism, but rather an extension of what Obama is trying to do at home.

I think the world now seems a chaotic place only if you assume that the Obama administration wished to be like its predecessors.

It is a largely politically ignorant constituency fed by a media actively hostile to America’s traditional interests. This is the coming of a dark age.

Iran – what is the Obama end game?

Michael Ledeen poses the question:

Obama entered the White House with the intention of forging an alliance with our most dangerous enemy in the Middle East. That fact has to be the baseline of any serious analysis of our government’s policies.

Which takes us straightaway to the great unanswered question: Why does the president want this alliance?

And his answer, after having watched Obama deal with this issue for six years:

I don’t know.

Well, that’s just great! But you don’t need to know why he is doing something, only that he is. Since there is no longer any doubt about what he is trying to do, my question is, why is no one trying to stop him? My answer to this is the same as his was to the question he asked above:

I don’t know.

As to why he is behaving as he is, I have do have an answer. It is because he hates America. From Thomas Sowell just the other day:

In his recent trip to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”

And as much as he hates his own country, as would be expected of any associate of Bill Ayers, he hates Israel even more. Why that is so hard to understand after the past six years I really truly don’t know.

Obama and Iran

This is an extraordinarily insightful article on Obama’s strategic approach to Iran. I wouldn’t have said he had one at all, but Michael Doran has tied all the strands together in a very compelling narrative, Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy. The lead-in quote sets out what is to come:

The president has long been criticized for his lack of strategic vision. But what if a strategy, centered on Iran, has been in place from the start and consistently followed to this day?

And the opening para sets the scene:

President Barack Obama wishes the Islamic Republic of Iran every success. Its leaders, he explained in a recent interview, stand at a crossroads. They can choose to press ahead with their nuclear program, thereby continuing to flout the will of the international community and further isolate their country; or they can accept limitations on their nuclear ambitions and enter an era of harmonious relations with the rest of the world. “They have a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it,” the president urged—because “if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication . . . inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power.”

That’s the aim, to turn Iran into a regional power in the Middle East. Once you see that, quite a bit of everything else falls into place, except how did he become president in the first place. Well written too, so it is easy to read from start to end.

AND NOW THERE’S THIS: The most dangerous man ever to be president. Obama wants to leave his stamp on history as the greatest strategic genius since, I don’t know, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Report: Secret ‘Talks About Talks’ Taking Place Between U.S. and North Korea, also about nuclear weapons. What a buffoon he is, an absolute buffoon.

“Straight out of Tehran”

Senate DEMOCRAT Blasts Obama Admin For Iran Talking Points “Straight Out Of Tehran” (January 21, 2015). There is a new world dawning, and it is arriving before January 2017. More on Obama and Iran from John Hinderaker at Powerline, where he concludes:

Barack Obama must love State of the Union speeches: once a year, he can describe the world as he wishes it were, and newspapers will report on it as though he were not delusional.

Don’t call me stupid

How do you solve a problem like Obama? He combines that fantastic combination of arrogance, ignorance, laziness and stupidity, and yet with the American institutional respect for the Presidency (at least amongst Republicans) it is hard to get Americans to make personal statements about their head of state. So now the Iranians have done it for us:

President Barack Obama is a “low-IQ US president,” whose threat to launch a military offensive should nuclear talks fail is an oft-cited punchline in the Islamic Republic, particularly among children, an Iranian general said on Tuesday.

“The low-IQ US president and his country’s Secretary of State John Kerry speak of the effectiveness of ‘the US options on the table’ on Iran while this phrase is mocked at and has become a joke among the Iranian nation, especially the children,” General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

You don’t often find me agreeing with Iranian generals. The effect of marijuana on the intelligence of adolescents is well understood and there was the young Barack, member of the “Choom Gang” in his high school days. But it is even potentially worse than that if we come to this editorial in The Washington Post of all places, titled President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy:

FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”

That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.

Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.

This sense that Obama lacks a fixed sense of reality, that he is incapable of dealing with conditions as they are, is also found in an article by Elliot Abrams which is titled, If he believes it, it must be so and subtitled, “Obama’s scary interview”. Here is his summing up of Obama’s thoughts on Iran:

When it comes to Iran, Obama shows an attitude that can only be described as solipsistic: what’s in his mind is reality. And any other reality is just plain silly.

He has his own private reality that is not shared by any of his major advisors. A low-IQ president with a private reality of his own who will not listen to anyone else is not a good bet at making serious decisions.

How can Obama be influenced? At the moment in many cases he is prevented from doing what he might wish to because of constitutional constraints. But how can he actually be influenced? I can only think that that Iranian general might be onto something. Just call him stoopid. Say out loud that what he is doing is stoopid. That he is stoopid. His decisions are stoopid. His policies are stoopid. It’s just a thought but given that other obvious characteristic of the Obama personality, his incredible vanity, it might at least get him to concentrate a bit more on the issues and less on playing golf and shooting hoops. The US is heading for a train wreck, and will take the rest of us with it if he can’t be stopped. If they won’t impeach him, they must find some way to discipline him so that the stated policies of a president of the United States are no longer seen as an international joke.

Where from here?

The new Middle East:

Tehran boasted at home that the accord recognised its ‘right’ to enrich uranium – which it says is for peaceful purposes – but Western leaders said the deal made no such reference.

Hassan Rowhani, whose election as Iran’s president in June raised hopes of a thaw with the West, insisted ‘Iran’s right to uranium enrichment on its soil was accepted in this nuclear deal by world powers’.

But US Secretary of State John Kerry was adamant: ‘This first step does not say that Iran has the right of enrichment, no matter what interpretative comments are made.’

I would say that Obama and Kerry are fools except that this is exactly what they want. The Iranian President is merely letting cats out of bags. No one is in any doubt about the troubles this is intended to cause.

The thing about being on the left when I was young was that there were adults still in charge who took a sober view of our interests and tried to act on them. We could go off to protest but it wouldn’t matter, and we knew it wouldn’t matter, because there were people at the top who paid no attention to us. Now there are no protests and the people at the top, if they are not opposed to our success and our way of life, certainly have an odd way of showing it.

If you are a nation dependent on American support, you would be wise to look for other kinds of friends and alliances. That Israel and Saudi Arabia may now make common cause is one more example of my enemy’s enemy is my friend. All this from Drudge today.

Netanyahu: ‘Historic Mistake’…
Appeasement…
Deal leaves Israel few options…
Obama calls…
BOLTON: Abject Surrender…
Six-Month Freeze, but Enrichment Issues Remain…
Iranians hail ‘smiling’ FM…
A STEP…
GOP sour…
Secret US-Iran talks…
Anger, jitters in Mideast…
Disagreements emerge…
‘Iran got what it wanted’…
Relief sweeps Tehran…
REPORT: Israelis inspect Saudi bases for possible strike…

Where from here? Two out of three of the “axis of evil” to have nuclear weapons. And it is American foreign policy to do nothing to stop it.

UPDATE: I hadn’t seen this but was sent to me by a friend. This is from Obama’s second inaugural:

And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice–not out of mere charity, but because peace in our time requires the constant advance of those principles that our common creed describes: tolerance and opportunity; human dignity and justice.

The phase is possibly not accidental but intended as directly in your eye to everyone who would like to maintain our way if life. But if just there by the force of words and concepts, then in itself in betrays the cast of mind and the personal beliefs that lie behind it. It’s not even si vis pacem, para bellum. The President may himself be a fifth column. We give up our freedoms so that a bunch of layabouts can have free phones.