Legacy or Bust: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Dec. 17, 2015 — Last Saturday, Barack Obama gained the second jewel in his foreign policy triple crown: the Paris climate accord.
Israel, Beware of Obama’s Ominous Plans: Gideon Israel, American Thinker, Dec. 2, 2015— After the last meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, some thought that finally after, seven weary years, they had found common ground.
Liberal Sanctimony: William Kristol, Weekly Standard, Nov. 30, 2015— It would be an interesting exercise to trace the history of the word sanctimony.
Obama, the President Who Lost His Voice: Richard Cohen, Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2015 — The presidency has changed Barack Obama.
Mele Kalik-Baracka: Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 23, 2015
Obama's Middle East Delusions: Efraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly, Winter, 2016
Iran Gets All Benefits of Nuclear Deal Without Doing Anything: Amir Taheri, New York Post, Dec. 20, 2015
Democrats Don't Know the Islamic State: A.J. Caschetta, Washington Examiner, Dec. 28, 2015
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Dec. 17, 2015
Last Saturday, Barack Obama gained the second jewel in his foreign policy triple crown: the Paris climate accord. It follows his Iran nuclear deal and awaits but the closing of Guantanamo to complete his glittering legacy. To be sure, Obama will not be submitting the climate agreement for Senate ratification. It would have no chance of passing — as with the Iranian nuclear deal, also never submitted for the Senate ratification Obama knew he’d never get. And if he does close Guantanamo, it will be in defiance of overwhelming bipartisan congressional opposition.
You see, visionary thinkers like Obama cannot be bound by normal constitutional strictures. Indeed, the very unpopularity of his most cherished diplomatic goals is proof of their prophetic farsightedness. Yet the climate deal brought back from Paris by Secretary of State John Kerry turns out to be no deal at all. It is, instead, a series of carbon-reducing promises made individually and unilaterally by the world’s nations.
No enforcement, no sanctions, nothing legally binding. No matter, explained Kerry on “Fox News Sunday”: “This mandatory reporting requirement . . . is a serious form of enforcement, if you will, of compliance, but there is no penalty for it, obviously.” If you think that’s gibberish, you’re not alone. Retired NASA scientist James Hansen, America’s leading carbon abolitionist, indelicately called the whole deal “bulls—.”
He’s right. The great Paris achievement is supposed to be global “transparency.” But what can that possibly amount to when you can’t even trust the reporting? Three months ago, the world’s greatest carbon emitter, China, admitted to having underreported its burning of coal by 14 percent (later recalculated to 17 percent), a staggering error (assuming it wasn’t a deliberate deception) equal to the entire coal consumption of Germany.
I’m a climate-change agnostic. But I’m realistic enough to welcome prudent hedging against a possible worst-case scenario. I’ve long advocated for a multilateral agreement (unilateral U.S. actions being climatically useless and economically suicidal) negotiated with the most important players — say, India, China and the European Union — containing real limits, real numbers and real enforcement. That would be a genuine achievement.
What the climate-change conference produced instead was hot air, applauded by 196 well-fed participants. (Fourteen nights in Paris, after all.) China promises to begin reducing carbon emissions 15 years from now. India announced it will be tripling its coal-fired electricity capacity by 2030. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is effectively dismantling America’s entire coal industry.
Looking for guidance on how the U.S. will fare under this new environmental regime? Take a glance at Obama’s other great triumph, the Iran nuclear accord. Does the American public know that the Iranian parliament has never approved it? And that the Iranian president has never signed it? Iran is not legally bound to anything. As the State Department freely admitted (in a letter to Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) of the House Intelligence Committee), the deal “is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document.” But don’t worry. Its success “will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures” and our “capacity to reimpose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments.”
And how is that going? On Nov. 21, Iran conducted its second test of a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in direct contravention of two U.N. Security Council prohibitions, including one that incorporates the current nuclear agreement — which bans such tests for eight years. Our response? After Iran’s first illegal launch in October, the administration did nothing. A few words at the United Nations. Weren’t we repeatedly assured that any Iranian violation would be met with vigorous action? No worry, again. As U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power told a congressional hearing last week, “discussions are a form of U.N. action.” The heart sinks.
It was obvious from the very beginning that the whole administration promise of “snapback” sanctions was a farce. The Iranians knew it. Hence their contempt for even the prospect of American pushback: two illegal missile launches conducted ostentatiously even before sanctions are lifted and before they receive their $150 billion in unfrozen assets early next year.
Why not? They know Obama will ignore, downplay and explain away any violation, lest it jeopardize his transformative foreign policy legacy. It’s a legacy of fictional agreements. The proliferators and the polluters are not bound. By our own volition, we are. Only Guantanamo remains. Within a month, one-sixth of the remaining prisoners will be released. Obama will not be denied.
ISRAEL, BEWARE OF OBAMA’S OMINOUS PLANS
Gideon Israel
American Thinker, Dec. 2, 2015
After the last meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, some thought that finally after, seven weary years, they had found common ground. Their meeting focused on working to limit Iranian influence in the region; discussing a new 10-year $50 billion U.S. aid package to Israel, unprecedented in terms of average yearly aid; and Obama conceded that a peace deal with the Palestinians is not on the horizon. A few days later, Jonathan Pollard, after 30 long years, was released from prison, something Netanyahu attempted unsuccessfully with former U.S. presidents. Thus, despite stark differences on the Iranian deal, the peace process, and overall views on foreign policy, some think that relations between the two leaders will finally improve. Yet, with all these positive developments, the only words that are sufficient to explain this situation is: Israel Beware.
Israel must beware because these gestures and statements by the Obama administration are calculated, hold a high price tag, and their purpose is to numb the prime minister, the Israelis, and their supporters in the U.S. It is to create the impression that everything is fine, the worst is behind us and now we can continue as friends with common goals. But Obama and his clever political team are not finished with Israel, and they have ominous plans for the future. Israel must understand that, like it or not, barring some major event, a Palestinian state will be declared and accepted by the UN Security Council before Obama finishes his presidency. The Hill reported that according to the administration’s rulemaking schedule for 2016, Obama is not slowing down on any of his goals. Though not included in The Hill’s report, a Palestinian state has been an important goal for Obama since the beginning of his presidency, and he has made the case for it numerous times.
For example, last year, the Times of Israel quoted senior White House official, Philip Gordon, saying that Israel “should not take for granted the opportunity to negotiate” with a reliable partner like Abbas, and continued occupation is a recipe for resentment, instability, and extremism. A few months ago, the Washington Post quoted Obama asking his audience to internalize the hopelessness the Palestinians find themselves in; and the LA Times quoted Obama in that interview saying we need actions, not words, to restore a hopeful situation for the Palestinians. The current rhetoric by the administration – that a peace process “isn’t in the cards” — is something that Aaron Miller, a veteran State Department official who worked on the peace process for more than two decades, has called ‘unprecedented’ and wonders if it was an ‘honest admission’ of a failed goal or if there is a ‘peace process surprise for 2016’.
Barack Obama ran for president, as he said himself, to fundamentally change America, and this goal continues to be central to his presidency. Obama’s view of what America should be and its place among the nations is fundamentally different from the average American. His support for a Palestinian state has nothing to do with Netanyahu, occupation or the Palestinian people, rather it is in sync with his anti-colonialist worldview which pervades his policy — from removing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, renaming a mountain in Alaska named after President McKinley to Denali, and allowing the mullahs to brutally subdue a legitimate uprising in Iran. In Obama’s worldview, Israel is a colonialist outpost in the Middle East, as delineated in his Cairo speech, and a manifestation of American power and influence which needs to be cut down to size.
Since President Obama aspires to fundamentally change America, in the last year of his presidency, his ideology and goals will shift into full gear as much as possible using executive orders, borrowing power, and other actions which allow him to implement policy without permission from Congress. Unfortunately, many commentators criticize Obama’s policies as inconsistent, naïve, or ill-fated. However, they fail to realize the deep ideological divide between most Americans and the president; and mistakenly think that they share the same goals and objectives as the president, but disagree on the tactics.
Yet, in America, support for Israel is broad, and the overwhelming majority of Americans believe either that there should not be a Palestinian state, or that it should only be established through a peace agreement with Israel. Obama does not need anyone’s consent in order to instruct his UN ambassador to support a Palestinian state proposal at the Security Council, but at the same time he has no reason to anger many Democrats by shoving this decision down their throat when there is another way. Obama, the master of rhetoric and expert in framing the narrative, need not use force; and he will succeed in convincing many that this is not only the correct decision, but the inevitable decision.
First, Obama will frame the concept using rhetoric which places his solution as the only logical alternative, as he has done on other issues. He will say: Some believe that we should force Israel to return to 1967 borders and force Israel to allow all Palestinian refugees to return to Israel, and others believe that we should allow the conflict and cycle of violence to continue while we just stand back and do nothing. I believe we need to find a middle ground and allow the Palestinians to have a state while not compromising on Israel’s security or its democratic fabric. His supporting arguments will claim that just about the whole world agrees that a Palestinian state needs to be established next to Israel, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has repeated this since 2009, and he takes the prime minister at his word. The dispute is only regarding the borders.
A Palestinian state, Obama will continue, is in everyone’s best interest. It is in Israel’s best interest since the Palestinians, being a stateless people, have been a source of tension between Israel and other Arab nations which will subside after the establishment of a Palestinian state. In supporting a Palestinian state, the U.S. will be eliminating an issue that generates anti-Americanism, extremism, and is a point of tension with its allies in the Middle East, which hinders cooperation on various issues.
Furthermore, he will proclaim that Israel needs to be strong as it faces new security threats across the region and the Palestinian issue cannot be hanging over its head, threatening the democratic fabric of the country and preventing cooperation between Israel and its Middle East neighbors. Obama will restate his commitment to Israel’s security more than any other president mentioning the $50 billion aid package, continuing to develop the Iron Dome, continuing joint exercises, and selling advanced weapons that Israel’s friend, George W. Bush, refused to sell. He will credit himself with the Pollard release and remind everyone that the two-state solution was George W. Bush’s idea and vision, so he is not creating a new idea here. Having a Palestinian state will also place responsibility on the Palestinians and their leadership. They will no longer have any excuses for terrorist attacks or supporting terror, and we will hold them accountable. He will finish by saying that running away from important decisions is un-American, and that a Palestine state is in line with American values and tradition, especially that set out by President Woodrow Wilson.
This argument sounds forceful, yet is filled with many flaws and half truths. Some of them being that this president has used aid, weapons sales, and other security measures to flaunt his support for Israel while damaging Israel in the diplomatic arena, making sure that they have no legitimacy to use the weapons. He has pledged that America ‘has Israel’s back’ on Iran, while simultaneously thwarting any Israeli attack on Iran either through leaks or outright threats, and in general has presented Israel as a liability for the U.S. However, Obama’s case for a Palestinian state will be enough to disarm well intentioned Democrats and citizens alike who are generally supportive of Israel and believe that a Palestinian State should only be established through negotiations.
The last year of Obama’s presidency will be an all-out offensive to implement his ideology through his policies and Israel will not be spared. Therefore, Israel must beware, a Palestinian state is on the horizon, and if a counterplan is not devised, we will all be witness to a terrorist organization receiving a state without even making one concession, being facilitated by the enlightened Western world.
William Kristol
Weekly Standard, Nov. 30, 2015
It would be an interesting exercise to trace the history of the word sanctimony. In its original derivation from the Latin sanctimonia, it seems to have had the straightforward sense of sanctity or sacredness. But centuries ago, it took on its current meaning—of pretended or affected or hypocritical holiness. Already in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Lucio remarks on “the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out of the table”—i.e., that thou shalt not steal. So we’ve been well aware of sanctimony since before the Puritans arrived in the New World. And it didn’t take the exposés of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 19th century or Sinclair Lewis in the 20th to convince ordinary Americans to be on their guard against those who indulge in it, whether in the pulpit or the public square.
One might think that sanctimony would have gone into remission in our supposed age of sophisticated irony. Yet it thrives. Perhaps 21st century liberal sanctimony is a particularly hardy and virulent strain of sanctimonia. Or perhaps our immune system is weaker than that of previous generations of Americans, owing to our soft and comfortable prosperity. But for whatever reason, liberal sanctimony is going strong.
And liberal sanctimony has its own distinctive character. From Angelo of Measure for Measure to Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, most purveyors of sanctimony know they’re frauds. Some agonize over succumbing to temptation. Others cheerfully feign piety because it is useful to them. But their awareness of what they’re doing makes them interesting characters. What’s amazing about today’s liberal sanctimony is its apparent lack of self-awareness.
Take, for example, our president. His sanctimony seems unalloyed with self-knowledge and untempered by doubt. And so he leaves even hardened observers of the human condition, like the foreign affairs scholar Walter Russell Mead, agape. Mead, by the way, says he voted for Obama in 2008. Here he is this week, writing on Obama’s berating of his countrymen for their hesitation in admitting thousands of immigrants from Syria and its environs: “To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?
“Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time. . . .
“To think that conspicuous moral posturing and holy posing over a symbolic refugee quota could turn President Obama from the goat to the hero of the Syrian crisis is absurd. Wringing your hands while Syria turns into a hell on earth, and then taking a token number of refugees, can be called many things, but decent and wise are not among them. You don’t have to be a xenophobe or a racist or even a Republican to reject this President’s leadership on Syria policy. All you need for that is common sense and a moral compass. . . .
“For no one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama. No one has committed more sins of omission, no one has so ruthlessly sacrificed the well-being of Syria’s people for his own ends, as the man in the White House. In all the world, only President Obama had the ability to do anything significant to prevent this catastrophe; in all the world no one turned his back so coldly and resolutely on the suffering Syrians as the man who sits in the White House today—a man who is now lecturing his fellow citizens on what he insists is their moral inferiority before his own high self-esteem.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
OBAMA, THE PRESIDENT WHO LOST HIS VOICE
Richard Cohen
Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2015
The presidency has changed Barack Obama. His hair has gone gray, which is to be expected, and he looks older, which is also to be expected, but his eloquence has been replaced by petulance and he has lost the power to persuade, which is something of a surprise. You can speculate that if the Obama of today and not Winston Churchill had led Britain in World War II, the Old Vic theater would now be doing “Hamlet” in German.
The president has lost his voice, that is certain. The numbers say so. Obama has the approval of only 44 percent of the American people. During his time in office, Congress and much of the nation have gone Republican — statehouse after statehouse, governor after governor (soon to be 32) — an astounding feat when you consider that the GOP has become the Know-Nothing Party in all its meanings. It’s not that Obama has lost his gift of eloquence. His problem is that he often has nothing to say. When he does, as after the mass murder in June at a Charleston, S.C., church, he can be moving and eloquent. It is on foreign policy particularly where he goes empty and cold. His policy, after all, is to avoid yet another Middle East quagmire. It entails the ringing call to do as little as possible.
Obama’s self-inflicted predicament was apparent in the statement he issued following the Paris terrorist attacks. Unlike many other mass killings, this one was broadcast in real time — unfolding on TV as it happened. It left the United States both shaken and horrified. Yet Obama spoke coldly, by rote — saying all the right things in the manner of a minister presiding at the funeral of a perfect stranger. The president is capable of better, and indeed, after some criticism, he eventually did better. But he is a cautious man who fears his rhetoric running away from him. This happened once before, when he issued his “red line” warning to Syria — and then, upon consideration, said never mind. The result has been a foreign policy debacle in which the measure of Obama has been taken. He’s been bullied off the playground.
Obama’s dilemma is not just that he cannot find the words to articulate his policy. He cannot stick to his policy either. His initial reluctance to act in Libya faded when Moammar Gaddafi threatened to massacre his opposition and the French took the lead. His determination to stay out of Iraq collided with the threatened genocide of the Yazidis. Iraq fell apart, the Islamic State seemed to come out of nowhere. Americans were beheaded. Women were enslaved. No boots on the ground became some boots on the ground — and then some more and then some of them helped the Kurds and mixed it up with the Islamic State. Reality rebuts policy, which unravels by degree.
George W. Bush’s Iraq war was a lesson to us all. But from the start of the Syrian crisis, no one sane was proposing doing it all over again. Instead, the proposal was to intervene early and attempt to avoid the bloodbath and humanitarian calamity that have resulted. The idea was to do more than simply tell Bashar al-Assad to return to practicing ophthalmology in London and for the United States and its allies to take some action — such as grounding Assad’s helicopters. And when it came to the Islamic State, the proposal was to do more than make some initially inadequate bombing runs, but put spotters on the ground and train anti-Assad fighters who had a stake in the fighting. As it was, the United States managed to assemble an army of about half a dozen.
Obama is confined by the prospect of another Iraq. He defends his policy of minimalism with an off-putting petulance: “If folks want to pop off and have opinions . . . .” He talked of seeing at Walter Reed hospital “a 25-year-old kid who’s paralyzed or has lost his limbs. . . . And so I can’t afford to play some of the political games that others may.” Yes, some of the Republican presidential candidates are playing games, but Obama’s critics in think tanks and elsewhere are dead – serious. Besides, life presents mean choices. Limbs were lost in Paris, too…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Mele Kalik-Baracka: Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 23, 2015—Before leaving for his annual Hawaiian Christmas vacation, President Obama found an odd way to wish Americans “Mele Kalikimaka!”
Obama's Middle East Delusions: Efraim Karsh, Middle East Quarterly, Winter, 2016—As the only person to have won the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of sheer hope rather than actual achievement, Barack Hussein Obama could be expected to do everything within his power to vindicate this unprecedented show of trust.
Iran Gets All Benefits of Nuclear Deal Without Doing Anything: Amir Taheri, New York Post, Dec. 20, 2015—Charade has always been part of diplomacy, but it is only now that, thanks to President Obama, it has become its very substance, at least as far as the virtual “nuke deal” with Iran is concerned.
Democrats Don't Know the Islamic State: A.J. Caschetta, Washington Examiner, Dec. 28, 2015—With each new speech they make, the nation's two top Democrats continue to reveal their profound ignorance of what motivates the enemy both promise to defeat.
