DEMOCRATS AND THE IRAN DEAL

Democrats are critical of the Iran deal but they stand behind the president in this agreement. The next few years will see if their gamble in supporting the president pays off.

Top congressional Democrats have done a great job laying out the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, a Free Beacon SuperCut finds.

These members of Congress explained how Iran will ramp up its campaign of terrorism and Middle East destabilization with funds gained through the nuclear deal. They expressed “concern”—grave concern, even—over key concessions such as the curtailment of inspections on Iran’s military sites, the removal of a ban on arms sales to Iran, and the 15-year sunset clause on restrictions to Iran’s ability to enrich nuclear material.

Still, as other Democrats have unceasingly reminded us, the Iran deal was ultimately an inviolable vote of conscience for each member of Congress.

REPUBLICAN DEBATE, SEPTEMBER 2015

Great lines:

Bobby Jindal:

[Obama] has declared war on trans fats ands a truce with Iran. Think about that. He’s more worried about Twinkies than he is about the ayatollahs having a nuclear weapon.

Fiorina nails Trump:

Fiorina responded to Trump’s attack on her business career by attacking his. She said that Washington politicians had run up huge amounts of debt, and pointed out that Trump had done so in some of his business ventures in Atlantic City, N.J.

“That is precisely the way you ran your companies. You ran up mountains of debt, as well as losses, using other people’s money,” Fiorina said. “Why should we trust you to manage the finances of this nation?”

Rubio:

Obama is "more respectful to the ayatollah of Iran than the prime minister of Israel."

Walker:

We don't need an apprentice in the White House. . .we have one right now.

WHO TO HOLD RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MIDDLE EAST REFUGEE CRISIS

The American Interest.  "Fecklessness 101."  Did the Obama administration miss a chance to solve the Syrian crisis in 2012?

Apparently the Obama administration turned down a Russian offer to dump Assad… because the Administration was sure he was going to fall on his own. The Guardian reports:

[Former Finnish president and Nobel peace prize laureate Martti] Ahtisaari held talks with envoys from the five permanent members of the UN security council in February 2012. He said that during those discussions, the Russian ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, laid out a three-point plan, which included a proposal for Assad to cede power at some point after peace talks had started between the regime and the opposition.But he said that the US, Britain and France were so convinced that the Syrian dictator was about to fall, they ignored the proposal.
Glenn Reynolds.  USA Today.  "The Obama-Hillary Mideast Debacles."

Obama initially called for the removal of Syrian President Bashar Assad, only to back down in the face of opposition from Vladimir Putin. Since then, the United States has postured a bit, but done nothing of consequence. The signal to our enemies: It’s safe to ignore us. The signal to our friends: It’s foolish to rely on us.

Now, as the war in Syria has expanded — with the U.S. arming and supporting various groups that have shown a disturbing tendency to take our guns and then switch sides — refugees are flooding Europe. It is, as Ron Radosh correctly states, Barack Obama’s refugee problem.

This would be bad enough if Syria were the Obama administration’s only foreign policy misstep, but instead it is merely representative of a larger problem. President Obamabragged about Yemen as a showpiece of his administration’s anti-terror program’s success; a few months later, Yemen was taken over by terrorists and now an ugly civil war, featuring Saudi troops, rages there. The administration’s responses, as even the Obama-friendly Vox.com notes, have been ”cringe-worthy.”

THE REFUGEE CRISIS: FAILURE OF EUROPE, ARABS, AND ISLAM

Walter Russell Mead. The Wall Street Journal.  "The Roots of the Migration Crisis."

The Syrian refugee disaster is a result of the Middle East’s failure to grapple with modernity and Europe’s failure to defend its ideals.

What we are witnessing today is a crisis of two civilizations: The Middle East and Europe are both facing deep cultural and political problems that they cannot solve. The intersection of their failures and shortcomings has made this crisis much more destructive and dangerous than it needed to be—and carries with it the risk of more instability and more war in a widening spiral.

The crisis in the Middle East has to do with much more than the breakdown of order in Syria and Libya. It runs deeper than the poisonous sectarian and ethnic hatreds behind the series of wars stretching from Pakistan to North Africa. At bottom, we are witnessing the consequences of a civilization’s failure either to overcome or to accommodate the forces of modernity. One hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and 50 years after the French left Algeria, the Middle East has failed to build economies that allow ordinary people to live with dignity, has failed to build modern political institutions and has failed to carve out the place of honor and respect in world affairs that its peoples seek.

Charles Paul Freund.  Reason.com  "The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis."

"We are a nauseating nation," wrote the Saudi journalist 'Ali Sa'd Al-Moussa in Al-Watan on September 5, in reaction to images of Syrians and other refugees fleeing to Europe. The "nation" he was angrily condemning was not only Saudi Arabia, but the greater Arab world. It is a world, he lamented, "that kills people for their opinions or affiliation. Compare [this] to the parallel image: in the central train station in Munich, dozens of German citizens gather to welcome the first train arriving from Budapest carrying hundreds of immigrants...

"Stop talking about the hypocrisy of [Western] morals and values, because reality exposes nothing but our own ugly countenance."

OBAMA SUPPORTERS

If this is the best Obama supporters can do, the president has a problem!  Surely you would come prepared to say something his administration has accomplished.

ANOTHER 9/11 ATTACK COMING?

Former U.S. intelligence officials are giving the warning. Also an interesting interview with a former intelligence operative.

The United States could be facing another 9/11 attack as factions grow deeper among the Taliban, al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, especially with the recently confirmed death of the Taliban's one-eyed leader Mullah Omar, according to a senior U.S. lawmaker, federal law enforcement and intelligence officials.

The tensions between Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and the Taliban is as dangerous a national security threat to the United States as it was before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, said Brian Fairchild, who spent two decades with the CIA and has testified before Congress on terrorism.

INTELLIGENCE BEING MANIPULATED

The Daily Beast is reporting that fifty intelligence analysts are saying the Obama administration is tinkering with their reports. . .a very serious charge. The Obama administration has been trying to paint a rosy picture, but the intelligence may not support this rosy view.

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned.

The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence.

“The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official said.

Arthur L. Herman in the National Review gives a conservative critique of this report.

Is anyone really surprised by this? Remember all the complaints Democrats made about how the Bush administration manipulated intelligence in order to get us into war with Iraq over non-existent WMD’s? Official investigation after investigation showed they didn’t, but the false claim that “Bush lied and people died’ still haunts the memory of that war–and the sacrifice Americans made fighting and dying in it. 

Now we know why Democrats were so insistent somebody had to be cooking the intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s WMD’s. It’s because that’s what they would have done themselves to fit their policy line. And, the Daily Beast suggests, that’s what they’re doing now, so they can avoid having to make the kind of military commitment we need, in order to eradicate the ISIS plague once and for all.

Update:  9/17/15.  John R. Schindler.  Observer.  "Obama's Messy Iraq Intelligence Scandal."

It’s happening again. A White House fumbling with the violent mess of Iraq finds itself surrounded by mounting accusations that it’s played dirty games with intelligence. A Pentagon facing charges that its analysts have skewed assessments on Iraq to tell top policymakers what they want to hear, rather than what is really happening in that troubled country.

If this sounds terribly familiar, it should. Only a dozen years after the George W. Bush White House was buffeted by allegations that it had “cherry-picked” intelligence to justify its 2003 invasion of Iraq, Barack Obama is facing similar accusations. Intelligence Community analysts alleged that, in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, they were pressured to exaggerate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, analysts claim that they have been pushed to present Obama’s war against the Islamic State as more successful than it really is.

Only the most optimistic Obama backers still portray that year-long air campaign (its proper name is Operation Inherent Resolve) as adequate, and most security experts agree that the Islamic State is winning the war on the ground, thanks in part to an American-led air war that is bombing too little and too cautiously. There is no indication that Western airpower is anywhere near inflicting decisive pain on the Islamic State, while our Iraqi partners, who serve as the ground anvil for the U.S. airborne hammer, increasingly feel left in the lurch by Obama.

CLINTON REFUSED TO GIVE OK TO KILL BIN LADEN

KIM DAVIS

Wow.  An article advocating burning the Christian, Kim Davis, because of her stand on homosexual marriage.  Michael Brendan Dougherty, This Week. "Burn Kim Davis."

Any normal punishment rewards her with the comfort of solidarity from right-wing Christians, or her own sense of moral self-approval. Therefore the only way to avoid granting her such "martyrdom" is to actually martyr her. That's the really perverse thing about Christians who make a spectacle like this. The only way the state can really punish them is to inform them that their suffering is meaningless and proving that God doesn't exist by sending them to the darkness of oblivion in torment. Justice Kennedy has issued his theological bull; let Kentucky officials in defiance of it be put on a pyre.

When the smoke settles there will be no GoFundMe campaign, save perhaps for a small carbon offset.

Brian Beutler.  The New Republic.  "Throw Kentucky Clerk Kim in Jail.  She must be severely punished for denying marriage licenses to gay couples."

There are surely other religious clerks in the South and elsewhere who’d love to get away with discriminating against gays and lesbians, in defiance of the country's highest court. The only way to assure this doesn’t happen is to jail Kim Davis until she agrees to issue the licenses, resigns, or is removed from office.

SYRIAN REFUGEE CRISIS: WHO IS TO BLAME?

Roger Cohen.  New York Times.  "Obama's Syrian Nightmare."  (He does not mention Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden's roles.)

Syria will be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency, a debacle of staggering proportions. For more than four years now, the war has festered. A country has been destroyed, four million Syrians are refugees, Islamic State has moved into the vacuum and President Bashar al-Assad still drops barrel bombs whose shrapnel and chlorine rip women and children to shreds.

At multiple stages, if Obama could have mustered the will, the belief in American power, there were options. The Syrian aircraft dropping those barrel bombs could have been taken out. A safe area for refugees might have been created. Arming the rebels early and massively might have changed the course of the war. Counterfactuals, of course, don’t carry much weight. We will never know. We only know the facts of the Syrian nightmare now seeping, in various forms, into the West. Syria, broken, will be the rift that keeps on giving.

In Libya, Obama bombed and abandoned. In Afghanistan, Obama surged and retreated. In Syria, Obama talked and wavered. He has been comfortable with the pinpoint use of force — the killing of Osama bin Laden for example — but uncomfortable with American military power.
Frederick C. Hof.  Foreign Policy.  "Obama:  Open Your Eyes".

Having decided to leave millions of Syrians subject to barrel bombs, starvation sieges, mass terrorism, and collective punishment so as not to offend Iran, the administration (or more precisely, Europe) now reaps the whirlwind of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Yet instead of changing course, it whines about how much worse things would have been had other decisions been taken.

Fred Hyatt, Editorial Page Director, Washington Post.  "Obama's Syria Achievement."

This may be the most surprising of President Obama’s foreign-policy legacies: not just that he presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions, but that he soothed the American people into feeling no responsibility for the tragedy.

Starvation in Biafra a generation ago sparked a movement. Synagogues and churches a decade ago mobilized to relieve misery in Darfur. When the Taliban in 2001 destroyed ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, the world was appalled at the lost heritage.

When Obama pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, critics worried there would be instability; none envisioned the emergence of a full-blown terrorist state. When he announced in August 2011 that “the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” critics worried the words might prove empty — but few imagined the extent of the catastrophe: not just the savagery of chemical weapons and “barrel bombs,” but also the Islamic State’s recruitment of thousands of foreign fighters, its spread from Libya to Afghanistan, the danger to the U.S. homeland that has alarmed U.S. intelligence officials, the refugees destabilizing Europe.

Ron Radosh, "Obama's Refugee Crisis."

While many foreign leaders have spoken out, there is one who has said not a word. That leader, as you most probably can guess, is Barack Obama. And how could he? His policies, after all, have ended in this tragedy. It is, as Michael Gerson writes in a powerful Washington Post column, the result of his failure in Syria.

Obama said a “red line” in Syria could not be crossed; then Bashar Al-Assad crossed it—and nothing happened except for temporarily harsher rhetoric from the president. Now, Assad drops barrel bombs on his own people, filled with supposedly outlawed chemical weapons. Obama, of course, had plenty of measures which he could have ordered that would have stopped or limited Assad’s war on his own people. Instead, he ignored the advice of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus, who favored using screened moderate forces of the Sunni majority willing to fight and supplying them with shoulder-to-air missiles that would have brought down the helicopters Assad uses to carry out the bombings. Instead, he did nothing.

Muslims chant "fuck you" in Hungary.  

Conservative European angry at refugees who are not refugees.  "European leaders are committing cultural and demographic suicide."

Michael Goodwin, New York Post.  "The Bigger Picture Behind the European Refugee Crisis."

This metastasizing catastrophe is not the result of famine or drought or disease. It is man-made and should have been ­prevented.

But that would have required leaders with the moral conviction of Roosevelt and Churchill. ­Instead, America and Great Britain are led by frat boys.

Barack Obama and David Cameron indulged themselves in the delusion that human nature had magically changed and the world would take care of itself while they gutted the arsenals of ­democracy.

History will record their fecklessness, and that of France, Germany and the other once-great powers. That is, unless history ­itself is erased by the madmen of Islamic State.

Not content to slaughter those they deem infidels and apostates, the would-be Hitlers are cleansing Syria and Iraq of its ancient temples and artifacts. They aim to control the past as well as the future.

Obama has been a gift to the worst of the world, topped by his surrender to Iran. He and the quislings masquerading as the leaders of Europe see no evil as Iran spreads its tentacles. Sooner, on their own, or later, with America’s blessing, the mullahs will have their doomsday weapon.

David P. Goldman. Asia Times.  "The Price of Europe's Fecklessness."

The Europeans, to be sure, are a pack of cynical hypocrites. If they had cared about Syrians, they might have sent a couple of brigades of soldiers to fight ISIS. But not a single European will risk his neck to prevent humanitarian catastrophe. The last time European soldiers got close to real trouble, in Srebrenica in 1995, Dutch peacekeepers stood aside while Bosnian Serbs massacred 8,000 Muslims.

The horror has now piled up on Europe’s doorstep, thanks evidently to the skill of Turkish gangs who have turned the Turkey-to-Balkans smuggling route into a superhighway. Europe said and did nothing while the global refugee count exploded from 40 million in 2010 to 60 million in 2014, according to the UN High Commission on Refugees, but was shocked, shocked to find such people on its doorstep.

Washington Post.  "Hungarian Bishop Says Pope is Wrong about Refugees."

Lee Smith.  The Weekly Standard.  "Obama Avoided Syrian Action to Help Iran Negotiations."

Obama decided to steer clear of the Syrian conflict not just to avoid doing anything, but just as importantly, to avoid damaging Iranian interests in Syria. As Obama wrote Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei, “the U.S.’s military operations inside Syria aren’t targeted at Mr. Assad or his security forces.” Obama didn’t do anything to bring down Assad because he was afraid it might anger the Syrian president’s patrons in Iran, and getting a nuclear deal with Iran was Obama’s foreign policy priority.

There is plenty that Obama might have done to support Syrian rebels— an opposition he derided as “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists”—without ever risking putting American forces on the ground in Syria. By 2013, all his national security cabinet officials—Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Thomas Donilon, et al.—argued for supporting Syrian rebel units.

Obama however kept his eyes on the prize: the Iran deal. Same when it came to enforcing the red line he drew against Assad’s use of chemical weapons. No one in their right mind believes that firing missiles on Assad regime facilities was likely to compel the White House to land forces in Syria. Obama’s concern rather was that if the United States signaled that it was no longer protecting Assad it might turn the balance of power against the Syrian regime. But that of course would anger the Iranians, and all Obama wanted was an accommodation with the regime—and now he has one in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.