Greek lesson

Jerusalem Post

Letters to the Editor, September 4, 2016

Greek lesson 

With regard to “The reluctant warrior” (Frontlines, August 26), why would the Israeli security establishment fondly remember Barack Obama, the US president who supports the Muslim Brotherhood and capitulated to Iran? Why would Americans, for that matter, remember him any better when he, along with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, turned the US into a kakistocracy? Kakistocracy comes from the ancient Greek (kákistos – worst, superlative of kakós – bad; and kratia – power, rule, government).

This is government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC 
Beersheba 

Caroline Glick: Obama’s greatest achievement

Jerusalem Post 

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.

By CAROLINE B. GLICK  

The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran.

“It worked,” he insisted.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

Hours later, the Defense Ministry issued a stinging rebuke of Obama’s claim, parroted more diplomatically by the Prime Minister’s Office.

Obama’s press conference took place the day after The Wall Street Journal reported that in January 2016, the US sent an unmarked plane to the Tehran airport filled with $400 million in cash, on the same day Iran released four US hostages.

Obama angrily rejected allegations that the cash payment was a ransom payment for the hostages’ release. He insisted that the US had made the payment as the first installment of a $1.7b. payment the administration made to settle an Iranian government lawsuit against America.

Obama claimed that the administration agreed to the settlement at the urging of the Justice Department.

He said his administration was able to settle the dispute only due to the nuclear deal which placed US officials in direct contact with their Iranian counterparts for the first time in decades.

Within a day, Obama’s claims were exposed as lies. It turns out that Justice Department lawyers opposed the cash payout to Iran.

One of the hostages released in January told the media that the Iranians refused to allow the hostages to leave Iran until the airplane with the cash landed in the airport.

The Iranians, for their part, contemptuously mocked Obama, and stated openly that the $400m. was a ransom payment for the hostages.

Two weeks later, Obama’s State Department admitted that the $400m. was a payment for the hostages.

Obama’s principle claim is that due to his deal, Iran no longer has a short-term nuclear breakout capacity. He also says that in accordance with the deal, Iran has shipped its nuclear materials out of the country. These claims are both untrue and misleading.

On Thursday Reuters reported that Iran did not ship the quantities of low-enriched uranium out of the country in the quantities the deal required.

Last January, when the deadline arrived for Iran to comply with the deal’s clauses calling for it to move its uranium enriched to 3.5 percent and 20 percent out of the country and so enable the US and its European colleagues to cancel UN sanctions against it, it worked out that Iran had failed to comply.

Rather than acknowledge Iran’s failure and maintain the sanctions in accordance with their deal, the Americans and Europeans decided to move the goalpost closer to Iran.

They secretly decreased the amount of uranium the Iranians were required to part with. They then announced triumphantly that they were canceling UN sanctions because Iran had complied with the agreement.

Reuters reported that much of the low-enriched uranium Iran did remove from its territory wasn’t actually removed from its possession. Instead it was transferred to neighboring Oman, where it is held under Iranian guard and control.

Obama of course knows all of this. So his claims that the agreement “worked” are nothing more than a card trick meant to trick the American public.

Obama’s assertion that Iran’s breakout time to a nuclear arsenal has been slowed as a result of his deal is similarly a stretch of the imagination. The Iranians have suspended much of their prior centrifuge spinning. But that is only because they are now directing their efforts to developing and deploying more advanced centrifuges that will be able to enrich uranium to bomb grade material far more rapidly than the centrifuges they were required to retire.

Experts have already placed Iran’s post-deal nuclear breakout time at a mere six months. And Iran can leave the agreement – which it never actually signed or officially agreed to – anytime it wants.

While developing their next generation centrifuges, the Iranians are expanding the range and precision of their ballistic missiles, deploying them and increasing the size of their arsenals. Despite the fact that these actions are prohibited under US law and breach what was initially claimed about the ever-changing nuclear deal, the Obama administration has refused to impose sanctions against Iran, insisting that its actions merely breach the spirit, rather than substance, of the deal.

The administration has had a similar response to Iran’s recent deployment of Russia’s S-300 missile defense battery around its military nuclear site at Fordo. On Sunday Iranian television showed footage of the missiles being set up around the formerly secret site.

As Omri Ceren of the Israel Project noted this week, Iran’s deployment of the S-300 system places it in breach of three US sanctions laws. Despite this, the White House announced on Wednesday that it has no intention of enforcing US law and applying sanctions on Iran. The S-300 missiles can be used both as a defensive system and as an offensive one.

On Tuesday, Tehran announced that it will be launching three satellites in the coming months.

Satellite launches are widely viewed as a means through which Iran is covertly developing a longrange ballistic missile capability. Rather than censure Iran for its actions, the Obama administration insists that such actions, as well as Iran’s recent longrange rocket tests, do not violate the nuclear deal or warrant US action.

Taken separately and together, Iran’s actions since the nuclear deal was officially concluded make clear that it continues to pursue its nuclear program, and indeed, has become more brazen in its nuclear operations than it was before the agreement was announced last year.

In other words, not only has the deal not worked, contrary to Obama’s claims, it has been a colossal failure on every level. The deal’s opponents were entirely right about the dangers it posed and Obama was entirely wrong.

This is true as well in relation to the administration’s qualified promises that the deal would lead to better relations between the US and Iran. As Shoshana and Stephen Bryen noted last week following the Iranian naval assault on the USS Nitze in the Strait of Hormuz, with its repeated harassment of US naval ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz, Iran is clearly practicing its tactic of swarming US naval craft as a preparation for a real strike against them.

The main reason that Iran’s nuclear program is such a grave concern for Israel and for other Middle Eastern states is that the Iranian regime has hegemonic ambitions. It seeks to destroy Israel and dominate the entire region.

Since it concluded the deal with Washington, Iran has surged its forces and massively expanded its power projection throughout the region.

On Thursday the Daily Mail reported that the commonly held belief that Iran commands 16,000 troops in Syria is wrong. According to the National Council of Resistance in Iran, the regime actually commands 60,000 forces in Syria, deployed throughout the country. The entire Syrian army today numbers a mere 50,000 men.

On August 4, Obama mocked claims that Iran would spend its windfall profits of $100b.-$150b. from the sanctions relief the nuclear deal offered to fund terrorism. Yet, according to the Daily Mail report, to date Iran has spent $100b. on the war in Syria.

The implications of the report are blood curdling.

They mean that despite Obama’s denials, the funds Iran has received as a result of the sanctions relief he brought about through his nuclear deal have paid for Iran’s war in Syria. That war has caused the death of nearly half a million people and forced more than 11 million people to flee their homes.

Obviously, it is important for Americans to know the truth about the Iran deal and its consequences as they consider their votes for Obama’s replacement.

One of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s top candidates for secretary of state is Wendy Sherman.

Sherman was the chief negotiator of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

For Israel, the question of what to do about Iran now is far more urgent than it is for Americans.

Today more and more commentators are voicing concern over the prospect that Obama will support an anti-Israel resolution at the UN Security Council as a parting shot at Israel.

But any such resolution will be small potatoes in comparison to the strategic devastation his nuclear deal, which is his main foreign policy legacy, has caused.

The rapidity of Iran’s advance makes clear that there is no justification for waiting to act until Obama has left office. If it doesn’t act soon, Israel is on the fast track to waking up one morning and discovering it has no means of thwarting the threat.

Indeed, with each passing month, its options for action become more and more limited.

After Israel’s security leadership undermined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to attack Iran’s nuclear installations in 2010 and 2012, Netanyahu settled on a strategy of blocking Obama’s moves to appease Tehran.

That strategy of course failed last summer. Since then, Netanyahu has worked to build an anti-Iranian alliance with the Sunni Arab states. His efforts in this area have clearly met with some measure of success, as witnessed by public statements from prominent Saudis and others.

Whatever that success may be, and whatever the status of that burgeoning alliance of spurned US allies, the fact is that it’s time Israel and its new allies do something more than send signals. Time is a-wasting.

Last spring Brig.-Gen. Hossein Salami, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, “Today the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are more present than ever before.”

Thanks to Obama, he may be right.

It is time for Israel to make him eat his words.



****

"The rapidity of Iran’s advance makes clear that there is no justification for waiting to act until Obama has left office. If it doesn’t act soon, Israel is on the fast track to waking up one morning and discovering it has no means of thwarting the threat."

"It is time for Israel to make him eat his words"

Netanyahu tried in 2010 when according to Caroline Glick  Dagan and Ashkenazi blocked the attack. So now that Iran  has deployed S-300 at the Fordo nuclear site this will be even more risky. 

With Obama now and the prospect of either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump the next four years, Israel will, as I predicted in 2008, be facing Iran alone.

Here is where you can see the Time left until Obama leaves office    . At the moment it is in 139 days 1 hour  26 minutes

Krauthammer: The price of powerlessness

The Washington Post

This photo, grabbed from Russian Defense Ministry video footage issued Aug. 16, is said to show a Tu-22M3 long-range bomber releasing its payload above Syria after it took off from an air base in Iran. (Russian Defense Ministry 

By Charles Krauthammer

This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to operate from its soil. Until now.

The reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria. Consider:

● Iran

The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed in with major deals, including theshipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.

● Iraq

These bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace. Before President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, that could not have happened. The resulting vacuum has not only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it has gradually allowed a hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit. According to a Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite militia fightersoperating inside Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.

● Syria

When Russia dramatically intervened last year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smuglypredicted that Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized the upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of state is running around trying to sue for peace, offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only Putin will promise to conquer gently.

Consider what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very weak hand — a rump Russian state, shorn of empire and saddled with a backward economy and a rusting military — he has restored Russia to great-power status. Reduced to irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.

In Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn the map. His annexation of Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager to throw off the few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape of eastern Ukraine continues.

Ten thousand have already died and now Putin is threatening even more open warfare. Under the absurd pretext of Ukrainian terrorism in Crimea (reminiscent of Hitler’s claim that he invaded Poland in response to a Polish border incursion), Putin has threatened retaliation, massed troops in eight locations on the Ukrainian border, ordered Black Sea naval exercises and moved advanced anti-aircraft batteries into Crimea, giving Moscow control over much of Ukrainian airspace.

And why shouldn’t he? He’s pushing on an open door. Obama still refuses to send Ukraine even defensive weapons. The administration’s response to these provocations? Urging “both sides” to exercise restraint. Both sides, mind you.

And in a gratuitous flaunting of its newly expanded reach, Russia will be conducting joint naval exercises with China in the South China Sea, in obvious support of Beijing’s territorial claims and illegal military bases.

Yet the president shows little concern. He is too smart not to understand geopolitics; he simply doesn’t care. In part because his priorities are domestic. In part because he thinks we lack clean hands and thus the moral standing to continue to play international arbiter.

And in part because he’s convinced that in the long run it doesn’t matter. Fluctuations in great power relations are inherently ephemeral. For a man who sees a moral arc in the universe bending inexorably toward justice, calculations of raw realpolitik are 20th-century thinking — primitive, obsolete, the obsession of small minds.

Obama made all this perfectly clear in speeches at the U.N., in Cairo and here at home in his very first year in office. Two terms later, we see the result. Ukraine dismembered. Eastern Europe on edge. Syria a charnel house. Iran subsuming Iraq. Russia and Iran on the march across the entire northern Middle East.

At the heart of this disorder is a simple asymmetry. It is in worldview. The major revisionist powers — China, Russia and Iran — know what they want: power, territory, tribute. And they’re going after it. Barack Obama takes Ecclesiastes’ view that these are vanities, nothing but vanities.

In the kingdom of heaven, no doubt. Here on earth, however — Aleppo to Donetsk, Estonia to the Spratly Islands — it matters greatly.


*****

My only comment is that there is now 153 days 6 hours and 14 minutes left until Obama leaves office

Time left until Obama leaves office

Dry Bones: Merged Reality

BRET STEPHENS :The Meaning of an Olympic Snub

The Wall Street Journal

The Arab world has a problem of the mind, and its name is anti-Semitism.

Egypt's Islam El Shehaby declines to shake hands with Israel's Or Sasson

By BRET STEPHENS

An Israeli heavyweight judoka named Or Sasson defeated an Egyptian opponent named Islam El Shehaby Friday in a first-round match at the Rio Olympics. The Egyptian refused to shake his opponent’s extended hand, earning boos from the crowd. Mr. Sasson went on to win a bronze medal.

If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It did itself in chiefly through its long-abiding and all-consuming hatred of Israel, and of Jews.

That’s not a point you will find in a long article about the Arab crackup by Scott Andersonin last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where hatred of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia—a given of the landscape. Nor is it much mentioned in the wide literature about the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East, or the oil curse, governance gap, democracy deficit, youth bulge, sectarian divide, legitimacy crisis and every other explanation for Arab decline.

Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab world got rid of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred of them. Over time the result proved fatal: a combination of lost human capital, ruinously expensive wars, misdirected ideological obsessions, and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for scapegoats. The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historianPaul Johnson noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed.

Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S.

These patterns were replicated in the Arab world. Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel. There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Lebanon in 1945. Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process.

In his essay, Mr. Johnson called anti-Semitism a “highly infectious” disease capable of becoming “endemic in certain localities and societies,” and “by no means confined to weak, feeble or commonplace intellects.” Anti-Semitism may be irrational, but its potency, he noted, lies in transforming a personal and instinctive irrationalism into a political and systematic one. For the Jew-hater, every crime has the same culprit and every problem has the same solution.

Anti-Semitism makes the world seem easy. In doing so, it condemns the anti-Semite to a permanent darkness.

Today there is no great university in the Arab world, no serious indigenous scientific base, a stunted literary culture. In 2015 the U.S. Patent Office reported 3,804 patents from Israel, as compared with 364 from Saudi Arabia, 56 from the United Arab Emirates, and 30 from Egypt. The mistreatment and expulsion of Jews has served as a template for the persecution and displacement of other religious minorities: Christians, Yazidis, the Baha’i.

Hatred of Israel and Jews has also deprived the Arab world of both the resources and the example of its neighbor. Israel quietly supplies water to Jordan, helping to ease the burden of Syrian refugees, and quietly provides surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to Egypt to fight ISIS in the Sinai. But this is largely unknown among Arabs, for whom the only permissible image of Israel is an Israeli soldier in riot gear, abusing a Palestinian.

Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs.

This may be starting to change. In the past five years the Arab world has been forced to face up to its own failings in ways it cannot easily blame on Israel. The change can be seen in the budding rapprochement between Jerusalem and Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which might yet yield tactical and strategic advantages on both sides, particularly against common enemies such as ISIS and Iran.

That’s not enough. So long as an Arab athlete can’t pay his Israeli opposite the courtesy of a handshake, the disease of the Arab mind and the misfortunes of its world will continue. For Israel, this is a pity. For the Arabs, it’s a calamity. The hater always suffers more than the object of his hatred.

****

It would be more accurate to say  that the Muslim world has a problem of the mind, and its name is anti-Semitism.

Obama said Israel supports the Iran deal — here’s their response

New York Post

By Post Editorial Board

What could President Obama have been thinking when he claimed that Israel’s “military and security community” now supports his disastrous nuclear deal with Iran?

“The country that was most opposed to the deal,” he said at his Thursday press conference, “acknowledges this has been a game-changer.”

Well, it didn’t take long for those same officials to put the lie to the president’s claim — and in unusually undiplomatic language.

Israel’s Defense Ministry, in an official statement, compared the deal to the infamous 1938 Munich accord, whose “basic assumption, that Nazi Germany could be a partner to any kind of agreement, was wrong.”

Similarly, it added, “agreements of this kind signed between the world powers and Iran,” which “states openly” it aims to destroy Israel, are also useless.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who was outspoken in trying to halt the deal — sought to soften the statement’s impact by stressing the strength of the US-Israeli relationship. But, he added pointedly, Israel’s position “remains unchanged.”

Yes, some former Israeli defense officials have said the deal could present future “opportunities” — but also cite its troubling “challenges.”

And one Cabinet minister who is a top Netanyahu adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, insisted that not only is Israel not on board with the nuke deal, but rather “the opposite is the case” and that “all our worries . . . were justified.”

All of which is understandable: Iran continues to pursue its ballistic-missile program, in violation of UN edicts. It remains, according to Obama’s own State Department, the world’s leading sponsor of terror. And when the deal expires, it will be just weeks from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

The president says the deal’s most outspoken critics should make public mea culpas and apologize. But if anyone deserves a mea culpa and an apology, it’s Netanyahu — from Obama.

****

I’ve spent the last month reading David McCullough’s biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams, most probably because I just could not watch any more the news on the presidential race of 2016.

I am still puzzled how was it possible to conduct diplomacy when it took 6 weeks to cross the Atlantic.  Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams had to make vital decisions themselves with no consultation.

What puzzles me even more today, in the time of instantaneous communication, is how is it possible that the US government could misrepresent the position of one of its main allies on a subject so vital to the survival of that ally and not expect that a denial would follow immediately.  To what purposes was this done? 

Kakistocracy

I am so disgusted with the choice of candidates in the US presidential election of 2016,  that I found this for me new word  from Peggy Noonan’s  WSJ  article  The Week They Decided He Was Crazy  quite appropriate:

“I end with a new word, at least new to me. A friend called it to my attention. It speaks of the moment we’re in. It is “kakistocracy,” from the Greek. It means government by the worst persons, by the least qualified or most unprincipled. We’re on our way there, aren’t we? We’re going to have to make our way through it together.”

 Etymology

Ancient Greek κάκιστος ‎(kákistos, “worst”), superlative of κακός ‎(kakós, “bad”) + -κρατια ‎(-kratia, “power, rule, government”).

Pronunciation

/kækɪsˈtɑkɹəsi/

Noun

kakistocracy ‎(plural kakistocracies)

Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.