Move Over ISIS
Kerry Air Conditioner Threat/Political Cartoon A.F. Branco ©2016.
Sun, May 8, 2016URL of the original posting site: https://www.clarionproject.org/news/white-house-foreign-policy-advisor-we-duped-public-iran
Secretary of State John Kerry was a primary negotiator of the Iran deal for the Obama administration. (Photo: © Reuters)
An interview with U.S. President Obama’s foreign policy advisor is sparking outrage for the revealed admission that the public was duped about the Iran deal. In an interview with the New York Times magazine, Ben Rhodes happily admits, “The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.”
Rhodes noted how the working of the deal were set in place in 2012, a year before the elections, and that concluding a deal with Iran was one of the goals of the Obama administration from the outset.
Rhodes further gloated that information doled out to the public by the press corps and think tanks on the deal was through a virtual “echo chamber” of the information given to them by the White House.
“They were saying things that validated what we had given them,” Rhodes said.
“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked,” he said.
Explaining how the White House was able to get the media to be its mouthpiece, Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Commenting on Rhodes revelation, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, writes that the White House “played us for fools … Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.”
URL of the original posting site: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/iran-sanctions-to-be/2016/01/16/id/709740/#ixzz3xRY2ZDch
At the last minute, the Obama administration officials decided to delay a package of limited and targeted sanctions intended to penalize Iran for recent test-firings of a ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. This account of previously unreported internal deliberations was provided by two people with knowledge of the matter.
Those unilateral U.S. sanctions were expected to be imposed quickly now that four Americans, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, were being released by Iran on Saturday. Eight Iranians accused in the United States of sanctions violations were having charges dropped or sentences commuted on Saturday under the complex prisoner deal, according to court filings and sources familiar with the cases.
The moves came as broader U.S. and international sanctions were set to be lifted after verification that it had met commitments to curb its nuclear program.
But Kerry’s decision not to call Iran’s bluff in December shows how months of clandestine negotiations to free Rezaian and other Americans became deeply intertwined with the final push to implement the nuclear deal, despite the official U.S. line that those efforts were separate.
A U.S. official said on Saturday there was no connection between the nuclear deal and the release of the Americans.
The prisoner swap could also come under scrutiny from critics who have questioned the Obama administration’s resolve in dealing with Iran and ability to follow through on its pledge to keep a hard line on sanctions outside those imposed on its nuclear program.
The episode was one of several diplomatic and military near misses between Iran and the United States in recent weeks, including a quickly defused crisis when 10 U.S. sailors were detained after entering Iranian waters.
TENSE CALLS AND BUREAUCRATIC ERRORS
Details of the prisoner talks were a closely held secret, so even within the Obama administration few people realized how perilously close the swap came to falling through.
On Dec. 29, Kerry told Zarif the United States intended to impose new sanctions on Iran over the missile test firings, which were deemed to have violated a United Nations ban, according to a U.S. official and congressional sources.
Zarif countered that if Washington went ahead, the prisoner swap was off, the sources said.
Kerry spoke by phone that night with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and a White House official and the decision was made to hold off on any sanctions announcement, they said. Obama’s role in the unfolding drama was not clear.
Zarif’s ability to fend off new U.S. sanctions, even temporarily, may have bought him some breathing space with Iranian hardliners who oppose the terms of nuclear deal. They have insisted that any new sanctions would be a show of bad faith by Washington.
But a bureaucratic misstep almost undid Kerry and Lew’s decision. Word of their last-minute intervention to delay the sanctions never filtered down to working-level officials at the State Department during the holiday lull.
Unaware of the change of plan, the State officials went ahead and quietly informed key congressional offices the next morning about the new Iran sanctions targeting about a dozen companies and individuals. They included copies of a news release that the Treasury Department intended to issue.
Officials then abruptly pulled back, telling congressional staffers the announcement had been “delayed for a few hours,” according to an email seen by Reuters. The next day the State Department emailed that sanctions were delayed because of “evolving diplomatic work that is consistent with our national security interests.”
Administration officials then told some congressional staffers confidentially that something big involving Iran was in the works, in an apparent attempt to tamp down criticism from Capitol Hill, a congressional source said.
Leading lawmakers, including some of Obama’s fellow Democrats, chided the White House for delaying the sanctions package and suggested it could embolden Iran to further threaten its neighbors and destabilize the Middle East.
SMALL CIRCLE OF TRUST
The nuclear deal signed on July 14 between Iran and world powers had been widely hailed as a major boost for Obama’s legacy. But he also faced criticism for refusing to make the accord contingent on Iran’s release of Americans known to be held by Iran. The prisoners, accused of spying and other charges, included Rezaian and several other Iranian-Americans.
At a White House news conference the day after the nuclear accord was signed, Obama bristled at a reporter’s suggestion that while basking in the glow of the foreign policy achievement he was all but ignoring the plight of Americans still detained in Iran.
“You should know better,” he said, adding that U.S. diplomats were “working diligently to try to get them out.” But Obama insisted that linking their fate directly to the nuclear negotiations would have encouraged the Iranians to seek additional concessions.
Once the deal was done, Kerry told his staff to redouble efforts to secure the Americans’ release, a U.S. official said. By that time, Brett McGurk, a State Department official, had already been conducting secret negotiations for months with an unnamed Iranian representative, the official said.
In a sign that Iran was looking for a way forward, officials of the Iranian interests section in Washington – Tehran’s de facto embassy – began meetings in August with some of the 12 Iranians held in the United States for violating sanctions. The aim was to see whether they would be willing to return to Iran if a swap could be arranged, according to a person familiar with the cases.
In recent months, senior Iranian officials repeatedly floated the idea of a prisoner exchange, despite apparent opposition from Iranian hardliners.
Kerry informed only a handful of senior lawmakers on a confidential basis on Thursday night that a release of Americans held in Iran was imminent, a congressional source said.
Obama has had some success in keeping such proceedings under wraps in the past. His aides negotiated a deal in late 2014 that led to Cuba’s release of former U.S. aid contractor Alan Gross and a U.S. intelligence operative while Washington freed three Cuban spies.
But it was a prisoner swap earlier that year – the Taliban’s release of alleged U.S. army deserter Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – that caused a backlash from Republican lawmakers. They argued that Obama failed to give Congress the legally required notice for transfer of Guantanamo prisoners and questioned whether Bergdahl endangered fellow soldiers by slipping away from his post in Afghanistan, provoking a massive manhunt.
On Saturday, Kerry and Zarif joined with European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini in Vienna for planned “Implementation Day,” which would end a decade of nuclear sanctions on Iran and unlock billions of dollars of its frozen assets.
With the U.S. prisoners free, Obama may now feel freer to go ahead with the missile sanctions, which are far more limited than the nuclear sanctions program that crippled Iran’s economy. U.S. officials have said that the new financial penalties remain on the table and are likely to be revisited soon.
© 2015 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.
by Ken Klukowski 23 October 2015
JERUSALEM—Ordinary Israelis are furious about the Obama administration’s accusing Israel of committing acts of terrorism, drawing moral equivalency between the Jewish State and the terrorists who seek Israel’s destruction. On Oct. 13, Secretary of State John Kerry suggested at a forum hosted at Harvard that Israel’s building additional residences in West Bank towns—which Israel’s opponents refer to
as building settlements, carrying the connotation that Jews are “settling” land that belongs to someone else—is provoking the current wave of attacks against Israel. The following day, Kerry’s spokesman at the U.S. Department of State—John Kirby—was asked to clarify Kerry’s remarks.Kirby was asked, “You do consider it an act of terrorism. Okay, so that would suggest then that you believe that this is—that both sides are, in fact, committing these…” Kirby cut off the questioner to respond, “Well, I would say certainly individuals on both sides of this divide are—have proven capable of, and in our view [are], guilty of acts of terror.”
Israelis whom Breitbart News talked to on the streets of Jerusalem were less than enthusiastic about the comparison.
Yoav Rotem is a tour guide in Israel, whose business takes groups to historical, cultural, and religious sites across the country, as well as conducting wine-tasting tours. Shown this quote, he responded, “It’s a bit stupid. Two Israelis were involved in an act that was terrible but he’s putting me in the same category as if I were a terrorist. I do not want to wipe the Palestinian people off the map.” Rotem noted that his perspective was as someone who deals daily with foreigners as he takes them on tours. He believes that Israelis who do not regularly deal with Americans might have a more blunt assessment: “Many regular Israelis would simply say of Kerry, ‘He’s a son of a bitch.’”
Breitbart News also spoke with an Israeli soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to comment on U.S. policy. “That is insane,” he began. “We punish anyone who deliberately attacks innocent people, and do everything to avoid harming civilians. The Palestinians deliberately target civilians, and celebrate those who succeed.”
Elliot Chodoff, a leading Israeli counter-terrorism agent whom Breitbart News has quoted previously in this series of reports, remarked a couple days later— not in response to Kerry’s and Kirby’s words, but regarding current pressure from Washington— “The United States says Israel must show restraint, when we have had one thousand rockets fired into Israel over the past year. I wonder how America would respond if a thousand rockets were launched into New York or New Jersey.”
Shifting gears, he adds:
“Then IDF [Israeli Defense Force] responds to take out the attackers and the rocket launchers, who are launching against Israeli civilians, firing from Gaza’s schools, and hospitals, and other civilian locations, and sooner or later civilians are killed during the response—because all humans make mistakes, and war is messy, and the reality is that there are almost always unintended casualties during military operations, especially in urban settings—then the United Nations issues a statement condemning Israel for human-rights violations.”
Back in the U.S., Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reacted to the remarks from Kerry and Kirby in a press statement: “The Obama administration is the most hostile we have seen towards the nation of Israel in our nation’s history.” Calling the remarks an “unfounded slur” that is “utterly unacceptable,” he added, “We must immediately and unconditionally reject the delusion that the coordinated Palestinian frenzy of bloodlust is in any way legitimate. There is no moral equivalence here between the savagery of the Palestinian terrorists and the innocent Israelis they are trying to murder.”
Ken Klukowski is legal editor for Breitbart News, reporting from Israel. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.
In an ill-omened trip, Secretary of State John Kerry headed to India to pave the way for a climate change deal, missing the important Paris march against terror. I was skeptical that the Indians would warm to any carbon emissions agreement, given the level of poverty in that country and need to rapidly modernize its industry. He should have listened to me, because he just emitted a whole lot of greenhouse gas for no reason. The Indians rejected the deal.
President Barack Obama has left India for Saudi Arabia without inking a climate deal that formed much of the basis for his second trip to the subcontinent. The Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday that India has refused to embrace the idea of a ‘peaking year’ for greenhouse gas emissions – a designated year after which emissions levels would have to start decreasing.
China agreed to that sort of framework last year, but Indian officials now see being lumped in with Beijing as a negative thing. India is the world’s fourth-biggest carbon emitter. China is number one.
‘Having a peaking year was not acceptable to us,’ an Indian environment ministry official told the Times.
Obama visited India on Air Force One, a plane that burns five gallons of jet fuel for every mile it flies. His round-trip, including a stop in Saudi Arabia, will emit 809 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The President did offer the Indians $1 billion to develop green technology to sweeten the deal…which is fascinating, because American green technology ventures sponsored by this administration have been man-made disasters.
The President tried to tempt the Indians with an apology, too:
President Obama apologized for the role the United States has played in global warming during a speech in India, but that didn’t convince the Asian nation to sign a deal to put a limit to future greenhouse gas emissions.
“… the United States recognizes its part in creating this problem, so we’re leading the global effort to combat it…” Obama said during a speech from Sirifort, New Delhi, on Tuesday.
In light of his failure, Obama tried to pack a guilt trip for the Indians before he jetted off to Saudi Arabia:
“I know the argument made by some – that it’s unfair for countries like the United States to ask developing nations and emerging economies like India to reduce your dependence on the same fossil fuels that helped power our growth for more than a century,” Mr. Obama told an audience of 1,500 mostly young Indians at Siri Fort Auditorium on the final day of his trip here.
“But here’s the truth,” he added. “Even if countries like the United States curb our emissions, if countries that are growing rapidly like India with soaring energy needs don’t also embrace cleaner fuels, then we don’t stand a chance against climate change.”
Between the gaffe-tastic gum chewing and the cold reception to the climate change deal, it confirms that the bad signs during Kerry’s trip were real portents of more #SmartPower failures.
[Featured Image: CBS News Video]
Why won’t administration say attack was Islamic terrorism?
They shouted in Arabic “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is Greatest) and “We are avenging the Prophet Mohammed” as they sprayed their victims with hundreds of bullets from their semi-automatic weapons.
Their “victims” were the top editorial cartoonists of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine, who had dared to practice their right of free speech. Their offense? Publishing cartoons deemed “offensive” by Muslim leaders around the world. The perpetrators? Islamic terrorists.
Yet in the immediate hours after the murders in Paris, the response from western leaders was scurrilously predictable in their refusal to describe the attack as an “Islamic terrorist attack.”
Phrasing the problem of “violent extremism,” as the Obama administration has done repeatedly, of being a problem exclusively of only Al Qaeda and now ISIS, is intellectually spurious and truly dangerous to our national security.
Indeed, the responses from our own president, French President Hollande and British Prime Minster David Cameron all spouted the same empty pabulum in asserting that the Paris attack had nothing to do with Islam or any religion for that matter. But the hollow comments coming from our own leaders are steeped in the stench of appeasement and cowardice.
The first comments came from Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, who refused to even call the massacre an act of terrorism, but made sure to add the now typical non-sequitor which now routinely follows Islamic terrorist attacks, that “Islam is a religion of peace” and therefore no should associate with the “extremists” in Paris with Islam.
Then President Obama issued his own statement, but in keeping with his administration’s 6 year old prohibition on using the term “Islamic terrorism,” he simply referred to the attack as “terrorism” — a vanilla term conspicuously devoid of any descriptive term explaining the motivation behind the attack. Thus, to the proverbial Martian it literally could have been eco-terrorism, white supremacist terrorism, or narco-terrorism. (But admittedly, calling this an act of “terrorism” was a step up from the classification of Major Nidal Hassan’s similar massacre at Fort Hood as “workplace violence.”) 
Then in live comments delivered later, both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry gave blustery defenses of the U.S. determination to protect the right of free speech and vowed that neither the French nor anyone in the West would be cowed into silence by terrorism.
Secretary Kerry said as follows:
“Today, tomorrow, in Paris, in France, or across the world, the freedom of expression that this magazine, no matter what your feelings were about it, the freedom of expression that it represented is not able to be killed by this kind of act of terror.” Nice words of bravado.
I hate to disabuse our secretary of state, but indeed “freedom of expression” has indeed already been killed by acts of Islamic terrorism. 
Notwithstanding the secretary’s nice words of bravado today, the views in 2012 of the Obama administration on the very same French magazine were markedly differently “We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this,” said Jay Carney, the White House spokesman. “We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”
The president himself, before the United Nations, revealed his own appeasement of Islamic terrorists and hoodlums when he declared in September 2012:
“The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”
Where was his moral insistence that we would never give into terrorists who would employ violence to intimidate us in suppressing our right to free speech? Just imagine if, amidst the recent North Korean campaign to intimidate Sony into not showing its film that offended North Korea, the president had stated, “The future must not belong to those who slander Kim Jong-un.”
The term Islamic terrorism mean just that: terrorist attacks with an Islamic motivation — whether they attempts to silence critics of Islam, impose Sharia, punish Western “crusaders,” commit genocide of non-Muslims, establish Islamic supremacy (or Caliphate), or destroy any non Muslim peoples (e.g. the Jews and Christians) that are “occupying Muslim lands.”
And so in refusing to use the term Islamic terrorism, the administration and their multiculturalist western leaders go along with the patently false charade that Islamic terrorism simply does not exist.
This has profound national security implications not only for non-Muslims, but for Muslim victims of Islamic terrorism. If you cannot name your enemy, how can you expect to defeat him? In buying into the notion that uttering the term “radical Islam” is somehow racist, the real scandal here is that our administration and other Western leaders in general are in fact taking a page out of the playbook written by Muslim Brotherhood front groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). 
Those groups, in turn, are ideological derivatives in the West of the Muslim Brotherhood which itself the parent of all Islamic Sunni terrorist groups—from Al Shabab to ISIS to Al Qaeada to Hamas. And in the West, those Muslim Brotherhood front groups have managed to perpetuate one of the biggest and most dangerous national security frauds of the past 30 years: that use of the term Islamic terrorism is tantamount to a racist generalization that all Muslims are terrorist. And that any criticism of Islam means you are an Islamophobe. Four weeks ago, the United Arab Emirates, a distinctly observant Muslim country, had the courage to designate the Muslim Brotherhood and 83 other Islamist groups including CAIR in the U.S. as Islamic terrorist groups. And our reaction? To our everlasting shame, the Obama administration came to the defense of CAIR, which has been described as a front for Hamas by the FBI and was designated an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist money laundering trial in U.S. history that resulted in the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the conviction of its leaders for laundering money to Hamas.
Phrasing the problem of “violent extremism,” as the Obama administration has done repeatedly, of being a problem exclusively of only Al Qaeda and now ISIS, is intellectually spurious and truly dangerous to our national security. Most recently, in describing ISIS, the Obama administration has categorically defined the group as having “nothing to do with Islam.” It’s time for our leaders to stop this nonsense. Islamic terrorism and extremism are brutal realities that have killed tens of thousands of people, mostly Muslims.
Islamic extremism cannot be confined to groups we don’t like. Islamic extremism is now a movement, just like fascism and communism; it spans a spectrum from Hamas to Al Shabab to the Muslim Brotherhood. And to ignore the common denominator in the motivation behind 75% of the world’s annual terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic terrorists is a sure guarantee that Wednesday’s attacks will be repeated over and over again.
Steven Emerson is executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and the executive producer of a new documentary about the Muslim Brotherhood in America “Jihad in America: the Grand Deception.”
Islamist do not expect to take over America from the top down. They’re too smart for that. Instead they know to follow the examples of Adolph Hitler, Saul Alinsky and Cloward-Piven;
Taking over America is then accomplished without firing a single shot. They have already expressed the same reluctance to take over America as Germany, Russia and Japan has in the past. They are very afraid of our Red-Neck brothers and sisters knowing how well armed they are. That is why they are pushing the U.N. to disarm America, and now that they have a President and Secretary of State that is enabling them to get further toward their ultimate goal, they have begun moving their people into America by the tens of thousands.
By WhatDidYouSay.org
Ever since September 2013, the day Secretary of State John Kerry signed the United Nations Small Arms Treaty, I have been bothered by the complete disingenuous concern he presented and outright lies he told to those gathered to witness the signing, and the American people. Here’s the video of the signing and his remarks.
The first thing I thought of was that this is a former senator who is signing a three inch document, which I’m sure he has never read. This is the disingenuous part of what he is doing.
Second, in discussing what the treaty is not, he declares “This treaty will not diminish anyone’s freedom. In fact, the treaty recognizes the freedom of both individuals and states to obtain, possess, and use arms for legitimate purposes. Make no mistake, we would never think about supporting a treaty that is inconsistent with the rights of Americans … to be able to exercise their guaranteed rights under our constitution.”
I would have to ask him for the specific citation on the specific page for how he can claim these things. I’m sure he wouldn’t be able to do it.
However, in January, William F. Jasper wrote at The New American:
The UN Arms Trade Treaty was written in secret by the Obama/Hillary Clinton State Department, along with Russia, China, France and Britain. Not exactly a lineup of champions of liberty. What does it actually say?
Article 2 defines the conventional arms covered, which include battle tanks, artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles — and “small arms and light weapons.”
Article 3 of the treaty places UN prohibitions on “ammunition/munitions fired, launched or delivered by the conventional arms covered under Article 2.”
Article 4 puts all “parts and components” of weapons within the scheme.
Several places in the treaty text, including Article 5, require all countries to “establish and maintain a national control system, including a national control list.” Moreover, it declares, “Each State Party is encouraged to apply the provisions of this Treaty to the broadest range of conventional arms.”
Article 5, Section 4 says each State Party “shall provide its national control list to the Secretariat, which shall make it available to other States Parties.” Which means our federal government will provide the guns and ammo registration list to the UN, which will provide it to Russia, China, Cuba — any and every State Party that wants it.
Do you get that? There’s a national control list. We might reference it as a national gun registration list. This will not only be provided to the federal government, something they have been given no authority over, but will also be provided to our enemies abroad, including the United Nations (Yes, friends, I do not consider the UN to be the friend of the United States).
Kerry has insisted that this treaty is about “keeping weapons out of the hands of terrorists and rogue actors.”
“This is about reducing the risk of international transfers of conventional arms that will be used to carry out the world’s worst crimes,” Kerry added. “This is about keeping Americans safe and keeping America strong. And this is about promoting international peace and global security.”
Ask yourself this question, “Do you believe John Kerry?” Furthermore, do you believe Barack Obama after all his lies? How about Hillary Clinton?
For more on what this has looked like in history, I highly recommend Stephen P. Halbrook’s excellent work Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State.”
By WhatDidYouSay.org
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – our last competent Secretary of State – has been aggressive in criticizing President Obama’s failed foreign policy. And she has the experience and expertise to do so with authority. While nobody really expects the Obama administration or most Democrats in Congress to pay Dr. Rice any heed, the Republican Party better be listening and raise its collective voice against the dangerous path that Obama is taking this country down.
Dr. Rice is particularly concerned with the “vacuum” in world leadership resulting from the Obama administration’s leading from behind policies. The vacuum is being filled by the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Dr. Rice wrote in an op-ed article appearing in the Washington Post on March 7th, “dictators and extremists across the globe will be emboldened” if the United States abandons muscular diplomacy and eschews its global responsibilities as the leader of the free world.
The Obama administration’s attempt to extend “hands of friendship to our adversaries, sometimes at the expense of our friends,” such as the administration’s “reset” button with Russia, has obviously not worked, Dr. Rice has pointed out.
For those who might say that Condoleezza Rice is hypocritically skipping over Russia’s push into Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush while she criticizes the Obama administration’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the Ukraine crisis, Rice set the record straight in her op-ed article:
After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the United States sent ships into the Black Sea, airlifted Georgian military forces from Iraq back to their home bases and sent humanitarian aid. Russia was denied its ultimate goal of overthrowing the democratically elected government, an admission made to me by the Russian foreign minister.
But even those modest steps did not hold. Despite Russia’s continued occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the diplomatic isolation waned and then the Obama administration’s ‘reset’ led to an abrupt revision of plans to deploy missile defense components in the Czech Republic and Poland.
President Obama said last week in The Hague that he was “much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan” than he was about any threat from Russia. Fair enough, but Obama’s agreement to fruitless negotiations with Iran and easing the pressure of sanctions in the meantime, while Iran advances its nuclear arms and missile delivery programs, is making that nightmare more likely. So is his failure to deal adequately with the spread of al Qaeda and its affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa, as well as the infiltration of Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Latin America. And rather than worry about the real threat of nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists as the most significant threat to homeland security, why is Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry foolishly declaring that “climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction?”
Dr. Rice expressed particular concern that withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan without a reasonable amount of residual military presence may repeat the disastrous aftermath of the Obama administration’s precipitous decision to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. Al Qaeda returned with a vengeance to launch widespread lethal attacks in Iraq and threaten its viability after they had been largely defeated as a result of the successful surge that President George W. Bush had ordered in the face of opposition by then Senator Obama, John Kerry and many other members of the Democratic Party of Defeat.
Addressing more than two thousand people attending the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner on March 26th, Dr. Rice also warned about the dangerous consequences of a shrinking military budget:
Our values and our interests require defense. As Ronald Reagan famously said, peace really only comes through strength. What are we doing? What are we doing when we’re talking about a defense budget that is so small that our military starts to tell us that we may not in fact be able to carry out all of the requirements put upon it?
President Obama wants to reduce the force level of the United States Army to its smallest size since 1940 and drop an entire class of Air Force attack jets.
While understanding the weariness of the American people after two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than a decade fighting global terrorism, Dr. Rice said that “leaders can’t afford to get tired. Leaders can’t afford to be weary.”
The Obama administration is operating on the dangerous assumption that America can lead from behind by relying on our European allies, even though they are unable to get their act together to take any effective measures against Russia over Ukraine, for example. President Obama also hides behind the apron strings of the fuzzy norms of international law, which he insists everyone in the 21st century is expected to follow as a matter of course. President Obama believes that even the Iranian regime can be dealt with rationally in good faith negotiations. This is the same regime ruled by Ayatollah Khamenei, who reportedly issued a fatwah declaring that he must be obeyed as the “representative of the Prophet Muhammad and [Shi’ism’s] 12th Imam on Earth.”
Unfortunately, what President Obama says in his speeches regarding how he thinks all world leaders should act bears little resemblance to how the leaders of our adversaries are actually acting in the real world.
Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere need to follow Dr. Rice’s example and directly challenge the basic tenets of Obama’s foreign policy. They need to clearly contrast Obama’s tenets with the principles that Republicans stand for, which if implemented will keep the United States and its allies free and secure. The United States must lead from the front, not from behind as Obama would prefer. An American president should give America’s allies such as Israel the benefit of the doubt, not those who time and again have proven that their word cannot be trusted as President Obama has tended to do. As Putin follows a more aggressive foreign policy and jihadists are expanding their bases of operations, now is not the time to radically cut America’s military defenses as President Obama wants to do. Peace is truly won through strength, not by planned weakness in cutting the U.S. military down to size in order to supposedly improve America’s image in parts of the world where we are not liked. As jihadists, who want to kill as many Americans as they can, get closer to possessing weapons of mass destruction, now is not the time for John Kerry to raise a red herring about climate change as possibly “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” In fact, to achieve energy independence for the United States and our European allies, the radical environmentalists should be told to return to their environmentally protected shells while such initiatives as the Keystone Pipeline and the export of liquefied natural gas are finally allowed to go forward.
Few Republican leaders in Congress have been as bold to date as Dr. Rice in directly challenging the foundational principles that animate the Obama administration’s foreign policy and have led to disastrous outcomes. Some are all too willing to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy that Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Senator (now Secretary of State) John Kerry and Barack Obama himself refused to do in their relentless and at times vicious attacks on President George W. Bush’s foreign policies. It would be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Bush’s surge was widely credited with winning the war in Iraq against the insurgents, Obama’s decision to withdraw all troops from Iraq managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And it would also be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Ronald Reagan helped win the Cold War, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Obama is managing to midwife the rebirth of the Russian empire.
When some Republican congressional leaders such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham do level a sharp criticism, it tends to deal with specific episodes such as the Obama administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi debacle. Hopefully, as it becomes painfully obvious by mid-summer to all but the willfully ignorant that there will never be a verifiable deal with the Iranian regime to dismantle Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and to curb its missile program, Republicans will insist on the passage of new sanctions against Iran and work with like-minded Democrats to ensure veto-proof majorities.
The world is a far more dangerous place than when President Obama first took office in 2009. A fundamental reason, as Condoleezza Rice said in her speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, is that under President Obama’s watch the world does not know where America stands. “You see,” she said, “when the friends or foes alike don’t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place.”
This should be the key foreign policy message during both the 2014 midterm election campaign and in 2016. Particularly if Hillary Clinton runs for president, perhaps the Republican slogan against candidates from the Democratic Party of Defeat can be “Strong American leadership DOES make a difference.”
What Did You Say? 
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