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The World Is Paying A Deadly Price For Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | APRIL 16, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/16/the-world-is-paying-a-deadly-price-for-barack-obamas-foreign-policy-legacy/

Joe Biden and Barack Obama

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If a belligerent state launched 186 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles, and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would Joe Biden call it a “win”? Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape, and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women, and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?

This is what Joe Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes, and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of Jewish State. And by “Iranian dupes,” I don’t only mean the Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens of the world, who worked to elevate the mullahs over Sunni allies and the Israelis, or even a Hamas-bestie like Rob Malley or Israel-hater like Maher Bitar. I mean assets of the Islamic State who promised the Iranian government to help out in any way possible.

Their worldview is a cancer that’s metastasized within the Democratic Party. To these people, Israel will always be the villain. And if the Iranian regime’s murder of more than 600 American servicemen couldn’t cool that bromance, 1,300 dead Jews certainly aren’t going to do the trick.

To begin with, Jared Kushner’s Middle East policy efforts were, by every measure, more successful than not only Obama’s efforts but the decades of Brookings Institute-endorsed failures the region has endured. The Trump administration undercut Palestinian terror efforts, stifled Iranian ambitions, and created space for the Gulf States and Israel to enhance ties.

Biden immediately reversed those gains, reverting to Obama-era Iranian boosterism. We’re now experiencing the consequences of pacifying Islamic ideologues. Obama might have sent the mullahs pallets of cash in the middle of the night, but the Biden administration openly subsidized the Revolutionary Guard with a $6 billion ransom payment, at least $25 billion in sanction relief, including $10 billion via a waiver, and so on.

Let’s also remember that one of Biden’s first foreign policy decisions was to overturn Trump-era policy by releasing millions to Gaza that would be sifted off by Hamas, releasing funding to Hamas-allied UNRWA, and removing the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list.

But to truly comprehend how demented our foreign policy has become, consider this: Iran reportedly informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, and the U.S. told Iran through Ankara that the attack should be “within certain limits.” This is a longtime ally of the United States we’re talking about — and a foe that’s murdered and kidnapped Americans for decades.

It should be mind-boggling that Biden likely knew Iran was moving forward with its attack but still gave his goofy and impotent “don’t” when asked about it by the press.

Indeed, the Biden administration’s position seems to be that Israeli military and defense forces exist to allow Iran to have a hissy fit and save face. The Iranian attack is only “symbolic” because it failed. According to officials, the attack, indiscriminately aimed at civilian centers, was designed to cause “mass casualties.”

Just because you shoot at someone, and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.

Then again, virtually every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)

Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where IRGC terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.

Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.

Now, it is something of a cliché to contend that Israel must be right 100 percent of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. The lo-fi Hamas attack last year was a devastating failure for the Jewish state and its leadership. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.

Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”

Meanwhile, Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. Anyone who’s paid five minutes of attention to Israeli politics knows that Netanyahu is frustratingly cautious. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.

We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.

Despite what Obama’s retreads demand.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Hamas And Hezbollah Are the Symptoms, Iran Is the Disease


BY: CHUCK DEVORE | OCTOBER 20, 2023

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/hamas-and-hezbollah-are-the-symptoms-iran-is-the-disease-2666031823.html/

USS Ford

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The U.S. response to Hamas’ Nazi-like massacre of Israelis, Americans, and anyone else in its murderous path has been, almost without exception, robust. But U.S. officials are largely missing the larger picture and risking being drawn into an escalation — on the enemy’s terms.

Hamas and Hezbollah are the symptoms; Iran is the disease.

But President Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation on Oct. 19 danced around the core issue of Iran’s financing, training, and encouragement of violent, brutal forces across the region and beyond, as well as its nuclear missile program. Thus, the gathering might of the U.S. Navy off the coast of Israel in the form of two aircraft carrier strike groups and a Marine Expeditionary Unit betrays unimaginative, linear thinking.

If used, American firepower would augment Israel’s own considerable military force. In theory, this threat helps to deter Hezbollah from unleashing its arsenal of 100,000 missiles on Israel, many of them sophisticated.

But, like Hamas, Hezbollah is expert at digging. They hide their missile launchers in an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — all guarded by an air defense network that is likely to get lucky enough times to raise the specter of captured American pilots.

The last time U.S. naval aviation operated over Lebanon was in 1983, in response to the Beirut barracks bombing in October — an attack that Iranian authorities arrogantly claimed credit for in the past month. Until 9/11, it was the deadliest terror attack on Americans. Two months later, the Syrian military fired on U.S. Navy aircraft, shooting down two A-6 attack jets and capturing an officer.

Optimal Use of U.S. Air Force and Navy

If the incremental addition of American airpower is helpful to the pending effort to destroy Hamas while deterring a wider conflict, that role can more than adequately be filled by the U.S. Air Force. The U.S. Navy should instead be concentrating 2,000 miles to the east in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. There, the U.S. Navy would be playing to its unambiguous strength, enforcing sanctions against Iran by controlling the sea lines of communication that Iran depends on to generate the cash for its empire of terror.

Unfortunately, this would require a Biden administration that was both imaginative and strategic — and not in the thrall of a recently revealed Iranian influence operation that managed to place several advisors friendly to the Iranian mullahs in key national security positions since the Obama administration. Chief among these, Robert Malley, a longtime friend of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and an architect of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran, a deal that focused exclusively on Iran’s nuclear program, rewarding the mullahs with cash and sanctions relief while greenlighting their missile program and global support for terror.

Iran’s Nuclear Program

Instead, Biden’s systematic appeasement of Iran, a continuation of the Obama-era policy that weirdly sought to use Iran as a counter to perceived Israeli intransigence on the Palestinian problem, has resumed. Up until the gruesome events of Oct. 7, Biden’s national security team was willfully blind to Iran’s bloody history of sponsoring terror and its determined drive to produce nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them.

As a result, U.N. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear, missile, and drone program — never well enforced by Biden — expired on Oct. 18 with the U.S. announcing its own unilateral set of sanctions. The U.S. continues to pretend these efforts are somehow slowing Iran’s drive to push its nuclear program to completion, while Russian use of Iranian combat drones in Ukraine reveals the prior sanctions regime as inadequate to the task.

Reagan-Era Lessons

The U.S. never fully grappled with the Iranian theocracy after the shah was toppled in 1979. During the Cold War, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would come to Iran’s aid and that the military cost of defeating the regime would be too high. Instead, the U.S. was content to see Iran tied down in a bloody stalemate against Iraq after the latter invaded in 1980.

As the war started to threaten oil exports out of the Gulf, America responded by providing a U.S. Navy escort to six Kuwaiti-owned super tankers in July 1987.  After an escorting U.S. Navy ship struck a mine on April 14, 1988, the Reagan administration responded only four days later with Operation Praying Mantis. It was the Navy’s largest combat action since World War II, sinking an Iranian guided missile frigate, crippling a second, sinking four other boats, and destroying two militarized oil platforms at the cost of one helicopter with two crew lost.

The operation was thoroughly wargamed a year before, when it was determined that an unambiguously aggressive response to Iran would likely prevent the conflict from escalating. In other words, a disproportionate response would rob Iran of the ability to control the timing and mode of escalation, reducing U.S. casualties and preserving the peace.

Applying Force

This lesson from the Reagan era opens up a final consideration. Rather than following through on the foolish precedent of incentivizing hostage-taking via negotiation and cash payments, America should ditch the carrots and pick up the stick.

Imagine the transformative discussion over the current hostage crisis — and the forestalling of future hostage-taking by Iran and its proxies — if the U.S. were to announce that every hostage taken is worth $1 billion (or $1.171 billion if we wish to account for Bidenflation). That amount would be deducted from seized Iranian assets or taken from oil tankers filled with Iranian oil. The proceeds would compensate hostages and their families, with the remainder used to replenish the Pentagon’s waning stocks of armaments.

This is exactly the kind of naval power application the U.S. Navy was built for. Unfortunately, the radical cadres infesting the Biden administration’s national security staff would never allow such an idea to reach the desk of our cognitively impaired commander-in-chief.

Chuck DeVore is chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and a former California legislator, and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel. He’s the author of “The Crisis of the House Never United—A Novel of Early America.”

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Obama Appoints Hamas Adviser Robert Malley to Senior Director on National Security Council


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http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/02/obama-appoints-hamas-adviser-robert-malley-senior-director-national-security-council/#4EP4STXREeqST2jP.99

9 hours ago

BrotherhoodPresident Obama has named Hamas adviser Robert O. Malley the senior director at the National Security Council (NSC). You may recall that Malley was foreign policy adviser to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2007, and was fired from his campaign team in 2008 because of his notorious ties to Hamas, the PLO and other jihadist, anti-Israel groups.

Atlas readers are long familiar with this subversive jihad operative. As early as 2007 and  2008 (and repeatedly throughout the campaign and in my book), I warned Atlas readers of the troubling relationship between Robert O. Malley and Barack Hussein Obama.

Robert Malley told the NY Times that he had regularly been in contact with Hamas, which is designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.

2007 and further:

[Malley] was part of the American negotiating team that dealt with Yasser Arafat at Camp David. He has presented a revisionist history of those negotiations since then: presenting a view that blames Israel for the failures of the negotiations. His version has been radically at odds with the views of Americans and Israelis (including the views of American Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross-also an adviser to Obama- and President Clinton). He has spent years representing the Palestinian point of view, co-writing a series of anti-Israel articles with Hussein Agha-a former Arafat adviser. Palestinian advocate. These have appeared in the New York Review of Books a publication that has served as a platform for a slew of anti-Israel advocates from Tony Judt to the aforementioned George Soros to the authors of the Israeli Lobby book Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. Malley has also called settlements “colonies” — implicitly condemning Israel as a “colonial” state. His writings have been so critical of Israel that the media-monitoring group CAMERA has a “dossier” on him.

Discover the Networks:

In a July 2001 op-ed (titled “Fictions About the Failure at Camp David“) which was published in the New York Times, Robert Malley (whose family, as noted above, had close ties to Yasser Arafat) alleged that Israeli — not Palestinian — inflexibility had caused the previous year’s Camp David peace talks (brokered by Bill Clinton) to fail. This was one of several controversial articles Malley has written — some he co-wrote with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat – blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for that failure.

hamas

One security official at the time said, “We are noting with concern some of Obama’s picks as advisers, particularly Robert Malley who has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hezbollah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts” (here).

Because of the exposure of Malley by the blogs, he was removed from Obama’s campaign team. But the mask is off, and Obama has no need to pretend to be something he is not. Malley is back and in charge  —

“Adviser Fired by Obama for Hamas Meeting Gets Top WH Security Job,”  Judicial Watch, February 19, 2014

A radical foreign policy adviser fired by President Obama years ago for meeting with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has been hired by the White House to be the senior director at the National Security Council (NSC).

How generous of the commander-in-chief to let bygones be bygones when it comes to this extremist, a Middle East “expert” named Robert Malley whose family had close ties to Yasser Arafat, founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Fatah movement. Malley was an adviser in Bill Clinton’s White House and he consistently exonerates Palestinians and condemns Israel.

Over the years he has published a number of newspaper opinion pieces urging the United States to reach out and negotiate with terrorist enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah and Muqtada al-Sadr. A website that documents the networks and agendas of the political left offers details about Malley’s scary past and provides links to the outrageous articles he’s published, including several co-written with Hussein Agha, a former adviser to Arafat.

Malley grew up in France and his Egyptian-born father was a key figure in Egypt’s communist party and a close friend of Arafat’s. His parents were fervently anti-Israel and huge supporters of several leftist revolutionary liberation movements, especially the Palestinian cause. Malley published a piece in a mainstream newspaper declaring that Israel was responsible for the failure of Bill Clinton’s peace talks with the Palestinians. Malley attended the 2000 event, which was held at Camp David because it was the site of the landmark 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace accords.

When Obama launched his 2008 presidential campaign, he brought Malley on as a foreign policy adviser Who is better offfocusing on the Middle East. The then-Illinois senator reportedly dumped Malley around May for meeting with and having regular contact with Hamas, which has long been classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. A London newspaper broke the story about Malley getting the boot for schmoozing it up with terrorists and U.S. media repeated the line, but Middle Eastern press published a vastly different version.

Shortly after Obama got elected president in early November, Israel’s largest news site revealed that the Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat reported that Hamas engaged in talks with Obama for months through his “fired” adviser. The article quotes Ahmad Yousuf, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s political advisor, saying this: “We were in contact with a number of Obama’s aides through the Internet, and later met with some of them in Gaza, but they advised us not to come out with any statements, as they may have a negative effect on his election campaign and be used by Republican candidate John McCain (to attack Obama).”

Every countryNow Malley is officially a top dog in the crucial, tremendously influential agency that advises the president on national security and foreign policy matters. The Obama-loving mainstream newspaper that reported Malley’s new position this week says his return to the White House reflects a changing U.S. role in the Middle East. “This time he will manage the fraying ties between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf, a job that says a lot about how America’s role in the Middle East has changed

About Pamela Geller

Pamela Geller is the founder, editor and publisher of Atlas Shrugs.com and President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). She is the author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, (foreword by Ambassador John Bolton), (Simon & Schuster).  Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She is also a regular columnist for World Net Daily, the American Thinker, and other publications.
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Read more at http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/02/obama-appoints-hamas-adviser-robert-malley-senior-director-national-security-council/#4EP4STXREeqST2jP.99

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