RUTHFULLY YOURS

As U.S. lawmakers debate the Iran nuclear deal, they are rightly concerned about Iran’s refusal to disclose its past work on nuclear weapons. Not only does this refusal deprive inspectors of a baseline for monitoring Iran’s compliance; it also deprives Congress of information about the networks that Iran’s regime might most readily employ should it choose to secretly continue its quest for the nuclear bomb.

On that note, it should also concern Congress that Tehran is not alone in hiding information on Iran’s history of developing nuclear weapons. Whatever President Obama and his negotiating team might know about such matters, they have been — to put it mildly — less than diligent about informing the American public.

An honest accounting would quite likely reveal something that many press reports have alleged, but U.S. administration officials have never publicly confirmed: A history of nuclear weapons collaboration between Iran and nuclear-proliferating North Korea.

Don’t take my word for it. Let us turn instead to an in-depth article published on August 4, 2003 by a staff writer of the Los Angeles Times under the headline “Iran Closes In on Ability to Build a Nuclear Bomb.” The reporter was no junior correspondent. The article was the product of a three-month international investigation by a veteran investigative reporter, previously a member of a Pulitzer-Prize winning team at the New York Times, Douglas Frantz.

•Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the author of Unlearning Liberty.
• Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at the NYU-Stern School of Business.

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress. In February, Laura Kipnis, a professor at Northwestern University, wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education describing a new campus politics of sexual paranoia—and was then subjected to a long investigation after students who were offended by the article and by a tweet she’d sent filed Title IX complaints against her. In June, a professor protecting himself with a pseudonym wrote an essay for Vox describing how gingerly he now has to teach. “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” the headline said. A number of popular comedians, including Chris Rock, have stopped performing on college campuses (see Caitlin Flanagan’s article in this month’s issue). Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke.

The Clinton email cover up keeps unraveling, thanks to the courts.

Hillary Clinton has made a career of stiff-arming Congress, inspectors general and the press. So it looks like it’s up to the courts and law enforcement to get to the bottom of her email scandal.

That’s the real meaning of this week’s news in the email case, as the Clinton stonewall becomes harder to sustain. Mrs. Clinton is turning over to the FBI the private server she used to conduct government business while Secretary of State, as well as three thumb drives containing her government-related email. The Clinton campaign won’t say she did this voluntarily, or in response to an FBI demand. And the FBI won’t say why it sought the server. But the handover follows news that top-secret information traveled across her private system, despite her previous denials.

Meanwhile, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has now verified that Mrs. Clinton will not certify that she has handed over to the State Department all of her work-related records. Two of her closest aides are also dodging Judge Sullivan’s request to hand over their work-related documents to State, and we now know that one of Mrs. Clinton’s aides was using the unsecured Clinton system for government work.

Gen. Odierno, the U.S. Army chief of staff, is retiring Aug. 14.

We need a force of 490,000 as global dangers rise. It’s at 450,000 and heading down.
For almost 40 years, I have had the honor to serve alongside the great men and women of the United States Army. I have been inspired by their professionalism and unwavering commitment to the mission, to the Army, and to the nation. Our leaders at every level have displayed unparalleled ingenuity, flexibility and adaptability. Our soldiers have displayed mental and physical toughness and courage under fire. They have transformed the Army into the most agile, adaptive and expeditionary strategic land force the world has ever known.

Today, the Army is engaged in Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan; in Kosovo, the Korean Peninsula and across the African continent. We have rotational forces in Europe, Kuwait and the Pacific. And our missions are both wide-ranging and essential. The missions include humanitarian assistance, training and advising forces in combat, and reassuring allies with a dedicated U.S. military presence.

As the velocity of world-wide instability rises, the demand for the U.S. Army escalates around the globe, with American soldiers responding where others either won’t or can’t. The threats they face are more complex and diverse than at any other point in recent memory. The nation’s enemies are determined, and they increasingly have the capability to threaten regional and world order, as well as America’s physical security and economic stability.

Mr. Ridley is the author of “The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves” (HarperCollins, 2010) and a member of the British House of Lords. His family leases land for coal mining in northern England.

Raising constant alarms—about fracking, pesticides, GMO food—in the name of safety is a dangerous game.

‘We’ve heard these same stale arguments before,” said President Obama in his speech on climate change last week, referring to those who worry that the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon-reduction plan may do more harm than good. The trouble is, we’ve heard his stale argument before, too: that we’re doomed if we don’t do what the environmental pressure groups tell us, and saved if we do. And it has frequently turned out to be really bad advice.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate. Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her 1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s. Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was done.

Foreign-policy failures have a way of compounding, and that’s what seems to have happened as U.S. officials said Thursday they believe that Islamic State militants used mustard gas this week against Kurdish forces in Iraq.

The sources told Journal reporter Adam Entous that the mustard gas was probably obtained in Syria. Bashar Assad’s government admitted in 2013 to having stockpiles of mustard gas and other banned poisons. President Obama has since claimed often that his deal that year with Vladimir Putin removed those weapons from Syria. But recently U.S. intelligence has said it believes the government hid some caches from international inspectors. That’s the first U.S. failure.

The second is Mr. Obama’s refusal to act with enough dispatch and force against Islamic State. He promised a year ago to degrade and destroy ISIS. But the jihadists have since been able to expand their writ in Iraq, taking the city of Ramadi in May. It’s hardly surprising that jihadists who drown men in cages would resort to using chemical weapons. They will use whatever they can to hold and expand their caliphate.

Hillary feels compelled to issue an everyone-remain-calm memo 15 months before the election.
The Titanic was a beautiful ship. It was a colossus—the culmination of decades of wisdom and design. It was financed and booked by the world’s rich and famous. It was unstoppable. And because it was, it steamed full ahead. Until it sank.
Democrats are this week beginning to freak out that Hillary Clinton is their Titanic, and to debate whether they might be better off on this 2016 political crossing in a less awesome, but more prudent, boat. The debate is overdue. The Clintons are masters at projecting invincibility and lulling their passengers into blanking the danger signs. But holes in a hull have a way of focusing minds.
It’s never a good sign when your party’s putative nominee feels compelled to send out an everyone-remain-calm memo 15 full months before an election. Campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri’s reassurance to supporters was classic Clinton—the perfect combo of airy dismissal (Server? FBI? It means nothing!), misdirection (this whole “classified” thing is really “complicated”), table-turning (Republicans hide things too, you know), and attack (this is just a “partisan witch-hunt”). Still, you don’t send out 700-word explanatories unless party leaders and donors are lighting you up with panic calls.
When Mrs. Clinton handed over her private email server to the Justice Department, Democrats sniffed vulnerability and took a wider look around. What they see is polls showing more than half of America now holds an unfavorable view of their front-runner, and that a mere one-third of the country trusts her. They see surveys showing her only tied with top-tier Republicans in a general matchup—down from a 10-point advantage in May—and losing head-to-head in key battleground states.

As furor builds over the EPA disaster in Durango, Colorado, I would like to propose a just solution. Given that the EPA is an unaccountable, job-killing, river-polluting behemoth, Congress ought to pass a ban on its onshore operations.

Joking aside, while political figures try to brush this fiasco under the table without heads actually rolling or the EPA compensating taxpayers for the environmental damage it caused, the point should be made that the federal government should be held not just to an equal standard as private enterprise, but a higher one.

After all, public servants are accountable to all of us. Private individuals are not.

Yet Democratic Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper argues the exact opposite:

The link between Jewish nationalism and Jewish settlements is crucial.

Jewish nationalism, Zionism, the reestablishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, the homeland of the Jewish people, rooted in Torah, the Bible and Jewish history, echoed in prophetic and rabbinic writing and in prayer, is the most invigorating dynamic in Jewish life in modern times. The uniqueness of Israel as a Jewish state is not only that it is connected to the Bible, documented history going back four millennia, but that it is the vehicle for the third Jewish commonwealth, a modern expression of Jewish civilization.

It is no coincidence that the rebuilding of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of former Jewish civilizations and where, by definition, all “settlements” exist, is contended. And it is no wonder that it is in this area, filled with religious Zionists, that Jewish nationalism is strongest, most vivid and unequivocal. Until 2005, the area of Gush Katif would also have been included in this panorama, and it is for that reason that the 2005 evacuation of Jews from the Gush, known as “the Gaza disengagement,” is correctly seen as an attack on religious Zionism. The link between Jewish nationalism and Jewish settlements is crucial.

Middle East expert Ilan Berman points out that for Iran, trading with Europe is actually the perfect self-defense, a virtual guarantee that it will not face military attack if it cheats on its obligations under the nuclear deal.

Sanctions will also be lifted on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s $95 billion business empire, as well as on Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which operates a vast network of companies and industries. No wonder European media outlets are referring to Iran as the “new El Dorado,” the “chance of a century,” and the “last untapped market.”

“Conducting business with the Iranian regime means to finance the nuclear program, the annihilation threats against Israel, Holocaust denial, the export of Islamist terror and the oppression of the Iranian population.” — Stop the Bomb, Austria.

“Everyone is looking at Iran with greed.” — Senior French official.

European politicians and business leaders, resembling the running of the bulls in Spain, are falling over themselves in a rush to secure the “first-mover” advantage in Iran’s $400 billion economy.

Under the nuclear deal reached in Vienna on July 14, international sanctions will be removed on Iran’s banking, energy and trade sectors if Tehran agrees to certain curbs on its nuclear program.

The lifting of sanctions on Iran, a market of 80 million consumers (the second-largest market in the Middle East after Turkey in terms of GDP) creates the potential for staggering business opportunities.