RUTHFULLY YOURS

The latest kerfuffle – actually it’s more than that — in the Republican presidential shootout is between Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and it’s over the all-important Iran deal. Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard:

Speaking to reporters here Saturday after an appearance at the Family Leadership Summit, Walker said the next president will need to be prepared to take aggressive action against Iran, “very possibly” including military strikes, on the day he or she is inaugurated, and said he would not be comfortable with a commander in chief who is unwilling to act aggressively on day one of a new presidency. In his announcement speech at the beginning of the week, Walker had promised to ‘terminate’ the Iran deal on day one of his presidency, and Bush, at a town hall four days later, said ending the deal on the first day of a new administration was unrealistic and suggested that promises to do so, while politically appealing, reflected a lack of seriousness

By this time what has come to be called the Tim Hunt affair has pretty well become common knowledge, having gone “viral” in the pejorative sense of the term. A malignant virus has become a virtual epidemic, precipitated by the hordes of ideological do-gooders who clutter the social media and infest the roiling bowels of academia.

To recapitulate for those who may still be in the dark: Hunt, a Nobelized physiologist, made an innocuous, self-deflating comment at a scientific conference in South Korea, poking fun both at himself and his female students. As The National Post [1] reports, citing the transcript of Hunt’s pre-luncheon toast to a group of female journalists hosted by a trade association representing Women’s Science and Technology Associations, he said:

“It’s strange that a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry. … Now seriously … Science needs women and you should do science despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.”

The murder of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly by an illegal alien who had been arrested five times and convicted of seven previous felonies, called attention to cities with a policy of shielding illegal aliens from detection by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known euphemistically as “sanctuary cities.”

Obviously failure of the administration to secure our border with Mexico enabled this thug, Francisco Sanchez, to easily gain repeated access to the United States. However, once past the border, the sanctuary policies of California enabled him to remain in the United States with impunity. In point of fact, when asked by news reporters why he kept returning to San Francisco, he said it was because he knew that he would not face deportation in that city.

The killing of five unarmed military servicemen at two military recruiting centers is an omen and a warning: The “war on terror” has come home.

Thanks to Obama’s retreat from Iraq and the Middle East, the jihad waged by Islamic terrorists is now being fought on American soil, instead of on a battlefront in Fallujah and Anbar. Thanks to the borders Obama has destroyed and the tens of thousands of legal immigrants the White House has decided to import from terrorist regions, the enemy is among us. Thanks to Obama’s denial that we are at war at all, the Islamic jihad is now being waged in Chattanooga and Fort Hood, the fly over country that liberals and progressives have always despised.

But one measure would have.

Critics of President Obama’s recent deal with Iran have rejected the president’s assertion that the only alternative to his deal is war. They think that more aggressive sanctions could have changed Iran’s behavior, given the economic costs the current sanction regime has inflicted. A corollary to this argument assumes that the majority of Iranians are pro-American and sick of the puritanical and corrupt mullahcracy and its willful isolation of the country from the global order. Increase the pressure of sanctions, and this mass of discontent could ripen into regime change or at least a moderation of its behavior.

On the sanctions issue the defenders of the deal have a point. Support for the sanctions has been weakening for a long time, for the simple reason that the member countries of the P5+1 who negotiated the deal are salivating at the chance to profit from the end of sanctions and to access 77 million Iranian customers. Russia wants to sell Iran weapons, China wants to buy its oil, and European countries are already negotiating business deals with Iran. These negotiating “partners”–– except for Germany, all veto-bearing members of the U.N. Security Council responsible for the sanctions––are loath to maintain, let alone increase them. Nor would unilateral sanctions have much effect. For decades we’ve had restrictions on U.S. citizens and corporations doing business with Iran, a ban that did little or nothing to change Iran’s behavior. Going it alone is unlikely to be any more successful.

President Obama thinks he has the U.S. Congress right where he wants it as the Members consider his nuclear deal with Iran. Not only do opponents need a two-thirds majority in both houses to stop it, the President has maneuvered to box them in by having the United Nations approve it first.

That’s the meaning of Monday’s unanimous vote by the U.N. Security Council approving the deal less than a week after negotiations were completed. The various ambassadors blessed the agreement with much self-congratulation but no debate on the substance. The only discouraging word came from Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor, who doesn’t sit on the council but pointed out that the deal had achieved the impossible of uniting Israel and the Arab world in opposition.

If Donald Trump weren’t a clown, he’d apologize for saying that John McCain isn’t a war hero.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a long-abiding dislike for McCain. It’s not just that he’s tied with Joe Biden for getting the most things wrong on foreign policy and defense for the past four decades. It’s not just that his politics are abhorrent to conservatives, which McCain proved for all time in 2007 when the Bush-McCain-Kennedy amnesty for illegal aliens bill was his highest priority.

It’s not even his comprehensive arrogance, which helped sink his amateur hour (e.g., Sarah Palin) presidential campaign. It’s the fact that the Republicans can never have sensible defense and foreign policies as long as he’s the chief architect of the Party’s positions. He needs to be retired, and quickly.

Shortly after the UN Security Council (UNSC) unanimously endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran and the P5+1, on July 20, 2015, Iran’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement reiterating that “the country’s ballistic missile program and capability… fall outside the scope and the jurisdiction of the UNSC resolution and its annexes. Thus it remains untouched and unrestricted by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231.” This was backed up by Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan, who said “Missile-related issues have never been on agenda of the nuclear talks and the Islamic system will resolutely implement its programs in this field.”

The purport of the July 20 Security Council resolution is to override the six UN regulations put in place since 2006 that pronounce Iranian bomb-making immediately illegal and include in four of them sanctions unless and until Iran ceased the development of its nuclear program and stop its terrorist activities.

Last October police in Lima found detonators and TNT in the home of a Hezbollah operative.
In the foreword to the 2014 book “Iran’s Strategic Penetration of Latin America,” former Colombian Defense Minister Marta Lucía Ramírez wrote that Venezuela’s “ ‘axis of unity’ with Iran embodies Latin America’s growing distance” from the U.S. “This is not to distract from the many conflicts the U.S. is engaging in the Middle East or elsewhere,” she noted. But she wanted “to remind our northern neighbors of the kind of disengagement in Latin America that led to a nuclear standoff in 1962.”

Blowing up the Middle East in order to save it—that’s the logic at work.

The Iran deal is supposed to prevent a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East. So what better way to get that ball of hopefulness rolling than by arming our regional allies to the teeth?

“The U.S. is specifically looking at ways to expedite arms transfers to Arab states in the Persian Gulf and is accelerating plans for them to develop an integrated regional ballistic missile defense capability,” the Journal’s Carol Lee and Gordon Lubold reported Monday. The goal, they add, is to prevent the Saudis “from trying to match Tehran’s nuclear capabilities.”

Let’s follow this logic. If the Iran deal is as fail-safe as President Obama claims, why not prove it by giving the Saudis exactly the same nuclear rights that Iran is now to enjoy? Why race to prevent an ally from developing a capability we have just ceded to an enemy? What’s the point of providing the Saudis with defense capabilities they presumably don’t need?