RUTHFULLY YOURS

It took seven and a half years, but the Obama Administration is finally awakening to the nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. On Friday John Kerry said the Syrian and Russian governments should face a war-crimes probe for bombing civilians in Syria, while the U.S. intelligence community announced its belief that the Russian government is behind the cyberattacks on the Democratic Party.

Many readers will recall how President Obama mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for saying in a presidential debate that Russia is America’s main adversary. And don’t forget Mr. Obama’s private whispers to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, caught unaware on a microphone, that he’d be ready to wheel and deal with Russia again after his 2012 re-election.

The wheeling has all been done by Mr. Putin, who returned as Russian President and proceeded to roll over Mr. Obama as if he were the president of Azerbaijan. The Russian’s affronts include his conquest of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, his military intervention in the Middle East, and now his attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election.

Secretary of State Kerry’s moral dudgeon about Syria reflects his frustration at being gulled by the Kremlin’s fake diplomacy one more time. But it won’t amount to much because Mr. Obama’s abdication in Syria has left the U.S. with little leverage on the ground. If Mr. Kerry took the war-crime issue to the United Nations, Russia and probably China would veto in the Security Council.

The meddling in U.S. elections is another matter. In an unusual joint statement Friday, the Department of Homeland Security and Director of National Intelligence said that “the U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

The U.S. spooks added that “the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia,” and that given the “scope and sensitivity” of these efforts “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Senior-most is a euphemism for Mr. Putin.

One question is why the Obama Administration has gone public with this hacking news now. One reason might be to warn Russia against dumping more of the U.S. documents it almost certainly has before Election Day. But then Russia’s hacking habits are hardly new, and Mr. Putin is still harboring the national-security thief Edward Snowden. The timing suggests the White House may also be trying to help Hillary Clinton given her campaign’s portrayal of Donald Trump as a Putin apologist. Sure enough, her campaign issued a statement linking Mr. Trump to the news almost on cue Friday. CONTINUE AT SITE

Once upon a time, President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? First, he was not President Bush. And second, the silly Norwegians behind the prize fell for “hope and change” as bad as anybody.

It’s a little different today, as we see in this post from Kathleen Hennessey:

Seven years ago this week, when a young American president learned he’d been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize barely nine months into his first term — arguably before he’d made any peace — a somewhat embarrassed Barack Obama asked his aides to write an acceptance speech that addressed the awkwardness of the award.

But by the time his speechwriters delivered a draft, Obama’s focus had shifted to another source of tension in his upcoming moment in Oslo: He would deliver this speech about peace just days after he planned to order 30,000 more American troops into battle in Afghanistan.

The president all-but scrapped the draft and wrote his own version.

The speech Obama delivered — a Nobel Peace Prize lecture about the necessity of waging war — now looks like an early sign that the American president would not be the sort of peacemaker the European intellectuals of the Nobel committee had anticipated.

I remember a Canadian friend, who did not support President Bush, sending me an email after the Nobel announcement. He said in so many words: this is silly and it certainly proves the Messiah thing that you’ve talking about.

Well said, Canadian friend.

Obama, the so called man of peace, has actually set the table for more conflicts and wars than any recent U.S. president. The Russians are flying MiGs over our aircraft carriers. Iranian boats bully U.S. warships. President Obama is not welcomed by Raul Castro in Havana and then has to go out what the Chinese called the “you know what” hole of the airplane. And let’s not talk about Iraq, Syria, etc.

Seven years ago this week the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Barack Obama. The decision was greeted with ridicule in the U.S., and it unsettled even supporters of the president, who hadn’t finished his first year in office. Still Mr. Obama flew to Oslo and delivered one of his trademark speeches. The philosopher-president was the toast of Europe.

Mr. Obama today almost never mentions the prize, and the Nobel Committee’s former secretary has expressed regret over the choice. Barack Obama the Nobelist is a bad memory among Europeans, who face more pressing concerns, chief among them a Syrian civil war that has flooded the Continent with more than a million refugees.

Yet this Nobel indigestion is unfair to Mr. Obama. On its own terms his prize has been a resounding success. Seven years later the president has achieved the future-tense victories first celebrated in Oslo.

The committee that awarded the prize hoped for an America that would no longer play the hegemon. The Norwegians wanted a U.S. president who would “strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” as the Nobel citation put it. A leader who would emphasize “the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play,” whose decisions would track the “attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”

This was the heyday of transnationalism, the philosophy that says all states—strong or weak, free or unfree—must submit to “norms” drawn up by law professors and global organizations such as the U.N. and European Union. The transnationalist view can’t tolerate an exceptional nation that imposes its will on others, even with the best intentions.

Mr. Obama was (and remains) a committed transnationalist, and he staffed his foreign-policy team with like-minded thinkers such as the journalist Samantha Power, the Yale Law School dean Harold Koh and the Princeton scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter. At his Nobel lecture in Oslo, Mr. Obama declared: “I am convinced that adhering to standards, international standards, strengthens those who do, and isolates and weakens those who don’t.”

The real-world results are a different matter. They are on display in Aleppo, where the Bashar Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian patrons are close to bringing to heel Syria’s last non-Islamic State opposition stronghold. Syrian forces shell houses and drop shrapnel-packed barrels on what remains of the city’s civilian buildings. Vladimir Putin’s pilots stalk the skies, setting women and children alight with incendiary ordnance.

In Oslo in 2009, Mr. Obama said of situations like the one unfolding in Syria: “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.” How costly?

During Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Gov. Mike Pence spoke of creating no-fly zones to protect civilians while Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine floated a “humanitarian zone” in Aleppo. The trouble is that the Kremlin this week deployed the SA-23 Gladiator anti-air system to Syria for the first time. The SA-23 can take down aircraft as well as missiles. It is an insurance policy for the Assad regime that will raise the stakes in any future U.S. military action.

With his endless patience for rogues, in other words, Mr. Obama has tied the hands of his successor. Set aside the human misery in Syria. Set aside, too, the destabilizing effects of millions of refugees on Syria’s neighboring states and Europe. The expansion of Russian and Iranian influence in the Middle East represents a long-term strategic setback for the West. CONTINUE AT SITE

Senator Obama opposed naming Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terror group even while it was closely involved in organizing attacks against American soldiers in Iraq. Then, as part of his dirty deal with Iran, he secretly sent a fortune in foreign cash on airplanes linked to the IRGC.

And, as another part of the secret ransom deal with Iran, he lifted UN sanctions on Bank Sepah.

The United States has gone after plenty of banks for aiding terror finance, but Bank Sepah is somewhat unique in that it is a financial institution actually owned and operated by Islamic terrorists.

Bank Sepah is an IRGC bank. The IRGC, despite Obama’s denials, is an Islamic terror group with American blood on its hands. It is to Shiite Islam what ISIS is to Sunni Islam. And even the Democrats know it.

After the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans, President Clinton sent a message to the leader of Iran warning that the United States had evidence of IRGC involvement in the attack.

More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that the IRGC have been “labeled as terrorists” when discussing how the Shiite terror organization will benefit from Obama’s sanctions relief.

Bank Sepah however had been sanctioned for something bigger than terrorism. The scale of bombings it was involved in could make the Khobar Towers attack seem minor. Sepah had been sanctioned for being “involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities.”

Among other activities, it had helped Iran buy ballistic missile technology from North Korea.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program would only be halfway complete if it gets the bomb. It also needs missiles to be able to strike Israel, Europe and eventually America. That’s where North Korea and Bank Sepah come in. Bank Sepah helps keep Iran’s ballistic missile industry viable. By delisting it, Obama aided Iran’s ballistic missile program just as he had earlier aided its nuclear program.

The revelation of recent days that, back in January, President Obama agreed that the United Nations should lift its sanctions against two Iranian state banks which financed Iran’s ballistic missile development puts the lie to Washington’s claims – stubbornly maintained for more than a year – that it was determined to rein in the Islamic Republic’s expanding missile program.

In fact, the president’s decision reflects a larger pattern of U.S. backtracking over Iran’s ballistic missiles – one that dates back to well before the landmark U.S.-led global agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in July of 2015.

During the U.S.-led negotiations over that agreement, the president decided they should focus squarely on Iran’s nuclear program and not cover such related issues as Iran’s development and testing of long-range ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads – despite the obvious tie between nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

With an agreement over Iran’s nuclear program in place, U.S. officials argued, they could then pressure Iran over not only its ballistic missile program but also its sponsorship of terror, its efforts to destabilize Sunni nations in the region and its increasingly grotesque human rights record at home.

But the public record – of which the new revelation about sanctions relief is now a part, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal – reveals something far different: While negotiating and implementing the nuclear agreement, Washington took multiple steps that not only legitimized Iran’s missile program but actually helped Tehran make further progress.

First and foremost, the United States agreed to soften the global prohibitions directed against that program.

Much of the city of Aleppo lies in ruins after days of airstrikes by Russian and Assad regime forces, and buried in the wreckage is whatever is left of the Obama Administration’s Syria policy. If it’s any consolation to the 275,000 souls trapped in the city, John Kerry has regrets.

That much is clear from a leaked recording of a conversation the Secretary of State had with a group of Syrian civilians engaged in humanitarian work during last month’s U.N. General Assembly. Mr. Kerry complained that “the Russians don’t care about international law, and we do.” He noted that “a lot of Americans don’t believe that we should be fighting and sending young Americans over to die in another country.”

Above all, he lamented that his diplomatic efforts to end Syria’s war were never backed by a credible threat of American military strikes. “I think you’re looking at three people, four people in the Administration who have all argued for use of force, and I lost the argument,” Mr. Kerry said.
The Secretary is right that President Obama doomed whatever chances the U.S. had of shaping a better outcome in Syria when Mr. Obama made clear that nothing, including chemical attacks against civilians, could induce him to deploy even modest force to ground Bashar Assad’s air force or establish no-fly/no-drive zones.

Then again, it’s hard to credit Mr. Kerry as the scorned voice of reason within the Administration when, until last week, he was the most vocal advocate of making common cause with Moscow in Syria.

In May 2015 Mr. Kerry first broke the informal diplomatic quarantine the U.S. had imposed on Russia after it granted Edward Snowden asylum in 2013 and invaded Ukraine the following year. Last month Mr. Kerry was pushing the Pentagon, over the objections of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, to share targeting intelligence with Russia to grease a new cease-fire deal. As with a similar cease-fire Mr. Kerry negotiated earlier this year, Russia violated it within days.

The Obama administration has set about redrawing its relationship with Russia amid this week’s diplomatic breakdown over Syria, taking on one of its most complex foreign-policy challenges just three months before a new president takes office.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry held out the possibility of once again working with Moscow after pulling out of talks over a Syrian cease-fire deal the day before.

While he faulted Russia for prolonging the war by tying its interests to the Assad regime and turning a blind eye to its brutality, his comments also underscored Moscow’s influence in bringing any resolution to the conflict.
“Russia knows exactly what it needs to do to get that cessation implemented in a fair and reasonable way,” Mr. Kerry said, as he urged Russia and the Assad regime to grant humanitarian access in Syria.

The move to formally walk away Monday from the cease-fire and military-cooperation agreement reached with Russia last month heightens pressure on Washington to spell out its next steps in Syria. But neither Mr. Kerry nor officials in Washington offered any new specifics Tuesday.

Mr. Kerry said the U.S. wanted Russian and Syrian warplanes out of the skies over Aleppo, but didn’t lay out a plan to do so. U.S. officials also said that one option could involve U.S. strikes on Syrian forces, although they acknowledged such a move carried risks of escalating a confrontation with Russia and is unlikely.