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In Foreign Policy, a Grim State of the Union By Aaron David Miller

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

Presidential rhetoric is much less effective in a final year, after a leader’s statements and approach have become rooted in reality. And in his final State of the Union address, Barack Obama will have a tough time persuading a skeptical nation that the world he inherited eight years ago is somehow more manageable and secure as a result of his efforts.

In his speech Tuesday, Mr. Obama is likely to claim success on a number of issues. He has reached out to Cuba, concluded an agreement to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and negotiated a trade accord with Pacific nations as well as a historic framework on climate change. But all of these accomplishments are works in progress; the first two depend on changes in the behavior of authoritarian regimes; the latter on (uncertain) congressional approval and the compliance of numerous international actors. The success or failure of these endeavors won’t be determined until long after Mr. Obama leaves the White House, and a Republican successor might well try to undermine, delay, or alter some or all of them.

When it comes to terror attacks at home, Mr. Obama will seek to reassure but it’s going to be a heavy lift. Two-thirds of the public disapproves of his approach to Islamic State. Mr. Obama can point to recent successes by the Iraqi army against ISIS in Ramadi, but that victory is less a turning point than a successful turn in a long and winding road. The image of a president who underestimated the rise of ISIS and has been reluctant to use more military muscle is increasingly criticized by the many Republicans running for president. Mr. Obama’s former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, has sought to distance herself from the president on the issue of a “no-fly zone” for Syria. Fair or not, more San Bernardino-style attacks, a Paris-like assault, or the downing of a U.S. commercial airliner could undermine Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy legacy.

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Donald Trump Vows to Slash Funding for Education, EPA In interview at local diner, Trump pledges ‘tremendous cutting’ if elected By Heather Haddon

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

MANCHESTER, N.H.—Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Monday he would slash funding for the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency if he is elected president.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal and New Hampshire’s WMUR at a local diner here, the businessman said he would do “tremendous cutting” of the federal government. Education policy, he said, should be returned to the states, and he said he would end the Common Core education standards, which conservatives view as federal overreach.

“Education should be local and locally managed,” said Mr. Trump, who also attacked the administration’s environmental policies. “The Environmental Protection Agency is the laughingstock of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s focus on domestic budgetary issues is a new plank in his presidential policy proposals. It is also one likely to appeal in New Hampshire, where voters have long rewarded candidates who promise fiscal restraint and to reduce federal government spending.

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Obama’s Empty Chair The State of the Union and the president’s taste for the grand but futile gesture. By Willilam McGurn

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

As Barack Obama puts the finishing touches on his final State of the Union address, a White House teaser reveals one of his planned props for the evening: “We leave one seat empty in the First Lady’s State of the Union Guest Box for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.”

Blame Woodrow Wilson.

Until Wilson, presidents stretching back to Jefferson had been content to fulfill their constitutional requirement to inform Congress about the state of the union in writing. In 1913, alas, Wilson elected to deliver his assessment in person. Speechwriters of both parties (I served my time in the George W. Bush years) have been embellishing ever since.

The spectacle is made for President Obama. After all, this is the man who strode out on a stage of foam Greek columns when he accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency. How appropriate that in his last State of the Union he now opts for the empty chair routine used to such derision by Clint Eastwood at the last Republican National Convention.

Then again, for Mr. Obama the maneuver has always been the message. From his 2008 campaign appearance before the Berlin Wall (where he declared himself “a fellow citizen of the world”) to his decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize before he had in fact done anything, the stage has always upstaged the substance. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s penchant for the beau geste carries a high price for Americans, not to mention other, less fortunate citizens of the world.

Start with foreign policy. Though Candidate Obama inveighed mightily against the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he also campaigned on the idea that Iraq had distracted us from winning “the necessary war” in Afghanistan. When he announced to the American people his own surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, the cadets at West Point were drafted to serve as the dramatic backdrop.

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The Cologne Portent In the spirit of Christian charity, Merkel has imported Muslim misogyny.By Bret Stephens

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

Among the hard lessons of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, surely one of them is that it’s foolish to expect that backward and often barbaric societies can be transformed into functioning liberal democracies. So why do liberals seem so surprised that so many people from these societies behave in barbaric ways after they’ve shoved their way into the West?

As I write, 516 criminal complaints have been filed in Germany against men of mainly North African or Arab origin who went on a New Year’s Eve sexual-assault rampage in the city of Cologne.

“Twenty or 30 men, foreign men, surrounded us and we couldn’t even move anymore,” a woman identified as Michelle told the BBC. “They just grabbed our arms and tried to tear us apart and pushed our clothes away and tried to get between our legs.”
Similar events also took place in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin. In Sweden, a scandal erupted after it emerged that police had suppressed a report of mass groping by Middle East migrants at a festival last summer. In September, Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute chronicled some 30 cases of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by migrants against German and migrant women alike.

“In Bavaria, women and girls housed at a refugee shelter. . . are subject to rape and forced prostitution on a daily basis,” Mr. Kern writes, citing reports from women’s rights groups. “The price for sex with female asylum seekers is 10 euros.”

For anyone even minimally acquainted with Mideast mores, none of this is news. Mob sexual assaults in Egypt became notorious after the 2011 attack on reporter Lara Logan, but they have become a staple of Egyptian life. “Suddenly I was in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of men in a circle that was getting smaller and smaller around me,” one Egyptian woman wrote of a 2013 attack in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. “They were touching and groping me everywhere.”

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Denying the Obvious About Islamist Terror After another ISIS-inspired shooting, Philadelphia’s mayor joins the chorus: It’s not about religion, no sir. Dorothy Rabinowitz

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

It required only half a minute for the mayor of Philadelphia, Democrat Jim Kenney, to achieve national fame. On Friday, an already sensation-crowded day, it fell to the mayor to take part in the official pronouncements on the attempted murder of city police officer Jesse Hartnett, shot and severely wounded as he sat in his patrol car when a would-be assassin emptied his gun at him—13 shots in all.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr., appointed just three days earlier, delivered the details with noteworthy eloquence: The wounded officer, bleeding heavily from three wounds, one arm useless, had gotten himself out of the car, chased the attacker and shot him.

The drama of this recital needed no amplification, but there it was anyway: Clear security video images showed the assailant in his flowing white dishdasha—a robe favored by Muslim men—running toward the patrol car, shooting, sticking his hand in the window, and racing speedily away. Pictures too of the police officer lurching out of the car to give chase.

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“The Case For Incrementalism” Sydney M. Williams

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

The case for incrementalism is based on the observation that extremism – whether from the right or the left – does not work in a country that prizes freedom. A democracy, by definition, is not efficient. It is not meant to be. It cannot totally satisfy all people with their myriad opinions, but it should satisfy most and be representative of the people.

Unfortunately, extremism has characterized politics for the past seven years and perhaps longer. Mr. Obama came to the White House promising to heal the wounds caused by an election in 2000 that many Democrats felt was illegal and from two wars that had grown increasingly unpopular. Instead, rifts deepened.

Immediately following the election in 2008, compromise went the way of the Dodo bird. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank – all passed with no (or minimal) support from the opposition. This “my way, or the highway” attitude on the part of the imperious Barack Obama has also led to deteriorating relations with Israel, an aggressive Russia, a rogue North Korea and a confrontational China. It brought about a premature troop withdrawal from Iraq, “leading from behind” in Libya, the abandonment of principle in Syria and a nuclear deal with Iran, perhaps conceived with good intentions, but executed in such a manner that it could turn the Middle East into a nuclear maelstrom. And, it has led to re-establishing relations with the most repressive Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

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Islamophobia & Political Correctness By Herbert London

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

“Progressive elites have accused those who condemn Muslim extremism of being extremists themselves – claiming that censure of radical Islam is an indiscriminate criticism of all Muslims. Here is an example of what progressives would call “Islamophobia,” dubbed appropriately by Andrew Cummins as a word “created by fascists, used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In accordance with a ten year plan of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to implement United Nations’ Resolution 16:18 which criminalizes all criticism of Islam worldwide, the U.S. House of Representatives issued H. Res. 569 condemning violence, bigotry and “hateful rhetoric” toward Muslims in the United States.

This proposal comes on the heels of Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s post San Bernardino promise to prosecute anyone guilty of anti-Muslim speech. It is clear that Ms. Lynch is firing a canon at a fly. According to FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, there were 1014 hate crime incidents motivated by religious bias in 2014. Of those, 154 – 15.2 percent – were anti-Islamic. More than half were anti-Jewish incidents. Not only is this yet another example of the Obama administration exaggerating minor threats, but it suggests as well an ignorance or callous avoidance of the First Amendment.

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Fuel for the fires of the Middle East The execution of a prominent Shiite cleric heightened Saudi-Iranian tensions By Jed Babbin

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

The Saudi Arabian-Iranian crisis that has erupted with the former’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr could easily, but not quickly, lead to open war. That war may be inevitable because it is, at the same time, a religious struggle as well as a conflict for domination of the Middle East.

The two nations have been engaged in proxy wars for years, but the nature of the conflict and President Obama’s nuclear weapons agreement with Iran shorten the time before open war breaks out.

As I’ll get to in a moment, the proxy wars in Yemen and Syria — as well as Iran’s having turned Iraq into a virtual satellite — made the Saudis feel surrounded and isolated. Al-Nimr’s execution, however, is significant in ways the other parts of this conflict are not. Its implications reach beyond to the core of the Sunni-Shiite religious wars that are almost as old as Islam.

The immediate results of al-Nimr’s execution include an attack on the Saudi embassy in Tehran which resulted in its being partially burned. Two Sunni mosques in Iraq were similarly attacked. Accelerating the crisis were statements from Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Khamenei, defending al-Nimr, and from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps accusing the Saudis of a “medieval act of savagery” that would result in the “downfall of the [Saudi] monarchy.”

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Obama’s Insane Iran Policy By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

The Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon published a thorough report last Friday about how President Obama’s Iran deal has strengthened the hand of Iran’s hardliners. What is most breathtaking in the story is the degree to which American policy is divorced from reality.

How could the deal, which injects over $100 billion (probably way over that amount) into the Tehran regime’s coffers, have done anything but strengthened the hardliners’ hand? Of course it could not. Yet Obama’s policy walks an incoherent line between conceding that fact and wishfully thinking it were not so. Thus, Mr. Solomon writes,

The Obama administration’s nuclear deal was intended to keep Iran from pursuing an atomic bomb, and raised hope in the West that Tehran would be nudged toward a more moderate path.

U.S. and European officials had hoped the nuclear accord would broaden cooperation with Tehran, and empower Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to promote democratic change. He was elected in 2013 on a platform to end the nuclear standoff and build bridges to the West.

As much as $100 billion in frozen revenues are expected to return to Iran after sanctions are lifted, which U.S. officials said could happen in coming weeks. The White House hoped the cash windfall would aid Mr. Rouhani’s political fortunes.

To summarize: you are to understand from this that the administration and its allies in the P5+1 negotiations over the deal believed that the deal would (a) moderate the regime’s behavior (notwithstanding that the more aggressively Iran behaved, the more inclined Obama was to appease it), and (b) strengthen the position of the purportedly moderate, reformist president Rouhani (notwithstanding that he is only president because he was allowed to run by the Shiite ayatollahs who actually control the country, and who he has made a career of faithfully serving).

Yet, at the same time, Solomon reports:

Iranian academics close to Mr. Rouhani are increasingly concerned Mr. Khamenei will use the money and diplomatic rewards [from the deal] to entrench hard-line allies, at the expense of the president.

Many of the companies about to be removed from international blacklists are part of military and religious foundations, including some that report directly to Mr. Khamenei. Those firms could be the first to benefit from the rush of international businesses looking to profit from the lifting of sanctions.

Moreover, we learn that:

“The guiding assumption was that Iran would not moderate its behavior,” said Rob Malley, President Barack Obama ’s top Mideast adviser. “The president considered [it] absolutely critical to get this nuclear deal because we had no assessment that in the foreseeable future, Iran would change its approach.”

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Obama’s Selective Hearing by Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on January 12th, 2016

President Obama’s showmanship is reaching new highs. He even shed tears to promote his gun-control agenda last week. Tomorrow, during his widely televised State of the Union Address, he will be calling attention – emotionally, no doubt – to an empty seat next to Michelle Obama, “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.”

Obama falsely claims more people die in the U.S from gun violence than from car accidents and illicit drugs. But statistics published last November by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) tell a different story; In 2013 (the last available numbers) the growing drug epidemic killed more than 46,000 people in the U.S. Car accidents caused 35,369 deaths and Firearms 33,636. Since then, as the nationwide heroin addiction increased, so did the number of people dying from an overdose. Don’t they deserve the president’s tears? An empty seat in the First Lady’s guest box?

The Obama administration’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy predicted that by 2015, drug related deaths would decline by 15 percent. Instead, it has risen by 30 percent. As this abysmal result has been heavily criticized, the administration claimed it had no way to predict the surge in heroin use, which led to 440 percent rise in overdose deaths. However, they did little, if anything, to stop the surge of purer, cheaper heroin on America’s streets.

The “21st century approach to drug policy,” as advocated in Obama’s 2010 National Drug Control Strategy, had miserably failed to stop both heroin and cocaine production, importation to and distribution on the streets of cities and rural areas in America.