RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iran nuclear deal has the same political weaknesses as the Affordable Care Act

The Iran nuclear deal is going to be the ObamaCare of arms-control agreements—a substantive mess undermined by a failure to build adequate political support.

Next Tuesday is the deadline for completing the “political” terms of an agreement with Iran. “Technical” details arrive in June. From news reporting on the negotiations, it appears the agreement is turning into a virtual Rube Goldberg machine, a patchwork of fixes that its creators will claim somehow limits Iran’s nuclear breakout period to “a year.” Which is to say, it’s going to be another ObamaCare, a poorly designed mega-project others will have to clean up later.

Just as ObamaCare was a massive entitlement program enacted with no Republican support (unlike Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), the administration’s major arms-control agreement is bypassing a traditional vote in the Senate. Instead, it will get rubber-stamp approval by, of all things, the U.N. Security Council.

Obama’s indifference to Israeli security concerns clarified matters for voters.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have won a handsome election victory following a grueling campaign, complete with foreign government money, including indirectly from the U.S. State Department, going to his opponents.

In order to win, Netanyahu is held now to have reneged on his 2009 in-principle, hedged commitment to reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA) encompassing a Palestinian state. This is actually untrue.

Largely unreported is Netanyahu’s explanation, in which he stated clearly that, under prevailing conditions, establishing a Palestinian state is a folly. This was not a blanket retraction; it was a statement of current geostrategic realities.

With Egypt in distress, the Obama administration’s behavior is strange.

Again, those disturbing questions about whose side the president is on.

A disturbing report [2] by Avi Issacharoff, one of Israel’s leading Middle East analysts, notes that Egypt is now under assault by ISIS from two directions—from its own Sinai Peninsula to the northeast and from the state of Libya, or what’s left of it, to the West.

It was last month that 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians living in Libya were kidnapped by ISIS and subjected to a mass beheading [3] on a beach. In response to that violent episode, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi ordered airstrikes against ISIS in Libya.

And in Sinai, Egyptian forces trying to tame the region have been hit by at least three ISIS terror attacks just last week. The trouble, Issacharoff notes, is that “precisely during these difficult days for the Egyptians, Washington is delaying military assistance deliveries to Cairo . . .”

The Obama administration has held a deep grudge against the government ever since Sisi, backed by a massive popular revolt, overthrew Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood regime in July 2013. The administration reacted by embargoing arms—even though Egypt had been a longstanding U.S. ally and Sisi’s is a nonradical, anti-terror government.

At the Iran nuclear talks, U.S. negotiators have been aiming for a deal that would involve a so-called breakout time of one year — meaning a deal structured so that the Tehran regime, should it cheat, would still need at least a year to be able to produce nuclear weapons. The idea is that this would be a period long enough for inspectors to detect the cheating, and the international community — presumably the “world powers” now negotiating with Iran — to do something about it.

At a background press briefing, held Monday in Switzerland on the sidelines of these nuclear talks, an American senior administration official was asked by a reporter, “Why did you pick one year, instead of nine months, or 15 months?… What’s the reasoning behind that?”

The senior official replied that the U.S. arrived at this goal of a one-year breakout time by using a secret, proprietary model to run “very complicated calculations, which have been validated by our labs and by outside opinion leaders with security clearances because these calculations are based on classified information.” This model, and the information, and the calculations, are all so secret that according to this official the U.S. has not discussed the details with its P5+1 negotiating partners — Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany. They all have their own models, and they negotiate with each other over how to haggle with Iran over arrangements that could yield some collectively acceptable margin of breakout time.

Editors’ note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died 17 years ago on March 15, 1998. To mark this occasion Frontpage is reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2014 issue. We also hope readers will contribute to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive.

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents — a father and a mother, Yuri and Marina Glazov, who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

If you believe Hillary Clinton, her email scandal happened because she couldn’t figure out how to do what every American of working age knows how to do; juggle a work and personal email account.

The Clinton vaporware bridge to the 21st century turned out to be a private email server that kept out the media, but not foreign spy agencies. When Hillary finally had to turn over some emails, she printed out tens of thousands of pages of them as if this were still the 20th century.

But like the rest of her party, Hillary is very much a 20th century regulator, not a 21st century innovator.

Despite claiming to have invented the internet, the Democratic Party isn’t very good at technology and doesn’t like technology. Everything from the Healthcare.gov debacle to the VA death lists happened because this administration was completely incompetent when it came to implementing anything more complicated than a hashtag. The success rate for exchanges managed by its state allies isn’t much better. The only databases it seems able to handle are for its incessant election fundraising emails.

The Obama administration is shamelessly whitewashing the Iranian regime’s state sponsorship of global terrorism, no doubt to help soften Iran’s image in preparation for trying to foist a bad nuclear deal on the American people. It also did the same thing for Iran’s jihadist proxy terrorist group, Hezbollah.

The administration’s most recent unclassified version of the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community report published on February 26, 2015, delivered to the US Senate by National Intelligence director James Clapper, conspicuously omitted any reference to the ongoing terrorist threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah. While acknowledging that Iran remains “an ongoing threat to US national interests,” the report noted Iran’s “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia.” The report also noted Iran‘s commitment of more resources to the fight against the Sunni extremists of the Islamic State.

I know you are all waiting with baited breath for the results of the elections in Syria, Libya, Qatar (pronounced Gutter), Saudi Arabia, Algeria, the Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Teheran and Yemen….right?

Not exactly huh? Did you useless idiots notice that there was an election in Israel yesterday in which over 70% of the population, including Arab Israelis voted in fair and monitored elections? Do you understand the meaning of “vox populi”-the opinions of the majority? That’s what holds in Israel and what is quashed in all those tyrannies that you ignore while you continue your relentless assaults on a model democracy.
But, I waste my time…you are too stupid and bigoted to think clearly…..rsk

While the Left hypocritically questions the senator’s patriotism, no one is disputing his letter’s actual content. It has been an Iranian tradition since 1979 to end Friday prayers with chants of “Death to America!” In a purely rational world, that would be all one needed to know that Iran is not a reliable negotiating partner. Alas, we do not live in such a world. But there’s more evidence. Iran, according to our State Department, has been the chief exporter of terrorism for the last three decades.
It has worked closely with al-Qaeda, facilitating its attacks on America and our allies. Most of the September 11 hijackers traveled through Iran with the help of the Iranian government. U.S. judges have ruled that Iran was an accomplice in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa and the September 11 attacks. During the Iraq War, Iran was responsible for numerous American deaths. And it’s not like any of this is ancient history. Indeed, in 2012, the Treasury Department designated the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security as a major promoter of terrorism and violator of human rights. Right now, via its brutal proxies, Iran is manipulating events on the ground in four Arab capitals — Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sanaa.

In its apparent, inexplicable eagerness to sign just about any deal with Iran to allow it nuclear weapons capability, the U.S. State Department has removed Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah — two of the world most undisguised promoters of terror — from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations List.

Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, has even openly admitted that Iran’s diplomacy with the U.S. is an active “jihad.” How much plainer does a message have to get?

The Islamists have nothing but contempt for Europe’s weakness.

The West needs to paralyze Iran, rather than appease it.

A series of significant defeats to Islamist organizations will counter the effects of their efforts to entice young people to join them, especially ISIS.

In these terrible times, critical for the future of our region, Netanyahu spoke in the U.S. despite the objections of Israelis and Americans, willing to accept personal, political and diplomatic setbacks for himself and his country, in order to look after his people’s security.

We are all also hoping that that the government of Israel will focus even more on bringing the Arabs of Israel into the Israeli fold. Otherwise a “fifth column” could form and harden that will drive them into the open and waiting arms of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Arab-Israeli politicians might also focus more on helping such an effort, rather than, as many Arab politicians do, strike out and blame others for what is wrong — a lazy, destructive substitute for actually helping improve the lives of their people.

Ever since Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came back from his recent visit to the United States, it has repeatedly been shown that he was right to stand before Congress and issue his warnings. Tehran’s Ayatollahs have not only clung to their desire for a naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz, where they targeted a simulated a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, they also displayed a new series of intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs] that could paralyze all the shipping in the Gulf.