Another Doomed Nuclear Agreement

After seeing Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris hit several consecutive back-to-back home runs in the early 1960's, fellow Yankee great, Yogi Berra quipped, "It's like deja vu all over again." This comes to mind as I consider the recent nuclear agreement with Iran because we have seen this before. In 1994, a similar agreed framework was adopted that was supposed to freeze and eventually eliminate North Korea's nuclear weapons program. We were told that the agreement would guarantee that North Korea would not produce a nuclear weapon by putting in place strong control measures, a sophisticated monitoring  regime and unfettered inspections of all North Korean military and civilian nuclear sites. In exchange for these concessions, the North Koreans received billions of dollars worth of fuel, food and economic aid. The North Koreans began cheating on the agreement almost immediately and by 2006, they had tested their first nuclear device.

Yesterday, President Obama announced that Secretary of State Kerry successfully negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran after nearly 18 months of talks. The agreement doesn't provide for the 24/7 anywhere/anytime inspections that we were promised; it didn't require Iran to renounce its call for the destruction of the state of Israel and in fact required no concessions from the Iranians at all. In addition, the deal ends the sanctions against Iran and frees up nearly $150 billion in frozen assets to a country that is still listed as the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Do we really think that this money will be used to improve the life of the Iranian people and not to spread terror and chaos throughout the world?

If you go back and read what was reported by in the press about the North Korean nuclear deal or listen to President Clinton's announcement of the agreed framework, one could substitute Obama for Clinton and Iran for North Korea and the two situations are nearly identical. Why does anyone believe the ultimate outcome of the Iranian nuclear agreement will be any different than that of the North Korean deal?

Doing the exact same thing and expecting a different outcome has been described as one definition of insanity. Ten years from now, Iran will have nuclear weapons. This agreement almost guarantees it and believing otherwise is clearly crazy!

US-Russian Relations

Putin Saves Obama's Political Bacon Over Syria

I don't know if President Obama has one or not but if he doesn't, I nominate Vladimir Putin for Obama's BFF after Vlad saved his political bacon this week over Syria. To say that Obama mismanaged the situation with Syria is a mistake because it suggests he tried to manage the situation with Syria. He did not. What happened was a series of missteps that has become the trademark of the Obama Administration - this inept team of amateurs. Fortunately for them and everyone else, it is often better to be lucky than to be good. Here is what I mean.

What started the sequence of events that had the Administration careening toward what appeared to be yet another blunder was President Obama's statement back in 2012 that if Syrian President Assad used chemical weapons that would be crossing a "red line." The off-handed and off-teleprompter remark placed the United States in the position of having to either take action against Syria or losing credibility when on August 21st of this year, someone (allegedly the Assad regime) fired rockets armed with chemical warheads into eleven neighborhoods in the Damascus suburbs killing 1500 civilians - 400 of which were children. Over the next several days, President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry tried to make the case for attacking Syria to let Assad know there are consequences to violating international law regarding the use of gas. Initially, Mr. Obama claimed he didn’t need the approval of Congress in order to strike Syria but as his efforts to build the support of the international community failed, he pivoted and said he would ask for Congressional approval. As the Administration tried to convince lawmakers and the American public that attacking Syria was in our national interest, the president began to receive criticism for “drawing the red line.” True to form, Mr. Obama denied drawing the red line and tried to blame everyone else - the world and Congress - despite the video of him clearly using the words “red line.” It was soon very apparent that this effort was also doomed to failure.

While answering the question, ‘Is there anything that Syria can do to avoid being attacked?’ during a CNN interview, Sec. Kerry made his own off-handed remark. Kerry flippantly replied, ‘Well of course they could give up all their chemical weapons within the week but that’s not going to happen.’ Kerry made this remark never dreaming anyone would take it seriously. However, when Russia and Syria indicated that they might be willing to discuss this proposal, he soon began backtracking and even the liberal press recognized this to be a major screw-up. With an address to the nation scheduled to take place within two days, things were looking pretty bleak for Team Barry. Suddenly it must have occurred to Obama and Company, that they had just been thrown a “life line.” What had initially been universally seen as a blunder was now being hailed by Kerry, Obama, and liberals everywhere as a great secret plan that had been weeks in the making. You know what they say, ‘Success has many parents; failure is an orphan.’ In his Tuesday night address, the president said he would delay asking for Congressional approval to strike Syria and that he would allow time to see if diplomacy might still lead to a peaceful solution. The president did however say that a military strike was not off the table if the weapons turnover proposal failed. President Obama was ‘off the hook.’

Since his speech, Mr. Obama and his administration have been patting themselves on the back for getting Russia to take the lead on Syria. Barack Obama has slipped comfortably back into his preferred leading from behind mode. In his new role as world leader, Mr. Putin wrote an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times that chastised President Obama for his handling of the crisis in Syria and warned him not to take military action. Not fully recovered from having so narrowly dodged a bullet, Obama and the gang that can’t shoot straight hasn’t had time to realized that they should be humiliated.

There is a saying, “There are three kinds of people in the world: Those that make things happen; those that watch things happen and those who say, ‘What just happened?’ I’ll leave it to you to decide for yourself which one is Obama; which one is Putin and which one is Kerry.