Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Obama Foreign Policy Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on November 05, 2014 10 Comments
Maryland hasn't gone purple. Yet. But we have a Republican Governor for just the third time in 48 years. (Spiro Agnew was elected in 1966 and served until 1969, when he went to White House as Richard Nixon's vice president. Bob Ehrlich was elected in 2002, but was defeated for re-election four years later by Martin O'Malley.) Republican Larry Hogan beat Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown in a race that Real Clear Politics called a tossup and Five Thirty Eight determined he had a 6% chance of winning by surprising 9% margin. (A late poll commissioned by Hogan - and ignored by Five Thirty Eight - had him up by 5.) Though I'm very happy with his victory, Hogan will be greatly limited as both houses of Maryland's legislature have veto proof majorities. The past eight years Martin O'Malley has used Maryland as the launching pad for his presidential aspirations, with tax increases and leftist legislation. Consequently Maryland has developed a reputation as having a bad business climate due to taxes and regulations. Brown claimed that he'd be better for business but nothing in his record suggested this would be true. Brown's major initiative was universal pre-K for four-year olds.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 04, 2014 5 Comments
Yesterday was oral argument at the Supreme Court in a lawsuit over whether Congress had the power to designate Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel on passports. The case is Zivotofsky v. Kerry, and the issue is a fight between Congress and the Executive Branch, Via Scotus Blog:
Issue: Whether a federal statute that directs the Secretary of State, on request, to record the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem as born in "Israel" on a Consular Report of Birth Abroad and on a United States passport is unconstitutional on the ground that the statute "impermissibly infringes on the President's exercise of the recognition power reposing exclusively in him."
Prof. Eugene Kontorovich points out that legally the issue is not the same as the political issue of recognition of Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. Most observers of the oral argument believe it it will be a 5-4 split, most likely in favor of the Executive Branch. But oral arguments are not necessarily accurate predictors of ultimate outcome, so who knows. Regardless of the legal technicalities, the media and public perception is that this is a political issue regarding Jerusalem, particularly in light of hostile and threatening statements made by the Obama administration over Israeli exercise of sovereignty over "East Jerusalem" (the part of Jerusalem illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949-1967). Via Mirabelle from Israelly Cool:
Some of Obama’s biggest recent grievances in that relationship [between Obama and Netanyahu] seem to have been over Jews living in various neighborhoods in Jerusalem. In the past few weeks, Obama or his spokespeople have expressed their displeasure with Jews moving into homes they legally purchased in Silwan, planned construction of mixed Jewish and Arab housing in Givat Hamatos, or Monday’s announcement of homes in Har Homa and Ramat Shlomo. Rather than go on a lengthy rant about my complete and utter disappointment at my own President, I though we’d just take a trip in the Wayback Machine, to 2008 . . .
In 2008, Obama pledged that Israel could keep its undivided Capital of Jerusalem, if it likes it. That was then. This is now:

Posted by David Gerstman on October 31, 2014 6 Comments
Elder of Ziyon picked up on a recent bit of hypocrisy when Egypt began destroying hundreds of homes along the Sinai's border with Gaza. In So where are the Rachel Corries for Egypt?  Elder writes:
800 homes demolished in the next few days? Israel has never demolished so many in so little time. Yet over the years there have been numerous NGOs and reports about Israel's home demolitions - and no one cares about Egypt's. There are no groups popping up where young idealistic moronic college students volunteer to act as human shields to protect these homes. Indeed, no one cares about Egypt's demolishing homes for security purposes.
Rachel Corrie was a college student who didn't heed the IDF's warning to get out of the way during the demolition of a house in Gaza that housed a smuggling tunnel; Corrie was killed during the demolition. Elder is right in saying that there has been precious little protest of Egypt's actions. (Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has been exception. In the case of Egypt, as with Israel, he sides with Hamas.) But what's frustrating is not just in the vastly different reactions to demolitions carried out by Israel as opposed to those carried out by Egypt, but also the contrast in how the world treats Israeli construction plans. This week the topic of Israel building in its capital, Jerusalem, has gotten the world worked up. From the New York Times (emphasis mine):
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that Israel would fast-track planning for 1,060 new apartments in populous Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, a move that appears calibrated to appeal to the maximum number of Israelis while causing the minimum damage to Israel internationally, according to Israeli analysts. But as is often the case, Mr. Netanyahu’s decision prompted swift international condemnation at a time when Israel’s relations with Washington are already strained and risked further igniting Palestinian anger and tensions in Jerusalem. It was also unlikely to satisfy the right-wing political rivals it was intended to appease, the analysts said.
Though there was "Palestinian anger" there's no immediate consequence to this action. No one lost property. No one was displaced.

Posted by New Neo on October 30, 2014 20 Comments
The senior official in the Obama administration who referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as "chickshit" probably has much more courageous things than Operation Isotope on his resume. Operation Isotope was a raid involving the rescue of hijacked Sabena Flight 571, and Netanyahu was a participant, along with another Israeli Prime Minister-to-be, Ehud Barak:
On 9 May 1972 at 4:00 p.m. the rescue operation began: a team of 16 Sayeret Matkal commandos, led by Ehud Barak and including Benjamin Netanyahu, both future Israeli Prime Ministers, approached the airplane. The commandos were disguised as airplane technicians in white overalls, and were able to convince the terrorists that the aircraft needed repair. The commandos stormed the aircraft and took control of the plane in ten minutes, killing both male hijackers and capturing the two women. All the passengers were rescued. Three of the passengers were wounded, one of whom eventually died from her wounds. Netanyahu was wounded during the rescue, presumably by friendly fire. The two female surviving terrorists were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment, but were freed as part of a prisoner exchange after the 1982 Lebanon War.
[caption id="attachment_104421" align="alignnone" width="550"]Benjamin Netanyahu is congratulated by former Israeli President Zalman Shazar during a ceremony honoring the elite commandos who rescued the hostages from the Sabena Flight 571. [Benjamin Netanyahu is congratulated by former Israeli President
Zalman Shazar during a ceremony honoring the elite commandos who
rescued the hostages from the Sabena Flight 571. (via Maggie's Notebook)][/caption] To paraphrase Winston Churchill: some chicken, some shit.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 29, 2014 11 Comments
Yesterday Prof Jacobson rightly assessed Jeffrey Goldberg's The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here as describing a crisis "in Obama-Israel relations." Although the White House has offered a disavowal of the profane insult made by one of Goldberg's sources, the full substance of his remarks needs to be rebutted. The offending official explained his boorish insult of Netanyahu :
“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.”
This is utterly false. Bret Stephens pointed out (Google link, emphasis mine):
The real problem for the administration is that the Israelis—along with all the other disappointed allies—are learning how little it pays to be on Barack Obama’s good side. Since coming to office in 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed, against his own inclination and over the objections of his political base, to (1) recognize a Palestinian state; (2) enforce an unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze; (3) release scores of Palestinian prisoners held on murder charges; (4) embark on an ill-starred effort to reach a final peace deal with the Palestinians; (5) refrain from taking overt military steps against Iran; and (6) agree to every possible cease-fire during the summer’s war with Hamas. In exchange, Mr. Kerry publicly blamed Israel for the failure of the peace effort, the White House held up the delivery of munitions at the height of the Gaza war, and Mr. Obama is hellbent on striking whatever deal the Iranians can plausibly offer him.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 21, 2014 22 Comments
Remember when President Barack Obama said that the United States will "always have Israel's back" when it comes to Israel's security---especially in regards to Iran's nuclear program? Or when Secretary of State John Kerry said that with Iran "no deal was better than a bad deal?" They were lying. The administration's aim is to make a deal with Iran even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warns that the emerging deal "is a threat to the entire world, and, first and foremost, this is a threat to us." Kerry's negotiation team continues to operate from a premise that "any deal is better than no deal." The Los Angeles Times is now reporting that the administration has sweetened its deal to allow Iran 4000 operational centrifuges.
The Obama administration has sweetened its offer to Iran in ongoing nuclear negotiations, saying it might accept Tehran operating 4,000 centrifuges, up from the previous 1,300, according to a semiofficial Iranian news agency. The Mehr news agency also said Monday that Iran and the six world powers seeking to negotiate a nuclear deal remained divided over how much uranium-enrichment capacity the Middle East nation should be allowed to maintain, and how to lift punitive sanctions from its economy.
Ray Tayekh, a critic of the current negotiations, observed that "the U.S. sweetener may encourage Iran to drag out negotiations to see what better offer it might receive after a few more months of talks."

Posted by Amy Miller on October 20, 2014 16 Comments
At the beginning of this year, Professor Jacobson wrote an article claiming that "the most dangerous years of the Obama presidency are upon us." If the latest reports about the President's next solo move in the area of foreign policy are trustworthy, then no truer article was ever written about the Obama Administration. We've already seen President Obama take it upon himself to threaten executive action on issues like immigration and the elusive closing of U.S. detainment facilities at Guantanamo Bay. We know he wields his executive authority like a sword, and we also know he's more likely than not to start apologizing on behalf of the American people the moment we turn him loose on foreign delegations. If President Obama stays true to form, discussions about the continuation of Iran's nuclear program are about to get very, very tense. From the New York Times:
No one knows if the Obama administration will manage in the next five weeks to strike what many in the White House consider the most important foreign policy deal of his presidency: an accord with Iran that would forestall its ability to make a nuclear weapon. But the White House has made one significant decision: If agreement is reached, President Obama will do everything in his power to avoid letting Congress vote on it.

Posted by New Neo on September 24, 2014 20 Comments
The NY Times made a rather large error the other day, and then issued a correction:
"...[Our article] gave an incorrect comparison between efforts by the president to seek allies' support for this plans and President George W. Bush's efforts on such backing for the Iraq War. The approach Mr. Obama is taking is similar to the one Mr. Bush took; it is not the case that "Unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners."
Hot Air points out that the Times is hardly alone in its egregious error (or was it a purposeful falsehood, otherwise known as a lie?) What's more, what took the Times ten days to figure it out, when the Times own contemporaneous coverage of the Iraq War easily refuted it? It's the old "fool or knave" question again. You might ask why we should care anymore, and I have to admit I care a lot less than I once did, because I have grown accustomed to the MSM's tendency toward stupidity/ignorance, reckless disregard for the truth, propensity to lie, blatant bias, and intense and shameless arrogance. But the process by which the Times and the rest of the MSM forms the opinions of the public (and it still is highly influential in doing so) remains a huge problem.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 29, 2014 32 Comments
I was in class yesterday during Obama's press conference, in which he announced the obvious: We have no strategy as to ISIS. So I didn't get to watch it live and see the instant reaction. There was Bad, Good and Worse news. The bad news: We have no strategy as to ISIS, or anything else in the Middle East other than reducing American influence. The good news: Obama is telling the truth. The worse news: The truth Obama is telling is a monumental and deliberate failure that will take a decade or more to reverse, if it even can be reversed. Mark Levin summed it up nicely on Hannity the other night, not just as to ISIS but the entire thrust of the administration:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 14, 2014 27 Comments
There are more apparent rifts between Israel and the U.S. administration, this time over an interruption of Hellfire missiles at the request of the White House and State Department. Normal channels apparently were followed, but the administration reportedly has its nose out of joint because the U.S. has been sidelined as Israel and Egypt work together, and Israeli press leaks painted the Obama administration as hopelessly naive and incompetent. The alleged confrontation has become a hot political issue in Israel, where tension with the U.S. always works against a politician. The Wall Street Journal reports:
White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. Since then the Obama administration has tightened its control on arms transfers to Israel. But Israeli and U.S. officials say that the adroit bureaucratic maneuvering made it plain how little influence the White House and State Department have with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu —and that both sides know it.... Then the officials learned that, in addition to asking for tank shells and other munitions, Israel had submitted a request through military-to-military channels for a large number of Hellfire missiles, according to Israeli and American officials.

Posted by New Neo on August 08, 2014 23 Comments
Post-9/11, I read a quip that went something like this: "I just realized what the problem is with the 21st century. We got the numbers mixed up. It's not 2001, it's 1200." In the ensuing years, barbarism and religious wars have made a strong comeback---not that they'd ever really disappeared. But with the rise of ISIS, we now have a group giving itself over to their purest expression. Beheadings and crucifixions are part of their m.o., as well as forced conversions with the threat of death or exile looming, and now the imminent extermination of a minority religious group, the Yazidi, at ISIS's bloody hands. The Yazidi have one representative in Iraq's parliament. Her name is Vian Dakhil and her recent raw cri de coeur to save her people has made her famous. The world loves a show and a dramatic story, but it no longer loves actually taking on risky rescues, and has become accustomed to relying on the Americans to do so. Nature---and geopolitics---abhors a vacuum. The deposing of bad guy Saddam Hussein left a hole that other bad guys would inevitably try to rush to fill. Anyone who would cause the toppling of Saddam had to know it might be necessary for them to stick around at some level for at least a generation if they wanted a chance of ensuring that a new group of leaders of a different and better ilk would be substituting instead. But quite early on it became clear that, due to the efforts of the left in this country and changes in Americans' attitude towards war, occupation, and sacrifice, we lacked the requisite commitment.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 07, 2014 19 Comments
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly told the U.S. Ambassador to Israel "not to ever second guess me again" when it comes to Hamas, after Hamas' refusal and eventual breach of ceasefire agreements. Did he have a point? The international community in its zeal to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians makes plenty of suggestions about what needs to be done. One would think that with the number of suggestions it's made that have backfired, it would learn a little humility and perhaps listen a little bit more to Israel when it comes to Hamas. For example, in a recent column, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen called the Israel-Palestinian conflict an "obscenity." At the end of the column he made a suggestion as to how to go about ending the conflict.
Real reconciliation can only come on the basis of an ironclad commitment to nonviolence and to holding of free and fair elections, the first since 2006. Good Palestinian governance, unity and nonviolence constitute the path to making a free state of Palestine irrefutable. The longer Hamas fights this, the greater its betrayal of its people.
What happened in those "free and fair elections" in 2006? Hamas won and established its political legitimacy among Palestinians. A year and a half later it violently forced Fatah out of Gaza and established a stranglehold on the territory. With its newly found freedom to operate it launched thousands of rockets into Israel forcing three wars. But how and why did Hamas, a terrorist organization with a genocidal charter come to participate in those elections? International pressure, including pressure from the Bush administration, forced Israel to drop its objections to Hamas' participation. In retrospect that pressure doesn't look so good. After Fatah and Hamas announced their unity deal earlier this year, Elliott Abrams, who was a member of the administration, recalled:
The last parliamentary elections were held in 2006, and there was a major dispute about whether Hamas should be allowed to run. Abbas then argued strongly and successfully (in that he persuaded Washington to back off) that an election without Hamas would be illegitimate: He would be barring his only real opponent, in the manner of all Arab dictators. We in the Bush administration made the wrong call and sided with Abbas, over Israeli objections. As Condoleezza Rice wrote in her memoirs, “In retrospect, we should have insisted that every party disarm as a condition for participating in the vote.” She was right, for several reasons.
Subsequent developments have shown Israel's objections to having Hamas run in those election to be valid.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 04, 2014 13 Comments
Last week's ceasefire between Israel and Hamas prompted a number of similarly themed observations. https://twitter.com/MsIntervention/status/494995494230171650 Similar tweets appeared here and here and here and here. What did Hamas gain by agreeing to the ceasefire to the terms of Thursday night's ceasefire when it rejected the same terms more than two weeks earlier? What did it gain by continuing to lose fighters and resources? It now appears, as Elder of Ziyon shows, that the reason Hamas agreed initially to the ceasefire was to carry out Friday's attack that killed three Israeli soldiers.
Clearly the ceasefire provided the opportunity Hamas wanted to perform this operation. Their acceptance of the cease-fire - including the terms that IDF soldiers can keep their positions, which Hamas knew were near a hidden tunnel entrance - can only be described as a well-planned ruse for this attack, Hamas' most sought-after prize. These were not conditions that Hamas would normally accept. Hamas' claim that this occurred before the ceasefire is a lie, as the reports of heavy clashes in Rafah all started at 9:30, not 7:30 as Hamas says.

Posted by David Gerstman on July 01, 2014 8 Comments
In the wake of yesterday's awful discovery that Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Frankel had been murdered by the abductors, it's now clearer what happened. The Times of Israel reported What happened on the night of the kidnapping:
The prevailing assessment within the defense establishment is that the kidnappers, at least at first, only saw one of the hitchhikers, perhaps Yifrach, who did not know Shaar and Fraenkel. Only once the kidnappers’ Hyundai i35 came to a stop did the kidnappers realize that they would be outnumbered by their hostages within the small confines of the car. This may be what changed the nature of the crime from kidnapping to murder, security sources suggested. ... Recognizing, too late, that the car was not an innocent Israeli vehicle, one of the teens called the police at 10:25 p.m. and whispered, “We’ve been kidnapped.” The call was transferred immediately to a senior officer, who continued to ask questions but received no reply. The call lasted for 2:09 minutes and was then cut off. The officer called the number eight more times, but received three busy signals and reached voicemail five times.
It is likely that shortly afterward the three boys were murdered and taken to the field where they were found buried. The reactions to the abductions have highlighted certain fault lines between Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Accessibility by WAH