If it all sounds suspiciously incestuous, it is.
The older generation likes to talk about how school was much harder when they were children. “I walked five miles to school and five miles home—uphill both ways!” is the old saw. But it wasn’t that school was harder, it was better. It was staffed by dedicated teachers who didn’t take any guff and knew their subject. It was the center of the neighborhood or community, and not under the thumb of some big, faceless government bureaucracy. It was where kids learned not only the three Rs, but what’s right and what’s wrong. They learned how to fend for themselves, and how to become productive members of society.
Doesn’t seem like much to ask for, does it?
Now, though, our schools have become places where students are indoctrinated into leftist thinking. In the most fundamental and important sense, they’re now the agencies for separating the youth of our nation from their parents and other Americans who grew up when the Constitution meant something and most Americans held values that the left now denigrates. Our schools have changed into the spawning grounds for young people who may no longer have any source for the truth and who may be among the first victims in the coming civil war.
CHAPTER 10
The War on Our Allies
With the announcement of public negotiations with Iran, the rift between the United States and Israel grew into a chasm. In one of the great understatements of all time, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a possible agreement between the United States and Iran, “a bad deal, a very, very bad deal.” Netanyahu went so far as to travel to Russia to try to get Putin to weigh in against the U.S.-Iran nuclear weapons deal. Can you image a prime minister of Israel traveling to Russia for help? Only in Obama’s Middle East could that happen.
There is popular cable television program called The Americans. If you haven’t watched it, I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Set in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, the show is about sleeper Soviet spies hiding in plain sight as a typical American family. The premise is brilliant in its small way because not only does it evoke the cloak-and-dagger drama of the Cold War, it also plays on fears that are much more recent. Russian president Vladimir Putin has restarted the Cold War with a vengeance. As the Middle East peace process falls apart, Iraq is overrun by a small Islamist terrorist army, and China becomes more militantly aggressive, we’re retreating from our position of world power.
If nothing else, the Obama foreign policy is falling apart before our eyes.
Let me begin with what’s happening in the Middle East. While the left was celebrating the wonderful Arab Spring, I coined the phrase “Arab Winter.” I saw that the uprisings meant our influence and ability to protect our allies in the region were facing extinction.
Sunni and Shiite sects hate each other now more than they ever did. Egypt remains in turmoil. The situation in Syria has caused fissures that may drive the world into war.
As I see it, it is evident that the administration’s pro-Muslim-fundamentalist foreign policy weakens our allies and assures that Muslim radicals will gain enough power to at least take over North Africa, while a weakened Iraq is also ripe for the taking. We have all but destroyed our relationship with our most important ally, Israel.
As we were leaving Iraq with no status of forces agreement in place, the power vacuum caused by the departure of our military there was being filled with Islamic chaos. Islamist radical forces took over Fallujah and Ramadi, two key western Iraqi cities that hundreds of American lives had been sacrificed to gain. Sunni radicals continued on the march in the early summer of 2014, beheading Christians and Shiite Muslims as they drove toward Baghdad.
The Middle East is returning to the Ice Age of Islamic Fundamentalism.
I’ve written twenty-eight books and I could write twenty-eight more on just what’s wrong with this administration’s handling of the Middle East alone and still have plenty of material left over.
In late August 2013, after chemical weapons were used in the Syrian civil war, the United States had every intention of firing Tomahawk missiles—the same missiles the military is now planning to eliminate from our weapons arsenal—at Syrian president Bashar Assad’s forces. Make no mistake. We were going to war. John Kerry and John McCain both wanted us to go to war, as did many others tied in to the U.S. military-industrial complex.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t forgotten our history of going to war based on bad information. And yet our commander in chief, who won the presidential election in 2008 on his antiwar stance, was going to fire Tomahawks into Syria in support of Syrian rebel forces that are rife with fighters from al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups.
Only an unscripted remark by Secretary of State John Kerry, the intervention of Vladimir Putin, and a promise by Assad to turn over his chemical weapons kept Obama’s finger off the trigger.
Had we attacked Syria, we might well have drawn the Russians into an expanded Middle Eastern war.
But we didn’t shoot any missiles at Syria, and everything worked out fine, right?
Well, not exactly.
Did I miss something? I haven’t seen a whole lot of sarin gas changing hands.
Meanwhile, the civil war there continues to escalate, a dangerously aggressive Russia has emerged as a major player in the Middle East and Ukraine, and the crimes against humanity in Syria and Iraq continue to pile up.
Not bad for a couple of weeks’ work on the part of the administration.
They were just getting started. A month after signing a chemical weapons pact that Assad had no intention of abiding by, the United States announced it was also going to negotiate with Iran. Easing economic sanctions on Iran, the State Department promised, would ensure the terrorist state would stop its development of nuclear weapons.
As it turned out, the public negotiations with Iran had very little to do with the real deals being struck. While Obama announced his “historic nuclear deal” with Iran, according to sources ranging from Investor’s Business Daily to Haaretz, the United States had already secretly reached an agreement with the Iranians. By the time photos of the world’s leaders arriving in Geneva for the talks with Iran appeared on the front pages of newspapers, we had already eased economic sanctions against the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei regime. We had already effectively given Iran the go-ahead to continue enriching uranium with virtually no limitations.
Obama’s operatives had put together the deal with Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.1
Months later, Abbas Araqchi, the chief Iranian negotiator in the agreement talks, admitted that there was a “nonpaper,” an informal side deal agreed to by the participants but not included or even mentioned in the text of the agreement. Among the guarantees that were part of the nonpaper was a guarantee of “Iran’s right to continue nuclear research and development during the next several months.”2 Although the State Department denied the existence of the nonpaper, Araqchi didn’t back down. He was smug when he talked about the secret side deal. “We will in no way, never, dismantle our [nuclear] centrifuges,” he said.3
In the wake of the signing of the agreement, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani bragged via Twitter: “Our relationship w/ the world is based on Iranian nation’s interests. In #Geneva agreement world powers surrendered to Iranian nation’s will.”4 The Iranian army’s commander, Maj. Gen. Ataollah Salehi, boasted to the Iranian news agency that “given their weakness in the military dimension, they have opted for the political arena and we will certainly succeed in this area too.”5
So the questions I pose are these: Is the reason we received nothing—no assurances for our allies, no halt of nuclear enrichment, no signal at all that the Iranian leopard had changed its spots—because of the ineptness of our State Department and other negotiators? Or did we actually get what we wanted all along: the empowerment of Iran?
We got the answer not much more than six months after we reached agreement with Iran in Geneva. Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made it
clear that Iran would not rest until the United States was wiped off the map. Here are his words:
Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist.… This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body and thought.… This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle and need for great strides.6
Do you wonder why we’ve given in to the Iranians on every front?
I’ve mentioned the name Valerie Jarrett earlier in this book. Jarrett is the president’s most trusted advisor, the true power broker in the White House. She’s the one who orchestrated the one-sided secret deal with Iran.
Put just about every pro-Muslim move this administration has made under a microscope and you’ll find Jarrett’s fingerprints on it.
So what is her allegiance to America?
Maybe her rise to the very pinnacle of power is just a series of unbelievable coincidences and circumstances?
Playing devil’s advocate in the truest sense of that term, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she is devoted to the red, white, and blue. But if that’s the case, she may be the most incompetent negotiator since Neville Chamberlain.
With the announcement of public negotiations with Iran, the rift between the United States and Israel grew into a chasm. In one of the great understatements of all time, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a possible agreement between the U.S. and Iran, “a bad deal, a very, very bad deal.” Netanyahu went so far as to travel to Russia to try to get Putin to weigh in against the U.S.-Iran nuclear weapons deal. Can you imagine a prime minister of Israel traveling to Russia for help?
Putin, a supporter of Iran, had this to say: “A real chance has now emerged for finding a solution to this long-standing problem.”7
One of the few trump cards we held in our relationship with Iran was the threat of partnering with one or more of the countries that are rapidly becoming our former allies—these include Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—in a military strike against Iranian nuclear production facilities.
But we don’t hold that card anymore. Our participation in any attack would be in violation of the agreement that we negotiated with Iran.
With her secret agreement in place, Jarrett left our former allies looking around to find other ways to protect themselves against a nuclear-armed foe.
The idea that Jarrett was given even a small role in negotiations with Iran—let alone leading a team of negotiators—is an indication, I believe, of how suspicious the negotiations were in the first place. She has absolutely no qualifications to be involved in high-level discussions of such critical importance to our foreign policy.8
Jarrett’s father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, and Frank Marshall Davis, Barack Obama’s mentor, were colleagues in Chicago. Both Vernon Jarrett and Davis were covert members of the Communist Party during the 1940s, and they influenced Jarrett’s political beliefs significantly. Valerie Jarrett grew up in the leftist incubator of 1960s Chicago, and she’s known Barack Obama since his radical days at Columbia.
I’ll ask again: Could the fact that Valerie Jarrett is Iranian possibly color her political and foreign policy views? Certainly Americans born in Israel are overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel’s policy positions.
Jofi Joseph, a member of the White House National Security Council, once tweeted that Jarrett was a “vacuous cipher” and that her relationship with the president “concern[ed]” him.9
I repeat my question: Does the fact that she’s Iranian have anything to do with the emerging Middle East policy of the United States?
Does the fact that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s personal assistant, Huma Abedin, “worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef”10 in any way influence our policy regarding Islamist extremism?11
Is it possible that the current administration’s foreign policy, controlled as it is by Valerie Jarrett, has been designed to encourage the emergence of what amounts to a new power alignment across the Middle East?
Sources in Israel described the United States as promoting “erratic” policies throughout the Middle East.12
I don’t find our policies erratic at all. I find them consistently on the side of supporting Islamist radical forces. The United States sided with Islamist insurgents during the “Arab Winter.” The United States supported the overthrow of the governments in Egypt and Libya, despite the fact that neither country was a direct threat to the United States.
Egypt was once our strong ally. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak helped maintain border security between Egypt and Israel. He kept in check the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical terrorist group responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981 and the seed group for other Islamist terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda.13 The Muslim Brotherhood, which has been declared a terrorist group by Egypt14 and Saudi Arabia,15 seeks nothing less than a government based on Islamist principles, including the implementation of Shariah law and waging jihad against the West.
What I called the Arab Winter resulted in the institution of a government run by Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. Less than two years later, the Egyptian people realized their mistake in electing an Islamist president, and the Egyptian military rose up to throw Morsi out, a move, one would think, that should have aligned nicely with America’s foreign policy. But instead of giving the new Egyptian government our support, we interrupted sending them foreign aid.
We followed much the same path as we did with Hosni Mubarak when dealing with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Gadhafi had given up being an enemy of the United States, and for all his faults, was able to keep political order and restrain the chaos that is now engulfing Libya. Yet, after Gadhafi’s death at the hands of a mob, Hillary Clinton joked, “We came, we saw, he died,”16 no doubt to the shrill laughter of her friends in high places.
In fact, if Gadhafi was still in power, four Americans who lost their lives in the Benghazi attack might well be alive today. It’s my conviction that their blood is on this administration’s hands. The administration’s handling of the Benghazi massacre has had devastating implications for America’s foreign policy and our ability to be the world’s leader in the fight against terrorism and for freedom. As one commentator put it, “The longer the Obama presidency continues, the more America’s status as a superpower ebbs away.”17
Is it so far-fetched to believe that the administration knew that Libya was a tinderbox of insurgency and terrorism and that Gadhafi’s removal was the spark that would set it ablaze?
On a related note, why does the administration keep supporting Palestine?
While he was meeting with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Kerry announced that the United States was sending Palestine an additional $75 million in aid. The announcement came only hours after an Israeli soldier was stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist as the soldier was riding on a bus in the city of Afula, Israel.18
Meanwhile, in the midst of the political, military, and economic chaos brought about by the lack of U.S. leadership in the Middle East, the president told the United Nations General Assembly that the world is more stable today than it was five years ago.
Do you know how many wars are going on in the world today? More than sixty. And there are more than five hundred different armies and militias and separatist groups that are conducting these armed engagements.19
That’s the administration’s idea of “stable.”
Pick just about any country in the Middle East, and you’ll see that America has looked the other way or outright supported the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the increase in terrorist activity that goes hand in hand with it.
Sunni rebels stage terror attacks because the Obama administration couldn’t be bothered to develop a status of forces agreement with Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Ma
liki that would have kept U.S. troops in Iraq.20
Baghdad is the scene of terrorist attacks and bombings almost every day, and the level of violence has been growing steadily since the current U.S. administration turned its attention away from Iraq. More than eight thousand Iraqis were killed in 2013 alone as the level of insurgency, supported by Iran, skyrocketed.21
In the early summer of 2014, the terrorist group ISIS, which some call more violent that al Qaeda, staged an offensive that saw them overrun several Iraqi cities and move aggressively toward Baghdad.22
Do you remember when the president announced that the United States would not install the missile defense system that we had promised to Poland? When he did that, he not only left our Eastern European ally without a way to stop potential Iranian missile attacks, he sent a message of weakness to Russia as well.
Now he’s done it again. Israel, working with the U.S. company Raytheon, has developed a missile defense system called David’s Sling, and our former Middle East ally had contracted to sell the system to Poland. That was until we stepped in and vetoed the sale of David’s Sling to Poland.23
The reason?
One U.S. official said this: “The decision was based on a very simple factor—Israel was a major player in the deal.”
It was a $13 billion deal.
Once again, we prevented our allies from stopping the spread of Islamist and communist aggression.
Our reputation in the Middle East shrinks, and the rest of the world takes notice.
The same thing is happening in the Far East.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un thumbed his nose at the president when he restarted his nuclear reactors and moved ahead with his country’s development of nuclear weapons.
China, through state-run media outlets including China Central TV and the People’s Daily, has publicly announced its plans to use its submarine fleet to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. They went as far as releasing a map that shows how much damage the attack will bring to the western United States.24 By early 2014, reports released by Chinese state media indicated that they were preparing to use force to seize the island of Zhongye, one of the Senkaku Islands whose ownership is disputed by the Philippines and China.25
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