Tag Archives: Iran

News

Is Obama promising the Russians more unilateral disarmament after the election?

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From CNS News, a conversation that was never meant for the public to hear.

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama told Russia’s leader Monday that he would have more flexibility after the November election to deal with the contentious issue of missile defense, a candid assessment of political reality that was picked up by a microphone without either leader apparently knowing.

Outgoing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he would pass on Obama’s message to his successor, Vladimir Putin, according to an audio recording of comments the two leaders made during a meeting in Seoul, South Korea. Obama and Medvedev did not intend for their comments to be made public.

What kind of promises might Obama be making?

How about something like this:

Thirty-four lawmakers sent a letter to the White House on Thursday in response to news reports that President Obama had ordered his staff to study the option of reducing America’s nuclear deterrent by 80 percent—down to as few as 300 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. The United States currently has a cap of 1,550 deployed strategic warheads under the so-called New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the controversial arms control pact with Russia that passed the Senate in December 2010.

The concerned lawmakers—who are led by Republican Congressmen Buck McKeon of California, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), and Mike Turner of Virginia, head of the HASC’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces—question whether the president is taking into account the full range of threats that face the United States in its allies.  In the letter, they caution against further nuclear cuts given “the growth in quantity and quality of nuclear weapons capabilities in Russia, the People’s Republic of China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and, perhaps soon the Islamic Republic of Iran” and “the divestment of U.S. conventional military capabilities under [Obama’s] recently announced defense strategy.”

Or maybe he wants to do more of this:

The Obama administration disclosed on Tuesday that it is considering sharing some classified U.S. data as part of an effort to allay Russian concerns about a controversial antimissile shield.

The administration is continuing negotiations begun under former President George W. Bush on a defense technical cooperation agreement with Moscow that could include limited classified data, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Brad Roberts told a House of Representatives’ Armed Services subcommittee.

He gave no details on the sort of data that might be shared under such an agreement.

Or maybe he would do more of this:

U.S. officials have confirmed to Fox News that images aired by Iranian state television do in fact show the secret U.S. drone that went down last week in eastern Iran.

“Yep, that’s it,” one senior official told Fox News. “And it’s intact.”

U.S. officials had been expecting the video to appear. The footage, which shows the aircraft intact, confirms the Iranians have custody of the drone but appears to refute Iranian claims that it shot down the RQ-170 drone.

With early knowledge that the aircraft had likely remained intact, the senior U.S. official also told Fox News that President Obama was presented with three separate options for retrieving or destroying the drone. The president ultimately decided not to proceed with any of the plans because it could have been seen as an act of war, the official told Fox News.

Among the options the U.S. considered were sending in a special-ops team to retrieve the drone; sending in a team to blow up the aircraft; and launching an airstrike to destroy it.

Or even more of this:

The most senior retired military officer to back President Obama’s run for the White House says the president is making a “real mistake” in terminating F-22 production.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was the Air Force chief of staff during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and who credited air power with winning the war, was the first four-star officer to endorse the one-term senator in his presidential campaign. McPeak traveled with Obama to bolster the candidate’s commander-in-chief credentials, much to the chagrin of the general’s fighter pilot colleagues.

But now McPeak is breaking with Obama on the president’s most contentious defense budget decision: ending production of the Air Force’s top-line fighter at 187 aircraft.

“I think it’s a real mistake,” McPeak told FOXNews.com. “The airplane is a game-changer and people seem to forget that we haven’t had any of our soldiers or Marines killed by enemy air since 1951 or something like that. It’s been half a century or more since any enemy aircraft has killed one of guys. So we’ve gotten use to this idea that we never have to breathe hostile air.”

McPeak’s comments come as Obama is in the throes of a major battle with Democrats and Republicans who have voted in committee to fund seven more F-22s.

Obama sent a letter to Congress Monday with a blunt warning.

“I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress,” Obama wrote. “To continue to procure additional F-22s would be to waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with the weapons that they actually do need.”

Worst. President. Ever. Unless you are an enemy of the United States, in which case he’s the best president ever!

Commentary

Thomas Sowell: the longer we wait to stop Iran, the worse it will be

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Thomas Sowell writing in National Review.

Excerpt:

Members of the Obama administration have been pointing out how hard it would be to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, now that they have been built deep underground and dispersed.

That would have been something to consider during the time when President Obama was taking leisurely and half-hearted measures to create the appearance of trying to stop the Iranian nuclear program, while vigorously warning Israel not to take military action.

Time was never on our side. The risks go up exponentially the longer we wait. When the Iranian nuclear program was just getting started, it could have been destroyed before it became so big, so dispersed, and so deeply dug in underground. Now, if we wait till they actually have nuclear bombs, the same kinds of arguments for inaction will carry even more weight, when the price of an attack on Iran could be the start of a nuclear Holocaust.

Nor should we assume that we can remain safe by throwing Israel to the wolves, once the election is over, as might well happen if Obama is reelected and no longer has any political reasons to pretend to be Israel’s friend.

That kind of cynical miscalculation was made by France back in 1938, when it threw its ally, Czechoslovakia, to the wolves by refusing to defend it against Hitler’s demands, despite the mutual defense treaty between the two countries. Less than two years later, Hitler’s armies were invading France — using, among other things, tanks manufactured in Czechoslovakia.

This was just one of the expedient miscalculations that helped bring on the bloodiest and most destructive war the world has ever known. Dare we repeat such miscalculations in a nuclear age?

At the end of the Second World War, Winston Churchill said, “There never was in all history a war easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe.” It might even have been prevented “without the firing of a single shot,” Churchill said.

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

News

Obama administration refused to help pro-democracy forces in Iran

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Middle East Map
Middle East Map

From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

During their brutally suppressed protests in 2009, Iranian freedom fighters sent the White House an urgent memo calling for help. Under Obama, America ignored it.

‘So now, at this pivotal point in time, it is up to the countries of the free world to make up their mind,” Iranian opposition leaders told the Obama administration in an eight-page memo in 2009. “Will they continue on the track of wishful thinking and push every decision to the future until it is too late, or will they reward the brave people of Iran and simultaneously advance the Western interests and world peace.”

President Obama made his choice, and like so often before it was to vote “present.”

The memo, written by leaders of Iran’s Green Party after the summer 2009 anti-government demonstrations, was obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The document confirms GOP candidate Rick Santorum’s charge that the U.S. squandered an opportunity to undermine the government established by the Ayatollah Khomeini three decades ago.

In the Arizona GOP debate last week, Santorum noted that “we did absolutely nothing to help” the Green Revolution. But “when the radicals in Egypt and the radicals in Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood … rise against either a feckless leader or a friend of ours in Egypt, the president is more than happy to help them out.”

The memo refutes claims still being made by the State Department that the Green Party “did not desire financial or other support,” because it “would discredit it in the eyes of the Iranian people.”

The secret memo’s warning that the Islamist regime “with its apocalyptic constitution will never give up the atomic bomb” also contradicts conventional wisdom that the Green movement wants a nuclear Iran.

The Obama administration is oddly proud that it does “not provide financial assistance to any political movement, party or faction in Iran.” But Foundation for the Defense of Democracies scholar Michael Ledeen has argued for years that supporting Iran’s real opposition can keep it from becoming the first jihadist nuclear power.

In his 2007 book “The Iranian Time Bomb,” Ledeen insists there must be “an explicit declaration that the United States wants regime change in Iran.” The Voice of America Persian Service could help.

As Ledeen notes, “Several Iraqi ayatollahs, including some who lived in Iran for many years, would love to do this, as would Khomeini’s grandson Hossein Khomeini, who has openly criticized his grandfather’s creation.”

The U.S. can also provide satellite phones and laptops to students, religious leaders and others, and fund large-scale strikes and mass demonstrations to bring Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime down.

With Iran close to a nuclear weapon, military action may be the only option. But the Green memo is a shameful blemish for a president who could have prevented a threat to the free world of nuclear terror, but didn’t.

This is important. A lot of liberals ask me what I would do to resolve the Iran situation short of war. One of the things we could be doing is supporting pro-democracy movements in Iran with information warfare, money, arms, etc. I was very annoyed when Obama backed dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Honduras, while helping the Islamists to take power in Libya and Egypt. Why does he do that? Is he stupid? Is he evil? Or is it a combination of the two?