MONDAY, JULY 19, 2010
Source: Warning Signs
By Alan Caruba
For months now, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the owner and editor-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report, has been writing increasingly desperate pleas for the Obama administration to do something about the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East and the world, Iran.
“When Barack Obama became president, Iran had perhaps several thousand centrifuges enriching uranium. Now it may have thousands more,” wrote Zuckerman in the August edition. “What’s at stake here is too menacing for the world to delude itself that Iran will somehow change course. It won’t.”
It must be very frustrating to be a multi-millionaire media mogul and yet unable to do much about an impending disaster other than warn about it. My sense is that it falls on deaf ears at the White House.
Americans got a glimpse of the President’s indifference to the U.S. military when, early in his first year he proposed that veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost the federal government pays for the treatment of injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.
“Look, it’s an all volunteer force,” said Obama. “Nobody made these guys to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn’t compute,” adding, “I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans.”
He backed off that proposal and, of course, later sent 30,000 more troops to the front lines in Afghanistan, the war he deemed the most important. Most observers deem it an unwinnable war. How does one train an Afghan army when an estimated 85% of its soldiers can neither read, nor write? (They are paying/bribing local militia to fight the Taliban.)
Anyone as dense as Obama should not be allowed to be Commander-in-Chief, but he is and, worse for America and all other nations, he likely has no idea of the dangers involved in reducing the nation’s military capabilities at a time when Iran is closing in on becoming a nuclear threat to the Middle East and beyond.
“So, if Iran succeeds,” warns Zuckerman, “it would be seen as a major defeat and open our government to doubts about its power and resolve to shape events in the Middle East. Friends would respond by distancing themselves from Washington; foes would aggressively challenge U.S. policies.”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Kay, the man who led the U.N. inspections after the Persian Gulf War and later led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group following the 2003 invasion, dismantled the Obama administration claims that either economic sanctions or a weapons inspection program in Iran will deter the Iranians. “As a former weapons inspector, I have very bad news: A weapons inspection regime in Iran will not work.”
Don’t look to the United Nations to do anything. “Even after Iran’s 20-year-long clandestine program started to be revealed the IAEA inspectors have had a hard time getting United Nations authority to confront the Islamic Republic.”
“The blunt truth,” said Kay, “is that weapons inspections simply cannot prevent a government in charge of a large country from developing nuclear weapons.” It didn’t even stop a small country, North Korea, from doing so.
Does anyone believe that President Obama will support an Israeli attack on Iran to degrade its ability to complete its goal of acquiring nuclear weapons?
Does anyone know the extent to which the President is trying to reduce the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons? Or the capability of the U.S. Air Force to respond to a threat to the peace anywhere in the world?
The only time this president has shown any “leadership” was in response to criticism by the former head of the forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McCrystal. Meanwhile, the cost cutting in the Pentagon continues relentlessly.
All this reeks of the weakness shown by Great Britain and European leaders in the face of the obvious aggression by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s.
A January 31, 2008 article in The Economist, “Has Iran Won?” asked, “Who would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies.”
The answer is that it’s easy when nations display the same gutless response of earlier generations and the weakness of the present administration.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
“When Barack Obama became president, Iran had perhaps several thousand centrifuges enriching uranium. Now it may have thousands more,” wrote Zuckerman in the August edition. “What’s at stake here is too menacing for the world to delude itself that Iran will somehow change course. It won’t.”
It must be very frustrating to be a multi-millionaire media mogul and yet unable to do much about an impending disaster other than warn about it. My sense is that it falls on deaf ears at the White House.
Americans got a glimpse of the President’s indifference to the U.S. military when, early in his first year he proposed that veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost the federal government pays for the treatment of injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty.
“Look, it’s an all volunteer force,” said Obama. “Nobody made these guys to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn’t compute,” adding, “I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans.”
He backed off that proposal and, of course, later sent 30,000 more troops to the front lines in Afghanistan, the war he deemed the most important. Most observers deem it an unwinnable war. How does one train an Afghan army when an estimated 85% of its soldiers can neither read, nor write? (They are paying/bribing local militia to fight the Taliban.)
Anyone as dense as Obama should not be allowed to be Commander-in-Chief, but he is and, worse for America and all other nations, he likely has no idea of the dangers involved in reducing the nation’s military capabilities at a time when Iran is closing in on becoming a nuclear threat to the Middle East and beyond.
“So, if Iran succeeds,” warns Zuckerman, “it would be seen as a major defeat and open our government to doubts about its power and resolve to shape events in the Middle East. Friends would respond by distancing themselves from Washington; foes would aggressively challenge U.S. policies.”
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Kay, the man who led the U.N. inspections after the Persian Gulf War and later led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group following the 2003 invasion, dismantled the Obama administration claims that either economic sanctions or a weapons inspection program in Iran will deter the Iranians. “As a former weapons inspector, I have very bad news: A weapons inspection regime in Iran will not work.”
Don’t look to the United Nations to do anything. “Even after Iran’s 20-year-long clandestine program started to be revealed the IAEA inspectors have had a hard time getting United Nations authority to confront the Islamic Republic.”
“The blunt truth,” said Kay, “is that weapons inspections simply cannot prevent a government in charge of a large country from developing nuclear weapons.” It didn’t even stop a small country, North Korea, from doing so.
Does anyone believe that President Obama will support an Israeli attack on Iran to degrade its ability to complete its goal of acquiring nuclear weapons?
Does anyone know the extent to which the President is trying to reduce the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons? Or the capability of the U.S. Air Force to respond to a threat to the peace anywhere in the world?
The only time this president has shown any “leadership” was in response to criticism by the former head of the forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McCrystal. Meanwhile, the cost cutting in the Pentagon continues relentlessly.
All this reeks of the weakness shown by Great Britain and European leaders in the face of the obvious aggression by Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s.
A January 31, 2008 article in The Economist, “Has Iran Won?” asked, “Who would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies.”
The answer is that it’s easy when nations display the same gutless response of earlier generations and the weakness of the present administration.
© Alan Caruba, 2010
