by Max Boot

President Obama is in the position of a high-school student who thinks that the cool kids are going to come to his birthday party and starts bragging about it around school, only to have his prized guests opt out at the last minute, leaving him looking considerably embarrassed. The guests in question are the leaders of America’s closest Gulf allies. They had been invited to a fence-mending summit at Camp David but only two—the emirs of Qatar and Kuwait—have accepted. All the others have suddenly discovered they have something else urgent to do that weekend. (Haircuts scheduled! Barbecues to attend!) Most embarrassing for Obama, as Jonathan Tobin noted earlier today, is that Saudi King Salman had at first accepted the invitation before declining it.

The administration spinmeisters can put a happy face on this all they want by claiming that they can still negotiate with the lower-level leaders the Gulf countries are sending but there is no doubt that this is a rebuke of the administration for putting Iran first. The Gulf leaders see the U.S. increasingly cozy with the rulers in Tehran, whose imperial designs they regard as a mortal danger, and they are not reticent about signaling their displeasure. Refusing to attend the Camp David summit is the least of it. Other actions that the Gulfies are taking are more serious—for example launching bombing campaigns against extremists in both Libya and, on a larger scale, in Yemen without asking for America’s permission or even bothering to notify us more than a few hours in advance.

As the New York Times notes, the Gulf states and in particular Saudi Arabia are manifesting their independence in other, even more disconcerting ways. For instance the hard-line King Salman is rethinking the opposition displayed by his more liberal predecessor, King Abdullah, toward the Muslim Brotherhood and possibly even toward more extreme and violent Salafists: “In Yemen, King Salman is working with Islah, a Muslim Brotherhood political party, and has warmed relations with Qatar, a backer of the Brotherhood. In March, he received Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in Riyadh. The two agreed to work together to support the rebels seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, according to Yasin Aktay, the foreign relations chief for Turkey’s governing party. Although Mr. Aktay said that only moderate groups received support, many of Syria’s most effective fighters are staunch Islamists who often fight alongside the Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, raising the possibility that aid might also empower extremists.”

Put another way, because the Obama administration is refusing to do anything to oust Bashar Assad, the Saudis are getting together with the Turks and Qataris to back some of the more fundamentalist Islamist fighters working against the Assad regime—including, it is rumored, the Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate. This is what happens when the Gulf states lose confidence in America: they start taking matters into their own hands and that means they will increasingly forge a pact with extreme Islamists, possibly even with ISIS, because they see the extremists as the only reliable barrier to the spread of Iranian influence.

This is a catastrophic if wholly predictable development, and it is only the beginning of the fallout from Obama’s decision to align so closely with Tehran. The next step in the Sunni pushback is, as the Saudi leadership has loudly and long signaled, for them to acquire their own nuclear weapons. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Saudi Arabia is conveniently next to Jordan which has vast uranium reserves but no money to exploit them. The Saudis could easily fill that gap and develop their own nuclear capacity within a decade, the timeline of the Iranian nuclear deal. Or the Saudis could get nukes even sooner if their friends in Pakistan agree to provide them.

Nothing that President Obama will do or say at the Camp David summit can remotely offset this parlous trend. What America’s Arab allies are looking for is an American commitment to resist Iranian designs. Instead all they see is America standing aside while Iran threatens to dominate the region.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Todd Beamon

Despite an appeals court’s ruling that the NSA’s vast data programs are illegal, former agency contractor Edward Snowden still remains a traitor to the United States for leaking stolen data about the efforts, former House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra told Newsmax TV on Friday.

“Congress knew all about this program,” he told “The Hard Line” host Ed Berliner. “We were well aware of what the executive branch was doing. We were involved in oversight — and Congress authorized this program and authorized it repeatedly.

“Edward Snowden is still a traitor to the United States,” Hoekstra said. “He was one on day one when he released this information. He still is today.”

But David Greene, the civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, countered he disagreed with Hoekstra on Snowden, but that the more important point was that the appeals judges ruled the National Security Agency had acted without congressional authority.

“This is not the first time we heard this,” Greene said. He noted that the Patriot Act, which Congress passed in 2001 and is due for reauthorization next month, “did not intend to give the NSA the ability to do this type of mass, bulk surveillance of people who were not suspected of doing anything wrong.”

“If you want to get mad at Snowden because now we all know about that, then go ahead,” Greene said. “But the important thing is now that we know about it, now it’s been subject to judicial review … and it’s been declared to be unlawful and unauthorized.”

Regarding congressional review, Greene disputed Hoekstra’s contention that the programs were known to lawmakers. He said the appeals court noted that Congress had been informed by letter of the surveillance efforts before they voted, but “that letter was not enough to put them on notice of the gravity and the breadth of the program.”

Hoekstra said that the court’s decision most likely would be appealed — and that by keeping it operating in the interim, “Congress is going to have to come up with a way to resolve the differences between the civil libertarians and the people who are focused on national security and come up with an effective compromise.”

“This information is vital. These tools are vital,” he said.

Said Greene: “The people who believe in civil liberties and the people who are concerned about national security are separate groups of people.”

“You can do both,” he added. “You can protect civil liberties and protect national security at the same time.”

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Rich Lowry

How dare Pamela Geller get targeted by terrorists bent on committing mass murder.

That’s been the reaction of a portion of the opinion elite to news that Geller’s “Draw Mohammed” contest in Garland, Texas, was (unsuccessfully) assaulted by two heavily armed Muslim men in an attack ISIS took responsibility for.

The Washington Post ran an article on Geller headlined “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas.”

News that the Post has yet to break: “Malala Yousafzai refuses to admit fault for seeking an education”; “Coptic Christians won’t concede error for worshiping wrong God”; “Unrepentant Shiites continue to disagree with Sunnis.”

Yes, these are more sympathetic cases, but it is no more legitimate to shoot someone for drawing Mohammed than it is to shoot a girl for going to school, or a Copt or a Shia for his or her faith. Expecting apologies from these victims would be almost as perverse as expecting one from Pamela Geller.

Respectable opinion can’t bear the idea that she has become a symbol of free speech, which once upon a time was — and still is, when convenient — one of the highest values of the media and the left.

Linda Stasi wrote a column for the New York Daily News titled “With Pamela Geller’s Prophet Muhammad cartoon stunt in Texas, hate rears its ugly face again.” The hatred referred to wasn’t that of the attackers but of Geller.

In perhaps the most obtuse and least grammatical sentiment committed to print in the aftermath of Garland, Stasi argued that “Geller, like ISIS and al Qaeda, revel [sic] in hate.”

This is like saying that the Finns and the Red Army both reveled in shooting guns during the Winter War, without taking account of who invaded and occupied whom.

Geller holds events and writes blog posts deemed offensive by many, all of which are fully protected by our laws. ISIS beheads people and blows them up, all of which is criminal by any civilized standard.

“While we have freedom of speech,” Stasi continued, “we also have freedom of religion, which shouldn’t be impinged upon.” This is a truism and a non sequitur: Tasteless speech doesn’t impinge upon anyone’s freedom of religion.

Scurrilous and even hateful speech and cartoons — sometimes involving religion — have been featured in Anglo-American history going back centuries. They are an inevitable part of a free society. In this context, a drawing of Mohammed is mild.

The only reason it seems different is that some Muslim radicals are willing to kill over it. Which is exactly why Pamela Geller’s event wasn’t purposeless.

“I feel that sometimes Muslims in America have become the last group in which public officials, organizations and others are allowed to publicly demean,” NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin opined the other day.

What country does he live in? The so-called new atheists merrily deride Christianity with no worries for their health or safety. Meanwhile, cartoonists who draw Mohammed have to go into hiding.

For better or worse, we live in a society in which nothing is sacred.

If we are to accept the assassin’s veto, the only exception (for now) will be depictions of Mohammed, which would be perverse.

A free society can’t let the parameters of its speech be set by murderous extremists.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Harold Rhode & Joseph Raskas

If the White House doesn’t pull the plug on negotiations, Congress must.
The most frustrating part for a rational observer of the P5+1 negotiations with Iran is this: There is little doubt that Iran is lying, and will continue to lie, but that doesn’t seem to matter to those negotiating with it.

Rather than cause Tehran to capitulate by ratcheting up the pressure, the White House and its negotiating partners first eased the sanctions that had been compelling Tehran to negotiate and then effectively tabled the military option. Since then, they have made a seemingly unending catalog of tangible and irreversible concessions, to which the Iranians have responded with increased hostility. Yet, still the talks go on.

Last month, in just a week’s time, the P5+1 reportedly relented on three key demands: that Iran must come clean on its past nuclear-weapons work, that it must dismantle its plutonium-production plant, and that it must cease its uranium-enrichment activities.

Not only has the White House folded on these important criteria, it is also employing an array of experts to cook up more schemes to keep the talks alive. The White House has signaled added flexibility by moving to offer sanctions relief immediately after a deal is signed, rather than waiting until Iran meets its obligations.

Given that Iran has for decades refused to come into compliance with its international obligations, has sought to destabilize the Middle East, and has waged a deadly war against America and its allies when pressure was in place, it stands to reason that when that pressure is removed Iran will ramp up its illicit nuclear activity, tighten its grip on the Middle East, and intensify its attacks against Western targets.

Negotiating does not mean accepting the opponent’s position as your own, particularly when it comes to serious matters of statecraft.

Negotiating does not mean accepting the opponent’s position as your own, particularly when it comes to serious matters of statecraft. In the lead-up to Operation Desert Storm, President George H. W. Bush gave a careful lesson in diplomacy when, on January 9, 1991, he dispatched his secretary of state, James Baker, to meet with Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz.

Baker handed Aziz a letter, in which Bush bluntly offered Hussein two options: Either he must comply with a dozen U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding the peaceful withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, or those troops would be expelled by force.

As Baker’s assistant secretary of state, John Kelly, later reported, “the tension was visible in Tariq Aziz.” Although he was a tremendously accomplished diplomat, “his hands trembled slightly as he held the letter. I remember seeing a small trough of perspiration running down his temple.”

It was precisely because President Bush defended the integrity of the United States and of the U.N. Security Council that he was able to present a united domestic and international front and restore the balance of power and global order.

In contrast to Bush’s ironclad dictates to Saddam, the secret correspondence from Obama to Khomeini constitutes a humiliating concession. Rather than confront Iranian aggression across the region, President Obama rewarded the leading terrorist sponsor by raising the specter of effective cooperation with Tehran.

It is commendable that the Obama White House is applying creative thinking to a complex problem that has bedeviled many successive administrations. And it is understandable that it has sought to bridge gaps with operational adjustments that the Iranian negotiators could spin politically in order to satisfy their leadership’s domestic constraints.

But it is unacceptable that the Iranians have been allowed to outmaneuver the West simply by wielding against us our willingness to negotiate. The White House has become captive to its own desire to achieve a deal, and that has caused Iran to make even greater demands.

Horrified by what they perceive as deepening acquiescence to Iran’s demands, America’s traditional Arab allies — Muslim and otherwise — are taking matters into their own hands, most notably in Yemen, where a coalition of Sunni states is countering Iranian efforts to reinforce the rebels.

The Iranian patrol boat’s seizing of a cargo ship that was under U.S. protection last week in the Persian Gulf is merely the latest in a steady stream of indicators that American concessions have only bolstered the determination of the clerical regime in Tehran to pursue anti-American policies.

When President Obama originally presented his plan to the American public, he said its purpose was to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran, not to contain it. Yet now the world stands on the brink of a deal that would, at best, legitimize an industrial-sized Iranian nuclear-weapons program and, at worst, spark a nuclear-arms race across the Middle East.

For members of Congress weighing the issue, it is time to honestly confront this question: Has the White House truly done everything possible to stop Iranian aggression, or has it given Iran — and other enemies — reason to underestimate American resolve?

If the latter is the case, Congress must do its utmost to kill the deal before an already corrosive Middle East, and other conflict-stricken areas around the world, descend further into chaos.

— Harold Rhode served for 28 years as an analyst covering Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs at the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Joseph Raskas is a combat veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and a consultant for the Friends of Israel Initiative, founded by former prime minister of Spain José Aznar.

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.

by Clifford D. May

Iran’s “suave” foreign minister has Americans eating out of his hand

Tehran’s largest cemetery, Behesht-e Zahra, contains the graves of thousands of Iranians killed in battle. There’s also a polished stone monument bearing this inscription: “To the memory of two Muslim Lebanese youths who on the morning of Sunday October 23, 1983, in two simultaneous martyrdom operations, with trucks carrying explosives, attacked the headquarters of American occupiers (in South Beirut) and headquarters of French occupiers (in West Beirut) killing 241 American marines and 48 French paratroopers. Their names we do not know, but we will continue their path.”

We do know the name of the man who planned those mass murders – against not “occupiers” but international peacekeepers working under UN auspices at the request of the Lebanese government.  Imad Mugniyeh was a commander of Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanon-based terrorist proxy. Among other attacks for which he was responsible: the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the prolonged torture and eventual murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley.

In 2008, Mr. Mugniyeh was assassinated. Last year, Iran’s foreign minister laid a wreath on Mr. Mugniyeh’s grave in Beirut.

And last week, at New York University, there was this event: A Conversation With “His Excellency Dr. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” What did he say in response to questions about the tribute he paid to Mr. Mugniyeh?

Not a word. No one thought to ask.

Instead, Dr. Zarif was given an opportunity to hold forth on a range of topics. The New York Times was impressed with his “suave fluency in English” and “familiarity with American history and law.” It found him “easygoing and smiling, living up to his image as a diplomatic charmer to an audience that was polite and respectful.”

Iran’s top diplomat did assume “a blunter tone” when discussing the U.S. Congress where there is bipartisan skepticism about the agreement that is to be finalized by June 30. In particular, he “took a few verbal pokes” at “Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who drafted a letter signed by 47 Republican senators warning Iran’s leadership that the validity of President Obama’s signature on an agreement could be undone by the next administration.”

“I think the United States, whether you have a Democratic president or whether you have a Republican president, is bound by international law,” he instructed, “whether some senators like it or not. And international law requires the United States to live up to the terms of an agreement that this government enters into.”

Just so we’re clear: “This government” means President Obama who is planning to “enter into” an agreement even if most members of Congress consider it detrimental to the security of the U.S and its allies. Mr. Obama plans to do this by not calling the agreement a treaty – which would require a Senate vote for ratification – but rather a non-binding “executive agreement” that he can then turn over to the UN Security Council which will issue what Dr. Zarif called a “mandatory resolution” that will bind the U.S. “whether Senator Cotton likes it or not.”

That last quip evoked laughter from the audience. “I couldn’t avoid [saying] that,” Dr. Zarif playfully conceded. “I am tempted to say you will pay for that,” responded the moderator, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius

I am tempted to say he will not — just as he is not paying for the fact that the government he represents is right now imprisoning four Americans, among them Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian. Asked about that by Mr. Ignatius, Dr. Zarif said he hoped Mr. Rezaian would be able to “clear his name” in an Iranian court.

In The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins – a journalist for whom I have enormous admiration — did report without equivocation that Dr. Zarif “is the foreign minister of a state that has killed hundreds of Americans (in Iraq, in Lebanon), and is possibly the world’s most active sponsor of terrorism.”

Mr. Filkins added: “He doesn’t apologize for, or even acknowledge, any of that. You get the sense, watching Zarif, that his most difficult job is not haggling over the details of a nuclear agreement with the West as much as keeping the darker forces in his own government at bay.”

That is the conventional wisdom. But if it were true would he have laid a wreath at the grave of Mr. Mugniyeh? Was that part of his strategy for keeping the darker forces at bay?

Two of my Foundation for Defense of Democracies colleagues, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA operative, and Ali Alfoneh, an Iranian-born scholar, have long been studying Dr. Zarif –reading his recently published memoir and just about everything else he’s written.

Their conclusion: The “affable foreign minister turns out to be every bit as religiously ideological as the radicalized student activist he was in the late 1970s” when Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran — “which Zarif still calls the ‘Den of Espionage’” – holding the diplomats hostage for 444 days.  Dr. Zarif’s goal is “to preserve the Islamic revolution, not to transform it.”

This statement seems particularly telling: “We have a fundamental problem with the West and especially with America. This is because we are claimants of a mission, which has a global dimension. It has nothing to do with the level of our strength, and is related to the source of our raison d’être.” The Islamic Republic, he added, has a “defined a global vocation, both in the Constitution and in the ultimate objectives of the Islamic revolution. I believe that we do not exist without our revolutionary goals.”

What did Dr. Zarif say about that during the conversation at NYU last week? Not a word. No one thought to ask.

Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times. Follow him on Twitter @CliffordDMay

All views are attributable only to the author. We encourage discussion of the viewpoints expressed by the author.