Author Archives: Denise Simon

Obama’s Doctrine is Vertigo

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The quite rage began across country by experts when it comes to foreign policy as a result of Barack Obama’s speech at West Point. Omitting the fact that he included climate change as a major global threat, Barack Obama worked to defend his posture and to explain his own view on why America is in fact exceptional and not weak when it comes to enemies of the United States. He even took a shot at World War ll veterans and military leadership by saying they did not estimate the later conditions or damage of their strategic decisions during World War ll.

The United States has a historical and successful duty to provide equilibrium to the world. There have been some failures yet they were corrected, yet no other nation has stepped up across the globe where the duty has fallen to America. The globe calls us to duty now yet Barack Obama has vertigo when it comes to leading, being decisive and demonstrating power.

The reaction to the speech was broadly in agreement, such that Obama is not a war-time president much less does he see the world for what it is but rather for what he wants it to be. Just a small comparison of the West Point speech, see the two videos here.

US FP

Reaction to the President’s West Point Speech

At West Point, President Obama Binds America’s Hands on Foreign Affairs – Washington Post Editorial

President Obama has retrenched U.S. global engagement in a way that has shaken the confidence of many U.S. allies and encouraged some adversaries. That conclusion can be heard not just from Republican hawks but also from senior officials from Singapore to France and, more quietly, from some leading congressional Democrats. As he has so often in his political career, Mr. Obama has elected to respond to the critical consensus not by adjusting policy but rather by delivering a big speech.

Obama’s Vision of U.S. as ‘Empowering Partners’ – Christian Science Monitor Editorial

Obama quoted President Kennedy about peace needing to be based upon “a gradual evolution in human institutions.” As more people and nations evolve toward shared ideals, the task of maintaining international order also becomes more of a shared one. The U.S., which was so instrumental as a military leader in the 20th century, can take on a new role in bringing nations and people closer.

America Can’t Ignore Military Muscle of Russia and China – Washington Examiner Editorial

President Obama told West Point’s graduating cadets Wednesday that “some of our most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences.” Apparently the nation’s commander-in-chief is unaware of — or perhaps unconcerned by — the more pressing reality that bad things happen when America’s real and potential adversaries don’t fear U.S. strength.

Obama’s Unclear Foreign Policy Path – Richard N. Haass, Council on Foreign Relations

President Barack Obama has laid out a vision for U.S. foreign policy calling for the need to avoid both unnecessary military entanglements and isolationism. CFR President Richard N. Haass said the speech at West Point on May 28 appeared too focused on what the president opposed and less on what he favored. “It was an attempt to essentially carve out a form of involvement in the world that avoided any and every excess,” Haass said. “But with one or two exceptions, it didn’t provide any specifics.” Obama’s call for ramping up support for non-jihadist rebels in Syria is welcomed, Haass said.

Doubling Down on a Muddled Foreign Policy – John Bolton, Wall Street Journal

At West Point on Wednesday, President Obama told the graduating seniors that he had discovered a middle way in foreign policy between isolationism and military interventionism. To the White House, this was like “the dawn come up like thunder outer China,” in Kipling’s phrase. Others were less impressed, especially since it took five-plus years of on-the-job training to grasp this platitude. Of course the United States has options between war and complete inaction. Not since Nixon has a president so relished uncovering middling alternatives between competing straw men.

The Obama Defense – Michael O’Hanlon, Foreign Affairs

U.S. President Obama — increasingly accused of having a listless foreign policy that, in the eyes of some, made Russian President Vladimir Putin believe he could get away with stealing Crimea — is doing much better on the world stage than his critics allow. But he does still have to address one significant problem. If he does not, he will likely find himself increasingly harangued over a supposed decline in American influence and power on his watch. His West Point speech on May 28 will probably fix some of the problem, but not all of it.

Obama’s Foreign Policy Repeats Some Avoidable Mistakes – David Ignatius, Washington Post

President Obama’s measured defense of his foreign policy at West Point on Wednesday made many cogent points to rebut critics. Unfortunately, the speech also showed that he hasn’t digested some of the crucial lessons of his presidency.

Obama Just Accidentally Explained Why His Foreign Policy Hasn’t Worked – Elliott Abrams, Washington Post

At West Point today, President Obama marched out his army of straw men and continued his ungracious habit of taking credit for successful actions attributable to his predecessor. But at bottom, the policy he outlined will be of little comfort to our allies and to the cause of freedom in the world.

Obama at West Point: A Foreign Policy of False Choices – David Frum, The Atlantic

On the evidence of President Obama’s commencement address at West Point on Wednesday, he’d have made an outstanding State Department memo-writer. The president outlined a Washington policy debate occurring in three corners. Over in Corner 1 are those who believe in “a strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks.” Huddled in Corner 2 are those who insist that “conflicts in Syria or Ukraine or the Central African Republic are not ours to solve.” Between these obviously stupid extremes is a sensible third way, which happens to coincide perfectly with the policy of the Obama administration.

What Obama Didn’t Explain in His Foreign Policy Speech at West Point – Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times

President Obama’s foreign policy speech at West Point on Wednesday didn’t break any new ground, not even rhetorically. But it wasn’t intended to. It was meant as a rebuttal, an answer to critics who have harried Obama for months complaining that America’s adversaries (Russia, China and Syria, for example) are pursuing their goals with more success than the United States has found in stopping them. The criticisms have gotten under Obama’s skin. He gripes about them frequently, in public and in private. So, with a speech already promised for West Point’s graduation ceremony, he seized the opportunity for a longer, more considered version of his side of the argument.

Obama Says Goodbye to American Hubris – Peter Bergen, CNN News

What Obama did in his West Point speech was to chart a course that balances two natural, and contradictory, American national security impulses — isolationism and interventionism — and points to a hybrid approach that avoids some of the pitfalls of either of these strategic approaches.

Obama vs. His Imagined Critics – Max Boot, Commentary

In his much ballyhooed West Point address, President Obama employed what in the 1990s was known as “triangulation”–but not an effective or convincing form of triangulation, rather one that appears to be mainly rhetorical instead of policy oriented.

The New World Disorder – Richard Parker, McClatchy-Tribune

The president’s speech Wednesday at West Point was, as all of his speeches are, a fine speech. But it did not advance the ball. He did not move the locus of American attention and energy out of the Middle East and northern Africa, where he continued to focus on the fragments of the remnants of al-Qaida. For a president who correctly noted that “not every problem is a nail,” he focused chiefly on the nails of terrorism and the hammer of the judicious use of force.

Obama’s Small Ball Foreign Agenda – Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun-Times

A strategy of singles and doubles is how President Barack Obama recently characterized his foreign policy. Anyone looking for more than small ball in what the White House billed as a major speech at West Point on Wednesday was bound to be disappointed. No big agenda or ambitious goals were pronounced. It was more a steady as we go on the more modest role Obama has chartered for America in world affairs.

Obama’s Foreign Policy Speech Sounds Familiar – Michael Crowley, Time

Obama’s foreign policy address at West Point won’t satisfy his critics, but it might reassure anxious supporters. For all the hype, President Barack Obama’s foreign policy speech at West Point on Wednesday didn’t break much new ground.

The Goldilocks Speech – Eric Cantor, ABC News

Today’s address at West Point was a goldilocks speech. Trying to find the lukewarm bowl of porridge will not likely reassure those who worry about our lack of leadership, and will not concern those who fear its return.

Commentators Break Down Obama Foreign Policy Speech at West Point – U.S. News & World Report Roundup

Views You Can Use: Staying the Course on Foreign Policy – Obama’s West Point speech didn’t break much ground.

Did Obama Make His Case? – New York Times Debate

In his address to graduating West Point cadets on Wednesday, President Obama laid out his administration’s foreign policy goals. His speech was directed at his critics who have suggested “that America is in decline” and “has seen its global leadership slip away.” Did it work?

US Lawmakers React to Obama Speech at West Point – Michael Bowman, Voice of America

One of Barack Obama’s top congressional critics in foreign policy matters has responded forcefully to a speech in which the president mapped out his vision for U.S. engagement around the globe.

Lawmakers Dark Money Against the Jews

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Colleges and Universities across America have real anti-Israel operations going on where highly paid professors are no longer teaching but rather they are indoctrinating and forcing politics and anti-Semitism in the classrooms as well in campus life. You can bet there is much more behind this agenda, so  lets take a look. This is either dangerously close to violations of the Hatch Act or it IS a violation of the law.

anti semitism

Is Rockefeller Brothers Fund Consciously Helping to Delegitimize Israel?

JNS.org – The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) is one of the more august grant-making institutions in the United States. Founded in 1940 by the sons of legendary oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller—America’s first billionaire, and a man whose political reputation was distinguished by his support for the Union during the Civil War as well as his commitment to educational opportunities for African Americans—the fund has always been a progressive enterprise, with a current emphasis on good governance, environmentalism, and the promotion of peace.

It is in that latter category, an area that the fund calls “peacebuilding,” that serious concerns have been raised regarding its funding commitments to NGOs working on the Arab-Israeli conflict. NGO Monitor—an Israel-based organization dedicated to analyzing the activities of civil society groups working in the Middle East, along with those groups’ funders—has just published a report which casts doubt on RBF’s goal to promote a “more just, sustainable, and peaceful world,” for the simple reason that many of the Middle Eastern beneficiaries of its largesse demonize the state of Israel in stridently anti-Zionist terms.

For example, “Breaking the Silence,” a small group of left-wing former IDF soldiers who accused of Israel of committing war crimes during its 2008-09 defensive operation against Hamas terrorists in Gaza, has received $145,000 from RBF. A commentary and opinion website called +972 (named after the international dialing code for Israel) has received $130,000 from the fund. +972 regularly publishes articles endorsing the analogy between Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa, and recently plastered its front page with articles about the “Nakba”—the Arabic word for “catastrophe” that is employed by Palestinian propagandists to describe the creation of the state of Israel. Among +972’s contributors is the odious Yossi Gurvitz, who recently tried to persuade me via Twitter that Judaism is a racist religion, drawing on the discredited tropes of Soviet Communist anti-Jewish literature to make his case. +972 has also cross-posted content co-written by the anti-Semitic American writer Max Blumenthal.

The Middle East Policy Network, a group that touts the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as “the most effective and strategic campaign for [Palestinian] refugee return at present,” has received $30,000 from RBF. The Institute for Middle East Understanding, a similar organization that describes the entire territory from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan as governed by Israeli “apartheid,” has received $50,000.

These are colossal sums, especially when one considers the relatively small size of these NGOs. There is also the larger question of why RBF deems them worthy of funding, since their stated goals are aimed at fundamentally undermining Israel’s security, and the methods used to pursue them draw on the standard arsenal of delegitimization—boycotts, insistence on the “right of return” for the descendants of Arab refugees, and the portrayal of Israel’s creation as the Middle East’s “original sin.”

Moreover, as NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg pointed out to me when I met with him in Jerusalem this week, the road which RBF is currently traveling down was previously traversed by another major funder, the Ford Foundation, which rapidly changed direction when it realized that the promotion of peace and the promotion of delegitimization are polar opposites.

“In 2001, the U.N. organized a massive ‘anti-racism’ conference in Durban, South Africa, which was really the beginning of BDS and delegitimization,” Steinberg said. “You had 5,000 NGO representatives using terms like ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ against Israel. And it was funded primarily by the Ford Foundation.”

The Ford Foundation’s credibility, Steinberg continued, was initially damaged by its association with the Durban hatefest. To Ford’s immense credit, however, it publicly acknowledged that mistake and pledged never to repeat it. In 2003, the then Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford announced that no grants would henceforth be awarded to organizations supporting “terrorism, bigotry, or the delegitimization of Israel.”

Steinberg and NGO Monitor would like to see the RBF engage in similar reflection. That will not be easy for many reasons, principal among them the fact that Daniel Levy, a founder of the leftwing lobbying group J Street, which is another recipient of RBF funds, just happens to be an RBF trustee. Levy also sits on the board of directors of another Israeli group that receives RBF funds, and is also heavily involved with the New Israel Fund, which works with many of the radical NGOs backed by RBF money.

Steinberg’s attempts to seek clarification from RBF were met with what he described as “pro forma responses—basically reiterating what they say in their guidelines and on their website, but no explanation of what seems to be a very blatant contradiction between those guidelines and what they are actually doing.”

I also sent emails to RBF officials Stephen Heintz and Ariadne Papagapitos requesting similar clarification. In their response to me, RBF did not address the substance of the NGO Monitor report, merely saying, “We respectfully disagree with your assessment of the contributions our grantees are making in support of the goal and strategies of our Peacebuilding Program and toward peacebuilding activities in the region.”

Given this reply, it isn’t possible to determine whether RBF is simply misguided, as was the Ford Foundation, or whether, as insinuated above, that it endorses the goals of the extremist groups it funds. What we do know, though, is that the delegitimization of Israel requires money. If diehard opponents of Israel are receiving six-figure sums for their activities from RBF, that will build many things—but peace isn’t one of them. ­

Ben Cohen is the Shillman Analyst for JNS.org and a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, Commentary, Haaretz, and other publications. His book, “Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014), is now available through Amazon.

 

 

MTV Indoctrinates Viewers at Behest of CAIR

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In 1979, the United State severed ties with Iran. An interesting twist however, Iran did not sever ties with factions inside the United States and pro-Khomeini Shiite activities. Even back in 1979 and moving forward, Iranian influence and Islamic influence were making end roads into the culture and driving down Main Street USA. No one noticed except the FBI. But the investigations of the FBI remained classified until 2008 and then the reports were meant to remain obscure and out of sight from America.

Moving into the United States went unnoticed such that Islam is now a common and accepted condition in America but this is the time to fight back as Islam is political and packaged as a religion. Sharia law cannot compete with the U.S. Constitution however, so far it has.

So, here we are witnessing Islamic indoctrination on our televisions right in our homes but who notices that? CAIR is a co-conspirator of the Holyland Foundation trial and was deemed such by the Department of Justice. Why then would MTV partner with CAIR?

No one at MTV is talking which likely is to understand that no one at MTV did their homework or bothered with vetting. So, the homework has been done for them and perhaps you will collectively contact MTV and hold class with their leadership. Then have a talk with your family and then have a talk with your cable provider until MTV admits the error and fixes the matter.

 

CAIR 1

 

MTV Partners With CAIR Despite Islamist Agenda

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.
By Ryan Mauro

MTV is including the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity with a history of radicalism, in its “world-class coalition of expert partners” for a campaign to combat discrimination and inequality. CAIR has a history of tarring its opponents by calling them “anti-Muslim” or “Islamophobes.”

 

The multi-year “Look Different” campaign will use celebrity activism, television shows and social media to influence the over 500 million households that MTV is available in. While well-intentioned, MTV unfortunately chose to include CAIR, an organization with an extremist history that tars every opponent as an anti-Muslim bigot.

The Justice Department designated CAIR an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism-financing trial in U.S. history. The government listed CAIR as an entity of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood, specifically its secret Palestine Committee; a body set up to covertly support the Hamas terrorist group.

The designation was upheld by a federal judge in 2009 because of “ample” evidence to show that CAIR is part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s pro-Hamas network in America. After the designation, the FBI formally ended its use of CAIR as an outreach partner “until we can resolve whether there continues to be a relationship between CAIR or its executives with Hamas.”

In 2004, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that CAIR does not consider Hamas and Hezbollah to be terrorist organizations. He said, “We do not and will not condemn any liberation movement inside Palestine or Lebanon.”

In 2007, federal prosecutors said in a court filing: “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists … the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”

You can read the Clarion Project’s fully-documented profile of CAIR here.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas have a history of extremism and anti-Semitism; the exact type of sentiment that MTV’s project seeks to counter. Yet, MTV is embracing an organization with confirmed links to these groups. CAIR’s fundraising banquets regularly feature radical speakers that promote violence and anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda and conspiracy theories.

“In our work, we see biases carried out in hurtful actions almost every day. The fact that so many of the young people MTV polled want to work to change or eliminate harmful biases fills us with hope that campaigns like Look Different can effect long-lasting, positive changes in our society,” CAIR spokesman Amina Rubin said.

CAIR and associated Islamists play the “Islamophobia

IslamophobiaGlossary Item

Unwarranted fear of Muslims; term frequently used by Islamist groups and their allies to label critics of Islamic extremism as bigots in order to stifle criticism.

According to Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, a former member of a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood front group (IIIT), “This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics.”

” card on anyone who stands in their way, drawing the ire of anti-Islamist Muslim activists. It is part of a calculated political strategy and CAIR will utilize MTV towards this end if given the opportunity. 

“Name-calling with the term Islamophobia is an aggressive tactic popularized by apologists for Radical Islam to silence individuals who attempt to tell the truth about Jihadist Islam,” writes Muslim activist Tawfik Hamid, a former member of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s group in Egypt.

Raheel Raza, President of the Council for Muslims Facing Tomorrow, describes the “Islamophobia” tactic as “a form of emotional extortion intended to extract special concessions from well-meaning but gullible people the West.”

A former member of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, has talked about a private meeting he held in the 1990s with the International Institute of Islamic Thought, CAIR’s fellow U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity. The discussion focused on delegitimizing any opposition by accusing it of “Islamophobia.”

“This loathsome term is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché conceived in the bowels of Muslim think tanks for the purpose of beating down critics,” he explains.

This tactic is even used on devout Muslims. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a practicing Muslim, has been accused of belonging to an “Islamophobia Network” countless times by CAIR. The group also went after the American Islamic Congress without provocation, accusing it of promoting “Islamophobia” just because it hasn’t adopted CAIR’s political causes.

This stands in sharp contrast to CAIR’s treatment of Islamist radicals, most recently defending Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a virulently anti-Semitic group with a terrorist history.

The American Islamists have been using this strategy since long before 9/11. For example, Imam

ImamGlossary Item

Religious authority figure; usually the leader of a mosque.

Siraj Wahhaj, a radical cleric that helps CAIR fundraise, can be seen preaching this theme in this video from around the time of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

Wahhaj tells the audience that there’s an anti-Muslim conspiracy involving the U.S. government and Israel and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he claims, is part of it. The overall message is the same one that we hear today: The Islamists’ opponents are part of an anti-Muslim network that is hijacking the institutions of power.

CAIR’s efforts to use MTV’s campaign for political advantage will be endorsed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, another organization included in MTV’s coalition. The think-tank equates any recognition of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood with anti-Muslim bigotry.

“The sole evidence for this conspiracy theory is a 20-year old document outlining a plan for such a [Muslim Brotherhood] takeover, which has since been debunked as the fantasy of a single Muslim Brotherhood member,” the Center incorrectly claims.

The Muslim Brotherhood document the Center refers to introduced as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. Contrary to what the Center says, the file’s authenticity has not been debunked or even seriously challenged.

And even if it was, it wouldn’t make any difference. Supporting proof comes in the form of declassified FBI documents, court filings, U.S. government determinations, other internal Brotherhood documents and the Islamists’ own actions and statements.

On May 19, the Clarion Project contacted MTV to inform the network of CAIR’s history and its false labeling of any and all critics as anti-Muslim “Islamophobes” with bigoted agendas. We requested a statement in response. MTV did not respond.

MTV has seriously erred by choosing CAIR as an “expert partner” in combating intolerance and discrimination. The well-meaning campaign runs the risk of becoming a platform for CAIR to assault the integrity of its opponents.

War Time President or Ally? Not so Much

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Much has been written that Barack Obama is feeble when it comes to foreign policy. There is the matter of Syria where deference was given to Putin by the White House to handle matters regarding the civil war there as well as the chemical weapons. Well, now additional chemical weapons are being used today that are chlorine based barrel bombs. Then there is Iraq where war again is as bad today as it was in 2004.

One cannot overlook the matter of the Budapest Memorandum where the United States as well as the United Kingdom must protect Ukraine with something more than a VP Joe Biden visit and MRE’s.

Completely ignored until 300 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Harem, it was not until the media reported the vast kidnappings that we found that neither Hillary Clinton or John Kerry listed Boko Harem on the FTO (Foreign Terror Organization) list. Heck it was not until this past January of 2014 that the attackers in Benghazi, Ansar al Sharia was listed on the FTO.

There is a war brewing in the South China sea where China continues to be aggressive over disputed islands involving Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

So, sanctions rule and go where no offensive measures shall. Diplomatic victories should prevail for sure but to date, all diplomatic efforts and talks have failed with Iran nuclear negotiations are now permanently broken as is the matter between Israel and the Palestinians.

The truth be known, America is at war and Barack Obama has not figured out how to be a war time president except to retreat without tangible victories anywhere.

Allies are asking hard questions of the White House and not getting any responses, so their conclusions are such that they doubt seriously that America even with NATO’s Article 5 will not be at their side at all.

 

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May 27, 2014

U.S. Foreign Policy Barack Obama Is Accused Of Timidity Overseas, Raising Fear and Anger Among The Country’s Allies.

By Geoff Dyer

When President Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he pulled off what for Democrats was a remarkable feat – he took foreign policy off the table as a campaign issue.  Ever since Harry Truman was accused of “losing China”, Republicans have sought to cast their Democratic opponents as weak in the face of foreign challenges. Yet fresh from his risky but successful military operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama side-stepped the usual assault during his re-election campaign. His challenger Mitt Romney hardly brought up foreign policy.  Eighteen months later, the political ground is shifting rapidly beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. As he prepares to give an important address on foreign policy at West Point tomorrow, the president finds himself under attack over what critics charge is a record of indecisive leadership.  The loudest voices have been Mr. Obama’s political opponents at home, but the critique of a rudderless, risk-adverse president has also found strong echoes among some of America’s most important allies. From Saudi Arabia to Japan, officials have been wondering whether the US would still come to their defense.  Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 reflected a widespread belief at home and abroad that there was “too much America” in the world. Although he still seems to be in tune with the US public, Mr. Obama faces the accusation that there is now too little.  Even John Kerry, his secretary of state, appeared to acknowledge this international perception in a speech last week. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism,” he told students at Yale. “Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence – they worry about what would happen in our absence.”

In his West Point speech, Mr. Obama will lay out how the US intends to “lead the international community but without getting overextended”, as a White House official puts it. But the persistent attacks have left Mr. Obama in a defensive crouch, tetchily defending his cautious approach.  “That may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows,” he said during a recent Asia trip. “But it avoids errors.”  The rap sheet on Mr. Obama has two basic charges: that he is too timid in his approach to foreign affairs; and that the US has begun a process of retreating from its place in the world during his presidency.  “On all these issues, our response has been to do the minimum and no more,” says Bob Corker, the leading Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “Every allied government I talk to, I get the same questions about whether we will be there.”  On one level, the claim that Mr. Obama is too passive is part of a longstanding intellectual debate in Washington about foreign policy.

When he was first elected, many analysts pegged Mr. Obama as an idealist – a reflection of his stirring rhetoric, his reaching out to the Muslim world and his longstanding association with Samantha Power, now his UN ambassador and the leading intellectual voice of liberal interventionism.  Instead, in recent years Mr. Obama has revealed himself as a president more rooted in a realist tradition that is more focused on the defense of national interests and is wary of moral causes. This should not have come as a complete surprise: even during his first election campaign, he told interviewers of his respect for the foreign policy of George HW Bush. Mr. Obama’s reticence over Syria reflects a belief that it is better to avoid mistakes than to appear decisive.  “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to the UN last September.  “Obama’s mistake on Syria was not that he did not follow through on the red line he set [about the use of chemical weapons],” says John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago scholar who is one of the leading realist thinkers. “It was setting a red line in the first place.” (He adds that he believes Mr. Obama “95 per cent supports” his point of view.)    Such a world view, however, puts the president at odds with a large part of the US foreign policy establishment on both the left and the right, which, despite the traumas of Iraq, is still instinctively interventionist.

Some supporters worry that the president’s caution can become an excuse for inaction. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, says that he believes Mr. Obama often has the right instincts but that “he does not always translate that into diplomatic strategies to achieve his goals”.  Mr. Obama has added to the impression of dithering and inaction through his highly deliberative style of decision-making, which is in stark contrast to George W Bush’s reliance on gut instinct. The months of painstaking discussion in the first term over whether to put more troops into Afghanistan have been matched in the second term by a series of reviews of Syria policy, which have each ended with Mr. Obama deciding to do little.  The root cause of much of the angst about Mr. Obama has been his public wobble last September over whether to launch Tomahawk missiles against Syria, culminating in the walk on the White House lawn when he decided to punt the issue to Congress. Outside of the Middle East, few US allies were worried about the details of the proposed Syria strike: what rattled them was the sight of a US president making a threat and then deciding he did not have the political authority to carry through with it.  “We have lost some of the aura we used to enjoy in the region,” says Vali Nasr, a former state department official in Mr. Obama’s first term who has been a strong critic of the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Since then the humanitarian catastrophe of the Syrian war has only deepened, yet Mr. Obama has consistently resisted pressure from within his administration to do more. Even those aides who agree with his caution admit it has been an inglorious episode.

The unfolding events in Europe and Asia have also fed the perception of a US president losing his capacity to shape events abroad. At a time that the Pentagon budget is being cut, China is increasingly bent on pursuing its territorial claims and on challenging American naval dominance in the western Pacific.  In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been able to annex Crimea and to destabilize parts of the east of the country while the west has scrambled to come up with a response that will be effective in the short term. “While the wolf is eating the sheep, there is no shepherd to come to the rescue of the pack,” former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal told the FT.  The second, broader argument about the Obama presidency – that the US is disengaging from the world – is much harder to support. After all, the Afghanistan mission, which formally ends this year, is the longest-running conflict in US history.

The strongest complaints about American retrenchment have come from the Middle East. Yet even after the withdrawal from Iraq, the US military presence in the region remains formidable, following a dramatic expansion in recent decades. During the second term of Ronald Reagan, at the height of the cold war, the US had an average of 8,800 troops in the Middle East: it now has 35,000. “Over the years we have steadily militarized our approach to the Middle East, which has not always been in our interests,” says Dennis Blair, the retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence.  In some parts of the region and south Asia, Mr. Obama has provoked anger not for reticence over Syria, but for his aggressive use of drone strikes or cyber attacks against Iran.  Indeed, a significant part of the criticism from allies in the Middle East has been much less about the credibility of the American president and more about basic differences in interests. Washington’s biggest focus is preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without starting a new war. The Saudis and Israelis, however, are incensed that the US would negotiate with a country they believe to be a rival for regional influence or an existential threat.  Many of the Sunni-dominated Gulf    nations see the Syrian war in sectarian terms and want to defeat Shia Iran. Yet the sectarian nature of the conflict is one of the main reasons the US is reluctant to get involved.

In Asia, the Obama administration is expanding America’s military presence, signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines for much greater access to bases and deepening co-operation with Japan. One explanation for recent Chinese assertiveness is that Mr. Obama has been pushing too hard rather than that he is considered a pushover.

Europe is the one place where the US military footprint has significantly shrunk. However, the case for a bigger American presence in Europe would be easier to make if European governments were not slashing their own defense budgets. Moreover, it is a stretch to suggest that Russia felt emboldened to annex Crimea because there were fewer US soldiers stationed in western Germany.  “We should worry less about putting more NATO troops in the Baltics, and more about whether there are disaffected Russian populations  that Putin can take advantage of,” says Thomas Graham, a former White House official under George W Bush.

Sometimes lost in Washington’s rancorous debates are the changes taking place in the world, the underlying shift in relative power that is being caused by the “rise of the rest”, the new generation of great powers that are staking their own claims.  The crises facing the administration are in many ways an early example of the harsh realities that a more multipolar world can bring.  Countries such as China and Russia appear to have found new ways to gradually chip away at US influence, pursuing territorial claims in Crimea or the South China Sea in a manner that fall well short of casus belli.  The fresh strategies that the US will require to meet this sort of challenge are rarely captured in the discussions about decisive presidential leadership.

Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama administration official now at the Brookings Institution, highlights this changed foreign policy landscape. “With such a structural shift in international politics, the US will need to operate in different ways, but we are still struggling to come to terms with the new reality,” he says.

There was Snowden but NOW there is Greenwald

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Actually we should all be grateful to Edward Snowden for what he revealed about the NSA and the sweeping indiscriminate spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant or approval. This caused a real debate and formal discussion where the checks and balances should be a mission of all citizens.

Snowden has the proof for the sake of validation but should there be limits to what is published globally?

Glen Greenwald along with some partnerships that included the founder of eBay has exposed worldwide documents that exposed sources and methods that likely has crossed the Rubicon. The debate has caused alarm and decisions are underway to address the intrusion into the privacy of common citizens. What is surfacing is social modeling and behavior control, something that has little attention, yet should.

Greenwald is publishing more yet to what end? The other question should be what is the solution to protect privacy, maintain limits of Constitutional protections and use of information for the sake of national security

The United States works with a few other countries that include the UK, Canada and Australia under an agreement and organization called GCHQ. While we are familiar with the NSA we are not so familiar with the UK’s eavesdropping operation called Menwith Hall.

Use of the social networking not only profiles all users regardless of their methods of communications, it does the same with terrorists, and it should. A deeper look is required however.

 

NSA GCHQ

How The NSA Uses Social Network Analysis To Map Terrorist Networks

Ever since The Guardian reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting the phone record metadata of millions of Americans, the cable talk circuit has been ablaze with pundits demanding answers to what should be obvious questions.

Who knew about the program to collect data? (Apparently, all three branches of government). Who else has been supplying data?  (Just about everybody, according to the Washington Post). What is metadata?  (It’s data about data).

The question that nobody seems to be asking is probably the most important one:  What is the NSA doing with the data and why do they need so much of it?  The answer is a relatively new field called social network analysis and, while it may make people uneasy, the benefits far outweigh the risks, so it is probably something we will just have to accept.

The New Science of Networks

The story of networks starts in 1736, long before the United States became a country, when Leonhard Euler set out to conquer a famous math problem concerning the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. To solve it, he created a new form of mathematics called graph theory, which concerned itself with links and nodes in a network.

In the 1950’s, interest renewed in Euler’s networks.  First, Anatol Rapoport introduced the concept of triadic closure, which asserted that networks grow when people meet through a central friend that they both know.  Later, Erdős and Rényi showed that as networks got bigger, communication among the people in the network got much more efficient.

In the 1970’s a sociologist named Mark Granovetter argued that we get most of our information not through close friends, but through weak ties and in the 1990’s Watts and Strogatz built on Granovetter’s work by showing that small clusters of people naturally organize themselves into far flung networks.

So by the late 1990’s, the small field of network analysis had built into a full fledged science and it was about to be applied to an increasingly important problem:  Terrorist networks.

Mapping Terrorist Networks

Valdis Krebs of Orgnet is a network scientist who in 2002 published a widely praised paper on mapping terrorist networks and has since consulted with the Defense Department on methods and approaches of evaluating and dismantling terrorist organizations.

It used to be that law enforcement officers would simply watch the two men closely, but in the era of global jihad, that’s much too slow to save lives.  The two might be peripheral to the conspiracy and it could take years before you could connect them to the leadership of the network, if ever.

Here’s where the data from Verizon and other companies comes in.  If you can analyze communication records, you can move much more quickly.  However, you don’t want to look at everyone the suspects talk to because you’ll end up with mostly incidental contacts, like friendly neighbors and delivery men.

But if you kept Rapoport’s concept of triadic closure in mind and had full access to communication records, you could look for contacts the two suspects have in common and start to build out a map of the conspiracy.  Read more here and see the graphic illustrations.

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Now is the time to question boundaries, collateral damage and protection results with regard to offensive measures against terrorists.