Early Solution to Islamic State was Ignored

Posted on January 1, 2015January 1, 2015 by Denise Simon

Those people in Syria, those rebels that everyone thinks are all jihadis need to rethink the early days. The matter was ignored, dismissed and exploited. Now between Syria, Iraq, Libya, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, the enemy has won by doing their own exploitation.

The cost of life and treasure grows with no real end in sight as explained by the White House and the Pentagon.

Rebels: Obama administration ignored early plan to stop Islamic State

ISTANBUL — Two months before Mosul and other cities in northern Iraq fell to the Islamic State last June, representatives of a Syrian rebel group called on the new U.S. special envoy for Syria with an outline of a plan to stop the extremists.

The group urged the U.S. to shift its focus to eastern Syria, where the Islamic State had emerged from Raqqa and other towns under its control and begun military operations to capture Deir el Zour province.

If Islamic State fighters seized the region’s oil and gas resources, they’d gain enough power to destroy the U.S.-backed rebel forces across northern Syria and link the swath of territory they held in Syria to that under their control in Iraq’s restive Anbar province

“Ultimately,” they said in a written memo, using a common abbreviation for the Islamic State, “this will lead to an expansion of ISIS to reach neighboring countries as well . . . bringing it closer to establish the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.”

But the presentation April 17 to special State Department envoy Daniel Rubinstein was stillborn. The plea for immediate financial support for moderate forces in the east, backing for a rebel offensive in Aleppo that would divert Islamic State forces, and relief and medical supplies in the east went unanswered.

“Two or three million dollars would have changed the whole thing,” said a rebel official who was at the meeting and spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing a diplomatic exchange. “But we never heard back from them.”

That’s been the pattern. Moderate rebels, despite their battlefield setbacks, have unique assets, such as ground-level intelligence about the locations and movements of the Islamic State, a grasp of local politics and the drive to expel foreign-led forces from their country. But they’ve failed to gain traction with the Obama administration for their plans to fight the terror groups, and recently they’ve had trouble even getting a hearing.

The Islamic State didn’t follow quite the path that Syrian rebel officials had predicted, conquering Mosul before Deir el Zour. But the rebels were right that the extremists’ takeover of eastern Syria would speed the demise of the moderates by radicalizing the battlefield, opening the border with Iraq to free movement of arms and manpower, and providing the Islamic State with income from the sale of oil and gas.

Syrian opposition leaders doubt that the U.S.-led intervention can defeat the extremists.

“You cannot defeat terrorism by airstrikes alone,” said Hadi al Bahra, the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition. “There must be a strategy in place.”

It should entail “full coordination” between U.S.-led airstrikes and ground forces, military pressure on the Bashar Assad regime and a commitment to enable moderates to establish a governing system in Syria, Bahra said.

“They listen,” he said of U.S. officials. “But they do not respond.”

The State Department had no comment on the April meeting. “We do not discuss details of our diplomatic contacts and outreach,” said spokesman Michael Lavallee.

The administration also has tried to choke off complaints from rebel officials and commanders, threatening a total aid cutoff if they’re quoted in the news media, rebel officials said. For this reason McClatchy isn’t naming its rebel sources. (A State Department official told McClatchy: “We have not heard of such a warning.”)

The meeting with Rubinstein, an intelligence expert who took over from former Ambassador Robert Ford in March, was only one of numerous such efforts.

In early May, the then-president of the opposition coalition, Ahmad Jarba, made a presentation about fighting the Islamic State to Michael Lumpkin, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.

Jarba emphasized that the battle for eastern Syria was “important to Iraq as well” and called for “real alliance . . . to fight this common cancer,” according to notes of the meeting made available to McClatchy.

“We need a strategic partnership to fight terrorism,” he said at the meeting. “We need logistical support and weapons to help the Free Syrian Army fight the Islamic State on the Iraqi border as well.” The Free Syrian Army is an umbrella group of moderate forces fighting the Assad regime.

Lumpkin replied that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was supportive of their efforts against the Syrian regime and al Qaida, and predicted there would be many more meetings “as we work together to end this challenge to us both,” according to the visitors’ notes.

The Pentagon confirmed that the meeting took place May 8 and addressed the “threat of extremists groups” such as the Islamic State. It said Lumpkin had affirmed U.S. support for Jarba’s efforts to build the capacity of the moderate opposition.

But there was no further response, Syrian opposition officials said.

One attendee at the meeting expressed surprise that Lumpkin didn’t ask about rebel strategy.

The former chief of staff of the Free Syrian Army – a post stripped of most power because the U.S. disburses covert aid to individual rebel commanders rather than through a general staff – said he’d taken maps and a five-page outline of the first phase of a strategic plan with him, as well as a separate file for the battle against the Syrian regime. “But no one asked me for any of these,” Gen. Abdul-Ilah Albashir said.

Interviewed in late September, he told McClatchy the Americans had shown no interest and that he didn’t volunteer his plans: “They don’t even say hello to us. How can we share these things with them?”

On May 14, Jarba and other rebel officials spent a half-hour with President Barack Obama at the White House, but the Islamic State threat didn’t appear to be a priority. The White House said they reviewed the “risks posed by growing extremism in Syria and agreed on the need to counter terrorist groups on all sides of the conflict.”

Even after the fall of Mosul on June 10, the U.S. showed little interest in rebel plans. Nour Kholouf, a defected Syrian army general who served as Syrian Opposition Coalition defense minister until recently, said in early July that he’d developed plans to expel the Islamic State in stages from Syrian territory but he couldn’t get an appointment with American officials.

The most detailed strategy proposal of all was produced by one of the most effective of the rebel groups during the summer and given in August to U.S. and other intelligence officials in the Turkish border town of Reyhanli. But it has yet to be presented formally to the rest of the U.S. government.

The 30-page plan, which centers on the use of mobile strike forces, proposes to clear the Islamic State from Syria within 12 to 18 months, rebel officials said. It calls for air, ammunition, logistics and other support, including intelligence.

It would require communications equipment to replace the walkie-talkies now obtained from Best Buy or Radio Shack. And it requires stepped-up support in the rebels’ battle to defend their control over much of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, from which they’d draw much of their manpower.

“It lays out city by city the force movements and the different tactics: which cities to enter first, how to enter each city, how to overcome the IS resistance at checkpoints and from suicide bombers,” said one rebel official.

Rebel officials said they hadn’t been able to get an appointment with U.S. defense officials.

One obvious candidate would be U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, who’s in charge of training and equipping a force of 5,000 Syrian rebels under a $500 million program.

But Nagata has yet to meet a commander of the Free Syrian Army, according to a knowledgeable rebel official. White House spokesman Alistair Baskey said Nagata and his team were “free to meet with members of the moderate Syrian opposition as they deem fit in order to advance their train and equip program.”

Has any such meeting taken place? The U.S. Central Command task force that deals with the new program “is taking a deliberate and careful approach toward direct engagement with members of the Syrian opposition,” said Maj. Tiffany Bowens, a spokeswoman.

The Central Command turned down McClatchy’s request for an interview with Nagata.

Though Rubinstein is one U.S. official who’s always available to meet, rebel officials said they saw him as a dead end. Rubinstein, whom several rebel officials have nicknamed “the complaint box,” listens to all and never responds, they said. “I think they empty it into the trash at the end of every day,” said one rebel official.

In November, after the Nusra Front, the al Qaida affiliate in Syria, pushed rebel forces out of their bases in Idlib province, Rubinstein gave a cool reception to rebel officials, according to three who met with him.

“It was an absolutely horrifying meeting,” said one attendee.

“How did it happen?” this official quoted Rubinstein as asking. “The tone was not one of ‘This is an emergency,’ but more, ‘How did you guys get beat?’ ” the official added.

The official said an aide to the envoy then asked them: “So what’s your strategy now? Is everything lost?” When told that the forces needed to regroup and obtain more resources, “No, that’s not a smart strategy,” the aide was quoted as saying. “Your strategy is to look at what your resources are and plan accordingly.”

With even the most effective fighting groups saying they’re receiving one-tenth the ammunition they need to sustain their two-front battle, the message seemed to be that the rebels should prepare to abandon the fight.

In December, the U.S. government cut salaries for a large part of the rebel forces, McClatchy has reported. The U.S. government has refused to comment.

The State Department turned down McClatchy’s request for an interview with Rubinstein.

“Unfortunately, the current strategy being implemented results in the increase of terrorism,” said Bahra, the businessman who heads the Syrian Opposition Coalition. “Some battalions are not being supplied with anything: food, clothing, fuel, what they need for survival. You are pushing them to be the prey to any extreme terrorist organization that offers assistance.”

He added: “But no one is listening.”

A Top Challenge for the 114th: Immigration

Posted on January 1, 2015January 1, 2015 by Denise Simon

It has been proven that the federal government does not do anything well by choice, by politics or out of cunningness. Immigration is no different. Below is a two track condition that speaks to all of the reasons above. This matter is in our hands to sound alarms for an immediate solution.

If you don’t feel safe, if you worry about the lack of law enforcement response due to the recent siege on police and if you are fretful about compliance with the existing law, below will cause real panic.

96% of Illegal Immigrant Families With Deportation Orders ‘Can’t Be Found’

By: Natalie Johnson

Thousands of illegal immigrants who spilled into border states earlier this year have “disappeared” from government tracking, according to a recent investigation by a Houston TV station.

The wave of unaccompanied children and women illegally crossing into the United States between July and October was so large that Border Patrol had to release thousands on their own recognizance due to lack of detention space.

Now, many of those ordered to be deported “can’t be found,” says investigative reporter Robert Arnold.

The Obama administration has repeatedly reinforced these cases as a top priority, yet the Houston TV station found that only a sliver have been sent home.

After six months of requests, the Executive Office of Immigration Review told Houston’s KPRC that 96 percent of the more than 4,100 families released on recognizance and ordered deported did not show up to court, prompting the government to classify them “in absentia.”

A similar 92 percent of the more than 1,600 unaccompanied children to be deported did not show up.

The Executive Office of Immigration Review usually reports an 11 percent to 15 percent annual “in absentia” rate, far below this year’s jump. Among the thousands who were caught and detained by Border Patrol, the court process remains sluggish. A mere 22 percent of the more than 30,400 families and unaccompanied children caught have received a court decision.

This number could remain low for several months to years, as federal officials sift through the thousands of cases yet to be heard.

But hold on, it continues to get worse.

More than 600 Detained Immigrants Released From ICE Custody Due To Exec. Actions

By: Caroline May

Since the Obama administration altered the nation’s immigration enforcement policies in November with the president’s executive actions, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has released more than 600 detained immigrants from custody.

An ICE official explains to Breitbart News that, following Obama’s announcement, ICE instructed its field offices to ensure that the detention of those immigrants in custody remains in line with the updated enforcement priorities.

“That includes detainees who appear to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Permanent Residents (DAPA), as well those individuals who, based on their case histories, no longer fall within DHS’ specified enforcement priorities,” the official said in a statement Breitbart News.

Those immigrants in custody who meet one or more of those apparent qualifications “are being released from ICE custody under an order of supervision pending a final determination in their cases.”

“Serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a significant threat to public safety remain a priority for ICE detention,” the official added.

Due to the new enforcement priorities, ICE has released 618 detained immigrants as of Dec. 27, the ICE official confirmed.

The Nov. 20 executive actions — in addition to providing legal status and work eligibility to millions of undocumented immigrants — further reworked the types of violations that would fall under the government’s enforcement priorities.

The highest priority for removal under the new guidelines are terrorists, gang members, convicted felons and people apprehended in the act of trying to illegally enter the U.S.

Undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of a felony, three or more misdemeanors, or have not been issued a final order of removal after Jan.1, 2014 are not considered a priority.

The official added that ICE is also looking at the cases of immigrants who are scheduled for removal but are not detained.

Obama is Selective on Human Rights Violators

Posted on December 31, 2014December 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

If Barack Obama was really true to his words, why not take on North Korea. The DPRK has operated gulags for 50 years where atrocities are beyond description and on par with Daesh (Islamic State).

‘Starvation food rations, forced labor, routine beatings, systematic torture and executions put the North Korean camps in the ranks of history’s worst prisons for political offenders. Originally modeled on the Soviet gulag, the North Korean camps have developed distinctive features of their own for which no terminology has yet been devised. Particularly horrifying is the incarceration of entire families, including children and grandparents, in order to isolate them from society and punish them because of their relationship to family members accused of political crimes. Rooting out “class enemies for three generations” was specifically ordered by Kim Il-sung, which at times has led to comparisons with Nazi death camps. An equally horrifying practice distinctive to North Korea is forced abortion regularly carried out and in the most brutal manner on women prisoners who illegally crossed the border into China, became pregnant by Chinese men and were forcibly repatriated to North Korea. In cases where the pregnancy is too advanced, guards beat the infants to death or bury them alive after they are born. Still another point of departure in North Korea is that all the residents of the kwan-li-so are denied any correspondence, visits or life saving parcels from family and friends. They are totally incommunicado.’

• Ahn Myong-chol, a former guard, reported that all three of the kwan-li-so at which he worked had isolated detention facilities in which many prisoners died from mistreatment, and that at Kwan-li-so No. 22 there were so many deaths by beatings from guards that the guards were told to be less violent.

• Former Prisoner # 37 was beaten at the Onsong An-jeon-bu police facility during his six month interrogation prior to being tried and sentenced to Chongo-ri kyo-hwa-so for smuggling food back and forth from China.

• Seo Jin was beaten so badly with wooden staves at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, and again at the Musan Bo-wi-bu interrogation center, that she could hardly walk. After transfer to the Musan An-jeon-bu detention facility, she was beaten by younger women guards when she objected to her third vaginal examination. And she was kicked on the legs and beaten on the back by guards at the Oro Kyo-yang-so penitentiary No. 55 when she did not keep up the required pace in her prison labor.

• Former Prisoner # 31 was whipped with a belt by male guards at the Onsong Bo-wi-bu interrogation facility, and severely beaten on her legs and back when, because of severe malnutrition, she was unable to maintain the pace of her prison labor.

• Bang Mi-sun was severely beaten on her legs with a wooden stave because she could not keep up with the work pace at the Musan An-jeon-burun ro-dong-dan-ryeon-dae mobile labor brigade owing to injuries she suffered while trafficked in China prior to her repatriation. Infection from this beating left her partially crippled. At the Musan An-jeon-bu pre-trial detention ku-ryu-jang, she and other prisoners were required to sit motionless for days, with fellow detainees forced to beat other detainees who moved.

For more testimony, documents and photos click here for the report.

Ed Schroeder’s Military Intelligence Report: North Korean Defector Details ‘Human Experiments’

by ****

Im Cheon-yong says that witnessing mentally and physically handicapped children being used in chemical weapons tests carried out by the North Korean military was the last straw.

An officer in North Korea’s special forces, Im had reservations about the nation in which he was living, and the regime that he served to the best of his abilities, but the “special training” he was required to undergo at a military academy in North Pyongan Province for the regime’s elite troops helped to convince him that he needed to defect.

“If you want to graduate from this academy, you need to learn how to confuse the enemy without revealing your own forces, how to carry out assassinations, how to use chemical weapons and so on,” he said.

‘The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth,’ says Shigemura

“And then we have what they call ‘field learning’. For the biological and chemical warfare tests, we needed ‘objects’,” he added. “At first, they used the chemical agents on mice and showed us how they died. Then we watched the instructors carrying out the tests on humans to show us how a person dies. I saw it with my own eyes,” Im claimed.

He said he got repulsed by what he had witnessed and managed to get over the border into China and arrived in South Korea in the mid 1990s. Now 50 years old, Im is a prominent advocate of the regime change in Pyongyang and president of both the Soldiers’ Alliance for Free North Korea and The Fellowship Foundation for Freedom.

Abuse of citizens

Some North Korea experts say that Im’s experiences tally with other defectors’ tales of abuse of citizens of the world’s most isolated state. Some of that testimony was shared with the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry before it issued its damning report on the state of human rights in the North in February.

“There are too many of these stories now for them not to be true,” Toshimitsu Shigemura, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University, and an authority on North Korean affairs, told DW. “There were reports in the past but it was difficult to confirm them, but the testimony that is emerging now is consistent and from numerous sources,” he added.

“Anyone who goes to Pyongyang will notice that there are no disabled people about at all,” he said. “We now know that they are being taken away as children and incarcerated in special camps. The regime does this because it insists to their people that North Korea is heaven on Earth, and there can be no disabled people in paradise,” he said.

But Kim Myong-chol, executive director of The Centre for North Korea-US Peace, dismisses Im’s claims.

“It is the same nonsense,” he told DW. “This guy – and plenty of others like him – are just looking to make money by attracting the attention of South Korea and the US. That is why they make these lies up. People like him know nothing about the real North Korea and all they care about is making money from their lies.”

Experiments on humans

‘The authorities buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,’ claims Im

According to Im, experiments on humans date back to the late 1960s and one of the first facilities used for chemical and biological weapons tests on humans was constructed on the military controlled island of Mayang-do, just off the east coast port of Sinpo, which is also North Korea’s most important submarine base. A second facility was subsequently constructed on an island off the west coast of the peninsula, while a third is in operation alongside a political prison camp outside the city of Hyanghari, the defector claims.

“They use anthrax bacterium as well as 40 different types of chemical weapons that the regime has developed itself,” Im said. “Through these experiments, they know the effects of the weapons and the amounts to be used.”

To give the regime’s actions legitimacy, children born with mental or physical disabilities are not taken away by force – although, in reality, few citizens of North Korea have the right to resist the authorities’ will, says Im.

“They want to do it ‘legally’ and they don’t want to lose the support of the people, so they buy disabled children from their parents for a few kilograms of rice,” he said. “The officials say they will take care of the children.”

Boehner’s Office Tallying the Obama Lies

Posted on December 31, 2014December 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

One may really need a calculator to tabulate the lies from Obama, but at least a staffer has been assigned to keep current. While political correctness is part of the verbal DNA in Washington calling lies ‘Pinocchios’, one must understand that no legislator in decades has used the word ‘lie’ out of the whole political deference thing as lies and omissions are as common pork laden bills.

The State of the Union Speech is coming up, so keep your own tally for 2015.

The President’s Year in Pinocchios

December 31, 2014|Matt Wolking –

In 2013, President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” was named Politifact’s “Lie of the Year.” In 2014, amid a mountain of stumbles and scandals, his rhetoric wasn’t received any better.

In May, the White House claimed President Obama first heard about secret waiting lists and deaths at the VA on the news, despite evidence to the contrary. CNN’s Drew Griffin said this was absurd, and more of the administration’s sloppy spin prompted National Journal’s Ron Fournier to ask, “How Dumb Does Obama Think We Are?”

It was a prescient question considering comments made by frequent White House visitor and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber, who said “the stupidity of the American voter” was “critical to getting the thing to pass” and bragged repeatedly about helping the president pull one over on the public. When asked about this, President Obama pretended he didn’t know that guy and denied misleading Americans about the law.

His unilateral action was another lowlight. President Obama said 22 times that he couldn’t ignore or create his own immigration law – and then he did. Just like his reasoning for rejecting the Keystone pipeline, his explanations for his flip-flop on executive action didn’t fool anyone.

And that was, of course, just one of these four things he hid from Americans until after the November election.

Looking back on 2014, from the continued cover-up of the IRS scandal, to all the president’s missing hard drives, to his dishonesty regarding the national debt, to the administration’s bogus ObamaCare enrollment numbers, there’s a clear pattern of hiding the truth and misleading Americans.

Indeed, fact checkers had a field day with President Obama this year. The Washington Post alone awarded him a total of 47 Pinocchios, plus one Upside-Down Pinocchio (the worst possible rating).

Here they are, in chronological order:

“Unprecedented inspections help the world verify every day that Iran is not building a bomb.” (Two Pinocchios, 2/6/14)
“We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion.” (Four Pinocchios, 2/24/14)
“We didn’t have billions of dollars of commercials [for ObamaCare] like some critics did.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/4/14)
“Today, the average full-time working woman earns just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns … in 2014, that’s an embarrassment. It is wrong.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/9/14)
“Thirty-five percent of people who enrolled through the federal marketplace are under the age of 35.” (Two Pinocchios, 4/22/14)
“[Republicans’] willingness to say no to everything — the fact that since 2007, they have filibustered about 500 pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a sense of how opposed they are to any progress[.]” (Four Pinocchios, 5/9/14)
“I want to announce a few more steps that we’re taking that are going to be good for job growth and good for our economy, and that we don’t have to wait for Congress to do. They are going to be steps that generate more clean energy, waste less energy overall, and leave our kids and our grandkids with a cleaner, safer planet in the process.” (Two Pinocchios, 5/16/14)
“At the beginning of my presidency, we built a coalition that imposed sanctions on the Iranian economy, while extending the hand of diplomacy to the Iranian government.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/2/14)
“When you talk about the moderate opposition [in Syria], many of these people were farmers or dentists or maybe some radio reporters who didn’t have a lot of experience fighting.” (Three Pinocchios, 6/26/14)
“So far this year, Republicans in Congress have blocked every serious idea to strengthen the middle class.” (Three Pinocchios, 7/15/14)
“If Congress fails to fund it [the Highway Trust Fund], it runs out of money. That could put nearly 700,000 jobs at risk.” (Two Pinocchios, 7/16/14)
“Keep in mind, I wasn’t specifically referring to ISIL [as a jayvee team].” (Four Pinocchios, 9/3/14)
“Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution by more than any other nation on Earth.” (Two Pinocchios, 9/25/14)
“If we hadn’t taken this on, and [health insurance] premiums had kept growing at the rate they did in the last decade, the average premium for family coverage today would be $1,800 higher than they are. Now, most people don’t notice it, but that’s $1,800 you don’t have to pay out of your pocket or see vanish from your paycheck. That’s like a $1,800 tax cut.” (Two Pinocchios, 10/17/14)
“Health care inflation has gone down every single year since the law [ObamaCare] passed, so that we now have the lowest increase in health care costs in 50 years–which is saving us about $180 billion in reduced overall costs to the federal government and in the Medicare program.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/6/14)
“We’ve created more jobs in the United States than every other advanced economy combined since I came into office.” (One Pinocchio, 11/11/14)
“Well, actually, my position hasn’t changed [on immigration executive action].” (Upside-Down Pinocchio, 11/18/14)
“Understand what this [Keystone XL pipeline] project is. It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/20/14)
“If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing. George H.W. Bush — about 40 percent of the undocumented persons, at the time, were provided a similar kind of relief as a consequence of executive action.” (Three Pinocchios, 11/24/14)

– See more at: http://www.speaker.gov/general/president-s-year-pinocchios#sthash.8H0npCgI.dpuf

The Secret Back Channels to Putin

Posted on December 31, 2014December 31, 2014 by Denise Simon

Add sanctions. Remove sanctions. Amend sanctions. Call the old-timers, try anything. Why? Putin is on the rocks financially but remains defiant. Why is the White House attempting to reset relations again? Could it be that Russia has more clandestine missions planned that includes the Baltic States or Europe?

(Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised New Year’s address on Wednesday that the “return home” of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula to Moscow’s control would forever remain an important chapter in Russia’s history.

Putin is facing the biggest challenge of his 15-year rule as the Russian economy is sliding sharply into recession, hurt by Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and falling prices for oil, Russia’s chief export.

***

Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia

By Josh Rogin

President Barack Obama’s administration has been working behind the scenes for months to forge a new working relationship with Russia, despite the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in repairing relations with Washington or halting his aggression in neighboring Ukraine.

This month, Obama’s National Security Council finished an extensive and comprehensive review of U.S policy toward Russia that included dozens of meetings and input from the State Department, Defense Department and several other agencies, according to three senior administration officials. At the end of the sometimes-contentious process, Obama made a decision to continue to look for ways to work with Russia on a host of bilateral and international issues while also offering Putin a way out of the stalemate over the crisis in Ukraine.

“I don’t think that anybody at this point is under the impression that a wholesale reset of our relationship is possible at this time, but we might as well test out what they are actually willing to do,” a senior administration official told me. “Our theory of this all along has been, let’s see what’s there. Regardless of the likelihood of success.”

Leading the charge has been Secretary of State John Kerry. This fall, Kerry even proposed going to Moscow and meeting with Putin directly. The negotiations over Kerry’s trip got to the point of scheduling, but ultimately were scuttled because there was little prospect of demonstrable progress.

In a separate attempt at outreach, the White House turned to an old friend of Putin’s for help. The White House called on former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to discuss having him call Putin directly, according to two officials. It’s unclear whether Kissinger actually made the call. The White House and Kissinger both refused to comment for this column.

Kerry has been the point man on dealing with Russia because his close relationship with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov represents the last remaining functional diplomatic channel between Washington and Moscow. They meet often, often without any staff members present, and talk on the phone regularly. Obama and Putin, on the other hand, are known to have an intense dislike for each other and very rarely speak.

In several conversations with Lavrov, Kerry has floated an offer to Russia that would pave the way for a partial release of some of the most onerous economic sanctions. Kerry’s conditions included Russia adhering to September’s Minsk agreement and ceasing direct military support for the Ukrainian separatists. The issue of Crimea would be set aside for the time being, and some of the initial sanctions that were put in place after Crimea’s annexation would be kept in place.

“We are willing to isolate the issues of Donetsk and Luhansk from the issue of Crimea,” another senior administration official told me, naming two regions in Eastern Ukraine under separatist control. “If there was a settlement on Donetsk and Luhansk, there could be a removal of some sanctions while maintaining sanctions with regard to Crimea. That represents a way forward for Putin.”

Meanwhile, Kerry has been proposing increased U.S.-Russian cooperation on a wide range of international issues. Earlier this month, he invited Lavrov to a last-minute diplomatic confab in Rome to discuss the the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

After one meeting with Lavrov in Paris in October, Kerry announced that he had discussed potential U.S.-Russian cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Yemen. But the apparent warming was overshadowed by Lavrov’s quick denial of Kerry’s claim that Russia had agreed to assist in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State in Iraq.

Kerry has seemed more enthusiastic about mending ties with Russia than Obama himself. After the president gave a blistering critique of Russian behavior in a major United Nations speech, saying that “Russian aggression in Europe recalls the days when large nations trampled small ones in pursuit of territorial ambition,” Kerry urged Lavrov to ignore his boss’s remarks, according to Lavrov. “Kerry said we have so many serious things to discuss that of course that was unfortunate, let’s not focus on that,” Lavrov told Russian reporters.

State Department officials insist that Kerry is clear-eyed about the challenges of trying to work with Russia, but that he believes there is no other responsible option than to see what can be accomplished.

“Secretary Kerry is not advocating internally or with Russia for a reset in the relationship, and in fact in meetings he has taken a strong and at times skeptical stance,” one senior State Department official told me. “As the nation’s chief diplomat he is simply always exploring ways to make relationships more productive.”

There is also a belief among many both inside the State Department and the White House that sanctions are working. The Russian economy is tanking, albeit due largely to collapsing oil prices and not targeted punishments. One senior administration official argued that absent the sanctions, Putin might have been even more aggressive in Ukraine. Moreover, this official said, the sanctions need time to work and might yet prove to have greater effect on Putin’s decision-making in the months ahead: “We’ll see how they feel as their economy continues to deteriorate and the Ukrainian economy refuses to collapse.”

If the Russians are getting ready to cave, they aren’t showing it. Putin remains defiant and Russian military assistance to the Ukrainian rebels continues. The Russian leadership has been rejecting Kerry’s overtures both in public and private. Diplomatic sources said that Lavrov has refused to even discuss Kerry’s conditions for partial easing of sanctions. And Putin has made a hobby of bashing the U.S. in public remarks.

To many of the administration’s critics, especially Republicans on Capitol Hill, pursuing engagement with Moscow is based on naivety and wishful thinking.

“It’s a strategy worthy in the finest tradition of Neville Chamberlain,” incoming Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain told me. “I think the Russians are doing fine. Meanwhile, what price has Vladimir Putin paid? Very little.”

The legislative branch has also been active on Russia this year, but its efforts run counter to the administration’s policy and sometimes have the indirect effect of putting more roadblocks in front of the Obama-Kerry push to find a way forward.

On Dec. 18, Obama reluctantly signed a bill authorizing new Russia sanctions and military aid to Ukraine that was overwhelmingly passed by Congress. Afterward, the White House awkwardly said that the legislation did not signify any change in policy.

And this week, the State Department sanctioned four more Russian officials, but not over Ukraine. The officials were added to a list of human rights violators under the Sergei Magnitsky Act of 2012, named after the anti-corruption lawyer who died in a Russian prison. In response, the Russian foreign ministry issued a statement saying that the Magnitsky Act sanctions “place in question the prospects for bilateral cooperation in resolving the situation surrounding the Iranian nuclear program, the Syrian crisis, and other acute international issues.”

These latest punishments show that it may be impossible to de-link the problems in the bilateral relationship from the opportunities, as the Obama administration wants to do. They also show that there will always be chances for those in Washington and Moscow who want to stoke the tensions to do so, jeopardizing any progress.

Some experts believe that any plan to warm U.S.-Russian relations is unlikely to succeed because it doesn’t have the full support of either president.

“It’s very clear that between the Putin Kremlin and the Obama White House there is a very bad chemistry. Its not a question of simply distrust, it’s a question of intense dislike between the two leaders,” said Dimitri Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest.

Also, some experts feel, placing the diplomacy in the Kerry-Lavrov channel dooms its outcome, because the Russians know that Kerry himself has no power to make major decisions and Lavrov has to be careful not to be seen as cozying up to the U.S.

“The more Kerry creates a perception he has a special relationship with Lavrov, the more he puts Lavrov in a difficult position with officials in his own capital, starting with Putin,” said Simes. “It’s clear that when Kerry deals with Lavrov and hopes that because they have overlapping interests, that would allow cooperation where useful, that is not a model of relationship that Putin is prepared to accept.”

Obama has made it clear that in his last two years in office he is prepared to make big moves on foreign policy even if they face political or legislative opposition, such as normalizing relations with Cuba or pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran. But when it comes to Russia, he is unwilling to place his own credibility behind any outreach to his nemesis Putin.

The administration’s cautious engagement with Moscow is logical: Why not seek a balance in a complicated and important bilateral relationship? But by choosing a middle ground between conciliation and confrontation — not being generous enough to entice Russia’s cooperation yet not being tough enough to stop Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe — Obama’s policy risks failing on both fronts.