Dangerous Times: A Looming Strategic Disaster in the Middle East

[H/T American Thinker] — If you think ObamaCare is bad, just wait till you hear the new “peace” agreement that is due to be imposed on the Middle East over the coming weeks. Even if it works, a giant if, it will make the world much more dangerous:

1. Iran will have nuclear weapons, or it will be balanced right on the edge — within one month or less to make nukes.

2. Saudi Arabia and Egypt will go nuclear, to balance Iran.

3. America’s role as a guarantor of peace will be blown, crushed by Obama’s betrayal of Israel and the Arabs. America’s nuclear umbrella, which has kept world from major war since 1949, was always based on trust. Once you blow that trust, the umbrella disappears.

4. The coming victory of Bashar Assad in Syria, supported by Hizb’allah and Iran, will forge the much-feared Shii’ite Crescent that surrounds Israel and directly threatens Arab nations like Egypt, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states).

5. Russia will replace America as a more trustworthy major power in the region, including the Eastern Mediterranean.

This is not a framework for peace. It is an unstable Rube Goldberg contraption that could lead to total war in a matter of weeks. It will never have the long-term stability of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of the last forty years. On top of all those balancing acts, Israel will be driven back to borders that are much more vulnerable to Muslim terrorism. World conquest is a basic premise of Islam, and it includes Europe, Russia, and America.

The emerging agreement, which will be greeted by the Euro-American socialist media as peace on earth, will be much more like Munich, 1938 — a temporary truce on the way to much more dangerous times.

Here is a reasonable guess about the Obama-Putin proposal that is now being circulated around the major participants:

1. The U.S. and Russia will agree to cut back drastically on nuclear weapons. That has been the major aim of the Russians, because they can defend against a small nuclear attack, but more attacking nukes and missiles will overwhelm any existing defense. This has its own pros and cons, depending on Russian intentions. It is a major draw for Putin, because it reinstates Russia as a superpower on an equal basis with the United States.

2. American power will be deliberately set back around the world, which is Obama’s announced policy. The U.S. will no longer be the guarantor of peace, because (a) Obama has decided to cut down our armed forces to divert money to the new massive welfare state, and (b) nobody trusts us to provide a nuclear umbrella any more.

Within that U.S.-Russian umbrella agreement, the Obama fantasy will be that:

1. The Iranian nuclear danger will be reduced by a treaty, to be monitored by a great power inspection regime, aided by the UN. Because Russia will be one of the guarantor powers, and because Russia fears and hates the prospect of a radical Muslim nuclear power near its borders, it will want to restrain Iranian weapons development. However, Iran will be able to get real nukes in a month. Other WMD programs (like dirty bombs) are not controlled, especially from rogue forces like the 60,000 Al Qaida gangsters in Syria.

Obama and the Europeans will celebrate this as a great victory. But it will be a huge gamble with the security of the world. In the foreseeable future Iran will have ICBM’s that can reach our shores.

Hamas and Hizb’allah terrorism will be increased rather than stopped, because that is the routine of every Muslim power in history. For example, Pakistan and India are nominally not at war, but Pakistan has never stopped terrorist attacks on India. That is the standard strategy for Muslim powers, and having nuclear weapons will make terrorism even more attractive.

2. The Europeans will lose the American nuclear umbrella, and will appeal to Russia for nuclear protection. They must also modernize the nuclear capacity of France and Britain, because this will not be a one- or two-superpower world, but an ongoing arms race between multiple powers, all possessing weapons of mass destruction. The UN will pretend to conduct inspections, just as it did in Iraq and Iran, a laughable failure.

In other words, this will be a fantasy peace, just as ObamaCare is a fantasy healthcare program. Obama craves the appearance of success, but in truth he never bothers to find out if his fantasies actually work. He is hooked on personal celebrity.

Obama is likely to run for UN SecGen after 2016, a major reason for this dreadfully unstable, phony solution to nuclear and missile proliferation. Obama’s personal ambition is a big ingredient in anything he does. The Russians have figured that out, and saw it as an opportunity to reverse their decline as a superpower. Domestically we no longer have a functioning opposition, so that there is no critical thinking about absurd policies any more. That is whyObamaCare is likely to fail over and over again. A number of O’Care “architects” have come forward in the last week to confess that yes, of course they were lying to Americans about their future healthcare. But they were lying for a good cause, naturally. In fact, they were making wild guesses and now have Americans in a trap. They won’t allow us to escape their fantasy trap no matter how bad it gets.

The same mad illogic governs this Middle East “peace” process. It’s just as phony and destructive as Obama’s medical takeover. The top goal is more power for the socialists. Healthcare and peace are strictly secondary.

UPDATE: IRAN, WORLD POWERS AGREE ON NUCLEAR DEAL

Tehran would reportedly be allow ‘limited’ uranium enrichment.  Iran and six major powers agreed early Sunday on an historic deal that freezes key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for temporary relief on some economic sanctions, diplomats confirmed.  The deal was reached after four days of bargaining and an 11th-hour intervention by U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry and other foreign ministers from Europe, Russia and China. the sources said.  This now puts the world’s safety officially at risk.

Obama, Hillary, Reid, Pelosi: President May Not Attack Without Congressional Authorization, Except When It’s Obama

Breitbart reported: Back in 2007 Democrats were very certain about one thing. A President needs congressional authorization to authorize military force against a nation in the Middle East. Here’s Sen. Hillary Clinton saying “President Bush must not be allowed to act without the authority and oversight of Congress.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the National Press Club in January 2007, “The president does not have the authority to launch military action in Iran without first seeking congressional authorization.”
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Nancy Pelosi, his counterpart in the House, was equally certain that President Bush needed congressional authorization to attack.

And of course we’ve already seen that Sen. Biden threatened to help impeach Bush if he dared to act without congressional approval.

And via Andrew Kaczynski, President Obama gave a response to a Q&A with the Boston Globe in Dec. 2007 in which he said “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Obama also gave a speech in Clinton, Iowa in Sep. 2007 in which CNN headlined“Obama to Bush: Don’t Invade Iran.” Here again Obama tells the President he does not have congressional authorization to attack.

Where are all of these Democrats on the President’s pending decision to attack Syria?

 

Al Qaeda Growing: Capabilities and Scope are Expanding, And Obama Has Claimed the Global Threat on Terror no Longer Exists?

Oddly enough, Barack Hussein Obama thinks the global threat of terror has been marginalized and reduced to pre-9/11 levels, insinuating I suppose, that his policies have worked.

A closer look tells a much different story.

Christian Monitor reports: Al Qaeda not only remains a threat to the United States, but its capabilities and scope are expanding, a new analysis from a respected think tank has concluded.

“There has been a net expansion in the number and geographic scope of Al Qaeda affiliates and allies over the past decade, indicating that Al Qaeda and its brand are far from defeated,” argues Seth Jones, an analyst at the RAND Corporation and the study’s author.

Why, after a decade of wars – the longest in America’s history – is the terrorist organization that the US military set out to defeat still active and growing? And does it really have an impact on the everyday safety of most Americans?

There are a few reasons for the growth of the terrorist group, Mr. Jones argues. “One is the Arab uprisings, which have weakened regimes across North Africa and the Middle East, creating an opportunity for Al Qaeda affiliates and allies to secure a foothold.”

This expansion – coupled with the weakness of central Al Qaeda in Pakistan – “has created a more diffuse and decentralized movement,” Jones added in little-noted testimony last week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the topic of “Re-examining the Al Qaeda Threat to the United States.”

As a result, most of Al Qaeda’s local affiliates “largely run their operations autonomously, though they still communicate with core leadership in Pakistan and may seek strategic advice.”

The good news is that within this disparate movement, most Al Qaeda affiliates and allies are not actively plotting attacks against the US homeland, according to the RAND analysis.

“Contrary to some arguments, most Al Qaeda leaders are not interested in establishing a global caliphate and do not seek to overthrow regimes in much of the world,” Jones writes.

Instead, they tend to have rather more parochial goals. “They want to establish Islamic emirates in specific countries or regions, though they may be agnostic about a broader violent jihad.”

The goal for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for example, is to overthrow regimes in North Africa, particularly Algeria, and replace them with an Islamic government, Jones notes.

In many cases, “France, rather than the United States, is the most significant foreign enemy.”

Captured Al Qaeda documents show that both Osama bin Laden and the current Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, primarily emphasized guerrilla campaigns to overthrow “apostate” governments in the Middle East.

Indeed, approximately 98 percent of Al Qaeda attacks between 1998 and 2011 “were part of an insurgency where operatives tried to overthrow a local government or secede from it – and were not in the West.”

That said, Al Qaeda affiliates do pose some threat to US citizens overseas. The RAND analysis notes that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its allies were involved in the 2012 attack that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya, for example.

There also have been a growing contingent of foreign fighters – perhaps several thousand, according to Jones, who has served as an adviser to the Pentagon – traveling to Syria to fight. Many of these volunteers are coming from Europe.

This is a problem because “volunteering for war is the principal stepping stone for individual involvement in more extreme forms of militancy,” Jones argues. “When Muslims in the West radicalize, they usually do not plot attacks in their home country right away, but travel to a war zone first.”

So what should US officials do about these expanding networks?

“In areas where Al Qaeda does not pose a significant threat to the homeland, the US government should support local countries and allies as they take the lead – much like the United States did in supporting France’s counterterrorism efforts in Mali in 2013,” notes the RAND analysis.

When they do pose a direct threat, the key is “implementing a light footprint strategy that focuses on covert intelligence, law enforcement, and Special Operations Forces to conduct precision targeting of Al Qaeda and its financial logistical support networks,” Jones says.

“In Afghanistan, for example, “the United States should withdraw most conventional forces, relying primarily on clandestine operatives as it has done in Colombia, the Philippines, and other counterinsurgencies.”

That’s because most of the terrorists involved in serious homeland plots after Sept. 11 – from Jose Padilla’s plot to blow up apartment buildings in the US to Najibullah Zazi and Faisal Shahzad’s plots to conduct terrorist attacks in New York City – “were motivated by large US conventional military deployments overseas.”

The US should also engage more robustly in psychological warfare, according to the report. Unlike the role of the US Information Agency, which was disbanded in 1999, there is no government department responsible for taking the lead role in countering Al Qaeda ideology.

“The CIA is involved in some clandestine activity, but most senior officials do not view undermining Al Qaeda ideology as its core mission,” Jones says. “Ultimately it is the president and the national security staff’s responsibility to appoint a lead agency and hold it responsible.”

The bottom line is that US policymakers, the analysis ominously concludes, “should view the Al Qaeda threat as a decades-long struggle like the Cold War.”

ISRAEL: Launches Two Airstrikes on Syria, Declares State of Alert

While everyone is looking for answers to Benghazi and the Boston Marathon bombing, there’s a story that’s flying under the radar, one with major implications if Israel has their way.  Over the weekend, Israel launched two airstrikes against Syria.

“Israeli aggression” that killed and wounded several people and “caused widespread destruction.” It also said the attacks aimed “to give direct military support to terrorist groups” fighting the government. It called the strikes a “flagrant violation of international law” that have made the Middle East “more dangerous.”

‘Israel’s aggression opens door to all possibilities’ – Syrian …

rt.com5/5/13

Syria’s information minister says that those who infringe on Syria’s sovereignty must “study their choices carefully.” He said that Israel has “proved its link to terrorist groups.” Israel has reportedly launched two airstrikes against …

Syria says Israel strikes military research center – Associated Press …

www.politico.com5/5/13

BEIRUT ? The Syrian state news agency SANA, citing initial reports, said early Sunday that Israeli missiles struck a military research center near the capital Damascus. If confirmed, it would be the second Israeli strike on …