Gates Memo To Obama: Your Iran Nukes Policy Is Useless

It appears as though Gates wasn’t buying the whole outreached hand for the unclenched fist theory.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, touched off an intense effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a revised set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

One senior official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the memo, described the document as “a wake-up call.” But White House officials dispute that view, insisting that for 15 months they had been conducting detailed planning for many possible outcomes regarding Iran’s nuclear program.

I feel so much better.  Don’t you?

A side note:  I don’t condone the New York Times leaking this highly classified information whatsoever, but you have to wonder about the hissy fit that Barry, Gibbsy et al must be having over the betrayal by their number one cheerleader in the press.

The Naivete Is Stunning

Your required reading for today is Charles Krauthammer’s take down of Obama’s preposterous new nuclear policy as only the Hammer can.

Under President Obama’s new policy, however, if the state that has just attacked us with biological or chemical weapons is “in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT),” explained Gates, then “the U.S. pledges not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against it.”

Imagine the scenario: Hundreds of thousands are lying dead in the streets of Boston after a massive anthrax or nerve gas attack. The president immediately calls in the lawyers to determine whether the attacking state is in compliance with the NPT. If it turns out that the attacker is up to date with its latest IAEA inspections, well, it gets immunity from nuclear retaliation. (Our response is then restricted to bullets, bombs and other conventional munitions.)

However, if the lawyers tell the president that the attacking state is NPT-noncoirmpliant, we are free to blow the bastards to nuclear kingdom come.

This is quite insane. It’s like saying that if a terrorist deliberately uses his car to mow down a hundred people waiting at a bus stop, the decision as to whether he gets (a) hanged or (b) 100 hours of community service hinges entirely on whether his car had passed emissions inspections.

When you break it down as Krauthammer does, Americans have to scratch their heads and think “Say what?”  I wonder how the Democrats facing tough re-election races this November feel about Barry handing their opponents another winning issue.

Sources Say Sarkozy Thinks Obama Is “Incredibly Naive and Grossly Egotistical”

How do you say “I concur” in French?

Breitbart has the story and yesterday’s WSJ editorial lays the foundation for Sarkozy’s sentiment:

President Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been “frustrated” for months about Mr. Obama’s reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official told us, and saw an opportunity to change momentum. But the Administration told the French that it didn’t want to “spoil the image of success” for Mr. Obama’s debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde. So the Iran bombshell was pushed back a day to Pittsburgh, where the G-20 were meeting to discuss economic policy.

Le Monde’s diplomatic correspondent, Natalie Nougayrède, reports that a draft of Mr. Sarkozy’s speech to the Security Council Thursday included a section on Iran’s latest deception. Forced to scrap that bit, the French President let his frustration show with undiplomatic gusto in his formal remarks, laying into what he called the “dream” of disarmament. The address takes on added meaning now that we know the backroom discussions.

“We are right to talk about the future,” Mr. Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. resolution on strengthening arms control treaties. “But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises,” i.e., Iran and North Korea. “We live in the real world, not in a virtual one.” No prize for guessing into which world the Frenchman puts Mr. Obama.

WaPo’s Richard Cohen Tells Obama To Start Acting Like The President

In his column today, Richard Cohen pens a blistering assessment of President Obama’s omnipresence on television, his handling of the Iran nuke issue and his inability to take a stand on an issue and see it through.

For a crisis such as this, the immense prestige of the American presidency ought to be held in reserve. Let the secretary of state issue grave warnings. When Obama said in Pittsburgh that Iran is “going to have to come clean and they are going to have to make a choice,” it had the sound of an ultimatum. But what if the Iranians don’t? What then? A president has to be careful with such language. He better mean what he says.

The trouble with Obama is that he gets into the moment and means what he says for that moment only. He meant what he said when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” — and now is not necessarily so sure. He meant what he said about the public option in his health-care plan — and then again maybe not. He would not prosecute CIA agents for getting rough with detainees — and then again maybe he would.

Most tellingly, he gave Congress an August deadline for passage of health-care legislation — “Now, if there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town . . . ” — and then let it pass. It seemed not to occur to Obama that a deadline comes with a consequence — meet it or else.

I keep thinking of this scene from the Godfather and wondering when someone is going to go Don Corleone on Barry.

UK Embassy staff members arrested in Iran

Overreach?  Time will tell.

David Milliband,  the foreign secretary, responds:

Miliband, speaking from a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Corfu, said the government was “deeply concerned” at the arrests. “This is harassment and intimidation of a kind that is quite unacceptable,” he said. “We want to see them released unharmed.”

Miliband said he believed nine local staff had been detained, although some had since been released. “We have protested in strong terms, directly to the Iranian authorities, about the arrests that took place yesterday.

But lets get back to more important matters, like what killed Michael Jackson and who will get custody of Blanket.

Review: The Stoning of Soraya M. “a grim and solemn duty”

Breitbart’s Chuck DeVore writes that “The Stoning of Soraya M.” is a grim and solemn duty.

Stoning’s premise, repeated with numbing regularity around the world today, is made all the more pressing by the masses of Iranians protesting in the streets today while the brutal Basij militia tries to beat them into submission.  But it’s one thing for a stoning of an accused “adulteress” to occur in Somalia, and quite another for it to happen in the soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran.  If a nation thinks nothing of stoning women to death for the “crime” of adultery while killing peaceful protesters, it takes no imagination to think of what they will do when in possession of a nuclear bomb.

The movie is based on a true story. Why we continue to bend and strain not to offend a government that encourages and condones such barbaric behavior is beyond me.

Jacoby: ‘Democracy’ is a dirty word for Obama

Jeff Jacoby is the lone voice of reason at the Boston Globe.

It’s worth a full read, but here are some snippets:

THE CHOICE presented by the democracy protests in Iran could hardly have been clearer.

So why was President Obama’s response initially so ambivalent? Why was he more interested in preserving “dialogue’’ with Iran’s dictatorial rulers than in providing moral support for their freedom-seeking subjects? Why did it take him until yesterday to declare that Americans are “appalled and outraged’’ by Iran’s crackdown and to “strongly condemn’’ the vicious attacks on peaceful dissenters?

A disconcerting answer to those questions appears in the new issue of Commentary, where Johns Hopkins University scholar Joshua Muravchik isolates the most striking feature of the young Obama administration’s foreign policy: “its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy.’’

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The rupture was telegraphed at a pre-inauguration meeting with the Washington Post, during which the incoming president argued that “freedom from want and freedom from fear’’ are more urgent than democracy, and that “oftentimes an election can just backfire’’ if corruption isn’t fixed first. Muravchik points out that when Obama gave Al-Arabiya, an Arabic-language satellite channel, his first televised interview as president, he focused on US relations with the Middle East and Muslim world, yet “never mentioned democracy or human rights.’’

In February, Obama traveled to Camp Lejeune, N.C., to announce his timetable for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. His strategic goal, he said, was “an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant.’’ But other than a glancing reference to the successful Iraqi election that had taken place a few weeks earlier, he again had nothing to say about democracy.

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In closing, Jacoby writes:

Obama may see himself as the un-Bush, cool to democracy because his predecessor was so keen for it. But to millions of subjugated human beings, he is the leader of the free world – an avatar of the democratic freedoms they hunger for. On the streets of Iran recently, many protesters held signs reading “Where Is My Vote?’’ There are limits to what the American president can do for Iran’s beleaguered democrats. But is it too much to ask that he take their question seriously?

Judging from what has been revealed today, I dare say it is too much to ask in Obama’s book.

Witness: Protesters beaten like “animals” in Theran

CNN reports:

Security forces wielding clubs and firing weapons beat back demonstrators who flocked to a Tehran square Wednesday to continue protests, two witnesses said.

One witness said security forces beat people like “animals.”

“They were waiting for us,” the source said. “They all have guns and riot uniforms. It was like a mouse trap.

“I see many people with broken arms, legs, heads — blood everywhere — pepper gas like war,” the source said.

Around “500 thugs” with clubs came out of a mosque and attacked people in the square, another source said.

The security forces were “beating women madly” and “killing people like hell,” the source said.

“They beat up a woman so bad she was all bloody,” the source said in a description that underscores the growing and central role of women in the uprising.

Gateway pundit reports three people were shot and one woman was killed and that the police won’t let protesters assist the wounded.

Bastards.

But lets not offend Iran’s leaders by rescinding those BBQ invitations.

UPDATE:  Gibbs: 4th of July BBQ invitations rescinded – according to a tweet from Major Garrett

Obama Administration negotiating with terrorists

Terrorist prisoner exchanged for release of two British soldiers’ remains

Andrew McCarthy of NRO warns ‘Prepare to be infuriated.

As the Iranian government’s murderous repression of the Iranian people continues, critics right and left agitate over the deafening silence of an American president who, as a candidate, derided the Bush administration’s ambitious democracy promotion as too timid. They speculate as to why Barack Obama won’t speak out: Why won’t he condemn the mullahs? Is he daft enough to believe he can charm the regime into abandoning its nuclear ambitions? Does the self-described realist so prize stability that he thinks it’s worth abandoning the cause of freedom — and the best chance in 30 years of dislodging an implacable American enemy?

In truth, it’s worse than that. Even as the mullahs are terrorizing the Iranian people, the Obama administration is negotiating with an Iranian-backed terrorist organization and abandoning the American proscription against exchanging terrorist prisoners for hostages kidnapped by terrorists. Worse still, Obama has already released a terrorist responsible for the brutal murders of five American soldiers in exchange for the remains of two deceased British hostages.

This may explain his inexplicable deference to the Iranian leadership in his remarks during the last ten days.

What took you so long?

After President Obama made a long overdue statement condemning the beating and killing of Iranian protesters, Major Garret asked “What took you so long?” As we have seen time and time again, Obama rewrote history and said he has been clear all on this along and to track what he has been saying.

OK.  Lets do that. (The Wall Street Journal has done the work for me.)

June 15, The Rose Garden: “It is up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be; that we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.”

June 16, The Rose Garden: “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling, the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections. What I will repeat, and what I said yesterday, is that when I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people.”

June 16, CNBC: “The difference between [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad and [opposition candidate] Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised. Either way, we’re going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has been hostile to the United States.”

June 19, CBS News interview, White House: What you’re seeing in Iran are hundreds of thousands of people who believe their voices were not heard and who are peacefully protesting and – and seeking justice. And the world is watching. And we stand behind those who are seeking justice in a peaceful way.

June 20, Formal Statement: “The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

And that leads us to today’s remarks: 

First, I’d like to say a few words about the situation in Iran. The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, the beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.I strongly condemn these unjust actions, and I join with the American people in mourning each and every innocent life that is lost.

I’ve made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran and is not interfering with Iran’s affairs.

But we must also bear witness to the courage and the dignity of the Iranian people and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore the violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.

Quite a leap to say he’s been clear all along.  Of course he denies that today’s shift in tone and rhetoric had anything to do with his critics calling his previous remarks weak and timid, but you can be sure he took note.