Tag Archives: President Obama

Yes, Obama and Clinton are Responsible for the Birth of ISIS

The mainstream media, liberal pundits and the Clinton campaign have lambasted Donald Trump this week for saying President Obama is the “founder” of ISIS and Clinton is the “co-founder” and ISIS’ most valuable player.  Trump also said ISIS is hoping Clinton wins the election

Suddenly CNN decided to be a stickler about campaign rhetoric.  Its on-screen chyron had an unusual editorial comment in parentheses disputing Trump’s claims.  (See above photo)  Mainstream reporters snickered about Trump’s ignorance, claiming it’s insulting to say the president of the United States started a terrorist organization and claiming ISIS was really founded in 2003 due to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration.

The press knew Trump’s comments were sarcastic but instead of focusing on the point he was making – that the disastrous Obama/Clinton foreign policy is responsible for the birth of ISIS – it instead decided to treat Trump’s comments as a blatant lie or evidence that he does not understand foreign affairs.

Far-left CNN reporter Peter Bergen tried to defend Clinton from Trump’s accusation by claiming ISIS was not formed until April 2013 – two months after she resigned as Secretary of State.  This is a dishonest argument since the bloodthirsty jihadist organizations which merged to formally become ISIS developed on Clinton’s watch.  Bergen knows the formal announcement of ISIS in April 2013 was a technicality and that four years of incompetent policies by Clinton were responsible for this announcement.

Trump is making the point that irresponsible policies by Obama and Clinton led to the resumption of sectarian violence in Iraq which allowed Al-Qaeda in Iraq to rise from the ashes and morph into ISIS.  I believe Trump is exactly right.  The Obama/Clinton decision not to leave behind a small contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq after 2010 and the power vacuum created by the administration’s failure to lead in the Middle East is why ISIS exists and why it has become a global threat.

In my view, Obama’s and Clinton’s incompetence are undoubtedly responsible for the birth of ISIS.

The mainstream media does not want to talk about this.  It knows ISIS did not exist when President Obama entered office.  It also knows that ISIS grew from zero affiliates in 2009 to 43 affiliates today in 18 countries.

CNN this morning is jumping on a tweet Trump sent yesterday clarifying that his claim about Obama and Clinton being the founder and co-founder of ISIS was sarcasm.  This makes me wonder how dumb CNN thinks the American people are – they obviously knew this.

One can argue that a presidential candidate shouldn’t be using sarcasm on such a dire national security issue, but by doing so Trump forced the mainstream media to talk about a subject it was purposely avoiding and encouraged Americans to think about whether Obama/Clinton policies are responsible for the birth of ISIS.

Maybe Donald Trump has a better understanding of foreign affairs and the news media than his Democratic and press critics realize.

Secret Ransom Payment Is More Evidence of the Enormous Fraud of the Iran Deal

The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that the United States secretly sent $400 million in cash on an unmarked cargo plane to Iran on January 17, 2016, to facilitate a swap that day of five innocent Americans held by Iran for seven Iranian criminals held by the U.S. Fourteen additional Iranians were removed from an INTERPOL wanted list as another part of this arrangement.

The prisoner swap was announced on the Iran deal’s Implementation Day (January 16) — when most sanctions were lifted from Iran and it received $150 billion in sanctions relief after the IAEA certified that Tehran had complied with certain requirements of the nuclear deal.

Obama officials have denied that the $400 million was a ransom payment. Instead, they say it was the first installment of an American payment to resolve a dispute over a pre-1979 arms deal with the Shah’s government.

According to the Journal article, the U.S. sent Iran wooden pallets of euros, Swiss francs, and other currencies because U.S. transactions with Iran in dollars are illegal under American law. Obama officials are asserting that the timing of the cash shipment to Iran was coincidental and that the negotiations to convince Iran to free the U.S. prisoners “were completely separate” from the nuclear talks.

If this is true, why the secrecy surrounding the cash shipment to Iran? Why did Obama fail to disclose this shipment to the American people or Congress?

I am concerned that the negotiations to free the U.S. prisoners and the ransom payment were deliberately structured by the Obama administration so that it could avoid briefing Congress before it voted on the Iran deal. Under the Corker-Cardin Act (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015), the Obama administration was required to provide to Congress for a congressional review of the Iran deal:

any additional materials related thereto, including annexes, appendices, codicils, side agreements, implementing materials, documents, and guidance, technical or other understandings, and any related agreements, whether entered into or implemented prior to the agreement or to be entered into or implemented in the future.

Given the negotiating record of the nuclear talks, it is impossible to believe there was no link between the Iran deal and the release of the American prisoners. More likely, the Obama administration desperately wanted Iran to release the Americans as part of the nuclear agreement but Tehran refused until sanctions were lifted and it received a large ransom payment.

This is not the first time the Obama administration has paid ransom to Iran. It paid $500,000 each to free American hikers captured by Iran in 2011 through the government of Oman.

As I explain in my new book, Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Fraud, the nuclear deal with Iran and the Obama administration’s defense of it are rife with deceptions and outright lies. Contrary to Obama-administration claims, the timeline to an Iranian nuclear bomb will shorten — not lengthen — because of this deal. The agreement also has very weak verification provisions. We also know from a May 5, 2016, New York Times profile of national-security adviser Ben Rhodes that he manipulated journalists by giving them false narratives intended to promote President Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

Last month, the Obama administration celebrated the one-year anniversary of the nuclear deal by claiming that Iran has fully complied with the agreement. There is compelling evidence this is false and that Iran has been engaged in massive cheating. In addition, contrary to assurances by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry that the nuclear agreement would improve U.S.–Iran relations and help bring Iran into the community of nations, Iran’s behavior has worsened and our relationship with the mullahs has weakened since the nuclear deal was announced.

Meanwhile, Iranian officials are complaining that the nuclear deal has not been generous enough to Iran. Further, the White House has been so active in encouraging U.S. and international firms to do business in Iran that leading members of Congress have accused the Obama administration of being Iran’s global “lobbying shop.”

So what should the next president do about the fraudulent nuclear deal with Iran? In an NRO article in July, I argued that the best option would be to tear it up and start over, following these ten principles:

  1. Iran must cease all uranium enrichment and uranium-enrichment research.
  2. Iran cannot have a heavy-water reactor or a plant to produce heavy water.
  3. Robust verification, including allowing “anytime, anywhere” inspections by IAEA inspectors of all declared and suspect nuclear sites.
  4. Iran must fully and truthfully answer all questions about its prior nuclear-weapons-related work.
  5. Iran must curtail and agree to limitations on its ballistic-missile program.
  6. Lift sanctions in stages in response to Iranian compliance with the agreement.
  7. Iran must agree to end its meddling in regional conflicts and its sponsorship of terror.
  8. Threats by Iran to ships in the Persian Gulf, U.S. naval vessels, and American troops must cease.
  9. Iran must cease its hostility toward Israel.
  10. Iran must release all U.S. prisoners.

Hillary Clinton is certain to ignore this advice — she owns this nuclear agreement as much as President Obama does. Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the Iran deal but says he wants to renegotiate a better one. That’s a better path forward.

Obama Withheld from Congress Another Secret Side Deal with the Iranians

Veteran Associated Press IAEA reporter George Jahn made news yesterday by revealing a secret agreement to the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran(the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). This agreement says that in January 2027, Tehran will be allowed to replace the primitive 5,060 uranium centrifuges it is allowed to operate while the nuclear agreement is in effect with more-advanced designs, even though other restrictions on Iranian uranium enrichment remain in place for 15 years.

I believe this is a significant development because it represents another secret JCPOA side deal that the Obama administration illegally withheld from Congress.

This agreement means that in only eleven years, Iran will be permitted to substantially increase its capability to produce nuclear fuel faster and in larger amounts. Since Iran is permitted to conduct R&D on advanced centrifuges while the JCPOA is in place — and can expand this effort after eight and a half years — it probably will be able to quickly construct and install these advanced centrifuges.

Jahn reported that although this undisclosed, confidential agreement is “an integral part” of the JCPOA, Iran will not be permitted to accumulate more than 300 kilograms of low-enriched uranium for 15 years. In light of recent reports that the Iranians are already cheating on the nuclear agreement, it is hard to believe that they will continue to abide by this restriction after they install more-advanced centrifuges .

Some media outlets responded to Jahn’s story as a major revelation. I agree but for different reasons from what many are laying out. It’s not news that Iran can begin enriching under the JCPOA with advanced centrifuges after ten years. I reported this in my new book, Obamabomb: A Dangerous and Growing National Security Threat. I’ve also explained that there is no limit on the number of uranium centrifuges Iran can operate after ten years.

What is news is that the Obama administration is a party to another secret side deal to the JCPOA that explicitly recognizes Iran’s plan to greatly expand its uranium-enrichment program. Other secret side deals include one that allows Iran to inspect itself on possible nuclear-weapons-related work and another that possibly weakened IAEA reporting on Iran’s nuclear program.

As with the previous secret agreements, withholding this deal from Congress probably violated the Corker-Cardin Act, which required the administration to provide all JCPOA documents — including side deals — to Congress before it voted on the deal last September.

According to Jahn’s report, “U.S. officials say members of Congress who expressed interest [in the document] were briefed on its substance.” Translation: The administration did not provide this side-deal document to Congress or mention it in committee briefings. Instead, the substance of this document was briefed only to members of Congress who asked about this issue.

So why haven’t we heard about this before now? Why didn’t representatives who were briefed on this secret side deal cry foul and demand that it be released before Congress voted on the nuclear deal last fall? I suspect the reason is that the administration briefed a handful of congressmen on the contents of this side deal without revealing the side deal’s existence. Also, this discovery forces us to ask: Are there more secret side deals to the CPOA that have not been made public or disclosed to Congress?

Jahn did not reveal a previously unknown flaw of the JCPOA. He revealed something more disturbing: another instance of the Obama administration’s deceiving Congress and the American people as part of its effort to ram through Obama’s deeply unpopular nuclear agreement with Iran — an agreement that is a dangerous and growing fraud.

Jahn’s report is more evidence of this and another reason the next president must tear up this agreement on his or her first day in office.

BOOK LECTURE: Obamabomb: The Fraudulent Nuclear Deal with Iran

Yesterday at the Heritage Foundation, the Center’s Fred Fleitz gave a lecture on his new book Obamabomb: The Fraudulent Nuclear Deal With Iran.  In his book he provides an in-depth analysis of the dangers of the nuclear deal with Iran and how the threats it poses to U.S. national security are growing. Fleitz discusses the dishonest campaign conducted by the Obama Administration to prevent Congress from rejecting the agreement, what is really in the deal and how Obama officials are trying to make even more concessions to Iran because Iranian officials claim the nuclear deal was not generous enough to Iran.

First anniversary of Iran nuclear deal marred by massive cheating

Expect the Obama administration to take more victory laps this week by claiming Iran has complied with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that reaches its first anniversary on July 14. However, recent press reports paint a very different picture, one that confirms its critics’ worst fears: massive Iranian violations of the agreement.

In an annual security report issued this month, German intelligence said Iran made a clandestine effort last year to acquire illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies at a “quantitatively high level,” and that “it is safe to expect that Iran will continue its intensive procurement activities in Germany using clandestine methods to achieve its objectives.” A German intelligence agency reported 141 clandestine Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and missile technology in 2015 versus 83 in 2013.

According to a July 7 memo from the Institute for Science and International Security, Iran recently tried, unsuccessfully, to covertly purchase tons of high-strength carbon fiber, which it uses to make rotors for uranium enrichment centrifuges. Under the JCPOA, Iran is required to seek approval for such purchases from a JCPOA procurement working group. The Institute said the JCPOA group probably would not have approved this sale, since Iran has enough carbon fiber to replace the rotors of centrifuges it is permitted to operate under the agreement.

In a separate report, the Institute said many Iranian entities that had been sanctioned for illicit nuclear and missile procurement but were relieved of these sanctions by the JCPOA in January “are now very active in procuring goods in China.”

Many other troubling reports indicate the JCPOA is much worse and much weaker than its critics believed. These include:

• Exempting China’s redesign and rebuilding of the Arak heavy-water reactor from the JCPOA procurement process.

• Iran placing military facilities off-limits to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors.

• The Iranian parliament approving a much weaker version of the agreement.

• IAEA members voting to “close the file” on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, even though Iran failed to cooperate with an investigation that found its nuclear weapons work hadcontinued at least until 2009.

• The IAEA dumbed-down its reports on Iran’s nuclear program to such an extent that it is difficult for anyone outside of the IAEA to know if Iran is complying with its JCPOA obligations.

• Iran has continued to test ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads, even though President Obama said when the JCPOA was announced that Iran, under the agreement, would comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions barring missile tests for eight years.

As serious as these issues are, the Obama administration is ignoring them, insisting the nuclear deal is a success because Iran has complied with it. The truth is that the JCPOA was negotiated entirely on Iran’s terms. As a result, Tehran made easily reversible concessions on its nuclear program that allow it to shorten the timeline to a nuclear bomb while the agreement is in force.

Making this situation worse, Secretary of State John Kerry is trying to make more U.S. concessions to Iran – such as granting Iran access to the U.S. financial system – and the White House has become a “lobbying shop” to encourage American and international firms to do business with Iran.

I predict in my new book, Obamabomb: the Fraudulent Nuclear Deal With Iran, that the Obama administration will become “Iran’s lawyer” by defending it against its alleged violations of the JCPOA, just as it did concerning Iranian cheating during the nuclear talks in 2014 and 2015. This was evident last week when State Department spokesman John Kirby struggled to dismiss recent reports that Iran was trying to acquire illicit nuclear technology.

The JCPOA is national security fraud. The best way for the next president to deal with it is to tear it up on his or her first day in office.

Given Donald Trump’s denunciation of the nuclear deal as one of the worst international agreements in history, I am confident that, if he becomes president and sticks to his promise to renegotiate the JCPOA, he will either scuttle the deal or negotiate a stronger one that responsibly addresses the nuclear and other security threats posed by Iran. Obamabombincludes a list of nine principles to guide a Trump renegotiation of the Iran deal if he wins the presidential election.

State Governors: Don’t Be Fooled by Obama Admin’s Claims About Iran Nuclear Deal

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney wrote this week about President Obama’s effort to press U.S. governors to rescind state-level statutory sanctions against Iran because of the fraudulent nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) and its sponsorship of terrorism.  Gaffney noted that

“Texas Governor Greg Abbott actually called the President out for his malfeasance. He said, in part: “Because the Iran deal is fundamentally flawed and does not permanently dismantle Iran’s nuclear capability, Texas will maintain its sanctions against Iran.” For good measure, Mr. Abbott told the President: “Further, because your administration has recklessly and unilaterally removed critical sanctions, I have called on the Texas legislature to strengthen the Iran sanctions that Texas already has in place.”

Governor Abbott, in a May 31, 2016 letter called on other governors to join Texas and pass or strengthen legislation prohibiting state pension and retirement funds, local governments and all state entities from investing in Iran or entities that do business in Iran, barring local governments.

14 governors joined Abbott in sending a letter to President Obama last September opposing the JCPOA and pledging that they will not lift state-level sanctions against Iran.  This letter was signed by the governors of Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.

The Obama administration is trying to convince state governments to lift state sanctions against Iran by claiming that the JCPOA is working and Iran is in compliance. Stephen Mull, who oversees the Iran deal for the State Department, made this case in an April letter to governors and during testimony on May 25, 2016 to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.  Mull’s letter and testimony repeated numerous false and misleading Obama administration claims about the JCPOA.  Below is a rebuttal to Mr. Mull’s testimony to the House hearing.

  • Mull’s claim that Iran is in full compliance with the JCPOA is misleading since the Iran nuclear deal represents a very low bar set for Iran to conclude a nuclear deal on its terms. Many of the claims made by the Obama administration about the deal are intended to evade how little Iran actually gave up in the agreement and how it allows Iran to continue to engage in activities with nuclear weapons applications.
  • For example, the JCPOA excludes Iranian missile tests and a requirement that Iran resolve outstanding questions about weapons-related nuclear activities (possible military dimensions).
  • As a result, Iran tested missiles last fall and this spring without violating the Iran deal. Written on the sides of some of these missiles were the words “Israel must be wiped off the Earth.”
  • In addition, as part of a secret side deal to the JCPOA between Iran and the IAEA, the IAEA conducted a short investigation of the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program last fall that, according to a report by the influential Institute for Science and International Security, Iran refused to fully cooperate with. Although the IAEA issued a report in early December 2015 indicating Iran’s lack of full cooperation and misleading answers, the United States voted with other IAEA members on December 15, 2015 to close the IAEA’s file on Iran’s military-related nuclear activities.
  • Mull claims that Iran “disabled and removed” two-thirds of its uranium enrichment centrifuges. This is misleading.  Iran was only enriching with 10,000 of its 19,000 centrifuges before the nuclear agreement.  6,104 remain in place under the agreement; 5,060 of these will be used to continue to enrich uranium.  The rest of the centrifuges (many of which were inoperative) have not been “disabled” – they have been disassembled and put in storage.
  • Mull claims Iran has sent 98% of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. This is impossible to verify because the IAEA in January 2016 ceased issuing detailed reports on Iran’s nuclear program.  This appears to be another secret side deal to dumb-down these reports at the demand of Iran.  (See my March 9 NRO article In Yet Another Secret Side Deal, Iran’s Nuclear Violations Won’t Be Publicly Disclosed for more details) The IAEA is not saying exactly how many kilograms of low enriched uranium Iran has sent to Russia and whether it verified these shipments.  The IAEA also is no longer reporting how many kilograms of uranium Iran is enriching every month.
  • Mull did not mention that the IAEA is not saying anything about Iran’s testing and development of advanced uranium centrifuges in its Iran reports, an issue it had been reporting on until the end of 2015. Iranian centrifuge R&D is a major flaw in the JCPOA and is a principle reason why Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) opposed this agreement.  Iran’s development of advanced centrifuges will enable it to make more enriched uranium faster, reducing the time for Iran to make nuclear weapons fuel.
  • Mull claims Iran’s Arak heavy water reactor has been permanently disabled and will be redesigned so it will not produce plutonium. This is misleading and partially false.  While it is true this reactor has been made inoperable, China will help Iran rebuild it.  Although the redesigned reactor will produce significantly less plutonium by operating it at a lower power level and changing the way it is fueled, Iran can change the fueling of this reactor is fueled in the future so it produces significant amounts of plutonium.  Moreover, this arrangement will give Iran expertise in the construction and operation of heavy-water reactors.
  • Mull’s statements about “rigorous, intrusive, and unprecedented transparency measures” are misleading since these only apply to declared nuclear sites and Iran’s declared nuclear supply chain. Iranian officials have placed military facilities — where Iran is likely to conduct nuclear weapons work — off-limits to IAEA inspectors.  Mull claims military sites are not off-limits, but since Iran has threatened to withdraw from the JCPOA if sanctions are re-imposed because of its non-compliance with the agreement, it is unlikely the Obama administration will press Iran for IAEA access to a disputed nuclear site before Mr. Obama leaves office.
  • I also note that Iran continues to refuse to allow IAEA inspectors to inspect the Parchin military base where Iran allegedly conducted explosive testing related to the development of nuclear warheads. Iranians inspected this site on behalf of the IAEA last September as part of a secret side deal with the IAEA as part of its investigation of Iran’s past nuclear weapons related activities.  The IAEA reported in a December report on this issue that Iran tried to use these Iranian-conducted inspections to deceive the IAEA and provided it with explanations of what occurred there that the IAEA determined were false.  See my December 2, 2015 NRO article Iran Was Researching Nukes in 2009 for more details.
  • Mull also did not explain how UN missile sanctions against Iran were weakened due to the JCPOA. In exchange Iran meeting the low-bar requirements of the JCPOA – which excluded missiles, allowed Iran to continue to enriched uranium, allowed Iran to continue to develop advanced centrifuges and did not require Iran to resolve questions about the possible military dimensions of its nuclear program – nuclear related UN sanctions were lifted and  UN missile sanctions were significantly weakened. See this US News and World Report article for more information.
  • Part of Mull’s testimony responds to criticism that the Obama administration violated promises it made to Congress last summer that terrorism-related sanctions that barred Iran access to US financial markets and dollarized financial transactions would not be lifted. After Iran demanded this earlier this year, it looked like the Obama administration would lift these sanctions.  It appears the Obama administration backed down on this action due to congressional pressure but may have given Iran “back door” access to US financial markets through offshore accounts.  See this link for more details: http://freebeacon.com/national-security/obama-commit-iran-us-dollar/
  • In response to Mull’s plea that state governments not pass legislation sanctioning Iran, I would stress that the above and other aspects of the Iran deal add up to an agreement that is a fraud which will do little to stop the threat from Iran’s nuclear program. In its desperation to get a legacy nuclear agreement with Iran for President Obama, Obama officials were prepared to make any concession they had to Tehran.  This is why Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-KS) is calling for a formal congressional investigation into whether the Obama administration misled the US Congress about the Iran deal and the concessions it made to get it to stop Congress from voting to disapprove the deal.  See this article for details on Pompeo’s efforts.
  • We also know from a May 5, 2016 New York Times profile of NSC staffer Ben Rhodes that the White House conducted a massive campaign of deception to sell the nuclear agreement with Iran that included a false narrative about a new moderate Iranian government and an operation to manipulate the news media.
  • One final note: the Obama administration has tried to defend the JCPOA by claiming it would improve US-Iran relations and make Iran a partner for peace in the Middle East. Given the many examples of how Iran’s behavior has worsened since the JCPOA was announced last July, including ballistic-missile tests, continued sponsorship of terrorism, intervention in Syria and Yemen, firing rockets near U.S. naval vessels, briefly taking U.S. sailors prisoner in January 2016, and recent threats to close the Strait of Hormuz to U.S. shipping, it is clear this has not happened.
  • The bottom line: Mull and the Obama administration have a lot to answer for. He can’t credibly take a victory lap for this fraudulent deal that excludes crucial elements such as Iranian missile tests. Pompeo and others believe Congress was misled about the JCPOA.  Rhodes admitted to the New York Times that the administration sold the JCPOA through lies and deception.

State governments therefore must ignore demands by the Obama administration to drop state-level sanctions against Iran and instead accelerate their efforts to pass punitive sanctions against Iran due to its continued sponsorship of terror, threats against Israel, threats to US Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, support to the Assad regime, support to Shiite rebels in Yemen, ballistic missile tests and other examples of belligerence.

U.S. and Vietnam Agree To Lift Military Arms Embargo

On Monday, May 23, 2016, President Obama announced the United States (U.S.) would be lifting a 50-year military arms embargo with Vietnam. Obama along with Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang, explained that the embargo lift was to help improve relations between the two nations.  Both leaders denied that the deal was in response to China’s aggressive campaign in the South China Sea (SCS).

The Vietnam War ended in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon and U.S. withdrawal from the country, thus allowing the North Vietnamese to launch an aggressive campaign to reunite the country under the communist doctrine. Diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Vietnam were restored in 1995, and by 2014 the Obama administration began easing sanctions on Vietnam by allowing the country to purchase maritime surveillance and security systems to strengthen itself against China.

While Vietnam and China both share a communist ideology, it has been China’s campaign of claiming territorial rights to 80% of the SCS that has escalated tensions. China has already claimed several atolls in the SCS, which Vietnam insists is in their sovereign territory. Conflict between the two nations occurred in 2014 when China installed a disputed oil rig in the SCS, and began intentionally ramming Vietnamese vessels anywhere near the oil rig. Tensions counted to mount between the two nations, when the Vietnamese coast guard seized a Chinese fueling ship this past April, which the officials claimed was in violation of being in Vietnamese waters.

In reality, Vietnam and China’s relationship has been turbulent for nearly 40 years in a series of conflicts from 1979-1988, known as the Sino-Vietnamese Wars.  Vietnam views China as unpredictable and dangerous. To better protect itself, Vietnam for years had a multi-billion dollar deal with Russia for military equipment, but now has expanded partnerships with Spain, the Netherlands, and Israel.

Vietnam, a country of 90 million, is a key partner in regards to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a U.S.-led trade deal to counter China’s growth.  The deal is currently stalled in congress, as a number of U.S. senators have called Vietnam regime one of the most oppressive regimes in the world, second only to North Korea under Kim Jung Un.

Quang, a former police chief and head of the Ministry of Public Safety, has only been president of Vietnam since the beginning of April. Many Vietnamese activists and journalists say it is the Ministry of Public Safety who harasses and detains protestors who only expressed freedom of speech.

Vietnam has been run under the communist political system since 1954. The Vietnamese government has been cracking down and arresting environmental protestors over the poisoning of fish at Ha Tihn along with targeting bloggers, journalists, and ethnic minorities.  In a means to prevent civil unrest, Quang had Facebook and other social media outlets shutdown, while Obama was in Hanoi.

Obama noted that the sale of arms to Vietnam will correlate to their human rights compliance and each request for weapons will be handled on a case-by-case basis. At a news conference on Monday, Obama acknowledged that Vietnam has made some progress in regards to human rights, but did not address questions in regard to the 100 political prisoners jailed, or Nguyen Van Dai, a human rights lawyer who has been unlawfully been detained and beaten according to Dai’s wife.

The Obama administration insists that the lift of the arms embargo on Vietnam is part of ending Cold War hostilities, and opening new economic and military relations. In reality, the deal is clear that the U.S. intends to supply Vietnam with the resources required to mitigate Chinese aggression.

How Obama Advisor Ben Rhodes Exposed the Wide, Corrupt Web of Liberal Journalism

As a conservative fed up with how so-called “mainstream” reporters and national security experts have been in the tank for President Obama’s disastrous foreign policy but relentlessly attacked President George W. Bush’s, I’ve been experiencing a bit of schadenfreude as I watched some of these journalists and experts squirm after David Samuels’ New York Times profile of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

I also was very pleased that Samuels  exposed the extreme partisanship of a liberal journalist who falsely accused me in 2005 of being the source in the Valerie Plame scandal.

Rhodes confirmed to Samuels what most Americans already believed: that the Obama administration misled them to sell the nuclear agreement with Iran. Rhodes also bragged to Samuels about how he manipulated the news media into publishing stories supporting the White House on its nuclear diplomacy with Iran by relying on “legions of arms control experts [who] began popping up at think tanks and on social media” and became “sources for hundreds of clue-less reporters.”

According to Rhodes, this crop of newly-minted experts cheer-led for the nuclear deal and “were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Arms control expert Joe Cirincione, whose Ploughshares Fund was cited by Rhodes as one of these arms control groups, rushed out a Politico article on Monday in which he insisted he had not been misled by Rhodes about the Iran deal and defended the agreement by citing letters signed by Americans who support it.

Probably reflecting new talking points from Rhodes, Cirincione failed to mention that 840 U.S. rabbis, over 200 U.S. generals and admirals, and 56 leading US nuclear weapons, arms control and intelligence experts signed other letters opposing the Iran nuclear agreement. Cirincione also omitted that a majority of Congress voted against the Iran deal and that when Congress voted on it last September, the American people opposed the agreement by a 2-1 margin and 64% believed President Obama and Secretary Kerry had misled the public about the deal.

I agree with Cirincione’s claim that he wasn’t deceived by the Iran deal – given his background, I am confident Cirincione fully understood how weak this agreement would be but supported it anyway because he shares President Obama’s radical views on conceding a nuclear weapons capability to Iran as part of a strategy to improve Iranian behavior and U.S.-Iran relations.

Based on Iran’s ballistic missile tests, continued sponsorship of terrorism, intervention in Syria and Yemen, and its recent threat to close the Strait of Hormuz to U.S. shipping, it is obvious this strategy has been a dismal failure.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for The Atlantic, also was named by Rhodes as one of the journalists he used to “retail the administration’s narrative” for a nuclear agreement with Iran. In a May 9 Atlantic rebuttal to the Samuels story, Goldberg disputed this and claimed he was “not been an overly enthusiastic advocate of the Iran deal.”

However, because of two massive articles Goldberg wrote based on lengthy interviews he did with President Obama in 2016 and Secretary Clinton in 2014, I find it hard to take his complaints about the Samuels piece seriously. This administration has a track record of rarely doing interviews with objective journalists. It is therefore no accident Goldberg snagged major interviews with both Obama and Clinton.

For me, Samuels’ biggest bombshell was when he singled out arms control expert and Al-Monitor journalist Laura Rozen as being such a reliable shill for the administration’s line on the Iran talks that an NSC official told him: “Laura Rozen was my RSS feed. She would just find everything and retweet it.”

In a May 10 Weekly Standard article on the Rhodes profile, Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Lee Smith noted that Rozen’s employer, Al-Monitor, “is a news organization owned by a Syrian-American businessman who supports Bashar al-Assad” and “is the only U.S.-based media organization that has a pro-Hezbollah correspondent reporting from the Hezbollah front lines in Syria.”

In response to the Rhodes profile, the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington, DC arms control think tank that was very critical of the Bush administration’s Iran policy, posted a tweet on May 7 saying that it tried to warn Rozen, ACA (the Arms Control Association), and the Ploughshares Fund that Obama administration officials were overselling the nuclear deal to them and they should be more critical.

However, like Cirincione, I believe Rozen deliberately published White House talking points on the Iran deal that she knew were false. For example, in July 2015, Rozen repeatedthe administration’s line putting much of the blame for Iran’s nuclear program on the Bush administration when she wrote:

Iran’s nuclear program had grown from fewer than 200 centrifuges in 2003 to thousands of centrifuges during the decade in which the international community demanded it entirely halt domestic uranium enrichment.

As someone who had been writing on nuclear issues for at least ten years, Rozen knew this was extremely misleading because most of the increases in Iran’s nuclear program took place after Barack Obama became president. Although Iran barely had enough enriched uranium to make even one nuclear weapon in January 2009, it had enough, according to President Obama, to make up to 10 weapons by July 2015. The number of Iran’s uranium centrifuges used to enrich uranium also soared from about 5,000 in January 2009 to 19,000 in November 2013.

I took special pleasure seeing Rozen singled out in Samuels’ article not just because I believe she knowingly promoted the Obama administration’s false case for the Iran deal but because of false and defamatory stories she wrote about Ambassador John Bolton and myself during the Bush administration.

Rozen wrote a series of stories smearing John Bolton when he was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. I was Bolton’s chief of staff when he held his previous job as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and was also attacked in Rozen’s pieces on the Bolton nomination.

It was clear at the time these false stories originated from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic members and staff and, just like Ben Rhodes would do in the Obama administration, these stories were fed to sycophantic journalists like Rozen who eagerly published them verbatim.

After Bolton was given a recess appointment as UN ambassador, Rozen in the fall of 2005 was one of several liberal journalists and bloggers who tried to drag me into the Valerie Plame scandal by falsely accusing me of being the source for Robert Novak’s July 14, 2003Washington Post column which leaked Plame’s covert CIA employment. Several reputable journalists, including NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, were aware of this allegation but refused to put it on the air because they thought it was completely groundless. (I remain grateful to Mitchell for her professionalism in this matter.) We now know Novak’s source was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

In the aftermath of the Samuels profile of Rhodes, Laura Rozen had her media friends post tweets praising Rozen for her reliability and honesty as a journalist. Aaron David Miller, Vice President of the Woodrow Wilson Center who served as a Middle East negotiator in Democratic and Republican administrations, said in a May 7 tweet: “Laura and I don’t agree on Iran deal. But she’s an incredibly hard working reporter. WH not Laura was arrogant/dishonest.”

Given her record of partisan journalism, shilling for Democrats and smearing conservatives, I take a different view. Maybe Mr. Miller will too after he reads this article.

Mr. Obama, you should have stayed home. Your trip to Saudi Arabia, Europe signals weakness

President Obama faces contentious meetings with European and Gulf state leaders during his trip this week to Europe and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because of his continuing refusal to adopt a serious strategy to defeat ISIS, confront Iran’s increasingly belligerent behavior, and his inexplicable comments published in an April 2016 Atlantic article that blamed Europe and Gulf states for his administration’s growing list of foreign policy failures.

The Atlantic article will lead to some awkward questions for Mr. Obama from the leaders of America’s closest allies.

For example, the president will undoubtably be asked by European and Gulf state leaders to explain how, after his administration ignored the growing crisis in Libya for the past four years and his 2011 “leading from behind” strategy during the Libyan civil war, he can criticize European and Gulf states of being “free riders” and not having “skin in the game” in the Libyan situation.

I imagine British Prime Minister Cameron will say to the president, “But Mr. Obama, France and the United Kingdom took the lead in fighting that war because you refused to.”

Saudi leaders are more concerned about Obama’s comment in the Atlantic article that Saudi Arabia needs to find a way to “share the neighborhood” with Iran and “institute some sort of cold peace.”  These incoherent remarks must have enraged Saudi officials in light of the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran which they strongly oppose and a recent surge in Iranian missile tests.

Obama’s tin-eared comments about Saudi Arabia may be why Saudi King Salman was not there to greet him when the president’s plane landed in Riyadh Wednesday.  The King did greet other heads of state when they arrived, according to Reuters.

Given the way he has ignored Saudi security concerns and tilted toward Iran during his presidency, I assume the Saudis have written off Mr. Obama and recognize that most experts in Washington – Republican and Democrat – do not share his radical and disjointed foreign policy views.  The Saudis know their strong relationship with the United States will survive Barack Obama’s presidency.  But even if they do understand this, Saudi leaders also know that this president’s failed Middle East policies did enormous damage to Middle East security that they will have to live with for many years to come.

Aside from Obama’s Iran policy – which is making Iran a regional hegemon – Riyadh is worried about the Syria/Iraq situation and the absence of a serious U.S. strategy to defeat ISIS and restore stability to the region.

Although Mr. Obama recently said the U.S. has “momentum” in its effort to defeat ISIS, the truth is that although ISIS has lost some ground in Iraq and Syria, it has expanded its reach in North Africa, Afghanistan and Europe.

The president also has been criticized for his refusal to provide more financial and military support to the Iraq Kurds.

When Gulf state leaders press President Obama for a bigger U.S. commitment to defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria, he is likely to ignore their request and claim his strategy is working.

European and Gulf state leaders are certain to be frustrated with President Obama’s visit.  In his mind, this trip is a victory lap.  Mr. Obama does not plan to do anything meaningful for the rest of his presidency to defeat ISIS or promote stability in Syria and Iraq.  He intends to defend the Iran nuclear deal as a legacy achievement of his presidency regardless of how badly the Iranians behave.

President Obama’s trip will not further damage America’s relations with European and Gulf states because they know he is a lame duck and expect the next president will be a stronger leader who will adopt a tougher and more sensible foreign policy, especially if a Republican wins the White House this fall.

The problem with this trip is that it will telegraph American weakness and divisions between the U.S. and its allies to our enemies who may try to exploit this weakness before the end of the Obama presidency.  Any perception of American weakness endangers global security.

Mr. President, you should have stayed home.

The Enormous Fraud of the Iran Deal Is Catching Up with Obama

After a recent surge in threatening behavior by Iran and reports that it may soon be given access to the U.S. financial system, the House Intelligence Committee opened an investigation into whether Obama officials misled Congress about the July 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the Joint Comprehensive plan of Action, or JCPOA). The “historic” deal, they said, would help bring Iran into the “community of nations” and lead to improved relations between Iran and the United States.

While this congressional investigation is a welcome development, it is too little and too late to reverse the Obama administration’s policy of offering any and all concessions — including over $100 billion in sanctions relief — to get a nuclear agreement with Iran. Most members of Congress thought the JCPOA was a bad deal; the majority of them voted against it last fall. But many now realize that this agreement is in fact an enormous fraud that is undermining Middle East and international security.

As I have explained here on National Review Online, in “Obama’s Iran Deal Is the Opposite of What He Promised the American People,” the negotiations that produced the JCPOA were an endless series of fallacies and deceptions. To get Iran to the negotiating table, the Obama administration foolishly agreed that the mullahs could continue to enrich uranium and develop advanced enrichment centrifuges. This means that the timeline for an Iranian nuclear weapon will shorten when the JCPOA is in effect, because Iran will all the while be improving its capability to produce nuclear fuel.

Obama officials made several misleading statements about the JCPOA last July that have come back to haunt them. These will be the focus of the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation.

One of the most controversial of these statements was President Obama’s and Secretary Kerry’s assertion that under this agreement, Iran agreed to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions barring missile tests for eight years. But there is no language barring missile tests in the JCPOA; this provision is buried in a U.N. Security Council resolution (Resolution 2231) that merely endorsed the JCPOA.

Obama officials later clarified that although the JCPOA does not bar Iranian missile tests, existing U.N. and U.S. missile sanctions would remain in place. But this isn’t exactly true, either. After the International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had taken certain steps to roll back its nuclear program (a certification the IAEA made in January this year), Resolution 2231 lifted previous Security Council missile sanctions and replaced them with much weaker language “calling” on Iran not to test missiles. According to diplomats cited by Reuters, this new formulation is not legally binding and cannot be enforced under Chapter Seven of the U.N. Charter, which deals with sanctions and authorization of military force. The Obama administration made no mention of this in its briefings to Congress on the JCPOA.

For its part, Iran says it never agreed to missile restrictions in the JCPOA and claims its missile tests do not violate Security Council resolutions because they are not designed to carry nuclear warheads. This is absurd. Iran’s missile program is widely believed to be a delivery system for nuclear warheads. If Iran were telling the truth, it would be the only nation in history without a nuclear-weapons program that nonetheless developed missiles with a range of 2,000 kilometers or more. Iran is not building long-range missiles to carry warheads full of dynamite or to fire monkeys into space.

Iran tested ballistic missiles last fall and last month. Written on the sides of some missiles recently launched were the words “Israel must be wiped off the earth.” Last week, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responded to criticism of the missile tests by saying that Iran’s future is a world of missiles, not negotiations.

Congress is worried that the Obama administration, in an effort to make sure Obama’s “legacy” nuclear deal is not jeopardized, will refuse to take any significant action against Iran for its missile tests. Tellingly, the administration has studiously avoided saying that the missiles Tehran tested were capable of delivering nuclear weapons and that they violated any Security Council resolution. A joint letter sent last week to the U.N. Secretary General from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France said that Iran’s missiles tests were “inconsistent with” and “in defiance of” Resolution 2231 but did not refer to them as a violation.

Congress knows there was at least one secret side deal to the JCPOA that was not briefed to Congress as required by the Corker-Cardin Act. One side deal allowed Iran to inspect itself for evidence of past nuclear-weapons-related work; it was discovered when Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) questioned IAEA officials about the JCPOA during a meeting in Vienna last July. Another secret side deal appears to require the IAEA to dumb down its reports on Iran’s nuclear programand its compliance with the JCPOA.

Congressional investigators are also troubled that contrary to administration claims that the JCPOA has the strongest verification provisions in history, the IAEA is unable to visit military facilities because the Iranian parliament approved an alternative version of the deal last October that put these facilities off-limits. The Obama administration has not publicly responded to the Iranian parliament’s action.

One of Congress’s newest concerns about the JCPOA stems from reports that the Obama administration is considering giving Iran at least partial access to the U.S. financial system. As Ilan Berman wrote last week on NRO, the administration may be about to violate promises it made to Congress last summer that it would not give Iran access to U.S. financial institutions or allow it to engage in off-shore dollar transactions with U.S. banks. If so, this would represent another concession to Iran and a sign that Congress cannot trust anything Obama officials have said about the JCPOA.

The House Intelligence Committee will also review a growing list of other belligerent actions by Iran contradicting the Obama administration’s claim that the JCPOA will help bring Iran into the community of nations. On March 29, for instance, the U.S. Navy intercepted an Iranian ship in the Persian Gulf that was transporting 1,500 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 200 rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 21 .50-caliber machine guns that were probably en route to Houthi rebels in Yemen. The Washington Post reported Monday that there have been at least two similar seizures over the last two months.

In addition, since the nuclear deal was announced, Iran has increased its support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s regime, giving financial support and supplying Iranian and Hezbollah fighters. And last week, the U.S. indicted five Iranians for cyber attacks against U.S. banks, NASDAQ, and a New York dam.

Perhaps the most stunning indictment of Iran’s belligerent behavior since the JCPOA was announced was an unprecedented April 3, 2016, Wall Street Journal op-ed by United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the United States Yousef Al-Otaiba, in which he said:

Sadly, behind all the talk of change, the Iran we have long known — hostile, expansionist, violent — is alive and well, and as dangerous as ever.

Iran’s destabilizing behavior in the region must stop. Until it does, our hope for a new Iran should not cloud the reality that the old Iran is very much still with us — as dangerous and as disruptive as ever.

President Obama said at last week’s nuclear-security summit that Iran is following the “letter” but not the “spirit” of the JCPOA by complying with the terms of the deal but testing missiles, continuing to call for the destruction of Israel, and supporting terrorism. The House Intelligence Committee investigation indicates that Congress rejects this ludicrous statement and wants a full accounting of what the White House really agreed to in the JCPOA and whether the Obama administration deliberately misled lawmakers.

The House Intelligence Committee’s investigation will not kill the JCPOA or lead to new sanctions against Iran. Its report might condemn Obama officials for misleading Congress, but these officials are certain to ignore the report. Nevertheless, this is an important investigation: If it exposes the JCPOA as a fraudulent agreement that has only exacerbated Iran’s destabilizing behavior, it will pave the way for a Republican president (if one is elected in November) to throw out the JCPOA entirely and begin the process of forging a better agreement with our European allies. The committee’s investigation also may give Americans a better understanding of what kind of legacy President Obama really earned from the JCPOA and his nuclear diplomacy with Iran.