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Posts Tagged ‘Chuck Hagel’

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The bewildered presidency

by Mojambo ( 167 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians at August 20th, 2013 - 7:00 am

Obama is starting to see that his vaunted “charm” and”persuasiveness” does not really  work on totalitarians who can see right through him.

by Jonathan S. Tobin

There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As the New York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week.

The easy answer to their questions is that unlike Sisi and the military, President Obama and his foreign policy-team continue to fail to understand that the conflict in Egypt is a zero-sum game. The choice there is between the military and the Brotherhood and the transformation of a key Arab country into an Islamist stronghold. This failure to comprehend the nature of the conflict has led inevitably to paralysis. This spectacle of American impotence is worrisome no matter what you think the U.S. should do about Egypt. But it’s not unrelated to the administration’s other foreign-policy failures that are piling up in the Middle East. Having failed to act decisively to try to avoid a far bigger bloodbath in Syria, and content to waste years on futile diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear threat while devoting disproportionate effort on reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks that have little chance to succeed, it’s obvious that Egypt isn’t the only venue where Obama has demonstrated his cluelessness. [……]

In Egypt, Obama’s main problem is his lack of understanding of the threat that the Muslim Brotherhood poses to both the non-Islamist majority in that country as well as to the region. Having bought into the myth that the Brotherhood’s rise in the aftermath of the fall of the Mubarak regime was an expression of democratic sentiment, it refused to see that if it was allowed to take power it would quickly move to destroy any opposition. The U.S. pressured the military to let Mohamed Morsi take office and then continued to urge them to stand aside as he proceeded to demonstrate that the Brotherhood had little interest in democracy. Even as 14 million people took to the streets to demand that Morsi step down, the president continued to preach restraint and then stood by in puzzlement when the military realized that this was probably their last chance to save their country. Even now, the administration seems stuck in the same mythical “Arab Spring” mindset that is predicated on the idea that a totalitarian movement like the Brotherhood is compatible with liberal democracy. Since they don’t understand what led to the events of the last week, how can we expect the Obama team to put forward a coherent position on what happened and what may unfold in the days to come?

[……..]

Obama came into office thinking that he could charm the Iranians into giving up their nuclear ambitions and that American pressure on Israel could magically create peace with the Palestinians. If problems arose elsewhere in the Middle East, he thought they would be easily resolved with bad guys like Bashar Assad conveniently leaving the stage because President Obama said he “must go.” So as we now peruse the Middle East, we see an Iran that thinks it can go on fooling the West with a diplomatic process intended to stall talks until they can build a nuke while the United States invests precious time and energy on muscling Israel into making concessions to a Palestinian Authority that has no interest in ever signing a peace agreement. And Bashar Assad, with the help of his Iranian and Hezbollah allies, remains in power while winning a civil war that Obama could have spiked two years ago with a timely push.

While critics from both the left and right assail Obama’s indecision that–as I noted on Friday–protects neither American interests nor values in Egypt, this is yet another symptom of an administration that remains besotted with the same preconceptions that it brought to Washington in 2009. While he laments his lack of good choices and the fact that America’s ability to influence events is limited, it is the president’s refusal to face facts about the Brotherhood and some of his other blind spots that is most to blame for the fact that he has left American foreign policy hanging in the wind at a decisive moment in history.

Read the rest – Obama on Egypt; The clueless presidency

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Posted in Barack Obama, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinians | 167 Comments »

200 U.S. soldiers to Jordan could jump to 20,000

by Mojambo ( 7 Comments › )
Filed under Headlines, Syria at April 18th, 2013 - 11:47 am

The fun begins! Chuck Hagel is an incompetent boob.

WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) — The Pentagon will send some 200 U.S. soldiers to Jordan to control spillover violence from the Syrian civil war, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the Senate.

But the troops, near Jordan’s border with Syria, could be the forerunner of 20,000 or more deployed if the Obama administration decides to intervene in the 2-year-old civil war, senior U.S. officials told the Los Angeles Times.

The 200 or so troops from the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, will work alongside Jordanian forces to “improve readiness and prepare for a number of scenarios,” Hagel told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Those scenarios could include securing chemical weapons arsenals or to prevent the war from spilling into neighboring countries, he said.

But the Pentagon has drawn up plans to possibly expand the force to 20,000 or more, the officials told the Times.

These forces could include special operations teams to find and secure Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles, U.S. air defense units to protect Jordan’s airspace and conventional military units capable of moving into Syria if necessary, the Times said.

Defense Department officials consider the move as preparing the United States for possible direct military involvement in Syria, the Times said.

The Pentagon had no immediate comment on the report.

“Military intervention is always an option, but it should be an option of last resort,” Hagel told the committee.

He warned a major deployment could “embroil the U.S. in a significant, lengthy and uncertain military commitment.”

Hagel told the panel the new forces will initially help deliver humanitarian supplies and help the Jordanian military cope with the flood of Syrian refugees.

They will replace an ad hoc group of U.S. troops “pulled from various units and places” who have been in Jordan since last year, he said. That group included U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets.

Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, who testified with him, if Obama had asked the Pentagon to recommend how to apply “any additional military pressure” on the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.

“We’ve had national security staff meetings at which we’ve been asked to brief the options, but we haven’t been asked for a recommendation,” Dempsey said.

“We’ve not been asked,” Hagel said. “As I said, I’ve not been asked by the president.”

Hagel is to be in Jordan next week as part of a Middle East trip that will also take him to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

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Posted in Headlines, Syria | 7 Comments »

The ‘all powerful’ Israel Lobby strikes again

by Mojambo ( 360 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Democratic Party, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan, Palestinians at February 28th, 2013 - 3:00 pm

The so called “Israel lobby” (or as Chuckster Hagel referred to it as “the Jewish lobby”) cannot hold a candle to the Saudi lobby.

by Daniel Greenfield

The Israel Lobby which controls American foreign policy, but has thus far been unable to get the United States to stop funding the terrorists currently shooting rockets at its 14th largest city, has struck again as Senate Democrats voted unanimously to make Chuck Hagel the next Secretary of Defense.

The dreaded Israeli Lobby, Jewish Lobby, Israel Lobby or any other permutation of the form that you prefer, has largely kept silent during the Hagel nomination. The head of the ADL was heard to mutter something and the AJC suggested that the Senate should possibly rethink the nomination before falling silent again. As if anyone needed more proof that the Zionist Entity controls Washington.

AIPAC and all the other groups who regularly send out envelopes warning of disaster if the check doesn’t come in the mail have an amazing track record.

When Israel builds apartment buildings in its own capital city, the State Department, that branch of government which Hagel claimed was an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, denounces the provocative act of putting one brick on top of another. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia arrests Christians for celebrating Christmas and you couldn’t pay the State Department to pay attention.

Pakistan was hiding Bin Laden and still rolls in the foreign aid. Egypt’s government is torturing protesters. Libya arrested Christian missionaries in Benghazi, but still can’t be bothered to arrest those responsible for the murder of Ambassador Stevens. The Palestinian Authority hasn’t held an election in forever and is actually paying the salaries of convicted terrorists.

[……] To hear them talk, East Jerusalem is the only thing standing in the way of peace in our time. And talk like that is just more evidence that the Israel Lobby really does run everything.

John Kerry, the new Secretary of State, gave Code Pink, the radical leftist Anti-War and Anti-Israel group, a pass to go see Hamas. John Brennan Islamized Jerusalem. Hagel blamed the Jewish Lobby for spoiling his milk. But what do you expect in a Washington D.C. run by the Israel Lobby?

There are constant dire warnings that Israel is about to pull the United States into a war. The number of wars that Israel has pulled the United States into clocks in at zero. The number of wars that the Saudis have pulled the United States into clocks in at three; if you count a Saudi terrorist funded by Saudis using a bunch of Saudis to ram planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

True aficionados of the nefarious Jewish Lobby however know that the House of Saud was framed by a few thousand Jews who showed up early to wire up the towers with C4 and then punched out before the flights arrived. That is if the planes weren’t just holograms full of passengers who never existed as part of a false flag operation against a fake terrorist group created by the CIA in a conspiracy to steal all the opium in Afghanistan.

And in the same way they know that Hagel really is an Israeli agent. Why else did the Jewish Lobby remain silent? And wasn’t it suspicious how Hagel seemed to hate Israel so much? […….]What if beneath that mopey exterior that bespeaks a man who has spent his entire life watching a fly crawl across a window, beats the heart of a Semitic partisan who is just raring to begin bombing Iran as soon as he figures out how to make his executive chair go up and down?

Hagel’s triumph is a disappointment to them. It would have been better if he had gone down a martyr, his stumped visage adorning book covers alongside James Forrestal and Adlai Stevenson III as another victim of the lobby in the blue-and-white hotel. A brave truth-teller like Charles Freeman who wasn’t approved for a position chairing the National Intelligence Council for taking money from Saudi Arabia and China, and claiming that Tienanmen Square was a moderate response, but mostly because of the Israel Lobby.

There’s no question that the Israel Lobby is a truly impressive beast. Every now and then it convinces a bunch of senators to sign a letter calling for peace and a two-state solution while condemning the taxpayer supported terrorists who shoot rockets at Israeli cities. The letter doesn’t actually call for ending funding to the terrorists. It just asks the President or Secretary of State to review the situation and strongly urge the terrorists to stop shooting rockets because that endangers the future of the peace process.

[……..]

Occasionally the Israel Lobby will get truly serious and a non-binding resolution of support will be introduced in Congress. Everyone will vote for it, even the senators and congressmen whose fondest wish is that Israel didn’t exist.  […….]

In a truly disturbing overreach of power, sometimes there will be a bill proposing to cut off aid to the terrorists unless they stop shooting rockets at Israeli cities. The bill will allow for a national security waiver by the president. And every president will employ the waiver making the bill slightly less useless than a non-binding resolution, but not in any way that can be pinned down.

Meanwhile the three-hundred blogs dedicated to exposing the Israel Lobby’s muzzling of dissent will denounce the bill and author six more books describing how the dreaded lobby makes it entirely impossible to discuss the conflict from the perspective that Israel is to blame for absolutely everything. This is a perspective that seldom appears in major newspapers and magazines and is absolutely never heard on CNN. You could go a whole five seconds without encountering it on any world news broadcast.

It’s not always clear what the Israel Lobby’s accomplishments really consist of. There’s a good deal of traffic between the interlocking American and Israeli defense industries that adds up to a sizable amount of foreign aid.  [……] To say nothing of the Pakistani Hotel Taliban. Israel is doing better than Taiwan which can’t convince the United States to sell it any serious firepower for fear of offending China, and if folks like Hagel had their way, Israel might be in the same boat.

Beyond that, Israel and the United States have a mutual agreement. The State Department, an adjunct of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, will blame Israel for all of America’s troubles with the Muslim world, especially those caused by Saudi Arabia, and Israeli diplomats will attend negotiating sessions with terrorists that will fail and then accept responsibility for the failure.

The United States will provide foreign aid to Israel and the countries and terrorist groups trying to destroy it. This will be known as a pro-Israel policy because Israel will get more aid than the countries trying to destroy it giving it a qualitative advantage.

The United States will help fund the terrorists shooting rockets at Israeli cities and help fund the Israeli Iron Dome anti-rocket program, so that both sides are evened out. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood will get fighter jets and tanks and Israel will get a visit from Obama. The last time Obama visited Egypt, it imploded, but when he visits Israel, he promises not to reduce the country to a violent civil war and urban anarchy. And so qualitative advantage is upheld once again due to the work of the Israel Lobby.

In one of his more brilliant moments, Hagel signed on to a report that called on Obama to present Israel with his own peace plan backed by a 60,000 NATO peacekeeping force deployed inside Israel that would include soldiers from Muslim countries. We have no idea if this latest brilliant plan will ever come to fruition, but carving up Israel like a turkey and deploying Muslim armies inside it is clearly another creation of the Israel Lobby.

It doesn’t sound like something the Saudi Lobby would come up with, does it?

Read the rest – The dreaded Israel lobby strikes again

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Democratic Party, Egypt, Hamas, Islamic Terrorism, Israel, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistan, Palestinians | 360 Comments »

The media’s ‘Team Hagel’ doing Obama’s dirty work for him

by Mojambo ( 150 Comments › )
Filed under Media at February 25th, 2013 - 1:00 pm

Given Hagel’s hard core socially  conservative record, the only  reason I can ascribe to the Obama media’s (a redundancy ) jihad to get him confirmed would be his rather bizarre foreign policy views and his desire to gut the Pentagon.

by Joel B. Pollak

Throughout the fight over Chuck Hagel’s nomination as Secretary of Defense, a devoted group of pro-Hagel journalists has been determined not only to defend Hagel, but to attack his critics and their credibility. They have gone beyond the “normal” mainstream media bias, which for most outlets merely meant ignoring flaws in Hagel’s record and his refusal to disclose key information. “Team Hagel” has even ignored its own scoops

For example, BuzzFeed was the first outlet on Feb. 14 to recover and post the prepared text of a controversial speech that then-Sen. Hagel delivered at Rutgers University in March 2007. (The controversy surrounds remarks allegedly made by Hagel about Israel in the question-and-answer session that followed.) BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith immediately took to Twitter to declare: “Nothing eyebrow raising in that prepared text.”

Evidently Smith had not read the speech properly, because he tweeted a few minutes later: “Actually, that ’07 Hagel speech isn’t so innocuous,on a second read. Hagel wanted consulate in Iran, talked cooperation.” For Smith, debunking criticism of Hagel was a higher priority than getting the story right–a story that BuzzFeed itself was the first to have, and could have been the first to break at a critical moment in the debate.

In a similar episode, Politico’s Dylan Byers and Mackenzie Weinger were the first to break the news that a 2008 speech by Hagel to the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) had been recovered and would be released later that day. Byers and Weinger reported, without having viewed the speech for themselves, that there was no newsworthy information in Hagel’s remarks: “the tape comes up clean,” they wrote.

Their sole source for the story was the ADC itself, an organization so anti-Israel that it gave an award to former journalist Helen Thomas after her anti-Jewish views had been exposed, even naming a scholarship after her. Yet when the video was released, it was clear that Byers and MacKenzie were wrong: […….]

Byers was also wrong on another point: he had suggested, prior to the video’s release, that it was debatable whether Hagel’s remarks had been “formal,” meaning Hagel may  not have misled the Senate by not making the video available. But the video made clear that the speech was formal, even if extemporaneous: Hagel was the keynote speaker, and was given an official introduction, delivering his remarks from the dais of dignitaries.

Likewise, on December 17, Dave Weigel of Slate (falsely) accused the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol of making up Hagel’s infamous remark about the “Jewish lobby” on Capitol Hill. “The quote isn’t merely redacted. It’s partly fabricated,”  [……..] However, as he later admitted, he had not checked the accuracy of the quote with the author who had recorded it. It was more important to attack Kristol than to ask what had Hagel said.

Perhaps the most glaring example of Team Hagel’s lack of interest in researching the nominee was another BuzzFeed scoop: namely, that Senate Republicans were focused on former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri as one of a handful of worrisome foreign donors to the Atlantic Council, which Hagel chairs. Citing “a senior GOP aide close to the confirmation process” (yes, an anonymous source), BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller wrote:

[……] But Miller did not report exactly why the Senators were particularly concerned about Hariri or the others.

It turns out that Saad Hariri has been a prominent supporter of Hamas, meeting with the Hamas leadership as prime minister and maintaining public contact with the group since leaving office. In December, Hariri sent a personal representative to a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the anti-Israel terror group in Beirut. It is worth asking why Hagel’s organization would accept funds from such a source. But Team Hagel has not bothered.

The hard work of vetting Hagel has fallen to a few conservative media outlets, which have unearthed a mountain of material on Hagel while Republican leaders prevaricated and major pro-Israel organizations sat on the sidelines. The scale of that evidence is beginning–perhaps belatedly–to weigh on the conscience of Democrats, who once eagerly denounced Hagel as “anti-Israel” and who attacked his “questionable record.”

In 2009, Ira Forman, the chair of Jewish outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, defended Hagel’s appointment to the National Intelligence Advisory Board by stating that he would oppose Hagel’s appointment to any senior policy role: […….]

The National Jewish Democratic Council declared in 2007 that Hagel “has a lot of questions to answer about his commitment to Israel.” Today, it defends Hagel to the hilt, on the sole grounds that he was selected by President Obama, whose pro-Israel credentials are, it says, “unprecedented” and “unquestionable.” It has not been interested in asking lingering questions about Hagel’s views–nor have the members of Team Hagel.

The point, for Team Hagel, has not been to hold Hagel or the Obama administration to account, but to hold conservative critics of Hagel in contempt. Through prejudice and deliberate neglect, they have given a pass to Hagel and to the rest of the mainstream media. In doing so, they may have helped clear the path for one of the most radical, poorly qualified, and least transparent nominees ever offered the Pentagon’s top job.

Read the rest – How media’s ‘Team Hagel’ did Obama’s dirty work

 

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Posted in Media | 150 Comments »

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