Tag Archives: foreign policy

Another Failure in Foreign Policy

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The United Nations Security Council called for an immediate halt to fighting in the Gaza Strip at an emergency session Sunday evening….

And

A press statement issued by the Security Council expressed “serious concern at the escalation of violence,” called for the protection of civilians under international humanitarian law, and said it was troubled by the growing number of casualties.

This is disgusting, and it’s…sad…that the Obama administration approved this—recall that the US could have vetoed this travesty.

There can be no useful cease fire with terrorists—the PA will simply use the time to regroup, rearm, and resume raining rockets on Israeli civilians and children. The PA will simply use the time to replace its combat casualties, retrain them, and do a better job of tunneling and then infiltrating under the Israeli border to wreck mayhem in Israeli kibbutzim and towns and cities. The PA will simply use the time to better target their rockets to resume their efforts at nuclear terrorism.

Furthermore, the crocodile tears over the Gazan civilian casualties wholly ignore the fact that the Israelis are at pains to avoid civilian casualties, using a three-step process to attack a target where civilians may be at risk. First, the IDF makes phone calls to the civilians in the target building, and it drops leaflets in the area, warning of the impending attack. The second step is to fire a small explosive onto the roof of the target building—a roof knock—to warn that the attack has become imminent. Only then is the building targeted with operational rounds. Further, the IDF waves off missiles in flight when civilians are discovered to be in the area after launch.

All of this, of course, allows terrorists to escape among those civilians in order to try again. Those crocodile tears also ignore the fact that the PA actively use their Gazan civilians as shields to protect their terrorists and their weaponry, concealing rockets in homes and mosques, preventing the civilians from leaving the area when warned, and so on.

The UN resolution also ignores UN complicity in the PA’s terrorism: 20 PA rockets were found secreted in an “unused” UNRWA school.

But President Barack Obama approved that UN resolution.

As Predicted

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I predicted this at the end of last week.

Iran agreed to new steps to contain its nuclear work in exchange for additional sanctions relief from the US as the two sides extended negotiations for four more months to reach a comprehensive deal.

Under Friday’s deal, the US will give Tehran access over the next four months to an additional $2.8 billion in oil export revenues frozen abroad by American sanctions, Secretary of State John Kerry said.

In return for this additional money, this speaking fee for the Iranian negotiators,

Iran agreed Friday to take further measures to curtail the most advanced parts of its nuclear program.

Iran also agreed to dilute its stock of up to 2% enriched uranium into natural uranium, Western officials said, which could slightly lengthen the time it would take to spin that into highly enriched fuel for a nuclear weapon.

And we believe them. Certainly the guy who currently sits in the Secretary of State’s chair believes them. John Kerry said, in announcing this latest American concession,

Let me be clear, Iran will not get any more money during these four months than it did during the last six months.

In other words and as noted above, Iran is going to get more money: the $8 billion to which it got access “the last six months” is only an upper bound to that additional money; the released $2.8 billion may not be the last of it.

One last thing: here’s what President Barack Obama said last January in his State of the Union address when he described the just-expired 6 months of talks that were, then, just getting started:

If Iran’s leaders do not seize this opportunity, then I will be the first to call for more sanctions, and stand ready to exercise all options to make sure Iran does not build a nuclear weapon.

The opportunity is passed. It expired Friday. But, then, that was just a deadline.

The MH17 Shootdown

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That this was done by the Ukrainian “separatists” (in quotes because, as some commentators are beginning to recognize, these…people…aren’t interested in separation from Ukraine so much as they are interested in uniting with Russia) with Russian SAM systems and personnel assistance is by now quite clear.

Yet, as The Wall Street Journal put it over the weekend,

The greatest foreign-policy failing of this Presidency is that he refuses to see that the world has bad actors. He can explain the consequences of aggression as he did on Friday, but he refuses to admit or explain that certain countries are responsible for those consequences and must be opposed.

Ronald Reagan didn’t flinch this way, and neither does Mr Obama’s own UN Ambassador.

Barack Obama, though, is no Ronald Reagan.

Moral Equivalence Pollution, Second Installment

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The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks.

Of the Gaza beach attacks that killed four cousins on Wednesday, [Jen] Psaki called the attack “horrifying.”

“The tragic event makes clear that Israel must take every possible step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed,” Psaki said. “We will continue to underscore that point to Israel.”

Asked whether the US believes Israel has not done enough to prevent civilian casualties, Psaki said: “We believe that certainly there’s more that can be done.”

Never mind that Israelis, openly and publicly, are warning the civilians in the area that an attack is imminent and encouraging them to leave. Never mind that this also gives the terrorists warning and allows those who were in the target zone also to leave and so to survive to attack Israel again, a few hours later.

Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the Palestinian Authority terrorists didn’t use them for shields, didn’t hide their weaponry in civilian buildings—homes and mosques, for instance—or didn’t fire their rockets from within those civilian buildings. Never mind that Palestinian civilians wouldn’t be in danger if the PA didn’t insist on attacking Israel.

Not to be outdone, the UN is adding to this moral equivalency sewage.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also urged Israel on Thursday “to do far more to stop civilian casualties,” calling the killing of four boys on a beach in Gaza City “appalling.”

On the other hand, maybe the UN really isn’t engaging in moral equivalence. They’ve been utterly silent about the PA’s rocket firings against the Israeli nuclear power plant in Dimona, even though the UN itself defines attacks on nuclear facilities as nuclear terrorism. This bit of naked terrorism is fine, apparently.

Flagrant UN Treachery

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Some 20 rockets were found Wednesday in a school in Gaza operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the organization confirmed Thursday.

Israel is being generous in its characterization of the situation. Yigal Palmor, of the Israeli Foreign Ministry said this:

Yet again, Gaza terrorists abuse UN facilities to carry out their violent activities. Hamas and other terror groups are determined to put civilians in harm’s way and will respect nothing in their violent frenzy. We expect the UN and the international community to condemn and to act strongly against this brazen violation of international humanitarian law, which endangers children and UN humanitarian activities.

Of course.

But larger questions remain unanswered: how could those missiles have been placed without UN complicity? How could those missiles have been placed without UN knowledge? It was the UN’s facility, after all.

And the UNRWA is the same agency that, during the last Israeli entry into the Gaza in response to then-Hamas terrorist rocket attacks, falsely claimed Israel had murdered Palestinian children in a hospital.