This is The “Art of the Deal?”

This is The “Art of the Deal?”

By Howard Barbanel

Is Barack Obama running foreign policy in the second Trump Administration? It sure seems like it. Recall Obama sending actual pallets of cash to Iran in the waning days and hours of his second term? Recall his acceding to most of Iran’s demands just to get an agreement – any agreement? Recall his horrible agreement which enabled Iran to build thousands of ballistic missiles and continue to enrich uranium?

Now comes along one of the most maddening accords ever agreed to. Have you read the 14 points in the memorandum? You’re not alone. Practically nobody has. It’s being done on the QT via executive order without any Congressional oversight (sounds like Obama too). it’s not even a treaty or even a contract, it’s really just the umpteenth ceasefire sweetened by tons of black and green sugar. By that I mean oil and money, which seem to speak louder than right and wrong.

Supposedly, some $24 to $25 billion in frozen assets will be released to Iran during the 60-day negotiation period to devise a treaty and theoretically dispose of Iran’s enriched uranium. Meanwhile, Iran is looking for $300 billion in reparations to rebuild everything the US and Israel destroyed and you can bet your bottom dollar that will include the terrorist infrastructure surrounding Israel. The Strait of Hormuz has been ceded to Iran’s ultimate control and you can bet this sword of Damacles will be wielded whenever it suits the mullahs to take the world economy hostage.

More significantly, the rumor is the US is agreeing not to foment regime change in Teheran and interfere in their internal affairs. Iran will agree not to produce or acquire nuclear weapons, but they’ve been making this promise for decades, insisting their program is for civilian use. If that’s not enough, the US will lift its blockade of Iranian ports and oil exports, thereby effectively rearming Iran with billions in oil sales each month – money that will not go not to the Iranian people but to procure weapons from China and Russia and strengthen the repression of their population. You can also bet that funds will find round-about routes to Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Israel’s hand is being checked and its arms tied behind its back as Trump caved to Iranian demands that Lebanon be linked to any deal with Iran. Hamstringing Israel’s freedom of action in Lebanon is unconscionable and will create friction with Washington.

That this awful deal was negotiated by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner is another disgrace. Two New York Jewish real estate guys reporting to another real estate guy (Trump) with everyone hot for a deal – any deal – just to make a deal. Witkoff is naïve and inexperienced to the extreme and Kushner ought to know better.

On September 30, 1938, British prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich accords with Hitler, a low point of Western weakness and appeasement for a “pledge of peace.” The footage of Chamberlain landing back in Britain, waving a piece of paper gloating about “peace in our time” is an iconic image of the foolishness of believing and trusting in dictators – all because the West lacked the backbone to enforce the Versailles treaty. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Rippentropp told Hitler that he should sign Chamberlain’s document because it’s just a piece of paper and that Nazi Germany will ultimately do whatever it wants. We know what happened next.

At the end of the day the derisive term “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) has held true here. Instead of ridding the earth of the dangerous fanatical regime in Iran, he’s opted for the photo op. Trump has zero stomach for any dead soldiers, even one is too much. Can’t handle the blood. The Iranians know this. They also know high oil prices and inflation are jeopardizing the Republicans’ chances of retaining the House and Senate in the midterms – and Trump blinked first, gambling that $3 a gallon gas and low inflation could bolster the GOPs chances in November.

The US Marines could have taken Karg Island and the Strait in a few days but probably many would be killed or injured, so instead of guts and glory, Trump raised the white flag and is embellishing that flag with all kinds of money for the mullahs. Disgraceful. And I don’t believe for a second that Iran will agree to the seizure and disposal of its enriched uranium and the kind of inspections and enforcement to keep them from a bomb.

It pains me to say this, but had Trump been President during World War II, he’d be berating Churchill not to fight and looking for a “deal” with the Nazis on the eve of D-Day leaving them in control of France because he wouldn’t be able to stomach the 2,500-plus US casualties on day one of a Normandy invasion.

The prophet Ezekiel (chapter 13, verse 10) famously says to the leaders of Judea, " because they have misled My people, saying, 'Peace,' when there is no peace; and when the people build a flimsy wall, behold, they plaster it with whitewash."

This just kicks the can down the road which like in 1938 will lead to a more deadly confrontation down the road, perhaps horrifically with nuclear weapons.

The Zeitgeist

A Nazi Crematorium

Baking Jews with Mike Huckabee:

When is an Oven an Oven?

Last weekend former Arkansas Governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee opened the oven door on President Obama’s Iran Nuclear deal and let out a big blast of heat and blowback.

On Sunday, July 26^th in an interview with Breitbart News, Huckabee said “this president's foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven." The metaphor used by Huckabee is that of the Nazi crematoria of World War II which were employed in the extermination of six million Jews.

The next day Huckabee was all over broadcast and cable TV defending his criticism of the Iran deal in those terms and saw his poll numbers rise appreciably against the 17-candidate GOP pack.

No end of vituperative criticism and righteous indignant invective was inveighed against Huckabee by President Obama, others within his administration, prominent Democrats, prominent American Jewish Liberals and the gaggle of cable talking heads. “How could you and how dare you compare the Iran nuclear deal to the Holocaust” was the general refrain. Somehow Huckabee had sacrilegiously besmirched the hallowed memory of the Nazis’ victims. But did he really?

It begs the question, what is an oven exactly? We’re all familiar with coal and wood fired ovens, which often make the best pizza. There are electric ovens and convection ovens, toaster ovens, gas-fired ovens and microwave ovens all employing differing levels of technology to achieve the desired result of cooking whatever dish might be placed within and sometimes you can burn a roast or casserole if the oven is too hot. The Nazis burned people in really big ovens. The main target of Nazi burning were Europe’s Jews who they killed with industrial efficiency with an eye towards genocide, at which they were nearly completely successful.

Hitler and his minions were unabashed and unapologetic about their stated goal of eradicating Europe’s (and even the world’s) Jews. At great cost to their war effort they pursued this goal practically until the bitter end. It was really kind of a rabid hate.

The Ayatollahs along with the political and military leaders of Iran have made no bones about their admiration for the Nazis’ effort (which paradoxically they deny ever happened) and their oft publicly stated desire to complete Hitler’s work by eradicating the State of Israel and all of the six million Jews in it. This is no secret, it’s shouted in the streets of Iran, in their press, tweets and broadcasts. They provide extensive monetary and strategic backing to various heavily armed proxy terrorist groups encircling Israel with the aim of enabling them to murder as many Israelis as possible and as an advance guard for the big, final push somewhere down the road.

This is why there is a wall to wall consensus in Israel from the far left to the far right against President Obama’s Iran nuke deal. After the experience of World War II and decades of ethno-religious hatred against them in the Middle East, Israelis take threats of genocide seriously and don’t pooh-pooh them as fantastical.

By allowing Iran to keep their nuclear program and permitting any pretense of inspections to expire in a decade along with the repeal of economic sanctions, the return of $150 billion in frozen assets, the lifting of prohibitions against selling Iran arms and intercontinental missiles, isn’t the deal in fact enabling Iran to burn more Jews in the short term and possibly realize their stated goal of genocide against the Jewish people perhaps 10 years on?

In the only two instances where atomic weapons were used against civilian populations (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) we saw the power of the atom to burn and incinerate. While the Nazis had to turn one body at a time into powder and ash, atomic weapons can do that to tens and hundreds of thousands in an instant and cause delayed death from radiation shortly after for the survivors of such a blast. If you incinerate thousands of bodies a day manually or perhaps a million instantaneously is not the end result the same?

The real desecration of the Holocaust victims’ memory is allowing such a thing to happen again, enabling would-be genocide by caving into the demands of dictatorial bullies who are fueled by religious and racial hatred. Holocaust survivors and most Jews generally ascribe to the philosophy of “Never Again” to a Holocaust against them.

Mike Huckabee used some very blunt language to disparage a deal that puts millions of Jews in harm’s way and Israel between a rock and a very hard place defensively.  When it comes to saving millions of lives perhaps diplomatic politesse is precisely the wrong tack to take and some plain speaking will both clear the air and shed more light.

For the diplomats in the White House and at Foggy Bottom this is all one big process and they’ll move on to the next treaty. For Israel and the Jewish people this is about life and death. Jews are very familiar with ovens of every caliber and would prefer not to be exposed to the heat in the Iranians’ kitchen.

The Zeitgeist

 

In Oz, the Lion ultimately found his courage (left) and there really are such things as "Wicked Witches" and "Flying Monkeys."

Lions and Tigers and Bears:

We Need Democrats in the

Fight to Defend the Emerald City

A few weeks ago my local 24-screen stadium-seating mega movie-plex had a special screening of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Never having seen it before on a large screen (let alone a huge one) I thought I should see what the flying monkeys look like when liberated from the confines of television. I can faithfully report that the monkeys are really terrifying and Margaret Hamilton’s performance as the Wicked Witch of the West is only done true justice when she’s 20 or more feet tall.

Inadvertently, I also came away with some other revelations from the giant screen experience – while Wizard is couched as a children’s story, it actually makes some pretty stark statements about good and evil and what to do about that aforementioned evil.

We are shown that the citizens of Oz, be they Munchkins, residents of the Emerald City or even the Wizard himself are all living in terror of the two Wicked Witches, those of the East and the West – so much so that when Dorothy (spoiler alert if you never grew up as a kid in America) upon her arrival to Oz kills (or her house kills) the Wicked Witch of the East; the Munchkins lay on a spontaneous parade of joy – hailing Dorothy for killing the former owner of the ruby slippers.

When towards the end of the movie Dorothy (with the help of Toto, the Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man) “liquidates” the Wicked Witch of the West, even the witch’s own soldiers are beside themselves with relief and happiness. There was no relativism or ambiguity about the bad guys (or gals) and no guilt in rejoicing at the witches’ demise.

While The Wizard of Oz is fantasy, like many fairy tales, it was meant to impart to its juvenile audience that evil really does exist (even in a candy-coated place like Oz), that it’s frightening, but that it can be overcome when good people band together to fight it.

Much as there was great evil in the real world of 1939 there is a whole lot of bad stuff going on in the real world of 2015, no matter how much we’d like to sugarcoat it or escape to somewhere over the rainbow to avoid it.

We face the dangerous and devious machinations of a Wicked Wizard of the East in the form of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He’s just signed a military cooperation deal with Iran which provides for joint military exercises and training along with pledges of cooperation against US “interference.” Putin arms Syria’s genocidal Bashir Assad and through Iran indirectly enables Hezbollah and Hamas, the twin Iranian proxies on Israel’s borders. Iran is also menacing Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula through its auxiliaries there. Mr. Putin also has a sophisticated Russian spy ship in Havana harbor and is planning Russian military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Let’s not forget his ongoing bullying of the Ukrainians.

And talking about the Hussars of the Wicked Witch of the West’s army and her squadron of flying monkeys – we’re now dealing with the crucifying and decapitating ISIS hordes rampaging across Sunni Mesopotamia; the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan; a resurrected Al Qaeda exporting wanton murder and mayhem across the world and the Nigerian Boko Haram rolling all Pol Pot-style by eradicating whole villages of non-Muslims and other opponents. Let’s not forget the A-bomb seeking Ayatollahs in Teheran – they’ve got intercontinental ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads with guidance systems aimed squarely at the West. It’s always “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and these people mean it. This is not make-believe, it’s all too real, just ask the Charlie Hebdo survivors in Paris

From 1939 to 1945 advances in technology didn’t deter the forces of evil – in fact technology enabled the more efficient killing of millions. Our web, wifi and cloud-based world of today is not a shield against nefarious maniacs – to the contrary, our new technologies are a boon to their efforts, not a civilizing palliative. In World War II it was only by mustering a greater resolve and greater determination that evil was vanquished – and at great cost to humanity.

For most of the 20^th Century it was the Democratic Party in the US that was at the forefront in the fight for freedom – from Woodrow Wilson through Truman, JFK and LBJ. The Republicans were the isolationists with their heads in the ground.

In January 1941, with much of the West under the thumb of fascism and with external threats against the US mounting each day, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address said that “thinking of our children and their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any part of the Americas” because “the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world…We must always be wary of those who…preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement…enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people’s freedom.”

FDR asserted that America needed to be front and center in the fight for what he called “The Four Freedoms.” They are “the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” Just as in 1941, civilization is under attack from those who trample upon and make a mockery of freedom and human rights. The difference today is that we’re perhaps at the “1933” place on the dial, not 1941. The key is to ensure our world doesn’t see the equivalent of 1941 in 2017or 2018.

A sure sign that most Americans still believe in good and evil, in the Four Freedoms, in America’s leadership role in ensuring a better world for all mankind is the resounding box office success of the new Clint Eastwood film American Sniper. Yes, it’s a great piece of movie-making and Bradley Cooper turns in a stellar performance reaching way beyond his prior goofy roles, but the film is resonating with Americans in a big way because it shows American leadership in the struggle against the bad guys and portrays what most Americans want our country to stand for. Jack Kennedy would have scoffed at calling this a “Republican movie” as some critics have dubbed it.

Back in Oz the Lion needed to find his courage, and find it he most certainly did because of his love for Dorothy. Since Vietnam vast swaths of the Democratic Party have become averse to the legacies of Harry Truman and JFK when it comes to projecting American force in the world.  Sometimes the only way to save the Munchkins and create security for the Emerald City is by liquidating witches and hobgoblins, however difficult that may be. Democrats need to love liberty as much as the Lion did Dorothy and join arm in arm with Republicans here and our allies abroad in a global effort to protect the yellow brick road so that all of humanity (not just Americans) can enjoy lives blessed with peace and freedom.