World Jewish Digest
Betrayal in the high places. After years of assurances that he will have Israel's "back," after years of pounding the podium that he will not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons, Barack Obama has shown his true colors.
His new Middle East pushes Israel and Saudi Arabia aside in favor of a detente with the Iranian mullahs. The nuclear agreement just signed in Geneva affirms Iran as a nuclear state, does not require it to dismantle its nuclear program, does not address at all Iran's military program, and completely ignores its worldwide sponsorship of terrorism and genocidal movements like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Thanks, Mr. President. Great job.
But as John Bolton points out in an opinion piece for the Weekly Standard, the whole point of the agreement is to stop Israel from acting against Iran.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree? The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time.
Why? Buying time for its own sake makes sense in some negotiating contexts, but the sub silentio objective here was to jerry-rig yet another argument to wield against Israel and its fateful decision whether or not to strike Iran. Obama, fearing that strike more than an Iranian nuclear weapon, clearly needed greater international pressure on Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations.
He cuddles up to enemies and pushes away friends. How else to describe the U.S. president?

Netanyahu: Geneva Agreement "a Historic Mistake"
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday: "What was achieved last night in Geneva is not an historic agreement; it is an historic mistake. Today the world has become a much more dangerous place because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon in the world. For the first time, the world's leading powers have agreed to uranium enrichment in Iran while ignoring the UN Security Council decisions that they themselves led."
"Sanctions that required many years to put in place contain the best chance for a peaceful solution. These sanctions have been given up in exchange for cosmetic Iranian concessions that can be cancelled in weeks. This agreement and what it means endanger many countries including, of course, Israel. Israel is not bound by this agreement. The Iranian regime is committed to the destruction of Israel and Israel has the right and the obligation to defend itself, by itself, against any threat. As Prime Minister of Israel, I would like to make it clear: Israel will not allow Iran to develop a military nuclear capability." (Prime Minister's

Greatest Danger Is that Interim Agreement Will Become Permanent - Ron Ben-Yishai
If the interim agreement with Iran turns into a permanent agreement, as Israeli officials fear, it's a bad and even dangerous agreement. The Iranians are still unwilling to completely halt the construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak, which will allow the production of plutonium in about two-three years.
The Iranians are committed to stop enriching uranium to a 20% level and convert what they have into fuel rods or uranium oxide. Another commitment is not to increase the amount of 3.5% to 5% enriched uranium which they possess. These restrictions are in fact almost meaningless. With nearly 18,000 centrifuges used to enrich uranium, they can enrich uranium to any level they want within a short period of time. At the moment they already have more than eight tons of uranium enriched to 3.5-5%, enough for four to five atom bombs.
The Iranians are only committing, sometime in six months, to answer questions presented by the IAEA on the efforts it has made and is still making to develop the explosive device and warhead. During this time, they can complete the development of the nuclear weapon. (Ynet News)

The Hidden Cost of the Iranian Nuclear Deal - Michael Doran
I see the Iranian nuclear deal as a deceptively pleasant way station on the road that is the American retreat from the Middle East. By contrast, President Obama believes that six months from now, this process will culminate in a final, sustainable agreement.
On the nuclear question specifically, I don't see this as stage one. In my view, there will never be a final agreement. What the administration just initiated was, rather, a long and expensive process by which the West pays Iran to refrain from going nuclear. We are, in essence, paying Ayatollah Khamenei to negotiate with us. We just bought six months.
What was the price? We shredded the six UN Security Council resolutions that ordered the Islamic Republic to abandon all enrichment and reprocessing activities. And we started building a global economic lobby dedicated to eroding the sanctions that we generated through a decade of very hard diplomatic work. But the price that troubles me most is the free hand that the U.S. is now giving to Iran throughout the region. And Iran will now have more money to channel to proxies such as Hizbullah.
Six months from now, when the interim agreement expires, another payment to Ayatollah Khamenei will come due. If Obama doesn't pony up, he will have to admit then that he cut a bad deal now. The writer, a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, served as a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense and a senior director at the National Security Council. (Brookings Institution)

Saudi Prince: "The Threat Is from Persia, Not from Israel" - Jeffrey Goldberg
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal told me, "There's no confidence in the Obama administration doing the right thing with Iran." Alwaleed believes that Iran will pocket whatever sanctions relief it gets without committing to ending its nuclear program.
I asked him if he thought the Arab states would actually back an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. "Publicly, they would be against it," he said. "Privately, they would love it." "The Sunnis will love it....The Sunni Muslim is very much anti-Shiite, and very much anti-, anti-, anti-Iran."
You're sure they loathe Iran more than they loathe Israel, I asked? "Look, Iran is a huge threat, historically speaking....The Persian empire was always against the Muslim Arab empire, especially against the Sunnis. The threat is from Persia, not from Israel." (Bloomberg)

A Bad Agreement Likely to Get Worse - Mark Dubowitz and Orde Kittrie
The interim agreement includes several Iranian commitments that, if verifiably implemented, would extend Iran's nuclear breakout time from about a month to about two months.
It places more constraints on Iran's nuclear program than the deal that the Obama administration reportedly was prepared to sign two weeks ago. The Senate's threat to pass additional sanctions, France's objections to the initial deal, and Israel's fierce resistance to the terms of the proposed agreement seem to have played a role in providing U.S. negotiators with leverage to extract a better deal from Iran. Mr. Dubowitz is executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Mr. Kittrie is a law professor at Arizona State University and a senior fellow at the foundation. (Wall Street Journal)

Observations:

Why the Iranian Nuclear Deal Is Dangerous - Eli Lake (Daily Beast)

The agreement signed in Geneva says Iran and six world powers will negotiate a comprehensive solution over the next six months that "would involve a mutually defined enrichment program with practical limits and transparency measures to ensure the peaceful nature of the program."

The offer represents a significant softening of earlier demands from the United States and even the Obama administration. During his first term, Obama offered Iran a deal that would have required Iran to import enriched nuclear fuel, but not allow Iran to make that fuel in facilities its government controlled.

See also Israeli Experts Suggest a Glass Half Full - Mitch Ginsburg (Times of Israel)

Dr. Ephraim Asculai, a veteran of both the IAEA and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, noted Sunday that the Iran accord "does not do anything to change that [breakout] time, except perhaps in a very minor way." He said the agreed-upon limitations of the interim agreement add only "a few days" onto the regime's clock, should it decide to sprint toward a bomb.

The former head of IDF military intelligence and current director of the Institute for National Security Studies, Amos Yadlin, told Army Radio that the value of the agreement, which he termed "neither the dream agreement nor the destruction of the Third Temple," would only be evident in six months' time. "The fall of this regime before it gets the bomb should be our objective," he said.

Gen. Hayden: Iran Deal 'Worst of All Possible Outcomes'

Sunday, 24 Nov 2013 11:21 AM

By Audrey Hudson

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Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden on Sunday criticized the Obama administration's deal with Iran saying it will only delay, not derail the country's nuclear program.

Hayden told CNN's "State of the Union" that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry "hit the pause button, rather than delete button."

"Practically the worst of all possible outcomes, because now what you have here is a nuclear capable state," Hayden said.

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"I think frankly that is Iran's bottom line, so what we're negotiating on is how much time we're putting between their nuclear capability and a nuclear weapon, a nuclear reality," Hayden said.

"And my fear is, this interim agreement, which doesn't roll back much of anything at all, becomes a permanent agreement," Hayden said.

The six-month agreement between the U.S. and other nations requires Iran to limit its nuclear activities in exchange for some relief on sanctions.

Hayden said the agreement contradicts the U.S. alignment with Sunnis Muslim and Israelis in the region, and that it will take "an awful lot of hand holding" to convince our allies this is the correct course of action.

Former Secretary of State John Negroponte also appeared on CNN and said that the U.S. should not consider lifting sanctions until after all of the demands to roll back the nuclear program have been met.

"I think what worries a number of people is that we might get salami-sliced and that the Iranians will engage in dilatory tactics and then seek some more momentary relief from sanctions," Negroponte said.

Nov 22, 2013

It’s 1938 all over again

Posted by Melanie Phillips

Neville Chamberlain declares 'Peace in our time' with Hitler, 1938

When Hassan Rouhani was elected President of Iran, western leaders declared, in the teeth of stark evidence to the contrary, that this man was a reformer. So they rushed to do a deal with him over Iran’s nuclear programme, considered by the west to be a threat to the free world.
But Rouhani does not run Iran. The man who actually calls the shots – the only man who matters – is Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Earlier this week, Khamenei said the Jews of Israel

‘cannot be called humans, they are like animals, some of them’

and that Israel was

‘the rabid dog of the region’.

What do you do with rabid dogs? That’s right: you put them down. That’s what Khamanei intends to do to the Jews of Israel. That’s why he says Israel is ‘doomed to collapse’ and why his regime has repeatedly declared it will wipe Israel ‘off the page of history’. Dehumanising the Jews: ring any bells? Know what happened next? But it’s not just the Jews who are in Iran’s sights. It’s the west, upon which it has been waging a self-declared war since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’ chanted the crowd in response. Yup, that’s the agenda. Always has been. And they mean it.
That’s why Iran wants nuclear weapons. That’s why its nuclear programme poses such a mortal threat not just to Israel but to Britain, America and Europe. That’s why Iran is the principal terrorist regime in the world and why it has murdered countless western victims. That’s why Britain, America and Europe said it was ‘unthinkable’ that Iran should be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
The most stunning aspect of the Iranian war against the west, however, is that since 1979 the west has effectively denied that it is taking place. When its civilians were murdered in terrorist atrocities with Iran’s fingerprints all over them, when its soldiers were blown up in Iraq by Iranian roadside bombs, when British Royal Navy personnel were kidnapped at gunpoint by Iranian forces on the high seas and held hostage for 13 days, the west turned the other way and refused to retaliate.
Iran has been protected throughout by a mysterious cloak of denial and paralysis. The west took the decision that acts of Iranian aggression and mass murder were to be absorbed without any response. For the west, war with Iran has always been seen as infinitely worse than war by Iran – regardless of the body count of its innocent victims. And now this suicidal farce has reached its last act – with the west tragically still in appeasement mode.
Obama’s White House and Britain’s Foreign Office, not to mention the apology for a statesman that is Baroness Ashton, the EU’s Foreign Affairs High Representative, are gagging to do a deal with the Khamenei regime – even though this has made it crystal clear that it will never yield at all on the central demand that it halt its progress towards nuclear weapons. What is currently on the table is a deal that will allow Iran to keep all its centrifuges and proceed inexorably to make its nukes, with the sanctions that have finally begun to bite being eased in return for precisely nothing. The west is now on the verge of handing to Iran on a plate what it once said was ‘unthinkable’. Obama, Ashton and Cameron might as well go to Tehran and wave a white flag.
There are persistent if unconfirmed reports that a deal with Iran was stitched up long ago by the very radical Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s most trusted and Iranian-born adviser. Whether or not this is true, what we are seeing playing out before our eyes could hardly be more disturbing. Presented with unambiguous evidence of the Supreme Leader’s genocidal prejudice towards the Jews of Israel, the Obama administration merely flapped the limpest of wrists. A spokesman said Khamenei’s remarks were ‘not helpful’, while Secretary of State John Kerry said: ‘Obviously we disagree with it profoundly’.
‘Disagree profoundly’ that the Jews are not human and like ‘rabid dogs’, eh. As if psychopathic racism is a debating-society proposition! But then, this is the same Kerry who told American law-makers to ignore any concerns the Israelis might express and to stop listening to them. After all, who cares what the putative victims of genocide say when they are only Jews who are still banging their own unhelpful drum! Only after Israel had expressed shock at the US response was Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN (who herself has a history of deeply questionable attitudes towards Israel) wheeled out to call Khamanei’s remarks ‘abhorrent’. Who do they think they're kidding? The hostility towards Israel being displayed by the Obama administration is as clear as it is shocking.
The rationale being offered by US officials in background briefings is no less jaw-dropping. This is how it goes. Measures to stop Iran from making the nuclear bomb will make the regime even more determined to make the bomb. So it’s smart not actually to stop Iran making the bomb. But not stopping it making the bomb, allowing the centrifuges to spin and enrichment to continue, also means it will make the bomb. So it’s win-win for Iran. World loses.
How’s that hope’n’change thingy working out for you right now?
We are indeed now facing the unthinkable. Not just that Iran is on the verge of being allowed to proceed to nuclear capability. The really unthinkable reality is that the enemies of the civilised world are not just to be found in Tehran. They are also in London, Brussels and Washington DC.