The Iran deal: it’s no big deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Check this out [hat tip: commenter “sdferr”]:

President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not “legally binding,” his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) obtained by National Review.

“The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document,” wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, in the November 19 letter.

Frifield wrote the letter in response to a letter Pompeo sent Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he observed that the deal the president had submitted to Congress was unsigned and wondered if the administration had given lawmakers the final agreement. Frifield’s response emphasizes that Congress did receive the final version of the deal. But by characterizing the JCPOA as a set of “political commitments” rather than a more formal agreement, it is sure to heighten congressional concerns that Iran might violate the deal’s terms.

As we parents used to say while watching our sons’ Little League games: good eye, Mike Pompeo, good eye!

I guess the administration thought no one would ever notice. And not too many did—for which I can’t blame them, because the audacity of this move is a bit astounding, even for Obama and Kerry.

So, what is the highly vaunted Iran deal? We already knew it was not a treaty; that would have required Congressional approval. We kind of thought it was an executive agreement, didn’t we? And it is an executive agreement—it’s just that all the “agreeing” seems to have been on the Obama side. We also already knew that, as an executive agreement, a subsequent president could change it or do away with it if he/she so desired, although that might be awkward. And we certainly knew that, even if signed by Iran (which I would imagine most people thought it had been), Iran would breach it without a moment’s hesitation if it wanted to, and no international tribunal saying it was “legally binding” would be able to enforce it.

It sounds as though Pompeo was on the ball with this one:

“The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose ”” and ramp up ”” our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments,” Frifield wrote to Pompeo.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the regime. “If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Rouhani said in August. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?”

I doubt that Iran thinks we (and Europe) are prepared to re-impose sanctions if they broach the deal’s conditions. And once the money has been freed under the deal, they’ve gotten quite a bit of what they wanted anyway.

Here are your pre-Thanksgiving instructions…

The New Neo Posted on by

…for talking to your progressive friends and relatives who might want to stir things up with you at the Thanksgiving table.

How to give offense without offense being taken. Easier said than done.

At Thanksgiving, I just try to keep my mouth shut when politics comes up. It does no good to argue under those conditions, and everyone at the table with me already knows my opinion anyway. Luckily—very luckily, and I hope my luck continues—politics has been a topic my greater family and I have steered clear of for the last decade or so.

Actually, my generation of the family (a small group, I might add) never really discussed politics very much anyway. It may be because we grew up witnessing recurrent and bitter verbal battles at the dinner/holiday table between the two wings of the family’s older generation—and by “two wings” I mean the Communist pro-Soviet wing versus the liberal Democrat wing. My parents were the latter.

A proposal to help the Syrian refugees stay within Sunni Arab countries

The New Neo Posted on by

Well worth reading, and containing some surprising and little-known facts:

Yet most of the Syrian refugees have been taken in not by Western countries but by Syria’s neighboring states: Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, whose capacity has been overwhelmed. Lebanon, with a population of around four million and a territory smaller than Maryland, is hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Young people are overrepresented in the refugee population, so that more than half of the school-aged children in Lebanon are now Syrian.

It is estimated that an extraordinary number of people have left Syria, or have been driven from their neighborhoods within Syria (this is from a year ago):

Already, more than 10 million Syrians ”” nearly half of the country’s population ”” are estimated to live as refugees, either living as internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Syria or having fled to Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan.

If you’re confused by the difference between the terms “displaced persons” (familiar from WWII) and “refugees,” you’re not alone. A great many of the Syrians we call refugees don’t actually fit the definition of “refugee” in the legal sense:

“A [refugee is a] person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…

That fits the Christian Syrians but I don’t see how it fits the Sunni Syrians. They appear to me to be displaced persons, both internal and international. However, if this is true, it doesn’t seem to matter much to those in charge right now.

More about displaced persons of the internal variety:

A forced migrant who left his or her home because of political persecution or violence, but did not cross an international border, is commonly considered to be the less well-defined category of internally displaced person (IDP), and is subject to more tenuous international protection…A migrant who fled because of economic hardship is an economic migrant.

Back to the plan in the original article:

Some 83 percent of Jordan’s refugees live in cities””around 170,000 in Amman alone. Their situation is clearly unsustainable: without access to international or state assistance, children grow up without education and families deplete their savings. The fate of the refugees who stay in the camps is similarly unfortunate: there, displaced Syrians languish under extreme dependency…

To avoid such outcomes, donor states and international organizations such as the UN have urged the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to permanently integrate Syrian refugees into their societies. But leaders in those countries are deeply resistant to that idea, because they perceive refugees as a threat to domestic employment and a drain on stretched budgets. Nor are Syrian refugees easily incorporated into the fragile ethnic and sectarian balances that are crucial for maintaining stability in all three countries.

Take a moment to think about it. Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, majority Muslim countries which are ethnically and culturally similar (quite a bit less so for Turkey, but still a lot more similar than Western Europe or the US) are keeping the refugees in camps because they are afraid of the consequences of integrating them into their countries. And yet we are not supposed to feel a similar reluctance? What’s more, my guess is that the given reasons for those countries’ refusal is not the entire story; they may be all too aware of the possibilities for disruption and even terrorism in their own countries.

To continue:

An effective refugee policy should improve the lives of the refugees in the short term and the prospects of the region in the long term, and it should also serve the economic and security interests of the host states.

Jordan offers one place to begin. There, a reconsidered refugee policy would integrate displaced Syrians into specially created economic zones, offering Syrian refugees employment and autonomy, incubating businesses in preparation for the eventual end of the civil war in Syria, and aiding Jordan’s aspirations for industrial development. Such an approach would align the interests of a host state with the needs of refugees and might prove broadly applicable to refugee crises elsewhere.

There’s much more. I have no idea whether this would work, but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing now—which means it’s probably never going to happen.

Cruz’s Iowa star rises…

The New Neo Posted on by

…as Carson’s sinks—a bit, anyway:

Mr. Cruz, the Republican Texas senator, was the choice of 23 percent of likely Republican caucusgoers in the new poll, from Quinnipiac University, following Mr. Trump at 25 percent and ahead of Mr. Carson at 18 percent. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was in fourth with 13 percent.

I expect a lot of up and down to continue in the Republican field. Notice this, too: “The margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.” That means the the three leaders in Iowa are pretty much neck and neck and neck.

The Times ascribes Cruz’s rise to his hardline on terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks. I suppose that might be true—even if it is in the Times. But I think it’s also the case that the concerted campaign to discredit Carson has drawn blood, and evangelicals who have growing doubts about Carson would be likely to veer to Cruz.

Turkey shoots down Russian military aircraft near Syria

The New Neo Posted on by

This story is still breaking, and it’s hard to sort out all the facts. But one fact that seems clear is that it has great potential to lead to a serious conflagration:

Turkish warplanes have shot down a Russian military aircraft on the border with Syria.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the Su-24 was hit by air-to-air missiles fired by Turkish F-16s while it was flying over Syrian territory.

But Turkish military officials said the plane was engaged after being warned that it was violating Turkish airspace.

Mr Putin described the incident as a “stab in the back” committed by “accomplices of terrorists”.

The crew ejected before the jet crashed in Latakia province, but Syrian rebels said at least one was dead.

It reminds me of those logic riddles where you have to figure out which of several groups is telling the truth: who is trustworthy, who is not? Sometimes the answer is: no one is trustworthy.

Turkey is a NATO country, and NATO is meeting. Where? In otherwise locked-down Brussels, of course.

Since the area over Syria is a war zone, there’s been more violence reported:

General staff spokesman Lt. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi, added that rebels in Syria fired on a Russian helicopter that was searching for the two pilots of the Su-24.

The shooting killed one crew member on the Mi-8 helicopter and forced it to land in neutral territory, he says.

Russia and Turkey are arguing over where the first plane was when shot down. Turkey says over Turkey, while Russia says over Syria. Putin said:

“Our pilots and our plane did not in any way threaten Turkey. It is quite clear,” he added.

“They were carrying out an operation against [Islamic State militants] in the mountains of northern Latakia, where militants who originate from Russian territory are concentrated. So they were carrying the key task of preventative attacks against those who could return to Russia at any time.”

I assume we’ll learn more as time goes on.

Brussels still on lockdown

The New Neo Posted on by

See this.

The Paris attacks did not accomplish all the terrorists’ goals. They had big plans for mass murder at the stadium, and perhaps even the assassination of the president of France. In that, the day resembled 9/11, where one of the hijacked airplanes was taken down by its passengers before it reached its likely Washington DC destination.

Despite that, both operations were a big success in terms of numbers of people killed (France being a smaller country than the US, the numbers killed there were even bigger than they might initially seem), shock and fear throughout the Western world, and jubilation among Muslim jihadis and their sympathizers. The more long-term repercussions from 9/11—the War on Terror, plus the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars—have been difficult for the terrorists, but thanks to the West’s decline and the influence of the left (two linked phenomena), jihadis have overcome that and strengthened their forces and influence lately.

So not only were the terrorist attacks in Paris wildly successful in those ways, but the continuing post-attack disruption of Brussels, one of the major capitals of the Western world, must be an extra source of tremendous jihadi joy. Brussels is not just a big European city, and home to many Muslim immigrants and their offspring, it is also a center for numerous international organizations of the Western world and what passes for international governing bodies. This list tells you some of them: NATO, for example, also Eurocontrol and many UN agencies. It is also the de facto capital of the EU, being the official seat of “the European Commission, Council of the European Union, and European Council, as well as a seat (officially the second seat but de facto the most important one) of the European Parliament” (more here).

The fact that a city of this magnitude and importance on a world scale can be so easily hog-tied is disturbing. I don’t have a solution—it’s not that I think it should be business as usual there right now. My solution would have been the obvious one of not letting the situation get to this point; for example, better police work and less denial, and a different immigration policy, to begin with. Now a city like Brussels is playing catch-up, and that’s a lot more difficult, particularly since its city government is particularly Balkanized and inefficient.

Obama, knave

The New Neo Posted on by

More evidence emerges that Obama knew what he was doing when he armed proto-ISIS groups in Syria, and did it anyway. In addition, the administration pressured intelligence to downplay the ISIS threat.

In a sane world, with a sane 2-party system, this would lead to impeachment at the very least.

In this world, probably a big yawn—except for us, the hysterical crazies who care about these sorts of things.

New Canadian government tells the people “take your refugee medicine, like good little boys and girls”

The New Neo Posted on by

Canada joins the liberal leaders of the US and much of Europe and plans to go ahead with the admission of many thousands of Syrian refugees:

Canada plans to fly in 900 Syrian refugees a day as of next month, according to media reports, as the defense minister said showing compassion for these people sends a message to Islamic State extremists.

Canadian officials said details of a plan to take in 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end would be announced Tuesday.

The Canadian media reports come amid fears that IS jihadists could slip into the country posing as refugees, in the wake of last week’s attacks in Paris that killed at least 130 people.

The bill is projected to be 1.2 billion Canadian dollars.

Canada has come up with a stupendous rationale for what they’re doing. The liberal Canadian Minister of Defence (who is a Sikh, by the way, with what appears to be a pretty strong resume) has made some statements that are similar to the reasoning of liberals in this country as well:

This crisis is not just about a humanitarian project,” he said in his opening remarks to military commanders and defense ministers from around the world.

“This also sends a great message to ISIS that you might create this environment for us, but we will not let you take advantage of this,” he said, using an alternate acronym for the IS group.

“By doing our part for this, we are actually hitting ISIS in a different way as well.”

I am certain the men of ISIS are quaking with fear and anxiety over this turn of events.

Oh, and the people of Canada? What do they think?:

The Ipsos poll, conducted exclusively for Global News, found that 60 per cent of Canadians disagree with Justin Trudeau’s election promise to relocate 25,000 people displaced largely due to the conflict in Syria.

Opposition is highest in Alberta with 70 per cent and lowest in Ontario with 56 per cent.

The major concern among those who oppose the Liberal’s refugee plan is security and the fear that appropriate security checks will be limited in order to hit Trudeau’s timeline.

The poll found 67 per cent of Canadians believe terrorists pretending to be refugees could enter our borders.

And those who don’t believe it could happen are mindboggingly stupid or perhaps stupendously trusting of the government and its competence and efficiency. In the US, when asked the same question about whether terrorists pretending to be refugees could enter the US, 81% agreed.

The liberal governments of both countries, however, could not care less.

No doubt Canada’s young and telegenic speechmaker Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is bringing his formidable experience as teacher and youth advocate to bear on this and other pressing issues.

[NOTE: I don’t know where to put this factoid, but I find it truly amazing that Richard Nixon seems to have correctly predicted Justin Trudeau’s future when he (Trudeau, not Nixon) was only a few months old:

…[Justin Trudeau, soon of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau] spent his early years at 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister’s residence in Ottawa. In fact, only months after his birth, American president Richard Nixon predicted his political future during a Canadian state dinner with Trudeau’s father. Nixon said, according to BBC news, “I’d like to toast to the future prime minister of Canada: To Justin Pierre Trudeau.”]

Cultural appropriation; cultural literacy

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, it’s so hard to keep the dictates of diversity straight! A person can be trying to do the right thing, and yet fail.

For example, yoga:

Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”

And then there are minority students (or the new catchword, “marginalized” students) who feel traumatized by being forced to listen to the bleatings of a white culture and tradition that disempowers them. One of them is Nissy Aya, a panelist participating in a “teach-in and speak-out” called “Race, Ethnicity and University Life”:

“I was accepted as the class of 2014,” Nissy Aya, CC ’16, said. “I will not receive a degree until 2016, if that is any marker of how hard it has been for me to get through this institution.”…

In addition to a lack of substantive support beyond “quick fixes” from the administration, Aya said that the the Core Curriculum further silences students of color by requiring students to read texts that ignore the existence of marginalized people and their histories.

“It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” Aya said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

A significant portion of Aya’s generation seems to be moving in the direction of supporting the practice of limiting speech that offends minorities: they support such efforts 40% to 58%, which while not a majority is still a much greater incidence of those wanting to limit such speech that any previous generation has demonstrated:

We asked whether people believe that citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to minority groups, or whether the government should be able to prevent people from saying these things. Four-in-ten Millennials say the government should be able to prevent people publicly making statements that are offensive to minority groups, while 58% said such speech is OK.

Even though a larger share of Millennials favor allowing offensive speech against minorities, the 40% who oppose it is striking given that only around a quarter of Gen Xers (27%) and Boomers (24%) and roughly one-in-ten Silents (12%) say the government should be able to prevent such speech.

I wonder how the polls would have gone if they had asked whether citizens should be able to make public statements that are offensive to majority groups; I doubt the response would have been anywhere near as high. My guess is that it’s only certain designated minority groups who have the right to be offended. My next question would be: what about when whites become a minority group, which is supposedly due to happen in a few years? Will they then be able to achieve minority group status (a different thing from merely being in the minority)? I think I know the answer: of course not.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a book by E. D. Hirsch entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Written in 1987 (the same year as Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind), it warns that, in the name of multiculturalism, American education had already failed to teach students the heritage and culture basic to Western civilization and being Americans. Here, Hirsch is quoting a passage written by Benjamin J. Stein, who describes his experience with teenage students in a series of Los Angeles focus groups that he ran in the high schools there. It’s from an essay entitled “The Cheerful Ignorance of the Young in LA” that appeared in the WaPo in 1983 [emphasis mine]:

I have no yet found one single student in Los Angeles, in either college or high school, who could tell me the years when World War II was fought [same for WWI and the Civil War]…

A few have known how many senators California has, but none have known how many Nevada or Oregon has…

Only two could even approximately identify Thomas Jefferson…None could name even one of the first ten amendments to the Constitution or connect them to the Bill of Rights…

On and on it went. On and on it goes…The kids I saw (and there may be lots of others who are different) are not mentally prepared to continue the society because they basically do not understand the society well enough to value it.

Let me repeat: that was written in 1983. The rot was already well established. By my calculations, these high school students are the parents of today’s students, or in some cases even the grandparents of today’s younger students. Not only are way too many of today’s students not getting a basic grounding in these things from their schools, but they’re probably not getting it from way too many of their parents, either. No wonder so many of them are willing to throw away freedom of speech in the name of protecting minorities’ feelings—they don’t een know what freedom of speech is or what it means, or why we have it in the first place.

Is the biggest news today really…

The New Neo Posted on by

…whether Trump was right about thousands of Muslims in Jersey City on TV celebrating 9/11?

One would think so.

I beg to differ. Why? Doesn’t the veracity of a candidate matter?

I think anyone who is paying attention to Trump already knows he exaggerates. Most people favoring him (and let me repeat that I am not one of them) support him because they believe he is strong on immigration and says the otherwise-unspeakable, and they don’t care if he plays fast and loose with a few facts along the way.

I also think anyone who has paid attention to 9/11 knows there are probably some Muslims in this country who celebrated 9/11, and knows there were indeed thousands and even millions who openly celebrated 9/11 round the world. That latter group are the ones we saw on TV. Anyone who is paying attention knows that the MSM and its fact-checkers also routinely distort what Trump and the other Republican candidates or Republicans in general say, and ignore exculpatory evidence about them. And anyone who is paying attention knows that the Republican nominee’s likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, is pretty good at exaggerating and lying herself.

Trump versus Hillary is one of my worst nightmares, although by no means the worst. But this particular statement of Trump’s really doesn’t change a thing for me, and I doubt it does for his opponents or even his supporters. Does it?

Brussels: raids net 16 suspects

The New Neo Posted on by

A total of 22 raids were carried out on Sunday across Brussels and Charleroi, Belgian prosecutor Eric van der Sypt told a news conference.

Police fired two shots at a car during an operation in Molenbeek, injuring one suspect who was later arrested…

Brussels has been on lockdown all weekend amid a manhunt for Abdeslam, who is suspected of being among the assailants who killed 130 people in Paris on Friday.

Mr Michel told reporters that authorities feared “an attack similar to the one in Paris, with several individuals who could also possibly launch several attacks at the same time in multiple locations”.

These raids are probably happening now because they’re based on intelligence gleaned from the Paris attacks, either directly from accomplices who were captured, or from their (or the dead terrorists’) cell phones or computers or acquaintances.

But why did it take until after the Paris attacks to do something about a situation in Brussels that has been allowed to fester and grow for many years, until it reached such a critical and destructive mass?

It appears that Abdeslam has eluded capture, although it’s impossible to know whether all the information—or even most of the information—we’re getting right now is accurate. Meanwhile, the city remains in lockdown.