Thoughts  from Iran Deal Lies Have Consequences by Jonathan Tobin.

Fact The White House lied to the American people when it was selling the Iran nuclear deal to the media, Congress and the public matter? 

Source:  Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes in his interview with David Samuels as published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, May 8, 2016.

Consequence:  The  nuclear  deal  guarantees that the Islamist regime will eventually get their nuclear weapon. That puts Tehran in a position to make good on its quest for regional hegemony. And   the West  won’t be able to do much about it. 

The lie at the heart of Rhodes’ sales job for the negotiations and then the deal was that the Iranian presidential election in 2013 put in place a set of new leaders that were amenable to cutting a deal with the West that would, in President Obama’s phrase, allow Iran to “get right with the world.” But as even some administration figures have admitted in the last several months after deal began to be implemented, there are no “moderates” in Tehran. The disputes within the regime are between different sets of hard-liners whose differences have nothing to do with their support for the acquisition of a nuclear weapon or an aggressive foreign policy

 The support of the liberal mainstream media  helped  keep wavering Democrats in line behind the president. It was that factor that, cenabled the deal to squeak through Congress via a Senate filibuster.

The lie is of lasting importance because, if there are no real Iranian moderates and no sign whatsoever that the regime wants to change, then what Rhodes sold to the press was a fatal mistake that strengthens and empowers a dangerous regime. As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Mark Dubowitz noted ,

As a result of sunset clauses in the deal that see most of the key restrictions disappearing over an eight to 15 year period, Iran will be left with an industrial-size nuclear program with near-zero nuclear breakout, easier advance centrifuge-powered clandestine sneak out, an ICBM program and a more powerful economy increasingly immunized against sanctions. If the Iranian regime has not moderated by then, the United States will be facing a much more formidable and dangerous enemy and may have little choice but to use military force (as sanctions power will be severely degraded) to stop Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon. At that point, Iran will be stronger and the consequences of military action more devastating. In selling the Iran deal on a lie, Rhodes may have made war with Iran more not less likely.

 The bottom line here is that a nuclear Iran will have  the financial might to stand up to any belated Western attempt to undo Obama’s mistake. Obama and his “mind-meld partner” Rhodes endangered the security of the United States, Israel, and the West. That it was done on the strength of a falsehood and with the help of credulous, feckless Washington press corps is less important than the catastrophic nature of the mistake they have made.

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Rhodes to Perdition

An exposé on journalism in the Obama era

By JAMES TARANTO WSJ   May 6, 2016 

David Samuels’s lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, is meant to be a puff piece. In some ways it is: Rhodes comes across in the New York Times magazine story as very effective and powerful, but also as morally dubious. Even more dubious, in Samuels’s presentation, is the state of American journalism in the Obama era.

Consider this passage:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plot lines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.

To put it less flatteringly, Rhodes is a masterful propagandist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—an administration, like any large organization, needs people to speak to the public on its behalf, and to engage in such advocacy is not, in itself, dishonorable.

But lying to the public is. Samuels describes what he calls the “innovative campaign to sell” Obama’s Iran nuclear deal:

The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented . . . was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false. . . .

In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the “story” of the Iran deal began in 2013, when a “moderate” faction inside the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat regime “hard-liners” in an election and then began to pursue a policy of “openness,” which included a newfound willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its illicit nuclear-weapons program. The president set out the timeline himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015. . . . While the president’s statement was technically accurate . . . it was also actively misleading, because the most meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran had begun in mid-2012, many months before Rouhani and the “moderate” camp were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

This is the section of Samuels’s profile that has received the most attention, and understandably so. “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers,” writes John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.” Make that the Obama White House and the New York Times!

The campaign for the Iran nuclear deal will likely draw comparisons with the Bush administration’s effort to promote military action in Iraq. There are similarities, but also key differences. Before joining the Obama campaign in 2007, Rhodes had worked as “chief note-taker” for the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, where, Samuels writes, he “developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour.”

The Iraq effort was promoted using false information, but even Rhodes does not claim the deception was deliberate. As Samuels writes: “For Rhodes . . . the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.” The Obama administration decision-makers aren’t morons, just con artists.

Not that the public fell for the con. Most polls found the public skeptical of the deal, and the administration succeeded in attracting only the bare minimum of support (all from Democrats) necessary to avoid rejection by Congress. In those respects it is similar to ObamaCare, passed with only Democratic votes and over strong public opposition—and sold, as we now know, through a campaign of deliberate deception that implicated the president himself.

Another similarity with ObamaCare is that the administration can count on its allies in the press to relay its propaganda uncritically. The Samuels piece describes this in especially stark terms:

Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them—”

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

The fault here lies not with the ventriloquist but with journalists who decide to be dummies.

Samuels observes that we no longer live “in a world where . . . carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power.” That last qualification is telling: It suggests that the Washington press corps is partisan as well as (selectively) servile, and leaves open the possibility that the journalists would reclaim some of their adversary spirit in the event of a Trump administration.

That seems likely to us, though the effect might be surprisingly similar. Candidate Trump has proved rather effective at using the press’s hostility to advance his “narrative” and “messaging.”

Obama Aide Ben Rhodes to New York Times:

 Iran Deal Built on Lie

The Obama administration misled Americans about supposed "moderates" that officials were dealing with in the Iranian theocracy to forge a nuclear proliferation deal — all to make the deal more palatable to the American public, according to The New York Times. 

Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, even boasted about how he helped create the false narrative to mask that Iranian hard-liners were really calling the shots, the Times reports.

Rhodes concedes to the Times that the so-called moderate regime is not moderate at all, commenting: "We're not betting on it."

"We created an echo chamber," he tells the Times in a piece to appear in the Sunday magazine of the newspaper. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say," he adds about so-called experts praising the deal in the press. 

According to the Times, when Rhodes was asked about his misleading version of the deal, Rhodes said, "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this."

"We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like [the anti-nuke group] Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else," he tells the Times. 

"So we knew the tactics that worked. We drove them crazy," he tells the Times, referring to Republicans and other opponents of the deal, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Leon Panetta, former secretary of defense, tells the Times the hard-line regime and its military arm was still in charge at the time of the Iran deal negotiations — despite what the administration said.

"There was not much question that the Quds Force and the supreme leader ran that country with a strong arm, and there was not much question that this kind of opposing view could somehow gain any traction," he tells the Times.

"I think the whole legacy that he [Obama] was working on was, 'I'm the guy who's going to bring these [Mideast] wars to an end, and the last goddamn thing I need is to start another war.'" 

Without naming him, Panetta suggested to the Times that Rhodes was one of several on Obama's staff who told the president only what he wanted to hear.

"They thought their job was not to go through this open process of having people present all these different options, but to try to force the process to where they thought the president wanted to be," he recalled. 

"They'd say, 'Well, this is where we want you to come out.' And I'd say, '[expletive], that's not the way it works.' "

Obama Advisers’ Gloating Admission to Manipulating Public Over Iran Nuclear Deal Prompts Uproar Among Washington Media, Pundits  Lea Speyer  Algemeiner MAY 6, 2016

http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/05/06/obama-advisors-gloating-admission-to-manipulating-public-over-iran-nuclear-deal-prompts-uproar-among-washington-media-pundits/

Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes. Photo: White House.

A senior White House official has caused an uproar among journalists, political pundits and policy officials after he admitted to manipulating the public with “misleading or false” information to garner support for last July’s nuclear deal with Iran.

In a New York Times Magazine profile published on Thursday of President Obama’s foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes, journalist David Samuels writes, “The way in which most Americans have heard the story of the Iran deal presented — that the Obama administration began seriously engaging with Iranian officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country — was largely manufactured for the purpose for selling the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to take away from those particulars are often misleading or false.”

Rhodes, who heads the communications team tasked with selling the Iran nuclear deal to the public, gloats about how he was able to create an “echo chamber” where journalists and think-tankers would discuss and report on the deal based almost exclusively on information provided by the White House. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them,” Rhodes said.

“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked,” he said.

Regarding Washington reporters, Rhodes said, “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Reflecting on this, Samuels writes, “In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once.”

New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, writing in a Thursday oped, said the White House “played us for fools” to sell the Iran deal, adding, “Congratulations, liberals of the Washington press corps and elite organizations: You’re a bunch of suckers. We all know this because the Obama White House just told us so.”

Omri Ceren, a senior staffer at The Israel Project (TIP), a group which strongly opposed the Iran deal, took to Twitter to attack Rhodes. “When Rhodes and company brag about how they manipulated their favorite journalists, you don’t get the sense they respect those journalists,” one tweet read. In another post, Ceren poked fun at journalists and policy advisers who still fail to challenge Rhodes.

Reporters and arms control experts in Rhodes echo chamber all echoing same defensive talking points this morning, which is sort of neat.

— Omri Ceren (@cerenomri) May 6, 2016

Michael Doran — former White House senior director in the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and current Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC — also took to Twitter, writing, “Obama’s favorite aspiring novelist spun tales about Iran for the press, which repeated them uncritically.”

Thomas E. Ricks, a former Washington Post military correspondent, who says he voted twice for Obama, wrote in an oped for Foreign Policy magazine that Rhodes comes across as completely “unsympathetic” for his actions, “which makes it all the more devastating.” His article, titled “A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the a**hole who is the president’s foreign policy guru,” calls out Rhodes for coming off “like an overweening little schmuck” and “a real a**hole.”

Referring to the Washington propaganda machine during the Vietnam War, Ricks warns, “Fact check: Obama’s hasn’t been an original foreign policy as much as it has been a politicized foreign policy. And this Rhodes guy reminds me of the Kennedy smart guys who helped us get into the Vietnam war. Does he know how awful he sounds? Kind of like McGeorge Bundy meets Lee Atwater.”

Major Western powers and Iran are currently working to finalize the implementation of the nuclear agreement signed in July. In September, Republican-led efforts in the Senate to block the deal failed, with 58 senators voting against and 42 in favor of the agreement.

The Holocaust and Human Rights: Lessons Learned and Actions to Be Taken

Irwin Cotler 5-1-16

http://www.algemeiner.com/2016/05/01/the-holocaust-and-human-rights-lessons-learned-and-actions-to-be-taken/

The gates of Auschwitz. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

I write at a historic moment of remembrance and reminder, of witness and warning.

We are on the eve of two historic anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the implementation of the Nuremberg Race Laws, which served as prologue and precursor to the Holocaust; and the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which served as the foundation for the development of contemporary international human rights and humanitarian law.

This historic juncture of the double entendre of Nuremberg — the Nuremberg of jackboots and the Nuremberg of judgements — will be the theme of an international legal symposium on May 3 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. It will be followed the next day by the March of the Living, when some 10,000 young people and survivors will march in remembrance, and in solidarity, from the gates of Auschwitz to Birkenau.

And so, we must ask ourselves two questions: What have we learned? What must we do?

Lesson One: The Danger of Forgetting — The Responsibility of Remembrance

The first lesson is the importance of zachor — of remembrance of the victims defamed, demonized, and dehumanized as prologue and justification for genocide, and where the mass murder of six million Jews, and of millions of non-Jews, is not a matter of abstract statistics.

As one says at such moments of remembrance, “Unto each person there is a name, each person has an identity, each person is a universe,” recalling that “whoever saves a single life it is as if he or she has saved an entire universe.” And so, the abiding imperative which we must imbibe and act upon is: We are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other’s destiny.

Lesson Two: The Danger of State-Sanctioned Incitement to Hate and Genocide — The Responsibility to Prevent

The second enduring lesson is that the Holocaust succeeded not only because of the industry of death — of which the crematoria are a cruel reminder — but because of the Nazis’ state-sanctioned ideology of hate. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, where it all begins. As the Canadian Supreme Court affirmed, “The Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” Indeed, it is this genocidal incitement — as the Supreme Court of Canada again affirmed in the Mugesera case — that constitutes a crime in and of itself, whether or not genocidal acts follow.  

Lesson Three: The Danger of Old/New Antisemitism — The Responsibility to Combat

The third lesson is the danger of antisemitism, the oldest and most enduring of hatreds and the most lethal. If the Holocaust is a metaphor for radical evil, antisemitism is a metaphor for radical hatred.

From 1941 to 1944, 1.3 million people were murdered at Auschwitz — of whom 1.1 million were Jews, recalling Elie Wiesel’s dictum that “the Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were victims.”

Let there be no mistake about it: Jews died at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism did not die there. As we have learned only too tragically, while it begins with Jews, it doesn’t end with Jews.

Lesson Four: The Danger of Holocaust Denial — The Responsibility to Repudiate False Witness

The Holocaust denial movement — the cutting edge of antisemitism old and new, is not just an assault on Jewish memory in its accusation that the Holocaust is a hoax and that the Jews fabricated this hoax; rather, it constitutes an international criminal conspiracy to cover up the worst crimes in history. Simply put, the Holocaust denial movement whitewashes the crimes of the Nazis, as it excoriates the “crimes” of the Jews. And now, in an inversion of the Holocaust, Israel is labelled as a genocidal state, and the Jews are the new Nazis.

Lesson Five: The Danger of Indifference and Inaction in the Face of Mass Atrocity — The Responsibility to Protect

The fifth painful and poignant lesson is that these Holocaust crimes resulted not only from state-sanctioned incitement to hatred and genocide, but from crimes of indifference, from conspiracies of silence — with the international community as bystander. What makes the Holocaust, and more recently the Rwandan Genocide, so unspeakable, is not only the horror of the genocide itself — which is horrific enough — but that these genocides were preventable.

Let there be no mistake about it: Indifference and inaction always means coming down on the side of the victimizer, never on the side of the victim. In the face of evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself.

Lesson Six: The Danger of Impunity — The Responsibility to Bring War Criminals to Justice

If the last century — symbolized by the Holocaust — was the age of atrocity, it was also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators — including in the Nuremberg Trials — were brought to justice. Just as there must be no sanctuary for hate and no refuge for bigotry, there must be no base or sanctuary for these enemies of humankind. Impunity only emboldens and encourages the war criminals and war crimes.

Lesson Seven: The Danger of La trahison des clercs — The Betrayal of the Elites: The Responsibility to Speak Truth to Power

The seventh lesson is that the Holocaust was made possible not only because of the “bureaucratization of genocide,” as Robert Lifton put it — and as the Nazi desk murderer Adolf Eichmann personified it — but because of the trahison des clercs, the complicity of the elites, including physicians, church leaders, judges, lawyers, engineers, architects, and educators.

Nuremberg crimes were also the crimes of the Nuremberg elites. It is our responsibility, then, to speak truth to power, to hold power accountable to truth. The double entendre of Nuremberg — of Nuremberg racism and the Nuremberg Principles — must be part of our learning as it is part of our legacy.

Lesson Eight: The Danger of the Assault on the Vulnerable and Powerless — The Responsibility To Intervene

The eighth lesson concerns the vulnerability of the powerless and the powerlessness of the vulnerable. Indeed, it is revealing, as Prof. Henry Friedlander pointed out in his work titled, “The Origins of Nazi Genocide,” that the first group targeted for killing were the Jewish disabled.

It is our responsibility, to give voice to the voiceless and to empower the powerless, be they the disabled, poor, elderly, women victimized by violence, or vulnerable children — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

Lesson Nine: The Danger of the Bystander Community – The Responsibility of Rescue

The ninth lesson is the remembrance and tribute that must be paid to the rescuers, the Righteous Among the Nations, of whom Raoul Wallenberg is metaphor and message, who demonstrated that one person with the compassion to care and the courage to act can confront evil, resist, and transform history. Tragically, the man who saved so many was not himself saved by so many who could have done so. We have a responsibility to help discover the fate of this great hero of the Holocaust, whom the United Nations called the greatest humanitarian of the twentieth century. An International Scholars Roundtable, in May 2016, will attempt to do precisely that.

Lesson Ten: The Legacy of Holocaust Survivors

We must always remember — and celebrate — the survivors of the Holocaust, the true heroes of humanity. For they witnessed and endured the worst of inhumanity, but somehow found, in the depths of their own humanity, the courage to go on, to rebuild their lives as they helped build our communities.

Together with them, we must remember — and pledge — that never again will we be indifferent to incitement and hate; never again will we be silent in the face of evil; never again will we indulge racism and antisemitism; never again will we ignore the plight of the vulnerable; and never again will we be indifferent in the face of mass atrocity and impunity.

We will speak up — and act — against racism, against hate, against antisemitism, against mass atrocity, against injustice, and against the crime of crimes whose name we should shudder to mention: genocide.

Irwin Cotler is Professor of Law (Emeritus) at McGill University and Founding Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. A former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada and long time Member of Parliament, he is Co-Chair with Professor Alan Dershowitz, of the forthcoming international legal symposium: “The Double Entendre of Nuremberg: The Nuremberg of Hate and the Nuremberg of Justice.”

Time to take aim at Iranian missiles

By MICHAEL MAKOVSKY and CHARLES WALD 

POLITICO   04/12/16 

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2016/04/shoot-down-iranian-ballistic-missiles-000089

Sanctions won't check Iran's ambitions anymore. It's time to think bigger.

Iran is back at its old game — testing boundaries and provoking its neighbors and the West — this time through a spate of recent ballistic missiles launches. In response, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke last week of offering Iran some vague “new arrangement” to address its ballistic missile program, and many in Congress have resorted to a tried-and-true response: more sanctions.

But Iran’s provocations are taking place in a new political and strategic context, one fundamentally altered by last summer’s nuclear agreement and the region’s spiraling conflicts. In this context, warmed-over U.S. policies, however well intentioned, are inadequate. The best chance to stop Tehran’s ballistic missile program, box in its ambitions and begin to restore U.S credibility now comes from boosting America’s ballistic missile defense capabilities, and those of our regional allies, and threatening to shoot down any ballistic missile Iran launches in the future. If credibly delivered, such a threat would compel Tehran to back off its tests.

Since the signing of the nuclear agreement in July, Iran has conducted at least three sets of tests of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, which can carry nuclear weapons and, in some cases, reach not only Israel and Turkey, but our East European allies. The first two launches violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which bans Iran from such activities. However, the third set of test fires occurred only several weeks ago, after the resolution implementing the nuclear deal had taken effect. This new resolution merely calls on Iran not to undertake such activities, rather than prohibiting them.

The United States and its partners dealt with previous Iranian infractions by levying ever more stringent sanctions on the rogue nation. Those sanctions were partly aimed to pressure Iran to enter negotiations, which eventually led to the nuclear deal. Under that agreement, the legal strictures on Iran’s ballistic missile activity, among other non-nuclear issues, have been eased, and Tehran has taken advantage of that by expanding its ballistic missile activity — despite, or because of, the imposition of some new sanctions.

Our responses to these Iranian provocations have so far been insufficient. Heaping more unilateral sanctions on Iran now will have only limited impact. And Iran rejected Kerry’s vague offer. In the post-nuclear deal era, a new set of responses to Iranian belligerence is needed.

The U.S. must respond in a way that both effectively punishes Iranian behavior and reassures our allies. That response should come in the form of investment and expansion of a capability too long ignored by the Obama administration: ballistic missile defense.

We already have the necessary capabilities to shoot down anything Iran can put in the air, or destroy on the ground what it seeks to put in the air. Our first line of missile defense is Aegis ship-based systems on U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. These are backed up by land-based Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Aerial Defense batteries operated by all our Middle East allies. In December, an additional ground-based Aegis site came online in Romania. Each of these systems was designed to intercept missiles of equal or longer range, and more sophisticated countermeasures, than anything in Iran’s existing arsenal.

Linked with U.S. radar stations in Israel, Qatar and Turkey to detect and track launches specifically by Iran, these BMD systems can fire and guide multiple surface-to-air interceptors to destroy an Iranian missile in flight above the atmosphere or in its terminal phase — either with a head-on collision or a shotgun-like area blast. Overall, this creates overlapping layers of defense against the medium-range ballistic missiles Iran has recently tested. This network could also intercept intermediate-range ballistic missiles that could reach Europe if Iran’s program continues apace.

Even as Iran doubles down on missiles, the United States and our allies are in good position to maintain our defensive edge. The Navy is already working to increase its fleet of Aegis-capable ships by more than a third, and to equip them with longer-range and more accurate interceptors. Meanwhile, the United States and its allies are busy procuring additional THAAD batteries.

It should be U.S. policy to utilize its existing BMD capabilities, starting immediately, to intercept the short- and medium-range ballistic missiles Iran has been testing and make painfully clear to Iran’s leaders that we are prepared to do so. Previous declarations and demonstrations of U.S. forces have compelled Iran to change course. For example, in early 2012, Iran backed down from its threat to close the Strait of Hormuz after the United States declared such a move a red line and sent a second U.S. Navy carrier group through the strait. Also, Iran altered its nuclear program, finding a way to limit its stockpile of enriched uranium, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2012 drew a red line over a specific stockpile level.

Intercepting Iran’s missiles would deny Iran the technical benefits of successful test launches, blunting its progress on longer range, more survivable and more accurate missiles — including an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States later this decade. It would also send an unmistakable signal to Iran and its allies, as well as to our own nervous allies, of the superiority of U.S. military capabilities and our willingness to use them.

In the face of an aggressive, determined and strategic Iran, the United States also must begin investing in a more robust regional BMD capability. We have invested more than $3 billion to co-develop Israel’s multi-layered air defense system of Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow. It is time to invest in similar cooperation on BMD capabilities with other allies threatened by the growing Iranian menace.

The U.S. government should explore a coordinated BMD system that ties in the Gulf Cooperation Council, Jordan, Egypt and Israel. Such a network could integrate in real time dispersed THAAD, Arrow, Patriots, and sea- and land-based Aegis systems to provide a comprehensive defense against Iranian threats.

We have the capability to slow, and even set back, Iran’s ballistic missile program. Unfortunately, we lack a policy to utilize this capability. Sen. Ted Cruz recently declared that as president he would threaten to shoot down Iranian ballistic missile test firings, but so far no other presidential candidate of either party or other leading policymakers have done so. Unless we leave no doubt about our readiness and willingness to shoot down these missiles, we not only encourage the further dissolution of U.S. influence and our allies’ insecurity but ultimately allow Iran to continue developing missiles that could eventually reach the United States.

Gen. Charles Wald, Retired, is former deputy commander of U.S. European Command and senior adviser to JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy. Michael Makovsky, a former Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, is chief executive officer of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

JINSA Launches New IDF Rising Officers Program

 

JINSA is proud to announce the successful completion of its inaugural IDF Rising Officers Program. The program educates a select handful of IDF field officers about the cultural, institutional, economic and historical factors that drive U.S. foreign and defense policy. The 10-day course took place April 10-20 in Washington, D.C. Fifteen IDF officers were selected by JINSA for this unique program from a pool of candidates determined by the Israeli War College as promising, high-potential future leadership of the IDF. All participants are majors who have been approved or likely will be approved for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and who are current participants in the Israeli War College's Command and Staff course. The officers included commanders of infantry units, pilots of squadrons, naval officers, intelligence officers, and officers who will be dealing directly with issues regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship in their next posts. Over twenty-five instructors, including current and former high-ranking senior officials and military officers, led sessions in the classroom, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill and at U.S. military bases.