Free Republic

Nero “fiddled,” so they say, while Rome burned. Today, this epigram all too accurately describes President Obama’s approach to U.S. national security. For five years, he has resolutely consigned foreign and defense issues to the bottom of his policy agenda, resulting in increasing disarray both domestically and abroad. The United States needs strategic thinking internationally, and we are getting the opposite. Mr. Obama’s personal Rome, the Affordable Care Act, is indeed self-immolating, and he responds by giving speeches (his version of playing Nero’s cithara) rather than taking command to save his eponymous program before the administration itself is consumed. Domestic...

A USA Today/Pew Poll found that 32 percent of Americans approve of the agreement and 43 percent disapprove, while four refused to answer or didn’t know. A majority of those who have heard about the accord said Iranian leaders aren’t seriously addressing international concerns about their nuclear program, i.e. 62 percent versus 29 percent who said they are.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that roughly 1.6 million Americans have enrolled in ObamaCare so far. The not-so-good news is that 1.46 million of them actually signed up for Medicaid. If that trend continues, it could bankrupt both federal and state governments. Medicaid is already America’s third-largest government program, trailing only Social Security and Medicare, as a proportion of the federal budget. Almost 8 cents out of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicaid. That’s more than $265 billion per year.

The gunning down of Hajj Hassan Hollo al-Laqqis, a high-ranking Hizballah commander and close crony of Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, raised the stakes of the clandestine war running between Saudi Arabia and Iran, two weeks after two suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the Iranian embassy in Beirut. The Hizballah officer was killed by five shots to the head and throat in the underground parking lot of his home in the Hadath neighborhood southwest of Beirut, when he returned home from work after midnight Tuesday, Dec. 3. The Hizballah statement, which said: “Israel is automatically held responsible for the crime,” described...

Entire sanctions regime ‘will collapse within months,’ unnamed sources tell Israeli TV; US has shown it has ‘no red lines’ on Tehran Unnamed Israeli officials denounced US President Barack Obama on Friday night for presiding over failed negotiations with Iran under which they said the sanctions pressure on Tehran is collapsing and the Islamic Republic has been granted the right to enrich uranium. The entire wall of sanctions, painstakingly constructed over years, is already crumbling and “will collapse within months,” the officials were quoted as saying. In comments reported by Israel’s Channel 2 news and attributed to unnamed senior Israeli...

House Intelligence Committee member Michelle Bachmann said that Iran’s nuclear facilities “must be bombed.” In a speech at a Zionist Organization of America gala on Sunday night, Bachmann said that the Geneva deal reached between Iran and world powers at the weekend will severely limit Israel’s ability to operate freely in the interests of its self defense. Bachmann said, “It may be incumbent upon the Prime Minister to make a decision he has no desire to make, and that would be to bomb facilities, that must be bombed, in Iran.” The former presidential candidate framed the deal as a deliberate...

Riffing on Hanukkah holiday, prime minister says Israel will be a ‘light unto the nations’ in dealing with Tehran should diplomacy fail Melding the Hanukkah holiday and foreign affairs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu solemnly vowed to serve as a “light unto the nations” and act against Iran’s nuclear program should diplomacy fail Thursday night. Speaking at the Western Wall for a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony, Netanyahu compared Iran’s nuclear program to a darkness that would be forced out by Israel, referencing a popular children’s song for the holiday. “We came to drive out the darkness, and the largest darkness that threatens...

JERUSALEM — Just after the signing ceremony in Geneva on Sunday, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran declared that the world had recognized his country’s “nuclear rights.” He was right. The agreement Iran reached with the so-called P5+1 — the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia, plus Germany — does not significantly roll back Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Iran made only cosmetic concessions to preserve its primary goal, which is to continue enriching uranium. The agreement represents a failure, not a triumph, of diplomacy. With North Korea, too, there were talks and ceremonies and agreements — but then there was the...

The metro bomb squad was dispatched to the Montavilla United Methodist Church in Southeast Portland Tuesday on a report of a suspicious device. A witness said bomb technicians used a remote-controlled robot to detonate what appeared to be a pipe bomb. A witness, Benjamin Kerensa, said an officer told him the device was a pipe bomb.

Iran will pursue construction at the Arak heavy-water reactor, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif was quoted as saying on Wednesday, despite a deal with world powers to shelve a project they fear could yield plutonium for atomic bombs. France, one of the six powers that negotiated Sunday's interim pact with Iran to curb its disputed nuclear program, said in response to Zarif's statement that Tehran had to keep to what was agreed in the Geneva talks. The uncompleted research reactor emerged as one of several big stumbling blocks in the marathon negotiations, in which Iran agreed to restrain its atomic...

The security cabinet held a special meeting Tuesday to consider the implications of the new nuclear accord with Iran, the Syrian war, Hizballah and other current threats to national security. The session was unusually long and is expected to be carried over to Wednesday. IDF and intelligence chiefs gave the ministers special briefings.

Certain US media suddenly this week claimed to have broken the news of a secret track used by President Barack Obama for secret negotiations with Tehran through Oman’s Sultan Qaboos. debkafile and DEBKA Weekly were in fact way ahead of the field. We uncovered the Qaboos track on Aug. 26, 2013 and were on the trail of back-channel communications between Washington and Tehran on Jan.26, more than a year earlier, when he exposed the first secret rendezvous between US and Iranian emissaries in Baghdad. For a while, they continued intermittently at venues in Ankara and Vienna (next door to the...

“For the first time in nearly a decade we have halted parts of Iran’s nuclear program” announced a jubilant Barack Obama after the news of the just-signed Geneva six-month interim agreement with Iran. But the American goal for the accord was that the Iranians not “advance their program” of building a uranium nuclear bomb (and perhaps a plutonium bomb too); the apparent deal exactly permits such advancement, plus sanctions relief to Tehran worth about $9 billion. This wretched deal offers one of those rare occasions when comparison with Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 is valid. An overeager Western government,...

The first preliminary nuclear deal the six world powers (US, Russia, China, UK, France and German) signed with Iran before dawn Sunday, Nov. 24, at the end of a four-day marathon, failed to address the most questionable aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, i.e. its clandestine military dimensions. The accord confined itself to aspects of uranium enrichment and stockpiles. UN inspections were expanded – but not applied, for instance, to Iran’s concealed nuclear sites - or even the Parchin military base where Iran is suspected of having tested nuclear-related explosions. Israel, the Gulf States and others are therefore highly dubious of...

Economics minister and Jewish Home leader says Israel cannot ‘sit idly by’ while world allows Iran to be 6 weeks from the bomb Economics and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) said Saturday that a “bad deal” with Iran on curbing its nuclear program would “increase the need for Israeli [military] action.” “If there will be a deal which would allow Iran to have the ability to ‘break out’ and build a bomb within six weeks, we cannot sit idly by in this situation and we will examine all the options,” Bennett told Channel 2 Saturday evening.

Bilateral talks were still dragging on up to midnight Saturday, Nov. 23 in Geneva, well after the deadline the US and European negotiators gave Iran for an interim accord on its nuclear program. This indicated that four of the six powers had reached the limit of their concessions. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif retorted that his government would not bow to threats, but stayed. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said the same difficulties encountered two weeks ago still remained. US Secretary John Kerry arranged to be in London Sunday.

American and European negotiators have given Iran until Saturday night, Nov. 23, the fourth day of negotiations in Geneva, to reach agreement on an interim nuclear deal, debkafile’s sources report. After that deadline, those delegations plan to cut the talks short and leave. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif retorted that his government would not bow to threats. The US-EU deadline indicated that Washington, Paris, London and Berlin had reached the limit of their concessions to Iran. UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said when he arrived in Geneva that the two difficulties encountered two weeks ago still remained. The Russian and...

<p>OKLAHOMA CITY -- A burrito caused a minor scare at an Oklahoma City police briefing station after a man brought the foil-wrapped object in for analysis.</p> <p>Oklahoma City Police Capt. Dexter Nelson says a man discovered a Thermos-type container in his lawn Thursday afternoon and brought it to a police briefing station.</p>

Secretary of State John Kerry travels to Geneva Friday to join Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who arrived in Geneva Friday for an effort to end the standoff in the talks between the six major powers and Iran on an interim accord for Iran’s nuclear program. Both will try and narrow the differences between the parties and bring them closer to an agreement. While in the Swiss city, Lavrov also plans to meet the UN special envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi and US diplomats Monday to work on preparations for an international peace conference on Syria.

The Iranian negotiators face the delegations of six world powers in Geneva Thursday, Nov. 21, with strict orders not to give ground on the two major sticking points holding up a first-step deal on their nuclear program: The heavy water reactor under construction at Arak for producing plutonium and Iran’s “right” to uranium enrichment. If Iran gains those two points, whatever concessions its negotiators may come up with are worthless, because they will leave Tehran in possession of two optional nuclear weaponizing tracks instead of one - plutonium as well as enriched uranium. Debkafile’s sources report that Tehran is fighting...