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Judging by the rhetoric coming out of Tehran, John Bolton’s appointment as America’s National Security Advisor is the worst thing that ever happened. The Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council labeled Bolton’s appointment “a matter of shame.”  The Chairman of the Iranian Parliament's Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy declared,  "The use of hardline elements against the Islamic Republic of Iran shows that the Americans seek to exert more pressure on Iran.”First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri opined, “They (US officials) are wrong to assume that the Iranian nation will give in to their threats against the Islamic Republic.”  ...

Another nice catch from the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross brings into sharp relief another aspect of the danger to national security that Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail system created. Chief of staff Cheryl Mills lost her Blackberry in March 2010, a little over a year into Hillary’s tenure at State, which had been used with the unauthorized and non-secure homebrew Hillary server. She reached out to the State Department to inform a familiar figure of the loss: Records obtained by The Daily Caller through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit show [Cheryl] Mills revealed that she lost her Blackberry in...

The supposed “responsibility to protect” has taken America into a war on the side of the ultimate killers of innocents. (See also "Rebel Libya: ‘Brothers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, now is the time to defend your land!" on the Tatler.) In the absence of any evident national interest justification for bombing Libya, the Obama administration is said to have been motivated by the so-called responsibility to protect — or “R2P” per the wonkish English acronym. In American discussions, “R2P” has quickly come to be associated with Obama advisor Samantha Power. But “R2P” did not emerge full-grown from the...

Sarkozy, then-French FM say the choice is "between an Iranian bomb and a bombing of Iran;" France pressed EU to impose sanctions. French then-foreign minister Bernard Kouchner warned that there could be a war against Iran, according to a US diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks this week. The cable, dated September 18, 2007, explains that "three weeks after [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy publicly warned about the 'catastrophic choice between an Iranian bomb and a bombing of Iran'...Kouchner publicly observed that given Iran's behavior 'we must prepare for the worst, in other words, war,' and called for EU sanctions against Teheran."

The Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah was believed to have received long-range variants of the Scud-class ballistic missile. Western intelligence sources said Syria has been supplying Hizbullah with the Scud C missile, with a range of 550 kilometers. They said a Syrian shipment of Scud Cs to Lebanon was detected in early 2010 in a transfer arranged and financed by Iran. "There is a stockpile of [Hizbullah] weapons, short-range, medium-range and perhaps even long-range missiles, and we are concerned," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said. Kouchner, in a French radio interview on May 2, did not provide details of the Syrian missile transfer...

BACKSTORY 11-08-2002 Dateline: PARIS American billionaire investor George Soros, on trial in a 14-year-old insider trading case, told a court Friday that he didn't have privileged information when he bought shares in French bank Societe Generale. Soros and two other businessmen are on trial at the Paris Criminal Court, accused of benefiting from insider knowledge when they bought the bank's stock in 1988 before a failed takeover that pushed up the price. "I have been in business all my life and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn't," said the president of Soros Fund Management, in...