A lot of sound and fury, but it doesn’t signify nothing. It tells the Iranians that the thing the president values most is the talks themselves – not stopping their nuclear program, not cutting their regional ambitions down to size, not defending American allies. The Iranians understand that Obama’s greatest desire is to be able to say that his central foreign policy promise – that he can settle conflicts through diplomacy – is finally, five years on, being fulfilled.
For their part, the Iranians know that with the talks set to begin, they have what amounts to a blank check from the White House to make mischief. They know that Obama will now say and do little lest Iran play its trump card – leaving the talks. Obama is thus playing cuckold, willing to absorb repeated public humiliation so long as his partner doesn’t leave him.
That’s been clear since he first ran for president and said he’d go to talk with Tehran “unconditionally.”
Ham testified in the classified session that there was some peripheral chat about a demonstration, but that he and other commanders were always clear, from the beginning, that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. That’s the word they delivered to President Obama and his top advisers including then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Ham has been consistent both in sworn testimony and in his public comments.
So that was always the military’s take. It was as we all know not President Obama’s take. He was selling the attack as a demonstration in response to a movie for weeks after the fact. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sold the same line, and then hand-picked the Accountability Review Board to conduct a phony investigation into the attack.
Should it be taken over by the Navy? Space is more like the sea than like the air, and I argue in my book that a US Space Guard would be a better organization for many things currently being done (or neglected) by NASA, the Air Force and the FAA.
It’s looking like 2013 was the year that we lost it. But Obama and the Dems got what they wanted, an “end” to the war. They never want to win wars, except against their domestic enemies.