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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (68121)	11/26/2013 8:34:47 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Worse Than Munich In 1938, Chamberlain bought time to rearm. In 2013, Obama gives Iran time to go nuclear. By Bret Stephens @StephensWSJ Bret.Stephens@wsj.com Nov. 25, 2013 6:47 p.m. ET To adapt Churchill : Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little. Britain and France's capitulation to Nazi Germany at Munich has long been a byword for ignominy, moral and diplomatic. Yet neither Neville Chamberlain nor Édouard Daladier had the public support or military wherewithal to stand up to Hitler in September 1938. Britain had just 384,000 men in its regular army; the first Spitfire aircraft only entered RAF service that summer. "Peace for our time" it was not, but at least appeasement bought the West a year to rearm. The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 was a betrayal of an embattled U.S. ally and the abandonment of an effort for which 58,000 American troops gave their lives. Yet it did end America's participation in a peripheral war, which neither Congress nor the public could indefinitely support. "Peace with honor" it was not, as the victims of Cambodia's Killing Fields or Vietnam's re-education camps can attest. But, for American purposes at least, it was peace. By contrast, the interim nuclear agreement signed in Geneva on Sunday by Iran and the six big powers has many of the flaws of Munich and Paris. But it has none of their redeeming or exculpating aspects. Consider: Britain and France came to Munich as military weaklings. The U.S. and its allies face Iran from a position of overwhelming strength. Britain and France won time to rearm. The U.S. and its allies have given Iran more time to stockpile uranium and develop its nuclear infrastructure. Britain and France had overwhelming domestic constituencies in favor of any deal that would avoid war. The Obama administration is defying broad bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress for the sake of a deal. As for the Vietnam parallels, the U.S. showed military resolve in the run-up to the Paris Accords with a massive bombing and mining campaign of the North that demonstrated presidential resolve and forced Hanoi to sign the deal. The administration comes to Geneva fresh from worming its way out of its own threat to use force to punish Syria's Bashar Assad for his use of chemical weapons against his own people. The Nixon administration also exited Vietnam in the context of a durable opening to Beijing that helped tilt the global balance of power against Moscow. Now the U.S. is attempting a fleeting opening with Tehran at the expense of a durable alliance of values with Israel and interests with Saudi Arabia. "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" is the title of a hilarious memoir by British author Toby Young —but it could equally be the history of Barack Obama's foreign policy. That's where the differences end between Geneva and the previous accords. What they have in common is that each deal was a betrayal of small countries—Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, Israel—that had relied on Western security guarantees. Each was a victory for the dictatorships: "No matter the world wants it or not," Iranian President Hasan Rouhani said Sunday, "this path will, God willingly, continue to the peak that has been considered by the martyred nuclear scientists." Each deal increased the contempt of the dictatorships for the democracies: "If ever that silly old man comes interfering here again with his umbrella," Hitler is reported to have said of Chamberlain after Munich, "I'll kick him downstairs and jump on his stomach." And each deal was a prelude to worse. After Munich came the conquest of Czechoslovakia, the Nazi-Soviet pact and World War II. After Paris came the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh and the humiliating exit from the embassy rooftop. After Geneva there will come a new, chaotic Mideast reality in which the United States will lose leverage over enemies and friends alike. What will that look like? Iran will gradually shake free of sanctions and glide into a zone of nuclear ambiguity that will keep its adversaries guessing until it opts to make its capabilities known. Saudi Arabia will move swiftly to acquire a nuclear deterrent from its clients in Islamabad; Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal made that clear to the Journal last week when he indiscreetly discussed "the arrangement with Pakistan." Egypt is beginning to ponder a nuclear option of its own while drawing closer to a security alliance with Russia. As for Israel, it cannot afford to live in a neighborhood where Iran becomes nuclear, Assad remains in power, and Hezbollah—Israel's most immediate military threat—gains strength, clout and battlefield experience. The chances that Israel will hazard a strike on Iran's nuclear sites greatly increased since Geneva. More so the chances of another war with Hezbollah. After World War II the U.S. created a global system of security alliances to prevent the kind of foreign policy freelancing that is again becoming rampant in the Middle East. It worked until President Obama decided in his wisdom to throw it away. If you hear echoes of the 1930s in the capitulation at Geneva, it's because the West is being led by the same sort of men, minus the umbrellas. Write to bstephens@wsj.com online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (68121)	11/27/2013 12:44:37 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Recommended By Blasher Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

An Executive Without Energy Responsibility for the mismanaged ObamaCare rollout lies in the Oval Office.By William A. Galston Nov. 26, 2013 7:13 p.m. ET On Jan. 28, 1986, over the objections of engineers who described a high probability of catastrophic failure, senior NASA managers authorized the launch of the Challenger. The shuttle exploded 73 seconds into its flight. In the last week of September 2013, a "pre-flight checklist" indicated that 41 of the 91 Healthcare.gov functions for which a key contractor was responsible were not working. Another checklist prepared a week later showed serious, and in five cases critical, defects in functions previously categorized as working. Nonetheless, the website was launched on Oct. 1 and failed almost immediately. These episodes have a common feature: In both, the pressure to meet deadlines overrode evidence that screamed for delay. But there is a key difference. President Reagan memorably eulogized those who died when the Challenger disintegrated, but he bore no responsibility for the disaster. The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, is President Obama's signature legislative achievement, and the trail of responsibility for its botched rollout ends at the Oval Office. Over the past century, we have come to see the presidency as the principal source of the legislative agenda that Congress considers, and we tend to regard the enactment of the president's program as the key test of his efficacy. In the process, we have played down the importance of presidential management. The travails of the Affordable Care Act have reminded us that this understanding of the presidency is distorted—and reflects a neglectful reading of the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, in defending the presidency that the proposed Constitution would establish, remarked that "the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration." The Federalist's co-author famously saw "energy in the executive" as a leading characteristic of good government, in large part because such energy is "essential to the steady administration of the laws." Section 3 of Article II of the Constitution states: The president "shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed." The occupant of the office is rightly (and revealingly) called the chief executive. In the early days of the Republic and for much of its history, executing and administering the law mostly involved enforcement. With the rise of the administrative state, a step prior to enforcement became essential. This involved translating Congress's will into terms specific enough to be workable and providing the means of administration. The chief executive's role expanded correspondingly to include ultimate responsibility for regulations and for the administrative activities of an increasingly complex executive branch beyond the White House. No president, of course, can possibly do all this directly. As chief executive, his core task is to establish managerial arrangements that transmit his priorities to subordinates and ensure the flow of accurate and timely information up the chain of command, all the way to him if necessary. Every experienced manager knows that, left to its own devices, the system will not always behave this way. The agents acting on the president's behalf may have their own priorities and may not deem it in their interest to share information with superiors, especially if the news is bad. So the president must lean against these perverse tendencies, not only by demanding regular and detailed progress reports but also by establishing a zone of safety and encouragement for truth-tellers. The president's subordinates at every level must be on notice that candor will be rewarded and the failure to transmit vital information will be punished. In recent weeks, it has become clear that President Obama failed to institute such arrangements. He rejected excellent advice from many quarters to appoint an overall project manager, reporting directly to the White House, who was a skilled executive with experience implementing complex information systems. The day-to-day links between the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services frayed, and responsibility for the website shifted four times before ending up in the hands of a midlevel bureaucrat at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services who lacked the authority to crack heads and break logjams. Although there were dozens of contractors, there was no prime contractor, a role for which CMS was ill-suited but filled by default. Making matters worse was a tension between politics and administration. The emerging narrative suggests that key regulatory decisions were delayed to avoid giving Republicans potent lines of attack before the 2012 election. Technology experts contend that crucial parameters were specified too late to permit adequate design and testing, and they are incredulous that testing of the overall system did not begin until just weeks before the launch. The American people are losing what little confidence they retained in the capacity of the national government to act effectively, and the president's standing as a competent manager of his own government has eroded badly. Unless President Obama can restore confidence in the government and in his leadership, the people may well hold the rest of his ambitious agenda at arm's length. online.wsj.com