Why the Iran Deal Ensures War

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The Iran agreement will remake the Middle East — for the worse.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 
Civilians survey damage after an air strike in Douma, Syria. (Abd Doumany/AFP/Getty) Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425107/why-iran-deal-ensures-war?target=author&tid=900280
Civilians survey damage after an air strike in Douma, Syria. (Abd Doumany/AFP/Getty)

There are several scenarios the Obama administration may be entertaining as it pursues its diplomacy in the Middle East. It may believe that the new agreement with Iran will lead to “engagement” with reform-minded theocrats. The idea is that this will insidiously liberalize the regime, empower a younger generation of pro-Western reformers, and put the theocracy on “an arc of history” back into the “family of nations.” Or perhaps an Obama-inspired second green revolution will overthrow the regime, and we will see a Euro-socialist Iranian republic renounce nuclear weapons — or at least, having inherited custodianship of the existing arsenal, oversee it in the fashion of democratic Israel or France.

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Obama: Nihilist or Just Incompetent?

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Who knows; the only mystery left is how much damage will the last gasp of 2016 bring? 

by Victor David Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via PJ Media
Photo via PJ Media

Three things so far have saved Obama’s otherwise unfortunate tenure; all came over his own objections.

One, after the 2010 midterm tsunami, the newly elected House Republicans put a lid on spending — ratified by the wins of 2014. Sequestration is a crude blunderbuss and slashed defense, but it at least slowed down Obama’s disastrous serial $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. In spending terms, it certainly has vastly reduced the government’s share of GDP. We know that because Obama occasionally brags of falling deficits, as if to say, “Thank you for not letting me be entirely myself.” When he leaves office, we will have $20 trillion in debt and nearly 100 million permanently out of the work force, as well as uncontrolled and unaddressed entitlement spending on life support through zero-interest rates. But we will still be alive for now, thanks to sequestration. Shutting down the government may have been politically unwise (or not — given the 2014 midterm elections [1]), but it kept the debt financeable.

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Pope Francis’s Hypocritical Politicking

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by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Photo via usnews.com
Photo via usnews.com

Unpopular though it may be to say so, I, for one, grew exhausted by the non-stop pronouncements /commentaries of Pope Francis. The spiritual leader of 1 billion Catholics — roughly half of the world’s Christians — Francis just completed a high-profile, endlessly publicized visit to the United States.

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The Underbelly Of The California Drought

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by Victor Davis Hanson // Eureka

Almaden Reservoir in San Jose, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Almaden Reservoir in San Jose, Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)

It is September in California, year four of a scorching drought. Forest fires are blackening the arid state, from Napa Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Fly over the High Sierra and about every tenth evergreen below appears dead. Even the high mountain lakes and reservoirs are about empty – and equally void of vacationers who have few places to boat, fish, and ski, and are unsure where the next forest fire will break out and force evacuations on often one-lane winding mountain roads.

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Obama’s Hope-and-Change Foreign Policy

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President Obama applies the same principles abroad that he does at home.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

whats-the-three-headed-monster-challenging-obamas-foreign-policyAt home President Obama is well known for his preference for perceived parity over liberty. Most of his domestic agenda —Obamacare, executive-order amnesties, open borders, near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, the piling up of $9 trillion in new debt, tax hikes, more regulations — is apparently aimed at shifting power and capital away from the upper middle class to the lower classes.

From Obama’s first appearance on the national scene, his rhetoric has been directed against those whom he perceives as the inordinately privileged — much more the supposedly uncouth upper middle class than the tasteful Martha’s Vineyard Wall Streeters or the jeans-and-T-shirt Malibu super-rich.

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Ahmed and the Art of the Psychodrama

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Ahmed the clockmaker and Columbia’s Mattress Girl are reminders that there are careerist advantages to becoming a victim of religious, racial, or sexual prejudice. 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Photo via: everything-pr.com
Photo via: everything-pr.com

During Pope Francis’s parade in Washington, 5-year-old Sophie Cruz suddenly dashed up to the popemobile and handed His Holiness a note about the wretched plight of her illegal-alien parents from Los Angeles, who are apparently terrified of all the recent talk about deportations. The media loved the spontaneity and courage of 5-year-old Sophie.

But that was not quite the whole story. The entire event reportedly had been scripted for about a year by a group called “Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition,” which, in actuality, is not about immigration per se, but rather full rights for illegal immigrants. According to spokesman Juan Jose Gutierrez, the group had carefully planned Sophie’s dash: “We planned to do this from the moment we learned he was coming to the States….We have been working for a while now trying to sensitize the American public that dealing with immigration is not just dealing with the people who came in without proper documents but that we also have … countless children whose parents are undocumented.”

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The Three Crucial Factors to Maintaining the Peace in Europe

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by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Photo via NRO
Photo via NRO

The bailed-out Greeks are still broke. Now their islands are flooded with a horde of migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

Spain, Portugal, and Italy are almost in the same boat. Their shared Mediterranean traditions — and vulnerabilities — are far different from those of northern Europe’s more affluent nations.

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Hillary Clinton’s Empire of Dirt

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Hillary Clinton’s Freudian Slip 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty)
Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa. (Scott Olson/Getty)

For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of dirt”?

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The 2016 Pack

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Plus some thoughts on Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, and the damage inflicted upon American culture by the Frankfurt School.

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

gop_reagan_library_debate_9-20-15-1We don’t know yet what issue will end up driving the autumn phase of the 2016 election. In 2008 a hectoring Obama thought it would always be Iraq — an issue that he had scrubbed from his website by mid-2008 when the surge had rendered his anti-war traction irrelevant.

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‘Black Lives Matter’—a Year From Now

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Exploring the many reasons why the slogan “Black Lives Matter” will be gone within a year. What will replace it? 

by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media

This is CNN
This is CNN

In the post-civil rights era of the last half-century, a number of black triumphalist slogans and movements have come and gone.

“Black is beautiful” was an informal self-help attitude that sought to encourage blacks not to emulate so-called arbitrary constructs of white majority aesthetics, but instead to rediscover a natural black essence — from Afros to Ebonics and Kwanzaa — that need not be discouraged.

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