The John Batchelor Show

Monday 17 August 2015

Air Date: 
August 17, 2015

Photo, left:
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Hour One
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block A: Bill Roggio, Long War Journal, and Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal, in re: New Taliban emir accepts al Qaeda’s oath of allegiance. The Taliban's new emir, Mullah Mansour, has publicly accepted Ayman al Zawahiri's oath of allegiance. The public acceptance of Zawahiri’s pledge demonstrates that Mansour has no intention of breaking with al Qaeda. ; Full statement of Mullah Mansour accepting al Qaeda’s oath of allegiance ; The full text of Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour's statement, entitled "New Amir of Islamic Emirate thanks and accepts all who pledged allegiance." ;   Mokhtar Belmokhtar now leads ‘Al Qaeda in West Africa’  ; A statement released online today confirms that Mokhtar Belmokhtar is now the emir of Al Murabitoon, which calls itself "Al Qaeda in West Africa." Another Al Murabitoon emerged in Egypt last month and it is also loyal to al Qaeda. ; Ayman al Zawahiri pledges allegiance to the Taliban’s new emir ;In an audio message released today, Ayman al Zawahiri pledges allegiance to the new emir of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour.
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block B:
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block C: Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re: In the next few years, India will become the world's most populous state.  Perhaps for the first time in history, China will not wear the global population crown.  That helps explain why Chinese manufacturing is leaving the country, migrating south. 
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 1, Block D:  Larry Johnson, NoQuarter, in re: New Hillary Clinton email count: 305 documents referred with potentially classified information.  ;  More than 300 of former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails -- or 5.1 percent of those ...
Hour Two
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block A:  David Drucker, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO (1 of 2) in re: Hunting Season:  1.  The "witch" hunt.  "What this has turned into is just a good, old-fashioned political witch hunt," the Missouri senator said Sunday morning in an appearance on ABC's "This Week."  "This has become just a partisan — this is called a 'Get Hillary Clinton' committee," she said.
2.  The "Republican" hunt.
DONALD TRUMP:  I would say reluctantly. But we're going to --
CHUCK TODD:  -- try to stabilize Saudi Arabia --
DONALD TRUMP:  -- be paid a lot of money. We're not paid. We defend Saudi Arabia. We send our ships. We send our planes. Every time there's a little ruckus, we send those ships and those planes. We get nothing. Why? They're making a billion a day. We get nothing. And this is the problem with the world.
   We make bad deals. We have no victories. I mean, we just don't have victories anymore. As a country, we don't have victories anymore. And it's very sad. Whether it's trade with China, whether it's Japan selling us cars by the millions. And what do we sell them? Nothing. I mean, we give them practically nothing. And by the way, when we send beef, cattle, wheat, when we send things to Japan, they don't even want to take it.
  "It's not clear to me that Donald Trump is a Republican," Fiorina said on ABC's "This Week." Fiorina cited Trump's openness to running on a third-party ticket and some of his policy positions as evidence that he might not be Republican.
3.  The "Iran Deal" hunt.  "Anything that threatens the regime threatens both the deal and Obama's strategy for the region, which is why the administration often sounds like Iran's lawyer," wrote Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in the Beirut-based NOW Lebanon website.
1. They have the right.   Among the things senior administration officials have said Iran has the right to possess is a peaceful nuclear program and conventional ballistic missiles. Though the administration has not gone as far as saying Iran has a right to enrich uranium as Tehran insists, Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty "is silent on the right to enrich. It doesn't grant people automatically a right to enrich. But the NPT also doesn't ban it. It doesn't say you can't enrich."
2. Don't upset them.  Concerns about upsetting Iran's leaders have shadowed Obama's policy toward that country since he took office. It was one of the factors that played into the passive U.S. response to the Green Revolution of 2009, and is widely believed to be a reason why the administration won't act against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who depends heavily on Tehran's support to stay in power.
3. Americans don't give them enough credit.   In testimony before Congress and in interviews, Kerry has consistently noted that Iran has been well-behaved since signing an interim nuclear deal in November 2013.
4. They deserve to be cross at us. In 1953, the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup supported by the CIA and British intelligence. Mossadegh, who had been democratically elected in 1951 but was by then ruling by decree, was ousted by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with the support of loyal military elements as well as the religious establishment which now rules Iran.
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block B: David Drucker, Washington Examiner, and John Fund, NRO (2 of 2).
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block C:  Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/08/17/are-ayatollah-khameneis-views-of-the-iran-nuclear-deal-emerging/  (1 of 2)
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 2, Block D: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/08/17/are-ayatollah-khameneis-views-of-the-iran-nuclear-deal-emerging/  (1 of 2)
Hour Three
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block A:  Mary Kissel,  , in re: Opinion Journal: Trump the Restrictionist  ; Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on the Republican presidential candidate’s immigration policies. ;  Opinion Journal: The Al Qaeda-Taliban Alliance  ; Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow Thomas Joscelyn on the terror group’s strategy and implications for U.S. policy.  ;  Opinion Journal: Hillary’s Email Scandal: No Joke  ; Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot on the investigation into how the former Secretary of State handled classified information. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block B: Kori Schake, Hoover, via War on the Rocks, in re: A Foreign Diplomat Just Taught America How to Win the War of Ideas. It is conventional wisdom in Washington that the United States is losing the “war of ideas” to the Islamic State, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, al Qaeda, and even the Taliban.  All those forces of entropy and intolerance that practice and support terrorism are somehow proving superior at messaging to the country with Madison Avenue advertising, Silicon Valley innovation, Hollywood image-making, the 24-hour news cycle, and permanent political campaigning.
We evidently have been losing this war for some time, because the late Richard Holbrooke questioned just after September 11th 2001 how it was we were losing the war of ideas.  Salon Magazine concluded we were continuing to lose in 2004.  As Secretary of State in 2011, Hillary Clinton testified to Congress we were still losing it.  West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center just released a report concluding we’re losing by even more now.
It is difficult to determine in real time, and our track record of assessing our relative strength is abysmal — recall the CIA assessed in 1954 that the Soviet economy would outpace America’s.  But our jeremiads serve the valuable function of improving our performance, as James Fallows has argued. Even more important is the inspirational performance that sets a high standard for us all to work towards.  As General Jim Mattis (ret.) argues, “in combat, attitudes are caught, not taught.”  In the diplomatic fight taking place in the Middle East, a British diplomat has set just such a shining example this week.
The United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Lebanon, Tom Fletcher, is departing that post and penned an amazing love letter to the country.  It is by turns despondent, critical, and even funny — please read it.  Fletcher shows how well he knows Lebanon’s people in all their diversity and their politics in all its dysfunctionality.  He describes his actions, argues his country tried to make a difference, gives a ringing endorsement of all Lebanon is capable of achieving for itself.  It is an unabashed plea to care about a country on the front lines of the war against the virulent forces that are destroying the Middle East.  By his actions as ambassador and his words in leaving, he shows a template for winning the war of ideas.
Ambassador Fletcher closed saying “it has been a privilege to share this struggle with you.”  If we would win the war of ideas, being in the fight on the side of those we want to win is essential.   If we are losing the war of ideas, it is because we are offering advice from the sidelines, rather than being as pungently engaged as has been Britain’s Tom Fletcher.
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block C: Henry I. Miller, Hoover and Forbes, in re: We Need a Scientific Approach to Regulating GMOs
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 3, Block D:   Paul Gregory, Hoover, in re: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-rulings-threaten-putin-by-paul-r--gregory-2015-08
Hour Four
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block A:  Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen, in re: Death in the Dardenelles: The short, hellish war of Charles Walter Shanks (1 of 2)
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block B: Blair Crawford, Ottawa Citizen, in re: Death in the Dardenelles: The short, hellish war of Charles Walter Shanks (2 of 2)
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block C:  Maj Gen Rick Devereaux, USAF (ret), & JINSA, in re: What to Do About Enemy Drones  The article “Meet the Drone Killers” (Business & Tech., July 24) should be worrisome to Americans because it describes several realistic scenarios that highlight the need to develop antidrone defenses.
Even more troubling are real-world incidents involving drones used by the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah during conflicts with Israel. Though the unmanned aerial vehicles employed by Hamas during the 2014 Gaza war were relatively primitive, this won’t remain the case for long. Hezbollah has been able to penetrate Israeli airspace on multiple occasions, coming perilously close to key infrastructure sites and population centers. Because the technologies involved in developing unmanned aerial vehicles are readily available, most agree that groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates will acquire this technology in the next decade. We should expect to see these groups employ UAVs for reconnaissance, ground attacks or as weapons packed with explosives.
Shortly after the 2014 Gaza war, I was part of an independent task force commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs to study the conflict and provide lessons for the U.S. military and policy makers when facing adversaries such as Hamas. Given the potential for UAV proliferation by terrorist organizations, we recommended the U.S. develop counter-UAV air-defense technologies to defend against large numbers of small, explosive UAVs attacking simultaneously, in a coordinated fashion. Without a credible defense against drones in the hands of terror groups, the U.S. may find itself ceding the advantages in drone technology that it has enjoyed over the past two decades.
Monday  17 August 2015 / Hour 4, Block D:   John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe., N.M., and the American University of Iraq; in re:  Yes, I might have encountered a modern-day Achilles or Hector or Agamemnon. But I think that, at least for me, it was better to meet them first in the Iliad.
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