Did the Obama Administration Withhold Documents That Could Have Undermined the Iran Deal?

Earlier this week, the CIA made public hundreds of thousands of documents from Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. The trove, obtained during the raid in which he was killed, contains extensive evidence of the depth of al-Qaeda’s relationship with Iran—which sheltered many of the organization’s operatives in its borders, supplied it with funds, and gave it operational support. With the publication of these documents, writes Michael Rubin, it is now clear why the Obama administration struggled so long to hide them from the public eye:

President Obama and his CIA heads . . . released only [those few documents that] upheld and affirmed Obama’s tenuous theories about Iran. Had the U.S. public known about the Iranian leadership’s outreach to, and association with, al-Qaeda, even Democratic congressmen might have been far less willing to tolerate the trust which Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry placed in their Iranian counterparts. . . .

Indeed, the refusal to declassify documents not out of fear that sources and methods might be exposed but rather to enable the White House and State Department to avoid calibrating their own policy goals to reality and in pursuit of Obama and Kerry’s goals appear to be both an abuse of classification and textbook politicization of intelligence.

It’s time to ask under oath and in public hearings what senior officials—including every former CIA director from the time bin Laden was killed—knew about the Iran-al-Qaeda partnership, when they knew it, and why they believed they needed to cover up that information.

To bury proof of an enemy’s culpability with a terrorist group purposefully, to leave that rogue regime with an industrial-scale nuclear program and enough centrifuges to build an arsenal, to provide billions of dollars in untraceable cash under the guise of sanctions relief and ransom payments, and to acquiesce with a nod and a wink in a no-inspections policy in the same military bases that sheltered al-Qaeda operatives is, to put it mildly, policy malpractice.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Al Qaeda, Barack Obama, CIA, Iran, Osama bin Laden, Politics & Current Affairs

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF