05/11/16

Times Article on Ben Rhodes Exposes White House Contempt for the Press and Public

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

A recent article by David Samuels for the New York Times Magazine demonstrates how President Obama and his Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes have been exploiting the media’s willingness to repeat and promote the Obama administration narrative of the day. In the interview Rhodes irreverently nicknames the foreign policy establishment “the Blob” and states that most reporters the administration deals with on foreign affairs are only 27 years old and know nothing. The Blob includes not only top media people, but also “Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.”

Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post describes the Times’ piece as so sycophantic that it has become “gross” through excess chumminess, hypocrisy and absurdity. For example, Lozada writes, “It is the blindness of a writer who declares that Rhodes is ‘not an egotist’ while offering countless examples of that subject’s gargantuan self-regard, and not bothering to note the contradiction.”

Michael Grunwald has also criticized Samuels in an article for Politico. His point is that Samuels is a hawk who opposed the Iran deal, and ignored the nuances in the Rhodes/Obama foreign policy, which Grunwald clearly finds admirable.

Continue reading →

03/24/15

Art Imitating Life, or Propaganda Selling a Flawed Iranian Nuke Deal?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

When the CBS show “Madam Secretary” premiered last September, there was much speculation and hand-wringing about whether or not the title character, Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord played by Tea Leoni, was inspired by Hillary Clinton, and if this show was meant as a long-running political ad humanizing Hillary Clinton. Such an effort might help make her ascension to the White House seem plausible, if not inevitable.

Despite the denials, it seems clear that “Madam Secretary” was just such an effort, and still is. But in the few episodes I’ve watched, I haven’t seen much of what we know of the real Hillary. “If I had the power to fire her, I would have fired her,” commented her long-time critic Jerome Zeifman in 1998, reflecting upon Mrs. Clinton’s political maneuvers during the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

Mrs. Clinton is a prima donna who travels like a rock star, and who puts herself above the law, presenting herself as a great fighter for women’s rights—yet in her own life she stood by her man, who has cheated on her for decades, and has been credibly accused of forcing himself on women who wanted nothing to do with him. In addition, Mrs. Clinton has, through her foundation, collected money from countries that deprive their women of their basic human rights. “But the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars in donations from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Algeria and Brunei—all of which the State Department has faulted over their records on sex discrimination and other human-rights issues,” reported The New York Times this month. So besides the hypocrisy issue, her conflicts of interest are quite extraordinary.

Hollywood elites strive not only to shape American culture, but also to promote their left-wing agenda. While CBS is engaging in propaganda to support of Hillary Clinton, it is also attempting to not-so-subtly condition the American people to accept a badly-flawed Iranian nuclear deal crafted in Washington. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hope to impose this nuclear deal on the world in the name of stopping Iran from getting nuclear weapons. But based on what we know about the deal, and the concessions made to the Iranians, it is more likely that the opposite will occur.

The current storyline on the CBS show has the fictional Madam Secretary traveling to Iran to attempt to save the Iranian nuclear deal—just days before the actual deal is about to be foisted on the world. There she met with the “moderate” Iranian foreign minister, Zahed Javani. At the end of the show, she went on CBS’s Face the Nation, and who was the host? None other than Bob Schieffer—playing the role of Bob Schieffer.

And keep in mind, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser is Ben Rhodes, whose brother David Rhodes happens to be president of CBS News. But since “Madam Secretary” is produced by the entertainment division—not news—that couldn’t have been a factor. Could it?

Here was the closing dialogue from last Sunday night’s episode, with Leoni’s character appearing on Face the Nation to discuss what happened on her trip to Iran, and to explain why it was so necessary and so important to the American people:

Bob Schieffer (BS): Madame Secretary, you made an unprecedented trip to Iran to save the nuclear deal between the Iranians and the United States.

Madam Secretary (MS): Yes, I did.

BS: And while you were there, of course, a coup, that was eventually foiled, began. You were in the room when the foreign minister Javani was killed.

(MS): That’s right.

BS: Who else was there and what happened?

(MS): We were at minister Javani’s house when it happened. Several members of my security detail were wounded or killed. And their courage was awe-inspiring. And I deeply mourn their loss, as does the entire country. Minister Javani’s son witnessed his father’s death. As a mother I would have given anything to protect that child. Which is why I am determined as ever to see through the nuclear agreement that his father gave his life for. Because I think that’s our greatest responsibility in this life. To leave a safer and more peaceful world for our children.

BS: Madame Secretary, thank you.

(MS): Thank you Bob.

You can watch most of that scene in this video, in which Schieffer says that if most of the guests he has on his show were “as direct and as honest” as Madam Secretary was, they would be a lot better off. Schieffer is confusing fact with fiction.

Leoni wasn’t being “direct” and “honest” on camera. She was merely repeating a fictional dialogue that she was given to memorize as an actress. This was propaganda, in which Schieffer was an active participant in trying to convince the audience about the wonderful peace dividends we should expect from a successful deal with Iran.

“I may send this around to Capitol Hill and say if you want to be on Face the Nation, this is how you should act,” said Schieffer.

The fictional Foreign Minister Zahed Javani parallels Iran’s current foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who, apparently, wants a really good deal for all sides—while all those hard-liners are sitting in the background demanding more from the deal, such as an immediate end to sanctions. So, the narrative goes, America should align itself with the Iranians who just want peace like we do, the ones who have our interests at heart.

“Iran’s Supreme leader Ali Khamenei called for ‘Death to America’ on Saturday, a day after President Barack Obama appealed to Iran to seize a ‘historic opportunity’ for a nuclear deal and a better future, and as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claimed substantial progress toward an accord,” reports the Times of Israel. The Los Angeles Times ran news of this under the title, “As crowd chants ‘Death to America,’ Khamenei backs nuclear talks.”

The Iranians also blew up a replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier last month, and their government regularly conducts cyber attacks against our country. Is this part of their charm offensive to get Americans to support the deal, or is it complete disdain for America and its leaders?

Of course “Madam Secretary” is just fiction, and any resemblance to the real life negotiations is purely coincidental. Who could possibly think otherwise?

Let’s be clear, almost everyone desires a world without Iran developing and threatening to use nuclear weapons on Israel, its regional neighbors, or other targets. But does the best strategy to achieve that goal include lifting sanctions on this rogue regime, while it is in the process of expanding its hegemonic reach across at least five countries in its region? Proponents of this deal—at least what we know of it—suggest that the options are making this deal or going to war. Yet President Obama says he is prepared to walk away if he doesn’t get the right deal. Does his Plan B include going to war?

As I reported earlier, according to Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi member Clare Lopez, the “November 2013 Joint Plan of Action gave Iran just about everything it wanted: the right to enrich, the right to keep uranium, centrifuge research and development, and continued intercontinental ballistic missile development.” And it added sanctions relief onto that long list of concessions.

Iran maintains that their nuclear energy is just for peaceful purposes. Yet they have a secret facility that we’ve recently learned about through a dissident group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors are also not allowed to visit another known site of unknown activity called Parchin.

Iranians are still sponsors of terror worldwide, and have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans. They simply can’t be trusted. But CBS, through “Madam Secretary,” would like America to think otherwise. And Mr. Schieffer has become complicit in such misinformation. Incredibly, as we approach the latest artificial deadline of March 31^st for the Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration has removed Iran and Hezbollah from the terror threat list.

On top of that, we now we have our President vouching for the character of two of Iran’s top leaders: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon,” said President Obama in a speech to the Iranian people, that was posted on the Whitehouse.gov website. Does anyone believe that these people are being honest and sincere?

In a just released New York Times article, a source close to Ayatollah Khamenei said that for now, the so-called hard-liners are finally keeping quiet. “Iran speaks with one voice,” he told the Times, and said that “the muzzle would remain in place as long as the negotiations seemed to be progressing.” He said that the “Fact of the matter is that we are seeing positive changes in the U.S. position in the nuclear talk…We are steadfast and the U.S. is compromising. We are not complaining.”

A deal with Iran would be just another “accomplishment” for the Obama legacy, and CNN acknowledged as much when it published “Iran nuclear deal: President Barack Obama’s legacy moment on Iran” two years ago. When the deal goes bad, he can always blame it on George Bush.

The Associated Press now reports that criticism of Obama’s desire for a legacy-building Iranian deal originates with “GOP hawks.” Yet as CNN is reporting, “A veto-proof, bipartisan majority of House lawmakers have signed an open letter to President Barack Obama warning him that any nuclear deal with Iran will effectively require congressional approval for implementation.” Among the signers of the March 20^th letter are Democratic Congressmen Steny Hoyer (MD), Charlie Rangel (NY), Elijah Cummings (MD), John Lewis (GA), Alan Grayson (FL), Nita Lowey (NY), Joseph Kennedy III (MA) and Jan Schakowsky (IL), hardly a group of “GOP Hawks.”

The letter says that “In reviewing such an agreement, Congress must be convinced that its terms foreclose any pathway to a bomb, and only then will Congress be able to consider permanent sanctions relief.”

While the world is waiting to see how this potential Iranian deal might affect the balance of power in the Middle East, it is clear that President Obama is pushing ahead, using all the tools at his disposal to sell this deal. But what’s not so clear is whether his tactics, and those of the Iranian leaders, will prevail.

02/20/15

No “Major Scandal” in Obama Administration?

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

David Axelrod’s book tour is off to a rollicking start, with perceived attacks on Hillary Clinton’s upcoming presidential run, and an absurd comment about the ethics and integrity of the administration he served so loyally, and continues to do so.

Axelrod, former senior advisor to President Obama, recently asserted something so patently untrue that it demands a response. “And I’m proud of the fact that, basically, you’ve had an administration that’s been in place for six years in which there hasn’t been a major scandal,” he pronounced at a University of Chicago event.

The Washington Post leapt in to defend Axelrod’s claim by pointing to how President Obama’s approval ratings did not shift in the wake of the potential scandals he has faced since taking office. “It could be that scandals don’t have a lot to do with how Americans rate the president,” writes Hunter Schwarz for the Post.

It could also be that the liberal media, along with academia, determine what is classified as a “scandal”—and then refuse to report on scandals which don’t meet their own predetermined criteria. In this case, any lies, corruption, abuses of power, financial payoffs, or associations with unsavory characters or organizations that involve President Obama or anyone in his administration are never to be treated as a scandal.

The ongoing incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and the media often tilts in favor of the administration, leaving many scandals uninvestigated, minimized, or outright ignored. For example, both CBS News president David Rhodes and former ABC News president Ben Sherwood have siblings working for the administration. CNN’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Virginia Moseley, is married to Tom Nides, a former Obama staffer under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager, joined Bloomberg News, while MSNBC hired Axelrod.

President Obama even joked in 2013 that “… David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod.”

With so many members of the elite media in bed with the administration, Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan’s 2011 observation that “the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing” becomes essentially meaningless. Nyhan said that a scandal becomes a scandal “once the S-word is used in a reporter’s own voice in a story that runs on the front page of the [Washington] Post.”

If Axelrod is using the same criteria, then, of course, President Obama probably can be considered scandal-free. But a real scandal involves actual administration wrongdoing or lies, regardless of the “perceptions” dished out by the media.

Axelrod’s comments ignore the presence of a number of real scandals which the mainstream media, including The Washington Post, continue to report on as phony—including but not limited to:

Benghazi:

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 were greeted with a concerted public relations campaign by the Obama administration blaming the attacks on a protest inspired by a YouTube video, as revealed in the smoking gun Ben Rhodes email. (Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to President Obama, is CBS’ President David Rhodes’ brother.) The media, including David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times, continue to dispute key facts of the case such as al Qaeda’s involvement, have championed erroneous Congressional reports, ignore evidence of a cover-up, and have generally covered for the administration by promoting the idea that this is one of many “phony scandals.” The interim report of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi details the various failings and scandals related to Benghazi.

IRS scandal:

The IRS targeted conservative groups applying for non-profit status from 2010 to 2012. In what some see as an attempt to influence elections, the IRS began requesting inappropriate information disproportionately from conservative groups and then delaying their approval, generally chilling free speech throughout the country. Lois Lerner, at the heart of the scandal, has refused to testify before Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment. The media continue to argue that President Obama is not connected to this scandal, but it can be tied directly to the White House. The President has tried to assert that there isn’t a “smidgeon” of corruption at the IRS.

Fast and Furious

The Obama Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged gunwalking across the Mexican border of thousands of weapons, resulting, ultimately in the murder of border agent Brian Terry. An ATF whistleblower, John Dodson, spoke out in 2011 about the problems with the ATF’s decision to let guns go to Mexico. As I wrote about in 2011, Fast and Furious was a scandal that no longer could be denied, but the media continued to do so. Sharyl Attkisson recounts in Stonewalled, “But as outrageous and remarkable as the allegations are, most of the media don’t pick up on the story. They’re steering clear.” As I wrote, the scandal “involves some 1,500 guns, about 1,000 of which ended up in Mexico, and a Border agent…who was murdered with weapons found near the scene of the crime in Arizona. The weapons were among 57 linked to Fast and Furious which have been tied to at least 11 violent crimes in the U.S., including the Terry murder.” Like Benghazi, Fast and Furious resulted in real deaths—but the media continue to ignore or downplay this scandal.

Veterans Administration

Following revelations in 2014 that there was widespread Veterans Administration falsification of health care wait times, and that certain locations had created secret waiting lists for veterans, the media finally declared this a scandal. But it’s not Obama’s scandal, it’s a Veterans Affairs scandal. Hunter Schwarz writes for the Post that “It was a very significant scandal, to be sure, but perhaps not one that people laid directly at Obama’s doorstep.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler recently referred to this one as a scandal, noting that only eight people have lost their jobs so far as a result of this veterans care debacle, not 60 as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald said last week on Meet the Press. But as I have argued, there were really two scandals at the Veterans Administration at the time: health care wait times and the disability benefits backlog.

Solyndra

Solar panel business Solyndra received more than half a billion dollars as part of the administration’s green energy program, before going bankrupt. Its executives took substantial bonuses before the layoffs began. And, a Solyndra investor was also a major bundler for Obama, demonstrating a conflict of interest when the administration refused to turn over more documents as part of a Congressional investigation. And yes, the Post reported on its front page that the Obama administration had asked the company to “delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress.” But NPR ran an article last year victoriously announcing that “Now that the loan program is turning a profit, those critics are silent”—as if that had anything to do with the crony capitalism of the Solyndra scandal.

Obamacare

Obamacare is an ongoing debacle of premium increases and high deductibles coupled with crippling regulations. It leads to less, not more, health care access. While the focus has been on errors made within the “Obamacare rollout,” the media continue to champion exaggerated statistics regarding the alleged 10 million who have received health insurance under President Obama’s signature legislation. In reality, this program marks a rapid increase in Medicaid, and many enrollees are part of a “substitution effect” by which people who previously had insurance have switched to Obamacare. The subsidies, which the media casts as essential to the law, are under dispute in the courts, and increase the burden on the American taxpayer. Even Politifact called President Obama’s false assertion that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” Meanwhile, the complicit media finds every chance it can to champion this legislation’s “successes.”

This list just scratches the surface. Executive overreach has become standard fare, whether on immigration or environmental regulations. The Obama administration’s penchant for controlling leaks, a lack of transparency, and a war on journalists has been noted by the likes of former Washington Post executive editor Len Downie Jr. who said “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration leaks,” and New York Times reporter David Sanger who said, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” James Risen of the Times added that the Obama administration has been “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.”

The administration’s Middle East policies have been a disaster, if not scandalous. Just look at the growing threat from the Islamic State (ISIS) and other radical jihadist Muslim groups. More than 200,000 have been killed in Syria, Libya has become a jihadist playground, described by former CIA officer Bob Baer as “Mad Max,” and Yemen, as recently as September held up as example of where Obama’s foreign policy is working, has seen a coup by Iranian backed jihadists. And looming over all of this is the unfolding, outright appeasement of an Iran with nuclear aspirations.

What unifies all of these scandals and lies is how our news media have looked past all the administration’s corruption, treating, these occurrences as discrete, minor grievances, gaffes—or even conservative or Republican political maneuvering. This means that the constant lies by the administration, and President Obama himself, can be made with impunity. The media simply will not hold President Obama, or any of his associates who might tarnish his reputation, accountable.

01/31/15

Washington Times’ Bombshell Tapes Confirm Citizen Commission’s Findings on Benghazi

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

As Hillary Clinton further delays the announcement of her 2016 run for the White House, more news has broken regarding her role in the 2011 disastrous intervention in Libya, which set the stage for the 2012 Benghazi attacks where we lost four brave American lives.

Two new stories from The Washington Times expose some of the infighting among government agencies and branches of government on this controversial decision, and highlight the key role that Clinton played in initiating the war. You can listen to tapes of discussions between Pentagon staffers, former Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), and the Qaddafi regime for yourself.

This news also validates the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi (CCB) 2014 interim report, which exposed that Muammar Qaddafi had offered truce talks and a possible peaceful abdication to the United States, which Washington turned down.

“[The article] also makes it clear that the Benghazi investigation needs to be broadened to answer the question: ‘Why did America bomb Libya in the first place?’” commented Rear Admiral Chuck Kubic (Ret.), a key source for the CCB’s interim report who was also quoted by the Times.

“Despite the willingness of both AFRICOM Commander Gen. Carter Ham and Muammar Qaddafi to pursue the possibility of truce talks, permission was not given to Gen. Ham from his chain of command in the Pentagon and the window of opportunity closed,” reads Kubic’s statement for our report from last year. You can watch here, from a CCB press conference last April, as Admiral Kubic described his personal involvement in the effort to open negotiations between Qaddafi and the U.S. government.

Now we learn that the likely source of the stonewalling came from the State Department—and Secretary Clinton—herself. “On the day the U.N. resolution was passed, Mrs. Clinton ordered a general within the Pentagon to refuse to take a call with Gadhafi’s son Seif and other high-level members within the regime, to help negotiate a resolution, the secret recordings reveal,” reported the Times on January 29.

Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates indicated in his book, Duty, that he was opposed to the war for national security reasons. He highlighted a division among White House advisors—with Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and Samantha Power “urging aggressive U.S. action to prevent an anticipated massacre of the rebels as Qaddafi fought to remain in power.” Add to that list the former Secretary of State.

“But that night, with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces turning back the rebellion that threatened his rule, Mrs. Clinton changed course, forming an unlikely alliance with a handful of top administration aides who had been arguing for intervention,” reported The New York Times on March 18, 2011, the day after UN Resolution 1973 authorizing a “no fly” zone in Libya was voted on and passed.

“Within hours, Mrs. Clinton and the aides had convinced Mr. Obama that the United States had to act, and the president ordered up military plans, which Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hand-delivered to the White House the next day.”

The Washington Times now reports that “In the recovered recordings, a U.S. intelligence liaison working for the Pentagon told a Gadhafi aide that Mr. Obama privately informed members of Congress that Libya ‘is all Secretary Clinton’s matter’ and that the nation’s highest-ranking generals were concerned that the president was being misinformed” about a humanitarian crisis that didn’t exist. However, one must wonder just how much President Obama implicitly supported Clinton in her blind push to intervene in what was once a comparatively stable country, and an ally in the war against al Qaeda. While this new report is certainly damning of Mrs. Clinton’s actions, and appears to place the blame for the unnecessary chaos in Libya—which ultimately led to Benghazi—on her shoulders, President Obama shares the blame as the ultimate Decider-in-Chief.

“Furthermore, defense officials had direct information from their intelligence asset in contact with the regime that Gadhafi gave specific orders not to attack civilians and to narrowly focus the war on the armed rebels, according to the asset, who survived the war,” reports The Washington Times in its second of three articles. Saving those in Benghazi from a looming massacre by Qaddafi seems to have been a convenient excuse made by the administration for political expediency. Could it be, instead, that President Obama, as well as Mrs. Clinton, put greater value on the rise to power of an “Arab Spring” government with Muslim Brotherhood connections? And, as the CCB interim report shows, the U.S. government was willing to go so far as to facilitate the provision of arms to al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Libya in order to ensure that Qaddafi fell.

Will the mainstream media pick up on these new revelations, or will they cast them aside as another “phony scandal” to throw into their dustbins filled with other stories that might possibly embarrass the Obama administration, or prove to be an impediment to Mrs. Clinton’s path to the White House?

“It’s critical to note that Qaddafi was actively engaged with Department of Defense officials to arrange discussions about his possible abdication and exile when that promising development was squashed by the Obama White House,” noted CCB Member Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer, regarding the failed truce talks. “The Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi has been asking, ‘Why?’ for well over a year now.”

“It is time the American people and the families of those who fought and gave their lives at Benghazi in September 2012 were told why those brave Americans had to die at all, much less die alone with no effort made to save them,” she said.

Clinton, through House Democrats, has indicated that she is willing to testify before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. But Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) recently indicated that the Committee must first examine her emails from the State Department before questioning his witness. This complicates the issue of her testifying, since Mrs. Clinton is in the process of calculating when she will announce her presidential run.

Do the emails that Gowdy has requested from the State Department even extend back to 2011?

Chairman Gowdy identified three “tranches” that his potential questioning would fall under in an interview with Fox’s Greta Van Susteren:

Why was the U.S. Special Mission Compound open in the first place?
What actions did Clinton take during the attacks?
What was Clinton’s role during the talking points and Susan Rice’s Sunday morning talk show visits?

A fourth tranche should be: Clinton’s push to intervene in Libya and how it set the stage for an insecure country and strong jihadist movement willing—and able—to attack the Americans posted there. And while he’s at it, Rep. Gowdy should ask Mrs. Clinton to explain why all of the very legitimate requests for increased security in Benghazi were turned down, and why were Ambassador Chris Stevens’ personal security staff, from the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) directed to store their weapons in a separate location—not on them—on the night of September 11, 2012?

01/17/15

It’s the President’s Policies—Not His Team’s Vision

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

It’s been a gradual process, but we welcome former New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb to the realization that President Barack Obama’s leadership has been disastrous for this country. Last October Gelb wrote, “While Obama inherited rather than caused many of the world’s current crises, his habitual complacency and passivity prevent him from mitigating or resolving them.”

By November, Gelb had scathing criticism for Obama, writing for The Daily Beast that “The leak suggests that Mr. Obama remains blind to the principal cause of his foreign policy woes… he is the person most responsible for the absence of a U.S. foreign policy strategy, for policy zigs and zags, and for the loss of credibility and power. The essential fault lies not with the stars around him, however dim, but with himself.”

The failure to send a high-ranking member of the Obama administration to Paris for the so-called unity rally was the last straw for Mr. Gelb, whose impeccable establishment credentials include board senior fellow and president emeritus at the Council on Foreign Relations. He even acknowledges it in The Daily Beast title: “This Is Obama’s Last Foreign Policy Chance.”

Gelb said that failing to go to Paris or to send the vice president was more than a “horrible gaffe,” adding that it “demonstrated beyond argument that the Obama team lacks the basic instincts and judgment necessary to conduct U.S. national security policy in the next two years. It’s simply too dangerous to let Mr. Obama continue as is—with his current team and his way of making decisions. America, its allies, and friends could be heading into one of the most dangerous periods since the height of the Cold War.”

But unfortunately, this wasn’t Obama’s last foreign policy chance. Gelb recommends that Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Denis McDonough, and Valerie Jarrett should go. There is no doubt that these four have helped make an utter mess of American foreign policy, but largely at the direction of their boss.

Gelb suggests that President Obama add establishment Republican Thomas Pickering, who is soft on Iran and also complicit in the Benghazi cover-up as the Chair of the discredited Accountability Review Board (ARB), the State Department creation that didn’t even interview then-Secretary of State Clinton, and informed Mrs. Clinton through her aide, Cheryl Mills, when the vice chair of the ARB became concerned about the testimony of one of the witnesses.

“Pickering has personally explored opening relations with Hamas; pushed peace talks with the Taliban; argued for getting rid of, or removing to the U.S., all tactical nuclear weapons in Europe (and moving Russia’s to east of the Urals); and promoted bilateral talks with Iran without preconditions,” wrote Andy McCarthy. These are the credentials to pull our country out of its foreign policy disasters?

Actually, we may not even agree with Gelb’s belief that the President should replace his current team, or whether that even matters. And that is because of another point he makes: “In the end, making the national security system work comes down to one factor, one man—Barack Obama. He’s the key problem, and he’s the only one who can bring about a solution.”

What Gelb’s column fails to recognize is that this isn’t a problem of President Obama receiving bad advice. It is that he is ideologically driven, and his agenda is clearly antithetical to America’s national security needs and interests. This has been apparent since before the President took office, but it was laid bare in his first year in office. It is just that virtually everyone at The New York Times and other foreign policy establishment institutions either didn’t recognize it, or thought his presidency would be a great antidote to the “cowboy” foreign policy, as they saw it, of the George W. Bush era.

Consider these following presidential actions:

President Obama’s Cairo speech in his first months, where he invited the Muslim Brotherhood, and didn’t invite the then-president of Egypt to attend;
His hands-off approach to the green revolution in Iran that possibly could have overthrown that dangerous, terrorist sponsoring, corrupt regime;
The unilateral removal of our missile defense system from Poland and the Czech Republic;
His ongoing pledge to shut down Guantanamo Bay;
His immediate demands on Israel that proved both wrong and counterproductive for what he was hoping to achieve;
The unnecessary war in Libya, and the ensuing Islamic terrorist attack on our Special Mission Compound and CIA Annex in Benghazi, and the obvious lies and dereliction of duty that went along with it;
The current phony war against ISIS, with a plan to defeat them that would be absurd if it wasn’t so tragic;
His lies and distortions about the nature of the threat in today’s world, which include the West’s failure to confront Islamist, jihadist terrorism and growing influence of the caliphate.

Thursday’s Wall Street Journal had an article about the Iraqis’ growing impatience with how the U.S. and its coalition are carrying out the war against the Islamic State (IS), with whom we’re supposedly in a years-long process of degrading and destroying. “The swelling disapproval reflects Iraqi impatience at the U.S.-led mission’s multiyear strategy against Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Many Iraqis see the insurgents as an immediate threat pulling their country apart amid immense suffering,” reports the Journal. “Some Iraqis even believe the coalition is aiding the extremists by airdropping weapons into the third of the country they control.”

It has put us in the position of coordinating with Iran, and the Iranian backed militias are doing much of the fighting on the ground. At the same time, we are supposedly attempting to defeat ISIS in Syria, where we are doing some of the dirty work for Syrian president Basher al Assad, another Iranian proxy.

Mr. Gelb, we’ve just outlined how President Obama’s foreign policy team has been mishandling the hard questions—since day one—and Paris was, unfortunately, just a flash in the pan that momentarily illuminated the President’s perverse ideological strategic vision. He wasn’t there, nor did he send Vice President Biden, because he doesn’t stand in solidarity with the views of the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, who said in the aftermath of last week’s terrorist attacks in Paris that left a total of 17 dead, “We’re at war, but not at war against a religion, not against a civilization, but at war to defend our values, which are universal.” He added, “It is a war against terrorism and radical Islam, against everything aimed at breaking solidarity, liberty and fraternity.”

The problem is not a lack of policy, or rearranging the circle of advisers—it’s Obama’s ideology and actual policies themselves that have us in this mess that Leslie Gelb has come to recognize.