Dateline Jerusalem – Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., glared at her colleagues at the U.N. Security Council on Dec. 18 as she cast the lone nay vote against a draft resolution presented by Egypt to nullify U.S. President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Ms. Haley then berated her U.N. colleagues for their assault against U.S. sovereignty and for their prolonged efforts to delegitimize Israel and blame the Jewish state for the absence of peace.
In her words, “The United States refuses to accept the double standard that says we are not impartial when we stand by the will of the American people by moving our U.S. embassy, but somehow the United Nations is a neutral party when it consistently singles out Israel for condemnation.”
The liberal media, led by The New York Times, chastised her.
“Punctuating America’s increasing international isolation, the United Nations Security Council demanded on Monday that the Trump administration rescind its decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to put the United States Embassy there,” the Times wrote in a purported news story.
While attacking Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley for isolating the U.S., the Times and its colleagues failed to explain what an international community-aligned U.S. foreign policy looks like.
Notably, just such a policy and its consequences were the subject of a 15,000-word investigative report published the same day, Dec. 18, by Politico.
“The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook,” by Josh Meyer, detailed how in the interest of advancing a policy supported by the international community, then-president Barack Obama imperiled U.S. public health, national security and its allies.
Obama’s Sneakiness
As Mr. Meyer recalled, Obama entered office in 2009 promising to turn over a new leaf with Iran.
By promising to turn over a new leaf in U.S.-Iran relations, Mr. Obama signaled his belief that the sorry state of those relations was America’s fault. Because if it wasn’t America’s fault, then no American president could change the situation.
Mr. Obama’s assumption was entirely wrong.
The Iranian regime declared war on the U.S. shortly after it seized power.
Months later, the regime’s shock troops stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.
Despite an uninterrupted record of Iranian aggression, since 1979 every U.S. administration tried to convince the ayatollahs to abandon their hostility to America.
Iran pocketed every presidential concession.
Then they redoubled their hostile actions against America and its allies and interests.
Ignoring the record, Mr. Obama argued he had the Midas touch. Mr. Obama made his case for uniqueness to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in his speech at Cairo University in June 2009.
There Mr. Obama legitimized Iran’s grievances against the U.S. He invited Iran’s leaders and their Sunni jihadist counterparts in the Muslim Brotherhood to work with him.
At the same time, he attacked Israel and the U.S.’s Sunni Muslim allies.
By attacking the U.S.’s allies and embracing its enemies, Mr. Obama signaled Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood that he was interested in a strategic realignment of America’s Middle East posture.
Times Bows to Obama
In its editorial following Mr. Obama’s speech, the Times’s editors gushed, “After eight years of [American] arrogance and bullying that has turned even close friends against the United States, it takes a strong president to acknowledge the mistakes of the past.”
In the months and years that followed his Cairo speech, Mr. Obama’s primary goal in the Middle East was to persuade Iran’s regime to reach a nuclear accord with him. Although Mr. Obama and his advisers insisted that his nuclear diplomacy didn’t affect their willingness to confront and punish Iran for its other rogue behavior, their actions showed the opposite was true.
From his earliest days in office, Mr. Obama turned a blind eye to all of Iran’s bad behavior.
For instance, just days after his Cairo speech, the regime stole the presidential elections. Then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of the poll against his two chief opponents Mir Hossain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.
The public, which came out in the millions for Mousavi and Karroubi, rejected the official results. Millions took to the streets in what became known as the Green Revolution.
Instead of standing with the Iranians in the streets demanding freedom, Mr. Obama stood on the sidelines and so effectively sided with the anti-American regime against the Iranian people begging for American support.
In his report, Mr. Meyer showed another casualty of Mr. Obama’s obsessive desire to reach a nuclear accord with Tehran.
Mr. Meyer chronicled the shocking fate of Project Cassandra, a multi-year investigation led by the U.S.’s Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA probe involved 30 U.S. and foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It was directed against Hezbollah’s worldwide narco-terrorist empire, which netted Iran’s foreign legion up to $1 billion annually.
Project Cassandra investigators “followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”
Rather than support the investigation, which showed that Hezbollah was importing thousands of tons of cocaine to the U.S. and using U.S. used car dealerships to launder their drug money, the Obama administration quashed it.
Mr. Meyer wrote at Politico:
“As Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way…. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.”
Mr. Meyer reports that Hezbollah used its drug profits to supply Syrian President Bashar Assad with chemical and conventional weapons he used against his own people.
How, Why They Killed Us
It used its drug money to provide tank-destroying roadside bombs to Iranian-controlled Shi’ite militias in Iraq which killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers. It used its drug money to build apartment blocks in south Lebanon which, as the IDF has documented, double as missile launch pads and storage facilities in preparation for its next war against Israel.
And it used the money to turn a slew of Latin American countries into U.S. enemies and Iranian allies in Tehran’s war to destroy America.
As Obama Treasury Dept.official Katherine Bauer claimed in written testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last February, “under the Obama administration… these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
This then brings us back to Ms. Haley at the UN on Dec.18, and the U.S. liberal media’s condemnation of her defense of Mr. Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In November 2015, the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal. The resolution was submitted by Mr. Obama’s U.N. ambassador Samantha Power.
The EU, the Russians and the Chinese all happily partnered with the Obama administration in concluding a nuclear deal.
That vaunted, unanimously supported deal paved the way for Iran to become a nuclear armed state within a decade.
The international community – along with the U.S. liberal media – cheered as Mr. Obama attacked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for daring to warn of the consequences of his nuclear pact.
At the same time, the international community, the Times and its liberal media counterparts all hid the news of Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism empire and its responsibility for thousands of cocaine-related deaths each year in America. Indeed, neither the Times’ nor The Washington Post’s websites mentioned Mr. Meyer’s report.
In her statement, Ms. Haley said, “This is the first time I have exercised the American right to veto a resolution in the Security Council. The exercise of the veto is not something the United States does often…. We do it with no joy, but we do it with no reluctance.”
She added, “The fact that this veto is being done in defense of American sovereignty and in defense of America’s role in the Middle East peace process is not a source of embarrassment for us; it should be an embarrassment to the remainder of the Security Council.”
And it should be an embarrassment to The New York Times and its colleagues that they have refused to report why Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump are demonstrably right to stand alone and why Mr. Obama was catastrophically wrong to believe that the U.S. should stand with the “international community” against itself.