Israel Matzav

Told to ignore Israel, Senators ignore Kerry instead

One thing for which Israelis ought to be grateful is that the Obama administration's malicious intent toward us is only outdone by their incompetence.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State John FN Kerry appeared at a closed-door session before the Senate Banking Committee to brief them on Iran. What came out of the session was that Kerry told the Senators to ignore Israel and slow down the sanctions like the Obama administration wants. The Senators were singularly unimpressed.

“It was an emotional appeal,” Sen. Bob Corker told reporters after the briefing. “I have to tell you, I was very disappointed in the presentation.”

Corker said that senators were given no details of the interim deal being formulated in negotiations between Iran and world powers in Geneva this month. Secretary of State John Kerry briefed the committee, along with Vice President Joe Biden and the State Department’s lead Iran negotiator Wendy Sherman.

“I am stunned that in a classified setting when you’re trying to talk to the very folks that would be originating legislation relative to sanctions, to have such a lack of specificity — I feel I may get that over the next 24 hours in another setting, but it was solely an emotional appeal,” Corker said.

Sen. Mark Kirk was even more forceful in criticizing the officials’ presentation, calling it “very unconvincing.”

“It was fairly anti-Israeli,” Kirk said to reporters after the briefing. “I was supposed to disbelieve everything the Israelis had just told me, and I think the Israelis probably have a pretty good intelligence service.” He said the Israelis had told him that the “total changes proposed set back the program by 24 days.”

A Senate aide familiar with the meeting said that “every time anybody would say anything about ‘what would the Israelis say,’ they’d get cut off and Kerry would say, ‘You have to ignore what they’re telling you, stop listening to the Israelis on this.’”

“They had no details,” the aide said. “They had no ability to verify anything, to describe anything, to answer basic questions.”

Kirk also criticized Sherman, whose “record on North Korea is a total failure and embarrassment to her service.” Sherman was part of the U.S. negotiating team that focused on North Korea in the 1990s.

“Wendy wants you to forget her service on North Korea,” Kirk said. “You shouldn’t allow her.”

Sherman is a total incompetent who is in way over her head. In fact, one has to wonder whether the real reason that Kerry rushed to Geneva last weekend was because the administration has no confidence in Sherman, who is nothing but a hack. Here's Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.

In 1988, the former social worker ran the Washington office of the Dukakis campaign and worked at the Democratic National Committee. That was the year the Massachusetts governorcarried 111 electoral votes to George H.W. Bush's 426. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Sherman was briefly the CEO of something called the Fannie Mae Foundation, supposedly a charity that was shut down a decade later for what the Washington Post called "using tax-exempt contributions to advance corporate interests."

From there it was on to the State Department, where she served as a point person in nuclear negotiations with North Korea and met with Kim Jong Il himself. The late dictator, she testified, was "witty and humorous," "a conceptual thinker," "a quick problem-solver," "smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident." Also a movie buff who loved Michael Jordan highlight videos. A regular guy!

Later Ms. Sherman was to be found working for her former boss as the No. 2 at the Albright-Stonebridge Group before taking the No. 3 spot at the State Department. Ethics scolds might describe the arc of her career as a revolving door between misspending taxpayer dollars in government and mooching off them in the private sector. But it's mainly an example of failing up—the Washingtonian phenomenon of promotion to ever-higher positions of authority and prestige irrespective of past performance.

This administration in particular is stuffed with fail-uppers—the president, the vice president, the secretary of state and the national security adviser, to name a few—and every now and then it shows. Like, for instance, when people for whom the test of real-world results has never meant very much meet people for whom that test means everything.

But Kirk had even more to say.

“Today is the day I witnessed the future of nuclear war in the Middle East,” Kirk said, also comparing the administration to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who signed away the Sudetenland to Hitler’s Germany in 1938. “How do you define an Iranian moderate? An Iranian who is out of bullets and out of money.”

The Democrats mostly had no comment about the meeting. But among those who were said to be unconvinced by Kerry is Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the Senate Banking Committee.

We could be a lot worse. The administration in Washington could be competently anti-Israel. Fortunately, these guys are the gang who couldn't shoot straight.

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Iran sanctions regime, Iranian nuclear threat, John Kerry, Mark Kirk, Robert Menendez, Wendy Sherman

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:43 AM