Update: In a huge win for the President, New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has come out for the deal. Some of her statement echoes the president's warning: she says killing the deal could result in "an invasion with yet another massive and costly land war in the Middle East."

Original post:

In his new book on the US and Israel, former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren says that all the young Ivy Leaguers who went to work for President Obama had read The Israel Lobby, by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, and that it was their playbook for understanding the Middle East. (Along with Edward Said's Orientalism).

Yesterday's speech shows that President Obama has also read The Israel Lobby and that its central points have become his chief concerns: The Israel lobby is a loose but powerful coalition of Israel supporters who will distort policy at every turn out of the sincere misguided belief that the US and Israel have the same interests; that coalition of conservative Jews in league with Republican hawks played a critical role in starting the Iraq war that has been an unmitigated disaster for our foreign policy. I have argued here for a long time that we won't defeat the war party till we identify its true cause, and Obama all but did so explicitly yesterday. "Every nation in the world that has commented publicly" supports this deal, except Israel, he said. And Israel has many friends in this country, including the president himself, he said.

Then he called out the "mindset" in the U.S. that opposes the deal as a mindset of warmongers. The same "mindset" that gave us the Iraq war will leave us no alternative but military strikes on Iran, and none of the advocates of that mindset have to go off and fight these wars themselves.

Never before have I heard Obama go step by step over why he was right to oppose the Iraq war, 13 years after the fact. But he is trying to defeat that "mindset," which as Paul Pillar says, he can't identify too explicitly because of political orthodoxies in D.C. Though he said that mindset's paranoia and reliance on force are inconsistent with American values and he'd be "abrogating" his constitutional duty if he sided with Netanyahu on the Iran Deal.

In response to the growing threat of fighters traveling to Syria and Iraq to join terror groups such as the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the Department of Homeland Security has announced changes to its visa waiver program that will increase restrictions on residents of "friendly" countries entering the United States.

It used to be that if you were a citizen of France, or Germany, or any of the 28 countries participating in the visa waiver program, all you had to do to enter the US was fill out a special form at the airport and hand it to Customs and Border Protection before boarding your flight.

Now, however, with the looming threat of IS and the influx of fighters joining its ranks in Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration is concerned that Western citizens may receive training from terror groups while abroad and use it to attack the homeland.

Russia has this week submitted a revised bid to the United Nations to expand its Arctic shelf borders — but if you'd been perusing some of the headlines in the Western press yesterday, you'd have been forgiven for believing that Vladimir Putin had launched an unprovoked attack on the North Pole.

Putin has made his "most audacious land grab bid yet," screamed the Daily Express. Russia launches "Arctic land grab," shouted the Mail Online. "Move over Santa: Putin claims the North Pole" wrote the Fiscal Times, before suggesting that polar bears might soon see "little green men" moving in.

Conservative blog, the Washington Free Beacon got it completely wrong, reporting that along with its bid, Russia had just planted its flag on the ocean floor — a purely symbolic move by Russia that actually happened in 2007.

To be fair, most of the pieces did then grudgingly explain that a number of other countries have also made claims to parts of the Arctic.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin press service announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart had terminated the contract.

France's former Minister of Transport Thierry Mariani said that Paris had surrendered to the influence of the United States and Europe in deciding to terminate the Mistral contract with Moscow.

"Hollande has conceded, France has obeyed the United States and Europe. This is a day of mourning for what is left of our national independence," Mariani wrote in his official Twitter account.

The president of the National Front, the third-largest political party in France, Marine Le Pen, said that the country had seriously discredited itself when Hollande canceled the deal.

The US government is responsible for the spread of terrorism in the Middle East, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif said in a statement Thursday in response to US President Barack Obama's claims that Iran may fund terrorism.

Obama said in a speech on Wednesday that Iran may use the funds it would obtain from sanctions relief to fund "terrorist organizations."

"The developments of the past years showed that what has resulted in insecurity and the spread of extremism and terrorism in our region, have been the uncalculated policies and actions of the US governments and some of their allies in the region.... The US officials have on numerous occasions admitted this reality, but they are still trying to escape the realities by blaming others," Zarif said in a statement published on Foreign Ministry website.

Zarif condemned US attempts to use force and threats "as foreign policy tools," adding that the civilized world had successfully abandoned the idea.

The US would love to see regime change in China, but Washington understands that the Chinese government remains firmly in control, political analyst Eric Draitser told Sputnik; therefore, the US is throwing its NGOs into the fray to do the "dirty work."

Although Moscow and Beijing have in the past tolerated the activity of US-based NGOs in Russia and China, they have since come to view the organizations as provocative and destructive, and have at long last decided to bring them to the end, by passing legislation aimed at preserving the countries' sovereignty and independence.

Unsurprisingly, their moves have met with harsh criticism from the West.

"The main reason why the West is so upset about Russia and China's moves to curb the influence of foreign NGOs is because these NGOs represent a critical element of the West's projection of soft power in these countries, and around the world. The NGOs act as a de facto arm of western intelligence and governments, helping to further the objectives of Washington and its allies," US geopolitical analyst and Stopimperialism.com editor Eric Draitser told Sputnik.

The magazine Foreign Policy's provocative article makes it seem like the nuclear bombings were a godsend, and that the US humanely intended to save Japan from communism.

The month of August is somberly commemorated as the only time in the world when nuclear weapons were used in warfare, where the US dropped two bombs that killed over 200,000 people in two fatal moments: one on August 6 over Hiroshima, and yet again three days later over Nagasaki.

For 70 years, this occasion has been marked by respect for the many victims who tragically lost their lives during these attacks, but now an influential American international affairs outlet, Foreign Policy, has decided to spin the event, blaming the Soviet Union for what happened.


In the article "Did Hiroshima Save Japan From Soviet Occupation?", Sergey Radchenko questions whether the nuclear bombings were actually good for the country, in that they may have saved it from Western bogeyman Joseph Stalin.

This callous inference is contradicted by the article's own conclusion, but nonetheless, it's worthwhile to examine why the magazine would find it fitting to denigrate the victims' memory in the first place with such a misleading and politically self-serving angle.

A group of Syrian rebels that includes fighters trained by the United States have declared their refusal to fight al-Qaida's affiliate in the country, the Nusra Front, following a series of kidnappings by the militant group.

A source in Division 30, which has endured a campaign of kidnappings by the Nusra Front, said they also oppose the American air strikes carried out in the last few days against the al-Qaida-linked fighters.

The statements complicate the American strategy in Syria, which has suffered a string of setbacks and delays, deploying just over 50 fighters dedicated to fighting the terror group Islamic State in the year since its programme to train and equip rebels began.


"With all the immense military power the US has at its disposal, the start to the mission is nothing short of an embarrassment and if it has any hope of succeeding, it needs to show results fast," said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center and an expert on Syrian insurgent groups.

The author, a native New Yorker, recently completed the development of a state of the art television network in Moscow, built without government funding. Its evening news program broadcasts to 65 million homes in Russia across eight time zones.

Previously he was a TV director in New York, for many years with Fox News. He won the New York Emmy in 1994 for best director, and his biography of Desmond Tutu also won a New York Emmy.

Currently he is Chairman of the Board of HellasNet, a group of TV stations in Greece.

America is heading for war with Russia. Some call the current situation "an increase of hostility" or "Cold War II." There are two sides to this story. I believe that American journalists from all political persuasions are not offering critical analysis. Understanding the Russian side and taking their arguments seriously can help prevent serious consequences.

Americans believe that Russians are fed propaganda by the state-controlled media. If Russians only could hear the truth, the thinking goes, they would welcome the US position. This is not so. There are more than 300 TV stations available in Moscow. Only 6 are state-controlled. The truth is that Russians prefer hearing the news from the state rather than the Internet or other sources. This is different from almost any other country. It is not North Korea where the news is censored. Each night during the Crimea crisis, anyone could watch CNN or the BBC bash Russia.

The US Congress took another step towards tyranny and away from legal and Constitutionally guaranteed protections this past week, when the House of Representatives approved HR 237.

This bill allows the Secretary of State, at his own discretion, to make a determination that an American citizen has terrorist affiliations and therefore to deny or revoke said citizen's passport.

According to HR 237, which is entitled the "FTO Passport Revocation Act of 2015," the Secretary of State may so revoke a citizen's travel rights without any invocation of due process. There will be no court hearing involved, and the individual will have no opportunity to object or to present evidence to the contrary.