Cubans pay price for Obama-Castro engagement

by Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

On July 1st, President Obama announced the formal resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, asserting confidently that "American engagement ... is the best way to advance our interests and support for democracy and human rights."

On July 5th, the Communist regime in Havana delivered its customary response. It arrested more than 80 democratic dissidents, including at least 60 members of Ladies in White, a peaceful group of brave women who march weekly in support of husbands, fathers, and other relatives imprisoned in the Castros' jails.

Many of those detained were hurt, some severely. One prominent human-rights activist, Antonio Rodiles, was sent to the hospital with a shattered nose; he had reportedly been handcuffed by security forces, then beaten for shouting "Long live freedom" and "Long live human rights."

There had been even more arrests and beatings in the days leading up to Obama's Rose Garden statement. Some 225 Cuban dissidents across the island were arrested the previous Sunday, with Ladies in White again prominent among those targeted.

In fact, there have been police actions against Cuban democrats for 12 Sundays in a row — the government makes a point of going after dissidents as they walk to Mass or emerge from church holding photos of imprisoned loved ones.

Like most US advocates of normalizing relations with the only all-out dictatorship in the Western Hemisphere, Obama claims that warming up to the Castro regime is the most effective way to promote freedom and liberal reform in Cuba. When he announced last December that ties between Havana and Washington were going to be restored, the president declared that "we can do more to support the Cuban people and promote our values through engagement."

Now, nearly seven months later, he reiterates "America's enduring support for universal values, like freedom of speech and assembly," and he insists that his administration "will not hesitate to speak out when we see actions that contradict those values."

No? Over the past seven months, life for Cuba's people has grown even more oppressive and unfree. Yet far from forthrightly condemning the brutality, Obama serenely counsels patience: "Nobody expects Cuba to be transformed overnight," he says.

There have been more than 3,000 political detentions on the island since last December, according to The Washington Post. The paper quotes Mario Felix Lleonart, a Cuban Baptist pastor who laments that he, like many, "had hoped, following the announcement about normalizing relations between the US and Cuba, that there would be a stop to — or at least a lessening of — the beatings" of dissidents. "We now know that what is happening is precisely the opposite."

The policy that Obama now embraces is also "precisely the opposite" of the one he feigned to uphold as a candidate for president.

Like opposing same-sex marriage and guaranteeing that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it, Obama reversed course on normalizing relations with Cuba, which he was clear could only come after, not before, "significant steps towards democracy." Once upon a time, Obama maintained that there would be no American embassy in Havana until all of Cuba's political prisoners were free.

Now he trumpets John Kerry's forthcoming trip to Havana "to proudly raise the American flag over our embassy once more," even as Cuba continues to lock up men and women for daring to seek the democratic liberties Americans take for granted.

The Obama administration is bestowing tremendous gifts on Cuba's rulers: diplomatic legitimation, a public-relations triumph, an influx of hard currency, and expanded influence in Washington. All this the Castros are getting in exchange for nothing: no elections, no free press, no end to beating of peaceful protesters, no justice for the many victims of Cuban totalitarianism.

"Castroism has won," mourned the Cuban dissident Yoanni Sanchez last winter, when Obama announced an end to America's principled policy on Cuba. If it wasn't obvious then, it is now.

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Hostages freedom should trump nuclear deal

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

The Washington Post's Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, is being tried in
Iran on bogus espionage charges.

In his remarks to the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April, President Obama pledged that his administration would work tirelessly for the freedom of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who has been held hostage by Iran since last summer on spurious espionage charges.

"Jason has been in prison for nothing more than writing about the hopes and fears of the Iranian people," Obama said. "We will not rest until we bring him home to his family, safe and sound."

Yet just four days later, the president warned Congress that he would veto any bill making approval of a nuclear deal with Iran contingent on the release of Americans in Iranian captivity. Obama may want the mullahs to set their US hostages free. But he wants that nuclear deal more.

On Monday, Obama boasted to a gathering of young Southeast Asian leaders that as a result of his policies, "today, once again, the United States is the most respected country on earth." Could anyone swallow such a risible claim without, as Hillary Clinton might put it, the willing suspension of disbelief?

It's hard to think of any nation on the planet that holds America in higher esteem because of the Obama presidency. Iran surely doesn't. Time and again, the White House has bent over backward to "engage" the Islamist regime in Tehran. At every step its overtures have been greeted with scorn.

The seizure of innocent Americans like Rezaian — whose trial, in a closed courtroom, began last week — fits a pattern of hostility that seven years of outreach and indulgence by the Obama administration has failed to soften.

"We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist," entreated the president in his first inaugural address. But Iran's theocratic leaders have not unclenched their fists, not even when it would appear to be in their interest to do so.

The nuclear accord being pushed so fervently by Obama and John Kerry would be a dream come true for the Islamic Republic's rulers — generating tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, legitimizing their eventual path to the bomb, and entrenching Iran's malignant regional hegemony.

Yet hungry as they are for this deal, they know that Obama is hungrier still. No provocation, no act of aggression, no insult by Iran has been enough to make the White House walk away from the negotiations.

Rezaian isn't the only US hostage in Iranian hands. Saeed Abedini, 35, is a Christian pastor from Idaho who was arrested in 2012 while on a humanitarian trip to Iran to help establish an orphanage. He was convicted in 2013 "undermining the national security of Iran" and sentenced to eight years in prison.

American pastor Saeed Abedini, seen here with his two young children, has been
held in Iran since 2012. He was sentenced to eight years imprisonment on
charges of undermining national security through worship gatherings
held in private Christian homes.

Amir Hekmati, a decorated U.S. Marine, was born in Arizona and raised in Michigan. He was seized in 2011 while visiting his grandmother in Iran, accused of spying, and sentenced to death (a sentence later commuted pending a retrial). Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent, vanished during a trip to Iran in 2007. Iran's state-run media reported at the time that he was in the hands of the security services, making him one of the longest-held US hostages ever.

The brazen detention of American citizens is an outrage. The refusal of the White House to call a halt to negotiations until the men are released is a humiliation. Iran has an odious history of abducting guiltless Americans, then using them as bargaining chips to trade for some concession from Washington.

You'd think Washington would have learned by now that ransoming hostages only reinforces the incentive to seize more hostages in the future.

It is mind-boggling that the president would threaten to veto a measure making the freedom of the four US citizens the price of any more nuclear talks. Can Obama truly believe that this is the way to make America "the most respected country on earth"?

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Does Tehran mean what it says? Oh Yes

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Who trusts Iran? Most Americans don't. According to two new polls, a majority of the public strongly doubts that the ruling theocrats in Tehran can be counted on to keep their end of any nuclear deal negotiated in the US-led "P5+1" talks in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Asked in a Fox News poll how much of Iran's claims on nuclear matters can be trusted, 55 percent of respondents replied that the United States "can't trust anything" the regime says, while 28 percent were willing to trust only "a little." Similarly, a survey by NBC News found that 68 percent of Americans consider Iran unlikely to abide by any nuclear agreement.

Nothing unusual there. Given Iran's long history of deceit, it would be strange if Americans and their allies didn't regard as worthless any nuclear promises the mullahs make.

Iran was an early signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970 and it signed a detailed safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1974. But after the Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers seized power in 1979, Iran began lying about its nuclear activities.

Virtually everything we know about Iran's nuclear program was uncovered only after years of stonewalling, concealment, and outright denial. The construction of a vast uranium enrichment installation near Natanz and a heavy-water reactor in Arak, for example, didn't come to light until 2002, when an Iranian exile group exposed their existence in a press conference in Washington.

Iran has repeatedly flouted UN Security Council resolutions ordering it to suspend all enrichment-related activities. Even now, reports the IAEA, Tehran refuses to answer questions about the "possible military dimensions" of its nuclear activities.

With such a track record, it stands to reason that Iran's commitments are so widely regarded as worthless. No piece of paper signed in Switzerland will take the ayatollahs' eyes off the nuclear prize they have pursued, by means mostly foul, for so long. And of what value is any agreement if one of the signatories can't be trusted not to cheat?

Yet what makes the framework nuclear deal so grotesque and dangerous isn't Iran's trail of deception. The real reason to block any nuclear accord with Tehran's rulers isn't that they always lie. It's that they don't.

Maybe Iran would cheat on the loophole-ridden deal being promoted the Obama administration. But it wouldn't have to. Even President Obama admits that Iran could abide by the terms agreed to and wait for them to run out in a little more than a decade.

"At that point, the breakout times [to nuclear weapons capability] would have shrunk almost down to zero," the president told NPR. Cheat or don't cheat, the end is the same: The Lausanne deal paves Iran's path to the bomb either way.

And then it will be clear — apocalyptically clear — that the ayatollahs were telling the truth.

They were telling the truth last November, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guards proclaimed that "the US is still the great Satan and the number one enemy of the [Islamic] revolution and the Islamic Republic."

They were telling the truth in February, when Ali Shirazi, a senior Iranian cleric and aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that his troops are in a global war that will one day bring "the banner of Islam over the White House."

They were telling the truth a decade ago when Hassan Abassi, a high-ranking intelligence operative, warned that Iranian agents had identified "29 sensitive sites in the West, with the aim of bombing them. . . . Our intention is that 6,000 nuclear warheads will explode" as part of a "strategy . . . for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization."

They were telling the truth when a commander of Iranian forces insisted that "America has no other choice but to leave the Middle East region beaten and humiliated." And when Iran's supreme leader raged that "there is only one solution to the Middle East problem, namely the annihilation and destruction of the Jewish state."

And when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asserted that "a world without America is not only desirable, it is achievable."

And when, over and over and over, they have incited crowds in chants of "Death to America."

Tehran's rulers may have lied for years about their nuclear activities; their negotiated commitments to suspend enrichment and submit to inspections may not be worth the ink they sign them with.

But the mullahs don't lie about what matters to them most: death to America, the extermination of Israel, unrelenting global jiihad. They say they are deadly serious.

Believe them.

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Putin in Russia: A gangster regime

By Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Putin is a coldly corrupt, KGB-trained totalitarian, not someone
with whom the West — as Margaret Thatcher said of
Mikhail Gorbachev — "can do business."

"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," Boris Nemtsov told a Russian website on February 10. He was dead before the month was out.

The charismatic opposition leader, a former deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, was assassinated in the heart of Moscow on Friday night as he walked over a bridge near Red Square, only yards from the Kremlin walls. The killing, it seems clear, was a professional hit.

Nemtsov was shot four times in the back by gunmen who escaped in a precisely timed getaway car, the murder unrecorded by nearby security cameras, which were mysteriously turned off — all in a section of the Russian capital that normally teems with security personnel and surveillance.

It was a calculatedly shocking crime, the highest-profile assassination since the Stalin era, and Vladimir Putin's propaganda machine immediately moved to exploit it. The Russian ruler said he would personally oversee the inquiry into Nemtsov's killing, which his press aide described as a "provocation" intended to make the government look bad.

With almost unfathomable cynicism, government investigators speculated that one of Russia's best-known liberal democrats might have been martyred by his own allies in a bid for sympathy.

"Nemtsov could have been a kind of sacrifice for those who stop at nothing to attain their political ends," spokesman Vladimir Markin suggested. Meanwhile, Pravda — a Putin mouthpiece — published a column labeling the murder "a CIA-staged false flag" and "Washington's latest attempt to destabilize Russia."

Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia, noted on Twitter that he was being flooded with thousands of messages parroting the "USA killed Nemtsov" line.

In the Russia that Putin has built, such brazen Big Lies are pervasive, relentlessly promoted by a regime that manipulates the media and the law to destroy its critics and strangle democratic opposition.

Putin's time in power have seen the elimination of a jaw-dropping array of inconvenient individuals: Courageous journalists like Anna Politkovskaya, Anastasia Baburova, Ivan Safronov, and Paul Klebnikov. Human-rights defenders, such as historian Natalia Estemirova and lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

High-placed whistleblowers, including one-time Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko and accountant Sergei Magnitsky. They are only a few of so many Putin foes who met untimely deaths. Other opponents have been neutralized in other ways, from long prison terms on trumped-up convictions to forced exile.

Did Putin order the latest assassination? As Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and longtime Nemtsov friend, noted over the weekend, whether or not Putin issued a directive is beside the point.

The Russian strongman "is directly responsible for creating the conditions in which these outrages occur with such terrible frequency."

What Putin's propagandists and proxies have done in Ukraine, Chechnya, and Georgia — inciting hatred and violence against far weaker opponents, demonizing all critics as traitors, fifth columnists, and enemies of Russia — they do at home to liberal dissidents and democratic reformers.

In such a culture of fear, there is little point asking who gave the order to kill. Ask rather whose killing will be ordered next.

And ask an even more pressing question: When will American policymakers
stop treating Putin's regime as anything but the gangster state that it is?

For those with eyes to see, there has never been any mystery about Putin's ways and means. He is coldly corrupt and vicious, a KGB-trained totalitarian who still resents the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century."

Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev, Putin is not a Russian leader with whom the West "can do business." He is a brute, one who scruples at nothing in his pursuit of power, wealth, and the breaking of his opponents.

Yet US leaders have consistently denied the obvious. George W. Bush famously looked Putin in the eye, got "a sense of his soul" and concluded that the former KGB colonel was "very straightforward and trustworthy." Barack Obama sought to "reset" relations with Moscow in his first term, and promised even more "flexibility" in his second.

Putin took their measure, and acted accordingly: crushing Chechnya, occupying Georgia, annexing Crimea, running interference for Syria and Iran — all while eviscerating Russia's democratic opposition, plundering its wealth, and periodically reminding anyone who might forget that those who get in his way are apt to die young.

Washington can best give meaning to Nemtsov's death by emulating the resolve and courage he embodied in life. Condolences won't slow Putin's aggression. Backbone is a different story.

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A happy Christmas for the Castros

A happy Christmas for the Castros from Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Normalized diplomatic ties with the United States will give the
Castro brothers even more reasons to smile. But President
Obama's sharp change in policy won't bring liberty any
nearer for Cuba's 11 million people.

After five years in a Cuban dungeon, American aid contractor Alan Gross was finally freed Wednesday, his release part of a deal to restore full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.

But there will be no freedom for the many thousands of Cuban citizens locked in the Castros' prisons — not even after a US embassy is reopened in Havana.

The United States has always had diplomatic ties with nasty regimes. In that sense, President Obama's announcement last week that he intends to normalize relations with Cuba merely adds another to the list. But Cuba isn't just another dictatorship.

To begin with, it is the only remaining totalitarian state in the Western Hemisphere. The Castro brothers' regime "continues to repress individuals and groups who criticize the government or call for basic human rights," notes a recent Human Rights Watch summary of conditions on the island.

"Officials employ a range of tactics to punish dissent and instill fear in the public, including beatings, public acts of shaming, termination of employment, and threats of long-term imprisonment."

There is no freedom of speech or religion in Cuba, no due process of law, no right to criticize the government. Nor is there any right to leave, which is why so many Cubans have lost their lives at sea, drowning in desperate attempts to escape.

If the president's abrupt shift of policy were part of an American strategy to topple such an odious dictatorship, it might be defensible. Unfortunately, it is hard to see this as anything but one more iteration of the Obama administration's idea of statecraft: Accommodate the world's worst actors and consciously reduce America's clout in shaping international opinion.

The Cuban regime is one of the few with which Washington severed ties on a fundamental matter of principle, having first welcomed its accession to power. The United States initially supported the Castro revolution — early in 1958 the Eisenhower administration imposed an arms embargo against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and it swiftly recognized the new government in 1959.

It wasn't until 1961 that President Eisenhower cut diplomatic relations with Havana, and that was only after Castro had seized private property and nationalized (read: stole) billions of dollars' worth of assets belonging to US companies in Cuba. More than half a century later, that massive larceny is still not repaid.

Obama dismisses this as mere history. He pooh-poohs the relevance of a policy "rooted in events that took place before most of us were born."

Yet as a candidate for president, Obama vowed that his policy toward Cuba would "be guided by one word: Libertad." He bent over backward to stress that while he favored engagement, there would be no quid of normalization until there was a quo of democratization: "Don't be confused about this," Obama told voters in Florida

"I will maintain the embargo. It provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear choice: If you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations. That's the way to bring about real change in Cuba."

That was then, this is now. As in almost every other region touched by Obama's foreign policy since 2009, liberty in Cuba has made no gains. Leverage has not been deployed. Political prisoners remain behind bars. And significant steps toward democracy remain a fantasy.

Obama isn't the first president to find ways to ease trade and travel sanctions against Cuba. But the increased business — US agricultural exports to Cuba soared from $4 million in 2001 to more than $450 million in 2010 — has mostly entrenched Cuba's rulers.

Easing them further will entrench them even more. That is because the Castro regime, in addition to its other charms, is a criminal syndicate. It controls Cuba's tourism and foreign trade operations much as Al Capone controlled Chicago's liquor rackets.

When foreign currency flows to Cuba, it flows to the dictatorship and its military. As Rich Lowry commented in Politico last week, it is as if the Pentagon owned the Radisson, Marriott, and Hilton hotel chains.

Despite the president's warm-and-fuzzy rhetoric about the Cuban people's right to "live with dignity and self-determination," nothing about this normalization reflects the least concession on Havana's part. For decades, Obama said, the United States has "proudly. . . supported democracy and human rights in Cuba."

But there is no hint that human rights or political freedoms will improve for ordinary Cubans. An end to Communist Party control? Contested elections? An unmolested free press? Don't hold your breath.

Echoing a popular talking point, the president claims that America's longstanding policy toward Cuba hasn't "worked," by which he apparently means that Cuba is still a crude and brutal tyranny. "For more than 35 years, we've had relations with China. . . Nearly two decades ago, we reestablished relations with Vietnam," Obama says — as if that supports, rather than undermines, the notion that normal diplomatic and trade relations with Communist dictatorships will transform them into humane and democratic societies.

Normalization hasn't "worked" in Vietnam or China. Why expect a different outcome in Cuba?

There have always been reasonable arguments on both sides of America's fraught Cuba policy. But there is nothing reasonable about Obama's drastic shift of policy. It amounts to an invaluable gift to the worst regime in the Americas, in exchange for no lasting gain in human rights, democracy, or libertad.

This will be a happy Christmas for the Castros and their courtiers, who are getting something they have long desired. As for their millions of beleaguered subjects, still unfree and impoverished:

They'll have to go on waiting.

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