On Thursday I kept my weekly date on The Hugh Hewitt Show. Mein host wanted to chew over foreign affairs:
HUGH HEWITT: Mark Steyn, I talked a lot about Iran today with Ambassador Oren. I'm curious if you think that this President will give the Iranians whatever they want in order that he can get a deal.
MARK STEYN: Yes, I think so, and I think that's certainly the way the Iranians are playing it with these last minute - and actually post-last minute - demands. They understand that the minute they entered into these negotiations, the priority for the guys on our side was that it be a successful negotiation, whatever its terms. And so the Iranians figure that they can extract whatever terms they want from Obama...
At a certain level, Obama is thinking in world historical terms here... ,The 9/11 world began with the fall of the Shah and the Iranian hostages that destroyed a Democrat president, and this is his way to draw the line under that era by making Iran, in fact, a regional power and beyond, a power beyond the region, and reintegrating them into the world community, whatever the cost to America's national interest or to its allies.
Speaking of 9/11, Hugh raised the question of recent intelligence reports about a possible attack on July 4th:
MS: Realistically, I think if we had been sitting here having this conversation on the morning of September 12th, 2001, I don't think we would have, either of us, would have thought we'd have gone this long without another major attack. Now obviously, there have been plenty of attacks. There have been things like the Boston Marathon bombing, and Fort Hood and all the rest of it. But I think most of us on September 12th, 2001, thought there was another big attack coming. And these guys certainly understand the power of symbolism. You know, they hit Benghazi on the anniversary of September 11th. And it would be a huge coup to them to make the headlines on America's national holiday ones of dead bodies in the streets at some important symbolic event. And the lesson here is the one that the IRA gave Mrs. Thatcher after the Brighton bombing in, I think it was 1984, when she survived and most of her cabinet survived, although some of them very grievously injured. And they said to her: today you were lucky. But you have to be lucky every day. We only have to be lucky once. And that's the advantage when you're playing terrorist odds. We have to be lucky every day. al Qaeda or ISIS or whoever it is only has to be lucky once. And they figure that if they keep trying all the time, they can do that eventually.
Hugh also brought up the latest Hillary Clinton emails in relation to Benghazi. Yet Benghazi, as appalling as it was, was the logical endpoint of a broader Libyan problem:
MS: You understand from these emails that Libya was supposed to be Hillary Clinton's pet project, that she would knock off this harmless, old, past his sell-by date, pock-marked desert transvestite, and she would end up with a big foreign policy feather in her cap, that it was easy to do. And instead, in effect, because she gave it no further thought, except in those shrunken terms of political benefit to her, she left a failed state in Libya, which has resulted in the Libyan ports being under the control of ISIS, and them now being used as the main jumping off point for this flood of refugees that are remorselessly landing on the shores of Italy every day, every day, every day, and destabilizing Italy and other European Union countries. That's Hillary Clinton's Libya. Libya is Hillary's failed policy. That's what she did. That was supposed to be her great accomplishment as Secretary of State. Instead, she turned it not only into just another failed state, but a failed state that is destabilizing American allies. And nobody is saying a word about that.
HH: And also, nobody is saying a word about Mike Morell told me, that our enemies knew she had this server, and almost certainly were following her every move and reading her every email at the same time that they were being sent...
MS: Right, right... At some point, the media do have to decide whether they're just going to be court eunuchs, because there's a great story here. And if this had been, if the Woodward and Bernstein self-mythologizing of what's left of the American media had any grain of truth to it, this would be a great story for a crack investigative unit at one of the big newspapers to make their bones and win the Pulitzers on... Most of Hillary's emails are one word answers. They're either 'yes' or 'please print', which is a two word answer, in that she understands that the reason she has this private email server is because she doesn't want to be caught at anything by what she perceives as her enemies. Well, she's not working for herself. She's working for the people of the United States. And the problem is that the United States' enemies around the world in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing and everywhere else, are reading all this stuff. And they're getting all this information in real time, because she put her own interests before that of the United States. How can someone like that be president?
You can find the full interview here.
~If you want a few more fireworks for your Fourth of July weekend, I'll be on C-SPAN's Book TV all weekend long, talking Climate Change: The Facts but also clobbering hockey-stick litigant Michael E Mann. The show airs on Saturday night at 12 midnight Eastern/9pm Pacific, with an encore presentation at 7am Eastern and again at 7pm Eastern on Sunday. It's a lot of fun.