History > 2015 > USA > Politics > White House / President (II)

Obama Says ‘Enough Is Enough’

After Colorado Shooting

NOV. 28, 2015

The New York Times

By JONATHAN MARTIN

President Obama responded angrily on Saturday to the mass shooting that took three lives, including that of a police officer, at a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs over the Thanksgiving holiday, calling the country’s recurring outbreaks of gun violence “not normal.”

“We can’t let it become normal,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”

The tragedy quickly found its way into the presidential race, with the Democratic candidates offering statements of solidarity with Planned Parenthood, which has faced intense conservative criticism this year, and the Republican hopefuls largely avoiding mention of the latest outbreak of gun violence.

Mr. Obama, who has voiced rising dismay as he has been forced to repeatedly respond to mass shootings, sounded notes of deep exasperation about yet another moment of fear and loss taking place at a time devoted to thanks and family.

“The last thing Americans should have to do, over the holidays or any day, is comfort the families of people killed by gun violence — people who woke up in the morning and bid their loved ones goodbye with no idea it would be for the last time,” he said. “And yet, two days after Thanksgiving, that’s what we are forced to do again.”

Without calling explicitly for new laws, Mr. Obama invoked the name of the slain police officer, from the University of Colorado’s Colorado Springs campus, to plead with leaders to show the will to address such shootings.

“May God bless Officer Garrett Swasey and the Americans he tried to save — and may He grant the rest of us the courage to do the same thing,” Mr. Obama said.

Previous large-scale shootings have not, however, reshaped the country’s polarized debate over gun control, and there was little reason to believe that the Republican-controlled Congress would take up measures to restrict access to firearms.

The shooting did insert two highly contentious issues, gun control and abortion, into a presidential campaign that has been dominated by a debate over national security and Middle Eastern refugees since the terrorist attack on Paris this month.

By late Saturday morning, though, the response to the violence was notably one-sided: The Democratic candidates all issued statements noting that they stood with Planned Parenthood, while few of the Republicans offered any response.

“Today and every day, we #StandWithPP,” Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote on Twitter, a reference to Planned Parenthood.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said much the same. “I strongly support Planned Parenthood and the work it’s doing,” Mr. Sanders wrote on Twitter. “I hope people realize that bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences.”

Mrs. Clinton has made women’s rights and gender issues central to her campaign. While largely avoiding direct attacks on her Democratic rivals, she has pointedly criticized Mr. Sanders, who represents a state with a lot of hunters, for some of his previous votes that aligned with views of gun-rights advocates.

Democrats largely focused on the gunman’s use of an assault-style weapon, pleading for tighter limits on firearms. But some prominent figures in the party did seize on the location of the attack to criticize Republicans, even though the gunman’s motive remained unclear.

“It is time to stop the demonizing and witch hunts against Planned Parenthood, its staff and patients, and the lifesaving health care it provides to millions every day,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California.

Republicans have been largely restrained about quickly responding to mass shootings, unwilling to weigh in on the role of access to guns. But some of them argued after previous shootings that if more people were armed, the loss of life could be mitigated — a case Donald J. Trump made again Saturday.

Mr. Trump did not specifically mention the Colorado mayhem during an hourlong speech in Sarasota, Fla. He did, however, bring up the assault in Paris and the attack this year on a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tenn. If the victims had access to guns, he said, “you would have had a totally different story, would have been a different world, and I can say that about a lot of these crazy attacks.”

That the killings on Friday took place at a clinic that performs abortions made the issue even more combustible for the Republican hopefuls, nearly all of whom oppose abortion rights and many of whom have inveighed against Planned Parenthood.

Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said in a statement, “There is no acceptable explanation for this violence.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, speaking to reporters in Lamoni, Iowa, called the shooting “tragic” but made no mention of where it took place.

“Our prayers right now are with the families, and at this point, the investigation will reveal — we don’t know the motives of what this murderer, what those motives were — but whatever they were, it’s unacceptable,” Mr. Cruz said. “It’s horrific and wrong.”

Mr. Cruz has been among the most vocal candidates pushing to deny federal funding to Planned Parenthood, even threatening to close down the federal government over the matter.

Withholding taxpayer dollars from groups that perform abortions has long been a rallying cry for conservatives, but the effort has been reinvigorated since the release of secretly recorded videos this summer in which a top official with the organization was recorded discussing the sale of fetal tissue to researchers. The issue drew significant attention at a Republican presidential debate in September, when several candidates condemned the group and Carly Fiorina described a video of “a formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

There is no such scene in the videos captured by an anti-abortion group, the Center for Medical Progress, but Mrs. Fiorina refused to back off her claims. She accused Planned Parenthood of waging a “propaganda” attack against her and improved in the polls. But she has since receded as the contest, dominated by Mr. Trump and Ben Carson, has moved away from abortion.

In a sign of what is animating the Republican contest, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida issued a statement Saturday referring to Americans’ being “less safe.”

But he was referring to the expiration Saturday night of a set of controversial intelligence-gathering laws — an issue on which he has been attacking Mr. Cruz — and he focused on the threat of the Islamic State.

Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Enough Is Enough,’ Obama Says After the Latest Outbreak
of Gun Violence.

Obama Says ‘Enough Is Enough’ After Colorado Shooting,
NYT,
NOV. 28, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/
colorado-springs-planned-parenthood-obama-responds-to-gun-violence.html

President Obama’s

Hypocrisy on Syria

NOV. 27, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages

Contributing Op-Ed Writer

Peter Wehner
 

IN 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency promising that he would heal our political divisions. Instead, Mr. Obama has been as polarizing as any president in the history of modern polling. The debate over the Syrian refugee crisis illustrates why.

The civil war in Syria has created one of the worst refugee crises since World War II, and the president has instructed his administration to admit at least 10,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016. Republicans in Congress, in the aftermath of the massacre in Paris on Nov. 13, called for a pause in this process, in part because of their fear that terrorists might pose as refugees. The president, rather than trying to persuade his critics, mocked them.

“Apparently they’re scared of widows and orphans coming in to the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” Mr. Obama said. “That doesn’t sound very tough to me.” According to the president, the most potent recruitment tool for the Islamic State isn’t jihadist social media or battlefield victories but Republican rhetoric. “They’ve been playing on fear in order to try to score political points or to advance their campaigns,” he said.

The president flippantly dismissed worries about the vetting process despite the fact that, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said in September, the possibility that the Islamic State might infiltrate operatives among Syrian refugees is “a huge concern of ours.”

Administration officials also acknowledge that there are limitations on determining the history of Syrian refugees since we’re in no position to collect vital information from Syria. Even if the president believes the case for accepting refugees overrides those concerns (as I basically do), he should acknowledge their legitimacy.

What made Mr. Obama’s assault on Republicans particularly outrageous is his hypocrisy, by which I mean the president’s failure to act in any meaningful way to avert the humanitarian disaster now engulfing Syria. It’s not as if options weren’t available to him.

In 2012 Mr. Obama rebuffed plans to arm Syrian rebels despite the fact that his former secretaries of defense and state, his C.I.A. director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported them. He repeatedly insisted he would not put American soldiers in Syria or pursue a prolonged air campaign. He refused to declare safe havens or no-fly zones. And it was also in 2012 that Mr. Obama warned the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, that using chemical weapons would cross a “red line.” Yet when Mr. Assad did just that, Mr. Obama did nothing.

The president, perhaps fearful of offending the pro-Assad Iranian government with which he was trying to negotiate a nuclear arms deal, chose to sit by while a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in The American Interest, “This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.” Some of us find it a bit nervy for the president to lecture the opposition party for heartlessness because cleaning up after his failure raises security concerns.

A reasonable approach would take account of both the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the concerns of critics of the president’s proposal. Doing so might result in a pause in the process to reassess our security procedures, make improvements where necessary and then proceed. Under the leadership of the new speaker, Paul Ryan, the House has passed just such a proposal with a broad bipartisan majority — 47 Democrats sided with Republicans — but Mr. Obama has promised to veto it if it passes the Senate. In his Manichaean conception of politics, such balance has no place, it seems.

What we have seen and heard from Mr. Obama during the Syrian crisis — self-righteousness without self-reflection, taunting, exasperation that others don’t see the world just as he does, the inability to work constructively with his opponents — have been hallmarks of his presidency. The man who promised to strengthen our political culture has further disabled it.

The president doesn’t bear full responsibility for the fractured state of our politics. The causes are complicated. They predate the Obama presidency, and Republicans have certainly played a role. (For some on the right, compromise is in principle capitulation.)

Yet it was Barack Obama who in 2008 wanted us to “rediscover our bonds to each other” and put an end to the “constant petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics.” He utterly failed in that and has to own his part in it. According to a new Pew Research Center study, 79 percent of Americans view the country as more politically divided than in the past.

Today our political discourse barely allows us to think clearly about, let alone rise to meet, the enormous challenges we face at home and abroad. Trust in government has reached one of its lowest levels in the past half-century. Americans are deeply cynical about the entire political enterprise; they are losing faith in the normal democratic process.

This creates the conditions for the rise of demagogues, of people who excel at inflaming tensions. Enter Donald J. Trump, who delights in tearing down the last remaining guardrails in our political culture.

Mr. Obama is hardly responsible for Mr. Trump, and it’s up to my fellow Republican primary voters to repudiate his malignant candidacy. Not doing so would be a moral indictment of our party. But in amplifying some of the worst tendencies in our politics, Mr. Obama helped make the rise of Mr. Trump possible.

Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the last three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 28, 2015, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: President Obama’s Hypocrisy on Syria.

President Obama’s Hypocrisy on Syria,
NYT, NOV. 27, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/
opinion/president-obamas-hypocrisy-on-syria.html

Refugees Must Not Be Turned Away,

Obama Says

NOV. 21, 2015

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — President Obama vowed on Saturday to keep America’s borders open to the world’s refugees “as long as I’m president,” even as he met with child migrants and refugees here and his administration refused to yield in a long-distance feud with his critics over the issue.

Mr. Obama chatted with elementary-school-age children, all sharply dressed in navy-and-white uniforms, at a humanitarian center that serves young people who have fled violence in Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

They were representative of the faces of all the world’s persecuted minorities, the president said, adding that such children must not be turned away by countries like the United States because of what he insisted was an unfounded fear of a terrorist threat from their presence.

“They were indistinguishable from any child in America,” Mr. Obama said after kneeling to look at their drawings and math homework. “And the notion that somehow we would be fearful of them, that our politics would somehow leave us to turn our sights away from their plight, is not representative of the best of who we are.”

A 10-day trip by the president to Turkey and Asia has been overshadowed by a relentless clash with governors, lawmakers and Republican presidential candidates about whether to block the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States.

In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, House lawmakers this week passed bipartisan legislation to drastically tighten screening for refugees seeking to enter the United States from Syria. Calls for restrictions on Syrian refugees have echoed across the political landscape, from Republican presidential hopefuls and governors to many lawmakers from the president’s own party.

The president and his aides have condemned what he called on Thursday a “spasm of rhetoric” among politicians. He accused Republicans in the United States of cowardice for seeking to block Syrian children and families who are fleeing the violent civil war in their country.

“Apparently, they’re scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” Mr. Obama said on Wednesday, adding a moment later: “That doesn’t sound very tough to me.”

As Mr. Obama has participated in a series of economic summit meetings on this trip, White House officials have repeatedly sought to emphasize what they say is a comprehensive screening process for Syrian refugees that takes up to two years and includes interviews and biometric data to ensure that terror suspects do not enter the United States.

In the president’s weekly radio address, taped by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and released on Saturday morning, Mr. Biden insisted that refugees from Syria face “the most rigorous screening” of anybody entering the United States.

“First they are fingerprinted, then they undergo a thorough background check, then they are interviewed by the Department of Homeland Security,” Mr. Biden said. “And after that, the F.B.I., the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Defense and the Department of State, they all have to sign off on access.”

Administration officials have also sought to change the subject, telling reporters during the president’s flight from the Philippines to Malaysia on Friday that the White House was open to discussions with lawmakers about tightening security for a separate program that reduces visa requirements for millions of people visiting the United States from certain countries.

But the White House efforts have done little to quell the anxiety back home. The House bill increasing security for the refugee program passed by a vote of 289 to 137, with nearly 50 Democrats supporting it. That is a margin that might allow lawmakers to override Mr. Obama’s promised veto if the bill also passes in the Senate.

At the Dignity for Children Foundation in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, Mr. Obama knelt to talk to several children as photographers and television cameras captured the broad smiles on their faces.

“What’s your favorite subject?” he asked, squatting beside a girl seated on a gray shag rug. “Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?”

The girl said she liked math and wanted to be an engineer when she grew up, prompting Mr. Obama to say, “You’re going to be an excellent engineer.”

Most of the children at the center were members of the Rohingya minority who have fled persecution, discrimination and ethnic violence in Myanmar, officials said. White House aides said the United Nations had documented more than 153,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia, but they said the images of Mr. Obama in the center were designed to highlight the plight of refugees across the globe.

In his remarks, the president said he hoped the recent elections in Myanmar, where Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won in a landslide, would help ease the humanitarian crisis in that country. In the meantime, he said, “The refugees from Myanmar — again, mostly Rohingya, mostly Muslim — those young children up there, they’re deserving of the world’s protection and the world’s support.”

More broadly, he said, the United States should not turn its back on children from all over the world. He said America’s role as a global leader was defined by its willingness to help people who have been discriminated against, tortured or subjected to violence.

“That’s American leadership,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s when we’re the shining light on the hill. Not when we respond on the basis of fear.”

Mr. Obama is scheduled to return to the United States on Monday, when he is likely to face more debate about the refugee issue. He is also scheduled to meet on Tuesday with President François Hollande of France to discuss the terror attacks in Paris.

Before leaving Asia, Mr. Obama spent some time on Saturday telling business leaders that the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal negotiated by 12 nations, including the United States, will improve the economy and security of Southeast Asia.

Speaking to a business group before heading to the humanitarian center, Mr. Obama said he remained confident that Congress would approve the deal. And he said that nations in Asia should quickly do the same.

“T.P.P. is more than just a trade pact; it also has important strategic and geopolitical benefits,” he said. “T.P.P. is a long-term investment in our shared security and in universal human rights.”

“With T.P.P., we’re not only writing the rules for trade in the Asia Pacific, we also have an historic opportunity to shape the future of the global economy,” he said, adding: “It says that America’s foreign policy rebalance to the Asia Pacific will continue on every front.”

Refugees Must Not Be Turned Away, Obama Says,
NYT, NOV. 21, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/world/asia/
refugees-must-not-be-turned-away-obama-says.html

A Grim Decision on Afghanistan

OCT. 15, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama was upbeat last Christmas, standing before American troops in Hawaii as he proclaimed the end of the United States’ combat mission in Afghanistan.
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“Because of the extraordinary service of the men and women in the armed forces, Afghanistan has a chance to rebuild its own country,” Mr. Obama said. “We are safer. It’s not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again.”

The president’s grim tone and body language on Thursday stood in sharp contrast as he explained why he has given up on leaving Afghanistan, one of the wars he inherited in 2009.

“The bottom line is, in key areas of the country, the security situation is still very fragile, and in some places there is risk of deterioration,” Mr. Obama said in a televised address, standing next to the vice president, the secretary of defense and the nation’s top military commander.

Mr. Obama’s decision to keep roughly 9,800 troops in Afghanistan next year — rather than drawing down to 1,000 troops by the end of 2016, as the White House had once intended — comes amid Taliban advances and other alarming changes in the region. While Mr. Obama’s shift is disturbing and may not put Afghanistan on a path toward stability, he has no good options.

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The administration’s decision is almost certainly driven by the advances of radical militant Islamist groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, where they have taken advantage of weak governments to seize ever expanding territory. American officials say the Islamic State, the largest and most brutal among them, has a growing presence in Afghanistan, which could allow it to tap into the country’s profitable opium trade.

Keeping a military contingent in Afghanistan in the short term, the officials say, may make the country less hospitable to the Islamic State and fighters who are attracted to its barbaric ideology. It might help the Afghan Army maintain control of the cities at a time when the Taliban is making alarming inroads across the country. It could dissuade more Afghans from joining the refugee exodus.

These are optimistic prospects; the most likely scenario might only be to maintain the security status quo for another year. It would be foolish to expect the drawdown delay to turn the war around, nor should this decision become an open-ended commitment that costs American taxpayers billions of dollars and takes American lives each year. The Obama administration and the Pentagon have been disingenuous, and at times downright dishonest, in their public assessment of the progress American forces and civilians have made in Afghanistan in recent years.

The key to ending the Afghan war remains a negotiated truce between the government and the leading factions of the Taliban, which has entered into talks with the Kabul government in recent years, but has not been persuaded to join the political process. It would also require that Afghan leaders take far clearer and bolder steps to root out the country’s entrenched corruption and turn a hollow, dysfunctional government into a state Afghans start to believe in.

Whether those goals are attainable will ultimately depend on the competency and tenacity of Afghanistan’s leaders. President Ashraf Ghani, who has been in office for a little over a year, has been a marked improvement over his erratic predecessor, Hamid Karzai.

“In the Afghan government, we have a serious partner who wants our help,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday.

The administration must redouble efforts during its remaining time in office to ensure that help is rendered as a part of a coherent, realistic strategy that ultimately cannot depend on American troops scrambling to hold the country together.

A version of this editorial appears in print on October 16, 2015, on page A32 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grim Decision on Afghanistan.

A Grim Decision on Afghanistan,
NYT, OCT. 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/a-grim-decision-on-afghanistan.html

Obama Consoles Families in Oregon

Amid 2 More Campus Shootings

 

OCT. 9, 2015

The New York Times

By GARDINER HARRIS

ROSEBURG, Ore. — President Obama on Friday flew into this mill town buffeted by the mass shooting at a community college to give solace to grieving families, but politics and two more deadly shootings on college campuses threatened to intrude.

“I’ve got some very strong feelings about this because when you talk to these families, you’re reminded that this could be happening to your child, or your mom, or your dad, or your relative, or your friend,” said Mr. Obama, standing next to Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon and Mayor Larry Rich of Roseburg. “And so we’re going to have to come together as a country to see how we can prevent these issues from taking place.”

Several hundred people stood outside the gates of the Roseburg airport. Some held signs and American flags, but most just held cellphones to record the passage of the presidential motorcade — rarely seen in this hilly, green area.

Many of the signs proclaimed, “Welcome Obama,” but others were more pointed, and referred to his desire for more gun control. “Gun-free Zones Are for Sitting Ducks,” said one. Another: “Nothing Trumps Our Liberty.” And one said simply, “Obama is Wrong.”

The Obama administration is reconsidering some administrative actions to tighten control over gun sales, including one that would define anyone who sells many guns at gun shows or online as a commercial seller, requiring that they perform background checks on potential buyers before completing any transaction. The measure would at least partly close what is widely known as the “gun-show loophole.”

Last week, Christopher Harper-Mercer brought six guns and spare ammunition to Umpqua Community College here and systematically shot and killed nine people and injured nine others. Hours after the attack, a visibly angry Mr. Obama stood at the White House and delivered a blistering lecture on the dangers of guns and the need for legislative limits on them. He said that thoughts and prayers — the usual expressions of grief — were not enough in the face of such a massacre, and he promised to politicize the issue for the rest of his presidency.

And on Friday, two more college shootings — one at Northern Arizona University and another at Texas Southern University that together left two dead and four injured — provided him the opportunity to hammer home his points.

But in addition to being the nation’s most powerful politician, Mr. Obama is also its chief official mourner, so he had to seek a balance in a rural town where guns are popular.

The trip to Roseburg was added to Mr. Obama’s schedule on Monday and, in an obvious nod to local sentiment, the White House said his meetings with grieving families would be private.

No speech. No politics. Just shared grief.

It was part of a long process of evolution for the president, who has gradually put action over grief.

On Jan. 12, 2011, Mr. Obama spoke about the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, and 17 others four days earlier and said that it was time “for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we’re talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

In July 2012, two days after a gunman walked into a movie theater near Denver and killed 12, Mr. Obama said his “main task was to serve as a representative of the entire country and let them know that we are thinking about them at this moment.”

And two days after the shooting of 26 people, mostly children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Mr. Obama said, “These tragedies must end, and to end them, we must change.”

Just hours after the shooting in Roseburg, Mr. Obama quickly set grief aside. “This is a political choice that we make to allow this to happen every few months in America,” he said in an unusually abrupt and often angry speech.

But last week’s rampage has actually tightened the embrace of guns for many here.

Some prominent residents, including the publisher of a local weekly newspaper, said Mr. Obama was not welcome. The language got so angry that on Tuesday, the mayor and other city officials put out a statement saying they welcomed Mr. Obama and “will extend him every courtesy.”

That was evident when the governor, Ms. Brown, greeted Mr. Obama at the airport. As his motorcade sped through town, an unusual number of people along the side of the road waved pleasantly.

Then Mr. Obama met with the victims’ families in the arts building of Roseburg High School, where flowers had been placed beside trees in a school courtyard.

After nearly an hour with the families, Mr. Obama offered federal assistance to help the community “heal from this loss.”

In barely audible remarks he then said something had to be done, before quickly turning back to expressions of grief and support.

“But today, it’s about the families and their grief, and the love we feel for them,” he said. “And they surely do appreciate all the support that they’ve received.”

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A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Consoles Families in Oregon Amid Two More Campus Shootings.

Obama Consoles Families in Oregon Amid 2 More Campus Shootings,
NYT, OCT. 9, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/us/politics/
obama-consoles-families-in-oregon-amid-2-more-campus-shootings.html

Obama Takes On

Opponents of the Iran Deal

AUG. 5, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

President Obama on Wednesday made a powerful case for the strong and effective nuclear agreement with Iran. In a speech at American University, he directly rebutted critics like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and rightly warned of the damage to global security if the Republican-led Congress rejects the agreement.

“If Congress kills this deal, we will lose more than just constraints on Iran’s nuclear deal or the sanctions we have painstakingly built,” he said. “We will have lost something more precious — America’s credibility as a leader of diplomacy. America’s credibility is the anchor of the international system.”

He debunked the notion that there was a better deal to be had if American negotiators and the allies — France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China — had demanded that Iran capitulate and completely dismantle all of its nuclear facilities. That was not going to happen. The truth is, if Congress rejects the deal when it votes in September, the robust web of multinational sanctions the administration persuaded other countries to impose on Iran will crumble and the only way to keep Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon will be war, he said.

Mr. Obama’s defense of the deal, which is designed to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon in exchange for relief from sanctions, was blunt and forceful. He likened Republicans to Iranian hard-liners, saying both are more comfortable with the status quo.

Congressional Republicans, Mr. Netanyahu and other opponents have mounted a multimillion-dollar lobbying campaign, including ads and a webcast on Tuesday by Mr. Netanyahu to American Jewish leaders in which he denounced the agreement as having “fatal flaws.”

Mr. Obama said he understood Israel’s security concerns and didn’t doubt the sincerity of Mr. Netanyahu’s objections, but he believes the deal is in the interests of both America and Israel. Mr. Obama also promised to redouble American support for Israel’s security.

The speech was so trenchant because Mr. Obama ably connected the opposition to the Iran agreement to recent history. “If the rhetoric in these ads and the accompanying commentary sounds familiar, it should, for many of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal,” he said.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama opposed the Iraq war. Invading Iraq was a catastrophic mistake that destabilized the country and, more than anything, has enabled Iran to expand its influence in Iraq and in the region. Mr. Netanyahu, of course, was a strong supporter of the Iraq war and in September 2002 made that case in congressional testimony as a private citizen.

After 14 years of war, thousands of American and Iraqi lives lost and many thousands more people wounded, it is appalling that so many opponents of the Iran deal either would cavalierly support military action against Iran or are willing to risk it by rejecting the deal. This is an irrational posture, since, as Mr. Obama pointed out, he and future American presidents would be able to use force if Iran tried to build a bomb in coming years.

In putting the current situation into its proper context, Mr. Obama drew one crucial lesson from Iraq — the need to get beyond “a mind-set characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mind-set that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus, a mind-set that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.” Some members of Congress may not have learned that lesson after so many years of war, but surely the American public has.

After the speech, in a meeting with a small group of journalists, Mr. Obama said the possibility of war if the deal fails was a matter of logic. Though Iran may not attack the United States directly, it could threaten American troops in Iraq with Shiite militias there, threaten Israel with rocket attacks by Hezbollah or send a suicide bomber in a small craft against American naval ships in the Strait of Hormuz, he said.

Despite fierce opposition, Mr. Obama expressed confidence the deal would get through Congress, even if by the slimmest of margins. After nearly seven years in office and lots of tough decisions, he said, “I’ve never been more certain that this is sound policy.”

A version of this editorial appears in print on August 6, 2015, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: A Compelling Defense of the Iran Deal.

Obama Takes On Opponents of the Iran Deal,
NYT, AUGUST 5, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/opinion/
obama-takes-on-opponents-of-the-iran-deal.html

Obama Takes a Crucial Step

on Climate Change

 

AUG. 3, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By RICHARD L. REVESZ

and JACK LIENKE

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan has rightly been hailed as the most important action any president has taken to address the climate crisis.

The new rule requires the nation’s power plants to cut their carbon dioxide emissions to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Power plants are the largest source of such pollution in the United States, responsible for more than a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. This greenhouse gas is the main driver of climate change, yet, until today, most plants could emit the pollutant in unlimited quantities.

The president’s plan is important not only because of the reductions it will achieve in domestic emissions. It also signals to the international community that America is serious about reining in its contribution to the global problem of greenhouse gas pollution. This message is particularly salient as the world’s nations prepare to gather in Paris in December to negotiate a new climate agreement.

Of course, not everyone is happy with the new rule. Some, like the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, a Republican from coal-producing Kentucky, have denounced it as the latest — and most damaging — attack in President Obama’s “war on coal.”

There’s no getting around the fact that a large number of coal-fired power plants are likely to close their doors in the near future. The Clean Power Plan will be at least partially responsible for many of these closings. A recent study by the United States Energy Information Administration estimated that almost 90 gigawatts of coal-fired electric generating capacity (close to 10 percent of the nation’s total) will be retired by 2020, and that just over half of that loss will be caused by the new regulation.

But the truth is that most of the coal plants at risk should have been shuttered years ago. Traditionally, the economically useful life of a coal-fired plant was thought to be about 30 years. As of 2014, coal-fired plants in the United States had been operating for an average of 42 years, and many plants had been in service far longer. Some date all the way back to the 1950s, meaning they have already been running for twice their expected life span.

Unsurprisingly, these clunkers tend to pollute at a far higher rate than more modern plants. Since 1990, a vast majority of the new electric generation capacity in the United States has been built to burn natural gas. Gas plants emit, on average, half the carbon dioxide, a third of the nitrogen oxides and a hundredth of the sulfur oxides per megawatt hour that coal plants do. The second largest source of new capacity has been wind power, which creates no air pollution at all.

Given the ready availability of newer, cleaner technology, why are we still getting our electricity from plants built in the Eisenhower era? The blame, ironically enough, rests with our nation’s most important environmental law.

Nearly 45 years ago, an almost unanimous Congress passed the Clean Air Act, which had the remarkably ambitious goal of eliminating essentially all air pollution that posed a threat to the public.

But however lofty its goals, the law contained a terrible flaw: Existing industrial facilities — most notably, electric power plants — were largely exempt from direct federal regulation. For some of the most ubiquitous pollutants, like those that form soot and smog, only newly constructed facilities would face limits on their emissions.

This “grandfathering” of old power plants didn’t seem terribly consequential at the time. Soon enough, it was thought, those plants would run out their useful lives and close down, making way for new facilities that would be subject to federal standards.

But that expectation turned out to be wrong. By instituting different regulatory regimes for new and existing plants, Congress had significantly altered the math behind decisions to retire plants. A system that subjected new plants to strict emissions controls but allowed old plants to pollute with impunity gave those old plants an enormous comparative economic advantage and an incentive for their owners to keep operating them much longer than they would have otherwise.

By the late 1980s, it was clear that the central goals of the Clean Air Act would never be achieved if these grandfathered coal plants were not regulated more stringently. Every president since then, whether a Democrat or Republican, has taken meaningful steps to slash pollution from existing plants, in most cases relying not on new legislation but on previously neglected provisions of the Clean Air Act itself. The statute has, in this sense, held the keys to its own salvation.

The Clean Power Plan follows in this bipartisan tradition. No new legislation is necessary. If the plan appears likely to spur a larger number of plant retirements than its predecessors, that is mainly because it is taking effect during a period when natural gas is affordable and abundant as never before. In the current market, shuttering old coal plants and ramping up the use of gas plants is simply many utilities’ most cost-effective option for cutting their carbon emissions.

Those who promote the “war on coal” narrative would have us believe that the president’s plan represents some sort of personal vendetta, an attempt, as Senator McConnell put it, to “crush forms of energy” the president and his allies don’t like. In reality, the rule is the latest chapter in a decades-long effort to clean up our oldest, dirtiest power plants and at last fulfill the pledge that Congress made to the American people back in 1970: that the air we all breathe will be safe.

It’s a promise worth keeping.

Richard L. Revesz is a professor and dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law, where Jack Lienke is an attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book “Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the ‘War on Coal.’”

Obama Takes a Crucial Step on Climate Change,
NYT,
AUGUST 3, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/opinion/
obama-takes-a-crucial-step-on-climate-change.html