Kenneth Timmerman
Opinon
The Caily Caller
3/25/2013
In a greeting to the Iranian people on the occasion of the traditional New Year (Nowruz) holiday last week, Secretary of State John Kerry exposed a secret that journalists and academics have been agonizing over for the past six weeks: the fact that his daughter has married an Iranian-American who has extensive family ties to Iran.
“I am proud of the Iranian-Americans in my own family, and grateful for how they have enriched my life,” Kerry said in the official statement. Kerry also said he was “strongly committed to resolving” the differences between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, “to the mutual benefit of both of our people.”
Politicians like to keep their families off-limits to the press, a decorum enforced vigorously when it comes to politicians who are in favor with the national media but ruthlessly discarded for others. But in Kerry’s case, there could be larger ramifications.
Since its inception, the FBI has vetted U.S. government officials involved in national security issues, and it generally won’t grant clearances to individuals who are married to nationals of an enemy nation or have family members living in that country, for fear of divided loyalties or, more simply, blackmail…
…In any other administration, such a complicated situation would have been considered an unacceptable security risk for a cabinet-level officer. My guess: Now that the cat is out of the bag, a fawning left-wing media will attempt to gin up public sympathy for Secretary Kerry, and lionize him for bravely reaching out to Tehran.
While that might send shivers down the leg of a Chris Matthews, it won’t resolve the very real security risk. The mullahs in Tehran and their goon squads won’t hesitate to exploit this messy situation for their own benefit…
The complete article is at The Daily Caller.
Update : Re: The Maliki Slapdown by Mark Steyn
…Had Obama far earlier just reached out to Iraq as a friend in the way he did to hostiles, for example, to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or the Iranian government in 2009–10, or to the Islamist rebels in Syria, we might have had better relations and a cooperative Iraqi government. As it is now, I’m afraid there are no upsides or downsides in Iraq’s relationship to the U.S., just a sort of irrelevance…
