RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tory-warning-to-u-s-republicans-11666305620?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

For the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in British history, Liz Truss sure has a lot of ignominy loaded on her shoulders. She’s apparently responsible for the fall of the pound, a looming recession, and the political demise of the Conservative Party. All accomplished in a mere 44 days.

Ms. Truss resigned as PM Thursday after a fiasco of a premiership, but the fault is far from hers alone. She is being made the scapegoat for the economic policy blunders that the ruling Conservatives have made over 12 years in power, and especially since 2019 under previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ms. Truss’s tax cuts lasted two weeks as a mere proposal and never even came to a vote in Parliament. She had told the Tory rank-and-file about her tax plans when she ran to succeed Mr. Johnson. The only surprise she offered in office was a cut in the top marginal income tax rate to 40% from 45%—about £2 billion in lost revenue in a year. Yet this supposedly was the nail that lost the shoe, that lost the horse, that lost the economy.

Ms. Truss certainly mismanaged her policy rollout. She didn’t prepare the country or her party to sell tax cuts after a decade of Tory tax-and-spend politics. She lacked an electoral mandate of her own and only narrowly beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the PM contest. When markets fell after exotic pension fund schemes broke down amid rising interest rates, she lost her nerve. She sacked her first Chancellor and threw over her program. The Tory sharks then went for the kill.

But Ms. Truss didn’t create Britain’s 10.1% inflation rate (blame the Bank of England), didn’t produce energy shortages and price spikes (blame the last two Prime Ministers), and didn’t fail to supervise pensions so they wouldn’t gamble to get higher returns. All of that was in motion before she took office.

Rough political justice would now give the premiership to Mr. Sunak, whose policies contributed to this economic mess. Whoever gets the PM job may be volunteering for a suicide mission, as an election must be held by January 2025. Even the Labour Party could beat this pack of panicked Tories.

The dumbest argument is that Ms. Truss’s fall is a warning to U.S. Republicans not to cut taxes. Ms. Truss wanted pro-growth policies to counter the economic failures of the Boris Johnson Tories, who pursued the policies lauded by America’s big government conservatives: more welfare and healthcare entitlements, green energy subsidies, higher taxes on business, and easy money.

If Republicans want to end up like the Tories, they’ll follow the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak tax-and-spend model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19007/biden-iran-nuclear-obsession

If US President Joe Biden really is “gravely concerned” about the plight of Iranian schoolgirls being attacked and killed by Iran’s authoritarian regime, then the best way to help them would be to abandon his ill-considered attempt to broker a new nuclear deal with Tehran.
The death toll is now said to have passed the 200 mark, with many of the fatalities reported to be children as young as 11 years old.
Consequently, Mr Biden’s response is being seen as little more than a token gesture….
Rather than holding the Iranian regime to account for its atrocious conduct, Mr Biden’s priority remains to secure another flawed nuclear deal with Tehran, one that would result in enabling Iran to have nuclear weapons with no prohibition on the missiles to deliver them, as well as the lifting of punitive economic sanctions and up to a trillion dollars in additional revenues to “export the revolution.”
If, as now seems increasingly likely, the White House commits to a new nuclear deal once next month’s midterm elections are out of the way, the US Congress will be in Christmas recess and therefore unable to block it.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, together with all the other instruments of state-sponsored oppression in Iran, would receive extra funding dollars once the sanctions are lifted that will enable them to further develop their hostile activities.
Iran has already destroyed four Arab countries in addition to its own: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
The Biden administration’s intransigence on the Iran issue also helps to explain the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to reach an agreement to reduce oil production….
The Saudis remain frustrated by Mr Biden’s obsession with trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which to the kingdom is a mortal threat…. How could Biden have expected them to help him?
Biden seems to be threatening “consequences” for the Saudis because they are trying try to prevent Iran from annihilating them?
Iran is also now supplying Russia with hundreds of “kamikaze” drones and lethal missiles which Russia is using to target civilians and destroy Ukraine — all while Biden has been relying on Russia to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal on America’s behalf: US negotiators are even not allowed in the room.
Consequently, rather than making the world a safer place, Mr Biden’s pro-Iran stance is merely fanning the flames of even greater global instability.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18999/china-attack-taiwan

Americans may not even know that China has struck the first blow until months after it has occurred… Americans think China’s war planners think like America’s war planners. Unfortunately, the Chinese ones do not. First strikes, despite what former intelligence officials believe, do not have to look like the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Chinese doctrine is different, something evident from Unrestricted Warfare, the 1999 book by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, then two Chinese air force colonels.

So what would China’s first attack on Taiwan look like? Say, six months before an invasion China, violating the Biological Weapons Convention, could release a deadly pathogen on Taiwan.

China’s National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” Pathogens can now be designed to infect specific groups and even specific individuals.

A regime monstrous enough to kill millions around the world [with COVID-19: the Chinese Communist Party pressured other countries to take arrivals from China without restriction while locking down Chinese territory] is surely monstrous enough to release, as the first act in a conflict, a disease on the 23.9 million people of Taiwan. It could take the Pentagon months to realize that China had started a war to annex the island republic.

I suspect Chinese ruler Xi Jinping would not be overly upset if Taiwan were a smoking radioactive slab as long as it were part of the People’s Republic of China.

“The biggest problem with the ‘China Hands’ of the U.S. intelligence community is their inability to place themselves into the mindset of the Communist Party and its Central Military Commission, in other words, to think like the enemy. There is still too much mirror-imaging going on…..” — James Fanell, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, to Gatestone, in response to the Culver report, October 2022.

Americans make assumptions about the Chinese style of warfare; some of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong.

The United States will have months of warning before China attacks Taiwan.

At least that is what John Culver, a retired CIA officer and now an Atlantic Council scholar, argues in a report issued this month by the influential Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-iran-a-new-generation-is-prepared-to-fight-the-mullahs/

The uproar, the girls and women ripping off and setting fire to their hijabs, the rage in the streets of 90 Iranian cities, show no signs of abating. The young people now leading these protests are different from the previous generation; they have lost that feeling of fear. They know that they have nothing more to lose by fighting against the only government they have ever known — the oppressive regime run by religious fanatics in Tehran. A report on the latest protests can be found here: “A barrier of fear has been broken in Iran. The regime may be at a point of no return,” by Jomana Karadsheh and Tamara Qiblawi, CNN, October 5, 2022:

A woman dressed in black raises a framed portrait of her son, Siavash Mahmoudi, in the air as she paces the sidewalk in Iran’s capital, Tehran. “I am not scared of anyone. They told me to be silent. I will not be,” the woman seen in a viral social media video yells, her voice fraught with emotion.

“I will carry my son’s picture everywhere. They killed him.”

Mahmoudi’s mother is among many Iranians who claim the regime tried to silence them as they mourned loved ones slain in ongoing nationwide demonstrations.

But Iran’s protesters, and their supporters, are defiant. For weeks [and now in its fourth week], a nationwide protest movement has relentlessly gathered momentum and appears to have blunted the government’s decades-old intimidation tactics. Slogans against the clerical leadership echo throughout the city. Videos of schoolgirls waving their headscarves in the air as they sing protest songs in classrooms have gone viral, as have images of protesters fighting back against members of the formidable paramilitary group Basij.

These are scenes previously believed to be unthinkable in Iran, where the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei rules with an iron fist. But experts say that these protests transcend Iran’s many social and ethnic divisions, breaking a decades-old barrier of fear and posing an unprecedented threat to the regime.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thoughts-of-chairman-xi-nationalism-aggression-china-ccp-communist-power-mao-war-taiwan-south-korea-11665955319?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The most important election in the world this year is no election at all. It’s a coronation. When China’s Communist Party anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term this week, it will confirm China’s combination of aggressive nationalism and Communist ideology that is the single biggest threat to world freedom. It all but guarantees an era of confrontation between China and the U.S.

We say this with regret, and not only because war with China would be a catastrophe. When China embarked on its reform project under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, there was reason to hope that the Middle Kingdom might eventually leave behind its murderous Communist past. For a time, into the 2000s, that still seemed possible as reforms continued and Chinese living standards increased.

The bet, which was worth taking for the sake of a better world, was that China would follow the path of other East Asian nations that evolved into democracies as the middle-class grew. But China’s Communist Party has never relinquished its grip on power as the authoritarians of Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines did.

In his book “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” Michael Pillsbury makes a powerful case that Chinese war hawks have been biding their time all along until China was strong enough to challenge U.S. power. But there were enough differences in elite opinion in China to think that even the Party wasn’t monolithic in its views. Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power has ended that debate, as he has become the most powerful and committed Communist leader since Mao Zedong.

In a decade Mr. Xi has crushed all dissent, imposed a vast censorship regime, and created an intrusive surveillance regime beyond anything the East German Stasi imagined. He has erased the autonomy for 50 years that China had promised Hong Kong and made Xinjiang province a prison camp for the Uyghurs.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18996/iran-freedom-lovers

The various parts if the repressive machine didn’t know what do. In the city of Sari, for example, they arrested 786 people in one day before they realized they had nowhere to keep them.

Unlike supporters of the regime mostly of older generations, who gain self-esteem from bestowed but easily withdrawable privilege, the mostly young activists of horizontal society, regard themselves as being “somebody” even if only because they have the mandatory 5,000 followers on the Facebook. They want to be subjects in their own life-story, not objects in someone else’s dystopian dream.

The Khomeinist system was exposed as a colossus with a foot of clay.

As the uprising in Iran enters its fourth week, speculation about its future is rife.

Participants insist that they are on the path to victory, achieving regime change. They cite a number of reasons.

To start with, this is the first time that a national uprising isn’t about any particular grievance that could be rectified by the regime; what is at stake is total rejection of a system.

Next, there is the fact that the regime has been unable to regain control of the public space with the speed and efficiency it did on other occasions since 1979.

Adversaries of the uprising, regime apologists or those concerned about socio-political disintegration, believe that though the massive rejection of the regime by so many Iranians, if not the majority, is bound to cause permanent damage to it, straight regime change is not yet in the cards.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-two-ways-of-war-in-ukraine-russia/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=

Ukraine’s devastating attack on the Crimean Bridge and Russia’s sickening response — deliberately targeting civilians — perfectly encapsulate how these adversaries are fighting this war. Ukraine has a coherent strategy, effective operational design, and close coordination among its forces. Russia is failing because it has none of this.

The centerpiece of Ukraine’s strategy is eviscerating Russian combat power without getting into a raw slugfest that would sacrifice its own troops. That means knocking out Russian combat power without a head-on battle, wherever possible. How does Ukraine do that? Mostly by executing precision strikes with US and NATO weapons, aimed at Russia’s local headquarters, supply depots, and rail and truck lines, which transport fuel, food, heavy equipment, and ammunition to frontline troops. Ukraine identifies those vulnerable sites with superior, real-time intelligence from its drones, US satellites and spy planes, and partisans behind enemy lines.

Attacking the bridge over the Kerch Strait fits snugly into that strategy. By hitting the rail line, Ukraine has crippled a vital link between Russia and Crimea (and Kherson). The only other rail link from Russia to those provinces runs through Zaporizhzhia, near the battle lines. Ukraine is certain to target it soon.

Once Ukraine has weakened Russian positions, it tries to flank and surround enemy forces wherever it can, rather than driving straight at them. (Ukraine was almost drawn into that brutal war of attrition in the Donbas before recognizing the peril and changing strategies.) When Russian forces realize they will be cut off, they typically withdraw without a bloody confrontation. Ukraine then moves forward, consolidates its position, reestablishes its supply lines, and repeats the process. This approach, plus surprise, is how Ukraine retook Kharkiv province last month. Now, without the element of surprise, it is repeating the process in northern Luhansk, beginning by cutting off Russia’s resupply links.