RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20361/us-withdrawal-syria-iraq

[T]he priority now for the White House must be to strengthen its military presence in the region, not reduce it. Worse, the vacuum created by any withdrawal by US troops is sure to be filled by adversaries of America and the free world.

Any US withdrawal is sure to be seen, especially after the US surrender in Afghanistan, as America running away — again.

[I]t would be folly of the highest order for the Biden administration even to contemplate a reduction of US forces in the region. With Iran clearly intent on pursuing its proxy war against the US and its allies, the US needs to demonstrate its determination to prevent Tehran from expanding its malign influence in the Middle East, rather than capitulating in the face of Iranian violence.

With Iran seemingly intent on intensifying its confrontation with the US, it is hard to imagine a worse time for the Biden administration even to consider withdrawing any of the US forces currently based in the Middle East.

Prior to the latest Iranian-sponsored attack on US forces based in Jordan, in which three serving American service personnel were killed and another 34 were injured, the White House had already opened negotiations with the Iraqi government on the future of US and other allied troops based in the country.

A statement issued by the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, after the first round of talks opened in Baghdad at the weekend, declared that the talks were aimed at ending the US-led coalition in Iraq.

There are currently an estimated 2,500 US troops based in Iraq. The US deployment in the country was originally part of the coalition formed in 2014 to fight Islamic State (IS). The force has continued to operate in Iraq despite the fact that the so-called IS caliphate established in the Syrian city of Raqqa has been destroyed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-state-department-has-lost-the-plot/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm

Since the October 7 attacks, the State Department has exposed for all to see a level of rot within the institution that was once apparent only to Republicans, who would inherit the agency from Democrats only to find their imperatives implemented with conspicuous lethargy — if they were implemented at all.

Like so many agencies within Joe Biden’s administration — up to and including the White House itself — the State Department is struggling to navigate a mutiny among the lower-level functionaries who are beside themselves over the president’s support for Israel’s defensive war against Hamas. Unlike most of those other executive agencies, Foggy Bottom has tried to appease the insurrectionaries under its roof. The latest example of that foolhardy impulse is apparent in its reported commitment to fast-track American recognition of a Palestinian state.

Axios reporter Barak Ravid has the details:

The Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy. This initiative is based on the administration’s efforts prior to Oct. 7 to negotiate a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.

Ravid adds that the U.S. could pursue this strategy either passively, by declining to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution admitting the territories as full member states, or actively by recognizing Palestine directly and encouraging its allies to do the same. Either way, it is an ideologically blinkered enterprise.

It is not as though there is no rationale for supporting Palestinian statehood today, even within the context of Israel’s anti-Hamas campaign. As Ravid notes, it could serve as an inducement to accelerate Saudi Arabia’s recognition of Israel. Past presidencies, Trump’s included, have paid lip service to the desirability of a Palestinian state as an aspirational objective as part of a broader regional normalization strategy. But to consent to that approach today would be to reward terrorism.

As many have rationally speculated, including Joe Biden himself, the impetus that led Hamas to execute the October 7 massacre was to advance the interests of the terrorist group’s Iranian benefactors by derailing the ongoing normalization process between Israel and its Sunni neighbors. Simply deeming Palestine a state as a direct result of Hamas’s attack will not impose sobriety on the Palestinian Authority, which the White House seems to regard as the only viable alternative to Hamas rule in Gaza. It would only create incentives for more terrorism — conduct in which the party in control of the Palestinian Authority is more than capable of engaging in, too.

The second, most intractable obstacle before Palestinian statehood is that “Palestine” is a fiction. No rational observer looks at the two noncontiguous territories in the West Bank and Gaza — two places with distinct governments (which, by the way, hate each other), disparate economies and foreign policies, and wildly divergent social contracts — and sees the Westphalian ideal. It’s especially telling that the State Department is evincing so much frustration with the uncooperative world that it appears inclined to simply impose statehood on the Palestinian territories in the absence of any reliable Palestinian negotiating partner. The whole initiative is an outgrowth of a variety of narratives to which America’s diplomatic class is beholden but do not much reflect the world it is tasked with understanding.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/did-the-state-department-just-let-an-architect-of-october-7-into-america/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

For the second time since the October 7 attack, the State Department has granted a visa to Iranian foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to attend meetings at the U.N. this week in New York. That’s noteworthy, of course, because Iran is a significant backer of Hamas and the rest of the so-called “axis of resistance,” including the Houthis.

Amir-Abdollahian, who arrived today, was quick to meet with another of Tehran’s partners: The Russian foreign ministry posted a picture of him with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who is also in town for meetings at the U.N. Security Council this week.

Amir-Abdollahian played a major role in building out Iran’s alliances with regional terrorist groups as the de facto foreign minister of Qassem Soleimani’s Quds Force. In fact, an Iranian lawmaker once called him “another Qassem Soleimani in the field of diplomacy,” in recognition of his efforts to unite Iran’s many terrorist allies throughout the region.

If you buy into the Wall Street Journal’s October 8 report on Iran’s role in planning the massacres in Israel, he’s also a key architect of that terrorist attack. If that reporting is accurate, Amir-Abdollahian attended key planning meetings leading up to October 7, though many analysts have expressed skepticism of the degree of direct Iranian involvement in approving it in the way that the Journal described.

Either way, given Amir-Abdollahian’s close coordination with the Quds Force, the Biden administration has ample reason to claim an exemption to the U.N. headquarters agreement that otherwise compels the U.S. to grant visas to its adversaries. But for the second time since October 7, State has apparently chosen not to exercise that option.

https://www.memri.org/reports/why-do-us-and-israel-tolerate-qatars-blatant-anti-us-and-anti-israel-policies

Introduction

Two developments with dangerous and even explosive repercussions for the standing and interests of both the U.S. and Israel in the Middle East occurred in the last few days.

1. The U.S. has extended its presence at Qatar’s Al-Udeid airbase – CENTCOM’s main airbase in the region – for another 10 years[1]: In recent weeks, there has been criticism of Qatar for its sponsoring of terrorism, causing President Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to maintain ambiguity about the future of the U.S.-Qatar alliance. This follows years of frequent undeserved U.S. praise for Qatar.

The Qataris, realizing that their very existence is threatened if the U.S. relocates its CENTCOM operations to the UAE or Saudi Arabia, hastened to nail down the U.S. for another decade in Qatar. This happened despite Qatar’s support of both Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations worldwide, and despite its open alliance with Iran, including joint Qatari naval training with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).[2] And the fact that it is standing with the Houthis, with whom the U.S. is currently engaged in military conflict to ensure free passage of shipping in the Red Sea.

Without CENTCOM in Qatar, the ruling family will be unable to continue ruling Qatar. Yet it seems like the U.S.  did not demand that Qatar reverse its policies of sponsoring terrorism – let alone demand the release of American hostages held by its proxy Hamas in Gaza, after it killed 32 U.S. nationals on October 7. How can this inconceivable approach on the part of the Americans be explained?

2. Israel is allowing Qatar to take charge of all the humanitarian support entering the Gaza Strip, where it is hijacked by Hamas gunmen as soon as it crosses the border. In fact, Qatar is keeping Hamas fighters in power, enabling them to kill Israeli soldiers every day. This is being done with the total consent of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had, over the past decade, allowed Qatar to build Hamas’s military power in the first place. Netanyahu is now actually allowing an ongoing process, by which his soldiers are being killed every day because he is a captive and hostage of Qatar, as well as its collaborator, and does not dare confront it lest it expose him. One solution to freeing the aid from Qatar’s pro-Hamas influence would be by giving the money to Egypt and Jordan, who have peace agreements with Israel, so that they could fully control the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, with no Qatari strings attached.

These approaches on the part of the U.S. and Israel are also prompting the natural allies of both, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to distance themselves from them and to join anti-U.S. alliances such as BRICS. How can these two mindboggling phenomena be explained?

This report will attempt to answer these questions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/american-hegemony-is-not-a-distraction/

If the United States sacrifices its obligations, our threatened partners will seek accommodations with their aggressive neighbors at America’s expense.

Elbridge Colby is the rare Trump administration official who has established a bigger profile for himself outside the administration than in it. Rarer still, he’s achieved this feat while making largely productive contributions to the national discourse. Trump’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development has devoted himself to advocating a vigorous effort to deter China from executing a potentially disastrous attack on Taiwan. But in his singular — at times, prohibitive — focus on the threat posed by China, Colby downgrades the significance of seemingly every other American strategic priority. He appears increasingly committed to a myopia that renders his advocacy unserious and undermines the cause he claims to support.

Like many on the right who are eager to slough off the old Reaganite consensus, Colby sees the conflict in Ukraine as a “distraction.” Even before Moscow launched its second invasion of Ukraine, he and his co-author, Stanford University’s Oriana Skylar Mastro, argued that the United States had succumbed to “delusion” if it thought it could compete against China and Russia simultaneously. Support for America’s partner on the European frontier would necessarily come at the expense of its effort to hem in Beijing. “To be blunt,” they wrote, “Taiwan is more important than Ukraine.”

That’s a debatable proposition. The other side of the argument maintains that Europe, of all places, is no “distraction.” The continent is home to America’s most powerful allies and its foremost trading partners. Its wars have a demonstrated tendency to conflagrate, dragging the United States into them whether Washington is predisposed toward intervention or not. Containing those wars is vital for the preservation of U.S. alliance structure. After all, we’re not talking about Europe’s “neighborhood” — say, for example, Libya, where America’s interests are dwarfed by Europe’s. This is the NATO frontier, a border along which a variety of critical and increasingly nervous U.S. partners reside. Deterring Moscow from testing the integrity of the alliance directly or sowing so much doubt about America’s commitment to the defense of the former Warsaw Pact states that they freelance their way into an infinitely more dangerous situation than the one we are currently confronting is no “distraction.” It’s a core, long-standing, empirically observable feature of American grand strategy.

But let’s concede for the sake of argument that beating back Russian expansionist aggression is a “distraction.” That would be easier to accept at face value if Colby weren’t similarly eager to declare almost every other hot conflict on the planet a “distraction” from his preferred priority.

President Biden’s reaction to Taiwan’s presidential election was instructive. He could have said that “the United States congratulates Taiwan on another free election” or “the people of Taiwan must determine their future.”

Instead, the president said exactly what Beijing wanted him to say: “We do not support independence” for Taiwan. When Chinese President Xi Jinping pulls the strings, Mr. Biden dances to the tune.

Taiwan’s Jan. 13 election was another milestone. Vice President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party won 40% of the vote in a three-way race. It marks the first time that one party will control the presidency for three consecutive terms.

With 23 million people, Taiwan has the world’s 21st-largest economy. According to the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index, it’s the freest country in Asia and the 12th-freest in the world. China ranks 149th, barely ahead of Iran.

What Beijing does to its people recalls the darkest days of 20th-century totalitarianism — democracy crushed in Hong Kong (despite solemn promises of “one country, two systems” at the time of reunification), cultural genocide in Tibet, the imprisonment and torture of 3 million Uyghurs and organ-harvesting prison camps.

Nations eager to condemn Israel for defending itself in a war for its survival smile benignly at Beijing’s savagery.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20319/confronting-iranian-regime

Any evaluation of the Biden administration’s policy towards the Iranian regime (and towards the Palestinians) reveals a failure: the deadly Western miscalculation that “being nice” will be reciprocated. In the culture of the Middle East, that simply does not work. Instead, one is looked on as a gullible sucker or juicy “mark,” like a jolly drunk at a strip club.

As Osama bin Laden pointed out, especially for his region, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

Former U.S. Army General Jack Keane recently noted that many possible targets are already on “the list” and suggested taking out the military installations that have been launching such attacks. Other possible responses floated include sinking Iran’s spy ship currently in the Red Sea and taking out Iran’s military communications systems.

If Iran itself is not made to pay a price, it will simply continue using its proxies to escalate aggression and take the hits. After all, that is why Iran has proxies in the first place.

The Biden administration’s reluctance to robustly respond to the rogue Islamist regime of Iran apparently only reinforces the inclination of Iran’s political and military leadership to inflict more harm.

When US responses lack decisiveness, the Islamic Republic interprets this “restraint” as a failure of nerve on the part of the US and the international community. Such leniency, it seems, simply invigorates the regime to persist in disrupting regional and global stability, and escalate its assertive military maneuvers and support for terrorist activities.

As Osama bin Laden pointed out, especially for his region, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/19/trying-to-explain-bidens-bumbling-policy-on-the-houthi-rebels-and-iran/

During recent interviews with two Arab-language TV networks, I was asked to comment on the Biden administration’s announcement that it has re-designated Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels as a terrorist organization. The programs’ hosts asked me to explain why this decision took so long and whether it indicates a significant change in the Biden administration’s policy.

My explanation puzzled the Arab TV hosts.

I started out by explaining that, despite press reports that the Biden administration reversed its 2021 decision to take the Houthis off the U.S. list of terrorist organizations, this is not exactly correct.

At the beginning of the Biden administration, the president rescinded decisions by President Trump to place the Houthis on the U.S. list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) and to name the group a Specially Designated Global Terrorist organization (SDGT).

The FTO designation represents the generally known U.S. terrorist group list; the SGDT is a little-known, weaker designation. The Biden administration only restored the SGDT designation and postponed enacting it for 30 days. Under this designation, Houthi members can apply for a U.S. visa; it is not a crime to support them; and U.S. banks are not required to seize Houthi funds.

Moreover, tough sanctions against the Houthis imposed as part of the Trump administration’s FTO designation will not be reimposed.

The Arab TV hosts were incredulous about my explanation and asked why the Biden administration would reimpose a weak terrorist designation against the Houthis and why, after three months of Houthi missile and drone attacks against Israel and Red Sea shipping, it took Biden administration officials three months to make this decision.

I answered that this decision was made for domestic political reasons in response to growing criticism in the U.S. of how President Biden is handling increased instability in the Middle East after the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack against Israel. This was a symbolic move that allowed the White House to inform the press that the president was doing something in response to this instability. It was not a serious response to the Houthi missile and drone attacks.