RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/we_need_to_build_an_exit_ramp_from_ukraine_for_putin.html

The horrors we see daily on our television screens of damage to Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities are bad enough, but the prospect of escalation into a nuclear conflict now seems within the realm of possibility.  That would make the damaged cities and millions of refugees that upset us today seem like the good old days if nukes start flying between two superpowers, each with thousands of warheads in inventory.  Making sure that doesn’t happen should be the top priority of everyone at the NATO Summit Thursday, and in Kyiv and Moscow officialdom, too.

It looks as though Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is not going well, with thousands of Russian deaths and casualties; multiple dead generals; and lots of equipment, including one significant ship, destroyed.

But we must take every report from both Moscow and Kyiv with a huge grain of salt.  It is the responsibility of wartime propagandists to lie whenever it might benefit their side, after all.  And there are analysts who see Russia as methodically achieving its goals of partitioning Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine off from the rest, and neutralizing the rest as a buffer between itself and NATO.  This color-coded map of voting results in the 2010 Ukraine election closely resembles the language preferences, with blue regions that supported Yanukovych speaking Russian and red regions that voted for Tymoshenko speaking Ukrainian.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18358/iran-deal-biden-obama

“By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store…. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Iran’s financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales.” — Statement from 49 US Republican Senators, March 14, 2022.

With the increased flow of funds to the ruling mullahs, do expect an increase across Iran in human rights violations and domestic crackdowns on those who oppose the regime’s policies, as hardliners tend to be the ones gaining more power as a result of any lifting of sanctions. Iran’s hardliners already control three branches of the government: the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary.

Regionally speaking, a nuclear deal will undoubtedly escalate Iran’s interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, despite what the advocates of the nuclear deal argue — just as when then US President Barack Obama predicted that with a nuclear deal, “attitudes will change.” They did. For the worse.

Sanctions relief, as a consequence of a nuclear accord, will most likely finance Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Quds Force (the IRGC branch for extraterritorial operations) and buttress Iran’s terrorist proxies, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Iraq’s Shiite militias, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The worst parts of the new deal are, of course, that it will enable the Iranian regime, repeatedly listed by the US as a state sponsor of terrorism, to have full nuclear weapons capability, an unlimited number of nuclear warheads, and the intercontinental ballistic missile systems with which to deliver them. In addition, as a separate deal, the US will reportedly release the IRGC from the US List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, “in return for a public commitment from Iran to de-escalation in the region” and a promise “not to attack Americans.”

Iran’s leaders, for a start, never honored their earlier “commitment,” so why would anyone think they would honor this one? In a burst of honesty, though — and a pretty explicit tip-off — they stated that they “didn’t agree to the U.S. demand and suggested giving the U.S. a private side letter instead.”

Then there is that revealingly narcissistic condition, “not to attack Americans”? Oh, then attacking Saudis, Emiratis, Israelis, Europeans, South Americans and everyone else is just fine? Thanks, Biden.

Worse, the Iranians were complicit with al-Qaeda in attacking the US on 9/11/2001. So we are rewarding them?

To top it off, the US State Department just confirmed that Russia and its war-criminal President Vladimir Putin could keep Iran’s “excess uranium.” (Excess of what?) Seriously? So Putin can use Iran’s uranium to threaten bombing his next “Ukraine”?

One can only assume that just as the region has become relatively more peaceful and stable, the Biden administration would like to destabilize it. After surrendering to the Taliban in Afghanistan and failing to deter Putin from invading Ukraine, has the Biden administration not created enough destabilization? Why would a US president want a legacy of three major destabilizations unless someone was interested in bringing down the West?

The US proposals — negotiated for the Americans by Russia of all unimpeachable, trustworthy, above-board advocates — have been described as: “This Isn’t Obama’s Iran Deal. It’s Much, Much Worse.” That sounds about right.

The Biden administration continues to disregard major concerns regarding the Iran nuclear deal, and has reportedly “refused to commit to submit a new Iran deal to the Senate for ratification as a treaty, as per its constitutional obligation.”

Forty-nine Republican Senators recently told the Biden Administration that they will not back the administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18357/elon-musk-china

“Other American CEOs have close relationships to the [Chinese Communist] Party. But [Elon] Musk is the only one who loudly praises Beijing while running a space company with incredibly sensitive and powerful defense applications.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Barron’s, November 13, 2020.

Musk’s dilemma is not unique. The close technology-sharing relationship between Tesla and SpaceX poses national security risks to his adopted home country, but so do Google’s and Microsoft’s work with China on artificial intelligence. U.S. government policy is predictably slow in catching up to the speed of hard-charging, globe-spanning enterprises like Musk’s, and the Chinese are only too happy to increase that gap.

At some point, however, companies such as SpaceX, Google and Microsoft, and the individual Americans who own, direct, or invest in them, will face a similar choice between their obligation to America and their pursuit of more profits abroad.

Elon Musk has fans all over the ideological spectrum. People on the Left love him for popularizing electric cars with his Tesla company, or maybe for openly smoking pot on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show. Conservatives love him for his entrepreneurial dash and penchant for standing up to politicians and Big Tech censorship of the internet. And everyone loves Musk for responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and severing of its communications links by making his Starlink satellite broadband internet service available in Ukraine and donating Starlink terminals to Ukrainians. The Starlink connectivity, according to one report, may even be helping armed Ukrainian drones target Russian military vehicles.

Less is known about Musk’s business dealings in Communist China, but that might be about to change.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/the-enduring-lesson-in-the-gulags-defiant-wisdom/

The guiding wisdom of the wretches who endured a living death in the Soviet Union’s labour camps was simple: Ne ver’ Ne boisya Ne prosy — Don’t trust. Don’t fear. Don’t beg.

These short sentences crystallize the collective experience of the millions who went through the gulags and perished amid the permafrost of far-north Russia, paying with their lives for the demented dreams of world conquest by Marxists fanatics. These six crisp words summarize the resolve of the human spirit when it refuses to be broken while retaining individual dignity by resisting oppression and injustice, even when the odds are overwhelmingly against it.

Pronounced together those words are an unexpectedly powerful poem. This poetry of defiance, silent by necessity in the face of brutal force, coercion and humiliation, was the only form of resistance available to the enslaved by the totalitarian State. They are also the way for the West to respond to international bullies. But political will is required to succeed, and this is where the problem lies. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18350/america-terrorist-allies

The Gulf states, in particular Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are already under attack by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. The Biden administration removed the Houthis from the list of foreign terrorist organizations and has since refused to reclassify it as a terrorist organization, despite the missile and drone attacks on Washington’s Arab allies and friends as recently as this week.

“It is true that the United States wants to withdraw from the region, but Washington will then have given China, Russia and Iran unprecedented strength…. By removing the Revolutionary Guards from the list of terrorist organizations, Washington will grant Iran the freedom to move and act in the region in the context of a Russian-Chinese-Iranian alliance.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Saudi journalist, former editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, March 20, 2022.

Al-Hamid reminded the Biden administration that Saudi Arabia “is the exact opposite of Iran, as it does not want control, but rather the stability and independence of countries.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“Lifting the sanctions while Hezbollah revels in Lebanon and Syria, and Iranian militias wreak havoc in Iraq amid Iran’s continued support for the Houthis in Yemen, is nothing but a crime against our region.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“The problem with this American change is that it came while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are leading internal and regional efforts to bring stability and moderation.” — Saudi political analyst Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“There is an American and Western policy that cannot be condoned, which is the insistence on making Saudi Arabia and the UAE militarily exposed to the attacks of the Iranian Houthi militia in Yemen, ballistic missiles and drones, and imposing illogical requirements on the export of arms to confront these serious threats.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“The hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, which enabled the Taliban to seize control of the country, removing the Houthi militia from the terrorism list, seeking to remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the list of terrorism, silence about Iranian bombing of Iraqi Kurdistan – these are very dangerous policies for the world and the Arab countries that support stability and peace.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

The IRGC and the mullahs are “the head of regional and international terrorism, from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, and from the Lebanese Hezbollah to the Shiite terror militias all over the world.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“Have you seen bigger liars?” — Dr. Mahmoud Al-Shami, Syrian writer, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“What did the Revolutionary Guard offer America as a price for the reward of being removed from the list of terrorist organizations and making billions of dollars available to it by lifting sanctions on Iran so that it could finance its terrorist activities at the expense of threatening the security of the Gulf and the stability of the Middle East?” — Dr. Mohamed El-Sherif, Egyptian, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“Mr. Blinken, it will be a true holiday for Iranians when they get rid of the murderous [Iranian] regime to which you are making terrible concessions. Mr. Blinken, the Iranian people will not forgive the US if the Revolutionary Guard, the largest terrorist organization backed by an official government, is removed from the list of terrorism.” — Masood A. R., an Iranian opponent of the mullahs, addressing the US Secretary of State, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“I think that when you remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the list of terrorist organizations, you will make a big mistake, and this will lead to the spread of Iranian terrorism and this will affect the region and allies, and America and Europe will be vulnerable to direct Iranian terrorism.” — Abdul Hadi Al-Shehri, Saudi writer, Twitter, March 19, 2022.

The question arises: If the Biden administration believes that the Houthi militia and the IRGC are not terrorist organizations, then why not also remove Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the blacklist? Indeed, if the US administration believes that it can do business with these terrorists and their sponsors in Tehran, then why not own up to its policies and straightforwardly declare all these terrorist groups as America’s newest allies?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/our-surreal-rage-self-mutilation-bruce-thornton/

That phrase is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the 20th century’s catalogue of horrors: two world wars, fascism, communism, Nazism, mass slaughter, the Cold War and its apocalyptic stakes–“oceans of blood and mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag,” as George Weigel put it. And that catalogue continues today in Ukraine, with mechanized violence and wanton inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.

Yet today our social, political, and cultural dysfunctions are more insidious, as over the last few decades they have distributed, promoted, and indulged failures of morality, technocratic hubris, and common sense of the sort that were the predicates of all the disasters of the 20th century. Only now they are at a level of surreal silliness and stupidity that would be mordantly funny if the stakes for our civilization weren’t so high.

Now comes proof in the news that the indirect negotiations between the Biden administration and the genocidal clerical regime in Iran are nearing completion. Since its beginning in the Obama administration, this diplomatic attempt to keep nuclear weapons out of the mullahs’ hands has defied facts and logic, and relied on magical thinking. How else other than surreal can we describe a process that aims at merely delaying, rather than preventing, an illiberal, fanatical cabal from obtaining weapons of mass destruction?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-crisis-in-u-s-arab-relations-russia-china-uae-defense-iran-oil-drone-attacks-response-11647893535?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Mr. Maksad is an adjunct professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School for International Affairs and a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

When the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates decline phone calls from the president of the United States, rebuff his requests to help lower oil prices, and shy away from condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and when the U.A.E. hosts Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Abu Dhabi, there is no doubt that a major crisis in U.S.-Arab Gulf relations is under way.

This will be exacerbated in the weeks ahead if the U.S. nears an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, lifting many sanctions in the process. How Washington handles this unfolding predicament will shape the region’s future, and America’s place in it, for decades.

To some in the West, the behavior of some of America’s Arab Gulf partners typifies the sort of erratic decisions made by strongmen such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin. But does that explain why most of America’s other Middle Eastern allies—Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Egypt—also are expanding ties to Russia and China at America’s expense? Are all these countries led by irrational strongmen?

No, America’s Middle Eastern partners have rationally concluded that they need to diversify their foreign-policy options given Washington’s reluctance to uphold its defense commitments. Dramatic scenes of the disorderly U.S. exit from Afghanistan confirmed that America is in retreat. For Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in particular, the lack of a meaningful American response to Iran-sponsored drone attacks on airports and oil facilities in 2019 and 2022 was the straw that broke the camel’s back.