RUTHFULLY YOURS

Putin swears his forces are in Syria to pound ISIS, even as initial reports suggest it is rebel factions opposed to his client Assad that are the targets. There is method in Moscow’s display of muscle: Unlike Obama, the Russians are declaring that their allies will not be abandoned
What is Russia’s game plan in the Middle East? When we analyse Russian policy, we start from the obvious and then delve into the realm of speculation. We cannot accept all of Moscow’s pronouncements at face value. Instead, Russian aims have to be understood on several levels.

Obviously, the preservation of the Assad regime in what is left of Syria is a continuation of the longstanding client relationship, going back to Soviet times. Russia has critical physical assets to defend, especially its naval base. But, in addition, Putin’s Russia sees opportunity to regain what was lost during the preceding four decades, and to achieve what the old Soviet Union never accomplished — the total extinguishing of American and Western influence in the Middle East.

Putin practices a brutal realpolitik. Contrary to muddled thinking by all too many so-called experts in the West, realpolitik does not entail the cynical abandonment of allies. On the contrary, fidelity to allies is the cornerstone of any great power’s credibility. The Assad regime seemed to be on the point of collapse. The United States and its European allies nursed the naïve hope that Russia might be induced to abandon an old client. They failed to understand that Russian support for a vulnerable ally sends a powerful signal in a region where power, not goodwill, is the guiding principle. By contrast, what signal is Obama sending with his increasingly uncertain support for Israel? What signal did he send by his abandonment of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and de facto embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood?

Their philosophies are antithetical, but the common ground of their contempt for liberty, free speech and all who disagree has spawned an alliance of convenience. How much longer can a supine West tolerate the erosion of institutions, values and public safety?
Back in January, when Curtis Cheng was still alive to return every night to his family (below) and nobody had heard of Farhad Khalil Mohammad Jabar, Quadrant Online published the essay below. Today, with PM and Opposition Leader alike reacting to the third Islamic terror attack in less than 12 months — Endeavour Hills, Martin Place and, now, Parramatta — by expressing their immediate sympathy for the Muslim community that keeps spawning these monsters, the topic of Islam’s incompatability with democracy is worth re-visiting.

cheng wide____________________

For many years we have been sold the idea of multicultural Australia as a significant and energising factor in our national evolution. Cultural differences are supposed to be gradually absorbed into the mainstream, leaving it enriched and reinvigorated in the process. When multiculturalism means colourful costumes, exotic recipes and unusual music, there may be some truth in this. At least there is little appreciable harm.

From Australia but certainly applicable to the United States……rsk
As always happens when fulminate of Islam explodes on our streets, there has been a great reluctance among profession media sorts to note that the Parramatta shooting has even slightest link to the Muslim faith. It’s everyone else’s fault, apparently, especially Tony Abbott’s.
It was always going to be a tough brief, but somehow, given their previous accomplishments, you just knew the curdled cream of Australia’s media would find a way to supply the requisite spin: A 15-year-old Muslim slips into his friendly neighbourhood mosque, there to don ISIS-style black smock and pants, before murdering an innocent stranger and shooting it out with cops, all the while shouting “Allah! Allah! Allah!”

And the reporting?

Why, this has nothing to do with Islam, not a damn thing! Or, rather, nothing to do with the Islam that the daily press is prepared to acknowledge. You have to give inmates of Australia’s newsrooms this: after two other Islamicist outrages – Endeavour Hills and the Lindt siege — the third such bloody eruption in less than twelve months was going to require a prodigious gift for ignoring the indisputable. Still, like their English antecedents, our homegrown editors and hacks once again have proven themselves entirely and eagerly equal to the task.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! The British journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to
– Humbert Wolfe

It just took them the weekend to get the narrative straight. Yes, that narrative, the one which always begins by warning the less-enlightened not to notice a pattern. And if the oft-repeated link between scripturally ordained Muslim blood lust and dead innocents proves just too compelling for some to subsume in a fuzzy ball of nothing-to-see-here pap and crap, under no circumstances should that thought actually be given voice. We’re all part of multiculturalism’s gorgeous mosaic, don’t you know, so we must be – what’s the word? – ah, yes, “tolerant”. Chinese-Australians have a thing for parading their dragons and stalling traffic, while droning Scotsmen inflict their pipes on all comers. Gunning-down strangers or, for a little variety, setting about them with knives, well that is a regrettable by-product, apparently, of the cultural enrichment Australia needs to undergo.

Barack Obama keeps a special big smile for times when the people he hates most really get screwed. He smiled that great big smile again recently when he said how much he loves the Jews – right after selling Israel out to its most dangerous enemy in history.

Human monsters with nuclear weapons are a completely new factor in the world. We’ve seen plenty of monsters before, but not equipped with Armageddon weapons. That’s what Obama has achieved in his historic presidency.

Don’t doubt that he has done so purposefully, starting before he took office, when he sent Ambassador William G. Miller to Tehran to tell the mullahs not to make any agreement with George W. Bush, because they’d get a much better deal from Obama.

None of this is coincidence. It was planned with malice aforethought. Obama’s delighted “screw you” smile is truly demonic. It seems to show that he is not just a narcissist, but a malignant narcissist who enjoys inflicting catastrophes on others. Bill Clinton is also a supreme narcissist, but I don’t remember him actually laughing at times like these.

Most politicians change their positions for political purposes. Only one national politician routinely changes her own identity — her accents, her name, her personality and even her height — to become likeable enough to get elected. She is flailing and failing. What does it say about her view of us?

Hillary Clinton has capitalized on identity politics throughout her political career. The irony of her practice is that she has shifted and changed her own “identity” throughout her political career — a career that began during her years at Wellesley, if not before.

We are used to politicians “trimming” their positions and agendas to gain support. Recently, Chuck Todd showed Hillary Clinton a montage of her own flip-flops but all but the most principled politicians are contortionists. They respond to political polling and focus groups and electoral math. They never admit to this practice but they all do it to get elected. Normally, they credit themselves — and their backers join in — for having “evolved.” A lot of evolution seems to occur when one enters the political arena — it is a dog-eat-dog world where only the most electable survive and prosper.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” begins the famous poem by Emma Lazarus emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty. When I was kid, it elicited a frog in my throat. The idea of it still does. But something’s gone wrong. Wildly wrong.

And what’s wrong isn’t so hard to figure out. Back in those days, and in the days before that, most of those coming to America wanted to assimilate into this burgeoning democratic society. Those that were having trouble, that were stuck in old-country ways, were known as “greenhorns” and worked hard to escape that pejorative, to become true Americans themselves. They wanted to be one of us, to live the dream together, win or lose.

These days, not so much.

These days — inspired by jingoism of nitwit ultra-nationalists like La Raza and amplified by our own cultural ambivalence — legal and illegal immigrants coming from south of the border often prefer to keep their allegiance to their home country. For many, perhaps most, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans Cinco de Mayo is their national holiday, not the Fourth of July. And heaven help Team USA when doing battle on the soccer field with Mexico.

Donald Trump flashed his non-interventionist foreign policy credentials on Sunday, staking out a firm position against establishment candidates who favor a more active role for the U.S. military in the Middle East.

On Meet the Press, Trump said that the Middle East would be a more stable place today if the dictators Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi were still in power.

Trump mentioned the countries in comparison to current efforts to drive Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out of power.

“You can make the case, if you look at Libya, look at what we did there, it’s a mess,” Trump said on NBC.

“If you look at Saddam Hussein with Iraq, look what we did there, it’s a mess. It’s going to be the same thing” in Syria, he said.

Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd if the Middle East would be more stable with Gaddafi and Saddam in power, Trump replied, “Of course it would be.”

Three things so far have saved Obama’s otherwise unfortunate tenure; all came over his own objections.

One, after the 2010 midterm tsunami, the newly elected House Republicans put a lid on spending — ratified by the wins of 2014. Sequestration is a crude blunderbuss and slashed defense, but it at least slowed down Obama’s disastrous serial $1 trillion-plus budget deficits. In spending terms, it certainly has vastly reduced the government’s share of GDP. We know that because Obama occasionally brags of falling deficits, as if to say, “Thank you for not letting me be entirely myself.” When he leaves office, we will have $20 trillion in debt and nearly 100 million permanently out of the work force, as well as uncontrolled and unaddressed entitlement spending on life support through zero-interest rates. But we will still be alive for now, thanks to sequestration. Shutting down the government may have been politically unwise (or not — given the 2014 midterm elections [1]), but it kept the debt financeable.

Then there is energy. Obama once bragged of sky-high electricity costs to come — echoed by Steven Chu’s dream [2] of European-level gas prices. Obama mocked “drill, baby, drill” and claimed it was no solution to the energy crisis, as he tabled Keystone and put millions of acres of federal lands de facto off the market for energy exploration. He tried to “bankrupt” the coal industry [3]. The EPA became a rogue agency [4]. Almost all his crony-capitalist Solyndra-like projects failed.

And? Gasoline and natural gas prices have plunged, thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling.

Private-sector entrepreneurs were apparently energized by new technologies and the specter of profits in an uncertain oil market — and a combative new sense of self-reliance that they were on their own without much government approval. Grimy, forgotten men on rigs have saved Americans trillions in lower energy prices and import costs — and all despite, not because of, Obama.

Third, Obamism is proving finite. Yes, this is the Obama era of intolerant imposition of gay marriage by court fiat, the selling of fetal limbs by Planned Parenthood, Climate Change McCarthyism, Black Lives Matter / Hands Up, Don’t Shoot mythologies, “Punish Our Enemies” ethnic smearing, state-ministry journalism, and Sanctuary City neo-Confederate nullification [5]. But in the process, Obama has nearly destroyed the Democratic Party — and all but turned it over either to a veritable crook and has-been or a 73-year-old self-described socialist. He lost both houses of Congress. The legislatures and governorships are overwhelmingly Republican. He turned off millions of working-class old-time Reagan Democrats. His new paradigm — demagogue minorities to vote en bloc in record numbers by any means necessary and screw those turned off by his separatist rhetoric — is probably not transferrable to other Democratic candidates.

Obama complains about Putin but does nothing. Here’s another way to squeeze him back home.

From Ukraine to Syria, the Obama administration has consistently misread Russian President Vladimir Putin’s objectives and the implications of cooperating with him. This has led to costly failures, but the administration is unlikely to change its approach. Congress need not sit idle too. By enacting new sanctions on Russia, U.S. lawmakers can send a strong signal to Moscow that its continued aggression against Ukraine and growing complicity in a genocidal war in Syria will come at a heavy price.

After Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014, the Obama administration and many U.S. allies imposed sanctions on Russian businesses and individuals. But those measures clearly haven’t been effective in discouraging Mr. Putin’s quest to exert Russian power and influence.

​In Ukraine, despite the supposed cease-fire effected by the Minsk Accords negotiated by Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia, Moscow-supported aggression continues in the contested east. Russian troops remain in the region, as an extensive Sept. 14 report from the Atlantic Council documents, and Reuters has reported that new Russian military bases are being built.

Officials underestimated complexities of setting up a rebel ground force amid chaos of war.
To build a rebel army, the Pentagon asked Syrian commanders last winter to nominate their best fighters. U.S. military officers spent more than a month checking each one for criminal or terrorist connections. Those who made the cut were sent to screening centers where they were questioned by American, Jordanian and Turkish officers. Then they waited, sometimes for days.

Fighters who made it to the screening centers were confused about the mission. When they learned what it was, many left. Others were found unfit, including one who showed up with open gunshot wounds. Under pressure to show operational success, the Pentagon started in July to field smaller groups than it wanted and watched from the sidelines as fighters fought the wrong enemy, or handed over equipment to al Qaeda or melted into Syria’s chaos.

The Pentagon’s effort to stand up a moderate rebel army, which would give the U.S. ground forces to fight Islamic State, has struggled since its inception to meet even its own modest goals, according to an account based on interviews with current and former U.S. officials as well as rebels who were part of the effort.

Officials now acknowledge they underestimated the complexities on the ground.

The program’s early stumbles, which follow problems with a similar Central Intelligence Agency effort, have reduced American military and diplomatic influence and left an opening for Russia—a long-standing Syrian ally—to ramp up its military assistance for the country’s embattled leader, Bashar al-Assad.