RUTHFULLY YOURS

If ever there was a need for U.S. diplomatic intervention in Middle East, this is the moment. Instead of sitting on the sidelines as a disinterested observer, Kerry and Company should be on a plane to Cairo to discuss an emerging schism in Saudi – Egyptian relations. In February, the Saudi kingdom announced that it was prepared to send ground troops to Syria to fight alongside the international coalition. Cairo objected.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said the Saudi decision to send ground troops into Syria does not fall within the scope of the Islamic Military Alliance to Fight Terrorism, the 34 member coalition Saudi Arabia launched in December. Shoukry confirmed Egypt’s endorsement of a political, not a military, solution in Syria.

As one might expect, spokesmen in both nations said the disagreement would not affect the strong ties between them. But the facts present a different version of the story.

Saudi Arabia under King Salman bin Abdul Aziz is extremely sensitive to any political position that challenges the Saudi vision of regional issues. This sensitivity was manifest when the kingdom rejected its $4 billion aid to the Lebanese army because Lebanon disagreed with Saudi Arabia’s stance on Hezbollah.

In addition to its military alliance with Saudi Arabia, Egypt is reliant on Saudi financial assistance including petroleum needs for five years and $8 billion in capital projects. Obviously Egypt has a stake in the maintenance of good relations. But in politics it is axiomatic to contend there aren’t permanent or perpetual friends or enemies.

Clashes between militias trained by the CIA and the Pentagon are intensifying as bitter fighting has broken out near Aleppo and the Turkish border.

Chicago Tribune:

The fighting has intensified over the past two months, as CIA-armed units and Pentagon-armed ones have repeatedly shot at each other as they have maneuvered through contested territory on the northern outskirts of Aleppo, U.S. officials and rebel leaders have confirmed.

In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east.

“Any faction that attacks us, regardless from where it gets its support, we will fight it,” said Maj. Fares Bayoush, a leader of Fursan al Haq.

Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.

The attacks come amid continued heavy fighting in Syria and illustrate the difficulty facing U.S. efforts to coordinate among dozens of armed groups that are trying to overthrow the government of President Bashar Assad, fight the Islamic State militant group and battle one another all at the same time.

“It is an enormous challenge,” said Rep.Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who described the clashes between U.S.-supported groups as “a fairly new phenomenon.”

“It is part of the three-dimensional chess that is the Syrian battlefield,” he said.

In Havana recently, President Obama talked of the similarities between Cuba and the United States, as if a constitutional republic of some 240 years and a thuggish and murderous communist dictatorship were kindred souls. In Argentina, Obama both tangoed and then apologized for the nth time for his country while abroad, this time supposedly for not opposing the brutal Argentine military dictatorship at the height of the Cold War. He also advised young people that there was not that much difference between communism and capitalism—without giving them a glimpse of his own retirement plans that will make the Obamas fabulously rich by following the hyper-capitalist post-presidential get-rich program of the Clintons.

Obama also missed the irony that, while he had just warmed up to a present-day Cuban dictatorship with blood on its hands, he then blamed his distant predecessors for warming up to a long-gone Argentine dictatorship with blood on its hands. Argentine General Galtieri and his predecessors, who may have overseen the killing of some 20,000, are long dead; Raul Castro, who may have the blood of about the same number on his hands, is very much alive—and in the back-slapping company of President Obama. So the next chief executive might return to Argentina to apologize to its youth for his predecessor having suggested that capitalism and communism were essentially synonymous—given the 100 million people of the 20th century who were slaughtered by their own communist governments in China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia.

As his presidency winds down, and there so far appears no positive legacy from it, Obama seeks his iconic moments at others’ expense—reaching out to communist Cuba, sidestepping the U.S. Senate to conduct a treaty with Iran, redefining Israel as a neutral, dismissing radical Islamic terrorism as a mere generic jayvee-like threat, hoping to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, dissolving the U.S. southern border, and through the destruction of federal immigration law remaking the political demography of the U.S.

The bruising battle between the president and Congress surrounding the Iran nuclear deal is over. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, despite its many troubling flaws, is already being implemented. Yet now another nasty battle is brewing.

Even as Washington prepared to release an estimated $100 billion in restricted Iranian oil assets and paved the way for Tehran to regain access to the Swift network (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)—allowing it to transfer funds across the global electronic banking system—the Obama administration vowed that the Islamic Republic would never get the ultimate prize: access to the U.S. financial system or dollar transactions.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew was adamant during a congressional grilling last July. “Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, or “hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks.”

Yet as Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.) noted in a March 22 letter to the White House, Mr. Lew, during a Financial Services Committee hearing earlier that day, “appeared to leave the door open” to Iran getting access to the U.S. financial system. Mr. Royce reminded Mr. Lew of what he said last year, then said he had “received reports from the administration that it is now considering providing Iran with access to the U.S. financial systems.” He repeatedly pressed Mr. Lew: “Specifically, are you considering permitting Iranian banks to clear transactions in dollars with U.S. banks or foreign financial institutions including offshore clearing houses?” CONTINUE AT SITE

Iranians are famously savvy negotiators, so recent revelations that, under the U.S.-led global nuclear deal, Iran has far more leeway than we had thought to hide its nuclear progress and test ballistic missiles shouldn’t surprise us.

It should, however, alarm us.

The revelations – reflecting the precise wording of resolutions by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors and the United Nations Security Council – come amid increasingly aggressive Iranian behavior in the region, mocking any remaining hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Tehran.

Iran watchers and nuclear experts were stunned to learn this month that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, believes he has new instructions on what the agency should report on Iran’s nuclear program. The agency, he said, no longer should report broadly on the program but, now, only on whether Iran is meeting specific commitments under the nuclear deal.

Everything has a history and a pre-history, and that includes Donald Trump and his angry hordes. Trump is by no means the first American tycoon to stir up fears and resentments and attempt to ride a populist wave. One of his notable predecessors, mostly forgotten today, is Robert Welch.

Born in the last year of the 19th century, Welch built his fortune in the confectionery trade. His company came up with the Sugar Daddy and then, after a slide into bankruptcy, returned successfully with Sugar Babies and Junior Mints. Candy made Welch fabulously wealthy; but his forays into electoral politics—including a run in 1950 for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts—went nowhere. Welch found another vehicle to advance his agenda, which in its essentials amounted to anti-communism on steroids.

That vehicle was the John Birch Society, which Welch established in 1958. By that juncture, the embers of the McCarthy era had already begun to cool. The demagogic senator from Wisconsin had died the previous year, not long after discrediting himself by recklessly lodging unfounded accusations. But the John Birch Society, picking up where McCarthy left off, was nonetheless extraordinarily successful. At its peak, at the close of the 1950s, it boasted 100,000 members—mostly white suburbanites—managed by a paid staff of 200, with 60 regional coordinators running chapters across the United States, making it the largest conservative grassroots organization in the country.

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy panel at CPAC. http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2016/03/25/europeans-warn-america-of-civilizational-jihad/ “Do not let what has happened in Europe and Britain happen to America,” stated Paul Weston, leader of the small British rightwing party Liberty GB, on March 3 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Weston along with the Danish writer Lars Hedegaard warned in apocalyptic terms […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=15613 “It’s very important for us not to respond with fear,” said U.S. President Barack Obama, defending his decision to enjoy a baseball game in Cuba with his wife, daughters and dictator Raul Castro, while dozens of dead bodies and hundreds of body parts lay strewn across the Brussels airport and Metro station. “Groups like […]

At the outset, I will admit that this review of Thomas McCaffrey’s seminal book on the history of and devastation wrought by environmentalism from its earliest days to the present, Radical by Nature: The Green Assault on Liberty, Property, and Prosperity, cannot begin to do it justice. As I underscored the importance of Lisa McGirr’s groundbreaking book, The War on Alcohol, about how Prohibition fostered the growth of the pervasive, all-encompassing State, I can only point with some humility to the heavy lifters of these two books and to the stellar and indefatigable efforts of their authors to bring their works to fruition and to the public eye.

Radical by Nature could easily be retitled, The War on Man. McCaffrey begins his history and exposé of the whole environmentalist movement, from olden times and brings it up to the present. With meticulous detail, a compelling narrative, and abundant documentation, he paints the anti-man, anti-civilization trends and motives behind the environmentalist movement in all its variegated forms.

Lisa McGirr’s scholarly but hard-hitting and thoroughly documented exposé of the role of Prohibition in its contribution to the cancerous growth of statism, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, should be the touchstone of all future studies and analyses of why the country is in such poor shape. This is the State we recognize today, the one that demonizes smoking with bogus statistics and ubiquitous propaganda yet depends on and collects revenue on tobacco sales, the one that demonizes “recreational drug” use but prohibits pharmaceutical companies from perfecting and releasing life-saving drugs, the one that criminalizes private gun ownership by private citizens and would leave them defenseless against gun-toting criminals who do not care about the law and who will always get guns.