RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18964/aggression-russia-ukraine

The West is not threatening Russia. Putin is threatening the West.

Putin might desperately try to reverse the situation, whatever the cost… Ukraine and its heroism have shocked the world. Ukraine’s army can win, but it will require the unwavering support of the West.

The men Putin recently began sending to the front may be reservists, but most have not held a weapon for a very long time and have no will to fight. Some who managed to send messages on Telegram channels say they know they are destined to be cannon fodder.

Putin has almost no allies and could lose what limited support he has. Chinese President Xi Jinping has in common with Putin a clear hostility to the West, but has reportedly not supplied Russia with weapons.

During a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand, Uzbekistan last month, Xi reportedly told Putin that it was necessary to “instill stability and positive energy into a world in turmoil”. Whatever that meant, it was not a message of support for the war.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on September 20 that “Russia should return the occupied lands to Ukraine” — not exactly the direction in which Putin would like to be going.

The Chinese Communist Party, which openly says it wants to dominate the world, apparently does not want a larger war just now. On September 24, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, was even more explicit…

The United States has, once again, like it or not, emerged as the only power capable of defeating an aggressive enemy of democracy; when it does, the status of the US and NATO are strengthened. It is, however, impossible to forget that America’s debacle in Afghanistan, the Biden administration’s frenzy to sign a lethal nuclear deal with Iran under almost any conditions, and the extreme weakness of Biden’s White House before Putin invaded Ukraine. These failures no doubt played into Putin’s decision to invade.

The Biden administration’s failure to arm Ukraine before the invasion and his comments that a “minor incursion” might be acceptable were catastrophic. The same failure to provide sufficient deterrence to Taiwan is unquestionably inviting Communist Chinese aggression.

The weakness of the Biden administration has created aggression everywhere — Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, North Korea; assaults on the dollar as the World’s reserve currency — even domestically.

Will the Biden administration ever learn from its mistakes? Or is its ultimate, unspoken goal actually to hand over the United States quietly to Russia, China and Iran?

September 21. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a pre-recorded speech on Russian television, announces that Russia is being attacked by the Ukrainian government and the West. He defines Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army as “liberated zones”. He speaks of the referendums he staged in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson to try illegally to attach them to Russia. He says that he has decided on a “partial mobilization” to defend the Russian fatherland; adds that the West threatens Russia, and that any aggression against Russian territory will lead to a response by “all weapon systems available to us”.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18995/iran-protest-support

While the majority of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Parliament chants ‘Death to America’ & supports the Khamenei loyal police for their barbaric actions the leader of the free world (Joe Biden) is silent. Why?” — Iranian Americans for Liberty, Twitter, October 2, 2022.

Nika Shakarami, a 17-year-old girl, was one of the many women who was arrested for burning her hijab. According to the forensic doctor, she was repeatedly raped, beaten and her dead body was delivered to her family with smashed nose and broken skull.

In August 2015, Obama delivered another speech justifying his [Iran] deal, also immediately exposed as a lie: “After two years of negotiations, we have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb. It contains the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”

However, as the “sunset clauses” quickly revealed, there was nothing “permanent” about it. Iran was to have all the nuclear weapons it wanted in a few short years, along with ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Obama’s billions which were reported as part of a plan to turn Iran in to a “friend,” did the opposite. Iran took the billions, enriched even more uranium, hid what it was doing even further from inspectors, took over Lebanon, and began a war in Yemen.

So far, sadly, instead of standing with the people of Iran heroically confronting a regime that chants “Death to America”, Biden tsk-tsks, says he is “gravely concerned,” but effectively says nothing. He still wants a deal with the mullahs that will quickly bring Iran to nuclear weapons capability, reward Iran’s aggression with a trillion dollars, enable it to oppress women and kill more of its innocent citizens, and empower it to help Russia with even more military equipment to crush Ukraine.

Is Biden — whose family received $3.5 million from the widow of the mayor of Moscow; who, on day one, effectively crippled US oil and gas exploration and exports, thereby, as the price of oil and natural gas suddenly shot up, funding Putin’s war on Ukraine, and who gave Putin the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to blackmail Europe in winter — once again just being a “Russian stooge”?

While the Iranian regime is arresting, wounding, torturing and killing protesters, all the Biden administration appears to be concerned with is trying to revive a nuclear deal that will soon give Iran unlimited nuclear weapons capability; lift sanctions against the expansionist regime of Iran thereby pumping billions of dollars into its treasury for further adventurism; build nuclear weapons; provide Russia with still more deadly military equipment; and empower the mullahs even further to oppress and murder their innocent, fed-up civilian population for the “crime” of women showing too much hair. Their mothers must be very proud of them.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-to-lose-friends-and-influence-over-people-saudi-arabia-obama-biden

Americans have a reputation, with others and in their own national literature, for being careless and breaking things. Often this is because they are so admirably creative, dynamic, and unattached to the past. But for the last two decades, the epicenter of American carelessness has been the Middle East, an area of the world that seems to encourage fantasies among all Westerners, yet where real-world margins for error are small. The result has been a series of disasters for the peoples of the region and for American prestige. This week brought what looks like another unforced error in policymaking, fed by hubris, fantasy, airy talk, and a refusal to acknowledge reality.

On Tuesday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby announced that President Joe Biden will be reevaluating America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia after OPEC+ announced the previous week that it would cut oil production. Kirby’s announcement followed a statement by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., claiming that Saudi Arabia is helping to “underwrite Putin’s war” through OPEC+. “As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Menendez said, “I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine.”

As a Saudi who loves the United States, and believes deeply that our two countries need each other, the only word that comes to mind regarding the contemporary “reevaluation” of our relations is: obscene.

It was the Obama administration that decided to give Vladimir Putin a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, which it sold to the American people as a way to “deescalate” the civil war in Syria. As the United States romanced Putin, offering him Crimea and warm water ports in Syria in exchange for pulling Iran’s irons out of the fire over the past decade, U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Israel have had no choice but to cope. Last month, while Russian-operated Iranian drones and missiles were pounding Kyiv, Riyadh used its diplomatic leverage to obtain the release of American and British POWs from Putin.