RUTHFULLY YOURS

The American public tends to see military action as binary: all in or not in at all. Mostly we’re not in — as befits a country that is not aggressive or acquisitive. But if we’re in it, win it. In this age of transnational enemies and vacuums of governance, however, the Obama administration has created a series of half-in, half-out military and political situations that have brought chaos to the Middle East, confusing our friends and comforting our adversaries. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Somalia, fear of a Vietnam-like quagmire still drives American leadership.

Afghanistan was called “Russia’s Vietnam” for a reason, but Vladimir Putin appears to have learned a different lesson about quagmires. Setting achievable aims — both military and political — and stopping when they have been met as much as practical, is key to being able to leave third countries while maintaining influence.

The apparent beginning of a Russian pullout of some forces from Syria should not be mistaken for the end of the Syrian civil war — or for a moral foreign policy. What it suggests, rather, is that Russia has achieved its military goals there and is now content to let both the political and military processes proceed with less direct Russian intervention.

Russia’s primary goals in Syria were:

To secure its hold on the bases at Latakia and Tartus, which requires a friendly government in Damascus, and
To damage Sunni jihadist rebels, whether ISIS, al Qaeda, or simply anti-Assad.

A secondary goal was to allow the Russians to test and show off new generation military equipment and tactics, including sustained bombing and the MiG-31M aircraft. Another was to provide diplomatic achievements including opening conversations — and discussing arms sales — with American allies/clients Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and deepening the information exchange with Israel.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama will take a bulging schedule with him on his history-making trip to Cuba, planning to meet President Raúl Castro, tour Old Havana, meet with dissidents and deliver a speech on U.S.-Cuba relations, senior officials said, all steps designed to showcase his policy of engagement.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to arrive in Cuba on Sunday evening, accompanied by his daughters, Sasha and Malia, first lady Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson, the officials told reporters Wednesday.

He will meet with staff members of the U.S. embassy and visit the sites of Old Havana, including the cathedral, where he will be greeted by Cardinal Jaime Ortega who, along with Pope Francis, helped facilitate the president’s secret talks with the Cuban government about restoring relations.

Mr. Obama won’t see Mr. Castro until the second day of his trip. The two leaders will meet at the Palace of the Revolution after Mr. Obama and the first lady lay a wreath at the Jose Martí Memorial to honor the 19th century Cuban national hero. Mr. Castro will also host Mr. Obama for a state dinner Monday evening.

Mr. Obama’s schedule includes an event with entrepreneurs, and before moving on to Argentina, he will deliver a speech at the opulent Gran Teatro. He’ll also meet with Cuban dissidents and attend a baseball game at Estadio Latinoamericano.

The trip is part of the Obama administration’s bid to make the policy shift permanent, Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama who helped negotiate the Cuba opening, said. The U.S. will discuss cooperation in agriculture, health care and educational exchange and will urge economic progress and contacts between the two countries. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—German authorities banned a far-right extremist group called Weisse Wölfe Terrorcrew and conducted raids in 10 states, moves the government said were aimed at people who want to create fear and panic among migrants.

The interior ministry said it searched and seized evidence against 16 leading members of the group, whose name translates to the White Wolves Terror Crew. The group, which has at least 50 members across Germany, includes neo-Nazis and former members of the skinhead scene, according to officials.

“Right-wing extremist groups such as WWT have no place in Germany,” Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said. “WWT is acting openly and aggressively against our state and our society, against migrants and anybody who doesn’t follow its line.”

Mr. de Maizière said the group had sought violent confrontations with political opponents, migrants and police. Two members were arrested last year, accused of planning attacks on refugee shelters, but it wasn’t clear if they had been carried out. The government didn’t provide full names for any of the group’s members.
The move against the fringe group highlights the German government’s efforts to deal with rising xenophobic sentiment since the arrival of roughly one million migrants in 2015. Before last year’s migrant influx, support for far-right groups had been declining for years. CONTINUE AT SITE

According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. But ISIS is on record saying that its eradication of Christians is due to their religious identity.

The Obama administration’s rejection of the word “genocide” fits a familiar pattern.

When asked about the plight of Christians under ISIS, Colonel Steve Warren said “We’ve seen no specific evidence of a specific targeting toward Christians.”

Although Christians number 10% of Syria’s population, only 2% of refugees accepted into the U.S. from there are Christian. (The majority — almost 98% — are Sunni Muslims, the same sect to which ISIS belongs and thus are not persecuted.)

According to the Obama administration, the Islamic State is committing genocide against certain religious minority groups — excluding Christian minorities. During a February 29 press briefing, White House spokesman Josh Earnest was asked: “Is the Islamic State carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians?” He replied:

Well, we have long expressed our concerns with the tendency of — well, not a tendency — a tactic employed by ISIL to slaughter religious minorities in Iraq and in Syria. You’ll recall at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL that some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military, were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mt. Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.

Due to the obvious equivocation — it is unclear how Obama’s efforts “to protect Yazidi religious minorities” answers a question about persecuted Christians — the question was repeated: “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in the situation [regarding Christians]?”

Earnest’s response:

My understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has at this point not been reached.

Eminently predictably, Angela Merkel just got the first taste of her well-deserved comeuppance at the polls over the weekend. There will be more to come:

The ripple effects of the German voter rebellion against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will rapidly be felt across the continent. It will not matter much that the Chancellor has tried to modify it after the fact, reaching out to Turkey and seeking ways to slow down the migration inflow, with NATO and the EU looking for joint solutions to strengthen the borders. If anything, the public rejection of Merkel’s policy has reinforced the sense that her leadership has failed to grasp fully the complexity of the nearly thirty-year-old European Union—especially the enduring strength of the national identity politics of its newer members and the ultimate insularity of state interests in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. Today, regardless of how Germany ultimately adjusts its immigration policy, the amount of damage done to the EU’s cohesion by Merkel’s initial open door policy will endure. It has already reinforced an increasingly nationalized approach to managing immigration by individual member states, while feeding the European public opinion’s growing anti-Brussels sentiment.

The anti-Merkel vote in Germany also casts in a different light the early decision by Viktor Orban of Hungary to build a fence across his country’s border, and, more recently, the refusal by France to take in more migrants, the ongoing resistance in Poland to the mandatory resettlement quota system advocated by the EU Commission, and the Macedonian government’s decision to close the country’s border completely. Likewise, the creeping de facto reintroduction of national border controls across the Schengen Zone is but the latest reaffirmation of what was once derided in Berlin, Vienna, and Brussels as the “Orbanization of Europe.” This was, in hindsight, at least on the border question, a prudent if clumsily executed effort to manage the flow so as to stay attuned to the public mood in the European Union and to preserve individual states’ absorption capacity. Whatever one thinks of Orban’s questionable economic and foreign policy priorities, he correctly anticipated the public’s resistance to the current wave of MENA migrants.

But today, these novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred… Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people.

What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

Mr. Saramago chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, shopping malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies while he was visiting Ramallah. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision.

What is the only country about which can be said:

Its very existence is disputed? (Clue: Not Zimbabwe, not Tuvalu, not even overrun Tibet.)
Its boundaries, bought with blood in wars initiated by others, is challenged by all nations, who now seem determined to destroy it through boycotts, unjust defamation and purported “laws” that are applied to no other nation?
It fully respects the rights of women and every kind of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, notwithstanding that it is condemned at the United Nations for being “the worst violator of women’s rights.” Worse than Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan?
It provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food and medical treatment; its Defense Forces, to avoid enemy civilian casualties, warn the enemy to evacuate buildings before attacking them, and — instead of simply carpet bombing the enemy as all other nations do, including most democracies –sends its own soldiers poissibly to die on land missions?

Yet this is the only country that even famous writers, intellectuals and Nobel laureates target, demonize and criminalize.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.
That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.
In July 2015, four men, one of whom is a Navy veteran, were called in for questioning. They had planned to penetrate a Navy base in the south of France, seize a high-ranking officer, decapitate him, and then spread photos of the decapitation on social media networks. The Navy veteran was one of the leaders.

According to a confidential memo, dated January 2015, from the anti-terrorist unit of the interior ministry, France was already host to 8,250 radical Islamists (a 50% increase in one year).

Some of these Islamists have gone to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS); others have infiltrated all levels of society, starting with the police and the armed forces.

A confidential memo from the Department of Public Security, published by Le Parisien, not only details 17 cases of police officers radicalized between 2012 and 2015, but that this increase had accelerated during 2014. Particularly noted were the police officers who listen to and broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.

In addition, the police were alerted to a policewoman who incited terrorism on Facebook, and called her police uniform a “filthy rag of the Republic” while wiping her hands on it. When she came out of the restroom she was wearing a hijab. In January 2015, immediately after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher market in Vincennes which had left 17 people dead, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Masked attack led by Zionist cowards… They need to be killed.”

That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.

Although Police headquarters in Paris confirm that this situation is rare, they have decided to review on a weekly basis any behavior that overstep the principle of separation of church and state, such as that of Muslim officers who appear to be leaning toward radicalization. Patrice Latron, who manages the office of the Paris police prefect, told Le Parisien that these circumstances are “very marginal.”

Americans have long associated the fight against Islamist terrorism with the Middle East, as Sunday’s attack in the Turkish capital of Ankara reminds us. But that geographical horizon is also increasingly out of date. Witness the expanding grip of jihadists in Africa—and the Obama Administration’s belated but increasingly urgent attempts to fight it.

This is apparent from the March 5 air strike, by manned and unmanned U.S. planes, on an al Shabaab training camp in Somalia that killed an estimated 150 terrorists. Four days later U.S. Special Forces assisted the Somali military in taking down another Shabaab camp. In both cases Pentagon officials cited intelligence suggesting an imminent threat of attacks by the al Qaeda-allied group, whose name means “the youth.”

Ostensibly, U.S. Special Forces are in Somalia to train and assist the African Union Mission in Somalia, or Amisom, which helps Somalia’s federal government. Shabaab is a menace to all of East Africa, with outrages including the 2013 attack on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi and last year’s rampage at Kenya’s Garissa College that massacred 148 Christian students.

But Shabaab is also a menace to the West. A Shabaab member tried to kill Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard in 2010 with an ax in revenge for drawing the prophet Mohammed. Shirwa Ahmed of Minneapolis became the first known American suicide bomber when he drove a truck bomb into a Somali government compound, killing 20. An estimated 40 U.S. citizens have traveled to Somalia to join Shabaab, which has called for attacks on U.S. shopping malls. If Islamic State can radicalize the San Bernardino killers from afar, Shabaab can do the same.

Al Shabaab militants parade new recruits after arriving in Mogadishufrom their training camp south of the capital on October 21, 2010. Photo: feisal omar/Reuters

The Obama Administration has sent 300 troops to Cameroon to fight the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram in neighboring Nigeria, and it’s an open secret that the U.S. operates a drone base in Garoua in northern Cameroon. A U.S. air strike last month near the Libyan city of Sabratha killed an Islamic State leader and 48 terrorist comrades, and the Pentagon is reported to be drawing up plans for a broader air campaign against Islamic State in Libya. CONTINUE AT SITE

A braking system that will let the new European-Russian ExoMars craft touch down on Red Planet without exploding comes from the Rafael defense systems firm .

Man’s latest attempt to search for life on the Red Planet has a critical blue-and-white component – a propulsion system that will gently guide the newly-launched ExoMars spacecraft to the surface of Mars when it gets ready to touch down sometime in 2018.

The craft’s propulsion system was developed by Rafael, the same company that developed, among other things, the Iron Dome missile defense system.

While known for its defense systems, Rafael is also active in the space business, specifically as the manufacturer of controllable propulsion and reaction control systems (RCS), which help “brake” the landing of satellites and missiles. This ensures that their fuel tanks do not crash into the ground as they land and ignite an explosion.

When ExoMars, launched Monday, gets to its destination, it will release a descent module called Schiaparelli which will land on Mars. During the descent phase, a heat shield will protect the payload from the severe heat flux. Parachutes, thrusters, and damping systems will reduce the speed, allowing a controlled landing on the surface of Mars.

The module’s fuel tanks are equipped with Rafael-supplied mini-rockets that will spring into action when the craft gets ready to land on the surface of Mars, according to Zvi Zuckerman, a Rafael engineer who helped develop the system. In comments to Yedioth Ahronoth, Zuckerman said that the landing “will be a dramatic moment, because if anything goes wrong, the spacecraft could explode” due to the impact of landing.

According to Zuckerman, the European Space Agency, which is sponsoring the mission along with Russian space agency Roscosmos, chose Rafael’s propulsion system for the job “because our propulsion tanks are lighter, and use cleaner fuel,” which ensures a smoother landing.

Russian diplomats are stressing that Israel’s national security interests will not be hurt by the country’s sudden announcement of its plans to withdraw troops from Syria, which Israel’s top general admitted took him by surprise, Ynet reported Tuesday.

“We will try to ensure that this (Syria) crisis is resolved, and we will also do everything so that Israel’s national security interests are not harmed in the process,” Alexey Drobinin, Russia’s deputy ambassador to Israel, told Ynet. Russian troops have been aiding the Iran-backed regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad since last fall.

Russia’s goal in withdrawing much of its forces from Syria is to send a “clear message” that “it’s time to give political dialogue a chance,” Drobinin said. He added that it was still necessary to fight terror organizations like ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, and that Russia would continue to do so alongside a international coalition.

Drobinin also told Israel’s Army Radio, that Russia is aware of Israel’s security concerns in the region, and that the Russians “have an ongoing dialogue with the Israeli side on all levels – the military level and diplomatic level.”

After Russia’s withdrawal was announced, IDF Chief of Staff Gen. Gadi Eisenkot told members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Russian intervention had strengthened Assad’s position, and it was unclear at this point what the ramifications of the withdrawal will be. “At this stage, humility and caution are required in trying to understand the vector in which the Syrian theatre will develop with the exit of Russian forces,” he said.

In How Israel Navigated through the Hurricane of the Syrian Civil War, which was published in the March 2016 of The Tower Magazine, Jonathan Spyer highlighted aspects of Israel’s coordination with Russia regarding Syria.

It is no less important that Israel has been careful to maintain communication with the Russians, and a “deconfliction” regime appears to be in effect between Russian and Israeli air power over Syria. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, and Military Intelligence chief Herzl Halevi travelled to Moscow immediately following the Russian intervention, presumably to lay the groundwork for a channel of communication. As of now, this appears to have permitted Israel to continue to operate in the skies over Syria. Thus, while the emergence of a fledgling Russian-Iranian strategic alliance in the Middle East is surely of concern to Israel, the evidence to date suggests that the alliance by no means implies carte blanche for the Iranians to pursue all their regional goals under the umbrella of Russian air cover. On the contrary, the Russians, as the senior partner in the relationship, dictate when and to what extent cooperation takes place.

Netanyahu, according to the Times of Israel, told Russian President Vladimir Putin in “no uncertain terms” that Israel would not tolerate Tehran’s efforts to arm Israel’s enemies in the region, and that Jerusalem has taken and will continue to take action against any such attempts. The Times quoted the prime minister saying, “This is our right and also our duty.… There were no objections to our rights.… There was readiness to make sure that whatever Russia’s intentions for Syria, Russia will not be a partner in extreme actions by Iran against us.”