RUTHFULLY YOURS

An international conference in Vienna on 30 October – attended by all five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council – America, China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom – has made an important breakthrough towards defeating Islamic State and ending the conflict in Syria and Iraq.
Together with Egypt, the EU, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United Nations – the Permanent Members reached a mutual understanding that

“Da’esh (Islamic State), and other terrorist groups, as designated by the U.N. Security Council, and further, as agreed by the participants, must be defeated.”

This is the first time the five Permanent Members have reached such a consensus – acknowledging that prior measures not involving the use of armed force under Security Council Resolutions 2170 and 2178 have failed to defeat Islamic State and other designated terrorist groups – a prerequisite before there can be any hope of restoring stability and reaching lasting political solutions in Syria and Iraq.

International co-operation to defeat Islamic State through a Security Council Resolution authorising the use of armed force had previously risked being vetoed by either Russia or America in the face of earlier American objections against co-operating with any armed force which included President Assad’s troops. Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, had declared as recently as 29 September.

What crashed the Russian Airbus A321 in the Sinai Peninsula is yet to be determined. At the time of this writing the British Telegraph reported an ISIS “bomb plot was uncovered by British spies,” and ISIS’s claim it downed the Russian plane flying at 30,000 feet with a MANPAD (Man Portable Air Defense System), was dismissed outright by counterterrorism and aviation experts. Strangely there seems to be a consensus that “Terrorist groups cannot have such capacities by definition.”

However, in October 2011, after rebels killed Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, some 20,000 MAENADS went missing. Months later only 5,000 were reportedly destroyed. Where the remaining 15,000 missiles went is unclear. This however, did not stop then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from issuing a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including MANPADS, had been secured. But NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that the missing MAENADS could be scattered “from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan],” subsequently materialized. Especially so, since ISIS has captured sophisticated MANPADS in Iraq and Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s new diplomatic process for dealing with Syria’s harrowing civil war involves convening a series of talks in Vienna. The effort is probably well-intentioned. But I cannot conceive of what he expects to accomplish.

Does anyone really believe that Syria can be put back together again and then revived through democratic elections? The danger is that the all-purpose diplomatic resort to “process” will lead the United States to ignore realities and even make them worse.

America faces two interconnected perils in the region: the expansion of Islamic State and the breakdown of the Middle East’s century-old security order. The Obama administration’s fear of involvement and denial of the fundamental struggle for dominance in the region increases the risks for the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia. The conference in Vienna last week—involving at least a dozen interested parties, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia—was escapism, not a serious strategy. The next gathering in a week or so will be more of the same.
The old state borders and authorities of the Middle East, established during and after World War I, are disintegrating. The Arab lands are now the scene of a terrible contest for power. As former U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus explained to Congress in September, “almost every Middle Eastern country is now a battleground or a combatant in one or more wars.”

“They attacked even the wounded. Many people throughout Kurdistan have been arrested wholesale lately. Some of them participated in the election campaigns for our party. Many Turkish mainstream media outlets distort the facts and put the blame of the conflicts on Kurds. But it was the police that started the violence and conflicts. This much is clear: they murdered civilians knowingly and intentionally” — Ferhat Encu, Kurdish member of parliament for the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)

“The police broke F.A.’s teeth, tortured him, beat him and inserted a gun in his anus. He fainted during the torture. Then he was taken to hospital. When we saw him, there were bruises and marks of torture all over his body.” — Zozan Acar, his lawyer.

“We sent ambulances, but the police opened fire even at the ambulances. They open fire at anyone who go outside.” — Seyfettin Aydemir, the co-mayor of Silopi, to newspaper Evrensel

Even though the AKP won the majority of votes this week, on November 3 a new curfew was imposed on the Kurdish town of Silvan —for the sixth time since August 17. Just before the curfew, Muslum Tayar, 22, was killed by the police. They shot him from their armored vehicle.

It could have been a coincidence. A Russian airbus with 224 people – mainly tourists – flying from Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt to St. Petersburg, Russia could simply have come apart in midair, killing all aboard. It would have been one heck of a coincidence, though, considering the players who would have wanted it to disintegrate and the constellation of agendas that would be advanced by a well-placed bomb.

It is almost impossible that the plane was hit from the ground. It was flying too high for a shoulder-fired missile. Although it isn’t clear whether there are mobile missile launchers in Sinai, assume for a moment that one or more exist. The missile would have to have been programmed – it needs radar and target designation – and therefore it needs a) to know the flight path of a particular plane if it plans to hit a particular plane and b) an operator with the right skills. (The list of requirements for a successful takedown of an airliner is what leads some to believe that it was a Russian operator in Ukraine who fired on Malaysian Air Flight 17 a year ago.)

A bomb inside the plane, however, would account for the widespread wreckage.

As organizations like CAIR and their allies wax indignant over “Islamophobia” in America, Muslims around the globe are visiting the worst sort of cruelty upon the Christian minorities in their midst.

For instance, over a span of four days, from October 19-23, the Indonesian government succumbed to the demand of Islamic “extremists” and demolished nine churches. Six days earlier, on October 13, Muslims unleashed a torrent of violence that left a church burned to the ground and a person dead.

And in the course of this single day, 8,000 Christians found themselves displaced from their homes.

The government has deported them.

According to a local church activist, someone who self-identified only as “Rudy,” Islamic militants issued an ultimatum to the Indonesian government: Either raze these Christian churches to the ground or “the radicals will deploy around 7,000 people” to besiege this Christian community.

The organization Open Doors, a group dedicated to “serving persecuted Christians worldwide,” reports: “Church members wept as they watched in despair [as] civil police officers [began] hammering down their worship houses.” As of this juncture, over 1,000 “churchless believers are prohibited from raising temporary tents to hold Sunday worship services.”

U.S. and European intelligence agencies now believe that the Russian airliner downed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on the weekend was probably taken out by a bomb planted onboard by an Islamic State-affiliated terrorist group, according to media reports.

The Russian airplane may have been attacked by Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh) because Russia is waging war against it.

British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Philip Hammond said yesterday it appears a bomb ripped apart the Airbus A321M on Saturday, Oct. 31, killing all 224 souls onboard. It is reportedly Russia’s worst air disaster on record. The Russian-operated plane that was registered in Ireland had taken off earlier from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for St. Petersburg, Russia.

“We have concluded that there is a significant possibility that the crash was caused by an explosive device on board the aircraft,” Hammond said as his government gears up for a British visit today by Egypt’s anti-Islamist president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The Secretary of State of the United States traveled to the Muslim country of Jordan to assure its Foreign Minister that Jews would not be praying any more at the holiest site in Judaism.

As Kerry put it, “It is Muslims who pray on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and non-Muslims who visit.”

Israel is often accused of apartheid and segregation, but here was the Secretary of State championing both, as long as it was Muslim segregation aimed at Jews. The Temple Mount “Status Quo” worriedly talked about by Kerry and the media as the answer to the recent Muslim stabbing spree is no different than the Muslim ban on Jews entering the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are buried, past the seventh step. It rewards Muslim violence by upholding Muslim segregationist racism.

There’s no word on whether segregated drinking fountains will be put in for Muslims and non-Muslims. Jews visiting the former site of their Temple have been attacked for drinking from an “Islamic” water fountain.

Indian-born Harjit Singh Sajjan, 44, a former police officer and veteran of three military deployments to Afghanistan, was named Canada’s new minister of defense Wednesday, bringing first-hand expertise to one of the country’s top cabinet positions, agencies report.

Sajjan will oversee an anticipated change in Canada’s military involvement in the battle against militants in Syria and Iraq.

“He has a taste for the reality of war and that’s very, very important,” David Bercuson, director of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, told National Post.

“He will have seen the aftermath of the effect of war on some of our men and women, which is a major issue with veteran’s affairs,” said Bercuson.

Newly sworn-in Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already said he wants to end Canada’s air strikes in the region in favour of providing humanitarian help.

Elected to Parliament for the first time in last month’s election, Sajjan is illustrative of the younger, more diverse cabinet Trudeau had aimed to create.

Outgoing Conservative defence minister Jason Kenney had taken a hardline stance on security, saying Canada needed to be fighting against Islamic State militants to prevent them from becoming a threat to Canada.

Thank you David Goldman for puncturing the love affair with a huckster by the same folks who thought the “Arab Spring” was the birth of democracy…..rsk
Meredith Wilson’s sappy 1962 Broadway show “The Music Man” illuminates an inscrutable side of American foreign policy: Why do Americans persist in believing that they can remake the world in their own image, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary? We Ameicans love crooks and swindlers who appeal to our national narcissism, even when we know that they are crooks and swindlers. Wilson’s hero is a turn-of-the-twentieth-century rogue who styles himself a professor of music, and sells marching band equipment to midwestern towns with the promise that he will teach the local kids to play–but disappears before keeping his end of the bargain. In one Iowa town, the “music man” is caught red-handed, but pardoned by the townsfolk who bask in the warmth of his flattery. He has a long list of antecedents, such as Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry.

The Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, whose death last week revived the controversy about the 2003 Iraq war, lives on in the hearts of the neoconservatives for the same reason that the burghers of River City, Iowa embraced Wilson’s swindler. It reveals the better side of the American character: We’re too dumb to lie about other countries’ politics, which we understand about as well as Sanskrit, and we have no natural defense against sociopaths who lie whenever their lips are moving. There are very few uniquely American jokes: one queries what Snow White said to Pinocchio (“Lie to me, Baby”). We Americans love it when the Pinocchios of foreign policy lie to us. Those who view American democracy as an export industry still haven’t managed to fall out of love with Chalabi.