RUTHFULLY YOURS

Please remember that in October 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers, while in port in Aden, Yemen, for refueling. The attack was attributed to al Qaeda. The explosion ripped a hole in the hull of the ship, killing 17 U.S. sailors. Thirty-nine others were injured. Yemen has been the haven and locus of terrorists. rsk
Mr. Bahah is the prime minister and vice president of the Republic of Yemen.

In a region racked by strife, Yemen stands out. It is the poorest country in the Middle East and since March the plight of my people has been worsened by an inhumane war.

The people of Yemen elected President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in February 2012 to preserve the country’s unity, independence and territorial integrity, while leading all Yemenis toward a brighter future. But that future has been stolen by Iranian-backed Houthi militia, who drove our legitimate government from office and have committed countless human-rights abuses, documented by the U.N. In response, a broad, international coalition led by Saudi Arabia, and with Yemen’s national army, is working to liberate our country from illegal, foreign-sponsored control.

The Chess Master vs. Putin-The author could easily have opted to live out life like an oligarch, yachting from port to port. Instead, he plunged into politics.
When Garry Kasparov, in 2005, suddenly announced his retirement from competition after two decades dominating the chess world, there was widespread puzzlement. He explains in “Winter Is Coming” that he left the pawns and pieces behind to join Russia’s pro-democracy movement. Having “achieved everything I could want to achieve at the chessboard,” he writes, he believed it was time for a different kind of accomplishment. “I wanted my children to be able to grow up in a free Russia. . . . I hoped to use my energy and my fame to push back against the rising tide of repression coming from the Kremlin.”

Now Mr. Kasparov reprises his participation in Russia’s fight for democracy. It is a compelling story of courage and civic-mindedness. With his wealth and status, he could easily have opted to live out life like a Russian oligarch, buying baubles and yachting from port to port. Instead, he plunged into politics, organizing coalitions to challenge the autocratic rule of Vladimir Putin, taking a leading role in public demonstrations and marches, and in 2007 running for president himself. The result was, among other things, beatings at the hands of secret-police thugs, confinement (briefly) in a Moscow prison cell and, finally, self-imposed exile in the West.

Sometimes a culture disappears with a whimper, not a bang. Institutions age and are ignored, and the complacent public insidiously lowers its expectations of state performance.

Infrastructure, the rule of law, and civility erode — and yet people are not sure why and how their own changing (and pathological) individual behavior is leading to the collective deterioration that they deplore.

There is still a “West” in the sense of the physical entities of North America, Europe, many of the former British dominions, and parts of Westernized Asia. The infrastructure of our cities and states looks about as it did in the recent past. But is it the West as we once knew it — a unique civilization predicated on free expression, human rights, self-criticism, vibrant free markets, and the rule of law?

Or, instead, is the West reduced to a wealthy but unfree leisure zone, driven on autopilot by computerized affluence, technological determinism, and a growing equality-of-result, omnipotent state?

Tens of thousands of migrants — reminiscent of the great southward and westward treks of Germanic tribes in the late fifth century, at the end of the Roman Empire — are overwhelming the borders of Europe. Such an influx should be a reminder that the West attracts people, while the non-West drives them out, and thus should spark inquiries about why that is so. But that discussion would be not only impolite, but beyond the comprehension of most present-day Westerners, who take for granted — though they cannot define, much less defend — their own institutions.

The Soviets would slink home from the Cuban Missile Crisis with tails and rockets between their legs. Two years later, the Politburo relieved Nikita Khrushchev of his job. For all that, although few would recognise his name, we can thank Oleg Konstantinovich Penkovsky.
On this day in 1962, October 26, Nikita Khrushchev blinked. Four days earlier, US President John F. Kennedy had informed Americans via a nationally televised address that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba and, as a consequence of this first-strike threat, he was ordering the US Navy to blockade the island until the weaponry was removed. As the superpowers faced off, the world held its breath and prepared for Armageddon.

In Moscow, meanwhile, Colonel Oleg Konstantinovich Penkovsky (above) of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noe Upravlenie, Chief Intelligence Directorate of Military Intelligence) was arrested and charged with the high treason. The world was not to know at the time that it was Penkovsky, much more than Khrushchev, Kennedy or their diplomats, who defused the crisis. The Soviets would slink home with tails and rockets between their legs and, two years later, the Politburo “relieved” Khrushchev of the leadership position. These were the unfolding consequence of Penkovsky’s actions, yet the man who saved the planet by supplying the Americans with top secret information that gave Washington the confidence to resist the Kremlin’s bluff and bluster has remained a largely obscure and overlooked player in the drama.

Unthinkable as it may be after all these decades of nuclear-enforced peace, Beijing’s determination to make the South China sea its own is day-by-day raising the likelihood that a full-blown shooting war will erupt. Australia’s prospects in such a conflict are especially parlous
China’s preoccupation with its past humiliation by foreign powers didn’t start with the communists: a public holiday, National Humiliation Day, was instituted by the Nationalists in 1927. Similarly, Chinese irredentism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Chinese primary school textbooks from 1938 have a map of China that extends well beyond its current borders in all directions. Now the map in Chinese passports includes the South China Sea as Chinese territory, as well as parts of India on its northern border.

The current situation is that China is in the process of completing bases on seven artificial islands in the South China Sea. Three of those bases will have 3,000-metre airstrips with attendant taxiways and aprons. Most of the bases include flak towers. Similarly, most of the bases have ramps up to the first level of their forts, probably so that mobile radars get some elevation and have a greater range.

Usually denounced as nutty Catholic right-wingers, Law and Justice are in fact a sui generis movement of truculent, carefully Eurosceptic étatist-patriots.

Charles Crawford was the British Ambassador to Poland from 2003– 2007

The official results are not yet out. But it is clear that Poland’s 2015 Parliamentary elections have given the Law and Justice party led by Jarosław Kaczynski a thumping victory, with up to 40 per cent of the vote. Depending on the final numbers and how many smaller parties squeeze over the 5 per cent threshold into parliament, Law and Justice could have an absolute majority in the Sejm, the first time any party has achieved that since communism ended 25 years ago.

The scandal-ridden pro-EU Citizens Platform party that has presided over one of Europe’s most successful economies for eight years saw its vote slump from 39 per cent in 2011 to 24 per cent this time round. A maverick party led by a Paweł Kukiz that favours the UK first-past-the-post election system achieved a respectable 9 per cent. (Imagine rock guitarist Brian May of Queen galumphing around UK politics as an idiosyncratic conservative, and you’ll get a rough idea). The motley Kukiz MPs will find it easy to work with Law and Justice.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—better known as the Iran nuclear deal—was officially adopted Sunday, Oct. 18. That’s nine days ago. It’s already a dead letter.
Not that you would have noticed by reading the news or tuning in to State Department or White House briefings. It’s too embarrassing to an administration that has invested all of its diplomatic capital in the deal. Also, too inconvenient to the commodity investors, second-tier banks, European multinationals and everyone else who wants a piece of the Iranian market and couldn’t care less whether Tehran honors its nuclear bargain.
Yet here we are. Iran is testing the agreement, reinterpreting it, tearing it up line by line. For the U.S.—or at least our next president—the lesson should be clear: When you sign a garbage agreement, you get a garbage outcome.

“Then he stuck his sword in my friend’s belly. One student started screaming but we all still thought it was a prank.” — Student, quoted in Expressen.

After the double murders at IKEA, there were no such discussions. We have yet to hear anyone condemn the racist motive of the IKEA murderer, Abraham Ukbagabir. When questioned by the police, he said that he had chosen his victims because they “looked Swedish.”

What does Sweden’s Prime Minister hope to achieve by condemning all violence from Swedes, but ignoring all violence from immigrants?

Just last week in Sweden, six would-be housing facilities for asylum seekers were set ablaze.

There is the risk that as Swedes become more and more convinced that no one speaks for them, they may feel an increasing need to take matters into their own hands.

“Once the lid blows in Sweden, it will happen with much larger force.” — Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, editorial columnist for the Danish daily, Politiken.

On Thursday, October 22, Sweden was shocked by yet another act of madness apparently connected to multiculturalism.

Nearly $50 million a month: According to the AP, that’s what the Islamic State (ISIS) earns in monthly oil revenues. Yet while some analysts say ISIS’s oil earnings are lower, the group raises revenue from other sources as well. Although the United States coalition has waged war on ISIS for more than a year now, the group’s financial stability proves that it remains strong.

Still, as happened last December — before ISIS captured Ramadi, and before the Islamic State metastasized across the planet — an increasing chorus of voices are claiming that the Islamic State has lost its strategic initiative. This is untrue.

Take Syria’s eastern Deir ez-Zor governorate, which is ISIS-controlled territory that is crucial for the group’s domination of Syria’s Sunni tribes, oil production, and supply lines into Iraq. ISIS expert Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi recently researched ISIS documents related to the governorate’s revenue streams and found that oil and gas account for 27.7 percent of IS revenue; taxes, 23.7 percent; electricity, 3.9 percent; and a massive 44.7 percent comes from “confiscations.” As al-Tamimi notes, these confiscations are highly variable and include traffic fines, asset seizures, and an array of fees. Joined to the ISIS energy industry, these revenues make for a strong financial foundation. Al-Tamimi’s research also tells us where ISIS spends its revenue:19.8 percent goes to base expenditures; 2.8 percent to media operations; 10.4 percent to Islamic policing; 17.7 percent to public services; 5.7 percent to discretionary aid; and 43.6 percent to fighter salaries.

Whether a massive movement of foreign peoples is a migration, an invasion, or a conquest is a matter of perspective. To the ancient Romans and later Romance historians, the migration of Germanic tribes into the empire in the 5th and 6th centuries was a catastrophic foreign invasion. To the Germanic peoples themselves, it was known as the Volkwanderung (the migration of the people). There is a profound irony that as waves of Muslim migrants press into Germanic Europe, that the very civilization they are now undermining was created in a series of migrations seen by the civilized people they replaced as an invasion. And just as Germanic tribal movements proved inexorable against the politically, economically, and morally weakened Roman state (at least in Western Europe), it appears (barring dramatic reversals of policy and will) that the ongoing wave of Muslim migration will inevitably replace European civilization as we know it. Even more worrisome, if history is any guide, this will happen long before Muslims become a majority there.