RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-10-20-it-is-remarkable-how-badly-putin-has-screwed-up-in-russia

Sometimes I look at the U.S. government under President Biden, and I think that it couldn’t be possible to be more incompetent than this. But take a look at any of the U.S.’s main geopolitical adversaries — besides Russia there’s China, and Iran, and perhaps you might throw in a Venezuela or a North Korea — and you quickly realize that all of them have far, far more incompetent government policy than the U.S. on its very worst day.

For today I’m going to focus on Russia. As recently as five or ten years ago, I was willing to grudgingly concede to Vladimir Putin some decent successes, particularly on the international stage. Starting with a relatively bad hand, I thought he was playing it cleverly in world affairs. But by 2018 I had come to the view that no amount of foreign policy cleverness could overcome Russia’s growing weaknesses, from a stagnant crony-capitalist economy to declining population. In a piece on March 4, 2018 titled “How Are Things Going In Russia?” I went through a litany of negative indicators, from a 40% decline in GDP since 2014 (mostly due to then-declining energy prices), to declining population, to military spending badly constrained by the small economy.

And now comes the invasion of Ukraine. It would be fair to say that the invasion and its consequences have taken Russia from a major player on the world stage to a much less important player. Here are some of the many indicators:

Loss of the fear factor. The biggest benefit of a large army is not actually being able to win a war, but rather being able to intimidate your adversaries into doing your bidding without having to resort to hostilities. When the invasion began in February, everybody assumed that the Russian tanks would roll through Ukraine in a matter of days if not hours. Now, eight months later, Russia is steadily losing back to Ukrainian counter-offenses significant parts of the small amounts of territory it had captured. If little Ukraine can stand up to the Russians so handily, it gives spirit to every one of Putin’s neighbors.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18972/isis-terrorists-turkey

In Ankara’s Sincan district, a 24-year-old enslaved Yazidi woman was rescued after her relatives in Australia (who themselves are asylum-seekers) purchased her freedom on the dark web. The woman was held captive in a house in Sincan for 10 months and systematically raped. Signs of torture in the form of cigarette burns and razor cuts were found on her body.

[A] secrecy order was placed on the indictment against those ISIS members who had kidnapped a seven-year-old Yazidi child to Turkey and listed her for sale. These are allegedly high-ranking IS members. They are currently living in Ankara and remain free.

[I]t is difficult to obtain data on the detained ISIS members from state authorities. When we ask questions to authorities, it is not possible to get an answer from them. — Hale Gonultas, Turkish journalist, interview with Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

“After I reported on Yazidi women’s sales on the dark web, Ankara Anti-Terrorism teams came to my house. They emphasized that the buying and selling of foreign nationals within the borders of the Republic of Turkey is a ‘human trafficking crime’ and they claimed that I supported human trafficking through the press by publishing such news.” — Hale Gonultas, interview with Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

” [V]ery little is being done…. I do not believe ISIS members should be able to settle anywhere, and police authorities should actively search for them in every country. At the same time, the rescue of innocent Yezidi captives should be an associated priority. This is for security and safety but also for humanitarian and human rights reasons. These missing Yezidis have suffered enormously, and their rights must not be ignored.” — Pari Ibrahim, executive director of Free Yezidi Foundation, to Gatestone Institute, October 2022.

ISIS terrorists are living and operating in Turkey, some with Yazidis abducted from Syria or Iraq. For years, these Yazidi children and women have been enslaved, raped and sold. Most are survivors of the 2014 genocide by ISIS in the Sinjar region of Iraq. Even though it has been more than three years since ISIS was ousted from the last of the territory it seized in Syria and Iraq, these crimes are still taking place now.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-globalist-coup-in-westminster/

Given what’s happened since her death on September 8, it would’ve been fitting for Queen Elizabeth II, in her final days, to have said, in an echo of Louis XV, “Après moi, le déluge.” Because it’s taken no time at all, since her passing, for the British ship of state to run aground.

In her last official act, on September 6, the Queen invited Liz Truss to succeed Boris Johnson as PM. Johnson – whose Spectator columns I’d read with enthusiasm for years – had been swept into power in a 2019 election in which the Tories won an 80-seat majority. The mandate: to get Brexit done. Boris got it done – sort of – but otherwise, in many ways, he spectacularly betrayed basic Conservative principles.

Backed by many voters who hoped he’d be a British Trump, Boris did little or nothing to tackle his country’s version of the swamp. On his watch, English police ignored Muslim rape gangs and arrested law-abiding citizens for criticizing Islam online. Boris championed strict COVID lockdown rules and mandatory vaccination, but broke the lockdown himself and then lied about it – a move that was used as an excuse to give him the heave-ho.

For me, the big lesson of Boris’s downfall was that a terrific political journalist doesn’t necessarily make a decent prime minister. As it happens, during the last months of his premiership I was fitfully making my way through Charles Moore’s magnificent three-volume biography of Margaret Thatcher. What a woman! The more I read, the more I admire her. It really can feel as if she was born to be prime minister. She had what it took – unshakable core beliefs, strong self-discipline, excellent management skills, etc. – to rescue Britain from socialism and help bring down the USSR. Why wasn’t Boris able to do something similar for the UK – and the world – at a time when globalism was threatening liberal democracy? Could it be he just wasn’t wired for the job? Alas, some writers aren’t good for anything other than writing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tory-warning-to-u-s-republicans-11666305620?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

For the shortest-tenured Prime Minister in British history, Liz Truss sure has a lot of ignominy loaded on her shoulders. She’s apparently responsible for the fall of the pound, a looming recession, and the political demise of the Conservative Party. All accomplished in a mere 44 days.

Ms. Truss resigned as PM Thursday after a fiasco of a premiership, but the fault is far from hers alone. She is being made the scapegoat for the economic policy blunders that the ruling Conservatives have made over 12 years in power, and especially since 2019 under previous Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ms. Truss’s tax cuts lasted two weeks as a mere proposal and never even came to a vote in Parliament. She had told the Tory rank-and-file about her tax plans when she ran to succeed Mr. Johnson. The only surprise she offered in office was a cut in the top marginal income tax rate to 40% from 45%—about £2 billion in lost revenue in a year. Yet this supposedly was the nail that lost the shoe, that lost the horse, that lost the economy.

Ms. Truss certainly mismanaged her policy rollout. She didn’t prepare the country or her party to sell tax cuts after a decade of Tory tax-and-spend politics. She lacked an electoral mandate of her own and only narrowly beat former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the PM contest. When markets fell after exotic pension fund schemes broke down amid rising interest rates, she lost her nerve. She sacked her first Chancellor and threw over her program. The Tory sharks then went for the kill.

But Ms. Truss didn’t create Britain’s 10.1% inflation rate (blame the Bank of England), didn’t produce energy shortages and price spikes (blame the last two Prime Ministers), and didn’t fail to supervise pensions so they wouldn’t gamble to get higher returns. All of that was in motion before she took office.

Rough political justice would now give the premiership to Mr. Sunak, whose policies contributed to this economic mess. Whoever gets the PM job may be volunteering for a suicide mission, as an election must be held by January 2025. Even the Labour Party could beat this pack of panicked Tories.

The dumbest argument is that Ms. Truss’s fall is a warning to U.S. Republicans not to cut taxes. Ms. Truss wanted pro-growth policies to counter the economic failures of the Boris Johnson Tories, who pursued the policies lauded by America’s big government conservatives: more welfare and healthcare entitlements, green energy subsidies, higher taxes on business, and easy money.

If Republicans want to end up like the Tories, they’ll follow the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak tax-and-spend model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19007/biden-iran-nuclear-obsession

If US President Joe Biden really is “gravely concerned” about the plight of Iranian schoolgirls being attacked and killed by Iran’s authoritarian regime, then the best way to help them would be to abandon his ill-considered attempt to broker a new nuclear deal with Tehran.
The death toll is now said to have passed the 200 mark, with many of the fatalities reported to be children as young as 11 years old.
Consequently, Mr Biden’s response is being seen as little more than a token gesture….
Rather than holding the Iranian regime to account for its atrocious conduct, Mr Biden’s priority remains to secure another flawed nuclear deal with Tehran, one that would result in enabling Iran to have nuclear weapons with no prohibition on the missiles to deliver them, as well as the lifting of punitive economic sanctions and up to a trillion dollars in additional revenues to “export the revolution.”
If, as now seems increasingly likely, the White House commits to a new nuclear deal once next month’s midterm elections are out of the way, the US Congress will be in Christmas recess and therefore unable to block it.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), designated by the US as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, together with all the other instruments of state-sponsored oppression in Iran, would receive extra funding dollars once the sanctions are lifted that will enable them to further develop their hostile activities.
Iran has already destroyed four Arab countries in addition to its own: Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq.
The Biden administration’s intransigence on the Iran issue also helps to explain the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to reach an agreement to reduce oil production….
The Saudis remain frustrated by Mr Biden’s obsession with trying to revive the Iran nuclear deal, which to the kingdom is a mortal threat…. How could Biden have expected them to help him?
Biden seems to be threatening “consequences” for the Saudis because they are trying try to prevent Iran from annihilating them?
Iran is also now supplying Russia with hundreds of “kamikaze” drones and lethal missiles which Russia is using to target civilians and destroy Ukraine — all while Biden has been relying on Russia to negotiate the Iran nuclear deal on America’s behalf: US negotiators are even not allowed in the room.
Consequently, rather than making the world a safer place, Mr Biden’s pro-Iran stance is merely fanning the flames of even greater global instability.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18999/china-attack-taiwan

Americans may not even know that China has struck the first blow until months after it has occurred… Americans think China’s war planners think like America’s war planners. Unfortunately, the Chinese ones do not. First strikes, despite what former intelligence officials believe, do not have to look like the invasion of Normandy in 1944.

Chinese doctrine is different, something evident from Unrestricted Warfare, the 1999 book by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, then two Chinese air force colonels.

So what would China’s first attack on Taiwan look like? Say, six months before an invasion China, violating the Biological Weapons Convention, could release a deadly pathogen on Taiwan.

China’s National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” Pathogens can now be designed to infect specific groups and even specific individuals.

A regime monstrous enough to kill millions around the world [with COVID-19: the Chinese Communist Party pressured other countries to take arrivals from China without restriction while locking down Chinese territory] is surely monstrous enough to release, as the first act in a conflict, a disease on the 23.9 million people of Taiwan. It could take the Pentagon months to realize that China had started a war to annex the island republic.

I suspect Chinese ruler Xi Jinping would not be overly upset if Taiwan were a smoking radioactive slab as long as it were part of the People’s Republic of China.

“The biggest problem with the ‘China Hands’ of the U.S. intelligence community is their inability to place themselves into the mindset of the Communist Party and its Central Military Commission, in other words, to think like the enemy. There is still too much mirror-imaging going on…..” — James Fanell, Geneva Centre for Security Policy, to Gatestone, in response to the Culver report, October 2022.

Americans make assumptions about the Chinese style of warfare; some of those assumptions are almost certainly wrong.

The United States will have months of warning before China attacks Taiwan.

At least that is what John Culver, a retired CIA officer and now an Atlantic Council scholar, argues in a report issued this month by the influential Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-iran-a-new-generation-is-prepared-to-fight-the-mullahs/

The uproar, the girls and women ripping off and setting fire to their hijabs, the rage in the streets of 90 Iranian cities, show no signs of abating. The young people now leading these protests are different from the previous generation; they have lost that feeling of fear. They know that they have nothing more to lose by fighting against the only government they have ever known — the oppressive regime run by religious fanatics in Tehran. A report on the latest protests can be found here: “A barrier of fear has been broken in Iran. The regime may be at a point of no return,” by Jomana Karadsheh and Tamara Qiblawi, CNN, October 5, 2022:

A woman dressed in black raises a framed portrait of her son, Siavash Mahmoudi, in the air as she paces the sidewalk in Iran’s capital, Tehran. “I am not scared of anyone. They told me to be silent. I will not be,” the woman seen in a viral social media video yells, her voice fraught with emotion.

“I will carry my son’s picture everywhere. They killed him.”

Mahmoudi’s mother is among many Iranians who claim the regime tried to silence them as they mourned loved ones slain in ongoing nationwide demonstrations.

But Iran’s protesters, and their supporters, are defiant. For weeks [and now in its fourth week], a nationwide protest movement has relentlessly gathered momentum and appears to have blunted the government’s decades-old intimidation tactics. Slogans against the clerical leadership echo throughout the city. Videos of schoolgirls waving their headscarves in the air as they sing protest songs in classrooms have gone viral, as have images of protesters fighting back against members of the formidable paramilitary group Basij.

These are scenes previously believed to be unthinkable in Iran, where the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei rules with an iron fist. But experts say that these protests transcend Iran’s many social and ethnic divisions, breaking a decades-old barrier of fear and posing an unprecedented threat to the regime.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thoughts-of-chairman-xi-nationalism-aggression-china-ccp-communist-power-mao-war-taiwan-south-korea-11665955319?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The most important election in the world this year is no election at all. It’s a coronation. When China’s Communist Party anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term this week, it will confirm China’s combination of aggressive nationalism and Communist ideology that is the single biggest threat to world freedom. It all but guarantees an era of confrontation between China and the U.S.

We say this with regret, and not only because war with China would be a catastrophe. When China embarked on its reform project under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, there was reason to hope that the Middle Kingdom might eventually leave behind its murderous Communist past. For a time, into the 2000s, that still seemed possible as reforms continued and Chinese living standards increased.

The bet, which was worth taking for the sake of a better world, was that China would follow the path of other East Asian nations that evolved into democracies as the middle-class grew. But China’s Communist Party has never relinquished its grip on power as the authoritarians of Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines did.

In his book “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” Michael Pillsbury makes a powerful case that Chinese war hawks have been biding their time all along until China was strong enough to challenge U.S. power. But there were enough differences in elite opinion in China to think that even the Party wasn’t monolithic in its views. Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power has ended that debate, as he has become the most powerful and committed Communist leader since Mao Zedong.

In a decade Mr. Xi has crushed all dissent, imposed a vast censorship regime, and created an intrusive surveillance regime beyond anything the East German Stasi imagined. He has erased the autonomy for 50 years that China had promised Hong Kong and made Xinjiang province a prison camp for the Uyghurs.