RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the ostensible cease-fire deal agreed upon during a security conference in Munich last week was supposed to take effect in Syria a few days from now, some 50 civilians were killed Monday in Russian airstrikes on two medical facilities.

This kind of deadly paradox is par for the course in the Middle East, particularly when none of the parties involved actually signed any agreement about what European brokers called a “cessation of hostilities.”

Russia, for example, which has been fighting ferociously to rescue the regime of Syrian dictator President Bashar Assad, announced that such a “cessation” would not apply to its bombing of opposition targets.

Assad echoed this in a televised address on Monday, saying that a cease-fire would not include a halt to the use of weapons by the warring parties. No, he explained, the real aim of a “cessation of hostilities” would be to prevent his enemies “from strengthening their positions. Movement of weapons, equipment or terrorists, or fortification of positions, will not be allowed.”

Sebastian Junger’s memorable book, we learned that weather systems, which usually work to cancel each other out, can in that once-in-a-century circumstance combine to create a perfect and awesomely destructive storm.

The same can be true of political and historical forces that we are compelled to conclude have combined to create the perfect refugee storm now rapidly destroying the European Union.

The immediate cause is, of course, the so-called civil war in Syria. It’s not a civil war because Russian and Iranian forces have long since replaced the Assad regime’s forces as one side’s primary belligerent against the Saudi-led effort to overthrow Assad. The risible new “truce” so expertly negotiated by John Kerry does not include Russian air forces in it, so the most devastating part of the fight will continue uninterrupted.

Vladimir Putin couldn’t have foreseen the exodus of people from Syria, but his forces are continuing the pressure that caused it. The fighting around the city of Aleppo alone has produced as many as three hundred thousand refugees, most of whom are gathered on the Syrian-Turkish border. Putin sees the opportunity to destabilize Western Europe by pushing more refugees into its borders. It’s a very useful (to him) byproduct of his military intervention in Syria.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-china-sea-missile-deployment-entrenches-u-s-chinese-positions-1455729019

The Obama administration sharply criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday after charging that China’s military had deployed batteries of advanced missiles on a disputed South China Sea island.

Secretary of State John Kerry said the missile deployment was at odds with a pledge made by Mr. Xi while visiting the White House last year to refrain from militarizing clusters of disputed islands throughout the South China Sea.

Chinese officials, while not directly confirming or denying U.S. and Taiwanese claims about the missiles, said they plan to keep strengthening defensive capabilities in the South China Sea.

While both sides have no appetite for open conflict, their entrenched positions are narrowing their options for a diplomatic solution, while fueling the potential for dangerous flare-ups.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that they had confirmed commercial satellite imagery appearing to show the deployment of surface-to-air missiles on Woody Island in the disputed Paracel chain. The commercial images, from the firm ImageSat International NV, indicate the missiles were deployed sometime after Feb. 3.

The U.S., which in recent months challenged Beijing by sailing warships and flying bombers near Chinese-held islands, had warned against China’s buildup in a region where both sides increasingly find themselves locked into opposing positions.

“When President Xi was here in Washington, he stood in the Rose Garden with President Obama and said China will not militarize in the South China Sea,” Mr. Kerry said on Wednesday. “But there is every evidence, every day that there has been an increase of militarization of one kind or another. It’s of serious concern.”

The rebuke appeared to douse any lingering warmth from Mr. Xi’s state visit to the U.S. For its part, just a month after the Obama-Xi summit, the U.S. started testing China’s posture with what it labeled as freedom-of-navigation patrols near islands controlled by Beijing. READ MORE AT THE SITE

Islamist extremists are waging a religious persecution so severe that, as Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill stated in their historic joint statement last week, “whole families, villages and cities of our brothers and sisters in Christ are being completely exterminated.” Nowhere does this obtain more than in Iraq and Syria, where Christian communities, a groundswell of prominent voices is now acknowledging, face genocide. On February 4, the European Parliament, with near-unanimity and solid socialist support, passed a resolution declaring that ISIS “is committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis” and “other religious and ethnic minorities.”

Despite a foreign-policy mandate to speak out against religious persecution, the United States government has so far been silent on whether this epic religious cleansing of Christians,Yazidis, and other minorities from the heart of the Middle East ranks among the gravest of crimes.

With pressure mounting, the State Department in October leaked word that an official genocide designation would be forthcoming but made clear that State would recognize only a Yazidi genocide and not one against Christians. This prompted Congress to mandate that Secretary John Kerry make a determination by March 16 on the precise question of whether “persecution . . . of Christians and people of other religions in the Middle East by violent Islamic extremists . . . constitutes genocide.”

For Abbas and the Palestinian leadership, the death of more than 170 Palestinians and 26 Israelis in the past five months occurred in the context of a “popular and peaceful uprising.” One can only imagine what the uprising would have looked like had it not been “peaceful.”

Abbas assured his people that those who die defending their holy sites would go straight to heaven. “Every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem is pure blood,” he stressed.

According to the Palestinian Authority, these youths are acting out of despair — over settlements, checkpoints and lack of progress in the peace process. The attackers are in fact targeting Jews because they have been incited and brainwashed by the same leaders who are now denouncing Israel for protecting itself.

Not a single senior Palestinian official has condemned the targeting of innocent civilians in this “peaceful” uprising. They are too busy glorifying the assailants and naming streets after them.

The blood of the Palestinians who are being shot and killed while attacking Jews is on the hands of Abbas and his senior officials.

It is a puzzle: are the leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) playing dumb, or do they believe their own ridiculous rhetoric?

The UN’s assertion that the Saudi-led coalition has committed war crimes in Yemen is unlikely to be true. UN experts have not been to Yemen, depending instead on hearsay evidence and analysis of photographs.

The UN has a pattern of unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes against the armed forces of sovereign states. Without any military expertise, and never having visited Gaza, a UN commission convicted the Israel Defense Force of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians in the 2014 conflict. It was an assessment roundly rejected by America’s most senior military officer, General Martin Dempsey, and an independent commission.

The Houthis have learned many lessons from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, groups also supported by Iran. Those lessons include the falsification of civilian casualty figures and their causes. The UN swallowed the fake Gaza figures hook, line and sinker, and are now making the same error in Yemen.

The Houthis exploit gullible or compliant reporters and human rights groups to facilitate their propaganda, including false testimony and fabrication of imagery.

Forensic analysis shows that rather than deliberately targeting civilians, the Saudis and their allies have taken remarkable steps to minimize civilian casualties.

The sisterhood is grimly determined to see women in every unit of the armed forces, objections on grounds of physical capability, logistics, group psychology and lowered standards being dismissed as mere phallocratic prattle. Let us hope that peace prevails while commonsense does not
“For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”

–Rudyard Kipling

Western feminists are getting a good scorecard on feminizing the Western military, starting with the all-powerful US forces. The Sisterhood’s pack, apart from the likes of our own Lt-General (Retd) David Morrison and politicians, include the human rights bureaucracies, the Left, and “diversity” advocates. The plan, branded as “equality”, is to have women promoted to one-star rank (roughly Colonel/Brigadier-General) and beyond. Those so elevated can then drive the feminizing from atop the system.

There is a problem, though. Currently, women without prior combat experience struggle to secure the loftiest promotions, so the campaign is on to lower combat fitness standards. “Equality” to the Left – and the current crop of top brass — means “discrimination” if women don’t represent suitably proportionate numbers in elite units. To conservatives, “equality” means equal opportunity to pass a necessary military test. If women don’t get through, too bad.

So, do women do well at war? From 2001 to 2013, 154 US servicewomen were killed on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, many by IEDs which, admittedly, do not discriminate. Nineteen mothers returned to their toddlers and children, but in body bags.[1] All studies suggest that women’s casualty rates become disproportionate the closer women get to combat – and close to half US women troops reported hostile action in those two war zones. But to the Sisterhood, these are trivial issues compared with the need for equality, “fairness” and “civilizing” the rude military. If the push leaves the West less able to deal with, say, ISIS and/or Iran, North Korea, Islamic “caliphates” and thousands of lone-wolfers, well, thAt’s just tough for the West. Feminists, so seemingly reluctant to denounce Islamic misogyny while Western men persist in looking at their watches or wearing blue ties, have maintained a prolonged and remarkable silence. Perhaps their hope is that they and their sisters will be the last consigned to sexual slavery and life in a burka’d sack.

Last December, US Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced lifting of all gender-based restrictions on combat and infantry roles, most in infantry and armor units[2] and including the elite Rangers and SEALS.[3] The Marines had wanted the toughest jobs, such as machine-gunner and field reconnaissance, to stay male-only. They lost partly because the US, conveniently for politicians, has faced no serious opposition in the field since Vietnam. There has been no extreme combat to test the fragility of mixed-sex combat units. [4]

Carter’s professed rationale – prompted by females’ lawsuits and pressure from the Obama White House — was to increase the pool of potential recruits for 220,000 new unrestricted roles. Low ability of women to pass existing physical tests (developed from generations of combat experience) may shrink the pool to just a birdbath, hence the push to drop standards.

Prior groundwork has included such comical stuff as rolling out courses for US non-commissioned officers and combat veterans, starting on Japanese Marine bases. The instructors donned fake 12kg bellies and boobs and, thus clad, went through the PT regime in order to feel greater empathy with pregnant soldiers. These courses were mandated whether or not a team actually had any pregnant soldiers. To watch the gym session, click on the video below [5].

CIA director John Brennan said in an interview with 60 Minutes that the Islamic State is developing the capability to use chemical weapons on the battlefield and in terror attacks.

Washington Examiner:

“There are reports that ISIS has access to chemical precursors and munitions that they can use,” Brennan said Sunday on “60 Minutes.”

“We have a number of instances where ISIL has used chemical munitions on the battlefield,” Brennan continued.

“60 Minutes” further reported, “The CIA believes that ISIS has the ability to manufacture small quantities of chlorine and mustard gas.”

To buttress his accusation, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that laboratory tests had come back positive for the sulfur mustard, after around 35 Kurdish troops were sickened on the battlefield in Iraq last August.

Reuters:

The OPCW will not identify who used the chemical agent. But the diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity because the findings have not yet been released, said the result confirmed that chemical weapons had been used by Islamic State fighters.

For all the attention attracted by the battle against Islamic State in the Middle East, Islamism is also wreaking havoc in Africa. Jihadist groups control territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Mediterranean coast and south to Nigeria, and that crescent was ablaze this weekend.

Al Shabaab on Saturday took responsibility for a bomb that ripped a yard-long hole in a Daallo Airlines plane while it was flying from Mogadishu to Djibouti on Feb. 2. The would-be bomber blew himself out of the cabin, while in a miracle the other passengers and the crew survived.

Al Shabaab, which is al Qaeda’s Somalian franchise, called the attack “retribution for the crimes committed by the coalition of Western crusaders.” Al Shabaab said it intended to bomb a Turkish Airlines flight but switched targets after bad weather forced the Turkish carrier to cancel. The Daallo plane was carrying many of the passengers from the cancelled Turkish flight. Ankara, a NATO member, is building a military base in Somalia and contributes to antiterror efforts in Africa. READ MORE AT SITE

Welcome to Permanent War, as Russian Prime Minister Dimitri Medvedev dubbed today’s Middle East. It isn’t as bad as it sounds, provided, of course, that you’re not in it. The bonfire built on tribal enmity and national disillusionment will have to burn itself out over time. The risk lies in the possible spread of the fire outside the region.
First, a quick review of what is not going to happen in Syria, rhetoric to the contrary:

Neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia will send ground troops into northern Syria and fight US-backed Kurdish militia. Turkish Defense Minister Ismet Yilmaz declared on Sunday that his country had “no intention” of sending its army into Syria, while Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir said that deployment of Saudi forces is up to the United States.
Turkey won’t send combat aircraft into Syria to be shot down by Russian air defenses. Turkey would only sacrifice its aircraft in the hope of drawing the United States into a showdown with Russia, and the United States has evidently told Ankara that it’s on its own. Saudi Arabia may base some aircraft in Turkey, but won’t use them. The United States does not want to finnd out how good Russia’s S-400 air defense system actually is; Pentagon analysts believe that it is very good indeed.
The Russian-Iranian reduction of Aleppo will add little to the flood of Syrian refugees. Perhaps 40,000 people have fled Aleppo and nearby towns. Syria’s refugee count had already reached 5 million in late 2013.
Russia and the United States will not stumble into a strategic confrontation over a long-since-unsalvageable patch of Levantine desert.