RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18608/world-peace-political-survival

Failed White House policies — on Afghanistan, open borders, and now the issues of energy independence and pork-barrel budgets — have caused surging rates of inflation.

With mid-term elections months away and dismal poll numbers, the White House and many Democrats have resorted to unpopular distraction campaigns, including an assault on the Second Amendment.

Meanwhile, 18 Democrat Members of Congress have addressed a serious, realistic strategy for world peace and political survival. Their concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear buildup include:

“If Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, has proven anything,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) stated in a joint press release, “it’s that they can’t be trusted… Iran’s paramilitary arm, has… killed hundreds of Americans, and attacked our bases and allies in the region. Strengthened with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, Iran would be an enormous danger to Americans at home and abroad, and to our allies. Additionally, it’s been reported that… Russia will be de facto judge of compliance, and in a position to return enriched uranium to Iran – without any oversight. Are we seriously going to let war criminal, Vladimir Putin, be the guarantor of the deal? We must address the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. ”

“Iran must never be allowed to become a nuclear threat to the world,” added Rep. Elaine Luria (VA-2) “Not today. Not ten years from now. Not ever.”

https://bit.ly/3MyNenk

According to the Washington, DC-based White House Historical Association, the 1978/79 US policy on Iran, that embraced Ayatollah Khomeini, betrayed the pro-US Shah of Iran, and failed the pro-US Sunni Arab regimes, was based on a superficial view of Middle East political, religious, cultural and historical reality:

“…. In January 1979, the Shah fled into exile, and the theocratic regime of Khomeini took power. There was little informed understanding in the U.S. government about the political implications of this fundamentalist regime. Gary Sick, who was on the National Security staff, recalled a meeting in which Vice President Walter Mondale asked the CIA director Stansfield Turner, ‘What the hell is an Ayatollah anyway.’ Turner said he wasn’t sure he knew….”

However, the New York-based Foreign Affairs Magazine claims that – following President Carter’s initial assessment that Ayatollah Khomeini would be preoccupied with tractors rather than with tanks – the US President amended his position on Iran, concluding that regime-change was the most realistic policy toward Iran, because the Ayatollahs were relentlessly anti-American, ill-faith negotiators, neither partners for peaceful coexistence, nor amenable to democracy or to abandoning their anti-US fanatic vision:

“….Recently declassified documents reveal that in December 1979, Carter issued a presidential finding—a notification to Congress required under laws passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal—ordering the CIA to ‘conduct propaganda and political and economic action operations to encourage the establishment of a responsible and democratic regime in Iran; make contacts with Iranian opposition leaders and interested governments in order to encourage interactions that could lead to a broad, pro-Western front capable of forming an alternative government….’ The CIA attempted to organize external Iranian opposition groups into a cohesive force, tried to aid dissidents in Iran, and enlisted regional powers such as Saudi Arabia to help undermine the nascent theocracy….”

Has the 1979-2022 track record of Iran’s Ayatollahs justified President Carter’s transformation of policy from diplomacy to regime-change?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18596/biden-fight-enemies

While Hamas and the Houthis target Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, in addition to that, continues to act against the interests of its own people. PA President Mahmoud Abbas appears to be encouraged by the unconditional support he is receiving from the Biden administration, to the point where he feels free to continue denying his people good governance and judicial due process.

All signs now indicate that most people in the region are fed up with the anti-peace camp in the Arab and Muslim world, especially with Iran’s proxies Hamas, the Houthis and Hizbollah, all of which have offered the region, including the Palestinians, nothing but violence and bloodshed.

Whenever Abbas feels encouraged by the US, he sees that support as a green light, this time from the Biden administration, to impose more suppression on his people and to whip up violence in the region.

Does the Biden administration really want as its legacy that it backed, encouraged and funded unscrupulous, violent regimes – the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese Communist Party, the state sponsor of terrorism Iran, the illegitimate rule of Venezuela’s Maduro – and the corrupt government of Mahmoud Abbas?

Meanwhile, Iran’s proxy, Hamas — whose charter calls not only for the elimination of peace but also of all Jews — continues to urge Arabs and Muslims not to normalize their ties with Israel.

Iran, among other atrocities, imprisons attorneys for defending human rights, executes minors, and criminalizes human rights activism. If that is how Iran’s regime treats its own people, what makes anyone think it will treat other countries — in the region or in Europe — any better?

And in a rare occurrence, according to the veteran Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, demonstrators in Iran have recently been publicly calling for regime change.

The Pakistani minister, however, is mistaken if she thinks that firing a journalist will support the rights of the Palestinians. Such myopic measures only support and embolden the enemies of peace, stability and human rights in the Middle East: Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey and Iran.

People who say they care about the Palestinians can genuinely support them by defending journalists and human rights activists who are being persecuted, harassed and even killed by the Palestinian Authority. People who claim they are “pro-Palestinian” can truly help the Palestinians by coming to the West Bank and defending freedom of speech and the press, and teaching Palestinians about democracy and respect for human rights. Spreading hate against Jews does not make one “pro-Palestinian.”

The Pakistani government’s decision is a big prize to despots and tyrants in the region, such as Iran and its many proxies, and a severe blow to attempts to build bridges between Arabs and Muslims and Christians and Jews.

A sure-fire way for Biden to get immediate and full cooperation from the Saudis would be, on his planned visit, to commit to entirely eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The US has the capability, apparently just not the will. To begin with, any country that is officially on the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations should not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons, period. It is what all serious discussions in the region are about. For everyone in the region except fundamentalist Qatar — and including the Iranian people, the mullahs’ regime is a mortal threat.

If Biden, as the leader of the Free World, would totally remove this threat, it would not only go a long way to preventing a nuclear war and regional arms race, and persuade the Saudis to export more oil, but after the threat is eliminated, it would send a message of deterrence to Russia, China, North Korea and other adversaries about what they could expect, and turn Biden’s poll numbers around overnight.

These increased efforts to foil peace are the main reason that the Biden administration needs to work toward strengthening and expanding the entities in the Middle East who want peace. President Joe Biden’s planned visit to Saudi Arabia is a praiseworthy first step. Saudi Arabia may not be perfect — no country is — but at least it not aggressively trying to take over its neighbors.

It is crucial that the Biden administration throw its full weight behind encouraging Saudi Arabia to be a leader for peace, stability and, as it has been doing, if slowly, advancing human rights.

Any efforts to cozy up to Iran will only be seen as hugging and empowering ruthless despots. It is more important to seek allies, wherever they can be found, that are eager to discard aggression and violence. Failing to do so will just plunge the region into a massive war — which Iran, its terrorist groups and the US administration unfortunately seem to be working toward day and night.

The enemies of peace in the Middle East are continuing their efforts to destroy any effort to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab and Muslim countries.

The enemies of peace want Arabs and Muslims to remain in a continual state of war with Israel. They want more violence and bloodshed, not Arabs and Muslims and Jews working together in various fields, including technology or anything that might bring economic prosperity.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18582/us-iran-allies

“By every indication, the Biden Administration appears to have given away the store. The administration appears to have agreed to lift sanctions that were not even placed on Iran for its nuclear activities in the first place, but instead because of its ongoing support for terrorism and its gross abuses of human rights. The nuclear limitations in this new deal appear to be significantly less restrictive than the 2015 nuclear deal, which was itself too weak, and will sharply undermine U.S. leverage to secure an actually ‘longer and stronger’ deal. What is more, the deal appears likely to deepen Iran’s financial and security relationship with Moscow and Beijing, including through arms sales.” — 49 U.S. Senators, press release, March 14, 2022.

Now, Iran’s negotiating team — with which U.S. interests are being negotiated by the same Russia currently trying to crush the Western-backed democracy, Ukraine — has excluded not only the U.S., but also those countries directly impacted by the Iran’s nuclear breakout and terrorism: the latest countries it is devouring: Syria and Iraq.

The Biden administration must not exclude the U.S. regional allies and the American people from the ongoing negotiations with the Iranian regime and keep them in the dark: they are the ones directly affected by any “deal.”

How could America allow Israel — not to mention itself — to be excluded from the negotiations to lift sanctions on the Iranian regime when the ruling mullahs have made it clear that their top ideological priority is to eradicate the Jewish state and “wipe Israel off the map”? Recently, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, known as the “butcher of Tehran” after reportedly being involved in the 1988 massacre of nearly 30,000 political prisoners, openly called again for the destruction of Israel:

“This great movement that we are witnessing today in the form of protests is a symbol of the solidarity of the Muslim people that will lead to the destruction of the Zionist regime.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/dont-look-now-but-bidens-iran-policy-is-still-failing/

John Hannah, a former national-security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the Randi and Charles Wax Senior Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). Michael Makovsky, a former Pentagon official, is JINSA’s President and CEO.

Iran envoy Robert Malley’s testimony revealed that the administration’s Iran policy has run its course and failed.

Drowned out by news of the horrific school shooting in Texas and the ongoing war in Ukraine, last week’s congressional testimony by President Biden’s Iran envoy, Robert Malley, passed largely unnoticed. That’s unfortunate. Overflowing with empty talking points bearing little relation to reality, it underscored that the administration’s Iran policy has reached a dangerous dead end — one that Biden’s team either doesn’t recognize or refuses to deal with.

Malley’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee represented the first time that the administration had been required to account publicly for its yearlong effort to entice Iran back into the 2015 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Predictably, Malley spent a lot of time blaming President Trump’s withdrawal from the deal for the subsequent escalation of Iran’s nuclear program and regional aggression. Fair enough. But he studiously avoided the uncomfortable reality that Iran’s most worrisome nuclear advancements — including its unprecedented decision to enrich a bomb’s worth of uranium to 60 percent — have occurred on Biden’s watch. Ditto the fact that Iran-backed attacks targeting U.S. troops and partners in the Middle East doubled during Biden’s first year in office as compared with Trump’s last year in office. Iran’s behavior might have been bad under Trump’s maximum-pressure policy, but it has gotten significantly worse under Biden’s more accommodationist approach.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/29/what-now-ukraine/

It was supposed to be a clear-cut, unambiguous invasion. Vladimir Putin’s much larger, richer, and more bellicose Russia staged a shock-and-awe attack on a much smaller, poorer Ukraine. He intended to decapitate the government in Kyiv. Then he would annex the eastern half of the country, and quickly consolidate his easy wins in preparation to ratchet up pressure to force western Ukraine into the Russian Federation.

The rest is history. The Russian military proved ill-equipped and ill-supplied. It was poorly led, with a high percentage of low-morale, conscript troops. Russia had no viable strategic plan to capture, much less hold, the Ukrainian capital. Ukraine was Russia’s version of our Kabul—but tens of thousands of deaths added to the equation.

Russian strategists naïvely believed NATO would become paralyzed in mutual recriminations and fear and follow the usual German prompt of appeasement. In fact, NATO united precisely because of the dire worries over further Russian aggression, as the alliance pressured Germany to back off from its self-interested Russian romance.

Sanctions seldom have a good record of quickly stopping a war, and they have not so far in this instance, either.

But Russia’s naked use of force, its war crimes against civilians, and pathetic propaganda turned off most of the Western world and it, in turn, boycotted, sanctioned, and embargoed Moscow. These porous and slow-moving efforts nonetheless will eventually make it even more difficult for Russia to muster the economic and military wherewithal to sustain a stalled invasion.