RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/the-enduring-lesson-in-the-gulags-defiant-wisdom/

The guiding wisdom of the wretches who endured a living death in the Soviet Union’s labour camps was simple: Ne ver’ Ne boisya Ne prosy — Don’t trust. Don’t fear. Don’t beg.

These short sentences crystallize the collective experience of the millions who went through the gulags and perished amid the permafrost of far-north Russia, paying with their lives for the demented dreams of world conquest by Marxists fanatics. These six crisp words summarize the resolve of the human spirit when it refuses to be broken while retaining individual dignity by resisting oppression and injustice, even when the odds are overwhelmingly against it.

Pronounced together those words are an unexpectedly powerful poem. This poetry of defiance, silent by necessity in the face of brutal force, coercion and humiliation, was the only form of resistance available to the enslaved by the totalitarian State. They are also the way for the West to respond to international bullies. But political will is required to succeed, and this is where the problem lies. 

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18350/america-terrorist-allies

The Gulf states, in particular Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, are already under attack by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. The Biden administration removed the Houthis from the list of foreign terrorist organizations and has since refused to reclassify it as a terrorist organization, despite the missile and drone attacks on Washington’s Arab allies and friends as recently as this week.

“It is true that the United States wants to withdraw from the region, but Washington will then have given China, Russia and Iran unprecedented strength…. By removing the Revolutionary Guards from the list of terrorist organizations, Washington will grant Iran the freedom to move and act in the region in the context of a Russian-Chinese-Iranian alliance.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Saudi journalist, former editor-in-chief of the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, March 20, 2022.

Al-Hamid reminded the Biden administration that Saudi Arabia “is the exact opposite of Iran, as it does not want control, but rather the stability and independence of countries.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“Lifting the sanctions while Hezbollah revels in Lebanon and Syria, and Iranian militias wreak havoc in Iraq amid Iran’s continued support for the Houthis in Yemen, is nothing but a crime against our region.” — Tarik Al-Hamid, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“The problem with this American change is that it came while Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are leading internal and regional efforts to bring stability and moderation.” — Saudi political analyst Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“There is an American and Western policy that cannot be condoned, which is the insistence on making Saudi Arabia and the UAE militarily exposed to the attacks of the Iranian Houthi militia in Yemen, ballistic missiles and drones, and imposing illogical requirements on the export of arms to confront these serious threats.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“The hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, which enabled the Taliban to seize control of the country, removing the Houthi militia from the terrorism list, seeking to remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the list of terrorism, silence about Iranian bombing of Iraqi Kurdistan – these are very dangerous policies for the world and the Arab countries that support stability and peace.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

The IRGC and the mullahs are “the head of regional and international terrorism, from Al-Qaeda to ISIS, and from the Lebanese Hezbollah to the Shiite terror militias all over the world.” — Abdullah bin Bejad Al-Otaibi, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 20, 2022.

“Have you seen bigger liars?” — Dr. Mahmoud Al-Shami, Syrian writer, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“What did the Revolutionary Guard offer America as a price for the reward of being removed from the list of terrorist organizations and making billions of dollars available to it by lifting sanctions on Iran so that it could finance its terrorist activities at the expense of threatening the security of the Gulf and the stability of the Middle East?” — Dr. Mohamed El-Sherif, Egyptian, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“Mr. Blinken, it will be a true holiday for Iranians when they get rid of the murderous [Iranian] regime to which you are making terrible concessions. Mr. Blinken, the Iranian people will not forgive the US if the Revolutionary Guard, the largest terrorist organization backed by an official government, is removed from the list of terrorism.” — Masood A. R., an Iranian opponent of the mullahs, addressing the US Secretary of State, Twitter, March 20, 2022.

“I think that when you remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the list of terrorist organizations, you will make a big mistake, and this will lead to the spread of Iranian terrorism and this will affect the region and allies, and America and Europe will be vulnerable to direct Iranian terrorism.” — Abdul Hadi Al-Shehri, Saudi writer, Twitter, March 19, 2022.

The question arises: If the Biden administration believes that the Houthi militia and the IRGC are not terrorist organizations, then why not also remove Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad from the blacklist? Indeed, if the US administration believes that it can do business with these terrorists and their sponsors in Tehran, then why not own up to its policies and straightforwardly declare all these terrorist groups as America’s newest allies?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/our-surreal-rage-self-mutilation-bruce-thornton/

That phrase is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the 20th century’s catalogue of horrors: two world wars, fascism, communism, Nazism, mass slaughter, the Cold War and its apocalyptic stakes–“oceans of blood and mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag,” as George Weigel put it. And that catalogue continues today in Ukraine, with mechanized violence and wanton inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.

Yet today our social, political, and cultural dysfunctions are more insidious, as over the last few decades they have distributed, promoted, and indulged failures of morality, technocratic hubris, and common sense of the sort that were the predicates of all the disasters of the 20th century. Only now they are at a level of surreal silliness and stupidity that would be mordantly funny if the stakes for our civilization weren’t so high.

Now comes proof in the news that the indirect negotiations between the Biden administration and the genocidal clerical regime in Iran are nearing completion. Since its beginning in the Obama administration, this diplomatic attempt to keep nuclear weapons out of the mullahs’ hands has defied facts and logic, and relied on magical thinking. How else other than surreal can we describe a process that aims at merely delaying, rather than preventing, an illiberal, fanatical cabal from obtaining weapons of mass destruction?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18346/houthis-iran-irgc-terrorist-list

The Houthis are a dangerous and deadly, terrorist group based in Yemen. Recently, senior Houthi leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi went on an antisemitic tirade in support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine stating, “It is because its President is Jewish. Any country run by a Jew ends up going to war.”

Does the Biden administration find such racist, slanderous statements acceptable? Will the Biden administration refute it? Or will they passively accept such slander the same way they passively accepted the Taliban taking over Afghanistan or Putin invading Ukraine?

The Biden administration would do well to make sure that something comes at a cost. It is this backwards and hateful way of thinking that underpins the atrocities being committed by the Houthis in Yemen every day.

The Houthis need to be put back on the List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations immediately — instead of the US taking Iran’s rapacious Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) off it. The IRGC, which just claimed credit for attacking the Kurds in Erbil, will simply, while the world is looking the other way, take over Erbil and the rest of Iraq.

“[S]aying that the world’s largest terrorist organization is not a terrorist organization… This is too high a price” for “empty promises from terrorists” on a nuclear deal, according to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

If the US allows Iran to acquire nuclear weapons capability, you can kiss peace in the region goodbye. That will be President Joe Biden’s legacy.

America’s allies in the Middle East — Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE — are raising serious concerns about any new agreement between the U.S. and Iran. They see that embracing Iran comes from a false hope that it will lead to better behavior on the part of its regime and terrorist proxies.

Those statements by one of the Houthis’ top officials give us a clear insight into what we can expect from Iran and its proxies. We should take them at their word.

Let us not make the same mistake the U.S. and Europe made by embracing Russia, or the mistake made in Asia by embracing China. We must recognize the Islamic Republic of Iran for the evil it is and redesignate the Houthis, who operate as a weapon of war for the Iranian regime, as the terrorist organization they are. The strategy of hope did not work for Russia or China, and it will not work with Iran.

Too often the West finds itself hoping for and seeing a positive outcome when reality presents something very different. Think about the West’s response to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, where we promoted Western values of openness as a replacement for Communism. Consider the vote by Congress in 2000 to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status, a status I voted against when in Congress. Reflect on President Barack Obama negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015. None of these major deals has worked the way the West and the United States had expected or hoped.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18335/anti-american-dictatorships

Buying oil from the mullahs of Iran means funding a regime that sponsors global terrorism and that is determined, as an oblation, to wipe out Israel and attack the US.

One day after the United Nations Security Council voted in favor of lifting the arms embargo on Iran in October 2020, the ruling mullahs unveiled a ballistic missile that reportedly can reach the United States. The headline of an August 15, 2020 report by Iran’s state-controlled Afkar News read in Farsi, “American Soil Is Now Within the Range of Iranian Bombs”.

The report boasted about the damage that the Iranian regime could inflict on the US: “By sending a military satellite into space, Iran now has shown that it can target all American territory; the Iranian parliament had previously warned [the US] that an electromagnetic nuclear attack on the United States would likely kill 90 percent of Americans.” — Afkar News, August 15, 2020.

The report also threatened the EU, which voted for lifting an arms embargo against Iran: “The same type of ballistic missile technology used to launch the satellite could carry nuclear, chemical or even biological weapons to wipe Israel off the map, hit US bases and allies in the region and US facilities, and target NATO even in the far west of Europe.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, reportedly views Russia, China and Iran as “partners,” “competitors, or deal-makers.” Russia, China and Iran are not “partners”. They are not “competitors.” They are aggressors. You bet they would like to “help” the United States with “climate change” and “going green”: it would give them a vast new market for their oil and gas and as well as increased leverage over the West. European and the US reports already allege that Russian “dark money” (anonymous funding) has been going to Western non-governmental environmental groups to advance that agenda.

An America dependent for its oil and gas on anti-democratic dictatorships would be a windfall, economically and politically, beyond their dreams. Imagine an America reliant on the warmhearted goodwill of Russia and China.

Now, in the new “Iran deal,” it seems that not only has Russia been serving as the negotiator for the United States, and that the US has agreed to waive $10 billion in sanctions it just finished placing on Russia for having invaded Ukraine so that Russia will be able to build a nuclear plant in Iran, but also, according to Rep. Michael Waltz*, that all enriched uranium from Iran will now be sent to Russia. To top it off, according to Waltz, the new arbiter of whether or not Iran is in compliance with the deal, will be – Russia. What could possibly go wrong?

The West is in for yet another shock as the Biden administration seems to be turning to the Iranian regime — and approached the illegitimate government of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — to purchase their oil instead of increasing US domestic oil production.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18331/us-reestablish-deterrence

The complacency with which the Biden administration has come to view military threats, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as a thing of the past has led to a misguided prioritization of issues such as climate change as the biggest threat facing the US. This misguided focus has come at the expense of a realistic definition of what the US’s vital national interests are and should be in the face of actual national security threats.

Over the past two decades, US leadership has waned, especially as it has retreated from the Middle East and Europe — where its military presence has been reduced from 400,000 troops in the 1950s to just around 60,000 troops today. US credibility has been compromised, as its reputation for adhering to US commitments — failing to prevent the crossing of red lines in Syria and the Afghanistan debacle, to mention just two examples — has been wrecked.

Rebuilding deterrence will require a massive political and military recommitment to vital national interests. Those will require a policy reorientation that acknowledges that the US is the primary Western force in a world with global military threats from a variety of bad actors — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea primary among them.

“How many times do you have to make this point that if you don’t have more resources, you get political leadership that makes the case to the American people that we face threats on multiple fronts and if we want to defend our way of life as we know it and our interests around the world, protect our allies, not as acts of charity but because it benefits us, then you do it. And if you can’t do it, you can’t be a world power anymore…” — Former National Security Advisor, Ambassador John R. Bolton, Ronald Reagan Institute, February 24, 2022.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has proven, sadly, that US deterrence lies in tatters.

While Russia’s invasion represents an absolute low point thus far, US deterrence has been eroding for years. The cause is failed policies and ill-defined national interests, which bad actors such as Russia, China and Iran have clearly been noting.