RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-s-will-withhold-aid-if-the-taliban-attacks-embassy-in-kabul/

The Biden administration is dangling the possibility of U.S. aid to a potential future Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan, in a last-ditch bid to prevent an assault on its embassy in Kabul.

The situation in the country is in free fall. Since the start of a blitz last week, Taliban fighters have now taken eleven provincial capitals, as U.S. efforts to negotiate a political solution and a desperate plea to the group to negotiate a power-sharing agreement founder. The deadline for the completion of the U.S. withdrawal is August 31, and the White House and Pentagon have demonstrated little interest in significantly higher levels of air strikes to stop the Taliban’s advance.

Washington is now placing its hopes in a diplomatic push, one feature of which is to convince the Taliban not to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul, if the Afghan capital falls, the New York Times reported today.

As the Times reports, part of this push includes preventing a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy by saying that keeping it open is the only way a government the group runs can possibly receive future financial assistance from Washington.

Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Afghanistan envoy and a veteran of the Bush and Trump administrations, has spearheaded the U.S. diplomatic effort.

Earlier this week, as Khalilzad traveled to Doha to meet Taliban negotiators, he and other administration officials faced criticism for saying that the Taliban would fail to gain international legitimacy if it came to power by force.

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/08/11/the_un_makes_out_big_with_americas_checkbook-97_billion_per_year_788959.html

The United States gives $9.7 billion annually to 58 United Nations (UN) accounts.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com compiled these findings in a new oversight report on U.S. foreign aid. The UN system, through 58 funding streams, received taxpayer money that included:

UN peacekeeping: $1.5 billion in FY2021 for dues, $10.3 billion over the last six years
UN regular budget: $685.5 million in FY2021 for dues, $2.5 billion over the last 3.5 years
World Food Program: $2.6 billion in FY2019
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: $1.7 billion in FY2019
United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund: $833 million in FY2020, $5.9 billion in U.S. funding over 14 years
World Health Organization: $230 million so far in FY2021, $4.1 billion in U.S. funding over 14 years
United Nations Relief and Works Agency Palestinian aid: New $150 million in restarted aid announced in 2021, $6.3 billion sent from U.S. taxpayers since 1953

We launched our report on The National Desk at Sinclair Broadcast Group — reaching 190 ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliated TV stations.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/trading_with_the_enemy_is_wrong.html

The Navy and Marine Corps have kicked off their two-week Large Scale Exercise 2021, a massive effort that spans 17 time zones, to test their vision of how to conduct war on a global scale against peer competitors. Such an operation is reminiscent of the Cold War, but then we are in another Cold War facing a coalition of powers who want to dominate the international order. That coalition is lead by the People’s Republic of China with the strong support of a Russia seeking to recover from its defeat in the first Cold War. Both powers have been strengthening their ties with Iran at the intersection of Europe and the Indo-Pacific. In response, the U.S. has reenergized its alliances and expanded them, most importantly in partnership with India. The Trump administration recognized the danger of renewed Great Power competition, and the Biden administration is continuing many of its policies because the change in the White House has not changed what is going on in the outside world.

The most prominent flashpoint is the South China Sea, where China has created artificial island bases backed by a naval buildup to support its claim to imperial sovereignty over this vital maritime realm in defiance of international law. China and a U.S.-led coalition are both conducting rival air and naval exercises in this sea demonstrating their ability to defeat the other. Beijing has complained to the UN that “The US has been stirring up trouble out of nothing, arbitrarily sending advanced military vessels and aircraft into the South China Sea as provocations.” Washington is not acting “unilaterally.” Great Britain has sent is new Carrier Strike Group to the region. Dutch and German frigates are there, along with a French task force to show NATO unity. Beijing’s state media outlet Global Times made a direct threat “We advise US allies to be particularly cautious…They must be bluntly told that if their warships rampantly behave as the U.S. military does in the South China Sea, they will more likely become an example of China defending its sovereignty and territorial integrity — just as a popular Chinese phrase indicates: To execute one as a warning to a hundred.”

India has sent a task force into the South China Sea as part of the Quad, which includes Japan and Australia along with the U.S. China claims to have the largest fleet of warships in the world. Beijing’s full spectrum military buildup and militant rhetoric have been the real provocations that has brought forth a powerful response.

Yet, in the midst of this very evident confrontation that actually goes back to the Obama administration “pivot” to Asia which saw the escalation of naval exercises during 2010, corporate lobbyists in Washington are still pushing for closer commercial ties with the Beijing regime. On August 5, nearly three dozen business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Semiconductor Industry Association sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, claiming Beijing had met “important benchmarks and commitments” in the so-called Phase One agreement negotiated by President Trump, including “opening markets to U.S. financial institutions and reducing some regulatory barriers to U.S. agricultural exports to China.” The aim of the letter was to cut tariffs and expand trade with China while ignoring its aggressive behavior in the larger context of world affairs.

The letter purposely missed the real point about the “trade war” with China, which is to correct past “public policy choices” which President Biden has accurately blamed for allowing American firms to create “fragile supply chains across a range of sectors and products. Unfair trade practices by competitor nations and private sector and public policy prioritization of low-cost labor, just-in-time production, consolidation, and private sector focus on short-term returns over long-term investment have hollowed out the U.S. industrial base, siphoned innovation from the United States, and stifled wage and productivity growth.”

https://bit.ly/3AsVdwy

1. September 11 was the zenith of anti-US Islamic terrorism, which has afflicted the US since the 18th century. At that time, the Barbary Muslim pirates routinely assaulted US merchant ships, triggering the 1801-1805 US Navy and Marines offensive against the Barbary headquarters in Tripoli.

The following are recent examples of the sustained anti-US Islamic terrorism: three US Navy sailors were murdered in December 2019 by an Islamic terrorist in Pensacola, FL; eight people were murdered in October 2017 by an Islamic terrorist in Lower Manhattan, NY; 49 people were murdered in June 2016 by an Islamic terrorist in Orlando, FL; 14 people were murdered in December 2015 by Islamic terrorists in San Bernardino, CA; 13 US soldiers were murdered by a Muslim terrorist in Ft. Hood, TX; etc. 

Thus, Islamic terrorism has haunted the US irrespective of US policy and independent of US-Israel relations: during Presidents Trump and Obama; during President Clinton’s pressure on Israel and embrace of the Palestinians (e.g., 300 people murdered when the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were demolished by two Islamic car bombs in August 1998); seven days following President Reagan’s recognition of the PLO (257 passengers murdered when PanAm-103 was blown up over Scotland in December 1988); despite President Carter’s critical support of Iran’s Ayatollahs’ toppling of the pro-US Shah of Iran (63 US personnel were held hostage for 444 days after Iran’s Ayatollahs seized the US Embassy in Teheran); etc.     

2. September 11 underscores the determination of Islamic terror regimes (e.g., Iran’s Ayatollahs, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, Al Qaeda) to engage the US in their battle to bring the West to submission, irrespective of the US’ intent to disengage from the Middle East.  These regimes view a potential US disengagement and isolationism as a symptom of Western battle-fatigue and erosion of posture of deterrence, energizing them to shift the battle gradually away from their own turf to Western turf.

3. September 11 implemented a central theme of the school curriculum of Islamic/Arab regimes (e.g., Iran and the Palestinian Authority), which highlights the 1,400 year old central Islamic precepts of “holy war” (Jihad) and “martyrdom” (Shuhada’) as prime commitments to Islam/Allah, guaranteeing each martyr 72 virgins in paradise.

https://asiatimes.com/2021/08/us-business-pushes-biden-for-a-china-trade-deal/

The US-China trade war has endured under the Biden administration.

NEW YORK – Never before in US political history has the whole of the American business community—more than thirty major business organizations—spoke with one voice as it did in an August 5 appeal to the Biden administration to eliminate tariffs on imports from China.

No entities in American politics are timider than business lobbies, most of whose work involves quiet lobbying for administrative relief and legislative tweaks. Such a high-profile intervention suggests that the business organizations believe that a deal is already underway.

A deal is likely because inflation could poison the Democratic Party’s chances at 2022 mid-term elections and return control of the US Congress to the Republicans. Cutting tariffs is the quickest way to reduce inflation. Beyond the arithmetic of electoral politics, a consensus is emerging that the technology sanctions that Trump imposed on China have failed and may even have backfired.

More than 30 business groups including the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the Semiconductor Industry Association, as well as retailer, farm and manufacturing representatives asked Biden to cut tariffs and restart trade talks with China.

The letter stated: “A worker-centered trade agenda should account for the costs that US and Chinese tariffs impose on Americans here and at home and remove tariffs that harm U.S. interests.”

Last month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the New York Times that tariffs “hurt American consumers.” Since then-president Donald Trump imposed a 20% tariff on roughly half the goods America buys from China, the Treasury has collected about $100 billion in fees. Most of that was paid by US consumers.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17612/ebrahim-raisi-us-visa

If [Iran’s President Ebrahim] Raisi is granted a visa to come to the US, the Iranian regime’s legitimacy will be enhanced, and the regime will be empowered to try to kidnap more Americans on the US soil.

The senators’ letter sheds a light on several examples: “In 1988, the United States barred PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat from entering the United States to attend a meeting of the United Nations. In 2014, President Obama denied an entry visa to Iranian Ambassador Hamid Aboutalebi, who was involved in taking American diplomats hostage in 1979. In 2020, the United States declined to issue a visa for Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.”

The Biden administration needs to listen to the US senators, who have accurately explained: “Ebrahim Raisi’s role in the Death Commissions, brutal crackdowns on Iranian protesters, and his association with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps should disqualify him from receiving a visa to the United States.”

If the Biden administration has a shred of respect for human rights and those people who lost their lives to reach freedom and democracy, it should not negotiate with Iran’s mass murderer president, or grant him a visa to come to New York.

The Biden administration has signaled that it is in a hurry to negotiate with the government of Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a mass murderer who is known as the Butcher of Tehran, in order to revive former US President Barack Obama’s catastrophic 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which Iran never signed — and lift sanctions against the Iranian regime.

Just last month, Iran was exposed in an attempt to kidnap a dual US-Iranian citizen, Masih Alinejad, from her home in New York City.

Raisi is currently scheduled to come to the city of that planned kidnapping to speak at the United Nations General Assembly in September. This prospect prompted six Republican senators — Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — to send a letter to US President Joe Biden urging him to deny entry visas to Raisi and other Iranian officials who are planning to attend the annual UN event.

https://bit.ly/3xnO4f1

Disengagement from the Middle East?

The Middle East is situated between Europe, Asia and Africa, and between the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

President Biden wishes to disengage from the Middle East, but the Middle East does not intend to disengage from the US.

The US is perceived by rogue Middle East entities as “The Great Satan” and the mega-obstacle on their way to achieve their mega-goal: bringing the West to submission, militarily, culturally and religiously. This mega-goal has been deeply-rooted since the 7th century, independent of US policies.

Isolation is not a realistic option in the increasingly globalized village, where rogue Middle East regimes are engaged in the proliferation of terrorism, non-conventional military technologies and drug trafficking around the globe. Their reach extends all the way to the American continent, impacting the US homeland security.

Will the US lead – or follow – the engagement process?  Will the engagement with rogue Middle East entities be conducted mostly around the US – or the Middle East – “end zone”?

The Biden team’s track record

President Biden’s Middle East policy reflects the worldview of his top foreign policy and national security team, most notably Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who has been President Biden’s most influential advisor since 2002-2008 (similar to Secretary Baker’s influence on President Bush), when Blinken was the Democratic Staff Director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Other leading members of the team are Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, William Burns, the CIA Director and Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence. They – like Blinken – played a key role in shaping President Obama’s Middle East policy.

For instance, they were instrumental in carving the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran (JCPOA), which followed the US embrace of Iran’s Ayatollahs (Shiite terrorism), while demoting the stature of the pro-US Saudis, the UAE and Bahrain.  This has intensified the existential threat to these regimes, injuring the US’ strategic reliability, and driving its traditional Arab allies closer to China and Russia.