RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/biden-risks-casting-away-trumps-progress/91492/

Samuel Johnson described a second marriage as a triumph of hope over experience. This sums up the Biden administration’s determination to revive President Obama’s Middle East doctrine that failed the first time around. Worse, this reprise of past mistakes threatens to undo the significant, though provisional, progress the Trump administration achieved in the region by doing the opposite of its predecessor.

Instead of courting Iranian regime, President Trump deemed Iran enemy number one in the Middle East. Mr. Trump abrogated President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran because it would facilitate Iran crossing the nuclear threshold even were the Iranians to abide by it. It depended for verification on Iranian goodwill that didn’t exist It subsidized Iranian aggression by lifting sanctions, and relied on the UN Security Council to re-impose sanctions in the event that we detected Iranian violations.

Mr. Obama’s Iran deal also failed to tame either Iran’s threats toward Israel or Iran’s campaign to incite sectarian violence across the Middle East through its surrogates in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. Nor did Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal constrain Iran’s burgeoning ballistic missile program from menacing America’s allies in both the Middle East and Europe..

President Trump’s re-imposition of primary sanctions and the threat of secondary sanctions crippled the Iranian economy, diminishing the regime’s capacity to foment mayhem beyond Iranian borders. Mr. Trump’s — and, let it not be forgotten, Congress’s — decision to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, emblematic of broader policy to embrace rather than distance America from Israel, bolstered our credibility globally.

Contrary to predictions of Middle East regional experts, Mr. Trump’s repudiation of moral equivalence between Israel and its enemies was met with the emergence of a regional coalition, with Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia as the linchpins, to contain Iran.

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/the-blame-israel-first-policy/91484/

Must Israel hold its fire against Iran in order to make it easier for President Biden to rejoin a nuclear deal that the Jewish state opposes? That is the question that is coming into focus in the wake of the explosion at the Natanz nuclear site and of what the Times is calling “shadowy naval skirmishes” in Mideast seas. Mr. Biden seems to think Israel is obligated to stand down while he pursues his appeasement of the ayatollahs.

That question also confronts an Israeli security delegation that is due in Washington today to air its objections to an entente with Iran, with whom we’re in what are called “indirect talks” at Vienna. On Friday the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, was asked whether the delegation — led by the director of Israel’s legendary Mossad — is likely to change the administration’s position. “No,” she answered.

The idea that Israel must stand down amounts, in our view, to a kind of political supersessionism. Mr. Biden seems to believe that his diplomatic ambitions in respect of Iran ought to trump — forgive the expression — Israel’s interests. “Israel’s relentless attacks on Iran may endanger Biden’s diplomacy” is the headline over an editorial in the Washington Post earlier this month. Scant hint that the danger might come from Iran.

The Post does acknowledge that Mr. Biden “doesn’t have much room to pressure” Prime Minister Netanyahu for restraint. It reckons, though, that Mr. Biden “should persist with his diplomatic strategy — and hope that the Iranian regime chooses to make a distinction between Israel and the United States.” It is a blunt call to put daylight between America and one of its closest allies. Call the policy “blame Israel first.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17305/afghanistan-cut-and-run

It is precisely on Afghanistan that Biden has adopted Trump’s hare-brained scheme for total troop withdrawal in exchange for a vague promise by the Taliban, one of the larger terrorist groups, to tone down their deadly attacks. Interestingly, this is precisely the policy that Biden, as Obama’s vice president, opposed as “premature.”

His [Biden’s] cheerleaders in part of the US media and political elite have also forgotten their opposition to Trump’s initial plan, which they dubbed as a “shameful cut-and-run” number and praise Biden’s wisdom of choosing a highly symbolic date for the withdrawal.

[W]hat if the Taliban or kindred terror groups such as ISIS, Khorasan and the Haqqani network choose precisely that date [9/11] to remind the world that they are still alive and kicking?

Who could guarantee that parts of Afghanistan would not , once again, be turned into bases for “exporting” terror beyond the region and, why not, as far as the United States?

Obama baptized Afghanistan as “the good war” in contrast with the “bad war” in Iraq.

Two decades later, the “nation-building” strategy has proved more successful than I thought in 2002. This is why, having argued for a speedy disengagement from Afghanistan in 2002 or 2003, I now believe that continued engagement is in the best interests of the United States.

The US military presence is now down to around 2,500 advisers, training officers and technicians, no longer involved in combat. Their presence is a morale booster for Afghans and a guarantee of support for 8,000 troops from other NATO members. It is also a strong signal that the US does not abandon its allies and does not leave a position unless asked do so by an allied government.

As for the cost of involvement, it is now in the peanuts category compared to what the US spends in Europe or the Far East.

Biden’s dwelling on the length of US involvement is bizarre when we remember that American presence in Germany, Japan and South Korea started eight decades and 13 presidents ago. Ironically, a day after fixing the date for withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden ordered the sending of more troops to Germany.

Deciding a major national security issue on the basis of a vague and necessarily shaky deal with a terrorist group that is hated by a majority of Afghans is a signal to other terror outfits that their best option is to stay in the ring until the “Great Satan” is overcome by political doubt and moral fatigue.

Biden could link withdrawal to the formation of a transition government that is part of the deal…. The US and NATO allies should be involved together with the United Nations Security Council. Remember that US involvement in Afghanistan happened on the basis of a UN mission.

The transition government cannot be concocted through traditional conclaves of tribal chiefs, mullahs and elders known as “loya jirgah”. Afghanistan now has a constitution and new political culture shaped over the past two decades with several referenda, local, parliamentary and presidential elections. To ignore all that would be wrong and unjust, a betrayal of both Afghan and American peoples.

Biden aides talk of a withdrawal with honor. To me, unless transition takes place within the parameters of the Afghan constitution and the participation of a new political generation that reflects today’s Afghan realities, the Trump-Biden scheme would be nothing but a cut-and-run number unworthy of America.

https://bit.ly/3sB9Fyo

While US policy in the Middle East focuses on multilateralism, human rights, democracy and international law, the stormy Middle East displays deeply-rooted domestic and regional Shiite (mostly Iran) and Sunni (mostly Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS) repression, terrorism and warfare, as well as imperial aspirations by Iran’s Ayatollahs and Turkey’s Erdogan.

The explosive state of the Middle East has highlighted the vulnerability and the actual/potential disintegration of Arab entities, which have always revered local/tribal – much more than national – loyalty.

This state of affairs emphasizes Western misinterpretation of the unpredictable, violently intolerant, highly fragmented, despotic and dis-functional Middle East, which has systematically frustrated benevolent Western efforts to introduce democracy, tolerance, stability and peaceful-coexistence into the Middle East.

In 2021, the well-armed Middle East is raging with a litany of armed conflicts, domestic and anti-Western terrorism and other forms of violence, which have yielded over 500,000 fatalities and close to 10 million refugees since 2011.

It features Iran (domestic repression and military and terroristic involvement in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and Europe), Turkey (the key supporter of the transcontinental Muslim Brotherhood terrorism, and militarily involved in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf); as well as Libya (internationalized civil war and global Islamic terrorism), Egypt (war on Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS terrorism) and Jordan (war on Muslim Brotherhood terrorism and explosive domestic conflicts).  In addition, there are Lebanon (Islamic terrorism and low scale civil war), Syria (internationalized civil war and Islamic terrorism), Iraq (Islamic terrorism and internationalized civil war, while considering Kuwait its own Province 19), Yemen (internationalized civil war and Islamic terrorism), Qatar (financial supporter of Muslim Brotherhood terrorism and closely aligned with Iran and Turkey), Saudi Arabia (war on Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Shiite terrorism, as well as war on Iran-supported Yemen-Houthi terrorism), the UAE and Bahrain (war on Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Shiite terrorism), etc.