Day: June 4, 2024
Andy Kim wins New Jersey Democratic Senate primary for indicted Bob Menendez’s seat Bowling Green Daily News
Andy Kim wins New Jersey Democratic Senate primary for indicted Bob Menendez’s seat Citrus County Chronicle
Over the decades, Iran’s people have paid a heavy price for freedom from the clutches of the evil regime of the mullahs. And although many brave people have laid their lives down for freedom, Iran lacks nothing to reach this final destiny.
The greatest asset of the Iranian people is the uprisings that have never ceased from June 20, 1981, to 1999, 2009, 2017, 2019, 2022, and now, and whose flames of demands have never been extinguished. These uprisings have gradually connected the demands of the initial pioneers and the subsequent ones, and now have matured into the demands of most of society. These uprisings are the principal common and national asset for rejecting any kind of dictatorship.
The evolution of the uprisings has clarified the positions and nature of forces with the criterion of their quality of demarcation from the rule of the current regime. This evolution, led by the organized resistance and the activities of PMOI Resistance Units inside and the National Council of Resistance of Iran across the globe—as the democratic alternative to the regime—has been characterized by the slogan “Neither Shah, nor mullahs.” Now, many ambiguities in Iran’s turbulent political atmosphere—where the main party causing confusion is the regime—are being resolved. The alignment towards a common goal, namely the overthrow of the entirety of the clerical regime, is a powerful asset and an effective provision on the path to Iran’s liberation.
Iranian society’s rejection of the entirety of the clerical regime is a substantial asset for shaping Iran’s destiny towards liberation and prosperity. We have witnessed this majority in the outcomes of the 2022 uprising, the massive boycott of the parliamentary elections in February 2024, and its continuation in May 2024, which has had a massive .
The intergenerational resistance against any kind of dictatorship is an asset perpetually poised for uprising, revolt, and revolution. The regime greatest fear is this asset, which, particularly in all the uprisings of the past two decades, has been ready for any opportunity to propel forward Iran’s struggle for freedom. The pioneers of uprisings from June 20, 1981, to now, and the political prisoners over these more than four decades, are indelible assets and the immediate assets for Iran’s liberation.
The expansion of the movement seeking justice for the blood of the 30,000 political prisoners massacred in the summer of 1988 has become a national, patriotic, and global call, an asset that continuously expands in scope and quality. One of the fears that haunts the entire clerical regime is the deep-rooted justice movement in every household in Iran. The popular and national reactions in hatred of Iranian regime president Ebrahim Raisi—which crystallized the hatred of the entire regime—are an aspect of the people’s potential and assets for Iran’s liberation.
The resilient political prisoners standing against regression and dictatorship is an asset that, with its more than 90-year history, has perpetually intensified the nightmare of dictatorial and reactionary regimes.
Global revelations and activities by the Iranian Resistance and freedom-loving Iranians against the regime’s crimes, plundering, and terrorism in international forums, along with gaining the support of thousands of parliamentarians, jurists, scholars, and Nobel laureates, are a substantial asset in raising awareness of the Iranian people’s demands and gaining global credibility for the resistance and uprisings. This global credibility has become one of the political and human rights challenges against the clerical regime.
Expanding the organized resistance and struggle to negate the entirety of the ruling regime has become a crucial factor and the highest-quality asset for the liberation of Iran. This asset embodies all other assets and represents the highest stage of the mature path for overthrowing the clerical dictatorship. The Resistance Units, especially in the past six months, with their successive anti-oppression operations, have provided a material and tangible response to the necessity of organization in most cities of Iran.
Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, during a set of whirlwind meetings in several European NATO countries, warned against Russian propaganda programs he accused of spreading “misinformation and disinformation” about US intentions to escalate the conflict by allowing Ukraine’s military to use longer-range US missiles to strike targets as much as 200 miles inside of Russia — something that the Biden administration had since the start of that war had not allowed, correctly fearing that it could lead to a larger and possibly nuclear war.
Blinken’s lie, though, was that at the time he was accusing Russia of dishonesty, he himself knew that the decision had already been made by President Biden to do exactly that: authorize Ukraine to strike Soviet air bases, missile launch sites, troop concentrations and staging areas well inside the Russia’s borders using missiles supplied by the US.
This inconvenient truth was exposed by Politico, which ran a story on May 30th disclosing the secret Biden decision, which followed intense lobbying of the president by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Sec. Blinken himself, as well as by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and various Ukrainian military leaders.
From the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over two years ago, Biden had made it clear that no US troops would be sent to fight for Ukraine, and no US weapons would be used against Russian territory. Nothing would be done that could risk turning the conflict into a head-to-head battle between US and Russian forces, because it was felt (correctly!) that such a situation could quickly lead to the use of nuclear weapons.
What changed to make Biden suddenly stop worrying about taking the first steps up what Pentagon strategists have, since the early days of the nuclear era in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, referred to as the “nuclear ladder” of tit-for-tat nuclear escalation?
Clearly it was the fact that Ukraine has begun losing the war. It’s out of ammunition, out of anti-aircraft missiles, short of troops, is facing a mass flight of draft-age men from the country’s recently expanded conscription efforts, and it is loosing ground around Kharkiv , Ukraine’s second-largest city of 1.5. million located near the Russian border in eastern Ukraine.
Additionally, it has become evident that the supposedly marvelous US weapons (as well as some widely banned ones like anti-personnel shells, rockets and bombs, and depleted uranium shells) have not turned the tide against Russian forces as optimistically predicted.
The reality is that this idea of attacking Russian targets — for the moment only in Russian territory relatively close to Kharkiv, but perhaps later much more deeply inside Russia — is nothing short of terrifying.
Russia, remember, has a nuclear arsenal of ICBM missiles and nuclear warheads that closely matches the US nuclear arsenal in number and destructive power. For 75 years since the Soviet Union successfully tested its own first nuclear bomb in August 1949, that rough parity has been able to prevent the wartime use of any third nuclear weapon against another nation since the bombing of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
Nothing has changed in those anxious years. Russia may be much weaker in many ways than the Soviet Union was, though the USSR’s military was never as powerful or advanced in its nuclear capability as the US’s forces. Still through all those decades, the ability of both nations to wreak unimaginable catastrophe on the other should even a fraction of its missiles reach their targets has over and over proven to be a compelling reason for even hotheads in both capitals, Washington and Moscow, to stay their hands during a crisis.
What seems different this time is that with Russia’s military proving weaker and less capable than expected in its war with Ukraine, and with the US bent on draining Russia further by simply helping keep the Ukrainians from losing, Russian President Vladimir Putin has begun stating clearly that if Russia is threatened by Western powers — including by weapons supplied by Western powers — it will if necessary turn to nuclear weapons.
That is where the “escalation ladder” comes into play.
As played by Pentagon strategists, the war games are basically a game of nuclear chicken:
One country, its forces pinned down and in danger of losing, launches a “small” so-called tactical nuke, which could be anywhere from a few kilotons equivalent in TNT, to 300 kilotons ( about 20 times the size of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945). Whether such a first shot destroys a battalion, an air base, or is an air-burst that destroys all electronic systems, that turn to nukes presents the other side with a bleak choice: sue for peace, or respond in kind with a nuclear shot targeting the other side.
In many of those games, the second country to go nuclear decides it has to up the ante to show it’s willing to stand firm and go on offense, which then makes it up to the initial nuclear attacker to make its own decision to sue for peace, respond in kind and seek negotiations, or go up the next rung on the ladder with a bigger blast or a strike an a significant city.
The process of ascending the escalation ladder in these games is often quite rapid, moving from bigger and deadlier back-and-forth exchanges to a full-scale nuclear apocalypse within hours or days because of a fear on both sides that the other side could launch a full-scale attack and knock out most of its ability to retaliate.
Most ordinary people are aware of this instinctively. That’s why Biden tried to keep his decision to change his policy and to allow Ukraine to start using US-supplied weapons to hit Russian targets across the Russian border from Kharkiv a secret from the US public. (It certainly wouldn’t after all be a secret to the Russians!)
I haven’t found a poll yet that asks Americans if they support the US’s permitting Ukraine’s military to hit targets inside of Russia’s heartland, but I think it’s clear from the months-long blocking of military aid to Ukraine by the Republican-led House of Representatives, that a huge swath of Republican voters would oppose the idea. Also, Donald Trump is polling slightly ahead of Biden lately, which could be either despite or perhaps even because he does not favor military aid for Ukraine.
I also think Biden and his campaign strategists know that a broad swath of Democratic and independent voters are opposed to the US’s doing anything that would make nuclear war with Russia more likely. (It’s certainly not a great way to win the youth or the millennial vote!)
Will Biden, having now approved crossing one of Putin’s “red lines,” go further and allow deeper strikes with US-supplied missiles at targets in Russia?
Perhaps, but the immediate criticism of a Ukrainian attack (not with a US weapon, but rather a Ukrainian drone) on a radar station used as part of the Russian nuclear early warning system, with an order to Ukrainian forces not to do such a thing again, suggests that total madness hasn’t yet taken over at the Oval Office and the White House War Room.
The problem of course is that Biden is widely being viewed internationally as a push-over. Israel i Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been ignoring Biden’s warnings not to attack Rafah, even bombing that lone-remaining still surviving city at the “Strip’s” western border with Egypt after being presented with Biden’s negotiated cease-fire deal proposal — a proposal that Netanyahu has dismissed out of hand as “not achieving our goals.”
What if Ukraine gets longer range US missiles, and then takes shots at critical targets deep inside Russia despite a lack of US approval?
*. * *
Meanwhile, try this experiment, suggested by Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Herman:
Take a story in the US media like this one about the US approving Ukraine’s use of US longer range missile to strike military targets deep inside Russia. Now wherever you see Russia, substitute US, and wherever you see US, substitute Russia. And for good measure, where it says Ukraine, replace it with Cuba or Venezuela. Now read it and see if you think you’d ever see that article in a US newspaper or magazine.
There is simply no way that the US would for even an hour allow Cuba or Venezuela to launch a Russian-provided short-range missile to strike any target, let alone a military one, in Florida or one of the other states along the Gulf Coast. Either country would be blitzed by an all out attack of rockets and bombers. Yet the idea of the US sending rockets to Ukraine to do exactly that to Russia is presented in the American news media as perfectly logical and safe!
What could possibly go wrong?
By Dave Patterson
Any narrative to defeat former President Donald Trump, whether it be accurate and fact-based or not, appears to be the leftist mantra. Pushed by the Biden team and adopted by pundits, there is prevalent a notion that Trump will abandon Ukraine if elected. As the combat successes of the Russian invaders taking real estate from Kyiv ebb and flow, Trump’s comments that he could stop the Ukraine-Russia war in 24 hours have fueled speculation that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee will cut and run from further support to Ukraine. However, beyond the commentary of the Fourth Estate, it’s fair to ask whether the former commander-in-chief has demonstrated such an inclination.
Biden Works to Hobble Trump on Ukraine
President Biden’s “as long as it takes” strategy suggests the current administration has no end-game. With that in mind, the president is working on a ten-year assistance agreement with Kyiv. “However, the real and not-so-veiled reason Biden, the man without a strategy, wants to lock in aid is to hobble former President Donald Trump from reducing or eliminating military and financial assistance to Ukraine if Trump is elected in November,” Liberty Nation suggested. There is no historical precedent for this expectation on Biden’s part or anyone else’s.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. During the Trump administration, the policy toward Ukraine – before the war even began – was to provide lethal aid to counter Russian hostilities in the Donetsk and Luhansk areas. The Obama-Biden administration refused to provide lethal weapons. According to a December 2019 Defense News report:
“US President Donald Trump will seek at least another $250 million in security aid for Ukraine in his 2020 budget request to Congress, including lethal Javelin anti-tank weapons, according to a senior Pentagon official…A $39 million sale of 150 anti-tank missiles and two additional missile launchers is pending, on top of the 200 missiles and 37 launchers the US sold Kyiv in 2018, Bloomberg and others reported last month…”
Furthermore, Trump’s opposition to the recent $61 billion Ukraine aid package had more to do with how the deal was crafted than objecting to helping Ukraine in its struggle with Russian invaders. “A key change in the House bill was to make $9.5 billion for economic aid in the form of forgivable loans, not grants, to align with an idea Trump floated months earlier,” The Wall Street Journal explained. The notion shopped around by the Biden administration that former President Trump is against aiding Ukraine is not born out by the evidence.
On the other hand, President Biden, after his first face-to-face summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June 2021, halted a planned military support bundle to Ukraine. “The Biden White House has temporarily halted a military aid package to Ukraine that would include lethal weapons, a plan originally made in response to aggressive Russian troop movements along Ukraine’s border this spring,” Politico reported. Even as late as December 2021, just a couple of months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Foreign Policy reported that the White House had not approved military assistance to Kyiv that included Javelin anti-tank missiles, counter-battery radars, communications equipment, and a variety of small arms.
Trump Applied Broad Array of Sanctions on Russia
At that time, Russia had 90,000 fully deployed combat troops on Ukraine’s border. Pushing the narrative that Trump, if elected, would abandon Ukraine seems more like projection, considering the haphazard dribbling out of critical military aid that has been the hallmark of the Biden administration’s behavior. There is, of course, the administration’s persistent harangue that former President Trump would sacrifice Ukraine to rekindle a cozier relationship with Russian President Putin. It is the “collusion” hoax redux; the record of Trump’s actions toward Moscow tells a different story.
NBC News described the rationale for Trump’s sanctions against Russia at the time:
“[Treasury Secretary] Mnuchin cited a number of Russian activities around the world as support for Friday’s US [sanctions], including Moscow’s occupation of Crimea and violence in eastern Ukraine, support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s attacks against civilians, and Russia’s ‘ongoing cyberactivities’ and efforts to ‘interfere in the democratic processes of the United States and its allies.’”
Though the assertion that Trump would throw Ukraine under the bus if elected in November is popular among Biden cohorts, the record does not bear out that notion. The evidence of what Trump’s administration did in supporting Ukraine during his term in office better reflects what to expect if there is a second Trump term. What we know for sure about the Biden administration is the Russian war on Ukraine will be long – as long as it takes.
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.
- About the author: National Security Correspondent at LibertyNation.Com. Dave is a retired U.S. Air Force Pilot with over 180 combat missions in Vietnam. He is the former Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, Comptroller and has served in executive positions in the private sector aerospace and defense industry. In addition to Liberty Nation, Dave’s articles have appeared in The Federalist and DefenseOne.com.
- Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation