U.S. troops block Russian forces from capturing a Syrian oil field

Did you know that U.S. troops prevented Russian troops from capturing a Syrian oil field last Saturday? Ben Wolfgang reports the story for the Washington Times here.

How Russia and China court chaos while the U.S. wades into civil conflicts with little understanding of the dynamics involved

In American Greatness, Brandon Weichert writes about how Russia has been courting chaos and using it to its geopolitical advantage, while America has

waded into countless civil conflicts with little understanding of the dynamics involved.

...Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran are case studies in how the United States completely destroyed its own dominance in a vital part of the world and allowed for its weaker rivals—particularly Russia—to benefit from the ensuing chaos.

Read more here.

"Undiplomatic"

In CNSNEWS, Patrick Goodenough reports,

Two Russian strategic bombers, which held joint exercises with Venezuelan fighter jets over the Caribbean Sea this week, will end their visit on Friday, according to the White House.

The arrival of the nuclear-capable Tupolev Tu-160 bombers – the third visit of its kind to Venezuela in a decade – sparked terse exchanges, as officials in Washington, Moscow and Caracas criticized each other’s spending priorities.

On Twitter, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented, “Russia’s government has sent bombers halfway around the world to Venezuela.”

“The Russian and Venezuelan people should see this for what it is: two corrupt governments squandering public funds, and squelching liberty and freedom while their people suffer.”

Pompeo’s comment drew a strong reaction in Moscow, where Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called it undiplomatic and inappropriate.

Read more here.

What we must do to contain Iran

In the American Thinker, Brandon J. Weichert writes,

...Beginning with Desert Storm, the United States spent the last 30 years running the biggest (failed) social experiment in the world: trying to democratize the Middle East to create long-term "stability." Unfortunately, all of America's military interventions there – each one escalating in size and scope – have done little to quell the unrest. In fact, American interventions have only worsened the instability in the region. With the old order broken, the region appears to be transitioning away from the Sunni- and Israel-dominated balance of power toward a new Iranian order inimical to American interests.

...Iran, like North Korea, has long been considered a rogue state with malicious nuclear weapons ambitions. Despite their continual calls for "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!," the Obama administration made an ill-advised executive agreement with the mullahs of Iran that effectively allowed Iran a path to acquiring nuclear weapons. The Obama deal then normalized the country with the outside world. Basically, Obama legitimized the virulently anti-American, revisionist regime in Iran – at the expense of American allies in Israel and throughout the Sunni Arab world.

...What few acknowledge is that the North Koreans came to the negotiating table because of the increasing pressure that the Trump administration placed on China. Trump used tripolar diplomacy (among the United States, China, and North Korea) to bring North Korea to heel. Just as China is North Korea's most important partner, Russia is Iran's most important ally. Thus, Trump must replay his strategic gambit of using tripolar diplomacy to prevent a seemingly implacable rogue state – this time Iran – from threatening the world.

Reaching out to Russia is something the president has been prevented from doing, thanks to the partisan hackery of Trump's opponents in Washington. According to these partisans, Trump colluded with Russian intelligence to steal the 2016 election (a claim that remains unproven), therefore any diplomatic overture to Russia is politically toxic for Trump.

While it might harm Washington's ego to treat Moscow as an equal partner in world affairs, the only way to mollify the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program – without a major war against Iran (and absent another silver bullet to use on Iran, like the Stuxnet cyber-attack) – is to grant Russia the respect Putin believes he and his country deserve. Thanks to the restrictive sanctions regime that President Trump has imposed on Russia, the United States has leverage. By dangling the prospect of a grand bargain between Moscow and Washington over key disagreements, the United States would likely be able to get Russia to work with it on ending the threat posed by Iran.

Life in a multipolar world order is complex; often enemies must work together to balance against greater, shared threats (such as the case with Iran) while, at times, pursuing shared opportunities. Let's not miss this opportunity out of moral squeamishness, pride, or misplaced partisan rancor.

Read more here.

Nice and new and smart!

What is going to happen in Syria? Russia is moving their ships out of the way of our missiles.

Trump tweeted:

Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

CNN expands into Russia.

Trump's team can pull it off!

Sundance is optimistic about Trump being able to negotiate with Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan to convince Kim Jong Un to end his nuclear program.



Read his thoughts here.

Thinking bigly

Scott Adams is one of those guys who likes to think and win "bigly." In this Periscope podcast Scott points out that we elected a salesman President of the United States, but when it comes to health care, we have not given him anything to sell! So Scott volunteers his persuasion skills to help sell #People's Health. Wouldn't it be better if the plan came from the people, instead of from the lobbyists for the hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies?

Scott believes that Trump just pulled off a historic accomplishment, getting Russia and China to join with the United States in sanctioning North Korea.

Russian money supporting environmental groups

Andrew Higgins reports in The New York Times that Russian money is suspected behind fracking protests.

Before stepping down in September as NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen gave voice to this alarm with remarks in London that pointed a finger at Russia and infuriated environmentalists.

“Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas,” Mr. Rasmussen said. He presented no proof and said the judgment was based on what NATO allies had reported.

Read more here.

An attempt at humor

I have a good friend who is married to a Russian woman. I sent him this email today:

It has been brought to my attention that you might be colluding with a Russian. This is very serious at this time. It didn't used to be. We used to have a president who whispered to Medvedev that he would be able to be more flexible after the election. His Secretary of State even presented her Russian counterpart with a reset button (mistranslated).

Now those same people are very suspicious of the Russians. They have told me to write you this email, which will be read by the National Security Agency, because it has Russia as the subject.

So, watch your step, unless you have some damaging information against Donald J. Trump, or any member of his family. If you do, please forward it, so the intel officers who read these emails between us can leak your information to the New York Times.

Where are we headed?

Mark Steyn will bring a smile to your face with this exchange with Tucker Carlson.

The latest hyphenated group in America are the journalist-Americans. They are now officially victims.

Steyn predicts that soon CNN may be asking CNN for more Elmo and less Russia because the more they drag on this investigation, the more likely it will lead to embarrassing moments for the Democrats such as Susan Rice and Loretta Lynch, and perhaps even Obama himself!

Today's number one news story

Hat tip Diogenes' Middle Finger

From Breitbart: China’s National Oil Company Suspends Sales to North Korea

John Hayward reports at Breitbart,

Reuters reported on Wednesday that China’s state-controlled National Petroleum Corporation has suspended fuel sales to North Korea for an undetermined period of time. CNPC is the primary supplier of fuel to North Korea.

Hayward looks at many angles to explain what is going on. This excerpt may explain:

“It is a wrong perception that North Korea is completely dependent on China,” said defector Ri Jong-ho.

He said dictator Kim Jong-un’s plan to replace Chinese oil with imports from Russia has been moving ahead at full steam since 2014, when a visit from Chinese President Xi Jinping to South Korea “infuriated” Kim and prompted him to begin viewing China as an “enemy state.”

If Ri’s assessment is correct, then some of the public confusion from the Chinese government over suspended fuel sales to North Korea might be due to the reluctance of Chinese officials to admit they have lost much of their leverage over Pyongyang. China has traditionally profited greatly from selling itself as the last resort for curbing the worst excesses of the Kim regime. If that posture is now a bluff, Beijing will not want it to be called, and the current suspension of fuel sales might really be best understood as apprehension over North Korea’s willingness and ability to pay.

Read more here.

"reference points that are being intentionally overlooked by media"

At The Last refuge, Sundance writes a lot today about Syria. An excerpt:

President Trump is forcing Assad (and Russia) to fight ISIS.

And THAT is the exact response Assad gave after the 59 tomahawk missiles struck the Syrian airbase. See: “Assad promises to fight ISIS harder.” This is also one of the reasons why the targeted airbase is still operational.

...Before getting to the interviews by current U.N Ambassador to the United Nations Mrs. Rubio vis-à-vis Syria, it is important to reassert reference points that are being intentionally overlooked by media; reference points the MSM pundits intentionally hide.

Point One – Russia, Iran and Syria’s President Bashir Assad care primarily about one thing: keeping Bashir Assad in power. All other influential objectives are secondary to this primary intention. All of the actions taken by Russia, Iran and the Syrian Government are specifically focused on keeping Bashir Assad in power.

Point Two – All historic action taken by the Russian, Iranian and Syrian participants are to eliminate the opposition to Assad. Goal #1 keep Assad in power, necessitates goal #2 eliminate Assad’s opposition.

Point Three – So long as Russia, Iran and the Syrian Regime can use the terrorism of ISIS as a foil they will continue to do so. As long as the appearance of Assad fighting ISIS remains the cognitive reference point of the international community – it is easier to keep Assad in power.

Point Four – Therefore the continued ground action of ISIS becomes a tool, a foil, to keep pressure away from the international community focusing on Assad’s removal.

Point Five – It is currently more beneficial for the objectives of Russia and Iran for the ISIS terrorism narrative to remain in place. The Syrian regime can survive with Assad, and accomplish the agenda of Russia and Iran, so long as the appearance of fighting ISIS remains the international optic.

Read more here.

"If the bank told you they were repossessing your home just as soon as you finished the kitchen remodel, how quickly would you work in remodeling the kitchen?".

The quote is from Sundance at The Last Refuge, and it pertains to the fact of

Assad’s 2017 motive NOT TO remove ISIS with any excessive urgency.

Currently, there are two sides in the six-year Syrian civil war: Assad and “the rebels”.

If you take out ISIS (‘the rebels’), you are left with Assad – a terrorist state. If you take out Assad you are left with ISIS – a terrorist state. The regional goal is to eliminate extremism. Both sides of the current Syrian coin are extremist.

Similarly, by actions and deeds the international community, and the regional community have essentially told Assad he must step down from power as soon as he eliminates ISIS. Do you see any grand motivation for Assad to remove ISIS in that equation? This is the basis for the quagmire. Syria is FUBAR.

Wikipedia says

FUBAR is a military acronym for "fucked up beyond all/any recognition/ repair/ reason/ redemption."

Sundance continues,

Syria is FUBAR and ordinary Syrians are being destroyed between the pendulum. Syria is FUBAR and despite the Russian and Iranian propaganda to the contrary, Bashir Assad is a terrorist and a dictator. Bashir Assad is to 2017 Syria what 1980’s Kaddaffi was to Libya.

Take ISIS, al-Nusra, and al-Qaeda out of the equation, which is almost impossible because those affiliates are people -tens of thousands of people- and you still have terrorist Bashir Assad and the terrorist group Hezbollah and the terrorist network of the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria is FUBAR because it is full of violent extremists.

Don’t kid yourself into believing that Bashir Assad is some grand magnanimous figure just because he is currently killing Sunni extremists (ISIS). Take away the “extremists” from the equation and Assad kills Sunni moderates. Either way you look at Syria one extremist element ends up killing ordinary Syrians. Syria is FUBAR.

There’s no going back to the time of Zookeepers Hussein (Iraq), Bin Ali (Tunisia), Mubarak (Egypt), Kaddaffi (Libya) and Abdullah Salah (Yemen), being able to contain the rabid cats.

...The entire region understands this; Assad has no allies in proximity. Assad is the only Zookeeper remaining amid a land that has moved away from Zoo-keeping. It’s only Assad, Russia and Iran who are trying to deny the reality of the inevitable.

...No-one in the media has been assembling all of the dots of the direct talks that have been taking place between President Trump and the Regional Partners.

♦ Immediately following his inauguration, President Trump spoke to Saudi Arabia’s King Salman and gained his ideological and financial support for building a safe zone for Syrian’s as they rebuild.

♦ A week later, President Trump spoke at length to Egypt’s Fattah al-Sisi about their efforts.

♦ At the beginning of February – King Abdullah III of Jordan traveled to Washington to meet with Vice-President Mike Pence and discuss aide and assistance for regional security. Previously, in November 2016, King Abdullah spoke to President-elect Trump

♦ A week later – Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington DC for a very warm and optimistic meeting with President Trump for talks on regional security.

♦ At the beginning of March – Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry visited Washington, met with members of Congress and held a long discussion with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,

♦ Mid-March Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met with an envoy from President Trump and told him that a peace deal is possible under the new president.

♦ Last Week (Monday) – Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to the White House for an official state visit, and a very warm greeting by President Trump.

♦ Last Week (Wednesday) – Jordan’s King Abdullah II follows al-Sisi with a visit to the White House and receives another very warm greeting by the U.S. President

Read more here.

"A course correction from Washington—if one is actually coming—will be as welcome as it is overdue."

Michael Totten writes,

...After blowing up hospitals and schools and butchering hundreds of thousands with chemical weapons and barrel bombs, there is no chance Assad could win a free and fair election in Syria, but his allies in Tehran and Moscow need never fear a free and fair election as long as he is in power. Assad is the kind of ruler who “wins” elections with 97.6 percent of the “vote.”

His regime has killed almost 500,000 people and displaced millions, triggering the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II, but at least he doesn’t massacre cartoonists in Paris or nightclub-goers in Florida. He’s a monster, but he’s not ISIS. In that sense, at least from the standpoint of faraway Washington, he’s the lesser of two evils.

But we need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.

Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.

This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.

Before writing off Syrian malfeasance during the Iraq war as irrelevant history, understand something else: ISIS in its current form is also a creature of the Assad regime. Assad wanted ISIS to rise. He needed ISIS to rise. He made damn sure that ISIS did rise and that it did so inside Syria.

In 2011, Assad’s regime shot, tortured, raped, and mutilated peaceful protesters while calling them terrorists. Everyone in the world knew he was lying, including his Iranian and Hezbollah allies. He had to say it, though, because after American-led regime-changes in Iraq and Libya, he had every reason in the world to fear that he might be next.

You can’t fight a war against terrorism if there are no terrorists, though. He needed to create a terrorist threat inside Syria. So he released the most extreme Islamists, including battle-hardened al-Qaeda fighters, from Sednaya prison north of Damascus. Some of them dutifully went out into the desert and established the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Others joined the remnants of the then-largely defunct al-Qaeda in Iraq and renamed it the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

Then Assad effectively told the world, “either I rule or they rule,” and the world bought it.
Chatham House scholar Nadim Shehadi once gave me some sarcastic advice about how to become a dictator if I ever got tired of journalism. “What you should do,” he said, “is establish the idea that you’re indispensable, that you’re irreplaceable, that beyond you is the abyss of sectarian civil war, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the breakup of the state. Create problems that only you can resolve.” He acquired this bit of wisdom after observing the Assad family’s modus operandi for four decades.

Newcomers to foreign policy like Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, and Nikki Haley correctly single out Iran as the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world, but they have seemed strangely unaware that Syria has been the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the Arab world since the 1970s.

ISIS is the most deranged terrorist army on earth, but Hezbollah, the joint Syrian and Iranian proxy militia in Lebanon, remains the most powerful. It is more powerful, in fact, than many of the Middle East’s national armies, including Lebanon’s. Its missile arsenal is now robust enough to strike targets anywhere and everywhere in Israel, including as far south as the Red Sea city of Eilat and the Dimona nuclear power plant.

After years of a slow-motion war led by the United States and its regional partners, ISIS is on the ropes, but the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis is stronger than ever, especially now that the Russians are fighting alongside it. Russia’s alliance with Syria and Iran is not new, and it’s perfectly natural. Syria has been the Kremlin’s chief client state in the Middle East since the 1970s, while Iran has received almost all its nuclear weapons technology from Moscow.

We are all tired of war, but we’re likely to get more of it if the United States effectively gives the world’s largest terrorist axis a pass. And we should not be the least bit surprised that the Assad regime resumed its use of chemical weapons just a few days after the White House indicated as much.

Removing Assad from power need not be America’s first priority in the Middle East, but outsourcing American counterterrorism to him, of all people, makes about as much sense as Churchill and Roosevelt leaving it to Mussolini and Franco to save Europe from Hitler. A course correction from Washington—if one is actually coming—will be as welcome as it is overdue.

Anti-corruption protests all across Russia this week

Did you know that on March 26 there were anti-corruption protests in over 100 Russian cities? Putin has been in office 17 years. Maybe it is time for him to retire to one or more of his many palaces. The story at The Economist:

...The marches came in response to a call from Aleksei Navalny, an opposition leader and anti-corruption campaigner who wants to run for president next year. Despite the government’s crackdown on activism, Mr Navalny has doggedly continued publishing exposés of corruption on social networks and YouTube, and expanding his volunteer organization. His latest target is Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister. On March 2nd Mr Navalny released a film alleging that Mr Medvedev had used charities and shell companies to amass a collection of mansions, yachts and other luxuries. The video has been watched 15m times on the internet.

The decision to target Mr Medvedev was strategic. Whereas Mr Putin is praised for restoring Russia’s geopolitical power, Mr Medvedev is seen as weak and held responsible for Russia’s economic woes. He is often ridiculed for his taste for Western gadgets and frequent gaffes. (“We have no money, but you hang in there,” he told pensioners in Crimea last year.) He is equally disliked by security-service hardliners, such as Igor Sechin, Mr Putin’s closest confidant, and by moderate technocrats such as Aleksei Kudrin, a former finance minister. Yet the protests were not restricted to Mr Medvedev. Denis Lugovskoi, an engineering student who demonstrated in Orel, 325km (200 miles) south of Moscow, says they were aimed at the whole political elite.

Although the crowds were thinner than those in Moscow in 2011-12, they were in some respects more alarming for the Kremlin. The protests of five years ago, sparked by rigged parliamentary elections, were largely confined to Moscow and St Petersburg, and deliberately lacked unified leadership; the educated, urbane protesters considered this a sign of political maturity. Now both demography and geography are much broader. Protests took place in industrial towns in the heartland, such as Nizhny Tagil and Chelyabinsk, and in poorer cities such as Nizhny Novgorod. Meanwhile, Mr Navalny has become the movement’s clear leader. On March 27th a court sentenced him to 15 days in jail for organizing an unauthorized demonstration.

Read more here.

"Democrats want to believe that they did not lose the election; that somebody stole it from them!"

Mark Steyn: "Once you strip away a century of Communism, Russia is essentially the prodigal child of western civilization. I'm glad Flynn is gone, not because of ties to the Russians, but because he was in the pay of Erdogan, and I regard Erdogan as a far greater threat to western civilization than Vladimir Putin!"

Obama, Trump, Russia, and journalism

Lee Smith writes at Tablet,

...Obama didn’t kill journalism, but he took advantage of it in its weakness, because he knew the press would do anything to feel relevant again. All those 27-year-olds at the Times, the Washington Post and others hired as bloggers—“who literally know nothing,” as Rhodes told the Times Magazine—when the foreign and national bureaus were closed, they didn’t know it wasn’t OK to be a journalist and a political operative at the same time. They thought it made them more valuable, even patriotic, to put themselves in the service of a historic presidency. And they’d replaced for pennies on the dollar all the adults who could have taught them otherwise.

That’s the raw material out of which the Obama administration built its echo chamber, the purpose of which was to drown out the few remaining vestiges of journalism in order to sell the president’s policies.

...What everyone saw at the time was that the press had put itself in the service of executive power. This was no longer simply tilting left, rather, it was turning an American political institution against the American public.

...The public is astonished and appalled that the media has now returned after an eight-year absence to arrogate to itself the role of conscience of the nation.

It’s not working out very well.

...The Russia story is evidence that top reporters are still feeding from the same trough—political operatives, intelligence agencies, etc.—because they don’t know how to do anything else, and their editors don’t dare let the competition get out ahead. Why would the Post, for instance, let the Times carve out a bigger market share of the anti-Trump resistance? And what’s the alternative? Report the story honestly? Don’t publish questionably sourced innuendo as news?

And still, you ask, how could the Russia story be nonsense? All the major media outlets are on it. Better to cover yourself—maybe it’s true, because the press can’t really be this inept and corrupt, so there’s got to be something to it.

I say this not only out of respect for a late colleague, but in the hope that journalism may once again merit the trust of the American public. Wayne Barrett had this file for 40 years, and if neither he nor the reporters he trained got this story, it’s not a story.

Read more here.

Obama's intel chiefs warn Israel Trump may be compromised

At Breitbart, Aaron Klein links to a story in Israel’s respected Yedioth Ahronoth daily newspaper.

U.S. intelligence officials warned their Israeli counterparts not to trust President-elect Donald Trump with intelligence secrets, citing alleged fears that Russia held blackmail information over Trump.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement yesterday that he had called Trump that day to tell him that the intelligence community “has not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.”

Read more here.
Oh sure, Israel is going to trust Obama?