The Morning Rant

Between Ukraine and Canada turning into a police state, there's a lot of other news that's getting lost in the sauce and that really shouldn't. For now, let's keep the focus on the international stage. The complete incompetence and idiocy that is the Biden Junta's foreign policy was amply demonstrated with its disastrous snap-decision to just bug out of Afghanistan in order to boost their polling numbers. In the event, it turned into arguably one of if not the biggest foreign policy and security catastrophes of the past 50 years and sank Biden's public opinion into the sub basement. Bravo, Foggy Bottom. Bravo.

No doubt, Biden's personal abuse of power during his term as Barack Obama's sidekick (and given the jackassery of Obama, being his VP is the moral equivalent of the title "assistant crack whore" [ironic considering Hunter]) as well as his having a ringside seat for eight straight years of Obama-led international foul-ups and disasters, from the Orwellian-named "Arab Spring" to the squelching of a real popular uprising in Iran and helping that regime get nukes and billions in American cash delivered on pallets via C5-A in the dead of night, to the destabilization of an otherwise neutralized Qaddafi and Libya and the abandonment of four Americans to die so as to cover up a gun-running scheme to anti-Assad - and anti-Putin - Islamic terrorists in Syria, to doing nothing as ISIS ran rampant all over the place, to the genuflecting and non-stop apologizing to the world for America's leadership role in world affairs, and on and on and on.

While Obama can certainly be blamed for much in that regard, he doesn't stand alone in the dock. The Bush family and Bill Clinton certainly laid the foundation for much of the crap we have had to endure from the end of Gulf War One, as well as an entrenched, unelected, globalist clique in Foggy Bottom, until a certain nouveau-riche, orange-complected guy with a bad comb-over from Queens shocked everyone and became the most powerful man in the world.

The contrast to the way things have always been done to the way that things should have been done - and were done between 2017 and 2020 - was breathtaking:

On February 14, 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett arrived in Bahrain, a small island country in the Persian Gulf with a population of 1.5 million, and which has had a very small Jewish population for more than a century. It was the first trip by an Israeli prime minister to this gulf state. Bennett was greeted at the airport by the King and Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa and a guard of honor playing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem which celebrates a “free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The Bennett visit was the outcome of the signing of the Abraham Accords on September 15, 2020, brokered by President Donald Trump, normalizing relations between Israel and two Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, a historic achievement for mutual recognition and increased cooperation between the three countries on trade and investment, and on defense against aggression by Iran.

The visit was a convincing refutation of a new report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity,” issued by Amnesty International. It concludes that Israeli laws, policies, and institutional practices regarding Palestinians amount to a regime of oppression and domination defined as apartheid under international law. In the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is defined by inhumane acts by one racial group over any other racial group with the intention of maintaining its regime. . .

. . . In November 2021, Israel, UAE, and Bahrain together with U.S. naval forces and a coalition of others, took part in a five-day naval exercises with the object to enhance collaboration to safeguard freedom of navigation and the free flow of trade and to meet the aggression of Iran in the strait of Hormuz.

A growing menace in the Persian Gulf has been the use by Iran of anti-ship mines, of which it has a store of 6,000, which hinder oil tankers from using Arab ports. The U.S. Navy minesweeper force is limited, and consequently Israel state-owned defense contractors are designing navy vessels capable of mine detection and anti-submarine warfare. After events in Afghanistan, Israel-Arab defense cooperation with the U.S. is crucial to deter Iranian aggression.

Israel began importing aluminum from Bahrain and the two countries are signing an agreement that allows the transshipment of goods arriving by sea in Bahrain on to planes going to Israel. A network of trade pacts is developing. The UAE and Israel have exchanged official ambassadors, and foreign minister Yair Lapid has visited UAE as have many Israeli tourists. Commercially, the UAE has invested in Israel’s offshore natural gas extraction.

A major UAE sovereign wealth fund has invested about $100 million in venture capital into Israel’s technology sector. Trade in 2022 is expected to reach $2 billion, up from $250 million annually before normalization.

Politically, it is clear that for Arab countries the fear of Iran is more consequential than resolution of the Palestinian problem. What is needed are useful actions to end Palestinian obduracy.

It's not only Bahrain and the UAE. It's Morocco, Sudan and Jordan. Add to that several nations that recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved their embassies there. There's also Saudi Arabia that, although did not join the accords (and honestly still have a pretty horrendous human rights record, which is a debate for another time) no doubt is working with Israel behind the scenes and not really all that covertly.

What all this brings me to is a big Psaki-Psircle back to Iran, by way of the Ukraine. As Irinia Tsukerman postulated in the NY Post yesterday:

The Ukraine invasion directly benefits the Islamic Republic. That’s why, after months of stagnation in Vienna, in the days leading up to Russia’s recognition of the separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine, we are hearing that a deal with Iran is close to being signed.

Biden has alluded to securing cheap Iranian oil as an answer to high gas prices in the United States, a policy which has now been picked up by the media. Biden hit on rising oil prices again in his Tuesday speech, as did Kamala Harris in the course of the Munich conference.

Biden is cynically using Russia’s destabilization of the global energy market to argue for the return to appeasement for the ayatollahs.

Ukraine was likely sacrificed well in advance in exchange for a lucrative energy deal and Iran’s cooperation in Vienna.

Aside from how the energy market will or will not react in the near term - and thinking gas will magically drop to under say $3.00 a gallon is delusional on their part - the salient point is the calculation from the Biden Junta that they can look tough standing up to Putin AND score a hit by getting the Iran Nuke Deal moving. Let's see: Putin is moving to take not just "disputed territory" but all of Ukraine and the Iran deal is hated by a majority of the voters who actually know better.

In any case, Israel and their allies in the Gulf see that they can not trust Biden at all AND that Iran will be emboldened to further enrich uranium to a breakout point where they can produce a bomb. And the latest report has that happening in months if not weeks.

Forget Ukraine. The action is in the Gulf. If not off the coast of Taiwan.

posted by J.J. Sefton at 11:02 AM

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