Fareed Zakaria got it right last November. Biden, too. Fund Ukraine war efforts with Russian assets.

 Fareed Zakaria was on the right track: He proposed using Russian assets in Western banks to fund the Ukraine war efforts. Today, G7 agreed to give Ukraine a 50 billion dollar loan to be paid back by interest on those assets. https://mufticforumblog.blogspot.com/.../a-possible-red...

No more extremist tail-wagging the national security dog.

https://www.msn.com/.../g7-leaders-agree.../ar-BB1oaguU...

Don't like NATO or multilateralism, American Firsters? Even if the GOP takes the Senate in November, Biden devises an end run. Like bi-lateralism? OK, Biden does that, too...that the GOP could overturn if it dares if they take the Senate in November. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/06/13/us-ukraine-security-deal-g7/

Also...it takes funding out of the hands of the House, should it not flip blue enough to get around the American Firsters and isolationists stone wallers, there..

None of this depends on NATO...so if the isolationists grabbing the Senate in November try to sabotage Article 5, mutual defense, it will not stop Ukraine's efforts that Putin so desires. Biden may be slow in speech but quick on strategy. Clever guy.

Putin is undoubtedly going ballistic, figuratively, if not actually. I wonder if he sees enough writing on the wall to negotiate. Stay tuned.

MSN.COM

G7 leaders agree to lend Ukraine $50 billion using frozen Russian assets

The money would come from interest accrued on some $300 billion.

For those who think Biden's bumbling age is an embarrassment abroad, the embarrassment is all yours. In Germany, where my son now lives, even before the announcement today at the G7 on funding Ukraine using interest from Russian Western banking deposits, there was a 40 percent gap in approval of Biden over Trump. That holds true for the rest of Europe. Biden is respected; Trump is not elsewhere as well. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/06/11/globally-biden-receives-higher-ratings-than-trump/ " Across the 34 nations polled, a median of 43% have confidence in Biden to do the right thing regarding world affairs, while just 28% have confidence in Trump. The gap between ratings is quite wide in many countries, especially in Europe. Biden’s confidence rating is at least 40 percentage points higher than Trump’s in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden."

How dictators make elections look free but are not fair: MAGA is a wannabe

How a dictator controls elections: Free but not fair. MAGA is a wannabe. Turkey and Hungary provide the blueprint for those who aspire to be "autocratic/" dictatorial rulers and, once prosperous, stay in authoritarian control while looking like elections were reasonably held and publicly supported. Fareed Zakaria on CNN 5/21 provided a clear and concise description of where in the world, including Turkey and Hungary, why and how elections may look free but are not fair, and liberal democracies such as ours have been destroyed. https://fb.watch/kFVpNRilsV The MAGA movement is example number one of an attempt and a desire of a political campaign to copy these tactics and destroy a democracy that is both free and fair. Trump and DeSantis, and CPAC fawn over Viktor Orban's dictatorial rule. Like him, Turkey's Erdogan had to first gain control of the judiciary and, on one pretext or another, be able to discredit, gag, or, in Turkey, jail his most threatening opponent and opposition journalists. In Turkey and Orban's Hungary, the dictators and their supporters control the media. Lies and corruption go unchallenged, and there is no platform for opposition public expression. The legislative branch was controlled early in the process by unfair elections or intimidation. The judiciary is a rubber stamp operation owned by the dictators' appointments to the bench in nearly all instances, ruling in the dictators 'interests. Their legislators nod in unified support of the leaders to whom they owe their positions.

Sadly, both Turkey and Hungary are members of NATO. Turkey has attempted to play both sides of the Ukrainian war. They are the reason Sweden has not yet been granted membership in NATO.

The MAGA GOP's current tactics reveal their attempt for their core supporter minority to control the rest of us, comprising the majority, Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans. The MAGAs further undermine the "free" election perception by attempting to claim elections are neither free nor fair. They unfairly try to make it more inconvenient for those to vote whose votes they fear and intimidation at the polls themselves. Their targets are racial minorities and younger voters. Fortunately for democracy, they have not yet sufficiently corrupted much of the judiciary, but they have seized total control of a large number of state legislatures and state houses. By claiming media who reports negatively about them, MAGA has managed a de facto control of the messaging reaching loyal supporters who view all other media reports they do not like as "fake news" or "lib" slanted, ignoring, downplaying, or cherry picking, facts, and data. No wonder they are shocked or in disbelief when national polls and elections do not go their way. "Why, everyone I know and my sole media outlets to which I tune in agreed." Those votes must be the result of fraud to explain the outcome, they believe, and the stolen 2020 election is still their mouthed mantra, the ticket into the MAGA clubhouse.

In all honesty, those of the left who also are in their media silos think most right-wingers are inhumane, hate-filled, uneducated nut cases. "We are such a divided country," the tongue-wagging pundits use as an excuse to explain away close election calls. Radicals on the left and right are also guilty, claiming anyone who compromises is "disloyal to their cause." The only way to break this curse is beginning to happen as independents and moderate Republicans revolt and vote. The midterms and recent polls of independents are revealing this new trend.

There are many known and obvious tactics of voter suppression. Among the tools the MAGAs use in the South are reducing early voting windows, mail-in voting, eliminating ballot drop boxes in targeted neighborhoods, claiming fraud that the election was stolen when they lost without providing evidence, gerrymanders, and district boundary drawing by legislative bodies they control that give their side more districts resorting to distorting the public will and sentiment, approving violence or threatening and intimidating racial or ethnic groups with antagonistic partisan poll watchers and unleashing or otherwise protecting violent constituents like the neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, Three percenters, Oath Keepers, and others from prosecution. To them, all judicial system prosecutions are just political, laws and evidence and juries to the contrary notwithstanding. While Trump's role in inciting January 6 is still being revealed in various court cases, he recently stated in a rally that he would, if elected, pardon those already convicted for everything from vandalism to criminal conspiracy to overturn the election of 2020. The "House" sub-sub-committee on government overreach led by Jim Jordan to attempt to prove a conspiracy of the "lib" FBI against MAGA Trump in 2020 or another committee to try to show "the Biden crime family" has so far fizzled. This was thanks to when the Durham special investigation final report failed to find evidence of widespread conspiracy in the FBI's Russia election interference cases and the disappearance of the key witness to Hunter's laptop. That the AG Barr and 63 federal judges and the Supreme Court found no evidence of widespread election fraud in 2020 points to the importance of an independent judiciary holding its ground. The MAGA crowd blithely ignores and is still missing judicial findings.

Current figures on those identifying as conservatives most loyal to FOX, AON, NEWSMax , especially after Hannity's departure, in 2021 (impacting the 2022 midterms) are available: Newsmax and OAN News Consumers Also Likely To Turn to Fox News | Pew Research Center

 

Trump's NATO policy has a Grand County impact.

There are many in Grand County who have more than a passing interest in what happens to NATO.  They still have family in eastern European countries that are current members of NATO and were once Soviet satellites.  Lithuanians and Poles  have settled here and have become respected members of our community. Those countries belong to NATO.  Other Eastern European settlers in Grand County from countries not in NATO are Russians and Moldovans.

Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians (the three Baltic States) and Poles in particular must be looking at alarming statements from Donald Trump for his comments that “We don’t really need NATO in its current form. NATO is obsolete…if we have to walk, we walk.”  Many  look with raised eyebrows  at the  sometimes called “bromance” with Russian President  Vladimir Putin.  Putin called Trump  "a brighter person, talented without a doubt." Putin reiterated has admiration of Donald Trump June 19 on Fareed Zakaria ‘s CNN program, as well as asking why the West still needs NATO.

Trump’s public assertion that not only is NATO obsolete, but their members are not living up to their promises to contribute. There is far more at stake than money.

Russia is on the march in a seeming attempt to reassemble former Soviet satellites , restoring past glories.  Russians also resent and fear  their former neighboring buffer states becoming NATO members and permitting missile defense installations (even if the defense systems are turned toward the Middle East) . Their grabbing  or helping surrogates grab   parts of non NATO members of Georgia, the Crimea and eastern Ukraine has been seen as a threat in particular to the NATO member Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.  NATO was quick to move more forces to the Baltics in response as a warning to Russia not to mess with members of NATO. Without NATO, the small Baltic states in particular would be vulnerable to a Crimea and Ukraine like grabs, making Poland and Romania especially at risk. In his June CNN comments, Putin slyly ignored Russia’s land grabs which would have answered his question of Why NATO?

There may not be a conspiracy involved, just a case of Trump’s ignorance or isolationist advocacy or wanting to make a deal with Russia,  but there is an interesting connection with his most inner advisor. It is his campaign chairman,  Paul Manafort, who was a political consultant to  once  president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych was attempting to stop some in his country who wanted greater trade ties with the West, while he was closely connected to Russia  and wanted his country to be more connected to them. A revolution followed in 2014.  During that revolution, Yanukovych fled first to the eastern Ukraine and now resides in exile in Russia.

Many in the United States’ foreign relations community on both sides of the aisle  look at Donald Trump’s foreign policy with alarm.  A particularly large howl was raised in a March open  letter  by 121 GOP national security leaders.  George W Bush’s secretary of State, Richard Armitage, announced  this month June,2016, he would vote for Hillary Clinton.

 http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/16/richard-armitage-plans-vote-hillary-clinton/he would vote for Hillary Clinton.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/29/politics/election-2016-trump-foreign-

policy/

http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/06/16/richard-armitage-plans-vote-hillary-clinton/

Colorado's jihadist roots

Fareed Zakaria of CNN has a must see hour special that seeks to explain why “they hate us”, to answer a puzzle.  Why are the jihadi Muslims killing mostly Muslims as well as some of us?  He concludes that these radical terrorists are at war with the modern world and all who embrace it. This also might explain why nightclubs in Paris and  the gay night club in Orlando were chosen for terrorist acts. Embedded in Zakaria’s special is that it all began in Greeley, Colorado, and the top Al Qaeda English language recruiter was a student at Colorado State University and a former resident of Denver.

The modern  seeds of a  revolt had already been planted in Greeley in 1947 per Zakaria.  An   Egyptian foreign student with beliefs firmly immersed in traditional Islam attended a church dance was  appalled by all the bare skin, tight fitting dresses, and close up dancing.  He returned home, and wrote a series of books which exhorted a return to Sharia law and traditional Islamic values as practiced in the 8^th century.  That resonated with an older Islamic movement of Wahhabism.  Its clerics cherry picked verses in the Koran (which had contradictory passages, as well) to foster a belief  in a return to Islam as practiced in medieval times and exhorted killing those who did not follow their religious interpretation, including Muslims . Zakaria believes that a small percentage  of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are followers of this interpretation.  The movement  became the driving ideology behind ISIS , al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

 A  New Mexico born Muslim student at Colorado State University visited post- Soviet invasion Afghanistan and was appalled by the poverty and conditions.  He became the American  voice of al- Qaeda recruitment,  Anwar al Awlaki.  While he was killed in Yemen by US strikes, as was his Denver born son, his voice lives on in al -Qaeda’s recruiting videos.

I am not surprised with Zakaria’s conclusion.  In 1959, during spring break travels in my junior year abroad in Berlin, I took a trip throughout all of what was then Yugoslavia, and I became fascinated with a  culture, the  moderate, westernized Turkish oriented Muslims in  Bosnia, once a province of Turkey and later a separate country. On my return to Northwestern University in spent my senior year learning more about the modernization of a secular Turkey, on Islam, and the impact on people who were struggling within themselves to become part of the modern world. We concluded the religion was locked into  very conservative traditional values.  Sometime in the future, there would be a revolt against all things Western.  

But Islam is not the only religion in revolt against modern society. So are fundamentalist movements in  Christianity and Judaism, as Karen Armstrong wrote in 2000 in “A Battle for God”. Donald Trump, who wants to make American Great Again, has tapped into that yearning for the old order  while using bigotry and racism to make his point.

American security  depends  upon cooperation of the 3.3 million  Muslims in the United States and our Arab allies abroad.  We should not fall for hate speech that paints all Muslims with the same brush.  Such rhetoric  is harmful for our national security as former CIA director Michael Hayden said, Trump’s rhetoric has “already made America less safe”.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/08/opinions/why-they-hate-us-zakaria/

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/saudi-connection-wahhabism-and-global-jihad

https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/543/the-battle-for-god

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/29/michael-hayden-ex-cia-director-donald-trump-alread/

Trump is wrong: America is still great but isolationism would harm us

Donald Trump's appeal is to those who believe American is in decline and he will make it great again...is mistaken, per Fareed Zakaria. By every measure America has become and still is the strongest country in the world; it dominates. However, to maintain that position in the face of growth in other countries, including China, it needs to cooperate internationally. Donald Trump's isolationist America First would be harmful to maintaining our greatness, per Fareed Zakaria. This is a column worth reading, if only for its fact checking. My view: Trump plays on the isolation and ignorance of the world outside our borders to make his case. For that reason, I believe his appeal is greatest to the less educated demographics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/america-is-still-great--but-it-needs-to-stay-strong/2016/05/26/d3c198ae-237c-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html

https://www.sott.net/article/313177-The-cult-of-ignorance-in-the-United-States-Anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-of-America

Fear mongering should not shape foreign policy.

I grew up in a fearful world   and it is still one…only the players have changed and it is a much more complex world now that cries for new strategies. There are those who are quick to criticize President Obama as ignoring the  dangers of Islam or being feckless without a strategy, but they are vague about what they would do differently. They instead monger fear and hark to Cold War days.

 Fear is a political tool. It can be a powerful message to rally political support. It is easy to communicate and to grab emotions or to silence opposing views as being soft on something or are not living in their real world as they perceive it .

Hyping fear was not a strategy that ended the Cold War. It took patience, faith in ourselves, strength, and a cold calculation that spending the Soviet Union into financial ruin in an arms race would end it.  Yes, the Reagan strategy worked.

Times have changed since the Cold War I experienced. One size of tactics and attitudes do not fit all. It is a multi-polar world of threats, not a bi polar one. The nuclear threat still nags us, but many of our current adversaries are not in an arms race, but use low tech tactical methods and modern media. Terrorists often come from poor, oppressive countries and have little to lose. Immigrants to the West feel alienated.  Sunni and Shia are fighting for the control of Islam.  New generations have access to the internet and demand better governance and prosperity.

 In contrast, prosperity in Russia and China has given their leaders much more to lose in war now than before and more than ever, their leaders depend upon popular support. That is why President Obama’s  foreign policy uses economic sanctions as a tool and beefing up NATO as an implied threat to halt further Russian land grabs.

These realities call for smart strategies tailor made for such currents. This should not become a religious war between Christians and Islam in the same way we pitted capitalism against communism.  Insulting their religion or ginning up Muslimphobia is what ISIS hopes we do.  It empowers them, a relatively small cult of Islam, to recruit many others to their cause. As Pres. Obama said in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN February 1,” we should align ourselves with the 99% of Muslims who reject the extremists.”, which explains his careful wording about practitioners of terrorism that  some on the right wrongly interpret as ignoring the threat.

There are alternatives to combat boots and occupation: Tough homeland security and building effective alliances.   Zakaria in a January 22 Washington Post column advocated a realistic counter to deal with radical Islam.    Increasing intelligence and counterterrorism (including carefully targeted drone strikes), improving integration of Muslims living in the West, and resilience, meaning  “terrorism doesn’t work if we are not terrorized, .. bouncing back and returning to normalcy” and not overreacting to ISIS beheadings.  Per that latter point, I  award the best responses to terrorist attacks: “Boston Strong” and “Je suis Charlie”.

A version of this appeared in the Sky Hi Daily News...February 5, 6 2015
http://www.skyhidailynews.com/news/14899100-113/muftic-hyping-fear-wont-stop-terrorists

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-wests-four-part-strategy-to-deal-with-radical-islam/2015/01/22

http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2015/02/01/pres-obama-on-fareed-zakaria-gps-cnn-exclusive/

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/02/03/white_house_reconsiders_arms_for_ukraine.html

Will the next four years be like Obama's last 4 if he's re-elected?

 Highly  recommended Fareed Zakaria's op ed in the Washington Post  who reports the IMF(International Monetary Fund)  projects a 3% growth rate for the US economy over the next four years, thanks to government action taken by Obama and the Federal Reserve....far out performing Europe's.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-us-economy-is-recovering-well/2012/10/24
With Moody's projecting the creation of 12 million new jobs even if Obama is re-elected, Romney's favorite line that if Obama is re-elected, the next four years will be like the last four is just more malarkey.