Landing in Riyadh: Geopolitics work in Putin’s favour

James M. Dorsey 

When Russian President Vladimir Putin lands in Riyadh this week for the second time in 12 years, his call for endorsement of his proposal to replace the US defense umbrella in the Gulf with a multilateral security architecture is likely to rank high on his agenda.

So is Mr. Putin’s push for Saudi Arabia to finalize the acquisition of Russia’s S-400 anti-missile defense system in the wake of the failure of US weaponry to intercept drones and missiles that last month struck key Saudi oil installations.

“We are ready to help Saudi Arabia protect their people. They need to make clever decisions…by deciding to buy the most advanced S-400 air-defence systems. These kinds of systems are capable of defending any kind of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia from any kind of attack,” Mr. Putin said immediately after the attacks.

Mr Putin’s push for a multilateral security approach is helped by changing realities in the Gulf as a result of President Donald J. Trump’s repeated recent demonstrations of his unreliability as an ally.

Doubts about Mr. Trump have been fuelled by his reluctance to respond more forcefully to perceived Iranian provocations, including the downing of a US drone in June and the September attacks on the Saudi facilities as well as his distancing himself from Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu following last month’s elections, and most recently, the president’s leaving the Kurds to their own devices as they confront a Turkish invasion in Syria.

Framed in transactional terms in which Saudi Arabia pays for a service, Mr.Trump’s decision this week to send up to 3,000 troops and additional air defences to the kingdom is likely to do little to enhance confidence in his reliability.

By comparison, Mr. Putin, with the backing of Chinese president Xi Jinping, seems a much more reliable partner even if Riyadh differs with Moscow and Beijing on key issues, including Iran, Syria and Turkey.

“While Russia is a reliable ally, the US is not. Many in the Middle East may not approve of Moscow supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but they respect Vladimir Putin for sticking by Russia’s beleaguered ally in Syria,” said Middle East scholar and commentator Mark N. Katz.

In a twist of irony, Mr. Trump’s unreliability coupled with an Iran’s strategy of gradual escalation in response to the president’s imposition of harsh economic sanctions in a bid to force the Islamic republic to the negotiating table appear to have moderated what was perceived as a largely disastrous assertive and robust go-it alone Saudi foreign and defense policy posture in recent years.

While everyone would benefit from a dialling down of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Mr. Trump’s overall performance as the guarantor of security in the Gulf could in the longer term pave the way for a more multilateral approach to the region’s security architecture.

In the latest sign of Saudi willingness to step back from the brink, Saudi Arabia is holding back channel talks for the first time in two years with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. The talks began after both sides declared partial ceasefires in the more than four year-long Yemeni war.

The talks potentially open the door to a broader Russian-sponsored deal in the context of some understanding about non-aggression between the kingdom and Iran, in which Saudi Arabia would re-establish diplomatic relations with Syria in exchange for the Islamic republic dropping its support for the Houthis.

Restoring diplomatic relations and reversing the Arab League’s suspension of Syrian membership because of the civil war would constitute a victory for Mr. Al-Assad’s main backers, Russia and Iran. It would grant greater legitimacy to a leader viewed by significant segments of the international community as a pariah.

A Saudi-Iranian swap of Syria for Yemen could also facilitate Saudi financial contributions to the reconstruction of war-ravaged Syria. Saudi Arabia was conspicuously absent at last month’s Rebuild Syria Expo in Damascus.

Mr. Putin is likely to further leverage his enhanced credibility as well as Saudi-Russian cooperation in curtailing oil production to boost prices to persuade Saudi Arabia to follow through on promises to invest in Russia.

Saudi Arabia had agreed to take a stake in Russia’s Novatek Arctic-2 liquefied natural gas complex, acquire Sibur, Russia’s largest petrochemical facility, and invest an additional US$6 billion in future projects.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak predicted that “about 30 agreements and contracts will be signed during President Putin’s visit to Saudi Arabia. We are working on it. These are investment projects, and the sum in question is billions of dollars.”

In anticipation of Mr. Putin’s visit, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said it was opening its first overseas office in Riyadh.

RDIF and the kingdom’s counterpart, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), are believed to be looking at some US$2.5 billion in investment in technology, medicine, infrastructure, transport and industrial production.

The Russian fund is also discussing with Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company, US$3 billion in investments in oil services and oil and gas conversion projects.

Saudi interest in economic cooperation with Russia goes beyond economics. Ensuring that world powers have an increasing stake in the kingdom’s security is one pillar of a more multilateral regional approach

Said Russian Middle East expert Alexey Khlebnikov: “Clearly, the recent attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities have changed many security calculations throughout the region.”

Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed Wins Nobel Peace Prize; It Takes Two to Make Peace

Thomas C. Mountain

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Peace which begs the question, if it takes two sides to fight a war doesn’t it take two sides to make peace? Just as it takes two hands to clap it takes two to make peace and P.M. Abiy has taken pains to give credit where credit is due, that Eritrea President Issias Aferwerki, his partner in the peace process was the leader in this process. Abiy said it unequivocally on July 8, 2018 at the end of
his speech welcoming Issias for the first time to Addis Ababa, stating that “Issias is leading us”.

Abiy is 43 years old, leading Ethiopia only since April of last year, 2018. Issias is well into his 70’s and a gray haired battle hardened veteran with almost 60 years of revolutionary leadership under his belt. Who do you think was the primary party responsible for peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Abiy or “Issias is leading us”?

Abiy has been unstinting is his praise for Eritrea and our leadership, saying how, during his first visit here in June 2018, that he would like to be an unofficial foreign minister for Eritrea so he could let the truth be known and help fight the lies being told about our country.

Not a word of this is being mentioned in any of the international media other than in pages such as these and we here in Eritrea have learned to expect nothing else. For how can so called “democracy’s” allow praise for a leader who came to power through the armed struggle, by “the barrel of a gun”?

Revolutionary and socialist, Eritrean President Issias Aferwerki is an anathema to those perpetrating neo-colonialism to maintain control of the wealth of the richest continent on the planet, Africa. They do it through elections and the IMF, who supposedly saw their recent offer of $1.6 billion to “modernize” Eritrea’s economy ignored. Issias is not about to sell the future to pay for non essentials today and fall into the trap of economic debt bondage that inflicts the rest of Africa.

In other words, Eritrea will “never kneel down” as the national motto goes and the western powers will not recognize anything positive about us, to the point of ignoring reality when it comes to making peace.

It takes two hands to clap and it takes two parties to make peace. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee showed it’s real agenda in this case. Then again, this award was given to Barack “The Libya War Criminal” Obama so it’s not like Abiy is joining any sort of honorable inner circle, far from it.

We will wait and see what P.M. Abiy has to say when he accepts his award in Stockholm, though somehow his words will be twisted away from their real meaning and only one party will be praised for the impossible task of making peace all by themselves.

United States Abandon Kurds and How will this Move Impact Middle East

Hossein Bouazar

Syrian Kurds are a distinct group and they have lived and owned their lands close to the Turkish and an Iraqi border for decades. They have been subjected to systematic discrimination.  The People’s Protection Units is a mainly-Kurdish militia in northern Syria and the primary component of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The YPG mostly consists of ethnic Kurds, and also Arabs. They secured the north region of Syria and their control was concentrated in three predominately Kurdish regions, Afrin, Kobane, and Qamishli.

The YPG fighters joined US lead coalitions against Islamic state group becoming spare head of Syrian Democratic Forces also known as SDF. SDF Influence widened Manbij and Raqqa. Sometime in the year 2017 ISIS were defeated in both cities. Turkish we are always concerned about the Syrian Kurds.

After US announcement that they withdrawal their forces from Northern Syria Erdogan orders Turkish offensive against northern Syria “to fight ISIS” and “and to bring peace to the area”. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced the beginning of the operation to create a “safe zone” cleared of US-backed Kurdish militias, which Ankara labels ‘terrorists’.

The dictator Bashar Al-Asad and the Iranian terrorist regime are very pleased about US’s decision. Hassan Rouhani, Iranian president said “Turkey has concerns about its southern borders, and it is their right that these concerns be alleviated, but the right path should be chosen. The solution for security in the northern borders of Syria and southern borders of Turkey is possible with the presence of Syria’s army.”

Syrian regime with help of their allies will attack the Kurds from South and Turkish government will attack the Kurds from North. The Syrian government crushing of the rebellion in Syria with help of their allies will also continue. This will strengthen Iran and Iranian allies’ forces throughout the Middle East, which get Iran closer to the regime’s primary goal, to project power throughout the Middle East to counter Israeli, and Saudi influence in the region.

By now everyone should know Bashar Al-Asad well enough, a dictator who is killing civilians in Syria. Some estimate he murdered more than half million Syria who were protesting for their own rights, and six million refugees fled Syria. United States abandoning the Kurds is like giving permission to Bashar to mass murder more people and this time is the Syrian Kurds. Will this be another humanitarian crisis this time in northern Syria? Could or better say will Untied States stop this humanitarian crisis?

Even though the Trump administration designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in April, Yemen’s Houthi rebels with help of Iran have launched a few drone attacks on a civilian airport and a strike on Saudi Arabian oil facilities.

US withdrawal also means America’s Syrian Kurdish allies are at risk of losing control of the vast camp. the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces, Gen. Mazloum Kobane said “There is a serious risk in al-Hol. Right now, our people are able to guard it. But because we lack resources, Daesh are regrouping and reorganizing in the camp,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “We can’t control them 100 percent, and the situation is grave.”

While US trying to defeat ISIS, withdrawal from North Syria isn’t going to help them to reach their goal, in fact ISIS may regrow in the region.United States will be handing Middle East to Iran and their allies if they don’t help the Syrian Kurds.

A shocking move by the United States and a great example of United States handing a country to Iran, is Iraq. since United States 2003 invasion of Iraq, this might be the worst week for United States foreign policy.

Iranian regime is keeping MiddleEast unsafe by deploying IRGC to interfere with other countries, meanwhile creating such event “Iranian regime’s military parade terrorist attack” is just to give themselves an excuse to arrest Ahwazi activists in Ahwaz.

While Iranian regime’s economy continue to suffer, and the damage is so great that the regime is doing everything to stop Trump from getting re-elected. A hacking group linked to Iran government attempted to break into US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

Iran has mastered conquering a country without replacing its flag and Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria are few examples. Meanwhile IRGC continuous their terrorist attacks, assassinations and kidnappings, and it’s sponsor attacks against Coalition Forces in Iraq, and drone attacks in Saudi soil.

Turkey and the Kurds: What goes around comes around

James M. Dorsey

Turkey, like much of the Middle East, is discovering that what goes around comes around.

Not only because President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have miscalculated the fallout of what may prove to be a foolhardy intervention in Syria and neglected alternative options that could have strengthened Turkey’s position without sparking the ire of much of the international community.

But also because what could prove to be a strategic error is rooted in a policy of decades of denial of Kurdish identity and suppression of Kurdish cultural and political rights that was more likely than not to fuel conflict rather than encourage societal cohesion.

The policy midwifed the birth in the 1970s to militant groups like the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), which only dropped its demand for Kurdish independence in recent years.

The group that has waged a low intensity insurgency that has cost tens of thousands of lives has been declared a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.

Turkish refusal to acknowledge the rights of the Kurds, who are believed to account for up to 20 percent of the country’s population traces its roots to the carving of modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire by its visionary founder, Mustafa Kemal, widely known as Ataturk, Father of the Turks.

It is entrenched in Mr. Kemal’s declaration in a speech in 1923 to celebrate Turkish independence of “how happy is the one who calls himself a Turk,” an effort to forge a national identity for country that was an ethnic mosaic.

The phrase was incorporated half a century later in Turkey’s student oath and ultimately removed from it in 2013 at a time of peace talks between Turkey and the PKK by then prime minister, now president Erdogan.

It took the influx of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s and early 1990s as well as the 1991 declaration by the United States, Britain and France of a no-fly zone in northern Iraq that enabled the emergence of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region to spark debate in Turkey about the Kurdish question and prompt the government to refer to Kurds as Kurds rather than mountain Turks.

Ironically, Turkey’s enduring refusal to acknowledge Kurdish rights and its long neglect of development of the pre-dominantly Kurdish southeast of the country fuelled demands for greater rights rather than majority support for Kurdish secession largely despite the emergence of the PKK

Most Turkish Kurds, who could rise to the highest offices in the land s long as they identified as Turks rather than Kurds, resembled Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, whose options were more limited even if they endorsed the notion of a Jewish state.

Nonetheless, both minorities favoured an independent state for their brethren on the other side of the border but did not want to surrender the opportunities that either Turkey or Israel offered them.

The existence for close to three decades of a Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq and a 2017 referendum in which an overwhelming majority voted for Iraqi Kurdish independence, bitterly rejected and ultimately nullified by Iraqi, Turkish and Iranian opposition, did little to fundamentally change Turkish Kurdish attitudes.

If the referendum briefly soured Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish relations, it failed to undermine the basic understanding underlying a relationship that could have guided Turkey’s approach towards the Kurds in Syria even if dealing with Iraqi Kurds may have been easier because, unlike Turkish Kurds, they had not engaged in political violence against Turkey.

The notion that there was no alternative to the Turkish intervention in Syria is further countered by the fact that Turkish PKK negotiations that started in 2012 led a year later to a ceasefire and a boosting of efforts to secure a peaceful resolution.

The talks prompted imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to publish a letter endorsing the ceasefire, the disarmament and withdrawal from Turkey of PKK fighters, and a call for an end to the insurgency. Mr. Ocalan predicted that 2013 would be the year in which the Turkish Kurdish issues would be resolved peacefully.

The PKK’s military leader, Cemil Bayik, told the BBC three years later that “we don’t want to separate from Turkey and set up a state. We want to live within the borders of Turkey on our own land freely.”

The talks broke down in 2015 against the backdrop of the Syrian war and the rise as a US ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State of the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG).

Bitterly opposed to the US-YPG alliance, Turkey demanded that the PKK halt its resumption of attacks on Turkish targets and disarm prior to further negotiations.

Turkey responded to the breakdown and resumption of violence with a brutal crackdown in the southeast of the country and on the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

Nonetheless, in a statement issued from prison earlier this year that envisioned an understanding between Turkey and Syrian Kurdish forces believed to be aligned with the PKK, Mr. Ocalan declared that “we believe, with regard to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the problems in Syria should be resolved within the framework of the unity of Syria, based on constitutional guarantees and local democratic perspectives. In this regard, it should be sensitive to Turkey’s concerns.”

Turkey’s emergence as one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s foremost investors and trading partners in exchange for Iraqi Kurdish acquiescence in Turkish countering the PKK’s presence in the region could have provided inspiration for a US-sponsored safe zone in northern Syria that Washington and Ankara had contemplated.

The Turkish-Iraqi Kurdish understanding enabled Turkey  to allow an armed Iraqi Kurdish force to transit Turkish territory in 2014 to help prevent the Islamic State from conquering the Syrian city of Kobani.

A safe zone would have helped “realign the relationship between Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and its Syrian offshoot… The safe-zone arrangements… envision(ed) drawing down the YPG presence along the border—a good starting point for reining in the PKK, improving U.S. ties with Ankara, and avoiding a potentially destructive Turkish intervention in Syria,” Turkey scholar Sonar Cagaptay suggested in August.

The opportunity that could have created the beginnings of a sustainable solution that would have benefitted Turkey as well as the Kurds fell by the wayside with Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria.

In many ways, Mr. Erdogan’s decision to opt for a military solution fits the mould of a critical mass of world leaders who look at the world through a civilizational prism and often view national borders in relative terms.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin pointed the way with his 2008 intervention in Georgia and the annexation in 2014 of Crimea as well as Russia’s stirring of pro-Russian insurgencies in two regions of Ukraine.

Mr. Erdogan appears to believe that if Mr. Putin can pull it off, so can he.

Extorting Ukraine is Bad Enough- But Trump Has Done Much Worse

Rebecca Gordon

Recently a friend who follows the news a bit less obsessively than I do said, “I thought George W. Bush was bad, but it seems like Donald Trump is even worse. What do you think?”

“Well,” I replied, “in terms of causing death and destruction, I suspect Bush still has the edge.” In fact, the U.S.-led forever wars begun under the Bush administration have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan (almost half a million by one respected estimate). And those are only directly caused, violent deaths. Several times that many have reportedly died from hunger, illness, and infrastructure collapse.

Millions more have become refugees. The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) says that, worldwide, “[t]here are almost 2.5 million registered refugees from Afghanistan. They comprise the largest protracted refugee population in Asia and the second largest refugee population in the world.” The numbers for Iraq are even higher. UNHCR reports that 3.3 million Iraqis were displaced by the various conflicts that followed the U.S. invasion of 2003 (though most of them remain in-country). Eleven million people, a quarter of the population, still need humanitarian aid.

Things are so bad that, since early October, Iraqis in Baghdad and some other cities have united across sectarian lines to risk death and injury in demonstrations demanding changes from the government. As Reuters explains it:

“After decades of war against its neighbors, U.N. sanctions, two U.S. invasions, foreign occupation, and sectarian civil war, the defeat of the Islamic State insurgency in 2017 means Iraq is now at peace and free to trade for the first extended period since the 1970s. Oil output is at record levels. But infrastructure is decrepit and deteriorating, war-damaged cities have yet to be rebuilt, and armed groups still wield power on the streets.”

So much for Operation Enduring Freedom. In terms of creating sheer human misery, George W. definitely has The Donald beat for now. But despite Trump’s frequently voiced desire “to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home,” he may yet do more harm than his Republican predecessor.

At the very least, he deserves impeachment as much as Bush did.

ITMFA

Back in 2006, when Bush was president, a reader of the gay sex-advice columnist and podcaster Dan Savage suggested a campaign to “Impeach the Mother-Fucker Already.” ITMFA was the mock acronym — a play on Savage’s frequent advice to readers in bad relationships that they should DTMFA (the “D” being for “dump”). In response, Savage would have a bunch of ITMFA pins and buttons made and raise about $20,000, which he split between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and two Democratic senatorial campaigns.

In 2017, Savage again took stock of the country’s situation. “I didn’t think I’d see a worse president than George W. Bush in my lifetime. But here we are,” he wrote. So he added a new line of T-shirts, hats, and mugs to the ITMFA store, and sales have allowed him to donate more than $250,000 to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Of course, Savage wasn’t the only one already talking about impeachment in 2017. That June, Representatives Brad Sherman (D-CA) and Al Green (D-TX) actually presented an impeachment resolution on the House floor. Its single Article of Impeachment accused President Trump of using the power of his office to “hinder and cause the termination of” the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election by threatening and ultimately firing FBI Director James Comey. It also cited Trump’s efforts to get Comey to “curtail” an investigation into Lt. General Michael Flynn who had briefly served as the president’s national security advisor. Flynn would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI about calls he made to Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. soon after Trump’s election victory.

Since October 2017, Representative Green has repeatedly introduced a different set of Articles focused on the president’s obvious and vocal racism:

“In his capacity as President of the United States… Donald John Trump has with his statements done more than insult individuals and groups of Americans, he has harmed the society of the United States, brought shame and dishonor to the office of President of the United States, sowing discord among the people of the United States by associating the majesty and dignity of the presidency with causes rooted in white supremacy, bigotry, racism, anti-Semitism, white nationalism, or neo-Nazism on one or more of the following occasions…”

The resolution goes on to list a number of Trump’s racist interventions, including calling some of the white supremacists and neo-Nazi protestors who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (and one of whom murdered counter-demonstrator Heather Heyer by driving his car into a crowd), “very fine people”; sharing on social media anti-Muslim videos originally posted by Britain First, a minor English far-right party; attempting to prevent Muslims from entering the U.S. by executive order; attacking professional football players for taking a knee during the national anthem; accusing Puerto Ricans of throwing the U.S. “budget out of whack” in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma; and insulting Representative Frederica Wilson, an African American congresswoman, by calling her “wacky.”

The House has repeatedly rebuffed Green’s efforts, most recently in July 2019, when it voted 332-95 to table the measure, effectively killing it.

What a difference a couple of months can make.

Impeachment Fever Rising

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows, even with a 54% majority in the House of Representatives, the Democratic leadership has long resisted calls to impeach the president, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi did a masterful job restraining the party’s left wing. Whatever I thought of her position on impeachment then, I had to admire her consummate parliamentary skills. She happens to represent my congressional district, so I’ve been a Pelosi-watcher ever since I worked for her opponent in her first congressional primary in 1987.

Impeachment advocates had hoped this would change with the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Although the report did document numerous presidential efforts to obstruct the inquiry, the special counsel declined to speculate on the question of Trump’s guilt, arguing that Justice Department rulings prohibit the indictment of a sitting president. Nevertheless, in his first public statement, Mueller made it clear that his team’s work did not exonerate the president: “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

With their eyes on the 2020 election season, however, Democratic Party centrists continued to argue that, because Trump would inevitably survive a trial in the Republican-dominated Senate, impeachment was a futile exercise. Worse, it might well stir up the president’s base and so improve his chances of reelection.

That all changed this August with a whistleblower’s revelation that the president had used a July 25th telephone call to press Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. At the time, Trump had, without explanation, also frozen $391 million in U.S. military aid previously appropriated by Congress to help Ukraine resist separatists and their Russian allies fighting on its territory.

Under pressure, the White House released a two-page synopsis of the call, thinking that this would calm things down. It had the opposite effect. In that document, which is not quite a transcript and might not be complete, Zelensky, a comedian elected president after playing that very role in a popular TV series, told Trump that Ukraine was “almost ready to buy more Javelins [U.S. anti-tank missiles] from the United States for defense purposes.”

Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though, because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…” (The ellipsis, which may or may not represent missing material, marks the end of his sentence.) Trump was referring to a discredited conspiracy theory in which a supposedly missing Democratic National Committee computer server, hacked by Russia during election 2016 according to the Mueller investigation, ended up in Ukraine. (There is, in fact, no missing server, here or in Ukraine.)

Later, Trump asked Zelensky to look into a previous Ukrainian government’s ousting of prosecutor Viktor Shokin for corruption. Specifically, he wanted his counterpart to check out the theory that then-Vice President Joe Biden engineered Shokin’s dismissal to protect his son, Hunter, who then held a seat on the board of Burisma, a natural gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch that was under investigation. It seems clear that Shokin really was corrupt and that Joe Biden’s role in his ouster was unremarkable. (It seems equally clear, as Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox, that the younger Biden “had no apparent qualifications for the job,” which paid up to $50,000 a month, “except that his father was the vice president and involved in the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.”)

Finally, Donald Trump had done something bad enough — strong-arming a foreign leader into digging up dirt on a likely Democratic Party presidential candidate — to convince the House leadership to initiate impeachment proceedings. Trump had already openly called on Russia to release 33,000 supposedly missing Hillary Clinton emails during the 2016 election. He had now invited a second country to interfere in U.S. elections and then tripled down by publicly asking China to do the same. All of this should be enough to demonstrate that the president has violated his oath of office on multiple occasions. ITMFA.

High(er) Crimes and Misdemeanors

Extorting political favors is bad enough, but Donald J. Trump has done so much worse, even if his true highest crimes and misdemeanors aren’t ever likely to make it into the Articles of Impeachment finally sent to the Senate. These, to my mind, would include:

* Violating U.S. responsibilities toward refugees under international humanitarian law as defined in treaties and conventions this country long ago signed and ratified: In his behavior towards asylum-seekers and other migrants at our southern border, Trump, who began his 2015 election campaign by denouncing Mexicans as “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists,” has as president turned his back on decades of international consensus on the rights of refugees. He, of course, oversaw an administration that instituted a cruel policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants, causing thousands of children to be cut off from their parents. He also allowed such children to be held for weeks in stinking, filthy cages near the U.S. border.

More recently, he has pursued “safe third country” deals with the very nations — El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — that people are fleeing, in part, because of drug cartel violence and their governments’ inability, or unwillingness, to stop it. How can Mexico, for example, be a “safe” alternative for Salvadorans fleeing gang violence when its own citizens are seeking asylum in the United States for similar reasons?

He has also slashed to 18,000 the number of refugees allowed to enter the United States annually. (One hundred and ten thousand were accepted in Barack Obama’s final year as president.) He has, in other words, caused the country to turn its back on its international responsibilities, as well as on millions of human beings in desperate need of help around the world.

* Unlike other wealthy people elected president, Donald Trump refused from the outset to put his assets in a blind trust, arguing that “conflicts of interest laws simply do not apply to the president.” The purpose of such a trust is to prevent officials from knowing whether actions they take will result in personal financial benefit. Instead, Trump retained ownership of all his assets through a revocable trust, run for his sole benefit by his own children, and about which he receives regular updates.

The Constitution’s “emoluments” clause prohibits federal office-holders from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” Nevertheless, Trump has continued to benefit personally from money spent by foreign governments at his hotels (and golf clubs), especially his still relatively new Trump International Hotel a few blocks from the White House.

And it’s not only foreign diplomats, domestic lobbyists, and the like who have felt obliged to patronize such Trump properties. On a recent visit to Ireland, Vice President Mike Pence chose to stay at the president’s Doonbeg hotel and golf club, a distant 181 miles from Dublin where his meetings were being held. But there was no presidential pressure involved, as Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short assured reporters: “I don’t think it was a request, like a command. I think that it was a suggestion.” (It’s always possible, of course, that a presidential suggestion carries more weight than your average TripAdvisor review.) The New York Times reports that Pence’s Great America Committee PAC has spent more than $225,000 at the Trump International Hotel, among other Trump properties, since 2017.

Not to be outdone by mere elected officials, the U.S. Air Force has acknowledged that it has lodged airplane crews at Trump’s Turnberry resort in Scotland at least 40 times since 2015, most of them since he was elected, at a cost of more than $184,000.

And undoubtedly such examples just scratch the surface of what a president who happens to be an international real-estate developer can rake in when he puts his mind to it.

* He has caused this country to unilaterally violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement that successfully confined Iran’s nuclear development to serving its domestic energy needs: In May 2018, the president rashly pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration had successfully negotiated. This move has not only induced Iran to begin violating the terms of the agreement, but has destabilized the balance of power in the Middle East, leading to tit-for-tat vessel seizures and further inflaming relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia in dangerous ways. In September, for example, the Trump administration blamed Iran for a drone and missile attack that seriously damaged two key installations where much of the Saudi’s oil is refined.

* His dishonest, vicious, and racially charged rhetoric has cheapened political discourse in this country and is helping to hollow out our democracy: Free conversation about political issues, including sharp disagreements, is essential to a democratic society. But such conversations are only possible when the people involved can assume that everyone will make a good faith effort to tell the truth as they see it, to argue honestly, and to respect each other’s right to participate in the conversation. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has called this approach “discourse ethics” and it should be at the very heart of democratic life.

Trump, of course, is a specialist in telling lies (more than 12,000 of them during his presidency so far, according to the count of the Washington Post). When the head of a democratic nation routinely treats lying as if it were a kind of truth telling in disguise, it changes the rules of political conversation. How can you argue with someone who “trumps” you not with logic, but with “alternative facts”?

Add to that the president’s constant use of insults, especially racially charged ones, to rule some participants out of the conversation altogether. He typically employs adhesive nicknames to “prove” (without evidence) claims about his opponents’ failings (“Crooked Hillary [Clinton],” “Shifty [Adam] Schiff”). Many of his ugliest insults are directed at women of color, calling African American congresswoman Maxine Waters “crazy” with an “extraordinarily low IQ,” for example. Perhaps most famously, he tweeted that four progressive Democrats (and women of color) known as “The Squad” should “go back” to where they came from:

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run.”

Of course, the four (New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib) are, in fact, part of “our government.” They are members of Congress. And by “countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” Trump must have meant the United States, because that’s where three of them were born. The fourth, Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia and is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Remembering Robert Drinan

Thinking about Trump’s impending impeachment reminds me of one of my heroes, Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and congressman from Massachusetts in the Nixon years. He was the first in Congress to call for the president’s impeachment — not for the cover-up of what the White House called “a third-rate burglary” of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, but for what he considered a much worse crime: the multi-year secret carpet-bombing of Cambodia.

That bombing campaign had begun under President Lyndon Johnson, but it expanded in a staggering way in the Nixon years. According to Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program, the U.S. flew more than 231,000 sorties over 115,000 sites, dumping “half a million or more tons of munitions” on that country. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger memorably relayed President Nixon’s orders on the subject to General Alexander Haig: “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves.”

Drinan asked his colleagues in Congress, “Can we impeach a president for concealing a burglary but not for concealing a massive bombing?” Their answer was that they could, although Nixon resigned before the House could vote on its articles of impeachment.

I’m reminded of Robert Drinan now, because once again we’re threatening to impeach a president, this time for a third-rate attempt to extort minor political gain from the government of a vulnerable country (without even the decency of a cover-up). But we’re ignoring Trump’s highest crime, worse even than the ones mentioned above.

He has promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, the 2015 international agreement that was meant to begin a serious international response to the climate crisis now heating the planet. Meanwhile, he’s created an administration that is working in every way imaginable to ensure that yet more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. He is, in other words, a threat not just to the American people, or to the rule of law, but to the whole human species.

And for that he richly deserves to be impeached and convicted.

Death, Misery and Bloodshed in Yemen

Kathy Kelly

“Strike with Creativity” proclaims Raytheon.

Writing about his visit to the world’s largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon’s stall: “Strike with Creativity.” Raytheon manufactures Paveway laser-guided bombs, fragments of which have been found in the wreckage of schools, hospitals, and markets across Yemen. How can a weapons manufacturer that causes such death, bloodshed, and misery lay claim to creativity?

Greta Thunberg, sitting alone outside her school as she initiated a movement of climate strikes, could properly invoke the words “Strike with Creativity.” She inspired Friday classroom walkouts, worldwide, by young people protesting destruction and death caused by climate catastrophe. Her admirable goal is to save the planet by promoting such strikes.

Coming from Raytheon, the words “Strike with Creativity” sound chilling, -grotesque.

Consider the Raytheon weapons now demolishing Yemen. Fragments of Raytheon and other U.S. manufactured weapons dot blast sites where Yemeni survivors struggle to collect body parts and scattered bits of clothing, which are needed to compile lists of the dead.

In September, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) hit a detention center in the Dhamar governorate, in the northern highlands of Yemen with seven airstrikes that killed at least 100 people and “pulverized” the area, according to Bethan McKernan, reporting for The Guardian. “It took five days to remove all the bodies impaled on metalwork ripped from the walls in the blasts,” she wrote.

After the attack, McKernan interviewed Adel, a 22-year-old security guard  employed at the site. His brother, Ahmed, also a guard, was among those killed. Adel pointed to a blanket, visible on the second floor of a building where the guards had slept. “You can see Ahmed’s blue blanket up there,” said Adel. “There were 200 people here but now it’s just ghosts.”

Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Saudi-led coalition bombarding and blockading Yemen have killed tens of thousands, wrecking the country’s already enfeebled infrastructure and bringing Yemen to the brink of a famine that may kill millions. President Trump signaled additional support for Saudi Arabia on October 11 when the U.S. military announced it would send thousands more troops to the kingdom, bringing the number of U.S. troops there to 14,000.

Just as Greta Thunberg insists adults must become intensely aware of details and possible solutions regarding the climate catastrophe, people in the U.S. should learn about ways to end economic as well as military war waged against Yemen. For us to understand why Yemenis would link together in the loose coalition of fighters called Huthis requires deepening awareness of how financial institutions, in attempting to gain control of valuable resources, have pushed farmers and villagers across Yemen into debt and desperation. Isa Blumi writes about this sordid history in his 2018 book, Destroying Yemen, What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World.

Blumi details how Yemen’s society, largely independent and agrarian, became a guinea pig for International Monetary Fund (IMF) “development projects” which, based on strikingly colonialist theories of  modernization, crushed grassroots institutions and amounted to “cost-effective ways of prying Yemen’s wealth out of its peoples’ hands.”

Local Development Associations, for example, were formed during the 1970s to help people hang on to their land, cooperatively determine what crops they would grow and decide how they would use the profits. But U.S. Agency for International Development “experts” pressured these groups to instead produce “cash crops strictly meant for export.”

“After all,” Blumi writes, “with the right kind of cash crop and the use of American labor-saving technology, pesticides and fertilizers included, Yemen’s villagers were no longer needed in the fields. Alternatively, they could work in cities in sweatshops producing clothes for a global market or the soon booming oil and gas projects.”

Blumi’s book documents the fiercely stubborn creativity with which, decade by decade, Yemenis kept surprising the West, exploring and pursuing countermeasures to resist its exploitative control, and risking the West’s destructive anger.

Yemenis resisted U.N. and IMF prescriptions of global integration and debt peonage. When farmers desperate for cash went to work in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, “they consistently sent remittances home to families that saved the cash and invested in local projects, using local bank transfers.” Imams and village leaders encouraged people to resist imperialist “modernization” projects, knowing that the West’s preferred “modern” role for them was as wage slaves with no hope of developing a better future.

The “Huthi” movement began when Husayn al-Huthi, an opponent of Yemen’s dictatorial (and Western-allied) Saleh regime, tried to defend the water and land rights of locals in the Sa’adah province in northwestern Yemen. Sharing what was then a porous and informal border with the KSA, they often found themselves in disputes with Saudi border patrols. They also resisted ‘structural adjustment’ demands by the IMF to privatize some of Yemen’s best farming and grazing land. When the dictator Saleh made criminal concessions to the KSA, al-Huthi and his followers persisted with protests. Each new confrontation won over thousands of people, eventually spreading beyond Sa’adah.

Blumi cites numerous instances in which Yemen’s economic assets were pillaged, with Saleh’s approval, by “well-heeled global financial interests” who now designate Saleh’s successor Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi as Yemen’s “internationally recognized government.” Hadi governs from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, due to a stunning lack of Yemeni support.

Strike with_Creativity cartoon – Sean Reynolds

In 2008, an extremely wealthy member of the bin Laden family aimed to build a bridge across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen to Djibouti. The project could generate hundreds of billions for investors, and quicken the process of exploitative modernization; but it would also require building railways and roads where there are only villages now. People living along the coastline of the Red Sea would be in the way.

Since 2015, fighting has been concentrated in this area, called the Tihama. Control of the coastline would also allow financial takeover of potentially profitable Yemeni fisheries. Blumi says billions of dollars of annual income are at stake, noting with irony that a war causing starvation is being waged, in part, to gain control over food assets.

A recent United Nations report says that Yemen is now “on course to become the world’s poorest country” with 79 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 65 percent classified as “extremely poor.” The Yemen Data Project estimated 600 civilian structures have been destroyed, monthly, in Yemen, mostly by airstrikes.

“Staple food items are now on average 150 per cent higher than before the crisis escalated,” says a 2019 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Teachers, health workers and civil servants in the northern parts of the country haven’t been paid in years,” according to the same report.

Mainstream media reports could convince concerned onlookers that Yemenis have been particularly vulnerable to violence and war because they are socially and economically backward, having failed to modernize. Blumi insists we recognize the guilt of financial elites from multiple countries within and beyond the Gulf states as well as institutions within the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. It’s wrong to blame “eighty percent of a country’s population currently being starved to death”

Here in the United States, news commentators discussing the Trump impeachment story liken the breaking developments to “bombshell after bombshell.” In Yemen, real and horribly modern bombshells, made in the United States, kill and maim Yemeni civilians, including children, every day.

Greta Thunberg continues calling us to join her on an unfamiliar, unprecedented, and arduous path to change course as our world careens toward terrifying devastation. We’re offered a chance to resist destructive, albeit “modern” means of exploiting the planet’s resources. A true strike for creativity, necessarily challenging militarism and greed, will help prevent the hellish process of destroying Yemen.

New Zealand housing crisis worsens under Labour government

John Braddock

Nearly two years into its term in office, and ten months after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared that 2019 would be her Labour Party-led government’s “year of delivery,” one of New Zealand’s major social issues—housing—is embroiled in an escalating crisis.

New Zealand and Canada are two countries with the most unsustainable housing markets in the world, according to Bloomberg. They have the highest cost of housing compared with wages, beating Australia, the UK, Norway and Sweden (which are all vulnerable), and the highest house price to rent ratio. Housing costs have soared due to rampant speculation, overwhelmingly by wealthy NZ-based investors.

The biggest city, Auckland, population 1.65 million, is the focus of the housing bubble, with average prices over $900,000. Between 2013 and 2018 Auckland’s population expanded by 11 percent, while the number of private dwellings increased just 6.5 percent. In 2017, the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment put Auckland’s housing shortfall at 44,738 homes.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of investment properties sit empty, with their value steadily increasing. Census figures show last year there were 33,360 unoccupied houses in Auckland alone, an increase of 6,000 (18 percent) compared with 2013.

Due largely to the construction of apartment blocks, rental supply is far outstripping new owner-occupier dwellings. Nevertheless, there is still a desperate shortage of rental properties in the major cities.

The number of rentals increased 25 percent over the past decade while home ownership went up just 5 percent. Every year since 2013 the gap has grown, with 9,725 completed homes in 2017 compared to an estimated increase in demand of 18,007.

In a country where home ownership has, since the 1930s depression, been considered essential to maintaining decent living standards, 35 percent of households now live in rented accommodation. The number of those renting under 65-years-old doubled between 2013 and 2018. Statistics NZ data indicates that owner-occupiers now come almost exclusively from the upper salary bands, above $84,500 per annum.

In the capital, Wellington, the demand for rental properties has this year pushed median weekly rents up by $60 to $540 per week. The increase equates to $3,120 over 12 months. The inner city, where students are largely concentrated, has the highest median weekly rent at $575, up 15 percent on last year.

Working-class areas are equally squeezed. The Dominion Post reported in July that a two-bedroom property in Lower Hutt, “priced in the low $400s,” was one of the Wellington region’s most in-demand rental listings: it attracted 76 enquiries in its first two days.

Nationwide, median weekly rents hit $500 in April for the first time, a 5.3 percent increase over the previous year. Last month, the number of people waiting for public housing grew to more than 13,000, a record number, despite a $50 million increase in government emergency accommodation funding.

This increase in funding has proven totally inadequate to addressing the worsening crisis. At least 40,000 people, one in 100, are homeless, but the May budget only provided funding for just over 1,000 new emergency housing places. While the state’s Housing NZ remains the largest residential landlord, with 60,000 properties, successive governments have not only failed to maintain an adequate supply of decent social housing, much of it has been sold off.

The New Zealand Herald reported last month that many Auckland landlords are charging the government exorbitant amounts of money, often $300 a night, to temporarily accommodate homeless people. Beneficiary advocates told Radio NZ that landlords are “profiting” off the homeless while offering none of the support that proper public housing needs. One owner was charging $2,100 per week for a three-bedroom suburban house in South Auckland.

Poland: Law and Justice Party wins second term in office, loses majority in the Senate

Clara Weiss

The far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) won 43.49 percent in Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Poland, up from the 37.6 percent it received in the previous parliamentary elections in 2015.

The Civic Coalition (KO), comprised of, among others, the liberal Civic Platform (PO), the Polish Greens, and the Nowoczesna (“Modern”) party, received only 27.40 percent. The Lewica coalition, which includes pseudo-left parties like Razem (Together) and Wiosna (Spring) as well as the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), had hoped to achieve between 20 and 27 percent, but received only 12.56 percent of the votes. Voter turnout stood at 61.7 percent.

PiS retained its majority in the Sejm (lower house of parliament), but lost its majority in the Senate where it will now hold 48 seats. The opposition parties from KO and the Lewica and the PSL will together also hold 48 seats.

While PiS polled over 60 percent in its traditional bastions in the predominantly rural East and southeast of the country, the liberal opposition failed to win a majority in all but one region.

Nevertheless, the electoral victory for PiS was narrower than the ruling party had expected. PiS headquarters, according to a report by Politico, were “far from euphoric.” In an evident sign of nervousness within the party, its head Jarosław Kaczyński stated, “We received a lot, but we deserve more.”

The election marks a deepening of the years-long political crisis in Poland. Since PiS became the ruling party in 2015, when it won an overwhelming majority in both houses of parliament, it has implemented far-reaching methods aimed at creating an authoritarian regime by criminalizing speech and historical research on Polish anti-Semitism, whipping up xenophobic and nationalist sentiments, and transforming Poland into a leading bulwark of US imperialism’s war preparations against Russia, spending billions on military armament and the creation of paramilitary structures.

PiS has thus stood at the forefront of the international turn of the bourgeoisie to the right and the promotion of far-right forces and militarism. This has created conditions in which the largest march of fascists in Europe since the end of World War II took place in the Polish capital Warsaw in 2017. Last year, Polish president Andrzej Duda and prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki demonstratively joined a demonstration of a quarter million people dominated by the far-right on the occasion of Poland’s “Independence Day.”

The fact that PiS was nevertheless reelected is largely due to the incapacity and, indeed, unwillingness of the official opposition to capitalize on the social and political opposition to PiS in the working class. For years, the official opposition parties have focused their criticism of PiS on appeals to the EU and especially German imperialism. They are speaking for a section of the bourgeoisie and upper middle class that is as fervently pro-war and anti-Russian as PiS but fear that the latter’s almost exclusive reliance on the US as an ally endangers Poland’s geopolitical and economic interests.

Their biggest fear, however, is that a genuinely left-wing opposition to the PiS government will emerge from within the working class. In the spring, 300,000 Polish teachers went on a national general strike, one of the largest in Poland since 1989, when the Polish People’s Republic was destroyed by the Stalinist bureaucracy and capitalism was restored. The strike shook the entire political establishment in Poland and provided an inkling of the enormous class and political tensions that have been building up in the country.

Teachers were seething with anger not only over the poverty wages they receive, but also about the education reform by PiS that has been aimed at transforming schools into a vehicles for nationalist and historically revisionist propaganda.

However, the PO-aligned teachers’ unions worked systematically to sabotage the teachers’ strike. Blacking out all political issues from the strike, they eventually sold it out, leaving teachers without virtually any gains after an embittered 17-day struggle.

The unions also opposed any renewed strike before the elections, even though a vast majority of the teachers have indicated that they were ready to go on strike again. The unions eventually called for a national work-to-rule protest which began on Tuesday in a effort to dissipate teachers’ anger.

According to recent statistics, Polish teachers make only 59 percent of the average pay of teachers in the European Union.

The liberal opposition has consciously decided to focus exclusively on mobilizing its traditional base in sections of the upper-middle class, and the EU-oriented educated intelligentsia. Throughout the campaign, the opposition refused to make any appeals to social discontent, and made barely a mention of the dictatorial measures, historical revisionism and build-up of fascist forces openly pursued by PiS.

Under these conditions, PiS, has been able to exploit the opposition’s collaboration in stifling workers’ anger and the fact that the liberal parties are correctly associated with years of devastating austerity and privatization programs.