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~ Featuring ~
Should U.S.-Saudi Alliance Be Saved?
by PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
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Caravan migrants in limbo as UN, Mexico negotiate
by Anna GiaritelliHow Health Insurance Failed America
by Merrill Matthews
{ipi.org} ~ The health insurance system has failed America. Most of the blame lies with state and especially federal government intervention... Lawmakers have increasingly abandoned long-standing actuarial principles, culminating in the Affordable Care Act. The result is insurers are increasingly covering small and routine health expenditures and exposing patients to very expensive costs, turning the principle of health insurance upside down. Short of repealing scumbag/liar-nObamacare, Congress should give insurers enough flexibility to operate outside of the current restrictions. Can the health insurance system be fixed? Maybe, but only if politicians are willing to let it function like real insurance rather than using it as a social justice tool to achieve their vision of “fairness”—and their chances of reelection.The principle behind any type of insurance is simple: People or businesses face a risk and want to avoid the full cost of that risk if it occurs. So, for example, individuals who want to limit the financial risk of death may buy life insurance. Those who want to reduce the risk of financial loss if their homes are robbed or destroyed buy property insurance. In each case the applicant applies for coverage and the insurer assesses the risk the applicant brings to the insurance pool and charges a premium based on that risk—or declines to offer coverage if the risk is too high....
Michigan’s Red-Green Axis
by Jim Simpson.
Guatemala Claims It Has Detained 100 ISIS Terrorists
Hiding in Illegal Alien Caravan
by Warner Todd HustonLicense to Kill
by LARRY DIAMOND
{the-american-interest.com} ~ With the astonishingly rapid accumulation of photographic and documentary evidence, leaked intelligence intercepts, and first-rate journalistic reporting... it is increasingly clear that the Saudi state brutally murdered journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul on October 2. The floating of the first lame attempt at a cover story—that Khashoggi, who was shown on surveillance tape entering the consulate but never leaving, had somehow disappeared for his own mysterious reasons—melted like a cube of ice in the Saudi desert. Any notion that Khashoggi’s murder was a “rogue operation” of interrogation gone awry will similarly melt in the face of withering evidence and logic. You don’t bring the kind of 15-member team of security officials—including a leading expert in forensic medicine—to conduct an interrogation unless you intend it to end with murder that must be thoroughly covered up. You don’t immediately scrub and repaint the scene of the interrogation if there was no crime to cover up. And, if the Turkish intelligence accounts are true, you don’t bring a bone saw to an “interrogation” unless you not only intend to murder the detainee but also to dismember his body to enable inconspicuous evacuation of the remains from the scene of the crime, and indeed the country. Moreover, as former CIA Director scumbag/commie-John Brennan observed on Meet the Press last Sunday, it is inconceivable that such a complex, heinous and brazen international criminal operation could have been mounted without the knowledge of the now de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the audacious and impulsive young man who appears to be making all the country’s key decisions, foreign and domestic—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Since being elevated to his current position in June 2017, the 33-year-old Crown Prince has alternately appeared as both reformer and repressor, an agent of badly needed social modernization and a throwback to royal despotism. His efforts to rein in the vast social power of the extreme Wahhabi religious establishment raised the prospect of a gradual but sweeping transformation toward greater openness, rationality, moderation, and innovation. But his ruthless power grabs—his rapid, driven ascent at barely half the age of royal competitors, breaking all the rules of Saudi royal succession; his detention and alleged coercive interrogation of a wide swath of the Saudi elite shortly after taking power; and his merciless, indiscriminate use of Saudi military force in Yemen, spreading death and displacement on a scale that could amount to war crimes—have suggested a darker, Shakespearian streak: breathtaking personal ambition tinged with total and ruthless resolve. Well before Khashoggi’s murder, some worried that the international persona of the charming, tech-savvy prince might mask a chilling, psychopathic streak...
Should U.S.-Saudi Alliance Be Saved?
by PATRICK J. BUCHANAN
{wnd.com} ~ Over the weekend Donald Trump warned of “severe punishment” if an investigation concludes that a Saudi hit team murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Riyadh then counter-threatened, reminding us that, as the world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia “plays an impactful and active role in the global economy.”
Message: Sanction us, and we may just sanction you.
Some of us yet recall how President Nixon’s rescue of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War triggered a Saudi oil embargo that led to months of long gas lines in the United States, and contributed to Nixon’s fall.
Yesterday, a week after Jared Kushner had been assured by his friend Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Khashoggi walked out of the consulate, Trump put through a call to King Salman himself.
According to a Trump tweet, the king denied “any knowledge of whatever may have happened ‘to our Saudi Arabian citizen.'”
Trump said he was “immediately” sending Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Riyadh to meet with the king on the crisis. The confrontation is escalating. Crown Prince Mohammed and King Salman have both now put their nation’s honor and credibility on the line.
Both are saying that what the Turks claim they can prove – Khashoggi was tortured and murdered in the consulate, cut up, and his body parts flown to Saudi Arabia – is a lie.
For Trump and the U.S., this appears a classic case of the claims of international morality clashing with the claims of national interest.
The archetype occurred in the mid-1870s when Ottoman Turks perpetrated a slaughter of Bulgarian Christians under their rule.
Former Prime Minister William Gladstone set Britain ablaze with a pamphlet titled, “The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East,” calling for the expulsion of the Turks from Europe.
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and Queen Victoria were apoplectic. For they were relying on the Turks to block the encroachment of Czarist Russia into the Eastern Balkans and down to the Turkish Straits.
Disraeli prevailed. The Brits put morality on the shelf.
For the U.S., morality and interests collided when FDR recognized the Bolshevik regime of Josef Stalin in 1933, even as Stalin’s agents were starving to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and landowners.
Foreign-policy moralists also took a holiday to cheer Nixon for flying to Peking and toasting Mao Zedong, even as Chairman Mao’s Red Guards were carrying out the national pogrom known as the Cultural Revolution.
Questions arise: If Khashoggi was assassinated and the order came from the royal family, does that make the Saudis morally unacceptable to us as allies or partners in the Middle East? And if it does, how do we justify our Cold War ties to autocrats such as Chile’s Gen. Pinochet, South Korea’s Gen. Park Chung-hee, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, or the shah of Iran?
How did Franklin Roosevelt handle such associations? “He may be an SOB,” FDR said of one Caribbean dictator, “but he’s our SOB.”
During World War II, when the Germans uncovered in the Katyn Forest a vast gravesite containing the remains of thousands from Poland’s officer corps, dating to Stalin’s occupation, Poles in Britain came to Prime Minister Churchill to ask for an investigation.
Churchill, for whom Stalin was by now an indispensable ally, replied dismissively: “There is no use prowling round the 3-year-old graves of Smolensk.”
Nor is it only during wartime that the U.S. has associated with authoritarians with repellent human rights records.
The U.S. maintains a treaty alliance with the Philippines of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has approved the extrajudicial killing of drug dealers, thousands of whom have been murdered.
Gen. el-Sissi came to power in Cairo in a military coup that ousted an elected government headed by a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who is, along with thousands of Brotherhood members, now in prison.
Since the coup attempt in NATO ally Turkey in 2017, President Recep Erdogan has imprisoned thousands, including more journalists than any country on earth.
Last week came reports that China has arrested the head of Interpol, and has indeed been operating an archipelago of re-education camps in its west to purge the ethnic and religious beliefs of the Uighur people.
As for Saudi Arabia, members of Congress are said to be readying sanctions to impose on the Saudi regime if it is proven Khashoggi was killed on royal orders.
However, which would be a greater violation of human rights: the sanctioned killing of a political enemy of the regime or 10,000 dead Yemenis, including women and children, and millions facing malnutrition and starvation in a Saudi war of aggression being fought with the complicity and cooperation of the United States?
Rather than resist Congress’ proposed sanctions, President Trump might take this opportunity to begin a long withdrawal from decades of entanglement in Mideast wars that have availed us nothing and cost us greatly.
Comments
Bonnie
I stand with you on both issues. Especially on the UN. They are worthless and has been against the USA on many issues.
i do not trust the UN but these people are NOT our problem or anyone elses they are their own problem and are creating a worldwide disaster. stay home make your country better
as for the US and Saudi relationship God how many 9/11 hijackers came from there i do not trust their explanation i doubt the pres believes much of it. relationships should be based on trust but they do alot in the middle east ok for themselves but they do help us in someways it is a/o fine line to get out ok i am fine w/that but it is not up to me