https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/06/26/the-us-supreme-courts-rulings-on-abortion-and-guns-could-unleash-a-firestorm/

The decisions are tantamount to pouring petrol over political, religious and racial brushfires.

Two massive earthquakes rocked the US last week. Sweeping rulings by the Supreme Court on guns and abortion widened already yawning crevices along two great national fault-lines: race and religion.

The abortion ruling, although no surprise, was still a shocking blow to American women. On Friday morning at 9:59, and for 50 years before that, they had the right to decide whether to give birth. By 10:01, that freedom vanished.

The Court had never before eliminated an individual constitutional right and handed the power to state governments. About half will severely restrict or virtually eliminate reproductive freedom.

But the ruling goes much further, eliminating the constitutional right to privacy. Chief Justice John Roberts failed to secure a compromise to save it. Now basic rights such as contraception and marriage equality have no established constitutional basis.

Mr Roberts is a political conservative, not a religious extremist. So, the new majority of hardline Catholic judges breezily ignores him while imposing its fundamentalist agenda on constitutional law, now eyeing those sinful privacy rights.

Extremism is hardly typical of Catholic Americans. Justices Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor are moderate Catholics. So is President Joe Biden and countless other leading liberals and conservatives. The newly extremist Court is implementing a broad-based Christian radical, not specifically Catholic, agenda. Decades of fundamentalist Protestant activism powered its creation.

The manifest content of the abortion ruling addresses state prerogatives in the federal system. But its latent, and real, significance rests on an article of faith beyond reason and impervious to evidence, debate or refutation (and therefore above and beyond courts). This decisive doctrine holds that, as a manifestation of divine will, human beings come fully into existence at conception.

This insistence that human life is, in all meaningful senses, fully realised at the moment of conception is indispensable, because if there is transformative development as a fertilised zygote becomes a baby about to be born, the issue inevitably becomes what stage of development demands government protection, returning from a metaphysical register to a legal and political one. That question informed the previous rulings that the current Court is trying to permanently obliterate entirely. So, the “life begins at conception” absolutism is essential.

Millions of other Americans (many also devout) in the majority who support regulated reproductive rights just don’t believe that a human being with operative legal personhood materialises the moment fertilisation creates a single-celled zygote.

It’s symptomatic that the rulings themselves, and most media coverage, treat the abortion question as entirely or mainly legal and political, not religious. That’s either calculated subterfuge or neurotic repression. The religious context and subtext of this definitive national rift often appears literally unspeakable.

The resulting mental landscapes are completely irreconcilable.

The left sees a culmination of minority rule by hyper-empowered rural and suburban Christian fundamentalist constituencies over a much larger liberal and moderate, but in the American system often disempowered, urban and coastal majority.

The right is celebrating a textbook example of morality trumping all other values, with half of the states now prohibiting what, since they consider human life to be effectively realised at conception, is a form of murder.

The left visualises suffering young women forced into reproductive servitude, while the right imagines rescued “babies”, as they consider fetuses at every stage of gestation.

Where one side sees health care, the other sees homicide. One side sees hypocrisy, the other honour. One side sees faith, the other fanaticism.

On the losing liberal side, outrage has congealed into gooey, glutenous layers of ever-increasing indignation.

It’s galling enough for them that simple good luck and ruthless Senate chicanery got previous president Donald Trump three Court appointments, the core of the new extremist majority, in a mere four years.

From lucky system-gaming, we move to historically groundbreaking heights of hypocrisy.

The abortion ruling completely contradicts the supposedly “conservative” principle of stare decisis, which holds that established precedent should generally prevail. Obviously terrible rulings demand correction. But nothing changed, and there’s no Court unanimity for this extraordinary reversal, let alone majority public support. It’s just a naked, opportunistic, and therefore utterly enraging, use of raw, cynically acquired power.

Beyond such magnificent hypocrisy lies a thick and viscous layer of brazen lying, which generates incandescent liberal rage.

Republican Senator Susan Collins has released detailed notes of a 2018 private meeting with then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who vehemently pledged not to overturn abortion rights. She says she was “misled,” a euphemism for being force-fed utter lies. Other senators say he also inundated them with extravagant dishonesty.

Most of the Court majority during their confirmations called abortion rights “settled law” or “important precedent,” or both, and vowed to uphold stare decisis and abjure “judicial activism” that might impose their personal beliefs.

Now they’ve jumped at the first opportunity to do exactly that.

The perception of justices as smug, sanctimonious and shameless black-robed hucksters was strongly reinforced by the other major ruling last week. The Court prohibited states from preventing individuals carrying firearms in most public places.

But don’t worry: courts lead the tiny list of explicitly protected exceptions.

The Court was in the news for another major ruling last week, when it prohibited states from preventing individuals carrying firearms in most public places.

It came weeks after massacres at a Buffalo supermarket and Texas elementary school reminded us of the inconceivable US average rate of more than one mass shooting per day this year. With the American majority in favour of gun regulation, a modest bill finally passed the Senate.

Employing “originalism” and “textualism”, the Court doubled down on a misreading of the Second Amendment. It sanctifies the passage about not infringing “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” while pretending such rights are not specifically framed in the context of “a well-regulated militia”.

The “militias” that are the actual subject of the Amendment evolved into state National Guards. The idea that any of this guarantees individual gun rights was unknown before the 1960s.

If the defining subtext of abortion is religion, on guns it is race.

The “well-regulated militia”, and hence the Second Amendment, was partly about fear of slave rebellions. White supremacy motivates many of today’s worst bloodbaths. Black men with guns are viewed and treated very differently than white men with guns. Imagine how this Court would rule on people flaunting firearms in public if the January 6 insurrection had been led by Black Panthers rather than Proud Boys?

With the FBI warning about the growing threat of right-wing violence, the Court is either intentionally encouraging domestic terrorists or simply doesn’t care. In its America, states have no power to stop thugs menacing folk with assault rifles, but they are now free to force a raped woman to carry and deliver her assailant’s child.

These fanatics must know they’re playing with fire. The January 6 hearings, with their damning revelations, have provoked an intensifying atmosphere of political violence. Escalating threats are the spitting embers smoldering under the American landscape.

The Court just gleefully poured gasoline on political, religious, and racial brushfires, enormously increasing chances they’ll converge into a national firestorm.

No American institution is doing more to fan the flames of fear and hatred. And none will face and deserve a harsher historical indictment if the country, as seems increasingly plausible, endures a sustained paroxysm of political violence.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-23/biden-can-repair-a-rift-and-push-human-rights-in-saudi-arabia?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Achieving the release and right to travel of high-profile critics would strengthen the relationship and improve the Saudis’ position in Washington.

When President Joe Biden visits Saudi Arabia next month, he’ll be moving past the antipathy he expressed during the presidential campaign toward the Saudi government and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He’s right when he says that whatever his personal feelings about the Saudis’ human-rights record, the US partnership with Riyadh is indispensable, for reasons ranging from oil prices to the containment of Iran to great-power competition with China.

But Biden shouldn’t avoid raising human rights with King Salman and the crown prince, known as MBS. A serious conversation about ongoing abuses should be a win-win for the US and the Saudis.

During a campaign debate, Biden spoke for the anger of many Democrats, and even some Republicans in Congress, when he vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” state. Democrats were enraged by the Saudi government’s excessive enthusiasm for then President Donald Trump. That was compounded by concerns over the civilian deaths and devastation of the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Antagonism coalesced over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. The killing was heinous, and Khashoggi had a lot of outraged friends in Washington (including myself).

The grim fact, though, is that justice for the dead is almost never possible, and certainly not for Khashoggi. Even Turkey has given up on the issue and transferred the trial of the accused parties over to Saudi Arabia. Europe has long moved on. Washington, alone, had been struggling to turn the page. Biden recognizes now is the time.

But human rights remain a significant issue, and Biden can raise them in a forward-looking manner that can produce results, rather than a quixotic, backward-looking request for unavailable justice.

Biden ought to bring up specific current cases with MBS and the king when they meet on July 15. He ought to start with asking for the release of the jailed adult children and son-in-law of former top Saudi intelligence official Saad Aljabri, who is in exile.

They are imprisoned on money-laundering and conspiracy charges that seem obviously trumped up, and are in effect being held hostage because their father was an associate of MBS’s most potent rival in the Saudi royal family, former Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. Nayef and Aljabri were key figures in cooperating with Washington on counterterrorism at the height of the al-Qaeda threat.

Biden should also appeal on behalf of the group of recently freed women’s-rights advocates, including restoring the right to travel of Loujain Alhathloul, a key campaigner for women’s right to drive. He should push for allowing the recently released blogger Raif Badawi to use social media as well as travel. And he should press for the release of jailed government critics including the aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan and activist Mohammed al-Rabiah.

Biden is right that statecraft involves unpalatable choices. He’s not the first president to have campaigned on a human-rights platform only to meet the realities of the Middle East. So did Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Saudi Arabia isn’t the only country on the itinerary that recently saw the death of a prominent journalist critic. His first stop, on July 13, will be in Jerusalem. Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank have been strongly implicated in what looks like a deliberate killing this May of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Biden should raise that issue and see what he can do about curtailing other Israeli abuses in the Palestinian territories.

But the more politically sensitive journey is to Saudi Arabia. If Biden can come away with some progress on outstanding human-rights cases, it will help justify his decision to go forward with the relationship. And MBS and company will gain a more sympathetic hearing for not only their strategic partnership with Washington but also the social and cultural liberalization underway in the country, which has been overshadowed by the Khashoggi murder.

There will still be critics on the left and right who want to terminate the US-Saudi partnership. But they’re basically neo-isolationists opposed to US global leadership. Washington and Riyadh have been partners for decades because they share a common interest in maintaining the global and regional status quo. That hasn’t changed. By pressing on human rights, Biden can make the partnership stronger.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/06/20/trump-may-survive-the-jan-6-capitol-riot-hearings/

Despite ample evidence and unprecedented revelations, he may escape conviction and even get reelected.

After four riveting hearings, mercifully without the usual personal grandstanding, the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection has revealed stunning new information – including unexpectedly implicating a Supreme Court justice – and raised serious conundrums for the US political and constitutional system.

The depth of villainy it has exposed has massively strengthened the potential of a case for criminal charges against former president Donald Trump and his worst confederates. Yet it appears the consequences of this shocking saga of malfeasance at the highest levels against the US constitutional order could prove negligible.

Mr Trump’s conduct was far more viciously malevolent than previously understood. He knew the mob rampaging through Congress was searching for and vowing to “hang” his vice president, Mike Pence. That murderous horde came within a mere 40 feet of him as the vice president was whisked to safety.

Mr Trump’s reaction was a tweet plainly calculated to further inflame anger against Mr Pence and increase chances he could be killed for not agreeing to unlawfully and unconstitutionally block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. A confidential informant has assured the FBI the rioters would certainly have killed Mr Pence if they caught him. According to committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, Mr Trump told his aides Mr Pence “deserves it,” although, of course, he denies it.

To date, the Department of Justice has investigated and prosecuted the rioters, but there is no apparent federal investigation or grand jury probing Mr Trump and his collaborators. They may be strategically leaving that to the committee, for now.

The potential charges against the former president and an attorney, John Eastman, and possibly others including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and a former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, have become blindingly obvious.

Mr Trump and Mr Eastman, who later requested a presidential pardon, could be extremely vulnerable to prosecution for attempting to obstruct an official proceeding of the US, and/or conspiracy to defraud the US, both serious felonies, by seeking, in various ways, to block or subvert the legally-mandated confirmation of the election results by Congress on January 6. 

In a Committee-related civil case in March, a federal judge concluded that Mr Trump and Mr Eastman were probably guilty of both these crimes, declaring “The illegality of the plan was obvious.” Such a finding virtually demands a federal criminal investigation.

Leaders of the white supremacist gangs the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been charged with the exceptionally serious crime of seditious conspiracy because of ample evidence they co-ordinated plans to use force to stop the January 6 procedure.

But it would be extremely difficult to convict Mr Trump or Mr Eastman of seditious conspiracy unless evidence is discovered to specifically tie them to plans to use force. Given Mr Trump’s Mafia-boss style of coded messaging – unsubtle yet indirect hints – to his supporters, that is unlikely to ever emerge.

But it is noteworthy that Mr Trump is suddenly promising presidential pardons for rioters if he’s re-elected, suggesting a potential quid pro quo for their silence. And his most recent 12-page response to the hearings, amid its endless ramblings and incessant fabrications, emphasises time and again how and why he was convinced the 2020 election was fraudulent.

That’s significant because both charges to which he’s vulnerable would require proving his corrupt intent. It should be easy enough, given the parade of his senior officials who testified they told him he really lost a clean election. One confirms he privately blurted out while watching Mr Biden on television, “can you believe I lost to that guy?” while publicly insisting he won.

There’s no defence in US law for “willful blindness” in the aid of a corrupt intent, which former attorney general William Barr strongly suggested Mr Trump was employing when refusing to accept facts and simply moving from one preposterous conspiracy theory to the next in search of some pretext to overthrow the election.

Mr Trump could also be potentially liable for wire fraud charges for raising hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters to supposedly fight election fraud. It was yet another nonexistent Trump fund that went into his own coffers.

He’s clearly, and maybe particularly, vulnerable to state-level criminal charges in Georgia, where he is being investigated regarding his audiotaped effort to convince officials to “find” exactly the number of votes to change the election results in his favor. That may well be the most plausible forum for a criminal reckoning.

Any federal effort to prosecute a former president who may run again and remains wildly popular in much of the country is fraught with immense risks, including future unwarranted revenge prosecutions against other former presidents.

The most unexpected revelations involve the depth of involvement by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in enthusiastically encouraging the corrupt and unconstitutional reversal of the election on the grounds that “there are no rules in war.”

She corresponded with Mr Meadows, Mr Eastman, Republicans in Arizona and others demanding a coup d’etat with “no rules”.

Yet Justice Thomas did not recuse himself from a Supreme Court case in which he alone voted in favour of Mr Trump’s effort to withhold White House communications from the Committee, including the “no rules” message from his own wife to Mr Meadows.

It is unprecedented that the wife of a Supreme Court justice is deeply implicated in a plot to overthrow the constitutional order, and even more that he may have acted corruptly to try to shield her.

The truth of his knowledge and involvement may never be definitively established, but the “no rules” stench will linger over the Court for decades.

Yet despite all this mindboggling venality, it is not in the least clear that the Committee’s superbly choreographed hearings and irrefutable narrative of unimagined corruption has significantly altered the US political equation, or that it ever will.

Most of the right seems impervious to discomforting facts, fed a constant diet of paranoid fantasies by Fox News and never encountering the Committee’s well-documented evidence. If they do, they’re primed to dismiss it as just more spin.

Almost all Republican leaders are, at best, ignoring and refusing to engage with these realities. At worst, they’re actively promoting the stolen election nonsense and “flood the zone with shit,” as Mr Trump’s former campaign chairman and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon more than once explained is the best way to deal with damning facts.

The truth may eventually sink in, or Republican leaders could finally decide they have had enough. But there is no guarantee of either happening.

Mr Trump is clearly nervous, and with good reason. But he may survive even this tsunami of unheard-of Ignominy.

Biden’s Trip Aims at Resurrecting U.S. Leadership in the Middle East

Having found success in reviving the Western alliance after the invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration is seeking a stronger coalition in the Middle East.

On June 14, the White House announced plans for President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first trip to the Middle East since he took office. The trip, set for mid-July, involves much more than simply an effort to buttress ties with traditional partners and, especially, positively recalibrate relations with Saudi Arabia. Coming in the internationally transformative wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the United States appears to be attempting to replicate its success in reviving the Western alliance and reunifying NATO in Europe by reinvigorating and restoring a U.S.-led bloc in the Middle East.

This effort comes amid the apparent failure of indirect negotiations in Vienna to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement with Iran. The talks stalemated largely over Iran’s demand that Washington remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. The negotiations are technically ongoing, but even if the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy remains securing an acceptable agreement with Tehran, the construction of a credible new regime of intensified containment and deterrence against Iran and its network of regional proxies is essential. In short, U.S. foreign policy would look much the same whether or not the Biden administration still really holds out hope that it can still secure an agreement with Iran.

Any strengthened U.S.-led camp in the Middle East will effectively be built on a de facto partnership between Israel and Gulf Cooperation Council states, especially the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as other Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan. Washington is already taking steps to improve ties with all these countries and bring them together in closer cooperation. But the key, as usual, lies in Riyadh, which is why Biden has been so insistent that the main point of his trip is not energy pricing but something “much larger” that is intimately connected to Israel’s security. That sounds a lot like political branding to Capitol Hill for a new Middle East policy that some members of Congress would otherwise find politically unpalatable at first glance.

Ukraine, Vienna, and U.S. Middle East Policy

During his campaign and early on in his administration, Biden seemed to distance himself from Saudi Arabia, so this trip appears to be a major reversal of policy. However, with Biden being only the latest U.S. president to run on a platform emphasizing human rights in foreign policy, the imperatives of statecraft were always likely to intrude on such an agenda. Additionally, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created a new urgency and opportunity for Washington in the Middle East.

The optics and actual dynamics of global power have been significantly altered by the Ukraine war. The Russian military looks like a paper tiger, unable to secure presumed easy victories and far less potent in the field against a much smaller adversary than most had anticipated. The United States, by contrast, while not directly engaged in the conflict, has gained a great deal of credit and credibility by marshaling unexpectedly robust and determined resistance to Russian aggression by European and NATO countries. Indeed, if the current atmosphere persists, Washington will have effectively resurrected a Western alliance in Europe that had been presumed moribund.

This success in rebuilding alliances against a would-be hegemon in Europe has dovetailed with the apparent failure of the Vienna talks. In February, U.S. negotiators, perhaps to a significant degree as a negotiating tactic, insisted that within weeks Iran’s nuclear technological development would render the resurrection of the JCPOA irrelevant. Months later, with no deal in hand and Iran instead enmeshed in a bitter dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency over nuclear residues the agency has discovered that Tehran has not explained, the United States is looking for a Plan B. Since the other options involve walking away from the Gulf region or capitulating to unreasonable Iranian demands, or engaging in military action that would likely be highly destabilizing to the region and unlikely to succeed, the only viable alternative appears to be the creation of a new regime of containment and deterrence against Tehran. Even if the administration holds out significant hope for an agreement in Vienna, a credible effort to create such a new program to contain Iran would be the most obvious means of gaining new leverage with Tehran.

Therefore, U.S. policymakers are seemingly advancing a two-front campaign of containment and deterrence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. All three key U.S. security partners in the Middle East – Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – have hedged their responses regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has clearly served as a red flag for Washington. For a decade, these states had steadily lost confidence in the United States as a security guarantor and consequently began to emphasize strategic diversification. That involved outreach to Washington’s global competitors, such as Russia and China, as well as, particularly in the case of Israel and the UAE, each other. Washington has been particularly alarmed at the rise of Chinese influence. Disputes over the alleged or potential transfer of sensitive U.S. security technology to China has been a source of contention with Israel and the UAE. Saudi Arabia, too, has been seeking to build bridges to Beijing. In response, the United States is trying to not only rebuild its own bilateral relations with the states but to promote and build on their growing cooperation against Iran.

Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia eventually sided with the United States against Russia in a strongly worded U.N. General Assembly resolution condemning the invasion. Yet, all three have also continued to keep the door open to Moscow and, perhaps more tellingly, Beijing. But since all of this was built on a narrative of U.S. decline, and particularly a lack of will and influence, in contrast with the rise of Russia and China, the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine has offered a unique opportunity to change this narrative and therefore restructure the calculations based on it.

Biden’s Evolution on Saudi Arabia

The president’s trip to Saudi Arabia will effectively involve moving U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia beyond anger in the United States toward the Saudi government, especially Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden had campaigned in a way that fully expressed Democrats’ anger over his killing as well as other human rights violations and the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. And when he was first in office, he oversaw the release of a CIA report implicating Mohammed bin Salman in the murder and applied sanctions on some Saudi officials.

Many Saudi officials believed that they had taken substantial steps to meet U.S. demands on pursuing a cease-fire in Yemen, accepting refugees from Afghanistan, and providing aid to factions cooperative with U.S. policy in countries such as Lebanon and Iraq, only to meet with a cold shoulder from the Biden administration on both policy issues and regarding personal snubbing of Saudi leaders, especially Mohammed bin Salman. Tensions frayed to the point where both sides were snubbing each other, with the U.S. president refusing to deal with the Saudi crown prince and he, in turn, declined to meet with some U.S. officials and, eventually, turned down a phone call with Biden personally.

The gesture of Biden meeting personally with Mohammed bin Salman alone will do much to signal a return to normalcy in the relationship with the kingdom, a relationship that the U.S. government had already renormalized, post-Khashoggi, during the administration of former President Donald J. Trump. Biden’s gesture has met with opposition in the United States, especially among Democrats in Congress, but is likely to prove a bilateral fait accompli. But beyond the optics of the visit, no matter how diplomatically and politically important, are the building blocks for a more integrated and reinvigorated U.S.-led camp in the region.

Practical Steps to Build This Bloc

Though doubts in the United States, especially in Congress, and in Gulf Arab countries persist about each other’s reliability and sincerity, 2022 has been replete with practical steps by Washington and regional partners to push to build a more cohesive partnership. Building on the momentum of the Abraham Accords, Israel has reportedly transferred advanced early warning radar systems to the UAE and Bahrain to shore up their missile defenses. The UAE-Israeli partnership has grown rapidly since the accords were signed in the summer of 2020 and have developed extensive security components. Saudi Arabia has dropped restrictions on Israeli businesspeople entering the kingdom, primarily to facilitate security-related commerce. The two countries were nudged closer together when the United States moved to involve Israel in arrangements to transfer sovereignty over two crucial Red Sea islands from Egypt back to Saudi Arabia.

Israeli officials continue to call for an open alliance with Gulf Arab countries against Iran. Biden appeared to be hinting at just such an agenda when discussing his trip with journalists on June 12. He insisted his trip wasn’t mainly about energy pricing, saying “the commitments from the Saudis” that he had been seeking “don’t relate to anything having to do with energy.” Instead, he said, the trip has to do with “national security for them — for Israelis.” He continued, “I have a program — anyway. It has to do with much larger issues than having to do with the energy piece.” Biden has yet to explain what program he began to mention but decided to keep under wraps, but the security component appears obvious, and he linked his trip to Saudi Arabia with Israel’s security in the briefing.

Another key component appears to be falling into place. Since at least November 2021, the UAE has made efforts to secure mutual defense assurances with the United States. While a long-standing Emirati goal, this has become even more urgent since the Iranian-allied Houthis in Yemen launched missile and drone strikes in January on Abu Dhabi killing three people. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly apologized to Abu Dhabi’s then-crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, for what Washington agreed was a delayed response to the attacks. The talks continued into early June when it was reported that a “Strategic Framework Agreement” was being seriously discussed and that the White House’s Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, had delivered a draft agreement to the UAE in late May. While no official announcement has been made by either side, on June 15 prominent and well-connected Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla tweeted that the two countries were on the brink of signing a mutual defense agreement that met all of the UAE’s “specifications.”

Such an agreement could be a major breakthrough in U.S.-Gulf Arab relations and would likely go beyond the benefits that Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar enjoy as designated “major non-NATO allies” of the United States. An agreement signaling a major U.S. commitment to UAE security is a necessary component in the construction of a new, more coordinated, and robust campaign of containment and deterrence against Iran because – lacking Israel’s independent nuclear deterrent and Saudi Arabia’s strategic depth – the UAE is especially vulnerable to devastating missile and drone attacks from Iran or, as the strikes from Yemen demonstrate, Tehran’s allies.

Moreover, it will be an important step in convincing Abu Dhabi – and potentially Saudi Arabia – that the United States is not turning its back on its Gulf Arab allies and is instead willing to recommit to their fundamental security. That may be crucial to convincing these countries, and even Israel, to turn away from a decade of strategic diversification, particularly regarding ties to Russia and China, and to recommit to a security framework in which Washington serves as the coordinating hub. At the same time, Washington will view these discussions as a two-way street, and the administration will need to respond to critics of such an approach, in Congress and elsewhere, and demonstrate that U.S. interests are also being addressed.

In Washington, some proponents of Biden’s trip and a new security commitment to Gulf Arab countries, in cooperation with Israel, are casting it as a first step toward these countries taking the primary responsibility for their own security and regional stability. A major U.S. role will be required for some time to buttress and protect this potential alliance. However, such a regional security structure, if it proves effective and durable, could be a key factor in downsizing the U.S. military footprint in the region and increasingly transferring a defense burden onto local partners.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/06/13/why-is-it-so-hard-for-liz-cheney-to-convince-americans-theyre-victims-of-a-coup-attempt/

For the January 6 committee, what happened in Washington last year couldn’t be more obvious.

The US House of Representatives select committee on the January 6 attack on Congress faces a huge task, and they know it. The hearings they launched last week are the most historically significant since the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s, which led to the resignation of then president Richard Nixon.

The committee is seeking to establish the first comprehensive account of the deadly mob attack that sought to stop the confirmation of President Joe Biden’s victory over his predecessor, Donald Trump. More urgently it is, in effect, serving as the third impeachment hearing against Mr Trump, seeking to ensure that enough Americans understand the gravity of his attack on the US constitutional system that he cannot effectively seek the presidency again.

Last week in these pages I described a looming battle of narratives. The committee didn’t fail at all to embrace the task.

Its opening salvo was strikingly powerful. The committee eschewed the traditional grandstanding and personal political promotion of all of its members and allowed its two leaders – Democratic chairman Benny Thompson of Mississippi and Republican ranking member Liz Cheney of Wyoming – and, more importantly, the facts to tell the story in genuinely riveting fashion.

Mr Thompson presided with dignity and gravitas, pointedly explaining that he represents a part of the country that was historically a hotbed of slavery, segregation, lynching and anti-democracy abuses. But, wisely, the committee allowed Ms Cheney to serve, in effect, as the lead prosecutor.

In recent decades, Republicans have been much better at telling stories than Democrats, who tend to get bogged down in policy data and prescriptions. Ms Cheney’s leadership in the case against Mr Trump reflects that asymmetry. She is a lot better at telling a simple story to the American public than anybody else on the committee.

It is also crucial that she’s a Republican. In attempting to convince Americans that the January 6 insurrection was an unprecedented attack on the US constitutional system, the committee is trying to reach several difficult constituencies. Having the tale largely told by a staunchly conservative Republican with impeccable credentials is essential to giving it a fighting chance at reaching them.

Mr Trump’s ongoing popularity and apparent political viability demonstrates the size of the parts of the public the committee must shift. It is mainly addressing those who simply do not know or care enough about what happened on and before January 6.

This is, in effect, a two-layered challenge. There are lots of Americans who don’t follow what they view as irrelevant “politics”. Thus far, it has been alarmingly possible for many of them to dismiss the fallout of the 2020 election, including the January 6 insurrection, as more boring, typical Washington posturing that has nothing to do with their lives.

The committee must break through that barrier of apathy and cynicism, and convince these millions that none of this was “politics as usual“ and that they have a personal stake in the attack on a democratic political system they have come to take for granted.

Indeed, one of the biggest challenges the committee faces in the ongoing hearings it plans in the coming weeks is the profound difficulty many Americans have in accepting the fact that, for the first time in the country’s history, a sitting president really did attempt to influence the outcome of a free and fair election and remain in power despite the will of the people and in violation of all constitutional laws and norms. That is such an extraordinary breach of over 200 years of uninterrupted tradition that it appears to be incomprehensible to a very large segment of the American public.

Many Americans have heard Mr Trump’s endless falsehoods about a stolen election alongside accusations that he tried to stage what amounted to a coup to stay in power and have tuned out both sides. The committee needs to demonstrate that while Mr Trump is lying, they are telling the truth without exaggeration or hyperbole.

So, they are trying to reach those who do not know or do not care, with the simple messages that, this time at least, Americans need to know and need to care if they value their freedom. It is a heavy lift, and the committee constructed a powerful case that highlighted the commitment to duty of brave police officers who were attacked by Mr Trump’s mob, magnificently represented by officer Caroline Edwards, the first to suffer severe injuries in the assault and who recalled the “chaos” and “carnage” of the day, including slipping in the blood of her own colleagues.

Beyond the drama, Ms Cheney accused Mr Trump of a seven-phase effort to subvert US democracy. First was his campaign of lies about massive fraud. Second were his attempts to corruptly misuse the Justice Department to promote those lies. Third were his efforts to coerce vice president Mike Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes from key swing states.

Fourth were his attempts to pressure state officials to change election results. Fifth were attempts to promote fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors from those states. Sixth was his summoning of the mob to besiege Congress. And seventh was his refusal for several hours to act to stop the violence and call off his rampaging supporters.

It was a dramatic juxtaposition of devotion to duty against dereliction of duty.

On Monday the committee will next seek to establish that Mr Trump was fully aware that he had lost the election, establishing his corrupt intent in this unprecedented and unimaginable malfeasance.

There are, of course, some Americans who fully support and applaud the insurrection and attempted coup. The committee is betting that they can convince enough others that Mr Trump finally went too far for him to remain a viable political figure. Last week, they got off to a spectacularly good start.

If these hearings are the closest thing Mr Trump will ever come to a trial for his subversion, the jury is the American public, including many who remain unpersuaded. The evidence is damning but the verdict remains to be determined.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/06/06/the-mid-terms-should-be-about-the-future-not-a-conspiratorial-past/

US politics are still dominated by bitter disputes about the 2020 and even 2016 elections.

This summer will see a major escalation in the war of narratives ahead of the US midterm election in November.

Republicans have their moral panic about race and sexuality curriculums in schools, while Democrats are absurdly trying to blame corporate greed for inflation. But the main event will be competing accounts of the 2020, and even 2016, elections.

A potential game changer is televised hearings starting on June 9 by the US House of Representatives’ select committee on the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The committee is ready to go public with what it has discovered after a year of investigating the first-ever attempted American coup that culminated in the attack on Congress.

By endlessly complaining about a “stolen election”, former president Donald Trump has convinced most Republicans that he was cheated. Yet, this “big lie” doesn’t have a central narrative about exactly what happened. It rests, instead, on a hodgepodge of far-fetched and disproven claims.

Few Republican voters who say they believe the election was stolen could explain exactly what they think happened. They have simply heard it so often that the “stolen election” has become an article of faith. That’s what the January 6 committee, made up of Democrats and Republican opponents of Mr Trump, most notablyCongresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, will seek to destabilise.

The committee will try to create the first authoritative, fact-based and comprehensive account of what happened between the November 2020 election and January 6. And it will also seek to challenge Mr Trump’s claims by outlining a detailed narrative that is so well-founded, coherent and convincing that at least some Republican voters may think again.

The committee will outline how an attorney named John Eastman (who has refused to testify) penned a precise, and potentially plausible, coup d’etat roadmap for Mr Trump to remain in power. It hinged on convincing then vice president Mike Pence to arbitrarily, unconstitutionally and unlawfully overturn Mr Biden’s victories in key swing states.

On January 5, Mr Pence explained he had no such authority. According to a The Washington Post report that quoted White House sources, Mr Trump tried to tempt him by asking: “Wouldn’t it almost be cool to have that power?” When he said no, Mr Trump reportedly shouted: “You betrayed us. I made you. You were nothing.” With the Eastman plot thereby rendered inoperable, the mob attack became Mr Trump’s last remaining gambit.

The committee will present this account as a deliberate counter to the Trump camp’s mantras about a “stolen election” that rest on a hodgepodge of bizarre fabrications. The latest is an absurd film entitled 2000 Mules, which purports to demonstrate election fraud based on cell phone tracking data that, naturally, establishes nothing.

The committee may well uncover new evidence from witness testimonies. Many former Trump officials haverefused to comply with congressional subpoenas, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and trade policy adviser Peter Navarro face criminal indictments for refusing to co-operate.

The record, therefore, will inevitably be incomplete. Yet, the committee has already interviewed 500 witnesses, secured 60,000 pages of documents and issued 86 subpoenas. Unlike Mr Trump’s associates, it will have a plethora of hard evidence. Disturbing facts continue to emerge, including that Mr Trump expressed enthusiastic agreement with the rioters’ chant to “hang Mike Pence” from a makeshift, but real enough, gallows they constructed.

But it’s not just 2020 that remains contested. Mr Trump’s central narrative about the 2016 election suffered another major blow last week when attorney Michael Sussman was acquitted of charges that he lied to the FBI. That extremely weak case was the only significant prosecution brought, after three long years, by special counsel John Durham.

Mr Durham was appointed by former attorney general William Barr to supposedly uncover evidence that elements within the FBI leadership colluded with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016 to construct a hoax about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia.

Mr Durham was effectively appointed to counter the investigation of former special counsel Robert Mueller, who established beyond any doubt that Russia had interfered in the election on behalf of Mr Trump, but not irrefutable evidence that his campaign had knowingly colluded with Moscow. Mr Mueller secured numerous criminal indictments, guilty pleas and convictions. But he declined to evaluate whether Mr Trump obstructed justice, while leaving the distinct impression that he probably did.

The case against Mr Sussman was thin, and even if he had been convicted, would not have established much, if anything, to undermine Mr Mueller’s conclusions. Mr Durham appears to have wasted vast amounts of time and money on a pointless quest for non-existent facts. Nonetheless, after Mr Durham’s only significant prosecution collapsed, Mr Barr was upbeat, insisting that the trial achieved something more important than a conviction, namely to “get the real story out” about the 2016 election. That is obviously not the proper role of Justice Department prosecutions.

Yet, Mr Barr has for years been implying there was improper collusion between Mrs Clinton’s campaign and FBI leaders that supposedly counters or mitigates Mr Mueller’s findings. Mr Durham’s work provided considerable fodder for more right-wing conspiracy theories. And as Mr Barr acknowledges in his statements about getting “the real story out”, it was always all a matter of spin and storytelling.

As always relying on stultifying repetition, Mr Trump and his allies have convinced most Republicans that theMueller report, and the well-documented fact of Russian interference on his behalf in 2016, are a “hoax”.

Few Americans have ever heard of John Durham or Michael Sussman, so the Russia “hoax” narrative among Republicans about 2016 is probably secure. However, the upcoming high-profile and possibly dramatic hearings by the January 6 committee may well be a different story.

The committee is hoping that a fact-based explanation of what really happened following the 2020 election will prove more compelling than Mr Trump’s slogans propped up by risible conspiracy theories. It is also hoping that more Americans may finally realise that Mr Trump and Mr Eastman really did try to perpetrate the first coup d’etat in US history, which collapsed at the last minute and therefore culminated in a violent attack against Congress.

That ought to help clarify the profound dangers inherent in another Trump presidential term, no matter how much it costs to gas up at the pump.

https://agsiw.org/iraqs-anti-normalization-law-could-prove-a-risky-political-stunt/ Iraq’s criminalization of relations with Israel may be domestic political maneuvering, but it could come at a heavy cost for several constituencies. On May 26, the Iraqi Parliament adopted the “Criminalizing Normalization and Establishment of Relations with the Zionist Entity Law.” It prohibits any Iraqi individual, institution, or organization from communicating with any Israeli entity or representative in the “cultural, political, scientific, commercial, economic, media or security sphere” and dictates that such ties are punishable by death or imprisonment. Out of 329 members of parliament, 275 Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds attended the session, and all voted in favor of the legislation. Coming in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords and the apparent opening of most Gulf Cooperation Council countries to closer ties to Israel, even symbolic political grandstanding could complicate efforts by Iraqi Kurdish, Sunni, and even Shia factions to cultivate closer ties with GCC states, as well as Israel, and gain greater distance from Tehran’s grip. The main champion of the law was Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose allies effectively won the October 2021 parliamentary elections. Despite severe political disputes and a breakdown of the process to form a government in Iraq after more than eight months, Sadr was able to rally his allies in the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Sunni Sovereignty bloc as well as his Shia rivals from the Coordination Framework, which is led by former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and has become a “blocking third” preventing the formation of a new government. The Coordination Framework includes pro-Iranian Shia militias and is closely aligned with Tehran, so it was unsurprising the group joined Sadr’s bid. Indeed, Sadr’s main intention may have been to avoid being outbid and outflanked by Tehran’s Iraqi allies on opposition to all things Israeli. But, for the Sunnis and Kurds who enjoy strong ties with the GCC countries that have been improving relations with Israel, the bandwagoning with Sadr and the Coordination Framework was probably also an effort to avoid negative political fallout. Yet for them, unlike Tehran’s allies, it could produce significant negative consequences. The law was a test for the loyalty of Sadr’s Kurdish and Sunni allies who have become a part of his National Salvation Coalition in a thus far unsuccessful effort to form a majority government. Sunni Parliament Speaker Mohammed Halbousi owes his post to Sadr, while the Kurdistan Democratic Party is seeking Sadr’s support for its candidate for Iraq’s presidency. Therefore, the Kurds and Sunnis had obvious motivations to support Sadr’s anti-Israel legislation. Further, if the Sunnis had rejected the bill, they could have come under serious pressure and potential protests by the Shias, and it was likely that Halbousi would have lost his job. Therefore, the Kurds and Sunnis’ “yes” vote was a defense strategy designed to avoid the wrath of increasingly domineering Shia rule in Baghdad. Nonetheless, the law may be detrimental to both of these constituencies by limiting their diplomacy and outreach to the GCC countries. On its face, the new law even threatens to consolidate and centralize control over all aspects of Iraqi foreign policy and international relations by the Shia-controlled Baghdad government. The Kurdistan Regional Government’s own missteps helped lay the groundwork for the law that will likely cause it headaches. In September 2021, Erbil allowed a U.S. research group to hold a conference that promoted normalizing Iraqi diplomatic and other relations with Israel. Some prominent Sunni Arab figures attended the conference and endorsed that agenda. The event sparked an intense negative backlash from the Iraqi government, Shia parties, and much of the public. Sadr sharply criticized the conference and even urged the government to arrest those who attended it. He also vowed to “work legally, mentally and patriotically” to ban any additional such conferences or meetings and suggested he would take stronger measures if his bloc gained the majority in the October 2021 elections. After the passage of the law, Sadr called on Iraqis to take to the street to celebrate the new legislation and demonstrate national unity in the face of the backlash from the international community. An accomplished populist, Sadr is well aware that the prospect of any opening to Israel is anathema to Tehran’s allies in Iraq. Unlike Gulf Arab countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar (which had trade-level diplomatic relations with Israel in the 1990s), Iraq was a central player in the Arab-Israeli wars. The 1967 debacle and the cultural trauma that swift defeat inflicted on Arab societies remains a part of the cultural and psychological matrix of some Iraqis. By contrast, the Gulf countries that have opened to Israel were not independent in 1967 and did not experience the brunt, if any, of the trauma. Outlawing actual dealings with Israel, and even forbidding merely advocating for any form of opening to Israel, may be a largely symbolic gesture, but it could resonate with some of the Iraqi public. That, in turn, underscores the gap in perceptions between a wide range of constituencies in Iraq and many of those in GCC societies. The Kurds in particular have come under increasing pressure because of the KRG’s history of dealings with Israel and, especially, recent allegations that it has been allowing the creation of a secret Israeli military base in Erbil. A Kurdish “no” vote could have appeared to validate accusations that the government of the Kurdish region and its main parties have been quietly cozying up to Israel in a manner unacceptable to most of the rest of the country. These accusations were used by Shia militia groups deployed on the border of the Kurdistan region to justify and rationalize several recent attacks on Erbil. While the Kurds sought to create some perceptions of distance from Israel by voting in favor of the law, the new legislation could nonetheless have ramifications for the Kurdish region. The Kurds have developed a barely concealed relationship with Israel, and 24% of the Kurdistan region’s oil exports were purchased by Israel in 2021. The law, if enforced as written, will prevent these crucial commercial transactions and the development of broader relations with Israel going forward. At the very least it provides the KRG’s Iraqi adversaries with new leverage and grounds for criticism. The law could also have painful economic consequences for the rest of the country, in particular the central government in Baghdad. Although the article in the original draft that would have prohibited any companies operating in Israel from investing in Iraq was removed, the law is still likely to deter investment, particularly if there is any effort to enforce it. Investors could worry about financial and ethical repercussions from working in Iraq. That would create a range of new concerns and possible obstacles to foreign direct investment in Iraq by companies that feel constrained by their own policies or the laws in their home countries that would penalize anything that looks like cooperating in a boycott of Israel. Western companies, already concerned about insecurity and lack of rule of law in Iraq, could have even less incentive to invest in an environment riddled with legal uncertainty. Abraham Accords’ Impact on Iraqi Politics The initiative of the UAE, followed by Bahrain and Morocco, to normalize relations with Israel has had significant positive and negative consequences for Iraqi politics and discourse. Both the anti-corruption protests in Iraq in October 2021, which led to the establishment of the “October 25 Movement,” and the Erbil conference, coming in the wake of the Abraham Accords, stirred the idea of a potential opening to Israel among some Iraqis. The argument for normalizing relations notes that Iraq has strong cultural ties with Iraqi Arab and Kurdish Jewish communities in Israel that have persisted despite the lack of diplomatic ties between the two countries. The argument holds that Iraq could benefit from using these familial and cultural ties to open commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel. More than 200,000 Jews of Iraqi origin live in Israel, so these cultural and family ties could serve as a strong ground for normalizing relations to the mutual benefit of both countries. But outspoken advocates of an opening to Israel came under heavy criticism by most Shia political elites and parties, among others, who accused them of being witting agents of a Zionist and U.S. plot to undermine Shia power in Iraq as well as supposedly betraying the Palestinian cause. Sadr vowed that he would never allow normalization with Israel even if that required shedding his own “blood.” Therefore, the ostensible objective of the law is to institutionalize a legal guardrail to prevent any Iraqis from seeking to promote new ties with Israel. Its intended or inadvertent consequence may also be to limit Iraq’s shared interests with the Gulf Arab countries that are strengthening relations with Israel. Many of its key backers may hope that the new law will help ensure Shia domination of Iraq’s national foreign policy and, more broadly, align Iraq’s orientation with that of Iran. Unsurprisingly, Iran enthusiastically lauded the law. Tehran’s new ambassador to Baghdad, Mohammad Kazem Al-e Sadeq, called the act “historic,” saying, “We congratulate the representatives of the brotherly Iraqi people in the House of Representatives for their vote on the law criminalizing normalization with the usurping Zionist entity.” However, and equally predictably, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel condemned the legislation. The State Department pointedly noted that it “stands in stark contrast to the progress Iraq’s neighbors have made in building bridges and normalizing relations with Israel, creating new opportunities for people throughout the region.” Understandably, the Gulf Arab countries’ positions regarding the law have been muted since they have an obvious interest in downplaying any negative impact of the new legislation. Additionally, they want to avoid the perception of interfering in domestic Iraqi politics and risk reversing the improvement in recent years of their diplomatic and political influence with the Iraqi government and significant factions in the country, including Sadr’s own bloc. Just days after the passage of the law, the UAE and Israel signed a free trade agreement, paving the way for bilateral trade to reach $10 billion – an indication of the deepening of the Emirati-Israeli relationship at a strategic level with the strong support of Washington. In addition to the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, Saudi Arabia has taken steps that could point Riyadh toward its own eventual opening to Israel. Saudi Arabia lifted the ban on Israeli passport holders visiting the kingdom for investment and business purposes, which has become more frequent, albeit typically conducted quietly and behind the scenes, but which now may be more evident. Iraq’s law criminalizing relations with Israel could simply be a domestic political gesture aimed at appeasing Iran and its most fervent clients while also appealing to traditional Arab grievances and sympathy for the Palestinians. However, if the law is enforced rigorously or in a politically pointed manner, it could spell significant trouble for Iraq. If, for example, the government in Baghdad attempts to pursue charges against the authorities or business and cultural entities in the Kurdistan region, that could spark tensions between the Kurdish region and much of the rest of Iraq with its Sunni and Shia Arab character and widespread religious and nationalistic antipathy toward Israel. The law could also be a significant impediment to foreign direct investment in Iraq, in particular in its energy industries and resources. Even if the law is not enforced, Washington, for example, could potentially cite it to discourage, punish, or prohibit investment by U.S. or foreign companies on the grounds that participating in a commercial boycott of Israel is unlawful in the United States. Moreover, because it is so pointedly at odds with the general trend among Gulf Arab countries, the new law could significantly complicate Iraq’s gradual reintegration into the community of Arab states, in particular with its Gulf Arab neighbors that can offer much needed economic, energy, and investment assistance. There are many laws on the books in Iraq, and indeed most countries, that exist in principle but are ignored in terms of practical impact and are not enforced. The consequences for Iraq of this new legislation will depend primarily on whether it is intended as a political exercise that has served its purpose for the meanwhile or will be used by populist, nationalist, and pro-Iranian forces within the Iraqi state as a cudgel against any entities and individuals, including in the KRG, that continue to seek closer ties not merely to Israel, but to the Gulf Arab states that are developing their own relationships with the Israelis. The consequences will also depend on the degree to which key external stakeholders (principally the Gulf Arab states that are normalizing relations with Israel, Israel, and the United States) choose to respond punitively to the passage and any implementation of this law.