https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/08/15/the-violence-iran-stoked-around-rushdie-was-not-even-about-his-novel/

Khomeini’s murderous fatwa was primarily in response to the brilliant lampoon of him in.The Satanic Verses.

On Friday, the renowned author Salman Rushdie was attacked and repeatedly stabbed while on stage to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institute in New York State. A 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar has been arrested. Mr Rushdie appears to be recovering but his nerves and liver are damaged and he may lose an eye.

Little is known about the suspected assailant. But in 1989 the government of Iran cynically put a target on Mr Rushdie’s back and has kept it there.

After the publication of Mr Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in September 1988, protests broke out in the largely South Asian English city of Bradford, and spread to India and Pakistan.

Few, if any, protesters had actually read the book, which they accused of being blasphemous. This is crucial, because the novel is not, in fact, blasphemous, depicting the wild fantasies of an insane character, Gibreel Farishta, who is under the delusion he has turned into the Archangel Gabriel.

These surrealistic – or rather magical-realist – fantasies include a fever dream inspired by the life and works of the prophet Mohammed, but no reader could come away with the idea that the novel was attempting to tell the tale of the birth of Islam or critique the religion.Although some Muslims may find the passages offensive, throughout the novel, the author was effectively reading his South Asian Muslim tradition, culture and experience through a magical-realist lens.

Of course, the protests were not really about the author or the book, but rather about strengthening the political clout of communal leaders, and an effort to make life difficult for local authorities. Protests about anything abstract or faraway are always really about very different targets much closer to home.

But Iran, still riding high on the revolutionary fervor of the 1980s, sought to place itself at the forefront of this latest iteration of highly manipulated “Muslim outrage” supposedly against the West. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s revolutionary supreme leader, issued a fatwa – or religious opinion which, in some Shiite traditions, can be considered effectively binding on followers – on February 14, 1989, calling for the author and anyone else involved in the publication of the book to be murdered.

Tehran subsequently offered a $6 million bounty for Mr Rushdie’s assassination. He was forced to live in hiding for years, and a wave of violence followed. Five bookstores in Britain were bombed. The Japanese translator of the book was stabbed and killed, and the Italian translator seriously injured. The Norwegian publisher was shot three times and badly wounded. The list of other violent incidents is long.

The Iranian government and various official institutions not only reiterated the validity of the bounty and the fatwa, but have added to the amount of money they say they’re willing to pay for this anti-civilizational terrorism.

All of this background to Friday’s attempted murder of Mr Rushdie is widely understood, but the deeper roots of Khomeini’s rage has been largely overlooked.

Chapter 11 of the novel paints a stinging and remarkably incisive caricature of Khomeini himself. It depicts a character called “The Imam” – a fanatical cleric forced to live in the West (just as Khomeini was when he was exiled to France after being expelled from Iraq by Saddam Hussein). Among the many absurdities of this madcap figure is that he wants to stop time, an obvious parody of Khomeini’s passionate hatred of progress and modernity.

“After the revolution there will be no clocks;” the Imam decrees, “we’ll smash the lot. The word clock will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God.”

This nightmarish character jumps on Gibreel Farishta, demanding the “angel” fly him to Jerusalem as he “slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air, twirls himself about, and settles on Gibreel’s shoulders, clutching on to him with fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws.”

Farishta realizes “he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric’s cause.” Eventually, the Imam has “grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole… and now every clock in the capital city of Desh begins to chime, and goes on unceasingly, beyond twelve, beyond twenty-four, beyond one thousand and one, announcing the end of Time, the hour that is beyond measuring, the hour of the exile’s return, of the victory of water over wine, of the commencement of the Untime of the Imam.”

It’s hard to imagine a more precise and stinging lampoon of Khomeini and his malevolent mission. He and his followers were certainly well aware of it when they decided the author had to die. Of course, they claimed to be responding to an attack “against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an.” But there is no doubt it was, above all, about the wounded ego of a man happy to anoint himself a “supreme leader.”

The reaction to the brutal attempted murder in Iran’s heavily-controlled media ranged from bland factual descriptions to joyous celebrations – and promises that Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo will be next – along with conspiratorial musings that it could really have been a Western “false flag” operation to derail nuclear negotiations.

But not a hint of concern, regret or objection. None.

That Khomeini and his followers recognized him and his murderous, fanatical regime in the character of the Imam — and then acted precisely according to monstrous type in 1989 and ever since — tells us everything we need to know about their ongoing addiction to violence and hostility to creativity and freedom of thought.

It’s bad enough they’ve never stopped encouraging extremists to kill Mr Rushdie to bolster their image among radical Muslims, especially since that powerfully stokes Western Islamophobia. That it is rooted in the wounded ego of a narcissistic tyrant is even worse.

Mr Matar is unlikely to see any of the promised millions. But Iranian gloating confirms who is responsible for this heinous attack, not just on a great artist, but on the essence of culture and civilization everywhere.

Iran Has One Last Chance to Revive the 2015 Nuclear Deal

A new EU proposal, embraced by the United States, gives Iran a last chance, but Tehran seems fixated on using it to shut down the IAEA investigation.
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Negotiators appear to be on the brink of either securing the revival of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal with Iran or confronting the stark reality that over 18 months of intensive work have produced no substantial results and the agreement is officially defunct. Senior officials from the European Union said they presented a draft agreement proposal to both Washington and Tehran that constitutes a last chance. Josep Borrell Fontelles, the EU foreign policy chief, phrased it bluntly in a tweet: “What can be negotiated has been negotiated, and it’s now in a final text.” For months, negotiations have been stalled and appeared stalemated, but neither side was willing to declare total failure. Now, however, the moment of truth appears to be close at hand.

Iran has reportedly dropped the two conditions that had been impeding an agreement in recent months: a demand that the State Department rescind its designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization and some sort of guarantee that the United States would not abandon the agreement under a future administration as happened when former President Donald J. Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement in May 2018. Now, however, Tehran is insisting that the investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency into unexplained uraniumfound at Iranian nuclear facilities be ended.

Indeed, in recent months Iran’s most bitter quarrels have not been with the United States but with the IAEA, as Tehran has shut down the agency’s surveillance in key nuclear facilities. In June, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said the move amounted to a “fatal blow” to reviving the JCPOA and warned that Iran’s nuclear program was “galloping ahead.” Iranian officials seemed to confirm this assessment by announcing that the country is now capable of building a nuclear weapon but has not decided to do that. Kamal Kharrazi, a senior advisor to Iran’s supreme leader, said in July that, “In a few days we were able to enrich uranium up to 60%, and we can easily produce 90% enriched uranium … Iran has the technical means to produce a nuclear bomb, but there has been no decision by Iran to build one.” Under the JCPOA, Iran was restricted to 3.67% enrichment, and 90% constitutes weapons-grade uranium.

Is the 2015 Agreement Still Relevant?

This means that Iran has already achieved the status of being a nuclear-threshold power, at least in terms of enrichment. It would take several months, at the very least, however, to develop a deliverable warhead or nuclear weapon once a sufficient supply of 90% enriched uranium is produced. But this is exactly the conundrum the JCPOA was supposed to postpone, if not entirely prevent. In November 2021, Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran and lead negotiator, was already warning that Iran’s ongoing nuclear activities “are gradually emptying the deal of the nonproliferation benefits for which we bargained.” However, he added, “We’re not going to agree to a worse deal because Iran has built up its nuclear program.”

This means that even if a solution can be found to overcome Iran’s demand that the IAEA abandon its investigation into the unexplained and apparently illicit uranium it discovered – and it is extremely unlikely that either the agency or Western powers would agree to simply let that go because it makes Tehran uncomfortable – Iran is going to have to be willing to roll back exponentially more enriched material than it did after implementation day in 2016. Moreover, there are indications that Iran might not be willing to transfer enriched uranium over 3.67% to another country – Russia having served that purpose in the past and remaining the most likely destination – and that it might insist on the material remaining inside Iran under some sort of IAEA control. But that, obviously, could easily be recovered in the event of a future breakdown or expiration of the agreement.

Moreover, as Malley noted, Iran’s technical advancements, particularly regarding centrifuges for enrichment, can’t be rolled back. Once a technology has been mastered, the knowledge cannot be unlearned. And if the agreement is effectively a revival of the 2015 agreement essentially on a compliance-for-compliance basis, as both sides have said they want, the 12-to-15-year sunsets now buy the international community far less time than they did when the agreement was implemented in 2016. So even if all the obstacles can be overcome, the prize itself – simply on its own terms – is a lot less valuable than it was 18 months, let alone six years, ago.

What Lies Ahead?

Despite all of that, an agreement to revive the nuclear deal would be a major diplomatic accomplishment. The sunsets are not about to expire immediately, so it would certainly involve another, albeit far shorter, chronological gamble well worth taking. Moreover, any U.S., Western, and even Arab diplomatic progress with Iran is closely linked to, and probably effectively dependent on, success in these negotiations. It’s not just that the level of mistrust is extreme. It is, rather, what a failure to return to the JCPOA would likely mean in the coming months and years.

The IAEA is neither a tool of Washington nor prone to exaggerations. When Grossi says Iran’s nuclear program has been “galloping ahead” at full speed in recent months, and when Tehran’s main antagonist becomes the IAEA instead of the United States, the world can be confident that Iran has indeed been making a major push to get to weapons-threshold status. If, as it claims, Iran has already achieved that landmark, in a post-JCPOA environment Iran will at times likely carefully inch and at other times suddenly sprint toward achieving the various other breakthroughs required before it suddenly and, perhaps inevitably, emerges as a fully fledged nuclear power.

The administration of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made it crystal clear that the United States “is prepared to use all elements of its national power to ensure” that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon, strongly suggesting a willingness to use military force. Yet Washington has been opaque about what metric or set of developments would trigger any such action. Israel, however, has been far more explicit about its own intention to act and has already been involved in a major shadow war with Iran involving attacks against its nuclear program, including sabotage, cyberattacks, assassinations, and other actions designed to impede or degrade Iran’s progress. Israel may not possess the bunker-buster munitions that would be required for some potential actions, meaning that Washington would either have to conduct them directly or would transfer such weapons to Israel, signaling that the two countries were contemplating such an action, even if it were carried out by the Israelis supposedly on their own. And, at the very least, Israel would be heavily dependent on U.S. diplomatic backup given the air spaces it would have to fly over in any such mission.

The consequences of such a drastic action, however, are clear. Therefore, while Iran would most likely inch and sprint at various moments toward nuclear power status, Washington’s most likely response to a final negotiation failure would be an effort, already begun during Biden’s recent Middle East trip, to build a stronger regime of containment and deterrence against Iran, in part by creating more networks of coordination and cooperation among U.S. partners in the Middle East. Key among those would be Gulf Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Yet both countries have their own ongoing dialogues with Iran, and the UAE has been contemplating sending an ambassador to Iran to fully restore diplomatic relations. Saudi Arabia, too, has indicated that it is ready for more intensified and formal talks with Tehran.

Yet if the Gulf Arab countries sense that Washington’s resolve is steadfast and perceive a new commitment to their security and concerns, they are likely to contribute what they can to a new regime of containment and deterrence. Still, the 2019 attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities and the deadly missile and drone attacks against Abu Dhabi in January demonstrate their ongoing vulnerability, hence Washington’s call for more integrated or coordinated air and missile defense systems. Even if it were merely on a bilateral basis, however, the United States could certainly help strengthen such systems, and it may find a more immediate appetite for coordination on maritime security. The path to greater regional coordination and cooperation among U.S. partners against Iran is complicated and tricky. Iran’s trajectory toward nuclear weapons status is dangerous but straightforward.

What this brief overview of the likely scenarios in a post-JCPOA environment demonstrates is how important it is that the EU proposal does not fail. Iran may be trying to use the evident peril of the situation to wriggle out of its imbroglio with the IAEA, and if some method can be found to satisfy both sides – consistent with the agency’s responsibilities – that should be welcomed on all sides. Yet, from the outset of these negotiations with the Biden administration, Iran appears to have been operating from the assumption that it enjoys a position of relative strength. The Biden administration has said that it is ready to “quickly conclude a deal” and agrees that the EU proposal is, in effect, a last chance. The ball is now firmly in the Iranian court.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/08/08/do-democrats-alone-govern-america/

Republicans aren’t yet beyond cooperating, as proven by several important bills passed by the Senate.

After more than a year of false starts, dead ends, frustration and despair, Democrats were finally able to pass the first major piece of US climate change legislation in a generation, bundled with important healthcare and tax innovations. They once again had to rely on their razor-thin 50-50 Senate majority, with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie. This pattern of significant, and even strikingly dynamic, legislation and governance by the Democrats – in the face of near-total resistance by Republicans – begs the question: are Democrats fated to try governing the country alone?

This achievement, which has yet to be fully appreciated both in the US and internationally, was only secured after months of torturous internal Democratic negotiations and a marathon “vote-a-rama” session in the Senate on Sunday in which Republicans spent over 15 hours trying to derail the vote with a range of thorny amendments. The left-wing independent Senator Bernie Sanders also, for a time, sought to put his liberal colleagues on the spot. There was last-minute bargaining until the very end, with conservative Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema intervening on behalf of hedge funds and private equity wealth.

Yet the historic package passed, capping off 17 months for US President Joe Biden and this Congress of remarkably intense activity and spectacular achievement. His predecessor, Donald Trump, in his full four years secured just one significant piece of legislation, a giant tax cut for corporations and the wealthy. To that could be added a large amount of deregulation via executive order, but little else. And both of those achievements – scaling back the funding and authority of government – could be fairly described as anti-governance.

Democrats would note that the first thing that happened under the Biden administration was a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that bailed out the whole economy, saved countless businesses and millions of jobs, and was also passed entirely by Democrats and against unified Republican opposition.

So, do Democrats have a point about governing the country alone? Yes and no.

Mr Trump’s record of success was so dismal, and the Republican Party’s evident disinterest in policy and legislation since he has emerged as its leader, it has certainly been looking that way for several years. The contrast between governance under Mr Trump and Mr Biden could hardly be starker.

However, the actual tally is not quite that one-sided.

Democrats were able to secure at least some Republican support, particularly in the Senate, for several key pieces of legislation. Gun control, the crucial microchip and technology funding bill, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, and a forthcoming plan to repair the outmoded and dangerous Electoral Count Act all required at least some Republican co-operation.

Democrats could easily insist they would have supported a serious infrastructure bill during the Trump presidency, but the Republican inability to even craft a proposal lets them entirely off the hook.

The most unified (meaningful) Senate vote under Mr Biden was the 99-1 approval ofNato membership for Finland and Sweden. It was opposed only by the radical right-wing Senator Josh Hawley, whose explanation was so garbled it appears he was simply pandering to anti-Nato sentiments in the party base stoked by Mr Trump.

The overarching reality appears to be that with sufficient Democratic leadership, Republicans, especially in the Senate, are still willing – at times and in a limited way – to engage in meaningful legislation and policy.

Unfortunately, the traditional political ideological spectrum is now only to be found among Democrats. As the prolonged negotiations over the climate, health and tax bill starkly demonstrated, there are at least two genuinely conservative Democratic senators. There are no liberal Republican senators. Indeed, it is hard to think of any liberal Republicans at all.

The fierce ideological struggle in the Republican Party is over personal fealty to Mr Trump. It is not anything to do with policy. The Party is being purged of such hard-right stalwarts as Liz Cheney, because she will not bend the knee to Mr Trump, repeat his lies about the last election or defend his attempted coup and the January 6 insurrection. That is entirely about personalities and not at all about ideas or principles.

It is at the state level one finds Republican interest in policy. Republican-dominated state legislatures are racing to ban abortion, while others are restricting teaching about race, history, gender and sexuality. And in some key states, Republican activists are seeking to seize control of the electoral process while, alarmingly, condemning the 2020 election as rigged. So, unfortunately, there is a distinct dynamism in state Republican parties.

Among the splits emerging within the Republican Party are between those who want to pursue Mr Trump’s agenda of “dismantling the administrative state” through federal deregulation and those, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who are increasingly using the power of state-level government to impose political correctness and ideological narratives, as well as reward friends and punish adversaries, including mega-corporations such as Disney.

It is conceivable that Mr DeSantis or some other post-Trump figure could define and pursue a political and ideological agenda that is genuinely new, taking its radical and authoritarian cue from the former president but breaking with the anti-governance attitudes he shared with traditional conservatives. We shall see.

For now, however, the Democrats can take justifiable pride in having negotiated a difficult and historic piece of legislation among conservatives and liberals, all within their own ranks and without any support from Republicans, and having secured a compromise measure that, particularly on climate change, will have global and momentous significance. The bill goes to the House for final passage, which is all but secured, as early as next Friday.

Democrats clearly have a governing agenda rather than a totemic figurehead and real ideological range. And, most importantly, they have again demonstrated that, if need be, they can and will govern alone.

Though there is little they want to do, and not much they’re willing to support, Republicans – especially in the Senate – are still at times willing to cooperate, especially on national security. Unfortunately, as I explained in these pages last week, most recently they had to be literally tricked into it.

Democrats could plausibly lay claim to at least 80 per cent of the existing impulse to governance in Washington. But that still leaves 15 or 20 per cent for some Republicans, sometimes. So, Democrats cannot quite claim to be governing the country entirely alone. Almost. But not quite.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/08/01/bidens-breakthrough-climate-and-healthcare-bill-could-reverse-his-fortunes/

The pending breakthrough climate, tax and healthcare bill could revive his popularity — or not.

A week ago, conventional wisdom in Washington held that Joe Biden’s presidency was in a profound crisis. A drumbeat intensified for the aging president not to run for a second term. But by the weekend, that narrative was upended as it once again became clear that he is accumulating a remarkable set of legislative achievements in short order and under difficult circumstances.

The sudden jolt was the announcement late last week that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the most conservative Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, agreed to major spending on healthcare, taxation and climate change. If the bill passes – as seems highly likely since Republicans cannot block budgetary measures – Mr Biden will endure the paradox of having passed a vast array of popular legislation while retaining dismal poll numbers.

Republicans are outraged that the agreement was kept completely secret, including from most Democrats and the press. For weeks, Democratic leaders insisted internal negotiations were ongoing, but carefully crafted the impression of an impasse.

Not wanting to allow Mr Biden too many successes, Republicans relied on this misdirection when they supported a $280 billion spending package to bolster American microchip manufacturing and other technological development. Aimed primarily at strengthening the nation’s technological and economic competition with China, it is the largest US industrial policy initiative in decades. It is also so evidently in the national interest that it should have been adopted without controversy or subsequent recriminations.

As soon as it passed, Democratic leaders announced that not only were their internal negotiations successful, Mr Manchin had agreed to a far bigger package than he led people to believe he might. It is the latest chunk of Mr Biden’s fraught Build Back Better program, a transformational agenda so sweeping it could not be passed in its totality, but much of which is instead being implemented piecemeal.

Last year, a huge infrastructure bill was broken away and adopted. When Mr Manchin insisted on a large reduction in overall spending on the rest of the package, and ruled out several key features including childcare, the project was generally given up for dead.

Now Democrats seem poised to pass another major chunk of the original highly ambitious agenda, and it will have a gigantic impact. Most strikingly, it will put the US on track to meet globally crucial climate change goals that had been considered politically unachievable.

Reversing decades of severe underfunding, the package provides major support to the beleaguered Internal Revenue Service, and that should finance the collection of untold billions in unpaid taxes. It imposes a minimum 15 percent tax on the wealthiest corporations, many of which pay nothing at all, and higher taxes on “carried interest” exemptions enjoyed by the likes of private equity and hedge fund managers. Former president Donald Trump will surely be infuriated at the elimination of “pass-through” loopholes that apparently allowed him to often pay virtually no income tax.

Government health providers will finally be allowed to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies, saving billions and greatly reducing drug costs. And the US would inch closer to universal healthcare coverage.

Some Republicans, infuriated at being suckered – although only into supporting obviously necessary legislation – are lashing out by withdrawing support for aid to military veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for legislation guaranteeing marriage equality. Both bills are overwhelmingly popular, so Republicans are being provoked into irrational and, in all likelihood, self-destructive retaliation.

Democrats not only completely outfoxed and bamboozled the Republicans, by cannily marketing the bill – accurately enough – as the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” they have emphasised how overwhelmingly popular virtually all its provisions and their impacts are likely to be.

Build Back Better was an ineffective legislative program not because its provisions were largely unpopular – although it originally included regressive forms of student loan relief, and state and local tax benefits that favour the better off. Rather, it was simply too vast and sprawling to be comprehensible and, as a unified bundle, provoked powerful sticker shock regarding its total costs.

But broken into discrete chunks, and with some key elements, both good and bad, jettisoned, much of the original plan seems likely to be eventually enacted. Only Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, another frequently uncooperative Democrat, might prevent passage, but it seems unlikely that she would ultimately thwart Mr Manchin’s breakthrough.

The biggest question is what impact this sprawling legislation and dynamic governance will have in both the November midterms and the next presidential election in 2024.

Inflation, and the economic slowdown now being engineered by the Federal Reserve to control it, will certainly prove a millstone. But Democrats can and should run on this extraordinary record of legislative achievement: $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief, $1.2 trillion for hard infrastructure, $280 billion for industrial investment, and now apparently, $700 billion for healthcare, taxation and climate change.

Add to that the first gun control legislation in decades, an upcoming measure to repair the badly-worded and anachronistic Electoral Count Act (which Mr Trump tried to exploit to retain power despite losing the 2020 election), plus another to protect marriage equality, and the legislative checklist is extremely impressive and, in theory at least, highly popular.

Much of what Democrats want remains undone, of course, but this massively exceeds any rational expectations. However, as I recently noted in these pages, Mr Biden has been downright atrocious at messaging.

In November, Republicans will be running primarily on inflation, and racial and cultural grievances, which are powerful emotional motivators. Yet they have nominated so many extremists, crackpots and charlatans in key Senate races that Democrats may well retain control. But Republicans seem equally poised to regain a majority in the House of Representatives.

Mr Biden’s legislative agenda would then surely be frozen, especially since many Republicans are now so enraged that they claim to regret having supported almost anything he proposed, no matter how basic and reasonable. But the president would still go into a re-election campaign in 2024 with an outstanding list of first-term legislative accomplishments he is already in the process of accumulating.

If Americans want their government to function, provide services and strengthen the country, under current circumstances Democrats – being the only party, at least at the national level, truly interested in policy and governance – have an unassailable case. They can bolster that by stoking reasonable fears that Republicans are stripping citizens of fundamental freedoms, particularly given the sudden and shocking wave of near-total abortion restrictions in many states.

But if voters prefer emotional release and high-octane entertainment, Republicans could regain power through the potent and resonant performative theatrics which has become their disgraceful stock-in-trade.

Americans are going to have to decide if they really want good government or a good show.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-30/iran-is-trying-to-play-the-saudis-against-the-us-it-won-t-work?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l

Five rounds of talks have yielded a truce in Yemen and perhaps renewed diplomatic relations between Riyadh and Tehran.

With US President Joe Biden having departed the Middle East, the region’s two prime antagonists are thinking about just getting along. Iran and Saudi Arabia, having completed five rounds of talks in Iraq over the past year, both said last week they were moving toward higher-level negotiations on reconciliation. Paradoxically, this budding rapprochement between friend and foe offers important opportunities for Washington.

After severing diplomatic ties following a January 2016 mob attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, the Riyadh government hoped sanctions on Iran by President Donald Trump’s administration might produce a change in Iranian conduct. Instead, Iran became more aggressive than ever, culminating with a devastating missile strike on Saudi Aramco facilities in September 2019.

The Trump administration, usually bellicose toward Iran, turned a blind eye, noting that no Americans had been killed. That proved a final straw for the Saudis. They were already upset that the Barack Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran ignored two main concerns — Iran’s drone and missile arsenal, and its network of armed gangs in Arab countries including Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.

The Saudis concluded that Washington was no longer reliable, and that if they wanted their top security issues involving Tehran to be on the negotiating table, they were going to put them there by themselves. After the 2020 US election, that realization dovetailed with the Biden administration’s encouragement of diplomacy over the use of force in the region.

The formal reconciliation talks began in April 2021 at the Baghdad airport; Iraq constituting something approximating neutral ground. Initially, little progress was made. The Saudis focused on getting Iran to pressure its Houthi clients in Yemen to agree to a cease-fire and eventual peace settlement in a war that has turned into a quagmire for Riyadh. The Iranians wanted only to discuss restoring diplomatic relations.

But after the fifth round earlier this year, and amid the growing sense that Iran was stubbornly blocking Biden’s effort to revive the nuclear deal, there was a minor, but real, breakthrough. Responding to Iranian prodding, the Houthis finally agreed to a truce, which has lasted more than two months and allowed significant humanitarian relief into the beleaguered country.

The Saudis’ securing and maintaining the cease-fire in the bloody conflict pleased the White House and Congress. Riyadh also took the opportunity to finally rid itself of the obstreperous Yemeni president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, replacing him with a new Presidential Leadership Council.

Another round of talks, which seems imminent, will come at a pivotal moment in US relations with friends and foes in the Middle East. Biden’s visit was intended to repair strained US-Saudi relations. But perhaps more importantly, the president encouraged Saudi Arabia to join other Arab countries, and even Israel, in building a set of informal cooperative security arrangements. These would include air- and missile-defense systems to offset Iran’s increasingly powerful arsenal.

The eventual aim of such expanded collaboration is for the US military to reduce its Middle East footprint, doing less with more, because regional cooperation could prove more effective and sustainable than outside intervention.

Not everything is going smoothly. There are already signs that the Houthis may break the uneasy truce in Yemen. Iran will play a central role in whether that happens, because it uses such militias to increase or relieve pressure on its adversaries, adjusting violence like turning a spigot.

It’s also clear that Tehran hopes to use the reconciliation talks with Riyadh to drive a wedge between the US and Saudi Arabia. The idea is to make the Saudis choose between either rebuilding close cooperation with Washington or achieving rapprochement with Iran and extraction from the Yemen war.

It’s a crude trap. Washington can outflank Tehran by strengthening security commitments to Saudi Arabia, while making it clear it expects greater Saudi cooperation on energy production and pricing, keeping Russia and China at arm’s length, and being open to greater regional security coordination. The Gulf Arab countries still have major doubts about US commitment and reliability, but they understand there’s no practical alternative to American support.

Iranian media are playing up Saudi Arabia’s supposed enthusiasm for wide-ranging reconciliation, but in fact the Saudis remain highly skeptical. The US and Saudi Arabia can give the Iranians a set of clear choices: They can have relations restored with the Saudis, a renewed nuclear agreement with Washington, and respect for legitimate security concerns — but only on reasonable terms, starting with curbing violence by their regional proxies.

The partnership between Washington and Riyadh may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s clearly on the mend. And it’s certainly still strong enough to be able to show Iran that it can’t score cheap victories by trying to divide them.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/26/america-has-seen-political-theatre-in-the-past-but-the-jan-6-hearings-were-unparalleled/

The US has seen grand political theatre in the past but not much like the January 6 hearings.

Last Thursday, the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and the broader campaign by former US president Donald Trump to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, completed its initial schedule.

New evidence and witnesses mean hearings will resume in September. But, for now, the first season of an extremely well-produced, gripping TV show – call it “American Coup” – has wrapped up with a final two-hour episode highlighting Mr Trump’s personal dereliction of duty as the attack unfolded.

The January 6 hearings seek to painstakingly inform Americans – especially Republicans – about essential realities many refuse to acknowledge

These hearings are among the most consequential ever, but don’t much resemble congressional inquiries of the past.

A great deal of credit for their effectiveness ironically belongs to House Republican minority leader Kevin McCarthy. His spectacular blunder of declining participation has allowed the committee to function as something approaching a “truth – although not yet reconciliation – commission” of the kind convened in numerous countries that suffered traumatic convulsions.

Mr McCarthy attempted to appoint two diehard supporters of Mr Trump’s “big lie” that the election was stolen. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rightly refused their involvement. These congressmen, most notably Jim Jordan of Ohio, are notorious for shameless grandstanding and stunts, and would have most likely ensured endless disruptive histrionics. But Ms Pelosi agreed that Mr McCarthy’s other three appointees could serve.

As Mr McCarthy recently confirmed on Fox News, he withdrew all co-operation to try to dismiss the investigation as a partisan sham. Ms Pelosi then outflanked him by appointing two very conservative and otherwise loyal Republicans – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – who are outspoken critics of Mr Trump’s attempted coup. That ensured the committee is indeed bipartisan yet speaks in a unified voice that rejects the former president’s conspiracy theories and is determined to tell the truth about the post-election fiasco and, especially, the January 6 insurrection.

That is how the committee has managed to present such a seamless, artful and authoritative chronicle – devastatingly drawn mainly from evidence given by former Trump loyalists and officials – and has outlined an initial public record of the first attempted coup in US history.

Moreover, their narrative is squarely aimed at swing voters and, above all, reachable Republicans, arguing that whatever they think about policy, the Democrats, Mr Biden and the election outcome, Mr Trump’s reckless irresponsibility renders him permanently unfit for any return to high national office.

There has never been anything quite like this.

Modern congressional hearings began with the explosion of television following the Second World War. The country’s attention was riveted in 1948 when a Time magazine editor, Whittaker Chambers, testified that in the 1930s he had been close comrades in the Communist Party with a former high-ranking State Department official and then-head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Alger Hiss.

Hiss was initially able to brush aside Chambers’ allegations, claiming they had never met. But it quickly became clear this was untrue. It eventually emerged that both men had served as Soviet spies in the 1930s. Hiss was eventually imprisoned for perjury, the statute of limitations on espionage having expired.

It was unparalleled American political theatre, and nothing that has followed has come close to such a dramatic, poignant, and tragic unraveling of bitter personal and national truths. But it was entirely unscripted, and more closely resembled a trial than anything else.

Anti-Communist hearings remained a staple in the 1950s. Demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy shot to fame by destroying countless lives and careers with unfounded accusations of treason at hearings, until his own comeuppance at the 1953-1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. After failing to secure special treatment for a conscripted former staffer, McCarthy accused military leaders of leftist disloyalty. Yet his own reputation was left in tatters after combative televised proceedings revealed his recklessness and dishonesty.

Significant hearings in the 1970s and ’80s were also effectively confrontational and/or investigative rather than expository.

The 1973 Watergate hearings brought down President Richard Nixon by slowly unearthing his corruption. The Church Committee hearings of 1975 probed a sordid history of political abuses by the FBI, CIA, and other agencies against dissident Americans such as Dr Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders. The 1987 Iran Contra hearings discovered how Ronald Reagan’s administration violated the law to funnel lethal support to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

The historical threads from these dramas intertwine and unravel to this day. Before being brought down by much later hearings aimed at him, Nixon became a national figure through the Hiss-Chambers saga. Mr Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was a key aide to McCarthy and the primary antagonist against the military in those legendary hearings.

The January 6 hearings seek to painstakingly inform Americans – especially Republicans – about essential realities many refuse to acknowledge and to break through a stone wall of psychic denial.

Their closest antecedent wasn’t about politics at all, but organised crime. The Valachi hearings of 1963 revealed a reality that, for still-unclear reasons, the FBI aggressively denied for decades: a national crime syndicate, the Mafia, had infected much of American social, political and economic life.

The FBI’s already threadbare denials definitively collapsed when scores of leading gangsters from around the country were apprehended by astonished local cops at a 1957 “commission” meeting in a small town in upstate New York. After that, an opportunity was required to finally explain the Mafia’s existence and power.

Joseph Valachi, a veteran but low-level and highly disgruntled mafioso, was the first turncoat to publicly break “omerta”, the code of silence. Although he provided lots of genuinely new and valuable facts and history, the FBI prompted him, and larded his testimony with, large amounts of information about Mafia activities – especially outside New York City – of which he was otherwise unaware but which they needed to expose.

At spellbinding hearings featuring this renegade mobster, all major aspects of the Mafia – and the building blocks of a massive cultural industry beginning with the best-selling book, and subsequent blockbuster movie adaptation, The Godfather – became firmly established in American minds. While these definitive stories were drawn largely from the Valachi hearings, coming full circle, The Godfather II included fictional scenes vividly reinventing them. (In yet another twist, Cohn was a noted mob lawyer in the 1970s and 80s.)

That systematic explication of crime, conspiracy, and an ongoing threat to society from almost 60 years ago bears the closest resemblance to the January 6 hearings. And while reconciliation may be a long way off, the truth that the committee is establishing beyond any reasonable doubt is unmistakably having its own profound impact on the American national narrative. Crucially, most viewers have been left wanting more.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/20/biden-needs-to-quickly-come-back-from-a-year-of-historic-unpopularity/

Biden’s policies are mostly defensible and sometimes excellent but his unwillingness to be honest with the public is wrecking his popularity.  

There’s much to criticize about Joe Biden’s performance thus far. Yet, the 46th US President’s sustained unpopularity – close to that of his predecessor, Donald Trump, who he now only narrowly defeats in hypothetical one-on-one races in swing states – is hard to explain.

He’s had policy botches, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and major challenges, several stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.

Still, his administration has been relatively scandal-free and stable, with an extremely low turnover rate. The tasks are generally getting done. That some of the bitterest criticism comes from the far left of his own party, which claims to feel betrayed, should bolster his position with the centre and centre-right – but no.

Unless Mr Biden quickly recovers from this year-long bout of historic unpopularity, the causes will be studied for decades. But even now it is clear that the Biden administration’s messaging mistakes are well worth a “hot take” consideration as the main suspect.

Take what is certainly the main source of discontent: inflation. The rate is now about 9 percent annually, the highest since the early 1980s. Americans have not seen such numbers in almost half a century and are angry. For low-income families this means significant suffering, if not calamity. Even those who can afford higher prices are dismayed.

Few Americans care that this is a global crisis largely produced by the pandemic, or that much of the developed world is experiencing even worse rates. Since it has come as an unpleasant shock, all that most Americans want to hear is what you’re going to do about it.

But it should not have come as a shock. Allowing it to have been a shock was itself a messaging failure. If the administration seriously believed that the massive coronavirus relief spending at the beginning of Mr Biden’s administration – $1.9 trillion in the American Reiscue Plan alone – wasn’t going to risk significant inflation, such wilful blindness is its own form of incompetence.

Surely they knew such spending could overheat the economy and contribute to inflationary pressures. Yet they never explained to the public that this spending was needed to stave off a nationwide unemployment crisis and other catastrophes, and that everyone should brace for a potential surge in inflation.

Instead, when inflation hit, the administration promised the problem would go away, and then blamed “corporate greed”, and a range of other facile excuses. They were right to make the difficult choice they made. The public should be thanking them for that.

But since they never explained what they were doing, they are getting castigated both for inflation and for the fact that unemployment is so low that businesses are having a hard time finding workers.

More than a year ago, Mr Biden needed to give a primetime address to the nation to bluntly say: “We had to choose between saving your jobs or risking a period of higher prices. We saved the jobs. Now we will all work together to bring down the prices.”

Because he didn’t, the austerity-like cooling measures required to do exactly that will feel like yet more unnecessary pain. And once again, they’re going to get the blame for everything bad and no credit for what is good.

Mr Biden just experienced another instance where he could have saved himself a lot of unnecessary grief by levelling with the American public early and bluntly. His Middle East trip was roundly criticised in the western media, largely because of his visit to Saudi Arabia and his meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

During the primary and presidential campaigns, Mr Biden vowed to make US outrage at the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi a centrepiece of his policy towards the kingdom and he even spoke of making it “a pariah”. That was effective politics, especially with regard to his own party’s left flank.

But it was obviously never going to be a basis for US foreign policy. The US-Saudi partnership has endured for almost 80 years because it rests on strong fundamentals, especially maintaining regional security and stability and defending the status quo.

Mr Biden had well over a year to prepare Americans for the fact that he was going to have to repair relations with the Saudi government and the Crown Prince. To help make the case, Mr Biden should have explained that he had indeed taken a range of significant measures to express US anger about the Khashoggi murder, including releasing CIA findings holding the crown prince responsible for the killing and enforcing a range of sanctions against implicated Saudi individuals.

Then Mr Biden should have described how, despite these measures, Saudi Arabia has been cooperating with a range of US requests including maintaining a truce in Yemen despite serious provocations from the Houthis, taking in Afghan refugees, extending financial support to US friends in Lebanon and Iraq, siding with Washington against Moscow at the UN, and increasing oil production (without breaking the existing OPEC+ agreement) to help control the spike in gas prices, largely caused by Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

Eventually, and only at the last minute, in a Washington Post commentary, Mr Biden told his fellow Americans that, whatever his personal feelings, he was elected to protect the interests of the American people and the country and that, therefore, he was going to Saudi Arabia. Coming when it did, it sounded defensive and flimsy instead of the simple truth that it is.

These are just two examples. The international relations analyst Brian Katulis has insightfully catalogued the administration’s extraordinarily muddled messaging on foreign policy – despite its astoundingly successful performance in reviving and revitalising Nato and the Western alliance in Europe to confront Russia and support Ukraine – and the story isn’t much better on the domestic front.

It is easy to imagine Republican and left-wing Democratic voices retorting that no amount of skillful messaging could make Mr Biden and his policies look good. But such predictable ideological carping explains nothing.

Unless Mr Biden rebounds relatively quickly and dramatically, a serious and complex explanation for this bout of extreme unpopularity will be required. For now, we can at least be sure that if his administration were not so dreadful at messaging – even when it comes to usually defensible, and sometimes excellent, policies – the president’s poll numbers couldn’t possibly be quite this dismal.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/12/why-do-people-think-of-the-republicans-as-americas-patriotic-party/

The Democratic center that is more in touch with American values, history, traditions and constitutional law.

Last week, the United States celebrated its 246 birthday amid the usual flag-waving enthusiasm. But dire national divisions and the unambiguous threat to democracy posed by an increasingly extremist Republican right, and to liberty posed by the equally extreme Supreme Court, raise difficult and urgent questions.Yet it’s a golden opportunity for the Democrats to redefine the terms of the American debate, if they answer them properly.

What do “freedom” and “liberty” really mean? And why have mainstream Democrats, including the Joe Biden administration, not fought harder over these crucial national tropes and symbols that are often absurdly monopolized by right-wing extremists who are typically the antithesis of patriotism?

The anti-Constitution and anti-democracy mob that attacked Congress on January 6, brutally assaulting police with flagpoles still bearing the US and pro-law enforcement banners, is the ultimate example of this political and cultural dissonance. Right-wingers who joined, supported, or tolerated the insurrection invariably call themselves “patriots”, even as they violently attack the country’s foundational system.

Their leader, former president Donald Trump, is a master of phony nationalistic virtue-signaling. At a notorious annual right-wing jamboree of anti-American lunacy, Mr Trump famously hugged and kissed the US flag, grabbing it as if it belonged to him –- as if it were one of the “beautiful” women he told Access Hollywood, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet… I don’t even wait….Grab them by the pussy.”

Yet he habitually sided with US adversaries, especially Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested his innumerable vicious assassinations were not an issue because “our country does plenty of killing also,” and routinely savaged core institution such as the military, FBI and intelligence services.

Nonetheless he succeeded in establishing himself as a “nationalist” with his “America First” slogan (that has a long and sordid pro-fascist history). Similarly, the most oppressive and exploitative right-wing extremists in Congress unite in a “Freedom Caucus.”

Democrats rarely play this patriotism-signaling game, but it’s a big mistake. Their extreme left-wing is, at best, uncomfortable with patriotic sentiments and symbols due to their, often reasonable, critique of US racial history and realities, and also their utterly deranged slogans like “defund the police.” Republicans have used them to paint all Democrats as anti-American nuts.

Yet the mainstream Democratic Party, led by Mr Biden, remains centrist and sincerely patriotic. Though they’ve been far more supportive in recent years than Republicans of not just the Constitution but also the FBI, CIA, veterans and often the military itself, Democrats have allowed themselves to be perceived as insufficiently patriotic.

This nationalistic virtual-signaling deficit is largely their own fault. Although the Trump-inflected Republican Party generally speaks exclusively to and for non-urban, white and Christian Americans, and pushes an exceptionally divisive agenda, they nonetheless speak to Americans as a national identity group. In their speeches, Democrats often sound like they are going down a rhetorical checklist of key constituencies instead of promoting a broadly unifying national narrative, although exactly that message of patriotic unity delivered eight years in the White House for Barack Obama.

The January 6 hearings are an ideal starting point for Democrats to contrast their own support for democracy versus the attack on constitutional order, and therefore the country, orchestrated by Mr Trump, who remains an unrivaled Republican leader. Even if he’s fading as I recently argued he clearly is following Cassidy Hutchinson’s devastating testimony at the House Committee hearing, most of his potential successors are striving to echo and emulate him, while his rare and isolated patriotic Republican opponents like Representative Liz Cheney are being purged.

Despite having significant perfectly reasonable reservations about some of its provisions, especially those that form the bedrock for a developing pattern of anti-democracy minority rule in the US, most Democrats uphold the Constitution that US officials vow “to support and defend,” while all but a handful of Republicans are hostile or, at best, indifferent. Democrats must stress that the Constitution IS the Republic, and that both are clearly founded on the principle, only fully realized in 1964, of majority rule..

Between Mr Trump’s failed coup and near-universal Republican support or acquiescence for his “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen – and recent highly unpopular, supremely-unrepresentative Court decisions that strip Americans of long-established individual rights based on minority religious dogma in the face of law, history and the principle of separation of church and state – Democrats a golden opportunity to refashion themselves as the party of freedom and genuine patriotism.

They must force the questions of what freedom and liberty mean in the contemporary United States.

When the Court eliminated the constitutional protection of reproductive choice, it sentenced women in many states to the extreme servitude of forced pregnancy and delivery.

Democrats have traditionally supported regulation, especially regarding commercial activities or land-use, that sometimes goes too far, becomes absurd or is used to advantage certain interests. But now they should launch their own campaign against administrative overreach, especially since Republicans, above all in Florida, are now using regulatory authority to punish  corporations uncooperative with their extremist policies.

Crucially, there’s no Democratic equivalent to the Republican rush to use state power to force women to bear children against their will, often even with no exceptions for rape or incest. Mr Biden emotionally cited a 10-year-old rape victim who had to leave Ohio to avoid giving birth to her tormentor’s child. Innumerable tragedies, avoidable deaths, and nightmarish, Kafkaesque prosecutions are inevitable.

Yet the same far-right Court majority insists Americans have a brand-new, yet somehow inviolable, right to wield military weapons of incredible destructive power in most public spaces. States, therefore, are perfectly entitled to use the power of government to force raped little girls to endure a completed pregnancy and deliver a baby into who knows what reality, which the court does not address. But they are not entitled to prevent American men, or others, to brandish instruments of utter mayhem, designed only for the killing and devastation of human bodies, in most public places, although courts, interestingly, are specifically exempted.

The achievement of such cherished goals ought to destroy the right’s ability to pretend to champion freedom as most Americans define it.

Where is the real liberty balance between a supposed right to wield the most terrifying instruments of human destruction in public versus the peaceful, normal, majority’s right not to be menaced, as they go about their daily business with their families, by random strangers flaunting machines designed exclusively to kill people with extreme brutality and almost unimaginable speed?

What’s the calculation between the effectively entirely religious, and distinct minority dogma, that insists on the full legal personhood of the most rudimentary embryo versus a woman’s autonomy over her own body in the early stages of pregnancy?

Democrats shouldn’t be reduced to hugging and kissing flags. But they must prioritize insisting they are the true patriots, supportive of core national institutions and the constitutional and democratic system and therefore far more reliable guardians of real liberty and actual freedom.

These include the freedom not to be forced to live in a society insanely characterized by daily massacres and the unrestricted public flaunting of the apparatuses of masculine, or to be compelled to give birth because of a minority-held, untestable, irrational and fundamentalist insistence that every conception, possibly even in a test tube, represents the will of God, and that the state should use its authority to intervene on behalf of the almighty but oddly powerless divinity in these godawful cases.

Recognizing few limits, the Court’s right-wing theocrats will next target contraception access, marriage equality and other gay-rights, and much more. Everything based on the assertion of a constitutional right to privacy is now up for elimination, even though privacy is only one of scores of establish rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and are not being overthrown by the Christian extremist majority. Democrats must remind Americans that government exists to protect them from, not force them to obey, religious doctrines they, and the vast majority of of their fellow citizens, don’t share.

The right can drone on about taxation and overregulation. But it has completely lost its credibility on fundamental freedom. And the dominant Trump-wing of the Republican Party isn’t just unpatriotic. It’s downright anti-American.

Democrats can and must redefine themselves as the party of patriotism, liberty, and the right of Americans to live their lives as they see fit. But they must start speaking to Americans as a unified nation with a shared identity and common interests that, unfortunately, the Democrats now defend almost entirely alone.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-11/biden-can-unite-israel-and-saudi-arabia-to-meet-iran-threat?sref=tp95wk9l

A guide to what the president can offer and ask for during his crowded agenda.

US President Joe Biden’s success in reunifying and revitalizing the alliance of Western democracies, even expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to include Finland and Sweden, has given Washington its most dynamic international leadership role in decades. Now he’s going to try to do the same in the Middle East when he visits the region this week.

There, the common adversary is Iran, not Russia. There’s nothing as galvanizing as the invasion of Ukraine to bring together fractious neighbors Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. But Iran’s nuclear progress, growing missile arsenal and network of extremist militia groups across the region is, or should be, the next alarming concern in geopolitics.

There won’t be a spontaneous re-embrace of US leadership or renewed trust in Washington as there was in Europe. There has been a growing sense that the US is losing interest in the region as it focuses on China and Russia. But there’s an existing pro-American — or, more precisely, counter-Iranian — Middle East camp, and Biden will be meeting all of it.

His biggest challenge is that the two most important actors, Israel and Saudi Arabia, don’t have diplomatic relations, and can’t or won’t cooperate extensively, especially in public. To bring them together in a de facto US-led coalition, even if quietly and behind the scenes for starters, Biden must ascertain what they want from each other and the US, and, especially, how to deal with the Palestinian issue.

Unlike its smaller neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which normalized relations with Israel in the Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia needs meaningful concessions on the Palestinians to take any major diplomatic steps.

Israel, Biden’s first stop, is again in political tumult, with the coalition government having collapsed last month. Yet this may provide an opportunity: A productive meeting with Biden could give the interim prime minister, Yair Lapid, greater stature heading into elections this fall. Lapid is far more open to restarting talks with the Palestinians than other Israeli leaders.

At the meeting, Biden should stress a halt on the building or expanding of settlements (especially beyond the West Bank separation barrier); protecting the status quo at religious sites in Jerusalem; and halting provocations like evictions and nightly raids into Palestinian-ruled areas.

Biden needs to press Israel to recommit itself to a two-state solution, which remains a key Saudi goal, by expressing support for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state and promising not to annex occupied areas. (Biden is also meeting with former, and possibly future, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who won’t be receptive to any of this.)

Washington has some carrots, mostly in terms of military hardware, but Biden must reinforce the primacy of countering Iran, and that working with the Saudis is the best way to ensure Israel’s safety.

When he meets with Palestinians in Bethlehem, Biden should reassure them the US is serious about a two-state outcome, something former President Donald Trump tried to dump.

But he should also press Palestinian leaders to develop their national institutions, especially in health and education services; to promote, not inhibit, civil society in the West Bank; and to prepare for competitive elections. He should pledge to line up major US and Gulf Arab financial support for this, which would give the Palestinians a tangible as well as aspirational stake in the emergence of a US-led regional partnership.

On Friday, Biden will meet with Saudi leaders, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom he has shunned because of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. In addition to pressing the crown prince on human-rights issues, Biden should make clear to him and King Salman that Washington is willing to sincerely recommit to Saudi security on two conditions.

First, Saudi Arabia needs to seriously undertake aiding the US to manage energy pricing, beyond the modest production increases reached by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and thereby abandon the production-limitation agreement reached with Moscow in 2017.

Second, Riyadh must eschew budding ties to China that threaten US security, such as joint manufacturing of drones and missiles. It’s fine for China to buy Saudi oil, but Biden should remind Saudi leaders that Beijing is Tehran’s primary economic and security ally, and emphasize that they can expect much more from Washington, especially in the context of a growing regional partnership.

As Biden presses Israelis and Palestinians to cooperate, the Saudi corner of the triangle is crucial. Meaningful Israeli steps to ease pressure on the Palestinians and re-embrace the goal of a viable two-state agreement should prompt Riyadh to respond with diplomatic outreach and strategic engagement, even if formal relations remain off the table.

Finally, on Saturday, when Biden joins a summit of friendly Arab governments — the six Gulf Cooperation Council states plus Egypt, Jordan and Iraq — they should all hear the consistent message that their interests are best protected through a US-led grouping aimed at maintaining regional order and stability, to which they can each contribute and from which they will all benefit.

In the end, Biden’s trip will raise this question: The US plus Israel plus the Palestinians plus the Saudis plus all the other Arab states equals … what? If the answer is “not much,” then it’s back to business as usual, relying on a hodgepodge of bilateral arrangements with regional partners to contain Iran, combat terrorists and secure other key US goals.

That hasn’t been completely ineffective. But a new de facto regional partnership would be much more potent in advancing both Washington’s interests and those of its Middle East partners.

Biden could be looking at another, even more unexpected, international coalition-building project than he helped forge in Europe. His ambitions for a “transformative presidency,” largely thwarted domestically, might be realized globally.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2022/07/04/cassidy-hutchinsons-testimony-does-serious-damage-to-trump/

His chances of being the Republican presidential nominee in 2024 have greatly diminished.

The House of Representatives Select Committee hearings on the January 6 insurrection were already among the most momentous in US political history. But no one, apparently including the committee itself, anticipated the almost literal smoking gun it produced last week linking former president Donald Trump directly and personally to the armed assault on Congress.

The brilliantly composed hearings have each focused on one aspect of the seven-phase offensive the committee says Mr Trump instigated to remain in office despite having lost the election to US President Joe Biden.

However, last week their meticulous and cautious planning was suddenly abandoned. On Monday, committee leaders told surprised staffers to announce a hearing the next day with no additional information provided to anyone.

Tuesday’s testimony by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson left no doubt why the committee scrambled so uncharacteristically. She had already testified on video, and was anticipated to join a final hearing focused on the personal conduct of Mr Trump, tentatively scheduled for July 11.

But a dramatic development had quietly occurred. Ms Hutchinson abruptly fired the attorney Mr Trump’s camp had arranged and paid for her. By hiring her own counsel, responsible exclusively to her and with no conflicting interests, she effectively announced her independence from his orbit to both the former president and the committee.

Moreover, she told the committee she was willing to tell the full, unvarnished truth about the former president’s conduct during, and indeed role in, the insurrection. Given the American climate of violent political fury, this young woman’s personal and physical bravery is impressive and even moving. She has nothing to gain and is only imperilled by her honesty, which seems genuinely motivated by patriotism.

The smoking gun was her testimony that Mr Trump, as ever wanting a larger crowd for the cameras, ordered the removal of metal detectors at his rally before the march that turned into the insurrection. “I don’t care that they have weapons – they’re not here to hurt me,” Ms Hutchinson recounted him ordering his staff, “Take the [magnetometers] away and let my people in.”

On June 20, in these pages, I explained how Mr Trump was vulnerable to major criminal charges regarding post-election intrigues, but not seditious conspiracy. That is the peace-time equivalent of treason and, perhaps along with espionage, the most terrible of US political crimes. Although five leaders of pro-Trump white supremacist gangs have been indicted for seditious conspiracy, I strongly doubted evidence would emerge to unambiguously tie the former president to a deliberate effort to use violence to prevent Congress from confirming Mr Biden’s victory. Mr Trump might well, I therefore argued, politically survive even this “tsunami of unheard-of Ignominy”.

Yet that’s exactly what Ms Hutchinson’s testimony unequivocally does. It establishes that Mr Trump knew his supporters were armed and bent on violence before he and his confederates whipped them into an even deeper frenzy with incendiary speeches at the rally, and that he clearly had no objection to them marching on Congress with weapons because they were, as he reportedly said, “not here to hurt me”.

All evidence suggests that chief among those he did not mind might indeed get “hurt” was his own vice president, Mike Pence, held guilty of refusing to misuse his role as President of the Senate, to reject certified electors from key states and generate a constitutional crisis Mr Trump hoped to use to stay in office despite his defeat.

Mr Trump not only knew imminent violence was likely, he appears to have sought to facilitate it by ordering the removal of magnetometers. His culpability in a deliberate attempt to use force to overturn the election and constitutional order can be therefore firmly established.

That will intensify pressure on the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against the former president. And it significantly decreases chances Mr Trump will be the Republican nominee in 2024.

He is reportedly considering the early announcement of another run, despite long-standing entreaties from Republican Party leaders not to do that before the November midterms. Mr Trump knows he’s in massive trouble and may calculate that only the announcement of another campaign, complete with raucous, attention-getting and news-generating rallies, will galvanise his supporters and offset the impressions that he is either fatally tainted or yesterday’s news, or both. A political revival could also spook the Justice Department, which is allergic to appearances of political bias.

Yet it is increasingly probable that he will announce a campaign, hold rallies, and, above all, raise money, but ultimately stand down, especially if he thinks he has a good chance of losing. Many Republicans won’t just want their most viable presidential candidate, but also one who can serve a full eight, and not a mere four, years and won’t enter office as a lame duck.

Ms Hutchinson’s testimony also painted a devastating portrait of her former immediate superior, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, as detached and disengaged, seemingly either overwhelmed or bored by the insurrection. The White House was doing nothing to defend Congress because, he told her, the president “doesn’t want to do anything” to stop the violence and “he thinks Mike [Pence] deserves” a rampaging mob chasing him down and vowing to “hang” him.

Her testimony included a secondhand account, that reportedly may be contradicted by the Secret Service, of Mr Trump supposedly lunging at the driver of his car to try to join the rioters. She reported what she was told by superiors. Accurate or not it is a minor footnote, as is her testimony he flung plates of food in a rage at the walls of the White House.

The committee wisely calculated that rushing Ms Hutchinson’s testimony onto television before details leaked or she changed her mind was necessary because her account of Mr Trump’s overt acts of support for the armed rebellion changes everything legally and politically.

Many Republicans have tried their best to ignore the hearings, dismiss or downplay the evidence, or pretend it’s not a big deal. None of that is working. The truth is starting to sink in and it is decisive that no one, other than him, has contradicted her account that Mr Trump ordered the removal of metal detectors that would help his armed supporters attack Congress.

So, a soft-spoken, remarkably composed and brave 25-year-old woman appears to have struck a blow from which, finally, the heretofore invulnerable former president may not recover and has probably put an end to the Donald Trump era in US politics.