In this mailing: - Guy Millière: A Storm Over the American Republic
- Amir Taheri: Biden Should Ditch the Doha Deal with Taliban
by Guy Millière • March 7, 2021 at 5:00 am The atmosphere in the United States remains poisonous. Critics claim that stoking in the public is being done on purpose -- to create a false narrative that not only is Trump supposedly a "threat to democracy," but that his more than 74 million supporters are, too. Others, however, claim that the real threat to democracy is actually these serial liars, violators of the Constitution and falsifiers of information. The right to challenge and criticize, which is an integral part of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, appears seriously threatened. The right to defend oneself against charges also appears threatened, and the legal profession dangerous to practice. Expressing doubts about the November 3 election is now a liability. Substantiated reports show that it was far from perfect. The American economist Peter Navarro, in his private capacity, drew up three meticulous analyses: "The Immaculate Deception," "The Art of the Steal" and "The Navarro Report". They have been zealously disparaged -- many think unjustly. Some authors describe what is happening as a slide towards authoritarianism. They note that many Americans and corporations, while behaving in an increasingly authoritarian manner, accuse their opponents of being authoritarian -- in other words, blaming their opponents for what they themselves are doing. For more than three years Trump was accused, without any evidence apart from a fake "dossier", of being a Russian agent. The accusations eventually proved baseless, but not before $32 million of taxpayers' money were spent in what the prosecutors knew from the start was a fraud. They also tried to frame, incriminate and send innocent people to prison. The exercise was, at bottom, nothing more than an attempted coup d'état. Throughout his entire term, Trump was faced with threats, abuse of power and unremitting attacks. Even though Trump is no longer president, the war against him continues. If H.R.1 becomes the law of the land, it will entrench those "very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess". These include, among other things, the flooding of states with millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, failure to verify signatures, no chain of custody of ballots, same-day voter registration, and ballot-harvesting -- many of which are invitations to commit fraud. As a bipartisan report in 2005 from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, concluded: mail-in ballots "remain the largest source of potential voter fraud." If H.R.1 is passed in the Senate, countless ways of demolishing election integrity will be set in cement.
 The atmosphere in the United States remains poisonous. Critics claim that stoking in the public is being done on purpose -- to create a false narrative that not only is Trump supposedly a "threat to democracy," but that his more than 74 million supporters are, too. Pictured: Members of the National Guard at a checkpoint on Capitol Hill on March 5, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images) January 20, 2021. President Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. The scene, however, is devoid of any human presence. The streets of Washington DC are empty. People had been urged to stay at home and Americans throughout the rest of the country asked not to come. The city is under the protection of 25,000 members of the National Guard, heavily armed. High barriers topped with razor wire surround the Capitol area. In the streets planned for the new president's "parade", barriers separate the sidewalks from the roadway. The only people visible are men in uniform carrying rifles. A day that is usually a day of celebration in the United States is, this year, strange and sad. Continue Reading Article by Amir Taheri • March 7, 2021 at 4:00 am There is at least one issue on which Biden would be wise to adopt the anti-Trump posture: Afghanistan. Today, Biden could ditch Trump's cut-and-run plan and re-commit the US to helping Afghans protect what they have achieved and move on to build more. By doing so, Biden would burnish his anti-Trump credentials and also please Obama nostalgics. This week, Khalilzad offered the chasing wolves a much bigger morsel: a plan for a coalition government in which the terrorist outfit would secure a leading place. It is worth remembering that, until the 9/11 attacks, Khalilzad and Karzai were lobbyists for Taliban in Washington.... By early August 2001, those interested in the issue already knew that Karzai was to be the first Taliban ambassador to Washington. [T]he US has invested heavily, in blood and treasure, in making Afghanistan what it is today, a chunk of the world freed from one of the darkest forces mankind has seen for centuries. Finally, it is clear to anyone familiar with Afghan realities that a scheme that may have worked 20 years ago has no chance of succeeding now. The Doha "peace deal" would be nothing more than a prelude to a new tragedy. For the Taliban to enter government in Kabul they should give up their arms, accept the Afghan constitution, take part in elections and let the world see how much support they have.
 In the past 20 years, the United States has forged a moral bond with the people of Afghanistan, persuading them to accept untold sacrifices in the hope of a better future, which in turn would not allow Afghanistan to become a base for terrorism against others, including the United States. Pictured: Afghan policemen arrive at the site of a bomb blast in Kabul that killed at least two people and injured five others, on February 21, 2021. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images) President Joe Biden's first foreign policy moves so far make at least one thing clear: he is looking for areas where he can distance himself from his predecessor without committing to dramatically different courses. He has promised to return to the Paris climate accord that, requiring congressional approval, doesn't imply doing anything in particular. He has flattered European allies by talking about multilateralism, forgetting that even the most multilateral arrangement still needs leadership and a program, something he tries to avoid for fear of being accused of Trumpian arrogance. He has pleased the mullahs in Tehran by removing their Yemeni surrogates, the Houthis, from the terrorist list, without removing the names of their leaders from it. Continue Reading Article |
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