person:putin

  • Putin threatens to target US if it deploys #missiles in Europe
    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/20/putin-threatens-to-target-the-us-if-it-deploys-new-missiles-in-europe.html

    Putin, in his annual address to parliament, says his country would not seek confrontation and would not take the first step in deploying missiles after the suspension of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

    However, he says Russia would respond to any deployment of new intermediate-range missiles in Europe by targeting the United States itself and not just the countries where they are deployed, according to a Reuters translation.

    He says he would field new weapons that would target U.S. decision-making centers.

    #nucléaire #armes

  • Les #Etats-Unis, première #menace d’une #Europe divisée - Le Temps
    https://www.letemps.ch/monde/etatsunis-premiere-menace-dune-europe-divisee

    US poses bigger threat than Putin or Xi, say voters | World | The Times
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trump-a-greater-threat-to-peace-than-xi-or-putin-polls-suggest-ds8qrr5s6

    The US under President Trump is perceived as a greater threat to Europe’s security than China or Russia, according to an international opinion poll.

    Mr Trump’s standing has fallen so low among America’s allies that people in France and Germany are now significantly more likely to say they trust President Putin or President Xi to “do the right thing” on the global stage. A clear majority of people in eastern European countries including Poland fear that war will break out with Russia as the US-backed liberal order threatens to dissolve into an era of renewed conflict.

  • Ex-U.S. marine held in Russia for spying was misled, says lawyer | Reuters
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-espionage-whelan-idUSKCN1PG0Y4


    Former U.S. marine Paul Whelan, who was detained by Russia’s FSB security service on suspicion of spying, looks out of a defendants’ cage before a court hearing in Moscow, Russia January 22, 2019.
    REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

    The lawyer for a former U.S. marine accused of spying by Russia said on Tuesday that his client had been misled before his arrest and believed that a thumb drive handed to him in a hotel room had contained holiday snaps rather than secret information.

    Russia’s Federal Security Serviced detained Paul Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, in a Moscow hotel room on Dec. 28.

    Whelan appeared in a Moscow court on Tuesday, where a judge rejected a release on bail. If found guilty of espionage, he could be jailed for up to 20 years.

    Whelan, who denies the charges, was detained after receiving a thumb drive containing a list of all the employees of a secret Russian state agency, the Russian online news portal Rosbalt.ru reported this month.

    Rosbalt cited an unnamed Russian intelligence source as saying that Whelan had been spying for 10 years, using the internet to identify targets from whom he could obtain information, and that the list he was caught with had long been of interest to U.S. spies.

    Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to support that version of events, later telling reporters Whelan had been “caught red-handed” carrying out “specific illegal actions” in his hotel room.

    But Vladimir Zherebenkov, Whelan’s lawyer, said on Tuesday that his client had accepted the information unknowingly.

    Paul was actually meant to receive information from an individual that was not classified,” Zherebenkov told reporters.

    These were cultural things, a trip to a cathedral, Paul’s holiday ... photographs. But as it turned out, it (the thumb drive) contained classified information.”

    The lawyer said Whelan had not been able to see what was on the thumb drive because he had been detained before he had a chance to do so.

    • McFaul: Whelan’s Arrest Is ‘Very Strange’ – Foreign Policy
      (article du 8/01/2019)
      https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/08/mcfaul-whelans-arrest-is-very-strange

      The former U.S. ambassador to Russia says the former Marine’s detention doesn’t fit the pattern of previous ones.
      […]
      _FP_spoke to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who has himself been harshly criticized by the Russian government, about his experience in dealing with such arrests and why he has many unanswered questions about Paul Whelan’s detention. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
      […]
      FP: What for you is still to be answered? What are the big questions?
      MM: Well the biggest one is what espionage was he doing. The story in the Russian press is quite convoluted, that he was asking for the names of some low-level officials on a USB drive. But you know that sounds all very strange to me. And again, the Russians are very good at counterintelligence—probably one of the best countries in the world at running that. They have extremely effective and pervasive monitoring systems in that country. If they caught him red-handed in this act, why haven’t we seen those photos? Why haven’t we seen tapes? That’s strange to me. And, by the way, they oftentimes make up this stuff. So it’s also even strange to me that they haven’t given us the made-up stuff as they’ve done with other people that they’ve detained. I want to learn more. This does not strike me as somebody familiar with intelligence operations in Russia. Mr. Whelan doesn’t strike me as a typical spy given his background. This doesn’t fit what I typically think of an intelligence operation inside Russia, which is a very risky place to do any kinds of operations. It doesn’t fit the normal standard operating procedure for me.
      […]
      FP: Is it unusual that we haven’t heard from the president or the White House on this?
      MM: No, I don’t know if it’s unusual or not. It’s striking to me how little the president’s talked about it. Not just talking about it but, do something about it. He has put forward a hypothesis about diplomacy that if he develops and nurtures these personal relationships with people like Putin, that will lead to concrete results that are good for the American people. He’s made that argument for years now. Well, here it is, here’s an American arrested.

      FP: Trump has made it a point in the past of getting Americans held abroad released, he’s been quite proud of that.
      MM: Exactly. Interacting with dictators and doing that as he did with the North Korean government. So, why not here? Maybe it’s happening behind the scenes, I don’t know, but I do think it’s odd.

  • Gabbard-2020 ? “D.C.-la-folle” devient fou !
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/gabbard-2020-dc-la-folle-devient-fou

    Gabbard-2020 ? “D.C.-la-folle” devient fou !

    Nos lecteurs imagineront sans peine la joie qui me transporte à cette simple nouvelle que Tulsi Gabbard va pose sa candidature à la désignation démocrate pour la présidentielle de 2020. (Elle l’a annoncé hier soir à CNN et posera sa candidature officielle la semaine prochaine.) La question n’est pas ici de savoir si elle sera élue, ni si elle a une chance d’être élue, ni ce qu’elle fera éventuellement contre Trump, et bla bla bla, mais bien de voir l’extraordinaire explosion de folie, de haine, de confusion, de désarroi qui a enflammé “D.C.-la-folle” à cette nouvelle.

    (RT-USA, qui n’a pas manqué l’occasion de sauter sur cette nouvelle, développe un articleessentiellement à partir d’une collection de tweet exprimant l’horreur et la confusion absolues qui se sont (...)

    • ‘Putin puppet’ vs ‘Assad shill’: Dems & Reps unite in panic over Gabbard challenging Trump in 2020 — RT USA News
      https://www.rt.com/usa/448632-tulsi-gabbard-negative-reactions

      With Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) entering the 2020 presidential fray, establishment figures on both Right and Left are scrambling to smear the anti-war congresswoman with impeccable identity-politics bona fides.

      Ever since her 2017 visit to Syria, Gabbard has been condemned for daring to seek firsthand accounts rather than blindly trusting the MSM narrative, so on Friday the pundits were again off to the races, with fresh accusations of Assad-sympathizing.

  • Richard Haass : Iran Is The Most Likely Setting For A Major New War In 2019 | Video | RealClearPolitics
    https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/12/27/richard_haass_iran_is_the_most_likely_setting_for_a_major_new_war

    If I were going to place a bet on 2019, where there could well be a serious new war in the world, it wouldn’t be North Korea, it wouldn’t be the South China Sea. You never know what Mr. Putin will do in Ukraine, but I would bet on Iran, whether it is Israel vis-a-vis Iran or it is the Saudis doing something

    #arabie_saoudite #prophétie_autoréalisatrice

  • Putin’s interests in Syria and Lebanon are limiting Israel’s military options
    Playing chess with Hezbollah is one thing. Trying to figure out what Putin wants, in Syria and perhaps also in Lebanon, even as Hezbollah is trying to manufacture weapons there, is a completely different challenge
    Amos Harel - Nov 18, 2018 9:39 AM
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-putin-s-interests-in-syria-and-lebanon-is-limiting-israel-s-milita

    One reason for Israel’s exceptional caution in dealing with Hamas in the Gaza Strip is its growing concern over the northern front. Though it may sound like a threadbare excuse, this seems to be one of the considerations driving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to decide, time after time, to try to reach a cease-fire in Gaza.

    The problem Israel faces in the north, in a nutshell, is the real danger that its operational window of opportunity is closing. In recent years, Israel has exploited the upheaval in the Arab world to expand its offensive activity, most of which is secret.

    Via hundreds of airstrikes and special operations, the army and the intelligence agencies have worked to distance the danger of another war and reduce the enemy’s operational capabilities in the event that war does break out.

    In Syria and Lebanon, the campaign initially focused on preventing Iran from smuggling advanced weaponry to Hezbollah. But over the last year or so, a new mission has been added – preventing Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria. This peaked with a flurry of incidents between the Israel Defense Forces and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards last winter and spring.

    A problem may also be developing in Lebanon. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly in September, Netanyahu warned of efforts by Iran and Hezbollah to set up missile production facilities in the Beirut area. Given the problems its smuggling operations had encountered, the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force apparently decided it had to shorten the distance between the manufacturer and the customer by moving its efforts to improve the accuracy of Hezbollah’s rockets to Lebanon.

    Netanyahu’s speech did its job. In the three days between that speech and the tour of Beirut the Lebanese government conducted for diplomats to rebut it, someone worked hard to get rid of the evidence. But over the long run, Iran seems unlikely to abandon this effort.

    What’s even more worrying is that Putin has recently displayed increased interest in events in Lebanon. In the worst-case scenario, the defensive umbrella — both real and symbolic — that Russia has spread over northwest Syria would be expanded to Lebanon, further complicating Israel’s calculus.

    Even now, at least according to Arab media reports, Israel hasn’t conducted an airstrike in Lebanon since February 2014, when the IAF, apparently pursuing an arms convoy that had crossed the border from Syria, bombed a target in Janta, a few hundred meters to the Lebanese side of the Lebanon-Syria border.

    Hezbollah, which was willing to pretend the spit was rain as long as its convoys were being bombed on the Syrian side, immediately responded with a series of attacks by Druze residents of the Syrian Golan Heights.

    The cell’s commander, Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, and his successor, Hezbollah’s Jihad Mughniyeh, were both subsequently killed in attacks attributed to Israel. Since then, Israel has confined its attacks to Syria.

    But playing chess with Hezbollah is one thing. Trying to figure out what Putin wants, in Syria and perhaps also in Lebanon, even as Hezbollah is trying to manufacture weapons there, is a challenge of a completely different order of magnitude.

    Netanyahu was presumably hinting at this problem, among others, when he spoke about security considerations that he can’t share with the public, at the memorial for Paula Ben-Gurion earlier this week.

    #IsraelRussie

  • The Real Reasons Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Wanted Khashoggi ‘Dead or Alive’
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reasons-saudi-crown-prince-mohammed-bin-salman-wanted-khasho

    Christopher Dickey 10.21.18
    His death is key to understanding the political forces that helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and slaughter today.

    The mind plays strange tricks sometimes, especially after a tragedy. When I sat down to write this story about the Saudi regime’s homicidal obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, the first person I thought I’d call was Jamal Khashoggi. For more than 20 years I phoned him or met with him, even smoked the occasional water pipe with him, as I looked for a better understanding of his country, its people, its leaders, and the Middle East. We often disagreed, but he almost always gave me fresh insights into the major figures of the region, starting with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, and the political trends, especially the explosion of hope that was called the Arab Spring in 2011. He would be just the man to talk to about the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, because he knew both sides of that bitter relationship so well.

    And then, of course, I realized that Jamal is dead, murdered precisely because he knew too much.

    Although the stories keep changing, there is now no doubt that 33-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the power in front of his decrepit father’s throne, had put out word to his minions that he wanted Khashoggi silenced, and the hit-team allegedly understood that as “wanted dead or alive.” But the [petro]buck stops with MBS, as bin Salman’s called. He’s responsible for a gruesome murder just as Henry II was responsible for the murder of Thomas Becket when he said, “Who will rid me of that meddlesome priest?” In this case, a meddlesome journalist.

    We now know that a few minor players will pay. Some of them might even be executed by Saudi headsmen (one already was reported killed in a car crash). But experience also tells us the spotlight of world attention will shift. Arms sales will go ahead. And the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi risks becoming just one more entry in the annals of intensifying, murderous repression of journalists who are branded the “enemy of the people” by Donald Trump and various two-bit tyrants around the world.

    There is more to Khashoggi’s murder than the question of press freedom, however. His death holds the key to understanding the political forces that have helped turn the Middle East from a region of hope seven years ago to one of brutal repression and ongoing slaughter today. Which brings us back to the question of the Saudis’ fear and hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, the regional rivalries of those who support it and those who oppose it, and the game of thrones in the House of Saud itself. Khashoggi was not central to any of those conflicts, but his career implicated him, fatally, in all of them.

    The Muslim Brotherhood is not a benign political organization, but neither is it Terror Incorporated. It was created in the 1920s and developed in the 1930s and ‘40s as an Islamic alternative to the secular fascist and communist ideologies that dominated revolutionary anti-colonial movements at the time. From those other political organizations the Brotherhood learned the values of a tight structure, party discipline, and secrecy, with a public face devoted to conventional political activity—when possible—and a clandestine branch that resorted to violence if that appeared useful.

    In the novel Sugar Street, Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz sketched a vivid portrait of a Brotherhood activist spouting the group’s political credo in Egypt during World War II. “Islam is a creed, a way of worship, a nation and a nationality, a religion, a state, a form of spirituality, a Holy Book, and a sword,” says the Brotherhood preacher. “Let us prepare for a prolonged struggle. Our mission is not to Egypt alone but to all Muslims worldwide. It will not be successful until Egypt and all other Islamic nations have accepted these Quranic principles in common. We shall not put our weapons away until the Quran has become a constitution for all Believers.”

    For several decades after World War II, the Brotherhood’s movement was eclipsed by Arab nationalism, which became the dominant political current in the region, and secular dictators moved to crush the organization. But the movement found support among the increasingly embattled monarchies of the Gulf, including and especially Saudi Arabia, where the rule of the king is based on his custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. At the height of the Cold War, monarchies saw the Brotherhood as a helpful antidote to the threat of communist-led or Soviet-allied movements and ideologies.

    By the 1980s, several of the region’s rulers were using the Brotherhood as a tool to weaken or destroy secular opposition. Egypt’s Anwar Sadat courted them, then moved against them, and paid with his life in 1981, murdered by members of a group originally tied to the Brotherhood. Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, then spent three decades in power manipulating the Brotherhood as an opposition force, outlawing the party as such, but allowing its known members to run for office in the toothless legislature, where they formed a significant bloc and did a lot of talking.

    Jordan’s King Hussein played a similar game, but went further, giving clandestine support to members of the Brotherhood waging a covert war against Syrian tyrant Hafez al-Assad—a rebellion largely destroyed in 1982 when Assad’s brother killed tens of thousands of people in the Brotherhood stronghold of Hama.

    Even Israel got in on the action, initially giving Hamas, the Brotherhood branch among the Palestinians, tacit support as opposition to the left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization (although PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat once identified with the Brotherhood himself).

    The Saudi royals, too, thought the Brotherhood could be bought off and manipulated for their own ends. “Over the years the relationship between the Saudis and the Brotherhood ebbed and flowed,” says Lorenzo Vidino, an expert on extremism at George Washington University and one of the foremost scholars in the U.S. studying the Brotherhood’s history and activities.

    Over the decades factions of the Brotherhood, like communists and fascists before them, “adapted to individual environments,” says Vidino. In different countries it took on different characteristics. Thus Hamas, or its military wing, is easily labeled as terrorist by most definitions, while Ennahda in Tunisia, which used to be called terrorist by the ousted Ben Ali regime, has behaved as a responsible political party in a complex democratic environment. To the extent that Jamal Khashoggi identified with the Brotherhood, that was the current he espoused. But democracy, precisely, is what Mohammed bin Salman fears.

    Vidino traces the Saudis’ intense hostility toward the Brotherhood to the uprisings that swept through much of the Arab world in 2011. “The Saudis together with the Emiratis saw it as a threat to their own power,” says Vidino.

    Other regimes in the region thought they could use the Brotherhood to extend their influence. First among these was the powerful government in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has such longstanding ties to the Islamist movement that some scholars refer to his elected government as “Brotherhood 2.0.” Also hoping to ride the Brotherhood wave was tiny, ultra-rich Qatar, whose leaders had used their vast natural gas wealth and their popular satellite television channel, Al Jazeera, to project themselves on the world stage and, they hoped, buy some protection from their aggressive Saudi neighbors. As one senior Qatari official told me back in 2013, “The future of Qatar is soft power.” After 2011, Jazeera’s Arabic channel frequently appeared to propagandize in the Brotherhood’s favor as much as, say, Fox News does in Trump’s.

    Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, and the birthplace of the Brotherhood, became a test case. Although Jamal Khashoggi often identified the organization with the idealistic hopes of the peaceful popular uprising that brought down the Mubarak dynasty, in fact the Egyptian Brotherhood had not taken part. Its leaders had a modus vivendi they understood with Mubarak, and it was unclear what the idealists in Tahrir Square, or the military tolerating them, might do.

    After the dictator fell and elections were called, however, the Brotherhood made its move, using its party organization and discipline, as well as its perennial slogan, “Islam is the solution,” to put its man Mohamed Morsi in the presidential palace and its people in complete control of the government. Or so it thought.

    In Syria, meanwhile, the Brotherhood believed it could and should lead the popular uprising against the Assad dynasty. That had been its role 30 years earlier, and it had paid mightily.

    For more than a year, it looked like the Brotherhood’s various branches might sweep to power across the unsettled Arab world, and the Obama administration, for want of serious alternatives, was inclined to go with the flow.

    But then the Saudis struck back.

    In the summer of 2013, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the commander of the Egyptian armed forces, led a military coup with substantial popular support against the conspicuously inept Brotherhood government, which had proved quickly that Islam was not really the “solution” for much of anything.

    Al-Sissi had once been the Egyptian military attaché in Riyadh, where he had many connections, and the Saudis quickly poured money into Egypt to shore up his new regime. At the same time, he declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and launched a campaign of ruthless repression. Within weeks of the coup, the Egyptian military attacked two camps of Brotherhood protesters and slaughtered hundreds.

    In Syria, the efforts to organize a credible political opposition to President Bashar al-Assad proved virtually impossible as the Qataris and Turks backed the Brotherhood while the Saudis continued their vehement opposition. But that does not mean that Riyadh supported moderate secular forces. Far from it. The Saudis still wanted to play a major role bringing down the Syrian regime allied to another arch enemy, the government of Iran. So the Saudis put their weight behind ultra-conservative Salafis, thinking they might be easier to control than the Muslim Brothers.

    Riyadh is “okay with quietist Salafism,” says Vidino. But the Salafis’ religious extremism quickly shaded over into the thinking of groups like the al Qaeda spinoff called the Nusra Front. Amid all the infighting, little progress was made against Assad, and there to exploit the chaos was the so-called Islamic State (which Assad partially supported in its early days).

    Then, in January 2015, at the height of all this regional turmoil, the aged and infirm Salman bin Abdelaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, began taking into his own hands virtually all the reins of power, making bold decisions about reforming the Saudi economy, taking small measures to give the impression he might liberalize society—and moving to intimidate or otherwise neutralize anyone who might challenge his power.

    Saudi Arabia is a country named after one family, the al Saud, and while there is nothing remotely democratic about the government, within the family itself with its thousands of princes there traditionally has been an effort to find consensus. Every king up to now has been a son of the nation’s founder, Abdelaziz ibn Saud, and thus a brother or half brother of the other kings.

    When Salman took over, he finally named successors from the next generation. His nephew Mohammed bin Nayef, then 57 and well known for his role fighting terrorism, became crown prince. His son, Mohammed bin Salman, became deputy crown prince. But bin Nayef’s position between the king and his favorite son clearly was untenable. As one Saudi close to the royals put it: “Between the onion and the skin there is only the stink.”

    Bin Nayef was pushed out in 2017. The New York Times reported that during an end-of-Ramadan gathering at the palace he “was told he was going to meet the king and was led into another room, where royal court officials took away his phones and pressured him to give up his posts as crown prince and interior minister. … At first, he refused. But as the night wore on, the prince, a diabetic who suffers from the effects of a 2009 assassination attempt by a suicide bomber, grew tired.” Royal court officials meanwhile called around to other princes saying bin Nayef had a drug problem and was unfit to be king.

    Similar pressure was brought to bear on many of the richest and most powerful princes in the kingdom, locked up in the Ritz Carlton hotel in 2017, ostensibly as part of an extra-legal fight against corruption. They were forced to give allegiance to MBS at the same time they were giving up a lot of their money.

    That pattern of coerced allegiance is what the Saudis now admit they wanted from Jamal Khashoggi. He was no prince, but he had been closely associated in the past with the sons of the late King Faisal, particularly Turki al-Faisal, who was for many years the head of the Saudi intelligence apparatus and subsequently served as ambassador to the United Kingdom, then the United States.

    Although Turki always denied he had ambitions to be king, his name often was mentioned in the past as a contender. Thus far he seems to have weathered the rule of MBS, but given the record of the crown prince anyone close to the Al Faisal branch of the family, like Khashoggi, would be in a potentially perilous position.

    Barbara Bodine is a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, which has suffered mightily since MBS launched a brutal proxy war there against Iran. Both MBS and Trump have declared the regime in Tehran enemy number one in the region. But MBS botched the Yemen operation from the start. It was dubbed “Decisive Storm” when it began in 2015, and was supposed to last only a few weeks, but the war continues to this day. Starvation and disease have spread through Yemen, creating one of the world’s greatest humanitarian disasters. And for the moment, in one of those developments that makes the Middle East so rich in ironies, in Yemen the Saudis are allied with a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    “What drives MBS is a ruthless effort toward total control domestically and regionally; he is Putin of the Desert,” says Bodine. “He has basically broken the back of the princelings, the religious establishment and the business elite, brought all ministries and agencies of power under his sole control (’I alone can fix it’), and jailed, killed or put under house arrest activists and any and all potential as well as real opposition (including his mother).”

    In 2017, MBS and his backers in the Emirates accused Qatar of supporting “terrorism,” issuing a set of demands that included shutting down Al Jazeera. The Saudis closed off the border and looked for other ways, including military options, to put pressure on the poor little rich country that plays so many angles it has managed to be supportive of the Brotherhood and cozy with Iran while hosting an enormous U.S. military base.

    “It was Qatar’s independent streak—not just who they supported but that they had a foreign policy divorced from the dictates of Riyadh,” says Bodine. “The basic problem is that both the Brotherhood and Iran offer competing Islam-based governing structures that challenge the Saudi model.”

    “Jamal’s basic sin,” says Bodine,“was he was a credible insider, not a fire-breathing radical. He wrote and spoke in English for an American audience via credible mainstream media and was well regarded and highly visible within the Washington chattering classes. He was accessible, moderate and operated within the West. He challenged not the core structure of the Kingdom but the legitimacy of the current rulers, especially MBS.”

    “I do think the game plan was to make him disappear and I suspect the end game was always to make him dead,” said Bodine in a long and thoughtful email. “If he was simply jailed within Saudi there would have been a drumbeat of pressure for his release. Dead—there is certainly a short term cost, whether more than anticipated or longer than anticipated we don’t know yet, but the world will move on. Jamal will become a footnote, a talking point perhaps, but not a crusade. The dismembered body? No funeral. Taking out Jamal also sends a powerful signal to any dissident that there is no place safe.”

    #Arabie_Saoudite #Turquie #politique #terrorisme #putsch

  • The Suffocation of Democracy | Christopher R. Browning
    https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy

    The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power. Perhaps the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary Source: The New York Review of Books

  • On the Ground News ( OGNreports) – Twitter
    https://mobile.twitter.com/OGNreports

    Media/News Company consisting of a group of Journalists working in Syria delivering accurate, confirmed & up to date news. We document Assad/Putin warcrimes.

    Twitter
    https://mobile.twitter.com/walid970721/status/1045807793809367040/photo/1

    Cette scène montrant clairement des hommes arborant des drapeaux #isis
    correspondrait à une « manifestation de civils » selon « On the Ground News », qui a vite fait d’effacer son tweet après qu’on lui ait mis son énormité devant le nez.

  • Russia. Winning in Syria and the Middle East - By David W. Lesch and Kamal Alam - Syria Comment

    https://www.joshualandis.com/blog/25520-2

    Winning in Syria and the Middle East
    By David W. Lesch and Kamal Alam
    For Syria Comment – July 16, 2018

    The common perception today is that Russia has won in Syria, having supported the government of Bashar al-Assad, which is now steadily reasserting its control over previously lost territory. As a result, Russia has inserted itself as the power broker in Syria, if not the entire Middle East. The summit between Presidents Trump and Putin on Monday in Helsinki, where the subject of Syria was high on the agenda, seems to have consecrated Russia’s victory. Countries tend to gravitate toward winners, not losers.

    Kamal Alam

    The United States, on the other hand, directly and indirectly intervened in multiple conflicts in the Middle East since 9/11, first in Afghanistan, then Iraq, followed by involvement in a series of upheavals brought on by the Arab Spring: Libya and Syria most notably. No one would say the US has won in any of these cases—far from it.

    On the surface, this is difficult to comprehend. After all, the US has by far the most powerful military on earth. The image of Russia’s only aircraft carrier limping toward, breaking down, and being towed in the eastern Mediterranean in support of Assad’s forces was a stark reminder of this reality. So how did Russia win—and why did the US fail over and over again?

    There is one outstanding difference in the Russian versus American military interventions in internal national conflicts in the Middle East: in Syria, the Kremlin supported the entrenched state. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the US supported opposition forces seeking the overthrow of the entrenched state.

    For the sake of argument, let’s say the US and NATO reversed their policy and actually wanted Libyan President Muammar Gadafi to remain in power against the opposition forces unleashed by the Arab spring. Is there any doubt that with US military support he would still be in power today? Perhaps he too would be mopping up pockets of resistance much as Assad is doing today in Syria. However illogical or immoral it may have seemed at the time to most in the West, let’s say Washington wanted Assad to stay in power seven years ago when the Arab spring hit Syria. Would not the US be the one crowning its success there, not Russia? Ironically, the US supported the Iraqi state against ISIS—and won. But the US is not going to get much credit for solving a problem it largely created when it dissolved the state via the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its chaotic aftermath.

  • Avoiding a Cold War in the High North - Bloomberg
    par l’amiral (en retraite) James G. Stavridis, ancien SACEUR…

    https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-04/russia-is-gearing-up-for-a-cold-war-in-the-arctic

    In the classic Cold War novel (and fine 1965 film) "The Bedford Incident," a U.S. destroyer on a NATO mission tangles with a Soviet submarine in the frigid waters near the Arctic Circle. Mayhem ensues in a tautly described set of interactions that lead the world to the brink of nuclear war.

    Today, as we watch U.S. and Russia continue to confront each other around the world — from Syria to Ukraine to the cyber sphere — the High North is no exception. “Our goal is to make it a truly global and competitive transport route,” Putin said of the Arctic in a March address to the Russian Federal Assembly. China may also be getting into the game: President Xi Jinping recently met with Putin to discuss a collaborating on a kind of “frozen Silk Road.

    Clearly, the Arctic is dangerously close to becoming a zone of conflict. How can we achieve what our Canadian allies wistfully call “high north but low tension"?

    Bon, on ne voit pas en quoi les deux déclarations d’intérêt géopolitique des « méchants » élèvent le niveau de tension, mais bon, c’est un ancien patron de l’OTAN…

    La suite, n’est guère plus rassurante, car, hormis le point 2, appel au renforcement des moyens plus que classique chez un responsable militaire, les trois autres points laissent assez peu de place à un optimisme raisonnable vu l’approche états-unienne actuelle des relations internationales…

    First, the U.S. should invest in the international institutions that provide forums for dialog between Russia and the rest of the Arctic nations. At the top of the list is the Arctic Council, a loosely organized but bureaucratically functional international organization with all the Arctic nations (and many observer states as well, notably China). The council brings together both the foreign ministers and military chiefs from the member nations, and uniquely could hold a summit and convene the heads of state from every state with either geographic or economic interest.

    Second, the Pentagon must increase its ability to monitor and operate militarily in Arctic. Congress must allocate financing for at least half a dozen significant icebreakers, and joint private-public partnering could help develop a strategic plan for constructing appropriate infrastructure — from airfields to ports to offshore platforms.

    Third, Washington should seek zones of cooperation with Russia (and eventually China if it becomes a regional player). These could include using “science diplomacy” to jointly sponsor missions to measure environmental issues from warming sea temperatures to melting ice; conducting exercises to test our ability to respond to ecological disasters (including oil spills); practice search-and-rescue operations over wide areas (Canada has invested heavily in this); and so on.

    Finally, Americans simply need to pay more attention to the vast stretches of ocean and ice at the top of the world. The stakes — geopolitical competition, hydrocarbons, a fragile environment with global effects, the emergence over time of important shipping lanes — are enormous. We can avoid a real world Bedford Incident, but it will require attention, resources and imagination applied to the High North.

    #Arctique

  • Mehdi Hasan - on the button, as ever.

    “We hear a great deal from liberals in the West these days about the rise of authoritarian and illiberal governments across the world: from Putin’s Russia to Orbán’s Hungary; from Trump’s America to Erdogan’s Turkey; from Modi’s India to Duterte’s Philippines.

    We don’t hear so much about Netanyahu’s Israel — despite the fact that the country, as former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami has conceded, “is succumbing to its deepest ethnocentric impulses” and is “now well on its way to joining the growing club of illiberal democracies, and it has Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to thank.””

    https://theintercept.com/2018/04/30/israel-palestine-netanyahu-idf-gaza

  • Why does Putin treat Britain with disdain? He thinks he’s bought it.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/why-does-putin-treat-britain-with-disdain-he-thinks-hes-bought-it/2018/03/16/9f66a720-2951-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html

    In her parliamentary statement, the prime minister did leave open the possibility of harsher financial sanctions. But the real question, for Britain — as well as France, Germany and the United States — is whether we are willing to end the financial relationship altogether. We could outlaw tax havens, in the Virgin Islands as well as in Delaware and Nevada; we could make it impossible to buy property anonymously; we could ban Russian companies with dubious origins from our stock exchanges. But that would cost our own financiers and real estate agents, disrupt the discreet flow of cash into the coffers of political parties, deprive the art market of its biggest investors. Does May have the nerve to do that? Do any of us?

    #élites#hypocrisie #finances #système #argent #capitalisme

  • Taibbi : Russiagate Trump, Putin, Mueller and Targeting Dissent - Rolling Stone
    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/taibbi-russiagate-trump-putin-mueller-and-targeting-dissent-w517486

    Putin loves you; therefore, you love Putin. The enemy re-tweets you, therefore, you’re in league with the enemy. We’re at war with them, therefore we’re at war with you.

    One of the first rules of a shunning campaign is that it doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to be what everyone’s saying. Since most Americans went to high school, we tend to be instinctively familiar with the concept.

    #etats-Unis #dissidence

  • Pensée magique américaine : quand les Russes interfèrent avec des élections, c’est mal. Quand les Ricains trafiquent des élections, c’est bien. (C’est comme les civils tués par des bombardements aériens massifs : quand c’est les Russes qui tuent civils, c’est mal ; quand c’est le shithole country qui tue des civils, c’est bien - sans doute parce que dans ce cas, les civils ainsi zigouillés/libérés de la dictature auraient pu ensuite voter dans des élections libres tripatouillées par les magouilles américaines).

    Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt-the-only-one-meddling-in-elections-we-do-it-too.html

    It is easy to understand why Mr. Putin sees such American cash as a threat to his rule, which tolerates no real opposition. But American veterans of democracy promotion find abhorrent Mr. Putin’s insinuations that their work is equivalent to what the Russian government is accused of doing in the United States today.

    “It’s not just apples and oranges,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute. “It’s comparing someone who delivers lifesaving medicine to someone who brings deadly poison.”

  • Report : Haley Duped by Prank Call From Fake Polish Leader
    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/report-haley-duped-by-prank-call-from-fake-polish-leader.html

    “Yes, this is Nikki. How are you Mr. Minister?” Haley (ostensibly) says. “Let me start with very much thanking you for the support we’ve received on the vote today. We will never forget it.”

    After discussing tensions between Ukraine and Russia, the fake Polish leader asks about America’s stance on Putin’s recent actions in (nonexistent) Binomo.

    “You know Binomo?” he asks.

    “Yes, yes,” Haley assures him.

    “They had elections and we suppose Russians had its intervention.”

    “Yes, of course they did, absolutely,” Haley agrees. “Let me find out exactly what our stance is on that, and what if anything the U.S. is doing or thinks should be done and I will report back to you on that as well.”

    #Etats-Unis #affaires_étranges

  • The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Long time Saudi regime propagandist gets an offer to write regularly for the Washington Post
    http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2017/10/long-time-saudi-regime-propagandist.html

    Jamal Khashoggi announced that he received an offer to write regularly for the Washington Post. He spent a career working as a propagandist for various Saudi princes. Do you think that a man who devoted a career for serving the propaganda of Bashshar Al-Asad or Iranian regime or Putin would get an offer writing regularly for a US newspaper?

    The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: The lousy journalism of Ben Hubbard: he defames Syrian football players: would he say that about Saudi football players?
    http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-lousy-journalism-of-ben-hubbard-he.html

    This is the trend in US journalism: you can get away saying the most absurd and ridiculous thing about a country if the regime of that country is not an ally of the US.

    The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: The case of Syrian opposition director who said he survived an assassination attempt in Istanbul: new developments
    http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-case-of-syrian-opposition-director.html

    you really can’t believe Western media on Syria because they are Pavlovian in regurgitating whatever is posted by Syrian rebels on their social media accounts—fabrications and lies and all.

    #msm #lamentable

  • Ynetnews Opinion - Pravda : Russia to continue backing Iran despite PM’s exhortations
    http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5009475,00.html

    Analysis: After their meeting in Sochi last week, the Prime Minister recounts how he warned Putin Israel won’t stand idly by as Iranian presence looms near Israel. A new account of the meeting released by Pravda, however, paints a different picture. ’Netanyahu was close to panic, Putin stayed cool,’ reports the Russian paper.

    #israel #Iran #Russie #Syrie

  • Putin signs law that bans VPNs from Novembre 1st, 2017

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2017/07/30/new-russian-laws-ban-vpns-and-force-chat-users-to-register-giving-censors-an-edge/#5e0703d82d7e

    One law, scheduled to go into effect November 1, will ban the use of internet proxy services in the country, including virtual private networks (VPNs), which have often helped users access to websites banned by the state. Under the law, internet providers will be required to block websites that offer VPNs and other proxy services.

    Another law, affecting Russians starting January 1, will order chat apps to identify users by their phone numbers, which many apps enthusiastically encourage but don’t demand. Facebook Messenger and other chat apps will now be required to collect users’ phone numbers, and to limit access for users who spread illegal content.

    #VPN
    #Putin #Vladimir_Putin
    #censorship #censure

  • Notes sur leur House of Cards
    http://www.dedefensa.org/article/notes-sur-leur-house-of-cards

    Notes sur leur House of Cards

    16 juillet 2017 – Au départ, ce n’est qu’une observation anecdotique faite par un twitter plus ou moins anonyme, dit-00Author87, le 7 juillet 2017, avec comme légende : « When you’re watching the news but you’ve seen it all before on House of Cards... » RT a repris ce tweet pour en faire l’argument d’un article, montrant évidemment les scènes concernées.

    « Donald Trump’s ascend to the White House has often been compared to something out of fiction. But on Friday at the G20 Summit, Trump’s meeting with Putin in front of the cameras took on the uncanny resemblance of a scene from a Netflix series. [...]

    » The G20 summit has already yielded two handshakes between Putin and Trump, with the second official greeting garnering the most interest due to its resemblance to (...)

  • This Is What Putin Wants From His Syria Deal With Trump
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-08/putin-s-endgame-in-syria-gains-traction-after-deal-with-trump

    Although Putin and all sides are formally committed to Syria’s territorial unity, the plan would temporarily lead to something akin to Germany after World War II, when the four allied powers divided the country into four administrative zones, according to Fyodor Lukyanov, who heads Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

    “This is the beginning of the soft-#partition of Syria,’’ he said. “De-escalation is a euphemism for zones of responsibility, where the different sides will agree which power is responsible for which part of the country.’’

    The outlines of the Russian proposal approved in Friday’s meeting between Trump and Putin were borrowed from ongoing talks to create de-escalization areas in other parts of the country, between Iran, Russia and Turkey, said Lukyanov.

    #Syrie

  • “An interview with Wolfgang #Ischinger - Germany’s best-connected former diplomat on its future in the world”
    http://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2017/05/new-germany #Germany #Allemagne #France #Europe

    So although it is long, I am publishing the transcript of our conversation. Among Mr Ischinger’s most striking points were his arguments that:

    – Germany is increasingly open to military action
    – Brexit makes EU defence integration easier
    – Germany’s deployments in Afghanistan, Mali and Lithuania mark a real turning point
    – NATO’s 2%-of-GDP target for defence spending is not sufficient on its own
    – The 2% should be replaced with a 3% target encompassing defence, foreign policy and aid
    – Mr Trump’s statements make it harder for European leaders to contribute more to NATO
    – Germany should not contemplate its own nuclear weapon
    – Mr Macron’s election is an “enormous and unique” opportunity to relaunch the Franco-German partnership as a model for the whole EU
    – The Kohl-Mitterrand era of co-operation can be (partly) revived, starting with joint military procurement
    – Mr Macron understands Germany “perfectly”
    – Germany and France should consider a 2018 rewrite of the Elysée Treaty codifying the alliance between the two countries
    – Germany should consider backing EU majority voting on foreign and security affairs
    – Germany and France might eventually share nuclear weapons and an army, but only in the very long term
    – Notions of Germany as the new leader of the liberal world are “totally unhelpful”
    – Russia’s current belligerence towards the West may not last
    – Germany and the West must keep the door open to Mr Putin
    – Europe and Canada cannot reform their relationship with Russia without America
    – Mrs Merkel’s patience and Russian language skills give her unique advantages in talks with Mr Putin
    – Germany must “engage, engage, engage” with Mr Trump
    – Mr Trump has “good and experienced pros” in his team but “believes in unpredictability as a negotiating strategy”