The Threats we Face, The New York Times
You know things are bad when NYT's David Leonhardt's column today is about the US' poor defensive posture.? To paraphrase Desi, "Kamala, you have a lot of 'splainin' to do."? But will she, or will she be given a pass? The article says:
The nation, the report continued, “is not prepared today.”Jared: [But the Navy just launched its first "coed" submarine. We are prepared, but for what?]
Jared: The article also says that "The report recommended increasing military spending, partly by making changes to Medicare and Social Security (which is sure to upset many liberals) and partly by increasing taxes, including on corporations (which is sure to upset many conservatives).
Then, the "report also called for more spending on diplomacy and praised the Biden administration for strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia.?
[Wherein lies a paradox.? Biden/Harris policy is based on appeasement and avoidance of confrontation.?
Thus, the administration has gone out of its way not to confront Iran and its proxies, to the extent of providing, indirectly funds: allowed the Houthis to lob missiles at commercial and US military vessels; allowed China free access to American airspace for spy missions, and excusing the same; putting restraints on Ukraine and Israel, etc.]
‘The threats we face’
The first sentence of the report — released over the summer by a bipartisan, congressionally appointed commission — was blunt: “The threats the United States faces are the most serious and most challenging the nation has encountered since 1945 and include the potential for near-term major war.”
The nation, the report continued, “is not prepared today.”
The threats begin with China, which has grown more belligerent in Asia. In Europe, Russia started the first major war in almost 80 years. In the Middle East, Iran finances a network of extremist groups. Increasingly, these countries work together, too, sometimes with North Korea. The report described them as “an axis of growing malign partnerships.”
I want to devote today’s newsletter to the findings from the group?(officially known as the Commission on the National Defense Strategy) because I found them jarring — and because I suspect many readers haven’t yet heard them. “In a healthy political climate,” Walter Russell Mead, a foreign affairs expert at the Hudson Institute, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the report would be “the central topic in national conversation.”
An anti-democracy alliance
This anti-American alliance presents a threat because its members are not satisfied with the status quo. That’s why Russia invaded Ukraine and Iran’s proxies have been so aggressive?in Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. It’s why China has rammed Philippine boats in the South China Sea and President Xi Jinping has directed China’s military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China, Russia and Iran all want more control over their regions than they now have.
One of the bipartisan group’s central arguments is that American weakness has contributed to the new instability. “This is not a report encouraging the U.S. to go to war,” Jane Harman, the former Democratic congresswoman from California and the commission’s chair, told me. “It’s a report making sure the U.S. can deter war.”
If the U.S. doesn’t do more to deter aggression, living standards in this country could suffer, Harman and her colleagues argued. Iran-backed attacks in the Red Sea have already raised shipping costs, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made energy more expensive. A war in Taiwan could cut off access to the semiconductors that power modern life.
Harman told me that she believed the warning signs today were similar to those in the run-up to both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — serious and underestimated.
American weaknesses
The report cited several major U.S. weaknesses, including:
A failure to remain ahead of China in some aspects of military power.?“China is outpacing?the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment,” the report concluded.
One reason is the decline in the share of U.S. resources devoted to the military. This Times chart, which may surprise some readers, tells the story:
Source: Congressional Budget Office | By The New York Times
The report recommended increasing military spending, partly by making changes to Medicare and Social Security (which is sure to upset many liberals) and partly by increasing taxes, including on corporations (which is sure to upset many conservatives). The report also called for more spending on diplomacy and praised the Biden administration for strengthening alliances in Europe and Asia.
A Pentagon bureaucracy that’s too deferential to military suppliers.?The report criticized consolidation among defense contractors, which has raised costs and hampered innovation. The future increasingly lies with drones and A.I., not the decades-old equipment that the Pentagon now uses.
A U.S. manufacturing sector that isn’t strong enough to produce what the military needs. A lack of production capacity has already hurt the country’s efforts to aid Ukraine, as The Times has documented.?“Putin’s invasion has demonstrated how weak our industrial base is,” David Grannis, the commission’s executive director, said. If the Pentagon and the innovative U.S. technology sector collaborated more, they could address this problem, Grannis added.
A polarized political atmosphere that undermines national unity. A lack of patriotism is one reason that the military has failed to meet its recent recruitment goals. Perhaps more worrisome, many Americans are angry at one another rather than paying attention to external threats.
The bottom line
A single commission won’t have all the answers to the hard strategic issues facing the country. How much money should the U.S. spend on the military, given other priorities and the large federal debt? How much waste can be cut from the Pentagon budget? Which foreign conflicts are vital to the national interest — and which are a distraction?
All these questions are vexing. But Americans do face a more dangerous world than many realize. The unexpected global turmoil of the past decade makes that clear.
IN THE MEANTIME: 09-23-2024
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U.S. President Joe Biden (C) meets with (L-R, at table) Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken during the Quadrilateral Summit at the Archmere Academy in Wilmington, Del, on Sept. 21, 2024. By Frank Fang, 09-22-24
President Joe Biden told leaders of Australia, India, and Japan that communist China is “testing us” with its aggression in the Indo-Pacific, a remark that was caught on a hot mic at a summit of the Quad alliance on Saturday.
The summit, which Biden hosted near his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, was attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
After they delivered their opening remarks before the press, Biden told his Quad counterparts that Beijing’s recent actions were a “change in tactic, not change in strategy.”
“China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region, and it’s true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South China, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits,” Biden said.
“We believe [Chinese Communist Party leader] Xi Jinping is looking to focus on domestic economic challenges to minimize the turbulence in China, diplomatic relationships, and he’s also looking to buy himself some diplomatic space, in my view, to aggressively pursue China’s interest.”
The Quad leaders’ joint declaration did not mention China or Xi by name. “We are seriously concerned about the situation in the East and South China Sea,” the declaration says.
China’s economy is facing a crisis on multiple fronts, with disappointing August economic data such as industrial production, retail sales, and youth unemployment. New home prices reported a nine-year-low in July.
U.S. companies’ optimism in China has fallen to an all-time low, according to a survey published by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai earlier this month.
Japan has expressed concerns after a Chinese aircraft carrier entered its contiguous waters earlier this month, following two Chinese territorial incursions in August that prompted Japan to lodge a protest with Beijing.
In recent weeks, the Philippines has criticized Beijing for ramming its boats, blasting them with water cannons, and firing flares at its aircraft, with most of the incidents occurring around the contested Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea.
The Chinese regime, which claims Taiwan as a part of its territory, has been targeting the island with military provocations and gray-zone tactics such as cyberattacks. For example, Taiwan’s defense ministry reported on Sept. 22 that it had spotted eight Chinese military planes and six military vessels in the island’s vicinity in the past 24 hours.
Summit
Biden was also caught on a microphone commenting on national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s visit to China in August.
“We see this engagement as important for conflict prevention and crisis management amid our strategic competition,” Biden said. “We’ve secured some gains in U.S.–China bilateral relations that are important.”
Before the Quad summit, Sullivan downplayed the idea that the Quad’s focus is on China.
“My point is that the purpose of the Quad is not to come together around China or any other country. It’s to come together around how to construct a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Sullivan said. “And actions and policies that disrupt or undermine that are certainly not just of interest, but are going to be a matter of discussion for Quad members.”
Biden and Kishida talked about “their shared concerns about [the Chinese regime’s] coercive and destabilizing activities, including in the South China Sea” during their face-to-face meeting on Saturday, according to a White House readout.
The same concerns were also discussed between Biden and Albanese in their meeting, according to the White House.
The Quad leaders announced several joint initiatives, including the expansion of an existing Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness initiative.
The leaders also agreed to a training initiative to help countries “monitor and secure their waters, enforce their laws, and deter unlawful behavior.”
Ryan Hass, director of the China Center at Brookings, said Biden’s hot-mic moment “is sound and it is logically consistent with the way his administration has been approaching the U.S.-China relationship,” according to a post on social media platform X on Sept. 22.
“I expect the comments would be reassuring to allies/partners and unsurprising to Beijing,” Hass wrote.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute and author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in an August article that China’s aggression against the Philippines meant that Xi “has decided to move on a weak neighbor.”
“The risk is that an attack on the Philippines will lead to general conflict in the region,” Chang wrote, adding that such conflict will be a fight pitting the coalition of China, Russia, and North Korea against the United States and its partners.
New cooperation between the United States, Australia, Japan, and India is largely focused on containing China.
The leaders of the Indo-Pacific Quadrilateral partnership (Quad)—the United States, Australia, Japan, and India—announced new efforts on Sept. 21 to boost their shared maritime security capabilities and expand other areas of regional cooperation.
President Joe Biden hosted the fourth in-person Quad Leaders Summit in Wilmington, Delaware, on Sept. 21 to discuss a range of topics concerning the four nations, including ways to enforce international law in the waterways of the Indo-Pacific.
Ahead of the summit, the White House announced that the Quad partners will soon begin their first joint coastguard exercises that will become a rotational training effort. The United States will lead the first round of the joint training, with Australian, Japanese, and Indian personnel coming aboard a U.S. Coast Guard vessel to pick up and exchange skills.
The White House announced that the Quad will also expand its existing Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness (IPMDA) initiative. The IPMDA aims to increase transparency about maritime activity in the region and how nations may be asserting their various claims in the Indo-Pacific waterways, providing awareness not only to the Quad members but also to other regional partner nations.
The four-way Quad partnership has the potential to serve as a check on the expansionist pursuits of the Chinese Communist Party, but its members have avoided announcing any quadrilateral military alliance that could one day face war with the communist party if it moves to enforce its model of governance in the region. The United States has instead pursued separate bilateral alliances and security partnerships more specifically positioned to respond to hostilities in the region.
US–Australia
Biden met with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on the evening of Sept. 20 for a bilateral discussion ahead of the main Quad meeting. In their post-meeting readouts, Biden and Albanese both emphasized the centrality of the shared values of the U.S.–Australia alliance to relations between their two countries. They both alluded to a “depth of cooperation” on defense and security, economic ties, and climate and clean energy initiatives.
According to the White House readout, the two leaders discussed their support for maintaining peace throughout the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwanese people govern themselves independently of the Chinese mainland. But the People’s Republic of China considers the island, also known as the Republic of China, as part of its territory despite there being no formal peace treaty to end the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Since the 1970s, the United States has favored a strategically ambiguous status quo on the question of who should control Taiwan.
“The leaders discussed their respective diplomacy with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and their shared concerns about the PRC’s coercive and destabilizing activities, including in the South China Sea,” the White House readout of the Biden–Albanese meeting reads.
US–Japan
Biden next met with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, on the afternoon of Sept. 21 for a second bilateral discussion.
“The President praised the Prime Minister’s visionary and courageous leadership over the past three years, which has fundamentally enhanced Japan’s defense capabilities and transformed its role in the world,” a White House readout reads. “He thanked the Prime Minister for his resolute support for strengthening Alliance defense cooperation, including on command and control, defense industrial cooperation, and enhanced exercises and training, and for advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific region.”
The White House stated that Biden and Kishida “reiterated their resolve to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and underscored their opposition to any attempts to change the status quo by force.”
Biden also thanked Kishida for being willing to grow ties between his nation and South Korea, allowing for an expanding trilateral partnership that could prove useful in reinforcing the regional status quo.
The United States and Japanese leaders also discussed shared efforts to develop and protect critical technologies such as semiconductors and artificial intelligence, two areas of growing competition with communist China.
US–India
The White House published a joint fact sheet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration on Sept. 21, highlighting existing U.S.–India cooperation on a range of issues, including defense technology and space exploration. The fact sheet noted India’s plans to procure MQ-9 Reaper drones, and a U.S.–Indian partnership to help maintain India’s fleet of C-130J Super Hercules military cargo aircraft.
The White House also published a roadmap laying out a U.S.–Indian clean energy initiative. The roadmap describes a plan to expand manufacturing of solar and wind energy components.
The roadmap calls for directing about $1 billion in new multilateral financing through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to help expand India’s domestic clean energy supply chain.
“Over time, we seek to mobilize additional financing into priority clean energy manufacturing sectors that harness public and private financial tools and pioneer innovative financial vehicles to meet the rapid demand for flexible climate finance solutions,” the White House document reads.
Another objective of this U.S.–India clean energy roadmap is to identify ways to expand supply chains for clean energy components. The roadmap also entails working with African partner nations on new solar and electric vehicle projects.
The U.S. Navy on Sept. 19 released a new strategic document centered on countering communist China’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
It directs the Navy to develop “readiness for the possibility of war with the People’s Republic of China by 2027,” pointing to China’s preparations for a possible invasion of Taiwan in the same year.
“The Navy emphatically acknowledges the need for a larger, more lethal force,” the document, titled “Navigation Plan for America’s Warfighting Navy,” states.
“By 2027, the Navy will be more ready for sustained combat as part of a Joint and Combined force, prioritizing the People’s Republic of China as the pacing challenge and focusing on enabling the joint warfighting ecosystem.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, claims that Taiwan is a part of its territory that must be united with the mainland through any means necessary.
However, Taiwan is self-governed by a democratically elected government and has never been controlled by the CCP.
CCP leader Xi Jinping has nevertheless ordered the communist regime’s military wing to prepare for war and to develop the capabilities required to invade Taiwan.
The regime has since engaged in a more than decade-long shipbuilding spree, massively expanding its fleet, drone capabilities, and nuclear arsenal.
Most importantly, for a Taiwan invasion scenario, it has also launched its own advanced aircraft carriers and destroyers.
That poses a problem for the United States, as the U.S. Navy floats far fewer ships than the Chinese, and must spread them more widely to maintain its global military presence.
China, meanwhile, can position the vast majority of its naval and coast guard units close to home, where they can receive cover from land-based units and where it is easier to maintain their supply lines.
A congressional report published in July found that “the U.S. military lacks both the capabilities and the capacity required to be confident it can deter and prevail in combat” against China.
The July report also said that China is likely to increase its hostile behavior in the coming years to “normalize unlawful behavior” around Taiwan as it seeks to take advantage of the United States’ lack of ability to deter conflict.
Key to the new Navy document’s goals, therefore, is the fulfillment of Project 33, a naval initiative aiming to ready the force by eliminating delays in maintenance, scaling the use of autonomous and robotic systems, and increasing navy recruitment, among other things.
“We cannot manifest a bigger traditional Navy in a few short years, nor will we rely on mass without the right capabilities to win the sea control contest,” the document reads.
“Nearer-term operational challenges demand that we integrate proven robotic and autonomous capabilities as soon as possible.
“We must do so with a focus on how we will use these systems in war. By 2027, we will integrate proven robotic and autonomous systems for routine use by the commanders who will employ them.”
Scaling the deployment of autonomous systems is just part of the puzzle, with the document underscoring that the United States’ grim position in the Indo-Pacific “goes well beyond just the size of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] Navy fleet.”
The document notes that China’s joint forces are developing into an integrated fighting force “specifically designed to defeat ours” and are backed by China’s massive industrial base.
The document also calls on the Navy to work with Congress to secure critical supply chains and lays out a vision in which all fleet headquarters in the service will field their own maritime operations centers.
The goal of the latter directive is to ensure that the U.S. Navy can continue to maintain superiority in command and control, military intelligence, and maneuvers, even against a numerically superior foe in a vast and distributed region.
“We must meet all the objectives in this Navigation Plan to field the people and capabilities needed to fight and win today, in 2027, and beyond,” the document states.
Asif Merchant was arrested on July 12. He had just loaded his luggage into his ride to the airport, commencing a journey either to his wife and children in Iran or to a different wife and children in his native Pakistan. In weeks of secretly recorded conversations with a federal informant, Merchant had confided that he had families in both countries. He also, according to an FBI affidavit, said he had come to America to arrange the assassination of “a political person.”
The identity of that person was not explicitly stated, either by Merchant or by his handler in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to a leaked document that was posted online by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley on Sept. 5 after, the Iowa Republican said, it was provided to him by a whistleblower. But, along with other evidence, the documents all but confirm that Donald Trump was the person Merchant was authorized to offer up to $1 million to kill.
In the leaked document, Merchant described remotely scouting a Trump rally, then sending a written report on event security—how many guards, how many body scanners—back to Tehran. In secretly recorded meetings described by the FBI after his arrest, Merchant “games out the assassination” with the informant. The plan he details involved a crowd, a staged demonstration intended to serve as a distraction, a target at a podium, and “security all around.” Alerted to the Iranian plot well before Merchant’s arrest, the Secret Service increased protection of Trump—context that only amplified the agency’s failure when an assassin’s bullet grazed the former President at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13.
Federal authorities say they have found no evidence that the slain shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, acted with the assistance of anyone else, let alone Iran. Nor has any evidence emerged connecting Iran to Ryan Wesley Routh, who was apprehended after the attempted ambush of Trump earlier this month on a golf course in Florida—though Routh displayed sympathetic interest in Iran. In a self-published 2023 book about Ukraine, he mentions Iran dozens of times, and states that he repeatedly attempted to obtain a visa “to join my Iranian friends in Iran” and protest U.S. sanctions on its government. In a passage expressing regret for voting for Trump, Routh addresses Tehran directly: “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the [nuclear] deal. No one here in the U.S. seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work, or even unnatural selection.”
Prosecutors made note of the passage in a Sept. 23 court filing,?in which they also singled out a reference to Iran in a “Dear World” letter Routh had left behind, explaining his reasons for trying to kill Trump. “The handwritten letter above goes on to state in part: “He [the former President] ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled."
Every aspect of Routh's peculiar life is under scrutiny, from the vainglorious social media postings, to his quixotic trip to Ukraine, where he wanted to bring Afghan anti-Taliban fighters who had been living as refugees in Iran.
Merchant’s arrest, by contrast, has drawn relatively little attention. Of the three assassination plots exposed in as many months, it is the only one detected in advance, and described in detail by a U.S. government already acutely aware of the threat. Iran’s leaders have been vowing to kill Trump for years, since he ordered the January 2020 death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The documents released after Merchant's arrest tell a story of how serious that vow has proved to be.
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To the U.S., Soleimani was an enemy, the chief of Iranian operations outside Iran—a portfolio that takes in Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and the Houthis. By sending particularly lethal IEDs into Iraq, he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. But inside Iran, Soleimani was the most popular figure in an unpopular regime, described as “James Bond, Erwin Rommel and Lady Gaga rolled into one,” and “like a son” to Iran’s Supreme Leader. After his assassination by a drone strike, the Islamic Republic singled out Trump and every U.S. official involved for “justice.”
The threat was sincere. Iran maintains a state apparatus expressly dedicated to assassinating perceived enemies overseas. For most of the last 45 years, it was used chiefly to kill Iranian dissidents who reside abroad. After Soleimani’s death, however, Tehran directed its assassins to murder some of the most prominent political figures in America—a remarkable shift that carries the potential to throw U.S. politics into crisis.
Merchant, according to the leaked document, “understood that the killing was related to Iran’s retaliation for the death of Qasem Soleimani.”
Little is known of Merchant’s life beyond his Pakistani nationality, and that he traveled frequently from Pakistan to Iran. After the news of his arrest, an Indian news site wrote that he had grown up in a wealthy Karachi family, and controlled a $70 million portfolio. But according to the leaked document—a proffer, or summary of information a suspect offers while negotiating for leniency—he told the FBI that he got involved with IRGC for the money. This April, he flew to Texas, where he appears to have family, then on June 3 on to New York, where he was met at LaGuardia airport by the person who would turn out to be the informant. In a Long Island hotel, according to the publicly filed arrest affidavit, Merchant announced that their partnership would not be in clothing imports but assassination, which he illustrated by making a “finger gun.”
He allegedly instructed the informant to introduce him to assassins for hire. Anticipating that they would ask who they were expected to kill, Merchant had already put that question to his IRGC handler, identified in the leaked document as Mehrdad Yousef, when they spoke in a safe house in Iran in January. Merchant told the FBI that Yousef first replied that Merchant should tell the hired guns that the target was Trump, “then paused” and rattled off a range of other possible targets: “Joe Biden or Nikki Haley, or politicians, military people or bureaucrats.” Merchant “interpreted Yousef’s pause to mean Trump could be the target.”
The plans appear to point nowhere else. It was after the conversation with Yousef that Merchant traveled to the U.S., researched the Trump campaign rally, then secreted his report—“30 guards,” “four to five scanners”—in a package mailed to the handler. By the time he reached New York, the plan had grown elaborate. The FBI affidavit includes a photograph described as Merchant in the hotel room explaining the plan to the informant, referred to as a “confidential source” (CS). Time-stamped 7:34 p.m. on June 4, the screen grab shows a slender, mustachioed man leaning intently forward, brow furrowed and left shirt sleeve pulled above the elbow to reveal a forearm tattoo. “Merchant began planning potential assassination scenarios on [a] napkin and quizzed the CS on how he would kill the target in the various scenarios,” the affidavit states. “Merchant pointed to the target and repeatedly asked the CS to explain how the target would die. Merchant told the CS that there would be ‘security all around’ the person.”
He explains that the assassination will require a distraction—a noisy demonstration, he says, arranged in advance. Merchant also wants someone—he specifies “a woman”—to do reconnaissance. That would bring the number of people who would need to keep the plot secret to nearly 30, including the actual assassins, whom Merchant reminds the informant he needs to line up. At this point, the scale of the plot has surpassed any previous known Iranian assassination mission, while retaining a signature seat-of-the-pants quality: The next day, Merchant will suggest he and the informant drive around Brooklyn to “scout clubs” where they might find willing accomplices.
“It’s funny. But at the same time, the clumsiness doesn't mean that they're not determined to get rid of their opponents, or to get rid of American officials,” says Masih Alinejad, an Iranian dissident Tehran has targeted repeatedly. In 2021, federal prosecutors charged Iranian agents with plotting to kidnap her from her home, then carry her by speedboat to Venezuela for transfer to Iran, and either imprisonment or death. A year later, a thug allegedly waited outsidethe same Brooklyn house in his car with an assault rifle and 66 rounds of ammunition.?
Word of a specific Iranian threat to Trump leaked to news reports amid the intense scrutiny of the Secret Service’s performance in the Butler shooting. By then, Merchant had already been arrested but the details remained secret because on July 14 a U.S. magistrate in Brooklyn had sealed the arrest affidavit at the request of prosecutors seeking time for investigators to pursue leads. Three days later, Merchant sat down with prosecutors and FBI agents. The information he provided was compiled in a five-page file labeled as a proffer: the document that would soon be leaked.
Law enforcement regards this kind of document as confidential. Several days after Grassley posted this one online, it was taken down at the request of the Justice Department, according to Grassley staff, who added that negotiations were underway for more information. The Justice Department told TIME it had no comment, but in previous reports did not dispute the authenticity of the document while protesting its being made public.
Merchant’s attorney, Avraham Moskowitz, expressed incredulity. “What proffer? Mr. Merchant is not cooperating,” Moskowitz wrote TIME by email after the document was posted. Three weeks earlier, the attorney emphasized that Merchant enjoys the presumption of innocence: “My client looks forward to his day in court and to the due process that our constitution guarantees him.” The leaked document all but affirms the implication of the FBI affidavit filed when Merchant was arrested, and finally unsealed on Aug. 5: that the logical target was Trump. “I think that's the assumption,” says Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official who tracks Iran’s assassination program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, adding, “You don’t put everything in an indictment.”
Since 1979, when the clerical regime came to power, Iran’s agents have killed more than 440 Iranians outside its borders, by the count of the Abdorraham Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran (named for a democratic activist stabbed to death in the lobby of his Paris apartment building by agents of the Islamic Republic in 1991). The count does not include nonfatal attacks like the March wounding by knife of a journalist for a dissident satellite television channel outside his London apartment.
“I’ve moved to almost 20 safe houses in three years,” says Alinejad, the dissident. She declined an offer to enter the Federal Witness Protection Program, she says, because doing so would prevent her from criticizing the Islamic Republic, where her social media profile (8.5 Instagram followers) drives her activism. And for the Iranian regime, the goal is silence.
?“They have managed to decapitate the opposition,” said Roya Boroumand, a daughter of Abdorraham and executive director of the center. “They have killed networkers. They have killed people who bring people together. Their killings are targeted to prevent any organized dissent. I remember when the news came out about Masih,” she says. “There were meetings in the Clubhouse. People were crying, in, like Canada, saying, "we are safe nowhere.”
But until recently, U.S. officials tended to be, at most, collateral damage: In 2011, according to a federal indictment, an Iranian agent called it “no big deal” if U.S. Senators also died in a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington by bombing a D.C. restaurant. Things changed with Soleimani’s death.
Assassinating Trump could be interpreted as an act of war, and provoke a U.S. military response endangering an Iranian regime that, till now, has made its own survival its top priority. The risk appears enormous.
“Yeah, but I don’t know that the regime sees it that way,” Levitt, the former Treasury official, says. “The regime believes in reciprocity, what it sees as reciprocity.” He pointed to a video posted on the website of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in January 2022. Titled “Revenge Is Definite,” the animation envisions Trump being killed, on a Florida golf course, by Iranian drones shortly after receiving a text message reading: Soleimani’s murderer and the one who gave the order will pay the price.
“They came out with this video, and they produced a list of people they believe were involved,” Levitt says. “And it starts at the top with Trump, and it goes down, and they believe those people are legitimate targets.”
Iran’s U.N. Mission did not respond to a request for comment. But while Tehran’s foreign minister claimed in a CNN interview that Iran’s quest for “justice” is “legal and judicial,” senior regime officials make no bones about “killing Trump,” as one put it on state TV. Tehran has even signaled its preference for locally hired assassins. At a ceremony marking the second anniversary of Soleimani’s death, his successor as head of the Quds Force of the IRGC, Esmail Ghani, declared: “We take revenge against Americans by the help of people on their side and within their own homes, without our presence."
As Ghani spoke, an effort to assassinate Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton, was well underway, though Bolton was no longer in government when Soleimani was killed. That plot, with a fee of $300,000, was also monitored by the FBI, which captured weeks of communication between a go-between and an increasingly impatient handler in Tehran. The handler floated a $1 million fee for the assassination of another former official, later revealed to be former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, says that in private conversation before the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 opened a new powder keg, two senior U.S. officials told him the greatest danger of open conflict with Iran would be a successful assassination avenging Soleimani. A third U.S. official, he says, recently told him the U.S. had warned Iran through back channels of how severely it regards the assassination efforts, “but Iran does not seem to take these threats seriously.”
Levitt this month unveiled a web page detailing every known “external operation” attempted by Iran, a definition that includes assassination attempts. More than half—at least 116 —have been launched since Soleimani’s death. “The tempo is up,” says Levitt. “I mean, there’s a lot going on.”
Maybe too much. Iran’s espionage efforts have never been consistently impressive, but the sheer number of recent assassination attempts can look like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. In the U.S., at least, not much has.
Meanwhile, in Tehran, the men who arrange assassinations are under pressure of their own. As the plot to kill Bolton dragged on, the Quds Force officer attempting to steer events from Tehran confided to his recruit that, having missed the anniversary of Soleimani’s death, he “was worried the job would be taken from them” if not completed soon.
By contrast, going by the affidavit, Merchant brought a salesman’s confidence. At the hotel, he put the informant’s cell phone in a drawer when they spoke, and told the purported hit men that they should get untraceable cells. Even on those, he said, they were to speak in code, pretending to be part of the clothing business that would serve as a front. Merchant jotted the key on a rectangle of paper that was still in his wallet when he was arrested: “T shirt” would refer to the protest (“the lightest work”), “flannel shirt” was stealing, and “fleece jacket,” meant the assassination (“commit the act of the game”). He added one more, “denim” as code for “sending money.” As a start, he handed the two undercover agents $5,000 in hundred-dollar bills.
“Now we know we’re going forward,” one of the agents said. “We’re doing this.”
“Yes,” Merchant replied, according to the sworn statement. “Absolutely.”
UN nations endorse a ‘Pact for the Future’ - I apologize in advance.? This is going to be a long read because of the subject matter. I don't know how any rational, Western civilization advocate can support the UN.? This was the conclusion of John McCain.
In 2007, for instance, McCain proposed creating a League of Democracies to counter the influence of the United Nations and other organizations that do not really care about democratic values. After all, the U.N.’s admission criteria boil down to mere existence as a nation. The Security Council was created on the principle that 'might makes' right, which is why China and Russia are on it. The various human-rights bodies are magnets for autocracies and dictatorships desperate to rig the system in their favor. The General Assembly is democratic solely in the sense that evil dictatorships get an equal vote to enlightened democracies.
The UN's shortcomings are even more pronounced today.? Two recent articles point to the problem.
UN nations endorse a ‘Pact for the Future,’ and the body’s leader says it must be more than talk - AP, 9/22/24
The U.N. General Assembly approved a blueprint Sunday to bring the world’s increasingly divided nations together to tackle 21st-century challenges from climate change and artificial intelligence to escalating conflicts and increasing inequality and poverty.
The 42-page “Pact for the Future” challenges leaders of the 193 U.N. member nations to turn promises into real actions that make a difference to the lives of the world’s more than 8 billion people.
The pact was adopted at the opening of the two-day “Summit of the Future” called by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who thanked leaders and diplomats for taking the first steps and unlocking “the door” to a better future.
“We are here to bring multilateralism back from the brink,” he said. “Now it is our common destiny to walk through it. That demands not just agreement, but action.”
The top UN official demands action
The U.N. chief challenged the leaders: Implement the pact. Prioritize dialogue and negotiations. End “wars tearing our world apart” from the Middle East to Ukraine and Sudan. Reform the powerful U.N. Security Council. Accelerate reforms of the international financial system. Ramp up a transition from fossil fuels. Listen to young people and include them in decision-making.
The pact’s fate was in question until the last moment. There was so much suspense that Guterres had three prepared speeches, one for approval, one for rejection, and one if things weren’t clear, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
“No one is happy with this pact,” said Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergey Vershinin.,
The summit opened with him proposing amendments that would have significantly watered down the pact. Speaking on behalf of Africa’s 54 nations — which opposed Russia’s amendments — the Republic of Congo countered with a motion not to vote on the amendments. That motion was approved to applause. Russia only got support from Iran, Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Sudan and Syria.
Assembly President Philémon Yang then put the pact to a vote and banged his gavel, signifying the consensus of all 193 U.N. member nations that was required for approval.? [Isn't "consensus of all", by definition, unanimity?]
Russia has made significant inroads in Africa -- in countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Central African Republic -- and the continent’s rejection of its amendments along with Mexico, a major Latin American power, was seen as a blow to Moscow by some diplomats and observers.
Yang announced ahead of speeches by world leaders that they would be muted after five minutes — a rare occurrence at the United Nations, where words are the backbone. Among those who kept talking after their mics were silenced: Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Kuwait’s Crown Prince Sheikh Sabah Khalid Al Sabah and Irish President Michael Higgins.
Talk of the future is dark
The Pact for the Future says world leaders are gathering “at a time of profound global transformation,” and it warns of “rising catastrophic and existential risks” that could tip people everywhere “into a future of persistent crisis and breakdown.”
Yet, it says, leaders are coming to the U.N. at a time of hope and opportunity “to protect the needs and interests of present and future generations through actions in the Pact for the Future.”
The pact includes 56 actions on issues including eradicating poverty, mitigating climate change, achieving gender equality, promoting peace and protecting civilians, and reinvigorating the multilateral system to “seize the opportunities of today and tomorrow.”
Secretary-General Guterres singled out a number of key provisions in the Pact of the Future and two accompanying annexes, a Global Digital Compact and Declaration on Future Generations.
The pact commits world leaders to reform the 15-member Security Council, to make it more reflective of today’s world and “redress the historical injustice against Africa,” which has no permanent seat, and to address the under-representation of the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America.
It also “represents the first agreed multilateral support for nuclear disarmament in more than a decade,” Guterres said, and it commits “to steps to prevent an arms race in outer space and to govern the use of lethal autonomous weapons.”
The Global Digital Compact “includes the first truly universal agreement on the international governance of artificial intelligence,” the U.N. chief said.
The compact commits leaders to establish an Independent International Scientific Panel in the United Nations to promote scientific understanding of AI, and its risks and opportunities. It also commits the U.N. to initiate a global dialogue on AI governance with all key players.
The pact’s actions also include measures “to mount an immediate and coordinated response to complex shocks” including pandemics, Guterres said. And it includes “a groundbreaking commitment by governments to listen to young people and include them in decision-making.”
As for human rights, Guterres said, “In the face of a surge in misogyny and a rollback of women’s reproductive rights, governments have explicitly committed to removing the legal, social and economic barriers that prevent women and girls from fulfilling their potential in every sphere.” [Are Muslim nations willing to abandon their religious beliefs about the role of women?]
Eighteen months of negotiations on the pact were led by Germany and Namibia. Namibian President Nangolo Mbumba said leaders must leave the summit committed to a path toward peace -- not one that leads to “an environmental catastrophe, widening inequality, global conflict and destruction and the rise of dangerous technologies that threaten our security.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz warned that If countries don’t unite and implement the pact’s more than 50 actions, “not only would history judge us … but also young people around the world.”
“The road is rocky,” he said. “But was that ever any different?”
Can 193 member states agree on a single agenda??
Will certain views predominate?
So, what is the utopia that the UN will attempt to achieve under the Pact for the Future?
Let's focus on the last item.? The Pact for the Future is "A More Multilateral World".
And there it is! Redistribution and transfers of resources. Ayn Rand covered it in Atlas Shrugged and Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.
We must lay the foundation for better access to concessional development finance, crafting measures of progress on sustainable development beyond the normal limits of GDP - Gross Domestic Product.
Did the Biden/Harris administration sign on to this?
Here is a preview of how Guterres' UN 2.0 would work -
Guterres stands by UNGA resolution calling for Jews to be removed from Old City of Jerusalem - JNS, 9/23/24
A spokesman for the secretary-general told JNS that António Guterres “has called for an end to the occupation, and he has called for the end of settlements.”
Prior to the U.N. General Assembly’s vote on Wednesday calling for Jerusalem’s Old City, Judea and Samaria to be free of Jews, António Guterres, the global body’s secretary-general, told reporters that he would back implementation of the resolution should it pass.? [And here is your preview.]
The Palestinian-drafted resolution, which passed by a 124-14 margin with 43 abstentions, is meant to give force to the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in July, when the U.N. high court in The Hague declared Israeli presence to be illegal in any area over the 1949 armistice line.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
Which would you rather have?
It seems the Pentagon has chosen Option 2.? That does not mean that some candidates would have qualified on merit but it means that the pool of qualified candidates is smaller because of the demographic exclusion.? A current example of this type of thinking are the Secret Service DEI goals which allowed ain unqualified female agent to lead the Trump protection squad in Butler PA. Lead advance agent at Butler rally failed exams.
From The Daily Caller [AllSides media bias - Right] -
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown — at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force — issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.” Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retentionshortfalls and low pay.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown — at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force — issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.” Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls and low pay.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals — not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center To Advance Security In America (CASA), told the DCNF.
CASA requested records regarding the Air Force’s new officer applicant standards through a federal transparency request in 2023. At the time, the Air Force said it couldn’t find any records, according to a letterobtained by the DCNF.
CASA then sued the Air Force for the records in April 2024 and received hundreds of documents and slides in response, which the DCNF subsequently obtained.
A spokesperson for the Air Force told the DCNF “The FOIA request was being processed at multiple levels within the Air Force.”
“One of the units responded to the FOIA request with a ‘no responsive records’ response after conducting their own local search, while the remainder of the units continued to process the responsive documents that were ultimately provided,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.
One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”
“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.
A screenshot of an internal Air Force slide deck titled “Officer Accession Applicant Pool Goals Diversity & Inclusion Outreach Plans” from January 2022.
The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.
For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”
“These documents show us that the Air Force has taken steps toward implementing their new directive of specific racial quotas for officer recruitment and enrollment throughout the branch,” Fitzpatrick told the DCNF.
Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”
In a separate set of documents from as early as 2022, the Air Force outlines its efforts to modify ROTC scholarship programs, which “play an important role in accession and diversity goals.” The Air Force suggests modifying the scholarship models could remove certain “testing barriers” to entry for under-represented groups.
A screenshot of an internal Air Force slide deck titled “Officer Accession Applicant Pool Goals Diversity & Inclusion Outreach Plans” from January 2022.
The diversity plans extend to the Air Force’s Aim High Flight Academy (AHFA), an aviation scholarship program for high school, ROTC and Air Force Academy students, according to the documents. The Air Force notes that the AFHA applicant pool should be made up of a “minimum” of 60% underrepresented groups, further noting that it must be at least 35% minorities.
Like other branches of the military, the Air Force has struggled to keep up with recruiting and retention targets in recent years. The Navy is expected to miss its recruiting goals in 2024; the Marine Corps, Army and Air Force are on on track to meet their goals, although the latter two branches missed their targets in 2022 and 2023,according to Military Times.
Only approximately 57% of servicemembers or military families polled by the Military Family Advisory Network in 2023 said they’d recommend joining the service, compared to 74% in 2019. Among some of the reasons the respondents wouldn’t recommend service were the politically charged nature of the military, differences and divisions, and low pay, among others.
A year-long study from the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions found that the Pentagon has turned into a “vast DEI bureaucracy” in the last four decades, a challenge that has been exacerbated by the Biden-Harris administration.
“It’s no surprise that young people are turning away from military service in record numbers… DEI indoctrination has become a core component of military training that begins for officers even at the service academies,” Matt Lohmeier, former Space Force commander, said in a statement in June.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with comments from the Air Force.
(Featured Image Media Credit:?Flickr/Robert Sullivan)
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