English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For January 25/2022
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/aaaanewsfor2021/english.january25.22.htm

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Bible Quotations For today
But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.
Mark 10/28-31: “Peter began to say to Jesus, ‘Look, we have left everything and followed you.’Jesus said, ‘Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.”

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 24-25/2022
Hariri announces suspension of political life
Tearful Hariri Withdraws from Politics Citing 'Iranian Influence' and 'Int'l Confusion'
Lebanon’s Hariri Steps Away from Politics, Upending Election Landscape
In move that could delay Lebanon elections, Hariri bows out of political life
Factbox: Turbulent career in politics of Lebanon's Hariri
Lebanese Cabinet approves 2021 draft budget law, to hold successive sessions on 2022 budget
Khalil Says No New Taxes in State Budget
Mikati chairs meeting over Naameh landfill
Berri welcomes UN’s Wronecka, Head of Socioeconomic Council, SSNP delegation
Official negotiations between Lebanese government, International Monetary Fund kick off
Bou Habib Says Studying Kuwaiti Paper Starts Today to be Done by Saturday
Jumblat 'Sad and Lonely' as Hariri Announces Withdrawal
Video From Amer Fakhoury Foundation: The illegal detention of Majd Kamalmaz & Austin Tice in Syria.
Lebanon Asked to Reply to Demands Paper as Aoun Voices Reservations on 1559
Paper of Int'l Demands Submitted to Lebanon Leaked
Report: KSA Asks Hariri to Postpone Elections Boycott Decision
Lebanese Cabinet Meets after Hiatus, amid Friction over Budget
Economic meltdown drives some Lebanese to collect recyclables for a living
SOS: Forget for a moment about the elections: Lebanon is in dire danger/Jean-Marie Kassab

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 24-25/2022
INSS: Iran can achieve nuclear breakout within weeks
Iran could hold direct talks with US to reach ‘good’ nuclear deal: FM
Malley: Iran Nuclear Agreement Unlikely without Release of US Prisoners
Iran insists prisoner swap not precondition for nuclear deal
Iran Blames US for Slow Pace of Nuclear Talks
Iranian Diplomats Partake in OIC Meetings for First Time in 6 Years
Iran Makes Arrest after Khomeini Statue 'Destroyed'
Iran Arrests Head of Chabahar Trade Zone
Hunger Strikers Demand Prisoners’ Release amid Iran Nuclear Talks
UAE intercepts Houthi ballistic missiles in latest attack
Arab League calls for designation of Yemen's Houthis as 'terrorist' group
45,000 Displaced since IS Attack on Syria Prison
Syria Defends Rights Record as West, Turkey Accuse it of 'Starvation'
EU Set for Show of Unity as Russia Invasion Fears Mount

Titles For The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 24-25/2022
The Houthis Must Be Relisted as a Terrorist Group/Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/January 24/2022
Ukrainian Cold War Redux/Charles Elias Chartouni/January 24/2022
A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East/Jonathan Schanzer/The Dispatch/January 24/2022 |
Islamic State prison break reinforces value of US military protection for Syria's Kurds/Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor/January 24/2022
Biden must act now to better arm Ukraine. Here’s what that should look like/Bradley Bowman/John Hardie/Jack Sullivan/Defense News/January 24/2022
The Houthis and Booby-Trapped Role/Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/January 24/2022
Iran Has Broken All Prohibitions/Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/January 24/2022
Will US Democracy Survive? Here’s How to Figure That Out./Noah Feldman/Bloomberg/January 24/2022
Leftist Indifference to Christian Genocide/Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/January 24/2022

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on January 24-25/2022
Hariri announces suspension of political life
NNA/January 24/2022
Prime Minister, Saad Hariri, on Monday announced the suspension of his political life, calling on the "Future Movement" to follow suit and not to run for parliamentary elections. "There is no room for any positive opportunities in Lebanon in light of the Iranian influence, international confusion, national division, sectarianism, and the state's collapse,” Hariri said. “After the assassination of martyr Rafik Hariri, the choice fell on me to continue his political project, but not for the Hariri family to remain in politics," he added. "Rafik Hariri's project prevented civil war and secured a better life for the Lebanese; I’ve succeeded in the first, but wasn’t destined to succeed in the second,” Hariri added in regret.  “I was forced to make settlements from Doha, to visit Damascus, to elect Michel Aoun; all of these settlements came at my expense,” Hariri said. “But every step I’ve taken emanated from my concern for the Lebanese people’s best interest, which cost me my personal wealth and my foreign friendships. Some of the Lebanese have come to consider me one of the authority’s main pillars that have sparked the country’s disaster. Yet, I was the only to reciprocate to the October 17 revolution, as I submitted my government’s resignation and insisted on forming a government of specialists,” Hariri added. The former Prime Minister then stressed that he would remain in the service of the Lebanese people. “We will cleave to our position as citizens who adhere to Rafic Hariri's project to prevent civil war, and we will endeavor to provide a better life for all the Lebanese.”

Tearful Hariri Withdraws from Politics Citing 'Iranian Influence' and 'Int'l Confusion'
Naharnet/January 24/2022  
Al-Mustaqbal Movement leader ex-PM Saad Hariri announced Monday the “suspension” of his role in political life and confirmed that neither him nor his political movement would run in the upcoming parliamentary elections. The 51-year-old, who was propelled into politics by his father Rafik's assassination in 2005, announced his decision during a press conference in Beirut. “Rafik Hariri's project can be summarized with two ideas -- preventing civil war in Lebanon and providing a better life for the Lebanese. I succeeded in the first and didn't achieve enough success in the second,” Hariri said.“Preventing civil war obliged me to engage in settlements, from containing the repercussions of May 7 (clashes) to the Doha Agreement to visiting Damascus, Michel Aoun's election and the electoral law,” the ex-PM added, noting that these settlements came at his expense. Noting that “preventing civil war” and “securing a better life for the Lebanese” were behind every step that he took, Hariri pointed out that this approach was the reason behind the loss of his “personal fortune, some foreign friendships, a lot of national alliances and even some comrades and brothers.” “What I cannot bear is that a number of Lebanese now consider me to be one of the members of the ruling class that caused the disaster,” Hariri went on to say.
 Adding that he is convinced that “there is no hope for any positive chance for Lebanon amid the Iranian influence, international confusion, national divisions, the aggravation of sectarianism and the state’s decay,” the ex-PM announced the suspension of his role in political life and called on al-Mustaqbal Movement to take the same step. “No nominations will be made for the parliamentary elections, neither by al-Mustaqbal Movement nor in the name of the Movement,” he confirmed.Addressing the supporters of political Harirism, the ex-PM said he will “remain in the service of our people and country.”“From our position as citizens, we will continue to cling to Rafik Hariri’s project to prevent civil war and seek a better life for all Lebanese. We will remain in the service of Lebanon and the Lebanese and our houses will remain open,” Hariri added.

Lebanon’s Hariri Steps Away from Politics, Upending Election Landscape
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Lebanese Sunni leader Saad al-Hariri said on Monday he was stepping back from political life and would not run in the parliamentary election, turning Lebanon's sectarian politics on its head as the country grapples with a financial crisis. Hariri, three times prime minister, also called on his party not to run any candidates in May's vote, indicating several factors were behind his decision, including Iranian influence -- a reference to the Hezbollah party. Hariri's Mustaqbal Movement has long been the biggest representative of the Sunni community, controlling one of the largest blocs in parliament that also included members of other sects - seats which others can now win. The move injects huge uncertainty into Lebanese politics just months ahead of the election, in which Hezbollah's adversaries had hoped to overturn a majority it won with its allies in 2018. Some analysts have said a boycott by Lebanon's largest Sunni movement, which would leave the Sunni political scene in disarray, may lead to calls for a delay. In a televised address, Hariri said he had decided to "suspend any role in power, politics and parliament", his voice breaking with emotion as he spoke in front of a portrait of his father, Rafik al-Hariri, who was assassinated in 2005. "I am convinced that there is no room for any positive opportunity for Lebanon in light of Iranian influence, international disarray, national division, sectarianism, and the collapse of the state," he said. While Hariri has remained Lebanon's leading Sunni since inheriting his father's political mantle, his political fortunes have waned in recent years. Mustaqbal lost a third of its seats in 2018. Walid Jumblatt, Lebanon's leading Druze politician, told Reuters the announcement was "very sad because we are losing a major pillar of independence and of moderation". "It means a free hand for Hezbollah and the Iranians," he added. Hariri's announcement comes as Lebanon suffers an economic meltdown, which the World Bank has described as one of the sharpest ever globally. The sectarian elite has failed to take steps to address the crisis even as the bulk of the population has fallen into poverty.
The price of compromise
Mohanad Hage Ali, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, said a boycott by Hariri "pulls rug from under the whole process, and would increase speculation that (the election) might not happen". Hariri's early years in politics were defined by confrontation with Lebanese allies of Syria and Iran, chief among them Hezbollah. He led a Western-backed alliance called "March 14".Tensions spilled into a brief armed conflict in 2008, during which Hezbollah took over Beirut. In his speech, Hariri said his goal of avoiding civil war in Lebanon had forced compromises on him, a reference to understandings with Hezbollah and a deal that made one of its allies, politician Michel Aoun, president in 2016. Hariri became prime minister under that agreement for a second time. Avoiding civil war "was the reason for every step I took, it was also the reason I lost my personal wealth, some of my foreign friendships, many of my national alliances, some comrades and even brothers", Hariri said, a reference to his brother Bahaa, a fierce critic of his policy towards Hezbollah.

In move that could delay Lebanon elections, Hariri bows out of political life
The Arab Weekly/January 24/2022
Former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri announced Monday he would not run in upcoming parliamentary elections and was withdrawing from political life.The Sunni Muslim leader said he was “suspending his work in political life” and urged fellow members of his Future party to leave the political arena.
A tearful Hariri, who was first elected to parliament in 2005, also announced he would not run in the legislative polls due in May, citing “Iranian influence and international upheaval.”“I am convinced that there is no room for any positive opportunity for Lebanon in light of Iranian influence, international disarray, national division, sectarianism and the collapse of the state,” he said.“We will continue to serve our people, but our decision is to suspend any role in power, politics and parliament,” Hariri added in a live televised address as he spoke in front of a portrait of his father. Hariri’s decision, party members said, amounts to a potential political earthquake during a national financial collapse. Some analysts say a boycott by Lebanon's largest Sunni movement, which would leave the Sunni political scene in disarray, may lead to calls for a delay. "I expect to hear voices calling for the postponement of the election, but it doesn't necessarily mean they will be postponed," said Nabil Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief of Annahar newspaper. Mohanad Hage Ali, a fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Centre, said a boycott by Hariri "pulls the rug from under the whole process and would increase speculation that it might not happen."
Hariri has served as prime minister three times since inheriting the political mantle of his father, Rafik al-Hariri, after his assassination in 2005. But while he remains the leading Sunni, his political fortunes have waned in recent years, with his position weakened by the loss of Saudi support.
Hariri has been holding meetings with his Future Movement and senior Lebanese politicians since Thursday.
Hariri's announcement comes as Lebanon suffers an economic meltdown which the World Bank has described as one of the sharpest ever globally. The sectarian elite has failed to take steps to address the crisis, even as the bulk of the population has fallen into poverty. Earlier on Sunday, future Movement legislator Mohamad Hajjar said: "It is most likely that Prime Minister Hariri will not participate and the Future Movement will not participate either, but the final word is what Prime Minister Saad Hariri will say."Lebanon is governed by a sectarian power-sharing system that distributes state positions among 18 officially-recognised sects, with the post of prime minister going to a Sunni. Hariri has expressed exasperation at what he has described as the obstruction of his past efforts to govern. Future Movement vice-president Mustafa Allouch said it was "now common knowledge ... that he will not run himself" in the parliamentary election. The heavily-armed, Iran-backed Shia group Hezbollah and its allies won a majority in the 2018 election, which adversaries hope to overturn in the vote scheduled for May. Western states say the vote should happen on time. Hariri's last spell as prime minister ended in 2019 when he resigned in response to mass protests against the ruling elite. He traded blame with other leaders over blocks to reforms that could have averted the economic crisis. The early years of Hariri's career were defined by confrontation with Hezbollah and its allies. But in later years his critics accused him of compromising with the group. His ties with Saudi Arabia, Iran's main regional rival, hit a low in 2017 when he was held while visiting the kingdom and forced to declare his resignation as prime minister, an incident widely reported though denied by both Riyadh and Hariri.

Factbox: Turbulent career in politics of Lebanon's Hariri
Reuters/January 24/2022
Lebanon's leading Sunni Muslim politician Saad al-Hariri said on Monday he would not run in a forthcoming parliamentary election and was suspending his role in political life, urging his political party to do the same.Hariri has served three times as prime minister, but his political fortunes have waned in recent years, with his position weakened by the loss of Saudi support.
* Hariri, 51, inherited the political mantle of his father, Rafik, after his assassination in 2005, becoming the leading Sunni Muslim in Lebanon's sectarian politics. In 2020, a U.N.-backed tribunal convicted a member of the heavily armed, Iran-backed Shi'ite group Hezbollah of conspiring to kill Rafik al-Hariri. Hezbollah denies any involvement.
* His early years in politics were defined by his close alliance with Saudi Arabia and confrontation with Lebanese allies of Syria and Iran, chief among them Hezbollah. He led a Western-backed Lebanese alliance called "March 14". Tensions spilled into a brief armed conflict in 2008, during which Hezbollah took over Beirut.
* He formed and led his first coalition government in 2009 after March 14 won a parliamentary majority.
* That cabinet was toppled in 2011 when Hezbollah and its allies quit over tensions linked to the U.N.-backed tribunal. For several years, he mostly stayed outside Lebanon on security grounds. He was strongly critical of Hezbollah's role fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
* Having led opposition to Hezbollah's arsenal for years, Hariri was widely seen to set the issue aside as he began to make political understandings with Hezbollah and some of its allies. This resulted in a deal in 2016 that made the Hezbollah-allied Christian politician Michel Aoun president, with Hariri becoming prime minister for a second time.
* While continuing to oppose Hezbollah's possession of arms, Hariri described the arsenal as a regional matter bigger than Lebanon, where he said the focus should be on tackling economic problems. Anti-Hezbollah hawks accused him of compromises and abandoning the principles of March 14.
* His political network in Lebanon, including media outlets, began suffering a financial crisis around 2015. This was a sign of the collapsing fortunes of Hariri's Saudi-based construction firm Saudi Oger, the source of the wealth that helped make Rafik al-Hariri Lebanon's leading Sunni after the 1975-90 civil war.
* The strains in Hariri's ties with Saudi Arabia, which analysts believe was angered by his compromises in Lebanon, surfaced in 2017 when he was held while on a visit to the kingdom and forced to declare his resignation. Though Riyadh and Hariri deny this, the incident was widely reported. French President Emmanuel Macron, who mediated an end to the crisis, has said Hariri was held. Hariri returned to Beirut and retracted his resignation.
* Financially weakened, Hariri's Future Movement lost more than a third of its seats in a 2018 parliamentary election. But he remained the biggest Sunni player, and led another coalition cabinet.
* His last spell as prime minister ended in 2019 when Hariri resigned in response to mass protests against the ruling elite, which erupted as Lebanon sank into financial crisis. Hariri's ties with Aoun soured badly, and Hariri wanted Aoun's son-in-law, Gebran Bassil, and other leading politicians removed in a government reshuffle, to be replaced with technocrats. Hariri and Bassil blamed each other for obstructing reforms that could have averted the financial crisis.
Writing by Tom Perry, Editing by William Maclean

Lebanese Cabinet approves 2021 draft budget law, to hold successive sessions on 2022 budget
NNA/January 24/2022
The Cabinet convened today in a session chaired by President of the Republic, General Michel Aoun, and attended by Prime Minister, Najib Mikati and ministers. The Council of Ministers approved the 2021 draft budget law and decided to hold consecutive daily sessions to approve the 2022 draft budget law, in preparation to referring the budget to the Parliament. In addition, the Cabinet approved a series of social offerings and an increase in transportation allowance for the public and private sectors, and military and security agencies, fulfilling promises to workers in the formal educational sector.
President Michel Aoun considered that “Cabinet-session interruption negatively affected the regularity of the work of the executive authority and increased the accumulation of negative repercussions of the general situation”.The President also asserted that “When the government is not resigned, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister cannot issue exceptional approvals”, asking to start studying livelihood issues which concern citizens, provided that agenda topics will be studied later. For his part, Prime Minister Mikati indicated that “The remaining time before parliamentary elections has become very stressful. We will try as much as possible to accomplish basic issues which are first related to the daily life of citizens, electricity, general budget and gas and oil”.The Prime Minister also revealed that “Upcoming sessions will be full of issues and basic files for all ministries and departments”.The session convened at 9:00am in the presence of minister, except Justice Minister, Henry Khoury, who is on an official mission to Iraq. The Cabinet session was preceded by a meeting between the President and Prime Minister, during which agenda topics were deliberated , in addition to life and livelihood issues.
Minister Halaby:
After the meeting, Information Minister, Abbas Halaby, read the Cabinet statement:
“The Cabinet convened today in a session headed by President of the republic, General Michel Aoun, and attended by Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, in addition to ministers except the Justice Minister who is on an official visit to Iraq.
At the beginning, the President welcomed the ministers after a long interruption during which the work of the executive authority, represented by the Council of Ministers, froze “Although ministers continued their work individually or through ministerial committees”.
The President indicated that “Cabinet-session interruption negatively affected the regularity of the work of the executive authority and increased the accumulation of negative repercussions of the general situation”.
“I have previously emphasized respect for the principle of separation of authorities in Lebanon between the executive, legislative and judicial authorities. What had happened in the past months wasn’t in accordance with this constitutional rule, which was reflected in many of the essential life demands of citizens. In this regard, I would like to assert that when the government is not resigned, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister cannot issue exceptional approvals” the President added.
Moreover, the President asked to start studying livelihood issues which concern citizens, provided that agenda topics will be studied later.
Then, the Prime Minister said “I am pleased to resume Cabinet sessions after a break, and that the “Together to rescue” government resumes duties seriously and effectively since present and imminent challenges no longer allow any delay, financially, socially and economically”.
“The remaining time before parliamentary elections has become very stressful. We will try as much as possible to accomplish basic issues which are first related to the daily life of citizens, electricity, general budget and gas and oil” PM Mikati continued.
“My hope is that our sessions will be fruitful and that we cooperate in a spirit of responsibility away from differences. I also hope that we proceed from the fact that people no longer bear the contradictions and are bored with the differences and want productive work and cooperation among all to extricate themselves from crises and dangers” PM Mikati added.
“What I ask for is that the views of ministers carry the spirit of optimism through the media in approaching all files, despite their difficulty. I ask to avoid, as much as possible, differences which harm ministerial solidarity, and to maintain the confidentiality of deliberations, because any partial or false or out of context leakage will distance the discussion in the general budget and its figures from its correct scientific approach” the Prime Minister said.
“There are also several topics on the agenda which are essential for running state affairs and giving the rights of people and employees. Upcoming sessions will be full of issues and basic files for all ministries and departments. We are also in the process of preparing for a special Cabinet session to approve the executive decrees of the issued laws. Through constructive cooperation, we can achieve a lot. This is at the heart of our work and direction” PM Mikati concluded.
Afterwards, the Council of Ministers began studying agenda topics, and decided to approve:
- A draft decree aimed at giving temporary social assistance to workers in the public sector (including government hospitals and the Lebanese University), municipalities, the Federation of Municipalities and anyone who receives a salary, wage, or allowances from public funds, in addition to retirees who benefit from a retirement pension, and to give the Ministry of Finance a treasury advance for this aim.
- A draft decree aiming to amend the value of the daily transportation allowance for the private sector in the amount of 65,000 Lebanese Liras for each day of actual attendance, plus an education grant.
- A draft decree aiming to amend the value of the temporary transportation compensation for public sector workers to reach 64,000 Lebanese Liras for each day of actual attendance.
- A draft decree aiming to give a monthly lump sum transfer compensation of one million and 200 thousand Liras to the military in the army, internal security forces, public security, state security, customs officers and parliament police.
-Extension of work in the temporary staff and the effect of decisions and contracts of temporary employees and contractors of various names.
-Adjusting the teaching wages for those contracting to teach in public schools and secondary schools, and vocational and technical education institutes.
- Appointing the National Anti-Corruption Commission according to the following: Judge Claude Karam as President, Lawyer Mr. Fawaz Kabbara as Vice President, Judge Therese Allawi and Messrs’ Ali Badran, Joe Maalouf and Kleib Kleib as members.
-Postponing the decision on the draft internal and financial regulations of the National Commission for Human Rights, including the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, in order to ensure the presence of Minister of Justice in the next session.
The Council of Ministers also approved all the items on its agenda.
After that, the Cabinet approved the draft general budget law for the year 2021, and a draft law aimed at authorizing the collection of imports as in the past and the disbursement of expenditures starting from the first of February 2022 until the issuance of the budget law for the year 2022, on the basis of the 12th rule.
As a result, the Council of Ministers began studying the draft general budget law for the current year. The Minister of Finance presented a detailed presentation on the foundations that were adopted, the positive reasons and the positive points of the project, provided that the Council, in successive daily sessions that will be held in the Grand Serail starting tomorrow, will thoroughlystudy the draft budget, preparing for referral to the Parliament.
Questions & Answers:
Question: Were you able to read the budget as a minister representing political forces, and do you agree with it?
Answer: “The Finance Minister presented the initial conception of how to draw up the draft budget, based on the existing situation and what the project would achieve if it was approved as it is. Today, we presented the vision of this project, provided that it follows that all ministers present their opinion on each separate item and paragraph. The Prime Minister confirms that the budget study will be item by item, paragraph by paragraph and article by article. Therefore, no matter how long it takes, the project will be approved as soon as possible, provided that the last session will be at Baabda Palace for final approval and referral to the Parliament”.
Question: Was the appointment of the National Anti-Corruption Commission easily approved?
Answer: “I would like to point out that the atmosphere of understanding in the session was at a very high level, dealing positively, and taking and responding constructively, and it was a special session for this large number of the agenda to pass through, but the pause will be on the issue of the budget”.
Question: Some described the budget as unfair and sterile, and that it meets the conditions of the IMF more than the needs of citizens?
Answer: “In my opinion, people rushed to give descriptions of this project. At the same time that the 1200-page was distributed, the budget began to be attacked. Everyone should calm down and allow the Cabinet to have its say. If the Council approved the budget, it will not find its way to implementation except through the Parliament”.
Question: When is the date of meeting with the IMF?
Answer: “At 4:00pm today, the first introductory session will be held. Lebanon has done what it should, through the draft budget, which, unlike what was corrected negatively, at least secures economic growth for this year and the next year”.
Question: Was the Kuwaiti demands-paper tackled?
Answer: “It was not discussed, but the Prime Minister reflected the positivity brought by the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, and the Cabinet expressed its satisfaction with what was presented by the President”.
Question: Who will respond to the paper?
Answer: “This is a matter related to the Prime Minister, and the concerned Minister, i.e. the Foreign Affairs Minister”.
Formal Education Sector Workers:
Minister Halaby, as Minister of Education, addressed the workers in the educational sector and said:
“The Cabinet approved the monthly social grant and decided to raise the compensation for daily attendance known as the transportation allowance, and also approved doubling the hourly wages for contractors.
We had previously provided them with a grant from donors of $90 per month linked to attendance, in addition to the funds that were transferred to public school funds. During the session, I offered the possibility of including contractors in formal and professional education in exchange for attendance and a social grant, and we gained the support of the Council of Ministers, and the Minister of Finance will study the matter to issue a decision in this regard or a new proposal to be presented to the Council.
Based on that, the Council of Ministers has done what it was supposed to, which means that the promises have been fulfilled despite the distress the country is experiencing at all levels. Therefore, I call on all professors, teachers, contractors, their assistants, mechanization workers, guards, and servants in schools and high schools, and official professionals, to return to schools starting tomorrow morning, and make efforts to compensate for the great loss incurred by the school year as a result of strikes, school closures and the loss of an entire semester.
I call on them to know that education is a sacred message upon which the dreams of generations, the policies of nations, and plans for change, development and advancement are built, so do not let anything hinder the completion of curricula after today, and preserve your safety and the safety of students, parents and society, through the application of the health protocol and global standards to protect against the epidemic.
We also presented issues related to the Lebanese University, and I requested that the Council of Ministers allocates, and very soon, a session to study the issue of appointing deans”.
Minister Statements After the Session:
Prior to their departure from the PresidentialPalace after the session ended, some ministers had a chat with journalists.
Finance Minister, Youssef Khalil, announced in response to a question that the customs dollar would be calculated according to the price approved on the “Sayrafa” platform.
Energy Minister, Walid Fayyad, when asked about the date of signing the expected agreements for energy import, indicated that “Lebanon will sign next Wednesday two agreements: one with Jordan to supply energy and the other with Jordan and Syria to import energy through Syrian territories”.
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, Abdullah Bou Habib, in response to a question about the date of the response to the Kuwaiti paper, stated that discussions will begin today, and that the response will be ready before next Saturday. -- Presidency Press Office

Khalil Says No New Taxes in State Budget
Naharnet/January 24/2022  
There will be “no new taxes” in the 2022 state budget, “contrary to what is being rumored,” Finance Minister Youssef Khalil said after Monday’s Cabinet session. “A lot of what has been said about the budget is inaccurate and the ‘customs dollar’ will be calculated based on the Sayrafa platform rate,” Khalil added. “All of the numbers related to aid will be published in the next two days,” he said. Asked about reports that the budget will adopt a dollar exchange rate ranging between LBP 15,000 and LBP 20,000, Khalil said “no agreement has been reached until the moment regarding the exchange rate."
He, however, noted that "the numbers may not be far from what is being said."Acting information minister and Education Minister Abbas al-Halabi meanwhile announced that Cabinet would hold successive sesssions as of Tuesday to finalize the state budget, noting that there would be morning and evening sessions.

Mikati chairs meeting over Naameh landfill
NNA/January 24/2022
Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, on Monday commented via Twitter on Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s speech, in which the latter declared the suspension of his political life. “Prime Minister Saad Hariri's speech is a sad page for the country, and for me personally; however, I do understand the painful conditions he’s been experiencing and the bitterness he must be feeling. Our homeland will always unite us, and moderation will always be our path — even if circumstances change. Let’s us be inspired by the Almighty’s saying: Do not think it is bad for you, but rather good for you,” he added.

Berri welcomes UN’s Wronecka, Head of Socioeconomic Council, SSNP delegation
NNA/January 24/2022
House Speaker, Nabih Berri, on Monday welcomed at his Ain Tineh residence, United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon, Joanna Wronecka, with whom he discussed the general situation and the most recent developments in Lebanon. However, Wronecka left without making a statement.
Berri then tackled the country’s economic, social, and living conditions with Socioeconomic Council President, Dr. Charles Arbid, and a number of council members, in the presence of President of the General Labor Confederation, Bechara Al-Asmar. Later in the afternoon, Berri received head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, Dr. Rabih Banat, with whom he discussed the general situation and political developments.

Official negotiations between Lebanese government, International Monetary Fund kick off
NNA/January 24/2022 
Official negotiations kicked off on Monday afternoon between the Lebanese government and the International Monetary Fund over the economic recovery program. Chairing the aforementioned negotiations on the Lebanese side is Deputy Prime Minister, Saadeh Shami, and Ernesto Ramirez, on the IMF’s side. The first round of negotiations is being held online due to the delegation’s failure to come to Lebanon as per pandemic travel restrictions imposed by the IMF. During today's first session, the agenda and points to be tackled within the coming two weeks were discussed. Deputy Prime Minister, Saadeh Shami, said in a statement: "In this first round of negotiations, we will discuss the budget, the banking sector, the US dollar exchange rate, the balance of payments, the energy sector, governance, assistance to poor families, and other topics that will form the basic elements of the economic recovery program."In response to a question, he expressed hope that negotiations would end as soon as possible. “Yet, given the complexity of issues, it is possible that other rounds will be held until we reach an agreement,” Shami added. He went on to point out that once negotiations were over, and after the approval of the Council of Ministers, the Lebanese government would sign a preliminary agreement with the IMF’s delegation. “After that, the IMF delegation will submit its report to the Board of Directors until the final approval is obtained and implementation begins,” Shami explained.

Bou Habib Says Studying Kuwaiti Paper Starts Today to be Done by Saturday
Naharnet/January 24/2022  
Foreign minister Abdallah Bou Habib said Monday that studying the Kuwaiti paper will start today. "It will be ready by Saturday," Bou Habib affirmed from Baabda, after meeting with President Michel Aoun. Kuwait’s foreign minister Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammed Al-Sabah said Sunday that he gave Lebanese authorities a list of suggested measures to be taken to ease a diplomatic rift with Gulf Arab countries. He added that he was "carrying a Kuwaiti, Gulf, Arab and international message containing measures and ideas to build confidence again with Lebanon."Sheikh Ahmed added that in order for the initiative to be successful there should be no interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries in general, and specifically Gulf states. Lebanon should "not be used a launching pad for oral or active aggression against any country," he said. President Michel Aoun meanwhile expressed to the Kuwaiti envoy his reservations over the mention of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 in the submitted paper, stressing that “the issue of Hizbullah’s arms and its regional role is not a local issue that has to do with Lebanon alone, but rather a regional and international issue,” Baabda sources told al-Akhbar newspaper in remarks published Monday. “Arabs and the world must understand this matter,” the sources quoted Aoun as saying.

Jumblat 'Sad and Lonely' as Hariri Announces Withdrawal
Naharnet/January 24/2022
Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat said Monday that "the country was orphaned today," after former Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his withdrawal from politics. "Mukhtara is sad and lonely," he added in a tweet, to which he added photos of the small Chouf town covered in snow. The tweet came right after Hariri announced his withdrawal from politics, in a televised address. "There is no hope for any positive chance for Lebanon amid the Iranian influence and international confusion," Hariri said, with tears in his eyes. Jumblat later claimed in a press interview that Hariri's decision would give Hizbullah and the Iranians the upper hand, adding that "the decision is very saddening.""We are losing a foundation for independence and moderation," the PSP leader said.

Video From Amer Fakhoury Foundation: The illegal detention of Majd Kamalmaz & Austin Tice in Syria.
Amer Fakhoury Foundation/January 24/2022
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/105840/%d9%81%d9%8a%d8%af%d9%8a%d9%88-%d9%84%d8%ba%d9%8a%d9%84%d8%a7-%d9%81%d8%a7%d8%ae%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a-%d8%a7%d8%b9%d8%aa%d9%82%d8%a7%d9%84-%d9%85%d8%ac%d8%af-%d9%83%d9%85%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%b2/
We (The USA) give nearly 13.5 billions to Syria while two innocent Americans are illegally detained in this country. Watch the full episode of four with fakhoury where we discuss more this important topic!
First episode of 4 with fakhoury discusses the illegal detention of Americans in Syria and the role of the American government. We discuss the illegal detention of Majd Kamalmaz and Austin Tice abducted in Syria.

Lebanon Asked to Reply to Demands Paper as Aoun Voices Reservations on 1559
Naharnet/Monday, 24 January, 2022 
Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmed al-Nasser, who visited Lebanon over the weekend, demanded that Lebanese authorities respond to the paper of demands that he submitted before January 30, the date of an Arab foreign ministers meeting that will be held in Kuwait, media reports said.
“Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib is supposed to carry the response to the conferees,” al-Joumhouria newspaper quoted sources as saying. President Michel Aoun meanwhile expressed to the Kuwaiti envoy his reservations over the mention of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 in the submitted paper, stressing that “the issue of Hizbullah’s arms and its regional role is not a local issue that has to do with Lebanon alone, but rather a regional and international issue,” Baabda sources told al-Akhbar newspaper. “Arabs and the world must understand this matter,” the sources quoted Aoun as saying. The President also emphasized “Lebanon’s keenness on the best relations with Arabs and the world,” noting that “all officials and authorities respect the Taef Accord and are keen on implementing it and abiding to the Arab and international resolutions.”Aoun also told the Kuwaiti visitor that he would communicate with Speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Najib Miqati in order to come up with a unified response to the paper. The Kuwaiti minister said Sunday that he gave Lebanese authorities a list of suggested measures to be taken to ease a diplomatic rift with Gulf Arab countries. He added that he was "carrying a Kuwaiti, Gulf, Arab and international message containing measures and ideas to build confidence again with Lebanon."Sheikh Ahmed added that in order for the initiative to be successful there should be no interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries in general, and specifically Gulf states. Lebanon should "not be used a launching pad for oral or active aggression against any country," he said.

Paper of Int'l Demands Submitted to Lebanon Leaked
Naharnet/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Al-Akhbar newspaper said Monday it has obtained a copy of the list of suggestions handed to President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Najib Miqati by Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammed Al-Sabah.
Below is the full text of the paper, as published by al-Akhbar:
"In order to bridge the gap between Lebanon and the Gulf and to build bridges of confidence with the sisterly Lebanese republic, the following measures and steps are requested to eliminate any disagreement:
1. Lebanon's commitment to the Taef Accord.
2. Lebanon's commitment to all U.N. and Arab League resolutions.
3. Confirming that Lebanon is a civil state, in accordance with the constitution.
4. The dissociation from the regional conflicts should be in word and deed.
5. Setting a timeframe to implement U.N. Security Council resolutions 1559, 1680 and 1701, related to Hizbullah’s arms, that call for the disarmament of all militias, for the sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon, for national dialogue, and for prohibiting all armed militias from operating anywhere in all of Lebanon (no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state).
6. Stopping Hizbullah from interfering in Gulf and Arab affairs and committing to prosecuting any Lebanese party that participates in aggressive behavior against the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
7. Stopping all activities by anti-GCC groups and pursuing anyone who incites violence against the GCC states or participates in it.
8. Committing to holding the parliamentary elections in May 2022, and the presidential elections in October 2022, on time and without changes.
9. Inspecting Lebanese exports to the GCC countries through bilateral controllers to ensure that the exports are free of any contraband, especially drugs that target the social security of the GCC countries. In this regard, a mechanism similar to the European one can be adopted.
10. Lebanese official authorities should have control over all state portals of entry.
11. Setting up a security information exchange system between the GCC countries and the Lebanese government.
12. Working with the World Bank to find solutions to the (banking sector) issue preventing Lebanese depositors from accessing their bank deposits.

Report: KSA Asks Hariri to Postpone Elections Boycott Decision
Naharnet/Monday, 24 January, 2022 
KSA has asked ex-Prime Minister Saad Hariri to "slow down" and take more time before announcing whether he will participate in the elections, sources said. The sources told al-Akhbar newspaper, in remarks published Monday, that Saudi Arabia does not necessarily want Hariri to change his position.
"KSA rather wants Hariri to postpone announcing his decision, amid fears that it might push other Sunni leaders to refrain from participating in the upcoming parliamentary elections," the sources said. The sources added that this Saudi initiative has reopened a dialogue between KSA and Hariri, after a long silence.Riyadh had received in the past few days calls from Lebanese allies asking it to intervene, according to the sources, in urging Hariri to postpone his decision for a couple of weeks. "Everyone assumed that Hariri will participate in the elections, but now that his decision has crystallized, KSA and other countries are trying to contain the situation," the sources said. The sources went on to claim that American Ambassador Dorothy Shea will also meet with Hariri to try to dissuade him from his decision. Al-Mustaqbal Movement leader is scheduled to deliver a speech today, Monday, at 4:00 pm to announce his decision. Al-Mustaqbal supporters have been rallying at the Center House since Saturday after reports and politicians said that he is inclined not to run in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Media reports have said that Hariri, in closed-door meetings, has cited the lack of Saudi financial backing as one of the reasons behind his decision.

Lebanese Cabinet Meets after Hiatus, amid Friction over Budget
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
The Lebanese cabinet met on Monday for the first time since October, convening after Iranian-backed Hezbollah ended a boycott but with the powerful group and others objecting to a draft budget that was the main agenda item. With Lebanon mired in one of the world's sharpest financial crises, Prime Minister Najib Mikati hopes passing a budget will help talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which Lebanese officials say will begin on Monday. Lebanon has failed since 2020 to make progress towards securing an IMF bailout, with no sign of long-delayed reforms sought by donors.
According to Reuters, Mikati said he hoped the cabinet would "cooperate in a spirit of responsibility, far from any disputes". A row over the probe into the 2020 Beirut port explosion had led Hezbollah and its closest allies to boycott cabinet. But criticism of the budget suggests difficulties ahead.
Heavily-armed Hezbollah said on Sunday the draft did not "bode well", criticizing proposed tax increases and saying it could not support it. The Free Patriotic Movement, the Christian party founded by President Michel Aoun, has objected to an article that gives the finance minister authorization to set the exchange rate. The Lebanese pound has lost more than 90% of its value since the crisis erupted in 2019, plunging most Lebanese into poverty.
Finance Minister Youssef Khalil said that there was no agreement yet on an exchange rate for the budget, "but numbers might not be far from" rates ranging between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds per dollar, broadcaster Al Jadeed reported. He was referring to rates reported by Reuters on Friday, when an official source said this range would be applied for operating expenses. He said that the rate determined by a central bank platform would be applied to customs transactions. That rate was an average 22,700 pounds per dollar on Friday, slightly below Monday's parallel market rate of 23,300.
Unifying Lebanon's multiple exchange rates is an IMF policy recommendation. A previous attempt to negotiate with the IMF failed in 2020 amid disagreement between the government, commercial banks, and central bank about the size of losses in the financial system and how they should be distributed.
Beirut said in December it had agreed on a figure of $69 billion for the losses, which the IMF has said it is assessing. The government has yet to release new proposals about how the losses could be distributed. An IMF spokesperson said on Friday the Fund intended "to remain closely engaged in the coming weeks to help the authorities formulate a comprehensive reform strategy".

Economic meltdown drives some Lebanese to collect recyclables for a living
Rodayna Raydan/Al-Monitor/January 24/2022
Lebanon’s increasing poverty and lack of jobs drive desperate people to live off of selling collected recycled materials in kilos to scrapyards, shops and manufacturers.
Since the economic crisis began in Lebanon in 2019, collecting plastic, cardboard, iron and anything suitable for recycling and remanufacturing has become a common profession in areas like Tripoli, Bekaa, Saida and Beirut. Inflated prices of imported materials mean that manufacturers and buyers are constantly looking for raw materials on the domestic market, as it saves them dollars since they do not have to pay for imported goods that are priced under the black market rate. This allows them to raise their profits as products sold in the domestic market are cheaper than imported products that often require payments in cash dollars. Some environmental experts say this can enhance sustainability in the production process and promote a circular economy while helping some people earn an income. Environmental consultant and engineer Tamara Ghanem told Al-Monitor, “This rising trend is basically trash for cash and is helping those in poverty who are desperate to earn something.”
Ghanem added that although some people have become more conscious about recycling, this trend itself is not sufficient enough to drive recycling on a national scale — it does mean, though, that people now value recyclable items more.  Previous calls and campaigns in Lebanon have been organized by the Ministry of Environment and many environmental associations that promote the importance of recycling. But the recycling of waste really kicked in with the onset of the economic collapse. High inflation along with the high exchange rate of the dollar against the Lebanese pound forced people of all ages to seek additional jobs that might provide as little as the equivalent of $1 per day, which is equivalent to 25,000 Lebanese pounds at today's exchange rate with the skyrocketing hyperinflation. Prior to the economic collapse and the loss of value in Lebanese currency, $1 equaled 1,507 Lebanese lira. With the instability of the exchange rate, $1 recently reached 33,000 Lebanese lira, leading to soaring prices and demand for fresh cash dollars.
Dozens of unemployed elderly and young men have been forced to turn into scrap collectors, riding their carts from one waste container to another in the early morning hours on the streets of Lebanon looking for recyclable items to sell. Al-Monitor spoke to one scrap collector, Maher Harb, who was laid off from his job in a butchery. “I can’t feed my family if I don’t earn some money, even if it is very little and worthless compared to the expensive prices of everything in the market.”Harb is forced to wake up at 6 a.m. and wander from one street to another in Beirut to dig up waste containers and look for what he calls “treasure” for the poor and unemployed. Small manufacturers have also benefited from this recycling, as they now purchase the materials used for packaging at cheaper prices. Ahmad Yassin, who works as a sales representative for cleaning products in Bekaa, told Al-Monitor, “I buy plastic gallons and bottles from collectors and fill them up with the liquid and detergents at a factory in Kamed Al Lawz after they go through the steaming and repackaging process, and this saves me and the manufacturer money from buying brand-new gallons.”
Recycling for money has even become more common in households that in the past barely questioned the value of recyclable items and instead threw everything away. Households today keep plastic containers, plastic bottles and gallons. And recycling glass bottles are now sold for 8,000 to 10,000 thousand lira. Mona Al Hajj, known to her family and neighbors for her recycling efforts, told Al-Monitor, “Before the dollar crisis hit the country, the majority of people I know used to mock me for recycling things like juice glass bottles, takeaway plastic containers and plastic gallons. But now they have become so expensive on the market, and their prices are continuously rising.” Hajj is now using the recycled items to store her “mouneh," or preserved foods, with glass bottles being used to store tomato paste, plastic gallons for vinegar, and plastic containers for dried herbs and fruits. Recycling items in Lebanese households and the appearance of scrap collectors is undoubtedly beneficial for the environment as well and can help to alleviate Lebanon's waste crisis by raising awareness on the importance of recycling. Although scrap collectors have benefited from reselling recyclable waste in a country that has minimal employment opportunities, environmental and sustainability experts told Al-Monitor about the unpleasant side of this emerging trend. Environmental engineer Ziad Abishaker told Al-Monitor, “Sometimes these scrap collectors create a mess more than they assist the streets of Lebanon, as they only look for recyclable waste they can profit on while digging up waste containers and leaving them in disarray.” Recyclable waste collectors in Lebanon mainly benefit from scrap yards or waste dumps where they hunt for items like appliances, wires and plastic materials. Outside of scrap yards, these collectors mainly look for plastic bottles and gallons as, according to Abishaker, one kilo of plastic sells for 2,000 to 4,000 Lebanese lira.
For experts like Abishakir, this form of collecting recyclables has the main advantage of helping those desperate for financial aid.  People in Lebanon are traditionally already familiar with implementing key waste management and circular economy principles, as older generations used to apply these methods without being aware of the benefits and their links to recycling. Many families in villages collected milk tanks and used them as plant pots; others commercialized the collection of metal and steel decades ago for resale. But again, this emerging trend of collecting recyclable waste from dumps or waste containers has mainly made its appearance in the shadow of the economic crisis. TRUE adviser Majd Fayyad told Al-Monitor, “Despite the benefits of removing scrap from the streets and creating income for some unemployed people, this approach cannot be considered as a solution to our crisis, especially due to its fragmented and uncoordinated nature.” Fayyad said those recycling scrap material for cash can raise awareness on recycling in local communities, as people become aware that desperate citizens are eeking out a living off of recycling these materials. Lebanon's waste crisis is the result of poor institutional capacity, corrupt political efforts and the lack of a long-term vision. The untreated waste crisis and the burning of waste at more than 150 dumps across the country have had a significant impact on the lives and health of nearby residents.

جان ماري كساب: إنها حالة طوارئ لأن لبنان في خطر داهم
SOS: Forget for a moment about the elections: Lebanon is in dire danger.
Jean-Marie Kassab/January 24/2022
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/105830/jean-marie-kassab-sos-forget-for-a-moment-about-the-elections-lebanon-is-in-dire-danger-%d8%ac%d8%a7%d9%86-%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8a-%d9%83%d8%b3%d8%a7%d8%a8-%d8%a5%d9%86%d9%87%d8%a7-%d8%ad%d8%a7/
The situation is getting worse by the minute. The visit of the Kuwaiti minister of foreign affairs and the letter he handed to the so called Lebanese officials is very intense. While totally approving its legitimate contents, I fear that none of them will be met. Arab Iranian war in in the air, and we are in the middle of it.
Add to that the retrieval of Hariri from politics which is by the way a good bad thing. But that is not the question, the question and the problem are where to find a firm, reliable and powerful replacement within the Sunni leadership. I am sure that there are many who keep on hiding and are shadowed by the traditional ones . Stand up people and shout before Lebanon is lost forever.
The targeting of peaceful Abu Dhabi by the Houthis, an extension of the Iranian IRGC, earlier via drones and hours ago with ballistic missiles will send ripples all over the area and particularly in Lebanon. Lebanon has always acted as a caisse de resonance.
Lebanon is occupied by Iran. Lebanon is ruled by traitors who work solely for Iran.
Unless we do something about it, Lebanon will be lost. Unless we remove them, Lebanon will no longer exist.
To do something about it, we need to be united and act right away.
The Task Force Lebanon sends a clear message to all the sovereign groups and individuals to unite.
Forget for a moment about the elections: Lebanon is in dire danger.
United we stand, divided we fall.
Vive la Résistance
Vive le Liban
Jean-Marie Kassab
Task Force Lebanon
Ps ; pls share and broadcast.
https://www.facebook.com/taskforcelb

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on January 24-25/2022
INSS: Iran can achieve nuclear breakout within weeks
Israel National News/January 24/2022
Institute for National Security Studies releases report on security challenges facing Israel in 2022 with emphasis on Iranian threat,
A delegation of researchers at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), led by the Chairman of the INSS Board of Directors Sir Frank Lowy, and including INSS Executive Director Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg, INSS Managing Director Brig. Gen. (res.) Udi Dekel, and INSS senior researchers former head of the National Security Council Mr. Meir Ben Shabbat, former head of the IDF Intelligence Research Division Brig. Gen. (res.) Dror Shalom, Ms. Sima Shine, Dr. Anat Kurz, Dr. Shira Efron, Brig. Gen. (res.) Assaf Orion, and Dr. Meir Elran, presented to H.E. Mr. Isaac Herzog, President of the State of Israel, the annual Strategic Survey for Israel at his office.
The INSS annual assessment summarizes the main points of an analysis of Israel’s strategic environment in terms of national security, with its potential threats and opportunities, and specifies a range of policy recommendations for decision makers. The Institute’s researchers presented to the President the political-security issues in Israel’s regional and domestic environments, and the challenges to its national security at the outset of 2022. Based on its analyses, the Institute stressed the need for an integrated strategic approach that will help Israel deal with the challenges before it.
An in-depth and detailed discussion of Israel’s leading national security challenges will take place as part of the INSS Annual International Conference, on February 1-2, 2022, in Tel Aviv.
At the outset of 2022, the State of Israel lacks an integrated, consistent, and long-term strategic approach with respect to the challenges it faces.
At the outset of 2022, Israel’s strategic situation is marked by Israel’s failure to maximize its security, economic, and technological potential in its response to the political, security, and internal challenges it faces. This is due to the lack of an integrated, consistent, and long-term strategic approach.
At the center of the challenges is Iran, which continues to strive for a nuclear threshold, and already has the capabilities required for a breakout to a nuclear weapon within a space of weeks. At the same time, it remains determined to build up its military options to threaten Israel in several areas along its borders, including through the use of proxies in a counterattack and with missiles, rockets, unmanned aerial attack vehicles, and precision fire.
The Palestinian arena is a very serious challenge to the vision of Israel as a Jewish, democratic, secure, and moral state – particularly due to the drift toward a one-state reality. This poses concrete risks to Israel in the form of security escalation, in part because of the increasing weakness of the Palestinian Authority, to the point of a near inability to function and a lack of governance. In tandem, the situation in this arena challenges Israel’s international political and legal standing.
Within Israel there is an intensification of trends of polarization between different groups, incitement, and weak governance, particularly in uncontrolled enclaves, which compound the erosion of trust in state institutions. All these constitute a substantive threat to social resilience and national security.
At the global level, Israel must navigate the growing power struggle between the United States and China, and prepare for a range of extreme events due to climate change, frequent economic crises, changes in norms in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasing concerns over the resilience of liberal democracies. Israel’s dependence on United States support continues, but the aid that Washington can give Israel is challenged by internal US polarization, even as America’s focus of attention is directed at its internal problems and the struggle with China, at the expense of its engagement with the Middle East. Against this background, the US administration is less prepared to pay attention to the interests and concerns of Israel, whether regarding Iran or in the Palestinian context. In addition, the United States is less willing to invest in extending and intensifying the normalization agreements between Israel and the pragmatic Arab countries.
Strategic Survey for Israel 2022, which discusses these topics at length, aims to contribute to the public debate of these challenges and their potential resolutions, while helping decision makers formulate a sound and informed strategic approach.
President Isaac Herzog, referring to the Strategic Survey, said:
“Today there is an emerging regional understanding that the future of the Middle East is a future of cooperation. In the face of the Iranian threat and its dangerous proxies in the region, we must cooperate with our friends. Not just for the sake of Israel’s citizens, but for all the inhabitants of the Middle East. This is a regional interest of the highest order. Israel’s security is tightly bound up with its national resilience, in our ability to deal with the most profound disagreements, without giving up on our faith in ourselves. We have the power to live together and act as one people. Bridging divides, including political ones, is perhaps the most important step for maintaining Israel’s security, stability, and prosperity. Thank you for your professional work in the preparation of this report, which is the product of genuine concern for the people and the state.”
The Three Main Threats Facing Israel in 2022
Departing from previous years, the Institute’s researchers identified a difference in the scale of the main threats to Israel in 2022. They contend that the following three threats are equal in their severity, and that the main challenge is to define an integrated way of dealing with all three.
Iranian nuclear activity: Tehran represents the most serious external threat to Israel, first and foremost due to Iran’s quest to achieve military nuclear capability. In the background is Israel’s structural inability to handle on its own all the challenges posed by Iran’s conduct, as well as the growing need to increase coordination with the United States and tighten the special relationship with it – whether or not an agreement is reached between Iran and the great powers on its nuclear program. Moreover, Iran continues with its program of regional subversion, including its efforts to surround Israel with the threat of attack, especially through its precision missile project for Hezbollah in Lebanon and its proxies in Syria. Apart from thousands of missiles and rockets, Iran is equipping its proxies with thousands of unmanned aerial attack vehicles (UAVs), with a range that enables them to penetrate deep into Israel’s skies from all fronts.
The progress of its nuclear program has given Iran the shortest time ever to break out to nuclear weapons – if the regime in Tehran decides to do so. For Iran, this progress reinforces the temptation not to return to the nuclear agreement without considerable rewards, and the US administration might have neither the ability nor the desire to grant them. Also, Iran’s confidence and readiness to attack its enemies through its proxies has increased.
Israel for its part is at a strategic impasse regarding the Iranian nuclear issue. The various possible scenarios for the dialogue between Iran and the great powers, whether resulting in a partial agreement or lengthy foot-dragging, or even breakdown of talks, are all negative for Israel. However, the opposition to an arrangement between the powers and Iran, focused on a freeze of the nuclear program, will leave Israel isolated with only the military option for preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon.
The Palestinian arena is not a secondary arena that can be contained by empty delusions about “limiting the conflict.” This fact became clear last year during Operation Guardian of the Walls, the round of fighting between Israel and Hamas. The absence of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict poses a serious threat to Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state, and to its status on the international stage. The security situation in the West Bank is nearing a boiling point due to the weakness of the Palestinian Authority in the face of united opposition from various factions and street gangs. True, the situation is still under control, thanks to determined activity by the IDF and the Israel Security Agency, and through security cooperation with the mechanisms of the PA. However, the PA has been weakened and could cease to function, while the growing frustration of the younger generation of Palestinians drives them to think in terms of a one-state reality. Internationally, there is growing criticism of Israel, which in fact works to thwart the chances of implementing the “two states for two peoples” solution, and intensifies the danger of legal moves against Israel and its definition as an apartheid state. Regarding the Gaza Strip, Israel currently faces the same complex and long-lasting dilemma: the need for an urgent response to the humanitarian situation, while avoiding security escalation; pressing for the return of prisoners and missing persons held by Hamas; and preventing Hamas from achieving further military and political control.
Israel’s domestic arena: There are signs of a serious social problem emerging due to polarization, rifts, tensions, and extremism (whether ideological, verbal, or physical), in addition to the erosion of trust in government institutions. Meanwhile, there are gaps in readiness for multi-front and high casualty war scenarios, or for violent incidents involving Jews and Arabs. This arena is particularly challenging because of the weakness of the police and the development of uncontrolled enclaves, and above all the absence of national mechanisms for integrated handling of all the issues involved. The consequences of these weaknesses are affecting the responses to other national security challenges.
This convergence of challenges demands a change in the national order of priorities, focusing on restoring government control within the country and healing the rifts between different groups in society. In view of the external threats, Israel must improve the readiness of its military strength, while also cultivating and exploiting soft power assets – its achievements in the fields of technology, science, sea water desalination, and energy, particularly in view of the changes in the global agenda, with the increased emphasis on the need to combat climate change, and the health, social, and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Israel’s relative advantages and its value to regional and international systems is particularly evident in contrast to the weaker countries of the Middle East.
Against the background of these challenges, the INSS researchers presented ten policy recommendations, as follows:
1. Prepare an up-to-date, innovative, and comprehensive strategy, suitable for a changing strategic and operational environment, based on preparing simultaneously for the challenges arising in Iran, the Palestinian arena, and the domestic front.
2. Set up mechanisms for integrated government planning and action to restore law and order and governance in Israel’s uncontrolled enclaves; tackle crime in Arab society; reduce tension, hostility, and inequality between communities in Israel.
3. The Iranian challenge: prepare for a nuclear agreement between Iran and the powers, as well as for the absence of any agreement. There is a need to build a credible military option to stop Iran from achieving a nuclear weapon, preferably in coordination with the United States.
4. Continue and update the campaign between wars in the face of Iranian entrenchment and the establishment of its proxy militias along Israel’s borders. At the same time, tackle all the elements of the regional Iranian challenge, with the emphasis on stopping the precision missile project in Lebanon and thwarting Iran’s efforts to exert influence.
5. The Palestinian arena: promote political and economic-infrastructure moves to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and improve the fabric of civilian life; avoid steps that could hasten the slide into a one-state situation, and create the conditions for separation and future promotion of other options.
6. The Gaza Strip: continue the efforts to formulate moves in the spirit of “economy in exchange for security,” involving Egypt, international and regional elements, and the Palestinian Authority. Calm depends on a resolution of the prisoners and missing soldiers issue, and some relief of the restrictions on the Strip.
7. Heighten coordination with the United States, along with the special relationship and establishment of trust at the bipartisan level, stressing Israel’s value to the United States as a responsible actor, and as an asset in the fields of technology, science, enterprise, and culture.
8. Extend the Abraham Accords as well as ties with Jordan and Egypt – aiming for regional collaborations in a range of fields, including intelligence, air defenses, energy, agriculture, water, and healthcare. In addition, Israel must extend its economic contacts with countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, and ease tensions with Turkey.
9. The technological revolution and cyberspace accelerate the “learning competition,” which means that Israel must invest in developing science, technology, and technological studies in order to maintain and expand its relative advantage, which is an asset to its national security and global status.
10. Continue military buildup along the lines of the IDF multi-year “Tnufa” (Momentum) program to maintain Israel’s operational and technological superiority in the age of information, autonomous systems, and cyber; adapting operational plans and improving civil readiness for limited conflicts as well as a multi-front war.

Iran could hold direct talks with US to reach ‘good’ nuclear deal: FM
Yaghoub Fazeli, Al Arabiya English/24 January ,2022
Iran could hold direct talks with the US over its 2015 nuclear deal if it deems it necessary to reach a “good” agreement, Tehran’s top diplomat said on Monday. “The US is sending messages calling for direct talks with us… If we reach a stage in the negotiations where it becomes necessary to have a [direct] dialogue with the US to reach a good agreement, we will not ignore it,” Iranian state media quoted Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as saying. Talks between Iran and the remaining signatories to the 2015 deal – Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain – are currently taking place in Vienna.
The US is participating indirectly in the talks due to Iran’s refusal to negotiate directly with Washington. The talks aim to bring Iran back into compliance with the nuclear pact and facilitate a US return to the agreement. US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, who heads up the US negotiating team in Vienna, told Reuters on Sunday that Washington would “welcome” direct talks with Tehran but added that his side has “heard nothing to that effect.” Under the 2015 deal, Iran limited its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. Washington withdrew from the deal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump, who also reimposed sweeping sanctions on Tehran. Iran has since started enriching uranium up to 60 percent purity – a big step closer to the 90 percent required for weapons-grade material.

Malley: Iran Nuclear Agreement Unlikely without Release of US Prisoners
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
The United States is unlikely to strike an agreement with Iran to save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal unless Tehran releases four US citizens Washington says it is holding hostage, the lead US nuclear negotiator told Reuters on Sunday.
The official, US Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley, repeated the long-held US position that the issue of the four people held in Iran is separate from the nuclear negotiations. He moved a step closer, however, to saying that their release was a precondition for a nuclear agreement. "They're separate and we're pursuing both of them. But I will say it is very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage by Iran," Malley told Reuters in an interview. "So even as we're conducting talks with Iran indirectly on the nuclear file we are conducting, again indirectly, discussions with them to ensure the release of our hostages," he said in Vienna, where talks are taking place on bringing Washington and Tehran back into full compliance with the deal. In recent years, Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards have arrested dozens of dual nationals and foreigners, mostly on espionage and security-related charges. Rights groups have accused Iran of taking prisoners to gain diplomatic leverage, while Western powers have long demanded that Tehran free their citizens, who they say are political prisoners. "I've spoken to a number of the families of the hostages who are extraordinarily grateful for what Mr Rosen is doing but they also are imploring him to stop his hunger strike, as I am, because the message has been sent," Malley said. Rosen said that after five days of not eating he was feeling weak and would heed those calls. "With the request from Special Envoy Malley and my doctors and others, we've agreed (that) after this meeting I will stop my hunger strike but this does not mean that others will not take up the baton," Rosen said. The indirect talks between Iran and the United States on bringing both countries back into full compliance with the landmark 2015 nuclear deal are in their eighth round. Iran refuses to hold meetings with US officials, meaning others shuttle between the two sides. The deal between Iran and major powers lifted sanctions against Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear activities that extended the time it would need to obtain enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb if it chose to. Then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018, reimposing punishing economic sanctions against Tehran. Iran responded by breaching many of the deal's nuclear restrictions, to the point that Western powers say the deal will soon have been hollowed out completely. Asked if Iran and the United States might negotiate directly, Malley said: "We've heard nothing to that effect. We'd welcome it." The four US citizens include Iranian-American businessman Siamak Namazi, 50, and his father Baquer, 85, both of whom have been convicted of "collaboration with a hostile government". Namazi remains in prison. His father was released on medical grounds in 2018 and his sentence later reduced to time served. While the elder Namazi is no longer jailed, a lawyer for the family says he is effectively.

Iran insists prisoner swap not precondition for nuclear deal
Al-Monitor/January 24/2022
Iran ruled out a prisoner exchange as a precondition for a renewed nuclear agreement on Monday, a day after the United States suggested a swap would be a necessary part of any deal made with the Islamic Republic.  Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters on Monday that Iran’s negotiators have never accepted a prisoner exchange as a precondition for the nuclear talks, which are “complicated enough and shouldn’t be made more complicated.” Khatibzadeh’s comments came a day after US special envoy on Iran Robert Malley suggested that a deal to revive the multilateral nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was unlikely without the release of four US citizens held by Iran.  “It is very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage by Iran," Malley told Reuters.Washington is currently in indirect talks with Tehran over a return to the nuclear accord that President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018. The two sides have conducted separate, indirect discussions over the prisoners that Malley confirmed were ongoing.
Who are the Americans?
Iran is known to be holding four Iranian-Americans on vague spying charges that human rights groups describe as baseless. Siamak Namazi, a businessman, was detained days after the JCPOA was reached in 2015 and later sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of cooperating with the US government. His father, Baquer Namazi, a former Iranian provincial governor and UNICEF official, was detained while trying to visit Siamak in prison. After two years in the notorious Evin Prison, the senior Namazi was placed on a restrictive medical furlough. He remains barred from leaving the country, despite his ill health. Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian-American environmental activist who also holds British citizenship, is serving a 10-year sentence for alleged collusion with the US government. Businessman Emad Sharghi was arrested in December 2020 and sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage. Rights groups accuse Iran of jailing dual nationals and foreigners to gain leverage for sanctions relief, the unfreezing of assets and other concessions from their home countries. According to the New York-based Center for Human Rights, Iran is holding at least 16 dual nationals and one foreign national.
Past prisoner swaps
Siamak Namazi is now the longest-held American prisoner in Iran. He was the only American of six not returned home as part of a detainee swap arranged by the Obama administration in 2016. Under Trump, Iran freed two Americans — Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang and Navy veteran Michael White — but Iran refused to release the remaining dual nationals. Babak Namazi told Al-Monitor in June 2021 that he worries his brother and father could again be excluded from another possible prisoner deal, asking, “Why were we left behind again and again and again? That’s a question we’ve had to ask ourselves.”
What’s next
For more, check out Andrew Parasiliti’s podcast with Bijan Khajehpour, an Al-Monitor columnist who is related to Siamak. Khajehpour argues that a prisoner release is in Iran’s interest and could help establish better relations between Tehran and its diaspora.

Iran Blames US for Slow Pace of Nuclear Talks
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Iran blamed the United States on Monday for the slow pace of indirect talks on reviving a 2015 nuclear deal. "The main reason behind the slow pace of the Vienna nuclear talks is the United States' lack of readiness," said Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh. He also ruled out any US preconditions for reviving the nuclear deal, including the release of US prisoners jailed held in Iran. "Iran has never accepted any preconditions by the United States... The US official's comments on the release of US prisoners in Iran is for domestic use," Khatibzadeh told a weekly news conference. The US lead negotiator in indirect talks with Iran on reviving the nuclear pact said on Sunday that Washington was unlikely to strike an agreement with Tehran unless it released US prisoners jailed in the Islamic Republic.

Iranian Diplomats Partake in OIC Meetings for First Time in 6 Years
Jeddah - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022 - 08:00
For the first time in six years, Iranian diplomats are participating in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meetings. Saudi Arabia and Iran had severed relations in 2016 after riots and attacks on the Kingdom’s embassy in Tehran and consulate in Mashhad. Today, Iranian diplomats are attending preparatory senior staff meetings for the 48th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers of OIC member states. The diplomats participated with their colleagues, representatives of the Islamic world, headed by Hissein Brahim Taha, the Secretary-General of the organization, well-informed sources told Asharq Al-Awsat. These Iranian diplomats are working at their delegation’s headquarters and away from the Iranian consulate in Jeddah. Last Tuesday, Asharq Al-Awsat reported the news of the arrival of three Iranian diplomats at King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah. Informed sources told Asharq Al-Awsat that the diplomats were welcomed at King Abdulaziz Airport in Jeddah and accorded the same reception as any other OIC delegation. The diplomats’ duties will be limited to representing their country at OIC meetings, explained the sources. The organization is holding several meetings in preparation for the OIC foreign ministers' meeting that is set for Pakistan. Even though ties have been severed, Riyadh has always granted visas to Iranians wishing to carry out the annual Hajj pilgrimage. They are treated the same as any pilgrims from any part of the world from the moment they arrive in the Kingdom to the moment they depart. In other news, the OIC on Sunday held a preparatory meeting for the 48th session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, which is due to take place in Islamabad in March. Held at the OIC’s headquarters in Jeddah, the inaugural session saw the handover of the chair from Niger to Pakistan. OIC Secretary-General Taha reviewed major developments that had taken place in some member states and also the meeting’s main agenda items. He addressed the situation in Palestine, Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Mali, the Sahel Region and Lake Chad Basin, and other African countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Muslim communities and minorities in nonmember states. Taha underlined the need to overcome the challenges faced by member states to ensure peace, stability, and development and to achieve the aspirations of their people. He also stressed the need to strengthen OIC capacities in the areas of peace, preventive diplomacy and mediation, counterterrorism and combating Islamophobia, along with response efforts to coronavirus challenges.

Iran Makes Arrest after Khomeini Statue 'Destroyed'
London - Tehran - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Iranian authorities on Sunday arrested an individual for destroying a statue of Ruhollah Khomeini the previous day, a local official said. The incident comes as Iran prepares to celebrate in February the 43rd anniversary of the Iranian revolution and Khomenei's triumphant return to Tehran from exile. "We have received a report stating that the statue of Imam Khomeini in the main square in the town of Ardestan was... destroyed yesterday," local governor Hamidreza Taamoli said, quoted by the official IRNA news agency. Ardestan is a town in the central province of Isfahan. "The individual was identified in the shortest possible time and sent to prison," he added, according to AFP, without disclosing the detainee's identity. "It is not possible right now to speculate on the accused's motives," Taamoli added. Earlier this month, the judicial authority announced the arrest of a "counter-revolutionary agent" on suspicion of carrying out an arson attack on a memorial to General Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani, who headed the Quds Force, the foreign operations arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, was killed in a US drone strike in Iraq's capital Baghdad in January 2020. The statue of him, in the southwestern town of Shahrekord, had been unveiled just hours before the arson attack. Two years ago, protesters burned an effigy of Khomeini’s ring in the city of Shahryar on the outskirts of Tehran, during the bloody protests in November 2019.

Iran Arrests Head of Chabahar Trade Zone
London - Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
The director general of Iran's Chabahar Free Zone, an economic development project in the country's southeast, has been arrested for "major offences", state news agency IRNA reported Sunday. It said the prosecutor in Sistan-Baluchistan province placed Abdorahim Kordi in custody, citing a statement from the intelligence branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Details on the alleged infractions were not provided, AFP said. Kordi had been named to his post in 2016 under the former government of moderate president Hassan Rouhani, who was replaced last year by ultraconservative Ebrahim Raisi. Located about 100 kilometers from Pakistan, the Chabahar free trade zone was established in 1994, allowing ships to avoid the busy Strait of Hormuz. By 2015, about 2,000 companies had a presence there. Half were from Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Gulf, while 30 percent were from China and other Asian countries. The remaining 20 percent were from the West. When the United States reimposed unilateral sanctions on Iran in 2018, Chabahar port was the only Iranian port with exemptions.

Hunger Strikers Demand Prisoners’ Release amid Iran Nuclear Talks
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Two men are staging a hunger strike to demand the release of prisoners being held in Iran, on the sidelines of international negotiations in Vienna to halt Tehran's nuclear ambitions. The two activists have also experienced being jailed, they told dpa in Vienna. As a young diplomat from the US, Barry Rosen was detained during the Iranian hostage crisis from 1979 to 1981, along with dozens of other embassy staff, he said on Saturday. He has been on a hunger strike since Wednesday. Nizar Zakka, who began his hunger strike at the same time, was arrested in 2015 for alleged espionage. The US-Lebanese citizen was jailed for four years.Currently, more than a dozen people from Western countries are being held in Iran, for alleged political offenses or espionage. "I want Iran to release all these hostages immediately," Rosen told dpa. He is calling on the US, Germany, France and Britain to put Tehran under greater pressure to bring about their citizens' release. It is also important to send a signal to the prisoners that they have not been forgotten, Zakka said. "This crisis has our full attention," senior US diplomat Robert Malley said in a tweet after meeting with Rosen in Vienna. However, he called on Rosen to end the hunger strike to protect his health. Rosen has taken up residence at the Palais Coburg hotel where the talks are taking place. Zakka is staying at the Hotel Imperial, where the US delegation is based. Malley and his colleagues have spent months trying to find a way to get Iran and the US signed back on to a 2015 deal - the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action - under which the US and five other countries agreed to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran halting its pursuit of nuclear weapons. But the US never lifted non-nuclear sanctions and then, former US president Donald Trump pulled America out of the deal, prompting Iran to start violating some of its terms. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke of only "modest progress" in the nuclear negotiations during a visit to Berlin on Thursday. Rosen and Zakka say the West should not agree to a nuclear solution unless they also receive guarantees that prisoners will be released. Rosen said he had been tortured and that those being held in Tehran were also suffering in the same way. "The psychological impact of that imprisonment has never left me," Rosen said.

UAE intercepts Houthi ballistic missiles in latest attack
Al-Monitor/January 24/2022
The United Arab Emirates and US military personnel intercepted two ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebels, the country said Monday.
No one was hurt in the attacks but debris from the missiles landed near Abu Dhabi, according to a statement by the Defense Ministry. US military forces at al-Dhafra airbase outside Abu Dhabi fired Patriot missiles to help bring down the projectiles, US Central Command confirmed Monday. “The combined efforts successfully prevented both missiles from impacting the base,” said Central Command spokesman Capt. Bill Urban. Saudi Arabia, which has frequently come under ballistic missile and drone barrages by the Houthis, also was targeted by at least one Houthi missile on Monday. The Saudi-led military coalition involved in Yemen’s civil war said the projectile was shot down. Monday’s barrage is the second attack on the UAE claimed by the Houthis in just a week, marking a new escalation outside Yemen’s borders in the seven-year-old conflict. Last Monday the Houthis claimed credit for a drone and cruise missile attack that blew up fuel tankers and killed three people in Abu Dhabi. It was the first strike claimed by the Houthis to have been confirmed to have successfully hit the UAE. Saudi Arabia was also targeted last Monday, but those projectiles were likewise shot down, the coalition said. The Emirates temporarily banned commercial and private drone flights in the country on Saturday in the aftermath of the attacks. The Saudi-led military coalition, of which the UAE is a major member, launched a blitz of airstrikes targeting sites in Yemen’s capital Sanaa last week in response to the attacks.At least 87 people were killed when the coalition bombed a prison at Saada in Yemen’s north last week, Doctors Without Borders’ director in the country told the Associated Press. The Saudi-led coalition also bombed Hodeidah, with women and children reportedly among the dead.
The Arab League convened on Sunday and urged the UN Security Council to “take a decisive and unified stance against Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE.”Top Emirati officials called on the United States to relabel the Iran-backed Houthis a foreign terrorist organization last week. The UAE’s de facto leader, Abu Dhabi Crown Price Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, requested additional support from the Pentagon last week to help bolster the country’s air defenses. US President Joe Biden indicated last week his administration would consider reinstating the terrorist group designation for the Houthis, which was repealed last year amid objections from aid groups who said the label inhibited humanitarian work.Last week's attacks came after UAE-backed fighters supporting Yemen's government helped recapture the country's Shabwa province from the Houthis in a surprise reversal of recent years' broad territorial gains by the rebels across Yemen's north.

Arab League calls for designation of Yemen's Houthis as 'terrorist' group
The Arab Weekly/January 24/2022
In a statement following an extraordinary meeting, the pan-Arab organisation called the strikes "a flagrant violation of international law ... and a real threat to vital civilian installations, energy supplies and global economic stability." The Arab League on Sunday said Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels should be labelled a "terrorist" group after they attacked the United Arab Emirates killing three civlians. On January 17 the Houthis claimed a drone and missile attack that struck an oil facility and the airport in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi, killing three foreign nationals and wounding six other people. The Houthis, believed by UN experts to be armed by Iran, have carried out previous attacks against oil installations and civilian targets in both Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The pan-Arab bloc, based in the Egyptian capital, said the Houthis should be designated "as a terrorist organisation" after the attack. In a statement following an extraordinary meeting, it called the strikes "a flagrant violation of international law ... and a real threat to vital civilian installations, energy supplies and global economic stability," as well as a threat to regional peace and security. Former US president Donald Trump designated the Houthis as a terrorist movement but the administration of President Joe Biden removed the designation of the group in a move perceived by most experts as having emboldened the Iran-backed militias. Biden's administration has, instead, sanctioned individual Houthi figures. On Friday, the UN Security Council unanimously condemned the Houthi strikes on the UAE. The UAE is a non-permanent member of the Council. The Emirates have had a major role in the Saudi-led coalition defending the internationally-recognised government of Yemen against the Houthis. Although it announced a troop withdrawal from Yemen in 2019, the UAE has remained involved by supporting and training forces there. The UN has estimated Yemen's conflict would have killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease.

45,000 Displaced since IS Attack on Syria Prison
Agence France Presse/January 24/2022
Up to 45,000 people fled their homes in a Syrian city where battles between Kurdish forces and jihadists have raged for days following a prison attack, the UN said Monday. "Up to 45,000 people have been displaced from their homes" in Hasakeh city since the Islamic State group launched an attack on the Ghwayran prison last Thursday, said the U.N. humanitarian agency OCHA.

Syria Defends Rights Record as West, Turkey Accuse it of 'Starvation'
Asharq Al-Awsat/Monday, 24 January, 2022
Western powers and Turkey accused Syria on Monday of imposing "starvation" and siege warfare in opposition-held areas, as Syrian officials said foreign forces were illegally occupying parts of the country suffering from US-led sanctions. Britain and the United States were among countries at the UN Human Rights Council calling on Syria to end unlawful detention and enforced disappearances, and allow humanitarian aid to reach all civilians after nearly 12 years of war. "It comes as no surprise that most recommendations are hostile to my country. They come from countries that sponsor terrorism in my country," said Bashar Jaafari, Syrian deputy foreign minister. Jaafari, addressing the forum's first review of Syria's record since Oct. 2016, said that the government of President Bashar al-Assad was facilitating aid deliveries. "France, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Turkey and Israel are all countries that are involved in the occupation of parts of my country and are violating international law by doing so," he said. "The Americans are experts in destroying the infrastructure in the Euphrates region, they are destroying oil and gas infrastructure," he added. Bathsheba Crocker, US ambassador to the UN in Geneva, urged Syria to grant unhindered access for humanitarian aid, including to besieged areas, and release people "who have been arbitrarily imprisoned and held without trial". Britain's ambassador Simon Manley said: "The Syrian regime's treatment of its people is simply appalling. We strongly condemn its attacks on civilians and infrastructure. The use of starvation and siege warfare in opposition-held areas is deplorable."Jerome Bonnafant, France's envoy, urged Syria to halt "unlawful executions, torture and inhumane practices in places of detention". Turkish diplomat Muzaffer Uyav Gultekin said the Assad administration remained the main perpetrator of gross human rights abuses. She said these included "starvation, disruption of basic services, obstruction of humanitarian assistance" or the use of siege.

EU Set for Show of Unity as Russia Invasion Fears Mount
Associated Press/Monday, 24 January, 2022
European Union foreign ministers are aiming to put on a fresh display of resolve and unity in support of Ukraine on Monday, amid deep uncertainty about whether President Vladimir Putin intends to attack Russia's neighbor or send his troops across the border.
"All members of the European Union are united. We are showing unprecedented unity about the situation in Ukraine, with the strong coordination with the U.S.," EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters in Brussels.
Asked whether the EU would follow a U.S. move and order the families of European embassy personnel in Ukraine to leave, Borrell said: "We are not going to do the same thing." He said he is keen to hear from Secretary of State Antony Blinken about that decision.
During Monday's meeting, which Blinken will attend virtually, the ministers will restate Europe's condemnation of the Russian military build-up near Ukraine, involving an estimated 100,000 troops, tanks, artillery and heavy equipment, diplomats and officials said ahead of the meeting.
They'll renew calls for dialogue, notably through the European-backed "Normandy format," which helped to ease hostilities in 2015, a year after Putin ordered the annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Fighting in eastern Ukraine has killed around 14,000 people and still simmers today.
Should Putin move on Ukraine again, the ministers will warn, Russia would face "massive consequences and severe costs." Those costs would be of a financial and political nature. The EU insists that it stands ready to slap hefty sanctions on Russia within days of any attack.
"We don't know what the Russians are going to do, but what we are talking about is basically the most important security development in Europe since the end of the Cold War," a senior EU official said. "The response of the European Union will be at the level of the challenge."
The official and diplomats briefed reporters on condition of anonymity so that they could speak more freely about the meeting preparations.
Over the weekend, some of the member countries closest to Russia — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — confirmed that they plan to send U.S.-made anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine, a move endorsed by the United States.
But questions have been raised about just how unified the EU is. Diverse political, business and energy interests have long divided the 27-country bloc in its approach to Moscow. Around 40% of the EU's natural gas imports come from Russia, much of it via pipelines across Ukraine.
Gas prices have skyrocketed, and the head of the International Energy Agency has said that Russian energy giant Gazprom was already reducing its exports to the EU in late 2021 despite high prices. Putin says Gazprom is respecting its contract obligations, not putting the squeeze on Europe.
The EU's two major powers appear most cautious. Germany's Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia, which is complete but yet to pump gas, has become a bargaining chip. French President Emmanuel Macron has renewed previously rejected calls for an EU summit with Putin.
Late last year, France and Germany initially expressed doubts about U.S. intelligence assessments that Moscow might be preparing to invade.
Late on Saturday, the head of the German navy, Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schoenbach, resigned after coming under fire for saying that Ukraine would not regain the Crimean Peninsula, and for suggesting that Putin deserves "respect."
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban plans to meet with Putin next week to discuss a Russian-backed project to expand a Hungarian nuclear power plant.
Still, diplomats and officials said hard-hitting sanctions are being drawn up with the EU's executive branch, the European Commission. But they were reluctant to say what the measures might be or what action by Russia might trigger them.
The aim, they said, is to try to match the doubts Putin has sowed about his intentions for Ukraine with uncertainty about what any retaliatory European action might look like, or when it would come. One diplomat refused to discuss the matter at all. Another suggested that a layered response might be in preparation, with different levels of retaliation depending on whether a cyberattack, rocket strike, or all-out invasion was launched.
A third was confident there would be no arguments over the trigger point, saying: "We'll know it when we see it." For now, though, the Europeans must wait and see whether Putin is satisfied with progress in talks with the United States, coordinate with Blinken on a response should things go wrong, and bank on the economic deterrent posed by the EU being Russia's biggest trading partner.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on January 24-25/2022
The Houthis Must Be Relisted as a Terrorist Group
Majid Rafizadeh/Gatestone Institute/January 24/2022
Attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken people of Yemen appear to have been blocked by the Houthis themselves, as well as by the United States, which has withdrawn support for Saudi Arabia, while giving the Houthis a free pass.
The Houthi strategy, it appears, is to use the dire living situation of the civilians under its control as a shield to get what it wants, such as being removed from the terrorist list and continuing its terror activities without facing any consequences.
If the Biden administration surrenders to this strategy, not only will the terror group feel that it has won, it will also be empowered to ratchet up its violence, crimes, and drone and missile attacks.
A surrender to this form of extortion will also set precedent for other terrorist groups or countries to deprive their populations of humanitarian aid, and hold them as hostages while they blackmail the US and the international community into handing them as a ransom whatever they dream up -- in addition to continuing their terrorist activities without any consequences.
The United States can, as it is doing with Iran, re-list the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and allow the export of humanitarian goods to Yemen -- if the Houthis even permit. If they do not, it is all the more reason to hold them accountable even more harshly rather than reward them.
Attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken people of Yemen appear to have been blocked by the Houthis themselves, as well as by the U.S., which has withdrawn support for Saudi Arabia, while giving the Iran-backed Houthi militia group a free pass. The strategy of the Houthis, it appears, is to use the dire living situation of the civilians under its control as a shield to get what it wants. Pictured: Displaced persons fill water containers at a makeshift camp in a village in Hajjah province, Yemen, on May 9, 2019.
This morning, Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, intercepted two ballistic missiles, launched courtesy of the Houthis.
The problem began almost a year ago, courtesy of the Biden administration. After less than a month in office, the Biden administration reversed yet another policy of the former administration. On February 12, 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially revoked the designation of the Houthis, an Iran-backed militia group, also known as Ansar Allah ("Partisans of Allah"), as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. According to the U.S. State Department press release:
"This decision is a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.... on Yemenis' access to basic commodities like food and fuel. The revocations are intended to ensure that relevant U.S. policies do not impede assistance to those already suffering what has been called the world's worst humanitarian crisis."
Just two days after removing the Houthis from the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, the State Department had to call on the Houthis to "immediately cease attacks impacting civilian areas inside Saudi Arabia and to halt any new military offensives inside Yemen." The Houthis, it turned out, had launched four drones into Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis had "intercepted and destroyed."
In February alone, in fact, the Houthi forces, fired more than 40 drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia. Even Western officials had to acknowledge the escalation. As a senior U.S. defense official told NBC News on a condition of anonymity:
"We're certainly aware of a troubling increase in Houthi cross-border attacks from a variety of systems, including cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles)".
France, Germany, Italy and Great Britain also condemned the Houthi offensive and characterized it as a "major escalation of attacks the Houthis have conducted and claimed against Saudi Arabia."
The Houthis, based in Yemen at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, had, in May 2021, launched a drone at the King Khalid military airbase in the southern Saudi city of Khamis Mushait, and had also claimed responsibility for the 2019 attacks on two Aramco plants at the heart of the Saudi Arabia's oil industry — the world's biggest oil processing facility at Abqaiq near Dammam and the country's second-largest oilfield at Khurais.
Last week, on January 17, 2022, the Houthis launched a military attack on the United Arab Emirates; it blew up three oil tanker trucks in Abu Dhabi, and killed three people.
The group, which, according to a Yemeni government intelligence report, "works closely" with Al Qaeda and ISIS, in addition, it seems, commits crimes against humanity. It has reportedly, since 2015, killed and injured more than 17,500 civilians -- and it recruits, injures and kills children. According to Human Rights Watch's World Report 2020:
"Since September 2014, all parties to the conflict have used child soldiers under 18, including some under the age of 15, according to a 2019 UN Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen report in 2019. According to the secretary general, out of 3,034 children recruited throughout the war in Yemen, 1,940—64 percent—were recruited by the Houthis."
The Houthis, by the same token, use landmines. According to Human Rights Watch:
"Houthi-planted landmines across Yemen continue to harm civilians and their livelihoods.... Since January 2018, at least 140 civilians, including 19 children, have been killed by landmines in just the Hodeidah and Taizz governorates."
The Houthi militia group also, it seems, routinely resorts to various methods of torture. According to Human Rights Watch:
"Former detainees described Houthi officers beating them with iron rods and rifles and being hung from walls with their arms shackled behind them.... The association [Mothers of Abductees Association] reported that there are 3,478 disappearance cases, at least 128 of those kidnapped have been killed."
After the Houthi's recent deadly attack on the United Arab Emirates and after the UAE urged the US administration to reinstate the Houthi's terrorist designation, the Biden administration said that it is mulling relisting the Houthis as a foreign terrorist group. The reluctance to do so, it appears, is linked to the argument that such a move will hamper the delivery to Yemen of humanitarian aid, which seems under Houthi control.
This issue, however, can be resolved by following the case of Iran: Although Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is listed as a foreign terrorist organization, and the US State Department currently lists Iran's regime as a "state sponsor of terrorism," delivering humanitarian aid is still permitted, and institutions will not be punished for exporting humanitarian goods to Iran. Similarly, the Biden administration can list the Houthis as a terrorist group and at the same time issue a waiver enabling the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Attempts to deliver humanitarian aid to the poverty-stricken people of Yemen appear to have been blocked by the Houthis themselves, as well as by the United States, which has withdrawn support for Saudi Arabia, while giving the Houthis a free pass.
The Houthi strategy, it appears, is to use the dire living situation of the civilians under its control as a shield to get what it wants, such as being removed from the terrorist list and continuing its terror activities without facing any consequences.
If the Biden administration surrenders to this strategy, not only will the terror group feel it has won, it will also feel empowered to ratchet up its violence, crimes, and drone and missile attacks.
A surrender to this form of extortion will also set precedent for other terrorist groups or countries to deprive their populations of humanitarian aid, and hold them as hostages while they blackmail the US and international community into handing them as a ransom whatever they dream up -- in addition to continuing their terrorist activities without any consequences.
The Biden administration needs immediately to re-designate the Iranian-backed Houthi group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization both for their crimes against humanity and their military aggression against other nations. The United States can, as it is doing with Iran, re-list the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and allow the export of humanitarian goods to Yemen -- if the Houthis even permit. If they do not, it is all the more reason to hold them accountable even more harshly rather than reward them.
*Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
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Ukrainian Cold War Redux
Charles Elias Chartouni/January 24/2022
The Ukrainian crisis that started in 2014 (Crimea and the Donbas) has never stopped and seems to usher a broader crisis which questions the post Cold War geopolitics, staggering borders, and alternative political cultures. Far from being restricted to the Belorussian, Georgian, Crimean, Donestian former Soviet oblasts…, the rising Russian imperialism seems to put at stake the new geopolitical order, threaten European and Western security, question their political culture and strategic consensuses, and elicit legitimate concerns all across the NATO political spectrum. The Russian massive movement of troops towards Ukraine, its overt insinuations and strategic subtexts have been carefully orchestrated on different frontiers: Belorussian-Polish, Baltic States entries matched with revisionist rhetorics jeopardizing the post Cold War equilibriums, through insidious triangulations, blatant destabilization strategies and instrumentalization of energy politics highlighted in the cases of Syria, Iran, Armenia,Lybia, and the European Union…,.
The Ukrainian crisis reflects the historical dilemmas of Russian geopolitical anchoring, civilizational quandaries and democratic travails. Putin is not only apprehensive of the extension of NATO’s strategic canopy which he deliberately recanted as a direct rebuttal to Gorbatchev’s philosophy of the “common European Home” (Strasbourg, Rome, Brussels 1989). This “Soviet” revisionism however reminiscent of older debates in Russia which pitted its European and Asian strategic and civilizational coordinates against each other, is quite hazardous since it runs against the grain of liberalization and westernization of Russian political and cultural values, the Russians aspiration to normalize and integrate the European and international community rules. The resuscitation of the imperial hubris and playbook, the cultivation of fear and distrust towards the West, and the tightening of autocratic controls highlighted by the presidential lifetime mandate (constitutional amendment , January 2020), and the mafia-drift exercise of power, the control of the subordinate and domineering “Soviet” military nomenklatura, and the instrumentalization of the sham democratic institutions, are the variables which account for the energized imperial drive. NATO, OSCE and the US have no choice but to counter the military movements throughout the European limes with Russia, raise the conventional and nuclear thresholds, solidify the demarcation lines, upgrade incrementally the economic sanctions, and endorse the domestic political opposition.
The current Russian power politics revolve mainly around destabilization, perpetuation of frozen conflicts scenarios, catalyzing and creating synergies between rogue States and political wastelands (Iran, Syria, Lybia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua…),arbitration of regional disputes and conflicts and active sabotaging(Israel, Syria, Turkey, Lybia….), promoting social, economic and civil unrest, hamstringing national security, disrupting self confidence and sowing discord in Western societies, and interfacing with Chinese imperial projections. The imperial juggling of a nasty autocrat is too dangerous to be left to its own devices and to the unrestricted usage of his discretionary power, especially that his imperial ambitions do not match his midget and underperforming economy, highly controversial foreign policy forays and oppressive domestic authoritarianism. The Ukrainian conflicts are highly symptomatic of the challenges of the New Cold War and its hazardous fallouts.

A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East
Jonathan Schanzer/The Dispatch/January 24/2022 |
Neo-isolationist trends raise troubling questions about the future of the U.S. commitment to order in the region.
One year into his presidency, Joe Biden endeavors to pivot away from the Middle East. The Middle East simply won’t let him. Like his predecessors, the president continues to struggle with the right approach to this important and perilous region. To date, many of Biden’s approaches have amounted to unforced errors. A number of them are likely to haunt him.
Afghanistan: Though the country is not technically not part of the Middle East, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year continues to impact how states in that region view America’s role in their neighborhood. The botched sequencing of the withdrawal was the primary focus (removing military assets before political assets). But the fact that the U.S. described the Taliban terrorist group as a “partner” in its retreat sent shockwaves around the world. Moreover, the Arab states and Israel cannot help but note that a ragtag, untrained army forced a superpower to flee under duress. Admittedly, the Taliban had help from state sponsors (notably Pakistan and Iran). However, the neo-isolationist trends in American politics that ultimately justified the embarrassing and unceremonious end to this American war effort raises troubling questions about the future of the U.S. commitment to the order it established in the Middle East. It’s also worth remembering that the defeat of the Soviet army at the hands of the mujahedeen in 1989 inspired Osama bin Laden (and his Palestinian partner Abdullah Azzam) to leverage the Islamist fighters (who believed that theirs was a divine victory) to create the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Whether we witness a resurgence in Islamist terrorism as a result of Biden’s Afghanistan disaster remains to be seen.
Iran: In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, the region is nervously watching as the White House signals its intent to completely capitulate to the clerical regime in Tehran at the negotiating table in Vienna. The administration’s determined effort to rejoin the deeply flawed nuclear agreement of 2015 at any cost has yielded too much leverage to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. While the negotiations have not yet concluded, it appears that the regime will walk away having legitimized a number of its alarming advances toward a nuclear weapon, with the Biden administration demanding fewer restrictions and granting tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief as remuneration for a weaker deal. The White House is aware of the terrible optics. The concerns are even more acute in light of the fact that most of Iran’s nuclear expansion occurred after Biden’s election. This was the result of Biden’s decision to reverse “maximum pressure” to what can only be described as “maximum deference.” Rumors are now swirling that the White House has sought out a high-priced public relations firm to handle the fallout. In the meantime, officials are doing their best to blame the Trump administration for whatever terrible deal is reached, citing Trump’s hasty exit from the nuclear accord in 2018. Try as they may, whatever deal is struck will be Biden’s to own. Right now, the chances are high that Iran pockets American concessions and still makes a dash for a bomb.
Saudi Arabia: In the early days of the Biden administration, the White House took a series of steps to deliberately alienate Riyadh. Biden pulled support for the Saudi-led war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, delisted the group as a foreign terrorist organization, and then released information implicating crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi operatives in 2018. These moves were all counterproductive. The Saudis are leading the only military effort to halt the dangerous Houthi advances in Yemen. The group is undeniably a terrorist group, as evidenced by a subsequent sanctions imposed by this administration on individual leaders of the Houthis. And while the Saudis should be lambasted for Khashoggi’s killing, the information released about MBS was not new; it was an obsequious nod to the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party that has labored to vilify Saudi Arabia. All three moves only served to drive a wedge between Riyadh and Washington. The Houthis continue to sow terror throughout the region, with a recent drone attack on the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, by deliberately injecting tensions into its relationship with Riyadh, the White House has squandered an opportunity to broker a valuable normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Given Saudi Arabia’s status as guardian of the two holiest sites in Islam, such an agreement would almost certainly inspire others in the Arab and Muslim worlds to follow suit.
Israel: The Israelis were truly thankful for Biden’s support during the Gaza War in May 2021. Biden blocked efforts to vilify the Israelis at the United Nations, and delivered the right messages at home to support Israel’s operations against Iran-backed Hezbollah. However, two days before the conflict ended, Biden’s rhetoric shifted dramatically. He blamed Israel for not bringing about a swifter end to the conflict, even though he knew an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was imminent. Once again, Biden was trying to score points with the hard left of his party. Since then, with a change in government in Israel, the administration has worked hard to build a solid foundation with new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. However, the lack of American resolve to remain engaged in the region, coupled with the looming Iran nuclear deal, leave many Israeli questions unanswered about the reliability of its most important ally.
Competing with China: Amid all of this, the administration has placed significant pressure on Israel to dial back on its commerce with Beijing. Specifically, the White House wants Israel to halt the sale of technology that could be exploited by the Chinese for military purposes. Israel has taken significant steps to do exactly that. But the administration is not holding the rest of the Middle East to the same standards. The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) all visited China recently for talks designed to take trade and security cooperation to the next level. The Biden White House has not mounted a meaningful response. Nor has it done anything to disrupt the 25-year strategic partnership worth $400 billion between Iran and China, signed in March of last year. If anything, the sanctions relief that the White House seeks to offer Tehran in the Vienna negotiations will only boost the value of this pact.
Global crises loom: China is eyeing an invasion of Taiwan. Russia has amassed troops around Ukraine. North Korean missiles are flying. A lack of American deterrence (the credible threat of a military response), as conveyed by the Biden White House, has likely contributed to these crises. Strong American leadership in response to these crises could help convey a sense of calm in other regions, such as the Middle East. A lack of American leadership will only lead to further destabilization. How the Biden administration tackles these challenges in 2022 could have immense consequences for his presidency, not to mention the political and military trajectory of the broader Middle East.
*Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His new book, Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War (FDD Press) was released in November. Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Islamic State prison break reinforces value of US military protection for Syria's Kurds
Amberin Zaman/Al-Monitor/January 24/2022
‘Cubs of Caliphate’ are among 700 boys held in Islamic State prison, as Syrian Kurdish forces keep up the battle to retake control
Kurdish-led forces in northeast Syria battled for a fifth day to regain full control of the country’s largest prison for Islamic State (IS) detainees, as coalition aircraft bombed jihadi targets in support of the effort to contain the deadliest violence since the territorial defeat of their so-called “caliphate” in 2019.
A spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said the US-backed multiethnic army had gained control of one of the buildings in the overcrowded complex, which holds around 5,000 IS suspects, most of them foreign fighters. Some 300 of them had surrendered, the SDF said. But the group reportedly retained control of the north wing of the prison. It is now confirmed that American and British special forces are taking part in the operation to retake the prison, the Rojava Information Center, an independent research organization documenting economic and security developments in northeast Syria, said citing sources on the ground.
Around 700 boys being held at the facility were being used as human shields by the jihadis, according to SDF forces. The UK-based charity Save the Children said today it had audio testimony suggesting that “there have already been multiple child deaths and casualties.” The charity noted in a statement, “This included one boy pleading for help. The SDF stated that the children were being used as human shields and said yesterday that the responsibility for the children’s lives lays solely with the fighters inside the prison.” The charity added that it could not independently confirm the claims.
Most of the boys, known as the “cubs of the caliphate,” are thought to have been captured following the fall of Baghouz, the jihadis last patch of territory that fell in March 2019.
Letta Tayler, associate director and counterterrorism lead at Human Rights Watch, asserted in a series of tweets that “some of these boys are [IS] suspects while many are [IS] suspects’ family members. These boys have not seen a judge or been charged with a crime. Most never chose to live under [IS].”
Over 170 people, mostly jihadis, have been killed and thousands of civilians displaced by the fighting since hundreds of the group’s suspected members broke out of al-Sina’a prison Jan 20. They fled after two vehicles packed with explosives were detonated by suspected IS militants outside the building. The SDF said it had lost 27 of its own fighters in the clashes.
The violence spread to the nearby Ghweiran and al-Zuhour neighborhoods, as IS fighters stormed civilian houses and killed at least five civilians on the first night of the attack, according to the Rojava Information Center. It said one of the civilians had been beheaded, a signature atrocity during four years of IS rule over large swathes of Syria and neighboring Iraq. The World Health Organization said at least 5,500 families had been uprooted from their homes as a result of the bloody events.
The chaos at the detention facility was waiting to happen, with a near-identical plot to free IS prisoners foiled in November. Al-Hol camp, housing some 10,000 women and children from IS, has also been the scene of lethal attacks against security personnel and fellow prisoners.
The Kurdish-led autonomous administration has complained bitterly over the refusal of foreign governments, notably European ones, to repatriate nationals who joined IS. The US-led coalition has provided millions of dollars in funding over the years to help improve security at the detention facilities and train local forces overseeing them. The jihadis have been regrouping in SDF-controlled areas for some time, mainly in Arab majority Deir ez Zor, where they force locals to share the proceeds of oil produced at makeshift refineries, steal sheep and have been building a network of collaborators to facilitate their illicit activities. They have also been escalating attacks inside Iraq, killing 11 Iraqi soldiers in a Jan. 21 attack. The Rojava Information Center documented 14 attacks claimed by IS in November alone.
The collapse of the Syrian economy and the country’s worst drought in 70 years has created a fertile breeding ground for IS, though they are nowhere close to regaining their former strength. US military officials contend that the threat is “containable.”
"The coalition is confident in its assessment that the recent [IS] escape attempt will not pose a significant threat to Iraq or the region," the Combined Joint Task Force of Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led international coalition combatting IS, said in a Jan. 23 statement.
On Monday, coalition officials confirmed they were offering support both from the air and on the ground. The past days’ tumult might have called such confident assertions into question. However, with all eyes trained on Russian military threats against Ukraine, there is very little chance that the United States will increase present troop levels in the northeast from an estimated 900 special operation forces deployed there, diplomatic sources say. The most immediate result will rather be further funding to harden security at the detention centers.
Aaron Stein, director of research at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and author of “The US War Against ISIS,” told Al-Monitor, “The challenge with the prisons from the get go is that the US wasn’t legally allowed to build specialized facilities [in northeast Syria]. So you had the SDF converting schools with small amounts of aid and quiet assistance from the [US] Task Force with basic security gear and biometrics.” Stein continued, “Then you had overcrowding because of how many IS folks there were left after the war.”
“It’s not a great situation, and efforts to offload foreigners — the majority of which are not European — remain a challenge,” Stein said. The bloody revolt will have reminded some increasingly anti-American voices within the autonomous administration of their vulnerability and the value of protection provided by US forces. The United States says the mission of its forces is to degrade IS and prevent its resurgence. But the US presence is also a bulwark against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Turkey and its Sunni rebel proxies, all of whom are unremittingly hostile to the Kurds.
There is speculation that the administration’s decision to remove protestors encamped near a bridge linking its territory to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq may have been accelerated if not actually prompted by the unrest. The crossing had been sealed since Dec. 15 by the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq in response to the violent clashes that erupted between youths demonstrating in solidarity with the protestors. The SDF had as recently as Jan. 7 refused to act on the KRG’s demands.
As Al-Monitor first reported, KRG Prime Minister Masrour Barzani decided last week to allow aid deliveries over the bridge twice a month following sustained pressure from the United States. The KRG said, however, that it would not allow the resumption of commercial and human traffic until the protestors, who were calling for the return of the bodies of Syrian Kurdish fighters killed in ongoing military operations by Turkey, left. The tents sheltering the protestors were removed by the local authorities over the weekend, and KRG officials confirmed to Al-Monitor that the crossing would gradually reopen to all traffic starting Jan. 24. The standoff was seen as a test for Mazlum Kobane, commander in chief of the SDF. Kobane has been accused by KRG officials of failing to assert his authority over the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been waging an armed insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984. PKK commanders played a key role in assisting the US-led coalition in the battle against IS, and PKK cadres remain influential in the Syrian Kurdish enclave. The youth group that clashed with KRG forces on the border is closely linked to the PKK and involved in its indoctrination and recruitment activities.
Kobane and many key members of the autonomous administration used to be active members of the group. Turkey has touted this as an excuse to launch multiple incursions against the Syrian Kurds, most recently in October 2019. Turkey has recently been spreading rumors of a growing rift between Kobane and pro-PKK hawks within the administration, part of a calculated push to sow the kinds of division it claims already exist. Aliza Marcus, one of the leading Western experts on the PKK and author of “Blood and Belief, The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence,” discounted the notion that the PKK had decided to remove the protestors because of the violence in Hasakah. “The tent protest had gone on for a long time and wasn’t accomplishing anything. Meanwhile, the closure of the border was actually hurting everyone in Rojava, including their support base,” Marcus told Al-Monitor. “The PKK can be very pragmatic, and in this case, they and their activists realized there was no benefit, just a cost, to continuing. They have lost nothing by abandoning the protest,” Marcus added. Sources with close knowledge of the US-mediated negotiations between the KRG and Kobane confirmed that the decision to remove the tents came a week before the prison break because the SDF commander had succeeded — albeit after much to-ing and fro-ing — in convincing the activists that it was in their interest to do so. If anything, the rioting had delayed its implementation.

Biden must act now to better arm Ukraine. Here’s what that should look like.
Bradley Bowman/John Hardie/Jack Sullivan/Defense News/January 24/2022
As Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to add troops on Ukraine’s borders in preparation for a potential large-scale military operation, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing whether to provide additional defensive weapons to Ukraine. This should not be a difficult decision for the White House. The administration should be moving heaven and earth to urgently provide Ukraine — a beleaguered democracy pleading for American help — with the weapons and other support it needs to deter a Russian offensive by increasing the costs of aggression for the Kremlin.
Hoping to prevent a Russian offensive, U.S. President Joe Biden has tried offering Moscow a diplomatic offramp while warning that a renewed Russian invasion would trigger harsh Western sanctions, a strengthened force posture on NATO’s eastern flank and a dramatic increase in U.S. defense assistance to Ukraine. That assistance could include support for a potential Ukrainian insurgency against Russian occupation forces.
Unfortunately, these warnings alone may well fail to deter Putin. Moscow has gone to considerable lengths to reduce the Russian economy’s vulnerability to sanctions. Putin likely expects that Western countries will forgo their toughest sanctions options if push comes to shove, fearing blowback on their own economies, and Moscow will surely seek to play on divisions within the trans-Atlantic alliance to weaken the Western response. Putin may also bet that Biden’s expressed desire to focus on other issues, such as China and the climate, will eventually impel the administration to seek an accommodation with Russia.
Moscow may further calculate that it can accomplish its political aims without a prolonged and costly occupation, instead using standoff strikes and a limited ground operation to force Kyiv to accept Russian suzerainty, and that similar military options would be more costly in the future.
In short, Putin may conclude that the long-term strategic benefits outweigh the costs and risks and that the time is ripe for action.
Some may ask why Americans should care. To be clear, a large-scale Russian offensive would spell disaster not only for Ukraine and Europe but for U.S. interests and credibility as well. It could be the largest military action in Europe since World War II, potentially killing thousands of Ukrainians, destabilizing Europe by sending millions more flooding westward, and harming the global economy as energy prices surge and markets react to a war in Europe.
An unstable Europe forced to contend with an aggressive and revisionist Russia will be less capable of joining the United States in addressing other major international challenges, such as the increasingly aggressive behavior of China.
More broadly, supporting Ukraine is about defending the post-war rules-based order in Europe that has been so beneficial to Americans and our European allies.
Putin has paired his troop buildup with demands that Washington and its allies accede to a Russian sphere of influence over neighboring countries, including by forswearing potential Ukrainian membership in NATO. Moscow’s efforts represent a direct challenge to the core principles underlying the existing security order in Europe, which Putin seeks to replace with a might-makes-right model whereby Russia is free to bully its smaller neighbors. Such a system would render Europe — home to top U.S. allies and trading partners — less secure, less prosperous and less free.
Moreover, advocates for an increased U.S. focus on China and the Indo-Pacific region should be extremely concerned that a weak U.S. response in Ukraine could undermine efforts to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan or elsewhere. The time and resources the U.S. would be forced to spend on security challenges in Europe is an important reminder that it is cheaper to deter aggression than deal with its aftermath.
So what’s to be done?
The first step is to recognize that time may be running out. The situation around Ukraine is growing increasingly dire. Russian forces continue to flow toward Ukraine, including into neighboring Belarus, adding to the roughly 125,000 troops already perched on Ukraine’s borders and in illegally occupied Crimea and Donbas. Meanwhile, Moscow has begun withdrawing diplomatic personnel and their families from Ukraine, and U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence warn that Russia is laying the groundwork for potential false-flag attacks that Moscow could use as a pretext to attack Ukraine. The White House warns that Russian forces are now prepared to attack “at any point,” and that the offensive could begin between mid-January and mid-February.
Second, the Biden administration should do now what it should have done in November when indications of an invasion emerged: Move with a sense of urgency to provide Kyiv with additional defensive weapons and other support. The goal should be to help Ukrainian forces survive Russia’s initial air and missile assault, and to make clear to Putin that Russian forces would suffer major losses during an invasion and potential follow-on occupation.
Following pressure from Congress, the Biden administration reportedly has authorized America’s Baltic allies to rush U.S.-made weapons such as Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense systems to Ukraine. The administration itself will begin shipping $200 million worth of Javelins, ammunition, medical supplies and other materiel to Ukraine in the coming days and weeks.
Unfortunately, the administration has dragged its feet, losing valuable time. The $200 million aid package lingered on the president’s desk for weeks over the administration’s fears of “provoking” Russia.
Much like with the Obama administration in 2014, Biden’s hesitation stems from a desire to avoid provoking Putin, based on a misdiagnosis of how the Kremlin leader views concessions. Biden should fully reject that flawed approach and take urgent steps to better arm Ukraine now — before the invasion occurs. Admittedly, some of these efforts will take time, but there are opportunities to expedite delivery.
To help Ukrainian forces defend against low-flying Russian aircraft, Washington should look to provide Kyiv with additional man-portable air defense systems — U.S.-made Stingers or perhaps Grom systems from Poland — as well as counter-UAV capabilities.
Assistance should also include armed drones, long-range counter-artillery radars, electronic warfare capabilities, anti-ship capabilities, and anti-tank and naval mines, for example. The U.S. Harpoon and U.K. Brimstone systems are potential candidates.
If the United States is unable or unwilling to provide these capabilities, Washington should unambiguously signal support for allies to do so and should facilitate their efforts. In addition, Washington and its allies should help ensure Ukraine’s armed forces have sufficient ammunition, including by providing access to U.S. and NATO stockpiles in Europe as needed. And all equipment originally destined for Afghan forces should be immediately diverted to the Ukrainian military.
Putin should see American and other NATO cargo aircraft landing every few hours, offloading defensive weapons that will make any new invasion of Ukraine increasingly costly. These flights should stop only when Russian troops temporarily deployed near Ukraine’s borders return to their permanent garrisons.
Beyond weapons, Washington should also provide Ukraine with actionable battlefield intelligence, something the United States did not do following Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine. In addition to enabling Ukrainian forces respond more quickly to a Russian offensive, such intelligence could also help Ukrainians disperse ahead of incoming air or missile strikes, as Dara Massicot of the think tank Rand has noted.
She also rightly argues that Washington should consult with Kyiv “on dispersal plans for Ukrainian air defenses” and on “hardening plans for other critical facilities,” which “will almost certainly be primary and early targets for Russian strikes.”
An authoritarian bully is threatening a beleaguered democracy. Fundamental democratic principles and national security interests are on the line. In a joint op-ed in 2014, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Obama administration to provide “weapons to help Ukraine’s troops defend their nation.” That was the right bipartisan policy then, and it is the right bipartisan policy now.
Momentum is building again in Congress to help Kyiv better defend itself in light of Putin’s impending potential invasion of Ukraine. Let’s hope President Biden listens and acts — fast.
*Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where John Hardie is a research analyst and Jack Sullivan is a research associate. Follow Bradley on Twitter @Brad_L_Bowman. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

The Houthis and Booby-Trapped Role
Ghassan Charbel/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/January 24/2022
It was natural for the Arab League to condemn the recent Houthi attacks on the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Making public violations and missile attacks against other countries’ airspace a common practice is a consolidation of an extremely dangerous terrorist behavior that threatens regional stability.
If the militias succeeded in destroying the maps, taking advantage of cracks in some countries, missiles and drones are used in the airspace in an attempt to achieve the same goals.
Respecting international borders is a condition for stability. Europe only got out of the cycle of violence and blood when it took a strict decision to respect international borders, refer any disagreement to the courts, and refrain from using force to settle disputes. One of the conditions for stability is accessing countries through their legitimate entrances and with the knowledge of their authorities, and refraining from pumping weapons and money into resentful groups looking for an opportunity to shatter their societies or overturn established balances.
Nothing gives any country the right to violate international borders and to seep into the internal equation of any country under ethnic, sectarian, or ideological pretexts.
There is no public disagreement over the principles that are supposed to govern stability in the world. The problem begins with the absence of institutions that can ensure respect for principles and deter those who try to break them.
The problem turns into a tragedy when a prominent regional state or a major country deliberately unleashes destabilizing winds, citing the existence of grievances, fears, or legitimate rights.
The world has witnessed experiences that revealed the inability of international and regional institutions to confront powers that resort to force in open contempt for international law and covenants.
Would the current Ukrainian crisis have reached this scale if the United Nations took action years ago to control Russian greed or the Ukrainian “provocations” that Moscow is talking about? Would the Houthi attacks have reached this extent if the Arab League had acted effectively years ago when it was obvious that the Houthis were employed in a coup program led by Iran in the region?
The recent Houthi attacks reminded me of the words of late President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa at the end of the first decade of this century. Saleh was an accomplished player, whose long stay in power gave him experience in not rushing to open trouble. That was in March 2010, as he was preparing to go to Libya to participate in the periodic Arab summit scheduled there.
He did not decide to boycott the summit despite his accusation of Muammar Gaddafi of supporting the Houthis, and his assertion that the Yemeni security services had seized part of the financial aid sent by the Libyan leader for this purpose. Saleh was confident that Gaddafi’s stance was part of his revenge practices since he was hit by the “Saudi complex.”
Ali Abdullah Saleh used to raise an issue without going into its details to avoid expanding the circle of hostilities. For example, he told the newspaper that the Yemeni authorities noticed that Houthis’ tactics were “close to those of Hezbollah” and that Houthis received training from members of the party, “but perhaps without the knowledge of the party leadership.” Saleh avoided escalating the situation with Iran, despite his knowledge of what General Qassem Soleimani was doing in the Yemeni part of his mission.
During that meeting, I asked the late president where the Houthis were getting weapons and training from, and he replied: “First, we should know that the Yemeni market was full of weapons as a result of the remnants of previous wars, whether in the 1970s with the Imamites and they were stored by some arms dealers, or the remnants of the summer of 1994, and there was a store of weapons that the tribes took over during the war of separation. The Houthis had money, which they collected from local or regional donations, and from supporting figures... You can say that their support came from the advocates of the new project, the so-called new school of thought - the Twelvers in Yemen, instead of the Zaidi or Shafii School. They received donations from parties or associations in regional countries and bought weapons… Arms were also smuggled to the Houthis by sea from arms dealers and regional powers as well, who were helping them promote their own agenda.”
I asked Saleh whether the Houthi problem was part of a Sunni-Shiite conflict, and he replied: “No, it is not a Shiite-Sunni conflict, but rather it can be said that it is the promotion of a new doctrine in the region, to trouble Yemen, the region or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in particular, and to deliver messages from small or large regional countries that had a role in this regard.”
Off-air, Ali Saleh was wondering what Lebanon would gain from getting involved in these issues. The Yemeni president had a report saying that the Houthis were infiltrating Lebanon from Syria without having their passports stamped, to receive training in the Lebanese Bekaa. He was also questioning Syria’s interest in allowing such practices across its territory.
The arsenal of the Houthis today is different from what it was at the end of the first decade of this century. Despite the passing of years, Ali Saleh’s words help in understanding the beginnings of the problem; of course, without forgetting that the late president himself did not refrain from adopting the extravagant method of political maneuvering, which has exorbitant costs.
The Houthi arsenal has certainly enriched over the years, multiplying the sufferings of Yemen, causing horrific losses and pushing the country into a clash with its natural surroundings.
The Houthi arsenal, as well as the Houthi role, are greater than Yemen’s ability to bear. Yemen needs development, job opportunities, schools and vaccinations… It does not need to launch its air militia against other people’s maps. The Houthi role was initially booby-trapped and quickly exploded in Yemen, with the aim to extend the fire to the maps of others.

Iran Has Broken All Prohibitions!
Tariq Al-Homayed/Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper/January 24/2022
We are facing a tidal wave of American and European statements about Iran and the nuclear negotiations in Vienna, as well as the Houthis, to which we can add Washington’s statements about the Russian-Ukrainian crisis. Despite all of these statements, we have not seen actions or repercussions worth mentioning, and no one expects anything from these statements. More importantly for our region, every prohibition has been disregarded, and every red line has been crossed- not just today, this has been the state of affairs in the region since 2011. Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people, and nothing happened. Iranian militias are roaming the region, going from Lebanon to Syria and Yemen, and wreaking havoc in Iraq. Militias are destroying the social fabric of their countries and undermining the state as a concept. The West, led by the United States, has done nothing. One may say that Washington should not be expected to wage wars in the region and that the administration’s priority is serving the American people. That is absolutely true, and the US is not being asked to fight our battles for us. The demand is very simple. Neither the US nor the Europeans should grant the Iranians things that they do not deserve or do not possess. The French, for example, should understand that Hezbollah does not own Lebanon and that the country is occupied by the Iranian militia. The Americans should understand that Iran does not own Iraq or the Shiites- be they Lebanese, Iraqi, or from other countries; they are against Iranian intervention. Syria does not belong to Iran or any of its neighbors, and historical political mistakes are not the same as geographic realities. And so, we ask Washington and the West not to take the region’s security lightly. Indeed, our countries’ security and stability should be taken very seriously, and doing so implies treating all forms of terrorism, be it Sunni or Shiite, the same way. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are no less dangerous than Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Iranian militias deployed in Syria, or the Houthis. Each of them, both their members and leaders, is a different side of the same coin.
We ask that Iran not be negotiated with leniently and that the negotiations not be limited to questions of nuclear enrichment. Instead, these negotiations should prevent Iran from financing and arming terrorism and militias in the region. Additionally, serious coordination is needed to push back against Iran’s arms in the region, as without a carrot and stick, you cannot have serious negotiations.
The United States cannot ignore the Iranian regime, which is sowing chaos across the region and funding terrorism, as it focuses on China or confronting Russia. We cannot say that the region and its states have not changed or that Washington is not concerned with protecting “traditional” allies; none of that is true. Moreover, we have a genuine axis of Arab moderation, and it is seeking to enhance lives, not spread wars and destruction like the Iranian model. One example demonstrating that the problem lies in Washington is the US disregard for its ally, Israel, and its stance on Iranian aggression in the region. The latter has explicitly said that it is not bound by the outcome of negotiations in Vienna and considers itself the guarantor against Iran ever possessing nuclear weapons. Thus, the US statements are nothing but an attempt to revolve crises, including President Biden’s statements about potentially putting the Houthis back on the terror list. In truth, removing them was a mistake, and delaying their re-designation as a terrorist group is also a mistake. Being lenient with Iran is a graver mistake.
Briefly: All states should act like states, especially those of the size and strength of the United States!

Will US Democracy Survive? Here’s How to Figure That Out.
Noah Feldman/Bloomberg/January 24/2022
Are we living in 1858 or 1968?
That is, are America’s divisions so profound and political institutions so crippled that we are poised for a breakdown akin to the Civil War? Or is the current polarization the product of conflicting social forces that can be gradually reconciled or redirected into more healthy electoral competition?
In this more hopeful scenario, even if we undergo 1970s-style economic malaise and the odd trauma like Watergate, we re-emerge and enter a phase of comparative national health and even greatness.
There have been signs of normal, if imperfect, political life in the 11 months since Joe Biden and the scant Democratic majority in Congress took office. But polarization only seems to be getting wider. In Congress, even what should be routine matters — like lifting the debt ceiling — continue to blow up into potential crises for no reason. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court appears willing to undermine its legitimacy by reversing Roe v. Wade. Such a ruling would not only unleash an intense and protracted national struggle over abortion rights, but also lead to a deeper questioning of whether the court itself is fulfilling its function as a protector of fundamental rights.Not very far in the background, Republicans at the state and local level are setting out to elect officials who might well acquiesce in Donald Trump’s claims that an election he lost was stolen from him. If those officials were prepared to invalidate the results of legitimate democratic elections — and the candidates seem to be undergoing selection with that goal in mind — then the national political crisis could become existential.
If Trump were to run and lose the 2024 election, yet be declared the winner by Republican-controlled state legislatures, we could find ourselves in a constitutional crisis that a delegitimated Supreme Court could not resolve. If he were to win the electoral vote in 2024 lawfully while losing the popular vote, as he did in 2016, progressives and liberals might take to the streets in protest of the undemocratic Electoral College — and the protests, if met with violent police reaction, might become violent themselves.
In general, I am an optimist about the resilience of our political institutions. In the spring of 2017, addressing what I (mistakenly) thought would be the biggest public audience of my life, I ended a TED talk about the partisanship of the 1790s by reassuring everybody that, notwithstanding Trump’s election, “It’s going to be OK.”Two and a half years later, in December of 2019, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Trump’s impeachment, telling a lot bigger audience that the US president had committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Even then, though, after the Senate declined to convict Trump, I remained optimistic that he would be voted out of office, and that he would have no choice but to go. Those things happened. They were close calls, but they did take place.
In assessing the performance of our institutions after the stress test that was the Trump presidency, my view remains that our constitutional democracy made it because of the strength of our formal institutions. Informal norms got broken a lot under Trump, and it is going to take more than just one presidential administration to rebuild them.
But the Democratic Congress did what it could to check Trump, including impeaching him twice. And the courts held out against most of his excesses.
The Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from going on the census. It stopped Trump from rescinding protection for the undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children. It didn’t overturn the Affordable Care Act.
Above all, the justices tartly declined Trump’s repeated invitation to overturn the results of the election and make him president for another term. These, too, are proof of resilience in a system that appeared to be teetering.
Based on these and other optimistic interpretations of observed fact, it isn’t unreasonable to conclude that our current situation is much more like 1968 than like 1858.
In the run-up to the Civil War, Congress failed to solve the looming crisis with a durable national compromise like those it had brought about in 1820, 1833 and 1850. 1 Congressional dysfunction had gone so far as to allow actual physical violence on the floor of the Senate, where Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was caned in 1856 and suffered permanent serious injury.
The feckless James Buchanan had failed as president to stand up to the secessionist wave. Relying on a legal opinion by his attorney general, Jeremiah Black, Buchanan ended up stating publicly that while secession was an act of revolution, the federal government lacked all authority to coerce the seceding states back into the union. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had squandered much of its legitimacy by deciding the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case, a failed attempt to solve the continuing struggle over slavery in the federal territories by stopping Congress from legislating on the subject.
With the federal government impotent, the door was open for Southern states to secede. Federal officials in those states resigned en masse. State officials convened secession conventions and declared their militias to be under their own or Confederate control. The militias obeyed the orders of the state governments.
It was a different story in 1968. Extreme political acrimony coupled with deep social divisions also led to violence. The rioting in more than 100 cities that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. dwarfed the Black Lives Matter protests and counter-protests of the past year and a half.
The most important reason the unrest in the 1960s did not destroy the country is that the conflicts over the Vietnam War and the civil-rights and women’s movements were generational. They could be resolved by institutions that effected both partial change and partial co-optation. That allowed the conflicts to be tamed and transformed into more ordinary forms of electoral division.
The US could and did leave Vietnam (change). The Jimmy Carter administration did not embrace pacifism but it did adopt a foreign policy more oriented toward human rights (co-optation). When Ronald Reagan was elected and took a more hawkish Cold War approach, that shift was domesticated into an ordinary, safe disagreement with Cold War doves. In the wake of the King assassination, the federal government continued its policy of ending de jure segregation that was first adopted in response to the civil-rights movement itself (change). The Democratic Party institutionalized support for affirmative action (co-optation). By the time Reagan Republicans began to eliminate those programs, both judicially and legislatively, the struggle had turned into a normal electoral conflict between Democrats and Republicans. That conflict could play out via elections, not through violence.
As for the social conflict created by the sexual revolution, the Supreme Court legalized abortion and established a constitutional right to sex equality in the 1970s (change). The Carter administration began to appoint women to important federal government positions, including the courts – and the Reagan administration largely followed suit (co-optation).
Although the abortion question never went away, and became a driver in the alliance that Republicans forged between Catholics and evangelicals, the struggle over sexual-equality issues became an ordinary political debate, with occasional judicial interference, as in the 1996 case of whether to allow all-male institutions like the Virginia Military Institute to persist.
By the time the gay-rights movement had its turn in the courts in the first decade of the 2000s, all parties understood the script well, and the transformation of sexual and cultural mores took place with little in the way of ungovernable social conflict outside of elections and courts.
Are today’s deep social conflicts similarly resolvable through a process resembling change, co-optation and normalization?
Today’s conflicts are less generational than those of 1968. Though young people today are more progressive on the whole than older folks, they are not united by a threat like the draft or by adherence to some sexual norms that are markedly different from what their parents accept. Nor are they demanding specifically identifiable revolutionary change, at least not the kind that can be realistically delivered by the government. To the contrary, #MeToo and BLM are objecting to the failures of co-optation that grew out of 1970s feminism and the civil-rights movement. They are pointing out that feminism didn’t stop sexual harassment and assault, and civil-rights law hasn’t stopped the police from killing Black men at traffic stops. All this makes it harder for institutions to change in response to activism or co-opt the activists. But it also means the challenges themselves may fade as a result of not having concrete objectives around which to unite. As for Trump’s warriors, they are united less by a specific agenda for change than by a condemnation of existing institutions. The most extreme expression of this view is the belief held by most Republicans — if you can believe what they tell pollsters — that the 2020 election was stolen and that the 2024 election likely will be, too.
Here is where the danger of antidemocratic activism becomes most manifest. In 1858, Southerners considering secession believed that the constitutional system as it then existed was no longer adequate to defend their interests. Concerned that, over time, they would be encircled and marginalized, they preferred to go it alone. To preserve slavery, their solution was to break the existing constitutional order. If Trump runs and can’t manage to win in 2024, either because he doesn’t have the votes or because his supporters believe Democrats “stole” the election again, then his followers could have an incentive to subvert the institutions of the government or even attack them violently, as a fringe group did on Jan. 6, 2021. The possibility of such a turn to violence or other subversion is why it isn’t absurd for retired US generals to call for civic education in the armed forces. It’s why Democrats are right to warn that there is a risk of newly elected Republican local officials following Trump in claiming the results of the 2024 election are faked if and when he loses.
The point of these warnings, though, is to shore up the institutions that are designed to sustain elections and democracy, to build on their existing resilience and to resist failure. That effort can succeed, and in my optimistic view almost certainly will.
Local election officials, Republican and Democrat, were in fact scrupulously honest in 2020. People turned out and voted amid a pandemic, despite impediments put in their way. Trump, some of his staffers, a lot of congressional Republicans and Fox News collectively tried to break democracy. They fell short.
From an institutional standpoint, it will also help that, in 2024, a Democrat will be in control of the US army and the Justice Department. That means the federal government won’t be in court demanding that legitimate election results be overturned. The Justice Department won’t falsely condemn state electoral counts. And the commander in chief won’t order the army to block his successor from taking office. The institutional dangers of 2020 will be mitigated to that important extent.
And however far the activist conservative Supreme Court goes in the next two and a half years, it is unlikely to acquiesce in an attempt to steal an election. An identically composed court did not do so in 2020. There is a difference between overturning Roe and overturning democracy. The former has been a conservative desideratum for almost 50 years. The latter is anathema to judges of all stripes. Their own power depends on the idea that civilian institutions will obey them when they declare what the law requires.
The conservative justices have already gotten everything they need from Donald Trump. To them, he is an embarrassment — particularly to his three appointees, who are old-style conservatives, not populists, and none of whom has personally expressed Trumpian beliefs or values. Two of them, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, worked in George W. Bush’s administration. In short, it doesn’t look as if our political institutions are headed for an 1858 kind of breakdown. The tougher medium-term question is whether the Trump supporters’ condemnation of our institutions, which isn’t susceptible to either change or cooptation, is deep and durable enough to erode them. It won’t be long before we find out.

Leftist Indifference to Christian Genocide
Raymond Ibrahim/Gatestone Institute/January 24/2022 
A recent and ostensibly insignificant “label change” by the U.S. Department of State sheds light on both President Joe Biden and former president Barack Obama, as well as on a potential presidential candidate for 2024, Hillary Clinton.
On November 17, 2021, the State Department removed Nigeria from its list of Countries of Particular Concern, that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom. It did this despite several human rights organizations characterizing the persecution meted out to Nigeria’s Christians as a “genocide.”
According to an August 2021 report, since the Islamic insurgency began in earnest in July 2009 — first at the hands of Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist organization, and later by the Fulani, Muslim herdsmen also motivated by jihadist ideology — more than 60,000 Christians have either been murdered or abducted during raids. The kidnapped Christians have never returned to their homes, and their loved ones believe them to be dead. During the same time, approximately 20,000 churches and Christian schools have been torched and destroyed. Nigeria was also the nation with the most Christians murdered (3,530) for their faith in 2020. According to another tally, at least 17 Christians were murdered every day in the first half of 2021 alone. As for those Christians who survive the jihadist raids, millions of them are currently internally displaced people.
Irrespective of these abysmal statistics, the U.S. State Department does not believe that Nigeria should be categorized as a Country of Particular Concern; and that nations such as Russia, which was included on the list, is a worse violator of religious freedom than Nigeria. In removing Nigeria from the list, the Biden administration has demonstrated a sheepish continuity with a previous administration. Despite jihadists having slaughtered and terrorized Nigeria’s Christians all during President Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure (2009-2017), and despite the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom having repeatedly urged that Nigeria be designated as a Country of Particular Concern, the Obama administration obstinately refused to acquiesce. It was only in 2020, under the Trump administration, that Nigeria was placed on that list — only to be removed again just recently.
To his credit, President Donald Trump had also forthrightly asked the current Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari (whom many Nigerian officials insist Obama helped bring to power), “Why are you killing Christians?”
Needless to say, many observers have slammed the State Department for its recent decision again to let Nigeria literally get away with mass murder.
As Sean Nelson, Legal Counsel for Global Religious Freedom for ADF International, noted:
Outcry over the State Department’s removal of Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria’s religious freedom violations is entirely warranted. No explanations have been given that could justify this decision. If anything, the situation in Nigeria has grown worse over the last year. Thousands of Christians, as well as Muslims who oppose the goals of terrorist and militia groups, are targeted, killed, and kidnapped, and the government is simply unwilling to stop these atrocities. Blasphemy cases are regularly brought against religious minorities, including humanists, in the North. Removing Country of Particular Concern status for Nigeria will only embolden the increasingly authoritarian government there. We call on the U.S. government to rectify this inexplicable decision, and instead continue America’s long tradition of standing up for those who are persecuted worldwide.
Similarly, the Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nadine Maenza, said:
USCIRF is especially displeased with the removal of Nigeria from its CPC designation, where it was rightfully placed last year…. We urge the State Department to reconsider its designations based on facts presented in its own reporting.
John Eibner, president of Christian Solidarity International, frankly said:
The State Department’s decision to de-list a country where thousands of Christians are killed every year reveals Washington’s true priorities…. Removing this largely symbolic sign of concern is a brazen denial of reality and indicates that the U.S. intends to pursue its interests in western Africa through an alliance with Nigeria’s security elite, at the expense of Christians and other victims of widespread sectarian violence…. If the U.S. CPC list means anything at all—an open question at this point—Nigeria belongs on it.
Worse, not only did the Obama State Department for eight years refuse to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern; during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State (2009-2013), she, too, refused to designate Boko Haram in Nigeria as a “terrorist” organization — despite Boko Haram (which roughly translates to “Westernization is forbidden”) being a jihadist group whose adherents have slaughtered more Christians and bombed more churches than the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria combined. Clinton’s refusal persisted despite the urging of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and more than a dozen senators and congressmen for her to designate Boko Haram. Instead, Clinton took the position that “inequality” and “poverty” are “what’s fueling all this stuff” — a reference to ideologically charged Muslims of Boko Haram terrorizing and murdering Christian “infidels” — to use the words of her husband, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, from 2012.
Her callousness — as with her response to the murders of Americans at Benghazi, Libya: “What difference at this point does it make?” — was particularly visible in 2014, when Boko Haram, a group she had long shielded, abducted nearly 300 schoolgirls from Chibok, Nigeria. It was an incident that made headlines and therefore required a response.
Publicly, Clinton bemoaned the lot of the kidnapped girls: “The seizure of these young women by this radical extremist group, Boko Haram, is abominable, it’s criminal, it’s an act of terrorism and it really merits the fullest response possible.” Meanwhile, as a 2014 report pointed out,
The State Department under Hillary Clinton fought hard against placing the al Qaeda-linked militant group Boko Haram on its official list of foreign terrorist organizations for two years. And now, lawmakers and former U.S. officials are saying that the decision may have hampered the American government’s ability to confront the Nigerian group that shocked the world by abducting hundreds of innocent girls.
Indeed, two years earlier, in 2012, when Clinton was actively shielding Boko Haram from the terrorist label, a spokesman for the group announced that they were planning on doing something just like they did at Chibok — to “strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women” — though that too had fallen on Clinton’s deaf ears. Notably, although news media initially presented the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls as Muslim, it later came out that they were Christian, at which point the media quickly lost interest.
Being placed on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations is important: it helps to ostracize and stigmatize malign groups and makes it illegal for any U.S. entities to do business with them. Most importantly, it allows U.S. intelligence and law enforcement to use certain tools and take certain measures that otherwise might not be legal, such as those offered by the Patriot Act: more surveillance, more efficient interagency communication, and so on.
Discussing Clinton’s failure to apply the terrorist designation onto Boko Haram — while simultaneously condemning them for engaging in “an act of terrorism” in regards to Chibok, 2014 — a former senior U.S. official said soon after:
The one thing she could have done, the one tool she had at her disposal, she didn’t use. And nobody can say she wasn’t urged to do it. It’s gross hypocrisy… The FBI, the CIA, and the Justice Department really wanted Boko Haram designated, they wanted the authorities that would provide to go after them, and they voiced that repeatedly to elected officials.
Apparently such is the official, unwavering, and consistent response, whether under Obama/Clinton or now under Biden: Nigeria is not a “country of particular concern” — even as a genocide continues to unfold against its Christians.