4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

4 June 1940: When the Commonwealth of Nations Saved Civilization

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (ret)

On 4 June 1940, Winston S. Churchill, the United Kingdom’s new prime minister, gave a speech to House of Commons. It was unarguably the most important moment of the 20^thcentury.

The question was not just of war or peace but also deciding the course for all humanity. In the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the Commonwealth of Nations had stood, faced and battled the greatest alignment of evil in all history when the forces for good were at their absolute nadir.

Churchill was to announce whether evil indeed had triumphed or the fading forces of good would carry on come what may.

A Tragic Background

The terror had begun earlier. In March 1939, the German Nationalist Socialist war machine dismantled Czechoslovakia. In reaction, France and the United Kingdom enacted economic embargoes against Nazi Germany. Storm clouds of another Great War began to form on the horizon.

As the days of 1939 slipped away battle lines were drawn amongst the world’s seven great powers. A quick survey did little to encourage the embattled Free World leaders in London and Paris. In East Asia, Japan was occupied with its predatory war against China and the United States a neutral sleeping giant. As for the rest, the three great radical socialist states – nationalist socialist Germany, communist socialist Russian and Fascist socialist Italy – unexpectedly congealed into a tenuous mutual assistance bloc. How that happened is an often-ignored chapter of World War II.

On top of the economic pain inflicted on Germany, Hitler realized that in the event of war the Royal Navy would blockade their ports. That could cripple his war machine but there was a solution at hand: Soviet Russia could supply everything the Werhmacht needed. Conversely, if the leaders in London and Paris could win over Moscow then another world war might be averted.

In the months that followed the destruction of Czechoslovakia, gaining the support of Josef Stalin’s Union of Soviet Socialist Republics became THEpolitical drama waged between the liberal free-market democracies and Nazi Germany. Hitler emerged as winner when he formed an alliance with Stalin formalized in the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or German-Soviet Nonaggression) Pact of 23 August. 

That ensured Nazi Germany would not have to fight a two-front war – what Hitler believed to be a prime reason why Germany lost the First World War. But Germany gained even more. A second important piece of the German-Soviet alliance dealt with economic support. Due to the embargoes, the German war machine was in desperate need of oil, manganese, rubber, and other resources. 

By July 1939, German-Soviet trade negotiations had progressed and an agreement was signed on 19 August, just days before the Non-Aggression Pact. Later, on 11 February 1940, an expanded German-Soviet Commercial Treaty was penned that provided even more critical raw materials to the Werhmacht. The amounts provided by Moscow exceeded of 2,000,000 tons of supplies to include 900,000 tons of oil. It was no exaggeration to say that the Nazi German blitzkriegs of 1940-1941 ran on Soviet fuel.

Hitler had been able to join forces with Stalin because Nazi Germany was willing to give the Soviets what the Western Allies would not: A free hand to invade and seize neighboring nations in eastern Europe – all outlined in secret protocols within the August pact. Central to agreement was the joint invasion of Poland. 

On 1 September, Nationalist Socialist Germany simultaneously attacked Poland from eastern Germany and East Prussia. On 17 September, The Red Army invaded Poland. Hitler and Stalin, two radical socialist leaders, plunged the planet into the Second World War. 

The timing could be seen as an act of Providence for the Western Allies for if the Soviets also had invaded Poland on or about 1 September, they would have been compelled to go to war with both dictatorships. Instead, France and Britain declared war on Nazi Germany alone on 3 September. 

When the Soviets struck Poland on 17 September, both Paris and London realized the battle for Poland was lost and they could not wage a war against the combined power of Nationalist Socialist Germany and communist socialist Russia. As a matter of survival, they found political expedients to restrict the war to Germany. It was a painful – even shameful – but absolutely necessary compromise. Europe continued to fall into darkness.

Dire June 1940

The subsequent events that led to Churchill’s speech read as an almost overpowering litany of depressing setbacks. Disaster and defeat seemed to be waiting at every turn and in culmination beat down the spirit of even the most ardent resister.

Stalin’s war making did not stop with Poland. The Red Army invaded Finland in November 1939 and in March 1940 the Soviets forced a peace on the Finns that strongly favored Moscow. To add to the lands gained in Poland and Finland, on 3 June 1940, Stalin secretly issued alert orders for the Red Army to prepare for an imminent invasion of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. While the West was appalled and watched helplessly, it was not a shock to the senior leaders of the two radical socialists regimes as Hitler and Stalin had agreed to everything in August 1939.

Hitler too carried on with his bloody campaigns of conquest. In a matter of two months, Nationalist Socialist Germany invaded and conquered Denmark (9 April), Luxembourg (10 May), the Netherlands (10-14 May), and Belgium (10-28 May). Norway, which also had been invaded on 9 April, still fought the Germans but its cause was hopeless. The same was true of France. Defended by what many considered the finest army in the world, the Third Republic was decisively beaten by 4 June.

The German Werhmacht seemed omnipotent.

Fighting beside the French Army was the British Commonwealth (the British Expeditionary Force or BEF) and it too had been pushed to brink of annihilation by Hitler’s panzers. Only through raw courage, daring, creativity, and at great risk, was the bulk of the BEF saved (Operation Dynamo). It was the one victory rising up in a sea of failures.

By 4 June 1940, the Commonwealth of Nations had lost it most powerful allies in Europe and stood alone in the face of relentless Nationalist Socialist aggression aided and abetted by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Finally, the Commonwealth of Nations had to be prepared to deal with socialist-fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, who had secretly informed his generals on 26 May at he soon intended to enter the war as Hitler’s ally. 

Britain’s Friends in the United States were of little use

While possessing tremendous latent power, the United States was of no material help on 4 June 1940. Lend-lease did not begin until much later – March 1941 – and the American armed forces woefully inadequate. The US Navy was America’s sole first-rate modern force of consequence. Naval aviation also was well developed consisting of 6 carrier air groups and 3 long-range patrol wings that were joined by 2 US Marine Air Groups.

In contrast, the US Army stood at just under 190,000 by the close of 1939 and modestly grew to 269,000 in 1940. As a comparison, the British Army held 1,650,000 soldiers in June 1940. The Commonwealth added about 400,000 more with most serving in the Indian Army.

The US Army only began to build its first main gun battle tank in 1939 and armed with an undersized 37mm cannon. By 1940, the US Army possessed 112 of these already obsolete M2 tanks (again in contrast, the British Army had over 800 main-gun tanks in 1940 although most were lost during the battle of France). Even the Italian and Japanese armored forces were superior to the Americans in June 1940. 

US Army Air Corps aircraft were more numerous (18 bomber and 30 fighter squadrons) and capable but lagged behind the other major powers – the one bright light shone on the limited presence of modern P-39 and P-40 fighters along with A-20, B-25, and B-17 bombers. The rest of the Air Corps was obsolete.

Eighty years ago the world teetered on the brink of great unspeakable darkness. 

Whole books can be written on how 20^thcentury radical socialism created police-state societies that repressed every type of freedom from speech, music, and architecture to every other form of art and creative activity.  The socialist dictatorships decided what information people could or could not have access to as well as where could live or work or even travel. But let us refine the inhumanity to the grimmest of human rights abuses: State sponsored murder.

The Soviet Union killed over 20 million “enemies of socialism.” The top three methods of extermination were (1) direct murder, (2) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor gulag camps, and (3) starvation through man-made famines.

Nationalist Socialist Germany murdered 11 million “enemies of the state.” Like the Soviet Union, the Nationalist Socialists used a modified version of Soviet “big three” methods: (1) direct executions, (2) death camps for mass-scale genocide, and (3) death through abuse and neglect in slave-labor concentration camps.

While fascist socialism did not devolve into a concentration camp-mass murder gulag system it enacted anti-Semitic laws in 1938 and allowed the Nazis to send Jews and other enemies of Nationalist Socialism in Italy and other Italian controlled areas to Nazi concentration or death camps.

Imagine a world dominated by Communism, Nationalist Socialism and Fascist Socialism.

How many millions of innocents would have been slaughtered under the radical socialist behemoths had the Commonwealth surrendered? How many millions or more would have been condemned to slave labor camps? And the remaining billions of all humanity would have been doomed to a life of soul crushing oppression under the boot of radical socialism.

Those were the stakes in June 1940. 

The Commonwealth’s Reply

For the war leaders in London, outwardly there was little or nothing to look to in hope of getting past the omnipresent gloom. Only internal strength could see the Commonwealth of Nations through its moment of greatest peril. In the face of all that, on 4 June 1940, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill gave Hitler his answer:

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

What the Commonwealth of Nations achieved by refusing to surrender and battling back sewed the seed for liberty and justice to be enjoyed by billions of people for generations after. 

And a special debt is owned not just to the heroes from the British Isles and Commonwealth nations but to the heroic Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis and many others who fought for all our freedoms even though they would not gain their own full independence until years into the future. And also a great debt is owed to the French, Poles, Norwegians, Czechs and other Europeans whose nations had fallen under the yoke of totalitarian socialism but carried on the struggle by whatever means possible – and at great cost.

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park

Peter Navarro hits Stephanopoulos curveballs out of the park 
Frank Miele, Heartland Diary

“Trade adviser” Peter Navarro gave one of the best performances ever by a senior Trump official during an ambush interview today. 

Appearing on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Navarro was textbook perfect in his ability to avoid being tripped up by the loaded questions thrown out by Stephanopoulos. 

From the first question, asked about Barack Obama’s latest attack on Trump, Navarro was ready for anything. 

 “I’m glad Mr. Obama has a new job as Joe Biden’s press secretary,” he started, getting in his zinger but then following it up with a cutting critique of Obama’s fake commencement address. “I note for the record in his speech that I read there was no mention of manufacturing, no mention of China. As far as I’m concerned, his administration was a kumbaya of incompetence in which we saw millions of manufacturing jobs go off to China. His new normal was a flatline in terms of wage growth, and I’m happy to report that this president, Donald J. Trump, in 3 1/2 years built the most beautiful economy in modern history, and the Chinese did take that down in about 30 days, but we are in the process right now of rebuilding that, and this president, Donald J. Trump, is the one who has the skills to do so. Because you know what George? What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go back to the future here. Buy American, deregulate and innovate. What do I mean by that? Bring jobs home. Make it here.” 

 Did you get all that? And that was just in the first minute. Navarro didn’t even break a sweat and you could sense Stephanopoulos wishing he had stayed in bed and let Martha Raddatz handle this interview! 

 If there was any doubt who was in charge of this interview, it evaporated when Stephanopoulos asked his gotcha follow up question:

 “You say the Chinese took down the American economy. So you’re saying they deliberately unleashed the COVID virus on the United States? You have any evidence of that?” 

 This is the typical Fake News trick of “interpreting” a response (i.e., lying about it) to try to get the guest to go down a rabbit hole. But Navarro was having none of it. 

 “I did not say they deliberately did it, but their China virus, let’s go over the facts here — correct me if I’m wrong: The virus was spawned in Wuhan province. Patient zero was in November. The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York, and around the world to seed that. 

 “They could have kept it in Wuhan. Instead, it became a pandemic. So, that’s why I say the Chinese did that to Americans and they are responsible. “Now, George, one other thing that I think is unconscionable about the Chinese behavior, as we speak, they signed a trade deal on January 15, and they promised not to steal our intellectual property, big part of that deal. 

 “Guess what? The FBI has now issued warnings that the Chinese government is hacking the intellectual property, so that they can steal vaccines for the world. And what would they do with it? It wouldn’t be a benign experience. They would use that vaccine to profiteer and hold the world hostage. 

 “So, yes, I do blame the Chinese. And it will be really interesting, George, as to how this election unfolds, because you have got Joe Biden, who has been a long friend of China, vs. President Trump… who is the only president who has ever stood up to China.”

 Question after question, Stephanopoulos looked for a chance to his Navarro with a haymaker, but Navarro sidestepped him on all his far-left propaganda and hit back hard with the facts. 

When Stephanopoulos quoted Joe Biden’s words against Trump for not standing up to China, Navarro turned it right back around against Biden:

 “Joe Biden’s has got 40 years of sucking up to the Chinese, including the eight years as vice president. And we know about the billion dollars that his son took from the Chinese.” 

 That of course raised a red flag for Democrat Stephanopoulos, who immediately tried to cover up the truth about the Biden family corruption. “That’s just not factual, sir. That is not a fact. He did not take a billion dollars from the Chinese.” 

 Oops, Navarro admitted. Yep, the billion dollars “Went into that hedge fund” run in part by Hunter Biden! Hit ’em where it hurts! 

 On every question, Navarro was prepared and knowledgeable. My favorite answer was his dismissal of fake whistleblower Rick Bright who said President Trump wasn’t doing enough to fight coronavirus. 

 “Here’s what happened with Rick Bright, and it’s an American tragedy, George. This guy is quite talented, but he was asked to be the field commander over at NIH to storm the testing hill with a billion dollars behind him. Instead of accepting that mission, he deserted. He went into a fox hole, wrote up the complaint. And now he’s part of a Capitol Hill partisan circus where he’s just become another pawn in the game. And the tragedy, George, is this man has talent. He’s a smart man. We could have used him on the battlefield. He’s not there now. And it was because of the decisions that he made.”

 Stephanopoulos tried to defend Bright, saying, “His expertise is vaccines. He wants to work in vaccine development. They’re putting him in diagnostic testing. Why shouldn’t a vaccine expert be working on vaccines?” Navarro hit this one out of the park! 

 “Here’s the thing, George, I was — I’ve been with the president since the campaign, right? I came here to do trade policy, right? What am I now? A conscript in the war on the China virus. I’m like a quartermaster and a shipping clerk half the time.

 “Do I complain? No. That’s my mission for this president, for this country. We do what we have to do when we have to do it for this country.

 “And Rick Bright, he made a choice. He could have been making a tremendous contribution over at NIH to testing and you and others have been complaining about testing. He could have been the field general. And now, he’s off the battlefield and it was by his own choice, sir.” 

 Bravo. 

 Everyone in the Trump administration should be provided with a copy of this interview and told to study it carefully. This was a master class in taking on the Fake News Media and turning their own questions against them.

Obamagate explained...

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

The Dems' least offensive candidate is still strangling them

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Joe Biden is the apparent Democratic presidential nominee. After all, he had a seemingly insurmountable lead in delegates going into the rescheduled August convention in the postponed Democratic primary race.

Biden was winning the nomination largely because he was not the socialist Bernie Sanders, who terrified the Democratic establishment.

Biden was also not Michael Bloomberg. The multibillionaire former New York City mayor jumped into the race when Biden faltered and Sanders seemed unstoppable. But Bloomberg spent $1 billion only to confirm that he was haughty, a poor debater and an even worse campaigner. He often appeared to be an apologist for China and seemed clueless about the interior of the United States.

The least offensive candidate left standing was Biden. Many Democratic primary voters initially had written him off as an inept retread, a blowhard and an impediment to the leftward, identity-politics trajectory of the newly progressive Democratic party.

On the campaign trail, Biden insulted several voters, using insults such as "fat," "damn liar" and, weirdly, "lying dog-faced pony soldier."

Long ago he spun tall tales about how in his youth he had taken on a Delaware street gang with a 6-foot chain or slammed a bully's face into a store counter. More recently, he taunted President Trump with tough-guy boasts about taking him behind the proverbial gym and beating him up.

Biden has been unable to keep his hands off women. Even his supporters cringed when he was seen sniffing the hair, rubbing the shoulders or whispering into the ears of unsuspecting females, some of them minors. Stranger still, Biden waxed on about his commitment to the #MeToo movement. The handsy Biden has insisted that women who made accusations of sexual harassment must be believed.

The more House Democrats attacked Donald Trump for supposedly pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden's wheeler-dealer son Hunter, the more Biden's own suspect dealings with Ukraine surfaced. Such scrutiny followed from Biden's boast, caught on video, that he had leveraged Ukraine by threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees unless a Ukrainian prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor had wanted to investigate the Ukrainian company for which Hunter Biden worked.

During the year-long rise, fall and rise of his campaign, the 77-year-old Biden often appeared confused. He was occasionally unable to remember names, places or dates. Biden would try to speak ex tempore but seemingly forget what he was trying to say.

The coronavirus epidemic and subsequent lockdown seemed to offer rest for Biden. But the more he recuperated from campaigning and sent out video communiques from his basement, the more he appeared to confirm that his problem was not simple exhaustion or age but real cognitive impairment.

With the Democratic nomination a lock, Biden assumed liberal reporters would allow him to campaign as a virtual candidate. They would forget his lapses and ignore prior controversies, including the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade, a former aide.

At first the media complied -- as it always had with Biden's troublesome habit of violating the personal space of women, his bizarre put-downs on the campaign trail, his exaggerated he-man stories, his mental lapses and his dealings with Ukraine. Again, to the Democratic establishment, Biden was far preferable to Sanders. Had the socialist Sanders won the nomination, he likely would have wrecked the Democratic Party in 2020.

But Biden misjudged the liberal media. Reporters were at first willing to overlook his liabilities. But the more Reade persisted in her accusations and the more the media ignored them, the more embarrassing the media's utter hypocrisy became. Journalists had torn apart Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over allegations of sexual assault, after all.

So suddenly the press decided that Biden was no longer worth shielding. Yet the change of heart was not entirely for fear of appearing hypocritical. Rather, the media seems terrified of Biden's increasingly obvious cognitive decline.

In other words, the media was most certainly not going to be degraded on behalf of a nominee who may no longer seem viable.

In the three months before the Democratic National Convention, Americans will witness some of the strangest political scrambling in presidential campaign history. Simply put, how does the Democratic Party cut from its neck an albatross -- one who has the most delegates but is likely not up to serving as president?

And how to do the deed without inciting the moribund Sanders campaign and his army of Bernie bros?
A host of Democratic donors and operatives would like Biden to disappear, clearing the way for a replacement such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, failed 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton or former first lady Michelle Obama.

But even if Democrats know why Biden must go, they haven't a clue about when or how.

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Joe Biden Is Cooked

Apart from the accumulated limitations of the former vice president’s performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

Conrad Black, American Greatness 

Despite polls showing that he leads President Trump in key states and in the country overall, there remains something seriously missing and not credible in the putative presidential nomination of Joe Biden.

The polls are never accurate with Trump, and there is both a reticence by his supporters to identify themselves and some sampling errors by the main polling organizations because of the unusually high numbers of people this president draws to the polls in his support who are not otherwise frequent voters. 

The real test of these matters is how the people vote, and the country saw Joe Biden come in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, and descend to 11 percent in that state’s Democratic primary. Generally, no candidate in either party is nominated who loses badly in New Hampshire.

It did not require a resurrected Alexis de Tocqueville to observe that Biden’s sudden emergence from punch-drunk Palooka on the ropes to the anointed nominee in two weeks was not entirely spontaneous. In a formidable display of professionalism, the Democratic Party elders carried him to the finish line on March 3, knocking Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren out of the race and obtaining endorsements of Biden from three of them.

With Bloomberg spending $937 million in a few months to collect just five delegates from American Samoa—the costliest pursuit of votes per capita in world history—there was no one else to snatch the nomination from Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who would have lost all 50 states (but not the District of Columbia) to Trump with his Marxist nonsense.

Biden won most of the Super Tuesday primaries. Once reestablished as the Democrats’ leading candidate, he is now awash in the endorsements of the Obamas, Clintons, and Sanders himself. But this is still the same person who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire.

The putative nominee was just getting into high gear as a human gaffe machine when the coronavirus pandemic mercifully rescued him from much direct exposure to the public and confined him to a little podium in his basement in Delaware, from which he skypes a somewhat moderated number of malapropisms and amnesiac lapses to the Trump-hating media.

More Troubles for Biden Await

Apart from the accumulated limitations of his performance as a functioning candidate, there are other problems already clawing at him or waiting to pounce.

There is no reason to believe that the issue of his and his son’s involvement in questionable financial activities in Ukraine and China will not return. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has assured President Trump and his representative, Rudolph Giuliani, that he will look into the matter of Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm. The Bidens deserve the presumption of innocence but, to use the clichés of the public relations business, the optics and externalities are not great.

Special counsel John Durham will be along some time in the next few months with indictments (or not) in the origins of the fraudulent Trump-Russian collusion outrage. It was clear from the December report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz that there were many illegalities and improprieties in the FISA aspect of the matter: internal espionage, conducted under the spurious rubric of a counterintelligence investigation against a major party nominee and then a president-elect. Ample evidence exists that Biden was present when these matters were discussed with President Obama. That doesn’t make Biden guilty of anything, of course. But if there is a slew of indictments over activities that he was aware of, it isn’t a great election year image-builder either.

And then there is the Tara Reade affair. This is a responsible, credible, stable person. A Democrat, whose friends say they remember how upset she was when she left the employ of then-Senator Biden in 1993 claiming she had been raped by him. This isn’t a dippy Blasey-Ford rerun with a pseudo-anonymous frequent flyer who hates flying and has no corroboration of any kind and who can’t remember where an incident stopping far short of rape 36 years before had occurred, as in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Nor is it a recording of an 11-year-old bawdy comment unconnected to any act or plaintiff, as with candidate Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape that almost killed his 2016 campaign. This is a real rape charge from a substantial person.

Reade’s is a serious allegation from a believable woman with some corroboration and a consistent story. Biden has avoided all comment, and the anti-Trump media with whom he converses from his virus-shelter basement haven’t got around to asking him about Reade (showing their customary no-holds-barred professional impartiality).

The Democrats embarked en bloc in the Kavanaugh nomination battle over two years ago on the credo “believe all women,” and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said that her former patron, President Bill Clinton, should have resigned because of his sexual advances on various women.

Of course, this is not a sustainable position and we can’t just take a woman’s word for the assertion that a sex crime was committed many years before because she says so. We have to end this practice of career destruction by mere denunciation. But this, too, could profoundly shake the Biden campaign, which has not been conducted to this point by a tidal wave of well-earned popularity.

Another Nominee Waiting in the Wings?

There is an aura of otherworldly unreality about the Biden candidacy: a man who got 11 percent of the vote in New Hampshire is effectively the party’s nominee a month later, and takes to his basement to avoid exposure to the media while he and his backers ignore several impending problems, any one of which could blow up his candidacy. Yet there are polls from ostensibly serious polling organizations claiming if the election were held today, Biden would defeat the president.

I believe that all of these supplementary problems will blow up during the spring and early summer. At that point, Biden could do the honorable thing and stand aside and ask his delegates to support a more presentable candidate than himself, well to the right of Sanders. After such a shuffle, when the delegate selection was over and too late for Sanders to restart his campaign, someone like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo could be nominated.

There is some precedent in the Democratic Party for former unsuccessful contenders for the highest office effectively nominating more promising candidates.

In 1912, with the convention deadlocked between Missouri’s House speaker Beauchamp Champ Clark and New Jersey governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, three-time unsuccessful presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan threw his weight behind Wilson, who was nominated and elected (as the Republicans were split between President  Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt).

In 1932, legendary media magnate William Randolph Hearst, who had once entertained some political ambitions, permitted Franklin D. Roosevelt to be nominated by causing his own candidate, House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, to withdraw in Roosevelt’s favor, in exchange for the vice presidency (an office Garner memorably disparaged in scatological terms).

Unless Biden comes out of hiding and takes some serious positions and looks and sounds like a leader, and can neutralize the Ukrainian, Durham, and Reade issues, his utility will have been to deny the nomination to Sanders and keep the place warm for a more plausible candidate. Whatever some polls say, this candidate cannot defeat the incumbent, unless Trump takes complete leave of his senses and starts to live up to the Democrats’ hideous caricature of him as a monster who incarnates corruption and incompetence.

Journalists ~ Russia Collusion Hoax?

Journalists ~ Russia Collusion Hoax?

Should journalists who propagated the Russia collusion hoax be jailed?
John Hinderaker, Powerline 

Roger Simon asks that question. He rightly indicts the journalists who spread the idiotic lie that President Trump “colluded” with Putin’s Russia:

"A penalty of some kind, indeed a serious one, should certainly be levied for misinforming the public on the most important subject of our day, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years concerning the Russia probe. And when these prevarications can be shown to have been deliberate, to have been done knowingly, difficult as that may be to prove, the line to sedition may have been crossed and there is an argument the reporters involved should face legal consequences. They should also be fired.

Many of the major media organizations and their reporters lied about Russia collusion on a regular basis, even, in the cases of the New York Times and the Washington Post, winning Pulitzers for their deceptions.

This evolved out of what we might call a “systemic folie á deux,” a corrupt alliance between the (almost always anonymous) leaker with an ax to grind and the leakee (i. e. the reporter) who is all too eager to grind that ax. A search for the leakers, who are in legal jeopardy, is putatively underway by the DOJ, but, although it obviously takes two for this pernicious tango, the leakees seem bound to get off scot-free."

Unjust? Of course, it is. And not so deep down, the media outlets know this.

In the end, Roger isn’t serious about jailing journalists, much as they might deserve it. But I would add this observation: Why is it that journalists who lied about Russia collusion will no doubt “get off scot-free,” while proudly displaying Pulitzers on their mantels? Why is it that the media organizations that employ them and share their political biases feel no need to sanction them in any way, let alone fire them?

The answer, I think, has a lot to do with the virtual abolition of libel law in the political arena. In a sane legal environment, journalists who published lies about people like Carter Page, and even President Trump, would have to worry about legal liability and the humiliation that comes with an adverse jury verdict. More important, perhaps, their employers would have to worry about paying civil judgments.

But when it comes to defamation, we don’t have a sane legal environment. The U.S. Supreme Court has seen to that in a series of decisions that deserve to be controversial. Wherever you think the boundaries of defamation law should properly be drawn, I think it is almost indisputable that our current legal regime goes too far in immunizing reporters, editors, newspapers and cable news networks against the consequences of negligently or maliciously propagating career-destroying and life-destroying falsehoods about public figures and matters of public interest.

Maybe if President Trump gets another Supreme Court appointment our extremist defamation jurisprudence will be moderated so that there is at least a possibility of holding journalists accountable.

Maybe the Press Should be Quarantined

Maybe the Press Should be Quarantined 
Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly.com 

If you are observant during this time of national isolation, you can learn a lot about your country and, perhaps, yourself.  This is a once in a lifetime experience that will change many things in America; some for the better, some for the worse.

On display right before our eyes is the collapse of honest journalism.  This has been brewing for a while.  In fact, Ted Koppel believes that I, your humble correspondent, ignited the situation by injecting opinion into a prime time cable news program beginning way back in 1996.  Mr. Koppel said that to my face on The O’Reilly Factor.

But Ted ascribes far too much influence to me.  All I did was take the newspaper editorial pages and hone them on television. Nothing wrong with that.  Of course, the concept can be misused by dishonest people but that’s been going on since William Randolph Hearst.

What we are vividly experiencing now in America is a herd media mentality that is using the medical catastrophe to sell a narrative to the folks: the virus is largely Trump’s fault and voters must banish him come November.
My opinion is not stated to support or engender sympathy for President Trump. Americans have seen him talk about the pandemic for hours each week.  Surely, we the people can arrive at a conclusion about the President using our eyewitness capabilities.

But the actual news reporting on the government’s response to the virus is heavily skewed to make Mr. Trump look bad. The hostility of many in the White House press corps is stark and anyone who denies that is a deceiver.  Obviously, the animus directed at Mr. Trump by “objective” reporters violates every journalistic tenet. Reporters can and should ask the toughest questions they can formulate.  But they should not inject hostility into the query.

What is happening here is failure to communicate honestly, with apologies to Cool Hand Luke.  National news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN, among others, are all practicing “outcome journalism.”  These outfits do not demand their employees search for factual truth.  Instead, editors and TV executives want a clear outcome from the pandemic reporting.  And that is Trump must go. Therefore, almost every bit of the President’s virus response will be portrayed as wrong, stupid, or even lethal.

It should be noted that there are some pro-Trump expositions in the media, but the hate-Trump presentations heavily outnumber them.

Once a free society cannot get honest, objective information, it becomes less able to make responsible decisions.  That is absolutely happening right now in America. The relentless contagion of propaganda funded by massive media corporations has spread to every part of this country.

It is not an overstatement to say the press collapse is a virus that is harming us all.  And there’s no vaccine in sight.

The 13 revelations about the FBI

The 13 revelations showing the FBI never really had a Russia collusion case to begin with

John Solomon, Just the News 

Recently declassified evidence directly undercuts the main arguments the FBI used to justify investigating President Trump and his campaign.

They’ve come slowly, drip by drip: the reluctant revelations of an FBI bureaucracy. But taken together, the body of evidence now amassed over two years of investigating the investigators explains why Attorney General William Barr last week declared there was never really a basis to probe Donald Trump’s campaign for alleged collusion with Russia.

"I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history," Barr told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

"Without any basis they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president. to sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency,” the attorney general said.

Two years ago, those words coming from the top law enforcement official in the land would have been hard to imagine, or to support with public evidence.

But today, after countless open record lawsuits, congressional investigations, sworn depositions and declassifications, there is compelling evidence that the FBI did not have justification to sustain its nearly three year-long, now debunked, Russia collusion probe or to support Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants targeting the Trump campaign.

Furthermore, the evidence shows, the false narrative was sustained by repeated leaks of information to the news media that was blatantly false, debunked in many instances by evidence sitting in the FBI's own files.

The latest revelations came Friday, when previously classified footnotes from the Justice Department inspector general were unmasked and showed the FBI had stunning reason to distrust Christopher Steele’s dossier when the former British spy first pitched it in July 2016.

Here are 13 of the most important revelations that undercut the FBI’s predicate for opening an investigation targeting the Trump campaign in July 2016, for obtaining a year’s worth of FISA warrants to spy on former campaign adviser Carter Page and for seeking a special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, to take over and extend the probe.

1.) The FBI possessed information dating to 2015 in Steele’s intelligence (Delta) file warning that he might be the victim of Russian disinformation through his contacts with Vladimir Putin-connected oligarchs. By 2017, the FBI was warned specific false information in Steele's dossier was planted by Russian intelligence, according to the declassified notes that became public from Michael Horowitz’s report.

2.) Senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr warned the FBI in August 2016 that Steele held an extreme bias against Trump (he was “desperate" to defeat Trump) and that his information was likely uncorroborated raw intelligence.

3.) Steele’s work on the dossier was funded by Trump’s rival in the election, Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and the Democratic Party, through their opposition research firm, Fusion GPS. Ohr warned the FBI in August 2016 that Steele’s work was connected to the Clinton campaign in some way.

4.) Steele told a State Department official in October 2016, 10 days before the FISA warrants were first secured, that he had leaked to the news media and had an election day deadline for making public the information he had shared with the FBI as a confidential human source.

5.) Steele was fired Nov. 1, 2016 for violating his confidential human source agreement by leaking to the news media.

6.) Information Steele provided to the government was proven, before the FISA warrants were granted, to be false and inaccurate. Specifically, he told State official Kathleen Kavalec in early October 2016 that he believed Russia was funding its hacking operations through its consulate in Miami. The Russians did not have a consulate in Miami, Kavalec reported in her notes.

7.) Steele was caught in October 2016 peddling a false internet rumor also being spread by a lawyer for the Democratic National Committee and a liberal reporter. That rumor claimed Trump and Putin might be communicating through mysterious computer pings at a server tied to Russia’s Alfa Bank. The rumor was dismissed by the FBI as false.

8.) The FBI falsely declared to the FISA court it had corroborated the evidence in Steele’s dossier used in the search warrant application, including that Carter Page had met with two senior Russians in Moscow in summer 2016. In fact, the Page meetings were never corroborated and a spreadsheet that reviewed every statement in the Steele dossier found most were either inaccurate, uncorroborated or information easily found on the Internet.

9.) The FBI interviewed Steele’s primary sub-source in January 2017, who claimed much of the information attributed to him was not accurate, exaggerated or rumor.

10.) The FBI possessed statements of innocence from Page collected by an undercover informer in August and October 2016, including that Page denied meeting with the two Russians and did not play a role in changing a GOP platform position on Ukraine during the Trump nominating convention. The statements undercut two primary allegations made by the FBI in seeking the FISA warrants.

11.) The CIA alerted the FBI that Page was a friendly U.S. asset who had assisted the Agency on Russia matters and was not a stooge for the Russian government. The FBI altered a document to hide this revelation.

12.) The FBI possessed exculpatory statements made by Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in which he told an undercover informer he and the Trump campaign were not involved in the Russian hacking of Clinton’s emails and considered such activity to be “illegal.” The FBI originally opened the probe of Trump campaign on suspicion Papadopoulos was somehow involved in the hacking.

13.) The FBI concluded in January 2017 that Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn was not being deceptive in his interviews with agents and likely suffered from a faulty memory and was not operating as an agent for Russia.

There are many more revelations that expose flaws, lies and misconduct in the creation of a false Russia collusion narrative. But these 13 alone help explain why Barr made such a sweeping statement last week.

They also likely explain a statement made years earlier in text messages between two key FBI employees, when lead Russia case Agent Peter Strzok texted his lawyer and paramour Lisa Page in May 2017 that there was “there's no big there there” in the Russia probe.

The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

The Unbearable Rightness Of Trump

Andrew Klavan, The Daily Wire 

During the Republican primaries of 2015, I played a funny supercut of Donald Trump on my podcast. I had misjudged Trump then, fearing his flaws too much and appreciating his talents too little. The supercut put together all the times and tones in which he had said the word “China,” and backed it up with a jazzy bass. I found it hilarious.

Well, it was hilarious. But Trump was right about China. Right that its behavior was unprincipled and dangerous. Right that our trade imbalance with them represented a power imbalance that they could abuse. He was right about China when the Democrats and their press were distracting the country’s attention with trivial Russian trolling. And he was right to engage them even though the Wall Street Journal types screamed like a girl in a horror movie over how his “trade war” might affect their portfolios.

Do you remember Trump’s inaugural address when he spoke about the “American carnage” of closed factories and unemployment that was already causing an epidemic of deaths by despair? He was right about that, too. Right that it required attention when every Democrat and his pet journalist said it was “dark” to mention it. Right that it could be fixed when Barack Obama said it couldn’t. And right that it was a matter of policy when conservatives said he was interfering with the magic of global capitalism and, anyway, those lazy, oxycontin-chugging crackers kind of deserved it.

He was right that globalism could not thrive without a strong self-defending nation state, because nations are not just economic structures, they are also moral entities and some (like China) are wicked and some (like us) are good and deserve favor.

He was right that borders must be secured when blithering leftists were ready to virtue signal the west to death and high-minded right wingers like myself were shrugging off a slow-motion invasion, trusting to some imagined protective magic in our creed.

He was also right that the American news media has become corrupt and fake and needs to be regularly savaged until they are shamed into reforming and playing fair with the public. The Left, of course, loves it this way, though it destroys any chance of American dialogue. The Right underplayed the problem and was resigned to long-term death-by-culture.

The current pandemic has only underscored how very right Trump was: it was unleashed by China, exacerbated by globalism and weak borders, and has been endlessly darkened by the lies of a Republican-hating press.

Trump has not always been articulate in his rightness, and often it has been instinctive rightness rather than philosophical, which has made it easy to dismiss. But he has been right so often and about so much that it is time to confer on him what no one but his most mindless followers have conferred on him yet: the benefit of the doubt.

Which brings me to the current situation.

The idea that Trump ignored warnings or that Trump reacted late or that Trump over-reacted and carelessly destroyed our economy: these are all the whiny assertions of irresponsible children.

We are always being warned about everything. Pandemics, pulse bombs, earthquakes. We have business to take care of. We prepare where we can. Trump reacted quickly given the misinformation we were getting from China and WHO. He stopped travel from China when Joe Biden and the rest of the Left called him names for it. Even the governors who hate him admit he has responded to their calls.

And as for over-reacting and uncaringly dumping the economy… What inside info have you got that he’s not seeing? Does anyone with an ounce more sense than the hate-filled half-wits at CNN or the New York Times – does any sensible person believe that Trump doesn’t care about the economy? His political fortunes depend on it for one thing. And he’s rightly proud of his skill at fixing things, the economy above all.

The president has had an unprecedented and unknowable threat on his hands. He is following experts and feeling his way – just like every leader on earth. If social isolation leads to a low death toll, and the economy bounces back as quickly as he hopes, will the Twitter Jeremiahs line up outside the White House to apologize? Will they say: “Hey. Wow. That really worked, Mr. President. We doubted you every step of the way but, doggone it, as it turns out, you did a good job.”

Who will be the first to wonder aloud if maybe Trump got it right again?

Anyone?

Corona Meltdowns

Corona Meltdowns
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness 

Is the bad and self-negating behavior of so many of Trump’s enemies setting him up for an even more impressive victory in the fall?

As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.

Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.

It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.

Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.

In retrospect, the public will remember how in fear and confusion she reversed course to spearhead impeachment, outsourced the task in the House of Representatives to its most incompetent and perfidious members—Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and wasted weeks of the country’s precious energy and time as it was on the cusp of an epidemic.

Pelosi then quickly weaponized the viral crisis in hopes that COVID-19 could do what Robert Mueller’s dream team and impeachment had not done—destroy the administration of Donald Trump before the November 2020 election. Only such an obsession explains why any sober politico would damn Trump as culpable in January for ignoring the viral dangers, while nearly a month after his necessary and controversial travel ban of January 31—that stopped perhaps 7,000 Chinese citizens entering California per day, some on direct flights from Wuhan—she was doing a photo-op tour to urge the public to get out and shop in San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown: “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here“.

Such a crazy juxtaposition is not just politics or hypocrisy—it’s insanity. The night before an impeached Trump was acquitted in the Senate, and five days after Trump had controversially stopped incoming Chinese visitors, Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address before a national television audience, a level of spiteful vitriol not seen in the U.S. Congress since the years leading up to the Civil War.

When the Congress finally agreed to call a truce and pass a bipartisan “rescue bill” to stave off a depression and deliver some relief to millions of unemployed, Pelosi single-handedly delayed passage to insert irrelevant progressive treats into the authorization—until she was reprimanded by her own party to cease and desist.

She is now, in the middle of an epidemic, insanely talking about a “truth” impeachment-light commission to investigate Trump. She is absolutely clueless of the nihilistic circus that would ensue when her own previous on-the-record statements, the parasitic investment practices of U.S. senators of both parties, the bizarre behavior of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the empty January braggadocio of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Joe Biden’s smearing of the Trump travel ban would be fully aired.

Does she have any idea that by forcing Trump to “own” the virus—predicated on the notion of trusting in bleak but widely criticized Armageddon modeling—she is greenlighting Trump to take credit for the response, especially if coronavirus proves in the end comparable to the 60 million infected, roughly 1 million hospitalized, and 15,000-60,000 dead in the prior influenza epidemics of 2009 or 2017?

It is difficult to find one thing Pelosi has said or done that has not made the country worse off since the virus officially hit our shores in late January.

The Media: Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century.

Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do.

Instead, journalists during White House briefings fixate on two agendas.

One is to goad the president into saying something sloppy, by repeatedly suggesting that in reacting to the virus, he was in error, that he is cruel and heartless, or that he is dangerous. That gotcha obsession explains why the media can call Trump a xenophobe and racist for issuing a travel ban against China—contrary to the earlier advice of WHO, the Centers for Disease Control, the media, and the entire Democratic Party hierarchy—then silently support it. It explains why they then use doctored Chinese data and propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party to convince Americans that China—a nation that lied about the origins, spread, and nature of the virus—is admirably doing a better job in containing the virus than is their own country. Even the media cannot keep straight their own anti-Trump gymnastics.

If evidence convinces Trump to let the public know that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are efficacious in treating patients infected with coronavirus, then reporters will seek to persuade Americans that such off-label uses have no utility and are dangerous—even if they have to stoop to find some nut who drank fish-tank cleaner, clearly marked unfit for human consumption, to argue that a nonpotable chloroquine derivative cleaning agent provides proof of “Dr.” Trump’s deadly ignorance.

But the White House press obsesses over a second agenda, too. It must always prove that previously respected figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, once embraced by the liberal media in their pre-Trump days, either are in revolt against their doltish boss or brain-washed into obsequious enslavement to the president. Often the media advances both antithetical scenarios near simultaneously.

The third rail for the media is that Fauci and Birx are empirical and sound mostly politically disinterested. They seek to provide Trump with scientific data about the virus to balance his incoming streams of financial, economic, military, and cultural information.

When Trump accepts their advice over objections from other advisors with competing national concerns, the two feel it was for the good of the country. When he demurs, they press their arguments as advocates of public health. And when they rarely lose an argument the two concede the president has to balance dozens of existential concerns.

In other words, it would be hard, for anyone other than the current press corps, on Monday to paint Fauci and Birx as frustrated scientists at the mercy of a moron who refuses to listen to science, while on Tuesday writing off both as Trump toadies who have joined the forces of darkness.

But that is currently the schizophrenic state of the American media. The only constant is that whatever Trump advocated, they are against, even if lives are at stake. And whatever Trump policy seems to be working for the good of the country, they either deny or ignore it.

Another irony: While the current media is the logical culmination of the liberal biases of the more polite leftwing domination of network and print media of the late twentieth century, it is now also far more vulnerable to exposure and ridicule. After all, it was progressive Silicon Valley’s creation of the Internet website and social media that have allowed truth to emerge past even media filters, truth that has largely exposed the media as incompetent, meanspirited, and increasingly irrelevant.

Joe Biden: The virus shutdown was first seen as providing a necessary respite for the 77-year-old former vice president to go home, rest up, and recuperate after an exhausting summer, fall, and winter of campaigning—an ordeal that supposedly had explained Biden’s increasing flubs and gaffes.

Indeed, when the shutdown first began, a rested Biden, coming off a well enough debate performance against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), was to broadcast daily out of his home. In informal fireside chat fashion, good ol’ Joe from Scranton would offer “here’s the deal” homilies and “point one, point two, point something or other” commentaries on the virus and Trump’s inadequate response to it.

But what followed was an ungodly disaster, as if the problem all along never was Biden’s weariness, but Biden himself. A rested Biden’s botched commentaries only convinced observers that a President Biden at this moment would be a veritable catastrophe. Biden seemed more confused from his home than he was on the campaign stump. He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.

After blasting Trump as a xenophobe and racist for the January 31 travel ban, Biden hemmed and hawed and finally conceded he agreed with the ban. His staff claimed his xenophobic/racist allegations were in connection to Trump’s use of “Chinese virus”—a rubric first institutionalized probably by CNN. Yet Trump used that terminology only after, not before, Biden’s smear. Now Biden apparently is trying to argue that Trump should have issued the once “racist” and “xenophobic” ban even earlier—as Biden its former critic supposedly would have done. Once Biden decided he had to be against everything Trump was for, and once Trump was for most things that the so-called experts thought best, then Biden inevitably was in Pavlovian fashion against what was good for the country.

The truth is that Biden cannot find much to disagree with, given that most Democrats—Pelosi and DeBlasio, especially—were playing down the severity of the virus, as was Anthony Fauci himself in January.

Anytime Biden faulted Trump for belated responses, it was easy for Biden’s opponents to show that almost no one but Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in early January was alarmed about the impending danger (and smeared by the Left for his warnings), and even easier given that Trump’s travel ban met fierce opposition as not merely racist but unnecessary and exaggerated.

Biden earlier also had promised a diversity vice president and is now wedded to that commitment. But the only Democrat in the present crisis who is winning mainstream media acclaim is Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite the paradox that he was also once exaggerating his own readiness for the virus and bragging about the openness of New York to the world. So far, he governs a state with the greatest numbers of virus cases as well as deaths and per capita fatality rates—facts which according to the blame—game logic of the Left are political fodder.

Nonetheless, Cuomo is being touted both as the far more competitive candidate in a crisis than the fumbling Biden, and yet he will prove almost impossible to nominate given Biden’s long campaign and delegate lead. The best squaring of that circle in the eyes of Democrat politicos would be to have Cuomo as the vice-presidential nominee on the ticket. He could rectify some of Biden’s gaffing, and do most of the fall campaigning, while with a wink and nod reassuring voters that he would likely have to step in for a President Biden if the latter’s present disturbing lapses continue.

Now that option seems less likely given Biden’s earlier politically correct grandstanding of promising a diversity vice-presidential pick without a clue of who such a person might be.

For now, the media, Pelosi, and Biden, along with the Left in general, wish to perpetuate a sense of viral Armageddon to make it politically impossible for Trump to initiate a graduated plan of returning America to work. Their hope is for a summer and fall of continued lockdown, a near depression rather than a mere recession, and enough public furor to end Trump in November—while hoping that a sudden post-election end to the lockdown will allow the natural recovery of Trump’s booming economy on their watch in 2021.

Missing in all these calculations is empathy for those who are ill and the losses that such macabre expectations certainly entail. Also absent is a sense of the irony that, by unfairly scapegoating Trump in hours of darkness, they are ensuring that in the upcoming dawn, he will be credited by their same logic with owning what will likely be an impressive U.S. response to suppressing the virus and reviving the economy.

For Turkey, a war and a new refugee crisis

For Turkey, a war and a new refugee crisis

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline 

With so much focus on the coronavirus and the Democratic primaries, the media has paid scant attention to two related developments: (1) war between Turkey and Syria and (2) refugees trying to push their way en masse from Turkey into Greece.
Turkey has been at war with Syria, and by extension Russia, for a few weeks. The war stems from the push by the Syrian regime, with its usual Russian backing, into one of the last footholds of the anti-Assad resistance in the northern province of Idlib, not far from Turkey.

Turkey, hoping to avoid another mass exodus of Syrians into Turkey or up against its border, attacked. This move brought it into conflict not just with Syria but also with Russia.

Dozens of Turkish troops were killed by airstrikes, in other words by Russia. Turkish drones and artillery pounded Syrian positions throughout the region, killing dozens Syrian troops. However, as I understand it, Turkey shied away from attacking Russians.

Turkey called for support from NATO. None was forthcoming.

In addition, the U.S. reportedly turned down a request for help in the form of Patriot anti-aircraft batteries to protect Turkish troops. It has been suggested that Trump’s negative response may have been at least in part the product of anger over Turkey’s purchase last year of Russian S-400, over American objections.

Sen. Lindsey Graham called for the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone in the region. This seems like too tall an order at this point. The time for a no-fly zone was before Russia became heavily invested in this war. Had the Obama administration acted at that time, the disasters that followed very probably would have been averted.

President Erdogan’s response to the West’s failure to assist Turkey was the release of large numbers of refugees being held behind a border wall. Greece pushed back against the resulting surge of refugees. Greece and Turkey dispute whether the Greeks have used lethal force to stem the flow.

Last night on Christiane Amanpour’s PBS program, a high level Greek official said that only a small portion — 5 percent or less — of the refugees who are trying to surge across its border are Syrians. I don’t know whether this is true or what Greece’s basis for the claim is. However, one of the seriously injured refugees featured in the PBS report is Pakistani, and there is evidence of a significant Afghan presence, as well.

It’s easy to understand why neither Greece nor Europe as a whole desires more refugees, and even easier to understand why it doesn’t want entrants who aren’t from Syria, where the true humanitarian crisis is. At the same time, one can understand why Turkey, facing an influx of new Syrian refugees, wants to rid itself of a large number of its current refugees. And it’s natural that Turkey would play the refugee card in order to gain assistance from the West.

Meanwhile, Turkey and Russia have agreed to a cease fire in northern Syria. It is Turkey that seems to have backed down, as one would expect given the extreme vulnerability of Turkish ground forces to Russia air attacks.

Russia, while desirous of good relations with Turkey in the long term, seems unwilling seriously to compromise its interests in Syria. For Putin, the solution is to seek an end to hostilities that allows Turkey to save face and that somehow minimizes its refugee problem, while at the same time enabling Syria to achieve its military goals.

Whether these objectives can be achieved remains to be seen. The current cease-fire agreement, standing alone, doesn’t seem to achieve them. It’s just a stop gap.

I don’t pretend to know all the wheels within wheels regarding either the war or the refugee question. I just think that both aspects the story deserve our attention.