cell913blog.com #69

 Is there anyone else out there whose perspective attempts to join dots among the ‘wannabe’ tyrants, including overt, dangerous, impulsive and irresponsible acts to put trump back in the Oval Office?

Everyone knows that Netanyahu, Putin, Orban, and most likely Xi Jin Ping, certainly Kim Jung Un, Maduro (Venezuela), all prefer, and will take significant steps to promote, trump’s re-election in November. We are only this week learning of a $10 million stash of cash, allegedly offered and delivered from President Sisi of Egypt prior to the election of 2016, to the trump campaign. According to Carol Leonnig of the Washington Post, reporting on MSNBC, all attempts to investigate this alleged transaction were thwarted by then Attorney General William Barr, in the previous trump administration.

In Newsweek, August 7, 2024, in a piece by Sean O’Driscoll, entitled, ‘Two Potential Crimes’ in Trump’s Reported Egyptian Cash Scandal: Attorney’ we read:

An August 2 Washington Post article claimed that Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi withdrew $10 million from a Cairo bank account to fund Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The money was allegedly withdrawn in giant duffel bags and given to an Egyptian spy agency to pass onto Trump’s campaign after El-Sisi and Trump had a private meeting at the United Nations in September 2016. The article states that, as president, Trump released $1billion in military aid to El-Sisi’s government.

Suspected cash, a considerable amount, from El-Sisi of Egypt and then a release of $1 billion in military aid by Trump to Egypt simply does not pass the ‘smell test.’ Neither does Netanyahu’s visit both to Congress on an invitation from Speaker (and trump sycophant) Mike Johnson and his subsequent obsequious trolling of trump at Mar-a-Lago. It seems that Netanyahu is able and willing to pressure Biden for more military aid, and to defy any Biden urging to tamper his IDF’s viscious killing of women and children in Gaza in his war against Hamas and then to bow to the trump ‘throne’ in obeisance and hope for his return to the Oval Office.

And there are other questions about what Netanyahu is up to.

For example, is Netanyahu deliberately fomenting violence with Iran and her proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in order to defy all efforts by the Biden administration to de-escalate violence in the Middle East, and thereby to challenge the election of the now Democratic presidential ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Is Iran complicit in joining into the potential expanded war with Israel, in part, because it senses that the Biden administration, now somewhat weakened by the decision and announcement of Biden’s withdrawal, thereby putting a most challenging, potentially upending decision on the president’s desk only weeks prior to the November election? That decision is whether and to what extent the U.S. administration, now resting on the shoulders of Biden and Harris and by implication, of Walz, will actually ‘go to war’ against Iran, by protecting and enhancing the defenses of Israel.

An expanded conflict in the Middle East, following approximately 200 days of war and killing, especially of innocent Palestinians, following the horrific attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, just as Americans are choosing their next president, could and would readily be framed by the trump campaign as a demonstration of weakness by that administration. And that framing and the thuggish rhetoric in which trump would inevitably couch it would undoubtedly severely tarnish the luster of Biden’s foreign policy credentials and hurt the election chances of Ms Harris and her VP pick, Walz.

We already know of the enmeshment of Iran with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From reuters.com, in a piece entitled Exclusive: Iran sends Russia hundreds of ballistic missiles by Parisa Hafezi, John Irish, Tom Balmforth and Janathan Landay, February 21, 2024:

Iran has provided Russia with a large number of powerful surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, six source told Reuters, deepening the military cooperation between the two U.S.-sanctioned countries. Iran’s provision of around 400 missiles includes many from the Fateh-110 family of short-range ballistic weapons, such as the Zolfagher, three Iranian sources said. This road-mobile missile is capable of striking targets at a distance of between 300 and 700 km (186 and 435 miles), experts say….U.N. Security Council restrictions on Iran’s export of some missiles, drones and other technologies expired in October. However,, the United States and Europeano Union retained sanctions on Iran’s missile programme amid concerns over exports of weapons to its proxies in the Middle East and to Russia.

This is clearly not a one-way arrangement.

From the Institute for Science and International Security, isis-online.org, in a piece entitled Iran/Rusia Military Technology Axis: Russia Showcases to Iran New and Advanced Military Technology, by David Albright and Spencer Faragasso, June 25, 2024:

A dangerous new weapons technology the partnership between Iran and Russia is emerging with deadly consequences for the United States, Israel and their allies. The axis, helped importantly by China, exchanges finished military hardware and the technology to replicate and produce it. With the advent of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the transfer of weapons technology from Iran to Russia has developed on a large scale. The Ukraine war has led Russia to seek goods from Iran, including prominently a $1.75 billion purchase of Shahed 136 kamikaze drones and the production know-how.

Another obvious question, especially at this moment in the U.S. election cycle, is:

Are Putin, the Iranians, (and by default and implication the Israeli’s), China, North Korea (and perhaps Venezuela) all conspiring to re-elect trump? The sale and delivery of American weapons, technology, fighter jets and the training necessary to operate these military assets, already into the billions from Washington to Kiev, has stretched the American arsenal, not to mention the tolerance of the conservative portion of the electorate in the U.S. to the point where months of delay by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by Speaker Johnson, has already helped to cripple the Ukrainian defense of its homeland. Any further demands from Israel, supported, as expected, by the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., on both the U. S Treasury and the Pentagon could and would exacerbate the frayed nerves in the White House.

There is already considerable rumbling about the prospect of the United States having to face, simultaneously, in the turbulence of a presidential election campaign, two wars, one in the Middle East, on behalf of U.S. ally, Israel, the other in Ukraine, on behalf of another ally, Ukraine.

The growing inter-dependence and enhanced exchanges between Russia and Iran, emerging at the same time as a potential Middle East conflict pitting Iran and her proxies Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel, a country that possesses nuclear weapons, at the same moment that we are learning that Russian nuclear weapons area already positioned in Ukraine.

From pbs.org, in a piece by the Associated Press, July 6, 2024, entitled, ‘Where Putin stands on using nuclear weapons to win Russia’s war in Ukraine, we read:

The message to NATO from President Vladimir Putin was simple and stark: Don’t go too far in providing military support for Ukraine or you’ll risk a conflict with Russia that could quickly turn nuclear. As the war in Ukraine turns slowly in Moscow’s favor, Putin declared he doesn’t need nuclear weapons to achieve his goals. But he also says it’s wrong for the West to assume that Russia will never use them…..Moscow has carried out drills with its tactical—or battlefield—nuclear weapons in southern Russia and with ally Belarus, where some were deployed in 2023. Russian Defense Ministry videos showed Iskander missile launchers, nuclear-capable warplanes and sea-launching missiles.

Anyone who thinks that the presidential campaign will continue under the cloud of euphoria that has lifted off from the Democratic re-visioned ticket is smoking dangerous stuff. And anyone who thinks that the world is not interested in the election results, and especially in the re-election of trump’s ‘project 2025, is also under some malignant influence. Of course, the news media focuses on threats, dangers, risks and fears, all of which guarantee sales, subscribers and advertisers.

Malignant, despotic, anarchic, and ambitious men who see themselves reflected in a trump-mirror-electoral-victory, and the prospect of withdrawal from NATO, as he previously withdrew from the Iran nuclear accord, and who also see the enhanced manufacture, sale and distribution of arms, including the high-tech operating systems of the latest killing machines, (something to which trump is addicted) and the plot thickens. Link these aspects with the erosion of voting rights and access, the atrophy of democracy, including specific plans and strategies to deny the election results in America if trump does not win, and the ascendancy of despotism, tyranny and the quick and easy adjustment of oligarchies to changing alliances and threats, to a default position in many quarters to violence and military conflict as the appropriate means to address political conflict and there is a toxic brew of forces. They may not be holding formal meetings in the same place at the same time; however, they all know what the others are doing, and they are all prepared to come to the aid of their cohorts in crime.

Of course, the politics of joy, happiness, honesty, authenticity, respect and dignity is an antidote to the hate, fear, malice, revenge and retribution promised (and previously delivered in his apprenticeship between 2016 and 2021). However, in the very reasonable prospect that trump fails to secure enough Electoral College votes, ‘they’ already have a plan to hold a supplemental election to grab the gavel of the Oval Office. Win or lose, the U.S. may well again face a situation, similar to if different from 2000 when the Bush v Gore election went to the Supreme Court for adjudication.

We all know that a repeat of that tragic scenario will not go well for Democrats. The Supreme Court has already demonstrated its deep and abiding sycophancy to the trump ‘ring’. Their majority kissed that ring in their presidential immunity decision.

From within, facing multiple challenges to legitimate voting officials, acts suppressing voting rights, and illicit claims of ‘destroying the country by a wild left-wing party of Democrats, and from without, facing multiple, simultaneous and merging, if not already conjoined malignant (far beyond weird) tyrannies. Not incidentally, all of these leaders and their nations are deeply enmeshed in the arms business (as is the United States itself). The Harris-Walz ticket faces not merely political (as in  campaign) assaults, character defamations, lies and deceptions…they also face, whether during the campaign itself or immediately following November 5, highly charged, motivated and malignant forces who seek to undermine, if not actually destroy the democratic, electoral and historic system of government, in order to install their own brand of despotism.

And the American voter is charged, not only with a choice of ‘what kind of country’ s/he wants to live in, but also (and since geopolitics is barely a campaign topic) the thin edge of the speer in the choice of the kind of world we all want to live in. Steeped in international chicanery, the average American voter is definitely not. Suspicious of the dangerous men and motives of international dictators, they definitely are.

Reducing their suspicions to a simplistic, ‘we need our own thug’ in a world dominated by thugs, is a recipe for disaster. America, (and we are all relying on you!), needs to elect this Democratic ticket, not only to begin to restore lost personal freedoms at home, but to offer a global force against those who would throw flames of both rhetoric and bombs, missiles and drones on freedom wherever they can find a target of their choosing.

Getting back into negotiations with Iran on nuclear development is not only a Middle East issue. It is a global issue. Fully investigating the Egyptian ‘crime’ of the $10 million can and will never be begun under a second trump administration. That too is a global issue. Returning to the UN climate-protection programs is not only a national but a global issue. Legal voting rights, legal health choices, legally free books to read, and by which to educate youth….these are note merely American issues, but are global. Access to public education is not merely a national issue, but a global issue, especially as it concerns young girls.

Confronting despotism, dictators, and neutralizing threats of the use and development of nuclear weapons is another global issue.

American voters…are you up to your challenge?

In the words of the Canadian comic, Red Green, “We’re rootin’ for yah!”