The Federalist Is Super Mad Virginia Will No Longer Subsidize Racists—Techdirt
I've written about the elimination of funding to neo-Confederate organizations in Virginia, but this is as succinct a description of how the racists in the Federalist Society have responded.
While I was not pleased when Abigail Spanberger won the Democratic primary for Governor of Virginia, former CIA officers are not my first choice for elected officials, she is clearly better than her predecessor the antediluvian Glenn Youngkin.
Since her taking office, I have been impressed by her actions, such as her stripping tax exemption from Confederacy huggers, rolling back executive orders requiring law enforcement to collude with ICE, and supporting a constitutional amendment restoring felon voter rights.
She is not playing nice, as can be seen by her signature on a bill ending Robert E. Lee license plates in the Commonwealth.
Being willing to stick it to racist dirt-bags is a good thing.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed Del. Dan Helmer’s bill to end the renewal of commemorative Robert E. Lee license plates in Virginia Wednesday, according to a press release.
A portion of the sale of these plates has previously supported the neo-Confederate organization known as the Sons of the Confederacy.
“The Confederacy was a four year period in which traitors hellbent on preserving slavery tried – and then failed – to divide the Union,” said Helmer in a statement. “The Confederacy and its leaders do not deserve our commemoration, and its adherents certainly do not deserve taxpayer dollars.”
More red meat please.
Providing subsidies in the form of tax breaks to groups that support the Confederacy is bad policy and bad politics.
New Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger has signed into law a bill that removes tax exemptions from the Daughters of the Confederacy and other Neo-confederate groups.
About f%$#ing time:
On Monday, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and the state’s first female governor, signed into law a bill that eliminates tax exemptions for organizations connected to the Confederacy.
HB167, passed by Democrats in the Virginia house and senate, specifically removes the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, along with other groups, from the state’s list of organizations that are exempt from state property taxes.
Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is a non-profit with chapters in states including California, Kentucky, South Carolina and others. The organization is largely responsible for the proliferation of Confederate statues and monuments across the country after the US civil war. According to tax filings published by ProPublica, the group raised more than $2.1m in revenue, had more than $1.1m in expenses and possessed $15.8m in assets in 2025.………
Still, Virginia lawmakers are pushing ahead with their efforts. Last week, Spanberger signed into law a different bill that discontinues speciality license plates that feature Robert E Lee and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. She also sent a bill that would establish a taskforce at the Virginia Military Institute to, among other things, recommend ways for the college to distance itself from sanitized narratives about the Confederacy back to the assembly with recommendations.
In many ways, this is more important than removing the statues, because this ends a direct state subsidy to an ideology that supports slavery and insurrection.
Econ 101, if you pay for it, people will make it.
Stop paying for Confederate apologists.
Never seen a covert CIA separatist military operation so heavily advertised as it's happening, as widely and loudly as they can PR it. You'd almost think CIA was running a deception operation here, to stoke IRI paranoia and get them to massacre local Kurdshttps://t.co/Q00UC4isOM
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 4, 2026
To quote Arthur Conan Doyle, "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
There are two possible non-exclusive explanations here that I can think of.
The first is what Mr. Ames suggests, and the second is that this is not an operation to manipulate the Iranians by the US State Security Apparatus, but rather that it is an operation to manipulate Donald Trump by the US State Security Apparatus.
I don't have much in the way of insights beyond the obvious, that frozen conflicts are a recipe for disaster.
In the short term, and by that I mean in the next 6 months, I would expect to see significant refugee flows (from the mid 5 figures to the low 6 figures) from the Syrian Alewite community, which numbers about 2½ million in Syria.
They, specifically the Assad family, have been in charge of Syria for over 50 years, and the new government will be dominated by Salafi Jihadists, and as such, they consider Shiah and Alewite religions to be apostasy.
Also, there are 50 years of scores to settle, which may push migration even higher.
After 11th anniversary of #Gaddafi's death during #NATO's assault on #Libya - all in the name of freedom, democracy & human rights - we'd do well to remember what happened next: terror, death, lawlessness, rape, poverty, starvation. Libya riven by conflict. That's NATO's legacy. pic.twitter.com/7CUgdSvcmJ
— Clare Daly (@ClareDalyMEP) November 30, 2022
You left off open slave markets and an ongoing refugee crisis.
To his credit, Obama acknowledges that this was a mistake.
(on edit)
I did not look at the video attached. It is largely unrelated to the basic point.
In response to a spike in oil prices, the Biden administration is sending officials to woo President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, because with gas prices in the United States passing $4.00/gallon, the upcoming elections are looking like a blood bath for Democrats.
It seems that the US wants Venezuelan oil back on the market as quickly as possible, and is offering some sort of rapprochement with the Maduro regime.
That being said, I am not sure how receptive Caracas will be to proposals from the Washington without immediate and concrete effects, and I am not sure how willing the Washington is to offer measures that deliver immediate and concrete effects:
Senior U.S. officials are traveling to Venezuela on Saturday to meet with the government of President Nicolás Maduro, according to people familiar with the matter, as the Biden administration steps up efforts to separate Russia from its remaining international allies amid a widening standoff over Ukraine.A note on the journalism here: What is described above are not sensitive policy matters, they are VERY public matters, and using anonymous sources here is journalistic malpractice.
The trip is the highest-level visit by Washington officials to Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, in years. The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Mr. Maduro and closed its embassy in Caracas in 2019, after accusing the authoritarian leader of electoral fraud. The Trump administration then tried to topple Mr. Maduro’s government by sanctioning Venezuelan oil exports and the country’s senior officials, and by recognizing the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as Venezuela’s lawful president.
Mr. Maduro responded to the sanctions by seeking economic and diplomatic help from Russia, as well as from Iran and China. Russian energy companies and banks have been instrumental in allowing Venezuela to continue exporting oil, the country’s biggest source of foreign currency, despite the sanctions, according to U.S. officials, Venezuelan officials and businessmen.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted the United States to pay closer attention to President Vladimir V. Putin’s allies in Latin America, which Washington believes could become security threats if the standoff with Russia deepens, according to current and former U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy matters.
………
When the U.S. and its allies began considering sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports this month to punish the country for devastation wrought in Ukraine, prominent voices affiliated with both major American political parties pointed to Venezuela as a potential substitute.
Well-connected Republicans have been involved in talks about restarting the oil trade, including Scott Taylor, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who is working with Robert Stryk, a Washington lobbyist who briefly registered to represent Mr. Maduro’s regime in 2020 and remains in contact with people around it.
Mr. Taylor said he spoke on Friday night to a Venezuelan businessman who signaled that Mr. Maduro’s team was eager to re-engage with the United States.
As I noted a very public matter.
On a policy note, I'm not convinced that the US is a particularly credible interlocutor in such situations. The duration of its welcome of nations and peoples offered by the US seems to be short lived, just ask Qaddafi , or Assad, or Noriega, or Mossadegh, or the Kurds, or the Kurds, or the Kurds. (Did I remember to mention the Kurds?)
It should be interesting how this all plays out.
The The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has observers on the ground monitoring the situation in and around the Donbas in the Ukraine, and they are reporting that most of the current shelling is coming from Ukrainian controlled area.
Given the statements of Ukranian officials, including their military, I do not believe that this is coming from their regular army units, but rather the right-wing paramilitaries like the Neo-Nazi Azof Battalion:
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has an observer mission along the line of control between the government and rebel side in south east Ukraine.
It reports that on Friday the number of ceasefire violations around the rebellious Donbas region of Ukraine had again nearly doubled:
- In Donetsk region, the SMM recorded 591 ceasefire violations, including 553 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 222 ceasefire violations in the region.
- In Luhansk region, the Mission recorded 975 ceasefire violations, including 860 explosions. In the previous reporting period, it recorded 648 ceasefire violations in the region.
………
The OSCE observer mission helpfully provides maps in its daily reports that show the impact points of artillery attacks. Yesterday a large majority of those were within the rebel controlled areas.
Here is a cutout from the OSCE map below.
………
The OSCE observer mission reports can be found among its press releases. The daily updates are here and the longer term Trends and Observations reports are here.
When in doubt of what is happening take a look at them.
It's clear from the OSCE reports, and the OSCE is largely a western Europe institution not inclined to favor the Russians, that the escalation in shelling has come from the Ukrainian side of the line.
I do not think that this is official policy from Kiev, even if they were to "Win" a conflict that draws in the Russians, the costs on the Ukraine would be unsustainable.
In contrast, the paramilitaries would likely find their influence in a post-conflict Ukraine enhanced.
Cui bono?
Gary Chambers is running for Senate in Louisiana as a Democrat. He hopes to defeat John Kennedy.
His campaign went viral when he smoked a joint in a campaign ad to argue for marijuana legalization, and now he has burned a Confederate flag in another video.
I like this guy:
>Last month, Gary Chambers drew attention for sparking up a marijuana blunt in a political campaign ad. Now the Democrat from Louisiana is getting attention for sparking up something else: a Confederate flag.
The new ad shows Chambers, who’s running for U.S. Senate, dousing the flag in gasoline in slow motion and setting it ablaze as he denounces what he describes as systemic inequality among Black Americans and argues that “remnants of the Confederacy remain.”
“The attacks against Black people — our right to vote and participate in this democracy — are methodical,” Chamber says in the one-minute video released Wednesday, adding: “Our system isn’t broken; it’s designed to do exactly what it’s doing, which is producing measurable inequity.”………
By Friday morning, Chambers’s new ad, titled “Scars and Bars,” had amassed nearly 1 million views on Twitter. One of Chambers’s previous campaign ads, released on Jan. 18, racked up 6.7 million views on the platform. In it, Chambers smokes marijuana and advocates for the drug’s legalization, arguing that laws that prohibit cannabis have disproportionately targeted Black Americans.
In a statement sent to The Washington Post, Erick Sanchez, a senior adviser to Chambers who conceptualized and scripted the ads, said the campaign was pleased with the response.
“Our ads are representative of Gary’s passion to raise awareness for the issues that leave the often forgotten communities in this country behind,” Sanchez said. “While the imagery might be deemed controversial by some, the harsh realities that are highlighted in these ads should be infuriating to all.”
This is how it should be done: Don't accommodate the racist claims of Confederate heritage, mock them, and demonize them, because this is something to be fought, not tolerated.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has made normalization and the dropping of economic sanctions conditional on regime change in Syria.
Enough is enough.
The US has literally spent a decade literally funding al Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra, etc.) in an attempt to change the regime in Syria, and the only result has been more war and more misery for the average Syrian.
The fact that Bashar al-Assad is the least bad option for Syria is a tragedy, but this is a direct consequence of the US, Turkey, and the Petty Princes of the Persian Gulf choosing the worst possible proxies in their attempt at remaking the Levant in its own image.
It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake:
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken renewed US opposition Wednesday to normalization with Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has seen growing acceptance from Arab nations that have concluded he won the brutal civil war.
Meeting with his Israeli and UAE counterparts, Blinken said that US President Joe Biden’s administration’s policy on Syria was largely focused on humanitarian relief.
“What we have not done, and what we do not intend to do, is to express any support for efforts to normalize relations or rehabilitate Mr. Assad,” Blinken told a joint news conference, not referring to Assad as president.
The United States has not “lifted a single sanction on Syria or changed our position to oppose the reconstruction of Syria until there is irreversible progress toward a political solution, which we believe is necessary and vital,” Blinken said.
A US law known as the Caesar Act came into force last year that punishes any companies that work with Assad as he seeks to rebuild after a decade of war.
The Caesar Act, accompanied by a slew of US sanctions on Syrians close to Assad, aims to force accountability for human rights abuses and to encourage a political solution in Syria.
I've heard this song many times, and it always ends the same way, instability and pain for the country that the US purports to "Help."
It needs to stop.
It turns out that the drone strike in Afghanistan which targeted an ISIS-K member, in a monument to poor intelligence just targeted an innocent aid worker, while killing 10 civilians, 7 of them children:
It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a “righteous strike” — a drone attack after hours of surveillance on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul’s airport.
But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen of the driver’s co-workers and family members in Kabul, raises doubts about the U.S. version of events, including whether explosives were present in the vehicle, whether the driver had a connection to ISIS, and whether there was a second explosion after the missile struck the car.
Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired, but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an ISIS safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car.
Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.
More useless death, and more terrorist created, because of the Pentagon and CIA's callous disregard for the lives of brown people.
After 2 decades of failure, the same people, and the same failed policies, and no one ever gets fired.
I'm sure that a lot of people, racists ones, will complain about the erasure of their history or heritage, but people of good conscience need to tell these snowflakes to get over it.
Let me repeat, "F%$# your feelings."
For 131 years it loomed over Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of America’s slave-owning south, sending a chilling message about the resilience of white supremacy to generations that passed beneath.
But at 8.55am on Wednesday, daylight reappeared between a giant statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee and its granite pedestal, now covered with Black Lives Matter graffiti. In warm sunshine the towering sculpture was hoisted by work crews and lowered to the ground amid cheers, songs and whoops from a watching crowd.
………
“It’s a beautiful day for democracy,” said a 47-year-old man who gave his name as Rig and carried a monochrome version of the Stars and Stripes that bore the words “Black Lives Matter” and a raised fist.
“It’s time for us to be honest about our history. Germany has zero statues of Hitler or Rommel. They learned the lesson and we have to learn the lesson: we cannot coddle white supremacy in this country.”
………
For more than a century the statue was a constant reminder to Richmond’s Black residents of generational slavery. Four years ago Mitch Landrieu, then the mayor of New Orleans, where another Lee statue was removed in 2017, wondered what it would be like for African American parents to explain to their daughter why Lee stood atop their city. “Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E Lee is there to encourage her?” he asked. “Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story?”
………
Three other huge Confederate statues on Monument Avenue were removed last summer and Northam ordered that Lee should meet the same fate, citing the pain felt across the country over the death of Floyd. His plans were tied up in litigation until the supreme court of Virginia cleared the way last week.
………
Just before 9am, a construction worker who strapped harnesses around Lee and his horse lifted his arms in the air and counted down: “Three, two, one!” There were excited shouts from hundreds of people watching, with little sign of counterprotests. Some chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” and sang, “Hey hey hey, goodbye!”
………
Goad Gatsby, who lives close by and has been arrested and teargassed at protests here, said: “This was a statue created to attract defenders of white supremacy. It represented that the descendants of plantation owners are still the ones in p.ower. The fact it’s removed: this neighbourhood is going to be safer, our world is going to be safer.”
………
Workers sawed off the torso of Lee and loaded it on to a flatbed truck. The statue pieces will be hauled to an undisclosed state-owned facility until a decision is made about its final location. The pedestal will remain for now, although workers are expected to remove decorative plaques and extricate a time capsule on Thursday.
Here's a suggestion, melt it down and erect a statue to Nat Turner, who led a slave revolt in 1831. Or, if you wanted to be a bit less confrontational, some prominent civil rights activists from the Commonwealth.
Anything is better than keeping the Robert E. Lee statue around. He was a slave owner, oath breaker, and a hypocrite.
Apparently, the Afghan Military Had Something in Common With the Massachusetts State House—Charlie Pierce
The invaluable Mr. Pierce is referring, of course, to the Beacon Hill tradition of no-show jobs.
I cut my teeth covering politics in the Massachusetts State House, which is where Captain Blood would have done business had he gone to parochial school in Dorchester. I became very familiar with the activities of politicians in the wild—their quirks, their penchant for nickel-and-dime graft, the mysterious ability of their otherwise unemployable relatives to appear on state payrolls. After three years, I was Marlin Perkins in that Wild Kingdom. Or maybe I was Jim Fowler, the guy who had to wrestle snakes while Marlin sold life insurance during the breaks.
Imagine the shock of the familiar that came over me when I was reading the Special Investigator For Afghanistan Reconstruction report from 2015 and saw this:
Despite 13 years and several billions of dollars in salary assistance to the Afghan government for the ANP, there is still no assurance that personnel and payroll data are accurate. Since 2006, U.S. government audit agencies have consistently found problems with the tracking and reporting of Afghan National Police (ANP) personnel and payroll data.………
………
In January 2015 SIGAR reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurances that personnel and payroll data were accurate. SIGAR found similar deficiencies during the course of the April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data. There are continuing reports of significant gaps between the assigned force strength of the ANDSF and the actual number of personnel serving.
All that money going all that distance around the globe, and we end up with a no-show job scam. All that high-falutin’ rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and we find out that our war is being run as though it were a Middlesex County road crew. I admire the departed Afghan government’s dedication to the classics, however.
Yes, the US State Security Apparatus created an even more corrupt and dysfunctional version of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) (as Charles P. Pierce would say) in Afghanistan.
The problem here is that the interventions* the US has made, notwithstanding the assertions otherwise, have never had the slightest concern about human rights and the rule of law.
They have been exclusively about enriching politically connected actors in the United States, and advancing US geopolitical goals. (The Great Game)
We invariably act brutally and stupidly, and we put the worst of the worst in charge, because they will kowtow to US demands, and equally invariably, we fail, and are left with a country hostile to US interests.
This is not a sustainable strategy.
The usual suspects are wondering why Joe Biden did not set some performance based metrics before pulling out of Vietnam Afghanistan.
The answer is simple: These metrics would never be quite met, because as I noted earlier, the military industrial complex will corruptly fight tooth and nail to preserve their profits and prerogatives:
The reason the US military has been openly insubordinate about leaving Afghanistan, because it allows senior officers to get their combat ticket punched, and because contractors, who hire the those senior officers after they retire, made so much money there.What is not being said, and what should be said is that the Pentagon, and the constellation of businesses who sell to it, are relentlessly corrupt, and in the case of the uniformed military, insubordinate.
If given the chance they would lie and leak to keep kicking the can 6 months (1 Friedman Unit) down the road, as they have for the past 20 years.
As Upton Sinclair pithily noted, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
To his credit, Joe Biden understands this, he saw the Pentagon browbeat and sandbag Barack Obama in 2009, and he knows that their capability to transform diarrhea into a full blown battle is nearly limitless.
So, over the weekend, the "Afghan Government" collapsed like so much overcooked broccoli.
This was inevitable, and the fact that it happened sooner rather than later is a good thing.
Any extension would just mean more dead Afghans with the same result.
The speed of the collapse was striking:
The Taliban effectively sealed their control of Afghanistan on Sunday, pouring into the capital, Kabul, and meeting little resistance as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, the government collapsed, and chaos and fear gripped the city, with tens of thousands of people trying to escape.
The insurgents’ return to power, two decades after they were ousted, came despite years and hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the United States to build up the Afghan government and its defense forces. In a lightning offensive, the Taliban swallowed dozens of cities in a matter of days, leaving Kabul as the last major redoubt of government control.
The rapid collapse of the US backed regime in Kabul is not a surprise.
The cause has been lost since the US invaded, because the model, one largely created by Richard Bruce Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense under George Herbert Walker Bush: Privatize as many military functions so that more money goes to contractors, who then buy off politicians with political donations.
According to some reports, something like 80% of the aid money went to contractors, where the money went back to the US where it went into stock buybacks.
Joe Biden pulled out quickly because he was there in 2009 when the Pentagon sandbagged Obama into the surge though lies and aggressive leaks to the press.
The reason the US military has been openly insubordinate about leaving
Afghanistan, because it allows senior officers to get their combat
ticket punched, and because contractors, who hire the those senior
officers after they retire, made so much money there.
Given the underlying dynamics of the military, a slow withdrawal would be impossible.
Biden had no option but to rip off the band-aid quickly.
So over 20 years our generals trained/supplied the Afghan army in a way to assure they could never function on their own and the US Army could never leave. https://t.co/mGqNLEsBTg
— Jon Walker (@JonWalkerDC) August 15, 2021
The one that struck me is that in 2007, when Iraq was in crisis and Afghanistan was clearly lost, Cheney’s people made a big, expensive switch in the Personnel Department, drawing down the much cheaper and more effective US Army troops and flooding Afghanistan with much more expensive, less effective private contractors. You wouldn’t do that if you wanted to win in Afghanistan, but you would if you wanted to spend money within the Blob (specifically the Erik Prince wing) and insulate a doomed Afghan war from public criticism by keeping official US Armed Forces casualties low.Matt Taibbi, on the other hand, takes an optimistic view of this, and believes that this is a product of delusion, and not corruption.
I'll go with the War Nerd, particularly since the it explains the profoundly self-destructive nature of our actions over the past 20 years. (See also the Tweet)
The involvement of the US government, starting with Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1970s, has been an ongoing series of crimes against the Afghan people.
One can only hope that further US meddling in the "Graveyard of Empires" will end, but it appears that the US is going to continue down the path of sanctions and seizure of assets, because the blob must be appeased.
Joe Biden has announced that he will be withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan by September 11, roughly 19 years and 11 months since we invaded the small Asian nation nicknamed, "The Graveyard of Empires."
I think that "all " in the statement is likely narrowly defined, but he has specifically eschewed basing it on the conditions on the ground, which can be manufactured by both our own military, and Pakistan's ISI for their own benefit.
Assuming that this stands, and the soldiers are not relabeled as "Freedom Constables" ore some-such, this is good news:
President Biden will withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan over the coming months, U.S. officials said, completing the military exit by the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that drew the United States into its longest war.
The decision, which Biden is expected to announce Wednesday, will keep thousands of U.S. forces in the country beyond the May 1 exit deadline that the Trump administration negotiated last year with the Taliban, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters Tuesday under rules of anonymity set by the White House.
While the Taliban has promised to renew attacks on U.S. and NATO personnel if foreign troops are not out by the deadline — and said in a statement it would not continue to participate in “any conference” about Afghanistan’s future until all “foreign forces” have departed — it is not clear whether the militants will follow through with the earlier threats given Biden’s plan for a phased withdrawal between now and September. The Taliban has conducted sputtering talks with the Afghan government, begun under the Trump deal, since last fall. It was also invited to an additional high-level inter-Afghan discussion in Turkey later this month.Officially, there are 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, although the number fluctuates and is currently about 1,000 more than that. There are also up to an additional 7,000 foreign forces in the coalition there, the majority of them NATO troops.
………
The goal is to move to “zero” troops by September, the senior administration official said. “This is not conditions-based. The president has judged that a conditions-based approach . . . is a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever. He has reached the conclusion that the United States will complete its drawdown and will remove its forces from Afghanistan before September 11th.”
About damn time.
We lost, get over it, and get the f%$# out.
US Intelligence Warns Withdrawal Could Lead To Afghanistan Being Controlled By Afghans—Caitlin Johnstone
To quote Charles Dickens, "It was as true... as turnips is. It was as true... as taxes is. And nothing's truer than them."
President Biden has reversed Trump's designation of the Yemeni Houthis as terrorists.
This is significant in a number of ways:
It's pretty clear that Biden is less favorably inclined toward Riyadh than either Trump of Obama. (It should be noted that Obama's go to on intelligence while in office was John Brennan, who was for his entire career a fanatical supporter of the Saudi royal family)
To the degree that the US can disentangle its foreign policy from slavish devotion to the House of Saud, this is a good thing.
The Biden administration has announced that it is reducing support for military operations by the House of Saud in Yemen.
The details are not in yet, but it appears that the scope of this reduction in support is limited.
It would be nice if US administrations didn't spend their time coddling the incompetent boy prince of the the Riyadh regime:
Joe Biden has announced an end to US support for Saudi-led offensive operations in Yemen, as part of a broad reshaping of American foreign policy.
In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden signaled that the US would no longer be an unquestioning ally to the Gulf monarchies, announced a more than eightfold increase in the number of refugees the country would accept, and declared that the days of a US president “rolling over” for Vladimir Putin were over.
“America is back,” Biden declared in remarks delivered at the state department, capping a whiplash fortnight of dramatic foreign policy changes since his 20 January inauguration. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
Biden said the conflict in Yemen, which has killed more than 100,000 Yemenis and displaced 8 million, had “created a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe”.
“This war has to end,” Biden. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arm sales.”
However, he said the US would continue to provide defensive support to Saudi Arabia against missile and drone attacks from Iranian-backed forces. US forces will also continue operations against al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula.
There is a whole lot of wiggle room for a whole lot of mischief by the petty Persian Gulf potentiates to continuing to prosecute their war against the people of Yemen.
The distancing of Washington from Riyadh is one of the most conspicuous reversals of Donald Trump’s agenda, but it also marks a break with the policies pursued by Barack Obama, who had backed the Saudi offensive in Yemen, although he later sought to impose constraints on its air war.
A bipartisan majority in Congress had previously voted to cut off support to the Saudi campaign, citing the civilian death toll and the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. But Trump used his veto to block the move.
The US will also freeze arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and name a special envoy to Yemen, to put more pressure on the Saudis and Emiratis and the Houthi forces they are fighting, to make a lasting peace agreement.
We'll see how long that lasts.
With Saudi money flooding the lobbying channels inside the Beltway, I expect pushback from the very serious people, and a walk-back from the White House.
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
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I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
