Tag: Foreign Aid

More Money And Even More Money

I have been ranting about the amount of money that the president and Congress has been throwing at Ukraine….especially now when there are so many Americans that are struggling to survive….but it matters not.

This is more previous post about the cash we are throwing…..

More Money….More Money….More Money

It is never enough Biden is asking for even more cash to aid Ukraine…..

President Biden asked Congress for $33 billion for the new Ukraine aid package, but congressional Democrats ramped it up to $39.8 billion. The package includes $11 billion in presidential drawdown authority, which allows President Biden to send Ukraine military equipment from US stockpiles.

The aid also includes $6 billion in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding, which enables the US government to buy weapons from arms makers and send them to Ukraine. The Pentagon will receive $8.7 billion to replenish weapons stockpiles that have been to Ukraine, and $3.9 billion to pay for troop deployments in Eastern Europe.

In March, $13.6 billion for Ukraine aid was included in a spending bill signed by President Biden. The new $39.8 billion plan will bring total US aid for Ukraine in 2022 alone to over $53 billion. To put the enormous figure into perspective, Russia’s entire military budget for 2021 was estimated to be about $65.9 billion.

(antiwar.com)

The measure passed in a vote of 368-57, with only Republicans voting against the bill. The legislation now moves to the Senate, which could hold a vote this week.

Read more…..

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/biden-wanted-33b-more-for-ukraine

And this must been done by 19 May….according to the admin…..

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have urged Congress to pass additional funding for Ukraine aid by May 19 as President Biden is close to exhausting funds that allow him to send weapons to Kyiv.

Austin and Blinken told House and Senate leadership in a letter obtained by The Hill that the administration needs more money by May 19 “if we are to continue are [sic] security assistance at the current pace.”

As part of a $13.6 billion Ukraine aid package passed in March, $3.5 billion went towards a presidential drawdown authority, enabling Biden to send arms from US military stockpiles. Biden recently signed off on a $150 million arms package for Ukraine and has about $100 million left from the drawdown funds.

“In short, we need your help. The ability to draw upon existing DoD stocks has been a critical tool in our efforts to support the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian aggression, allowing us to quickly source equipment and ensure a sustained flow of security assistance to Ukraine,” Blinken and Austin wrote.

(antiwar.com)

The urgency seems to be the panic the admin is feeling for they fear the purse strings will be cut and their handlers in the industry will retaliate at election time.

I have stated many times….help Ukraine but not when the help hurts American families….but since those families do NOT have a lobbyist then their plight is of no importance.

They, Congress, should be ashamed of themselves….they turn their backs on the American people all in the name of the bribes (oh my bad….donations) they get every election.

As usual it is all about the cash not the country.

When is enough enough?

At what point do the American people start questioning the decisions of our Congress?

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When Will The Damn Well Run Dry?

I am talking about the seemingly endless funds being funneled into Ukraine….

To answer my own question….it will apparently never run dry….no matter how many Americans will suffer from the waste of dollars.

I recently read that Biden has a plan to speed up the aid to Ukraine..

Really?

I think it is  moving damn fast without some legislation that will make it even faster to piss away taxpayer dollars….but I am a minority and the plan is moving forward….

On the day Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a restrained Victory Day speech in Moscow, President Biden signed into law an updated version of the Lend-Lease program that helped the Allies—including the Soviet Union—defeat Nazi Germany in World War II. This time, Lend-Lease will be used against Russia. “Every day Ukrainians fight for their lives,” Biden said at the signing ceremony Monday in the Oval Office, the New York Times reports. “The cost of the fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is even more costly.”

The program will allow the US to send equipment and supplies to Ukraine more quickly to help it turn back the invasion. It gives Biden the ability to reach agreements with Ukraine and other Eastern European countries more quickly, per the Washington Post. “It’s important to note that it’s about time,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said about the plan last month. “Time is very important when lives are at stake.” Passage was a bipartisan effort; the vote in the Senate was unanimous. Biden’s request for another extra $33 billion in aid for Ukraine is pending in Congress.

It is official!

The dollars will fly out of treasury and our gutless Congress gave it wings….

President Biden on Monday signed a bill into law reviving the World War II-era lend-lease program for Ukraine, paving the way for an escalation in US military aid to Kyiv.

The Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 allows Biden to send weapons to Ukraine free of charge while technically requiring payment at a later date. Under the lend-lease act during World War II, the US sent billions of dollars in weapons to the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and other allies.

The legislation received massive bipartisan support in Congress, passing by voice vote in the Senate and by a vote of 417-10 in the House, with only Republicans voting against the bill.

According to a summary of the bill, it waives “certain requirements related to the President’s authority to lend or lease defense articles if the defense articles are intended for Ukraine’s government or the governments of other Eastern European countries affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

The bill’s signing comes after President Biden asked Congress for $33 billion in new aid for Ukraine, including $20.4 billion in military assistance. He has nearly exhausted the funds for arms shipments to Kyiv from a $13.6 billion Ukraine aid package that was included in a spending bill he signed in March.

President Biden waited until Monday to sign the bill since May 9 is the day Russia marks its victory day for the Soviet defeat of the Nazis in 1945. Ironically, the Soviet Union was one of the largest beneficiaries of US military aid under the lend-lease act during World War II.

At what point is enough enough?

But those Dems have gone one further….

Congressional Democrats drafted a plan to raise President Biden’s $33 billion aid request for Ukraine to $39.8 billion, which the House could pass as soon as Tuesday.

Biden’s $33 billion request included $20.4 billion for military aid. According to Bloomberg, Congress is adding $3.4 billion in military aid and $3.4 billion in humanitarian assistance.

Democrats initially wanted to include the Ukraine aid with additional COVID-19 funding, but Biden told lawmakers to separate the two packages. “We cannot afford delay in this vital war effort. Hence, I am prepared to accept that these two measures move separately so that the Ukrainian aid bill can get to my desk right away,” he said in a statement Monday.

Giving aid to Ukraine has strong bipartisan support in Congress, but Republicans have yet to sign on to the Democrats’ plan since they are seeking a larger increase. Republicans want to add $8 billion, while the draft plan drawn up by Democrats increased the aid by about $6.8 billion.

If the $39.8 billion plan is passed, it will bring total US aid for Ukraine in 2022 alone to over $53 billion. To put the enormous figure into perspective, Russia’s entire military budget for 2021 was estimated to be about $65.9 billion.

Why can’t these spineless tools in Congress find that much compassion and bi-partisanship for the people of this country?

This BS makes me want to vomit!

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Where Did The Money Go?

I have been bitching about the amount of mo bey that the US is throwing at Ukraine……and like most of our endless wars we have no idea where the cash goes once it leaves the bank……well guess what Ukraine conflict is NO different……

US officials just admitted they don’t know where their arms shipments to Ukraine will actually end up, and that they could fall into dangerous hands.

Ever since the crisis over Ukraine began last year, a minority of commentators, including the present author, have cautioned about the dangers of inundating the country with weapons, and the risk of fueling extremist groups that could destabilize the country and create blowback for the West, as the United States’ anti-Soviet policy in Afghanistan did in the 1980s. A new CNN report suggests US officials are well aware of these risks.

A suite of anonymous sources told the network that Washington has no way of tracking the weapons they send or knowing where they end up when they enter Ukraine, one of Europe’s largest arms trafficking markets even before the war. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time,” one source told CNN.

According to the report, both military analysts and US officials acknowledge that the massive quantity of arms being supplied by more than twenty governments could in the long term “wind up in the hands of other militaries and militias that the US did not intend to arm.” Ukrainian troops pick up trucks loaded with weapons mostly in Poland, states the report, before driving them across the border, at which point it’s entirely up to Ukrainians how and where they’re given out.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/04/united-states-military-aid-ukraine-war-weapons

This should be unacceptable to anyone serving in our government…..especially those morons in Congress that are always going on about smaller government…..but no the gutless wonders we elected just rubber stamp the pissing away of taxpayer money.

Not worry Biden and the rest of the pilferers will just throw more money and aid at Ukraine….

President Biden will ask Congress for an additional $33 billion to help Ukraine fend off the Russian invasion, two administration officials said Thursday, per the AP. Biden’s latest proposal—which the officials said was expected to last for five months—has more than $20 billion in military assistance for Ukraine and for bolstering defenses in nearby countries. There is also $8.5 billion in economic aid to help keep Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government functioning and $3 billion for food and humanitarian programs to help civilians and other spending, said the officials.

The new proposal would be more than twice as large as the initial $13.6 billion package of defense and economic aid for Ukraine and Western allies that Congress enacted last month and is almost exhausted. It seemed to signal a long-term US commitment to staving off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to expand his nation’s control of its neighbor, and perhaps beyond. The request comes with the fighting, now in its ninth week, sharpening in eastern and southern parts of the country and international tensions growing as Russia cuts off gas supplies to two NATO allies, Poland and Bulgaria.

 

There is wide, bipartisan support in Congress for giving Ukraine all the assistance it needs to fight the Russians, and its eventual approval seems certain. But Biden and congressional Democrats also want lawmakers to approve an additional $22.5 billion for vaccines, treatments, testing, and aid to other countries in continuing efforts to contain COVID-19, and that along with a Republican push to entangle the measure with an extension of some Trump-era immigration restrictions leaves the proposal’s pathway to enactment unclear. In a compromise with Republicans, Senate Democrats have already agreed to pare the $22.5 billion figure to $10 billion.

THis plan should sail through Congress with few problems….yet when funds are needed to help our fellow Americans there is debate and antics and nothing gets done…..

Why is that?

What makes Ukraine more important than feeding kids in this country?

Please do NOT give me the democracy thing as the excuse….that does not wash.

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How The West Can Assist Ukraine

There are way too many, in my opinion, that are calling for all out war with Russia…..since I am a staunch antiwar individual I will not support any armed involvement in the conflict between Ukraine and ‘Vlad the Invader’…..

But what can the West do to support and aid Ukraine in their fight?

Across the world, political leaders and ordinary citizens have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the same time, there seems to be basically no chance that the United States or any other major world power would send its troops to fight on the Ukrainians’ behalf — for the simple reason that doing so could plausibly lead to a wider war, and even nuclear conflict.

The question then becomes: What can America and its allies do if they continue to rule out direct intervention?

The answer is quite a lot, much of which — though by no means all — is being done already.

The basic Western strategy has been to make the war more painful for Putin: Supply the Ukrainians with weapons while imposing crippling sanctions on the Russian economy. These measures are designed to shift Putin’s cost-benefit analysis, making the war costly enough that he’ll look for some kind of exit. In broad strokes, experts say, it’s a sound strategy — one that can still be escalated, albeit within certain bounds.

“The West has to keep going full speed in the current direction,” says Yoshiko Herrera, a political scientist who studies Russia at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “Right now is not the time to let up on pressure.”

At the same time, Washington and its allies need to think more carefully about their endgame.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22958725/ukraine-russia-us-nato-sanctions-military-aid-protest

My problem is that the US has found $800 million for aid to Ukraine…..with growing poverty and hunger in this country some of that cash would be better spent here helping struggling Americans.

That aside there needs to be a debate on foreign policy instead of always a knee jerk reaction with military hardware…..now is the time for such a debate…..as hard as it may be…..

Conflicts that we now think of as uniting the country were still political. Americans were torn over what to do in World War II, for example. Congress passed a series of neutrality acts in the 1930s, and these isolationist policies were responsible for America’s late entry into the war. And, of course, unity sometimes came at a price. The U.S. government’s steps to punish anti-war speech during World War I, for instance, are good examples of going too far with the idea that dissent is inherently harmful to war efforts.

The reality is that foreign policy has always been contested — and, more often than not, linked to questions of identity and ideology. But debates about war are so interwoven with our larger culture-war politics now that most questions of how to handle military conflict have been largely reduced to partisan scoring. And that’s a problem — not because we need to get back to some bygone bipartisan era, but because real dissension is vital in a democracy, especially in matters of foreign policy. 

The seeds of war politics’ merging with culture-war politics arguably date back to the late 1960s, when anti-Vietnam War protests overlapped with civil rights protests and other social movements that challenged the existing social order. Over time, conservatives and liberals diverged in their attitudes toward the war, especially as liberal elites began to criticize it. Starting with the 1968 presidential election, being anti-war became more closely associated with being a liberal Democrat. And the accusation that George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, was all for “acid, amnesty1 and abortion” helped solidify this cultural connection.

Why It’s Important To Debate Foreign Policy Even In Times Of Conflict

Time for a real debate before it is too late for a solution other than going to yet another war.

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Money To Burn

The US is spending taxpayer money like there is no tomorrow (if you believe the panic driven social media then there may not be a tomorrow)…..every day there seems to be a new monetary figure attached to the blind support for Ukraine.

President Biden announced a massive $800 million military aid package for Ukraine that includes armed drones, anti-tank, and anti-aircraft missiles as the US continues to fuel the fighting between Russia and Ukraine.

The White House released a fact sheet detailing the contents of the aid package:

  • 800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
  • 2,000 Javelin, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, and 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems;
  • 100 Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
  • 100 grenade launchers, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, and 400 shotguns;
  • Over 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenade launcher and mortar rounds;
  • 25,000 sets of body armor; and
  • 25,000 helmets.

The “Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems” that the US is sending are small drones that crash into their targets, known as Switchblade drones. The Switchblades were first used by US special operations forces in Afghanistan and can hit targets dozens of miles away.

Think about the cost to Americans…..

Biden’s announcement brings the total military aid authorized for Ukraine over the past week to $1 billion. The funding for the new weapons package will come out of the $13.6 billion for Ukraine that was added to the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill Biden recently signed. Out of the $13.6 billion, the Pentagon will get $6.5 billion to replenish weapons stocks sent to Ukraine and to pay for troop deployments to Eastern Europe.

Tat is taxpayer cash that will NOT be spent on the people of this country that are in deed…..I watched the exuberance of our lawmakers after the Zelensky speech and I thought I had not seen such applause and smiles when policies about this country are debated…..but yet they can find cash to prolong a war…..

Why is that?

I mean is war, death and destruction so popular that everyone in DC is thrilled to spend needed revenue to prolong this conflict.

I guess those people in the defense industry are jerking off at this announcement…..since Afghanistan has cut into their profits they need another outlet that will continue their profits streak.

I am sorry if I sound like I do not care what happens in Ukraine…well that is not so…..I just think that we should not be the only country pissing away our revenue on war…..when those funds are needed here and now.

This war is quickly becoming a US war.

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More Money….More Money….More Money

As could be predicted the US warmongers will make the case that the answer to the Ukraine/Russia mash-up will be more taxpayer money thrown into the fray.

White House asked Congress for $6.4 billion for military and humanitarian aid for Ukraine and to help US allies in Europe to bolster their security in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

According to Bloomberg, $2.9 billion will go towards security and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and other regional countries. The remaining $3.5 billion will go to the Pentagon “to respond to the crisis.”

…

The total amount could change as the White House and Congress work it out. Some members of Congress think more money needs to be spent. Sen. Chris Coon (D-DE) said the US might need to spend around $10 billion to respond to Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

(antiwar.com)

Over the past year, the US has given Ukraine over $650 million in military aid and $52 million in humanitarian assistance. The Pentagon said Friday it wants to send more weapons to Ukraine and is working out ways to do so.

The United States is providing Ukraine with US$350 million (S$473.71 million) in additional military equipment to fight off Russia’s “brutal and unprovoked assault”. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Saturday (Feb 26).

“This package will include further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne and other threats it is now facing,” Mr Blinken said in a statement.

The justification for the aid has varied. Some have made the case that U.S. military assistance to Ukraine can change Russia’s calculus now, possibly deterring Moscow from launching an attack. Others claim that aid to the Ukrainian military can have a real impact on a possible fight with the Russians, making it meaningfully more challenging for the Kremlin to achieve victory and ruling out certain military options Russia might be considering. And there are also voices who call for additional capabilities merely to raise costs for Moscow—that is, to kill more Russian soldiers—so as to create political problems for President Vladimir Putin at home, although without much expectation that Ukraine would prevail.

None of these arguments is convincing. That does not mean security cooperation with Kyiv should cease. It does mean that military assistance is not an effective lever for resolving this crisis.

(rand.org)

More money?

What did Ukraine do with the 90 tons of stuff they received from the US in January of this year?

Will throwing more cash at the problem….solve the problem?

I say it will not.

Most wars aren’t “rational” and become more irrational the longer they go on (See Afghanistan). And most attempts to “rationalize” them are freighted with the very biases that will serve to perpetuate them. It’s one reason Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August will never go out of date. Almost all of the “lessons” learned from the insane bloodbath of World War I were wrong and helped to set the stage for the even more genocidal World War two decades later, was itself a war that produced not global peace but a world at perpetual war with itself, with antagonistic nuclear powers still fighting over the same scraps of land and oil reserves, insensate to the future of the planet itself.

(Jeffrey St. Clair)

Those emergence funds are needed here in this country to help solve our growing problems….but our corporate Congress had rather spend it anywhere but here.

If we want to help Ukraine then let the Pentagon and the CIA divert their funds….stop milking the taxpayer or let the corporations making profits off war foot the bill.

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GOP On Ukraine

As usual the GOP will take political advantage…..and Ukraine is no different…..I listened to Sen. Ben Sasse attack the Dems for Ukraine’s dilemma……

This is a prepared statement…..

“The Biden Administration has dropped the ball for months and months and months. Every single step of the way, Washington has limited our options and expanded Putin’s opportunities. Let’s be clear: Nobody wants a massive ground war with American and NATO troops in Ukraine. Nobody wants a shooting war with Russia. We should, however, have been arming the Ukrainian people to the teeth for months. Putin’s calculus is pretty straightforward: he’s going to go as far as he can until he feels that his intervention is too costly. It isn’t like you can let him take Ukraine and then this all gets simpler. The United States should be making it very costly now – not by putting troops on the frontlines in Ukraine, but by running a massive new Lend-Lease program with Kyiv.”

Here is the full transcript of Sen. Sasse’s statement……read it for yourself….

https://www.sasse.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=AEAD0BA4-6453-4432-B114-2365F9A14810

While on CNN Sasse stated that the US should ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth”…..

“We need to be arming them to the teeth,” Sasse continued, as Newsmax reported. “So, President Biden should be coming to the Congress right now asking for an emergency supplemental for defense spending. We’re not going to put boots on the ground in Ukraine. We shouldn’t. We don’t need to. They [the Ukrainians] are willing to fight. But we need to arm them.”

Seriously Ben?

We threw $650 million in military aid just this January and they crapped out….and now you want to more money at them….what is it Einstein said?

You do not need to spend more money just divert some of those extra Pentagon funds that were given out late last year….it is time for the taxpayer to stop paying for every little war that the GOP supports.

When will the American people awake from the ignorance coma and demand that their money be spent here where it is needed?

Who’s paying Sasse’s salary?

Apparently the same people that own all Congresspeople.

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Closing Thought–30Sep21

WTF?

Then I ask why?

It appears that the US is on the verge of giving more cash to Israel to the tune of $1billion……

House passed legislation that would give Israel an extra $1 billion in military aid. The measure passed with an overwhelming majority and now moves to the Senate.

The bill passed 420-9-2, with Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN.), Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), André Carson (D-IN), Marie Newman (D-IL), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Chuy Garcia (D-IL) voting against it.

Reps. Hank Johnson (D-GA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) voted “present.”

US lawmakers wanted to assure Israel that the money would be delivered after the funds were stripped from a stopgap funding bill earlier this week. “While this funding would ordinarily be included in a year-end spending package, we are advancing this legislation now to demonstrate Congress’ bipartisan commitment to Israel’s security,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), who introduced the bill on Wednesday.

Israel requested the additional amount in June, after its bombardment in Gaza in May, which killed over 250 Palestinians, including over 60 children. The aid is being presented as money to replenish the Iron Dome missile defense system. But when it was first reported, Israeli officials said they also need the money to purchase munitions, including precision-guided munitions for the air force.

The extra $1 billion is on top of the $3.8 billion Israel gets from the US each year. Out of the $3.8 billion, $500 million is allocated for the Iron Dome and other missile defense systems. The Iron Dome is a joint project between the Israeli defense firm Rafael and the US firm Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Again I ask……WHY?

Why does the US continue to support and fund a country with such horrendous human rights abuses?

One reason is that Israel owns so many of our lawmakers that they everything they want.

My thought is ‘f*ck Israel’ that cash is needed here in this country…..stand or fall on their own….the US needs to cut the apron strings to Israel.

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Egypt–WTF?

As a foreign policy geek I am always looking for situations that are a problem to our policies…..

Using Open Source intel….I have found a problem with our foreign policy and as a geek in international situations this worries me.

The country is a strong ally to the US right? Has been since Saddat was the leader.

As a friend they are entitled to certain perks…..like aid from the US…..in 2020 to the tune of $297.9 in economic aid in 2020 and $1.55 billion in military aid.

That much cash should give the US some pull on the actions of our ‘friends’, right?

To take a different track here…..the US is NO friend of Assad of Syria, right?  As a matter of fact we are trying everything we can short of all out invasion to end Assad’s rule of Syria, right?

Then why is a ‘friend’ sending troops to Syria to help Assad?

Egypt has reportedly sent 150 soldiers to fight alongside Bashar al-Assad‘s regime in a planned operation against against rebel forces in northwestern Syria.

Turkey’s Anadolu news agency on Thursday quoted “reliable military sources” claiming that the soldiers have been sent to Aleppo and Idlib provinces, in coordination with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC),

Iran has been a key backer of the Syrian regime since an uprising against Assad’s rule started in March 2011, sending client militias from around the world such as the Afghan Fatemiyoun and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

The Egyptian troops have been deployed to the Khan Al-Asal area of western Aleppo province and around the town of Saraqeb in southern Idlib province, the agency reported.

Saraqeb was captured by the regime in late 2019 and is on the frontline between regime and rebel forces.

The Syrian news agency Shahed also reported a Syrian opposition military source as saying that “Egyptian mercenaries had arrived to fight alongside regime forces and sectarian militias in northern Syria”.

https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2020/7/30/egypt-sends-troops-to-syria-to-fight-for-assad

Basically, our taxpayer money is inadvertently being used to prop up Assad in Syria.

Just another case for a program to upgrade our foreign policy….but sadly that will not happen any time soon…..

Not to worry though……Egypt will spend cash with Russia for fighter planes……

Russia Today quoted military sources July 27 as saying that the Egyptian army will acquire the Russian Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jet, a first for Egypt, after photos emerged of five of them heading to Egypt. Neither the Russian nor the Egyptian side has so far made any official comments on the alleged acquisition, while the United States objects to any such deals.

According to Russia Today, “The sources indicated that these heavy and long-range fighter jets would give the Egyptian army superiority in the regional sky, which is why the US strongly objected.”


Russia’s Top War website, which focuses on defense affairs, reported July 23 that the first batch of Su-35 fighters took off from the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aviation Plant and headed to the European side of Russia, from where they will be delivered to Egypt.

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Closing Thought–25Nov19

I try to not post too much on religion…..one it is a personal choice and being so is of no importance to the dialog IST wants to have…..and two just not something I want to do…..

I read something about the VP….it does not surprise me for Pence is a theocrat and would force me to believe his brand of religious fervor if he had his chance….so when I read he was only using aid to benefit certain religions…..

Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups.

“Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-mike-pences-office-meddled-in-foreign-aid-to-reroute-money-to-favored-christian-groups

Then Trump considering a possible benchmark for receiving foreign aid……..

Aides to President Donald Trump are drafting plans to condition U.S. aid to other countries on how well they treat their religious minorities, two White House officials said.

The proposal is expected to cover U.S. humanitarian assistance, and could also be broadened to include American military aid to other countries. If the proposal becomes reality, it could have a major effect on U.S. assistance in a range of places, from Iraq to Vietnam. Its mere consideration shows how much the White House prioritizes religious freedom, an emphasis critics say is really about galvanizing Trump’s evangelical Christian base.

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/11/11/trump-weighs-foreign-aid-religious-freedom-069595

This is just a way to promote one religion over another….we can call it whatever we want but it is not the business of the US to pick a country’s religion for them…..this will strain relations with Middle East and India for sure.

Keep in mind that most Americans do NOT want religion as part of the government…..

While Americans largely have a positive view of the role of religion in public life, they overwhelmingly want religious institutions to stay out of politics, a new survey from the Pew Research Center has found.

Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults believe churches and other houses of worship should “keep out” of political matters. When asked if religious institutions should endorse political candidates, 76 percent say no. And a plurality of adults—at 37 percent—believe that religious groups already have “too much” political influence.

https://www.newsweek.com/religion-democrats-republicans-politics-pew-poll-1472207

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