Ted Cruz: How U.S. must push back Putin in Syria (Cruz-Op Ed- CNN)

CNN ^ | 10/9/15 | Sen. Ted Cruz

[VinL]

Over the last week, the world has once again looked on aghast as President Vladimir Putin has taken violent advantage of regional instability to re-establish Russia's influence, this time in the Middle East. Despite promises to join the United States in a counterterrorism effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Putin is on a mission to protect Russian assets in the Mediterranean by propping up his client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ted Cruz Ted Cruz

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has been caught flat-footed as Putin's actions threaten to inflame and destabilize an already acute crisis.

Enough already. We don't need a reset. We need a reality check.

Putin has been unmoved by the Obama administration's threats of isolation on the international stage, and economic sanctions have on their own been no deterrent to his opportunistic behavior. More of the same will not result in success.

We need a coherent plan to address both the specific crisis in Syria and the challenge posed more broadly by Putin's resurgent Russia. The good news is that America still has options -- if our leaders can summon the will to exercise them.

For starters, in Syria we can't double down on the failed strategies that have given Putin [snip]

[Sacajaweau]

I agree with you. Assad got rid of his chem weapons....Thanks to PUTIN...not Obama.

We just removed/and or destroyed them.

Russia and Syria have been allies for over 50 years.

We have no diplomatic relations with Syria and we closed their Embassy in DC in June of 2014 and sent their reps packing.

It started out as a civil war. We turned it into a war with the west BUT we have no business being there.

Please be aware that IRAQ has now asked Russia for assistance.

[TBP]

Cruzing!

[basil]

I’ve been pulling for Sen Cruz since the beginning.

What he needs is money. He is one of the very few politicians that I have sent money to in a very long time.

All like-minded Freepers should do the same.

I believe Sen. Cruz is the closest thing to President Reagan that I have seen in a very long time.

If I have to vote for Trump, I will—but not very enthusiastically

[DoughtyOne]

I agree with your take on it. And isn’t it interesting that John McCain was there to urge Obama to get involved supplying weapons and funding.

Obama, Clinton, and McCain deserve a cell where they could go at each other at will.

[Sacajaweau]

http://www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/news/764296

[DesertRhino]

“Despite promises to join the United States in a counterterrorism effort against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Putin is on a mission to protect Russian assets in the Mediterranean by propping up his client, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad”

Silliness and a lot of misleading statements.

A) I never heard Russia express a desire to simply join into the US mission. (whatever that actually is)

B) The US is not involved in any anti ISIS mission, we are instead trying to use airpower to funnel ISIS towards Syrian forces. Removal of Assad is our only Syrian goal.

C) Russia has always stated that Assad remaining is a critical interest to them.

Something is wrong here. Assad is the evil tyrant who must be removed. But in every single measure, he is a child of the enlightenment compared to Saudi Arabia, who we slavishly love and obey. Treatment of women, religious freedom, etc.
Sounds like Saudi and Gulf state money has been sloshing around DC again.

[MNDude]

it’s not just ISIS. A semi-secular dictator who’s historically protected Christians is better than another Muslim Brotherhood government.

[Lexinom]

Yes, I second your opinion.

[MNJohnnie]

it’s not just ISIS. A semi-secular dictator who’s historically protected Christians is better than another Muslim Brotherhood government.

Sad but true. We shown we do not have the political will to civilize this area so the best we can hope for is containment.

[ETL]

A semi-secular dictator who’s historically protected Christians is better than another Muslim Brotherhood government.

You talkin about KGB/FSB Putin?

Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?

September 2014

(excerpt from a long, detailed article)

First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.

It was the Soviet Communist Party’s tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.

But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.

In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.

Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, “Blackbird”), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin’s KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates — Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) — also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.

Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:

According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.

Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin’s cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.

Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin’s Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ...”

much more at link

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality

*******************************************************************

“For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin’s administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004.”

“On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[Eva]

I don’t think that Cruz called for removal of Assad but I could have missed it. Mostly, Cruz advocated a return to the Reagan method of controlling Russia’s imperialism by installing defense systems wherever Putin threatens the sovereignty of an independent country.

What we don’t want is to facilitate the take over of ,Syria by the Muslim Brotherhood. Cruz did not address that, but he needs to.

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[Parley Baer]

Twice in two days now I have disagreed with Ted. First the Trump comment and now this.

[DesertRhino]

Liked Cruz a lot, but this was a tour de force in stupid. He even references Obamas red line and chemicals, though it has been long proven that was the rebels who used gas. It was even obvious then.
Obama says if Syria uses gas, we jump in on rebel side. And bada bing, a week later the rebels say “hey, we just got gassed”.
Please, the stupid is so high in that, that its just embarrassing.

95% of this op ed could have been written by Hillary. Combining this with TPP fast track, and im seeing him more and more as a fairly good guy, who can be bought off by the establishment as they desire.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Looking to topple Assad looked like a good move years ago with the “Arab Spring” bringing democracy and social justice to the ME. But, it didn’t turn out that way—It brought Tribalism, Murder and death. Now, the idea of a strong man to protect Christians and others looks better.
Russia is on the right track now. We should meet with Putin and the Russians, urge our mercenaries to join Assad and unite to fight the greater evil of ISIS. Our warplanes should Join with Russia’s in round the clock bombings of ISIS. We should send US Marines to fight next to Russian Marines in their march on ISIS. Put out this fire and show that we can work together (we did once before if you look at history). This would also run Ice water down the Iranian Mullahs—to See Russia/USA together.

[DJ Taylor]

"But for now, let him slaughter them."

Rest assured, whoever it is that remains standing when this killing ends will still be our enemy.

[duckln]

Cruz jumped the shark and sold the farm on this. He's in the toaster like you McCainistas.

The tide is finally rightly shifting to Putin and your personnel nauseating chicken little attacks on him are overwhelmingly being ignored.

Now we have Peggy Noonan's latest article with a imo favorable impression of him on the Rose show. A timely must read.

[VanDeKoik]

I’m just not sure what the point of getting involved would possibly be.

Let’s drill for our own damn oil here and let these freaks kill each other. We sure as hell aren’t fighting in any war in Africa BECAUSE they have nothing we need.

[SeaHawkFan]

True, but there will be a lot fewer of them.

[ETL]

Re: "> Russia moving in under the pretense of ridding the region of ISIS is like the Mafia moving to your neighborhood under the pretense of moving out a violent street gang, then setting up a permanent base there to do Mob “business”."

30 years ago the Mafia did move into my neighborhood and eliminated the gangs and local crime. They were very good neighbors and took care of things. The neighborhood was quite, reserved, clean and safe.

Well, goody-goody for you. What about the rest of the city and country? The millions of dead or ruined lives as a result of their drug business, the high crime rate as a result of their drug business? The jacked-up prices we pay on so many things as a result of their muscling legit business owners? And all the other dirty and evil things they do that seriously hurt the country, outside of your wonderful little neighborhood that is.

BTW: I live within about 10 blocks from where many of your heroes now lie buried: St John Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens (New York).

Among those there are:

Salvatore Maranzano (1886-1931)
Salvatore "Lucky Luciano" Lucania (1897-1962)
Carlo Gambino (1902-1976)
Vito Genovese (1897-1969)
Carmine Galante (1910-1979)
John Gotti (1940-2002)
Giuseppe Profaci (1897-1962)
Roy Albert DeMeo (1942-1983)
Joe Colombo (1923-1978)
Paul "Paulie" Vario (1914-1988)
Philip "Rusty" Rastelli (1918-1991)
Carmine Fatico (1910-1991)
Neill "The Hat" Dellacroce (1914-1985)
Frank "Funzi" Tieri (1904-1981)
James "Jimmy Nap" Napoli (1911-1992)