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“We saw his body while washing it. There was a scar on his neck as if he had been hanged with a clothesline. Both of his eyes had burst. Blood was coming from his eyes. His nose was completely broken and filled with cotton. There was such a large swelling and bruise on his chest it looked as if a tree had been stuck there. His upper lip was almost as big as a palm. His right foot was stitched.” — Hikmet Yılmaz, elder brother of Ferhan Yılmaz, evidently tortured to death in Silivri prison on April 10, 2022.

Arabs point out that one of Biden’s biggest mistakes was that he took America’s Arab allies for granted while embarking on a policy of appeasement towards Iran’s mullahs.

“The behavior of the Obama and Biden administrations regarding Iran and Afghanistan served as a wake-up call for the countries of the region.” — Ali Hamadeh, Lebanese Journalist, Annahar, July 20, 2022.

I guess by now we all know that Saudi Arabia will not raise its production capacity beyond 13 million barrels a day by 2027 after the Kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made it clear in his address during the regional summit this month that was attended by US President Joe Biden.

Biden’s Trip Shows Why Washington Is Still Getting the Region Wrong

U.S. President Joe Biden’s trip to the Middle East ended not with a bang but a whimper. The rewards for his fist bump with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, proved paltry. Saudi Arabia did not commit to increasing oil production. No dissidents were released. Human rights only came up when MBS dismissed criticism of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, which was carried out under his orders, by pointing to American silence over Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist who was killed in May in the West Bank by the Israeli military. Saudi Arabia did not announce major moves toward normalization with Israel, and no new security alliance emerged.

Nasrallah said that Hezbollah has the ability to prevent Israel or companies from extracting gas from the Karish gas field.

All of Israel is within the range of Hezbollah’s missiles, Lebanese Hezbollah terror leader Hassan Nasrallah said in an interview published Monday night.

In the weeks preceding the visit of U.S. President Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia for the July 16, 2022 Jeddah Security and Development Summit, Arab and international media published numerous reports claiming that one of the main topics slated to be discussed at the summit – attended by Biden and the leaders of the nine Arab countries – was the establishment of a regional military alliance against Iran. According to the reports, this alliance was to include Israel alongside the moderate Arab countries, among them Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, and Jordan. Many were referring to this initiative as the establishment of a “regional NATO.”[1] Remarks by Jordan’s King Abdullah II in a June 24 interview with an American channel, that he would be the first to join a regional NATO, intensified the debate around this issue even further, and the Arab and international press published numerous items about it.

The Islamic Republic of Iran did not murder just one American journalist… in 1983, Iran murdered 241 American servicemen in the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

To top it off, then in 2018, Iran was ordered by a US federal court to pay billions of dollars in compensation to relatives of victims in the 9/11 attacks that murdered 3,000 people on US soil.

Russian, Iranian presidents aim to prevent Turkey from a new offensive in northern Syria.

The leaders of Russia, Turkey and Iran are gathering in Tehran, with Ankara’s threat of a new incursion into northern Syria likely to top the agenda. While Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has both domestic and strategic reasons for the move, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi want to maintain the status quo in Syria, where both their countries have expended significant resources to prop up the Assad regime. Russia’s war on Ukraine will also feature prominently at the trilateral summit. Iran has offered to provide Moscow with drones and Putin and Erdogan are reportedly set to discuss restarting Ukrainian grain exports in the Black Sea.

Forget retrenchment: Strategic competition and boosting security cooperation, particularly to counter Iran, will keep Washington focused on the region.