Foreign Digest: Brazil, Ukraine, Lebanon and Iraq

Brazil: The far-right President of Brazil lost narrowly to the leftwing candidate in the Brazilian presidential Elections earlier this month. A center-right candidate, such as usually nominated by Brazil’s center-right parties, would likely have fared better. The incumbent, like his political ally, Donald Trump, had minimized the Coronavirus pandemic, among other controversial policies. Ukraine: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky won the Liberty Medal, awarded by the National Constitution Center, which is located in Philadelphia. Zelensky has exhibited extraordinary leadership in defending Ukraine military against the Russian invasion, and thereby defending fellow former Soviet Republics and Satellites, and the principles of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. Under tyrannical ex-Soviet intelligence officer Vladimir Putin, the Russian Federation is trying to restore the Soviet Union. Lebanon and Iraq: Lebanon extradited a grandson of former Baathist tyrant Saddam Hussein, who is charged by Iraq with leading a massacre committed in 2014 on behalf of the Islamic State, the offshoot of the al-Qaeda Islamist terrorists. The Islamic State murdered well over a thousand Shi’ite and non-Muslim cadets and militiamen at a training facility in Iraq. Hussein’s grandson, who fled to Lebanon after the massacre, could face death by hanging, like his grandfather. Al-Qaeda was responsible for the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks on New York, Virginia and over Pennsylvania that killed nearly 3,000 people, which were the deadliest in history. I have previously posted of the alliance between the Islamist Islamic State and the “secular” Baathist regime remnants, which contradicts the argument of opponents of the Liberation of Iraq in 2003 that the Baathist Hussein regime and violent jihadists would never ally with each other, despite the all the evidence to the contrary.