printSo asks Pat Buchanan in another thoughtful column, “Distant Drums At Sarah’s Party.” Here are excerpts:
“U.S. troops have crossed into Pakistan to attack Taliban and al-Qaida units in the privileged sanctuary of the tribal areas just across the border from Afghanistan. Have we just thrown a rock into the biggest hornet’s nest on earth?
How will the Pakistani government and people react to this U.S. incursion into their country to fight a war their own army has been reluctant to wage? How will the tribal peoples react? Will the weak new democratic regime, united only in its hatred of deposed President Musharraf, fall?
What is the future of this Islamic nation of 170 million, with its five-dozen nuclear weapons, that was once America’s great ally in South Asia, but is now seething with anti-Americanism?
In Afghanistan, the Taliban move closer to the capital Kabul as hardly a day goes by without U.S. armed forces being charged with the accidental killing of Afghan women and children. Is this even a winnable war, after seven years of fighting? And, if so, at what cost?
While the convention hears claims of victory in Iraq and an early return of U.S. troops, there are reports the Nouri al-Maliki regime, in collusion with Iran, wants the Americans out to settle accounts with the U.S.-sponsored Sunni militias and the Kurds over who rules in Baghdad and Kirkut.
Is the end of America’s long and costly war in Mesopotamia to be an Iraq incorporated into a Shia crescent led by Tehran?
Arnaud de Borchgrave reports that Israel, having supplied Mikheil Saakashvili’s army with weapons and training prior to his invasion of South Ossetia, had hoped to use Georgian airfields to fly strikes against Iran. The Russians are said to be furious and considering new military aid to Syria.
Now one reads of Dutch intelligence agents, who had infiltrated Iran’s nuclear program to sabotage it, being withdrawn, as the Dutch believe a U.S. strike on Iran may be imminent.
Vice President Cheney is in Tbilisi promising $1 billion in new aid, as Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.
In Moscow, President Medvedev and his foreign minister are talking of a Russian sphere of influence like the one the United States has demanded for two centuries with its Monroe Doctrine – a sphere from which all foreign military blocs and foreign troops are to be excluded.
This is a direct challenge to administration and neocon plans to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. John McCain may declare, “We are all Georgians now!” – but, are Americans, or Europeans, truly willing to go to war with a nuclear-armed Russia to keep Josef Stalin’s birthplace under a regime led by an erratic hothead who launched what may be the dumbest war in history, which he lost within 24 hours?”
I can understand the wish of the Russians to have allies on their borders, and in their region of the world, but I don’t think invading neighboring nations improves the chances of their being good allies if it is against the will of the majority of the invaded people; consider the previous failure and Eastern European backlash against Soviet domination of Eastern Europe; and I don’t think that the “Monroe Doctrine” was intended to promote the idea of the United States, or any other strong nation, to invade and occupy neighboring nations, even if perhaps sometimes wrongly used for that purpose, but on the contrary, to resist powerful foreign influence over weaker neighboring nations.
There were people handing pornography at my daughter’s school’s Back To School Night last week in all 3 major languages: English, Korean, and Spanish. This included soft core (Obama) and hard core (McCain) smut. I asked the McCainiac that if he wanted to put “America first”, why was McCain and Bush sending money to Georgia Tbilisi rather than Georgia Atlanta. He said that the US always sends money overseas – and I said “Yes, but it is MY money, not McCain’s own personal money” Of course, the Republicans believe that ONLY Democrats spend money! Sadly, Buchanan may be right that we are heading to trigger World War I in the Caucasus instead of the Balkans this time. // To Tom – concerning the Monroe Doctrine: Vladimir Putin is merely applying the Roosevelt corollary:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Corollary – to Georgia. // P.S. Last week’s entire Republican convention is summed up in this wonderul Youtube excerpt from Duck Soup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAiQuj7tEGA also known as “We’re going to War”.
“Prime Minister Putin of Russia is asking why, if this aid is humanitarian, it is being brought into the Black Sea in U.S. warships.”
That’s because Putin is capitalizing on the ignorance of his listeners, and of people like Buchanan, who don’t realize that US warships are by far the world’s most effective means of delivering humanitarian aid–for example, US Navy aircraft carriers can produce thousands of gallaons of fresh water daily, store massive caches of food and medicine, and are loaded with fit and superbly trained men capable of delivering it. The same idiotic thing was said when the Navy delivered assistance to the tsnami survivors in India, by people too dumb to realize that warships aren’t just loaded with weapons, but are floating cities designed to sustain huge numbers of ravenous people at sea for months on end. Putin knows this, but he also knows that men like Buchanan will be willing to pass along any dark hints and insinuations to their readers, and sow suspicion of US motives.
It looks like the Idiots In Charge are maneuvering us towards a World War that we are in no position to win. The Russians ought to know, having just been through it themselves — right about the time the nation crumbles in financial ruin, the heat will be turned up. The chess pieces are being put in place, and we have been suckered into the gambit by our own delusional hubris. We will have to fight a world war or walk away from the objectives we pursued at such a high price.
I hope we have the wisdom to just walk away. I doubt whether that wisdom exists in our political sphere, on either the socialist or the fascist side.
The options for an individual to escape with his skin are narrowing quickly. Be ready to jump, if you have to. Where to, though?
–John Danforth–