Category Archives: Bush

UPDATED (3/4): NEW COLUMN: Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure

America, Bush, Europe, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Iraq, Morality, UN, War

NEW COLUMN, “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM , The Unz Review and The New American, my new home. MY FAVORITE LINE IN IT has been retained only for the Unz Review:

If Putin belongs in the Hague’s International Court of Justice, so do Genghis Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and their countless culprits. Colin Powell is already in the Hadean afterworld for his role in the invasion of Iraq.

Excerpt:

… There is something utterly obscene—as rudely shocking as the front-row viewing of the “Shock and Awe” visited on Iraq—about watching the displacement of people and the destruction of innocent lives in real time, on television, without lending a hand.

And I don’t mean a military hand.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky—who is the toast of the town simply because he did not skedaddle from the mess in which he mired his country—to this ass with ears goes a special award for recklessness. Not fleeing a situation largely of your making does not a hero make. Curiously, we Americans have offered Zelensky the coward’s way out, when we ought to have forced him to sit down with his foes.

Granted, America, as British paleolibertarian Sean Gabb quips, is “some kind of zombie apocalypse plus nuclear weapons that might not yet be past its use-by date. It has not won a war against an equally-matched power since it defeated itself in 1865.” However degraded, the onus is on the USA, the only so-called responsible superpower, to calmly negotiate with Putin on behalf of his innocent, weak victims. Instead, world leaders watch the suffering on TV and bemoan the fate of the sufferers. Both sides are a disgrace and a failure to have brought us thus far. Ditto NATO and the EU.

This is precisely what President Joe Biden should be shamed into doing now: talk to Putin; thrash out a cease-fire, ASAP; haggle for the lives of the population under siege because led by imbeciles. …

… Ukrainians, for their part, are tireless and wily lobbyists in Washington, way more cunning than their American counterparts. To all intents and purposes, Zelensky, head of the corrupt American client statelet that is Ukraine, had tethered the fate of his country to America, NATO and the EU, constantly trying to bend these foolish and feckless entities to his will; too much of a clown to look out for his countrymen’s safety, rather than his own popularity in the West.  …

… Having sat out the ‘67 and ‘73 wars in Israeli bomb shelters—I still remember what old-school diplomacy and statesmanship—realpolitik—sounded like. Diplomatic tools like substantive talks, a cease-fire, and an agreement between warring sides, however, have been absent from the repertoire of the two tools, Presidents Biden and Zelensky. …

… READ Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American, my new home.

UPDATE (3/4): follyofwar says on the Unz Review:

Ms. Mercer is a top-notch intellect and excellent writer. I am ashamed of my country and disgusted by the Euro weenies who refuse to extricate themselves from America’s “Iron Heel,” (a novel by Jack London).  

HERE.

Thanks, Martin on Twitter:

NEW COLUMN: Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia

Barack Obama, Bush, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Military, Nationalism, Neoconservatism

NEW COLUMN is “Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia.” It is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, The New American, and Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

… Although Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, who understood and feared nuclear weapons, thought they had ended the frightful Cold War, by the early 1990s, Bill Clinton had ignited it. It all began … with President Clinton expanding NATO and bombing a Russian ally, Serbia. Although Bush Sr. had cast Russia as a defeated power beholden to America; Clinton amplified this characterization. Russia to these leaders had become a “vassal state.” Bush II, for his part, had flooded Russia with waves of “Democracy promoting” agitators. In a word, it is the US that has meddled in Russia in an attempt to make it over in its image.

So, why is the new cold war so much more dangerous? As Stephen Cohen had explained in his voluminous work on the topic, we have been raised without nuclear war awareness. In swallowing up countries and pitting them up against Russia, NATO, moreover, has been has moved the epicenter of any putative conflict to Russian borders. Whereas proxy wars used to take pace in Africa (Angola, for instance); now these are ongoing closer to Russia—in Syria, Georgia and Ukraine, increasing the likelihood of conflict.

After the Cuban missile crisis, cooperation ensued, as the crisis awoke both sides to the dangers of a war to end all wars. Since then, however, nearly all cooperation with Russia has stopped. Talks have stalled, treaties have not been revived as they ought to have—although President Joe Biden’s administration must be commended for renewing the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the US and Russia, lapsed under Trump. And both sides are developing “usable nuclear weapons,” which is Orwellian speak for working to make nuclear war more user-friendly, as though that were morally acceptable or practically possible.

Scurrilous catalysts of a Cold War redux are the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Department and the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, all proven to be malign, politicized forces in recent conflicts and wars, engaged in expedient myth-making. They cooked up the Russiagate libel, and actively crafted the “myth propagated by elements of the US intelligence community that Putin is attempting to subvert American democracy.”  “The reverence with which some liberals greet pronouncements made by today’s intelligence chiefs is in sharp contrast to their past critiques of the malevolence and misinformation spread by” the intelligence community, notes Irish historian Geoffrey Roberts.

A read through the fevered briefs produced by America’s once-venerable intelligence agencies reveals that these are artsy concoctions scribbled by girls like Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, whose personal correspondence is a portmanteau of hysteria and hate: “F–k the cheating motherf—ing Russians. Bastards. I hate them.”

A not-so-silent Greek chorus are America’s media, ever tuned-out, turned-on and hot for war. Having shed all fidelity to fact and truth, media, the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post, inch Russia and America ever closer to conflict by constantly lying about and libeling Russia. Rumors for which no evidence can possibly be adduced are regularly recounted as facts in newsrooms that now function as rumor mills. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN is “Neocons, Neolibs And NATO Inch Us Closer To Nuclear War With Russia.” It is currently on WND.COM, The Unz Review, The New American, and Townhall.com.

 

 

 

UPDATE II: Genghis Bush Destroyed A Country Or Two, Now Turns On His Countrymen

America, Bush, Homeland Security, Iraq, Middle East, Nationalism, Nationhood, Neoconservatism

The Shrub, as George Bush was called during the heyday of his destructive powers—and having destroyed a country or two and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan nationals—now turns on Americans. Proper:

… we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them. …

In the words of Andrew Breitbart: “Fuck you. War.”

Reading for Patriots: “January 6 Committee: Menstrual America Vs. MAGA America,” or, “Trumpeting The Hardcore Libertarian Take On Jan. 6 Capitol Incident.”

UPDATE I: Genghis Bush (corrected the title) was talking about the January 6 Trumpsters or “the sixers,” as Musil Ken calls them. Not in a million years would I have imagined that any America Firster would misconstrue this evil man to be defending Robert E. Lee and the like. Our side is hopeless if someone thought thus.

UPDATE II: For heaven’s sake; when Genghis Bush laments the destruction of  “national symbols,” he doesn’t mean confederate or other historic monuments; he means The State; Uncle Sam; The Ultimate Predator.

* Image courtesy of “The Spoof.”

That’s Why We Elected Him: TRUMP Was OUR President, Not The World’s Tool

Bush, China, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Foreign Policy, Middle East

Coming from the liberal Economist, an accounting of Donald Trump’s foreign policy achievements carries more force. While to me, this is a list of Trump’s achievements, to the Economist, it is a list of the president’s failures. (Inquiring minds should always read the reasonable opposition, which means sources outside America.)

Before cussing him out, they write: “Donald Trump has given American foreign policy a bracing bolt.

The area where Mr Trump has shaken things up most is in relations with China, the single biggest issue in American foreign policy. Such a rattling may have been coming anyway because of China’s growing aggression. But Trumpists believe the president’s new realism marked a decisive break with the Democrats’ tendency to favour process over outcomes.

According to this narrative, Americans naively thought that opening up to China and letting it join the WTO in 2001 would in time encourage it to become more liberal and democratic. The opposite has happened. China exploited the West’s openness in order to steal its intellectual property. Under its increasingly authoritarian president, Xi Jinping, it has become a fiercer economic rival, as well as a more powerful one. It has continued to build up its armed forces and to bully its neighbours. It was left to Mr Trump to challenge the idea that this was unstoppable.

Toughness towards China has become a rare area of bipartisan consensus in America. The administration has started to shift attitudes elsewhere, too. It successfully urged Britain to shun Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, for its 5G telecoms network. More allies are expected to fall into line. Mr Pottinger says that Europe is “18-24 months behind us, but moving at the same speed and direction”. In Asia, America’s embrace of the phrase “a free and open Indo-Pacific”, expressing resistance to Chinese hegemony, has found favour from India to Indonesia, much to China’s annoyance. …

COVID-related:

Mr Trump’s response to covid-19 has shown this approach at its worst. In the midst of a global pandemic he chose to attack and abandon the World Health Organisation, the body responsible for tackling such crises. Where the world would normally expect America to take a lead, or at least to try to, it found an administration more interested in blaming others and shunning global efforts. Something similar goes for the greater crisis beyond covid, that of climate change: a repudiation of international efforts and wilful negligence at home. Every such American retreat from the international system is seen in Beijing as a chance to advance China’s claims.

It’s the platform Trump was elected on: look after neglected and impoverished Americans. America First.

The second area of damage is Mr Trump’s sidelining of his allies, who have frequently had no prior warning of major developments such as America’s abandoning of the Kurds in Syria or its reduction of forces in Germany. America’s alliances can act as a force-multiplier, turning its quarter or so of world GDP into a coalition accounting for some 60% of the world economy, far harder for China or Russia (neither of which has a network of permanent allies) to resist. Yet Mr Trump has taken allies for granted and belittled their leaders while flattering Presidents Putin and Xi. Foreign-policy get-togethers are awash with worries over “Westlessness”.

Amazing: Our allies seem to think that the role of an American government is to work for them, instead of for the American People.

My take on the Kurds, for whom I feel enormously, is a little unusual, articulated in “Bush Betrays The Kurds” and “Masada On Mount Sinjar“: Israel was missing in action on the Yazidi’s Masada odyssey and on matters Kurd. The Kurds are Israel’s responsibility. READ.
Similarly, the Palestinian refugees should have been a regional problem, in particular, the problem of the wealthy Arab countries.