Category Archives: Bush

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

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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

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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.

Image courtesy the Economist.

Andrew Sullivan Forgets How He ALSO Once Policed Uniformity. Iraq, Andrew?

America, Argument, Bush, Conflict, Constitution, Free Speech, Iraq

What Andrew Sullivan, a fine essayist, says in this one paragraph of his latest piece, “Is There Still Room For Debate?,” is profound. It concerns the manner in which adherence to ideology is policed in America (and it is):

In America, of course, with the First Amendment, this is impossible. But perhaps for that very reason, Americans have always been good at policing uniformity by and among themselves. The puritanical streak of shaming and stigmatizing and threatening runs deep. This is the country of extraordinary political and cultural freedom, but it is also the country of religious fanaticism, moral panics, and crusades against vice. It’s the country of The Scarlet Letter and Prohibition and the Hollywood blacklist and the Lavender Scare. The kind of stifling, suffocating, and nerve-racking atmosphere that Havel evokes is chillingly recognizable in American history and increasingly in the American present.

The new orthodoxy — what the writer Wesley Yang has described as the “successor ideology” to liberalism — seems to be rooted in what journalist Wesley Lowery calls “moral clarity.” He told Times media columnist Ben Smith this week that journalism needs to be rebuilt around that moral clarity, which means ending its attempt to see all sides of a story, when there is only one, and dropping even an attempt at objectivity (however unattainable that ideal might be). And what is the foundational belief of such moral clarity? That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start,

Funny thing, however: I well remember, early in the 2000s, how Mr. Sullivan, together with the likes of David Frum (see my “Frum’s Flim-Flam” ), scolded and almost silenced those who objected to the invasion of Iraq. Well, I was certainly exiled from polite political company, around about then.

From my “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (May 29, 2004):

Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom seem to have conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – they all grabbed the administration’s bluff and ran with it. Like the good Trotskyites many of them were, once they tasted blood, they writhed like sharks. Compounding their scent-impaired bloodhound act was their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities – they insisted our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.
Their innumerable errors and flagrant hubris did not prevent the neoconservatives from managing to marginalize their competitors on the Right: the intrepid Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative; the quixotic Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. of LewRockwell.com, and Antiwar.com. (Plus this column, of course). Unfortunately for America, there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that these prescients did not foretell well in advance.

“Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan” (2007):

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.

Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)

I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, neoconservative pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

The latest policed orthodoxy Sullivan expounds on and wishes to be able to debate openly is, “That America is systemically racist, and a white-supremacist project from the start, that, as Lowery put it in The Atlantic, ‘the justice system — in fact, the entire American experiment — was from its inception designed to perpetuate racial inequality.”

Obviously incorrect.

Another of those Big Lies guarded across the spectrum, left and right, are the lies about America’s mandate around the world, borne of its exceptionalism: The Big Lies undergirding the destruction of Iraq (supported by Republicans like Sullivan) and Libya (brought about by Democrats like Hillary Clinton).

These are typical American truisms which need shattering, too. Mr. Sullivan, in his defense, did apologize for his role in the destruction of Iraq (after the fact).

* Image courtesy John @John89325183