Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Diplomatic Immunity From The Dangers Of Occupation

Barack Obama, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government, Individual Rights, Islam, Just War, Terrorism, War

Our government’s only legitimate function is to protect American lives, one by precious one. Yet under “W,” ordinary Americans were regularly beheaded in the theaters of war Genghis Bush launched. None of their representatives stateside bargained for their lives or staged showy Congressional hearings to probe their forsaken security.

“President Bush sat bone idle, never lifting a bloodstained finger to haggle for his countrymen.”

The helpless faces in televised pleas of Americans such as Private First Class Keith Maupin, Paul Johnson, Nick Berg, and American engineers Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong; the depraved indifference of my countrymen to their plight—these haunted me throughout 2003-2004, documented in columns such as “AFTER THEIR HEADS ROLL, AMERICA’S DEAD REMAIN FACELESS.”

Now, Republicans are attempting to saddle a war president by any other name—Barack Obama—with the blame for the “resurgence” of terrorism in America’s occupied territories, when the same anger was evinced by the occupied under Bush, and it will persist under future Republican leaders.

One voice of sanity on foreign policy is “departing Congressman” Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. Kucinich, who will be sorely missed, made a cameo today during the “House Hearing on Attack on U.S. Consulate in Libya,” where he asked about al-Qaida’s presence in Libya. Lt. Col. Andrew Wood said: ‘Their presence grows everyday. They are certainly more established than we are.'”

More from Kucinich via Reason:

Departing Congressman Dennis Kucinich said at today’s hearing on security failures in Benghazi that rather than engaging in partisanship Congress ought to look at its role in failing to curb American interventionism as what led to the terrorist attack in Benghazi on 9/11, saying extremists exist and are more powerful in Libya because the U.S. “spurred a civil war” there, “absent constitutional authority, might I add.”
Kucinich blamed “decades of intervention” on the rise of extremists in the region and asked why no lessons from Iraq were drawn on Libya.
“Interventions do not make us safer,” Kucinich said, “they are themselves a threat to America,” before asking how much more Al-Qaeda there is in Libya now than before the U.S. intervention (the only answer he got was that they have a bigger presence in Libya than the U.S. does.” He also asked how many surface-to-air missiles were still missing since the U.S. intervention. Between 10 and 20,000, according to one of the witnesses.

Talking Turkey

Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, The West

Ever wonder what’s up between Turkey and Syria? Mainstream media is unlikely to talk turkey about the developing conflict between the two countries on their shared border.

Robert Fisk of The Independent fills in the blanks:

…Bashar al-Assad is a despot, his regime is awful … BUT. When it comes to international law, to moral compromise, to sheer hypocrisy, the Western powers take the biscuit. La Clinton raves on about Syrian depravity when Syrian shells slaughter a Turkish woman and her four children – which they did – but gives succour to the gunmen who torture and kill and suicide-bomb the regime’s supporters inside Syria.
…And another story that isn’t being told. Syrian shells exploding in Turkey are largely landing in the province of Hatay (Akçakale is further east), but what is not being reported is that until 1939, Hatay was part of Syria – and that Syria still claims this coastal province as Syrian territory. The real story – since it involves Europe and Hitler – should be told. For hundreds of years, this territory was Syrian. Alexandretta (now Iskenderun) was the finest port in Syria. But as the power of Nazi Germany grew in the 1930s, the French, who then held the League of Nations mandate for Syria, decided to hand the whole place over to the Turks – in the hope that Turkey would join the Allied side against Hitler.
A fraudulent referendum was held and the mass of Arabs in the province – tens of thousands of them Alawites, who form the backbone of Assad’s regime today – fled south, along with an almost equal number of Armenians who had survived the 1915 Turkish genocide. Today, the children and grandchildren of those Armenians tacitly support the Assad regime.

MORE.

UPDATED: Benghazigate And The True Tools of Deception

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Media, Middle East

Intimately familiar with the way information flows in and from the White House, Pat Buchanan relates that the day after the Benghazi attack, the intelligence community would have known this was terrorism. Yet 2 days after that, Jay Carney was talking a spontaneous attack. Who was it, asks Buchanan, who briefed Carney, and told him to go out and lie? In the White house Buchanan worked in it would have been the chief of staff and the NSC (National Security Council) adviser.

Next, 4 days on, out Susan Rice was trotted , she too a (willing) tool (in more than one ways) of deception. The FBI never went in to investigate the scene of the attack because Benghazi is an “utterly unsafe” city, although fifteen days following the attack, Rice promised the FBI was in there. That never happened, says Buchanan.

There is nothing new or particular galling, on the political scale of ethic, about what Buchanan has outlined.

The bigger scandal in all this is the “cover up of the cover up.” And the real tools (of deception) are the media Mafia, focusing as they are on poor Mitt Romney’s assorted hiccups, so as to cover for their Godfather Obama.

UPDATE (10/2): The consulate in Benghazi was, of course, a typical US government operation. There was full-on access to anyone who wanted it after the attack as before it. Arwa Damon of CNN tells of a scene unsecured after the attack, locals coming and going, rummaging through the compound and taking mementos (paid for by US taxpayers). Would that this manifest hostility to American presence in Libya deterred future diplomats from “duty,” but it won’t. What the fiasco in Benghazi means is not that America will divest from democratizing the word, but, rather, that the American taxpayer will fork out for fortresses, for Green Zones everywhere.

Andy Sullivan: Struggling to Stay Relevant

Barack Obama, Democrats, Economy, Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Pseudo-intellectualism, War

Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively titled, “President Obama: The Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.”

Like any liberal who doesn’t have to worry about a pay cheque, crunchy con Sullivan is still convinced that Barack Obama can “hold his staff out” over stormy waters, and divide the sea so that the people may pass through “with a wall of water on either side.”

Obama’s “tally of achievements is formidable,” declares Sullivan, who then proceeds to praise every thing BHO has done to cripple the American economy (including extending or entrenching US hegemony abroad):

…the near-obliteration of al Qaeda, democratic revolutions in the Arab world that George Bush could only have dreamed of, the re-regulation of Wall Street after the 2008 crash, stimulus investments in infrastructure and clean energy, powerful new fuel-emission standards along with a record level of independence from foreign oil, and, most critically, health-care reform. Now look at what Obama’s second term could do for all of these achievements. It would mean, first of all, that universal health care in America—government subsidies to people so they can afford to purchase private insurance and a ban on denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions—becomes irreversible. Yes, many details of the law would benefit from reform, experimentation, and fixes—especially if Republicans help to make them. But it’s still the biggest change in American health care since the passage of Medicare in 1965.

Sullivan’s piece tells you about the degree to which neocon and left-liberal political “thinking” have converged.

On war too.

Crunchy con Sullivan’s anti-war followers should not forget what was documented in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan“:

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, 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.