Category Archives: Foreign Policy

To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question

America, Foreign Policy, Islam, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism

“To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question” is my new weekly column, now up on RT (the reason for the late posting was explained here). Here is an excerpt:

“It’s okay to kill ’em, but it’s not okay to pee on them once they’re dead.

This sums up the piss-poor discussion over the LiveLeak clips of “four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters.” According the New York Times, the videos, “posted on public video-sharing Web sites including YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday,” January 11.

The urinators “are members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.” They kicked off the wee odyssey in the northern part of Helmand Province.

Quick to distinguish themselves were the pro-pee pundits. For a ghastly moment, I was back in 2002, watching the anchorwomen of Fox News countdown to obliterating Iraq. How like watching bitches in heat that experience was!

The force of the to-pee-or-not-to-pee position is just up Beavis and Butthead’s philosophical alley. The repartee of the two animated MTV characters, the products of Mike Judge’s genius (think “Idiocracy”), would go something like this:

Butthead: “Beavis, check this out. What’s better; to have a dude waste you or whiz on you, uh huh huh?” (Sound effects are here.)

Beavis: “Yeah, yeah, I’ll take the whiz, Butthead, gimme the whiz, yeah, yeah.” (More grunting.)

As the Daily Mail noted, the dead Afghans may have been civilians or insurgents, we simply do not know. Whichever is the case, they would have, I wager, welcomed the kind of options even Beavis and Butthead are capable of entertaining.

For the truth about the people we are pissing on and pissing off in Afghanistan is quite simple. America’s indisputably brave soldiers have been ordered to, at once, woo and war against a primitive Pashtun population. These Pashtuns disdain the central government we desperately want them to obey. So it goes: We help local groups believed to be patriotic, but, at the same time, end up establishing an authoritarian protectorate they despise. …

The complete column is “To Pee Or Not To Pee is Not the Question”. Read it on RT. Do “Like” it on Facebook and Retweet it to Twitter.

Andy Sullivan’s Struggle

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

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 subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”

A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last 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.

UPDATED: The Vexing Case of the Vanishing Iranian Scientists

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Iran, Israel, Middle East

I fully expect to hear former CIA operative Michael Scheuer on Judge Napolitano’s Freedom Watch tonight. I expect Scheuer to implicate the Israeli Mossad in the killing of an Iranian nuclear chemist by motorbike assassins. For once, I expect I to agree almost completely with what Scheuer will posit on the show (if Nap’s producers have been quick on their feet, as I expect they have).

If Israel has indeed been eliminating Iran’s intellectual arsenal, it may be acting in bad faith, in seriously bad faith. It knows that the US has zero credibility with the Arab world. No surprise there. America’s lack of credibility in the Middle East is well deserved. Israel knows full well that if Hillary Rodham Clinton, “the gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department,” denies doing the deed, as Clinton has, no one will believe the woman who cackled, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” when she was informed of Col. Muammar Gadhafi’s execution by her proxies.

If Israel had indeed “recruited Iranian operatives on the ground,” as it is alleged to have done, to carry out these precision killings, Bibi’s government has placed the Obama administration in a very dodgy position.

UPDATE: I stopped listening after a while; I have an allergy to truth deniers such as Erika Payne. I think the story was not covered on Freedom Watch. Perhaps tomorrow.

Everything You Need to Know About Perry But Were Afraid to Ask

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iraq, John McCain, War

As you know, Iraq is imploding, as it has been since the US took out the glue that held it together by hook or by crook: Saddam Hussein.

Seventy five percent of Americans have, belatedly and at long last, realized that we have to leave that godforsaken place. Presidential candidate Rick Perry obviously counts himself in the minority when he promised to “send troops back into Iraq. …”

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now?
PERRY: I — I think we start talking with the Iraqi individuals there. The idea that we allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country, with all of the treasure, both in blood and money, that we have spent in Iraq, because this president wants to kowtow to his liberal, leftist base and move out those men and women. He could have renegotiated that timeframe.
I think it is a huge error for us. We’re going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in at literally the speed of light. They’re going to move back in, and all of the work that we’ve done, every young man that has lost his life in that country will have been for nothing because we’ve got a president that does not understand what’s going on in that region.

As informed is John McCain, who has called for the deployment of a “residual force” to Iraq.

How about Meghaan McCain? She qualifies as a “residual” spent force.