Category Archives: Foreign Policy

The Worst of Times

Bush, Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Jihad, Liberty, Military, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

National Journal has had an aha Moment: “The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled,” concludes the Journal’s Ronald Brownstein:

[George W. Bush’s] “mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped U.S. strength and imposed costs vastly exceeding their benefits. Overstretched and in the red, America ends the decade weaker on many international dimensions than when it began… At home,… the median income is now lower than in 2001 and the number of Americans in poverty nearly one-third higher. Most incredibly, fewer Americans are working today than in September 2001—a decadelong record of decline matched since 1900 only during the 1930s. Faith in all public and private leadership is flickering.”

No doubt, it began with Bush, who was bad to the bone.

UPDATED: John McCain Is Scum (The Biggest Bully on the Block)

Foreign Policy, John McCain, Just War, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism, War

I’ve dubbed him McMussolini, and a serial killer by proxy. John McCain, concurs Larry Auster, is simply “the worst man in America.” Adds Larry: Americans who’ve gone along with John McCain’s latest criminal endeavor, the war of choice against Libya, “share in his guilt”:

McCain has justified the war on Libya because Kaddafi “has blood on his hands”–a reference to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. But, as shown on MSNBC last night by the man substituting for Lawrence O’Donnell, McCain visited Libya in 2009 and had a friendly meeting with Kaddafi. The meeting is shown in photographs, and there is a transcript. At one point McCain expresses his support for “progress in the bilateral relationship” between Libya and the U.S.
So in 2009 McCain had put Pan Am 103 behind him, as he had no choice to do, given that the U.S. had made peace with Kaddafi following his abandonment of his WMDs programs in 2003. But in 2011, the “script” had changed (that ever-changing “script” which tells liberals who is the oppressive villain and who is the saintlike victim in any given situation), and under this new script Kaddafi was suddenly a terrible enemy again and had to be destroyed, and it was as though the 2003 peace, and the good relations Kaddafi had maintained with the U.S. since 2003, including his friendly meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Tripoli in 2006, had never existed.
I repeat that if we had destroyed Kaddafi in 1988 in retaliation for the Lockerbie bombing that would have been just and right; but we did not do that; we let it pass, for 15 years, and ultimately we made peace with Kaddafi, as a part of which he paid substantial monetary damages to the families of the victims. On the political level, the Lockerbie bombing was a closed account, and no U.S. leader had the right in 2011 to bring it up again and say that we had to punish Kaddafi over it.
During the course of his career Kaddafi has been known as a whimsical tyrant. But in our war against Libya, it is not Kaddafi, but the U.S., which has behaved with the whimsicality of a tyrant.
John McCain is the worst man in America; but to the extent that we have gone along with this criminal war we all share in his guilt

UPDATE (Aug. 29): THE BIGGEST BULLY ON THE BLOCK. Huggins wrote: “That Khaddffi needed to be eliminated is not up to debate.” By who? God=USA? In he same vain the (pale) imitation of a Huggins over in the Arab world is saying, “That Bush needed to be eliminated is not up to debate.” And he’d have a solid point. Start seeing matters from both sides, and then you’ll come back to my position: quit invading these backward and benighted regions. What we’ve done—and are doing—to them is way worse than anything these people are capable of doing to us.

UPDATED: Gadhafi A Gold Bug? Finally, A Believable Conspiracy

America, Colonialism, Conspiracy, Debt, Democracy, Economy, Foreign Policy, Government, Inflation, Middle East

Was Moammar Gadhafi promoting a gold-driven monetary revolution? Did he, somehow, contravene the American creed of cruising on credit? Is it entirely within the realm of conspiracy to posit that the war against Libya had at least something to do with taking down “a pesky, persistent Arab gold bug?”

The following is from my new column, “Gadhafi A Gold Bug? Finally, A Believable Conspiracy,” now on WND.COM:

“In 2009—in his capacity as head of the African Union—Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi had proposed that the economically crippled continent adopt the Gold Dinar. I do not know for sure if Colonel Gadhafi persevered in the plan he had hatched to ditch the dollar and adopt a ‘Gold Dinar.’ … Had a gold revolution engulfed oil-rich African and Persian-Gulf states this would have spelt trouble for the debt-strapped West.

If only symbolically, a gold revolution across Arabia and Africa would have outweighed by far the significance of a democratic revolution. …

A Gadhafi-driven gold revolution would have, however, imperiled the positions of central bankers and their political and media power-brokers. The former surreptitiously print away the fruits of the people’s labor; the latter scramble their brains so that they don’t know they are being robbed blind.” …

The complete column, “Gadhafi A Gold Bug? Finally, A Believable Conspiracy,” is now on WND.COM.

My new book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa,” is available from Amazon.

A newly formatted, splendid Kindle copy is also on sale.

If you’re interested in syndicating my weekly, WND column, kindly email me for details at ilana@ilanamercer.com. “Return to Reason“ is WorldNetDaily’s longest standing, exclusive libertarian column.

UPDATE (Aug. 28): The late Elizabeth Wright had an interesting tidbit about the twisted relationship between Muammar Gaddafi and “the foolish Europeans”:

When Libya’s cynical Muammar Gaddafi laughs at the foolish Europeans, who have encouraged the emigration of millions of Third World aliens, and offers Europe’s leaders a financial deal to keep more of the mob out of that continent, are American conservatives taking notes?
As literally tens of thousands of African refugees in boats try to reach Italy, the Libyan navy has been instrumental in keeping them out, thanks to an agreement with the Italian government. “We don’t know,” the bemused Gaddafi is quoted as saying, “if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.” And then he comes right out and says it: Your continent is turning into Africa.

UPDATE III: Merciless Revolution & Its Masterminds (‘Crimes Against Libya – Redux’)

America, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Journalism, Just War, Justice, Law, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

“The concept of a society is based on the quality of its mercy, of its sense of fair play, its sense of justice.” So Billy Hayes told his inhuman and inhumane Turkish jailers in “Midnight Express” (a film that surely represents Hollywood’s heyday).

Hayes’s (essentially Christian) protest against a merciless authority now, sadly, applies to the US (“NATO”) and its adopted surrogates around the world.

Once again the US is supervising, and/or lending imprimatur, to a French-Revolution like upheaval in a Muslim country.

(The blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution, of course, bore no philosophical resemblance to the American Revolution.) Repulsive (deeply silly) Western journalists are darting about cheering like groupies for the amorphous entity the same “tards” have termed “Rebels.” America helped kill-off the extended family of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi, who is on the lam, small children included. Now we’re whooping it up for those who want to do the same to Qaddafi.

Naturally, our enlightened “leaders” said not a word about the quality of justice former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak is receiving in another court that is masquerading as a court of law, but seeks to oblige the masses. This set-up (down to the caged defendant) also more closely resembles the French Revolutionary Tribunal, meting justice mercilessly by popular demand.

Under American auspices a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, was hung (and heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner). Even more repugnant than that hasty hanging were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein obtain here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” also had more in common with the French Revolutionary Assembly’s methods.

As Hayes said in that memorable scene, asking mercy from the merciless is “like asking a bear to sh-t in a toilet.”

UPDATE I: In answer to TL on Facebook: Would you feel you’d gotten due process sitting in a cage in court, being tried by the Muslim Brotherhood? Why the trials? Why not just begin your democracy with a pardon? I’m not the Christian; you guys are. What did i quote in the beginning of the post? If these new, Middle-East regimes are so magnificent, why not be munificent? Forgive and spend your money on building your society, not prosecuting crimes for which evidence in a court of law is impossible to muster.

UPDATE II: Compassionate Fascist: Yes, why haven’t anti-Semites like yourself (and others who bayed about the Jews having brought about an invasion of Iraq) pointed toward the Arab neoconservatives pushing lies about Libya in the media?

Fouad The Awful Ajami is not the only Arab agitating for ever more intervention.

UPDATE III (Sept. 5): “Crimes Against Libya – Redux.”