Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Stupid Bitch At Foggy Bottom*

Affirmative Action, Foreign Policy, Gender, Intelligence, Media, The State, War, WMD

The display below is far more off-putting than Miley Cyrus’s hootchy hoopla. We pay for this stupid bitch to crack her whip at Foggy Bottom.*

In this State Department news conference, a reasonably intelligent, veteran newsman attempts to engage the schoolmarmish (but tartish) young spokeswoman in reasoned repartee. But he fails miserably to get a coherent reply from the low-watt bimbo (who, no doubt, hails from an Ivy League school).

And I thought Dana Perino, who came out of the Bush administration, was dumb. Affirmative action for ditzes like Dana means that press conferences look increasingly like the one you just watched.

Low-Watt Woman attempted to disguise in phony outrage her ignorance about the US’s historical use of the WMD ploy to invade other countries. She got defensive because someone dared to demonstrate that he was on to her.

* The U.S. Department of State.

UPDATE II: So Said Ban Ki- Moon (Saving Presidential Face)

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Neoconservatism, UN, War

Secretary of State John Kerry has “watched the videos — the videos that anybody can watch in the social media,” and based on “the videos,” he will likely invade Syria. Kerry admitted, in his address today, that his sources are not quite sure who’s doing what to whom in Syria, but meddle he and Obama must.

Ban Ki- moon said last week, the U.N. investigation will not determine who used these chemical weapons, only whether such weapons were used, a judgement that is already clear to the world.

The US government has no constitutional authority to police the world. The castrates in Congress ought to have a say, for what that’s worth, in the decisions of the imperial president. And as Patrick J. Buchanan put it,:

… who deputized the United States to walk the streets of the world pistol-whipping bad actors? Where does our imperial president come off drawing “red lines” and ordering nations not to cross them?

Neither the Security Council nor Congress nor NATO nor the Arab League has authorized war on Syria.

Who made Barack Obama the Wyatt Earp of the Global Village?

Moreover, where is the evidence that WMDs were used and that it had to be Assad who ordered them? Such an attack makes no sense.

Firing a few shells of gas at Syrian civilians was not going to advance Assad’s cause but, rather, was certain to bring universal condemnation on his regime and deal cards to the War Party, which wants a U.S. war on Syria as the back door to war on Iran.

Why did the United States so swiftly dismiss Assad’s offer to have U.N. inspectors – already in Damascus investigating old charges he or the rebels used poison gas – go to the site of the latest incident?

Do we not want to know the truth?

Are we fearful the facts may turn out, as did the facts on the ground in Iraq, to contradict our latest claims about WMDs? Are we afraid that it was rebel elements or rogue Syrian soldiers who fired the gas shells to stampede us into fighting this war?

UPDATE (B/27): Saving Presidential Face. The ponce-in-chief drew a red line in the sand; he ran his mouth off, as an anti-interventionist on CNN suggested. So now the US must make even more of a mess of Syria, if that’s possible, so as to save presidential face.

UPDATE II: “In an amazing and unsettling coincidence,” quips my former colleague Vox Day, “it seems the recent massacre in Syria, which we are supposed to believe was committed by the Assad regime just as it had taken control of the civil war …” (The rest of the sentence is not clear to me.)

What’s interesting is that Assad might have been winning, which means a heavy-handed calm might have been restored to that country soon.

A Made-In-America Generalissimo For Egypt

Foreign Policy, History, Islam, Middle East, Military

There’s a surprise. President Mohamed Morsi’s replacement is Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who was trained in a “prestigious and historic college in Pennsylvania”: “the U.S. Army War College, in 2006.”

The Daily Beast (whose website’s front-page is festooned with enormous icons and very little text) has an in-depth (and thankfully wordy) expose on Egypt’s new strongman, the “’American trained’ general.”

From “The Quiet General: What Does Egypt’s Ruler Want?”

… After Morsi’s election last summer, the new president moved quickly to change the dinosaurs of the Army. Outsiders marveled at the seeming lack of resistance from the high command, without realizing that this was a generational change—a revolution within the military itself, led by al-Sisi. Morsi appointed al-Sisi the new defense minister, seemingly believing that neither he nor the other generals would turn on him as long as he respected their economic privileges.

Whatever the scope of his original goals, al-Sisi reportedly started stealthily to maneuver himself into a much more ambitious position late last year. As Morsi started claiming more dictatorial powers, excluding rivals from his team, and declaring himself immune to rulings by the courts, bloody riots broke out. The country, once more, seemed to be spiraling toward chaos.

Even as security forces were called on to defend the increasingly unpopular regime, al-Sisi began to behave in public as a player independent of the Morsi government. The general called a meeting for talks among opposition groups, and military intelligence officers began to communicate secretly through intermediaries with those who wanted to force Morsi out of office, according to anti-Morsi sources.

In May, old-guard elites, including intellectuals and journalists, met with al-Sisi at a military event and encouraged him to act. “Don’t rush,” he said, in a way that suggested, according to one of those present, “all in good time.” …

MORE.

Miss Mubarak Yet?

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

Sadly, and as this writer wrote on October 18, 2011, when Mohamed Husni Mubarak was ousted, the Egyptian Christian Coptic community lost a protector.

Yes, how is the Lotus Revolution working out? That was how the West had dubbed the mess in Egypt. With few exceptions, the American media slobbered mightily over the revolution in Egypt.

So, you had the Beltway libertarians joining Anderson Cooper (CNN), Neil Cavuto (Fox News), and Christiane Amanpour (ABC) in spirit at Cairo’s Tahrir Square to celebrate Egypt’s democratic spring; you had America’s female journos rushing to the mainly macho scene to show solidarity with the generic freedom fighters, who, it turned out, doubled up as common-or-garden gropers and rapists.

At the time, this writer wrote about the impossibility of a happy ending “in a country that has become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s.” I added that, “Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood.” Unjustly, but probably quite usefully.

“This is about freedom,” said the immensely silly Lara Logan before the freedom fighters piled up on top of her.

Indeed.

In touting the sea-change underway in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, our moron media interviewed 0.1% of the country’s population, the intelligentsia, to extrapolate to the majority. And there was also the a central stupidity, so prevalent in the US, whereby all human beings are said to be the same under the skin, with an equal “civilizing potential.”