Category Archives: Foreign Policy

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

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UPDATED: Robert Gates Aka ‘Yoda’ Aka Yaddah-Yaddah, Blah, Blah, Blah …

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans, War

Let’s see where on the continuum of stupidity are Republicans situated with respect to the recent revelations of former defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

Eighty two percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan. Like most Americans, B. Hussein Obama, hardly a peacemaker, questioned the mission in that G-d-forsaken hellhole of a country, and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself a long-term commitment to that theatre of war.

So far, it sounds good to this writer—who has approved of Obama a total of perhaps twice.

What’s Gates, “whose nickname in the Obama White House was Yoda,” on about?

Yoda, Yaddah-Yaddah, Blah, Blah, Blah.

UPDATED (1/13): I heard that Gates cried himself to sleep over the (wasted) lives he was sending to battle. Could he too have had misgivings about the mission?

* NPR Interview.
* WSJ Gates Archive.

Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi

Democrats, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, History, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Terrorism

“Left And Right Bamboozling You On Benghazi” is the current column, now on WND. A excerpt:

“Us against al Qaeda”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed). …

… Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”

How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.” …

… The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth. …

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Where Have All The Graveyards Gone? Down The Memory Hole Everyone…

Foreign Policy, Military, Propaganda, War

First they love them, then they loathe them. After a while, as memory fades, the love-loathe tug-of-war is repeated, for that is the relationship Americans have to the wars prosecuted perennially by their revered politicians, pundits and special interests.

Suckers are suckered into war, again and again, implies Lawrence Wittner, Professor of History emeritus, at SUNY Albany:

… it is also true that much of the American public is very gullible and, at least initially, quite ready to rally ’round the flag. Certainly, many Americans are very nationalistic and resonate to super-patriotic appeals. …

…The responses of Americans to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars provide telling examples. In 2003, according to opinion polls, 72 percent of Americans thought going to war in Iraq was the right decision. By early 2013, support for that decision had declined to 41 percent. Similarly, in October 2001, when U.S. military action began in Afghanistan, it was backed by 90 percent of the American public. By December 2013, public approval of the Afghanistan war had dropped to only 17 percent.

In fact, this collapse of public support for once-popular wars is a long-term phenomenon. Although World War I preceded public opinion polling, observers reported considerable enthusiasm for U.S. entry into that conflict in April 1917. But, after the war, the enthusiasm melted away. In 1937, when pollsters asked Americans whether the United States should participate in another war like the World War, 95 percent of the respondents said “No.”

And so it went. When President Truman dispatched U.S. troops to Korea in June 1950, 78 percent of Americans polled expressed their approval. By February 1952, according to polls, 50 percent of Americans believed that U.S. entry into the Korean War had been a mistake. The same phenomenon occurred in connection with the Vietnam War. In August 1965, when Americans were asked if the U.S. government had made “a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam,” 61 percent of them said “No.” But by August 1968, support for the war had fallen to 35 percent, and by May 1971 it had dropped to 28 percent.

“When Will They Ever Learn?” implores Wittner.

Performed by Peter, Paul and Mary, here is the song from which that neat line comes:

The relevance of this to the news item du jour ? Whether he knows it or not, Robert M. Gates, the Former Defense Secretary, is all about increasing his sphere of interest: War.