Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf died from complications of pneumonia after a long illness at his home in Tampa, where he lived in retirement after refusing to exploit his fame to enter the immoral and treasonous world of politics.
Given the fact that his death coincides with one of the great acts of pathetic stupidity of all of human history – the fiscal cliff – his decision not to contaminate his love for America with the ultimate cynicism that is politics was clearly a wise one.
“Forward” is a great slogan and everything, but the only way Obama is going to take America “forward” is to drive us off the fiscal cliff that was his bright idea to create in the first place (and see here for more because Obama set this disaster up from the very start). The fact of the matter is that it is a documented fact by one of the great journalists in American history that the idea for sequestration – i.e. the “fiscal cliff” or “taxmageddon” – came from Obama’s chief of staff Jack Lew and Rob Nabors (Obama’s White House Assistant to the President and head of the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs). The money quote:
“At 2:30 p.m. Lew and Nabors went to the Senate to meet with Reid and his chief of staff, David Krone. ‘We have an idea for the trigger,’ Lew said. ‘What’s the idea?’ Reid asked skeptically. ‘Sequestration.’ Reid bent down and put his head between his knees, almost as if he were going to throw up or was having a heart attack. He sat back up and looked at the ceiling. ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ he said, ‘my staff said to me that there is one more possible’ enforcement mechanism: sequestration. He said he told them, ‘Get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?’ Well, it could work, Lew and Nabors explained. What would the impact be? They would design it so that half the threatened cuts would be from the Defense Department. ‘I like that,’ Reid said. ‘That’s good. It doesn’t touch Medicaid or Medicare, does it?’ It actually does touch Medicare, they replied. ‘How does it touch Medicare?’ It depends, they said. There’s versions with 2 percent cuts, and there’s versions with 4 percent cuts.” (Bob Woodward, The Price Of Politics, 2012, pp. 326)
So anybody who wants to assert that sequestration originated ANYWHERE other than the Obama White House is a documented liar. Not that liberals care about being documented liars.
And that destruction of the US military will spread through the entire defense industry, with 2 million more jobs about to fall prey to his savage attack against America.
America will never rise to true might again after this blow which will be even greater than the one Schwarzkopf inflicted on the Iraq military machine. Which is why I’m glad Stormin’ Norman didn’t have to live to see the new year under the grip of the president of God damn America.
Norman Schwarzkopf was a man who was literally born to serve his nation at the ultimate moment. He grew up in Iran (his father went there to train Iran’s national police force and served as an adviser to the young Shah, Reza Pahlavi). And he had the insight to understand that his destiny was tied to that turbulent and violent region. He had his choice of commands – and many of his alternative possibilities looked better on paper at the time – but he wanted and got the U.S. Central Command – which was responsible for the Middle East.
Gen. Schwarzkopf was a man of vision: he wargamed out the EXACTscenario that in fact took place, as Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait out of lust for that small nation’s wealth and oil resources.
Because of General Schwarzkopf, America did not have to scramble; the commanding general was ready to go the moment Saddam’s thugs violated Kuwait’s borders.
People don’t remember how huge his 100 hour land war truly was. Liberals, ever wrong, predicted a blood bath as Saddam Hussein prepared for World War One-style trench warfare and promised “the mother of all battles” and his desire to inflict massive casualties on the American-led coalition. Stormin’ Norman had other plans, and delivered the military equivalent of a vicious punch right to the nose of Saddam’s military – which at that time was the fourth largest military power in the world and which was armed to the teeth with Soviet weaponry. No one short of God knows how many American and coalition lives Schwarzkopf spared due to his strategic and tactical brilliance.
Schwarzkopf’s character and courage marks a stark contrast with the leaders that mark God damn America today. And I honor this great man and celebrate his great victory back when the Late Great USA could actually win a damn war.
I can’t take away your loss and grief, Schwarzkopf family. But I can remind you that your pain ought to be accompanied by a feeling of great pride for a great man.
Sorry, women of Afghanistan. I know this will be an incredibly painful lesson as Barack Obama returns you to the state of abject slavery that George Bush delivered you from. Just remember from now on NEVER to trust Democrats; they will promise you the world only to completely abandon you the moment it becomes politically expedient for them to do so.
Status of Afghan women threatens Hillary Clinton’s legacy The secretary of State has devoted herself to the issue, but gains made may be reversed as Afghanistan’s conservatives become more powerful in the West’s wake.
By Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times
April 8, 2012, 6:05 p.m.
WASHINGTON — In the final months of her tenure as secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton is fighting a long retreat on a cause close to her heart, and to her legacy — the status of Afghan women.
Clinton embraced the cause long before the first U.S. troops landed in the country, and as secretary of State she has brought Afghan women worldwide attention, political power and unbending promises of American support.
“We will not abandon you,” she pledged.
But now, with U.S. officials laying plans to remove most troops in two years, the Afghan government and other institutions appear to be adjusting their positions on women’s rights to accommodate conservative factions. Restrictions on women have made a comeback.
“Most of women’s important achievements over the last decade are likely to be reversed,” predicted a bleak report issued last month by the Afghan Human Rights and Democracy Organization, a nonprofit in Kabul funded by Western governments and private groups.
This puts Clinton in a tough spot. Among senior U.S. officials, none is more closely associated with women’s rights: When prominent Afghan women are alarmed by developments at home, they often fire off emails to Clinton’s staff.
“She has been a very strong conscience of the world on this issue,” said Wazhma Frogh, director of the Research Institute for Women, Peace and Security in the Afghan capital, Kabul. “We have leaned on her help in the past, and we are looking to her help for our future.”
Clinton insists that the United States views women’s rights as a nonnegotiable “red line.” At a recent meeting of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council, she insisted that “any peace that is attempted to be made by excluding more than half the population is no peace at all. It is a figment that will not last…. We will not waver on this point.”
Yet administration officials also acknowledge sharp limits to what America can do. Even future U.S. funding to help women is uncertain.
Melanne Verveer, U.S. ambassador at large for women and a longtime Clinton aide, said that American officials remain influential and will do all they can.
“But this is going to be in the end an Afghan-led process,” she said. “Ultimately, it is going to be the Afghans who are in the driver’s seat. We can’t see the future. This is a work in progress — we don’t know — we hope it will be progress.”
Senior U.S. officials see Afghanistan as an intractable foreign policy mess that will only get worse as long as large numbers of U.S. troops remain in the country. Winding down the U.S. commitment has become an overriding priority.
As America’s chief diplomat, Clinton has won praise not only from liberals, but also from conservatives. Gallup polls have found she is the nation’s most admired woman for each of the last 10 years.
Clinton has signaled that she will step down as top U.S. diplomat early next year, and the fate of Afghan women may not be clear until long after her departure. Even so, a reversal on women’s rights would be a blow to Clinton’s legacy.
“People will identify her with whatever happens,” said Shamila Chaudhary, who was National Security Council advisor on Afghanistan and Pakistan until late last year and is now with the Eurasia Group research firm in Washington. “There’s a huge reputational risk in this for her.”
Clinton’s advocacy for women in Afghanistan goes back to her time in the Senate before the Sept . 11 attacks, when the world was horrified to see how the Taliban regime had marginalized women.
Clinton pushed for guaranteed seats for women in the Afghan parliament and other government bodies and has made sure that the United States has amply funded programs to support women’s health and education, businesses, legal clinics and shelters. Clinton was among the Western officials who lobbied the Afghan government to set up a women’s ministry and enact a tough law barring violence against women.
Her efforts have contributed to Afghan women’s gains. Over the last decade, women’s life expectancy there has increased from 42 to 64 years, and the number of girls in school has gone from 10,000 to 2.5 million.
But two months ago, the country’s top religious body, the Ulema Council, issued an edict that men are “fundamental” and women “secondary,” and barred women from mingling with men in schools or the workplace. Afghan President Hamid Karzai appeared to embrace the ruling, setting off an international outcry.
When Clinton called Karzai on March 8 to demand an explanation, Karzai said the ruling was only “advisory” and insisted that he stood by the Afghan Constitution’s guarantees of equality for women.
Yet the incident was widely seen as proof that Karzai and other Afghan institutions have started to position themselves for the more conservative era they see ahead.
Karzai “has a lot to lose if he can’t find a way to reach an accommodation with the Taliban,” said Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch in Kabul. “The consequences for him of moving against women’s rights are probably a lot less serious.”
Clinton’s pressure helped gain women nine seats in the High Peace Council, a body appointed to help direct the negotiations with the Taliban. But so far, Afghan women have been largely shut out of the preliminary talks, former First Lady Laura Bush, another advocate for the women’s cause, said during the meeting of the U.S.-Afghan Women’s Council.
There are other trouble signs. Dozens of mixed-gender and girls schools have been destroyed by insurgents in recent years, including 74 in 2010 alone, Amnesty International says. Prominent female politicians have been killed and others face growing threats of violence, Amnesty says.
U.S. spending for Afghan women, like other aid, has begun to decline, women’s advocates say. Although the administration is committed to long-term development aid to Afghanistan, Verveer acknowledged that decisions on such appropriations “will be a negotiation between the administration and the Congress.”
Although Clinton has remained focused on women’s rights, others in the Obama administration have concentrated most on security goals, starting with winning Taliban commitments to break off ties with Al Qaeda, say current and former U.S. officials.
If the negotiators are able to work out an agreement on security and other key issues, “the final deal won’t be held up by a disagreement over women’s rights,” Chaudhary predicted. “No way.”
You can go back to what Democrats did to Bush on Iraq to see that Democrats are 100 percent reliable – to abandon their own words and instead cut and run when their allies need them the most:
George Bush won his war in Iraq that Barack Obama demonized. Vice President Joe Biden literally tried to claim credit for Iraq, claiming, “I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Barack Obama proceeded to piss that victory away by not bothering for three years to get any kind of agreement to keep US forces in as peacekeepers whatsoever. And now we find that Barack Obama is very obviously losing his war in Afghanistan.
BEIRUT/UNITED NATIONS, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Western and Arab states voiced outrage on Sunday after Russia and China vetoed a U.N. resolution that would have backed an Arab plan urging Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to give up power, and Washington vowed harsher sanctions against Damascus.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the veto a “travesty”. It came a day after activists say Syrian forces bombarded a district of Homs, killing more than 200 people in the worst night of bloodshed of the 11-month uprising.
Russia said the resolution was biased and would have meant taking sides in a civil war. Syria is Moscow’s only big ally in the Middle East, home to a Russian naval base and customer for its arms. China’s veto appeared to follow Russia’s lead.
Washington’s U.N. ambassador Susan Rice said she was “disgusted” by Russia and China’s vetoes on Saturday, and “any further bloodshed that flows will be on their hands”.
In Syria, Barack Obama has simply failed. His cabinent-level United Nations ambassador has failed. It’s past time for people to get fired according to a man who served four UN ambassadors over eight years:
One of the reasons the American public holds unelected government officials in such low esteem is that they are never held accountable for their failures.
Presidents and cabinet officials could send a strong message of accountability if they held senior appointees responsible for their performance.
President Obama should use this weekend’s UN failure to show Americans and Arabs alike that it is unacceptable to stand idly by while some 6,500 Syrians are killed by their government. Obama should ask for U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice’s resignation and replace her with someone tougher and more effective. If she won’t voluntarily resign then she should be fired.
The case against Susan Rice has been building over the last few years.
This weekend’s embarrassing failure on a Syria resolution was the latest and last straw. Her diplomatic failures and silence have given the United States a weak representation at the United Nations.
Next month marks the anniversary of the Syrian uprising. But Rice, as she has on many issues, has ignored Syria’s growing problems for too long.
Rather than speaking out immediately when the violence started, she stayed silent.
Rather than calling for action, she did nothing.
Russia and China saw Rice’s passivity as a sign that Syrian President Assad’s removal wasn’t a priority.
By the time Rice started pressuring Security Council members to confront the growing violence and death, it was too late.
Once a draft resolution condemning Syria was introduced, Rice was too quick to negotiate changes that weakened it without insisting on a date for the Security Council to vote. Her constant agreement to changes seemed desperate. The frantic and late maneuvering left the United States at the mercy of Russia and China, who vetoed even the watered down measure.
On her post-veto media tour, however, Rice sought to blame Russia for not listening to the United States or other western governments rather than acknowledge her failed diplomatic skills – an ironic spin given that Rice and team Obama created this same new Russian resolve when they naively and dramatically called for a “re-set” to our relationship with Russia.
The “reset” Rice championed and spoke affectionately about has not only failed to deliver support for US national security policies but it has also exposed the dangers of an inexperienced team’s strategy of personal diplomacy.
This continues Rice’s pattern of failing at her own stated goals.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Susan Rice talked very openly about restoring America’s leadership at the United Nations and often derided President George W. Bush for acting without U.N. backing.
Rice cheerfully exclaimed that, unlike Bush, Barack Obama would engage in active diplomacy even with countries considered our enemies.
She was very critical of the US’s reputation at the UN and vowed to build better relationships with every country.
In her current stump speech Rice claims that her goal has been accomplished, “We’ve repaired frayed relations with countries around the world. We’ve ended needless American isolation on a wide range of issues. And as a consequence, we’ve gotten strong cooperation on things that matter most to our national security interest.”
This past weekend shows just how disastrous Rice’s strategy has been.
Rice has been silent on important issues and ineffective when she does engage. She skipped Security Council meetings when Israel needed defending and even failed to show up for the emergency session on the Gaza Flotilla incident.
Rice didn’t even show up for the first two emergency Security Council meetings on the unfolding Arab revolution last year.
Rice stayed silent when Iran was elected to the UN women’s committee, she didn’t call out Libya when it was elected to the Human Rights Council, she was absent from the Haiti crisis meeting and was a no-show for the last open meeting scheduled before the planned U.N. vote to recognize Palestinian statehood. When she actually shows up, she is a miserable failure.
Take the crucial issue of Iran. Rice spent the last several years undermining and grumbling about the Bush administration’s increasingly tough measures but has only been able to pass one resolution of her own – compared with the Bush team’s five.
Rice’s one and only Iran resolution was 22 months ago. And it passed with just 12 votes of support – the least support we have ever seen for a Security Council sanctions resolution on Iran. In fact, Susan Rice lost more support with her one resolution than the previous five Iran resolutions combined.
In another example, Rice secretly negotiated with the Arabs on acceptable language for a possible U.N. resolution to condemn Israel’s settlement activity.
Rice’s engagement sent a strong message that making a new policy, rather than encouraging the two sides to negotiate directly, may not garner an automatic U.S. veto.
In February of 2011, the US abruptly changed tactics on the Arabs and vetoed a UN resolution on Israeli settlements.
The Palestinians were justifiably furious with Rice. After all, they had just spent weeks going back and forth with her on acceptable language to make Israeli settlement activity a violation of international law — something previous U.S. administrations had bluntly and immediately threatened a veto over. Rice’s negotiations suggested the U.S. was open to change, when in fact it was not.
Whether the issue is Sudan, Egypt, North Korea or Rwanda, Rice has been either missing in action or unable to deliver a quick and effective resolution.
Firing Rice may serve Secretary of State Hillary Clinton too. Clinton’s team has always viewed Susan Rice with suspicion dating back to the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, when Rice went on MSNBC to slam Clinton’s ad claiming she was best equipped to take the national security emergency call at 3 a.m.
“Clinton hasn’t had to answer the phone at three o’clock in the morning and yet she attacked Barack Obama for not being ready. They’re both not ready to have that 3 a.m. phone call,” Rice said. Secretary Clinton, one State Department diplomat told me, has tried to distance herself from Rice and her lackluster UN performance.
President Obama could show the Arab street that it is unacceptable for the United States government to sit idly by while the United Nations Security Council does nothing. What better way to show that things at the U.N. have to change than to fire the woman spearheading the failed U.S. efforts there.
Rice’s last diplomatic initiative should be putting the United States’ reputation above her own.
Richard Grenell served as the spokesman for four US Ambassadors to the United Nations. including John Negroponte, John Danforth, John Bolton and Zalmay Khalilzad. He is currently based in Los Angeles. For more visit his website at www.richardgrenell.com.
For the “disgusted” and “outraged” liberals who are so shocked that Russia and China would block such an effort, let me just say one thing as politely as I know how:
YOU QUIVERING, HYPOCRITE, ABJECT PILES OF FOUL-SMELLING TOXIC SLIME!!! HAVE THE DECENCY TO THINK BACK TO 2003 WHEN RUSSIA AND CHINA (ALONG WITH YOUR BUDDIES IN FRANCE) DID THE SAME EXACT THING WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH WAS JUST TRYING TO GET REASONABLE WMD INSPECTIONS!!! YOU ACTUALLY JOINED RUSSIA AND CHINA LIKE THE TRAITORS YOU ARE. AND YOU GAVE BUSH NO CHOICE WHATSOEVER BUT TO GO TO WAR WITH IRAQ!!!
I tried to write a history of what Democrats did in joining Russia and China as a means to undermine Bush:
I also provided the FACTS about how truly treacherous and in fact blatantly traitorous the Democrats truly were in their before-and-after statements about Iraq:
If Democrats had just been united with the rest of the nation, we could have presented a strong, united front to the world. As it was, Saddam Hussein did not believe America would invade because Democrats had so fractured America, and Russia, China and France saw no reason to cooperate with the President of the United States when no DEMOCRATS in his own country would lift a finger to do anything other than stab him in the back.
In the end, it was basically the United States and its historic ally England standing against Iraq, Russia, China, France, the United Nations and the Democrat Party.
So now Russia and China are doing the same thing they did to George Bush for year after year and suddenly only NOW it’s “disgusting” and “outrageous”???
It obviously IS “disgusting” and “outrageous” what Syria is doing. They have killed thousands of their own people.
Since 2003 in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of bodies have been discovered in more than 300 mass graves. The Ministry of Human Rights estimates that as many as 1,500,000 people remain missing and unidentified. The missing may have been captured, abducted, secretly detained or killed and buried en masse in unmarked graves. Iraqi Minister of Human Rights Mohammed S. Al-Sudaney stated “It is important for the future of Iraq that we engage in a sustainable effort to address this issue. Millions of Iraqis have been affected by decades of abuse and we must work on their behalf to find their missing relatives.”
You Democrats are on an eternal walk of shame.
As vile as Russia and China are for their veto of any resolution to help the people of Syria, it is no more than what the vile current president of the United States deserves.
And never forget that the Democrat Party stood for the rape, torture and murder of untold hundreds of thousands of the Iraqi people. Even as they falsely postured themselves as championing human values.
You need to understand the STAKES of what is going on in Syria as Russians and Chinese (along with Syrian thugs) sense weakness in a truly weak President Obama:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As the Obama administration weighs worst-case scenarios for Syria, one stands out: a civil war that develops into a proxy battle between Arabs and the West on one side, and Russia and Iran on the other.
U.S. officials stress they do not want to play a military role in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on protests has killed more than 5,000 people and raised fears of a protracted power struggle in a country at the heart of the Arab world.
But after U.S. and Arab-led efforts to craft consensus in the U.N. Security Council on Syria’s political transition were torpedoed by vetoes from Russia and China, some analysts say risks are growing that the international community will line up on opposite sides of a fratricidal war.
The volatile ingredients are already in place.
Resistance fighters known as the Free Syrian Army have pledged to liberate the country from Assad’s rule. Activists call for armed support for rebels. And Syrian security forces are ratcheting up the violence, vowing to fulfil their president’s threat to strike with an “iron fist” against the government’s opponents.
“”There is a risk of it could become a proxy conflict. It is already headed in that direction,” said Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Now think of Egypt and Obama’s massive failure there.
Mr. Obama downplayed concerns that the Muslim Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests.
“I think that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. Obama said he wanted a representative government in Egypt that reflected the country’s broader civil society.
Though the current upheavals in the Middle East were not initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa.
In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups, the Brotherhood and the Salafists, won about three-quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering.
The Brotherhood, an organization founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan el Banna back in 1928, has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom:
“Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
It is this radical vision, which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.
The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic — points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.”
CAIRO — Ignoring a U.S. threat to cut off aid, Egypt on Sunday referred 19 Americans and 24 other employees of nonprofit groups to trial before a criminal court on accusations they illegally used foreign funds to foment unrest in the country.
Egypt’s military rulers had already deeply strained ties with Washington after their crackdown on U.S.-funded groups promoting democracy and human rights that the country’s leadership has accused of stirring up violence in the aftermath of the uprising a year ago that ousted Hosni Mubarak. The decision to send 43 workers from the groups to stand trial marks a sharp escalation in the dispute.
The 19 Americans include Sam LaHood, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s son and the head of the Egypt office of the Washington-based International Republican Institute.
“Threatening to cut off aid”??? What the hell business do we have giving the MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AID?!?!?
But, yes, Obama was actually trying to INCREASE AID TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD-DOMINATED EGYPT JUST A FEW SHORT WEEKS AGO:
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama plans to accelerate the pace of American aid to Egypt, a top State Department official said on Wednesday, as the most populous Arab nation reaches a critical stage in its uncertain transition away from autocratic rule.
Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats, part of a U.S. delegation that held unprecedented talks last week with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, said Washington wanted to provide “more immediate benefits” to Egyptians, who earlier this month conducted their first democratic elections in decades.
“During this period, we want to be as supportive as we can. This is an historic moment. Egypt’s a country of enormous importance,” Hormats said.
Hosni Mubarak was a dictator and a thug, but he was the best America and Israel were ever going to get in a region of evil nutjobs. Now what do we have thanks to Obama???
If you haven’t already seen the magnitude of this president’s utterly contemptible and despicable failure, you are without excuse if you don’t understand it now.
As for Iran and the nuclear weapons that Obama will allow them to have, and the war Obama’s failure to that regard will create, I just wrote a piece about that. Suffice it to say that George Bush TRIED to do something about Iran’s dangerous nuclear weapons program, but demonic Democrats including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton prevented him from being able to do anything.
Democrats were completely wrong; Bush was 100 percent RIGHT.
Every single Democrat who voted for Obama deserves to have an Iranian nuclear bomb shoved right up their anuses and detonated, but unfortunately they are going to take the rest of the world with them.
Remember Libya and Obama’s overthrow of Gaddafi? And how Obama took all the credit in the world for that?
The political situation in Libya is falling apart:
I was pointing out that Obama had taken us from bad to far, far worse as far back as August of last year. So it’s not like Obama couldn’t have known what would probably happen.
Up to 3,000 Libyans demonstrated Friday in the eastern city of Benghazi, demanding that sharia be the source of the North African country’s future constitution.
“Islamic! Islamic!,” chanted the demonstrators, with some waving copies of the Qur’an.
A press statement distributed at the rally called for an article identifying Islam as the state religion to be added to the constitution.
That article should be non-negotiable and not subject to change in the forthcoming referendum on the constitution, it said.
Demonstrators also expressed opposition to any plan to make Libya a federal state.
Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?
But it’s only fascist if Republicans do it, of course.
Then we come to Obama’s colossal and inexcusable failure in Iraq.
I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.
Aside from the fact that it is naked chutzpah that the same two men who demonized George Bush for his successful surge strategy and tried to do everything they could to undermine and backstab Bush during his efforts to prevail in Iraq, it at least serves to prove that Iraq was a huge success for Bush as Obama took office.
Listen to the general who directed that surge speaking of Obama’s disastrous and disgraceful failure in Iraq:
President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.
Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.
Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.
“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
We also learned that Obama’s decision to not even TRY to negotiate for U.S. troops to stay to safeguard what we had won was KNOWN to be a huge mistakeeven as Obama was MAKING that mistake:
(Reuters) – U.S. intelligence agencies warned that security gains in Iraq could degenerate into sectarian violence after a troop pullout that some officials say left the United States with little leverage in a country it occupied for nearly nine years.
A wave of bombings that killed at least 72 people in Baghdad on Thursday provided further evidence of a deteriorating security situation just days after the last U.S. troops left Iraq.
“This should be a surprise to no one that this is happening,” said House of Representatives intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers.
“Most people believed, the assessments that were coming out believed, that the sudden rapid withdrawal with no troop presence on the ground was going to leave this vacuum that would be filled with the kind of problems that you’re seeing,” Rogers, a Republican, said in an interview with Reuters.
Rogers said the troop pullout reduced U.S. influence and that a chaotic Iraq plays into Iran’s desire for increased influence in that region.
And now, under Obama’s completely failed and depraved leadership, the headline is, “Iraq Stands on the Brink of Disaster.” It is poised to fall under the influence of Iran because Obama was too much of a coward and a weakling to stick around like America did in Germany and Japan and Korea and a whole bunch of other places.
Even the New York Times writes about “a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.” It describes US State Department officials as being “confined to the embassy because of security concerns” after we pulled all of our troops out of the country. And the obvious result is that we are going to lose everything we fought so hard for and sacrificed so much for to win in Iraq.
And Barack Obama is criminally responsible for that complete disaster.
That leaves us with the dismal failure of Obama in Afghanistan.
Obama demanded a timetable for withdrawal so that our friends in Afghanistan would know they couldn’t count on us to stay and our enemies the Taliban would know that they could wait us out.
We find that Obama never bothered to listen to his generals in Afghanistan dating back to when they wanted 40,000 for their surge and he decided not to give them their request after humming and hawing FOREVER.
Lieutenant General John Allen told the Senate Armed Services Committee today that the Afghanistan decision President Obama announced last week was not among the range of options the military provided to the commander in chief. Allen’s testimony directly contradicts claims from senior Obama administration officials from a background briefing before the president’s announcement.
In response to questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Allen testified that Obama’s decision on the pace and size of Afghanistan withdrawals was “a more aggressive option than that which was presented.”
Graham pressed him. “My question is: Was that a option?”
Allen: “It was not.”
Allen’s claim, which came under oath, contradicts the line the White House had been providing reporters over the past week—that Obama simply chose one option among several presented by General David Petraeus. In a conference call last Wednesday, June 22, a reporter asked senior Obama administration officials about those options. “Did General Petraeus specifically endorse this plan, or was it one of the options that General Petraeus gave to the president?”
The U.S. military said in a secret report that the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, are set to retake control of Afghanistan after NATO-led forces withdraw, raising the prospect of a major failure of Western policy after a costly war.
Lieutenant Colonel Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, confirmed the existence of the document, reported on Wednesday by Britian’s Times newspaper and the BBC.
Which is EXACTLY what conservatives predicted would happen if we followed Obama’s incredibly stupid and immoral policies.
When we elected Barack Obama, we elected a truly evil and vile man to lead us. Obama’s wicked reverend Jeremiah Wright spake as a prophet concerning the Obama presidency when he said, “No, no, no. Not God bless America! God DAMN America.” And this IS God damn America.
Barack Obama is a clear and present danger to America, to the American people and to the world. And if we don’t wise up and vote him out of office, we deserve every catastrophe that his presidency will create.
The Bible forewarned us that the beast is coming. And Obama was the useful idiot who has done so much to prepare the way for Antichrist.
I want you to go back to December 2007 and reflect on documented history:
THE NATION – Democrats rip Bush’s Iran policy Presidential candidates say a new intelligence report shows that the administration has been talking too tough.
By Scott Martelle and Robin Abcarian
December 05, 2007
Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.
While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.
“I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing’s changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change,” said New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect. I think that is an important lesson.”
Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the new intelligence report indicated that Iran dropped its program before international pressure came into play.
“It was like watching a rerun of his statements on Iraq five years earlier,” Biden said. “Iran is not a nuclear threat to the United States of America. Iran should be dealt with directly, with the rest of the world at our side. But we’ve made it more difficult now, because who is going to trust us?”
The debate was aired without a studio audience over NPR, live from the Iowa State Historical Museum. It covered Iran, China and immigration, offering the contenders a chance to delve more deeply into subjects that often receive less detailed debate treatment.
Clinton and Biden were joined by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson missed the debate to attend the funeral of Cpl. Clem Robert Boody in Independence, Iowa. Boody was a Korean War soldier whose remains Richardson had helped retrieve from North Korea earlier this year.
The National Intelligence Assessment report on Iran, released Monday, was the focus of the first third of the two-hour debate.
The assessment concluded that Iran halted its nuclear program in 2003 largely because of international pressure — reversing a conclusion made two years ago that the nation was aggressively pursuing nuclear weapons.
The Democrats used the issue to criticize each other as well as President Bush. Yet their own prescriptions for dealing with Iran are similar — and fairly close to the administration’s approach of increasing diplomatic and economic pressure to force Tehran to suspend enriching uranium that can be used for making nuclear weapons.
The leading Democratic candidates have differed over whether to negotiate directly with Iran. In a July debate, Obama said he would be willing to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a position criticized by Clinton and others. But front-runners Clinton, Obama and Edwards have all said they would not rule out military action against Iran.
For their part, Republican candidates have said that the new intelligence estimate did not change their view of Iran as a major threat to the United States — a view also held by Bush.
In the Democrats’ debate Tuesday, the focus on foreign-policy issues gave Clinton a chance to bring up what many people believe was the high point of her eight years as first lady — her speech at the 1995 U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In it, she castigated China over its treatment of women, arguing that women’s rights could no longer be considered separate from human rights. The Chinese government blocked the speech from being heard within China.
As at the Black & Brown Forum here Saturday night, the debate did not provide any landscape-shifting moments. Exchanges among the candidates were polite — but also at times direct, particularly over the recent bill sponsored by Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) that unofficially declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization.
Clinton was the only Democratic candidate to vote for the bill. When asked whether she thought the Revolutionary Guard were “proliferators of mass destruction,” she said “many of us believe that” and suggested that earlier comments by Obama and Edwards about Iran indicated that they did too.
Edwards and Obama responded that they believed Iran was a threat to stability in the Mideast but that the administration was moving toward an unnecessary war.
“What I believe is that this president, who, just a few weeks ago, was talking about World War III, he, the vice president, the neocons have been on a march to possible war with Iran for a long time,” Edwards said. “We know that they’ve prepared contingency plans for a military attack.”
Obama, who missed the Kyl-Lieberman vote in the Senate because he was campaigning in New Hampshire, also drew parallels to the Iraq war buildup.
Who – and which party - turned out to be right? And who couldn’t have been more wrong???
Secretary of State Leon Panetta – serving as Obama’s attack poodle – spilled the beans on an Israeli attack on Iran:
Panetta believes Israel may strike Iran this spring United States Defense Secretary Leon Panetta believes there is a growing possibility Israel will attack Iran as early as April to stop Tehran from building a nuclear bomb, according to reports.
7:03AM GMT 03 Feb 2012
The Washington Post first reported that Panetta was concerned about the increased likelihood Israel would launch an attack over the next few months. CNN said it confirmed the report, citing a senior Obama administration official, who declined to be identified.
“Panetta believes there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June – before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote.
“Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon – and only the United States could then stop them militarily,” Ignatius wrote.
Ignatius did not cite a source. He was writing from Brussels where Panetta was attending a NATO defense ministers’ meeting.
Panetta and the Pentagon both declined comment on the Post report.
Israel, widely believed to possess the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal, views Iran’s uranium enrichment projects as a major threat and has not ruled out the use of military force to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Iran says its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.
The Post article said the postponement of a joint U.S.-Israeli military exercise that had been scheduled for this spring may have signaled the prospect of an Israeli attack soon.
Washington and the European Union imposed tighter sanctions on Iran in recent weeks in a drive to force Tehran to provide more information on its nuclear program.
Iran has said repeatedly it could close the vital Strait of Hormuz shipping lane if sanctions succeed in preventing it from exporting crude, a move Washington said it would not tolerate.
Israel’s military intelligence chief said on Thursday he estimated that Iran could make four atomic bombs by further enriching uranium it had already stockpiled, and could produce its first bomb within a year of deciding to build one.
But in his rare public remarks, Major-General Aviv Kochavi held out the possibility that stronger international sanctions might dissuade Tehran from pursuing a policy he had no doubt was aimed at developing nuclear weapons.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said separately that “if sanctions don’t achieve the desired goal of stopping (Iran’s) military nuclear program, there will be a need to consider taking action.”
What if Israel had done something similar shortly before our Navy Seals went into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden??? We would have rightly blasted such treachery.
That said, Israel has no choice BUT to attack Iran because Barack Obama and the entire Democrat Party are traitors and cowards who put the United States and the state of Israel at grave risk by demanding we stick our heads up our asses and keep them there until it was too late.
Re-read this sentence: “”Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have stored enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon – and only the United States could then stop them militarily.” And let me translate it for you. Israel will attack Iran – and start a war in the Middle East – because it knows it cannot trust a pathological weakling like Barack Obama to stand up to evil. They know they will have to do what Obama lacks the moral will or courage to do; and Israel’s attack will mark the failure not of Israel but of Barack Obama.
You can bet that Obama won’t launch an attack on Iran. Bottom line: he is a pathological weasel. What he’ll do is sit back like a trembling little coward and wait for Israel to do what any decent nation would do for not only its own survival but for the sake of sanity itself and attack Iran. And then Obama will tut-tut naughty Israel for its aggression.
This is the most obvious train-wreck in human history. In early February of 2009 I wrote about America’s enemies seeing a weakling in the White House and smelling blood:
When Iran gets its nuclear weapons, we will start seeing some hard-core “generated international crises.” Right up the wazoo.
I’ve written about Obama’s dilemma in dealing with Iran before (and see also) Given the fact that Obama opposed the war with Iraq due to what he claimed was insufficient evidence of Iraqi WMD, how would he be able to go to war with Iran when the evidence will likely be even more flimsy? I mean, we were IN Iraq for several years; we actually SAW their WMDs in the Gulf War. We know very little about Iran’s weapons programs.
Allow me to guarantee you that a Democratic administration will see a nuclear Iran. Given their policy on Iraq, it becomes an implicit campaign promise. And it will see a nuclearized Middle East. Democrats have spent forty years proving that they are cowards who will not stand by their allies, and their actions will come home to roost.
A Republican president can say to the Iranians, “We went in to Iran when we thought they might attack us, Iran. And I promise that will do the same to you if you continue your weapons program.” And no one can question that. A Republican president can say to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, “We stayed with Iraq and defended them even when it was difficult, and we’ll do the same for you.” and no one can question that.
One of the things that I here point out is that even if Obama surprises me and actually attacks Iran, it will also be a shocking surprise to Iran that believes that Obama is a weakling and a coward based on his own words. They would not have similarly believed that McCain was such. Which is to say that even if Obama does the right thing and attacks Iran, it will be a war that didn’t have to be fought had we just voted with wisdom and courage in 2008.
Here we are now, on the verge of a nuclear Iran and a regional war involving Israel and Iran that the United States will most assuredly be drawn into at great economic cost (at a minimum) to ourselves. Entirely due to the fault of Barack Obama and a treasonous Democrat Party.
One of the primary points that I documented was that we had no choice to go to war with Iraq because three countries – Russia, China and France – blocked every serious international effort to prevent Iraq from developing WMDs which American foreign policy rightly concluded was unacceptable. For the record, we are facing basically the same situation now with Iran and with Syria. And how are we going to gain international cooperation when Russia and China can block any meaningful effort at international cooperation with their respective veto powers?
Three sites provide a list of statements that top Democrats made as they gave their support for the Iraq War before they treasonously turned on a president at war. You can see that they talked as tough as “Dubya” EVER did about military action against Saddam Hussein; but when it came time for these cowards to put their money where their mouths were, well, that was when they cut and ran:
I have repeatedly attacked the Democrat Party for its:
Opposition to the Iraq War (which 60% of Senate Democrats voted for, only to repudiate and claim Bush deceived them); opposition to the Patriot Act; opposition to Domestic Surveillance on calls from international terrorists; opposition to Gitmo, even though it is the only reasonable place to hold these people that no country wants; the demand for full legal representation in civilian courts for terrorists; opposition to even the reasonable use of profiling to weed out terrorists. And I could go on and on. It boils down to the fact that the left despise anything that help us win the war on terror or protect us from terrorism.
And to quote Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright who demonized America in his “No, no, no! Not God bless America. God DAMN America!” sermon, “Our chickens have come home to roost” for voting for this disgrace and this party of disgrace.
There is one person – Barack Obama – and one party – the Democrat Party – that are 100 percent responsible for the crisis we are about to face.
It’s called the Gold Star pin; it is an award that is given to family members of a veteran who was killed in action:
It turns out that most Americans don’t even recognize it or know what it means when they see it.
That’s a shame. By which I mean a dishonorable shame.
An article titled, “Sacrifice Isn’t Shared” posted by PJMom (I’m just guessing she’s the mother of an Air Force Pararescue Jumper) makes my guts churn:
Gallup surveyed attitudes among military. What shocked me wasn’t veteran attitudes toward Obama, but the disparity of service among generations:
75% of 80-89 year-old men served
60% of 70-79 year-olds
49% of 60-69 year-olds
21% of 50-59 year-olds
19% of 40-49 year-olds
13% of 30-39 year-olds
8% of 18-29 year-olds
The drop in service among Boomers marks the 60s cultural revolution more explicitly than anything else: who cares about serving thee when I can just serve me, me, me? It’s pretty obvious by the ever-dwindling percentage of veterans that boomers passed along their selfless mentality to their own progeny, no? Serve the country? How passé.
The 5,000 service members who have died in the wars of the past decade have wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. The impact ripples. But families tend to raise and shoulder the burden of service. Society at large doesn’t feel it, not with 8% of 18-29 year-olds serving in the military.
UPDATE: Via Hot Air, a tribute to the Greatest Generation who served and the pilots who donate time and resources to ensure the veterans see their memorial. If you want to be humbled, visit the WWII Memorial and watch the octogenarians awed by memories of long ago.
The thing that made me gasp was the sight of that diminishing table of military service. There was a time when almost everyone had served their country; now almost nobody has.
It makes me just sick that so few have suffered so much for so long to stand up for the rest of us. And when they are killed doing their duty on our behalf, we don’t even notice or care.
Look at that pin. Memorize it.
Only those who have lost a spouse, mother, father, child or step-child to combat are authorized to wear that pin.
And if you are fortunate enough to come across someone wearing it, please stop that person and do your best to tell them from the bottom of your heart that you are thankful for that soldier, airman, sailor or Marine who gave what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion” to their country.
No one should be more honored in America than those who gave their lives in defense of this nation and the families that mourn their loss.
It’s the least you can do to a family member who may be RIGHTLY wondering if this country was truly worth sacrificing for in the face of such shocking apathy.
When I call Barack Obama a traitor, I am using that term in the most accurate and technical sense:
DECEMBER 19, 2011 The Daqduq Disgrace Obama releases a terrorist rather than send him to Gitmo.
One of the most widely photographed acts of President Obama’s first year in office was his symbolic pre-dawn salute to the caskets of U.S. soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base. In the case of a terrorist named Ali Musa Daqduq, who was released yesterday from U.S. custody in Iraq, the President is letting down those fallen soldiers and their families.
Daqduq is a Lebanese national and top Hezbollah operative who in January 2007 masterminded the ambush, kidnapping and murder of five American soldiers in the Iraqi city of Karbala. Arrested by U.S. forces in Basra two months later, Daqduq is said to have initially pretended to be deaf and mute. But he eventually talked, giving U.S. interrogators an extensive picture of the ways in which Iran was arming and training Iraq’s insurgents.
Now Daqduq is in Iraqi custody—released, according to the Administration, because it could not lawfully do otherwise. “We have sought and received assurances [from the Iraqi government] that he will be tried for his crimes,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Mr. Vietor surely knows the likelier outcome is that Daqduq will be released or acquitted so that he can rejoin his comrades in Beirut or Tehran. The Iraqi government has already released some 50 other prisoners responsible for attacks on U.S. forces.
The Administration contends that its hands were tied by the U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration, which required Iraq’s consent—not forthcoming—to remove any prisoners from the country. But it’s hard to see why that stipulation would apply to Daqduq, who is not an Iraqi citizen.
The Administration also thought of bringing Daqduq to the U.S. for trial in federal court or a military tribunal. Both ideas would have meant taking political heat, but at a minimum it showed that the status-of-forces deal was not an insuperable obstacle to keeping Daqduq in U.S. custody provided the Administration was determined to do so.
Alas, it wasn’t. The one place Daqduq unquestionably belongs is in the prison at Guantanamo, which also happens to be the one place the Administration wouldn’t countenance having him. By now, even Mr. Obama understands that Gitmo serves a vital role in housing terrorists who either can’t be safely released or easily tried. Daqduq, the most senior Hezbollah figure in U.S. custody and a man who conspicuously disdained the laws of war, fits that bill.
But even if Mr. Obama can’t close Gitmo as he promised, neither can he bring himself openly to acknowledge its benefits. Leftist furies are more than he’s willing to face. Instead, the Administration has made the calculation that one more terrorist kingpin on the loose with American blood on his hands is an acceptable price to pay for not establishing the precedent that new prisoners may again be brought to Guantanamo.
In a different world, Daqduq would not be heading for a hero’s welcome in Beirut or Tehran but instead would be on a military flight to Cuba, with the (feigned) indignation of the Iraqi government receding in the distance. In a different world, too, the families of Daqduq’s victims would have the solace that he is behind bars and unable to do further harm. That’s a world that will have to await a different Administration.
I watched the mainstream media’s news coverage of the last U.S. troops leaving Iraq. And what a great day for Obama, on their presentation.
After all, didn’t Obama promise that the troops would come home? And aren’t they in fact coming home?
A couple things are notably absent; first, that the departure of U.S. troops were in fact negotiated under George W. Bush and NOT Barack Obama; and second, that our military commanders are sick that we aren’t leaving a force behind similar to those that stayed behind in postwar Europe, Japan and Korea to protect the gains we fought so hard to attain.
The überliberal Huffington Post presents the Obama narrative this way:
WASHINGTON — Fulfilling a long-held campaign promise, President Barack Obama announced Friday that he will pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of the year, as conditioned by the Status of Forces Agreement with the country.
“As a candidate for president, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama said. “So today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”
“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” he said.
In confirming his plans for troop withdrawal by the end of 2011, the president fulfilled the most memorable pledge he made in securing the nomination of president from his party. There had been reports the administration had been plotting ways to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government so as to prolong America’s presence in the country. Those rumors heightened concerns among Democrats who backed Obama in part because of his pledge to end the war in Iraq.
I mean, wow, it sounds like Obama is an amazing leader, doesn’t it? And it should never occur to anyone that Obama would have pulled out U.S. forces three years ago when he first came into office if his rhetoric had any validity whatsoever.
But buried in the middle of the story is this:
Under an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008, U.S. troops were due to end their mission in Iraq by the end of 2011. But for much of this year, Obama and his advisers have been trying to find a way to retain some troop presence in the country.
According to people familiar with the negotiations — which were conducted for the Obama administration by some of the same individuals who led the Bush-era process — the main sticking points in recent months were over the precise number of troops that would stay behind, and whether the Iraqi government would agree to provide them with legal immunity.
Experts on the mission in Iraq say that despite the public protestations on all sides, both parties were eager to come to an agreement over a continuing troop presence: the Iraqis because they hoped for help in providing stability, and the Americans because they wanted a futher bulwark against encroachment by Iran.
Which is to say very clearly that 1) why is Obama stupidly taking credit for a withdrawal of forces that he had nothing to do with apart from the fact that he is a man without shame or honor or dignity? And 2) why is he deceitfully presenting thing pullout as a “win” for America when all we are doing is abandoning nine years of investment of blood and treasure?
“I am very optimistic about — about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”
Again, this is an administration characterized by a profound lack of honesty, or shame, or honor, as the FACTS reveal.
Of the Bush decision to employ a surge of U.S. forces in Iraq that turned the war around and resulted in victory, we have this from Obama:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama’s aides have removed criticism of President Bush’s increase of troops to Iraq from the campaign Web site, part of an effort to update the Democrat’s written war plan to reflect changing conditions.
Debate over the impact of President Bush’s troop “surge” has been at the center of exchanges this week between Obama and Republican presidential rival John McCain. Obama opposed the war and the surge from the start, while McCain supported both the invasion and the troop increase.
A year and a half after Bush announced he was sending reinforcements to Iraq, it is widely credited with reducing violence there. With most Americans ready to end the war, McCain is using the surge debate to argue he has better judgment and the troops should stay to win the fight. Obama argues the troop increase has not achieved its other goal of fostering a political reconciliation among Iraqi factions.
After Bush delivered a nationally televised address on Jan. 10, 2007, announcing his plan, Obama argued it could make the situation worse by taking pressure off Iraqis to find a political solution to the fighting.
“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” the Illinois senator said that night, a month before announcing his presidential bid. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
Obama continued to argue throughout 2007 that the troop increase was a mistake. By the early part of this year, he was acknowledging that it had improved security and reduced violence, but he has stuck by his opposition to the move.
The AP – from which I snagged the article – purged that story from its site. That is a dilemma I face again and again as leftwing media seem to keep articles that damage conservatives forever and ever, but conveniently lose those articles which paint liberals in a bad light. It’s just another way the mainstream media demonstrates its naked media bias. Years ago, conservatives were helpless; now, stories can be preserved even after the leftists purge them.
The fact of the matter is that the United States won the war in Iraq in spite of the idiocy and foolishness of one Barack Hussein Obama; and that Bush demonstrated wisdom and perseverence whereas Obama demonstrated weakness and cowardice.
And to claim credit for the very success he himself vigorously opposed is again an act of dishonesty and dishonor and shamelessness.
Obama tried to claim that the success that “coincidentally” directly accompanied the surge really had nothing to do with the number and courage of our warriors, but merely was the result of an “awakening” of sheiks in Anbar province. The funny thing about that – apart that it denies American troops any credit whatsoever – was that all the mainstream media stories reporting this “awakening” took place AFTER the Bush surge, and that it was in fact the Bush surge that gave the sheiks the cover and the confidence to rise up against the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s forces. And that we have faced the same dilemma in Afghanistan; that the locals won’t courageously rise up against terrorism if they don’t believe that America will be around to stand with them.
It’s a helluva lot easier for the oppressed locals to bravely “rise up” if you’ve got thousands of tall, strong and brave American troops coming in to help you. That’s the bottom damn line that Obama doesn’t understand.
So, the war in Iraq was a huge Bush success – and the very fact that the Obama administration tried to take credit for a war that they did everything possible to undermine when it mattered PROVES that it was a great Bush success. But what has Obama done with that victory?
President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.
Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.
Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.
“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
U.S. troops will be vacating Iraq at a time when neither Baghdad’s counterterrorism skills nor its abilities to protect against invasion are at levels needed to fully protect the country, say analysts long involved in the nearly nine-year war.
“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.
“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”
Because we’re not there to do a damned thing to stop them, are we?
Hillary Clinton “warned” Iran to watch out as our troops pull out:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday warned Iran not to miscalculate the U.S. decision to withdraw its troops.
“No one, most particularly Iran, should miscalculate about our continuing commitment to and with the Iraqis going forward,” she said in an interview with CNN from Uzbekistan.
Yeah, that will do it. A warning from Hillary Clinton has got to be worth at least as much as 100,000 American warriors dug in and ready to fight, right?
Charles Krauthammer sums up the great Bush victory become the miserable Obama defeat as follows:
Barack Obama was a principled opponent of the Iraq War from its beginning. But when he became president in January 2009, he was handed a war that was won. The surge had succeeded. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been routed, driven to humiliating defeat by an Anbar Awakening of Sunnis fighting side-by-side with the infidel Americans. Even more remarkably, the Shiite militias had been taken down, with American backing, by the forces of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They crushed the Sadr militias from Basra to Sadr City.
Al-Qaeda decimated. A Shiite prime minister taking a decisively nationalist line. Iraqi Sunnis ready to integrate into a new national government. U.S. casualties at their lowest ebb in the entire war. Elections approaching. Obama was left with but a single task: Negotiate a new status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to reinforce these gains and create a strategic partnership with the Arab world’s only democracy.
He blew it. Negotiations, such as they were, finally collapsed last month. There is no agreement, no partnership. As of Dec. 31, the American military presence in Iraq will be liquidated.
And it’s not as if that deadline snuck up on Obama. He had three years to prepare for it. Everyone involved, Iraqi and American, knew that the 2008 SOFA calling for full U.S. withdrawal was meant to be renegotiated. And all major parties but one (the Sadr faction) had an interest in some residual stabilizing U.S. force, like the postwar deployments in Japan, Germany and Korea.
Three years, two abject failures. The first was the administration’s inability, at the height of American post-surge power, to broker a centrist nationalist coalition governed by the major blocs — one predominantly Shiite (Maliki’s), one predominantly Sunni (Ayad Allawi’s), one Kurdish — that among them won a large majority (69 percent) of seats in the 2010 election.
Vice President Joe Biden was given the job. He failed utterly. The government ended up effectively being run by a narrow sectarian coalition where the balance of power is held by the relatively small (12 percent) Iranian-client Sadr faction.
The second failure was the SOFA itself. The military recommended nearly 20,000 troops, considerably fewer than our 28,500 in Korea, 40,000 in Japan and 54,000 in Germany. The president rejected those proposals, choosing instead a level of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.
A deployment so risibly small would have to expend all its energies simply protecting itself — the fate of our tragic, missionless 1982 Lebanon deployment — with no real capability to train the Iraqis, build their U.S.-equipped air force, mediate ethnic disputes (as we have successfully done, for example, between local Arabs and Kurds), operate surveillance and special-ops bases, and establish the kind of close military-to-military relations that undergird our strongest alliances.
The Obama proposal was an unmistakable signal of unseriousness. It became clear that he simply wanted out, leaving any Iraqi foolish enough to maintain a pro-American orientation exposed to Iranian influence, now unopposed and potentially lethal. Message received. Just this past week, Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurds— for two decades the staunchest of U.S. allies — visited Tehran to bend a knee to both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
It didn’t have to be this way. Our friends did not have to be left out in the cold to seek Iranian protection. Three years and a won war had given Obama the opportunity to establish a lasting strategic alliance with the Arab world’s second most important power.
He failed, though he hardly tried very hard. The excuse is Iraqi refusal to grant legal immunity to U.S. forces. But the Bush administration encountered the same problem, and overcame it. Obama had little desire to. Indeed, he portrays the evacuation as a success, the fulfillment of a campaign promise.
But surely the obligation to defend the security and the interests of the nation supersede personal vindication. Obama opposed the war, but when he became commander in chief the terrible price had already been paid in blood and treasure. His obligation was to make something of that sacrifice, to secure the strategic gains that sacrifice had already achieved.
He did not, failing at precisely what this administration so flatters itself for doing so well: diplomacy. After years of allegedly clumsy brutish force, Obama was to usher in an era of not hard power, not soft power, but smart power.
Which turns out in Iraq to be … no power. Years from now we will be asking not “Who lost Iraq?” — that already is clear — but“Why?”
If you don’t think that General Keane – the author of the successful surge that turned Iraq around – doesn’t completely agree with Krauthammer’s assessment, you are almost as big of a fool as Obama.
As far as I’m concerned, Newt Gingrich nailed this one.
The “Palestinians” exist for everyone who has a spiritual and ideological hatred of Israel, and that is the ONLY reason it/they exist. It NEVER existed prior to the existence of Israel and no Arabs even bothered to TRY to create it/them. The so-called “Palestinians” could have and should have gone to the 99-plus percent of the land that was controlled by Arabs; but the Arabs in their rabid hatred of Israel decided it was better to create a festering sore by leaving people in camps and ghettos as a deceitful way to denounce Israel.
In an interviewon Saturday, Newt Gingrich put some reality into the surreal discussion of the Middle East conflict and (as he put it) the delusional nature of the current “peace process.” The Palestinians are indeed an “invented people” — invented by the Nasser dictatorship and KGB by the way — and the Hitlerian lie that Israel occupies one square inch of “Arab” let alone “Palestinian” land needs to be buried for any clarity on what the conflict is about, let alone progress towards peace.
Of course there is no peace in the Middle East and there can be no peace so long as the Muslim Arabs want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. That is the explicit goal of the enemies of Israel in the terrorist entities of Gaza and the West Bank, and also of Israel’s principal enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Newt Gingrich’s gutsy statements — if he will hold to them — could change the nature of the debate not only about how to deal with the Islamic terrorists of the Middle East but with the Islamic jihad itself. For the campaign to destroy Israel is at bottom a campaign to restore the Muslim (not Arab) ummah — as it was under the Turkish empire and the caliphate.
According to CNN, a Palestinian spokesman called Gingrich’s observation that the Palestinians are “an invented people” quote “the most racist I’ve ever seen.” This just shows what brazen liars Palestinian spokesmen are. Everything that Gingrich said was obvious fact. For nearly 2,000 years “Palestine” referred to region not a people — just as “New England” refers to a region not a people. In 1948 the Arabs of the Palestine region were not talking about a Palestinian state and were not referring to themselves as Palestinians. That came in 1964 with the creation of the PLO, engineered by the KGB and the Jew-hating dictator of Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser. Even then the PLO charter (which is still available on the web) did not call for the liberation of the West Bank or Gaza (annexed by Jordan and Egypt respectively) but for the destruction of the Jewish state. Jew hatred is what has driven the conflict in the Middle East which is more precisely described as a genocidal war against the Jews.
Here’s another article on the subject from another guy I listen to when it comes to this region:
The former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and current Republican presidential candidate said yesterday that “there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire. We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people, and they had the chance to go many places.”
Everyone from the PLO to a Mitt Romney spokesman jumped on Gingrich for this assertion, but he happens to be absolutely correct: no Arabic-speaking Muslims identified themselves as “Palestinian” until 1920, when, in rapid order this appellation and identity was adopted by the Muslim Arabs living in the British mandate of Palestine.
For details, see a long article of mine from 1989 on the topic or a short one from 2000. (December 10, 2011)
I was frankly appalled at the criticism Newt Gingrich received from rival Republicans competing for the GOP nomination. The only candidate who supported Gingrich’s completely accurate and factual statement was Rick Perry.
The idea made by Mitt Romney and seconded by most of the candidates that covet Gingrich’s poll numbers that this somehow is “speaking for Israel” is simply asinine. Newt Gingrich isn’t speaking for anybody; he’s a private citizen and doesn’t even speak for “America,” let alone Israel. Rather, Newt Gingrich was speaking for “truth.” And I’m on board with that.
Since Newt said this, I have laughed at the snooty “journalists” who huffed that countries like Iraq, Syria and Lebanon were “invented,” too, as though somehow that means that we can’t oppose allowing “Palestinians” to be similarly invented. Because as we all know, the world would obviously have been just so much worse off without the many blessings provided by Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to world harmony. And the more dictator-controlled hellholes, the better, right?
The modern Middle East was born in crisis. Remnants of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires of the 19th century, the countries of this realm only took the form of modern nation states after passing through the brutal mill of European colonialism. Whereas state formation in Europe took centuries to develop, countries in the Middle East were created by the veritable stroke of a pen; by a line drawn on a map; by a decision taken in a smoke-filled boardroom.
So what the hell, let’s get back into that smoke-filled boardroom and invent another country. Because it’s just worked so damn well in the past and all. And you know how great the United Nations is about getting things right, right?
Most of the countries “created with the stroke of a pen” are hellholes. So one question worth serious discussion is why do we want to create another hellhole?
It’s almost as if the left is arguing, “We have a chance to repeat the mistakes of history, and let’s not be timid about doing so.”
Fwiw, when Newt Gingrich says (and when I agree with him) that Palestinians are an “invented people,” neither of us is trying to argue that the Arab people living in the West Bank, etc., are not “real people.” What we are claiming is the FACT that there had never in history existed a people with a “Palestinian” identity, nor had there ever existed a nation-state with that identity. EVER. There is no legitimate historical reason to ascribe to them the idenity that the United Nation and liberals and various other enemies of Israel have been attempting to ascribe to them. And these people – who have genuine needs and are genuinely suffering – should have been absorbed by the many surrounding regions and nations out of which they came from in the first place. And I further submit that it is not Israel, but those Arab countries, to whom the real blame ought to be directed for ignoring the plight of the “Palestinians” and abandoning them to neglect. Because these their own people literally WANTED these people to suffer simply so they could point a finger at Jews and say, “See what you did?”
For more than sixty years Arabs have allowed the “Palestinians” to suffer in ghettos and camps because they would not take care of their own people. Rather than give a damn about their fellow Arabs in need, they preferred to keep hating on Israel and say, “We want nothing to do with these Arabs because we frankly have no respect for human life whatsoever, but YOU ought to care more about our people than we do and provide for them.”
So before you attack me as a “racist” or an anti-Palestinian “bigot” or whatever, realize that I will merely re-direct those charges right back at you and state that in fact YOU are the hater who wants these poor people to suffer just so you can point a finger of blame at the Jews you so rabidly despise.
If Muammar Gaddafi is truly overthrown from Libya, who or what is going to take his place? A worse regime? A French-Revolution-style bloodbath of mob-rule and executions galore? Terrorist Islamist groups like al Qaeda? A pro-Iranian puppet state like Lebanon?
It shouldn’t surprise anybody if the factions that fought alongside one another to depose Gaddafi begin to fight against each other for control over the oil fields and political control. There are the Berbers versus the Arabs, and a whole bunch of tribes versus a whole bunch of other tribes.
Just remember that if Barack Obama assumes the credit for the wonderful day that Gaddafi is overthrown, then he should assume every single particle of blame for Libya turning ugly.
Colin Powell famously told Bush regarding Iraq, “If you break it, you buy it.” And liberals threw that in Bush’s face – even though Bush got Saddam Hussein and won the Iraq War. If a crisis develops – which I think it will – shouldn’t Obama be held accountable for his substantial role in buying Libya???
But is the mainstream media blaming Obama for the disastrous developments in Libya the same way they blamed Bush at every turn for everything that went wrong in Iraq? Nope.
The fighting fuelled growing fears that nobody is in control of thousands of swaggering armed men who are still based in Tripoli and that the country’s interim government will struggle to impose law and order.
Two people died from bullet wounds and at least seven fighters were injured during a battle that started when militia from the town of Zintan were stopped by guards from the Tripoli Brigade from entering the city’s Central Hospital to kill a patient.
The hospital front door and entrance hall were afterwards left pocked with bullets, doctors and patients had to flee the building and two elderly patients died of heart attacks during the shooting, which lasted from about 1am until dawn. Heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft guns were used by both factions, supposed allies who in reality nurse a dangerous rivalry.
The shoot-out started when a group of gunmen arrived at the hospital in search of a man they had shot earlier in the night. Witnesses said the gunmen were drunk, and had come to finish the man off after learning that he had survived and been taken for medical treatment.
Doctors asked them to leave, at which point one of them pulled out a pistol and began shooting.
“He was overpowered, but then hundreds of Zintan men arrived outside the hospital with heavy weapons and shooting started,” said Mohamad Hamza, a Tripoli Brigade fighter in charge of security. “We had to call for backup, and our boys came from all over Tripoli.
“We couldn’t believe that they were shooting at us. I had to say to them, you are shooting at a hospital, not at Muammar Gaddafi’s 32nd Brigade. Eventually, after several hours, a Shaikh came from the mosque and persuaded them to stop and they handed over three of them who started it to Tripoli’s military council.”
He said one Zintan fighter and a passer-by were killed in shooting, and seven Tripoli Brigade men were injured, two seriously. He said he believed Zintan injured were taken to other hospitals.
The incident will raise pressure on the fragile National Transitional Council to disarm the former rebel fighters who are still at large in Libya’s capital, even though they were asked to leave weeks ago and have been ordered to give up their heavy weapons.
The Zintan brigades were some of the most ferocious fighters against Gaddafi’s forces and helped lead the attack on Tripoli, but have outstayed their welcome, earning a reputation for mayhem and looting.
Thousands of them have ignored pleas to go, staying put instead of returning to their town in the mountains three hours drive to the south.
The battle came on the day Human Rights Watch warned in a report that the entire population of 30,000 people from the town of Tawargha, near Misurata, has been driven out by former rebels for siding with Gaddafi. There have been reports that some of its men, who are predominantly black-skinned, may have been shot or beaten.
Tripoli’s residents fear that there will be more clashes in their city, which is desperate to get back to normality. Mr Hamza, in charge of security at the hospital, said he expected more trouble. “I think it will happen again,” he said. “They will be back for revenge.”
Peter Cole, Libya analyst with the International Crisis Group, said: “Rivalry between brigades from different cities has not been resolved and it does now pose a threat to Libya’s security.
“This suggests that the National Transitional Council needs to work harder with the militia groups to bring unity among them.”
The fighting came on the day that Nato formally ended operations in Libya.
The military action, unprecedented in setting out from the beginning to win a war while guaranteeing not to use troops to do so, was declared a success by Nato’s chief. “At midnight tonight, a successful chapter in Nato’s history is coming to an end,” Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Nato secretary-general and a former Danish prime minister, said at a press conference with the interim Libyan president, Mustafa Abdul Jalil.
Libya’s interim leadership meanwhile elected an academic from Tripoli as the country’s new interim prime minister.
Abdel-Rahim al-Keeb was chosen by the National Transitional Council and will appoint a new Cabinet in coming days. The new government is to run Libya in the coming months and to pave the way for general elections.
Obama gets all the credit for killing Osama bin Laden. But he receives absolutely no blame whatsoever for destabilizing U.S. – Pakastani relations by the mainstream media propaganda. Even when he actually personally admits his action was responsible for that destabilization.
The US-Pak ties have strained following the detention of American diplomat Raymond Davis in Lahore and the Abbottabad raid which killed Osama bin Laden, affecting the bilateral military cooperation, President Barack Obama has told the Congress.
“Bilaterally, the fallout of the raid resulting in the death of Osama bin Laden continued to complicate the United States-Pakistan relationship, further strained by a series of media reports based on alleged leaks from both the United States and Pakistan,” Obama said in a new report to Congress on US operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Let’s also not forget the disaster that Obama has now created in Iraq with his total troop pullout.
Obama had THREE YEARS to negotiate with the Iraqi government. The Iraqi Congress WANTED American military assets to remain. And in EVERY SINGLE WAR ON EVERY SINGLE FRONT for the last SIXTY YEARS, when the United States of America fought and won to defeat an enemy, they have STAYED ON THE GROUND THEY FOUGHT FOR. Example Germany. Example Japan. Example Korea.
Obama snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. And turned Iraq into Vietnam, the only country we pulled out of.
President Obama’s decision to pull all U.S. forces out of Iraq by Dec. 31 is an “absolute disaster” that puts the burgeoning Arab democracy at risk of an Iranian “strangling,” said an architect of the 2007 troop surge that turned around a losing war.
Retired Army Gen. John M. Keane was at the forefront of persuading President George W. Bush to scuttle a static counterinsurgency strategy and replace it with 30,000 reinforcements and a more activist, street-by-street counterterrorism tactic.
Today, even with that strategy producing a huge drop in daily attacks, Gen. Keane bluntly told The Washington Times that the United States again is losing.
“I think it’s an absolute disaster,” said Gen. Keane, who advised Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was top Iraq commander. “We won the war in Iraq, and we’re now losing the peace.”
U.S. troops will be vacating Iraq at a time when neither Baghdad’s counterterrorism skills nor its abilities to protect against invasion are at levels needed to fully protect the country, say analysts long involved in the nearly nine-year war.
“Forty-four hundred lives lost,” Gen. Keane said. “Tens of thousands of troops wounded. Over a couple hundred thousand Iraqis killed. We liberated 25 million people. There is only one Arab Muslim country that elects its own government, and that is Iraq.
“We should be staying there to strengthen that democracy, to let them get the kind of political gains they need to get and keep the Iranians away from strangling that country. That should be our objective, and we are walking away from that objective.”
But how is the mainstream media propaganda describing this abject disaster? As a great victory won by Obama. That’s how dishonest the media is today.
And let’s not forget Iran. George Bush WARNED America that Iran posed a clear and present danger to the United States as they developed nuclear weapons. And Democrats demonized him for being RIGHT:
THE NATION – Democrats rip Bush’s Iran policy Presidential candidates say a new intelligence report shows that the administration has been talking too tough.
By Scott Martelle and Robin Abcarian
December 05, 2007
Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.
While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of them sought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.
“I vehemently disagree with the president that nothing’s changed and therefore nothing in American policy has to change,” said New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. “We do know that pressure on Iran does have an effect. I think that is an important lesson.”
Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the new intelligence report indicated that Iran dropped its program before international pressure came into play.
“It was like watching a rerun of his statements on Iraq five years earlier,” Biden said. “Iran is not a nuclear threat to the United States of America. Iran should be dealt with directly, with the rest of the world at our side. But we’ve made it more difficult now, because who is going to trust us?”
The debate was aired without a studio audience over NPR, live from the Iowa State Historical Museum. It covered Iran, China and immigration, offering the contenders a chance to delve more deeply into subjects that often receive less detailed debate treatment.
Clinton and Biden were joined by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Connecticut Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Ohio Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, and former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel.
You also need to realize that the euphamistically media-labelled “Arab Spring” (sounds SO refreshing) has unseated long American allies such as Egypt and is the direct result of Obama’s terrible mismanagement of the U.S. dollar which has created soaring food prices both here and abroad:
FEBRUARY 23, 2011 The Federal Reserve Is Causing Turmoil Abroad Few protesters in the Middle East connect rising food prices to U.S. monetary policy. But central bankers do.
By GEORGE MELLOAN
In accounts of the political unrest sweeping through the Middle East, one factor, inflation, deserves more attention. Nothing can be more demoralizing to people at the low end of the income scale—where great masses in that region reside—than increases in the cost of basic necessities like food and fuel. It brings them out into the streets to protest government policies, especially in places where mass protests are the only means available to shake the existing power structure.
The consumer-price index in Egypt rose to more than 18% annually in 2009 from 5% in 2006, a more normal year. In Iran, the rate went to 25% in 2009 from 13% in 2006. In both cases the rate subsided in 2010 but remained in double digits.
Egyptians were able to overthrow the dictatorial Hosni Mubarak. Their efforts to fashion a more responsive regime may or may not succeed. Iranians are taking far greater risks in tackling the vicious Revolutionary Guards to try to unseat the ruling ayatollahs.
Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do. They complain, most recently at last week’s G-20 meeting in Paris, that the U.S. is exporting inflation.
China and India blame the U.S. Federal Reserve for their difficulties in maintaining stable prices. The International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, always responsive to the complaints of developing nations, are suggesting alternatives to the dollar as the pre-eminent international currency. The IMF managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has proposed replacement of the dollar with IMF special drawing rights, or SDRs, a unit of account fashioned from a basket of currencies that is made available to the foreign currency reserves of central banks.
About the only one failing to acknowledge a problem seems to be the man most responsible, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. In a recent question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington, the chairman said it was “unfair” to accuse the Fed of exporting inflation. Other nations, he said, have the same tools the Fed has for controlling inflation.
Well, not quite. Consider, for example, that much of world trade, particularly in basic commodities like food grains and oil, is denominated in U.S. dollars. When the Fed floods the world with dollars, the dollar price of commodities goes up, and this affects market prices generally, particularly in poor countries that are heavily import-dependent. Export-dependent nations like China try to maintain exchange-rate stability by inflating their own currencies to buy up dollars. [...]
Oil is going up. Foodstuffs are going up. And when the Fed sneezes money, the weak economies of the world, and the poor masses who are highly vulnerable to price rises in the necessities of life, catch pneumonia. [...]
The Fed is financing a vast and rising federal deficit, following a practice that has been a surefire prescription for domestic inflation from time immemorial. Meanwhile, its policies are stoking a rise in prices that is contributing to political unrest that in some cases might be beneficial but in others might turn out as badly as the overthrow of the shah in 1979. Does any of this suggest that there might be some urgency to bringing the Fed under closer scrutiny?
Obama has depicted the “Arab Spring” like it was a good thing. It has been a terrible thing that was the result of terrible Obama policies.
This reminds me of the Clinton years. Bill Clinton created one foreign policy disaster after another. And it started right away. In 1993, Bill Clinton radically expanded the humanitarian mission to Somalia that George H.W. Bush had implemented. Clinton turned it into a military campaign to get the Somalia warlord Adid. But Clinton refused to allow the US military the assets on the ground they needed to get that job done; he refused to allow them the heavy armor they needed to support any raid that could (read “would”) run into trouble because he wanted to keep “a low profile.”
When the Black Hawk Down” incident that humiliated America occurred, the U.S. was forced to seek emergency assistance from the U.N. security forces from Pakistan and Malaysia – which were justifiably furious at us for not having warned them about any military actions.
And then we pulled out with our tails between our legs like cowards.
That incident pulled a yet-unknown Osama bin Laden to conclude – and I quote:
“Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press…”
And so Osama bin Laden – smelling liberal Democrat weakness – began to set a plan in motion during the Clinton presidency. He put all of his assets into the United States under Bill Clinton’s nose. And by the time it was all ready to go, George Bush had just taken over. Which of course made the plan that occurred during the Clinton years and the assets being inserted into the U.S. during the Clinton years all Bush’s fault when the Clinton-era terrorists took down the World Trade Center twin towers and murdered 3,000 Americans.
Upon taking power in 1993, Risen reports, the Clinton administration “began slashing the intelligence budget in search of a peace dividend, and Bill Clinton showed almost no interest in intelligence matters.”
The agency cutbacks combined with presidential disinterest took their toll almost immediately.
“Over a three-or-four-year period in the early-to-mid 1990s,” reports Risen, “virtually an entire generation of CIA officers – the people who had won the Cold War – quit or retired. One CIA veteran compared the agency to an airline that had lost all of is senior pilots . . . “
After Clinton CIA Director John Deutch cashiered several senior officers over a scandal in Guatamala, the situation got even worse.
“Morale [at the CIA] plunged to new lows, and the agency became paralyzed by an aversion to high-risk espionage operations for fear they would lead to political flaps. Less willing to take big risks, the CIA was less able to recruit spies in dangerous places such as Iraq.”
What chance did George Bush have to stop the 9/11 attacks? Bill Clinton had gutted our intelligence capability and allowed all of the terrorists into America before Bush even took office.
And of course Democrats SCREAMED in outrage when Bush spent to rebuild the United States military and intelligence capabilities in order to fight a war that was the direct result of Bill Clinton dismantling the American military and the American intelligence capability – leaving America both weak and blind – and then displaying gross weakness and outright cowardice by pulling out of Somalia the way he did. But, then again, it was Bush’s fault that Clinton had done those things.
It is long past time to disregard the mainstream media propaganda and finally hold the Democrats responsible for the messes that they have made.
The only thing more dangerous to the United States of America than the Democrat Party is the Goebbels’-like media propaganda that sustains the Democrat Party with bias and distortion and outright lies.
When Bush – during the tense crisis-aftermath of having just been horribly attacked by terrorists and having no idea if we’d be attacked again – asked his lawyers what he could do and what he could not do, HE LISTENED TO THEM.
Obama, the self-righteous hypocrite, denounced Bush for listening to the conclusions of his top laywers. Obama and his legal puppet Eric Holder actually wanted to criminalize the men who did what they had to do during an incredibly dangerous time for our nation. They actually sought to politicize the war and hold the previous administration criminally responsible basically for not being as foolish as the Obama Administration and it’s “man-caused disasters” instead of “terrorism” and it’s “overseas contingency operation” instead of “war on terror.”
But now we Obama is greater than his lawyers, and certainly far greater than the Constitution, in his own diseased mind.
WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.
Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.
But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days.
“It should come as no surprise that there would be some disagreements, even within an administration, regarding the application of a statute that is nearly 40 years old to a unique and evolving conflict,” Mr. Schultz said. “Those disagreements are ordinary and healthy.”
Still, the disclosure that key figures on the administration’s legal team disagreed with Mr. Obama’s legal view could fuel restiveness in Congress, where lawmakers from both parties this week strongly criticized the White House’s contention that the president could continue the Libya campaign without their authorization because the campaign was not “hostilities.”
The White House unveiled its interpretation of the War Powers Resolution in a package about Libya it sent to Congress late Wednesday. On Thursday, the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, demanded to know whether the Office of Legal Counsel had agreed.
“The administration gave its opinion on the War Powers Resolution, but it didn’t answer the questions in my letter as to whether the Office of Legal Counsel agrees with them,” he said. “The White House says there are no hostilities taking place. Yet we’ve got drone attacks under way. We’re spending $10 million a day. We’re part of an effort to drop bombs on Qaddafi’s compounds. It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities.”
A sticking point for some skeptics was whether any mission that included firing missiles from drone aircraft could be portrayed as not amounting to hostilities.
As the May 20 deadline approached, Mr. Johnsen advocated stopping the drone strikes as a way to bolster the view that the remaining activities in support of NATO allies were not subject to the deadline, officials said. But Mr. Obama ultimately decided that there was no legal requirement to change anything about the military mission.
The administration followed an unusual process in developing its position. Traditionally, the Office of Legal Counsel solicits views from different agencies and then decides what the best interpretation of the law is. The attorney general or the president can overrule its views, but rarely do.
In this case, however, Ms. Krass was asked to submit the Office of Legal Counsel’s thoughts in a less formal way to the White House, along with the views of lawyers at other agencies. After several meetings and phone calls, the rival legal analyses were submitted to Mr. Obama, who is a constitutional lawyer, and he made the decision.
A senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about the internal deliberations, said the process was “legitimate” because “everyone knew at the end of the day this was a decision the president had to make” and the competing views were given a full airing before Mr. Obama.
The theory Mr. Obama embraced holds that American forces have not been in “hostilities” as envisioned by the War Powers Resolution at least since early April, when NATO took over the responsibility for the no-fly zone and the United States shifted to a supporting role providing refueling assistance and surveillance — although remotely piloted American drones are still periodically firing missiles.
The administration has also emphasized that there are no troops on the ground, that Libyan forces are unable to fire at them meaningfully and that the military mission is constrained from escalating by a United Nations Security Council resolution.
That position has attracted criticism. Jack L. Goldsmith, who led the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, has written that the administration’s interpretation is “aggressive” and unpersuasive, although he also acknowledged that there was no clear answer and little chance of a definitive court ruling, so the reaction of Congress would resolve it.
Walter Dellinger, who led the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration, said that while “this is not an easy question,” Mr. Obama’s position was “both defensible and consistent with the position of previous administrations.” Still, he criticized the administration’s decision-making process.
“Decisions about the lawfulness of major presidential actions should be made by the Department of Justice, and within the department by the Office of Legal Counsel, after consultation with affected agencies,” he said. “The president always has the power of final decision.”
Other high-level Justice lawyers were also involved in the deliberations, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. supported Ms. Krass’s view, officials said.
Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said, “Our views were heard, as were other views, and the president then made the decision as was appropriate for him to do.”
This article, “Obama Rejects 2 Top Lawyers’ Views on War Power in Libya,” first appeared in The New York Times.
Representative Lynn Woolsey charged the President of showing “contempt” for the Constitution, and insulting the intelligence of the American people. Woolsey made the following statement: “The Obama Administration’s argument is one that shows contempt for the Constitution and for the executive’s co-equal branch of government, the United States Congress. To say that our aggressive bombing of Libya does not rise to the level of ‘hostilities’ flies in the face of common sense and is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. This act must not stand, because we can’t afford another full-blown war—the ones we’re already fighting are bankrupting us morally and fiscally. Let those who support the military campaign against Libya make their case, in an open debate culminating with a vote in the U.S. Congress. The American people deserve nothing less.”
Democrats denounced the two wars Bush waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama is still in both countries, but in addition he is now bombing three others. WE ARE NOW IN FIVE WARS UNDER OBAMA.
And now we learn that we is circumventing the normal proces and not even bothering to listen to his own top lawyers.
What we are finding out is that Democrats are the quintessential essence of hypocrisy, with way too few exceptions. Where are all the damn liberal protestors shouting about all these outrages? They crawled out from every rock when Bush was president.
“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama responded [on December 20, 2007].
Unlike Barack Obama, George Bush NEVER ACTED IN SUCH A MANNER.
If Democrats had any honor or integrity whatsoever, this would not stand. The problem is that they don’t.
Update, 6/18: Headline: “NATO bombs Tripoli, sending Khadafy into rage.” Strange, this. It seems that Qaddafi is under the clearly completely false impression that Obama constantly bombing his country somehow qualifies as “hostilities” or mayhap even “war.” I’m sure it’s all just a complete misunderstanding, one that the Teleprompter-in-Chief could lay to rest with one of his long speeches.
