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Post by philunderwood on Dec 5, 2011 14:51:08 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=egyptEgypt: How many times did I say this? Published December 5, 2011 | By Bruce McQuain What, you ask? How many times did I say the most organized and ruthless would win in Egypt? Anyone? Well, here’s the post-mortem for the Egyptian election I could have written a months ago: The Islamists’ victory has been foreshadowed by preelection polls as well as by early unofficial reports about the elections’ outcome. But the official results showed just how thoroughly the young revolutionaries who plugged into social media to ignite a revolution that brought down President Hosni Mubarak in February had failed to excite voters. They won no more than 336,000 votes. 336,000 votes out of 9.7 million cast. 336,000! Hampered by political naivete, egos and lack of funding, the young activists were overwhelmed at the polls by better organized Islamists. The multiphase elections, which end in January, have so far indicated that activists in the Continuing Revolution party have been unable to turn the passion they inspired last winter in Tahrir Square into political capital. Emphasis mine. Organized and ruthless vs. naïve and clueless. Gee wonder who’s going to win. Of course they were no more naïve than those here who thought their triumph was pre-ordained. "Young revolutionaries have struggled with political inexperience at some points and suffered from lack of funds and organization at others," said Emad Gad, a political analyst with Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "This didn’t enable them to reach voters or carry out strong campaigns like those of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Egyptian Bloc." Result? The better organized and more ruthless organizations – the Islamists — won. And there are people who think they’re very plugged in who are absolutely shocked, shocked I tell you, that there’s an outcome other than that for which they hoped. Faith is a wonderful thing except when it is confronted by reality and facts. And the realty of this particular situation should have been evident to any keen observer of the area (and of human nature) from the start. Yet the moon pony and unicorn crowd remain shocked it didn’t turn out to be a triumph of secular democracy with the Twitter crowd installed in a new and enlightened Middle East democracy. Go figure. ~McQ
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Post by twinder on Dec 5, 2011 22:45:25 GMT -5
Ah, the slap to the face of that old bitch we call reality. Some just never get it hard enough to make them see reality for what it is.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 6, 2011 9:04:11 GMT -5
You've got that right Todd.
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Post by philunderwood on Mar 5, 2012 8:56:30 GMT -5
America's longest war will leave no trace By Mark Steyn www.JewishWorldReview.com | Say what you like about Afghans, but they're admirably straightforward. The mobs outside the bases enflamed over the latest Western affront to their exquisitely refined cultural sensitivities couldn't put it any plainer: "Die, die, foreigners!" And foreigners do die. U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Loftis, 44, and Army Maj. Robert Marchanti II, 48, lost their lives not on some mission out on the far horizon in wild tribal lands in the dead of night but in the offices of the Afghan Interior Ministry. In a "secure room" that required a numerical code to access. Gunned down by an Afghan "intelligence officer." Who then departed the scene of the crime unimpeded by any of his colleagues. Some news outlets reported the event as a "security breach." But what exactly was breached? The murderer was by all accounts an employee of the Afghan government, with legitimate rights of access to the building and its secure room, and "liaising" with his U.S. advisers and "mentors" was part of the job. In Afghanistan, foreigners are dying at the hands of the locals who know them best. The Afghans trained by Westerners, paid by Westerners and befriended by Westerners are the ones who have the easiest opportunity to kill them. It is sufficiently non-unusual that the Pentagon, as is the wont with bureaucracies, already has a term for it: "green-on-blue incidents," in which a uniformed Afghan turns his gun on his Western "allies." So we have a convenient label for what's happening; what we don't have is a strategy to stop it – other than more money, more "hearts and minds" for people who seem notably lacking in both, and more bulk orders of the bestselling book "Three Cups Of Tea," an Oprahfied heap of drivel extensively exposed as an utter fraud but which a delusional Washington insists on sticking in the kit bag of its Afghan-bound officer class. Don't fancy the tea? A U.S. base in southern Afghanistan was recently stricken by food poisoning due to mysteriously high amounts of chlorine in the coffee. As Navy Capt. John Kirby explained, "We don't know if it was deliberate or something in the cleaning process." Oh, dear. You could chisel that on the tombstones of any number of expeditionary forces over the centuries: "Afghanistan. It's something in the cleaning process." In the past couple of months, two prominent politicians of different nations visiting their troops on the ground have used the same image to me for Western military bases: crusader forts. Behind the fortifications, a mini-West has been built in a cheerless land: There are Coke machines and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Safely back within the gates, a man can climb out of the full RoboCop and stop pretending he enjoys three cups of tea with the duplicitous warlords, drug barons and pederasts who pass for Afghanistan's ruling class. The visiting Western dignitary is cautiously shuttled through outer and inner perimeters, and reminded that, even here, there are areas he would be ill-advised to venture unaccompanied, and tries to banish memories of his first tour all those years ago when aides still twittered optimistically about the possibility of a photo-op at a girls' schoolroom in Jalalabad or an Internet start-up in Kabul. The last crusader fort I visited was Kerak Castle in Jordan a few years ago. It was built in the 1140s, and still impresses today. I doubt there will be any remains of our latter-day fortresses a millennium hence. Six weeks after the last NATO soldier leaves Afghanistan, it will be as if we were never there. Before the election in 2010, the New York Post carried a picture of women registering to vote in Herat, all in identical top-to-toe bright blue burkas, just as they would have looked on Sept. 10, 2001. We came, we saw, we left no trace. America's longest war will leave nothing behind. They can breach our security, but we cannot breach theirs – the vast impregnable psychological fortress in which what passes for the Pushtun mind resides. Someone accidentally burned a Quran your pals had already defaced with covert messages? Die, die, foreigners! The president of the United States issues a groveling and characteristically clueless apology for it? Die, die, foreigners! The American friend who has trained you and hired you and paid you has arrived for a meeting? Die, die, foreigners! And those are the Afghans who know us best. To the upcountry village headmen, the fellows descending from the skies in full body armor are as alien as were the space invaders to Americans in the film "Independence Day." The Rumsfeld strategy that toppled the Taliban over a decade ago was brilliant and innovative: special forces on horseback using GPS to call in unmanned drones. They will analyze it in staff colleges around the world for decades. But what we ought to be analyzing instead is the sad, aimless, bloated, arthritic, transnationalized folly of what followed. The United States is an historical anomaly: the nonimperial superpower. Colonialism is not in its DNA, and in some ways that speaks well for it, and in other ways, in a hostile and fast-changing world of predators and opportunists, it does not. But even nations of an unimperialist bent have roused themselves to great transformative "cleaning processes" within living memory: The Ottawa Citizen's David Warren wrote this week that he had "conferred the benefit of the doubt" on "the grand bureaucratic project of 'nation building'... predicated on post-War successes in Germany and Japan." It wasn't that long ago, was it? Except that, as Warren says, the times are "so utterly changed." It seems certain that, waging World War II today, the RAF would not carpet-bomb Dresden, and the U.S. would not nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, lacking the will to inflict massive, total defeat, would we also lack the will to inflict that top-to-toe "cleaning process"? Ah, well. Kabul is not Berlin or Tokyo. As long as wily mischief-makers are not using it as a base for global mayhem, who cares? To modify Bismarck, the Hindu Kush is not worth the bones of a single Pennsylvanian grenadier, or "training officer." Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you're Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you're Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America. And too much about the Afghan campaign is too emblematic. As much as any bailed-out corporation, the U.S. is "too big to fail": In Afghanistan as in the stimulus, it was money no object. The combined Western military/aid presence accounts for 98 percent of that benighted land's GDP. We carpet-bomb with dollar bills; we have the most advanced technology known to man; we have everything except strategic purpose. That "crusader fort" image has a broader symbolism. The post-American world is arising before our eyes. According to the IMF, China will become the dominant economic power by 2016. Putin is on course to return to the Kremlin corner office. In Tehran, the mullahs nuclearize with impunity. New spheres of influence are being established in North Africa, in Central Europe, in the once-reliably "American lake" of the Pacific. Can America itself be a crusader fort? A fortress secure behind the interminable checkpoints of Code Orange TSA bureaucratic torpor while beyond the moat the mob jeers "Die, die, foreigners"? Or, in the end, will it prove as effortlessly penetrable as the "secure room" of the Afghan Interior Ministry?
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Post by philunderwood on Sept 16, 2012 9:55:17 GMT -5
neoneocon.com/2012/09/15/about-those-guards-in-benghazi/September 15th, 2012 About those guards in Benghazi A reader alerted me to the following, written by someone who purports to have had a long career as a US Foreign Service Officer. If correct, it sheds some light on certain questions that have come up in recent discussions on this blog in connection with the security (or lack thereof) at the Benghazi consulate: The press has spent a lot of time speculating about marines. Not all embassies have them, and few consulates do. Contrary to what you see in Hollywood movies, an marine detachment at an embassy (MSG) is generally small: six to eight marines, at times a few more. Their job is to protect the most sensitive parts of the embassy. They are rarely expected to be the force that stops an assault on the outer walls. That is the responsibility of the host nation. I remember being inside an embassy on many occasions, with a howling mob of thousands of irate Muslims outside, hoping that the host country would fulfill that responsibility. If they did not, and things such as high walls, and barbed wire could not hold back the invaders, we had drilled, over and over and over, the things we all would do to protect classified materials and ourselves as best we could. Different embassies have different rules of engagement for the marines. In the ones I ran they had very instructions on the use of deadly force. They had weapons, and those were loaded. The Obama White House is hiding its manifest incompetence and failures of judgement behind the excuse of lack of “actionable intel.” The White House claims there was no “advance warning” of an attack in Libya and presumably Egypt. This, of course, is nonsense. As noted before, there rarely is highly detailed advance warning of a specific event; when you have that sort of rare quality intel you often can do something to avoid the incident in the first place. If, for example, you know of an assassination attempt on the Ambassador at point X on date X, at a minimum you make sure the Ambassador is not there then. In one case in which I was heavily involved, we had exceptionally good intel that the bad guys were building a giant truck bomb to use in a public event in which we would be participating; we were able, working with specially vetted local forces and the always great Aussies, to interrupt that construction effort and put away a nice number of evil doers. Most of the time, however, you have to have good people interpreting incomplete and often contradictory information in light of current events and the current operating environment. It is an art, not a science, and it relies on something which seemed missing in the Libya case, i.e., common sense. Common sense, remains the single most important component in making decisions about security. If the resources did not exist for whatever reason to have a properly set up and secured facility in Benghazi, why was it there? That is a question for the people at State management and for the Secretary. Who approved placing such a weakly defended facility in a highly unstable location? What was the purpose and usefulness of the facility weighed against the risks of having it there? Some bad calls seem to have been made. A valuable piece of intel seemed to have been ignored: the calendar. Did nobody have access to a calendar? They are readily available. In the missions where I served we always had a keen awareness of the date and the love of terrorists for key dates. Certainly the date 9/11 should have rung some bells. Were people not aware of outside events that could have an impact in Libya? What was the urgent nature of the business that required the Ambassador to be in a remote, hard-to-defend location on 9/11, at a time when any newspaper reader could see the tensions building all over the Muslim world? Canada, for example, had just shut down its Tehran mission and ordered Iranian diplomats in Canada to leave. Why? What was up? I do not want to be unfair but I fail to understand why the Ambassador was in Benghazi on 9/11. When I was at State, the atmosphere under the Obama misadministration was even more unreal than usual. The fawning over Obama and Hillary Clinton knew no bounds. The press releases and the internal conversations seemed to reflect the nattering of a cult rather than sober deliberations. We would have “serious” people tell us, “The world loves President Obama.” There was a feeling that somehow we were at a magical turning point in the history of humanity. In addition, Breitbart quotes Colonel David Hunt as saying it would have been Hillary Clinton with the final authority for such decisions, as well as the rules of engagement: Hunt told Breitbart News that the new State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya, approved and signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton since the 2011 fall of Khadafi’s regime, severely compromised the safety and security of murdered Ambassador Stevens and all American diplomatic staff in Libya. He also stated that the decision not to staff Benghazi with Marines was made by Secretary of State Clinton when she attached her signature to the State Department Rules of Engagement for Libya document. Breitbart News has subsequently learned that under those rules of engagement, Secretary Clinton prohibited Marines from providing security at any American diplomatic installation in Libya… We allowed a contractor to hire local nationals as security guards, but said they can’t have bullets. This was all part of the point of not having a high profile in Libya.” Wishful thinking on Hillary and Obama’s part. But common sense is not their specialty.
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Post by philunderwood on Dec 26, 2012 8:23:23 GMT -5
Middle East Democracy By Walter Williams www.JewishWorldReview.com | Here's the first paragraph of my last year's column "Democracy Is Impossible": "After Moammar Gadhafi's downfall as Libya's tyrannical ruler, politicians and 'experts' in the U.S. and elsewhere, including French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, are saying that his death marked the end of 42 years of tyranny and the beginning of democracy in Libya. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said Gadhafi's death represented an opportunity for Libya to make a peaceful and responsible transition to democracy. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said, 'Now it is time for Libya's Transitional National Council to show the world that it will respect the rights of all Libyans (and) guide the nation to democracy.' German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that 'Libya must now quickly make further determined steps in the direction of democracy.'" It's good to have hope, but if we're going to be realistic, there's little chance for Middle East emergence of what we in the West call democracy. Almost a year ago, both Egyptians and Westerners welcomed and celebrated the downfall of three decades of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's tyrannical rule. It was called an "Arab Spring." A year later, Egyptians are once again taking to the streets, this time protesting the tyrannical acts of President Mohamed Morsi, who represents the vision and ideological orientation of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood's goal has always been to impose Shariah law. Egyptian tyranny hasn't been eliminated; its form has changed. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship is now being challenged by a hodgepodge of armed resistance groups nominally united as the Free Syrian Army. Speaking for our nation, last year President Obama said, "The United States has been inspired by the Syrian peoples' pursuit of a peaceful transition to democracy. They have braved ferocious brutality at the hands of their government." Is al-Assad's downfall in any way more likely to produce democracy than Gadhafi's downfall or Mubarak's downfall? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is optimistic in saying the rebel protest shows "the strong desire of the Syrian people ... for a Syria that is democratic, just and inclusive." The human experience should have taught us that just getting rid of a particular dictatorship is only half the struggle. We must always ask what's going to replace it. The 1917 Russian revolution got rid of the Czars only to be replaced by the far greater brutality of the Bolsheviks under Joseph Stalin and his successors. In China, Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorial rule was replaced by Mao Tse-tung's unprecedented barbarity, which became responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. Cuba's Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship was replaced with that of Fidel Castro. The injustices of Western colonialism in Africa were replaced with homegrown brutal dictators who murdered their citizens. In most countries in the Middle East, the collection of human rights that Westerners know as personal liberty is nonexistent. According to Freedom House's 2011 "Freedom in the World" survey, as well as Amnesty International's annual report for 2011, most North African and Middle Eastern countries are ranked either "repressive" or "not free." Moreover, I believe there's little prospect for liberty and whatever the West tries to promote in terms of liberty is doomed to failure and disappointment. The fact of the matter is that nations in the Middle East do not share the cultural and philosophical foundations of the West that created its respect for the rule of law and private property rights. What should the West do about the gross violations of human rights so prevalent in North Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere? My short answer is: mind our own business and only intervene when there are direct threats to our national defense or economic interests. Otherwise, what they want to do to one another is none of our business.
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Post by philunderwood on Aug 20, 2013 9:28:31 GMT -5
Reality Versus Mirages in Egypt By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | Nothing symbolizes the Utopianism of our times like both liberals and some conservatives calling for us to cut off aid to the Egyptian military, because of the widespread killings in what is becoming a civil war in Egypt. Such utter lack of realism from the left is not new, but hearing some conservatives saying the same things takes some getting used to. President Obama's call for the Egyptians to end the violence and form an "inclusive" government, with all factions represented, may sound good to many Americans. But there is not a snowball's chance in hell that it will happen. Egypt existed for thousands of years before there was a United States of America. In all those millennia, Egypt has never had a free or democratic society. Nor is Egypt unique in that. Of all the different nations that have existed at various times and places throughout recorded history, it is doubtful that even ten percent were free or democratic. Even free and democratic nations existing today took centuries to achieve freedom and democracy. Barack Obama may have enough ego to imagine that he could accomplish, during his White House years, what took centuries to accomplish elsewhere. But do others, including some conservatives, need to share that delusion? Yet Obama is only the latest in a long line of American officials, including Presidents, who have thought that a universal human desire for freedom meant that freedom and democracy could be exported, even to countries where they have never existed before. However widespread the desire to be free, that is wholly different from a desire to live in a society where others are free. Nowhere is such tolerance harder to find than in the Middle East. Has no one noticed the on-going lethal violence between different sects of Muslims in the Middle East, or their intolerance toward Christians and murderous hatred of Jews? Muslims in some other parts of the world have been more tolerant, and there have been five female heads of state in Muslim countries. But not in the Middle East. Much is made of the fact that the United States gives financial support to the Egyptian military that is shooting down hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of Egyptians in the streets. But we have to make our choices among the options actually available. With the Muslim Brotherhood mounting armed attacks, what can anyone rationally expect, except shooting on both sides? It would certainly be a lot nicer if everyone laid down their guns, and just sat down together and worked things out peacefully. But has anyone forgotten that, for centuries, Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other and tried to wipe each other out? Only after the impossibility of achieving that goal became clear did they finally give it up and decide to live and let live. As regards Egypt, it is not at all clear that any regime that has existed after Mubarak, or that is currently on the horizon, is better than Mubarak was. But the very idea of leaving well enough alone is foreign to those who are looking for moral melodramas and soaring rhetoric, such as talk about "the Arab spring." What did we get for our money in Egypt under Mubarak? We got peace in a part of the world where peace cannot be taken for granted — and a part of the world from which oil provides the economic lifeblood of Western civilization. But we could not leave well enough alone. Now we are paying the price — and perhaps it is only the first installment of the price. The idea that, when a government we find unsatisfactory is overthrown, we can expect a better government to follow, goes back at least as far as President Woodrow Wilson. His intervention in the First World War — a war "to make the world safe for democracy" — turned out to be a war whose actual end results replaced old monarchies with new, and far worse, totalitarian governments. Barack Obama's Middle East interventions have replaced stable and neutral despots in Egypt and Libya with anti-Western despots and chaos. Such is the price of pursuing ideological mirages. After contributing to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and the disastrous aftermath of that, the Obama administration is now publicly lecturing Egyptian leaders, and trying to micro-manage them from thousands of miles away. And some conservatives are joining the Quixotic chorus, playing with fire.
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Post by philunderwood on Sept 6, 2013 9:04:00 GMT -5
www.qando.net/?tag=syriaHow do you ask a man to be the first to die for a mistake? By Bruce McQuain That, of course is exactly what Obama and, ironically, Kerry, are going to ask US servicemen and women to risk for their tattered “credibility”. And is this the side we’re interested in backing? The Syrian rebels posed casually, standing over their prisoners with firearms pointed down at the shirtless and terrified men. The prisoners, seven in all, were captured Syrian soldiers. Five were trussed, their backs marked with red welts. They kept their faces pressed to the dirt as the rebels’ commander recited a bitter revolutionary verse. “For fifty years, they are companions to corruption,” he said. “We swear to the Lord of the Throne, that this is our oath: We will take revenge.” The moment the poem ended, the commander, known as “the Uncle,” fired a bullet into the back of the first prisoner’s head. His gunmen followed suit, promptly killing all the men at their feet. This scene, documented in a video smuggled out of Syria a few days ago by a former rebel who grew disgusted by the killings, offers a dark insight into how many rebels have adopted some of the same brutal and ruthless tactics as the regime they are trying to overthrow. Those sorts of executions are tantamount to murder. I’m not saying that Syrian forces are any better, but to pretend that we’re helping out a side which is at all friendly to us or not packed to the rafters with murderous Islamic extremists is to simply blind one’s self to reality. And one has to wonder why alleged death by chemical weapons is somehow more atrocious or horrific than these murders? No “red line” here, huh? Much of the concern among American officials has focused on two groups that acknowledge ties to Al Qaeda. These groups — the Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria — have attracted foreign jihadis, used terrorist tactics and vowed to create a society in Syria ruled by their severe interpretation of Islamic law. They have established a firm presence in parts of Aleppo and Idlib Provinces and in the northern provincial capital of Raqqa and in Deir al-Zour, to the east on the Iraqi border. While the jihadis claim to be superior fighters, and have collaborated with secular Syrian rebels, some analysts and diplomats also note that they can appear less focused on toppling President Bashar al-Assad. Instead, they said, they focus more on establishing a zone of influence spanning Iraq’s Anbar Province and the desert eastern areas of Syria, and eventually establishing an Islamic territory under their administration. Other areas are under more secular control, including the suburbs of Damascus. In East Ghouta, for example, the suburbs east of the capital where the chemical attack took place, jihadis are not dominant, according to people who live and work there. While many have deridingly called our potential effort there as acting as “al Queda’s air force”, that does, in fact, hold some truth. There is a well-organized effort among the rebels by Islamists to co-opt the effort if it is successful and turn Syria into an extremist Islamic state. And we want to help that effort? Why? And while the United States has said it seeks policies that would strengthen secular rebels and isolate extremists, the dynamic on the ground, as seen in the execution video from Idlib and in a spate of other documented crimes, is more complicated than a contest between secular and religious groups. What nonsense. Why in the world would anyone believe that the incompetent crew that makes up this administration has any possibility of actually being able to accomplish that? One only has to survey the shipwreck that is this nation’s foreign policy under Captain “Red Line” and it is clear that they could no more make that happen than understand that ego shouldn’t drive the use of the US military. But it apparently is going too. The siren song of “save our president” is being wailed within the Congress and the usual party hacks appear to be lining up to put the men and women of the military in harm’s way because Obama shot his mouth off before doing the very basic work necessary to ensure he could back his words up and now Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines are going to be asked to pull his fat out of a fire of his own making. But back to our “leaders”: Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who served on Capitol Hill for years as a top Democratic aide, put the party’s dilemma in stark terms on Wednesday: “I think the Democrats are going to be forced to sacrifice men and women who really, really don’t want to vote for this. They’re going to have to vote for it to save the president’s hide. That’s a bad position to put your party in.” “Sacrifice” men and women. What a freaking insult. Matthews likens a political act to a “sacrifice”. Give it a rest you buffoon. He’s apparently more than willing to risk the sacrifice of military lives in order to “save the president’s hide”. And make no mistake, even a partisan hack like Matthews knows this is a crisis of the president’s own making. And why are they willing to go along? Not because Syria has any compelling national interest to the United States or that it poses an imminent threat to the country. Nope. It’s pure politics: The Obama administration’s efforts to get Congress to pass an authorization for military force against Syria are going badly in policy terms, but they are looking up in political terms. Even as the administration’s arguments become more strained, the political imperative that Democrats must support their president or risk having him “crippled” for the next 40 months is being drilled into them. That’s it. Take us to war instead of face the political consequences of Obama’s self-inflicted wound. Apparently there’s much more at stake than a few military lives. /sarc These are the people who you want leading you? Really? ~McQ
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Post by philunderwood on Sept 10, 2013 9:38:40 GMT -5
Syria and Obama By Thomas Sowell www.JewishWorldReview.com | I cannot see why even a single American, a single Israeli or a single Syrian civilian should be killed as a result of a token U.S. military action, undertaken simply to spare Barack Obama the embarrassment of doing nothing, after his ill-advised public ultimatum to the Syrian government to not use chemical weapons was ignored. Some people say that some military response is necessary, not to spare Obama a personal humiliation, but to spare the American presidency from losing all credibility — and therefore losing the ability to deter future threats to the United States without bloodshed. There is no question that the credibility of the presidency — regardless of who holds that office — is a major asset of this country. Another way of saying the same thing is that Barack Obama has recklessly risked the credibility of future presidents, and the future safety of this country, by his glib words and weak actions. Some people who disagree with Obama's issuance of a public ultimatum to the Assad regime in the first place, and who also disagree with his recent threat of military action against Syria, nevertheless say that we must back up that threat now, simply to forestall future dangers from a loss of American credibility in the eyes of other countries, including both our enemies and our allies. But will a transparently token military action preserve American credibility? And dare we risk an unintended escalation, such as began both World Wars in the 20th century? Since so little real history is taught in even our prestigious colleges and universities, it may be worth noting how World War II — the most catastrophic war in human history — began. When a weak and vacillating leader, Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, belatedly saw Hitler for what he was, after years of trying to appease him, he issued a public ultimatum that if Germany carried out its impending invasion of Poland, Britain would declare war. By this time, Hitler had only contempt for Chamberlain, as Putin today has only contempt for Obama. Hitler went ahead with his invasion of Poland. Chamberlain then felt he had to declare war. That is how World War II began. Britain's action did not save Poland, but only jeopardized its own survival. Unintended consequences are at least as common in military actions on the world stage as they are in domestic policies that start out with lofty words and end with sordid and even catastrophic consequences. Assurances from either President Barack Obama or Senator John McCain as to the limited nature of the military actions they advocate mean nothing. As someone said, long ago, once the shooting starts all plans go out the window. If a purely token military strike will do little or nothing more to preserve our national credibility than will a failure to act at all, why get people killed to spare Barack Obama a personal humiliation? This man's runaway ego has already produced too many disasters at home and abroad, and nowhere more so than in the Middle East. A personal humiliation may be all that can make him stop and think before shooting off his mouth in the future, without thinking through the consequences beforehand — as he clearly has not done in this case, as shown by his recent delays and vacillations. Nor is it at all clear that his previous policies and actions in the Middle East were well thought out, unless he was deliberately trying to weaken the position of the Western world, including Israel. Whatever the Obama rhetoric, the reality is that his policies in Egypt and Libya have led to replacing stable regimes, at peace with Israel and the West, and tolerant of their own Christian minorities, with chaotic regimes in which fanatical anti-Western terrorists have played a large and growing role, with hostility to Israel and murderous attacks on Christians in their own country. Barack Obama will try to salvage his policy and his presidency with a speech to the nation. Rhetoric is his strong suit. The big question is: How many Americans have learned to distinguish between his soaring words and his sorry record? Matters of life and death can hinge on the answer to that question.
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