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The plural of Vanilla Ice would be pronounced ….. Vanilla Ice’s (or ISIS)…
They ran out of Vanilla in the Syrian desert….
Tough group, aren’t they? If they walked down my street like this, I too would hide….
Dear fellow members of the Human Race.
I speak to you now from the heart. People are people. Some have good souls and some do not. You know as well as do I that no nation is composed of all of one type or all of the other… Each of our nations have both good and bad people in them. With every choice of direction taken, we must analyze if either of our nations are making a correct or incorrect step…. In fact across every life, each person must daily battle over whether what they are doing, the course of action they are pursuing, is indeed the correct one they should be upon….
This is coming to you from the heart. Your nation’s course of action is puzzling to me, to my nation, and to your fellow members of the human race now scattered across the planet. Your nation has come so far since the 1992, You are a highly respected member of the international community. You recently awed us by your mastery in hosting the entire world at your Olympics in Sochi.
With all that behind you today it is puzzling that your nation is embarking on a course of action that negates all that. One that makes you appear to be less of a great power in this world. Instead of greatness one would expect from the pageantry of Sochi, the very nation that beget Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, we are getting the behavior of a warlord existing in a land in which there is no law and there is no order.
Among our species, there will always be disputes. There will always be disagreements between nations for as long as there will be disagreements between individual people. But civilized people have forged a means that deal with such. We have institutions that we respect and that we trust will not side with either one or another solely because of personal favoritism, but decide what they do, because they honestly think their decision will make the world a better place. For one to take a course of action because one has a superiority of force, is not conducive to a better future for anyone.
For it will cause my side to react. It will cause your government to react to our reaction. It will cause us to react to that new threat imposed on us by your reaction to what we did…. in all regards, further continence on the current path will be a step backwards for the world community, and for the entire species of man… It will be a return to the Cold War Days, where as one of your diplomats stated, “our tanks are again on your front lawn.” I hope you can see that if your nation’s current threat of force is continued, and that if this old retired idea that taking sovereignty from other nations were again to become the norm of Russia’s international behavior, then our nation and allies will have no recourse but to implant ourselves on the soil of those nations bordering next to your great country, for only the sole purpose to keep each of them from becoming the next Crimea.
This will of course intensify an arms race for both our nations. A race of resources that will have great negative economic consequences for your country, as well as ours. We are prepared and capable of undergoing it again, and you the Russian people should not doubt, that based on a comparison of our two economies, all global experts predict our side will win, again.
I hereby ask you to challenge your ruler, who seems bent on pursuing this destructive action. And one can make no mistake that it parallels a course our nation chose a decade ago when we wrongly under the guise of protecting our national interests, did something similar. However there are vast differences between our past, and this present. We tried diplomacy first; we used the UN weapons’ inspectors; we took our case before our own people, then to the United Nations, and from both we got a consensus of support. Unlike us, your nation just moved in.
To your nation’s credit, there has not yet been violence. You have acted far more civilized than did ours. There is still time for your nation to chose to return to the previous status quo of two weeks ago, then make your case to the UN, the US, and the EU. As is all diplomacy among civilized human beings, nothing will be dismissed out of hand.
You are a great nation. one that has come far. I ask the Russian people to consider whether going backwards in time, returning again to a Cold War, is truly the best option available to your nation… Isn’t cooperation, as was seen in the Olympic games held on Russian soil, a far more productive, a far more fruitful enterprise of action, than exerting one’s will through military occupation?
The stakes are not high. Yet your leaders hold them much higher and stress them far more important than most others think they seem to be. We simply ask that your nation returns to your rightful bases; that the referendum is postponed and allowed to be done properly with adequate international observation solely to provide credibility to its results. Our intelligence tells us the outcome is not in question; the numbers seem to be in your favor. However by rushing the referendum and having it take place in occupied territory, certainly will cast a shadow over many decades to come, of whether or not those results were indeed legitimate. As Russian people you should have no fear of legitimacy.. You have spawned many new nations since 1992, because those people chose through elections to be independent from Russia. It would certainly be fair in the eyes of the international community, if a nation or part of one, wanted to come back in…
But there needs to be legitimacy. It needs to be done in a certain way, under certain guiding principles, with the approval of the global community… Being wrong in the international community’s eyes is a costly endeavor; one of wasted investment. Again, many in the world community likewise disapproved of my nation, the United States’ military intervention into the Mideast now over a decade ago. Many Russian people were among them… I ask you now, speaking from the heart, if it was wrong for us, and it was, why would it not be wrong for Russia to do exactly the same thing?
There are many commonalities between the Russian people and those of the United States of America. We both have children, and grandchildren. We both want what is best for them probably more than we care about ourselves… The collision course our two nations are headed towards now, is not good for either of our progeny, no matter where they call home….
We have no quarrel with where Crimea itself wishes to end up. My only concern is how that gets determined, and whether I have to expend expensive resources to make sure that no other nation with a border touching Russia, ever has to worry about the same thing happening to them… Western Europe is thriving and prosperous today, because of actions that the US took 70 years ago. Indeed our investment back then has paid off handsomely. We are prepared to do it again if we must. However our doing so, does not help your children or our children, have the better future which they could have, if our two nations were to always work within the structure and framework provided by, for and to the global community, in order to achieve our interests and build to better future…
I ask all Russian people to make their will known, that they as we suspect, would also prefer a peaceful world, a civilized world, a world whose future is based on the best intentions of mankind, to one day hand over to both our children…
There is still time for Russia to act magnanimously; if there is the Will. …By the grace of the God present in us all on either continent, we pray for the sake of the civilized future of both our nations, that deep within every Russian, that Will is still there….
If you didn’t hear Allan Loudell today, you missed one of the best broadcasts I have heard since those early days of CNN leading up to the First Gulf War.
You know how today’s news is kinda sickening and syrupy? Promoting an agenda, with t’s crossed and i’s dotted? Well this broadcast went back to the old days of journalism, as when CNN was starting out, … of putting people familiar with the MId-East on, and letting them tell us what they knew….
It was amazing and one came away from is with a wider knowledge of who is pushing what, even though why still, at this point makes no sense….
As a lesson that “what makes sense” usually turns out wrong, is this potential solution that seems to be a win, win, win for all.
Only in America…
Actually Britain, but it was still an American, our own Secretary of State, John Kerry. When asked by a reporter in London, what, if any, alternative there was other than war that could possibly solve this, Kerry flubbed and said.… Well, if Assad were to turn over all his chemical weapons to the international community and let them be destroyed, US would find it hard to go to war….
Putin quickly responded… That is a great idea… Let me call Assad… In minutes, Assad said… “why yes. What a great idea.”
The White House was quick to back track…
“Uhhh, Kerry wasn’t serious… We still want to go to war (reason still unknown), and Kerry was just making a hypothetical argument knowing full well that the impossible could never occur, that Assad would give up his Chemical Weapons…”
(Mental note: the White House really wants war.)
Meanwhile all those familiar with the problems begin working through the implications. It is a win for Assad. It is a win for Russia. It is a win for Iran, Hesbollah, Israel, Jordan. It is a win for America and the west. it is a win for the rebels in Syria. We’ve gone full circle…
So, John Kerry’s big FU’… may have just unintentionally saved the world from a war no one except those in the White House, ever wanted…
Only in America… (well technically Britain)
What a great excuse for a cup of tea… and a biscuit or even better, two.
The reason we are so sure Assad ordered the chemical attack itself, comes from an intercepted communique from a high ranking Hesbollah official to the Iran embassy in Damascus, which states that “Assad made a big mistake in ordering the use of chemicals.
Put yourself in his shoes. Wouldn’t that be exactly what you would have said upon first hearing of the attack and seeing footage? Everyone, including myself, thought is was Assad long before proof began to turn up that other alternatives existed.
So to make the assumption that a Hesbollah in Lebanon would have inside knowledge of the upper mechanizations of Syria’s armed forces, is not realistic. For this person to say Assad made a grave mistake is really, no different than myself, saying Obama is making a grave mistake by ordering this discussed future military strike. Do I know if he has ordered it? No.
But that doesn’t stop me from trying to warn them that such actions are severely harming themselves,…
And this, is our whole “evidence” supporting that Assad needs punished.
Assad in his Charlie Rose Interview, asserts that he did not order chemical weapons. As many including the Russians have said… doing such would be the height of stupidity. Similar to the US, nuking Damascus because chemical weapons were stored there… Duh, why would we do that?
This is corroborated by German Intelligence, who now state that intercepted phone calls show Assad was not himself involved in last month’s attack or in other instances when government forces have allegedly used chemical weapons.
Which suggests rogue elements in Assad’s forces. That is to be expected. In an area where religious hatred is so high, the ability to inflict causalities on one’s hated adversary, might overrule any orders to the contrary. Those old enough to remember the Cold War, no doubt also remember the countless novels and movies depicting a rogue element inside our own military, initiating nuclear strikes to achieve a personal result…. perhaps even a promotion.
So we have a flimsy piece of evidence that a recent law school graduate could get thrown out of court, and we have an ally offering up intelligence showing Assad knew nothing, nothing… and having both together, we have to give Assad a pass, because the preponderance of the evidence, shows him to be not guilty. Maybe he is guilty and hides it well. However, the preponderance of evidence is not enough to convict him…. if any American courtroom would acquit him, we certainly can’t bomb them back into the Stone Age.
it’s over. We may attack despite it being over. That would be a mistake. Just looking over support for an attack shows it disappearing faster than a party where the last one left pays the check….
Assad will win us over tomorrow. Clips have been reviewed already. Obama will state his case, but offer no evidence. It will not even be a wash.
The American People, have decided we should not go to war. That decision crystallized this afternoon. It would be wise to accept their verdict, and begin work on Plan B. It also might be wise to get rid of your staff in the White House who brought you to this catastrophe and replace it with those who have recently lived outside the beltway.,… Just sayin’…
We are a tired generation… We grew up with ‘Nam. Which ever side we were on during the battle here in America over that police action, or war, looking back after it was done, …. we all knew it was wrong….
After that we thought all war was wrong, and unfortunately took some of that angst out on those who least deserved it: those coming back from the steamy jungles of hell…..
Against our will a certain president soon sent Marines into Beirut; what happened then reinforced our belief that an American war was unjustifiable and that all other means must be utilized to prevent American war from ever happening again…. Against our will, we propped up a Nicaragua dictator against some rebels. Against our will, we sold arms to Iran to use for paying for our support for that Nicaragua dictator, since a Congress elected by the American people, flatly said no to supporting him in Nicaragua… We found a way to do it anyway….
I remember Senator Rudman, (R-NH) saying at the hearing while addressing Oliver North,… “The American people have the RIGHT to be wrong.”
Oliver North had been insisting that even when Americans flatly say NO, one still must do what one deems is necessary, that whatever one deems necessary, is the highest moral truth. “Sometimes one has to go above the law!” was actually said by the defense at this hearing. Only one good thing came out of those hearings: we all were introduced to Fawn Hall.
But then… The Brits quickly regained the Faulklands. Then came Grenada, which went off without a hitch. Then Panama, which was successful and almost painless. Then came General Schwartzkopf. The 4th largest army in the world, was routed in hours, and in days, had been completely mopped up. Then came the Balkans. We were on a roll. We’d finally nailed down the successful formula of how to win in battle.
Today we say Iraq is a failure. But that was so not so just after the invasion. Inside Baghdad, the pulling down of Saddam’s statue, the victory of capturing Saddam, the ability of us to hand out billions of American dollars, initially gave this campaign the luster of looking like another success story…
Until we tried to steal their oil. The standard global rate of dividing oil revenues is that the US gets a 20% cut for the development, and Iraq would get to keep 80% because it is after all, their resource. That is how we deal with Nigeria.
But Brenner announced that we’d flip that to pay for the war, and that Iraq would be allowed to keep 20% because we liked them so much, and we’d only, by our good graces, take 80% of the revenues. 24 hours after letting that cat out of the bag, the first IED went off under a US military vehicle… Before week was out, the total was in the hundreds.
The luster was gone. We were an invading army, something we have not called ourselves since WWII. We always saw ourselves as the policeman who leaves as soon as order is restored…
Afghanistan likewise, got worse. Then Pakistan. Then Yemen. On the diplomatic front instead of doing no harm, .. we could do no good. Then Libya costs us an ambassador who was running guns through Turkey. He shouldn’t have been there; it should have been a low level staffer with security clearance.
This baby boomer generation knows that war is wrong. We know from experience. The only time it can be employed successfully, is a) when the whole world is united behind you, b) you go in and get out, and c) you have a structure that stays in place long after you are gone.
The only time it goes badly… is every other scenario.
Which brings us to Syria. Syria has no importance to anyone. (They couldn’t even defend the militarily advantageous Golan Heights in ’67!) Which is why we let the Russians have them.
People are going to die in Syria if a): Assad wins, b): the rebels win, or c): no one wins. The only thing changing upon this wars outcome, is which side will be massacred at war’s end. Hence the battle for survival over there now.
So by having the US intervene or not, we are choosing which side gets to kill the other after the hostilities die down.
The weakest argument for going in still left with standing, is that they used chemical weapons. In WWI, the British, French, and Germans all used chemical weapons. Are chemical weapons really worse than being burned alive? Or asphyxiated as a bomb blast sucks all the oxygen out of your lungs and the room? Or a milk jug sized piece of jagged metal shrapnel ripping and leaving a hole through your body? Or a mine being stepped on? I’m trying to think why chemical weapons are so much worse, except for the fact that we’ve been told” they are so much worse”?
A causality is a causality.
We understand “why” some say we should go into Syria. Because if we do not respond to chemical weapons in a big way, someone else will become confident and use theirs. There is only one way to keep the genie inside the bottle, and that is to never leave a opening for it to escape….
We also understand “why” one of our beloved School districts had a policy that suspended, and expelled those who brought weapons to school! Not just guns, but knives too. After all, the argument for punishing Syria, applies to soon-to-become high school felons too.
But, there came a time when the response generated by a policy, actually became the crime, You remember the little boy expelled who brought a cake to school, and his grandmother thoughtfully sent a knife knowing teachers usually don’t have utensils in their classrooms. The teacher actually cut the cake, served it, thinking nothing of it.. it was someone higher up, reviewing the situation, who said, “wait, that can be interpreted as a breach of regulations. Let’s make an example out of this little boy”. He was suspended and could have been expelled, except it eventually became news and public outcry was solidly on his side. The policy makers were laughed out of town.
Which is why, if you are making this decision, you need to stall. Acting quickly and decisively is equivalent to acting on rumor and innuendo. So what if Syria lied and shot the gas cannisters off?
Does a military strike create enough excellent good will to neutralize this bad act?
Ironically what is best for the US in this situation, is for Assad to stay in power, to have a zealous change in heart, to work closely with the USA to get his economy working, to becoming a partner in that region with the US, and to signing a treaty with Israel, as did the Egyptians many, many years ago…
What is worse for us, is if the jihadists win, push out the moderates and take over the reform movement (they always do), then go to war with Israel, Jordan and Turkey. Making ourselves into the evil empire will only create more explosions everywhere, flare-ups which would not have occurred had we taken the Jedi way, and used the “Force” in our possession, to make events on the ground turn our way and happen in our favor….
Realistically such a rosy scenario probably can’t happen; but if it did, were this to come about, there would be no doubt: Obama would be lauded as the best president we’d ever see in our lifetimes. The cost of failure is so low that it just might be worth the try.
The second point… which all us Viet-namers will well remember, is that you may win every engagement you participate in Syria, but you won’t win the war at home, and that… will suck all your energy away from all the good you plan to do before 2016.
It broke LBJ. It broke Bush II. Don’t let it break you….
Why not back when Kerry was running and only the firewall in Ohio kept Bush in office?
Just think … had we been able to stop the implosion four years earlier?
(As of this printing, the world record is at thirty shoes; can you even get close?)