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Recently all of Delaware called out Chris Coons for supporting war with Iran.
He has now pulled his support from that piece of legislation..
- Obama promised to veto that bill last night in his State of the Union.
- Two others pulled out today as well: Sen. james Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
It’s emotionally tough to go back on one’s word, when one realizes one has made a mistake. However, It is intellectually stupid NOT to do so.
Hat’s off to Chris Coons for listening to the right angel whispering in his ear……
Gate’s Slams Biden the headline read… In it the paper went directly to the money quote by Bob Gates: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Four decades is a long time. Going back from today it would begin in 1974.
Of course making decisions invites controversy. In any decision, there are those who agree, those who don’t. The only effective judge of any action plan, is how it stands up historically. One can be on the least popular side, and be proven right as perhaps one considers those who protested the Vietnam War in the 60’s and 70’s for example. Or one can be on the more popular side and be proven wrong, such as our move into the War in Iraq in 2003.
I quickly found an account that outlined Biden’s foreign policy over 4 decades and simply listed what was forthcoming. You can judge for yourself, the right and wrong choices Biden made… I predict you will find that unless you yourself are one who consistently chooses wrong when it comes to our nation’s future (as in Conservative), you will find that Gate’s exaggeration is a bit overblown….
Biden in the beginning focused on arms control issues. In response to the refusal of Congress to pass the SALT II, Biden took the initiative to meet the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, educated him about American concerns and interests, and secured several changes to address objections of the Foreign Relations Committee.
When the Reagan administration wanted to interpret the 1972 SALT I Treaty too loosely in order to allow the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) to proceed, Biden was who argued for strict adherence to the treaty’s terms.
Biden clashed again with the Reagan administration in 1986 over economic sanctions against South Africa. Reagan was against them. Biden for.
Biden can be classified generally as a liberal internationalist in foreign policy; he collaborated effectively with important Republican Senate figures such as Richard Lugar and Jesse Helms and sometimes went against elements of his own party
Biden was co-chair of the NATO Observer Group in the Senate. Biden met with some 150 leaders from nearly 60 countries and international organizations; three times he chaired the Subcommittee on European Affairs..
Once the Bosnian War broke out, Biden was among the first to call for the “lift and strike” policy of lifting the arms embargo, training Bosnian Muslims, and supporting them with NATO air strikes, and investigating war crimes.
In 1999, during the Kosovo War, Biden supported the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia and Montenegro,and co-sponsored with his friend John McCain the McCain-Biden Kosovo Resolution, which called on President Clinton to use all necessary force, including ground troops, to confront Milosevic over Serbian actions in Kosovo…
In 1998, Congressional Quarterly named Biden one of “Twelve Who Made a Difference” for playing a lead role in several foreign policy matters, including NATO enlargement and the successful passage of bills to streamline foreign affairs agencies and punish religious persecution overseas…
Biden had voted against authorization for the Gulf War in 1991 siding with 45 of the 55 Democratic senators
Biden was a strong supporter of the 2001 war in Afghanistan, saying “Whatever it takes, we should do it.”
The Bush administration rejected an effort Biden undertook with Senator Richard Lugar to pass a resolution authorizing military action only after the exhaustion of diplomatic efforts before the Bush invasion of 2003.
Biden argued repeatedly that the Iraqi war should be internationalized, that more soldiers were needed, and that the Bush administration should “level with the American people” about the cost and length of the conflict.
Biden’s stance had shifted, and Biden opposed the troop surge of 2007, saying General David Petraeus was “dead, flat wrong” in believing the surge could work….
Biden was a leading advocate for dividing Iraq into a loose federation of three ethnic states…. similar to how the US is formed.
Biden lost an internal debate to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton regarding his opposition to sending 21,000 new troops to the war in Afghanistan.
Joe Biden became the administration’s point man in delivering messages to Iraqi leadership about expected progress in the country.
Biden’s January 2010 visit to Iraq in the midst of turmoil over banned candidates from the upcoming Iraqi parliamentary election resulted in 59 of those candidates being reinstated by the Iraqi government two days later.
In a controversy arising over how much influence Russia still had on a global scale, Secretary of State Clinton quickly disavowed Biden’s remarks disparaging Russia as a power.
Biden led the successful administration effort to gain Senate approval for the New START treaty.
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So what was your score? By my count and it should differ by each person’s outtake and priorities, I count him wrong on five out of the list of the above. (and even two of them were very hard choices)
So …. why the contrarian role announced by Gates? This may well be the reason.
Biden’s most important role within the administration has been to question assumptions and playing a contrarian role. Obama said that, “The best thing about Joe is that when we get everybody together, he really forces people to think and defend their positions, to look at things from every angle, and that is very valuable for me.” Another senior Obama advisor said Biden “is always prepared to be the skunk at the family picnic to make sure we are as intellectually honest as possible.”
Simply based on an apolitical history across his lifetime, it now seems obvious that when someone in ignorance makes a disparagement over the effectiveness of one former Senator and current Vice-President Joe Biden , what they are really saying, is a rather negative commentary about a lack of their own astuteness, and not a disparagement about the real Joe Biden….
China shoots down two B52’s flying through it’s extended air zone.
What now?
The initial reaction would be to retaliate. Strike something of theirs! Expect some nut of the Tea Party to do a stand-up filibuster the Senate and demand nuking Beijing and Shanghai… But they are stupid.
The US is really not in any position to retaliate. We would have to react diplomatically. Pull our staffs, etc, etc,… talk to them through the Russians.
For if we were to launch, we would be launching against a nation smart enough to cybersleath into our NSA, not some dumb Muslim nation locked in the 13th Century. Good chance that not only would we have lost the two planes originally, but our losses would also extend to every single one of our attacking planes. We’d be wiped out. No doubt all our electronic deflections have already been neutralized by the Chinese… Our most effective military retort would be of a submarine at-sea launching of unmanned missiles taking out a minor retaliatory target. But even if that launch was not jammed, once that was over, the extension of airspace would remain, and not be challenged again…..
In any military engagement off its coast, China wins. Pretty much the same way the US would win in enforcing the Monroe Doctrine 2 centuries ago… We have the power here; and you, from way over there, don’t.
So one must use a different perspective.
What is the one thing China most fears… Come on.. you know… It is obvious… Still guessing? Ok, I’ll help you out. China most fears an insurrection of its own people. People who want freedom, privacy, democracy, and those great things we often take for granted. The Chinese willingly let themselves be run by their totalitarian government… At any point, based simply on numbers, ie the number of people in security, and the number of people not, China could rise up, revolt, and rule itself… This scares the Party more than any other threat. They know that whereas the US would certainly not dismember their bodies in a public square, if the revolt got ugly, unlike us the local population would have no qualms in doing so…
Therefore we play to their fear….
The reason China does what it does, is to keep the people happy enough so they don’t revolt. Their economic growth, their development, their capitalism, is all based upon that premise. “If they are happy, we, the Party, stay in control….”
So.
What if we declared economic war? Stopped buying anything from China? China would have to become a consuming nation to survive. Currently China’s wealth is saved and reinvested. Compared to the average US income, which practically buys everything it makes… China buys very little of their own products, those are slated for exports to bring more cash into the country. If the world stops buying Chinese products, then those savings not invested outside of China, need to start buying up the products instead of the other members of the global economy…. That is a short lived proposition. After all, how many shovels will each Chinese buy?
It is further aggravated by China’s demand for raw materials. Food is one. Oil is another. Heavy metals are a third. As each of these become critical, each becomes rationed, the growing restlessness starts whispering that these hardships would never have come to pass, if the regime had not shot down two airplanes that up until a week earlier, had always flown that route with no problem. Now, because of a gross error made by the current regime, millions have to go hungry, aren’t working, and are barely existing… Perhaps the whispering campaign goes, it is time to overthrow the overlords and sue for peace, and get things back to normal?
As China cracks down against this whispering dissent internally, it loses focus externally…
That would be the time to present a show of force. The US then blockaids China. It would take two rings. The outer ring would consist of ships permanently parked outside the range of China’s missiles… Their job would be to impede all international commerce headed to China, boarding and searching every ship… The inner ring would consist of primarily of stealth submarines who would sink or shoot down everything making a mad dash into China…
The Russians would probably take the middle road, most likely benefiting from their proximity to China, but not going as far to alienate the US itself by forming a Sino-Soviet Aggression Pact. It would be impossible to stop all commerce into China. The demand for all goods would make the profit margins of smuggling, impossible to ignore. The Soviets would benefit; Indochina, India, Burma, the Stans, would all benefit, but that amount slipping through, would not compensate for the hurt coming from the Shanghai and Hong Kong docks being empty of commerce….
Sooner or later, a group within the Chinese leadership, would have attracted enough numbers to challenge the military extremists, and something would crack and diplomacy would then become an option….
Point is, the choice to not attack militarily, is not an act of cowardice… it is just so smart. If every American citizen were to follow the Tea Party option and attack China, we would be at a 5 to 1 disadvantage. But if every citizen in China attacked the ruling party and we were on THEIR side, we would have a 20 to 1 advantage….
Attacking China with economic weapons, is no different than surrounding a castle during a Medieval siege and waiting it out….
Super smart. One gets the prize for no cost at all…..
That is why China has erred in its calculations… by thinking only in military terms where it does possess all the cards in its favor…
Unfortunately in war… one does not get to make up all the rules….
Let us start here. A good leader takes his people where they want to go. A good leader does not force his people to go where they definitely don’t want to go… That is ruling. Not leading.
A good leader convinces his people why they must do something. He makes sure he puts in how it will benefit them. If it doesn’t benefit them, he is ruling. Not leading.
A good leader creates good out of evil. There is a moral equivalency to leadership. It can be defined shallowly at times. Such as calling Hitler good leader based on his strategy of conquering France. But time makes such affirmations short lived. I don’t think anyone looking over the rubble left of Germany in 1945 at that moment considered Hitler a good leader after viewing his legacy.
A good leader does not follow the rules… He decides when and where the rules apply. Some would apply the name “great leader” to one who never wavered. Well, such a leader would have ruined the life of a little boy whose grandmother sent along a knife to cut the cake, not knowing that knives in school were grounds for expulsion. A lot of misdirected people in leadership positions in that particular school district, made bad decisions based on their mistaken view of what makes a good leader. A good leader does not always follow the rules.
A good leader decides when and where the rules apply.
In Syria we have controversy. We have one argument stating that Syria must be punished. We have the other that says War must be reserved only for something Huge. That “Huge” is of course undefined and fits in with “we know it when we see it.”
As the executive of the world’s largest force, militarily, economically, and morally, our president pretty much get to decide.
Here is what a great leader would do. He would find a way to unite the two sides into one… He would find a way to punish Assad of Syria in a way that would scare any other despot thinking of using chemical weapons, and do it without going to war.
That would be great leadership.
So what would scare Assad the most? It’s hard to tell, but my guess is that his biggest fear as a man, is if his palace is overrun by Syrians, who basically tear him apart, and do his wife and children, then systematically erase any acknowledgement that he or his dad ever existed… That whole reign of terror becomes ridiculed, laughed at, for the rest of History. i would guess that is how you could get to Assad.
So, we, (not just the US but the rest of the world) have to make that threat real.. We don’t have to carry it out necessarily, but we have to make it real. How can that happen?
I think first, is that we make crossing the border out of Syria a real good move for Syrians… Send the signal, that if you leave Syria, the world community will settle you somewhere, give you a job, and a chance to begin a life of freedom and prosperity. ideally what we are doing is a Cold War. Over time we are saying: “See how great the Rest of the world lives? Oh, you poor Syrians… Escape and come join us”. Where could we relocate them? Iran could step up, Jordan,, and Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States,
This is how your hurt Assad… Turn his own people against him… No ruler can rule a group of people who don’t want to be ruled. He can use brutality to a certain extent, but the numbers are completely on the side of the population wanting him gone. With our intelligence capacity, he will never be safe… Every bodyguard is a potential killer..
And that, more or less, is what we should do… It is what a great leader does… He solves problems in ways where the evil get punished and the good win out.
Going to war, rewards those doing evil, and hurts the good….
It is time our President, become the great leader. Not by digging down and reinforcing the costly methods promoted in the past.. But to devise and implement new methods which because of their success, will be utilized far into the future….
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….
So impressed was Leon Panetta with Hillary Clinton’s taking out the Republican opposition for 2014/2016, he said, “Damn! Women can sure fight good!”
Immediately thereafter, he overturned the ban on women in combat.
Photo courtesy of The Colossus of Rhodey
So. You’re saying we should have given them all guns instead? ….
The NRA says we need more guns.
I have taken on the task of illuminating news stories where more guns would not have made any difference. Less guns would.
With heavy heart we enter the holiday season with …
Bryan Herrera, 16-Year-Old Miami Boy, Shot While Riding His Bike To Do Homework
4 Firefighters Shot, 2 Killed At Webster, New York Fire Scene; Shooter Dead
Jennifer Lynn Sebena Dead: Wisconsin Police Officer Found Shot On Duty, Investigation Ensues
In the first story, a 16 year old with a gun riding a bike? Guns couldn’t help him.
In the second story, firefighters responding to a call, with guns in their hands? Guns couldn’t help them.
In the third, a police officer, murdered. Was wearing a gun. Guns didn’t help her…
So the NRA is full of poop. You know what their answer is? Deport Pier Morgan! He is calling them out on TV and they can’t handle the truth.
Simply put, ban all assault rifles, ban all large ammo clips, and license all guns and be able to trace them through every transaction both private and public…. We’d be done with this…..