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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….
Susan Rice is crispy around the edges. Republicans are refusing to endorse her… Why? When pressed by reporters the answer is… they don’t know.
They tried to pin the Benghazi hearings on her. That backfired. She was telling what was thought at the time. Republicans say… you should have said you didn’t know instead of saying what you thought was true…. Not many other then Breitbart readers are buying that one.
Her real sin, it appears, is that she is our UN ambassador. Republicans hate the UN.. Why? If the US wants to attack Canada for tar sands, the UN will object. If the US wants to attack Newfoundland to change its timezone by one half an hour…. the UN will object. If the US attacks Iraq to steal its oil, the UN will object……
That is why the Republicans don’t like the UN. They can’t attack random countries. The UN recently supported Palestine over their favorite child Israel, giving it another bad mark in Republicans eyes… For you see? Republicans have a basic flaw. If you hand them a giant bag of money, and tell them what to believe, THAT becomes what they believe… Forget facts.
Now, conservative pundits are becoming worried. It appears that all the noise they created, as of itself, pushed Susan Rice into the number one contender. Originally, no one outside of the beltway and New York, knew who she was. Now thanks to Republicans, we all know her name… And the more we see of her, the better she appears over other contenders to take over the Hillary Clinton legacy.
As anyone who has just come from seeing the movie “Lincoln” knows, the Secretary of State needs to be on a very personal relationship with the president. Obama and Clinton though once adversaries, did sit on quite a few stages together throughout the primary campaign. That relationship has worked well.
The president gets to chose who he wants. The Republicans have offered a list of those who they recommend. However, based upon the election, the direction the American people want to go, is directly opposite the way Republicans want to take us… In fact, it should be argued that the election proved concisely that Republicans are going in the wrong direction. Beaten back on every platitude they uttered, the American people said “no! We don’t like what you say, how you act, or what your policies are.”
So the Republican list, should read as…. these people are exactly the ones who should not be Secretary of State. In fact, based upon the election’s results, by sitting back and seeing whom the Republicans object to the most…. should point the finger at who will become our best Secretary of State…
That person appears to be Susan Rice.
She is reportedly blunt, or crisp around the edges, at times. Yet, her detractors are decrying that on the talk shows… she was not blunt enough.. She was diplomatic, obfuscating, pleasant, and believable. So, since they are using her bluntness against her, and her non-bluntness against her at the same time, it is obvious that as with everything else on Capitol Hill right now, Republicans are in disarray. Repbumblicans don’t know what they want… Which is why,… no news source should be noting their objections except to make fun of them.
If she has the president’s confidence, it sounds like the Benghazi episode in itself, PROVES she has all the qualifications she needs… If she made the world believe the incident was caused by a video, (without intention of course) thereby buying time for the US to rescue it’s informants, I would think she would have the perfect qualifications to be Secretary of State….
Some of us can remember a Chief Executive once saying: We do not have spy planes flying over Russia”, less than a week before one got shot down…. Sometimes, you have to lie to your enemies….
The fact that John McCain, Susan Rice’s biggest critic, thinks Sarah Palin is the smartest woman in the world (at least back in 2008) shows the world how good of a judge he is when it comes to women and that little matter of their intelligence.
So, if this Rice IS a little crispy wound the edges…. it is time to move forward and to serve the world a wondreful batch of: Rice Crispy Treats….. 🙂
Priceless. Republicans are imploding like exploding chickens on Skyrim.
Yes. It is true. John McCain missed a critical Senate Intelligence hearing behind closed doors, to hold a press conference referred below, to complain we needed a special committee to get the truth on Benghazi. Senator Collins, who was also on the committee, and who was also in the briefing, said it was funny that McCain would miss such an opportunity to get the full facts from all sources.
The AP is reporting that the story told publicly about the riots being over the movie, was to stall Al Qaeda and the terrorists from knowing what we knew. In essence, it was done to throw a smokescreen across our spy system, buying time to make adjustments in personal who had been compromised by the attack…
It is all McCain needed to know. It shuts down the entire Republican attack. It shows that Obama is truly the best president we have had in our lifetimes. It suggests that the entire Benghazi event was scripted by Republicans just to create drag on Obama before the election.
Why would McCain do something so silly? Well here is an idea. McCain will not be head of any committee next term. He could if he wanted, be head of the Committee on Indian Affairs, but that is a step down in prestige. Perhaps if he could create a new committee, one on which he was chairman, one that would be in the daily news feed, inviting himself on talk shows and newscasts,… he could keep some of his prestige?
Right click to open full image… Pictograph Courtesy of Viral..
So, can someone tell me again, why we shouldn’t tax the rich, and instead, balance the budget on the backs of everyone else?…….
I seem to be missing that little detail where that all makes sense……
Courtesy of the Spectator.co.uk
Much has been said about the new missiles tested this past weekend. It is hard however to find anything about the turmoil taking place in Iran as we speak..
Courtesy of Mirror.co.uk/News
To understand Iran, is to understand the connection between the two…
Iran’s leaders have very little interest in bombing Israel, or American bases within range of their newly tested missiles… They do have a large vested interest towards staying in power inside their own country.
Flashback for a moment to Condoleezza Rice’s admission when no weapons of mass destruction materialized in Iraq. “We saw the same thing in East Germany when it collapsed. There was very little militaristic muscle capable of being applied towards the rest of Europe. Apparently it was all for show and was in place primarily to contain internal dissension… not project a threat to the West…
Saddam Hussein’s charade of fooling others into believing that he had WMD’s, was also in place to keep control of his own politics. As long as he had the perceived threat of WMD’s, he was safe within his own country. In fact, their need to him was so important enabling him to establish domestic control over dissenting elements within his own country, that he felt more safe in defying the West, than he did in admitting to his own people, that he had barely any iota of a threat at all..
The timing of this Iranian missile test and the revelation that there is another centrifuge plant near Qom, (yeah right, Google Earth picked it out two years ago…) are both attempts to place Iran in the cross-hairs of deadly enemies, and create a crises that is so bad, that all dissenting factions have no choice but to band together, if their nation is to survive….
The media is playing right into the right wing goverment’s hand… by calling out the deadly danger…
Now the smart thing to do and what I would begin immediately, is to spin this tactic to backfire on the right wingers of Iran. In order to do that all we need to do is to build up the respect for the opposition each time a stunt like this is pulled. The result would be this. If each time they test a missile, more Iranians join the opposition, the missiles will stop being launched…
The U.S. Europe, and Asian countries need to emphatically state that because of these irrational actions by the current Iranian leadership, Iran must take on its leaders and change them… The economic giants need not to threaten Iran, but instead announce they will support the opposition parties, donating money, supplying weapons, anything that will scare the pants off of those Iranian conservatives hanging on to power by a thread..
It can be done with words. We don’t need a task force in the Persian Gulf… That… helps the WRONG party. Instead, if we recognize the opposition as a worthy cause of enlightenment,one which is trying to overcome ignorance and suppression, and follow up so that every time an Iranian missile heads for the troposphere…. the world press lavishes praise upon the opposition, so much so, the world soon forgets the name of Iran’s president…
Now that is how you handle Iran…
kavips 
