China Confidential
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
MSNBC Insiders: Olbermann is Out of Control
Dateline USA....
Media matters.
NBC/MSNBC TV news sources say veteran, professional commentators and journalists--most notably, Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell--are appalled by the network's amateurish, biased coverage of the Democratic National Convention.
Industry insiders say Matthews is incensed by Keith Olbermann's commentary, which amounts to little more than a nightly adulation of Barack Obama.
Only two days into the event, the obnoxious, out-of-control Olbermann, one of the most outrageous and arrogant personalities to ever make it in TV news, has insulted and over-talked his colleagues to an alarming degree. At one point in Tuesday night's coverage, the totally bald, toupee-topped Olbermann even used a childish hand gesture to ridicule Matthews, who has inexplicably been relegated to sidekick status on Olbermann's show.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
On US Support for Radical Islam
Foreign Confidential....
What is to be done about US foreign policy--specifically, the suicidal tendency to attempt to manipulate, accommodate, and appease right-wing political Islam, also known as radical Islam, or Islamism?
It's a decades-old problem; and, contrary to popular belief, the Bush administration has perpetuated it, even after 9/11. The administration has revealingly avoided an all-out war on Islamism, in favor of a confused--and confusing--"War on Terror," which, after seven years, the US is nowhere near winning and is actually in danger of losing. The President himself has praised "peaceful and beautiful" Islam, and Islamist-sponsoring and -exporting Saudi Arabia; and his administration, incredibly, has sought ties with supposed Islamist moderates, including elements of the Iranian mullahocracy and Hamas--notwithstanding the US State Department's formal designation of the Palestinian group as terrorist. The Hamas takeover of Gaza is a case in point: it would not have happened without the State Department's misguided democracy-promotion project and mistaken belief in Muslim--and Islamist--moderation.
That even the worst-ever attacks on US soil did not result in an immediate and permanent end to this perfidious policy is both troubling and mystifying. Understand, as Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama likes to say, that the idea of using Islam, inherited from the British, dates to US support for the Muslim Brotherhood (which spawned Al Qaeda) against Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser during the1950s and the Carter administration's 1979 betrayal and abandonment of the pro-US Shah of Iran and covert aid to anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan--before the Soviet invasion of December 1979. The Reagan administration subsequently escalated the Afghan intervention into the largest-ever US covert operation.
Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, saw Muslim populations as prime targets for influence, and argued for a de facto alliance with Islamist Iran and Islamism in general. He told Time Magazine in January 1979: “An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.”
Brzezinski made the comment about a year after President Carter had appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommended dumping the Shah, a modernizing monarch, and supporting the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Shah, dying of cancer, later commented in exile, “I did not know it then, perhaps I did not want to know? But it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is what the human rights advocates in the State Department wanted. What was I to make of the Administration’s sudden decision to call former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an adviser on Iran? Ball was among those Americans who wanted to abandon me and ultimately my country.”
Brzezinski's craven attempt to cozy up to Khomeini’s new Islamist regime culminated in and may have actually contributed to the Iranian hostage crisis in November 1979, as more extreme elements within the regime moved to take advantage of perceived American weakness and use the crisis as a rallying point.
Brzezinski learned nothing from the loss of Iran to Islamism. In a January 1998 interview with a French magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur, he conceded that it was US policy to support Islamists to undermine Russia, and confirmed that US covert action drew Russia into starting the Afghan war in 1979.
Asked if he had any regrets, he replied: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.”
Asked if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” he responded: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
Responding to the interviewer's observation that Islamism had become a "world menace," Brzezinski said: “Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam….”
Brzezinski, who is again advocating appeasement of Iran, and, also Hamas (in tune with the views of his former boss, Carter, who this year visited and embraced Hamas leaders in Syria), is one of Obama's foreign policy advisers. The Candidate of Change can be expected to look even harder for phantom Islamist moderates.
Which leads this reporter to ask: is there any hope? The answer is ... maybe. One hopes that Obama's opponent in the Presidential contest, Republican John McCain, will live up to his reputation as a political maverick, and advocate a new course--a path to victory over the world menace that the world's greatest democracy should have never allowed to grow and develop, let alone, aided and encouraged.
-Andre Pachter
Copyright 2008North Korea Stops Disabling Atomic Plants
North Korea's decision to stop disabling its atomic plants is a "step backward" and violates a six-nation accord aimed at ending the hardline communist state's nuclear drive, the US State Department said Tuesday.
"This would be a step backward," department spokesman Robert Wood said, reacting to Pyongyang's announcement Tuesday that it has stopped disabling its nuclear plants and would consider restoring them because the United States has failed to remove it from a terrorism blacklist.
"It certainly is in violation of its commitments to the six-party framework, certainly in violation of the principle of action-for-action," Wood said. "It is a concern."
North Korea will never abandon atomic arms. The secretive, Stalinist/Kimist regime has played for time, and is now handing a lame-duck US administration a new foreign policy crisis that will benefit nuclear-arming Iran.Unite With China and Russia to Win World War III
Now is the time for all good Americans to come to their senses.
The war against right-wing political Islam, commonly called Islamism, or radical Islam, must be won. Our nation's entire future--the survival of modern civilization, in fact--depends on winning this war.
But it will not be won without help from America's European allies, and, most important, China and Russia, all of which are also threatened by the Islamist foe. Europe is being overrun by Muslim fundamentalists sympathetic to the Islamist cause; and China and Russia have to contend with restive Muslim regions that are hotbeds of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. Russia also borders Islamist Iran, which is pursuing an imperialist foreign policy, and seeking to develop an arsenal of nuclear-tipped, intercontinental ballistic missiles. Heaven help us if Iran achieves its aim.
Given our common enemy, Washington should be working with Beijing and Moscow--not against them. Instead of antagonizing, criticizing, and disparaging the two superpowers, we should be making every effort possible to avoid needless confrontations, crises, and disputes, and actually partnering with China and Russia and praising their accomplishments. The start of China's post-Olympic era and the urgent need to calm things down in Georgia and Poland call for a radical reassessment, a new way forward.
There is a powerful historical precedent, of course: World War II. If, during the 1940s, the United States and Britain could bring themselves to ally with Stalin's Soviet Union in order to utterly destroy and defeat the Axis powers--Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan--the US and Europe can surely forge an alliance with changing China and post-Communist Russia to win what has rightly been termed World War III--and misguidedly named the "War on Terror" by President Bush. (The vintage World War II poster reproduced above is worth 1,000 words.)
Our Islamist enemies--Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Al Qaeda--have somehow managed to bridge their differences. It is time the US did the same with its current, potential--and former--allies. The alliance that beat fascism--The Big Three--Russia, Britain, and the US--plus China, which President Roosevelt called "The Four Policemen," must be rebuilt to crush clerical fascism.
If not now, when?
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
True to form, and as if to underscore its alliance with Islamist Iran, North Korea is again acting up. AFP reports:
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