Friday, January 13, 2012
NORTH KOREA TEST-FIRES MISSILES
Thursday, January 12, 2012
MIDEAST AT THE BRINK
Republican Establishment Set on Romney
Iran Declares Terror War on Israel, US
Russian Arms Ship Reaches Syria
Sick Thinking: the Case for Appeasing Iran
English-Language Iran TV Piece on Ahmadinejad-Chavez Meeting
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Again, China Disappoints US on Iran
Clinton's Kosovo Figures in Florida Bomb Plot
Obama's Egypt Cancels Jewish Festival
Ahmadinejad Arrives in Cuba, Beaming
US Moves Closer to Muslim Brotherhood
Coup Fears in Nuclear Pakistan
Will Wounding the Snake Spark War?
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Regarding Ron Paul
Friday, 13 January 2012
The test-firings are regarded as routine.
Be that as it may, Foreign Confidential™ predicts Pyongyang will soon provoke a crisis or series of crises with the United States, South Korea, and Japan. Long-range missile launches, attacks on South Korean military and civilian targets, and a third nuclear test are all likely to occur in the coming weeks and months.
War with Iran seems imminent in the wake of the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist on Wednesday--the latest in a string of such killings--Iranian vows of revenge, and recent Iranian threats to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world's oil supplies are shipped.
If the GOP nominates this mean Merchant of Debt it deserves to lose!
romney
(rom-ney) v.
1. to defecate in terror.
Click here. Romney is mean … cold and unfeeling ... to people and dogs.
He is unfit to be President of the United States, as shown by his illegal animal cruelty and unethical vulture capitalism. His private equity firm experience should disqualify him. The obsolete PE model was about buying troubled companies with debt, loading them up with more debt, firing workers--discarding them like trash--outsourcing and downsizing, refinancing, and selling the companies at huge profits. Romney isn't a value-creating merchant banker; he's a company-looting, community-and-job-killing merchant of debt. Romney and his ilk sold American workers down the river and out to China. Throughout the hollowing-out process, the PE firms were dedicated to creating wealth, alright--for themselves, first, for investors/shareholders, second, and for employees and host communities, not at all. The ordinary worker was at best considered a necessary evil by the money-minting PE firms.
A Cleric With Theodemocratic Roots
It must also be said that Romney is a cleric … a Mormon church leader …. and therefore not likely to fight hard against rightwing political Islam abroad and creeping Islamic law (sharia) at home. A candidate and President with strong, theodemocratic roots is unlikely to be an effective advocate for genuine democracy--certainly not going to be an effective critic and opponent of the phony "islamic democracy," or Islamocracy, that the Obama administration is promoting in the context of an utterly failed, pro-Islamist foreign policy. (Similarly, a secretive GOP Presidential candidate who refuses to release his income tax records is not likely to challenge Obama to release his mysteriously sealed academic records, from kindergarten through law school--secrecy that has fueled rumors of possible dual citizenship, foreign student status, etc.)
Romney's net worth is estimated at more than $200 million. Not too shabby, unless you compare it to the six Walton heirs, who collectively own more of America's wealth than the bottom … 30% … of the country. At the same time, a whopping 49 million Americans live in poverty. That's a staggering statistic. The U.S. is living through the greatest income inequality since the Great Depression. To deny this, which Romney and the Republican establishment seem bent on doing, is dangerously delusional, a prescription for defeat in 2012--and worse.
Related:
Iran is vowing to respond to yesterday's assassination of its nuclear scientist with "cross-border, cross-regional" operations. Click here for the story.
Related: Will Wounding the Snake Spark War?
Russia sells Syria about $1 billion in arms annually. Moscow does not want to lose this business.
The NATO-backed revolt in Libya resulted in Russian arms manufacturers losing about $4 billion in annual sales to that Arab country.
Moscow also has a Soviet-era naval supply and maintenance installation in Tartus, which is Syria's second largest port city after Latakia. The base represents Russia's only Mediterranean foothold.
After 9/11, the United States should have found a way to lure Syria away from Iran (whose Islamist regime should have been annihilated) with Russian cooperation.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO should have been disbanded instead of expanded. Ron Paul is right about that.
The unnecessary NATO intervention in Libya--on the side of Al Qaeda-connected Islamist-led rebels, whom John McCain hailed as "freedom fighters"--has made it more difficult for the U.S. to deal with Syria and its chief ally, nuclear-arming Iran.
But Syria doesn't have to follow the Libyan script. Click here for a proposal--political neutrality for Syria. Come to think of it, buying $1 billion of goods from Russia every year (to make up for the loss of its arms sales to Damascus) and allowing its navy to remain in Tartus would be a small price to pay for meaningful Kremlin cooperation on Syria and Iran.
VETERAN ADVOCATE OF APPEASING AND ALIGNING
WITH ISLAMIST IRAN BLAMES US FOR NUKE CRISIS
From CNN comes the case for further appeasement, a masterpiece of moral equivalency, misinformation, and sheer stupidity. Click here to read it.
WARNING: CNN reporting on Islamist Iran and the Islamist threat in general can cause vomiting.
Independent Report from Miami: Ahmadinejad in Cuba
(AND AMERICAN JEWS STILL SUPPORT OBAMA)
The heads of two terrorist-sponsoring countries are meeting--only 90 miles from the coast of Florida.
Iran and Cuba have cooperated closely in the field of biowarfare under cover of civilian biotechnology transfer and research and development agreements.
And Cuba's Cold War experience in using nuclear missiles to force the Kennedy administration into agreeing not to ever again attempt to invade the island, after the disastrous Bay of Pigs affair, always makes a good conversation topic at such summits.
The Obama administration, which has made support for rightwing political Islam the foundation of an utterly failed foreign policy, is holding its highest-level talks to date with the fountainhead of Islamic clerical fascism--the dreaded Muslim Brotherhood. Click here for the story.
Obama, of course, emboldened and encouraged the MB to overthrow the country's long-serving, pro-American president, Hosni Mubarak. The betrayal and abandonment of Mubarak, who helped the United States combat Al Qaeda and for three decades maintained Egypt's peace pact with Israel, echoes the craven Carter administration's catastrophic involvement in Iran's Islamic Revolution and the stabbing in the back and abandonment of that country's pro-American, modernizing monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi--whose government cooperated closely with Israel for mutual gain and defense purposes.
Obama is the new Carter; Egypt, the new Iran.
It is incredible, to say the least, that any American who cares about national security … and any American Jew who cares about the survival and well being of Israel and the Jewish people … could even consider voting for Obama (of "the Muslim World").
The covert conflict continues, as reported here. Another blast, and another Iranian nuclear scientists bites the dust. The article says sanctions "have started to bite," too.
The key concern is whether wounding the venomous snake is going to cause it to strike back viciously in a stunning sneak attack, and how the full-blown war that will surely follow such an assault will be fought on a battlefield that will include a strategic waterway--and civilian population centers--as the enemy has repeatedly warned.
A deadly game that should never have begun is playing itself out--the enemy should never have been allowed to take power in the first place, and, having been allowed to take power, should long ago have been eliminated--and millions of lives are at risk. Apparently, the so-called international community has forgotten or failed to learn the most important lessons of the lead-up to World War II.
Israel, of course, has not forgotten. Never again is more than a mere slogan, as the monstrous mullahocracy will learn if it tries to make good on its evil threat to "burn Tel Aviv." Unlike the United States, which surprisingly responded to 9/11 in a relatively restrained way, Israel will not hesitate to use any all weapons in its arsenal to prevent a new Holocaust.
The horrors of the 1930s and '40s have naturally not been forgotten--will never be forgotten--in the Jewish State. One hopes that the horror of October 6, 1973--the surprise attack that nearly ended the state--is also in the minds of Israeli leaders.
Republicans who are sincerely concerned about national security would be wise to address Ron Paul's foreign policy views in a serious way. Simply branding him an isolationist is shortsighted and downright stupid considering America's horribly costly and clearly unnecessary interventions in Iraq and Vietnam, and the federal government's seemingly insane investment in a bloated, overseas empire of outmoded military bases that have little or nothing to do with genuine security.
It's time for the GOP to grow up. Vietnam and Iraq were huge, bipartisan blunders. But Iran is neither Iraq nor Vietnam. The fact that some interventions are unnecessary does not mean that all interventions are unnecessary. And there is a huge difference between an air war and a ground war, between bombing the hell out of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in order to obliterate the bastards, which should have been done, using any and all necessary weapons, including tactical nuclear weapons, and invading and occupying the Afghan hellhole, which Bush stupidly did, while allowing Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden and their most senior commanders to escape into neighboring Pakistan. Someone needs to explain the difference; a confused country cries out for clarification of complex issues and problems.
Looking back (to go forward), containment of the Soviet Union made sense--in Europe. Extending the policy to the Third World was a major mistake. The Soviets of the 1970s and '80s were despotic. But they were not Stalin, and their foreign policy was not imperialist--it was not aimed at overthrowing the status quo. Following Stalin's death, the Soviets were mainly focused on preserving--rather than expanding--their empire. That the Soviet system was bad, to put it mildly, did not justify our supporting the worst reactionary scum on earth--the jihadists and drug-dealing warlords of Afghanistan--in a secret, $3 billion intervention that blew back horrifically on 9/11. There is no denying that the United States was instrumental in unleashing the global Islamist menace. The time for candid conversation--on the part of Republicans and Democrats--is long overdue.
Containment's covert side--the bipartisan rollback program of the early Cold War period--was also terribly wrong. The perfidious program included the clandestine importation into the United States of legions of Nazi war criminals and collaborators--mass murderers hailed as freedom fighters. It is now clear that rescuing and financing the genocidal, fascist filth of Europe paved the way for the Carter-Reagan embrace of Afghanistan's human garbage--which Reagan referred to as the "moral equivalent of the founding fathers."
Ron Paul is alarmingly wrong about nuclear-arming, Islamist Iran--it is an implacable enemy that has made its intentions known--and wrong about rightwing political Islam, or Islamism, in general. It is a menace that must be defeated. But merely calling the candidate names, while continuing to support every idiotic intervention, including the intervention in Libya--the failed 2008 GOP Presidential candidate John McCain copied Reagan by calling the Al Qaeda-connected, Islamist-led Libyan rebels "freedom fighters"--won't suffice, not after decades of government lies and, most important, decades of government waste of human lives, including American lives, and countless taxpayer dollars ... in the name of defending democracy.
ENDNOTE: Republicans who really want to win in 2012 would also be wise to steal Paul's libertarian thunder by ceasing to mindlessly support another never-ending and unnecessary "war" … on drugs. Pot should have been legalized decades ago--in fact, it should never have been made illegal in the first place--and other recreational drug use should be decriminalized. The money that is wasted on the utterly failed and corrupting war on drugs should be reallocated to treatment and prevention of drug abuse.
Copyright © 2012
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