Category: War

DECADES Of Living Dangerously

The rift between science and religion gets a chapter in the Climate Change debacle. Enjoy your climate today; It might be gone tomorrow.

The World Sheriff— or Rogue Nation?

Obama World SheriffSommmmebody stop mmmmmeee!

(Original image may surprise you.)

Congressman Alan Grayson is catching flack for his arguments against our intervention in Syria.

Grayson sums it up like this:

First, it’s not our responsibility.
Secondly, whatever we do won’t actually accomplish anything useful.
Third, it’s expensive.
And fourth, it’s dangerous.

Let’s clarify.

First, it’s not only our responsibility, it’s every nation’s responsibility.
Secondly, if we do something on our own, we won’t accomplish anything useful, but we will create even more global animosity towards the United States.
Third, yes, bloody expensive.
Fourth, dangerous, foolish, and criminal.

Here is Grayson’s DontAttackSyria.com petition:

“The Administration is considering intervening in the Syrian civil war.  We oppose this.  There’s no vital national security involved.  We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury. Our own needs in America are great, and they come first.  The death of civilians is always regrettable, and civil war is regrettable, but no Americans have been attacked, and no American allies have been attacked.  The British Parliament understandably has voted not to join in any attack. Notably, defense contractor Raytheon’s stock is up 20% in the last 60 days.  It seems that nobody wants US intervention in Syria except the military-industrial complex.  I oppose US military intervention in Syria.  Join me.”

Ban-Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General, said this Tuesday:

“The use of force is lawful only when in exercise of self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter and/or when the Security Council approves such action.  That is the firm principle of the United Nations.”

Grayson and others are right:  we “are not the world’s policeman.”  But our membership in the United Nations means we are a cosignatory to a document designed to ensure world law and order, and there are rules, man. . .
If we act unilaterally, or outside of our obligations to the member nations, we are acting as a rogue nation, and committing another* war crime.

It’s time to start demonstrating we can walk the walk of a nation dedicated to world peace.  And that means acting in consort with the decision of United Nations, and then helping to see their legal mandates are carried out.  That means ALL nations have to contribute either boots (with people wearing them), equipment, etc., or MONEY.

It’s time for abandoning the twin sophistries of sovereignty and self-determination.  The nations of the world will finally begin to enjoy peace when they freely surrender their respective sovereignties into the hands of a truly global government— the sovereignty of the brotherhood of mankind.  In this world state, the small nations will be as powerful as the great, even as a small state like Rhode Island has its two senator just the same as the populous state of New York or huge area of Texas.

 Global sovereignty is the only sovereignty that will prevent global wars— nothing else can.  Global wars will go on until the government of mankind is created.  The nations  of the world have not possessed real sovereignty;  they never have had a sovereignty which could protect them from the ravages and devastations of world wars.

In the creation of the global government of mankind, the nations are not giving up sovereignty so much as they are actually creating a real, bona fide, and lasting world sovereignty, which will henceforth be fully able to protect them from all war.  Local affairs will be handled by local governments;  national affairs, by national governments;  international affairs will be administered by global government.

And under a world government, the individual will enjoy far more liberty.  Today, the citizens of the great powers— US— are taxed, regulated, and controlled oppressively, and much of the present interference with our individual liberties will vanish when the national governments are willing to trustee their sovereignty as regards international affairs, into the hands of a true global government.

Under global government ALL national groups will be afforded a real opportunity to realize and enjoy the personal liberties of genuine democracy.  The fallacy of self-determination will be ended.  With global regulation of money and trade will come a new era of world-wide peace.

There simply is no better way to world peace.

You cannot prevent nations going to war as long as they remain infected with the delusional virus of national sovereignty. Internationalism is a step in the right direction. An international police force will prevent many minor wars, but it will not be effective in preventing major wars, conflicts between the great military governments of earth.
—The Urantia Book

*Okay, we all can agree poison gas is a Weapon of Mass Destruction.  But so is a hail storm of cruise missiles.  It’s time to outlaw ALL war.
 

McCain: Pallin’ Around With Terrarists?

Jon Stewart reviews another thrilling episode of the action-adventure  series, “McCain”

Obie Grump Kanobi, as Stewart calls our favorite galavanting action star and former POW, Senator John McCain (Warmonger-Az), has never seen an international conflict where US military forces shouldn’t just stay the fuck home.

As pointed out here about McCain in Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper:

Just as he has never gotten over being tortured by the North Vietnamese, manifest in his ‘bomb the hell out of ‘em’ knee-jerk response to nearly every foreign policy crisis, he will never get over losing to The Black Man in The White House.

Early in President Obama’s first term, McCain beat the war drums on Iran. During the Arab Spring, he demanded that our default response be to arm every opposition group in sight, despite the fact that many of them are Islamic fundamentalists with Al Qaeda sympathies. The strategy of “leading from behind” that operated so effectively in overthrowing Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi, costing not a single American life, makes McCain’s wrinkled and liver spotted skin crawl right off his malformed skeleton. (That skeletal malformation was the result of a crash landing he endured after being shot down over heavily populated Hanoi by the Vietnamese during one of his 23 bombing sorties.) This is a guy who really, really enjoys the smell of napalm in the morning.

The political point being that arming anyone and everyone who mouths the word “democracy” is not necessarily a trusted ally; that weapons provided to today’s “freedom fighters” won’t be used by anti-US forces tomorrow, a  point that Stewart drives home. (See, e.g. the Muhajadeen in Afghanistan, who we armed to fight the Soviets but who later morphed into today’s Al Qaeda and Taliban.)

In the clip above, one of the vaunted Syrian rebel commanders photographed with McCain during his secret trip to Syria (designed to undermine President Obama’s cautious foreign policy?) appears to be the same guy who kidnapped 11 Shiite religious pilgrims in Lebanon. That would, of course, make him a terrorist, assuming he uses the ransom money to buy weapons.

During the 2008 presidential election, McCain’s hand chosen VP candidate, Sarah Palin, accused Obama of “pallin’ around with terrorists.” This was an apparent reference to Obama’s acquaintance with former Weather Underground co-founder, Bill Ayers, who happened to be a professor at the University of Illinois at the same time Obama was teaching law there.

McCain seems to be as oblivious to irony as he is to critical judgment. A dangerous combination for someone who seems to have an open invitation from the Sunday morning talk show “public affairs” programmers, who regularly offer him a platform from which he can inflict his warmongering bias upon their considerable audience.  

To be fair, McCain seems to be somewhat saner on domestic matters. However, when his carefully self-cultivated image as a political Maverick is seriously challenged by the extreme right wing of the GOP, as it was on the issue of immigration when it could have determined his most recent re-election to the Senate,  he will default to doing whatever it takes to maintain his political survival.

For someone who has so much invested in the legend of his own mind, the image of him as the Crypt Keeper is, well, a keeper.

Dick In Undisclosed Location

Ex-president and prosecutable war criminal, Dick Cheney, is reportedly “resting comfortably” at an undisclosed location after an undisclosed “procedure.”

Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper (Update)

Crypt Keeper John McCain says: “Hello, Boils and Ghouls. Welcome to my nightmare.”

Is it just US (Urantian Sojourn), or is John McCain becoming a decrepit parody of himself?

Just as he has never gotten over being tortured by the North Vietnamese, manifest in his ‘bomb the hell out of ’em’ knee-jerk response to nearly every foreign policy crisis,  he will never get over losing to The Black Man in The White House.

Early in President Obama’s first term, McCain beat the war drums on Iran. During the Arab Spring, he demanded that our default response be to arm every opposition group in sight, despite the fact that many of them are Islamic fundamentalists with Al Qaeda sympathies.  The strategy of “leading from behind” that operated so effectively in overthrowing Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi, costing not a single American life, makes McCain’s wrinkled and liver spotted skin crawl right off his malformed skeleton. (That skeletal malformation was the result of a crash landing he endured after being shot down over heavily populated Hanoi by the Vietnamese during one of his 23 bombing sorties.) This is a guy who really, really enjoys the smell of napalm in the morning.

Not surprising then that he would immediately jump all over the Benghazi tragedy. Instead of waiting for a thorough investigation of how and why four brave Americans lost their lives (former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen (ret.), is conducting one such investigation for the State Department), McCain accused the Administration of a political cover-up, supposedly to preserve President Obama’s national security cred in the run-up to the election. Killing Usama bin Laden had effectively neutered what had been a major GOP political advantage, national defense. Given that they had thoroughly tanked the economy under George W. Bush, they had little left to hang their hats on.

A few weeks later, Obama won the election in an electoral landslide and the popular vote by nearly four percentage points. At that point, you would have thought that all the election year cover-up hype would have died a natural death. Not so, when the ever-vengeful McCain catches the scent of blood and feces in the air.

(Perhaps his shattered dreams of being appointed Secretary of Defense in a Mitt Romney administration added fuel to his always simmering anger. How would someone with McCain’s psychological profile confront the loss of an opportunity to do more than just sing “Bomb, bomb, bomb…Iran”? Hadn’t Romney’s biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson, who contributed a record $70 million after saying he would spend whatever it took to defeat Obama, made the price of his support a war against Iran? Thus did another fevered McCain ambition turn to ashes in his hands.)

Instead of confronting Obama directly over the Benghazi snafu, McCain focused his fire on UN Ambassador Susan Rice, the hapless messenger sent out by the White House to explain the ever developing understanding of the events of 9/11/12.  (Funny how the Obama proxies subjected to the most vicious Rethug attacks have all been Black, namely Rice, Eric Holder and Van Jones). In his continuing pogrom against all things Obama, McCain was joined by two fellow Rethug senators,  his BFF,  Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Kelly Ayotte (R-Maine).  Together, The New Three Amigos reacted to every subsequent intelligence community disclosure with suspicion, if not downright hostility. (See our earlier reports here and here.)

For instance, when former CIA Director and Republican rock star, David Petraeus, confirmed the White House account of how Rice was dutifully relaying talking points provided to her by the intelligence community, they were left sputtering and reaching for a new line of attack. They soon seized upon the difference between the classified and unclassified versions of the talking points. The unclassified version given by Rice omitted mention of Al Qaeda,  and instead tenuously identified the proximate cause as “extremists” reacting to an anti-Muslim YouTube video that had spurred riots around the Muslim world, a theory later deemed untrue, despite testimony eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

The McCain reputation assassin team geared up and leaped into action, once again accusing the White House of altering the talking points for political purposes. And once again, they were shot down by the intel community who said that they had approved the unclassified version in order to protect sources and methods, and for legal reasons “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Undeterred, The Benghazi Crypt Keeper nursed his conspiratorial golem back to life from his own withered man boob, claiming that were still “fifty questions”  he wanted answered. Hoping to finally put the issue to rest, Rice traveled to The Russell Senate Building Tuesday, accompanied by the interim CIA Director, Michael J. Morell, to personally answer whatever questions the Amigos might still have.

When the interviews were over, the Amigos immediately flocked to the Klieg lights and tv cameras,where they proceeded to double down on their shoot the messenger campaign. McCain said that he would be “very hard pressed” to support her expected nomination to succeed Hilary Clinton as Secretary of State. And Dear Lindsey had the line of the day when he confessed “Bottom line, I’m more disturbed than I was before.” (Ahem, Lindsey. Your lacey Freudian slip is showing.) Former Amigo Joe Lieberman (I-CON) was also paid a visit but he took a different tack, saying that Rice “told the truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Rice and Morell continued their visits to The Hill Wednesday, stopping by to see Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking minority chair of the; and Bob Corker (R-TN), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Corker picked up the baton and dutifully continued the party line criticism of Rice. Collins unexpectedly opened up a new line of attack, implying that Rice might have also been responsible for the bombings of the Kenya and Tanzania embassies in the mid 1990s when she was assistant secretary of state for African Affairs  in the Clinton administration. One is entitled to ask: If Collins really considers that such a burning issue, why didn’t she bring it up during the January 2009 floor debate that preceded Rice’s unanimous Senate approval as Ambassador to the UN? Prolly because Rice ‘s old job involved policy, not security.

“Questions, questions– vee still have questions!” An endless series of questions, most or all of which have already been answered, as Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show Wednesday evening. All of which leads us to our own question: Just what the hell is all this sturm and drang really about?MORE. . .“Tales From The Benghazi Crypt Keeper (Update)”

Mitt Romney’s Fevered Dreams: #3

A Romney Adviser Flippantly Characterized Romney As “Shell Shocked” After His Historic Loss

Metamorphosis Mitt

President Obama schools Metamorphosis Mitt on the nature of modern warfare

During last night’s final presidential debate, it soon became apparent that, in the arena of foreign policy, Willard Mitt Romney is playing fantasy football while President Obama is grinding out the real thing.

Obama is studying the opposition, meeting with his coaches, drawing up and revising game plans as circumstances require. He chooses the starters, putting his faith in his players whether they are in the State Department, the CIA, or the military, then sends them out to the field. He trusts in their professionalism and experience to move the ball forward, to stop the opposition, and ultimately, win the game.

Meanwhile, Romney is just making shit up as he goes along, shifting positions faster than a fantasy football fan/atic trades his virtual players. He even threw most of his foreign policy advisers under the bus, some 70% of whom are Bushie neocons, including chicken hawks like Dan Senor and Robert Kagan who’ve never seen a war they wouldn’t start or send somebody else’s kids to fight. Heck, Romney tacked so far to the left that he sounded like he was channeling John Lennon:

“…[O]ur purpose is to make sure the world is more — is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet.”

Even with plenty of advanced warning to his advisers that he was going to shake his mighty, all-forgiving etch a sketch once again, John Bolton’s head must have exploded, if even out of just one side.

On record for criticizing Obama’s decision to set a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan? No problemo. Just inhale a heady dose of Romnesia , and voila– Romney is suddenly on the same page as Obama, despite his earlier characterization that setting a withdrawal deadline was a grievous strategic flaw that only empowered the enemy.

But it wasn’t just Obama’s Afghanistan policy that Romney suddenly found himself embracing. (A growing majority of Americans are sick to death of the longest war in US history, so that has to be counted as a no-brainer.) Add Willard’s support for the Administration’s role in the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Mohamar Qadaffi; the killing of Usama bin Laden, despite the violation of Pakistani sovereignty that previously had Willard’s magic underwear in such an excruciating twist; the cautious approach to the civil war in Syria; the imposition of increasingly ruinous sanctions against Iran; the handling of the Benghazi incident; and other gimmees like unconditional support for Israel and the increasing use of killer drones around the world—Obama and Romney might just as well have been kissing cousins.

The political calculation of Romney’s debate strategy is painfully obvious. While maybe a million people at any one time are exposed to a given campaign speech or a targeted media buy, alight as they are with inflammatory, hyperbolic rhetoric, the number of people tuning into any one of the four televised debates is [at least] an order of magnitude greater. A perfect venue to re-invent a candidate from a “severe conservative” into a controlled, reasonable moderate that would appeal to undecided voters, including a large swathe of the coveted female voter demographic, with whom Obama continues to enjoy a substantial lead.

Gag me with a bayonet.

[image found here.]