I’m just wondering, with all the excitement about the conventions, if anyone is even paying attention to the plethora of conflicts we are engaged in anymore. Why are we sending in our navy gunboats into the Black Sea, except to stoke the fire?
Moments like this show why it is so important to pay attention and elect competent people. Instead, we have a cowboy and a madman at the helm. Their world views are warped to say the least, and their hypocrisy knows no bounds. From today’s news:
The United States on Wednesday called on Moscow to allow a “credible investigation” into reported atrocities committed in South Ossetia during the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia, a top official said.
“We have seen reports that there are atrocities being committed against civilians,” said State Department spokesman Robert Wood.
“We want to call on the Russians to allow credible investigation to take place on reports that atrocities have been committed by all sides,” he told a press conference.
Wood did not clarify who should be tasked with the investigation or how it should be carried out.
Yes, let’s have some credible investigations. Let’s start with investigating the torture regime set up by BushCo. That would be a good place to start. Torture is pretty atrocious. Or all the civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, what about investigating their deaths? And if we are going to demand that others be completely loyal to international law and that they submit to its authority, then it would seem only fair that we do the same.
Like that would ever happen.
No, instead we get the Republicans stirring up a little war fear right before the election. I expect Red Dawn to start running on all News Corp channels soon. Barack Obama isn’t perfect when it comes to his foreign policy decisions, but even at his worst he would still be a better president then John McCain for many reasons. The one that secures my vote is because he could, and would actually talk to people, as opposed to at them like BushCo does. Instead of all the threats and warmongering, we need to look at our own actions and see how as the biggest military and economy in the world our actions help create fiascos like this.
Look, the Russian leadership is not stupid; they know that the future relationship of our two nations for decades to come depends completely on who wins November 4th. And the Russians are well aware of the Republicans use of fear and war to win elections.
When you stop and listen to the two men running for president, think about this:
On May 18, in Pendelton, Ore., Obama said that “strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny, compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet, we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’
“And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time, allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall,” Obama continued. “Now, that has to be the kind of approach that we take. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have, to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. That doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything. We might not compromise on any issues, but at least we should find out other areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that has caused us so many problems around the world.”
Then think of this:
It’s not even on the level of, “which one seems more presidential”; it’s more, “which one seems more like an adult”?
The Russians have stated their case:
………..ignoring Russia’s warnings, western countries rushed to recognise Kosovo’s illegal declaration of independence from Serbia. We argued consistently that it would be impossible, after that, to tell the Abkhazians and Ossetians (and dozens of other groups around the world) that what was good for the Kosovo Albanians was not good for them. In international relations, you cannot have one rule for some and another rule for others.
And I really don’t think there is much that the US could do about this, assuming it really wanted to do anything at all. Short of all out war, this is a draw. We can push this to the edge, but we must remember that there’s quite a few people in this world that have a grudge or two with us (we haven’t exactly been spreading goodwill in those secret CIA torture planes).
Russia may take a stab at the Ukraine. Personally I doubt it. At least not just an out right invasion. Maybe another “intervention for democracy”. It depends in large part on what we do from here. If we keep pushing them, they will keep pushing back. You can’t think about this logically, you have to view it for what it is: playground politics.
This is also insane. Georgia only matters to this administration because of oil pipelines and geographical location. We are trying to start a war, yet again, over oil.
This pretty much sums it up:
There has been much talk among western politicians in recent days about Russia isolating itself from the international community. But unless that simply means North America and Europe, nothing could be further from the truth. While the US and British media have swung into full cold-war mode over the Georgia crisis, the rest of the world has seen it in a very different light. As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, “most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia”. While the western view is that the world “should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia … most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer.”
Why that should be so isn’t hard to understand. It’s not only that the US and its camp followers have trampled on international law and the UN to bring death and destruction to the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon warned that to ensure no global rival emerged, the US would need to “account for the interests of advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership”. But when it came to Russia, all that was forgotten in a fog of imperial hubris that has left the US overstretched and unable to prevent the return of a multipolar world.
I find it interesting that our “unipolar” days started and ended with a Bush in the White House.
