McKiller

The Christian Science Monitor posted this article discussing whether or not currently serving military officers should or should not speak publicly about current operations if they might contradict the President. Well, I have always felt that your right to free speech doesn’t end when you don a uniform. In fact I think it’s quite the opposite; when it’s your butt that’s going to get shot at you have every right to speak up.

Wars are generally fought by the young for the benefit of the moneyed. Most young people I met in the army didn’t know a damn thing about the world beyond the farm they grew up on, or the inner city/suburb they grew up in. However, we are not talking about just anyone here. No, we are talking about General Stanley McChrystal.

General McChrystal is in charge of our forces in Afghanistan. Back in Iraq, you know, the war that is apparently over, he ran torture prisons and death squads. Now he wants to ramp up the Afghanistan occupation.

Just what we need. Because the Afghan people haven’t suffered enough. No, it would seem they need to be murdered and tortured much, much more. Ignoring that we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan at all, General McChystal is the wrong person to head anything other than a third world murder mill. He will escalate the occupation, further alienate the Afghan people, no doubt piss off Pakistan and Iran (he does love illegal cross border raids) and generally make a fucked situation worse.

We now have the moral equivalent of a serial killer in charge. Many on the right and in the media like to say General Betrayus’ “surge” worked. No, he just used McChrystal to assassinate everyone and anyone until there was was no one left to speak out.

To me it’s not a matter of whether or not General McChrystal should have spoken up, it’s that he is a fucking psycho who shouldn’t be listened to.

That place named Iran

Juan Cole, who continues to amaze me through his consistently, well, amazing analysis, has a great post up titled “Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True“. Well worth the read. A couple of highlights:

Belief: But didn’t President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to ‘wipe Israel off the map?’

Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that “this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.

Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.

Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA’s discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can’t attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.

Speaking of that Green Revolution

In my last post I mentioned that imposing further sanctions on Iran would mean “more clamping down on democratic protesters”. I am not the only one who feels this way.

Former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, Iran’s main political opposition leader, called Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy “wrong and adventurist” this week but came out against new sanctions, saying he worried that “deprived people” would pay the highest price.

“Sanctions would not affect the government but would impose many hardships upon the people, who suffer enough as a result of the calamity of their insane rulers,” Mousavi said in a statement.

Government critics and dissidents, dozens of whom are on trial on charges of fomenting unrest after Ahmadinejad’s disputed June 12 reelection, probably would come under more pressure if tougher sanctions were imposed, according to politicians and analysts on both sides.

“The government will say that critics of their policies are doing the foreigners’ bidding” and will use sanctions as a pretext to silence opponents, said Ali Shakouri-Rad, a leading member of the opposition Islamic Iran Participation Front.

So even the people risking their lives to run against Ahmadinejad can see that sanctions will only give the government an excuse to crack down on anyone who opposes the current regime. And only the average Iranian will suffer from sanctions as it becomes harder and harder to make a living and feed their families.

Kind of like what we did to Iraq for years. Saddam Hussein sure suffered in his many giant homes while we imposed sanctions on his country. Of course all those American companies buying oil through their European subsidiaries helped him live large, as they broke federal law in the process.

The article goes on to mention the possibility that sanctions will fuel unrest against Ahmadinejad’s rule. I disagree. It’s one thing to hate your dictator, it’s another thing entirely to have an outside entity, that has a history already of fucking up your country, try to force it’s will upon you. Something about him being an asshole but at least he’s our asshole.

Given how the US has helped overthrow a dictator in Iraq only to help impose a new one in the making, backed one in Pakistan in opposition to the will of the people until they finally threw him out themselves, our total support of countless dictators across the Middle East, and our help in installing one in Afghanistan; with all that, how could anyone think that any action against Iran will drive it’s people apart? We are to be feared by dictators (not friendly to our business interests) and democratic activists alike.

And as long as we openly and unequivocally support Israel’s constant aggression towards its neighbors and the Palestinians the Iranians would be insane to think we have their interests at heart. We blew that when George Bush called Iran part of the “Axis of Evil”. That little remark is what propelled Ahmadinejad into the presidency; before him Iran had a moderate president, one that was actively working with the US to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan.

We are repeating the Iraq war build up with a whole one letter change. Iraq, minus a q, add an n, Iran. Wow, that was too easy.

I’ll leave it to the ever amazing Glenn Greenwald to define American imperialism. Read more of his site for further analysis of the Iran war build up hype.

Here we go again

Another war in the making. It’s like Iraq all over again. Sanctioning Iran will only further empower the Iranian government to become even more extreme. It’s a downward spiral. The more we threaten them, the more Tehran will say, “Look at what they are doing to our people, we have no choice but to defend ourselves.” That means more clamping down on democratic protesters, more money spent on the military, and as the average Iranian finds it harder to feed their family, fundamentalist religious views will spread.

We are told to believe that Iran is now really the threat we should all fear. Iraq? Yesterday’s news. Afghanistan? As long as it’s profitable for the military industrial complex we will still be told it’s the “good war”. But Iran offers up a whole new market for war profiteers to enrich themselves. After all, Iraq didn’t really put up any real resistance, and the Taliban never had large weapons systems to begin with. But Iran, now there’s a country that would cost quite a bit to invade.

What’s worse, the big players in the game are using Iran as a political tool. Look at the Russian’s response. Once we took the missile defense shield off the table, suddenly they see Iran as a problem. It was good for their politicians to resist us and use Iran as a pawn. Makes me wonder what other concessions our government made. No doubt there is a nice fat oil deal or two somewhere in all this for them.

And I’d bet Israel is busy buying up all the military hardware they can get their hands on in anticipation for a war with Iran. The Israeli government is doing the same thing Bush’s administration did; creating the need for more military spending by pumping fear into their people. When the masses are terrified, they have no problem giving into the notion that war will somehow save us all.

It’s sad really. Iran was once a democracy, but our government couldn’t live with the fact that they wouldn’t bow to western corporate profits. How dare they not let us steal their oil for our own gain. What bastards. And that is what this is really about, corporate profits.

Notice how North Korea isn’t on the “to invade” list right now? Oh sure, maybe to some neo-cons. But China would never agree to that, and the reality is that our country is so heavily dependent on loans from China that we wouldn’t dare piss them off. Never mind that China is now home to all our manufacturing base. No, China sells us too much crap to be made an enemy; too many US corporations are making a killing off their slave labor in Chinese factories filling Walmart’s shelves to want to butt heads with the communists.

But if we can convince enough people that war with Iran is a “good war”, then they will have no problem making corporations richer. Because that is what war is really all about; profit. Nothing pisses off the boardroom executives more than knowing that all that oil in Iran is not in their portfolios. The green revolution? Fuck em. It’s better to create an enemy that will require a larger defense budget than to admit we have no business telling other countries what they can do.

Funny how our insane levels of military spending never seem to get mentioned by the teabaggers. Of course not. A single payer health care system wouldn’t be as profitable for the corporate fatcats. We could insure every citizen and then some with much less than we spend building weapons of war. And it would help the average American a hell of a lot more than buying more jets, more bombs and more missiles. But it wouldn’t make the people that are already rich any richer.

There will always be a grave danger to our society as long as money can be made from war. There will always be a need for new weapons systems, bigger “defense” budgets and a further degrading of our constitutional rights. The cycle will never end because our government and the corporations are too in bed together. And our media is owned by the same people that profit from war (I’m looking at you GE). So don’t look to the evening news for the truth. (On a side note, how many of the teabaggers buy communist made product every day while decrying a fear of communism?)

Will we invade Iran? Personally I think we are being primed for an Israeli attack, one that this country will have no option but to support. This works for Israel because they will use it as an excuse to commit further crimes against the Palestinians in the hope that the Palestinians will rise up in response to bombs being dropped in Iran. Same goes for Lebanon and Syria.

And even if an invasion never happens just the threat of one demands an increase in military spending. We have to be prepared after all. And what a great way to change the subject. Torture? Look over here at Iran. Banks getting richer even as the economy crumbles? Iran wants nukes. Health care crisis? Fucking Iran is going to kill us all! Racism alive and well in America? You’re all going to die! Bomb Iran!

So we threaten, and they threaten, and we say we have no choice but war. After all we tried to be nice when we made it impossible for them to feed their families, when we used our might to make them desperate. We corner them, they react, we are justified. Sounds about right. And profitable too.

Oh for fucks sake

This is one of the many idiotic voices attempting to discuss our clusterfuck that is Afghanistan:

If the president turns off the spigot of American assistance in Afghanistan, he will pay a substantial price for it. He’ll be going back on his rhetoric about Afghanistan as the “good war,” a war of necessity. He will cast the withdrawal from Iraq in a different light, endow the jihadist with a public victory (which will only encourage future attacks), and make it more difficult to achieve positive change in Afghanistan as well as collect intelligence on terrorists. He may turn Hamid Karzai’s government into an adversary. He will diminish our ability to help Pakistan fight terrorists, and will likely make the U.S. less trusted in the world. But those prices will be less than the cost of sending young Americans to fight and die in a war the president is not committed to winning.

The military is doing its job in Afghanistan. It’s time the rest of the government does its job. We need to turn our attention to the failures of the nonmilitary parts of our strategy and bring them up to the standard at which our military is performing. Otherwise we will not be doing what is needed to win.

What this fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an associate professor at the United States Military Academy seems to not understand is that it is our military stance in the middle east that is the problem. The military doing its job? Just what would that job be exactly? Hey smart one, ever live under the constant fear of drone aircraft bombing your home? We have no business there to begin with. That IS the problem.

Karzai’s government is thoroughly corrupt. Make them an “advesary”? They just stole an election. Doesn’t that already make them an “adversary”? How the hell can a “nonmilitary” anything happen when the “government” of Afghanistan is just another dictatorship hiding behind democracy? Let’s just play your way and assume we should be there; Did it ever occur to you that President Obama is withholding funds until they can figure out how to deal with Karzai’s corruption?

And I doubt short of bombing Iran that we can make ourselves any less trusted in the world. Did you sleep through the last 8 years? The fact that we are in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and positioned in 700 other bases around the world makes it pretty damn hard to trust us. Never mind our unending support of Israel and it’s steady genocide against the Palestinians and saber-rattling at Iran.

Dumping more money into Afghanistan will fix nothing, regardless of whether it is military or nonmilitary spending. President Obama was wrong to call Afghanistan the “good war”. And you’re right, sending our soldiers to die in a war we are not committed to is a horrible thing. So bring them home! The reason we are not “committed” is because there is nothing to commit to.

You are missing the point oh smart one; We create terrorism by invading other countries, by propping up dictatorships and by torturing people in secret prisons. Bagram Airbase is the new Gitmo. Pakistan? Didn’t we back their last dictator? Why would they want to talk to us?

Fellow at Stanford huh. Stanford must not have very high standards.

Oh, and nice try using “or get out” in the title. You never mention that option once in your little rant.

More War, More Death, Oh Boy!

In two days we get a shiny new president to kick around. And he is all ready for it, so let’s get to work.

Our military is gearing up for a “surge” in Afghanistan. President-elect Obama said during the debates he wants more war there, and it looks like he is living up to his rhetoric:

A naval brigade is being diverted to Afghanistan to help prepare for the extra U.S. troops that will be sent to that country, a Pentagon spokesman announced Friday….

… Their change in orders was announced just days before President-elect Barack Obama takes office, and one month after Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed a deployment order to move an additional 3,000 troops to Afghanistan.

Military officials say those troops will be part of a combat aviation brigade, bringing helicopters to the region, and will go in late spring or early summer.

There are currently more than 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, but the U.S. commander there has requested more.

Gen. David McKiernan has requested at least 20,000 more troops be sent to fight resurgent Taliban forces, and Obama has said he would like to see more troops rotated into Afghanistan.

Hooray for the Afghan people. I’m sure this is what they want right about now, more war. Peace is for losers anyway. And let us not forget that Obama has stated he wants to increase the size of the military as a whole, which means a larger budget to support all those new troops, not to mention all their new equipment.

Of course his hands are tied even if he wanted to reduce the military budget, which I don’t think he does. Those bombs are made by middle class Americans, read jobs. Increasing the military would make more jobs or at least keep a lot of people employed.

Look at his response to the Gaza massacre, nothing. Will that change after Tuesday? Don’t hold your breath. Obama openly supported the destruction of Lebanon in 2006 on his campaign website. For those who see him as an anti-war president, your in for a shock.

I wrote not that long ago that I supported Obama because I thought he would make better decisions regarding the military. So far I am not impressed. I guess we will have to wait and see what happens after he is sworn in to truly know where Obama stands on military aggression. Campaign rhetoric is one thing, hat he does from here on out is what really matters.

If he has any sense he will get our troops out of the business of nation building. We are not very good at it:

Whatever the truth of the matter, in the long run, it’s not soldiers but services that count — electricity, water, food, health care, justice, and jobs. Had the U.S. delivered the promised services on time, while employing Afghans to rebuild their own country according to their own priorities and under the supervision of their own government — a mini-Marshall Plan — they would now be in charge of their own defense. The forces on the other side, which we loosely call the Taliban, would also have lost much of their grounds for complaint.

Instead, the Bush administration perpetrated a scam. It used the system it set up to dispense reconstruction aid to both the countries it “liberated,” Afghanistan and Iraq, to transfer American taxpayer dollars from the national treasury directly into the pockets of private war profiteers. Think of Halliburton, Bechtel, and Blackwater in Iraq; Louis Berger Group, Bearing Point, and DynCorp International in Afghanistan. They’re all in it together. So far, the Bush administration has bamboozled Americans about its shady aid program. Nobody talks about it. Yet the aid scam, which would be a scandal if it weren’t so profitable for so many, explains far more than does troop strength about why, today, we are on the verge of watching the whole Afghan enterprise go belly up.

What’s worse, there’s no reason to expect that things will change significantly on Barack Obama’s watch. During the election campaign, he called repeatedly for more troops for “the right war” in Afghanistan (while pledging to draw-down U.S. forces in Iraq), but he has yet to say a significant word about the reconstruction mission. While many aid workers in that country remain full of good intentions, the delivery systems for and uses of U.S. aid have been so thoroughly corrupted that we can only expect more of the same — unless Obama cleans house fast. But given the monumental problems on his plate, how likely is that?

Genocide

Well, another year, another massacre perpetrated by Israel. What a surprise. I guess they felt the need to commit genocide to pay tribute to our out going Dear Leader. One last orgy of death to send the Bush administration off in style. Kind of fitting actually.

And it really works out well for the Israelis because this assault will stir up years of radicalism driven by the need for revenge amongst the Palestinians. Since our president-elect has already declared his unwavering support of the nation of Israel and all its crimes, we can be fairly sure the blood letting will continue with vigor.

Oh sure, there will be peace summits, some good photo ops and a determined looking Hillary stating this and that. But let’s be honest with ourselves, as long as the US continues to turn a blind eye to what is going on nothing will ever change.

Then again I guess it’s hard to say anything with forces in Iraq and Afghanistan chewing their way through the locals. Or for that matter considering how well we’ve handled our relationship with the Native Americans I suppose we shouldn’t point fingers.

More on this from the American Conservative:

…The actual purpose is connected to Israel’s long-term vision of how it intends to live with millions of Palestinians in its midst. It is part of a broader strategic goal: the creation of a “Greater Israel.” Specifically, Israel’s leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy, which was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in the 1920s and has heavily influenced Israeli policy since 1948, is commonly referred to as the “Iron Wall.”

What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy.

War on Terror Report Card

Tom Engelhardt over at his site TomDispatch gives us a breakdown of the War on Terror waged by BushCo for the last 7 years. Short version, we get an F for failure. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, links and all. Tom’s site is one of the most informative out there, and his guest writers seem to always pretty much nail it, what ever the subject.

I would just add that we are at the end of America as the “Most Chosen Nation”. We are quickly becoming irrelevant, a joke, a sad caricature of greed and lust still clinging to the hope of an empire along the lines of Rome or Britain in its hay day. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe it’s time we as Americans except the fact that we have been riding the victory of WWII, when we were the only industrialized power left, and that the rest of the world is finally caught up with us. The idea of empire building in this day and age doesn’t work, people are too connected now. And as the financial mess shows us, and history as well, things too big to fail always do.

This country needs to get over the idea that we are somehow “Chosen” and except that we are only 1 out of every 20 people. Instead of forcing our views on them, it would be wiser to learn their views and trying sharing the planet and its resources. Humanity as a whole needs to learn that we are all there is out there, we are all in this together, and we have all we need right here on this little planet we call Earth. We can either continue to fight over it till there is nothing left to fight over or we can learn to appreciate each other for who we are and realize that we never left Eden, it’s all around us.

What this has to do with America is that our Republic could be a great model for others if we could get it to work like it’s supposed to. We are all supposed to have a voice, a vote, an interest in the system working. Instead we have countless laws, regulations and hurdles that keep most of us from even wanting to try and participate. What we end up with is an elite few gaming the system for themselves while the fringe elements work to divide the citizenry through the political parties and the media.

I read the other day that countries are no longer turning to our courts to learn about democracy because we have slipped so far away from our roots and into violating the very human rights we claim to promote. This doesn’t surprise me at all considering how we imprison millions of Americans for activities that our government has no business making illegal in the first place. We have created a prison system that needs mandatory sentencing to justify itself, turned our police departments into paramilitary units and have thrown out the notion of innocent until proven guilty. We seem to have no problem spending an ever larger percentage of our tax dollars on super-mega prisons but we balk at pay raises for teachers, after school programs, extracurricular activities; you know, the things that might give kids something to do so their not bored enough to get in trouble in the first place.

This attitude extends to our foreign policy. Both candidates for president want to expand our military, which we already spend a third of our budget on now. Why? Why do we need more bases overseas, more weapons systems, more wars? Wouldn’t it be wiser to tone down our bravado and try talking with the rest of the world? I know, that’s surrender monkey talk. Real men kill them all and let god sort them out. I guess George Washington wasn’t a real man then: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Yep, he sure hated America.

We have a president who said Saddam Hussein was evil because he had people tortured, and then we learn we are doing the same thing in the very same prison in Iraq. We all watched the twin towers fall in horror, killing thousands, yet our own military has killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and do we feel the same horror and disgust? Even now we are bombing civilians in Pakistan with drone aircraft, robot warriors out of science fiction. What could be more terrifying then knowing that there are countless drones flying over head and at the whim of someone far away one of them will unleash death upon your home and you won’t even have the chance to flee for your life?

The worst part to me is that our push for ever more destructive weapons drives the rest of the world to develop something to counter them. Iran may very well want nukes, and why not since Israel got them from us and is an aggressor nation just like us. We are systematically arming countless dictatorships around the world all the while claiming to be spreading “Democracy”. That is, as long as your democracy is favorable to our business interests. Don’t dare want to help your own people or you will get a visit from our illustrious covert ops.

Our War on Terror would be better labeled a War of Terror. We are far better at terrorizing humanity then a bunch of guys in the desert waste lands. Our government has used this war as cover to spread across the globe, and anyone who dares to protest quickly gets labeled a terrorist, making it impossible for them to do business and putting a price on their head.

What a sad reality for a country that claims to be a beacon of hope and a bastion of liberty.

Will someone at least try to stop this from escalating?

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.

Nice convention and all, but………

The latest fiasco of BushCo inches ever closer to war. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has officially recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as sovereign entities:

MOSCOW – Russia stunned the West on Tuesday by recognizing the independence claims of two Georgian breakaway regions, and U.S. warships plied the waters off of Georgia in a gambit the Kremlin saw as gunboat diplomacy.

The announcement by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ignored the strong opposition of Europe and the United States, and signaled the Kremlin’s determination to shape its neighbors’ destinies even at the risk of closing its doors to the West.

“We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” President Dmitry Medvedev said hours after announcing the Kremlin’s decision and one day after Parliament had supported the recognition.

Lovely idea, but no thanks. Seriously, are there any grown ups left in Washington who could step in and maybe manage this a little better?

What’s really screwed up about this is that the US is trying so hard to keep a straight face while it chest thumps and grunts at Russia. BushCo knows full damn well they created this mess, and they will exploit it to get McCain elected just like they used 9-11 to win elections in 2002 and 2004. Hell, this is even scarier then Iran ever could be. The war on terror wasn’t working anymore, but all those middle aged white folk remember the Reds.

And so we stir the pot. First off, from the article above, this really does stand out:

As the West focused on Russia’s effort to shift Georgia’s internationally recognized borders, the Kremlin denounced the U.S. use of a Navy destroyer and Coast Guard cutter named the Dallas to deliver aid to Georgia’s Black Sea coast.

“Normally battleships do not deliver aid,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dryly told reporters in English, apparently confusing the word “warship” with “battleship.”

Earlier Tuesday, the United States said it intends to deliver humanitarian aid by ship on Wednesday to the beleaguered Georgian port city of Poti, which Russian troops still control through checkpoints on the city’s outskirts.

Good point. Then there’s this:

The State Department said Monday an interagency team led by U.S. Undersecretary of State Reuben Jeffery arrives this week to assess Georgian post conflict reconstruction needs that officials of the Tbilisi government say could reach $2 billion.

The Pentagon meanwhile said an air and sea relief effort for Georgia continues and has now delivered more than 700 tons,nearly $20 million worth of emergency supplies. The first of three U.S. military vessels sent to Georgia, the Navy guided missile destroyer USS McFaul, arrived at Georgia’s Black Sea port of Batumi on Sunday.

Now why on earth would that make the Russians nervous? And it is making them nervous:

SOCHI, August 26 (RIA Novosti) – Russia does not want a new Cold War but is not afraid of one should it occur, the Russian president told the Russia Today international news channel on Tuesday.

President Dmitry Medvedev signed decrees on Tuesday recognizing Georgia’s breakaway South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states despite warnings by Western leaders against the move.

“We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one, and in this situation everything depends on the position of our partners,” Medvedev said, adding that the West should understand why Moscow recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s sovereignty.

Medvedev also said that U.S. presidential candidates may use this current situation in their election campaigns, although “voters are indifferent to events abroad during U.S. elections.”

And he’s right. We are all so worried about the economy that we have let Iraq slip into the background, and this fiasco is even less on the public’s radar. The Russians see this as their “Kosovo Moment”:

Both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been seeking independence since the early 1990s, resulting in bloody conflicts with Georgia. Their hopes were given a new lease of life following Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in February and subsequent recognition by most EU and western countries, including the United States.

“In both cases the center started a war in Kosovo and South Ossetia, as well as Abkhazia, but the conflicts were halted in different ways – through the ruthless inhuman bombardment of Belgrade in the case of Kosovo and without punishing Tbilisi for its attacks on Sukhumi [Abkhazia's capital],” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

“A ceasefire was agreed, peacekeepers were deployed and mechanisms for talks established. Belgrade has never tried to use military force or cast doubt on negotiations since 1999, but they were destroyed by Kosovo Albanians supported by the West. And it was Tbilisi that undermined the settlement mechanisms in South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” the minister said.

“Therefore, drawing parallels is irrelevant here, and the difference is evident between Belgrade’s policy towards Kosovo and how Saakashvili’s regime behaved towards South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” Lavrov said.

The Russians are using our own arguments against us. After all, who are we to point fingers with 150,000 soldiers and 190,000 contractors in Iraq, and we won’t honor the sovereignty of the government there that we helped get elected:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Monday that all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by 2011 and there would be no security agreement between the United States and Iraq without an unconditional timetable for withdrawal. This was a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which insists the timing for troop departure would be based on conditions on the ground.

“No pact or an agreement should be set without being based on full sovereignty, national common interests, and no foreign soldier should remain on Iraqi land, and there should be a specific deadline and it should not be open,” Maliki told a meeting of tribal leaders in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone.

………………………………………………………………………………….

But the White House disputed Maliki’s statement and made clear the two countries are still at odds over the terms of a U.S. withdrawal.

“Any decisions on troops will be based on conditions on the ground in Iraq,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in Crawford, Texas, where President Bush is vacationing. “That has always been our position. It continues to be our position.”

Fratto denied Maliki’s assertion that an agreement has been reached mandating that all foreign forces be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

“An agreement has not been signed,” he said. “There is no agreement until there’s an agreement signed. There are discussions that continue in Baghdad.”

Maliki also said the dispute has not been resolved over immunity for U.S. troops and contractors when they are off their bases. He said this was one of the most divisive issues under negotiation.

“We can’t neglect our sons by giving an open immunity for anyone whether he is Iraqi or a foreigner,” he said.

See, it’s ok when we do it, but not ok when anyone else does it. The EU is no doubt regretting letting us run willy-nilly for so long because now they don’t really have a whole lot of ground to stand on either. They have been complicate in our antics since 2001 in one form or another. So this plea by Georgia’s president falls on deaf ears to a point, because they have been letting the US get away with much worse for years. Which brings us to another front in this blossoming cold war (let’s hope it’s a cold one):

MOSCOW – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is warning his country may respond to a U.S. missile shield in Europe through military means.

Medvedev says that the deployment of an anti-missile system close to Russian borders “will of course create additional tensions.”

“We will have to react somehow, to react, of course, in a military way,” Medvedev was quoted as saying Tuesday by the RIA-Novosti news agency.

Again, what is Russia so concerned about? Not the most trusting bunch, those Reds.

And since this can only get worse with BushCo at the helm, we’re sending in Mr. Personality himself, Darth Cheney. Strangely, he was scheduled to be there any way about this time, which doesn’t make me feel any better about this whole mess. I guess Cheney has the time since his buddy in Pakistan is out of a job.

We still have troops dying in Iraq. That needs to be said everyday so people don’t forget about it.

Well, I guess that’s it for now. Michelle’s speech was nice and all, but……..