This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Foreign Policy

  • US training Mexican troops

    The Washington Post reports that the US military is training Mexican troops to fight in the drug wars south of our borders. The curious part of the story is this;

    U.S. military officials have been hesitant to discuss publicly their growing ties with Mexico, for fear of triggering a backlash among a Mexican public wary of interference.

    Do the Mexican public really think that we want to invade? Seriously? For what? We don’t have enough dusty shit holes in our own country? Why should we invade when the whole Mexican nation is trying to move here.

    The last time we sent troops to Mexico was in 1916 when Pancho Villa assaulted some border towns in the US. Before that it was 1846 when Mexican troops tried to claim parts of Texas on the north side of the Rio Grande.

    The lesson, I suppose, is that if you don’t want US troops in Mexico, you should keep your shit on the south side of the border.

  • Mystery Missile Launch

    This seems a bit odd…

    (CBS) A mysterious missile launch off the southern California coast was caught by CBS affiliate KCBS’s cameras Monday night, and officials are staying tight-lipped over the nature of the projectile.

    The Air Force and Navy are claiming it wasn’t them…

    A Navy spokesperson told KFMB it wasn’t their missile. He said there was no Navy activity reported in the area Monday evening.

    On Friday night, Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California, launched a Delta II rocket, carrying an Italian satellite into orbit, but a sergeant at the base told KFMB there had been no launches since then

    Robert Ellsworth, former NATO embassador and former Deputy Sec. Def. took a guess.

    When asked, however, what he thought it might be, the former ambassador said it could possibly have been a missile test timed as a demonstration of American military might as President Obama tours Asia

    Personally, I don’t know why this administration would want to flex any muscle while the POTUS is in India/Indonesia…anyone else have a good guess?

    UPDATE: This guy has an interesting take, check out the photos…and it’s not from Monday night…
    contrail

  • Smart diplomacy to sponsor terror

    Last week I wrote that the Obama Administration decided they’d continue military assistance to The Sudan, despite the fact that they employ child soldiers against whatever enemy they designate from week-to-week. The week, the rocket scientists at the State Department are planning to take the Sudan off of the state-sponsors of terror list;

    The Obama administration has offered to take Sudan off a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism if the Sudanese government holds a credible and on-time referendum on southern independence.

    The Obama administration has taken a decision “to move up our readiness to rescind the designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism as early as July 2011,” a senior administration official said in a background briefing on Sunday.

    Sudanese President Omar Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) has demanded for several years that Sudan be removed from the list.

    Yeah, the Sudanese government demands to be removed from the list without making any headway towards becoming a civilized nation. But doing them favors will influence them. Just like the Clinton Administration doing favors for North Korea has turned them around. If I remember correctly, Libya got off the list during the Bush Administration by actually doing something.

    Boy, this smart diplomacy really rocks. Well, not for us, but for everyone else it’s pretty cool. Well, not our allies.

  • Wanna fight some child-soldiers?

    Well, you might get the opportunity thanks to the Obama Administration. According to the Washington Post, our president signed a waiver that allowed us to send military aid to some countries who still force children into their military;

    Obama sent a memo to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, dated Monday [last week], saying that it was “in the national interest” to waive a cutoff of military assistance for Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Yemen.

    Those countries would have been penalized under the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush shortly before he left office. The law took effect this year, after the State Department identified six countries that used government soldiers – including Somalia and Burma.

    Senior U.S. officials said Wednesday that Yemen was exempted because ending military aid would jeopardize the country’s ability to fight al-Qaeda. In Sudan, U.S. military assistance will be critical in helping the unstable southern part of the country build military institutions if it votes to secede in a January referendum, as expected, officials said.

    Congo was exempted because U.S.-funded programs there are aimed at helping the military become more professional and less abusive, officials said. Chad got a pass because of its role in fighting terrorism and assistance with the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. In addition, U.S. aid goes toward helping that country’s military end its practice of using child soldiers, officials said.

    So all of this talk about “respect” from the “industrialized” and “civilized” world is just hooey. never mind that withholding taxpayer dollars might just make these countries become a little bit more civilized. This soft approach certainly won’t make any difference. But the UN is more interested in racial profiling than funding the use of small Black children in Africa. Makes perfect sense.

  • Obama seeks counsel of Rice

    The Associated Press reveals that the president huddles with former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice;

    A White House official said Miss Rice and Mr. Obama have a “cordial relationship,” and the president looks forward to Friday’s meeting covering “a range of foreign policy topics.” The official isn’t authorized to speak publicly and insisted on anonymity.

    Must’ve been tired of listening to the same old crap from his foreign policy advisors, and tired of a string of foreign policy failures. This must really grate on those far left whiners who demonized Rice for eight years.

    From the Washington Post;

    TV host Jon Stewart [asked Rice] what she would be doing differently if she were in office, Rice declined to second-guess.

    “I am not going to chirp at the people inside,” Rice said during Wednesday’s appearance on Stewart’s “Daily Show.” “I know that it’s a lot easier out here than it is in there, and these are patriotic people who are trying to do their best every day. They don’t need me chirping at them. I think that things are not easy. This is a really tough time for the United States, a tough time for our world, but people are doing their best.”

    Now if only the Obama Administration would return the favor to the Bush Administration.

  • Germans celebrate 20 years of reunification

    On a day of anniversaries, the Germans celebrated 20 years of the reunification of the states which had been divided for thirty five years by a repressive Soviet government and later, by their own leaders.

    I took the above picture a mere 3 years before reunification near Coburg, Germany.

    From an Associated Press article;

    He said their chants of “we are one people” as communism crumbled awoke “a national feeling that was long buried, for understandable historical reasons” after the Nazi era.

    “Now, a new self-confidence has grown in all of Germany, an uninhibited patriotism, an open commitment to our country, which is aware of its great responsibility for the past,” Wulff said in a speech in the western city of Bremen, which hosted this year’s main anniversary event.

    A US patrol on the intra-German border March, 1983

    You’re welcome.

    More exclusive (to This Ain’t Hell) pictures of US soldiers patrolling the East German border here and here.

  • Depression strikes White House

    Drudge is running a subheadline about a study that one in ten Americans suffer from depression. So it stands to reason statistically that President Obama would be one of them (Washington Insider link);

    So you state that President Obama is depressed? How did you come by this information? From a direct source still working within the White House on a daily basis. As I had stated previously, tensions at the White House have reached a critical stage. The infighting among staff is off the charts. More recently, the president has increasingly withdrawn emotionally from the day to day demands of his job – he has become what was described to me as “empty”.

    I don’t know if it’s true or not, nor do I care very much, I just thought it was strange that right before the election we discover that our president might be mentally unstable. Given the climate, I suppose we should feel sorry for him and vote for Democrats so he doesn’t collapse.

    The elections shouldn’t be the only thing he’s depressed about, though. It’s things like this which should depress him;

    Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assured his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Saturday that their ties were solid — a view unlikely to please Washington which is working to isolate the Islamic state.

    “We have stood beside Iran in a brotherly way from the very beginning of the (Iranian Islamic) revolution,” Assad said during a one-day visit to Tehran.

    It turns out that for all of that blather about “smart diplomacy” was just so much hooey. That would depress me, too, if I was wrong about about every single policy. That’s what you get with Joe Bite-Me…bad advice and mental illness.

    Thanks to Mr Wolf for the link to the “depression in the White House” link.

  • FARC’s #2 eats hot lead

    The Star (Reuters) is reporting that the Colombian communist guerrilla group FARC is reeling from the aerial attack which killed their #2 commander, Mono Jojoy, pictured above in an Eric Shinseki black beret with FARC founder Manuel Marulanda.

    El Universal says that the defense minister of Colombia is calling this “the most significant blow to FARC in history”.

    Using his real name, Jorge Briceno, ABC writes;

    Briceno belonged to the FARC’s seven-member ruling Secretariat. The group’s main leader, Alfonso Cano, remains at large and is believed to be in the mountains of central Colombia.

    Colombian officials say they believe other Secretariat members are hiding out in neighboring Venezuela.

    Good. That ought stir Hugo Chavez into making stupid mistakes and saying stupid shit.

    Once branded as a failing state, Colombia has seen bombings and kidnappings from its long war ebb and foreign investment has grown fivefold since 2002, when former President Alvaro Uribe began a hard-line campaign against the rebels.

    The news comes as former captive of FARC, Ingrid Betancourt releases a book about her experiences as a hostage for six and a half years. I haven’t read her book, but I did read the book “Out of Captivity” by the three American contractors who were held hostage by FARC for five years. In that book, Marc Gonsalves was not kind to Betancourt. Betancourt and the three American hostages, Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell, were rescued by Colombian special forces without firing a shot.

    I wonder how this administration will react to death of Mono Joyjoy (mono means “monkey” in Spanish) along with an estimate of 27 others in the attack.