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

Category: Foreign Policy

  • Future belongs to goat-roping camel herders

    Iran’s punchline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told the Associated Press that “the future belongs to Iran” during an interview with him upon his arrival in the US to address the United Nation General Assembly’s annual roast of the United States;

    “The United States’ administrations … must recognize that Iran is a big power,” he said. “Having said that, we consider ourselves to be a human force and a cultural power and hence a friend of other nations. We have never sought to dominate others or to violate the rights of any other country.

    “Those who insist on having hostilities with us, kill and destroy the option of friendship with us in the future, which is unfortunate because it is clear the future belongs to Iran and that enmities will be fruitless.”

    Yeah, never mind that they hang gays from construction cranes or stone women in the public square, they’re a “big power.” The Iranian government bullies their own people with the tacit approval of the current US administration. They successfully prosecute a proxy war against the US in Iraq and Afghanistan because, for some reason, we don’t have the stones to obliterate the backwards government.

    Does anyone honestly believe that once Iran has nuclear weapons that they’ll not use them immediately to bully the rest of the world? Yet here we are allowing the despot (who is probably more than a little retarded as well) to come to the United States and make a mockery of the community of nations. Not that the UN hasn’t done a stellar job of making a mockery of themselves. Of course, the fact that he’s even in the US makes a mockery of us as well.

  • Latest message from the land of Rainbows and Unicorns.

    I really have a strong love/hate relationship with this group. On one hand I respect that while other people talk about what is going on in Afghanistan they are there and have been for quite a while. They are trying to help by talking to the population to give a connection to the people outside of Afghanistan. But that is where the respect ends.

    On the other side they have managed to do nothing productive besides making feel good videos with such generic like “Why not love”. Think Bobby Whittenberg without the anger management issues. Todays videos are no exceptions.

    To make matters worse and more insulting is that JTC has been working with people that have not only not using him as a way of finding out how to have a direct impact on Afghanistan with needed supplies and other items, but actively ignored it. Preferring to make stories about how nothing we are doing is working and indirectly giving press to the Taliban. Yes DC am talking to you on this one.

    Stop making the risk that these people are taking in vain and get a program started to see that they are not just wasting their time and health.

    Like now, yes you Rethink Afghanistan, get off your computer and do something about this.

  • Peace with Honor Reloaded.

    Well at least people are starting to think about what happens with Afghanistan when we leave. The bad part it is just a re-visited plan used over 35 years ago.

    How to Leave Afghanistan Without Losing

    I am going to start were it goes wrong.

    In conjunction with the disengagement process, the agreement would set in motion U.N.-brokered peace negotiations. The Taliban has long demanded a disengagement timetable as the precondition for peace. Ironically, however, its emotional appeal comes primarily from its role as the standard-bearer of opposition to foreign forces. Thus, when and if the United States does present a timetable, it will be cut down to size. The Taliban will be in a strong bargaining position, but only as the dominant force in the ethnically Pashtun south and east of the country.

    The focus of peace negotiations could then be redirected from the terms for power sharing with the Taliban in Kabul to the nature and degree of the power to be ceded to the Taliban in its Pashtun strongholds.

    Yea except for one minor problem, the Taliban does not share power. Feels like a bad pun off of Lord of the Rings.

    This approach is likely to get Pakistani blessing as the best deal available under present circumstances. Islamabad’s leading strategist on Afghanistan, former Foreign Secretary Riaz Mohammed Khan, suggested such a shift in focus in a Washington meeting on June 17, observing that the Taliban has “important regional influences where they should be accommodated.”He specified Khost and Paktia as examples of provinces where Taliban control might have to be accepted, and he implied that Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan’s Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, had explored such arrangements in their two Kabul meetings in early June.

    Yea, it gets better.

    The provinces under Taliban rule would have a significant stake in stable relations with Kabul as a source of foreign aid for dams, roads, and other economic infrastructure projects.

    Yea like they are doing a great job of that now.

    Afghanistan’s neighbors would be more likely to help contain the Taliban under a U.N.-brokered agreement than under wartime conditions in which they want to avoid identification with an unpopular U.S. military presence.

    Of course they are because they know the UN is not going to do a thing no mater how may times they break the agreement.

    But lets not forget the real danger, out of control Generals.

  • A Department of Peace?

    This all started a few days ago on Facebook. I posted in reply to this video about General Petraeus. It got started with this comment.

    “The general wants more war. Gee whiz.” …which underlines the need for civilian CONTROL of the military, not handing control over to those who want more war, the way the previous, corrupt, criminal mis-administration did (and this administration is doing now)!

    Civilian control? You mean like it is now with the President in charge? What more were you really expecting? In which I got my answer.

    …When there is a Secretary of Peace advising the President at NSA briefings, I would think the civilian control is adequate to balance a Department that funnels billions of dollars to the war industry, which funnels enough of it to Congress to keep it in the war business.

    You mean the department of the Federal Government and Congress? The ones that approve all of the military’s budget? Also before you just view this as a joke there have been several attempts for a bill that would create such a position. It has been submitted in 2005, 2007 and 2009. All as of this posting date have not gotten past Committee. The sponsor of the bill, Rep. Dennis Kucinich has not made any noticeable changes to the bill each time he has submitted it.

    Here is the full Bill, and from what I have read so far most of it if not all is based on the assumption that this will be enforceable outside of conventional methods. But that is not stopping people from trying to raise support for this bill once again.

  • Think of the Children/Afghanistan version.

    It seems that Rethink Afghanistan is claiming that it has a exclusive story that prove that NATO forces were responsible 50 civilian deaths to include women and children. But given that the first images of the area are from Al Jazeera is enough to give pause considering their past actions. DC wrote a post about it that talks about it in more detail.

    The video goes into several interviews from people that claim that say what exactly happened/ But considering what the Taliban does to people that oppose them I find that these are suspect. Like the video of Al Jazeera recording the Taliban arresting people who voted in the 2009 Afghanistan election. In this case the fate of the people is not good. Also considering the Taliban is threatening to behead anyone who it considers a “informer”

    The Taliban in Afghanistan has threatened to behead informers who have been revealed following the explosive disclosure by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has put out over 90,000 uncensored intelligence documents, causing a security scare.

    So is this still a victimless crime now?

  • Russia Violated the ’91 START treaty. Who knew???

    Well knock me over with a feather…

    From Bill Gertz at the Washington Times

    Russia continued to violate provisions of the 1991 START nuclear-arms treaty up until the agreement expired in December, raising new concerns that Moscow will violate the pending “New START” treaty now being debated for ratification in the Senate.

    So here’s a great idea…Let’s do it again!!!

    Under pressure from the Obama administration, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hope to approve the treaty and send it to the full Senate before the monthlong August recess.

    And the State Departments take on it…

    Release of the compliance report followed dispatch of an earlier State Department analysis to Congress on arms verification that concluded that Russian cheating on the new START treaty would not be significant.

    Really, they won’t cheat…..that much…
    When exactly was it that the Russians became our “friends”?

  • Israel-Iran clash approaches

    Old Trooper sends us a link to the latest reports about the threatened deployment of Iranian Navy vessels expected off the coast of the Gaza strip;

    One ship left port on Sunday and another will depart by Friday, loaded with food, construction material and toys, the report said. The boats would be part of international efforts to break Israel’s isolation of the Gaza Strip.

    “Until the end of the Gaza blockade, Iran will continue to ship aid,” said an official at Iran’s Society for the Defence of the Palestinian Nation.

    While Israel has long suspected Iran, which rejects the Jewish state’s right to exist, of supplying weapons to Hamas, Tehran says it only provides moral support to the group.

    In the meantime, Saudi Arabia denies reports that they granted permission to the Israelis to use Saudi airspace to attack Iranian nuclear facilities (Bloomberg link);

    Saudi Arabia rejects “the violation of its sovereignty and the use of its airspace or territory by anyone to attack any country,” the official Saudi Press Agency said late yesterday, citing an unidentified official at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. “It is more appropriate that Saudi Arabia should apply this policy to the authority of the Israeli occupation with which it has no relationship in any way.”

    The Times reported yesterday that Saudi Arabia agreed to allow Israel to use its airspace to make bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The newspaper cited unidentified people. Saudi Arabia would ensure that the bombers pass through an area in the north of the country without its missile defense systems being activated, the newspaper said.

    Israel is the last hope of the civilized world while an impotent UN churns out strongly-worded letters and ineffective sanctions against Iran.

  • Iran reacts to UN sanctions

    The UN hit Iran with a fourth set of sanctions against the rogue nation to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. President Ahmadinejad reacts with stark horror;

    “These resolutions are not worth a dime for the Iranian nation,” he said.

    “I gave one of them (world powers) a message that the resolutions you issue are like a used hanky which should be thrown in the dust bin. They are not capable of hurting Iranians.”

    Of course, who couldn’t predict that reaction? Four sets of sanctions. And the UN continues along a path of impotent measures and empty gestures. The same kind that haven’t worked anywhere in the world and resulted in the first and second invasions of Saddam’s Iraq.

    But the UN has an ace up their sleeve – Bebe Netanyahu. They’re hoping that Israel will deal with Iran and then the UN can stand back in shock at what Israel has done and condemn the Israelis like they’ve done for the last forty years or so.

    And Ahmadinejad is giving the Israelis just the provocation they need by volunteering to escort blockade busters to Gaza with the Iranian Navy in the Mediterranean.

    The Iranian Navy off it’s coast and Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon ought to motivate the Israelis to do the bidding of the UN. Our State Department is probably drawing up a document full of false outrage as I type this.