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

Category: Foreign Policy

  • Hollywood stuck in the 60s

    I’ve long been a “student” of  Che Guevara in that I read every word of his that I could find. I studied his life and his activism – and I kept him at arm’s length. It’s easy to succumb to the romanticism of a iconic figure like Che if you read the romanticism of the Left that has him the symbol of the struggle against the United States and democracy as a whole.

    Just like if you only read the Left’s version of Nixon, the Left’s version of Reagan, the Left’s version of…oh, well, just about anything, really. And it’s that romanticism that attracts young minds of mush to the Che T-shirts, the Che beer – it’s easy to fall in love with notion of Che as long as you don’t think about him too much.

    Reason has put out this video entitled “Hollywood’s Sick Love Affair with Che Guevara”, that, characteristic of everything Reason produces, makes more sense than any crap coming out of Hollywood these days.

    The event is the release of Benecio Del Toro’s portrayal in the new movie “Che” which Del Toro opened in Cuba the other day – sweet, huh? I’ll admit that Che is an underachiever when it comes to mass murder, at least when you compare him to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and other successful mass murderers, but then how many people do you have to kill to be despised by the Left? Cuba Archives lists 132 executions directly attributable to Guevara – it’s certainly not the millions of other communist thugs, but how many does it take (hat tip to Babalu Blog)?

    According to Cuba Archives, those 132 weren’t given the benefit of a trial;

    During its on-going investigations, Cuba Archive has found that most of the men executed by order of Ché Guevara were career or low-ranking members of the Police or Armed Forces of Cuba who had performed their constitutional duties and had committed no crimes despite serving under a 7-year dictatorship. In many cases, they came from families that had served their country for several generations. A few were members of paramilitary groups or protective forces that had committed crimes under the Batista dictatorship. But, none had the benefit of trials conducted with basic rules of jurisprudence.

    The American Left has been whining for years about the abuses of the criminal Bush Administration. Have 132 been executed? Has even one been executed? Their greatest complaint about the Bush Administration is the water boarding of two people and the outing of Valerie Plame. But Che is a fricken hero worthy of worship.

    This how I remember Che;

    Stretched out in a jungle hut with a Bolivian sergeant’s bullet in him – after a failed revolution that Castro sent him on to get him out of Castro’s hair.

    If the Hollywood Left is looking for a Cuban to make a movie about, why don’t they make a movie about Yoani Sanchez, a cuban blogger who has been systematically harrassed and persecuted for blogging about the Cuban regime and conditions in Cuba. Doesn’t that sound like a story worthy of a movie more than a story about an idealist who becomes a thug-murderer whose only claim to fame is to look dashing in a beret?

    Thanks to ponsdorf for reminding with the link to CDR Salamander.

  • Colombia, the new Israel

    Mora at Babalu Blog writes that the United Nations is getting bored with just bashing Israel so they’ve found themselves a new democracy awash in a sea of thugs at which they can aim their false outrage;

    The UN is now demonizing Colombia alongside Israel as a nation whose human rights record must meet UN scrutiny and condemnation.

    While Zimbabwe dies of cholera.
    While Venezuela slides into a dictatorship.
    While Darfur runs from genocide.
    While Russia turn into a hell with no future.
    While Burma goes ignored by the outside as monks are beaten and killed and aid is denied
    While business as usual goes on in red China.
    While Cuba continues to abuse truth tellers like Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet and harass Yoani Sanchez. While Cuba artificially impoverishes 9 million people to keep them servile and controlled. While Cuba continues to imprison 1000 people, many up on no charges at all except ‘dangerousness.’ While Cuba gets away with destroying libraries and mob-lynching dissidents. While Cuba refuses to allow anyone at all to leave the vortex legally.

    Never mind that: Israel and Colombia are the real problem you see.

    Well, actually, the United Nations does that because if they get outraged at Zimbabwe, Cuba, Darfur, etc… they’d have to actually do something about it to remain a legitimate human rights defender. As long as they point and yell at the more innocuous offenders, they never really have to actually accomplish anything and their high-paying jobs in cushy offices are secure. And if they actually started making a difference in the world, they’d lose their jobs to peaceful coexistence – can’t have that, can we?

    From the link;

    Colombia was also criticised recently by Human Rights Watch, which said that President Alvaro Uribe’s administration “hampers justice efforts” by obstructing investigations into its alleged links with paramilitaries.

    Um, Human Rights Watch was actually ejected from Venezuela a few months back. When will they get their panties bunched about Chavez?

  • The War Against Terror, in case you forgot

    It’s been easy to forget that the war against terror is actually a war against terror the last few years while Iraq and Afghanistan became (and still are) political footballs. With the Left trying to call the war “imperialistic” and “immoral” they seem to forget that there are folks out there trying to kill us all. The action in Mumbai last week has brought that home to those of us who remain sane. While IVAW and World Can’t Wait (the Maoist-rooted communist organization) were protesting the war in San Francisco, innocent people were dying in Mumbai for no other reason than to shock the world. Gateway Pundit writes that the death toll may reach 300 after scores of bodies were found stacked in some of the hotel rooms.

    At least four of those killed were Americans. Not American spies, or American military personnel, but just Americans. Alan Scherr and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi were probably the same types who were protesting in San Francisco (Washington Post);

    Alan Scherr was an art professor with a comfortable life in the Maryland suburbs, but he spent 25 years studying Transcendental Meditation in a quest for something more. The search took him and his family to Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where they shed their old life in Silver Spring and meditated in the complex of a New Age mystic.

    Rabbi Gavriel N. Holtzberg, 29, and his Israeli wife, Rivka, 28 were apparently bound with telephone wires before they were executed in the Mumbai Jewish Center (Washington Post);

    “They were killed,” whispered Yeshiva boys just out of school, holding scooters and book bags.

    Grown men turned and strode away, suddenly tearing up.

    “I don’t understand how this works,” said Yosef Rodal, 18, a yeshiva student who said Gavriel Holtzberg was a distant relative. “How do bad things happen to good people?”

    Four peaceful people murdered purely for the shock value – no military goals, no tactical advantage. Just mass murder – and the 200 known dead weren’t enough. The only terrorist captured alive claims they were going for 5,000 dead (Daily Mail);

    Azam Amir Kasab, 21, from Pakistan, said the attacks were meticulously planned six months ago and were intended to kill 5,000 people.

    He revealed that the ten terrorists, who were highly trained in marine assault and crept into the city by boat, had planned to blow up the Taj Mahal Palace hotel after first executing British and American tourists and then taking hostages.

    Well, no they weren’t really highly trained – anyone can pull a trigger and pull pins on grenades. A highly trained force would have gotten out alive after killing a lot more people. As Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive wrote last night these ten people were “not much more than chimps with an evil purpose”. Curt at Flopping Aces says they’re just run-of-the-mill cowards.

    Does anyone think that ANSWER or World Can’t Wait or Not In Our Name are going to protest the people who sent the ten chimps out to kill innocent people? Not on your life. A few days ago, I got to listen to the same types defending Bill Ayers’ domestic terrorist activities as a logical result of American foreign policy. They damn sure aren’t going to condemn foreign terrorists.

    In fact, The Nation finds a Pakistani to condemn American and Indian State terrorism as the reason for the attacks. In between rants about ‘Hindu facism” and in the typical sleight-of-hand language of the terrorist apologists in this country to which we’ve become accustomed, Humayun Gauhar writes;

    Group terrorism is a last-resort cry of a people long oppressed. Poorly armed, in utter desperation, they turn their own bodies into bomb delivery systems for lack of cannons, missiles, Predator drones and helicopters armed with Hellfire Missiles, fighter jets and bombers that State Terrorists have. They don’t have Daisy Cutters so they make ‘Improvised Explosive Devices’. India is one of the biggest State Terrorists of them all. Pakistan is the biggest victim (and sucker) of both State Terrorism and group terrorism, a hapless country that always becomes a frontline state in a superpower imperialist adventure gone wrong in return for millions of ingrate refugees to share scare food with and thousands of foreign terrorists and freedom fighters pushed in by the failure of State Terrorism.

    So as long as it remains perfectly legitimate to kill innoncent people in large numbers to make a point, we can’t expect the Left to engage in meaningful discussions about how to defend ourselves since everything we do in that regard seems to be the wrong answer. If we can’t agree that there’s no rational justification for murdering innocents, I guess there’s nothing to talk about.

  • Hillary Plans to Accept Secretary of State Position

    According to the Guardian, Hillary will accept the role of senior diplomat for Obama.

    Hillary Clinton plans to accept the job of secretary of state offered by Barack Obama, who is reaching out to former rivals to build a broad coalition administration, the Guardian has learned.

    Obama’s advisers have begun looking into Bill Clinton’s foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to Africa to help with development, to ensure that there is no conflict of interest. But Democrats do not believe that the vetting is likely to be a problem.

    If true, this would be very interesting on several levels. Getting her approved by a Democrat Senate would obviously be no problem. The press, after vilifying her in the primaries, will prop up her non-existent experience (sorry folks, being a wife is not evidence of experience of what the husband did) and proclaim her uniquely qualified. She will sail through.

    But why would she? What is her plan?

    It is true that several former Secretaries of State were also Presidents including Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Quincy Adams, and Van Buren. But that string stopped in 1849 when James Buchanan left the post as a totally unremarkable Secretary and eventually became the only President in history that was worse than Jimmy Carter.

    Does Hillary think she can reverse 160 years of history or does she have a different agenda? And spare me people, Hillary does have an agenda and Obama is residual at best in that.

    If her plan is to make her and Bill enormously wealthy, this position is perfect for that but it is not a good position if she plans another Whitehouse run.

    Only time will tell.

  • US freezes assets of Chavez aides


    Yesterday, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave the US amabassador there 72 hours to close the US mission there and recalled his own ambassador. Prior to the announcement, Chavez manufactured a rally and assembled a crowd of supporters and told them that he had successfully twarted another coup attempt, ostensibly backed by the US. Jungle Mom posted this video in which Chavez called Americans “Yanquis de mierda” saying “we’ve had enough of your shit…” More of that excellent diplomacy to which we’ve become accustomed from Banana Boy. Val Prieto at Babalu Blog does a better translation than i can.

    As I wrote yesterday on my Latin American blog, Tall & Rich, the Venezuelan blog, The Devil’s Excrement, saw no evidence of a coup. It also comes the day after the legislature gave Chavez the authority to toss out foreign oil companies.

    The Miami Herald this morning, reports that the US retaliated by accusing thee Chavez aides of supporting the Colombian narco-terrorist group FARC.

    The move by the U.S. Treasury Department, a day after Chávez announced the expulsion of U.S. Ambassador Patrick Duddy, freezes any assets the three men may have under U.S. jurisdiction.

    Rodríguez Chacín is accused of helping the FARC obtain weapons, while the other two allegedly protected drug shipments. There was no immediate reaction to the sanctions from Venezuelan authorities.

    This all comes as Bolivia’s communist President Evo Morales expelled the US ambassador there for supposedly lending aid to the autonomy movement there;

    U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington ”regrets” the expulsions, which ”reflect the weakness and desperation” of the Chávez and Morales governments.

    Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro said McCormack’s statement was an attempt to ”cover up the reality of the decadent government of the United States.” A foreign ministry statement accused Washington of “repeated demonstrations of hostility.”

    It also comes on the day that a Miami judge is scheduled to sentence two Chavez agents in the maleta-gate scandal involving illegal campaign contributions to the Argentine elections from Chavez (el Universal link);

    A judge is to sentence on Friday, September 12 Venezuelan Moisés Maionica and Uruguayan Rodolfo Edgardo Waseele Paciello, who are accused of conspiring to act as covert agents of the Venezuelan government in US territory without Washington authorization in the so-called suitcase scandal, reported on Monday court sources.

    While part of the Russian Navy sails into Venezuelan waters, Chavez welcomed two Russian bombers to his country on Wednesday (France24 link);

    Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers were in Venezuela on Wednesday for “training flights,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said, adding he would be piloting one of the aircraft.

    “I hope that stings, ‘pitiyanquis’,” he said, using a derogatory term for Venezuelan opponents who have perceived US sympathies.

    “What’s more, I’m going to take the controls of one of these monsters,” boasted the president, a former paratrooper and left-wing politician who has avowed antagonism towards the United States.

    Manuel at The Devil’s Excrement says there’s no evidence of Chavez actually piloting either of the aircraft yet…just more bluster from the little pudgy weasel.

    As I wrote yesterday, if I were Venezuelan, I’d be worried about who Chavez will accuse of undermining the Bolivarian Revolution after he tosses the yanquis out. The Real Cuba reports that the Bolivian Army has announced to Chavez that they won’t allow ANY foreign intervention;

    “To the President of Venezuela, Mr Hugo Chavez, and to the international community, we say that the armed forces (of Bolivia) emphatically reject any foreign intervention of any kind, wherever they be from,” Armed Forces Commander in Chief Luis Trigo said in a televised statement. “We will not allow any foreign soldier or armed force to set foot on our soil,” he added.

    In Latin American, the military defends the respective constitutions of their nations, not the political leaders. The Bolivian Army allows Morales to be President – that makes this pronouncement much more ominous than it seems.

    Thanks to Jimmy Carter…the gift that keeps on giving.

    Crossposted at Tall & Rich

  • They’re paying attention now

    In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, in an opinion piece entitled “They’re paying attention now” explains why John McCain has suddenly surged ahead of Barack Obama in the polls;

    There are many answers, but here I think is an essential one: The American people have begun paying attention.

    Despite the year-and-a-half of the media showing us snippets of Obama from his carefully scripted and directed speeches, Americans really didn’t care – certainly not as much as the rest of us who tear apart every word spoken by any politician.

    (more…)

  • Obama still hasn’t learned his lesson

    How soon they forget. Barack Obama and the Democrats have forgotten how we spent billions of dollars in the eighties keeping Saddam Hussein in his box. How many times were our aircraft enforcing the No-Fly Zone attacked by surface-to-air missiles? At least twice, Hussein rattled his saber during the 90s and caused the Clinton Administration to send troops to Kuwait to man the prepositioned equipment we had there to protect the Kuwaitis. Not to mention missile attacks on Iraq proper to punish his assassination attempts or destroy his weapons labs.

    Iraq was the right war, but at the wrong time…Hussein should have been punished in 1991 when COB6 and I sat near the banks of Euphrates poised and equipped to rumble into Baghdad. But, Obama still insists it was the wrong war;

     “Our military is stretched extraordinarily because of trying to fight two wars at the same time, and so my job, as the next commander in chief, is going to be to make a decision what is the right war to fight and how do we fight it. And I think that we should have been focused on Afghanistan from the start,” [Obama] said.

    Two wars? Afghanistan and Iraq are part and parcel of the same war. Remember that some al Qaeda fighters busted ass for Iraq when the Taliban fell – including al-Zarqawi the first leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. All of these motor-mouths who claim we should have focused on Afghanistan instead of Iraq, I’d like them to tell me how we should have focused on Afghanistan more. They easily criticize how our resources should have been in Afghanistan…what resources? How, exactly, would they have done it differently? I’d like to see an alternate plan.

    President Bush criticized the Democrats for shooting off their mouths in the 2004 election without offering any alternatives…they still take the easy path and no one demands from them answers to the questions their empty platitudes raise.

  • ZBiggy; Long-distance analysis

    Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ZBiggy to those of us who suffered through his tenure as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, has decided that an injection of additional troops into Afghanistan puts the United States in danger of being like the Soviets in the 80s in a HuffPo interview. Keep in mind, Biggy has never set foot in Afghanistan and he admitted in 1998 that his policies in 1978 may have triggered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

    And it’s with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. “I think we’re literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy,” Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. “When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets.”

    However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations “with little regard for civilian casualties” may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West’s role. “It’s just beginning, but it’s significant,” Brzezinski said.

    This is the same guy whose reticence to support the Shah of Iran brought on the problems that come with the Islamic Republic these days. His reticence to support the Nicaraguan government brought on a communist regime there and fanned the flames of communist insurgencies in Central America. His weakness on basic national defense issues encouraged the Soviets to station a combat brigade in Cuba – ninety miles from our shores. And of course, because he was willing to half-way support the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, the Soviets invaded assured that the weak Carter crew would do nothing to prevent their centuries-old dream of securing warm water ports.

    Now, with an analysis based purely on reportage from left-wing sources apparently, he accuses us of attempting a Soviet-style occupation. He goes on with even more hyperbole about the coming of World War IV;

    “Well, if McCain is president and if his Secretary of State is Joe Lieberman and his Secretary of Defense is [Rudolph] Giuliani, we will be moving towards the World War IV that they have been both favoring and predicting,” he said, calling that an “appalling concept” (and adding that by their lights, the Cold War counted as World War III).

    Well, dumbass, if the Cold War was World War III, why didn’t you act like it was a world war? We faced a modern army in Europe with our own Korean War-era equipment, the military was woefully underfunded and underpaid and every threat was met with surrender and weakness. Acting as if those things never happened, ZBiggy drives on with his yammering;

    Asked who he would like to see in a potential Obama cabinet, Brzezinski said: “I think [Sen. Chuck] Hagel. I would like to see a bipartisan cabinet. I think we need one very badly — and we did well in the Cold War when we had one. I would say Hagel and [Sen. Dick] Lugar would be very good Republicans [for Obama].” He also cited Sen. Joe Biden as a potential Secretary of State, in which case it would also be possible to “keep [Secretary of Defense Bob] Gates in the job for a few months.”

    Any credibility this doofus ever had evaporated in December 1988 when the wall in Europe came down. And when did his “bipartisan cabinet” ever do “well”? Point to one damn thing, ZBiggy.

    And the ignorant HuffPo masses fall right in line begging for Chuck Hagel to be Obama’s VP and lauding the Taliban for ending the opium trade. Crackpots with crackpot views of the world.