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

Category: Foreign Policy

  • Lil Mac and Blind Faith

    Last night I linked to Jammie Wearing Fool and the story about “Lil Mac” Wesley Clark, but the more I thought about the article, the more angry I became. First here’s the quotes as reported by the Washington Times;

     “[McCain] has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee and he has traveled all over the world, but he hasn’t held executive responsibility,” Clark said. “That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded _ that wasn’t a wartime squadron.”

    Moderator Bob Schieffer, who raised the issue by citing similar remarks Clark has made previously, noted that Obama hadn’t had those experiences nor had he ridden in a fighter plane and been shot down. “Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president,” Clark replied.

    Who the Hell is Wesley Clark to tell us what kind of experience is acceptable to be the President? I’m here to tell you that schmoozing with domestic terrorists and racist preachers isn’t qualifications for President, either, Wes, m-boy.

    Neither is being an E-4 journalist with a personal body guard, nor being a green lieutenant with a boat who accidentally shot himself in the arm. But that didn’t stop you from endorsing Gore or Kerry based on their military experience, did it?

    How many wartime commands did Clark have? Since the bulk of his service was between Vietnam and Kosovo, I have to say; very few. I guess it’s McCain’s fault that he was being held prisoner while the wars were going on and his peers got those plum wartime commands.

    Who keeps giving this knucklehead a forum? CBS should be ashamed for allowing this addle-brained, weasel-faced half-pint on the air. The Democrats should be ashamed that he gets anywhere near their party. All the little peckerhead did yesterday was point out that Obama has less experience than someone with even a tiny bit of experience.

    Getting fired from a command position during a time of relative peace doesn’t qualify Lil Mac for disparaging other veterans’ service with any credibility.

  • Sunday link fest

    Time to give back to all of my friends out there;

    im_pro_zombie.jpg

    Me, too.

    Jammie Wearing Fool catches Wesley Clark trashing McCain AGAIN.

    Zero Ponsdorf disagrees with Michael Yon – just this once.

    The American Pundit finds a politician who not only defends Obama and his posse, but he defends Mugabe in the same tone.

    Ziva at Babalu Blog gets nostalgic for pre-Castro Cuba.

    Big Dog recounts the childishness of the Democrats and Baldilocks tells them to grow a pair.

    Uncle Jimbo cuts loose on the Left at Blackfive.

    Bloodthirsty Liberal has little patience for this German revisionist.

    Doubleplusundead takes on the “Dueling Dumbasses” of the Second Amendment revisionists.

    I can’t even summarize this bit of Swedish buffoonery from Rich Horton at Blue Crab Boulevard.

    To show how bi-polar the Obamists are, Robin at Chickenhawk Express finds some hunting for people who bad-mouth B?O for his middle name and DrewM at Ace of Spades finds some changing their middle name to whatever Obama’s middle name is.

    The only guy on the internet who lists me in his blog roll as “This ain’t He**”, my buddy, Steve at Common Cents helps you find cheap gas.

    Confederate Yankee catches AP in an outright lie…once again.

    Don Surber‘s Weekend Scoreboard.

    Lisa and WL MacKenzie Redux at Dust My Broom writes about Jackboot Justice in our neighbor to the north.

    Fausta says there’s a monkey god in Obama’s future.

    Wordsmith’s Sunday Funnies on Flopping Aces.

    Gateway Pundit recounts Lieberman’s charge at Obama’s throat.

    Marooned in Marin reports that Feds are investigating the City of San Francisco for harboring an illegal alien who’s also a crack dealer.

    See-Dubya explains Obama using the McMurthy Lonesome Dove story at Michelle Malkin.

    My buddy Skye at Midnight Blue is still standing against the clowns in West Chester, PA every Saturday.

    Greyhawk at Milblogs pulls back the covers on Obama’s McPeak.

    Kate at A Colombo-Americana’s Perspective has nearly-live photos of the protests in Nicaragua.

    Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs lashes out at Olmert’s deal with the Palestinians.

    The Gentle Cricket says McCain has impressed him already.

    D. at The Dillard Doctrine has advice for the pro-mission organizations – join or die.

    Stop the ACLU reports that Think Progress has resorted to outright lies – not a first for them, though.

    Last Reporter at Red Maryland and Unfree State tells the story of Baltimore’s latest corrupt-thug mayor.

    There, that oughta hold ya’all.

  • Iran threatens oil in the Straits of Hormuz

    Yesterday, Iran threatened to disrupt Persian Gulf oil shipments through the narrow Straits of Hormuz in the event that the West attacked the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons development according to the AFP;

    The chief of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards warned that Iran would use its control of the Strait of Hormuz in response to an attack, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

    “It is natural that when a country is attacked it uses all of its capabilities against the enemy, and definitely our control of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz would be one of our actions,” General Mohammad Ali Jafari told the conservative daily Jam-e Jam.

    The strait is a vital conduit for energy supplies, with about 20%-25% of the world’s crude oil from Gulf oil producers passing through the waterway.

    Now, I’ve been staring at a map of the world and I fail to see how blocking the Straits of Hormuz would disrupt our oil flow from off of our coasts or Alaska. 76% of Americans say we should drill and refine our own fuel – can they be wrong?

    Did anyone tell the Islamic Republic that they would be violating our Carter Doctrine? Will Jimmy Carter make that point as forcefully as he did in his State of the Union Address in 1980;

    This situation demands careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come. It demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened.

    Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region.

    Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.

    Probably not – after all, he promised in his “malaise speech” (July 1979) to build refineries and pipelines when we needed them and we haven’t built a refinery since 1977.

  • WaPo Global; Mugabe bad, but not that bad

    I wrote the other day about liberal guilt and their inability to find any reason to use force against tyrants who abuse their own people. It reaches near-comic extremes today in the Post Global section of the Washington Post in an article by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar entitled “No Moral Ground to Oust Mugabe Alone“. His whole argument is based on the naive assessment that Mugabe is bad, but he’s not as bad as other African rulers have been;

    Robert Mugabe is indeed an odious ruler with blood on his hands. But since when is that a disqualification to rule? The world has long been full of rulers even more odious and bloodthirsty than he.

    Isn’t that an enlightened approach to world politics? Mugabe’s thugs chopped up an opponents wife while she was still alive. He’s been murdering entire families since he was given his power in 1980. Pressure from the civilized world has failed to make him change one iota. Even Nelson Mandela, Mugabe’s fellow traveler, has abandoned him;

    Former South African president Nelson Mandela said there is a “tragic failure of leadership” in Zimbabwe. His remarks at a dinner in London Wednesday was the first time he has spoken publicly about Zimbabwe’s political crisis.

    The Brits have stripped of his knighthood finally;

     “This action has been taken as a mark of revulsion at the abuse of human rights and abject disregard for the democratic process in Zimbabwe over which President Mugabe has presided,” a Foreign Office spokesman said.

    Despite all of this, Mugabe still refuses to budge and give Zimbabweans a break;

     President Robert Mugabe refused Tuesday to give into pressure from Africa and the West, saying the world can “shout as loud as they like” but he would not cancel this week’s runoff election even though his opponent quit the race.

    South Africa’s ruling party issued a toughly worded statement calling on Mugabe’s government to stop “riding roughshod” over the opposition headed by Morgan Tsvangirai, who quit the presidential contest and sought shelter in the Dutch Embassy.

    But this Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar doesn’t think that anything Mugabe does rises to the level that reaches  a crisis worthy of intervention from the real world. I’m betting there are many Zimbabweans that would disagree with his pompous arrogance to let them suffer because it doesn’t affect his family.

  • Iran continues support of Shi’ite radicals

    As we get news from the Associated Press that Shi’ite militants attacked a council meeting in Sadr City, the Wall Street Journal writes that US authorities continue to accuse the Islamic Republic of continuing their support of Shi’ite radicals in Iraq;

    The report reserved its harshest words for Iran, accusing Tehran of breaking its promise to curtail the flow of Iranian armaments into Iraq. It said U.S. and Iraqi forces operating in Basra found large caches of Iranian-made weapons that had been manufactured earlier this year, after Iranian officials told their Iraqi counterparts that they would take measures to curb such shipments.

    The report also noted that the number of attacks featuring a particularly lethal form of roadside bomb that the U.S. has linked to Iran reached a high in April, while the number of attacks involving Iranian-supplied rockets rose sharply over the same period.

    Iran has been facilitating the “large-scale trafficking of arms, ammunition, and explosives,” and helping to “fund, train, arm and guide numerous networks that conduct wide-scale insurgency operations,” according to the report.

    Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs writes that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is making a special trip to meet with Israeli military heads this week;

     In a visit likely to fuel speculation about possible Israeli military action against Iran, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen will touch down briefly in Israel at the end of the week for talks with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, top defense officials told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

    A few weeks after Mullen’s visit, Ashkenazi will fly to Washington DC for several days on his first visit to the US as chief of staff.

    And the USAToday reports that rockets are again striking Israel from Iran-backed Hamas-controlled Gaza effectively ending the days-old ceasefire;

     The midafternoon rocket barrage, which lightly wounded two people, capped a day of violence that presented the truce with its first serious test. Just before midnight, Palestinian militants fired a mortar shell into an empty area in southern Israel. And in a pre-dawn raid, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians in the West Bank city of Nablus.

    Islamic Jihad, a small armed group backed by Syria and Iran, claimed responsibility for the rocket fire. Although the West Bank is not included in the truce, the militant group said the Nablus raid had soured the atmosphere of calm.

    All of this on the day after the Islamic Republic rejects the legality of EU sanctions against the government for ignoring pleas to stop their march towards nuclear armaments;

    Iran condemned on Tuesday fresh European Union sanctions against the Islamic Republic and made clear they would not slow the country’s nuclear activities, an Iranian news agency reported.

    “Such illegal and paradoxical behavior …. is meaningless and strongly condemned,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini was quoted as saying by the Fars News Agency.

    All of this activity a few days after UN’s Nobel Prize winning Nuclear policeman Elbaradei warned that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within the next six months, but that a strike against them would turn the Near East into an inferno. And Iran negated the effect of an Israeli attack on their facilities after Israel supposedly made a practice run of an attack on Iran’s nuclear labs.

    It seems to me that all of the planets are aligned.

  • Liberal guilt vs. White Man’s Burden

    Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Burma, the Sudan, Tibet, Iran are all countries with which we’re all familiar of the terrible depravations portions of the respective populations suffer nearly every day. Their particular oppressors use liberal guilt to continue their brand of governance.

    Zimbabwe’s Mugabe blames the United Kingdom for his political opposition, Venezuela’s Chavez warns that “the Empire” of the US wants Chavez dead for Venezuela’s oil, Iran’s Ahmadinejad almost daily warns of a US invasion. The Myanmar government hides behind the Chinese while maintaining it’s brutal repression under the guise of protecting the country from foreign instigators.

    The United Nations act concerned about these pockets of oppression, but they do nothing to further their intentions than wring their hands and make lofty speeches. Mostly because the members are all engaged in various degrees of oppression themselves and they worry that actually enforcing the tenets of human rights might someday come to their own countries.

    Despite the rhetoric of the American Left, there is case to be made for the use of force to relieve the sufferings of people around the world. The “peace-at-any-cost” crowd can’t justify not removing radical entities from the world stage while they complain about the imagined deprivations they suffer under the Bush Administration. We have a responsibility to make the world safer for all people, as the premier defender of human rights – the city on a hill.

    The UK has a moral responsibility to end the brutal regime of Robert Mugabe since they actually facilitated his installation three decades ago. Since the United Nations has hardly been able to summon the fortitude to even mention Mugabe, they’ve outlived their usefulness. When corrupt dictators have an equal voice in the UN as civilized nations, thecollective voice is muted.

    The world knows what they won’t admit – the US isn’t prone to non-judicial use of military power and the UK isn’t looking to rebuild it’s empire. If ever there was a time or a place to use the threat of military force to remove repressive governments, it’s in those nations I listed above. If the United Nations can’t get their act together, and they’ve proven time-and-again that they can’t, the civilized nations have a responsibility to heal these aberrations using any means possible.

    Why should one more person suffer because the Left feels guilty about the judicial use of force? What’s the real humanitarian choice here?

  • Sanity on a clueless planet

    We’ve all heard how the world stood with the US on September 11th, 2001, but somehow within a few days, George W. Bush had squandered all that goodwill and the entire planet turned against us. In less than two years, the French (who were dealing with an internal Islamic problem) turned on us, the Russians (who were also fighting Islamic terrorism) turned on us, the Spanish were frightened into turning on us by Islamic terrorism.

    Of course, it turns out that the Russians, French and Germans were profiting hugely for protecting Hussein’s regime and the only western news agency in Iraq, CNN, was purposely not reporting the truth from Iraq. The news reporting hasn’t changed – no news agency, outside of Fox wants to tell the public about the oil-for-food scandal (or as Hussein’s inner circle called it, the oil-for-palaces program).

    The American Left relishes the resulting hate for Bush’s United States, because they have no policy plans that they can tell Americans about that’ll get them votes. Clinton’s “third way” New Democrats are gone according to the Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel last Friday;

    When Mr. Clinton left, so did the most prominent New Democratic voice. Party liberals have been reasserting control ever since. Howard Dean’s 2004 consolation prize was the Democratic National Committee. Nancy Pelosi became House Speaker in 2006, and gave back committee chairs to the old 1960s liberal bulls. And now comes Mr. Obama, the party’s most liberal nominee since Hubert Humphrey.

    So how does the world feel about Obama? They’re enthusiastic, according to Fouad Ajami in today’s WSJ;

    The Pew survey tells us that some foreign precincts show a landslide victory for Barack Obama. France leads the pack; fully 84% of those following the American campaign are confident Mr. Obama will do the right thing in foreign policy, compared with 33% who say that about John McCain. There are similar results in Germany, and a closer margin in Britain. The populations of Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan have scant if any confidence in either candidate.

    84% – that’s about the same as Washington, DC’s liberal community support for Obama. Why? Because, of course, the world wants our money. Envy is at the root of almost every policy towards the United States, envy and greed for the American taxpayers’ earnings.

    Look at the list of Obama supporters in COB6’s post below – every one of them has a vested interest in seeing America fail. Why would they not support a Obama candidacy since he’s the most likely to make us a failure like Europe, Asia, the Near East and Africa and hand out our taxpayer dollars and make us more dependent on our supposed allies.

    Who cares who the Euro-wienies want to be our President? Who cares that Turks support Obama? We Americans each support our candidates based on our personal values, what makes the outside world any different? Because they want to take smiling protraits with us? No. Because they want our money and Obama is more likely to hand over sacks full of cash to them.

    Europeans and Arabs are too damn lazy to earn their own way in the world (somehow they got it in their heads that the economy is a zero-sum game – that there are losers and winners), so they all want a piece of our country – they line up outside of our consulates around the world every morning hoping for a visa to get here, and then burn our flag either here or their own country, depending on the outcome of their visa application.

    It’s becoming more and more apparent that John McCain is becoming the torch bearer for the few remaining sane people on the planet. One final question; why would any sane American want to vote for a candidate that the French support by 84% when the French are on their fifth constitution and we’re still on our first one?

  • Saudi minister: Oh, you need oil? We have oil.

    The Saudi oil minister acted surprised that the world needs more oil and said that, sure they can pump more if the world needs oil. (AP/NY Times link);

    Saudi Arabia’s oil minister says the kingdom is willing to produce more oil if customers need it, but he cited no specific production increase.

    The kingdom will pump about 9.7 million barrels a day beginning in July because of recent increases already announced.

    But Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi says it can produce more than 9.7 million a day if customers request it.

    I don’t suppose he got antsy because of the discussion in the US about tapping our own resources. 76% of Americans now favor drilling off our coasts and venturing into ANWR, despite the those 24% who are Luddites and are savoring  our current morass.

    Luckily, two years ago President Bush authorized exploration in ANWR in anticipation of this crisis. Also lucky is that Jimmy Carter formed the Energy Department which has a stated purpose of cutting through red tape to build pipelines and refineries. Now let’s see if the Energy Department can fulfill it’s stated mission.

    Obama claimed the other day that drilling now wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem, but just having the discussion has influenced the Saudis to pump more. Imagine what will happen when we actually start drilling, pumping and refining our own fuels and declare ourselves less beholden to foreign producers.