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

Category: Foreign Policy

  • “Tell Obama we want guns”

    Usually, for all of my Luo News, I defer to Baldilocks. But this story proved too good to pass up. Apparently, Barack Obama’s appeal extends beyond US borders, according to an NDTV report;

    Amidst the riots taking place in the sprawling slums of Kenya, the rioters are occupied with something from the US – Barack Obama.

    Obama, whose father is a Kenyan, is a favourite son of the nation that erupted into violence after the hotly contested elections in December.

    Well, according to the BBC he’s a bit more than a “favorite son”;

    Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has said he is a cousin of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

    Mr Odinga told the BBC’s The World Today that Senator Obama’s father was his maternal uncle.

    Mr Obama’s father – a Kenyan also called Barack – met and married his American mother when they were students at the university of Hawaii.

    So what would Luo tribesmen like from Obama?

    “We are supporting him here. We want him to win the election,” said Mohammed Noor, 27.

    “Did you know that Obama’s father is also Luo?” he added.

    Behind Noor, young men yelled: “Tell Obama we want guns!”

    I wonder if arms shipments are included in that nebulous “change” that Obama is always mentioning.

    It must be that “sirens’ call” that Rick Moran wrote about at the Right Wing Nut House today. If Obama’s song can pull them in all the way from Africa, maybe we need something a little sturdier than a mast.

  • Secure our borders! Yesterday!

    In this morning’s Washington Times, Sara Carter (quickly becoming one of my favorite reporters over there) writes that “US Foes target Latin America”

    Iran, Cuba and Venezuela are working together against the U.S. by undermining democracy in Latin America, allowing trafficking of illegal drugs and creating safe havens for extremist groups, intelligence officials said.

    Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell said that influence from the three countries — led respectively by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — has spilled into Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador, which “are pursuing agendas that undercut checks and balances” of democratic governments.

    She goes on to write;

    “We’ve known for some time that Islamic extremists groups were gaining momentum and exploiting the region,” said one U.S. federal law-enforcement official, on the condition of anonymity, who worked drug operations in Central America. “Iran is no exception — now with Cuba and Venezuela, the door is open.”

    Web sites advocating Hezbollah and other Islamic extremist groups in Central America are used to recruit members and espouse extremist ideology.

    On one Web page — now removed from the Internet — “Hezbollah Latin America” displayed photographs of members, with their faces covered and weapons raised. The Web site contained links to Hezbollah group members in Venezuela, El Salvador, Argentina and as north as Chiapas, Mexico.

    Regular readers of this blog will remember the link to Jungle Mom that I’ve posted several times over the past several months referring to Hezbollah influence among the indigenous people of Venezuela’s interior after Chavez forced Christian missionaries out of the country.

    Unless we build the wall and start enforcing border securing, these Latins influenced by terrorist organizations will have the ability to blend into our own population and strike without a bit of hinderance.

    If that’s not terrifying enough for you, try this;

    In 2005, Venezuela became a major transient route for South American — predominantly Colombian — cocaine destined for the U.S. market and it continues to grow, U.S. intelligence officials said.

    Mr. Chavez’s lack of counterdrug cooperation “undermines efforts by other countries, particularly Colombia, by giving traffickers access to alternative routes and transit points Chavez is likely to remain unengaged on the counternarcotics front unless the drug trade is perceived to damage his international image or threaten his political longevity,” Mr. McConnell said.”Military cooperation between Tehran and Caracas is growing,” Mr. McConnell testified. “There are growing signs of anxiety among Venezuela’s neighbors about this military buildup.”

    Coca-chewing Chavez and crackhead Ahmadinjad supplying our own drug addicts with druga and using the money against us (where are all of those Libertarians who say that drug use is a personal preference and don’t harm society).

    But any war against drugs must be prefaced with secure borders. It’ll be up to the next president since this one has been a bit out-to-lunch on that one. And it’ll take a sturdily-spined Congress to force the next Administration to do what needs to be done.

    As it stands now, the only people willing to stand up to Chavez and his cronies seems to be Exxon-Mobil.

  • Attorneys For Terrorists Endorse Obama

    Who would have thought they’d endorse a democrat? More than 80 attorneys for suspected (“Suspected” being a legal nicety much like “alleged”) Terrorists now being held at Guantanamo Bay , Cuba have endorsed good old Barrack (How dare you mention my Middle name is Hussein) Hussein Obama. The Miami Herald has the story. According to the author, writs of habeas corpus are “Traditional”. Gee, when in the history of this nation have constitutional rights been extended to foreign combatants who, under the Rules of Land Warfare are illegal combatants?

  • March Against FARC (Update)

    Background from the Financial Times;

    During his eight months as a hostage of Colombia’s Farc rebels in 2002, businessman Gustavo Muñoz knew that he would be executed the moment the Colombian military intervened.

    “They used to practise my execution every fortnight,” he said. “I knew exactly who would do it if the military attacked.”

    Mr Muñoz says Colombians are now more concerned about the 4,000 people held illegally by the Farc, other left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and common criminals.

    Thousands of Colombians are on Monday expected to march in repudiation of the Farc and its practice of kidnapping, in a demonstration organised through Facebook, the social networking site. The organisers claim the protest will be one of Colombia’s biggest, demonstrating a growing indignation with the kidnappings.

    “Some on the left used to argue that it was justifiable . . . that they needed to do it to finance the struggle for social transformation,” says Olga Lucia Gómez, whose País Libre charity helps victims. “You don’t hear those arguments anymore.”

    So I decided to add my voice to the millions worldwide from here in DC.

    I was really surprised that an ad hoc organization put together such a large demonstration in such a short period of time. It was just three weeks ago that Kate emailed me about contacts for getting permits for the demonstration. Most of the organization was done on Facebook and crossed generational lines as you can see from the photos. It really was a study in modern organization. My compliments to Laura Busche for herding all of these cats for the media and the participants.
    There were a few thousand people, mostly Colombians from what I could tell, gathered in the chilly drizzle of Freedom Plaza, just a few blocks from the White House;

    The theme of the demonstration was to show opposition to the Armed Revolutionary Front of Colombia, a Marxist terrorist organization that has been murdering innocent Colombians for forty years.

    Many of the people at this rally are refugees of the conflict in their country between a democratic government they elected and the Marxist narco-terrorists of FARC. This is a YouTube of Laura Busche, the main organizer of the event explaining the demonstration in English and Spanish.

    Aside from the hundreds of Colombians being held hostage for ransom (that’s how FARC finances it’s anti-government operations in addition to drug dealings) there are also three Americans being held hostage for propaganda purposes. The Colombians at the rally demonstrated for their release, too.


    Many of the signs the Colombians carried were specific about who are the enemies of democracy in Colombia. For example, this one about Human Rights Watch, which ignores the atrocities of FARC while pressuring the Congress and Bush Administration on supposed Human Rights violations of the Uribe government.

    This one speaks for itself;

    “[Simon] Bolivar dreamed of a great Colombia, not a terrorist Venezuela”

    This turns out to be the author of Padre Hoyos Blog.

    Here’s a YouTube video of the crowd singing the Colombian national anthem. They began their demonstration by singing the US national anthem, though. Another YouTube video of the crowd.

    Try as I might, I couldn’t find any Communists or Socialists on the periphery of the protest like they are at so many others. There were no Code Pink showboats trying to steal the show. There were no Bushitler signs, no signs that called for us to end our war against some nebulous brown people or to release prisoners from invisible camps. It was a genuine outpouring of contempt for FARC and a call for the hostilities to end against the Columbian people.

    Kate at A Colombo-Americana’s Perspective has a worldwide round up of the international demonstrations today. We bumped into each other taking pictures in Freedom Plaza today so I’m sure she’ll have less Anglo-centric view of the event when she gets her pictures posted.

    Gateway Pundit has amazing pictures of the huge crowds in Colombia. Daniel at Venezuela News and Views has pictures of the march in Caracas.

    UPDATE: I was anonimously sent this YouTube link to very well done video record of the event in DC. Pictures and videos of the event in Toronto at Correo Canadiense.

  • Obama’s naivete

    I was a little stunned this morning to read in the Washington Times that Obama is still convinced that he was still right to oppose the war in Iraq;

    Both Mr. Obama of Illinois and Mrs. Clinton of New York agreed that they would carefully withdraw troops from Iraq and rededicate the U.S. military to Afghanistan. But they sparred briefly during the mostly congenial forum on how the nation was led into the war.

    “It is important to be right on Day One,” Mr. Obama said to applause, riffing off Mrs. Clinton’s frequent claim that she’s ready to be president on Day One. “The judgment that I’ve presented on this issue, and some other issues is relevant to how we’re going to make decisions in the future.”

    He said that because “the terrorist threat is real” and because the nation has “finite resources, we don’t have the capacity to just send our troops in anywhere we decide, without good intelligence, without a clear rationale.”

    Of course, when your audience is a pack of Koolaid drinking Democrat sheep, I suppose being opposed to a national security venture that has been the powder keg of American foreign policy for 18 years looks attractive. Especially since Democrats only approve of bombing the living shit out of the Serbian people to punish their leader and putting missiles into the middle of a Sudanese aspirin factory as a foreign policy solution.

    I remember the news footage of Haitians standing on the pier in Port-au-Prince who waved their machetes wildly and actually drove off the US Navy. I remember that my friend, Tim Martin lost his life in Mogadishu when he rode a Hummer back into the city to rescue his fellow Rangers because the administration didn’t have the cojones to give the US Amy the weapons they needed to fight that war because they didn’t want to appear too aggressive.
    Whichever Democrat becomes our President, we can expect to see these scenes played out around the world, especially judging by their constituency’s continued push towards US irrelevance in the world.

  • Piro, Hussein and 60 Minutes’ weapons of mass distraction

    The “Bush Lied” crowd should be shutting up about now, but of course, they never will. The ancient platitudes about “Nixon’s secret war” have survived for four decades and so will the empty platitudes of this generation. However, the intellectual emptiness of the “Bush lied” crowd becomes more evident every day.

    CBS’ 60 Minutes interviewed FBI agent George Piro who interrogated Hussein and buried in rhetoric the key part of the interview. In their on-line story, the conversation is on the 6th and final internet page, and it was glossed over in the TV broadcast.

    In fact, Piro says Saddam intended to produce weapons of mass destruction again, some day. “The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” Piro says.

    “And that was his intention?” Pelley asks.

    “Yes,” Piro says.

    “What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?” Pelley asks.

    “He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program,” says Piro.

    “Chemical, biological, even nuclear,” Pelley asks.

    “Yes,” Piro says.

    CNN admits that the threat from Hussein was imminent.

    Hussein had the ability to restart the weapons program and professed to wanting to do that, Piro said.

    “He wanted to pursue all of WMD … to reconstitute his entire WMD program.”

    The Wall Street Journal comments on the story today in their “Review and Outlook“;

    Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being “contained” by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, “sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq].”

    Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called “No-Fly Zones.” And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.

    Judging by the interview, it is safe to say that Hussein was, indeed, an imminent threat – since imminent means that sooner or later he’d be successful and he had the intent to rebuild his destructive weapons programs. Although it may be true that sanctions and inspections had contained him, it cannot be said that we could have maintained the No-Fly Zones, the failing sanctions or the weapons inspectors in perpetuity.

    Not only were the Russians and French (and maybe the Germans) profiting from the oil-for-food scandal, the No-Fly Zone patrols were attacked frequently and inspectors were intermittently tossed out by Hussein when it suited him. Before George Bush influenced the UN to get their inspectors back in Iraq in 2002, Hussein had been free of inspectors since 1998.

    Of course the media has focused on the “Hussein didn’t have WMDs” portion of the story and ignoring the fact that he had the means to eventually use these terrible weapons against his enemies. And we were one of those enemies.

  • Miracle election in Cuba

    The Associated Press, in an article entitled “Cuba’s Raul More Popular Than Fidel” reports that to everyone’s surprise, the brothers won an upset reelection;

    Acting President Raul Castro — not his older brother Fidel — was the top vote-getter in Cuban parliamentary elections, according to official results released yesterday.

    Bespectacled, camera-shy and far less charismatic than Cuba’s ailing longtime leader, the 76-year-old Raul Castro received 99.4 percent of votes cast in the family’s base of Santiago in eastern Cuba — Fidel got 98.3 percent.

    Both brothers easily won re-election to the rubber-stamp legislature known as the National Assembly of Popular Power, as did all of the 614 candidates presented to the island’s 8.4 million voters on Jan. 20.

    After those three paragraphs of typical Communist propaganda, the truth outs;

    The unopposed candidates needed to get at least half the votes cast in their districts, and none came close to losing.

    What a miracle! The imprisoned and tortured population of Cuba elected their wardens overwhelmingly (CNN link to similar story). And voter turnout was astounding!

    Officials said that 95 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, though about 4.5 percent of those turned in blank or invalid ballots. While voting is not mandatory, failing to do so can draw unwanted attention from pro-government neighborhood-watch organizations.

    Cuba Watcher at Babalu Blog congratulates Raul;

    My most heartfelt congratulations to Raul Castro on his having become the next primary target for an entire nation of maligned, angry people.

    Marc Masferrer at Uncommon Sense says Raul scored bigger than Fidel because he’s been pandering to voters;

    Instead of locking up dissidents for long prison terms, like Fidel Castro did during the “black spring” of 2003, Raúl has perfected a more subtle, but no less dictatorial, method. Under Raúl, the police are more likely to take you off the street or from your home, drive you to a police station, warn you to abandon your opposition to the regime, threaten you with a long prison term, take your picture and fingerprints and then let you go.

    Isn’t that sweet of Raul? He’s a regular humanitarian.

    Meanwhile, according to the Miami Herald, 7 more dancers defected from Cuba in Mexico Friday. I think that’s 10 Cuban dancers in the last three weeks.(CBS4 Miami link);

    Last month, the three members of the Cuban National Ballet defected in Canada and crossed the border to the U.S., part of a slew of defections in December. Among the most famous was TV host Carlos Otero.

    Four members of the Cuban National Circus and the popular Cuban group Los Tres de La Havana also made their way to the U.S.

    I’ll bet they’re really kicking themselves that they missed out on this blowout election.

    (In case you didn’t notice, I was being sarcastic)

    But it reminds me of the news coverage over the October 2002 reelection of Saddam Hussein.

  • The legacy of George Bush

    Yesterday, I was completely enthralled with a post on The Anchoress about George Bush’s legacy. It’s probably not what most Conservatives would say about him, let alone the Left, but it’s pretty much what I’ve been saying all along;

    Perhaps I am a dim bulb, but President Bush has never surprised me, and that is probably why I have never felt let down or “betrayed” by him. He is, in essentials, precisely who he has ever been. He did not surprise me when he managed, in August of 2001, to find a morally workable solution in the matter of Embryonic Stem Cells. He did not surprise me when, a month later, he stood on a pile of rubble and lifted a broken city from its knees. When my FDNY friends told me of the enormous consolation and strength he brought to his meetings with grieving families, I was not surprised. When the World Series opened in New York City and the President was invited to throw the first pitch, there was no surprise in his throwing (while wearing body armor) a perfect strike.

    […]

    Let me tell you what has surprised me about George W. Bush. I have been surprised by his ability to keep from attacking-in-kind the “public servants” in Washington who – for five years – have not been able to speak of the American President with the respect he is due, by virtue of both his office and his humanity, because they are entralled with hate and owned by opportunism. I have been surprised that he has kept his committment to “changing the tone” even when it has long been clear that the only way the tone in Washington will ever change is if everyone named Bush or Clinton or Kennedy is cleared out and “career politicians” are shown the door….

    Now, I don’t pray at the altar of George Bush or pray in the direction of the White House, but you have to give the man his due, and I think The Anchoress has done that. Whether you agree with his policies or not, he told what he was going to do before you voted for him, didn’t he? Because he told us what he believed in that first election, nothing he did surprised us – except that he kept his word. How unpolitician-like.

    He said he’d never govern by polls, and by-God he hasn’t. He put his head down and plowed through the nattering nabobs of negativity (h/t Spiro Agnew) and did what he thought was right regardless of the cacophony of the dissenters – on both sides. We’d have gotten the same kind of determination from Fred Thompson, I think, but that ship has sailed apparently.
    More praise for George Bush is published in, of all places, the Washington Post, this morning (I can only imagine the comments that’ll appear there before the end of the day) written by Michael Gerson;

    Proposals such as No Child Left Behind, the AIDS and malaria initiatives, and the addition of a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would simply not have come from a traditional conservative politician. They became the agenda of a Republican administration precisely because of Bush’s persistent, passionate advocacy. To put it bluntly, these would not have been the priorities of a Cheney administration.

    This leaves critics of the Bush administration with a “besides” problem. Bush is a heartless and callous conservative, “besides” the 1.4 million men, women and children who are alive because of treatment received through his AIDS initiative . . . “besides” the unquestioned gains of African American and Hispanic students in math and reading . . . “besides” 32 million seniors getting help to afford prescription drugs, including 10 million low-income seniors who get their medicine pretty much free. Iraq may have overshadowed these achievements; it does not eliminate them.

    Conservatives have been dealt cards which are Socialist in nature. If we want the big ticket items (National Security, sane economic policy, etc…) we have to pay for the things that are aptly named “entitlements” that Democrats have used to pay for votes for decades and the victims of our public school system have come to expect. Until we either change the culture or accept the fact that we don’t want to have Conservatives in public office, that’s the price we have to pay – it’s called accepting reality.

    Gerson continues;

    Bush has received little attention or thanks for his compassionate reforms. This is less a reflection on him than on the political challenge of compassionate conservatism. The conservative movement gives the president no credit because it views all these priorities — foreign assistance, a federal role in education, the expansion of an entitlement — as heresies, worthy of the stake. Liberals and Democrats offer no praise because a desire to help dying Africans, minority students and low-income seniors does not fit the image of Bush’s cruelty that they wish to cultivate.

    In the January 30th edition of The Weekly Standard, Joseph Loconte writes about Bush’ success in Africa against AIDS;

    “Protecting our nation from the dangers of a new century requires more than good intelligence and a strong military,” Bush said. “It also requires changing the conditions that breed resentment and allow extremists to prey on despair. So America is using its influence to build a freer, more hopeful, and more compassionate world.” Under PEPFAR, about 1.4 million
    AIDS patients in 15 nations in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean have received life-saving medicines. Bush announced Monday night that he intended to add another $30 billion to the program over the next five years.

    Many on the left, at home and abroad, have reproached the president for his alleged failure to use “soft power” to confront religious extremism and advance U.S. foreign policy goals. Yet here is a supremely humane initiative – inconceivable to foreign policy realists – linked to U.S. security concerns. Bush rightly calls it “a reflection of our national interest and the calling of our conscience.” Just think about the number of AIDS orphans that would be scratching for survival without PEPFAR. Millions of rootless young boys cannot be a good thing for any society. Whatever the relationship between poverty and terrorism, this program is probably doing more to check the flow of terrorist recruits than all the diplomatic bloviating in Brussels, Geneva, and New York put together.

    Either way he’s screwed, at least by the voices on both extreme ends of the political spectrum. A man who has always been true to his word, who kept his campaign promises, ignored the loudest noisemakers – quite refreshing considering his predecessor and the alternate choices we had in 2000 and 2004.

    History will be more kind to him than his current critics. Especially if we get a Clinton or Obama term to compare to Bush’s.