Benazir Bhutto Assassinated in Pakistan:
Uh oh. From the New York Times:
The Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated near the capital, Islamabad, on Thursday. Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto, who was appearing at a political rally, was fired upon by a gunman at close range, quickly followed by a blast that the government said was caused by a suicide attacker.
Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister of Pakistan, was declared dead by doctors at a hospital in Rawalpindi at 6:16 p.m. At least a dozen more people were killed in the attack.
Dr. Abbas Hayat, professor of pathology at Rawalpindi General Hospital where Ms. Bhutto was taken, said doctors tried to revive her for 35 minutes, but that she had shrapnel wounds and head injuries and was in heart failure. He said he could not confirm whether she had bullet injuries.
A close aide to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf blamed Islamic militants for the assassination, and said it was carried out by a suicide bomber. Ms. Bhutto’s death is the latest blow to Pakistan’s treacherous political situation, and leaves her party leaderless in the short term and unable to effectively compete in hotly contested parliamentary elections that are two weeks away, according to Hasan Askari Rizvi, a leading Pakistani political and military analyst.
Except Musharraf.
As they say, "Those bastards only have to get lucky once."
If the attack on Sharif's followers was an attack on Sharif himself -- reports I've seen are unclear -- that would have the simultaneity that's a Qaeda trademark.
I don't think 'Pakistanis' are capable of it, but this ought to make them think about whether the more or less modern part might want to split from the tribal areas and let the tribesmen murder each other in peace.
Other than being Muslims, it's hard to say why they think they believe they belong in the same country. East and West Pakistan split, after all, because they had nothing in common except religion.
The best place to get information on this is NDTV
It is an English news station from India.
http://www.ndtv.com
Live Video
My condolences to Ms. Bhutto's family. Without trying to turn this tragedy into a campaign issue, this is exactly why we need Representative Paul's foreign policy. Now we have Guiliani, Romney, Clinton, et al issuing statements about what the US government needs to do to protect world order. If Paul were President, we'd send official condolences, and the people of the United States would thank their lucky stars that we don't live in that part of the world. Their nuclear weapons are simply not a vital threat to us, even if an anti-US regime takes over (any more than Russia or China's nukes are a serious threat justifying either intervention or behind-the-scenes manipulation).
Pericles said, "Even if you are not interested in politics, politics is interested in you." Even if the US stays out of foreign affairs, there is no reason to believe foreign affairs will stay out of the US.
Paulite isolationism is just passive appeasement: feeding the alligator in the hopes he will eat you last.
Pakistan is not going to hunt down Osama or the Taliban - it's too hard a job, they haven't the motive, they can't afford the backlash. If and when they see some advantage that outweighs those liabilities, then they might do it.
However, while the GWOT is funneling them Scrooge-McDuck-style mountains of cash, which they can then use to threaten India and foment trouble in Kashmir, why would they want to catch Osama or Mullah Omar?
Instead today we thank our lucky stars that Ron Paul isn’t president.
Cite please.
Riiiiiiiiigggghhhhhhht.
This trope gets repeated again and again and yet AGAIN without an ounce of proof. First, most of the people the US assisted 25 years ago are part of the coalition government in Kabul. The rest died, mostly fighting the Soviets and in the subsequent civil war. If you have any actual _names_ of Al'Qeda leaders who were "trained" by the USA, please post those with a description of the aid or training received, not Kossington bullshit.
Additionally, even if this factoid were actually true, so what? 25 years is a long time. Was the US responsible for the USSR crushing the '68 Invasion of Czechoslovokia because it had sent Lend Lease Aid to the USSR in 1942?
And the year 1942 is directly relevant to Paul's argument that the USA should withdraw from international affairs. How does one distinguish Paul's proposed policy from the one the US actually followed with disastrous results between 1918 and 1941? Why will the consequences a second time around be better in a world with nuclear weapons?
One obvious problem with foreign intervention is it requires picking sides. This tends to cause immediate enemies among the other side. Surely we don't have to get involved if Bhutto's killer, like Lee Harvey Oswald, was a lone gunman. To the extent that is not true, we are talking about picking sides among factions, each commanding the loyalty of a fraction of the citizenry. But we don't really need to do any of that. The argument is NOT that if we don't intervene nothing bad will happen. The argument is that unless vital interests are at stake the relative harm of intervening is greater than the relative benefits. We lived with the Chinese and Soviets having nucs for many decades. The Arabs have lived with Israel having nucs for several decades.
If Americans could have foreseen the current situation in Iraq four [or sixteen] years ago, we clearly wouldn't have intervened. Yet things were not ideal for us at those times. Saddam was obviously a bad guy. He no longer represented our interests. Yet in retrospect, it's not clear we did the Iraqis any favors, and we certainly haven't helped our own cause. The world always has tyrants and those who don't share our interests. But the costs of controlling them, or replacing them, are somewhat greater than getting a better roll of the dice on a Risk board.
So with due respect I disagree with GV and Malvolio. Of course, per GV, diplomacy is always in order, but not to "keep Pakistan together", merely to assure that whoever comes to power knows that the US isn't going to intervene and is willing to be a trading partner with its people.
Tell me: If it turned out there was evidence that LBJ had played some role in the assassination of JFK, would the situation have been improved by a foreign government invading the US to preserve order?
That last insight should be released from the parentheses that shackle it. IMHO.
Do you think the instability in Pakistan, given their nuclear arsenal, is more dangerous to us that the instability of the USSR, leading to its disintegration, given THEIR nuclear arsenal? Yet we managed to suffer through that that fairly well. Threats can always be painted to loom large.
A non-interventionalist foreign policy, like Churchill's comment about democracy, is the worst foreign policy except for all the others...
Intervening could have "widely felt effects". See Iraq.
1) a friend of the U.S., and
2) the only barrier between a dictatorship of the mullahs, and Pakistan's large nuclear arsenal.
Anyone can do the math. This is very bad for the U.S. - and the world.
Gaius Marius:These days, every weather event is [according to some deluded folks] traceable to global warming. And every political event is, of course, entirely the fault of the Great Satan - no matter how much of a stretch.
At least try to wait for a few facts to come in, before blaming America for everything.
'K? Thx Bye
Depends on how you define "jihadist" but I think the well-received books by Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright bear out the broader point. Of course, the problem may not have been so much the intervention itself, as it was our losing all interest in and support for Afghanistan after the Soviets left.
Let us all hope that our own crop of candidates remains safe from this kind of violence.
We've also forsaken that four letter word of multilateralism. The UN is FUBAR for sure, but the idea that we should go it alone in this or any other foreign policy engagement seriously limits our options.
And speaking of options, the physical capability of the United States armed forces is thinning. Again, even if full military engagement in Pakistan were the correct option, we couldn't exercise it.
At the end of the day, as much as the brinksmanship of the Cold War, the Powell strategy of Gulf I, or Clinton's UN-based interventionism, at least they spelled out a coherent theory for United States engagement. Right now, we don't know what we believe.
"Nihilists...F*** me. Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, but at least its an ethos."
Smokey, global warming is science fiction so your analogous reference to global warming is nonsense. BTW, I like how you accuse me of "blaming America for everything" when I merely make an observation about a well known historical fact that apparently you are ignorant of.
Who is capable? (not that I disagree, BTW)
Very sad day.
Oh, you had to go and use that word.
The problem is exacerbated by a dramatic drop-off in U.S. expertise on Pakistan. Retired American officials say that, for the first time in U.S. history, nobody with serious Pakistan experience is working in the South Asia bureau of the State Department, on State's policy planning staff, on the National Security Council staff or even in Vice President Cheney's office. Anne W. Patterson, the new U.S. ambassador to Islamabad, is an expert on Latin American "drugs and thugs"; Richard A. Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a former department spokesman who served three tours in Hong Kong and China but never was posted in South Asia. "They know nothing of Pakistan," a former senior U.S. diplomat said.
Current and past U.S. officials tell me that Pakistan policy is essentially being run from Cheney's office. The vice president, they say, is close to Musharraf and refuses to brook any U.S. criticism of him. This all fits; in recent months, I'm told, Pakistani opposition politicians visiting Washington have been ushered in to meet Cheney's aides, rather than taken to the State Department.
Right. You wouldn't want a bunch of pointy headed Pakistan experts interfering with Dick Cheney's hallucinations.
The single greatest argument for not allowing the Republicans to run the executive branch is Dick Cheney. There's just no way in hell any Democrat could screw things up as much as that man has.
n/t digby
America's Bad Deal With Musharraf, Going Down in Flames
By Ahmed Rashid
Sunday, June 17, 2007; Page B01
I did a search for Operation Cyclone:
Wiki
This statement is patently untrue. Around 11 million civilians were directly murdered by the Nazis either in death camps or through ad hoc executions. At least another 5--6 million more were killed indirectly through privations and war in eastern Europe. Even the most hard core Soviet haters don't pin more than 30 million on the USSR, and this number is probably off by a factor of two (if only because of the numbers of men the Soviet Union was able to muster for WWII demonstrate that the purported deaths in the 30's were overstated). And remember the Nazis managed to kill the vast majority of their victims in the space of just a little more than three years (late '41 to early '45).
Regardless, if we had let the Nazis beat the Soviet Union (a questionable proposition at best), they would have had the opportunity to kill tens of millions more people and certainly would have done so. You seem to think that we would have been willing to kill tens of millions of civilians of Germany using nuclear weapons.
You need to keep a little fact in mind: not all brown people are the same.
I tend to get very repetitive on this, but Arabs and Persians are linguistically, culturally, ethnically, and racially different. The only common bond is that the Arabs successfully spread (by the sword) Islam to most of the Persians (this bond gives rise to all sorts of other commonalities like hating America and the Jews, but that another story). The inability to recognize this distinction is what gave rise to the "CIA - Bin Laden" myth.
In reality, there were two distinct resistance movements against the Soviets. We backed the native persian/afghan resistance movement, not the foreign/arab jihadi resistance (the Bin Laden part). Richard Miniter explained it
here.
The Taliban is the result of the arab jihadi movement gaining control. The afghan group then became the "Northern Alliance," and continued to resist the Taliban as they had the Soviets. The arab-Taliban and persian-afghan movements have always been enemies, and although we funded the persian-afghans, we did not fund Bin Laden's arab jihadi thugs. This, of course, is why Bin Laden had the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance assassinated on September 9, 2001 - to cripple our ally in advance of the inevitable post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan.
Just try calling a Persian person an "Arab." You will learn very quickly not to confuse the two.
Whether or not the CIA funded OBL in particular is unimportant. The important point is that in their zeal to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, the CIA did fund fundamentalist Islamic extremists which led inexorably to the rise of the Taliban and their support of Al Qaeda. We didn't care who we funded as long as they were killing commies. 20 years later it has come back to bite us in the ass.
Now we support Musharraff because he claims he is tough on terrorists and if we don't the Islamic fundamentalists will take over. Of course the reason the fundamentalists will take over (just like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) is that he has exiled or eliminated all the moderate opposition. It is like the man who kills his parents and then begs for the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.
However, while the GWOT is funneling them Scrooge-McDuck-style mountains of cash, which they can then use to threaten India and foment trouble in Kashmir...
If you were actually paying attention then you would know that Indian-Pakistani relations have improved markedly in the last couple of years, specifically because both countries feel threatened by Islamic militants. Things are a lot different than they were during the Kashmiri crisis of 1999.
to the comments: oy veh squared (i'm too luddite to know how you summon the proper character).
Oh, really? Not paying attention, eh?
December 23, 2007:
In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.
As for Kashmir, if you think Pakistan's given up on that, then you'll believe anything. Public opinion - not to mention the army - won't tolerate such a thing.
Oh, and that Kashmir link is dated Dec. 24, 2007, not June 2006. Way to "pay attention."
My computer doesn't have an "oy veh" character anywhere. Damn Gentile techies!
There is no evidence that the CIA had direct contact with Bin Laden in the 1980s, and the CIA has given sworn testimony before Congress that no such contacts exist. So there’s no evidence that the United State gave direct support to Bin Laden. But the United States was funneling huge amounts of cash and weapons into the region in the 1980s and almost none of it was tracked, so it’s highly likely that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda received at least some of it, in some fashion. And as detailed in Ghost Wars, the mishandling of Afghanistan by Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton helped lead us to the world we live in today.
This is a generally accurate statement. A few statements of note:
"Looking back in 1998, Brzezinski certainly did not display any regret over the initiation of the covert war: 'What was more important in the world view of history? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?'"
and:
"Zbignew Brzezinski saw the Afghan invasion as an opportunity, in his words, 'to finally sow shit in their backyard'
Hartman, Andrew. “’The Red Template’: US Policy in Soviet-Occupied Afghanistan.” Third World Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 3 (Jun., 2002): 467-489.
I'm not saying that what the United States did was wrong in supplying arms to the ISI (a requirement of Pakistan) - who provided said arms to the Gruh-e-Haftganah (Pushtun: “Group of Seven”) and in turn to the front-line mujahidin. The US made a choice that at the time, the Soviet threat was the most important threat, and the US was willing to do what it took to counter that threat. That does not mean that there were not side-affects of that decision.
I'm not saying things are all sweetness and light between Pakistan and India, I'm just saying relations are about the best that they have ever been since the 1948 partition.
Should we go even further back to the times of the British Empire and the results of WWI ? Or even further down History lne?
The thing is, none of the politicians ever think like a chess masters for the years ahead and the consequences of their actions in the future.
Some of our grandchildren certainly will be the beneficiaries (not) of the policies of the idiotic neocon rule of today....
I don't believe so. The side-effects, or what some may call unintended (and some might say known) consequences were considered by the United States and the possible benefits were deemed worth the risk by US policymakers.
What is the real problem initially (to me) was the influx of refugees once the Soviets invaded resulted in a large population of disaffected young males who had lost bonds to families, tribes and clans. A perfect group that the madrasas could appeal to and provide food, clothing, medical care - and education featuring a very specific brand of Islam. These madrasas were schools that Zia Al-Haq supported, in addition to secular educational venues.
The problem of angry young males in Pakistan (and near areas ) that subscribe to a a certain notion of Islam will take 40-80 years to correct. Bhutto was a moderate Muslim who made statements that she was willing to take confront the more radical elements of Islam in her country and she gave her life for what she believed was the best course of action. The problems within Pakistan started long before neocons were "in power", so to speak.
It was never an either-or situation. There is a belief that the militant Islamist movement started during the insurgency in Afghanistan. That is simply not the case as there was an active and growing militant Islamist movement before then. (For example, the Grand Mosque in Mecca seizure occured one month before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.)
Can I have a mindless surrealist chopstick in a Midwest bridge game?
Sorry, but this is my bread and butter.
I suspect something you tried to link to didn't work out.
Uh oh." Orin, after seeing the assassination covered several times on the TV news, that's the best commentary I have seen yet.
Indeed! Maybe we can get Jonathan Adler to represent them (esp. if they've been waterboarded).
This neglects the likelihood that, if the U.S. had not intervened in WWI, the war likely would have ended in stalemate, rather than the punishing Treaty of Versailles.
But the huge difference between now and 1941 is that the Al Qaeda does not control even a single country...let alone a country like Germany of WWII.
It is freaking strange that argument, seems made by leftists with Cold War stuck...
So many points in front of that...
-So when USA desinvested from Afeghanistan doesnt matter?
-When USA defended and restored sovereign Koweit while staying in Saudi land that pissed off Bin laden doesnt matter?
-When Al Qaeda was formed in 90's doesnt matter?
-When USA started making drug deals with Taliban and didnt supported Northern Alliance didnt matter? (How about that Ron Paul supporters? is isolationism always good?)
-When Al Qaeda started to threaten USA and nothing relevant happened because well end of Cold War is The End of History(Fuky meaned it differently but almost everyone took it wrong) etc etc...
-First attacks against USA interests and 93 WTC bombing with overall incompetence of American Government and of course a jazzy President that didnt wanted to bother much with anything meaningful. Didnt matter?
-Wahhabism and the Saudi Arabia money..didnt matter?
-The rising of Islam in Arab lands since the failure of National-Socialist Governments, didnt matter? Sadat was killed in 80's...
- State of Islam itself at begin of XXI century...
I'm not sure why this makes you think he is sincere? Isn't it much more reasonable to attribute this difference to the fact that he's a professional preacher, and has long experience in handling the giving of condolences? [As they say in politics and preaching, when you can fake sincerity, you've got it made...]
I think you have it exactly right. If you ignore the positions Huckabee espouses and simply observe his mannerisms and presentation, he comes across (to me at least) as sincere, thoughtful, concerned -- just the kind of decent human being that you want as your leader. He is head and shoulders above the rest of the field (in both parties) in that regard. (And he's got Chuck Norris as his enforcer, too.) Obama taps into a similar vein, I suppose, on the other side, but not as smoothly. Then, of course, I look at where he wants to lead the country and gag.
That person should have a conversation with Andrew McCarthy (not normally considered a moonbat), who said this:
And yesterday McCarthy said this:
It's heartwarming, the way our fundamentalists helped their fundamentalists.
But in the spirit of balance, knowing it would be wrong to only support religious thugs, we also supported secular thugs, like Saddam. Reagan and Rummy helped Saddam with useful goodies like cluster bombs, anthrax, bubonic plague and deadly pesticides, right at the moment that Saddam was gassing Kurds.
But it's OK, because we've learned our lesson, and we know that the people we're arming now (Maliki, Sunni tribes, and Pakistan) would surely never turn against us someday.
First, Andrew McCarthy does not say that the US funded Bin Laden. Instead, the U.S. funded fundamentalists that also worked with Bin Laden. Basically, he thinks we helped create Al Qaeda of this funding. (I doubt it, see below.)
Second, as I posted above, there was an active and growing militant Islamist movement long before the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan began. As I mentioned, a group of militant Saudi Islamists siezed the Grand Mosque of Mecca by force a month before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.* Blaming the existance of militant Islamists on the United States is foolish.
More generally, I have an observation.
Consider two types of people: (i) one type believes that virtually all good in the world was caused and supported by the United States (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) and (ii) the other type believes that virtually evil in the world was caused and supported by the United States (e.g., Noam Chomsky). While both positions are equally naive, the latter is given substantially more credibility in current culture.
Yeah right, which is why Noam Chomsky dominates talk radio and his acolytes have blocks of time on Fox News to spread their message and their books are at the top of the best seller lists. O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, etc. are silenced by the MSM while Chomsky is all over the airwaves.
You are right. When I said culture, I meant intellectual or educated culture. I should have added that qualification. However, my point still holds.
In my opinion, you're splitting hairs. No, I can't show you a personal check, signed personally by Reagan, with OBL's endorsement on the back, indicating that he cashed it personally. The money passed through some other hands, on its way from point A to point B. That's how this sort of thing is done. It amounts to the same thing.
By the way, it's quite interesting to notice how the logic gets twisted in the other direction, when the shoe is on the other foot. Because there's a rumor that someone who might work for Bin Laden might have talked to someone who might have talked to someone who might have talked to someone who might have talked to someone who might work for Saddam, this is taken as proof that OBL and Saddam are Siamese twins.
Likewise for the 'proof' that was used to suggest that Saddam was in Niger personally packing his pockets with yellowcake.
Stunningly selective skepticism is one of the great hallmarks of the modern GOP.
"Blaming the existance of militant Islamists on the United States is foolish"
Nice job with the straw man. The claim is not that they didn't exist until we helped them. The claim is that we helped them. And we did, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And we're still doing very much the same sort of thing, by arming folks who are very likely our future enemies.
"Consider two types of people"
Consider two types of people: those who make factual claims relevant to the topic, and those who make sweeping platitudinal generalizations that are essentially worthless.
"I meant intellectual or educated culture"
If you're trying to say that folks with brains realize that Chomsky makes more sense than Limbaugh, then I won't disagree with you.
Of course the AEI, Cato, National Review, Foreign Policy Magazine, Brookings, et. al. are hotbeds of Chomsky acolytes.
Give it up.
Foreign Policy and Brookings believe that the US is responsible for almost all the good in the world?? I doubt that even Cato and the other conservative magazines you mention believe that.
They may not be blindly "America can do no wrong" as Limbaugh but they are hardly Noam Chomsky blame America Firsters either. Foreign Policy I would place in the traditional pragmatic Republican realist (pre-neocon) camp, and Brookings is Centrist (I would say truly non-Partisan).
Then why did you cite Limbaugh as an example?
Nice job pretending to not notice what was actually said: that the views of Chomsky are given "substantially more credibility in current … intellectual or educated culture."
I'm not aware of FP and Brookings saying anything nice about Chomsky.
And what do FP and Brookings have to say about Limbaugh?
Nice job of distorting what I said.
And nice job at being rude, too.
I think you're still evading what was actually said, which in my opinion is a form of rudeness. And I think the "distorting" is all yours.
Why would FP and Brookings have anything to say about Limbaugh? He contributes absolutely nothing to the serious discussion of foreign policy in this country.
OK, fair enough. I apologize. Given that you have no prior track record in this thread indicating bad faith, I should have given you the benefit of the doubt. My mistake.
J.F. Thomas, I wouldn't even have brought this up, but since Jukeboxgrad said
"I'm not aware of FP and Brookings saying anything nice about Chomsky," I thought it worth mentioning that they haven't said anything about Limbaugh either. Personally, I think Limbaugh and Chomsky are both worthless, and I don't agree with Jukeboxgrad that Chomsky makes more sense than Limbaugh, though he is obviously more intelligent.
Thoughtful said (yesterday):
I strongly disagree. We would probably have removed Saddam in the first Gulf War and, if not, would have waged this one far differently. But we would still have done it.
And the US probably would, and should, have taken the same actions in funding the mujahedeen in Aghanistan in the 1980s. And in funding the USSR in WW2.
You have to fight the war you're fighting, and not look forward to possible or even likely consequences of your actions.
Our mistake in Afghanistan was in dropping our involvement after the Soviets left. Not sure it would have done any good, but it might, and we should have stayed involved, at least to try to police up the Stingers.
Did she have a right to do it? Sure. Should she be able to do so? Sure. Is it stupid? Sure. I don't blame her for her death, but I do lay the responsibility for poviding a golden opportunity at her feet. I have to wonder how many other armed assasins were in the crowd, but just didn't have the opportunity to strike because she didn't give it to them.
Does anybody know the fate of the other people who were inside her armored car, and not hanging out the moonroof?
"I think you have it exactly right. If you ignore the positions Huckabee espouses and simply observe his mannerisms and presentation, he comes across (to me at least) as sincere, thoughtful, concerned -- just the kind of decent human being that you want as your leader. He is head and shoulders above the rest of the field (in both parties) in that regard. (And he's got Chuck Norris as his enforcer, too.) Obama taps into a similar vein, I suppose, on the other side, but not as smoothly. Then, of course, I look at where he wants to lead the country and gag."
I note, Porkchop, that your last sentence is ambiguous, making it unclear whether the "he" in "where he wants to lead the country" that makes you gag, is Huckabee or Obama.
Because I try to be generous in interpretation of ambiguous statements, I'm going to assume you were referring to both. Is that right?
Well, I agree with your 3:40 post, anyway.
[And Gaius Marius -- I am overly sensitive to the constant America-bashing by others. On re-reading your post, I was wrong. My apologies].
Today on the radio, so far, I've heard from Rudy Guiliani that "we" (that is, the US government) has to hunt down the masterminds behind the attack. This is being taken as a reasonable statement. An "expert" on FOX News last night said the Pakistani President should immediately ask for the CIA and FBI experts to come and investigate the crime scene, since everyone apparently knows the US government runs a world-wide CSI service. There is some talk of sending in US military to "keep things calm" (since we do such good work in that respect in Iraq, I guess). And Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden (yes, he's still running...) reminisced on POTUS 08 (on XM radio) that Bush had dealings with Musharraf prior to Bhutto's return from exile concerning her safety, and that Bhutto had called Biden (on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) recently saying Musharraf wasn't living up to his side of the deal and she feared for her life.
So it seems it's the responsibility of the US government to arrange deals between various factions in Pakistan, and simply shocking that we can't somehow enforce them.
Again, it seems clear that Paul's foreign policy recommendations of "don't get involved in the first place" are, in retrospect, NOT the crazy ones. The crazy view is that the US government CAN pull this sort of thing off, and that it HAS to if it wants to remain safe. The CRAZY policy is foreign interventionism, especially when wielded by a man with a messianic belief that he can through force of will (backed by force of US military) *install* worldwide "democracy".
Well, I agree with that. Bin Laden has been improperly linked to both Iraq and the United States - usually by different sets of people.
You are likely right. However, as mentioned by someone else, we were allied with the USSR during WWII. We sometimes have to live in the world in which we find ourselves. The question is not whether our current "allies" will eventually turn on us. Instead, the key question is whether we are better off making certain alliances versus not making those alliances.
No, what I am saying that Chomsky's tendency to blame everything bad in the world on the U.S. is just as naive as Limbaugh's "America is the greatest force for good on Earth." The two approaches are opposite sides of the same coin.
Also, people with "brains" can be just as naive as the unwashed masses.
J.F. said:
I certainly wasn't citing Limbaugh as intellectual or educated culture. Instead, I was pointing out that people with naive ultra-patriotic attitudes (such as Limbaugh's) are widely derided in intellectual or educated culture. However, from my experience, people who have the opposite "blame-America-first" attitude (such as Chomsky) enjoy a fair amount of credibility in intellectual or educated culture.
In response to another poster saying, "After all, the Soviet Union exterminated tens of millions of more people than Hitler could have ever dreamed of in his wet dreams. (We could have nuked Hitler into oblivian and Nazi Germany into submission without the Soviet Union.) "
JFThomas comes to Stalin's defense, noting: This statement is patently untrue. Around 11 million civilians were directly murdered by the Nazis either in death camps or through ad hoc executions. At least another 5--6 million more were killed indirectly through privations and war in eastern Europe. Even the most hard core Soviet haters don't pin more than 30 million on the USSR, and this number is probably off by a factor of two
My thanks to Mr. Thomas for correcting the historical record. Stalin, it seems, did NOT kill "tens of millions" of more people than Hitler (to say nothing of the presumed larger amount in Hitler's wet dreams). Stalin only killed perhaps 88-200% more people than Hitler. Even at the high range, this would be less than 20 million more people, so "tens of millions" was clearly overwrought and borders on a libelous statement about Stalin, clearly made with reckless disregard.
I have not recently reviewed the numbers in The Black Book of Communism Harvard University Press (October 15, 1999) 912 pages
ISBN-10: 0674076087, though Thomas's numbers re Stalin seem low. Nonetheless, I respond not to debate JF, but to thank him for so quickly leaping to the defense of Stalin. So few do these days, you know...
Nice... you just came up as a complete ignorant . Since 1984 USA was the first country to have dual use limits - which didnt worked very well since many dual use equipment was outside scope like high speed cameras, computers etc...- in exports for Saddam's Iraq following UN verification of Iran accusations. Other countries followed shortly.
Worse you dont even know what you are talking about since antrax, bubonic plague and deadly pesticides(thanks for the redundancy...do you know what "pesticides" means?) must be weaponised even if it was true which was not that Reagan and Runmmy?!(why Rummy he was a nobody... photo ops means too much for you...) would send them in packages.
The Iraq chemical warfare program was West European based since at least 11 Iraq chemical factories in Iraq were from European firms: Germany, Italy,France, Belgium or Netherland( cant remember) and most of know-how came from that cooperation. No chemical factory was from a USA firm. The most important country for WMD chemical program was West Germany. Now the Bubonic plague and antrax are not chemical weapons they if weaponised can be biological weapons fortunately Saddam was not successful in that but for you is convinent to lie with your full mouth. For that Saddam bought everywhere from science labs all over the world including in Pasteur Center in France, Asia, USA, they sent doctors agents to medical congress etc.
Third the military supporters of Saddam were Soviet Union (that also sold weapons to Iran),with over 50% of imports, France, China, Brazil, West Germany, Warsaw Pact countries. USA came with less than 1% and much less if we count logistic supplies, training systems, minor weapons etc.
You're right, and I don't want to sound immoderate. I am willing to have our troops sent half way into war zones and then turned around and brought back. Granted, a tad more expensive than a non-interventionalist policy per se, but only marginally more dangerous...
More seriously, Montie, I suspect your statement assumes an equivalency between non-intervention and pacificism. Non-interventionalists are willing to go to war WHEN VITAL NATIONAL INTERESTS are at stake. Granted, politicians itching for war (shocking thought? read Machiavelli, or Shakespeare) are always willing to CLAIM this, but they are frequently mendacious, so perhaps the real difference between non-interventionalists and others is that we're less easily spooked, more modest in our aims, comfortable recognizing we cannot control all world events, and MUCH LESS WILLING to take the claims of our government at face value (much like conservatives and libertarians act when talking about domestic issues).
The evidence indicating that the CIA helped create AQ is a lot stronger than the evidence indicating that OBL was in bed with Saddam.
"We sometimes have to live in the world in which we find ourselves."
Now you tell us. For some strange reason I can remember that not very long ago I heard something very different:
It's entertaining to notice how the idea of 'nuance' goes in and out of style, depending on which way the wind is blowing.
I think you're implying that we required Saddam to prove that he was using the anthrax peacefully. Really?
"deadly pesticides(thanks for the redundancy...do you know what 'pesticides' means?)"
Pesticides are usually designed to target insects. They are not all highly toxic to humans. What Reagan sold Saddam was, and there was reason to believe that Saddam was using the pesticides for chemical warfare against humans, not insects. That's the point of the adjective.
Maybe you didn't read the article I cited. Right now I notice a problem with the original WP link, but the same text is here.
"why Rummy he was a nobody"
He was appointed special envoy to the Middle East, and he met with Saddam. If that's your idea of "a nobody," then you're obviously entitled to your opinion.
"must be weaponised even if it was true which was not that Reagan and Runmmy … would send them in packages"
Please try English next time. It's hard to tell what you're trying to say. If you're trying to say that we didn't send them what I said we sent them, you're wrong. It's a documented fact. Look at the article I cited.
"The Iraq chemical warfare program was West European based"
Yes, he got help elsewhere, too. That doesn't change the fact of the help he got from us.
"fortunately Saddam was not successful in that"
I didn't make a statement regarding whether or not Saddam was successful in weaponizing what we sent him. I indicated what we sent him.
"for you is convinent to lie with your full mouth"
Here's an idea: indicate what I said that was a lie. And show proof that it's a lie.
"USA came with less than 1%"
If you can prove that statement, that would be helpful.
Non-interventionists got their way in the 20s and 30s. The result was a World War that killed 50 million people, and almost collapsed the entire Eastern Hemisphere into barbarism. Then Pearl Harbor, which forced the USA to fight anyway.
We now live in a world with nuclear weapons. If the same kind of geopolitical collapse takes place now that took place in the 30s, the entire globe will descend into barbarism AT BEST. At worst, the human race will experience a massive die-off, and be knocked back into the early iron age.
If you have a substitute for US leadership at trying to tamp down trouble spots, plenty of us are all ears. But if you're seriously claiming that the USA will get along just swell if we mind our own business, then explain why that idea failed for the sailors who perished on the USS Arizona, and how this time it will be different.
You're skeptical about the government's claims? Well so am I. But September 11, 2001, and a series of prior atrocities directed at US interests, make it kind of hard to claim the government is exaggerating the threat posed by Islamic terrorism. These people are actually flakier than the European fascists of the 30s, and unlike the Nazis, they have a realistic chance of obtaining and using nuclear weapons. You think the US government is overinvolved in world affairs now? Just wait until Long Beach, Rotterdam or London disappear under a pillar of radioactive fire. Present-day deployments in Iraq will look like a Boy Scout jamboree.
For gods sake. Weaponised antrax is a biological weapon Antrax is not, he was not successful in weaponising any biological weapon, research in sequence of 1991 War established that, like it established that the path to a nuclear weapon was much more advanced than tought by IAEA . Antrax bacteria is endemic in Middle East. Iraq is full of Antrax bacteria naturally and the disease it provoques mostly in farm animals and Iraq Scientists went around was shopping for other stirpes. Now that can be made to make vaccines and treatment or to perfect a biological weapon. At time when that happened no one was aware of possible implications and it wasnt a Government deal.
"He was appointed special envoy to the Middle East, and he met with Saddam. If that's your idea of "a nobody," then you're obviously entitled to your opinion."
He was the envoy to start diplomatic relation between USA and Iraq and to have a contacts about war against Iran.
He was nobody in Departament of Commerce that wanted to sell almost everything to everybody and the Pentagon that wanted to restrict every export to Iraq that could be used as a weapon or transfer technology to Soviets.
"Here's an idea: indicate what I said that was a lie. And show proof that it's a lie."
Your post. You picture USA as a big supporter of Saddam and it was not. Without USA, Saddam had no big problem. With USA support only, Saddam couldnt even defend against his own people. The fact that Rumsfeld meet with Saddam doesnt means necessarely anything, there were many USA envoys that meet with Arafat. The picture only showed up because Iraq 2003 and as was very effective political tool. Information not much.
"If you can prove that statement, that would be helpful"
Go to Jane's or any weapon encyclopedia of 80's.
In short:
Airforce: Soviet,France,Chinese aircrafts; Soviet,France, German and USA helicopters.
Army: Soviet,French,Brazil,China weapons
Navy(not much relevant):Soviet; bought modern Italian Ships but they never arrived.
For that thousand of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, hundreds of aircrafts, helicopters the major USA export was around 80 transport helicopters. Im not entering in all logistical tail that all that equipment and support like radars, c3i systems etc.
If you can dispute that...
The USA helicopters were transport helicopters without weapons. Bell and Hughes and it made lots of trouble and investigations because they could be used has a weapon when there was an embargo and it went to judicial system.
I dont remember what happened.
As far as is known no one sold chemical weapons to Saddam, there was technology cooperation between European firms and Military research institutes of Iraq with Iraq scientists. The weaponisation was made in Iraq. And they shopped around for any civilian equipment that could help them.
The best- i call it less worse since it only focuses in West and have the bias that the best information exists only in more opened Governs of the West is
As a testimony of the complete ignorance of military matters the plane in the cover is a Soviet Mig-29, at least they could have put a Mirage...
I rate that WP article is a good show of some facts mixed with lies(falsely linking the Governement to some dual use exports that were free for all or were made by intermiediaries in Europe), scare information(anthrax,plague) and innuendo to show a complete diferent dimension of what happened. I dont understand how can anyone talk about Antrax and Bubonic plague and at same time say that Government talk about Saddam chemical weapons was a scare tactic. The chances of Saddam having a biological weapon were much less than a chemical weapon.
http://www.amazon.com /DEATH-LOBBY-CL-Kenneth-Timmerman/dp/0395593050.
Lets see if the link works now. I have put a space between .com / since the link button doesnt appear to work and the system dont accepts more than 60 char.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a thread running through right wing and libertarian blogs recently that Hitler wasn't so bad and certainly was better than Stalin. So yes, I have been forced to point out that Hitler and the Nazis were very, very bad people and that to compare raw numbers of dead is deceptive. First of all, the USSR existed for 75 years while the 3rd Reich lasted barely 12. Most of the Nazis mass murder occurred over a period of just over 3 years while the worst of the Gulag system and deprivations in the Soviet Union spanned about forty years (from the time of the revolution until the mid-1950's when conditions improved somewhat). Also, to get the high numbers of deaths under the Communists, authors include deaths from engineered famines or famines that resulted from poor planning or natural causes where the government just decided to punish the victims of the famine by withholding relief, overwork and maltreatment in the Gulags, and even deaths in the Civil War, or other causes that were not direct execution.
The 11 million victims of the Nazis I cited were planned, direct executions. At least 20 million (probably closer to 25 million) Soviet Citizens died in WWII, of which 10--12 million were military deaths. Poland lost about a fifth of its population in the war. Of the 3 million or so Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, only about 600,000 survived the war (Soviet POWs were the first victims of the gas chambers at Auschwitz).
For you to claim that the world would have been better off letting the Germans destroy the Soviet Union and then have us destroy Germany through the use of nuclear weapons, besides making no strategic sense (Germany until the very end of the war had effective anti-aircraft defenses--if they had oil, trying to use nuclear weapons on them would have been very problematic), is despicable considering what the Nazis were capable of.
Well, yes and no. :-) I apologize for the ambiguity. I wrote the last sentence first, and then inserted the reference to Obama as an afterthought. My initial intention was to refer only to Huckabee.
I don't "gag" (yet) at "where [Obama] wants to take the country," because I have yet to figure out where that is -- other than understanding that it is a place where everyone will be nice to each other and we will all be happy and healthy (Lake Woebegone, maybe? Big Rock Candy Mountain?). Putting Obama in the driver's seat would violate my firmly held belief that one should never get in a car with strangers while wearing a blindfold. It's just highly unlikely to lead to a good result, even if the driver seems to be a really nice guy.
Would anyone object if the rest of the world has detailed plans for capturing and removing the US stocks of nukes, since they have noticed we are prone to aggression? Under what circumstances would it be OK to do so? (Of course, this assumes it is possible.)
If you can explain why anyone (in or out of the US) should logically view unprovoked oil-seeking aggression as a form of "leadership," then plenty of us are all ears.
"make it kind of hard to claim the government is exaggerating the threat posed by Islamic terrorism"
The fact that Bush is managing the war in such a way as to require no sacrifice from 99% of the population (he's essentially said that what the rest of us should do to help is go shopping) makes it kind of hard to claim the government is not exaggerating the threat posed by Islamic terrorism.
The constant comparisons to WWII would be marginally less ridiculous if our leaders were demanding universal sacrifice, as our leaders did in WWII. But of course that would bring the whole enterprise to a screeching halt.
"unlike the Nazis, they have a realistic chance of obtaining and using nuclear weapons"
Unlike the Nazis, who were in control of a very large, sophisticated industrial power, you are now wetting your bed in response to a bunch of wackos in a cave who are in control of almost nothing. And who seem to have a problem hanging on to popular support. For some reason I'm hearing lots of messages that sound like this:
And this:
You folks should pick one story and stick with it.
"Just wait until Long Beach, Rotterdam or London disappear under a pillar of radioactive fire."
A much more likely outcome is that our kids end up speaking Chinese and Arabic because we've mortgaged their future to foreign bankers. We spend more on military than the rest of the world combined. And we're not using our own money to do it. We are now in the process of selling off large chunks of the US financial infrastructure. The USSR self-destructed as a result of military overspending. We're headed down the same road.
Please continue to ignore plain facts:
"Iraq is full of Antrax bacteria naturally and the disease it provoques mostly in farm animals"
Now you tell us. I don't recall hearing from you when Bush et al were running around yelling 'anthrax' to scare us.
"Your post."
I asked you to specifically indicate where I told a lie. Your answer isn't an answer; it's an evasion. You've accused me and WP of lying, but you're short on specifics. This is a pretty good clue that you're a waste of time.
"Go to Jane's"
You cited a specific number (1%). I asked you to prove it. "Go to Jane's" is not an answer; it's another evasion.
Is English not your first language? Obviously there's nothing wrong with that, but maybe you can get some help. Your stuff is just too much work to decode. On the other hand, I have a feeling your ideas would still make no sense, even if they were organized into actual sentences.
One more thing. If that's really what worries you, then presumably you're upset that we're pissing away a trillion dollars on a pointless war, while neglecting obvious needs in homeland security. Not to mention other needs that ultimately effect our security, like infrastructure, health and education.
It's been eye-opening to discover that the GOP is gung-ho for nation-building, as long as it's someone else's nation. And this makes sense; stealing billions is much easier when it's happening on the other side of the world, behind the fog of war. If those same contracts (to build all sorts of facilities, for example) were exercised inside the US, they would be much less 'profitable.'
See? It really is difficult to provide cogent argument without the benefit of hindsight.
I again congratulate JF Thomas, this time for his highly refined sense of moral nuance, and his ability, after much reflection, to detect the moral superiority of a man responsible for only perhaps 13 million deaths [Stalin] rather than the clearly condemnable figure of 15 million [Hitler]
I assume it is Mr. Thomas's extremely nuanced sense of morality, and his reflection on the relationship of ends and means, that allows him to so flippantly fabricate the claim that I believe "the world would have been better off letting the Germans destroy the Soviet Union and then have us destroy Germany through the use of nuclear weapons". This statement of my beliefs (which in Mr. Thomas' refined circles might be called a prevarication, though in the rough-and-tumble world in which I live is simply called a lie) was startling news to me, but, then, so is much of what Mr. Thomas posts.
Yeah, I'm a hysteric.
Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
Iran will have them within a few years.
Iran is currently run by extremists, who have been moving toward greater extremism as time goes on.
Pakistan _will_ fall under the control of "a bunch of wackos in a cave" if left to its own devices. Which is exactly what the Ron Paul thinks we ought to do because its none of our business.
Non-interventionists got their way in the 20s and 30s. The result was a World War that killed 50 million people, and almost collapsed the entire Eastern Hemisphere into barbarism. Then Pearl Harbor, which forced the USA to fight anyway.
I think there is general agreement that it was the punitive Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI that led to the rise of Hitler and WWII. As you know, it was the willingness of Wilson to break from the American tradition of non-interventionism that allowed for a dictated rather than negotiated peace at WWI's end.Thomas Fleming's book, "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I," discusses the matter in some detail.
One of the reasons Wilson was successful in pushing Americans into entering that war was our ignorance of the internecine secret treaties drawn up in the prior two decades between various democratic European nations, all hidden from their citizens, guaranteeing military alliances, that turned the assassination of a public figure in the summer of 1914 into a massive world conflagration less than a month later. Instead we were told it was a simple matter of good vs evil, the Kaiser vs western civilization. When the secret treaties came to light after WWI, the work of dedicated historians in many countries, including the USA, Americans were revulsed with war and a re-adherence, if only briefly, to non-interventionism ensued. This is the period in the 20s and 30s of which cgray speaks. But of course, it didn't repeal the treaty of Versailles, despite the cries of many war historians to try and do so.
And speaking of politicans lying to their people in order to get into war, FDR is a perfect example. Getting re-elected on a platform of non-intervention, it is well known today that he was simultaneously promising Churchill that the US would enter the war as soon as possible after the elections, as soon as he could come up with a good excuse. No historian denies this duplicity today, though historians that admire FDR claim he was right to lie to the American people, who had not as then yet developed the habits of today, blindly accepting everything they are told. Clearly, Lend Lease, the assistance American ships gave to British war vessels in hunting down German submarines, etc. are not the actions of a neutral country. Neither were the efforts by America's Pacific fleet to bar the flow of oil to Japan. So it's not as if we just were minding our own business, being good non-interventionalists, when Pearl Harbor happened out of the blue. Similarly, our interventions in the Middle East did not begin on September 12, 2001.
We now live in a world with nuclear weapons. If the same kind of geopolitical collapse takes place now that took place in the 30s, the entire globe will descend into barbarism AT BEST. At worst, the h