COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Monday, February 22, 2016

The Neocon Stranglehold on Washington DC


Ron Paul: Intervention Fail, Back To Libya – OpEd


Ron Paul. Photo by David Carlyon, Wikipedia Commons.
The use of the US military overseas seems to have become so commonplace that the Obama Administration can bomb a country with no Congressional input and very little media interest at all. Such was the case on Friday, when the US military killed some 49 people in a bombing run near Tripoli, Libya.
We had to bomb Libya, we are told, because Libya has become a hotbed of ISIS activity. The group has been moving training facilities into the country, taking advantage of the chaos. Ironically, it was five years ago this week that the “Arab Spring” uprising began in Libya — an uprising that was supported by US military force and led to the overthrow of the Libyan government and the murder of its leader, Gaddafi.
We were told that the US had to intervene to overthrow Gaddafi so that democracy and human rights could flourish, yet five years after the US-led intervention no one would argue that the country is better off. Instead of bringing Libya democracy, US intervention brought Libya ISIS. So now the US has to go back and bomb Libya some more to take care of ISIS.
Will this work? No. Logic tells us you cannot do more of what caused a problem and expect it to fix the problem.
As Middle East analyst Hillary Mann Leverett observed after Friday’s US attack on Libya, “the problem is, for each one of these targeted killings, what we have seen in the data that at least two more people sign up to join.”
The United States has made a habit of lecturing other countries about the need to follow the rule of law, yet this seems to be a matter of “do as we say, not as we do.” How else can we explain a US attack overseas with no Congressional input? Certainly there was no Congressional authorization for Friday’s bombing. The Administration claimed that its authority came from the 2001 authorization to use military force against al-Qaeda in retaliation for the attacks of 9/11. But ISIS did not even exist on 9/11. How can the 2001 authorization be twisted to include bombing Libya in 2016?
Libya has been in chaos since its 2011 “liberation,” but the country’s interim government strongly objected to Friday’s US bombing, claiming they were not consulted before the US attack. They called US air strikes a violation of Libya’s sovereignty and of international law.
They have a point. But the most important point we must learn from the destruction of Libya – and of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on – is that US interventionism has been a complete failure. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in the last 15 years, societies have been broken apart, economies have been destroyed, and property has been flattened. There are no success stories. The neocon plan to remake the Middle East has only succeeded in destroying the Middle East. As a consequence, we are far less safe than before the “war on terror” was launched. ISIS and other terrorist groups have expanded their territory and have even been able to attack in Europe and the US. Our currency has been debased to pay for the trillions of dollars spent in this no-win war. The connected elites have gotten rich while the middle class has gotten poorer.
Intervention has failed. It is time to stand up to the neocons and their liberal interventionist collaborators and say “no more!”
This article was published by RonPaul Institute.
-----------------------------

Were We Lied Into War?
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
by , February 19, 2016
Donald Trump threw down the gauntlet at the last GOP presidential debate with his declaration that the Bush administration lied us into war, and the reverberations are still roiling the political waters on both the right and the left. If his candidacy does nothing else, it will have performed a great service to the nation by re-litigating this vitally important issue and drawing attention to the outrageous lack of accountability by the elites who cheered as we turned the Middle East into a cauldron of death and destruction. Trump has ripped the bandage off the gaping and still suppurating wound of that ill-begotten war, and the howls of rage and pain are being heard on both sides of the political spectrum.
On the neoconservative right, Bill Kristol’s sputtering outrage is a bit too studied to be taken at face value: is he really shocked that no one is coming to the defense of himself and his fellow neocons, who elaborated (with footnotes) the very lies that led us down the primrose path to what the late Gen. William E. Odom called “the worst strategic disaster in our history”? 
Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine promoted every conceivable narrative pointing to Saddam Hussein as the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, no matter how fantastic and bereft of evidence. Here he is accusing the Iraqis of being behind the dissemination of anthrax through the mails. Here is his subsidized magazine denying that the forgedNiger uranium documents – the basis of George W. Bush’s claim in his 2003 State of the Union that Iraq was building a nuke – were an attempt to lie us into war. Here is neocon propagandist Stephen Hayes retailing a leaked “secret” memo to give credence to the debunked story of a meeting between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence.
Every single one of these tall tales has been so thoroughly disproved that it’s enough to recall them in order to embarrass the perpetrators beyond redemption. Kristol & Co. served as a clearing house for these outright fabrications, which were then utilized by the Bush administration to make the case for war. And yet we have Peter Suderman, a senior editor over at Reason magazine, deriding Trump’s calling out of George W. Bush and his neocon intelligence-fabricators as a “conspiracy theory” on a par with birtherism and the weirdo 9/11 “truth” cult:
“[H]e is flirting with a kind of 9/11 trutherism when he accuses the Bush administration of having knowingly lied in order to push the country into war in Iraq, as he did in Saturday’s GOP debate.
“Now, as Byron York wrote on Twitter yesterday, you can reasonably interpret that charge as a general nod toward the idea that the Bush administration hyped the war effort beyond what the actual evidence could support, that the case for the war was, well, trumped up and ultimately misleading, built on insufficient proof, overconfidence, and mistaken assumptions. But Trump’s attack also leaves room for more radical, less grounded conspiracies about Bush and the war as all, and I suspect this is not an accident. 
I would respectfully suggest that it is Suderman who needs “grounding” in the facts of this case. I would refer him to a project undertaken by our very own Scott Horton, whose radio program is essential listening for anyone who wants to be so educated: Scott has prepared a reading list on the occasion of the anniversary of the Iraq war, one that Suderman might want to make use of.
Of special interest is Seymour Hersh’s account of the Office of Special Plans, run by Abram Shulsky. This denizen of the murkier depths of the US intelligence community is a devotee of the philosopher Leo Strauss, who believed – as one scholar cited by Hersh put it – “that philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.” The OSP, set up in order to do an end run around the official intelligence community, specialized in retailing the tallest tales of Iraqi “defectors,” later proven to be self-serving fiction.
In another account of the administration’s tactics, Hersh describes how raw (and cherry-picked) “intelligence” marked “secret” was “funneled to newspapers, but subsequent C.I.A. and INR [State Department] analyses of the reports – invariably scathing but also classified – would remain secret.” Hersh points out that when the crude forgeries known as the Niger uranium papers – the basis for George W. Bush’s contention that Iraq was seeking uranium in “an African country – were exposed by the IAEA, Vice President Dick Cheney went on television and denounced the UN agency as being biased in favor of Iraq. Is this someone who was concerned with the truth?
Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in close quarters with this parallel intelligence operation, says "It wasn’t intelligence‚ – it was propaganda. They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together." Those who didn’t toe the neocon party line were purged, and replaced with compliant apparatchiks.
So was this simply ideological blindness, or outright lying? Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, writing in Mother Jones, cite neoconservative foreign policy expert Edward Luttwak, who “says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations’ criteria for war. ‘Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction,’ he says. ‘The ties to Al Qaeda? That’s complete nonsense.’”
Yet the American people didn’t know that at the time. The pronouncements of the Bush administration, and the War Party’s well-placed media network, led 70 percent of them to believe that the Iraqi despot was behind the worst terrorist attacks in American history – to the point that, even after this canard had been debunked (and denied by the White House) a large number of Americans still believed it. Not only that, but they believed the Iraqis had those storied “weapons of mass destruction,” and that the Bush administration was entirely justified in launching an invasion. 
This is what Max Fisher’s account of the Trump-generated imbroglio fails to take into account. Fisher, who analyzes foreign policy issues for the left-of-center Vox.com, writes:
“Trump’s 10-second history of the war articulated it as many Americans, who largely consider that war a mistake, now understand it. And, indeed, Bush did justify the war as a quest for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
“The other Republican candidates, who have had this fight with Trump before, did not defend the war as their party has in the past, but rather offered the party’s standard line of the moment, which is that Bush had been innocently misled by ‘faulty intelligence.’
“But neither version of history is really correct. The US primarily invaded Iraq not because of lies or because of bad intelligence, though both featured. In fact, it invaded because of an ideology.”
“…This is perhaps not as satisfying as the ‘Bush lied, people died’ bumper sticker history that has since taken hold on much of the left and elements of the Tea Party right. Nor is it as convenient as the Republican establishment’s polite fiction that Bush was misled by "faulty intelligence."
Fisher’s long account of how the neoconservatives agitated for war in the name of an “idealistic” ideology that sought to transform the Middle East into a “democratic” model is accurate as far as it goes. Yet the idea that the neocons were – or are – above fabricating evidence to make their case is naïve, at best. “If the problem were merely that Bush lied,” says Fisher, “then the solution would be straightforward: Check the administration’s facts. But how do you fact-check an ideology …?”
 What if the ideology justifies lying for a “noble” end? And of course the Bush administration’s facts were checked, both during and after the war (see above): what we can conclude from this fact-checking is that the policymakers 1) Started out with an agenda, 2) Suppressed all evidence that contradicted it, and 3) Made up “factoids” out of whole cloth, the most egregious being those contained in the Niger uranium forgeries and the outright lies disseminated by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress. 
We can see how the neoconservatives within the administration constructed a parallel intelligence-gathering apparatus, independent of – and usually in opposition to – the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community. We can further see how their intelligence product was “stovepiped” up to the highest echelons, and landed on the President’s desk unvetted and unconfirmed. All the safeguards against compromising the US intelligence stream were dismantled – to what purpose? Fisher doesn’t think to ask this vital question. Instead, he attributes it to “ideology”;
“It does not appear that the administration encouraged them to lie, but rather that deep-rooted biases led top officials to dismiss the mountains of intelligence that undercut their theories and to favor deeply problematic intelligence that supported it.
“… By all appearances, administration officials believed their allegations of Iraqi WMDs were true and that this was indeed sufficient justification. Why else would the US launch a desperate, high-profile search for WMDs after invading – which only ended up drawing more attention to how false those allegations had been?
“Rather, they had deceived themselves into seeing half-baked intelligence as affirming their desire for war, and then had sold this to the American people as their casus belli, when in fact it was secondary to their more high-minded and ideological mission that would have been too difficult to explain. That, more than overstating intelligence on WMDs, was the really egregious lie.”
But of course they had to launch a hunt for the WMD they knew weren’t there – after all, they had justified the war on this basis. And so what if they were never found? They got away with it, didn’t they? There was never any real investigation into the intelligence-gathering activities of the Office of Special Plans, or of efforts to suppress dissent within the mainstream intelligence agencies. This was scotched by the politicians, who never followed through with their “phase two” investigation of the murky circumstances surrounding the administration’s activities. 
By the time it was revealed that the war critics were right and that there weren’t any WMD in Iraq, the neocons’ goal had already been accomplished – the destruction of Iraq and the establishment of a permanent pretext for a US military presence in the region. Whatever consequences would follow the revelation of the deception – and deception it was – would be borne by the hapless George W. Bush, who was never the sharpest blade in the drawer to begin – and whom the neocons soon threw overboardas someone not willing or able to carry out their full agenda. 
The US intelligence stream had been contaminated for a purpose: some entity with an agenda that included getting us inextricably involved in the Middle East over the long term. But who?
Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the office that was to become the Office of Special Plans, is an eyewitness:
“In early winter, an incident occurred that was seared into my memory. A coworker and I were suddenly directed to go down to the Mall entrance to pick up some Israeli generals. Post-9/11 rules required one escort for every three visitors, and there were six or seven of them waiting. The Navy lieutenant commander and I hustled down. Before we could apologize for the delay, the leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary Feith’s office on the fourth floor. Two thoughts crossed our minds: are we following close enough to get credit for escorting them, and do they really know where they are going? We did get credit, and they did know. Once in Feith’s waiting room, the leader continued at speed to Feith’s closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door. ‘Mr. Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few more minutes.’ The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary’s head as he demanded, ‘Who is in there with him?’
This minor crisis of curiosity past, I noticed the security sign-in roster. Our habit, up until a few weeks before this incident, was not to sign in senior visitors like ambassadors. But about once a year, the security inspectors send out a warning letter that they were coming to inspect records. As a result, sign-in rosters were laid out, visible and used. I knew this because in the previous two weeks I watched this explanation being awkwardly presented to several North African ambassadors as they signed in for the first time and wondered why and why now. Given all this and seeing the sign-in roster, I asked the secretary, ‘Do you want these guys to sign in?’ She raised her hands, both palms toward me, and waved frantically as she shook her head. ‘No, no, no, it is not necessary, not at all.’ Her body language told me I had committed a faux pas for even asking the question. My fellow escort and I chatted on the way back to our office about how the generals knew where they were going (most foreign visitors to the five-sided asylum don’t) and how the generals didn’t have to sign in.”
Israeli generals walking in and out of Feith’s office was the least of it. Feith himself, along with Richard Perle, David Wurmser and his wife Meyrav (all with links to Feith’s Office of Special Plans), had once prepared a strategy paper for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office. Entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper recommended a general offensive against Israel’s neighbors:
“Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.” 
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer showed in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, that the Jewish state’s American amen corner played an instrumental role in agitating for the Iraq war. As they pointed out, “A Clean Break” 
“[C]alled for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments … and Israeli interests.’”
Whose interests were they pursuing while they manufactured talking points based on “faulty” intelligence in order to bamboozle Congress and the American people into fighting Israel’s war on Saddam Hussein?
But that was just the beginning of the long tortured road they led us down. As Ariel Sharon told a visiting delegation of American congressmen at the time, Iran, Libya, and Syria were next on Israel’s agenda:
“’These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve,’ said the Prime Minister to his guests, rather like a commander issuing orders to his foot-soldiers. While noting that Israel was not itself at war with Iraq, he went on to say that ‘the American action is of vital importance.’” 
Two down, one to go.
Much of the “faulty” intelligence that found its way to the desks of Bush and Cheney originated with foreign intelligence agencies, and there is plenty of evidence that much of it came straight from Tel Aviv. Certainly the Israelis had an interest in using the United States military as a cat’s-paw against their traditional Arab enemies, notably Iraq. And the defense of Israel was often cited by the administration as a justification for targeting Saddam Hussein. This wasn’t the first time a foreign entity launched a covert operation to lure the United States into an overseas conflict, and it certainly won’t be the last – that is, unless and until we learn the real lesson of the Iraq war.
Yes, it was ideology that led us to commit ourselves to become the policemen of the Middle East – but the adherents of that ideology utilized methods that included fabricating “evidence” of Iraqi WMD. One aspect of neoconservative ideology conveniently left out of Fisher’s otherwise comprehensive analysis of the neocon mindset is their dedication to Israel as a model “democracy” and our ideal ally which must always be defended. An odd omission, to say the least.
If we look at the Iraq war as a wildly successful covert operation to lure us into a position from which it is almost impossible to extricate ourselves – all to the advantage of a certain Middle Eastern “democracy” beloved by the neocons – then the whole disastrous episode begins to make sense. If such is the case, then why should the perpetrators care if no WMD were found after the invasion? It would be no skin off the Israelis’ noses: Bush would get the blame, not Bibi. And of course the operatives inside the administration responsible for skewing the intelligence could always claim to have been mistaken: after all, everybody thought the WMD were there, and in any case they would never be held to account. Since when is anybody in our government held accountable for anything?
Yes, I know, this is a “conspiracy theory,” and therefore we aren’t allowed to consider it, let alone examine the facts that back it up. Nations never engage in conspiracies, and government officials never lie.
And if you believe that, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in purchasing….

22 comments:

  1. It's all O'bozo's fault, our Light Worker pulled the troops out too soon.

    O'bozo fled
    People dead

    Excellent long article on get in/get, pro/con.

    Disengagement has been most damaging in Iraq. The U.S. withdrawal from the country was the most important of a range of factors that pulled it back into civil war. Scholars have long recognized that shepherding a nation out of a civil war requires some internal or external peacekeeper to guarantee the terms of a new power-sharing arrangement among the warring parties. Over time, that role can become increasingly symbolic, as was the case with NATO in Bosnia. The alliance’s presence there dwindled to a militarily insignificant force within about five years, but it still played a crucial political and psychological role in reassuring the rival factions that none of them would return to violence. In the case of Iraq, the United States played that role, and its disengagement in 2010 and 2011 led to exactly what history predicted.

    Kenneth M. Pollack | February 16, 2016 3:07pm

    Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East

    http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2016/02/16-americas-choice-in-middle-east-pollack

    ReplyDelete
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    1. get in/get out pro/con

      If, as many have said, we/the west have to rid the world of ISIS what's the alternative to getting back in, big time ?

      Delete
    2. You see what Mr. Pollack says there, Quirk ?

      Delete
    3. You know, really, if Saddam had been a gentleman, and minded his manners, and not invaded Kuwait in the very first place, none of this would have happened.

      So far, at least, I haven't seen anyone allege that the Israelis put Saddam up to invading Kuwait, though I wouldn't be surprised if I do before I die.

      Delete
    4. Ah, the mind of a boobie is a truly small and simple thing - 'Iraq was invaded because of Kuwaiti and all would be fine now except Obama prematurely withdrew.'

      Delete
  2. Israeli director Udi Aloni, who won the top audience at Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, has labelled the Israeli government “fascist” and urged Germany to cease its military support of the Jewish state.

    At a Q&A session about his award-winning film Junction 48, hours before being presented with the Panorama Audience Award for best fiction film, Mr Aloni said Germany supported the “fascist regime of Israel”, according to a report by Channel 10 News.

    The 56-year-old called Israel a "democracy of white people" and criticised German chancellor Angela Merkel’s support for Israel, saying: "Merkel does not mention the occupation and sells submarines to Netanyahu to continue such things."

    ReplyDelete
  3. NO STOPPING THE BULLDOZIN CHOSEN

    Ma’an News Agency | – –

    JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces on Sunday demolished a Bedouin school for children in the Abu al-Nuwaar community near the town of al Eizariya in the occupied West Bank, a spokesperson for the Al-Jahalin Bedouin community said.

    Atallah al-Jahalin told Ma’an that Israeli forces, accompanied by 30 vehicles and a delegation from Israeli’s Civil Administration, raided the area and destroyed the sole school in the community.

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    1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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    2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  4. It's interesting how you assign no responsibility to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Hezbollah. the Palestinians for their actions.

    You are obsessed with pointing the finger at Israel and the Jews.

    But the good news?

    No matter your finger wagging?

    Israel is not self destructing and your "side" of the conflict? Is slaughtering one another....

    Now it does fit into my wildest dreams, the complete and total collapse of all of Israel's enemies, "who benefits" Israel could NEVER kill/murder like the Americans, Russians, Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Yemenis, French, Hezbollah and other can...

    If you look at the combined death toll since the Arab spring? From North Africa thru Iraq, from Egypt thru Yemen... And other points of Jew hatred?

    The Moslems are self destructing and lashing out.

    They are losing. They are dying....

    And? They are destabilizing Europe.

    Who is next? Most likely Russia and China... Indonesia, India and Malaysia...

    The collective world of united Jew and Israel hatred?

    IMPLODING....

    Got to love it...

    So focus on Israel and it's evil ways, and it's hugE gobbling up of a couple hundred ACRES of fallow lands..

    And IGNORE CHINA, IGNORE RUSSIA.. (how's that annexation of Georgia, Chechnya and Crimea going) IGNORE TURKEY (remember Cyprus) IGNORE every nation on the planet conquering MILLIONS of square miles and displacing 10's of millions of people...

    Ignore them all because Israel exists...

    LOL

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. .

      So focus on Israel and it's evil ways, and it's hugE gobbling up of a couple hundred ACRES of fallow lands..

      If it's fallow land, why not give it to the Palestinians.

      If 97% is empty, as you said yesterday, why? For the answer, of course, all you have to do is read The Times of Israel, Ynetnews, Haartz. The Palestinians have been seeking permits to build all over that territory and the permit requests have summarily been rejected or ignored.

      There are plenty of legitimate things you can complain about. Can the bullshit.

      .

      Delete
  5. The Dangerous Faggot Tour on Adam Carolla Podcast. (30 Minutes in.)
    http://adamcarolla.com/milo-yiannopoulos-and-greg-fitzsimmons/

    The Dangerous Faggot Tour:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zalg45gzN_U

    ReplyDelete
  6. .

    You see what Mr. Pollack says there, Quirk ?

    I saw it the other day. Try and keep up.

    My view? Mr. Pollack s wrong. Mr. Paul is right when he sees says just look around at the devastation we have wrought around the world in the last two decades through our 'humanitarian intervention', not just Iraq, but Afghanistan, Libya. We never left Afghanistan. Please explain to me how that is a success story.

    Ash is right, 'Ah, the mind of a boobie is a truly small and simple thing..."

    If you had two brain cells to rub together you would be a truly dangerous thing.

    .

    ReplyDelete
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    1. .

      You are just like Bill Kristol and all the other dicks who fed the myth and got us into the situation today. Their only excuse for the FUBAR situation we now have, forget the $trillions we wasted, forget the hundreds of thousands (millions?) dead, the multiple millions turned into refugees, forget that the US once the sole hyper-power in the world is now a diminished paper tiger, forget that the longest war in US history, Afghanistan continues though it was lost many years ago, forget that we will be keeping thousands of US troops there for what may turn into decades all with no effect, forget all that and blame Obama for not leaving few thousand troops in Iraq as targets for radical Islam, forget the fact that the first time those troops were attacked we would have the same situation or worse than we have today as the US sent in additional troops and air support for those troops.

      You, sir, and Mr. Pollack and Mr. Kristol are dishonest. Or, if you really believe the bull you are spreading, nitwits.

      ,

      Delete
    2. And why did it happen? Let the trials begin.

      Delete
    3. So I'm reading Q as saying the west should not have pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, or responded to 9/11.

      What's the trigger point then, or is there one at all ?

      It's so much easier to bitch, than be cogent.

      Delete
    4. How man Iraqis were on the planes that Killed thousands of Americans?

      Delete


    5. In 1913, Kuwait was recognized as a separate province from Iraq and given autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty in the draft Anglo-Ottoman Convention, however this was not signed before the outbreak of the first World War.

      The border was revisited by a memorandum sent by the British high commissioner for Iraq in 1923, which became the basis for Kuwait's northern border. In Iraq’s 1932 application to the League of Nations it included information about its borders, including its border with Kuwait, where it accepted the boundary established in 1923.

      Delete
    6. It was none of our business.

      Delete
  7. I don't think it is a neocon strangle hold. The neocons are blamed for everything on this blog. Instead, try blaming everything on the Washington establishment, period.

    "Who is Donald Trump?" The better question may be, "What is Donald Trump?"
    The answer? A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment.
    Some Trump supporters are like the 60s white girls who dated black guys just to annoy their parents. But most Trump supporters have simply had it with the Demo-socialists and the "Republicans In Name Only." They know there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Hillary Rodham and Jeb Bush, and only a few cents worth between Rodham and the other GOP candidates.
    Ben Carson is not an "establishment" candidate, but the Clinton machine would pulverize Carson; and the somewhat rebellious Ted Cruz will (justifiably so) be tied up with natural born citizen lawsuits (as might Marco Rubio). The Trump supporters figure they may as well have some fun tossing Molotov cocktails at Wall Street and Georgetown while they watch the nation collapse.
    Besides - lightning might strike, Trump might get elected, and he might actually fix a few things. Stranger things have happened (the nation elected an[islamo-]Marxist in 2008 and Bruce Jenner now wears designer dresses.) Millions of conservatives are justifiably furious. They gave the Republicans control of the House in 2010 and control of the Senate in 2014, and have seen them govern no differently than Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Yet those same voters are supposed to trust the GOP in 2016? Why?
    Trump did not come from out of nowhere. His candidacy was created by the last six years of Republican failures.
    No reasonable person can believe that any of the establishment candidates [dems or reps] will slash federal spending, rein in the Federal Reserve, cut burdensome business regulations, reform the tax code, or eliminate useless federal departments (the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, etc.). Even Ronald Reagan was unable to eliminate the Department of Education. (Of course, getting shot at tends to make a person less of a risk-taker.) No reasonable person can believe that any of the nation's major problems will be solved by Rodham, Bush, and the other dishers of donkey fazoo now eagerly eating corn in Iowa and pancakes in New Hampshire.

    Many Americans, and especially Trump supporters, have had it with:
    Anyone named Bush
    Anyone named Clinton
    Anyone who's held political office
    Political correctness
    Illegal immigration
    Massive unemployment
    Phony "official" unemployment and inflation figures
    Welfare waste and fraud
    People faking disabilities to go on the dole
    VA waiting lists
    TSA airport groping
    ObamaCare
    The Federal Reserve's money-printing schemes
    Wall Street crooks like Jon Corzine
    Michelle Obama's vacations
    Michelle Obama's food police
    Barack Obama's golf
    Barack Obama's arrogant and condescending lectures
    Barack Obama's criticism/hatred of America
    Valerie Jarrett
    "Holiday trees"
    Hollywood hypocrites
    Global warming nonsense
    Cop killers
    Gun confiscation threats
    Stagnant wages
    Boys in girls' bathrooms
    Whiny, spoiled college students who can't even place the Civil War in the correct century... and that's just the short list.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Trump supporters believe that no Democrat wants to address these issues, and that few Republicans have the courage to address these issues. They certainly know that none of the establishment candidates are better than barely listening to them, and Trump is their way of saying, "Screw you, Hillary Rodham Rove Bush!" The more the talking head political pundits insult the Trump supporters, the more supporters he gains. (The only pundits who seem to understand what is going on are Democrats Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell and Republican John LeBoutillier. All the others argue that the voters will eventually "come to their senses" and support an establishment candidate.)

    But America does not need a tune-up at the same old garage. It needs a new engine installed by experts - and neither Rodham nor Bush are mechanics with the skills or experience to install it. Hillary Rodham is not a mechanic; she merely manages a garage her philandering husband abandoned. Jeb Bush is not a mechanic; he merely inherited a garage. Granted, Trump is also not a mechanic, but he knows where to find the best ones to work in his garage. He won't hire his brother-in-law or someone to whom he owes a favor; he will hire someone who lives and breathes cars.

    "How dare they revolt!" the "elites" are bellowing. Well, the citizens are daring to revolt, and the RINOs had better get used to it. "But Trump will hand the election to Clinton!" That is what the Karl Rove-types want people to believe, just as the leftist media eagerly shoved "Maverick" McCain down GOP throats in 2008 - knowing he would lose to Obama. But even if Trump loses and Rodham wins, she would not be dramatically different than Bush or most of his fellow candidates. They would be nothing more than caretakers, not working to restore America's greatness but merely presiding over the collapse of a massively in-debt nation. A nation can perhaps survive open borders; a nation can perhaps survive a generous welfare system. But no nation can survive both - and there is little evidence that the establishment candidates of either party understand that. The United States cannot forever continue on the path it is on. At some point it will be destroyed by its debt.

    Yes, Trump speaks like a bull wander[ing] through a china shop, but the truth is that the borders do need to be sealed; we cannot afford to feed, house, and clothe 200,000 Syrian immigrants for decades (even if we get inordinately lucky and none of them are ISIS infiltrators or Syed Farook wannabes); the world is at war with radical Islamists; all the world's glaciers are not melting; and Rosie O'Donnell is a fat pig.

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  9. Is Trump the perfect candidate? Of course not. Neither was Ronald Reagan.
    But unless we close our borders and restrict immigration, all the other issues are irrelevant. One terrorist blowing up a bridge or a tunnel could kill thousands. One jihadist poisoning a city's water supply could kill tens of thousands. One electromagnetic pulse attack from a single Iranian nuclear device could kill tens of millions. Faced with those possibilities, most Americans probably don't care that Trump relied on eminent domain to grab up a final quarter acre of property for a hotel, or that he boils the blood of the Muslim Brotherhood thugs running the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
    While Attorney General Loretta Lynch's greatest fear is someone giving a Muslim a dirty look, most Americans are more worried about being gunned down at a shopping mall by a crazed [Islamic] lunatic who treats his prayer mat better than his three wives and who thinks 72 virgins are waiting for him in paradise.

    The establishment is frightened to death that Trump will win, but not because they believe he will harm the nation. They are afraid he will upset their taxpayer-subsidized apple carts. While Obama threatens to veto legislation that spends too little, they worry that Trump will veto legislation that spends too much.
    You can be certain that if an establishment candidate wins in November 2016, … [their] cabinet positions will be filled with the same people we've seen before. The washed-up has-beens of the Clinton and Bush administrations will be back in charge. The hacks from Goldman Sachs will continue to call the shots. Whether it is Bush's Karl Rove or Clinton's John Podesta, who makes the decisions in the White House will matter little. If the establishment wins, America loses.



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