by Justin Raimondo
www.antiwar.com
I suppose progressives and others hopeful for a more rational foreign policy are going to have to be content, for the moment, with crumbs from the presidential table, such as Barack Obama's recent statement to the New York Times that we might consider negotiating with elements of the Taliban. This is, however, not entirely good news, because the counterinsurgency doctrine that animates this proposal aims at replicating our alleged "success" in Iraq, where the U.S. military allied with hard-core Sunni fundamentalists against largely foreign forces said to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. The blowback from this tactic has yet to hit the fan, but you can be sure that when the U.S. military begins to downsize its presence in Iraq, these soldiers of the "Awakening" – armed and subsidized by us – will move to fill the power vacuum and run straight into the Shi'ite militias. The resulting conflict will no doubt cause the Obama administration to think twice about leaving, as the Iraqi government asks us to intervene. Having planted the seeds of the coming civil war, we'll have ample pretext to renegotiate the status of forces agreement.
The two faces of the Obama administration illustrate the principle that foreign policy, far from being formulated with the solving of actual problems in mind, is almost entirely driven by domestic political concerns. On the one hand, we have the Good Obama – the one who says he's going to stop the practice of torture by U.S. military and intelligence personnel – except that Leon Panetta, his pick for CIA chief, says we're going to continue "renditioning" prisoners when we don't want to dirty our own hands by subjecting them to methods that, say, the Egyptians or the Saudis wouldn't blink at.
The Obama administration has made overtures to the Russians that we might be willing to forgo the anti-missile system Bush installed in Eastern Europe, which Moscow is up in arms about. On the other hand, the clueless Hillary Clinton's State Department can't get a decent translator. When she handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a toy button, she thought it was labeled "reset." The idea was to follow up on Vice President Joe Biden's remarks in Munich, where he suggested that relations between the two countries needed to be reset on a new course – while demurring when asked if Obama intended to drop the missile-shield deployment. For a long moment, as Clinton presented the button to Lavrov, the mask of "competence" slid down to reveal the utter ridiculousness of the Americans: "We worked hard to get the right Russian word," burbled Hillary, smiling her most plastic smile. Her grin vanished as he answered, "You got it wrong." Instead of "reset," the word meant "overcharge." As Politico reports, she came back with
"'In a way, the word that was on the button turns out also to be true,' she argued. Though Lavrov had said that word on the button meant overcharge, Clinton suggested that that peregruzka could also be translated as overload."
I'll tell you what's on overload: my BS detector.
Keep Reading....
punditman says...
This is well worth reading through as a good primer on where things stand in the "speak out of both sides of its mouth" Obama administration. The War Party still very much has the upper hand, but various forces are at play.
www.antiwar.com
I suppose progressives and others hopeful for a more rational foreign policy are going to have to be content, for the moment, with crumbs from the presidential table, such as Barack Obama's recent statement to the New York Times that we might consider negotiating with elements of the Taliban. This is, however, not entirely good news, because the counterinsurgency doctrine that animates this proposal aims at replicating our alleged "success" in Iraq, where the U.S. military allied with hard-core Sunni fundamentalists against largely foreign forces said to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. The blowback from this tactic has yet to hit the fan, but you can be sure that when the U.S. military begins to downsize its presence in Iraq, these soldiers of the "Awakening" – armed and subsidized by us – will move to fill the power vacuum and run straight into the Shi'ite militias. The resulting conflict will no doubt cause the Obama administration to think twice about leaving, as the Iraqi government asks us to intervene. Having planted the seeds of the coming civil war, we'll have ample pretext to renegotiate the status of forces agreement.
The two faces of the Obama administration illustrate the principle that foreign policy, far from being formulated with the solving of actual problems in mind, is almost entirely driven by domestic political concerns. On the one hand, we have the Good Obama – the one who says he's going to stop the practice of torture by U.S. military and intelligence personnel – except that Leon Panetta, his pick for CIA chief, says we're going to continue "renditioning" prisoners when we don't want to dirty our own hands by subjecting them to methods that, say, the Egyptians or the Saudis wouldn't blink at.
The Obama administration has made overtures to the Russians that we might be willing to forgo the anti-missile system Bush installed in Eastern Europe, which Moscow is up in arms about. On the other hand, the clueless Hillary Clinton's State Department can't get a decent translator. When she handed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a toy button, she thought it was labeled "reset." The idea was to follow up on Vice President Joe Biden's remarks in Munich, where he suggested that relations between the two countries needed to be reset on a new course – while demurring when asked if Obama intended to drop the missile-shield deployment. For a long moment, as Clinton presented the button to Lavrov, the mask of "competence" slid down to reveal the utter ridiculousness of the Americans: "We worked hard to get the right Russian word," burbled Hillary, smiling her most plastic smile. Her grin vanished as he answered, "You got it wrong." Instead of "reset," the word meant "overcharge." As Politico reports, she came back with
"'In a way, the word that was on the button turns out also to be true,' she argued. Though Lavrov had said that word on the button meant overcharge, Clinton suggested that that peregruzka could also be translated as overload."
I'll tell you what's on overload: my BS detector.
Keep Reading....
punditman says...
This is well worth reading through as a good primer on where things stand in the "speak out of both sides of its mouth" Obama administration. The War Party still very much has the upper hand, but various forces are at play.
