The Trump Presidency Ocho :: It Can't Go On. A.K.A. We All Gotta Duck / When The Shit Hits the Fan

I think it's unrealistic to expect a flawless record of moral purity in foreign policy from any US president. Being a world power means you will sometimes have interests or relationships that require cooperation with (or tolerance of) governments that are engaged in unsavory things, and will encounter situations where breaking those ties might make the world situation worse. And some international political and humanitarian disasters simply have no obvious solutions.

All the same, we can still make some moral distinctions and judgments. There's a big difference between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. And even within a single presidential administration there can be big differences - for example, Reagan's second term was distinct from his first one in terms of the priority placed on human rights.

Most criticism of Bush (understandably) focuses on the bad decision to invade Iraq in the first place. But from my perspective, the lack of foresight and thought that went into planning the postwar situation in Iraq was far more costly and inexcusable than the decision to overthrow Saddam. That was a truly historic blunder. Stabilizing and governing Iraq after Saddam was going to be an inherently tricky process, but there's no reason other than unmitigated incompetence that things had to get anywhere near as bad as they did.

I mean, let's estimate the total number of fighting-age Sunni Arab men who lived in Iraq at the time, and multiply that by the number of dollars required to hire them to do something useful at a salary that would be considered a good wage in the Iraq of 2003. Then, compare that to the total US budget for our wars. We had at our disposal financial resources that could meet the economic needs of essentially every prospective insurgent in Iraq. Of course the mechanism for getting money to the right places might have been problematic and some would have been siphoned off through corruption or ended up in the wrong hands - but even so, I think we should still have easily been able to outpay and out-recruit the various terrorist and militia groups for less than what we eventually spent to fight them.

Regardless of whether the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct, I think that a large-scale Sunni insurgency (with all its horrible economic, political, and human costs) should have been easily avoided.

 

Wasn't that a Hank Kissinger clusterf#ck?

 

Pol Pot's Year Zero was a Kissinger job? What the ******** are you smoking?

 

The single biggest blunder being disbanding the army in the first place. That’s one that gets repeated a lot at West Point these days.

You can’t simultaneously argue a war crime is a war crime regardless of numbers and then argue genocide is different. It’s either relative or absolute. It can’t be both.

10 =/=1,000=/=1,000,000

Why, how, how many, and resulting issues of possible alternatives relating to different action (or no action at all) is important. There was no reasonable justification for Iraq. Even less for the post conquest strategy. That said (far better by NGV), there’s a reason why the world powers are the ones forced to make these calls which result in triumphs (or blunders).

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/articl...imposter-account-was-used-on-facebook-to-drum

Interesting article. The recent caravan was boosted by a fake Faceplant account. Once the fake account was successful in growing the caravan, many pro-immigrant groups supported it. But a fake account got the thing going.

Suspicious timing.

????

We destabilized Cambodia with bombing campaign during the Vietnam War.

 

...which was never declared...

But anyway, bombing Cambodia didn't make Pol Pot slaughter class traitors amounting to a significant proportion of the population.

 

What's your beef with war?

 

That's a very strange question.

Let's throw an oldie but goodie out there to start us off: "War is the health of the state."

 

What's your beef with the state?

{ducks}

 

And he was only a colliding RH-53 and EC-130 away from being one himself.

 

But the purpose of that war was to raise Haliburton's cash flow to the point where they could manage an adverse result in the asbestos case if it came out that way. Not to pay a bunch of towelheads not to make trouble. You forget who we're talking about here-- Kissinger was less evil.

 

The only side in that situation that was guilty of War Crimes — potentially or actually — was Iran.

 

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=418369751841824

 

Well said.

 

Which bombing did cause the literal decimation (times 2) of Kampuchea.

 

Hitch wasn't a fan

 

Did NOT cause...

Dammit.

 

Many years ago I took some students to the Romanian Mission to the UN. We had studied Romania fairly in-depth, and we had a fascinating, informative conversation with their diplomatic staff for more than an hour. Then one of the students asked about the issue/problem with orphans in the country, and it was like a switch was flipped: they all assured us there was no orphan issue in Romania, that all were healthy happy and hale and in loving environments, and would we like a cookie?

 

OK, how about East Pakistan in the early 70s?

Nixon’s foreign policy blunders in places like Cambodia and Chile have been well picked over by historians. One area that has until now been overlooked is South Asia. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary J. Bass, remedies that omission. The book is a meticulously researched and searing indictment of the shameful role the United States played from 1970-1971 in the events that resulted in the breakup of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh...

...A few weeks later on December 7, the country held elections, and an East Pakistani, Mujibur Rahman, was elected president for the first time. But he was never allowed to assume office. Massive demonstrations erupted in East Pakistan that quickly escalated into a civil war. In March, West Pakistan sent in the army, which using U.S.-supplied arms embarked on a killing spree against its own citizens that resulted in the genocide of some 200,000 Bengalis, many of them students. Hindus in particular were singled out. Ten million refugees were displaced and fled into India, bringing it into the conflict.

In spite of increasingly frantic cables sent by the U.S. consulate in Dacca and the embassy in New Delhi confirming the atrocities, Nixon and Kissinger chose to ignore them. They disparaged Archer Blood, the U.S. consul-general in Dacca, as "the maniac in Dacca," and accused Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador in India and a formidable former Republican senator, of being a mouthpiece for the Indians. Instead, indebted to Gen. Yayha Khan, the military dictator of Pakistan, for his help in arranging Kissinger’s visit to China in July 1971, they continued to find ways to channel arms and aid to Pakistan.

And where have I seen this move before?

But once India entered the war to help liberate Bangladesh, Nixon decided to help Khan against the Indians he so despised. He pressured Jordan and Iran to supply aircraft and weapons to Pakistan, despite being advised by the Pentagon and State Department that it would be illegal. Bass argues that, in his determination to help Pakistan, Nixon and his aides "knowingly broke U.S. law." Thanks to the White House tapes, we have the president and Kissinger on tape discussing what to do in case they were found out.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/12/17/the-blood-telegram/

 

The changing of hands for the object because this shit ain' about you was perfect.


//also what is this from? He's only been to a handful of services and it wasn't 41's funeral

 

Huh.

That video appeared as a totally blank post before.

 

Here’s the Wikipedia page for our new UN ambassador. Most of her career was being on Fox News, including Fox &Friends.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Nauert

 

Here's a better story from Fox, even though it's a local Fox affiliate...

https://fox59.com/2018/07/03/indian...6ys3KfTeq_I6BMEjE-MPNEe9U9aT1IkgAWoi9V3gZOQVE



An Indianapolis church put the Holy Family in an ICE detention cage. I love it. Of course, if they really wanted to be "realistic" the Baby Jesus should have torn out of Mary's hands and put in a separate cage.