If T. (for "Tweetybird" or "Tyranosaurus" -- take your pick -- Rump and his accomplices were real Americans, they would know that Americans, even white ones, finally draw the line when it comes to their sports heroes. Therefore, in his endless roaming around the playgrounds of the world to see who else he can bully, in tangling with members of the NBA and the NFL he has definitely grabbed the sow by the wrong teat, as James Joyce would have said. Lebron James has already trumped him big time with that unbeatable "but you showed up" remark. The U.S. and the world is now flooded with people deeply and tearfully regretting the day that he volunteered to make so many people miserable on so many levels. Far too much of the white population went along with that , and the Repubs could not restrain themselves, because making the world miserable is all that they have ever stood for.
Those who for whatever nefarious reasons voted Republican in the last U.S. Presidential elections would bitterly deny it, but the fact is that now the geopolitical political positions of Germany and the U.S. have been reversed from what they were in the 1930’s. The U.S. has an alleged President who is moving quickly toward fascism, while – fortunately for the world – Germany, the strongest country in the E.U. , has a President who strongly brings to mind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rump believes in baring his teeth and rattling his weapons. Merkel believes in negotiations and remaining calm and reasonable. Beyond them, then, what about the other two in the world’s Big Four? Pugnacious Putin is Rump’s natural partner, while the more circumspect but potentially strongest of them all because of China’s people and its strategic location, Xi is in Merkel’s league.
Those who voted in the ignoramus who is currently perched like a stupefied tweetybird in the Oval Office picked a man who knows only one policy, and that is to keep firing and hiring staccato-style in the hope that someone will arrive in the job who will manage to come up with the results wanted. I think it can be said with all the confidence in the world that that policy will never work with regard to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The only recourse left there is the same one that ended up being resorted to when the U.S. finally, belatedly got out of Vietnam, which was to crawl out while trying and failing to give the appearance of standing tall. McNicholson, the 12th U.S. lead commander in Afghanistan in those 16 years, can and probably will be dumped and replaced, but that will mean nothing, because the Afghans will always still be there, forever ready to feast in many ways on every invader who gets the bad idea of showing up and trying to impose its will. That's their bread and butter, flavored with poppy seeds.
You could ask the British. They ought to know. They had two centuries to learn, but as clever as they are supposed to be, over that long span of time, they, too, like Americans today, learned exactly nothing, and if it were not for the distraction of Brexit, you would undoubtedly see them still trying to sneak back into some sort of prominence in Afghanistan while concealed in the U.S.'s hip pocket. That's some crazy stuff!
Having had quite a long time to cogitate on these things (3 days ago I hit 86), I have seen nuclear weapons as being little more than a means by which small nations as well as big ones could beat themselves on the chest gorilla-style while yowling at each other without risk of having their bluffs called. But now that too large a proportion of the U.S. "white" population has let sheer racial hatred get the better of them and they have put into the Oval Office a creature much more terrifying than any gorilla, i.e. a human gone berserk with power, all bets are off – except one. That one bet, that one hope is that the U.S. military has long since seen the need to quietly but thoroughly disable the button in the legendary nuclear suitcase that U.S. Presidents are thought to have available at all times. If the military hasn't done that by now, then they are all traitors of the worst kind, to the U.S., and, even more, to the entire planet, since the planet counts for much, much more than do the political considerations of any number of self-absorbed nation-states.
On the other hand, however, what makes me think that the military would act any more responsibly in this matter than would the Executive or any other branch of the Government? Am I hoping for a coup, or something of that nature? --Not really, though that would be interesting. Everything that is bad news for T. Rump is good news for this country.
This is a truly wonderful presentation on a truly horrible demolition procedure that is being ruthlessly and idiotically carried out by the White House as we speak. This article is in the best tradition of Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly,” in which she details four instances in which “world leaders” stupidly defied the admonitions of the well-informed of their times and marched straight ahead into inevitable catastrophe. This article should be required reading in the White House, but we know how totally non-existent the chance of that is. That Afghanistan scenario with which the author ends his article is so incredibly vivid that one feels as if he is watching those events unfold right at his feet and in real time!
I think that there is some peril in forming definite conclusions about the recent meeting between T. (for "Tweetybird") Rump of the U.S. and Macron of France. While we are suffering from heavy overdoses of knowledge about Rump, we don't know nearly enough about Macron, especially what was in it for him when he invited Rump over for lobster in the Eiffel Tower. Was Ms Marine Le Pen, the woman whom Macron had ungallantly pushed aside by winning his post, still very much on his mind? I think we can say, without fear of contradiction, that she was very much Rump's preference for winning that job, and that he would have greatly enjoyed being entertained in the Tower by her instead, so much so that he could have long since readied his lines to deliver about her state of preservation, and that, seeing no point in wasting them, he dropped instead on Macron's wife.
Ms Le Pen, her father, and the odious political party that they co-own have been entrenched on the French scene for quite a long time, and they are not likely to vanish any time soon, and so in that sense the French are doomed, just as Americans are in a similar fix when it comes to the even worse Republicon party. So was Macron's invite to the lobster fest a highly subtle, conciliatory attempt to keep the right-hand seam in the French uniform from opening any farther? Or was he trying to parlay that excessively tight handshake in which he had earlier taken part with Rump, with the intention of latching on to a bigger playground bully for use against the likes of Merkel and the Scandinavian EU leaders, who have quickly and accurately written off Rump as being an ignoramus who is best avoided and left on the sidelines of the real business at hand?
Because they are based on human nature as I have come to know it -- more than is possible to know about Mr. Macron so far -- I see both incentives as having run through his mind, simplistic though these conjectures might be.
I don’t think that there has ever been a time since the 1960’s when the Republi-conservatives have not looked askance at our institutions of higher learning, especially when it comes to admissions policy. Just as their current fierce attempts to obliterate “Obamacare” are 100 percent aimed at denying medical care to the descendants of the slaves from Africa, in the barely concealed hope that that will contribute to them dying off or at least becoming less of a reliable voting bloc that is opposed to the Repubs’ always indecent policies, so have the Repubs consistently tried to put a chokehold on universities (see, for example, the career of a guy named David Horowitz), mainly because, among other inconveniences, those universities have those pesky things called history departments, and the Republicons each day have more and more obscenities to answer for in the history books of the future.
Colleges are hated by the T. Rump lovers because they, the colleges, are much more productive than the churches, the military, the U.S. Congress, or any other organizations in furnishing the opposition that has the best chance of at least slowing down the drift toward outright fascism that is the wet dream of U.S. conservatives everywhere. In their eyes this kind of resistance needs to be put to an end right now!
Colleges have the data, the real scoop on everything, unlike the fans of the dolt that the more questionable half of the white population has allowed to occupy the Oval Office and who gives all the appearance of having not read a book of any kind all the way through since he was in the 6th grade.
I am of the opinion that Trump's speech to the like-minded right-wingers in Poland was lifted almost verbatim from the archive of speeches by Hitler and Goebbels. In that speech against whomever, Trump used the same language and made the same arguments as the Nazis did to justify their aggressions against countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland. A previous comment touched on how Trump tipped his hand when he wasted no time in using the word "will" as a noun three times within two lines of text. Riefenstahl's film pretty much patented the Fascists' use of that word in that way.
If you look back at the arguments that the Germans made at the outset of World War 1 to justify their murderous invasion of Belgium so as to more easily hit France from the flank, it would seem that Hitler and Goebbels in turn lifted their treacherous untruths from Kaiser Wilhelm's sanctimonious generals. Barbara W. Tuchman tells about this in her "The Guns of August."
Meanwhile how can there be Polish right-wingers like Duda and his party at all? The Polish people can't have forgotten how their neighbors to the east, Germany and Russia, in former days right-wingers all despite what they called themselves, worked to wipe poor Poland almost off the map, as Professor Cole pointed out. What gives?
In reference to the title of this informative article, I long ago decided that Gardner’s 2nd Law is the truth of the matter and that anger is in fact a very bad thing and not at all good. That Law states that “Anger is one of the very worst traits of Homo Sapiens. One should never do or say anything while he or she is angry, because otherwise they will find themselves indulging in acts so stupid and uncalled-for that, if the perpetrators have even just a glimmer of conscience, later they will deeply regret what they’ve done. That will happen every time.”
I have had a lot of time to see how often that holds true, in myself and in others, and I haven’t seen much of anything that would refute that Law. Deny it, yes, and that’s only to be expected. But never to refute it.
And so, what sort of a future can this country have, since we are faced with an administration riding in roughshod over all common decency, especially as that relates to women and minorities, and bearing at the sharpest point of its hell-bent prow a “strategist” who just loves rage and anger and has absolutely nothing else to offer but the destruction of all worthwhile things, such as the freedom to vote without fear of being harassed, or giving everyone equal opportunity regardless of their melanin count?
It could be that the “partitioning” of Iraq might not only be better termed as “redistributing,” but it might also take place anyway, as a result of forces as elementary as the planetary motions. Because what is Iraq?
If nations can best be defined as collections of generally like-minded people, then Iraq is not a country. It is instead an artificial construct of mainly three groups of people who strike me as being a bit less happy with each other than, for instance, are the three groups that comprise Switzerland. And in that light I seem to remember that, way back in 2003 when the U.S. went into Iraq under the same imbecilic impulses as are now ruling those who want to attack Iran, there were strong speculations then, that between the poorly connected human groupings in Iraq and the influences of Iraq’s neighbors, that construct would start flying apart, with the fragments more naturally adhering elsewhere, and that looks like what could be happening now.
There were always two aspects of Iraq that most strongly made Iraq such an unnatural construct. One was that the minority Sunnis were allowed to rule over the Kurds and the majority Shiites by force. The other was that the Kurdish provinces were much more naturally a part of something that looked suspiciously like a real country called “Kurdistan,” whose parts were culturally and geographically connected but were politically disconnected by Kurdistan’s location in three different and very uptight jurisdictions: Iraq, Syria, and above all, Turkey. And so the efforts of those three Kurdish regions to coalesce with each other in a process much like how fragments came together to form the Earth and everything else in the Solar System, could be underway in this case of Iraq, no matter what Turkey says.
I think it will all depend on the kind of war, aside from who is elected next year. Women, that non-thuggish half of humanity, cannot be depended on for going into those wrecking and killing sprees known as wars, or for continuing them, and lest it be forgotten, H. Clinton is a woman. Meanwhile, from the U.S. point of view, the regular types of war are going out of fashion, and that leaves pushbutton wars as the sprees of choice for quite a distance into the future. By that I mean such tactics as the newly and quickly developing use of drones, and the Republicans are so invariably and heavily committed to regression in all things that most likely they will try to work against that trend, to the point that “boots to the ground” might become their new refrain.
--Until the day when someone pushes his own button that will blow a U.S. destroyer, cruiser, or even an aircraft carrier right out of his home waters thousands of miles from Virginia.
Americans do not take kindly to being called to account for having indulged in crimes against humanity, and so much weeping and wailing will ensue from that event that one would think the caldera under Yellowstone Park had finally caught up with its timetable and had covered the U.S. with six inches of ash and perpetual winter.
In the defenses of McCain, I keep noticing omissions of factors that ought to count for something and that took away from his being that thing far too often and loosely called a “hero.”
His father was not just any admiral. From 1968 to 1972 John Sidney McCain II was the commander of all the U.S. forces in Vietnam. Having a father like that had to have helped McCain throughout his military years, after his very poor showing at Annapolis. But McCain demonstrated that he had fallen far from the tree by being nothing more than a reckless jet jockey, when more than one of those enormously expensive things called war planes came to grief through his taking chances. So, as the son and the grandson of not one but two four-star admirals, he probably thought he was untouchable when, in 1967, over Hanoi, he saw, as he wrote somewhere, missiles coming up at him “as big as telephone poles.”
Ever since 2008, when I read about these things, I’ve never seen how the U.S. Navy could not have actually breathed a big sigh of relief when one of those “telephone poles” clipped that latest aircraft that was unlucky enough to be under his rear end and it was up to the Vietnamese to bind his wounds after he hit the ground at the cost of several broken limbs and to keep him alive and out of trouble for the next five years. That allowed the Navy to hold on to some of its remaining hardware a bit longer, and they no longer had to worry about that foolhardy progeny of admirals coming to a final reckoning.
But this also enabled McCain to take part in crashes of other kinds over the subsequent years, the biggest one being trying to put a deeply silly and badly informed woman within a single heartbeat – his own -- from running the U.S. government. That’s a hero?
For one of a very few times D. Trump hit on something that had some basis. But those things happen, and it’s entertaining to watch the effects of his having detonated such a big stink bomb among his own kind.
It's interesting, Professor, that you would mention Charlize Theron, because I had already associated her with the very next item that you covered, the wise crack that Sean Penn made just before presenting Inarritu with the Oscar for Best Picture. Earlier this morning, Google News, which leans conservative, had shown a series of tweets and what-not in which Penn is roundly lambasted for -- in place of the more polite way you put it -- allegedly having said instead, "Who gave this son of a bitch a green card?" He was attacked for having supposedly thrown dirt on Mexicans and the whole immigrant question.
However, several things tell me beyond all doubt that nothing could've been farther from Penn's mind. One is that he had already worked with Inarritu on another film a few years ago, and therefore this had to be just a private joke that they may have shared as much as a half dozen times in the past. Therefore the rest of the world was actually lucky that Penn chose to bring it into the joke, and in fact Penn most likely was just as happy as he could be to present his friend with this honor. Another factor is that Sean Penn was just being Sean Penn. Anybody who has noticed this actor even desultorily over the years will know just what I mean. But the clincher is that Penn just recently had the great, good luck of having talked one of the most choice, accomplished, and interesting women in the film world, the said Ms Charlize Theron, into being his wife. Sean Penn, who isn't exactly a lady's man, cannot have come down, yet, from the euphoria of such an achievement, and therefore he can be forgiven for just about everything.
For a great many years I’ve thought of Denmark as being an ideal country, to the point where, if I had ever visited Europe, I would as soon have wanted to check it out as any of the usual biggies there, like Spain, Italy, or France. This was because everything I ever heard about Denmark was as solidly on the side of decency and a sense of proportion as it is possible for any society to be. Two things that especially stuck in my mind were how, during WW2, even though it was occupied by the Germans, Denmark managed, at great danger to itself, to spirit away so many of its nearly 8,000 Jews to safety in nearby neutral Sweden that 99 % of them survived the War, and also there was how humanely the Danes treated their prison populations, including allowing wives to have generous access to their incarcerated husbands.
And so I thought, and still think, that Denmark serves as a model for many other countries, especially the U.S. and Israel. Denmark is close to the same size as Israel, in land and in population, but consider how, throughout its short existence, the latter has been a gigantic boil in the side of the Middle East, and compare that to how one has never heard of the Danes as being any sort of pain to their neighbors, at least not since Viking days.
Therefore I can't understand why the Danes thought it was a good idea to go along with GWBush’s highly obvious blunder of invading Iraq, unless they had a leader at the time who had a bad attack of Stephen Harperitis, as has been happening with serious consequences to our neighbor to the north, Canada, which till recently rivaled Denmark in virtuosity.
I totally fail to see how the absence of high level U.S. officials from the recent "Unity Rally" in Paris was an "unspeakably stupid blunder" on the part of the Obama administration. Instead, as more and more things come to light, that event may yet turn out to be not quite what it was cracked up to be, at least among the "world leaders" who did attend. Meanwhile note that Obama’s counterparts in Russia and China were not subjected to the usual kneejerk Conservative attacks for likewise not being in Paris on that glorious day . Only Obama had to suffer those, alone as always.
Though it was interesting and maybe even a little awe-inspiring to see so many heads of state and lesser figures from many places in the world all gathered in one spot at such short notice to demonstrate against a series of unspeakable mass murders, nevertheless the whole thing carried a definite air of being a display of mere exhibitionism. Clarion calls of "unity" kept ringing through the air, even while one wondered how the horrible acts of just a very few thugs with guns could possibly set aside so many traditional antagonisms of nations for longer than brief moments. And then one wondered if all along -- Paris being what it is to nearly everyone -- the appeal of the rally to the French premier's highly placed guests had been its location instead of the occasion itself.
Some have wondered why Hollande even invited all those dignitaries, and why he didn't leave the rally purely in the hands of his ordinary fellow Frenchmen instead, because by now it should have been clear even to world leaders everywhere exactly what terrorists can do. Obama, for one, had a very clear idea on that score, having had to spend a large amount of his Presidency dealing with issues brough on by the seemingly indelible and enormous messes left behind by the Republicans in their badly misguided responses to 9/11, which included such abominations as the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the prison at Gitmo, and the open use of torture, with all the enormous rents that those measures tore in the American fabric and its ideals. And soon enough that "world leader" part of the rally in Paris was badly tainted anyway, by the actions of just one man.
Like Lady Macbeth, B. Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, is so packed from head to toe "topful with direst cruelty" that he must spoil every party that he attends, as shown by his White House excursions and by several spectacles that he staged at the UN, one of which featured him displaying -- what else? -- a cartoon while trying to lay down the law to one of his neighbors that is in every way -- including staying cool, calm, and reasonable -- as much as 10 times larger than his own bailiwick. Along with his own unpleasant run-ins with this man, Obama already has his fill of having to deal every day with a solid, unbroken bloc of similar buffoons, hundreds of them, all aching to get in individual whacks at him -- the Republicans in Congress.
Therefore Obama is to be commended instead, for sparing his two most immediate underlings, Biden and Kerry, the ordeal of this baleful man, while Netanyahu made a big fool of himself even in the eyes of many Israelis, by crashing Hollande's "party" after having been asked not to come to the rally and at first agreeing but then changing his mind and coming anyway and muscling his way from the second row in the march up into the first, and climaxing that by engaging in his own brand of unity and doing just what the French had feared -- urging French Jews to do the ridiculous and to leave the amenities and the beauties of France in favor of relocating in a country that has inflicted an endless succession of heartless, brain-dead leaders upon itself and on their prisoners, the Palestinians.
From the article that precedes these comments, I got the idea that the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre weren't unanimous in appreciating the rally. Some charged some of the world leaders with being hypocrites because they wouldn't have permitted Hebdo to operate in their countries, and besides, the Hebdo cartoonists had lampooned leading figures in those countries, angering those leaders, yet here they were, toasting the Charlies.
With Obama having become a regular target for lampooning and all other means of derision in the U.S., thanks to unflagging opposition from the Republicans from the day he took office, it is very likely that Obama took a few lumps from the Hebdo cartoonists as well. But now at least there won't be a dreadful picture showing him arm in arm with the likes of Netanyahu or anyone else, nor should there be any accusations of hypocrisy hurled at Obama and by implication also upon his country. He thought to leave the Frenchmen to do the rally on their terms, in their own way, which didn't involve bringing the hellfires down on the nearest Muslims. I call what was, after all, Obama's normal circumspection a quite decent thing to have done in this matter, and not at all a blunder.
A highly predictable and kneejerk first reaction by the U.S. State Department was to say that this action will damage the atmosphere with the very people with whom the Palestinians ultimately need to make peace.
I wonder if the people who issued that statement were aware of how much it made them the spiritual descendants of the "white" racists in the U.S. during the long ago days of the Civil Rights struggle in the U.S. Regularly so-called "black" people were warned that they shouldn't press so hard or at all for their civil rights, because it was making the "white" folks mad. If memory serves me correctly the most famous instance of this was a rejoinder that the Rev Billy Sunday made to Rev King's renowned "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." It's great for one and all that this badly wrong-headed advice was roundly ignored, and the Palestinians would do well to do the same. And I believe that in fact they will do the same, even if the West Bank Palestinian leader Abbas is under deep suspicion by believers in the Palestinian cause. See the also informative Mondoweiss site.
Khamenei is in a good position to sound and to be more reasonable and relaxed than anyone in the West because he is not hobbled by being chained to the pit bull leaders of the most roguish nation in the Middle East, or to anyone else. And yet people keep referring to the U.S. as a superpower! The Middle East has long since shot down that notion.
I have always thought that the Iranian leaders are well aware that developing and maintaining nuclear weapons is a supreme waste of time, money, resources, and just about everything else, and they’ve actually never had anywhere near the interest in having such weapons that B. Netanyahu so obsessively keeps trying to persuade everyone that they really have.
The Iranians don’t need nuclear weapons. Just by being where they are, and being 70 or 80 million strong, and sitting on all that territory and oil, and incidentally, by never having sent their planes to bomb any of their neighbors (except Saddam, who was the sort who provoked such things), they have a better reputation among their neighbors and in general they far, far outshine that tiny snarling place gone mad from mistaking for wine too much of the waters of the Dead Sea. But the nuclear weapons stuff does allow Iran to keep rattling the western cages, so there’s that for Khamenei.
All in all he’s in the driver’s seat here, while the Western leaders are just doing a lot of pointless yammering, without even a suggestion of a leg to stand on. It’s an amazing spectacle to watch, if impossible to understand. If they weren’t so dense about wanting to do Iran in, these leaders would actually be encouraging Iran to develop those weapons instead, complete with the lovely problem of what to do with the waste, and then Iran would be in the same leaky boat that all those already holding nukes have long been enduring.
Even if he is religious, Khamenei is a shrewd rascal, but nobody in the West wants to give him that kind of credit, because he doesn’t appear to be white.
The Republicans, as expressed by their foremost intellectual arm, the Fox News Nasties, are already enraged that Obama did not resign the Presidency as soon as the just concluded 2014 election results became clear. Obviously they see that midterm election as really having been a Presidential one, and also they have the 2008 one in mind as well, and in their eyes that means that J. McCain is now finally recognized as being the U.S. prez after all. And other mainstream media seem to be going along with that perception, judging by how often they've been consulting McCain lately, even if, as far back as 2008, his brain processes were already showing signs of not running at full throttle, when that media could do so much better in interviewing Professor Cole, who from all I've ever been able to see is second to none in being able to untangle for us all the highly complicated skeins of Middle East matters, as shown by this article.
And so once again, if Americans don't want to put a lot of "boots on the ground" to defeat ISIS, what better move for our actual President for the next year and a half to make than to team up with Iran (as Roosevelt did with Stalin, back in 1941)? Iran is right there in the neighborhood instead of being half the globe away and also is far from being the rogue nation that so many people see it as being. People can point to the U.S. itself, and Israel, and Britain, and Russia, and Germany, and many other nations in the West and all over the planet, as having attacked other nations, often without good reason and in many ways. But who has Iran attacked in the last several centuries, for any reason?
It's amazing to me how the answer to this simple question and its implications are always evaded, in deference to the common wisdom, so important is it to keep on indulging in the Netanyahu Kickapoo joy juice.
Thanks much, Razer Ray, for your reference and your link to Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning" blog. I've been reading her site since before, during, and after the Bush invasion of Iraq. I thought her posts were second to none in showing what it was like in Baghdad in those days, and I tried to keep track of her, but as you no doubt know, several very long periods passed when nothing was heard from her, especially after she and her family fled Iraq and went to Syria and then really especially after Oct 2007, after which there was a period of silence that seems to have lasted almost till now. I am glad to know that she is alive and well and kicking as much as ever, and I think that a lot of experts would have to defer to her when it comes to speaking about events in Iraq clearly and with insight, providing that she has a mind to and is in a situation to do just that.
I agree with the commenter who said that if the British Parliament had not undercut the British Prime Minister, Obama would've begun his Syrian initiative by now, without the backing of the Arab League, Congress, or anyone else, but not without France AND Britain. his two standbys (and stand-ins) in Libya. All he really needed for his international support was that pair of the largest and most active European nations in trying to do something about al-Assad's slaughter of his own people for little more reason than to keep the rulership of Syria purely a family matter, with his family enjoying that privilege. Meanwhile the rest of that "international support" mainly seems to have stood idly by while over the past several years, many thousands of Syrian citizens have been killed. to the tune of as many as 100,000 by now.
And that is the whole point of why I think American military intervention is not a bad idea, and that's been so for some time.. It would be a truly humanitarian effort to cut down and even end this bloodbath, as one was cut short in Libya, and meanwhile I don't think the number of operative crystal balls is anywhere near the number of dire predictions -- should Obama give the order -- that are being flung all over the place. And what better use of that unbelievably expensive American military machinery that otherwise merely sits rusting away, here. there. and everywhere?
It's too bad that Obama let himself be spooked into consulting that body of do-nothing baboon-butts called the U.S. Congress. While he wastes that time, more Syrians will be fed into the Syrian death machine who otherwise had every right to live as long and as comfortably as anyone else in this largely indifferent world. And that will also happen for sure if the U.S. merely resumes sitting in the bleachers.
There's that thing called "self-respect," which "even" Palestinians should be allowed to have and to exert.
We also might want to look at how little the Palestinians have gained from decades of previous "peace talks" and talk of "peace talks." The very informative and scarlet-smeared maps that Dr. Cole showed toward the beginning of his article threw in vivid and painful relief the tremendous losses in land that the Palestinians have suffered from the start, no matter what they did. And engaging in yet more "peace talks" that will yield nothing requires some exertion, and I hear that it's passingly hot in the Middle East, so -- unless one has not much else to do -- why bother, when there's not a drop of sincerity to be found on the U.S.\Israeli side?
It ought to be clear to all that these latest "peace talks," if they're held, will be for show only. With the U.S. doing its usual thing and indeed having set the precedent, the Palestinians have as little chance of stopping the Israeli wholesale theft of their land as Chief Joseph and his tribe had of stopping the grabbing of Nez Perce property by the U.S. military and those brave pioneers from Europe.
If T. (for "Tweetybird" or "Tyranosaurus" -- take your pick -- Rump and his accomplices were real Americans, they would know that Americans, even white ones, finally draw the line when it comes to their sports heroes. Therefore, in his endless roaming around the playgrounds of the world to see who else he can bully, in tangling with members of the NBA and the NFL he has definitely grabbed the sow by the wrong teat, as James Joyce would have said. Lebron James has already trumped him big time with that unbeatable "but you showed up" remark. The U.S. and the world is now flooded with people deeply and tearfully regretting the day that he volunteered to make so many people miserable on so many levels. Far too much of the white population went along with that , and the Repubs could not restrain themselves, because making the world miserable is all that they have ever stood for.
Those who for whatever nefarious reasons voted Republican in the last U.S. Presidential elections would bitterly deny it, but the fact is that now the geopolitical political positions of Germany and the U.S. have been reversed from what they were in the 1930’s. The U.S. has an alleged President who is moving quickly toward fascism, while – fortunately for the world – Germany, the strongest country in the E.U. , has a President who strongly brings to mind Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rump believes in baring his teeth and rattling his weapons. Merkel believes in negotiations and remaining calm and reasonable. Beyond them, then, what about the other two in the world’s Big Four? Pugnacious Putin is Rump’s natural partner, while the more circumspect but potentially strongest of them all because of China’s people and its strategic location, Xi is in Merkel’s league.
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Those who voted in the ignoramus who is currently perched like a stupefied tweetybird in the Oval Office picked a man who knows only one policy, and that is to keep firing and hiring staccato-style in the hope that someone will arrive in the job who will manage to come up with the results wanted. I think it can be said with all the confidence in the world that that policy will never work with regard to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The only recourse left there is the same one that ended up being resorted to when the U.S. finally, belatedly got out of Vietnam, which was to crawl out while trying and failing to give the appearance of standing tall. McNicholson, the 12th U.S. lead commander in Afghanistan in those 16 years, can and probably will be dumped and replaced, but that will mean nothing, because the Afghans will always still be there, forever ready to feast in many ways on every invader who gets the bad idea of showing up and trying to impose its will. That's their bread and butter, flavored with poppy seeds.
You could ask the British. They ought to know. They had two centuries to learn, but as clever as they are supposed to be, over that long span of time, they, too, like Americans today, learned exactly nothing, and if it were not for the distraction of Brexit, you would undoubtedly see them still trying to sneak back into some sort of prominence in Afghanistan while concealed in the U.S.'s hip pocket. That's some crazy stuff!
Having had quite a long time to cogitate on these things (3 days ago I hit 86), I have seen nuclear weapons as being little more than a means by which small nations as well as big ones could beat themselves on the chest gorilla-style while yowling at each other without risk of having their bluffs called. But now that too large a proportion of the U.S. "white" population has let sheer racial hatred get the better of them and they have put into the Oval Office a creature much more terrifying than any gorilla, i.e. a human gone berserk with power, all bets are off – except one. That one bet, that one hope is that the U.S. military has long since seen the need to quietly but thoroughly disable the button in the legendary nuclear suitcase that U.S. Presidents are thought to have available at all times. If the military hasn't done that by now, then they are all traitors of the worst kind, to the U.S., and, even more, to the entire planet, since the planet counts for much, much more than do the political considerations of any number of self-absorbed nation-states.
On the other hand, however, what makes me think that the military would act any more responsibly in this matter than would the Executive or any other branch of the Government? Am I hoping for a coup, or something of that nature? --Not really, though that would be interesting. Everything that is bad news for T. Rump is good news for this country.
This is a truly wonderful presentation on a truly horrible demolition procedure that is being ruthlessly and idiotically carried out by the White House as we speak. This article is in the best tradition of Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly,” in which she details four instances in which “world leaders” stupidly defied the admonitions of the well-informed of their times and marched straight ahead into inevitable catastrophe. This article should be required reading in the White House, but we know how totally non-existent the chance of that is. That Afghanistan scenario with which the author ends his article is so incredibly vivid that one feels as if he is watching those events unfold right at his feet and in real time!
I think that there is some peril in forming definite conclusions about the recent meeting between T. (for "Tweetybird") Rump of the U.S. and Macron of France. While we are suffering from heavy overdoses of knowledge about Rump, we don't know nearly enough about Macron, especially what was in it for him when he invited Rump over for lobster in the Eiffel Tower. Was Ms Marine Le Pen, the woman whom Macron had ungallantly pushed aside by winning his post, still very much on his mind? I think we can say, without fear of contradiction, that she was very much Rump's preference for winning that job, and that he would have greatly enjoyed being entertained in the Tower by her instead, so much so that he could have long since readied his lines to deliver about her state of preservation, and that, seeing no point in wasting them, he dropped instead on Macron's wife.
Ms Le Pen, her father, and the odious political party that they co-own have been entrenched on the French scene for quite a long time, and they are not likely to vanish any time soon, and so in that sense the French are doomed, just as Americans are in a similar fix when it comes to the even worse Republicon party. So was Macron's invite to the lobster fest a highly subtle, conciliatory attempt to keep the right-hand seam in the French uniform from opening any farther? Or was he trying to parlay that excessively tight handshake in which he had earlier taken part with Rump, with the intention of latching on to a bigger playground bully for use against the likes of Merkel and the Scandinavian EU leaders, who have quickly and accurately written off Rump as being an ignoramus who is best avoided and left on the sidelines of the real business at hand?
Because they are based on human nature as I have come to know it -- more than is possible to know about Mr. Macron so far -- I see both incentives as having run through his mind, simplistic though these conjectures might be.
I don’t think that there has ever been a time since the 1960’s when the Republi-conservatives have not looked askance at our institutions of higher learning, especially when it comes to admissions policy. Just as their current fierce attempts to obliterate “Obamacare” are 100 percent aimed at denying medical care to the descendants of the slaves from Africa, in the barely concealed hope that that will contribute to them dying off or at least becoming less of a reliable voting bloc that is opposed to the Repubs’ always indecent policies, so have the Repubs consistently tried to put a chokehold on universities (see, for example, the career of a guy named David Horowitz), mainly because, among other inconveniences, those universities have those pesky things called history departments, and the Republicons each day have more and more obscenities to answer for in the history books of the future.
Colleges are hated by the T. Rump lovers because they, the colleges, are much more productive than the churches, the military, the U.S. Congress, or any other organizations in furnishing the opposition that has the best chance of at least slowing down the drift toward outright fascism that is the wet dream of U.S. conservatives everywhere. In their eyes this kind of resistance needs to be put to an end right now!
Colleges have the data, the real scoop on everything, unlike the fans of the dolt that the more questionable half of the white population has allowed to occupy the Oval Office and who gives all the appearance of having not read a book of any kind all the way through since he was in the 6th grade.
I am of the opinion that Trump's speech to the like-minded right-wingers in Poland was lifted almost verbatim from the archive of speeches by Hitler and Goebbels. In that speech against whomever, Trump used the same language and made the same arguments as the Nazis did to justify their aggressions against countries like Czechoslovakia and Poland. A previous comment touched on how Trump tipped his hand when he wasted no time in using the word "will" as a noun three times within two lines of text. Riefenstahl's film pretty much patented the Fascists' use of that word in that way.
If you look back at the arguments that the Germans made at the outset of World War 1 to justify their murderous invasion of Belgium so as to more easily hit France from the flank, it would seem that Hitler and Goebbels in turn lifted their treacherous untruths from Kaiser Wilhelm's sanctimonious generals. Barbara W. Tuchman tells about this in her "The Guns of August."
Meanwhile how can there be Polish right-wingers like Duda and his party at all? The Polish people can't have forgotten how their neighbors to the east, Germany and Russia, in former days right-wingers all despite what they called themselves, worked to wipe poor Poland almost off the map, as Professor Cole pointed out. What gives?
In reference to the title of this informative article, I long ago decided that Gardner’s 2nd Law is the truth of the matter and that anger is in fact a very bad thing and not at all good. That Law states that “Anger is one of the very worst traits of Homo Sapiens. One should never do or say anything while he or she is angry, because otherwise they will find themselves indulging in acts so stupid and uncalled-for that, if the perpetrators have even just a glimmer of conscience, later they will deeply regret what they’ve done. That will happen every time.”
I have had a lot of time to see how often that holds true, in myself and in others, and I haven’t seen much of anything that would refute that Law. Deny it, yes, and that’s only to be expected. But never to refute it.
And so, what sort of a future can this country have, since we are faced with an administration riding in roughshod over all common decency, especially as that relates to women and minorities, and bearing at the sharpest point of its hell-bent prow a “strategist” who just loves rage and anger and has absolutely nothing else to offer but the destruction of all worthwhile things, such as the freedom to vote without fear of being harassed, or giving everyone equal opportunity regardless of their melanin count?
It could be that the “partitioning” of Iraq might not only be better termed as “redistributing,” but it might also take place anyway, as a result of forces as elementary as the planetary motions. Because what is Iraq?
If nations can best be defined as collections of generally like-minded people, then Iraq is not a country. It is instead an artificial construct of mainly three groups of people who strike me as being a bit less happy with each other than, for instance, are the three groups that comprise Switzerland. And in that light I seem to remember that, way back in 2003 when the U.S. went into Iraq under the same imbecilic impulses as are now ruling those who want to attack Iran, there were strong speculations then, that between the poorly connected human groupings in Iraq and the influences of Iraq’s neighbors, that construct would start flying apart, with the fragments more naturally adhering elsewhere, and that looks like what could be happening now.
There were always two aspects of Iraq that most strongly made Iraq such an unnatural construct. One was that the minority Sunnis were allowed to rule over the Kurds and the majority Shiites by force. The other was that the Kurdish provinces were much more naturally a part of something that looked suspiciously like a real country called “Kurdistan,” whose parts were culturally and geographically connected but were politically disconnected by Kurdistan’s location in three different and very uptight jurisdictions: Iraq, Syria, and above all, Turkey. And so the efforts of those three Kurdish regions to coalesce with each other in a process much like how fragments came together to form the Earth and everything else in the Solar System, could be underway in this case of Iraq, no matter what Turkey says.
I think it will all depend on the kind of war, aside from who is elected next year. Women, that non-thuggish half of humanity, cannot be depended on for going into those wrecking and killing sprees known as wars, or for continuing them, and lest it be forgotten, H. Clinton is a woman. Meanwhile, from the U.S. point of view, the regular types of war are going out of fashion, and that leaves pushbutton wars as the sprees of choice for quite a distance into the future. By that I mean such tactics as the newly and quickly developing use of drones, and the Republicans are so invariably and heavily committed to regression in all things that most likely they will try to work against that trend, to the point that “boots to the ground” might become their new refrain.
--Until the day when someone pushes his own button that will blow a U.S. destroyer, cruiser, or even an aircraft carrier right out of his home waters thousands of miles from Virginia.
Americans do not take kindly to being called to account for having indulged in crimes against humanity, and so much weeping and wailing will ensue from that event that one would think the caldera under Yellowstone Park had finally caught up with its timetable and had covered the U.S. with six inches of ash and perpetual winter.
In the defenses of McCain, I keep noticing omissions of factors that ought to count for something and that took away from his being that thing far too often and loosely called a “hero.”
His father was not just any admiral. From 1968 to 1972 John Sidney McCain II was the commander of all the U.S. forces in Vietnam. Having a father like that had to have helped McCain throughout his military years, after his very poor showing at Annapolis. But McCain demonstrated that he had fallen far from the tree by being nothing more than a reckless jet jockey, when more than one of those enormously expensive things called war planes came to grief through his taking chances. So, as the son and the grandson of not one but two four-star admirals, he probably thought he was untouchable when, in 1967, over Hanoi, he saw, as he wrote somewhere, missiles coming up at him “as big as telephone poles.”
Ever since 2008, when I read about these things, I’ve never seen how the U.S. Navy could not have actually breathed a big sigh of relief when one of those “telephone poles” clipped that latest aircraft that was unlucky enough to be under his rear end and it was up to the Vietnamese to bind his wounds after he hit the ground at the cost of several broken limbs and to keep him alive and out of trouble for the next five years. That allowed the Navy to hold on to some of its remaining hardware a bit longer, and they no longer had to worry about that foolhardy progeny of admirals coming to a final reckoning.
But this also enabled McCain to take part in crashes of other kinds over the subsequent years, the biggest one being trying to put a deeply silly and badly informed woman within a single heartbeat – his own -- from running the U.S. government. That’s a hero?
For one of a very few times D. Trump hit on something that had some basis. But those things happen, and it’s entertaining to watch the effects of his having detonated such a big stink bomb among his own kind.
It's interesting, Professor, that you would mention Charlize Theron, because I had already associated her with the very next item that you covered, the wise crack that Sean Penn made just before presenting Inarritu with the Oscar for Best Picture. Earlier this morning, Google News, which leans conservative, had shown a series of tweets and what-not in which Penn is roundly lambasted for -- in place of the more polite way you put it -- allegedly having said instead, "Who gave this son of a bitch a green card?" He was attacked for having supposedly thrown dirt on Mexicans and the whole immigrant question.
However, several things tell me beyond all doubt that nothing could've been farther from Penn's mind. One is that he had already worked with Inarritu on another film a few years ago, and therefore this had to be just a private joke that they may have shared as much as a half dozen times in the past. Therefore the rest of the world was actually lucky that Penn chose to bring it into the joke, and in fact Penn most likely was just as happy as he could be to present his friend with this honor. Another factor is that Sean Penn was just being Sean Penn. Anybody who has noticed this actor even desultorily over the years will know just what I mean. But the clincher is that Penn just recently had the great, good luck of having talked one of the most choice, accomplished, and interesting women in the film world, the said Ms Charlize Theron, into being his wife. Sean Penn, who isn't exactly a lady's man, cannot have come down, yet, from the euphoria of such an achievement, and therefore he can be forgiven for just about everything.
For a great many years I’ve thought of Denmark as being an ideal country, to the point where, if I had ever visited Europe, I would as soon have wanted to check it out as any of the usual biggies there, like Spain, Italy, or France. This was because everything I ever heard about Denmark was as solidly on the side of decency and a sense of proportion as it is possible for any society to be. Two things that especially stuck in my mind were how, during WW2, even though it was occupied by the Germans, Denmark managed, at great danger to itself, to spirit away so many of its nearly 8,000 Jews to safety in nearby neutral Sweden that 99 % of them survived the War, and also there was how humanely the Danes treated their prison populations, including allowing wives to have generous access to their incarcerated husbands.
And so I thought, and still think, that Denmark serves as a model for many other countries, especially the U.S. and Israel. Denmark is close to the same size as Israel, in land and in population, but consider how, throughout its short existence, the latter has been a gigantic boil in the side of the Middle East, and compare that to how one has never heard of the Danes as being any sort of pain to their neighbors, at least not since Viking days.
Therefore I can't understand why the Danes thought it was a good idea to go along with GWBush’s highly obvious blunder of invading Iraq, unless they had a leader at the time who had a bad attack of Stephen Harperitis, as has been happening with serious consequences to our neighbor to the north, Canada, which till recently rivaled Denmark in virtuosity.
I totally fail to see how the absence of high level U.S. officials from the recent "Unity Rally" in Paris was an "unspeakably stupid blunder" on the part of the Obama administration. Instead, as more and more things come to light, that event may yet turn out to be not quite what it was cracked up to be, at least among the "world leaders" who did attend. Meanwhile note that Obama’s counterparts in Russia and China were not subjected to the usual kneejerk Conservative attacks for likewise not being in Paris on that glorious day . Only Obama had to suffer those, alone as always.
Though it was interesting and maybe even a little awe-inspiring to see so many heads of state and lesser figures from many places in the world all gathered in one spot at such short notice to demonstrate against a series of unspeakable mass murders, nevertheless the whole thing carried a definite air of being a display of mere exhibitionism. Clarion calls of "unity" kept ringing through the air, even while one wondered how the horrible acts of just a very few thugs with guns could possibly set aside so many traditional antagonisms of nations for longer than brief moments. And then one wondered if all along -- Paris being what it is to nearly everyone -- the appeal of the rally to the French premier's highly placed guests had been its location instead of the occasion itself.
Some have wondered why Hollande even invited all those dignitaries, and why he didn't leave the rally purely in the hands of his ordinary fellow Frenchmen instead, because by now it should have been clear even to world leaders everywhere exactly what terrorists can do. Obama, for one, had a very clear idea on that score, having had to spend a large amount of his Presidency dealing with issues brough on by the seemingly indelible and enormous messes left behind by the Republicans in their badly misguided responses to 9/11, which included such abominations as the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the prison at Gitmo, and the open use of torture, with all the enormous rents that those measures tore in the American fabric and its ideals. And soon enough that "world leader" part of the rally in Paris was badly tainted anyway, by the actions of just one man.
Like Lady Macbeth, B. Netanyahu, the Israeli leader, is so packed from head to toe "topful with direst cruelty" that he must spoil every party that he attends, as shown by his White House excursions and by several spectacles that he staged at the UN, one of which featured him displaying -- what else? -- a cartoon while trying to lay down the law to one of his neighbors that is in every way -- including staying cool, calm, and reasonable -- as much as 10 times larger than his own bailiwick. Along with his own unpleasant run-ins with this man, Obama already has his fill of having to deal every day with a solid, unbroken bloc of similar buffoons, hundreds of them, all aching to get in individual whacks at him -- the Republicans in Congress.
Therefore Obama is to be commended instead, for sparing his two most immediate underlings, Biden and Kerry, the ordeal of this baleful man, while Netanyahu made a big fool of himself even in the eyes of many Israelis, by crashing Hollande's "party" after having been asked not to come to the rally and at first agreeing but then changing his mind and coming anyway and muscling his way from the second row in the march up into the first, and climaxing that by engaging in his own brand of unity and doing just what the French had feared -- urging French Jews to do the ridiculous and to leave the amenities and the beauties of France in favor of relocating in a country that has inflicted an endless succession of heartless, brain-dead leaders upon itself and on their prisoners, the Palestinians.
From the article that precedes these comments, I got the idea that the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre weren't unanimous in appreciating the rally. Some charged some of the world leaders with being hypocrites because they wouldn't have permitted Hebdo to operate in their countries, and besides, the Hebdo cartoonists had lampooned leading figures in those countries, angering those leaders, yet here they were, toasting the Charlies.
With Obama having become a regular target for lampooning and all other means of derision in the U.S., thanks to unflagging opposition from the Republicans from the day he took office, it is very likely that Obama took a few lumps from the Hebdo cartoonists as well. But now at least there won't be a dreadful picture showing him arm in arm with the likes of Netanyahu or anyone else, nor should there be any accusations of hypocrisy hurled at Obama and by implication also upon his country. He thought to leave the Frenchmen to do the rally on their terms, in their own way, which didn't involve bringing the hellfires down on the nearest Muslims. I call what was, after all, Obama's normal circumspection a quite decent thing to have done in this matter, and not at all a blunder.
A highly predictable and kneejerk first reaction by the U.S. State Department was to say that this action will damage the atmosphere with the very people with whom the Palestinians ultimately need to make peace.
I wonder if the people who issued that statement were aware of how much it made them the spiritual descendants of the "white" racists in the U.S. during the long ago days of the Civil Rights struggle in the U.S. Regularly so-called "black" people were warned that they shouldn't press so hard or at all for their civil rights, because it was making the "white" folks mad. If memory serves me correctly the most famous instance of this was a rejoinder that the Rev Billy Sunday made to Rev King's renowned "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." It's great for one and all that this badly wrong-headed advice was roundly ignored, and the Palestinians would do well to do the same. And I believe that in fact they will do the same, even if the West Bank Palestinian leader Abbas is under deep suspicion by believers in the Palestinian cause. See the also informative Mondoweiss site.
Khamenei is in a good position to sound and to be more reasonable and relaxed than anyone in the West because he is not hobbled by being chained to the pit bull leaders of the most roguish nation in the Middle East, or to anyone else. And yet people keep referring to the U.S. as a superpower! The Middle East has long since shot down that notion.
I have always thought that the Iranian leaders are well aware that developing and maintaining nuclear weapons is a supreme waste of time, money, resources, and just about everything else, and they’ve actually never had anywhere near the interest in having such weapons that B. Netanyahu so obsessively keeps trying to persuade everyone that they really have.
The Iranians don’t need nuclear weapons. Just by being where they are, and being 70 or 80 million strong, and sitting on all that territory and oil, and incidentally, by never having sent their planes to bomb any of their neighbors (except Saddam, who was the sort who provoked such things), they have a better reputation among their neighbors and in general they far, far outshine that tiny snarling place gone mad from mistaking for wine too much of the waters of the Dead Sea. But the nuclear weapons stuff does allow Iran to keep rattling the western cages, so there’s that for Khamenei.
All in all he’s in the driver’s seat here, while the Western leaders are just doing a lot of pointless yammering, without even a suggestion of a leg to stand on. It’s an amazing spectacle to watch, if impossible to understand. If they weren’t so dense about wanting to do Iran in, these leaders would actually be encouraging Iran to develop those weapons instead, complete with the lovely problem of what to do with the waste, and then Iran would be in the same leaky boat that all those already holding nukes have long been enduring.
Even if he is religious, Khamenei is a shrewd rascal, but nobody in the West wants to give him that kind of credit, because he doesn’t appear to be white.
The Republicans, as expressed by their foremost intellectual arm, the Fox News Nasties, are already enraged that Obama did not resign the Presidency as soon as the just concluded 2014 election results became clear. Obviously they see that midterm election as really having been a Presidential one, and also they have the 2008 one in mind as well, and in their eyes that means that J. McCain is now finally recognized as being the U.S. prez after all. And other mainstream media seem to be going along with that perception, judging by how often they've been consulting McCain lately, even if, as far back as 2008, his brain processes were already showing signs of not running at full throttle, when that media could do so much better in interviewing Professor Cole, who from all I've ever been able to see is second to none in being able to untangle for us all the highly complicated skeins of Middle East matters, as shown by this article.
And so once again, if Americans don't want to put a lot of "boots on the ground" to defeat ISIS, what better move for our actual President for the next year and a half to make than to team up with Iran (as Roosevelt did with Stalin, back in 1941)? Iran is right there in the neighborhood instead of being half the globe away and also is far from being the rogue nation that so many people see it as being. People can point to the U.S. itself, and Israel, and Britain, and Russia, and Germany, and many other nations in the West and all over the planet, as having attacked other nations, often without good reason and in many ways. But who has Iran attacked in the last several centuries, for any reason?
It's amazing to me how the answer to this simple question and its implications are always evaded, in deference to the common wisdom, so important is it to keep on indulging in the Netanyahu Kickapoo joy juice.
Thanks much, Razer Ray, for your reference and your link to Riverbend's "Baghdad Burning" blog. I've been reading her site since before, during, and after the Bush invasion of Iraq. I thought her posts were second to none in showing what it was like in Baghdad in those days, and I tried to keep track of her, but as you no doubt know, several very long periods passed when nothing was heard from her, especially after she and her family fled Iraq and went to Syria and then really especially after Oct 2007, after which there was a period of silence that seems to have lasted almost till now. I am glad to know that she is alive and well and kicking as much as ever, and I think that a lot of experts would have to defer to her when it comes to speaking about events in Iraq clearly and with insight, providing that she has a mind to and is in a situation to do just that.
"As his international support collapses?"
I agree with the commenter who said that if the British Parliament had not undercut the British Prime Minister, Obama would've begun his Syrian initiative by now, without the backing of the Arab League, Congress, or anyone else, but not without France AND Britain. his two standbys (and stand-ins) in Libya. All he really needed for his international support was that pair of the largest and most active European nations in trying to do something about al-Assad's slaughter of his own people for little more reason than to keep the rulership of Syria purely a family matter, with his family enjoying that privilege. Meanwhile the rest of that "international support" mainly seems to have stood idly by while over the past several years, many thousands of Syrian citizens have been killed. to the tune of as many as 100,000 by now.
And that is the whole point of why I think American military intervention is not a bad idea, and that's been so for some time.. It would be a truly humanitarian effort to cut down and even end this bloodbath, as one was cut short in Libya, and meanwhile I don't think the number of operative crystal balls is anywhere near the number of dire predictions -- should Obama give the order -- that are being flung all over the place. And what better use of that unbelievably expensive American military machinery that otherwise merely sits rusting away, here. there. and everywhere?
It's too bad that Obama let himself be spooked into consulting that body of do-nothing baboon-butts called the U.S. Congress. While he wastes that time, more Syrians will be fed into the Syrian death machine who otherwise had every right to live as long and as comfortably as anyone else in this largely indifferent world. And that will also happen for sure if the U.S. merely resumes sitting in the bleachers.
There's that thing called "self-respect," which "even" Palestinians should be allowed to have and to exert.
We also might want to look at how little the Palestinians have gained from decades of previous "peace talks" and talk of "peace talks." The very informative and scarlet-smeared maps that Dr. Cole showed toward the beginning of his article threw in vivid and painful relief the tremendous losses in land that the Palestinians have suffered from the start, no matter what they did. And engaging in yet more "peace talks" that will yield nothing requires some exertion, and I hear that it's passingly hot in the Middle East, so -- unless one has not much else to do -- why bother, when there's not a drop of sincerity to be found on the U.S.\Israeli side?
It ought to be clear to all that these latest "peace talks," if they're held, will be for show only. With the U.S. doing its usual thing and indeed having set the precedent, the Palestinians have as little chance of stopping the Israeli wholesale theft of their land as Chief Joseph and his tribe had of stopping the grabbing of Nez Perce property by the U.S. military and those brave pioneers from Europe.