Antiwar.com Blog

Putin humiliated next to Bush “It could be that he kept his cool Thursday because he couldn’t quite believe what was happening to him.”

Robin Shepherd, Washington Times:

“It all happened following the end of bilateral talks when a televised press conference turned into a relentless and devastating assault on Putin’s backsliding on democratic reform.
Since global democratization has been made the centerpiece of Bush’s second term foreign policy agenda, analysts and politicians in the United States and elsewhere had billed this meeting as the first key test of the American president’s credibility.
As Russia analysts James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul had put it in a commentary in the current issue of the Weekly Standard: ‘If the president neglects to affirm his commitment to freedom with Putin at his side, Bush will be signaling that his words don’t count.’
So most of us were expecting the issue to be raised, if only in passing.
But no one could have been prepared for what was about to unfold.
While observing diplomatic niceties, President Bush’s opening remarks included a pointedly blunt statement of his concern that Russia was not fulfilling “fundamental” democratic principles.
And this was nothing to what President Putin was forced to endure in the subsequent questions, every single one of which focused on democracy.
Continue reading “Let’s pick a fight with Russia”

Arthur Chrenkoff says that he and his neocon buddies don’t consider Walid Jumblatt an authority on anything. Well, Michael Young sure does, as he has now highlighted Jumblatt’s testimony in two essays (here’s the first) affirming the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine in Iraq and/or calling for more of it in Lebanon/Syria. In the latest, Young writes:

Writing in the Washington Post on Wednesday, David Ignatius offered up this quote from Lebanon’s paramount Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who, after siding with Syria for decades (he didn’t have much choice; they killed his father) and opposing the U.S. war in Iraq, has become the leading figure in the anti-Syrian Lebanese opposition: “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world . The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

Jumblatt, for whom political changeability has long been the price to pay for protecting his minority community (and his control over it), nevertheless means what he says. Like many Lebanese, albeit at much greater risk to his own life, Jumblatt has gone too far in attacking Syria to turn back now. And while there are those in the Middle East and the United States who will refuse to give the administration any credit on democratization, at this end of the table, and in Iraq, the more pragmatic view is that it’s best to take what one can from the outside if expanded freedom is the upshot.

Unlike the warbloggers, who do nothing but read each other’s babble, Young, an editor at Beirut’s Daily Star, can be expected to know better about Jumblatt. Yet here he is, offering not an argument from a dubious source – which would have to be addressed on its own merits – but a sort of hunch or vibe, as if Jumblatt is equivalent to a journalist on a political roundtable saying that he doesn’t think the American people are ready for Social Security reform. We may disagree with said journalist, but we do take him to be something of an authority, insofar as we believe him to have his finger on the national pulse and to have no hidden agenda.

So it’s absolutely fair to say that anyone broadcasting Jumblatt’s hunch as proof of the correctness of Jumblatt’s assertions does, in fact, consider him an authority. Which means it’s also fair to question exactly where Jumblatt’s finger is and what the hell it’s up to. If David Duke comes out in favor of an affirmative action program, saying that he’s had a sudden change of heart, any reasonable person will question his motives, and more importantly, the validity of his analysis of that program. Ditto for Jumblatt, who, incidentally, rather sounds like David Duke:

The oil axis is present in most of the U.S. administration, beginning with its president, vice-president and top advisers, including [Condoleezza] Rice, who is oil-colored, while the axis of Jews is present with Paul Wolfowitz, the leading hawk who is inciting (America) to occupy and destroy Iraq.

And Jumblatt wasn’t just saying such things 50, 20, or even five years ago – he was saying them right up to the goddamn minute he issued his calculated switcheroo to David Ignatius. ‘Scuse me for being a little, er, cynical about both his motives and the validity of his analysis.

This is the best you’ve got?

Conn Hallinan, of Foreign Policy in Focus, reports that the militant neoconservative wing of the Bush administration is pushing an extremely aggressive policy toward China. Despite the fact that;

… while China is modernizing its military, it is 20 years behind the U.S., and that “the balance between the United States and China, both globally and in Asia, is likely to remain decisively in America’s favor beyond the next 20 years.”

China’s military budget is less than one tenth that of the U.S. and it does not have a massive arms industry, preferring to purchase submarines, destroyers, aircraft, and high performance anti-aircraft missiles from Russia and Israel. In spite of Rumsfeld’s grim forecast, the Chinese navy is designed for defending its territorial waters, not projecting force elsewhere. While the U.S. has a dozen aircraft carriers, China has one, and an old obsolete Soviet one at that.

The neocon strategy, which is described as “well under way” is to”ring China with US military bases”;

Besides its traditional bases in Japan and South Korea, Guam has become, according to Pacific Commander Admiral William Fargo, a “power projection hub,” that will play an increasing role in Asia, with “geo-strategic importance.” The island already hosts B-52s, fighter planes, nuclear attack submarines, and the high altitude spy drone, the Global Hawk. Since Guam is a U.S. colony acquired during the Spanish American war, the military does not need permission for the buildup, as it would in Japan or Korea.

The U.S. is also attempting to build bases in Southeast and South Asia. While Indonesian authorities deny the story, the Singapore Times reports that the U.S. is presently negotiating to open a naval base on Sulawesi Island. It is also strengthening military ties to Thailand, Singapore, India, Sri Lanka, and Malaya.

Michael Berg reports:

Today, military recruiters have unprecedented access to public schools. The little-known Section 9528 of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 grants the Pentagon access to directories of all public high schools (supplying them with student names, addresses and phone numbers) to facilitate contact for military service recruitment.

A student or parent wishing to protect privacy must actively contact the school to opt out and protect their personal information. In some districts, it can be difficult to withhold information specifically from recruiters, yet still allow this information to be used for other purposes that parents and students may approve of, such as honor rolls or school TV shows.

Arthur Chrenkoff semi-responds to my post on Walid Jumblatt. I say “semi” because he curiously excises the Jim Henley passage at the end that ties it all together:

Simply start saying things useful to the Bush White House and you too can take on gravitas with Gannonite speed. Only spoilsports would pause to wonder if your insights into the murder of Rafiq Hariri or your enthusiasm for democracy were more credible than your shrewd deductions regarding the massacres of September 2001. And the only people who would suggest that, as a politician, anything that comes out of your mouth is calculated to maintain and increase your own power would be people who are just on the other side.

The point, Arthur, is that Jumblatt is not merely some reasonable analyst who opposed the Iraq war then had the scales fall from his eyes as everything turned out peachy keen – he’s a politician with an agenda of his own that he now wishes to advance with help from the U.S. Moreover, Jumblatt’s insane extremism – calling 9/11 a U.S. government plot, cheering the deaths of the Columbia astronauts because one of them was Israeli, etc. – must be considered when assessing the supposed changes in this leopard’s spots. This is not Gerhard Schroeder or Jacques Chirac we’re talking about here, or even a Saudi prince, but a full-blown America-hating opportunist playing the get-Syria crowd for the fools they are.

Update: Further reading.

2/25: More!

In Backtalk:

Emile Meylan describes visiting his daughter Mariela at the Walter Reed Medical Center.

R.T. Carpenter points out that the last Civil War widow/ pensioner died just last year. The hundreds of billions budgeted for today’s wars are just the down payment.

Gordon Prather explains why the N. Korean nuke mess is still Bush’s fault.

Eric Garris explains how you can e-mail any Web page.

We get an update from the Kevin Benderman Defense Committee.

And more….

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Also…

Speaking of “peak oil,” Brian S. Wesbury (“Greenspan’s Quiver“) says:

Oil valued in dollars is up 20% versus its peak in 2000, but when valued in euros, the price of oil has fallen by 20%. In other words, it is not a shortage of oil that is driving prices up; it is the falling value of the dollar. If there were a true shortage of oil, its price would be up in all currencies.”

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Oh yeah, and:

The Department of Homeland Security has given hundreds of millions of dollars to protect ports since Sept. 11, 2001, without sufficiently directing the money to those that are most vulnerable, a policy that has compromised the nation’s ability to better defend the most critical ports against terrorist attacks, the department’s inspector general has concluded.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been invested in redundant lighting systems and unnecessary technical equipment, the audit found, but “the program has not yet achieved its intended results in the form of actual improvement in port security.”