Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Your evidence so far is that a Republican who worked for the Bush administration on a sub-committee to Wolfowitz, lobbied for Georgia and now works for the McCain campaign. And another Republican has offered a Republican perspective in his capacity as a Republican adviser to the McCain campaign.
He was the president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a board member of the Project for the New American Century and an adviser to Donald Rumsfeld on Iraq. He was one of the chief cheerleaders for Ahmed Chalabi.
His crowd has been steadily eased out of the White House inner circle since Rumsfeld exited -- on grounds of being effing crazy -- so now he's a key foreign policy adviser to McCain.
Moreover, he is providing McCain with advice on Georgia at the same time as his two-person company is under contract to provide advice to Georgia.
And he's not the only adviser to McCain to come from that crowd.
So, yeah, I think it reeks. And I think my original title, 'The newest neocon catastrophe', is not inapt.
-
Saakashvili now seems to have lost the plot a bit. It really seems he believed the West would rush to his aid if the Russians responded to last Thursday's attack. And more:
He made repeated references not only to the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan in the 1970s, but also to the invasion Prague in 1968 and even repeated references to the German invasion of Poland before the start of World War II.
As for how he planned to halt the formidable Russian forces if they indeed headed toward Tbilisi, he said, “This will not be only Georgian troops” but an “all-out defense.”
“Freedom is worth fighting for,” he said, adding that his country was doing this “not only for us but for the rest of Europe.”
Asked if the White House was doing enough, he said: “I just spoke to President Bush. Frankly, some of the first statements were seen as a green light for Russia. They were kind of soft.”
He said, “Georgia is the first test case.”
He said the United State should be doing more. “We should realize what is at stake for America; America is losing the whole region,” he said.
“Who else can stand up for liberty in the world?”
It appears that the claim of 2000 civilians deaths from the original assault on Tskhinvali is a Russian PR exaggerration, but these BBC pictures serve to emphasise that what happened wasn't trivial either. It's pretty hard to square it with some noble defence of liberty.
You don't have to like the Russians to understand why Georgians are kind of pissed off with their leader.
-
As No Right Turn notes, After the war, the ethnic cleansing.
-
Damian Christie talks to Kerri Ritchie, the ABC's New Zealand correspondent, about reporting us for the Australians.
-
Here's another McCain foreign policy adviser, Max Boot, urging that the US start directly arming Georgia with new Stinger missiles so that, presumably, it can fulfill its destiny as the American proxy on Russia's border.
Boot, rather notoriously, prescribes the use of "American might to promote American ideals" anywhere in the world.
These people are nuts. And this has the same whiff as the Iraq project. Same Weekly Standard freakshow, same willingness to spill the blood of others in pursuit of dubious ideological goals.
I honestly don't think you can separate this crowd from what is happening there, and from Saakashvili's disastrous decision to start flattening buildings in his troublesome province. It backfired -- but these peole's adventures usually do.
-
Well, it depends on whether you think travel bans are credible or effective when they're not applied consistently, or are no more than cosmetic window dressing in the first place.
Well, you've managed to misdirect that one nicely Craig, although I'm with Tony in seriously struggling to see the equivalence. I can't really see your point.
-
Tony,
So it is unclear to you whether the regimes of North Korea, Burma or Zimbabwe deserve to be overthrown or not? ...Well, I guess that is moral relativism for you. An inability to see the blindingly obvious. A sad place to be.
What a lot of nonsense, James. It's very easy to prescribe war when you won't personally have to endure it.
It's not a fucking TV reality show and we're not talking about who "deserves" to get thrown off the island because they're, like, bad.
It's about the real consequences of actual war, not some "blindingly obvious" moral gotcha you think you can use to corner liberals:
"If you don't support the immediate violent overthrow of all bad people then you're just as bad as the bad people are!"
C'mon ...
-
Ummm, James? First paragraph of the blog entry that this discussion is attached to:
Actually, it gets worse. The WaPo has discovered that Scheunemann is still billing the Georgians, via his two-man company, even as he takes McCain's dollar for "advice". Astonishing, but by recent standards, sadly not surprising.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports from the S. Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, mostly flattened in the original Georgian assault, where people are really pissed off. Thing I didn't know: most South Ossetians already carry Russian passports ...
-
And lets not forget, that while Iraq was a mistake originally, it hasn't turned out all that bad. The silence now from the left-wing media on Iraq says it all...
Oh, some people are still keeping count. A quick scan of Iraq Today indicates nearly 50 people have been killed by suicide bombings, IEDs, etc, since Saturday, and at least twice that many wounded. Couple of mortar attacks on the Green Zone too.
The squatters being kicked out of government buildings don't have homes any more of course, and the US soldier who had his spine shattered and half his body burned on his sixth tour of duty is still struggling with life. And if course there are a couple of million displaced people who have no idea when they might return to their homes, let alone whether there is actually anything to return to.
But apart from that, it's going swimmingly five years down the track.
-
Oh Jesus... do you think this is really the time to be getting too snidely bitchy about sport-based jingoism? You know -- the country where it's time for a mass wrist-slitting when the All Black LOSE A FUCKING FOOTBALL MATCH?
Oh, bollocks. If you think New Zealanders get unusually upset over sport, you're, well, wrong.
This is a country where opposing supporters sit shoulder-to-shoulder in the stands -- half of them have probably come to the match together. Try that in most of Europe and see what happens.
We don't have neo-Nazi thugs identifying themselves with football teams and, inevitable incidents of munterism aside, we do not have football violence as such. Certainly not in any way that could viably be linked with nationalist thuggery. Again, compare with Europe and Russia, where politically-tinged violence is entwined with sports-fan thuggery in quite a few places.
Humph.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 … 2279 Older→ First