Posts by Simon Grigg
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Trying to work and, as always with PAS, being distracted.
Always appreciate your thoughts James, but the tongue in my cheek was pointed elsewhere.
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Where's James when you need him to tell us how it really is?
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I might have the timeline wrong, but it seems to me that it was around the time of Katrina that the united front started to crack.
But for all that there is a refusal by the more ardent to recognise that, and an inability to recognise the huge shifts that the FUBAR in Iraq have caused in the world's perception of the USA.
At least here in Asia the US has been shifted from the role of the lone superpower, to that of a very major player, which is quite a jump from 2000. It could reasonably be argued that the Neocons have diminished the role and influence the US has over much of the world.
Of course the other problem which remains largely unresolved is the fact that the US military budget needs to be substantially increased in the near future to simply maintain the current level of power simply because of aging hardware from the Reagan and earlier eras, coupled with WOT attrition. It's a problem that any future president has to come to terms with.
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Hopefully, we'll run out of oil before it gets to that point.
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And in a piece (not online) in The Straits Times earlier this year McCain continued the same 'ring China' argument as a way to 'contain' her. It's not over yet.
He's either as mad as the rest of them or simply doesn't understand. Maybe he can't find it on a map......
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There's quite a difference.
Juan Cole has a fairly informative post on the surge .
and Cole has certainly had a more reliable track record (and a more in depth understanding) on Iraq than the current GOP candidate.
As many others have noted:
what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.
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I don't understand rugby..never have, never will and I don't care
But I do understand The Turnaround..you lucky bastard Russell...I always try to time my trips to Auckland to coincide. It feels like family.
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Ford owns Mazda, after all.
But not Toyota which is killing them all and manufactures in the US. Honestly, the US car companies have been bleeding so long, it's really just a matter of time. I'd imagine a major merger, likely Ford-Chrysler could be on the cards, in the same way the US aviation industry rationalised (dontcha love that word..lots of people got fired) a few years back. They just can't afford to let any one of them crash despite the fact that they're dinosaurs from a past age.
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That, along with 'Obambi', is nothing more than the phantom twitchings of a severed dittohead.
Ha, if 'Barry' has got James squirming like that he's gotta be running strong....
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Blair didn't drive a car all the time he was PM.
Not so surprising..I'd be surprised if many ministers or corporate high fliers drove in the UK. "The Car", complete with driver, is a way of life in many large cities. Few captains of industry or politicans drive in Asia either (or their wives or husbands).
Here in Indonesia there always surprise that I insist on driving myself. No-one does (and I don't just mean expats or the very wealthy).