US Foreign Policy


Sock Puppets and Partners

Jaerome Doolittle argues that w is osama’s sock puppet:

Giving Osama bin Laden an instrument like George W.Bush to play is like handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.
Bin Laden has got from Bush virtually everything he wanted: U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia, his enemy Saddam is dead, the Al Qaeda franchise has gone international, his hideout in Pakistan is safer than ever, the Taliban is resurgent, the Great Satan is globally hated and isolated, and Bush has done, praise be to Allah, effectively nothing to end the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors. Sweet!

Perhaps.
The way things have played out bush has gotten from osama virtually everything that he wanted: a huge popularity hit in his first term, a mission accomplished photo op, a 2nd term in office, billions in oil profit windfalls for his cronies around the world, the war on terror, the shredding of the bill of rights and so on ad infinitum.
It is not at all clear who is pulling the strings.

Perhaps they are each others sock puppet and, if so, perhaps they are partners.


Just Say No!

It is time for congress to just say no to the misadministration’s request:

The Bush administration has earlier this year said it would need $147.5 billion for fiscal 2008, but the estimates have been raised by another $47 billion. This request is in addition to the Pentagon’s nearly half-trillion annual budget, which omits war spending but covers routine costs, including training, payrolls and weapons procurement.

If congress doesn’t do its job then, as we fire the congress critters, we should petition the bushies Chinese financiers to put an end to the waste.


schwarzenegger Sends A Love Letter to bush, reid and pelosi

schwarzenegger’s veto of legislation that would have allowed Californians an opportunity to vote on withdrawing the troops from Iraq is exactly wrong :

“There is no louder message Californians can send to Washington on the Iraq war than who should lead our nation,” he wrote. “Placing a non-binding resolution on Iraq on the same ballot, when it carries no weight or authority, would only further divide voters and shift attention from other critical issues that must be addressed.”

Excuse me but what issues can possibly be more important than Iraq?
As for messages about who should lead the nation, what bs. It should be pretty clear to one and all that the supposed end the Iraq debacle message of the last congressional election has been ignored by the republicrats.

A somewhat louder message might be a few million Californians (along with the rest of us) getting out on the street and tossing these folks out of office. Yes, including the governator.


My Daddy Is Bigger Than Your Momma

The russians continue their recent saber waving with the announcement of a new bomb:

russiasbigdaddy.jpg
THE Russian military has successfully tested what it described as the world’s most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia’s state television reported on Tuesday.

“The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,” said Colonel General Alexander Rukshin, a deputy chief of the Russian military’s General Staff, in televised remarks.
Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn’t hurt the environment, he added.

Right, that little bit of show and tell in the above picture goes off and nothing happens except:

The Russian weapon’s blast radius is 990 feet, twice as big as that of the US design, the report said. Like its US predecessor, first tested in 2003, the Russian bomb is a “thermobaric” weapon that explodes in an intense fireball combined with a devastating blast.
It explodes in a terrifying nuclear bomb-like mushroom cloud and wreaks destruction through a massive shock wave created by the air burst and high temperature.

But, you know, no environmental damage…

The paranoid amongst us might even think that w and p are in cahoots with the military-industrial complex to turn up the heat so that they can create even more demand for military spending.


Rogue State?

Billmon ponders:

I’ve been trying to picture what the world might look like the day after a U.S. nuclear strike on Iran, but I’m essentially drawing a blank. There simply isn’t a precedent for the world’s dominant superpower turning into a rogue state — much less a rogue state willing to wage nuclear war against potential, even hypothetical, security threats. At that point, we’d truly be through the looking glass.

This shouldn’t be so hard to visualize because it is not a nuclear strike against Iran that is the turning point. That turning point was reached several years ago. The world’s dominant superpower has already turned into a rogue state and we are already on the other side of the looking glass as exemplified by the fact that this discussion is even happening.

There is still some small possibility of getting back to the sane side. Don’t expect your congress critters to lead the way anytime soon.