August 19, 2008 archive

Original article, subheaded The Mindlessness is Total, via counterpunch.com.

Pervez Musharraf, the puppet installed by the US to rule Pakistan in the interest of US hegemony, resigned August 18 to avoid impeachment.  Karl Rove and the Diebold electronic voting machines were unable to control the result of the last election in Pakistan, the result of which gave Pakistanis a bigger voice in their government than America’s.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.  You can read him regularly at counterpunch.com and antiwar.com.  He’s become one of the sane voices on the right (not that he doesn’t have tons to answer for being a member of the Reagan administration).  If you don’t read Roberts, you should!

1. The NY Times reports Taliban forces kill 10 French soldiers and raid U.S. base in Afghanistan.

   Taliban insurgents mounted their most serious attacks in six years of fighting, one a complex attack with multiple suicide bombers on an American military base on Monday night, and another by some 100 insurgents on French forces in a district east of the capital, killing 10 French soldiers and wounding 21 others, military officials said Tuesday.

   Three American soldiers were wounded and six members of the Afghan special forces in the attack on the base in the eastern province of Khost, bordering Pakistan, the Afghan military spokesman, Gen. Zaher Azimi, said. The battle lasted all night, 10 suicide bombers were killed or blew themselves up, and the insurgents were repulsed without entering the base, he said.

   This was a war Bush declared as won and therefore he could go invade Iraq. 2007 was the deadliest year for allied forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion. The Guardian has more, French soldiers killed in Taliban gun battle. “In the past three days, more than 100 people have died in fighting and bomb attacks around the country.”

2. The LA Times reports In west Georgia, few signs of damage by Russia.

   Government officials of this small, war-weary country invited a group of journalists for a 180-mile trip aboard a Russian-made Mi-8 helicopter Monday to Georgia’s western provinces to show the damage wrought by the recent Russian military incursion.

   Instead, the 19 international journalists on a daylong tour found just a few signs of Russian destruction, not very evident amid the sleepy resort towns of the Black Sea coast and the lush inland valleys.

   Just as Russians are suspected of having exaggerated the number of casualties and damage in the initial Georgian offensive that sparked the war in Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia, Georgians appear to have stretched the facts on the extent of destruction caused by the subsequent Russian attack, at least here in the country’s west.

   “This conflict is very much about proving who is the bad guy,” said a Western diplomat in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, speaking on condition of anonymity.

   So the propaganda will continue to flow. According to The Guardian, the U.S. urges NATO to punish Russia for operations in Georgia. “Washington will urge its European allies today to introduce sanctions against Russia by freezing the six-year-old Nato-Russia council.” Because nothing works better toward achieving peace than by breaking off diplomacy.

   The LA Times adds Russia relying on its military, Rice says. Secretary of State Condoleezza “Rice, in her toughest criticism of the Kremlin to date, said Russia’s incursion into Georgia was part of a pattern in which the government has increasingly turned to its military to assert its influence.”

   “Russia is a state that is unfortunately using the one tool it has always used when it wants to deliver a message . . . that’s its military power.”

   How Condoleezza can say this without a hint of irony is beyond me.

   Russia has reacted as expected. According to BBC News, Russia hits back at Nato warning. “Russia has dismissed a warning by NATO that normal relations are impossible while its troops remain inside Georgia.”

Four at Four continues with deadly ship pollution and planting trees around Portland, Oregon.

Post partisan my ass! That MIGHT be a good theme as a campaign strategy. It MIGHT appeal to an electorate tired of the incompetent,  ineffectual and just plain stupid brand of government they have been getting for the last ten years….you know, since the incredibly partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton by the Republican Congress….

It might sound … nice …and evenhanded and reasonable and mature and responsible and all that. But it ignores the simple and undeniable fact that since the Republicans lied, cheated and smeared (including smearing their current champion when he was running against Bush) their way into having full unfettered dominance of the government…..just about everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and the country is in sad, sorry shape.

Because of the Republicans.

Everything the Republicans has touched in the last decade has turned to crap. From the micro (life saving stem cell research) to the macro (Climate Crisis) the Republicans have had full power to implement their vision, programs and policies….and have gotten it disastrously wrong every single time.

How do you square this:

I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as both as First Lady and Miss Buffalo Chip.

With this:

I will be a pro-life President and this presidency will have pro-life policies.

This is a review of James Gustave Speth’s Bridge at the Edge of the World, intended as a supplement to the short review given of this book in the Monthly Review.  Speth is a prominent environmentalist who has worked with the Democratic Presidential administrations of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.  His words, then, deserve our attention for their connections to political effectiveness.

(crossposted at Big Orange)