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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Fri Nov 14, 2008 7:56 pm Post subject: Cold War hawks nesting with Obama |
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/12/EDD4142N5B.DTL
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Sen. John McCain, whose top foreign policy adviser had been a paid lobbyist for Georgia, was most eager to confront the Russians, while Sen. Barack Obama was a bit more cautious. But as recently as in his Oct. 29 infomercial, Obama promised to "curb Russian aggression," which hardly suggests the change we need from the unilateral belligerence of the Bush foreign policy.
The result of that policy has been increased estrangement from the one country whose cooperation is totally indispensable in the effort to control the spread of nuclear weapons, given that Russia possesses roughly half of the world's nuclear arsenal and the ready means to build more. Yet instead of putting up a common front against nuclear proliferation, and even before the Georgia fracas, the Bush administration insisted on placing missiles on Russia's borders in a deal breaker with Putin, whom Bush had previously embraced.
Improved relations with Russia are critical to the change toward a more peaceful world that Obama has promised, but it is disquieting in the extreme that some of his closest advisers are inveterate hawks with a history of needlessly provoking tension with the Russians during the Cold War days. Key among them is Zbigniew Brzezinski, who, as President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, engineered the U.S. involvement on the side of Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan.
Of course, the official story line at the time was that the Soviets had invaded to support their ally, which happened to be the governing power in Kabul, against the fanatic mujahedeen rebels, whom President Ronald Reagan would later officially embrace as "freedom fighters." Those freedom fighters came to be united by our CIA with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.
It was decades later that the truth came out that the Soviets invaded only after being deliberately provoked by U.S. hawks. One of them was Robert Gates, who worked for Brzezinski in the Carter administration and who is currently the Secretary of Defense, now being considered by President-elect Obama to retain that position. A 1996 press release promoting Gates' memoir promised the revelation of "Carter's never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen - six months before the Soviets invaded."
The Gates revelation prompted an interviewer for the French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, to ask Brzezinski in a 1998 interview whether he regretted "having given arms and advice to future terrorists," and Brzezinski replied: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? .... What is most important to the history of the world? ... Some stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
That was three years before those "stirred up Muslims" attacked us on 9/11, but Brzezinski has not lost his nerve for escalating wars. While advising Obama, he gave interviews hyping the Russian "invasion" of Georgia as the occasion for a new global conflict, telling journalist Nathan Gardels that Putin's action "was ominously similar to Stalin's and Hitler's in the late 1930s." |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Nov 15, 2008 11:35 am Post subject: |
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And the really hilarious thing is that, despite the Bush-appointed Gates saying he'd be willing to serve under Obama, over on the far-right boards and blogs, they're STILL trying to argue that Obama is an "anti-American terrorist sympathizer".
At least with something like Willie Horton in '88, you could imagine the GOP backroom boys saying to themselves "well, this IS a bit of fear-mongering on our part, but Dukakis did kind of screw up by furloughing that guy, so we're not totally duping the public here". This time around, however, it's pretty apparent that nobody in the Republican backroom could possibly have believed any of the crap they were sending out in the spam mails. They must have been absolutely laughing at the people who fell for it. |
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