As both Iraq and Afghanistan meltdown after spending $4 trillion and losing thousands of lives, the Obama Administration wants to pour $500 million into training and equipping the Syrian rebels. Ignore the fact that the Syrian rebels have been accused of human rights violations and atrocities (as has the regime). The government insists that U.S. weapons and money will go to the “right” forces — just ignore all those pictures of ISIS rebels driving around with U.S. equipment in Iraq.
President Obama wants $500 million from Congress to help “train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition.” It is another investment after bad returns on the $4 trillion in prior wars in this area. It is like watching a bad gambler at Vegas screaming that the next hand will pay off.
My primary concern is that we are still cutting basic environmental, scientific, and educational programs due to lack of state and federal funding. In Fairfax county (where my kids go to public school), the county has ordered a disastrous series of cuts of hundreds of positions, teacher raises (despite one of the lowest salary levels in the area), and a further increase in class size. My kids already go to school with an absurd 30 plus kids in a single class with a single teacher. All of this for the need of a fraction of what Congress will pour into Syria with little thought. Obviously, the cuts will hurt Fairfax in the long run which has always drawn families to the area due to its schools. I heard a Maryland official on the radio celebrating the cuts in Fairfax as promising a exodus to Maryland which continues to put a higher priority on education. The greater concern however is that, while other countries are increasing their investment in training students for the modern workforce, the U.S. is continuing to fall in the rankings in education. We are frittering away our future by funding wars rather than education and science needed to keep us competitive in the world market.
It is all perfectly otherworldly as these requests are treated an done deals. Half a billion for rebels seems a no brainer but a fraction of that for schools or science or the environment is viewed as excessive and highly problematic.
Source: CNN
Well, we cannot easilly stop our psycho leaders from waging war. Many times it IS waged to profit from spent arms. With the pretence of democracy, arguments are made to make it plausible for normal people.
“Its the universal soldier and he really is to blame…” Donovan, late 60s. STOP WORSHIPING THE SOLDIER! The GI is NOT saving America or the world. He is messing it up! He takes more time and spends more of his country’s money than ISIS/ISIL, but the net result is negative. Only Exception: troops diverted to help in domestic natural dissasters and the Coast Guard in general.
Anything else? Yes the Democrats & Republicans. Why would you vote for or support either of these bickering groups, bent on providing a smoke screen to what is really going on?
Annie,
Downsizing the military necessarily means upsizing the role of contractors.
America should leave the Middle East.
WWI, WWII, Vietnam, S. Korea, Iraq have all abundantly demonstrated that there is no point, no benefit and nothing gained through these global adventures. Without cause, America prevailed over Germany and Japan and now they hold massive American debt and run economic circles around America. Korea and Vietnam were embarrassing exercises in futility. All for not.
America should have allowed its industry to flourish and bided its time, eschewing commitment.
The Founders admonished against “foreign entanglements.”
America derives no benefit from a relationship with Israel.
America doesn’t need foreign oil.
America sells Bakken oil to China.
America has had Bakken oil for many years and the domestic price of gas rises.
We are in the Middle East because of Christians.
America is not a theocracy.
We should NOT be involved in the region. Period.
Israel should be compelled to co-exist with its neighbors as It did for millennia.
There is no physical law or axiom describing a state of Israel.
Eric, I certainly agree with you on keeping all the jobs in house. Contracting is a blight on our military.
NEW YORK POST
Hillary called Obama ‘incompetent and feckless’ in boozy rant
Hillary Clinton called President Obama “incompetent and feckless” and charged that he had “no hand on the tiller half the time” during a boozy reunion with college pals, a new book claims.
The scathing attacks came as the wine was flowing at a May 2013 dinner at Le Jardin Du Roi, a cozy French bistro near the Clinton family home in Westchester, according to “Blood Feud,” by best-selling author Edward Klein.
The former first lady, months removed from being Obama’s secretary of state, unleashed the verbal assault between sips of vino, sources told the author.
“When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,” Klein wrote.
Clinton ranted, “The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time. That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f–king tiller,” according to the book, which was excerpted exclusively in Sunday’s Post.
“Obama has turned into a joke,” she went on, according to Klein.
“The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and [Fox reporter] James Rosen’s e-mails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,” she raged, the book says, adding that she called the president “incompetent and feckless.”
Annie: “The IDEA was to seize Iraq’s oil. It surely didn’t work out that way, did it?”
Securing Iraq’s oil is vitally important, most of all for Iraq’s sake. That’s their economic lifeblood. To hurt Iraq and its people at a fundamental need, terrorists have relentlessly targeted Iraq’s petroleum infrastructure.
As for understanding the idea of the 1991-2003 Iraq enforcement that resolved with OIF, I suggest reviewing PL 107-243 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ243/pdf/PLAW-107publ243.pdf and UNSCR 1441 http://www.worldpress.org/specials/iraq/unscr1441.htm to start with.
Annie: “Halliburton subsidiaries did well in Iraq however”
I’m sympathetic to criticism of contractors because I’d prefer, as a soldier, to keep everything in house. Soldiers taking care of soldiers may necessarily be more Spartan or austere than what contractors set up, but I tend to trust soldiers will do right by soldiers more than contractors will.
However, the theory goes that contractors handle essential, but not mission-essential tasks that free up soldiers to be warfighters. They’re part of the modern flexible modular military concept. Even when I served back in the day, contractors were ubiquitous enough so that I wondered how we’d deal with some of the issues we routinely entrusted to contractors in an actual war if a contractor couldn’t reach us because, you know, the enemy.
The alternative is to handle everything in house with a permanent standing increase of the size of the military, jobs, and duties assigned to soldiers. Robert Heinlein has some good commentary on the subject in Starship Troopers.
TheSaucyMugwump: “I’m sure you know this, but there are three groups fighting in Syria (with many subgroups in each): Assad government, Islamic nuts, and quasi-democratic rebels.”
learning-curve.blogspot.com/2012/09/our-middle-east-choices-autocrats.html
The contest for dominance in the Middle East is a 3-way contest between autocrats, Islamists, and liberals. We want the liberals to be dominant. However, due to urgent political economic needs, we historically worked with the autocrats in power, who at least participated in the conventional nation-state system. The autocrats checked (repressed) both populist threats, Islamists and liberals, to the autocrats’ dominance.
Political scientists from the ‘realist’ school that guided our foreign policy during the Cold War believe that liberal dominance in the Middle East is an unrealistic option. Therefore, they believe the realistic option in the Middle East is working with autocrats who will repress Islamists, even if the cost is sacrificing the liberals who are most compatible with us.
In the Arab Spring at Step One, we used the various tools of our superior power in the nation-state system to defeat the autocrats on behalf of the liberals. However, removing the autocrats’ check on the liberals also removed the autocrats’ check on the Islamists. The Islamists are less affected and influenced than the autocrats by our conventional power, so we need the liberals to check the Islamists at Step Two. But in the post-autocrat populist contest, the Islamists are far more powerful than the liberals. The liberals need sufficient smart assistance from the liberal West in order to have a feasible chance (note: not a guarantee) of winning dominance over the Islamists.
The best example of sufficient smart assistance to liberals competing with Islamists in the Middle East is the Bush-era Counterinsurgency “Surge” in Iraq. President Bush understood the dynamics of our 3 choices in the Middle East when he championed liberals in the Middle East with the Freedom Agenda, but President Obama ended the Freedom Agenda and decided to implement a more ‘realist’ foreign policy. Obama’s change in course, though popular with opponents of Bush’s foreign policy, rendered the West ill-prepared to assist the liberals in Step Two of the Arab Spring.
In short, when it came time to put up or shut up on behalf of liberals in Iraq, Bush put up. If we want – need – the liberals to defeat the Islamists and achieve dominance of the Middle East, then Obama and the West need to put up in Libya and the rest of the Arab Spring.
Earlier, I asked the presidential candidates whether liberalism still defines American foreign policy. What kind of leadership do we need now from President Obama and the West? See the New York Times article on President Bush’s decision for the “Surge” in Iraq.
How about a half billion for US infrastructure?
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The following is OT but considering the number of dog threads, especially those where cops kill family pets, and GZ required a firearm to protect himself from a pet, the following is what can happen when officers are trained.
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2014/06/27/arlington-officer-praised-for-rescuing-aggressive-pit-bull/
ARLINGTON (CBSDFW.COM) – An Arlington officer has been cast into the spotlight after coming to the aid of a pit bull deemed “aggressive” and “vicious” by residents.
Arlington Police Sergeant Gary Carter, responding to an unrelated alarm, was notified of a “pit bull” following and chasing neighbors around.
“This dog is so vicious, please get him,” said one resident.
But after Sgt. Carter and Patrol Officer Heather Gibson observed the dog’s behavior, they determined that something else was wrong. In reality, the dog was just thirsty and lost.
The two officers coaxed the animal into their patrol car with a protein bar as they attempted to locate the owner.
“This is exactly the type of compassion we love to see our employees exhibit and credit their good judgment and our significant investment that our organization has made in providing training to officers on how to deal with dogs,” said Arlington Police Chief Will D. Johnson.
The department recently instituted mandatory training for officers. The goal of the training was to “bolster our existing training protocols and assist officers in identifying the differences between aggressive and non-aggressive dogs,” according to police.
Bettykath, I restored your comment at 2:56.
jonathanturley: “As both Iraq and Afghanistan meltdown after spending $4 trillion and losing thousands of lives, the Obama Administration wants to pour $500 million into training and equipping the Syrian rebels.”
President Obama’s approach has been sabotaged from go by the fundamentally flawed premise that a liberal internationalist approach to current events in the Middle East can be attempted sans sufficient investment in the basic element of security. Securing the peace is necessary to win a war, and securing the peace normally takes a lot longer than the war.
Security is the necessary condition for the various developmental areas of building the peace, liberal or otherwise, anywhere, not just in the Middle East. Sufficient security for the kind of conditions versus the kind of enemy confronting us over there demands – with respect to my Naval and Air Force brethren – boots on the ground. (To be fair, Navy and Air Force, even Coast Guard I believe, have placed their share of boots on the ground, too.)
Whatever the errors of application that demanded correction, which is normal in our military history, President Bush’s approach was fundamentally correct. Recall military historian T.R. Fehrenbach’s famous quote, “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men in the mud.”
Like President Eisenhower stayed the course from President Truman, despite the controversy surrounding Truman’s decisions, Obama should have stayed the course from Bush in order to build on the gains earned at high cost during the Bush administration. But Obama believed he could do it better than Bush by going a different way – Obama has been proven wrong. Because Obama decided to deviate from Bush’s fundamentally correct course, we’ve lost the hard-won, expensive progress made under Bush. The Iraqi people most of all are paying the penalty for Obama’s fundamental error. We’re all going to pay for it.
I question how the cost of OIF and OEF is computed compared to far bloodier wars and much lengthier post-war peace operations in our military history, but setting aside the accounting issue, my take is much of the early ‘reconstruction’ money spent was wasted because it was spent outside of a working methodological peace-building framework. In Iraq, we eventually developed the right peace-building method with the GEN Petraeus-led Counterinsurgency, and the turnaround in Iraq that followed was surprisingly rapid.
The analogy is parenting. The US role in the post-war peace operations has been parental. Like raising actual children, lavish gifts and a bottomless debit card can’t replacing proper parenting in a safe home. A safe home is even more important in an unsafe neighborhood with bad kids. Proper nation-building, like proper parenting, isn’t cheap either, but it’s not as expensive as giving stuff to your kids in place of hands-on parenting.
One problem is we left Iraq while our ‘parenting’ was still needed within Iraq. The larger problem is we took away the necessary security when we left Iraq in a neighborhood that already unsafe but also rapidly growing more dangerous. Again, the necessary condition for the various developmental areas of building the peace, in the short and long term, is security.
In America’s military history, we’ve routinely failed and made errors in war and post-war, but the fundamental thing we got right was to persist in providing security. That one thing has allowed us to work our way through failure and error in order eventually to secure the peace. Obama broke with his heritage as Commander in Chief of the leader of the free world by withdrawing our boots on the ground. The expected tragic consequences of Obama’s fundamental error have followed.
Barkin ~
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
George Bernard Shaw
paulette – Shaw also said that women were like rugs and should be beaten regularly.
Well we can not be soft on terrorists. We could not be soft on communists like in Vietnam, and Korea. We could not be soft on Nazis. In Germany they had the same thing happen– a 9/11 event. Theirs might have been contrived. Goering said after the war when he was in prison at Nuremburg that he set the fire. The Reichstag Fire in 1933. That was when von Hindenburg issued the Reichstag Fire Decree. All civil liberties were suspended because the communists burned the Reichstag (German Parliament). The rest is history. History repeats itself. Some of those military industrial complex folks must have immigrated over to America after WWII. Ike warned us about them on his last day in office. Too bad that nobody listened. Maybe someday we will see the truth behind the 9/11 attacks. All that being said, if we can spend a half billion in the Middle East to keep some Saudis from getting on commercial airplanes with box cutters then it will be money well spent. Seig Heil.
And can someone explain the Russian hysteria? Having exactly seen countries falling one by one behind a new iron curtain of their choosing. If you look at it from the other way though… Going to the ocean this weekend, and I don’t want Putin to sneak up on me while I’m down there.
I think Annie summed it up pretty well. There is no “right side” here. We need to stay out and let them figure it out. Like we did in the 1860s. The countries that are there now are just phony western lines drawn in at the end of WWI. That part of the world is reverting to what it used to be, and it’s a no-win situation for us if we get involved. Although the arms guys have the perfect storm–they get to sell weapons to both sides!
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/rand-paul-dick-cheney-exploited-911-iraq-halliburton
Rand Paul says Dick Cheney pushed for the Iraq war so Halliurton would profit. Take it up with Rand Paul, Paul. 🙂
Annie – I rarely agree with Rand Paul.
That’s neither here nor there Paul. There are many Glibertrians that do. What he says will influence the way they vote and feel about our entanglements into foreign wars.
Annie – I am more concerned with my candidate, Mickey Mouse. His take on foreign affairs is what guides me.
randyjet – we have e-verify here and we enforce it. However, Latino groups are suing to stop the enforcement.
CIA trained Bin Laden
The IDEA was to seize Iraq’s oil. It surely didn’t work out that way, did it? Halliburton subsidiaries did well in Iraq however, thanks to Cheney. I recall hearing about the troops being electrocuted in the showers and getting skin sores due to dirty water because of shoddy practices by contractors.
annie, even worse, Halliburton is IMMUNE from being sued for their deaths. A gift from the GOP who supposedly support our GIs, unless they get in the way of high profits to the GOP donors.
It is funny that the GOP in Texas is against illegal immigrants, but when they were asked to pass a bill mandating E-Verfiy for all Texas employers, they refused to even let the bill come to the floor for a vote because the biggest contributor,Robert Perry, was a homebuilder whose labor force was mainly illegals! Only GOPers are stupid enough follow such hypocrites.
Annie – Cheney was long out of Halliburton.
I disagree that Obama always wants war and never chooses diplomacy.
He let Russia handle Syria after they used chemical WMD. Russia. Which invaded Georgia and took the Crimean Peninsula. He told Russia to please dispose of Syria’s chemical WMD. Gee. I wonder if that’s going to come back to bite us?
Karen Show us how Russia is one of our greatest security threats. Think we should attack Russia for acting in its interest on its borders? Think that when the local fools decide to ethnically cleanse Russians in those places, we should support those governments and attack Russia? You also forget that is was IRAQ which demanded US troops leave. So please tell us how Romney was right. Think that we should have overthrown Maliki, or let our troops be subject to Sharia courts in Iraq? Those were the only two options.
As for government making bad venture capitalists, I see that you know little US history since the government has been a venture capitalist from the beginning. Ever hear of the National Road that was the First venture capitalist project after the Constitution was adopted. Or maybe you forget about the government run and owned hospitals that were established for US merchant sailors. Then we have all the massive hydroelectric projects that the US still owns and operates. Or you have forgotten about ComSat, and all the other space projects and the fact that most medical research is government funded and operated.
I live in Texas where in San Antonio and Austin, the electric companies are owned by the local government which makes their power bills HALF of what I pay in Houston. Then in San Antonio, CIS, contributes over 25% of the city budgets as well. So please tell all those folks how they are getting screwed and need capitalists to take over and double their power bills and get rid of the contributions to the city budget. GET REAL!
Is this the old adage keep your friends close but your enemy’s closer?
Bruce:
Romney was ridiculed for saying that Russia posed one of the biggest security threats.
He was right.
He was ridiculed for saying a troop withdrawal from Iraq was premature, and we would lose all we’d gained.
He was right.
He said the government makes a bad venture capitalist.
He was right (as almost all green energy companies the government invested in went bankrupt and was guilty of currying favor and special deals)