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Tomgram: David Vine, A Permanent Infrastructure for Permanent War | TomDispatch
Tomgram: David Vine, A Permanent Infrastructure for Permanent War | TomDispatch.
In a September address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Barack Obamaspoke forcefully about the “cycle of conflict” in the Middle East, about “violence within Muslim communities that has become the source of so much human misery.” The president was adamant: “It is time to acknowledge the destruction wrought by proxy wars and terror campaigns between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East.” Then with hardly a pause, he went on to promote his own proxy wars (including the backing of Syrian rebels and Iraqi forces against the Islamic State), as though Washington’s military escapades in the region hadn’t stoked sectarian tensions and been high-performance engines for “human misery.”
Not surprisingly, the president left a lot out of his regional wrap-up. On the subject of proxies, Iraqi troops and small numbers of Syrian rebels have hardly been alone in receiving American military support. Yet few in our world have paid much attention to everything Washington has done to keep the region awash in weaponry.
Since mid-year, for example, the State Department and the Pentagon have helped pave the way for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) launchers and associated equipment and to spend billions more on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles; for Lebanon to purchase nearly $200 million in Huey helicopters and supporting gear; for Turkey to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of AIM-120C-7 AMRAAM (Air-to-Air) missiles; and for Israel to stock up on half a billion dollars worth of AIM-9X Sidewinder (air-to-air) missiles; not to mention other deals to aid the militaries of Egypt, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
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US-China Relations: The Danger of Strategic Misjudgment | The Diplomat
US-China Relations: The Danger of Strategic Misjudgment | The Diplomat.
President Obama will head to Beijing in the coming days to attend the annual APEC summit on November 10 and 11. But perhaps the more important event on his agenda is the whole day meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on November 12. Compared to Obama’s first state visit to China in 2009, and the two leaders’ meeting in Sunnylands, California last year, both of which drew the world’s media focus, this meeting has not accumulated the same hype. The importance of this year’s summit has been diminished in the light of President Obama’s weakened domestic political leverage.
President Obama left Washington with the bad news that his Democratic Party had lost control of the U.S. Senate to the Republicans in the mid-term elections. With the result of the elections and the lower approval rating for his policies, it has become apparent that Mr. Obama is a lame duck president going into his final two years in office. Next year will bring the start of the 2016 presidential election cycle, and the current presidency will become even less of a focus. There is a sharp contrast between President Obama and his Chinese contemporary when it comes to domestic politics. Mr. Xi continues to accumulate more power and influence within China as he uses his anti-corruption campaign as a tool to further strengthen his power base. Additionally, Mr. Xi is conducting major reforms with the ambitious plan to further change China and his party.
For both President Obama and President Xi, the upcoming meeting on November 12 will be mainly focused on the immediate future, with the hopes of creating a mechanism to set the tone for smoother relations between the U.S. and China while Obama finishes his term in office.
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Former CBS Reporter Accuses Government of Secretly Planting Classified Docs on Her Computer | Liberty Blitzkrieg
Attkisson speculated on how the Nixon controversy would have been handled in a world filled with today’s television and social media obsessions.
“Nixon would basically refuse to turn over tapes to Congress, his aides would refuse to testify to Congress or would take the Fifth or would lie to Congress with fair amount of impunity,” she said. “Woodward and Bernstein would be controversialized on social media by special and political interests. … Then at the end Nixon would go on a popular late-night comedy show, during which time he would humorously refer to his attackers as people who were political witch-hunters who believed in Area 51-type conspiracy theories.”
– From the Huffington Post article: Sharyl Attkisson Says Journalists Have ‘Gone Backwards’ Since Watergate Scandal
In case you forgot, Sharyl Attkisson is the former CBS News reporter who resigned from the network in March after expressing frustration that her stories covering the Obama Administration’s role in the Benghazi and Fast and Furious scandals were being spiked due to a desire to protect the President.
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White House Presses States to Reconsider Mandatory Ebola Quarantine Orders – NYTimes.com
White House Presses States to Reconsider Mandatory Ebola Quarantine Orders – NYTimes.com.
The Obama administration has expressed deep concerns to the governors of New York and New Jersey and is consulting with them to modify their orders to quarantine medical volunteers returning from West Africa as President Obama seeks to quickly develop a new, nationwide policy for the workers, according to two senior administration officials.
One administration official said the federal government has been pressing the governors to back off their decisions, which quarantine all medical workers who had contact with Ebola patients. But another official said the administration has not specifically asked the governors to reverse their policies.
Mr. Obama held a meeting with his top advisers at the White House on Sunday as officials work to craft a policy that reassures Americans that they are protected from the virus while following the guidance of the government’s scientific advisers. Officials said that policy will be ready in days and that the government would urge all states to follow it.
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The Pentagon Will Use 30 Person “Quick-Strike Team” To Deal With Domestic Ebola Patients | Zero Hedge
President Obama may have been busy golfing this weekend, and his brand new Ebola Czar may have had more pressing matters to attend than the White House’s Saturday evening meeting on the US “response to domestic Ebola cases” (because clearly the Ebola Czar is superfluous at such Ebola-related events), but that doesn’t mean that the administration will once again be caught with its pants down the next time an Ebola index patient is unveiled on US soil. Nope.
In taking a page right out of America’s response to the Ebola pandemic in… West Africa, where the US has dispatched several thousands troops to do, something, unclear what, earlier today, it was revealed that the U.S. military is forming a 30-person “quick-strike team”, which according to CNN is “equipped to provide direct treatment to Ebola patients inside the United States, a Defense Department official told CNN’s Barbara Starr on Sunday.”
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, Seven Bad Endings to the New War in the Middle East | TomDispatch.
It was May 23, 2012, and President Obama was giving a graduation speech at the Air Force Academy when he told the assembled cadets that they should “never bet against the United States of America… [because] the United States has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world affairs.” On that basis, he suggested, the twenty-first century, like the twentieth, would be an American one. Then, on October 23, 2012, in the final presidential debate with Mitt Romney, he reiterated the point, saying: “America remains the one indispensable nation, and the world needs a strong America, and it is stronger now than when I came into office.”
That phrase, “the indispensable nation,” is of relatively recent coinage, but it is now seemingly an indispensable word for any American politician and so it’s not surprising that the president continues to cling tightly to it. On May 28, 2014, for instance, giving another commencement speech, this time at West Point, he once again went for that indispensable rhetorical jugular. “And when a typhoon hits the Philippines,” he assured the cadets, “or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help. So the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.” (Of course, to this day those schoolgirls remain kidnapped and there are still masked men in buildings in Eastern Ukraine, but those are small points indeed.) On August 26th, Obama returned to the theme, speaking to the national convention of the American Legion. “No nation,” he told the assembled veterans ringingly, “does more to help people in the far corners of the Earth escape poverty and hunger and disease, and realize their dignity. Even countries that criticize us, when the chips are down and they need help, they know who to call — they call us. That’s what American leadership looks like. That’s why the United States is and will remain the one indispensable nation in the world.”
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EITHER YOU’RE THE BUTCHER OR YOU’RE THE CATTLE « The Burning Platform
EITHER YOU’RE THE BUTCHER OR YOU’RE THE CATTLE « The Burning Platform.
I know many people have no interest in watching the boob tube because 99% of the programming is either mindless drivel or government sanctioned propaganda. It’s the 1% that reflects the deeper themes and moods engulfing our society. Television shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead reflect the darkening mood of this intensifying Fourth Turning. I wrote one of my more pessimistic articles called Welcome to Terminus in April regarding the season four finale of the Walking Dead series. I essentially argued we are approaching the end of the line and the world is going to get real nasty.
In the six short months since I wrote that depressing article, we’ve seen men beheaded on Youtube videos by terrorists no one had ever heard of at the beginning of this year. Somehow a ragtag band of 30,000 Muslim terrorists, using American military equipment supplied to fight Assad in Syria and taken from the Iraqi Army when they turned tail and ran away, have been able to defeat 600,000 Iraqi and Kurd fighters with air support from the vaunted U.S. Air Force. Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan descend into never ending religious based warfare. We’ve even had passenger planes mysteriously disappear in Asia with no trace.
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