Antiwar Radio’s Scott Horton will be interviewing Gareth Porter and Michael Hastings for KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles/98.7 Santa Barbara, Friday, July 16 at 5:00 PM Pacific. Listen live here.
Month: July 2010
Ron Paul: Afghanistan Is ‘Obama’s War’
Somalia Spin Could Make You Dizzy
Actually, that seems to be the very point of idiotic statements by none other than the President of the United States, shocking I know, referring to the recent Uganda bombings, such as:
“On the one hand, you have a vision of an Africa on the move, an Africa that is unified, an Africa that is modernising and creating opportunities, and on the other hand, you’ve got a vision of al-Qaeda and al-Shabab that is about destruction and death.”
I wonder what Mr. Obama thinks the “vision” is exactly when Ugandan troops randomly — regrettably imprecisely, our man might say — shell Mogadishu neighborhoods in the general direction of those al-Shabaab crazies and blow up children playing (yes!) soccer. Oh but you see, just like Israel killing 10 times more Palestinians than vice versa, not to mention uncountable-fold Lebanese, the Ugandans have a purity of arms insomuch as that they didn’t intentionally target those inconveniently playful kids that they nonetheless turned into sausage filling.
Telling though, this use of the word “vision” to describe Africa, a place which despite his patrilineage does not help to inform the president as to what daily life could possibly be like there. Obama is reduced to having vague “visions” of the dark continent, which is fine, really, because as long as it serves him really well as a talking point — and it does — then for him it’s all good. And if his boys can call al-Qaeda “racist” while this iron is hot, MAN is that ever for the better! To wit:
An administration official went further, saying that the Ugandan attacks show that “al-Qaeda is a racist organisation that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life”.
It almost justifies the billion or so dollars a minute spent trying to make Afghanistan a Jeffersonian democracy and chase out the literal hovel-full of “al-Qaeda” members, doesn’t it?
No.
And anyway, mentioning al-Qaeda when talking about al-Shabaab is so unbelievably far from the real state of things as to expose the president either as a complete moron incapable of reason or a Machiavellian scumbag befitting the ranks of some of history greatest scoundrels. Oh, haha, I know — YES, UNbelievably. I am indeed shocked all the time by these people despite their past idiocies and transgressions upon civilized decency. But back on track here, al-Shabaab is to al-Qaeda as the FARC is to Marx. The former are inspired by the ideals of the latter. That’s the end of this connection, especially considering as mentioned above and elsewhere by none other than the director of the CIA that Classic “al-Qaeda” numbers maybe 100 men. No, there are no zeros left off of this figure. That’s like a billion bucks per year per bad guy, effectively zero of whom US troops have ever captured or confirmed killed.
Where was I? Oh yes, Obama is a goddamned liar and you should laugh at him until he is mercifully out of office and we no longer have to hear from “progressives” that the war is over despite even more people dying all the damn time.
John Bolton’s “Armed Social Workers”
As part of the continuing discussion of Michael Steele, Judge Andrew Napolitano and Rep. Ron Paul bravely take on former UN Ambassador and AEI senior fellow John Bolton with passion but the winning zinger goes to Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Professor Preble dares to ask why conservatives who opposed nation building under President Clinton now embrace such under President Obama.
Independent Learns The Wrong Lesson on Uganda
This was the Independent‘s lesson from last weekend’s deadly Uganda bombings, which killed some 74 people. It was also decidedly the wrong one, and based on faulty assumptions.
The world has, far from “ignoring” Somalia, been trying to install a series of illegitimate governments there for years, and Uganda has been at the forefront of this recently, contributing the most troops to the African Union’s military adventure into Somalia.
The current government got its start at an outdoor stadium in neighboring Kenya, dubbing themselves the “Transitional National Government” (TNG) of Somalia and behaving to all appearances as a government in exile, albeit a government only in its members’ minds. The history of Somalia for the past several years is a history of several nations trying to shoehorn the TNG into the position of legitimate nation-state, something no one serious believes they can do.
And this attack did not happen in a vacuum but rather came after repeated threats from the Somali militant faction to “retaliate” against Uganda for its many, many attacks on residential neighborhoods under al-Shabaab’s control.
Though one can not but condemn al-Shabaab for taking out its retaliation on innocent civilians, it is also impossible to notice that the Ugandan troops in Somalia have been doing virtually the same thing, responding to ambushes against them by shelling residential neighborhoods, on a regular basis since the troops got there.
In fact since we’re so keen on the soccer aspect of the killings, let us not forget an incident in mid-January, when AU troops responded to an attack on the presidential palace by al-Shabaab by launching artillery shells at a playground in al-Shabaab-held territory a day later, killing seven children who were playing soccer at the time.
It was shortly after this that al-Shabaab started talking about banning soccer, and while the official line on this is that it proves the group’s extremism the reality is that it largely isn’t safe to play soccer in Somalia not because of al-Shabaab but because Ugandan and Burundian troops have declared the right to attack any region under “insurgent” control, which considering the self-proclaimed government owns little more than a few city blocks in Mogadishu, puts virtually the entire civilian population of Somalia directly in the line of fire.
The notion that al-Shabaab launched this attack out of some religious dislike of watching soccer on television is nonsense, and in reality this is as classic an example of blowback for interventionism as there ever has been.
In fact it seems like Somalia could stand a little more ignoring from the outside world, as one can’t help but note that there weren’t any attacks originating from the nation before the “government” got kicked out of their hotel rooms in Kenya and convinced the African Union et al to try to prop them up. Groups like al-Shabaab simply did not exist in Somalia before then, and to the extent that they enjoy any support domestically, it is because they are one of the few groups able to oppose international troops with force of arms.
The Rise of the Monkey Terrorist
Asymmetrical Monkey Warfare to Challenge America’s Dominance of Central Asia.
When Senator Lindsey Graham was calling for the abandonment of the drawdown date for Afghanistan, saying “Gen. Petraeus needs to get this monkey off his back,” he perhaps didn’t realize how literally right he was.
It was perhaps only a matter of time with the advent of the “helper monkey” that there would rise an alternative group on monkeys, less helpful in the main but at least as skilled. Enter the terrorist monkey.
This is literally what officials are calling them. Small central Asian monkeys being allegedly trained to wield AK-47s with deadly precision, the first deadly harbingers of an Islamofascist Monkey Army poised to invade Afghanistan and do battle with the 100,000 US troops there.
It seems difficult to imagine, given the comparatively small size of most of the monkeys of the region, how they will manage to wield the nearly meter-long AK-47 effectively. Less clear still is how many monkeys there are, and if they are being trained to march in lockstep as parts on powerful monkey battalions. They do however seem well suited to provoking fear for the already failing war effort, and provide another excuse when the war is inevitably lost.
The Taliban didn’t beat us, the monkeys did.