Posted on 09/28/2009 4:24:41 AM PDT by Loyal Buckeye
Edited on 09/28/2009 4:48:29 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
For President Barack Obama, last week was rather like a major exam on his skills as a diplomat and architect of foreign policy. In his debut at the United Nations and as host to the G-20 economic powers in Pittsburgh, Obama was given more scrutiny by foreign leaders and domestic constituencies than at any other time in his first year in office.
(Excerpt) Read more at dispatch.com ...
First let me finish barfing.
Hey David, you have something on your chin.
Hillary Clinton is the most inappropriate Secretary of State since Cyrus Vance. She has absolutely no qualifications for the office.
She was first lady.
Because of that, and that alone, she got the opportunity to run for US Senator in NY state.
She served for a relatively short time as a US Senator, having stood for re-election once.
Then she ran for POTUS and lost.
Immediately upon that failed campaign, she was named Secretary of State.
She owes it all simply to the fact that her husband was POTUS. If her husband had not been POTUS she could not have been elected District Attorney in any county in the country.
Gates is no damn good. Never has been. Never will be. He’s an Ayatollah-Hugger and a Panda-Hugger. An unfortunately rather typical Bush appointee who fits right in with the Obamanistas. That tells us all we need to know.
David S. Broder writes for the WaPo, so what else would you expect?
What planet is he living on? It’s not Earth.
The problem is that the foreign policy of appeasement isn’t immediately measurable. It will take years, perhaps a decade until this turns around to bite us hard.
Speechless.
“There were no historic breakthroughs but, as far as we know, there also were no gaffes — at least in part because of his ability to find the right words to make his points without offending others.”
Let me summarize. Obama didn’t appear to screw up too. So he did OK. As long as Obama can, metaphorically, jump over a speed bump, some folks are happy.
That’s Obama. Able to leap speed bumps at a single bound.
So, announcing that you're letting the Poles twist in the wind on the anniversay of the Soviet co-invasion is skilled? Oh, I see, I guess it depends what your goals are.
And this is the “Dean of Washington correspondents”! How fitting and how sad.
LLS
Gates certainly exceeded the abilities of his predecessor who refused to acknowledge the need for the surge in Iraq. Gates signed off on it.
Really? that's apparently not saying much for Congress then. Judging by the obama administration's evident foreign policy (if you could call it that) to date... well, I'm not sure they have one. At least, not one that goes much beyond appeasement. Seriously, "Lets make everyone happy, lets have everyone like us." is not a foreign policy. It is what naive teenagers try in middle school and high school before they learn the cold hard truth. Not everyone is going to like you, not everyone is going to be your friend. In fact, some people are just mean, some people have their own self-centered agenda and are going to try to do you harm. That life lesson maps to international relations fairly well.
The irony is that she has more experience in government than the guy who is calling the shots ! Go figger?
Gates is a pansy who is preparing for a massive white flag to be waved on behalf of our Nation.
Rumsfeld would never do that, neither would Gates mentor, the late William J. Casey, Reagan’s DCI.
David Broder, the 2 Toms, Brokjaw & Friedman and 90%+ of the rest of bigheaded pundits are examples of aholes that deserved nothing but derision for everything they have written, they are nothing more than propagadist and boldfaced LIARS!
See, “Dances with Despots” staring Barack Obama!
“we now have a President of the United States whose most avid plaudits come from two-bit, tin-horn Marxist dictators who have spent their entire adult lives imprisoning, murdering, and maiming their enslaved minions.
And to make matters worse, that President – Barack “Sorry-to-be-an-American” Obama – is in lockstep agreement with all of what Castro says and much of what Castro does. How do we know that? Well, let’s look at the record.
In August of this year, Obama delivered a 53-minute medley of his favorite apologies to what amounted to a pep rally for Latin American dictators. Included among his supine we-a culpas was this gem in reference to the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion: “I’m grateful that President Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old.”
Well, so much for the brave Cuban freedom fighters who died at the Bay of Pigs vainly attempting to rescue their country from the bloodied hands of Fidel Castro. So much for JFK’s declaration that “We will support any friend and oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” And so much for the truth: Barack Obama wasn’t even born when the invasion occurred.
As if to make sure his amigo bueno Fidel got the bouquet, Obama then proceeded to pull the plug on the highly popular “Freedom Message” ticker on the US mission building in Havana. Twenty-five feet long, its bright red letters emblazoned in the sky, the ticker’s inspiring words of encouragement from democratic leaders like Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, and Lech Walesa had served as a beacon of hope for the Cuban people. But, alas, that was clearly not the kind of “hope” Barack Obama intended to foster.
No wonder, then, Obama felt compelled to warmly embrace the Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez at the same Latin America Despots Dance at which he cuddled up to Danny and Fidel. In return, Chavez lauded Obama as “more of a Marxist than Fidel and me.” He enthused that “the changes that started in Venezuela in the last decade of the 20th century have begun to reach North America.” And he warned his compadre Barack not to go too fast in socializing the US lest he create a backlash.
Obama, for his part – ever the faithful amigo intimo ¬– repaid Chavez loyalty first by appointing Arturo Valenzuela as the Obama Administration’s “Western Hemisphere Czar.” Sr. Valenzuela, it should be noted, considers Chavez one of the history’s greatest Latin American leaders. He has even gone so far as to praise Chavez’ crackdown on Venezuela’s formerly free press.
Not content with putting Hugo’s good buddy in charge of everything Latino, Obama added injury to insult by appointing Chavez’ lickspittle Mark Lloyd as the Federal Communications Commission’s “Diversity Officer.” Not only does Mr. Lloyd agree with Mr. Valenzuela that Venezuela’s free press was an anathema, he has even gone so far as to praise Chavez for his “incredible revolution” that gutted the country’s democratic institutions top to bottom.
So, it’s little wonder that we now have “a President of the United States whose most avid plaudits come from two-bit, tin-horn Marxist dictators who have spent their entire adult lives imprisoning, murdering, and maiming their own people” kowtowing to like-minded despots at every opportunity. And creating opportunities where none exist.
Which, of course, is exactly what he did in the UN speech that won Castro’s praise. In essentially apologizing (once again) for all things American and declaring that “rich nations have a particular responsibility to lead” in de-industrializing the world, Obama has shown (once again) that he can tout Marxist dogma with the best (no, make that the worst) of them.
It is, of course, the “rich” nations that gave the world such onerous commodities as electricity, transportation, modern communications, and advanced medicine. Not to mention food, potable water, the clothes on our backs, and the roofs over our heads. And it is the rich nations of the world that brought hope from despair, light from darkness, and dreams of a better tomorrow to the nightmarish lives of hundreds of millions of Third World minions.
That’s the message the President of the United States should have delivered to the Two-Bit Tyrants of Turtle Bay, who huddle in the lap of luxury to denigrate democracy while swilling its largesse. But, unfortunately, it is not what this President of the United States believes. So, he bellows his own bellicose denunciations of all who have labored long and hard to build a better world – while basking in the glow of Fidel Castro’s poisonous approval.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, a posturing, preening Barack Obama piously advised the American people to “Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself.” We are, Mr. Obama. Yes, sadly, we finally are.”
Barack Obama’s Dance with Despots
Written by Carter Clews
http://netrightnation.com/index.php?option=com_tag&tag=Foreign%20Policy&tag_id=315
Wait for it ....islamakazis will prove this presstitute to be just that.
David has finished his cup of Kool Aid and would like a refill.
Rumsfeld is vastly overrated (especially on this forum). If it hadn’t been for Bush’s penchant to protect friends out of a sense of loyalty he would have been gone before the 2004 election and the issues in Iraq would have been resolved much quicker.
How 'bout with the title? If if cut it short, I should be through criticizing about mid November.
When Bush replaced Rumsfeld with Gates, that was a symbol of Bush shifting from the NeoCon doctrine to the Realist/Pragmatist doctrine.
Obama campaigned on the Realist doctrine while McCain campaigned on the NeoCon doctrine. Virtually all of the republican realists endorsed candidate Obama's foreign policy plans or criticized McCain's. Realist Colin Powell even voted for Obama.
It needs to be recognized that Obama is listening to the Realists. His "wise old men" are Kissinger, Scowcroft, Zbig, Baker, and Pickering.
Gates opposed the Surge actually.
I don’t hate Rumsfeld but I do remember his opposition to putting more troops in Iraq. That was the central mistake of the war. My opinion is informed by a 20 year career in the Air Force retiring as a Lt Col. What informs your opinion?
What informs my opinion are plenty of years spent at NAVSEA and NAVAIR, and working in the defense establishment to know what I’m talking about.
I don’t need to wave my resume’ around. I know what I know, and furthermore “I know what I don’t know” (to quote my NAVAIR mentor).
Now, here’s what I know: the fact is, Rumsfeld opposed the original concept of the surge as presented by General Jack Keane (ret), who insisted that the entire liberation of Iraq was going to fail, but had only anecdotal evidence for that assertion. But when the rubber hit the road in a joint meeting between the President, Rumsfeld and his incoming successor (Gates), Rumsfeld was fully on board with the surge and that’s a matter of record according to noneother than Dick Cheney.
One (of many) concerns of Rumsfeld was whether or not the Iraqi government and military would be up to the task of fighting the insurgency as a full partner if and when the surge began, or if they would choose to let our troops do the heavy lifting (and take the heavy casualties), and that is (to his credit) one of Rumsfeld’s strengths, i.e., he was not about to needlessly risk American lives unless the benefits were fully proven and established.
And the bottom line to this is that it was not Rumsfeld who urged that a lighter numerical force of troops be used for the liberation of Iraq, that decision was made by noneother than General Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld deferred to his greater military experience.
So if you’re looking for a boogie man regarding troop levels used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, it’s not Rumsfeld.
The fact that you pointed out that Rumsfeld was onboard with the surge in a joint meeting with the President and his successor makes quite the opposite point you intend. His opposition to deploying more troops during the early stages of the occupation is well documented. His decision to support the new policy while on the way out says nothing more than that he wasn’t going to get in the way of the Presidents new policy by publicly opposing it and embarrasing Bush. Nothing more. Just politics. Rumsfeld was the author of the lighter mobile strategy that he tried to employ after the fall of Saddam. It didn’t work.
Your resume (which you purport not to wave after you do) doesn’t equate with your earlier insulting and childish post
(Gently...carefully...put...down...the...hate-flavored...
antiRumsfeld...KoolAid...the...media...has...been...serving...you.
Now ask yourself this question: who celebrated the loudest when GWB threw Rumsfeld under the bus following the 2006 elections?
Did you answer “liberal, leftist, America-hating ‘Rats” ?
Congratulations. Now ponder that.)
so I might be forgiven for mistaking you for a typical poster who tries to impress with their sarcasm instead of their knowledge. As to your further comment about who celebrated loudest and longest after Rumsfelds resignation it surely was the left but not for the reason you imply. They thought it signalled the defeat of Bush and the US in Iraq. Little did they know it signalled a strategy change which would result in success. Keep defending Rumsfeld if you like but it’s clear the strategy change after his resignation signalled the turn around in Iraq. That’s the way history will record it because that’s the way it happened.
What part of ‘General Tommy Franks recommended the troop levels that were employed for the liberation of Iraq’ (and not Rumsfeld) don’t you understand?
And that ‘lighter mobile strategy’ that you’re peering down at from 50,000 feet is exactly what made it possible for our troops to push forward and capture Baghdad in record time.
George Soros?
Here’s what I do understand about Franks proposal. Civilians (Rumsfeld and the President) get to make the final decision, not the general. So, whether or not Franks proposed, it was Rumsfeld who disposed. Strategy rests with the civilian leadership (one of the few things about our constitution that is still observed) and any succes or failure with regard to that strategy ultimately rests on their shoulders.
Top-notch working for which country?
One other point regarding your little dig about peering down from 50,000 feet on the lighter mobile strategy (a typical and irrelevant insult regarding the Air Force) is that the full military strategy envisioned by Rumsfeld for the defeat of Saddam wasn’t even implemented due to the Turkish govts. refusal to let us invade simultaneously from the North. Turns out it wasn’t even necessary because of the deplorable state of the Iraqi military and the total destruction of the command and control structure of the Iraqi military by (you guessed it) precision strikes and battlefield preparation due to air power from the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. Turns out we did it with even less force than Rumsfeld envisioned.
Back to your childish sarcastic self I see. See ya.
oops, I missed this reply and thought I could shed some light where there is apparently none. The debate really isn’t about the overthrow of Saddam since that was accomplished expeditiously but instead the follow on occupation and the resistance that was totally unexpected by anyone including any of the generals. That’s where Rumsfeld failed by sticking with the notion that we had enough troops in country already. He couldn’t see the problem and refused to address it. That’s his failing and that’s the problem the surge fixed. Rumsfeld gets no credit for that shift in strategy.
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