The price of powerlessness
This week Russian bombers flew out of Iranian air bases
to attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended not
to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely
nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to
operate from its soil. Until now.
The
reordering of the Middle East is proceeding apace. Where for 40 years
the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the region, a Russia-Iran condominium
is now dictating events. That’s what you get after eight years of U.S.
retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from the nuclear deal
with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on Syria.
Consider:
● Iran
The
nuclear deal was supposed to begin a rapprochement between Washington
and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a strategic-military alliance
between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of sanctions and the
normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed in with
major deals, including the shipment of S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.
● Iraq
These
bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace. Before President Obama’s withdrawal
from Iraq, that could not have happened. The resulting vacuum has not
only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it has gradually allowed a
hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit. According to a
Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite militia fighters operating inside Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.
● Syria
When Russia dramatically intervened last year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smugly predicted
that Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar
al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized
the upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of
state is running around trying to sue for peace, offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only Putin will promise to conquer gently.
Consider
what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very weak hand — a rump Russian state,
shorn of empire and saddled with a backward economy and a rusting
military — he has restored Russia to great-power status. Reduced to
irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.
In
Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn the map. His annexation of
Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager to throw off the
few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape of eastern
Ukraine continues.
Ten thousand have already died
and now Putin is threatening even more open warfare. Under the absurd
pretext of Ukrainian terrorism in Crimea (reminiscent of Hitler’s claim
that he invaded Poland in response to a Polish border incursion), Putin
has threatened retaliation, massed troops in eight locations
on the Ukrainian border, ordered Black Sea naval exercises and moved
advanced anti-aircraft batteries into Crimea, giving Moscow control over
much of Ukrainian airspace.
Unlucky R Us.
The people running Washington DC now are nothing more than social criminal’s compared to the way our country's forefather intended for the US Republic to be run. So I keep seeing Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, as only a sorry reflection of how they should be performing in this country's three branches of Government today.
Just like the Golden Age of American popular music in mid early twenty century that sounds just as good to me now, as it was popular then. Like Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington, that still lingers after all those years. Because the quality of their music was simply the height of human accomplishment in creating songs for us to hear.
On the other-hand the music being played now doesn't have the same high class artistry that this world population had back then today. So I play the old songs whenever I can as I try to ignore this racket these so called musicians keep playing now, by the music makers in their own mind.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynEOo28lsbc
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