Is Gates gonna be the one to convince Obama and the warmongers that Afghanistan was a bad bet and we need to fold?

He definitely seems to be a realist/internationalist, which to wingnuts, means he’s completely off the reservation and probably a closet terror-lover.

Some one who actually respects the military knows how damaging dilletantes playing soldiers are to them, and to the country.

Those mass graves in Central America are a testament to Reagan’s discretion. Different tactics, same death.

But…but…the contras were freedom fighters!

[/wingnut]

Well then, how did he get chosen by the wingnuttiest administration evah?

If not to pretend to be Reagan, what was the point of Decider Bush having a fake ranch? It’s not like he could just put on a flight suit to do that.

Because he was Poppy’s choice to clean up Chimpy’s mess.

Soviet surrogates soon faced their own lethal insurgencies.

None of those murderous proxy wars would have been necessary if we’d only realized we had Beatle Power…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8232235.stm

It’s not just a flight suit. It’s a Decider Suit.

Well, we had Beetle Bailey in the Oval Office.

I actually think Reagan’s fake ranch was more authentic than W’s. Reagan at least had horses on his “ranch.”

Bob Gates, you say?

Could anyone be worse than Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary? Well, how about an old Bush Family factotum who was hip-deep in the Iran-Contra arms-drugs-terror scam, who doctored, spun and manipulated intelligence for partisan purposes and also steered secret U.S. military intelligence to help Saddam Hussein launch WMD attacks?

Still, nothing that would stop Obama from keeping Gates in his job. Indeed, from “commanding considerable respect” (NYT).

Gates reflects far more poorly on Obama at this point than he does on W.

Yet another example of Decider Bush slacking off.

Brush ranching is hard work. Brush doesn’t just grow itself, you know. It needs lots of tendin’

But, but, mission accomplished damit!!

Good thing Cheney was running things since Decider Bush had to bring in the brush harvest.

From what little I’ve heard about Gates, he’s a rabid self-promoter. So any decision he makes should be looked at from the POV of what good it does him.

Hey, I resemble that.

That sounds about right.

Yes, it is also very fortunate that the brush harvest is in August when Congress is in recess.

Define RR freedom fighters…those fighting freedom, or just following orders.

now see, that-Gates- being one of Bush srs people is one reason that I liked Bush Sr as president. 1-he was a realist, he said “read my lips, no new taxes”, but when confronted with reality, he raised taxes(Reagan also raised taxes, but because that doesn’t fit the legand, it is never mentioned)2-He was a realist in foreign policy. His response to Iraq invading Kuwait was excellent. He managed to put together a massive multi country coalition, which even had several arab states and won GWI without all the problems that shrub had in GWII(Iraq invasion, the neocon wetdream)
And I liked Bush Sr because he was a moderate(to me anyway) republician, who had adults running the govt-and who brought in adults to attempt to bail out gwb.
Bush sr is an internationalist, much traveled and known personally to many world leaders, shrub was in way over his head from day 1, which could be why he tried running the US just like he did Tx when he was the gov(not even the most powerful political job in Texas) Gov really only has a couple of powers, he can call the ledge back into session anytime and set the agenda and he can name people to state boards and commissions. Other than that, well he can just glad hand people.(actually I don’t think that the Tx gov has any other powers) Can he even set the budget? Isn’t that one of the Tx Speakers jobs?(speaker of the house)is, IMO, the most powerful political job in Tx. Followed by the Lt Gov, who, if I read the Tx constitution correctly(and I could be wrong, the Tx constitutiuon is the biggest clusterfuk in the entire damn state)is the 2nd most powerful pol in Tx.

Thank-you Ronald Reagan for keeping America safe from Grenada. If not for your courage, we might all be speaking Grenadine.

It’s important, every few years, to pick some really small country, slam them up against the wall, and beat the crap out of them. Just to show the world we’re tough.

[/Pantload]

Or drinking Grenadine.

I have difficulty placing value on any decision emerging from the family Bush. Gates included.

shorter W:

‘grip it and rip it. now, watch this drive.’

I predicted before Dubya took office that within two years he would use the military to stomp some third world country to prove he had big cojones like his old man. In retrospect, that might have been preferable to what actually happened.

If you like 41, and you like conspriacy theories, you’ll love Family of Secrets, which argues that 41 was a CIA agent for all the time after he graduated from Yale. Among other wild & woolly tales.

oh yea, and Obama is going to sink 100,000 into the dust of Afghanistan, because alqaida is in Somalia and Yemen. Whoopee!

Maybe back when it was made from fruit. Nowadays most of it is just high-fructose corn syrup. Mmmm-mmm good!

His response to Iraq invading Kuwait was excellent.

“We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

–April Glaspie

Mostly a coloring agent, isn’t it? I own a bottle but have never used it. It must be 3 decades old.

His response to Iraq invading Kuwait was excellent.

That’s highly debatable since we’ve been at war with Iraq almost non-stop since 1991.

And of course a few years before that we were arming them to the teeth to fight Iran…

Apparently it is also used for flavor. From wiki:

The characteristic flavor can be obtained from a mixture of blackcurrant juice and other fruit juices with the blackcurrant flavor dominating.

Ask the Kurds how swell Bush I was.

It is not really a flightsuit. He has on an inflatable vest over a jacket over a regular shirt.

Thanks.

Saw a clever ad on the NYC subway yesterday. The tag line was: Google does not have all the answers. It was an ad for a church.

Hereare yet more godamn lies to help get us into yet one more fucking war so that the MIC can keep killing people and making arms. Just the kind of thing the idiots in power in America want to have happen. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Obama, they are all the fucking same.

The Israeli military on Wednesday released documents and photos it said proved Iran was behind a huge shipment of weapons Israeli navy commandos intercepted last week.

Great bumper sticker today, shape of the oval European country tags: WTF. I love understated jokes that whiz by those not paying attention…

At the time I believed Bush could have easily prevented Saddam from invading Kuwait. Saddam had made his intentions clear and the ramping up process was slow and deliberate. The Bush admin sat on it’s hands. Perhaps they expressed disapproval in private but gave no indication we would support Kuwait.

In retrospect I think Kuwait’s oil revenue would have greatly exceeded what Saddam was receiving from U.S. patronage, so we didn’t have much leverage. Without a strong prior indication by Bush that we intended to defend Kuwait militarily the temptation was probably too great for him to resist.

Here is one that they won’t be touting.
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2009/11/2009111091058657517.html

Heh. The best vanity license plate I ever saw was: LXIX.

Kuwait was apparently pilfering Iraq’s oil, so Iraq had good reason to attack them. I’ve read that Bush I had been planning an invasion of Cuba before the Kuwait situation presented itself, but I’m not sure that’s true.

Slant drilling under the border. Kuwait was a province of Iraq in earlier times, until colonization fucked up borders.

Yes. IIRC Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraq’s oil fields.

In any event, that ten billion per year spent during the ’90s to contain Saddam seems like a real bargain now.

Emptywheel has a fresh cross-post up: “Crazy Pete Hoekstra Is a Big Fat* Demogoging Liar”

No indeed and they can be certain that it will be nowhere in the American news media.

I’m sure that the first words uttered by those hearing the warning sirens in Sderot are “Here comes another fucking lie”.

To be fair, Ronald Reagan was no Ronald Reagan either. “Circumspect about putting or keeping America’s troops and America’s credibility at risk without a clear mission or strong odds of success?” Reagan? He wasn’t so much circumspect as asleep. Check the list:

* Libya: I have heard former service members who were there say that Reagan’s deliberate and pointless provocation of Libya in the Gulf of Sirte brought us closer to catastrophic losses than has ever been admitted–luck saved a carrier.

* Lebanon: Reagan’s intervention in Lebanon cost catastrophic losses in the Marine barracks bombing, encouraged Reagan’s proteges, the Lebanese fascists, into a suicidal confrontation with Syria, implicated us in the worst excesses of the Israeli ultra right and ultimately resulted in outright defeat–a Lebanon dominated by Syria and Hezbollah.

* Soviet Union: Reagan flirted with nuclear disaster by sending ships and submarines to provoke the Soviets in the approaches to the Soviet Arctic. Members of his administration talked glibly about nuclear first strikes and winning nuclear wars by living in buried automobiles. He did perhaps permanent damage to arms control agreements by pursuing a Star Wars program that was a fraud from the start and by committing to a massive arms escalation that stoked fears, enriched contractors, and never produced useful weapons.

* Afghanistan: Reagan invented Al Qaeda and the Taliban in order to harass the Soviets in Afghanistan, while brushing aside warnings about the danger both groups posed to America.

* Pakistan: Reagan’s administration scuttled the nuclear proliferation treaty by turning a blind eye to the Pakistani nuclear program, all because harassing the Soviets in Afghanistan was deemed more important.

* Iran: Iran-Contra. The cake, the Bible, and the Colt .45 revolver? Need I say more?

* Central America: Reagan waged secret wars with Saudi money in defiance of Congress, permanently blackening our reputation in Latin America and giving further impetus to the forces that produced 9/11.

I could go on. But the bottom line is that Reagan was just Bush without control of both houses of Congress. He had the same intent, just not the same opportunity.

This blind and/or dishonest Reaganolatry shows why Gates should have been banished from public life long ago.

Yeah, there’s a lot of demand for it these days. Got Credit Default Swaps to cover it? Heh.

I think Gates is respected as someone who can carry out policy as needed and both Repubs and Dems need dept chiefs who can do that.

Just because our pols are a disgracce is no reason to believe Iraqi pols.

The claim that Kuwait was part of Iraq was politically convenient to Sadaam, but true only to the extent that the Ottoman Empire lumped Kuwait together with Iraq for administrative convenience, claiming to rule it from Basra. Until the Ottomans asserted themselves at the end of the 19th century, the claim had little connection with reality. Kuwait had a distinct existence in the 17th century and an independent government–already allied with Britain–from the 18th century on.

In fact, if we take Ottoman colonial boundaries as our standard, then Iraq was itself part of Turkey with arguably less claim to an independent, pre-colonial existence than Kuwait. Iraq was soley defined by arbitrary Ottoman and subsequently British colonial boundaries that did not delineate any culturally or ethnicly unified group. This is why Iraq’s territory covers distinct Sunni-Kurdish, Sunni-Arab, and Shiite-Arab areas, each with counterparts in neighboring countries (Turkish and Iranian Kurdistan and Iranian Arabistan).

Alleged slant drilling was one of Sadaam’s complaints. But he also disputed the modern border and argued that Kuwait owed Iraq for protection from Iran and for undercutting the cartel oil price. All such claims are debatable, to say the least.

Sadaam’s claims were hardly unique and seem to be part and parcel of the way land and power grabs are made in the Arabian peninsula. The first Kuwait crisis back in the 1960s involved Saudi Arabia as the agressor. Again, the attack was justified by claimed but ill-defined Ottoman-era borders and “stolen” oil fields. British intervention settled matters.

I was about to post about Reagan and us getting our Marine barracks blown up in Beirut, but you reminded me about Reagan and his attitude about “Limited Nuclear War,” a wacko theory that a “shot across the bow” would be enough to prevent further hostilities.
Oh, and all ya hadda do to protect yourself from a nuclear blast “Hey, just dig a hole, throw a few doors on top, put some dirt on it and wait until the fires burn out. You’ll be fine!”

Well, now, just a second. I’m sure that Bush’s ranch had a cow or two on it. Remember that W spent his whole time clearing brush, not fixing fence, and the neighbors would have been glad to take advantage of all that pasture that grew up where the brush used to be. A few snips with the wire cutters and Voila! the cows have somewhere else to go.