Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category
Tuesday, August 20th, 2013
There’s a lot of Egyptian news going on, much of it of the classic Middle East Problem Solving variety. In particular, the Egyptian government seems to be doing most of the “solving,” so expect to see some 50-100 members of the Muslim Brotherhood develop acute lead poisoning every day for the foreseeable future.
Beyond that, I can’t tell you. My knowledge of Egypt is basically that of a one-eyed, myopic man who can at least see shapes in strong sunlight. Here’s an Egypt news roundup in mini-LinkSwarm form.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader is arrested. That’s going to be a big blow to them, and probably indicates the Egyptian military is fairly confident they’ll not only win the current test of wills with the Brothers, but win it decisively.
The Muslim Brotherhood isn’t dead yet, but they are severely weakened. “The army seems determined to decapitate the Middle East’s oldest and arguably most resilient Islamist movement, to prevent it from preparing a political comeback.”
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?
The Coptic Kristallnacht.
Hosni Mubarak has been found innocent and should soon be released. Don’t expect to see him return to power, as the military opposition to his turning the country into a dynastic fiefdom by anointing his son Gamal as his successor is the reason they let him get toppled in the first place.
Egypt’s burning, Obama’s golfing.
Is Obama secretly suspending aid to the Egyptian government? If so, he’s once again superbly crafted a policy to please no one and accomplish nothing.
Thomas Sowell on Obama’s (and America’s) illusions about democratizing the Middle East.
“The President and his team have been taken in by two very old American mistakes about the rest of the world. One is to confuse the end of history with the morning news. The other is to exaggerate America’s importance to the rest of the world. ”
Evidently the rest of the Arab world is pissed at Qatar (and Qatar-owned Al Jazeera) for backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
I’ve been seeing a lot of very dubious reports about Obama secretly giving the Muslim Brotherhood $8 billion. Look, as much as I think Obama is an incompetent failure whose Administration has played footsie with the Brotherhood, I don’t buy this for a minute. Setting aside the why, not even President Trillion can conjure $8 billion from thin air to hand out on his own.
Tags:Al Jazeera, Copts, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Hosni Mubarak, Jihad, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama, Qatar, Thomas Sowell
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Monday, August 19th, 2013
Mark Steyn is always good, but this piece on Egypt is so succinctly pithy that it’s hard to stop quoting from it.
General Sisi has made a calculation that he has a small window of opportunity to inflict damage on the Muslim Brotherhood that will set them back decades and that it is in Egypt’s vital interest to do so. Grasping that, the Brothers are pushing back hard.
And this:
All these parties are pursuing their strategic interest. Does the United States have such a thing anymore? Not so’s you’d notice. As a result, the factions in Egypt are united only in their contempt for Washington. Obama is despised by Sisi and the generals for being fundamentally unserious; by the Brotherhood for stringing along with the coup; by the Copts for standing by as the Brothers take it out on them; and by the small number of genuine democrats in Egypt for his witless promotion of Morsi’s thugs as the dawning of democracy. Any “national-unity government” of the kind the usual deluded twits are urging on Egypt would be united only in its unanimous loathing of Obama, his secretaries of state, and his inept ambassador.
One more:
“[Under Obama] America is harmless as an enemy but treacherous as a friend.”
Read the whole thing.
Tags:Copts, Egypt, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Mark Steyn, Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama
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Friday, August 16th, 2013
Michael Totten has an interview with Egypt expert Eric Trager on the truth about Egypt. Include Western observers deluding themselves about the Muslim Brotherhood. “The Brotherhood prevents moderates from becoming members and prevents members from becoming moderates.”
Also this:
But once the army made the decision to step in, as reluctant as it may have been, it’s modus operandi unquestionably changed. It entered into a direct conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood, perhaps even an existential one. The military believes it not only has to remove Morsi, it has to decapitate the entire organization. Otherwise, the Brotherhood will re-emerge and perhaps kill the generals who removed it from power.
Still more:
MJT: How much support do you think the Muslim Brotherhood actually lost since it won the election?
Eric Trager: It has lost substantial public support. Think back to the early presidential elections in 2012. Morsi only won five million votes, which was 25 percent of the votes cast. That’s not a high number. It’s substantially lower than what the Brotherhood had won just a few months earlier in the parliamentary elections. So already by May 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s support shrunk back to its base which is only around five million people.
The Brotherhood’s power is not derived from mass public support and it never has been. It is derived from its exceptional organization capabilities on one hand, and the fact that the rest of Egypt is deeply divided and highly disorganized on the other. That’s still the case. I think if Egypt had free and fair elections today, the Brotherhood would still do well and might even win because nobody else is prepared to run in an election.
Read the whole thing.
Tags:Egypt, Eric Trager, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Michael Totten, Muslim Brotherhood
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Friday, August 16th, 2013
A Friday LinkSwarm on Friday. Will wonders never cease?
Ted Cruz hails from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.
Speaking of Cruz: “Cruz acquired his citizenship, at birth, through his mother. He is a natural born US citizen and eligible to be President of the United States. Let us never have to speak of this again.”
Victor Davis Hanson does an Obama scandalrama roundup.
A few Democrats appear to be defying the idea that Hillary is unbeatable, just like she was in 2008.
163 Ohio poll workers dismissed for that voting fraud that doesn’t exist.
Teen complains that Facebook just isn’t like it was when they were 7.
Why is Dennis Franz shooting Martin Luther King?
Muslim Brotherhood calls on followers to tourch Coptic churches.
The Jewish community isn’t wild about Alice Walker’s new book. Uh, guys? Given that Walker believes in David Icke’s shapeshifting lizard people, I’d say rational political discourse isn’t in her wheelhouse.
Jesse Jackson Jr. sentenced.
Generation parasite.
NPR Ombudsmen rips them a new one, but NPR itself stands by the lies: “At NPR, commitment to leftist ideology trumps any fealty to the facts.”
Dead Goblin Report, Texas Edition: “A couple of Texas criminals had the tables turned on them when a Texas man — taken as a hostage along with his wife and forced to rob a bank — decided he’d had enough and pulled a gun out of his glove box and shot them, killing one.”
Terry McAuliffe: Parasitic tick on the body politic.
Ashton Kutcher actually making sense. “Opportunity looks an awful lot like hard work.” Also: No job is beneath you.
Dear dumbass: Don’t put out a call on Twitter for people to sell you drugs.
Washington Post headline writers evidently have no idea what the word “surreal” means.
Speaking of the Post, evidently their biggest problem is that they still have one token conservative on staff.
Tags:2016 Election, Ashton Kutcher, Benghazi, Crime, David Icke, Democrats, Egypt, Facebook, George Zimmerman Trial, Guns, IRS, LinkSwarm, Media Watch, Muslim Brotherhood, NSA, Obama Scandals, Terry McAuliffe, Twitter
Posted in Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Guns, Jihad, Media Watch, Obama Scandals | No Comments »
Thursday, August 15th, 2013
And the violence continues apace in Egypt. Egypt’s government cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood, the brotherhood looting government buildings and attacking the Christian Coptic minority. And assaulting the occasional journalist taking their picture.
Looking for insight as to what Obama should do? Sorry, all out of insight today. The best thing to do is stay the hell out of the way, make the usual meaningless appeals for calm as a sop to the “international community,” and let things run their course. Which seems to be pretty much what Obama is doing, either through calculation, incompetence, or indifference.
This, in fact, is the way politics is conducted in the Middle East: Two factions kill each other until one is weakened enough to stop fighting. It’s in our interest to see as many of the Bad Guys (Muslim Brotherhood) killed by the Not Nearly As Bad Guys (Egyptian military) as possible.
Sorry I couldn’t be more cheerful. Here’s a cute dog video compilation to make up for it.
Tags:Egypt, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Muslim, Muslim Brotherhood, video
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Wednesday, August 14th, 2013
NRO has running updates. Civilian death toll at 245, security forces death toll at 43.
Here’s your generic Middle East conflict video montage:
(Note: I originally had a completely different generic Middle East conflict video montage there, but AFP evidently doesn’t like embedding videos.)
It was always wishful thinking that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to relinquish its grip on power without a fight. The only question now is how many dead, and how many of its top leadership the Egyptian military is going to kill.
Egypt should count itself lucky that Mohammed Morsi was so stupidly impatient. If he had only followed Erdogan’s lead, he could have slowly but steadily consolidated his rule while pushing the military out of the picture. Now he’s toast, and we can only hope his fellow Islamists get pushed out of power-sharing entirely.
Tags:Egypt, Foreign Policy, Islamist, Jihad, Mohammed Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, video
Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, video | No Comments »
Thursday, August 1st, 2013
This appears to be the case.
CNN reports that there were allegedly “dozens” of CIA operatives on the ground during the Benghazi attack and the agency is doing its utmost to conceal its involvement.
CNN’s sources say that, since January, some operatives that were involved in the agency’s mission in Libya are being polygraphed monthly to determine who, if anyone, is talking to Congress or the media. Sources describe the efforts as pure intimidation, and say there are threats to end the careers of unauthorized leakers.
This makes Benghazi an ever bigger scandal than we thought, with a government agency actively undermining legitimate congressional oversight in order to cover up either real crimes or its own incompetence.
It also suggests that the CIA was carrying out one (or possibly both) of the secret (and possibly illegal) operations that been widely rumored to be the real reason behind the Benghazi coverup:
They were already running arms (including surface-to-air missiles) to Syrian rebel, well in advance of Obama’s public declaration, or
Benghazi was an extrajudicial center for “harsh interrogation methods” of the sort Obama theoretically banned, as suggested by former CIA Director David Petraeus’ former mistress Paula Broadwell.
Either way, Obama lied, and Americans died to cover up Obama’s lies, and now even more people are being forced to lie, or at least refrain from talking to investigators seeking the truth, in order to cover up the coverup.
Tags:Benghazi, CIA, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Libya, Obama Scandals, Syria
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Wednesday, July 10th, 2013
The ongoing European Debt Crisis hasn’t ended, it’s merely undergoing a summer hiatus while the various bankers and Eurocrats involved in the shell game take their customary 8 week vacations. As such, expect a new round of crisis headlines to come rolling in during the fall.
Remember: The purpose of the shell game is to let insiders unload their bad debts onto taxpayers. (Look how it was done in Ireland for pointers.) The shell game will continue as long as the insiders can get away with buying off restive electorates with an unsustainable cradle-to-grave welfare state.
Europe’s present is our future.
Once again, Greece is being given money to pretend to reform. Look for more fake austerity, and another bailout in six months.
“Greece will never repay the money it’s been lent to ‘save’ it. The current debate over whether Greece has done enough by way of reform, tax hikes and spending cuts to have earned the next tranche of bailout funds is largely beside the point. If Greece is cut loose, or walks away, its euro-zone creditors will lose their money. The Greeks and the Germans are surely both aware of this. They’re also aware that Greece’s external debt position is far worse than when the bailouts began—when its debt stood at a mere 129% of GDP—and that any talk of debt sustainability in Greece has become a joke.” It’s now at 157% of GDP.
Predictably, Greek unions respond to more fake austerity and staff cuts by extending strikes.
Europeans realize that their governments are corrupt. Those who think they’re not corrupt? “In Spain that number is just 8 percent. In Italy, it’s 13 percent. And Greeks and Portuguese have the least trust in the world regarding their governments’ efforts: Just 1 percent of respondents say their government is making strides against corruption.”
And just how corrupt is Greece? “Politicians and journalists are viewed as on the take by most Greeks with 50 percent also saying they’ve had to bribe public officials to get services.”
Eurozone unemployment hits all time highs.
The EU is preparing a banking union bill. No word on whether it will require depositors to take haircuts like those in Cyprus in the event of a bank failure.
And speaking of bank failures, there are rumblings that Slovenia will require a bailout.
Portugal is still trudging through their own bank bailout…
…despite which they may still need another bailout.
Italy could be forced to beg for a bailout in six months.
UK actually proposes to roll back some 35 EU laws. This may be the first sign that Cameron’s wet Tories have actually noticed how effectively Nigel Farge’s UKIP is eating into their base…
UKIP itself says it’s a threat to the entire political class Well, let’s hope so…
Latvia is now set to join the Euro on January 1, 2014.
Tags:Budget, Euro, Europe, European Debt Crisis, Greece, unions, waste, Welfare State
Posted in Budget, Economics, Foreign Policy, unions, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013
The inevitable has happened. The Egyptian military has deposed corrupt, dictatorial Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, suspended his Islamist-tainted constitution, and promised new elections. Adly Mansour, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court, is Egypt’s new president.
There are coups and there are coups. Morsi was trying to pull the classic “one man, one vote, once” maneuver of turning Egypt into a one party Islamic state under his dictatorship. So intent was he on this goal that ignored trivial Presidential duties like reviving the economy and protecting the lives, liberty and property of Egyptians, with Copts and political opponents killed in the streets. This is a coup that increases, rather than decreases, the chance for Egypt to experience real democracy, still slight though it may be.
Hopefully the army will follow up on it’s promise of fair elections. The Green Laser Revolution continues apace…
Tags:Egypt, Foreign Policy, Jihad, Mohammed Morsi
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