Wrong Around the Clock

[Daveparts]

Sometimes when someone around you makes a mistake the best thing you do is to just say nothing but then if they keep on, over and over, again and again like an episode of the three stooges it becomes a farce. However in real life it must be stopped as lives are in the balance. The total inability of this administration to get it right in regards to foreign policy even once and a while, just by accident or dumb luck. Hell, even a broken clock is right twice a day but not this bunch!

Six and a half years into the administration of George W. Bush and the foreign policy record is one of farce, fantasy, fiasco and failure. Or to paraphrase Churchill, never in the field of human conflict have so few screwed up so often for so many.

At home in our own country the administration left a billion dollars in foreign aid money on the table for the refugee’s of hurricane Katrina. Just turned their backs and walked away, arrogantly, pridefully with their noses in the air insisting that our people don’t want aid from the likes of you people! We don’t need your stinking doctors or relief aid our poor have gotten along just fine with out healthcare for this long.

The absolute arrogance rivaling Marie Antoinette, to let our own people suffer rather than to allow a country with which we might have poor relations with to score foreign policy points. I guess that’s an easier decision to make from catered luncheons wearing $5,000 shoes and attending Broadway shows at night.

The administration chose the high road, so high in fact that they now appear to be oxygen deprived. Early on the administration either in collusion with or with outright collaboration with the right wing forces in Haiti they overthrew the lawfully elected government of President Aristide. Senseless, is the only word to describe this crime maybe it was just a reaction to Clinton’s efforts to reestablish the Aristide government and if Clinton did it they were going to undo it. The result has been murders thuggery and the reestablishment of the Haitian military and a brutal dictatorship.

Our relationship with Mexico has become a love hate relationship with outgoing President Vincentia Fox calling the fence across America’s southern border a criminal act. The free trade policies of this administration have so depressed jobs and income in Mexico that Mexico’s primary export is now its population. The currency they send home from El Norte is it’s second largest source of hard currency. Proponents of this immigration bill claim America needs their labor to keep our economy healthy yet it appears to me that the opposite is true. Its largest source of hard currency is it’s oil reserves but that is already mortgaged to finance the Mexican debt to the World Bank.

Like the Irish a century before they come to America by the millions to escape famine, but unlike the Irish this famine is man made. Just like 19th century Ireland Mexico is a top-heavy ruling elite who control land and industry making prosperity an impossible illusion forcing the immigrants leave seeking only survival and sending their wages back to the suffering at home. The administrations policy? Sounds good to us, give us your poor your tired your huddled masses yearning to work cheap! The official policy is, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, a two fer for the administration grandstanding on immigration while supplying a depressive affect on domestic wages.

In Cuba the Administration has strictly adhered to the Kennedy doctrine and that might have been a pretty good policy, if the Berlin wall hadn’t fallen almost twenty years ago and our biggest trading partner wasn’t communist China. But the administration brushes off any entreaties made by the Cubans and attempts to prosecute those who visit Cuba while the Bush advisors plan the President’s up coming state visit to Vietnam!

But nowhere on the continent has the demagoguery been worse than in the case of Venezuela. The US media routinely describes the lawfully elected president as a mad man a dictator another Fidel Castro. What does Chavez say for himself? That he wants to bring about a Socialist Bolivarian Revolution. Chavez has renegotiated oil contracts to give Venezuela the same royalties now enjoyed by our good friends in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia whose leaders weren’t ever elected.

Does Chavez seize the assets of Oil Company’s? No, he explains that these are the new rates for Venezuelan crude and those who don’t wish to participate will be paid cash on the barrelhead for their assets. This outrageous type behavior that we have accepted for generations from Sultans and Satraps is met in Venezuela with covert support by the US government of the over throw of yet another lawfully elected government.

So if you were Hugo Chavez where would you look for friends on the continent? Oil starved Cuba was anxiously ready to help, Venezuela sends oil and medical students to Cuba, Cuba in return send doctors and expertise to Venezuela. Chavez has offered Central and South America another way, right out of the mouth of Simon Bolivar a continent free of foreign intervention and foreign domination. But to the myopic vision of the neo con unipolarists this is heresy and so the US continues to support death squads in Columbia and sends billons to president Uribe to fight drug smuggling.

Apparently they are totally unaware that Uribe was removed from the Columbian Aviation administration for supplying pilot’s licenses to the Medellin drug cartel. Uribe was also removed from his position as the mayor of Medellin for being too closely associated with Pablo Escobar. This is the administrations best friend in South America and we send him $5 billion dollars a year in cash and military hardware to fight drug trafficking. Good plan huh? You think it’s going to work? I’ll ask my $5,000 dollar shoes… I don’t think they’ll say yes though.

In Europe, France is disparaged The Hague is ignored as German chancellor Merkal tries to maintain decorum, we however are too busy with our new friends the Czechs and Poles with their close proximity to the Russian frontiers. When the Soviet Union fell someone forgot to tell this administration as the US continues to push its missile defense boondoggle on its new European partners. Well aware that it won’t work as designed, it’s a bluff, it doesn’t have to work because we don’t ever intend on using it. Because… if we did the world would soon find out that it doesn’t work. Prompting Russian President Putin to announce it’s deployment will cause Russia to reassess its strategic posture.

Which the American media promptly translated into Putin to Point Missiles at Europe!
Ignoring that it is the Americans deploying a new system in Europe with the excuse that these missiles aren’t pointed at you but at the guy behind you. But the real threat from Russia that the US fears isn’t nuclear at all but economic. Russia has halved it foreign debt under Putin and now ranks 5th in foreign account reserves. Rich in oil, gold and diamonds with vast areas as yet unexplored Russia stands to become one of the dominant economic powers of the 21st century.

The smart move when faced with the inevitable would have been to grow closer to Russia to established partnerships like former adversaries France and Germany, Instead the administration chooses to try and blunt Russia’s emergence and attempt to isolate her diplomatically. To construct oil pipelines and exclude her from them and to install puppet governments in her former republics.

So who does Russia sign oil agreements with? Why with our allies in Europe of course and rather than isolating Russia from Europe we’ve alienated our own friends by our own bizarre and unnecessary blustering. We’ve sown distrust where there was opportunity hostility where there was only animosity and there by squandered the chance of a generation in pursuit of a unipoler world. Like Hugo Chavez the media has disparaged the lawfully elected Vladimir Putin as a dictator and accused him of destroying democracy in Russia.


The irony of the inevitable is that the fall of the Soviet Union was brought about by the strength of the US economy. The Soviets had the sword but we had the money and this time around the US waves its sword as its economy crumbles while the Russians pump oil and mine gold and diamonds growing economically stronger by the day.

You know some times I think Amoco named that oil tanker after Condolezza Rice because she’s like an oil tanker. She’s empty vessel and with out a captain at the wheel she has know idea of where to go. Like hauling oil she does the administrations dirty work and then disappears over the horizon until there is more dirty work to do. Hammering out tough negotiations with India trading mangos for nuclear fuel.

A deal which is on it’s face is as absurd as it is insane and destabilizing to boot, or in the words of Groucho Marx, “Barovelli may look like and idiot and he may act like an idiot but don’t let that fool you he really is an idiot!” Bush and Rice will send nuclear fuel in exchange for mangos to a country which has been to war six times with it’s nuclear neighbor. The use of the fuel is completely unregulated other than to allow US inspectors to inspect up to 2/3rds of Indian nuclear facilities of the Indian government choosing of course.

To President Musharif of Pakistan our best friend in the region, a general who came to power in a coup de tat’ he stands tall in the saddle with us in our war on terror. But how does he react when we supply unregulated nuclear fuel to his potential adversary? As much as it might bother him the one billion dollars a month he receives in aid from America sooths his trouble brow. And just to make sure there are no hard feelings we are sending him 18 front line fighter aircraft free! Gratis!

This is the showcase of the administrations foreign policy, their crowning achievement their moment in the nuclear spotlight! To trade nuclear fuel for fruit and then to have to throw in hundreds of millions of dollars in fighter aircraft to appease dictators already propped up and on our payroll. To make an already tense region of the world better armed and more tense and to spend millions for an agreement which accomplishes absolutely nothing, nothing but to make a bad situation worse and then to have the hubris to call it an achievement!

But now we have reached the Middle East and the administration continues to find ways to fail. In Afghanistan we had Osama Bin Laden trapped in Tora Bora and yet by approaching from only three sides some how he got away. Gee, I wonder how that happened?

The Taliban retreated to the mountains under US attack just as they did when under British attack a century ago or Russian attack just thirty years ago yet the US seems stymied by their strategy. They look around and point fingers at those who could be helping the Taliban forgetting that the Taliban is Afghanis and the Afghanis are the Taliban. To the media all the bad guys are Al Queda; if they sink a boat with twenty people on it they were all Al Queda.

If we kill children in a house it’s a tragedy, imagine so many children in an Al Queda safe house. The arrogant refusal to admit that we are in their country and trying to impose our will upon them and yet unable to understand why they resist so. Obviously ignorant of history that we aren’t the first invaders to come we are only the latest.

The situation in Iraq defies written word; there are no combinations in the English language of syllables or of nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs to adequately explain the gross negligence of intelligence or the compound folly of incredible stupidity. There has never been enough paper made nor will there ever be to fully explain the madness of a room full of fools certain they know better than every one else. The legacy of Iraq will haunt America for generations to come; we haven’t even begun to feel the pain, as the other shoe isn’t even off yet. When the other shoe does drop and drop it will the images of helicopters on top of the Saigon embassy will be long forgotten.

This administration never explains, even when they attempt to explain they merely trying obscure and blur the issue always pointing fingers at others. Never accepting one iota of responsibility for anything, they insist the exportation of democracy is their primary mission. Yet when Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza elect Hamas over Fatah the administration freezes Palestinian assets and credits. The administration disapproves of their democratic choice and then puts the screws to them because of it. Does anyone object or with hold aid when Israel choose politicians less prone to negotiation?

But the current situation as brought about by this administrations policies and intransigence boggles the mind. The administration’s too little and way too late unfreezes aid to the Palestinians. While Abbas like Custer stands on the crest of the little Bighorn yelling, You Indians had enough yet? Are you ready to give up? I’ll give you terms!”
The lunacy of the Fatah position makes you think that perhaps the Palestinian electorate knew what they were talking about.

The Genie is out of the bottle now, the debate is over, the good or bad or rightness or wrongness of political positions are mute. The atoms are energized now and cannot be stopped; the kinetic energy stored for decades will cause the landscape to shift radically through out the Middle East. The delicate underpinnings have been undone and those not completely undone are still being gnawed and tugged at. For as foolish and ignorant as they have behaved up until now they’ve yet to realize they are on the precipice of disaster and about to detonate the entire region in an explosion of radicalism with the primary focus of their bitterness being directed at the United States of America.

Where I in the position to bring articles of Impeachment against the President the grounds would be simple and succinct to just say Foreign Policy would be enough. Like taking the wheel from a drunk driver it is not something that needs to be discussed or to be debated but the only obvious solution.