(no subject)

[razorjak]

Jeeeeeesus FUCKSHIT!!!

Gods, how do these people's brains function? How can they parse this shit? As far as I can tell, this is truly how their minds are set:

Anything good that happened in the Clinton administration happened in spite of him.
Everything bad that happened was directly his fault or that of his wife.
Anything good that has come about during Shrubbo's tenure as Chimp in Thief is directly his glory.
Everything that goes wrong was due to those pesky liberals and leftists who are trying hard to undermine his "great work".

Anything I halfhandedly might "blame" on Bush immediately brings out comments of how "this decision had nothing to do with Bush. It was entirely a seperate group who came up with it." And more than half of those commments end with " ... probably a hold-over from Clinton."

Seriously? How can it go from "All the president's fault" to "Not the president's fault" simply due to the token political party each gets their funding?

Comments

[jruske.livejournal.com]

Up until recently it looked like GWB had at least dodged my biggest complaint about the Clinton foreign policy of paying off tin pot dictators.

Then GWB decided to cave on Iran.

*shrugs*

Definitely a mixed bag. I had more issues with Clinton, but in the last couple of years GWB has caught up with most of those mistakes and the ones he has not made, Congress has made for him.

[montieth.livejournal.com]

I think there's a larger strategic game being played with Iran that we're not privy too. Clinton seemed to want to side step any tough issues if it couldn't be solved with a few high altitude low risk cruise missile strikes. I was actually elated when we went into the Balkans. I'd seen far too much raw footage of it at work to think it'd not gone far too long. I still have great deal of ire for Europe's nations for not getting involved with out the US's involvement. What the fuck was that about "Never Again?"

Back to Iran, if I were Iran, and were playing Risk, I'd be shitting bricks. The big bad guy of the board with more X's and V's and piles of I's than anyone else on the board and he'd move to both sides of my country with a whole handfull of those X's V's and Is. ;-)

There's the aspect of Turkey's continued movement away from the west. Stronger ties even with just a Kurdish North Iraq is a strategic move that has long term thinking behind it. And honestly, our dealings in Afghanistan are looking pretty good all things considered. We've not gone in with heavy assets which is exactly the way history says you should NOT do with Afghanistan. If you get too bogged down there or too heavy, you end up with lots of problems. Light forces seem to be the way.

[jruske.livejournal.com]

I think there's a larger strategic game being played with Iran that we're not privy too.

That's entirely possible.

[montieth.livejournal.com]

If the Neocons have showed one thing, its that they think long term. One of our hazards is that we have a very unsteady continuum from one administration to the next. The NeoCons attempt to bridge that by being present in the administrations that they can. The problem with that is that it can engender a climate of a back room polity that can nudge the elbows of those that have the reigns of power, if not actual control. The benefit is that we get some consistency of foreign policy.

Unless you were a major ally like the UK, one could find one administration willing to really help your nation with a problem and then after an election and a new president your efforts to deal with a local problem to your nation would leave you out in the cold as that next president left you high and dry and cut off aid, funding or some form of assistance. This Fickle nature has left things tricky when dealing with ally's and has given enemies hope that maybe the next president will be concerned with other issues and will stop bothering you.

The propensity for foreign governments to attempt to influence US elections leaves me quite worried at times. ANY funding of a US politician before or after an election should be what McCain and Feingold should be most concerned with.

The overall strategic thinking and goals as regards Iran are interesting and I'm certain quite deep, which is why in part I saw Syriana and had a response of, ok, nice story, where's the problem? You just portrayed reality and the way we deal with it is bad? It's realistic and it has to happen.

Iran is potentially a great ally in the region. The schism between Sunni and Shia is wide. If we can turn Iraq into a democratic nation ala Japan/Germany then we can shift focus to Iran, get them on the same path and once that's accomplished, we can finally knock the house of Saud out of power as sole controllers of the nation and move them towards a constitutional democracy (trappings of monarchy can be beneficial from a tradition standpoint, but only if there's a legislative body as well).