Statement of Foreign Policy.
Dear Tyrant,
Please stick to approved methods of slaughtering your people. If you use unapproved methods of slaughtering your people, we will conduct telegraphed brief and limited military action that will NOT be targeted at the following:
- We will not target your unapproved slaughter capabilities.
- We will not target you, tyrant.
- We will not try to destabilize your regime even though we have called for regime change for 2 years ever since we stopped calling you a model of rational leadership in the middle east.
Instead, we will briefly and in a limited way target runways and military bases so as to:
- Preserve my credibility after making a foolish line in the sand threat.
- Preserve my belief in my own peace aura.
- All while not angering the other Islamo-nazi groups that I currently back.
That about sum it up?
August 28, 2013 at 4:41 pm
I think you can be even more concise: Obama does whatever he wants. There is no external validation outside his will, e.g. making sense.
August 28, 2013 at 6:00 pm
Not bad. But the notion tht Obama lives in an environment that has consequences is laughable. Bush, Reagan and Clinton combined had fewer scandals that made daily media play. I mean, I heard about a blowj@b for two years nonstop. But the real scandals of Obama is met with his apologists and whitewash crew…I mean, the media.
August 28, 2013 at 10:29 pm
He's a Manchurian Candidate. How else can you understand our backing of Al Queda in Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt?
August 28, 2013 at 11:26 pm
Nailed it!
August 29, 2013 at 2:09 am
Dear Legitimate Head of State,
I dont't want you in power anymore so get out. If you do not leave I will arm and fund terrorists to oust you, all in the name of democracy.
Yours insincerely
….
August 29, 2013 at 6:09 am
@Ma Tucker: there basically aren't any legitimate heads of state in the Islamic world, except for the King of Jordan and maybe a few in Southeast Asia (well, the King of Saudi Arabia is basically legitimate, his country's crazy laws aren't really his idea). Obama's problem has been that he's been helping to topple stable, relatively low-key illegitimate despots and replacing them with radical, crazy Islamist ideologues.
August 29, 2013 at 7:12 am
Dear Syria,
Our culture is based on the necessity of perpetual war. And it's your country's turn to host our incompetent but eager and massively over-funded army.
Have a nice decade.
America
August 29, 2013 at 7:13 am
@Suzanne Carl – true that
August 29, 2013 at 8:48 am
And Aggiornamento thought you'd like to know he cannot find America on a map and has no actual knowledge of its culture or its military.
He will doubtless be giving encore performances of his street-theater, a dramatic subversion of the concept of man as the creation of a benevolent rational God, later on this combox. Stay tuned.
Have all your immunizations up to date.
August 29, 2013 at 1:42 pm
re. Sophia's Favourite.
I'm married to a Californian, have four young American children and am very fond, by and large, of Americans. I also speak as one whose father-in-law (an American) deals in weaponry (is a VP at GenCorp) largely to the US state, but also to foreign powers. So I think I have reasonable knowledge of the US and its military.
So setting that aspect of your witty comment aside, from where we sit, America as a political entity (and that's all it is, of course), is a brutally nasty, militarily incompetent bully which retains its global primacy by extreme, sustained and massive violence without regard to the cost to those within its own political borders. It is not innovative to suggest this, and it is often suggested by those on the left-wing. But that does not mean it's untrue. What America is about to instigate by strong-arming its 'allies' into bombing Syria is wicked, and appears to have no political motive outside the continued destabilisation of the Middle East for the benefit of the USA's military industry.
Of course, whilst such policy will certainly benefit America's military (and my F-i-L!), in reality this policy has functioned thus far only to the benefit of Islam, which has taken the opportunity of the America-funded Arab Spring, to eviscerate the Christian populations of North Africa and the Middle East.
So yes, perhaps I am a moron who subverts the God-image your propose. But I'm also right. Which makes you..?
Aggiornamento
August 29, 2013 at 2:46 pm
"Massive violence"? Are you freaking kidding me? The Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, combined, have resulted in as many deaths in 9 years as Toyotomi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea—in 1592!—killed in 6. I'm sorry, a conflict involving missiles and machineguns that causes early-17th-century casualty-rates is not "massive violence" by any meaningful measure.
You are right, though, it is not innovative to suggest that America wages wars for profit. The accusation is essentially a form of a logical fallacy refuted in 1850 by Frédéric Bastiat, namely the "broken windows" or "digging ditches" fallacy. No country ever goes to war for the sake of weapons contractors, the only "war for profit" any state has ever even attempted involves the loot of the defeated enemy, and that certainly hasn't happened in Iraq (and Afghanistan has nothing to loot).
August 30, 2013 at 3:06 am
Well said, Aggiornamento. And Patrick. What in the world business do we have involving the military in Syria? Smoothing the ruffled feathers of a president whose 'sound bite' backfired.
August 30, 2013 at 8:10 am
If your analysis of geopolitics assumes that wars can be waged to subsidize weapons sales, you need to rethink everything that went into it. Nobody ever smashes windows just to sell more glass, it is transparently stupid economic policy on the level of taking wooden nickels.
Weapons developers make plenty of money selling to militaries that are never deployed. The Japanese Self Defense Forces, for example, have been the fourth to sixth best-funded and best-equipped in the world, consistently, since 1987. This despite the only deployment they ever see being the occasional skirmish with North Korean ships.
What is happening here is much simpler: a Democrat, tired of being belittled as the weakling he is, trying to look like a man by getting involved in some conflict in the world-stage with no American interest, not even one as debatable as there was in Iraq. See Kennedy in Vietnam and Clinton…everywhere he deployed troops, actually.
August 30, 2013 at 8:15 am
Also, RE: the whole idea America goes to wars to subsidize weapons developers, we're actually canceling lots of contracts. Please explain how "no new orders for FA-22s" and "the average plane in the USAF was built around the time Reagan was re-elected" fits into your Glazier's Fallacy analysis.