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Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

For months I've closely followed the glacial pace of things in Germany largely via DW,
Deutsche Welle, both on TV and in print, since the U.S. news media has seemed to decide to give Germany and their current Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittig, a 'hall pass' on all controversial topics, like #Ukraine #Russia #sanctions #ISIS. 
Any one of which, Once Upon a Time in the '70's, '80's or '90's, would have gotten him an invite he could not really turn down.

If you didn't know it, even for something as insignificant as sending 100 German military 
"advisors" to Iraq who would never be put in a position to actually face the enemy, there
was months and months of Sturm und Drang in the Bundestag, in the country 
where Sturm und Drang was born.

As someone who spent LOTS of time over at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pre and post Fall of the Berlin Wall, on trade and economic issues, and who made enough 
friends there to attend the party at the Embassy celebrating the unification in 1991 -even bringing a German chocolate cake with the German flag's colors on it that I ordered at the #1 German bakery in greater DC, not far from my house in Arlington County- I was especially aghast last year that Germany's policy was, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be firmly against arming Ukraine so that it could better defend itself.

Which is how it came to be that back on February 8th, before Chancellor Merkel's visit to DC, I asked the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, @SenBobCorker - 
How is #Merkel #Germany an ally vs. Isis if sending 100 Bundeswehr 2 TRAIN Iraqis is political crisis? 

Condescending, patronizing pols in Germany acted like their troops were almost too important to actually deploy them to the Mid-East to accomplish something tangiblethat was in the West's best interests. But did you see anything about this in the newspaper or on network TV at the time?

And not once in all the many long months since the shoot down of the Malaysian flight 
MH17 over Ukraine last August by Russian-armed and trained separatists has the Ambassador Wittig gone on a single American Sunday morning TV chat show to lay out the position of Germany to the American people, whose own sons and daughters, husbands and wives continue to be stationed in Germany in the tens of thousands to defend Germany against the existential threat that President Obama claimed in one of his 2012
debates with Mitt Romney did NOT exist -Putin's Russia.

Well, history has shown us who was right about that question, haven't they?
And the Russia reset, too.

No, these days, the Foreign Ministry geniuses at the German Embassy on Reservoir Road prefer to employ their old standby, checkbook foreign policy, and simply pay for ads on Foreign Policy magazine's email newsletters, like this one I received, below, so they aren't forced to explain or defend their policies in-person to people who know the facts and could pin them down.
Yes, it sort of explains a lot about the current Foreign Policy Establishment and what it just winks at:

And paying for ads also means they don't have to deal with curious ethical issues like this:
#Germany hires ex #Stasi to check #Facebook for critics of #immigration policy. 

So, to sum it up, Peter Wittig, the German Amb. to the U.S. has not appeared on one of the most guest-friendly forums he could possibly appear on in all of DC, esp. for an important ally like Germany, Sunday morning chat shows, and been forced to defend Germany's feckless position on all these important matters, even while smaller countries with much less resources are continuing to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile, Germany, the European economic giant opts largely to stay on the sidelines as a spectator in the fight against ISIS, preferring to play the role of pit-crew grease monkey,
and not be one of the actual participants.
How much longer is this kind of unhelpful behavior going to be allowed to continue -and continue to be unremarked upon by the American press?




















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Friday, November 20, 2015

Tighter security checks on refugees in U.S.? At least for one night, U.S. Rep. @GerryConnolly's concise and to-the-point logic and reason (re refugees) actually triumphed on American TV last night. Sensible people across the U.S. should enjoy it while we can...; #Syria #refugees #Paris #terrorism #ISIS





PBS NewsHour
Does the U.S. need tighter security checks on refugees? 
November 19, 2015 at 7:07 PM ET

Highly recommend you watch this video from last night's PBS NewsHour, and not just because it may be the only fair-minded discussion of the  Syrian/Iraqi refugee debate I've seen on American TV this year, where someone who was arguing for both logic and accountability from the federal government wasn't sandbagged.

It features the insightful comments of Rep. Gerry Connolly, the new Democratic Congressman 
who represents Northern Virginia, and specifically, Arlington County, where I lived for 15 years, roughly about 5 miles from Georgetown.

 Rep. Connolly replaced bombastic, combative and often over-the-top longtime Rep. Jim Moran, 
Moran, not unlike Mayor Joy Cooper in beleaguered Hallandale Beach, was considered by even 
people who voted for him, to often be an insufferable egomaniac with a deep-and-abiding love for TV camera lights that challenged New York Senator Charles Schumer's widely-known love for the limelight, fancied himself a shoot-from-the-hips pol whose shortcuts with facts and logic often resulted in him shooting himself in the foot and getting into un-necessary and petty fights. 
And for good measure, just like Mayor Cooper in Hallandale Beach, Moran has a pugnacious son with a penchant for criminality and mischief but who -surprise- considers himself above the law.

Gerry Connolly was a generally respected politician who stood out among Northern Virginia's lock-step liberal mindset when I lived in Arlington, back when I was still a DLC Democrat, because he was the sort of principled Democrat whom we have far too few of these days in DC, to wit, someone who thinks that well-thought out, fair-minded results that actually solve real problems mattered more than ideology or party. (Usually.)

This is the sort of TV performance that catches people's attention outside of his immediate area, and not just because you have to know that there were NOT exactly many among the 47 Dems who, having voted against President Obama yesterday on refugee resettlement in the U.S., didn't relish the idea of going on national TV and telling everyone why he and his supporters were wrong -again.
Especially when it's so much easier to just toe-the current DNC mindset and blithely assume the federal "bureaucracy" will handle everything correctly without any genuine accountability or benchmarks from Congress.
Like that's ever happened with positive results for most Americans.

Rep. Connolly's performance is also noteworthy precisely because he didn't fall for the usual trap of allowing the news media's own narrative to dominate the discussion, nor did he allow the discussion to drift off into other areas that would allow him to be trapped into a corner and painted as a heartless pol by the other guest, Erol Kekic of Church World Service.

Something that as I have gone on at length about here before many times, seems to frequently happen to most GOP members of Congress appearing on that sort of TV show pretty much without fail.
Usually because they are dumb enough to act like they will be treated fairly instead of aggressively by both host and fellow guests. 
The recent history of the GOP, even when they are in power, is, seemingly, to never learn from history.

Rep. Connolly's concise and to-the-point logic and reason (re refugees) actually triumphed on
American TV.  For at least one night anyway...
Sensible people across the U.S., like so many of you readers of this blog, should enjoy it while we can...
You can be sure there there won't be many more such examples before the end of the year.

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Friday, July 31, 2009

Downing Street: 4 British hostages held for 2 years by Iran-backed group in Iraq are dead; U.K & U.S. duped?; Iran protests

"...Britain's worst hostage outcome in
living memory," says Channel 4 presenter
Jon Snow.
That was how it was described Wednesday night
across the U.K. after news was issued about the
death of a the third and fourth hostage.

Friends of Peter Moore, lone remaining hostage,
believe the British government must admit that
mistakes were made in their handling of the
hostage situation, including, most fundamentally,
trusting Iraqi govt. officials and intermediaries.

Apparently, the U.S. was also duped by the
same group of people, as they allowed the release
of someone under their custody to effect release.
Result?
After Iranian-backed Shia militant is released
by U.S. military, U.K. was given two bodies of
dead bodyguards last month and a note saying,
oh, by the way, the other two bodyguards are
also dead.
Looks like they were killed TWO years ago.

The Guardian has the timeline here for the
events that have led us to this point,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/30/iraq-hostages-timeline

URL: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111?bclid=30548878001&bctid=31112820001



Interview with hostage negotiator Dr. James Alvarez,
who has much experience working in Iraq.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111?bclid=30548878001&bctid=31113811001



And early this morning, Sam Marsden's column over
at The Independent says it all:

Questions over Iraq collusion in Britons' kidnap

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/questions-over-iraq-collusion-in-britons-kidnap-1765448.html

Marsden doesn't mess around with his intro,
he gets to the heart of the matter:
"Iraqi government officials may have colluded in the kidnapping of five Britons two years ago in a bid to prevent high-level corruption being exposed, it was reported today..."
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