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Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lebanon. Show all posts

Friday, August 30, 2013

Syria: Plain and True, Fact and Fantasy, Past and Present, but ever since it's artificial creation by the French and the British, it's always been an artificial 'Line in the Sand'. For President Obama, though, it's now 'a red line' in the sand




Awesome Sean Lee @humanprovince! "An open letter on Syria to Western narcissists."
http://humanprovince.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/an-open-letter-on-syria-to-western-narcissists/">http://humanprovince.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/an-open-letter-on-syria-to-western-narcissists/</a>





















































































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Friday, October 19, 2012

Vacillating Obama: Washington Post's Jackson Diehl zeroes-in on fundamental weakness of Obama's dithering Mid-East policy and multilateralism: Obama’s greatest failure - "His miscalculations on Syria have led to a wider war" that threatens to bring in more dangerous players and more unpredictability, NOT more stability and democracy; @JacksonDiehl, #syria


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 I've been wanting to post this excellent analysis by The Washington Post's veteran foreign policy hand Jackson Diehl since reading it online early, early Sunday morning, while listening to some hard news online via the BBC.
Soon thereafter, I sent it out to a couple dozen well-informed friends and acquaintances across the country and around the world, who follow U.S. foreign policy as closely as I do, and who also like me, shake their head at what President Obama is doing. 

 Though we all disagreed on lots of matters whenever we were together, we're all in agreement about this Diehl column -it's spot-on analysis from the get-go about Barack Obama's unwillingness to stop digging the foreign policy hole he has put the United States in.
He just keeps digging, utterly convinced that he's right and that everyone else is wrong.

 I suspect that in about a dozen years or so, people who voted for Obama in 2008 will actually shake their head in wonder that they ever allowed themselves to willfully ignore his inexperience and weaknesses and elect someone as president who was foolish enough to convince himself -and them- that his carefully-constructed personal/media narrative would somehow allow him to solve longstanding problems.
It hasn't and it doesn't and it won't.

 Despite all the accumulated evidence on U.S. foreign policy that shows he has made already bad situations worse, sometimes, much worse, Obama still remains utterly convinced that the sheer star power of his personality will lead to positive results.
It's the ultimate act of -and sign of- his amazing hubris.


The Washington Post
How Obama bungled the Syrian revolution
By Jackson Diehl
October 14, 2012
Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans are doing their best to portray the assault on the U.S. mission in Libya and its aftermath as a signal foreign policy disaster for Barack Obama. But my bet is that when historians look back on Obama’s mistakes in the last four years, they will focus on something entirely different: his catastrophic mishandling of the revolution in Syria.
The deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi were a calamity — but those losses were mainly the result of poor security decisions by mid-level State Department officials, not policy choices by Obama. The president’s handling of Syria, on the other hand, exemplifies every weakness in his foreign policy — from his excessive faith in “engaging” troublesome foreign leaders to his insistence on multilateralism as an end in itself to his self-defeating caution in asserting American power.
Read the rest of the column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jackson-diehl-how-obama-bungled-the-syrian-revolution/2012/10/14/13c492d2-13b2-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html
Read previous Diehl columns at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/jackson-diehl/2011/02/24/ABccMXN_page.html
I subscribe to his RSS feed and get his columns as sson as they go online.
http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/rss/linksets/opinions/jackson-diehl

 Also see his Twitter page: https://twitter.com/JacksonDiehl

 The National Journal
Obama’s Quagmire: Syria and the Islamist Arc, Hammered on leadership, the president struggles for a Middle East policy.
By Michael Hirsh
Updated: September 21, 2012  1:55 p.m., 
September 21, 2012  1:07 p.m.
U.S. and Western diplomats are concerned that the longer Bashar al-Assad hangs on to his failing regime in Damascus, the more likely it is that the aftermath of the Syrian rebellion will be dominated by Islamist elements, completing an arc of newly empowered radical groups along the southern half of the Mediterranean from Libya to Syria. 
Read the rest of the column at: http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/obama-s-quagmire-syria-and-the-islamist-arc-20120921?mrefid=site_search

 As I've noted here several times over the past two years with videos of him speaking forthrightly about Syria, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has been much more realistic than Hillary Clinton's dog-chasing-its-tail State Dept. on the reality of what has been going on the Middle East and what is likely to happen if President Obama's dithering foreign policy is given four more years to make things worse.

 And seriously, how does U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice still even have a job? 
Is there no penalty for her abject failure, serial lying to the American public and Congress and her calculated and willful ignorance?
Rice's performance the past month has validated all the criticism of her as nothing more than a political hack with foreign policy pretensions, not a serious foreign policy professional, no matter what her actual experience is.
Susan Rice is the female version of Rahm Emanuel -a fixer.
And a Grade B fixer at that.

 How can we reasonably expect representatives of other countries to trust her and take her seriously if average Americans have learned from watching her for themselves, after paying attention to her own words and actions, NOT to trust her?


SenatorMarcoRubio video: U.S. Senator Marco Rubio on Foreign Aid to Libya, Egypt and Pakistan and what America and American taxpayers have a right to expect from these countries in exchange for U.S. dollars. Uploaded September 20, 2012. http://youtu.be/SFOBW7xkz7g Reminder, this video is a month old.

 Articles and columns on Syria in The Washington Post, in chron order:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/search.html

By the way, if anyone reading this post knows anyone at Foreign Policy magazine, tell them that their YouTube Channel is the very picture of irrelevant.
One original video in the past nine months during a presidential election year?
That's embarrassing!
http://www.youtube.com/user/ForeignPolicyTV
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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

In honor of espionage and the Season Two premiere of SHOWTIME's Emmy Award winning HOMELAND getting a 60% increase in viewers over last year's premiere, I present some amazing video that needs to be seen to be believed: VICE News videos - Hezbollah's Propaganda War; Morena Baccarin @missmorenab


An inside look at Season Two with the creators and stars of SHOWTIME's espionage drama HOMELAND, the best show on American television. 
http://www.sho.com/sho/video/titles/17717/behind-the-scenes-homeland-season-2


SHOWTIME video: Season Two, Episode One: An asset from Carrie's old life comes in from the cold. Uploaded September 30, 2012. http://youtu.be/-xtJ5lLkW70
In honor of espionage and the Season Two premiere of SHOWTIME's Emmy Award winning HOMELAND getting a 60% increase in viewers over last year's premiere, I present some amazing video that needs to be seen to be believed: VICE News videos - Hezbollah's Propaganda War; Morena Baccarin @missmorenab
Have already watched the new episode on TV twice. Plus, watched the DVD-RW I made looking for hidden clues, so I guess that makes thrice!

 More HOMELAND clips are at SHOWTIME's YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/show/homeland/

http://www.sho.com/sho/homeland/home

 http://ithitshome.com/

 Dana's Unfiltered blog: http://danaunfiltered.com/

Ratings: 'Homeland,' 'Dexter' Score Big for Showtime
http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/ratings-homeland-dexter-score-big-showtime-58666
-----


"Hezbollah has built a multi-million dollar theme park celebrating its military victories over Israel. It's the latest PR offensive from the Iranian-funded Shia Muslim militia its followers call the "Party of God." Host Ryan Duffy heads to Lebanon to visit this bizarre tourist site to learn how this group that started as a ragtag militia in the 1980s has skillfully used propaganda to transform itself into a military and political force to be reckoned with, and how anti-Hezbollah groups are trying to compete in this war of words." September 2012.
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/hezbollahs-propaganda-war-part-1
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/hezbollahs-propaganda-war-part-1#ooid=tuNjhvNTqb2dIf_zU1QRpOrNm1A1pGyx

http://www.vice.com/vice-news/hezbollahs-propaganda-war-part-2
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/hezbollahs-propaganda-war-part-2#ooid=A0cXVsNTp8c_QoL8UCnCs0K8Uwy3jVSG

 Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles... paparazzi cameras go off by themselves when HOMELAND star Morena Baccarin walked the red carpet two weeks ago...


http://youtu.be/3CRtkyxIVvM

 And the week before that there was...

Esquire Magazine
WOMEN WE LOVE
Morena Baccarin Is a Woman We Love
And today, she is also the most beautiful woman in the world
By Tom Chiarella
September 10, 2012, 12:00 AM
http://www.esquire.com/women/women-we-love/morena-baccarin-1012

 Morena Baccarin @missmorenab https://twitter.com/missmorenab

 Special bonus: photo of Morena Baccarin AND Laura Vandervoort together in one photo. Seriously, you might want to sit down first so the double-dose of beauty doesn't make you faint dead away after you click this link: http://twitter.com/Vandiekins22/status/245715759555289088/photo/1

 You're welcome!

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