Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreign policy. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Updated; President Obama lands in Sweden, first bilateral visit by a U.S. president in history; Links to LIVE worldwide TV coverage of President Obama's trip in Stockholm, watch the press conference at 8:30 Eastern; #obamainsweden, ‏@usembassysweden, #stockholm

Above, screenshot of SVT's website promoting their LIVE news coverage of President Obama's visit to Sweden, which can be seen here, worldwide, on their Special Report version of their news show Rapport with hosts Claes Elfsberg and Marianne Rundström until about 11:20 a.m. Eastern Wednesday morning:

 1:30 p.m. Update: SVT has recorded this morning's events and has it as a 7 hour and 18 minute video that you can watch or skip ahead in to find something you find of interest: 
Extra Rapport: Obama besöker Sverige 10:00-17:20: Obama besöker Sverige - DIREKT. SVT följer USA:s president Barack Obamas besök i Stockholm. Gäster, samtal, bakgrund, analyser, pressträffar. Programledare: Claes Elfsberg och Marianne Rundström.
http://www.svtplay.se/video/1435951/extra-rapport-obama-besoker-sverige

 This LIVE broadcast can also be viewed on mobile phones if you are so inclined.
SVT's mobile streaming is among the best in the world.
Above, screenshot of TV4's website promoting their LIVE news coverage, which they are promoting as "around the clock" and they do seem to be doing more interesting stuff from what I can see and can also be seen worldwide.
http://www.tv4.se/nyheterna/klipp/live-obamas-bes%C3%B6k-i-sverige-2433617

 1:30 p.m. Update: TV4 is doing a great job today and as of this writing is still doing their LIVE coverage of the visit, but sometimes that consists of only streaming video of an exterior scene like the Grand Hotel with no sound until someone appears on screen to say something or or the cortege heads somewhere.
By the way, with their coverage, you can also see the TV commercials in Swedish and after awhile, you may find yourself having a sudden craving for Felix brand Tandoori meals -like me! 
http://www.lhw.com/hotel/Grand-Hotel-Stockholm-Stockholm-Sweden

I'm watching/listening to both of them, bouncing back and forth as I edit my promised post about some things that President Obama and most well-informed Americans don't know about Sweden -and should- but won't be hearing anything about from the dim-wits in the White House press corps.
That post should be online sometime today.

 Reminder, Sweden is six hours ahead of the Eastern time zone in U.S. & Canada.

 Schedule: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/sweden-g20-trip-2013

Air%20Force%20One%20landar%20p%C3%A5%20Arlanda
TV4 video of Air Force One landing at Stockholm Arlanda Airport, which is about 40 miles north of Stockholm.


Barack%20Obama%20g%C3%A5r%20av%20flygplanet
U.S. Ambassador to Sweden Mark Brzezinski -Zbig's son, Mika's brother- and his wife Natalia
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalia-lopatniuk-brzezinski/still-trying-to-have-it-a_b_1713346.html
greets President Obama coming off the plane prior to his meeting the Swedish government dignitaries on the tarmac at Arlanda, including Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, below

Obama%20v%C3%A4lkomnas%20av%20Carl%20Bildt
TV4 video

H%C3%A4r%20passerar%20Obamas%20konvoj%20Upplands%20V%C3%A4sby
TV4 video: Här passerar Obamas konvoj Upplands Väsby.
Presidential convoy from Stockholm Arlanda Airport to the Grand Hotel in Stockholm down the E4.

As some of you know, per my once being part of an advance team for Walter Mondale, I was one of the passengers in one of the limousines in a Secret Service convoy from a private tarmac at Miami International Airport to the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, where we were going to be staying as part of a campaign visit, and we received the full heavy police escort, of course.
Trust me, THAT is the only way to go!
Prickskyttar%20p%C3%A5%20taken%20kring%20Grand%20hotel
TV4 reporter Ted Lundgren appearing on the Nyhetsmorgon program from the center of the security zone in and around the Grand Hotel, where policemen are patrolling and rooftop snipers are at the ready for security purposes
http://www.tv4play.se/program/nyhetsmorgon?video_id=2435597

Press conference is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. Eastern U.S. time, where he will likely start by saying something like what Ambassador Brzezinski said at his swearing-in, "Det är en stor glädje och ära, att se den svenska närvaron här idag."

 U.S. Embassy in Sweden @usembassysweden 

The latest head's up from Stockholm I've received in the mail is...
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From: Mynewsdesk 
Date: 2013/9/4
Subject: Stockholms stad: Trafikhinder på Hägerstensvägen



Stockholms stad

Trafikhinder på Hägerstensvägen

Stockholms stad - Sep 04, 2013 10:37 CEST
Nu placerar Trafikkontoret tillbaka den höj- och sänkbara stolpe, så kallad pollare, som ska förhindra genomfartstrafik i rusningstid på Hägerstensvägen.
Pollaren – på Hägerstensvägen, mellan Axelsberg och Örnsberg – kommer att hindra bilister från att använda Hägerstensvägen som genomfartsväg under vardagar klockan 7-9 samt 16-18. Syftet med avspärrningen är att skona de boende i området från rusningstrafiken. Kollektivtrafik och uttryckningsfordon undantas förbudet.
Förbudet gäller redan idag men i och med de fysiska åtgärderna hoppas Trafikkontoret hindra de billister som ändå bryter mot förbudet.
Pollaren installerades första gången för ett drygt år sedan då den ersatte en vägbom. Pollaren blev dock påkörd och har tillfälligt varit ur funktion under en period. Utöver att den nu har reparerats så har Trafikkontoret även låtit sätta upp en trafiksignal samt tydligare förbudsskyltning på platsen.
– I och med dessa åtgärder hoppas vi att det blir en bättre efterlevnad och respekt för gällande förbud, säger Lotten Backström, trafikplanerare på Trafikkontoret.
Pollaren och trafiksignalen är planerad att tas i bruk under vecka 37.

Kontaktperson: 
Lotten Backström, trafikplanerare, Trafikkontoret:
Telefon: 08-508 26215 E-post: lotten.backstrom@stockholm.se

Download the attached files

Related material

Documents

Karta pollare Hägerstensvägen

Sep 04, 2013 10:37 CEST
Mynewsdesk Newsroom   Update your network on Mynewsdesk



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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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Monday, August 26, 2013

On Syria, this week I think Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," as per our purported upcoming bombing of Syria. Per what George F. Will has said previously about Obama's over-blown rhetoric on the campaign and at The White House, now I think even normal words will start losing their true meaning if he says them too often

Not that you asked, but on the issue of Syria, I think that this week, President Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," as per our purported upcoming bombing of Syria because of the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons to clear areas of Syrian rebels who want Bashar al-Assad out of power, dead or alive.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/

Just like MLB's so-called "imminent" decision on suspending Alex Rodriguez that was two weeks that seemed like two months!
And thus far, meaningless, since he continues to play.

Laura Ingraham interviews George F. Will. Uploaded March 2, 2013. 

Per columnist George F. Will's recent spot-on comments that Obama's over-blown rhetoric was having a negative effect on both American citizens and the American lexicon, a line of thinking that for all sorts of reasons I admit will always have appeal to me, regardless of whom it is being said about
I think Obama is going to redefine yet another word and that word is "imminent," the
word of choice for newspaper headline writers and U.S. Senators.

Under him imminent is going to come to mean the combination of "one-of-these-days 
when I get around to it," PLUS, "I really wish you hadn't done that because now I have
to do something I really don't want to do but will because you gave me no choice."

I am now starting to come around to the idea, more than ever, that anything Obama does
makes things worse, regardless of intentions, regardless of the issue.

 In that sense, he's like like many South Florida pols I could name, who don't properly prepare for public meetings and seem to have no remorse for NOT fighting harder for their own residents and taxpayers, and are are chronically unprepared to engage in genuine oversight and accept some personal responsibility for asking hard questions when necessary, not just roll-over for city or county mangers and their staffs.
You know the names!
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Saturday, August 17, 2013

Obama's passivity in U.S. foreign policy, esp. in Egypt, is setting-off alarms in D.C. Old Conventional Wisdom: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. CW for 2013: Obama golfs while Egypt burns. Even while majority within pro-Obama U.S. Mainstream Media continue giving him a free pass, many at The Washington Post and other D.C. foreign policy centers are VERY ANXIOUS about Obama's lack of concern or influence, witness WaPo's Jackson Diehl's devastating column, "Obama’s Dangerous Passivity on Egypt and Syria on Display." Consider this but a taste: "Obama looks like a president in full flight from a world that looks nothing like what he imagined when he took office." Diehl is 100% correct!





Obama's passivity in U.S. foreign policy, esp. in Egypt, is setting-off alarms in D.C. Old Conventional Wisdom: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. CW for 2013: Obama golfs while Egypt burns. Even while majority within pro-Obama U.S. Mainstream Media continue giving him a free pass, many at The Washington Post and other D.C. foreign policy centers are VERY ANXIOUS about Obama's lack of concern or influence, witness WaPo's Jackson Diehl's devastating column, "Obama’s Dangerous Passivity on Egypt and Syria on Display."
Consider this but a taste: "Obama looks like a president in full flight from a world that looks nothing like what he imagined when he took office." Diehl is 100% correct!


The Washington Post
Obama’s dangerous passivity on Egypt and Syria on display 
By Jackson Diehl
August 15, 2013 
There was hope a few months ago that mounting chaos in the Middle East, and a revamping of President Obama’s national security team, would prompt the president to snap out of what looked like a deepening torpor in foreign policy.  
Instead, this president’s extraordinary passivity in the face of crisis may have achieved its apotheosis this week. On Wednesday, as Egyptian security forces gunned down hundreds of civilians in the streets of Cairo, an unperturbed Obama shot another round of golf at Martha’s Vineyard. His deputy press secretary was left to explain to reporters that the administration remained firmly committed to not deciding whether what had happened in Egypt was a coup.
Read the rest of the column here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jackson-diehl-obamas-dangerous-passivity-on-egypt-on-display/2013/08/15/69d085fc-0522-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html

 @JacksonDiehl https://twitter.com/JacksonDiehl

 Jackson Diehl archives at Washington Post: 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/jackson-diehl/2011/02/24/ABccMXN_page.html







The Washington Post
By Editorial Board
Egypt erupts as security forces attack Morsi supporters
August 14, 2013

 The Post's powerful mince-no-words editorial includes this passage;
This refusal to take a firm stand against massive violations of human rights is as self-defeating for the United States as it is unconscionable. Continued U.S. support for the Egyptian military is helping to push the country toward a new dictatorship rather than a restored democracy. Gen. Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, the coup leader, increasingly is styling himself as a national savior in the mode of such former dictators asGamal Abdel Nasser;
Read the rest of the editorial at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/egypt-erupts-as-security-forces-attack-morsi-supporters/2013/08/14/f230a080-04fa-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html



















When one of the most-dependable and prominent Obama supporters in the Washington new media, Eugene Robinson, an actual Pulitzer Prize winner, takes him to task and personally attacks his morality and lack of backbone, that's more than just news within the Beltway. 

 The Washington Post
A lack of spine on Egypt
By Eugene Robinson
August 15, 2013
There may be little the United States can do to end the savage bloodletting in Egypt, but at least our nation can be loyal to its ideals by bearing witness and telling the truth. In this, President Obama has failed.
Read the rest of the column at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-a-lack-of-spine-on-egypt/2013/08/15/33a7bc80-05df-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html













Christian Science Monitor
Why Mahmoud Badr is pro-Army, anti-Muslim Brotherhood
Interview: Mahmoud Badr, the activist whose online campaign helped to bring down Egypt's president, now supports the army attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood. Why?
By Yasmine Saleh, Reuters
August 17, 2013
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0817/Why-Mahmoud-Badr-is-pro-Army-anti-Muslim-Brotherhood

More at: http://www.csmonitor.com/content/search?SearchText=Egypt



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Thursday, July 11, 2013

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen flashback to 1989 - WTVJ-TV video: Ros-Lehtinen wins Special Election to succeed late Rep. Claude Pepper and makes history


Wolfson Archive YouTube Channel video: On what was a Special Election night in August of 1989, WTVJ reporter Ileana Bravo reports on the historic occasion of Florida state Senator Ileana Ros-Lehtinen winning a bruising election for the then-Miami Beach based congressional seat of Claude Pepper, who had died on May 30th at the age of 88, the oldest menber of Congress. She became the first Cuban-American ever elected to Congress and first Hispanic woman elected to the U.S. House. Uploaded July 11, 2013. http://youtu.be/jeC0ZwuB4e0

Future Florida governor Jeb Bush is rather obvious in the news clip, but who else do you recognize? (Suggested title in my YouTube inbox was "Happy Birthday, Madame Congresswoman!" due to her upcoming birthday on July 15th.) 

The other irony of this night, apparent to folks like me who grew-up in South Florida -but then living and working in Washington, D.C., and who knew people on Pepper's staff on The Hill- was that for many campaign cycles in the 1970's, the Republican who ran against longtime incumbent and Democratic icon Pepper was a Cuban-American businessman named Evelio Estrella, who was perhaps most noteworthy for refusing to do any campaigning in English in what was then FL-14, to the great astonishment of nearly everyone who was not Cuban-American, including the local and national news media.

Okay, so that happens once, you think.
Maybe there are no good candidates available and you have to field someone, even if a sacrificial lamb.
But Estrella ran enthusiastically several times!
Now THAT was Miami in the '70's!

Ros-Lehtinen is the current Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, just as the late Dante Fascell was, who represented Miami in Congress and whose CD extended south down to Key West.

I saw much of him over the years after I first moved to Washington in 1988 and became a regular presence at the full committee hearings as well as the European Subcommittee ones in the Rayburn Building, becoming very friendly with several members and the professional staff.
(Sometimes I'd even have lunch back with some friends there in the TV room while they watched either CNN or soap operas.)

That lasted until the GOP takeover in 1994, at which point Lee Hamilton had already succeeded Facell as Chair after he retired and didn't seek re-election in November of 1993.

As I've mentioned previously here on the blog, at various points while I was at IU, Lee Hamilton had been my congressman in Bloomington.
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Saturday, April 27, 2013

WaPo's editorial is important because it matters and will be read in lots of important places: Washington Post Editorial Board mulls facts over and fillets Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his well-known, self-destructive penchant for engaging in historical revisionism and nationalism: "Shinzo Abe’s inability to face history" -or reality; @安倍 晋三



Arirang News YouTube Channel video: Japanese Prime Minister Shenzo Abe statement inflames tensions between Korea and Japan 아베의 '망언'...한일. Uploaded April 24, 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWRVleXJIvM


Steve Miller reports from South Korea on the latest Abe controversy that has the Koreans and Chinese so irate: 


theqirangervlog YouTube Channel video: Shinzo Abe Denies Historical Colonization of Korea. Uploaded April 23, 2013. http://youtu.be/lLMGdNGdZ1g
WaPo's editorial is important because it matters and will be read in lots of important places: Washington Post Editorial Board mulls facts over and fillets Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his well-known, self-destructive penchant for engaging in historical revisionism and nationalism: "Shinzo Abe’s inability to face history"
Get it, the Post's intentional or unintentional double-meaning of face?

Defenders of Abe and at least some of the Japanese Establishment will no doubt see this criticism of him as a result of China and South Korea teaming-up behind the scenes to... blah blah.

 No, it's that Abe, far too often for comfort's sake, seems unable to help himself and keep his mouth shut and his head focused, a habit that is NOT a positive trait for anyone, least of all, Japan, China, South Korea or the U.S. and its military forces in the area to protect our allies, capisce?

But how do you convince the Chinese people or their government of this, or that this character fault of his can be overcome, since some of them at least, officially or not, STILL believe in 关系, guanxi and feel that in this equation, we, the U.S, are still NOT doing enough to make Abe stop indulging himself at their expense and humiliation?.

 Our dilemma is that we don't seem to always act like we know when Abe is playing to small elements within Japanese society that he feels he must sate, but with his fingers crossed, or when he's actually serious about what he's saying or doing.

 But there's no real confusion of what it means to Koreans and Chinese when Abe goes to the Yasukuni Shrine.

Our perceived confusion on this part, whether real or feigned for public consumption in Asia, only is making things worse, and as most of you know, I'm not a fan of John Kerry's, so I don't see him bringing anything to the equation that's going to change the dynamic.

 And now the main course...

The Washington Post
Editorial Board
Shinzo Abe’s inability to face history
April 26, 2013
From the moment last fall when Shinzo Abe reclaimed the office of Japanese prime minister that he had bungled away five years earlier, one question has stood out: Would he restrain his nationalist impulses — and especially his historical revisionism — to make progress for Japan?
Until this week, the answer to that question was looking positive. Mr. Abe has taken brave steps toward reforming Japan’s moribund economy. He defied powerful interest groups within his party, such as rice farmers, to join free-trade talks with the United States and other Pacific nations that have the potential to spur growth in Japan. He spoke in measured terms of his justifiable desire to increase defense spending.
Read the rest of the WaPo's editorial at:

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For more on this topic, see this largely accurate overview:
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Friday, January 4, 2013

Troubling American foreign policy story unfolding in Moscow with Radio Liberty, with WSJ's John O'Sullivan and WaPo's Kathy Lally adroitly describing the change in public poilicy that has Russians confounded by a move that seems destined to HELP Putin, not Russians who want genuine democracy and access to relatively-honest news and information


TechnerVideo: Shortwave Radio Bandscan 1. Uploaded December 25, 2009.

To me, the very troubling American foreign policy story unfolding in Moscow, described so well and with so much nuance by John O'Sullivan in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed and Kathy Lally's article in Thursday's Washington Post, is also one of the most confounding of the year.

 Confounding because it manages to connect what I believe is a very misguided change in U.S. public policy and the perplexed public perceptions of millions of average Russians, who can't understand why we as a nation are seemingly helping Vladmir Putin, the architect of the frightening nightmare of a reality show they wake up to everyday under his misguided leadership.

 Under Putin's manic and oversize ego, every week seems to bring fresh news and all-too obvious evidence of his callously using the instrument of the Russian government as a giant club to vent and exercise his personal pique -and reveal his loss of bearings.
See Spotlight on Russia blog by Vladimir Kara-Murza
Standing Up to Russia's 'Herod's Law'
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/vladimir-kara-murza/standing-russias-herods-law

 I should admit at the outset here that part of my concern about what I perceive to be some very 
troubling developments is in large part shaped by my own past experience.

Unlike 99% of you who are reading this blog post now, I used to listen to (and depend upon) my high-quality Radio Shack shortwave radio for many HOURS a day.

 I listened everyday to foreign news services, as well as the Voice of America and some of its foreign services, when I was in college at IU in those precious pre-Internet days of the early 1980's, and then later when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette, just a few blocks from the shores of Lake Michigan.

Radio Tirana, Sveriges Radio Int'l., Swiss Radio International, Radio Deutsche-Welle, BBC World Service, Radio Moscow, Radio Canada, Radio Nederland... 
I knew those broadcaster's musical intros as well as I knew the names of the people who lived on my dorm floor or on my apt. floor.
Actually, usually better... 

humanracer28 YouTube Channel video: Sveriges Radio/Radio Sweden jingle and ident. Uploaded March 18, 2010. http://youtu.be/_QhzQYKFOlU



While I've been following it in bits and pieces over the past few months, mostly on blogs and in The Post, for reasons known only to themselves, most other Mainstream Media outlets have consciously chosen to ignore this story, like it's the spoiled mayonnaise left out on the picnic table at the huge Fourth of July get-together that the last person using it forgot to put back in the cooler when they were finished with it.
But they could find space for the Justin Bieber kidnapping & castration case that never happened.
LA Times - Justin Bieber murder plot: Tie, pruning shears, unrequited feelings
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/gossip/la-et-mg-just-bieber-murder-castration-plot-20121213,0,6636059.story

 It goes without saying that this story has been completely ignored by the South Florida press, even though once upon a time, it would have been on the front page of what used to be the Miami Herald's halfway decent Sunday Op-Ed section in the 1970's and ''80's, but which as I have described here in some detail in many posts is now a four-page running joke.
And no, not just because they NEVER EVER include something compelling about some aspect of Broward County public policy in it, even though it's roughly 40% of this ADI.

The things is, as bad as the decisions and the policies described below have been, and they have been both counter-intuitive and terrible, it actually only seems to get worse and worse by the week from the point-of-view of responsible Americans who want to see the U.S. continue to shine a beam of relative honesty about the news into Russia -and falling-thru-the-cracks Belarus and Ukraine.

 It highlights the dangerous minefields that can emerge when public policy intersects both the news media and pop culture and the people making the decision forget what is most important -the customer, not managements and the consultant's tastes.
But then there always someone in radio who wants to reinvent the "Morning Zoo," isn't there? 

The Washington Post
Radio Liberty loses its license in Moscow, and Russians raise voices in dismay
By Kathy Lally
Published: January 3, 2012
MOSCOW — American-financed Radio Liberty, which penetrated the Iron Curtain with news of the outside world during the Cold War, has been trying to join today’s information revolution — and the static crackling around its efforts has been loud enough to reach Washington.
The radio station, funded by Congress but independent of it, has embraced a digital future, dismissing 37 journalists as it downsized just before it lost its only local broadcasting license here in November, when a 2011 law preventing foreign ownership came into effect.
Read the rest of the story at:

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Wall Street Journal
OPINION
Turmoil Over America's Radio Voice in Russia
The mass firing of Radio Liberty journalists prompted a protest by human-rights activists in Moscow.
By JOHN O'SULLIVAN
December 30, 2012, 7:43 p.m. ET
A few years ago Peter Pomeranzev, an Anglo-Russian journalist, found himself in a Moscow taxi where the radio was playing Radio Liberty, the U.S.-financed station that transmits uncensored broadcasts in Russian. As a boy Mr. Pomeranzev had been taken to hear his father, a Russian poet in London, deliver regular broadcasts to a closed Soviet Union. But that was another era. Why, in 2009, would a Moscow taxi driver listen to Radio Liberty?
Read the rest of the Op-Ed at:
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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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