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“Sol Sanders”

SOL SANDERS: WHY BENGHAZI?

Washington is notoriously a one-crisis town. And it may well be that the growing concern over Russian aggression in Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s threats to other former Soviet-occupied areas in Central and Eastern Europe will soak up all the controversy oxygen in the U.S. capital.

But there is increasing evidence that the events of 9/11 2012 in eastern Libya were extremely significant although any effort to elucidate them studiously has been ignored by the mainstream media.

They may, indeed, be an important marker in the longer term development of U.S. politics and American foreign policy and therefore of world peace and stability.

There are two overarching reasons why those events were significant:

An analysis of what happened there – when more facts are available – could well reveal the basis of the growing worldwide perception of the fundamental failure of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. That perception, whether a reflection of reality or not, is increasingly an ingredient in world politics given the central role of the U.S. since the end of World War II.

The Benghazi events could produce in more detail than has been otherwise available an evaluation of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, whatever veneer her frenzied activity of almost constant world travel has given it. If, as might be argued, the events at Benghazi and the conditions leading up to them were a product of Mrs. Clinton’s decision-making at State, even at second hand, they are important indicators of her executive ability. Until now that executive command had never been tested in any other venue since she has had no election to executive office.

Czechoslovakia” or “Finland” by Sol Sanders

All historical analogies are odious, some dead white man – probably a Frenchman – has said. Obviously, he meant that times change, the cast changes, the nuances change, the world moves on, and no geopolitical situation really replicates an earlier one. Some historiographers go even further; they say that for all these reasons there are not, indeed, any “lessons” from history, George Santayana notwithstanding. Still …

It’s good intellectual fun to make comparisons and sometimes we learn a little by playing a game in which we compare those former events with the contemporary happening. Of course, one problem is that our reconstruction of earlier events is often skewed if not downright wrong. For, obviously, if for no other reason, we view them in the context of the present. Again, still…

That’s the case now examining Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and attempted subversion of Ukraine as a sovereign state. It has become the cliché of clichés to see his program of violating internally accepted borders as the same route to war the totalitarian dictatorships took before World War II. But Putin is no Adolph Hitler, nor certainly no Josef Stalin. He has neither their talent for villainy and he heads an even more fragile economy, and indeed a political union coming apart at the seams. Yet his use of stratagems those 20th Century international outlaws used is all too obvious. One even is tempted to go along with the Polish official who said it was hard to believe Putin’s speechwriters hadn’t actually plagiarized an earlier Hitler model.

So that begs the question are we on the eve of a general war such as broke out in 1939?

The year 1938 was more than usually momentous for European history, and indeed for the whole world so Euro-oriented as it was in the last century. Among the many events were two dramatic crises that captured the headlines:

Trying to head off another catastrophe like The Great War from which the Europeans have never fully recovered because of the enormous loss of life, a deal was made at a conference in Munich between the Western allies and Hitler. War was temporarily averted.

SOL SANDERS- IDEOLOGY/INCOMPETENCE?

yeoldecrabb.com

Belatedly in this instance, in our search to solve the mystery of the Obama Administration’s policy formulation process, highly touted The New Yorker extended interviews by David Remnick are found wanting. A little more Obama, a little less Remnick should have been the order of the day! But there must be anecdotal origins to these quotes. In fact, for the most part they hardly seem “quotable” and suggest having gone through the mill of the White House speechwriters.

Still, as with reading during the 2008 presidential primary the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, one looks for the kernel which set off Remnick’s ubiquitous fawning..

The question posed is whether the motivation behind the Obama Administration’s disasters is ideological or sheer lack of knowledge/executive experience?.

If anyone had any doubt about the complexity of such an inquiry, that question was thrown into bold relief by the passage and attempted implementation of Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. [Note the shortcut to passage of a measure to order one sixth of the economy without a single Republican vote, speaking of lack of inter-Party cooperation.]

Obamacare, according to sources close to the President was conceived as the historic legacy of this presidency, and it is likely to be its only one, for better or for worse. It is the quintessential example of our problem: what government-subsidized National Public Radio recently called “difficulties” of the website rollout is still inconceivable. In an era when modest startup businesses can hire IT expertise for a song, how could the U.S. government fail so spectacularly with a $93-million budget — a minimal estimate by its advocates? [We may never know how much was actually spent on the original and the continuing attempts at rescue.] How could our late unlamented Secretary of Health and Human Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have presided over such a disaster? [Maybe there is something “wrong in Kansas” if she could have not only held the governorship but eight years as the state’s insurance commission!]

Corruption/incompetence? The incredible costs suggest that possibility. Or do we have to go to conspiracy theories, i.e., that since the President and most of his coterie of health care advisers have always expressed preference for total federal government control [let’s skip the euphemism “single payer”], did they intend just such a catastrophe so that, ultimately, the country would throw up its hands and out of sheer frustration collapse into that equally disastrous U.K. template?

ISRAEL/PALESTINE….ENOUGH ALREADY; SOL SANDERS

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It must have been a shock to its “right-nick” listeners. But even government-subsidized National Public Radio [NPR] had a commentator last week declaring that the so-called Israel-Palestine “Peace Process” is going anywhere. And, more importantly, he noted, the rest of the Middle East at the moment doesn’t care all that much about the issue. That’s quite an admission for the increasing anti-Israel lobby which now counts The New York Times and NPR among its brightest stars.

Nor was Pres. Barack Obama likely to have heard much about the Israel-Palestine schmoozle in his peripatetic travels including trying to put a band aid on worsening Washington-Riyadh relations. True, the Arab League – which has more differences among its members than the United Nations Security Council –recently did come out against “a Jewish state”. But the Arab League has become less and less a spokesman for the Arabs. Its anti-Israel screeds are all that’s left of what broke away from British tutelage with Gama Nasser’s overthrow the British protected Egyptian monarchy in the early 50s.

Indeed, the list of issues is long facing the Arab world, and Muslim majority nations in general, and the Western powers ostensibly led by the U.S. in the Middle East. It is fraught with so many other threats that the problem of Israel’s relations with the Arabs pales in comparison. Nor does anyone believe the myth held among Pres. Obama’s Arabist coterie that “solution” of the Israel-Palestine problem would be an open sesame to solving all the Middle East myriad difficulties.

Foremost now, for the Sunni Arab regimes – and even those nominally secular such as Egypt’s new military rule – is the specter of the growing regional power of the mullahs in Tehran. That’s exemplified for the Saudis by the growing evidence that the bloody Syrian Dictator Basher Assad relies on Iran for life support. The Saudis publicly keep reminding Obama and the Europeans they had promised to eliminate him. Instead, there is even the prospect that Assad may negotiate his way into some sort of permanence through, ironically, Washington-sponsored peace talks.

SOL SANDERS: THE COOL WAR COMETH 11

  There is presently about as much confusion as when the U.S. entered The Cold War against the Soviet Union in the late 1940s. But there are fundamental defining differences to what is likely to be an equally long and complex new struggle between the U.S., its allies and Moscow.   The two engagements do […]

SOL SANDERS: THE REAL RED LINE

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The real “red line”

Recorded history is generally a straight-line narrative, often written with prejudice, and as the cliché has it, by the victors.

Only those involved in writing it, or more importantly, living through it, know the many cross-currents that because they do not present a clear picture of events defy immediate balanced analysis. These truths apply to any moment in history but particularly to those when violent events or revolutionary technology changes the pattern of life for everyone.

We are obviously in one of those periods on several scores by any calculation.

But while history may or may not repeat itself, there are permanent aspects of the relationships among nations. And we live with contemporary manifestations of the intricate nature of those liaisons.

Among those which is of ultimate importance is the integrity of the national state as a cornerstone of international law.

With the expansion of the concept of the European nation-state after the NapoleonicWars, its further consolidation in the 19th century, and Woodrow Wilson’s blessing – if failure of implementation — after World War I, conquest, international acceptance and treaty obligations have made national boundaries sacrosanct.

When they have been violated deliberately by a rogue power, it has led to even more bloodletting on the Old Continent where they had been enshrined to prevent just that very catastrophe, and now expanded however unfittingly to a vast new world in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

SOL SANDERS: THE COOL WAR COMETH

The Cool War Cometh  http://yeoldecrabb.com/   No, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin has not ushered in the return to The Cold War with his assault on the integrity of Ukraine. But he has confirmed that the United States and his Russian regime – very likely as long as he lasts – is engaged in a bitter […]

SOL SANDERS: A WORLD ABLAZE

A version of this column will be published at http://yeoldecrabb.com/ on Monday, Feb. 24, 2014.

A world ablaze – but different fuels

A bane of modern military studies [let’s eschew “science”] is the concept of counter-insurgency – the idea that indigenous revolts around the world can be analyzed with “the scientific method” and a set of general principles if implemented could cure the problem. Common sense tells us that the essence of any dissidence/armed insurrection is its particularity, its basis in specific local conditions. They differ not only in geography but in the characteristics of individual societies. So, yes, the army should not steal the peasants’ chickens is a good maxim – but such bromides do not go far to tell you how to prevent civil war.

At the moment, we have one bitter internecine war in Syria, and three incipient revolts between two or more elements in Ukraine, Venezuela and Thailand. Other conflicts, even messier to define, are growing in the Central African Republic and Nigeria.

The question, of course, is whether there anything that connects all these conflicts? And, if so, what if anything can be done to lessen tension and conflict?

Ukraine

The ambivalence between Ukraine and Russia is as old as the two peoples. In fact, it was from centers in what is now Ukraine that Christianity spread to the Great Russians and where they even got their name. More recently, Ukrainians have suffered disproportionately in the Soviet Union – a bitter irony, often at the hands of ethnic Ukrainian members of the Communist hierarchy. Stalin’s man-made famine of the 1930s followed on to the horrors of those of World War I when the engineer Herbert Hoover first emerged on the world scene. But a flame of Ukrainian identity survived, expressing itself at the height of Soviet repression in such small protests as citizens of Ukraine’s western metropolis, the old Hapsburg city of Lviv [Lvov, Lemberg] unofficially using “our time” [Central European] rather than Moscow’s time zone to express their identification with the West..

SOL SANDERS: A TEST WE MUSN’T FAIL

http://acdemocracy.org/a-test-we-mustnt-fail/#sthash.shJAxBJl.dpbs The United States is going through one of those periodic crises, testing a complex and often sclerotic constitutional system. An increasingly diminishing presidency has tried to “transform” the society, and particularly its economy, with draconian measures. One at least, Obamacare, rammed through an absent-minded Congress with a temporary majority of the President’s party, has […]

SOL SANDERS: WHY IS EVERYTHING GOING WRONG? IT ISN’T

http://yeoldecrabb.com/ Why is everything going wrong?       It isn’’t. There is an old axiom in the news business – or what is left of it as traditional newspapers die to be replaced, for the moment at least, by amateurism on the internet and its social networks – that good news is not news. So we get […]