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Friday, June 26, 2009

Meanwhile, back in REAL news
Posted by Jill | 12:40 AM
The main page at the New York Times is all Michael Jackson, all the time, above the fold. Scroll down, and we see that the thugs running the nation of Iran have just about succeeded in crushing the opposition:
Step by step, Iran’s leaders are successfully pushing back threats to their authority, crushing street protests, pressing challengers to withdraw or to limit their objections to the disputed presidential election and restricting the main opposition leader’s ability to do much more than issue statements of outrage.

Two weeks after Iran’s disputed presidential election, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the top challenger, issued an angry statement Thursday that underscored his commitment to press ahead — but also his impotence in the face of an increasingly emboldened and repressive government.

Mr. Moussavi does not have a political organization to rally, and during the height of the unrest he attracted a large following more because of whom he opposed — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — than because of what he stood for, political analysts said.

“I am willing to show how election criminals have stood by those behind the recent riots and shed people’s blood,” Mr. Moussavi said in a statement posted on his Web site. “I will not back down even for a second because of personal threats and interests from defending the rights of the people.”

Perhaps the most important question now is whether the leadership can paper over the deep divisions that the election has widened within Iran’s political elite, which present the most serious threat to the system in its 30-year history.

There were still signs of widespread public anger and resentment toward the leadership, but no organization to channel it, political analysts said.


Our blogbuddy Jurassicpork has been nothing short of spectacular in his coverage of the Iran situation, and if you haven't visited Welcome Back to Pottersville in a while, I highly recommend that you do so.

As for the other troubled hotspot of the world, I had dinner last night with a colleague who is originally from South Korea, and we were discussing the North Korea situation. Another colleague wondered why the people of North Korea can't band together and rebel. I think we're seeing in Iran why that's not often possible. As long as these dictatorial strongmen have the army in their pockets, and can keep them by giving them more money and better housing than the rest of the population, any rebellion, unless the population is huge, unified, AND willing to suffer huge casualties, is going to be crushed the way the one in Iran has been. Meanwhile, the thought of people in South Korea sending messages tied to balloons in the hope that they will arrive in the North just breaks my heart.

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Monday, June 22, 2009

Imagine if John McCain were president right now
Posted by Jill | 12:13 AM
(Hooray! I even beat Chris Ryan over at Americablog today! And I don't gripe about generations, either.)

I was walking around the lovely city of Cologne yesterday while John McCain was seeking to revive his flaccid member by talking of boarding the North Korean ship suspected of carrying illegal weapons to Burma and the equally flaccid but even more bellicose John Bolton all but called Barack Obama a pussy on national television.

But I for one am glad to have a president who doesn't bomb first and ask questions later. It's easy for these armchair quarterbacks to call this president a pussy, but the reality is that Barack Obama is dealing with actual threats to not just the U.S. but to the world at this point, while George W. Bush was destabilizing the Middle East with his little My Dick is Bigger Than My Daddy's adventure in Iraq. And a certain amount of consideration of consequences is going to be vital if and when actual military action occurs.

George W. Bush made us a rogue nation in his dealings with loose bands of terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. When dealing with state operators, we're not going to be able to go it alone. So while Congress was passing meaningless resolutions of solidarity with the Iranian demonstrators that would cut off all possibility of engagement with Iran if the rebellion fails (and if we were to go in there militarily and make it succeed, Mir-Hossain Mousavi would be perceived in the Middle East as Shah II: Electric Boogaloo).

The famous definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. We've done the Wild Wild West thing for eight years -- destabilizing the Middle East and convincing the Madman of North Korea that it is WE who are the threat to HIM, not the other way around. I'm willing to give the consideration of consequences of our action a try before we bring out the nukes.

I do wonder, however, why the outrage from the right about a possible North Korean missile attack directed at Hawaii. Wasn't it the wingnuts who said that Obama was an illegitimate president because Hawaii wasn't really part of this country?

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Friday, June 27, 2008

But when the president does, it is NOT appeasement...as long as the president's name is "George W. Bush"
Posted by Jill | 7:04 AM
I hate to rag on George Bush too much about the successful negotiations with North Korea about that country's nuclear program, because it's probably the only thing in his entire misbegotten administration that he's gotten right. But where at one time I would have been obliged, however grudgingly, to congratulate the administration on a job well done, Bush's appalling comments about appeasement just a few weeks ago mean that we have to point out his hypocrisy and that of his entire administration.

Or we could just let Keith Olbermann do it:





Note in particular the condescension with which Bush points out the strengths of negotiation -- as if he'd just discovered something previously unknown to anyone.

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Thursday, March 01, 2007

They ran it up the flagpole and no one saluted
Posted by Jill | 7:38 AM
And they have no personnel with which to attack Iran and North Korea at the same time:

The Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed.

The chief intelligence officer for North Korea, Joseph R. DeTrani, told Congress on Tuesday that while there is "high confidence" North Korea acquired materials that could be used in a "production-scale" uranium program, there is only "mid-confidence" such a program exists. Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill, the chief negotiator for disarmament talks, told a conference last week in Washington that it is unclear whether North Korea ever mastered the production techniques necessary for such a program.

[snip]

When Bush took office in 2001, a number of top administration officials openly expressed grave doubts about the 1994 accord, which was negotiated by the Clinton administration, and they seized on the intelligence about the uranium facility to terminate the agreement. The CIA provided an unclassified estimate to Congress in November 2002 that North Korea had begun constructing a plant that would produce enough "weapons-grade uranium for two or more nuclear weapons per year . . . as soon as mid-decade."

David Albright, a respected former U.N. inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, issued a report last week in which he likened the intelligence on North Korea's uranium facility to the discredited intelligence before the invasion of Iraq that Baghdad was building a nuclear program. "The analysis about North Korea's program also appears to be flawed," he wrote.


This is now the Bush Administration's modus operandi. Claim that you have the intelligence, invoke mushroom clouds, then attack. The problem is that Americans aren't buying it anymore. Of course, this disbelief has its own problems, because it means that if and when here IS a legitimate threat, we won't believe them then either.

Sounds like a perfect setup if you want to allow another attack to take place on U.S. soil, doesn't it? Especially one timed to allow you to cancel the 2008 election.

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