Your Vote for Mitt Romney, will bring the Neocons Cabal back to Power

“If Romney aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations, that’s probably a question that he’s going to have to answer, and I think that’s a legitimate part of the campaign,” Obama said of the Bain report in an interview with Washington TV station WJLA.

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Mitt Romney Wants To Refight the Failed Terror War–Looking To Return One of It’s ZIOCONNED Authors…

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by Joe battenfeld

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[To be sure, a vote for Romney is a vote to return the Neocon cabal to power. Condoleeza Rice is just the most obvious manifestation of this stagnant lack of vision suffered by Mitt. Even his foreign policy white papers from his campaign site are copied from the Neocon bible, the Project for a New American Century (SEE: An American Century—A Strategy To Secure America's Enduring Interests and Ideals). If Americans ever again turn the government back over to the Republicans, we will deserve the Police State which they will bring with them.]

… And Mitt Romney finally stands up to Barack Obama

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Mitt Romney, facing the harshest attacks yet from the White House, launched a new offensive last night, demanding an apology from President Obama as speculation swirled he’s looking at former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.

The presumptive GOP nominee gave a round of televised interviews and prepared to sit down with advisers this weekend as speculation heated up about Rice. Another VP contender, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, appeared at a Romney fundraiser in Boston yesterday.

But it’s Rice who has Republicans buzzing. While some GOP leaders lauded her as a running mate, others said she is unlikely to get the nod because of her pro-choice views — a deal-breaker for many conservative voters.

“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me,” Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia, told the Herald about the Rice rumors.

Sabato also scoffed at a new report raising questions about whether Romney lied about leaving Bain Capital after 1999, predicting most voters won’t care about the old charge come Election Day.

“It’s a tempest in a summer teapot,” Sabato said. “It’s a clear attempt by the Obama campaign to keep the focus off President Obama and the economy.”

The former Massachusetts governor, asked whether he thinks Obama should apologize for his aide suggesting Romney committed a felony for misrepresenting his position at Bain in federal documents, delivered a stinging reply — for Romney, anyway.

“Absolutely — my goodness!” an animated Romney told CBS News in a round of televised interviews aired last night.

“What kind of president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party?” Romney added. “This is reckless and absurd on his part, and it’s something that’s beneath his dignity.”

But Obama refused to let up, citing a Boston Globe report about Romney being listed as CEO of Bain until 2002 in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The Globe claimed the scoop but later admitted it had already been reported by two other news organizations.

“If he aspires to being president, one of the things you learn is, you are ultimately responsible for the conduct of your operations, that’s probably a question that he’s going to have to answer, and I think that’s a legitimate part of the campaign,” Obama said of the Bain report in an interview with Washington TV station WJLA.

Sabato said Romney’s new aggressive stance against the Obama campaign, which has been blistering the airwaves with ads focusing on Bain, is long overdue.

“Who cares about whether he left Bain in 1999 or 2002,” he said. “But there is a correct answer. They (the Romney campaign) give the impression of being too afraid of too many things. Don’t look like you’re hiding something.”

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Source   Title image

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Unrest in Xinjiang: Where’s the Muslim outrage?

Xinjiang Riots and the Muslim World

by Matthew Clark

Note for WoP Readers: The riots between the Han Chinese and the Uighurs or Xinjiang Muslims, erupted in the first week of this month and resulted in more than 184 deaths. Without going to be investigative on who did what to whom, reports received were contradictory and they had to be; the Chinese have had their own version and in contrast the other version was that of the western media, who of late have made it a habit to exploit the Muslims’ sentiments – to their own advantage.

The post that follows is from Matthew Clark. In his article, which was published originally in the Christian Science Monitor, Matthew laments Muslims’ apathy towards their fellow Muslim brothers suffering at the hands of Han Chinese. In response to Clark’s observations I wrote to him via the blog site where his articles reappeared and I reproduce my comments as follows:-

Clark,

Muslims are not reacting over what happened in Xinjiang province of China because the games played by respective US administrations to make Muslims fight their wars and then leave them in lurch as it happened in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, in Chechnya and as it is now happening in Pakistan, the machinations, the orchestrated happenings, all have convinced Muslims that in every matter US governments have their own vested interests.

The Muslim populations world wide have seen how the Pentagon used Muslims’ sentiments to grind its own axe, all the time, by all US administrations, and at all times it were the Muslims who suffered in the long run. Your article on the plight of Uighur Muslims is not based on any sympathy for the Muslims, it is just an effort by the US to bleed China as she bled Soviet Russia, made the Afghans to lay their lives for America’s cause, which was termed as a war of Islam vs. the Infidels and now too, again the US is indirectly playing the same game under the garb of Muslims’ plight under a Chinese rule.

Muslims very well know now how the US propagandists and psy ops specialists converted Muslim youth into Zealots to fight against the Soviets and then turn their offsprings into Frankensteins.

And this Rebia Kadeer of WUC is running an NGO which is funded by the Pentagon, how can then Muslims stand-up to side with the Uighurs when they know ultimately it is the Uighurs who will first fight the US war against China and ultimately the same Uighars will be punished being Muslims as the clash of civilizations is still in progress, the Neocons who want an NWO be introduced are still in their place, how can you expect Muslims to be fooled again and again. Muslim governments may be a stooge of the US presidents but the Muslims in general the common Muslims on the street now very well understand how were/are these games  played where Muslims were/will be a pawn in the great game and nothing else???

And now the article from Matthew.

Paramilitary police officers patrol on the main street in Urumqi, western China’s Xinjiang province. (Eugene Hoshiko/AP)

Muslims around the world have largely remained silent about last week’s deadly riots between Han Chinese and Uighurs. What makes this case of ‘oppression’ of Muslims different than others?

Shhhh! I think I just heard a pin drop.

Nope. It’s just more deafening silence from the Muslim Street in the wake of last week’s ethnic riot that killed more than 184 in China’s restive Xinjiang Province, home to the Uighurs, a Muslim minority group.

According to the Chinese government, the majority of the victims in the riot were Han Chinese, attacked by Uighurs who’ve complained for decades about being marginalized, abused, neglected, and oppressed ever since former Communist leader Mao Zedong launched a campaign to flood Xinjiang with Han Chinese in 1960s. But many of the victims were Uighurs, too, and thousands of Uighurs were arrested as a result of the melee. Many could face execution.

China also closed mosques last week – just one of many strict limits on freedom of expression in Xinjiang.

It’s the kind of stuff that would arouse passionate protests if a Western country were the one cracking down. (Remember the apoplectic protests over the Danish cartoon of Prophet Muhammad?)

But there were no Chinese flags burned in Karachi. No effigies of Hu Jintao smoldered in Cairo. No “Death to China” chants echoed through the streets of Tehran.

Not that the Monitor would ever be in favor of such protests against any country. But why does it seem as though there such a different response for China?

The Uighurs’ “spiritual mother,” Rebiya Kadeer (profiled here by the Monitor’s Beijing Bureau Chief Peter Ford), has some ideas.

“So far the Islamic world is silent about the Uighurs’ suffering because the Chinese authorities have been very successful in [their] propaganda to the Muslim world … that the Uighurs are extremely pro-west Muslims – that they are modern Muslims, not genuine Muslims,” she said at a press conference Monday in Washington.

Ms. Kadeer contrasted a lack of action from Muslim countries with the support Uighurs get from Western democracies and called on Muslim nations to do more.

Turkey drops the G-word

Days later, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called the situation “genocide” and thousands of Turks protested China’s treatment of Uighurs on Sunday. Turks share ethnic and cultural bonds with the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, so the support in Turkey goes beyond sympathy for fellow Muslims allegedly being oppressed by non-believers.

Iran’s clerics speak out

Iranian critics are starting to get into the act, too.

Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, a high-level cleric, demanded that Iran’s foreign ministry quickly condemn what he described as the Chinese government’s “horrible” backing of “racist Han Chinese.”

The news website Tabnak, backed by, Mohsen Rezai, conservative challenger of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the government of hypocrisy in ignoring violence against fellow Muslims: “When Israel was striking Gaza, state radio and television aired round-the-clock reports and analyses about the massacre of Muslims, but now only short reports are heard. . . . During the Israeli invasion of Gaza, nearly 1,000 died in 20 days – or 50 per day. In China’s riots, nearly 100 Muslims were killed in a day. Our government is silent regarding clear carnage.”

But, by and large, the Muslim Street has been just as silent.

A plea from the Palestinian territories

“Muslims around the world have an absolute religious, moral, and human duty to identify with their oppressed brothers and sisters in [Xinjiang],” journalist Khalid Amayreh in an opinion piece on Islam Online, comparing the Uighurs’ plight to that of the Palestinians. “Muslims, as the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said, must never betray or abandon other Muslims, especially in time of distress. Unfortunately, however, Muslim states and Muslim peoples alike have been largely silent in the face of these atrocities in [Xinjiang].”

Will this change? We’ll see.

Source:
http://www.instablogs.com/

The Ir-Af-Pak War: Obama Looses the Manhunters

Charisma and the Imperial Presidency

Note from WoP: Other day, while watching the interview president Obama gave to Anwar Iqbal of Dawn TV, I was tremendously impressed by president’s eloquence, the days he spent in Pakistan, the friends he had from Karachi and Hyderabad, whom he so nostalgically remembered, his experience of cooking daal (lentils) and qeema (chopped meat), the popular Pakistani  dishes, his excellent relations with Pakistani Americans, the role they are playing in US economy and lastly Pak US relations, I was so impressed, so delighted, I felt like saying well done brother Obama, You won our hearts.

But that’s where Obama’s charm as a statesman and his charisma as an astute politician, is at its best. It was same in Cairo when he sent his message to the Muslim world waiving his Olive branch to Muslims all around the world. But when it comes to action, Obama’s charming persona, his most befitting, most moving choice of words, his articulation, his perfect command over what the president is communicating comes to end.

by Tom Engelhardt

Let’s face it, even Bo is photogenic, charismatic. He’s a camera hound. And as for Barack, Michelle, Sasha, and Malia — keep in mind that we’re now in a first name culture — they all glow on screen.`

Before a camera they can do no wrong. And the president himself, well, if you didn’t watch his speech in Cairo, you should have. The guy’s impressive. Truly. He can speak to multiple audiences — Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, as well as a staggering range of Americans — and somehow just about everyone comes away hearing something they like, feeling he’s somehow on their side. And it doesn’t even feel like pandering. It feels like thoughtfulness. It feels like intelligence.

For all I know — and the test of this is still a long, treacherous way off — Barack Obama may turn out to be the best pure politician we’ve seen since at least Ronald Reagan, if not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He seems to have Roosevelt’s same unreadable ability to listen and make you believe he’s with you (no matter what he’s actually going to do), which is a skill not to be whistled at.

Right now, he and his people are picking off the last Republican moderates via a little party-switching and some well-crafted appointments, and so driving that party and its conservative base absolutely nuts, if not into extreme southern isolation. In this sense, his first Supreme Court pick was little short of a political stroke of brilliance, whatever she turns out to do on the bench. Whether the opposition “wins” (which they won’t) or loses in any attempt to block her nomination, they stand to further alienate a key voting bloc, Hispanics. Now 9% of voters, Hispanics went for Obama in the last election by a staggering 35-point margin. Next time their heft might even bring solidly red-state Texas closer to in-play status in the two-party system. In other words, the president has left his opponents in a situation where they can’t win for losing.

Mix Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan…

All this is little short of amazing, particularly if put into even the most modest historical context.

If, in a Star-Trekkian mode — hand me the “red matter,” Mr. Spock! — you could transport yourself back to early 2003 and tell just about any American what’s coming, you might have found yourself institutionalized. If you had said that the new norm would be a black president with Reagan-like popularity, Kennedy-like charisma, and Roosevelt-like skills in the political arena, leading a majority Democratic Congress in search of universal health care, solutions to global warming, energy conservation, and bullet trains, your listener might, at best, have responded with his or her own joke: “A priest, a rabbi, and a penguin walk into a bar…”

After all, back then, before two “hurricanes” – the invasion of Iraq and Katrina — began the process of turning our American world upside down, the Bush administration seemed to be riding ever higher globally and the Republican Party even higher than that at home. Back then, the neocons were consumed with imperial dreams of shock-and-awe-style eternal global conquest and domination (“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran”); and the President’s “brain,” Karl Rove, now exiled to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, was convinced that he was nailing down a domestic Pax Republicana for generations to come.

And at that moment, who would have denied that things would turn out just that way? So don’t let anyone tell you that history doesn’t have its surprises. A black guy with the middle name of “Hussein,” a liberal Chicago politician from — in a phrase Republicans then regularly spit out, as if saying “Democratic” was too much effort — the “Democrat Party”? I don’t think so.

And yet, in mid-June 2009, less than five months into the Obama presidency, can you even remember that era before the dawn of time when people were wondering what it would be like for an African-American family to inhabit the White House? Would American voters allow it? Could Americans take it?

You betcha!

Being President

All that said, let’s not forget reality. Barack Obama did not win an election to be president of Goodwill Industries, or the YMCA, or the Ford Foundation. He may be remarkable in many ways, but he is also president of the United States which means that he is head honcho for the globe’s single great garrison state which now, to a significant extent, lives off war and the preparations for future war.

He is today the proprietor of — to speak only of the region extending from North Africa to the Chinese border that the Bush loyalists used to call “the Greater Middle East” — American bases, or facilities, or prepositioned military material (or all of the above) at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, in Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq (and Iraqi Kurdistan), Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan (where the U.S. military and the CIA share Pakistani military facilities), and a major Air Force facility on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.

Some U.S. bases in these countries are microscopic and solitary, but others like Camp Victory or Balad Air Base, both in Iraq, are gigantic installations in a web of embedded bases. According to an expert on the subject, Chalmers Johnson, the Pentagon’s most recent official count of U.S. “sites” (i.e. bases) abroad is 761, but that does not include “espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude — e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.”

In January when he entered the Oval Office, Barack Obama also inherited the largest embassy on Earth, built in Baghdad by the Bush administration to imperial proportions as a regional command center. It now houses what are politely referred to as 1,000 “diplomats.” Recent news reports indicate that such a project wasn’t just an aberration of the Bush era. Another embassy, just as gigantic, expected to house “a large military and intelligence contingent,” will be constructed by the Obama administration in its new war capital, Islamabad, Pakistan. Once the usual cost overruns are added in, it may turn out be the first billion-dollar embassy. Each of these command centers will, assumedly, anchor the American presence in the Greater Middle East.

Barack Obama is also now the commander-in-chief of 11 aircraft carrier strike groups, which regularly patrol the planet’s sea lanes. He sits atop a U.S. Intelligence Community (yes, that’s what our intelligence crew like to call themselves) of at least 16 squabbling, overlapping agencies, heavily Pentagonized, and often at each other’s throats. They have a cumulative hush-hush budget of perhaps $50 billion or more. (Imagine a power so obsessively consumed by the very idea of “intelligence” that it is willing to support 16 sizeable separate outfits doing such work, and that’s not even counting various smaller offices dedicated to intelligence activities.)

The new president will preside over a country which now ponies up almost half the world’s total military expenditures. His 2010 estimated Pentagon budget will be marginally higher than the last staggering one from the Bush years at $664 billion. (The real figure, once military funds stowed away in places like the Department of Energy are included, is actually significantly larger.)

He now inhabits a Washington in which deep-thinking consists of a pundit like Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution whining that these bloated sums are, in fact, too little to “maintain” U.S. forces (a budgetary increase of 7-8% per year for the next decade would, he claims, be just adequate); in which forward-looking means Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reorienting military spending toward preparations for fighting one, two, many Afghanistans; and in which out-of-the-box, futuristic thinking means letting the blue-skies crew at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) loose on far-out problems like how to turn“programmable matter” into future Transformer-like weapons of war.

While Obama enthusiasts can take pride in the appointment of some out-of-the-box thinkers in domestic areas, including energy, health, and the science of the environment, in two crucial areas his appointments are pure old-line Washington and have been so from the first post-election transitional moments. His key economic players and advisors are largely a crew of former Clintonistas, or Clintonista wannabes or protégés like Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. They are distinctly inside-the-boxers, some of them responsible for the thinking that, in the 1990s, led directly to this catastrophic economic moment.

As for foreign policy, had the November election results been reversed, Obama’s top team of today could just as easily have been appointed by Senator John McCain. National Security Advisor James Jones was actually a McCain friend, Gates someone he admired, and Hillary Clinton a figure he could well have picked for a top post after a narrow election victory, had he decided to reach out to the Democrats. As a group, Obama’s key foreign policy figures and advisors are traditional players in the national security state and pre-Bush-style Washington guardians of American power, thinking globally in familiar ways.

General Manhunter

And let’s be careful not to put all of this in the passive voice either when it comes to the new president. In both of these areas, he may have felt somewhat unsure of himself and so slotted in the old guard around him as a kind of political protection. Nonetheless, this hasn’t just happened to him. He didn’t just inherit the presidency. He went for it. And he isn’t just sitting atop it. He’s actively using it. He’s wielding power. In foreign policy terms, he’s settling in — and despite his Cairo speech and various hints of change on subjects like relations with Iran, in largely predictable ways.

(Left) Obama’s New Man in Kabul, Gen. Stan McChrystal

He may, for example, have declared a sunshine policy when it comes to transparency in government, but in his war policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his imperial avatar is already plunging deep into the dark, distinctly opaque valley of death. He’s just appointed a general, Stanley A. McChrystal, as his Afghan commander. From 2003-2008, McChrystal ran a special operations outfit in Iraq (and then Afghanistan) so secret that the Pentagon avoided mention of it. In those years, its operatives were torturing, abusing, and killing Iraqis as part of a systematic targeted assassination program on a large scale. It was, for those who remember the Vietnam era, a mini-Phoenix program in which possibly hundreds of enemies were assassinated: al-Qaeda-in-Iraq types, but also Sunni insurgents, and Sadrists (not to speak of others, since informers always settle scores and turn over their own personal enemies as well).

Although he’s now being touted in the press as the man to bring the real deal in counterinsurgency to Afghanistan (and “protect” the Afghan population in the bargain), his actual field is “counter-terrorism.“ He spoke the right words to Congress during his recent confirmation hearings, but pay no attention.

The team he’s now assembling in Washington to lead his operations in Afghanistan (and someday maybe Pakistan) tells you what you really need to know. It’s filled with special operations types. The expertise of his chosen key lieutenants is, above all, in special ops work. At the same time, reports Rowan Scarborough at Fox News, an extra 1,000 special operations troops are now being “quietly” dispatched to Afghanistan, bringing the total number there to about 5,000. Keep in mind that it’s been the special operations forces, with their kick-down-the-door night raids and air strikes, who have been involved in the most notorious incidents of civilian slaughter, which continue to enrage Afghans.

Note, by the way, that while the president is surging into Afghanistan 21,000 troops and advisors (as well as those special ops forces), ever more civilian diplomats and advisors, and ever larger infusions of money, there is now to be a command surge as well. General McChrystal, according to a recent New York Times article, has “been given carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans… [He] is assembling a corps of 400 officers and soldiers who will rotate between the United States and Afghanistan for a minimum of three years. That kind of commitment to one theater of combat is unknown in the military today outside Special Operations, but reflects an approach being imported by General McChrystal, who spent five years in charge of secret commando teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Like the new mega-embassy in Pakistan, this figure — the Spartans, after all, only needed 300 warriors at Thermopylae — tells us a great deal about the top-heavy manner in which the planet’s super-garrison state fights its wars.

So, this is now truly Obama’s war, about to be run by his chosen general, a figure from the dark side. Expect, then, from our sunshine president’s men an ever bloodier secret campaign of so-called counter-terror (though it’s essence is likely to be terror, pure and simple), as befits an imperial power trying to hang on to the Eastern reaches of the Greater Middle East.

The new crew aren’t counterinsurgency warriors, but — a term that has only recently entered our press – “manhunters.“ And don’t forget, President Obama is now presiding over an expanding war in which “manhunters” engaging in systematic assassination programs will not only be on the ground but, thanks to the CIA’s escalating program of targeted assassination by robot aircraft, in the skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands.

For those who care to remember, it was into counter-terrorism and an orgy of manhunting, abuse, and killing that the Vietnam era version of “counterinsurgency” dissolved as well.

Rise and Fall of the US empire

In the name of freedom and democracy America has used military force against many countries, most of them small and weak, committing atrocities, killing unarmed civilians, including women and children, and destroying their homes, as happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Korea, in the saturation bombing of North Vietnamese cities, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq.

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THE RISE AND FALL OF THE US EMPIRE

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by Ahmad Naguib Roushdy

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The American empire is in danger and needs rescuing. That is the consensus among strategists, columnists and book authors in the United States and in the West.

How is it that the United States, which ascended as an empire and a pre-eminent global power after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the shattering of the Soviet Union in 1991, is losing the respect of its European allies and gaining the resentment of many countries, including those of the Middle East?

During the Cold War, the United States never fought the Soviet Union—it would have been a deadly war. Instead, the US conducted a policy of deterrence with its adversary: both were engaged in an ideological contest, or “chess game”, as Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s former national security adviser, likes to call it.