Well I miss the resoluteness of his cowboy ways. None of this "regional stability" realpolitik hand-wringing, just good old-fashioned absolutism. Even the right, led by my girl Sarah, is lining up against the protesters, who are all MB terrorists or something. I can't believe I'm saying it but I do miss the neocon ideology. Dubya was a good vehicle to promote this arrogant worldview by dressing it up in feel-good "us vs them" rhetoric and a southern charm.
i dont understand this at all. popular media made fun of him, so im going to wildly resist any possible idea that there was a single good thing about him. is that not the correct opinion?
I think that the Egyptian people who now have the military in control of the country and who believe that they are on the way to "democracy" and "freedom" are going to be in for a pretty rude awakening.
Democracy USA-backed death squads 1, USA-backed dictator 0. Meh. As long as the military is in control, this is not a revolution nor democracy; it is merely a changing of the guard. Tech is right -- Mubarak didn't just step down, he stepped to the side so his thugs can apply the crackdown. USA will use this opportunity to proclaim 'mission accomplished' and claim that this is what the protesters wanted. The press will pull their camera crews from Egypt, and cheer and fawn over the articulate black president. Opportunistic politicians will support the crackdown by claiming the protesters are MB terrorists or something. And that will be that. Still, hat's off to the protesters...pretty epic either way. And hopefully it causes a domino effect throughout the region.
The Egyptian revolution has displayed the true power of social power and the populist, democratic nature of networking. As scared as I am of US interests placing Suleiman, the torturer trained in the 1980s at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina (and his partaking in extraordinary rendition had him accept the transfer of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who was tortured into providing false information to get the US into Iraq), in-- I think the people of Egypt have grown to see how much power they have in their ability to organize. I hope it doesn't result in a military coup. While it is true the Pentagon has not been able to buy military influence as much as it would like, just look who that dirty "Marxist" sent to Egypt: Frank G. Wisner, former director at Enron and AIG, and namesake son of a founding pseudo-person at the OSS and CIA (who helped overthrow Arbenz and Mossadeq). He’s performing the same anti-democratic role Dick Holbrooke played for Clinton in the Balkans. Wisner comes bearing dark gifts: the Pentagon and CIA black budget operators, narcotraffickers, banks to launder drug money, death squads and paramilitaries that the CIA goons fund with that drug money, and camp following crony capitalists like Halliburton and Blackwater. If you want to see what Wisner is going to offer on this episode of Democracy Theater, just look at his work in 2002's "Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq" (a report funded by the oh-so-reliable CFR and James Baker Institute), manifesting themselves in the "100 Orders" which did nothing but make Iraq a place secured primarily for the benefit of corporations from Rockefeller to Monsanto (literally, included in the bill is the licensing of GM seeds and criminalization of seed-saving). I fear any elections in the immediate future of Iraq or Egypt will be between figures for neoliberal, corporatist figures-- not Egyptian people. The Revolution Was? Not quite. Empires don't fall in a day. What has been happening to the American Satan in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and even growing in Baghdad and Syria-- all of this is deeply reminiscent of what happened to the Russian Devil in 1989 with Bulgaria, Poland, East Germany, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The people of Egypt may not win this battle like they won against Mubarak, but I think the war is definitely on their side as the American Raj crumbles.
FUCK IT DOUBLE POST (edit: well it was anyway). I just wanted to comment on this-- while I don't agree with everything you just said, I share a similar sentiment. It reminds me of a passage from "Student Revolution" by Murray Rothbard: The "liberal" tactic (I hate using that word to describe these people, ugh) pretends to be diplomatic and understanding, though never addressing the actual problems the belligerents suffer from-- they push through mealy-mouthed reforms, and when the true core of that rebellion doesn't take the bait, the marginal and the public at large paints them as irrational "extremists" and thus sanctifies the use of force. And thats why I miss Bush-- his evil was laid right out on the table for all to see. Obama covers his war paint in civility.
clashes in algeria, yemen, bahrain, and iran. arrests to the liberal media members in turkey will almost certainly spark clashes there from the youth, fingers crossed.
i bumped into the president outside of the plaza hotel a few months ago, he gave me this smile and a wave, i gave him the biggest stink eye. fun exchange.
Good article here. Palinites, teabaggers hardest hit. http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-...-just-a-proud-moment-for-egyptians-but-obama/
welp, so much for the Iran uprising. just watch this vid. http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/02/15/iran.protests/index.html?hpt=T2
It's a problem. Assassinations are also a huge problem. One of the reason why progressive leaders are so hard to come by in the Middle East is that they get killed off very quickly.
Yes. I'd settle for Mecca, BTW. Or Fox News headquarters. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/15/stewart-fox-news-egypt_n_823291.html
all you need to know about iran is in that 5 seconds (on a cycle for a thousand times for no good reason). if the parliament decides they are going to become a mob, what do you expect from that regime?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/15/60minutes/main20032070.shtml?tag=exclsv Fuck. Only in America.
I love how the US voices support for protests in Iran, but it says near to nothing about the other ongoing protests, just like in Egypt. Diplomacy might be hard, but if it's making you look hypocritical, you have to reconsider what you're doing. It's scary how when I'm listening speeches by Iran's president pointing these things out, I find myself agreeing with almost everything that is said. That's what happens when you compromise your integrity for diplomacy and local interests. It's a bad sign when you look less open and sincere than one of the worst dictatorships in the world.
Well Mahmoud is the only dictator in the middle east we are not in bed with, so we can't really put pressure on him. Plus we know he does provide regional stability and his successor could be so much worse!
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/02/...l-statement-rebuking-israel-over-settlements/ Dunno if this is just a dog and pony show for public (mainly Arab/European) consumption, concocted by both Israel and USA to give the region's players some breathing room, but if it's not, it possibly/hopefully signals real shift away from our unilateral and steadfast (aka blindly unquestioning) alliance with Israel and puts us more in line with the rest of the world. Either way, I'm ecstatic that we, by jumping on board with the UN, are so publicly and audaciously signaling a criticism of Israel's illegitimate settlement activity, and also are resigning ourselves to the fact that we are on the precipice of a post-American world. Couple this with Rand Paul's call for cutting our funding to Israel as well. This will also probably help ease tensions slightly between USA and Iran. It shouldn't be too hard for Israel to find another "sugar daddy" country to saddle up to anyway. Or am I reading too much into this?
Protests in Bahrain are being squashed with protester deaths already. Civil war across the middle east could be kinda cool.
Yep. Bahrain had to lay down the law though because they are a buffer and a client state for our friends the Saudis. I would love to see unrest break out in Saudi Arabia but any protests will be demonized as terrorism and get crushed like a bug. USA has no choice but to stay quiet. Egypt was a fluke, mainly because we were taken by surprise; by the time the protests were on CNN it became very hard for us to believably demonize the protesters. I'd really like to see mass unrest and overthrows but it's just not gonna happen like it did in Egypt. Many protesters in the middle east may be gassed up on false hope; as the number one consumer of cheap oil, USA is now on warning and will back the dictators to the hilt at the very onset of future protests. Even our country's biggest neocons will back Obozo up when he decides that regional stability and cheap oil are a lot more important than our supposed cherished values of freedom and liberty and human rights. That's true though, isn't it? tl;dr: Egypt was a fluke; USA-backed dictators will crush future dissenters.
Yemen's turn to be ignored by USA. The protesters' PR sucks. "Day of Rage" doesn't exactly sell democracy, dearies. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/18/yemen-protests-friday-of-rage_n_824960.html
jesus christ. i still think teabaggers are more dangerous, but this is pretty crazy. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/18/iran-opposition-leaders_n_824998.html
he the one who bombed protests with fighter jets? that is pretty hardcore, i wish they'd do that in Wisconsin
