Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

NATO summit

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • GVChamp,

    IME, there are plenty of moderate Republicans interested in or amenable to environmental protection,
    i've been waiting for quite some time for even the slightest legislative evidence of this. even if we take climate change off the table as a political hot potato...what other environmental protection initiatives have Republicans championed?
    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

    Comment


    • anyways, back to the original topic:

      http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...ty-team-215227

      Trump National Security Team Blindsided by NATO Speech

      They thought the president would commit to the principle of collective defense. They were wrong.

      By Susan B. Glasser

      June 05, 2017

      When President Donald Trump addressed NATO leaders during his debut overseas trip little more than a week ago, he surprised and disappointed European allies who hoped—and expected—he would use his speech to explicitly reaffirm America’s commitment to mutual defense of the alliance’s members, a one-for-all, all-for-one provision that looks increasingly urgent as Eastern European members worry about the threat from a resurgent Russia on their borders.

      That part of the Trump visit is known.

      What’s not is that the president also disappointed—and surprised—his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

      It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences—without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change.

      “They had the right speech and it was cleared through McMaster,” said a source briefed by National Security Council officials in the immediate aftermath of the NATO meeting. “As late as that same morning, it was the right one.”

      Added a senior White House official, “There was a fully coordinated other speech everybody else had worked on”—and it wasn’t the one Trump gave. “They didn’t know it had been removed,” said a third source of the Trump national security officials on hand for the ceremony. “It was only upon delivery.”

      The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, “The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.”)

      Either way, the episode suggests that what has been portrayed—correctly—as a major rift within the 70-year-old Atlantic alliance is also a significant moment of rupture inside the Trump administration, with the president withholding crucial information from his top national security officials—and then embarrassing them by forcing them to go out in public with awkward, unconvincing, after-the-fact claims that the speech really did amount to a commitment they knew it did not make.

      The frantic, last-minute maneuvering over the speech, I’m told, included “MM&T,” as some now refer to the trio of Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson, lobbying in the days leading up to it to get a copy of the president’s planned remarks and then pushing hard once they obtained the draft to get the Article 5 language in it, only to see it removed again. All of which further confirms a level of White House dysfunction that veterans of both parties I’ve talked with in recent months say is beyond anything they can recall.

      And it suggests Trump’s impulsive instincts on foreign policy are not necessarily going to be contained by the team of experienced leaders he’s hired for Defense, the NSC and State. “We’re all seeing the fallout from it—and all the fallout was anticipated,” the White House official told me.

      They may be the “adults in the room,” as the saying going around Washington these past few months had it. But Trump—and the NATO case shows this all too clearly—isn’t in the room with them.

      ***

      No one would find this episode more disturbing than Strobe Talbott, the Washington wise man who as much as anyone could be considered an architect of the modern NATO. As Bill Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, Talbott oversaw the successful push to redefine the alliance for the post-Cold War, expanding to the same countries in Eastern Europe and the Baltics now so urgently looking for American reaffirmation of the commitment Clinton and Talbott gave them in the 1990s.

      I spoke with Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution and a Russia watcher going back to the 1960s when he translated Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs as a Rhodes Scholar classmate of Clinton’s, for this week’s Global Politico podcast, and he warned at length about the consequences of Trump’s seeming disregard for NATO at the same time he’s touted his affinity with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump’s rebuff of America’s European allies on his recent trip—combined with his decision last week to withdraw from the Paris climate-change agreement—is not merely some rhetorical lapse, Talbott argued, but one with real consequences.

      “The failure to say something has had a very dangerous and damaging effect on the most successful military alliance in history,” Talbott told me. Given that all of Trump’s top officials like McMaster and Mattis had spent months promising that the president didn’t really mean it when he called NATO “obsolete” and insisting the Article 5 commitment from the U.S. was unshakable, Talbott noted, “all we needed was for the commander in chief to say it, and he didn’t say it”—an omission that “from that day forward … [means] the Atlantic community was less safe, and less together.”

      Compared with his volatile management style and struggles on domestic policy, some have argued in recent months that Trump’s foreign policy is a relative outpost of competence, with strong hands like McMaster and Mattis on board to avoid major failures. But Talbott and others with whom I’ve spoken since Trump’s trip believe the NATO incident really overturns that assumption. It’s destroyed the credibility of Trump’s advisers when they offer reassurances for allies to discount the president’s inflammatory rhetoric—and cast into doubt the kind of certainties necessary for an uncertain world to function.

      “I had a very high-placed Asian official from a major ally in Asia not long ago, where you’re sitting, who shook his head with sorrow, and said, ‘Washington, D.C. is now the epicenter of instability in the world,’” Talbott recounted. “What it means is something that our friends and allies around the world have taken for granted for 70 years is no longer something that they can take for granted.”

      And in fact, we’re already seeing the ripple effects from the Trump NATO speech-that-wasn’t—and what several of the sources told me was an even worse rift with the allies during the private dinner that followed. In the days immediately after, European leaders like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron went public with unusually frank criticisms. Meantime, Trump’s rebuffed national security leaders have been left in increasingly awkward positions. “Are these people going to steer Trump,” one former senior U.S. official asked, “or are they simply going to be made enablers?”

      McMaster, a widely respected three-star general before he took the job, had been presumed by the Trump-wary foreign policy establishment to be a smart pick because of his track record of being unafraid to speak truth to power (and a book on Vietnam in which he specifically argued that LBJ’s generals had failed by not doing so). But he’s now being pilloried by some early supporters for his very public efforts to spin Trump’s trip as a success—and claim the president supported the Article 5 clause he never explicitly mentioned.

      Mattis, meanwhile, has taken a different route.

      Not only has the defense secretary, a former top general at NATO, not joined in the administration’s spinning, he set Twitter abuzz over the weekend with an appearance at an Asian security forum in Singapore. In his speech, he praised the international institutions and alliances sustained by American leadership, seeking to reassure allies once again that the U.S. was not really pulling back from the world despite Trump’s “America First” rhetoric.

      But when asked about Trump moves like withdrawing from the Paris accord and whether they meant America was abandoning the very global order that Mattis was busy touting, the secretary responded with an allusion to Winston Churchill’s famous quote about the dysfunctions of democracy.

      “To quote a British observer of us from some years back, bear with us,” Mattis told the questioner. “Once we have exhausted all possible alternatives, the Americans will do the right thing.”

      “So,” he added: “we will still be there, and we will be there with you.”

      The audience chuckled, one attendee told me, because “it was an elegant way out of an awkward question.”

      But the awkward question remains: Should we believe James Mattis, or Donald Trump?
      There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

      Comment


      • Next thing someone's gonna suggest that the Russians switched out the script overnight.

        Comment


        • Originally posted by astralis View Post
          GVChamp,



          i've been waiting for quite some time for even the slightest legislative evidence of this. even if we take climate change off the table as a political hot potato...what other environmental protection initiatives have Republicans championed?
          I don't even see how this is controversial. Virtually the entire modern environmental movement occurs at the exact same time as the Reagan Revolution and the years immediately preceding it. EPA is Nixon, Clean Air Act and acid rain provisions are Bush I, attempted mercury caps and Great Lake oil drill banning is Bush II. It's not even controversial to suggest there are plenty of Republicans who think Climate Change is an actual thing: Bush before he left was proposing a framework that was exactly like the Paris agreement.
          "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

          Comment


          • GVChamp,

            I don't even see how this is controversial. Virtually the entire modern environmental movement occurs at the exact same time as the Reagan Revolution and the years immediately preceding it. EPA is Nixon, Clean Air Act and acid rain provisions are Bush I, attempted mercury caps and Great Lake oil drill banning is Bush II. It's not even controversial to suggest there are plenty of Republicans who think Climate Change is an actual thing: Bush before he left was proposing a framework that was exactly like the Paris agreement.
            yup, all in the past:

            https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/u...te-change.html

            but i meant in the here-and-now. right now, Scott Pruitt's EPA is busy sh*tting on everything environmental, and if word "environment" is actually used with the GOP today, it is usually with the words "job-killing" somewhere in the mix.

            to put it another way, ten years ago, Bush and McCain were at least making polite noises about cap and trade-- is there even the faintest hint of such a noise today?
            There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

            Comment


            • https://www.washingtonpost.com/poste...ration-to-date

              The most devastating foreign policy story about the Trump administration to date

              By Daniel W. Drezner June 6 at 6:45 AM

              One of the odder aspects of that very bad, no good, horrible H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn op-ed of last week was their claim that President Trump had affirmed Article 5 of NATO — “an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies” — when he very clearly had not.

              Yesterday, Politico’s Susan Glasser dropped a bombshell of a story that explains why the Trump team’s messaging on this seemed so strange:

              The president also disappointed — and surprised — his own top national security officials by failing to include the language reaffirming the so-called Article 5 provision in his speech. National security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson all supported Trump doing so and had worked in the weeks leading up to the trip to make sure it was included in the speech, according to five sources familiar with the episode. They thought it was, and a White House aide even told The New York Times the day before the line was definitely included.

              It was not until the next day, Thursday, May 25, when Trump started talking at an opening ceremony for NATO’s new Brussels headquarters, that the president’s national security team realized their boss had made a decision with major consequences — without consulting or even informing them in advance of the change …

              The president appears to have deleted it himself, according to one version making the rounds inside the government, reflecting his personal skepticism about NATO and insistence on lecturing NATO allies about spending more on defense rather than offering reassurances of any sort; another version relayed to others by several White House aides is that Trump’s nationalist chief strategist Steve Bannon and policy aide Stephen Miller played a role in the deletion. (According to NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who did not dispute this account, “The president attended the summit to show his support for the NATO alliance, including Article 5. His continued effort to secure greater defense commitments from other nations is making our alliance stronger.”)

              Do read the whole thing.

              So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United States is a member of NATO, which means that Article 5 is legally binding whether Trump says so out loud or not. Unlike NAFTA or the Paris climate treaty, I’ve been assured by smart lawyer types that Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw.

              So why does this story matter? First, it puts the lie to the notion that Trump can be constrained by the adults in the room. I was dubious of the “Axis of Adults” language when it was first proffered — by last week I was laughing at the lot of them. Still, reasonable people could disagree over whether the mainstream foreign policy folks like Mattis or McMaster could sway Trump when it was important. Given that European allies were clearly fidgety about Trump’s commitment to the alliance, that speech was important.

              Second, it makes it clear that Trump possesses core policy beliefs and will stick to them even if given contrary advice by policymakers. On the Paris treaty, this is a guy who “started with a conclusion, and the evidence brought him to the same conclusion” in the words of Kellyanne Conway. On the Muslim travel ban, this is a guy who tweeted the following last night despite loud warnings from Justice Department lawyers:

              As Maggie Haberman tweeted out yesterday morning, “The idea that anyone can stop Trump from doing something once his mind is made up is off.”

              Given that Trump’s core foreign policy beliefs are antithetical to the liberal international order, this is going to be a bumpy foreign policy ride.

              The real reason Glasser’s story is so devastating, however, is that it undercuts the influence of Mattis, Tillerson and McMaster going forward. In the wake of Trump’s first overseas trip, Mattis tried to do cleanup in Asia, and then Tillerson and Mattis both tried in Australia. To their credit, they said all the right words. Except that those words don’t mean much, since Trump is not listening. They now all sound like Nikki Haley, who is going around sounding thoroughly mainstream but also not necessarily having any influence over foreign policy.

              This story is particularly devastating for Tillerson. As Politico’s Eliana Johnson and Michael Crowley reported Sunday, Tillerson has focused all his energies on earning Trump’s trust at the expense of communicating with anyone within his own State Department. He has essentially relied on just two or three key staffers, such as director of policy planning Brian Hook.

              That’s a defensible move, if it works. But as Johnson and Crowley noted:

              The lack of Trump appointees at the State Department’s regional desks and embassies, and the sidelining of many career diplomats, has added pressure on Hook’s office to develop policy for Tillerson.

              It’s also led foreign governments to seek out other avenues of communication. Trump has nominated only a handful of U.S. ambassadors, and some countries have responded simply by reaching out directly to Hook or to other White House officials, including Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

              If foreign officials were trying to reach Kushner before this story, they are likely redoubling their efforts now. Unless and until Tillerson can demonstrate his ability to shape Trump’s actions, there is not much incentive in talking to him.

              There is a vicious feedback loop at work here. Mattis, McMaster and Tillerson lose influence over Trump. This encourages foreign officials to look for their own back channels. This undercuts their influence even more.

              Nothing fundamentally changed with this story. And yet, in its own way, it’s a devastating indictment of the influence of Trump’s mainstream policy advisers.
              There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

              Comment


              • So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United States is a member of NATO, which means that Article 5 is legally binding whether Trump says so out loud or not. Unlike NAFTA or the Paris climate treaty, I’ve been assured by smart lawyer types that Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw.
                Treaties aren't suicide pacts or sacred texts; if NATO nations aren't taking their national defense seriously Trump was right to put them on notice, without the use of Vaseline, that they have to step things up. If not mentioning Article 5 scares them, because they don't take their defense seriously, so be it.

                I spoke with Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution and a Russia watcher going back to the 1960s when he translated Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s memoirs as a Rhodes Scholar classmate of Clinton’s, for this week’s Global Politico podcast, and he warned at length about the consequences of Trump’s seeming disregard for NATO at the same time he’s touted his affinity with Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Trump’s rebuff of America’s European allies on his recent trip—combined with his decision last week to withdraw from the Paris climate-change agreement—is not merely some rhetorical lapse, Talbott argued, but one with real consequences.
                Billions in direct handouts to corrupt third world states, lost American jobs, no restrictions on China/India, and the treaty wasn't ever put in front of the Senate.

                Brookings, enough said.

                ===========
                To the LOL-worthy. If states and local governments will "step up" I wonder how much state and local tax payer money they will be handing over to third world nations, or did none of them actually read the agreement?

                The wrath of Gaea is worse than Fascism...

                Xi's meeting with California governor: A message to Trump on climate?


                By Matt Rivers, CNN


                Updated 7:17 AM ET, Wed June 7, 2017

                Story highlights
                California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, met Tuesday with the Chinese President
                The public meeting could signal how serious China is about climate change

                Beijing (CNN) — China's government and its top officials don't do things by accident.


                President Xi Jingping's schedule is tightly controlled, his statements meticulously scripted, and his public appearances neatly choreographed.


                So his high-profile meeting Tuesday with California Gov. Jerry Brown, which was splashed across state-run newspapers the next morning, was significant for several reasons -- not the least of which was its timing.


                The Democratic governor's six-day trip to China focused on combating climate change. After stops in Jiangsu and Sichuan provinces, it culminated in Beijing for an appearance at the Clean Energy Ministerial Conference, which unites public and private delegations to focus on developing cleaner energy



                California Gov. Jerry Brown gives a speech on Tuesday, June 6, during the Clean Energy Ministerial international forum in Beijing.


                California Gov. Jerry Brown gives a speech on Tuesday, June 6, during the Clean Energy Ministerial international forum in Beijing.


                The meeting took on a different tone this year, coming just days after US President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the landmark 2015 climate accord signed in Paris.


                Xi and Brown met just as the Beijing conference was kicking off. They discussed the fight against climate change and how China and California could work together to wage it.


                RELATED: EU, China unite behind Paris climate deal despite Trump withdrawal


                "It's highly significant that the governor of California can meet with the President of China and talk about the foremost issue of our time," Brown told CNN.


                Though Brown and Xi didn't directly discuss the Paris accord, Brown told an audience at a forum in Beijing that climate change could be more dangerous than the threat of fascism during World War II. He has called Trump's decision to drop the Paris accord "crazy."



                A thinly veiled message?


                Xi and his government were not unaware of the governor's views or his intense rhetoric. And yet, they went ahead with a one-on-one meeting, making sure it got positive reviews in state-controlled media.


                China has not explicitly criticized the US decision to leave the agreement. But Xi's meeting with Brown could easily be interpreted as a thinly veiled message to the Trump administration: China believes climate change is a problem and doesn't think the US is doing enough to solve it.




                California governor: Trump's decision is crazy




                California governor: Trump's decision is crazy 01:42


                On its face, it might not seem odd that Xi would meet with Brown. California is, on its own, the sixth-largest economy in the world. Xi's father also knew the governor.


                But the fact remains that China's president rarely meets with officials below the top cabinet level.


                RELATED: How climate activist Ma Jun went from China's enemy to ally


                It can be seen as beneath the president to take meetings with lower-level officials. China's government is also wary of meetings with representatives of non-nation states, given its sensitivities over sovereignty issues in places like Tibet and Taiwan.


                Xi's decision to meet with Brown in spite of all that, and in such a public way, could signal how serious China is about fighting climate change.



                Curbing coal use


                China already spends more than any other country in the world on renewable energy projects -- more than $200 billion in 2015 and 2016. It announced plans for another $360 billion in investment by 2020.


                China has curbed its coal use three years running, and although it has committed to peak its carbon emissions by 2030, experts say it likely will meet that goal ahead of schedule.



                Can China pick up US slack on climate change?


                Related Article: Can China pick up US slack on climate change?


                As the largest remaining economy left in the Paris agreement and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China seems poised to take the global lead on the issue.


                Taking a meeting with one of the biggest proponents of fighting climate change in the US -- and one of Trump's biggest critics -- would appear to be just the latest indication of how much importance China places on the issue -- even more so, given what could be at stake.


                The Trump administration has worked hard to curry favor with China, seeking further cooperation on issues like North Korea.


                How the Trump administration will respond to a perceived slight, if at all, remains to be seen. But it could call into question how effective both sides will be in working together on issues outside of climate change, like trade and national security.
                Last edited by troung; 07 Jun 17,, 14:00.
                To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                Comment


                • Originally posted by troung View Post
                  Treaties aren't suicide pacts or sacred texts; if NATO nations aren't taking their national defense seriously Trump was right to put them on notice, without the use of Vaseline, that they have to step things up. If not mentioning Article 5 scares them, because they don't take their defense seriously, so be it.
                  Treaties have ways to properly quit them. In case of NATO Article 13 offers the appropriate bailout for the US applicable since 1969. Article 12 allows Trump to officially revisit the treaty, such as to discuss his opinion that the European allies are not keeping to Article 3. He didn't do that, hence there is no such issue. Simple as that.

                  Comment


                  • frankly what's even weirder to me is how Trump apparently is up in arms about Europe free-loading on the US, but has absolutely no problem with getting us more involved in Saudi Arabia/GCC shenanigans. apparently now we're part of the Sunni team against the Shias.

                    "billions in handouts to corrupt third world states" indeed.
                    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                      apparently now we're part of the Sunni team against the Shias.
                      Interestingly on Iranian state TV they're careful not to lump you in with them. As in, in the same interview Saudi Arabia is called a terrorist sponsor, while the US are only "enemies of democracy".

                      Comment


                      • Treaties have ways to properly quit them. In case of NATO Article 13 offers the appropriate bailout for the US applicable since 1969. Article 12 allows Trump to officially revisit the treaty, such as to discuss his opinion that the European allies are not keeping to Article 3. He didn't do that, hence there is no such issue. Simple as that.
                        He was telling you guys to step it up.

                        frankly what's even weirder to me is how Trump apparently is up in arms about Europe free-loading on the US, but has absolutely no problem with getting us more involved in Saudi Arabia/GCC shenanigans. apparently now we're part of the Sunni team against the Shias.
                        I would have assumed you would love the continuity of our support for hardline Sunni movements/governments. The last admin armed the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria with TOWs, called the Army of Islam (Alawites/Christians in cages; wanted a hardline Islamic State) and Ahrar (ex-AQI) "pragmatic" (too crazy to directly arm/but we still like them), allowed the massive expansion of AQ in Syria (Kerry tried to use joint bombing of them as a carrot to the Russians), ignored AQ's alliance with our proxies (who seem to have been numbered bank accounts/Twitter accounts/TOW missile teams), and provided weapons to Islamists who went on to join AQ (habitually fought with shoulder to shoulder with them beforehand). Hell Wapo ran an Op-Ed from Ahrar al-Sham where they didn't mention supporting establishing a Taliban style state, having founding members from AQI, or being allied with AQ; without wapo of course informing their readers.

                        I think we would be nice to drop all of them (not just Qatar), but hey we aren't giving AQ TOW missile teams anymore at the moment.

                        "billions in handouts to corrupt third world states" indeed.
                        Tax money to third world regimes to "green up."
                        Last edited by troung; 07 Jun 17,, 21:54.
                        To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                        Comment


                        • troung,

                          I would have assumed you would love the continuity of our support for hardline Sunni movements/governments. The last admin armed the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria with TOWs, called the Army of Islam (Alawites/Christians in cages; wanted a hardline Islamic State) and Ahrar (ex-AQI) "pragmatic" (too crazy to directly arm/but we still like them), allowed the massive expansion of AQ in Syria (Kerry tried to use joint bombing of them as a carrot to the Russians), ignored AQ's alliance with our proxies (who seem to have been numbered bank accounts/Twitter accounts/TOW missile teams), and provided weapons to Islamists who went on to join AQ (habitually fought with shoulder to shoulder with them beforehand). Hell Wapo ran an Op-Ed from Ahrar al-Sham where they didn't mention supporting establishing a Taliban style state, having founding members from AQI, or being allied with AQ; without wapo of course informing their readers.

                          I think we would be nice to drop all of them (not just Qatar), but hey we aren't giving AQ TOW missile teams anymore at the moment.
                          bah, all piker's stuff. how many -trillions- have the US and other western governments shunted to the House of Saud? how much of that went to leakage to terrorist groups, and Wahhabi "foundations"?

                          but what Trump is doing goes beyond just indirectly funding terrorists and arming some ragtag militias whom can't find their arse with both hands tied behind their back, he's directly taking credit for an inter-Sunni squabble and seems to have fallen for Sunni propaganda altogether regarding Iran.

                          ridiculous.

                          Tax money to third world regimes to "green up."
                          $1 billion towards projects already reviewed by the USG. there's better accountability there than, say, the $68 billion the US has poured into the Afghan security services or say, the approximately $18 billion the US wasted on Future Combat Systems.
                          There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

                          Comment


                          • but what Trump is doing goes beyond just indirectly funding terrorists and arming some ragtag militias whom can't find their arse with both hands tied behind their back, he's directly taking credit for an inter-Sunni squabble and seems to have fallen for Sunni propaganda altogether regarding Iran.
                            Rag-tag militias: "Indirectly arming the guys behind 9/11" let's get it correct. The American government/policy class isn't just on team Sunni, everyone not a hardcore Wahabbi/Salafist (as long as they hopefully don't act up here too much) is pretty much a heretic.
                            Qatar: Qatar for years has been alleged to support terrorism, as have the Saudis, and if they cut funding for some of the nasty groups they support that's a win.
                            Iran: The Donald, Number-44, and everyone else (think tank propagandists/the media/congress) are all about "ebil eyeran" so let's not pretend this is something new. As seen by the last administration working shoulder to shoulder with AQ in the hopes of ending "Iranian influence" in Syria. Unfortunately our government tying the nation to such vile regimes is a bipartisan issue.

                            Great that a took a change of party to wake people up for a brief news cycle. The screeching class would also be up in arms had Trump called out the whole Wahabbi block as being horrible people, who judicially murder women as witches, oppress religious minorities, beat and rape foreign workers, judicially murder domestic opponents, spread their evil ideology in the West, and fund terrorists.

                            $1 billion towards projects already reviewed by the USG. there's better accountability there than, say, the $68 billion the US has poured into the Afghan security services or say, the approximately $18 billion the US wasted on Future Combat Systems.
                            Never considered those a great use of money either, but wasting money in one area doesn't free us up to give non-existent money away to corrupt third world nations while killing more jobs here.
                            Last edited by troung; 08 Jun 17,, 14:37.
                            To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                              GVChamp,



                              yup, all in the past:

                              https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/u...te-change.html

                              but i meant in the here-and-now. right now, Scott Pruitt's EPA is busy sh*tting on everything environmental, and if word "environment" is actually used with the GOP today, it is usually with the words "job-killing" somewhere in the mix.

                              to put it another way, ten years ago, Bush and McCain were at least making polite noises about cap and trade-- is there even the faintest hint of such a noise today?
                              That's not surprising with the environment becoming such a huge partisan issue, but Republicans don't want to drink lead and don't want to breathe in particulate matter. We even like trees! Our neighborhoods are all lined with them. At the state level, a lot of R-Midwest states have renewable energy mandates, and Utah has at least made noises about cleaning up some of their garbage. So I think there remains a lot of possible middle ground, even if it won't get accomplished in the next 4 years.

                              A lot of the stuff I hear Dem voters point out strike me as stupid. Opposition to pipelines is wholesale and ridiculous. Kyoto Protocol is crap. And I don't care about Bangladesh.
                              "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by astralis View Post
                                troung,



                                bah, all piker's stuff. how many -trillions- have the US and other western governments shunted to the House of Saud? how much of that went to leakage to terrorist groups, and Wahhabi "foundations"?

                                but what Trump is doing goes beyond just indirectly funding terrorists and arming some ragtag militias whom can't find their arse with both hands tied behind their back, he's directly taking credit for an inter-Sunni squabble and seems to have fallen for Sunni propaganda altogether regarding Iran.

                                ridiculous.



                                $1 billion towards projects already reviewed by the USG. there's better accountability there than, say, the $68 billion the US has poured into the Afghan security services or say, the approximately $18 billion the US wasted on Future Combat Systems.
                                a billion dollars for sheet rock... seems a tad steep....

                                Comment

                                Working...
                                X