#1
The KSA has their work cut out for them, as the upheaval is as much about the future of Islam, i.e. Sunni-vs-Shia competition for dominance, espec as per lands where Muslims are a Minority; as about State-specific socio-cultural + econ local reforms.
E.G. TRADITIONAL STRONG RULING MONARCHIES VS. LIBERAL POPULAR DEMOCRACY VS. HYBRID.
Unfortunately for the KSA, Iran = Tehran is NOT its only competitor = wannabe out there.
#1
Obama will do absolutely nothing. You can depend on him to be passive and irresolute.
Besides Iran will be in the news and in terminal crisis by the end of June. That will keep everybody occupied. Pakistan will slide.
The American people dont care and the majority are ignorant. Gasoline prices remain too high. People are out of jobs and we are in an Election year. The political attitudes of Americans are divided, the Congress is blind and drifting. And civil discourse and shared values dont exist.
Our military and our patriotic ethos are spit upon and the burden is born by only the few. Physical disasters are apparent and draining.....and most people feel nothing concerning the fate of their fellow citizens and countrymen.
And the present American leadership? America's future wears a single cubic zirconium earring and his pants are too tight in the crotch.
Posted by: de Medici3489 ||
05/27/2011 5:39 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I never understood the need for a third world train wreck of a country to have 100 nuclear weapons.
The inept and corrupt regime of Pakistan is using India as a boogie man to deflect attention away from their incompetence and the ruined economy. As long as they have someone to blame, be it India or the US.
Tin hat dictators all over the world have used the US as the root cause of their problems for years. Our media feeds into that with their attitudes toward terrorism being the result of something we did in a region.
The constant fixation with blaming the US for their woes has created irrational anti US feeling in Central America and the Middle East. I think part of the reason for the upheaval in the ME is satellite TV's and cell phones with browsers. These regions are learning that we are not the problem. They are their own problem putting up with the crap and the propoganda.
Pakistan is a mess. It has lived continually since the partition on the premise that India was out to get them. Kashmir is an excuse to spend money on the military and suppress the citizens.
I personally think the game is up in Pakistan and us pulling the plug on our aid to them would put a bow on it. What do you suppose happens when the average Pakistani finds out the US has given BILLIONS in foreign aid to their country for infrastructure, education and economic development? The government cannot deny they received aid from us and at the same time blame economic woes on AID BEING CUT OFF.
Of course, we're talking about Pakistan where white is black and up is down and logic and reason are completely irrational thought processes.
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
05/27/2011 10:26 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Yeah, but climbing down off the tiger tends to be the challenging part.
Iran's president is facing a growing backlash from his conservative allies, including Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Omid Memarian on how the tension could turn into a bloody duel in Iranian politics over the coming weeks.
From the Daily Beast, another op-ed piece in the MSM that notices that Iran is a mess, and opines that Short Round's days are numbered.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/27/2011 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
The other radical wing will try to muscle in to maintain order of a real freedom loving populace in the cities. Conservatives are in fly over country""
Mahdi in June will be his downfall. Be alert, the big balloon is about to go up
#3
Shortround is crazy but the opposition is crazy too. It does seem like a showdown is coming. If the Mahdi doesn't come in June, that's problem for Shortround. Since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the Supreme Leader and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Shortround would probably get aced out. The real power is not behind Shortround.
Afshin Molavi at the National Interest understands what we've been noting for some time: Iran is a mess. It has a short, evil clown as president and a mullahocracy that's really good at running a police state and really bad (as most police states are) in running everything else. Worth the read.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/27/2011 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
I was the big redneck, ignorant rube, and Gun toting dude that knew Iran was the biggest enemy you ever had when I was working for McDonald's. I remember those 30,121 (alleged) people that took on this POS Mullocracy - Mousavi made the order in some document I stashed somewhere. No need, Kohemini ordered the stray children into the mine fields with plastic keys to heaven. I really should be posting this on my site Rantburg is too valuable.
Either way, I see a very decent people in there whom I crave to speak with again. Iran is our Friend. (Persia).
The religious extension of hate in that government is our enemy. Please understand this. Honor does not drip off of the pulpit..Not in that case.
#2
Iran and the U.S. seemed to fare better under the Shah of Iran prior to the islamic revolution.
The Shah instituted a series of economic and social reforms that moved the country towards modernity. Iran had a decent education system. They had suffrage for women. They were the second largest oil exporter. Citizens could make a decent living by middle east standards.
This is not to say there were not problems. The Shah manipulated OPEC oil prices. He lost the support of the Shi'a clergy, particularly due to his strong policy of modernization, secularization, conflict with the traditional class of merchants known as bazaari, and recognition of Israel. He banned the communist Tudeh Party (that sounds like a plus) and suppressed political dissent by using Iran's intelligence agency SAVAK. They tortured political opposition and jugged a lot of the dissent.
Despite the abuses, the country seemed better off and heading towards a more modern society than under the present theocracy. We had reasonable relations with them. The country took a backwards turn towards the 7th century under the mad mullahs and Shortround--except for their obsession with obtaining nukes. Oh, that sounds quite a bit like Pakistan in some ways.
"Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talkingas if aggressors dont know exactly what theyre doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administrations intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assads belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorships interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Philand not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirers Berlin Diaryproblems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence."
#1
The present confusion in the civilian mind and the true military mind respecting the purposes of armies and limits of warfare is attributable to many circumstances. Among them, no doubt, is the character of military history as it has commonly been written. Ordinary citizens are lacking in the raw experience of combat, or deficient in technical knowledge, and inclined to leave the compilation of military records to experts in such affairs. Writers on general history have tended to neglect the broader aspects of military issues; confining themselves to accounts of campaigns and battles, handled often in a cursory fashion, they have usually written on the wars of their respective countries in order to glorify their prowess, with little or no reference to the question whether these wars were conducted in the military way of high efficiency or in the militaristic way, which wastes blood and treasure.
Even more often, in recent times, general historians have neglected military affairs and restricted their reflections to what they are pleased to call the causes and consequences of wars; or they have even omitted them altogether. This neglect may be ascribed to many sources. The first is, perhaps, a recognition of the brutal fact that the old descriptions of campaigns are actually of so little value civilian and military alike. Another has been the growing emphasis on economic and social fields deemed normal and the distaste of economic and social historians for war, which appears so disturbing to the normal course of events. Although Adam Smith included a chapter on the subject of military defense in his Wealth of Nations as a regular part of the subject, modern economists concentrate on capital, wages, interest, rent, and other features of peaceful pursuits, largely forgetting war as a phase of all economy, ancient or modern. When the mention the subject of armies and military defense, these are commonly referred to as institutions and actions which interrupt the regular balance of economic life. And the third source of indifference is the effort of pacifists and peace advocates to exclude wars and military affairs from general histories, with the view to uprooting any military or militaristic tendencies from the public mind, on the curious assumption that by ignoring realties the realties themselves will disappear.
This lack of a general fund of widely disseminated military information is perilous to the maintenance of civilian power in government. The civilian mind, presumably concerned with the maintenance of peace and the shaping of policies by the limits of efficient military defense, can derive no instruction from acrimonious disputes between militarists, limitless in their demands, and pacifists, lost in utopian visions. Where the civilians fail to comprehend and guide military policy, the true military men, distinguished from the militarists, are also imperiled. For these the executioners of civilian will, dedicated to the preparation of defense and war with the utmost regard for efficiency, are dependent upon the former.
Again, and again, the military men have seen themselves hurled into war by ambitions, passions, and blunders of civilian governments, almost wholly uninformed as to the limits of their military potentials and almost recklessly indifferent to the military requirements of the wars they let loose. Aware that they may again be thrown by civilians into an unforeseen conflict, perhaps with a foe they have not envisaged, these realistic military men find themselves unable to do anything save demand all the men, guns, and supplies they can possibly wring from the civilians, in the hope that they may be prepared or half prepared for whatever may befall them. In so doing they inevitably find themselves associated with militaristic military men who demand all they can get merely for the sake of having it without reference to ends.
Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism, rev. 1959, Free Press, NY, pp 33-34.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
