by Oui
Fri Apr 29th, 2022 at 12:10:11 PM EST
State of exceptionalism, if you don't have money, and lots of it, you don't have a voice. Position of power in direct relationship to wealth of a person.
Wielding power as highest ranking Democratic member Senate Foreign Relations Committee ...
User Clip: 1998 - Biden chastises UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter | C-span |
In 1998, the former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee following Ritter's resignation after years of frustration in Iraq. In Biden's time after his opening statement, Biden chastised Ritter that the decision to go to war was above his "pay grade." While open to the idea of removing Saddam, Biden said the President and Cabinet Secretaries and people in "limos" get to make that decision, not a Weapons Inspector.
Joe Biden as an All American boy possesses a one track mind: depose of the dictator and force regime change at any cost. While in the Senate or later as VP under Obama or as resident of the White House, Joe has always backed military confrontation where economic sanctions have not reached its goal.
Saddam Hussein between 1991 and 2003, Libya and Gaddafi in 2011 combined with the attack on Syria to remove Bashar Assad. Early assertions by president Obama that Assad was a dead man walking, the dictator is still in p,ace, the nation and the neighborhood devastated. Most important, the displaced persons, families with children, many have become refugees seeking peace and a new life in Europe.
After the 9/11 attacks on the United States the propaganda machine of Israel trumped up the charge that its enemies were all terrorists. The neighborhood was Muslim majority, so a long process started and was supported by vast wealth in the HS and Europe to degrade all Muslims as potential terrorists. The start of FEAR across the Western "Christian" world ended in Islamophobia that was endorsed by rightwing idol Donald Trump. He was and is seen as a savior send by the Almighty. Just as George Bush as new born Christian got Power Point presentation by the Pentagon to continue Operation Enduring Freedom. The Iraqis deserve democracy American style as the West takes its fossil fuel as reward for all effort and expenses.
The Obama administration had VP Biden as most powerful person to set foreign policy strategy. Both Libya and Syria where left in shambles, Lebanon an be added as collateral damage. Obama had a change to follow the independent advice from Richard Holbrooke to drawn down the military in Afghanistan. Once again Joe Biden got his way for a surge of American and allied forces to settle the Afghan War once and for all to keep terror and the Taliban out.
Oh irony and déjà vu, it was Trump who left the defeat of America and its retreat to his successor Biden. His legacy is already written in stone. Surely after the hasty retreat out of Saigon and Vietnam, the biggest failure in US policy and its military operation. Ghost of the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. The Taliban has returned more powerful than before. Twenty years of losses and a region which has lost its trust in American policy. Central Asia is left to the might of. Nina and somewhat to Russia and Tu4key. Plenty of turmoil awaiting in the near future.
Ukraine today there will be no winners. Once again bullying from the White House and the Pentagon with over a decade of propaganda to demonize Putin and Russia as the most grateful asset in this confrontation. Disinformation and censorship goes a long way in the age of Big Tech. Living 1984.
At a 1998 Senate hearing, Biden argued that "taking this son of a -- taking Saddam down" was the only way to guarantee Iraq's disarmament | The Intercept - Jan 7, 2020 |
Joe Biden this week continued to maintain the fiction that he stood against the war in Iraq "the very moment" it began in 2003. The claim has been easily taken apart by fact checkers [WaPo] -- Biden publicly supported the war before, during, and after the invasion -- but a 1998 Senate hearing sheds additional light on his determination to confront Iraq over weapons of mass destruction.
In 1998, U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter resigned in protest and accused the international community of not giving him and his colleagues the support they needed to carry out their job in Iraq, which had agreed in 1991 to destroy its chemical weapons stockpile. He was called to testify before the Senate in September 1998, where Biden, who was then the highest-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations committee, grilled him. In the course of the questions, Biden made revealing remarks about where he stood on regime change in Iraq.
Biden thanked Ritter for forcing senators to "come to our milk," by which he meant forcing them to make a decision on what to do about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction program.
Biden told Ritter that no matter how thorough the inspections, the only way to eliminate the threat was to remove Saddam Hussein. "The primary policy is to keep sanctions in place to deny Saddam the billions of dollars that would allow him to really crank up his program, which neither you nor I believe he's ever going to abandon as long as he's in place," Biden said, characterizing former President Bill Clinton's administration's policy.
"You and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction.
....
Biden's grilling of Ritter is important because it gives context to claims Biden later made: First, that when he voted in favor of the invasion of Iraq as a senator, he did not mean to vote for war, but hoped the resolution would empower inspectors to get back into Iraq and monitor the program. And second, that he never believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
....
In October 2004, by which time it had become clear there were no WMDs, Biden told an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, "I never believed they had weapons of mass destruction."
Clinton's 21st Century Statecraft and the Land of Two Rivers
Foreign policy decisions | NPR |
The 76-year-old former vice president and longtime Delaware senator defended his broader record on foreign policy, pointing out that he has more experience than all of his opponents combined.
With that long record, Biden has faced criticism over the years for his judgment on key foreign policy decisions, such as voting to authorize the Iraq War, trying to partition the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, opposing a troop surge, and overseeing the withdrawal in 2011 that some say created a power vacuum that allowed ISIS to flourish in Iraq.
"He's been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades," former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir.
Make Britain Great Again: UK calls for a 'global NATO'
Riding the coattails of Biden's expansion of economic power ...
NATO should also defend Taiwan: UK foreign secretary | Taiwan News |
MOSCOW Feb 28, 2022 - Mr Putin said he had placed Moscow's nuclear forces on "special alert" due to "aggressive statements" by the West, amid widespread international condemnation of his invasion of Ukraine.
Russian state television channel Rossiya 1 used Ms Truss's comments to illustrate its news flash on the Kremlin's order and claims of Western aggression.
NUCLEAR THREAT M.A.D.
In 1991 President George H. W. Bush announced sweeping changes to the US nuclear force structure | Air Force Magazine - 2011 |
But Bush's Presidential Nuclear Initiatives (PNIs) still mark an extraordinary moment in history, the point at which it might be said that the US truly won the Cold War. For decades, the superpowers had been piling warhead upon warhead. As historian Raymond L. Garthoff has noted, Bush's September speech and Gorbachev's response were a time when the arms race ran in reverse--downhill.
Furthermore, the PNIs showed that ponderous negotiations aiming at a treaty were not the only way to cut nuclear arsenals. Unilateral arms control turned out not to be an oxymoron. And it was perhaps a good example of the deftness with which Bush handled the US response to the USSR's collapse and Russia's rebirth as a separate state.
"George H. W. Bush ... presided with great skill over the [Soviet] transition," wrote former Air Force nuclear negotiations expert Michael O. Wheeler in a 2006 report co-authored for the USAF Institute for National Security Studies.
When Bush assumed office as the 41st President in 1989, the nation's nuclear policy was still focused on traditional deterrence, meaning the prevention of war and nuclear use by a superpower adversary. "Arms control" meant the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks, which the US and the USSR had engaged in, off and on, since 1982.
America's Nuclear Policy Reversal After 9/11 Attacks - Fear for WMDs
Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Europe's Redundant WMDs | May/June 2004 |
- The new strategic context makes redundant the original purpose of these weapons' deployment;
- There is a real concern that these weapons will play a part in the new US doctrine of pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons to achieve military objectives;
- There is a need to buttress the non-proliferation regime through reducing the circumstances in which nuclear weapons might be used rather than undermining that regime by devising new purposes for nuclear weapons;
- The removal of all TNW from nuclear arsenals (especially those in the former Soviet Union) would constitute an important act of disarmament that would increase international and regional security;
- Their removal would also avoid the enormous (opportunity) cost of sustaining these deployments through planned modernisation of storage facilities;
- Their removal would be another step towards fulfilling the political commitments made by the US and the other established nuclear powers under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.
Do Unto Others: Toward A Defensible Nuclear Doctrine - Carnegie Endowment |
In Prague on April 5, 2009, President Obama declared that the United States is committed to seeking "the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." All presidents since Truman had said more or less the same thing, except George W. Bush. Obama was perceived to really mean it. But he added a caveat that proponents and opponents of Obama and of disarmament tend to neglect--as long as nuclear weap- ons exist, "the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary."
Over the next twenty months, the Obama administration achieved a number of objectives in what became known as the Prague agenda. The administration released a new Nuclear Posture Review that acknowledged the decreasing contingencies in which the United States might need nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies.
In Washington, proponents of new nuclear weapons and opponents of arms control have effectively mobilized against the president's Prague agenda. These antagonists either genuinely fear that Obama will put the U.S. arsenal on a slippery slope toward zero or tactically insinuate that this is the case in order to weaken the president. They prefer to fund and develop new nuclear warheads and delivery systems better suited for use in the post-Cold War world, which they view as more credible deterrents.
Britain and US war hawks playing with fire 🔥
Britain's Declaration of War on Russia [... and China too!]
British FM Liz Truss says a 'Global NATO' needs to arm Taiwan, like Ukraine
The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn't working anymore, so the West needs "a global NATO" to pursue geopolitics anew, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss argued, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday. Truss also urged the US-led bloc to send more "heavy weapons, tanks" and airplanes to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn't "play by the rules."
"My vision is a world where free nations are assertive and in the ascendant. Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships," Truss said in a speech at a Mansion House banquet in London.
Dubbing this arrangement "the Network of Liberty," Truss argued it was necessary because the economic and security structures developed after 1945 - such as the UN Security Council - "have been bent out of shape so far, they have enabled rather than contained aggression."
"Geopolitics is back," she announced.
The collective West and its allies need to supply Kiev with "heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes - digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production," Truss said, because the objective is to "push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine" and rebuild the country along the lines of a new Marshall Plan.
"The war in Ukraine is our war - it is everyone's war because Ukraine's victory is a strategic imperative for all of us."
Beyond that, NATO must ensure that "the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom," and uphold the "sacrosanct" open-door policy, Truss said.
Her ambitions went beyond Europe, though, as Truss denounced the "false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security."
"In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO," she said. "And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves."
Pointing to London's unprecedented effort to embargo Russia, Truss insisted that "economic access is no longer a given. It has to be earned," and that countries who wish to earn it "must play by the rules. And that includes China."
The UK has sent a large quantity of weapons systems to Ukraine over the past several months, including NLAW anti-tank missiles and Stormer armored vehicles. British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey told Thames Radio on Wednesday it would be "completely legitimate" for Ukraine to use UK-supplied weapons to strike into Russian territory, to which the Russian military warned that any such attack would be met with a proper response.
