Why doesnt a leader of a Country

[Rustic]

If they had anything on Trump, it would have come out before the election.

He's been under surveillance since last July, about a year now. Yes Obama tried to takeover the voting process and rig it, he was stopped by the states.

That is an act of treason right there, another one in addition to trading 5 terrorist leaders in exchange for a traitor.

Yep, The Russian connection = nothing burger

 

[easyt65]

The entire DNC Hacking claim is one HUGE smokescreen, a diversion from the entire DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ ESPIONAGE Case.

DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ, THE DNC CHAIRPERSON - HIRED 3 TERRORIST-CONNECTED, ALLEGED MURDERING, MOTHER-KIDNAPPING, CRIMINAL RECORD-OWNING PAKISTANIT IT SPIES...AND RE-HIRES ONE AFTER THEY ARE BANNED FROM THE HOUSE AFTER BEING CAUGHT ACCESSING CLASSIFIED FILES WITHOUT A SECURITY CLEARANCE AND AFETR A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION FOR ESPIONAGE HAS BEEN OPENED. AFTER AGAIN BEING CAUGHT ACCESSING CLASSIFIED HOUSE FILES AND BEING GIVEN ACCESS TO DNC E-MAILS, TO INCLUDE THE ONES HACKED / LEAKED, AND GIVEN THE DNC USERNAMES AND PASSWORDS TO THOSE E-MAIL ACCOUNTS BY NONE OTHER THAN DWS, THE PAKISTANI SPY FLEES TO INDIA WHERE HE IS NOW BEING PROTECTED BY THE INDIAN GOVT.... DWS, IN THE MEANTIME, WAS FIRED AS DNC CHAIRWOMAN...AND IMMEDIATELY HIRED BY HILLARY AND HER CAMPAIGN.

NOTHING has been reported on this story since then.

WHY IS THERE NOTHIN GIN THE NEWS ABOUT THIS?

WHY HASN'T DWS ALREADY BEEN PERP-WALKED IN HANDCUFFS AND CHARGED WITH TREASON / SPYING / ESPIONAGE?

 

[Marion Morrison]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

The "regime-change" thing is simply a failure of an idea.

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

 

[Crixus]

There was more proof of WMD in Iraq than there is of Russian "election hacking"(very little) as well as Trump "collusion"(none).

That's the thing, it's no surprise Russia tried to mess around during our elections. They and other countries always have. The democrat party gave anRussia a pass on this one for political reasons. Typical Dems frat move from the party of the KKK. They never lost the slave owner mentality.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Well, that was brave, waiting 'til I signed off to pile on, y'all.
Let me put it this way, TNHarley. You can nurse your hurt feelings that Bush told the IC to find him something on Iraq, and that the information they uncovered that led to doubts was buried or ignored. That was 15 years ago. Bush is no longer President. Some of us have tried to move on.

Your argument that once the IC has made a miscalculation, it can never be trusted again is not being "consistent." It is being unreasonable. I won't even mention all the emotional garbage you've thrown in there. Let's not throw stones about logic there, huh?

There is no reason I can see for the IC to blame Russia for hacking us and interfering with our election if they didn't do it. We don't want war this time and Trump sure as hell isn't "pushing" them for that conclusion. Our IC equally has no reason to do what you claim they've done--doing all the hacking themselves. The IC was under the control of the Democratic administration at the time. According to Repubs, it is still crawling with them and doing all in their power to take down Trump. So my question again, why would the intelligence community do this?

They wouldn't.

If you want to argue that Russia did not, despite their efforts, influence the vote, you can reasonably do that. No one can prove it one way or the other. If you want to argue that Trump was not involved, you can do that, too, although the investigation isn't actually over. You're welcome to that opinion.
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it. You can whine about this that and the other all you want, but it isn't me who's short on logic here.

It isnt JUST Iraq. That is just the biggest one. BILLIONS of people, multiple countries and multiple intelligence agencies were WRONG for YEARS. That caused ungodly deaths and trillions of dollars to be wasted.
CENTCOM is a failure
Pearl Harbor
Tet offensive
Iranian revolution
9/11
Would you like me to continue?
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it.
Now we are going to start arguing your strawmen? No thanks
Its not just the IC that cant be trusted; its the GOVERNMENT. They lie to us EVERY ******* DAY. Their policies are driven around greed, corporations and other special interests. They havent offered ANY proof, therefore, I cant believe them. ESPECIALLY when it something as big as calling out a foreign state. Even if it was guccifer that did it(which he has hacked bill clinton before) HOW does that equate to be it being the russian federation? NO PROOF OL. Nothing but words and assumption. If you think that is unreasonable, well, you are a ******* idiot. Sorry but its true.
Weird how you ignore EVERYTHING but the govts assumption. Those assholes cant even run a hospital program for vets. They let the Post office fail. They put crack in the streets. They arm/train terrorists, they give weapons to mexican cartels, they take away rights, they spy on us, they do SO MUCH SHIT. They dont care about us. The CIA doesnt care about us. IF they did, why would they be working on ways to frame american citizens for MURDER?
But silly ol me asking for proof is UNHEARD OF
Give me a ******* break!
Excuse me for THINKING

Okay TN. Sorry you were born in such a miserable, rotten country. So defend Russia if it makes you feel more righteous. Nothing I say is going to sink into that head.

how quaint. More strawmen. Cant say anything about my post, so you create arguments so you can feel accomplished. Nice.

Sometimes talking to you is like talking to a gerbil.

You try talking to gerbils? LOL I don't bother...LOL

 

[usmbguest5318]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

The "regime-change" thing is simply a failure of an idea.

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

From the perspective of the "long view," I agree for the most part; however, conclusions on the extent to which such undertakings work depend on what were the endeavors' stated and implied aims. It's very possible that the long run consequences were not factors the implementers cared about or sought to orchestrate or control.

 

[Marion Morrison]

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

The "regime-change" thing is simply a failure of an idea.

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

From the perspective of the "long view," I agree for the most part; however, conclusions on the extent to which such undertakings work depend on what were the endeavors' stated and implied aims. It's very possible that the long run consequences were not factors the implementers cared about or sought to orchestrate or control.

If you mean they didn't think it all the way through, or even care to, I agree.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

The "regime-change" thing is simply a failure of an idea.

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

It really never is successful, (like Communism) yet they keep trying it over and over thinking "It'll work this time".

From the perspective of the "long view," I agree for the most part; however, conclusions on the extent to which such undertakings work depend on what were the endeavors' stated and implied aims. It's very possible that the long run consequences were not factors the implementers cared about or sought to orchestrate or control.

If you mean they didn't think it all the way through, or even care to, I agree.

I mean that I don't know that they did or didn't "think it all the way through," but I know it's possible they did not "think it all the way through."

 

[iceberg]

Well, that was brave, waiting 'til I signed off to pile on, y'all.
Let me put it this way, TNHarley. You can nurse your hurt feelings that Bush told the IC to find him something on Iraq, and that the information they uncovered that led to doubts was buried or ignored. That was 15 years ago. Bush is no longer President. Some of us have tried to move on.

Your argument that once the IC has made a miscalculation, it can never be trusted again is not being "consistent." It is being unreasonable. I won't even mention all the emotional garbage you've thrown in there. Let's not throw stones about logic there, huh?

There is no reason I can see for the IC to blame Russia for hacking us and interfering with our election if they didn't do it. We don't want war this time and Trump sure as hell isn't "pushing" them for that conclusion. Our IC equally has no reason to do what you claim they've done--doing all the hacking themselves. The IC was under the control of the Democratic administration at the time. According to Repubs, it is still crawling with them and doing all in their power to take down Trump. So my question again, why would the intelligence community do this?

They wouldn't.

If you want to argue that Russia did not, despite their efforts, influence the vote, you can reasonably do that. No one can prove it one way or the other. If you want to argue that Trump was not involved, you can do that, too, although the investigation isn't actually over. You're welcome to that opinion.
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it. You can whine about this that and the other all you want, but it isn't me who's short on logic here.

It isnt JUST Iraq. That is just the biggest one. BILLIONS of people, multiple countries and multiple intelligence agencies were WRONG for YEARS. That caused ungodly deaths and trillions of dollars to be wasted.
CENTCOM is a failure
Pearl Harbor
Tet offensive
Iranian revolution
9/11
Would you like me to continue?
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it.
Now we are going to start arguing your strawmen? No thanks
Its not just the IC that cant be trusted; its the GOVERNMENT. They lie to us EVERY ******* DAY. Their policies are driven around greed, corporations and other special interests. They havent offered ANY proof, therefore, I cant believe them. ESPECIALLY when it something as big as calling out a foreign state. Even if it was guccifer that did it(which he has hacked bill clinton before) HOW does that equate to be it being the russian federation? NO PROOF OL. Nothing but words and assumption. If you think that is unreasonable, well, you are a ******* idiot. Sorry but its true.
Weird how you ignore EVERYTHING but the govts assumption. Those assholes cant even run a hospital program for vets. They let the Post office fail. They put crack in the streets. They arm/train terrorists, they give weapons to mexican cartels, they take away rights, they spy on us, they do SO MUCH SHIT. They dont care about us. The CIA doesnt care about us. IF they did, why would they be working on ways to frame american citizens for MURDER?
But silly ol me asking for proof is UNHEARD OF
Give me a ******* break!
Excuse me for THINKING

Okay TN. Sorry you were born in such a miserable, rotten country. So defend Russia if it makes you feel more righteous. Nothing I say is going to sink into that head.

how quaint. More strawmen. Cant say anything about my post, so you create arguments so you can feel accomplished. Nice.

Sometimes talking to you is like talking to a gerbil.

You try talking to gerbils? LOL I don't bother...LOL

and for that the gerbils thank you.

 

[JBond]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events. Obama took tax payer money to **** with the Israel election. He over turned the Ukraine election which resulted in the annexation of Crimea. Let's not forget all the shit he started in the ME.

Then, after all of his crap and failures liberal turds are freaking out claiming the big bad Russians forced them to change their vote. Just yesterday one of you morons claimed Facebook made them vote for Trump. It's not my fault you are stupid and that you follow orders from Russia.

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

Almost EVERY MAJOR country on the planet TRIES TO INFLUENCE the elections of other nations. We do it, they do it.

Just stfu with this ignorant bullshit already.

 

[usmbguest5318]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events. Obama took tax payer money to **** with the Israel election. He over turned the Ukraine election which resulted in the annexation of Crimea. Let's not forget all the shit he started in the ME.

Then, after all of his crap and failures liberal turds are freaking out claiming the big bad Russians forced them to change their vote. Just yesterday one of you morons claimed Facebook made them vote for Trump. It's not my fault you are stupid and that you follow orders from Russia.

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events.

Okay...The "US Military" document I linked details some twenty or so instances in the last half of the 20th century. There there are these three 21st century instances of U.S. involvement in regime change, one of which was initiated by Bush and continued by Obama.

Afghanistan

The first was the disaster of the invasion of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001. I’m not sure we should call it a “crime,” since the international coalition that invaded was authorized by a UN resolution, or a “mistake” since it was clearly the result of calculation. But it has been a disaster, resulting from the initial proposition that the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization were one, and that one need not (as George W. Bush put it) “make a distinction” between the two.

In fact, the Taliban was a xenophobic Pashtun nationalist organization preoccupied with restoring order to Afghanistan, after two decades of civil war and chaos, on the basis of a stern implementation of the Sharia as it understood it, and which it regards as the laws of God. (Much like some people see the Old Testament book of Leviticus—which specifies stoning to death for adultery, the burning of witches and death for men who have sex with other men—as the Word of God.) There was a time (October 1996) when Zalmay Khalilzad (Afghan-born neocon, soul-mate of Paul Wolfowitz, one-time U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, the ambassador to Iraq) could editorialize in the Washington Post that the U.S. should engage the Taliban because the “Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran—it is closer to the Saudi model.”

Al-Qaeda on the other hand was an international jihadi network devoted to the cause of provoking, through spectacular acts of terror, a general confrontation between Islam and the west. These are two very different things, and there is little evidence that in 2001 they were coordinating activities with one another. Bin Laden was already living in Afghanistan at the time the Taliban rose to power; he had been expelled from Sudan at U.S. insistence and allowed to relocate to Afghanistan with tacit U.S. approval. He was allowed to remain in the country under the Taliban due to the Pashtunwali code of hospitality; his financial support to the new cash-strapped rulers; and his history of leading Arab mujahedeen against the Soviet-backed regime during the 1980s.

As the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan at the time has made clear, by the time that the U.S. bombing began in October 2001, the Taliban had agreed to the U.S. demand that it arrest and hand over Osama bin Laden to U.S. custody. But the neocons in Washington wanted nothing less than regime change. Ignoring the offer, the U.S. achieved this rapidly, almost bloodlessly, as Taliban forces responding to appeals from tribal leaders abandoned the cities (to spare civilian lives) and faded into the countryside to fight another day.

The U.S. soon cobbled together a regime, initially headed by Hamid Karzai and assorted Northern Alliance warlords, which fourteen years later has yet to stabilize the country or defeat the resurgent Taliban. U.S. military leaders have long since concluded and stated openly that the war is not winnable and that a political solution must be secured.

The major battle of the war pitted about 50 U.S. troops plus Northern Alliance forces against perhaps as few as 300 al-Qaeda militants at Tora Bora. The U.S. military estimates some 200 militants were killed, although no detailed count is available, given the U.S. government’s desire at the time to both exaggerate al-Qaeda’s strength (to suggest a force of tens of thousands and frighten the U.S. public after 9/11) and its desire to inflate the death toll to emphasize U.S. success in the conflict.

It’s clear that hundreds of al-Qaeda militants successfully retreated across the border into Pakistan, whence some moved on to Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other countries, and as the Tribal Areas of western Pakistan became the headquarters of an al-Qaeda operation more vigorous and widely admired than ever.

Meanwhile Taliban forces that had similarly regrouped across the border inspired the formation of like-minded Pakistani Taliban groups. These became a massive headache for the Islamabad government—formerly the Taliban’s main patron—now reluctantly forced to ally with the U.S. in its so-called “War on Terror.” It had to tolerate the U.S. drone strikes that inevitably stimulated more local anti-U.S. sentiment, and launch attacks on homegrown pro-Taliban Islamists on the border resulting in heavy casualties and generally, failure.

While al-Qaeda has virtually disappeared in Afghanistan, its (even more brutal) offshoot ISIL is now gaining a foothold there. And the Taliban far from disappearing has been able to take over the city of Kunduz, once thought beyond their reach. The central government, which only controls the region around the capital of Kabul, is weak and divided among supporters of the president and his rival, the prime minister.

The agenda of reforms once promised by the invaders (including most notably, the education of girls and women and their liberation from the burqa) has fallen by the wayside. The Afghan experience can be considered Bush Disaster Number One since it is the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Iraq, 2003

The second disaster was of course the invasion and occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003. If Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld had had his way, the U.S. would have begun bombing Iraq immediately after 9/11 “because,” as he put it, there were “no good sites to bomb” in Afghanistan.

In other words, he would have immediately manufactured a case blaming Iraq for 9/11 in order to justify war on the Arab country. George W. Bush, who had already told a biographer that if he “had a chance,” he “would invade Iraq” would have embraced that proposal. But the British prime minister told him that British support an invasion of Iraq would be more likely if Afghanistan were attacked first. Since al-Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan, but none in Iraq, it would just be hard to sell an Iraq war as a response to 9/11.

But after a sustained propaganda campaign, launched with Bush’s state of the union speech just four months after 9/11, in which a tiny cabal of fear mongering disinformation specialists in the Pentagon and White House deliberately produced a case for war—a case entirely discredited soon after the beginning of the occupation—Bush did indeed lead the country to war in March 2003.

This was clearly a crime—a “crime against peace” as defined during the Nuremburg trials and by the UN Charter. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council requesting authorization for war fell on flat ears; the UN refused to approve the war; key U.S. NATO allies opposed it and refused to participate; Powell himself later acknowledged that the speech had been full of nonsense.

The war based on lies has dealt a sharp blow to U.S. credibility. But that is not why it was and is a disaster. Had the U.S. merely removed Saddam Hussein, leaving the professional army and secular Baath Party intact if subject to reform, there might have been some hope for post-invasion stability. The neocons had predicted an enthusiastic welcome for the troops, and a smooth transition along the lines of the Occupation of Japan from 1945.

But no! Occupation procurator Paul Bremer stomping around Baghdad in cowboy boots ordered the ruling party and the Iraqi Army disbanded, depriving the Sunni minority of their sources of power and income. And necessarily bending to the peaceful protests of Shiite demonstrators clamoring for elections, the U.S. gradually empowered a fractious collection of Shiite-based parties bent on revenge and confrontation with the Sunnis. Civil war broke out in earnest within a year of Bush’s declaration “Mission Accomplished” and U.S. troops started taking serious casualties.

More importantly, the number of Iraqi deaths likely rose to over half a million, while millions fled into internal or foreign exile.

Here is where the disaster in Afghanistan started to overlap the one in Iraq. The Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, having fled Afghanistan after the U.S. attack, popped up in west Iraq with a band of militants. He told the local disaffected Sunnis, look at what the American infidels have done! They’ve empowered the Shiite apostates and strengthened the Shiites’ ally, our enemy Iran. We have to wage a jihad on the foreign troops as well as the Shiites!

Having hitherto refused to join al-Qaeda, and in fact constituted a rival militant force, al-Zarqawi now pronounced his allegiance to al-Qaeda and established what was originally called “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” This of course morphed into today’s ISIL or Islamic State. Its targets included Shiite religious sites and Shiite communities, attacked by suicide bombers. The general climate of terror initiated by the U.S. invasion became even more pervasive.

During the famous “surge” of 2007-8, an increase in U.S. troop strength is supposed to have suppressed the al-Qaeda-led “insurgency” in Iraq. In fact it was more a matter of bundles of U.S. dollars offered tribal leaders to encourage resistance to the anti-Occupation forces. And Zarqawi’s movement was not in fact crushed but merely driven over the border into Syria. There it strengthened and from thence it returned into Iraq last year with a vengeance, in a wave of lightning conquests. Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah have all become part of the Islamic State.

Iraq has in all probability been permanently dismembered. It now constitutes a nearly independent Kurdistan in the north, under intermittent fire from U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey (which fears the independence movement among Turkey’s own 11 to 20 million Kurds); the Shiite-led, Iran-friendly rump Iraqi state around Baghdad and Basra; and the ISIL-dominated Anbar Province. The border between Syria and Iraq imposed by French and British imperialists after World War I has been erased.

This can be considered Bush Disaster Number Two since it is again the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Syria
The third disaster is the destabilization of Syria. We know that the neocons in the Bush/Cheney administration were plotting the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government from at least 2001; that Israel bombs Syria routinely, with U.S. approval; and that diplomatic documents published by Wikileaks show multiple efforts by the U.S. embassy before its closure in 2012 to undermine Assad.

But the key year was 2011, during the “Arab Spring” that President Obama apparently thought was going to bring down most governments in the Middle East. He also apparently thought that, by rhetorically siding with the youth-led, social media-fueled protest movements he could subsequently pose as a champion of “freedom” in the region. So in July after the forceful suppression of some protests he declared that Assad had “lost his legitimacy” (as though Washington had respected his legitimacy earlier) and began to funnel limited assistance to the armed opposition.

We know that Hillary Clinton as secretary of state found the aid inadequate and would have preferred to involve the U.S. more heavily in another attempt at (illegal) “regime change.” (She makes a point in her memoir Hard Choices of noting how she differed with Obama on this issue.) From 2011 the U.S. sought to train armed forces in the “moderate opposition” but has in the years since been frustrated by their inclination to align with the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda branch, and to pass on U.S. weaponry to the more experienced and effective group.

Support for the armed opposition by the U.S. and its Gulf allies with Saudi Arabia in the lead has all but destroyed the modern Syrian state, just as the U.S. and its partners destroyed Iraq. It has contributed to the emergence of ISIL, as the result of a split within al-Qaeda that occurred in Syria, and to ISIL’s acquisition of de facto state power and a capital in Raqqa. Often battling against al-Nusra, it has succeeded better than any other al-Qaeda chapter or offshoot in holding and expending territory. Hence its self-designation, the Islamic State.

This is the group once dismissed by Obama as of “Junior Varsity” quality compared to al-Qaeda (the real threat). But no, it has become the most ferociously evil armed force of the century (next to U.S. imperialism itself)—demanding compliance with a certain version of Sunni Islam; forcing conversions; beheading Christians, Shiites, Yezidis and others solely on the grounds of their religious beliefs; burning and burying people alive; crucifying prisoners of war; enslaving women and forcing them into marriage; terrifying hundreds of thousands to flee their homelands for Europe where they meet with more cruelty and death.

Its wanton destruction of the precious monuments of Palmyra that shocks and grieves the world might never have happened if Obama had recognized that Assad is NOT the main problem in Syria.

Assad has tried to avoid conflict with the U.S. When in 2005 Washington demanded that it withdraw its troops from neighboring Lebanon—where they had been upon the request of a Christian-led government in 1976 in the course of a civil war sparked by an Israeli invasion, to separate warring forces and restore order—Syria did indeed withdraw. (As it did, huge numbers of Lebanese rallied to express their gratitude to the Syrian Army.)

When Obama accused Damascus in 2013 of using chemical weapons against the opposition (a charge substantially refuted since by Seymour Hersh and other investigative reporters), and prepared to launch strikes against Syria initiating yet another war, Assad quickly agreed to a Russian proposal that Syria turn over its chemical weapons stocks to the United Nations. This was done efficiently and expeditiously. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had in fact spared a trigger-happy Obama a likely nightmare.

But Obama persists in the delusion that there’s a viable, “legitimate” opposition in Syria standing between the state forces and the Islamist crazies. And so he denounces Russia for supporting the Syrian government and army while trying to lead a coalition backing this opposition while fighting both Assad and the Islamists. And now that Russia has made the decision to support Damascus with airstrikes, the U.S. State Department echoed by the U.S. press claim that those strikes are hitting “the opposition rather than ISIL.”

As though ISIL and similar forces are not the bulk of the opposition! U.S. public opinion is once again being shaped to view Putin as a relentless aggressor rather than a leader responding cautiously to U.S. efforts that are sowing chaos. Meanwhile Putin himself asked the U.S. bluntly, in his speech September 28 to the United Nations General Assembly: “Do you realize what you’ve done?” (Would that these pointed and necessary words would resonate and linger in Obama’s cold brain.)

Syria too has been an unmitigated disaster. And although its roots lie in the Bush/Cheney co-presidency, it is basically Obama Disaster Number One.
​

The point I'm making is that among individuals of integrity who object to regime change, what political party holds sway has nothing to do with it. They object to forcibly effected regime change when a foreign power aids and abets it. Period. Similarly, people of integrity who don't oppose such actions being pursued do so on the merits of the action itself, not based on what party holds sway.

 

[whitehall]

"Messed up things"? Typical simple minded phrase by simple minded lefties.

 

[TNHarley]

"Messed up things"? Typical simple minded phrase by simple minded lefties.

did you just call me a leftist?

 

[JBond]

Funny stuff. The government never examined the DNC servers. We do know Obama hacked multiple state election systems.

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events. Obama took tax payer money to **** with the Israel election. He over turned the Ukraine election which resulted in the annexation of Crimea. Let's not forget all the shit he started in the ME.

Then, after all of his crap and failures liberal turds are freaking out claiming the big bad Russians forced them to change their vote. Just yesterday one of you morons claimed Facebook made them vote for Trump. It's not my fault you are stupid and that you follow orders from Russia.

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events.

Okay...The "US Military" document I linked details some twenty or so instances in the last half of the 20th century. There there are these three 21st century instances of U.S. involvement in regime change, one of which was initiated by Bush and continued by Obama.

Afghanistan

The first was the disaster of the invasion of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001. I’m not sure we should call it a “crime,” since the international coalition that invaded was authorized by a UN resolution, or a “mistake” since it was clearly the result of calculation. But it has been a disaster, resulting from the initial proposition that the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization were one, and that one need not (as George W. Bush put it) “make a distinction” between the two.

In fact, the Taliban was a xenophobic Pashtun nationalist organization preoccupied with restoring order to Afghanistan, after two decades of civil war and chaos, on the basis of a stern implementation of the Sharia as it understood it, and which it regards as the laws of God. (Much like some people see the Old Testament book of Leviticus—which specifies stoning to death for adultery, the burning of witches and death for men who have sex with other men—as the Word of God.) There was a time (October 1996) when Zalmay Khalilzad (Afghan-born neocon, soul-mate of Paul Wolfowitz, one-time U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, the ambassador to Iraq) could editorialize in the Washington Post that the U.S. should engage the Taliban because the “Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran—it is closer to the Saudi model.”

Al-Qaeda on the other hand was an international jihadi network devoted to the cause of provoking, through spectacular acts of terror, a general confrontation between Islam and the west. These are two very different things, and there is little evidence that in 2001 they were coordinating activities with one another. Bin Laden was already living in Afghanistan at the time the Taliban rose to power; he had been expelled from Sudan at U.S. insistence and allowed to relocate to Afghanistan with tacit U.S. approval. He was allowed to remain in the country under the Taliban due to the Pashtunwali code of hospitality; his financial support to the new cash-strapped rulers; and his history of leading Arab mujahedeen against the Soviet-backed regime during the 1980s.

As the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan at the time has made clear, by the time that the U.S. bombing began in October 2001, the Taliban had agreed to the U.S. demand that it arrest and hand over Osama bin Laden to U.S. custody. But the neocons in Washington wanted nothing less than regime change. Ignoring the offer, the U.S. achieved this rapidly, almost bloodlessly, as Taliban forces responding to appeals from tribal leaders abandoned the cities (to spare civilian lives) and faded into the countryside to fight another day.

The U.S. soon cobbled together a regime, initially headed by Hamid Karzai and assorted Northern Alliance warlords, which fourteen years later has yet to stabilize the country or defeat the resurgent Taliban. U.S. military leaders have long since concluded and stated openly that the war is not winnable and that a political solution must be secured.

The major battle of the war pitted about 50 U.S. troops plus Northern Alliance forces against perhaps as few as 300 al-Qaeda militants at Tora Bora. The U.S. military estimates some 200 militants were killed, although no detailed count is available, given the U.S. government’s desire at the time to both exaggerate al-Qaeda’s strength (to suggest a force of tens of thousands and frighten the U.S. public after 9/11) and its desire to inflate the death toll to emphasize U.S. success in the conflict.

It’s clear that hundreds of al-Qaeda militants successfully retreated across the border into Pakistan, whence some moved on to Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other countries, and as the Tribal Areas of western Pakistan became the headquarters of an al-Qaeda operation more vigorous and widely admired than ever.

Meanwhile Taliban forces that had similarly regrouped across the border inspired the formation of like-minded Pakistani Taliban groups. These became a massive headache for the Islamabad government—formerly the Taliban’s main patron—now reluctantly forced to ally with the U.S. in its so-called “War on Terror.” It had to tolerate the U.S. drone strikes that inevitably stimulated more local anti-U.S. sentiment, and launch attacks on homegrown pro-Taliban Islamists on the border resulting in heavy casualties and generally, failure.

While al-Qaeda has virtually disappeared in Afghanistan, its (even more brutal) offshoot ISIL is now gaining a foothold there. And the Taliban far from disappearing has been able to take over the city of Kunduz, once thought beyond their reach. The central government, which only controls the region around the capital of Kabul, is weak and divided among supporters of the president and his rival, the prime minister.

The agenda of reforms once promised by the invaders (including most notably, the education of girls and women and their liberation from the burqa) has fallen by the wayside. The Afghan experience can be considered Bush Disaster Number One since it is the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Iraq, 2003

The second disaster was of course the invasion and occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003. If Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld had had his way, the U.S. would have begun bombing Iraq immediately after 9/11 “because,” as he put it, there were “no good sites to bomb” in Afghanistan.

In other words, he would have immediately manufactured a case blaming Iraq for 9/11 in order to justify war on the Arab country. George W. Bush, who had already told a biographer that if he “had a chance,” he “would invade Iraq” would have embraced that proposal. But the British prime minister told him that British support an invasion of Iraq would be more likely if Afghanistan were attacked first. Since al-Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan, but none in Iraq, it would just be hard to sell an Iraq war as a response to 9/11.

But after a sustained propaganda campaign, launched with Bush’s state of the union speech just four months after 9/11, in which a tiny cabal of fear mongering disinformation specialists in the Pentagon and White House deliberately produced a case for war—a case entirely discredited soon after the beginning of the occupation—Bush did indeed lead the country to war in March 2003.

This was clearly a crime—a “crime against peace” as defined during the Nuremburg trials and by the UN Charter. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council requesting authorization for war fell on flat ears; the UN refused to approve the war; key U.S. NATO allies opposed it and refused to participate; Powell himself later acknowledged that the speech had been full of nonsense.

The war based on lies has dealt a sharp blow to U.S. credibility. But that is not why it was and is a disaster. Had the U.S. merely removed Saddam Hussein, leaving the professional army and secular Baath Party intact if subject to reform, there might have been some hope for post-invasion stability. The neocons had predicted an enthusiastic welcome for the troops, and a smooth transition along the lines of the Occupation of Japan from 1945.

But no! Occupation procurator Paul Bremer stomping around Baghdad in cowboy boots ordered the ruling party and the Iraqi Army disbanded, depriving the Sunni minority of their sources of power and income. And necessarily bending to the peaceful protests of Shiite demonstrators clamoring for elections, the U.S. gradually empowered a fractious collection of Shiite-based parties bent on revenge and confrontation with the Sunnis. Civil war broke out in earnest within a year of Bush’s declaration “Mission Accomplished” and U.S. troops started taking serious casualties.

More importantly, the number of Iraqi deaths likely rose to over half a million, while millions fled into internal or foreign exile.

Here is where the disaster in Afghanistan started to overlap the one in Iraq. The Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, having fled Afghanistan after the U.S. attack, popped up in west Iraq with a band of militants. He told the local disaffected Sunnis, look at what the American infidels have done! They’ve empowered the Shiite apostates and strengthened the Shiites’ ally, our enemy Iran. We have to wage a jihad on the foreign troops as well as the Shiites!

Having hitherto refused to join al-Qaeda, and in fact constituted a rival militant force, al-Zarqawi now pronounced his allegiance to al-Qaeda and established what was originally called “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” This of course morphed into today’s ISIL or Islamic State. Its targets included Shiite religious sites and Shiite communities, attacked by suicide bombers. The general climate of terror initiated by the U.S. invasion became even more pervasive.

During the famous “surge” of 2007-8, an increase in U.S. troop strength is supposed to have suppressed the al-Qaeda-led “insurgency” in Iraq. In fact it was more a matter of bundles of U.S. dollars offered tribal leaders to encourage resistance to the anti-Occupation forces. And Zarqawi’s movement was not in fact crushed but merely driven over the border into Syria. There it strengthened and from thence it returned into Iraq last year with a vengeance, in a wave of lightning conquests. Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah have all become part of the Islamic State.

Iraq has in all probability been permanently dismembered. It now constitutes a nearly independent Kurdistan in the north, under intermittent fire from U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey (which fears the independence movement among Turkey’s own 11 to 20 million Kurds); the Shiite-led, Iran-friendly rump Iraqi state around Baghdad and Basra; and the ISIL-dominated Anbar Province. The border between Syria and Iraq imposed by French and British imperialists after World War I has been erased.

This can be considered Bush Disaster Number Two since it is again the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Syria
The third disaster is the destabilization of Syria. We know that the neocons in the Bush/Cheney administration were plotting the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government from at least 2001; that Israel bombs Syria routinely, with U.S. approval; and that diplomatic documents published by Wikileaks show multiple efforts by the U.S. embassy before its closure in 2012 to undermine Assad.

But the key year was 2011, during the “Arab Spring” that President Obama apparently thought was going to bring down most governments in the Middle East. He also apparently thought that, by rhetorically siding with the youth-led, social media-fueled protest movements he could subsequently pose as a champion of “freedom” in the region. So in July after the forceful suppression of some protests he declared that Assad had “lost his legitimacy” (as though Washington had respected his legitimacy earlier) and began to funnel limited assistance to the armed opposition.

We know that Hillary Clinton as secretary of state found the aid inadequate and would have preferred to involve the U.S. more heavily in another attempt at (illegal) “regime change.” (She makes a point in her memoir Hard Choices of noting how she differed with Obama on this issue.) From 2011 the U.S. sought to train armed forces in the “moderate opposition” but has in the years since been frustrated by their inclination to align with the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda branch, and to pass on U.S. weaponry to the more experienced and effective group.

Support for the armed opposition by the U.S. and its Gulf allies with Saudi Arabia in the lead has all but destroyed the modern Syrian state, just as the U.S. and its partners destroyed Iraq. It has contributed to the emergence of ISIL, as the result of a split within al-Qaeda that occurred in Syria, and to ISIL’s acquisition of de facto state power and a capital in Raqqa. Often battling against al-Nusra, it has succeeded better than any other al-Qaeda chapter or offshoot in holding and expending territory. Hence its self-designation, the Islamic State.

This is the group once dismissed by Obama as of “Junior Varsity” quality compared to al-Qaeda (the real threat). But no, it has become the most ferociously evil armed force of the century (next to U.S. imperialism itself)—demanding compliance with a certain version of Sunni Islam; forcing conversions; beheading Christians, Shiites, Yezidis and others solely on the grounds of their religious beliefs; burning and burying people alive; crucifying prisoners of war; enslaving women and forcing them into marriage; terrifying hundreds of thousands to flee their homelands for Europe where they meet with more cruelty and death.

Its wanton destruction of the precious monuments of Palmyra that shocks and grieves the world might never have happened if Obama had recognized that Assad is NOT the main problem in Syria.

Assad has tried to avoid conflict with the U.S. When in 2005 Washington demanded that it withdraw its troops from neighboring Lebanon—where they had been upon the request of a Christian-led government in 1976 in the course of a civil war sparked by an Israeli invasion, to separate warring forces and restore order—Syria did indeed withdraw. (As it did, huge numbers of Lebanese rallied to express their gratitude to the Syrian Army.)

When Obama accused Damascus in 2013 of using chemical weapons against the opposition (a charge substantially refuted since by Seymour Hersh and other investigative reporters), and prepared to launch strikes against Syria initiating yet another war, Assad quickly agreed to a Russian proposal that Syria turn over its chemical weapons stocks to the United Nations. This was done efficiently and expeditiously. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had in fact spared a trigger-happy Obama a likely nightmare.

But Obama persists in the delusion that there’s a viable, “legitimate” opposition in Syria standing between the state forces and the Islamist crazies. And so he denounces Russia for supporting the Syrian government and army while trying to lead a coalition backing this opposition while fighting both Assad and the Islamists. And now that Russia has made the decision to support Damascus with airstrikes, the U.S. State Department echoed by the U.S. press claim that those strikes are hitting “the opposition rather than ISIL.”

As though ISIL and similar forces are not the bulk of the opposition! U.S. public opinion is once again being shaped to view Putin as a relentless aggressor rather than a leader responding cautiously to U.S. efforts that are sowing chaos. Meanwhile Putin himself asked the U.S. bluntly, in his speech September 28 to the United Nations General Assembly: “Do you realize what you’ve done?” (Would that these pointed and necessary words would resonate and linger in Obama’s cold brain.)

Syria too has been an unmitigated disaster. And although its roots lie in the Bush/Cheney co-presidency, it is basically Obama Disaster Number One.
​

The point I'm making is that among individuals of integrity who object to regime change, what political party holds sway has nothing to do with it. They object to forcibly effected regime change when a foreign power aids and abets it. Period. Similarly, people of integrity who don't oppose such actions being pursued do so on the merits of the action itself, not based on what party holds sway.

I misjudged your intentions. This is a very fair post. Thank you.

 

[MisterBeale]

The CIA, FBI, NSA and Director of National Intelligence all have "high confidence" in their judgment that Russia engaged in an influence campaign directed at the election.
The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have no question whatever that Russia hacked the DNC and Podesta and that they tried getting in to state election cyberspace, without success. Russia interfered. The intelligence agencies have as much proof as can be had and it is valid information.

Europe has come to the same conclusion about Russian interference in their elections.

Why would they lie about it? And why do you refuse to believe it? What does that accomplish for you?

I can not get too deeply into why they would lie about it, that would require me to write a book length response. You would need to read several books in fact. It has to do with control over the economy, energy and food. It also has to do with creating chaos and distraction. Currently, I believe there is not a complete and total control over these agencies that once existed, a state of civil disruption exists.

All of those agencies have political motivations. These are the real bureaucracies, in combinations with the corporations, foundations, Wall Street players and big data that control society. It isn't the publicly elected officials that determine anything, it is the bureaucracy that is trying to, and almost always steers the predetermined course of history. I know you lean to the left, so I would highly urge you to read this book, it is by a left leaning thinker, though there are right leaning thinkers that have written much the same;

It is by noted professor emeritus of Berkeley, Professor Peter Dale Scott.

If Trump won, it is because the establishment deemed it necessary. All of this controversy going on is just a distraction from the real issues that should be concerning all of the electorate.

I will tell you this much, for this reply, I went to the Foreign Affairs site, (that's the official magazine of the CFR) from there, all of the articles of any substance that influence the upper class and upper middle class (meaning the representatives, congressmen, folks on wall street, silicon valley, etc.) on policy, and what will be in the Wall Street Journal and the NYT, and there was NOTHING about any of these scandals? What does that tell you? It should tell you that the controllers are using it for what it is, to distract the lower classes, to keep them occupied. Compare the stories at that site with what are the breaking stories on this site.
Foreign Affairs
Foreign Affairs has the news that real political scientists are talking about. Trust me on that. The public Foreign Affairs site has the propaganda, or the BS elites POV.

 

[iceberg]

Well, that was brave, waiting 'til I signed off to pile on, y'all.
Let me put it this way, TNHarley. You can nurse your hurt feelings that Bush told the IC to find him something on Iraq, and that the information they uncovered that led to doubts was buried or ignored. That was 15 years ago. Bush is no longer President. Some of us have tried to move on.

Your argument that once the IC has made a miscalculation, it can never be trusted again is not being "consistent." It is being unreasonable. I won't even mention all the emotional garbage you've thrown in there. Let's not throw stones about logic there, huh?

There is no reason I can see for the IC to blame Russia for hacking us and interfering with our election if they didn't do it. We don't want war this time and Trump sure as hell isn't "pushing" them for that conclusion. Our IC equally has no reason to do what you claim they've done--doing all the hacking themselves. The IC was under the control of the Democratic administration at the time. According to Repubs, it is still crawling with them and doing all in their power to take down Trump. So my question again, why would the intelligence community do this?

They wouldn't.

If you want to argue that Russia did not, despite their efforts, influence the vote, you can reasonably do that. No one can prove it one way or the other. If you want to argue that Trump was not involved, you can do that, too, although the investigation isn't actually over. You're welcome to that opinion.
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it. You can whine about this that and the other all you want, but it isn't me who's short on logic here.

It isnt JUST Iraq. That is just the biggest one. BILLIONS of people, multiple countries and multiple intelligence agencies were WRONG for YEARS. That caused ungodly deaths and trillions of dollars to be wasted.
CENTCOM is a failure
Pearl Harbor
Tet offensive
Iranian revolution
9/11
Would you like me to continue?
But saying the NSA or CIA hacked the DNC and Podesta and gave the info to Wikileaks to destroy the Clinton campaign, cleverly "framing" Russia for it, is absolute bullshit and you have no argument to defend it.
Now we are going to start arguing your strawmen? No thanks
Its not just the IC that cant be trusted; its the GOVERNMENT. They lie to us EVERY ******* DAY. Their policies are driven around greed, corporations and other special interests. They havent offered ANY proof, therefore, I cant believe them. ESPECIALLY when it something as big as calling out a foreign state. Even if it was guccifer that did it(which he has hacked bill clinton before) HOW does that equate to be it being the russian federation? NO PROOF OL. Nothing but words and assumption. If you think that is unreasonable, well, you are a ******* idiot. Sorry but its true.
Weird how you ignore EVERYTHING but the govts assumption. Those assholes cant even run a hospital program for vets. They let the Post office fail. They put crack in the streets. They arm/train terrorists, they give weapons to mexican cartels, they take away rights, they spy on us, they do SO MUCH SHIT. They dont care about us. The CIA doesnt care about us. IF they did, why would they be working on ways to frame american citizens for MURDER?
But silly ol me asking for proof is UNHEARD OF
Give me a ******* break!
Excuse me for THINKING

Okay TN. Sorry you were born in such a miserable, rotten country. So defend Russia if it makes you feel more righteous. Nothing I say is going to sink into that head.

how is this defending russia? unless you just give up and this is a parting shot, fine.

i'm saying if russia did it you tell me - how is that any different than what we do? the ONLY reason the left gives a flying horse shit here is cause they hate trump and this is their lifeline to being able to handle it. BAD TRUMP HACKED OUR FREEDOMS!!!!

great. if hacking a countries freedoms are so bad, why do *we* do it so often and why are *we* so hypocritical when done back to us? if you can't see both sides as wrong then - to me - that is massively hypocritical.

You have brought up a different argument altogether that I'm choosing not to get involved in. I was asking the OP why the government would frame Russia for Democratic hacks they did themselves. I never got a straight answer. At least not one I could make out.
I am choosing not to get involved with it because it is probably not "right" for us to get involved in other countries' democratic elections or overthrowing regimes unfriendly to us. However, none of us would be too unhappy if our government could figure out a way to overthrow the regime in North Korea about now. Would we?
Anyway, I think what you've brought up is what they call a "moral equivalency" argument, is it not, which is a logical fallacy? If other countries want to get p.o.'d and sanction us, call us out at the U.N., that's their right. Maybe they have. That's pretty much all I think on the topic.

and fyi - i knew i didn't start the "moral equiv" slant.

it was done to say - as i would interpret it - that our hacking into other countries bears no merit on us getting upset if someone does it to us.

i won't ever buy that. while our NOT doing it won't guarantee they won't, it does mean we practice what we preach.

so like i said - i'd hug a rabid monkey if people would put this down and see a bigger picture, not throw it up as a wall of defense when you have nothing else to say.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Obama hacked multiple state election systems.
Link?

Its only speculative at this point. But i believe it did trace back his DoD or something. He also tried to influence other countries voting. But im sure you guys dont care about that

Its Ok to force a freely elected leader of the Ukraine out of his own country. It's fine to spend tax payer money on Israeli elections, as long as its a liberal doing it.

Excuse me? The U.S.' involvement in regime change is hardly unique to either major political party.

• 1900 -- Boxer Rebellion
• 1903 -- Panamanian secession with U.S. aid in Thousand Days War
• 1903 - 1925 -- U.S. government inserts itself, at the behest of the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, into Honduran affairs. This series of events is what inspired the term "banana republic."
• 1912 - 1933 -- U.S. occupation of Nicaragua
• 1953 -- Overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Iran. The U.S. literally planned and executed a coup d'etat.
• 1954 -- Guatemala. Operation PBSUCCESS was another U.S. planned and executed coup d'etat.
• 1958 -- The Eisenhower Doctrine is first implemented in Lebanon with Operation Blue Bat

Dude, you really need to read more or, minimally, invest some effort to confirm your suppositions before sharing them publicly as though they come with portfolio.

• United States Military Intervention and the Promotion of Democracy

You are either grossly under informed (ignorant), outright stupid, hubristic and slothful, or unrepentantly mendacious. I don't know which for I cannot tell whether you simply don't know the facts (ignorance), know them and have chosen to ignore them (mendacity), or you don't know them and don't bother to discover them (stupidity, hubris and sloth).

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events. Obama took tax payer money to **** with the Israel election. He over turned the Ukraine election which resulted in the annexation of Crimea. Let's not forget all the shit he started in the ME.

Then, after all of his crap and failures liberal turds are freaking out claiming the big bad Russians forced them to change their vote. Just yesterday one of you morons claimed Facebook made them vote for Trump. It's not my fault you are stupid and that you follow orders from Russia.

I am perfectly aware, but I am focused on current events.

Okay...The "US Military" document I linked details some twenty or so instances in the last half of the 20th century. There there are these three 21st century instances of U.S. involvement in regime change, one of which was initiated by Bush and continued by Obama.

Afghanistan

The first was the disaster of the invasion of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001. I’m not sure we should call it a “crime,” since the international coalition that invaded was authorized by a UN resolution, or a “mistake” since it was clearly the result of calculation. But it has been a disaster, resulting from the initial proposition that the Taliban regime and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization were one, and that one need not (as George W. Bush put it) “make a distinction” between the two.

In fact, the Taliban was a xenophobic Pashtun nationalist organization preoccupied with restoring order to Afghanistan, after two decades of civil war and chaos, on the basis of a stern implementation of the Sharia as it understood it, and which it regards as the laws of God. (Much like some people see the Old Testament book of Leviticus—which specifies stoning to death for adultery, the burning of witches and death for men who have sex with other men—as the Word of God.) There was a time (October 1996) when Zalmay Khalilzad (Afghan-born neocon, soul-mate of Paul Wolfowitz, one-time U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, the ambassador to Iraq) could editorialize in the Washington Post that the U.S. should engage the Taliban because the “Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran—it is closer to the Saudi model.”

Al-Qaeda on the other hand was an international jihadi network devoted to the cause of provoking, through spectacular acts of terror, a general confrontation between Islam and the west. These are two very different things, and there is little evidence that in 2001 they were coordinating activities with one another. Bin Laden was already living in Afghanistan at the time the Taliban rose to power; he had been expelled from Sudan at U.S. insistence and allowed to relocate to Afghanistan with tacit U.S. approval. He was allowed to remain in the country under the Taliban due to the Pashtunwali code of hospitality; his financial support to the new cash-strapped rulers; and his history of leading Arab mujahedeen against the Soviet-backed regime during the 1980s.

As the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan at the time has made clear, by the time that the U.S. bombing began in October 2001, the Taliban had agreed to the U.S. demand that it arrest and hand over Osama bin Laden to U.S. custody. But the neocons in Washington wanted nothing less than regime change. Ignoring the offer, the U.S. achieved this rapidly, almost bloodlessly, as Taliban forces responding to appeals from tribal leaders abandoned the cities (to spare civilian lives) and faded into the countryside to fight another day.

The U.S. soon cobbled together a regime, initially headed by Hamid Karzai and assorted Northern Alliance warlords, which fourteen years later has yet to stabilize the country or defeat the resurgent Taliban. U.S. military leaders have long since concluded and stated openly that the war is not winnable and that a political solution must be secured.

The major battle of the war pitted about 50 U.S. troops plus Northern Alliance forces against perhaps as few as 300 al-Qaeda militants at Tora Bora. The U.S. military estimates some 200 militants were killed, although no detailed count is available, given the U.S. government’s desire at the time to both exaggerate al-Qaeda’s strength (to suggest a force of tens of thousands and frighten the U.S. public after 9/11) and its desire to inflate the death toll to emphasize U.S. success in the conflict.

It’s clear that hundreds of al-Qaeda militants successfully retreated across the border into Pakistan, whence some moved on to Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other countries, and as the Tribal Areas of western Pakistan became the headquarters of an al-Qaeda operation more vigorous and widely admired than ever.

Meanwhile Taliban forces that had similarly regrouped across the border inspired the formation of like-minded Pakistani Taliban groups. These became a massive headache for the Islamabad government—formerly the Taliban’s main patron—now reluctantly forced to ally with the U.S. in its so-called “War on Terror.” It had to tolerate the U.S. drone strikes that inevitably stimulated more local anti-U.S. sentiment, and launch attacks on homegrown pro-Taliban Islamists on the border resulting in heavy casualties and generally, failure.

While al-Qaeda has virtually disappeared in Afghanistan, its (even more brutal) offshoot ISIL is now gaining a foothold there. And the Taliban far from disappearing has been able to take over the city of Kunduz, once thought beyond their reach. The central government, which only controls the region around the capital of Kabul, is weak and divided among supporters of the president and his rival, the prime minister.

The agenda of reforms once promised by the invaders (including most notably, the education of girls and women and their liberation from the burqa) has fallen by the wayside. The Afghan experience can be considered Bush Disaster Number One since it is the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Iraq, 2003

The second disaster was of course the invasion and occupation of Iraq beginning in 2003. If Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld had had his way, the U.S. would have begun bombing Iraq immediately after 9/11 “because,” as he put it, there were “no good sites to bomb” in Afghanistan.

In other words, he would have immediately manufactured a case blaming Iraq for 9/11 in order to justify war on the Arab country. George W. Bush, who had already told a biographer that if he “had a chance,” he “would invade Iraq” would have embraced that proposal. But the British prime minister told him that British support an invasion of Iraq would be more likely if Afghanistan were attacked first. Since al-Qaeda had training camps in Afghanistan, but none in Iraq, it would just be hard to sell an Iraq war as a response to 9/11.

But after a sustained propaganda campaign, launched with Bush’s state of the union speech just four months after 9/11, in which a tiny cabal of fear mongering disinformation specialists in the Pentagon and White House deliberately produced a case for war—a case entirely discredited soon after the beginning of the occupation—Bush did indeed lead the country to war in March 2003.

This was clearly a crime—a “crime against peace” as defined during the Nuremburg trials and by the UN Charter. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council requesting authorization for war fell on flat ears; the UN refused to approve the war; key U.S. NATO allies opposed it and refused to participate; Powell himself later acknowledged that the speech had been full of nonsense.

The war based on lies has dealt a sharp blow to U.S. credibility. But that is not why it was and is a disaster. Had the U.S. merely removed Saddam Hussein, leaving the professional army and secular Baath Party intact if subject to reform, there might have been some hope for post-invasion stability. The neocons had predicted an enthusiastic welcome for the troops, and a smooth transition along the lines of the Occupation of Japan from 1945.

But no! Occupation procurator Paul Bremer stomping around Baghdad in cowboy boots ordered the ruling party and the Iraqi Army disbanded, depriving the Sunni minority of their sources of power and income. And necessarily bending to the peaceful protests of Shiite demonstrators clamoring for elections, the U.S. gradually empowered a fractious collection of Shiite-based parties bent on revenge and confrontation with the Sunnis. Civil war broke out in earnest within a year of Bush’s declaration “Mission Accomplished” and U.S. troops started taking serious casualties.

More importantly, the number of Iraqi deaths likely rose to over half a million, while millions fled into internal or foreign exile.

Here is where the disaster in Afghanistan started to overlap the one in Iraq. The Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, having fled Afghanistan after the U.S. attack, popped up in west Iraq with a band of militants. He told the local disaffected Sunnis, look at what the American infidels have done! They’ve empowered the Shiite apostates and strengthened the Shiites’ ally, our enemy Iran. We have to wage a jihad on the foreign troops as well as the Shiites!

Having hitherto refused to join al-Qaeda, and in fact constituted a rival militant force, al-Zarqawi now pronounced his allegiance to al-Qaeda and established what was originally called “Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.” This of course morphed into today’s ISIL or Islamic State. Its targets included Shiite religious sites and Shiite communities, attacked by suicide bombers. The general climate of terror initiated by the U.S. invasion became even more pervasive.

During the famous “surge” of 2007-8, an increase in U.S. troop strength is supposed to have suppressed the al-Qaeda-led “insurgency” in Iraq. In fact it was more a matter of bundles of U.S. dollars offered tribal leaders to encourage resistance to the anti-Occupation forces. And Zarqawi’s movement was not in fact crushed but merely driven over the border into Syria. There it strengthened and from thence it returned into Iraq last year with a vengeance, in a wave of lightning conquests. Mosul, Ramadi, Tikrit, and Fallujah have all become part of the Islamic State.

Iraq has in all probability been permanently dismembered. It now constitutes a nearly independent Kurdistan in the north, under intermittent fire from U.S. ally and NATO member Turkey (which fears the independence movement among Turkey’s own 11 to 20 million Kurds); the Shiite-led, Iran-friendly rump Iraqi state around Baghdad and Basra; and the ISIL-dominated Anbar Province. The border between Syria and Iraq imposed by French and British imperialists after World War I has been erased.

This can be considered Bush Disaster Number Two since it is again the fault of the Bush/Cheney co-presidency.

Syria
The third disaster is the destabilization of Syria. We know that the neocons in the Bush/Cheney administration were plotting the downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government from at least 2001; that Israel bombs Syria routinely, with U.S. approval; and that diplomatic documents published by Wikileaks show multiple efforts by the U.S. embassy before its closure in 2012 to undermine Assad.

But the key year was 2011, during the “Arab Spring” that President Obama apparently thought was going to bring down most governments in the Middle East. He also apparently thought that, by rhetorically siding with the youth-led, social media-fueled protest movements he could subsequently pose as a champion of “freedom” in the region. So in July after the forceful suppression of some protests he declared that Assad had “lost his legitimacy” (as though Washington had respected his legitimacy earlier) and began to funnel limited assistance to the armed opposition.

We know that Hillary Clinton as secretary of state found the aid inadequate and would have preferred to involve the U.S. more heavily in another attempt at (illegal) “regime change.” (She makes a point in her memoir Hard Choices of noting how she differed with Obama on this issue.) From 2011 the U.S. sought to train armed forces in the “moderate opposition” but has in the years since been frustrated by their inclination to align with the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda branch, and to pass on U.S. weaponry to the more experienced and effective group.

Support for the armed opposition by the U.S. and its Gulf allies with Saudi Arabia in the lead has all but destroyed the modern Syrian state, just as the U.S. and its partners destroyed Iraq. It has contributed to the emergence of ISIL, as the result of a split within al-Qaeda that occurred in Syria, and to ISIL’s acquisition of de facto state power and a capital in Raqqa. Often battling against al-Nusra, it has succeeded better than any other al-Qaeda chapter or offshoot in holding and expending territory. Hence its self-designation, the Islamic State.

This is the group once dismissed by Obama as of “Junior Varsity” quality compared to al-Qaeda (the real threat). But no, it has become the most ferociously evil armed force of the century (next to U.S. imperialism itself)—demanding compliance with a certain version of Sunni Islam; forcing conversions; beheading Christians, Shiites, Yezidis and others solely on the grounds of their religious beliefs; burning and burying people alive; crucifying prisoners of war; enslaving women and forcing them into marriage; terrifying hundreds of thousands to flee their homelands for Europe where they meet with more cruelty and death.

Its wanton destruction of the precious monuments of Palmyra that shocks and grieves the world might never have happened if Obama had recognized that Assad is NOT the main problem in Syria.

Assad has tried to avoid conflict with the U.S. When in 2005 Washington demanded that it withdraw its troops from neighboring Lebanon—where they had been upon the request of a Christian-led government in 1976 in the course of a civil war sparked by an Israeli invasion, to separate warring forces and restore order—Syria did indeed withdraw. (As it did, huge numbers of Lebanese rallied to express their gratitude to the Syrian Army.)

When Obama accused Damascus in 2013 of using chemical weapons against the opposition (a charge substantially refuted since by Seymour Hersh and other investigative reporters), and prepared to launch strikes against Syria initiating yet another war, Assad quickly agreed to a Russian proposal that Syria turn over its chemical weapons stocks to the United Nations. This was done efficiently and expeditiously. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had in fact spared a trigger-happy Obama a likely nightmare.

But Obama persists in the delusion that there’s a viable, “legitimate” opposition in Syria standing between the state forces and the Islamist crazies. And so he denounces Russia for supporting the Syrian government and army while trying to lead a coalition backing this opposition while fighting both Assad and the Islamists. And now that Russia has made the decision to support Damascus with airstrikes, the U.S. State Department echoed by the U.S. press claim that those strikes are hitting “the opposition rather than ISIL.”

As though ISIL and similar forces are not the bulk of the opposition! U.S. public opinion is once again being shaped to view Putin as a relentless aggressor rather than a leader responding cautiously to U.S. efforts that are sowing chaos. Meanwhile Putin himself asked the U.S. bluntly, in his speech September 28 to the United Nations General Assembly: “Do you realize what you’ve done?” (Would that these pointed and necessary words would resonate and linger in Obama’s cold brain.)

Syria too has been an unmitigated disaster. And although its roots lie in the Bush/Cheney co-presidency, it is basically Obama Disaster Number One.
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The point I'm making is that among individuals of integrity who object to regime change, what political party holds sway has nothing to do with it. They object to forcibly effected regime change when a foreign power aids and abets it. Period. Similarly, people of integrity who don't oppose such actions being pursued do so on the merits of the action itself, not based on what party holds sway.

I misjudged your intentions. This is a very fair post. Thank you.

TY2 and YW.