Tag Archives: Middle East

Middle East Violence: Coming Clean Take 2

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“You hate to think that the President would purposely mislead the American people, but it sure looks like it to me.” — House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon 9/21/2012

Let’s give the President the benefit of the doubt for now on whether he is coming clean on events in the Middle East that led to the death of our Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others. But Chairman McKeon should hold that thought.

We should focus first on UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who on Sunday, September 16th, went on a national media bender to deliver three messages: One, the violent protests in Libya were spontaneous. Two, the protests were caused by the release of an American video that insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Three, the two former Navy Seals who were killed in Libya were part of a security detail protecting the Ambassador to that country. Continue reading →

Middle East Violence Spontaneous?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“I’ve come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutal interest and mutal respect and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.”  — President Barak Obama in Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009

In the last two weeks, three years after that speech, militant Islamists have been engaging in violent, lethal protests against the United States in Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Tunisia, Indonesia, and Guinea. In Afghanistan, the U.S. is also facing violence from within, from Afghan police we have trained and work alongside.

Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, distanced her boss from the protests in a whirlwind weekend tour of Sunday talk shows. Continue reading →

Obama Is Not Working

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

All hell is breaking out in the Middle East and in North Africa. Israel is preparing to go to war with Iran. China and Japan are at the brink of war. Unemployment is above 8 percent. The Federal Reserve is forced to buy forty billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities a month because the Chairman is very worried that the economy will backslide into a deep recession. The debt numbers are only getting worse as the government grapples with adding a new entitlement to an already over-subscribed entitlement system.

The Obama Administration is failing on both the international and domestic stage.

And Mitt Romney is on the defensive!

How the hell does that happen? Continue reading →

Obama Nice Enough Guy

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Friday night I was on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, AC360, with one of my favorite debate partners, Paul Begala. As neither Paul nor I am a foreign policy expert we talked about the domestic political aspects of the riots – and killings – in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Cooper quoted from Friday morning’s Mullings (I don’t have the transcript but this is close): “Rich, you wrote in your column this morning that President Obama’s foreign policy is: Blame George W.”

What I wrote, in its entirety was: “Barack Obama’s foreign policy is the same as his domestic policy: It’s all George W’s fault.” Continue reading →

Syria is Serious, Indeed

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, abruptly resigned as the special peace envoy to Syria.

Abrupt is the correct word, because Annan’s brief only extended until the end of this month. The current UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said he would try to find a replacement for Annan to complete the term of the “mandate.”

Annan said, in his statement of resignation: “At a time when we need – when the Syrian people desperately need action – there continues to be finger pointing and name calling in the Security Council.” Continue reading →

From Iran to Advertising: What’s Real?

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBmag.com

I had lunch the other day with a very successful investor and entrepreneur. He came to the United States from Iran as a young teenager. The extreme dichotomy that is Iran is fascinating to say the least—a huge country of well-educated people who, when given the chance to emigrate to the U.S., succeed disproportionately to the population, much like our friends who emigrate from India.

And yet Persians live in a medieval world, governed by strict Shiite theists who employ fear, suppression, and violence to manage both domestic and international relations. So, which is the real Iran? A wild-eyed, blustering Muslim theocracy, or a country of contemporary people living their lives in spite of—and hopefully out of harm’s way of—the unstable demagogues who control power? Continue reading →

Secular, Liberal Egypt. We Hardly Knew Ya

BY TONY BLANKLEY
Reprinted from Townhall.com

One of the nice things about human history is that no matter how much people or their leaders misjudge events and make a hash of things, within a few centuries, the debris is cleared away, and we can have another go at getting things right.

Yes, I am thinking about the Middle East. Whether or not there is a message in that turn of events, I’ll leave it to theologians.

At the moment, I have in mind the latest blunder by the experts — their assessment, just a few months ago, of the nature of the Arab Spring and its democracy movement. Back in spring, the leading experts — from the Obama administration to the neoconservatives on the right to the major liberal media to most of the academic area specialists — were all overwhelmingly predicting that all those great secular, liberal, college-educated kids with their iPhones in Tahrir Square represented the new Egypt and would bring all their wonderful values to the revolution. It was primarily us cranky right-wingers who have been writing on radical Islamic politics (and, of course, the Israelis, who can’t afford to get it wrong on Muslim political habits) who warned that this was all going to end in the rise in still-ancient Egypt of radical Islamist, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti American and anti-Western governance. Continue reading →

Obama Speech Okay But Late

BY RICH GALEN 

Reprinted from mullings.com 

President Obama’s speech on Monday night was, at best, OK. It got tongues wagging about the “Obama Doctrine” which appears to be: “If it won’t drag Iran into the fight we’ll take a look.”

Continue reading →

Understanding Mideast Not Easy

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from the Washington Times

In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed at the time to Sultan Murad Khan, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl, the co-rulers of the Aztecs, or to Rao Kanha, one of the princes of Jodhpur in India – it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it was an early indication of an historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that would lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world. Nor would they have foreseen a renaissance of European thought that would give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least a half a millennium.

Continue reading →

Bahrain, A Jewel in the Desert

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

Headline:Saudi Troops Enter Bahrain to Help Put Down Unrest

Come with me into the Wayback Machine.

Back in the day, I worked for a company called EDS which had been founded by a guy named Ross Perot. Perot was gone in the mid-90s when I was there and got involved with what I’m about to describe to you.

Continue reading →

Boundaries Part of Mideast Conflict

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

There is growing discussion over the nature of country borders in the roiling region of Northern Africa and the Middle East .

SIDEBAR

We should just call the region “NAME” to save typing.

Continue reading →