Literally....
"This day in history" August 02, 2015 (a Sunday).
In 1934, President Paul von Hindenburg of Germany died, paving the way for Adolf Hitler’s complete takeover.
Related:
"In 1921, Adolf Hitler became the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party."
Guy is popping up all over the place in my jew$paper. Fortunately, I've already reached an epiphany.
In 1939, Albert Einstein (above) signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging creation of an atomic weapons research program.
More on that later.
In 1943, during World War II, US Navy boat PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, sank after being rammed in the middle of the night by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri off the Solomon Islands. Two crew members were killed.
We got even with 'em -- twice.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and Britain’s new prime minister, Clement Attlee, concluded the Potsdam conference.
Where he told Stalin he had a new weapon.
In 1974, former White House counsel John W. Dean (above) III was sentenced to one to four years in prison for obstruction of justice in the Watergate coverup. (Dean ended up serving four months.)
Where is the next Nixon when you need one?
In 1985, 137 people were killed when Delta Air Lines Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashed while attempting to land at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate.
You remember. The GOOD Gulf War. (More below)
In 2005, an Air France jetliner from Paris skidded off a runway while landing at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport during a storm and burst into flames; all 309 people aboard survived.
In 2010, President Obama, addressing the Disabled American Veterans in Atlanta, said the United States would leave Iraq ‘‘as promised and on schedule,’’ portraying the end of America’s combat role in the seven-year war as a personal promise kept.
In 2015, he's sending them back and the V.A. is a mess.
In 2014, Dr. Kent Brantly, the first Ebola victim to be brought to the United States from Africa, was safely escorted into a specialized isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where he recovered from the disease....
How are the tests going? Good?
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"The US has forgotten the foreign policy lessons of the Gulf War" by Ambassador Joseph Wilson Globe Contributor August 09, 2015
Wilson is the guy who got sent to Niger and found no yellowcake. When he made a stink, W's administration outed his CIA wife.
Looks like all is forgiven:
Aug. 2, 1990. Saddam Hussein sent his troops into Kuwait.
*****************
What followed was seven months of precedent-setting international diplomacy followed by the most significant US-led military victory since World War II.
What do we remember of that famous victory of a quarter-century ago? General Colin Powell’s promise at the beginning of the Gulf War that we were “going to cut it [the Iraqi Army] off, and then we are going to kill it.” Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf’s 100-hour war. CNN footage of the airstrikes on Baghdad and Iraqi troops surrendering en masse or dead along the infamous “Road of Death.” These images may have made it seem so effortless in retrospect.
But forgotten, regrettably, in the fog of the Iraq War are the profound lessons of the Gulf War, especially relevant to us today. President George H.W. Bush termed the approach to international crisis management and resolution in this first conflict after the end of the Cold War “the New World Order,” in which our national interests and goals would be best achieved in concert with our allies and broad international approval. That approach required the painstaking diplomacy of Secretary of State James Baker and the State Department, including our embassy in Baghdad to forge an international consensus and real coalition of like-minded nations.
And there it is.
At the embassy in Baghdad our task was to ensure that Americans and other affected civilians were moved out of harm’s way and to communicate that Saddam should be under no illusions about American and international determination that his invasion of Kuwait would not stand. Thousands were evacuated from Kuwait and Southern Iraq, including Americans, but also Russians, Central Europeans, Egyptians, North Africans.
Never mind the trap April Glaspie laid for Saddam, or the Bush connections to the Kuwaiti cretins who were slant drilling and stealing Iraqi oil (Iraqis complained, but to no avail), or the lies about babies thrown from incubators and all. It was a good and noble war.
We threatened, cajoled, embarrassed, and made our demands known to the Iraqis in every way possible until all foreigners who wanted to leave were able to do so. Among them were several hundred hostages held by Saddam, 150 Americans as well as another 70 in our care to keep them out of Iraqi hands. We lost two Americans, a hostage who suffered a heart attack shortly after being taken the night of the invasion of Kuwait, and an employee of the embassy who died of a brain aneurysm that same night. There is no doubt that our personnel and their families were at risk, in considerable danger in fact. We persevered because the safety of our fellow citizens and the success of our policy to roll back Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait depended on our efforts, much as the success of our efforts in Libya depended on Ambassador Chris Stevens’ work, however dangerous it might have been. Fortunately, unlike today, in the aftermath of the Gulf War we never had to suffer the ignominy of preening political peacocks abusing their congressional power to seek partisan advantage.
In Washington, President Bush; his National Security Adviser, General Brent Scowcroft; and Secretary Baker were reaching out across the globe, securing military and financial commitments from friends and like-minded governments, while at the United Nations, Ambassador Tom Pickering led efforts to define the specific goals of the international community. The results constituted an unprecedented display of global cooperation: 32 nations contributed troops; 90 percent of the costs of the war were borne by other nations; and 12 resolutions were passed by the UN Security Council providing the international legal framework for our actions.
Comparing the Gulf War to the Iraq War of 2003, the contrasts become depressingly clear. In 2003, our actions were largely unilateral. Support was purchased, coerced, co-opted, or suborned. The United States could not even be bothered to go to the United Nations for the requisite resolution for the use of force. The massive costs were — and are — still being borne by the American taxpayer.
Never mind the WMD and ties to 9/11 lies.
We emerged from the Gulf War in 1991 with the political and moral authority, and the unity of purpose, to broker major progress on some of the most difficult issues in the region.
And still no peace in Palestine.
But now we are so conflicted that we find the most significant nuclear arms agreement in years that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon under a fierce attack, lacking in facts but not funds from a right-wing casino magnate and his far right proxies.
While our current national security debate lurches from hyperbolic neoconservative chest beating to the most ominous fear-mongering, it would do us well to recall when realists and pragmatists held the ideologues at bay.
Yeah, which elite group would you rather run the New World Order? The Zionist Israeli wing or the Criminal Globalist clans?
We are still paying the price financially and strategically for the dire consequences of the neocon debacle in the Iraq War in which the lessons of the Gulf War were studiously ignored.
And then there are the Iraqis and the price they are paying.... warped fetuses, environment poisoned, country flattened.
We should remember now, as we consider the agreement with Iran, that when we have operated on the basis of international consensus, law, and convention, the United States has only enhanced its national security, strategic position, and prestige.
It would help insofar as it would show this government is not yet a total tool of Israel.
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"Reinstating soft power into US foreign policy; Twenty-five years after the first Gulf War, its lessons lost" by Joseph S. Nye Globe Contributor August 09, 2015
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait 25 years ago, the world was so much simpler. A “bad guy” openly sent tanks across the border of his little neighbor, granting the United Nations Security Council authority to sanction military action to enforce collective security for the first time since the Korean War. The Cold War — and the Soviet Union — was coming to an end, leaving the United States as the world’s only superpower. George H.W. Bush organized a broad coalition of states that included Syria and Egypt to ensure the soft power of legitimacy, while the hard power of the US military defeated Saddam’s forces in a matter of days with minimal American casualties. Bush famously resisted the temptation to march on Baghdad, preserving a balance of power between Iraq and Iran in the Persian Gulf.
Only a decade later, that picture had dramatically changed. Al Qaeda, a nonstate actor, attacked the world’s only superpower, and Bush’s son invaded Iraq (which had little to do with 9/11), destroying the balance of power between Iraq and Iran, unleashing sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia, fragmenting the Iraqi state, and providing a focal point for jihadi terrorists.
See: Occupation Iraq: Divide and Conquer
Cui bono?
The United States fell into Osama Bin Laden’s trap, and though Bin Laden is now dead, the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant has picked up the mantle of Al Qaeda and now controls Eastern Syria and Western Iraq.
I can't read this conventional narrative anymore.
Once again, America finds itself embroiled in a debate over whether to intervene in a Middle East conflict. The outstanding question is: How should the United States become involved in the internal affairs of other countries? If there is a clear lesson from the two Gulf wars, it’s that we should stay out of the business of invasion and occupation.
Therefore, "we" will fund mercenaries and train rebels for covert overthrows.
President Obama has said that America should use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when its security or that of its allies is threatened. Without a direct threat, but when conscience urges the country to act, such as a dictator killing a large number of his citizens, the president argues the United States should not act alone and only use force if there is a good prospect of success. These are reasonable principles, but what if a civil war like Syria’s allows a terrorist group to establish a safe haven? The United States, of course, must try to influence outcomes by hard and soft power means — but from afar.
They are. The airstrikes continue and the U.S. and its allies are helping ISIS.
In an age of nationalism and socially mobilized populations, foreign occupation is bound to breed resentment.
Yeah, happens every time.
Military force will remain an important component of American power, but it is a blunt instrument. Those who note the role that a US presence played in the economic and political success of South Korea forget that our troops were welcome because of a clear and present external threat, and even then it took more than three decades for democracy to emerge. Consciously or not, the first Bush administration chose the right path when it decided against moving farther into Iraq. It remains a lesson to remember today: Trying to occupy and control the internal politics of nationalistic populations in the Middle East revolutions is a recipe for failure.
I'm sorry, guys. The parameters of the discussion are so awful it's not worth responding.
The current turmoil throughout the region could last for decades. It stems from the artificial post-colonial boundaries, sectarian strife, and a loss of hope by the delayed modernization described in the UN’s Arab Human Development Report.
Delayed mostly because of allied governments. Iraq was the most modern and progressive Arab regime until the U.S. smashed it under Bush I and then subsequently sanctioned the shit out of it. Iran has still thrived despite the sanctions.
None will be easy to solve, especially by outsiders.
Maybe "we" shouldn't try. After all, it is THEIR COUNTRY!
It took 25 years after the French Revolution for the return of stability in Europe, and interventions by foreign powers like Austria and Prussia made things worse rather than better.
Even with reduced energy imports, however, the United States cannot turn its back on the Middle East. Our security interests in Israel, nonproliferation, and human rights are just some of the reasons the stakes are too high.
Those other two things don't matter.
But our policy should be one of containment, nudging and influencing from the sidelines rather than trying to assert a control that would not only be costly, but also counterproductive.
In other words, covert efforts to destabilize regimes that the AmeriKan government can deny. Great.
In other words, we will have to be smarter in our interventions both in the Middle East and around the globe. We passed that test in the first Gulf War; we failed in the second.
The SMART THING would be to NOT DO IT, especially when the CASE is BASED on LIES every time!
--more--"
So what have the Iraqis recorded regarding the wars?
"Baghdad library battling time to preserve Iraq’s culture, past" by Vivian Salama Associated Press August 08, 2015
BAGHDAD — The dimly lit, dust-caked stacks of the Baghdad National Library hide a treasure of the ages: crinkled, yellowing papers holding the true stories of sultans and kings; imperialists and socialists; occupation and liberation; war and peace.
These are the original chronicles of Iraq’s rich and tumultuous history — and now librarians and academics in Baghdad are working feverishly to preserve what’s left after thousands of documents were lost or damaged at the height of the US-led invasion.
As Islamic State militants set out to destroy Iraq’s history and culture, including irreplaceable books and manuscripts kept in the militant-held city of Mosul, a major preservation and digitization project is underway in the capital to safeguard a millennium’s worth of history.
Destroying collective memory and identity is a key part of the globe-kicker's program.
In darkrooms in the library’s back offices, employees use specialized lighting to photograph some of the most-precious manuscripts. Mazin Ibrahim Ismail, the microfilm department head, said they’re testing the process with documents from the Interior Ministry under Iraq’s last monarch, Faisal II, who ruled from 1939 to 1958.
‘‘Once restoration for some of the older documents from the Ottoman era, 200 to 250 years ago, is completed, we will begin to photograph those onto microfilm,’’ Ismail said. He said the digital archives, which will not be made available immediately to the public, is more to ensure their contents survive any future threat.
The restoration process is nothing short of microsurgery, and the type of damage to each document is a story — and a puzzle — on its own. Some manuscripts are torn from overuse and aging; others are burned or stained from attack or sabotage. And then there are some that were completely fossilized over time — the combined result of moisture and scorching temperatures — looking instead like large rocks dug up from the earth.
‘‘Those are the most difficult books to restore,’’ said Fatma Khudair, the senior employee in the restoration department. ‘‘We apply steam using a specialized tool to try to loosen and separate the pages.
‘‘Sometimes, we are able to save those books and then apply other restoration techniques, but with others, the damage is irreversible.’’
Technicians sterilize manuscripts and documents for 48 hours, washing them of dust and other impurities that accumulated over time. Then they go page by page using Japanese tissue, specialized paper for book conservation and restoration, to either fill in torn edges or layer the more-delicate documents with a sheer coating to make them more durable.
The Baghdad National Library, established by the British in 1920 through donations and first overseen by a Catholic priest, has weathered violent upheaval before.
At the start of the war, arsonists set fire to the library, destroying 25 percent of its books and some 60 percent of its archives, including priceless Ottoman records. Archives from 1977 to 2003 burned to ashes. Earlier archives from 1920 to 1977 had been stored in rice bags and survived.
During the invasion of Iraq, ‘‘we had an alternative site for the most important books and documents at the Department of Tourism,’’ said Jamal Abdel-Majeed Abdulkareem, acting director of Baghdad libraries and archives. ‘‘Then books and the important documents were exposed to water because the American tanks destroyed the water pipes and water leaked onto these important cultural materials.’’
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Related: When US intervention turns from bad to worse
Iraq today:
"Iraqi prime minister calls for political reforms" by Omar Al-Jawoshy and Tim Arango New York Times August 09, 2015
BAGHDAD — Facing widespread protests against government corruption and poor services as well as calls for change by Shi’ite clerics, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Sunday proposed a series of drastic reforms.
The latest U.S. puppet in trouble?
The government changes could be a turning point in the dysfunctional politics of Iraq that have persisted since the US invasion in 2003.
Abadi’s proposals, which came as the war against Islamic State militants has stalled in western Anbar province, were wide-ranging. They included the elimination of three vice presidency positions, largely ceremonial jobs that come with expensive perks, and the end of sectarian and party quotas that have dominated the appointments of top officials.
No wonder the reports have all but vanished the last three weeks.
The vice presidencies are held by three figures who have dominated Iraqi politics since the United States toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime: the former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki; Ayad Allawi, a Shi’ite whose Sunni-dominated bloc won the most seats in national elections in 2010; and Osama al-Nujaifi, a prominent Sunni leader.
Maliki was run out by ISIS because he told U.S. troops to get out and wasn't voted out like they had hoped.
“We are witnessing the end of the post-2003 Iraq,” said Maria Fantappie, the Iraq analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Fantappie, who recently visited Iraq, said she felt a palpable sense of public dissatisfaction. “There is a really strong and growing sentiment of mistrust among the Iraqi public against the political class,” she said.
We have the same here in AmeriKa, and it only took Iraqis twelve years to get there!
Can we leave now?
The protests, which began in recent weeks in reaction to the searing heat of Iraq’s summer — temperatures have consistently been above 120 degrees — and the lack of electricity to power air conditioners, grew into a wide-scale rebuke of corruption and an ineffective political system.
Didn't Halliburton and Bechtel rebuild the place? All those billions spent?
The Shi’ite religious leaders in the holy city of Najaf quickly backed the protest movement, which seemed to emerge from a grass-roots effort rather than a political party, forcing Abadi to act.
Rivero is right. The Iraqis are sick of their U.S puppet regime.
“After putting the trust in God and responding to the faithful calls of the marjaiya, which has drawn clear lines to activate political and administrative reforms, and to respect our beloved people’s will in achieving their legitimate demands, I submit these procedures before the Cabinet,” Abadi said Sunday in a written statement, referring to the clerics in Najaf.
Abadi’s proposals were greeted with statements of support across the political spectrum, including from Maliki and Nujaifi, a reflection of the mandate Abadi has been given from both the demonstrators and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shi’ite cleric, whose representative called for change in a sermon Friday.
Yeah, well, those Shi'ites.... they train kids to fight.
Related:
"The Naval Academy also has been reaching out to students in seventh and eighth grades to emphasize the importance of developing math and science skills to help raise chances of admission."
That's different!
The reform plan was immediately approved Sunday afternoon by Abadi’s Cabinet, but some of the measures, including elimination of the vice presidencies, need to be approved by Parliament, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday.
With Iraq facing a financial crisis as oil prices drop, Abadi also said he would drastically cut back government jobs and some ministries and would also reduce the perks of politicians, including the large and expensive security details that political leaders have long felt entitled to. The proposal goes to the heart of grievances expressed in peaceful rallies in Baghdad and other cities in the Shi’ite-dominated south of Iraq.
Hey, it's the price you must pay so the EUSraeli Empire can hurt Iran and Russia.
Abadi’s seven points of reform, which he released on his Facebook page Sunday and included reopening corruption cases against top officials, seemed to transcend the particulars and represent a wide statement of rebuke against the entire political system that has taken root since the US invasion.
You know, the one the U.S. fostered.
Notably, Abadi pushed for the elimination of one of the system’s hallmarks: the quotas used in the selection of top officials.
With the proposals, Abadi also, in swift fashion, shifted the narrative that had grown around him as a weak and ineffectual, although well-meaning, leader.
“It’s the boldest we have ever seen Abadi act,” said Ahmed Ali, an Iraq expert and senior fellow at the Institute of Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, located in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. “He had not been decisive up to this point.”
How goes the Turkish pounding?
See:
Turkey seeks NATO meeting on Islamic State threat
As they bomb Kurds.
NATO backs Turkey’s attacks on Islamic State
As they bomb Kurds.
Turkish hits rebel Kurdish targets
In Iraq.
Turkey’s assault on ISIS labeled a cover for attacks on Kurds
Turkish airstrikes target Kurdistan party
Attack by Kurds in Turkey kills two
That's the end of peace between them.
US fighter jets deployed to Turkish base
US, Turkey set to battle extremists
Yeah? Who would they be?
"A larger number of rebels US officials deem relatively moderate have been trained in a covert CIA program, but on the battlefield they are often enmeshed or working in concert with more hard-line Islamist insurgents. Whatever the goal, Turkish officials and Syrian opposition leaders are describing the agreement as something just short of a prize they have long sought as a tool against Assad: a no-fly zone in Syria."
Already shot down a Syrian warplane.
"Clashes between members of the Al Qaeda branch in Syria and a rebel faction in the country’s north believed to have been trained by the US government have stopped after the rebels abandoned their headquarters in Azaz, activists said Saturday. The Qaeda branch known as Nusra Front released a video showing a captured rebel saying men in the faction known as Division 30 were trained in Turkey by US officers and sent back to Syria."
Al-CIA-Duh, Al-nUSrA, it's all the same!
Oh, did I mention this was also about Syria (and by extension Iran, Israel, and Jordan), with the same old discredited arguments being tossed out (no mention of rebel use, of course)?
And if that doesn't get you foaming at the mouth for an invasion, maybe this will. Maybe not.
Ali said that in eliminating so many government jobs, including that of the Sunni vice president, and promising to abolish sectarian quotas, Abadi risks further marginalizing Iraq’s Sunni minority, whose disenchantment with the policies of Maliki’s government played a critical role in the rise of the Islamic State.
I already explained that.
Crucially, Nujaifi and Salim al-Jubouri, the Sunni speaker of Parliament, said they supported the reforms. Still, much of Iraq’s Sunni population lives in territory controlled by the Islamic State, with little connection to politicians in Baghdad.
They certainly look like they were formed by AmeriKan planners because it's the same over here.
--more--"
The airstrikes continue, of course.
"This day in history, August 9, 2015 (a Sunday)
In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order nationalizing silver.
Don't think the current regime won't do the same if we get another banking collapse.
In 1936, Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics as the United States took first place in the 400-meter relay.
Hitler waved at him, did you know that?
In 1944, 258 African-American sailors based at Port Chicago, California, refused to load a munitions ship following a cargo vessel explosion that killed 320 men, many of them black. (Fifty of the sailors were convicted of mutiny, fined, and imprisoned.)
Nuclear bomb test? (From the government that gave black men syphilis?)
In 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, the United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people....
The history that follows pales in comparison to that monstrous war crime.
--more--"
I just finished patrolling near Japan before the flare up. Same situation as 1941. Trade talks are snarled, and Japan is falling short on its commitments to peace.
They now face a crucial test. A North Korean warship fired a shot at a Japanese freighter, and the Imperial Japanese Navy responded by sinking it -- the first clash in the opening of WWIII in the Pacific.
Related:
In Hiroshima, a plea for end to nuclear arms
In Japan, some call for eradication of nuclear weapons
Scary thing is U.S. closed WWII with them, and will likely open WWIII in the same way.
The Worst Day in World History
The Worst Days in World History
I'm now finished with that I suppose. On behalf of the citizens of the United States I would like to once again issue a deeply remorseful apology to the Japanese for this government having used those abominable weapon on your country when it was completely unnecessary.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
Germany drops treason inquiry
Bombings in hard-hit Iraq province kill 42
It was ISIS, yup.
Syria releases prominent activist jailed for over 3 years
Syrian group leaving front in Islamic State fight
Takes you through Turkey, too.
Sorry I'm sick of the war propaganda, so sick I'm not even reading it anymore.
This did catch my eye:
"The Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant is plagued by massive flows of contaminated water leaking from its reactors."
And it's polluting the Pacific to the tune of 300 tons a day since the whole thing started.
UPDATE: "Mayor Bill de Blasio said anyone who owned or managed a building with a cooling tower would be required to test and disinfect it or risk being charged with a misdemeanor for failing to comply."
