As we watch Pakistan degrade to a total breakdown. I have felt from the beginning that because of the nuclear weapons if not the fact that Pakistan is a major cultivator of insurgents and probably the home of Bin Laden, that Bush would have the excuse of having to act to secure the situation and then all hell will break out. Musharraf has made promises to hold elections to quell opposition in Pakistan and around the world but he will not say when he will lift martial order and plans elections while it is still imposed which is ridiculous.
I don't see anyway out of this and John Bolton doesn't mean to but highlights that fact. Make no mistake: This is a very dangerous situation," said John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. But Bolton told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that he would urge the United States to continue to back Musharraf, whose government has received $10 billion in U.S. aid since 2001. In the 1980s, some of Pakistan's nuclear labs were controlled by Abdul Qadeer Khan considered responsible for leaking technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran. Musharraf announced in 2004 that he had pardoned Khan. This is a lose, lose situation for us because of Bush!
Pakistan's nuclear stockpile may be technically secure, Bolton said but the issue isn't whether the weapons are locked away. "It's a political issue," the former U.S. ambassador said. "If the military comes unstuck, if it divides, then the technical fixes won't protect those weapons. Musharraf is in a difficult spot, Bolton said. "Even the military is filled with Islamic fundamentalists that he's tried to keep in lower positions." "But they're pervasive," he said. "And he doesn't have the flexibility of a real military dictator."
Bolton urged U.S. officials to consider more than whether Pakistan is being ruled democratically. "I'd have to put securing those weapons at the top of our agenda." Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, told CNN, "everyone should be concerned about this arsenal ... This is is an extraordinarily volatile situation. We don't want to see Pakistan, with its bombs, fall into the hands of people like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the mullahs." Read Bolton on Pakistan
You know Bush the idiot insists on putting so called Democracy above all else and that is why we are in this situation in Pakistan, the middle east, and around the world. Anyway as expected Pakistan's opposition called on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to lift a state of emergency, saying Monday that upcoming parliamentary elections would be a sham unless citizens' rights were fully restored. Several parties were mulling a boycott. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto meanwhile prepared to launch a cross-country caravan to protest military rule. Police ramped up security for her, saying they had received intelligence that a suicide bomber was planning to attack her in the eastern city of Lahore.
Raja Zafarul Haq, chairman of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's party, demanded restoration of the constitution which was suspended under the emergency, reinstatement of top judges purged by Musharraf and the release of detainees — as well as Sharif's return from exile. "Under the current circumstances it is very difficult to expect there would be fair elections in the country," he told Associated Press Television News. "Within the next week there will be meetings and we will finally decide whether to go for elections or agitation."
Liaqat Baloch, secretary general of Pakistan's most popular Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said they were strongly considering boycotting the elections. "If there is an emergency and no constitution, it is impossible to have free and fair elections," he told The Associated Press. opposition to martial order grows
Knowing that things in Pakistan will erupt out of control you know for a fact that support for us created the current situation but Bush will be able to appear forced into action. As should have been expected Russia is now getting even closer to India. What a surprise!
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Russian President Vladimir Putin called during Kremlin talks for boosting their countries' traditional ties, with a view to more than doubling trade by the end of the decade. Ahead of the talks, Russia's space agency Roskosmos signed an agreement with the Indian space agency for joint lunar exploration through 2017.
'Russia and India will jointly build a space ship. Under the project we plan to send an entire laboratory to the moon,' Roskosmos head Anatoly Perminov said in a statement. High-tech, and particularly military cooperation, are at the centre of bilateral ties, Putin said. 'We paid particular attention to cooperation in nuclear energy and in military-technical cooperation,' Putin told journalists. Besides the fact that this will more than double trade, The deals 'open new prospects for our scientific, technical and production cooperation in sensitive areas,' Putin said. Read more on increased cooperation between Russia and India
Sounds to me like sides are continuing to form as this slide to world war is turning into an avalanche that will not be stopped whether it happens before or after Bush leaves.
James Joiner
Gardner Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com
5 comments:
unfortunately, your analysis makes way too much sense. With an administration not known for its diplomacy, the ongoing clashes between Pakistan and India, the clash between Bhutto and Mushrraf, and Russia's Putin flexing his near dictatorial muscles, and U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, it could get very ugly out there.
jamie
I am afraid you are right and it will not be avoided. they all want war. I have sons in this and am cocerned for them as well as what this is going to mean for the country and the entire world. this will dwarf all other wars combined.
I am afraid that is Bush's intention as he is trying to bring about the End of days. I have had right wing nut cases say they were ready was I! Damn!
Looks like Bush forgot his feelings of war from a few years ago Jim:
By Joe Strupp
NEW YORK Sig Christenson, a founding member of Military Reporters and Editors who has worked five assignments in Iraq since the war began, reached back some 10 years for a Veteran's Day piece that noted President George Bush's early opposition to an Iraq invasion.
Christenson, who covers the military for the San Antonio (Tex.) Express-News, penned the piece for Sunday's paper that cited Bush's comments on Veteran's Day 1997 as governor of Texas. He pointed to Bush's defense of his father's decision during the Gulf War not to remove Saddam Hussein.
"There are a lot of Americans (who say), 'Why didn't you go get him?'" Bush told the Express-News back in 1997, according to Christenson. "Well, I'm confident that losing men and women as a result of sniper fire inside of Baghdad would have turned the tide of public opinion very quickly," Bush added.
Bush said efforts to ferret out Saddam from his many Baghdad hideouts would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular "guerrilla war," Chistenson recalled.
He added: "Neither Bush nor his son expressed regret in the 1997 interviews over the failure of U.S. forces to pursue and destroy the Iraqi army's Republican Guard."
Christenson observed: "That Veterans Day, Bush said efforts to ferret out Saddam from his many Baghdad hideouts would have transformed the battle from a desert conflict to an unpopular 'guerrilla war.' A decade later, proponents of the Iraq war, including President Bush and his father, dismiss those reservations, saying the 9-11 terrorist attacks forced the conflict."
Christenson added that White House spokesman Blair Jones told him Friday: "Since that time this nation experienced one of the most horrific moments in our history — the attacks on September 11, 2001. As the president has said many times, one of the lessons learned from that day is that we have to take emerging threats seriously. We have to deal with them before they fully materialize."
But Christenson then pointed out, "the fears expressed 10 years ago have become reality. The United States is mired in a ground war, with no military or political solutions in near sight. Insurgents, using increasingly sophisticated roadside bombs to target coalition troops, are waging the very guerrilla war that Bush predicted."
"A crowd of several thousand had largely emptied the cemetery after the governor delivered the Veterans Day keynote speech on that cloudy, cool morning when Bush broke away from a media gaggle and chatted with the Express-News about Iraq. The governor praised his father's decision to abruptly end the offensive, launched to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait."
Christenson notes, "Both men have consistently supported one another on how they handled their conflicts in the Persian Gulf. Back then, the elder Bush told the Express-News his son 'got it right' in his assessment of the first Gulf War. The former president also suggested that the decision he did not make — to send U.S. troops all the way into Baghdad — would have led America into another Vietnam-like conflict, 'and one guerrilla war in my lifetime was enough.'"
"That day he said taking the war to Iraq's capital would have been a form of 'mission creep' that would have exceeded his mandate to prosecute the war and unraveled the 31-nation Persian Gulf coalition," Christenson recalls of the elder Bush's 1997 views. "Such a decision, added Bush, who served from 1989 to 1993, 'would have made a (Gamal Abdel) Nasser' out of Saddam — a reference to the late Egyptian leader who remains a hero in the Arab world."
Christenson goes on to say, "The comments of both men a decade ago stand in contrast to statements they made at the end of last week. President Bush said at a Terrell Hills fund-raiser Thursday that history would vindicate his decision. 'Some day people are going to look back at this time and day and say, 'Thank God there was a generation that did not lose faith ... because the Middle East is a place free of suiciders,' he told supporters attending the private event for Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, after visiting with wounded GIs at Fort Sam."
Later, Christenson points out that "Vice President Dick Cheney, in an April 15, 1994, interview...said Arab troops would have abandoned the coalition if the Americans had pressed on. U.S. forces would have stood alone in an occupation of Baghdad, he said, and seen greater casualties. 'Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off,' Cheney said in the interview, which was done by C-SPAN and surfaced last summer on YouTube. He added, 'It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.'"
Larry
I can't stand these lying, two faced, warmongering, scum. We keep saying it but with Russia increasing military, finacial, and space ties with India we are just one more step closer to this explosion.
The sides are setting more every day. It is sickening to watch ot and be voiceless as we are lied to daily.
response to your comment:
Dear Jim,
That you bring your evidence for malice of Iran from Fox news is surprising.
Since when is Fox news teh best provider of contextualized information?
I guess Fox is an integral part of the American culture though. At least in Iran, we do not quote our media's anti-western propaganda as proof of reality!
This same Fox network, is calling for funding of "car bombs" in Tehran!
Now, I am no defender of capital punishment. I do not think men, women, wild animals, mad criminals have to be executed.
The only people whose death I will not mourne are cancerous evil humans like Dick Cheney! But even he, has to be let rot in jail.
In America, you execute killers and murders, don't you? I saw a disturbing documentary on 60 minutes, about an insane man on death row. Because American law does not permit execution of insane humans, they were giving him psychotherapic drugs to make him "meet his death sanely"!
How is this different that some absurd law in some other part of the world deciding that a woman pregnant with her brother's child will be a walking dead for the rest of her life, and putting an end to her misery?
Now about the execution of the underaged boys. Again, execution is a barbaric act, regardless when/where. However, there were three boys involved in that business, the two who got death penalty were engaged in raping a third boy. The third boy is not hanged! In your country you prosecute killers and rapists, Iran has its own set of laws to establish order in the society.
The tougher laws in Iran are perhaps why we do not have instances of school shooting and gang banging to the extent that you have in America.
In Iran, there is a strong activist lobby that is working tirelessly to abolish death penalty, ALL TOGETHER. This lobby is taking advantage of the media attention given to isolated cases of execution in Iran and is putting the heat on the government to, under the scrutinizing watch of the world, change the laws.
This group is however progressive. A lot of people are still bound by their religious beliefs. And those people have no issue with death penalty for crimes that are deemed huge risk to society's health and order.
Your pope for example, has not quite modernized the christian laws regarding birth control, has he?
What you prove to me, in spite of all your hatred for Bush, Jim, is that you too buy teh simple line of your master's propaganda. I wish Americans started to see beyond the bubble of their so called values, and start to respect the world
Post a Comment