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Posted on Mar 30, 2015 in Foreign Policy Issues, Middle East | 0 comments

Iraq and Yemen: Watch how we label the enemy or we risk making the same mistakes in that we did in Vietnam.

Yemen, Iraq, and more infamously the Vietnam War all have seen U.S. foreign policy stumble badly because of faulty logic in the facile application of highly abstract labels to describe the participants. For example, in Vietnam, at the height of the Cold War, Ho Chi Minh and his followers were given the most highly charged label of that time period: “communists.” It implied a threatening enemy of the United States, a tool of the Chinese Communists, and, to use an even more confusingly abstract term, the “free world.” All of the “free world” knew (or more precisely thought they knew), about the inevitable militant class conflict that Communist theoreticians Karl Marx and Vladimir Illyich Lenin predicted. War with the communists therefore was inevitable. From the right-wing came the book by Cleon Skouson, “The Naked Communist,” which posited that communists, like Aldous Huxley’s “Big-Brother” were in the process of creating “Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.” The communists were aided, he...

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Posted on Mar 23, 2015 in Congress, Elections-Non-U.S., Elections-U.S., Foreign Policy Issues, Israel, Middle East, President Obama, Public Opinion Polls | 0 comments

Republican “temper-tantrum” coordinated attack on Democrats and President Obama a dirty tricks political ploy for 2016

The partisanship-izing of the Israel-U. S. relationship continues unabated. This time, even as Netanyahu tries to soften his attacks on U.S. policy, the Republicans are continuing to throw fuel on the flames on an ongoing basis. Recall that Republicans Speaker of the House, John Boehner, broke with a long standing tradition by inviting Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress—WITHOUT first notifying either President Obama OR the Democratic leadership in Congress. This in the final days of the Israeli election. Interfering with an Israeli (or U.S.) election was yet another historical N0- No! Netanyahu cemented the alliance of the Israeli right-wing to the U.S. right-wing by both accepting the invitation–a slap in the face to President Obama–and then by refusing Jewish Senator Dianne Feinstein and others’ invitation to meet face-to-face with congressional Democrats. Now, Speaker Boehner announces a post-election visit to Israel, and Republican Spokesmen are sounding a unified insulting attack on the Democratic President Obama, urging him, as National Review (a Conservative magazine) long-time...

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