I can honestly say I am very tired, really sick and tired, of our tax dollars doing for others what we need to have done for our own selves. Just how much more money are we gonna give for a free ride to this administration? I want you to look at this and tell me what you think.
To me, I think this is stupid….but then who am I, so I say. Do I really see the whole picture or what??!! We must stop this activity and do it as quickly as possible. We do not call for a cease fire but we sure as hell can train their army!!! Oh, for heavens sake, give me a break!
Given the fact that our own army is broken and we do not have the money to repair it, what in the world are we thinking of trying this kind of overt action to steal our tax dollars. Do they really think we are that stupid?! Well, this morning I listened to the stats on what kind of money it will take to upgrade and repair our own military and that fact that we do not have 34 or some odd brigades of our reserve/guard that is not prepared for war! I ask you where is the brains of this administration for thinking things out and being coherent in their priorities…good lord……
The whole idea is so screwed up on so many levels, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…
Me too, in that regard, CG. I honestly feel it is quite dishonest for the US to do such a thing. We have our hands full-our plate full- with what we are doing in Iraq and yet they want to take on more! Given that the French has something to do with this,–slightly mentioned– reminds me of their earlier colonization of that country. It will not work…or so I think anyhow. But for us to think of such an adventure, it is nuts!
I think it just drives home the fact that all the current administration wants to do is create complete and total chaos throughout the middle east (along with record profits for Halliburton and the oil companies), and will stoop to any means to do it.
I’m disgusted.
Look at how well this concept is working out in Iraq. Oy.
The US, instead of specializing in nation building is becoming adept at fomenting civil war… look out Lebanon.
;o)..I hear ya Nag…
We can train the Lebanese to buy our weapons.
American corporations have missiles, airplanes, land mines, etc. for sale. They need to sell their products to serve the bottom line. Profits are needed to enrich corporate officers, and compliant “representatives” and agencies in Washington.
The USA can’t afford to buy all that crap because the money has to come from the taxpayers, a group in which corporations avoid participation. Not to mention that the budget is still subject to approval by the people. That pesky Congress!
You do have a point, Alice, but I think training the army is something else. We can’t even do that for our own, why bother for someone else in another land…we will just have to drop it and run again from another commitment…or that is how I see it anyhow. Besides we can’t even finish that which we have started, before starting something else…it is nuts….
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TODAY’s HEADLINES ::
«« click to enlarge● Afghanistan – Unfinished
● Pakistan (Waziristan) – Unfinished
● Pakistan/India (Kashmir) – Unfinished
● Iraq – Unfinished
● Somalia – Unfinished
● Israeli-Palestinian conflict – Unfinished
● Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution – Ashes
● Ukraine’s Orange Revolt – DOA
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
This is more evidence that I am right on my premise that we do not need to take on anything else. Talk about childish ways of doing things…starting a job and never finishing it…We need to grow up in America and get to doing adults business..I do not care what administration it is..this is not kids play…seemingly as it is being handled like such.
Thanks Oui. YOu can always enlighten us to the reality of life, always…hugs…
I wonder where DuctapeFatwa is. I never really shared his point of view, but now I’m belately warming to it.
Add to this the near-total lack of protest, both in Congress and in the public, against the destruction of Lebanon — which according to Bush is “US policy” — and one can only say, WTF?
If only you could have seen the email I got from my congressman recently on this topic of Lebanon. I now am truly wondering about his intellect as well. My God, he seems just as stupid as I thought he really was. I think they follow each other by clutch the– dope a rope, on things such as this.. You are right, you know…
.
How seldom we see them even mentioned. What an infrequent and miserly recognition is given to their sacrifice, their commitment to their courageous defense not only of their nation, but of their humanity, and our own, whether we are Americans or not …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
covering everything over at his blog.
The USA, your one stop shopping destination for all your military hardware needs.
Maybe they can have a little cammo smiley face logo.
Do you see why I keep harping on spare parts? They are the key to Israel’s security. By supplying the military equipment to our allies we thereby can dictate what those armies are used for.
I’d be willing to bet that every F-15, of F-16 we sell to a Muslim nation can be put out of service by remote control.
Here is what the Pentagon is going to try to do. They are bribing the military officers of the Lebanese government with offers of tons of new equipment and training (and whores and cash). Once they accept, we will not only have contracts to service their military, we’ll also be able to cut off those services.
We are trying to gin us up a civil war in Lebanon, where the bribed will kill the enemies of Israel.
It has worked in other countries. But Lebanon is complicated and I don’t think this is a good idea even from a cynical realpolitik amoral point of view. In addition to being immoral, I don’t think it will work. That makes a double whammy in my book.
Although, given the circumstances, I am hardly surprised to see this approach.
I hear ya, Boo. Maybe it was here I read about it or from you or from someplace else I read it and from someone else, I just do not remember, I read exactly what you said. It does not make it right; however, when we here in America are lacking the essentials for keeping us strong here at home. A nature of debate can go on from here, but I think everyone knows what we are talking about here. I fear that this will not change even with the changing of the guard in Nov. if this should happen. This has, like you imply, gone on for many a years and shall never come to an end as long as we have greed and powerful ppl in those lies of getting the $$$$ at the weeks end. Such a sever shame for the world to be on a road of termination as we know it just cause of this..
“…. when we here in America are lacking the essentials for keeping us strong here at home.”
As long as we keep outsourcing the manufacture of electronic components to other low wage countries, we won’t be truly secure here at home. How long would our “smart” weapons continue to work without replacement parts, circuit boards and people here that know how to design the boards and the ICs? If our trading partners decided to cut off supplies, we’d be back to the bad old days while they had access to our technology for their own use.
you do have a great POV. Thanks for adding t his. It all seems to intertwine for some odd reason..:o)
The idea seems a bit like having a BigPharma salesman train our family doctor on medications.
Here is a caveat for our Lords Of War. The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise.
Hi S. YOu got that one right!!!! So many shitin cronies of big business that keep getting in the way of taking care of business for us ALL! hugs BTW, how did the elction go in your neck of the woods?
Hi Brenda and hugs back to you from both of us! I won the primary 71% to 29% and have to beat my repub opponent in Nov. so I have been campaigning all week at our county fair. Tomorrow is the last day for that. I’m helping with the IN-9th district congressional campaign in a small way too.
Thanks for the excellent diary;-)
You go S! I knew you would do it all along…;o) congrats.
Give my best to the Mrs and will be waiting to hear about when you win later on…..
Thanks….
Thanks for the good laugh, ID. . .
Like they haven’t been doing that for years now. . .hehehehehehehe
Maybe we all should take notice of this writting. From salon. I think it is exceptional IMHO.
How Lebanon rescued me This is just part of the article and it should be reading for all to read for peace to take hold. The rest of it could be read by entering the free day pass at the web site.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
How Lebanon rescued me
I fled America for Beirut’s cultural freedom. Now I watch as bombs
destroy my refuge — and the best hope for a viable Middle East
democracy.
By Alia Malek
Aug. 04, 2006 | In March 2003, I fled to Beirut, Lebanon, wanting to
escape the made-for-TV war on Iraq, the monotony of Washington, and
the man who had become my boss, John Ashcroft.
Naturally, in this era of pretexts, the convergence of those events
was itself also just an excuse. Even if my job as a trial attorney in
the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department had not been
increasingly meaningless under the Bush administration, I would have
been fantasizing about returning to Beirut, as I had ever since it
seduced me in the summer of 2000, when I first visited it as an adult.
So it was with irony, sadness, disbelief and anger that I watched
thousands flee last month from Lebanon.
Of course, this is where we — in the collective American
consciousness — had last left off in Beirut: a steady stream of
wailing mothers clutching children under the watchful eyes of
soldiers, menacing helicopters and merciful warships, as if Lebanon
has been in perpetual evacuation since the 1970s.
The intermediary post-civil-war years were only occasionally
memorialized and then often in publications and by writers desiring to
be so hip as to discover what everyone else in the Middle East already
knew: The former war zone was one movable party.
These writers, usually white men, were in constant awe that Lebanon’s
women were beautiful and wore bikinis, that the liquor always flowed,
and that the nightlife rivaled — according to the usual comparisons
— that of South Beach or New York City. The bullet-pockmarked façades
of several buildings lent gravitas to their writing and reporting on,
essentially, hedonism.
Admittedly, Beirut’s famed partying had in part beckoned me to
Lebanon; it provided a comfortable buffer to living in a part of the
world incredibly fragile and scarred while affording me the chance to
probe the nagging questions of what my life might have been had my
parents stayed in the Middle East and whether its chaos was better for
me than the United States’ contradictory offerings of comfortable
assimilation and interminable alienation.
But I was also drawn by the intoxicating blend of antiquity,
modernity, freedom and struggle with a history and culture that I
could partly claim as my own. Though my parents are Syrian, my
father’s roots were in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and I had,
coincidentally, been conceived in Beirut. While my parents had
swallowed their regrets when they gave up family, friends and lives to
try to make it in America, their nostalgia and longing were evident
everywhere, from the Arabic names they gave their children to the
Arabic cassette tapes they listened to, over and over, for years. And
their cravings became my own.
So when straight from the airport I arrived outside the apartment
building I would eventually call home, to find a crowd surrounding a
minibus that had crashed into a popular snack shack — its tail end
emerging almost organically from the concrete wall — there was no
place else I wanted to be.
The perpetual exodus of Lebanon’s people was echoed in the song,
“Waynoun?” (“Where Are They?”), by the chanteuse Fairuz, the voice of
Lebanon and at times of the entire Levant. Though written about an
ancient time and penned in 1972, on the eve of the wars in Lebanon, it
would soon become relevant again. She sings without accusation but
only sadness:
Where are they?
Where are their voices,
Their faces?
Now there’s a valley between us!
They fled in the arms of oblivion,
They left their children’s laughter
Abandoned on the walls.
Lovers in the streets went separate ways,
No words, no promises.
I’m the only voice in the streets;
I’m the only lantern of sorrow.
Where are they?
Today Fairuz is perhaps singing to those dual and foreign nationals
who fled Lebanon, leaving the Lebanese to face alone a fate Europe and
the United States would not tolerate for its own citizens, evacuated
on warships within view of the Lebanese left behind. Perhaps she is
singing to those whose conscience has yet to be riveted out of
slumber. Her inquiry plays on a loop in my mind, and I, again, want to
flee to Lebanon.
— By Alia Malek
Oh yeah… that’s where I heard of that before.
That idea worked out SO well for us last time.
You just know! Oh by the way, the first boot on the ground in Lebanon by the first American will be the last boot on the ground, I am afraid. This dog won’t hunt any longer with the ME…now nowadays. But then again, we are doomed to make the very same mistake all over again, what with the mentality of this administration…sad to say.
I would leave a comment here, but it has all been said above. How about a big loud DITTO, instead….
From Rawstory:
In theory, if protecting Israel is our primary goal in the region, then supplying and training the Lebanese army so they can suppress Hezbollah is a good idea. In practice, a significant percentage of the Lebanese army seems to be made up of Hezbollah members, so supplying and training them is probably the dumbest strategy our leaders could come up with. This isn’t going to go well.
YOu do have a point that needs to be addressed by our govenrment, however do you think they should have kept on the army in Iraq too? What would you do if y ou had the choise to make? I think things like this needs to be addressed by may in all kinds of advisery positions before taking this agressive thing on. Don’t you think like this as well?
I think dismissing the Iraqi army was the biggest mistake the US made in Iraq. The militias we are worried about now formed in part from former soldiers who suddenly found themselves unemployed because of that dumb decision. By the time we started putting the Iraqi army back together again, many of the enlisting soldiers had already developed higher loyalties, which is one of the major problems the Iraqi government will have to confront once we are gone. The sectarian strife in Iraq was inevitable, but disbanding the army sped it up by several years.
I’m not sure there was a perfect path we could have chosen that would have stabilized Iraq, invading in the first place was a lousy idea, but it seems like everytime there has been a choice since then the Bush administration has made the worst possible decision.
Well, if Iraq is Vietnam, it only figures that someone has to get stuck playing the role of Cambodia, and it looks like Lebanon is it. Our bombing campaign in Cambodia triggered the ascendance the Khmer Rouge, and Israel’s bombing campaign is doing the same for Hezbollah.
Oh sure, nitpickers will point out that we’re not bombing Lebanon ourselves the way we did with Cambodia, but with Bush accelerating arms shipments to our Israeli proxy, the difference is academic. Everyone knows the score.
The refusal of Americans to recognize this, notoriously ignorant of history as they are, is no surprise. But honestly, you’d expect that by now, third world countries would recognize the offer of American military advisers as the kiss of death that it invariably is.