Comments on The Belmont Club "Kilcullen vs Sullivan"

My take is that people are making something simple complex. Obama wants out.

When he was campaigning the big war was in Iraq and AfPak was a sideshow. Obama only talked about AfPak as a distraction to make himself sound serious about a topic he knows nothing about. His knowledge base on the area comes from one Summer trip during college and old National Geographics he saw at the dentist's office. Bush and Petreaus won Iraq for him. That earns no gratitude but did spare him from withdrawing under fire.

The Russians, Iranians and Chinese may have preferred that the US had retreated in humiliating failure. Some may speculate that Obama is an agent of their interests but I could not possibly say so. Most Americans probably think that the Shanghai Cooperative Organization is a plot element from a Jackie Chan movie. Some like Obama get their news from The Nation, Huffpo and MSNBC.

If the military wanted to make Obama happy they would produce a report on "New Strategic Realities for the Asia-Pacific Region." If my worst instincts are right Obama, with his mentors Maurice Strong and Soros are paving the way for a shift to an American withdrawal in favor of China. What I expect to see from the Left is a series of attacks on India as unstable, provocative, racist, imperialist, and hostile to Gaia. China is already mobilizing along the Indian border and has bases in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. A China allied politician is seeking to subvert Thailand. This makes Japan an Asian Germany and puts The Philippines in the role of an Asian Poland. Australia may get to be the Eastern Israel. As for India and Vietnam, what choices do they have?

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buddy larsen,
Suez happened the same weekend the Soviets went into Hungary. The anti-American Little Englanders have been using it to beat on the US for over 50 years. That is why, with the exception of Thatcher, under Labour or Tory governments the gulf between the US and UK has kept spreading. Equally important was the nail it drove into the coffin of the 4th Republic in France. There too both the Left and the Right have no love for America. As we in the BC know to well.

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FC,
carried out in its usual clumsy, bullying and ignorant manner
... Afghanistan. Yet another example of American hubris.

For myself I was well aware that the Suez example empowered attitudes like yours and would probably stimulate an injection of your bile. Your main points are accurate to a point, your proportions are what is off. The focus was not driven by old fashioned anti-British politics of the Colonel McCormick Chicago Tribune school. That was part of the pre-war Isolationism of the Right that morphed into the anti-Colonialism of the Left. The problem was the Soviets and their invasion of Hungary.

Nov 14, 2009 - 3:29 am