Re: US strike options on TSP

The Strategic Issues & International Relations Forum is a venue to discuss issues pertaining to India's security environment, her strategic outlook on global affairs and as well as the effect of international relations in the Indian Subcontinent. We request members to kindly stay within the mandate of this forum and keep their exchanges of views, on a civilised level, however vehemently any disagreement may be felt. All feedback regarding forum usage may be sent to the moderators using the Feedback Form or by clicking the Report Post Icon in any objectionable post for proper action. Please note that the views expressed by the Members and Moderators on these discussion boards are that of the individuals only and do not reflect the official policy or view of the Bharat-Rakshak.com Website. Copyright Violation is strictly prohibited and may result in revocation of your posting rights - please read the FAQ for full details. Users must also abide by the Forum Guidelines at all times.
shiv
BRF Oldie
Posts: 34982
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30
Location: Pindliyon ka Gooda

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by shiv »

Satya_anveshi wrote:^^Superb!!

Raheel Raza ji should be made to visit India along with Tarek Fatah saab for educating the public. Desis must spread this video far and wide.
They will be heckled and kicked out by our pseudoseculars. This job is for us to do.
ramana
Forum Moderator
Posts: 59773
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by ramana »

Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter redux. Same dreaded malaise afflicts them.
chetak
BRF Oldie
Posts: 32227
Joined: 16 May 2008 12:00

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by chetak »

look at how the EJs protect themselves but lecture us on "religious" freedom :lol:

when it's done to them it's an attempt to "proselytize Islam in a public school", accusing the school of "religious indoctrination" but when the EJs do it to us it's "bringing christ" to the heathens

what a bunch of hypocrites!! shutting down all the schools in the district.

this from the washington post, no less


Furor over Arabic assignment leads Virginia school district to close Friday

A Virginia school system has decided to close schools Friday after a high school geography assignment on world religions led to allegations of Islamic indoctrination and a slew of angry emails and phone calls.

Augusta County School District officials said that there had been no specific threat of harm to students. But in a statement posted on the school district’s website, officials said they were concerned about the “tone and content of these communications.”

“We regret having to take this action, but we are doing so based on the recommendations of law enforcement and the Augusta County School Board out of an abundance of caution,” the statement says.

[University moves to fire professor who says Sandy Hook massacre is a hoax — and allegedly harassed parents of victims]

Superintendent Eric Bond did not respond to questions about why he canceled school given the lack of a specific threat, or about whether he considered the original assignment improper. Members of the school board also did not respond to requests for comment.

The school district serves about 10,000 students in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley west of Charlottesville, Va., about 150 miles from Washington, D.C.

A geography teacher at the district’s Riverheads High near Staunton, Va., gave an assignment asking students to try their hand at calligraphy by copying a statement in Arabic, according to the Staunton News Leader.

It was the Muslim statement of faith, according to the newspaper: “There is no god but Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

The assignment was meant to give students a sense for the art of calligraphy, according to the newspaper, and the teacher did not have the students translate the statement into English, require students to recite the statement, or say they believed in it.

But some parents were outraged at what they saw as an attempt to proselytize Islam in a public school. One parent’s post on Facebook accusing the school of religious indoctrination caught the attention of national media, triggering a community meeting and an avalanche of messages to the school system.

“These children were deceived when they were told it was calligraphy,” the parent, Kimberly Herndon, told NBC29 television. “This is not calligraphy, this is a language.”

Students were also invited to try on a hijab, or head scarf.

In the statement posted on the school district website, officials said that “no lesson was designed to promote a religious viewpoint or change any student’s religious belief.”

Students will continue learning about world religions as required by state academic standards, they said. But in the future, students will practice calligraphy using a different sample that has nothing to do with Islam.
Vayutuvan
BRF Oldie
Posts: 12060
Joined: 20 Jun 2011 04:36

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Vayutuvan »

KrishnaK wrote:. How much of US consumption is the immigrants though ?
All of it sans the minuscule consumption by the native Americans?
Vayutuvan
BRF Oldie
Posts: 12060
Joined: 20 Jun 2011 04:36

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Vayutuvan »

ramana wrote:Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter redux. Same dreaded malaise afflicts them.
The same people who idolized JC idolize BO and Al Gore. Clinton of course is idolized for his karishma and bedding women by the same feminists liberal crowd who also want India to reduce their emissions while they subscribe to elitism in every aspect of their lives - Quite sickening the hypocrisy.

Usually some of these same females fall for paki boy friends - in fact serial paki BFs.

Shiv garu: that is another thing - pakis and their four father Arabs get lot of white women. I have seen very few black women dating these scum.
Lilo
BRF Oldie
Posts: 4080
Joined: 23 Jun 2007 09:08

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Lilo »

Paul
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3800
Joined: 25 Jun 1999 11:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Paul »

Few differences between BO and Carter....

BO does not have Islamophile advisors like Brezenski who should be made a war criminal for bringing misery to much of Asia and Africa.

Secondly BO by staying out of Syria has provided an opening for the world to be multi polar.

Thirdly his attention to China as the pivot to Asia while not a success is providing India with breathing space by forcing China to spend more of its budget on the Navy on it's eastern coastline.
Satya_anveshi
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3532
Joined: 08 Jan 2007 02:37

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Satya_anveshi »

Trump certifies Clinton to be a strong Presidential candidate
On NBC's "Meet the Press," Sunday, Trump dismissed Clinton's criticism, knocking her as a "liar" and "weak."

"It's just another Hillary lie," Trump said. "She lies like crazy about everything -- whether it's trips where she was being gunned down in a helicopter, or an airplane. She's a liar and everybody knows that."

Hours later, Trump reiterated his comments up in a tweet, stating, "Hillary Clinton lied when she said that "ISIS is using video of Donald Trump as a recruiting tool." This was fact checked by @FoxNews: FALSE"
svinayak
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14223
Joined: 09 Feb 1999 12:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by svinayak »

Especially because for once in my life, I will vote Democrat if Trump is the nominee of my party.

In 30 years, I have not missed a primary or general election; and I have never been embarrassed to be a Republican in my entire life, until now.

Trump has no chance of winning the general election, but he has every chance of destroying the Republican party.

Which, I'm starting to think, was Trump/Clinton plan all along.

A trojan horse masterfully played?
You're nuts. Hillary will be our first woman President. I guarantee you that many Republican women in the workforce will cross over to vote for her. They know that once a woman shatters the biggest glass ceiling in the world, it will help all women. Once that big glass ceiling is but a bad memory, and women see the clear blue sky, the little glass ceilings all over America will shatter too.

I would not be surprised if once in the voting booth, alone, immersed in memories of all the indignities she probably experienced on her way up the corporate ladder, and the indignity of her attractiveness being maligned by Trump, that Fiorina votes for Hillary too!
MSN rarely has anything positive to say about Trump. Americans are tired of theses politicians being bought and paid for by millionaires for their selfless benefits at the expense of the middle class. All the career politicians running for presidency, will owe all their donors special favors for the contributions to their campaigns
svinayak
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14223
Joined: 09 Feb 1999 12:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by svinayak »

onald Trump tells it like it is and speaks out honestly about how we the American people want our country back. We need someone to finally stand up for the American people and he is the only one that speaks the truth and probably the only one that has enough strength and leadership to turn our country around and make it great again. For several years friends and family have talked about how the government is so crooked and they are destroying this once Great Nation. We don't need to bring in people that hate us and want to destroy us and that is what the our present government is doing. Mr Trump gives us hope again...God Bless America!
Remember why the GOP is doing poorly with women and minorities. I would never at this point vote for anybody in the modern Republican Party as I think it a party of bigots and haters. That charge as you know resonates with the general voters who come out for the presidential. Women will determine as you know who the next president is.
I am a woman and am voting for Trump He is Not the Average everyday Republican He will Not be just a figurehead for the wishes of the Repub Party,
Trump's negatives pale in comparison to Hillarys. Once Trump gets the republican nomination, he will be laser focused on Hillary. He will DESTROY her in a general election. Sit back and watch Janet. The head to head national polls now mean little, Trump has not began his 24/7 assault on Hillary yet. He has destroyed everyone who he competes with....period.
Trump nation is about to begin.
My inter anthropologist as found observing this fascinating. My inter historian as been given insight into how Hitler rose to power.

I survived Nixon and Reagan. I will survive this. If Trump wins there's the bonus. We will see a humorous four years.
the problem with your scenario is that trump is striking distance to Clinton, and in some polls he beats her. Also, im a democrat..voted for Obama twice....realized that this country is going totally anti-constitution, and pro-socialist.....obamacare is a disaster, and frankly im sick and tired of the PC crap and apologizing because im white......if a democrat gets in, you can kiss this country goodbye........trump all they way......signed a Connecticut yankee
Donald Dumb: 1998 interview with People magazine:

"If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific."
The Bush family has been owned by the Sauds for at least three generations. 2 Bush generations invaded Iraq at the request of the Sauds.
TRUMP
exposing how stupid and hate filled
Americans have become
America does not nominate U.S. Presidential candidates, but the far right in United States does, and is. But he won't win.
I'm a Brit living between London and Paris - both these cities are in the stranglehold of lefty wing PC fanatics and they're both very dangerous places - 3rd world dumping grounds. Be careful who you elect USA or you'll end up just like Europe. If Trump doesn't get a clear majority the Libs will stitch him up like they did in France:
http://www.davidsedgwick.co.uk/blog/200 ... ical-elite
The Muslims and liberals think Trump is so bad for just suggesting a temporary ban on travel and entry till the vetting process is being figured out.

Most have not been reporting what is going on in France. The French are pi**ed. They have enacted and extended their emergency powers act allowing sweeping powers.
Ban on associations and public demonstrations
Searches and arrests without warrants
Blocking and take down of websites and social media at will.
Unknown number of houses raided some say 2000+ and hundreds arrested with hundreds of weapons confiscated some them heavy machine guns.
recently 3 Mosques raided and closed. with weapons and seditious material seized according to reports 200 more mosques to be closed.

Germany has also raided and closed a mosque the other day.

I think UK has taken action on 3 mosque closure but it may have been in the past.

It might be the days of Muslims using the freedoms of the west against the host countries might be coming to an end. It is a wake up call to American Muslims to police yourself, keep your people under control and live in peace. Or once people get fed up enough there will be a huuuge action to clean house and they will not like the result. The American Muslims will soon not have the protection of Obama and Valerie Jarrett his Iran born muslim senior white house adviser.

Trump has a business mind of improving or using a process. He is watching what is going on in the world. I have no doubt that he knew about the legality of 8 US 1182 authority of the POTUS to ban alien entry while everyone and the media was claiming unconstitutional which they have now grown silent on its legality.

Those opposed to Trump think he is stupid but anyone who can sustain and command an election as front runner half the year using just 6 mil deserves serious consideration as the POTUS. Jeb as spent 30 mil and look where he is.
svinayak
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14223
Joined: 09 Feb 1999 12:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by svinayak »

Trump: "I'm going to Putinize the US"
member_19686
BRFite
Posts: 1330
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by member_19686 »

Old interview:

Samuel Huntington: "Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity" (Booknotes, 6/5/04)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2ac0VoBF4E
Shreeman
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3762
Joined: 17 Jan 2007 15:31
Location: bositiveneuj.blogspot.com
Contact:

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Shreeman »

I dont often get out anymore and was surprised todin. The outside is changing for a brown person, your random drunk will appoint himself an enforcer on seeing le brownie. And there is a lot more of "oh, do I really have to serve you?" attitude in the air with half of your request invariably unfulfilled. Bonus points in spoiling le whities day if you have a beard.

Shave, people. And if you can subscribe to fair and lovely too that would be great too. The next "we will not forget the 9/11" reaction is silently happening. George Ws dream is coming true.
A_Gupta
BRF Oldie
Posts: 12056
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 11:31
Contact:

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by A_Gupta »

David Frum's article in the Atlantic is essential reading to understand the US of A:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... lt/419118/
A_Gupta
BRF Oldie
Posts: 12056
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 11:31
Contact:

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by A_Gupta »

Former Vice President Walter Mondale has an OpEd in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/opini ... ssies.html
America’s Empty Embassies
At one point in 2014, nearly a quarter of the world’s countries lacked an American ambassador, and even today, despite some efforts to approve candidates, a dozen nominations have not received congressional action — including nominees to represent the United States in strategically vital countries like Mexico, Norway and Sweden.
Take the case of Roberta S. Jacobson, whom President Obama nominated as ambassador to Mexico this summer. A State Department veteran who is fluent in Spanish, she is exactly the sort of person we need to advance our interests in Mexico. The Mexican government has expressed support, as did the Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

But because, as an assistant secretary of state, Ms. Jacobson helped negotiate the thawing of relations between the United States and Cuba, Senator Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has placed a “hold” on her candidacy, unilaterally preventing her from receiving what should be a pro forma vote of approval.
Despite the vital national interest in working with Norway and Sweden, the Senate has failed to take a vote on nominees for the ambassadorships to either country, nominees who were unanimously approved by the Foreign Relations Committee this summer.

Both nominees have impeccable records. The candidate to Sweden, Azita Raji, had an illustrious career in investment banking. Samuel D. Heins, the nominee to Norway, is a distinguished attorney here in Minneapolis, with a long record as an advocate for human rights and against torture. These are the kind of well-respected Americans on whom we depend to foster needed cooperation and to promote our national interest.

And yet both have been placed on hold for reasons completely unrelated to their candidacies, or to American relations with Norway and Sweden.
UlanBatori
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14045
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by UlanBatori »

Trump surpassed himself with his BENIS-quality "satisfaction" criterion:
Eeph *** couldn't keep her mard satisfied how she eei going 2 keep Amreeki beebal satisfied?
Probably become the leading Bumper Sticker of the 2016 campaign.
member_20292
BRF Oldie
Posts: 2059
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by member_20292 »

I wonder if its a good idea to have a clean shaven head with a goatee in the US these days? Too much skinhead look, or okay for a corporate guy??
UlanBatori
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14045
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by UlanBatori »

U absolutely gotta have a Fu Man Chu moustache to go with that.
KLP Dubey
BRFite
Posts: 1310
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by KLP Dubey »

svinayak wrote:
Trump: "I'm going to Putinize the US"
So it will be a choice between Putin and a Pinko regime. Not much to cheer about for the locals here in the US. The Pinko scenario is vastly more likely. It looks like Billary will finally realize their dream of being the first husband-wife pair to have filled this job opening.
habal
BRF Oldie
Posts: 6919
Joined: 24 Dec 2009 18:46

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by habal »

this is from some site called conspiracyarchive so not posting a link.

William Barr (Attorney General of the United States and former CIA) told Bill Clinton in a bunker in Arkansas that: “you are our fair-haired boy, but you do have competition for the job you seek. We would never put all our eggs in one basket. You and your state have been our greatest asset.... Mr. William Casey (CIA director) wanted me to pass on to you, that unless you ****** up and do something stupid, you are number one on our short list for shot at the job you always wanted."

In similar streak Obama (Barry Soetoro) also outed as a CIA creation.

http://www.infowars.com/bombshell-barac ... -creation/
President Obama’s own work in 1983 for Business International Corporation, a CIA front that conducted seminars with the world’s most powerful leaders and used journalists as agents abroad, dovetails with CIA espionage activities conducted by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960s post-coup Indonesia on behalf of a number of CIA front operations, including the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Ford Foundation. Dunham met and married Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather, at the East-West Center in 1965. Soetoro was recalled to Indonesia in 1965 to serve as a senior army officer and assist General Suharto and the CIA in the bloody overthrow of President Sukarno.
there are other records from multiple sources that say that Obama was being mentored to be future President from 79 to 82 along with 10 others in some closed private college off California

George H.W. Bush (2 time president and father of Dubya) was a CIA Director himself.

All in all USA seems like a tightly run ship with a closed coterie at top who select & train initiates as public faces periodically. There is tremendous micromanagement that is happening here and presumably not a step is taken without validation from the powers that operate behind curtain.
UlanBatori
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14045
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by UlanBatori »

2 anticipate: :mrgreen:
You don't thunk The Company would put any ol' stupid potatoe in the job of POTUS, would you?
Happy New Year
habal
BRF Oldie
Posts: 6919
Joined: 24 Dec 2009 18:46

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by habal »

but 'training' started in 1979. Fruition came in 2009. Now that is some advance planning.
what would Indian equivalent be ? like IB is preparing candidates for PM post 30 yrs before candidate is announced.
also these people are not independent, all kind of incriminating records are collected on them in such a long period of gestation if they get brain attack or righteous fervor and go 'out of line'.
USSR & East. Germany seem like a freedom paradise in comparison to this.
deejay
Forum Moderator
Posts: 4024
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by deejay »

Should this go here or on the positive news thread:
The Oregonian ‏@Oregonian now5 hours ago
UPDATE: Militia takes over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters near Burns, Oregon http://ORne.ws/1PEnyUb
The Oregonian ‏@Oregonian now1 hour ago
Updated with statement from sheriff: Militia takes over Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters http://ORne.ws/1mrhQfj
Ian Kullgren ‏@IanKullgren now1 hour ago
Bundy said feds' actions are violation of constitution. Founding fathers were ready to die, and so are they. #OregonUnderAttack
Is the start of the Pink Revlution in US? Who is funding this? Are these forces like ISIS or they like the moderate terrorists? Is this America's Syria moment?

(Just saying :) )
Satya_anveshi
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3532
Joined: 08 Jan 2007 02:37

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Satya_anveshi »

don't know if this should go in positive news or understanding thread:

Armed militia, incl. Bundy bros, occupy forest reserve HQ in Oregon, call ‘US patriots’ to arms - Jan 03, 2016
https://www.rt.com/usa/327762-armed-bun ... -ranchers/
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s three sons and “about 150” militiamen have occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge HQ to protest the pending imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers accused of arson, arguing the federal government has no authority in local cases.

“We’re going to be freeing these lands up, and getting ranchers back to ranching, getting the loggers back to logging, getting the miners back to mining where they could do it under the protection of the people and not be afraid of this tyranny that’s been set upon them,” Ammon Bundy, who appears to be the leader of the group, said in a Facebook video posted by Sarah Dee Spurlock on Saturday.
Satya_anveshi
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3532
Joined: 08 Jan 2007 02:37

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Satya_anveshi »

NATO: Seeking Russia’s Destruction Since 1949 - by Gary Leupp (on counterpunch.org)

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, U.S. president George H. W. Bush through his secretary of state James Baker promised Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev that in exchange for Soviet cooperation on German reunification, the Cold War era NATO alliance would not expand “one inch” eastwards towards Russia. Baker told Gorbachev: “Look, if you remove your [300,000] troops [from east Germany] and allow unification of Germany in NATO, NATO will not expand one inch to the east.”

In the following year, the USSR officially dissolved itself. Its own defensive military alliance (commonly known as the Warsaw Pact) had already shut down. The Cold War was over.

So why hasn’t NATO also dissolved, but instead expanded relentlessly, surrounding European Russia? Why isn’t this a central question for discussion and debate in this country?

NATO: A Cold War Anti-Russian Alliance

Some challenge the claim that Bush’s pledge was ever given, although Baker repeated it publicly in Russia. Or they argue that it was never put in writing, hence legally inconsequential. Or they argue that any promise made to the leadership of the Soviet Union, which went out of existence in 1991, is inapplicable to subsequent U.S.-Russian relations. But it’s clear that the U.S. has, to the consternation of the Russian leadership, sustained a posture of confrontation with its Cold War foe principally taking the form of NATO expansion. This expansion hardly receives comment in the U.S. mass media, which treats the entry of a new nation into NATO much as it does the admission of a new state into the UN—as though this was altogether natural and unproblematic.

But recall the basic history. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in April 4, 1949, initially consisting of the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Portugal, as a military alliance against the Soviet Union, and principally the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

It was formed just four years after the Soviets stormed Berlin, defeating the Nazis. (As you know, Germany invaded Russia six months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor; the U.S. and USSR were World War II allies versus the fascists; the key victories in the European war—Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk—were Soviet victories over the Nazis; that U.S. soldiers only crossed the Rhine on March 22 as the Red Army was closing in on Berlin, taking the city between April 16 and May 2 at a cost of some 80,000 Soviet dead. If you don’t know these things, you’ve been denied a proper education.)

In the four-year interim between Hitler’s suicide and the formation of NATO, the two great victors of the war had divided Europe into spheres of influence. The neighboring Soviet Union had contributed disproportionately to the fascist defeat: over eight million military and over 12 million civilians dead, as compared to the far-off U.S., with losses of around 186,000 dead in the European theater and 106,000 in the Pacific.

It might seem strange that the lesser hero in this instance (in this epochal conflict against fascism) gets all the goodies in the battle’s aftermath: the U.S. created a bloc including Britain, France, Italy, most of Germany, the Low Countries, Portugal, and most of Scandinavia, while the Soviets asserted hegemony—or tried to—over their generally less affluent client states. But the Soviets were not in any case interested primarily in drawing the richest nations into their fold; were that the case, they would not have withdrawn their troops from Austria in 1955.

Rather Russia, which had historically been invaded many times from the west—from Sweden, Lithuania, Poland, France, and Germany multiple times—wanted preeminently to secure its western border. To insure the establishment of friendly regimes, it organized elections in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and elsewhere. (These had approximately as much legitimacy as elections held under U.S. occupation in Iraq or Afghanistan in later years, or at any point in Latin America). They brought the Eastern European “people’s republics” into existence.

The U.S. and British grumbled about the geopolitical advances of their wartime ally. In March 1946 former British Prime Minister Churchill while visiting the U.S. alluded to an “iron curtain” falling across Europe. (Perhaps he was unwittingly using the expression that Josef Goebbels had used just thirteen months earlier. The German propaganda minister had told a newspaper that “if the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets…would occupy all of Europe…An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory…”) Very scary.

But the U.S. was working hard at the time to consolidate its own bloc in Europe. In May 1947 the U.S. CIA forced the Italian and French governments to purge Communist members of cabinets formed after electoral successes the previous year. (The U.S. had enormous clout, bought through the $ 13 billion Marshall Plan begun in April 1947, designed to revive European capitalism and diminish the Marxist appeal.)

The CIA station chief in Rome later boasted that “without the CIA,” which funded a Red Scare campaign and fomented violent, even fatal clashes at events, “the Communist Party would surely have won the [Italian] elections in 1948.” (Anyone who thinks Soviets rigged elections while the U.S. facilitated fair ones as a matter of principle is hopelessly naïve.)

Meanwhile—before the establishment of NATO in April 1949—the U.S. and Britain had been fighting a war in Greece since 1946 on behalf of the monarchists against the communist-led forces that had been the backbone of the anti-fascist movement during the World War II. The Communists had widespread support and may well have won the civil war if the Soviets had only supported them. But observing the understanding about spheres of influence agreed to at Yalta and Potsdam, Stalin refused appeals for Soviet aid from the Greek (and Yugoslav) Communists. The Greek partisans surrendered in Oct. 1949, six months after the formation of NATO. (But NATO was in fact not deployed in this military intervention in Greece, seen as the first Cold War U.S. military operation under the broadly anticommunist “Truman Doctrine.”)

Just a month after NATO was formed, the pro-U.S. leaders in west Germany unilaterally announced the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany. (The pro-Soviet German Democratic Republic was declared only six months later. As in Korea, the Soviets promoted reunification of occupied sectors. But the U.S. was intent on establishing client states, and dividing nations if necessary to stem Soviet inroads. This was also the case with Vietnam.)

Four months after the creation of NATO the Soviets conducted their first successful nuclear test. The Cold War was underway in earnest.

NATO was thus formed to aggressively confront the USSR and exploit fears of a supposed threat of a westward Soviet strike (to impose the Soviet social system on unwilling peoples). That threat never materialized, of course. The Soviets cordoned off East Berlin from the west by the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent embarrassing mass flight. But they never invaded West Germany, or provoked any clash with a NATO nation throughout the Cold War. (Indeed, in light of the carnage visited on Europe since 1989, from civil wars in the Balkans and Caucasus to terrorist bombings in London, Madrid and Paris to the neo-fascist-led putsch in Ukraine last year, the Cold War appears in retrospect as a long period of relative peace and prosperity on the continent.)

Comparing U.S. and Russian/Soviet Aggression during the Cold War

NATO expanded in 1952, enlisting the now-pacified Greece and its historical rival, Turkey. In 1955 it brought the Federal Republic of Germany into the fold. Only then—in May 1956, seven years after the formation of NATO—did the Soviets establish, in response, their own defensive military alliance. The Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Mutual Assistance (Warsaw Pact) included a mere eight nations (to NATO’s 15): the USSR, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Albania.

Warsaw Pact forces were deployed only once during the Cold War, to crush the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968. (They were not used during the suppression of the “Hungarian Revolution” of 1956, occurring five months after the founding of the alliance. That operation was performed by Soviet troops and loyalist Hungarian forces.) The Czechoslovakian intervention occasioned Albania’s withdrawal from the pact, while Romania protested it and refused to contribute troops. Thus practically speaking, the Warsaw Pact was down to six members to NATO’s 15. The western alliance expanded to 16 when Spain joined in 1982.

Between 1945 and 1991 (when the Warsaw Pact and the USSR both dissolved themselves), the U.S. had engaged in three major wars (in Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf); invaded Grenada and Panama; and intervened militarily in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Haiti and other countries.

During that same period, the Soviets invaded eastern European nations twice (Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968), basically to maintain the status quo. Elsewhere, there was a brief border conflict with China in 1969 that killed around 150 soldiers on both sides. And the Soviets of course invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to shore up the secular regime faced with Islamist opposition. That’s about it. Actually, if you compare it to the U.S. record, a pretty paltry record of aggression for a superpower.

That Islamist opposition in Afghanistan, as we know, morphed into the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the group founded in Iraq by one-time bin Laden rival Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that’s now called ISIL or the Islamic State. Referred to—almost affectionately—by the U.S. press in the 1980s as the “Mujahadeen” (“those engaged in jihad”), these religious militants were lionized at the time as anti-communist holy warriors by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Brzezinski told the president six months before the Soviets sent in troops that by backing the jihadis the U.S. could “induce a Soviet military intervention.” The U.S., he declared, had “the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War” and could now “bleed” the Soviets as they had bled the U.S. in Vietnam.

(Linger for a moment on the morality here. The Soviets had helped the Vietnamese fight an unpopular, U.S.-backed regime and confront the horrors of the U.S. assault on their country. Now—to get back, as Brzezinski out it—the U.S. could help extreme Islamists whose minds are in the Middle Ages to “induce” Soviet intervention, so as to kill conscript Soviet boys and prevent the advent of modernity.)

The anti-Soviet jihadis were welcomed to the White House by President Ronald Reagan during a visit in 1985. Reagan, perhaps already showing the signs of Alzheimer’s disease, trumpeted them as “the moral equivaent of America’s founding fathers.” This is when the great bulk of U.S. (CIA) aid to the Mujahadeen was going into the coffers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a vicious warlord now aligned with the Taliban. One of many former U.S. assets (Saddam Hussein included) who had a falling-out with the boss, he was the target of at least one failed CIA drone strike in 2002.

Thus the Soviets’ one and only protracted military conflict during the Cold War, lasting from December 1979 to February 1989 and costing some 14,000 Soviet lives, was a conflict with what U.S. pundits have taken to calling “Islamist terrorism.”

The Soviets were surely not facing anticommunists pining for “freedom” as this might be conceptualized in some modern ideology. The enemy included tribal leaders and clerics who objected to any changes in the status of girls and women, in particular their dress, and submission to patriarchal authority in such matters as marriage.

The would-be Soviet-backed revolutionaries faced religious fanatics ignorant about women’s medical needs, hostile to the very idea of public clinics, and opposed to women’s education, (In fact the Soviets were able to raise the literacy rate for women during the 1980s—a feat not matched by the new occupiers since 2001—but this was mainly due to the fact that they maintained control over Kabul, where women could not only get schooling but walk around without a headscarf.)

Those days ended when the Soviet-installed regime of Mohammad Najibullah was toppled by Northern Alliance forces in April 1992. Things only became worse. Civil war between the Pastun Hekmatyar and his Tajik rivals immediately broke out and Hekmatyar’s forces brutally bombarded the capital—something that hadn’t happened during the worst days of the Soviet period.

As civil war deepened, the Taliban emerged, presenting itself as a morally upright, Sharia-based leadership. Acquiring a large social base, it took Kabul in September 1996. Among its first acts was to seize Najibullah, who had taken refuge in the UN compound in the city three years earlier, castrate him, and hang him publicly, denying him a proper Muslim burial.

Just as the neocons were crowing about the triumph of capitalism over communism, and the supposed “end of history,” the Frankenstein’s monster of Islamism reared up its ugly head. There were no tears shed in western capitals for Najibullah. But the Taliban were viewed with concern and distaste and the UN seat remained with the former Northern Alliance regime controlling just 10% of the country.

How the Cold War Encouraged “Radical Islam”

Surely the U.S.—which had packed up and left after the Soviet withdrawl, leaving the Pakistanis with a massive refugee problem and Afghanistan in a state of chaos—had bled the Soviets, and anyone daring to ally with them. And surely this experience contributed to the realization of Brzezinski’s fondest wish: the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But it also produced Islamist terrorism, big time, while the U.S.—having once organized the recruitment and training of legions of jihadis from throughout the Muslim world to bleed the Soviets—was and is now obliged to deal with blow-back, and in its responses invariably invites more terror.

Is it not obvious that U.S. military actions against its various “terrorist” targets in the “Greater” Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya have greatly swelled the ranks of al-Qaeda branches as well as ISIL?

And does not the course of events in Afghanistan—where the Kabul government remains paralyzed and inept, warlords govern the provincial cities, the Supreme Court sentences people to death for religious offenses, much of the countryside has been conceded to the Talibs and the militants are making inroads in the north—convince you that the U.S. should not have thrown in its lot with the jihadis versus the Soviet-backed secular forces thirty-five years ago?

In a 1998 interview by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn Brzezinski was asked if he regretted “having given arms and advice to future [Islamist] terrorists.”

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn’t a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

In other words, winning the contest with Russia—bleeding it to collapse—was more important than any risk of promoting militant Islamic fundamentalism. It is apparent that that mentality lingers, when, even in the post-9/11 world, some State Department officials would rather see Damascus fall to ISIL than be defended by Russians in support of a secular regime.

NATO to the Rescue in the Post-Cold War World

Since the fall of the USSR, and the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, what has NATO been up to? First of all, it moved to fill a power vacuum in the Balkans. Yugoslavia was falling apart. It had been neutral throughout the Cold War, a member of neither NATO nor the Warsaw Pact. As governments fell throughout Eastern Europe, secessionist movements in the multiethnic republic produced widespread conflict. U.S. Secretary of State Baker worried that the breakup of Yugoslavia’s breakup would produce regional instability and opposed the independence of Slovenia.

But the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl—flushed with pride at Germany’s reunification and intent on playing a more powerful role in the world—pressed for Yugoslavia’s dismantling. (There was a deep German historical interest in this country. Nazi Germany had occupied Slovenia from 1941 to 1945, establishing a 21,000-strong Slovene Home Guard and planting businesses. Germany is now by far Slovenia’s number one trading partner.) Kohl’s line won out.

Yugoslavia, which had been a model of interethnic harmony, became torn by ethnic strife in the 1990s. In Croatia, Croatians fought ethnic Serbs backed by the Yugoslav People’s Army; in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs quarreled over how to divide the land. In Serbia itself, the withdrawal of autonomy of the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina produced outrage among ethnic Albanians. In 1995 images of emaciated Bosniak men and boys in Serb-constructed prison camps were widely publicized in the world media as Bill Clinton resolved not to let Rwanda (read: genocide!) happen again. Not on his watch. America would save the day.

Or rather: NATO would save the day! Far from being less relevant after the Cold War, NATO, Clinton claimed, was the onlyinternational force capable of handling this kind of challenge. And thus NATO bombed, and bombed—for the first time ever, in real war—until the Bosnian Serbs pleaded for mercy. The present configuration of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a dysfunctional federation including a Serbian mini-republic, was dictated by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and his deputy Richard Holbrooke at the meeting in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995.

Russia, the traditional ally of the Serbs, was obliged to watch passively as the U.S. and NATO remapped the former Yugoslavia. Russia was itself in the 1990s, under the drunken buffoon Boris Yeltsin, a total mess. The economy was nose-diving; despair prevailed; male longevity had plummeted. The new polity was anything but stable. During the “Constitutional Crisis” of September-October 1993, the president had even ordered the army to bombard the parliament building to force the legislators to heed his decree to disband. In the grip of corrupt oligarchs and Wild West capitalism, Russians were disillusioned and demoralized.

Then came further insults from the west. During Yeltsin’s last year, in March 1999, the U.S. welcomed three more nations into: Czechoslovakia (later the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, and Poland. These had been the most powerful Warsaw Pact countries aside from the USSR and East Germany. This was the first expansion of NATO since 1982 (when Spain had joined) and understandably upset the Kremlin. What possible reason is there to expand NATO now? the Russians asked, only to be assured that NATO was not against anybody.

The Senate had voted to extend membership to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1998. At that time, George Kennan—the famous U.S. diplomat who’d developed the cold war strategy of containment of the Soviet Union—was asked to comment.

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” averred the 94-year-old Kennan. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever… It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expansion advocates] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are–but this is just wrong.”

NATO Versus Serbia

In that same month of March 1999, NATO (including its three new members) began bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade, the first time since World War II that a European capital was subjected to bombardment. The official reason was that Serbian state forces had been abusing the Albanians of Kosovo province; diplomacy had failed; and NATO intervention was needed to put things right. This rationale was accompanied by grossly exaggerated reports of Serbian security forces’ killings of Kosovars, supposedly amounting to “genocide.”

This was largely nonsense. The U.S. had demanded at the conference in Rambouillet, France, that Serbia withdraw its forces from Kosovo and restore autonomy to the province. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic had agreed. But the U.S. also demanded that Belgrade accept NATO forces throughout the entire territory of Yugoslavia—something no leader of a sovereign state could accept. Belgrade refused, backed by Russia.

A “senior State Department official” (likely U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) boasted to reporters that at Rambouillet “we intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. . . . The Serbs needed a little bombing to see reason.”Henry Kissinger (no peacenik) told the press in June: “The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, and excuse to start bombing. Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.”

The U.S. had obtained UN approval for the NATO strikes on Bosnia-Herzegovina four years before. But it did not seek it this time, or try to organize a UN force to address the Kosovo problem. In effect, it insisted that NATO be recognized as the representative of “the international community.”

It was outrageous. Still, U.S. public opinion was largely persuaded that the Serbs had failed to negotiate peace in good faith and so deserved the bombing cheered on by the press, in particular CNN’s “senior international correspondent,” Christiane Amanpour, a State Department insider who kept telling her viewers, “Milosevic continues to thumb his nose at the international community”—because he’d refused a bullying NATO ultimatum that even Kissinger identified as a provocation!

After the mass slaughter of Kosovars became a reality (as NATO bombs began to fall on Kosovo), and after two and a half months of bombing focused on Belgrade, a Russian-brokered deal ended the fighting. Belgrade was able to avoid the NATO occupation that it had earlier refused. (In other words, NATO had achieved nothing that the Serbs hadn’t already conceded in Rambouillet!)

As the ceasefire went into effect on June 21, a column of about 30 armored vehicles carrying 250 Russian troops moved from peacekeeping duties in Bosnia to establish control over Kosovo’s Pristina Airport. (Just a little reminder that Russia, too, had a role to play in the region.)

This took U.S. NATO commander Wesley Clark by surprise. He ordered that British and French paratroopers be flown in to seize the airport but the British General Sir Mike Jackson wisely balked. “I’m not going to have my soldiers start World War III,” he declared.

I think it likely this dramatic last minute gesture at the airport was urged by the up-and-coming Vladimir Putin, a Yeltsin advisor soon to be appointed vice-president and then Yeltsin’s successor beginning in December 1999. Putin was to prove a much more strident foe of NATO expansion than his embarrassing predecessor.

Cooperation Meets with Provocation

Still, recall how two years later—after 9/11, 2001, when the U.S. invoking the NATO charter called upon its NATO allies to engage in war in Afghanistan—Putin offered to allow the alliance to transport war material to Afghanistan through Russian territory. (In 2012 Foreign Minister Lavrov offered NATO the use of a base in Ulyanovsk to transport equipment out of Afghanistan.) This Afghan invasion was only the third actual deployment of NATO forces in war, after Bosnia and Serbia, and Moscow accepted it matter-of-factly. It even muted its concerns when the U.S. established military bases in the former Soviet Central Republics of Uzbekistan and Kirghizia.

But in 2004, NATO expanded again—to include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which had been part of the USSR itself and which border Russia. At the same time Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia were admitted, along with Slovakia, which had become separate from the Czech Republic. Russians again asked, “Why?”

In 2007 the U.S. began negotiating with the Poles to install a NATO missile defense complex in Poland, with a radar system in the Czech Republic. Supposedly this was to shoot down any Iranian missiles directed towards Europe in the future! But Moscow was furious, accusing the U.S. of wanting to launch another arms race. Due largely to anti-militarist sentiment among the Poles and Czechs, these plans were shelved in 2009. But they could be revived at any time.

In 2008, then, the U.S. recognized its dependency Kosovo, now hosting the largest U.S. Army base (Camp Bondsteel) outside the U.S., as an independent country. Although the U.S. had insisted up to this point that it recognized Kosovo as a province of Serbia (and perhaps even understood its profound significance as the heartland of Serbian Orthodoxy), it now (through Condoleezza Rice) proclaimed Kosovo a “sui generis” (one of a kind) phenomenon. So forget about international law; it just doesn’t apply.

In this same year of 2008, NATO announced boldly that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO.” ThereuponGeorgia’s comical President Mikheil Saakasvili bombarded Tskhinvali, capital of the self-declared Republic of South Ossetia that had resisted integration into the current Republic of Georgia since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this instance Russia defended South Ossetia, invading Georgia. It then recognized the independence, both of South Ossetia and of the Republic of Abkhazia, from Georgia. (This may be seen as a tit-for-tat response to the U.S.’s decision to recognize Kosovo’s independence from Serbia six months earlier.)

It was a six-day war, resulting in about 280 military fatalities (including 100 on the South Ossetian-Russian side) and about 400 civilian deaths. And there has been no Russian war since. Crimea was not “invaded” last year but simply seized by Russian forces in place, with general popular support. And there’s little evidence that the regular Russian military is confronting Ukrainian state forces; ethnic Russians are doing so, receiving no doubt support from cousins across the historically changeable border. But the charge of a “Russian invasion of Ukraine” is a State Department talking point—propaganda automatically parroted by the official press sock-puppet pundits, not a contemporary reality.

Georgia’s Saakasvili perhaps expected the U.S. to have his back as he provoked Moscow in August 2008. But while he received firm support from Sen. John McCain, who declared “We are all Georgians now,” he received little help from the George W. Bush State Department wary of provoking World War III. Georgia was not yet a NATO member able to cite the NATO charter’s mutual defense clause

Saakasvili left office in 2010 and is now under indictment by the Georgian courts for abuses in office. After a brief stint at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy in 2014, he acquired Ukrainian citizenship—losing his Georgian citizenship as a result—and (as one of many examples of how crazy the current Kiev leadership including Yatsenyev and Poroshenko can be) was appointed governor of Odessa last May!

Given the debacle of 2008, countries such as Germany are unlikely to accept Georgian admission any time soon. They do not see much benefit in provoking Russia by endlessly expanding the Cold War “defensive” alliance. Still, Croatia and Albania were added to NATO in 2009, in the first year of the Obama administration—just in time to participate in NATO’s fourth war, against Libya.

Again there was no reason for a war. Colonel Gadhafy had been downright cordial towards western regimes since 2003, and closely cooperated with the CIA against Islamist terrorism. But when the “Arab Spring” swept the region in 2011, some western leaders (headed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, but including the always hawkish Hillary Clinton) convinced themselves that Gadhafy’s fall was imminent, and so it would be best to assist the opposition in deposing him and thus get into the good graces of any successors.

The UN Security Council approved a resolution to establish a no-fly zone for the protection of civilians from Gadhafy’s supposedly genocidal troops. But what NATO unleashed was something quite different: a war on Gadhafy, which led to his brutal murder and to the horrible chaos that has reigned since in Libya, now a reliable base for al-Qaeda and ISIL. Russia and China both protested, as the war was still underway, that NATO had distorted the meaning of the UN resolution. It’s unlikely that the two Security Council permanent members will be fooled again into such cooperation.

We can therefore add the failed state of Libya to the dysfunctional states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, to our list of NATO achievements since 1991. To sum up: Since the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. and some allies (usually in their capacity as NATO allies) have waged war on Bosnian Serbs, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, while striking targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere with impunity. Russia has gone to war precisely once: for eight days in August 2008, against Georgia.

And yet every pundit on mainstream TV news tells you with a straight face that Putin’s the one who “invades countries.”

What Is the Point of NATO Expansion?

So while NATO has expanded in membership, it has showing a growing proclivity to go to war, from Central Asia to North Africa. One must wonder, what is the point?

The putative point in 1949 was the defense of “Western Europe” against some posited Soviet invasion. That rationale is still used; when NATO supporters today speak in favor of the inclusion of Lithuania, for example, they may state that, if Lithuania had remained outside the alliance—the Russians would surely have invaded by now on the pretext of defending ethnic Russians’ rights, etc.

There is in fact precious little evidence for Russian ambitions, or Putin’s own ambitions, to recreate the tsarist empire or Soviet Union. (Putin complained just a few days ago, “We don’t want the USSR back but no one believes us.” He’s also opined that people who feel no nostalgia for the Soviet Union—as most citizens of the former USSR young enough to remember it say they do—have no heart, while those who want to restore it have no brains.)

As NATO expanded inexorably between 1999 and 2009, Russia responded not with threats but with calm indignation.

Putin’s remarks about the dissolution of the Soviet Union being a “geopolitical tragedy,” and his occasional words addressing the language and other rights of Russians in former SSRs, do not constitute militarist threats. As always the neocons cherry-pick a phrase here and there as they try to depict Putin as (yet) “another Hitler.” In fact the Russians have, relatively speaking, been voices of reason in recent years, Alarmed at the consequences of U.S. actions in the Middle East, they have sought to restrain U.S. imperialism while challenging Islamist terrorism.

In August 2013 Obama threatened to attack Syria, ostensibly to punish the regime for using chemical weapons against its people. (The original accusation has been discredited by Seymour Hersh among others.) Deft intervention by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the refusal of the British House of Commons to support an attack (insuring it would not, like the Iraq War, win general NATO endorsement), and domestic opposition all helped avert another U.S. war in the Middle East.

But it’s as though hawks in the State Department, resentful at Russia’s success in protecting its Syrian ally from Gadhafy’s fate, and miffed at its continued ability to maintain air and naval facilities on the Syrian coast, were redoubling their efforts to provoke Russia. How better to do this than by interfering in Ukraine, which had not only been part of the Soviet Union but part of the Russian state from 1654 and indeed was the core of the original Kievan Rus in the tenth century?

NATO had been courting Ukraine since 1994—five years before the alliance expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Kiev signed the NATO Membership Action Plan in 2008 when Viktor Yushchenko was president, but this was placed on hold when Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010. Enjoying the solid support of the Russian-speaking east, Yanukovich won what international observers called a free and fair election.

Yanukovich did not want Ukraine to join NATO: he wanted a neutral Ukraine maintaining the traditional close relationship between the Ukraine and Russia. This infuriated Victoria Nuland, the head of the Eurasia desk at the State Department, who has made it her life’s project to pull Ukraine into NATO. This would be NATO’s ultimate prize in eastern Europe: a country of 44 million well-educated people, the size of France, strategically located on the Black Sea historically dominated by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. An ethnically divided country, with a generally pro-Russian and Russian-speaking east, and a more western-oriented Ukrainian-speaking west with an unusually vigorous and fiercely anti-Russian neofascist movement—just there waiting to be used.

Nuland, a former Cheney aide whose neocon worldview drew Hillary Clinton’s favorable attention, resulting in her promotion, is the wife of neocon pundit and Iraq War cheerleader Robert Kagan. (Kagan was a founding member of the notorious Project for a New American Century “think tank”.) The couple represents two wings of incessant neocon plotting: those who work to destroy Russia, and those who work to destroy the Middle East, consciously using lies to confuse the masses about their real goals.

At the National Press Club in December 2013, Nuland boasted that the U.S. (through such “NGOs” as the National Endowment for Democracy) had spent $ 5 billion in Ukraine in order to support Ukraine’s “European aspirations.” This deliberately vague formulation is supposed to refer to U.S. support for Kiev’s admission into the European Union. The case the U.S. built against Yanukovich was not that he rejected NATO membership; that is never mentioned at all. She built the case on Yanukovich’s supposed betrayal of his people’s pro-EU aspirations in having first initialed, and then rejected, an association agreement with the trading bloc, fearing it would mean a Greek-style austerity regime imposed on the country from without.

From November 2013 crowds gathered in Kiev’s Maidan to protest (among other things) Yanukovich’s change of heart about EU membership. The U.S. State Department embraced their cause. One might ask why, when the EU constitutes a competing trading bloc, the U.S. should be so interested in promoting any country’s membership in it. What difference does it make to you and me whether Ukraine has closer economic ties to Russia than to the EU?

The dirty little secret here is that the U.S. goal has merely been to use the cause of “joining Europe” to draw Ukraine into NATO, which could be depicted as the next natural step in Ukraine’s geopolitical realignment.

Building on popular contempt for Yanukovich for his corruption, but also working with politicians known to favor NATO admission and the expulsion of Russian naval forces from the Crimean base they’ve had since the 1780s, and also including neo-fascist forces who hate Russia but also loath the EU, Nuland and her team including the ubiquitous John McCain popped up at the Maidan passing out cookies and encouraging the crowd to bring down the president.

It worked, of course. On Feb. 22, within a day of signing a European-mediated agreement for government reforms and new election, and thinking the situation defused, Yanukovich was forced to flee for his life. The neofascist forces of Svoboda and the Right Sector served as storm troops toppling the regime. Nuland’s Machiavellian maneuverings had triumphed; a neocon Jew had cleverly deployed open anti-Semites to bring down a regime and plant a pro-NATO one in its place.

It seemed as though, after 14 years of expansion, NATO might soon be able to welcome a huge new member into its ranks, complete the encirclement of Russia and, booting out the Russian fleet, turn the Black Sea into a NATO lake.

Alas for the neocons and “liberal interventionists”—the new regime of Nuland’s chosen Arseniy Yatsenyuk and his Svoboda Party allies immediately alienated the eastern Russian-speaking population, which remains up in arms making the country ungovernable, even as its economy collapses; and the notion of expelling the Russians from Sevastopol has become unimaginable.

But what do NATO planners want? Where is all the expansion and reckless provocation heading?

Russia: an “Existential Threat”?

First of all, the NATO advocates, however often they repeat that “We’re not against Russia, this isn’t about Russia,” do indeed posit an enduring Russian threat. Thus General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, the most senior British officer in NATO, stated last February that Russia poses “an obvious existential threat to our whole being.” Gen. Joseph Votel, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command told the Aspen Security Forum in July that “Russia could pose an existential threat to the United States.”

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) warned Obama to sign a military appropriations bill because Russia poses “an existential threat” to the U.S. Philanthropist George Soros (who likes to finance “color revolutions”) wrote in the New York review of Books in October that “Europe is facing a challenge from Russia to its very existence.”

These are wild, stupid words coming from highly placed figures. Isn’t it obvious that Russia is the one being surrounded, pressured and threatened? That its military budget is a fraction of the U.S.’s, its global military presence miniscule in relation to the U.S. footprint?

But anyone watching the U.S. presidential candidates’ debates—and who can perceive the prevalence of paranoia about Russia, the unthinking acceptance of the “Putin as Hitler” theme, and the obligatory expression of determination to make America more “strong”—can understand why the expansion of NATO is so horribly dangerous.

People who do not think rationally or whose minds are twisted by arrogance can look at the maps of NATO expansion and think proudly, “This is how it should be! Why would anyone question the need for nations to protect themselves by allying with the United States? It’s alliances like NATO that preserve peace and stability in the world.”

(Some are able to believe that, perhaps, but the fact is the world has become less peaceful and far less stable than it was during the Cold War when the two superpowers checked one another’s moves. Thereafter the U.S. emerged as what a French diplomat has called an “hyper-puissance” or hyper-power intervening with impunity in multiple countries and producing new, often ugly forms of resistance.)

People looking at the NATO map of Europe can mentally color in Montenegro too. A tiny republic on the Adriatic with under 650,000 people, it was formally invited by NATO to submit its membership application on December 2. What other countries have yet to sign?

As mentioned, in 2008 NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would join. But their cases actually seem to be on hold. Belarus, wedged between Poland and Russia, has been under the self-styled “authoritarian” President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994. The regime, considered close to Moscow, was targeted by an abortive U.S.-funded “color revolution” in March 2006. The U.S. favored Mikhail Marynich, a former ambassador to Latvia and proponent of NATO membership. (He participated in a closed-door NATO “War and Peace” conference in Riga in November 2006.)

Then there is Moldova, the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic located between Rumania and Ukraine. To its east is the breakaway republic of

Transnitria, where ethnic Moldovans are a minority and Russians and Ukrainians make up almost 60% of the population. It is a “frozen conflict” zone. The neocon dream is to ultimately change all their regimes and draw them all into the warm embrace of NATO.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them

One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

in the Land or Mordor where the shadows lie

What do you do after you complete the western encirclement of Russia? Why, you destabilize the country itself, hoping to slice it up! Russia remains a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural nation. There are tensions and secessionist movements to exploit in the Caucasus particularly, but also on the Karelian Peninsula and in Siberia.

If Russia is an existential threat, its own existence is a threat, right? So why not cut it up?

Doesn’t the logic of NATO expansion require an enemy, and doesn’t America lead the world in defeating enemies?

Or if not, isn’t NATO itself the real threat? (After all, didn’t it, in its last major project, totally wreck the modern state of Libya, and as a result destabilize Mali?)

Shouldn’t we welcome tensions within NATO, and failures of member states to devote the required 2% of GDP to military expenses? Shouldn’t we welcome resistance to further expansion, complaints about U.S. arm-twisting, and calls for cooperation with Russia rather than confrontation and destruction?
deejay
Forum Moderator
Posts: 4024
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by deejay »

An interesting tweet on the Oregon militia
Eric Trautmann ‏@mercuryeric 13h13 hours ago
Just saw the idiots in Oregon referred to as "Vanilla Isis" and 2016 is already better than 2015.
Satya_anveshi
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3532
Joined: 08 Jan 2007 02:37

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Satya_anveshi »

President Obama cries during gun violence speech; but the same guy is supporting people who killed hundreds of thousands of people across the world (India, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine etc):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijFPMrptrwE


reminds me of AAP politician crying on TV on allegations that he provoked Gajendra Singh, a farmer who committed suicide and victim's daughter didn't even get a chance to speak a few words.

I know some people will find this parallel objectionable but such drama is usually played when they know they are going against significant mainstream and cannot make their case in legit ways almost insulting common sense of a common man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvK7QGmw25Y
KLP Dubey
BRFite
Posts: 1310
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by KLP Dubey »

Satya_anveshi wrote:President Obama cries during gun violence speech; but the same guy is supporting people who killed hundreds of thousands of people across the world (India, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine etc):
This guy, like many lawyers, is a supreme huckster (da real Shree 420). I am surprised he did not do this break-down trick during the many "obamayya vastavayya" moments of his visits to India.
ramana
Forum Moderator
Posts: 59773
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by ramana »

2/3 of the 30,000 gun deaths are suicides. So these people will find other ways.
Of the remaining 10,000 don't know how many are police shootings.

An interesting thing I heard is double Pareto relationship ~90% of all gun homicides are with guns sold by ~3-5% of the gun dealers.

So Obama would achieve more in cracking down on those gun dealers for having sold weapons used in homicides and be more effective than this weepy/teary act.

Arun_G need you to look into the stats of this issue.
Philip
BRF Oldie
Posts: 21538
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30
Location: India

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Philip »

The real reason why these assaults have spiked by 50% is because the US/Pentagon protects the offenders to the hilt. There is little respect for women in uniform amongst a majority of the military and sexual assaults against them are treated as "par for the course".

Sexual assault reports surge at three US military academies by more than 50%

Offical says the sharp increases over 2-14-15 school year were due largely to growing confidence in the reporting system and expanded awareness programs :rotfl:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... re-than-50
The US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where reports of sexual assaults over the last school year have spiked. Photograph: Kathleen Lange/AP

Associated Press
Friday 8 January 2016

Reports of sexual assaults at the three US military academies surged by more than 50% in the 2014-2015 school year, and complaints of sexual harassment also spiked, according to Pentagon officials.

A senior defense official said that the sharp increases were due largely to students’ growing confidence in the reporting system and expanded awareness programs that over the past several years have included training, videos and information sessions for both students and leaders. The programs have been aimed at making victims more aware of the reporting process and more comfortable seeking help.

But the dramatic increases raise questions about whether criminal assaults and harassment are on the rise or if the numbers actually reflect a growing willingness of victims to come forward.

“I think it’s appropriate for people to feel frustrated about hearing this in the news. Bottom line is that if this were an easy problem, we would have solved it years ago,” said Nate Galbreath, the senior executive adviser for the Pentagon’s sexual assault prevention office. “Unfortunately, this is a very hard problem to solve.”

According to the report documents reviewed by the AP, there were 91 reported sexual assaults over the last school year at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the US Air Force Academy in Colorado, compared to 59 during the 2013-2014 school year.

Reports of assaults went up at all three of the schools, but the number nearly doubled at the Air Force Academy, jumping from 25 to 49.

At the same time, the number of sexual harassment complaints spiked by 40%, to a total of 28 during the last school year. According to the documents, the most sexual harassment complaints were at the Naval Academy, with 13. There were seven at West Point and eight at the Air Force Academy.

Asked about the Air Force increases, officials said the decrease in assaults during the 2013-2014 school year may have been an anomaly, and the latest totals were closer to the norm in previous years. Air Force cadets, they said, also seem to be much more aware of the sexual assault prevention and response coordinators on campus and may be more willing to file reports.

The Air Force, however, has seen a number of public sexual assault scandals in recent years, including incidents involving members of academy sports teams.

Galbreath said a key recommendation this year is for the academies to put more emphasis on sexual harassment prevention and training, because often harassment leads to assault. Discussions with focus groups and other studies found that while students are very familiar with how to report sexual assaults and how to treat victims, they didn’t know as much about what makes up sexual harassment and what to do about it.

One problem is that sexual harassment is handled by the various military equal opportunity offices, while sexual assault issues are handled by the sexual assault prevention and response offices.

“That improved emphasis on sexual harassment will likely lead to prevention of sexual assault,” Galbreath said. “We are smarter now and we know that a lot of other factors are beginning to play into prevention work.”

He said that cadets and midshipmen need to be taught more about the connection between sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Senior Pentagon leaders have consistently argued for years that increased reporting is a good thing, because it suggests that victims are now more willing to come forward. Sexual assault in civilian and military society have historically been a vastly underreported crime because victims often fear reprisals or stigma, or they worry that they won’t be believed or don’t want to go through the emotional turmoil of a court case.

But officials acknowledged on Thursday that it is often difficult to tell how much of the increase in numbers stems from more crime or more reporting. *(That's closer to the truth!)
And keeping them company are their Brit mates in uniform!
Lieutenant-Colonel says British soldiers tortured Iraqis during war
Former senior military lawyer rejects assertion that ‘ambulance-chasers’ are bringing fraudulent claims against UK soldiers
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk
vishvak
BR Mainsite Crew
Posts: 5836
Joined: 12 Aug 2011 21:19

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by vishvak »

Discussion on documentory hunting ground on the net
link
Shreeman
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3762
Joined: 17 Jan 2007 15:31
Location: bositiveneuj.blogspot.com
Contact:

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Shreeman »

bad things, they happen EVERYWHERE -- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/10/po ... -park.html
TSJones
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3022
Joined: 14 Oct 1999 11:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by TSJones »

Shreeman wrote:bad things, they happen EVERYWHERE -- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/10/po ... -park.html
I think you are picking on our minorities by ignoring crimes committed by white people. You seem to be an enemy of diversity which is our strength. I must report you to the UN Commission on Human Rights.
UlanBatori
BRF Oldie
Posts: 14045
Joined: 11 Aug 2016 06:14

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by UlanBatori »

US is nearly as advanced as (never mind, can't think of anyone else advanced enough to do this)
the child's 27-year-old mother, Egypt Moneeck Robinson, faces a murder charge. He said "ritualistic sacrifice" is among the possible reasons the boy was killed. His body was found Dec. 29 behind their house near Panama City.

The News Herald of Panama City reports that the woman made statements while being taken to the hospital about needing to save the child from the end of the world.
Shreeman
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3762
Joined: 17 Jan 2007 15:31
Location: bositiveneuj.blogspot.com
Contact:

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Shreeman »

TSJones wrote:
Shreeman wrote:bad things, they happen EVERYWHERE -- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/01/10/po ... -park.html
I think you are picking on our minorities by ignoring crimes committed by white people. You seem to be an enemy of diversity which is our strength. I must report you to the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Dont do that TSJ, the Saudis WE installed there will probably add me to the list of the next 57 or 72 or whatever coconuts they roll every friday. And no one will even pretend to notice.

Seriously though, who is keeping score on this side of the pond? Newspapers building databases of fireworks, all the shootey stealey being too large for any one to blot in one edition.

May be there are more candles being lit, and it was always this dark. May be all those depleted heavy metals copiously dusted in the middle east have ingested by so many that we are reverting back to neanderthals. who knows.
TSJones
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3022
Joined: 14 Oct 1999 11:31

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by TSJones »

Shreeman wrote:
Dont do that TSJ, the Saudis WE installed there will probably add me to the list of the next 57 or 72 or whatever coconuts they roll every friday. And no one will even pretend to notice.

Seriously though, who is keeping score on this side of the pond? Newspapers building databases of fireworks, all the shootey stealey being too large for any one to blot in one edition.

May be there are more candles being lit, and it was always this dark. May be all those depleted heavy metals copiously dusted in the middle east have ingested by so many that we are reverting back to neanderthals. who knows.
you should not fear the saber of truth in the mosque parking lot.

it is there to cleanse and purify those who are corrupt on earth.

I could easily see such a concept gaining popularity at places like U. of Missouri, Yale and Princeton. Perhaps even in Montana where the chill wind blows against the evil majority culture (soon to be a minority culture and completely suppressed from living memory). And in the City of Merced which is receiving the blessings of El Nino where righteous pupils are shunned out of study groups..
Satya_anveshi
BRF Oldie
Posts: 3532
Joined: 08 Jan 2007 02:37

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by Satya_anveshi »

The Citadel is Breached: (US) Congress Taps the Fed for Infrastructure Funding by ELLEN BROWN on Counterpunch.org
For at least a decade, think tanks, commissions and other stakeholders have fought to get Congress to address the staggering backlog of maintenance, upkeep and improvements required to bring the nation’s infrastructure into the 21st century. Countries with less in the way of assets have overtaken the US in innovation and efficiency, while our dysfunctional Congress has battled endlessly over the fiscal cliff, tax reform, entitlement reform, and deficit reduction.

Both houses and both political parties agree that something must be done, but they have been unable to agree on where to find the funds. Republicans aren’t willing to raise taxes on the rich, and Democrats aren’t willing to cut social services for the poor.

In December 2015, however, a compromise was finally reached. On December 4, the last day the Department of Transportation was authorized to cut checks for highway and transit projects, President Obama signed a 1,300-page $305-billion transportation infrastructure bill that renewed existing highway and transit programs. According to America’s civil engineers, the sum was not nearly enough for all the work that needs to be done. But the bill was nevertheless considered a landmark achievement, because Congress has not been able to agree on how to fund a long-term highway and transit bill since 2005.

That was one of its landmark achievements. Less publicized was where Congress would get the money: largely from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street megabanks. The deal was summarized in a December 1st Bloomberg article titled “Highway Bill Compromise Would Take Money from US Banks”:

The highway measure would be financed in part by a one-time use of Federal Reserve surplus funds and by a reduction in the 6 percent dividend that national banks receive from the Fed. . . . Banks with $10 billion or less in assets would be exempt from the cut.

The Fed’s surplus capital comes from the 12 reserve banks. The highway bill would allow for a one-time draw of $19 billion from the surplus, which totaled $29.3 billion as of Nov. 25. . . .

Banks vigorously fought the dividend cut, which was estimated to generate about $17 billion over 10 years for the highway trust fund.

According to Zachary Warmbrodt, writing in Politico in November, the Fed registered “strong concerns about using the resources of the Federal Reserve to finance fiscal spending.” But former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who is now at the Brookings Institute, acknowledged in a blog post that the Fed could operate with little or no capital. His objection was that it is “not good optics or good precedent” to raid an independent central bank. It doesn’t look good.

Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), ranking member on the House Transportation Committee, retorted, “For the Federal Reserve to be saying this impinges upon their integrity, etc., etc. — you know, it’s absurd. This is a body that creates money out of nothing.”

DeFazio also said, “f the Fed can bail out the banks and give them preferred interest rates, they can do something for the greater economy and for average Americans. So it was their time to help out a little bit.”

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

It may be their time indeed. For over a century, populists and money reformers have petitioned Congress to solve its funding problems by exercising the sovereign power of government to issue money directly, through either the Federal Reserve or the Treasury.

In the 1860s, Abraham Lincoln issued debt-free US Notes or “greenbacks” to finance much of the Civil War, as well as the transcontinental railroad and the land-grant college system. In the 1890s, populists attempted unsuccessfully to revive this form of infrastructure funding. In the Great Depression, Congress authorized the issuance of several billion dollars of US Notes in the Thomas Amendment to the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act. In 1999, Illinois Rep. Ray LaHood introduced the State and Local Government Economic Empowerment Act (H. R. 1452), which would have authorized the US Treasury to issue interest-free loans of US Notes to state and local governments for infrastructure investment.

Law professor Timothy Canova plans to reintroduce this funding model if elected to represent Florida’s 23rd Congressional district, where he is now running against the controversial Debbie Wasserman Schultz, current chair of the Democratic National Convention. Prof. Canova wrote in a December 2012 article:

. . . Wall Street bankers and mainstream economists will argue that greenbacks and other such proposals would be inflationary, depreciate the dollar, tank the bond market, and bring an end to Western civilization. Yet, we’ve seen four years of the Federal Reserve—now on its third quantitative-easing program—experimenting with its own type of greenback program, creating new money out of thin air in the form of credits in Federal Reserve Notes to purchase trillions of dollars of bonds from big banks and hedge funds. While the value of the dollar has not collapsed and the bond market remains strong, neither have those newly created trillions trickled down to Main Street and the struggling middle classes. The most significant effect of the Fed’s programs has been to prop up banks, bond prices, and the stock market, with hardly any benefit to Main Street.

In a January 2015 op-ed in the UK Guardian titled “European Central Bank’s QE Is a Missed Opportunity,” Tony Pugh concurred, stating of the US and European QE programs:

Quantitative easing, as practised by the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve, merely flooded the financial sector with money to the benefit of bondholders. This did not create a so-called wealth affect, with a trickle-down to the real producing economy.

. . . If the EU were bold enough, it could fund infrastructure or renewables projects directly through the electronic creation of money, without having to borrow. Our government has that authority, but lacks the political will. The [Confederation of British Industry] has calculated that every £1 of such expenditure would increase GDP by £2.80 through the money multiplier. The Bank of England’s QE programme of £375bn was a wasted opportunity.

According to IMF director Christine Lagarde, writing in The Economist in November 2015:

IMF research shows that, in advanced economies, an increase in investment spending worth one percentage point of GDP raises the overall level of output by about 0.4% in the same year and by 1.5% four years after the spending increase.

In a December 2015 paper titled “Recovery in the Eurozone: Using Money Creation to Stimulate the Real Economy”, Frank van Lerven expanded on this research, writing:

For the Eurozone, statistical analysis of income and consumption patterns suggests that €100 billion of newly created money distributed to citizens would lead to an increase in GDP of around €232 billion. Using IMF fiscal multipliers, our empirical analysis further suggests that using the money to fund a €100 billion increase in public investment would reduce unemployment by approximately one million, and could be between 2.5 to 12 times more effective at stimulating GDP than current QE.

The Hyperinflation Myth

The invariable objection to exercising the government’s sovereign money-creating power is that it would lead to hyperinflation, but these figures belie that assumption. If adding €100 billion for infrastructure increases GDP by €232 billion, prices should actually go down rather than up, since the supply of goods and services (GDP) would have increased more than twice as fast as demand (money). Conventional theory says that prices go up when too much money is chasing too few goods, and in this case the reverse would be true.

In a November 2015 editorial, the Washington Post admonished Congress for blurring the line between fiscal and monetary policy, warning, “Many a banana republic . . . has come to grief using its central bank to facilitate government deficit spending.” But according to Prof. Michael Hudson, who has studied hyperinflations extensively, that is not why banana republics have gotten into trouble for “printing money.” He observes:

The reality is that nearly all hyperinflations stem from a collapse of foreign exchange as a result of having to pay debt service. That was what caused Germany’s hyperinflation in the 1920s, not domestic German spending. It is what caused the Argentinean and other Latin American hyperinflations in the 1980s, and Chile’s hyperinflation earlier.

Promising Possibilities

Any encroachment on the Fed’s turf is viewed by Wall Street and the mainstream media with alarm. But to people struggling with mounting bills and crumbling infrastructure, the development has promising potential. The portal to the central bank’s stream of riches has been forced open, if just a crack. The trickle could one day become a flow, a mighty river of liquidity powering the engines of productivity of a vibrant economy.

For that to happen, however, we need an enlightened citizenry and congressional leaders willing to take up the charge; and that is what makes Prof. Tim Canova’s run for Congress an exciting development.
habal
BRF Oldie
Posts: 6919
Joined: 24 Dec 2009 18:46

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by habal »

The 21st Century: An Era Of Fraud — Paul Craig Roberts

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/01 ... g-roberts/
In the last years of the 20th century fraud entered US foreign policy in a new way. On false pretenses Washington dismantled Yugoslavia and Serbia in order to advance an undeclared agenda. In the 21st century this fraud multiplied many times. Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya were destroyed, and Iran and Syria would also have been destroyed if the President of Russia had not prevented it. Washington is also behind the current destruction of Yemen, and Washington has enabled and financed the Israeli destruction of Palestine.
NRao
BRF Oldie
Posts: 19224
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30
Location: Illini Nation

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by NRao »

Talking of Super Delegates at the Democratic Party nominations, does anyone recall what happened in 2008?
ramana
Forum Moderator
Posts: 59773
Joined: 01 Jan 1970 05:30

Re: Understanding the US-2

Post by ramana »

The SD went with the people and voted in Obama.
Post Reply