I have temporarily escaped from Tom Biscardi's clutches in order to bring you this important link from Vcrisis.com, written by Pedro Camargo.
After weeks of planning, the activist political arms of Venezuelaâs Hugo Chavez, under the guise of the Bolivarian Revolutionary Party, staged an enormously destructive two province-wide oil production shut down. This was no mere tire burning event so often staged by protesters in Latin America. Rather the so-called protest was actually an orchestrated criminal assault on both government and privately owned property and assets in Ecuadorâs most vital petroleum producing region. It was no ideology-based protest for human or indigenous rights: it was engineered politically through the numerous groups, such as Ecuadorâs Movimiento Popular Democratico (MPD) party, to cause vast harm and is part of a planned destruction of property to squeeze Ecuador, which has scant margins for error, by cutting off its oil production and make it fall in to the arms of its seducer, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez that is. This is, of course, rank political extortion by destruction of oil production to financially force Ecuador into a binding geopolitical agreement with Chavez.
The government of Ecuador is called upon to demand immediate due diligence on every situation involving its own mineral rights and any government backed financial âdeal.â This includes any relationship with Chavez, including the so-called medical doctors on 'loan' (with barely a year of training); or the Ecuadoran oil-backed bond debt deal (to bail out private speculators whose bond holdings collapsed when Gutierrez failed to return); plus the refinery and oil purchases offered by Chavez (currently backed by an ever-changing, always mysteriously opaque verbal deal). Each must be examined with full transparency under Ecuadoran law.
Ecuador must also demand full disclosure of identities of agitators that took it to criminalize the productive oil areas: who paid them to be in the provinces, commandeering almost 1/10 of Ecuadorâs sovereign territory? To this must be added a demand for payment of restitution to the people of Ecuador for the property damages these `protestersâ inflicted. No one, even under the guise of thoughtful protesting, can render millions of dollars of property lost and assume that the hapless citizenry of Ecuador will cheerfully pick up the tab, leaving scarce resources for education, transportation, infrastructure and healthcare. In other words, the criminals who caused the millions of dollars in losses should repay the people of Ecuador and not leave taxpayers to cover what never should have taken place.
We suggest: send the bill for damages and lost revenues to the creator of the planned attacks: Hugo Chavez. American media reports that Ecuador will negotiate with these protesters cum criminals. With pro-Gutierrez rogue elements of the Ecuadoran military assisting this destabilizing auto da fe last week, it can be hoped that the military will at last cease its aversion to military compliance under law. We suggest that all who participated in last weekâs armed assaults on two provinces, complete with bombings, lootings, pipeline attacks and oil well destruction, will be happier residing in Cuba instead and should be deported. As if to avoid any responsibility for the enormously expensive criminal destruction of Ecuadorâs assets, Chavez announced on August 21, 2005 that he would provide all necessary replacement petroleum, ostensibly the oil lost (by his goons) last week, for Ecuador. No word yet on who supplied the dynamite, mortars and bullets that terrorized a significant portion of Ecuador⊠or why the attacks were permitted to escalate for so long.
Chavez needs a win to show off his successes, which to date amount to none at all. He wants fresh meat, so to speak. He wants a political gain and a financial gain. Ecuador would unwittingly give him both. With vast untapped natural gas fields and incredibly underperforming petroleum fields, Ecuador presents a land ripe for abuse and take over. Chavez, having drained Venezuelan resources to the breaking point by his on-going financial bailouts to Fidel Castro (which of course help no one in Cuba except the corrupt Castro-Chavez inner circle who are cheerfully profiteering from spot sales of the Chavez oil gifts to Cuba while Cubans suffer in the dark with no power at all). Chavez has made no small point regarding his interest in regaining the Panama Canal as well as squeezing Colombia into submission to his take over plans by surrounding Colombia and isolating Uribe with pro-FARC, anti-Plan Colombia state actors.
'Regaining' the Panama Canal? When did Panama ever belong to Venezuela?
While Chavez and Castro grant their corrupt cronies sole source dominion over oil transport, refineries, oil price rigging and election jiggering (to insure on-going price controls), his minions are busy cutting off- the- books oil deals. There is no legal structure remaining for Venezuelaâs state oil entity, PdVSA, which has morphed in to a rogue oil vendor and under-the-table oil price fixer for speculators and hedge fund operators. There's more at the link; read the whole thing. It's probably also a good idea to check out The Devil's Excrement from time to time. I have to run now, Biscardi's closing in again.
'Regaining' the Panama Canal? When did Panama ever belong to Venezuela?
Well, Panama used to belong to Columbia, which he'd like to own too... (although this was in the days before the canal). BTW, I thought I put this on page 3... yikes! A camcorder! run away! run away!
There they are again. You know who I am talking about. It's the same tie dyed freaky crowd who love to hate the USA. They have assembled at Crawford Tx to denounce the President, the war and do the foot work of the Democratic Party.
The same good ol' crowd that hate anyone who hunts for sport but have not a problem in the aborting of a fetus.
The same crowd that rally against exploration of oil within our country yet they themselves drive to their 'Peace Protests' in Suburus, Volvos, Land Rovers.
The same crowd who hate the US Military but seem to love the leftist guerrillas that live in the hills of South America.
Not suprisingly they failed to appear to protest against the enemy who attacked us after 9/11.
I could go on with the comparisons that expose 'their' hypocrisy but I would have to write forever to do so. The point I am striving to put forth has to do with the manipulation of Cindy Sheehan by the LEFT. Seems to this man that they [Lefties] do not have any problem taking advantage of Cindy Sheehan and using her to put forth their own sick agenda. That agenda is to bring down the USA and have us beholden to the World Order.
Hypothetically speaking, why aren't these people protesting against the terrorists who killed Ms. Sheehan's son? Exactly how did they turn this woman against this President? The President did meet with her not very long ago and she reported that he was a [gist of the report] fine man who understood what the parents of the fallen soldiers were going through.
This group, MoveOn.Org is the frontrunner for the Democratic Party and are fighting against the election of GW by using any opportunity to smear him. I assume that the ends justify the means and this group of scum have little compassion for Ms. Sheehan . They were able to turn her against this nation and her words spew hatred for this country and this President comparing us and him to the 'real terrorists'. Somehow she neglected to remember that Saadam murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people. That the Taliban executed women in Afghanistan. That the terrorists are routinely blowing up cars that in turn are killing innocent Iraquis.
But, are these her words or has she become a puppet for this propagandist group of fools? I think I'd bet on her being a useful idiot of the left. She is not alone. The mainstream media are also jumping with joy in reporting this. I guess they longed for the days of the Viet Nam War when they gave us the daily US body count and only reported the negatives.
However, this is a different time and a different war. The public has unlimited access to the news and also have the choice of reading and hearing other opinions that are not controlled by the left. But this time the Silent Majority will not be silenced and we will counter the left and their off the wall rhetoric by exposing the lies that they spew out.
Ms. Sheehan. Go home, revere the sacrifice your son made by not cheapening his death by allying yourself with the enemy.
#4
its different today because we're not saving the world from communism, we're spporting our growing addiction to having the Oil Co.'s convince us that we should drive BIG cars all the time and buy lots of their gas by God because God said it was OK in the Bible, honest, He did.
Posted by: bk ||
08/24/2005 11:18 Comments ||
Top||
#5
That's another thing the left is doing bk, trying to shift the motivation for this war to anything but fighting terrorism. In 4 hours on sept. 11, 2001 they killed what, 3,200 people because they caught us off guard. Now that we know what's up they kill 1,800 in 3 years. We didn't go to iraq for oil, or for conquest, or for any other perverted reason, we went to shut down the people and organizations that threaten the U.S. When will the left ever get it? If we leave iraq today they won't stop killing us, if we abandon israel they will not stop killing us. If we submit to a worldwide caliphate, they will not stop killing us. We are apostates, to be killed in their religion, the only way to keep them from killing us is to become wahabi hardline muslims.... or kill them. So which is it going to be? They don't just want us out of Iraq, that wont end it. So what now?
The press, especially in Europe, characterized Pope Benedictâs Saturday address to Muslim leaders in Germany, as blunt. By recent Vatican standards, it perhaps was; but by any worldly standards, or even those of the Papacy in, say, the 15th century, it was quite understated. One thinks of the remarks made by Pius II (the great humanist), shortly after ascending the throne of St. Peter, in 1458. In particular, the bull, in which he announced a new Crusade, to check the advance on Europe of ye Infidel Turk. Now, that was blunt.
The question today is whether we have achieved any advance in relations between Muslim East and (formerly) Christian West, in the intervening centuries. Have the Muslims given up on their project of conquering Europe, or the Christians on reconquering the territories they lost to the Arabs in the 7th century of our era?
It is always worth looking at things on an historical scale larger than the one that can be fit on a newspaperâs front page. One of the advantages of having a Pope, is that we can expect him to think not only of the moment, the way conventional power politicians must think. Though of course, he must also think of the moment, as Pope Benedict was undoubtedly doing in Germany -- a country which, when he left it some years ago for Rome, did not yet have 3.5 million Muslims living in it.
I found his speech an important development from his predecessor's remarks on "Christian-Islamic relations".
Most obviously, the implied "apology for the Crusades" has been rephrased. It now includes an accusation as well as a mea culpa. It politely reminds a Muslim reader that Christians were not alone in committing atrocities, in the Holy Land or anywhere, in past centuries. I think it tells the Catholic reader, as subtly, that we have done with making gratuitous apologies for distant historical events.
Trying to read it as if I were an intelligent and educated Muslim, I would note several things. First, that the Pope is well informed about Islam, and about its historical consciousness, yet rejects its central theses. But there are some very clever moments. When he speaks of the "new barbarism", for instance, he is using a phrase that will ring bells among Muslims, as a companionable allusion to the Mongol hordes who descended on mediaeval Baghdad.
Having listed attributes of God acknowledged in common by Christianity and Islam, he declares, "How many pages of history record battles and even wars that have been waged, with both sides invoking the name of God, as if fighting and killing the enemy could be pleasing to him." Since no one is unaware of Muslim teachings on Jihad, he is subtly asking, "What does this word mean to you today?"
His invocations of "the sacredness of every human life", of "the dignity of the person", of "the clear voice of conscience", push very Christian interpretations of ideas which are presented differently in Islam; yet he is sounding common themes. And again, there is an implied question: âDoes Islam today embrace the inestimable value of the individual, and therefore can it be a champion of individual freedom?â
The closest I find to real bluntness, is mildly worded towards the end of the short talk. Pope Benedict tells Muslim leaders they are responsible for the education of their children in peace, and specifically mentions the power of words in the education of the mind. The implication is, that not only Christians will pay, if a generation of Muslims is raised to hate their neighbours.
Is civilized dialogue possible? The Pope thinks so, and says so. But he implies that a genuine dialogue requires truth from both parties, not the concealment of what we really believe.
Now, if the reader will permit me to entertain a position held by Osama bin Laden, one of the catastrophes that afflicts the Muslim world today is the absence of a Caliph. This unfortunate state of affairs, from their view, was brought about when Kemal Ataturk, founder of secular modern Turkey, deposed the last universal, Sunni Islamic Caliph, who had ruled the Ottoman Empire both temporally and spiritually, in 1924. Osama and other Islamists demand the ârecreationâ of a single Muslim caliphate, âfrom Andalusia to the Philippinesâ. The geography is an aggressive aside, but let us consider his principal point.
The Pope serves, at least in Catholic theory, as the final living arbiter of Christian doctrine -- a court of last resort. Who speaks for Islam?
In the absence of such a living institution as the caliphate, this is unclear. There is, in the end, no one to whom the obedient Muslim may turn, to get a formal answer to such a question as, âWhat is meant by Jihad?â There is none, for instance, to declare, definitively, that âOsama does not speak for Islam; I do.â
Like a reverse King Midas, everything Mugabe touches is changed into waste.
The latest of his blunders is changing the constitution â yet again â so that the rightful owners of the farms he has stolen cannot challenge the confiscations in court.
In May, parliament announced that it was seeking another constitutional amendment: the abolishment of freehold land tenure, conveniently forgetting the fact that lack of land property deeds has been the bane of African agriculture both traditionally and under colonial rule, as land is not cared for, farmers cannot obtain loans from the banks for development, and cannot afford to improve the infrastructure.
His deadly touch is evident and abhorrent to the meanest intelligence, with the exception of those of his neighbours who might wish to imitate him sooner or later, and it has transformed a rich and self-sufficient country into a failed state.
Mugabeâs childish rants against âcolonial mastersâ, âimperialist puppetsâ and the like, do not impress anyone anymore; what was seen before as a political ploy (albeit naïve) is now correctly interpreted as the babbling of an old man, no more in control of his mind than of his bodily functions.
What is really puzzling though, is that amid the total collapse that Zimbabwe is experiencing, no one has emerged to forcibly take his place. Is he so entrenched, has he corrupted so many, does he put so much fear in his would-be successors?
The MDC is rattled by internal feuds and, despite its claims, does not seem to be able to mobilize enough people to make a difference. Moreover, they badly underestimated the painstaking measures ZANU PF took before the elections to make sure they would win.
Mugabe, in his rare moments of lucidity, must be looking for a way out. South Africaâs âloanâ, at long last, seems to have some teeth in it (despite Zimbabwe face-saving protestations, it will have some strings attached). Chinaâs support at the Security Council can be a consolation but not a substitute for the billion dollars requested, and the âprofessorshipâ bestowed on Mugabe by the Chinese is looking more and more like a not so subtle sign of oriental contempt.
One way out for Mugabe, perhaps the only one (short of suicide) at this point, is to provoke a crisis that would justify the introduction of martial law, immediately followed by a military coup (his support in exchange for protection). His recent promise to allocate stolen land to 6000 members of the armed forces hints at some kind of agreement.
Unfortunately, Zimbabwe armed forces do not have a Rawlings, and the cure (for ordinary Zimbabweans) could be worse than the sickness.
#2
What is really puzzling though, is that amid the total collapse that Zimbabwe is experiencing, no one has emerged to forcibly take his place. Is he so entrenched, has he corrupted so many, does he put so much fear in his would-be successors?
The MDC is essentially incompetent. What intelligentsia there is, is mentally incapable of fomenting revolution. The rest are either impotent amd hanging on hoping things will get better, or do-gooders who are more concerned about the 'unfortunates' and their present condition than in what caused it.
The mosque stood empty beside the road in a Christian town in Kenya. Funded by Saudis, it wasn't meant for worshippers. It was meant to stake a claim.
The mosque annoyed the locals. Windows were broken. A goat grazed in the garbage-speckled yard. Yet that shabby mosque was part of an extremist campaign that threatens widespread strife in the years ahead.
On a trip to Kenya and Tanzania last month, I saw recently built mosques wherever I went. Even along the predominantly Muslim coast, there were far more mosques and madrassahs than the worshippers needed. I counted seven mosques along one street in a Mombasa slum â most of them new but neglected.
The construction boom is part of what my personal observation convinces me is "the other jihad," the slow-roll attempt by fundamentalists from the Arabian Peninsula to reclaim East Africa for the faith of the Prophet. We dismiss Osama bin Laden's dream of re-establishing the caliphate, Islam's bygone empire, as madness. But Saudis, Yemenis, Omanis and oil-rich Gulf Arabs are every bit as determined as bin Laden to reassert Muslim domination of the lands Islam once ruled.
No region is as vulnerable as Africa. The differences between the Saudi ruling family and bin Laden aren't so much about goals as about methods. The Saudis were furious over the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam not because of the viciousness of the acts, but because the attacks threatened to call the West's attention to quiet subversion by fundamentalist Wahhabis in the region.
Lengthy ties
For the Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, ties to Africa's Indian Ocean coast go back more than a millennium. By the 14th century, trading cities such as Kilwa (now a ruin) and Mombasa were opulent outposts of Islam. One dream shared by the House of Saud and Islamist terrorists is the reclamation of the old Swahili Coast, where their ancestors grew rich trading ivory, gold and slaves.
Arabs still regard black Africans as inferior, fit only to be subjects. As a result, their charities don't fund clinics, universities or sanitation systems. They just keep on building mosques, staking graphic claims to a once and future empire of faith.
Even in the United States, Saudi-funded Quranic schools encourage religious apartheid. While events have forced their mullahs to tone down public hate-speech directed toward the West, Saudi madrassas never encourage young people to integrate into their host society. They praise rigid separation.
In East Africa, this takes the form of pressuring the young to devote themselves to studying the Quran. This prevents Muslims from getting a practical education. As a result, they remain unqualified for the best jobs, which are taken by Christians with university degrees, further exacerbating antagonism.
The Saudis and their accomplices know exactly what they're doing. They don't want a "separate but equal" system. Separate and unequal does the trick, creating a sense of deprivation, of being cheated, among Muslims and driving a wedge down the middle of fragile societies. The last thing the bigots of the Arabian Peninsula want to see would be prosperous, patriotic, well-integrated Muslim communities in Africa.
Nor is this slow-motion jihad confined to the coast. It takes still uglier forms in the interior. Saudi money and arms smuggled from Yemen keep tribal strife alive in northern Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia and, of course, Somalia.
During my stay in Kenya, nearly a hundred tribal people were massacred near the Ethiopian border. The religious undertone of the slaughter â which included the executions of schoolchildren â was played down. The Kenyan government fears a wider conflagration and quietly accepts its inability to control its northern borders. But extremist sentiment is growing, while Kenya's policy of benign neglect collapses.
No one has called the Saudis or their partners to account. This matters. Kenya and Tanzania have largely avoided the succession of tragedies that crippled Africa in the post-independence era. But the tension between Kenya's Christian majority and Muslim minority, or between Tanzania's roughly equal factions, never quite disappeared. Now, Arab money threatens to undermine the fragile unity of these struggling, yet hopeful states.
Religious freedom goes only so far. Building mosques and madrassas would be tolerable were their purpose not frankly subversive. A strong society such as our own can overcome such hate-based shenanigans. But the stakes could not be higher and the danger could not be greater for the struggling states of eastern Africa.
The violent jihad waged by those who hijacked Islam in the Middle East is our immediate challenge. Even so, terrorists from the Horn of Africa have already been implicated in the London subway bombings and other attacks. The time for engagement is now â not after widespread radicalization has destroyed the future for millions of Africans and drawn still more states into the maelstrom of terror.
#2
The real issue is that given the choice why wouldn't the Shia in Saudi Arabia try to join up in a Federal Iraq where they can be protected and get more of a share of their oil wealth. Why wouldn't the Kurds in Syria and Iran try to join up and live in a state that won't repress them.
A successful Federalism in Iraq threates to chip away all of her neighbors. The leaders of the neighboring country see this and thus have been reluctant to stop the insurgents from flowing from their territory into Iraq. In some cases they've actively helped those insurgents.
#5
It really cracks me up that virtually every major argument of the American constitution has come up again and again with other nations. And yet, several of their brilliant and innovative solutions that have worked for us for 200 years have been ignored. For example, a bicameral legislature with an upper house based on a federalized district, and a lower house based solely on population. This solved the great problem of small states vs large *and* more populous vs less populous. Iraq is mistakenly seen as broken into three basic parts, until you examine it as 18 federal states. Several of those states are "swing" states, ethnically, and could vacillate considerably over time, based on demographic changes. This puts pressure on a federal government to moderate its views to get support from these swing states.
Ironically, Kurdistan represents to the Iraqi Constitution what slavery did in the US Constitution. Their demands for protection of their independence is really a demand for confederation, not federalism. This means that the future holds one of two courses: either a complete integration of Kurdistan into a greater Iraqi union; or an eventual breakdown into two nations.
If Kurds continue with their push for ethnic separation and a de facto split from the economy and social structure of the rest of Iraq, eventually they will either have a civil war, or a wise Iraqi leader, like the Czech leader Havel, will let them go without a fight. Hopefully, he will choose the latter course.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
There they are again. You know who I am talking about. It's the same tie dyed freaky crowd who love to hate the USA. They have assembled at Crawford Tx to denounce the President, the war and do the foot work of the Democratic Party.
