Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Reply - By Richard Sale

I will be brief and be gone.

Someone who commented on my piece, basically said that while I condemned the vitriolic partisanship that refuses to accept President Obama’s election as a legitimate national decision, the hatred and loathing of President George W. Bush by his opponents was portrayed by liberals as normal patriotic dissent and given a pass from criticism.

    This misreads the article.

I took care to show that the disgraceful animosity of certain segments of the public against FDR came from the propertied classes, chiefly Republicans, but  I also took pains to snow the excoriation of our first president, George Washington,  took place at the hands of the Democrat-Republican group formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who loathed the Federalists with whom Washington was  in broad sympathy.

 

Moral Absolutes and Politics by Richard Sale

I have only just become aware of the depth of revulsion, hatred and suspicion that a certain segment of Americans feels for President Obama - a horde of passionate, committed (if not overly bright) people who are out there busily driving needles into wax Obama dolls, or who are eagerly driving stakes into the facsimile of his heart: Obama is a radical, he is a socialist, he will change America from a free market to a government-directed, centrally planned economy, he will destroy the American way of life. Worst and most ominous of all, he is not even an American citizen – this is a part of their liturgy.

What occasions this? One cause is a kind of conceit that says “My vision of the way the country should be run is the only sound and permissible vision. Stray from it and there will be unprecedented calamity.”

    That is one element.

 

Crippling Obama’s Counterinsurgency Strategy - Richard Sale

A critical component of Obama’s Afghan strategy – separating local Afghans from Taliban insurgents and then building social and economic programs that create local loyalty to the central government – is being nullified because of inadequate numbers of Afghan police who are illiterate, untrained and deserting in droves, congressional and other experts say.

Speaking of the current Marine assault into the southern province of Helmand, an administration official said: “Material support and strong and continuous aid are essential to our progress.” Adding, “The Taliban are counting on the United States and its allies to be unable to sustain a costly and interminable war.”

Analysis: Iran – Crowds and Power - Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, Middle East Times Intelligence Correspondent

What dictators like Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and Ayatollah Khomeini had in common was their grasp of the blunt truth that whoever controls the streets controls the government and the country. As students of mob dynamics the late Mr. Milosevic and the Ayatollah Khomeini had few equals.

    Khomeini knew the power of crowds from the 1979 revolution. As French sociologist Gustav LeBon noted, a member of a crowd descends to a very low degree of civilization. Like Milosevic, Khomeini was aware that crowds were inflammable, mindless, imbued with violent feeling but incapable of thought, acting with the elation and excitement of “blind men who are blindest when they suddenly think they can see,” as Adam LeBor, a Milosevic biographer so neatly said.

"Taliban strategy could threaten Pakistan’s nukes" Richard Sale

Administration officials see a sinister new shift in Taliban strategy in the latest attacks on Pakistani nuclear scientists and engineers, key players in developing Islamabad’s strategic weaponry.

One of Pakistan’s most dangerous terrorist groups, the Tehrik-e-Taliban, has claimed responsibility for a July 2 assault when Pakistani engineers and scientists in a bus traveling on the Rawalpindi-Peshawar Road were rammed by a lone suicide bomber on a motor bike, killing six and wounding 36 others, according to press accounts confirmed by U.S. officials.

Former U.S. intelligence officials believe the Tehrik-e-Taliban were also responsible for a May 27 attack on a Lahore police station and the local office of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, killing 15 police officers, one ISI lt. colonel and 10 other persons.

Other Tehrik-e-Taliban targets include the Kahuta Research Laboratories which built Pakistan’s nuclear bombs, weapons grade uranium and long-range missiles, along with the Army-run Mechanical Complex at Taxila, both built with Chinese assistance.

“The terrorists are sending a clear message: they can strike where they want, what they want, and when they want,” said an administration official.

Analysis: A Two-State Solution? - Richard Sale

In his 1989 book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Tom Friedman wrote that Israel’s far-right “will never be prepared, for ideological reasons, to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank or Gaza, explaining: “They are committed to holding forever the Land of Israel, out of either nationalist or messianic sentiments.”

     Friedman has been proved right, but the question of any desire by Zionists to share the Land of Israel with the Arabs stretches far back into the origins of the state. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, envisioned the Jewish settlement of Palestine as giving rise “a wondrous breed of Jews...The Maccabees will rise again,” and he  talked of the “displacement and transfer” of Palestine’s Arab population, albeit “with full financial compensation,” according to Israeli historian Benny Morris. “We must expropriate gently,” Herzl said.”Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor (Arabs) must be done discreetly and circumspectly.”

 

A New Kind of War 2 - Richard Sale

Experts: Kabul security build up faces huge odds

Even as the Pentagon released news of progress in the U.S. program to reform the Aghan National Police, that organization is responsible for a major crime wave afflicting the Afghan population, said South Asia experts and congressional sources.

     Even though the Taliban are unpopular, the Afghan people give them passive support because of the unpopular and corrupt government of President Hamid Karzai, these sources said.

     According to Brookings Institution analyst, Vanda Felba-Brown, what the ordinary Afghan population wants “is suppression of ordinary street crime and the rule of law” which the ANP currently renders impossible. Officially, the functions of the ANP are to man check points that monitor the movements of suspicious individuals, help identify IEDs and suicide bombers, and provide intelligence.

 

"A New Kind of War Part 1" Richard Sale

Escalating violence, an acceleration of targeted killings, and deniable attacks by U.S. Special Forces on Taliban strong holds in Pakistan will all be the major results of the administration’s U.S. latest change in command  in Afghanistan, according to senior Pentagon officials.

   The very public May 11 firing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, replaced by Special Forces expert, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, portends a much bloodier phase of the war, these sources said.

     “McChrystal is an expert killer. That’s what the teams he heads are good at,” said former senior DIA official Pat Lang.

     “The idea is to put out the eyes of the insurgency using force,” a Pentagon official said.

     McChrystal, who headed U.S. Special Operations forces during the famous troop surge  in Iraq in the late spring of  2007, used a whole new array of methods to detect, locate and kill insurgent leaders which many claim was key to the success of the operation.

 

Obama administration creates South Caucasus supply network - By Richard Sale

  As the United States prepares to boost its military presence in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is using all means to secure alternative routes to supply U.S. and NATO forces as the security situation continues to deteriorate in Pakistan, according to U.S. officials who asked that they not be named.

        So far Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan have all agreed to provide new supply routes to Afghanistan, all anxious to boost their international profiles, these sources said.

    Teresita Schaffer, director of the South Asia program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Times, “These new routes reflect a necessary fallback position since Pakistan is becoming more and more unstable. We relied on the Paks for seven years, but routes became more and more insecure.”

     Former CIA chief of Counterterrorism, Vince Cannistraro, described the Pakistan routes as “a mess” and “increasingly vulnerable.”

 

"Administration to begin jamming Taliban frequencies" Richard Sale

Download Administration to begin jamming Taliban frequencies