FNS invited the discraced neocon Wolfowitz to bloviate on US policy.

INGRAHAM: I think -- we have to look at the sense of upwards of $20 trillion in Iraq, right? We don't have a lot to show for it. We are stumbling still in Afghanistan.

American people -- I mean, we can talk about we should do this and we should do that -- and I understand that. I really do. But we have a country right now where people look around and say wait a second, why do we only seem to care about borders and sovereignty when they're other countries' border -- border and sovereignty? Why is it that we're obsessed about that but in our country, we have a middle class completely flat-lining, we have economic opportunity dwindling?

And I think it's a hard sell to the people spending money where we don't know where it's coming from in an economy that needs desperate help here.

So, these are the perils of military adventurism and previous decades. We're paying the price of that a little bit today.

I was a big supporter of the war in Iraq. And I understand there are a lot of complexities there. But the American people are looking and going, where is the bang for the buck? That's what they're running into, in the Democratic and Republican Parties.

(CROSSTALK)

WOLFOWITZ: You can't do this in the rearview mirror. The problem is --

INGRAHAM: You've got to learn from the past, Paul, right?

WOLFOWITZ: Yes, I know. But one of the things to learn from the past includes unfortunately the past of 1930s, is that if you don't deter this sort of moves early, when you can do it without military force, you end up in wars. And that's what we're trying to avoid here.

----------------------------

One of the obsessions of the neocon faith is the need to deter Nazi Germany.  I agree that this would have been a good idea, but Russia in this decade is not Nazi Germany anymore than Iraq was in the time of Wolfowitz criminal folly.  This man admitted that he lied about Iraq WMD as a matter of political convenience in propaganda aimed at the US citizenry.  He was also dismissed from his post as president of the World Bank for malfeasance.  pl

http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/fox-news-sunday-chris-wallace/2014/03/23/inside-search-flight-370-gov-john-kasich-reflects-ohios-economic-turnaround

Comments

[Thomas]

Nothing will stop their crusade To Serve Man. Damn humanity full speed ahead.

"U.S. Senator John McCain, a Republican foreign policy specialist, told the same BBC show that Putin's actions in Ukraine were akin to those of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany.

"I think he (Putin) is calculating how much he can get away with, just as Adolf Hitler calculated how much he could get away with in the 1930s," McCain said.
McCain criticized the international response and said he supported sending military equipment to Ukraine. He also said he considered Moldova and the Baltic nations, all former Soviet states with sizeable Russian populations, to be under threat"

http://news.msn.com/world/nato-commander-warns-of-russian-threat-to-separatist-moldova-region

[toto]

If things remain as they are, the neocons have already lost this one. The sanctions decided upon are clearly in the "symbolic" range (Well, not for the individuals involved of course, but who will cry over a few oligarchs?)

OTOH, if Putin invades East Ukraine or Transdniestria as the NATO brass seems to fear, Zeus help us.

[Karel Dolejsi]

I understand that You in the U.S. are primarily concerned with neocon and R2P witches crowd. But, sadly, even Russia isn`t rational actor anymore. Russians got people like Aleksandr Dugin, who is teacher of geopolitics in academy of general staff for about 15 years. And he is just mad neonacist. His youth "Eurasian" movement prepared partition of Ukraine for 10 years and now it is leading current destabilisation campaign in Donetsk. Dugin wants full-scale thermonuclear war over Ukraine. And he comments foreing policy in state-run TV and pro-Kremlin newspapers regularly.

[mac]

Colonel,

War criminals are not all alike. Some were uniforms, some three piece suits. Please pardon my rant, but in my humble opinion, PW is of the latter kind. Launching wars of aggression more than secures his place in the Hague.

Mac

[tv]

Americans have always traditionally leaned on the isolation side.
It was easy, given our geography and abundance of resources.
AND they like winners and don't have much use for losing.

Then come foreign "entanglements" - Vietnam, Iraq - where, after massive amounts of blood and treasure, we lose.
And for what?
The old dictum of "a Great Power can go where it wants and do what it wants when it gets there" has been dated for quite a while. It was valid before nuclear deterrents, stateless actors and asymmetric warfare.
What is our strategic interest in Ukraine?
You're right: Putin doesn't resemble Hitler.
He's a RUSSIAN who seems to want to re-create "Great Russia."
When Obama told Medvedev to "tell Vladimir I'll have more flexibility", Putin (correctly) took that as a sign of weakness.

[John Gavin]

I was in Afghanistan from summer of 2002 through Spring 2003 (the first of five vacations there). Late in fall 2002,we lost pretty much all of our air support as it was repositioned to invade Iraq. By early 2003, we understood that air support and MEDEVAC were probably always unavailable or the response time was so extended that whatever happened would be over long before they arrived.

Mr. Wolfowitz came to visit one day, and there was air cover stacked to 30,000 feet, just to protect him during his visit. AH-64s down low, A-10s above them, and contrails from fast movers all over the winter sky. After he left, so did the air cover.

Every time I hear his name, that is the first thing I think of...

[Matthew]

Col: McCain and the Neo-Cons love self-fulfilling prophesies. If Putin finally concludes that we do wish Russia harm, then why wouldn't Russia try to damage Europe now while it's economically vulnerable, rather than wait until Europe further weans itself off Russian gas?

[Will]

The Anglo-Russian alliance had its beginning against Napoleon. Later a French-Russian Alliance because Germany was too big for either to handle by itself. In WW1, Russia was quickly knocked out. In WW2, France was quickly knocked out. In both cases it took American power to break the stalemate.(Without all the American trucks and supplies, the Red Army would have been bogged down.)

What possible leverage could the Anglo-French used to deter the German eastward expansion, save an alliance with the Soviets which they rejected.

To correct McCain-it's not about "Russian Populations," but "Russian-Speaking" populations. It's not about blood but shared culture and language. It reminds me of the pan-Arab formulation of "Arab." Shared culture, language, and outlook- not necessarily religion nor blood.

[Alba Etie]

Mac
Clearly I am not an expert , nor attorney - but just common sense says that lying to the American public that led to the death of service members should be an indictable offense .

[rjj]

"One of the obsessions of the neocon faith is the need to deter Nazi Germany."

By means of Freikorps Nudelman?

[walrus]

I agree with Col. Lang; we are but One or Two steps from Armageddon. Any military response to Russia, including arming Ukraine, is fraught with danger as in my opinion, it will provoke an immediate Russian military response aimed at pre-emptiing training and deployment.

What concerns me now is that there will be people in Washington advising Obama to "finish the job" and go to war now, pre-empting the inevitable build up in Russian military capabilities (and perhaps Chinese) that the Ukraine adventure has no doubt stimulated.

This thinking would parallel not Hitlers activities, but the Germman thinking before world war One - that war with Russia was inevitable and that it would be better to have one sooner rather than later when Russias rail networks were more fully developed.

[MRW]

Wolfowitz should have been tried for treason. Period. And all those who caused the unnecessary deaths and wounding of US soldiers. No exceptions.

[gemini333]

I've seen Wolfowitz. I've seen Hadley more than once.
1. Why would anyone in the world listen to these guys on foreign policy?
2. Why are they not being challenged, since they're clearly agitating for war again? Why doesn't anyone even mention during the interview how wrong they were in the past and how they deceived the nation, deliberately, and worked to take us into war.

It's madness.

[Buzz Meeks]

If we had a working justice system we could probably see Wolfowitz in the dock. The Zio-con/libs are too firmly rooted and hidden in the government to get back to a legal and just society in the US.

As I have said in the past all it would take is a Federal Attorney with some sand to start RICO or other criminal investigations to bring these folks to a screeching halt. I also know that ain't going to happen given the caliber of political hacks that have gained appointment to serve these traitors.

I hope I live long enough to see the payback the Col mentioned the other day.

[kao_hsien_chih]

It is more than that. The driving force behind almost any irredentism comes from not the power doing the annexing, but the "minorities" (with cousins across the border) in the countries being annexed. This applies even to Germany in 1930s. Austria produced far more Nazis per capita than Germany itself (including, obviously, Hitler himself). Sudentenland was the most pro-Nazi region of the World War II "Germany." Fast forward to 1990s, the Serb minorities in Bosnia and Croatia that were the most dedicated believers in "Greater Serbia," not Slobodan Milosevic and nationalists in Serbia itself (even as the latter sought to use the former for their political gain.) Heck, even in cases of Texas and Hawaii, it was not as much the United States government itself as much as the Texans and American planters in Hawaii that agitated vigorously for US intervention. When we have the chance to look back on the situation here, we will doubtlessly discover that it was the Russian (or Russophone or whatever) populations in Ukraine that feared potential persecution (or, at least, unfavorable treatment of some kind) from the new regime in Kyiv that drove the pace of the action in this sordid episode, sped up by the clumsy anti-Russian attitudes of the mob that took power (as indicated very quickly by their anti-Russian language legislation and attacks on Russian war memorials against both Hitler and Napoleon) although one could hardly claim that Putin was not happy to take advantage of the situation.

Every people who fear "persecution" (defined broadly) will do what they can to resist. Calling on their brethren across the border for help, if the latter is powerful, is about the most obvious thing they can do. Clumsy moralizing in situations like this can only worsen the crisis, if you ask me, since that gives an appearance of justifying the persecution that these people expect to fall upon them any minute.

[Bobo]

In the above Ingraham figures the cost of Iraq in the $20 Trillion range while Wolfowitz did not blush on that number. Interesting the overall US Debt is less than that number presently.

While I did vote for McCain, today, I see him as a candidate for the dementia ward. While he may still retain his bodily liquids mine seems to seep out at the thoughts of what he proposes.

Diplomacy is our only option and Obama needs to beef up his team. Anything else will blow another $20 Trillion.

[mac]

Alba Etie,

I concur. In addition, but for the invasion of Iraq and the WMD ruse specifically attributable to PW and company, 10s of thousands of Iraqi civilians would not have perished.

I have yet to read the Putin speech where he justifies the Crimea action, but it is not subject to reasonable dispute to deny that there is not in fact a direct link between Moscow's justification for its actions there and US policy vis-à-vis Iraq in 2003. We opened that Pandora's Box, not them. I do not know the form the 'off-ramp' to US/Russian tension will take, but I am convinced some sort of gentleman's agreement must be reached on returning the international system to a pre-2003 understanding, however the parties wish to articulate that as.

Mac

[Ryan]

I recall that "Wolfie" said that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the Iraq excursion.

It also seems to me that Wolfowitz initially said invading Iraq would only cost $20 billion dollars, but I may be confusing him with some other neocon.

In any event, the US has suffered from a terrible version of cost overrun in more ways than one. Wolfowitz is a war criminal who should be tried along with the others who told all the lies.

If this were ever to come to pass we would need a stadium to conduct the trial for all the defendants because if I had my way I would go a head try those from the Bush Sr., the Clinton and the Obama administrations.

[Ryan]

WOLFOWITZ: You can't do this in the rearview mirror. The problem is --

When I heard this today I cursed this lying SOB. This line will be used in the future by others advocating stinking our noses where they don't belong regarding Russia.

INGRAHAM: You've got to learn from the past, Paul, right?

Too bad she hasn't, otherwise, she wouldn't have made her earlier comments.

WOLFOWITZ: Yes, I know. But one of the things to learn from the past includes unfortunately the past of 1930s, is that if you don't deter this sort of moves early, when you can do it without military force, you end up in wars. And that's what we're trying to avoid here.

"Hitler's Revenge". This expression was coined by Peter Brimelow, author of "Alien Nation", a book critical of US immigration policies and editor of VDARE.com, a website that further explores this issue. By this expression Brimelow is aluding to the change from the 1924 Immigration law that heavily favoured Europeans immigrants to the revised 1965 law that reversed this to favor people from other lands. Part of the campaign to bring this about focused upon the shock the GIs has when they went into the concentration camps. In short, a guilt trip.

I"ll take Brimelow's expression a step further and apply it to foreign affairs. This is why we can never have a sensible or sane, for that matter, discussion of foreign affairs and whether or not the US should become involved. The neocons or the neolibs will always pull this trick to try to make people feel guilty by invoking WWII and the run up to it, a subject the majority of people know little about. This is the worst form of emoting. There was considerably more involve here and he knows it.

"And that's what we're trying to avoid here."

This should be noted, too. Using military force can also get you into wars and is a certainty if the ilk that Wolfowitz hails from have their way.

[oofta]

Colonel, it wasn't just malfeasance that got Wolfowitz fired from the World Bank, it was also an ethics issue. It is instructive to review what Der Spiegel, the respected German magazine wrote.
" The simple fact is that Wolfowitz has throughout his entire career demonstrated a penchant for cronyism and for smearing and marginalizing perceived rivals as tactics for getting his way. He has been arrogant and highhanded in dismissing the views of wiser and more informed experts, exhibiting a narcissism that is also apparent in his personal life. Indeed, these tactics are typical of what might be called the "neoconservative style."
Arrogant and highhanded is exactly what he was when he dismissed Gen Shinseki's estimate of troops required for Iraq.

[YT]

"Soviet power, unlike that of hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventunstic[??]. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw -- and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns."

From the Long Telegram, Moscow, February 22, 1946 -- 9 p.m.

[Received February 22 -- 3: 52 p.m.]

Col. sir,

What think you of the Russkies (whom Mr. Kennan had a thorough understanding of due to mastery of their national tongue & thus, their mindset) would alter their defensive stance in strategic & operational Art to that of an offensive one akin to that fashioned by the lunatic with fantasies of Götterdämmerung, he of the 3rd. Reich?

& how far would have Russian military strategy have evolved/transformed since then to actually be on an offensive stance overall?

Or even one honed for the "imperialist" ambitions (if any) of someone at the helm of Russian politics?

p.s.: Italics, i.e. "[??]" are mine.

p.p.s.: 1st. the pr*ck from Irag, now the one who heads the Russian Federation. After this, who next to be the "hitler" of this century?

p.p.p.s.: If some other Gent here had beat me to the punch with this argument in a former post, my sincere apologies.

[Alba Etie]

Walrus
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers called for arming the Ukrainians yesterday on various newsies. You & Col Lang are right this could end very badly ; at the very least sparking another Cold War with Russia aligned with China this time . Recall the neocon , neo liberals have also been aiding & abetting the jihadis in Western PRC as well.

[Alba Etie]

Mac
I agree , we would also need to involve the PRC , & India as two more major power in this gentleman's agreement. IMO it could be a global initiative for this agreement . And as 'sidebar' I agree with you the Irak occupation was an illegal war of aggression - and those that perpetrated are criminals that should be indicted by the Hague court .

[RetiredPatriot]

One thing about these privileged neo-cons and their fellow Totskyist travelers - they always seem to fail upwards! Kristol back on the Sunday gab-fests... now Wolfie too.

I wonder if he licked his comb before going on the air?

RP

[William R. Cumming]

What is PW's citizenship?