xchagalx SANDY BERGER MAKES FIRST STRING IN THE BUSH LEAGUE

How little importance Sandy Berger concedes to history is appalling. Theft of documents from the National Archives to either protect his reputation or the official he served is as sub-plebeian as one can get. And to think he served as National Security Advisor to President Clinton. The question I must ask is was he or wasn't he doing this at someone else's bidding? If any of us in the general population had done what he did .. and so deceitfully so, I can assure you we would be doing more than 100 hours of community service. Shame on you Sandy .. and then some.

xchagalx Where are our troops? or Where aren't they


There's no doubt the Army and the Marine Corps need more personnel. The problem is the time it will take to recruit and train those same recruits for combat service in Iraq. For whatever reason, be it international politics or fear of stepping on the wrong toes, our Army has literally thousands of available troops trained and in many cases combat equipped. Where are they? Maybe we should ask .. where aren't they? Seems they are marking time in protecting 'allies' who don't want to spend what's needed for their own defense. Specifically, they are in 135 of 192 nations in the world. We have 112,000 troops committed to NATO nations. More than 79,000 of our military personnel are in Germany. Pardon me, but I don't see the Russians as a comparable threat to the immediacy of global terrorism. We have in the neighborhood of 47,000 troops in Japan and another 32,000 in Korea. Most of these committments began in the 1940s and early 1950s. You might say these deployments are habitual. Is our Cold War stance still sensible? Come on General Shoomaker! As Chief of Staff of the Army, make a case for the use of fresh troops and give those two and three-tour troops a rest.

xchagalx
Cutting And Running On America's Allies
Skip directly to the full story.
By MAX BOOT Los Angeles Times
Published: Dec 3, 2006


If you think this headline is exaggerated, .. forgive the headline writer. Still .. read Boot's historical examination of what our country has done in instances involving our stated commitments. It reveals why our reputation has been tarnished .. not so much at home .. as it has abroad.



Many American have been wondering why so many Iraqis are willing to fight for militias and terrorist groups but not for the American-backed government.
Look at it from their perspective. Would you stake your life on a regime whose existence depends on Washington's continuing support? Given our long, shameful record of leaving allies in the lurch, that has never seemed to be a smart bet.
We have been betraying friends since our first overseas conflict, against the Barbary pirates who captured ships off the African coast and enslaved their crews. To defeat the pasha of Tripoli, the United States made common cause with his brother, Hamet Karamanli.
In 1804, American envoy William Eaton led a motley force of mercenaries and Marines across North Africa to install Karamanli on the throne. The offensive was called off prematurely when President Jefferson's envoy reached a deal with the pasha to free his American captives in return for $60,000.
Karamanli was evacuated to the United States, but his family members were left as hostages. Eaton raged: "Our too credulous ally is sacrificed to a policy, at the recollection of which, honor recoils, and humanity bleeds."
Something similar could have been said about U.S. conduct after World War I. President Wilson was the leading champion of "national self-determination" at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, yet the United States did nothing to safeguard the states he helped midwife.
America stood by, for instance, when Czechoslovakia and Poland were occupied by the Nazis. This callous indifference was repeated after World War II when we did too little to save the Eastern Europeans from Russian occupation.
Postwar U.S. administrations compounded this duplicity when they urged the "captive" peoples behind the Iron Curtain to seek their freedom and yet did nothing to help the East Germans in their 1953 uprising, the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechs in 1968.
If we weren't willing even to put more diplomatic and economic pressure on the Soviet Union to mitigate the worst of their crackdowns, we shouldn't have instigated the uprisings in the first place.
Cuban anti-communists fared just as poorly at American hands. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 exiles organized by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs. The Cuban army counterattacked, and the rebels were killed or captured. The outcome might have been different if the United States had been willing to provide air cover, but President Kennedy refused to do so because he wanted to hide U.S. complicity.
In the following years, the United States waged a massive war to stop a communist takeover of South Vietnam. By 1973 we had tired of the conflict, and the South Vietnamese were left to fend for themselves. Many were killed, wound up in brutal re-education camps or took to the seas in leaky boats.
The United States was equally inconstant in its support of rebels battling the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
And then there was the shah of Iran, installed by the CIA and Britain's MI6 in 1953 and then abandoned by the United States in 1979.
Trail Of Treachery
But that was nothing compared with the betrayal of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites in 1991. President George H.W. Bush urged Iraqis to "take matters into their own hands" yet stood by as Saddam's henchmen brutally put down the uprisings.
This long trail of American treachery has grave consequences for our foreign policy. It emboldens our enemies, dispirits our friends and makes it harder to achieve our objectives.
Knowing our history, few Iraqi leaders are counting on American support in the future. They're making their deals with the devil, whether neighboring states or sectarian militias. And if we do scuttle out of Iraq prematurely, Afghans and others whose support we seek will get the message again: Don't trust Uncle Sam.
The least we can do is to assure those Iraqis who have worked closely with American forces - whether as janitors, translators, soldiers or bureaucrats - that if we do leave, they and their families will receive asylum in the United States. We should not sacrifice another "too credulous ally" on the altar of dishonorable and inhumane policy.
Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This should be required reading for all those elected to the Congress before they receive their next salary check!