Archive for the ‘U.S Foreign Policy’ Category
The recent North Korea's test of a nuclear explosion has caused grave concern. But it also is causing confusion on whether or not it was a success or failure. Of course, this being the election season, politics will be playing a pivotal role during this crisis. However, knowing what is the truth or fiction will be hard to discern for many observers.
U.S. Intelligence agencies believe it was not a nuclear explosion, but a conventional high explosives that was used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device. It is also possible that the test was for the Iranians who have been working with North Korea in developing nuclear capabilities.
Iran will be watching the world's response to these tests, which will determine their path of action in their nuclear development. For the time being the world's attention has been shifted to North Korea and away from Iran.
Of course, the blame is being place on Bush to China, but not on North Korea for the test.
[..] a Washington Post editorial said the Bush administration should "rightly press hard for new U.N.-sponsored sanctions" against North Korea.
"It should take any further measures that could increase the pressure on the North or prevent it from exporting its technology. It also should be prepared to talk to Mr. Kim about disarmament in the unlikely event he elects to take up the framework that was agreed on a year ago in the 'six-party' negotiations."
The editorial also said North Korea's neighbors, and not the United States, bear the burden of the North's decision to proceed with it nuclear program. "The real leverage lies with South Korea and China," the newspaper opined. (CNSNews.com)
By Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals have enjoyed the convenience of calling for shifting American troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan, where terrorist action was much less until recent dates. That stance has been a good way to camouflage defeatist appeasement with a phony national- security firmness.
The Associated Press, for example, quotes socialist candidate Ned Lamont as saying in New Haven that,
"We have sacrificed our daughters and sons and our treasure in a war we didn’t have to fight ….. We have ignored the real threats and security needs in the war we should be fighting, the one against the terrorists. …
Senator Lieberman believes that President Bush has it right in Iraq.
I believe that he’s dangerously wrong….. Today we have five times as many troops in Iraq as we have in Afghanistan," [Lamont] said. "We spend more in a month in Iraq than we do in a year in Afghanistan. These decisions are wrong and they have left us less safe."
Evidently the "fight against the terrorists" boils down to nothing more than having troops in Afghanistan instead of Iraq, because liberals oppose all measures to combat terrorism through CIA, NSA, and FBI surveillance and interrogation.
Another possibility is that the liberals want to make their version of the "fight against the terrorists" into a way for tort-bar lawyers to replace revenues lost from the Federal clamp-down on fraudulent securities and asbestos litigation. That’s vital, of course, as the tort bar, along with socialist teachers’ unions, are the big money sources for liberal political campaigns.
Liberals have long insisted that combatting terrorism be simply an extension of after-the-fact criminal prosecution, rather than truly effective preventive action. What a delicious prospect for liberal candidates and their tort-bar henchmen: years of litigation, funded by Amnesty International, to represent terrorist prisoners who have been deprived of their 14th Amendment rights!
Mr. Lamont and his fellow socialist candidates have endlessly cudgeled President Bush for fomenting terrorism by our presence in Iraq, while failing to pour troops into Afghanistan to capture Osama Bin Ladin. Among other inconsistencies, that "plan" requires ignoring the probability that Bin Ladin is in neighboring Pakistan, where officials have flatly refused to permit U.S. troops to operate.
Now, with strikingly bad timing, terrorism has re-heated with a bang in Afghanistan and is blowing the socialists’ cover. Moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is, at the moment, merely a matter of which frying pan to use.
In early August, General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command and the most knowledgeable senior military official about Iraq, expressed his fears to a Senate Committee that conditions in Iraq are the very next thing to a “civil war.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman went further one day later when he wrote that our armed forces in Iraq “are baby-sitting a civil war.” Can any good come of continued U.S. presence in such a conflict? Isn’t it time to consider letting the Sunnis and Shiites settle their centuries-old animosity without our forces caught in the middle?
Wisdom imparted by past presidents of our nation has never been more needed than today. As the quagmire in Iraq deepens, and as cries are heard for U.S. involvement in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, George Washington’s advice should be heeded. He urged commercial relations with other nations “but to have with them as little political connection as possible.” The sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, concurred when he stated: “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” And Calvin Coolidge, our nation’s 30th chief executive, famously summarized: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”