Posted on 08/12/2008 9:41:37 AM PDT by RicocheT
If Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin were president of the United States, would Iran try to build a nuclear bomb? Would Pakistan provide covert aid to al-Qaeda? Would Hugo Chavez train terrorists in Venezuela? Would leftover nationalities with delusions of grandeur provoke the great powers? Just ask Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili, who now wishes he never tried to put his 4 million countrymen into strategic play
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
If adultery were disqualifying, we’d have had few of our previous presidents. President Andrew Jackson was (unknowingly) a bigamist, President Kennedy was a serial adulterer and there have been rumors about nearly every president, as I’m sure you know. On the other hand, being surrounded with communists, terrorists, black seperatists, Nation of Islam and other racists has had to have an effect on Senator Obama, his denials to the contrary notwithstanding! I’d rather see a patriotic sinner in that office than an anti-American, racist socialist!
So you want a dictator? This America. We do not have dictators, we do not want dictators, and will never have dictators. Thank you God and thank you Founding Fathers for establishing a system that prevent evil dictators like Putin from ever being Presidents.
Proof positive that anyone can read whatever they want into another's post.
Do we want a strong, decisive President or a wimpy, indecisive push-over?
Was Carter a strong, decisive President? Were our citizens safer abroad under his administration? Was our sovereignty safe?
Agreed. If there is an arrangement, it is first and foremost with the Shia.
Tsinaaghmdegoba — It means “resistance.”
(Yes, I looked up the Georgian alphabet and used a translator...)
Would we ever get rid of him?
Yes, that’s exactly what happened, which is why Iran is weakened and fears us and why the Taliban no longer exists. Not to mention North Korea has no nukes and Pakistan isn’t harboring terrorists. uh huh.
Oh, I agree. One of the things that Spengler points out, however, is that the Russians had trouble with Chechnya (Muslim) - until they went in and destroyed large numbers of its fighters - and its people.
Spengler points out that Chechnya is now perfectly docile. Muslims respect only one thing, superior force.
Do I think we should do this to Muslim territories? Of course not. But I do think we have to have a clear objective, be willing to back it up with force if necessary, and have a president capable of stating this.
I love Bush, but he’s been too nice in dealing with everybody from the Dems to Chavez to Imanutjob. Granted, the Dems have been undermining him every step of the way, but I think we really have to have a position and then present it.
If other countries don’t want to join up, that’s fine...
If Putin was Premier of the USSA, we would be on the trains to Alaska, then on a boat to Siberia.
Anyway as I said we will take each terrorist nation at a time. President Bush have been defending us for seven years and he changed the course of history forever by taking down two terrorist regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and we crushed Al Qaeda in Iraq.
It seems you are impressed with a dictator called Putin bullying the tiny nation of Georgia, from historical perspective he achieved nothing and neither did Russia. The Russian remain a third world country.
Actually, Spengler is a very sharp analyst of world affairs. In this instance he came to a conclusion that was at odds with the sentiments of most FReepers, and a lot of them (you included) are, I think, overlooking his use of sacrasm: ‘pull the world apart like taffy’ is hardly the way a cultured writer would express something he regarded as an actual desideratum.
Putin may be a tyrant, or he may be the closest thing to a democratic head of government that the Russian psyche can accept at this juncture in history, but he is certainly not old-school Soviet: his resistance to Westernization has its intellectual roots in the Solzehenitzyn’s critique of Western secularism and further back in the Slavophile movement, not in Marx or Lenin, and his hard anti-Western stance only set in in reaction to U.S. and NATO misbehavior in the former Yugoslavia. In the last days of the Soviet Union, there was an internal debate within the K.G.B. whether or not state atheism had not been a hideous mistake. Putin was plainly on the side that felt it had been a mistake.
Putin’s Russia has a flat tax, not just prayer, but Christian religious education in the schools, a strong defense policy; it suppresses flamboyant homosexual rights demonstrations, has no whining corner complaining whenever the Church expounds traditional moral teachings, and exhibits a variety of other policies that should both make FReepers jealous and give credence to the prophecy of St. Paisius of the Holy Mountain that alone among the nations of the world, because of the millions of martyrs and confessers it offered under the Bolsheviks, Russia will not fall under the domination of Antichrist.
As for ‘democratic’ Georgia, it is functionally even more of a one party state than Russia—only one party besides the ruling Soros-backed ‘pro-Western’ party passed the 7% threshold to get seats in the proportionally elected parliament, and that just barely. (And how pro-Western is something George Soros backs really? and pro- which west, the one FReepers love, or the West whose culture flows from Hollywood and Soho and San Francisco?) Milosevic’s Serbia was more democratic—he had a real functional opposition and only governed as head of a coalition government.
The Russo-Georgian war is tragedy in the classical sense, a conflict between flawed goods, rather than a piece with a villain and a hero.
You have to work on your sense of humor.
Because Putin’s not an obvious enemy of Christians and keeps homosexuals under control, you’re willing to forgive him for ordering the murders of journalists and dissidents who oppose him, and stealing enough money to become the richest man in Europe? Disturbing.
Spengler should spend some time at Putin’s renovated Lubyanka with a nice view of the new statue of Iron Felix.
I’ll laugh at funny things. You might work on your definiton of humor.
It is not for me to forgive Prime Minister Putin his sins, that is between him and his spiritual father as God’s representative.
What I am not willing to do is see Russia as the unalloyed villain in this conflict, and Georgia as all sweetness and light, nor to counsel that Western policy makers take that view. The ‘pro-Western’ regimes in Georgia and Ukraine are beholden to George Soros, who is an enemy both of Christianity, and most specifically of the Orthodox faith, and of the sort of ordered liberty that FReepers hold dear.
Georgia miscalculated when it tried to seize control over South Ossetia under cover of the Olympic Games, and Russia reacted as a great power will to being poked. At least Russia has the sense to violate international law (if this is really a violation and can’t be justified under the ceasefire accords that stationed Russian troops in So. Ossetia in the first place) on behalf of its clients. Other than the fact that the U.S. and NATO were acting against their own objective self-interest by backing the Al Qaeda-supported KLA against Serbia, the symmetry between the current situation in Georgia and the NATO campaign against Serbia is almost perfect:
In both cases a province of a constituent republic of a recently disolved Communist country whose population was ethnically different from the majority of the republic were fighting a secessionist war against the new state formed from that republic. In both cases the ethnic difference had increased during the Communist era. In both cases, the new state was seeking to re-exert control of the secessionist province. In both cases, it was a government elected in a free election in which the secessionist provice declined to participate that was seeking to reassert control. In both cases, the press in the attacking great power published breathless accounts of ‘genocide’ at the hands of the forced trying to reassert control. (I no more believe the Russian reports of anti-Ossetian genocide by the Georgian than I believed the, now provably false, reports of anti-Albanian genocide by the Serbs.) In both cases the attacking great power was not careful to avoid civilian targets.
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