Posted on 12/09/2014 8:25:01 AM PST by Kaslin
Hopefully, Russians realize that our House of Representatives often passes thunderous resolutions to pander to special interests, which have no bearing on the thinking or actions of the U.S. government.
Last week, the House passed such a resolution 411-10.
As ex-Rep. Ron Paul writes, House Resolution 758 is so "full of war propaganda that it rivals the rhetoric from the chilliest era of the Cold War."
H. R. 758 is a Russophobic rant full of falsehoods and steeped in superpower hypocrisy.
Among the 43 particulars in the House indictment is this gem:
"The Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Georgia in August 2008."
Bullhockey. On Aug. 7-8, 2008, Georgia invaded South Ossetia, a tiny province that had won its independence in the 1990s. Georgian artillery killed Russian peacekeepers, and the Georgian army poured in.
Only then did the Russian army enter South Ossetia and chase the Georgians back into their own country.
The aggressor of the Russo-Georgia war was not Vladimir Putin but President Mikheil Saakashvili, brought to power in 2004 in one of those color-coded revolutions we engineered in the Bush II decade.
H.R. 758 condemns the presence of Russian troops in Abkhazia, which also broke from Georgia in the early 1990s, and in Transnistria, which broke from Moldova. But where is the evidence that the peoples of Transnistria, Abkhazia or South Ossetia want to return to Moldova or Georgia?
We seem to support every ethnic group that secedes from Russia, but no ethnic group that secedes from a successor state. This is rank Russophobia masquerading as democratic principle.
What do the people of Crimea, Transnistria, Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Luhansk or Donetsk want? Do we really know? Do we care?
And what have the Russians done to support secessionist movements to compare with our 78-day bombing of Serbia to rip away her cradle province of Kosovo, which had been Serbian land before we were a nation?
H.R. 758 charges Russia with an "invasion" of Crimea.
But there was no air, land or sea invasion. The Russians were already there by treaty and the reannexation of Crimea, which had belonged to Russia since Catherine the Great, was effected with no loss of life.
Compare how Putin retrieved Crimea, with the way Lincoln retrieved the seceded states of the Confederacy -- a four-year war in which 620,000 Americans perished.
Russia is charged with using "trade barriers to apply economic and political pressure" and interfering in Ukraine's "internal affairs."
This is almost comical.
The U.S. has imposed trade barriers and sanctions on Russia, Belarus, Iran, Cuba, Burma, Congo, Sudan, and a host of other nations.
Economic sanctions are the first recourse of the American Empire.
And agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and its subsidiaries, our NGOs and Cold War radios, RFE and Radio Liberty, exist to interfere in the internal affairs of countries whose regimes we dislike, with the end goal of "regime change."
Was that not the State Department's Victoria Nuland, along with John McCain, prancing around Kiev, urging insurgents to overthrow the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych?
Was Nuland not caught boasting about how the U.S. had invested $5 billion in the political reorientation of Ukraine, and identifying whom we wanted as prime minister when Yanukovych was overthrown?
H.R. 578 charges Russia with backing Syria's Assad regime and providing it with weapons to use against "the Syrian people."
But Assad's principal enemies are the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaida affiliate, and ISIS. They are not only his enemies, and Russia's enemies, but our enemies. And we ourselves have become de facto allies of Assad with our air strikes against ISIS in Syria.
And what is Russia doing for its ally in Damascus, by arming it to resist ISIS secessionists, that we are not doing for our ally in Baghdad, also under attack by the Islamic State?
Have we not supported Kurdistan in its drive for autonomy? Have U.S. leaders not talked of a Kurdistan independent of Iraq?
H.R. 758 calls the President of Russia an "authoritarian" ruler of a corrupt regime that came to power through election fraud and rules by way of repression.
Is this fair, just or wise? After all, Putin has twice the approval rating in Russia as President Obama does here, not to mention the approval rating our Congress.
Damning Russian "aggression," the House demands that Russia get out of Crimea, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria, calls on Obama to end all military cooperation with Russia, impose "visa bans, targeted asset freezes, sectoral sanctions," and send "lethal ... defense articles" to Ukraine.
This is the sort of ultimatum that led to Pearl Harbor.
Why would a moral nation arm Ukraine to fight a longer and larger war with Russia that Kiev could not win, but that could end up costing the lives of ten of thousands more Ukrainians?
Those who produced this provocative resolution do not belong in charge of U.S. foreign policy, nor of America's nuclear arsenal.
The asleep-at-the-wheel congress has no idea whatsup in Russia let alone anywhere outside the beltway.
Sorry, but the use of the term “phobic” identifies (to me, at least) the person using it as being one to whom we should pay absolutely no attention whatsoever.
When you’re quoting Ron Paul in the third sentence, you’re doing it wrong.
Pat Buchanan is now dead to me.
I hope Pat is getting a good stipend from Putin.
He is pro Putin and anti-Israel. Pat’s got a weird pro-authoritarian streak that takes him off the reservation as a decent sort of chap. Lots of people, but not all of his critics, think it’s because of the Uncle he lost during the Holocaust. He got drunk and fell out of a guard tower.
Wait, I didn't see one mention of Afghanistan in there?
5.56mm
Great line! and dead-on, to be sure.
This seems like a good thread on which to remind FReepers of the 2008 Quiz on World Affairs from my blog:
With the end of the Cold War, a Communist country, which had been organized along federal lines into constituent republics, dissolves into those republics, with each becoming a sovereign nation. In one of those republics, there is a province in which (partly due to population shifts during and just before the Communist era) the majority of the population is ethnically distinct from the now-independent republic. In that province there is a strong separatist movement engaged in an armed insurrection that has taken effective control of much of the province. As a result, the province has not participated in the parliamentary elections that elected the national government of the republic.
The premier of the republic orders military action to retake control of the province, which is, under international law, a part of the now-sovereign republic. In the press of a great military power (which, incidentally, has unfriendly relations with the democratically elected government of the republic due to its close ties to another great military power), there are breathless (false) reports of genocide being carried out as part of the attempt to reassert sovereignty over the province. The great power, without U.N. sanction and without taking care to avoid targetting civilian targets, launches a military campaign which strikes target throughout the republic, and is which it describes as a ‘humanitarian intervention’. The other great power, which was friendly to the government of the republic, protests and sends logistical support to the futile resistance by the republic’s government.
1. The great power launching the military strike on behalf of the separatists is
A. The United States
B. Russia
C. not enough information is provided
2. The republic fighting the separatists is
A. Georgia
B. Serbia
C. not enough information is provided
3. The separatists are
A. mostly Christian Ossetians
B. mostly Muslim Albanians
C. not enough information is provided
4. The year when this takes place is
A. 1999
B. 2008
C. not enough information is provided
The correct answer in each case is, of course, C.
Pat Buchanan rewriting history
Pat Buchanan accuses the House of propaganda straight from the cold war while totally ignoring all of Putin’s Leninist rhetoric from the last few years.
I stopped paying serious attention to Pat Buchanan a long time ago. Anyone who writes that Winston Churchill was responsible for the Second World War is a loon. I only stopped by this screed out of the same curiosity I have when passing a car wreck or when seeing two guys in a fight outside a sports bar.
Why is Chechnya not one of the choices, it so easily fits the questions.
It’s similar, but notice my long accumulation of details, all of which apply to both the U.S. intervention in Serbia and the Russian intervention in Georgia. A lot of those are different in the case of Chechenya — blessedly we don’t have a real analogue of Chechenya.
Sadly we, FRs, and the people's house, more than Obama, are phobic in unwarranted bigoted hatred of Russia.
Buchanan, Ron and Rand have it right, the rest are drinking the coolade the neocon MSM has been peddling for years.
Forgive them, they know not what they doing, will be the reason we fail in defeating the Islamists.
Has Buchanan renounced his US Citzienship yet?
Lord Pat-Paw.
Pat is wasting his time. The neocons want war. Because patriotism. Or something.
Hitler was.
Now that there is funny. Speaking of Koolaide . . . .
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