This week at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Russia and China's recent aggression are directly related to President Barack Obama's failure to follow through with his threat that a "red line" would be crossed if Syria used chemical weapons.
Gates said, "Russia and China see that void" in world leadership and are taking advantage of it. He added he always tells presidents, "If you cock the pistol be ready to fire it"...
The Most Equal Comrade's strategy of planned decline is right on track.
Yeah, that was a big mistake. An even bigger mistake was keeping on a hold-over from the Bush administration because that has really come back and bit Obama in the ass.
ReplyDeleteGates has been more a careerist who had a chameleon-like skill to adapt to the ideological hues of the powerful people around him. But – at his core – he seemed most comfortable in a Cold War setting of tough-talking belligerence which led him to repeated policy miscalculations, including dismissing Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 as a phony and missing the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later. But it’s how Gates began his meteoric rise in the U.S. intelligence community during the Reagan years that has remained most cloaked in mystery. As a young CIA official in 1980, Gates was implicated in secret maneuvers to sabotage President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran, a failure by Carter that doomed his reelection. Gates was identified as one of the participants in a key October 1980 meeting in Paris allegedly also involving William Casey, who was then Reagan’s campaign director; George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director and then-Reagan’s vice presidential running mate; Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi; and Israeli intelligence officers, including Ari Ben-Menashe who later testified under oath about what he witnessed.
ReplyDeleteRead more at http://consortiumnews.com/2014/01/08/robert-gates-double-crosses-obama/
Big strong tough guy Gates, he knows how to win friends he can influence and, well, lose wars, unless you can call Iraq & Afghanistan victories. Did freedom endure? Your ilk had 7 years to take care of business. Instead, Cheney, who you would have thought would be a shoo-in for President for the next 8 years with his agenda of strength through intimidation and preemption, has been reduced to crying over spilled milk for the past 6 years.
ReplyDeleteThe October 1980 story has been thoroughly debunked. http://hnn.us/article/4249
ReplyDeleteCheney was not interested in running for president.
ReplyDeleteThe only people or countries that those with a pro-US-leadership foreign policy are interested in "intimidating" are those who have declared themselves to be enemies and threats.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were mishandled, but the causes in each case were just and the invasions were good things.
In your first comment on this thread, you said that Gates was correct in saying that the Syrian red line led to our rivals being emboldened, so what's with all the subsequent griping about Gates or Cheney or whatever?
ReplyDeleteSo, Cheney was more interested in going on television between hospitalizations and crying about the current administrations perceived failures? How powerful! In answer to your question, you will never find me supporting any left-over neo-con in their repeated bids to regain power. Comical how they continue to cry though. Real manly men. Some lines from Kipling come to mind here:
ReplyDeleteIf you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
Not crying. Expressing alarm. Where do you get this "crying" business?
ReplyDeleteAnd why you relish America's rapidly increaing vulnerability and your very own freedom being increasingly threatened is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteMaybe so, but I will not personally brook any return to the Cheneyites.
ReplyDelete