The question is whether Sen. Warner has "grown some spine" in the last eight weeks.

Can this Administration field anyone for a senior position who is not tinged by scandal?

Negroponte and Gates, two Iran-Contra alums, should be very comfortable working together.

I've always wondered how Negroponte even got back into prominence. Is it a coincedence that he was serving as US Ambassador to the Philippines when that government barred it's citizens from working in the sweatshops of the CNMI in 1995? Did Jack Abramoff lobby Negroponte to get the Philippine government to throw the doors back open (it sure didn't take them long to reverse policy)?

Why is "Central American socialism" the "real enemy"?  The enemy of whom?  While we are at it, why is it necessary for us to have an "enemy" all of the time?  Why not just people and organizations that don't agree with us?

Socialism cannot simultaneously be a failed economic system and a terrible enemy threatening our way of life.  If it is a failed economiic system, it must not be strong enough to ever threaten us - not that I can conceive of an economic system being a threat to us in any case.  If it is so powerful that it can overwhelm our country, then it can hardly be called  failed economic system, but must be a highly successful one that should be welcomed here.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Well if it's a choice between war with Iran or war with "Central American Socialists" I'm going to take the "Central American Socialists" because things get somewhat less fucked up that way.

I hope that's not the choice we have to make though.

Can we put this on some bumper stickers? Can we make it a national priority? Can we at LEAST all agree that it is a great concept?

While we are at it, why is it necessary for us to have an "enemy" all of the time? Why not just people and organizations that don't agree with us?

Jan Knaus

I don't wish to be unkind, but:

It's a fine bumper sticker slogan, and would sell well here in San Francisco. It wouldn't do anything if we tried to make it a national policy except make its proponents look like polyannas. Conceptually, it seems to ignore important realities of the world. We do have enemies - people who wish to do us harm and aren't interested in negotiating - we deny this at our peril.

"We do have enemies - people who wish to do us harm and aren't interested in negotiating - we deny this at our peril."

But South American socialists aren't among them, or at least shouldn't be. Chavez doesn't need to be an enemy. Hell, Fidel Castro didn't need to be an enemy! If it weren't for the rabid Cubans in Miami we would have far more influence in the Carribbean and South America simply by trading with and visiting Cuba for the last several decades.

We do not have to consider every non-democratic government an enemy. Odd that our leaders seem to understand that when they want to buy oil from someone, like Saudi Arabia, or borrow money from them. like China.

I disagree with your idea that a policy that values diplomacy rather than force is one of polyannas. That attitude has gotten us into Iraq. It has helped with the nuclearization of North Korea, and has shut off talks with Iran; a country full of people who are highly educated and very western in their outlook (in other words -- potential allies).

Why invent new enemies? Right; there are those who wish us ill. Let's deal with them and not multiply them while at the same time dissing our former allies because they don't want to go around knocking chips off of everyone else's shoulders just to prove we are right and tough. We need to get off of the "BULLY" pulpit!

Jan Knaus

"The South American socialists thing was obviously a joke."

Not so obvious if you were one of the tens of thousand of Guatamalans, or Nicaraguans, or Salvadorans that the Reagan administration managed to get killed because they considered them to to be our enemies. What do you mean, it was a joke? I have 2 adopted Salvadoran children who don't see it as a joke.

Jan Knaus

Bingo.

Ha! Ha! Ha! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! How funny!

Jan Knaus

I wonder how SFC Wallace's blood pressure is today!

Tom

Thanks for the background on Gates, very interesting. Most of us have no idea who this person was I think, and the MSM isn't going to delve into his past. After reading here, now it makes sense. Seems it is par for the course another spook/traitor pulled out of the dad's hat. What exactly do they have against employing citizens with US military background and experience to run defense? Instead Rumsfeld's incompetence is replaced with a participant or at the very least an enabler of the traitors and murderers of the Iran Contra crime cabal. Bush must be smirking away with revenge slapped in the face of the American electorate who had the audacity to send the message that the/his gig is up.

Not a fan of dark humor?

To be fully aware of Negroponte's insidiousness, one needs to be aware of where he was on Tuesday, June 20, 1972.

At this point I can be cold and  calculating.  Reality is harsh and time is short.

If I was given a vote on Gates' confirmation my standard for what Gates has to do going forward is very, very high. I want to know if he has the brains, experience and power amongst those in this Administration to change strategy and manage its execution. Because of the mess we are in I have to ignore his past sins, unless they are evidence that he cannot be effective in this Administration going forward.

I'd be an adult holding my nose on the vote.  

Agree.

If Gates were to to be nominated in for a full 4 year term, I would oppose him. However, as you say time is short, and there and there are other battles to be fought. Starting out here is just not worth the effort. Let the Dems wait until a particully egregious court nominee is put before them. Or maybe if or when Bolton's full term has surfaced.

fxr

Learning more about him.  Some detail on Gates from a Texas Monthly article on his leadership at Texas A&M and how he views change. For example:

“I am an agent of change,” he told the A&M Board of Regents when he was interviewed for the job of president (for which his competition was none other than former U.S. senator Phil Gramm). “If you don’t want change, you don’t want me.”

Many of the changes Gates has made have come in the area of governance. And most of these are too prosaic to talk about. It is a task force here, a committee there, a new initiative over there, but they all add up to a better way of running the university—more businesslike, more receptive to new ideas. He seldom rules by fiat. His style is to create a climate in which change is encouraged and bring in a person who is amenable to it.

Gates had his own full chapter in the Walsh Iran contra Report:

The Walsh Iran/Contra Report
Volume : Investigations and Prosecutions
Chapter 16: Robert M. Gates

It indicates that either Gates was incompetent and derelict in his position in the CIA, or he was evasive and deceitful in sworn testimony given.

Strong support for my interpretation here:
"GOP furious about timing of Rumsfeld resignation"
www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/110906/rumsfeld2.html

The ties get downright incestuous. Just what America needs, another inbred wonk, who has slept with anything that moves within the beltway, making policy decisions.

["
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, brought Dr. Gates to the White House from the CIA as a Soviet specialist. 'I think the Gates appointment is the best appointment that President Bush has made in the course of his six years in office,' Mr. Brzezinski said. 'I co-chaired with him [Dr. Gates] two years ago a study on American policy towards Iran. 'He is a remarkably intelligent, responsible and balanced individual whose judgment can be trusted and whose common sense is reassuring. This appointment may be marking the beginning of a major corrective in American policy towards the Middle East.'

Mr. Bush said Dr. Gates will bring a 'fresh perspective' to the Defense Department
"]
Jim Landers, "Gates well-armed for tough job [dallasnews.com]", The Dallas Morning News, November 9, 2006

I feel so much more confident in the Robert W. Gates nomination now that the moral bed wetter, and renown beltway slattern, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has given his seal of approval to Gates. It was not that long ago that this elitist wanker of a wonk was claiming credit for the fall of the Soviet, because he conceptualised and loaded a trap for them in Afghanistan at the end of the Carter Admin, by providing arms, funds and black magick insurgency instruction to Moslem fundamentalists.

In an interview given for CNN's Cold War Series on June 13, 1997, Brzezinski admitted the covert arming and training of the Mujahadin began before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and this policy was premeditated as an intentionally provocative act:

"I told the President, about six months before the Soviets entered Afghanistan, that in my judgment I thought they would be going into Afghanistan. And I decided then, and I recommended to the President, that we shouldn't be passive...We weren't passive."

The National Security Archive, "Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for CNN's Cold war Series, June 13, 1997

In an interview given to the French Publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, Early in 1998, Brzezinski expressed even more bravado and self-adulation about his role as a provocateur. He was remorseless:

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Le Nouvel Observateur, Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Paris, January 15-21, 1998, translated by Bill Blum, hosted on Counterpunch

Brzezinski was still impenitent about his arming of the Mujahadin, even after September 11, 2001.

"A few days ago, I called Brzezinski, and he told me he still has no regrets. He maintained that the Carter administration funded the moderates, not the fundamentalists. The true problem, he asserted, was that the Soviet Union, then supporting terrorists around the world, 'pulverized' Afghanistan society through the 1980s, and that set the stage for the ugly infighting of the 1990s and the subsequent rise of the Taliban. How can you assume, he asked, that there would be no terrorism today, had there been no U.S.-supported resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan? Perhaps if the Soviets had not been confronted and drained in Afghanistan, he suggested, the Soviet Union might have lived on a little longer and might have, in that time, fostered other sorts of terrorism.

Perhaps. Historical what-ifs are impossible to prove. But Brzezinski is quick to note the policymakers who succeeded him in subsequent administrations screwed up by bugging out once the Soviets had departed: 'That was immoral.' In other words, they messed up the project he began.

Here, then, is the lesson for Brzezinski and the CIA and the other muj-backers (past and present): be careful when you start (or underwrite) a secret war, for the consequences of such action can extend far beyond your intentions."

David Corn, "Anthrax, Mujaheddin and the CIA", AlterNet, October 19, 2001.

Brzenski perceives an analog between geopolitics and a Game of Chess, and thinks both games are Grand. Easy for one such as him, who has always been a Chess Player; never a pawn. His bio reads almost like a fairy tale. He was born in Poland in 1928, but fortunately for him, was sired by a diplomat who was posted to Canada in 1938. For those not up on their history, Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. At that time, Poland's Armed Forces still included a cavalry that rode into battle on horseback. No match for blitzkrieg. In 1949, Brezinski graduated from McGill University in Montreal, fast-tracking to his MA there the following year, then to a Harvard PhD in 1953. From there onto Harvard's faculty, then to Columbia's. He was at State during LBJ's tenure; a foreign policy wonk for Humphrey's losing '68 presidency run; sat on the Trilateral Commission until advising Carter for his presidential campaign, and appointed as his NSA. He is not a pure Democrat, instead a switch hitter, as he was a member of Reagan's NSC, Chemical Weapons Commission, and Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He then served on GHW Bush's National Security Advisory Task Force. Guaranteed, Brzezinski hasn't an 'effin clue what war is like from a pawn's point of view, when it is being sacrificed in a trade with an enemy pawn for an insignificant positional preference by an abstruse player on the motivating side of the unseen hand of compulsion.

It is important to emphasise that Brzezinski's support of Gates' nomination is not in any way bipartisan support, but instead is nepotic and incestuous. In the previously cited interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski stated that during his time as Carter's NSA Robert Gates was "at that time a member of my staff". He then went on to mention that his former understudy had given the Carter Administration its proper accolades for the fall of the Soviet in a book Gates authored in which he revealed:

"...that as early as 1978, President Carter approved proposals prepared by my staff to undertake, for example, a comprehensive, covert action program designed to help the non-Russian nations in the Soviet Union pursue more actively their desire for independence - a program in effect to destabilize the Soviet Union. We called it, more delicately, a program for the "delegitimization of the Soviet Union". But that was a rather unusual decision. He took some others along these lines, too. So his public image to some extent was the product of his great emphasis on arms reductions and a desire to reach an agreement on that score with the Russians. But it didn't quite correspond to the reality, and it certainly didn't correspond even to the public reality in the second half of the Carter Administration."

Again, I feel drawn like a moth to one of the last flaming muses of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's:

The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgiveable sin in America.

Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today,
but I am not.

Big Darkness,
soon come.
Take my word for it.

Hunter S. Thompson, "Welcome to the Big Darkness", ESPN Page 2, July 22, 2003

Rest In Peace Doc.