Tag Archive 'Dick Cheney'

Bleh, Sullivan.

Just when I was thinking that Andrew Sullivan must have hit some sort of moral and intellectual bottom by now, I read his retrospective on neoconservatism. It turns out the philosophy was actually a vast Zionist conspiracy:

The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.
(Sullivan)

Yes, it’s merely a matter of a guarded preface and a few adjectives that distinguishes this sort of thing from the photocopied rants of an ‘anti-Zionist’ street corner pamphleteer. But what’s most amusing about Sullivan’s post is his insistence that “America is not Israel”, and should not be made into a garrison society to wage permanent war against the adversaries of the Jewish state. As always, it’s a convenient formula for Sullivan to attack, given that no one appears to have actually advanced such an argument. Excepting people like Pat Buchanan in denouncing it as a hidden purpose (someone who Sullivan is now strangely in perfect alignment with in this post).

Whatever may be wrong with the neoconservative perspective on foreign affairs (and there is a great deal), at the very least I can say I’m at pains to think of a neoconservative who is as enterprising as Sullivan in inventing conspiratorial opponents, or as promiscuous in choosing new political bedfellows.

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Buying Tymoshenko

As the European Union commendably attempts to pull Ukraine closer into the safety of the West, Russia has reportedly earmarked $1 billion to fund suddenly pro-Kremlin Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, against heroically pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko in the 2010 presidential election.

One billion. If true, it seems Russia is ready to make an enormous commitment to the subversion of democracy in her neighbor…and it’s a frighteningly expensive investment to allow to fail.

(more…)

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A Shattered Idol in the Black Garden

Baku skyline
(photo: Rahim Alizadeh)

In Verdi’s opera Nabucco –the namesake of the western gas pipeline to Europe that holds the promise of partial independence from Russian energy reliance– the Jewish patriots take the daughter of the Babylonian king hostage, in order to compel his charity for Jerusalem. Today, after the Georgian invasion, Azerbaijan is a victim of a not dissimilar hostage-taking by example, and it’s just as perilous.

So much a captive to the gambit is Azerbaijan, that it had to be seen embarrassingly consulting with the Russian president, while the American vice president was left to rant to reporters in their captial. Cheney wanted a Nabucco pipeline endorsement from Azerbaijan, although he didn’t get the rejection portrayed in the press, he didn’t get approval either. He got the thing Dick hates most: strategic ambiguity.

Sympathy for the Azeri position here is mandatory. Their heart is with the United States, but their survival instinct forces them to withdraw into balance. An overt endorsement of a pipeline under American pressure would have potentially been against every instinct for a country that has been playing the game of pacifying powerful neighbors for far longer than the Americans have even been aware of the region. Any pipeline threaded through Turkey to Central Europe –which Iran has been refused access to, and is designed specifically in order to bypass Russia– has long promised the Azeris hostility from her two invidious and lethally powerful neighbors. (more…)

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Hearts and Minds

Little Miss Attila picks up a good line from Jas at postpolitical. An amusing reversal for the ‘Cheney is the brains of the White House’ school of commentary.

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Dick just has his hand on his rod

Really, it is no big deal.

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