On Saturday Fidel Castro for the first time in four years addressed Cuba’s communist parliament. He almost died in 2006 from intestinal problems when he handed over power to his now 79-year-old brother Raul Castro. The almost 84-year-old gave a ten minute speech warning about a nuclear holocaust if the United States and Israel stand firm against the dictators of Iran and North Korea and their efforts to develop nuclear weapons. The Miami Herald reports:
Castro noted that after months of warning of the risks of nuclear war if the United States tries to inspect Iranian ships beginning in September, as part of U.N. sanctions, he’s now less pesimistic.
“At first I thought that the imminent danger of war had no solution possible,” he said.
“I am sure, however, that it will not happen that way and that, on the contrary, the conditions for a solution . . . are being created at this time.”
“One man alone will have to make the decision: The president of the United States,” Castro said, because Iran will not bow to U.S. and Israeli demands to halt its nuclear program.
If Obama approves an attack on Iran, he added, he will trigger a war that will spread through the Middle East and Asia and cause “the instantaneous death of hundreds of millions of people, among them an incalculable number of people in his own country.”
The “established order of the planet . . . will inevitably collapse, the reigning social order will disappear abruptly” and all currencies will be worthless, he added.
Castro noted that “as luck would have it,” Obama’s father was Muslim and his mother was Christian and added he hoped the U.S. president will become conscious of the threat to world peace.
Unfortunately, Castro is right about Obama’s unwillingness to seriously confront Iran and take out it’s nuclear capability. The real threat to the world is the opposite of Castro’s warning. Not confronting Iran and destroying its nuclear facilities creates the risk of a nuclear war in the Middle East.
If we had a president who understood the nature of the Iranian regime and of propaganda from old dictators like Castro, he would see through Castro’s rhetoric and understand that doing the opposite of what Castro recommends will ensure the world’s safety. Unfortunately, President Obama has been incapable of understanding the evil nature of Iran’s leaders and has grown up surrounded by leftist intellectuals who still idealize Castro’s murderous regime. Obama won’t admit this in public, but he is likely to find validation in the warnings of a decrepit dictator.
Florida Pundit is catching up on the news after two and a half weeks in Central Europe with very limited internet access. Quite a bit has happened here that doesn’t get covered by European newspapers.
The Obama administration was afraid of letting the Arizona immigration law go into effect and got a liberal judge to suspend most of it. Bacteria breaking down oil seem to be attacking the Gulf oil spill a lot faster than anyone but Rush Limbaugh predicted. An agriculture department employee has been fired over racist remarks and then was offered her job back (I still have to catch up on the details of this one).
GM will be selling a “green” car whose main virtue seems to be that it has a gas-based backup engine that ensures that you won’t be stranded when the battery is exhausted after just forty miles. It takes ten hours to recharge the battery for another forty mile trip. I wonder how much coal is burned in power plants to provide the electricity to charge the battery and how that compares to the one to two gallons of fuel that would be burned by a regular gasoline engine for a forty mile drive. We’ll need to follow up on this one.
A lot more has happened, but I also have collected interesting stories from my trip that I will cover over the next couple of weeks. Here are some highlights:
1. If you think we have a lot of “green” initiatives here, Western Europe is much more extreme and believe in global warming is unquestionable dogma in the media. What is interesting though is that despite a heat wave that brought 95 degree heat for more than half my trip in places with no air conditioning, no one I talked to ever linked the heat wave to global warming.
2. There is a demographic revolution occurring in big cities causing an rise in an increasingly radicalized Muslim population. Locals seem to believe that all the women in burkas (head to toe black dress covering the entire face but the eyes) are all rich Saudi Arabian tourists. This is certainly a factor, but I find it hard to believe that it is the whole story. I will provide pictures, plus the surprisingly frank comments of a monk given during a guided tour through a monastery.
3. While Western Europe is declining in political and economic power, life during this decline can still be pleasant especially if you have no children or grandchildren to worry about.
4. A visit to Prague, which Florida Pundit first visited shortly after the fall of communism twenty years ago, illustrates how the future of Europe lies in what former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called “new Europe”, i.e. in the former communist states stretching from Lithuania to Slovenia.
5. The European Union has brought changes that make travel a lot easier. You don’t have to worry about changing currencies when traveling between countries using the Euro and crossing the border between many countries is like crossing the state line between Florida and Georgia. The only thing that remains are the abandoned border posts. Positive developments, but a lot of these changes are imposed by a European elite and, with crises like the Greek economic collapse, one has to wonder about the long-term stability of these arrangements.
Europe is a continent with a rich history, but it is in decline and faces enormous demographic changes. It is great for many Europeans to take a month vacation in summer and a couple of weeks in winter, but they are spending at the expense of future generations. When conservative governments take over from socialists all they can really do is slow the decline. The potential exceptions are some of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe where flat taxes and less regulations have created an economic boom.
President Obama is the most European president the United States has ever had. This statement probably puzzles the American left. It is not Obama’s race that is relevant, but rather his ideas. Obama is steering the US toward policies that Europe has been implementing since World War 2 and we need to reverse this direction in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
It is good to be home. More on all of this in future posts.
During the confirmation hearings for General Petraeus assuming command of our forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus skillfully communicated that the deadline for starting the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in July, 2011 is not something any military commander recommended.
In his testimony today, Petraeus started chipping away on the deadline that President Obama announced to appease his leftist constituency.
Petraeus is in a strong position to change the dynamics of the war in Afghanistan. No other general would have the credibility to say what Petraeus is saying without getting fired by our thin-skinned president. Eliminating talk of a deadline for withdrawal is key to success in the counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan.
No deadline for withdrawal does not mean endless US casualty. Without a deadline, Afghans will have more confidence that supporting the fight against the Taliban will not get them killed because of a premature US withdrawal. This leads to more success in fighting the Taliban which will reduce the number of US casualties.
We have had the American military for more than sixty years in Germany and Japan and for over fifty years in South Korea. There isn’t much objection to this because American troops are not killed in these countries. We may never get to the peaceful conditions of Germany, Japan and South Korea in Afghanistan, but a drastic decrease in casualties will make our presence there as long as needed less of an issue to the American people.
President Obama’s today accepted General McChrystal’s resignation after the publication of an article in Rolling Stone magazine in which McChrystal and his staff were critical of administration officials. McChrystal never challenged Obama’s policy and most of the critical comments came from his staff.
The subordination of America’s military to elected civilian leadership is an important foundation of constitutional government. General McChrystal and his staff said nothing in the article that would constitute subordination. Nevertheless, it was an error in judgment to let a reporter hear what undoubtedly many in the military would say amongst themselves in private conversations.
President Obama could have asked General McChrystal to stay on as the leader in the war in Afghanistan without weakening the principle of civilian leadership over the military. There were differences of opinion on whether McChrystal should stay among conservative commentators. The strongest argument for retaining McChrystal was that we need continuity in leadership during a critical phase in the war.
Given Obama’s decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation, appointing McChrystal’s boss, General Petraeus to lead the war was the best possible outcome. General Petraeus successfully turned around the war in Iraq and created conditions under which a democratically elected Iraqi government with all its imperfections could govern.
President Obama today gave a speech which has been described as the best speech of his presidency. He did indeed commend McChrystal on his outstanding service and he restated the mission in Afghanistan.
There are still issues with Obama’s policy. The most fundamental is that Obama has set July of 2011 as the date for American troops to withdraw from the fight against the Taliban. In a war, you simply cannot let the enemy know that if they hold out long enough, their opponent will withdraw. Afghans have no confidence that their government army will be ready to continue the fight on their own.
Given the credibility and respect that General Petraeus has among all mainstream Americans, he has the opportunity to convince the Obama administration to back off from a fixed withdrawal date and put in place a policy that we will withdraw only when the Taliban has been decisively defeated. We don’t have to stay in Afghanistan forever, but if we let our enemies know that we will not leave before the fight is over, the vast majority of Afghans who oppose the Taliban will not be afraid to support the fight against the Taliban helping us to a faster victory.
General Petraeus deserves our unambiguous support. We wish him well on his new assignment.
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Vice President Joe Biden, addressing the European Parliament got a little carried away in being polite to his host by saying that maybe Brussels, not Washington should be considered the capital of the free world. An innocent gaffe from the gaffemeister? Maybe. But this deference to socialist Europe is also in line with the Obama [...]
I just finished watching The Stoning of Soraya M., a powerful, emotional movie about the brutal stoning of an innocent woman in an Iranian village. Set in 1986 Iran at the start of Khomeini’s reign, director Cyrus Nowrasteh’s drama tells the true story of Soraya (Mozhan Marnò), whose husband plots to have her falsely accused [...]
Poland suffered a great tragedy today when its president, its top military leaders and 90 other people died in a plane crash in Russia. Initial reports indicate that bad weather and human error caused the crash. Ironically, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and the country’s top military leaders were on their way to commemorate the 70th [...]
Babalu Blog comments on a shocking discovery made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reported in the Washington Post: In a revelation that is sure to send shock waves through the halls of the Obama State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has unearthed a shocking discovery in regards to Cuba’s totalitarian government. According to [...]
On Saturday Fidel Castro for the first time in four years addressed Cuba’s communist parliament. He almost died in 2006 from intestinal problems when he handed over power to his now 79-year-old brother Raul Castro. The almost 84-year-old gave a ten minute speech warning about a nuclear holocaust if the United States and Israel stand firm against the dictators of Iran and North Korea and their efforts to develop nuclear weapons. The Miami Herald reports:
