War, Politics, and Life by Bruce Maulden
Insights into the little dust up in the Caucasus region last summer keeps coming into the light just about every day. The West wanted to believe the Russians were the bad guys in the Georgia war, even Jackboot John McCain blubbered, “We are all Georgians” during the conflict, but the facts on the ground seemed…
Rhetoric dreams fade fast when confronted with political reality. Despite President-Elect Obama calling for easy, unconditional talks with just about everybody, and for quickly getting US GIs out of Iraq, reality bites the ass of expectations. How quickly should troops leave, however, is the main concern, especially with the Pentagon. Obama’s stance on Iran, however,…
UPDATE BELOW As President-Elect Obama continues a rapid transition into the White House, he faces not only the mundane problems, like the financial meltdown, wars and more wars, but also the most-major of issues: The end of civilization. Nothin’ heavy. (Illustration of Salvador Dali’s “Cavalier de L’Apocalypse” — Horsemen of the Apocalypse — can be…
As the situation worsens in Afghanistan, some are voicing concerns whether the US should be there in the first place. Seven years along and nothing has really changed. Foreign Policy In Focus two years ago: Yet the Bush administration continues to be in denial about the worsening situation in Afghanistan. President Bush recently declared that…
Decider George said yesterday he had regrets, most of which were some of his hardcase-cowboy, dumb-ass remarks, nothing serious, though, nothing about torture, Iraq, Katrina. “I regret saying some things I shouldn’t have said,” Bush told CNN’s Heidi Collins, when asked to reflect on his regrets over his two terms as president. “Like ‘Dead or…
(Illustration in oil by Frank Quinn of Walpole, MA, can be found here). Despite the ongoing and apparently never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US public for the first time in years, favor the military a more positive view. From yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor: While the military continues to rate highly in public opinion…
Despite the joy, a new CNN poll has exposed a scared, anxious public still worried about which direction this ship of state is headed, a bit concerned the course might be plotted toward an ill-fated collision. After an hour’s delay, the RMS Titanic departed Queenstown, Ireland, about 1:30 in the afternoon, April 11, 1912, bound…
War is chaos — hence the word ‘war‘ can be traced back to the Indo-European root, ‘wers,’ which is to confuse, mix up. Funny, another form derived from the same Indo-European root word had developed into a word denoting a more benign kind of mixture, Old High German, ‘wurst,’ meaning “sausage.†In a flurry of…
Five days after the massive voter surge, President-Elect Obama is treading carefully on all kinds of foreign policy entanglements that have come up, and he’s displayed a sense of you can’t rush good shit in to replace some real bad shit. Despite whatever the voters in the US said last Tuesday, the world remains one…
A woman moves through a graveyard near Kabul in December 2001. In the first seven months of this year, at least 540 Afghan civilians were killed in fighting related to the armed conflict, and add more from recent incidents just this past week. (Illustration found here). According to CNN yesterday, the situation in Afghanistan appears…