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| quote: | Originally posted by Joss Weatherby
Yea, but a multibillion dollar boondoggle that helps no one is not the way to go supporting them.
I do not get you conservative types, you will be totally willing to spend billions on a foreign countries defense against a former and now semi-dormant foe, but god forbid we spend that money here at home trying to fix health care.
Are your priorities with the people of the US or the Czechs and Poles? |
Is it really that black and white to you? A semi-dormant foe? We are placating Russia at the expense of our allies, bottom line. As long as Russia perceives America as weak, they will continue to exert control over the neighboring countries who have been trying to get out from under their influence for decades. Mark Steyn gives some good perspective on the matter:
| quote: | Diplomacy used to be, as Canada's Lester Pearson liked to say, the art of letting the other fellow have your way. Today, it's more of a discreet cover for letting the other fellow have his way with you. The Europeans "negotiate" with Iran over its nukes for years, and, in the end, Iran gets the nukes, and Europe gets to feel good about itself for having sat across the table talking to no good purpose for the best part of a decade. In Moscow, there was a palpable triumphalism in the news that the Russians had succeeded in letting the Obama fellow have their way. "This is a recognition by the Americans of the rightness of our arguments about the reality of the threat or, rather, the lack of one," said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma's international affairs committee. "Finally the Americans have agreed with us."
There'll be a lot more of that in the years ahead.
There is no discreetly arranged "Russian concession." Moscow has concluded that a nuclear Iran is in its national interest � especially if the remorseless nuclearization process itself is seen as a testament to Western weakness. Even if the Israelis are driven to bomb the thing to smithereens circa next spring, that, too, would only emphasize, by implicit comparison, American and European pusillanimity. Any private relief felt in the chancelleries of London and Paris would inevitably license a huge amount of public tut-tutting by this or that foreign minister about the Zionist Entity's regrettable "disproportion." The U.S. defense secretary is already on record as opposing an Israeli strike. If it happens, every thug state around the globe will understand the subtext � that, aside from a tiny strip of land on the east bank of the Jordan, every other advanced society on earth is content to depend for its security on the kindness of strangers.
The Europe Putin foresees will be one not only ever more energy-dependent on Moscow but security-dependent, too � in which every city is within range of missiles from Tehran and other crazies, and is, in effect, under the security umbrella of the new czar. As to whether such a Continent will be amicable to American interests, well, good luck with that, hopeychangers.
In a sense, the health care debate and the foreign policy debacle are two sides of the same coin: For Britain and other great powers, the decision to build a hugely expensive welfare state at home entailed inevitably a long retreat from responsibilities abroad, with a thousand small betrayals of peripheral allies along the way. A few years ago, the great scholar Bernard Lewis warned, during the debate on withdrawal from Iraq, that America risked being seen as "harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend."
In Moscow and Tehran, on the one hand, and Warsaw and Prague, on the other, they're drawing their own conclusions. |
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