http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/26gates.html?_r=2&hp
Gates seemed to part of the Obama Administration for the long-term. At first he was merely the silent carry over from the Bush administration. His continuation was a surprise because he was the CIA man during “waterboarding” and he was Secretary of Defense after Donald Rumsfeld. That made him a participant in what the Obama administration has blamed for the wrong war, (Iraq) and the wrong methods “waterboarding’. However, this writer was glad because Mr. Obama had denounced both and claimed that he would call all American troops home by 2009 and that he would prosecute CIA personnel as criminals and he would enter more fully into the “right” war which he defined as Afghanistan. However right Mr. Obama’s ideas may have seemed to the millions who elected him, they were worrisome to the Military, the Intelligence Community and to the other millions who did not vote for Barrack Hussein Obama. So when Gates decided to stay on as the Secretary of Defense and the Obama people allowed him, many felt relieved that sense and sanity would prevail over political ideology.
However, with the recent support of the Obama Administration for what they call the Arab Spring, the USA witnessed the reality and complexity of a duplicitous White House. Some review first:
Please remember that Obama went to Egypt and the whole Mid East as one of the very first things he did as President. During that 2009 trip the President called upon the Arab world to embrace a whole new concept of Freedom, and democracy. It was a call to revolution. It was a speech addressed to the Arab World and just recently a later installment of that call was made by Obama in his speech for a Israeli return to 1967 borders.
This blogger has no inside information concerning any USA aid to revolutionary groups within the mid eastern counties and I have no insider information concerning CIA and other clandestine support for rebel groups inside those counties.
However, response to a new US President and the ideas of the “Audacity of Hope” concepts put forth by the Obama government seem to be linked with organized and well equipped rebellions within the target nations. The central planned and unified command structures of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and Syria and Libya are all too obvious- namely, the same issues for the street campaigns, the same signage, the same titles for each of the escalating days of “reckoning” “justice” “”rage” etc themes which indicated central planning and unified organization and funding instead of spontaneous and locally inspired discontent. These factors indicate revolutionaries from outside the targeted countries who were provocateurs inciting street rebellions.
Then we get Tunisia which government easily collapses. Then Egypt which also easily falls. But Libya and Syria seem to linger. The weaker of the two and the one with the most oil is Libya so we see the charade of humanitarian assistance at the end of 218 cruise missiles and two thousand five hundred bombing raids. We see the farce of UN sanctioned mandates for civilian protection which is quickly used as a coverup for violent illegal aggression against the armed forces of the legal Libyan government in support of the rag-tag rebellion army.
Suddenly Secretary Gates appears before Congress with a sour faced Admiral Mullen next to him as Gates declares his opposition to the “war” in Libya. And just as suddenly we hear of Gates being replaced by an old politically trusted hack named Leon Paneta and the CIA job going to General Patraeus whose strategy in Afghanistan is failing. Could it be that Paneta’s new job is to bring the military into line politically with the Obama idea of the “New World Order” and to bring the CIA into that same orbit. (Interesting that Obama is also bringing McChrystal back as some kind of picture boy to be paraded around indicating additional military support for the Obama agenda?! Sad to see such a really great General reduced to a political puppet. But then again, when Obama shuts a person out, like he did McChrystal, the punishment is severely enforced until the person being punished begs for mercy.)
Progressive Politics 