Deja Vu All Over Again

The old time baseball player Yogi Berra used to talk about things feeling like "Deja Vu All Over Again." Well that's how I feel right now like we're experiencing Deja Vu All Over Again in other words reliving the past.
The past being the late 1990s, remember that era when the public was obsessed with the John Benet Ramsey Case and other sensational crimes, we're obsessed with that all over again. Or when the chattering classes were obsessed with the blunders and shortcomings of a lovable but fallable president? It seems that way again only the president was Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush. Then as now political extremists are demanding the impeachment of a president they dislike, the difference being that the extremists are leftists and the president a Republican. Although, the rantings and ravings of the Far Left against Bush sound exactly like the bile directed against Clinton ten years ago from the right.
Finally there's the monstrous evil we're ignoring again as we ignored ten years ago Islamic terrorism. We spent the nineties pretending that Islamic terrorism didn't exist or didn't affect us even if it did. Even though Islamic terrorists had carried out a deadly attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. No matter what the Islamic terrorists did over seas or at home we ignored them.
We all know how that ended, it ended in the horror of Sept. 11 and 2,000 Americans slaughtered on American soil by Islamic terrorists. I wonder when will we or our leaders wake up and see what's going on. My guess is that we'll we wake up when Bin Ladin and his ilk perpetuate something worse than Sept. 11.

French Troops In Lebanon: A Very Bad Idea

From the geniuses of international diplomacy comes another really bad idea to end the fighting in Lebanon that will only make the crisis worse by spreading the conflict to Europe: the deployment of French peacekeeping troops to Lebanon.
The general plan for ending the fighting is for a deployment of a “robust international peacekeeping force” to Southern Lebanon, preliminary plans call for this force to be composed of 15,000 French troops. To me this doesn’t sound like a plan for peacekeeping, to me it sounds like a recipe for an all out war between Europe and the forces of Radical Islam. A war for which I don’t think France is prepared for or even capable of fighting.
The French aren’t even capable of policing the streets of their own cities, remember last year’s riots when Moslem youth burned up large areas of French cities. The French military couldn’t stop the rampaging mobs from burning cars and destroying property. If French troops can’t protect the property of French citizens in France how are they supposed to protect Israel from Hezbollah? Hezbollah has fought the Israeli Army one of the world’s best to a stand still now the French are supposed to contain this menace, give me a break!
The French troops probably couldn’t stabilize the situation in Lebanon and would probably destabilize France itself in the process. I imagine that the French troops would have to fight their way into Southern Lebanon and kill Moslem civilians, probably women and children in the process. The reaction to this in France would probably be another round of really destructive rioting from France’s Islamic minority, rioting that French leftists would probably join in.
The sight of French soldiers, Lebanon’s former colonial occupiers in Southern Lebanon would probably enflame Islamic public opinion and lead to further terrorist attacks on France. Within a few weeks of the French landing, the first bombs would be going off in the Paris Metro and French civilians would be dying. I imagine the reaction of the French people would be to demand the troops be called back further destabilizing Lebanon. Leaving Israel with little choice but to make South Lebanon into a wasteland, an act that would further inflame Moslem opinion against Israel.
The way would be cleared for the all out Middle Eastern War that Hezbollah seems to want. A war that would totally destabilize that region and have catastrophic effects upon the entire world.
So how should a “peacekeeping force” be constituted? My suggestion would be a combination of American, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, Indian and Israeli troops with some British and European units added to the mix. This force would have the authority and firepower to restore order and shore up the Lebanese government, it would also have a mandate to disarm and disband Hezbollah, a terrorist force that is a threat to world peace.
Chinese and Indian troops have to play a major role in this peacekeeping force because it is time for the world’s real major powers to step up to the plate and take responsibility. The United States and Europe have carried the burden of peacekeeping too long, a burden that they increasingly lack the power and money to uphold.
Will we see such a sensible course of action from the world’s major powers? Yes, but only after the French adventure in Lebanon has been a complete catastrophe and a great deal of French blood has been spilled because of the arrogant delusion that France is a major power. A delusion that must be sacrificed if we are to achieve a real peace in the Middle East.

Fidel Castro: America's Creation

The world’s most pesky dictator, Fidel Castro, has once again managed to upstage war in the Middle East for command of the nation’s headlines. Simply by getting sick or claiming too Fidel can command the news, so many of us ask who is this man and where did he come from? The answer is simple and obvious, the United States of America created Fidel Castro and has kept him in power for generations.
Fidel Castro is a living relic, the New World’s last living dictator, he’s outlasted them all and is still in power while his right wing rival Augusto Pinochet is facing trial for his crime. Fidel is also one of the few real Communists left, he believes in Socialism to an unprecedented extent, he has sacrificed his own country to it. Had Fidel allowed capitalist economic reforms in the 1980s, he’d be among the world’s richest men and Cuba would be a wealthy country today.
Fidel has been able to do this only because the USA has allowed him to do it as a short glance at the ugly history between the United States and Cuba reveals. Fidel got his start in the 1950s as a guerrilla fighting the corrupt rule of his predecessor, General Batista. Fidel won his war because Batista was a complete fool and didn’t have an effective army and because the United States allowed him too.
Among Fidel’s tactics were the kidnapping of American citizens to use as hostages. As long as he kept Americans hostage, Fidel knew that Batista’s air force wouldn’t bomb his guerilla strongholds. President Dwight D. Eisenhower did nothing about this outrage even though there was a garrison of US Marines at Guantamo Bay that could have easily rounded up Fidel and his sorry guerrilla forces and ended their revolution.
Eventually Fidel seized power and in the process overthrew Cuba’s constitutional president. The United States did nothing even though Fidel’s henchman Che Guevara was murdering his political opponents in the soccer stadium in Downtown Havana.
The fairy story the American Left tells is that the heroic rebel Fidel overthrew the corrupt dictator Batista and brought social justice to Cuba. This is nonsense, Cuba was a prosperous country in 1959, it’s level of income rivaled the United States today it is among the world’s poorest thanks to Fidel’s Marxist economy.
Then there’s the matter of skin color, General Batista was black, the son of poor peasants, Castro is white the son of a rich land owner. None of Fidel’s ruling elite are black, the only black man at Fidel’s table is the guy clearing away the dishes. Fidel’s so called revolution has all the hallmarks of “putting the darkies in their place.” Dark skinned people who look to the American Left for social justice should consider this. American leftists are racists and like racists as long as they cloak themselves in Marxist rhetoric.
Once in power, Fidel couldn’t run to Moscow to kiss the asses in the Kremlin fast enough. Unfortunately America’s leaders, in particular that overrated Ivy League wimp, John F. Kennedy, couldn’t see this. JFK held back especially at the Bay of Pigs, a few flights of US warplanes to assist the Cuban exiles on the beach and Fidel, Che, and Raul would have on the plane to Moscow and the Cuban Revolution a sorry footnote in history. Instead JFK wimped out and the result was the Cuban Missile Crisis, an international incident entirely created by the incompetence, shortsightedness and stupidity of the doped up, cocktail guzzling party boy from Harvard Yard. Instead of simply ignoring the obsolete Russian missiles in Cuba, JFK courted World War III then sold the people of Cuba out. Had JFK yawned, went on television and said my fellow Americans the Russian missiles in Cuba pose no danger to you so ignore them, Khrushchev would have calculated that supporting Fidel was a waste of money called his troops home, ended the Soviet support for East Germany in the Caribbean and in a few years Fidel would have come crawling to Washington on his hands and knees begging for foreign aid.
Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s Fidel remained in power only because the Red Army was there to protect him. Freedom loving Cubans got the message, America has abandoned you oppose Fidel and get a Russian bullet in your chest. Unfortunately the withdrawal of the Red Army from Cuba wasn’t followed by a speedy American occupation of Cuba and the arrest of Fidel and the rest of the traitors who sold Cuba out to Communism.
In the 1990s, Fidel stayed in power only because Bill Clinton who values the opinions of liberals at New York cocktail parties more than the freedom of the Cuban people just like his icon JFK refused to pull the plug on Castro. Had Slick Willy simply done to Fidel what Bush sr. did to Noriega the sorry charade would have been over and Cuba would have been free. Since Sept. 11, America has had real enemies to worry about so Bush has ignored the tired old fraud of Havana.
Castro has remained in power for nearly fifty years not because the Cuban people love him, but because certain elements in the American elite want him in power. They love the idea of Castro at America’s footstep because it proves how great and good America is no matter how the Cuban people suffer. America can tolerate anything even regimes it finds ideologically unpalatable. If the Cuban people want Castro, let them have him, even though Castro has never allowed a democratic election, Fidel’s a smart old bird, he knows the only reason he’s still alive is that his thugs have their guns trained on the Cuban people. Take away the goons and the secret police and the crowds waving Cuban flags and shouting Fidel’s name would quickly turn into a lynch mob cheering as the firing squad pumped a few bullets into him and his worthless brother.
The old editorial cartoon of Fidel saying he owed his job to the New York Times is correct. The American liberal elite likes Fidel in power and lets him stay there, the only reason he’s still in power today is that he’s not worth the expenditure of US forces to remove him. America should apologize to the Cuban people for Fidel, because his crimes are America’s crimes and I have a feeling that both the United States and Cuba are going to pay for those crimes in innocent blood long after Fidel’s sorry corpse is rotting away in the grave.