According to the Christian Science Monitor and 50,000 other “liberal rags” President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of
Kyrgyzstan says he intends to close the Manas airbase to the US. This is the last US military base in former Soviet Central Asia. Where was this announcement made? In Moscow. Sitting next to Russian president Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev. Medvedev is a proxy for Vladimir Putin, the man into whose soul George Bush peered, reporting with great certainty that this was a good man.
“Manas, a sprawling installation that houses scores of US fighter planes and transport aircraft about 1-hour flight from the Afghan capital of Kabul, has been a key staging point for NATO operations in Afghanistan. Losing it would be a severe blow to Washington as it prepares to boost US forces in the region and searches for alternative supply lines to replace the troubled route through Pakistan.”
By tying our resources and forces down in a misguided war in Iraq and an under-resourced policing action in Afghanistan, and having to rely on Putin for his half-hearted support in the war on terror, Russian ambitions of regaining its former status were encouraged. The massive rise in oil and gas prices funded those ambitions, at the same time as our economy was being weakened by spiking energy prices and sagging economic growth.
The Monitor reports “A US spokesman suggested Bakiyev’s gambit is aimed at wresting more cash from Washington, since rent for Manas has been poverty-stricken Kyrgyzstan’s biggest single source of revenue.
“I think it’s political positioning…. We have a standing contract, and they’re making millions off our presence there,” Colonel Greg Julian, US military spokesman in Afghanistan, told journalists.
But it’s clear that the power has shifted from Bakiyev to Putin, and that’s who President Obama’s team will have to deal.
Ronald Reagan, pounding on a progressive Russian leader Micail Gorbachev, helped bring down the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain of Soviet domination.
George W. Bush, sputtering in the face of an emboldened Russian hardliner, has helped lay the foundations for new walls and an increased Russian influence over its former satellites. Strident words were all we could manage when the Russians invaded Georgia. What else was there? All our resources are committed, and we’ve stretched our military beyond the breaking point, fighting the wrong wars in the wrong ways, at a terrible cost in blood and treasure.
If you voted for Bush once, you can be forgiven.
If you voted for him twice, you should be ashamed and should lend your support to a new President.
If you’d vote for Bush again, you really should wake up, get some serious therapy and look at what the voting public said. Maybe you need to re-evaluate your ideological fixation. Because this isn’t the 19th century world of global empires. It’s the flat, crowded and sweaty 21st century world, and America needs to reposition itself as a moral leader as well as a superpower. The values of Enron, Worldcom, Blackwater and Haliburton can no longer stand if this country is going to.
Change is coming. Change is essential. Get out of the road, and get on the bus.
Pres. Obama and Vice President Biden: Investigations and prosecutions are required. Make the hard decisions and put the prosecutors to work. Show that the rule of law matters and that no one is above it.
May the Higher Power of your choice guide your thoughts and contemplations.
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