Category Archives: International news

International news

Study your history, Sen. Rubio

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio needs a refresher course on 20th-century American history.

The Florida Republican — quite naturally — was critical the other day of President Obama’s decision to begin normalization of relations with Cuba, a nation with which we’ve had zero diplomatic contact for the past five decades.

Rubio ventured into Fox News Channel’s right-wing echo chamber and declared that Obama is the “worst negotiator since Jimmy Carter.”

I heard that and thought, “What in the world is that young man saying?” Chris Matthews noted correctly that Rubio was 7 years of age when President Carter worked some diplomatic magic.

Worst negotiator, eh?

To the young senator, here’s a bit of history for you to ponder.

President Carter summoned two enemy heads of government to the White House in 1978. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to hammer out a historic peace treaty between the ancient enemies.

They went to Camp David, took off their jackets and ties and worked day and night to agree to a peace treaty. Carter reportedly got along much better with Sadat than he did with Begin. Sadat and Begin couldn’t find their way past their ancient differences, dealing mostly with how their people could live together in places like Gaza.

Finally, after several days in the Maryland mountains, Carter got the two men together and the three of them agreed on a peace treaty that holds up today, nearly four decades later. It’s now known as the Camp David Accords.

The deal ended up costing Sadat his life when Muslim extremists assassinated him during a parade. An Israeli extremist would kill Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for hammering out a peace deal with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat.

For the young Florida Republican senator to suggest Jimmy Carter is a terrible presidential “negotiator” is to ignore the historical record.

Hit the books, senator, before popping off.

 

International news, political news

Cuba policy change provokes GOP fight

President Obama is picking a fight — between two Republicans who might want to succeed him in the White House.

I love this infighting.

Obama has announced a dramatic change in our nation’s policy toward Cuba. We’re moving toward normalization of relations, you know, with embassies in both countries and ambassadors representing their nation’s interests.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky supports the change; GOP Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida opposes it.

So, what does Paul do? He calls Rubio an “isolationist.” He mentions his colleague by name. He takes direct aim at the young Floridian’s opposition to what Paul thinks is a reasonable and long overdue change.

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rand-paul-tears-isolationist-marco-rubio-over-cuba

I happen to agree with Sen. Paul on this one.

He wrote an essay for Time magazine in which he lays out his argument. “The supporters of the embargo against Cuba speak with heated passion but fall strangely silent when asked how trade with Cuba is so different than trade with Russia or China or Vietnam,” Paul wrote. “It is an inconsistent and incoherent position to support trade with other communist countries, but not communist Cuba.”

Rubio is among those “strangely silent” lawmakers who cannot grasp the need for change in the U.S.-Cuba relationship.

Rubio actually baited Paul with a statement he made on Fox News: “Like many people who have been opining, [Paul] has no idea what he’s talking about,” Rubio said. Paul’s op-ed essay in Time was in response largely to what Rubio said.

So the intra-GOP fight has commenced.

Rubio’s own Cuban heritage gives him some credibility on this issue. However, like a lot of politicians who blind when the subject of Cuba comes up, Rubio needs to look at the big picture and understand what Barack Obama and Rand Paul both get: If a 50-year policy doesn’t produce any positive change, then it’s time to change the policy.

 

International news

How to respond to cyber attacks?

Let me stipulate that I love living in a relatively free and open society.

However, there are some things I don’t need to know.

I don’t need to know where we’ve deployed all our nuclear weapons and which nations are targeted by them. I don’t need to know where our spies are operating overseas.

And I don’t need to know how we’re going to respond to the cyber attack launched — admittedly — by North Korea in response to that film that depicts an attempt to kill Kim Jong-Un.

President Obama said today at a news conference that the United States is planning a “proportional” response to the cyber attack.

Fine.

Go ahead and plan away. I don’t need to know what we’re going to do to retaliate.

I do have confidence that our highly trained American cyber spooks are going to deliver some serious grief to the North Koreans when the time is right and when they’ve decided how to get back at them for what they did to us on this end.

Let’s face facts. North Korea is a half-starving Third World dictatorship that has squandered its money on a military machine at the expense of feeding its people or providing them with infrastructure. Its Internet technology is third- or maybe fourth-rate as well. Yet the reclusive Stalinist state has managed to hack into American businesses using some skill its cyber geeks have acquired.

How much damage can our geeks do to the North Koreans? Plenty.

I just don’t feel the need to know the nitty-gritty details of what they’re going to do.

 

entertainment news, International news

Sony's bigger mistake was in making film

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President Obama said today Sony Pictures made a mistake when it pulled a film depicting an attempted assassination of North Korean dictator/goofball Kim Jong-Un.

Well, Mr. President, from my vantage point, Sony’s bigger mistake was making the film in the first place.

http://politicslive.cnn.com/Event/President_Obama_Press_Conference?hpt=hp_t1

The film and the reaction from North Korea has been the talk of, well, the world. “The Interview” was supposed to be released. It stars Seth Rogen and James Franco and it’s about a plot to kill Kim Jong-Un.

Sony pulled the picture, cancelling its release after North Korea launched a cyber attack in response to the film. Yes, the crazy Stalinists in North Korea were angry.

Why in the world would anyone be surprised? And why would anyone doubt North Korea would respond with a cyber attack that has done considerable damage around the world?

Why, also, wouldn’t Sony have anticipated this kind of unpredictability from the leader of a reclusive state known to do just about anything to make a point?

Obama said American filmmakers shouldn’t be pushed around by nations angry over their work.

That’ a fair point.

But don’t filmmakers have a responsibility to exercise some judgment in choosing the topics — and individuals — they seek to portray?

They made a “comedy” about an attempt to kill a living, breathing leader of a nation that has acted rather dangerously before.

Therein lies Sony’s mistake.

 

International news, military news

3 ISIL leaders killed; keep killing more of them

The news today that U.S. air strikes have killed three key Islamic State leaders cheered me a little.

Then reality set in almost immediately: There will be others to step in to replace these murderous monsters.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/18/politics/u-s-air-strikes-kill-3-high-level-isis-leaders/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

The White House and the Pentagon couldn’t confirm until recently that the three ISIL leaders had been killed by American pilots. The news is good, to be sure. Pentagon officials say the deaths of these three individuals has “degraded” ISIL’s command and control capability. “We believe that the loss of these key leaders degrades ISIL’s ability to command and control current operations against Iraqi Security Forces, including Kurdish and other local forces in Iraq,” Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said.

OK, so what now?

Well, we keep launching air strikes and we keep killing the leaders of this terrorist cabal.

As we’ve learned in the fight against al-Qaeda, killing key leaders doesn’t mean the end of a group’s ability to function. We killed Osama bin Laden, but al-Qaeda lives on.

ISIL won’t die a quick death. It will require continued vigilance and diligence on our part to ensure that the terrorists remain “degraded.” Then we must destroy them.

 

International news

U.S. need not continue pointless embargo

The United States embargo against Cuba did not work.

It won’t work in the future.

So, the president of the United States made a calculation: If the sanctions are being enforced by just one nation in the world, ours, what is precisely the point of continuing a policy that the entire rest of the world is ignoring?

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2014/12/50-years-is-long-enough-to-prove-that-cuba-sanctions-werent-working.html/

Let’s put it another, harsher, way: One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

OK, our Cuba policy wasn’t exactly insane. It just nutty.

The Cuban people deserve to be free. President Obama has declared his intention to keep applying the pressure on Cuba’s leaders to give Cubans basic human rights that others in civilized nations ought to enjoy. The best way for the United States to apply that pressure is to engage the Cubans directly through diplomatic missions. So, let’s start that project.

Our non-relationship has lasted 50 years. It began when the Cold War was going full bore. That “war” has ended. Cuba is a Third World country that does business with Canada and Mexico, North America’s other two giant nations. It also does business with virtually the entire world.

Only the United States enforces this so-called “embargo.”

It is good that we end it. The sooner the better.

As the president noted, if we can engage nations such as China and Vietnam — two nations we have fought on the battlefield — surely we ought to do the same with Cuba.

International news, military news

Massacre might have gained U.S. an ally

It is virtually impossible to find any glimmer of goodness in the massacre of school children by monstrous terrorists.

But the Taliban’s attack the other day in Peshawar, Pakistan on a military school that killed dozens of students might have produced a single — but critical — bit of positive news.

It might have delivered to the United States a critical ally in its war on terror. Welcome to the fight, Pakistan.

http://video.kacvtv.org/video/2365388149/

Sure, Pakistani leaders have said they’re on board with fighting terrorists. Their actions — or non-actions — though, tell a different story.

Terrorists have been given refuge in the remote regions of the country bordering Afghanistan. Military and law enforcement experts keep telling us about the difficulty of navigating through the region, that it’s impossible to track down and capture or kill the bad guys. However, as the PBS link attached here explains, the Peshawar attack has shocked and stunned Pakistanis at every level.

And how in he world does one explain that the late Osama bin Laden — the world’s most notorious terrorist — had been “hiding in plain sight” in the middle of a major Pakistani city? In May 2011, though, Navy SEALs, Army Special Forces pilots and CIA commandos took care of that by hunting down bin Laden and killing him in his compound.

The Pakistani response to that raid? They threw up their hands as if to say, “Who knew?”

The Taliban’s horrific act well might spur the Pakistanis now to do more than just say they’re in the game. They’ve lost many of their young people in a horrifying attack perpetrated by a despicable band of killers.

It’s time to actually join the fight.

 

International news, political news

No surprise at GOP balking over Cuba proposal

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Imagine my huge surprise that two leading Florida politicians, both Republicans, would be critical of President Obama’s decision to begin normalizing relations with Cuba.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parent fled Cuba to the United States, and former Gov. Jeb Bush, a probable candidate for president in 2016, both have come out against the president’s plan.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/alan-gross-released-113635.html?hp=c2_3

I get it. Really, I do.

They’re appealing to their home state political base, which includes a seriously anti-communist Cuban-American community that cannot stomach the thought of their communist former homeland getting any kind of overture from the United States.

OK, I’m just kidding about the surprise.

Obama is going to hear more angst from other Republicans. Some of them are going to openly oppose any effort to end the economic embargo because they, too, are afraid of the party’s base.

The effort got kick started when Cuba released Alan Gross from five years of wrongful imprisonment. In return, the United States sent three Cuban prisoners back to the island nation.

Given that Cuba poses zero threat militarily to the United States and that regular, run-of-the-mill Cubans deserve a chance to see their country improve its economic standing when the U.S. embargo is lifted, the decision seemed prudent and compassionate.

Yet some in Congress only heard part of the president’s remarks today. He said he intends to keep pressuring the Cubans to improve human rights and that the Havana government must allow people to express themselves freely. Did I hear the president correctly on that? I believe so.

Why didn’t Rubio and Bush hear it? Oh, that’s right. One is a probable candidate for president and the other, Rubio, might jump in, too.

An upcoming political campaign appears to be hard on politicians’ hearing.

 

entertainment news, International news

What was Sony thinking?

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Time allows one to think things through and to cogitate a bit on the consequences of one’s action.

Perhaps the makers of the film “The Interview” could have thought just a little bit longer about the product that was supposed to be shown to American theater crowds.

I’ve been pondering the blowback from the film, the threats of Internet hackers striking back at the producers of the film — and at the public at large. My conclusion? I believe Sony Pictures should have known with whom it was dealing when it made a “comedy” about an attempt to assassinate the leader of North Korea.

My sympathy for Sony, the actors involved and those who thought they would make a lot of money from the film is waning — rapidly.

The film stars Seth Rogen and James Franco. It’s supposedly a comedy. The main characters are plotting to kill Kim Jong Un.

Let’s be real. The entire world knows about Kim Jong Un’s weirdness. The world knows he runs a country that gives hyper-secrecy a bad name. I mean, this place is reclusive beyond description. Kim’s antics — just as those of his late father, Kim Jong Il — are, to say the least, highly unpredictable.

Why couldn’t the makers of the film fictionalized the story? Why single out the leader of a nation — and a dangerous one at that — for this kind of “comic parody”? What would the reaction be in any country on Earth if someone made a film purporting to assassinate its leader?

My conclusion is that Sony should have expected a highly negative reaction from a country that hardly anyone knows with any certainty.

Terror threats in response to the film? Well, duh! Do you think?

 

entertainment news, International news

Terrorism goes online

Twenty-first century terrorism has entered a new phase.

It’s highly offensive and utterly mind-blowing. It comes in the form of threats to hack into people’s emails if they dare attend a movie — a movie, for crying out loud! — that portrays the North Korean goofball/dictator in a decidedly unflattering light.

This is what terrorism looks like in the Digital Age.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/17/media/the-interview-sony-theater-owners/index.html?hpt=hp_t2&hpt=hp_c2

The film in question is “The Interview.” It stars Seth Rogan and James Franco. Sony today cancelled the release of the film after major movie chains declined to show the film because of terrorist threats by computer hackers.

The film is about an attempted assassination of Kim Jong Un, the bizarre North Korean dictator who succeeded his equally bizarre father, Kim Jong Il. It’s a comedy. It’s meant to make people laugh. It’s meant to poke fun at the reclusive Marxist government that operates in the shadows on the Korean Peninsula.

So now some mysterious Internet terrorists are telling American movie-goers that they cannot watch the film. What do they fear? That someone is going to see the film and then become motivated to try to do what is portrayed on the screen? That the movie is going to produce an assassin bent on killing Kim Jong Un?

Sony already has been hit by hackers reportedly angry over the film.

All of this has me absolutely bumfuzzled.