After US blood and treasure expended in Iraq – 9 years of war, hundreds of billions of dollars, and 4,500 American dead – what is to stop ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) from overrunning the whole of Iraq? Iraq has 250,000 frontline troops, 270 aircraft including drones, 130 helicopters, and 400 […]
Posts Tagged ‘Barack Obama’
Is Russia now in charge of Middle East policy?
Sep 17th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.The US has been comprehensively outmanoeuvred over Syria. First, the Commons vote induced Obama to seek a vote in Congress to shore up his authority to take military action against the background that US public opinion shared UK public opinion in resisting any further intervention in the Middle East. Then as uncertainty grew about the […]
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The West is too riddled with self interest to lead on Syria or other world affairs
Sep 5th, 2013 by Michael Meacher.Obama’s key line that the attack on Syria would be a short, surgical strike was designed to win over those who were appalled at Assad’s (virtually certain) use of chemical weapons and wanted him to be punished, but without risk of another long war. His latest deviation from this line – that the missile strike […]
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Obama could yet make New Labour’s mistake
Nov 19th, 2012 by David Osler.MOST liberal post-mortems of the US presidential contest have been pretty upbeat; many comfortingly assert that the Republicans can never win again. The GOP is said to be irretrievably out of sync with the new America of openly lesbian senators, women who know their bodies cannot shut down rape pregnancies, and ever-increasing numbers of Latinos […]
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Lessons from Obama’s victory
Nov 9th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.It’s not simply that Obama won, nor even that he won by a far larger margin than the media (ever eager to exaggerate electoral uncertainty to increase newspaper sales) had predicted. It’s the small print of the election which is so interesting. Social liberalism prevailed over hardline conservatism.
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Polls: Obama would win a world vote, and might scrape home in the US too
Oct 12th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.A UPI/CVoter/Gallup poll of people in more than 30 countries shows U.S. President Barack Obama would win by 81% to 19% if they were allowed to vote in the U.S. election. The highest levels of support were in Iceland (98%), Netherlands, Portugal & Germany (97%), Ireland & Denmark (96%), and Switzerland, France and Finland (95%). The only […]
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Wake the fuck up, says Samuel Jackson
Sep 27th, 2012 by Newsdesk.Get off your ass and start campaigning for Obama, is the message of this great video. Not an official ad, but one promoted by the Jewish Council for Research and Education. Excellent.
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The big US-UK divide
Mar 15th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.Cameron has enjoyed portraying in Washington that the US and UK are marching in lockstep towards early withdrawal from Afghanistan. But not on what matters even more – policy towards the deficit. There are two ways to deal with a big budget deficit: one is by cutting back expenditure (austerity) and the other is growth […]
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The end of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam
Dec 15th, 2011 by Michael Meacher.The final pull-out of US troops from Iraq marks the end, or perhaps just one stage of the end, of the biggest military disaster since Vietnam. Every US-UK goal behind the invasion has been lost, in some cases humiliatingly. Iran, the target for revenge after the sacking of the US embassy in 1979, emerges as […]
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Iraq and the Arab Spring: a thought experiment
Dec 15th, 2011 by David Osler.Very few things about the political state of Iraq can accurately be described as clear. But now that the flag has been cased and the last 4,000 US troops are on the way home, some sort of preliminary balance sheet is finally possible. As president Obama told the troops at the military base in Fort […]
