Putin supports Obama's reelection, or does he? Whither Georgia?

Now that Putin supports Obama over Romney, do TRUE AMERICANS support Romney?  Can a True American possibly support a candidate supported by Putin?  Or is Putin only pretending to support Obama, to help Romney?  Or are we supposed to think that Putin’s support for Obama is a ruse to make us think that he merely pretends to like Romney, hoping for an Obama victory.  Or . . . .

I’ll take him at his word.  Russia’s Caucasus problems with Islamist militants are real.  Obama is more likely to be helpful than the inflexible Romney.  I don’t like some of Obama’s anti-terrrorist policies, but I like them better than Bushco’s, which Romney’s election would see reborn.

I worry about Georgia and the new revelations of Abu Garbe-like prisoner abuse in the prison system there.  The present Georgian administration is close to the Obama administration.

"When, O When, will the world turn sane?”, the old man laments.

Note:  The Moscow Times is owned by the Finnish publishing group Sanoma. Wikipedia says that the Times frequently is critical of the Russian administtation.

Why Putin Wants Obama to Win

27 September 2012
By Andrei Tsygankov


The 2012 U.S. presidential election presents a contrast to the 2008 election in terms of their perceptions by the Russian elite.
In 2008, then-President Dmitry Medvedev expressed a desire to work with a "modern" U.S. leader rather than one "whose eyes are turned back to the past." He was referring to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But influential Russian elites voiced their support for the Republican candidate, John McCain, despite McCain calling President Vladimir Putin a KGB spy who has no soul and calling to expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial nations.
Even though McCain was more critical of the Kremlin, some members of Putin's entourage favored McCain because they believed he was more predictable than Obama. They insisted that Russia was doing well economically, whereas the United States was losing one position in the world after another. Therefore, when confronted with the U.S. threat, Russia might only get stronger and consolidate its status as a great sovereign power. The elite's main concern is with rebuilding power and geopolitical influence. If McCain were in the White House, the thinking went, Putin would have a convenient anti-Russian bogeyman whom the Kremlin could exploit for domestic political reasons, giving it another pretext to ratchet up its anti-Americanism, increase defense expenditures and crack down on the opposition.
Yet it seems that the Kremlin's support for U.S. hawks is shifting. In March, Medvedev took issue with U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney's characterization of Russia as the "No. 1 geopolitical foe." He said the view "smelled of Hollywood stereotypes" and suggested that it was rooted in the Cold War.
But it wasn't only Medvedev and his pro-Western supporters who became critical of the Republican's views. Although President Vladimir Putin recently thanked Romney for his openness regarding the "No.1 foe" comment, he also indicated that it would be hard for the Kremlin to work with Romney as president, especially on sensitive security issues such as the missile defense system. During Putin's interview with RT state television, he also called Obama an "honest man who really wants to change much for the better." This comment was widely viewed as Putin's most direct endorsement of Obama in the presidential race.
The change in Russia's perception can be explained by the sobering effects of the global financial crisis and progress that Russia and the United States have made since 2009. The crisis ended Russia's era of 7 percent average annual growth from 1999 to 2008. Russia, which is overly dependent on energy exports, was hit particularly hard by the 2008 crisis. Its gross domestic product fell about 8.5 percent in 2009, while China and India continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace.
It took Russia's leadership some time to adjust its foreign policy to the new global conditions. Obama's decision to improve relations with the country and establish strong ties with Medvedev despite Russia's war with Georgia in August 2008 was essential. The diplomacy of pressing the "reset" button with Russia proved important for alleviating the Kremlin's fear of NATO expansion and the region's destabilization in response to Washington's strategy of regime change in several countries.
Since 2009, the two sides have cooperated by signing and then ratifying the new START treaty, imposing tougher sanctions on Iran and working to stabilize Afghanistan. Not only did the Kremlin provide overflights and overland transportation, but it also recently approved NATO's use of the Ulyanovsk airport as a transit point for soldiers and cargo to and from Afghanistan. Russia also renewed a strong interest in developing economic relations with the United States and completed negotiations over its membership in the World Trade Organization.
The progress in U.S.-Russian relations since 2009 does not mean that Russians are entirely satisfied with their relations with the U.S. Russia remains critical of the U.S. proposal to develop the missile defense system jointly with the Europeans without Russia's participation. At the end of 2010, Moscow had to swallow its pride by shelving Medvedev's proposal to create a pan-European security treaty after getting an ice-cold reaction from the U.S. and NATO. Furthermore, NATO remains supportive of Georgia's eventual membership in the alliance, a particularly sore point in U.S.-Russian relations. Finally, the Kremlin's stubborn support of Syria in the United Nations Security Council remains an irritant for Obama and even more so for Romney.
Despite all the Kremlin's frustrations, it remains hopeful that Obama will be re-elected and that he will help to move U.S.-Russian relations forward. The stronger dialogue and engagement that may result from an Obama presidency is an opportunity to weaken nationalist phobias in both Russia and the U.S. This opportunity must be seized.
Andrei Tsygankov is professor of international relations and political science at San Francisco State University.

Happy news:Arab Spring comes to Saudi Arabia?

First hint of trouble on national news media:  From Tom Brokaw:  Saudi leadership is aging; caught between Wahabis and a rising population of unemployed young folks. I'll look for more.

Why Muslims Think Muslims Riot

The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad. . .

. . . including two showing him naked.  An obscure US film insulting the Prophet was translated into Arabic and circulate throughout the Arabic world (but not in Saudi Arabia) by the Saudis,.

Following, there have been some demonstrations in 20 Muslim countries, and some people, including a US ambassador, have been killed.

These two insults to the prophet are said  have produced the demonstrations.

From The Guardian, September 12, 2012:

Condemning the publication of the cartoons in France as an act verging on incitement, Egypt's grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, said on Thursday it showed how polarized the west and the Muslim world had become.

Muhammad and his companions had endured "the worst insults from the non-believers of his time", he wrote on the Reuters blog Faith World.

"Not only was his message routinely rejected, but he was often chased out of town, cursed and physically assaulted on numerous occasions.

"But his example was always to endure all personal insults and attacks without retaliation of any sort. There is no doubt that, since the prophet is our greatest example in this life, this should also be the reaction of all Muslims."

•  •  •  •

Gomaa said insults to Islam and the response, including the killing of the US ambassador in Libya and attacks on other western embassies in the region, could not be dissociated from other points of conflict between the west and the Muslim world.

He cited the treatment of Muslims at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay  the US-led war in Iraq, drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan, and the denomination  of Muslims by far-right European parties as "underlying factors" for the tension. [Emphasis added]

Well, maybe so.   You have to love a country deeply to be truly angry with it.  Folks in Cairo don't know the US, they know a cartoon of it; the anger reflected in the Muslim demonstations have a theatrical quality, and were easily put down by authorities. (The well-executed attack on our consulate in Benghazi is another matter.)

I, am a Unites States citizen: I denounce the horrendous prison at Guantanamo Bay and also the one at Pelican Bay, just sas bad, with its non-judicial solitary confinement for life; the cruel and blunderous Iraq war that hurt Iraqis so badly and even now harms US interests. Drone strike in Yemen are another matter; not as bad as an innovation of Yemen, which we could still do, and not as good as cooperating with the Southern Secessionist Movement

So I don't  accept the good Worthy's assessment uncritically.

Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa was appointed to his high position by the dictator and friend of the US, Hosni Mubarak, in September 2003.  Google does not report anti-West sentiments by Gomaa until it became obvious that his patron would fall.  Then he became sympathetic with the "youthful demonstrators".  Gomaa focuses on Western flaws and faials to mention Mulim ones:  the grossly unfair treatment of it's women and the murder by hanging of  Gay men; depositing horded billions of dollars "safely" rather than investing them in jobs that could feed their people; the ungracious ignoring of billions of aid the West has praovide to the Muslim world.

We all see the world through prisoms; no reason to expect a High Religious Eminence to be better than the average run of mankind.

∼  ∼  ∼

The Web images, in the main, remind me of youthful pranks I might have  joined with glee when I was 18.

Some of the images below are tragic, some are hurtful, some defiantly disrespectful of the all-powerful West and Israel (What fun that must be, and at what little personal cost to most!), some are dignified, some are of bravery, but mostly they are of youngmen letting offf long-pent-up steam.

Here are some of riot images I like, mostly from Cairo.  I like them for a variety of reasons, some artistic, and some you won't like, for reasons of misplaced patriotism:

Male bonding, Cairo

From The Guardian:  Pakistani soldiers hold back 

Muslim protesters shouting anti-US slogans 

as they attempt to reach the US embassy 

during a demonstration against

 the anti-Islam film 

in Islamabad. 

Photograph: Aamir Qureshi/AFP/Getty Image

Outside the US Embassy in Yemen.  From VIN, The Voice of the Jewish  Orthodox Community."  

Yemeni hvve a special 

reason for disliking the US 

which hass to do with 

tribes, abuse of power,  

and an instinct for democracy.  

More in a different  blog.

Pakistan

Sudan

Outside the US Consultate in Libya.  

Some, like this image, have been blogged so many times 

that I can't tell its origin.

Sudan.  Someone is  preparing to burn someone's flag, 

and others are intent on stopping him.  

Explain, please.

Pakistani lawyers, no doubt.

India.  Don't know who is depicted with Hussein.  

Looks artificial and posed.

Said to be Bagdad or in Pakistan.  

My kinda guys.  I loved climbing flag poles. . . when I was young.

Cairo

Cairo

Pakistan

London.  Perhaps a Londoner standing near by would hold a sign:

"Muslims, Keep out of  English lands",

but that would be boorish.  I have a button from the 60s:  

"US Out of North America."  

I guess is was only partly a  joke.

Cairo.  A Baroque image.

Mannerly Irrnians

Yemen at our embassy gates.  

Note that there are no images from

 the Horrible Saudis, 

because public displays of  anything at all 

are prohibited.

Bad boys playing with fire.

Somalia.  Somebody is abut to burn a flag,

 others are bent on stopping him.  

What's going on here?

In my dreams,

this would be me.

Heart-sick

Heart-sick.  If Bushco had been responsible, rage would know no bounds;  there is rage against Hussein Obama for our treatment of this young Yemeni.  I admit to being partial in the distribution of my rage, for there are many things I like about Obama; few abut Bushco.  In this matter, they stand equally condemned.

The worst of the horrors of this detailed in The Times article below is force-feeding a bound, helpless man, entrusted to our care, who wanted only to die.  We -- you and I, our Nation -- denied him that Liberty by tying him up and forcing tubes through his nostrils into his stomach, to give him food he didn’t want.  Try being force-fed through your nostrils; see how you like it.  Try having it done to you against your will.  

Tomás de Torquemada was a mere child when it comes to torture.  Burning at a stake would be a blessed relief, compared to our -- our -- obstinate refusal to allow this this suffering young man even to have the peace of a death he desired.  Surcease from sorrow, indeed.

I pity, too, the military men who had to guard and injure and humiliate this man through all the years of his detention.  I do not envy them their old age.  I know a little about memory and old age.

Men and women are storming the US embassy gates in Yemen.  We supported a ruthless dictator in Yemen for years; we now support his hand-picked successor.  If Yemeni treated a US citizen this way, systematically, for years, would we tolerate it?  Why the hell shouldn’t Yemeni hate the United States? 

Can we, in time, right some of these wrongs?  It doesn’t seem likely.  And we are said to be the Beckon of Liberty for the World.  Liberty’s light is burning low.

September 15, 2012Death at Guantánamo Bay

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen and one of the first detai

nees sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, died thereearlier this month. There is no official autopsy report yet, but in his decade in prison he had gone on hunger strikes and made several suicide attempts.

In 2006 and 2008, during the George W. Bush administration, and again in 2010, during the Obama administration, government officials recommended Mr. Latif for transfer out of Guantánamo as a low-level threat. But he was kept behind bars — though no formal charges were brought against him — because both administrations were wary of sending detainees back to Yemen for security reasons, and other countries were wary of accepting them.

Mr. Latif’s lawyers battled for his freedom in federal court, making him a test case for the rule of law at Guantánamo, which has been notably deficient.

In 1994, when he was 18, Mr. Latif sustained injuries to his skull and ear in a car accident in Yemen, and he went to Jordan for treatment. Seven years later, he went to Pakistan, he said, to get additional medical treatment. The Pakistani police seized him near the Afghanistan border, and he was transferred to American custody. The United States government contended that he was an Al Qaeda recruit who trained and fought with the Taliban.

In 2010, he was ordered freed from Guantánamo by Federal District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr., who ruled that Mr. Latif’s detention was unlawful because the government had not shown that he was part of Al Qaeda or any associated force. But last October, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed Judge Kennedy’s ruling.

The appeals court majority, in a manifestly incorrect decision, said that the government’s dubious and uncorroborated intelligence report about Mr. Latif had to be treated as reliable and accurate, like official tax receipts, unless there was “clear evidence to the contrary” — shifting the burden of proof to the detainee.

The Supreme Court did not take the Latif case for review, despite its promise in its 2008 decision in the Boumediene case that prisoners were entitled to a “meaningful opportunity” to challenge the lawfulness of their detention.

For much of the time in custody, Mr. Latif was in solitary confinement, often with his hands in cuffs and his arms pinned by a body cuff. He was also housed in a psychiatric ward and force-fed through tubes in his nose because of his hunger strikes.

When he died he had not been charged with any crime or legal violation, as is the case for most of the 167 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo. This brutal outpost has tarnished American justice every day of its existence.

Our mess in Iraq -- still

We made a mess in Iraq.  We  -- the United Sates of America.  Bushco is the proximate cause, and we elected it.  Twice.  Our bad.  Yours and mie, if you can vote in the United States.  "Their" pain.

Those of us who opposed Bushco should have worked harder; resisted more strongly; risked more.  That goes double for Romney the Good Mormon Bully.


"Unintended" consequences.  For some of the unintended consequences  from Iraq -- what we now blithely call "collateral damage" -- see here.

The latest report of Bushco's Gift that Keeps On Giving comes from The Guardian:  the Iraqi government -- our Iraqi government -- is torturing and killing gays: gay men and boys, men and boys suspected of  being gay; men and boys who look as if thy might be gay.

Killing gays, governments torturing, raping, hanging us, will not long last. The practice will disappear in a mere two or three generations.  Millions of five-year-olds throughout the world may freely view images of extraordinary sexual explicitness of every variety there is  -- save only necrophilia, bestiality, and sex with children -- on the Web, and mores will change even in the Shiite, Mormon, and Roman Catholic traditions. Salafists, now enjoying a revival fueled by Saudi money, will be a thing of the past, though I suppose we, "this busy monster Man unkind" will invent new horrors.


A blog I posted a few days ago is of images of gay men.  The images are taken from blogs published freely in many counties and are available for viewing by the world's five-year-olds.  My blog is read -- or at looked at -- in many lands, including Muslim and Roman Catholic lands.  Yes, even in Utah.


Here are a few of the international images of gay men and boys available on the Web.  A great blog, another country, has an impassioned plea that all nations stop killing gays.

Innocent.  Sweet.  Naive, even.  And I would be killed in our Iraq.  Here, there has been no midnight knock on the door; my friends have not been interrogated; my internet has not been blocked.

While we await the a more accepting future, I would that our Secretary of State, with the hugh contingent of Mercenaries in Iraq at her disposal,  insist on some corrective action by the Iraqi government!


Write or call anyone you know or know about (Hillary Clinton, even if you don't know her) who has the authority to rescue our friends in Iraq from the doom we visit upon our friends.  Do it now.  

Please.

Durell


kP.a., Don't Bomb Iran.  Do encourage it to be more humane than its enemy, the Horrible Saudis.  Or thy Bad-enough Mormons.