When America did nothing after Obama’s red line was crossed, U.S. credibility suffered.
In early August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait and declared it to be his nation’s lost 19th province.
Said George H. W. Bush, “This will not stand!”
Translation: Get out of Kuwait, Saddam, or we will come over there and throw you out.
Six months later, after a five-week air assault on Iraq, a U.S.-led army of 500,000, in a 100-hour ground war, sent Saddam’s legions back up the road to Basra and Baghdad.
By Tim “xrugger” Stebbins for The Burning Platform
I have been thinking a great deal lately about red lines, those Rubicon’s of thought and action that, once crossed, present little or no opportunity of a peaceful return to the original status quo. There are lines crossed by tyrants, which finally trigger the violent response of a people too long oppressed. There are lines beyond which not one more compromise, law, or government threat will suffice to maintain a precarious peace. The riflemen at Lexington and Concord understood that kind of red line.
I got to thinking also of Colonel Travis’ apocryphal “line in the sand” at the Alamo. His red line was an invitation to sacrifice and martyrdom. The men who stepped over that line crossed in an instant from their present reality into the mists of myth and legend. Such is the power of a red line.
A major goal of this Asia trip, said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, is to rally allies to achieve the “complete, verifiable and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
Yet Kim Jong Un has said he will never give up his nuclear weapons. He believes the survival of his dynastic regime depends upon them.
Hence we are headed for confrontation. Either the U.S. or North Korea backs down, as Nikita Khrushchev did in the Cuban missile crisis, or there will be war.
In this new century, U.S. leaders continue to draw red lines that threaten acts of war that the nation is unprepared to back up.
I bet Putin and the Chinese are laughing their asses off at our joke of a president telepromptering red lines across the globe, as his world crumbles around him. Fourth Turnings don’t give a shit about the words or opinions of a corrupt community organizer Kenyan from Chicago. I knew George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR, and this guy ain’t them. This panty waist president is not the Fourth Turning leader this country needed.
Ukraine Military Transport Plane Shot Down, 49 Killed
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/14/2014 08:35 -0400
While the world’s short attention span may have been diverted to Iraq where the ISIS insurgents are now knocking on Baghdad’s door, and with it – Iraq’s vast southern oil fields and infrastructure (which if taken offline would send oil up to $200 according to T. Boone Pickens). the “out of sight, out of mind” conflict in Ukraine, which the western media dropped covering like a hot potato some time in early May for reasons not entirely known, continues to escalate and where the latest outbreak of violence took place overnight when a Ukraine military transport Il-76 was allegedly shot down by separatists in the city of Lugansk as it was about to land.
As a result of the crash all 49 Ukrainian service personnel on board were killed. The death toll would be the biggest suffered by government forces in a single incident since Ukraine’s government launched a military operation against pro-Russian separatists in the east.
We remind readers that Lugansk is the same city where in the beginning of June a Ukraine fighter jet was caught on tape wantonly bombing civilians in broad daylight resulting in numerous civilians.
As AFP reports, Pro-Russian separatists shot down a Ukrainian military transport plane overnight carrying troops and supplies in the eastern city of Luhansk, the defense ministry said on Saturday. This is the second major reported Ukraine airborne casualty following the downing of a military transport helicopter which took place at the end of May and killed a Ukraine army general.
“On the night of June 13-14, the terrorists…fired from an anti-aircraft weapon and a large calibre machine gun, shooting down military transport aircraft…IL-76 as it was about to land,” the ministry said in a statement, offering its condolences to the victims’ families.
Forty-nine military personnel were killed in the incident, according to military spokesman Vladislav Seleznov.
Luhansk lies near Ukraine’s border with Russia, an area where separatists have seized government buildings and declared independence after holding disputed referendums.
An estimated 270 people have been killed in the violence over the past two months.
In other news, Bloomberg reports that a guard found an explosive device near one of the main entrances of the president’s office overnight, Unian news service reports citing an unidentified official from State Guard Department. The device was made of several grenades and mobile phone. Conveniently the man who planted the device escaped, Unian says, so it is unclear if he was a Russian “separatist” or merely hired by the CIA.
That said, we expect the latest tragic development in the Ukraine civil war to get far more western media coverage than the wanton bombing of civilians in the same town by Ukraine forces two weeks ago.
