The Strident Centrist Blog

Writing in the Asia Times, M K Bhadrakumar, a retired Indian diplomat, writes about how Bush’s just completed Middle East swing has exposed for all to see the breadth and depth of the disaster his administration has been for US interests in the Middle East:

The point is, the historic failure of the Iraq war is yet to be fully grasped. On a regional plane, as the Iraq war interminably rolls on, the situation is fraught with the immense consequence of the unraveling of the entire system of states that was created in the Anglo-French settlement after the fall of Ottoman Empire in 1918. The Iraq war has triggered Shi’ite empowerment and unleashed historical forces that lay chained for centuries. Its geopolitical significance is yet to sink in as winds of change sweep across the entire region. (more…)

Jonathan Tilove of the Newhouse News Service delves into why Barrack Obama was a distant second choice for voters in Tuesday’s West Virginia primary, and asserts it’s not a black/white racial issue but rather a cultural one.

These are the people whose ancestors lived and fought along the brutal borderlands between England and Scotland, and later in Northern Ireland (they are the Protestants of Ulster). Unlike other British settlers, the Scots-Irish, Webb writes, migrated “directly to the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains, bypassing even the rudiments of colonial civilization.”

. . .

Enter the silky, smooth-faced and super-smart Obama. With his Harvard pedigree, mellifluous voice and high-minded talk of moving beyond the politics of confrontation, he is totally out of place in Appalachia.

It’s like casting Hugh Grant instead of Mel Gibson as William Wallace in “Braveheart.”

“What people don’t understand about Appalachia is that we’ve heard all this `hope’ and `change’ stuff since the English kicked the Scotch-Irish out in the 1700s. We’re `hoped’ out. Nothing ever changes out here,” Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Virginia political strategist who worked on John Edwards’ campaign, told The Politico on the eve of the West Virginia vote.

. . .

Appalachia reaches from western New York and Pennsylvania down through eastern Ohio, all of West Virginia, stretches of western Virginia and the Carolinas, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee and on into north Georgia and Alabama and northeastern Mississippi. As Josh Marshall noted in posting on Talking Points Memo after the West Virginia results were in, the map of Appalachia lines up pretty well with a map of counties where Clinton has won more than 60 percent of the vote.

“She’s won the Appalachian region of every state contested,” wrote Dana Houle, who in his postings on Daily Kos has dissected how Obama’s difficulty in Appalachia does not necessarily translate into a broader or more permanent problem with white voters.

“No, Obama doesn’t have a racial problem,” Houle concluded. “It appears that Appalachia has an Obama problem.”

Gorilla Guides points us to a piece at Azzaman, an independent Iraqi newspaper published in London, in which a Kurdish legislator compares what the US is now doing to Sadr City to the poison gas attack Saddam perpetrated against the Kurds back in the 1980s.

“The aerial bombardment and military operations the U.S. is carrying out in Sadr city are similar to what happened in Halabja,” Iraqi member of parliament Falah Hassan said.

U.S. helicopter gun ships and warplanes have been pounding the city, home to more than 2 million people – their declared aim is to have it flushed of gunmen.

While gunmen are nowhere to be found, those bearing the brunt of U.S.’s disproportionate use of force are none but the city’s impoverished inhabitants.

Sadr City is a warren of mainly one-story houses, most of them shabby and dilapidated.

Iraqi demographers say the city is even more densely populated in terms of the number of people per square kilometer than the city of Gaza in Palestine.

What a way to win hearts and minds.

The family the late Senator Barry Goldwater recently discovered the private journals he kept throughout much of his career, and they have now been compiled and edited for publication by Barry Goldwater Jr. and his long-time friend and former prep school roommate, as well as his late father’s former protege, John Dean. Since Senator John McCain has been billing himself as a politician cut from the same cloth as the founder of modern conservatism, Dean thought it appropriate to point out what his mentor really thought of the man who succeeded him as Senator from Arizona. Today, Dean has done just that from his perch as a regular columnist at the Findlaw website, and the picture isn’t pretty. At least not for McCain. In addition to using the diaries, Dean also sources from McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, a recent biography written by Matt Welch. Here are some of Dean’s comments:

To begin, Welch reports that McCain seeks to use the federal government to generate greater patriotism and expand the nation’s greatness, while Goldwater – knowing the folly of empire and excessively large government – sought to maximize individual liberty and local autonomy. (more…)