Obama adviser compares Putin to Hitler

Hmm. I guess there's no ambiguity in his mind as to who's to blame for the mess in Soviet Central Asia...

The foreign policy adviser of US presidential candidate Barack Obama has called on the world community to isolate Russia in protest over its campaign in the Caucasus, likening its tactics to those of "Hitler or Stalin".

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981, and is now advising the Democratic candidate, said the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was "following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s".

He said that Putin's "justification" for splitting up Georgia - because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia - could be compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.

From here. I suppose there are similarities, but there are much more recent examples of similar justifications for military action, which Mr. Brzezinski seems to have forgotten about. And in any case, Russia doesn't seem to be interested in occupying Georgia:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an end to military operations against Georgia, the Kremlin says.

He told officials he had decided to end the campaign after restoring security for Russian citizens and peacekeepers in South Ossetia.

From the Beeb. I don't recall the Nazis pulling out of the rest of Czechoslovakia after securing the Sudetenland, which sort of weakens Brzezinski's analogy, don't you think?

More war

Paul Craig Roberts used to be a neocon, but he recovered. Here he points out what most of the world already knows, but the American media won't acknowledge:

With its editorial, “Stopping Russia: the US and its allies must unite against Moscow’s war on Georgia,” the Washington Post has established a world record for the maximum number of lies in the minimum number of words.

Except for the Washington Post, the entire world knows that Georgia (the birthplace of Joseph Stalin, not Georgia USA) initiated the aggression that killed Russian peacekeepers and hundreds of civilians in South Ossetia, peacekeepers who were there with the blessing of Georgia and international agreements.

The true facts are available all over the world press. But the “liberal” Washington Post serves up the lie that Russia has attacked Georgia and conceivably plans to conquer all of Georgia. “This is a grave challenge to the United States and Europe,” thunders the Bush Regime’s mouthpiece, aka, “the liberal media.”

Thirsting for blood, the “liberal media” declares: “The United States and its NATO allies must together impose a price on Russia.”

Here we see the combination of idiocy and delusion in one sentence. The United States has proved that it is incapable of occupying Iraq, much less Afghanistan. Russia has a large trade surplus. America’s NATO allies are dependent on Russian natural gas. Yet the “liberal” Washington Post wants a bankrupt US and “its NATO allies” who are dependent on Russian energy “to impose a price on Russia” for defending its peacekeepers!

Seldom has the world seen such total insanity as the neoconservative Washington Post, a propaganda sheet as far from “liberal media” is it is possible to be.

Thanks to M. Spector in this babble thread. Of course, Russia isn't exactly innocent either, but it's remarkable how much Western media- and leaders- are lining up to defend Georgia. Hopefully it's all just bluster on the West's part, but if not, things could get very bad indeed:

The dramatic military attack by the military of the Republic of Georgia on South Ossetia in the last days has brought the world one major step closer to the ultimate horror of the Cold War era—a thermonuclear war between Russia and the United States—by miscalculation. What is playing out in the Caucasus is being reported in US media in an alarmingly misleading light, making Moscow appear the lone aggressor. The question is whether George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are encouraging the unstable Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili in order to force the next US President to back the NATO military agenda of the Bush Doctrine. This time Washington may have badly misjudged the possibilities, as it did in Iraq, but this time with possible nuclear consequences.

The underlying issue, as I stressed in my July 12 Global Research article entitled Georgia, Washington and Moscow: a Nuclear Geopolitical Poker Game , is the fact that since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 one after another former member as well as former states of the USSR have been coaxed and in many cases bribed with false promises by Washington into joining the counter organization, NATO.

Rather than initiate discussions after the 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact about a systematic dissolution of NATO, Washington has systematically converted NATO into what can only be called the military vehicle of an American global imperial rule, linked by a network of military bases from Kosovo to Poland to Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004. Now Washington is putting immense pressure on the EU members of NATO, especially Germany and France, that they vote in December to admit Georgia and Ukraine.

Again, I don't think it will come to this; even world leaders generally recognize that a nuclear war between the US and Russia is more than most people, including them, are likely to be able to survive. But this kind of brinksmanship is scary.

A nice weekend

I spend the weekend at the cottage with my parents and the younger of my brothers. Nice time, weather was just about perfect, got to do some sailing, saw a bit of the Perseids (though the peak of the shower isn't for a couple of days) and played some Trivial Pursuit. Nice time.

Italian army sent on to the streets

I thought their prime minister's name was Berlusconi, not Mussolini:

The Italian government has deployed 3,000 soldiers in cities across the country as part of a plan to fight street crime.

In the capital Rome, about 400 soldiers were stationed at underground stations and at an immigrant centre on Monday.

"This morning we have deployed about 350-400 soldiers of the Italian army at institutional sites and sensitive sites," Lieutenant Colonel Claudio Caruso said.

The Italian opposition and police unions have criticised the use of troops, accusing the government of seeking to "militarise" city centres and using the measure to mask budget cuts in the security forces.

One opposition MP expressed fears that the move at the height of the tourist season could alarm visitors to the city.

But Gianni Alemanno, the mayor of Rome, said no soldier would patrol in the historic centre where most tourists are concentrated.

Roberto Maroni, the interior minister, told reporters in Rome last week that he wanted to "give the public a better perception of security".

From here. Between this and the mass fingerprinting of the Roma, fascism seems to be on the resurgance in that country.

As Obese Population Rises, More Candidates Courting The Fat Vote

From The Onion, natch. Except that someone seems to have made this suggestion for real:

Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn't give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

"Listen, I'm skinny but I'm tough," Sen. Obama said.

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

As they said at Sadly, No!, this is beyond fucking parody. The freaking Wall Street Journal has seen fit to write an article about Obama's failure to conform to the all-American ideal of a guy sitting on his couch watching TV and eating pork rinds.

Thanks to zetawoof, posting on atomicat's LJ, for the tip.

A brilliant piece of animation

Someone on Facebook forwarded this to me:

Anthrax scientist commits suicide as FBI closes in

Well, that's the official story, anyway:

A U.S. military scientist committed suicide as federal prosecutors readied an indictment alleging he mailed anthrax-laced letters in 2001 in what authorities said Friday may have been a bizarre attempt to test a vaccine for the deadly poison.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, worked at the army's biodefence labs at Fort Detrick, Md., for 18 years until his death on Tuesday.

He had a long history of homicidal threats, according to papers recently filed in local court by a social worker.

Letters containing anthrax powder turned up at congressional offices, newsrooms and elsewhere weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killing five and sending numerous victims to hospitals with anthrax poisoning.

From here. There are a few curious things about this story; the one that initially leaped out at me was this:

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. Tom Ivins, a brother of the scientist, told the Associated Press that his other brother, Charles, had told him that Bruce committed suicide and Tylenol might have been involved. The Los Angeles Times, which first reported that Ivins was under suspicion, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Now maybe this is true. However, that seems to me to be an unlikely way for a biologist to commit suicide. If the codeine kills you, great- but if it doesn't, you're likely to die much more slowly, as your liver shuts down from the effects of the Tylenol. And Ivins would likely have known that. Of course, a severely despondent person might not be thinking clearly enough, so there's some plausibility... but one has to wonder.

Glen Greenwald has a great deal more on Ivins' death:

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

So it does make you wonder, doesn't it? If Ivins was party to this deception, or simply was aware of it, it might be a wee bit awkward if he were about to be cross-examined in court. Maybe someone decided to make sure that didn't happen...