Category Archives: foreign policy

by Barry Kelly | March 4, 2014 · 7:40 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 103

PUTIN-OBAMA FACEOFF

Are Putin’s action in the Ukraine a surprise? I hope not, but for the group of amateurs in this administration, they probably were. Is there a foreign policy expert in the stack of dead wood the president depends on? Certainly not Secretary of State Kerry or Vice President Biden or the departed Mrs. Clinton. Reminds me of the surprise of the Carter White House when the Ayatollah was allowed to enter Iran from Europe. When have deeply committed religious radicals ever established a true democracy with regular free elections? I think the Carter administration was shocked when his followers took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran and established an Islamic theocracy. When the Russians moved into Afghanistan, he was again surprised.

For centuries, the czars had tried to establish a geo-political foothold in South Asia. Through Afghanistan was the most direct route to a warm-water port and the riches of the sub-continent. Only the power of the British Empire thwarted the Russian plan. The Russians, seeing a weak U.S. president, made their move and thousands of lives were lost to add to the total killed by the Muslim aristocracy in Iran. History holds many keys to the future and weakness invites aggression. It has always been so. Now what about Ukraine?

The Ukraine was part of the great Russian Empire that President Putin wants to restore. Ukraine looks both east and west. To the west are its hopes for a close relationship with Europe to balance the threat from Russia. To the east it has a long border with a powerful nation that has shown its willingness to use its military power to achieve political goals, such as the forcible annexation of a part of the Georgia nation in the era of the Bush presidency. Ukraine’s current leadership knows it cannot afford a conflict with Russia without strong political support from the west.

What are President Putin’s plans? Well, even the Obama administration should understand that the recent upheaval in the Ukraine threatens Russia’s strategic interests. The only warm-water port in the entire Russian nation is in the Ukraine. This port is part of a settlement between Ukraine and Russia. Russia’s entire Black Sea Naval Force calls Sevastopol home. A large portion of the people in the area of Sevastopol are Russian ethnics. President Putin probably felt he had to move to protect his naval forces. The question is will he push to acquire Ukrainian territory beyond the strategic area of Sevastopol? He knows his history. There is not great love between the people of Ukraine and the Russians to the east. When the German panzers pushed into the Ukraine in World War II, many Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators. Some even took up arms and supported the Germans. Unfortunately, for those Ukrainians and the German Army, the German leadership treated the Ukrainians like the other people they had conquered. German cruelty knew no ethnic bounds in their drive to occupy Moscow.

President Obama has few options. One is to know that his plan to reduce the U.S. Army to pre-World War II levels is another revealing sign of his weakness. He should immediately re-think his destruction of American power. Peace has never come from weakness. A strong America is necessary for a path to peace. The progressive party is well on the way to achieving what neither the aggressors of both World Wars and the Cold War could accomplish. Our president is a master of winning elections but he is way out of his league when dealing with a man who is not afraid of power and its use.

If Putin goes beyond the securing of routine access to strategic Russian bases in the Crimea portion of the Ukraine and annexes Ukrainian territory, the Obama administration will maybe learn that words do not count for much in the constant struggle to maintain world peace. Weakness only feeds the actions of dictators. It does nothing in the struggle to contain territorial aggression. The willingness to maintain and use national power when necessary, sets apart real leaders from empty ones. Ronald Reagan was a real leader. Barack Obama is not.

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EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 101

A COUP IN THE USA?

Is a coup possible in America? If enough of us keep our heads buried in the sand, it will happen sometime. It may not require violence or the deployment of uniformed troops; there have been coups without gunfire in the streets. A coup is simply the shifting of power from an existing norm to a new organization of government that becomes the new norm. A new structure that no longer permits individual freedom to criticize or work to change back to the old system. The slogan ‘one person, one vote, one time’ is an apt description. No violence or dramatic action is required. A coup can happen slowly over a period of years, one small step at a time.

The one thing that is essential for a coup to succeed is the coup sponsors must first destroy the opposition. In America the first opposition to a coup is the opposing political party. The law and courts also protect our current system. The concept of a separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government is another bulwark against inside coups. Lastly, our traditions and collective morality make drastic change harder for the coup makers.

Let’s assume that President Obama and his cadre of progressive radicals are working to turn America into a one-party government, run by a self-proclaimed progressive elite, in order to bring about their version of heaven on earth. Are they succeeding? The only way we can tell is to look at their policies and actions over the last six years.

What do they need to do?

(1) Control health care and associated industries. The Obama administration is well on the way to controlling the seven plus percent of the national economy and a very large part of the populace.

(2) Expand the welfare system under federal control. The welfare system, including unemployment insurance and food stamps, has grown immensely under Obama.

(3) Ensure win at the polls. Using blatant delaying tactics, the administration withheld critical information on Fast and Furious (gun running to the drug cartels), Ben Ghazi, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the targeting of journalists, and the true nature of Obamacare. It also fought voter I.D. legislation in all the states aimed at reducing voter fraud. Why would anyone object to identifying themselves at the polling places? The Obama administration knows how to win elections using all possible tactics.

Random thought: You would think that a President who leads from behind, would stand behind his word!

— Barry Kelly (@factsfictions80) December 16, 2013

(4) Re-distribution of wealth. The increase of welfare programs, the pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy, and constant messaging to promote class warfare are seen by many as an organized campaign to destroy capitalism and the free market. Plans for a death tax to destroy the economic power of wealthy American families are waiting in the wings. The administration is fully prepared to use the United Nations to re-distribute national wealth through programs like Cap and Trade (global warming).

(5) Shift control of industry from the private sector to federal control. The flow of regulations from the executive branch is at the highest level ever. Many of these regulations give the federal government more control over the means of production. (The killing of the coal industry comes to mind.)

(6) Encourage class warfare issues. Do you remember President Obama ever giving a speech that did not include class warfare rhetoric like “protecting the middle class,” “the widening gap in income levels,” and “the top 2 percent must pay their fair share?” This is the big lie of the Progressives. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it. (A page out of the Nazi coup success.)

(7) Focus attention on domestic issues. Notice the president almost never gives a speech devoted to foreign policy issues. All his energy is devoted to transforming domestic America. He is so inept at foreign policy that it appears he just doesn’t care about foreign issues.

(8) Destroy the opposition. With considerable help from the hopeless Republican Party leadership, Obama progressives are well on their way to establishing the ground work for a one-party system.

(9) Control the justice system and the courts. The Department of Justice is under tight control of the progressive agenda. Why else would investigations by Justice employees, including the FBI, be so slow and ineffective? The IRS’s deliberate targeting of conservative groups and the State Department and Joint Chiefs lies and failures of the Ben Ghazi affair are virtually being ignored by the FBI and Justice Department. Congressional inquires by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives are, at best, lackadaisical. After the debacle of the Supreme Court’s rewriting of the Affordable Care Act to make it constitutional, can we count on the judicial system to protect the Constitution from the executive branch’s routine usurping of the powers reserved to the Congress? Probably not.

(10) Corrupt the civil service. The IRS, FBI, STATE, EPA, HHS, ENERGY, JUSTICE, EDUCATION, DEA have all lost their claim to being politically neutral. They are, or seem to be, fully on board with the Progressive Party, once the proud Democratic Party.

(11) Weaken the military. Successive deployments have worn down the troops. They need more manpower, not planned cutbacks. New weapon systems need to be planned and procured. The Joint Chiefs of Staff needs to be composed of people who are not afraid to tell the truth and who will not lie to protect the White House. Mission creep turned the campaign in Afghanistan from victory into a defeat. Nation building is not something the military or any part of our government knows how to do. The War in Afghanistan under the current rules of engagement cost us many of our best and bravest.

(12): Protect the message. Everyone in the Progressive Party must be on the same page. It doesn’t matter if the message is true. Over and over with the big lie while at the same time doing everything possible to censor the opposition. Outspend them, use the power of the government to criticize and punish the media outlets that print and broadcast news that is not favorable to the administration. Fox News and talk radio are examples of uncontrollable media outlets. Witness the recent effort by the FCC to send its people out to newspaper media outlets to query them on how they decide to publish an article and what is their political position. Under a law-abiding administration, this would be prevented by the Constitution.

If the current governing process is continued, you won’t be able to recognize what is left. Your freedom and control of your own destiny will only be memories. It will be a coup by a “thousand cuts.” Wake up, America, while there is still time.

By the author of the Jack Brandon novels.

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by Barry Kelly | February 28, 2014 · 7:30 am

by Barry Kelly | February 14, 2014 · 7:51 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 98

IRAN AND THE BOMB

Let’s begin with a few facts the Obama administration seems to overlook.

It is hard to believe any White House could assemble a more naive team that can’t even find the ball, let alone watch it. You don’t even need inside information to tell you where to start. It is all there for all of the former players now pacing on the sidelines. Why should Iran want a nuclear weapon? Not a bad starting point. The only friends the Shia Moslem nation of Iran has are those like Russia, China, North Korea, and France who view them as a lucrative market for all their wares and as an anti-American supplier of oil. They have no friends among the Sunni Moslem nations. The Iranians fought a long and bloody war against Iraq when it was under Sunni rule. Today, decades later that bloody war is still remembered by Iraqis who lost family members in the fighting.

Iran’s exporting of terrorism through its puppets Hamas and Hezbollah has alienated Lebanon. Iran is hated by the Israelis and pays for its uneasy partnership with Syria. Iran is without loyal allies. That is a weak position from which to dominate the Middle East, unless they become a nuclear power. That’s is their number one strategic goal. How can anyone think they will negotiate away their top priority national security goal?

A military strike by Israel or the United States would destroy or set back Iran’s time table to achieve nuclear status. The sanctions, before the Obama administration eased off on them, were causing hardships in Tehran. Not all Iranians want to make sacrifices to achieve nuclear weapons. For internal political reasons the religious leaders decided to roll out a strategy of negotiating to buy time and get concessions from the West on the crippling sanctions. This strategy had worked before. Why not dial back the anti-American rhetoric and pretend to negotiate on their nuclear program?

Of course the Obama administration jumped at the bait and became the leader of the “let’s negotiate” flock. He thinks it makes sense to use all possible diplomatic endeavors before resorting to any military action. That is generally true but not when it is obvious that the other side is playing you. Iran is so confident that the Obama administration is below the paper tiger level that they have blatantly tested an ICBM capable of destroying Israel and hitting several American targets. Big clue. Yes! No nation has ever spent treasure on developing a long-range ballistic missile unless they were positive they could mate it with a nuclear weapon. There is no other rational explanation. Yet our president is resisting his own party’s effort to ready additional sanctions to ensure Iran lives up to the agreement.

Officials from the administration and learned talking heads will tell us that it will be some time before Iran can weaponize a nuclear device. Don’t believe that fairy tale. North Korea and other nations that are not admirers of the U.S. and Israel would sell the Iranians whatever they need in a heartbeat.

To sum up the administration’s position: They are confident that even though the Iranians have put much treasure and time into developing a nuclear weapon they can be talked out of completing the task. After buying hundreds of centrifuges, building underground facilities to house them, and developing long-range missiles, how can anyone believe they can stop Iran’s long, expensive effort to acquire nuclear weapons by negotiating from a weak position? The administration’s followers will point with pride to the Iranian destruction of highly enriched uranium. This not true. The Iranians didn’t destroy anything, they merely converted the enriched uranium into another form that can easily be reversed.

Don’t be surprised if the Iranians test their bomb while Secretary Kerry is having tea in Damascus.

By the author of the Jack Brandon novels.

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by Barry Kelly | February 10, 2014 · 11:29 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS 96 THE ADVISOR

THE TAKE DOWN OF AMERICA

The Advisor had been going over all his files and journals going back to the Nixon Era. He was trying to decide if he would be the first Advisor to break protocol and publish a book, anonymously, of course. After weeks of studying the Presidential Journals written by his predecessors and books published during the same time period, he concluded that some Advisors had used their knowledge of the President’s actions and policies to contribute to the open record.

He rationalized that if his sole responsibility was to advise the President for the good of the nation, it was within his authority to tell the nation what the President was planning. Nothing less than America’s future was at stake.

He sketched out a few pages, filled his pen and began to write.

The President told us when running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States that his goal was to transform America. Many of us thought that the nation could use a little transformation. We didn’t realize he meant transformation to the edge of destruction and beyond. It’s not the end of America but the end of the America that anyone over thirty years of age knew and cherished. We also did not even suspect that the transformation would be accomplished by a policy of “the end justifies the means,” an approach laid out by Saul Alinsky, an American revolutionary and former community organizer in Chicago. Alinsky preached the “issue is never the issue,” meaning anything his Progressive followers, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton,did to overthrow the existing power structure and replace it with an income distribution social order where everyone got a fair shot was moral.

False statements, deliberate misleading of the American people, using all issues as tools to destroy the Republican Party and win elections are the right things to do. Old-fashioned morals like keeping your word, being honest and open, solving problems that advance American individual liberty, promote economic power and follow the rule of law and Constitutional restrictions were relegated to a growing pile of disregarded broken pieces of the separation of powers, states’ rights and Constitutional protections of individual freedom.

To transform anything you must first destroy or replace the existing order. The Obama-led Progressives (a more acceptable label than Socialists or Communists) have prepared America for an historical take down. The first step is to destroy the opposition. The opposition is the Republican, Libertarian, and Tea Parties. Only a few of the leaders of these groups/parties understand what Obama is doing. He doesn’t care at all about solving problems, foreign or domestic. He only wants to use the issue to destroy the opposition. Health care, immigration, tax policy, economic policy, unemployment, minimum wage, the use of the military services, counter-terrorism, foreign policy, energy development, environmental concerns provide a never-ending supply of issues to use against the befuddled leadership of the Republican Party.

President Obama is not a stupid or evil politician. He just doesn’t bring the beliefs or mindset that Americans automatically assume all their leaders bring to the Oval Office. He is certainly not a free-market capitalist. Nor is he a constitutionalist. He was not born of the civil rights movement. He is not an America First politician. He is more anti-colonialist, anti-war, anti-western with very strong elitist socialist leanings. He is so insecure in his American leadership costume that he can not stand up to foreign leaders.’

The Advisor put his pen down. Mused over what he had written and thought this sounds harsh but I believe it is true. I will develop these points as I continue with the book on the take down of America.

Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.

This is a fictional account of an Advisor that doesn’t exist by the author of the Brandon novels. The author (pictured far right) has 27 years of Government service, including two years serving President Ronald Reagan (middle left) in the 1980s as an advisor. Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.

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by Barry Kelly | January 6, 2014 · 7:30 am

EIGHT DECADES OF INSIGHTS-93 THE ADIVSOR

PREDICTIONS FOR 2014

For the first time in all of his years of sitting in his underground office suite, The Advisor, more out of boredom than anything else, decided to put his predictions for the new year in his Journal. He opened the Journal to a clean new page and began to write.

I am just beginning my sixth year of advising a President who only listens to his own drum. He doesn’t like my straight talk. I believe that is my job to tell him important things that no one else will. As a result he seldom comes to see me. He has had a bad year and knows if he had followed my advice ,both he and the nation would be better off.

It has taken me a while to realize that he does not share my view of the nation or the world. He is like the utopians of our past who believed human behavior could be changed to fit a society based on Karl Marx’s axiom that ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ The early utopians in their agrarian progressive compounds all failed, as have all the nation states that have tried the communist or progressive approach to governing people.

Does the President have no understanding of history? It is clear. In modern times, Russia, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, Germany, and even the United Kingdom all have tried varying degrees of wealth distribution. All the economies failed and individual freedom disappeared when power ended up in the hands of a Progressive elite that used an increasing amount of raw power to coerce people into doing what the elite decided was best for them. There is no other way that increasing centralization combined with one person or a party elite exercising all the power can end up.

So my first prediction is: (1) President Obama will continue to push for a one-party government; (2) the Democratic party will lose badly the mid-term elections and the Republicans will take over the Senate. (That will be okay for the President for he believes two years of a do-nothing Republican Congress will set the stage for a decisive victory in the 2016 National Elections and he may be right.) (3) Iran will have a nuclear weapon before the next national election. (Anyone who believes Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful uses or that weaklings can deter them by talk are very wrong.) (4) The Affordable Care Act will fail but not before it has done serious harm to the best medical system in the world. Once reconstructed the whole things will look more like Obamacare than a free market system. (5) China and Russia will increase their influence in the world. (6) Before President Obama leaves office, America will begin to feel the impact of unemployment, over-regulation, and inflation. (6) Lastly, radical Islam will show the beginnings of the organization of an Islamic Empire and the isolation of the Israeli Nation.

The Advisor put his pen away and placed the Presidential Journal back in its place. Maybe one of his successors would read it and find it helps them understand the years he was responsible for keeping the real record of every President.

This is a fictional account of an Advisor that doesn’t exist by the author of the Brandon novels. The author (pictured far right) has 27 years of Government service, including two years serving President Ronald Reagan (middle left) in the 1980s as an advisor. Meeting with President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Deputy National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and General Colin Powell in the Oval Office.