'Drain the swamp' not the State Department

'Drain the swamp' not the State Department

By Arnold Pinsley

The State Department definitely needs to be drained.  It has a history of 85 years of one costly mistake after another.  Our noble chaps felt that a little character with a moustache was a joke - in the name of isolationism, folks like Watson (IBM) and Joseph Kennedy (steel) continued to sell him materials necessary to his war machine; no attention was paid to the terms of the treaty that ended the 'War to end all wars' which forbade his nation the development of a military.  From 1938 until Treasury Secretary Morgenthau intercepted a cable in 1943, State Department stonewalled any mention of what was happening to the Jews, Gypsies, and physically and developmentally challenged in the way of Hitler because it might hinder the war effort - no bombing of railroad tracks or trains taking people to extermination or slave labor camps (where slaves died in three to four months due to starvation or beatings); the numbers slaughtered exceed 25 million.

In 1945, General Stillwell, Commander of the China, Burma, and India theater was charged with Communist sympathy and brought back to home in disgrace for, horror of horrors, suggesting that we achieve a rapprochement with the Communist Chinese because Chiang Kai-Shek wasn't fighting the Japanese and the Communists were.  In 1950, following the policy set re General Stillwell, State and Defense stumbled into the US into a Korean Conflict, also including the Chinese which carried us into 1953 when an agreement to cease hostilities was hammered out - why are there 35,000 US troops still stationed on the border?

1948 saw the establishment of Israel which State advised President Truman not to recognize.    In 1953, State and the British Foreign Office conspired to assassinate Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, because he wanted to nationalize the country's oil resources and together these two organizations made Reza Pahlavi Shah of Iran.  Luckily he died of cancer before the British and Americans could kill him for the same crime as his predecessor - not to worry, these two organizations saw to it that the country became a theocracy.  The Iranian theocrats nationalized the country's oil reserves as soon as they took power with nary a peep from the State Department or the international captains of industry.  Every attempt to remove the theocrats from power by the citizens of Iran has been ignored by the State Department.  We are told that the Iranian people love us; one wonders why.

President Eisenhower was besieged by State and Defense to bail out the French in their attempt to maintain control of Vietnam (then called 'French Indochina').  Immediately after WW II, the State Department purged anyone with any real knowledge of China and Southeast Asia.  President Eisenhower had sufficient gravitas and intelligence to withstand the pressure from State, Defense, and CIA - unfortunately his successor did not have his gravitas and we entered a military engagement in Vietnam which cost more than 50,000 lives with many more seriously wounded not to mention the even greater number of Vietnamese maimed or killed.  Wonderful way to negotiate a favored nation trading alliance, don't you think?

Now let us move on to Israel where State Department activities have for more than 50 years resembled Einstein's definition of insanity, 'performing the same failed experiment over and over again in the hope of a successful outcome'.  Isn't that brilliant?  Obviously State believes that the 22% of the original British Palestine Protectorate left as a homeland for the Jews and made part of the League of Nations Charter and, in its turn, the United Nations Charter was way too much land - State has been pressuring Israel to cede more and more land to the 'Palestinians' who are virtually all of Saudi or Syrian descent.  They arrived in Judea and Samaria in 1948 after King Abdullah I of Transjordan had ethnically cleansed all Jews from that area and destroyed countless Arab villages so that massed Arab armies would be able to sweep the Jews of Israel into the sea.  Said Arabs were then lodged in 'Refugee' camps like Sabra and Shatilla where they are kept in squalor as stateless refugees to this day - no pressure from State Department to change this at all - a disgraceful policy.

It is obvious that State has never forgiven some Jews for having survived WW II, because treatment accorded Israel is abominable. The State Department wants to keep providing money to PA/PLO/Fatah which has been in administrative control of 98% of the land in Judea and Samaria for more than two decades and continue paying millions of dollars per year to the PA.  A large portion of this largesse has paid salaries to terrorists convicted of murdering Israeli citizens and handsome pensions to families of deceased martyrs to the PA cause.  Every PA social media organ is used to incite violence against Israelis without a word of condemnation from our State Department.  No condemnation from these 'professionals' regarding the firebombing of more than 200 churches in Iraq and violence perpetrated against Christian Arabs in the past two decades either.  In 1986, the population of Bethlehem was 75% Christian, today it is barely 10%.  Now our State Department accedes to a Russian proposal that an Iranian camp be located in Syria within three miles of the Israeli border (see BBC aerial photos of the site).  That is really going to create a stable environment in the area, isn't it?

Let us now look at other incomprehensible policy messes; Iraq, Afghanistan, and Arab Spring.  President Bush, Sr. had sense enough to stage a pretend conflict with Saddam Hussein where Saddam was allowed to remain as a bulwark against the Iranian theocrats - his son decided that he had to do better than daddy and remove the bulwark.  Not the best idea Bush Jr. ever had and here Colin Powell, Secretary of State, was never able to meet with Bush Jr. alone to explain to him the danger inherent in removing Saddam.  I don't know whose idea it was to enter Afghanistan - I do know that when Representative Wilson wanted a few million dollars for schools and hospitals for Afghanistan after we had armed the Mujahidin to help them defeat Russian incursion, the cornucopia was suddenly dry.

In 2001, the Bush Jr Presidency was encouraged by two of the worst characters ever to advise a President in this nation's history, Cheney and Rumsfeld, to enter Afghanistan.  It is now the longest conflict in American military history and our State Department has done little if anything to negotiate a cessation of hostilities.  The Arab Spring is still paying dividends in slaughter and mayhem.  President Clinton had sense enough to realize that a dictator in Libya could be counted on to keep the nasties at bay; Secretary of State Clinton couldn't see this and she had to remove him.  Libya is a massive training ground for many lovely terrorist groups and a tribal battle ground today.  Egyptian military had enough sense to remove a Muslim Brotherhood Caliphate before it could become a fully functional destabilizing force in the Middle East.  US State Department denied weaponry to the Egyptian military and almost drove it into the arms of the Russians.

State and Defense treat the Turks with kid gloves even though, as Orhan Pamuk writes in his autobiography, 'Istanbul', 'the music of Armenian, Greek, and Ladino is no longer heard in the streets of Istanbul', and the Turks have been engaged in engaged in almost a century of denial of Armenian Genocide and uninterrupted slaughter of Kurds.  Although Iraqi  and Syrian Kurdish tribes did a great deal of the heavy fighting against ISIL, State Department in conjunction with Russia, accords them no seat at a bargaining table.

Doesn't make for a great resume, does it?