My expanded NYTimes Comment #60.
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 17th, 2009
9:45 am
My expanded NYTimes Comment #
EthicalDemocracy
New York City
September 17th, 2009
9:48 am
Excellent -- the Poles and the Czechs got lucky. No Star Wars planned there.
Hope the President, whom I and the majority of the US electorate voted for, will re-think any attempt to tilt at windmills in Iran. Iran has a right to go nuclear and nobody can stop them. The US govt's Iran policy has a powerful lobby-backed pro-Zionist subtext. Give Peace and the Palestinians a chance.
Now can we do the entire South Asia region a favor and get the US and US-led NATO, the hell out of there too?
If history is any guide, the Afghans, can do that on their own, with no help from anyone.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/world/europe/18shield.html?_r=1
White House to Scrap Bush’s Approach to Missile Shield
By PETER BAKER and NICHOLAS KULISH
The Obama administration plans to announce a reconfigured system that won’t be based in Poland or the Czech Republic, and will be aimed at intercepting Iranian missiles.
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Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Russia's Role in the New Global Order of Competing Fundamentalisms
The US Whiteness system which has its origins in slavery and genocide for profit, is strongly ideological while posturing as progressive, pragmatic and ethical. This is the core ideological system in which Obama performs Whiteness. I voted for Obama because I clearly understood he is the lesser of two evils within the US Whiteenss System of racialized dominant power based on extreme exloitative profit.
Who armed, trained and paid the Mujahideen who morphed into the Taliban? The US has been a state sponsor of terror throughout the world for over 50 years. Its latest military adventurism, along with US led-NATO, is in my region of South Asia. The US is seeking strategic depth" in South Asia in order to counter Russia and Iran while continuing satellization of Israel. All three adjoin the South Asia region, which the US is cultivating as the main theater of US geopolitical operations.
But fingerpointing at the US does not absolve each nation-state. We each have to do whatever we can to promote social and economic justice in the world for the billions of our fellow citizens of earth. This requires ethical thinking and practice over strategic thinking thinking and practice.
We need idealistic pragmatism that demonstrably promotes prosperity under conditions of peace for the billions of hungry, diseased and homless in our world today.
Russia has to do considerably more by developing a visibly open society (look at India) that takes a more responsive and responsible place in the world.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
Russia today copyright
http://russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-05-06/Taliban_Rising__Pakistan_swaps_mountain_skiing_for_strict_Sharia_law.html
Who armed, trained and paid the Mujahideen who morphed into the Taliban? The US has been a state sponsor of terror throughout the world for over 50 years. Its latest military adventurism, along with US led-NATO, is in my region of South Asia. The US is seeking strategic depth" in South Asia in order to counter Russia and Iran while continuing satellization of Israel. All three adjoin the South Asia region, which the US is cultivating as the main theater of US geopolitical operations.
But fingerpointing at the US does not absolve each nation-state. We each have to do whatever we can to promote social and economic justice in the world for the billions of our fellow citizens of earth. This requires ethical thinking and practice over strategic thinking thinking and practice.
We need idealistic pragmatism that demonstrably promotes prosperity under conditions of peace for the billions of hungry, diseased and homless in our world today.
Russia has to do considerably more by developing a visibly open society (look at India) that takes a more responsive and responsible place in the world.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
-------------
Russia today copyright
http://russiatoday.com/Politics/2009-05-06/Taliban_Rising__Pakistan_swaps_mountain_skiing_for_strict_Sharia_law.html
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Obama's New Cold War
Obama Offered Deal to Russia in Secret Letter
By PETER BAKER
Published: March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html?hp
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html#postComment
New York Times copyright
----------------------
The core problem with US foreign policy for the past 60 years is its exceptionalist, triumphalist,supremacist, dictatorial and interfering posture, matched by a 60-year accumulation of actions of unparalleled state-sponsored violence marked by invasion, occupation, militarization, nuclearization, destabilization, satellization.
That foreign policy posture and actions in the West Asia and Central Asia regions has a counterproductive Israel subtext, as well as affirms that the US continues to maintain its confrontational Cold War stance in a post-Cold War, multipolar era of sovereign-state intra andinter-regional alliances that do not necessarily include the US, or Russia for that matter.
Obama's "secret" (what happened to transparency?) reportedly hand-delivered letter to Russia's President Medvedev, three weeks ago, attempts to dictate and micromanage geopolitics in West Asia and Central Asia, which the last time I looked is not where the US is located. The sovereign nation-state stakeholders in these regions have every right to safeguard their perceived local interests without the US menacing nation-states that are located there.
Q. Why shouldn't Russia help Iran nuclearize? Iran and Russia are strategic neighbors, the US is not. Did the US nuclearize Israel?
Q. Why shouldn't Iran develop nuclear power for both military and civilian purposes? The US, Israel and Russia are all nuclear. The last two are regional neighbors, the US is not.
In the adjoining South Asia region, Pakistan and India are nuclear. What would motivate Iran NOT to nuclearize and Russia NOT to help Iran do so?
Obama's shopworn Star Wars bargaining chip of a National Missile Defense Shield (NMD) suspension wont wash with Iran, especially since the US helped Israel develop its Arrow missile system which has been successfully tested repeatedly by the US and Israel acting in combination. Is it possible, therefore, both Iran and Russia might feel their respective national security interests are threatened by such unilateral and unprovoked militarization in their backyard?
Obama's foreign policy in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia is likely to be no different than that of his white male predecessors.
Superpower foreign policy ideology trumps race.
At the same time, supremacist ideology in U.S. foreign policy has its roots in white male dominance (developed and enforced during three centuries of slavery and genocide of indigenous people in the US, by white males), in which all 'others' are racialized and rendered inferior. Obama is embedded in that Whiteness system and rewarded by it.
Change We Can Believe In? A new and ethical direction for US foreign policy where strategic interests are sincerely attempted to be aligned with ethical concerns ?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
See Theory of Systemic Whiteness and related articles
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
By PETER BAKER
Published: March 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html?hp
New York Times copyright
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/03/03/washington/03prexy.html#postComment
New York Times copyright
----------------------
The core problem with US foreign policy for the past 60 years is its exceptionalist, triumphalist,supremacist, dictatorial and interfering posture, matched by a 60-year accumulation of actions of unparalleled state-sponsored violence marked by invasion, occupation, militarization, nuclearization, destabilization, satellization.
That foreign policy posture and actions in the West Asia and Central Asia regions has a counterproductive Israel subtext, as well as affirms that the US continues to maintain its confrontational Cold War stance in a post-Cold War, multipolar era of sovereign-state intra andinter-regional alliances that do not necessarily include the US, or Russia for that matter.
Obama's "secret" (what happened to transparency?) reportedly hand-delivered letter to Russia's President Medvedev, three weeks ago, attempts to dictate and micromanage geopolitics in West Asia and Central Asia, which the last time I looked is not where the US is located. The sovereign nation-state stakeholders in these regions have every right to safeguard their perceived local interests without the US menacing nation-states that are located there.
Q. Why shouldn't Russia help Iran nuclearize? Iran and Russia are strategic neighbors, the US is not. Did the US nuclearize Israel?
Q. Why shouldn't Iran develop nuclear power for both military and civilian purposes? The US, Israel and Russia are all nuclear. The last two are regional neighbors, the US is not.
In the adjoining South Asia region, Pakistan and India are nuclear. What would motivate Iran NOT to nuclearize and Russia NOT to help Iran do so?
Obama's shopworn Star Wars bargaining chip of a National Missile Defense Shield (NMD) suspension wont wash with Iran, especially since the US helped Israel develop its Arrow missile system which has been successfully tested repeatedly by the US and Israel acting in combination. Is it possible, therefore, both Iran and Russia might feel their respective national security interests are threatened by such unilateral and unprovoked militarization in their backyard?
Obama's foreign policy in Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia is likely to be no different than that of his white male predecessors.
Superpower foreign policy ideology trumps race.
At the same time, supremacist ideology in U.S. foreign policy has its roots in white male dominance (developed and enforced during three centuries of slavery and genocide of indigenous people in the US, by white males), in which all 'others' are racialized and rendered inferior. Obama is embedded in that Whiteness system and rewarded by it.
Change We Can Believe In? A new and ethical direction for US foreign policy where strategic interests are sincerely attempted to be aligned with ethical concerns ?
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
See Theory of Systemic Whiteness and related articles
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
=====================================================================================
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