Worldwide Nightmare Theatre, Empire of Chaos Enhanced and Expanded

[xilman]

There are two related news reports on the front page of the Beeb right now.

The first reports that the UK ambassador the UK has been forced to resign because Trump refuses to have anything to do with him. He's already been frozen out of a couple of social occasions.

The other concerns the US asking allies to do the dirty work protecting shipping in the Gulf while the US sits back and provides only command and control

Anyone else see a certain amount of irony in the juxtaposition of these two reports?

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by xilman

There are two related news reports on the front page of the Beeb right now.

The first reports that the UK ambassador the UK has been forced to resign because Trump refuses to have anything to do with him. He's already been frozen out of a couple of social occasions.

The other concerns the US asking allies to do the dirty work protecting shipping in the Gulf while the US sits back and provides only command and control

Anyone else see a certain amount of irony in the juxtaposition of these two reports?

I can actually see some merit in the idea of having nations escort their own merchant ships. Still, it does seem rather high-handed.

Il Duce's approach to the UK Ambassador didn't work so well with his critics on Twitter. Here's the Second Circuit Court of Appeals opinion in Knight First Amendment Institute, et al v. Donald J. Trump, et al

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I can actually see some merit in the idea of having nations escort their own merchant ships.

I entirely agree. It's about time the Panamanian navy started pulling their weight. However, the present display of lack of diplomacy by POTUS is not a good way to win friends and influence people, in my opinion.

[kladner]

Originally Posted by xilman

I entirely agree. It's about time the Panamanian navy started pulling their weight. However, the present display of lack of diplomacy by POTUS is not a good way to win friends and influence people, in my opinion.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Dr Sardonicus

I can actually see some merit in the idea of having nations escort their own merchant ships.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48946051

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by xilman

I entirely agree. It's about time the Panamanian navy started pulling their weight.

Haw, haw! I assume you refer to the fact that many merchant ships have Panamanian registry.

However, the present display of lack of diplomacy by POTUS is not a good way to win friends and influence people, in my opinion.

I agree.

The current Admin isn't into diplomacy. They seem to rely on threats and coercion to try to get their way. Bunch of ing s.

During the "tanker war" of the 1980's the USA arranged to have tankers from other countries go through the Strait if Hormuz flying US flags. That way, they fell under the protection of the US Navy. Of course, the Iranians immediately nailed some of them with mines.

[kladner]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52005.htm

Trump is powering the UK’s preparations for war – it is he who needs to be deterred, not Iran

It’s about time we wised up to what is going on in this utterly farcical “crisis” in the Gulf, this charade of lies and pomposity which Trump and his doggies in London are presenting to us.

An American president who is a racist, misogynist, dishonest and psychologically disturbed man – assisted by two vicious and equally dishonourable and delusional advisers – is threatening to go to war with Iran while a kipper-waving and equally serial-lying buffoon, who is probably the future British prime minister, prefers to concentrate on the self-destruction of his country rather than the hijacking of his ships.

The Iranians, ever the scheming Shia “terrorists” of the Gulf, have dared to give two fingers to the crackpot president who ratted on his country’s international nuclear agreement with Iran, and now play motor-boats in the Strait of Hormuz to remind both Trump and Johnson – and poor wee Jeremy Hunt – that the Middle East is the graveyard of empires both real and long dead. What mischief! What brazen terroristic crimes will the Persians be up to next?

And we take all this garbage seriously? Perhaps we must blame ourselves. Our commentators and our correspondents, our mighty media empires, gleefully take down the sleazy characters in Washington and London and then – the moment they sniff war – their faces freeze in righteous and patriotic lockjaw as they speak disingenuously of Trump’s “Mid-East policy”, his “Gulf policy”, his close friendship with his blood-boltered Saudi “ally” or his land-grabbing Israeli ally. What tosh. There is no Trump policy on anything. Nor is there a Boris Johnson policy, nor a Jeremy Hunt policy – save, perhaps, a plaintive Gilbert and Sullivan bleat about Iran’s “totally and utterly unacceptable” behaviour in nicking the Stena Impero.

“Impero” was the right word. Indeed, there was nothing sadder or more pitiful than the sound of the commander of HMS Montrose – or “Foxtrot 236” as the Iranians addressed him by the frigate’s bow number – reading his Victorian rulebook to the Revolutionary Guards on Friday. “You must not impair, impede, obstruct or hamper the passage of the MV Stena Impero,” he quoted. Oh but the Iranians could and did impair, impede, obstruct and hamper the passage of the British-flagged tanker.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by xilman

I entirely agree. It's about time the Panamanian navy started pulling their weight. However, the present display of lack of diplomacy by POTUS is not a good way to win friends and influence people, in my opinion.

Panama has a navy?! There's precious little mention of such a concept in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamanian_Public_Forces
Does 19 patrol boats count as a navy? If so, the sheriff in the county I live in probably has a navy. Heck, the local sailing club has far more boats.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Panama has a navy?! There's precious little mention of such a concept in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamanian_Public_Forces
Does 19 patrol boats count as a navy? If so, the sheriff in the county I live in probably has a navy. Heck, the local sailing club has far more boats.

Given the enormous size of their, uh, merchant fleet, it would be profoundly remiss of them to not have a navy up to task of protecting same from Teh Evildoers.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Given the enormous size of their, uh, merchant fleet, it would be profoundly remiss of them to not have a navy up to task of protecting same from Teh Evildoers.

One might have similar expectations of the various branches of the military of the Cayman Islands to protect all those offshore accounts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayman...aw_enforcement

[kladner]

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/1765...ration_crisis/

Still, this isn’t really an article about Amílcar,** but about why he -- like so many hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans, Hondurans, and El Salvadorans in similar situations -- was in the United States in the first place. It’s about what drove 225,570 of them to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol in 2018 and 132,887 of them to be picked up at or near the border in a single month -- May -- of this year. As Dara Lind observed at Vox, “This isn’t a manufactured crisis, or a politically engineered one, as some Democrats and progressives have argued.”

It is indeed a real crisis, not something the Trump administration simply cooked up to justify building the president's wall. But it is also absolutely a manufactured crisis, one that should be stamped with the label “made in the U.S.A.” thanks to decades of Washington’s interventions in Central American affairs. Its origins go back at least to 1954 when the CIA overthrew the elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. In the 1960s, dictatorships would flourish in that country (and elsewhere in the region) with U.S. economic and military backing.

When, in the 1970s and 1980s, Central Americans began to rise up in response, Washington’s support for right-wing military regimes and death squads, in Honduras and El Salvador in particular, drove thousands of the inhabitants of those countries to migrate here, where their children were recruited into the very U.S. gangs now devastating their countries. In Guatemala, the U.S. supported successive regimes in genocidal wars on its indigenous Mayan majority. To top it off, climate change, which the United States has done the most of any nation to cause (and perhaps the least to forestall or mitigate), has made subsistence agriculture increasingly difficult to sustain in many parts of Central America.

** Murdered by San Francisco police, under a false accusation, with NO CONSEQUENCES.