Josh Trevino writes that we should treat our eviction from Uzbekistan as a badge of pride.
Reader Interactions
12Comments
Comments are closed.
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!
Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.
They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.
I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.
Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.
Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.
“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”
Everybody saw this coming.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.
When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?
Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.
They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?
Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.
If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.
Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.
🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵
The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?
Fuck these fucking interesting times.
I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.
Stormy70
I agree, it’s time to walk the walk.
rilkefan
This seems like a tough call, but there’s something unsatisfactory about saying we’ll put up with torturers as long as it’s useful to advance our goals.
Don Surber
The boiling opponents in water that got me. I would rather we stay, overthrow this bozo, and establish a democracy.
ppGaz
Based entirely on the information supplied here …
I have no reason not to think that there’s a calculation here. The base was going to be shut down, so while we’re at it, let’s get in a human rights plug. The history of US foreign policy indicates that US interests traditionally come first, human rights — I dunno, ninth? Whether this is good or bad, I’ll leave to foreign policy wonks to slug out.
Steve
Considering that taking the side of the Uzbek government has required absurd statements like this by Scott McClellan:
(That’s right: It’s now the position of the US that one should not resort to violence in order to bring about democracy.)
One of the ongoing problems in the G-SAVE is that we have given many of our allies, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the velvet-glove treatment when they don’t necessarily deserve that. If they can’t take a little tough rhetoric about their human-rights violations, too bad for them.
demimondian
From a purely strategic and cynical viewpoint, letting ourselves get kicked out of Uzbekistan is actually a great move. By building up a replacement base in a neighboring country and then walking away from the established base in the original host country, the United States gains negotiating leverage.
The Saudis, in particular, must be terrified by the respone to the closure of K2. Although the United Stated doesn’t have a permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia any more, we still had strategicilly critical trans-shipment bases there. Iraq, however, is a much more desirable staging area — and we now have established bases there. The only use the Saudis have for us is as a moderator of the price of oil, and global demand has risen to such a pitch that they can’t moderate those prices any more, either.
You can’t negotiate if you can’t say “no”. By getting kicked out of K2, the US has shown “This is how we say ‘no'”.
Mike S
Not sure how I feel about this. We’re being evicted for a tepid response to the massacre after our original response was to basically ignore it and prior abuses. Maybe the state dept will be able to spin it to the world as a win for us but I don’t see it.
I’ve been saying for a while that we need to rethink our “enemy of my enemy” policy. I think this would have been a good place to start. And if we had any indication that eviction was coming we should have gotten out in front of it and demanded an end to the govt abuses. That way we would really look like we were saying “no” as opposed to the tepid “no” we did give. That’s assuming that we had any idea that we were about to be evicted.
I’ll have to wait to see how the world perceives this for final judgement from me. If they see it the way Trevino does than this will definately be a win. And hopefully we can use it as the start of a new policy of not ignoring abuses for short term strategy. This has the potential for very good things.
Richard Bottoms
Darn. Now where are we going tosend our Extraordinary Rendition prisoners to be tortured?
W.B. Reeves
Implying, of course, that up till now we’ve just been blowing smoke.
Knemon
Baby steps.
anonymous
The UN is recruiting here, giving Uzbeks immigration to other countries, beyond Kyrgistan, which is the real reason for the baby steps.
Barry
Richard Bottoms Says:
“Darn. Now where are we going tosend our Extraordinary Rendition prisoners to be tortured?”
Syria, of course. I heard a story once, about a german artillery officer in 1941 waiting until a Soviet food train crossed the demarcation line in Poland before launching the artillery barrage which kicked off Operation Barbarossa.
It’s probably a fable, but I could just see some poor schmuck getting tortured by the Syrians on our behalf, and then, after the US attacks Syria, getting a ‘do-over’ to make him confess to being a US spy. If the schmuck was Al Qaida I’d say ‘tough’, but the way this adminstration works it’d be some random guy turned in for the reward.