Bad news for Scooter Libby.

Richard Fernandez;

If the U.S. had not won World War 2, Midway would never have existed in Japanese history. The average man of course read nothing in the papers, heard nothing on the radio, saw nothing in the newsreel. But perceptive Japanese “felt” something momentous had happened though they could not identify its cause. It’s impact, though denied in the press, shuddered through the whole imperial fabric. From that day forward events seemed to take a downward trajectory. Only after the war did the Japanese know the root of their misfortunes.

h/t bdoggins

Jihadists Now Control Secretive U.S. Base in Libya;

In the summer of 2012, American Green Berets began refurbishing a Libyan military base 27 kilometers west of Tripoli in order to hone the skills of Libya’s first Western-trained special operations counter-terrorism fighters. Less than two years later, that training camp is now being used by groups with direct links to al Qaeda to foment chaos in post-Qaddafi Libya.

Nobody knows anything.

…the United States has groomed a whole generation of foreign policy wonks-in-training who lack any real understanding of how the world actually works. These impressive-on-paper people – let it be noted they are legion in both parties – the under-45′s who are always graduates of the right schools and first-rate players of The Game in Washington, DC (which really comes down to cultivating the right mentors who will guide you to the proper think-tank until your party returns to power), are no match for the stone-cold killers of the Kremlin, led by the Chekist-in-Chief Putin. They have grown up in a world where unipolar American power has never been challenged, and while they can utter pleasant, Davos-ready platitudes about the whole range of bien pensant issues – global warming, emerging trends in micro-finance, gender matters on the Subcontinent, et al – they have quite literally nothing to say when old-school conventional threats emerge and enemies – yes, enemies: not rivals or merely misunderstood would-be partners – emerge from the darkness with conquest and killing on their minds.

Related: “Brilliant. Positively brilliant. Thousands of American troops dangling at the end of a lifeline ultimately controlled by the sponsors of al Qaeda wasting billions of dollars on Obama’s strategy.”

“The 80’s called, they want their foreign policy back.” – Barack Obama, to Mitt Romney
From the Telegraph, in the UK:
Wow. Mrs Palin not only got the country that Putin would threaten right, she also predicted the reason behind it. Obama’s “indecision and equivalence” over Iran, Egypt and, most importantly, Syria, has probably encouraged Putin to believe that there would be next-to-no Western response to an attack on Ukraine.

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Powerline: Photo of the Day – The scene is Yarmouk, a district of Damascus that is populated largely by Palestinian “refugees” and has been the scene of heavy fighting. The U.N. gained access to Yarmouk and passed out food there. These people are hoping to get something to eat.