Posted on Jan 10, 2020
Congressman Who Lost Legs to IED Walks to Podium to Torch Dems for Being 'Cowards' After...
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We, here on RP, know what courage and cowardice are, or at least we should. This veteran and member of Congress knows the difference and he lectured the other members of the House on that difference. Sadly, most were cowards and voted, symbolically, to castigate President Trump for ordering the attack on Soliemani even though they had remained silent in the face of other attacks ordered by Presidents of their own party. Courage, for those reading this who don't know (I'm sharing this link on Facebook), is the moral strength to do what is needed, what is necessary, in spite of fear, in spite of danger. President Trump demonstrated courage. The Democratic House members demonstrated cowardice. Thank God there was a hero in the House to remind them
Congressman Who Lost Legs to IED Walks to Podium to Torch Dems for Being 'Cowards' After...
Posted from pjmedia.com
Congress
Heroes
Posted 5 y ago
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One problem with claiming the moral high ground, is that someone with basically the same situation might disagree. Is Tammy Duckworth a coward? She also lost both her legs. One of her arms is permanently messed up.
Disagreeing with the President’s current course of action doesn’t inherently imply cowardice or somebody who lacks the courage to endure danger.
Simply ridiculous.
Disagreeing with the President’s current course of action doesn’t inherently imply cowardice or somebody who lacks the courage to endure danger.
Simply ridiculous.
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I completely disagree, Jack. The Democrats were not taking the side of Soleimani against our own heroes and neither were Mike Lee or Rand Paul. They were defending the Constitutional powers of Congress to declare war and limit the powers of an Executive branch in the use of military actions. Soleimani, whether you agree or not was not an enemy combatant because we are not in a declared war with Iran. If you think we should be, then go to Congress and ask for a declaration of war like the President is required to do. Democratic Presidents like Truman and Johnson have pushed that "Executive Power" argument to the detriment of the Constitution. Imagine if Pompeo were in Europe and was killed by a missile strike from Syria because they believed the US dropped bombs or missiles that killed citizens of their own country. We would declare that as an act of war. When President Reagan sent troops to Grenada, he notified Tip O'Neil. Why can't President Trump notify the Speaker of the House, third in line for the Presidency according to the Constitution, that an airstrike was going to happen? Do not tell me that the President can't trust the opposing party. One day the shoe will be on the other foot. Would you be satisfied that the President of your opposing party do whatever he or she likes because he/she is the President?
This Congressman is not the only serviceperson to lose his or her legs in combat. Tammy Duckworth, whether you agree with her policies or not, lost her legs as well.
This Congressman is not the only serviceperson to lose his or her legs in combat. Tammy Duckworth, whether you agree with her policies or not, lost her legs as well.
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MCPO Roger Collins
SGT (Join to see) Sorry, Dave, I’m going with what’s happening on the ground today. We have hundreds of our service members killed, not to mention thousands of injured, as a result of this dead terrorist, that would not have been stopped had he been required to inform Congress first. My question remains, what did Trump do that wasn’t consistent with the Constitution and the War Powers Act of 1973?
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SGT (Join to see)
MSgt Robert "Rock" Aldi - Then go to Congress and declare war. The entire Iran fiasco was a result of a misguided American policy that overthrew the elected government of a sovereign nation and installed the Shah of Iran. I do not like the mistreatment of any American citizen. However, again, how would you feel if a country overthrew our lawfully elected government and installed a government we neither asked for or approved? As Ron Paul once said, our actions have blowback. If not for oil, why are we in the Middle East in the first place? Would we ever been attacked?
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CPT Jack Durish
SGT (Join to see) - "...a misguided American policy that overthrew the elected government..." What was misguided was the fact that we decided to reserve our own supplies of crude and allow ourselves to become dependent on imported crude, principally imported from an unstable region of the world. And the elected government we overthrew was just about as legitimate as the "elected governments" of the Soviet Union and the People's Democratic Republic of China. And the Iranians enjoyed unprecedented freedom and modernity under the Shah. Iran also brought stability to an unstable region. Being the most powerful nation in that region, aggressors like Saddam and bumbling kinds like the one in Saudi Arabia were held in check. Yes, the Shah responded brutally to rebellions incited by Stone Age Ayatollahs. They were brutal and, when President Carter knocked the props out from under the ailing Shah, they took over and look at the mayhem we now live with. "...how would you feel if a country overthrew our lawfully elected government...?" Haven't you looked recently? It has been overthrown by an unelected bureaucracy that now exercises unfettered executive, legislative, and judicial functions. How do you feel about that? Finally, "...why are we in the Middle East in the first place?" Ah, the Circle of Politics. We arrive back where I began. "...we decided to reserve our own supplies of crude and allow ourselves to become dependent..." Well, we are no longer dependent, are we? We are now a net exporter of energy (thanks to President Trump unleashing the energy industry). So, why don't we leave now? Well, the rest of the industrialized world, our trading partners, aren't so fortunate, and if their economies fall, they'll drag ours down with them.
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Sgt Bob Leonard
CPT Jack Durish -
You said, “And the elected government we overthrew was just about as legitimate as the "elected governments" of the Soviet Union and the People's Democratic Republic of China.”
Can you provide something other than your opinion to support that statement?
These accounts would seem to lead to a different conclusion.....
.......
All the Shah’s Men
An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
S T E P H E N K I N Z E R
PREFACE
One day I attended a book party for an older Iranian woman who had written her memoirs. She spoke for an hour about her eventful life. Although she never touched on politics,...
After she finished speaking, I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask a question. “You mentioned Mossadegh,” I said. “What do you remember, or what can you tell us, about the coup against him?”
She immediately became agitated and animated. “Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?” she cried out. “We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?”
.......
And this one.....
.......
At an NSC meeting in early 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower said "it was a matter of great distress to him that we seemed unable to get some of these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us."1 The problem has likewise distressed all administrations since, and is emerging as the core conundrum of American policy in Iraq. In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times suggests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no2/article10.html
......
I particularly direct your attention to one sentence in the middle of the paragraph: “The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests.”. i.e. oil
And this one.....
.......
64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup
June 20, 2017
“On August 19, 1953, democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, after having nationalized the oil industry. The Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was re-installed in the primary position of power. Massive protests broke out across the nation, leaving almost 300 dead in firefights in the streets of Tehran.”
“Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/
.......
.......
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1952-1954, IRAN, 1951–1954
Planning and Implementation of Operation TPAJAX, March–August 1953
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/ch3
.......
What’s past is prologue. The Eisenhower administration certainly didn’t plan or even foresee that Operation Ajax would eventually lead to the conditions in the ME we have today. But it stands, nonetheless, that it did.
Would the ME today be a veritable Garden of Eden Redux if we hadn’t coup d’étated Mossadeq? Even I’m not naive enough to believe that. But what might have been isn’t the issue. The point is that our actions in Iran in 1953 have had significant consequences that we’re dealing with today.
You said, “And the elected government we overthrew was just about as legitimate as the "elected governments" of the Soviet Union and the People's Democratic Republic of China.”
Can you provide something other than your opinion to support that statement?
These accounts would seem to lead to a different conclusion.....
.......
All the Shah’s Men
An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
S T E P H E N K I N Z E R
PREFACE
One day I attended a book party for an older Iranian woman who had written her memoirs. She spoke for an hour about her eventful life. Although she never touched on politics,...
After she finished speaking, I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask a question. “You mentioned Mossadegh,” I said. “What do you remember, or what can you tell us, about the coup against him?”
She immediately became agitated and animated. “Why did you Americans do that terrible thing?” she cried out. “We always loved America. To us, America was the great country, the perfect country, the country that helped us while other countries were exploiting us. But after that moment, no one in Iran ever trusted the United States again. I can tell you for sure that if you had not done that thing, you would never have had that problem of hostages being taken in your embassy in Tehran. All your trouble started in 1953. Why, why did you do it?”
.......
And this one.....
.......
At an NSC meeting in early 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower said "it was a matter of great distress to him that we seemed unable to get some of these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us."1 The problem has likewise distressed all administrations since, and is emerging as the core conundrum of American policy in Iraq. In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times suggests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol48no2/article10.html
......
I particularly direct your attention to one sentence in the middle of the paragraph: “The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests.”. i.e. oil
And this one.....
.......
64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup
June 20, 2017
“On August 19, 1953, democratically-elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA and British intelligence, after having nationalized the oil industry. The Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was re-installed in the primary position of power. Massive protests broke out across the nation, leaving almost 300 dead in firefights in the streets of Tehran.”
“Declassified documents released last week shed light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s central role in the 1953 coup that brought down Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/20/64-years-later-cia-finally-releases-details-of-iranian-coup-iran-tehran-oil/
.......
.......
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1952-1954, IRAN, 1951–1954
Planning and Implementation of Operation TPAJAX, March–August 1953
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran/ch3
.......
What’s past is prologue. The Eisenhower administration certainly didn’t plan or even foresee that Operation Ajax would eventually lead to the conditions in the ME we have today. But it stands, nonetheless, that it did.
Would the ME today be a veritable Garden of Eden Redux if we hadn’t coup d’étated Mossadeq? Even I’m not naive enough to believe that. But what might have been isn’t the issue. The point is that our actions in Iran in 1953 have had significant consequences that we’re dealing with today.
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror — Central Intelligence...
All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror - Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
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CPT Jack Durish I salute everyone on both sides of this issue because each one brings something to the table to be considered. This is why we have 2 sides on either side of the aisle. Now may the best of the best of both help bring a out resolutions.
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CPT Jack Durish
Sadly, the best aren't filling the seats in the House. There are ideologues on both sides. The problem I have is that I see no case for opposing President Trump's decision in this case, especially by those who sat mute while President Obama did the same thing countless times (more than 2,000 by some count)
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