World's 10 worst dictators

[ljb]

This week's Parade has a list of the world's 10 worst dictators. Data is compiled from U.S. State Department, Human rights watch, Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders.
Coming in as number 4 this year (up from 5 last year) is none other then King Abdullah from Saudi Arabia. Isn't this the despot Bush was hand holding with a few years back ?
Anyway researchers at West Point say that the largest number of al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq still come from Saudi Arabia.
This condition is part of the reason the war-mongering, imperialistic, neocons have faded in this election. The American public finally sees the big picture of our occupation in Iraq being continued primarily to support this dictator.

[Boats]

And what is the only country where we are forbidden to travel? Cuba. Castro didn't even make the list.

[Lefty]

lbj, That guy in N. Korea KiM Jong il higher on list and was given nukes by your beloved dems. This admin had to deal with that. Wonder where Saddam woulda been on the list? This admin took him out, remember. Clinton talked 8 yrs but Bush took him out. Sometimes you hafta stop talking and take action.
There ya go.

[46zilzal]

And what is the only country where we are forbidden to travel? Cuba. Castro didn't even make the list.
People with US passports go there all the time by way of Toronto.

Castro? On an international scale is not now, nor has he ever been a threat. What a joke. I spoke recently with a family who goes there twice a year bringing poor families things they cannot get due to embargo (toothpaste, bicycle tires etc.) and the photos they showed me paint a completely different story than the crap one reads in the papers.

[bigmack]

Castro? On an international scale is not now, nor has he ever been a threat. What a joke. I spoke recently with a family who goes there twice a year bringing poor families things they cannot get due to embargo (toothpaste, bicycle tires etc.) and the photos they showed me paint a completely different story than the crap one reads in the papers.
The biggest threat he poses, is to his own people. You sit in a world thinking that the average American Joe is worried about Cuba. :lol: Merely just another delusion on your part.

Share with the world your story that Cuba is the land of milk & honey. :p

[ljb]

lbj, That guy in N. Korea KiM Jong il higher on list and was given nukes by your beloved dems. This admin had to deal with that. Wonder where Saddam woulda been on the list? This admin took him out, remember. Clinton talked 8 yrs but Bush took him out. Sometimes you hafta stop talking and take action.
There ya go.
Lefty,
Back to the ol blame-o bill-o game, figures. What about NOW ? We got the number 4 despot playing handys with dubya NOW and you look to the past ?

[kenwoodallpromos]

I did not see the list or a link to it; but the #1 world's worst dictator of a country for closed immigration, sex and religious discrimination should always be the Pope. Think about it.
Vatican City is a UN recognized country.

[Boats]

People with US passports go there all the time by way of Toronto.

True, but not legally. Hundreds have been caught and paid fines up to $10,000.

For some info on traveling to Cuba see
http://www.cubaclimbing.com/travel.htm

For example
A retired 64 year-old social worker who joined a Canadian bicycle tour to Cuba paid $7,600 to the Treasury Department. These and other U.S. citizens, including a man who took his deceased father's ashes to be buried in Cuba, have become recent targets of the Treasury's prosecutions.

[kenwoodallpromos]

"C. Laws of the Supreme Pontiff



The VCS is a unique entity in that the state’s monarch is also the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church throughout the world. As the elected absolute temporal monarch of the state, the Pope has full legislative, executive, and judicial authority over the jurisdiction."
Of course, since it became a country every head of state has automatically been "elected" by appointed hierarchy for life.
I doubt there has ever been an election voted on by the full citizenery.

[Tom]

Castro fades into history........buh-bye.

Now, can someone tell what the hell the trade embargo has ever accomplished or ever will accomplish?

If we trade with China, we will trade with any low life forms. Why not Cuba?

[OTM Al]

The only reason I can come up with is sugar. Cuba would give a very cheap supply of sugar that we could use rather than the more expensive and far less healthy corn syrup that is currently in use for sweetened products. However, corn syrup has been such a boon to agriculture interests here that it is in their interests to not let Cuban sugar onto the US market.

[Tom]

Which says a lot for our governement.
We talk the talk real good, but need a little work on walking the walk.

[russowen77]

Pooh on Castro or whomever is running the place. There is no way the Gov should take Cuba away from us. I love the Carib and the thought of Cuba of all places being off limits is inane.

[ddog]

It's all about Florida and getting elected guys.
You can't P.O. the Cuban segment down there and carry that state plus your position gets you trashed on con side if you are thought to be weak on Commies.

Now CHina, that's another story, they have what we want now, the bucks and cheap goods plus a market to sell to , so we dance with 'em.
Cuba was/is a cheap talking point to prove conservative bonafides.

[Robert Goren]

There are trade missions to Cuba all the time. My Nebraska governor has been there.

[ddog]

Nebraska v. Florida???

Tell Dave not to run in Florida.
;)

Good for him if he can get agreements to supply for your farmers there setup, have they actually signed sales contracts yet?

We can sell meds and food to them as I recall.

[delayjf]

Castro? On an international scale is not now, nor has he ever been a threat. What a joke. I spoke recently with a family who goes there twice a year bringing poor families things they cannot get due to embargo (toothpaste, bicycle tires etc.) and the photos they showed me paint a completely different story than the crap one reads in the papers.
I was not aware that the US is the only country that makes toothpaste and bike tires? Are we talking about an embargo or a blockade? Is not Cuba able to trade with other countries besides the US??

[Gibbon]

Finally read the complete report. How sad our good friend King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia makes it into the top five for 10 consecutive years! Doesn't seem to matter – Dems, Reps both pimp America out when modern day clean reliable nuclear energy can wean us off terrorist oil.






_________________________________
"...worked together as effectively as the terrorists do...." ~ King Abdullah

[Lefty]

Yep. Once again, it's mostly dimdems that stand in the way. Didja ever notice how they keep whining about the probs but are against every viable solution?

[ljb]

A little more back on topic here. Late last year in meetings with senior Saudi government officials, Congressional staffers raised concerns about the case of the Saudi rape victim who faced six months in prison and two hundred lashes because she spoke out publicly.

The Saudi officials responded by simply saying, "Guantanamo" and "Abu Ghraib". As if to say, "Who are you to lecture us about due process and human rights?"
So perhaps Saudi's king should not be so High on the list?

[delayjf]

Saudi rape victim who faced six months in prison and two hundred lashes because she spoke out publicly.

The Saudi officials responded by simply saying, "Guantanamo" and "Abu Ghraib".

Nothing at Gitmo or Abu Ghraib is as bad as what that women faced - and all because she was a rape victim.

[Greyfox]

There are trade missions to Cuba all the time. My Nebraska governor has been there.

Michael Moore went there and got away with it.

http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j191/mikesamerica/gmMooreSicko-1.jpg
.

[riskman]

I did not see the list or a link to it; but the #1 world's worst dictator of a country for closed immigration, sex and religious discrimination should always be the Pope. Think about it.
Vatican City is a UN recognized country.


Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it.
Pope John Paul II

[Gibbon]

Guantanamo ... Abu Ghraib Something must be lost in translation. Guantomo is a rousing success story. The Bush doctrine has kept US safe for 7 years while other nations have suffered terrorist attacks.

If those beautiful Abu Ghraib shepherds were unleashed – this war would be over. But noooo, we must be nice, we must be polite. Our lily white rules of engagement will ensure Senator McCain is correct. We’ll be in Iraq for 100 years.







_______________________________________
War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. ~ General William Sherman

[russowen77]

Something must be lost in translation. Guantomo is a rousing success story. The Bush doctrine has kept US safe for 7 years while other nations have suffered terrorist attacks.

If those beautiful Abu Ghraib shepherds were unleashed – this war would be over. But noooo, we must be nice, we must be polite. Our lily white rules of engagement will ensure Senator McCain is correct. We’ll be in Iraq for 100 years.







_______________________________________
War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. ~ General William Sherman

What rules of engagement would you like us to us?

[Gibbon]

russowen77,

Superb question! Answer: WWII Asian Pacific rules. I'm a student of military history so allow me to further elaborate...

As Winston Churchill long ago stated “war is the most serious business.” Understanding the difference between civilian and military decision making is one of the most valuable lessons military history teaches.

In Western democracies like the United States and Britain, the civil power, elected by the people, has the sole right to declare war and make peace. Civilian leaders must lay down clear objectives and give the military commanders their orders accordingly. But then, having done that, civilian leaders must leave the field of battle to professional commanders. It is not for the military to dictate policies, as General MacArthur tried to do, but equally it is not for the politicians to tell the generals how to fight.

This time honored rule has been broken several times and always with disastrous results. On one memorable occasion was during the brief Suez War of 1956, which the British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, with his French allies, launched against Egypt. Eden was a man of peace who hated war, and got involved in this one reluctantly. He made many mistakes. He acted in a secretive manner, not taking into his confidence the House of Commons or even all his Cabinet colleagues, and above all his American ally, President Eisenhower. As a result there was great opposition to the war, at home and abroad, once it was launched. But his most serious mistake was to fail to give his military commanders clear orders about their objectives, and then leave them to get on with it. He tried to fight a kind of limited and political war, with the generals and air marshals restrained by political factors in what weapons they could use. He even told the Royal Air Force not to use bombs above a certain weight. The confusion of the commanders about what they were supposed to be doing was a factor in the war’s failure, which ended with an ignominious Anglo-French withdrawal, dictated by political factors. The Suez War was a historic demonstration of how fatal to success it is to muddle politics and military operations together.

That being said, it is astonishing to think that only a few years later, the United States made exactly the same boneheaded mistakes in Vietnam. Our current occupation of Iraq is yet again a political war NOT a military action. We must go all out for total victory with all the resources America could command just as he had done with the invasion of occupied Europe in June 1944. My personal belief system: we should work to avoid war if at all possible. But if you can’t - fight it to WIN at all costs.

It seems to me that this confusion {political war v. military war} originating in the first Iraq war and deepened in the second. What successful time honored military campaigns in the past teaches us again and again, is that clarity of aim is paramount, above all in the deadly serious business of war-making. The Allies in the First World War were never clear about why they were fighting it and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, it can be argued, added to the confusion. Therein lay the weakness of the Versailles settlement, which laid the foundations of another conflict. In the Second World War, both politicians and military warriors agreed on at least one thing: the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan and the total destruction of the Nazi/Emperor Hirohito economic/political apparatus. We should require no less in Iraq.

In simple terms; complete annihilation and humiliation of the enemy.

[Tom]

Anything less than 110% effort in war is surrender.

[riskman]

First, how do you determine whether you’re winning in a war like this? There are certainly no battle fronts or capitals to ransack. Well, many of our presidential candidates have a measure.

According to news reports, fewer soldiers than usual have died in the past few months. And this statistic is supposed proof of the troop surge’s efficiency. But wait one second, since when do fewer casualties mean that we’re winning? According to this logic, the Allies lost the battle of D-Day during WWII. Thousands of men died on Omaha Beach. Surely this means America lost. Someone should also send the Russians a memo alerting them to the historical failures of battles both at Stalingrad and Berlin where hundreds of thousands of their soldiers fell, many more than the Germans lost.

It is obvious that the American people are being misled regarding the actual status of the conflict. The amount of dead has nothing to with whether a nation is strategically succeeding in warfare. Absolutely nothing! In fact, victory often comes at the expense of more lives not fewer. In reality, there is no real way to tell whether you are winning or not in such conflicts.

Some claim that "we’re fighting them over there; so that we don’t have to fight them over here."

What can we do under these dire circumstances? There is only one option: Let’s get out of Middle East affairs entirely. The United States should no longer intervene in Middle Eastern countries and only maintain mutually beneficial trade.

The terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom. The fundamentalists revile the U.S. for four reasons: our alliance with Israel; our imperialist presence in the Middle East in general; our occupation of their Holy Land in particular, Saudi Arabia; and the fact that we have for over a decade been bombing and blockading Iraq.

With regard to this last atrocity, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked if the U.S. sanctions against Iraq, which were responsible for killing some half a million children, were "worth it." She replied in the affirmative.

If Hillary, or Obama are elected from the Democratic side, John from the Republican, they will continue all four hated policies and will continue to make the United States of America a prime target.

Leaving any troops will still make the U.S. a target. Both Democrat and "mainstream" Republican non-withdrawal plans would be a disaster for our soldiers. If US troops are actually reduced, those remaining in the region will be weakened with fewer numbers. Both parties have a "helpless and stranded" evacuation plan.

[Gibbon]

This war ended long ago. The first six weeks of shock and awe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe) will be studied by future warriors as an exemplary model of military tactics. The goal of ousting Saddam Hussein and his two sons is now a historical fact. Moving on; politicians have promoted themselves to field Marshall status in need of a new objective. Without any clearly defined goals, we are officially a police presence in Iraq. The three major factions in Iraq refuse to share oil revenue, refuse to maintain civil order so US forces must act as a police agency.

It's a fiasco unless – we wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil. We can do so! Japan, Russia {an oil supplier} France, China are all building new nuclear power plants based on primary research stolen from US designs.

We constrain ourselves from extracting black gold in Alaska. We constrain our selves by bowing to irrational pressures from radical “green” associations. We spend resources on boutique small scale energy development. We celebrate our ingenuity from Star Trek fantasy technology in full cells and hydrogen. Technologies that are at least 25 to 50 years from mass deployment.

We need answers right NOW or every congressional district will experience California type rolling blackouts. Nuclear energy can solve global warming hysteria. Nuclear energy can sustain large masses of population. Nuclear energy can help drastically alleviate the mass transfer of wealth from western nations to terrorist sponsored states.

But noooo, we choose to hang ourselves. The current crop of presidential candidates are clueless wonders with NO solutions to anything facing America's future.

Americans' will cast their vote based on empty promises. Promise the moon and stars. Promise them free this and that. Discuss health care and race relations. Never-ever ask an American to sacrifice their pleasures. As Bush said in a now infamous speech in lower Manhattan addressing the aftermath of 9/11 “go shopping.”