PAX Centurion - March / April 2014

www.bppa.org PAX CENTURION • March/April 2014 • Page 25 Veteran’s Corner: Patrick M. Rose What is Secretary of State Kerry thinking? L ast issue I promised to critique John F. Kerry’s tenure as Sec- retary of State. Where should I begin, I guess at the beginning: On January 29, 2013 the Senate overwhelmingly approved Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) as the next Secretary of State, it was a Tuesday afternoon, surprisingly with only three Republican “no” votes. The vote was 94 to 3, clearing the way for Kerry to formally take over from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Fri- day, Feb. 1, 2013. He assumed the post amid a civil war in Syria that had killed an estimated 60,000 at that point, stalled nuclear negotiations with Iran and the spread of militancy across NorthAfrica. U.S. relations with Russia were at a low point, the United States was struggling to manage a changing relationship with a rising China and the prospects for newMideast peace efforts appeared dim. That was then this is now; as if there wasn’t enough news to already cover, the world now stands at the precipice of WorldWar III.Yes a WorldWar, what do you think Rus- sian President Vladimir Putin is pushing for, colonization?Annexing poor mistreated, enslaved Ukrai- nian Russian speaking souls, who according to him just happen to live in a territory that needs foreign intervention, protection or help of some kind?! Give me a break! Putin has marched his troops into a Sovereign Nation backed by the Russian Military ma- chine prepared to go to battle. He engineered the invasion and theft of a State and all of her occupants, equipment, wealth, military and shipping without so much as having a single soldier twist an ankle. How could he get away with this without a shot fired? Simple, we are led and commanded by Barack Obama and our country’s principal mouthpiece for all things considered Foreign Policy in none other than John F. Kerry. I can’t lay the entire blame on Kerry, after all he is just following the lead of our Commander in Chief, but he is the country’s foreign affairs expert. Our answer to the Russians and Putin, (who by the way see themselves as regaining their old status of a superpower ie., the Soviet Union), is the equiva- lent of being sent to bed early without cookies and milk. This Nation is becoming a ‘paper tiger’with no teeth to back up our bark. Look at what is going on in the rest of the world under our current Secretary of State: Iran has taken our ‘bribe money’ and continues to develop nuclear reactors turning out weapon’s grade plutonium. Iraq is in turmoil, the Kurds in the north have their own security force and are running their own government and ignoring the central Iraq government & law. Al Qaeda-linked Sunni extremists continue with regular attacks against government targets and Shiites. Street murders and bombing have once again become common place. The potential for economic develop- ment in Iraq is huge, but violence remains endemic, and many Iraqis fear the return of civil war and a possible partition of the country. Afghanistan, the government there is in the process of releasing another 65 Taliban insurgents from prison to renew their attacks on U.S. Personnel, “Detainees from this group of 65 are directly linked to attacks killing or wounding 32 U.S. or coalition personnel and 23 Afghan security personnel or civilians,” the military said in a state- ment. We have pulled out the majority of com- bat forces and left our remain- ing military personnel virtually defenseless, but continue to hand this corrupt government millions of dollars! Meanwhile Syria and the al-Assad regime is still murder- ing any and all opposition to their brutal dictatorship and rule, while we continue to issue supercilious threats of diplomatic reprisals! Meanwhile our refereeing of the Israeli/Palestinian debacle is going down the tubes. It depends on what day it is to determine which side of the table we are sup- porting and how. How about the other end of the spectrum? North Korea and South Korea are about to break out into a shooting war. Meanwhile in one of our best dip- lomatic moves in a century we send the First Lady, her children and her mother on a vacation to China. The trip was of course covered in detail by the ‘White House News’, no public media invited, move along nothing to see here, (sarcasm intended) . This while Japan and China are postur- ing and basically threatening each other with a shooting war over a land dispute. Speaking of the Japanese, it is reported that they now posses enough weapons grade plutonium to build over 2,000 nuclear war- heads in spite of their non nuclear principals of non-possession and non-production of nuclear weapons. In addition they have started a very vocal press campaign letting both Korea and China know that they posses the material to build and fly those bombs if necessary. I’d love to write another four pages about NorthAfrica and India but I think you get the point. So let me ask, how much safer are we as a Nation, how much safer has the world become in the last 14 months after the appointment of John F. Kerry as Secretary of State?! I’ll leave the critique to you.