Anti-Empire Report, April 7, 2012
Joseph Biden
From a document found at Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because "Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. ... Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.13
So ... it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?
And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China's presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?
America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China's authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don't think freely or innovate. "Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they're not innovating." Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, "It's impossible to think different in a country where you can't speak freely. It's impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It's impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That's why we remain the most innovative country in the world."14
Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth's orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1's success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA. 15
Notes
- Washington Post, April 1, 2012 ↩
- Huffington Post, December 19, 2011↩
- See the document on WikiLeaks ↩
- Washington Post, March 24, 2012↩
- Ibid., March 26, 2012 ↩
- Ibid., January 10, 2012 ↩
- Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012 ↩
- See the video description on Cuba's UN Ambassador at Left Forum '12↩
- BBC News, "Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion", April 3, 2012↩
- Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009 ↩
- New York Times, February 6, 2009 ↩
- Associated Press, November 17, 2008 ↩
- Washington Post, March 16, 2012 ↩
- Ibid., March 1, 2012 ↩
- Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1 ↩
