This is all old news. This is Bill. Hillary has yet to build her own library and ambitions.
May 7, 2015
Like countless people before him, (click here) Frank Giustra's first meeting with Bill Clinton was a life-altering event indelibly etched in his memory. "We hit it off right away," Giustra recalls. "We hit it off for a whole number of reasons. We had a very similar upbringing. We had similar interests in books. Pretty soon, we were having a great conversation. I think he liked me."
Giustra was experiencing the famous Clinton connection, the tractor beam of personal magnetism that Clinton has deployed to pull people into his orbit since his earliest days in Arkansas. Back then, they were people like Mack McLarty, the well-to-do kindergarten classmate who became Clinton's first White House chief of staff, and Jim McDougal, the local banker and real estate investor who was the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal and eventually wound up in jail. In Arkansas the stakes were comparatively small. Clinton had little money, and his admirers didn't have a whole lot more. Today, in his post-presidency, Clinton has built up a multibillion-dollar family foundation with a global reach. He may soon be back in the White House. The people he solicits are the sort who gravitate to Davos, not Little Rock—people like Frank Giustra....
I don't have any problem with this. Hillary's private emails were NOT on Google, but, as Saddam was not al Qaeda, what difference did it make, the American people were nudged on that path and many of them still remain there.
I do, however, have a great deal of problems with illegal and immoral wars conducted by the government and military of the USA.
The West went to a great deal of trouble to understand the people of Iraq. They were personalized to us and some have immigrated to The West, including the USA. But, the course of their existence has been horrible and no one can dispell that. The cultures of these people keep them going and The West has no right to interfere. This is a Shi'ite family that lived in Sadr City. That particular city was impoverished under Saddam Hussein, but, the Shi'ites persisted.
If the people of Iraq don't want to fight the former Ba'athists, it is somewhat understandable. I am sure they are as tired of war as any people on Earth. The dreams for their children were never their reality and even The West could not deliver them from that reality. If anything, The West deepened their hopelessness for a future that is always clouded by others priorities for their land and people.
Adnan Hamid held his son, Hassan, as his wife, Zainab, held their
daughter, Benin, in May. Hamid’s brother Kaiss (R) also lives with the
family in Sadr City.
(World Picture News File Photo / Scott Nelson)
July 4, 2005
By Thanassis Cambanis
BAGHDAD -- Benin Hamid, (click here) now a coquettish 4-year-old, swings the stuffed yellow duck that has been her constant companion in a short life punctuated by an invasion and two uprisings that forced her and her family to flee their home in Sadr City.
She has never named the duck, and it is not clear how well she remembers her older brother and her two sisters, who were killed with her aunt, on the catastrophic day in April 2003 when a mortar struck the house.
Life goes on in the Hamid household, a two-story jumble of rooms that contains four scarred families whose uneven progress since the US invasion mirrors the struggles of many in the Shi'ite Muslim slum where they live.
The Hamid family has survived, but just barely, over the past 26 months.
Repeated visits by a Globe reporter offered a view of an extended clan whose members have inventively kept themselves fed and clothed, but who have a decidedly mixed record at keeping their spirits up....
If Iraq is to have a future as a sovereign country, it has to be the will of the people. I do not believe a sovereign Iraq was ever the plan of the Iraqi people. They didn't mind trying, but, with the invasion of a strange group of violent extremists across the border from Syria, it was simply one more insult to people who have been pushed to the brink of existing rather than thriving. Their religion is their solace and we have no right to judge them.
I heard some talking head today state, the USA has to pull itself up by the boot straps and invade North Africa, Libya included, Syria and retake Iraq. It'll never happen. The only successful attack that ever dominated North Africa was the Third Reich and their Panzer tanks. At the time there was no resistance. North Africa was not organized to fight wars of such magnitude.
Somehow the delusional Bush element in the world believes the Middle East and North Africa would be the same if the USA had left ten thousand troops in Iraq.
All I can say to that is, "Really?"
May 7, 2015
Like countless people before him, (click here) Frank Giustra's first meeting with Bill Clinton was a life-altering event indelibly etched in his memory. "We hit it off right away," Giustra recalls. "We hit it off for a whole number of reasons. We had a very similar upbringing. We had similar interests in books. Pretty soon, we were having a great conversation. I think he liked me."
Giustra was experiencing the famous Clinton connection, the tractor beam of personal magnetism that Clinton has deployed to pull people into his orbit since his earliest days in Arkansas. Back then, they were people like Mack McLarty, the well-to-do kindergarten classmate who became Clinton's first White House chief of staff, and Jim McDougal, the local banker and real estate investor who was the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal and eventually wound up in jail. In Arkansas the stakes were comparatively small. Clinton had little money, and his admirers didn't have a whole lot more. Today, in his post-presidency, Clinton has built up a multibillion-dollar family foundation with a global reach. He may soon be back in the White House. The people he solicits are the sort who gravitate to Davos, not Little Rock—people like Frank Giustra....
I don't have any problem with this. Hillary's private emails were NOT on Google, but, as Saddam was not al Qaeda, what difference did it make, the American people were nudged on that path and many of them still remain there.
I do, however, have a great deal of problems with illegal and immoral wars conducted by the government and military of the USA.
The West went to a great deal of trouble to understand the people of Iraq. They were personalized to us and some have immigrated to The West, including the USA. But, the course of their existence has been horrible and no one can dispell that. The cultures of these people keep them going and The West has no right to interfere. This is a Shi'ite family that lived in Sadr City. That particular city was impoverished under Saddam Hussein, but, the Shi'ites persisted.
If the people of Iraq don't want to fight the former Ba'athists, it is somewhat understandable. I am sure they are as tired of war as any people on Earth. The dreams for their children were never their reality and even The West could not deliver them from that reality. If anything, The West deepened their hopelessness for a future that is always clouded by others priorities for their land and people.
July 4, 2005
By Thanassis Cambanis
BAGHDAD -- Benin Hamid, (click here) now a coquettish 4-year-old, swings the stuffed yellow duck that has been her constant companion in a short life punctuated by an invasion and two uprisings that forced her and her family to flee their home in Sadr City.
She has never named the duck, and it is not clear how well she remembers her older brother and her two sisters, who were killed with her aunt, on the catastrophic day in April 2003 when a mortar struck the house.
Life goes on in the Hamid household, a two-story jumble of rooms that contains four scarred families whose uneven progress since the US invasion mirrors the struggles of many in the Shi'ite Muslim slum where they live.
The Hamid family has survived, but just barely, over the past 26 months.
Repeated visits by a Globe reporter offered a view of an extended clan whose members have inventively kept themselves fed and clothed, but who have a decidedly mixed record at keeping their spirits up....
If Iraq is to have a future as a sovereign country, it has to be the will of the people. I do not believe a sovereign Iraq was ever the plan of the Iraqi people. They didn't mind trying, but, with the invasion of a strange group of violent extremists across the border from Syria, it was simply one more insult to people who have been pushed to the brink of existing rather than thriving. Their religion is their solace and we have no right to judge them.
I heard some talking head today state, the USA has to pull itself up by the boot straps and invade North Africa, Libya included, Syria and retake Iraq. It'll never happen. The only successful attack that ever dominated North Africa was the Third Reich and their Panzer tanks. At the time there was no resistance. North Africa was not organized to fight wars of such magnitude.
Somehow the delusional Bush element in the world believes the Middle East and North Africa would be the same if the USA had left ten thousand troops in Iraq.
All I can say to that is, "Really?"
