Sunday, May 08, 2016

Armed Forces Minister: Obama ‘Woefully Ignorant’ of Threat EU Membership Poses

One of the points President Barack Hussein Obama made during his visit to Britain in April 2016, was that the UK will be safer inside the European Union wheras if we vote OUT in the Brexirt referendum scheduled for June this year, we will face existential threats from foreign power. Presumably Obama was referring to Russia, after all he has devoted most of his foreign policy during his second term as president to talking up the imaginary threat posed by a resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin in order to justify to some extent the USA's warmongering against small, and largely powerless nations in the middle east.

In adopting this scaremongering approach Obama seems to have seriously underestimated the amount of influence his word carries in Britain and around the world, just as he underestimated first the capability of Syria's secular, Shia Muslim regime under President Assad to mount a very effective resistance to the US backed attempt to depose Assad and make way for a Sunni Muslim regime friendly to US allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Oman. In taking this pro - Sunni position and trying to escalate tensions between Russia and the NATO alliance of western Europe and north America, the US President has shown his “woeful ignorance” of the hampering effect that being within the European Union has on Britain’s security, the UK defence minister has said. The minister suggested that rather than behaving as if he is an omnipotent monarch, Obama might think about asking the US diplomats in Euriope and the middle east, or maybe the CIA why creating a European Army or an EU-wide intelligence agency would not help to ease tensions with Russia.

Mr Obama spent a lot of his visit to Britain, telling the British people why he thinks they should vote to remain within the European Union at the IN / OUT referendum on June 23.
He has made it clear that he believes it to be in America’s economic and political interests interest for Britain to remain within a large European bloc rather than striking out alone.
His arguments on security in particular have been closely followed by Britain’s Armed Forces minister Penny Mordaunt, who has concluded that she cannot agree with what the President has had to say.
While she acknowledged the role that America and Britain have played as allies in the fight to promote freedom and democracy, she said “Where we part company, however, is in our views of the value of EU membership to this mission.”
Referring to a statement Mr Obama made in the Telegraph on Friday in which he said: “The European Union doesn’t moderate British influence – it magnifies it,” she responded: “Unfortunately this opinion betrays a woeful ignorance of the practical reality of the EU’s impact on our security, and the interests of the U.K. and the US.”


In his effort to persuade the British people to think as he does, he suggested that Europe owes a debt to the USA for saving it from the Nazis in World War Two, and has the European Project to tank for the last seven decades of peace in Europe . He is completely wrong on both, it was British obduracy and a Russian winter that saved Europe from the Nazis.

By the time the USA entered the shooting war, the tide was turning; in North Africa, the Advance of the Axis (Germant / Italy was halted at the first Battle of El Alamein in July 1942 and in a second battle in October and November of the same year, the Allied army, mainly troops from Britain and Commonwealth nations including Canada, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa, Nigeria, Keyna, and the Caribbean colonies, supported by expatriate forces from conquered nations in Europe, including France, Poland and Czechoslovakia began the pushback by defeating Gerneral Rommel's combined German and Italian army.

Although The USA had been supplying Britain and Russia for some years, military involvement did not begin until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 and in the early months was focused in the Pacific theatre. A small contingent of US troops was deployed to north Africa but serious US involvement did not begin until the invasion of Italy in 1943.

Several times during the visit he reiterated the pro EU British government’s argument that Britain is more secure within the European Union.

UK Armed Forces Minister Penny Morduant told the media, “Obama warned that divisions in Europe will weaken NATO, but often those divisions are caused by the EU itself. Obama confuses collective action and defence through Nato with the integration at all costs and damn the consequences ideology that too often motivates the EU, which Russia, understandably sees as a provokation if not a realistic threat.”

Mr Obama also used his statement to argue: “We must be resolute and adaptive in our efforts to prevent terrorist attacks against our people, and to continue the progress we are making to roll back the threat posed by Islamic State (ISIL) until it is destroyed.”

Ms Mordaunt agreed, but countered that membership of the European Union is inimical to that aim.
“The President must be unaware of the alarming weaknesses that allow Daesh [Islamic State] terrorists to move unimpeded across Europe are the result of the EU’s bull-headed desire to take down all frontiers on the continent,” she said.

“Even in this country, although we are outside the Schengen borderless zone, European free movement rules mean we cannot keep out those we suspect wish us harm if it is based on incomplete evidence.” And Ms Mordaunt went on to dismiss Mr Obama’s claims that intelligence sharing is enhanced by the European Union, saying: ”Obama cannot appreciate how the ECJ has repeatedly undermined the arrangements which enable the UK and US to share intelligence. I am sure the CIA would be happy to explain to him why that the creation of a EU intelligence agency will not result in intelligence being shared EU-wide.”

In view of the realities in seems Penny Morduant's description of Obama as 'woefully ignorant' is typically British understatement.

Far from being the answer to Europe’s security problems, it has often been the cause of them. Is Obama aware of what happened to Greece in the past five years? And the other nations, chiefly Italy, spain, Portugal and Ireland, that face economic ruin because of the appalling consequences of forced harmonisation of the Eurozone? Is he oblivious to the suffering, the resulting tensions, the distrust, the rise of extremism?

There is certainly an evidence based case to be made that Obama cares little about anything that does not relate to gay and transgender issues in the USA, yet European leaders continue to take not of his words and act on them, thus serving the interests of Washington and US Corporate culture rather than those of the people who elected them.

The EU has its own geopolitical ambitions including an expansion of the union beyond Turkey and Ukraine and into the middle east and North Africa, which, while detrimental to the people of its members states will secure places for members of Europe's political elites in the global government bankers, businessmen and academics have been working towards since the United Nations was formed after World War Two.

It has been said of the EU that expecting it to act as a functioning geopolitical entity is like putting wheels on your grandmother and saying she is a car. I worry that in years to come we will see a major car crash because of the misplaced ambitions of Brussels.








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