Dangerous to domestic, international
relations
Editing and comment by
Carolyn
Bennett
Author and journalist Finian
Cunningham asks, “What is it about America’s women diplomats?” And concludes that women diplomats “seem so hard and cloned — bereft of any humanity or intelligence. … [F]ar from
displaying female independence, they are pathetic copies of the worst traits in
American male politicians — aggressive, arrogant and completely arrant in their
views.” Cunningham’s principal examples in his Sunday article are the clearly unqualified U.S.
Department of State officials Victoria Nuland and Wendy Sherman.
Social worker turned senior officer at State
U.S. Department of State Under Secretary for Political Affairs Wendy Ruth Sherman holds the third highest-ranking position in the U.S. Department of State. Her experiential credits include working as a social worker, director of EMILY’s list (acronym for “Early Money Is Like Yeast”, a political action committee that helps elect pro-choice Democratic Party female candidates to office), director of the State of Maryland’s office of child welfare, and founding president of the Fannie Mae Foundation. The William Jefferson Clinton government employed her as Counselor of the United States Department of State and Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State and North Korea Policy Coordinator. Well beyond her qualifications, she was, under Clinton, “instrumental in negotiations related to North Korea’s nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs.” She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology and urban studies, and social work from Boston and Maryland universities.
Vicious appointee turned senior officer at State
U.S. Department of State Assistant Secretary for European
and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Jane Nuland (original family name Nudelman), a Wikipedia
article recalls, has been “one of the
key figures … accused by various sources of initiating a cover up of the 2012
Benghazi (Libya) attack.
After reading the first draft of
the State Department talking points that stated that the incident was a
coordinated terrorist attack, she [Nuland] sent a message writing that they ‘could
be abused by members of Congress to beat the State Department for not paying
attention to agency warnings so why would we want to seed the Hill.’
After [Nuland’s] memo, former
United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice was given talking
points that formed the basis of her statements on [media programs] This Week
with George Stephanopoulos, Meet the Press, State of the Union with Candy
Crowley, and Fox News Sunday.
More recently, Victoria Jane Nuland was exposed making an “obscene
reference to the European Union.” In a January 28, 2014, telephone conversation
with the United States Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, broadcast February
6, 2014, on YouTube her “obscene reference to the European Union” and her
belittling of heads of state and the United Nations “caused a diplomatic
scandal.”
Appointed by three administrations, Nuland was a Foreign
Service Officer, chief of staff to the Clinton government’s deputy secretary of
state, then deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs. She was the George
W. Bush/Richard Cheney government’s principal deputy foreign policy adviser then
U.S. ambassador to NATO; then the Barack Obama government’s special envoy for
Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, State Department spokesperson then Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Nuland holds a Brown
University undergraduate degree.
“In her previous posting as a
spokeswoman for the U.S. State Department,” Cunningham continued, “Nuland had
the demeanor of a robotic matron with a swivel eye. Now in her new role of
covertly rallying anti-government protesters in Ukraine, Nuland has emerged to
sound like a bubblegum-chewing Mafia doll.” As to Sherman, he wrote, she “is
another flinty-eyed female specimen of the American political class, who, like
Nuland, seems to have a block of ice for a heart and a frozen Popsicle for a
brain.” These women “illustrate the cold-hearted logic at work in American
robotic politics: it’s a system programmed for imperialism and war, and it
doesn’t matter whether the officials are Democratic, Republican, male or female;
they are all clones of a war criminal state.”
Perhaps such women officials —
“in the goldfish-bowl environment of Washington politics…” where “the uniform
monopoly of America’s political class is dictated by militarism (weapons
manufacturers, oil companies and Zionist lobbyists) … — are to be even more
feared,” Cunningham concludes. “The only way to ‘succeed’ in this cesspool is
to be even more aggressive and imperialist than your peers.”
Ignorance, incompetence, vulnerability
Incompetence means, as the English put it, you are not “fit
for purpose.” You are not up to the job to which someone has appointed you or
voters have elected you. Ignorance is either a state of genuine unknowing, you
cannot help yourself; or it is arrogantly willful, you know you don’t know and
just do not care, qualifications don’t count with you and your class. In any
case, ignorance and incompetence together with a character lacking in moral and
human sensibility weaken person and position leaving both at the mercy of pernicious
manipulative forces. In high level, influential positions — whether in government
or in religious, NGO, non/not-for profit industries, or private corporations — they
are terribly dangerous to their country and to the world. These women (I agree
with Cunningham) — together with the whole
of government in federal Washington — stand exposed before the world.
I am a feminist. I believe women are and must be different
and that their difference is imperative to constructive change in domestic and
international affairs. In their own right, women should hold positions in
whatever area, whatever position they choose. I also believe women should be clearly
qualified in every way to hold those positions so that they are not vulnerable
to and dangerously at the mercy of nor put others at the mercy of entrenched pernicious
forces.
Sources and notes
“Washington's cloned female
warmongers” by Finian Cunningham, February 9, 2014,
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/02/09/349910/washingtons-cloned-female-warmongers/
Finian Cunningham
East Africa-based author,
journalist, columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic
Culture Foundation Finian Cunningham “is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab
Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor
of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent.” He was “deported from Bahrain in June 2011” where
he had been reporting on “systematic human rights violations by regime forces.”
Native of Belfast, Ireland and former editor and writer for news outlets such
as The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent, Finian Cunningham has also credits
as a musician.
Nuland and Sherman biographical notes from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Sherman
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