ATAR Notes: Forum
General Discussion => General Discussion Boards => News and Politics => Topic started by: TrueLight on April 16, 2009, 02:27:15 am
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I just wanted to make a new topic seeming as there is no specific topic like this
i thought this was really interesting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaRugipCEE0
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_Ug1X8N_Ks
ha the last part is quite funny
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Ron Paul questions Richard Holbrooke during Foreign Affairs hearing 05/05/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uRBm4rlDXY
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Ron paul on Pakistan and foreign policy may11th 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGmmMRz6DX4
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get over ron paul lol
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never!
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ron paul on why america is less safe from terrorism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozChKDg3FoI
Matthew Alexander on Torture
Alexander is a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006. His op-ed is worth reading:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
Also, this interview from Harper's:
In Iraq, we lived the "ticking time bomb" scenario every day. Numerous Al Qaeda members that we captured and interrogated were directly involved in coordinating suicide bombing attacks. I remember one distinct case of a Sunni imam who was caught just after having blessed suicide bombers to go on a mission. Had we gotten there just an hour earlier, we could have saved lives. Still, we knew that if we resorted to torture the short term gains would be outweighed by the long term losses. I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the number one reason they had decided to pick up arms and join Al Qaeda was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay. My team of interrogators knew that we would become Al Qaeda's best recruiters if we resorted to torture. Torture is counterproductive to keeping America safe and it doesn't matter if we do it or if we pass it off to another government. The result is the same. And morally, I believe, there is an even stronger argument. Torture is simply incompatible with American principles. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both forbade their troops from torturing prisoners of war. They realized, as the recent bipartisan Senate report echoes, that this is about who we are. We cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.
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RON PAUL ON NORTH KOREA MAY 30, 2009 "CLINTON SUBSIDIEZED NORTH KOREA WITH TECHNOLOGY"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk16JkkOKds
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Ron Paul on the Foreign Relations Authorization Act bill that allows a facility that is "to facilitate democratic and political transition". which obviously is to interfere with the internal affairs of other nations. the mandate is to "reconstruct societies"- ron paul says in a sarcastic tone (lol) that's wonderful there's alot of societies that need reconstruction but so many of the societies that we have to reconstruct, we helped to destroy or disrupt! eg. iraq and afghanistan...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU-B9ESCPc8
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i dont know where to post this but eh
some ~great~ words from jfk. some people may disagree with the actual video clip but i think its very interesting. his words are awesome though
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942oPuleuM8
then after half way its just weird and freaky...
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Ron Paul on Afghanistan! its a mistake! 14/9/2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHaWtJ3FHhg
and ron pauls prophetic words back in 2002 on Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf87kpYO1Ls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4WqBefv0Y4
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Ron Paul on the Iranian Nuclear Program
same old scare war mongering as iraq's womd
sanctions put on iran to not allow gas to be imported, for plan to bring down the Ayatollah which will NOT work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EX5Lm-1jBQE
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You are really into Ron Paul aren't you?
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yep his message is awesome but its not just his message, i like the whole libertarian ideas and the others who promote it, freedom is always the best means to prosperity and these ideas were promoted by the founding fathers of america...and people who truly understand the free market were the only ones to have predicted the economic crisis we have with their strong understanding of the business cycle and bubbles... the freedom message is strongly told by Americans but ignored by mainstream media alot of the time, although now ron paul has gotten more attention with his hr1207 to audit the federal reserve which he was pushing for a long time... in australia not many ppl say it..especially with Rudd... *apparently* the only two labor prime ministers that were leaning more towards free markets and had some type of understanding of them was bob hawke and paul keating... so eh... anyway....lol
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Ron Paul on Russia Today 1/10/09
talking about foreign policy and Iran and its nuclear facility
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxw8lmGl0yQ
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Ron Paul in "High Tide" campaign for liberty ?trailer?
ha a cool nifty video looks like a gaming video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrxSmdwlihs
found this quote
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Benjamin Franklin
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Jeremy Scahill on BLACKWATER a private military company founded in 1997 by Erik Prince...
VERY interesting information. he goes in to much depth and detail regarding its operations and affairs in wars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQiZvtuLl-k
Blackwater Worldwide now Xe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_Worldwide#Iraq_War_involvement
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Ron Paul is a genius, he has some great ideas. He's sorta like the austrian school of economics ( mises.org ). An eyeopening read.
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yep he is. and he doesn't look worn out considering his 74! he has studied thorougly the austrian school of economics which i find is so amazing and logical! im reading his 'end the fed' book and yeah he got a lot of his influences from famous austrian economists like mises, hayek, rothbard, hazlitt, sennholz. so he knows his stuff.
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Ron Paul- A foreign policy of free trade, not bombs and sanctions 5/10/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCKtJVYr4ds
Rand Paul on war and how we don't just go "nilly willy" and only go when a country is directly under threat and as a last resort.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkWmkHeswFQ
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some interesting points...
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/blog.php?view=26057
10 Things you should know about Iran
Juan Cole
Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US.
Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war in modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.
Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.
Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.
Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off the map."
Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.
Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to 'wipe Israel off the map?'
Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.
Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?
Actuality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.
Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.
Actuality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate by 16 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran. While Germany, Israel and recently the UK intelligence is more suspicious of Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.
Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant in a mountain near Qom.
Actuality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.
Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June's presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.
Actuality: Iran's reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary Iranians.
Belief: Isn't the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?
Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why haven't they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.
Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran, and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.
Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to 90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as demonstrated by the CIA's discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006 from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones, consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can't attack and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC."
and some other comments
- Iran is a signatory to NPT & it's constituion FORBIDS aquiring any type of Nuclear weapons.
- Over 200 Israeli nuclear warheads is pointed to Iran. Quarter of a million US troops are deployed surrounding Iran in Iraq,Afganistan,Kuwait & the Persian Gulf.
-IAEA even this week has said “Iran do NOT have any nuclear(military) ambition & is complying with IAEA”. Our own intelligence report said “Iran stopped all its military program that could have DUAL use since 2003”.
*****also they already knew about the facility a long time ago... so the war mongering propaganda is just pathetic just like the iraq war propaganda... to me Iran has a perfect right to create a nuclear bomb if it wants, USA and Israel has thousands of nuclear bombs, so a little hypocrisy there...also america has a lot to do some Iranian people hate for americans...overthrow of their democratically elected government (Mosadeqq) in a coup in 1953..hmmm...
in regards to the israeli government and how the US highly regarded and given so many nuclear bombs... just some quote i found....
Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, who was awarded the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said: "The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic," he said. "People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful -- very powerful."
Stephen Steinlight, former Director of National Affairs of the American Jewish Committee, notes the "disproportionate political power" of Jews, which is "pound for pound the greatest of any ethnic/cultural group in America." He goes on to explain that "Jewish economic influence and power are disproportionately concentrated in Hollywood, television, and in the news industry."
so basically Iran has no nuclear weapons and the rest of the world including America has heaps, so yeah just the hypocrisy point again.
heres a quote "we will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state." Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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very interesting...Balfour Declaration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration_of_1917
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Interesting documentary film about Iran's history
http://www.iranisnottheproblem.org/about_the_movie
This film is intended to counter the misinformation presented in the U.S. mass media
Sources are cited at www.iranisnottheproblem.com
IRAN (is not the problem) is a feature length film responding to the failure of the American mass media to provide the public with relevant and accurate information about the standoff between the US and Iran, as happened before with the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.
We have heard that Iran is a nuclear menace in defiance of the international community, bent on "wiping Israel off the map", supporting terrorism, and unwilling to negotiate. This documentary disputes these claims as they are presented to us and puts them in the context of present and historical US imperialism and hypocrisy with respect to Iran.
It looks at the struggle for democracy inside Iran, the consequences of the current escalation and the potential US and/or Israeli attack, and suggests some alternatives to consider.
This 79 minute documentary features Antonia Juhasz (The Bu$h Agenda), Larry Everest (Oil, Power, and Empire), and other activists and Iranian-Americans. The DVD also contains a 20 minute preview version ideal for meetings. The goal of this movie is to promote dialog and change the debate on Iran, so please consider organizing a screening, big or small, in your area.
Produced by Aaron Newman, an independent film-maker and part of the Scary Cow film co-op in San Francisco. He is an anti-imperialism/pro-democracy activist, founder of the SF Chomsky Book Club, and a member of Hands Off Iran
There are differences of opinion between many of the voices in this film, but all agree that a war would be unjustified. Below are brief video introductions for each of the people who participated
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjXaip5Foso&feature=related
a quote from one of the speakers in the movie that i like
Majid Baradar- Iranian-American, "Social Entrepreneur"
"once the threat of bombing Iran comes from an adminstration at this stage, it's basically allows radicals that are basically very small percentage that holding to the power, to clamp down on all these movements and what it does happen that with threat of bombing, the movement stops and the repression becomes much larger and does not allow these grass roots to develop properly."
the article cited in the video about the increase in "terrorists" after the Iraq war
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/03/iraq-101-iraq-effect-war-iraq-and-its-impact-war-terrorism-pg-1
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On Ron Paul's policy on Afghanistan - Do you not see this as distrubing, he wants to withdraw all troops immediatey? Until I saw this (in one of your videos) I was so-so about Ron Paul, I didn't like him, but didn't dislike him. But this has got my severely questioning his foreign policy knowledge. Is that the he does not understand the wider geo-political nuansces of the situation. It is no longer primarily about Afghanistan, I would say onlu 65-70% of the war is actually about Afghanistan. I refer this article http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/lose_afghanistan_lose_pakistan.html which correctly indentifies that if Afghanistan is lost so too is Pakistan, then Iran. As we know Pakistan is a nuclearly armed state far, far from stable, what if Pakistan becomes a failed state? Terrorists with Pakistani nukes? I don't like this situation. A failed Pakistan means greater Indian presence on the border, another nuclear armed state. A Indian-Pakistan war = devastating for the region and the world. On the other border with Afghanistan is Iran which is believed to be acquiring nukes itself, despite the over-hyped media reports, an evil regime it is cannot be debated. I think Ron Paul needs to seriously reconsider his view on Afghanistan, as this is the most crucial foreign policy issue at this moment, therefore should be the cornerstone of any politicians foreign policy who wishes to dip into the arguement regarding FP.
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-no i don't see this as disturbing, the American founding fathers advocated a policy of non-intervention and to mind your own business, do not go into entangling alliances...etc
-there was a speaker in Australia, talking at the place in Canberaa where all the other speakers talk at and has said the people accept the taliban even though they are more vicious and ruthful because they provide the afghan people with the necessaties they need and courts for civil disputes etc.. the afghan national police do nothing of the kind... the war in afghanistan just like when the Soviets invaded (have you read Kite Runner for school?) will fail. you cannot force your own will on another nation, let the people decide what it is they want...not some US puppet Karzai... Afghanistan was much more peaceful before any intervention...
-Afghanistan is lost? to whom ? the taliban? al-qaeda (which is made up since the US are the ones who paid the mujahideen to attack the Soviets- since back then the whole thing with the cold war..
-pakistan is nuclear armed because of America given them the weapons or paying them....since they also have a government who is pro-America....
-"terrorists" get motivated by foreign occupation who kill many thousands of their own people... this promotes normal everyday citizens to radicalism to fight what they think is wrong... and rightfully so...
-pakistan, israel, india- all have not signed the non-proliferation treaty and America gives them nuclear arms? it's amazing isn't it...
- in contrast to Iran who has signed it... i think you haven't read the last 3 posts of mine... and you might find it interested to actually watch the documentary Iran is not the problem..since this explains alot...
-Iran is does not have nuclear weapons! they have the most nuclear inspectors than anyone else in the world... compared to like 2000 nuclear weapons America has...
-It is the most crucial foreign policy but i believe a policy of intervention which always leads to some sort of 'blowback' and the expansion of power by the US and the accelerating inflation that this is creating is much more worse to everyone...-- and a quick fact i think around ah 60% of the oil reserves in the world are in the middle east region- alot is in the Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq region...America has already caontrolled Iraq, and have Saudi Arabia under their finger so... yes Iran is left... very bad move for the US to continue its war-mongering to gain whateva sinister goals it wants to instead of proper dialogue and fair proposals...
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You continually refer back to the past, which is correct everything you say, but what the US has done in the past supporting the mujahideen is virtually irrelevant in the current situation - the past means nothing in the current situation.
What I said about lost Afghanistan is that IF it is lost, so too is Pakistan and Iran. I'm not saying it is lost.
I also think the fact that Pak, Isral and India haven't signed the non-proliferation treaty is largely irrelevant also, it is merely a part of the complex geo-political situation. But my main arguement is that if troops are withdrawn from Afghanistan the entire region collapses. 2 nuclear armed states, one which arguably is attempting to gain them, and with China VERY close to all of this, not to mention Russia, is very worrying indeed. Therefore, the US CANNOT and SHOULD NOT withdrawal - which is why I question Ron Paul on this issue.
Also, I personally believe the belief of the founding fathers cannot be given as an adaquate reason to deny an interventionalist policy. in the late 18th century America was not the dominant superpower of the world, that was far, far beyond the minds of the founding fathers. The whole internventionalist debate, also fun, is also irrelevent, the way I see it is the ONLY important thing is if the US withdraws the region collapses.
- To add I have read 'The Kite Runner'.
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-it is relevant, if we don't look at our history then we will continue to do the same mistakes over again
-this is the reason they had weapons, and were trained and then the various groups started fighting each other... consequences of US foreign policy have large implications with unintended consequences
-ronald reagan supported the freedom fighters and now we call these same people terrorists? hypocrisy?
-america funded the Madrassas in Pakistan which were used as places to enroll mujahideen trained by the American and Pakistani intelligence services to fight the Soviet Army occupying Afghanistan back then.
-you cannot antagonize the people in a country by bombing their citizens, it doesn't improve anything! or improve the image to them of America- it just increases extremism
- and by propping up people and supporting people like musharaff in the past a military dictator- you think this helps the situation in pakistan...
- intervensionist and militaristic policies do not help countries becomes stable or even settle things themselves... it just promotes the environment that creates the problems that they are trying to solve...
-but this policy won't change with governments like obama's or bush's or any of them in fact since they have an interest in having a presence in the middle east for a long time and Oil reserves have a lot to do with this as well as their misguided philosophy hijacked by the neo-conservatives about policing the world and bombing nations to then rebuild the same infrastrucutre they just bombed...
-if we withdraw all troops the country collapses? just like the country collapsed when America left Vietnam?
-therefore I argue that a foreign policy change needs to occur if we want to promote peace and stable governments.
-i disagree that the interventionist debate is irrelevant, its completely relevant, its the policy that has led to so many unforeseen by the US government consequences which jeaperdizes national security!
-let their own people deal with an grieveances they may have and their own people can bring about change if we just get out of the way... we wouldn't like it if China occupied Australia in the name of helping us get rid of racists who promote violence... or something like that and then in the meanwhile "accidentally" killing everyday citizens...you would see people fight against the Chinese forming groups and the more they killed the more people would either flee or take arms.... obviously this won't happen but i'm giving you an analogy.
-if you see out of such a narrow window then unfortunetaly nothing will change, just as the world governments see the economic problems out of such a small window
-oh ok awesome just wanted to know cause its sorta like the life they had before the soviets invaded.
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I'm sure Ron Paul has said something before to reject the need for "tactical shifts" to reflect "geo-political nuances". He has a bigger picture in mind, which is what TrueLight has covered.
They need an exit strategy, something less inactive than Obama, and perhaps more realistic than Ron Paul.
Hatred towards the US is caused by their interventionism in the region. It was cited as a major reason for 9/11. The US props up these proxy wars, and caused this mess to begin with. I'm not sure what the range of outcomes could be if they stopped, but it would only get worse if they continued.
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-it is relevant, if we don't look at our history then we will continue to do the same mistakes over again
I think the US has learnt its lesson and isn't going to repeat any policies of the last 20 years really, therefore I would say we should only concentrate on the future for the time being.
-this is the reason they had weapons, and were trained and then the various groups started fighting each other... consequences of US foreign policy have large implications with unintended consequences
-ronald reagan supported the freedom fighters and now we call these same people terrorists? hypocrisy?
-america funded the Madrassas in Pakistan which were used as places to enroll mujahideen trained by the American and Pakistani intelligence services to fight the Soviet Army occupying Afghanistan back then.
All very true, however, under the political situation of the time (Cold War) these actions very much much warranted as the spead of Communisim had to be halted. And it is not hypocrisy, they were 'freedom fighters' to an extent in which they fought against an oppressive regime, they became terrorists when they attacked innocent civilians for political means, in a far away country grabbing the worlds attention. I see a big difference.
-you cannot antagonize the people in a country by bombing their citizens, it doesn't improve anything! or improve the image to them of America- it just increases extremism
Perhaps, but it is the leaders of the Taliban and Al-qeada who camp in the tribal border areas, and lead the campaign, if they are taken out the Taliban fighters to an extent loose their co-ordination and tactical ability, as the average fighter has little grasp on command and tactical decision needed to be made.
- and by propping up people and supporting people like musharaff in the past a military dictator- you think this helps the situation in pakistan...
I didn't like Musharraf anymore than the next guy, but I think with the geo-political situtation of the time, the US needed his support to help with the invasion of Afghanistan, and I think he failed with that support, but it was still needed.
- intervensionist and militaristic policies do not help countries becomes stable or even settle things themselves... it just promotes the environment that creates the problems that they are trying to solve...
The taliban harboured terrorists, and actively supported them with their attack on the US, I do not see this as stable or settled. If they did not attack the US, the US would have stayed out no question, yet with 9/11 there was no choice.
-but this policy won't change with governments like obama's or bush's or any of them in fact since they have an interest in having a presence in the middle east for a long time and Oil reserves have a lot to do with this as well as their misguided philosophy hijacked by the neo-conservatives about policing the world and bombing nations to then rebuild the same infrastrucutre they just bombed...
Yes oil is a motivating factor in having a presence in the Mid-East. This is not a bad thing though, a majority of oil comes from this region, and no one can argue that oil doesn't run this world, we need oil. Therefore, the US as a vested interest in seeing the oil supply secure, not just for themselves but for the rest of the world, including Australia.
-if we withdraw all troops the country collapses? just like the country collapsed when America left Vietnam?
Vietnam fell to Communism. The situation in Afghanistan is much more dire than it was in Vietnam. Like I have said, It isn't just Afghanistan at stake here. We are talking about a nuclear armem Pakistan which would essentially be left isolated in the region. We don't want this.
-therefore I argue that a foreign policy change needs to occur if we want to promote peace and stable governments.
Yes I would argree that a foreign policy change needs to occur, however, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan prematurely is not it.
-i disagree that the interventionist debate is irrelevant, its completely relevant, its the policy that has led to so many unforeseen by the US government consequences which jeaperdizes national security!
With Obama winning the Nobel peace prize I can't see him launching any new military invasions, even before I couldn't see him doing so. Therefore, regards if you suport interventionalism or isolationism, we are in Afghanistan.
-let their own people deal with an grieveances they may have and their own people can bring about change if we just get out of the way... we wouldn't like it if China occupied Australia in the name of helping us get rid of racists who promote violence... or something like that and then in the meanwhile "accidentally" killing everyday citizens...you would see people fight against the Chinese forming groups and the more they killed the more people would either flee or take arms.... obviously this won't happen but i'm giving you an analogy.
I understand completely where you are coming from, but 3000 dead civilians in the US and many more thousand family members would beg to differ we should let the Afghani people sort it out themselves, they are the ones who really jeopardise national security.
-if you see out of such a narrow window then unfortunetaly nothing will change, just as the world governments see the economic problems out of such a small window
I agree, wider view has to be taken, but that view must be confined to the South Asian region.
-oh ok awesome just wanted to know cause its sorta like the life they had before the soviets invaded.
Afghanistan has been a failed state for a long, long, long time.
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-i disagree they are repeated the same mistakes only this time being for sophisticated with them.... they're now funding the sunni's extremist groups to counter iran's shia!
-the short sightedness of america's foreign policy is just wrong- first they fund the fundamentalists that created the now so called al-qaeda due to the whole "communism" scare which is just bizarre- do u know how much damage they did to south america for this!nicaragua.(and this had consequences- funding the contras through covert means by selling arms to israel to IRAN!!!which blew up in their face)..etc... communism wouldn't have spread like a wild, that was just a lie spread by american government and CIA, they usually justified a coup against a government due to the fact they may have ties with russia...pathetic...and now they are adament on fighting a group of people that are spread not only in afghanistan... and now they are easing on the taliban and probably funding them too to get them on the side of the american's..don't you see how america's involvement in the middle east has bit them on the butt?..one of the reasons stated by osama bin laden was america's support for israel and the occupation and bases in the saudi arabian desert during the iraq war in the 90's, that was their holy land!and was seen as defiling their holy land...america needs to reconsider it's foreign policy to not just serve whateva interest's they have and their corporations but to actually promote peace and a democratic society and to help their own people! not steal their taxpayers dollars!..and.not by a barrel of a gun! don't you see that the bombing of so called "enemies" such as libya, sudan, albania, afghanistan, iraq produced the opposite effect of what they seek? don't you think that continueing this same policy will just make things worse?
-the war into and afghanistan and the bombings by drone in pakistan have actually helped to destablise the america gifted nuclear pakistan and increase the anti-american sentiment by the radcalized groups there..
- do you actually realize why "terrorists" have only attacked America? and have not attacked other countries like iceland or sweden or luxembourg? because they haven't got invovled in such a war and interfering in other countries affairs!
-and also because of oil america has to secure it? by going into a country and attacking it...do you know how much damage to iraq oil they caused when they invaded now they obviously have contractors that have a nice stack of cash in their pockets..
- yeah i just don't agree in what your saying and don't believe in interventionism which is not the same as isolationism..you have to get those facts straight and ron paul has talked a lot about the difference..
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"The invasion of Iraq created what the CIA calls a "training and recruiting ground" for al Qaeda wannabes in that land, though it seems the low numbers of so-called "foreign fighters" being brought into "al Qaeda in Iraq" have had even less influence than the skeptics had predicted.
These al Qaeda wannabes in Iraq have worn out their welcome with the local Sunni insurgency and have not been able to mount attacks outside Iraq. The local Sunnis tolerated them only as long as they were useful in fighting the occupation and were able to flick off "al Qaeda in Iraq" like a switch when they felt like it, as seen in the 2006–2007 "Sunni Awakening" in provinces where they had been welcomed.
The president threatens that if the U.S. withdraws, Osama bin Laden and his followers could somehow take over Iraq and create a new terrorist state bent on attacking the America. This just does not hold water. Osama's movement remains small and marginal. The "central front" in the fight against them is in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, not in far away Iraq.
The end of Saddam's rule has also empowered Iran, which has used the democracy provided by the American occupation to get their proxies elected to power. The Bush administration apparently tolerated this for no other reason than that the pro-Iran factions needed the U.S. occupation and so welcomed it, while the nationalist Shi'ite leaders like Muqtada al Sadr insisted on withdrawal. Were the American occupation to end, it is much more likely that nationalist types such as Sadr's Mahdi Army would drive the Iranians back to Persia.
Ironically, the U.S. has spent 2007 accusing Iran of backing and waging war against American forces in Iraq through the Sadrists, who are not Iranian proxies and who are not fighting the occupation. They have provided no evidence that this is the case and our Shi'ite allies in Iraq have nothing but praise for Iran's support of their government.
When it comes to Iran, Ron Paul's view isn't much different than that of Gen. John Abizaid, George Bush's former head of Central Command. The General stated recently that Iran is not much of a threat and still would not pose one were they to obtain nuclear weapons – an achievement they are years away from, according to Mike McConnell, Bush's National Intelligence Director.
The Iranians pose no real threat to Israel or the West. Their nuclear enrichment equipment is nothing more than first-generation crap bought second-hand from the Pakistanis, every bit of which is monitored by international inspectors. Ninety percent pure Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 is needed to make an atom bomb; the Iranians have yet to enrich their uranium higher than 4 percent and could not do so in the presence of the International Atomic Energy Agency monitors and sensors. Harvesting plutonium from their nuclear reactors would take years and likewise could not even begin without everyone knowing.
Iran's much touted "support for international terrorism" has nothing whatsoever to do with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda or the September 11th attacks on this country. Iran supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. While often times extremely violent, these groups are not global in their reach, are not enemies of the United States and pose no threat to this country.
It has been claimed that the president of Iran, who actually holds the power of a glorified Secretary of the Interior, has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," in a speech in October, 2005. But according to those who are fluent in Farsi, he said no such thing. What he said was that the "regime" over Jerusalem would one day "vanish from the page of time." This was not even a subtle or implied threat, much less a promise of imminent attack. The fact also remains that Iran has no capability to destroy Israel, conventionally, with nukes they don't have or through nearly powerless groups like Hamas.
No country in the world would attempt to "annihilate" Israel. The politician who did so would be dooming himself and his entire nation to perish in nuclear flames. Israel has at least 300 nuclear bombs and the delivery systems necessary to "wipe Persia off the map" in the space of an afternoon. As Paul has noted, the U.S. triumphantly faced down the Soviet Union (who actually were an existential threat), while our modern day think-tankers say the only way to deal with nearly-helpless Iran is with preemptive war.
Many Americans believe they need the government to defend them from "radical Islam," but those who hold truest to enforcing the strictest interpretations of Islam as a way of life have no chance of gaining or maintaining real dominance over humanity in the 21st century. Even if 100 impossibilities found Osama bin Laden leading the new caliphate in the Middle East, it would be as doomed as Communism was in the last century. Do we really fear that a stateless band of pirates in exile in the Hindu Kush will destroy us? Have we so much confidence in the capabilities of those who had to steal our planes in order to launch their Kamikaze attack and so little belief in the resilience of our own civilization?
Speaking of (Japanese Shintoist and Buddhist) Kamikazes, why should we believe that terrorism is intrinsically connected with Islam at all? Suicide bombings are rife in Sri Lanka where neither side is Muslim. By contrast, radical Islam is prevalent in Sudan, where it has no relationship to the current widespread violence (both sides are Sunni Arabs) and there has never been a suicide bombing. Did radical Catholicism motivate the IRA?
In the book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, Dr. Robert A. Pape's research shows that suicide terrorism is a strategic response to occupation by foreign armies, plain and simple. The only role religion plays in this struggle, according to Pape, is that the willingness of the occupied to resort to suicide attacks increases when the occupying army is made of people who come from far away, look different and believe differently due to the fear that their entire way of life will come under attack.
Americans are the same way. Our irrational fear that Arab Islamic terrorists from the Middle East are coming here to force us all to convert to Wahhabism has convinced us to spend thousands of lives, trillions of dollars, pass piles of new laws and nearly break our defenses in our efforts to preempt them. Now that's suicide.
The hyperbole about "radical Islam" has also helped to obscure divisions among those who oppose the U.S. in the Middle East and Central Asia. Even presidential candidates speak as though al Qaeda, the Ayatollahs in Iran, Sunni radicals in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon are all one unified threat that must be "preempted." This may be good for defense manufacturing firms and votes, but if we can't even tell who our adversaries are, what distinguishes one from another, how are we supposed to win the fight?
A recent local newspaper story from Dr. Paul's Texas Gulf Coast district quoted one of his constituents complaining that if Paul were elected president and withdrew U.S. troops from the Middle East, we would have no oil at all. This is just not the case. In fact, it is the economic theory of mercantilism that Adam Smith refuted in The Wealth of Nations back in 1776.
It is not necessary for the Japanese, Chinese or Swiss to send armies to the Middle East in order to get the petroleum their economies demand. They simply buy it on the market like anything else. The only reason one would need the Marine Corps to "secure" the oil is to ensure which companies get to do the pumping and distributing. The fact that the price of oil is now approximately triple what it was before the war ought to tell us that someone is benefiting. But who? Is it you and me? Or is it politically connected big-wigs such as oil company shareholders and executives? The oil will always be for sale. Even if unfriendly regimes sit on the wells and sell only to others, it will free up other supplies elsewhere in the market and we'll be just fine.
It is a mistake to think of Ron Paul's foreign policy as some sort of liberal exception to the rest of his conservative outlook. Instead, his views follow the tradition of the Old Right Taft Republicans. They opposed foreign interventionism for the same reason America's founders did – out of caution for the inevitable domestic detriments that accompany permanent military establishments. It has only been since the Vietnam War era that the antiwar position has been perceived as the province of hippies and leftists. Paul's prescriptions for dealing with the world are the most conservative in the race. Meanwhile, the current National Security Strategy – unlikely to change substantively under Giuliani, Romney or Hillary administrations – is itself a radical doctrine, called "Hard Wilsonianism" by its closest adherents. Paul's policy is to pull back the empire in order to preserve the republic and the Constitution from the radical changes brought about by avoidable conflict. These are conservative principles of independence and prudence, friendly relations and open trade. As Gov. George W. Bush once advised,
"use of the military needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. ... I think one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American is for us to go around the world saying, 'We do it this way. So should you.' ... I think the United States must be humble ... in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course."
Sooner or later the U.S. must leave Iraq – for financial reasons if nothing else – and the jihadists will attempt to claim credit for it no matter when it happens. Leaving Iraq and the larger Middle East as a matter of principle, however, is the only way to do so with any hope of restoring some of the integrity that has been lost since the invasion. Dr. Paul believes we have no business maintaining a world empire and that its consequences cost us far more than the gains. A withdrawal from Iraq under a Ron Paul administration would not be a victory for the terrorists, but an event to which they quickly become irrelevant bystanders.
When someone finally captures or kills Osama bin Laden and his few hundred followers, the larger "Global War on Terrorism" must end as well. The sooner the U.S. disengages from the Middle East, the quicker al Qaeda's support will dry up. International cooperation from the various national police forces and intelligence agencies will be plenty to handle the problem. The more America intervenes in the affairs of others, the more blowback we can expect to suffer, but it is not too late to put our country back on the right track."
by David T. Beito and Scott Horton
http://lewrockwell.com/orig8/beito2.html
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interesting stuff...
Seymour Hersh: US is funding Al-Qaeda to counter Iran - 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnUWcjXvdlo&feature=PlayList&p=E07D3A6ED13BFA31&index=0&playnext=1
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Ron Paul- Why is the U.S. military still in Afghanistan? 12/10/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swmLyP63WUA
Ron Paul on Freedom Watch 14/10/09- on war in Afghanistan against taliban
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXRrLcmXla0
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Ron Paul in a hearing on Afghanistan- ITS A DISASTER! 15/10/2009
"it looks like we have accepted this notion that perpetual war leads to perpetual peace"
"we never question whether pre-emptive war is a good strategy, and this is what this is all about pre-emptive war, starting wars, saying it's preventative but this is a completely un-American approach to fighting wars"
"i think the people in Afghanistan, the large majority, no matter what the reports are from the Administration, our puppet Administration, most people want us out of there, they don't want us in Pakistan, people in Pakistan don't want us there, people in Iraq don't want us there, IT'S OCCUPATION"
"PEOPLE WHO ARE WILLING TO SACRIFICE THEIR LIFE TO MAKE A POINT, IS BECAUSE WE ARE SEEN AS FOREIGN OCCUPIERS, JUST AS THE SOVIETS WERE SEEN AS FOREIGN OCCUPIERS, JUST AS WE JOINED THOSE INDIVIDUALS WHO WANTED TO THROW OUT THE FOREIGN OCCUPIERS IN THE PAST"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDQ-QXtXcg
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Ron Paul with Tavis Smiley on Afghanistan 21/10/09
and Karzai
puppet Afghan government- fraudulent elections etc...
"sometimes we turn on our puppets, i remember back in Vietnam days when Diem was our puppet, and we had our CIA overthrow him and actually kill him"
"it's getting pretty hard to defend him, so yes there has to be an election but i won't be surprised if our government quits supporting him, he can't exist without our support, so if we withdraw support....but the big problem is we don't have anyone to replace him"
"we ought to allow the Afghans to decide what kind of government they want, and they don't want a centralized government, they want tribalism, and we just can't change them, people have been trying to do that for centuries and it's just not going to happen"
also responds to question about if we pull out, the whole region will collapse
"staying there will cause more trouble, i think the fact that we've been there for 8 years and destabilized the area, Afghanistan isn't stable, now Pakistan isn't stable"...."now we're sending our drones over there and innocent people are getting killed and we're pretty soon going to think about what we have to do to stablize and get control of the weapons of Pakistan, at the same time they're planning on expanding the efforts to overthrow the government in Iran"... real strong sanctions and that's not going to help us...
"it's just an endless task to continue to try to nation build and police the world, we weren't meant to that and we can't afford it any longer and it all has ramifications and blowback phenomenons that will be hurtful to us, i think it's a real threat to our national security to be overly involved in that area"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbORVqzhkZI
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Ron Paul on foreign policy...wars... on CNN
Osama Bin Laden loves how we are in the middle east!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_66zbAEsUM
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Ron Paul: Sanctions on Iran are an Act of War October 28th 2009
Favourite quotes...
"When we went into Iraq there was a unintending consequences, there is still no stability there but one thing is certain is Iraq is a much closer ally of Iran right now, we throw the Iraqis into the hands of the Iranians"
"This is the best thing in the world for China, they are motivated, they have already invested in Iran, the production of petroleum products has gone up significantly in Iran"
"You're deliberately undermining the dissendence there"..."We ruin the dissending views that are operating in that country"
"We are willing to take on armed conflict"
"I am just disturbed by not looking through and looking at the ramifications, looking at the unintended consequences, and this pretense that we can just do this and everything is going to come out alright because i really believe in the long run, we will suffer, the people will suffer and there will not be more stability"
"Up until recently they couldn't even make their own gasolene but because of our pressure so far, they're getting quite capable of doing it. We're driving them into the hands of the Chinese, they have our money, they can control us through the dollar, and yet we're driving the Chinese into taking over, just as we drove the Iraqis to become close allies of the Iranians. I think our policies are deeply flawed, i say your motivations are fine and dandy, but motivations aren't the answer, we have to think of the consequences."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRZiOhd8tyg
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Ron Paul at the New Orleans Investment Conference 11/11/09
Sample
3:27
"So what has the candidate for peace been doing [Obama]. Well the first thing he did was he said he was going to wind the war down in Iraq, well he's only had 9 months, but there was a couple of troops that came home and they were replaced by private contractors. And the private contractors make twice or three times as much as our military personel, it's costing us more money, and the danger is still there and the timebomb is still there."
"So what are we doing in Afghanistan? Arguing over whether we should add 30000 or 40000 or 60000, so that war is being expanded."
"At the same time the war into Pakistan, the frontlines are moving over into Pakistan. Well they say the bad guys have moved out because now we occupy Afghanistan, so they're moving over into Pakistan, so it looks like we have to continue the bombing in Pakistan. Then we wonder why they get upset with us when we send drones over, we bomb people and civilians get killed, and then they wonder why should they be upset with us? What would we think? What is China did that to us? And what if they had a base on our country, we would be so outraged and yet the American people just let it go by and let it happen! And its bankrupting us! And on top of this plans are being laid for the day we drop bombs on Iran, sactions are going to increased..." and more...
5:31 - 5:47 LOL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ykzKlRa49I
and i love this quote in part 4 of the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCjPAJQb0I8
"What we have lost is not the words of the Constitution, we have lost the character of the nation"
"...because the people don't care and they send people up there that don't care either and they just totally ignore the Constitution. The Constitution is very limited, the Constitution, any document is only good as the people. If you have people without character, they're not going to obey it"
also 4:40 onwards... Ron Paul concludes very nicely with wise wise words
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Ron Paul on the war overseas and 9/11
"...The planning was done in Spain and they were accepted there in legal bases, they were done in Germany they were accepted. In a matter of fact they even came to this country with legal visas. And i mean they were accepted by the countries and no no, we said it was the Taliban, its the people of Afghanistan, never questioning the fact that a few years back, back in 1989 when the Soviets were you know wrecking the place, we were allied with the people who were friends of Osama Bin Laden and we were over there trying to, you know support him..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaiKEWwDgUY
we never learn from history... we need to change course
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86AFDVAZpUQ&feature=related
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Love love love this speech Ron Paul tells the Fox ppl about the Afghan war
Ron Paul-Dec. 02, 09-Fox Business: "Obama Preparing for Perpetual War"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ALhRCUV34
like this comment
"UtubeMyAccountName (3 hours ago)
"perpetual war for perpetual peace"
Great Great Quote!!
It displays the absurdity of a preemptive war policy perfectly!!"
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Ron Paul Asks CFR Members Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates if they Support the Bush Doctrine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dqclmkxcRk
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A neat 2:38 video that someone made with Ron Paul and a music clip
Title
'Ron Paul Speaks The Truth About Iraq, Neoconservatives, The Warhawk Left, & History'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IUyPV6398A
i liked this comment from a user
"CommanderUTube
It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
( Robert E. Lee )
History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
( Ronald Reagan )
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
( David Friedman )
If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. you talk to your enemies.
( Moshe Dayan )"
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Afghanistan: Withdraw Rapidly and Completely
By Ron Paul
Published 12/12/09
Statement of Congressman Ron Paul
United States House of Representatives
Statement Before Foreign Affairs Committee
December 10, 2009
Mr. Speaker thank you for holding these important hearings on US policy in Afghanistan. I would like to welcome the witnesses, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and General Stanley A. McChrystal, and thank them for appearing before this Committee.
I have serious concerns, however, about the president's decision to add some 30,000 troops and an as yet undisclosed number of civilian personnel to escalate our Afghan operation. This "surge" will bring US troop levels to approximately those of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan with disastrous result back in the 1980s. I fear the US military occupation of Afghanistan may end up similarly unsuccessful.
In late 1986 Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, told then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, "Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels." Soon Gorbachev began the Soviet withdrawal from its Afghan misadventure. Thousands were dead on both sides, yet the occupation failed to produce a stable national Afghan government.
Eight years into our own war in Afghanistan the Soviet commander's words ring eerily familiar. Part of the problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. It is our presence as occupiers that feeds the insurgency. As would be the case if we were invaded and occupied, diverse groups have put aside their disagreements to unify against foreign occupation. Adding more US troops will only assist those who recruit fighters to attack our soldiers and who use the US occupation to convince villages to side with the Taliban.
Proponents of the president's Afghanistan escalation cite the successful "surge" in Iraq as evidence that this second surge will have similar results. I fear they might be correct about the similar result, but I dispute the success propaganda about Iraq. In fact, the violence in Iraq only temporarily subsided with the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Shi'ites from Sunni neighborhoods and vice versa -- and all neighborhoods of Christians. Those Sunni fighters who remained were easily turned against the foreign al-Qaeda presence when offered US money and weapons. We are increasingly seeing this "success" breaking down: sectarian violence is flaring up and this time the various groups are better armed with US-provided weapons. Similarly, the insurgents paid by the US to stop their attacks are increasingly restive now that the Iraqi government is no longer paying bribes on a regular basis. So I am skeptical about reports on the success of the Iraqi surge.
Likewise, we are told that we have to "win" in Afghanistan so that al-Qaeda cannot use Afghan territory to plan further attacks against the US. We need to remember that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 was, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, largely planned in the United States (and Germany) by terrorists who were in our country legally. According to the logic of those who endorse military action against Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was physically present, one could argue in favor of US airstrikes against several US states and Germany! It makes no sense. The Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to remain in Afghanistan because both had been engaged, with US assistance, in the insurgency against the Soviet occupation.
Nevertheless, the president's National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, USMC (Ret.), said in a recent interview that less than 100 al-Qaeda remain in Afghanistan and that the chance they would reconstitute a significant presence there was slim. Are we to believe that 30,000 more troops are needed to defeat 100 al-Qaeda fighters? I fear that there will be increasing pressure for the US to invade Pakistan, to where many Taliban and al-Qaeda have escaped. Already CIA drone attacks on Pakistan have destabilized that country and have killed scores of innocents, producing strong anti-American feelings and calls for revenge. I do not see how that contributes to our national security.
The president's top advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said recently, "I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we'll know it when we see it." That does not inspire much confidence.
Supporters of this surge argue that we must train an Afghan national army to take over and strengthen the rule and authority of Kabul. But experts have noted that the ranks of the Afghan national army are increasingly being filled by the Tajik minority at the expense of the Pashtun plurality. US diplomat Matthew Hoh, who resigned as Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. Government in Zabul Province, noted in his resignation letter that he "fails to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war." Mr. Hoh went on to write that "[L]ike the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people."
I have always opposed nation-building as unconstitutional and ineffective. Afghanistan is no different. Without a real strategy in Afghanistan, without a vision of what victory will look like, we are left with the empty rhetoric of the last administration that "when the Afghan people stand up, the US will stand down." I am afraid the only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire is a rapid and complete US withdrawal from that country and the region. We cannot afford to maintain this empire and our occupation of these foreign lands is not making us any safer. It is time to leave Afghanistan.
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Ron Paul On House Floor - Debate On Iran Sanctions! 16/12/09
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is9gHHKQNYo
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Ron Paul on Foreign Policy in the Middle East (12/22/09)
"the war is spreading, it's going into Pakistan, now it's going into Yemen. The border dispute between the Iranians and Iraqis is designed i believe, to make sure that the American people are conditioned that some day we're going to have take on the Iranian government, we have to have regime change is our policy."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMpmohzPdVM
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Ron Paul gives his thoughts on Yemen, the attempted airline bombing, the motivations of Al Qaeda, the radicalization of the Middle East, and the negation of our liberties to government provided "security."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjIz4M1Tn-A
and heres a clip of Ron Paul on Larry King live
Ben Stein calls Ron Paul Antisemitic on Larry King!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qbKypqXADk
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Changing the Narrative for War
By Philip Giraldi
Published 12/29/09
"In spite of the calamities of the past eight years, there continues to be no shortage of neoconservatives in one's face in the media, advising their fellow Americans that wars can be won quickly and decisively and that using military force to change how other nations behave is sound policy. The Washington Post features Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, all three Kagans, John Bolton, and Eliot Cohen on a regular basis. The Wall Street Journal editorial page is the epicenter for those who favor muscular interventionism. The New York Times, America's most influential newspaper, is somewhat more circumspect, featuring neocons-lite David Brooks and Thomas Friedman regularly, but also including the more measured foreign policy analysis of Frank Rich and Roger Cohen. But even at its best The Times never really breaks the mold by bringing in someone who rejects the entire American imperial and interventionist enterprise. Such individuals do exist and many appear regularly at Ron Paul events and on Campaign for Liberty, but it is as if the mainstream media has decided that such views are outside the pale, the journalistic equivalent of praising Mussolini for making the trains run on time or advocating the disenfranchisement of women voters. And occasionally the Times features a real game breaker that goes in the other direction in the form of an op-ed that sets new benchmarks in terms of audacious support of Washington's self proclaimed right to enforce its own standards on the world. Such an op-ed was "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran" by Professor Alan J. Kuperman which, ironically, appeared on Christmas Eve.
As a former intelligence officer I frequently shake my head when I read a piece like "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran" because I know exactly how what the Soviets used to call disinformation works. When the policy stinks and you have to create buzz about it anyway, you dig up someone who can plausibly describe himself as an "expert" and then find some obliging folks in the media to publish a piece that enables you to change the story line. That is what I used to do myself back in the days when I was working hard to demonize the Soviets. Take an incident or development, twist it a bit so you can come to a conclusion that is at odds with the facts, get your paid asset to write it up, hand it over to another paid agent in the media, and then let it fly. It will be picked up here and there, spread around the world and incorporated into other news coverage, and eventually everyone is saying we have to stand up to the Russians. Or Chinese. Or Iranians. Or the Yemenis.
Recently we have seen change the narrative applied to justify all sorts of outrages, including the pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe, where, so the accepted story goes, brave bands of reformers took on corrupt and authoritarian old regime leaders. The reality was much different, with European and American Non-Government Organizations funding one group of criminals against another with not a touch of genuine reform in sight. And then there is poor little Georgia, hardly plausible that Tbilisi might have been the aggressor against Russia, was it? But it was (John McCain please take note).
That kind of narrative shift is precisely what Kuperman and those who are like minded are doing, changing the story to turn black into white to make war appear to be the only option to resolve a thorny international problem. Appearing in The Times is particularly damaging because when the Grey Lady gives over its pages to someone like Kuperman they are providing their seal of approval and legitimizing his point of view. Even if they don't explicitly endorse the article they are in effect saying that the argument is extremely credible and worth considering. With the Times imprimatur, the story then becomes part of the broader neoconservative narrative which can exploit the appearance in the Times to convince Americans that a war against Iran would not be such a bad thing and could, in fact, be the best way to eliminate the possibility that Tehran might develop a nuclear weapon.
The only problem is that the entire Kuperman narrative is itself nonsense. It starts by rejecting negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program after assuming that something is true, namely that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. There is no evidence that that is the case and even the US intelligence community continues to assert that Iran abandoned its weapons program in 2003. It then goes on to assume that any agreement with Iran to enable it to buy enriched fuel for electricity generation will inevitably lead to the uranium being further enriched to weapons grade. That amounts to taking a worst case scenario and combining it with another worst case scenario to draw a conclusion. Kuperman then piles on a third worst case assumption, that Iran would unhesitatingly hand over its expensively acquired nuclear deterrent weapon to a terrorist group. In baseball, three strikes and you are out, but apparently three non sequiturs in a single article does not rule you out for a New York Times op-ed.
Kuperman then describes the mechanics of defanging Iran, how taking out the country's alleged nuclear sites would be quick and relatively painless with little in the way of collateral damage to the US. Does anyone hear the word cakewalk? Kuperman has clearly not spent much time in the real world. Using American air power to attack Iran would be piling Pelion on Ossa, with terrible consequences including making it far more likely that Tehran will actively seek a nuclear weapon while guaranteeing a wave of terrorism that could well become global. There would also be a major spike in oil prices that would sink the already struggling American economy, whether or not the US Navy succeeds in controlling the Straits of Hormuz. Kuperman concedes that military action could backfire, but he draws on the analogy of the completely dissimilar Israeli destruction of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, which he regards as a success. He notes somewhat ominously that Iran's much larger infrastructure would require repeated bombings coupled with the threat to use still more force if Tehran were to retaliate. It all sounds a bit like the Cheney doctrine of first attacking Iran and then threatening it with nuclear weapons if it seeks to defend itself. On an optimistic note, Kuperman also throws in a final added benefit to a bit of devastating aerial bombardment, concluding that "air strikes against Iran would be a strong warning to other would-be proliferators."
Actually, they wouldn't be. Attacking Iran would not necessarily destroy its ability to build an atom bomb if it chooses to do so and would only encourage other potential proliferators to proliferate, if only to obtain a deterrent against being bombed by the United States or Israel. Also, thousands of completely innocent Iranians would die, which does not appear to be a consideration that bothers Kuperman very much. As Ron Paul and others have warned, yet another illegal war of choice in the Middle East would inflict damage on the US constitution and the rule of law and would also be a human and economic catastrophe both for Iran and the United States. It would likely not do much good for Israel either. Kuperman surely understands that. The op-ed by-line indicates that Professor Alan J. Kuperman is director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas. If a sustained bombing campaign is the best policy that the Prevention Program can come up with it is perhaps time for the good people in Texas to begin to wonder what exactly their tax dollars are supporting."
Philip Giraldi
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=482
some of this reminds me of the book 1984.... where it mentions (memory failing...) how if you keep repeating lies then ppl will believe it or something about changing history books...eh
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Ron Paul with others on Larry King Live 4/1/09
Ron Paul "This Is Not What America Is All About!" pt.1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QOrswe9Y44
Ron Paul "This Is Not What America Is All About!" pt.2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcrm_awaO0E
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Ron Paul on the Ed Show 5/1/09
"...we spend 75 billion dollars trying to get intelligence and then when somebody comes with a hot lead, we can't even handle it. Even with all this effort we're missing the whole point, is we don't ask the question, why are they so angry and if it is what i say, because we're there, all this effort will be for nought. We have to think about: is our presence in the Middle East worth anything to us?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJt_h44-00
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interesting...
Is Ron Paul Really An Anti-Semite or the only one with the balls to tell us the truth!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0yOa7FrgUg
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Ron Paul on Haiti, Yemen, body scanners, fed
Ron Paul : "US wants obedient servants of the state." 14th 1st 2010
"The greatest threat to a government is people who think for themselves, believes US Congressman Ron Paul.
If you condition people to everyday, all day, depend on the government to do their thinking for them they will become more obedient.
Paul said the billions of dollars spent by the American government on intelligence could not prevent the recent terror attempt in US skies.
I think the responsibility has fallen on the $75 billion bureaucracy that has 16 agencies that cannot co-ordinate their work, he said. Airlines should be responsible for who gets on their planes, he added.
According to the congressman, all the efforts of the US government to introduce new technical systems for airport passenger control, such as body scanners, are just to make us obedient servants of the state, to teach us that they are in charge of us and to tell us what to do, that we are robots and are supposed to obey them.
Its not that individuals are perfect, its just that governments are always imperfect, they always make mistakes and when they do they are very painful and they hurt each and every one of us.
Paul said that America has made an amazing shift away from traditional values while even former communist regimes are moving in the direction of a free market.
[The economy] should be micromanaged by the people, by the consumer. In the free market the consumer is king, Paul said. But in the US, as in most countries in the world today, it is being micromanaged by the central government and central banks.
Speaking about the earthquake in Haiti, Paul said, just handing out money to Haiti is not going to solve their problems.
According to the outspoken politician, the best thing the US could do for Haiti in the long term would be to introduce the country to sound economic policies so that they would not suffer from poverty.
Commenting on the situation in Yemen, Paul said that the US is looking for another war and that it is a disastrous continuation of the foreign policy of George Bush."
dumbbel33
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRLwCfDLnu4
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Wayne Madesen talks about Obama seeking power to assassinate "US Citizens" they label as a terrorist and Yemen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUbAKrITJFY
Ron Paul also talks about this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC33zNMARgg
5/2/10 Ron Paul on Fox Business' America's Nightly Scoreboard w/ David Asmantalks about the necessity of the department of Homeland Security
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiF_35rFQj8
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Bombs Away: Conservatives Embrace War
By Doug Bandow
Published 02/10/10
"Leading Democrats and Republicans alike agree on the need for action against Iran. At least some liberal Democrats seem reluctant to use military force; in contrast, many conservative Republicans are eager to start bombing. While the latter say they oppose Big Government, these days they spend much of their time proposing new wars.
Conservatives once resisted the imperial tendencies of government. The Founders opposed creating a standing army. Even when the nation went to war -- against Great Britain, Mexico, and Spain in the 19th century, for instance -- Washington quickly demobilized afterward. Conservatives recognized the threat to individual liberty and budget economy posed by an imperial foreign policy.
The Right opposed Woodrow Wilson, who pushed the U.S. into the murderous slugfest of World War I to satisfy his own messianic pretensions. Conservatives led the fight against Franklin Delano Roosevelt's surreptitious campaign to take the U.S. into war against Germany while promising the American people that their husbands and sons would not be sent to die on foreign battlefields. Conservatives then were reluctant warriors who insisted on following the Constitution.
Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to expand the Korean War to the Chinese mainland: he settled for compromise rather than risk triggering World War III. And it was Eisenhower who both warned of the malign influence of the military-industrial complex and insisted that congressional approval was necessary to go to war. He may have been the last president to take the latter provision of the Constitution seriously.
Ronald Reagan belied his cowboy reputation, using the military only sparingly and modestly, intervening in Lebanon -- which even he later implicitly acknowledged to be a mistake -- invading Grenada, and bombing Libya. George H.W. Bush invaded Panama and attacked Iraq, but sharply limited U.S. objectives in the latter. Many Republicans were generally unenthused when President Bill Clinton turned American foreign policy into social work. Yet most GOP leaders, like 1996 presidential nominee Sen. Robert Dole, supported the Clinton administration's bombing of Serbia, a campaign based on hypocritical humanitarian claims and no recognizable security objectives.
Then President George W. Bush launched grand nation-building crusades in both Afghanistan and Iraq; in justifying the latter he sounded like he was channeling liberal Woodrow Wilson. The administration also intervened to stage regime change in Haiti. The president, along with his officials and conservative allies, threatened military action against Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The administration apparently even considered intervening militarily against nuclear-armed Russia in Georgia -- another conflict with no relevance to American security.
After sanctimoniously triggering a disastrous conflict which has killed at least 100,000, and perhaps many more, in Iraq, leading conservatives advocate doing the same to Iran. Republican Presidential nominee John McCain gaily sang what he termed the old Beach Boys' classic "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" when asked about the issue. Today the Right takes for granted America's unilateral right to unleash death and destruction upon whatever people in whatever nation for whatever reason. Like Iraq, Iran has neither attacked nor threatened America. "Bombs away!" appears to be the new conservative mantra. Lest some on the Right be uncomfortable with the results of the Iraqi war, the hawks say: Don't worry, be happy. This time everything will work out. This time America will be received with love.
Moreover, argues Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, Barack Obama would benefit politically as well. The president, writes Pipes, "needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations." So President Obama should send in the bombers over Tehran.
But President Obama should be skeptical of the argument that war with Iran would be win-win for America and his presidency.
First, war advocates say bombing would end Iran's threat to the U.S. What threat is that, however? Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. It isn't even certain that Tehran is developing weapons. War enthusiasts who confidently claimed that Iraq possessed a fearsome nuclear capability now ridicule the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had halted its program. However, the latter conclusion, though controversial, was supported by evidence -- far better evidence than that indicating Baghdad possessed nuclear weapons. There are good reasons to be suspicious of Iran's intentions, especially after the revelation of the uranium-enrichment plant near the holy city of Qum. But hard evidence of a weapons program remains elusive. Some analysts suspect that Iran desires to establish a "turn-key" capability, like that presently possessed by Japan, rather than an arsenal. Even assuming the worst intent, Tehran appears to remain far away from actually building nuclear weapons, let alone deploying deliverable nuclear weapons.
Even possessing the latter wouldn't be enough to endanger the U.S. Some analysts worry about the impact of an electromagnetic pulse attack more than a traditional nuclear strike. But in either case Washington could effectively wipe Iran off of the map as retaliation. The authoritarian regime in Tehran appears to be evil, not suicidal. It surely is undesirable that Iran develop a nuclear weapon, just as it was undesirable that Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China built nuclear weapons. That is, however, very different from saying that America would be at risk.
Second, Pipes worries that the Iranians "might deploy these weapons in the [Middle East], leading to massive death and destruction." Deploy them against whom? While many Arab states are understandably uneasy about the prospect of a more powerful regime in Tehran, Israel is the only nation which publicly worries about being attacked. And it is the only nation most U.S. policy-makers worry about being attacked. Yet Israel has upwards of 150 nuclear weapons. The reason Israel developed nuclear weapons was to deter aggression by countries such as Iran. The Tehran government would have to be suicidal to attack Israel. Again, the fact that current Iranian leaders are malevolent doesn't mean they are crazy.
Obviously, it would ease minds in Washington and throughout the Middle East if Iran was prevented from developing nuclear weapons. But then, minds also would have been eased if the Soviet Union, China, India, and Pakistan had never developed nukes. Some minds in the Middle East likely feel the same way about Israel. That doesn't mean preventive war would have been a better response than wary accommodation in these cases, however. Loosing the bombers would not be the slam-dunk that most conservative crusaders seem to assume. Not all Iranian nuclear facilities may be identified and known works are dispersed and underground. The result of a U.S. strike, then, might only be to delay rather than forestall an Iranian weapon -- at most a modest benefit not worth war.
An American bombing run also would reinforce the message sent by the attacks on Serbia and Iraq: only the speedy and secret acquisition of nuclear weapons can protect other states from unilateral U.S. military action. Tehran probably would redouble its effort; the already de minimis chance of North Korea abandoning its program would shrink still further.
Ironically, even a democratic Iran might choose to develop nuclear weapons. America's long-time ally, the Shah, began Iran's nuclear program before the Islamic Revolution. Any Iranian government might like the assurance of a weapons capability if not actual weapons.
Moreover, if the U.S. strikes Tehran, all bets would be off on a democratic revolution in Iran. The situation in Tehran appears to be explosive and the regime looks unstable. But how the Iranian public would respond to a U.S. attack, despite the growing popular estrangement from the government, is unclear. Certainly the regime would use any strike as an excuse to justify a further crackdown on the opposition. Despite dissatisfaction among the public and internal conflicts among the ruling elite, the regime might benefit from a "rally around the flag" effect. Nor would war be costless for the U.S. Retaliation would be certain. The degree of Tehran's reach and potential for harm are disputed, but Iran is larger and more populous than Iraq. Iran might launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. and encourage proxy forces in the occupied territories and Lebanon to strike at Israel.
U.S. troops in Iraq would be especially vulnerable to attack by Iranian agents as well as Iraqi citizens sympathetic to their co-religionists next door. Tehran might not be able to close the Persian Gulf, but it could disrupt oil shipments and push up insurance rates. Washington's gaggle of authoritarian Islamic allies -- Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States -- could find themselves under popular assault from populations angered by yet another U.S. government attack on a Muslim nation. Political tremors even could reach already unstable Pakistan. Overall, it would not be as easy to end as start war with Iran.
A bombing run by Washington also would reinforce the meme that animates many terrorists, that the U.S. is at war with Islam. While U.S. officials debate how to improve Washington's PR efforts abroad, the substance of American foreign policy continues to send a far more dramatic and powerful message. Although U.S. foreign policy does not justify attacks on civilians, U.S. policymakers must consider all of the consequences of their decisions.
The substantive arguments for striking Iran are dubious enough. Worse is Pipes' contention that war would be good presidential politics. He points out, correctly, that opinion polls show popular support for military action. Moreover, he figures "Americans will presumably rally around the flag, sending that number much higher." This is no argument for war, however. Presidents should not mete out death and destruction to boost their poll ratings.
Pipes also underestimates the political downsides of war. He writes: "Just as 9/11 caused voters to forget George W. Bush's meandering early months, a strike on Iranian facilities would dispatch Obama's feckless first year down the memory hole and transform the domestic political scene. It would sideline health care, prompt Republicans to work with Democrats, and make the netroots squeal, independents reconsider, and conservatives swoon."
In fact, the Bush experience demonstrates that popular support for war can be temporary at best. Conservatives swoon all too easily at the sight of blood, since so few of the hawkish elites advocating promiscuous war-making actually serve in the military and risk their own lives. They leave that to the brave men and women who actually join the armed services. Independents and liberals usually are less impressed with aggressive war-making. Anyway, George Bush quickly turned the public against a war incompetently waged based on false premises resulting in disastrous consequences. Perhaps Iran would be a quick victory, resulting in regime change and democratic triumph, with statues of Barack Obama sprouting across ancient Persia. But then, Iraq was supposed to be a cakewalk, yielding a pro-American government willing to host U.S. troops and join the Bush administration in enforcing U.S. dictates elsewhere in the region. Something went wrong along the way. Counting on votes from a successful war against Iran might result in a trip to the unemployment line for President Obama in 2012.
There are no good solutions in Iran. The world will be a better place if Iran becomes democratic and abandons any nuclear weapons program. But initiating war likely would inhibit reform in Iran while making the world a more dangerous place. The disastrous experience of Iraq should teach us many lessons, the most important of which is that war always should be a last resort. That standard is no where close to being met in Iran."
Doug Bandow
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=599
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Friday, Feb 19, 2010 07:20 EST
Terrorism: the most meaningless and manipulated word
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)
"Yesterday, Joseph Stack deliberately flew an airplane into a building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas, in order to advance the political grievances he outlined in a perfectly cogent suicide-manifesto. Stack's worldview contained elements of the tea party's anti-government anger along with substantial populist complaints generally associated with "the Left" (rage over bailouts, the suffering of America's poor, and the pilfering of the middle class by a corrupt economic elite and their government-servants). All of that was accompanied by an argument as to why violence was justified (indeed necessary) to protest those injustices:
I remember reading about the stock market crash before the "great" depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn't it ironic how far we've come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn't have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it's "business-as-usual" . . . . Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.
Despite all that, The New York Times' Brian Stelter documents the deep reluctance of cable news chatterers and government officials to label the incident an act of "terrorism," even though -- as Dave Neiwert ably documents -- it perfectly fits, indeed is a classic illustration of, every official definition of that term. The issue isn't whether Stack's grievances are real or his responses just; it is that the act unquestionably comports with the official definition. But as NBC's Pete Williams said of the official insistence that this was not an act of Terrorism: there are "a couple of reasons to say that . . . One is he’s an American citizen." Fox News' Megan Kelley asked Catherine Herridge about these denials: "I take it that they mean terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to?," to which Herridge replied: "they mean terrorism in that capital T way."
All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon. The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity. It has really come to mean: "a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies." That's why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist: he's not a Muslim and isn't acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the "definition." One might concede that perhaps there's some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized: it's not "terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way." We all know who commits terrorism in "that capital T way," and it's not people named Joseph Stack.
Contrast the collective hesitance to call Stack a Terrorist with the extremely dubious circumstances under which that term is reflexively applied to Muslims. If a Muslim attacks a military base preparing to deploy soldiers to a war zone, that person is a Terrorist. If an American Muslim argues that violence against the U.S. (particularly when aimed at military targets) is justified due to American violence aimed at the Muslim world, that person is a Terrorist who deserves assassination. And if the U.S. military invades a Muslim country, Muslims who live in the invaded and occupied country and who fight back against the invading American army -- by attacking nothing but military targets -- are also Terrorists. Indeed, large numbers of detainees at Guantanamo were accused of being Terrorists for nothing more than attacking members of an invading foreign army in their country, including 14-year-old Mohamed Jawad, who spent many years in Guantanamo, accused (almost certainly falsely) of throwing a grenade at two American troops in Afghanistan who were part of an invading force in that country. Obviously, plots targeting civilians for death -- the 9/11 attacks and attempts to blow up civilian aircraft -- are pure terrorism, but a huge portion of the acts committed by Muslims that receive that label are not.
In sum: a Muslim who attacks military targets, including in war zones or even in their own countries that have been invaded by a foreign army, are Terrorists. A non-Muslim who flies an airplane into a government building in pursuit of a political agenda is not, or at least is not a Real Terrorist with a capital T -- not the kind who should be tortured and thrown in a cage with no charges and assassinated with no due process. Nor are Christians who stand outside abortion clinics and murder doctors and clinic workers. Nor are acts undertaken by us or our favored allies designed to kill large numbers of civilians or which will recklessly cause such deaths as a means of terrorizing the population into desired behavioral change -- the Glorious Shock and Awe campaign and the pummeling of Gaza. Except as a means for demonizing Muslims, the word is used so inconsistently and manipulatively that it is impoverished of any discernible meaning.
All of this would be an interesting though not terribly important semantic matter if not for the fact that the term Terrorist plays a central role in our political debates. It is the all-justifying term for anything the U.S. Government does. Invasions, torture, due-process-free detentions, military commissions, drone attacks, warrantless surveillance, obsessive secrecy, and even assassinations of American citizens are all justified by the claim that it's only being done to "Terrorists," who, by definition, have no rights. Even worse, one becomes a "Terrorist" not through any judicial adjudication or other formal process, but solely by virtue of the untested, unchecked say-so of the Executive Branch. The President decrees someone to be a Terrorist and that's the end of that: uncritical followers of both political parties immediately justify anything done to the person on the ground that he's a Terrorist (by which they actually mean: he's been accused of being one, though that distinction -- between presidential accusations and proof -- is not one they recognize).
If we're really going to vest virtually unlimited power in the Government to do anything it wants to people they call "Terrorists," we ought at least to have a common understanding of what the term means. But there is none. It's just become a malleable, all-justifying term to allow the U.S. Government carte blanche to do whatever it wants to Muslims it does not like or who do not like it (i.e., The Terrorists). It's really more of a hypnotic mantra than an actual word: its mere utterance causes the nation blindly to cheer on whatever is done against the Muslims who are so labeled.
UPDATE: I want to add one point: the immediate official and media reaction was to avoid, even deny, the term "terrorist" because the perpetrator of the violence wasn't Muslim. But if Stack's manifesto begins to attract serious attention, I think it's likely the term Terrorist will be decisively applied to him in order to discredit what he wrote. His message is a sharply anti-establishment and populist grievance of the type that transcends ideological and partisan divisions -- the complaints which Stack passionately voices are found as common threads in the tea party movement and among citizens on both the Left and on the Right -- and thus tend to be the type which the establishment (which benefits from high levels of partisan distractions and divisions) finds most threatening and in need of demonization. Nothing is more effective at demonizing something than slapping the Terrorist label onto it."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/02/19/terrorism/index.html
Glenn Greenwald
Wilson's War
By George C. Leef
Published 02/20/10
"Although most conventional liberal historians, blinded by their adulation for politicians who embrace "progressive" causes, continue to regard Woodrow Wilson highly, a few others have issued highly negative opinions about our 28th president.
For example, historian Walter Karp, in his 1979 book, The Politics of War, writes,
Wilson simply could not afford to think realistically about his "association of nations." For the burdens he was willing to inflict upon an unwilling America only a transcendent goal unsullied by the skeptical judgment of practical statecraft could possibly serve as adequate justification. In order to become a "great statesman," Wilson had, of necessity, to forfeit every quality that makes a statesman great. Self-deception, self-elation, and self-regard were the chief ingredients of Wilson's celebrated "idealism." In Wilson's War, the nonliberal and unconventional historian Jim Powell buttresses Karp's assessment, regarding Wilson as the worst of our presidents for having so blindly pursued a belligerent policy calculated to involve the United States in the European bloodbath of World War I. The book not only exposes the utter foolishness of Wilson's moves — in clear opposition to the desires of most of the American population — to bring the United States into the war against Germany, but also makes it clear that the horrors of World War II would probably have been averted had it not been for Wilson's intervention. Political meddlers have brought untold misery upon mankind, and after reading Wilson's War it is easy to make the case that Woodrow Wilson must be listed among the greatest malefactors in history.
Powell begins by setting the historical scene. (Given the lack of knowledge about the past among most people, that's a crucial task.) He surveys the century from the end of the Napoleonic wars to the outbreak of World War I, with the purpose of informing the reader about the enormous benefits people around the world derived from the conditions of free trade and free enterprise that largely prevailed during that period.
Living standards rose dramatically, with the strongest gains in the nations that most closely approached true laissez-faire conditions — the United States and Britain. Powell also wants to make sure that the reader understands what brought that era of relative peace and prosperity to an end, namely the rise of socialist and nationalist ideology in the latter part of the 19th century. Just reading the book's opening chapter would be a stupendous educational boon for most people. Even if readers learned nothing else, they would do well to remember these sentences:
Maintaining a separation of the economy and the state would have prevented politicians from turning business competition into political and military conflicts. There wouldn't have been nasty trade wars and empire building, contributing to paranoia and the arms race. If governments had let people live their lives as freely on one side of a border as the other, there wouldn't have been much political support for war. The "Great War" broke out in Europe in the summer of 1914. Wilson initially kept the United States neutral in the conflict, since few Americans thought there was any reason to spend their blood and money in the latest eruption of militarism across the Atlantic. He had, however, shown his interventionist predisposition by dispatching American forces to Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and in the years 1914—1916, his insistence on meddling in Mexican affairs led to pointless, bloody conflict.
Feeling that it was his place to improve the government of Mexico, he ordered the U.S. Atlantic Fleet to the Mexican Gulf Coast in April 1914 following a minor incident. Marines were sent in to occupy Veracruz. Soldiers on both sides were killed and matters were becoming so tense that ambassadors from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile offered to mediate a settlement to the absurd dispute, a dispute that wouldn't have occurred except for Wilson's messianic view of himself. At the conference to resolve the dispute, he demanded "an orderly and righteous government in Mexico." It was a taste of things to come.
Bent on intervention
Once war broke out in Europe, Wilson paid lip service to American neutrality but took positions that were designed to assist the British and French. Most significantly, he supported Britain's naval blockade against neutral shipping of nonmilitary cargo to Germany. Britain intended to starve the Germans into surrender, but the blockade was a clear violation of international law. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan vigorously argued that the United States needed to stand up for the rights of neutrals and oppose the blockade. Wilson ignored him.
Wilson also refused to issue a warning to Americans traveling in the war zone, asserting a spurious right for citizens of neutrals to go wherever they pleased. During the conflict with Mexico, he had issued a warning to Americans in Mexico that they remained there at their own risk, but he wanted to provoke conflict with Germany and calculated that a few American casualties would give him a casus belli. Bryan again protested to Wilson, writing, "I cannot help feeling that it would be a sacrifice of the interests of all the people to allow one man acting purely for himself and his own interests to involve the entire nation in difficulty when he had ample warning of the risks which he has assumed." As usual, Wilson didn't bother to respond to an argument against a course he was determined to take.
In 1916, Wilson used the famous Zimmerman telegram for all it was worth in an effort to inflame public opinion against Germany. In a telegram from the German foreign minister to the Mexican government, which the British intercepted and decoded, the German government said that if the United States and Germany went to war, Germany would assist Mexico in regaining the territory it had lost to the United States in 1848.
Powell observes that the telegram was much ado about nothing, since, even if Germany and America declared war on each other, there was absolutely no way for the Germans either to attack the United States or to assist the Mexicans. Nevertheless, Wilson and his pro-war allies used the incident to whip up anti-German sentiment with ridiculous depictions of vicious "Huns" slaughtering American women and children.
By April 1917, Wilson thought he had sufficient support in the country for a declaration of war. He delivered a speech to Congress that was full of lofty rhetoric, such as the famous line about making the world "safe for democracy." Powell comments acidly,
He didn't explain how this was to be done by allying with the British Empire, which had colonies around the world; with France, which had colonies in Africa and Asia; and with Russia, which was ruled by a czar. Wilson had done everything he could to bring the United States into the war. Why? So he could crush Germany and then bring about a new world order. Just as he had demanded a "righteous" government in Mexico, he envisioned a "righteous" remaking of Europe once the war was over. He was eager to sacrifice American lives so that he could play what he called "the noblest part."
Consequences of World War I
American troops did prove to be decisive on the Western front, where Germany, France, and Britain were at the point of exhaustion after four years of incessant killing. More than 117,000 Americans were killed in the fighting, lives expended for no reason other than the grandiose dreams of their president.
While the military commanders proved to be competent, Wilson proved to be a bungler of the first magnitude in diplomacy during and after the war. One blunder was his insistence that Russia remain in the war after the overthrow of the tsarist government early in 1917. The democratic government that had replaced the monarchy probably would have survived if it had bowed out of the fighting immediately. Russia had suffered horrendous casualties and its creaking, pre-capitalist economy could not deliver either guns or butter.
Everyone was sick of the war, but Wilson wanted Russia to stay active in the battle against the undemocratic allies Germany and Austria-Hungary. He accomplished that through bribery. American officials informed the new Russian leadership that massive loans ($325 million) would be forthcoming from the United States, provided that Russia continued fighting. (Too bad that the Constitution gives the president power to lend money to foreign governments. Oh wait — it actually doesn't. Too bad that presidents so often ignore the document they're sworn to uphold!) So, to get the desperately needed money, the Russian government launched one last offensive. It was mauled with heavy casualties.
That military disaster sowed the seeds of the destruction of the democratic government. Powell argues convincingly that Lenin would have had virtually no chance of establishing his communist dictatorship if the democratic government hadn't thrown away much of its support by continuing in the war. Wilson had no idea about the conditions in Russia and his blind insistence that everything possible had to be done to crush Germany and Austria militarily set the stage for the later communist takeover in Russia in 1917. But for his meddling, the world would probably have been spared the 70-year horror of Soviet communism.
Powell also demonstrates that the shorter-lived but equally destructive phenomenon of Nazism (socialism with the added toxin of nationalism) would have been avoided if Wilson had kept the United States out of the war. The likely outcome of a negotiated peace between the combatants — and by 1917, both sides were quietly moving in that direction — would have been some minor and essentially meaningless territorial adjustments, just as in previous European wars.
The decisive military defeat of Germany, however, made possible the vindictive Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Wilson evidently thought that he would be able to achieve his vision of a democratic world free from warfare. Instead, the Treaty, with its harsh terms, led to seething discontent in Germany and virtually guaranteed the rise of a demagogic leader. Adolf Hitler filled that role perfectly. Even though Woodrow Wilson was long dead, we might well conclude that World War II was actually his war.
When governments interfere in the conflicts of other nations, we should expect undesirable and even perverse consequences. Thanks to Jim Powell for driving that point home so forcefully with his account of Wilson's intervention into World War I."
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=629
George C. Leef
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Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt
Published 02/23/10
Explain Something to Me
Fixing What's Wrong in Washington... in Afghanistan
"Explain something to me.
In recent months, unless you were insensate, you couldn't help running across someone talking, writing, speaking, or pontificating about how busted government is in the United States. State governments are increasingly broke and getting broker. The federal government, while running up the red ink, is, as just about everyone declares, "paralyzed" and so incapable of acting intelligently on just about anything.
Only the other day, no less a personage than Vice President Biden assured the co-anchor of the CBS Early Show, "Washington, right now, is broken." Indiana Senator Evan Bayh used the very same word, broken, when he announced recently that he would not run for reelection and, in response to his decision, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz typically commented, "The system has been largely dysfunctional for nearly two decades, and everybody knows it." Voters seem to agree. Two words, "polarization" and "gridlock" -- or hyperbolic cousins like "paralyzing hyperpartisanship" -- dominate the news when the media describes that dysfunctionalism. Foreign observers have been similarly struck, hence a spate of pieces like the one in the British magazine the Economist headlined, "America's Democracy, A Study in Paralysis."
Washington's incapacity to govern now evidently seems to ever more Americans at the root of many looming problems. As the New York Times summed up one of them in a recent headline: "Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds Fear of a Debt Crisis." When President Obama leaves the confines of Washington for the campaign trail, he promptly attacks congressional "gridlock" and the "slash and burn politics" that have left the nation's capital tied in knots.
And he has an obvious point since, when he had a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate, congressional Democrats and the White House still couldn't get their act together and pass health-care reform, not even after a year of discussion, debate, and favors trading, not even as the train wreck of the Massachusetts election barreled toward them. These days the Democrats may not even be a party, which means their staggering Senate majority has really been a majority of next to nothing.
The Republicans, who ran us into this ditch in the Bush years, are now perfectly happy to be the party of "no" -- and the polls seem to show that it's a fruitful strategy for the 2010 election. Meanwhile, special interests rule Washington and lobbying is king. As if to catch the spirit of this new reality, the president recently offered his vote of support to the sort of Wall Street CEOs who took Americans to the cleaners in the great economic meltdown of 2008 and are once again raking in the millions, while few have faith that change or improvement of any kind is in our future. Good governance, in other words, no longer seems part of the American tool kit and way of life.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars, the U.S. military is promoting "good governance" with all its might. In a major campaign in the modest-sized city of Marja (a place next to no one had heard of two weeks ago) in Taliban-controlled Helmand Province, Afghanistan, it's placing a bet on its ability to "restore the credibility" of President Hamid Karzai's government. In the process, it plans to unfurl a functioning city administration where none existed. According to its commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, as soon as the U.S. Army and the Marines, along with British troops and Afghan forces, have driven the Taliban out of town, he's prepared to roll out an Afghan "government in a box," including police, courts, and local services.
The U.S. military is intent, according to the Wall Street Journal, on "delivering a new administration and millions of dollars in aid to a place where government employees didn't dare set foot a week ago." Slated to be the future "mayor" of Marja, Haji Zahir, a businessman who spent 15 years in Germany, is, according to press reports, living on a U.S. Marine base in the province until, one day soon, the American military can install him in an "abandoned government building" or simple "a clump of ruins" in that city.
He is, we're told, to arrive with four U.S. civilian advisors, two from the State Department and two from the U.S. Agency for International Development, described (in the typically patronizing language of American press reports) as his "mentors." They are to help him govern, and especially dole out the millions of dollars that the U.S. military has available to "reconstruct" Marja. Road-building projects are to be launched, schools refurbished, and a new clinic built, all to win Pashtun "hearts and minds." As soon as the fighting abates, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has suggested, the post-military emphasis will be on "economic development," with an influx of "military and civilian workers" who will "show a better way of life" to the town's inhabitants.
So explain something to me: Why does the military of a country convinced it's becoming ungovernable think itself so capable of making another ungovernable country governable? What's the military's skill set here? What lore, what body of political knowledge, are they drawing on? Who do they think they represent, the Philadelphia of 1776 or the Washington of 2010, and if the latter, why should Americans be considered the globe's leading experts in good government anymore? And while we're at it, fill me in on one other thing: Just what has convinced American officials in Afghanistan and the nation's capital that they have the special ability to teach, prod, wheedle, bribe, or force Afghans to embark on good governance in their country if we can't do it in Washington or Sacramento?
Explain something else to me: Why are our military and civilian leaders so confident that, after nine years of occupying the world's leading narco-state, nine years of reconstruction boondoggles and military failure, they suddenly have the key, the formula, to solve the Afghan mess? Why do leading officials suddenly believe they can make Afghan President Hamid Karzai into "a Winston Churchill who can rally his people," as one unnamed official told Matthew Rosenberg and Peter Spiegel of the Wall Street Journal -- and all of this only months after Karzai, returned to office in a wildly fraudulent presidential election, overseeing a government riddled with corruption and drug money, and honeycombed with warlords sporting derelict reputations, was considered a discredited figure in Washington? And why do they think they can turn a man known mockingly as the "mayor" or "president" of Kabul (because his government has so little influence outside the capital) into a political force in southern Afghanistan?
And someone tell me: Just who picked the name Operation Moshtarak for the campaign in Marja? Why am I not convinced that it was an Afghan? Though news accounts say that the word means "togetherness" in Dari, why do I think that a better translation might be "crushing embrace"? What could "togetherness" really mean when, according to the Wall Street Journal, to make the final decision to launch the operation, already long announced, General McChrystal "stepped into his armored car for the short drive... to the presidential palace," and reportedly roused President Karzai from a nap for "a novel moment." Karzai agreed, of course, supposedly adding, "No one has ever asked me to decide before."
This is a black comedy of "governance." So is the fact that, from the highest administration officials and military men to those in the field, everyone speaks, evidently without the slightest self-consciousness, about putting an "Afghan face" on the Marja campaign. The phrase is revelatory and oddly blunt. As an image, there's really only one way to understand it (not that the Americans involved would ever stop to do so). After all, what does it mean to "put a face" on something that assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what we know to be the actual "face" of the Afghan War, which is American.
National Security Adviser James Jones, for instance, spoke of the Marja campaign having "'a much bigger Afghan face,' with two Afghans for every one U.S. soldier involved." And this way of thinking is so common that news reports regularly use the phrase, as in a recent Associated Press story: "Military officials say they are learning from past mistakes. The offensive is designed with an 'Afghan face.'"
And here's something else I'd like explained to me: Why does the U.S. press, at present so fierce about the lack of both "togetherness" and decent governance in Washington, report this sort of thing without comment, even though it reflects the deepest American contempt for putative "allies"? Why, for instance, can those same Wall Street Journal reporters write without blinking: "Western officials also are bringing Afghan cabinet members into strategy discussions, allowing them to select the officials who will run Marjah once it is cleared of Taliban, and pushing them before the cameras to emphasize the participation of Afghan troops in the offensive"? Allow? Push? Is this what we mean by "togetherness"?
Try to imagine all this in reverse -- an Afghan general motoring over to the White House to wake up the president and ask whether an operation, already announced and ready to roll, can leave the starting gate? But why go on?
Just explain this to me: Why are the representatives of Washington, civilian and military, always so tone deaf when it comes to other peoples and other cultures? Why is it so hard for them to imagine what it might be like to be in someone else's shoes (or boots or sandals)? Why do they always arrive not just convinced that they have identified the right problems and are asking the right questions, but that they, and only they, have the right answers, when at home they seem to have none at all?
Thinking about this, I wonder what kind of "face" should be put on global governance in Washington?
[Note on further reading: The single best piece I've seen suggesting answers to some of the questions raised above is Andrew Bacevich's "Government-in-a-box in Marja," in last week's Los Angeles Times. As ever, I recommend that, on war and peace subjects across the Middle East, Central, and South Asia, you check out Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog (never to be missed),Antiwar.com (an invaluable daily resource), and the War in Context website, which I've always relied on and which now exists in a new, more focused iteration. (It has been riveting lately as it follows the spreading scandal surrounding the assassination in Dubai of a senior Hamas military commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.)]"
Tom Engelhardt
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=632
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Australians' passports stolen for Dubai hit: Smith
By online political correspondent Emma Rodgers, staff
Updated Thu Feb 25, 2010 11:16am AEDT
"Foreign Minister Stephen Smith says three Australians whose passports were allegedly used by suspected Mossad assassins in Dubai appear to have been the victims of identity fraud.
Dubai police have named 15 new suspects in the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was found dead in his hotel room last month in what police say was almost certainly an Israeli hit.
Police say three of the suspects travelled to the emirate on Australian passports in the names of Adam Marcus Korman, Joshua Daniel Bruce and Nicole Sandra McCabe.
Speaking after meeting the Israeli ambassador in Canberra today, Mr Smith said the Australian Federal Police would conduct a full investigation into how the passports had been copied or altered.
"At this stage Australian officials have no information to suggest the three Australian passport holders were involved in any way other than as victims of passport or identity fraud," Mr Smith said.
"The Australian Government condemns in the strongest possible terms the misuse and the abuse of Australian passports."
Mr Smith said he also told ambassador Yuval Rotem that the Australian Government expected Israeli officials to cooperate "fully and transparently" with the AFP's investigation.
Earlier Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he was determined to "get to the bottom" of the case.
He told AM that officials had been working on the case through the night and pledged the Government would "not let the matter rest" and that Australia "will not be silent on the matter".
"If Australian passports are being used or forged by any state, let alone for the purpose of assassination, this is of the deepest concern and we are getting to the bottom of this now," he said.
"We will not leave a single stone unturned."
Asked what action the Government may take against Israel, Mr Rudd replied: "Let us establish the facts first."
The three Australians named will be contacted by the Department of Foreign Affairs.
"This is not just a deep concern for the Australian Government, it must be therefore the deepest concern to any individual associated with this as well," Mr Rudd said.
'Simply unbelievable'
Mr Korman, 34, is Australian-born but lives in Tel Aviv where he sells musical instruments.
In an interview with Israeli media he has denied any involvement and says he is the victim of identity theft.
AM tried to contact him, along with a Bruce Daniel who lives near Haifa in Israel's north, but neither was answering the phone.
But Mr Korman has told Israel's biggest newspaper Yediot Aharonot that he is shocked over what has happened.
"It's identity theft. Simply unbelievable," he is quoted as saying.
"It's a violation of human rights to do such a thing. I have travelled all over the world but never visited Dubai or the United Arab Emirates."
Mr Korman also told the paper he was perplexed as to how he could fly to Australia again now that he is considered an international suspect.
"I have been frightened and shocked since receiving the news," he reportedly said.
AM has confirmed that Australian Nicole Sandra McCabe also lives in Israel.
When contacted this morning, her family in Australia said they had no knowledge of her name being linked to the Dubai investigation.
Dubai police have released new information about the movements of the 26 suspects before and after the assassination.
All had apparently travelled to Dubai from one of six European cities or Hong Kong, and each left the country to various destinations, including Hong Kong and Iran, before returning to Europe where they apparently abandoned the fraudulent passports.
Many had also used credit cards issued by the same US bank.
Police also released new vision from the hotel's security cameras showing the man named as Mr Bruce with one of the French suspects inside the hotel.
The Israeli foreign minister has said there is no proof his country carried out the killing."
By online political correspondent Emma Rodgers, staff, ABC news
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/25/2829656.htm
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The War on Terror Is Anti-Conservative
By Philip Giraldi
Published 02/26/10
Why Real Conservatives Oppose the War on Terror
[This speech was part of a panel sponsored by the Future of Freedom Foundation, Campaign for Liberty and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance (LOLA) held on February 20th at the 2010 CPAC. The panel presentation was titled "Why Real Conservatives Are Against the War on Terror."]
"Benjamin Franklin once observed that those who would trade their liberties for security will wind up losing both. James Madison stated that no nation can preserve freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare. Few can question that America's Founding Fathers epitomize true conservatism. There is something seriously wrong in America today precisely because the elites from both political parties have forgotten about Franklin and Madison and ignored their wise counsel.
No one should doubt that ill-conceived security measures and the greatly exaggerated fear of terrorism have driven much of both foreign and domestic policy since 9/11 -- it was undeniably a horrific experience for this nation, but it did not threaten the survival of the American Republic. Its perpetrators and their heirs do not do so today. Only we Americans can do that and we are doing so by overreacting to the danger and compromising our own liberties.
Conservatives should be the voice of reason. They should demand commensurate and realistic responses to genuine foreign and domestic threats rather than overkill, more bureaucracy, and lots of unneeded government pork. The government's creation of a no-fly list with one million names and a terrorist suspects list with nearly half a million entries exemplify that damage that has already been done. If there were even one per cent that many people in the US actually threatening terrorist acts there would be waves of bombings in the streets. That that has not taken place tells you that both the lists and the process used to compile them are essentially bogus.
The expression war on terror is meaningless. Terror is a tactic, it is not a foreign government or political movement. To use the expression a "terrorist group" is equally misleading as the groups which come in all shapes sizes and colors are essentially political and have frequently clearly defined political objectives even if they use terrorism to advance their agenda. In most cases, the groups we call terrorists seek to take over the government of the countries where they operate, replacing groups not dissimilar to themselves who are currently in charge.
Why is what we call something important, whether we use the expression "terrorist" or not? It is important because how you name and define something shapes how you think about it and how you respond to it. It frames the narrative. Instead of bumper sticker definitions, we should instead be asking whether international groups that use terror genuinely threaten either the United States or any vital national interest. If we were to undertake such an analysis, we would quickly learn that frequently the terrorist label is misleading.
The exploitation of fear of terrorism by those in government has led to wars that did not have to be fought. Fear has been the key to the door for expansion of government and government powers and the people in charge in Washington have seized the opportunity. It has also eroded the liberties that have defined us as a nation. To cite only one example, the position taken by the Obama Administration in early February that it is all right to assassinate American citizens overseas based on secret information, violates principles of due process and deprives every citizen of the constitutional right to defend himself before a jury consisting of his peers.
While government expanded, and because bureaucrats view the world in terms of institutions and power, America's leaders looked at the terrorism tactic and drew all the wrong conclusions, namely that those we call terrorists hated the United States for no rational reason and that there was a military solution that could be imposed to make the terrorists go away. The Washington elite confused America's ability to field a large army with something we call policy, in this case foreign policy, not understanding that using the military is a failure of foreign policy, not an alternative to it. The same officials and politicians also created a vast and ineffective homeland security bureaucracy, the domestic equivalent of an interventionist foreign policy, that has stripped many Americans of their fundamental liberties here at home. Predictably, the international situation has become even more unstable as a result of the enormous expansion of the security state. When meddling in the affairs of others began to produce bad results, the solution was more meddling, most recently in Somalia and Yemen, never looking at intervention itself as a possibly source of the instability and the terrorism.
Some of the numbers behind what has happened should appall every true conservative. The United States now spends nearly one trillion dollars every year on the military, homeland security, and intelligence. Much of the money is borrowed from China. If one assumes that there are something like 5,000 active terrorists in the world, and there are likely less than that, it works out to something like $200 million per terrorist per year every year. Fear of terrorism drives growth in government and has led to involvement in multiple little wars and some bigger ones as well as subsequent exercises in nation building, all of which have been unconstitutional, and none of which have turned out well. The so-called global war on terror, now referred to as overseas contingency operations, is without end and without limits, and has made the US hated and feared in most of the world, not respected. It has even made American citizens potential targets of their own government without any recourse to the protections afforded by the constitution.
And America's war against the world did not have to happen. There are real threats in the world against Americans and American interests, but military action in support of the national interest should only be a last option after every other step has been taken. And then there is the issue of blowback. Why is America the target of terrorists and suicide bombers? Surely not because it has freedoms that some view negatively. As Usama bin Laden put it, in possibly the only known joke made by a terrorist, if freedoms were the issue al-Qaeda would be attacking Sweden. Congressman Ron Paul, former CIA Bin Laden Task Force head Michael Scheurer, and numerous others have noted that America has become a target because it is involved militarily in so many countries, meddling in other people's business. As they put it, "They are over here because we are over there."
Above all, the American people should follow the money. It is fashionable to blame the Republican Party for many of our ills, but the war party in America is bipartisan. It is driven both by the lust for power and the good old fashioned profit motive. The current push to attack Iran has more Democrats behind it than Republicans and it is fully supported by a media that has been characterized as being largely liberal but which really shares the collectivist viewpoint and interests of the Washington elite. War is big business and it produces money and jobs for a lot of people, ranging from think tanks to defense contractors to congressmen and senior government officials who are looking for a nice income supplement when they retire. The American people must demand a change in that dynamic. Into the early fifties it was still possible for a traditional conservative Republican like Russell Kirk or Senator Robert Taft to object to America's growing global role without being labeled an isolationist or being ostracized by one's own political party. That changed as war became an engine driving the economy with a bit of pork sweetening the deal in every congressional district. Today, one might argue, that weapons are the only thing that the United States produces for which there is a worldwide demand. That is not only sad, it has been the undoing of the American Republic.
In short, real conservatives who believe in small government, fiscal responsibility, a rational foreign policy based on the national interest, and non-involvement in other people's quarrels should never support global wars on terror or global wars on anything. They should reject completely the insidious and absurd notion that Washington can intervene all over the world and not raise taxes to pay for the cost, handing our security over to the Chinese lenders and bankrupting our children and grandchildren. Some in Washington have already seen the folly of our present course and are speaking out. "The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people." Ron Paul said that in 2008 and it should be the rallying cry for a constitutionally based foreign and defense policy that truly benefits the American people."
Philip Giraldi
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=643
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Ron Paul: End the War in Afghanistan NOW! 10/3/10
Ron Paul spoke on the House floor in support of Dennis Kucinich's H. Con Res 248 which would end the war in Afghanistan and bring U.S. Armed Forces home within 30 days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuCgC_Ntut0
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U.S. Government Confirms Sanctions Don't Work
By Jacob Hornberger
Published 03/12/10
"Even while employing sanctions against Iran, the U.S. government is confirming that sanctions do not work.
The Chinese government has threatened to impose sanctions on the United States if the U.S. government persists in its decision to sell weapons, including F-16s, to Taiwan. According to the New York Times, the threat was issued by a top Chinese military official, who did not specify what the sanctions would be. However, a possibility would be the wholesale dumping of U.S. government securities onto the international financial markets. Those instruments represent the enormous amounts of money that China has loaned the U.S. government to fund its enterprises in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding the U.S. government's steadfast insistence that its sanctions will induce Iranian government officials to submit to U.S. demands regarding its nuclear program, the U.S. government is steadfastly refusing to succumb to China's threat to impose sanctions on the United States.
Wouldn't you think that U.S. officials would want to use this opportunity to show the world that sanctions really do work? Imagine: U.S. officials could announce, "Given China's threat to impose sanctions on our country, we have decided to not go forward with our plans to sell weaponry to Taiwan." What better way to show that sanctions work than that?
But we all know that that isn't going to happen. U.S. government officials are a proud bunch. They're not about to let Chinese government officials push them around.
But what about China's ability to dump all those U.S. debt instruments onto the market. Surely U.S. officials realize that such an action could cause untold monetary havoc for the U.S. dollar and, thus, severely threaten the financial well-being of the American people.
It doesn't matter. U.S. officials would never bow to the demands of China's government, no matter how high the cost to the American citizenry.
But the obvious questions arise? Why wouldn't Iranian officials be expected to react in the same way? Why would anyone expect them to succumb to demands of U.S. officials? Aren't they just as proud as U.S. government officials are? Wouldn't they be just as willing to sacrifice the well-being of their citizenry as U.S. officials are?
The fact is that the citizenry of any country are viewed simply as pawns by both their own government and the foreign government that is imposing the sanctions.
For example, as I pointed out here, the U.S. sanctions against Iran have caused several plane crashes, killing hundreds of Iraqi citizens. Yet, that hasn't persuaded the U.S. government to lift the sanctions, just as it hasn't induced the Iranian government to bow to U.S. demands. The Iranian citizenry are considered expendable by both governments.
Recall the brutal sanctions that the U.S. government enforced against Iraq for more than 10 years. Every year, they were causing the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children from infectious illnesses, malnutrition, etc. Those deaths didn't cause Saddam Hussein to leave office, which is what the U.S. government wanted. Equally important, U.S. officials were indifferent to the deaths of all those Iraqi children. In fact, the official U.S. position was that those deaths were "worth it," the term used by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright when asked about the deaths by "Sixty Minutes."
Or consider the brutal embargo that the U.S. government has enforced against Cuba for decades. It has produced untold economic harm to the Cuban people. U.S. officials couldn't care less. They steadfastly maintain that one of these days the embargo will finally succeed in persuading Fidel Castro (and his brother) to give up power and permit a U.S.-approved ruler to be substituted in his stead. Not surprisingly, the Castro brothers have reacted to the decades-long U.S. embargo in the same way that the U.S. government is responding to China's threat to impose sanctions on the United States -- by refusing to succumb to U.S. demands no matter how much the Cuban people must suffer as a consequence.
With its refusal to bow to China's threat of sanctions, the U.S. government is confirming that sanctions simply don't work. Given the great harm the U.S. government has inflicted on foreign citizens with its own sanctions, it's time for U.S. officials to lift their sanctions against Iran, Cuba, and everyone else."
Jacob Hornberger
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=676
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The Truth about Terrorism
By Jack Hunter
Published 03/13/10
Both the Left and Right make ideological excuses for terror
The Truth about Terrorism
"In a recent commentary, I called 19th century insurrectionist Denmark Vesey a "terrorist," a term I define as someone who intentionally targets civilians to advance an objective or agenda. Vesey, who planned to murder every white person in Charleston in 1822, certainly fits this description, as does President Harry Truman, who dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. I made this exact same comparison in my column.
Liberals cursed my portrayal of Vesey, while thanking me for bringing up Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Conservatives cursed my portrayal of Truman, yet thanked me for my comments on Vesey.
Though liberals are generally thought of as bleeding hearts, I'm never surprised when they endorse terrorism. It's an easy philosophical leap for liberals, who view humanity through the lens of class, race, gender, and other collectivist identities, to justify the mass killing of people in the name of social justice or "progress."
In the early to mid-20th century, many American and European liberals were so sympathetic to socialism that they turned a blind eye to the atrocities being committed against the Soviet Union's civilian population by the Communist Party leadership. Millions died.
Modern, white, guilt-driven liberals who would never think of sacrificing their own small children for any progressive cause still champion Vesey's plans to slaughter every pale-faced child in Charleston. When defending Vesey, liberals don't think about the idea of children being murdered; they only think about black liberation. Similarly, when it came to Lenin and Stalin's Russia, liberals of the past didn't think about the genocide and famine caused by these totalitarian regimes, only the idea of the workers of the world uniting. In the name of saving humanity, the Left is always prepared to sacrifice plenty of humans.
Unfortunately, so are many of today's conservatives. The most common defense of Truman's decision to drop two atomic bombs is that it was done to "save American lives." But was it?
Wrote Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff to both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman: "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender..." Douglas MacArthur's consultant Norman Cousins wrote: "When I asked Gen. MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb."
Dwight Eisenhower also had a similar view. He told Newsweek in 1963 that "the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Leahy also had this to say: "The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
Barbarians? Dark ages? Destroying women and children as a method of waging war? These descriptions could easily apply to Al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, Leahy is describing the United States government.
Even if Leahy, MacArthur, and Eisenhower were wrong about the use of atomic weapons, describing Truman as a terrorist seems to upset conservatives most, because they subscribe to the popular narrative that the bombings were just another type of conventional warfare.
According to the thinking of mainstream conservatives, "state-sponsored terrorism" only seems to apply to Arab nations which fund terrorist individuals; state-sponsored terrorism could never be applied to a government engaging in plain, old war.
Using Truman's actions as an example, conservatives seem to say that terrorism carried out by individuals is always unwarranted, but terrorism carried out by government is warranted. In fact, it isn't even "terrorism" at all. Is there any other sphere in which conservatives, quite literally, allow their government to get away with such murder?
Reveling in the excesses of government in the form of militarism hasn't always been stock conservative thinking. As late as 1959, William F. Buckley's National Review could say the following in an editorial: "The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed."
Regardless, for the Left or Right, if the definition of terrorism is not the intentional targeting of civilians to advance an objective or agenda, then what is it? I've yet to hear a better definition.
And I don't see how that particular evil ceases to become such depending on who's doing it."
Jack Hunter
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=679
Battling the Bipartisan Consensus for War
By Doug Bandow
Published 03/13/10
"The U.S. is rarely at peace. It doesn't matter which party or which politician is in power: American military forces will be on the move, invading a Third World nation here and threatening an emerging power there.
In January 2009 Republican George W. Bush yielded to Democrat Barack Obama, and the U.S. government increased military spending and expanded the war in Afghanistan. If a Republican is elected in 2012, recent history suggests that defense outlays will grow further, as Washington attacks another nation or two.
Enthusiasm for war crosses party lines -- Robert Kagan recently wrote approvingly of the militaristic alliance between "liberal interventionist Democrats" and "hawkish internationalist Republicans" -- both groups which have never met a war they didn't want to fight. However, support for peace also is transpartisan. Such sentiments are perhaps strongest on the Democratic left, which increasingly feels disenfranchised by President Obama. A smaller contingent of libertarians, traditional conservatives, and paleo-conservatives has resisted the conservative movement's adoption of war-mongering intervention as a basic tenet.
Right and Left recently came together for a day-long conference in Washington. Participants included this writer, editors from the Nation, Progressive Review online, American Conservative, Reason, and other publications; leftish anti-war activists reaching back to the Vietnam era and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School; Ralph Nader; a supporter of Patrick Buchanan's 1992 presidential bid; a former campaign aide to internet sensation Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) and three members of the Paul-inspired group Young Americans for Liberty; representatives of several activist organizations, including Voters for Peace and Veterans for Peace; and writers, think tankers, academics, and organizers from across the political spectrum.
The moment economics, domestic policy, or election law came up, participants disagreed. But on the central issue of war and peace the group united. While war might sometimes be unavoidable -- pacifism was not on the agenda, though some of the participants might have been pacifists -- it should be a last resort, a tragic necessity to protect a free American society. While war sometimes brings out the finest and most sublime human values such as courage and honor, more often it looses the basest passions and destroys what we most hold dear. Despite today's constant celebration of all things military, Americans are best served by peace, allowing them to enjoy the pleasures and surmount the challenges of daily life.
Yet today the U.S. is one of the world's most militarized states, accounting for nearly half of the globe's military outlays. The U.S. government maintains hundreds of military installations and hundreds of thousands of troops abroad. No other country, democratic or authoritarian, comes close to matching America's aggressive military record in recent decades: nations and territories invaded or bombed include Iraq (twice), Serbia, Bosnian Serbs, Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, Panama, and Grenada. Threats have come fast and furious against North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and most recently Yemen.
It is bad enough that Washington policymakers see war as a first resort, a convenient tool for conducting social engineering abroad. They seem to treat the resulting death and destruction as incidental and unimportant, especially if concentrated on others.
Even worse, many U.S. policymakers appear to enjoy wielding military force safely out of harm's way from their Washington offices. Rather than feel reluctant at loosing the dogs of war, some American leaders, almost always ones who have never put on a military uniform let alone served in combat, joyously add new targets. "Real men go to Tehran," ran the neoconservative mantra in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, when otherwise sober analysts were filled with hubris at America's ability to remake the world at will. Never mind those who would be killed along the way.
It is this world which brought representatives from Right to Left together. Participants discussed rhetoric: criticizing "imperialism," for instance, resonates far better with the Left than the Right. But there was broad agreement on policy. Washington today has a strategy of "empire." The U.S. isn't the same as the Roman or British empires, to be sure. But American foreign and military policy could hardly be further from those one would expect from a constitutional republic with a government of limited powers intended to concentrate on protecting the safety and liberty of its citizens.
Thus, Americans need real change, not the faux variety offered by the Obama administration. The military should be configured to defend America, not client states around the globe. U.S. taxpayers should not be fleeced to subsidize wealthy allies. Washington should not use patriotic 18-year-olds to occupy Third World states, treating them like American satrapies, governed by U.S. ambassadors. Uncle Sam should stop trying to micro-manage the globe, treating every conflict or controversy as America's own, exaggerating foreign threats and inflating Washington's abilities.
The price of today's policy of empire is high. Far from being the costless adventure imagined by members of Washington's ubiquitous sofa samurai, war is the ultimate big government program, a threat to Americans' life, prosperity, and liberty.
So far the Iraqi "cakewalk" has resulted in the death of roughly 4400 Americans and 300 other coalition soldiers. Then there are tens of thousands of maimed and injured Americans, others suffering from PSD, and numerous broken families and communities. At least 100,000 and probably many more Iraqis have died. Some estimates run up to a million, a truly astonishing number. America's ivory tower warriors seem particularly unconcerned about dead foreigners. However many Iraqis died, it is treated as a small price to pay for the privilege of being liberated by Washington.
Another cost is financial. Direct military outlays this year will run over $700 billion. Iraq is ultimately likely cost $2 or $3 trillion. Washington spends more on "defense," adjusted for inflation, today than at any point during the Cold War, Korean War, and Vietnam War. The U.S. accounts for nearly half of the globe's military expenditures.
American taxpayers pay to defend prosperous and populous European states. Japan devotes about a fourth as much of its economic strength to the military as does the U.S. The NATO member which makes the most military effort is crisis-prone Greece -- in response to nominal ally Turkey. For years American taxpayers spent as much as South Koreans to defend the Republic of Korea.
Such generosity might have made sense in the aftermath of World War II, when so many Asian and European states had been ruined by war and faced Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. No longer, however. Especially with the U.S. budget deficit expected to run nearly $1.6 trillion this year alone. Over the next decade Uncle Sam likely will rack up another $10 trillion in red ink. In effect, Washington is borrowing every penny which it is spending to defend other nations.
Liberty also suffers from a policy of empire. "War is the health of the state," intoned Randolph Bourne, and it certainly is the health of the national security state. The constitutional deformations of the Bush years were legendary, yet President Barack Obama has done little to rein in his predecessor's lawless conduct. Executive aggrandizement, government secrecy, privacy violations, military arrests and trials, and constitutional violations. The U.S. is in danger of losing its republican soul.
Of course, one could imagine a truly necessary war which would have to be fought almost irrespective of cost -- World War II, perhaps. However, while jihadist terrorists are ugly and murderous, they are a poor substitute for Adolf Hitler with armored divisions and Joseph Stalin with nuclear weapons. We aren't fighting World War III. We aren't fighting anything close to World War III.
And if we were in such a conflict, a policy of empire, of meddling around the globe, of engaging in international social engineering, would be about the most foolish strategy possible. Most of what the U.S. military does has nothing to do with American security: protecting European states threatened by no one, aiding a South Korea which vastly outranges its northern antagonist, attempting to turn decrepit Third World states into liberal democracies and Western allies.
The problem of terrorism is real, but is best met by sophisticated, targeted countermeasures rather than promiscuous blunt-force intervention. The war in Iraq has enhanced Iran's strategic position, weakened America's reputation, stretched U.S. military forces, spurred terrorist recruitment, and confirmed the radical terrorist narrative. A lengthy occupation of Afghanistan and overflow combat into Pakistan risk doing much the same -- potentially for years. Expanded American intervention in Somalia, Yemen, and elsewhere would have a similar effect.
Militaristic sloganeering, patriotic preening, and demagogic ranting are no substitute for making a realistic assessment both of threats and capabilities. Meeting participants agreed that pro-peace activists must seize back the patriotic mantle. Patriotism should no longer be the last refuge of the scoundrel, used to shield from scrutiny policies drafted by those personally unwilling to serve which have wreaked death and destruction abroad and increased debt and insecurity at home. And any antiwar movement should welcome those who have worn the nation's uniforms, whose courage has been misused by self-serving politicians.
This is not the first time that people from across the political spectrum have joined in an attempt to stop imperialist adventures. Various groups opposed the Spanish-American War and especially the brutal occupation of the Philippines. Woodrow Wilson's bloody crusade for democracy was resisted by conservatives and progressives; socialist Eugene Debs went to prison for criticizing that conflict. Left and Right even opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt's surreptitious push for war, though the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and German declaration of war ultimately made involvement inevitable.
Indeed, mainstream American concern about international adventurism goes back to George Washington's famed farewell address warning against "foreign entanglements" and consequent "overgrown military establishments." Secretary of State John Quincy Adams warned against going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy." Future Civil War generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee expressed disquiet at America's rapacious war with Mexico even while serving their nation in that very conflict. "The commercial interests" angered war-hawk Teddy Roosevelt for opposing his campaign for war against Spain. Middle America resisted demands that the U.S. join both great European wars of the 20th century. President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning about the military-industrial complex.
Unfortunately, politicians have proved extraordinarily adept at rousing, at least temporarily, public support for foreign military adventures. Resisting the ivory tower warmongers will be no easier today. But those who believe in peace have no choice but to try, and try again.
Peace should be America's natural condition. Unfortunately, it will not be so as long as today's unnatural alliance of liberal and neoconservative hawks runs U.S. foreign policy. And only the American people can take back control. The future of the American people and republic is at stake."
Doug Bandow
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=689
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Hitler's National Security Court
By Jacob Hornberger
Published 03/20/10
"Let's make no bones about it. Adolf Hitler, who served as chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, could easily be the inspiration for those here in the United States now calling for the creation of a special national security court for trying terrorists. After all, it was Hitler who first established a national security court, and he did it for the same reason that U.S. proponents are now calling for such a court: the concern that regular courts would fail to convict people that government officials knew were terrorists.
Hitler's national security court, which he established in 1934, was called the People's Court. It consisted of a tribunal of judges, both civilian and military. There was no trial by jury consisting of regular citizens. The most famous of the lead judges of the People's Court was a man named Roland Freisler, who presided over the now-famous trials of Hans and Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose.
Hitler established the People's Court after the terrorist bombing of the German parliament building, the Reichstag. After a trial in a regularly constituted German court, many of the people charged with that terrorist act were acquitted, which, needless to say, outraged Hitler as much as it would have outraged current U.S. proponents of a national security court. After all, Hitler argued, those people who were acquitted were terrorists -- otherwise they wouldn't have been charged and prosecuted -- and, therefore, they deserved to be convicted and punished, not acquitted and released.
To ensure that terrorists and other criminals were never again acquitted, Hitler established the People's Court. Like the national security court that some Americans are now advocating for the United States, the purpose of the court was to create the appearance of justice while ensuring that terrorists and other criminals were convicted and punished.
Proceedings before the People's Court would easily serve as a model for U.S. advocates of a national security. The trial of Hans and Sophie Scholl was over in less than an hour. Criminal defense lawyers were expected to remain silent during the proceedings, and did so. Defendants were presumed guilty and treated as such. Hearsay was permitted, as was evidence acquired by torture. There was no due process of law. Confessions could be coerced out of defendants. The judges on the tribunal would berate, humiliate, convict, and then swiftly issue sentences, including the death penalty.
For a good example of how a national security court would operate here in the United States, see Part 13 and Part 14 of the great movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days .
Yes, I know what the American proponents of a national security court would say in response: Just because Hitler was the first to establish such a court doesn't necessarily mean that it is a bad thing. They would point out that Hitler's People's Court had an extremely high conviction rate, and they would claim that it kept the German people safe. Why, perhaps they might even recommend that a bust of Hitler be placed in America's national security court, much as the U.S. Social Security Administration has posted a bust of Otto von Bismarck, who was known as the Iron Chancellor of Germany, on its Social Security website.
Proponents of a U.S. national security court would also undoubtedly point out that Hitler's National Socialist regime also embraced such much-vaunted American socialist programs as public (i.e., government) schooling, social security, national health care, government-business partnerships, and a military-industrial complex. And they would remind us that Hitler's socialist autobahn system served as the inspiration for America's giant boondoggle of a public-works project known as the Interstate Highway System.
But shouldn't the fact that it was Adolf Hitler who first came up with the idea of a national security court to make sure that terrorists and other criminals were duly convicted and punished at least be enough to raise eyebrows among the American people?"
Jacob Hornberger
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=694
The Forgotten War
By Laurence M. Vance
Published 03/22/10
"The civil war in Korea from 1950 to 1953 that the United States foolishly intervened in, and, for the first time for a major conflict, without a congressional declaration of war, is known as the Forgotten War. The number of American soldiers killed in this senseless war is over 36,000. Yet, Korea remains divided at the 38th parallel to this day just like it was before the war began. Talk about dying in vain. None of these soldiers died in defense of the United States; all of them died for the United Nations, for the foolish policies of Harry Truman, and for the failed diplomacy of World War II.
Most Americans have no idea that there are still over 24,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea (some no doubt the grandchildren of the soldiers who fought in the Korean War). Fewer still probably know anything about the war that put them there in the first place.
There is another war that, incredibly, is fast becoming a forgotten war: the war in Iraq. I lamented last year at this time that we didn't hear much about the war in Iraq anymore. Even though candidate Barack Obama pledged in 2007 that the first thing he would do if elected was bring the troops home and end the war, the war wasn't an issue in the 2008 election. And before the electoral vote was even counted, Democratic opposition to the war had evaporated.
Now, on the seventh anniversary of the unconstitutional, immoral, aggressive, unjust, unnecessary, manufactured, manipulated, and senseless war that is the war in Iraq, the escalation of the war in Afghanistan has eclipsed any mention of the ongoing war in Iraq. And this in spite of the fact that there are still 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.
When I wrote about the Iraq war on its third anniversary, 2,317 American soldiers had died for a lie. On the fourth anniversary, that number had risen to 3,218. On the fifth, it was up to 3,992. Last year, on the sixth anniversary of the war, the number of dead American soldiers rose to 4,259. Currently, the death toll is at 4,385, with 157 of those deaths since Obama became the new commander in chief.
But, it is said, look how the number of deaths per year has fallen. Agreed. But that is no consolation to the father, mother, wife, or child of the soldiers who died in vain and for a lie yesterday, last week, or last month.
Although combat deaths are decreasing in Iraq (but certainly not in Afghanistan), increasing among returning soldiers are suicides, PTSD, broken families, substance abuse, unemployment, horrible memories, lingering injuries, shattered dreams, acts of violence, and criminal activity. And of course, the war is still costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars a week.
But even if only one American soldier had died since last month, even if only one American soldier had died since the last anniversary of the war, even if only one American soldier had died since Obama took office, and even if only one American had died since the beginning of the war, that would still be one too many.
Only the grossly naïve still think that those fighting and dying in Iraq are doing so for our freedoms or to keep us safe from terrorism. The truth is rather that since the war on terrorism began our freedoms have steadily deteriorated and we have created more terrorists
Before the United States invaded Iraq, not one American had been killed by an Iraqi since the previous time we invaded that country. But no U.S. soldier had to die in either war against Iraq. Bringing "democracy" to Iraq, ridding the country of Saddam Hussein, and destroying Iraq's weapons of war were not worth the life of one American. They were not worth the shedding of one drop of American blood.
But that's not all. No Iraqi soldiers had to die, no Iraqi civilians had to die, and no Iraqi children had to die between the wars because of brutal U.S. sanctions.
Yet, Americans who have lamented the senseless deaths of American soldiers, not to mention the deaths of countless numbers of Iraqis, and denounced this war from the beginning are the ones who have been labeled unpatriotic, un-American, communists, and traitors. This callous disregard for human life — American and Iraqi — is appalling, and especially among those who call themselves pro-lifers.
If you love what is left of our republic and want America to be loved instead of hated, blessed instead of cursed, admired instead of despised, and emulated instead of attacked, then you should want the United States to get out of Iraq and the Middle East — and stay out. Oh, it might take years, even decades, to restore America to favor in the eyes of world, but we must start sometime if it ever has a chance of coming to pass.
Do I think U.S. troops will ever leave Iraq? I can answer that with a question: Does the United States still have troops in South Korea?"
Laurence M. Vance
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=709
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i thought this was quite interesting and sad and post it here even though its not specific about foreign policy but related in some way
Israeli Army makes shirts promoting the killing of Pregnant Palestinian Women in Gaza
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBeLZll9L9U
3:45 ...wtf...
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No Special Relationships
By Philip Giraldi
Published 04/02/10
"In his farewell address George Washington recommended that the United States chart a course that would be unique among the nations of the world. He and the other Founding Fathers had just triumphed in a revolution that challenged in part the right of Kings to wage wars based on their own personal interests or due to rivalries with other nations. Washington understood that the complex alliances that both stitched together and divided the great powers of Europe had resulted in a nearly continuous series of wars starting in the sixteenth century, bringing death to millions and economic ruin. Washington advised the American people to avoid the quarrels of foreigners in his Farewell Address of 1796, "Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government ... Excessive partiality for one foreign nation, and excessive dislike of another, cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests." Washington also counseled the American people to "Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."
And Washington was not alone. James Madison coined the phrase "entangling alliances" and Thomas Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, used the expression to tell congress and the people about the broad outlines of his foreign policy: "Peace, Commerce, and honest Friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." And the desire to avoid war based on someone else’s quarrel obtained broader currency worldwide after the success of the American Revolution. The nineteenth century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston put it in perhaps shrewder, more pragmatic terms regarding his own country, "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
Twenty-first century America has chosen to ignore both its founding principles and its national interest. It has also forgotten relatively recent history. Looking back from the window of 2010, it is hard to imagine that some Americans still living can recall a time in the 1930s when the American people demonstrated in their tens of thousands against any involvement in foreign wars. Prior to US entry into the Second World War, most Americans did not support involvement in the conflicts rocking Europe and Asia, forcing pro-war President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to engage in subterfuge to bring about the American entry. Entangling alliances have become the mode ever since that time. The United States helped found the United Nations, bound the nations of Western Europe to it with the creation of NATO, and entered into a series of bilateral arrangements and pacts in a number of parts of the world. Some would argue reasonably that NATO and the UN helped stabilize a shattered post war world and American involvement could not be avoided, but the chaos of 1945 is long since gone. Many of the international arrangements have long since outlived their usefulness while others never benefited the US national interest in any way.
NATO was founded to counter an expansionistic Russia in the postwar period. Even though the illusion of Soviet power exceeded its reality, most would agree that the threat posed by a nuclear armed and assertive Russia was real. But that threat disappeared in 1991 and now NATO has no obvious role. NATO’s presence fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan reveals the irrelevancy of the alliance. And then there is the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe which, if anything, has created instability. The war between Georgia and Russia is a recent memory that underlines the danger in including new members of the alliance that bring with them local quarrels. If Georgia had been a member of NATO, it is not inconceivable that a small war would have developed into something much larger as NATO rushed to defend an alliance member. The US could have gone to war with Russia over Georgia, precisely the type of situation that George Washington advised against. Many in NATO, including the United States government, continue to insist that countries like Georgia should become part of the alliance. To do so would mean that the US would be obligated to defend their territorial integrity, a recipe for disaster. The solution? Disband NATO.
And then there are the special relationship countries. Two stand out at the present time, Great Britain and Israel. Britain and the US are together in NATO, but the special relationship goes back to the Second World War, a coming together that was artfully crafted by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. It has persisted ever since, with the British generally supporting US policies, no matter how absurd, and Washington reciprocating by quietly advancing British interests. The most recent manifestations of the special relationship were on display in the invasion of Iraq, in which Britain supported a US led attack which it knew perfectly well was not grounded in reality. The US is currently reciprocating by accepting British claims of an economic exploitation zone around the Falkland Islands, in an area that is also claimed by Argentina. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for talks to resolve the issue, knowing that the British have already rejected that option. That the US should even find itself in the middle of a quarrel in which it has no stake is an unfortunate product of the special relationship. The real issue for both Britain and Argentina is economic as London believes there are 60 billion barrels of oil reserves offshore of the Falklands.
And then there is Israel. American politicians and media pundits constantly refer to Israel as an ally but, in fact, there is no alliance. Washington has several times proposed some kind of security arrangement, but Israel has rejected the proposals because it would require reciprocity and also Israel would have to have defined borders. That would mean Israel’s expansion into the West Bank would have to stop and the reciprocity requirement would also put a brake on Israel’s ability to make war on its neighbors without prior consultation and agreement. General David Petraeus has recently gone public with something that many have understood for a long time: Israel’s policies enflame Muslim opinion in the Middle East and Asia to such an extent that they are endangering American troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Admiral Mike Mullen has privately gone one step farther with the Israelis, telling them that Washington does not want war with Iran. Mullen knows that the relationship with Israel is potentially toxic in that Israeli actions, uncontrolled by the US, can lead to much bigger confrontations with more formidable adversaries. Most in Washington now accept that Israel was a key player in the run up to the war against Iraq, a role that it and its major ally in Washington AIPAC are again playing to bring about a war with Iran. Reports that Israel might be considering using its own nuclear weapons against Iran to destroy that country’s nuclear development program are disquieting to say the least. The United States forces spread out through the region would quickly find themselves in the middle of a nuclear holocaust.
So much for alliances and special relationships. As is so often the case, the Founding Fathers were right. Foreign entanglements bring little in the way of benefit and ultimately can only do harm yet they are hardly ever challenged either by congress or the media. And they come at great expense. James Madison’s "entangling alliances" have largely been responsible for the current round of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which have cost nearly $1 trillion total and are continuing to run an unfunded tab at $11 billion per month. To sustain its NATO commitment the US maintains scores of otherwise unnecessary bases in Europe. In Asia, there is a major troop presence to defend South Korea and Japan, both of which have advanced economies and significant armed forces of their own. Israel gets more than $3 billion in aid a year and Egypt nearly $2 billion more on top of that just for being nice to Tel Aviv. Amidst all the spending and engagement, it is difficult to see what the American national interest might be. Perhaps someone in Washington should read up on George Washington and the other Founders and get back to basics."
Philip Giraldi
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=738
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When Was the Last Time You Visited Iraq?
By Tom Engelhardt
Published 03/26/10
Exporting American Democracy to the World
"Recently, I wrote about a crew of pundits and warrior-journalists eager not to see the U.S. military leave Iraq. That piece appeared on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times (and in alonger version at TomDispatch.com) and then began wandering the media world. One of its stops was the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
From a military man came this emailed response: "Read your article in Stars and Stripes. When was the last time you visited Iraq?"
A critique in 15 well-chosen words. So much more effective than a long, angry email, and his point was interesting. At least, it interested me. After all, as I wrote back, I'm a 65-year-old guy who has never been anywhere near Iraq and undoubtedly never will be. I have to assume that my emailer had spent time there, possibly more than once, and disagreed with my assessments.
First-hand experience is not to be taken lightly. What, after all, do I know about Iraq? Only reporting I've been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on the blogs of experts like Juan Cole. On the other hand, even from thousands of miles away, I was one of many who could see enough, by early 2003, to go into the streets and demonstrate against an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people, theoretically far more knowledgeable on Iraq than any of us, considered just the cat's meow, the "cakewalk" of the new century.
It's true that I've never strolled down a street in Baghdad or Ramadi or Basra, armed or not, and that's a deficit, if you want to write about the American experience in Iraq. It's also true that I haven't spent hours sipping tea with Iraqi tribal leaders, or been inside the Green Zone, or set foot on even one of the vast American bases that the Pentagon's private contractors have built in that country. (Nor did that stop me from writing regularly about "America's ziggurats" when most of the people who visited those bases didn't consider places with 15-20 mile perimeters, multiple bus lines, PXs, familiar fast-food franchises, Ugandan mercenary guards, and who knows what else, to be particularly noteworthy structures on the Iraqi landscape and so, with rare exceptions, worth commenting on.)
I'm certainly no expert on Shiites and Sunnis. I'm probably a little foggy on my Iraqi geography. And I've never even seen the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. On the other hand, it does occur to me that a whole raft of American pundits, government officials, and military types, who have done all of the above, who have spent time up close and personal in Iraq (or, at least, in the American version of the same), couldn't have arrived at dumber conclusions over these last many years.
So, first-hand experience, valuable as it may be for great reporters like, say, Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post and now the New York Times, or Patrick Cockburn of the BritishIndependent, can't be the be-all and end-all either. Sometimes being far away, not just from Iraq, but from Washington and all the cloistered thinking that goes with it, from the visibly claustrophobic world of American global policymaking, has its advantages. Sometimes, being out of it, experientially speaking, allows you to open your eyes and take in the larger shape of things, which is often only the obvious (even if little noted).
I can't help thinking about a friend of mine whose up-close and personal comment on U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan was that they were trapped in an American-made box, incapable of seeing beyond its boundaries -- of, that is, seeing Afghanistan. Let me be clear: I have no doubt that being there is generally something to be desired. But if you take your personal blinders with you, it often hardly matters where you are. Thinking about my Stars and Stripes reader's question, the conclusion I've provisionally come to is this: It's not just where you go, it's also how you see what's there, and no less important who you see, that matters -- which means that sometimes you can actually see more by going nowhere at all.
An Iraqi Tragedy
When American officials, civilian or military, open their eyes and check out the local landscape, no matter where they've landed, all evidence indicates that the first thing they tend to see is themselves; that is, they see the world as an American stage and those native actors in countries we've invaded and occupied or where (as in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen) we conduct what might be called semi-war as so many bit players in an American drama. This is why, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, military commanders and top officials like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or National Security Advisor James Jones continue to call so unselfconsciously for putting an Iraqi or Afghan "face" on whichever war is being discussed; in other words, to follow the image to its logical conclusion, putting an Iraqi or Afghan mask over a "face" that they recognize, however inconveniently or embarrassingly, as American.
This is why American officials regularly say that "Afghans are in the lead," when they aren't. This is why, when you read newspaper descriptions of how the U.S. is giving Afghan President Hamid Karzai the "leading role" in deciding about the latest military offensive or pushing such-and-such an official (with his U.S. or western "mentors" in the wings) to take the lead in some action that seems to have been largely planned by Americans, the Afghans sound like so many puppets (which doesn't mean that they are) -- and this doesn't embarrass Americans in the least.
Generally speaking, the American post-9/11 language of power ostensibly aimed at building up the forces Washington supports in Muslim lands invariably sounds condescending.
They are always peripheral to us, even when they are being urged or prodded to be at the center of the action. This is why their civilians who come in harm's way are referred to as "collateral damage," an inconceivable way to describe American civilians in harm's way. This is why, from Vietnam to today, in the movies that are made about our wars, even the anti-war ones, Americans invariably hog center stage, while you usually have to keep a careful watch to find passing evidence of those we are fighting against -- or for. This was why, 40 years ago, Vietnam was regularly referred to here, whether by hawks or doves, as an "American tragedy," not a Vietnamese one -- and why the same thinking applies to Afghanistan and Iraq today.
This is why, using imagery that might have come out of the mouths of nineteenth century colonialists, American officials long talked patronizingly about teaching the Iraqi "child" to pedal the "bike" of democracy (with us, as global parents, holding onto the bike's seat). This is the context within which even a president wondered when to take off "the training wheels."
This is evidently why, today, the introduction of "democracy" to Iraq is considered an American gift so precious that it somehow makes up for anything that's happened in the last seven years. This is why, for instance, in a piece about the recent Iraqi elections headlined "It's Up to Iraqis Now. Good Luck!" pundit Tom Friedman could write this sentence about the "U.S. project in Iraq": "Former President George W. Bush's gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right."
This is why, in honor of those same Iraqi elections, Newsweek could feature a "Victory at Last" cover showing George W. Bush striding from the scene on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where he gave his infamous "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" speech under a White-House-produced banner reading "Mission Accomplished." And then, under the eerie headline, "Rebirth of a Nation," with its American movie resonances, that magazine's correspondents could write: "And yet it has to be said and it should be understood -- now, almost seven hellish years later -- that something that looks mighty like democracy is emerging in Iraq. And while it may not be a beacon of inspiration to the region, it most certainly is a watershed event that could come to represent a whole new era in the history of the massively undemocratic Middle East."
Like Afghanistan before it, Iraq is now largely the "forgotten" war, and if this is "victory," then here's a little of what's been forgotten in the process, of what Friedman suggests he'd prefer to leave future historians to sort out: that the American invasion led to possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths; that literally millions of Iraqis had to flee into exile abroad and millions more were turned into internal refugees in their own country; that the national capital, Baghdad, was significantly ethnically cleansed in a brutal Shiite-Sunni civil conflict; that the country was littered with new "killing fields"; that a devastating insurgency roiled the land and still brings enough death and terror to Baghdad to make it one of the more dangerous places on the planet; that a soaring unemployment rate and the lack of delivery of the most basic services, including reliable electricity and potable water, created nightmarish conditions for a vast class of impoverished Iraqis; that the U.S., for all its nation-building boasts, proved remarkably incapable of "reconstructing" the country or its oil industry, even though American private contractors profited enormously from work on both; that a full-scale foreign military occupation left Americans on almost 300 bases nationwide and in the largest embassy on the planet; that American advisors remain attached to, and deeply embedded in, an Iraqi military that still lacks a credible air force and is unlikely to be able to operate and resupply itself on its own for years to come.
The Pride of Us
In other words, as bad as Saddam Hussein was (and he was a megalomanic monster), what followed him was a staggering catastrophe for Iraq, even if Americans no longer care to give it much thought. Against the charnel house that Friedman would prefer to leave to history, however, stands one counterbalancing factor, the gift of "democracy" (even if, as was true in the Afghan election of 2009, the present election in Iraq is now dogged by claims of fraud from all sides). Democracy remains, it seems, the pride of us.
Even many who never supported George W. Bush's "democracy agenda" now seem to take some pride in this. (Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that the Bush administration arrived in Iraq with remarkably undemocratic plans for the country and was thwarted only by the unwavering insistence of the revered Shiite cleric Ali Sistani on a one-person, one-vote election.)
Here's a prosaic passage on the recent elections from a Wall Street Journal report, which managed to sum up a hopeful, if hesitant, American consensus. Journalist Margaret Coker wrote:
"The election to choose a new 325-seat parliament is considered a key step in Iraq's transition to stability and a harbinger of whether U.S. troops will be able to begin their planned withdrawal this summer. Both the vote itself and the protracted wait for results have been relatively free of violence, adding to hopes that Iraq's democracy is maturing."
There, of course, is that "kid" again, maturing, even if still under our tutelage. The question remains, however: Is he stable enough to stay on that bike so American troops can let go of the seat and withdraw fully? And if that still-immature democratic Iraq fails to grow up? Rest assured, it will be the fault of the Iraqis. They just didn't mature fast enough -- an unfortunate American tragedy, which would leave us no choice but to garrison the country into the indefinite future.
Of course, in all of this, there are staggering levels of hypocrisy -- in the fact that we were for Saddam before we were against him. In the fact, as well, that from Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) to Chile (September 11, 1973) and Pakistan (2008), the U.S. has, in instance after instance, regularly fostered and supported military juntas, strong men, and dictators, while holding off or overthrowing democracies not to our taste or not in what Washington defined as our interests.
Perhaps stranger yet, the democracy that we actually have in the United States -- and so assumedly can offer as our ultimate apology for invading and occupying other countries -- is rarely subjected to analysis in the context of the glorious urge to export the same. So let's just stop for a moment and think a little about the American urge to be thrilled that, despite every disaster, against all odds, our grand accomplishment lies in bringing American democracy to Iraq.
The Rectification of Names
Democracy, like terrorism, is a method, a means to an end, not an end in itself. Nobody is ruled by elections, anymore than any organization is run by terror or has terror as its ultimate goal. If this obvious point had been accepted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the absurdity of the idea of a "global war on terror" or "on terrorism" would have been self-evident, as would a global war to deliver "democracy" to far-away peoples.
Democracy, after all, is a way to determine and then express the majoritarian will of a people, a way to deliver power to "the people" or, more important, for those people to take possession of it themselves. It's the sort of thing that, by its nature, is hard to import from great distances, especially when, in our case, the delivery system to be exported seems strikingly deficient. And keep in mind that the "people" exporting that system to Iraq were largely incapable of seeing Iraqis as actors in their own democratic drama. They were incapable, that is, of imagining the nature of the lives they wanted to shape and change.
In a sense, that was hardly less true when they looked homeward. After all, the glorious democracy they trumpeted to the world bore little relation to the Pax Republicana headed by an imperial presidency (complete with a cult of executive power) that they dreamed of installing in Washington for generations to come.
Given the nature of American democracy today -- the first billion-dollar presidential election, the staggering levels of lobbying and influence peddling that go with it, the stunning barrages of bizarre advertising, the difficulty of displacing incumbents in Congress, the increasingly corporate-owned and financed campaigns, a half-broken Congressional system, a national security state with unparalleled powers and money, and so on -- why all the effort to take it to Iraq? Why measure Iraqis against it and find them lacking? After all, in 2000, our presidential election went to the non-majoritarian candidate, thanks to decisions made by Supreme Court justices appointed by his father. If this had happened in Nigeria, Afghanistan, or perhaps Iraq, we would know just what we were dealing with.
The fact is we have no word adequate to describe what, at the national level, we still persist in calling "democracy," what we regularly ask others to admire to the skies or bow down before. The other day, at TPM Café, Todd Gitlin termed our system a "semi-democracy." That, at least, represents an honest start.
In imperial China, when a new dynasty arrived on the scene, the emperor performed a ritual called the "rectification of names" in the belief that the previous dynasty had fallen in part because reality and the names for it had ceased to correspond. We in the United States undoubtedly now need such a ceremony. We certainly need a new term for our own "democracy" before we're so quick to hold it up as the paragon for others to match.
We also need to rethink our language when it comes to the U.S. military undertaking "nation building" in distant lands -- as if countries could be constructed to our taste in just the way that KBR or Dyncorp construct military bases in them. We need to stop our commanders from bragging about our skill in creating a "government in a box" on demand for our Afghan friends, when our government at home is largely boxed in and strikingly dysfunctional.
So, no, I have never been to Iraq, but yes, I've been here for years, watching, and I can see, among other things, that the American mirror, mirror on the wall which shows us ourselves in such beautiful, Disneyesque detail, has a few cracks in it. It looks fragile. I'd think twice about sending it abroad too often."
Tom Engelhardt
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=722
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You have a lot to say don't you Mr. TrueLight.
Or rather, you have a lot to copy/paste.
Word to the wise: Don't believe everything you read.
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yeah i liked these articles thats why i put them up
most of the articles i post are libertarian anti war articles
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Hmmm... No offence but I detest that kind of thing (libertarian/anti-war)
and I disagree with 90% of what I skim-read in your articles.
I'd love to debate it sometime but I gotta go now
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well some people have ideas about war being good and being interventionist is awesome and then you have others thinking war is pointless to the everyday citizen and interventionism leads to more problems
but debates in this area would probably lead to nowhere like with Trent in page 2
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argh im left sickened after watching this
Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com
Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
and heres Wikileads editor Julian Assange talking about this video on RT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QEdAykXxoM&feature=channel
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Who is Winpac?
By Karen Kwiatkowski
Published 04/06/10
"In-the-know neoconster Bill Gertz wrote recently that "Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons." For perspective, and illustrating a classic American policy contretemps is paragraph six on North Korea’s existent "capability to produce nuclear weapons with a yield of roughly a couple of kilotons TNT equivalent." This latter statement was based upon North Korea’s actual nuclear test in May 2009. But what is the former statement based upon? Recurring neocon snuff dreams that feature Iran as star victim.
Gertz is reporting from a report written by Winpac, the CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center. Remember Iraq’s import of some aluminum tubes and what Colin Powell said to the UN and the world in February 2003 about them? Winpac is the dumb and dumber subset of the CIA that insisted (in spite of widespread US intelligence agency internal dissent, and the facts) "Iraq intended the tubes to be used in centrifuges that would enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear weapon."
Winpac "never budged from their [insanely stupid] analysis," stubborn and wrong to the bitter end. Except, it wasn’t the end, and I suspect, not bitter at all.
The Gertz report follows escalating murmurings and rumbling on Iran, no doubt geared in part as a cyclical appeasement of Israel’s ruling coalition that Washington, D.C. truly loves it above all others, foreign and domestic, and in part to appease those Congresspersons who may be worried that future Obamacare and its budget busters won’t interfere with the ongoing Obombacare of the military-industrial complex, and its demand for bunker-busters.
Who can doubt that government will take care of itself first and foremost? Any and all perceived threats, as we have seen with recent outrageous confections created by government paranoiacs, will result in swift government action, and hefty charges of illegalities on the "evildoers." Too bad the majority of Americans (in and out of trailer parks) who vehemently opposed and oppose industry and banking bailouts, the black-box decision-making of Federal Reserve, and national healthcare mandates can’t get that kind of swift government response regarding their concerns.
But who is Winpac? Their website says it "studies the entire spectrum of threats, ...and [provides] intelligence support to US nonproliferation, threat reduction, and arms control efforts. This provides end-to-end analysis of weapons systems from their development until they are no longer a threat to the US and our Allies. Perhaps Winpac is staffed with all those runner-ups in beauty contests who wanted world peace! Never mind. Beauty queens would probably do a better job of actually looking at the intelligence, and getting maps out to people.
Winpac served admirably during the Bush 43 years as neocon shock troops and leakers of data bits to Middle East war friendly media, stoking an unwarranted and unjust war against Iraq, a war that continues to this day as Iraqis refuse to completely relinquish autonomy and submit to us peacefully. The type and content of information being reported for the past 15 months in state media (and what is not reported) on Iran’s capabilities, ambitions, and rights tells me these same shock troops are still on the job. Have neocon provocateurs retained their appointments or made permanent their positions within the CIA, and in particular Winpac?
Well -- I don’t know, but I expect they did. I would be extremely shocked, shocked, to find that they didn’t. What I do know is that the career path of another "civil servant" who has been in the news recently, Mike Furlong, is all too typical. There is a segment of the population that seeks to lord it over others, and play great games with other people’s money without fiscal or moral or even political accountability, all while waving flags and getting that warm rush of self-righteous superiority spiked with false altruism. This is the very essence of government employment, and Mike Furlong has snorted the stuff for many decades.
Mike was an Army officer, then a contractor working for several parasitical defense budget feeders, then a high-ranking civil servant (Special Executive Service) just in time to ride out the Bush era and continue his efforts under Generalissimo Obama. Lil’ Mike got in trouble recently because a supposed information operation he was running in Afghanistan may have actually been killing people in addition to changing their minds.
Imagine that -- an information op that ends up getting people killed. Sounds like just about every war and a not a few pre-war, post-war and inter-war activities of the U.S. government since gaining independence from the King George III. Hmmm.
As I wander fruitlessly over the net to find out who Winpac really is and why they are saying the things they do, I see that overnight, the U.S. Navy has fired a Trident missile somewhere out of Saudi Arabia. The Trident can carry nukes (well, what can’t these days) but the assessment of what this is about seems split between demonstrating a military capability we’d like to sell the Saudis before their oil runs out, or a marker for the Iranians that now "We really really, really, really have you surrounded!" with permanent, if poorly managed, military bases and ships. It’s Washington sign language to a fellow centralized, broke, and paranoid government that we are prepared to "defend ourselves and our centralized, broke and paranoid allies."
Perhaps, little Winpac, "our" entire foreign policy, and increasingly "our" domestic policy isn’t ours at all. The government and government beneficiaries are lining up in anxious opposition against the much larger, much more creative and decentralized populations that existentially threaten its comfortable, profligate and power-wielding existence. This is the real reason that ragtag and brokedown militias, tea partiers, entrepreneurs, raw milk drinkers and libertarian thinkers of every stripe are obsessively feared by the state, and state media.
It’s been said that the Americans can be sheeplike. I have a few sheep, and they are not as easy to lead and herd as their reputation implies. Furthermore, they are interested in everything and never forget a face. I suspect the government already knows what I have only recently discovered, and I must say, it puts a smile on my face and a spring in my step!"
Karen Kwiatkowski
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=752
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What does Israel gain by exaggerating or falsifying their intelligence on the Iran nuclear issue? It in no way benefits Israel to have direct confrontation with Iran. For them to even be considering military action (as evidenced by their recent training drills and purchase of bunker-busters), they must have some pretty solid intelligence that Iran really are in the process of building nukes.
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im building a nuke, should be done in a few months ;)
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im building a nuke, should be done in a few months ;)
Got a target in mind yet? Or is it just for deterrence
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im building a nuke, should be done in a few months ;)
Got a target in mind yet? Or is it just for deterrence
lol just for deterrence atm.
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if iran is attacked i suspect that america will bomb first
but israel has special relations with america and america has vested interests in the middle east, natural resources is one of them
and even if iran is seeking the capability to build nuclear weapons that is in no way a justification to go to war
and besides israel has over 200 nuclear weapons itself
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no biasty towards either side but i just done see why a country shouldnt be allowed to build a nuke when every other country in the world has em :/
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And how many times has Israel threatened to wipe another country off the map?
Everyone knows that Israel's nukes are just a deterrence.
Whereas with Iran, with a maniacal, genocidal dictator backed by Islamic fundamentalists, with the stated intention of turning Israel to dust, there is much reason to fear that they would actually use them. Israel absolutely has the right for a surgical strike to disarm Iran before it can be attacked.
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no biasty towards either side but i just done see why a country shouldnt be allowed to build a nuke when every other country in the world has em :/
Because it's ruled by a genocidal, clinically insane, religious fundamentalist maniac.
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And how many times has Israel threatened to wipe another country off the map?
Everyone knows that Israel's nukes are just a deterrence.
Whereas with Iran, with a maniacal, genocidal dictator backed by Islamic fundamentalists, with the stated intention of turning Israel to dust, there is much reason to fear that they would actually use them. Israel absolutely has the right for a surgical strike to disarm Iran before it can be attacked.
kind of disagree there, but ill leave it at that .
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i disagree im sure i posted it somewhere on here
http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/rumor-of-the-century/
there will be many unintended consequences if they start bombing iran... one of them being a rally around their government instead of the agitation that is currently in their country.
http://lewrockwell.com/orig8/beito2.html
http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/iran-the-nuclear-assumption/
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OK, so perhaps it wasn't in those exact words. In any case, he's made it extremely care he's interested in the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state completely. i could find you quotes for that but I'm sure it's not necessary.
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so you actually think Iran would bomb Israel?
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a few interviews i like
Bomb, bomb Iran? US in 'same build-up to war as to Iraq invasion'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBQeyqoUDkM&feature=PlayList&p=93188243F6D0495F&playnext_from=PL
Chossudovsky: US will start WW3 by attacking Iran (agree alot with this guy)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4p1kD8CZX8&feature=PlayList&p=93188243F6D0495F&playnext_from=PL
Is the US going to attack Iran?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hbde7A3htQ&feature=related (oh yeah i forgot... who benefits? one being the military industrial complex, the companies who profit from war)
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I doubt iran would bomb irsael... its just a stupid move.
As far as im aware with my passing knowledge israel is in some kind alliance or at least psuedo-alliance with America, if they were to bomb israel.. they'd be well... screwed. Its sort of like mutal assured destruction doctrine.. in the way that if they do much they'll be in trouble..America has a huge technically advanced army. (Or just wave after wave of soldiers...)
I'm not sure people will let America preemptively attack Iran after what they saw in the current wars, so id have to have a pretty big cause.
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yeah hopefully Iran doesn't end up like Iraq (fear mongering about WOMD)- a colossal failure
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Ron Paul on Freedom Watch talking about Obama's foreign policy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co8fgKzgSiE
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Ron Paul on Freedom Watch talking about Obama's foreign policy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co8fgKzgSiE
I haven't watched that video but I don't need to.
Obama's foreign policy is a joke, a catastrophe, a disaster waiting to happen, a betrayal, I could go on but you probably see my point.
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lol yep
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The WikiLeaks Video and Terrorist Blowback
By Jacob Hornberger
Published 04/08/10
"I can't improve on Glenn Greenwald's analysis of the WikiLeaks video depicting the slaughter of Iraqi citizens. See here and here and here.
However, there is one part of the WikiLeaks video that I wish to address -- the reaction of the helicopter pilots upon learning that there were two children who were shot and injured during the melee. Their reaction, in fact, perfectly exemplifies the mindset that has long characterized U.S. officials, including those in the Pentagon.
When the pilots discovered that they had shot the two Iraqi kids, here was their exchange:
"Well it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle."
"That's right."
No remorse, no anguish, no regret, no concern. Just callous indifference to the possibility that the lives of two innocent children might have just been snuffed out.
What will be the reaction of the relatives of those two Iraqi children, who lost their father in the attack? Surely, even the most ardent pro-war advocates would not deny the obvious: the relatives will be filled with anger and rage.
Welcome to the world of U.S. foreign policy and terrorist blowback.
In fact, this most recent episode in Iraq is a minor déjà vu of what took place during the Persian Gulf War and the 11-year period following it. During that war, the Pentagon conducted a secret study that concluded that if Iraq's water and sewage facilities were destroyed, this would help spread infectious illnesses among the Iraqi people.
So, the order was given: Drop the bombs on those facilities.
Then, to ensure that the facilities couldn't be repaired, the U.S. government induced the UN to impose one of the most brutal systems of sanctions in history on Iraq.
The Pentagon proved to be right, with the deadly consequences of drinking the polluted water falling most heavily on Iraqi children. Year after year, tens of thousands of Iraqi children were dying. Two high UN officials even resigned their posts in protest to what they termed "genocide."
What was the reaction of U.S. officials to those deaths? It was the same reaction expressed by those pilots in the WikiLeaks video: callous indifference. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright reflected the mindset of U.S. officials when she told "Sixty Minutes" (and the people of the Middle East) that the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions were "worth it."
It is impossible to measure the depth of anger and rage that spread not just in Iraq but also the Middle East over the deaths of the Iraqi children, year after year, and over the mindset of callous indifference that characterized U.S. officials. When Ramzi Yousef was sentenced for the 1993 terrorist attack on the WTC, he angrily cited the sanctions and the deaths of the Iraqi children as one of the things that drove him to commit his terrorist attack.
That WTC attack in 1993 was followed by the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and, of course, the 9/11 attacks.
We all know what U.S. officials said: Oh, it's not because of what the U.S. government has done to people in Iraq and the Middle East, including the sanctions and our indifference to the deaths of the Iraqi children, the Persian Gulf intervention, the unconditional financial and military support to the Israeli government, or the intentional stationing of U.S. troops on Islamic holy lands. People in the Middle East don't care about all that. They just hate us for our freedom and values.
Mark my words: they'll say the same thing if relatives of those two Iraqi children -- or the children themselves -- end up retaliating for what was done to the children's father and other victims of the most recent slaughter.
Finally, let us never forget: Neither the Iraqi people nor the Iraqi government participated in the 9/11 attacks or ever attacked the United States. That makes the U.S. government the unlawful aggressor, invader, attacker, and occupier in this conflict, which means that U.S. soldiers have no right, moral or legal, to be killing anyone in Iraq, including those Iraqis who are simply trying to rid their country of an illegal aggressor, invader, attacker, and occupier.
By the way, Joy Gordon, who wrote one of the most insightful articles on the Iraq sanctions, entitled " Cool War: Economic Sanctions as a Weapon of Mass Destruction" has a brand new book out on the Iraq sanctions entitled Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions. I haven't read it yet but if it's as good as her article, it's definitely a great book.
For a nice compilation of articles on the sanctions, see: www.fff.org/whatsNew/2004-02-09a.htm"
Jacob Hornberger
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=759
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If I saw a terrorist about to launch an attack, which would threaten the lives of many innocent civilians, I'd happily shoot him even if he was holding his baby daughter in his arms. As terrible as it is, the lives of many outweigh the lives of one, so if they bring children with them when they do their dirty work then the responsibility and fault for that child's potential death lies purely with them.
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this wasn't the case in that incident
and its obvious you don't want a guy with guns about to shoot or wrapped with bombs around him running towards a crowd and not do anything about that, but then u look at the other side of it and you don't want some foreign military force shooting at whoeva killing innocent people, and then those children in those cars growing up wanting to kill americans.
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Murder.gov
By Becky Akers
Published 04/12/10
"Listen to the drums beating the Dead March as the American Empire chugs into totalitarianism’s next terminus: execution of citizens without trial.
"The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen," the New York Times reports. And yes, those are cheers you hear over the drums, erupting from the same neocons who applauded torture and Gitmo. That’s because the intended victim is "the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki... who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam" but who is now "hiding in Yemen."
"Extraordinary," indeed. Once upon a time we required a trial; in fact, the Constitution still does. The State must present and prove its charges to an "impartial jury" before it takes a man’s life. True, politicians and bureaucrats often rig those trials, while cops and prosecutors tamper with evidence, but what else would we expect from government? Yet Leviathan now dispenses with that pretense, too, as it has with search warrants, habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, motive, and other such quaint necessities.
Even the Times, which leads the pack of "mainstream" (sic for "considerably to the left of Pravda") media in its animosity to liberty, is appalled enough to quote anonymous "officials" who admit that this is "extremely rare, if not unprecedented."
What has our fellow-citizen done to merit such attention? The Feds allege a great many foul deeds, though I’m hard-pressed to find one that threatens us nearly as much as the average Congressional act. Our Rulers "[believe]" Anwar is now "participating directly" in attacks on Americans rather than simply "encouraging" them. They’ve "linked" him to bad guys like the Underwear Bomber and the Ft. Hood Shooter. "Counterterrorism officials" who, curiously enough, battle those inept bad guys instead of the horrifically successful ones in Congress, claim he’s a member of al Qaeda.
"'Awlaki is a proven threat,'a US official told Reuters news agency" -- just not in court. Far be it from the Feds to convict their suspect at trial, however easy it would be given Anwar’s patronage of prostitutes and a system that punishes vice as crime. No, we’re simply supposed to trust Our Rulers. After all, paranoid nuts who add motherly doctoral students from Stanford University, famous singers, and 4-year-old boys to their silly blacklists couldn’t possibly make another mistake, could they?
For all his sleaze, Anwar eschews the secrecy our supposedly open government craves. He’s outspoken and honest about why he left his native country. "I lived in the U.S. for 21 years," he says on a tape CNN "obtained" but could not "authenticate" last month. "America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However with the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim."
Anwar isn’t the only "terrorist" to sing this song. Indeed, it’s become the usual refrain. Over and over, Moslems that the Feds dismiss as terrorists blame American foreign policy for reactions the Feds dismiss as extremism. "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security," Osama himself advised us in 2004. "... We fought you because we are free ... and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours... While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon [during the Israeli invasion American busybodies encouraged in 1982], it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women... God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind."
You might think the sense of this so self-evident that even the Feds would listen. After all, lex talionis, tit-for-tat, what-goes-around-comes-around has reigned internationally for millennia; that’s one reason George Washington recommended "extending our commercial relations" with "foreign nations" while forming "as little political connection as possible." Attack a country by outright invasion (even when euphemized as "liberation") or by meddling in its affairs, and sooner or later, its residents will defend themselves. Nevertheless, Our Rulers play checkers with the Middle East, manipulating peoples, governments, and whole countries to satisfy American politicians, special interests, or corporations.
DC’s thugs will see us all die in more 9/11’s rather than admit their culpability and cease their anti-Constitutional forays overseas. That’s because ending the War on Terror would cancel all those lucrative, cozy contracts belligerent bureaucracies from the Pentagon to the Transportation Security Administration hand out; "targeting" Anwar instead funnels billions of our taxes into corporations'coffers and from thence to politicians'campaign chests. No wonder yet another nameless "official" sniffed to the New York Times, "The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual -- through his own actions -- has become one. ... None of this should surprise anyone." Especially those who understand corporatism and the transformation of a republic into a fascist empire.
Meanwhile, there’s this from Rep[ulsive] Jane Harman (D-Israel -- whoops, I mean CA), neoconservative chair of "a House subcommittee on homeland security": Anwar is "probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us."
Don’t you hate false modesty?"
Becky Akers
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=767
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Tina Fey is a god.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__M7G3qxCcE
(Sorry not really on-topic, but kind of)
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TrueLight who gives a fuck
The man is pure evil
He shouldn't be killed by a drone, he should be cut to pieces
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ill probably be running for president lol ... yeah not really related to foreign policy
but i don't agree with her on that issue
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TrueLight who gives a fuck
The man is pure evil
He shouldn't be killed by a drone, he should be cut to pieces
which man?
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Murder.gov
By Becky Akers
Published 04/12/10
"Listen to the drums beating the Dead March as the American Empire chugs into totalitarianism’s next terminus: execution of citizens without trial.
"The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen," the New York Times reports. And yes, those are cheers you hear over the drums, erupting from the same neocons who applauded torture and Gitmo. That’s because the intended victim is "the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki... who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam" but who is now "hiding in Yemen."
"Extraordinary," indeed. Once upon a time we required a trial; in fact, the Constitution still does. The State must present and prove its charges to an "impartial jury" before it takes a man’s life. True, politicians and bureaucrats often rig those trials, while cops and prosecutors tamper with evidence, but what else would we expect from government? Yet Leviathan now dispenses with that pretense, too, as it has with search warrants, habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, motive, and other such quaint necessities.
Even the Times, which leads the pack of "mainstream" (sic for "considerably to the left of Pravda") media in its animosity to liberty, is appalled enough to quote anonymous "officials" who admit that this is "extremely rare, if not unprecedented."
What has our fellow-citizen done to merit such attention? The Feds allege a great many foul deeds, though I’m hard-pressed to find one that threatens us nearly as much as the average Congressional act. Our Rulers "[believe]" Anwar is now "participating directly" in attacks on Americans rather than simply "encouraging" them. They’ve "linked" him to bad guys like the Underwear Bomber and the Ft. Hood Shooter. "Counterterrorism officials" who, curiously enough, battle those inept bad guys instead of the horrifically successful ones in Congress, claim he’s a member of al Qaeda.
"'Awlaki is a proven threat,'a US official told Reuters news agency" -- just not in court. Far be it from the Feds to convict their suspect at trial, however easy it would be given Anwar’s patronage of prostitutes and a system that punishes vice as crime. No, we’re simply supposed to trust Our Rulers. After all, paranoid nuts who add motherly doctoral students from Stanford University, famous singers, and 4-year-old boys to their silly blacklists couldn’t possibly make another mistake, could they?
For all his sleaze, Anwar eschews the secrecy our supposedly open government craves. He’s outspoken and honest about why he left his native country. "I lived in the U.S. for 21 years," he says on a tape CNN "obtained" but could not "authenticate" last month. "America was my home. I was a preacher of Islam involved in non-violent Islamic activism. However with the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims, I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim."
Anwar isn’t the only "terrorist" to sing this song. Indeed, it’s become the usual refrain. Over and over, Moslems that the Feds dismiss as terrorists blame American foreign policy for reactions the Feds dismiss as extremism. "Any state that does not mess with our security, has naturally guaranteed its own security," Osama himself advised us in 2004. "... We fought you because we are free ... and want to regain freedom for our nation. As you undermine our security we undermine yours... While I was looking at these destroyed towers in Lebanon [during the Israeli invasion American busybodies encouraged in 1982], it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women... God knows that it had not occurred to our mind to attack the towers, but after our patience ran out and we saw the injustice and inflexibility of the American-Israeli alliance toward our people in Palestine and Lebanon, this came to my mind."
You might think the sense of this so self-evident that even the Feds would listen. After all, lex talionis, tit-for-tat, what-goes-around-comes-around has reigned internationally for millennia; that’s one reason George Washington recommended "extending our commercial relations" with "foreign nations" while forming "as little political connection as possible." Attack a country by outright invasion (even when euphemized as "liberation") or by meddling in its affairs, and sooner or later, its residents will defend themselves. Nevertheless, Our Rulers play checkers with the Middle East, manipulating peoples, governments, and whole countries to satisfy American politicians, special interests, or corporations.
DC’s thugs will see us all die in more 9/11’s rather than admit their culpability and cease their anti-Constitutional forays overseas. That’s because ending the War on Terror would cancel all those lucrative, cozy contracts belligerent bureaucracies from the Pentagon to the Transportation Security Administration hand out; "targeting" Anwar instead funnels billions of our taxes into corporations'coffers and from thence to politicians'campaign chests. No wonder yet another nameless "official" sniffed to the New York Times, "The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual -- through his own actions -- has become one. ... None of this should surprise anyone." Especially those who understand corporatism and the transformation of a republic into a fascist empire.
Meanwhile, there’s this from Rep[ulsive] Jane Harman (D-Israel -- whoops, I mean CA), neoconservative chair of "a House subcommittee on homeland security": Anwar is "probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us."
Don’t you hate false modesty?"
Becky Akers
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=767
^ That one ^
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TrueLight who gives a fuck
The man is pure evil
He shouldn't be killed by a drone, he should be cut to pieces
the point is principle and the unconstitutionality of it... now Obama has authorised the killing of its own citizens without trial or nothing, so he can basically now declare anyone he wants as a terrorist and kill him
i also like this point
'"targeting" Anwar instead funnels billions of our taxes into corporations'coffers and from thence to politicians'campaign chests. No wonder yet another nameless "official" sniffed to the New York Times, "The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual -- through his own actions -- has become one. ... None of this should surprise anyone." Especially those who understand corporatism and the transformation of a republic into a fascist empire.'
also take a read of this
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/04/07/assassinations
"If you're going to go into the comment section -- or anywhere else -- and argue that this is all justified because Awlaki is an Evil, Violent, Murdering Terrorist Trying to Kill Americans, you should say how you know that. Generally, guilt is determined by having a trial where the evidence is presented and the accused has an opportunity to defend himself -- not by putting blind authoritarian faith in the unchecked accusations of government leaders, even if it happens to be Barack Obama. That's especially true given how many times accusations of Terrorism by the U.S. Government have proven to be false."
also take a read of this if you want
http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/06/the-914-presidency
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TrueLight who gives a fuck
The man is pure evil
He shouldn't be killed by a drone, he should be cut to pieces
i also like this point
'"targeting" Anwar instead funnels billions of our taxes into corporations'coffers and from thence to politicians'campaign chests. No wonder yet another nameless "official" sniffed to the New York Times, "The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual -- through his own actions -- has become one. ... None of this should surprise anyone." Especially those who understand corporatism and the transformation of a republic into a fascist empire.'
I don't get that. How does naming an American citizen as a terrorist put billions of dollars into corporations' coffers?
In any case, hundreds of people get legally killed without trial every year. Any time someone dies in a shoot-out with cops, he's killed without trial and it's perfectly legal. This situation is hardly very different.
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i think she means that going on this whole crusade against terror ... anwar being part of it that it funnels billions of dollars into corporations, companies that profit from war and intelligence and killing etc... if you read it in its whole context i think you'll see the point she was making.
is it legal to kill without trial? what if the cops were wrong? i don't agree with that either.
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America and the Dictators
By Alfred McCoy
Published 04/16/10
"From Ngo Dinh Diem to Hamid Karzai
The crisis has come suddenly, almost without warning. At the far edge of American power in Asia, things are going from bad to much worse than anyone could have imagined. The insurgents are spreading fast across the countryside. Corruption is rampant. Local military forces, recipients of countless millions of dollars in U.S. aid, shirk combat and are despised by local villagers. American casualties are rising. Our soldiers seem to move in a fog through a hostile, unfamiliar terrain, with no idea of who is friend and who is foe.
After years of lavishing American aid on him, the leader of this country, our close ally, has isolated himself inside the presidential palace, becoming an inadequate partner for a failing war effort. His brother is reportedly a genuine prince of darkness, dealing in drugs, covert intrigues, and electoral manipulation. The U.S. Embassy demands reform, the ouster of his brother, the appointment of honest local officials, something, anything that will demonstrate even a scintilla of progress.
After all, nine years earlier U.S. envoys had taken a huge gamble: rescuing this president from exile and political obscurity, installing him in the palace, and ousting a legitimate monarch whose family had ruled the country for centuries. Now, he repays this political debt by taunting America. He insists on untrammeled sovereignty and threatens to ally with our enemies if we continue to demand reforms of him. Yet Washington is so deeply identified with the counterinsurgency campaign in his country that walking away no longer seems like an option.
This scenario is obviously a description of the Obama administration's devolving relations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai in Kabul this April. It is also an eerie summary of relations between the Kennedy administration and South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon nearly half a century earlier, in August 1963. If these parallels are troubling, they reveal the central paradox of American power over the past half-century in its dealings with embattled autocrats like Karzai and Diem across that vast, impoverished swath of the globe once known as the Third World.
Our Man in Kabul
With his volatile mix of dependence and independence, Hamid Karzai seems the archetype of all the autocrats Washington has backed in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since European empires began disintegrating after World War II. When the CIA mobilized Afghan warlords to topple the Taliban in October 2001, the country's capital, Kabul, was ours for the taking -- and the giving. In the midst of this chaos, Hamid Karzai, an obscure exile living in Pakistan, gathered a handful of followers and plunged into Afghanistan on a doomed CIA-supported mission to rally the tribes for revolt. It proved a quixotic effort that required rescue by Navy SEALs who snatched him back to safety in Pakistan.
Desperate for a reliable post-invasion ally, the Bush administration engaged in what one expert has called "bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting" to install Karzai in power. This process took place not through a democratic election in Kabul, but by lobbying foreign diplomats at a donors' conference in Bonn, Germany, to appoint him interim president. When King Zahir Shah, a respected figure whose family had ruled Afghanistan for more than 200 years, returned to offer his services as acting head of state, the U.S. ambassador had a "showdown" with the monarch, forcing him back into exile. In this way, Karzai's "authority," which came directly and almost solely from the Bush administration, remained unchecked. For his first months in office, the president had so little trust in his nominal Afghan allies that he was guarded by American security.
In the years that followed, the Karzai regime slid into an ever deepening state of corruption and incompetence, while NATO allies rushed to fill the void with their manpower and material, a de facto endorsement of the president's low road to power. As billions in international development aid poured into Kabul, a mere trickle escaped the capital's bottomless bureaucracy to reach impoverished villages in the countryside. In 2009, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan as the world's second most corrupt nation, just a notch below Somalia.
As opium production soared from 185 tons in 2001 to 8,200 tons just six years later -- a remarkable 53% of the country's entire economy -- drug corruption metastasized, reaching provincial governors, the police, cabinet ministers, and the president's own brother, also his close adviser. Indeed, as a senior U.S. antinarcotics official assigned to Afghanistan described the situation in 2006, "Narco corruption went to the very top of the Afghan government." Earlier this year, the U.N. estimated that ordinary Afghans spend $2.5 billion annually, a quarter of the country's gross domestic product, simply to bribe the police and government officials.
Last August's presidential elections were an apt index of the country's progress. Karzai's campaign team, the so-called warlord ticket, included Abdul Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who slaughtered countless prisoners in 2001; vice presidential candidate Muhammed Fahim, a former defense minister linked to drugs and human rights abuses; Sher Muhammed Akhundzada, the former governor of Helmand Province, who was caught with nine tons of drugs in his compound back in 2005; and the president's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, reputedly the reigning drug lord and family fixer in Kandahar. "The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands," one Western intelligence official told the New York Times during the campaign.
Desperate to capture an outright 50% majority in the first round of balloting, Karzai's warlord coalition made use of an extraordinary array of electoral chicanery. After two months of counting and checking, the U.N.'s Electoral Complaints Commission announced in October 2009 that more than a million of his votes, 28% of his total, were fraudulent, pushing the president's tally well below the winning margin. Calling the election a "foreseeable train wreck," the deputy U.N. envoy Peter Galbraith said, "The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners."
Galbraith, however, was sacked and silenced as U.S. pressure extinguished the simmering flames of electoral protest. The runner-up soon withdrew from the run-off election that Washington had favored as a face-saving, post-fraud compromise, and Karzai was declared the outright winner by default. In the wake of the farcical election, Karzai not surprisingly tried to stack the five-man Electoral Complaints Commission, an independent body meant to vet electoral complaints, replacing the three foreign experts with his own Afghan appointees. When the parliament rejected his proposal, Karzai lashed out with bizarre charges, accusing the U.N. of wanting a "puppet government" and blaming all the electoral fraud on "massive interference from foreigners." In a meeting with members of parliament, he reportedly told them: "If you and the international community pressure me more, I swear that I am going to join the Taliban."
Amid this tempest in an electoral teapot, as American reinforcements poured into Afghanistan, Washington's escalating pressure for "reform" only served to inflame Karzai. As Air Force One headed for Kabul on March 28th, National Security Adviser James Jones bluntly told reporters aboard that, in his meeting with Karzai, President Obama would insist that he prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers." It was time for the new administration in Washington, ever more deeply committed to its escalating counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, to bring our man in Kabul back into line.
A week filled with inflammatory, angry outbursts from Karzai followed before the White House changed tack, concluding that it had no alternative to Karzai and began to retreat. Jones now began telling reporters soothingly that, during his visit to Kabul, President Obama had been "generally impressed with the quality of the [Afghan] ministers and the seriousness with which they're approaching their job."
All of this might have seemed so new and bewildering in the American experience, if it weren't actually so old.
Our Man in Saigon
The sorry history of the autocratic regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon (1954-1963) offers an earlier cautionary roadmap that helps explain why Washington has so often found itself in such an impossibly contradictory position with its authoritarian allies.
Landing in Saigon in mid-1954 after years of exile in the United States and Europe, Diem had no real political base. He could, however, count on powerful patrons in Washington, notably Democratic senators Mike Mansfield and John F. Kennedy. One of the few people to greet Diem at the airport that day was the legendary CIA operative Edward Lansdale, Washington's master of political manipulation in Southeast Asia. Amid the chaos accompanying France's defeat in its long, bloody Indochina War, Lansdale maneuvered brilliantly to secure Diem's tenuous hold on power in the southern part of Vietnam. In the meantime, U.S. diplomats sent his rival, the Emperor Bao Dai, packing for Paris. Within months, thanks to Washington's backing, Diem won an absurd 98.2% of a rigged vote for the presidency and promptly promulgated a new constitution that ended the Vietnamese monarchy after a millennium.
Channeling all aid payments through Diem, Washington managed to destroy the last vestiges of French colonial support for any of his potential rivals in the south, while winning the president a narrow political base within the army, among civil servants, and in the minority Catholic community. Backed by a seeming cornucopia of American support, Diem proceeded to deal harshly with South Vietnam's Buddhist sects, harassed the Viet Minh veterans of the war against the French, and resisted the implementation of rural reforms that might have won him broader support among the country's peasant population.
When the U.S. Embassy pressed for reforms, he simply stalled, convinced that Washington, having already invested so much of its prestige in his regime, would be unable to withhold support. Like Karzai in Kabul, Diem's ultimate weapon was his weakness -- the threat that his government, shaky as it was, might simply collapse if pushed too hard.
In the end, the Americans invariably backed down, sacrificing any hope of real change in order to maintain the ongoing war effort against the local Viet Cong rebels and their North Vietnamese backers. As rebellion and dissent rose in the south, Washington ratcheted up its military aid to battle the communists, inadvertently giving Diem more weapons to wield against his own people, communist and non-communist alike.
Working through his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu -- and this should have an eerie resonance today -- the Diems took control of Saigon's drug racket, pocketing significant profits as they built up a nexus of secret police, prisons, and concentration camps to deal with suspected dissidents. At the time of Diem's downfall in 1963, there were some 50,000 prisoners in his gulag.
Nonetheless, from 1960 to 1963, the regime only weakened as resistance sparked repression and repression redoubled resistance. Soon South Vietnam was wracked by Buddhist riots in the cities and a spreading Communist revolution in the countryside. Moving after dark, Viet Cong guerrillas slowly began to encircle Saigon, assassinating Diem's unpopular village headmen by the thousands.
In this three-year period, the US military mission in Saigon tried every conceivable counterinsurgency strategy. They brought in helicopters and armored vehicles to improve conventional mobility, deployed the Green Berets for unconventional combat, built up regional militias for localized security, constructed "strategic hamlets" in order to isolate eight million peasants inside supposedly secure fortified compounds, and ratcheted up CIA assassinations of suspected Viet Cong leaders. Nothing worked. Even the best military strategy could not fix the underlying political problem. By 1963, the Viet Cong had grown from a handful of fighters into a guerrilla army that controlled more than half the countryside.
When protesting Buddhist monk Quang Duc assumed the lotus position on a Saigon street in June 1963 and held the posture while followers lit his gasoline-soaked robes which erupted in fatal flames, the Kennedy administration could no longer ignore the crisis. As Diem's batons cracked the heads of Buddhist demonstrators and Nhu's wife applauded what she called "monk barbecues," Washington began to officially protest the ruthless repression. Instead of responding, Diem (shades of Karzai) began working through his brother Nhu to open negotiations with the communists in Hanoi, signaling Washington that he was perfectly willing to betray the U.S. war effort and possibly form a coalition with North Vietnam.
In the midst of this crisis, a newly appointed American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived in Saigon and within days approved a plan for a CIA-backed coup to overthrow Diem. For the next few months, Lansdale's CIA understudy Lucien Conein met regularly with Saigon's generals to hatch an elaborate plot that was unleashed with devastating effect on November 1, 1963.
As rebel troops stormed the palace, Diem and his brother Nhu fled to a safe house in Saigon's Chinatown. Flushed from hiding by promises of safe conduct into exile, Diem climbed aboard a military convoy for what he thought was a ride to the airport. But CIA operative Conein had vetoed the flight plans. A military assassin intercepted the convoy, spraying Diem's body with bullets and stabbing his bleeding corpse in a coup de grâce.
Although Ambassador Lodge hosted an embassy celebration for the rebel officers and cabled President Kennedy that Diem's death would mean a "shorter war," the country soon collapsed into a series of military coups and counter-coups that crippled army operations. Over the next 32 months, Saigon had nine new governments and a change of cabinet every 15 weeks -- all incompetent, corrupt, and ineffective.
After spending a decade building up Diem's regime and a day destroying it, the U.S. had seemingly irrevocably linked its own power and prestige to the Saigon government -- any government. The "best and brightest" in Washington were convinced that they could not just withdraw from South Vietnam without striking a devastating blow against American "credibility." As South Vietnam slid toward defeat in the two years following Diem's death, the first of 540,000 U.S. combat troops began arriving, ensuring that Vietnam would be transformed from an American-backed war into an American war.
Under the circumstances, Washington searched desperately for anyone who could provide sufficient stability to prosecute the war against the communists and eventually, with palpable relief, embraced a military junta headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu. Installed and sustained in power by American aid, Thieu had no popular following and ruled through military repression, repeating the same mistakes that led to Diem's downfall. But chastened by its experience after the assassination of Diem, the U.S. Embassy decided to ignore Thieu's unpopularity and continue to build his army. Once Washington began to reduce its aid after 1973, Thieu found that his troops simply would not fight to defend his unpopular government. In April 1975, he carried a hoard of stolen gold into exile while his army collapsed with stunning speed, suffering one of the most devastating collapses in military history.
In pursuit of its Vietnam War effort, Washington required a Saigon government responsive to its demands, yet popular with its own peasantry, strong enough to wage a war in the villages, yet sensitive to the needs of the country's poor villagers. These were hopelessly contradictory political requisites. Finding that civilian regimes engaged in impossible-to-control intrigues, the U.S. ultimately settled for authoritarian military rule which, acceptable as it proved in Washington, was disdained by the Vietnamese peasantry......
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continued...
"Death or Exile?
So is President Karzai, like Diem, doomed to die on the streets of Kabul or will he, one day, find himself like Thieu boarding a midnight flight into exile?
History, or at least our awareness of its lessons, does change things, albeit in complex, unpredictable ways. Today, senior U.S. envoys have Diem's cautionary tale encoded in their diplomatic DNA, which undoubtedly precludes any literal replay of his fate. After sanctioning Diem's assassination, Washington watched in dismay as South Vietnam plunged into chaos. So chastened was the U.S. Embassy by this dismal outcome that it backed the subsequent military regime to a fault.
A decade later, the Senate's Church Committee uncovered other U.S. attempts at assassination-cum-regime-change in the Congo, Chile, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic that further stigmatized this option. In effect, antibodies from the disastrous CIA coup against Diem, still in Washington's political bloodstream, reduce the possibility of any similar move against Karzai today.
Ironically, those who seek to avoid the past may be doomed to repeat it. By accepting Karzai's massive electoral fraud and refusing to consider alternatives last August, Washington has, like it or not, put its stamp of approval on his spreading corruption and the political instability that accompanies it. In this way, the Obama administration in its early days invited a sad denouement to its Afghan adventure, one potentially akin to Vietnam after Diem's death. America's representatives in Kabul are once again hurtling down history's highway, eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror, not the precipice that lies dead ahead.
In the experiences of both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai lurks a self-defeating pattern common to Washington's alliances with dictators throughout the Third World, then and now. Selected and often installed in office by Washington, or at least backed by massive American military aid, these client figures become desperately dependent, even as they fail to implement the sorts of reforms that might enable them to build an independent political base. Torn between pleasing their foreign patrons or their own people, they wind up pleasing neither. As opposition to their rule grows, a downward spiral of repression and corruption often ends in collapse; while, for all its power, Washington descends into frustration and despair, unable to force its allies to adopt reforms which might allow them to survive. Such a collapse is a major crisis for the White House, but often -- Diem's case is obviously an exception -- little more than an airplane ride into exile for the local autocrat or dictator.
There was -- and is -- a fundamental structural flaw in any American alliance with these autocrats. Inherent in these unequal alliances is a peculiar dynamic that makes the eventual collapse of such American-anointed leaders almost inevitable. At the outset, Washington selects a client who seems pliant enough to do its bidding. Such a client, in turn, opts for Washington's support not because he is strong, but precisely because he needs foreign patronage to gain and hold office.
Once installed, the client, no matter how reluctant, has little choice but to make Washington's demands his top priority, investing his slender political resources in placating foreign envoys. Responding to an American political agenda on civil and military matters, these autocrats often fail to devote sufficient energy, attention, and resources to cultivating a following; Diem found himself isolated in his Saigon palace, while Karzai has become a "president" justly, if derisively, nicknamed "the mayor of Kabul." Caught between the demands of a powerful foreign patron and countervailing local needs and desires, both leaders let guerrillas capture the countryside, while struggling uncomfortably, and in the end angrily, as well as resentfully, in the foreign embrace.
Nor are such parallels limited to Afghanistan today or Vietnam almost half a century ago. Since the end of World War II, many of the sharpest crises in U.S. foreign policy have arisen from just such problematic relationships with authoritarian client regimes. As a start, it was a similarly close relationship with General Fulgencio Batista of Cuba in the 1950s which inspired the Cuban revolution. That culminated, of course, in Fidel Castro's rebels capturing the Cuban capital, Havana, in 1959, which in turn led the Kennedy administration into the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion and then the Cuban Missile Crisis.
For a full quarter-century, the U.S. played international patron to the Shah of Iran, intervening to save his regime from the threat of democracy in the early 1950s and later massively arming his police and military while making him Washington's proxy power in the Persian Gulf. His fall in the Islamic revolution of 1979 not only removed the cornerstone of American power in this strategic region, but plunged Washington into a succession of foreign policy confrontations with Iran that have yet to end.
After a half-century as a similarly loyal client in Central America, the regime of Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza fell in the Sandinista revolution of 1979, creating a foreign policy problem marked by the CIA's contra operation against the new Sandinista government and the seamy Iran-Contra scandal that roiled President Reagan's second term.
Just last week, Washington's anointed autocrat in Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, fled the presidential palace when his riot police, despite firing live ammunition and killing more than 80 of his citizens, failed to stop opposition protesters from taking control of the capital, Bishkek. Although his rule was brutal and corrupt, last year the Obama administration courted Bakiyev sedulously and successfully to preserve U.S. use of the old Soviet air base at Manas critical for supply flights into Afghanistan. Even as riot police were beating the opposition into submission to prepare for Bakiyev's "landslide victory" in last July's elections, President Obama sent him a personal letter praising his support for the Afghan war. With Washington's imprimatur, there was nothing to stop Bakiyev's political slide into murderous repression and his ultimate fall from power.
Why have so many American alliances with Third World dictators collapsed in such a spectacular fashion, producing divisive recriminations at home and policy disasters abroad?
During Britain's century of dominion, its self-confident servants of empire, from viceroys in plumed hats to district officers in khaki shorts, ruled much of Africa and Asia through an imperial system of protectorates, indirect rule, and direct colonial rule. In the succeeding American "half century" of hegemony, Washington carried the burden of global power without a formal colonial system, substituting its military advisers for imperial viceroys.
In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains momentum.
With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup, Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran, or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963 -- a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces."
Alfred McCoy
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=779
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i know i posted this before
but i watched it again and i love it lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqAF-Alc7CM&feature=player_embedded#!
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Ron Paul on the sanctions on Iran bill 22/4/10
Ron Paul : Today's Conversation Was Nothing But War Propaganda!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUGjjg8qr1I
Rising in Opposition to Iran Sanctions
By Ron Paul
Published 04/23/10
"Mr. Speaker I rise in opposition to this motion to instruct House conferees on HR 2194, the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act, and I rise in strong opposition again to the underlying bill and to its Senate version as well. I object to this entire push for war on Iran, however it is disguised. Listening to the debate on the Floor on this motion and the underlying bill it feels as if we are back in 2002 all over again: the same falsehoods and distortions used to push the United States into a disastrous and unnecessary one trillion dollar war on Iraq are being trotted out again to lead us to what will likely be an even more disastrous and costly war on Iran. The parallels are astonishing.
We hear war advocates today on the Floor scare-mongering about reports that in one year Iran will have missiles that can hit the United States. Where have we heard this bombast before? Anyone remember the claims that Iraqi drones were going to fly over the United States and attack us? These "drones" ended up being pure propaganda -- the UN chief weapons inspector concluded in 2004 that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ever developed unpiloted drones for use on enemy targets. Of course by then the propagandists had gotten their war so the truth did not matter much.
We hear war advocates on the floor today arguing that we cannot afford to sit around and wait for Iran to detonate a nuclear weapon. Where have we heard this before? Anyone remember then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's oft-repeated quip about Iraq: that we cannot wait for the smoking gun to appear as a mushroom cloud.
We need to see all this for what it is: Propaganda to speed us to war against Iran for the benefit of special interests.
Let us remember a few important things. Iran, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has never been found in violation of that treaty. Iran is not capable of enriching uranium to the necessary level to manufacture nuclear weapons. According to the entire US Intelligence Community, Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapons program. These are facts, and to point them out does not make one a supporter or fan of the Iranian regime. Those pushing war on Iran will ignore or distort these facts to serve their agenda, though, so it is important and necessary to point them out.
Some of my well-intentioned colleagues may be tempted to vote for sanctions on Iran because they view this as a way to avoid war on Iran. I will ask them whether the sanctions on Iraq satisfied those pushing for war at that time. Or whether the application of ever-stronger sanctions in fact helped war advocates make their case for war on Iraq: as each round of new sanctions failed to "work" -- to change the regime -- war became the only remaining regime-change option.
This legislation, whether the House or Senate version, will lead us to war on Iran. The sanctions in this bill, and the blockade of Iran necessary to fully enforce them, are in themselves acts of war according to international law. A vote for sanctions on Iran is a vote for war against Iran. I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to turn back from this unnecessary and counterproductive march to war."
Ron Paul
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=801
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This is the man you would trust with nuclear weapons? Shame on you.
The following are quotes from a speech Ahmedinajad gave last week:
Why must I worry, when we have a plan to change the world, to reshape the balance of oppressive [power] in the world, and [to change] the unilateral and discriminatory world order? And we are progressing step by step [in implementing] the plan , and are glad and thankful to God that they [i.e. the West] are carrying out the operations that we expected. We want to prove to the world that the Security Council has no legitimacy, that it is oppressive and uses a double standard, that it is a tool of the U.S. and the Zionist regime, and that it lies
So he has a plan, and is implementing it step by step? What could that possibly be if not making nuclear weapons? Cos it sure ain't delivering chocolate-chip cookies.
I hereby announce that from this point forward, one of the Iranian nation's main aspirations will be to deliver the American people from [its] undemocratic and bullying government.
So Iran is attempting to bring down the US government. Oh and 'undemocratic and bullying'? Pot calling the kettle black, or was he just asleep when this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan happened?
Sixty years ago, they gathered the filthiest and greatest of criminals, who appear to be human, from all the corners of the earth, organized and armed them – on artificial and false pretexts, fabricating information and inventing stories
Nice to know he thinks I'm not human. I'd love to get the chance to tell him what I think of him...
Again I say, shame on you.
http://www.thememriblog.org/iran
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/138168
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your probably thinking about it out of context
that does by no means mean he is planning to make nuclear weapons to bomb anyone
and besides ive already gone through all the arguments against this
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Read the fucking speech man. It's all there. I don't give a fuck about nuclear weapons, he called me and my all my kind 'the filthiest and greatest of criminals, who appear human'. I don't care what context that's in.
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yes highly emotive but its obvious he doesn't like the ideology of zionism and anything associated with that. that doesn't mean he hates jews or whatever cause theres lots of jews in iran.
so what do you want to do about it? bomb them? or just feel offended? i don't get what you want to achieve
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Of course he hates Jews, don't give me that rubbish, the evidence is all there. Read his words, don't make up your own 'context'.
People like you are the biggest fucking appeasers in mankind. You'll let anyone get away with anything, and that's what allows people like Hitler (think Neville Chamberlain) and this maniac to do what they like.
When confronted with evil like this, someone has to put up a stand. You can't just let him continue and say nothing will come of it.
History has taught us time and time again, appeasement does not work. It only ever encourages the aggressor.
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great video
July 1
On July 1, Congressman Paul spoke on the House floor concerning the war in Afghanistan and the need for a new foreign policy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuitnWM6BJc&feature=channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmOxWDJw1js&feature=channel
Was Ronald Reagan the ultimate hawk?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZICDg0FOUI
July 27
Ron Paul spoke on the House floor during debate on a privileged resolution to invoke the War Powers Act and remove our troops from Pakistan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9sVMDXsWQ8&feature=player_embedded
Dr. Paul highlights how many people thought this administration would shrink our foreign wars. Instead, drone attacks have doubled, civilian casualties are high, we sent $7.5 billion in "aid" to Pakistan and instead of spending it on infrastructure, much of the funds went to fund the ISI (Pakistani intelligence service) who it turns out have been funding the Taliban. Rather than declarations of war, Dr. Paul states "we slip into wars" by slowly increasing the amount of our involvement.
We pay for these wars with an enormous amount of blood and treasure and we can't afford to increase either at this point.
July 21
this is a great debate too
On Wednesday, C4L held a debate entitled "Empire Without a Cause?: Debating U.S. Foreign Policy on the Right" between former Reagan associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein (author of C4L's new book, American Empire: Before the Fall) and Jeff Kuhner, talk radio host on the D.C. area's AM 570, as well as a columnist and media commentator at The Washington Times.
The debate examined whether current U.S. foreign policy is endangering our Republic with perpetual, world-wide warfare for the sake of nation-building-or whether the conflicts in which we are embroiled are necessary to protect American citizens from Islamic extremism in a post-9/11 world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srlffmLr65c&feature=PlayList&p=60EDBA3CAFE9867F&index=0
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ha this video is quite good (funny in a sarcastic sort of way)
Southern Avenger - Government Intervention, Left and Right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22cC3i3mDOc&feature=player_embedded
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I disagree when he said the US did "little to nothing decades ago". There has been a massive US presence in countries such as Israel, Turkey and Saudi for ages (which you most probably already knew).
But yeah, it was rather entertaining. Speaking of the bailout failure, there are talks of a possible double dip occurring soon. Not sure whether it's just a minor bear market or a lapse in recession. Unfortunately, I'm a complete n00b at these sorta stuff.
Edit: Jesus Christ that's a lot of Ron Paul vids
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hm yeah the us intervention into the middle east and other areas happened mainly in the 20th century+
haha yes ive liked him (and moreso his message) ever since ive found out about him
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Edit: Jesus Christ that's a lot of Ron Paul vids
Incredibly ironic choice of words given that TrueLight clearly thinks he's the messiah
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yes sure i do ::)
some people are drawn to a non-interventionist foreign policy
some people like you are not i cant help it
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Well, you've got to pass the time somehow after bombing the fuck out of Latin America
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Saudi Arms Deal is About Iran
By Ron Paul
Published 11/02/10
"This month the US Administration notified Congress that it intends to complete one of the largest arms sales in US history to one of the most repressive regimes on earth. Saudi Arabia has been given the green light by the administration to spend $60 billion on some 84 new F-15 aircraft, dozens of the latest helicopters, and other missiles, bombs, and high-tech military products from the US weapons industry.
Saudi Arabia, from where 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers came, is a family-run dictatorship, where there are no political parties, no independent press, and where any form of political dissent is met with the most severe punishment. We are told that we must occupy Afghanistan to encourage more rights for women, an issue on which the Saudi regime makes the Taliban look rather liberal by comparison. We are told that our increasingly aggressive policies toward Iran are justified by that country’s rigid Islamic laws and human-rights violations, while the even more repressive Islamic rule in Saudi Arabia is never mentioned.
So why would the US government, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars yearly and maintains hundreds of bases overseas to push global democracy, approve a deal like this with such a regime? As Stockholm Institute scholar Pieter Wezeman told the Washington Post, "Of course it's against Iran. Of course it's against Yemen. You can read between the lines ... but there are not any official statements about it." Although the deal must be approved by Congress, there is little chance of any significant Congressional opposition for the above reason.
Imagine if China had armed an aggressive, anti-American Mexico to the teeth. How would we feel? Threatened? That is likely how Iran feels with this massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia. To underscore this message, the US quietly announced early this month that it was selling 20 F-35 Stealth fighters to Israel. As Israeli military purchases are paid for with US foreign aid, we must realize that the weapons pointed at Iran in the Middle East are American made and largely paid for with American tax dollars. Certainly Iran understands this. Will such a provocative move, arming two anti-Iranian powers in the region to the teeth, lead to a trigger event to bring about a full invasion of Iran? The economic tsunami that would result from such a horrific turn of events would only be eclipsed by the death and destruction in the region -- and likely beyond.
Some will argue that these arms deals are international trade which we should encourage and applaud. Sadly, the United States does not build much that we can export these days. But the fact is that the US weapons industry is underwritten by the American taxpayer. From research and development to acquisition by the US military, the costs of the US arms industry are borne by American citizens. But, as so-called "private" companies, the enormous profits they make selling weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia are of course privatized. So the costs are socialized and the profits are privatized. There is a word for this arrangement and it is not "capitalism.""
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1180
Ron Paul
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dare i ask, who the fuck is ron paul?
and foreign policy? pfft. you mean american policy dealings as the sole superpower.
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google him or watch this its the first youtube clip when you type his name
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG2PUZoukfA
it is foreign policy perhaps mainly american foreign policy
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er, why are you so into american policy? wouldnt it be better, as well as educational for you, to focus on Aust policy?
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because im interested in it and it affects australia... and besides australia is involved in these wars as well but to a lesser extent
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When the head moves, the body will follow. If you jumped head first into a meat grinder, wouldn't you want to stop the head altogether, or at least sever the head from the body?
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neoconservatism and their philosophy. quite interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orTsSboJSFU
also have to stick an article on, i just wish his message was listened to.. oh well..
America at War: The Missing Election Issue
By Doug Bandow
Published 11/15/10
"Americans have voted, and voted for change. Real change.
Yet the most important area requiring change is one that received virtually no attention on the campaign trail: foreign policy.
No doubt, wild spending and mounting debt threaten America's fiscal future. ObamaCare will deliver worse medical care with fewer choices at higher cost. Extreme proposals for "cap and trade" could wreck the economy. Reform is needed on more than a few domestic issues.
But the U.S. is at war. Two wars, in fact. Americans are dying.
Yet virtually none of the 435 candidates elected to the House and 37 elected to the Senate on November 2 talked about either war. Former Bush aide Peter D. Feaver explained: "The big strategic consideration is that the electorate is energized over jobs, not over the war right now."
Unfortunately, "out of sight, out of mind" appears to be the motto for most Americans. Like past imperial powers, war has become both constant and largely invisible. Military personnel die and funerals are held; service men and women are injured and families suffer. But most Americans go about their lives with little sense that their government is sending fellow citizens to kill and to die in the name of the American people.
Even more blame falls on the candidates, however. They are supposed to be debating America's future. They should be offering contrasting visions of the future. They should be debating where and how the U.S. should be at war. And whether the U.S. should be at war at all.
Unfortunately, both parties are complicit in today's welfare/warfare state. President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress demonstrated that they spend money like Democrats. In their six years together the Republicans tossed money at virtually every program. They were as bad as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress when it came to upping domestic discretionary spending. In fact, the GOP-backed Medicare drug benefit was the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Johnson's "Great Society."
Moreover, war has become a constant under Republican rule. With the enthusiastic support of his party, President Bush launched two costly adventures overseas. And that's not enough for many GOP leaders and activists, who sing about bombing Iran, advocate attacking North Korea, suggest military action against Syria, and propose confrontation with Russia. When it comes to war, some Republicans never can have enough -- at least as long as other people are doing the fighting. Indeed, the new House leaders are markedly more hawkish than their predecessors.
However, Democrats have proved to be no better on either score. The expansive and expensive welfare state is a Democratic inspiration. Republicans have been mostly me-too, other than the Bush push for the Medicare drug benefit. Even there, GOP candidates attempt to defend their big-spending performance by claiming that the Democrats eventually would have forced passage of an even bigger program. Moreover, President Barack Obama and the Democrats have set new records for domestic spending.
Nor do Democrats live up to their reputation as peaceniks. Until recently it was Democratic presidents who routinely took America into peripheral Third World conflicts, most notably Korea and Vietnam. President Bill Clinton's MO was intervening militarily where no noticeable U.S. interests were at stake: Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia. Many Democrats supported the invasion of Iraq. President Barack Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, making it his own. And many Democrats are even more fervent than Republicans for war with Iran.
In fact, Washington Post columnist David Broder suggested that President Obama adopt a warlike course towards Tehran in order to improve his political changes in 2012. True, Broder denies "suggesting that the president incite a war to get reelected." However, Broder's meaning was unmistakable.
Shortly before the Democrats' electoral drubbing Broder wrote: "With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, [the president] can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve."
Surely no one wants Iran to have nukes, but Broder offers no evidence to back his claim that "Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century." That country is economically weak and politically divided; it is surrounded by states determined to limit its power. And for Tehran to use any nuclear weapons that it develops would be suicidal -- Israel has an overwhelming deterrent, as does America. Ahmadinejad is a vile demagogue, but there is no evidence that he is suicidal. There certainly is no evidence that those who actually control the Iranian military -- Ahmadinejad does not -- are suicidal.
Yet Broder assumes the American people would reward the president politically for raining death and destruction down on another people. After all, they look and talk different, and thus really shouldn't count in Washington's calculations. Unfortunately, Broder probably is right, at least in the short term.
What better evidence is there that the U.S. needs real change?
War is sometimes necessary. But not often, thankfully. No other state can match America, the globe's only superpower. Terrorism remains a threat, but not the existential kind like World War II or the Cold War. The answer to terrorism is better intelligence, improved international cooperation, and limited use of Special Forces, drones, and other limited means.
In fact, intervention and war make terrorism more likely. As the U.S. has expanded operations in Pakistan and Yemen and backed foreign African military forces in Somalia, those nations have become greater incubators of terrorism. Unfortunately, Washington appears to be creating terrorists faster than it can kill them.
But war is more than bad foreign policy. It also undermines republican government at home. The U.S. accounts for roughly half of global military spending. Iraq alone will end up costing at least $2 trillion and probably more. The expense of fighting the war in Afghanistan is spiraling upwards. Yet Uncle Sam is effectively broke.
The national security state also threatens civil liberties. Randolph Bourne famously observed that "war is the health of the state." That's why traditional conservatives opposed interventionist foreign policies and large military establishments.
There is a more basic moral point, however. War is fundamentally immoral. Peoples possess a basic right to self-defense, of course, but the burden of starting a conflict is exceedingly heavy, even if done nominally for humanitarian purposes. Alas, American policymakers now treat war as a matter of choice and threaten to bomb and invade other nations for almost frivolous reasons. That people will be displaced, maimed, and killed is viewed as merely a minor, even incidental, cost.
The American people voted for change on November 2. One of the most important changes would be to require American foreign policy to be consistent with a republic. Military intervention should always require overwhelming justification; war should always be a last resort. Rather than attempt to transform the world, Americans should concentrate on preserving their freedom."
Doug Bandow
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1198