Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Syria: The U.S. has learned nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan

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TAMPA, August 28, 2013 —  “And now we’re back where we started. Here we go round again. Day after day I get up and I say I better do it again.”

Apparently, Ray Davies’ lyric has become the U.S. government’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, they’ve added a line to the chorus that Davies left out: Make sure you learn absolutely nothing from the day before.

After twelve years of war, hundreds of thousands of U.S. and foreign civilian casualties and trillions in debt, the U.S. has accomplished nothing in the Middle East. They haven’t eradicated the Taliban or Al Qaeda. There has not been a single regime change favorable to U.S. interests. Americans are not freer. They are less free than they have ever been in U.S. history.

The Obama administration’s response? Do it again.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who does not have a strong sense of déjà vu this morning, as officials from the president on down gear up for a missile strike against Syria. The U.S. and U.K. governments have both issued statements that they have “no doubt” that the Assad government used chemical weapons against rebel forces and civilians. But U.N. inspectors have not concluded their investigation and have issued no such statement confirming anything.

The Assad government denies use of chemical weapons.

If the U.N. inspectors do conclude that chemical weapons were used, there is still reasonable doubt about who used them. There are suspicions that the rebels may have actually deployed the chemical weapons in an attempt to frame the Assad government and persuade the U.S. to enter the war.

In 2003, the Bush administration emphatically warned of the imminent threat that the Saddam Hussein Iraqi government posed to the U.S. and the rest of world. Images of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities were invoked, with the administration making the absurd claim that Hussein could strike the U.S. within 45 minutes.

No such capabilities existed. After the U.S. had invaded the country, destroyed its infrastructure, displaced over two million refugees and set the stage for an Islamic government friendly to Iran to replace the previous secular one which was hostile towards Iran, it admitted that the “WMD” didn’t exist.

The entire eight year debacle accomplished nothing. Zero. Nada.

Now, even the man who wrote up the plan for missile strikes against Syria says that those strikes won’t accomplish anything.

“Tactical actions in the absence of strategic objectives is usually pointless and often counterproductive. I never intended my analysis of a cruise missile strike option to be advocacy even though some people took it as that,” said Chris Harmer, the senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who wrote up a plan for missile strikes.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been warning for months that intervention in Syria will accomplish nothing favorable to U.S. interests. He’s gone so far as to say that even if the rebels were to win, they would not likely be friendly toward the U.S. government.

There are no “good guys and bad guys” in this struggle. On one side you have an oppressive dictatorship with strong ties to Russia. On the other you have a fundamentalist Islamic coalition of rebels with many different factions, including one that just took a pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri.

These are the “freedom fighters” the Obama administration has been backing.

In Afghanistan, the “security forces” that U.S. soldiers are training to supposedly enforce the rule of law and democratic government after the U.S. leaves occasionally kill their trainers. They are restrained only by their own officers who remind them of the weapons the U.S. is supplying them.

This is what thousands of American casualties and trillions of dollars in new debt has bought us. That’s not to mention the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of new terrorists that U.S. intervention has created. Every drone strike against a terrorist leader results in innocent civilian deaths. Fathers, brothers or sons of the dead then dedicate their lives to war against the U.S.

Every bomb launched against Syria will be purchased with borrowed money. Each one will take innocent lives and create new terrorists. According to anyone with any expertise, it will accomplish nothing, although the stated goal is to oust the Assad government and replace it with a fundamentalist Islamic government that is even more hostile towards the United States.

The U.S. just did that in Egypt. It did the same in Iraq. The Taliban is now negotiating with the U.S. and others for an end to the war in Afghanistan, where they may very well return to power.

Einstein is credited with defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

James Madison said that no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. We haven’t. In the past twelve years, we’ve built a frightening police state, turned federal government surpluses into $12 trillion in public debt and accomplished nothing in the Middle East or against terrorism in general.

Let’s not do it again.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

 

Dempsey’s Syria letter raises questions about entire Mideast policy

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TAMPA, August 21, 2013 – Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y. in an August 19 letter obtained by the Associated Press that the Obama administration is opposed to even limited military intervention in Syria because the rebels wouldn’t support American interests even if they won.

Dempsey said that the U.S. is capable of destroying President Assad’s air force, but that it would plunge the U.S. into another Mideast war with no strategy for peace.

 

Dempsey’s assessment has been criticized by Sen. John McCain, who called a previous letter to Sen. Carl Levin “disingenuous.” According to the Jerusalem Post, McCain said “No one is seriously talking about striking Assad’s naval forces as part of a limited campaign. And no one seriously thinks that degrading Assad’s air power would require hundreds of American military assets. The whole thing is completely misleading to the Congress and the American people, and it is shameful.”

 

It’s time to take a serious look at just who has misled the American people. For twelve years, neoconservatives and other war hawks have presented military intervention in the Middle East as the only way to fight terrorism, bring stability to the Middle East and champion democratic values.

 

Twelve years of active war has failed to achieve any of those goals. Neither has it advanced any U.S. interest in the region, even if that were a justifiable cause for war.

 

Dempsey’s assessment of intervention in Syria highlights lessons the U.S. should have learned by now

 

First, the conflict is not between two sides, one pro-democracy and one dictatorial. It is a many-sided conflict, involving longstanding ethnic and tribal differences, according to Dempsey. No side is pro-U.S.

 

This is much like Afghanistan, where the U.S. attempted to combine military action with bribes, coalition building and humanitarian efforts to “win hearts and minds.”

 

In the end, the government it backed has waffled on supporting U.S. interests. The security forces U.S. military personnel are training have taken to killing their trainers from time to time, restrained only by Afghan officers who discourage the practice because of the weapons the U.S. is providing them.

 

Last month, the Taliban opened an office in Dohar, Qatar to begin negotiating with the U.S. and others to end the war. What that means for stability, democracy or U.S. interests in Afghanistan remains to be seen. The original reason for invading Afghanistan was to remove the Taliban.

 

This after the U.S. left Iraq a nation in chaos, its infrastructure razed, two million refugees displaced, an ancient Christian community destroyed, and a government with strong ties to Iran.

 

U.S. intervention in Egypt has had similar results, where a military junta uses arms purchased with U.S. foreign aid to slaughter those who protest the recent overthrow of a democratically-elected government. That government was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, hardly a result the U.S. welcomed in terms of its own interests or those of its allies.

 

In addition, the Assad regime is a longstanding friend of Russia, which has a naval base in Syria. The Obama and Bush administrations have both unnecessarily strained relations with post-Soviet Russia. Military intervention in Syria could strain them further, with no discernible benefit to the United States.

 

Idealists look at the twelve year U.S. adventure in the Middle East as a righteous mission to bring democracy to the oppressed peoples under dictatorial or Islamic rule. From that perspective, the U.S. has been played for a sucker by a myriad of tribal factions that have cooperated temporarily and then turned on the U.S. the minute cooperation no longer served their interests. Wherever democratic elections have taken place, Islamic governments have been elected with dubious prospects for supporting the U.S. or Israel.

 

Cynics see the period as one of quasi-imperial conquest by the U.S. to remake the political landscape to better serve U.S. interests and secure access to oil and other natural resources. The project has been a disaster from that perspective as well, even if true.

 

It’s time to take a serious look at U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and in general. There are questions that need to be answered.

 

Based upon twelve years of experience, what do we expect to accomplish in the Middle East? How many decades are we willing to stay at war to accomplish it?

 

How much more money are we willing to borrow?

 

What evidence is there that we have accomplished anything? Why will next year be different?

 

If the U.S. is indeed waging “wars of liberation,” how did U.S. taxpayers become financially responsible for the liberty of every soul on the planet? When will this financial responsibility end?

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Egypt in flames: A perfect metaphor for U.S. foreign policy

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TAMPA, August 19, 2013 – At least 64 more people died in Egypt Friday as fighting erupted between Muslim Brotherhood-led supporters of ousted president Mohmmad Morsi and armed civilians who oppose them. Police officers were among those killed, some possibly fighting out of uniform with vigilante forces.

The Brotherhood has called for daily protests “until the coup ends,” meaning that the democratically-elected Morsi is returned to power. With chances of that close to zero, there is no clear pathway to an end to the carnage.

Egypt is in flames. It is a perfect metaphor for U.S. foreign policy.

Yesterday, President Obama announced that he was canceling joint military training exercises with the Egyptian military. “Our traditional cooperation cannot continue as usual when civilians are being killed in the streets and rights are being rolled back,” the president said.

The civilians are being killed with weapons purchased with U.S. foreign aid to Egypt.

Just two years ago, the Obama administration materially supported the “pro-democracy” revolution against Hosni Mubarak, but has refused to condemn the Egyptian military’s deposing of Morsi.

If the administration were to recognize that as a coup, it would be legally required to cut off military aid.

Meanwhile, the administration is supporting a rebellion against President Assad of Syria. That has strained relations with Russia, a longtime ally of Syria and supporter of the multi-generational Assad regime. Russian president Vladimir Putin has publicly questioned why the United States is supporting rebel forces in Syria that include Al Qaeda after fighting extended wars against Al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The tension may have influenced Putin’s decision to grant asylum to fugitive Edward Snowden. In response to that, Obama cancelled a scheduled meeting with Putin.

The failures are not confined to the Obama administration.

The Bush administration reacted to 9/11 the way FDR reacted to Pearl Harbor. It attempted to wage conventional war against an unconventional enemy.

“Mission accomplished,” declared President Bush in May, 2003, after U.S. forces had marched into the Iraqi capital, the traditional measure of victory in a conventional war.

The problem was that Saddam Hussein’s forces weren’t the real enemy. Eight years later, the U.S. left Iraq a nation in chaos, its infrastructure razed, two million refugees displaced, an ancient Christian community destroyed, and a government with strong ties to Iran.

“No one in his right mind speaks of a U.S. victory in Iraq these days,” wrote former Congressman Ron Paul.

Paul also noted that the Taliban has recently opened an office on Doha, Qatar, where it will negotiate with the U.S. on ending the war in Afghanistan. Few doubt that the Taliban will be a major influence in Afghanistan, if they don’t eventually return to power altogether, after the U.S. withdraws.

The entire, twelve-year U.S. adventure in the Middle East has been an unmitigated disaster, using any of the measures of success offered by its proponents.

It did not neutralize weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They didn’t exist.

It did not permanently depose the Taliban.

It did not eliminate or even reduce al Qaeda, which filled every vacuum created by U.S. arms.

It has not made the Middle East more stable.

It certainly has not made Americans freer. The Patriot Act, the TSA, NSA collection of phone and e-mail data, indefinite detention without due process and the presidential kill list have all accompanied the war on terror. While military intervention did not cause these domestic policies, it has done nothing to reduce the perceived need for them.

The U.S. has learned nothing from the Cold War. The two significant military interventions during that period were its only failures. The U.S. left Viet Nam in defeat. The Vietnamese largely abandoned communism on their own in the decades that followed.

The U.S. prevented North Korea from taking over South Korea, but still finds itself entangled in the six decade standoff that followed it. North Korea is one of the few truly communists countries left in the world, largely because an outside threat unites people behind the government.

It’s time to give serious consideration to a noninterventionist foreign policy. The results of trying to police the world and export democracy have been exactly the opposite of what was intended. It’s a lot like when the government intervenes into the economy. When it puts price controls on food to help the poor, it results in food shortages and the poor starve.

It is often said that if the United States did not have its massive military presence around the world, other powers like China would fill the void. Let them.

The idea that there is something to fear from potential rivals “controlling resources” is based upon economics as spurious as those employed by the price controllers. Natural resources are worth nothing if not sold to all potential buyers. Oil is not sold from government to government. It is sold to major exchanges and from there to the highest bidder.

While the United States is bankrupting itself blowing up bridges and then rebuilding them in Middle East backwaters, China is investing in resources in Africa and elsewhere. They do not appear worried about their security despite the absence of military bases outside their borders.

The interventionists would do well to read the inauguration speeches of the first 22 U.S. presidents. Regardless of their differences on domestic policy, their comments on foreign policy play like a broken record.

Nonintervention worked. It’s no coincidence that the United States rose from one of the poorest economies in the world to the mightiest economy in human history while this was its foreign policy. Being the world’s policeman has played a large part in reversing that trend.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Thank God the 4th of July is over

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TAMPA, July 5, 2013 – Thank goodness the 4th of July is over. For those who believe in freedom, it has become unbearable.

On July 4th, 1776, a written document codifying the resolution passed two days earlier was approved by Congress. It declared to the whole world that thirteen of Great Britain’s colonies were seceding from the union. The document stated the Lockean principles upon which the decision was based and then listed the reasons why secession was necessary.

The modern U.S. government is far worse than George III’s. Today’s Americans not only fail to object, but celebrate its depravity.

Unqualified worship of the military is the most obvious example. Throughout human history, standing armies in times of peace have been the most recognizable characteristic of tyranny.

The 21st-century U.S. government and media invites Americans to thank the military for what little freedom they have left. Despite the complete absence of any cause-effect relationship between U.S. military adventures and the smattering of freedom Americans retain, they enthusiastically comply.

And where is this freedom the government supposedly secured by invading Korea or Afghanistan?

The “irony of the flag-waving masses slouching along in airport lines toward their inevitable date with the total state so that they could celebrate their liberty and freedom” was not lost on Daniel McAdams, but likely is on most Americans. Just watch them laugh and joke with government agents who literally bark orders at them before searching them without probable cause or a warrant.

It’s not just the airport. Any clear-thinking person recognizes the various domestic police forces as an army of occupation, complete with body armor, assault weapons and tanks. Yet, most Americans believe there are not enough of these “swarms of officers to harass our people and eat their substance.” This despite the U.S. having the largest prison population in human history, twice the size of present-day China’s, China’s population being five times as large.

The Constitution assumes law enforcement officers cannot even be trusted to arrest the right person after he has committed a crime. It requires them to get written permission from a judge to do anything. That concept is completely lost on most Americans, who teach their children police officers are their friends and their orders should be obeyed, whether they have been directed by a judge to issue them or not.

The entire paradigm of police officers patrolling the streets and supposedly “preventing crime” is completely antithetical to the principles of 1776. As Anthony Gregory observes, “Although there was plenty to object to in colonial law and law in the early republic, police as we now know them didn’t exist back then.” Nevertheless, conservatives are this institution’s biggest proponents. These are the “small government” people.

The colonists complained that George III’s army was insulated “from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.” William Grigg’s blog has documented thousands of examples of the very same tyranny in 21st-century America.

The Declaration cited “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” and “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury.” That referred to trying American colonists in public courts in England, sometimes by a judge instead of a jury. Today, the U.S. government transports its subjects to secret prisons all over the world without even bothering to charge them with a crime.

Or, they might just decide to summarily execute you and save the time and trouble.

Modern Americans hold up as heroes the presidents who have helped build this Orwellian nightmare. They revere those who have presided over massive expansions of government power and took their country into hugely destructive and largely unnecessary wars, while dismissing those who presided over relatively free and peaceful periods as “postage stamps.”

Worse yet, they dutifully join the government’s propaganda machine in engaging in the “two minute hate” against Edward Snowden, uncritically parroting the government’s charges of treason, even though no reasonable person could believe what he did constituted “levying War against them [the United States – plural], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Charged with the same crime George III charged Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Franklin with, for resisting substantively the same tyranny, 21st-century Americans side with the government that spies on them, routinely lies to them, plunders their wealth, controls every aspect of their lives and kills hundreds of thousands of civilians in undeclared wars.

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe observed, “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

This has never been truer than in 21st-century America on the 4th of July. Thank God it’s over.

Libertarianism, anyone?

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

When is Taxpayer Day?

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TAMPA, May 27, 2013 ― Today is the tenth day since Armed Forces Day. Ten straight days of “thanking the troops,” supposedly for the freedom we enjoy because of the sacrifices they’ve made.

Something needs to be said. It probably won’t be popular, but I have a sinking feeling there are more than a few people who have entertained the same heretical thought I have:

I’m sick and tired of being invited to “thank the troops,” especially for my “freedom.”

There is no disrespect intended towards the families of anyone who has died in one of the government’s wars. The loss of a child, husband, father or mother is a tragedy, regardless of the circumstances.

Moreover, it is hard not to respect the kind of courage it takes to actually go into combat, regardless of the reasons one may have enlisted.

But thanks is quite another matter. Thanks assumes that we have enjoyed some benefit as a result. We’re told that “freedom isn’t free” and the benefit we enjoy is our liberty. That begs an obvious question.

What is the cause and effect relationship between any war the U.S. government has prosecuted, at least since WWII, and whatever relative freedom Americans have left? Are we freer because our government invaded Iraq? Viet Nam? Afghanistan? How?

Asking those same questions in reverse reveals the absurdity of the whole mantra. Obviously, we would not be less free if the government didn’t invade Korea. There is no chain of events that would have followed resulting in you and I being less free to express our opinions or practice our religion. In fact, exactly the opposite is true.

In every war the U.S. has fought, Americans have become less free, especially while the war was going on. Every war president has persecuted war protesters, from John Adams to George W. Bush. Wars have brought taxes, rationing and conscription. Worst of all, American society has become permanently more militarized and socialist (but I repeat myself) with each new war.

Some argue the U.S. government has fought wars for justice, liberating people in other countries or protecting them from evildoers. That may or may not be true, but it begs two more obvious questions:

How did the American taxpayer become financially responsible for the liberty and security of every soul on the planet? When will this responsibility end?

The answer to the first question is a mystery this writer has been unable to solve. The answer to the second is obvious: When all resources are exhausted and all productive capability has been eliminated. That is the end of all military empires.

The American people have truly forgotten what a free country looks like. Worst of all are “small government” Tea Partiers who literally worship the military. Despite all of their talk about the Constitution, one has to wonder if they have ever actually read it’s authors. James Madison wrote,

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Free people do not worship the military establishment. They are suspicious of it. At one time the average American would not tolerate the existence of a standing army in peacetime. At the conclusion of Shay’s rebellion, John Adams and the U.S. Congress tripped over each other trying to take credit for disbanding the army.

How times have changed.

This is not a utopian vision. We live in a world of nation states, many of which could pose a threat to our liberty and security. There is a need for the means to defend ourselves if another nation besides the United States actually did show aggression. However, the present military establishment is orders of magnitude larger than any free country could possibly need or should tolerate.

The U.S. military employs approximately 1.4 million people. There is a reasonable argument to be made that all ground troops could be eliminated, given our air, naval, missile and nuclear capabilities. But let’s say for argument that 10% should be kept to train others if war broke out.

The rest are just on another government program that gives them free college, free housing, a guaranteed job and a guaranteed pension.

Meanwhile, the Forgotten Man (or woman), the one who pays for all of this, is reviled. He is never thanked. He is only ever told that he does not pay enough. Yet, it is he who actually makes us free, not by paying taxes, but by producing the wealth from which taxes are confiscated. He makes us free by allowing us to pursue our happiness, thanks to the goods and services he provides that we would otherwise have to produce ourselves. It is he who makes “society in every state a blessing.”

When is Taxpayer Day?

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Korean fiasco highlights U.S. foreign policy failures

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TAMPA, April 9, 2013 – It would be the stuff of a Peter Sellers satireif there weren’t for nuclear weapons and 26,000 American troops needlessly in harm’s way. A tiny dictatorship that has to cook the books even to call itself “third world” has the world’s “lone superpower” dancing on a string. It is a fitting tribute to 100 years of U.S. foreign policy failure.

When you invade and occupy a country, it almost always ends badly, as the British found out before the United States and Napoleon found out before them. Napoleon’s exploits in Spain are particularly instructive in understanding the U.S. government’s boondoggle in Iraq.

But it is only after you have got yourself stuck somewhere for 60 years that costly and tragic turns to ridiculous. Having unintentionally kept a multi-generational dictatorship in power by rallying its people around it, the U.S. finds itself outsmarted and outmaneuvered by a despot whose father might have suffered Il Duce’s fate if not for the continued presence of U.S. troops on North Korea’s border.

Read the rest of the article on Liberty Pulse…

Questions remain after Rand Paul’s filibuster

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TAMPA, March 10, 2013 – First, the good news. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul squared off in a 13-hour game of chicken with the White House on Wednesday. At stake was the bedrock American principle that no one will be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Early Thursday morning, the White House blinked.

“It has come to my attention that you have now asked an additional question: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” The answer to that question is no. Sincerely, Eric H. Holder, Jr.”

It took “a month and a half and a root canal” to get that carefully worded answer, according to Senator Paul, and even then some obvious questions remained.

Does the president have the authority to use manned aircraft to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? How about a rifle? A bow and arrow?

Perhaps due to the popular support for Paul’s filibuster, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney attempted to clean up Holder’s overqualified answer.

Read the rest of the article at Liberty Pulse…

Obama has state of the delusion speech shovel ready

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TAMPA, February 12, 2013 — Pundits are already atwitter over tonight’s annual exercise in political posturing. The question many are asking is whether Obama will stay on the attack against his Republican opponents or attempt to use the speech to identify areas where he can work with them.

The real question is whether the president will make a single remark that bears any resemblance to reality.

The State of the Union address (SOU) has always been little more than a nationally televised stump speech. As all presidents believe that anything happening anywhere in the country is a direct result of their policies, none have ever wanted to paint a less than rosy picture about the supposed “state of the union.” After all, if it’s in a bad state, it must be their fault.

However, with the U.S. now in full-fledged collapse, the speeches have become so detached from reality that they should be called “state of the delusion” addresses.

The speech is interminably long, but let’s look ahead to the main areas it will cover and try to separate fantasy from reality.

The president will remind us that he inherited an economy in shambles, which is true. He will hope that listeners draw the inference that his predecessor was wholly at fault for this, but that isn’t close to true. Every president since at least Teddy Roosevelt contributed to the problem, with the largest contributions coming from Democrats.

It will really turn bizarre when Obama starts talking about “the recovery” that’s underway. We’ll be told that while we’re not out of the woods and there is still “a lot of work to do (i.e., more government meddling to accomplish),” new jobs are being created, new industries are flourishing and things are generally looking up.

In reality, the United States is in a depression, just like the one in the 1930’s, and it’s being prolonged for all of the same reasons. The official numbers say that unemployment has been hovering around 8 percent, but that’s only because they’ve changed the way unemployment is measured. If they measured it the same way that they did in the 1930’s, unemployment would be the same as it was in the 1930’s.

As an aside, there isn’t any substantive economic distinction between “recession” and “depression.” Politicians just decided to stop calling them depressions to con the public. After a while, they started believing their own bovine waste products.

Read the rest of the article at Communities@ Washington Times…

McCain, Bolton and the NeoCons are on the wrong side of history

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TAMPA, January 31, 2013 — Republicans behind John McCain and the neoconservatives have picked the wrong fight. With the Democrats in the ascendancy and feeling confident enough to attack the Second Amendment for the first time in almost two decades, the Republicans need to pick some battles they can win if they want to survive the decade as a relevant political party.

Gun ownership would be a good one if their record on defending this right were better. Opposing Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense is not.

Senator and 2008 Republican Presidential Nominee John McCain made news today saying that Hagel was “on the wrong side of history” in opposing the troop surge in Iraq.

How ironic.

The troop surge during the Iraq War may or may not have achieved a temporary tactical objective, depending upon who you ask. It really doesn’t matter, because history will judge not only the Iraq War but the entire, neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) as an utter failure.

The U.S. government’s invasion of Iraq removed a secular dictator who presided over a relatively modern, stable Middle Eastern nation and replaced it with utter chaos, out of which emerged an Islamic state with strong ties to the supposedly most dangerous American enemy in the region, Iran.

Apparently incapable of learning from even the most recent history, the U.S. government has achieved similar results supporting various Middle Eastern revolutions collectively known as “the Arab Spring.”

It is also about to achieve Viet Nam-like results in Afghanistan, where a Taliban return to power is likely when the U.S. government finally declares “victory” and triumphantly cuts its losses and gets out.

The whole, multi-decade adventure in the Middle East will have squandered trillions, cost millions of lives on all sides, and not only achieved nothing, but actually made the landscape in the Middle East much worse. If Islamic fundamentalism truly is a threat to the Western world, then PNAC has increased that threat by orders of magnitude.

History will judge PNAC and the neoconservatives harshly. The American public is already there. Americans are finally beginning to question the wisdom of trying to remake the rest of the world through military intervention. They are beginning to ask the crucial questions. What is the cause and effect relationship between invading Middle Eastern backwaters and my relative freedom or security? If we had not invaded Iraq, exactly how and why would I be less free?

Read the rest of the article at Communities@ Washington Times…

The real question about Benghazi: Was Chris Stevens a CIA agent?

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TAMPA, November 25, 2012 ― The media can’t get enough of the “investigation” into what the Obama administration knew about what was happening in Benghazi and when they knew it. Obama survived the initial furor and got reelected, but the controversy rages on.

What is the real question here? Judging from media coverage and the Congressional investigation, we might assume that the only matter to be resolved is whether the Obama administration knew that a coordinated terrorist attack was underway, rather than a spontaneous demonstration against an anti-Muslim film. According to this narrative, Obama could have been more proactive in responding to the attack and sent in military assistance to try to save Stevens and his associates.

None of this would seem to be the stuff of a major scandal. The Obama administration may or may not have handled the situation properly. If they didn’t and tried to cover up their incompetence, it would hardly be a new Watergate. The intensity of the controversy doesn’t jibe with its supposed cause.

Or is there another reason for a cover-up by the White House? Was Chris Stevens a CIA agent?

Read the rest of the article…

As far back as October 25, Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano asked this question and he was not alone. He cited his colleague Justin Fishel’s report on the same subject. According to Fishel:

“In reality, CIA agents and other intelligence officials were operating out of Benghazi conducting delicate missions, including the search for over 20,000 deadly shoulder-fired missiles previously owned by Muammar Qaddafi’s Libyan forces … Both the CIA outpost and the consulate were attacked on Sept. 11. Two of the men killed, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were hit by indirect fire while defending the intelligence post, not the consulate.”

If the September 11 attack targeted a CIA base actively conducting covert operations within Libya, it renders the whole question of whether the attack was a reaction to the infamous video or a coordinated terrorist attack moot. Under those circumstances, it would be neither. It might more accurately be described as a “counterinsurgency operation” carried out by forces opposed to the new U.S.-installed Libyan government. Perhaps they were aligned with the ousted Qaddafi government. Perhaps they were al Qaeda who were happy to accept U.S. assistance in getting rid of Qaddafi and are now happy to turn on the U.S. That would be a familiar story.

Regardless, Stevens’ death might have been collateral damage in an attack against a known (in Libya) CIA covert operation. Or Stevens might have been a CIA operative himself who was not only participating in the post-revolution operations in 2012 but had actively participated in the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime. According to Napolitano, this theory might fit the facts better than any offered so far.

“Now we can connect some dots. If Stevens was a CIA agent, he was in violation of international law by acting as the U.S. ambassador. And if he and his colleagues were intelligence officials, they are not typically protected by Marines, because they ought to have been able to take care of themselves.”

If Stevens was a CIA agent actively involved in covert operations, it would be a major international scandal. It would call into question not only the Obama administration, but all of the U.S. government’s activities during its decade-long “war on terror.”

So why have neither the media nor the Congressional committee even asked the question?

Fishel confirms that the House oversight committee investigating the incident has been instructed not to investigate certain aspects of the Benghazi operation.

That means that no one is even trying to get at the truth. The Congressional investigation and the media frenzy amount to little more than a distraction for the American public, which seems to have taken the bait hook, line and sinker. They join the two major parties in fiercely debating a non-issue while ignoring the crucial questions asked by a few actual journalists.

Was Chris Stevens a CIA agent? Was the attack on Benghazi a terrorist attack or a counterattack against a covert military operation? Are there other U.S. diplomats actively participating in covert operations while posing as ambassadors of peace to foreign governments? Has the U.S. government become as immoral as the terrorists it purports to be fighting? What else do we not know about its international activities?

The silence is deafening.