Category Archives: Foreign Policy

UPDATE II: The Perils of a Killer President (Parlaying Vice into Votes)

Barack Obama, Constitution, Ethics, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Iran, Islam, Justice, Law, Middle East, Natural Law, Ron Paul, Terrorism

He oversees nothing but destruction. But practically everyone except Rep. Ron Paul (and most assuredly Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio) is praising the exercise of an extrajudicial, unconstitutional execution by President Barack Obama.

Anwar al-Awlaki was terminated today in Yemen (in violation of that country’s sovereignty). According to the say-so of U.S. officials, this American-born cleric is said to have “played a ‘significant operational role’ in plotting and inspiring attacks on the United States.”

Good enough evidence in the court of the imperial presidency and his adherents and architects (like Dick Cheney).

Outside of a war zone, as Awlaki was, lethal force can only be employed in the narrowest and most extraordinary circumstances: when there is a concrete, specific and imminent threat of an attack; and even then, deadly force must be a last resort

(The Guardian)

“The targeted assassination program that started under President Bush and expanded under the Obama Administration essentially grants the executive the power to kill any U.S. citizen deemed a threat, without any judicial oversight, or any of the rights afforded by our Constitution. If we allow such gross overreaches of power to continue, we are setting the stage for increasing erosion of civil liberties and the rule of law.” (The Center for Constitutional Rights)

WARNING: Thanks to the wastrel ways of the killer-in-chief and his predecessor (Genghis Bush), America is getting weaker, not stronger. A weakened bully is extra vulnerable.

Note to all Americans who want to go out into the world and soak up the sensation of spring in Arabia, Asia and elsewhere: As hard as it is to grasp, the world is not your friend. Remember what befell a couple of American hikers who wondered into … Iran, after backpacking across … Iraq. You heard right. Their touchy-feely friends stateside vouched for their amaaazingness and thirst to embrace the world. Apparently, the feeling in Iran was not mutual. (By the way, who paid the million-dollar ransom for those bozos? Did taxpayers subsidize that stupidity?)

UPDATE I: A chilling thread on my Facebook Page. Having skimmed the general thrust of the comments, here is my response:

“What are you freedom fighters so afraid of? The rule of law? Due process? A court of law? Twelve jurors? A Judge? You can’t just assert a man’s guilt; you must prove it with credible evidence. You can’t accept the say-so of the state. What is most chilling in a thread I’ve only skimmed is that, if I were to be arrested tomorrow by the Obama-Bush bot apparatus, and you were all told I as was a militia member (read “Missouri Police State: Beware Of People Like … Mercer”; I qualify)—you’d all be, ‘Yeah, yeah , that makes sense. We could see it coming. Go get Ilana.’ All of you except for Bill Meyer and a few others.”

UPDATE II (Oct. 1): As I put it in my latest column, politicians parlay human vice into votes. The Obama fairy dust is dissipating. The president is good at coordinating terrorism-related killings. (Or perhaps he is simply lucky on this front.) Perhaps this most cynical and wily of politicians is simply playing to the crowd. Murder is one way to unite the bifurcated American voter.

Myron: Your analogy about attacker vs. attacked extinguishing borders doesn’t work in this instance. For one thing, Israel is attacked from Gaza and the West Bank with more than words. When last did Yemen attack the US? That “country” harbors a couple of clerics who write fiery tracts on the Internet. For another, I am unable to tell how bad al-Awlaki’s authentic words were because, er, I can’t access them in the original. I have to contend with US government filtered hearsay. Besides, US law gives wide latitude to speech. We’d have to show that this man was an organizer, a direct funder of terrorism and terrorists. Due process takes care of all that—you know, the pesky need to shore-up your case with evidence.

The BHO strategy works: “According to an Associated Press-GfK poll conducted in late August, … 60 percent of those surveyed approved of his handling of terrorism. Just 36 percent approved of his handling of the economy, an all-time low for Obama.”

UPDATED: NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change

America, BAB's A List, Conflict, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Israel, Judaism & Jews

NATO Socks It To The Serbs, For a Change
By Nebojsa Malic

MORE THAN A DOZEN civilians were injured when NATO troops opened fire on Serb protesters in northern Kosovo on Tuesday. The Serbs had been peacefully protesting NATO’s seizure of checkpoints on the roads to the rest of Serbia, seeking to enforce the writ of the self-proclaimed Albanian government “in the entire country” (Kosovo’s Albanians declared an independent state with NATO support in 2008; Serbia, along with most of the world, refuses to recognize it). Western media reported this as “clashes.” NATO spokespeople argued they’d used only rubber bullets, in “self-defense.” Video and eyewitness reports prove them wrong.

NATO occupied Kosovo in 1999, after an illegal war in support of the separatist Albanian “Liberation Army.” Evidence of alleged Serb atrocities – used to justify the war – never materialized. Albanian persecution of ethnic Serbs and other communities, meanwhile, has unfolded for 12 years now, under the very noses of the “peacekeepers” and often with their tacit approval. When Serbia acted to establish law and order in Kosovo in 1998, it was condemned by NATO as “aggressor” and its actions deemed “genocide.” But when NATO initiates violence on behalf of a criminal regime of ethnic cleansers, slavers, drug-runners and organ harvesters, they call it “law and order” and anyone who opposes it, no matter how peacefully, a “criminal element.”

Why should any of this matter? Because it shows the world’s dominant military power (for now) as dangerously and deliberately disconnected from logic, and hence justice.

In the early 1990s, a media image of the Balkans wars was created in the West, wherein the Serbs were these mass-murdering aggressors against their peaceful neighbors, and the virtuous West had to step in and stop them. The Serbs were accused of the most vicious atrocities and compared to the Nazis.

None of that makes any sense. The Serbs are accused of breaking up Yugoslavia – yet they wanted to preserve it (and even then, not at all costs). The West decided that Yugoslavia had ceased to exist (just like that) and that the borders of its federal units were inviolable – except for Serbia, which could be carved up further (Kosovo). Serbs in Croatia were denied autonomy and expelled en masse, but Albanians in Serbia were given independence. Serbs in Bosnia were told they had to submit to a centralized, Muslim-dominated state, while Serbia itself was ordered to de-centralize to the point of separatism. No matter which way one turns, the only consistent “principle” in the Orwellian Balkans is that the Serbs always lose.

The Nazi comparison is especially vile, considering that 1) the Serbs were the principal targets of Nazis and their allies during WW2, and had also fought German and Austrian aggression in WW1; 2) Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians were allied with the Nazis in WW2, and the first two fought for Austria-Hungary in WW1, and 3) both Croats and Albanians had designs for eliminating the Serbs from the territories they claimed, and put those plans into effect under Western patronage, while the Serbs were accused of genocide without any evidence of intent!

One PR executive even bragged, as early as 1993, that the biggest coup of his agency was convincing the Jewish public opinion in the West that the Serbs were Nazis reborn, even though Croats and Bosnian Muslims had a history of “real and cruel anti-Semitism”!

In the course of the Balkans interventions, the West has repeatedly violated its own laws and charters (NATO), making a mockery of the UN and international law, while claiming to be guided by some sort of higher morality. The result of these interventions was that the US, Britain and France betrayed an ally from two world wars and demonized them as Nazis reborn, while supporting Germany and aiding German allies from WW2 to finish what they started in 1941. If this sort of stunning reversal can happen in the Balkans, it can happen anywhere else. To anyone else.

First come the smears. Then the bombs. Then the boots on the ground, and the desert called peace.

You have been warned.

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.

UPDATE: BAB contributor Nebojsa Malic on Russia Today, TODAY. The neocon is always and everywhere the most uncivilized:

UPDATED: Fox News-Google GOP 2012 Debate: Perry’s Bushisms (Mitt’s Manners)

Bush, Elections, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Politics, Relatives, Republicans

The debate was good; well-put together with interesting information culled from the Google meta-media. The Republican “thrust and Perry” in Tampa, Florida, earlier this month, set a good standard. You know me: I want words—textual red meat to sink my teeth into. I was worried at first that, true to character, Fox News would stick with visuals and stiff the written or pixelated word. (Here’s a slide show of the debaters! Oy!) But—hooray!— Fox came through with a rush transcript. Well-done!

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN, R-MINN had the opportunity to salvage the question Jon Huntsman flubbed in the previous, Tea-Party debate: “Out of every dollar I earn, how much do you think that I deserve to keep?” “It’s all yours,” she replied, but we still have to send something back for the government. A contradiction, of course.

FORMER Utah Governor Jon Huntsman solidified his standing as a committed statist, having “told the New Hampshire Union Leader [that] as president [he] would subsidize the natural gas industry.” Huntsman just can’t keep his sticky fingers out of the meddling business. The industry doesn’t need help; it needs to be left alone. (The industry is currently making its case to the public via tremendous ads that explain the safeguards with respect to fracking.)

However, as in the previous debate, Huntsman managed to distill, better than the rest, a foreign-policy vision: “… as the only one on stage with any hands-on foreign policy experience, having served — having lived overseas four different times, we’re at a critical juncture in our country. We don’t have a foreign policy, and we don’t project the goodness of this country in terms of liberty, democracy, open markets, and human rights, with a weak core. And right now in this country, our core, our economy, is broken. And we don’t shine that light today. We’re 25 percent of the world’s GDP. The world is a better place when the United States is strong [I understood him to mean strong economically]. So guiding anything that we talk about from a foreign policy standpoint needs to be fixing our core. But, second of all, I believe that, you know, after 10 years of fighting the war on terror, people are ready to bring our troops home from Afghanistan, Rick.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry sounds more and more like a slightly less stupid W, which is still plenty stupid and cunning to boot.

Here Perry is losing control over the words, as W used to:

PERRY:

I think Americans just don’t know sometimes which Mitt Romney they’re dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment?
Was it — was before he was before the social programs, from the standpoint of he was for standing up for Roe v. Wade before he was against Roe v. Wade? He was for Race to the Top, he’s for Obamacare, and now he’s against it. I mean, we’ll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we’re really talking to tonight.

Now that’s a Bushism. Shudder.

Garry Johnson had a good joke: “My next-door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this current administration.”

Even better was Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, invoking Ronald Reagan’s lines:

“When your brother-in-law is unemployed, it’s a recession. When you’re unemployed, it’s a depression. When Jimmy Carter’s unemployed, it’s a recovery. Nothing — nothing will turn America around more than Election Night, when Barack Obama loses decisively.”

NOW, SOMEONE PRAY TELL, why do all these candidates say “Sosal Security”? In English it’s pronounced Soshial Security.”

UPDATE (Sept. 23): MITT’S MANNERS. Hours after this site singled out Perry’s pathetic Bushisms, mainstream media is doing the same. Almost a full day after the debate, Perry’s word-salad is being reluctantly reported by Fox News.

However, what other sources see as a dismal lack of command of issues of foreign affairs, Fox News described as Perry’s “show of some chops, flashing knowledge about the Haqqani Network and Indian diplomacy.”

I’m with Alan Schroeder of the HuffPo:

Yet on matters of substance, Perry remains startlingly unprepared. Asked a theoretical question about Pakistan losing control of its nuclear weapons, the governor gave an incoherent response that amounted to a pile of steaming dung. It is remarkable that a man so obviously lacking in foreign policy credentials does not make a greater effort to bone up; in this regard he is more Sarah Palin than Ronald Reagan.

Over to Schroeder again:

Romney the debater is crisp, businesslike, in command of his material, and as bloodlessly efficient as a German luxury sedan. Perry the debater is sloppy, sentimental, uncertain of his facts, and brimming with the sort of down-home folksiness that makes Republican audiences go weak in the knees.

The Palestinian Authority May Face ‘Death by Recognition’

BAB's A List, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The PA may well come to regret invoking the Kosovo precedent, says Nebojsa Malic:

THE EFFORTS OF THE Palestine Authority (PA) to declare independence and get UN recognition have been compared to those of the “Republic of Kosovo,” a province of Serbia occupied by NATO in 1999 on behalf of the ethnic Albanian “Kosovo Liberation Army.” The KLA, a terrorist organization dabbling in drug-running, slavery and other unsavory practices on the side, orchestrated NATO’s aerial campaign and subsequent invasion (much like the current “rebels” in Libya), and after almost nine years of ethnically cleansing the province and laying the groundwork, declared it an independent state in 2008. While “Kosovo” is recognized by around 80 governments (most notably the US and major Western European powers), it has yet to claim a seat at the UN, faced with a certain Russian and probable Chinese veto.

Last year, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, not to be confused with faux tribunals such as the ICTY and ICTR) turned in a stunning verdict, refusing to recognize that the KLA government’s declaration directly violated the UN resolution regulating the status of Kosovo and accepted international law. Torturing language and logic, the majority of judges said that the declaration had been made not by the UN-regulated provisional government, but the “direct representatives of the Kosovo people,” and as such not bound by UN resolutions or international law (!). Following this sort of logic, any group, anywhere, could declare statehood – and the only thing that mattered would be whether it has sufficiently powerful patrons to enforce that statehood by force.

Upon recognizing “Kosovo,” its U.S. and EU sponsors insisted it would not establish any sort of precedent, as fervently as they had once insisted that the occupation of the province in no way conflicted with Serbia’s sovereignty over it. And now the PA is about to exploit the very Kosovo precedent. Critics of the American Empire often deride Washington’s belief in American exceptionalism, but it does actually apply in one, albeit unintended, respect: the U.S. may well be the first country in history to destroy the very international order its global dominance was built upon. Flouting the law with impunity is one thing; declaring that behavior to be the law, quite another.

However, there are drawbacks to PA’s invocation of the Kosovo precedent. For one, it would undermine “Kosovo” itself, obliterating a major argument of the separatists’ sponsors and putting the rest of the world on notice regarding their own separatist issues (and many countries have them). With many already uneasy about the professional revolutionaries (a method of unconventional takeover first tested in Serbia) in their midst, now another legacy of the Euro-American Balkans interventions – death by recognition – threatens to go global. While few seem to be aware of these potential problems down the road – there appears to be near-universal support in the UN for a state of Palestine – they will most certainly read their heads sooner or later.

Arabs themselves may be ill-served by the declaration. The PA is not self-sustaining, while the economic activity in the territories in question leans heavily on Israel. However much of a nuisance navigating the security checkpoints may be now, becoming an international border won’t make them any better – quite the contrary. Statehood would also mean taking ownership and responsibility for one’s actions and behavior, including terrorist attacks; until now, everything that happened could be blamed – and usually is – on Israel and the occupation. With statehood, that excuse disappears.

Claiming a Palestinian state in the territories of West Bank and Gaza would also go against the charters of both Fatah (current PA leadership) and Hamas. Both deny Israel’s right to exist and claim the entire territory of the old Palestine Mandate as their own. Settling for territories annexed by Egypt and Jordan in 1948, and occupied by Israel in 1967, is not just a matter of quantity, but of principle: it is an indirect recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. Last, but not least, the existence of a Palestinian state would shift the dynamic of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the current field of 4th-generation warfare (where weakness is strength) that has benefited the Arabs to a more conventional model, where Israel has proven its superiority repeatedly (as the Egyptians who remember 1967 and even 1973 can attest).

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Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. This editorial is exclusive to Barely A Blog.