Category Archives: War

Update II: Beck: 'I'm With Ron Paul' (Breaking From The Pack)

Debt, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, Glenn Beck, Homeland Security, libertarianism, Ron Paul, War

A good few posts ago, I observed that “in his groundbreaking series on the American Progressive Movement, Fox News personality Glenn Beck, previously an unambiguously pro-war military-booster, was inching towards examining his support for the kind of state expansion (via warfare) the founders would have abhorred.

Glenn made the final leap today to a non-interventionist foreign policy emphasizing American interests and self-defense and no nation building. He said the words, “I am with Ron Paul.” This could be good for the country—unless Beck is forced by his backers (FoxNews) to back down.

For example, this reasonable remark of Obama’s is drawing FoxNews ire:

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

I will post the Beck YouTube feature as soon as it’s up (readers are welcome to beat me to it).

Update: “America Is a Republic, Not an Empire” by Glenn Beck:

“The example we set now is what pisses everyone off: We say we’re going to spread democracy, but we bed dictators, we bow to Saudi princes, when it’s to our advantage. George Washington wanted us to be like the Swiss: Enemy of none, friend to all. Places like Germany — hey, we’re glad you are all straightened out, but we’re pulling out, you’re on your own. We’re not staying. We need to get out of the Korean Peninsula and Japan. No longer will we be the world’s loiterers.

The United States spends approximately $102 billion annually to maintain troops, equipment, fleets and bases overseas — if you count Iraq and Afghanistan it jumps to $250 billion. Well, I’m tired of being the world’s policeman. And in many cases we are the world’s loiterers. We need to have a “no loitering” policy.

That policy comes from the progressives. The Republicans say we’ll send in the “green helmets” and just nation build our way to global security. The liberals want to do it through the United Nations; they want to send in the “blue helmets” — which we pay for.

This doesn’t work. I don’t want to nation build. I don’t want a global government or military force.

And for all the Don Rumsfelds out there watching who are cursing me out right now because they think no time is a good time to cut defense spending. Well, maybe this will help. This chart shows who accounts for all military spending in the world.

Almost half of all military spending in the world — 47 percent — is America. The next biggest spender is Europe — that’s not even a country, they spent $289 billion on military-related expenses. We almost spent that much outside our country for our own defense!

So don’t tell me we can’t afford to cut back. Clearly we can.

And when we are in a situation like Afghanistan, we fight to win it. With all of our technology today, why can’t we get in and out of Afghanistan in a couple of years? Because the politicians have their grimy little fingers on everything. Take the military off the leash; if you decide to go to war, unhook those dogs and get the hell out of the way.”

Update II (April 16): Together with the Cato Institute, the author of the blog Downsizing the Federal Government in particular, Beck has been running pragmatic, hour-long workshops on where and how much to slash. Pretty much everything. The man is a force of nature.

Back to the matter of Beck’s “I’m with Ron Paul on foreign policy” statement: This too is a very important development. Beck is pulling away from the neoconservative pack at Fox. By declaring war on their gratuitous wars he has driven a wedge between himself and the likes of Hannity, O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Kristol, and all the followers (I don’t know a Republican ditto head who doesn’t go along with the war-all-the-time = a strong national defense formula). The unity of the ditto heads on war policy was unshakable.

Again: By denouncing the war talisman, Beck, a major star on the Right, has created oscillation in the ossifying GOP. He has broken a united front which—thanks to the likes of Hannity, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly; National Review, Weekly Standards—seemed unchallenged.

On Nuking Nonnuclear States

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Just War, Republicans, War

HERE’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AMERICAN “CONSERVATISM”: Obama, who seldom does anything good, is “revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions under which the United States would use nuclear weapons.”

The only country to ever nuke hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is committing to not repeat that shame. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Not if you’re a fire-breathing GOPier or conservative.

They object to the following policy outline, which seems to me more than reasonable:

“For the first time, the United States is explicitly committing not to use nuclear weapons against nonnuclear states that are in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, even if they attacked the United States with biological or chemical weapons or launched a crippling cyberattack. [Nuke a country for hacking into the state’s computers?! Are these people serious?]
Those threats, Mr. Obama argued, could be deterred with ‘a series of graded options,’ a combination of old and new conventional weapons. ‘I’m going to preserve all the tools that are necessary in order to make sure that the American people are safe and secure,’ he said in the interview in the Oval Office.
White House officials said the new strategy would include the option of reconsidering the use of nuclear retaliation against a biological attack, if the development of such weapons reached a level that made the United States vulnerable to a devastating strike.”

Today’s GOP is too dim to double check their lust for blood against what their oracle Ronald Reagan would have preached. This via Andrew Sullivan:

“A Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And no matter how great the obstacles may seem, we must never stop our efforts to reduce the Weapons of war. We must never stop at all until we see the day when Nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this Earth.”
– Ronald Reagan , 1984, in China.

Updated: Karzai Crazy, Or So The US Says

Foreign Policy, Israel, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Old Right, Terrorism, War

Afghan President Hamid Karzai must be crazy, or at least hopping high, to kick back at the empire that created him. These are what supposedly serious pundits are saying in response to Karzai’s allegation that Western governments and the United Nations committed electoral fraud in last year’s Afghani presidential election.

The Hill: “Over the weekend, Karzai reportedly told members of his parliament that he would consider leaving the political process to join the Taliban if he continued to come under outside pressure.”

The last threat was so obviously tongue in cheek, but Americans didn’t find it amusing. Peter Galbraith, “the US diplomat who worked for the UN in Kabul until last year,” went on Smear TV accusing the leader of our Afghan satellite state of being unstable and toking it up too.

It’s a “bad trip” indeed.

I haven’t searched out reactions on the far- Left and Right to this hint from Kabul that the US has overstayed its welcome. These political factions, however, generally treat shows of Israeli sovereignty with fury and demands for Obama to crush Israel.

My guess is that you should look for the exact opposite reaction from said elements when it comes to our “Muslim allies.”

Since consistency is the touchstone of truth, this scribe is pleased about both Afghani and Israeli resistance to US meddling:

“Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane American foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, Israel included, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.”

Update (April 8): Meanwhile back in the trenches on the side of the righteous, a US “Special Forces team gunned down an Afghan police chief, a prosecutor, and three unarmed women, infuriating locals and drawing a sharp rebuke from politicians in Kabul.”

AND (via the CSM):

In a video conference taking questions from troops earlier this year, McChrystal said with some frustration “we’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not, in fact, threats. In February, McChrystal apologized to the Afghan people after a NATO airstrike killed 27 civilians.

A scene of “Sulcha” unflods in which an animal is sacrificed and American slobber, and the only words that are sensible and honorable come from a local man, Mr. Sharabuddin:

“… justice would only be served when the Americans gave up the informant who sent the Special Forces squad to raid a house full of civilians and government officials. ‘We want that spy who gave the false information to the Americans,’ Mr. Sharabuddin said. ‘I don’t want the spy for myself, I want him to face justice or be handed over to the commander of the [Afghan army] corps.”

Iraq Wants What … Saddam Provided

Bush, Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Neoconservatism, War

The poor Iraqis have bought what our crooked politicians and theirs have impressed upon them with the aid of smart bombs and a lot of suffering: If you brave bombs and ink a ballot, you’ve struck a blow for freedom.

Freedom is the exact opposite. “Casting a vote to give someone power does not make a man free; freedom is the knowledge that even if one abstains from that ritual, nobody can exercise power over one’s life, liberty, and property.”

In Iraq, ink and blood stains mingle, just like the Jacobins like it. Elections yesterday left Iraq 40 people short—they died for democracy by improvised bombs. “Authorities in Baghdad announced a curfew,” which Americans, the public and the pols, do not consider a limitation on liberty given the monumental importance of the act of voting.

AND LISTEN TO THIS:

About 6,200 candidates from more than 80 political entities are vying for seats. [Read: a steady income from the USA] At least a quarter of the positions — 82 — are guaranteed to go to women, and eight more have been allocated for minorities. [We’ve Americanized them: they abide by quotas; yippee.] They include five set aside for Christians and one each for the Shabak, Sabaeans (Mandaeans), and Yazidis.

With so many candidates fighting to get in on the political game, no wonder “the leading political parties are expected to take until late spring or even summer to strike the bargains needed to form a coalition government.“

STRONG CONTENDERS ARE “Maliki’s State of Law alliance, former prime minister Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya party, or the Iraq National Alliance, which includes Ahmed Chalabi and radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr. … The two main Kurdish parties and a breakaway Kurdish group are expected to be a key part of any coalition.” [McClatchy]

Chalabi, right-hand man to the neoconservatives in their push for war in 2003, is striking another blow for freedom. He heads the “Justice and Accountability Commission, tasked with purging Baathists from political life.” It has “barred hundreds of candidates from running in these elections.” Way to go.

So what do The People want from the hordes of politicians they are electing?

CNN’s most excellent Arwa Damon took the popular pulse:

“We want basic services (like water and electricity) and jobs for our husbands and children,” Umm Rasha told CNN at a campaign rally in central Baghdad.
“And someone to deal with the displaced people, the retirees, and the widows,” her sister Umm Hassan chimes in. … “We want stability … security,” said a young man who didn’t want to be named. “Even now, there are still kidnappings and bombings.”

Essentially impoverished traumatized Iraqi’s, whom one can forgive for wanting so much from the state, crave what Americans extract from their social democracy—and what Saddam provided to a greater degree than the Obama/Bush approved goons.

If the state is going to provide, it must also control.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

Under the socialist Ba?th Party, the economy was dominated by the state, with strict bureaucratic controls and centralized planning. Between 1987 and 1990 the economy liberalized somewhat in an attempt to encourage private investment

Although Saddam’s judiciary was relatively independent, “The political system, however, operated with little reference to constitutional provisions, and from 1979 to 2003 President Saddam Hussein wielded virtually unlimited power.”

But before the radical G. I. Jacobins arrived in 2003, Iraq was undergoing slow, evolutionary progress, much like in Iran—:

In 1989 a committee was set up to draft a new, more democratic constitution, which would extend the power of the National Assembly and permit the formation of new political parties. A draft constitution was prepared and approved by the National Assembly in 1990 …

During Saddam HEALTH AND WELFARE were heaven on earth; it’s something Iraqis want but are now without:

Between 1958 and 1991 health care was free, welfare services were expanded, and considerable sums were invested in housing for the poor and for improvements to domestic water and electrical services. Almost all medical facilities were controlled by the government, and most physicians were (and still are) employed by the Ministry of Health. Shortages of medical personnel were felt only in rural areas. Cities and towns had good hospitals, and clinics and dispensaries served most rural areas. Still, Iraq had a high incidence of infectious diseases such as malaria and typhoid, caused by rural water supplies contaminated largely by periodic flooding. Substantial progress, however, was made in controlling malaria. … After 2003 the health care system relied heavily on donations from abroad and the efforts of international aid organizations.

What do you know? Saddam’s socialist Ba’ath regime had a little more than K to 12. Darn dem Arabs:

Britannica again: “The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research have been responsible for the rapid expansion of education since the 1958 revolution. The number of qualified scientists, administrators, technicians, and skilled workers in Iraq traditionally has been among the highest in the Middle East. Education at all levels is funded by the state.”

* Iraq. (2008). Encyclopædia Britannica. Deluxe Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica.