Tag Archives: American interventionism

Tulsi Gabbard’s Chance to Make the Race About the Wars, by Scott Horton

Posted on July 30, 2019 | 1 comment

The big flaw in Tulsi Gabbard’s antiwar stance is that she still believes in something called the war on terrorism. From Scott Horton at antiwar.com:

Tulsi Gabbard, U.S. Representative from Hawaii, is running for president. She’s one of the only Democrats in the race who says anything meaningful or interesting about foreign policy. Unlike the rest of them, she’s decided to make it the center of her campaign.

Gabbard was for Iraq War II before she was against it, serving two tours overseas during the war, one at Balad air base north of Baghdad and another in Kuwait. But she has done the very best thing she could do with that experience, and that is to use it to cover her right flank from hawks’ criticism about “weakness” while demanding retrenchment in the name of her colleagues in the Hawaii National Guard, where she is still an active duty major, and other U.S. military personnel.

The idiots on cable news are terrified of her. The U.S. population now regrets the terror wars by super-majorities. Veterans of the wars themselves agree – and the wars are not even over yet! Then here comes an attractive, credentialed candidate for high office saying exactly what is not supposed to be said – it doesn’t have to be this way – and right where the American people can hear it.

If and when she gets a chance at her Ron Paul moment, like what happened when Paul tangled with Rudy Guiliani about the motives of the September 11th hijackers back in 2007, it could change everything for the campaign and finally give the American people another chance to argue about what is really going on here.

That is why Gabbard needs to step it up right now. She needs to draw a line in the sand on her antiwar position and demand the others pick their side of it. How will the world know that war and peace is up for a vote this time around if she doesn’t take the initiative and make sure that it is? It’s true that she talks about it in her appearances all the time, and she did a pretty good job of beating up on that reflexive hawk, Tim Ryan, over Afghanistan in the last debate.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, History, Military, Politics, War

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True Budget Hawks are Foreign Policy Doves, by Ron Paul

Posted on July 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

One great way the US government could dramatically cut expenses would be for it to completely realign its interventionist policies to noninterventionist policies. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

During my presidential campaigns, well-meaning supporters would sometimes suggest I stop emphasizing opposition to overseas intervention and focus on fiscal issues. I disregarded the advice, not only because adopting a noninterventionist foreign policy is crucial to restoring constitutional government but because it is impossible to be both a budget hawk and a war hawk. This is shown by the constant failure of so-called fiscal conservatives in the Republican leadership to fulfill their promise to cut spending.

Military spending is the second largest category of spending in the federal budget, behind Social Security spending. The US military budget equals the combined budgets of the next seven biggest-spending countries. Yet, many Republicans who claim to want to reduce federal spending want to increase the military budget.

Many Republicans also prioritize protecting the military-industrial complex over reducing spending on welfare and entitlement programs. This makes them eager to agree to a deal giving Democrats almost all of their welfare wish list as long as Republicans get almost all of their warfare wish list. Many Republicans do not have a principled objection to the welfare state; they just think Democrats want to spend too much on welfare and not enough in warfare. Many Democrats find increasing warfare spending acceptable; they just think Republicans want to overspend on warfare and underspend on welfare.

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Posted in Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Imperialism, Military

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We’re Not the Good Guys, by Tom Engelhardt

Posted on July 3, 2019 | Leave a comment

It’s always other nations that do “aggressive” things, never the US. From Tom Engelhardt at tomdispatch.com:

Why Is American Aggression Missing in Action?

Headlined “U.S. Seeks Other Ways to Stop Iran Shy of War,” the article was tucked away on page A9 of a recent New York Times. Still, it caught my attention. Here’s the first paragraph:

“American intelligence and military officers are working on additional clandestine plans to counter Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf, pushed by the White House to develop new options that could help deter Tehran without escalating tensions into a full-out conventional war, according to current and former officials.”

Note that “Iranian aggression.” The rest of the piece, fairly typical of the tone of American media coverage of the ongoing Iran crisis, included sentences like this: “The C.I.A. has longstanding secret plans for responding to Iranian provocations.” I’m sure I’ve read such things hundreds of times without ever really stopping to think much about them, but this time I did. And what struck me was this: rare is the moment in such mainstream news reports when Americans are the “provocative” ones (though the Iranians immediately accused the U.S. military of just that, a provocation, when it came to the U.S. drone its Revolutionary Guard recently shot down either over Iranian air space or the Strait of Hormuz). When it comes to Washington’s never-ending war on terror, I think I can say with reasonable confidence that, in the past, the present, and the future, the one phrase you’re not likely to find in such media coverage will be “American aggression.”

I mean, forget the history of the second half of the last century and all of this one so far. Forget that back in the Neolithic age of the 1980s, before Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein turned out to be the new Adolf Hitler and needed to be taken down by us (no aggression there), the administration of President Ronald Reagan actively backed his unprovoked invasion of, and war against, Iran. (That included his use of chemical weapons against Iranian troop concentrations that American military intelligence helped him target.) Forget that, in 2003, the administration of George W. Bush launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, based on false intelligence about Saddam’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and his supposed links to al-Qaeda. Forget that the Trump administration tore up a nuclear agreement with Iran to which that country was adhering and which would indeed have effectively prevented it from producing nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future. Forget that its supreme leader (in fatwas he issued) prohibited the creation or stockpiling of such weaponry in any case.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, War

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