Bulletin

Have You Seen This Man?

An American-born man, Barack Hussein Obama, is wanted for questioning in connection with the continuing destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia, and genocide in Yemen. He's regarded as extremely dangerous and is at all times accompanied by heavily armed men. He may be wearing a Nobel Peace Prize medal.

If you see him, exercise caution.

Do not call the authorities.

Cruz and Rubio: Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism

I see no point splitting hairs over whether Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the more egregious warmonger. Both love the bloody and costly U.S. empire. Both believe in American exceptionalism. (Rubio arrogantly calls for a "New American Century.") Both want to make war in the Middle East (and beyond) and "stand behind Israel," though such policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. Both want to pour money into the military, as though America were militarily threatened. (The U.S. military budget equals the budgets of the next seven highest spending nations.) Both want to prevent detente with Iran, which poses no danger. Both hype terrorism as an existential threat. Both want the government to spy on Americans, especially Muslim Americans. Both want to "control the border," code for violating the natural right of people to move freely and make better lives without government permission.

TGIF: The Season of Peace Requires Action Not Songs

It's the time of year when people sing about peace and goodwill. Unfortunately in the United States, too little thought accompanies the nice words. Otherwise Americans would be in the streets demanding that President Obama shut down the war machine. They would also be repudiating every presidential candidate who endorses the fundamentals of America's criminal foreign policy, and that means every presidential contender in the major parties. Each one of them thinks it's the U.S. government's obligation to destroy ISIS (which it helped create), and most of them think -- contradictorily -- that Americans should overthrow the Syrian government, even though massive noncombatant casualties would result, fanatics would benefit, and neither ISIS nor Bashar al-Assad pose an existential threat to our society.

That Was Then

"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

--Candidate Obama, 2008

TGIF: The Wickedness of Foreign Policy

If you want to see how inhumane people can be, just watch those who make and execute foreign policy. We could spend all day discussing the cruelties that politicians and bureaucrats commit against people who live inside the United States. Think how many are caged like wild animals because they manufacture, sell, or consume disapproved substances; gamble where government has forbade it; traded sexual services for money; possessed a gun they weren't "supposed" to possess; etc. ad infinitum. Naturally, America leads the world in locking up people.

Another Iranian Non-Threat

This image tweeted by Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has a lot of people upset. Is it supposed to be Barack Obama holding a gun to his own head?

What if it is? The picture is hardly threatening or aggressive in any way. After all, it's not a picture of Khamenei holding a gun to Obama's head.

And look at the text:

We welcome no war, nor do we initiate any war, but if any war happens, the one who will emerge loser will be the aggressive and criminal U.S.

That is not aggressive in the least. On the contrary, it rejects war. Who's been threatening war against whom? The U.S. government (along with Israel) has been threatening war against Iran. Even after the nuclear agreement was signed, Secretary of War Ash Carter reiterated that war against Iran is still an option. So all Khamenei is saying is that if the U.S. government starts a war, it will lose. It will be as though Obama had pointed a gun at himself and pulled the trigger.

In the past, Iran's pledges to retaliate if attacked have always been presented by the news media and politicians as though they were threats to initiate war. This is happening again.

When will the media and the hack politicians be straight with the public? Iran has threatened to attack no one, but the U.S. and Israeli governments, both with nuclear weapons, routinely threaten to attack Iran. Who is the criminal?

King John Might Envy President Obama

King John of England, who 800 years ago this week was forced at Runnymede to affix his Great Seal to Magna Carta -- which at least in theory subordinated his power to law -- might have envied President Obama.

Sure, Obama also pays lip service to idea that the executive is subject to law. But what happens when he acts like an autocrat? Nothing. King John had to contend with rebellious barons who resisted his taxes to finance losing wars and other impositions. Obama has no effective opposition to contend with. He is free to fight wars as he pleases, never worrying that he might be deprived of the revenues he needs to engage in his far-flung killing.

We like to believe we’ve come a long way in those 800 years, but in important respects we have not. We’ve regressed, not the least in the sense that people no longer show an interest in resisting tyranny even through nonviolent noncooperation.

Observe what Obama is up to in the Middle East.

Marissa Taylor and Jonathan Landay of McClatchy recently noted, “As U.S. military operations against the Islamic State approach the one-year mark, the White House has failed to give Congress and the public a comprehensive written analysis setting out the legal powers that President Barack Obama is using to put U.S. personnel in harm’s way in Iraq and Syria.”

That’s right. Obama has been at war with the Islamic State for a year, and his administration won’t even do us the courtesy of spelling out his legal authority in detail. Lately, Obama has been intensifying his intervention in the areas that were formerly part of Syria and Iraq. He’s setting up a new base in Iraq’s Anbar province, which the Islamic State largely holds, and he’s increased the number of so-called advisers and trainers. The force that we know of is up to about 3,500.

Obama has not been totally silent about his legal authority. “The only document the White House has provided to a few key lawmakers comprises four pages of what are essentially talking points, described by those who’ve read them as shallow and based on disputed assertions of presidential authority,” Taylor and Landay write (emphasis added). Note: "to a few key lawmakers" -- not to the public. I suppose the administration doesn’t want us to worry our little heads over this.

Taylor and Landay speculate that “by not setting out its legal case in public documents, Obama may be trying to preserve his flexibility to authorize new operations against the Islamic State or other extremist groups elsewhere, unfettered by constraints that could be imposed by Congress.”

Yet again, Obama sinks beneath George W. Bush. At first Obama invoked the allegedly inherent war powers of the presidency, ignoring the Constitution’s delegation of the war power to Congress. (Important figures in early American history, notably John Quincy Adams, regretted that clause.) Then Obama claimed the 2001 and 2002 resolutions authorizing military force in Afghanistan (against those who carried out the 9/11 attacks) and Iraq as authority. But this has been ably rebutted by various people, who point out that the Islamic State is an enemy of, not associated with, al-Qaeda; had nothing to do with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein; and did not even emerge until long after those resolutions were passed.

To complicate things, while Obama asked for congressional affirmation, he claimed he could legally fight his war without it. Congress’s ineptitude in getting itself together on the question, with Democrats and Republicans having different reasons for not coalescing, suits Obama just fine.

Of course, what the country needs is not a declaration of war from Congress, but a demand that Obama stop fighting wars without it. Fat chance of that happening, though. Few members of Congress want the responsibility of blocking a war.

Obama’s rationalization for autocratic military action is a license for unchecked global war. And that’s what we’ve seen throughout his tenure in the White House. His administration brags that airstrikes recently killed terrorist leaders in Libya (maybe), where Obama helped overthrow a government four years ago, and Yemen, where Obama ordered even American citizens killed.

Where are the protests? Where are the organized tax strikes? King John would be green with envy.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog "Free Association" and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society.

The Emperor Lies

Four years ago the late great journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, “Alas, the actual story of ‘our history’ is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America’s superior moral worth.”

It so happens he wrote that sentence in closing a column on President Obama’s elaborate story about the Navy SEALs’ May 2, 2011, assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Obama Still Does a Good Imitation of Bush

We really should be used to this by now. After almost six years in office, President Obama is far more like George W. Bush in national-security matters than he led the American people to believe.

For example, the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports that Obama has yet to decide whether the international ban on torture applies to U.S. government conduct outside the United States.

Read it here.

Liar, Liar!

Calling President Obama's ISIS plan a "counterterrorism operation" is a lie to pacify the American public. ISIS is not a terrorist group (though it's capable using terrorism as a tactic.). It's a nonstate conquering army that is taking and holding territory in order to build a formal state.

P.S.: If Obama really thought ISIS presented a significant threat to Americans at home, would he rule out sending ground troops?

Press TV Interview

Press TV interviewed me about U.S. policy toward Ukraine. You can listen here.

TGIF: Trivial Dispute: Obama Versus the Interventionists

American politics is largely a series of debates over unimportant details. These debates are conducted far above the fundamental level because the supposed contenders share the same premises. Where they disagree is at the level of application, and so the disagreements end up being fairly minor, especially if you think the premises are wrong.

This is an especially pronounced feature of what passes for foreign-policy debate within the accepted range of opinion.

TGIF is here.

Op-ed: Obama Plays with Fire in Ukraine

How many American parents would proudly send their sons and daughters off to kill or be killed in Slovyansk or Donetsk? How many young men and women aspire to be the first American to fall in Kramatorsk?

Read it here.

TGIF: Obama's Iraqi Fairy Tale

One need not condone Vladimir Putin’s ham-handedness to see that Obama has no leg to stand on when he contrasts Russia’s essentially bloodless and provoked annexation of Crimea with America’s unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq. Unfortunately, the Americans who committed this cold-blooded mass murder and societal destruction are less likely to face justice than Putin is for his crimes in, say,Chechnya.

Read the full TGIF.

Well, Mr. Obama?

Vladimir Putin acknowledges that Russia has been an empire Why can't Barack Obama do the same for America?

Op-ed: Obama Should Steer Clear of Ukraine

President Obama insists he does not regard the conflict in Ukraine “as some Cold War chessboard in which we are in competition with Russia.”

He’d be more credible if he were not following his predecessors in acting as though the Cold War still exists. Although the Soviet empire, including its Warsaw Pact alliance, disbanded beginning in 1989, Republican and Democratic presidents have pursued aggressively anti-Russian policies up to the present.

Read it all here.

Finally Something to Admire in Obama

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes in his new book, Duty, that Barack Obama was suspicious of the senior military leadership. Finally! A quality in Obama I share and admire!

Does He Listen to Himself?

If Barack Obama really "welcome[s] the debate" on the surveillance state, why is his administration pulling out all the stops to find the leaker who's making that debate possible?

TGIF: The Lie Factory

Obama says things are going well in Afghanistan. He lies.
Read all about it.

Op-ed Obama's Willful Foreign-Policy Blindness

Here's my take on Barack Obama's May 23 major foreign-policy address.

For more on the phony nature of the speech and alleged policy changes, see William Saletan's unmaking.