Justin Raimondo – The Burning Platform

A Campaign Of Blatant, Self-Serving Lies——–The U.S. Army’s Propaganda War On Russia And For Bigger Budgets

In early April, a battalion of senior military officials appeared before a Senate panel and testified that the US Army is “outranged and outgunned,” particularly in any future conflict with Russia. Arguing for a much bigger budget for the Army, they claimed that, absent a substantial increase in funding, the Russians would overtake us and, even scarier, “the army of the future will be too small to secure the nation.”

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! And before you know it, Brooklyn will be renamed Putingrad.

Of course it was pure coincidence that, shortly after these alarm bells were rung, a piece appeared in Politico magazine purportedly showing that the Russians were breathing down our necks: it revealed a “secret study” – revealed for the first time! – that supposedly detailed Russia’s deadly new capabilities as demonstrated in Ukraine. Included in this potpourri of propaganda was the assertion by none other than Gen. Wesley Clark, former presidential candidate and well-known Russophobe, that Moscow had developed a tank that is for all intents and purposes “invulnerable.”

Perhaps embarrassed by what seemed like an exercise in inter-service internecine warfare, Politico recently ran an article by Mark Perry throwing new light on what is really going on here. Citing senior military figures, Perry’s piece threw a rhetorical hand grenade into the Army’s argument:

“’This is the ‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army,’ the senior Pentagon officer said. ‘These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.’”

Continue reading “A Campaign Of Blatant, Self-Serving Lies——–The U.S. Army’s Propaganda War On Russia And For Bigger Budgets”

The Oligarchy Is Tottering – Trump Tramples The Neocons’ “False Song Of Globalism”

Submitted by Justin Raimondo via AntiWar.com,

The reaction to GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s much-awaited foreign policy speechfrom the Washington elites was all-too-predictable: they sneered and snickered that he had mispronounced “Tanzania.” The more substantive criticisms weren’t much better: perpetual warmonger Lindsey Graham, whose presidential bid garnered zeropercent in the polls, tweeted “Trump’s FP speech not conservative. It’s isolationism surrounded by disconnected thought, demonstrates lack of understanding threats we face.” For Graham, anything less than starting World War III is “isolationism” – a view that gives us some insight into why his presidential campaign was the biggest flop since the “new” Coke. This is the party line of neoconservatives who have long dominated Republican foreign policy orthodoxy, to the GOP’s detriment. Neocon character assassin Jamie Kirchick, writing in the European edition of Politico, put a new gloss on it by claiming to detect a Vast Kremlin Conspiracy as the animating spirit behind the Trump campaign.

Which just goes to show that having Roy Cohn as your role model can lead one down some pretty slimy rabbit holes. I guess that’s why the editors of Politico put Kirchick’s smear piece in the European edition, where hardly anyone will read it, saving a more reasonable analysis by Jacob Heilbrunn for the US version. (Although, to be sure, apiece by neocon-friendly Michael Crowley limns the same McCarthyite theme inPolitico’s magazine.)

Heilbrunn is the editor of The National Interest, publication of the Nixon Center, which has been a sanctuary for the outnumbered – but now rising – “realist” school of foreign policy analysts. The Trump speech was sponsored by TNI, and Heilbrunn gave a very interesting if somewhat defensive explanation for the motives behind their invitation to Trump, succinctly summarizing its significance:

Continue reading “The Oligarchy Is Tottering – Trump Tramples The Neocons’ “False Song Of Globalism””

Hillary Clinton’s Road to War

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo

She’s the Democratic version of Chris Christie and Marco Rubio combined

Hillary Clinton promised us a speech on what she’d do to destroy ISIS, but what she gave us was a speech detailing how she would destroy Syria – and drag the US down the road to another unwinnable war. What she essentially proposes is that we fight a three-sided battle – against ISIS, on the one hand, and against Bashar al-Assad, Russia, and Iran on the other.

She elaborated on her “no-fly zone” scheme, saying she wanted to set it up only in the north. This means not only that the US air force will be protecting the “moderate” Syrian rebels – a coalition of US-supported head-choppers and al-Nusra, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda – but also preventing Russian warplanes from flying over the huge swath of territory in the north controlled by the Islamic State – including Raqqa, their capital. So how does she intend to keep Putin out of the skies over Raqqa – by shooting down Russian planes, Chris Christie-style?

Signaling that her main focus is still overthrowing Assad, rather than fighting ISIS, Clinton averred that Putin is “making things somewhat worse.” Yet the Russians have been pulverizing ISIS, pushing them back on every front – and there is evidence that the terrorists’ increasing desperation in the face of this merciless onslaught provoked the Paris attacks. The snake lashes out one more time before it is decapitated. Francois Hollande seems to understand the importance of enlisting Russia in the anti-ISIS coalition, but Hillary is intransigent on the subject of Assad, thus ruling out any real cooperation with Moscow.

Incredibly, Clinton called for another “Arab Awakening,” signaling that under her reign the US will continue to play the “Sunni card,” arming the “moderate” Islamist rebels, and even encouraging insurrection among Iraqi Sunnis and Kurdish ultra-nationalists. “Baghdad needs to accept, even embrace, arming Sunni and Kurdish forces in the war against ISIS,” she declared. “But if Baghdad won’t do that, the coalition should do so directly.”

Continue reading “Hillary Clinton’s Road to War”

‘We Can’t Have Perpetual War’: The Realism of Rand Paul

Guest post by Justin Raimondo

Senator Rand Paul is everywhere: campaigning for Republican candidates during the crucial midterm elections, on Fox News explaining to Hannity why going into Iraq with ground troops is a mistake, teaming up with Cory Booker to call for reform of federal sentencing guidelines – and, as Olivia Nuzzi points out, the media is scrutinizing his every word as if he were already the GOP presidential nominee. When he gave his much-anticipated foreign policy speech to the Center for the National Interest, reporters were live-tweeting it as they would a presidential inaugural. And, unlike earlier media frenzies over such nonentities as Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman, and Chris “close the bridge” Christie, this level of attention is surely warranted.

Not since the days of Senator Robert A. Taft – another somewhat aloof, irascible, and highly intelligent GOP presidential wannabe – has the Eastern Republican establishment faced such an articulate and calculating challenger. And what annoys – and, now, frightens – GOP mandarins the most is Sen. Paul’s challenge to their failed foreign policy, which has given us so many years of bloodshed and misery, along with a multi-trillion bill we cannot possibly pay.

He started out taking some easy shots, reminding Francis Fukuyama that “history has not ended” – no kidding – and doing a little bit of pandering, albeit not to the people in the room. Russia, he averred, “slides backward vainly hoping to resurrect the Soviet Union” – a view not shared by many writers for The National Interest, who have mostly resisted Washington’s fashionable Russophobia. But this was just part of his Obama’s-foreign-policy-is-going-to-pot riff: also included was a vague warning about “the remarkable rise” of China’s “one-party state capitalism,” and, in the Middle East, the “rise of radical jihadist movements” who “represent the antithesis of liberal democracy.”

Seeking to explain these unsettling phenomena, the Senator attributes them (“in part”) to Washington’s failure to precisely define our national security interest in a new era:

“Our allies and our enemies are unsure where America stands. Until we develop the ability to distinguish, as George Kennan put it, between vital interests and more peripheral interests, we will continue to drift from crisis to crisis.”

Although I’m not sure how China’s rise can be at all attributed to anything having to do with Washington, Sen. Paul’s point is clear enough – especially as our current regime stumbles into Iraq War III, with no clear strategy or, for that matter, a believable rationale.

Paul’s peroration should dispel for all time the canard, spread by both John McCain and the tiny sectarian wing of the libertarian movement, that the Senator is compromising his anti-interventionist principles in the vain hope of getting a date with Jennifer Rubin. After the above-mentioned preliminaries, he strikes a theme continually repeated throughout:

“Americans want strength and leadership but that doesn’t mean they see war as the only solution. Reagan had it right when he spoke to potential adversaries: ‘Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will.’”

Citing “the tragedies of Iraq and Libya” – and let us stop here, for a moment, and acknowledge the wondrousness of a candidate considered the Republican frontrunner describing George W. Bush’s war as a tragedy – Paul lets the War Party have it:

“America shouldn’t fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate. America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory. America shouldn’t fight wars that aren’t authorized by the American people, by Congress.”

Shouldn’t – don’t – think about it real hard: this is the woof and warp of the “conservative realism” the Senator espouses. But realism isn’t pacifism: indeed, it’s quite the opposite, as Sen. Paul makes clear:

“America should and will fight wars when the consequences….intended and unintended….are worth the sacrifice. The war on terror is not over, and America cannot disengage from the world.”

Even as he acknowledges the limits of the anti-interventionist impulse in an age of terrorism, you’ll note how the Senator also acknowledges what his warlike colleagues in Washington rarely admit: that even justified wars – i.e. defensive wars – are fraught with unpleasant possibilities. And while retaining – and emphasizing – his default opposition to overseas adventurism, he’s intellectually honest enough to admit that while “blowback” accounts for some degree of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, it surely isn’t the whole story.

Despite the threat inflation indulged in by the usual neocon suspects, there is indeed an enduring threat from an international jihadist movement that aims its main blow at the “far enemy,” i.e. the continental United States. Sen. Paul points to a RAND corporation study claiming “a 58 percent increase over the last three years in jihadist terror groups.”

Here’s where Paul’s vision starts to cloud over: proliferation of jihadist groups could be a sign either of weakness or of increasing strength, depending on whether it’s due to ideological splits or geographic extension. Falling back on the standard evocation of Ronald Reagan, Paul cites the Great Helmsman as saying ‘we will act” if we have to “preserve our national security.”

Simultaneously citing Reagan and an undefined concept of “national security” is the foreign policy equivalent of ordering combination plate #1 Chinese takeout: faced with the problem of deciphering the unknown, it’s always safe to go with what you think you know.

The problem is that what Sen. Paul and his advisors think they know about the “why do they hate us?” question isn’t exactly clear. “Will they hate us if we are less present?” asks Paul, whose speechwriters have developed the slightly dotty tic of having the Senator appear to be talking to himself. “Perhaps,” answers Paul’s invisible doppelganger, “but hatred for those outside the circle of ‘accepted’ Islam, exists above and beyond our history of intervention overseas.”

This is downright confusing. The phrase “outside the circle of ‘accepted Islam’” clearly refers to the internal conflicts of “radical Islam,” so-called: the sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shia. Yet this has nothing to do with the question of our continuing presence in the region except insofar as that presence intensifies the internecine battle (as, perhaps, it’s intended to).

Things get even more confusing when, in his very next breath, Senator Paul’s nod to the essentialists – who argue Islam is inherently hostile to American interests – is rudely contradicted:

”The world does not have an Islam problem. The world has a dignity problem, with millions of men and women across the Middle East being treated as chattel by their own governments. Many of these same governments have been chronic recipients of our aid.”

So which is it – do we have an Islam problem or don’t we? Some confusion is inevitable when speeches are assembled by committees, rather than written by individuals, but in this case the Senator is in danger of exacerbating his growing reputation – perhaps unfairly acquired – as a champion flip-flopper. Nuance is fine, but it doesn’t win hearts and minds – or elections.

However, there is one aspect of Paul’s “dignity problem” thesis that, as far as I know, has been totally overlooked and yet seems clear as day.

Mocked by both neocons and our babbling sectarians for supposedly trying to appease the GOP’s Israel Firsters, Sen. Paul himself may or may not have been aware of just how much his description of the Middle East’s “dignity problem” conjures the Israeli occupation of Palestine – but whoever wrote those words surely did. Yes, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab kleptocracies have been recipients of US aid – but so has Israel, which does indeed treat its Palestinian subjects like chattel. The lack of specificity as to which countries are suffering from a dignity problem lends itself to my preferred interpretation – and I’m just waiting for Jenn Rubin to pick up on this, if she hasn’t already.

In spite of my impatience with nuance, I have to respect the Senator’s thoughtfulness when it comes to filling the Washington policy void when it comes to the Middle East. And it’s clear that in trying to strike a balance between necessary belligerence and an instinctive aversion to intervention, President Paul would lean toward the latter. This was underscored by his reference to Malala Yousafzai, the young girl who stood up to both the Taliban and an American President ordering drone strikes on her country: for every terrorist killed by the Western alliance, she told Obama, “500 and 5,000 rise against it and more terrorism occurs.”

“The truth is,” says Paul, “you can’t solve a dignity problem with military force.” Citing Secretary Robert Gates’s warning that our foreign policy is becoming “over-militarized,” the Senator got in a shot at John McCain and others eager to arm the “good’ Syrian Islamist rebels: “Yes,” Paul snarked, “we need a hammer ready, but not every civil war is a nail.” This is presumably true when it comes to Ukraine as well.

While I doubt quoting Otto von Bismarck to libertarians skeptical of Sen. Paul’s bonafides is going to win them over, it’s hard to contradict Paul’s view that “policy is the art of the possible.” And what’s possible, Paul avers, is “common sense conservative realism” which is, it turns out, a cancellation of the neoconservative project as enunciated by George W. Bush in his 2005 inaugural speech. With the neoconservative ascendancy in the GOP at its height, President Bush II ranted on about igniting “a fire in the mind” across the Middle East and indeed the whole world.

The conservative realism of President Paul, far from igniting any fires, would seek instead to tamp them down: “We can’t retreat from the world, but we can’t remake it in our own image either.”

Yes, Paul says, the war in Afghanistan was justified because the effort to deny Al Qaeda safe haven and bring Osama bin Laden to justice directly served American interests. He endorses the overthrow of the Taliban, but then proceeds to denounce the nation-building project undertaken by the Bush administration and continued by the Obamaites. Yet these two aspects of American policy are inseparable: once we decided to widen our war aims beyond narrowly targeting bin Laden & Co. Afghanistan was inevitably turned into a nation-building construction site.

In any case, in expressing his frustration with this outcome, Sen. Paul gives vent to some of his strongest dissent from the bipartisan interventionist consensus:

“After the killing of Bin Laden and the toppling of the Taliban, it is hard to understand our exact objective. Stalemate and perpetual policing seem to be our mission now in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. A precondition to the use of force must be a clear end goal. We can’t have perpetual war.”

We can’t have perpetual war: there, in a phrase, is “conservative realism” – and the basis for a successful appeal to Americans on both sides of the political spectrum to rein in the American empire.

Unfortunately, the Senator doesn’t leave it at that. Instead, he paves the way for perpetual war in Iraq by endorsing the first step down that road:

“I support a strategy of air strikes against ISIS. Our airpower must be used to rebalance the tactical situation in favor of the Kurds and Iraqis and to defend Americans and our assets in the region. Just as we should have defended our consulate in Benghazi, so too we must defend our consulate in Erbil and our embassy in Baghdad.”

To begin with, why is the United States the only power with “assets” in the region capable of launching air strikes against ISIS? Those elaborate weapons systems we sell the Saudis, the Jordanians, and the Gulf states surely ought to serve some purpose other than enriching our military-industrial-congressional complex. I can’t imagine why Sen. Paul is pretending he’s never asked this very same question himself.

Aside from the folly of encouraging the Kurds – and not revealing the exact nature of our other “assets” in the region – the absurdity of Paul’s argument culminates in the “we must defend our consulate/embassy” defense. This surely sets a new standard for US military intervention: is the Senator saying we should have bombed Tehran in response to the 1980 takeover of our embassy? Can he really be saying that anywhere we have a consulate we must commit ourselves to the military defense of the host nation? If so, that’s an awfully unrealistic position for an alleged “realist” to take.

Paul does a very good job of enunciating the core principles of a viable conservative realism: his big problem, however, is translating abstract ideas into credible and consistent policy options. And although this speech was supposed to be the Final Word on the question that’s been preoccupying the pundits and worrying the War Party – what would President Paul do in the Middle East, and what wouldn’t he do? – I rather doubt this is the last we’ll be hearing of it.

Anarchy in Washington: Is Anybody in Charge?

by Justin Raimondo on Contra Corner

The President pledges “no combat troops” in Iraq.

The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, says he may recommend combat ground troops in the battle against ISIS.

The President, in a speech, reiterates “no ground troops,” and “no combat troops.”

While Hillary Clinton, Obama’s presumptive heir, waits in the wings as her scheme to arm the Syrian rebels is implemented and the fuse is lit on the Levantine tinderbox. It isn’t a very long fuse….

So what is going on with the US government, and especially over at the Pentagon? Are they directly challenging the President – who is then acting to quickly quash them? Sure looks like it.

Amid reports of a titanic battle within the Obama administration, the conflicting messages being put out there by various wings of the national security establishment remind us of the Empire’s sheer size and the scale of the bureaucracy: it is large enough to constitute what are, in effect, competing governments – a condition statists of every variety always told us was unworkable.

In short, when it comes to the making of American foreign policy what we have in Washington is what appears to be the functional definition of anarchy! And the libertarians haven’t even taken over yet.

The mess that is the Obama plan for defeating ISIS perfectly illustrates the central dictum of what I call “libertarian realism” – a theory of international relations that attributes foreign policy decision-making to primarily domestic political pressures, i.e. to the chief motivation of politicians everywhere, which is to maintain and expand their own power and their own term in office. The result is that US policy – or, indeed, the foreign policy of any nation – has little to do with facts on the ground, or how to utilize them to serve legitimate national interests. Instead, it’s all about how to appease the various domestic pressure groups with a stake in the matter.

This is why war propaganda is such a vital component of modern warfare, arguably the most important weapon in any country’s arsenal. That’s because the real target is domestic public opinion, with the targeted cities of the enemy only a secondary consideration.

Left with the Iraqi mess he inherited from the Bush administration, President Obama had few viable options. Constrained by his own campaign promises and public opposition to any further fighting in Iraq, he is nevertheless confronted with the blowback – and his “plan” reflects the only possible means to deal with it within the theoretical framework of libertarian realism. The public opposes troops on the ground – and so the President sticks that in his “plan.” The political elites want to aid the Syrian rebels, so he sticks that in there, too. A general who knows better tells the country the truth: it will take ground troops to accomplish the mission. Yet the mission being accomplished is beside the point – because the real mission is winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s the battlefield this President – and every President – must fight on.

The Sunni-Shia civil war we encouraged throughout the region for our own purposes has now given birth to the monstrous ISIS, the Frankenstein creature that crawled out of the chaos we created. Like those scary mutations depicted in post-nuclear war movies, all scales and fangs, ISIS gibbers and glories in its monstrousness, doing for the War Party what Bill Kristol and his fellow neocons could never have pulled off by their own efforts. All it took was a few Youtube videos and the social media savvy of the ISIS public relations department.

Funny how that worked out, eh?

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Antiwar.com Original. To view original, click here.

Fruits Of Meddling In The Syrian Civil War: Washington’s Frankenstein Brigade

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo

The revelation by a spokesman for the family of Steven Sotloff, the second journalist beheaded by the Islamic State (ISIS), that Sotloff was “sold [to ISIS] for between $25–50,000,” by the US-supported “moderate” Free Syrian Army underscores the irony and absurdity of this moment. As the President gets ready to go to the American people and ask for their support in pursuing a military campaign in Iraq and Syria, how the principle of “blowback” operates should be clear to everyone – even Rudy Giuliani.

The “moderates” we have been funding, arming, and training for the past few years couldn’t have come up with a better plan to suck us into the Syrian quagmire. After crying “Wolf!” for so long – what with chemical attacks supposedly inflicted by the infinitely evil Bashar al-Assad, and other tall tales of dubious provenance – the rebels had lost all credibility. What to do? Desperate to increase the decibel level of calls for US military action in the region, they resorted to targeting the US media in hopes that the outrage generated would push the Americans into war.

And the ruse certainly seems to be working. That’s their battlefield, after all: the Syrian Mod Squad has never been an effective fighting force on the ground in Syria, but when it comes to dominating the Western media landscape they’ve been wildly successful. According to their many friends in the Fourth Estate, those lovable cuddly “moderate” Islamists wouldn’t hurt a flea – after all, they’ve been “vetted,” haven’t they?

What a grisly joke.

The immoderate kidnapping of Sotloff surely eviscerates the argument that we could’ve been spared the existence of ISIS if only we’d gone full bore in supporting the Syrian Free Army. Yes, if only we’d handed Syria over to them the way they handed Sotloff over to ISIS everything would be hunky dory. That makes sense – in Bizarro World.

Yet Bizarro World “logic” is exactly what has been determining US policy in the region ever since the “Arab Spring,” when the Obama administration decided to hop on board the “revolution,” co-opt all that energy, and use it to generate support for regime change throughout the region. The results have been an unmitigated disaster, to wit:

In Libya we overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, “liberating” the country with the help of – and at the urging of – our European allies. The Libyans expressed their gratitude by murdering our Ambassador, trashing our embassy, and plunging the country into Somali-like chaos.
In Egypt we backed a “moderate” Islamist regime, throwing longtime American sock-puppet Hosni Mubarrak overboard without so much as a by-your-leave – and wound up supporting an even worse “secular” military dictatorship.
In Syria, we plotted to overthrow another Gaddafi-like secular despot, aligning with those lovable “moderate” Islamists – many of whom would soon defect to ISIS, taking their US-supplied arsenal with them.

As I’ve said in this space from the beginning, ISIS has “Made in USA” stamped all over it – and I don’t mean that just figuratively. Yes, our wrong-headed policies have so alienated the Sunnis that they’ve resorted to supporting the fanatics of ISIS, but it’s worse than that. It is literally true that we armed, trained, and deployed these monsters – what we might call the Islamist Frankenstein Brigade – and now they’ve turned on us with a vengeance.

Well then, so what? So what if our crazy policy of empowering Islamist militias in Libya and overthrowing Assad in Syria led us to this horrific pass: the monster is rampaging over the entire region and we’ve got to act fast before it takes Baghdad – right?

Wrong. To begin with, contrary to US government officials and their media echo chamber, ISIS represents little threat to the continental US. If we can’t corral the few dozen Americans who’ve gone over there to fight on behalf of our self-proclaimed allies, the darling rebels, then where have the billions spent on “homeland security” gone?

The principal victims of ISIS are those who actually live in the region: the Syrians, the Iranians, and the Iraqis. The Turks and the Kurds have a lot to lose, too, if ISIS triumphs: so why not let them take care of the problem? Senator Rand Paul, in an interview with Sean Hannity, proposed exactly that:

“Right now, the two allies that have the same goal would be Iran and Syria, to wipe out ISIS. They also have the means, and the ability, and they also have the incentive to do so because [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad’s clinging for power and clinging for life there.”

What could make more sense? Yet it’s precisely because it’s the logical solution that it’s being ruled out of order. The well-known high “moral standards” of the US government absolutely forbid such a course: Assad, we are told, is “killing his own people.” He’s a monster, and even indirectly helping him maintain his power is impermissible – because, you see, “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend” is a Very Bad Principle to adopt because … well, just because. Not to mention the poor, persecuted Sunnis who will be “alienated” from us, and we just couldn’t have that, now could we? Far better to risk American lives, expend our resources, and bear the burden of empire alone, pure in our virtuous martyrdom.

Among the more incredible arguments along these lines is made by foreign policy maven Daniel Larison, who weaves a strange and entirely illogical theory around the idea that “Assad benefits from ISIS’ continued existence. As long as ISIS appears to be the main alternative to him and his regime in Syria, he is much more secure, and so at least in the short to medium term he has little reason to want them destroyed. One might think that he would have an incentive to destroy this group, but in practice he hasn’t been trying to do this.”

The fact of the matter is that there are no alternatives to Assad aside from ISIS. The kidnapping of Sotloff by the FSA and his quick transfer to the custody of ISIS proves they are operationally inseparable. After all, what is the so-called Free Syrian Army except for a vague collection of militias – Syria has over 1,500 of them! – of dubious loyalties loosely aligned with the radical Islamic Front – which, in turn, is close to Al Nusra, the official Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria. The fine distinctions drawn by deskbound analysts seem to evaporate into nothingness on the ground in Syria. Whatever differences exist between these factions and ISIS is down to turf, not ideology. The President himself told Tom Friedman that the idea of Syrian “moderates” among the rebel fighters is “a fantasy.” Does Larison know any better?

What’s really ludicrous is the notion that ISIS is thriving due to a sinister plot by the wily Assad, who is deliberating laying off his deadliest and most well-armed enemies because he somehow “needs” them. This is like keeping a pet rattlesnake because you want to get rid of the gophers. And where does Larison get the idea that “in practice” Assad’s forces have gone easy on ISIS – surely not from this, or this? Is Larison saying the Syrian army’s defeat at the battle of Raqqa was an inside job?

If ISIS wins, Assad’s is the first head to roll – and he knows it. And the Alawites, Christians, and other minorities will meet the same fate shortly afterwards, and they know it, too – which is why they support the Ba’athist regime as the only alternative at the moment.

No, we don’t have to ally with Assad – or the Iranians, for that matter – for them to deal effectively with our monstrous creations. We simply have to stand aside and watch as those states with a real stake in this fight are allowed to take aim and fire. In this case, inaction is the most effective act we can take: by stopping our support for the Syrian Islamists, we cut off a major source of support for ISIS – and leave Assad free to go after them hammer and tongs.

ISIS and its sympathizers worldwide would like nothing better than to lure us into another land war in the Middle East, one in which we would fare no better than we did last time around. Yet that is the only alternative to the Rand Paul strategy.

Speaking of Senator Paul, some who fear being dragged back into Iraq are now saying a few air strikes shouldn’t be out of the question. They are forgetting the first operating principle of any and all government programs, especially those of a military nature: the mission is constantly being expanded. A government agency that starts out regulating one specific area of life will invariably invade all other conceivably related realms of human activity. In the same way, and for the same reasons, a “limited” war – perhaps initially confined to the deployment of air power – is bound to expand in scope when victory proves elusive.

We are now being told this new war will take precisely three years to be prosecuted successfully – which seems like an extremely odd prognosis indeed. How do they know this – they who never saw ISIS coming? Of course it will take a lot longer than that if we pursue the strategy of fighting ISIS and Assad and doing our best to keep Iran out of it. For even if we do debilitate ISIS, another monster will arise from its ashes, perhaps even uglier and deadlier – and we return to our Sisyphean task.

Whether it’s three years, three months, or three centuries, Iraq War III – which is sure to encompass Syria, just as the Vietnam conflict enveloped Cambodia – promises to be an even worse disaster than the previous editions. Everyone who jumps on board this particular bandwagon is going to be leaping off sooner than they imagine – or else denying they were ever on it. So don’t say I didn’t warn you.

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Antiwar.com Original. To view original, click here.

Rick Perry, Neocon Tool

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo

His pathetic “comeback” is going to go nowhere – fast

The media hates Republicans, and so naturally they’re elevating Texas Governor Rick Perry to the status of a potential 2016 GOP presidential contender who must be taken seriously. After his last embarrassing run – embarrassing not only for him, but for the much-maligned state of Texas (see the video above) – one would think he’d put his presidential aspirations in the back of the garage, along with that Stairmaster he never uses. But no: dumber than a steer who’s been zapped by a cattle-prod and still won’t move, Perry is going along with the joke. He’s been busy lately inveigling himself into the good graces of those Republican grandees who think they can dictate whom the candidate will be. And he’s doing that by taking on the prospective candidate the GOP Establishment is determined to stop at any cost: Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).

This job was supposed to be left to former UN ambassador John Bolton, but given his almost nonexistent name recognition, his abrasive personality, his one percent base of support, and that distinctively Prussian mustache – for cryin’ out loud! – there’s some doubt Bolton could even make it into the presidential debates. So Perry is auditioning for the role of Rand’s designated nemesis – and if his recent op ed in the Washington Post is any indication, he’s doing as well at that as he did in that fatal 2011 debate – when he forgot what agencies he supposedly wants to abolish.

The first paragraph deploys the “isolationist” epithet twice, but it’s tempered by what can only be called appeasement: “I can understand the emotions behind isolationism,” he avers. “Many people are tired of war” – but Gov. Perry isn’t among them, as the rest of his piece makes clear. What’s interesting, though, is that he feels obligated to apologize for dissing those bad old “isolationists”: “Unfortunately,” he writes, ” we live in a world where isolationist policies would only endanger our nation even further.”

In a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone, Perry goes on to bewail how “disheartening” it is “to hear fellow Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), suggest that our nation should ignore what’s happening in Iraq. The main problem with this argument is that it means ignoring the profound threat that the group now calling itself the Islamic State poses to the United States and the world.”

So how and why is a group financed and run by our Saudi “allies” suddenly a threat that requires us going back to Iraq – a country 999 out of 1,000 Americans never want to hear of again? One expects to hear the old “safe haven” argument, which kept us in Afghanistan well beyond our expiration/exhaustion date, but no, Perry has come up with a new one: the They-Have-US-Passports argument. Not only is the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham [Syria] (ISIS) scarier than even al-Qaeda, according to Perry they are so “adept at recruitment” that they have “thousands of people with European passports fighting” in their ranks, “as well as some Americans.” So, you see, the threat to our precious bodily fluids emanates from the fact that “any of these passport carriers can simply buy a plane ticket and show up in the United States without even a visa.”

Does Perry think the feds don’t have a very clear idea of who these American jihadis are? Why oh why do we have this all-pervasive surveillance of the American people if not to pick out these individuals and put them on the terrorist watch list? Of course, that’s assuming the government is actually doing its real job rather than what we know they’re doing – which is spying on ordinary Americans for no good reason – but surely it would be far easier and much less costly to identify these potential culprits from a distance, as opposed to re-invading Iraq. Perry is the one screaming about the lack of border security, so presumably under his presidency (shudder!) this would become a top priority.

Perry’s lame argument gives way to an extended discussion of just what Ronald Reagan would do in this situation, a ritual performed by every GOP presidential aspirant as a matter of course. Yet Perry’s version of what a Reaganite foreign policy transplanted into today’s world would look like elides the entire history of how the cold war actually ended: in negotiations rather than confrontation, as Reagan signed a nuclear disarmament treaty, hailed glasnost and perestroika, and was denounced by some of the very same neocons who are now giving Perry such bad foreign policy advice.

Last time around the GOP presidential racetrack, Perry conferred “for hours” with Douglas Feith, former defense secretary for policy at the height of the Iraq war, as well as Bill Luti, whose “Office of Special Plans” during Feith’s tenure manufactured “talking points” that made it what Mother Jones magazine called “the lie factory.” As the chief source of those lies, Ahmed Chalabi, came under investigation for being an Iranian double agent, Feith hurriedly resigned rather than face the music.

Perry’s problem is that this horse is too lame to run. Indeed, hoping my readers will let me stretch the equine analogy to its limit: if neoconservative foreign policy can be likened to a racehorse, this one would’ve been put out of its misery long ago. Saddled with the Feith-Luti gang, the Perry-for-President bandwagon is going to be stuck in the mud at the opening bell. The reason is because Americans aren’t just tired of war, as Perry admits – they’re tired of the warmongers, i.e. the same all-too-familiar neocons who lied us into Iraq the last time.

One almost has to feel sorry for Perry, who can’t seem to stop embarrassing himself: his “argument” for intervening in Iraq is so contradictory that he winds up pulling back at the end of his op ed. He stupidly brings up the “red line” – the one Obama said he was drawing around Syria’s chemical weapons – and attacks the President for using it as a “rhetorical device rather than a promise of action.” The problem for Perry is that the American people were horrified at the “promise of action” in Syria and rose up as one to demand that the President drop his plans to bomb. Obama wanted to act, the political class was chomping at the bit to act, but ordinary everyday Americans said “No!” – and Obama wisely drew back. Just like Perry does in the latter half of his op ed:

“There are no good options in Iraq or Syria. The window to shape events for the better passed years ago. The lousy choices we face today are the price of failed leadership. Nonetheless, the president can and must do more with our military and intelligence communities to help cripple the Islamic State. Meaningful assistance can include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sharing and airstrikes.”

So it’s too late to charge in there guns blazing, and we can blame everything on Obama. “Nonetheless” we can do something – which just happens to be exactly what Rand Paul has come out in favor of. For far from advocating “inaction,” the junior Senator from Kentucky has indeed said he’s for using our “hi tech” military to do everything Perry wants us to do – he’s even said he “would not rule out” air strikes.

Perry’s argument is cowardice standing in fear of itself: he doesn’t dare come out and say we need to send ground troops back to Iraq, although his neocon advisors would dearly love to see that happen. On the other hand, he doesn’t say he would never do it: he simply doesn’t mention the prospect in hopes that no one will bring it up. Ah, but Sen. Paul brought it up in his response:

“Unlike Governor Perry, I am opposed to sending American troops back into Iraq; I support continuing our assistance to the government of Iraq. I support using advanced technology to prevent ISIS from becoming a threat.

“I also want to stop sending U.S. and arms to Islamic rebels in Syria who are allied with ISIS, something Governor Perry doesn’t even address. I asked Governor Perry, ‘How many Americans should send their sons and daughters to die for a foreign country, a nation the Iraqis won’t defend for themselves?’”

This is the question Perry – and his neocon puppeteers – don’t want to answer because they can’t tell the truth without being driven out of the public square. The overwhelming majority of Americans aren’t just opposed to re-entangling ourselves in that mess – they don’t think the war was ever worth fighting. And that includes half of Republicans.

This is a nearly insurmountable barrier for the War Party – and any presidential wannabe who plans on running as their chosen candidate. Sure, the warmongers will shower him with plenty of moolah and take out ads attacking the alleged “isolationism” of Paul, but the problem is they have to reverse a verdict that’s already been handed down by the court of public opinion: Iraq was a disaster, and going back there will only exacerbate the failure. And whose failure is it? Although both parties were complicit in dragging us into that quagmire, the Republicans are taking the lion’s share of the blame because the war defined the Bush era.

Does the GOP want to be stuck with that albatross hung around their necks forever? That will ensure their permanent status as a rapidly-shrinking minority party – which is just what the GOP Establishment is supposedly trying to prevent. So the party’s “grandees” are faced with a seemingly insoluble contradiction: they insist they are all about picking a “winner,” but refuse to dump their losing obsession with maintaining and expanding our foreign policy of global meddling.

Perry’s op ed, and his appearance on “Face the Nation,” where he was confronted with Sen. Paul’s rebuttal, was supplemented by the obligatory appearance of John McCain on CNN’s “State of the Union,” during which the Senator went into the usual neocon riff about the alleged history of the “isolationist” movement:

“’Senator Paul is part of a wing of the party that’s been there ever since prior to World War I in our Republican Party, and that is a withdrawal to fortress America,’ McCain said, comparing Paul to American isolationists who wanted to keep the US out of World War II.”

McCain needs a course in basic history, starting with the history of his own party: the GOP in the run up to World War I was solidly in favor of intervening. Indeed, one of McCain’s heroes, Teddy Roosevelt, demanded we go to war long before Woodrow Wilson dragged us into it. Henry Cabot Lodge, the influential Republican Senator from Massachusetts, was a major proponent of intervention, and military “preparedness,” and applauded Wilson’s decision to enter the war. Lodge’s main worry was that Wilson would conclude a peace without demanding unconditional surrender.

In any case, the same tired bromides about how refusal to go along with another cockamamie neocon scheme to involve us in a foreign war is “isolationism” isn’t going to cut it, this time. Both McCain and the nutso Peter King (R-IRA) – who’s threatening to cut into Bolton’s one percent by running for President – keep evoking the shade of Charles Lindbergh as if the Battle of Britain were still raging, but they are merely underscoring their own irrelevance.

It may be true that for the neocons it’s always 1939 – but the rest of us aren’t stuck in that time-warp. ISIS isn’t Nazi Germany: it isn’t even Fascist Italy. The very idea that this ragtag army – subsidized and supported by our “allies” in the Gulf – poses a threat to the territory of the United States is a gruesome joke: gruesome because the consequences of taking such a view seriously would result in many more thousands of American (and Iraqi) deaths in the second part of a war that was a disaster from the beginning.

The neocons have a major problem: their own party, the GOP, is rebelling against their hegemony in the foreign policy realm. If Sen. Paul succeeds in breaking the neocons’ hold, he’ll have destroyed the monopoly the War Party has enjoyed when it comes to the vital issue of our relations with the rest of the world. This has been their greatest strength: never having to encounter any real opposition in the arena of presidential politics. The pro-peace camp has never been defeated – because they’ve never been heard.

All that may be changing – and that’s why nary a week goes by without some stand in for the neocons – Dick Cheney, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, McCain, Lindsey Graham – unloading on Sen. Paul. The great irony of these attacks is that they accomplish the exact opposite of what’s intended: instead of hurting Paul’s presidential aspirations they help him by underscoring the fact that his views – unlike his opponents’ – are exactly in accord with the views of the American people.

So keep it up, guys. Or, as George W. Bush would put it: “Bring it on!”

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

I’ve written a couple of books, which you might want to peruse. Here is the link for buying the second edition of my 1993 book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, with an Introduction by Prof. George W. Carey, a Foreword by Patrick J. Buchanan, and critical essays by Scott Richert and David Gordon (ISI Books, 2008).

You can buy An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000), my biography of the great libertarian thinker, here.

The War Party Never Learns: Gulf War 3.0 Is Imminent

By Justin Raimondo Via David Stockman’s Contra Corner

Way back in the summer of 2009, when the US withdrawal from Iraq was being touted as yet another great triumph by the Obama administration, we wrote in this space:

“Was withdrawal from Iraq just another campaign promise, made to be broken – like Obama’s pledges on government secrecy and other civil liberties issues? The president’s record, so far, does not bode well for an answer in the negative.

“This administration of self-proclaimed ‘pragmatists’ has no problem dispensing with principles and promises when it’s convenient. And it is decidedly inconvenient to be getting out of Iraq at the very moment we are ratcheting up pressure on our new adversary in the region: Iran.”

At the time, this may have seemed a bit of a stretch: after all, the President had secured his party’s nomination – and the White House – largely on the strength of his promise to get us out. And the country, by that time, was more than ready to see the last of Iraq.

So who could’ve foreseen that an American return to Iraq was in the cards? Well, anyone with half a brain, but unfortunately that doesn’t even come close to describing US policymakers and the alleged “experts” of Washington wonkdom.

The regional war many of us predicted would be the inevitable result of the Iraq invasion is now upon us. A group expelled from Al Qaeda known as the “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” or ISIS, has mysteriously arisen, fully armed, like a Muslim Minerva from the head of Allah. Now in possession of Iraq’s second largest city – Mosul, population 2 million – ISIS controls roughly the western third of the country. And they’re marching eastward, taking Tikrit and converging on Karbala and Najaf – the sites of Shi’ite shrines, which the Sunni militants of ISIS are intent on destroying.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is asking the White House for air strikes: Obama is saying “all options are on the table” – including, one presumes, troops on the ground. John McCain is already demanding it, and the outcry from the War Party is getting louder by the moment: Obama, they aver, must “do something.” The Iraqi “army” we spent billions training and arming is useless: discarding their uniforms in the street, they can’t run away fast enough. Who will stop ISIS as they converge on the ultimate prize, Baghdad?

The answer is: Iran. Tehran has already answered Maliki’s call to arms, with the elite Quds force taking up positions in the country, including in Tikrit, where they are reportedly retaking the province on the Iraqi government’s behalf. They are also stationed in Karbala and Najaf, guarding those two symbols of Shi’ite power.

When the US invaded Iraq, and destroyed the secular Ba’athist regime, Washington effectively delivered the country to the Iranians. Indeed, Ahmed Chalabi, and his fellow “heroes in error” – who along with his neocon sponsors lied us into war – turned out to be Iranian agents: remember those US raids on his various Iraqi compounds? Tehran was the main beneficiary of the neocons’ war, and now they are moving to claim their prize – before it is ripped out of their hands by ISIS.

This augurs a perfect storm of regional rivalries, one that sets every religious and political faction in the ‘Middle East’ up for a war of all against all. The second phase of the Iraq War has begun: the only question remaining is how big a role will the US play in it?

As I noted in 2009, the Status of Forces agreement we signed with the Maliki government has plenty of escape hatches, which could easily be invoked to send US troops back into the country. Here’s one:

“When any external or internal danger emerges against Iraq or an aggression upon it violates its sovereignty, its political stability, the unity of its land, water, and airspace or threatens its democratic system or its elected establishments and according to the request of the Iraqi government, the two parties will immediately start strategic talks and according to what they will agree on between them the United States will undertakes the appropriate measures that include diplomatic, economic, military or any other measure required to deter this threat.”

I can just hear the Obamaites justifying an American re-entry by claiming we have a “treaty obligation” to intervene. Whether this involves drone strikes or some type of air support and even sending in troops is irrelevant, at this point, since the reappearance of US soldiers on the ground is eventually going to be required if Washington decides to shoulder the responsibility of retaking Mosul and environs.

In any case, we have only to consult the theory of what I call “libertarian realism” – the idea that a nation’s foreign policy is determined by internal political factors rather than by objective considerations – to predict what the eventual outcome of this latest “crisis” will be. Rather than be haunted by the accusation that he and his party “lost Iraq,” and that the thousands of Americans killed and hideously wounded in that war sacrificed for nothing, the President will start us down the path to re-intervening in a big way. And if his successor in the Oval Office is Hillary Clinton – who supported the war, and up until just the other day, defended her vote in favor – the bigness of the American footprint will soon result in a confrontation with Iran.

This has been the War Party’s goal since well before the invasion of Iraq, and today we are at the end of that long and bloody road.

In a rational world, re-fighting the Iraq war would be inconceivable: in the world we are living in, however, it is all too probable. If we had a foreign policy that made any kind of sense, we would partner with Iran in keeping the peace in the region: they are in a much better position to clear out ISIS. In our world, however, this is a virtual impossibility: there is too much of a chasm between Washington and Tehran. Indeed, the present crisis could well mean an end to the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, if and when push comes to shove in Iraq.

Our present conundrum is entirely self-manufactured: there was no Al Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the US invasion, in spite of the Bush administration’s ridiculous attempts to hold Saddam Hussein responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The repressive measures taken by the government we installed – remember those purple-stained fingers that were supposed to symbolize a New Dawn for Iraq? – have done more to consolidate support for ISIS than any other single factor. Our efforts to overthrow Syria’s Ba’athist regime have given ISIS and other radical Islamist groups the space – and the means – to create their “caliphate” in northern Syria and Iraq, where ISIS recently dismantled the border posts. I wonder how many US-supplied arms to the “moderate” Islamists have gone into the hands of ISIS and its allies.

The present mess in Iraq has “Made in Washington” written all over it. But not everyone in Washington is crazy, and the proof is a bipartisan effort to repeal the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq. Cosponsored by Senators Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), the measure has widespread support, including from some very conservative Republicans like Mike Lee (R-Utah).

If this effort succeeds, it will be a huge roadblock in the path of the drive to start Iraq War III. After all, how is one to make the case for re-intervening at the very moment the official end to the war is being certified?

The last time the War Party tried to pull a fast one – during the alleged Syrian “humanitarian emergency,” when Obama was intent on bombing the regime of Bashar al-Assad out of existence – the American people rose up and put a stop to it. It’s not hard to imagine a similar eruption in the case of this latest made-in-Washington “crisis.”

This is the only factor keeping the Obama administration in check: fear of the political consequences. Which is why we need to keep up the pressure – and step up the fight for a noninterventionist foreign policy.

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Antiwar.com Original. To view original, click here.

Belligerent Nationalism Returns—-From Kiev’s Neo-Fascism To Narendra Modi’s Hindu Chauvinism

Guest Post by Justin Raimondo via David Stockman’s Contra Corner

It turns out that Francis Fukuyama, widely mocked post-9/11 for his proclamation that history has “ended,” was right after all – but not in the way his journalistic interpreters imagined. Fukuyama’s thesis was that the ideological struggle over the forms of governance had been decisively won by the forces of liberal democracy: this, he averred, was the lesson of the Soviet implosion, and the earlier destruction of the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Yet he did not say, as widely believed, that the passing of history would mean the end of international conflicts:

“There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.”

Nationalism, ensconced in the religious and ethnic identities that would replace the ideologies of the twentieth century, would still retain its hypnotic power, and perhaps even get a fillip from the “boredom” ensuing from a world reduced to economic calculation and the care-taking of “the museum of human history,” as he put it. In this sense, Fukuyama has been proven right: the conflicts that are tearing apart the Middle East, for example, fit his scenario to a tee. What I fear he got wrong is the idea that these conflicts will not involve large states, and that the scale of potential tragedy is much bigger than he dared imagine.

Nationalism has indeed returned with a vengeance, and it is rearing its head on a global scale, from eastern Europe to Eastasia. The dangers it poses are equal in scope to anything that confronted us during the cold war era, if not more so.

Where Fukuyama was wrong – very wrong – was his overoptimistic take on the evolution of large states which were supposedly not “caught in the grip of history.” Recent events tell a different story.

Take India, where Narendra Modi, the candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has just won an overwhelming victory which has propelled that nation of 1.269 million square miles and 1.237 billion inhabitants to the right – the far right – for the first time in modern history. Modi is a charismatic demagogue whose tenure as governor of Gujarat was marked by a pogrom of Muslims carried out by Hindu fanatics who murdered thousands as Modi’s police looked on. As a result Washington denied Modi a visa and he was barred from entering US territory.

Modi is a member of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a cultish paramilitary group of ultra-nationalist Hindu activists founded in the 1930s and modeled along the same lines as various right-wing ethno-nationalist groups in the ascendant at the time: the Italian fascists, the German National Socialists, and the right-wing Zionist followers of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Gandhi’s assassin was an RSS militant, and the group has been at the center of the anti-Muslim riots that have wracked India in recent times.

At the core of RSS-BJP ideology is the idea of Hindutva, which idealizes Indian ethnicity and upholds a mythology that portrays Indians as the first pure “Aryan” race, which supposedly sprang from the Arctic region eons ago. Partisans of Hindutva adopted the swastika – an ancient Indian symbol – as the emblem of their movement, and the constitution of RSS specifies that the leader of the cult must be a blue-eyed Sarasvat Brahmin.

I have written about Hindutva here and here: suffice to say in this context that the prospect of these fanatics with an absolute majority in the Indian parliament and complete control of the government ought to scare the pants off of anyone who was hoping that history had indeed ended. India, after all, is a nuclear-armed state, facing off against nuclear-armed Pakistan, a Muslim country. The prospect of a man like Modi at the head of the Indian state ought to send chills up everyone’s spine – after all, if you really believe in reincarnation the idea of a nuclear war isn’t so off-putting, now is it?

The scariness is hardly limited to India: all Eastasia is the scene of a frightening nationalist revival, where confrontation with China’s rising power is generating a dangerous backlash. In Vietnam, thousands of rioters recently burned 15 Chinese-owned factories, killing one and wounding a hundred, in response to China’s construction of an oil rig in a part of the South China Sea claimed by Hanoi. And don’t forget the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war, in which China invaded Vietnam and took several border towns in response to the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia that toppled the Khmer Rouge.

While Vietnam’s Communist government has tolerated some independent political expression, they quickly cracked down when the demonstrations turned violent – just as the Chinese government has cracked down on anti-foreigner demonstrations that have broken out periodically over the years. In both cases, a dark undercurrent of militant nationalism threatens to upend the rule of these Communist regimes, which have run out of ideological steam and stand in fear of resurgent nationalism cracking the thin veneer of archaic Leninism.

The nationalist surge is hardly confined to Eastasia: in Israel, where right-wing nationalists have captured the government, forces to the right of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Zionist-nationalist Likud party are on the rise. Interestingly, Netanyahu was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Modi on his victory.

In eastern Europe, too, the nationalist monster is reawakening: dark forces that were kept under wraps in the days of the Warsaw Pact are reasserting themselves in Ukraine. There openly neo-Nazi movements, which look to the legacy of Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera, are not only rioting in the streets – they’re in the government!

While the Western media has dutifully echoed the US State Department line that the putsch in Ukraine was carried out by “pro-Western” liberals, the reality is that the shock troops of the “national revolution” (as the Ukrainian fascists are calling it) was carried out with muscle supplied by the radical nationalist Svoboda party, formerly the “Social National” party, and Right Sector, a violent paramilitary gang of skinheads, criminals, and professional thugs openly committed to fascism and “ethnic purity” as a political ideal. Combining devotion to Ukrainian ethnicity with brazen anti-Semitism – which they are now seeking to deny, with some invaluable help from Yale professor Tim Snyder, The New Republic, various neocons, and the US government – Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists are being used as a stalking horse for the US and the European Union in their campaign to restart the cold war with Russia.

Washington’s failure to see the horrific danger posed by these worrying trends is underscored in Ukraine, where US taxpayer dollars are going to subsidize a movement that traces its lineage back to the Brownshirts of the 1930s. The US thinks it can ride this wave and not fall into the deep – a tragic miscalculation that can only end in disaster.

Aggressive nationalism has been the main driver of wars in the twentieth century and promises to wreak even more havoc in the twenty-first. However, not all nationalism is aggressive: in America, for instance, it has been “isolationist,” (i.e. pro-peace), as in the run-up to World War II, when many conservatives (and liberals, like Charles Beard) described themselves as nationalists and yet wanted to stay out of wars. They wanted to put “America First,” as they put it, aloof from foreign squabbles and safe behind an impregnable wall of defenses. In China, too, nationalism was formerly characterized by indifference to the outside world: it was in this context that the horrific “Cultural Revolution” took place, a violence that was directed inward rather than across borders.

The revival of nationalism in the new millennium is not of that sort, unfortunately: it is, instead, based on hatred of the foreigner, the Other, who must be eliminated before the nation can be secured. And you’ll note that these movements are being generated in countries where economic deprivation, corruption, and authoritarian governments give ordinary people few outlets of political expression.

Nationalist ideology imbues its adherents with three ingredients of ideological self-actualization otherwise unavailable to them: a sense of identity, an overriding mission, and the illusion of unity with a greater whole. In a world where modernity dissolves traditional ties and threatens to overwhelm the individual in a mishmash of competing influences, militant nationalism brings clarity out of confusion, defines one’s friends and one’s enemies, and promises an impossible purity. As such, it is a potent force – and the deadly enemy of liberalism.

It also raises the threat of future wars – and not that far in the future, if I may be so bold as to proffer a prediction. As Fukuyama put it at the end of his famous essay:

“I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

As we approach the centenary of the start of World War I, I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a sense of déjà vu. It looks like history is restarting – with a bloody vengeance.

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Antiwar.com Original. To view original, click here.

The War Party Desperately Fights Back: The Bill Kristol/Samantha Power Grand Alliance Of Neocons And “Progressives”

Guest Post from David Stockman’s Contra Corner

by Justin Raimondo

The War Party is making a comeback. After laying low in the wake of the disastrous invasion and occupation in Iraq, and the complete failure of our efforts to subdue Afghanistan, the coalition of forces that made these strategic catastrophes possible has returned – and they are winning.

While the public is still highly skeptical of foreign adventurism – recent polls show overwhelming support for supposedly “isolationist” policies – the political class is doing what it does best: undermining the popular will by simply doing an end run around the American people. Their campaign has opened up on three major fronts:

1) The Snowden revelations – The single biggest blow to the War Party’s hegemonic power in Washington was delivered by Edward Snowden, the libertarian dissident ex-NSA contractor forced into exile for exposing the horrifying scope of what is nothing less than the apparatus of a police state in the making. This set the authoritarians in both parties back on their heels: it was a blow in the dark – and this time they were on the receiving end.

However, it wasn’t long before they picked themselves up off the ground and started fighting back. As the rising tide of protest on both sides of the political spectrum threatened to upend official Washington, they mobilized their forces and manned the battlements.

The siege of the castle was begun by the heroic Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), our Braveheart, who, in tandem with Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), introduced the most radical “reform” of the National Security Agency yet proposed: his bill would’ve yanked funding for its unconstitutional activities outright. In an effort led by “progressive” Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, my former representative in Congress, Amash’s assault was staved off – but just barely.

In a closely-watched debate, the bill splintered the partisan divide and polarized the House along ideological lines, albeit not in accordance with the familiar left-right straitjacket we are all supposed to be wearing. For a few glorious hours the old liberal-conservative paradigm was abolished and the new political reality stood revealed in all its starkness: arguing on the floor of the House, it was libertarians versus authoritarians in a knockdown drag-out fight that nearly succeeded in toppling the Surveillance State.

But that was just the beginning. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), who introduced the original “Patriot” Act, breached the castle walls by furiously denouncing the NSA data dragnet as “un-American” and demanding to know “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?”

And so the battle lines were drawn around “reform” legislation that would somehow “fix” the problem without dismantling the legal basis for the necessary task of investigating and prosecuting criminal acts. The two camps coalesced around two rival bills, one introduced in the Senate by Diane Feinstein, and the Sensenbrenner bill – known, respectively, as the “FISA Improvement Act” and the “USA Freedom Act.” The former was widely mocked – Sensenbrenner called it “a joke” – as an extension of the NSA’s powers rather than anything remotely approaching “reform,” however loosely defined, while the latter picked up co-sponsors and support on both sides of the aisle.

As the castle walls began to shudder and shake, the defenders retreated to their inner sanctum and contemplated a way to break the siege. What was needed was some kind of truce: a negotiated settlement that would let them keep the keys to their kingdom whilst giving the impression they had surrendered. So they ran up the white flag, and conferred with the other side: using the Byzantine rules of the House, which give committee chairmen the power to bottle up legislation or wave it through, they arranged for the Freedom Act to pass the Judiciary Committee – but only after being essentially gutted, as Marcy Wheeler explains here, here, here, and here. (Also here and here.)

In brief, the “compromise” bill deploys the time-honored bureaucratic weapon of linguistic obfuscation to redefine language and use it in ways no ordinary person would recognize. In translating the intent of legislators into lingo describing the technical architecture of our emerging police state, terms like “selector” can be interpreted broadly enough to put not even a dent in the NSA’s armor.

The final legislative product will be an amalgamation of the language contained in both the original Sensenbrenner bill and the Feinstein extension of the NSA’s powers, leading to the creation of a new hybrid system in which the power of the State to track, surveil, and investigate Americans on suspicion of “terrorism” will be extended in more ways than it is (theoretically) restricted.

The castle still stands, its inner sanctum unbreached – while, outside, the peasants with pitchforks gather …

2) The new cold war – The Iraq and Afghan conflicts exhausted the American people, and by the time the new gang in the White House decided to go on yet another Middle East rampage – Libya, Bahrain, Syria – their patience was coming to an end. When the Obamaites got around to Syria, with Hillary Clinton and General Petraeus leading the charge, they’d finally had enough: a major public outcry scotched that one pretty decisively. Plans to go after Iran – the neocons’ favored target – had been shelved earlier by the administration, and the War Party was frustrated. They had a very big problem: there was no one left to go to war with!

Osama bin Laden was dead, Al Qaeda in eclipse, and the never-very-convincing neocon attempt to portray China as the new bogeyman had petered out. American capitalism was conquering the Chinese market without a shot being fired anyway, so why bother?

In preparing a new war narrative, the groundwork had already been done: the neocons had been doing a job on Russia ever since their favorite oligarchs had been sent packing by Putin, and the Russian leaders’ refusal to jump on board the Iraq war train was the final straw. It wasn’t until later, however, when the complete lack of an official foreign bogeyman threatened to end the War Party’s profitable racket, that ostensible liberals and their sterner “progressive”-minded comrades enlisted as foot-soldiers in the new cold war. A storyline portraying Putin’s Russia as a homophobic racist anti-Semitic fascist Hell was thrown together, in tandem with a semi-covert effort by the US to overthrow the democratically elected Ukrainian government.

This was a cause both neocons and progressives could glom onto, and the Ukrainian coup was the perfect occasion for a grand alliance: Samantha Power and Bill Kristol, together at last!

3) The political battle – As the War Party has always understood, but some libertarians have never grasped, electoral politics is the main battlefield in the war for the hearts and minds of Americans. Insofar as mobilizing large numbers of people around a particular cause is concerned, it usually only happens around election time. Even more importantly, of course, he who controls the State controls the guns – and gets to point them in a certain direction.

The War Party has had remarkable success in reserving the job of bipartisan gatekeeper for itself: by presenting voters with a “choice” between two candidates with virtually identical views on foreign policy and civil liberties, they have managed to maintain control of the presidency, Congress, and the two major parties ever since the end of World War II.

The combined impact of war fatigue and the Snowden revelations had sent the War Party reeling, but the castle was still surrounded by the moat of electoral politics – and there are plenty of crocodiles in those waters.

As the 2016 presidential contest looms closer, the two camps – the authoritarian and libertarian tendencies in American politics – are gathering behind their respective champions. On one side is Hillary Clinton, whose disdain for the Internet predates the present NSA controversy, and who has already been all but nominated by acclamation by the Democrats a full year and a half before the first primary. Running interference for her are a number of prospective Republican candidates with zero chance of winning the White House, along with the not-for-sure candidacy of Jeb Bush. Bush’s entry would make the race a competition of rival political dynasties – an easy hook for the lazy media and a good way to obscure the real issues before the public.

And then there’s Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who has all but declared his candidacy – and is using his lawsuit against the NSA as a launching pad for his campaign.

The smear campaign against the son of Ron Paul has already started, with David Corn of Mother Jones competing with the Washington Free Beacon – the voice of Sheldon Adelson inside the Beltway – to see who can make the most vicious attacks. And they aren’t forgetting about Justin Amash, believe you me: he is the target of a primary challenge by one Brian Ellis, who is supported by millions in out of state neocon money – including a hefty donation from Home Depot – in addition to plenty of dough from the Chamber of Commerce (on account of Amash’s opposition to the corrupt crony capitalism which is the signature cause of that lobby).

Another target of the War Party, staunch anti-interventionist and Ron Paul ally Rep. Walter Jones (R-North Carolina), beat back his neocon primary opponent, a former lobbyist and Bush administration insider, but it was a close call. They had lots of money, but they never engaged Jones on the issues for which he is justly famous: his fierce opposition to the Iraq war, and his bold declaration that Dick Cheney is going to find a place in Hell right next to Lyndon Baines Johnson. Only the “Emergency Committee for Israel,” which spent a lot of moolah on ads denouncing him for not wanting war with Iran, brought up foreign policy issues during the campaign – and these probably helped Jones more than they hurt him.

In short, the War Party has fought their opponents – that is, us – to a standstill on all three battlefronts: the legislative, the ideological, and the electoral. Not only that, but they’re slowly but surely making a real comeback. Their crowning moment will be the election of Hillary Clinton – or some warmongering, anti-libertarian Republican – as President in 2016.

As Walter Cronkite used to say: and that’s the way it is, folks, as of May 8, 2014, at 3:09 Pacific Standard Time. Stay tuned to this space for updates.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/05/08/the-war-party-makes-a-comeback/

Progressive Left And Fox News/Neocon/Right Wing Jointly Declare War—-On Rand Paul Because He’s Anti-War!

by Justin Raimondo

The war is on – no, not that war, this war: I’m talking about the GOP establishment’s war on Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, whose presidential campaign has taken wing and soared. And it isn’t just the Karl Roves and Peter Kings of this world who are up in arms over the prospect of an anti-interventionist libertarian in the White House: they’re getting plenty of tactical support from “liberals” like David Corn.

Why do they hate him?

The Rovians hate him because he challenges the whole Fox News–neocon right-wing paradigm that has kept the GOP a dwindling minority party ever since the Bush era ended with a whimper. The progressives hate him because he is the most likely candidate – at the moment – to be facing Hillary Clinton in 2016, and they know they’ll have a hard time selling a candidate who still refuses to second guess her 2003 vote for the Iraq war. So the two groups have a common enemy – which, in politics, is enough to cement a working alliance between two supposedly antithetical forces.

Of course they aren’t really antithetical: while Establishment Republicans and Establishment Democrats duke it out every election, it’s not an ideological fight so much as a battle for the spoils. And when it comes to foreign policy, “politics stops at the water’s edge,” as that old reprobate Arthur Vandenberg used to say: left and right are united for the Empire.

That explains why Mother Jones Washington correspondent David Corn popped up with footage of Rand Paul attacking Dick Cheney for switching his position on Iraq. Corn rips Rand’s remarks out of a half hour long talk, in the relevant portion of which, Sen. Paul – who wasn’t a Senator yet, he was campaigning for his father – goes into a long disquisition on the military-industrial complex. Citing Eisenhower and answering critics who say Ron Paul is weak on defense, Rand cites Cheney’s answer to neoconnish questions about why George Herbert Walker Bush didn’t go all the way to Baghdad during the first Gulf war: there would be a civil war, there would be “chaos, we’d be sucked into a quagmire. In short, all the reasons Ron and Rand gave for opposing Bush II’s invasion. Rand goes on to opine:

“And this is Dick Cheney saying this. But, you know, a couple hundred million dollars later Dick Cheney earns from Halliburton, he comes back into government. Now Halliburton’s got a billion-dollar no-bid contract in Iraq. You know, you hate to be so cynical that you think some of these corporations are able to influence policy, but I think sometimes they are. Most of the people on these [congressional] committees have a million dollars in their bank account all from different military-industrial contractors. We don’t want our defense to be defined by people who make money off of the weapons.”

Here’s what Corn makes of this:

“The message is clear: Cheney, a corporate shill, was more loyal to Halliburton – and the millions of dollars he earned from the company – than to the United States, and he and Halliburton manipulated the country into the Iraq War. Paul was essentially accusing Cheney of a profound betrayal: using 9/11 to start a war to profit Halliburton.”

Only Corn’s first sentence has any relationship to reality: yes, the “message is clear” indeed, except to uncomprehending “progressives” who’ve hung out in Washington for too long. Rand was describing a system in his talk, the Washington-based culture of crony-capitalist militarism that employs and enriches some very powerful people in this country. The merchants of death, as an early 20^th century bestseller dubbed them, give millions to candidates – and Washington thinktanks – for whom war propaganda is mother’s milk. This isn’t about Dick Cheney – it’s about how Washington works.

In explaining how Cheney came to such a dramatically different view on Iraq, Rand was quite right to point to the Vice President’s five year immersion in the corporate culture of Haliburton as one important factor in his subsequent evolution. Why wouldn’t being CEO of a company that provides “services” to US occupiers incline one to favor American military intervention overseas? Yet it is seriously understating the radicalism of Rand’s view to reduce it, as Corn does, to Cheney was “using 9/11 to start a war to profit Haliburton.” The Senator’s critique is more fundamental.

Remember what Rand actually said is that big defense contractors “influence policy” – which is a far cry from dictating it. Later in the tape he mocks John McCain for his “bomb bomb Iran” Beach Boys act, and goes on to say that war should be the absolute last resort: he’s visibly appalled by the way in which these matters of life and death are trivialized by neocons like McCain and Richard Perle. His point was that these people – including “most of the people on these congressional committees” – live in a world where war is the first option.

The system we’ve set up has a built-in bias, like all government programs, in favor of exponential expansion, and Cheney was a cog in that machine. And so while Cheney’s Haliburton connection wasn’t the determining factor in his Iraq policy turnaround, his experience there undoubtedly influenced his foreign policy views in general – and whatever personal profits he gained in the process sure didn’t hurt.

I can’t imagine Corn disagrees with this sentiment: but he doesn’t say so in his piece, which is devoted to giving ample ammunition to the Rovians and their neocon allies to take down the Republican frontrunner. Paul’s “accusations about Cheney, 9/11, and Iraq could well provide rich material for questions in presidential debates,” he snarks.

Corn is taking a calculated risk here: he may wind up converting the readers of Mother Jones into enthusiastic campaign workers loudly tweeting #RandPaul2016. And isn’t Cheney one of the most disliked political figures in recent history? We already know the neocons hate the Pauls, both of them, equally and irrevocably – and it’s only natural for partisan shills like Corn, who don’t have a principled bone in their bodies, to egg on the Bill Kristols of this world.

Getting beyond all this background noise, however, the real question is: can the junior Senator from Kentucky brush these chirping sectaries aside and build a coalition that defies the old categories of “left” and “right”? Can he unite Midwesterners angered by federal landgrabs with urban millennials sporting Free Snowden t-shirts? It’s the War Party’s worst nightmare: a serious presidential contender who’s serious about fighting for civil liberties and a noninterventionist foreign policy (along with a dose of good old fashioned dose of economic common sense).

This being a Republican presidential primary – yes, we’re talking about that already – there’s been much talk of Rand Paul’s relationship with Ronald Reagan, or, rather, with the ghost of the last Republican to build a broad-based center-right coalition. Jennifer Rubin has chimed in, claiming that the Senator and would-be presidential aspirant has “de-Reaganized” Reagan. Poor Jenn, possibly the most reviled pundit in Washington, mistakes Reagan for Benjamin Netanyahu. She also misses the real significance of the Reagan mystique – and that was his ability to reach out to the other side, in this case the so-called Reagan Democrats, inner city and suburban blue collar families. He managed to split the Democrats’ taken-for-granted constituency and built a new governing majority.

In the context of today’s politics, the demographics are different but the principle of “divide and rule” is the same. The “Paul Democrats” and “Paul Independents” are precisely the kind of younger urban voters both Rand and his father have done such a phenomenal job attracting. These are people Democrats have tended to take for granted – and Rand is the first Republican politician since Reagan to challenge them on this terrain. Which is why Democrats like Corn, and the other partisan hacks masquerading as “journalists” – Rachel Maddow comes to mind – have it in for Sen. Paul.

As for the Rovians and their neocon Deep Thinkers, their unappeasable hate for the Senator is due to his last name – and the knowledge that this isn’t really about Rand Paul or any particular person, it’s about a movement that threatens to overtake them. Once John McCain and Peter King stop being the face of the GOP, the Establishment that manipulates the leadership of both parties is in big trouble.

The last thing the Establishment of both parties wants is a 2016 presidential race pitting an anti-interventionist anti-surveillance Republican against the stridently interventionist Hillary, who long ago declared that the Internet needs “gatekeepers.” I would argue that of all the potential candidates, it’s Rand Paul who has the best chance of stopping the Clinton Restoration. Jeb Bush as the candidate would make it a clash of dynasties, with the Clintons an easy winner in that kind of contest. Marco Rubio has limited appeal, and by the time the primaries get going will be polling in the vicinity of John Bolton. Chris Christie is over. David Petraeus, once a neocon favorite, is in disgrace: you only get to have that kind of fun after you’re safely elected. So who’s left?

The Anti-Paul Popular Front is only just beginning to rev up its engines. With David Corn and the Sheldon Adelson-funded Washington Free Beacon leading the charge, this red-brown coalition is determined to spike Sen. Paul’s campaign long before the first primary. The day is young, and so is this smear campaign.

The Ukrainian Imbroglio: Why The War Party Must Now Stand-DownIn “Justin Raimondo”

Aim of the Neo-Cons’ Ukrainian Diversion: Sabotage Talks With Iran and SyriaIn “Stockman’s Corner”

Meet The Americans Who Put Together The Coup In Kiev—Chapter and VerseIn “Contra News and Views”

This is a syndicated repost courtesy of Antiwar.com Original. To view original, click here.

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She’s the Democratic version of Chris Christie and Marco Rubio combined

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His pathetic “comeback” is going to go nowhere – fast

Read more by Justin Raimondo

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