Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Balko’s Morning Links

Check out Radley Balko’s Morning Links.  Highlights include:

  • How the American war on drugs is “one of the most catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in American history”.   I agree.  Whatever it started as, the drug war is now nothing more than a jobs program for testosterone-flooded neanderthals and it’s only accomplishment is bringing misery and destruction to people who engage in an activity that should never have been illegal in the first place.  The fact that it has now enveloped the entire Western Hemisphere in an unstoppable and ever escalating cycle of corruption and violence fits well with a foreign policy whose main goal seems to be pissing the rest of the world off.
  • Mother Jones inadvertently makes the case that banning assault weapons would probably have zero effect in reducing mass shootings.  Not that reasoning or  effectiveness actually play much of a role in any conflict between team left and team right.
  • The DEA (those folks who, as a condition for employment, are required to swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution) thinks it can come onto your property and set up surveillance cameras to record your activities in order to catch you in a crime, all without a warrant, of course.  Folks, this goes right to that stunningly ignorant belief (and you hear this a lot from libertarians) that it’s the government’s job to protect the rights of citizens.  It is not.  The government is, in fact, the biggest threat to citizens’ rights.  Government serves government.  Only the public, in large enough numbers, can protect citizens from abuses of power by the government.  And, I might point out that the public is notoriously incompetent in this mission.

Obama selectively invokes MLK

An interesting observation by Glenn Greenwald:

Obama’s policies are a manifestation of exactly the militaristic mindset which King so eloquently denounced. Obama has always been fond of invoking King’s phrase “fierce urgency of now”, yet ironically, that is lifted from this anti-war speech, one that stands as a stinging repudiation of the continuous killing and violence Obama has spent the last four years unleashing on many countries around the world (Max Blumenthal suggested that Obama’s second inaugural speech be entitled “I have a drone”).

Ah, the irony.   After a warmongering President receives the Nobel Peace Prize, it should come as no surprise when he then uses the anti-war rhetoric of Martin Luther King to advance a conflicting agenda.

Opposition to America’s policy of routinely delivering liberation, peace, and security in the form of an air-launched missile will be a repeated theme on this website.  War is a tool of the state and, except in the case of popular rebellion, always benefits the government at the expense of the citizens.  The obviousness of this fact can only be suppressed by invoking mindless patriotism (usually on the part of the right) or the equally ignorant claim that the U.S. is bombing them for their own good, often referred to as a “humanitarian action” (a justification used by Bush and repeatedly by Obama).

[Update]

Greenwald posted another column today that points out another outrageous misuse of MLK, this time to promote the U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command.

The US military – which is currently bombing Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen at least, all in secret – just exploited one of the 20th Century’s greatest proponents of nonviolence and most vehement opponents of US militarism as a public face for its aggression and violence in the world.

America’s schizophrenic (two-faced) foreign policy

Glenn Greenwald writes about the conflict between the U.S. government’s claim to be on the side of freedom and democracy even as it enthusiastically supports the worlds worst despots.

Greenwald describes how clearly this point is made in a recent memo to Obama from former CIA officer and adviser to four presidents, Bruce Riedel.

Riedel stridently argues that the US must remain steadfastly opposed to any democratic revolutions in the region. That’s because Saudi Arabia is “America’s oldest ally in the Middle East, a partnership that dates back to 1945.” Thus, “since American interests are so intimately tied to the House of Saud, the US does not have the choice of distancing the United States from it in an effort to get on the right side of history.”

Riedel is not exactly a principled advocate of peace, being an enthusiastic supporter of starting a war with Iran, the only beneficiary of which would be Israel.

In 2012, Riedel contributed to a book on Iran by Brookings “scholars” which argued that the US could launch a war against Iran by covertly provoking its government into responses that could then falsely be depicted by the US to the world “as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression” – exactly what Brookings’ Ken Pollack proposed be done in 2002 to deceitfully justify the attack on Iraq.

It’s not hard to see that the U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would easily be considered an act of war if the situation were reversed, fit into that strategy and are remarkably similar to the initiation of war with Iraq.  There can be no doubt that the U.S. has been trying to coax Iran into a response that will justify military action.  So far, Iran hasn’t taken the bait, even though Israel has been chomping at the bit to attack Iran.

American politicians and their PR branch, commonly known as the mainstream press, spew forth all manner of rhetoric about humanitarian motives, but Greenwald points out that their actions say otherwise.

Just listen to the patently deceitful rhetoric that spews forth from US political leaders and their servants in the Foreign Policy Community when it comes time to rail against anti-US regimes in Libya, Syria and Iran. That the US and its Nato allies – eager benefactors of the world’s worst tyrants – are opposed to those regimes out of concern for democracy and human rights is a pretense, a conceit, so glaring and obvious that it really defies belief that people are willing to advocate it in public with a straight face.

The fact is that the U.S. government must maintain allies in the Arab countries if it is going to fulfill its commitment to AIPAC to protect Israel.  As Israel continues to occupy and expand further into Palestinian territory, the U.S. must sacrifice it’s integrity to maintain “friendships” with the few Arab countries that can be bought off with favors and advanced military technology.  Our continued support for these dictators is very likely to come back in the form of further terrorist attacks on U.S. property and citizens.

Greenwald sums it up this way:

The fact that one can have a memo like Riedel’s so clearly explaining US policy to support the worst tyrannies that serve its interests, sitting right next to endless US pro-war rhetoric about the urgency of fighting for freedom and democracy, is an outstanding testament to that myth-making.

 

Mali: The 8th Muslim country to be bombed by the west in the last 4 years

From Glenn Greenwald:

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers – over the last four years alone – have bombed and killed Muslims – after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region).

Luckily, the citizens of these countries understand that they are being bombed for their own good, so there is absolutely no resentment that could come back to the West in the form of a “terrorist” attack.   It’s “terrorism” when they do it to us, you see.

And, how is this violent intervention justified?  Simple:

Any western government that wants to bomb Muslims simply slaps the label of “terrorists” on them, and any real debate or critical assessment instantly ends before it can even begin.

Well, this can’t go on forever.  It’s only a matter of time before the West declares victory and peace once again reigns throughout the world.  Hahahaha!  Just kidding.  Here is the real truth:

The “war on terror” is a self-perpetuating war precisely because it endlessly engenders its own enemies and provides the fuel to ensure that the fire rages without end.

It’s ok when our guy does it

One of the most striking aspects of the Obama administration is how uncritical democrats have become with regard to those reviled Bush administration policies that Obama, so outspoken against as a candidate in 2008, has carried forward.

Of course, it doesn’t end there and it’s not limited to party po0litics.  The entire American culture now seems quite acquiescent about a foreign policy consisting of active military aggression, torture, violations of sovereignty, and sanctions on a scale that would easily be considered acts of war if perpetrated against the U.S.   These very same policies, if carried out by any non-allied foreign power would be considered an outrage.  But, when our guy does it, it’s ok.

Quoting from reason.com:

According to the report, prepared by New York University’s Global Justice Clinic and Stanford University’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, American drone strikes have directly killed nearly 900 noncombatants, including 176 children, and injured more than 1,200 since June 2004.

Something to think about next time terrorists kill a bunch of “innocent” Americans.  It’s also worth considering how much devastation the drug war brings to places like Mexico and South America.  Hopefully, those people will never become so angry that they will retaliate on U.S. soil, because they aren’t half way around the world.  They are right across the border.