Anti-war

Over the weekend, the British media was awash with the blood-splattered Tony Blair's self-serving attempts to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. The coverage was sparked by a new essay in which Blair claimed that the chaos in Iraq was the 'predictable and malign effect' of the West having 'watched Syria descend into the abyss' without bombing Assad. Blair advocated yet more Western violence, more bombing
The post Blair: Bombing Iraq Better. Again appeared first on BSNEWS.

The same people who got the US into the mistaken Iraq War are now urging President Obama to use military force in Iraq again. Republican hawks are using the violence in Iraq as a political tool that is escalating pressure for US military intervention. But, if the US follows the rule of law — both US and international law — the president does not have the authority to attack Iraq without Congressional and UN authorization.

I have been increasingly struck over the years by how America is divided between those who hear the screams of its millions of victims abroad and those who do not. This is the fundamental issue underlying Michael Kinsley’s recent attack on Glenn Greenwald, in which Kinsley wrote “newspapers should not have the final say over the release of government secrets. That decision must ultimately be made by the government.”1

The world has gone dramatically wrong as she is ravaged by ecosystem collapse, abject poverty, grotesque inequity, militant nationalism, and resurgent authoritarianism. Overpopulation combined with inequitable over-consumption, leading to a state of permawar, in particular are root causes destroying natural ecosystems and threatening collapse of our one shared biosphere. Either the human family learns to share, simplifies our way of living, and takes any and all truthful actions to end the current state of global ecocide; or else we collapse into nothingness.

Ironically, one of the factors that made the Syrian presidential election a success is the six million displaced Syrians that chose to seek refuge within Syria rather than flee to neighboring countries.  These are persons that escaped from “rebel” zones to government areas, thus depopulating the former but swelling the government constituency. A result is that the vast majority of Syrians was able to participate in the election.

It is not prudent and it is not safe to stick an iron rod into a dragon’s mouth. Whatever they say in the West about dragons… but here in Asia, the dragon is revered as the greatest fabled creature on Earth and in the sky. The dragon is wise and patient, and it hardly ever uses force first. But if treated with disrespect and aggression, it is capable of retaliating in a deadly, determined and powerful way.

If Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter, then he’s a hero. Furthermore, he might have been the only sane American in Afghanistan. That war is not only unnecessary, it is wrong. Bergdahl’s recognition of this fact (if that’s what occurred) proves his sanity. Then again, perhaps he just got tired of killing and the threat of being killed. Or maybe the military’s excessively macho culture got to him. If he did just walk away from his post, it’s clear something cataclysmic happened in his psyche. It is not his fault other soldiers may have been killed searching for him.

The President’s foreign policy address at West Point was interesting in that he advocated a judicious use of military force. But proxies can be just as devastating and proxies of proxies uncontrollable. Thousands upon thousands are dead in Libya and we now have the general (Khalifa Haftar) who found shelter and further training in Langley (1990 onwards after a betrayal by Muammar Gaddafi) rampaging across the country, while marines wait offshore. The blowback from Libyan chaos has already led to a well-armed Boko Haram causing new chaos in Nigeria.

battle-weary soldiers get a mixed welcome back to the Inland Northwest

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell1