OPINION– As governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley didn’t have much need to worry about foreign policy. Yet for reasons unknown (other than perhaps her Indian heritage), Donald Trump tapped her to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. There, she has performed to perfection, offering a model of the hubris and lack of awareness that consistently characterize U.S. foreign policy.
(COMMONDREAMS) — A House committee on Thursday took a surprising—yet welcome—step towards canceling the “blank check for endless war.”
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist.
– George Orwell, 1984
Although the U.S. already has special forces operating in Somalia (of course), Mr. “America First,” Donald Trump, figured it’d be a swell idea to add some more.
An article published in The New York Times this past Sunday perfectly demonstrates how out of control and unconstitutional America’s foreign policy has become. It highlights the latest war being perpetrated by the Obama administration, which is expanding with very little scrutiny from the press or the government branch supposedly in charge of waging war, the U.S. Congress.
The latest growing battlefield is in Somalia, and it threatens to spiral out of control just like so many other undeclared war zones before it. From the NY Times:
Hillary Clinton's National Security Address (C-SPAN)by Gaius PubliusI mentioned near the end of a piece called "Blowback, Money & the Washington War Party" that I would compare Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton with respect to its main subject, America and its wars. For context, I'd like to repeat the start of that piece:
I wish I could say that Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights, will be the capstone of his wretched political career. But with Hillary likely to be the next president, I suspect Panetta’s repulsive attacks on Obama will only guarantee him position and influence to come. Everyone knows the 76 year old Panetta was Bill Clinton’s OMB Director and then Chief of Staff and then Obama’s Director of the CIA and then Secretary of Defense.
