Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Obama Again Forced To Clean Up One Of Bush’s Messes.

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It has taken most of 5 years for President Obama to clean up the economic mess left by the Bush administration…an economic disaster that former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke labeled as worse than the 1929 crash that led to the Great Depression.

Now the Obama administration is determined to clean up the mess created by the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq…a country that posed no real threat to the US. ISIS, aka ISIL and IS, began as al-Qaeda in Iraq in the vacuum created by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. When Paul Bremer decided to “de-Ba’athify” Iraq following the invasion, Saddam’s former military officers were left with no jobs, no income and no future. The situation was further complicated when the US military following the directions of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld left the Iraqi ammo dumps unguarded allowing the guerilla fighters to turn artillery shells into IEDs that kept US forces bogged down in Iraq for more than 9 years.

The Ba’athists and former Iraqi military officers became further alienated by the new Iraqi leadership who gave power to Shiites and marginalized Sunnis.

So here we go again. Round three in Iraq.

Only this time, we are doing it right. Although the Obama administration has been criticized for not committing ground troops, that is because they are being careful not to make the war on ISIS seem like another Christian crusade against the Muslim world. Instead, we have put together a coalition that includes the Arab nations of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Jordan and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

It’s not perfect. No war is. But it’s unlikely to be another disaster on the scale of what Bush-Cheney gave us.

Qurans At Our Border?

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As part of election year fear-mongering, conservatives have once again tried to foment fear over our southern border. Some good ol’ boy cowboy-hat-wearing nitwit recently appeared on Fox Noise Channel to warn that “Muslim clothing and the Quran book” had been found at campsites near the border. In addition, right wing politicians have warned that ISIS could infiltrate from Mexico.

Yeah, right.

Not only have the FBI, Homeland Security and our counter-terrorism unit dismissed the claims, the accusations are obviously false on their own merits. What is “Muslim clothing?” Is it a cotton robe? A hijab? A burqa? The cowboy wouldn’t recognize one if he saw it. And about that Quran…to Muslims, it is a holy book. They would not desecrate it by leaving it on the ground unless they had died. That being the case, we have nothing to worry about. The bearer of the book is dead…either having collapsed from heat and dehydration or shot by some gun-toting, flag-waving “patriot.”

In reality, such fears about our southern border are the result of racism…fear that more of those brown people, whether they’re Muslim or Catholic will immigrate into the US. On the other hand, the only terrorists known to have successfully attacked our nation either came into the country across our more extensive border with Canada, entered our nation legally with student visas, or were born here (remember Timothy McVeigh?).

Fact is, we have more to fear from home-grown terrorists and the Faux News Channel’s attempts to divide us than we do from Muslim-clothing-wearing, Quran-carrying immigrants attempting to cross our southern border.

The Home Of Radical Islam.

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ISIS (aka ISIL and the Islamic State), al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the radical Islamic madrassas in Pakistan all have something in common aside from Islam. They have all been funded by Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Arabia that is sitting on an ocean of oil which has turned a family of desert tribesmen into billionaires; the Saudi Arabia whose ruling family consists of nearly 15,000 members; the Saudi Arabia that is home to Mecca and radical Wahhabi Islam; the Saudi Arabia that has a dismal record for women’s rights and human rights; the Saudi Arabia that has a government based on nepotism and corruption; the Saudi Arabia that still beheads criminals and dissidents; the Saudi Arabia that has close ties with both former Presidents Bush; the Saudi Arabia that was held harmless for 9/11 even though the plot was mostly financed and carried out by Saudis.

Yes, that Saudi Arabia!

Considering all of this, you may wonder why we continue to treat Saudi Arabia as a close ally. The answer can be summed up in a single word. It begins with “o”, ends with “l” and has an “i” in the middle.

If we are ever to bring peace to the Middle East, we can’t do it militarily. Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have proven that. Radical Islamists must be defeated from within…by moderate Muslims. We can only remove the Saudi’s sources of arms and funding. Of course, that means ending the sale of arms from our defense industries. It means ending our reliance on Saudi Arabian oil. It means committing to sustainable forms of energy. It means developing alternative sources for plastic, such as the process that makes plastics by drawing carbon from the atmosphere.

It means ending support for Saudi Arabia as long as it continues to fund extremist groups.

The Real Israeli-Palestinian War.

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Since the murder of 3 Israeli teenagers and the revenge killings of more than 2,000 Palestinians, Israel and Hamas have been engaged in a propaganda war. And it appears that Hamas is winning. The disproportionate Israeli attacks on Gaza, including air strikes on hospitals, schools and UN facilities, polls have caused the popularity of Hamas to soar. As recently as March, 58 percent of Gazans disapproved of Hamas. But since the conflict, the approval ratings of Hamas have skyrocketed. 94 percent of Palestinians now approve of the way Hamas conducted the war and 53 percent now believe that military conflict is the best way to achieve a Palestinian state.

This can only be made worse by the Israeli announcement that it is annexing another 1,000 acres of the occupied West Bank.

Despite polls showing that the majority of Israelis favor peace negotiations and a two-state solution, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems determined to provoke Hamas into a prolonged conflict. Israel points to the rockets being fired from Gaza, yet Israel controls everything that goes in and out of Gaza. As a result, Gazans have great difficulty gaining access to building materials and food. There are pronounced shortages of virtually everything.

So if rockets and other arms are being smuggled into the strip, it’s as much Israel’s fault as it is Gaza’s.

Even with the rockets and small arms, Hamas can have little effect on Israel. But thanks, in part, to the $3 billion a year in military aid from the US, Israel can wipe Gaza from the face of the Earth. Indeed, the UN estimates that it will take 20 years or more for Palestinians to rebuild Gaza neighborhoods providing, of course, Israel will allow concrete to cross the border. Yet, despite its military superiority, this is a war that Israel cannot win.

To understand why, one has to examine the region’s history. Even before World War II, Great Britain made the decision to help displaced Jews return to their “promised land.” To implement the plan, Britain drew up arbitrary borders which displaced thousands of Palestinians. In other words, Jewish refugees created Palestinian refugees. By 1948, there were already more than 700,000 Palestinian refugees crowded into Gaza, the West Bank and surrounding nations. With the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Arab nations chose to fight back on behalf of the Palestinians. There has been almost constant fighting ever since.

After Israel won the 1967 war, it occupied Gaza and the West Bank. It filled the West Bank with Israeli settlements. Contrary to previous agreements, it claimed all of Jerusalem as its capital. It has placed a highly restrictive blockade on Gaza. It has refused to negotiate a peaceful solution since Hamas won control of the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006. And it called for its special ally, the US, to block Palestinian membership in the UN.

Those are the facts. How you interpret them and which side you take is largely the result of the propaganda war.

What Good Are Geneva Conventions If We Refuse To Enforce Them?

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By signing the Geneva Convention on torture, the US agreed that it would never resort to torturing prisoners, and that it would prosecute or extradite anyone who did. So why has the Obama administration refused to press charges of war crimes against George W. Bush, Richard “The Dick” Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, et al?

The Senate Intelligence Committee has now documented torture during the Bush administration and President Obama has confirmed the findings. If that’s not enough evidence to generate indictments, Bush officials have confessed to their crimes in their published memoirs and on television. Not only have they admitted knowledge of “extraordinary renditions,” aka torture. They have bragged about their “extreme interrogation techniques” and stated that they would not hesitate to use them again.

In other words, they are self-confessed war criminals.

So why hasn’t the Obama administration pressed charges according to the Geneva Conventions? Why have they not extradited the perpetrators to countries that will? Aren’t we supposed to be a nation of laws? Don’t we brag about our commitment to human rights? Don’t we accuse and prosecute the officials of other nations for war crimes?

If we can’t live up to our own rhetoric and promises; if we can’t abide by the treaties we sign, what good are they?

Where Is Our Conscience?

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If the events of this past week disclosed anything, it’s that the people of the United States have no conscience. We not only support a government waging war on civilians, including women and children, resulting in 860 dead and more than 5,000 wounded. We have accelerated deportations of desperate mothers and kids escaping the violence and poverty of Central America.

One must ask why? What happened to us? Where is our concern for our fellow men, or more accurately, our fellow women and children? Where is our sense of charity? Where is our morality?

For many years, we have unconditionally supported Israel. That made sense when the Arab nations around it refused to accept its right to exist. But that is no longer the case. Now Israel is the baddest bully on the block, with state-of-the-art weaponry purchased with our money. The Israeli government has made Gaza a prison and every so often, in the words of Israeli military leaders, it invades Gaza to do “a little lawn-mowing.” Israel refuses to negotiate a permanent two-state solution with the PLA because, in its view, the PLA has nothing of value to offer. It has no weaponry other than rocks. Israel also refuses to negotiate with those Palestinians who are armed…Hamas…probably because Hamas provides Israel a reason to justify its repression of Palestinians and its development of Palestinian territory in the West Bank.

So what is the US attitude to the violence in Gaza? Secretary of State John Kerry is working hard to negotiate a cease fire, saying that any agreement must first assure Israel of its security and Palestinians of an economic future. Not to villify Kerry, but why just talk about Israel’s security? It is the Palestinians who are being killed!

As for the refugees from Central America, why are their lives of so little value? Why are we deporting them when we have accepted refugees from around the globe who were facing similar conditions? Are Guatemalan lives worth less than Somalis? Are Honduran lives worth less than Romanians?

Conservatives preach that our entitlements will soon be bankrupt because, as baby boomers retire, there will be fewer people to contribute portions of their salaries to add to the trust funds. They say that we will soon have more people “on the dole” than people working. If that is true, why not accept refugees who have come here looking for jobs? Don’t the taxes and contributions of Latinos count as much as those from Sudanese, Ukranians, Russians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and all of the other refugees we have welcomed?

If we can so easily watch Palestinians die with our complicity; if we can so angrily turn our backs on desperate people seeking our help, we may as well remove the inscription from the Statue of Liberty. We must admit that we are no longer the beacon of freedom for the world. We must admit that we no longer hold the moral high ground.

We must admit that we have no conscience.

Does Israel Actually Want Peace?

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It’s a fair question. Because nearly every time Israel is presented with a real opportunity, it seems to turn, instead, to violence.

Israel’s latest misadventure was soundly criticized this past Sunday by former Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski during an appearance on Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square. When asked if the Israeli invasion of Gaza was a wise move, he pulled no punches. “No,” he said, “When Hamas accepted the notion of participation in the Palestinian leadership, it, in effect, acknowledged the determination of that leadership to seek a peaceful solution with Israel. That was a real option. They should have persisted in that. Instead, Netanyahu launched a campaign of defammation against Hamas, seized on the killing of three Israeli kids to immediately charge Hamas with having done it without any evidence, and has used that to stir up public opinion in Israel in order to justify this attack in Gaza which is so lethal. I think he is isolating Israel. He is endangering its long-range future, and I think we ought to make it very clear that this is a course of action that we thoroughly disapprove, that we do not support, and which may compel us and the rest of the international community to take somes steps of legitimizing Palestinian aspirations, perhaps in the UN.”

In other words, instead of seeking peace with his neighbors through negotiation and conciliation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was looking for an excuse to militarily destroy his enemies. He claims that the military operation is limited with pinpoint strikes. If it is, then the Israelis have been targeting civilians and children since they represent the majority of the casualties. In doing so, Netanyahu is continuing the never-ending cycle of violence thereby ensuring that the conflict will continue for many more generations.

Not that violence in the territory is anything new. Jews, Arab Muslims and Christians have occupied and fought over the land for millenia with the Israelis being emboldened by their religious doctrine. They claim that they are the “chosen people” and that Jerusalem and the “Holy Land” was a gift from God…a claim that makes sharing the territory all but impossible. In fact, the modern State of Israel was a gift from the British Empire and the United Nations Partition Plan. Out of a sense of guilt following World War II, the UN drew up borders creating the Jewish State of Israel and the Arab State of Palestine.

However, re-drawing borders and relocating people has seldom led to a peaceful coexistence. Not in Israel. Not in Iraq. Not in Ukraine.

Israel’s military control of Gaza, by fencing its borders, blockading its ports and controlling everyone and everything that enters or leaves Gaza has turned it into what is, in effect, the world’s largest and most populous prison. It has not only created economic hardships for Palestinians. It has robbed them of hope. That’s a situation that simply cannot end well.

As for the notion that Israel will eventually agree to a two-state solution, one has to ask, which two states? Israel has already claimed all of Jerusalem for itself. It has accelerated settlements on the West Bank to the point that almost nothing is left for Palestinians. It continues to delay peace negotiations to allow the settlements to continue. It even called upon the US to block Palestine’s membership in the UN. All of this has been pushed by conservative Tea Party-like politicians who are even to the right of Netanyahu, powerful Jewish lobbying groups in the US and certain evangelical US churches who believe that the removal of Arabs from the “Holy Land” will hasten the coming of the new Messiah.

Fortunately, these groups don’t seem to represent the majority sentiment of the Israeli and American people. A number of Jewish organizations are dismayed by the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. The Jewish Voice for Peace is calling for the US to stop funding the on-going massacre in Gaza. And the Jewish organization, J Street, has long called for moderation and a two-state solution. These groups seem to understand that peace cannot be achieved until each side recognizes the rights and circumstances of the other. Palestinians must recognize the historical claims of the Jews and Israel’s right to exist. Conversely, Israel must recognize the historical claims of the Arabs and the ongoing hardships for the Palestinian people.

But a recent article in the New Republic detailing Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to negotiate peace between the two sides reveals the depth of the problem.

Why Does The Right Feel Free To Interpret Science But Not The Constitution And The Bible?

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If anything, it should be the other way around. The Bible is not only full of contradictions. Most of it was written hundreds of years after the events it portrays, and it has lost meaning with each translation. As for the Constitution, not even its authors thought it was infallible. Indeed, the Founders expected it to be modified regularly. Jefferson even suggested that it be revisited every generation. And the Constitution addressed the principles and issues of the time. The Founders could not have imagined the issues of today.

As a result, both the Bible and the Constitution may be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

Science, on the other hand, is based entirely on evidence. Science takes a hypothesis and tests it in order to determine if the principle is correct. Only when the results have been repeated on multiple occasions does science accept the hypothesis as fact. For example, gravity was once considered a theory, but every experiment and observation proved it to be true, so it is now accepted as fact. The same is true of evolution and human-caused climate change. In each case, there is an abundance of evidence. Yet conservatives continue to challenge the principles with a few anecdotal experiences based on personal opinion.

In other words, on these issues and many others, conservatives have things backward.

Conservatives continually want to replace science and other evidence with opinion to suit their own ideologies. For instance, they deny the positive impact of Keynesian economics which has been proven by economists on multiple occasions. Instead, they want to rely on Reaganomics which has never proven to work. Even the two architects of Reagan’s trickle down theory have abandoned the concept as a failure and a fraud.

Conservatives actually believe that the poor are lazy despite the fact that most work full-time jobs. Conservatives believe that giving tax breaks and subsidies to large corporations will actually increase federal revenue and create jobs. Conservatives believe that using contraceptives makes women sluts. They believe that preaching abstinence to teens prevents unwanted pregancies despite all evidence to the contrary. They believe that defunding abortion, denying food stamps and school lunch programs for children and declaring war halfway around the world makes them “pro-life.”

Conservatives deny that our national obsession with coal, gas and oil is destroying our planet despite the findings of the world’s most respected climatoligists and evidence of the rapid melting of the planet’s largest glaciers. Conservatives believe that allowing industries to police themselves will maintain our environment. Conservatives believe that allowing the wealthy and large corporations to influence elections is protecting freedom of speech.

There’s a word for such people…and it’s not conservative. It’s delusional!

Conservative “Values.”

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Whenever I hear someone talk about “values,” I silently prepare myself to endure yet another lecture about religion, hard work, freedom and patriotism. That’s because conservatives assume that they are the only ones who appreciate such things – the only ones who admire hard work, dedication to family and the benefits of living in the US.

Conservatives talk about religion, but they spout hateful ideas. They talk about freedom, but they want to discriminate against those who look different and those with whom they disagree. They talk about hard work, but they refuse to see others rewarded for it. They talk about getting the government off their backs, but they don’t want anyone to touch their Medicare or Social Security. They rail against illegal immigrants while denying equality to the First Americans. They spout quotes from the Founding Fathers, but ignore the statements from those Founders with whom they disagree.

They talk about patriotism, even as they are at war with our federal government.

For the so-called “values voters,” everything is black or white; us against them; Christians against heathens; fiscal conservatives against spendthrifts; cut-and-save against tax-and-spend. There simply is no room for middle ground. As stated by former president George W. Bush, “you’re either with us, or against us.”

I suspect this will fall on deaf ears, but here’s some news for conservatives. Caring for and helping others is a value. Negotiating peace is a value. Showing compassion for those less fortunate than yourself is a value. Leaving the environment in the same shape you found it is a value. Helping to educate others is a value. Honoring knowledge and accomplishment is a value. Tolerance for other lifestyles, ideas and religions is a value. Moderation and compromise are values. And you can be patriotic without waving the flag, shouting “USA” or supporting yet another war.

I understand, dear conservatives, that these may be distasteful and foreign concepts to you. But these are values shared by most of the developed world. In fact, your “values” of greed, anger, hate and intolerance are reviled by most of those who are educated and enlightened. You remember who used those words to describe themselves and their aspirations, don’t you? We refer to them as the Founding Fathers.

Immigration Issues Tied To Foreign Policy.

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Conservatives, especially those in Arizona, California and Texas, are using the recent influx of unaccompanied children from Central America to “prove” that President Obama is neglecting our southern border. They can’t seem to comprehend the fact that the children have been apprehended while crossing the border. They weren’t just given a pass into the US. They also fail to understand that the transport of immigrant children from Texas to facilities in other states has to do with the fact that our holding facilities are overflowing. The Border Patrol could not have been prepared for the mass influx of children who were sent northward to escape the violence and poverty in their own countries.

This is not simply a border crisis. It’s a humanitarian crisis.

The seeds of this crisis were sown more than 100 years ago when the US allowed its corporations to divide up the impoverished nations of the Western Hemisphere. The United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International) and the Standard Fruit Company (Dole Food Company) seized control of large tracts of land along with the banana trade of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other parts of the Caribbean. With the military might of the US behind them, these companies dominated the politics of the region. It was this fact that led to the term “Banana Republics.” And it is the primary cause of the long-term poverty of these nations.

But the meddling of US corporations didn’t stop there.

Following the ratification of CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement), large US-based agri-businesses began dumping corn on Mexico and Central American countries. This led to the financial ruin of small farmers. With no way to feed their families, the farmers were forced to move to the slums of cities in hopes of obtaining jobs. Finally, in desperation, some turned to crime. Many more immigrated north.

Although the current crisis may be caused by misinformation, rumor and greedy smugglers, in many ways, the flood of illegal immigrants across our borders is the result of our own actions (rather the actions of our large, greedy corporations). Without an immigration policy that accounts for the causes of immigration…all of the causes…it will continue and the problems associated with illegal immigration will be magnified.