With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.
As gruesome as the Islamic Front’s videotaped beheadings are, there is ambiguity over whether the U.S. government’s death-by-drone is any less horrific, with some victims crawling about with severed limbs and others just collateral damage
Now the US claims it must raise another army of “moderate” ground troops to augment its aerial bombardment of “ISIS.” But in reality, attacks on phantom enemies in the desert serve the singular purpose of creating a no-fly zone and no-drive zone for Syria’s military, preventing the final annihilation of the West’s terrorist mercenaries in Syrian territory and in fact giving them a second chance to finally march on the gates of Damascus with US airpower in tow.
The casualties of Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce more recruits for ISIS. Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce “boots on the ground” in Iraq. Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed, and our heads will be cut off. The newly created propaganda of a “Russian threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s borders. A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.
This week’s attacks on Islamic State positions in Syria mean that Obama has bombed no less than seven different countries in six years. All this comes from a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. There’s been a new Cold War too, to go with the hot ones. The man who promised a “reset” in relations with Russia has taken his country and other western nations into a new economic trade war with Moscow after the US engineered, along with the EU, a highly provocative regime change in a country bordering Russia.
That the president wants the authority to intervene in the Syrian civil war is not a sufficient reason to give him that power. Under the Constitution, it is Congress’s independent responsibility to commence war.
We are the representatives of the American people. The government is proposing to take their resources and to put their children’s lives at risk. I encourage all my colleagues to give the decision the weight it is due.
From a historical point of view, it is ironic that a young senator from Illinois who campaigned in large part agains the Iraq War and who showcased his credentials as a constitutional scholar would be the handmaiden of the permanent “state of exception” described by the National Socialist philosopher Carl Schmitt, who argued that sovereigns should have the right to suspend the legal and juridical constraints of their societies so that they may act outside of law. This is the opposite of the legal constitutionalism that forms the philosophical basis of the American legal order, which can be summarized with the words of Edward Coke: “The King himself should be under no man, but under God and the Law.”
By Pepe Escobar (Asia Times | The Roving Eye) The Tomahawks are finally flying again – propelled by newspeak. 42 Tomahawks fired from a Sixth Fleet destroyer parked in Mare Nostrum, plus F-22s raising hell and Hellfires spouted by drones, that’s a neat mini-Shock and Awe to honor Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al -Baghdadi, self-declared leader of Islamic State. […]
For Washington and its close London ally, the British public is a crucial constituency to also win over. It seems more than a coincidence that ISIS has now carried out the same sickening execution of a British national as it did with the two Americans. President Obama said after the videoed slaying of Briton David Haines that the US “stands shoulder-to-shoulder” with the British people.
The glitzy NATO summit in Newport has not publicly announced major decisions but it is likely that they were taken in secret. To prevent Russia and China – but also India – from continuing their development, NATO can count on Terrorism from the Islamic Emirate which it pretends to condemn and fight.
Needless to say, US, NATO, Saudi and Qatari support and funding to the Islamic State will continue. The objective is not to destroy the Islamic State as promised by Obama. What we are dealing with is a US sponsored process of destabilizing and destroying both Iraq and Syria. The campaign against the Islamic State is being used as a justification to bomb both countries, largely targeting civilians.
After ignoring beheadings by radical jihadists in Syria for years, as well as legal executions by their Middle Eastern allies, it’s a little hypocritical for Obama and Cameron to voice outrage at ISIS now, antiwar activist Michael Raddie told RT.
