Author: Daniel McAdams

Why is the US warning Syria not to shoot back at Kurdish militia members who are firing on Syrian military positions? Because US Special Forces troops are fighting alongside the Kurds. But it also may be a shift in US policy away from its stated focus on ISIS and toward a focus on removing Assad. House Speaker Paul Ryan inexplicably released a statement at the end of last week castigating the Obama Administration for failing to attack the Assad government after the 2013 chemical attack in Ghouta. That all evidence points to a false flag rather than Syrian government culpability means little to Ryan’s propaganda team. With US-backed militants facing the possibility of a crushing defeat at Aleppo, it looks as if the US may be shifting toward direct confrontation with Assad (and by default also with Russia). This and more in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Just when you thought US foreign policy could not get more absurd. Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, who is listed as “commander of US forces in Iraq and Syria,” has issued a warning to the Syrian military that if its counter-insurgency operations on Syrian soil leave US troops on Syrian soil “feeling threatened,” the US military would “defend itself.”

That needs to be broken down to even be believed.

The Syrian military is fighting an armed uprising on its own soil. The US government is training and equipping several factions of that armed insurgency, in this case the Kurdish YPG militia. The US military is also operating on Syrian soil alongside and in support of the YPG militia. Members of the YPG militia have, over the past several days, been firing on Syrian government forces. The Syrian air force returns fire on its own soil and the US military that is illegally operating on Syrian soil issues a warning to the Syrian government to stop firing on insurgents on Syrian soil!

Continue reading “US Warns Syrian Military… Against Operating Inside Syria!”

Osama bin Laden’s youngest son, Hamza, purportedly released an audio recording earlier this week in which he called for young Saudis to get involved with al-Qaeda in Yemen and in which he called for retaliation against ongoing US military operations in several countries in the greater Middle East. Said the younger bin Laden: “We will continue striking you and targeting you in your country and abroad in response to your oppression of the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and the rest of the Muslim lands that did not survive your oppression.” Should we listen to him and start thinking about removing his recruiting tools, or do we keep doing that which helps him and others like him recruit more terrorists? Our thoughts in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

The Saudis have purchased more than $100 billion in weapons from the US during the Obama presidency. Much of it has been used to attack next-door Yemen in attempt to restore a deposed president. Over the past several days the Saudis have bombed a school, a hospital, and a potato chip factory. Scores of civilians have been killed. Washington has yet to condemn the slaughter carried out by the Saudis with US weapons. Now the Saudis want another billion dollars worth of weapons from the US to continue their war of aggression. There is little push-back in military-industrial complex-controlled Washington. But is this foreign policy good for America? Today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report.

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

The elephant in the living room? Foreign policy. No one wants to really talk about it. Washington is hoping the rest of us won’t blurt out that the emperor has no clothes, that US interventionism is making us poorer, less free, and less safe.

Even when candidates like Donald Trump talk about it, they don’t talk about it. No nation-building, he said recently. But if we happen to see a country with some oil we should take it. "To the victor go the spoils!" is not a great slogan if you are running on the idea of restraint.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t talk about it because her track record of hyper-interventionism speaks for itself. She thinks President Obama has been far too timid and reluctant to use military force overseas. He has not sufficiently weaponized the State Department.

The "reformers" pretend to criticize foreign policy. They like to point out that it costs a lot to run the world, that we should not intervene everywhere, etc. But scratch the surface and in most cases you will see that they philosophically back the idea that the US has the right – and the obligation – to tell the rest of the world how to live.

At the Ron Paul Institute we take a different view. We believe that US foreign policy is not flawed in its execution, in the selection of targets, in the balance between "soft power" and "hard power." We think it is rotted to its philosophical core. And our mission here is to try our best to do something about it.

This September 10th, the Institute will hold its first public conference, ‘Peace and Prosperity 2016." We are taking our case to Washington just two months before the US presidential election and just one day before the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – attacks that launched the endless "war on terror." We are taking on the idea of endless war. We have assembled a spectacular group of speakers, most of whom we have known and worked with for many years. We do not all agree on everything. But we agree that a change is needed. We would love to see you there. Let’s make our voices heard.

Ron Paul Institute ‘Peace and Prosperity 2016’ Conference

Continue reading “See You in September! Ron Paul Institute ‘Peace and Prosperity 2016’ Conference Program”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a major foreign policy speech in Ohio yesterday which was once again a very mixed bag. On the one hand he promised an end to regime-change and nation-building, which if he had just stopped there and stuck to it would have been a positive development. Unfortunately his positions are less driven by principles and policy than by desire to please both the pro-war and antiwar factions. Therefore he swore to defeat radical Islamic terrorism by dropping even more bombs in the Middle East, obviously not understanding that it was US bombs in the Middle East that created the problem in the first place. He wants to blame Obama and Hillary Clinton for ISIS without understanding that they were just carrying to its conclusion the interventionist policies of George W. Bush. We take a look at the ups and downs of Trump’s foreign policy speech in today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.