Author: Daniel McAdams

The two US Navy riverine command boats intercepted in Iranian territorial waters yesterday were sent on their way along with the crew of 10 US sailors after brief detention on Iranian soil. According to news reports, the well-armed warships either suffered mechanical or navigational difficulties which caused them to enter Iranian territory (although it may well have been a game of cat-and-mouse to test the Iranian response). The US sailors were apparently treated well, enjoyed what appeared a decent meal in relaxed surroundings, and in the end apologized for the mistake and praised their treatment by the Iranians.

Thanks to President Obama’s policy shift on Iran toward engagement and away from isolationism, Secretary of State John Kerry was able to telephone his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Zarif and quickly defuse what just months ago would have been a far more serious situation.

This should be a good-news story about the value of diplomacy and reducing tensions with adversaries, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) was having none of it. That Kerry expressed his appreciation to the Iranians for swiftly releasing the American sailors only showed the Obama Administration’s “craven desire to preserve the dangerous Iranian nuclear deal at all costs evidently knows no limit,” said McCain in a press release.

Continue reading “Sen. McCain Furious That Iran Treated US Sailors Well”

The quick resolution of the potentially difficult situation of US sailors caught inside Iranian territorial waters should have been celebrated in Washington as a triumph of diplomacy. With the Naval personnel in Iranian custody, Secretary of State John Kerry telephoned his Iranian counterpart and was able to talk the crisis back down to a relative non-event. This, of course, infuriated the neo-cons who saw it as a sign of weakness that the US did not respond with bombs instead of words. More in today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Why did the US fly a B-52 over South Korea yesterday? Was it a sign of superiority…or insecurity? North Korea tested some sort of nuclear device last week and the fly-over was part of a multi-pronged US response to the test. Today on the House Floor a bill strengthening sanctions against North Korea is likely to pass overwhelmingly. There is no shift in US thinking over the past 60 years. But if you think about it, even Kim Jong-Un’s foreign policy is more rational that Obama’s: in response to the threat posed by US troops in South Korea and strong rhetoric from Japan, North Korea has developed an effective nuclear deterrent. North Korea does not practice “regime change” overseas, it does not attempt to invade its neighbors. It merely has developed a deterrent to a threat. More on ineffective US foreign policy toward North Korea in today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Cries of glee must have emanated from the military-industrial complex and the Beltway think tanks as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made another of his periodic pleas for global attention. The nuclear detonation is looking less likely as powerful and thus significant than the North Korean government initially claimed, but that is not stopping vested US interests in playing up the threat. To some, like Donald Trump, it’s all China’s fault. To others, like Jeb Bush, it’s all the fault of the Obama/Hillary foreign policy. To the think tankers, more policy papers are being feverishly crafted all calling for more of the same to produce different results. More military spending and more sanctions!

But the North Korean “problem” is a direct result of US interventionism and the uncertainty it produces. After all, the Libyans gave up their nuclear program and not long afterward were “regime changed” by Washington. No one thinks a similar attack on North Korea is imminent. So as a deterrent, North Korea’s nuclear policy actually works well. Why would anyone expect them to change? Perhaps taking away the incentive for such a deterrent would be more successful? Don’t count on new thinking among the entrenched elite. Instead, turn to the Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

When pondering the intellectual decline of political movements, it is hard not to call to mind the former flagship publication of the Buckleyite wing of conservatism called National Review. Where once learned men (and women) made their case from the heights of argumentation and erudition — a force to be reckoned with, like it or not — the publication has over the years accelerated to absurdity, devolved to inanity, shrunk into a whiny club of simpering sycophants screaming full force in an empty echo chamber. An exercise in intellectual onanism, today’s NRO has nothing to say about the future because it remembers nothing of the past. It is conservatism not only without a conscience, but without understanding of that which it purports to conserve.

It may be debatable whether there was ever a Buckleyite movement wholly separate from the neoconservative impulse, or at what point the worms began eating into the flesh of the magazine. But that the neocons hijacked the magazine, silenced any conservative vein of thought not in harmony with their heterodox and revolutionary views (can one be at the same time a conservative and a revolutionary?), and proceeded to redefine what passes as modern conservatism to suit their alien agenda cannot be denied.

So now that the neoconservatives have successfully burrowed themselves so deeply into what was once the conservative movement that they have killed the host, they look around at the destruction they have wrought and scream, “don’t blame us!”

Continue reading “Neocons at National Review: ‘Stop Calling Us Neocons!’”

Is House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce purposely deceiving the American public, or is he just that badly informed? As the Saudis beheaded 47 prisoners, including a prominent Shiite cleric, Royce went on CNN to blame the whole thing on the Iranians! The problems started when the Iranian military invaded Yemen, he said. But that is demonstrably untrue. It was the Saudis who invaded Yemen. The presidential candidates are no better, promising to use the US military to defend our “ally” the Saudis. Why are they so seemingly bought off by the Saudis? It could have to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars the Saudis spend on PR in Washington each year. More on these neocon lies in today’s Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.