Further Escalation Against the Houthis Makes No Sense

James Stavridis isn’t satisfied with the current pointless war against the Houthis and wants something more:

Four mariners dead. Two commercial ships sunk. One ship and 25 mariners held captive.  Global supply chains distorted. Where is a strong military response to this high seas threat?

The U.S. and Britain have been waging a war against the Houthis for the past five months, and all that they have managed to accomplish is to boost Houthi recruiting, deepen anti-American sentiment among Yemenis, and waste limited resources. What “strong” response should the U.S. consider when its military action has so far proven to be useless? Escalation was the wrong way to handle the attacks on Red Sea commercial shipping at the start of the year, and further escalation is the wrong answer today. It should be obvious by now that the Houthis are not going to be bombed into stopping their attacks. If anything, the U.S.-led military campaign has played into their hands and benefited them politically without doing much to reduce their ability to launch more attacks.

Continue reading “Further Escalation Against the Houthis Makes No Sense”

Congress Debates Women and the Draft, but Not War and the Draft

“Firestorm erupts over requiring women to sign up for military draft”, reads the headline on a story today on TheHill.com.

Unfortunately, that firestorm amounts mostly to an exchange of sound bites and social-media posts, not a real debate, much less a hearing with independent witnesses, in either the House or Senate. It focuses on the proposal included in the Senate version of the annual National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) to expand registration with the Selective Service System to include young women as well as young men, rather than on what may be a more significant proposal in the House version of the same bill to try to make draft registration automatic by basing the list of potential draftees on information aggregated from other Federal records rather than provided by registrants themselves — denying potential draftees the chance to indicate their opposition to being drafted, and to obstruct the mobilization for total war, by opting out of draft registration.

Most importantly, the current “debate” ignores both the profound and quite possibly insolvable practical problems with trying to compile a registry of potential draftees from other existing Federal databases, and the more fundamental issue with any contingency planning or preparation for a draft: the way that, even when a draft is not active, the perceived availability of a draft as a fallback emboldens warmakers to embark on wars that people wouldn’t volunteer to fight.

Continue reading “Congress Debates Women and the Draft, but Not War and the Draft”

The Heretics: Global Dominance at Any Price

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

American foreign policy remains in the grip of heretics. They believe that the Prince of Peace is actually a god of war. They believe America is strengthened by entangling alliances (think here of our so-called alliance with Israel). They believe in constant war as a recipe both for dominant power and greater freedom and democracy throughout the world. They believe that spending roughly a trillion dollars each year on weapons and war is a wise “investment.” And they believe they are the toughest and truest of patriots, the ones who see further, the ones with the guts to get things done, no matter how poorly America’s wars have gone from Korea and Vietnam through Afghanistan, Iraq, and today’s proxy wars.

There used to be a different America, a much less militaristic and bellicose one. The American tradition is rich and complex; it contains multitudes, as Walt Whitman might say. Why are we so stuck on warmongers, thieves, and vainglorious simps of empire?

Continue reading “The Heretics: Global Dominance at Any Price”

Israel Spokesman: Defeating Hamas ‘Unachievable.’ Bibi: ‘Send More Bombs!’

On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

As the Israeli operation in Gaza continues to miss achieving its goals of eliminating Hamas, in-fighting inside the government is heating up. Recently an IDF spokesman said it was “unachievable” to defeat Hamas, as the IDF rushed to “clarify” his statement. Meanwhile Netanyahu BLASTED the US in a new video complaining that weapons were being withheld. Also today: US envoy assures Lebanon that US will back Israel in any war on its territory.

GET YOUR TICKETS NOW to the RPI 2024 DC Conference. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.