Antiwar.com Blog

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Trump administration is once again threatening to launch an illegal attack against the Syrian government:

The United States is threatening to attack Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime for a third time should it use chemical weapons in an assault on the northwestern province of Idlib, marking a significant shift in strategy after months of indications that the United States would soon pull out of the conflict.

In the most explicit warning to date, U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, said Monday that the United States and its British and French allies had agreed that another use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government would trigger a significant escalation, compared to previous airstrikes.

“We’ve tried to convey the message in recent days that if there’s a third use of chemical weapons, the response will be much stronger,” Bolton said after a policy speech in Washington.

The US has attacked the Syrian government twice in the last two years in response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons, and both attacks were clearly illegal under the Constitution and the U.N. Charter. A third attack would be just as illegal. The fact that the US has to keep striking and threatening the Syrian government tells us that previous strikes have been ineffective, and that means that additional strikes would likely be no better.

Continue reading “A Third Attack on Syria Would Be Just as Illegal as the Last Two”

Seventeen years after 9/11, we’ve spend $5.6 trillion in a “war on terror” that has left al-Qaeda “stronger than ever” (as in a recent LA Times article). Most of that war effort seems to have been directed against the American people, who these days cannot fly on a plane without a TSA sexual assault, cannot be secure in their papers and persons due to government spying, and cannot speak freely due to government censorship. Have we just gone completely off the rails this past 17 years? Can we right our course? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

The following post is sponsored by The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy (CRFP).

The bipartisan initiative Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy will host an event this week examining the role of constitutional war powers in military interventions abroad, as the United States faces increasing scrutiny for its support for the wars in Yemen and Syria.

The event, which will take place in Washington, DC, near Capitol Hill, will also examine how defending constitutional war powers can prevent human suffering and protect religious liberty.

The event takes place on the symbolic date of the 17th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, which prompted U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and provided policymakers with a casus belli to invade Iraq two years later.

Continue reading “Event Tuesday (9/10/18): Experts Demand Review of War on Terror on 9/11 Anniversary”

TO: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Moscow Has Upped the Ante in Syria

We are concerned that you may not have been adequately briefed on the upsurge of hostilities in northwestern Syria, where Syrian armed forces with Russian support have launched a full-out campaign to take back the al-Nusra/al-Qaeda/ISIS-infested province of Idlib. The Syrians will almost certainly succeed, as they did in late 2016 in Aleppo. As in Aleppo, it will mean unspeakable carnage, unless someone finally tells the insurgents theirs is a lost cause.

That someone is you. The Israelis, Saudis, and others who want unrest to endure are egging on the insurgents, assuring them that you, Mr. President, will use US forces to protect the insurgents in Idlib, and perhaps also rain hell down on Damascus. We believe that your senior advisers are encouraging the insurgents to think in those terms, and that your most senior aides are taking credit for your recent policy shift from troop withdrawal from Syria to indefinite war.

Big Difference This Time

Russian missile-armed naval and air units are now deployed in unprecedented numbers to engage those tempted to interfere with Syrian and Russian forces trying to clean out the terrorists from Idlib. We assume you have been briefed on that – at least to some extent. More important, we know that your advisers tend to be dangerously dismissive of Russian capabilities and intentions.

Continue reading “Moscow Has Upped the Ante in Syria”

The New York Times unleashed a firestorm by publishing an anonymously written op-ed from someone purporting to be a “senior US Administration official” and who writes of a secret cabal within the US government that conspires to thwart President Trump’s agenda. Presented as a heroic “resistance” from within, many see it as the work of a dangerous and undemocratic “deep state.” Is the “steady state,” as the NYT anonymous writer terms it, really another word for the “deep state”? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.