Antiwar.com Blog

I have just arrived in Hiroshima with a group of Japanese "Okinawa to Hiroshima peace walkers" who had spent nearly two months walking Japanese roads protesting U.S. militarism. While we were walking, an Afghan peace march that had set off in May was enduring 700km of Afghan roadsides, poorly shod, from Helmand province to Afghanistan’s capital of Kabul. Our march watched the progress of theirs with interest and awe. The unusual Afghan group had started off as 6 individuals, emerging out of a sit-in protest and hunger strike in the Helmand provincial capital Lashkar Gah, after a suicide attack there created dozens of casualties. As they started walking their numbers soon swelled to 50 plus as the group braved roadside bombs, fighting between warring parties and exhaustion from desert walking during the strict fast month of Ramadan.

The Afghan march, which is believed to be the first of its kind, is asking for a long-term ceasefire between warring parties and the withdrawal of foreign troops. One peace walker, named Abdullah Malik Hamdard, felt that he had nothing to lose by joining the march. He said: "Everybody thinks they will be killed soon, the situation for those alive is miserable. If you don’t die in the war, the poverty caused by the war may kill you, which is why I think the only option left for me is to join the peace convoy."

Continue reading “Marching for Peace: From Helmand to Hiroshima”

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Jason Rezaian describes what renewed U.S. sanctions will do to the Iranian people:

Although sanctions won’t target food and medicine directly, Iran will be cut from the international financial system, so imports for many items will be affected, causing delays in delivery. People needing certain lifesaving drugs will have to cross borders to buy their medicine – if they can afford it – on the black market. People who might otherwise live normal lives with the aid of their medications will needlessly die.

The Trump administration is engaging in collective punishment of all Iranians in a vain attempt to force changes in regime behavior and ultimately to force a change in the regime itself. It isn’t likely to work, but it is an unacceptable tactic to use in any case. Strangling a country’s economy in a bid to pressure its government to do what Washington wants is cruel, aggressive, and excessive. Punishing the population for the wrongdoing of a government that they don’t control is both wrong and foolish. It isn’t going to weaken the regime in any case, and it will inflict needless suffering on people that have done nothing to us.

Continue reading “The Cruel Collective Punishment of Sanctions”

With the Syrian army’s liberation of the southwest complete, there remains just a single province in control of ISIS and al-Qaeda in the country. The “bloodbath” that the “experts” warned about if Assad regained control not only did not come to pass, but tens and hundreds of thousands of Syrians are returning home. Once the neocons got it all wrong. So what’s next? Join today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Recently, the State Department held a conference on religious freedom. Our friends at The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy were invited to present a series of talks on the impact of war on religious liberty.

Individual videos from this three-hour presentation can be searched here.

After a firey, all-caps Tweet warning Iran, President Trump did a 180 and said he’d meet with Iranian president Rouhani with no pre-conditions. Then his neocon Secretary of State Pompeo got wind of it and added a list of conditions to the meeting. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians balked at the offer. Is Trump in a box of his own making when it comes to his options on Iran? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

As a military officer, I was trained to strictly observe security protocols. So when I first heard of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, I was instinctively critical. But upon reading his released documents, I saw how Julian gave people accurate insights into the inner workings of their own government.

Government “of the People” cannot flourish beneath a suffocating cloak of secrecy. And secrecy is often aimed, not at protecting us from enemies abroad, but at deceiving us about the dark machinations of our own government. The most consequential secrets are those used to conceal steps taken to establish predicates for future wars – unwarranted conflicts that seem to roll off an endless assembly line. No-fly zones, bombings, sanctions, false flags, blockades, mercenaries, bloodthirsty terrorists have all become stock in trade. Sanctions destabilize our targets through hunger and suffering. We terrorize and blow body parts into the streets like calling cards. Regime change is the end game; coups and assassinations are fair play.

Before Assange, those who “broke the code” and detected the Deep State’s patterns of misbehavior were labeled “conspiracy theorists” or worse. But with the advent of WikiLeaks, original, unchallenged source documents have proven our arguments, and revealed the truth to citizens.

Continue reading “Sen. Richard Black: Why the Censors Hate Assange”