Antiwar.com Blog

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Curt Mills explains who Fred Fleitz is and why it matters that he has been hired as John Bolton’s chief of staff on the National Security Council:

But Fleitz’s hiring signals three developments clearly: Bolton’s propensity to tap hardline loyalists; Bolton’s readiness to associate with Iran and North Korean regime change advocates; and Bolton’s assiduous staffing of Russia investigation critics.

Fleitz has been working for Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, which is known for both its wacky conspiracy theories about Islamist infiltration and its hard-line foreign policy views. Like Bolton, he was a vehement opponent of the nuclear deal, and absurdly claimed in 2014 that Obama was “conceding” an Iranian nuclear weapon by negotiating the agreement. Bolton’s hiring of Fleitz is a reunion for the two, as Fleitz served as Bolton’s chief of staff when the latter worked in Bush’s State Department. It was there that he earned the reputation of being Bolton’s “enforcer,” and presumably that is the role he is going to reprise on the NSC.

Fleitz’s position confirms that Bolton continues to remake the National Security Council in his image, and it shows once again the extent to which hard-line fringe figures have gained extraordinary influence in the Trump White House.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter. This article is reprinted from The American Conservative with permission.

From today’s Cato Institute event, featuring Gene Healy, Vice President, Cato Institute; and John Glaser, Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute; moderated by Jeff Vanderslice, Director of Government Affairs, Cato Institute.

Healy and Glaser discuss the practical consequences of Congress’s abdication of its war-making powers and how Congress can reassert its rightful place as the branch of government responsible for determining the time, place, and targets of war.

Congress’s most solemn constitutional duty is to determine whether, where, and against whom the United States will engage in war. Yet for far too long, legislators have ceded that responsibility to the executive branch, allowing multiple administrations to use the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) as a blank check to wage war whenever and wherever the president decides.

As Congress determines how to respond to growing demands for a new AUMF, it should beware of proposals that would institutionalize mission creep by surrendering more authority to the executive branch. Instead, Congress should repeal — and not replace — the 2001 AUMF.

US Commander of the Europe Command, Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, has called for thousands more US troops to “deter Russian aggression” in Europe. He has even suggested that the US troops should be pulled off of counter-terrorism duty and sent to Europe. Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced a massive shipment of military equipment to Europe, including tanks and other tracked vehicles. Do US military officials really believe that Russia is about to invade western Europe? Are we back in the 1940s? Or is Washington’s military-industrial complex looking for new ways to justify an ever-expanding military budget? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

The Washington Post calls on the Trump administration to pressure the Saudi coalition to halt its offensive against the port of Hodeidah:

The world’s worst humanitarian crisis may be about to get much worse. In Yemen, where some 8 million people are on the brink of famine and the worst cholera epidemic in history is raging, the country’s most important port has become the target of a new offensive in the three-year-old civil war. Yemeni forces backed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are seeking to cut off and eventually capture Hodeida, a city of 700,000 that is the entry point of 70 percent of the aid shipments keeping millions of civilians alive. The United States, which supplies the Saudi-UAE alliance with arms and intelligence, should use its leverage to stop this reckless venture.

The U.S. absolutely should do as the editorial recommends, but the fact that the offensive is happening suggests that the Trump administration supports the coalition’s decision to attack the port or it tells us that the coalition doesn’t think they will face any consequences for doing it anyway. Trump has shown no interest in pressuring the Saudis and their allies, and his administration has fought every Congressional effort to end US support for the war. It would be good news if the administration suddenly changed its position on the war on Yemen, but we have to assume that it won’t.

Continue reading “Making Yemen’s Humanitarian Catastrophe Even Worse”

It looks like the neocons may not succeed with their plot to blow up the Trump/Kim meeting next month. With Trump canceling the meeting at the end of last week, the North and South Korean leaders held an impromptu meeting on the border to look for a path ahead toward peace. President Trump has taken notice and plans are again underway for the historic meeting. Are neocons sidelined for now? Tune in to today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

How best to show respect for the U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and for their families on Memorial Day? Simple: Avoid euphemisms like “the fallen” and expose the lies about what a great idea it was to start those wars in the first place and then to “surge” tens of thousands of more troops into those fools’ errands.

First, let’s be clear on at least this much: the 4,500 US troops killed in Iraq so far and the 2,350 killed in Afghanistan [by May 2015] did not “fall.” They were wasted on no-win battlefields by politicians and generals cheered on by neocon pundits and mainstream “journalists” almost none of whom gave a rat’s patootie about the real-life-and-death troops. They were throwaway soldiers.

And, as for the “successful surges,” they were just P.R. devices to buy some “decent intervals” for the architects of these wars and their boosters to get space between themselves and the disastrous endings while pretending that those defeats were really “victories squandered” all at the “acceptable” price of about 1,000 dead US soldiers each and many times that in dead Iraqis and Afghans.

Continue reading “Ray McGovern on How To Honor Memorial Day”