Philip Giraldi

The presidential candidates’ failure to have a serious discussion about Afghanistan and America’s other ongoing wars has been noted by many. Mitt Romney did not mention Afghanistan at all in his acceptance address. In his defense, he cited a speech made to the American Legion on the night before his appearance in Tampa. “The president was also invited to the American Legion and he was too busy to go. It was during my convention. I went to the American Legion, described my views with regards to our military, my commitment to our military, my commitment to our men and women in uniform.”

Paul Ryan also pitched in to defend the Afghanistan omission, telling Charlie Rose on Sept. 4 that Romney “repeatedly” speaks about Afghanistan, expressing gratitude for the “sacrifice of our troops” and striving for “peace through strength.” He also noted that he had spoken about veterans in his own convention speech, “I talked about veterans and what they’ve done for our country.” The remainder of the Ryan interview, including a series of foreign policy bromides bereft of any content, was largely incoherent, concluding with a comment that the President Romney position on Afghanistan would include making “an assessment” through consulting with “our generals” on how to manage security arrangements both preceding and after 2014.

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Philip Giraldi

Mitt Romney’s division of the US electorate into “contributors” and “takers” is ironic because it is far from clear what taxes Mitt himself has been paying and what tax breaks he has received.

The underlying Romney message is that those who fit his definition of takers exploit the system and are essentially deadbeats. How else do you explain “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”? Per the GOP groupthink, “takers” are also quite likely regarded as so improvident as to not have jobs that include healthcare or 401-Ks.

There are many taxes that moderate income earners pay disproportionately: social security, Medicare, personal property, sales, usage, and excise on goods like gasoline. More than two-thirds of Americans own their homes and real estate taxes are in many states like New Jersey at punitive levels. So nearly everyone but those in the underground economy pays taxes.

But I would also like to suggest that if Mitt and company want to restore republican (small r) rigor they might adopt the citizenship standards of ancient Greece and Rome. Only property owners had the full franchise. In Rome, the voters were organized in tribes and the more property one had the more one’s vote meant as the tribes voted in sequence from the richest to the poorest and once a majority was reached the voting stopped. It is unlikely that the numerous Roman urban poor, the headcount, ever actually got to vote.

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Philip Giraldi

Photo: Iranian parliament speaker Ali Larijani, center, attends a protest after the Friday prayer, on Friday, Sept. 14, 2012, while a worshipper holds up a poster of US President Barack Obama, as part of widespread anger across the Muslim world about a film ridiculing Islam's Prophet Muhammad. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

There have been a number of conspiracy theories floated by those who are seeking to learn exactly how a video clip guaranteed to provoke riots throughout the Middle East surfaced at this time, close to a U.S. presidential election. The Romney team has already worked hard to make hay from the past week’s events, claiming that the protests are a symptom of Obama administration weakness. Israel too has an interest in portraying an unstable Middle East to support its attempts to nudge Obama into hardening U.S. policies in the region to include drawing new red lines vis-à-vis Iran’s nuclear program, but it surely also realizes that there is far more to be lost than gained in encouraging Muslim uprisings on its doorstep.

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Philip Giraldi

Eric Posner gives intellectual cover to the unitary executive

My college alumni magazine is featuring an article entitled “Octopotus” on the kind of reasoning in some jurisprudential circles that has supported the “unitary executive.” The article is about the University of Chicago Law School’s Professor Eric Posner, whose most recent book is The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, co-authored with Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule. Posner and Vermeule would appear to agree that when George W. Bush declared the US Constitution to be just a piece of paper he was being candid and also acting in the best interests of the American people. Posner unambiguously sees the non-constitutional accumulation of presidential power as a good thing, enabling rapid response to crises, and describes the Madisonian separation of powers in government as a “historical relic.”

The article, written by one Jason Kelly of the magazine staff, is a strange amalgam of political correctness combined with a puff piece on Posner’s Straussian views, which I suspect most U of C alumni would find repugnant if they bother to read the article. Kelly cites “undocumented immigrants” at one point and refers to Posner’s support of executive power as a “common view” in legal circles. He accepts Posner’s lead in defining those who criticize the unitary executive as engaging in “irrational fear” that Posner labels “tyrannophobia,” which colors the discussion that follows. Kelly might equally have referred to critics of Posner as constitutionalists, which would result in a different perception.

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Philip Giraldi

Comrade Napoleon: Jerusalem platform omission a 'mistake' - No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all [human beings are chosen]. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be? ~ G. Orwell, Animal Farm

I really did not want to write about Israel again this week, but the outrageous manipulation of the Democratic Party platform, moves in California to make any criticism of Israel a hate crime, and news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dressed down the U.S. ambassador in the presence of a congressman before insisting that the United States has no moral right to judge Israel has made it unavoidable to go “once more into the breach, dear friends.”

There is a fundamental issue at stake here. That is, does the United States have a national interest in its dealings with the countries in the Middle East that is fundamentally distinct from the Israeli interests? It is a question for dummies, as the answer is clearly yes. Well, if the answer is yes, why are leading politicians and talking heads insisting that the answer is no? Why are so many prominent Americans prepared to ignore the U.S. national interest in support of a foreign nation that has been the source of numerous armed conflicts, that has spied relentlessly on the U.S., and that is a serious drain on the U.S. Treasury? One might add that Americans have become terrorist targets as a consequence while the sharp decline in the favorable views of the United States around the world is largely attributable to the ties to rogue state Israel, even if the Bushes and Obamas have no doubt done their bit through the policy of unrestricted preemptive warfare that has evolved over the past 11 years.

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Philip Giraldi

Normally Washington bureaucracies shut down in August, but this year the intelligence community was working flat out to develop information on two crises in the Middle East. One official describes a deep sense of foreboding, recalling NSC Counter Terrorism Security Group chairman Richard Clarke’s description of walking around the West Wing in August 2001 with his “hair on fire.”

Syria is on the frontburner as a shooting war in which the U.S. is already clandestinely involved. The attempt to come up with a consensus National Intelligence Estimate on the crisis has been put on hold, both because the situation is too volatile and because new intelligence paints an increasingly dark picture of the insurgency. A number of atrocities against civilians previously attributed to the Assad government are now known to be the work of the rebels, who are becoming less reticent about their plans to eliminate all regime supporters, which would include most Alawites as well as many in the Christian community. U.S. intelligence has also come to the conclusion that rebel militias are heavily infiltrated and frequently commanded by jihadis linked to al-Qaeda. Attempts by CIA officers to discuss the issue with the rebels’ political representatives in Lebanon and Turkey have been blown off or deferred, suggesting that the movement’s leadership might be fully complicit. There is also increasing concern about a domino effect spreading unrest to Lebanon. Even the Turks are backing away from more direct involvement, worried that major refugee and Kurdish-based terrorism problems are developing.

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Philip Giraldi

It is September. And as surely as the swallows are preparing to depart Capistrano, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arriving in New York. It is an annual ritual, with Netanyahu explaining to a skeptical U.N. General Assembly why Israel is not bound by the rules that most other nations observe. Last year the theme was Palestinian statehood, meaning that the Palestinians should not have any such thing until Israel says it’s okay. This year it is all about Iran, with Netanyahu preparing to “tell the nations of the world in a clear voice the truth about the terror regime of Iran which represents the greatest threat to world peace.”

Bibi will be in the U.S. for at least three days, and it is not certain whether he will meet with either President Barack Obama or Republican candidate Mitt Romney. I believe that he will likely meet with both because he knows that he has them in a vulnerable position that he will want to take advantage of to maximize what he can get out of them. He already has a commitment from Romney to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, which would make the United States the only nation to have its diplomatic mission in the disputed city that Israel claims as its capital, but this time he will be shooting for something much bigger. He wants nothing less than war with Iran, and he expects the United States to provide him with a casus belli, to set a date for the war to begin, and to actually do the fighting for him.

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Philip Giraldi

A guarantee of support for a strike against Iran overlooks the lessons of the First World War.

Israel’s attempt to steer American foreign policy has been nowhere more evident than in the sustained campaign to move the United States in the direction of war with Iran, a war that serves no American interest unless one believes that Tehran is willing to spend billions of dollars to develop a nuclear weapon only to hand off the result to a terrorist group.

The most recent overtures by the Israeli government have pushed the United States to make a declaration that negotiations with Iran have failed and will not be continued. For Israel, this is a necessary first step towards an American military intervention, as failed negotiations mean there is no way out of the impasse but by war, if the Iranians do not unilaterally concede on every disputed point.

Two recent op-eds have elaborated the argument, promoting the necessity of convincing the Israelis that the United States is absolutely serious about using military force against Iran if the Iranians seek to retain any capacity to enrich uranium. One might note in passing that this new red line, sometimes also called the abstract “capability” to create a nuclear weapon, has been achieved by moving the goal posts back considerably. At one time Iran was threatened with a military response if it actually acquired a nuclear weapon (which is still the official position of the Obama administration), but earlier benchmarks within that policy saying that enrichment should not exceed 20 percent or that the enrichment should not take place on Iranian soil have been abandoned in favor of what now amounts to zero tolerance. Those who note that Iran, which is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is under IAEA inspection, has a clear legal right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes have been ignored in favor of those who believe that Iran is somehow a special case.

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Philip Giraldi

Rep. Ron Paul did not get a speaking slot at the GOP convention.

It was perhaps inevitable that the GOP would turn on the Ron Paul supporters to eliminate them from their version of a body politic. I predicted it would take place and so did a number of others. But what has been surprising is the timing. It seemed reasonable to assume that the Republican gatekeepers would wait until after the convention or even the election to keep the Paulistas in harness and supportive, nurturing their faint hopes that their message would somehow have an impact, encouraging them to vote for Mitt Romney. But the Republican Party leadership decided instead to purge Paul supporters at both the state and local level and also on the convention floor. As Justin Raimondo has noted, a harrowing worthy of Josef Stalin took place in a number of states employing procedural ploys, stripping delegates of their accreditation, and even illegal closing of caucuses, which denied to Ron Paul’s supporters any ability to have significant impact at the convention. The deal was sealed when the GOP rules committee revised its convention guidelines, initially to make it impossible to cast dissident votes or to propose nominations from the floor, and subsequently to allow the national party to veto and replace state delegates. As one Associate Press report put it somewhat laconically in an early report on convention preparations “Republican officials have reduced the ranks of Paul delegates.” Jordan Bloom, who attended the Paul events in Tampa, reported that Paul’s supporters were angry and frustrated, many having experienced political corruption up close and personal for the first time. One friend of mine on Capitol Hill likened the caucus deals finally arrived at in various states to having a burglar steal everything you own and then return a couple of days later to give you half back if you do not complain. That’s what happened. The Paul supporters were outgunned and out-muscled and, led by a campaign team that wanted accommodation, wound up taking what they could get.

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Philip Giraldi

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, poses for a picture with
the national synchronized swimming team during an awards cere-
mony for Russia's Olympians in Moscow's Kremlin. (08/15/12)

That 120,000 Russians can gather in the streets to protest an election speaks well of them and they should be left alone to find their own way. Would that half that many Americans could come together to actively protest the political process in the United States. That would be something worth seeing.

I confess that I cannot quite understand the campaign by the neoconservatives and also a number of leading Democrats to vilify Russia and confront it at every opportunity. The Cold War has been over for more than 20 years, but some appear to want to revive it. Russia has evolved into a developing democracy, has a relatively free press, has a judiciary that functions at least some of the time, is natural-resource rich, and has an economy that is now linked to the rest of the world and is doing reasonably well. On the negative side, it is plagued by corruption and cronyism as well as increasing authoritarianism, but the average Russian enjoys freedoms never experienced in Soviet days and can also see steady improvement in the standard of living. The country’s president, Vladimir Putin, continues to be supported by most Russians, though dissent is admittedly growing over his clear reluctance to give up power.

Russia has a lot to offer the West. It has good ties with its traditional friends in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, and it still is seen by many foreign governments as an anti-colonial power. This means it is well placed to help mediate crisis situations with countries like Syria and Iran, which no longer trust Washington or the Western Europeans. Instead, however, the U.S. and some of its allies have seen Russia as an obstruction precisely because it refuses to endorse “humanitarian intervention” and regime change. Regime change has not exactly worked out very well in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and we shall soon see what will happen in Syria. Moscow’s cautious approach is almost certainly the better option.

And Russia is still a major military power. It is the only country in the world that has the ability to destroy the United States, which one might think would be sufficient reason to establish a friendly relationship. Russia has also indicated its willingness to reduce its own nuclear and chemical arsenals and to work with Washington to safeguard existing nuclear stockpiles through the bilateral Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.

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