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Friday, March 25, 2011

Middle East Foreign Policy

 


I would not have voted to authorize the “wars” in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya. I was opposed to all three military interventions from the start, although, in the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, I cannot say that at such a young age I was aware of precisely why our reasons for doing so were either unjust or illegal.



Legality of War

The difference between a war and a police action is that in a war, the armed forces of at least two sovereign states are committing state-sanctioned violence against one another. Congress has not formally declared war since Pearl Harbor.

According to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, in response to a “national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces” the president has the power to act unilaterally in committing armed forces to military action, but must notify Congress within forty-eight hours. The resolution also stipulates that, unless Congress authorizes the use of military force or declares war within sixty days of committing armed forces, armed forces may not remain after sixty days, and the chief executive has an additional thirty days to disengage.

However, the War Powers Resolution only applies to national emergencies created by attacks upon the United States. The sovereign governments of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya did not attack the United States; neither the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hussein’s Ba’ath Party regime in Iraq, nor Gadhafi’s regime in Libya purposely attacked the United States or its territories or possessions, at least not in a completely overt manner that was not in response to some unjust action committed by the United States. I will explain this one country at a time.

Being that no direct attack on the military or land of the United States occurred in the cases of either of these three countries, former president George W. Bush and President Barack Obama acted – or are acting – in manners that were – or are – unconstitutional, as well as in violation of the War Powers Resolution, when they ordered attacks against those three countries. Therefore, I believe that impeachment of either or both of these presidents would have been – or would be – appropriate, legal, constitutional, and within the jurisdiction of Congress.



Libya

 In the case of Libya, it can rightfully be argued that Colonel Muammar Gadhafi has caused the deaths of Americans, as Gadhafi’s former justice minister claimed about a month ago that Gadhafi personally ordered the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed nearly 270 people, two-thirds of them Americans. Admittedly, that happened nearly twenty-five years ago, so President Reagan was most likely unaware that Gadhafi may have been behind the bombing, even though Gadhafi had possibly sponsored a hijacking in Pakistan two years earlier.

Nevertheless, I do not believe the airplane which was allegedly bombed on Gadhafi’s orders in 1988 qualified as a possession of the United States – as it was a commercial plane heading from Germany to England to the U.S., as opposed to U.S. military aircraft – and so, I do not believe the War Powers Resolution applies in any case in which a U.S. president – past, present, or future – would be justified in claiming that action against Libya – even if the goal were to kill Gadhafi – qualifies as a response to an emergency situation resulting from an attack on the United States.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that an international panel could potentially seek to convict Colonel Gadhafi of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in order to provide closure for the families of the victims. This may explain why so many U.S. officials are now claiming that our intention is not to kill Gadhafi. Our officials are also saying that the U.S. is not playing a leading role in the enforcement of the No-Fly Zone, but we are deploying the vast majority of the missiles, and permitting Britain to bomb Gadhafi’s headquarters.

The main reason which American officials are providing for enforcing the No-Fly Zone against Libya is that we would like to help the opposition against Gadhafi, which has been losing ground against him rapidly. Former Bush administration White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove even characterized the opposition as intent on establishing a democracy. That’s the major problem with our intervention in Libya; the U.S. is taking a side in a civil war in which we do not know whom we are supporting, nor what its goals are.

As in the case of Egypt, no doubt at least some of the Libyan opposition – or those sympathetic to it – support establishing democracy, but there is also a distinct possibility that many want to bring about a Sunni Islamic republic which would be more religiously orthodox than Gadhafi’s faction. It is also possible, as Gadhafi has repeatedly claimed, that some among the opposition have military and financial ties to – or at least sympathy with - Osama bin Laden and / or al-Qaeda.

The situation in Libya represents a sea change in American Middle East foreign policy. Usually the United States finds a Middle Eastern dictator it likes, then funds and arms him, and later invades his country. This time, Gadhafi started off as an enemy of the United States; and then, during the Bush administration, Libya was removed from the list of sponsors of state terrorism, and we began funding him; and now, rather than invading his country outright, we are “enabling” the enforcement of a No-Fly Zone against Libya.

It is difficult to judge what to do about Libya. With President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton repeatedly saying, “the time for Gadhafi to leave is now”, it is very puzzling why they desired to allocate taxpayer money to continue to fund him just a month ago and did not ask him to resign once the Obama administration transitioned into the White House.

While many argue that President Obama should have asked for congressional approval for the U.S. role in enforcing of the No-Fly Zone before he went to the headquarters of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the League of Arab States, it appears that, since Libya has not attacked us, congressional approval does not even apply to this situation. That would mean that President Obama’s actions are clearly illegal and unconstitutional, and he should be impeached whether congress votes to “authorize” the intervention by late May or not.

If we’re agreed that Gadhafi and his supporters are enemies of the United States – even though they have not attacked its citizens in over twenty years – and if we’re also agreed that we should take Gadhafi at his word that some of those armed Libyans who are trying to oust him are in fact al-Qaeda - or people who have sympathy with al-Qaeda – then I have no problem letting Gadhafi and his heavily-armed opposition destroy each other, and allowing the U.S. stand by while a coalition of European states foolishly take sides, to their own potential future diplomatic and military detriment. Only if any of those European states were directly attacked by Libya in the future would it be remotely appropriate that the U.S. should seek international authorization to defend the victims against Libya, in accordance with our N.A.T.O. obligation to assist them.



Iraq

In the case of Iraq, to speak to the issue of whether Hussein’s Iraq ever attacked the United States, I believe the United States had a desire to provoke Iraq into military action in order to justify armed conflict. During the Clinton administration, the U.S. Air Force would intentionally occupy Iraqi air space, and some American military officials hoped Iraq would shoot one of the planes down, which would be presented in the media as an attack, obscuring the fact that we had no reason to occupy their air space to begin with. Also, during the Clinton administration, the U.S. sent hundreds of C.I.A. agents to meet with Saddam Hussein, but they were kidnapped and forced to choose between their own deaths and the deaths of their families. All were murdered by Iraqis. There was even a failed coup against Hussein in 1996 in which the C.I.A. was involved. What all this means is that Iraq did kill Americans, but that violence was provoked, and the military operation which could be characterized as retaliation for those events was not timely in the least.

I believe the U.S. should pull its armed forces out of Iraq as quickly as that task can be safely performed. I also believe we should not leave any permanent military bases there. But, being that the role which the U.S. played in the ‘liberation’ of Iraq can never be undone, the U.S. should continue to play an important diplomatic role in Iraq’s affairs.

I think the U.S. should engage the Iraqis – as well as the governments of Syria, Turkey, Armenia, and Iran – to commence a dialogue that could result in those countries putting into place legal mechanisms whereby the Kurdish minorities in each of them may eventually hold a referendum which would allow them to peacefully declare and establish an independent Kurdish state. I think this would help to fan the flame of ethnic tension in Northern Iraq.


To further the goal of decreased ethnic tension, I also desire that the U.S. – without the use of coercion or threats – encourage the new Iraqi government to adopt a decentralizationist model for their government, affording local communities as much self-governance as is reasonable, in order to lessen the likelihood that a high-stakes federalist paradigm could undermine Sunni confidence in and fidelity to the government, which now affords more rights to Shi’ites than did the Hussein regime.



Afghanistan

In the case of Afghanistan, a little background is required. The Taliban was formed in the mid-1990s as a split off of the more opium-tolerant Mujahideen, which the C.I.A. trained, armed, and funded against the Soviets during the Reagan administration. I don’t believe we should engage in proxy wars or strengthen groups of warriors against sovereign governments, because there can be dire consequences. We should certainly never do it again, and we should also be careful when we fund and arm sovereign nations and help train their soldiers.

Afghanistan’s opium makes up nearly half of the worldwide opium trade, and there are even rumors that Osama bin Laden himself earns money off of the drug trade, in addition to his family’s oil wealth. I believe that the U.S. runs the risk of further and more drawn-out involvement in Afghanistan, now that it has been discovered that the country has wealth in mineral and oil deposits.

I do not desire that the U.S. continue to express solidarity with the CIA-backed Afghanistani President Hamid Karzai, whose brother has been accused of not only being paid by the CIA, but also of being involved in the drug trade. The U.S. claims it invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban had contact with Osama bin Laden and refused to turn him over, but I believe one important reason for the invasion was that the Taliban was cracking down on the production of opium in the several years prior to 9/11. However, this would seem to be contradicted by rumors that the opium trade is a major source of funding for the Taliban.

Some of President Obama’s critics are calling the conflict in Afghanistan “Obama’s war of choice”, being that Obama Democrats view that conflict as more popular and legitimate than the conflict in Iraq. As in the case of Iraq, I desire neither that the president commit any more troops to Afghanistan, nor that the U.S. leave any permanent military bases there, and I would vote to pull U.S. armed forces out of Afghanistan as quickly as that task can be safely performed. We should also cease Predator-drone strikes on Pakistani targets, and leave those tasks up to the relatively new government of Pakistan which has replaced that country’s military dictatorship.



General Middle East Policy

Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Iraq are among the top 15 national producers of oil, and Libya and Afghanistan produce some oil as well. In the lead-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was repeated that oil wealth would help pay for the costs of military intervention. Bill Clinton’s air strikes on Baghdad were, in part, retaliations for Saddam Hussein’s desire to sell oil to the U.S. through Europe – rather than directly to us – which cost the U.S. money due to rates of currency exchange.

I don’t believe the U.S. should continue this policy of engaging in trade wars over commodities that are highly valuable, and thus, prone to causing conflicts. The U.S. obviously still has some desire to both protect its own economic interests, as well as contain international socialism, whether it be Marxist-Stalinist or Islamic-communitarian in character. I believe that neither of these goals can be achieved through colluding with the governments of foreign nations to intervene in the economy without causing the occasional international military conflict.

 If the U.S. desires to keep practicing Wilsonianism – that is, ‘making the world safe for democracy’ – while continuing to look after its own economic interests, as well as undermining regimes which are destructive to human liberty; trade wars, military strikes, regime-change, and nation-building are not the way to go; nor is training, arming, and funding dangerous groups of warriors within those countries.

We should replace the “stick” approach with the “carrot’ approach”; that is, we should trade with businesses and people in foreign nations, so that they may learn to appreciate the economic liberty which our economic policy affords them, leading them to identify with us ideologically against the regimes which plunder their wealth through taxes.

That way, they may reap the benefits of the free market, and allocate their wealth in whatever way they might. If they choose to use that wealth to destroy their oppressors, so be it; the United States has no place intervening and taking sides in civil wars. Once the free market is enabled, and communal autonomy is secured; legitimate, localistic participatory democracies will have the opportunity to flourish in order to balance the interests of the earners of wealth with the egalitarian interests of the community without the specter of needless monolithic, bureaucratic, federalistic, centralizationist, sovereign, nation-state government incursion into their affairs.



Iran and Israel

Another part of the question of Iraq and Afghanistan is Iran. I believe that, in truth, the United States has practically no legitimate reason to be militarily involved in Afghanistan, that our establishment of military bases there is primarily intended to serve as a launching pad – as a compliment to Iraq – for a future invasion of Iran, and that part of the reason the U.S. is in Iraq is to protect Israel from Iran, and to direct Iraqi oil to Israel.

 Israel is the other missing piece of Middle East foreign policy. Osama bin Laden, in his alleged ‘admission’ to complicity in the September 11th attacks, stated that the attacks occurred because the U.S. has military bases on the Arabian Peninsula, and because it supports the State of Israel. I believe that these two reasons are among the most important causes of the recent inflammation of Muslim antipathy towards the United States.

 In accordance with what was, until about a century ago, the law of the Ottoman Empire, as well as what is the law of the Old Testament, Jewish and Muslim communities are to be as autonomous as possible, with no modern, sovereign, nationalistic, statist entities subverting the law of G-d to the authority of mankind. Furthermore, there is not to be sovereign government among the Jews until the rabbinic court of religious law called the Sanhedrin has been fully established, and the Jewish Messiah has arrived and been identified.

 I believe there is only one hope to cooling tensions between the United States and the Islamic and Jewish international communities, and that a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine is not that hope. That’s why, as a condition of any and all negotiations between the U.S. and Israel, I would vote that the U.S. require the State of Israel to set a deadline for its own peaceable de-establishment. I think this is the only way that members of the three major Abrahamic faiths have a chance to live in peace with one another in observance of the laws of their own religions.




For more entries on military, national defense, and foreign policy, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/american-sovereignty-restoration-act-of.html
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/foreign-occupation-and-declaration-of.html

For more entries on Judaism, the State of Israel, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, please visit:
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Sunday, March 20, 2011

2012 Electoral College Predictions

   The following are my predictions for the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election, in which Barack Obama will be seeking re-election. I feel that the most likely Republican challengers are former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. I have created electoral college maps which show the closest events to ties which would be possible.







For more entries on election studies, please visit:
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Saturday, March 5, 2011

9/11: Here's What I Think Happened



Back in the mid-1980s – when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were cozy, the economy was picking up, the rate of inflation had begun to stabilize, and the electronics technology revolution was beginning – the American and British governments realized that eventually there would come a time when the tech bubble would burst, and the deflation which it was creating in the financial system would cause major problems for the balance of trade.

A few years earlier, the U.S. had seen the completion of the construction of the World Trade Center, a gas shortage, and rampant inflation. Conflicts in the Middle East were contributing to those gas shortages, and the Western democracies needed an insurance policy to protect against shortages and deflation all at once.

The Iraq-Iran War lasted throughout nearly the entire decade of the 1980s, and the U.S. armed both sides. During this time, the U.S. was also investing in Saudi Arabia, and arming the opium-tolerant Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets, which was associated with Osama bin Laden, whose family had interests in both the oil industry and the opium trade, in addition to being friends with the Saudi royal family.

The C.I.A. needed help translating negotiations to fund and arm the Mujahideen against the Soviets, so they brought in Asian languages expert, third-generation C.I.A. asset, and future President of the United States Barack Obama.

With Saddam Hussein about to be removed from power in Iraq, there would be little preventing the Iranians from gaining a foothold in the Mesopotamian region against the Israelis, save for continued occupation of Iraq by the military forces of the U.S., the U.K., and dozens of other countries.

So, in mid-2000, after the Hussein removal attempt had failed, and the Taliban had splintered off of the Mujahideen, as the Taliban was beginning to crack down on the production of opium, the dot-com bubble was in the midst of bursting, and with a presidential election – in which a vice-president would have succeeded his two-term incumbent president, thus making his election unlikely – only several months away, the U.S. had to find a way to get the opium and the oil for America while doing something about the overvaluation of the dollar.

But what’s the cure for inflation? Deflation. How does deflation work? Well, it’s the exact opposite of how inflation works. Inflation happens when too much money is put into the system. Deflation happens when not enough money is put into the system, or when money is removed from the system.

So how can money be removed from the system? One way is for the Federal Reserve to take money back from the banks. Another way is to make something valuable disappear through theft. Yet another way is to make something valuable disappear through destruction. 9/11 accomplished both of the last two.

Have you seen those commercials that advertise gold which was somehow miraculously saved from the World Trade Center only months before the buildings were destroyed? And hey, why is Germany suddenly assisting us in so many of our military operations? And why is such a high ratio of the American military force stationed in Germany? Why does Deutsche Borse of Germany now own more than half of the New York Stock Exchange? Hell, why did German Chancellor Angela Merkel just receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama?

The answer to all these questions: Because the U.S. was storing $300 billion in German-owned gold in the Building 7 of the World Trade Center. Not only that, but on the day before the 9/11 attacks, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly announced that about $2.3 trillion worth of transactions had become unaccounted for.

Having destroyed the section of the Pentagon which contained the computer databases in which records of the missing trillions would have been stored, having planned the controlled demolition of the Twin Towers and of World Trade Center Building 7 – which housed offices belonging to government agencies which soon after became consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security – and having had access to important parts of those three buildings in the World Trade Center for the purpose of wiring explosives, our intelligence apparati likely had access to this gold, removed it, and transferred it to Fort Knox and / or into the hands of those financiers and / or politicians who benefited off of the destruction of the buildings, and also managed to neatly destroy information in both the Pentagon and Building 7 which would have constituted evidence of planned demolition as well as of the missing assets.

Now Germany is following us around the world and watching us, making sure we recover an equal amount of assets for them through the coercive extraction of foreign countries’ natural resources.

But the following questions remain: Who actually carried out the attack on the World Trade Center, and what does Israel have to do with all of this?

Israel’s intelligence agency is called M.O.S.S.A.D.. From 1998 to 2002, its director was Ephraim HaLevy. HaLevy dispatched M.O.S.S.A.D. agents – disguised as Arabs – to meet with Mohammed Atta, who believed they were sent by Osama bin Laden. What this means is that M.O.S.S.A.D. infiltrated Al Qaeda in order to half-agents-provocateurs them, half-help them, carry out the 9/11 attacks.

In order to physically carry out the attack, M.O.S.S.A.D. brought in a former officer of the counter-terrorism intelligence unit Sayeret Matkal. That officer was American Daniel M. Lewin, who happened to be the billionaire Chief Technical Officer of the internet tech company Akamai Technologies.

Lewin would be reported as having been murdered by one of the alleged on-board Muslim hijackers – one of whom was reported as being Atta himself – who were seated near him. The reporting of the cause of Lewin’s death was inconsistent; one report claimed he was stabbed to death, while another claimed he was shot. Some have even claimed that on at least one of the flights that morning, the “hijackers” had taken control of the airplane before the flight had even taken off.

The whole incident would immediately be construed by former and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as good for Israel, and World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein and WTC occupant Frank Lowy of the Westfield corporation – both influential Jews with close personal and financial ties to the last several Prime Ministers of Israel, including Netanyahu – would benefit financially off of something which has not been, and will never be, investigated as a possible case of insurance fraud.

Then, America and the British would invade Afghanistan and Iraq – and later, unofficially, Pakistan – in order to flank Iran – the supposed Israeli threat – on both sides, in case a quick invasion of that country ever became necessary, or, as it were, opportune.

In the meantime, while awaiting this invasion of Iran, the Western democracies would plunder Iraq's oil and direct it westward to themselves and to Israel, while employing American soldiers to help Afghani tribesmen farm their poppies, to be purchased cheaply for use in opiate narcotic painkillers produced by Western pharmaceutical industries, and exploring Afghanistan's then-undiscovered abundant mineral resources.

After that, two prominent victim figures would come together in New York City in order to attempt to drum up anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S., fueling the fire of fears that its president was a Holocaust-denying, Jew-oppressing “next Hitler” whom had vowed to violently destroy the State of Israel and all its inhabitants. Those victim figures were the mayor of New York City during the so-called attack – Rudy Giuliani – and Elie Wiesel – a man whom has been alleged to have stolen the identity of a Holocaust survivor and author – and thus could be used to exploit the situation to manipulate Americans in general and American Jews in particular into supporting a potential war against Iran.

And, of course, the facts that Iran possesses no nuclear weapons and has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that Israel has not – despite possessing eight hundred nuclear weapons, making it the world's third greatest nuclear military power – would never be mentioned in any mainstream media outlet.

Oil, opium, and additional mineral resources secured. Deflation addressed. Rich and powerful made even more so. Germany placated. Israel protected.

Case closed.



For more entries on military, national defense, and foreign policy, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/american-sovereignty-restoration-act-of.html
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/foreign-occupation-and-declaration-of.html

For more entries on homeland security and terrorism, please visit:

For more entries on Judaism, the State of Israel, and the Israeli-Arab conflict, please visit:
http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/us-withdrawal-from-united-nations.html

For more entries on free trade, fair trade, the balance of trade, and protectionism, please visit:


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