Tag: war

international affairs national politics & policies

The Return of the Imperialists

Post author By Redactor
Post date December 2, 2020
1 Comment on The Return of the Imperialists

We don’t live in a Star Wars universe. Not yet. But certain themes crop up: republic gives way to empire, and elite corps of . . . magic fighters? . . . seek to run a technocratic state.

Donald Trump was cast by Democrats as an evil emperor sort of figure, but he didn’t quite fit that script — being the only president in two decades not to engage in a regime-change war.

So, with President-not-quite-Elect Joe Biden publicly announcing his new cabinet heads, we can see the old script followed closely, with the imperial guard piling up outside the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania, panting for power.

Though there are reams of news stories about this to pore over — the picks are big news — I’ll focus on Reason’s round-up. Of course, Biden is offering up Big Spenders (for whom deficits and debts just don’t matter*) as well as gung-ho interventionists. Take the Secretary of State candidate, Antony Blinken, profiled by Bonnie Kristian. While the proposed Secretary pro forma admitted that America cannot “solve all the world’s problems alone,” he then suggested that “our government can solve all the world’s problems if only it partners with other governments,” Ms. Kristian relates. She notes that Blinken has supported “U.S. military action in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

“And though he has since regretted the Yemen call, he believes the mistake in Syria was a failure to escalate.”

President Donald John Trump has followed the bomber love of his advisors, but has never quite bought into the need to escalate every conflict. And for that audacity, the foreign policy establishment has loathed him.

When Biden does hobble into the White House, we can unfortunately expect fewer ‘failures to escalate.’

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* While Republicans do almost nothing to hold back deficit spending, and consequent debt accumulation, Democrats increasingly demonstrate a special zealotry in confessing their lack of concern.

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international affairs national politics & policies

In Deep with Biden

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture The Draft too much government

How Un-Warlike

It’s war!

A common refrain regarding the coronavirus. “This is our World War II,” say media mavens and politicians . . . who have never had to endure anything like World War II.

The utter vapidity of the “war” response was explained very well by Peter Schiff on a recent episode of The Tom Woods Show. Schiff is famously bearish on the American economy, which he has argued for years is addicted to debt and consumption but not production and responsibility. He notes how different this new “war” is.

Folks today, he argues, have no more idea how World War II was won than how the economy works.

Politicians increased taxes during the war.
Americans were not bailed out: they had to struggle to survive, even on the home front, as
they had to do without creature comforts. Taxes on goods and services sky-rocketed, to pay for the war . . .
in which many young men died.
Middle-class wealth was tapped like never before, to win the two-front war, and one mechanism to aid the effort was the withholding tax . . .

which now we are talking about suspending.

What is widely being proposed today is not the “socialism” of war, where lives and wealth are conscripted.* What is being proposed is the “socialism” of bailouts and sugar-plum fairies, where consumers are coddled.

And unlike in World War II, Schiff contends, there is no vast private wealth to tax to pay for what is deemed necessary. Instead, we have debt.

It is indeed a strange war where we fight the threat of any harm coming to us, or any sacrifice required.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* We should oppose the conscription of individuals, as was done in the First and Second World War as well as Korea and Vietnam. Not only does it violate the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against involuntary servitude, it was not needed then, nor is it now. More on this later in the week.

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From a photo by Nick M

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Tags corona virus, coronavirus, Do something, pandemic, suicide, war

international affairs

America Safe for Quagmires?

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 29, 2020
3 Comments on America Safe for Quagmires?

quagmire, war, foreign policy, Iraq, Iran,

It happened: “The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.”

We are talking about Iraq . . . and the U.S. military.

So, not much else has happened.

After that parliamentary vote, Ron Paul explains, “when the Iraqi prime minister called up Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to request a timetable for a US withdrawal, Pompeo laughed in his face.”

I am with Dr. Paul on this one. The U.S. should take this opportunity to get out . . . “before more US troops die for nothing in Iraq.”

But is it for nothing?

Once upon a time, Americans were afraid of military “quagmires.” Now somehow we’ve come to accept permanent quagmire status in multiple theaters.

Could it be that when President George Herbert Walker Bush said, following the First Persian Gulf War, that “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all,” he was speaking of its psy-op effect on the American electorate?

Pushing us into World War I, President Wilson claimed to be “making the world safe for democracy.” Perhaps Papa Bush made America safe for never-ending “regime-change wars.”

Before becoming vice president and then president, and going on to claim victory over “Vietnam Syndrome,” Bush headed the Central Intelligence Agency, the original regime modification professionals. And certainly endless, pointless foreign warfare has been the health of . . . the Deep State.

“The pressure for the U.S. to leave Iraq has been building within the country,” argues former Rep. Paul, “but the U.S. government and mainstream media is completely — and dangerously — ignoring this sentiment.”

Put American soldiers — not some secret or not-so-secret Deep State agenda — first. Bring them home.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Bye-Bye Iraq?

We may soon be at war with Iran. Wait, in this day and age of endless conflicts without so much as a decent declaration, are we not already at war with Iran?

Clearly, the drone-strike killing of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, described by The New York Times as “the architect of nearly every significant operation by Iranian intelligence and military forces over the past two decades,” was an act of war. The Trump Administration predicated the U.S. assault on previous Iranian acts of war — including involvement in the recent storming of parts of the sprawling 104-acre U.S. embassy in Baghdad and, moreover, deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq.

Iran vows revenge. I want to bring U.S. troops home from the Middle East. And so did President Obama and so does President Trump, no? But several thousand more U.S. soldiers are now headed to the region.

The world’s policemen.

But, then, miraculously, a possible way out. News reports announced that Iraq’s legislative body, the Council of Representatives, would take up a resolution on expelling U.S. troops — er, well, asking U.S. troops to leave.

Please, Iraqi legislators, please: don’t throw us in that briar patch!

The vote was held. The measure asking all foreign troops to leave . . . passed.

It is an understandable request, one that we can only presume the U.S. will respect . . . once the legislation is signed.

Oops! The prime minister has resigned; there’s no one to sign it.

Plus, the resolution is “non-binding.”

Training the Iraqi army has been difficult, but how proud our nation-builders must be to see Iraqi politicians show a professional understanding of political sleight-of-hand.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by incidencematrix

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national politics & policies The Draft

Five Days Left!

draft, registration, slavery, war, freedom,

You may have noticed me take notice . . . repeatedly . . . of an otherwise little-noticed National Commission on Military, National and Public Service (NCMNPS). It was established by Congress in 2017 to look into the issue of extending draft registration to women or let the federal courts end registration for not including women.

While I protested the atavistic practice, loud calls could be heard to bring back military conscription partially or universally . . . or to impose a year or two of national “service” on all young people when they turn 18 — despite its utter lack of value.

The last day of the year — Dec. 31, 2019 — is your deadline to quickly and easily express your thoughts on the draft here.

Thankfully, as the Commission is finishing its work (making its report in March — don’t forget to share your thoughts!), Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) and Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) have introduced House Resolution 5492. “To repeal the Military Selective Service Act, and thereby terminate the registration requirements of such Act . . .”*

“Today, with the introduction of H.R. 5492, the report of the NCMNPS due in March 2020, and Congress likely to be forced by pending legal cases to choose between ending draft registration and trying to expand it to women as well as men,” 1980s draft registration resister Edward Hasbrouck writes at AntiWar.com, “we are closer to ending draft registration than at any time since the requirement for all young men to register with the Selective Service System was reinstated in 1980.”

Speak loudly to the Commission now and let’s carry all the big sticks we can to Congress in the new year with one simple message: Pass H.R. 5492.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* The legislation would also end what are sometimes lifetime penalties imposed by federal agencies and state governments against those who fail to register.

Draft Links of Note: https://thisiscommonsense.org////2019/01/01/paul-jacob-on-the-draft/

Archive of Posts on the Draft: https://thisiscommonsense.org////category/the-draft/

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international affairs national politics & policies too much government

The New Arms Race

We who grew up in the time of the Apollo missions are more than aware of the arms-race angle to the Soviet and American forays into Earth orbit and beyond.

Now, we must recognize that the space race is no longer mere ornamentation over earthly military competition.

“The United States and China are rapidly building space warfare capabilities,” writes Bill Gertz in the Washington Examiner, “as part of a race to dominate the zone outside Earth’s atmosphere.”

Of course, much of this remains ground support. WHNT News 19 in Alabama quotes the Commander of the U.S. Space and Missile Defense Command at Redstone Arsenal — a Lieutenant General who “will soon become Deputy Commander of the U.S. Space Command in Colorado” — explaining that current space resources must be ever-ready in support of “the war fighter, the soldier on the ground.”

But the “satellites in space” he refers to, the ones with “very unique capabilities,” are not just about ground support. For when Donald Trump proposed a new Space Force military division last year, he wasn’t blowing smoke.

Billions of future dollars, maybe, but not smoke.

In the works?

“AI for space war to stop anti-satellite weapons”;
Capabilities to treat “Space [a]s a warfighting domain similar to air, land and sea”;
Space planes, such as the in-dev X-37B;

and much more.

The Chinese are looking for “space superiority,” says American intelligence, and of course “you know what this means,” as Bugs Bunny liked to say.

War?

At least war profits.

Even France is talking about militarizing space.

Brave new world? Or more of the same, just higher up?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies The Draft

The Draft Goes Hollywood?

“Whether you’re able to recall the last military draft or not, if you watch the show This Is Us, then you may have some familiarity,” says a column at Medium.com apparently authored by the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

The commission was set up by Congress to explore the idea of extending draft registration to young women, as a federal judge has ruled, or ending it altogether, as should be done — or even go all the way to impose a one- or two-year compulsory national service requirement for every young high school grad.

According to the piece, headlined, “This Is Us and the Military Draft,” the “one thing” the commission, the military draft, and the October 21, 2019 episode of this NBC television program, “Nicky’s Number Is Called,” have “in common” is “the Selective Service System.”

Today, the agency threatens young men to register, keeping, at great expense, a badly out-of-date registration list that could be used to conscript those young men into the military. Back in 1970, Selective Service held a draft lottery live on TV whereby young men whose birthdates were picked first got involuntarily shipped off to Vietnam.

A This Is Us 1970 flashback “gives us a glimpse of what that was like in one powerful scene.” Two brothers are at a bar waiting to learn their fate. The commission explains that one brother “is adamant that his birthday will be called.” Drinking heavily, he is more terrified than “adamant.”

His birthdate is picked fifth out of 365 — making it a certainty he will be drafted. Immediately, his brother comforts him with, “We’ll get you to Canada.”

Is the commission signaling its support for my position?

The draft is unconstitutional, unjust and unnecessary.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Action Item: Go HERE to instruct the commission to tell Congress: Don’t extend draft registration to women, end it for everyone. No draft and no forced national service program.

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The Draft

Attendant Loss of Life

Is there an easy way to avoid the insanity of what author and decorated Marine vet Elliot Ackerman calls America’s “two-decade military quagmire”?

Yesterday, I took issue with Ackerman’s idea of a “reverse-engineered draft,” whereby each year about 65,000 young men and women — but only those with parents in the highest federal tax bracket* — would be forced into the military for two years of “service.”

“A draft places militarism on a leash,” he argues. But in reality, select young people lose their freedom and politicians don’t relinquish any powers.

Still, Ackerman maintains that

“with a draft the barrier to entering new wars would be significantly higher”
placing these “kids” in jeopardy via military conscription would activate their wealthy and influential parents to lobby Congress and the White House
“could create greater accountability”

ultimately resulting in a saner military posture around the globe, hopefully allowing us to “avoid . . . a major theater war, the continuance of our ‘terror wars,’ the attendant loss of life.”

Threatening to draft their kids would raise the eyebrows of parents. That’s why when Congress last voted on legislation mandating a draft, even the bill’s author voted NO.

But would having a small drafted force somehow actually save lives?

Let’s look at combat deaths when the United States used a military draft, post-World War II, and compare that to the time-period since 1973, when the draft ended and the All-Volunteer Force began. Those numbers are not close:

Between 1946 and 1973, with the draft in place, nearly 100,000 American soldiers were killed overseas.
Over the more than four decades since the draft ended, fatalities remain under 10,000.

That’s a heap-big correlation between the military draft and “attendant loss of life.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* As I noted yesterday, targeting the draft to apply only to top income earners clearly violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

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Fourth Amendment rights national politics & policies The Draft

Rich Kids for Ransom

Elliot Ackerman, conscription, war, slavery, soldiers,

Elliot Ackerman wants peace so badly that he is willing to conscript our sons and daughters into the military in hopes of achieving it.

“From Somalia to Syria, American forces are engaged in combat,” the author and decorated Marine veteran writes in Time. “With recent military posturing against Iran, against North Korea, it is also easy to imagine our country sleepwalking into another major theater war.”

Mr. Ackerman is not arguing the draft would help in current or future combat operations, or appreciably improve the military. In answer to the obvious question, “Why would you degrade the finest fighting machine the world has ever known?” he replies, “[W]e must move the issues of war and peace from the periphery of our national discourse to its center.”

How?

Ackerman proposes a “reverse-engineered draft.”

His idea is to call up 65,000 young men and women by lottery for two-year terms of servitude. This would represent roughly 5 percent of the armed forces. “And no one could skip this draft,” he claims . . . though obviously not everyone sent a “Greetings” letter will be physically able to serve.

Lastly, he insists that “the only ones eligible” would be “those whose families fall into the top income tax bracket.”

In short, conscript the rich kids!

Of which Ackerman was one.*

Maybe his stance of theatrical class self-sacrifice distracted him from his proposal’s blatant violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

All this to stir up more angst from allegedly influential high-income earners by turning their children into political hostages.

Doesn’t make Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In the 1990s, I served with Peter Ackerman, Elliot’s father, on the board of directors of U.S. Term Limits.

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