Military action passes 60-day threshold, but Obama won't seek congressional approval
The White House is skipping a legal deadline to seek congressional authorization of the military action in Libya — but few on the Hill are objecting.
Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973 a president can only send troops into combat for 60 days without congressional mandate. That deadline fell Friday, but in absence of pressure from Congress, White House officials say they think they're on solid ground continuing U.S. involvement in the mission, now led by NATO, without formal congressional sign-off — as long as consultations with Congress continue.
In that spirit President Barack Obama sent a letter to congressional leaders Friday saying U.S. involvement remains critical and welcoming congressional input.
Phi Beta Iota: Unconstitutional, illegal, immoral — business as usual.
Nuclear Pakistan, we are often told, is the Islamic-state equivalent of a Wall Street firm: In geostrategic terms, it is too big to fail. That explains why, even as the Obama administration begins preparing for modest troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this July, it dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad last week to smooth over bilateral relations with Pakistan's paranoid regime, which were strained even before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Clinton's trip and the Obama administration's instinctive embrace of Islamabad is a fool's errand, doomed by history, geography and globalization itself.
In fact, the U.S. should drop the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan mess in China's lap now, while the getting is good, and here are the reasons why: …
Phi Beta Iota: World Politics Review has not figured out the new world of information quite yet, and we have no desire to copy their entire article. Suffice to say that Barnett, who has gotten much more coherent since his first book, is on target here, but add to that that the US Government's foreign policy is both ideological and idiotic — apart from the huge error by Zbigniew Brzezinski giving Pakistan the nuclear bomb in the first place, the US has no business in Central Asia that is of benefit to the American people, only to the American carpet-baggers that feed at the public treasury (now much depleted and greatly in debt) while looting foreign countries.
America can be a superpower or a welfare state, but not both.
Phi Beta Iota Sidenote: BOTH of the above “choices” are corruption incarnate. The correct choice was articulated by Thomas Jefferson: “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry.”
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In a series of farewell speeches, Mr. Gates has warned against cuts to weapon programs and troop levels that would make America vulnerable in “a complex and unpredictable security environment,” as he said Sunday at Notre Dame. On Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Gates noted that the U.S. went on “a procurement holiday” in the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration decided to cash in the Cold War peace dividend. The past decade showed that history (and war) didn't end in 1989.
Robert Steele Sends. This is personal. In1995, Gates was one of four Americans invited to address the French national conference on “Waging War and Peace in the 21st Century.” He followed me on the schedule, and on hearing my presentation, sashayed up to the stage, sniffed dismissively, and said “I'm not even going to touch that.” As we now know, I nailed it in 1989 for General Al Gray, in 1992 for the Whole Earth Review, again in 1995 for all in France (and separately in USA for COSPO under Joe Markowitz and for US Government as a Whole), and again in 2000 for NATO. And onward to the UN and various multinational audiences who lack a single nation ready to play a leadership role in the M4IS2 arena. Robert Gates was arrogant then, he is ignorant now….and he does “do maintenance,” that is all he has done as a placeholder at Defense. Gate's farewell comments are crap, pure and simple. He has overseen the waste of America's blood, treasure, and spirit with abject amorality that Dick Cheney would be proud of. He has failed to demand what Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) called for–a strategy, a force structure (the four forces after next) suited to the 21st Century, and an acquisition system with integrity.
Robert M. Gates is one of those people the Beltway Consensus refers to as a “serious adult”: not overtly partisan, measured in his pronouncements, possessed of actual knowledge about the job he has been charged to do. The adulation he has received is certainly understandable if we grade on a curve; his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, established an Olympic record for petty vanity, nasty abrasiveness, and disastrous professional judgment. Such a collective sigh of relief greeted Rumsfeld's departure that his successor was bound to shine in comparison.
But what of Gates's record on his own merits? He is given to making such comments as, “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.” A normal person would infer that he is opposed to the types of military intervention that have contributed significantly to a near-bankruptcy of the country. Yet in practice he has taken concrete measures to protract the very problem he professes to deplore.
Centre for Research on Globalization, 29 April 2011
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As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.
While the United States keeps trying to forget about Afghanistan, a new secret program in Afghanistan is quietly boasting of bringing about an end to the decade-long war.
The program is “kill/capture,” and it has been waged by the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, for the past year, with, according to PBS’s excellent Frontline, 3,000 operations in only the past 90 days.
Essentially, it sends special forces out in the dark of night into slumbering Afghan villages to force Taliban leaders out of their hiding places and then shoot them or capture them.
There is only one major problem: It appears rather too often that the American intelligence planners are not certain that the men they are killing or capturing are really Taliban. There is, of course,a larger question: Why are we killing and capturing Taliban when this war was supposed to be about al-Qaida?
STOCKHOLM — The notorious Cold War terrorist Carlos the Jackal says in an interview to be aired Thursday that Osama bin Laden is a martyr who earned himself a place in history through terrorism.
In the interview with Swedish national television, the Venezuelan terrorist said the former al-Qaida leader will still be remembered in 100 years' time because “of what he has done, the example he gave.”
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He said “nobody” will remember President Barack Obama.
Carlos, or Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, is serving a life sentence in France for killing two French secret agents and an alleged informer in 1975.
He is also accused of having a role in two 1982 bombings – on a Paris-Toulouse train and outside the Paris office of Arab-language newspaper al-Watan – and is suspected of two other train bombings on Dec. 31, 1983.
Swedish television providedThe Associated Press with the unedited version of the telephone interview, parts will be aired in Sweden Thursday evening.
Phi Beta Iota: From the beginning we have emphasized the financial asymmetries achieved by those who seek to engage the US with asymmetric tactics–for every dollar they spent, initially the US spent $500,000 and now the US spends closer to $5 million. It costs $50 million PER BODY in Afghanistan, and the cost in national blood, treasure, and spirit has both finished the destruction of the US economy AND revealed the lack of integrity and intelligence at the top in Washington DC. Bin Laden's greatest gift may be to have finally inspired a “Day of Rage” in the USA at some point in the near-term future.
