Will ISIS Debate Get Us ‘War Without Limits?’

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

The Republican Congress is expected to take up an authorization bill for the war against ISIS even though the U.S. bombing and ground escalation campaign has been underway for months.

The specter of the Islamic State has silenced Congressional criticism and marginalized anti-war voices on the outside. The looming question is whether an open-ended authorization will extend the War on Terror for years to come.

The most critical issues are these:

First, whether an authorization will include a narrow or a broad definition of the "enemy". Will it be ISIS in Iraq and Syria or ISIS and associated groups? The broader definition, similar to "Al Qaeda and associated groups" in the 2002 authorization, will allow US military action in any region where Islamic State loyalists raise a flag, like northern Egypt. Even the narrower definition  is ambiguous, since the "Islamic State" is a category based on shifting loyalties among battlefield factions. A new authorization for a global war on terrorism therefore may be in the making.

Second, whether the president's prohibition on US ground troops will prevent another Americanized war. Obama already has sent hundreds of advisers and at least 1,500 new US ground troops. All reports indicate that Baghdad's armed forces are incapable of fighting on their own, even with American bombing, with the exception of some Kurdish units and sectarian Shiite militias. Obama's military advisers and Republican senators are urging the deployment of ground troops.

Third, whether the authorization will be for 18 months before another Congressional debate or extend for three or four years, into the next presidency. Secretary Kerry and Rep. Adam Schiff both are proposing a three-year extension, which would contain serious Congressional debate until 2017. That would continue the war as onecarried out by the executive branch and CIA except for annual debates on appropriations.

Fourth, whether the authorization will include mandatory independent reports on metrics of progress, casualties [including civilian casualties] and costs in US tax dollars. History indicates that such reports are useful if done by an independent inspector general with specialists in budgeting and wartime civilian casualties.

The most important test will be whether a majority votes to bloc US ground troops, or whether the gates of hell will be left open.

Rep. Barbara Lee is attempting to inject limiting amendments and non-military alternatives into the floor debate. On her left, many peace advocates want a vote opposing the use of US military force altogether. On her right are the McCains and Grahams who blame Obama for withdrawing UStroops in the first place. The unknowns include presidential aspirants of both parties.

Lee argues that her Dec. 16 bill intends to "ensure that the U.S. pursues a comprehensive diplomatic, political, economic, and regionally-ledstrategy to degrade and dismantle ISIL, including working through the U.N. The bill would also repeal the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF) to ensure that they are not relied on for authority in lieu of an ISIL-specific AUMF passed by Congress. Lastly, the bill would require a report from the Administration on its comprehensive strategy to degrade and dismantle ISIL and information on human rights vetting for partner elements the U.S. is supporting in Iraq and Syria."

According to Lee's legislative director Diala Jadallah, "The underlying point is to ensure that the non-military solutions to the crisis in Iraq and Syria are included in any debate on the war. Right now, no one is talking about that, and all other legislative proposals are simply putting limits on a possible AUMF rather than trying to end the war through diplomatic, humanitarian, and political means. We are not prescribing a [new] AUMF."

The Congressional vote also will define a core peace bloc willing to stand firm during a moment when the winds of escalation are

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John Kerry Said What? Welcome to Year 10 of the Long War

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising via TomHayden.com

Dec. 9, 2014 - Secretary of State John Kerry seems to be engaging in some double speak this week. (Photo: AP, December 2014)Secretary of State John Kerry today called for a congressional authorization of the New War before he didn't.

Instead Kerry proposed the appearance of an authorization before stripping the idea of real public and congressional accountability. Members of Congress should look carefully at this insult to their constitutional role.

First, Kerry said it was "crystal clear" that the President wants no US troops in combat operations on the ground, but that Congress should not, "preemptively bind the hands of the commander-in-chief to react to changing circumstances."

Second, Kerry said he doesn't want an open-ended timeline for war but that the authorization should run for three years or longer, safely after the 2016 elections.

Third, Kerry promised no wider war beyond Iraq and Syria, but doesn't want any constraint on US going after ISIS militarily in other nations.

HOW THIS HAPPENED

This is nothing but an attempt to avoid an embarrassing battlefield defeat during the next two years before handing over the mission of derailing ISIS to the next president. At the same time, it will limit the ability of Congress to question the policy once they have signed on. This is how escalation works.

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Importance of the War Powers Resolution

 

By Paul Ryder and Tom Hayden

[Research by Paul Ryder]

Nov. 10, 2014 - The nation needs a full public debate and a Congressional vote on whether to authorize the current American military interventions in Iraq and Syria and, if so, under what conditions. The past is prologue:

April 4, 1956: President Dwight Eisenhower’s news conference --

Q: Sarah McClendon, El Paso Times: Sir, would you order those Marines that were sent over to the Mediterranean and over in that area, would you order them to war, without asking the Congress first?

A: President Eisenhower: I get discouraged sometimes here. I have announced time and time and time again I will never be guilty of any kind of action that can be interpreted as war until the Congress, which has the Constitutional authority, says so.

Now, I have said this so often that it seems to me almost ridiculous to ask me the question. Look, how can a war be conducted? You’ve got to have troops, you have got to have draft laws, you have got to have money. How could you conduct a war without Congress? Their Constitutional power is to declare war, and I am going to observe it.

Now, there are times when troops, to defend themselves, may have to, you might say, undertake local warlike acts, but that is not the declaration of war, and that is not going to war, and I am not going to order any troops into anything that can be interpreted as war, until Congress directs it.[1]

One of the hard-earned lessons of the Vietnam War is that Congress must not cede to the White House its constitutional power to declare war.

This lesson became law in the form of the 1973 War Powers Resolution. With a new war starting in the Middle East, Congress must now invoke this law.

 

1. Why bring up Vietnam?

Since no two wars are the same, the new war is not the same as Vietnam. The similarities, however, are so haunting they are already being discussed across the board. Here is a selection of recent articles:

• “Formula For Defeating ISIS Evokes Memories Of Vietnam Nightmare,” Donald Kirk, Forbes, September 13, 2014
• “ISIS and Vietnam,” Thomas Friedman, New York Times, October 28, 2014
• “Obama echoes LBJ on Vietnam,” Bruce Fein, Washington Times, September 21, 2014
• “ISIS: Obama’s Vietnam?” David Seaton, Fire Dog Lake, October 12, 2014
• “The Iraq/ISIS Debate: Beware the Ghosts of Saigon and Karbala,” The National Interest, July 10, 2014
• “Ellsberg Sees Vietnam-Like Risks in ISIS War,” Barbara Koeppel, Consortium News, October 1, 2014
• “McCain: ‘Incremental’ Strikes on ISIS Remind Me of Vietnam,” Brendan Bordelon, National Review, October 6, 2014
• “Vietnam v. Iraq: Suicide attacks changed everything,” The Economist, September 11, 2014
• “As U.S. Bombs Fall, British Hostage of ISIS Warns of Another Vietnam,” Rukmini Callimachi, New York Times, September 22, 2014
• “Pentagon official: The Similarities Between Obama’s ISIS and Kennedy’s Vietnam Are Eerie,” Joseph Miller, Daily Caller, October 13, 2014

Like it or not, Vietnam is back. We all need to know what happened and what it means.

Today, Congress is hampered in this discussion by the loss of its institutional memory of Vietnam. No one currently in the U.S. Senate was in office in 1973 when the War Powers Resolution passed.[2] Only four current members of the U.S. House were then serving: John Dingell of Michigan, who retires in January 2015, John Conyers of Michigan, Charles Rangel of New York, and Don Young of Alaska.[3]

So, too, with the public: most Americans now living had not been born when the War Powers Resolution became 50 U.S. Code Chapter 33.[4]

2. The Constitution and the Vietnam War

In 1787, the Founders made the Constitution as clear as they could about the matter: “The Congress shall have power to . . . declare war.”[5]

Over the next 155 years, Congress passed eleven U.S. declarations of war authorizing five wars: the War of 1812, U.S.-Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.[6] [7]

President Harry Truman used the resolutions of the new United Nations as the legal basis for the Korean War, but the modern pattern for riding roughshod over Congress was set by President Lyndon Johnson.

The 1964 Tonkin Gulf “Incident” had four now-familiar stages.

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Today's Wars May Signal A Qualitative Change In US Foreign Policy

By Harry Targ
Beaver County Peace Links via Diary of a Heartland Radical

From Wartime Alliance to Deadly Global Conflict

I do not believe history repeats itself but I find myself looking back to the past for lessons which might be relevant today. For example, during World War II an “unnatural alliance” between the United States (the new imperial hegemon), Great Britain (the old one), and the former Soviet Union (the revolutionary challenger to capitalist hegemony) formed to defeat fascism in Europe. It was in the interests of all three nations to do so.

As the war was ending the leaders of the “big three” nations--President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin--met at Yalta in the Crimea to plan for a post-war world order. They made agreements on Eastern European borders, facilitating elections in Poland, administering a defeated Germany, defeating Japan in the Asian war, and planning for the first meeting of the United Nations. The three leaders returned to their respective countries declaring that a peaceful post-war world order would be established. “The spirit of Yalta” brought hope to millions of North Americans and Europeans, West and East.

In April, President Roosevelt died and a new more bellicose administration had come to power in Washington. Within three months the United States had successfully tested its new atomic bomb and dropped two of them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the fall, 1945 US and Soviet disputes over treaties ending the status of war with former fascist regimes in Eastern Europe began to destroy the comity that had been built over the course of the war and codified at Yalta. In 1946 crises occurred between East and West over Iran and Greece. It is clear in retrospect that ever since its ascendency to power the new Truman administration had been working to achieve global hegemony in the post-war period, using its military and economic superiority as tools.

In the spring of 1947, the US decided to replace the British in Greece as the latter worked to crush a leftwing insurgency in that country’s civil war. President Truman was warned by the Republican Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he, Truman, better “scare hell out of the American people.” This was so because most Americans favored peace over more conflict in world affairs and many still perceived the former wartime ally, the Soviet Union, positively.

The announcement of the new global threat and the need to mobilize resources over the next several years to “defend” against the demonic Soviet Union led to the recommendations for action in the famous Truman Doctrine speech to Congress in March, 1947. These put the US on a war path that would cost more than 10 million lives, international and American, and at least $5 trillion by the twenty-first century.

So the decisions made between 1945 and 1947 presaged a dramatic shift in United States foreign policy that had enormous consequences for both its own citizens and the world. Decision-makers in the Truman administration who favored maintaining some semblance of cooperation with the former Soviet Union lost their influence. Even some of Truman’s hardline advisors like George Kennan felt the evolving policies went too far in terms of bellicosity.

From Global Conflict Management to Renewed Global Military Madness

Fast-forward some 65 years. President Obama, from 2008 to 2013, continued the Bush war in Afghanistan, ordered drone attacks on alleged terrorist targets in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and authorized covert support for destabilization of populist regimes in Latin America. In contrast, at the same time, he has tried to create a more “realist” panoply of policies based on diplomacy and modest recognition that there were limits to US power. During the President’s second term, the United States partnered with Russia to curb Syria’s brutal war on its citizens and Russia, Iran, and the United States began to make progress in arms negotiations.

But then, with the aid of undercover US operatives, rebels overthrew a Ukraine government in February 2014 that had close ties with Russia.

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New Western Crusade in Middle East Has No Better Prospects Than Last

Photo: Iraq Kurds Protesting ISIS

Global Times –China - September 17, 2014

Washington's foreign policy has an increasingly Alice in Wonderland character. But President Barack Obama's policy toward the Islamic State (IS) does not surprise.

To consider the new US crusade, it is helpful to get first the context and narrative into perspective.

The present mess in the Middle East was caused by the George W. Bush administration's deeply flawed Middle East policy featuring an unnecessary war for "regime change" in Iraq. The US lied to the world about the Iraq threat and then Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Back in 2002, despite warnings from many experts including academics, US military officers, diplomats and intelligence professionals, the US launched what president Bush himself called a "crusade" against Baghdad.

Back then, as today, what experts have to say apparently makes no difference. What does make a difference is what is politically correct inside the beltway surrounding Washington.

Policy is driven by a foreign policy elite linked to a variety of think tanks that receive money from foreign governments and corporations as well as receive generous funding from interested individuals, organizations and lobbies.

Many politicians ardently espouse the foreign policy line of the day, so as to themselves receive campaign funding and good press. This is particularly true with respect to the Middle East, as the pro-Israel lobby in the US is well organized and generous to friends in high places.

When it comes to Middle East policy, the US news media is of no help, as the pro-Israel lobby exercises decisive influence and in many cases ownership patterns are Israel-friendly.

Obama's policy has been a continuation of the regime change crusade launched by George W. Bush. Contrary to campaign promises, there has been no real "change" in US foreign policy.

The Obama administration joined the UK and France to launch regime change wars against Libya and Syria. Thus it is the West which created the present situation in the Middle East.

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FROM VIETNAM TO IRAQ, LESSONS NEVER LEARNED

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

[Ann Arbor, Sept 16, 2014 - Tom Hayden is speaking Wednesday night at Angell Hall, the site of the first Vietnam teach-in in 1965, on the lessons of Vietnam for Iraq. Excerpts of the speech are here, the full text is at the Democracy Journal online.]

I am joining many peace groups around American in expressing opposition to the escalation of the Iraq War into a quagmire that is likely to be costly in lives, tax dollars, and our tarnished reputation.

Ann Arbor is the place, along with Berkeley, where the young American peace movement demanded a teach-in, an end to campus business as usual, an end to intellectual conformity, as we confronted the growing horror of the Vietnam War.

There are many parallels between the wars of our youth and the latest one unfolding. Once again, we need to suspend the business-as-usual of our everyday lives and ask the questions that need to be asked. We cannot trust "the best and brightest" to have the answers any more than students trusted their pedigreed elders fifty years.

We need Congressional hearings, full debate and a vote on authorization of this unilateral war. In 1964, the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" was contrived and exploited to stampede our country into a hasty and irresponsible authorization. Only two members of Congress had thegood sense then to vote "no" on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which permitted an open-ended bloodletting for more than a decade before the Congress finally helped put an end to it.

I would hope that the present Congress learns from the past to check and balance the war "fever" gripping Washington as described this week by the New York Times. I would hope that the Obama administration re-reads history and thinks again before excluding the Congress and the American public from a war by executive fiat. Only a Congressional debate with give legitimacy to the very real questions, and consideration of alternatives, to the questions many Americans are asking about this crisis.Whatever the outcome of a Congressional vote, the dissent deserves to be aired, the hawks must be held accountable, and the questioning must begin. No threat justifies the exclusion of Congress from its constitutional role, nor the American people from a voice in a decision that will take American lives and resources.

The Obama administration needs to take its case to the United Nations as well, since war is being planned against Syria, a sovereign state, and because diplomacy, beginning now, will be the only way this conflict will end.

During Vietnam, we were told that the "faceless Vietcong enemy" was disemboweling innocent villages, slaughtering Catholics, kidnapping children and imposing a dictatorship through aggression against South Vietnam. What we were not told was that our government was intervening in a civil war that had been set in motion by the French colonialists who we replaced in trying to "save" South Vietnam. We were fighting against a communist-led army, yes, but one who represented national independence to most of the Vietnamese people.

We were told it would be an affordable war, that our great country could pay for both "guns and butter", that it would be short in duration too. It bankrupted the US Treasury and lasted at least fifteen years.

We were told, and still are told, that counterinsurgency would be the answer, that rounding up the villagers in "strategic hamlets" to isolate the guerrillas, then a targeted killing campaign against those guerrillas, would bring stability to South Vietnam at last. The infamous "tiger cages" and Can Son island were the precursors of Abu Graeb and the dungeons in Iraq where eventually ISIS was born. Our own generals like David Petraeus wrongly interpreted the lessons of Vietnam to propose a renewal of Vietnam's failed CIA "Phoenix Program" and tried in vain to apply to Iraq in 2007.

We were told we were fighting for democracy, but in fact thousands of Americans were drafted against their will, families on all sides were deceived by one administration after another, secret bombings were carried out against Cambodia and Laos, secret CIA counterterrorism operations targeted alleged terrorists, and the repression came home in countless FBI campaigns to spy on, inform on, harrass, indict and demonize the anti-war opposition, from Dr. Spock to Dan Ellsberg, from the Catholic resistance led by the Berrigans to the Chicago 8 defendants. The Watergate conspiracy was properly described as a cancer on our democratic system, and two presidents were driven from office as a result of that war. Democracy was saved by the anti-war movement, including many soldiers in our armed forces, and by political leaders who found the courage to stand up.

Because our leaders didn't listen, or listened too late, the end came in Vietnam as a total catastrophe, the implosion of the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces, and the literal expulsion of American diplomats from the rooftop of our embassy.

It may seem implausible, but who is to say these events won't repeat in some ways again?

Our government even now is spending millions on a multi-year memorial campaign to teach "the lessons" of Vietnam in our schools, while excluding the voices of the Vietnam generation dissenters who were right, and while failing in its ability to accept that Vietnam war a mistake. Some of us are meeting now to demand a say in how the Vietnam era is taught - just as we must demand a say in how to understand and approach Iraq. If a mistake is repeated over and over, the result will be the same. We must demand of our Sec. of State John Kerry, a Vietnam war hero who through some of his ribbons away and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that he reflect on the very question he asked the Senate forty long years ago: who will be the last to die for a mistake?

It is a question as real today as before. Tonight we must begin again, announcing a demand for debate, diplomacy and democracy.

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Clinton vs. Obama, Iraq and ‘The Long War’ Theory

This photo is believed to be the ISIS forces moving into the Anbar province of Iraq in January 2014. (Photo: Associated Press, 2014)This article was republished by The Nation on August 13, 2014.

Tom Hayden on the Alternatives in Iraq

By Tom Hayden

Beaver County Peace Links via The Nation

Aug 12, 2014 - Hillary Clinton's flapping of her hawkish wings only intensifies the pressure on President Barack Obama to escalate US military involvement in the sectarian wars of Iraq and Syria. Domestic political considerations already are a major factor in forcing Obama to "do something" to save the Yazidis, avert "another Benghazi," and double down in the undeclared Long War against Islamic fundamentalism.

Clinton certainly was correct in arguing that Obama's statement "don't do stupid stuff" is not an organizing principle of US foreign policy. Instead of offering a new foreign policy, based for example on democracy, economic development and renewable energy however, Clinton lapsed into the very Cold War thinking she once questioned in the Sixties.

America's long war on jihadi terrorism should be modeled on the earlier Cold War against communism, Clinton said. We made "mistakes", supported many "nasty guys", did "some things we're not proud of", but the Cold War ended in American triumph with, "The defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism."

Ignoring the new Cold Wars with Russia and China, Clinton's nostalgic vision is sure to be widely accepted among Americans, including many Democrats. She ignores, or may not even be familiar with, the actual Long War doctrine quietly promulgated during the past eight years by national security gurus like David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq.

Put simply, the Long War theorists have projected an eighty-year military conflict with militant Islam over an "arc of crisis" spanning multiple Muslim countries. Starting with 9/11, the Long War would continue through twenty presidential terms. In Kilcullen's thesis, Iraq is only a "small war" within a larger one. Since a war of such duration could never be declared officially, the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force [AUMF] stands as its feeble underlying justification.

Obama has made cautious attempts to separate himself from the Long War doctrine and even seeks to narrow or revisit the AUMF. But Obama has never named and or criticized the doctrine, presumably for fear of being accused of going soft in the War on Terrorism. Obama's true foreign policy leaning is revealed in his repeated desire to "do some nation building here at home", which many hawks view as a retreat from America's imperial role. They prefer, in Clinton's words, the posture of "aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward," rather than being, "down on yourself."

While expanding US drone attacks, intervening in Libya and Yemen, and now escalating again in Iraq, Obama has emphasized another foreign policy direction that is disturbing to hawks. Obama repeatedly argues, “There is no military solution…" to the very wars he has engaged in, or tried to disengage from. That rational observation apparently is too "radical" for a government with the largest military in the world.

Clinton thinks the better approach is a little more muscular intervention - arming the Syrian rebels, for example, combined with some "soft power" on the ground.

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The Interventionist Starved Neo-Con Hawks Are Trying to Drag Us Back Into More War

 

Amid the crises in Iraq, Gaza and Ukraine, hawks are calling for U.S. military intervention.

By William Greider

Beaver County Peace Links via The Nation

July 25, 2014 |   The War Party in American politics is beating its drum and once again, mobilizing hawkish politicians and policy experts of both parties to wage a high-minded war of words.

Hawks are salivating because they see the world’s current turmoil as a chance to rehabilitate themselves and the virtues of US military intervention. Three hot wars are underway and the United States has a client state in each of them. Civil wars in the Ukraine and Iraq plus Israel’s invasion of Gaza give Washington’s armchair generals fresh opportunity to scold President Obama for his reluctance to fight harder. They are not exactly demanding US invasions—not yet anyway—but they want the dovish president and Congress to recognize war as a worthy road to peace.

“In my view, the willingness of the United States to use force and to threaten to use force to defend its interests and the liberal world order has been an essential and unavoidable part of sustaining the world order since the end of World War II,” historian Robert Kagan wrote in The Washington Post.“Perhaps we can move away from the current faux Manichaean struggle between straw men and return to a reasoned discussion of when force is the right tool.”

“Reasoned discussion,” that’s the ticket. By all means, we should have more of it. But please don’t count on it from Professor Kagan. What he neglected to mention in his stately defense of American war-making is that he himself was a leading champion fifteen years ago in stirring up the political hysteria for the US invasion of Iraq. Why isn’t this mentioned by The Washington Post when it publishes Kagan’s monthly column on its op-ed page? Or by The New York Times in its adoring profile of the professor? Why doesn’t the Brookings Institution, the Washington think tank that employs Kagan as a senior thinker?

Kagan was the co-founder of the Committee to Liberate Iraq, the neocon front group that heavily promoted pre-emptive aggression and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. You might assume Kagan was reacting to 9/11, but his role as propagandist for war actually preceded the terror attack by three years. Back then, Kagan and William Kristol also co-founded the Committee for a New American Century that was meant to restore American greatness through military power. They attacked the United Nations and warned that “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by misguided insistence on unanimity at the UN Security Council.” To Iraq’s lasting sorrow, George W. Bush took their advice.

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Memo to Obama: Avoid Splinters in Iraq, Syria

Jim McGovern (D-MA) pushing war powers vote

By Tom Hayden

Beaver County Peace Links

July 15, 2014 - Congressional support for a War Powers authorization looms as the only opportunity for the US to avoid another self-inflicted wound in Iraq and Syria.

The fifteen-day deadline provides an opportunity for anti-war groups to exert public pressure against any escalation, and a wrenching deadline for Congress to end its dickering and denial.

The best that can be expected is a face-saving bipartisan formula for avoiding a quagmire while minimizing the political cycle of blame. The difficulty will be defining a formula that might yet patch together the Sunni "humpty" with the Shiite "dumpty". If that is possible at all, the interim solution will take the same threat by John Kerry and the Western alliance to stop funding sectarianism, which has worked for the moment in Afghanistan. A no-fault divorce of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites seems out of the question, meaning an expansion of war.

The most important advice President Barack Obama should heed in Iraq and Syria is to avoid splinters. When these tiny barbed slivers cut into flesh, they can be painful to remove completely. Patience and soapy warm water are recommended, which translates into diplomacy as the equivalent of medicine.

ISIS is an Islamic splinter ready to pierce American flesh. The responsible US approach should be hands-off. As predicted here, the ISIS offensive will stall as it approaches Shiite strongholds in Baghdad and further south. Tensions within ISIS will increase. Instead of funding and arming the sectarian al-Maliki regime, the best American approach is to threaten a cutoff in funding unless al-Maliki abides by a genuine power-sharing arrangement, presumably including his resignation. As frequently occurs, America's "client" (in this case al-Maliki) turns the tables (on his "master") with confidence that the US will not pull the plug. 

ISIS is only the latest example of how wrongheaded US military intervention often creates exactly the enemies they claim to be preventing. It is established fact, except among the neo-con crackpots, that al-Qaeda did not even exist in Iraq until the US invasion created the conditions for its birth. Then US Special Ops went to war in Iraq against al-Qaeda in league with Sunni "Awakening" forces in 2007, when that version of AQ was considered too extreme even for the disenfranchised Sunni tribes in Anbar Province. The apparent "defeat" of that al-Qaeda by the US and the tribes spawned a splinter insurgency, which has become ISIS in Iraq.

Meanwhile, other splinters were breaking loose within the Syrian Sunni insurgency against Assad. While the US tried to pick and choose among competing "free Syria" contenders, the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was expelling the splinter group which became ISIS. The grounds for the split were two-fold: that the ISIS violence was too extreme and indiscriminate, and Zawahiri wanted ISIS to focus on Iraq and leave the Nusra Front to deal with Syria. The splintering continued with the formation of the Army of Islam, whose thousands of fighters have been battling ISIS on the same issues of excessive brutality. By one estimate, seven thousand fighters have been killed in clashes between these Syrian splinter groups since January.

Air strikes by the US, combined with any escalation of ground forces, under whatever label, would be a key factor in unifying these insurgent splinters who otherwise are at each other's throats. The splinters thus lodged in America's flesh will be hard to remove any time soon.

****************

McGovern Demands War Powers Vote in Two Weeks

July 11 - Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) today introduced a measure requiring a House vote on Iraq under the War Powers Resolution, forcing the Republican leadership to take action within fifteen days or face an up-or-down vote, which might curb the administration's escalating military intervention in the civil war. 

"We are trying to signal to the House leadership that we have a constitutional responsibility on questions of war and peace," McGovern said this morning. "It's all to easy to let things drift. When Congress goes on recess in August, there could be more American troops authorized, or a US bombing. John Boehner doesn't want a debate on Iraq. He's rather sit back. There's a fear that a majority will say they don't want a war."

McGovern's measure is co-authored by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). Lee has been circulating a House letter calling for application of the War Powers Resolution. The new measure contains a trigger that is hard to avoid. McGovern is seeking co-authors on his proposal while the clock is running. Lee, along with Republican Rep. Scott Rigell, has gathered nearly one hundred signers on a House letter urging compliance with the War Powers Resolution

--

Sources:

McGovern's House Floor Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3VZGjxD7SE&feature=youtu.be

The Resolution: http://mcgovern.house.gov/sites/mcgovern.house.gov/files/McGovern%20HCON%20RES%20105.pdf

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Behind the Madness in Iraq

 

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPost

June 13, 2014 - The U.S. had no business invading Iraq. We toppled a dictatorship on a false 9/11 rationale, which plunged Iraq into a sectarian civil war inside a war with the United States. We left behind a vengeance-driven Shiite regime aligned with Iran. Now the sectarian war in Syria is enlarging into a regional one. The primary blame for this disaster is on the Bush administration, but also on all those who succumbed to a Superpower Syndrome, which said we could redesign the Middle East. There is no reason whatsoever to justify further loss of American lives or tax dollars on a conflict that we do not understand and that started before the United States was born.

Anti-war networks already are sending online messages to Congress opposing any U.S. military re-intervention in Iraq. Representative Nancy Pelosi already is there. Those voices need to be amplified to help President Barack Obama stave off the most irrational forces during this crisis.

Then we need to construct a narrative that blocks the hawks from blaming Obama for "losing" Iraq, and turns the focus on the neo-conservatives, Republicans, and Democratic hawks who took this country into a sea of blood. Most of them remain in power, unscathed and immune, even occupying high positions in this administration. What they fear most is not an Iraqi insurgency, but the risen families of the dead and wounded, on all sides, that increasingly ask who led them into an unwinnable, unaffordable war. The duty-driven bravery of their lost sons and daughters stands in direct contrast to shameless privilege of those who sent them into harm's way.

As this immediate crisis unfolds, we must act to strip away certain delusions. The least of these, though still irritating, is the view of many visible anti-war "radicals" that says the United States never really withdrew from Iraq, but instead secretly left behind tens of thousands of Special Forces in disguise. This silly notion was meant to refute the belief that Obama had "ended" the war.

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US Drone War Kills ‘Others,’ Not Just al- Qaida leaders

 

By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers

April 10, 2013

Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified “other” militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA’s missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against “specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces” involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting “imminent” violent attacks on Americans.

“It has to be a threat that is serious and not speculative,” President Barack Obama said in a Sept. 6, 2012, interview with CNN. “It has to be a situation in which we can’t capture the individual before they move forward on some sort of operational plot against the United States.”

Copies of the top-secret U.S. intelligence reports reviewed by McClatchy, however, show that drone strikes in Pakistan over a four-year period didn’t adhere to those standards.

The intelligence reports list killings of alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as “other militants” and “foreign fighters.”

In a response to questions from McClatchy, the White House defended its targeting policies, pointing to previous public statements by senior administration officials that the missile strikes are aimed at al Qaida and associated forces.

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Light Footprints: The Future of American Military Intervention

Following is an EXECUTIVE SUMMARY of a longer think-piece outlining a new Pentagon policy for the future. It is worth studying by the peace and justice movement, so we know what’s on the rise. The full 44-page document can be downloaded HERE.

By Major Fernando M. Luján, USA

Center for a New American Security

Looming budget cuts, ground forces worn down by years of repeated deployments, and a range of ever evolving security challenges from Mali to Libya and Yemen are quickly making “light footprint” military interventions a central part of American strategy.

Instead of “nation building” with large, traditional military formations, civilian policy- makers are increasingly opting for a combination of air power, special operators, intelligence agents, indigenous armed groups and contractors, often leveraging relationships with allies and enabling partner militaries to take more active roles. Despite the relative appeal of these less costly forms of military intervention, the light footprint is no panacea. Like any policy option, the strategy has risks, costs and benefits that make it ideally suited for certain security challenges and disastrous for others. Moreover, recent media coverage of drone strikes and SEAL raids may also distort public perceptions, creating a “bin Laden effect” – the notion of military action as sterile, instantaneous and pinprick accurate. Yet for these smaller-scale interventions to be an effective instrument of national policy, civilian and military leaders at all levels should make a concerted effort to understand not only their strategic uses and limitations, but also the ways the current defense bureaucracy can undermine their success.

Drones and commando raids are the 'tip of the iceberg.'

Surgical strikes are only the most visible (and extreme) part of a deeper, longer- term strategy that takes many years to develop, cannot be grown after a crisis and relies heavily on human intelligence networks, the training of indigenous forces and close collaboration with civilian diplomats and development workers. While direct, unilateral action can be very effective in the short term, it is best when undertaken sparingly and judiciously, balanced with civilian- led initiatives such as political reconciliation, reintegration or influence campaigns, and phased out over time by efforts undertaken by local police or military units. These indigenous partners are the strategic lynchpin and the only means of producing lasting security outcomes.

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