US policy informed by expert dunces

[What follows is an excerpt from an article by Bruce Fein published yesterday on the website of The Washington Times:]

US foreign policy is informed by expert dunces, who chronically give birth to calamities. (...)

Exemplary is the advice of Kenneth M Pollack, a senior fellow at the prestigious Brookings Institution, to bring stability and legitimacy to the government of Iraq through a Shiite-Sunni power sharing dispensation. Writing in The New York Times (“ISIS is Losing Iraq. But What Happens Next?” Feb 4, 2015), Mr Pollack insinuates that US national security would be profoundly impaired if Iraq falls into a Shiite-Sunni civil war.

That conclusion is far from self-evident, and Mr Pollack fails to articulate a single reason for believing that it is true. Numerous countries are plagued with civil strife irrelevant to the security of the United States. Think of Somalia, Libya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.

The United States does not revel in the misery of other peoples. But our national security would be no more implicated in a Shiite-Sunni civil war than it was by the Rwandan genocide of Tutus by Hutsi in 1994. (...)

In 1991, the United States encouraged Iraq’s Marsh Arabs to revolt against Saddam Hussein, and then abandoned them to Saddam’s mercy. The United State supported Saddam in his 1980-88 war with Iran, and then switched to overthrow and kill him in 2003. The United States normalized relations with Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi for destroying weapons of mass destruction, renouncing terrorism, and paying compensation for the Lockerbie bombing. Then we flipped and commenced war against Gaddafi in 2011, which led to his ouster and murder by our allies.

No Shiite or Sunni in Iraq with minimal intelligence would trust the United States not to double-cross them, for instance, abandoning Iraq’s Sunnis to cut a nuclear deal with Shiite Iran, or betraying Iraq’s Shiites to solidify relations with Saudi Arabia, including undiminished production of oil to keep international prices low and Russia, Venezuela, and Iran economically destitute.

Expert dunces need to be driven out of the nation’s foreign policy arena as Jesus drove out money changers from the Temple.

[Another relevant article by Bruce Fein can be accessed here.]

The United States Empire

[What follows is excerpted from a long article by Washington DC attorney Bruce Fein headlined The United States Empire which was published yesterday on the website of The Washington Times:]

If the United States is not an empire, the word has lost all meaning.

No sparrow falls in the forest that does not provoke a national security assessment and response.

At present, we are employing military force in six countries — Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

In 2011, we reduced Libya to rubble after Muammar Gaddafi did our bidding in abandoning weapons of mass destruction and in paying more than $1 billion to compensate for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. (...)

We dot the planet with hundreds of military bases.

We police the oceans with aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships.

We dominate the skies with spy satellites, stealth aircraft, and hundreds of fighters and bombers.

We have outstanding economic sanctions against 20 nations for bad behavior.

We control cyberspace with the ubiquitous collection, retention, and search of electronic communications of friend and foe alike.

We expend $1 trillion annually on national security, a sum more than the collective defense expenditures of the rest of the world.

We honor secrecy more than transparency, a quest for a risk-free existence more than liberty.

We bedeck the presidency with the trappings of a Roman emperor, including a bloated Pretorian Guard and a White House staff approaching 500. Roads are closed and traffic stops whenever the president travels. (...)

In sum, the United States has become a full-fledged empire.

Acknowledging this truth is the first step to curing the disease. Otherwise, self-ruination will be our fate. As Abraham Lincoln presciently lectured: “At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Gaddafi "was no threat to any national security interest of the United States"

[What follows is the text of an article by American lawyer Bruce Fein that was published yesterday in the US edition of The Huffington Post:]

Hillary Clinton, Democratic presidential nominee, has derided “Don’t do stupid stuff” as a worthless organizing principle of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.

But her substitute of “Doing stupid stuff” is even worse.

As Secretary of State during President Barack Obama’s first term, Ms. Clinton single-handedly compounded problems of international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, war, refugees, and human rights from North Korea and China to South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa to Europe and Russia.

In sum, Ms. Clinton foreign policy makes former President George W. Bush look like a Talleyrand, Metternich, or Bismarck.

Emblematic was her imbecilic orchestration of war against Libya in 2011 to overthrow anti-jihadist Muammar Gaddafi. The secular Libyan leader had recently abandoned weapons of mass destruction, had paid billions in compensation to the victims of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, and had been removed from the United States list of state sponsors of terrorism. He was no threat to any national security interest of the United States.

Secretary of State Clinton should have rewarded Gaddafi with economic, trade, and investment incentives. Such diplomatic savvy would have encouraged North Korea and Iran to abandon their nuclear ambitions which were fueled by worries that the United States would otherwise overthrow their respective regimes by force and violence.

Instead, Ms. Clinton chose war—a monumental blunder that continues to haunt the United States.

1. Clinton’s justification for war was Gaddafi’s human rights violations in Libya. That casus belli invited wars of aggression everywhere because no nation is without warts. Thus, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea under the pretest that Ukraine was oppressing its Russian ethnic citizens. It could use the same pretext to invade the Baltic States. That is why the United Nations Charter prohibits war except in self-defense under Articles 2, paragraph 4 and Article 51. Clinton flouted that international prohibition.

2. Clinton’s war justification was a stupendous lie known to one and all. On her watch, the United States maintained amicable relations with numerous countries beset with human rights records as bad or worse than Libya’s, for instance, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Yemen, China, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia.

3. Clinton lied to Russia in denying that an ulterior motive for the United States military intervention in Libya was regime change and the killing of Gaddafi. Strutting like Julius Caesar, Clinton clucked, “We came, we saw, he died.” Clinton’s lie gratuitously alienated Russia, and invited a new Cold War.

4. Clinton’s war splintered Libya into hundreds of tribal, ethnic, sectarian, or personal militias. The nation was thrown into an ongoing hydra-headed civil war, which gave birth to ISIS in Sirte and rival governments in Tripoli and Tobruk. Gaddafi’s cache of conventional arms fell into the hands of international terrorists throughout the Middle East. The lawlessness and chaos Clinton’s war created fueled the terrorist assassination of our Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens; and, the flight of millions of refugees from Libyan shores to Europe and tens of thousands of drownings in the Mediterranean Sea.

5. Clinton’s war fortified the determination of North Korea and Iran to develop, maintain, or expand nuclear arsenals to deter the United States from invasion. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, recently testified to Congress that negotiating nuclear disarmament with North Korea is now a pipedream. Additionally, Clinton’s so-called “Pivot to Asia” antagonized China and ended any possibility of its necessary cooperation in stopping North Korea’s nuclear adventurism. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by President Obama with Iran only postpones fulfillment of its nuclear ambitions for ten years.

Hillary Clinton’s Libyan war is the very definition of doing stupid stuff. The multiplicity of calamities that ensued was as predictable as the force of gravity. Libya had never practiced democracy. It had never embraced democratic norms. It sported 140 tribal networks. Civil society was embryonic. Its political development was pre-Magna Charta. And corruption was endemic.

Depend upon it. If Ms. Clinton is elected President, her “doing stupid stuff” foreign policy will find expression in wars with Syria, China, and Russia with consequences far worse than the disasterous fallout from Libya.

US Libya intervention "smart power at its best"

[What follows is excerpted from an article by attorney Bruce Fein headlined Hillary Clinton’s appalling enthusiasm for war that was published in yesterday’s edition of The Washington Times:]

Hillary Clinton exhibits an appalling enthusiasm for United States wars not in self-defense, i.e., legalized murders on an industrial scale that create enemies while destroying our liberties and prosperity at home.

To William Tecumseh Sherman, war was “hell.” To Abraham Lincoln, war was a “scourge.” But to Hillary Clinton, war is a coveted instrument of foreign policy in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

If she is elected president, the United States will be fighting gratuitous wars every hour of every day of her presidency. That should give pause. (...)

Despite such hallowed wisdom, Mrs. Clinton has supported every war initiated by the United States not in self-defense for more than twenty three years since she first occupied the White House as first lady: Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Yemen, Somalia, and international terrorism generally. (...)

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Clinton championed a “humanitarian” war against Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi after he had abandoned WMD, Libya had been removed as a state sponsor of terrorism, he had handsomely compensated the victims of the Lockerbie bombing, and he posed no threat to the United States. She has fiercely defended the war as “smart power at its best.”