Analysis: The Riddle of Why Russians Don't Protest Against the War in Ukraine

by Nomad

Although now a British citizen, Oxford-educated political philosopher Vlad Vexler was born in the Soviet Union. For this reason, when it comes to an understanding the Russian mentality, he is something of an insider.
He says:

I know that there are a lot of people who are concerned and overwhelmed about what's happening with politics, not just in their country but all over the world, what I do here is help us operate openly in the light and not blindly in darkness.

In the video below, he takes on one of the most perplexing questions of our time: What can account for the apathy of the Russian people in the wake of the brutal invasion of Ukraine?

You will probably what he has to say interesting and, given the current politics in the USA, a bit foreboding.

Putin's Disastrous Misadventure in Ukraine

by Nomad

Why the Trump Administration Threatened to Veto a UN Resolution on Wartime Rape

by Nomad

Ever since the human species climbed out of the jungle trees and began throwing rocks at one another, one of the recognized spoils of war was pillaging of the villages, the looting of the valuables and the raping of the women.
For those who subscribed to the adage that might makes right, it was only logical that the weakest should pay the price of the barbarian conquest. 

Throughout our history, women were always at particular risk of sexual victimization during conflict. "To the victor go the spoils" has long been a war cry, and female bodies generally have been classified as part of those spoils of war.

Gates of War: Donald Trump and the Temple of Janus

by Nomad

Keeping the decision to go to war out of the hands of a single person has long been considered a prudent policy, dating back to ancient times. History has plenty of examples of what can go wrong when this restraint on executive power is ignored.
And that's exactly what Congress is doing with Trump.

The Sacred Gates of War

In Roman mythology, the god Janus was always connected to the ideas of beginnings, of gates, transitions, but also conclusions and endings. This duality is usually the reason Janus is depicted as having two faces, with one face looking to the future and the other to the past.

The Temple of Janus in Rome had a sacred custom of opening its great double-doors during times of war and closing them again in victorious peace. Not too surprisingly, the gates of war were rarely closed. There were always wars being waged somewhere, first to expand and later defend the conquered lands.

Congress Demands Legal Justification for Trump's Syrian Missile Attack

by Nomad

Dear Mr. President

You might not have seen the joint press release from Congressman Adam Schiff and Senator Tim Kaine issued yesterday. It was in regards a letter they sent to the Trump administration concerning legal matters and the Syrian missile attack earlier this month.

An interesting letter it was, too.

Washington, DC – Yesterday, Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, and Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a member of the Senate Armed Services and Senate Foreign Relations Committees, sent a letter to President Trump asking that he detail the legal basis for the strike against, which has yet to be provided to Congress and the American people.
Schiff and Kaine stated that a full understanding of the domestic and international legal basis for the strike is of great importance to Congress in exercising its constitutional responsibilities.

As the letter states, “By articulating a legal basis for military action, as well as laying out a strategic vision for such action, a president provides a justification for the use of the momentous power to commit American lives to a cause, but also an understanding of the limits of those powers.”
Both Schiff and Kaine believe that Bashar al-Assad must be held accountable for his atrocities and war crimes, but have argued that the missile strikes on the Syrian regime without congressional approval were unlawful.
The full text of the letter is below:

Spiraling Out of Control: The Dangerous Fallacies of General Mattis

by Nomad

Contrary to what the Defense Secretary apparently believes, there's a lethal risk in basing American foreign policy on the belief that other nations will pull back from the brink.

Red Lines and Spirals

On April 11, 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and General Joseph L. Votel, commander, U.S. Central Command held a press conference. It was a comparatively sedate and well-mannered meeting with the press. Mattis came across as a wise and disciplined type of leader, something solely lacking in the Trump administration.

However, there was an exchange that stood out for me and worth a bit more attention.

Q: Secretary Mattis, you're a student of history. You're a student of strategy. You've talked about red lines. The president has talked about red lines. The Russians have talked about red lines. At what point is there a danger of this spiraling out of control and to conflict between two nuclear-powered countries?

SEC. MATTIS: I don't believe I've talked about red lines. I generally shy away from it myself. I recommend Assad be rather cautious about violating international law with chemical weapons. I suppose that could be considered a red line. So I won't argue the point.
It will not spiral out of control. As you know, Secretary of State Tillerson is in Moscow. We maintain communications with the Russian military and with the diplomatic channels. It will not spiral out of control.

Could We Soon Be Witnessing the Fall of ISIL?

by Nomad

Last Friday, while most of the US media was myopically focused on the collapse of Donald "Genitalia-Grabbing" Trump's campaign, there was, in fact, other news happening. With all the current talk about fights for survival and battleground states, it's easy to forget that a very genuine war is being fought.

And what happens in the battle for the capital of the Islamic State may have a profound effect on what happens next month in the US elections.

ISIS' Armageddon in Dabiq

At the end of last week, the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters scored a major and perhaps a decisive victory against the terrorist organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, otherwise known as ISIL or Daesh: the liberation of the strongholds of Dabiq and Soran. 

Since 24 August of this year, the Turkish military and Syrian rebel groups have joined together against ISIL forces in northern Syria in a cross-border operation called Euphrates Shield. 

Friday marked the Day 53 of that offensive with the Turkish military hitting at least 80 ISIL targets and reportedly killing 80 terrorists. Turkish news sources add:

Turkish warplanes also destroyed two military quarters and three buildings. The army added that since the beginning of the operation in late August, 28 mines and 1,156 handmade explosives of Daish terrorists have been safely destroyed.

After driving out the jihadist fighters, the FSA took control of the northern Syrian towns of Dabiq and Soran. Over the weekend, FSA fighters were still trying to neutralize the bombs set up by ISIL militants in the area, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

Why is Dabiq so important? Well, Dabiq isn't just your average town in northern Syria.

"According to Islamic tradition, Dabiq will be the site of a final battle between Muslims and infidels heralding Doomsday."

To some devout Muslims, it's where Armageddon is to take place. For ISIL fighters, the loss of this symbolic town must have had extremely demoralizing implications, as they find themselves on the losing side in the battle of good and evil. 

Syria and ISIS: A Five Minute History of How We Got to This Point

by Nomad

Information is our best defense. Here's a fairly good video that answers the question: How on earth did the world let ISIS happen?

If you have been struggling to make sense of the terror group, ISIS, it's really not your fault. Firstly, it's a complicated situation, with a lot of actors on the stage. Also, the news media in the US has done a pretty lousy job in trying to explain things to those of us who may have a limited understanding of the region and the events that led up to where we are now.

Here's a very helpful video clip which goes a long way in explaining things. It's important that you take a moment to watch because information is your best defense against panic and paranoia. Will this answer all your questions? No, but it is enlightening. And with the information in this clip, you will probably know enough to spot a lie when you hear it.

Meaningless Mea Culpa: All about Tony Blair's Dishonest Apology for the Iraq War

by Nomad

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair finally made an apology. To many, it was a startling admission. In fact, it was typical Blair, saying so much and yet saying nothing. He told CNN:

“I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong. I also apologise for some of the mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.”

Sorry may be the hardest word but not for Tony Blair. That's what "whoops" sounds like in England I suppose. Still, we really need to look a little closer at Blair's barring of soul.  

Rebellion, Retrospect,and Regret: The 50th Anniversary of a Vietnam Peace March

by Nomad

Fifty years ago on this date, April 17, 1965, Washington saw one of the first and largest peace marches in its history. It was to become the first of many anti-war marches and demonstrations across the country.
Here's the story behind that history.

The planning for the anti-war march had been in the works since December 1964. Demonstrations against racial injustice had been remarkably successful in waking up the country and its leaders. Activists for peace were determined to inert similar pressures on Washington.
Up to that time, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a little known student activist organization. However, as the America's involvement in the Vietnam War steadily grew, students and others in that age group suddenly faced the reality of the draft.
This was real and it was a matter of life and death.
As one source explains:

Even before they shipped out, those who were drafted had begun to see the horrors of the war, most notably on television. The growing presence of television in nearly every American household thus exacerbated divisions over the conflict and helped fuel the antiwar movement. What Americans watched on television each night shaped their perceptions of the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the “living room war.” For some young Americans, called on to fight but unable to vote until the age of 21, the situation was unacceptable.

The anti-war message was easy enough for a child to understand. America had no reason to be in Southeast Asia and the reason were equally simple: the war hurts the Vietnamese people, the war hurts the American people and the SDS was concerned for both Vietnamese and American people. Anybody who agreed with those three points was invited to join in on the march on Washington.
The book, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage explains:

The official call, hoping to appeal to a broad opposition, maintained that the war was fundamentally a "civil war" as well as "losing," "self-defeating," "dangerous" "never declared by Congress" and "hideously immoral."

These objections, the establishment press immediately labeled "pro-Communist," unpatriotic and at the very best, misguided and naive.

Molly Ivins: War-Mongering is Not an American Tradition

 by Nomad

Desolation Row: Scenes from the Syrian Civil War

by Nomad

Scenes of destruction in Syria demonstrates what national suicide looks like.

Here are some images of the devastation in the three-year Syria Civil War. In addition to this appalling destruction and the deaths of over 191,000, it has sparked one of the biggest refugee crises since WWII.

The UN has recently released a report on the Syrian Civil War. The number of dead had to be revised from an earlier UN figure. Navi Pillay, the U.N.'s top human rights official told the press:

Tragically it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict."

Fastening The Shackles: How the Militarization of the Police was Prophesied a Century Ago

by Nomad

Progressive reformers and anti-imperialists from a century ago warned us about what happens when a nation uses its military to establish an empire. Today, with the militarization of the police force around the country we are watching their warnings playing out right before our eyes.

Some effects are more predictable than others. If you do that, this will happen. That is also true for nations and societies. Take the militarization of the American police force.

Over a hundred years ago, high-minded progressives were warning that the nation which relies on military for its empire-building would suffer some drastic unintended consequences. It would, without any doubt, lead to the kind of police force that was counter to anybody's concept of liberty. Those chickens, as they say, would inevitably come home to roost.

In 1900, for instance, William Jennings Bryan espoused that view. In a speech on American imperialism, he said that when a nation freely violates the human rights of other nations it would be no time at all when it turns its lawlessness on its own people. 

Bryan said:

If there is poison in the blood of the hand it will ultimately reach the heart.

Scouring the archives, I found this stunning quote by the long-forgotten American reformer and author, Ernest Howard Crosby. Though his career as a reformer was short- only the last ten years of his life- he earned a fine reputation for his anti-militarist and anti-imperialist writings. 

(You can find Crosby's complete biography here.)

When he died of pneumonia in 1907, there was hardly a mention of his passing. That fact prompted the feminist, anarchist, atheist Emma Goldman to write:

Oh, if he had been a puller of strings in the murky business of politics, an unscrupulous bare-faced parvenu, a successful thief of the toil and sweat of the poor, the columns of the major newspapers of the lying money press would have been unanimous in their sing splendid paeans to his virtues..

They said nothing: no one seemed to have noticed that a great intellect and noble heart had been still forever.

Apocalypse Avoided: Did Nazi Germany Plan to Nuke New York City?

by Nomad

Two years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a claim  by a top level US missile defense chief reveals how close we came to nuclear war.

While trawling the archives, I stumbled across an August 2 1947 newspaper article. According to the piece, a top level official for Air Force alleged that Germans had made plans to launch a nuclear attack from the other side of the Atlantic in order to destroy New York City.

That allegation was made by Brig. General William L.Richardson in a CBS science radio show. As  chief of the Guided Missiles Division in the Office of the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff for Operations at Army Air Force headquarters, Richardson is clearly a person who ought to know what he was talking about.  His career was, to say the least, illustrious. Here's a snippet of his biography prior to this statement:

Joining the War Department General staff in June 1941, he was assigned to the Planning Branch of the Operations and Training Division.

Going to England in August 1942, General Richardson was assigned to the Eighth Air Force staff where he organized and trained its airdrome defense units. The following February he went to North Africa to study air defense operations, and in March 1943 returned to Fort Bliss, Texas, to organize and train the 51st Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade. Four months later this brigade was assigned to the Fourth Air Force, which was defending the West Coast and training Air Force units for overseas theaters.

In December 1943, General Richardson organized and trained the Ninth Air Defense Command of the Ninth Air Force, and planned the air defense operations for the continental invasion. 

According to Richardson, the Germans had developed a two-stage rocket known as the "A" series, a progression of advanced rocketry. This series included the V-2 rockets which were used to devastate London and other cities in Great Britain. 

It is not hard to visualize what might have been in store for the Allies had the Germans been given sufficient time to complete developments.

The article is quite specific. Richardson explains that each of the "A" series was developed primarily for research. However, the A-4, was the only rocket design that actually became operational when it was re-named the V-2. The A-series, according to Richardson, was to culminate in the A-10, a weapon to bomb New York City from launch sites in Europe. 

The project was, in fact, codenamed Projekt Amerika with a launch date of 1946. (The rocket reportedly had one weakness, its guidance system was inaccurate at such long distances, requiring a pilot to make the one-way trip across the Atlantic.) 

Although that weapon was never actually constructed, all design studies and computation had been completed. So how close did they come to realizing the goal? 

Richardson claims that the A-10 "could have been built and served its purpose provided the German had been given another year of development and production."

  

Of course, some historians- with the advantage of historical perspective and later uncovered evidence- might not concur with Richardson's assessment.

Police Brutality: Is This The Price of Empire?

by Nomad

Recent cases of police overreaction have led to public outrage. But the question is: Is this the inevitable consequence of imperial war? If so, it shouldn't surprise anybody. One politician from an earlier age warned us that this would happen.

A few recent news stories about the  police caught my attention. Here's one from the Chicago area:

A suburban police officer has been charged with reckless conduct, in the death of a 95-year-old World War II veteran who was shocked with a stun gun and shot with beanbag rounds at a Park Forest nursing home last year.

Park Forest Police Officer Craig Taylor was charged with one count of reckless conduct in the death of John Wrana. at the Victory Centre nursing home on July 26, 2013.

The Cook County Medical Examiner’s office said Wrana died from internal bleeding from blunt force trauma caused by the bean bag rounds. Cook County prosecutors said Wrana was struck five times with beanbag rounds fired from a shotgun.

According to one source, police misconduct has cost the City of Chicago over $500 million in legal settlement, fees and other costs. People are quite rightly starting to ask questions about the training and oversight of the force. 

In 2013 alone, the city shelled out $84.6 million — the largest annual payout in the decade analyzed by the Better Government Association (BGA), and more than triple the $27.3 million the city had initially projected to spend last year.

That's a lot of taxpayers' money being needlessly shelled out. Moreover, events like this seem to be happening more and more. Or maybe they are just getting reported more.  

The Shocking Truth about Freedom Fries, the French Boycott and Fox News

by Nomad

An exclusive look back at the Conservative revenge against the French for not joining its coalition of the willing: the crusade of Freedom Fries and a boycott of French products, promoted by Fox News.

The French Warning

On February 14, 2003, Dominique de Villepin, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, addressed the UN to state his nation's opposition to the invasion of Iraq.

Ten days ago, the US Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, reported the alleged links between al-Qaeda and the regime in Baghdad. Given the present state of our research and intelligence, in liaison with our allies, nothing allows us to establish such links. On the other hand, we must assess the impact that disputed military action would have on this plan. Would not such intervention today be liable to exacerbate the divisions between societies, cultures and peoples, divisions that nurture terrorism?

His tone was that of an old friend giving advice to a headstrong impulsive youth:

This message comes to you today from an old country, France, from a continent like mine, Europe, that has known wars, occupation and barbarity. An old country that does not forget and knows everything it owes to the freedom-fighters who came from America and elsewhere. And yet has never ceased to stand upright in the face of history and before mankind.

The response from the member nations was unprecedented. His speech received an ovation from the normally circumspect crowd.
Villepin's remarks came on the heels of speeches by chief UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei who had both cautioned against taking a fatal misstep. Instead, they called for a "steady as she goes" policy with regards to the inspections.

The Bush administration was, to put it mildly, less than pleased. It was a critical time in the coalition forming and the prospects of forming any kind of international consensus were growing dim. This was not your daddy's coalition, critics might have told George Bush. 

Government officials were already well aware of the European opposition to any military action against Saddam Hussein. Opinion polls showed the population was against the war, with the opposition as high as 90% in Spain and Italy, and also widespread in Eastern Europe. Key allies like France and Germany both advocated a continuation of the inspections.

The Bush officials and the conservatives in Washington saw all this as nothing short of a European betrayal, led by the weak-willed French.

Obama’s Impeachment: Mr. Jones and the War Powers Act 2/2

by Nomad

In the previous post in this series, we examined in detail the resolution put forward by Republican Congressman Walter B. Jones of North Carolina charging President Obama with impeachable acts for his handling of the incidents in Libya last year. For the most part, we have seen them to be specious and without any real foundation. As I mention at the close of that post, there still seemed to be something I was overlooking. We'll begin with a closer look at the law.

The War Powers Act as Written

source:

To understand more about the War Powers Act, we need to take a small step back in time. 

In an attempt to put in practice the lessons learned from the Vietnam War, in 1973 Congress established the War Powers Resolution (later called the War Powers Act) which attempted to limit the president’s ability to wage undeclared wars; more precisely to limit the president’s ability to conduct a protracted military engagement without the authorization of Congress.

The act also attempted to clarify the ambiguity on the Constitution which considers the president the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces while at the same time, gives Congress the power to declare war and to provide the funding.