“… revitalize the concept of the separation of powers. Here is the second principle with the potential to reduce the hazards by the new American militarism.”
“In all but a very few cases, the impetus for expanding America’s security perimeter has come from the executive branch.” “The result, especially in evidence since the end of World War II, has been to eviscerate Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, which in the plainest language confers on Congress the power “To declare War”.”
Andrew J. Bacevich is a Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam Veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel and is a member of the Council on foreign relations. He is the author of several books, including ‘The Limits of Power, the End of American Exceptionalism’.
He is not a liberal.
He is not a Democrat.
Having read Andrew J. Bacevich’s ‘The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War’, I would like to share his proposed means, which ‘rests on ten fundamental principles’ by which to abate ‘the present day militaristic tendencies’.
“First, heed the intentions of the Founders, thereby restoring the basic precepts that animated the creation of the United States and are specified in the Constitution that the Framers drafted in 1787 and presented for consideration to the several states. Although politicians make a pretense of revering that document, when it comes to military policy they have long since fallen into t e habit of treating it like a dead letter. This is unfortunate. Drafted by men who appreciated the need for military power while also maintaining a healthy respect for the dangers that it posed, the Constitution in our own day remains an essential point of reference.”
Sen. Lieberman: “If We Don’t Act Preemptively, Yemen Will Be Tomorrow’s War”
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, independent Senator Joseph Lieberman suggested the United States should preemptively attack Yemen in light of the failed airline bombing.
Sen. Lieberman: “I was in Yemen in August. And we have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence. We’re working well with the government of President Saleh there. I leave you with this thought that somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Iraq was yesterday’s war. Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.”
So, according to the Senator, unless we go to war - that is, engage in unlawful state aggression - we’ll have to go to war.
Well, Senator, talking shite seems to have worked for your efforts to protect the massive insurance companies you serve from adverse affects of health care reform. Perhaps your military/industrial masters will reward you for similarly boosting their bottom line at the expense of the American and Yemeni people.
Leave it to Monty Python’s Terry Gilliam - Python’s ‘Yank-in-the-wood-pile’, director of ‘Brazil’, ‘Twelve Monkeys’ and other cinematic adventures - to pitch a zinger to Keith Olbermann. To wit, “Why didn’t Colin Powell’s interview about the ‘Terror Industrial Complex’ become a bigger story?”
Indeed; Why? The answer, of course, is revealed by asking another question; why aren’t US forces and contractors out of Iraq and Afghanistan?
That scene from ‘Saving Private Ryan’ comes to mind where the Captain, with his dying breath, tells Ryan ‘Earn this.’
With two hot wars and others simmering, that’s precisely what Obama has to do now - earn this honor or disgrace himself, the people who elected him and the Nobel committee.
Listening to Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs and 60 Minutes Correspondent on the Colbert Report sell not only her 3-part Special Report on CBS but throwing an impassioned (and obviously well-rehearsed) pitch for the escalation of the war in Afghanistan to the US people.
I am physically revolted by the murderous audacity of her appeal to continued slaughter and ruin in that devastated country.
Ms Logan, a South African, tells us that what “appears to be a wavering of US resolve, smells like victory to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.”
I must less-than-elegantly observe that her ‘wavering resolve’ line smells a lot like a blend of the verminous horse-shit that reporters and government spokes-people were spoon-feeding us during the war in South-east Asia and the pre-digested bull-twaddle of a time-share salesman trying desperately to close the deal.
This blatant propagandizing of a war increasingly unpopular with the American people (not to mention the Afghani people) by a member of what sadly passes as the Fourth Estate in the US can only be reviled and vilified by civilized, intelligent witnesses.
This despicable display of war-mongering by one who shows no sign of professional journalistic objectivity must be seen as nadir point but for the fact that the New York Times is also riding the pale horse of war.
In a review of Robert Greenwald’s documentary, ‘Rethink Afghanistan’ which opened in New York City last week, Andy Webster complained about there being too many dead and maimed in the film. He further kvetched in his thinly veiled editorial that what Mr Greenwald presents in his documentary “again and again, are terrifying images of children”. Then in a turn that would be the envy of The Exorcist special FX team, he snidely quips “Military engagements, it seems, are messy and claim innocent lives.”
One must stand dumb-founded at the callous, calculating disregard for human suffering so brazenly, disdainfully displayed by Mr Webster and his editors.
Now consider this: it is a shop-worn axiom – an article of faith - that the New York Times and CBS News are purveyors of ‘the liberal media bias’. What an evil friggin’ joke. Yes, bleeding hearts one and all. Bleeding from self-inflicted wounds to their professional integrity, whining and blustering as the circumstance dictates while thousands upon thousands of children are murdered by Minuteman missiles and Predator drones.
Thanks, Lara, Andy, for your fair, even-handed objective reporting of world events. Your checks from the Pentagon will be deposited directly to your accounts as agreed.
I’ve been working on an essay for several months – ruminating mostly; rolling things round in my head looking for supporting or counter-arguments. The gist of the piece is that the United States is becoming or - more nefariously - is being turned into a Third World economy.
From personal observation, I’ve seen my friends and family, by necessity, change from manufacturing jobs or occupations as skilled workers to service jobs, losing pay, perks, union representation, and a sense that the situation will improve with time. Associating those numerous anecdotes, with the dismantling of social services and the disintegration of infrastructure, I wondered what other element would further the affect the USA’s slide from First World to Third World economy in this depressing scenario.
(n.b. Scenario construction like this is one, is a technique I employ to control my natural ebullience.)
Since the time last March when this dismal thought first occurred to me, the US economy has imploded; the huge no-strings-attached bail-out funds of TARP have mostly been distributed and dispersed to some of the largest corporations on the planet. Unemployment has risen unofficially to nearly 20% and officially in double digits. Home foreclosures and bankruptcies are pandemic. The missing element that would precipitate the change in the US from a First to a Third World economy became evident; massive debt to foreign creditors. Being heavily indebted to foreign entities is an economic characteristic of all of the poverty-stricken nations of the Third World.
The unknown trillions of dollars borrowed from the Fed, the PRC, France (and who knows where else) hemorrhaging from the U.S. Treasury to pay war profiteers (e.g. Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.), Defense Contractors, corporate subsidies, and the out-and-out wholesale bail-out of the most morally destitute, most conniving, self-serving, rapaciously avaricious swindlers, scammers, hornswogglers, flim-flammers and thoroughly destructive bunch of crooks seen in nearly a century would, I judge, qualify as over-bearing burden of debt. A perfect shit storm of financial hanky-panky, two never-ending wars and the continuing slavish dependence on petroleum just might be the fulcrum by which the middle class of the USA begin to empathize with the citizens of Nicaragua and Colombia.
This postulation was an apparent orphan, though, as far as I could tell – a depressing day-dream but nothing more. I found little real evidence supporting the idea and that offered some relief.
Until I saw a segment of “Real Time with Bill Maher” from Friday, September 25th, that is. In that segment, Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate in Economics said, “On bad mornings I wake up and think that we are turning into a Latin American country,” Krugman said. “If America was officially a Third World country, the international monetary fund would come in and say, “You’ve got to break the power of your oligarchs. Those banking interests; they have too much power. You’ve got to end all of this crony capitalism… We’re not in good shape.”
He went on the say that while the American dream is not totally dead, it is “dying pretty fast,” particularly when it comes to social mobility.
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I only wish that the surprise was a more pleasant one.
Right this way, Mr and Mrs America. Your hovel is waiting.