While claiming that he just needs a “limited” war against Syria to back up his “red line” threat, President Barack Obama is actually seeking a far broader mandate from Congress. The authorization would allow Obama to take any action that he “determines to be necessary and appropriate in connection with the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in the conflict in Syria” as well as acting to “prevent or deter the use or proliferation” of the weapons or to “protect the United States and its allies and partners” from the weapons.”
Indeed, it reminds one of the authorization leading into Iraq with only the 9-11 angle replaced by a chemical weapons rationale. The Iraq Resolution or the Iraq War Resolution (formally the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002), stated “That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”
Now replace the terrorist attacks with the chemical attacks and you have our latest blank check demanded by a President. The language accomplishes two things. It allows members to claim that they merely wanted to protect the nation while making it unnecessary for the President to ask them again (and expose them to difficult votes). This is how politicians like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry voted to allow the Iraq War. While they later claimed that they had no idea and were misled, they ignored critics at the time questioning the evidence and objecting to the blank check language of the authorization. They also took no action later as the war killed thousands of U.S. personnel and spent hundreds of billions.
Nevertheless, democrats like Nancy Pelosi are demanding action and once again absolute (and blind) loyalty to Obama. The speech for Obama in the final vote has already been written (with a few modest edits):
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our [] dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
. . .
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. . . .
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for [Barry], [America], and Saint George!’
While I find what Assad has done and is doing absolutely reprehensible, there is no justification for the US to barge in even if that “barging” is just a “shot across the bow” (what the hell ever that amounts to).
The Speechmaker in Chief really is so egotistical that he thinks he merely need speak and he can govern the events in other countries. He has painted himself into a corner by flapping his mouth and now he needs to do something to try and save face before a world becoming less infatuated with him by the day.
Obama is in a no-win scenario of the worst kind here. If he doesn’t act he will further weaken himself on the world stage; if he does act, he may set up a repudiation of his ideas at the ballot box that will see Democrats lose more seats in the House and maybe enough seats in the Senate to lose control there too.
His punt to the Congress really won’t save him either. While it frees him from doing anything immediately, ultimately he will be forced to choose which he values most: Democrat’s in the bicameral houses or his false reputation as a Nobel Prize-winning peace maker and champion of the downtrodden. I predict he will act independently of the world at large (which evidently wants action but no involvement) and the wishes of the majority of the population of the US (which wants neither action nor involvement) and choose to save face.
I see only one action on his part that will put an end to the war in Syria: take out the central government including Assad. Trouble is, it will require a strike on Damascus that would likely kill more non-combatants than the last gas attack did and would not carry any certainty of success.
Further, such action would violate the silly prohibition on the assassination of the leaders of enemy countries; a prohibition put in place by those thinking that any group or government that would do such would respect such a “red line” (to co-opt a phrase from our inferior “leader”).
If the third-world puffins knew they were going to die FIRST, I’d bet there’d fewer of them causing trouble. Think about it. In the case of Iran, making it clear to the “clerics” that run the country that they may be taken out without notice for continuing their hate-filled agitation would likely lead to less trouble making by the “preachers”.
With apologies to the shade of Percy Bysshe Shelley and his immortal poem “Ozymandias,” I offer here a brief meditation on the current, continuing, and contemplated depredations of the Apartheid Zionist Entity (and its pariah patron, the U.S.A.) upon those captive Palestinian Arabs who had absolutely nothing to do with the German/Christian persecution of Jews in Europe before and during World War II.
Cozy, Scandalous
I met a refugee from Gaza Strip,
Who spoke to me with empty, staring eyes
Dumb words whose depth of pain I could not grip
With all the helping hands the world denies
While lapping up the lurid lies that slip
And roll so greasy off the practiced tongue
Of Zionists whose caged and wounded prey
Are told to flee and leave their dying young
To weep beside the corpses of their old
In darkened shattered former homes where they
Cannot refute the garbage we’ve been told
By glib Israeli liars trained to spread
A veil of darkness over crimes they’ve sold
As “Peaceful Co-Existence” — with the dead.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2009
Fat thumbs on an iPhone…
“All the punt isn’t say so.” S/b all the pundits say so.
MM
This is the same brother who, in 2006 when I was railing about Bush’s unconstitutional spying, said, “there’s no spying. And besides, what have you got to hide, anyway?”
Yep, Constitutionally illiterate.
Except I can’t “unfriend” my blood brother.
One thing I have noticed with the “ILLERTACY” is that, be it Limbaugh or Hannity or other political elite propagandist mouth pieces is, when confronted to explain THEIR FACTS, they balk and toss an, “I don’t know about that.
I quoted Article 1 sec 8… And my brother, when asking for his facts, blinked and spouted, “All the punt isn’t say so.” No law, screw Constitution, what War Powers Act… But the paid war hawks said so. I said, “They get paid to lie.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. But I have been following this for a week.” – my brother.
Grrrrrrrrr….
The Triumph of Treason
The A.U.M.F.
Our enemy Al Qaeda
Now we should help them?
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
Credibility Chasm
Saudi Jihadis
Apartheid Zionism
America’s wars
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
Here you go, President Obama. “Kill for Peace.” One from the Fugs:
Max-1,
I know the feeling. I just took a younger relative by marriage off my little (and getting smaller) Facebook “friends” list. He had started frothing at the mouth about all those gassed children in Syria and how he wanted to see the President of that country hung upside down and strangled with piano wire. Presumably, he thinks that killing a whole lot of other Syrian children with American bombs will somehow make dead Syrian children more emotionally cathartic for him..He didn’t even know the name of the man he wanted someone else to murder for him.
Oh well, one less relative. I have no patience any longer for such bloodthirsty ignorance.
If an American cop sprays tear gas and/or pepper spray into the eyes of an American citizen, should the Obama administration bomb the local police station to “send a message” that it “will not tolerate” such use of chemical weapons? Just asking …
The United States of Anarchy.
Might makes right.
So much for civilization.
I didn’t bring up the War Powers Act with my brother. He says he knows all he needs to know because the pundits on FOXNews said so.
I hate the Constitutionally illiterate!!!
Sorry to off load here however the problems we face today are manifest in the People who get paid to lie/brainwash the masses.
“That aggression without UN authorization would be a war crime, a very serious one, is quite clear, despite tortured efforts to invoke other crimes as precedents.”.Noam Chomsky
Precisely. As I’ve noted many times, those who argue in favor of official and corporate lawlessness as both legal “precedent” and the foundational principle of government can only do so by studiously refusing to notice the tortured absurdity of claiming that crime pays sometimes so it should pay all the time.
As a matter of fact and law, the U.S. government insisted upon the creation of the United Nations as an institution designed to prevent wars of aggression. By ratifying the U.N. Charter, the United States made that charter part of American law. Now the government of the United States wants to wage a war of aggression which will violate both international and U.S. law. But President Obama’s desire to commit a war crime finds itself frustrated by the very institution that America helped create to prevent war crimes. So should America withdraw from the United Nation because it works, or insist that the United Nations no longer work so that the United States can commit war crimes whenever it wishes?
I don’t see where the United States has any basis for arguing that crime pays whenever the United States wants it to pay, but not when any other country wants it to pay. To the extent that the U.N. works to prevent wars of aggression by any nation against another, then the United States ought to abide by its own and international law. Simple.
Or else criminality forms the basis of American law and government.
waits s/b “says”
“He (Obama) has the authority to bomb… Because Rush Limbaugh said so.” – my brother.
“Under what authority?” I asked.
“I’ll let Rush explain it.”
“How are they going to fund it?”
“Well, I pay my taxes.”
“Do you know what the Constitution waits about authority?”
“Alls I know is that the president is commander in chief.”
“So you even know what Article 1 section 8 says and who it pertains to and why article one comes BEFORE article 2?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
Figures…
Manufactured Mendacity and Managed Mystification
Gulf of Tonkin! WMD!
You lied, you lied, you lied to me!
So go on, lie some more
But I’ll never agree
Because through your lies
I can clearly see
Repeat as necessary until the Congress of the United States tells President Obama to go piss up a rope.
lottakatz,
Every four years the American people elect a personality to play the role of absolute monarch. The corporate oligarchy selects the personalities from which we may “choose.”
As Gandalf the Grey said to Saruman the White in The Fellowship of the Ring:
“Well, the choices are, it seems, to submit to Sauron, or to yourself. I will take neither. Have you others to offer?”
We need other choices. And we need to determine these choices for ourselves. We can no longer afford to simply accept pseudo-choices placed before us by those who will have their own way no matter which side of the same two-headed coin they flip for us.
MM,
Try again. You have nothing stuck in the filters.
“It’s simply a steady creep of assumed authority.” — lottakatz
Indeed.
“Washington made clear in his Farewell Address his rejection of ‘change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.'” — Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency
“Change by usurpation” has to cease forthwith. It has nearly destroyed our formerly free republic. “A riot is an ugly thing. And I think it is about time that we had one.”
Help. Lost a post with link to Christopher Dicky explaining Saudi — meaning U.S. — policy in Syria.
Al Qaeda, Enemy. Al Qaeda, friend.
I get so confused. But then Christopher Dickeycomes along to try and help me understand:
“On the Syrian battlefield, the lines between the [Muslim] Brotherhood and Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al Qaeda, often are blurred. The Saudis do not want to support either organization as such. But Riyadh is very concerned that the governments of Turkey and of Qatar, both of which have close ties to the Brotherhood, will dominate the Syrian scene if the Saudis themselves do not take the lead by supplying covert funding and arms to try to buy influence and control. It’s a tricky game, but of a kind that the Saudis have played for generations.”
So President Obama wants the United States to wage war on Syria as a way of assisting a repressive medieval monarchy in playing its tricky game of encouraging and supplying Al Qaeda — ostensibly an enemy of the United States (according to the A.U.M.F.) — just enough so that other Muslim countries (also “allies” of the U.S.) won’t assist Al Qaeda even more.
Our “ally” Saudi Arabia, it seems, assists our enemy Al Qaeda so that other allies won’t assist our enemy even more. This leads President Obama to conclude that the U.S. must assist our enemy — by becoming Al Qaeda’s air force and navy — even more than our allies assist our enemy, presumably so that the U.S. will not lose its own ability to buy influence and control of our enemy/friend.
There. That un-confuses things. The United States has become Saudi Arabia.