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!’
NonnyO
R E M E M B E R:
“They hate us for our freedoms…”
… So Congress legislated them away!
THAT IS ABOUT TREASON
.
Obama’s Fellow War Criminals
McCain and Graham
Pelosi and Boehner, too
“Bipartisanship”
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
MM
So my brother sent me a link to FOXNews to establish his point of view; America has a history of unilateral intervention, and according to the author, mr. John Yoo, it’s ok because other presidents have done it…
Other nations have tortured… So that makes it legal to torture.
Other people have gotten away with murder… Does that make a sound argument to hold up in court?
Other people have gotten away with rape… Does THAT make future rapes legal?
Etc. etc. etc. …
A.U.M.F.
We have to kill them
Before someone else does first
Aid for Al Qaeda
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
Deaf as a Door Nail
The people want none
He offers them even more
Obama won’t hear
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
Trying to encapsulate the above: More war instead of less war because the American people don’t want any war.
The American people do not want a war with Syria. So how does President Obama respond? He promises us not a “limited” war that Mad Dog John McCain says he will oppose (because it doesn’t kill enough people), but instead an “expanded” one that Mad Dog John will support (because it will kill more).
I swear, you just can’t make up clueless insanity like this.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/03-3
On the other hand, Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque has a pretty good run-down of the tragic situation in Syria:
http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2345-gas-and-air-the-foundations-of-western-moral-authority-on-the-use-of-chemical-weapons.html
Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk
By William R. Polk.
James Fallows Sep 2 2013, 4:55 PM ET
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/your-labor-day-syria-reader-part-2-william-polk/279255/
Wag the dog
http://news.yahoo.com/holder-says-played-no-role-ap-phone-subpoena-215013058.html
Holder says he played no role in AP phone subpoena
MM,
“Now more than ever it became essential to protect Americans from thinking that that the best way to avoid wars was to stay out of them.” — Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010)
“The best way to avoid trouble is not to be there when it starts.” – Ōsensei Ueshiba Morihei, founder of Aikido
Some good advice is timeless and universal.
This is at Glenn’s twitter from the lawfare blog: ”The proposed AUMF focuses on Syrian WMD but is otherwise very broad. It authorizes the President to use any element of the U.S. Armed Forces and any method of force. It does not contain specific limits on targets – either in terms of the identity of the targets (e.g. the Syrian government, Syrian rebels, Hezbollah, Iran) or the geography of the targets. Its main limit comes on the purposes for which force can be used. Four points are worth making about these purposes. First, the proposed AUMF authorizes the President to use force “in connection with” the use of WMD in the Syrian civil war. (It does not limit the President’s use force to the territory of Syria, but rather says that the use of force must have a connection to the use of WMD in the Syrian conflict. Activities outside Syria can and certainly do have a connection to the use of WMD in the Syrian civil war.). Second, the use of force must be designed to “prevent or deter the use or proliferation” of WMDs “within, to or from Syria” or (broader yet) to “protect the United States and its allies and partners against the threat posed by such weapons.” Third, the proposed AUMF gives the President final interpretive authority to determine when these criteria are satisfied (“as he determines to be necessary and appropriate”). Fourth, the proposed AUMF contemplates no procedural restrictions on the President’s powers (such as a time limit).
“US secretary of state John Kerry on Sunday said the president has the “right” to strike Syria with or without congressional backing.
13m ago
Obama plans more than punitive strike
Barack Obama has confirmed that he plans to go beyond punitive strikes against the Assad regime in response to last month’s chemical weapons attack on eastern Damascus.
Speaking ahead of a meeting Congressional leaders, Obama said US military action would degrade Assad ability to use chemical weapons.
He insisted that US has a broader strategy to step up help to the Syrian opposition.
He told reporters:
What we are envisioning is something limited. It is something proportional. It will degrade Assad’s capabilities at the same time we have a broader strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition.”
Obama has confirmed that yet again, he will commit a war crime. Kerry affirms he may do so. Try them in absentia at the Hague. Full due process. That’s a message which needs sending.
Yep, Like Mike Murray said, Noam Chomsky gets the gravamen of the issue:
(HuffPo). International law as well as U.S. law has been ignored and violated for way too long now.
Max-1, September 2, 2013 at 5:33 pm – Absolutely correct, Max-1. A few months ago when I discovered the papers of one of my Revolutionary War ancestors (his honorable discharge was signed at Newburgh by “G. Washington” and said ancestor was in several important battles in six and a half years), I went back and watched “Liberty!” and “The Revolution.” The latter is still on YouTube but the former has been taken offline. Still, the fact that Congress is supposed to be the most important of the three branches of government was highlighted in one of the series.
What our modern politicians have done to our government in no way resembles what my ancestors fought for in our Founding Document. By the end of both series I was bawling, particularly in light of the ugliness of the last 13 years and the rights taken away that we do not yet have back.
BBC just reported that Obama plans a very wide war, no longer to deter CW but to degrade Assad’s military capability and to give aid to the opposition.
That is a war crime. It is a war of aggression. The concern about CW is just the early on cover story to go to war. Obama should have charges brought against him in the Hague.
All the talk about just sending a message about how much the US really cares is BS. This is madness and the international community needs to step up and stop it, NOW.
Indeed, the Kaiser should stay out of Algeria. The actors and sets change, but the play is the same.
Michael Murry the U.N. is a front for the corporation. until barry got into the ceo office and decided to just do it outright rather then hide behind lies and games. the corporations only continue to lie because amazingly there are those who still believe in them and are falling for the lies. even with all the evidence proven to the opposite they claim its the other side lying. i recently had to remove a long time friend out of my life. because she decided that all muslims need to die and immediately. and no matter how much i pointed out the truth she just kept coming back foaming at the mouth. to the point where she is badgering her sons to join the military and get in on killing muslims women,children, dogs, cats, pet spiders and all. so i know she is loving the latest lie from the corporation. to bad though i would love to see her face the day reality intrudes into her world of lies and she realizes that she is the enslaved, brainwashed, controlled idiot that she has been calling everyone else all these years
Oh, great. President Obama has somehow managed to get Senator Mad Dog John McCain to approve of the U.S.A. bombing some foreigners. Who would ever have imaged such a triumph of personal persuasion by that silver-tongued Kenyan Marxist Anti-Colonialist Barack Obama? As a point of history and fact, however:
Mad Dog John McCain Bombs Again
Get a life, John McCain: Now. Tonight.
We’re so sick of you and all your slogans trite
Face it: you lost back in ‘Nam
So you’ll never sell your scam
That if given one more chance you’ll do it right
You couldn’t fly a plane to save your ass
Now you want to peddle jokes of bombing crass
Seems your time spent in the clink
Never caused you much to think
Of the people down below whom you would gas
Not a pretty sight, your abject lack of grace
Seems some stitches you should once again replace
Then each time you kiss the bum
Of some vicious right-wing scum
You’ll get less shit on your sagging, lifted face
Don’t you know when you’re not wanted, John McCain?
Have you no conception of the grief and pain
That your hero George has wrought
Even though he never fought
In the war that you forgot for your own gain?
Why on earth do you suppose that we would choose
Such a reckless fool as you to light the fuse
Of another needless crime
That you’d start to pass the time
Just until you show another way to lose?
One can summarize your policy insane
As a take-off on the Third Reich’s brutal bane:
“Where our soldier plants his boot
On some foreign country’s loot
Why then, there forever after he’ll remain”
Not a dollar for a doctor, school, or job;
Yet more billions for some bombs that you can lob
At those hapless foreign souls
Whom you brutalize for polls
Claiming that your “straight talk” lies persuade the mob
Oh, I hope you get that nomination soon
Then your party can collapse into a swoon
From the stench that fills the air
Of that albatross you wear
Dead as your career: you clueless, crude cartoon!
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright 2007, 2008
I swear I’ve never forgiven the North Vietnamese for releasing Bomber John from their prisons only to inflict him back upon the rest of us Americans.
barrywilliams991,
I understand the conventional wisdom you reference when you say that President 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.” But consider what the late historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in The March of Folly about America’s stubborn refusal to liquidate a disastrous war policy in Southeast Asia forty years ago:
“[The alternative to continuing a failed war] was disallowed because of assumed damage to America’s reputation. That cutting losses and getting back to the proper business of the nation might have aided rather than harmed America’s reputation was not weighed in the balance of policy making.”
So everything hinges upon what one means by “act.” If President Obama acts wisely and forgoes waging a stupid war of aggression, then his reputation and America’s disposable power in the world will increase, not decrease. On the other hand, if President Obama acts stupidly and initiates a war of aggression against Syria (and who knows who else?) then his reputation abroad will further deteriorate and America’s power and influence will only deteriorate with it. In any case, the world will decide how to evaluate President Obama’s actions as to their statesmanship. Americans have an evaluation to make, as well; but that concerns America’s domestic politics and does not have to involve the rest of the world in destruction as a byproduct.
As history has shown time and again, Americans should never project their own domestic political attitudes — for the most part based on Fear Itself — onto the rest of the world. Nor should Americans assume that the world thinks as the American people do — to the extent that one can even say the American people collectively “think.”
U.S. Presidents always blubber their patented bullshit about losing credibility should they fail to act stupidly. “Our friends won’t respect us and our enemies won’t fear us if we don’t do something (bloody stupid),” they say. This presumes that our friends value our stupidity and our enemies fear it — precisely the opposite of how real friends and enemies think. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, for example, swore up and down that If they didn’t “act” — by which they meant “bomb” — then America would “lose” Vietnam and we Americans would die from all the dominoes falling on us. Pure insanity.
True, President Obama does find himself in a self-created domestic political conundrum, but as he does not have to run for election ever again, he can magnanimously take personal responsibility for misspeaking and — after a short interval of huffing and puffing by the fascists in both of America’s reactionary factions — the American people and the world will settle down, breathe a sigh of relief, and reevaluate upwards their opinion of President Obama as a far-sighted statesman.
Anyone can just “act,” or “do stuff.” But the best opportunity for avoiding a needless and pointless war occurs prior to starting it in the first place. As received wisdom has it: “Discretion is the greater part of valor.” But if President Obama personalizes his own foolish statements and thinks he can redeem them by implicating his party, Congress, and the American people in a war crime, then the opprobrium of history will justly attach to his cowardly egotism.
The world will applaud us for avoiding war and condemn us for indulging in it. If President Obama does not understand this, then he understands nothing worth knowing and the United States should rid itself of him.
Max-1,
I have clumsy thumbs and fingers. Therefore I do not own an iPhone. Plus I don’t want the NSA tracking my every move for President Peeping Tom. I suppose the spooks can still follow me by satellite — they’ve got so much money to squander — but I try not to make things easier for them if I can help it.
I don’t live in the United States anymore, so I have less of a problem than I used to dealing with homicidal maniacs. Escape if you possibly can.