The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : Search Results

Bombs Away Over Syria! Washington Has Gone Stark Raving Mad

Wednesday August 27, 2014

America’s spanker-in-chief is at it again—threatening to bomb Syria owing to the uncivilized actions of its inhabitants. And when it comes to Syria, Washington avers that there are punishable malefactors virtually everywhere within its borders.

Exactly one year ago Obama proposed to take Bashar Al Assad to the woodshed because he had allegedly unleashed a vicious chemical attack on his own citizens. That was all pretext, of course, because even the CIA refused to sign-off on the flimsy case for Assad’s culpability at the time—-a reluctance corroborated since then by the considerable evidence that hundreds of Syrian civilians were murdered during a false flag operation staged by the rebels with help from Turkey. The aim of the rebels, of course, was to activate American tomahawk missiles and bombers in behalf of “regime change”, which was also the stated goal of the Obama Administration.

Now the White House is threatening to bomb Syria again, but this time its “regime change” objective has been expanded to include both sides! In 12 short months what had been the allegedly heroic Sunni opposition to the “brutal rule” of the Assad/Alawite minority has transmuted into the “greatest terrorist threat ever”, according to the Secretary of Defense.
read on...

Iraq Policy: Washington’s Puzzle Palace Keeps Getting Curiouser

Tuesday August 12, 2014

Let’s count the ways. It goes without saying that Obama is now busily bombing American military equipment. Some of that equipment is pretty high tech gear and especially lethal — not the kind that jihadists ordinarily train with in their desert lairs or mountain redoubts.

But then again, ISIS got provisioned by none other than the Iraqi Army. The latter not only dropped its uniforms for civvies during the battle for Mosul, but also left behind armored Humvees, heavy artillery, night vision systems, state of the art firearms and much else of like and similar nature. Nor was this the first time that the Iraqi Army disarmed itself unilaterally. A while back they also surrendered their uniforms and guns when another American President — George W. Bush — bombed them.

That was called “shock and awe.” Afterwards, the remnants of the Iraqi army must have found it indeed shocking and awesome that Washington immediately pivoted — after hanging the country’s leader — and spent $25 billion re-equipping and training them in brand new uniforms and with far better weapons.

Fast-forward to 2014. The hasty hand-off of these American weapons to ISIS during its June blitzkrieg was easy enough to explain. On their way out of Baghdad, the Washington “nation builders” had equipped and trained a native army so that it could defend a “nation” which did not exist. What passed for “Iraq” was some very long, straight lines drawn on a map exactly 98 years ago by the British and French foreign offices as they carved up their winnings from the Ottoman Empire. What passed for governance within these so-called Sykes-Picot boundaries was a series of kings, generals and dictators — culminating in Saddam Hussein — who ruled from the barrel of whatever gun had been supplied by the highest bidder among the Great Powers.
read on...

Washington Opened The Gates Of Hell In Iraq: Now Come The Furies

Friday August 8, 2014

The late, great critic of the American Imperium, Chalmers Johnson, popularized the salient concept of “blowback”. That is, the notion that if you bomb, drone, invade, desecrate and slaughter—collaterally or otherwise— a people and their lands, they might find ways to return the favor.

But even Johnson could not have imagined the kind of blowback coming ferociously Washington’s way now. Namely, the mayhem being visited on much of Iraq by American tanks, armored personnel carriers, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft batteries and other advanced weaponry that has fallen into the hands of the very jihadist radicals that have been the ostensible target of Washington’s entire multi-trillion dollar “war on terrorism”.

No question about it. The ISIS terrorists are winning against the hapless Iraqi military and even the formidable Kurdish peshmerga fighters—using some of the most lethal arms that the US military-industrial complex could concoct.
read on...

On Dominoes, WMDs And Putin’s 'Aggression': Imperial Washington Is Intoxicated By Another Big Lie

Tuesday July 29, 2014

Imperial Washington is truly running amuck in its insensible confrontation with Vladimir Putin. The round of new sanctions is a counter-productive joke. Apparently, more of Vlad’s posse will be put on double probation, thereby reducing demand for Harry Macklowe’s swell new $60 million apartment units on Park Avenue. Likewise, American exporters of high tech oilfield equipment will be shot in the foot with an embargo; and debt-saturated Russian state companies will be denied the opportunity to bury themselves even deeper in dollar debt by borrowing on the New York bond market. Some real wet noodles, these!

But it is the larger narrative that is so blatantly offensive—that is, the notion that a sovereign state is being wantonly violated by an aggressive neighbor arming “terrorists” inside its borders. Obama’s deputy national security advisor, Tony Blanken, stated that specious meme in stark form yesterday:

“Russia bears responsibility for everything that’s going on in Eastern Ukraine” and “has the ability to actually de-escalate this crisis,” Blinken said.

Puleese! The Kiev government is a dysfunctional, bankrupt usurper that is deploying western taxpayer money to wage a vicious war on several million Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas—the traditional center of greater Russia’s coal, steel and industrial infrastructure.
read on...

Hell No! Taxpayers Shouldn’t Go To Syria

Saturday June 28, 2014

Barack Obama has rekindled 1968. Back then the folly of Vietnam had become so self-evident and omnipresent that the most power-obsessed President in US history was driven from office and his bloody escalation of the war on Vietnam was stopped in its tracks by the overwhelming sentiment of the American people.

Obama has now created another such defining moment in his request for $500 million to arm the Syrian “opposition”. Does this clueless man not know we have already done that? Has this social media savvy gasbag not viewed the ISIS YouTube channels where he could see tens of millions worth of American war equipment on parade under the black flag of these terrorists?

Obama Proposes $500 Million to Aid Syrian Rebels

Program to Train and Equip Moderate Opposition Would Expand U.S. Role in Civil War

Has the President not noticed that these “enemies” were trained as “friends” in order to fight across the now non-existent border in Syria? Some of them apparently even got their diplomas at the CIA training camp in Jordan. Did they not became battle-hardened trying to overthrow the Alawite government of Bashir Assad — that is, a second cousin to the Shiite sect that is allegedly on our side in Iraq’s sectarian carnage?
read on...

Obama: Stop The Sanctimonious Kidstuff; Let Europe Fund Its Own Security

Tuesday June 3, 2014

The EU has a GDP of $17 trillion—-a figure approximately 9X that of Russia. If there is any one over there who actually believes that Putin is about to mobilize his troops on a reverse of Hitler’s march through the Ukraine and back into central Europe, let them make their case and take up a collection from the purportedly threatened states.

Quite obviously no one is making that case in Berlin, Brussels or any other significant European capital—for the simple reason that such a scenario is purely a figment of the Washington War Party’s imagination. So what we actually have is an American president on a photo op tour of Europe being importuned by local dignitaries for more Washington largesse. And the result will be more kidstuff maneuvers that are laughable in there own terms, but still another irritant in America’s utterly unnecessary confrontation with Russia.

In that regard, we have already witnessed the President of Poland, Bronislaw Komorowski, making this hideous remark as he stood with Obama alongside F-16s employed in joint training exercises between the two nations:

Mr. Komorowski said the U.S. and Poland are a “brotherhood in arms.”

Well, not at all. We are actually two nations at peace, and Poland is a fortunate nation that has been born again solely because of the sacrifices American taxpayers made for 50 years to first defeat its German occupiers and then to outlast its Soviet overlords.
read on...

The Chicoms Are Coming! Reflections On The Folly Of The War On Vietnam And Its Progeny

Sunday May 18, 2014

Back in the spring of 1968 I also got an invitation to evacuate. It was from Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, suggesting I evacuate my cushy life as a student in East Lansing, Michigan to join his crusade to stop the “chicoms” from annexing Vietnam.

According to McNamara, Chairman Mao and Uncle Ho were joined at the hip in a crusade to turn all of Southeast Asia “red”. Unless forcefully deterred with American guns and blood, the chicoms would come pouring across the Vietnamese border any day; it would be the Yalu river crossing all over again.

As it turns out, right about then 40 million people were starving in the villages of China due to the massive crop failures brought on by Mao’s earlier “Great Leap Forward”. During that ingenuous project, hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants had been instructed to become overnight industrialists by building tiny steel furnaces in their backyards. Unfortunately, the peasants had gotten so enthused by the Great Helmsman’s vision of turning the Yellow River Valley into the Ruhr overnight that they had melted their hoes and rakes for scrap!
read on...

No Nation Left Un-Invaded: Sen. McCain Would Put US Military Into Nigeria In 'A New York Minute'

Wednesday May 14, 2014

Nigeria has been a failed state of corruption, outlawry, civil war and unspeakable violence and cruelty for decades. Literally millions have been starved, maimed and butchered owing to ethnic, tribal and religious clashes. And billions more have been stolen from the nation’s long-suffering people by government officials, the military and oppositionists alike in what is surely the most corrupt nation on earth.

In this context, the latest episode involving the kidnapped school girls is just another tragic eruption of the anarchy which is Nigeria. But it is also none of our business, period. Parachuting American forces into this chaos would be an act of sheer madness. Yet that’s exactly what Senator McCain is loudly proclaiming he would do if he were President.

Below are his exact words, and they bristle with imperial arrogance. To be charitable, this nonsense might be dismissed as the ravings of an old man who has gone off his meds.

But I think not. Washington has become an Imperial City and looks upon the rest of the world as provinces to be managed and pacified by American dollars, diplomacy, legionnaires and drones. Senator McCain is simply crude enough to express this deplorable beltway ethos baldly.
read on...

Bravo, Rep. Walter Jones! Primary Win Sends Neocons Packing

Wednesday May 7, 2014

Rep. Walter Jones, 20-year Republican of North Carolina, is one of America’s most courageous and honest politicians—putting him in a company that is virtually non-existent inside the beltway.

He originally was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, but then he learned the facts, discovered the blatant lies the Cheney/Neocon cabal had used to sell it, and did the unthinkable. He broke with the Bush White House and became a relentless, informed, passionate and persuasive critic of not only the Iraq fiasco — but also the entire interventionist foreign policy of the War Party.

Not surprisingly, the latter went after him hammer and tong in his recent primary — a challenge almost unheard of for 20-year incumbent. The whole Bush White House crowd that destroyed the GOP commitment to fiscal discipline, bailed-out Wall Street and GM and launched disastrous wars of invasion and occupation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and countless lesser arenas joined the attack. The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party’s highly paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.
read on...

The Devil’s Beltway Workshop: Why The Warfare State Must Be Dismantled

Monday May 5, 2014

Between the east and west of the Ukraine lies a historical highway, paved in unspeakable barbarism and blood. To the west it traverses the blood soaked black earth of the Ukrainian breadbasket where Stalin’s most heinous crime was committed–the savage liquidation of several million independent and enterprising peasants known as Kulaks. To the east it tracks the scorched earth route of Hitler’s Wehrmacht on its way to Stalingrad and the most barbaric military assault ever launched on the civilian population of a major city.

And along this path of misery and carnage there are even more remainders of historic atrocities and resultant motives of revenge. The west of the Ukraine gave rise to the pro-Nazi fifth column of Stepan Bandera and his legions of collaborators. The latter joined Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Stalingrad and murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles while at the main business of killing the hated Russians.

But in the east the Russian population has its own reasons to deeply fear the Ukrainian nationalist coup in Kiev. And its not just because the latter immediately tried to abolish Russian as an official language and not even because the easterners have memories of the Banderite/Ukrainian complicity in Hitler’s assault on the motherland. Nor is it even because of outrageous provocations like that of the the braided lady, Ms. Tymoshenko, who emerged from prison at the time of the coup averring that 8 million Russian speaking citizens of her country “should be nuked”.
read on...

Search Results

David Stockman