The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity
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Libya: A Perfect Storm of Interventionist Failure

Tuesday February 17, 2015

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Libya is the perfect storm example of the failure of US interventionist policy in the Middle East.

The Obama-Clinton Model

In 2011, Libya was to be the centerpiece of Middle East Intervention 2.0, the Obama-Clinton version.

Unlike the Bush model, that of Texas-sized land armies, multi-year campaigns and expensive reconstruction efforts, the Obama-Clinton version would use American air power above, special forces and CIA on the ground, and coordinate local “freedom fighters” to overthrow the evil dictator/terrorist/super-villain of the moment. “We Came, We Saw, He Died,” cackled then-Secretary of State Clinton as Libyan leader Moamar Quaddafi was sodomized by rebels on TV.

The idea was that the US would dip in, unleash hell, and dip out, leaving it to the local folks to create a new government from scratch. So how’d that strategy work out in Libya?
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Ron Paul Liberty Report: President's Day and Washington, D.C. Speech

Tuesday February 17, 2015

Ron Paul returns for another episode of his Liberty Report. This time he discusses his favorite president and why. Also he tells us about his recent speech at the International Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Dr. Paul discusses the great importance of non-interventionism even as some European guests at the conference disagreed on the need for US involvement in Ukraine. Dr. Paul also dispenses with the idea recently put out in the media that inflation is dead and buried..
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Putin Heads Off a US-Russia War

Monday February 16, 2015

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Has Russia’s Vladimir Putin pulled Barack Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire for a second time?

Will the shaky cease-fire in Ukraine that began this weekend hold up and end a conflict that was threatening a nuclear war between the United States and Russia?

The answer to the first question is yes. Remember back in 2013 when the Obama White House was threatening to attack Syria over allegations it was using poison gas?

As it turned out, the UN found it was the US-backed Syrian rebels who were likely to have used chemical weapons rather than the Damascus regime.

Noble Peace Prize Winner Obama and his lady strategists almost got the US into a war in Syria that could have led to direct clashes with Russia, which was backing the Damascus government.

Along came that unlikely man of peace, Russia’s Vlad Putin, who charted a diplomatic course out of the Syria mess for the bumbling White House which had talked itself into corner.
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How Many More Wars?

Monday February 16, 2015

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Last week President Obama sent Congress legislation to authorize him to use force against ISIS “and associated persons and forces” anywhere in the world for the next three years. This is a blank check for the president to start as many new wars as he wishes, and it appears Congress will go along with this dangerous and costly scheme.
 
Already the military budget for next year is equal to all but the very peak spending levels during the Vietnam war and the Reagan military build-up, according to the Project on Defense Alternatives. Does anyone want to guess how much will be added to military spending as a result of this new war authorization?
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Ron Paul: 'I Am Not Pro-Putin, I Am Not Pro-Russia, I Am Pro-Facts'

Sunday February 15, 2015

Ron Paul was a keynote speaker at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. this weekend, where he enjoyed his usual enthusiastic reception among America's youth, but found himself grilled by several east European visitors about his position on the civil war in Ukraine. "Why are you pro-Putin," asked the foreign participants in the conference, who seek a more robust US military "solution" against the secession movement in east Ukraine. Dr. Paul replied with his usual, consistent position on these foreign conflicts: "I Am Not Pro-Putin, I Am Not Pro-Russia, I Am Pro-Facts," he said. "The Ukraine coup was planned by NATO and EU... The best thing we can do for Ukraine is get the foreigners out," he explained.
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The Real Problem of 'Getting to Yes' With Iran

Saturday February 14, 2015

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Talking to reporters Monday, President Obama asked rhetorically, “[D]oes Iran have the political will and desire to get a deal done?” Iran “should be able to get to yes,” Obama said. “But we don’t know if that is going to happen. They have their hard-liners, they have their politics….”

The idea that Iranian agreement to US negotiating demands is being held back by “politics” is a familiar theme in US public pronouncements on these negotiations. The only reason Iran has not accepted the deal offered by the United States, according to the standard official view, is that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is a hardliner who is constraining the more reasonable Iranian negotiating team from making the necessary compromises.

But that is a self-serving understanding of the problem, and it reflects a much more profoundly distorted view of US - Iran relations on the nuclear issue. The premise of Obama’s remark was that US demands are purely rational and technical in nature, when nothing could be further from the truth. The US proposal on enrichment capacity is justified by the concept of “breakout”, which experts acknowledge is based on a completely implausible scenario. But Iran has now had a “breakout” capability – meaning the capability to enrich enough uranium at weapons grade level for a single bomb - for six years. So the US insistence on reducing its capability so that the breakout timeline is a few months longer clearly has nothing to do with denying a nuclear weapons capability.
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What You Should Know About the New Defense Secretary

Friday February 13, 2015

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When President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961 delivered his farewell address and warned about the Military-Industrial Complex, he surely was thinking of men like Ashton Carter, the new Secretary of Defense.

Carter appears to move easily between the higher echelons of the military and the business world.

From October 2011 to December 2013, he served as the Department of Defense’s Chief Operating Officer overseeing more than $600 billion per year. During the Bush administration, he was a member of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's International Security Advisory Board; co-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Policy Advisory Group; a consultant to the Defense Science Board; a member of the National Missile Defense White Team, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control.

When not working in a military capacity and doling out of billions, he has worked in the private sector for many of the firms that have benefited handsomely from the billions spent by the Defense Department.
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What Will 'Minsk II' Agreement be Worth?

Thursday February 12, 2015

RPI Director Daniel McAdams is interviewed on RT as negotiations dragged on between leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France, Germany over a ceasefire agreement in eastern Ukraine. McAdams pointed out that some kind of document would certainly come out of such a high level meeting, but was unsure what real value it would have for those fighting for independence in eastern Ukraine.
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The Seduction of Brian Williams: Embedded with the Military

Thursday February 12, 2015

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Brian Williams was seduced.

He is a liar of course, someone who did not tell the truth no matter the reason or excuse, a bad trait for a journalist. Williams lied about being RPG’ed in a helicopter over Iraq; he did not see any variant of what you can see in this photo. And that’s not a hard thing to “misremember.”

But if there is any reason to forgive Williams, it was that he was seduced by both his own conflation of his sad little life as a talking head and the “brave troops,” and, more clearly, by the process of embedding with the military. I know. I saw it.

Journalists into Liars

What is it about the military that turns many normally thoughtful journalists into liars? A reporter who would otherwise make it through the day sober spends a little time with some unit of the US military and promptly loses himself in ever more dramatic language about bravery and sacrifice, stolen in equal parts from Thucydides, Henry V, and Sergeant Rock comics.

I’m neither a soldier nor a journalist. I was a diplomat who spent 12 months as a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) leader, embedded with the military in Iraq, and let me tell you that nobody laughed harder at the turgid prose reporters used to describe their lives than the soldiers themselves. They knew they were trading hours of boredom for maybe minutes of craziness that only in retrospect seemed “exciting,” as opposed to scary, confusing, and chaotic. That said, the laziest private knew from growing up watching TV exactly what flavor to feed a visiting reporter.
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Yemen Today: Another 'Fall of Saigon' Moment for US

Wednesday February 11, 2015

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The US government was forced to flee yet another US facility overseas today, as the last of the US personnel at its embassy in Yemen were whisked out of country and the building was abandoned.

With the announcement last week that the rebel Houthi movement would form a government in Yemen, the country's second coup in just four years was finalized. Then-President Hadi had been put into place with US blessing after an “Arab Spring” coup deposed previously pro-US dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2011. But last month it was Hadi’s turn to be overthrown. He had been a loyal partner and supporter of the US drone program in his country, which had racked up untold numbers of “collateral damage” kills in addition to killing members of al-Qaeda’s Yemen franchise.

In September, President Obama heralded the US drone program in Yemen as the “model” for future US counter-terrorism operations.
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