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Daniel McAdams

Iran, Syria and the Tragicomedy of U.S. Foreign Policy

As the Joint Plan of Action and Geneva II diplomatic initiatives, dealing with Iran and Syria, respectively, RPI academic advisor Hillary Mann Leverett speaks with Scott Horton for Pacifica Radio with words of caution to those who think the new Senate bill imposing more sanctions on Iran is dead and buried.
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How Dare They Invite Iran to The Syria Peace Conference!

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon had the temerity Monday to invite Iran to participate in the "Geneva II" conference on the ongoing crisis in Syria. Though one might believe Iran has a legitimate interest in a conflict right in its neighborhood, the US refused to allow Iran to participate unless its leadership agreed to the pre-condition that Assad must be driven from power. For the US, the result of the conference must be decided before the conference commences. It is Queen of Hearts diplomacy: sentence first, verdict afterward!

Mexico was invited to participate, but Iran, whose border with Syria is some 100 miles away, was forbidden by the US from attending.

So Monday's unexpected invitation from Ban Ki Moon to Iran sent shockwaves through Foggy Bottom.
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Kerry's Geneva II Delusions

Secretary of State John Kerry is in a bind. The US claims that the purpose of its two-plus year covert and overt support for rebels in Syria is to establish democracy in that country. But to get there the US has backed an artificially cemented together gaggle of expatriate oppositionists who are less supported in Syria than was US-backed Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress in Iraq. On the ground in Syria the "moderate" rebels the US has supported have turned out to be allied with -- and in some cases a PR front for -- Islamic fundamentalists of the al-Qaeda variety.

To get to "democracy" in Syria, the US has allied with the most undemocratic forces in a "we must destroy the village to save the village" strategy.
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Gates Too Kind About Biden?

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates thinks Vice President Biden is a decent guy but a bit loopy. In his new book, Duty, Gates writes on Biden that:
...he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.
The interventionist foreign policy establishment collectively gasped that one of their own could be criticized -- how could it possibly be wrong to want so badly to project American power worldwide? We are the indispensable nation, after all.
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Has Robert Gates Become One of Us?

Is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates becoming a non-interventionist? Has he taken the hard road to conversion that begins with all faith in US power projection and coercive influence and ends up with frenzied and joyous clicking through the pages of LRC and RPI?

That is probably being too optimistic -- though our doors are always open. Nevertheless there is much to fascinate in what we have seen from his new memoir -- and no, it's not the silly personality conflicts and "dissing" Obama with which the mainstream media is obsessed.
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Back to Iraq? You Bet!

As usual, the interventionists who run the US foreign policy establishment are drawing all the wrong conclusions from the news that the former "al-Qaeda in Iraq" (now "al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria") has set up shop in the notorious Fallujah. Sen. John McCain and his sidekick, Sen. Lindsey Graham, issued a joint statement over the weekend which unsurprisingly blamed the whole development on President Obama's decision to withdraw US forces form Iraq in 2011.
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Ron Paul and Stephen Kinzer: The History of Interventionism

RP Kinzer

Today on the Ron Paul Channel, Dr. Paul interviews Stephen Kinzer, author of the fascinating new book on the Dulles brothers and their interventionist rampage through the 1950s.

As Kinzer tells Dr. Paul in the interview, the Dulles brothers -- John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as CIA Director -- never paused for a moment to consider that the operations they were launching would have "huge terrible implications for American security, decades and even generations later."

From Iran to Iraq to Egypt to Syria to China to Africa to every hot spot we see in the news today, the Dulles brothers, with the blessing of President Eisenhower, inserted their covert and overt fingers. The brothers literally overflowed with their deep faith in American exceptionalism and the need to remake the world in their own image.
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The Real 'Blame America' Crowd

The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus loves to protect his sources in the Intelligence Community. In an awkward attempt to cast aspersions on the NSA leakers and the journalists who cover them, he posed “Questions for Snowden” earlier this year that were so off-base his employer was forced to publicly correct him. Pincus was outraged at the leaks rather than at the illegality they exposed, so he penned the piece questioning the motives of the leakers and suggesting that journalists who cover the leaks are part of a grand conspiracy.

Well Pincus is back, and again apparently doing the bidding of his sources in spookdom. In a column today titled “Good or not, change is coming to the NSA,” Pincus bemoans the anemic reforms suggested by the president’s hand-picked NSA review task force. This task force of course concluded that the mass collection program was completely legal. What else is to be expected when it contains people like former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley pointed out actually wants to expand the NSA’s data collection program?
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Saudis to Buy French Weapons For Lebanon Army

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced yesterday that it would extend $3 billion to the Lebanese army to purchase weapons from France. This is no garden variety foreign aid. This is in part Saudi Arabia's response to Washington's recent reconsideration of its Syria policy.

The Obama Administration is finally realizing that its allies in Syria are far worse than its enemies. Saudi Arabia, which some estimate has committed tens of billions of dollars to overthrow Assad in Syria, has been furious with the US ever since the Obama Administration failed to attack Syria over a chemical attack that has subsequently been shown to be a false flag provocation.


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Judge Napolitano Applauds, Explains NSA Ruling

As usual, Judge Andrew Napolitano, an RPI Advisory Board Member, explains clearly and eloquently the real importance of US District Court Judge Richard Leon's ruling that the NSA's massive data collection program aimed at Americans may be unconstitutional.
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