Why you should never listen to the foreign policy establishment on war

It is a predictable pattern. As the US gears up for war, any war, the foreign policy establishment reacts like soldiers to a bugle call, quickly lining up to support it, irrespective of where they supposedly stand on other political issues, and whether they are self-identified as liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

On the occasion of the death of Leslie Gelb, one of the many ‘liberal interventionists’ who cheered on the Iraq war, Philip Weiss reminds us of something that Gelb said when asked later to explain why he initially supported the invasion of Iraq, something that he said that he later regretted.

“My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”

That pretty much sums it up. ‘Credibility’ is not dependent on being right but on being supportive of wars. All these people in the establishment media know the unwritten rules of the game, that if you oppose, or just even seriously question, any of America’s wars, you are not considered ‘serious’ and will immediately become a pariah and lose your media and professional platforms. As the cliché goes, they know which side of their bread is buttered.

For these people, it is easier to quickly support the war and then when things turn sour, as they almost inevitably do, to express regret and say that ‘everyone’ agreed with them. In this way, blame is spread so thinly that no one gets expelled from the ranks of punditry and they can respond enthusiastically to the next bugle call. This is why we still see Andrew Sullivan, Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and the rest still around pontificating in the media, while people like Phil Donahue who opposed the Iraq war from the beginning were sent into the wilderness and remain there.

In-depth look at Tulsi Gabbard

Presidential candidate and Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is a bit of an enigma, hard to pin a label on. She has incurred the wrath and venom of the Democratic party establishment for reasons that are not totally clear to me but seem to involve the fact that she does not take an instinctively hostile attitude to the designated enemies of the political establishment, namely Russia, China, Syria, and Iran. Edward Isaac-Devore tried to understand the reasons for this antipathy. He says that the party establishment seems convinced that she has some ulterior motives for running for president even though they cannot articulate what it might be.
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Elizabeth Warren shuts down fossil fuel industry talking points

During the climate change town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo of CNN raised the issue of whether fighting climate change would require forcing people to give up their straws etc. Warren quickly shut down that line of questioning, saying that the fossil fuel industry wants to put the onus of cleaning up the environment on us and for us to be always talking about such things as violating our personal freedoms, in order to distract from their major role in destroying the environment.

Farcical US attempt at bribery

You may recall the Iranian oil tanker that was seized by the British in the Mediterranean and taken to Gibraltar because of suspicions that it was taking its cargo to Syria. It was released later over the protests of the US government that wanted to seize the ship. It has now been revealed that the US government tried to bribe the ship’s captain to take the ship somewhere where the US could seize it but he ignored them.

The US state department has confirmed it offered millions of dollars to the captain of an Iranian oil tanker which is at the centre of a diplomatic row.

Brian Hook, head of the department’s Iran Action Group, emailed the captain of the Adrian Darya 1 about sailing it somewhere the US could seize it.
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According to the Financial Times, Mr Hook sent an email to the Indian captain of the Adrian Darya 1, Akhilesh Kumar, before it imposed sanctions on the ship.

“I am writing with good news,” the email read. The Trump administration was willing to pay the captain several million dollars to take the ship somewhere it could be seized by US authorities.

The emails reportedly carried a state department phone number to make sure the captain – who took over the ship after it was impounded – did not think they were fake.

Mr Hook told the newspaper that the state department was “working very closely with the maritime community to disrupt and deter illicit oil exports”.

Mr Kumar ignored the emails. The US then imposed sanctions on him personally when they blacklisted the Adrian Darya 1.
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A brief history of slavery in the US

In The 1619 Project of the New York Times that I wrote about earlier, the opening piece that frames the rest of the magazine is by Nikole Hannah-Jones. She looks at the history of how slavery became embedded in the very legal fabric of the nation from the very beginning in August 1619 and she argues that it has been the struggle by slaves and their descendants to achieve basic decency that has resulted in so many of us having rights that the original slaves and their descendants were denied.
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Summary of the Democratic town hall on climate change

Yesterday, CNN hosted a seven-hour climate change marathon where 10 candidates in sequence faced about 40 minutes of questions from the moderators, scientists, and others about their climate change plans. Rolling Stone had a summary of the key points, saying that “We can’t pretend it was fun. But it was historic: This is almost certainly the longest stretch of programming a U.S. news network has ever dedicated to the topic of climate change. We watched all ten of the candidates make their case for their candidacies on the basis of their plans to keep the planet from overheating.”
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Boris Johnson’s terrible, horrible, no-good week continues

Boris Johnson has had a very bad first few days in parliament. In addition to having a 100% loss record in votes, today his own brother Jo Johnson quit the government and said he would not stand in the next election, and a cabinet minister Nick Hurd said the same. In addition, a Labour party MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi took Johnson to task for a 2018 newspaper column where he compared Muslim women covering their faces and bodies to letterboxes and bank-robbers. Watch


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Conan O’Brien goes off to buy Greenland

If there is an unofficial good will ambassador for the US, it may well be late night talk show host and comedian Conan O’Brien. On an occasional series on his show called Conan Without Borders that can be seen on Netflix, he has gone to places that have been demonized by the US over a long period (such as Cuba) as well as those that have been brutally exploited by the US and more recently insulted by Donald Trump (like Haiti and Mexico) and in his interactions with the people and his description of the country shows Americans how mistaken these views are and that we would be a lot better off having good relations with the people of those nations.
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The Brexit endgame begins

The UK parliament has passed the third reading of the bill to ban a no-deal Brexit by a margin of 327-299 and it now goes to the House of Lords for approval before it can be signed into law by the Queen. In response to this second major defeat in the two days he has been in parliament as prime minister, Boris Johnson has called for a new general election to be held on October 15. But under a law that was adopted during David Cameron’s period as prime minister, parliament needs to vote by a two-thirds majority to be dissolved before its scheduled five-year term ends, which means that Johnson needs opposition support for the move. The rules also say that at least 25 days must pass between dissolution and the election. But Johnson’s motion for dissolution only garnered 298 votes, well short of the 434 needed, thus handing him his third consecutive defeat.
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Jeremy Corbyn’s powerful speech in parliament

In yesterday’s debate, in which Boris Johnson lost the vote on the SO24 motion despite his threats to rebel Conservative MPs that they would not be the party’s candidates at the next election if they voted in favor of it, Jeremy Corbyn gave a powerful performance that exposed the reckless behavior of the government. As Corbyn said, “Boris Johnson’s government has no mandate, no morals and, as of today, no majority.”

Here are two short excerpts.


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