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War Party’s New Line: Vladimir Putin is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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English: Richard Nixon meets Leonid Brezhnev J...
Nixon meets Leonid Brezhnev June 19, 1973 during the Soviet Leader’s visit to the U.S.  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Remember the good old days? The US and the Soviet Union constantly staring each other down? Mutual Assured Destruction? Perpetual brushfire and proxy wars punctuated by deadly and disastrous conflicts like Korea and Vietnam?

They’re baaaaaaack …

America’s War Party (a faction that sprawls across Democratic and Republican affiliation lines) has been looking for something to replace the Cold War ever since it ended.

As the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact collapsed, the rationale for spending one of every four US government budget dollars on a military jobs program and corporate welfare for “defense” contractors evaporated. With peace breaking out, American politicians faced the daunting task of remaining relevant without an external boogeyman to scare the bejabbers out of us commoners.

Bush the Elder and Bill Clinton tried hard to keep the scare up with Iraq, but after Desert Storm nobody really bought Saddam Hussein as a major threat to world peace. It took 9/11 to really put the War Party back in charge. They took full advantage, joyfully dancing on 3,000 graves while they dragged the US into interminable and expensive fiascoes in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, all the while grooming a reluctant China as the next monster under the foreign policy bed.

All that was wearing thin, too, even after US president Barack Obama drew his “red line” in Syria and went to war without so much as a do-you-mind to Congress, seemingly unable to decide from day to day whether the enemy was the Islamic State or the Assad regime.

Enter Vladimir Putin. He’s perfectly suited to serve as the War Party’s new hobgoblin: Former KGB agent, head of an authoritarian regime, already on the US enemies list after frustrating US ambitions in Georgia and Ukraine … what’s not to like?

As I write this, Putin is escalating Russian involvement in the Syrian conflict, going from airstrikes against Islamic State targets to having the Russian navy fire cruise missiles in support of a regime ground offensive.

Frankly, Putin seems to be going gangbusters at  one of the two jobs Obama can’t seem to decide between (liquidating the Islamic State as a military force) while making it clear that the other job (“regime change” in Syria) is no longer on the table unless we want to go back to the days of two superpowers brandishing nukes at each other.

No more solitaire for the American empire. It’s back to high-stakes poker. Which, of course, is exactly what War Party politicians on both sides of the aisle want. Gambling with our money and lives is their bread and butter.

Can we build a real American peace movement to call the War Party’s bluff? Our lives may depend on it.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Gun Control”: The Answer Is NO

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English: MP-446 "Viking" 9mm Handgun
English: MP-446 “Viking” 9mm Handgun (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” US president Barack Obama said after last week’s shootings at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. “[O]nce again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

Hillary Clinton, front-runner for the Democratic party’s 2016 presidential nomination, chimed in as well: “How many innocent people in our country, from little children, to church members, to movie theater attendees, how many people do we need to see cut down before we act?”

The upshot, of course, is that Obama and Clinton want Congress to pass yet another round of victim disarmament (“gun control”) legislation. And they’re more than willing to do a little happy political dance on the graves of the latest nine victims to advance that agenda.

To steal a line from Obama himself, let me be perfectly clear: “Gun control” isn’t about guns, it’s about control.

How do we know this? Because the evidence is clear. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, “gun control” not only doesn’t work, but has the exact opposite effect.

There’s a strong and near-universal correlation between violent crime and “gun control” laws. American cities with the most draconian “gun control” laws routinely report the highest violent crime rates in the nation. Areas with fewer restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, conversely, report the lowest violent crime rates. Violent crime rates routinely drop rather than rise when and where restrictions on gun ownership and carry are eased.

Above and beyond the blatant falsehoods concerning intent — for Obama and Clinton certainly know the foregoing facts, which are a matter of public record — “gun control” is also illegal, immoral and impossible.

It’s illegal because neither the plain text nor the intended meaning of the Second Amendment are unclear. The “supreme law of the land” forbids both federal and state governments to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms in any way, shape, manner or form.

It’s immoral because each of us has an inalienable human right to defend our own lives. To forbid us the tools to do so is to openly abet all of our would-be murderers.

And it’s impossible because so many Americans already own so many guns (rough estimate: 250 million guns in the hands of 100 million Americans), and with new technologies like 3D printing have the ability to manufacture so many more at will, that we will buy, sell, trade and gift them among ourselves whether the politicians like it or not.

Obama and Clinton don’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether they like it or not. “Gun control” is a utopian fantasy if its goal is to reduce violence, a dystopian fantasy if its goal is, as is clearly the case with these two, to reduce us under an absolute despotism.

The answer to both fantasies is “no.” It’s going to stay “no.” Get used to it.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“Hysteria” or Not, the Iran Deal Will Happen

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“There’s a lot of hysteria about this deal [with Iran over nuclear research],” US Secretary of State John Kerry told Israeli TV’s Channel 10 on May 3. “People really need to look at the facts, look at the science of what is behind those facts.”

So let’s look at three key facts and one key question.

Fact #1: There is not now, nor has there in more than a decade, been so much as a crumb of evidence that the Iranian regime is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. If you don’t believe me, ask the US Central Intelligence Agency or Israel’s Mossad — they say so too.

Fact #2: It follows from Fact #1 that the purpose of negotiations is not to prevent Iran from doing something it isn’t doing.

Fact #3: It follows from Fact #1 and Fact #2 that there must, then, be some other reason for these negotiations and the proposed deal.

These three facts bring up the big question: Why do the politicians of P5+1 (the US, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom and Germany) and Iran want a deal so badly?

Working backward, Iran’ s politicians are willing to negotiate because they want US and UN sanctions lifted.

Politicos from Russia, China, France, the UK and Germany want a deal for perfectly obvious reasons: Their countries sell things that Iranians want to buy (including but not limited to arms and nuclear reactor technology) and Iranians sell things that people from those other countries want to buy (including but not limited to oil).

US politicians are, on the other hand, divided on the matter.

Congressional Republicans (and some Democrats) don’t want a deal because for the last 40 years or so “we stand with Israel” has always been a winning political bet. Even more so recently, since casino mogul Sheldon Adelson started dangling large sums of money over the heads of Republican presidential aspirants who evince a willingness to obey the commands, no matter how cockamamie, of Benjamin Netanyahu.

US president Barack Obama and his administration want a deal for two reasons.

One is that thawing relations with Iran would make great “legacy material” for a president whose real accomplishments over 1 1/2 terms in office seem rather sparse.

The other is, really, the nut of the matter. Obama and Kerry know that if the US bucks out of these negotiations on some pretext, at least four of the other five countries (the possible exception being the UK, and that’s only a possibility) will negotiate their own deals with Iran, leaving the US odd man out and bringing “The American Century” to an ignominious end.

What’s at stake here is America’s claimed post-WWII “leadership of the free world.”

As a libertarian, this looks to me like a win-win situation. If Obama gets his way, peace breaks out (sort of, anyway). If the hawks get theirs, they will have painted themselves (and their constant proposals for military American misadventures) into a corner from which escape seems unlikely.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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