As the congressional debate on whether to authorize military action against Syria gets under way, we will hear endlessly from the war hawks who have predictably started salivating at the prospect of more killing by the US military about the need to uphold US ‘credibility’ and that in the highly unlikely event that Congress votes down the resolution and the administration abides by their decision, US credibility will be seriously damaged. As numerous commentators and commenters to this blog have pointed out, ‘credibility’ has now become narrowly identified with the willingness of the US to carry out a threat, whether or not that threat was wise or even reasonable. [Read more…]

Now that president Obama has decided to refer the Syria issue for Congressional action, while reserving the right to ignore them if they don’t agree to what he wants to do (this is how democracy now operates in the US), here is the text of the Authorization to Use Military Force resolution that president Obama is sending to Congress. [Read more…]

Recall that it was a mere ten years ago, when the French declined to sign on the Iraq invasion in 2003, that they were derisively referred to as ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’ and some members of Congress, in an example of incredible childishness, renamed the French fries in the Congressional cafeteria as ‘Freedom fries’. At that time, England was America’s best friend. [Read more…]

The debate over Syria in the US, such as it is, seems to center around whether chemical weapons were used in Ghouta and by whom. The Obama administration says it is convinced that they were used and that the Syrian government did it and that this justifies military action against the Syrian government, though what that action will be and what it seeks to achieve has not been clearly articulated. Furthermore, even if what they say is true, that does not make a US attack on that country legal. [Read more…]

In a move yesterday that few expected, president Obama announced that he is going to refer the Syria matter to the US Congress for deliberations before taking any action. It is a telling indicator of the state of the times that an action that should be normal was so unexpected. [Read more…]

Apart from all the other wars that president Obama has inherited, started, and is planning to start, his biggest battle may be with the English language. All politicians twist words, as George Orwell pointed out in a much-quoted passage: “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” [Read more…]

Much of the attention has been focused on the revelations contained in the documents released by Edward Snowden and rightly so. It is what has been revealed and what it says about the way the government works that is important, not the people involved. But at the same time, I want to step back a little and observe that when it comes to strategic thinking, Snowden has revealed himself to be an exceptionally able at it, even though he is up against the US government propaganda machine. [Read more…]

The Washington Post has an article that outlines the massive secret budget that the government has allocated for intelligence gathering. This was also part of the Snowden documents. [Read more…]

David Cameron called parliament back from vacation thinking that they would quickly approve a resolution giving him effectively a blank check to attack Syria. He argued that it was clear to him that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons and that the UN investigation was unnecessary, which is also the Obama administration position. When that ran into headwinds and he seemed likely to lose, he agreed to a watered down resolution that would revisit the issue later depending on what the UN inspectors reported. [Read more…]