Author: Barbara Boland

From The American Conservative:

Thirty-five days after he was sworn into office as President of the United States, Joe Biden ordered airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria, in response to rocket attacks on U.S. targets in Iraq. Congress has not declared war against Syria or Iran.

However, Congress never revoked the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which authorized the war in Iraq, despite numerous attempts in multiple legislative sessions to do so.

“There’s no general authority for a president to launch airstrikes, and President Biden hasn’t claimed they were necessary to stop an imminent attack,” commented Michigan’s former Rep. Justin Amash. “Our Constitution demands he get approval from the representatives of the people.”

Some within the Biden administration used to know the constitutional limits of presidential power. Comments from Press Secretary Jen Psaki from April 2017 criticizing former President Trump for launching airstrikes against Syria haven’t aged very well.

Psaki asked what “legal authority for strikes” Trump had in Syria. “Assad is a brutal dictator,” she tweeted, “But Syria is a sovereign country.”

Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (Minn.) resurfaced Psaki’s tweet and asked, “Great question,” while Republican Congressman (Mich.) Peter Meijer added that the question “dovetails nicely with a renewed push for AUMF reform!”

Pentagon press secretary John Kirby spun the strike in eastern Syria as “proportionate” and “defensive,” saying they “were authorized in response to recent attacks against American and coalition personnel in Iraq, and to ongoing threats to those personnel.”

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From The American Conservative:

Arizona Republican Congressman Andy Biggs warned President Biden that any delay in keeping the timetable to withdraw in Afghanistan could lead to what he called a “slippery slope.”

“I respectfully urge you to continue to remove United States service members from Afghanistan in the coming weeks, with the goal of ensuring all our brave men and women in uniform return from the theater before May,” Biggs wrote in a letter to Biden.

The U.S. agreed to withdraw all US service men and women from Afghanistan in a deal with the Taliban by May 1 in return for peace talks and a cessation of violence. This would bring an end to America’s longest war, which began in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently refused to say whether the US would keep the May withdrawal deadline.

The Taliban is very likely prepared to resume its campaign of violence against the US and coalition targets if it perceives that coalition forces have stalled or reversed course on the agreed-upon withdraw, according to the Afghanistan Study Group co-chairs who testified to the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on National Security. They testified that US troop levels may have to double their troop presence or more if the US stays beyond May 1.

The calls to delay the withdrawal in order “to give the peace process sufficient time to produce an acceptable result… is an all-too-familiar slippery slope,” wrote Biggs.

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From The American Conservative:

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is touring the Middle East in a quest to have other Arab countries sign on to the US-brokered deal that Israel and the United Arab Emirates made earlier this month. He was met with rejection Wednesday in Bahrain, where the king told Pompeo that the Gulf state will not normalize ties with Israel and is committed to the creation of a Palestinian state.

The UAE is the third Arab country to agree to normalize relations with Israel after Egypt and Jordan. The deal was rejected by the Palestinians, who called it a “stab in the back” and has been panned in Israel after it was revealed that the US plans to sell the UAE weapons systems.

Like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Israel share a common powerful enemy, namely Iran. Members of the Trump administration had hoped that fear of their mutual enemy would force Arab nations to the table. But these nations, perhaps sensing blowback, have been wary of following the UAE’s lead.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa told Pompeo that Bahrain will exchange peace and the normalization of relations only if Israel completely withdraws from the Palestinian territories occupied after 1967, the official Bahrain News Agency reported.

“The king stressed the importance of intensifying efforts to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict according to the two-state solution … to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital,” the agency reported.

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From The American Conservative:

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice is rumored to be near the top of Joe Biden’s short list for vice presidential candidates. A new letter attacking Rice’s “poor judgment” is being widely circulated among delegates to the Democratic National Convention, calling Biden’s inner circle of foreign policy advisors a “horror show” with track records supporting “disastrous” U.S. military interventions. The letter hasalready received more than 275 signatures from delegates, almost all of whom had been pledged to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

The letter highlights Biden’s long-time chief aide on foreign affairs Antony Blinken as well as several other prominent former members of the Obama Administration who would likely hold cabinet-level appointments in a Biden administration, HuffPost reports. Blinken co-founded a company called WestExec Advisors, that aided a Pentagon effort to enhance drone warfare.

The presumptive Democratic nominee is relying on former Obama aides and Libya war cheerleaders Samantha Power and Jake Sullivan, as well as a bevy of other military-industrial complex beneficiaries, including former Defense Department official Michèle Flournoy, who worked several years for the Boston Consulting Group, while the firm accrued multi-million dollar contracts with the military, and Avril Haines, a former CIA deputy director reviled on the left for her role in making redactions to a report on President George W. Bush’s use of torture and her assistance in President Barack Obama’s extra judicial drone strikes.

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From The American Conservative:

Senate Republicans unveiled Monday their $1 trillion coronavirus stimulus package. Tucked inside is a $29.4 billion request for new defense spending, over $8 billion of which is for defense procurement and acquisition.

Critics point out that the bill does not delineate any new or urgent defense threat to justify the $30 billion request over and above the Pentagon’s ask.

Instead, the bill requests millions in new spending for things like missile defense money and F-35’s.

Here’s some of what Congress wants to spend money on:

$1,068,000,000 for additional Boeing P-8A Poseidon aircraft

$720,000,000 for additional Lockheed Martin C–130J aircraft

$686,000,000 for additional Lockheed Martin F–35A aircraft

$650,000,000 for wing replacements to the Boeing A–10

$375,000,000 for General Dynamics Stryker upgrades

$283,000,000 for additional Boeing AH–64 Apache Block IIIB helicopters

$243,270,000 and $76,325,000 for THAAD related items, the anti-ballistic missile defense system designed to shoot down short, medium, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles

$49,100,000 for Sonobuoys, a tactical sonar system for transmitting submarine activity

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