Antiwar.com Blog

Letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Just Foreign Policy:

March 13th, 2019

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

We write to request your support for the bipartisan measure, H.R.1004 – Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act, introduced by Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island. We respectfully ask that any floor consideration of legislation addressing the crisis in Venezuela include H.R. 1004, a critical safeguard against unconstitutional U.S. military action. The newly elected Democratic majority of the House of Representatives must make explicit in its first step of developing and adopting legislation on Venezuela that the Congress will serve as an effective counterweight to the militaristic and anti-refugee policies of the Trump Administration.

As you know, US officials in charge of policy toward Venezuela, such as Elliott Abrams, have pursued a strategy of provocation and confrontation. President Trump has publicly declared that all options, including US military force, are on the table. Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe recounted that in 2017, President Trump argued that Venezuela is the “country we should be going to war with. They have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”

Continue reading “Support HR1004: The Prohibiting Unauthorized Military Action in Venezuela Act”

Secretary of State Pompeo has ordered all US diplomats to return from Venezuela. Their presence in country is “constraining” US foreign policy, he says. Is this the pre-cursor to a US attack? What about the power outages in Venezuela? A US cyber-attack? Are the neocons about to pull the trigger? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Former Trump campaign official Paul Manafort has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for acting as an unregistered agent for Ukraine. But looking at the media coverage of the case one would never know that “taking down” Manafort was not all about Russia collusion. Reporting… or propaganda? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:

Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.

Originally appeared on The American Conservative.

Andrew Sullivan comments on the U.S.-Israel relationship and the role of “pro-Israel” lobbying groups in our politics in a new essay. There are several things that I think Sullivan gets wrong, but perhaps the most significant and pervasive error in the piece is his repeated description of the relationship an “alliance.” He notes that the U.S. gets nothing in return for the extensive military and diplomatic support that it provides, he acknowledges that the US“suffers internationally” on account of its close relationship with Israel, and he marvels at how badly its government under Netanyahu has behaved towards the US Nonetheless, he writes, “I would defend the alliance despite this, because of my core belief in a Jewish state.” The trouble with all this is that there is no alliance and Israel is not our ally. Its government does not behave as an ally does, it has never fought alongside US forces in any of our foreign wars, and its interests are not aligned with ours as an ally’s should be. There is no formal treaty and no binding obligations that require our governments to do anything for the other.

There are few words in US foreign policy debates used more frequently and with less precision than ally and alliance. Our politicians and pundits use these terms to refer to almost every state with which the US has some kind of security relationship, and it always grossly exaggerates the nature and extent of the ties between our governments. The exaggeration in Israel’s case is greatest of all because it is routinely called our “most important ally” in the region, or even our “most cherished ally” in all the world. These are ideological assertions that are not grounded in any observable reality. Dozens of other states all over the world are better allies to the United States than the “most cherished ally” is, and they don’t preside over an illegal occupation that implicates the US in decades of abuses and crimes against the Palestinian people living under that occupation, but none of them enjoys the lockstep, uncritical backing that this one state does. The effect of this constant repetition is to make the U.S.-Israel relationship seem extremely important to US interests when it is not, and that serves to promote the “illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists.” It is this illusion as much as anything else that prevents a serious reassessment of the relationship.

Continue reading “Israel Is Not America’s Ally”