Independent Institute: Center on Peace and Liberty (Independent Ins)

Three seemingly unrelated recent events highlight the imperial nature of the Bush administration's foreign policy: U.S. F-16 sales to Pakistan, the creation of an office in the State Department to plan for future U.S military interventions in developing nations and the indefinite detention in Guantanamo prison of a German man held on the basis of secret evidence that even U.S. intelligence disputes... [more]

In a characteristically unwitting way, President George W. Bush himself stumbled upon a resolution of the seeming paradox when he told Time magazine’s interviewer last summer that the war had proved to be a “catastrophic success.” By that oxymoron, he sought to convey the idea that in the invasion the U.S. military forces had overcome the enemy unexpectedly quickly, “being so successful, so fast, that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in, escaped and lived to fight another day.” [more]

The Missile Defense Agency has spent $80 billion since 1985 and has very little to show for it. Over the next five years, the U.S. government will dump another $50 billion into missile defense programs. Yet rogue states probably will be able to come up with cheap countermeasures to foil costly defensive systems. [more]

The only way to find and eliminate Iranian nuclear weapons using military action would be to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran. If the Bush administration even began to contemplate this course of action, however, the U.S. military would probably be near open revolt. Invading Iran would likely make the bloody quagmire in Iraq look like a picnic. [more]

December 6, 2004, marked the centennial of one of the landmark statements in U.S. foreign policy: Theodore Roosevelt’s so-called “Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.” It was here, and not in the post-9/11 speeches of George W. Bush, that we first heard the rationalization for a pre-emptive imperialism coming from the White House. [more]

The Federal Court (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe is obliged to accept the case filed by the American-based Center for Consitutional Rights (CCR) [against Rumsfeld], a legal group renowned for their spirited defense of the Guantanamo-detainees and representation of soldiers victimized by "stop-loss" policies, because of a law passed in 2002 in Germany stipluating that War Crimes can be tried in Germany regardless of whether the case involves a German citizen or resident. Whether Rumsfeld will be able to weather this and other storms may have less to do with the letter of law, however, than with the strength of his persona. [more]

The planned election will change the political composition of Iraq to suit the interests of the occupation authorities. The change will also lead to ethnic, sectarian and religious divisions that the Iraqi state and people had succeeded to avoid. [more]

Unfortunately, Iraq is then likely to descend into chaos and civil war. So despite Bush administration boasting of killing 1,200 guerrillas in Falluja, the future of Iraq looks grim indeed. [more]

Any U.S.-brokered Israeli settlement reached with Abbas and Qurei would lack widespread legitimacy among Palestinians and would thus be only a paper agreement. [more]

Many intelligence personnel have leaked embarrassing—and accurate—information to the media about the Bush administration’s missteps in Iraq. Now it’s payback time from the White House. [more]

What is less understood is that all of the great empires in history have been characterized by a decline of reason and an increase in super-naturalist faith, combined with a belief in the empire with the emperor holding God’s “mandate” on earth. [more]

But, as it turns out, wanting a US empire and benefiting from one are markedly different things. This is something not well appreciated in many of the recent books analyzing the American Empire... [more]

Probably even worse than the lives lost in vain in the Iraq War is the modern imperial presidency’s ability, using the excessive media coverage accorded to it, to sell the public on an unnecessarily broad “war on terror,” including the aggressive invasion of a sovereign country. [more]

Many Americans, like the citizens of dominant nations of the past, believe that their way of life is superior and should be shared with other peoples—often at gunpoint. [more]

With all of the attention on Iraq and Afghanistan, with elections much in the news in those nations as well as in the United States, it is easy to lose sight of the U.S.’s long-term policies as recently projected by the Bush Administration and American military planners. [more]

Over the years, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government has spent a whopping $130 billion on missile defense but still has no genuinely effective system to fulfill Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars fantasy. The desire on the right to deify Reagan and preserve his legacy has made support for missile defense a litmus test issue—even though it has little to do with national security. [more]

So even oil, the most defensible of the potential unstated reasons for invading Iraq, doesn’t turn out to be very defensible at all. Could 1,000 Americans have died in vain? [more]

In sum, although savage attacks against civilians should never be condoned, the harsh reality is that Russia, Israel, and the United States must expect further attempts by Islamist terrorists to attack their soil until the underlying cause of the terrorism is removed. [more]

So there is plenty of room for suspecting that the system has been politicized, especially in the wake of Attorney General Ashcroft’s recent manipulation of terrorist threats for political gain and John Kerry’s unexpected challenge to President Bush’s record on security issues at the Democratic National Convention. [more]

Unlike 1800, the people are given no meaningful choice. Senator John Kerry, the President’s only real challenger, voted in favor of the PATRIOT Act and authored some of its provisions. According to the Kerry campaign, the problem is not with the PATRIOT Act itself, but with those enforcing it... [more]

In his statement upon release of the commission’s report, Thomas Kean, the commission’s chairman, incorrectly opined that the terrorists hate America and its policies. Even al Qaeda does not hate America per se... [more]

The Democrats on the committee foolishly bought into an agreement that will likely postpone a committee report on that more important issue until after the election. Yet voters would profit from information about whether the Bush administration pressured the intelligence community or exaggerated, twisted the truth or even lied about the Iraqi threat in its rush to justify war. [more]

Although the U.S. military believes that the “center of gravity” in the continuing Iraq War is the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people, the Iraqi insurgents believe, as did the North Vietnamese almost 40 years ago, that the center of gravity lies with the hearts and minds of the American people. [more]

Two parallels between our Revolution and today’s insurgency in Iraq come to mind. One, based in myth, would lead its advocates to folly, while the other deserves serious consideration. [more]

Paul Bremer, the outgoing proconsul, patted himself and his Bush administration employers on the back by bragging that there was “no question the liberation of Iraq was a great and noble thing.” Unfortunately, Iraqis are not feeling so liberated and have not been fooled by the faux handover of governance. [more]

All of the Bush administration’s quibbling about the definition of the word “relationship” is as ridiculous as President Clinton’s hair-splitting over the definition of the word “is” during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. [more]

The Bush administration is trying to make Tenet a sacrificial lamb for its blundering into an Iraqi quagmire. But that ill-advised military adventure was actually championed by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and their subordinates. [more]

In the battles for the Sunni town of Falluja and the Shiite cities south of Baghdad, the Bush administration has essentially capitulated—hoping to reduce, until the U.S. election is over, images of fighting, mayhem and U.S. blood streaming to the American public. [more]

The president is somehow deluded that a fake turnover of power to a puppet interim government—to replace the widely discredited U.S.-picked Governing Council—will take the fire out of the guerrilla insurgency... [more]

If today the U.S. government were to put itself on trial, on the same basis it employed to try the Nazis at Nuremberg, for actions taken in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years, it might have to convict itself—if only for the sake of consistency. [more]

So what can the United States do to dampen the insurgency and avoid a potential civil war? Something that the Bush administration and the Washington foreign policy establishment have avoided like the plague: rapid U.S. troop withdrawal and genuine and complete self-determination for Iraqis... [more]

"Although no principle stands higher in military doctrine than that the commander bears full responsibility for the actions of his subordinates, neither Bush nor Rumsfeld, the two top military commanders, has the decency to resign — not just on account of the prison disclosures, of course, but also on account of the plethora of actions by which they have abused their constitutional powers and brought everlasting shame upon the United States." [more]

As for the members of Congress holding the hearings, they seemed more concerned about the release of the photos than with the barbaric behavior depicted in them. Would the behavior have been more acceptable if no photos or videos had been taken of it? Hardly. [more]

In any unnecessary war, the leaders of the attacking side are morally responsible for all deaths in the enemy military: accidental killings of civilians (the military euphemism is “collateral damage”) as well as abuses by rogue elements of those same groups toward enemy prisoners... [more]

The war in Iraq shares parallels with both the Vietnam War a generation ago and the Spanish-American War a century earlier—massive civilian deaths and torture are characteristics of all three imperial interventions... The estimates of civilians killed in the Philippines range from 200,000 to a high of perhaps 600,000 — no one really knows... [more]

Part of the problem, a British officer said, is that Americans tend to see the Iraqis as “untermenschen,” the term for “sub-humans.” [more]

"The Bush Administration has no intention of allowing the kind of Iraqi self-rule and self-determination invoked by the president in his speeches over the last year and a half." [more]

"Americans love a good 'How To' book, and the Wall Street Journal has long touted this 446 page one, which details how 'from 1898 to 1934, the Marines fought a number of small wars, in the Philippines, Cuba, Honduras, China, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.'" [more]

And the recent suggestions of the presidential commission on intelligence make the 9/11 commission's appetite for recommendations look restrained. The presidential commission went on a federal feeding frenzy and recommended stuffing the intelligence community with many new offices and organizations. [more]

Nobody disagrees that W.M.D's are absolutely monstrous weapons, but that shouldn't prevent us from making realistic assessments of their capabilities for harm, argues Ivan Eland. [more]