C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere that the devil always sends his temptations in twos, so that in backing away from one, you are liable to stumble into the other.
That’s very true of political temptations.
The cult-like behavior of hard-core Donald Trump loyalists, and of Q-Anon followers in particular, is a great danger to functioning of American democracy.
How can I engage in democratic discourse with people who are disconnected from reality as I see it?
But the drive to censor MAGA Republicans, including Q-Anon, is an equal danger.
How can I engage in democratic discourse with people and at the same time deny them a voice?
People who are silenced do not think they are refuted.
And I would be naive if I thought that censorship will be limited to persons and causes I disapprove of.
Most of President Trump’s critics, at home and abroad, saw nothing morally wrong with the killing of Iranian General Qasim Soleimani. They criticized the murder on pragmatic and procedural grounds.
They said that while Soleimani was a bad person who deserved to die, killing him at this particular time until these particular circumstances without proper consultation would have dire consequences.
I don’t claim to know what happens next, but right now it looks as if the consequences might not be all that dire. If so, the critics seem like a bunch of nervous nellies—provided you see nothing wrong with assassination in and of itself.
President Trump
Iranians fired missiles with pinpoint accuracy at two U.S. military bases, causing damage but not casualties. Their action was a demonstration of American vulnerability and Iranian restraint.
It’s worth remembering that the United States simulated an invasion of Iran in the Millennial Challenge 2002 war games, and lost badly. An all-out shooting war is not in the interest of either side.
Iranian and Hezbollah leaders said they will take revenge in the form of stepped-up attacks on U.S. troops. They said they will spare American civilians.
I think Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper regard increased American military casualties as an acceptable loss. If they cared about the lives of American troops, they would have wound down the futile Afghanistan campaign years ago.
One danger is that Trump, Pompeo and Esper will regard Iranian restraint as weakness. Pompeo has said he hopes increased economic pressure will make the current Iranian government fall.
That’s entirely possible, but the replacement Iranian government would be more fiercely anti-American and less restrained than the current one.
For now, both sides have stepped back from the brink. What many feared did not happen. Trump’s procedural sins do not seem all that bad.
But a precedent has been set – that the assassination of foreign leaders is one more foreign policy option that has to be considered. Killing leaders of foreign governments may be expedient or inexpedient, but we think about it on a case by case basis.
Here are some of that bad consequences that can flow from the new ethical normal.
Our government, having decided that it is all right to commit criminal acts against foreigners, would decide it is all right to commit criminal acts against citizens.
Democratic foreign governments would decide the United States is a rogue state and unite to stop it. This would more likely come in the form of economic boycotts, divestment and sanctions rather than a military alliance..
Authoritarian foreign governments would take the United States as a role model. Assassinations would become commonplace, and some of them would be of American leaders..
The following is from Edward Snowden’s new book, Permanent Record.
Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11
Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone.
Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among and who formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore.
The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.
Now consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.
The killers do their shooting in public places and are almost guaranteed to be gunned down in their turn, if they don’t kill themselves first.
They are comparable to the suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere, except that the jihadist killers are sometimes trying to achieve a specific military objective, like the Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War Two.
Among all the rich Western nations, the United States is the only one in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis.
That is not to say that ordinary Americans, and visitors to the United States, are in grave danger. As a risk factor, mass shootings rank far below traffic accidents.
Click to enlarge
But the fact that they occur says something about our society. For every man (the shooters are almost all men) who kills others and then himself out of rage and despair, there must be a hundred others who feel the same rage and despair and don’t act it out.
Some people blame ideologies based on hatred of black people or hatred of immigrants or hatred of women. But the mass shooters can be of any race, and the percentage of white mass shooters is slightly less than the percentage of whites in the general population.
The killers profess all kinds of professed political and social motives and some profess no motives at all. The only common denominator is that the killers are almost all suicidal men.
Hatred and bigotry have long been motives for killing. The new thing is that the killers are suicidal.
There are ways to commit murder without sacrificing your life in the process. (The methods are obvious, but if you can’t think of them, I see no benefit to society in helping you out.)
I think the root cause of mass killings are feelings of powerlessness and feelings of meaninglessness. Your life is meaningless, so you give it up. But you take others with you, so you do have some power after all.
I don’t have a good answer for this. Calling for a greater sense of community or a stronger sense of values isn’t going to bring these things about. Greater availability of mental health counseling probably would help some, but it won’t in itself empower people or make their lives meaningful.
Matthew N. Lyons is author of INSURGENT SUPREMACISTS: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire and principal author of CRTL-ALT-DELETE: An Antifascist Report on the Alternative Right.
His two books give me a framework for understanding the “alternative right” movement. What makes the movement “alternative”, according to Lyons, is that, unlike right-wing movements of the past, its leaders are revolutionaries.
The right-wing extremists of the past, such as the Klan, used extreme and sometimes violent movements to suppress threats to the status quo, such as labor unions or black people who wanted voting rights. The alternative right is not a defender of the existing system. They want to repeal and replace it.
While they are small in numbers, the nomination and election of Donald Trump is an indication that many people are fed up with the existing governmental and corporate system, including the leadership of both political parties.
The “alternative right” movement is diverse. It is not led by any particular individual or organization, and there are exceptions to almost any general statement one could make about it. Lyons sees three main strains:
White nationalists. Nowadays they tend more to white separatism than to old-time white supremacy. They are anti-semitic, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim as well as anti-black. They include long-time racist organizations such as the Klan, neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations, but the highest-profile leader is Richard Spencer, founder of the National Policy Institute.
Theocrats. Their aim is to enact their idea of Christian doctrine and morality into law. They oppose feminism, abortion, gay rights and separation of religion and government. One of the driving forces is the Christian Reconstructionist movement, which advocates a theocracy based on Old Testament law in order to hasten the Second Coming of Christ.
The ‘Patriot’ movement. Their aim is to arm themselves to prepare for a breakdown in social order or a totalitarian government takeover. They believe they have a right to resist illegitimate federal authority with armed force, but also to enforce order when the authorities fail to do so. Examples are the Posse Comitatus and Oath Keepers movements.
One common theme uniting all the groups is an ideal of masculinity and warrior brotherhood. Woman are honored mainly for their role as wives and mothers, although women do exercise leadership roles in some alt-right organizations.
White people and Christians are declining as a percentage of the population, so white nationalists and Christian theocrats think it’s important for whites and Christians to reproduce.
Lyons thinks the alt-right, the radical left and the corporate and governmental elite are engaged in a three-way fight that only one of them can win.
There is overlap between the alt-right and the radical left. Both oppose globalization, both regard the corporate elite as enemies and both think the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt, all of which I agree with.
The alt-right, like the radical left, is anti-imperialist. Alt-rightists oppose military intervention in foreign wars, and want to wind down the existing wars, as do I. Many admire Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian foreign leaders as examples of masculine strength and conservative nationalist values.
Lyons argued that the alt-right is not fascist. Rather than trying to set up a totalitarian police state modeled in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, they seek to decentralize power.
In the United States, right-wing whites and Christians have never needed a central authority to enforce racial or religious domination. In fact, the federal government has sometimes been a liberator, as during the Civil War and the civil rights era.
Karl Marx and other socialists believed that capitalism depended on exploitation of workers, and that workers could liberate themselves by taking control of the means of production.
But the driving force in capitalism today is to eliminate workers as much as possible. Manufacturing jobs are being eliminated through automation. Now service jobs are being eliminated through use of artificial intelligence.
The end result would be a capitalism without workers—just investment in capital goods such as robots and AIs.
I don’t say this would ever happen completely, and it wouldn’t happen any time soon, but this is the direction we’re heading.
Treating people as unnecessary, and telling them that they are unnecessary, is wrong and very dangerous.
Almost everyone has it in them to do something that is useful and beneficial to others. An economic system should be set up to honor and encourage this. Investing in machines rather than investing in people is a choice, not a law of nature.
It’s often said that science fiction is not so much a forecast of the future as a mirror of concerns about the times in which it is written. That is most certainly true of Cory Doctorow’s new book, RADICALIZED: Four tales of our present moment.
The title story is the most powerful and disturbing of the four. It is about an on-line community of men who’ve been denied, or whose loved-ones have been denied, insurance coverage for treatable cancer, and who, one by one, decide to take revenge.
The first engages in a suicide bombing at a Blue Cross / Blue Shield office to avenge the death of his six-year-old daughter. The second is a widower who kills a Senator who ran in a platform of health care for all, then voted against Medicare expansion.
The third is the elderly moderator of the forum, who has been subtly encouraging the bombings and killings. He wheels his wheelchair into the middle of a health insurance conference at a Sheraton before setting off a home-made bomb that blows away himself and a sizable percentage of the guests.
Their objective is not just revenge, but health care reform. They think that the power of fear may be enough to overcome the power of money.
Joe, the protagonist, joined the on-line forum when he was in despair about his wife not being able to get an “experimental” treatment that would cure her breast cancer. She turns out to be a lucky one who has a spontaneous remission, but he stays on the forum, arguing against suicide and violence on private lines
He realizes that he is guilty of a crime simply by being aware that crimes are being planned and not reporting it to the police. But he can’t bring himself to do this.
“Health care terrorism” spreads. There’s more security at HMO and insurance company offices than at airports. People who are denied insurance claims are put on terrorist watch lists. But bombings and killings continue. And Joe realizes it’s only a matter of time before Homeland Security catches up with him.
The conclusion is that a lot of people, including bystanders, have been killed, but Congress has enacted something called Americare. Joe’s wife, visiting him in prison, remarks, “Who says violence doesn’t solve anything?“
The attack on innocent Muslims in New Zealand by white nationalist terrorists was a horrible thing.
I make no excuse for white nationalist terrorists, or any other kind of terrorist.
But I also note that many more innocent Muslims have been killed as a result of the U.S. war on terror than by all individual white nationalist terrorists combined.
This is not, of course, to make light of the Christchurch attack. The blood on the hands of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump does not wash any blood off the hands of Brenton Tarrant.
This would have been a great opportunity for the United States to lead the world in suppressing Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorists.
Instead the George W. Bush administration chose to use the “war on terror” as an excuse to invade Iraq. The Obama administration actually armed jihadist terrorists to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and a long-shot candidate for President, wants to replace the bogus war on terror with a real war on terror.
After serving with the U.S. military in Iraq, she concluded that intervention was a mistake. She opposed “regime change” proxy wars against Libya and Syria. She courageously questioned the official narrative about chemical weapons in Syria.
After some misgivings, she endorsed the nuclear deal with Iran. She opposes U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen.
She is not a peace candidate. She just wants to replace the bogus war on terror with a real one.
She has praised President Assad of Syria for fighting the Islamic State (ISIS) and Al-Nusra (successors to Al Qaeda) fighters. She has praised President el-Sisi of Egypt for suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood. She is aligned with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a radical authoritarian anti-Muslim nationalist.
She favors drone warfare and continued Special Operations missions against terrorists. She has said that the root of terrorism is in “radical Islam” and criticized President Obama for his refusal to use that word.
The Al Qaeda terrorists were in fact members of an extremist Muslim sect, the Wahhabis or Salafists, who are the established religion of Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have promoted their version of Islam all over the world, especially in Pakistan.
This is true, but it is not the whole truth. Just being an extreme Muslim authoritarian doesn’t make you a terrorist. The reason terrorism has cut an appeal is the U.S. military presence in so many majority-Muslim lands, U.S. manipulation of so many majority-Muslim governments and the death and destruction caused by U.S. forces in so many Muslim lands.
U.S. policy serves the interests of Saudi Arabia more than it does Americans. That’s because of a long-standing deal, going back to the 1970s, in which the Saudis agree to guarantee an oil supply, buy U.S. weapons and keep the oil profits in dollars in return for U.S. military support.
Gabbard is right to oppose wars to serve Saudi interests. Her policy would be an improvement over Trump’s, Obama’s and George W. Bush’s. She is not a peace candidate, but right now she is closer to being one than any of other candidates I know about.
At the same time, her policy is compatible with maintaining the Pentagon budget and the military contractor establishment in all its bloated glory.
Killing terrorists, in and of itself, won’t end terrorism, any more than killing drug dealers will end drug addiction.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat from Hawaii, is more of an anti-war candidate than Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or any other presidential candidate who has announced so far.
She opposes “regime change wars” on principle, which no other high-profile politician has been willing to say since Rep. Ron Paul left Congress. Such wars, as she pointed out in the interview, have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and enormous suffering to ordinary people in the Middle East and elsewhere without making Americans safer or better off.
Ending regime change wars would be a big change for the better, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean giving up the U.S. empire of bases and cutting back the U.S. military mission to defense of the homeland and fulfilling treaty obligations to allies. If you really want to crush Al Qaeda’s successors and imitators, the first step would be to stop arming them to so as to bring about regime change.
Most of the commentary on Gabbard’s announcement ignored all of this. Instead it focused on her opposition to gay rights moe than 15 years ago..
She is one of a number of people who was raised as a social conservative, and changed their minds over a period of years. I can understand this, because my own opinions, including on LGBT issues, have changed in the past 15 years. But some commentators think this will sink her campaign before it gets started.
Gabbard comes from an unusual background. According to her Wikipedia page, her father is part Samoan and a Catholic; her mother is a convert to Hinduism. She was elected to the Hawaii state legislature at the age of 21, then was deployed to Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard. She is now serving her fourth term in Congress.
In 2016, she resigned from the Democratic National Committee in order to support Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president.
The video of of an interview with Joe Rogan gives a good overview of what she believes. It runs an hour and 43 minutes, a little long to watch on a small screen. Here are starting points of the highlights:
7mn. Why North Korea has nuclear weapons
9mn. Regime change wars (the key segment)
22mn. Authorizing war with Iran
30mn. Russian troll farms.
32mn. Why she supported Bernie Sanders
49mn. Paper ballots and electronic voting
1hr4mn Pros and cons of universal basic income
1hr13mn Affordable higher education and health care
1hr22mn Threats to civil liberties
1hr33mn Legalizing marijuana
I agree with everything she said in the Joe Rogan interview and most of her views as given on her Wikipedia page.
My main concern about her is her praise of the authoritarian nationalist government of President Narendra Modi of India and her alignment with Hindu nationalists in the Indian-American community, which is reportedly a large source of her funding. I also object to her statement in a 2014 interview that torture may be justified under certain circumstances.
Aside from this, I’m favorably impressed with her, not only because I think she is right on policy, but because of her calm, self-assured and well-informed way of answering questions. Also, that she was not afraid to say “I don’t know.”
Win or lose, she will force the Democrats to debate war and peace issues on a more fundamental level than before.
My dictionary’s definition of terrorism is “the use of terror and violence to intimidate, subjugate, etc., especially as a political weapon.”
If there is any group of people in American history who have been terrorized, it is African slaves and their descendants. When they were theoretically emancipated, a terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, arose to intimidate and subjugate them through the use of terror and violence. The Klan was a predecessor and role model for Nazism and fascism in 20th century Europe.
I can remember when white people could kill black people with impunity in certain parts of the country. Patrisse Cullors, pointed out in her book, When They Call You a Terrorist, written with Asha Bandele., that white people are still killing unarmed black people out of fear, and often getting off with no punishment or token punishment.
The FBI has added “black identity terrorism” to its categories of terrorism. There could be such a thing, I suppose, but most domestic terrorists, including those who attack police, are white racist terrorists.
Russian-backed forces have defeated the so-called Islamic State in Syria. U.S.-backed forces have defeated the Islamic State in Iraq. Peace may be at hand.
The winners in these wars were Russia, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Shi’ite militias in Iraq. The losers, in addition to the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL and Da’esh), were Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates and Israel.
The United States was in a contradictory position. By invading Iraq and overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein, the U.S. gave power to Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, which is aligned with Iran. This went against long-range U.S. goals, which are to support Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Also, the official justification for intervention in the Middle East was to fight Al Qaeda terrorists. But the regimes attacked by the U.S. government—Saddam’s Iraq and Assad’s Syria—were enemies of Al Qaeda, as was the Ayatollahs’ Iran. No matter what U.S. did, it would either strengthen Al Qaeda or strengthen Iran.
Given the inherent contradiction in U.S. policy, I think the current outcome was the best that could be expected. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump deserve credit for not escalating a new war to keep Russians out of Syria and Iranians out of Iraq. I’m not sure Hillary Clinton, given her record of starting wars, would have shown the same wisdom.
When Al Qaeda jihadist terrorists attacked the U.S. World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it was part Osama bin Laden regarded the USA as the “far enemy” who propped up all the “near enemies” in the Arab world.
But for many of the jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, the “far enemy” is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not the USA. A large number are Chechens, a Muslim nationality living mostly within the Russian Federalion, or Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs or others living under regimes in Central Asia that are propped up by Russia.
One of Putin’s first actions when he came to power was to ruthlessly crush the independence movement in Chechnia. The justification was a series of terrorist attacks that were very likely a false flag attack by the Russian FSB.
Since then many Chechen fighters have been driven out of Russia, and are now fighting the Russian-backed Assad government of Syria, along with Uzbeks and other nationalities from the former Soviet republics.
Some analysts think that the export of jihadists is a conscious Russian strategy. The best outcome, from the Russian point of view, is that they die fighting in Syria. But even if they survive, they have made themselves known to Russian intelligence services.
Saudi Arabia does the same thing with its jihadist rebels—suppresses them at home and encourages them to go wage war in other countries.
In September, 1999, Russia was wracked by a series of explosions that President Vladimir Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.
It solidified Putin’s power and popularity, and enable him to launch his own “war on terror” against the breakaway province of Chechnya.
But unlike with the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years later, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the explosions were a false flag carried out by Russian intelligence services.
David Satter, a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, summed up the evidence in a recent article in National Review.
The Chechens are a fierce Muslim warrior people whose homeland is in the Caucasus. They were conquered by the Russian Empire in 1859 and declared independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up. The Russian Federation tried and failed to reconquer them in 1994-1996.
At the time of the explosions, Vladimir Putin, formerly head of the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB), had just become prime minister of Russia. He used the explosions as a justification for starting a new war, in which Chechnya was defeated and reincorporated into Russia.
There were four apartment bombings in all, in which a total of 300 people were killed. One was in an apartment building in Buinaksk in Dagestan in the Caucasus, two in apartment buildings in Moscow (9/9 and 9/13) and one in Volgodonsk in Rostov province to the south (9/16). All the explosions involved hundreds of pounds of an explosive called RDX.
Suspicious characters with traces of RDX on their persons were arrested in an apartment building in the southern Russian city of Ryazan. They turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB said they were conducting a training exercise.
Some in the CIA say the “war on terror” could have been won in six months if the U.S. government had not given “regime change” priority over capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.
After the 9/11 attacks, the whole world, including the Muslim world, sympathized with the United States.
The whole world, including the Muslim world, condemned the terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 innocent civilians.
The U.S. government had an opportunity to unite the world in bringing the Al Qaeda terrorists to justice. This could have been a step to unite the international community behind a rule of law.
Instead the Bush administration chose to implement pre-existing plans to invade Iraq, whose leaders had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks. The Obama administration has done likewise with Libya, Syria and other countries.
The result has been militarization of American life, eclipse of civil liberties and the deaths of many more innocent civilians in majority-Muslim countries than ever were killed in jihadist attacks on Americans and Europeans.
Even worse, a generation of Americans has grown up in which all these things are normal.
And jihadist terrorism, partly and maybe mainly as a result of U.S. policies, is stronger than ever before.
Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, who died a few days ago, was a ruthless dictator comparable to the Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
A holdover from the Soviet era (appointed by Mikhail Gorbachev, no less), Karimov was known for his repression of the Muslim religion and of dissent of all kinds, and for forced child labor in cotton fields, his country’s chief export industry.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, said growing a beard or being seen praying five times a day could be enough to get you thrown in jail or to “disappear” mysteriously.
Yet Karimov was courted by Russia, China and the USA as an ally against radical Islamic terrorism. Uzbekistan was an important transit point for supplies going to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
What should US policy have been? Should our government be like China’s, which scrupulously refrains from interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, no matter how odious their governments?
Or should the US have armed Karimov’s opponents, as was done in Libya and Syria, to being about a change in the regime?
The justification of the whole military buildup of the past 15 years has been the need to protect Americans against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.
Ashton Carter
Yet Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, in recent testimony (actually several months ago, but I’m just catching up with it) ranks ranks terrorism as a lesser threat to the United States than Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
The governments of Russia, China and Iran are in fact enemies of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and the successors of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Targeting them indirectly strengthens terrorism.
What do Russia, China and Iran threaten? They do not threaten American citizens. They do not threaten the American homeland.
What they threaten is U.S. military superiority in eastern Europe, eastern Asia and the Middle East. Protecting Americans from terrorism takes a back seat to what the Pentagon calls full spectrum dominance.
Risking war with any country without a good reason is both stupid and morally wrong. But of all the countries in the world, Russia and China are the worst ones to pick as enemies.
Russia is the world’s second-largest nuclear power. It is the only country in the world with the military capability to literally destroy the United States as a nation.
China is the world’s second-largest or maybe largest economic power. It has the power to ruin the United States financially by ceasing to lend money and by cutting off supplies of essential U.S. imports.
The leaders of Russia and China, being rational, would not do this because they would ruin their own countries in the process. The only ways this would happen would be if they were backed into a corner where they thought they had nothing to lose or—in the case of Russia—they found themselves in a situation in which nuclear war could be touched off accidentally.
The United States has by far the world’s most expensive military. We Americans spend more on our armed forces than the next 10 countries put together. But that doesn’t mean we have the world’s most effective military, especially when fighting far from home.
In fact, the big U.S. military budgets may be counter-productive. Decision-makers may think the U.S. is so rich and powerful that individual instances of waste and ineffectiveness don’t matter. Or that it is not necessary to set priorities.
In the past 25 years, the United States has waged war openly against five nations.
Serbia
Iraq
Afghanistan
Syria
Libya
The U.S. has waged economic and covert war against two other nations:
Iran
Russia
Hillary Clinton supported all of them.
What’s noteworthy about this list is that the governments of all of these countries, except Afghanistan, was or is threatened by Al Qaeda and other Islamic jihadist groups. The U.S. war effort is directed more against the terrorists’ enemies than the terrorists.
In every case except Afghanistan, the U.S. actually supported jihadist groups against the incumbent government, just as it did against the pre-Taliban Russian-backed regime in Afghanistan.
I believe that the reason for this strange policy is the American DeepState—the parts of government not affected by elections—is more concerned about maintaining global corporate economic supremacy and U.S. military supremacy than it is about protecting American citizens from possible terrorist attacks.
Among the political candidates, Hillary Clinton is the most highly committed war hawk. She has supported every war on this list, and also favors military confrontation with China. I don’t think the Iran sanctions deal would have been negotiated if she had remained as Secretary of State.
Bernie Sanders supports existing U.S. policies with reservations.
In many ways, I agree with Donald Trump more than I do Clinton. He wants to stop the cold war against Putin’s Russia, and he recognizes how counterproductive the attacks on Syria and Libya have been.
Malik Jalal has traveled from Pakistan’s Waziristan border region to Britain so as to plead with President Obama to stop trying to kill him.
Malik Jalal
Malik is an honorary title that means “village leader”. He is a member of the North Waziristan Peace Committee, whose mission is to negotiate with the Pakistan Taliban to reduce violence in the region. The committee’s work is sanctioned by the government of Pakistan.
He has survived four attacks by Hellfire missiles and now sleeps out in the woods with his six-year-old son. He wrote in The Independent that he has information that the U.S. military wants to stop the work of the Peace Committee because they think peace would give the Taliban a secure sanctuary.
Jalal wrote that the first attack came in 2010, when his nephew took his vehicle to a service station to get an oil change and to have the tires checked. A Hellfire missile hit Jalal’s vehicle and another vehicle parked just beside it. The nephew was injured and four innocent bystanders were killed.
The next time he was driving to a peace conference, with another vehicle on the road behind, which happened to be the same shade of red as Jalal’s. A Hellfire missile destroyed the trailing vehicle and all four occupants, all innocent bystanders, were killed.
Jalal became sure that he was the target after the next attack. He accepted a dinner invitation by cell phone and, while he was on the way, a Hellfire missile struck, killing three innocent people, including a father of three and a mentally retarded man.
The fourth attack came early in 2011, when the Hellfire missile struck a meeting of community leaders, killing 40 people, none of whom, according to Jalal were engaged in acts of violence.
Since then he has taken to sleeping out of doors on a mountainside far from his house and always parking his vehicle a long distance from any destination. Recently, he said, his six-year-old son has joined him on the mountainside. The little boy said it was unrealistic to think that the U.S. military would refrain from killing Jalal’s family just because he wasn’t at home.
An official British inquiry has concluded that Vladimir Putin probably ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, an FSB defector and whistleblower, in late 2006.
I think it was obvious from the beginning that Putin not only ordered the killing, but wanted it to be known that he ordered the killing.
How else could the killers have obtained the deadly radioactive isotope, Polonium 210, which was used to poison Litvinenko? Why else would they have used such a method unless they wanted to signal that this is what happens to defectors?
They were not only eliminating an enemy. They were sending a message.
This is not the only death of a Russian dissident on British soil under suspicious circumstances. In 2012, a Russian whistle-blower named Alexander Perepilichnyy, who was due to testify against a Russian company in a $200 million fraud case, was poisoned in Britain with an extract from rare plant known as “heartbreak grass” and found in the mountains of Asia.
In 2013, Boris Berezovsky, a Russian opposition figure in exile, was found dead by hanging. The coroner’s verdict was suicide, but years before Scotland Yard foiled an apparent assassin who’d traveled to Britain from Russia.
David Satter, a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, summed up the evidence in a recent article in National Review.
A holdover from the Soviet era (appointed by Mikhail Gorbachev, no less), Karimov was known for his repression of the Muslim religion and of 
Phil Ebersole's Blog 