Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Apparently Ron Paul has ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, and we’ve fallen through into another dimension in which U.S. foreign policy is debated on national daytime television.

Pretty amazing. I like this universe much more than the old one.

That is, assuming they want to. Here’s a piece of mine about this in Mother Jones:

What would a serious congressional strategy to block a war with Iran look like? Constitutional scholars and congressional staff agree there’s no one magic answer. The alarming truth is that 220 years after the adoption of the Constitution, there are few settled answers about what legal powers the executive branch possesses to start a war. But there are several steps Congress could take to make a war with Iran politically very difficult for the White House…

The limiting factor on a determined president is not whether an attack is “legal.” Rather, it is how high a political cost he’s willing to pay.

I found it hard to get my mind around this, but it’s true. If the executive branch is determined to do something, it’s extremely difficult for the legislative branch to stop it merely with laws.

For instance, take the spying program about which James Comey just testified. Congress has written clear laws about what domestic surveillance the executive branch can and cannot carry out. And it’s the Justice Department’s job to interpret such laws for the executive branch. But when the Justice Department told the White House that what they were doing was illegal, the White House didn’t say, “Oh! Well, we’ll definitely stop then.” Instead, they decided to keep on doing it. They only modified the program when all the top Justice Department officials threatened to resign.

In other words, it wasn’t the law that stopped them by itself, but the political damage they would have suffered from all the resignations. If they’d been willing to suffer that damage, the White House could have let everyone quit and then hire replacements who’d come up with some theory about why the spying program was legal.

So Congress should pass laws forbidding Bush from attacking Iran—but that by itself isn’t enough. They need to use all the tools they have to create a climate in which the political cost to the Bush administration of starting a war would be excruciatingly high. Those tools are what the article is about.

AND: Speaking of laws, Congress is voting today on the DeFazio-Paul-Hinchey-Lee amendment to the defense authorization bill. This amendment tells Bush he can’t attack Iran without congressional permission. If you think war with Iran is a bad idea, call the Capitol Hill switchboard at 202 224-3121 and ask your representative to support it.

Nope, the vote happened last night, and the amendment failed 136-288. Never trust the word of twelve year-old Capitol Hill staffers. Interestingly, Pelosi isn’t listed there at all.

MORE: Emailers tell me the Speaker of the House generally doesn’t participate in votes like this. Don’t ask me why.

Michael Schwartz: “The Struggle over Iraqi Oil: Eyes Eternally on the Prize”

Patrick Cockburn: “A Small War Guaranteed to Damage a Superpower: What the Bush Administration Has Wrought in Iraq”

Dilip Hiro: “Unholy Alliance: How Secularists and Generals Tried to Take Down Turkish Democracy”

Tom Engelhardt: “What Price Slaughter?: In New York and Jalalabad, Human Life Is Valued Differently — by the U.S. Government”

Don’t miss the NY Times Magazine cover story by Nir Rosen, aka World’s Bravest Person, on the gigantic Iraq refugee crisis. As the article reports, about four million Iraqis have fled their homes. That’s 15% of Iraq’s population; the equivalent in the US would be 45 million people.

It’s really something to live in a country so powerful we can rip another nation to shreds like this and barely notice. Hey, what time is the Golden State-Jazz game on?

Of course, at the top of the US government it’s not ignorance. It’s total indifference:

“What I find most disturbing,” [Kenneth] Bacon [president of Refugees International] went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war”…

When I read John Bolton’s comments to Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, they mainly agreed with him.

Or as George Bush put it in January, “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude.”

So it seems the House Intelligence Committee may have a little more self-respect than the Senate Intelligence Committee under Jay Rockefeller. Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists points out this section of the House version of the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act:

The Committee was dismayed at a recent incident wherein the Intelligence Community failed to inform the Congress of a significant covert action activity. This failure to notify Congress constitutes a violation of the National Security Act of 1947. Despite agency explanations that the failure was inadvertent, the Committee is deeply troubled over the fact that such an oversight could occur, whether intentionally or inadvertently.

The Committee firmly believes that scrupulous transparency between the Intelligence Community and this Committee is an absolute necessity on matters related to covert action. The Committee intends this audit and reporting requirement to act as a further check against the risk of insufficient notification, whether deliberate or inadvertent.

Obviously this likely involves Iran. And given its tremendous importance, we can count on the U.S. media never looking into it.

(Via)

UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me this could also plausibly be about Ethiopia/Somalia.