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Obama is the New Bush

Stop The Wars: By Ron Paul

The Foreign Policy Dictatorship: Fox Interview Ron Paul & Lew Rockwell

Time to Stop the Violence says Dr. Ron Paul

I must say I agree.  Let’s break this cycle of violence and live in peace.  There is a lot of work ahead of us though.  Thanks Dr. Paul for defending peace and true Christianity.

Ron Paul: Return to Non-Intervention

Ron Paul urges the American people to come to their senses and return to non-intervention. It’s time we took his advice.

Obama Promised, Yet Still They Die

Obama continues to break his promises at the cost of many lives. Where is the AntiWar movement?

Pentagon: More Money for Weapons, Less for Troops

Pay and Benefit Hikes Unsustainable, Officials Warn

by Jason Ditz

A decade of massive annual increases in military spending have given the Pentagon record budgets, but officials are warning that, as financial problems make more hikes unlikely, the pay raises and benefits packages Congress has given to troops are “unsustainable.”

Instead the Pentagon is pushing Congress to decrease the amount of money set aside for troop pay and benefits, and increase the amount it spends on weapons and operations.

Though in practice the Pentagon hasn’t had to balance the enormous health care costs from all its casualties and all the other expenses associated with its two major wars, officials seem convinced that sooner or later those costs will have to be reckoned with instead of being funded with emergency spending and budget hikes.

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What I Learned in Afghanistan – About the United States

by Dana Visalli

I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,” and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled “Silence is Violence,” that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the “30-year war” there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand stories like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

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Ron Paul Challenges GOP’s Foreign Policy Agenda

By Doug Bandow

It has been nearly a decade since President George W. Bush chose arrogance over humility as the basis of American foreign policy. The intervening years have not been good for the United States or the Republican Party. As the GOP seeks to take back the White House it needs to conduct a serious foreign policy debate. Republicans should start by listening to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

At the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference big spending Mitt Romney bested Rep. Paul by just one vote in the popularity contest. Yet Paul eschewed reliance on easy applause lines and challenged the newfound Republican fondness for big militaries and constant wars.

For instance, Paul observed that conservatives, like liberals, enjoyed spending money, only “on different things. They like embassies, and they like occupation. They like the empire. They like to be in 135 countries and 700 bases.”

Similarly, Paul said, conservatives talked about following the Constitution, “except for war. Let the president go to war anytime they want.”

Paul garnered applause from more youthful members of the audience. But boos were heard as well. Many establishment GOP activists appear to have become wedded to a big-government foreign policy.

When Politico polled activists and analysts about why the GOP mainstream was hostile to Paul, James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation complained that “The deliberate self-weakening of America is an invitation to disaster.” Carafano argued that Paul failed to fulfill the constitutional obligation to “provide for the common defense” and that the latter’s vision would not keep America “safe, free, and prosperous.”

Yet Washington’s policy of promiscuous intervention is not providing for America’s “common defense.” Rather, the U.S. is protecting virtually every other nation. That’s one reason why the Pentagon was incapable of defending Americans when the U.S. was attacked on 9/11,

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