Section: Ron Paul Institute (USA)
An Age of Innocence, in Retrospect
Ahmed Chalabi, age 71, has died of a heart attack in Baghdad. As a close observer of his unique role in provoking the Iraq War – a foreign policy and strategic military disaster 12 years ago – I can’t help but look back on that time as an age of innocence. That may sound ironic, but I think it’s true given that many Americans now see...
Breaking: Obama Puts US Boots in Syria – Where is Congress?
“I will not put US boots on the ground in Syria.” That was President Obama’s unequivocal statement to the American people just two years ago when he first planned to bomb Syria. He has repeated the statement several times, as he has also repeated his promise that he “will not pursue a long air campaign” in Syria and...
NATO Looks To Station Thousands Of Troops On Border With Russia
Russia’s dramatic intervention in Syria has served to push the conflict in Ukraine (a country that is now partially governed by Star Wars characters) to the back of the world’s collective mind. After all, separatists exchanging fire with government forces and/or far-right “volunteer” battalions every couple of days against a dreary...
The Older, Better Canada is Back Again
I used to call Canada “the land that time forgot.” While the rest of the world lurched from crisis to crisis, Canada remained peaceful, humane, prosperous, progressive, and famously polite, a sort of North American Scandinavia. Polls showed that Canada, for all its blandness and low profile, was one of the world’s most respected...
How Can Anyone Still Be An Interventionist?
Given the ongoing disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East, how can anyone in his right mind still be an interventionist? Look at Iraq. The US invasion and multi-year occupation of that country was supposed to bring a paradise of peace, prosperity, and harmony to the country. That’s what killing...
MH-17 Final Report: Who Shot Down The Plane?
The long-awaited final report of the Dutch Safety Board on the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine came out yesterday, but it offered very little in terms of what actually happened. With the most powerful intelligence apparatus on earth, how is it that the US cannot bring forth evidence to back its claims about Russian...
The New McCarthyism
Cold War II is upon us. Once again, to write the phrase “the Kremlin” is to evoke images of an Oriental despotism both ominous and inscrutable, only slightly less sinister than the Dark Tower. Russia, once thought to have been liberated from its Soviet chains, is now the new Mordor. And, of course, Vladimir Putin is the new Sauron: cunning,...
Two Minutes of Hate For Belarus
With Belarusian president Aleksander Lukashenko elected to a fifth term in office on Sunday, the ritual western hate-fest against the former Soviet Republic shifts into high gear. The regular march of western journalists to Minsk to report on “Europe’s last dictatorship,” has already begun, with Buzzfeed’s Max Seddon being...
The Government We Deserve?
The problem with the twenty-four hour news cycle is that everything being reported comes and goes too quickly to connect the dots. I noted a number of stories during the past several weeks that should have raised all kinds of red flags, particularly if considered together, but they frequently received such limited media coverage and were gone so...
Orwell at the UN: Obama Re-Defines Democracy as ‘a Country That Supports US Policy’
In his Orwellian September 28, 2015 speech to the United Nations, President Obama said that if democracy had existed in Syria, there never would have been a revolt against Assad. By that, he meant ISIL. Where there is democracy, he said, there is no violence or revolution. This was his threat to promote revolution, coups and violence against any...
