Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=42896"><span class="small">Seth Ackerman, Jacobin</span></a>
Sunday, 23 June 2019 14:03
Ackerman writes: "Many in the pundit class claim to be confused about Bernie Sanders’s big socialism speech. For one thing, what was Franklin Roosevelt doing in it?"
Bernie Sanders campaigns in Warner, New Hampshire, USA. (photo: Aflo/Shutterstock)
Why Bernie Talks About the New Deal
By Seth Ackerman, Jacobin
23 June 19
The pundits are puzzled that Bernie Sanders sees socialist values in the New Deal. They shouldn’t be. That’s how socialists around the world — and their enemies — saw it at the time.
any in the pundit class claim to be confused about Bernie Sanders’s big socialism speech. For one thing, what was Franklin Roosevelt doing in it?
“There’s something a little strange about saying ‘I meant socialism like the kind advocated by the guy who very explicitly and intentionally did not call his project socialism,’” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said on Twitter, referring to FDR. Slate’s Jordan Weissmann expressed the same thought on his website’s What Next podcast. “Bernie now wants to talk about democratic socialism as the continuation of FDR’s legacy. And it’s kind of weird rhetorically. He’s sort of latched on to this identity as a socialist even as he’s just sort of a New Deal liberal.”
More sympathetic observers saw political logic in the move, even as they agreed it made no sense on a factual level. Jamelle Bouie, in a perceptive column for the New York Times, wondered why Sanders would attempt to — in Bouie’s words — “defend himself as a ‘democratic socialist’ by defining ‘democratic socialism’ as something that is not actually socialism.” He concluded that the Vermont senator, having spent so much of his life in socialist circles, is simply trying to “bring the term itself into the mainstream of American politics.”
That is surely true. But there’s another reason why Sanders points to the New Deal as an expression of socialist values: that’s how it was perceived by many observers at the time.
Some of these observers, of course, were reactionary Republicans. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, for example, the 1944 GOP vice-presidential nominee, liked to rant about how “Communist forces have taken over the New Deal.”
But they also included “progressive” Democrats like Al Smith, the Irish-American former New York governor, whose 1928 presidential campaign had mobilized millions of immigrant voters with its inclusive message opposing nativist bigotry. Smith was a lifelong Democrat, but like many leading Democrats today he felt distaste for “demagogues that would incite one class of our people against the other.” By the end of FDR’s first term, Smith had seen enough of the New Deal.
“Just get the platform of the Democratic Party, and get the platform of the Socialist Party, and lay them down on your dining room table, side by side, and get a heavy lead pencil and scratch out the word ‘Democrat,’ and scratch out the word ‘Socialist,’ and let the two platforms lay there,” Smith quipped in a 1936 speech. “Then study the record of the present administration up to date. After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will put your hand on the Socialist platform. You couldn’t touch the Democratic.”
It wasn’t only red-baiting opponents of socialism who saw the resemblance. So did many socialists — including Norman Thomas, the longtime leader of the Socialist Party of America. In the words of his biographer, Thomas “viewed Roosevelt’s program for reform of the economic system as far more reflective of the Socialist Party platform than of his own [Democratic] party’s platform,” in particular its embrace of a shorter workweek, public works, abolition of sweatshops, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, and old-age pensions. Though always highly critical of Roosevelt — who never embraced “our essential socialism” — Thomas acknowledged that FDR built a rudimentary welfare state by adopting “ideas and proposals formerly called ‘socialist’ and voiced in our platforms beginning with Debs in 1900.”
Nor was it just American socialists who saw the affinity. French prime minister Léon Blum — a genuine, red flag–waving, Marx-reading European socialist — was almost lyrical in his praise of Roosevelt. Elected in 1936 as the candidate of the French Section of the Workers’ International, in a coalition with the French Communist Party, Blum made no secret of the fact that he took the New Deal as his governing model: “Seeing him [FDR] act,” Blum said in a 1937 speech in Paris, “French democracy [i.e. the French left] has had the feeling that an example was traced for it, and it is this example that we wish to follow.” When Roosevelt won reelection, Blum rushed to the US embassy, where, according to the ambassador’s report to Roosevelt, he displayed “as genuine an outpouring of enthusiasm as I have ever heard….Blum himself said to me that he felt his position had been greatly strengthened because he is attempting in his way to do what you have done in America.”
Rank-and-file Communists shared that feeling as well. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, a lifelong member of the party who joined it in Berlin in 1931 and remained an active militant into the 1950s, recalled in his memoirs the admiration he and his fellow European Communists felt for Roosevelt:
In the 1920s and early 1930s America was a by-word for the hardfaced pursuit of profit, for injustice, for ruthless, unscrupulous and brutal repression. But F. D. Roosevelt’s USA not only disclaimed this reputation; it turned it sharply to the left. It visibly became a government for the poor and the unions.
What is more, Roosevelt was passionately loathed and denounced by American big business, that is to say by the very people who more than any others represented the evils of capitalism to us. It is true that, as usual, the Communist International, stuck in its ultra-sectarian phase, took its time to recognize what was obvious to everyone else and denounced the New Deal, but by 1935 even it had come round.
In short, in the 1930s it was possible to approve of both the USA and the USSR, and most youthful communists did both, as did a very large number of socialists and liberals. Franklin D. Roosevelt was certainly not Comrade Stalin, and yet, if we had been Americans, we would have voted for him with genuine enthusiasm. I cannot think of any other “bourgeois” politician in any country about whom we felt that way.
That so many observers saw a connection between socialism and the New Deal shouldn’t be surprising. In 1932, FDR was a fairly conventional progressive Democrat, but the wave of mass strikes that started in 1934 forced him to the left. By 1936, the newly formed industrial unions that grew out of those strikes had become the core of his political base, and most were led or had been organized by socialists and communists: Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, Sidney Hillman of the Clothing Workers, Harry Bridges of the Longshore Workers, John Brophy of the CIO. At the same time, thousands of socialist and communist experts flooded into the New Deal agencies, including the National Labor Relations Board and the Treasury, Agriculture, and Commerce departments.
In 1944, Roosevelt called for an Economic Bill of Rights: the right to a job and adequate income; to decent housing and medical care; to protection from the risks of old age and unemployment. As reform momentum in Washington slowed in the face of war and congressional conservatism, the CIO took up the mantle in its “People’s Program for 1944,” distributed in pamphlet form to millions of voters.
The CIO program laid out an aggressive social-democratic platform for postwar America: guaranteed full employment, progressive taxes, public works, day care programs, a national health insurance plan, and expanded old-age and unemployment insurance, all backed by price controls and “planning for plenty.” (Its civil rights program included voting rights guarantees for Southern blacks and a permanent federal job discrimination commission.) As the historian Isser Woloch has shown, the CIO program closely echoed the contemporaneous postwar programs of Britain’s Labour Party and France’s National Council of the Resistance — both written largely by socialists.
Utterly dependent on CIO support, Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign — the last of the New Deal era — embraced the union federation’s rhetoric and program almost in their entirety, including a single-payer health care system, a full-employment guarantee, a higher minimum wage, and continued postwar price controls. When news of his victory reached London, the British Labour Party — “a Socialist Party, and proud of it,” in the words of its 1945 manifesto — released an exultant statement: “We are not suggesting that Mr. Truman is a Socialist. It is precisely because he is not that his adumbration of these policies is significant. They show that the failure of capitalism to serve the common man . . . is not, after all, something we invented . . . to exasperate Mr. Churchill.”
The same message came from the Labour Party’s internal left-wing dissident group, Keep Left (the “Bevanites,” followers of socialist leader Aneurin Bevan), which was otherwise bitterly critical of Truman’s emerging Cold War foreign policy: “The Fair Deal, backed by a politically conscious labour movement, is based on . . . moral principles which inspire our socialism . . . Over a wide field the Truman Administration and the Labour Government have the same interests and ideals — and the same enemies.”
The socialists who saw their likeness in the New Deal, it should go without saying, were hardly representative of socialism’s most radical currents. There were always factions on the left, including most Trotskyist groups, that could see no common ground between themselves and the patrician from Hyde Park. And Roosevelt, of course, never called for the collective ownership of the means of production (at least outside a few sectors, like rural electrification) let alone a dictatorship of the proletariat.
But real-life politics is more than just a battle of philosophical position papers about ultimate goals, and socialism, as Marx said, is about the “real movement” more than any blueprint for a distant future. Maybe it’s precisely the absence of a mass socialist tradition in this country that accounts for the pundits’ oddly rigorous and literal-minded definitions of socialism: in Britain, no one in the commentariat seems to question Jeremy Corbyn’s self-description as a socialist, though he’s not calling for wholesale nationalization either.
Republicans have spent decades ludicrously insisting that anyone to the left of Calvin Coolidge is a socialist. The Democrats, it now seems, want to claim that anyone to the right of Bob Avakian couldn’t possibly be one. When did the party of Joe Biden start sounding like a bunch of Maoist sectarians?
Any Dem Who Wants to Be President Should Reject War with Iran, Not Hide Behind Process Criticisms
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=49959"><span class="small">Julianne Tveten, In These Times</span></a>
Sunday, 23 June 2019 13:53
Tveten writes: "The crisis, fueled by the Trump administration’s bellicose rhetoric and dangerous provocations, has offered a glimpse into the foreign-policy platforms of some of the leading 2020 Democratic hopefuls."
Former Vice President Joe Biden speaking at a press conference in New Castle, DE on May 30, 2019. (photo: Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Any Dem Who Wants to Be President Should Reject War with Iran, Not Hide Behind Process Criticisms
By Julianne Tveten, In These Times
23 June 19
Here’s where 2020 Democratic hopefuls stand.
n the evening of June 20, Donald Trump reportedly gave initial authorization to launch strikes on Iran, then revoked the order at the eleventh hour. The move—which was the latest action in a long-simmering campaign to wage war against Iran—was falsely framed by the Trump administration as retaliatory: Earlier on the same day, reports surfaced that a U.S. Navy surveillance drone violated Iran’s airspace border, prompting the Revolutionary Guard to shoot it down, which Trump called “a big mistake.”
The previous week, shepherded by neocon National Security Advisor John Bolton, the administration alleged, with no conclusive evidence, that Iran was responsible for attacks on two commercial oil tankers near the Gulf of Oman on June 13. This occurred just over a year after the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, putting the U.S. on a path to greater aggression towards Iran.
Iran has denied the Trump administration’s oil-tanker claims, which remain unsubstantiated. On June 14, the U.S. military released indistinct video footage, which the U.S. military insisted showed an Iranian military patrol boat approaching one of the tankers. The Pentagon followed this with additional “clearer” photos meant to “prove” Iran’s involvement in the attack, and claimed that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) removed an unexploded limpet mine from one of the ships, yet failed to prove that these mines were even attached to the ship. Further, the head of the Japanese company Kokuka Sangyo Co., which owns one of the ships, contradicted the U.S. military’s allegations.
The crisis, fueled by the Trump administration’s bellicose rhetoric and dangerous provocations, has offered a glimpse into the foreign-policy platforms of some of the leading 2020 Democratic hopefuls. The responses of these candidates—Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders—ranged from expressing skepticism about the U.S. narrative on Iran’s actions and condemning “forever wars” to handwringing about whether Trump is following the right process for starting a war and reinforcing the White House narrative that Iran as a “threat.” While Sanders appears to adopt the strongest and most morally informed oppositional stance, Warren trails just behind him, owed to her slightly weaker legislative record on Iran. Meanwhile, candidates like Harris and Biden, who continue to espouse rhetoric about the supposed national security threat posed by Iran and focus more on procedural critiques, rank among the weakest.
Kamala Harris
California Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris has vowed to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal if elected, commenting that Trump’s decision to withdraw “was not only not smart, because so far it was working, but it was also unilateral action, not bringing along and apparently not consulting our allies around the globe who are also invested in the right outcome.”
The Iran nuclear deal was an agreement between the U.S., UK, France, China, Russia and Germany in which Iran would restrict supposed nuclear-weapons development in exchange for lifted economic sanctions. While the deal is a step towards deescalation, it meets a low bar, as it is premised on a power imbalance: U.S. intelligence agencies acknowledged in 2007 and 2012 that Iran does not have a nuclear-weapons program. What’s more, per the agreement, the U.S. is allowed to retain nuclear weapons, despite its horrific nuclear history. Nonetheless, U.S. withdrawal is disastrous, as it puts the U.S. on a path to greater confrontation with Iran, and because of this, the deal should be defended.
Harris, however, has remained largely mum on the oil-tanker canard. In May, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the U.S. could leverage the post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) as legal justification to attack Iran, Harris stated that she was unaware of the comments. To her credit, Harris became a cosponsor of the “Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2019,” which prohibits funds from being used for a war with Iran without congressional approval. But she was more than three weeks behind Warren, who signed up as a cosponsor on May 14, and even further behind Sanders, who cosponsored the day the bill was introduced: April 4. Troublingly, Harris voted in favor of and co-sponsored a 2017 bill that imposed new sanctions on Iran by bundling them with sanctions against Russia and North Korea. Warren voted in favor of this bill but did not cosponsor, and Sanders was the only congressperson in the House or Senate who caucuses with the Democrats to vote against.
Harris has questioned Washington’s Iran narrative, but frames it not in terms of morality—say, sparing the lives of Iranian people—but in terms of national security. On June 18, she tweeted:
“This president likes to talk tough, but for six months now, we've gone without a permanent Secretary of Defense and he just withdrew his nominee — all as Trump marches us toward conflict with Iran. The president is making us less safe.”
She continued on June 20:
“Either the Trump Administration is angling for another disastrous war in the Middle East, or they've spent two years saber-rattling against Iran with no strategy and no endgame. This president is making America weaker and less safe.”
Harris’ comments boil down to a substanceless process critique. The lack of a Secretary of Defense isn’t the problem: The problem is a political establishment clamoring for war with Iran. Harris, then, ignores the moral stakes of the issue, while accepting the Trump administration’s charge that Iran is a threat to “national security.”
Pete Buttigieg
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose campaign is informed by a “policy details later” approach, has endorsed the unsubstantiated claim that Iran orchestrated the attacks. In a June 16 interview on “Meet the Press,” he called the evidence that Iran orchestrated the attacks “compelling” and stated:
“It’s a little distressing to think that because this administration's credibility is so low in general, I think a lot of people are thinking twice at a moment when America’s word should be decisive.
When the U.S. says this is something that has happened and this is the consensus of our administration, that should be something that goes without question. But of course, that’s just not the case in an administration that has been extremely unreliable in so many ways.”
The same day, Buttigieg expressed disagreement with Bolton’s efforts to ratchet up aggression when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that “we need a measured assessment of information as it continues to come in.” Buttigieg added:
“There's no question that Iran has a pattern of malign activities. There's also no question that there is a pattern that is disturbingly reminiscent of the run-up to the war in Iraq, in some cases being driven by the same people.
I mean, the fact that one of the architects of the Iraq War is the President's National Security Adviser right now, when the president himself has pretended that he was against the Iraq War all along, this is shocking. And it should be extremely disturbing to all of us.”
Buttigieg is right to condemn those who orchestrated the Iraq War and to warn of the parallels between Iraq and Iran as targets of U.S. military action. However, he is mistaken to ignore the power assymetry between the U.S. and Iran.
Joe Biden
Joe Biden’s history as Vice President from 2009 to 2017—which included overseeing the Iran nuclear deal—colors his response to the White House. Like Harris, Biden has remained mostly silent in response to the Pentagon’s recent account, but as of 2017, rejected Trump’s intent to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Like Harris, his rationale gave primacy to the “security” of the U.S. and Israel. “[The Iran nuclear deal] is working,” he wrote on Facebook. “It is making the United States and our allies, including Israel, more secure.” He added, “The Iran deal does one thing: remove the immediate threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would present to the region, Israel, and the United States.”
After the Navy drone was shot down, Biden called Trump’s Iran strategy “a self-inflicted disaster.” He continued:
“Trump also promised that walking away would somehow lead to a better deal—instead, the predictable has happened: Iran is building back up its nuclear capability. It’s sadly ironic that the State Department is now calling on Iran to abide by the very deal the Trump administration abandoned.”
“By walking away from diplomacy, Trump has made military conflict more likely. Another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.”
“Make no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region.
What we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America's standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.”
While Trump’s stratagems should be rebuked, Biden misplaces his focus on the supposed danger of Iran, rather than the violent posturing of the Trump administration.
Elizabeth Warren
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who has supported the nuclear agreement since its inception, has levied criticism toward the White House. On June 18, in response to a New York Times report titled, “Trump Adds Troops After Iran Says It Will Breach Nuclear Deal” (a questionable media framing given that the U.S. had already violated the deal), she tweeted:
“I hope Iran chooses a different path. But let’s be clear: Trump provoked this crisis. He has no strategy to contain it, he’s burned through our friends and allies, and now he’s doubling down on military force. We can’t afford another forever war.”
While Warren was correct to argue against war, she opens by appearing to place blame against Iran, neglecting to acknowledge the U.S.’s role in villainizing Iran in the first place.
On June 20, after reports of the Navy drone were published, Warren elaborated on her comments, adopting a stronger oppositional stance to the prospect of war with Iran.
“Trump provoked this crisis, and his reckless foreign policy by tweet will only worsen it. I've co-sponsored legislation to prohibit a war with Iran. We need to de-escalate tensions—not let the war hawks in this administration drag us into conflict. #NoWarWithIran”
That same day, she followed with
“Donald Trump promised to bring our troops home. Instead he has pulled out of a deal that was working and instigated another unnecessary conflict. There is no justification for further escalating this crisis—we need to step back from the brink of war.”
Here, Warren uses stronger language to denounce Trump’s actions, but still falls short of a moral denunciation of U.S. violence or a more incisive analysis of the Iran nuclear deal’s power relations. Meanwhile, Warren’s vote for new sanctions against Iran in 2017 weakens her legislative record.
Bernie Sanders
Like Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders (and Independent from Vermont who is seeking the Democratic domination) has taken a decidedly oppositional stance, explicitly questioning the official Washington narrative. In a June 18 interview on MSNBC, he commented:
“If you look at the recent history of this country, I think we understand that the two worst foreign policy disasters [the Vietnam War and the Iraq War] were based on lies that came from the White House.”
He added:
“Let me just say this: I will do everything I personally can as a United States Senator to stop the United States attacking Iran. If we go into a war with Iran, this will be an asymmetrical war which will go on and on and on. There will be never-ending wars in the Middle East…So we have got to do everything we can to bring the antagonists, Saudi Arabia, which is a brutal dictatorship, together with Iran…Use the power of the United States to work out a diplomatic solution, not a military solution.”
Sanders repeated these points on Twitter on June 18, noting Trump has “no legal authority to launch an attack on Iran,” and on June 20:
“If you think the invasion of Iraq was a disaster, a war with Iran would be worse. The United States must bring Iran and Saudi Arabia to the negotiating table, not foment a never-ending, unconstitutional war in the region.”
“I think if there was a war with Iran, it would be an absolute disaster for our country, for Iran, for the region, and for the world.”
Sanders, who voted against new sanctions against Iran in 2017, acknowledges U.S. provocation and rejects the notion that Iran is a true threat. Because of this, Sanders’ censure of the White House’s latest war attempt offers the most robust rejection of war with Iran.
Sanders’ was the only campaign that immediately responded to In These Times’ request for comment, sending the following statement (which had previously been publicly released).
“Attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman are unacceptable and must be fully investigated. But this incident must not be used as a pretext for a war with Iran, a war which would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States, Iran, the region and the world. The time is now for the United States to exert international leadership and bring the countries in the region together to forge a diplomatic solution to the growing tensions. I would also remind President Trump that there is no congressional authorization for a war with Iran. A unilateral U.S. attack on Iran would be illegal and unconstitutional.”
Candidates, of course, are right to criticize the power of Trump to wage war without Congress, thanks in part to the expansion of presidential war-making powers under George W. Bush and Obama. But on the eve of possible war, it won’t suffice to point out this procedural breakdown. Candidates need to make it clear they're against a possible war itself, rather than simply the means by which Trump is executing it.
The moral stakes of Washington’s escalating actions against Iran couldn’t be higher. The war the White House seeks is, as Sanders notes, based on lies, and it would unequivocally do untold harm to Iranian people. The evidence doesn’t show that Iran is a “threat,” but rather that the U.S. has manufactured a pretext for yet another brutal war.
FOCUS: The "Center" of American Politics Is on the Left
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=39255"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website</span></a>
Sunday, 23 June 2019 10:42
Reich writes: "Donald Trump, Fox News, and Republicans in Congress label proposals they disagree with 'fringe,' 'radical,' or 'socialist.'"
Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich. (photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star)
The "Center" of American Politics Is on the Left
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Website
23 June 19
onald Trump, Fox News, and Republicans in Congress label proposals they disagree with “fringe,” “radical,” or “socialist.” Well, let’s see where the American people actually stand:
So why do the powerful call these policy ideas “fringe,” or “radical,” or “socialist?”
Money. Many of these initiatives would cost them – requiring either higher taxes on the rich (many could be achieved by repealing the giant Trump tax cut for the wealthy and corporations), or regulations that might cut into their corporate profits.
So you can bet that as these proposals become even more popular, the powerful are going to intensify their attacks.
But just remember: the “center” is not halfway between what most Americans want and what big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy want.
The “center” is what the vast majority of Americans want.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Sunday, 23 June 2019 10:33
Kiriakou writes: "Well, we walked right up to the brink of war with Iran last week. Again. It didn’t happen, of course, and The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other journals of record are replete with minute-by-minute explanations of what happened when and why. Much of it is nonsense. And much more of the coverage ignores the bigger-picture analysis."
John Kiriakou. (photo: The Washington Post)
With Trump’s Iranian Misadventure, Putin Wins Again
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
23 June 19
ell, we walked right up to the brink of war with Iran last week. Again. It didn’t happen, of course, and The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other journals of record are replete with minute-by-minute explanations of what happened when and why. Much of it is nonsense. And much more of the coverage ignores the bigger-picture analysis.
First, we know that after a full day (and part of a night) of consultations with top generals, advisors, and Congressional leaders, President Trump decided to call the whole thing off. He tweeted, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it.” I don’t believe this for a second. That’s not the way it works in real life.
I can tell you from 15 years of first-hand experience at the CIA and another two-and-a-half at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there is never just one target, and never just a target or targets with civilian casualties. Any mid-level nobody involved in planning such an attack can tell you that the president is given a list of dozens of potential targets, each with a cost/benefit analysis attached. International law is such that the targets must not be adjacent to civilian populations anyway. 150 casualties? Not a chance.
A conversation between Trump and “his” generals would have consisted of those generals offering up dozens of choices like bombing parked planes, hitting buildings somehow associated with the Iranian nuclear program in the middle of the night, or maybe even bombing utilities. There wouldn’t be any 150 casualties.
We’ve also seen reports that Trump, through Omani diplomats, told the Iranians that an attack was coming. That’s standard operating procedure. It’s done so that the country being bombed can evacuate whomever needs to be evacuated. It’s a “courtesy” to prevent casualties, as ironic as that may sound. That’s why there were no casualties when Trump bombed Syria in 2017.
More important than Trump’s reasons for calling off the attack is that fact that the entire incident, from start to finish, made him look weak, and it exposed a serious ideological rift in the administration. The image of a “compassionate” Trump—that he called off the attack because the planned response wasn’t commensurate with Iran’s alleged downing of a Northrop Grumman Global Hawk drone—just doesn’t make sense. Nobody believes it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump himself doesn’t. A more likely scenario is that Congressional leaders—Republicans—got to him and told him that he wouldn’t have their support for an attack on Iran, he was being manipulated by his aides, and he was beginning to look like he was taking orders from John Bolton. Remember, Trump is all about perception. He wouldn’t want to be perceived as Bolton’s bitch.
Furthermore, and again I say this from experience, nobody wants less to send troops into harm’s way than the Pentagon brass. When I was at the CIA, the real hawks were the likes of Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, not the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They did all they could to keep us out of places like Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere, even if they failed in the end. Trump, meanwhile, has surrounded himself with hawks who would love nothing more than to bomb the daylights out of just about anybody, Iranian or not. The heavy-hitters are John Bolton, who couldn’t get himself confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration because he was too hawkish even for Republicans in the Senate; Mike Pompeo, who by his own admission absolutely loved the clandestine workings of the CIA when he was director there; and Bloody Gina Haspel, who replaced Pompeo and whose love of torture and violence against other human beings already is well-documented. These are the people who have the president’s ear. At least, they did until a few days ago.
None of those mentioned so far have come out of this a big winner. One person did, though. That would be Vladimir Putin. Trump’s stooges put Putin in a win/win position. First, he wins if Trump acts unilaterally, that is, without United Nations or Congressional authorization and without support from allies. He consults with the Chinese, the Japanese, the Germans, Brits, and French and he looks like the level-headed statesman, the one who doesn’t want to resort to military power.
But then Putin wins again if Trump does attack Iran because he was (again) the level-headed statesman who urged calm, who wanted to use diplomacy, who was willing to be the middleman with the Iranians. He was the one offering negotiations, shuttling to speak with the Chinese, the Europeans, and the Iranians, trying to work out a deal.
I think I have an idea or two. First, hands off Iran. We can’t afford another war, either literally or figuratively. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our schools are declining in quality, our international health care ranking is plummeting. We should spend the money at home. If we’re going to be taken seriously as the strongest superpower in the world, we should exhibit that power across a diplomatic conference room table. Finally, it’s time that Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates fight their own battles. It shouldn’t be up to us to take out their enemy just because it might make their lives easier. They should do their own dirty work, or even better, they too should be engaged in diplomacy, whether directly with Iran in the case of the Gulf States or with their own people, in the case of Israel and the Palestinians.
When war became the de facto way for us to do business, we weakened ourselves. It doesn’t matter how many drones we have, how many ships, or missiles, or tanks. We can’t fight forever, and we certainly can’t win people over with the sword. That kind of policy only weakens us. We’ve seen it fail through both Democratic and Republican administrations. The policy is a bad one. And it has to change.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Clarence Thomas's Astonishing Opinion on a Racist Mississippi Prosecutor
Sunday, 23 June 2019 08:28
Toobin writes: "A Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine."
Clarence Thomas. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Clarence Thomas's Astonishing Opinion on a Racist Mississippi Prosecutor
By Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
23 June 19
Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. Clarence Thomas thinks that was just fine.
That’s the message of an astonishing decision today from the Supreme Court. The facts of the case, known as Flowers v. Mississippi, are straightforward. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, in his admirably blunt opinion for the Court, “In 1996, Curtis Flowers allegedly murdered four people in Winona, Mississippi. Flowers is black. He has been tried six separate times before a jury for murder. The same lead prosecutor represented the State in all six trials.” Flowers was convicted in the first three trials, and sentenced to death. On each occasion, his conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court, on the grounds of misconduct by the prosecutor, Doug Evans, mostly in the form of keeping African-Americans off the juries. Trials four and five ended in hung juries. In the sixth trial, the one that was before the Supreme Court, Flowers was convicted, but the Justices found that Evans had again discriminated against black people, and thus Flowers, in jury selection, and they overturned his conviction. (The breathtaking facts of the case and its accompanying legal saga are described at length on the American Public Media podcast “In the Dark.”)
As Kavanaugh recounted in his opinion, Evans’s actions were almost cartoonishly racist. To wit: in the six trials, the State employed its peremptory challenges (that is, challenges for which no reason need be given) to strike forty-one out of forty-two African-American prospective jurors. In the most recent trial, the State exercised peremptory strikes against five of six black prospective jurors. In addition, Evans questioned black prospective jurors a great deal more closely than he questioned whites. As Kavanaugh observed, with considerable understatement, “A court confronting that kind of pattern cannot ignore it.“
But Thomas can, and he did. Indeed, he filed a dissenting opinion that was genuinely outraged—not by the prosecutor but by his fellow-Justices, who dared to grant relief to Flowers, who has spent more than two decades in solitary confinement at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman prison. Thomas said that the prosecutor’s behavior was blameless, and he practically sneered at his colleagues, asserting that the majority had decided the Flowers case to “boost its self-esteem.” Thomas also found a way to blame the news media for the result. “Perhaps the Court granted certiorari because the case has received a fair amount of media attention,” he wrote, adding that “the media often seeks to titillate rather than to educate and inform.”
The decision in Flowers was 7–2, with Neil Gorsuch joining Thomas’s dissent. The two have become jurisprudentially inseparable, with Gorsuch serving as a kind of deputy to Thomas, as Thomas once served to Antonin Scalia. But Thomas usually has a majority of colleagues on his side, in a way that often eluded Scalia. The Flowers case notwithstanding, Thomas now wins most of the time, typically with the assistance of Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Kavanaugh.
Despite Thomas’s usual silence on the bench (he did ask a question during the Flowers argument), he is clearly feeling ideologically aggressive these days. In his Flowers dissent, Thomas all but called for the overturning of the Court’s landmark decision in Batson v. Kentucky, from 1986, which prohibits prosecutors from using their peremptory challenges in racially discriminatory ways. Earlier this year, he called for reconsideration of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, from 1964, which established modern libel law, with its protections for journalistic expression. And in a decision earlier this month, Thomas made the case that the Court should be more willing to overturn its precedents. It’s customary for the Justices to at least pretend to defer to past decisions, but Thomas apparently no longer feels obligated even to gesture to the Court’s past. As he put it last fall, in a concurring opinion in Gamble v. United States, “We should not invoke stare decisis to uphold precedents that are demonstrably erroneous.” Erroneous, of course, in the judicial world view of Thomas. The Supreme Court’s war on its past has begun, and Clarence Thomas is leading the charge.
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Mississippi prosecutor went on a racist crusade to have a black man executed. 
