The recent decision by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to begin holding press conferences may be one more indication of the increased influence of Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas). The Federal Reserve has long ignored the public and conducted its proceedings in cloister, but the Wall Street Journal reported April 21 that Bernanke will hold the Fed’s first scheduled press conference ever after Wednesday April 27 Open Market Committee meeting.
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Mike Lawson writes:
I’m not saying it’s good or giving him a pass on the natural born thing, but honestly, in light of everything else going on, is pursuing this really likely to do anything but cause fights?
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Of our Libyan intervention, one thing may be safely said, and another safely predicted.
When he launched his strikes on the Libyan army and regime, Barack Obama did not think it through. And this nation is now likely to be drawn even deeper into that war.
For Moammar Gadhafi’s forces not only survived the U.S. air and missile strikes, after which we turned the air war over to NATO, his forces have since shown themselves superior to the rebels. Without NATO, the rebels would have been routed a month ago.
And, today, NATO itself stands a chance of being humiliated.
“NATO’s Bomb Supply Is Running Short,” ran Saturday’s headline in The Washington Post over a story that began thus:
“Less than a month into the Libyan conflict, NATO is running short of precision bombs, highlighting the limitations of Britain, France and other European countries in maintaining even a relatively small military action over an extended period of time. …
“The shortage of European munitions, along with the limited number of aircraft available, has raised doubts … about whether the United States can continue to avoid returning to the air campaign if Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi hangs on to power.”
Only six NATO nations have planes running strikes on the Libyan army, and the French and British, who are doing most of the bombing, are running out of laser-guided munitions. And their planes are not equipped to handle U.S. smart bombs.
NATO air attacks are thus becoming less precise and lethal, as Gadhafi is pounding Misrata, the last rebel-held city in the west, and his army is again contesting Ajdabiya, the gateway to Benghazi.
In short, the war is not going well. Where does this leave us?
If the United States does not get back on the field, the Libyan army will likely crush resistance in Misrata and push the rebels back to Benghazi and Tobruk.
As the rebels lack the soldiering experience or organization to conduct an offensive, and their NATO air arm is weakening, the best they can probably hope for in the near term is to hold on to what they have in the east. Which means a stalemate — a no-win war.
Can Obama accept such an outcome to a war he started, at the outset of which he declared Gadhafi must go? Can he go into 2012 with Republicans mocking him for picking a fight with Gadhafi, then losing it for the United States? Can Obama leave Gadhafi in Tripoli knowing he is plotting terror attacks against America in reprisal?
If Gadhafi survives, does Obama survive?
Can he tell the beleaguered British and French we are not going to double down on our folly of having started this war?
In an op-ed last week in The New York Times, Obama, along with Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron, wrote:
“Our duty and our mandate is … not to remove Gadhafi by force. But it is impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gadhafi in power. … It is unthinkable that someone who tried to massacre his own people can play a part in their future government.”
But if it is “unthinkable” and “impossible” for Gadhafi to remain in power, who is going to remove him?
Absent celestial intervention, it is Uncle Sam, or no one.
If regime change is now the unstated NATO mission, who but the United States can ensure the mission is accomplished?
The Post story about Britain and France, the leading military powers of NATO Europe, depleting their smart-bomb supply in a one-month clash with an African nation of 6 million, and begging the Yanks to come back and win the war for them, raises a major question.
Is the most successful alliance in history, which kept the Red Army of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev from smashing through the Fulda Gap and reaching the Channel, a hollow shell?
Is NATO, without America, a paper tiger?
On the eve of World War I, the German foreign minister, after visiting the aged Emperor Franz Josef in Austria, reported back to the Kaiser, “Sire, we are allied to a corpse.”
Are we?
In the 1990s, we had to pull the British and French chestnuts out of the Bosnian fire. When Serbs fought for their cradle province of Kosovo, America had to break Belgrade with 78 days of bombing.
NATO Europe couldn’t handle a fight in its own backyard.
Though we are still in Iraq, NATO is gone. There are NATO units in Afghanistan, but some have pulled out and others won’t fight.
What benefit does America receive from membership in NATO to justify the cost of maintaining tens of thousands of troops, air and naval bases, ships and planes defending a rich and populous continent that chronically refuses to provide the arms and men to defend itself?
Why are Americans still defending Europe 66 years after World War II ended and a generation after the Soviet Union disappeared?
Isn’t it time we kicked them out of the nest?
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Texas Rep. Ron Paul has won another Republican presidential straw poll.
The Texas Republican won the Lexington county Republican Party presidential straw poll Saturday, taking 16 percent of the 139 ballots cast. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney finished in a tie for second place with real estate mogul Donald Trump, taking 12 percent of the vote.
Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/articles/rep-ron-paul-wins-south-carolina-straw-poll/#ixzz1JsAlZ9b3
Ron Paul, the conservative congressman from Texas known for his small-government beliefs rooted in Libertarianism, told an audience Monday in Iowa that government should dictate what happens in the womb of pregnant women.
Speaking at the Iowa Family Leader’s presidential lecture series in Sioux City, Paul, an obstetrician and a Christian, explained that he disagreed with the popular belief that to be a Libertarian means having a laissez faire attitude of “it’s the woman’s body; she can do whatever she wants.”
“Life comes from our creator, not our government,” Politico reported Paul as saying. “Liberty comes from our creator, not from government. Therefore, the purpose, if there is to be a purpose, for government is to protect life and liberty.”
Paul’s stance on abortion won him the endorsement in 2008 of none other than “Jane Roe” from the landmark Roe v. Wade legal case of the ’70s.
“Roe,” whose real name is Norma McCorvey, became a pro-life advocate a decade ago and supported Paul in the last presidential election specifically because of his views on abortion. “I support Ron Paul for president because we share the same goal, that of overturning Roe v. Wade,” McCorvey said. “He has never wavered … on the issue of being pro-life and has a voting record to prove it. He understands the importance of civil liberties for all, including the unborn.”
When Paul accepted the endorsement he said, “As much as I talk about economic liberties, and civil liberties and trying to avoid the killing overseas, I think the issue of life is paramount.”
“NATO is moving very slowly, allowing Gadhafi forces to advance,” said rebel leader Abdul Fattah Younis, as the Libyan army moved back to the outskirts of Ajdabiya, gateway city to Benghazi.
“NATO has become our problem.”
Younis is implying that if NATO does not stop Libyan soldiers from capturing Ajdabiya, the rebels may be defeated — and NATO will be responsible for that defeat.
And who is Abdul Fattah Younis?
Until six weeks ago, he held the rank of general and interior minister and was regarded as the No. 2 man in Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.
Yet his military assessment does not appear too far off.
Last week, Gadhafi’s forces were again on the offensive, after having been driven by U.S. air and missile strikes all the way back to his hometown of Sirte.
What gave the Libyan army its new lease on life?
The Americans handed off the war to NATO and moved to the sidelines, restricting U.S. forces to supporting roles.
As of today, however, it appears that if the U.S. military does not re-engage deeply and actively in this war, the Libyan uprising could go down to defeat. And we will be blamed.
How did Barack Obama get us into this box?
Last week, Sen. Jim Webb questioned Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa Command.
As neither the United States, nor its citizens, nor any U.S. ally had been attacked or imperiled, Webb asked, what was the justification for the U.S. attack on Libya, whose government, Gadhafi’s government, the State Department still recognizes as the legitimate government of Libya?
“To protect lives,” was Ham’s response.
Yet, as last week brought news of the slaughter of 1,000 civilians by gunfire and machete by troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the man we recognize as the legitimate president of the Ivory Coast, a question arises: Why was a real massacre in West Africa less a casus belli for us than an imagined massacre in North Africa?
Was Obama stampeded into war by hysterical talk of impending atrocities that had no basis in fact?
That is the issue raised by columnist Steve Chapman, that ought to be raised by a Congress that was treated almost contemptuously, when Obama launched a war without seeking its authorization.
On March 26, over a week after he ordered the strikes on Libya, hitting tanks, anti-aircraft, radar sites, troops and Gadhafi’s own compound in Tripoli, 600 miles away from Benghazi, Obama told the nation he had acted to prevent a “bloodbath” in Benghazi.
“We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
White House Middle East expert Dennis Ross reportedly told foreign policy experts: “We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ — the real or imminent possibility that up to 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it.”
A hundred thousand massacred! And our fault? But that is seven times the body count of Katyn, one of the Stalinist horrors of World War II. Was Benghazi truly about to realize the fate that befell Carthage at the hands of Scipio Africanus, at the close of the Third Punic War?
How did the White House come to believe in such a scenario?
In this low-scale war, the cities of Zwara, Ras Lanuf, Brega, and Ajdabiya have changed hands, some several times. Misrata, the only rebel-held city in the west, has been under siege for seven weeks.
Yet in none of these towns has anything like the massacre in the Ivory Coast taken place, let alone Srebrenica. The Guardian’s Saturday report read, “Fierce fighting in Ajdabiya saw at least eight people killed.”
Yemeni President Saleh’s security forces killed six times that many civilians just to break up one rally in his central square.
True, on March 17, Gadhafi said he would show “no mercy.” But as Chapman notes, he was referring to “traitors” who resisted him to the end. And Gadhafi added, “We have left the way open to them.”
“Escape. Let those who escape go forever.” Gadhafi went on to pledge that “whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected.”
Perhaps Gadhafi is lying.
But there is, as yet, no evidence of any such slaughter in any town his forces have captured. Nor do the paltry forces Gadhafi has mustered to recapture the east — Ajdabiya was attacked by several dozen Toyota trucks — seem capable of putting a city of 700,000 to the sword.
With the Libyan war now seemingly a stalemate, and pressure building for the United States to renew air and missile strikes, and train and equip rebel forces, Congress needs to learn how we got into this mess.
Was Obama stampeded into this war by the panic and hysteria of his advisers? Because, quite clearly, he did not think this thing through.
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Obama went to war to split the Republican Party in anticipation of the 2012 elections. He has succeeded. He has sundered the GOP not only from its base, but from the Constitution (pacethe well-argued assertions that there was never a serious ligature to sever). Hard-core Bush supporters, especially the Big-Money types who profit so much from endless war (viz. Dick Cheney’s fan club), will be hard-pressed to “oppose the troops,” who will undoubtedly be on the ground until the elections are over — nor will they want to lose their incomes.
But what about Obama’s Left-wing supporters? They are “anti-war” in name only. All they want is power, and he’s grabbing plenty of it — and “spreading it around” like he is our money. In that, they are like their cousins on the Old Left, the Neocons, who now cheer Obama the liar, who broke all his campaign promises so he could remake the country in his own sordid image. (Kid Kristol welcomes this, of course: with his pathetic smirk he welcomes Obama as a “Born-Again Neocon,” bragging that Obama might even have consulted him about Libya).
This is the sad reality. In a sense, Obama has already secured his second term.
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Kuyperian Commentary Podcast
