Bruce Fein
Constitutional Lawyer and Author

Our safety and salvation lie in the Constitution and the rule of law.
 
That is why the President’s sole oath is to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
 
Thus, President-elect Donald Trump must void President Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) aiming to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions because it is an executive agreement that violates the Constitution’s Treaty Clause.
 
The Constitution’s authors worried that the President would betray national interests for ulterior motives in concluding secret agreements with foreign nations. The example of King Charles II was fixed in their memories. The British Monarch unilaterally negotiated the Secret Treaty of Dover with French King Louis XIV in 1670. Among other things, the treaty provided that Charles II would receive a yearly pension from Louis; that additional sums would be forthcoming when Charles jettisoned Anglicanism for Roman Catholicism; that Louis would provide up to 6,000 French soldiers in the event Charles’ treason provoked an English rebellion; and, that Charles would ally with France in its war against the Dutch.
 
Accordingly, Article II, section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution empowers the President, “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.”
 
To provide treaty advice to the President, half of the eight United States delegates to negotiate the United Nations Charter were Members of Congress: Senators Tom Connally (D-Tex.) and Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.), and Representatives Sol Bloom (D-N.Y.) and Charles Eaton (R-N.J.). Presidents William McKinley, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover similarly included Senators as U.S. delegates to negotiate treaties.
 
Alexander Hamilton elaborated the reasons for the Treaty Clause in Federalist 75:
 
An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.”
 
President Obama negotiated the JCPOA without congressional participation. Further, the agreement between the United States and Iran is a treaty by any plausible constitutional standard or tradition. Hamilton explained in Federalist 75 that treaty “objects are CONTRACTS with foreign nations, which have the force of law, but derive it from the obligations of good faith. They are not rules prescribed by the sovereign to the subject, but agreements between sovereign and sovereign.”
 
The JCPOA fits an agreement between sovereign and sovereign like a glove. Moreover, agreements bearing on nuclear arms have traditionally been treaties. They include the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. Even a paltry agreement with Britain over migratory birds was a treaty, i.e., the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916.
 
Secretary of State John Kerry did not dispute that the JCPOA is a treaty in testifying before the House Foreign Relations Committee. Instead, Mr. Kerry explained that the Obama administration would no longer comply with the Treaty Clause because the threshold of political consensus needed for ratification was too challenging.
 
Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wisc.) inquired: “Why is this [Iran deal] not considered a treaty?”
 
Secretary Kerry responded:
 
“Well Congressman, I spent quite a few years ago trying to get a lot of treaties through the United States Senate...And frankly, it’s become physically impossible. That’s why...Because you can’t pass a treaty anymore...And it’s become impossible to, you know, schedule, it’s become impossible to pass. And I sat there leading the charge on the Disabilities Treaty which fell to, basically, ideology and politics. So I think that’s the reason why.”
 
Alexander Hamilton would have been appalled. The Treaty Clause is to prevent, not to facilitate presidential betrayals or follies.
 
The Constitution’s framers would have impeached, convicted, and removed Mr. Kerry from office for his constitutional perfidy. But Congress has degenerated from a vertebrate to an invertebrate institution over the past several decades. Accordingly, Mr. Kerry escaped congressional rebuke. Congress meekly acquiesced in the JCPOA as an executive agreement.
 
But the Constitution’s separation of powers is a structural bill of rights to protect the American people from tyranny. The Supreme Court has thus held that one branch may not voluntarily surrender its powers to another branch and jeopardize the liberties of the citizenry.
 
Last March, Mr. Trump declared that his “Number-One priority” would be “to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” That is not an option. It is a constitutional imperative until and unless the Senate ratifies the agreement with a two-thirds majority.
 
And if the JCPOA precedent is not disowned by President Trump, it will lie around like a loaded weapon ready for any successor to use to justify an international global warming pact as a constitutionally valid executive agreement that might cripple the American economy.
 
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More: Iran Nuclear Deal Executive Agreements Treaty Clause Trump

Original: Huffington Post

Bruce Fein
Constitutional Lawyer and Author
President-elect Donald Trump campaigned against the multi-trillion dollar military industrial-counterterrorism complex (MICC). Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her battalions of neo-con myrmidons were its drum majors.
If Mr. Trump refrains from dismantling the MICC in favor of invincible self-defense, he will have betrayed his constituents. He will be another outsider who becomes an insider by the seduction of power.
The MICC represents the worst investment in the history of mankind. Continuing MICC wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, have cost a staggering $6 trillion—nearly one-third of the entire national debt. In exchange for that sum, they have begotten an escalation of international terrorism, record opium production, the birth of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and a strengthening of arch-enemy Iran. The MICC is unworthy of even a sentence in The Art of the Deal.
Mr. Trump’s campaigned on making America great again.
In foreign policy, America’s greatness and glory has been the celebration of liberty at home, and exerting influence abroad by example. The principles of equality, self-government, and liberty enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution fell like hammer blows on an anvil across monarchical Europe.
Then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his July 4, 1821 Address to Congress that preserving America’s greatness meant renouncing war except in self-defense, and creating an invincible national shield with the motto: “Freedom, Independence, Peace.” Thus, when Hungary pleaded for United States military intervention to defend against the Russian Bear under the banner of “world leader,” Senator Henry Clay responded:
“Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty, that, adhering to our wise, pacific system, and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp burning brightly on this western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics of Europe.”
Senator Clay was echoing President George Washington’s Farewell Address warning against foreign entanglements.
The United States lost its greatness with the birth of the MICC after World War II. It inflated danger abroad manifold to justify its existence and growth. At present, the MICC is gratuitously waging war in seven countries: Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is also engaged in indefinite global wars against ISIS and Al-Qaeda. The MICC scoffs at Abraham Lincoln’s pinpointing the true danger to American greatness:
“-At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?— Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?...It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
To make America great again, President Trump’s foreign policy slogan should be “Tens of billions for defense, but not one cent for world leadership.”
President Trump should immediately end all of the MICC’s wars that are diverting trillions of dollars away from the construction of needed infrastructure; making us less safe by creating more enemies than they are destroying; hijacking our national genius away from production to killing; and, giving birth to a surveillance state that targets every “not-yet-guilty” American.
President Trump should redeploy all of our armed forces stationed abroad back to the United States to defend our borders, our sea lanes, our air space, and our cyberspace. As Otto von Bismarck would not risk the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier for the whole of the Balkans, President Trump should not risk the life of a single American soldier for a foreigners or foreign nations without allegiance to us.
To symbolize his commitment to invincible self-defense, President Trump should give our armed forces a pay raise after redeployment to the United States.
He should also renounce any treaty commitment to defend another nation from aggression as unconstitutional. The United States Supreme Court held in Reid v. Covert that treaties cannot override the Constitution; and, the latter entrusts to Congress exclusive responsibility for war under Article I, section 8, clause 11. Treaties involve only the Senate.
Finally, President Trump should renounce the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran purporting to restrain its nuclear ambitions. By any legal or historical standard, the JCPOA was a treaty requiring Senate ratification by a two-thirds majority. Instead, President Obama promulgated the JCOPA as an executive agreement in circumvention of the Constitution’s Treaty Clause.
The Constitution is too important to America’s greatness to sacrifice on the altar of political expediency.

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Original: Huffington Post

Bruce Fein
Constitutional Lawyer and Author

Five American foreign policy myths are generated in the corridors of power to elicit popular support and lavish congressional funding for the multi-trillion dollar military-industrial-counterterrorism complex.
MYTH 1. We actively oppose non-democratic nations.
Not only does our foreign policy underwrite a cavalcade of dictatorial-authoritarian regimes, we often prefer them to democratic dispensations. Among other things, in 1953, we overthrew the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, in favor of the dictatorial Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi. In 1954, we overthrew Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of genocidal military dictators. In 1965, we intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic to block the restoration to power of democratically elected President Juan Bosch. In 1973, we intervened in Chile to orchestrate the overthrow and killing of democratically elected President Salvador Allende in favor of the murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet. From 1976-1983, we encouraged military dictatorship in Argentina featuring grisly human rights violations at the expense of democracy.
The United States routinely supports dictatorial or oppressive regimes with weapons sales or financial assistance. We have approved approximately $90 billion in weapons sales to the religiously bigoted, misogynistic, anti-democratic, anti-Semitic Saudi Arabian government since 2010 alone. We have also approved billions of dollars in weapons sales to the Persian Gulf statelets ofQatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, all of which exhibit contempt for fundamental human rights. In 2011, Saudi Arabia dispatched troops to Bahrein to suppress a popular uprising against a tyrannical, sectarian Sunni regime while the Fifth Fleet of the United States Navy stood by.
We support the Jordanian monarchy, Egypt’s military dictatorship, an ousted Yemeni dictator, a growing authoritarian government in Turkey, a tribal tyranny in Ethiopia, and a military dictatorship in Thailand.
We support regimes that assist our foreign policy objective of global domination irrespective of their democratic credentials. The basic idea is well illustrated by two quotations. President Franklin Roosevelt reputedly said about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, “He may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he’s our son-of-a-bitch.” And French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau acerbically remarked about President Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference: “He speaks like Jesus Christ, but he acts like [British Prime Minister] Lloyd George.”
MYTH 2. The United States knows how to make countries embrace democracy; and, we will succeed in giving birth to democratic dispensations if we employ sufficient financial or military leverage.
The infinitely complex elements of democracy have been mastered by only a handful since the beginning of time. It took the unique mind, scholarship, and political experience of James Madison to produce a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in 1787, i.e., the United States Constitution. The British needed six centuries after Magna Charta before monarchy was replaced by responsible government.
Despite substantial financial or military leverage, we failed to introduce viable democracies or reasonable facsimiles in South Vietnam, the Arab Middle East, Somalia, Libya, South Sudan, Egypt, Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, and Azerbaijan, among other nations. We have been unable to prevent the loss of Turkey’s democratic trappings.
Democracy in post-World War II Germany and Japan do not disprove the myth. Prior to World War II, both countries had embraced building blocks of democracy and the rule of law during the Weimar Republic and Meiji Restoration, respectively. Both countries exhibited a homogenous culture and self-identity necessary before tribalism can be rendered subservient to national loyalties. The United States needed little leverage or genius to return Germany and Japan to their democratic paths after the war concluded.
Neither do the cases of South Korea or Taiwan contradict the myth. In the former, we supported three decades of authoritarian rule under Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, and Chun Do Hwan before democracy was flowered at the demand of the South Korean people. We had delayed South Korea’s democratic flowering by approving of the military’s bloody suppression of the 1980 Kwangju uprising. In Taiwan, we supported the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek from 1949-1975. Taiwan slowly segued into a democracy by popular demand over the next two decades under the hand of the dictator’s son, Chiang Ching Kuo. The culmination was the direct election of President Lee Teng-hui in 1996. In the interim, the United States ceased recognition of Taiwan in favor of the more ruthless and dictatorial People’s Republic of China. The United States did not accelerate, but delayed Taiwan’s indigenous embrace of democracy by our unwavering support for the military dictatorship of Chiang Kai-Shek for twenty-five years.
MYTH 3. The United States is saddled with a moral or legal obligation to undertake “humanitarian” wars to prevent large-scale killings or genocide in foreign lands.
The only moral obligation of the United States Government is to advance the interests of its citizens who pay the taxes, obey the laws, and fight necessary wars in self-defense. The USG has no moral obligation to assist any foreigners unless we are responsible for their plight.
In the 1930’s alone, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin killed at least thirteen to fifteen million opponents—more than twice the number of Holocaust victims. The United States stood idly by without provoking either moral or legal rebuke. Approximately 65-70 million Chinese were killed under Mao Zedong’s dictatorship while the United States like all other nations and the United Nations did nothing. It has never been suggested that a “humanitarian” war against Mao was a moral or legal imperative.
Not a word in the United States Constitution or international law that supports a United States obligation to send its citizens abroad to risk that last full measure of devotion to save foreigners from killing or abuse by their own governments or peoples. Foreigners owe us no loyalty and pay us no taxes. If there were such an obligation, we would be compelled to commence multiple wars immediately with Russia over Chechens, China over Tibetans and Uighurs, Burma over the Rohingya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo over tribal and ethnic killings which have surpassed 6 million, South Sudan for the massacre of non-Dinka tribes, Nigeria for brutalizing Christians and Biafrans, and North Korea for starving or otherwise oppressing its entire population. Humanitarian wars frequently kill more lives than are saved, as with our military interventions against Libya in 2011 and Somalia in 1992.
United States citizens who feel morally compelled to attempt the prevention of mass killings abroad are free to risk their lives or money towards that end in the manner of the 3,000 Americans who fought for the Loyalists against General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 under the banner of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
“Humanitarian” war is an oxymoron. All wars make legal what would otherwise be first degree murder, which can never be humanitarian.
MYTH 4. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a moral or legal cornerstone of international peace and security.
The NPT reflects an international legal order in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. It crowns five (5) nations with the exclusive rights to develop, possess, and deploy nuclear weapons: the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France.
The five were not selected because of a demonstrated superiority in international morality or justice. The United States is the only nation that has ever used nuclear weapons. The United States and the Soviet Union brought the world to the edge of nuclear destruction during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. China’s Mao Zedong blithely remarked in 1957: “I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I’m not afraid of anyone.”
During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur requested authority to use atomic weapons. He explained that he would drop 30-50 atomic bombs across the neck of Manchuria, and spread a belt of radioactive cobalt from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea to insure that for 60 years there would be no land invasion of Korea from the North.
The United States, Russia, Great Britain, China, and France were the only nuclear-weapons states when the NPT was negotiated. They wished to maintain that military advantage over the rest of the world. Under the NPT, all non-nuclear weapons states are forced to assume a risk of nuclear obliteration that nuclear-weapons states do not. That asymmetry emboldens rather than discourages adventurism by the latter.
The key peace provision in the NPT has been flouted. Article VI requires nuclear-weapons states “to pursue negotiations in good faith...on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” No such negotiations have been forthcoming for nearly 50 years.
The NPT as an instrument of international peace is further weakened by Article VII’s authorization to withdraw upon three months’ notice. North Korea exercised this option in 2003, and is currently estimated to possess 10-15 nuclear warheads. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan, and India never signed the NPT, and have developed substantial nuclear arsenals.
In sum, the NPT is only an ornamental barrier to nuclear weapons proliferation.
MYTH 5. The United States is an indispensable nation. We are compelled by providence to play the role of world leader.
This is national narcissism at its apex, a modern version of “Manifest Destiny” that ignited the Mexican-American War and the slaughters of Native American Indians.
In playing the role of “world leader,” the United States was responsible for millions of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilian deaths during the Vietnam War. We inflicted further devastation on millions more with indiscriminate use of Agent Orange.
In playing the role of “indispensable” nation” since 9/11, we have been responsible for at least 1.3 million Muslim deaths according to a study conducted the Physicians for Social Responsibility. On Hillary Clinton’s watch as Secretary of State, we turned Libya and South Sudan into Aceldamas. Our ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya have generated millions of refugees. On May 12, 1996, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a soulmate of Hillary Clinton, callously declared on CBS’ “60 Minutes” sanctions against Saddam Hussein were “worth [the price]” of killing 500,000 Iraqi children.
Graveyards are filled with indispensable nations.
 
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Original: Huffington Post

Bruce Fein
Constitutional Lawyer and Author

They are all begotten from the DNA of the species that craves power for the sake of power—an evil that has persisted unchanged since Adam and Eve.
The United States has predictably followed the model of its Roman precursor. First we fought in self-defense against the British. Then we fought in defense of allies in World War I. Then we invented allies to defend, for example, Vietnam, Kuwait, or Somalia. And then we began to fight for the sake of fighting unable to define victory over international terrorism or otherwise beyond Justice Potter Stewart’s memorable definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.”
Like its predecessors, the American Empire refuses to entertain the idea that our endless, gratuitous foreign interventions have created enemies that would not otherwise have attacked us. Upton Sinclair explained the fierce resistance to the truth: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Trillions of dollars of wealth, great power, and social status lie behind our military-industrial-terrorism (MIT) complex. It thrives on perpetual war and concocted fears of danger and existential threats. Since the Americana Empire took hold after World War II, none have dared to insinuate that our chronic, objectless, military interventions in the Middle East in support of brutal, corrupt, oppressive regimes have provoked retaliation by the oppressed. We have provided material assistance to state’s featuring repression, torture and extrajudicial killings, for example, the Shah of Iran, the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Two fatwas issued by Osama bin Laden before 9/11 protested the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia near the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, not our freedom of speech or religion, elections, due process, or gender equality.
Think of the analogy of a bayonet and a hornet’s nest. The nest will not harm you if you leave it undisturbed. But if you smash it to bits with a bayonet, the hornets within will sting you.
The United States would be vastly freer, wealthier, and safer if we withdrew all our troops from the Middle East for redeployment at home to protect our borders, our shores, and our skies. Israel commands more than enough power to fend for itself. With vastly less military might in 1948, Israel handily defeated Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Palestinian Arabs combined. And we should cease selling arms or providing non-humanitarian aid of any type to the region.
Our warfare state, nursed and fueled by the military-industrial-terrorism (MIT) complex, is the great destroyer of liberty. Its malignant children have been the surveillance state, national bankruptcy, secret government, and the evisceration of constitutional checks and balances.
Abraham Lincoln said it best in 1838 as we began our descent into Empire riding the militant wave of Manifest Destiny:

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?— Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
...If [danger] ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”


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Original: Huffington Post

Bruce Fein
Constitutional Lawyer and Author

Since climbing to the apex of global power, the American Empire’s foreign policy has been earmarked by stupidity on steroids.

Our chronic gratuitous interventions abroad at staggering expense under the delusion of spreading democracy and peace have diminished our security and spiked the world’s misery index.
Yet the architects of these failures have paid no price. They have been neither punished nor professionally ridiculed.
The establishment treats them like Montessori School students with grades based on effort irrespective of the catastrophic results.
Our race towards self-ruination will accelerate unless we begin to hold the authors of foreign policy debacles accountable and create disincentives for stupidity.
In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency engineered the overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq on behalf of the megalomaniacal, brutal, and corrupt Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlevi. Prime Minister Mossadeq was unthreatening to the United States. His democratic dispensation was the first in the Middle East. His agreement to pay compensation for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company satisfied international law. There never would have been an Iranian Revolution if the United States had left Iran’s democratic dispensation unshipwrecked.
The 1979 Revolution was provoked by our support for the keenly execrated Shah.
On December 31, 1977, in Tehran, President Jimmy Carter effused: “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world. This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”
Then came Ayatollah Khomeini as the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the hostage crisis, Hezbollah, and Iran’s decent into a theocratic, tyrannical, terroristic state with nuclear ambitions.
No official or advisor has been held accountable for this foreign policy calamity.
In 1954, the C.I.A. orchestrated the overthrow of democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. He was an unthreatening socialist like Norman Thomas. We next supported four decades of Guatemalan military, genocidal dictatorship featuring hundreds of thousands of unspeakable atrocities. We made Guatemala a failed state that fuels illegal drug trafficking and immigration across our borders.
No official or advisor has been held accountable for our stupendously stupid and wicked Guatemalan interventions.
The Vietnam War was a fool’s errand from its beginning in 1955 to its conclusion in 1975. Indochina posed no threat to the United States. The domino theory was bogus. We engineered the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem, and then supported a phalanx of unpopular, corrupt, and brutal military dictators in tandem with the C.I.A.’s notorious Phoenix assassination program. The war cost more than $1 trillion in current dollars, and more than 58,000 American soldiers were killed. The boundless stupidity of the Vietnam War is confirmed by our current support for Vietnam in its disputes with China over the South China Sea or otherwise; our 2001 extension of permanent normal trade relations with Vietnam; and, out inclusion of Vietnam in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement.
Why no professional ignominy for the officials or advisors who engineered the Vietnam non-natural disaster?
We initiated war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in 1991 to undo his occupation of Kuwait to restore the 300-year-old Al-Sabah dynasty marginally less tyrannical but more religiously extremist. The war weakened Iraq’s capacity to contain Iran at zero cost to us, and was superfluous to deterring Saddam’s WMD ambitions. Israel had destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, and was poised for a repeat performance if necessary. Oil would continue to flow through the Persian Gulf to the United States—directly or indirectly—irrespective of Kuwait’s fate as it did throughout the Arab OPEC oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War. Force does not defeat the law of supply and demand as the failed trillion-dollar War on Drugs corroborates.
Operation Desert Storm was taken to a new level of stupidity twelve years later in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In 2003, Iraq was a cost-free Chinese Wall against Iranian regional hegemony. Our no-fly zones and sanctions had eliminated Saddam as a danger to the United States. To believe that Saddam could be replaced with a democratic dispensation featuring freedom of religion, the rule of law, and separation of powers required doltish hallucinations.
The post-Saddam government predictably became an appendage of arch-enemy Iran. Iraq splintered on religious, ethnic, and tribal lines creating an opening for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. To date, the United States has expended $1 trillion in Iraq and sacrificed the lives and limbs of thousands of brave American soldiers over thirteen years to make Iran and ISIL stronger and Iraq convulsed.
No official or advisor has been stigmatized for complicity in our Iraqi follies.
Since we haven’t taxed foreign policy stupidity, we have gotten more of it in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, West Africa, South Sudan, the South China Sea, ad infinitum.
We have entrusted foreign policy to persons without any theory of man necessary to avoid catastrophes born of mistaking God for Mephistopheles.
They will not expend the intellectual labor to acquire that mastery without strong professional disincentives for failing to do so.

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Original: Huffington Post