War Pigs

Exposing and Disarming the Military Industrial Complex

Jan 29, 2024

We are rapidly approaching a scenario where US troops are once again sent into the Middle East, as garden variety conservatives foolishly cheer Joe Biden’s bombing of Yemen.

I’d like to start this SubStack out with a few short words from Lt. General Michael Flynn, specifically an excerpt from his interview last year with Eric Metaxas:

And I’d like to supplement that with a clip from a recent interview with Col. Douglas MacGregor:

There is nothing “America First” about escalating a conflict that will inevitably cost the American people—who are already struggling to get by—not only the little pittance they’ve managed to scrape together, but potentially the lives of their friends and family.

You would think that by this point, in our 7+ years working together as an army of digital soldiers, we’d be hip to the game, but it is abundantly clear that there is a sizable subset of our readers who are still afflicted with the Clinton/Bush-era media programming they were steeped in for the better part of two decades.

There are always forces working behind the scenes. The Israel Lobby, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, have more power over our current administration than most would like to believe.

Remember what I wrote in the first War Pigs, at the outset of this conflict, “they don’t care what side you choose, so long as you do choose a side.”

They need your investment in this war, you can support Israel or Palestine, so long as you are no longer thinking about AMERICA FIRST.

The Western neocons play the undiscerning public like a fiddle. They haven’t gone off into the sunset with Bush Jr. and Dick Cheney; they live on, as influential as ever, in league with the modern Democrat party.

The Rebranded Neocons of the Democrat Party

To the untrained eye, the unholy reunion of establishment Democrats and the political representatives of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC,) otherwise known as Neoconservatives, appears to have occurred more than half a decade ago, in the immediate wake of Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump in 2016.

It was one of the most under-discussed things in progressive and liberal circles at the time. The Democrats, who were enjoying the limelight and clout awarded by an articulate President-of-color and a well oiled propaganda machine during the Obama Era, were seemingly in the process of assimilating the then-radioactive and discredited neocons, something that would be on full display once Trump won the Presidency.

The reasoning was simple: both factions loathed Donald Trump, as he posed an existential threat to them all.

The Democrats and the establishment Republicans hated him because he was their first real political opposition after years of uncontested uniparty-rule. The neocons loathed Trump because he sought to put an end to all wars and enact non-interventionist policy, essentially neutering the MIC.

In any other time, this budding union would have been looked on by Democrat voters with horror and dismay, however, the Trump Derangement Syndrome that had afflicted such huge swaths of the population at that time must also have been accompanied by some kind of amnesia. No one batted an eye once the same forces that were almost universally hated by the end of the Bush era were now on the side of establishment Democrats.

Though it may have seemed like they were quietly getting the old band back together, the truth was that they never really parted ways.

Remember how the liberal media, once the MIC/Deep State agenda in the Middle East was safely secured, began shifting its stance from exclusively focusing on post 9-11 war-propaganda to then criticizing Bush, Cheney and the neocons? They were presented as the problem in American politics, to which Barak Obama would be marketed as the ‘solution.’

Of course, it was all very effective kabuki theater, as the left was in bed with neocons the whole time.

One of the things that the security state and its representatives often do is prime the conditions for future wars while they’re engaged in present wars. Obama was still drone bombing civilians in the Middle East (including an average of 72 bombs dropped per day in 2016 alone,) while the likes of Victoria Nuland were busy escalating tensions with Russia. A confrontation with Russia had been in the works for a long time at that point, and it never would have happened if the neocons had actually been reined-in during the Obama era.

Vladimir Putin was the new up and coming boogeyman for the denizens of the West to hate and fear, so developing an angle where Donald trump was an agent of the Kremlin served two purposes. This is how the Russia-Collusion hoax was born.

Soon, once disgraced neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, Mike Rogers. Jamie Fly, etc. would grace left-wing media outlets like CNN and MSNBC, pontificating to us plebs about the dangers Donald Trump posed to Democracy.

These same neocons were hard at work during the Clinton Administration, too.

Do you remember the air strike against Iraq that Bill Clinton initiated on the same day that Monica Lewinski was testifying before a grand jury? That move was the brainchild of Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and their fellow neocons in the Project for A New American Century.

Democrats frequently rationalize this alliance as a simple union of convenience—a pragmatic and transitory partnership imperative for the limited objective of obstructing Trump. However, that is a patent pretext and, to put it mildly, unpersuasive for a multitude of reasons. Long before anyone believed Donald Trump could accede to power, a reunification of Democrats and Neocons was taking place; this alliance is based on shared objectives, perspectives, and policies.

An example: one of Dick Cheney's foremost foreign policy advisers during the Bush administration was Victoria Nuland. Nuland, who was married to one of the most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, transitioned without difficulty from the Bush White House to the Obama State Department, then to the Clinton campaign's chief foreign policy adviser, and now is second in command in Joe Biden's State Department.

The ramifications of this reunion are significant and enduring. By a wide margin, neocons have caused considerably more harm to the United States and the world than any other single group. They were the masterminds behind the Iraq invasion and the accompanying deceit, the post-9/11 global torture regime, and the prevailing political atmosphere that stigmatized dissent.

The Bombing Campaign

In most Western countries, it is extremely unusual for their government to just casually announce that they are going to start bombing another country, but in America, we’ve become so used to it that no one really bats an eye.

Regardless of your views on the bombing campaign that Biden initiated, there are a couple of indisputable points worth considering:

First, despite the fact that these attacks had been planned weeks in advance, they were carried out without congressional approval or debate. A number of representatives have made objections to the strikes on the grounds that they are illegal and unconstitutional.

It is worth noting, in case anyone was wondering, that it is a matter of debate whether the American President has the constitutional authority to order the use of military force without the proper congressional approval in this instance.

Secondly, even if you think Biden’s decision to bomb these targets without congressional approval was the right call, you cannot deny that his actions have now caused the war to escalate to include the use of American combat forces.

Regardless of the various excuses being bandied about, what Biden and the UK did was, by definition, an escalation.

We weren’t bombing Yemen, and now we are.

And by the way, they broadcast their intentions to the entire world before carrying these strikes out, compromising whatever strategic effect they might have had.

Now, instead of simply sending an endless stream of taxpayer dollars to another country on the other side of the world, we will potentially also soon be paying with the lives of our brothers, our sisters and our children in uniform.

It’s worth noting that as I am writing this, the Houthis, despite how any of us might feel about them, to my knowledge haven’t actually killed anyone in their “harassment campaign,” though the MSM and the Pentagon are already slow rolling a Hollywoodesque narrative designed to elicit further support of the bombing campaign.

Was the Escalation Unconstitutional?

The United States had ceased bombing Yemen for roughly a year—that is, until last Thursday when the Biden Administration decided it was going to bomb 16 different sites in that country.

To provide some critical backstory, there had been a somewhat informal ceasefire between the Houthis and the Saudis for the last year, which, by the way was a war that had started under President Obama, who extensively helped the Saudis by decimating Yemen and creating one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, until the recent bombardment and deprivation taking place in Gaza, of course.

The primary justification you’ll see for this escalation, among others, is the often misrepresented War Powers Resolution (or Act) (50 U.S.C. §§ 1541-1550).

Section 1541(c) of the War Powers Resolution states:

"The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

None of the three scenarios cited above indicate that the President can take unilateral offensive military action without the consent of Congress.

Former Michigan Congressman Justin Amash recently broke it down on X:

The first two (scenarios) allow the president to take offensive military action but only with Congress's express approval (Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war). The third authority allows the president to take defensive military action without Congress's approval in the event of a specific type of national emergency, a sudden unforeseen attack on the United States (happening too quickly for Congress to meet) necessitating immediate action to protect Americans.
It's for this last situation (or for situations in which the president introduces forces into hostilities unlawfully) that the War Powers Resolution provides for the oft-mentioned 48-hour report to Congress (§ 1543) and 60-day (up to 90-day) timeline (§ 1544). If there's an attack in progress on the United States (i.e., currently happening), we expect the president to respond swiftly to neutralize the attack and protect Americans—and then we will hold the president to account.
The Framers of the Constitution agreed at the debates in the federal convention of 1787 that the president should have the "power to repel sudden attacks" but not the power to otherwise introduce forces into hostilities without congressional approval.
The War Powers Resolution does not confer any new authority on the president to take offensive military action without congressional approval—nor could it under our Constitution. It instead checks the president when, as the Framers contemplated, the president introduces our Armed Forces into hostilities to repel a sudden attack.

The belief that Presidents have no limitations on their power is one that came about during the Bush-Cheney era, particularly when they exploited 9-11 to usher in radical theories of executive power under Article Two of the Constitution.

You’ll see people argue that The Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001, which was passed shortly after 9/11 authorizes the President to use all "necessary and appropriate force" against those he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks, or harbored said persons or groups.

The argument seems to go back and forth endlessly. Putting aside the legal jargon, as I am not a law scholar, we can judge the merit of this authorization by its fruit.

This authorization was born from a neocons wet dream.

It was first used to go after Al Qaeda and, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service published May 11, 2016, has since been used “37 times in connection with actions in 14 countries and on the high seas.” The countries that have been targeted via this authorization include Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

Remember when Obama and Hillary iced Gaddafi? The AUMF was cited in that instance as well.

It is not hard to see that the founders were opposed to the idea of a standing army at the ready to be used at the discretion of a President. The President is only commander-in-chief once there is a war declared by Congress. The arguments that Biden had the authority to attack Yemen is a neocon’s argument, as they were the ones who dreamt up the AUMF well before 9-11 as the ultimate workaround to initiate endless wars.

The AUMF should be repealed, and until it is, Congress should withhold the funding necessary to continue this campaign.

What I really want to stress is that the men behind the curtain in the West, as always, are manipulating both sides of this conflict. They’ve seen that money has gone into the hands of HAMAS, and they’ve seen, over the years, that many billions have gone to Israel.

Why do you think that is?

I’ll give you a hint: that money was not freely given with the intent to create a more peaceful world.

It’s easy to get caught up in picking a side, as many conservative outlets that I respect have, but I believe that mindset is playing into the hand of the enemy.

I personally believe that Donald Trump and the brilliant military minds that support him would be able to end this conflict with as little collateral damage as possible. This does not seem to be the goal of neocons and the MIC.

For now, we are weak, overextended, and incapable of handling the complexities that will inevitably arise from continued escalation.

Stay focused on the real enemy. They are not some other ethnic group in a faraway land. The real enemy lives among us.

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

If you enjoyed this contribution to Badlands Media, please consider checking out more of Ryan’s work for free at the Post-Liberal.

Badlands Media

War Pigs

Exposing and Disarming the Military Industrial Complex

The Rebranded Neocons of the Democrat Party

The Bombing Campaign

Was the Escalation Unconstitutional?

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