Ron Paul Institute Board Members Weigh In On Syria

Members of the Ron Paul Institute For Peace And Prosperity (RPI) advisory board have been making their views on Syria known to media outlets lately. Unsurprisingly, all are against military involvement in Syria's civil war.

Ron Paul, for his part, wrote this in his syndicated column this week:

"I agree that any chemical attack, particularly one that kills civilians, is horrible and horrendous. All deaths in war and violence are terrible and should be condemned. But why are a few hundred killed by chemical attack any worse or more deserving of US bombs than the 100,000 already killed in the conflict?

 Why do these few hundred allegedly killed by Assad count any more than the estimated 1,000 Christians in Syria killed by US allies on the other side? Why is it any worse to be killed by poison gas than to have your head chopped off by the US allied radical Islamists, as has happened to a number of Christian priests and bishops in Syria?

For that matter, why are the few hundred civilians killed in Syria by a chemical weapon any worse than the 2000-3000 who have been killed by Obama’s drone strikes in Pakistan? Does it really make a difference whether a civilian is killed by poison gas or by drone missile or dull knife?"

Walter Jones, the staunchly anti-war Republican Congressman who says he will take his vote invade Iraq to his grave, and who previously introduced legislation to impeach Obama for unilateral action in Syria and Libya, released the following statement:

“I will vote against any proposal to authorize U.S. military intervention in Syria,” said Congressman Jones. “The reality of America’s dismal fiscal situation is that any money spent to bomb Syria will be borrowed from overseas or will be taken from the Defense Department’s already-shrinking budget – resulting in even fewer resources for Eastern North Carolina military installations. Neither of these options is acceptable.”

“Furthermore, there are serious questions about the credibility of the Obama administration’s claims regarding the use of sarin gas in Syria.  The president has failed to explain how our national security depends on engaging in yet another Middle Eastern civil war on the side of radical Islamist rebels who have been documented as possessing sarin gas and beheading Christians, among other atrocities.”

John Duncan Jr., the only remaining Republican Congressman to vote against the Iraq War, who like Jones is firmly anti-war, released this statement:

"I am opposed to us getting involved in another war in the Middle East.  We do not have the authority under our Constitution or even under international law to get involved in a civil war in another country.

While what is going on in Syria is very sad, if we keep getting into situations like this, we will be in a state of almost permanent war.

We spent and will be spending several trillion dollars that we could not afford in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Even so called limited wars have usually led to much greater involvement later on, and I simply do not want to see any young Americans killed in Syria.

We need to start taking care of our own people, and stop trying to run the whole world."

Dennis Kucinich, the former Democratic Congressman who is known as the left's version of Ron Paul in terms of foreign policy, said this in an interview with The Hill:

“So what, we're about to become Al Qaeda's air force now?” Kucinich said. “This is a very, very serious matter that has broad implications internationally. And to try to minimize it by saying we're just going to have a 'targeted strike' — that's an act of war. It's not anything to be trifled with.”

Additionally, Kucinich wrote an excellent opinion editorial entitled "Top 10 Unproven Claims for War Against Syria".

Last but not least, Judge Andrew Napolitano called out the legality issues of Obama's proposed intervention in his Townhall.com column.

Because of the vicissitudes of history, the personalities of presidents and the myopic compromises of past Congresses, the area of presidential war-making has different legal and constitutional ramifications. Under the Constitution, only Congress can authorize the offensive use of military force. James Madison's notes from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 make it obvious that the Framers were nearly unanimous in their resolve to keep the war-making power away from the president and repose it exclusively with Congress. They did this clearly and unambiguously in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

 Notwithstanding the precise language of the Constitution and the history of the nation's birth, the War Powers Resolution (WPR), a federal statute enacted in 1973 over President Nixon's veto, does permit the president on his own to use the military for offensive wars for a maximum of 90 days. Thus, under current federal law, Obama may lawfully bomb Syria even if Congress declines to authorize him to do so and even though such an act would violate international law.

 But the WPR is profoundly unconstitutional because it cedes Congress' constitutional war-making power to the president. The WPR was an ill-conceived political compromise effectuated by a Watergate-weakened president, congressional hawks who approved of Nixon's unilateral invasion of Cambodia and sober congressional heads more faithful to the separation of powers.

 This diverse coalition made up of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians is not only occurring within the RPI, but all across the country as Americans are overwhelmingly against war in Syria. Polls are showing it, and a vote would go a long way of confirming it. As Ron Paul put it in his interview with MSNBC:

“If this vote is won, that is defeat the request to have more military approach to Syria, I think it’d be historic because it’ll be a grand coalition of the libertarian Republicans and the Democratic progressives.”

Scandals in the Obama administration are racking up

Things are getting crazy very quickly in Washington. Scandals are now running rampant throughout the executive branch.

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is calling for the possible impeachment of President Obama in light of the Benghazi cover-up. It is clear that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton either ignored or was unaware of cables requesting backup for protection against radical jihadists, and when the massacre was allowed to take place Ambassador Susan Rice was sent on a media tour to promote the theory that a YouTube video set off "spontaneous" riots, which led to the consulate attacks.

Some are even speculating Benghazi served as outpost for CIA operations directed at illegally intervening in Syria. From Conor Friedersdorf:

According to a Wall Street Journal article published way back in November 2012, "The U.S. effort in Benghazi was at its heart a CIA operation, according to officials briefed on the intelligence. Of the more than 30 American officials evacuated from Benghazi following the deadly assault, only seven worked for the State Department. Nearly all the rest worked for the CIA, under diplomatic cover, which was a principal purpose of the consulate, these officials said."

Doesn't that fact need to be acknowledged if the goal is to figure out what happened? I'm not invested in any outcome. If the Obama Administration is proved to have acted badly, I won't be surprised: as someone who thinks that President Obama violated the U.S. Constitution and the War Powers Resolutionwhen he unilaterally volunteered American forces for the rebellion against Colonel Gaddafi, it seems to me that he's guilty of scandalous behavior in Libya regardless, and I am always eager for more transparency in the American government's conduct abroad. At the same time, I have no faith in the Republican Party to make good use of its oversight authority, and presume they're more interested in winning the next election than forcing transparency in foreign affairs, which they generally oppose, or improving State Department policy.

Moreover, I don't know what happened in Benghazi.

But knowing that the U.S. facility was a CIA post would seem to help explain certain mysteries. Why wasn't the Obama Administration truthful about what happened? There may have been multiple reasons. Surely one of them was thatthey wanted to hide the fact that a supposed diplomatic facility was really rife with spies. Why was the compound attacked? It seems likely that the presence of more than 20 CIA agents had something to do with it. Why were bureaucrats at the State Department so insistent on deflecting blame? Perhaps they're just typically averse to seeing their misjudgments revealed. But it also seems plausible that they conceived of Benghazi as a CIA operation, given the fact that it was largely a CIA operation, and felt the CIA bore responsibility for protecting their own assets, a rebuttal State Department officials cannot make publicly so long as we persist with the fiction that Benghazi was just a normal diplomatic facility with foreign service folks, a visiting ambassador, and no overwhelming spy presence.

Benghazi is now drawing parallels to Iran-Contra.

Also breaking in the news is the IRS targeting of conservative groups dating back to 2011, which is even getting liberals up in arms. Such as former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who when asked whether the IRS targeting was political, responded with "How can it not be?"

Finally, we are learning that the Department of Justice, which still hasn't been held accountable for Fast and Furious, has been spying on Associated Press phone records.

Holder announced in June 2012 that he had assigned two U.S. attorneys to lead investigations into the possible leaking of state secrets, and members of Congress have complained about disclosures of electronic warfare campaigns against Iran, U.S. drone attacks overseas and Obama's personal involvement in "kill lists" of militants in Yemen and Pakistan.
But Pruitt wrote that most of the records collected from the AP "can have no plausible connection to any ongoing investigation," and the American Civil Liberties Union called on the Justice Department to explain its actions.
"Obtaining a broad range of telephone records in order to ferret out a government leaker is an unacceptable abuse of power," Ben Wizner, the head of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a written statement. "Freedom of the press is a pillar of our democracy, and that freedom often depends on confidential communications between reporters and their sources."

If Boehner were to ever grow a pair, we might actually see some investigations and possibly impeachment proceedings. But at this point he doesn't seem too interested.