By Dave Lindorff
Well, here we are just over a month into the new Joe Biden presidential administration and he’s already launched a bombing attack in Syria. That seems to be a required action for presidents these days, certainly dating back at least to the Barack Obama administration.
Biden personally ordered the bombing of a border crossing point between Syria and Iraq where two ”Iranian-backed militia” are supposedly said to be getting supplies from Iran, claiming it was a “defensive” action in response to attacks by those militias on American military personnel in Syria.
This is the most outrageous of justifications possible. US military personnel are illegally operating in Syria, a sovereign state that has not invited them in, and that indeed has called repeatedly for them to leave the country. That is as opposed to Iranians who are in Syria by invitation of the Syrian government.
To accept the “Biden doctrine” for bombing a country and killing people there, would mean that the US thinks it has the right to go to war in any of the 80 or so countries where the US has military bases or military personnel “posted” or even, one must suppose, where the US has dispatched special forces to engage in military action without invitation, as in Niger or Yemen. All that’s required is for one US soldier in any of those places to be “threatened.”
This is not justified war. It is a justification for the law of the jungle.
As Francis Boyle, an international law specialist at the University of Illinois puts it, “It reminds me of the ‘defense’ the lawyers made for the Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg Tribunal from 1945-36: that the entire World War II was a war of self-defense of the German Reich as determined by the Nazi government and that no one had standing to complain otherwise.” He adds, “Of course the Nuremberg Judgement made quick work of that argument by ruling that what is a war of self defense can only be determined by an international tribunal. Several Nazi leaders were then hanged for their crimes against peace.”
Don’t expect to see Joe Biden face impeachment for his maiden war-crime venture in office. A bloodthirsty Congress in which Democrats and Republicans alike are eager to have a justification to shovel more hundreds of billions of dollars into the maw of the already hugely bloated US War Department is not going to hold it against Biden for stoking another fire in the Middle East, which is always good for winning support from the yahoo crowd of Muslim-haters in the US.
US presidents have long ago realized that as long as they can fight wars around the globe from the air, ideally by pilotless drones or cruise missiles, but if need by piloted aircraft, and can keep US casualties and prisoners to an acceptably small number, they can get away with almost everything and anything, and even win plaudits for showing “toughness”…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF i ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-tme Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/it-didnt-take-long-for-this-new-president-to-play-commander-in-chief/