Fmr House Intel Committee Chair (and campaign spy) Mike “Hamilton68” Rogers on Emergency Order: 'Legally, I Think the President Is on Pretty Solid Ground'
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/02/18/fmr-house-intel-committee-chair-mike-rogers-on-emergency-order-legally-i-think-the-president-is-on-pretty-solid-ground/
AOC is a "Commie Girl"
The Only Path to a U.S. Victory in the Middle East Is to Leave Now
It is still possible to achieve bipartisan consensus in Congress. Just vote to oppose Trump and prolong lost wars.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell showed how it’s done late last month with an amendment rebuking the president’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Syria passed by a wide 70-26 majority. Even that endorsement of the status quo was only a symbolic measure since a second-order amendment stipulated that McConnell’s could not be interpreted as legally authorizing military force in those conflicts.
But symbolizing what? An appetite for never-ending war? That there is no cost to opposing Trump even when a vast majority of the American public, Democratic and Republican, want out of the Middle East? The answer is a little bit of both—which is to say, it symbolizes the fact that U.S. foreign policy has become unmoored from American reality.
All the Senate Democrats who have declared their candidacy for president voted no, as did four Republicans, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Patrick Kennedy.
The foreign policy establishment has replaced strategy with symbolism. The problem is that symbols represent differently in different cultures. To Picasso, for instance, a primitive mask was a kind of artwork, but to the culture that designed it, the mask was a different kind of totem.
The danger is in confusing contexts. This has been a central issue in the United States’ engagement in the Middle East.
You can bet that policymakers and Pentagon officials defend the continued U.S. deployments citing Osama bin Laden’s conviction that the United States’ 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon signaled America is a paper tiger.
So what would convince a bin Laden that the U.S. is not feeble? A longer U.S. deployment, a permanent one? America killing thousands of Arabs, millions? Eradicating a town, a clan, an entire nation? Those aren’t American answers because it’s not an American question. It was bin Laden’s question freighted with the meaning of his symbols.
The proper American question is, what constitutes an American victory, in the eyes of Americans?
Our almost two-decade long stay in the Middle East and Central Asia has shown that the U.S. has no power to shape the region’s essential political and cultural dynamics. Perhaps the greatest impact has been on our own political elite who have become fluent in using symbols that are not ours to project and answer questions that belong to others.
The U.S. public has already answered what constitutes an American victory—get out, now.
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/280804/one-path-to-victory-in-the-middle-east