By Caitlin Johnstone
June 30, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - The US is again illegally bombing nations on the
other side of the planet which it has invaded and
occupied and branded this murderous aggression as
“defensive”.
“At President Biden’s direction, U.S. military
forces earlier this evening conducted defensive
precision airstrikes against facilities used by
Iran-backed militia groups in the Iraq-Syria border
region,” reads
a statement by Pentagon Press Secretary John
Kirby. “The targets were selected because these
facilities are utilized by Iran-backed militias that
are engaged in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) attacks
against U.S. personnel and facilities in Iraq.
Specifically, the U.S. strikes targeted operational
and weapons storage facilities at two locations in
Syria and one location in Iraq, both of which lie
close to the border between those countries.”
Even more absurd than the fact that we’re all
still pretending this
clearly dementia-addled president is “directing”
anything is the claim that these actions were
“defensive” in nature. It is not possible for
occupying invaders to be acting defensively in the
nations they are occupying an invading; US troops
are only in Iraq by way of an
illegal 2003 invasion, a bogus
2014 re-entry, and a
refusal to leave at the Iraqi government’s
request last year, and they are in Syria
illegally and
without the permission of the Syrian government.
They can therefore only ever be aggressors; they
cannot be acting defensively.
It’s like if you broke into your neighbor’s house
to rob him, killed him when he tried to stop you,
and then claimed self-defense because you consider
his home your property. Only in the American
exceptionalist alternate universe is this considered
normal and acceptable.
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The only actual defensive action that the US
could legitimately take to protect troops in Iraq
and Syria would be to remove US troops from Iraq and
Syria.
As former US representative Justin Amash
pointed out following the bombing, there is no
actual legal authorization for US troops to be in
Iraq or Syria in the first place. As journalist
Glenn Greenwald
highlighted, there is also no legal basis for
bombings on the military personnel in those nations
either, no matter how “Iranian-backed” they are.
“I know it’s boring to note this but Biden has no
legal authorization to bomb ‘Iranian-backed’ targets
in Syria and Iraq, making it illegal,” Greenwald
tweeted, adding, “But Obama bombed Libya
after the House voted against doing so,
and few of the Sacred Rule Of Law mavens cared.”
The legal justification the Biden administration
is using for this airstrike is
the same bogus
one it used for its airstrikes in Syria
this past February: not counter-terrorism, but
an extremely weird and broad interpretation of
Article II of the US Constitution.
“As a matter of international law, the United
States acted pursuant to its right of self-defense,”
Kirby writes in the aforementioned statement. “The
strikes were both necessary to address the threat
and appropriately limited in scope. As a matter of
domestic law, the President took this action
pursuant to his Article II authority to protect U.S.
personnel in Iraq.”
This claim the Executive Branch has been leaning
on lately, that Article II permits unilateral acts
of war on the other side of the planet without
congressional approval, has come under criticism
from legal scholars across the US political
spectrum. As Tess Bridgeman
wrote for Just Security following
Biden’s February airstrikes:
“With former President Donald Trump’s term in
office over, it’s time to evaluate his war
powers legacy and where it leaves the Biden
administration as it begins to grapple with how
and when to use force abroad in the absence of
congressional authorization. The picture that
emerges from Trump’s war powers reporting to
Congress is one of an extraordinarily broad
vision of the president’s authority to use force
abroad without congressional authorization, and
of a willingness to exploit loopholes in
reporting requirements in a way that obscures
information on the use of force from the
public.”
A willingness to exploit loopholes is right. But
as long as acts of mass military violence serve as
the glue which holds a globe-spanning empire
together, death finds a way.
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