Demanding Their Share of the War Power Pie

House Democrats this week fought back against accusations that they are antiwar or opposed to assassinating foreign leaders.  Far from being disturbed by Donald Trump's murder of Iran General Qassem Soleimani or the waging of endless wars of American aggression, their resolution is, in fact,  a cold-blooded document which passive-aggressively celebrates the latest U.S. war crime.

Democrats and even a few Republicans are just mad that Trump didn't "brief" them beforehand. They're just mad because he has made no effort to supply the usual doctored evidence that some reviled foreign leader was planning anything nefarious. They're especially mad because the Soleimani murder might get the military and the corporate land-grabbers it protects kicked out of oil-rich Iraq.

Not for nothing was former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin of Michigan tapped to introduce the pro-war House resolution, which also serves to absolve the United States of any culpability for Middle East chaos. The jingoistic document provides no evidence for its claim that Soleiman was a "terrorist" rather than a sometime-partner of the US, especially as pertains to his fighting the Islamic State.

The resolution "condemning" Trump's reckless action does nothing less, in fact, than to tacitly justify it. It rather hilariously states that fhe occupying and invading American forces in the region have an an absolute right to defend themselves from the invaded and the occupied, who very conveniently become "terrorists" when they have the nerve to balk at the home invaders with the conceit to pose as social workers with guns and bombs.

Therefore, the sanctimonious House resolution continues, whenever the president gets wind of an imminent rogue counter-offensive plot, Congress should be consulted about whether to further punish the recalcitrant evictees and squatters and their representatives. The occupying invaders have to carefully weigh whether such drastic punishment will make them feel more safe and secure in order to "prevent further disastrous attacks on the United States."

Since there have been no disastrous attacks on United States soil since 9/11, it seems that the House Democrats are also buying into the specious claim that Iran and Iraq were behind that 2001 Saudi-financed attack. Although the  mainstream press rightly derided Vice President Mike Pence for repeating this false claim right after the Soleimani murder, they remained silent when the Democrats also (albeit more obliquely) echoed it in their own resolution.

As Speaker Nancy Pelosi dithers on when or even whether she'll send the House's severely limited articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial, her party's resolution sanctimoniously announces that "supporting the people of Iraq, Iran, and other countries throughout the Middle East who demand an end to government corruption and violations of basic human rights" is why the United States must invade, destroy, kill, conquer and occupy the region. 

They fight the corruption and human rights abuses over there so they don't have to address all the domestic misery which they themselves have caused over here.

And to hammer home the reality that their resolution is nothing but a sham, they add at the very end of it that Trump is still allowed, even encouraged, to unilaterally assassinate Al Qaeda operatives or "associated forces."

In effect, they canceled out their own resolution. By calling Soleimani a terrorist - rather than the bona fide military official and popular government leader that he was -  and then confirming in the very last section that Trump has their continuing Congressional permission to both define and to kill terrorists, they contradict themselves in a manner that actually vies with Trump in double-talking, double-dealing, double-crossing chutzpah.

They're counting on the establishment press to gloss over this glaring hypocrisy. They're also counting on the American citizenry to not bother even reading the resolution for themselves. They're mainly counting on the mass marketing of their phony antiwar manifesto to squelch any incipient bottom-up citizen antiwar movement.