“…And a War in the Middle East”

The United States has been in
international news lately. Last week much of the world’s media

focused on the grand jury announcement in Ferguson, Missouri.
Foreign reporters already in U.S. police news mode then
picked up the grand jury announcement over the death of Eric
Garner in New York City.

None of this, of course, is new. Cops in the U.S. have been
killing hundreds of Americans of every race each year, in incidents
ranging from good shots to murder. In just the month before the
killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson captured the mainstream
media’s attention, cops in Ohio
shot a man holding a fake gun in the fake gun aisle of Walmart
and a cop in Georgia
shot a 17-year-old in the chest after he opened the door for
her holding a Wii controller, which is white.

While the attention to Ferguson helped the Eric Garner grand
jury receive a level of media attention the
second Ramarley Graham grand jury never did, it’s still no
guarantee of wider attention to incidents of police killings. The
killing of
Rumain Brisbon earlier this week over a bottle of prescription
pills has yet to enter the national or international news cycle and
is unlikely to.

But the U.S. is in international news for another reason, too,
if not in domestic news, for the continuing campaign against ISIS.
The U.S.
conducted at least 25 more air strikes in Syria in the last
week, strikes Syria’s Bashar Assad has dismissed as
unserious. King Abdullah of Jordan, one of the members of the
U.S.-led coalition against ISIS called the struggle “our
third world war.” France is now conducting what’s described as

“major” raids in Iraq.

Amid all this, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has also been a
leading national voice on police issues, is forcing a vote on the
war (in all but name) with ISIS, by threatening
to attach a declaration of war to a world drinking water bill being
considered in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, drawing the
ire of Sen. John “not an angry bird” McCain (R-Az.), who said it
was an example of why Congress shouldn’t bother with lame duck
sessions. Congress, of course, has failed to act as a check on the
president’s war-making powers both in the regular and lame duck
sessions of Congress held during Barack Obama’s presidency. He’s
the
fourth consecutive president to commit U.S. military force to
Iraq, and the first not to bother getting any kind of OK from
Congress at all. And so war in the Middle East just doesn’t cut it
as news anymore.