https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/come_home_america_stop_policing_the_globe_and_put_an_end_to_wars_without_end
Come Home, America: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Wars-Without-End
“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning. From secrecy and deception in high places; come home, America. From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation; come home, America.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate
I agree wholeheartedly with George S. McGovern, a former Senator and presidential candidate who opposed the Vietnam War, about one thing: I'm sick of old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.
It’s time to bring our troops home.
Bring them home from Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.
That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.
The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”
Don’t fall for the propaganda, though: America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.
The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”
This is how a military empire occupies the globe.
Already, American military servicepeople are being deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere in anticipation of the war drums being sounded over Iran.
This Iran crisis, salivated over by the neocons since prior to the Iraq War and manufactured by war hawks who want to jumpstart the next world war, has been a long time coming.
Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton: they all have done their part to ensure that the military industrial complex can continue to get rich at taxpayer expense.
Take President Trump, for instance.
Despite numerous campaign promises to stop America’s “endless wars,” once elected, Trump has done a complete about-face, deploying greater numbers of troops to the Middle East, ramping up the war rhetoric, and padding the pockets of defense contractors. Indeed, Trump is even refusing to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in the face of a request from the Iraqi government for us to leave.
Obama was no different: he also pledged—if elected—to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan and reduce America's oversized, and overly costly, military footprint in the world. Of course, that didn’t happen.
Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and now Iran) aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.
War spending is bankrupting America.
Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.
In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.
Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.
In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.
Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.
Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.
As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”
War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”
Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.
A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:
$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.
That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.
Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.
Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.
That needs to change.
The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.
The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback.
The 9/11 attacks were blowback. The Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback. The attempted Times Square bomber was blowback. The Fort Hood shooter, a major in the U.S. Army, was blowback.
The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by a U.S. military drone strike will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people.
The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.
James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
We are seeing this play out before our eyes.
The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.
Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.
At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:
The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.
This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.
We failed to heed his warning.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.
It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home before it’s too late.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
SC203-15
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/01/05/the-us-government-lies-constantly-and-the-burden-of-proof-is-on-the-accuser/
The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser
Over the last 48 hours I’ve been splitting my free time between (A) learning as much as I possibly can about the US assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and (B) arguing with people online who are uncritically swallowing US government claims about why that assassination was necessary. I always engage such political debates because they’re a valuable source of information on what propaganda narratives people are buying into, and therefore which propaganda narratives need to be addressed.
What has been made abundantly clear from this particular engagement is that those who have bought into the Trump administration’s completely unsubstantiated claims about Soleimani are sincerely unaware that they have unquestioningly bought into unsubstantiated US government narratives. People tend to get their information from tightly insulated echo chambers, and if you inhabit an echo chamber that supports the current president all you’ll get is a bunch of officials, pundits and reporters saying in a confident-sounding tone of voice that Soleimani needed to be taken out. Since they’re surrounded by chatter affirming that Soleimani had attacked America and/or posed an imminent threat in the near future, they assume that chatter must be based on some actual facts in evidence.
It is not.
When I speak out online against Trump’s act of war on Iran and interact one-on-one with those who object to what I’m saying, the disparity between what they think they know and what they actually know gets very quickly highlighted. Simply by my challenging people to prove the claims that they are making about Soleimani planning to attack Americans, attacking a US embassy, directing a strike that allegedly killed a mysteriously unnamed US contractor in Iraq, killing hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq, that he’s a “terrorist”, etc, they quickly realize that they have literally no evidence for their claims beyond the unsubstantiated assertions of US government officials and people who unquestioningly repeated those assertions.
And from there I just ask them, “How well has uncritically swallowing US government narratives about the need for military action worked out for you in the past?”
Nobody wants to admit that they are doing such a thing, least of all a Trump supporter who’s poured plenty of mental energy into distancing this administration from the previous Republican occupant of the White House. But that is indeed exactly what they are doing: uncritically swallowing baseless claims by US government officials about the need to advance a pre-existing military agenda, in a way that is indistinguishable from the cult-like behavior of Bush supporters in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.
In reality there’s no evidence for any of the reasons we’ve been offered for why Iran needed to be provoked into an almost inevitable retaliation that Trump is currently tweeting will result in all-out war:
The claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” is completely without evidence, rumored to be “razor thin“, and entirely debunked in this excellent essay by Craig Murray.
Mike Pence’s claim that Soleimani assisted 9/11 terrorists is so ridiculous that even the war-loving Washington Post dismissed it.
There’s no proof that Soleimani directed the strike that allegedly killed a US contractor, or that that contractor even existed.
There’s no proof that Soleimani was involved in any “attack” on any US embassy, leaving aside the obvious fact that a little graffiti on the walls wouldn’t justify his assassination if he did.
The “hundreds of American deaths” line you hear regurgitated by everyone from Trump to Elizabeth Warren actually refers to Iraqis defending themselves from an illegal US invasion with some training from Iran. The claim that Iran was behind Iraqi bombs is without evidence and wouldn’t matter if it were true; claiming the inhabitants of an invaded nation don’t have the right to defend themselves is absurd, regardless of where they got their weaponry.
The claim that Soleimani was “a terrorist” is only made because the branch of the Iranian military he commanded was arbitrarily designated a terrorist organization by the US government last year, a designation that any foreign government could just as easily make for any branch of the US military. He was actually a fearsome enemy of ISIS and al-Qaeda and played a massive role in halting the spread of ISIS.
We are being lied to, yet again, about yet another war on yet another geostrategically crucial Middle Eastern nation. And a huge percentage of the population is marching right along with it. When Iran retaliates for Soleimani’s assassination, these propagandized sheep will be herded by the political/media class into believing that the attack was completely unprovoked. And if their credulity thus far is any indication, they’ll swallow the whole load without so much as a twinge of gag reflex.
The US government has a very extensively documented history of lying to advance pre-existing military agendas. This is an entirely indisputable fact. It’s been universally true from generation to generation, from administration to administration, and from political party to political party. The Afghanistan Papers came out just a few weeks ago further documenting this already conclusively established fact. Anyone who just accepts US government assertions about the need for military force without a mountain of independently verifiable proof is, to put it nicely, a complete fucking idiot.
The demand for proof would be normal even if the entity in question didn’t have an extensive history of lying about these things, because, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of logic already knows, the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. When it comes to incalculably important matters like life and death, demanding that the burden of proof be met is just being a sensible human being.
Add in the fact that the US government is known to lie constantly about these matters, and believing its current claims about Soleimani makes as much sense as believing a known compulsive liar who has deceived you many times when he tells you it’s urgent that you go murder your neighbor right this instant.
Debating the current Iran situation, then, is simply a matter of holding the unassailable positions that (A) the US government lies constantly, and (B) the burden of proof is on the party making the claim. In a post-Iraq invasion world, the level of proof required is very, very high, and the Trump administration has taken no steps whatsoever to even providing anything that could qualify as evidence.
People will often try to get around this unassailable argument by contending “Well where is your proof that they’re lying?” This is called shifting the burden of proof, and it is a logical fallacy.
I lay this all out not because I expect the US government to suddenly begin conducting itself rationally or providing proof of its claims that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but because streamlining our thinking in this way helps to avoid confusion in a landscape that is saturated with propaganda and its mindless regurgitators.
The only sane response to US government claims about the need for military force is intense skepticism. If US government officials begin telling us that something happened necessitating military intervention, your default assumption should always, always, always be that they are lying. And you should hold that position until the (highly unlikely and historically unprecedented) event that conclusive, independently verifiable proof of their claims is provided.
No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from ever again deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed, no war crimes tribunals were held; no one was even fired. This is because they had every intention of doing it again. And now here’s the US government again spouting lies about why it was necessary to initiate war with another Middle Eastern nation. And people are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.
The more skepticism we can encourage toward current deceptions about Iran, the easier it will be to encourage skepticism about the next wave of escalations, which make no mistake are absolutely on their way. Spread the word.
The US Government Lies Constantly, And The Burden Of Proof Is On The Accuser
Over the last 48 hours I’ve been splitting my free time between (A) learning as much as I possibly can about the US assassination of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and (B) arguing with people online who are uncritically swallowing US government claims about why that assassination was necessary. I always engage such political debates because they’re a valuable source of information on what propaganda narratives people are buying into, and therefore which propaganda narratives need to be addressed.
What has been made abundantly clear from this particular engagement is that those who have bought into the Trump administration’s completely unsubstantiated claims about Soleimani are sincerely unaware that they have unquestioningly bought into unsubstantiated US government narratives. People tend to get their information from tightly insulated echo chambers, and if you inhabit an echo chamber that supports the current president all you’ll get is a bunch of officials, pundits and reporters saying in a confident-sounding tone of voice that Soleimani needed to be taken out. Since they’re surrounded by chatter affirming that Soleimani had attacked America and/or posed an imminent threat in the near future, they assume that chatter must be based on some actual facts in evidence.
It is not.
When I speak out online against Trump’s act of war on Iran and interact one-on-one with those who object to what I’m saying, the disparity between what they think they know and what they actually know gets very quickly highlighted. Simply by my challenging people to prove the claims that they are making about Soleimani planning to attack Americans, attacking a US embassy, directing a strike that allegedly killed a mysteriously unnamed US contractor in Iraq, killing hundreds of US soldiers in Iraq, that he’s a “terrorist”, etc, they quickly realize that they have literally no evidence for their claims beyond the unsubstantiated assertions of US government officials and people who unquestioningly repeated those assertions.
And from there I just ask them, “How well has uncritically swallowing US government narratives about the need for military action worked out for you in the past?”
Nobody wants to admit that they are doing such a thing, least of all a Trump supporter who’s poured plenty of mental energy into distancing this administration from the previous Republican occupant of the White House. But that is indeed exactly what they are doing: uncritically swallowing baseless claims by US government officials about the need to advance a pre-existing military agenda, in a way that is indistinguishable from the cult-like behavior of Bush supporters in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion.
In reality there’s no evidence for any of the reasons we’ve been offered for why Iran needed to be provoked into an almost inevitable retaliation that Trump is currently tweeting will result in all-out war:
The claim that Soleimani posed an “imminent threat” is completely without evidence, rumored to be “razor thin“, and entirely debunked in this excellent essay by Craig Murray.
Mike Pence’s claim that Soleimani assisted 9/11 terrorists is so ridiculous that even the war-loving Washington Post dismissed it.
There’s no proof that Soleimani directed the strike that allegedly killed a US contractor, or that that contractor even existed.
There’s no proof that Soleimani was involved in any “attack” on any US embassy, leaving aside the obvious fact that a little graffiti on the walls wouldn’t justify his assassination if he did.
The “hundreds of American deaths” line you hear regurgitated by everyone from Trump to Elizabeth Warren actually refers to Iraqis defending themselves from an illegal US invasion with some training from Iran. The claim that Iran was behind Iraqi bombs is without evidence and wouldn’t matter if it were true; claiming the inhabitants of an invaded nation don’t have the right to defend themselves is absurd, regardless of where they got their weaponry.
The claim that Soleimani was “a terrorist” is only made because the branch of the Iranian military he commanded was arbitrarily designated a terrorist organization by the US government last year, a designation that any foreign government could just as easily make for any branch of the US military. He was actually a fearsome enemy of ISIS and al-Qaeda and played a massive role in halting the spread of ISIS.
We are being lied to, yet again, about yet another war on yet another geostrategically crucial Middle Eastern nation. And a huge percentage of the population is marching right along with it. When Iran retaliates for Soleimani’s assassination, these propagandized sheep will be herded by the political/media class into believing that the attack was completely unprovoked. And if their credulity thus far is any indication, they’ll swallow the whole load without so much as a twinge of gag reflex.
The US government has a very extensively documented history of lying to advance pre-existing military agendas. This is an entirely indisputable fact. It’s been universally true from generation to generation, from administration to administration, and from political party to political party. The Afghanistan Papers came out just a few weeks ago further documenting this already conclusively established fact. Anyone who just accepts US government assertions about the need for military force without a mountain of independently verifiable proof is, to put it nicely, a complete fucking idiot.
The demand for proof would be normal even if the entity in question didn’t have an extensive history of lying about these things, because, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of logic already knows, the burden of proof is always on the party making the claim. When it comes to incalculably important matters like life and death, demanding that the burden of proof be met is just being a sensible human being.
Add in the fact that the US government is known to lie constantly about these matters, and believing its current claims about Soleimani makes as much sense as believing a known compulsive liar who has deceived you many times when he tells you it’s urgent that you go murder your neighbor right this instant.
Debating the current Iran situation, then, is simply a matter of holding the unassailable positions that (A) the US government lies constantly, and (B) the burden of proof is on the party making the claim. In a post-Iraq invasion world, the level of proof required is very, very high, and the Trump administration has taken no steps whatsoever to even providing anything that could qualify as evidence.
People will often try to get around this unassailable argument by contending “Well where is your proof that they’re lying?” This is called shifting the burden of proof, and it is a logical fallacy.
I lay this all out not because I expect the US government to suddenly begin conducting itself rationally or providing proof of its claims that rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world, but because streamlining our thinking in this way helps to avoid confusion in a landscape that is saturated with propaganda and its mindless regurgitators.
The only sane response to US government claims about the need for military force is intense skepticism. If US government officials begin telling us that something happened necessitating military intervention, your default assumption should always, always, always be that they are lying. And you should hold that position until the (highly unlikely and historically unprecedented) event that conclusive, independently verifiable proof of their claims is provided.
No changes were made after the Iraq invasion to keep the US government from ever again deceiving Americans into war. No new laws were made, no policies changed, no war crimes tribunals were held; no one was even fired. This is because they had every intention of doing it again. And now here’s the US government again spouting lies about why it was necessary to initiate war with another Middle Eastern nation. And people are swallowing it hook, line and sinker.
The more skepticism we can encourage toward current deceptions about Iran, the easier it will be to encourage skepticism about the next wave of escalations, which make no mistake are absolutely on their way. Spread the word.
Monday, January 6, 2020
SC203-14
https://www.globalresearch.ca/state-war-exists-between-us-humanity/5699788
A State of War Exists Between the US and Humanity
There’s no ambiguity about what’s going on globally.
Washington’s geopolitical agenda is all about seeking dominance over other countries, their resources and populations worldwide — by whatever it takes to achieve its aims, notably by brute force and other hostile actions.
The Trump regime’s assassination of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi deputy PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (connected to the country’s military) were the latest examples of its state’s sponsored terrorism on the world stage.
Since Harry Truman’s aggression on North Korea in the early 1950s, a state of war has existed between the US and humanity.
It’s been ongoing endlessly since that time, smashing one nation after another by naked aggression, color revolutions, old-fashioned coups, economic terrorism, targeted assassinations, and other hostile actions.
No nation in world history caused more harm to more people over a longer duration than the US — a hegemonic menace, masquerading as democratic, a notion it tolerates nowhere, especially not at home.
Today is the most perilous time in world history, the risk of another global conflict real — potentially with nuclear weapons able to kill us all if used in enough numbers.
Most Americans are mindless of the greatest threat in their lifetimes because establishment media treat them like mushrooms — keeping them well-watered and in the dark.
Trump is a geopolitical know-nothing, a billionaire businessman/reality TV president — aware only about what his extremist handlers tell him, along with Fox News propaganda, his favorite TV station.
His regime’s assassination of Iranian and Iraqi military commanders is symptomatic of a nation off-the-rails, threatening everyone everywhere by its hegemonic rage.
He’s not the issue. If not him, someone else in charge would pursue the same agenda — dirty business as usual no matter who in the US serves in high office — in the White House, Congress, the bureaucracy and judicial branch.
That’s America’s disturbing state — today more threatening to humanity than earlier, at home and abroad.
Its criminal class is bipartisan, both warrior wings of its one-party state as menacing to humanity as the other.
In the wake of Trump regime assassinations, acts of war on Iran and Iraq, events are fast-moving.
On Sunday during an emergency session, Iraqi parliamentarians voted to expel US occupying and coalition forces, demanding it supported by Prime Minister Mahdi.
Two major parliamentary factions strongly backed the measure — the Fatah Alliance and prominent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr-led Sairoon.
Press TV reported that MPs “cit(ed) Articles 59 and 109 of the (Iraqi) Constitution” — expulsion “in line with their national and regulatory responsibilities as representatives to safeguard the security and sovereignty of Iraq.”
US forces were allowed back in the country to combat the scourge of ISIS — created and supported by Washington.
In late 2017, military operations against their jihadists were concluded. Iraqi parliamentarians and ruling authorities want US occupation of the country ended.
According to adopted legislation, Baghdad is required to file a formal complaint with the UN Security Council against US aggression on its territory.
Fatah Alliance head/Badr Organization secretary general Hadi al-Ameri called for expelling US forces from the country, saying the following:
“We will defeat Americans and drive them out, as we did earlier in the face of Daesh (ISIS).”
“We will expel Americans right before Iraqis’ eyes as they will be frustrated and humiliated.”
“We will press ahead with this struggle. We don’t have any option but to fully restore Iraq’s sovereignty.”
Time and again, Trump tweets and otherwise comments before he thinks.
On Sunday following Iraqi MPs voting for the expulsion of US forces, he said the following:
“We’re not leaving (Iraq) unless they pay us back for” what the US spent in the country — to smash it and massacre its people for decades, he failed to explain, adding:
“If they do ask us to leave…(w)e will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever.”
Iraq is US-occupied territory, threatening its sovereignty, population, and the region.
As long as US forces remain anywhere in the Middle East, and Washington continues supplying billions of dollars worth of heavy weapons to its belligerent nations, regional peace, stability and security will remain unattainable.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote by Iraqi parliamentarians, the Trump regime tried and failed to stop it.
Ongoing turmoil in the country with US dirty hands behind it makes it uncertain what’s coming next.
Pentagon forces will likely be forced out of Iraq, when and under what circumstances uncertain. It could be a long time coming or sooner. It’s too early to know either way.
Assassinating widely respected Iranian and Iraqi military commanders was a colossal Trump regime blunder.
It elevated them to martyr status, making them more prominent in death than alive, arousing the people of both countries, uniting them against the US hegemonic menace.
Only Cassandra was good at predicting future events. What’s ahead remains unknown for mere mortals like myself.
If past is prologue, most likely things will be more dismal than already, at home and abroad.
Endless US wars of aggression against nonbelligerent countries may continue in our lifetimes, new ones launched, hordes of newly recruited US terrorist foot soldier replacing eliminated ones.
Forever wars are the new normal, ones launched by the US post-9/11 continuing with no near-term prospect for resolution.
Along with Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Donbass (Ukraine), Occupied Palestine, and Iraq, Iran is in the eye of the storm.
Will the Trump regime attack Islamic Republic territory in the new year?
Will it risk the mother of all post-9/11 wars by going this far, boiling over the region more greatly than already, risking blockage of regional oil supplies to world markets — severe global recession conditions to follow if this happens and it’s protracted.
If Trump regime hardliners unleash greater Middle East fire and fury than already by attacking Iranian territory, global war could follow.
I believe US hot war with Iran is unlikely because of its potentially catastrophic consequences if launched.
At the same time, with hardliners in charge of US geopolitical policymaking in both right wings of its war party, the unthinkable is ominously possible.
A State of War Exists Between the US and Humanity
There’s no ambiguity about what’s going on globally.
Washington’s geopolitical agenda is all about seeking dominance over other countries, their resources and populations worldwide — by whatever it takes to achieve its aims, notably by brute force and other hostile actions.
The Trump regime’s assassination of Iran’s IRGC Quds Force commander General Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi deputy PMU leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (connected to the country’s military) were the latest examples of its state’s sponsored terrorism on the world stage.
Since Harry Truman’s aggression on North Korea in the early 1950s, a state of war has existed between the US and humanity.
It’s been ongoing endlessly since that time, smashing one nation after another by naked aggression, color revolutions, old-fashioned coups, economic terrorism, targeted assassinations, and other hostile actions.
No nation in world history caused more harm to more people over a longer duration than the US — a hegemonic menace, masquerading as democratic, a notion it tolerates nowhere, especially not at home.
Today is the most perilous time in world history, the risk of another global conflict real — potentially with nuclear weapons able to kill us all if used in enough numbers.
Most Americans are mindless of the greatest threat in their lifetimes because establishment media treat them like mushrooms — keeping them well-watered and in the dark.
Trump is a geopolitical know-nothing, a billionaire businessman/reality TV president — aware only about what his extremist handlers tell him, along with Fox News propaganda, his favorite TV station.
His regime’s assassination of Iranian and Iraqi military commanders is symptomatic of a nation off-the-rails, threatening everyone everywhere by its hegemonic rage.
He’s not the issue. If not him, someone else in charge would pursue the same agenda — dirty business as usual no matter who in the US serves in high office — in the White House, Congress, the bureaucracy and judicial branch.
That’s America’s disturbing state — today more threatening to humanity than earlier, at home and abroad.
Its criminal class is bipartisan, both warrior wings of its one-party state as menacing to humanity as the other.
In the wake of Trump regime assassinations, acts of war on Iran and Iraq, events are fast-moving.
On Sunday during an emergency session, Iraqi parliamentarians voted to expel US occupying and coalition forces, demanding it supported by Prime Minister Mahdi.
Two major parliamentary factions strongly backed the measure — the Fatah Alliance and prominent cleric Muqtada al-Sadr-led Sairoon.
Press TV reported that MPs “cit(ed) Articles 59 and 109 of the (Iraqi) Constitution” — expulsion “in line with their national and regulatory responsibilities as representatives to safeguard the security and sovereignty of Iraq.”
US forces were allowed back in the country to combat the scourge of ISIS — created and supported by Washington.
In late 2017, military operations against their jihadists were concluded. Iraqi parliamentarians and ruling authorities want US occupation of the country ended.
According to adopted legislation, Baghdad is required to file a formal complaint with the UN Security Council against US aggression on its territory.
Fatah Alliance head/Badr Organization secretary general Hadi al-Ameri called for expelling US forces from the country, saying the following:
“We will defeat Americans and drive them out, as we did earlier in the face of Daesh (ISIS).”
“We will expel Americans right before Iraqis’ eyes as they will be frustrated and humiliated.”
“We will press ahead with this struggle. We don’t have any option but to fully restore Iraq’s sovereignty.”
Time and again, Trump tweets and otherwise comments before he thinks.
On Sunday following Iraqi MPs voting for the expulsion of US forces, he said the following:
“We’re not leaving (Iraq) unless they pay us back for” what the US spent in the country — to smash it and massacre its people for decades, he failed to explain, adding:
“If they do ask us to leave…(w)e will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever.”
Iraq is US-occupied territory, threatening its sovereignty, population, and the region.
As long as US forces remain anywhere in the Middle East, and Washington continues supplying billions of dollars worth of heavy weapons to its belligerent nations, regional peace, stability and security will remain unattainable.
Ahead of Sunday’s vote by Iraqi parliamentarians, the Trump regime tried and failed to stop it.
Ongoing turmoil in the country with US dirty hands behind it makes it uncertain what’s coming next.
Pentagon forces will likely be forced out of Iraq, when and under what circumstances uncertain. It could be a long time coming or sooner. It’s too early to know either way.
Assassinating widely respected Iranian and Iraqi military commanders was a colossal Trump regime blunder.
It elevated them to martyr status, making them more prominent in death than alive, arousing the people of both countries, uniting them against the US hegemonic menace.
Only Cassandra was good at predicting future events. What’s ahead remains unknown for mere mortals like myself.
If past is prologue, most likely things will be more dismal than already, at home and abroad.
Endless US wars of aggression against nonbelligerent countries may continue in our lifetimes, new ones launched, hordes of newly recruited US terrorist foot soldier replacing eliminated ones.
Forever wars are the new normal, ones launched by the US post-9/11 continuing with no near-term prospect for resolution.
Along with Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Donbass (Ukraine), Occupied Palestine, and Iraq, Iran is in the eye of the storm.
Will the Trump regime attack Islamic Republic territory in the new year?
Will it risk the mother of all post-9/11 wars by going this far, boiling over the region more greatly than already, risking blockage of regional oil supplies to world markets — severe global recession conditions to follow if this happens and it’s protracted.
If Trump regime hardliners unleash greater Middle East fire and fury than already by attacking Iranian territory, global war could follow.
I believe US hot war with Iran is unlikely because of its potentially catastrophic consequences if launched.
At the same time, with hardliners in charge of US geopolitical policymaking in both right wings of its war party, the unthinkable is ominously possible.
Sunday, January 5, 2020
SC203-13
https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-hoax-redux/5680814
The War Hoax Redux. How to Start Another War
America’s hegemonic military agenda has reached a dangerous threshold: The assassination of IRGC General Soleimani ordered by Donald Trump on January 2, 2020 is tantamount to an Act of War against Iran.
US Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper described it as a “decisive defensive action” while confirming that the operation ordered by Donald Trump had been carried out by the Pentagon. “The game has changed” said Defense Secretary Esper.
This incisive article by Edward Curtin first published in June 2019 intimates that Trump’s team of advisors have been working on creating a justification for confronting Iran. According to Edward Curtin “Crazy people do crazy things”.
***
The Trump administration has a problem: How to start another war – this time with Iran – without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt members of Trump’s team, led by the war-thirsty and perdurable John Bolton, are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, Americans should feel confident that their leaders, together with their Israeli and Saudi bedfellows, are not sitting on their hands. Crazy people do crazy things.
After the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it slowly became apparent what alternative media and war critics had insisted was the case before and during these wars: That the U.S. government had achieved a propaganda coup by tightly controlling the media access to the truth and by getting the mainstream media (MSM) to do their bidding. This ex post facto revelation was, of course, not prime time or front page news, but was reported bit-by-bit by critics or was buried deep within the news reports. While some of the truth arrived, it did so obliquely, and corporate media devotees went back to their gullible and comforting sleep.
Yet once again Americans are being played for fools by the government and MSM. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the U.S. plans to attack Iran if they can seduce enough Americans that they are threatened. The Trump people know this, the corporate media shills know it, for the Bush-Clinton-Obama scenario, written years ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. all learned better. The U.S. never seeks a peaceful solution.
As in 1991 and 2003, the MSM play along with Trump, who repeatedly says, or has his spokespeople say, that the decision hasn’t been made and that the U.S. wants peace. Within a few hours this is contradicted and confusion and uncertainty reign, as planned. Chaos is the name of the game. But everyone in the know knows the decision to attack has been made at some level, especially once the propaganda dummies are all in place. But they pretend, while the media wait with baited breath as they anticipate their countdown to the dramatic moment when they report the incident that will “compel” the U.S. to attack.
The corporate media, however, always avoid the key question: How will the U.S. justify its fait accompli and what is its goal? This question is too disturbing to broach, for it suggests that the fix is in, the show is rigged, something is rotten in the symbiotic relationship between a government intent on war and a media in that government’s service.
What could, in the eyes of the American people, justify a war against Iran, assuming the Trump administration even cares about justification? Will Iran attack Israel? No. Will Iran attack the United States? No. Of course not, not least because it can’t, even if it wished to do so, which it clearly doesn’t. Any such Iranian attack – absurd as such a suggestion is – would give the Trump administration ample justification for a war.
So what is the administration to do now that the news from so many quarters – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. – is so bad? What, if they are intent on a war with Iran, are they going to do about the absence of a cause for war? It seems that they are in a dilemma.
“Seem” is the key word. Logically speaking, if there is a war plan, if there is a Bolton/Pompeo/Israeli scenario, then the gun on the wall in the first act of this deadly play, must go off in the final act, no matter how long it takes. The audience is being primed by the administration and their media mouthpieces to expect a “smoking gun.” But what might it be?
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” George W. Bush said at a staged pseudo-event on October 7, 2002 as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity. Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S.
Now Iran is the Nuclear devil. Now Iran must be stopped. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, Iran has been and will be accused of developing nuclear weapons. Saddam was said to have had them; Iran only developing them, yet both lies need no evidence, just rhetoric.
Nevertheless, it might be claimed that secret “evidence” must be withheld on “national security” grounds or for fear of endangering Iranian informers or their families. Thus a preemptive attack could be justified on the grounds of preventing another “Ground Zero” (a misnomer when applied to the World Trade Center site, but conveniently evocative for stirring nuclear fears).
The American people, still severely shaken by the attacks of September 11, 2001, would surely be alarmed by such a “threat,” especially if it were linked to terrorism (on the high seas? In the air?), which has been the modus operandi of one administration after another. Aren’t we at war with terror? But it is a strategy – linking nuclear fears with terrorist fears – that the Trump administration may be hoping will cover its lack of evidence with emotional blackmail. But it is a strategy that may not work, since, for some very odd reason, people may prefer facts to fictions. I emphasize “may.”
Perhaps Trump’s neo-con henchmen’s best option, therefore, is to promote or create a Tonkin Gulf incident, “unprovoked aggression against American forces,” as Lyndon Johnson put it when he lied to the world in order to get the war he wanted after JFK had been disposed of by the CIA. It worked in 1964, so it might work again, especially with the help of our special “ally” in the region – Israel. And today’s attackers won’t be aggressors, they will be terrorists, which seals the deal. Bombs away!
It’s hard to say with certainty what justification the Trump war-crazies will settle on, but time is running out for them. The news is bad from every corner, so something must be done.
Many years of secret American/Israeli planning for an attack upon Iran can’t be wasted.
The stage is set. The charade continues. The MSM keep preparing us for the “smoking gun.” Something’s got to give, and propaganda geniuses are working overtime on delivering us an Oscar-winning justification.
Don’t buy it.
Especially since you’ve heard this before, and I’ve written it. With a few minor changes and the substitution of Iran for Iraq, this column was published on the morning before George W’s infamous (the 16 words about uranium from Niger) State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, fifty-one days before the invasion of Iraq, and one week before Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations.
Shocked and surprised should be words eliminated from our vocabularies.
The War Hoax Redux. How to Start Another War
America’s hegemonic military agenda has reached a dangerous threshold: The assassination of IRGC General Soleimani ordered by Donald Trump on January 2, 2020 is tantamount to an Act of War against Iran.
US Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper described it as a “decisive defensive action” while confirming that the operation ordered by Donald Trump had been carried out by the Pentagon. “The game has changed” said Defense Secretary Esper.
This incisive article by Edward Curtin first published in June 2019 intimates that Trump’s team of advisors have been working on creating a justification for confronting Iran. According to Edward Curtin “Crazy people do crazy things”.
***
The Trump administration has a problem: How to start another war – this time with Iran – without having a justifiable reason for one. No doubt members of Trump’s team, led by the war-thirsty and perdurable John Bolton, are working hard to solve this urgent problem. If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one. Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. Whatever the solution, Americans should feel confident that their leaders, together with their Israeli and Saudi bedfellows, are not sitting on their hands. Crazy people do crazy things.
After the Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it slowly became apparent what alternative media and war critics had insisted was the case before and during these wars: That the U.S. government had achieved a propaganda coup by tightly controlling the media access to the truth and by getting the mainstream media (MSM) to do their bidding. This ex post facto revelation was, of course, not prime time or front page news, but was reported bit-by-bit by critics or was buried deep within the news reports. While some of the truth arrived, it did so obliquely, and corporate media devotees went back to their gullible and comforting sleep.
Yet once again Americans are being played for fools by the government and MSM. The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the U.S. plans to attack Iran if they can seduce enough Americans that they are threatened. The Trump people know this, the corporate media shills know it, for the Bush-Clinton-Obama scenario, written years ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. all learned better. The U.S. never seeks a peaceful solution.
As in 1991 and 2003, the MSM play along with Trump, who repeatedly says, or has his spokespeople say, that the decision hasn’t been made and that the U.S. wants peace. Within a few hours this is contradicted and confusion and uncertainty reign, as planned. Chaos is the name of the game. But everyone in the know knows the decision to attack has been made at some level, especially once the propaganda dummies are all in place. But they pretend, while the media wait with baited breath as they anticipate their countdown to the dramatic moment when they report the incident that will “compel” the U.S. to attack.
The corporate media, however, always avoid the key question: How will the U.S. justify its fait accompli and what is its goal? This question is too disturbing to broach, for it suggests that the fix is in, the show is rigged, something is rotten in the symbiotic relationship between a government intent on war and a media in that government’s service.
What could, in the eyes of the American people, justify a war against Iran, assuming the Trump administration even cares about justification? Will Iran attack Israel? No. Will Iran attack the United States? No. Of course not, not least because it can’t, even if it wished to do so, which it clearly doesn’t. Any such Iranian attack – absurd as such a suggestion is – would give the Trump administration ample justification for a war.
So what is the administration to do now that the news from so many quarters – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. – is so bad? What, if they are intent on a war with Iran, are they going to do about the absence of a cause for war? It seems that they are in a dilemma.
“Seem” is the key word. Logically speaking, if there is a war plan, if there is a Bolton/Pompeo/Israeli scenario, then the gun on the wall in the first act of this deadly play, must go off in the final act, no matter how long it takes. The audience is being primed by the administration and their media mouthpieces to expect a “smoking gun.” But what might it be?
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” George W. Bush said at a staged pseudo-event on October 7, 2002 as he set Americans up for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It was all predictable, blatant deception. And the media played along with such an absurdity. Iraq obviously had no nuclear weapons or the slightest capability to deliver even a firecracker on the U.S.
Now Iran is the Nuclear devil. Now Iran must be stopped. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, Iran has been and will be accused of developing nuclear weapons. Saddam was said to have had them; Iran only developing them, yet both lies need no evidence, just rhetoric.
Nevertheless, it might be claimed that secret “evidence” must be withheld on “national security” grounds or for fear of endangering Iranian informers or their families. Thus a preemptive attack could be justified on the grounds of preventing another “Ground Zero” (a misnomer when applied to the World Trade Center site, but conveniently evocative for stirring nuclear fears).
The American people, still severely shaken by the attacks of September 11, 2001, would surely be alarmed by such a “threat,” especially if it were linked to terrorism (on the high seas? In the air?), which has been the modus operandi of one administration after another. Aren’t we at war with terror? But it is a strategy – linking nuclear fears with terrorist fears – that the Trump administration may be hoping will cover its lack of evidence with emotional blackmail. But it is a strategy that may not work, since, for some very odd reason, people may prefer facts to fictions. I emphasize “may.”
Perhaps Trump’s neo-con henchmen’s best option, therefore, is to promote or create a Tonkin Gulf incident, “unprovoked aggression against American forces,” as Lyndon Johnson put it when he lied to the world in order to get the war he wanted after JFK had been disposed of by the CIA. It worked in 1964, so it might work again, especially with the help of our special “ally” in the region – Israel. And today’s attackers won’t be aggressors, they will be terrorists, which seals the deal. Bombs away!
It’s hard to say with certainty what justification the Trump war-crazies will settle on, but time is running out for them. The news is bad from every corner, so something must be done.
Many years of secret American/Israeli planning for an attack upon Iran can’t be wasted.
The stage is set. The charade continues. The MSM keep preparing us for the “smoking gun.” Something’s got to give, and propaganda geniuses are working overtime on delivering us an Oscar-winning justification.
Don’t buy it.
Especially since you’ve heard this before, and I’ve written it. With a few minor changes and the substitution of Iran for Iraq, this column was published on the morning before George W’s infamous (the 16 words about uranium from Niger) State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, fifty-one days before the invasion of Iraq, and one week before Colin Powell’s lies at the United Nations.
Shocked and surprised should be words eliminated from our vocabularies.
Saturday, January 4, 2020
SC203-12
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52797.htm
There can be no justification for this act of murder
America’s lawless arrogance has gone too far with the assassination of Iran’s top military commander. The deadly airstrike against General Qasem Soleimani was carried out on the order of President Donald Trump.
Several other senior Iranian military officials were also killed in the US missile attack on Iraq’s international airport in the capital Baghdad, including a top Iraqi militia leader.
Iranian politicians called it “an act of terrorism” and vowed harsh revenge. Meanwhile, the Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, condemned the US violation of his country’s sovereignty. Other Iraqi leaders are demanding the immediate expulsion of US forces from the country, where they number about 5,000 troops.
Trump taunted by tweeting the American flag after the news of the assassination emerged on Friday, and he later declared that the Iranian general “should have been taken out years ago” because he allegedly was responsible for the deaths of “thousands” of US troops, according to Trump.
Certainly, Soleimani was considered an enemy by the US. He organised effective military resistance to American imperialist designs in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere across the Middle East. For such strategising, the 62-year-old Iran-Iraq War veteran was revered, not just in his own nation, but across the region.
Trump claims the assassination was a necessary “pre-emptive defensive strike” because Soleimani was personally planning to launch region-wide attacks against US forces and diplomats. Pre-emptive “defensive” murder is not legally credible. The accusations against Soleimani are merely hearsay, and rely on the dubious word of internationally disgraced American intelligence agencies. Recall that US officials have been warning for months about Iranian plots to sabotage American interests in the Middle East – based on similar empty speculation.
For Trump to order the killing of such a revered public figure of a state which the US is not officially at war with is a brazen violation of international law. There can be no justification for this act of murder, despite the Trump administration’s lurid claims.
Qasem Soleimani, as leader of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was seen by the Iranian nation as second only in importance to Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
What Trump has done is not just order a barbarous act of violence, it is a reckless act of war.
To order the murder of senior foreign officials by presidential decree without any pretence of lawfulness is to set a new low bar for US state roguery.
Many people in the Middle East, as well as around the world and among the US’s own population are rightly anxious about the consequences.
Trump is tempting to unleash an all-out war with Iran that will potentially drag several countries into a world war.
For several decades now, the US has acted as if it were above the law.
Countless illegal wars and invasions against foreign countries, leading to the deaths of millions of people, are now climaxing in the form of a so-called president and ruling clique which shows absolute disregard for even legal niceties. American lawlessness is now rampant and shameless in its arrogance.
Whether Iran retaliates this week, next week or in the coming months is perhaps besides the point. US aggression and its sense of impunity has taken the world into an extremely dangerous situation where international law is evidently redundant. Washington is behaving as a full-on tyranny that does what it pleases. War, sanctions, killings, bullying all done with a frightening delusion of self-righteousness.
Arguably, nothing on this scale of state criminality has been seen since the Third Reich.
But one suspects that such hubris and hypocrisy comes with fatal ignorance among US establishment politicians and media. America is an overstretched empire whose lawlessness is stumbling towards its own collapse.
The murder of General Qasem Soleimani this week rattled US financial markets from the repercussions of possible war. We can just imagine how the American and world economy will implode if Iranian ballistic missiles send a few US warships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
There can be no justification for this act of murder
America’s lawless arrogance has gone too far with the assassination of Iran’s top military commander. The deadly airstrike against General Qasem Soleimani was carried out on the order of President Donald Trump.
Several other senior Iranian military officials were also killed in the US missile attack on Iraq’s international airport in the capital Baghdad, including a top Iraqi militia leader.
Iranian politicians called it “an act of terrorism” and vowed harsh revenge. Meanwhile, the Iraqi prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, condemned the US violation of his country’s sovereignty. Other Iraqi leaders are demanding the immediate expulsion of US forces from the country, where they number about 5,000 troops.
Trump taunted by tweeting the American flag after the news of the assassination emerged on Friday, and he later declared that the Iranian general “should have been taken out years ago” because he allegedly was responsible for the deaths of “thousands” of US troops, according to Trump.
Certainly, Soleimani was considered an enemy by the US. He organised effective military resistance to American imperialist designs in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere across the Middle East. For such strategising, the 62-year-old Iran-Iraq War veteran was revered, not just in his own nation, but across the region.
Trump claims the assassination was a necessary “pre-emptive defensive strike” because Soleimani was personally planning to launch region-wide attacks against US forces and diplomats. Pre-emptive “defensive” murder is not legally credible. The accusations against Soleimani are merely hearsay, and rely on the dubious word of internationally disgraced American intelligence agencies. Recall that US officials have been warning for months about Iranian plots to sabotage American interests in the Middle East – based on similar empty speculation.
For Trump to order the killing of such a revered public figure of a state which the US is not officially at war with is a brazen violation of international law. There can be no justification for this act of murder, despite the Trump administration’s lurid claims.
Qasem Soleimani, as leader of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, was seen by the Iranian nation as second only in importance to Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.
What Trump has done is not just order a barbarous act of violence, it is a reckless act of war.
To order the murder of senior foreign officials by presidential decree without any pretence of lawfulness is to set a new low bar for US state roguery.
Many people in the Middle East, as well as around the world and among the US’s own population are rightly anxious about the consequences.
Trump is tempting to unleash an all-out war with Iran that will potentially drag several countries into a world war.
For several decades now, the US has acted as if it were above the law.
Countless illegal wars and invasions against foreign countries, leading to the deaths of millions of people, are now climaxing in the form of a so-called president and ruling clique which shows absolute disregard for even legal niceties. American lawlessness is now rampant and shameless in its arrogance.
Whether Iran retaliates this week, next week or in the coming months is perhaps besides the point. US aggression and its sense of impunity has taken the world into an extremely dangerous situation where international law is evidently redundant. Washington is behaving as a full-on tyranny that does what it pleases. War, sanctions, killings, bullying all done with a frightening delusion of self-righteousness.
Arguably, nothing on this scale of state criminality has been seen since the Third Reich.
But one suspects that such hubris and hypocrisy comes with fatal ignorance among US establishment politicians and media. America is an overstretched empire whose lawlessness is stumbling towards its own collapse.
The murder of General Qasem Soleimani this week rattled US financial markets from the repercussions of possible war. We can just imagine how the American and world economy will implode if Iranian ballistic missiles send a few US warships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf.
Friday, January 3, 2020
SC203-11
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/war-with-iran/
War With Iran
The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.
The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport, also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.
A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.
Iran, which has vowed “harsh retaliation,” is already reeling under the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel were wounded. The U.S. responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child’s play.
Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.
So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?
The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.
The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.
Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will not cooperate with Washington if the U.S. goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump administration’s view that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.
International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.
A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?
The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a new order would undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.
War With Iran
The assassination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near Baghdad’s airport will ignite widespread retaliatory attacks against U.S. targets from Shiites, who form the majority in Iraq. It will activate Iranian-backed militias and insurgents in Lebanon and Syria and throughout the Middle East. The existing mayhem, violence, failed states and war, the result of nearly two decades of U.S. blunders and miscalculations in the region, will become an even wider and more dangerous conflagration. The consequences are ominous. Not only will the U.S. swiftly find itself under siege in Iraq and perhaps driven out of the country—there is only a paltry force of 5,200 U.S. troops in Iraq, all U.S. citizens in Iraq have been told to leave the country “immediately” and the embassy and consular services have been closed—but the situation could also draw us into a war directly with Iran. The American Empire, it seems, will die not with a whimper but a bang.
The targeting of Soleimani, who was killed by a MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired missiles into his convoy as he was leaving the Baghdad airport, also took the life of Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, along with other Iraqi Shiite militia leaders. The strike may temporarily bolster the political fortunes of the two beleaguered architects of the assassination, Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is an act of imperial suicide by the United States. There can be no positive outcome. It opens up the possibility of an Armageddon-type scenario relished by the lunatic fringes of the Christian right.
A war with Iran would see it use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, mines and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which is the corridor for 20% of the world’s oil supply. Oil prices would double, perhaps triple, devastating the global economy. The retaliatory strikes by Iran on Israel, as well as on American military installations in Iraq, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. The Shiites in the region, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province, the Shiite majority in Iraq and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would turn in fury on us and our dwindling allies. There would be an increase in terrorist attacks, including on American soil, and widespread sabotage of oil production in the Persian Gulf. Hezbollah in southern Lebanon would renew attacks on northern Israel. War with Iran would trigger a long and widening regional conflict that, by the time it was done, would terminate the American Empire and leave in its wake mounds of corpses and smoldering ruins. Let us hope for a miracle to pull us back from this Dr. Strangelove self-immolation.
Iran, which has vowed “harsh retaliation,” is already reeling under the crippling economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration when it unilaterally withdrew in 2018 from the Iranian nuclear arms deal. Tensions in Iraq between the U.S. and the Shiite majority, at the same time, have been escalating. On Dec. 27 Katyusha rockets were fired at a military base in Kirkuk where U.S. forces are stationed. An American civilian contractor was killed and several U.S. military personnel were wounded. The U.S. responded on Dec. 29 by bombing sites belonging to the Iranian-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia. Two days later Iranian-backed militias attacked the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, vandalizing and destroying parts of the building and causing its closure. But this attack will soon look like child’s play.
Iraq after our 2003 invasion and occupation has been destroyed as a unified country. Its once-modern infrastructure is in ruins. Electrical and water services are, at best, erratic. There is high unemployment and discontent over widespread government corruption that has led to bloody street protests. Warring militias and ethnic factions have carved out competing and antagonistic enclaves. At the same time, the war in Afghanistan is lost, as the Afghanistan Papers published by The Washington Post detail. Libya is a failed state. Yemen after five years of unrelenting Saudi airstrikes and a blockade is enduring one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters. The “moderate” rebels we funded and armed in Syria at a cost of $500 million, after instigating a lawless reign of terror, have been beaten and driven out of the country. The monetary cost for this military folly, the greatest strategic blunder in American history, is between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.
So why go to war with Iran? Why walk away from a nuclear agreement that Iran did not violate? Why demonize a government that is the mortal enemy of the Taliban, along with other jihadist groups, including al-Qaida and Islamic State? Why shatter the de facto alliance we have with Iran in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why further destabilize a region already dangerously volatile?
The generals and politicians who launched and prosecuted these wars are not about to take the blame for the quagmires they created. They need a scapegoat. It is Iran. The hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed, including at least 200,000 civilians, and the millions driven from their homes into displacement and refugee camps cannot, they insist, be the result of our failed and misguided policies. The proliferation of radical jihadist groups and militias, many of which we initially trained and armed, along with the continued worldwide terrorist attacks, have to be someone else’s fault. The generals, the CIA, the private contractors and weapons manufacturers who have grown rich off these conflicts, the politicians such as George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, along with all the “experts” and celebrity pundits who serve as cheerleaders for endless war, have convinced themselves, and want to convince us, that Iran is responsible for our catastrophe.
The chaos and instability we unleashed in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, left Iran as the dominant country in the region. Washington empowered its nemesis. It has no idea how to reverse its mistake other than to attack Iran.
Trump and Netanyahu, as well as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are mired in scandal. They believe a new war would divert attention from their foreign and domestic crises. But they have no more rational strategy for war with Iran than they did for the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. European allies, whom Trump alienated when he walked away from the Iranian nuclear agreement, will not cooperate with Washington if the U.S. goes to war with Iran. The Pentagon lacks the hundreds of thousands of troops it would need to attack and occupy Iran. And the Trump administration’s view that the marginal and discredited Iranian resistance group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the war against Iran and is seen by most Iranians as composed of traitors, is a viable counterforce to the Iranian government is ludicrous.
International law, along with the rights of 80 million people in Iran, is ignored just as the rights of the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria were ignored. The Iranians, whatever they feel about their despotic regime, would not see the United States as allies or liberators. They do not want to be occupied. They would resist.
A war with Iran would be seen throughout the region as a war against Shiism. But these are calculations that the ideologues, who know little about the instrument of war and even less about the cultures or peoples they seek to dominate, cannot fathom. Attacking Iran would be no more successful than the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon in 2006, which failed to break Hezbollah and united most Lebanese behind that militant group. The Israeli bombing did not pacify 4 million Lebanese. What will happen if we begin to pound a country of 80 million people whose land mass is three times the size of France?
The United States, like Israel, has become a pariah that shreds, violates or absents itself from international law. We launch preemptive wars, which under international law is defined as a “crime of aggression,” based on fabricated evidence. We, as citizens, must hold our government accountable for these crimes. If we do not, we will be complicit in the codification of a new world order, one that would have terrifying consequences. It would be a world without treaties, statutes and laws. It would be a world where any nation, from a rogue nuclear state to a great imperial power, would be able to invoke its domestic laws to annul its obligations to others. Such a new order would undo five decades of international cooperation—largely put in place by the United States—and thrust us into a Hobbesian nightmare. Diplomacy, broad cooperation, treaties and law, all the mechanisms designed to civilize the global community, would be replaced by savagery.
Thursday, January 2, 2020
SC203-10
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/52779.htm
Full Spectrum Fubar
Back in the days when the Deep State’s diktats commanded a modicum of credibility, its stated goal was worldwide military “full spectrum dominance”. Twenty years of grossly humiliating failure in its murderously ineffectual floundering has rendered that idea null, even to doctrinaire NeoCon wanks.
Instead, the WWII term for total situational dysfunction and chaos is now so perfectly descriptive of our national Goon Show that it seems made for it. Back then, when a major planned operation went tits up, GIs described it as “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition” and the acronym stuck. Consider:
America raped and bludgeoned half a dozen countries that never harmed it while financing two that injured it materially. That monumental destruction, and the funneling of billions to whore states Isreal and Saudi Arabia (much of it earmarked for death merchants Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing) gorged the War Machine at the price of tens of thousands of young American’s lives, bodies, and sanity. Americans mostly don’t care, of course, but that, too, is a fubar indicator.
In America’s chief industry and source of psychotic pride--making weapons of war--the genius of Capitalism has diligently devised ways to gouge more and more money for less and less quality in extravagantly non-performing turkeys. The motive, Putin observed, is that while Russia makes arms for defense, America does so to maximize War Machine profits. This is why America puts billions into endless iterations of gold-plated F-35s that break down and don’t work, and aircraft carriers that were gangbusters at Midway against Zeroes but are now just lumbering, gigantic pinatas Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles will blow the jujus out of in a Moscow minute.
Russia’s hypersonic, non-ballistic missiles--its phenomenal Avangard inter-continental system (Mach 27) and the Kinzhal and Zircon land and sea-based missiles that operate above Mach 9 (6000 mph)--are untrackable and indestructable by US defenses, and are generations ahead of anything America is even testing. This data isn’t secret; it’s openly available and the US Military has it. Regarding the old days of bitter US/Russian weapons rivalry, Mr. Putin said, “They didn’t listen to us then; they’ll listen to us now.”
America has lately performed the exquisitely difficult geopolitical maneuver of alienating all nations it considers friends while simultaneously actively provoking those it considers enemies. That extraordinary diplomatic Quadruple Axel had never yet been attempted, much less accomplished.
America has undermined, abrogated, or withdrawn from the entire web of international nuclear arms control treaties, in addition to unilaterally and dishonestly sabotaging the nuclear JCPOA with Iran to the dismay of our “partners”. It did this at a time when it’s futile mayhem in the Arab world has made it the butt of the world’s derision, its Imperial hubris has alienated even its European vassals, and when Russia and China, which have been moderate and restrained in absorbing US rants and tantrums--knowing the mortal risk of brinksmanship as America can’t--have the resolve, if forced, to go all in and show this deluded Empire what real war is all about.
In addition to its military and diplomatic faceplants, the US has appalled and estranged most of the world with its oafish, braindead denial of rapidly accelerating climate change, and is leading the omnicidal charge of gross polluting nations against all science and sanity toward a blistering, toxic, inundated, and perhaps even humanly uninhabitable earth.
So much for our status in the world; America is the active definition of fubar at home. A blundering Capitalist Fascist tyranny burlesquing shamelessly as a democracy, run as a Mafia Family for its vicious oligarchs and owners, with a Kshatriya class of Deep State Security thugs managing its clownish Punch-and-Judy politics to mesmerize the rubes, it has baldly stolen every benefit, every right, every security, and every source of pride from its dull people and left them with porn, dope, toons, and cage fighting in place of hopes, dreams or aspirations beyond becoming one of their own exploiters.
Our Capitalist ruling class, entrenched in absolute power behind a symbolic Potemkin Government of flunkies comprised of a contemptible claque of hicks, clods, whores, and sleazy, Cracker hypocrites--our Congress--that stages infantile foodfights to cozen the gullible, rapes and robs us with the blessing of a justice system that is the black embodiment of corruption. Pathologically greedy, Capitalists have abandoned production as a less efficient way to plunder the public good than financial chicanery, bank fraud, and tax crime. Poisoned by their disease, they lack even the foresight to alter their sick voracity in the face of the climate catastrophe that is driving mass extinction and may portend the end of humanity itself.
After half a century producing nothing of benefit to the American people, our Congress, fiercely divided for melodrama’s sake on fairytale principles neither gang respects or adheres to, focused only on doling trillions in fiat money to its masters, is fully engaged in an exercise so ridiculous and debased that a rational nation would summarily dissolve and eliminate it.
A criminal sociopathic President, impeached by a criminal, sociopathic Congress, not for high crimes in which they have been deeply complicit, but on two empty, trivial, puny premises, with the charade locked in insoluble stasis while the clueless country hurtles toward catastrophe: this is what is laughingly referred to as government in this sad, stupid, criminal nation.
QED, Fubar is indisputably the term that applies. Perceptive cynics will take issue, saying that because great Capitalist thieves have both hands deeper into the national till than they ever have proves that the system is working as intended. On a superficial level the argument is defensible but behind the heavy protective armor of Imperial propaganda lurks the broad insider economic awareness that the day of dollar hegemony is at sunset.
Russia and China are dumping treasuries by the hundreds of billions and buying gold in unprecedented quantities. Money cognoscenti are deeply troubled by enslavement to a currency supported only by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S.A., in which they now have no faith whatever. Decoupling from the dollar as the world reserve currency and adoption of a basket of currencies in its place will bring a devaluation jolt that will disintegrate our massive debt-disabled national financial junkyard and bankrupt us all.
Back in the days of Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, GIs not under fire at the Front could laugh at Army disasters and joke about the fubar. We don’t have that space: our Front is everywhere and we can’t escape it. The plain fact is it is terrifying to live in an evil, dying, decomposing Empire. There is no joy in exposing systemic failure of ones own. There is only a profound and wounding sadness in the awareness that your country is a horror, a criminal monster, and the source of so much misery and pain to so much of the world. It is pure grief to find that all you have believed, likely loved, and certainly identified with, is false and rotten at its core. Yet life and beauty have always survived the deaths of empires, and love never dies. History, as well as Dylan Thomas, assures us that “Death shall have no Dominion.
Full Spectrum Fubar
Back in the days when the Deep State’s diktats commanded a modicum of credibility, its stated goal was worldwide military “full spectrum dominance”. Twenty years of grossly humiliating failure in its murderously ineffectual floundering has rendered that idea null, even to doctrinaire NeoCon wanks.
Instead, the WWII term for total situational dysfunction and chaos is now so perfectly descriptive of our national Goon Show that it seems made for it. Back then, when a major planned operation went tits up, GIs described it as “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition” and the acronym stuck. Consider:
America raped and bludgeoned half a dozen countries that never harmed it while financing two that injured it materially. That monumental destruction, and the funneling of billions to whore states Isreal and Saudi Arabia (much of it earmarked for death merchants Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing) gorged the War Machine at the price of tens of thousands of young American’s lives, bodies, and sanity. Americans mostly don’t care, of course, but that, too, is a fubar indicator.
In America’s chief industry and source of psychotic pride--making weapons of war--the genius of Capitalism has diligently devised ways to gouge more and more money for less and less quality in extravagantly non-performing turkeys. The motive, Putin observed, is that while Russia makes arms for defense, America does so to maximize War Machine profits. This is why America puts billions into endless iterations of gold-plated F-35s that break down and don’t work, and aircraft carriers that were gangbusters at Midway against Zeroes but are now just lumbering, gigantic pinatas Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missiles will blow the jujus out of in a Moscow minute.
Russia’s hypersonic, non-ballistic missiles--its phenomenal Avangard inter-continental system (Mach 27) and the Kinzhal and Zircon land and sea-based missiles that operate above Mach 9 (6000 mph)--are untrackable and indestructable by US defenses, and are generations ahead of anything America is even testing. This data isn’t secret; it’s openly available and the US Military has it. Regarding the old days of bitter US/Russian weapons rivalry, Mr. Putin said, “They didn’t listen to us then; they’ll listen to us now.”
America has lately performed the exquisitely difficult geopolitical maneuver of alienating all nations it considers friends while simultaneously actively provoking those it considers enemies. That extraordinary diplomatic Quadruple Axel had never yet been attempted, much less accomplished.
America has undermined, abrogated, or withdrawn from the entire web of international nuclear arms control treaties, in addition to unilaterally and dishonestly sabotaging the nuclear JCPOA with Iran to the dismay of our “partners”. It did this at a time when it’s futile mayhem in the Arab world has made it the butt of the world’s derision, its Imperial hubris has alienated even its European vassals, and when Russia and China, which have been moderate and restrained in absorbing US rants and tantrums--knowing the mortal risk of brinksmanship as America can’t--have the resolve, if forced, to go all in and show this deluded Empire what real war is all about.
In addition to its military and diplomatic faceplants, the US has appalled and estranged most of the world with its oafish, braindead denial of rapidly accelerating climate change, and is leading the omnicidal charge of gross polluting nations against all science and sanity toward a blistering, toxic, inundated, and perhaps even humanly uninhabitable earth.
So much for our status in the world; America is the active definition of fubar at home. A blundering Capitalist Fascist tyranny burlesquing shamelessly as a democracy, run as a Mafia Family for its vicious oligarchs and owners, with a Kshatriya class of Deep State Security thugs managing its clownish Punch-and-Judy politics to mesmerize the rubes, it has baldly stolen every benefit, every right, every security, and every source of pride from its dull people and left them with porn, dope, toons, and cage fighting in place of hopes, dreams or aspirations beyond becoming one of their own exploiters.
Our Capitalist ruling class, entrenched in absolute power behind a symbolic Potemkin Government of flunkies comprised of a contemptible claque of hicks, clods, whores, and sleazy, Cracker hypocrites--our Congress--that stages infantile foodfights to cozen the gullible, rapes and robs us with the blessing of a justice system that is the black embodiment of corruption. Pathologically greedy, Capitalists have abandoned production as a less efficient way to plunder the public good than financial chicanery, bank fraud, and tax crime. Poisoned by their disease, they lack even the foresight to alter their sick voracity in the face of the climate catastrophe that is driving mass extinction and may portend the end of humanity itself.
After half a century producing nothing of benefit to the American people, our Congress, fiercely divided for melodrama’s sake on fairytale principles neither gang respects or adheres to, focused only on doling trillions in fiat money to its masters, is fully engaged in an exercise so ridiculous and debased that a rational nation would summarily dissolve and eliminate it.
A criminal sociopathic President, impeached by a criminal, sociopathic Congress, not for high crimes in which they have been deeply complicit, but on two empty, trivial, puny premises, with the charade locked in insoluble stasis while the clueless country hurtles toward catastrophe: this is what is laughingly referred to as government in this sad, stupid, criminal nation.
QED, Fubar is indisputably the term that applies. Perceptive cynics will take issue, saying that because great Capitalist thieves have both hands deeper into the national till than they ever have proves that the system is working as intended. On a superficial level the argument is defensible but behind the heavy protective armor of Imperial propaganda lurks the broad insider economic awareness that the day of dollar hegemony is at sunset.
Russia and China are dumping treasuries by the hundreds of billions and buying gold in unprecedented quantities. Money cognoscenti are deeply troubled by enslavement to a currency supported only by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S.A., in which they now have no faith whatever. Decoupling from the dollar as the world reserve currency and adoption of a basket of currencies in its place will bring a devaluation jolt that will disintegrate our massive debt-disabled national financial junkyard and bankrupt us all.
Back in the days of Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, GIs not under fire at the Front could laugh at Army disasters and joke about the fubar. We don’t have that space: our Front is everywhere and we can’t escape it. The plain fact is it is terrifying to live in an evil, dying, decomposing Empire. There is no joy in exposing systemic failure of ones own. There is only a profound and wounding sadness in the awareness that your country is a horror, a criminal monster, and the source of so much misery and pain to so much of the world. It is pure grief to find that all you have believed, likely loved, and certainly identified with, is false and rotten at its core. Yet life and beauty have always survived the deaths of empires, and love never dies. History, as well as Dylan Thomas, assures us that “Death shall have no Dominion.
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