http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/gate-of-gates/
Gate of Gates?
When historians of the future finish their meal of rat à la moutarde at the campfire, and pass around the battered plastic jug of wild raisin wine, they will kick back and hear the griot sing of John Brennan, the fabled chief of an ancient order called the CIA, and how he started the monkey business aimed at bringing down the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness, chief of chiefs in the land once known as America. Alas, the hero’s journey of Brennan, ends in a jail cell at the storied Allenwood Federal Penitentiary, where he slowly pined away between games of ping-pong and knock-hockey, dreaming of a cable network retirement package that never was….
One gets the feeling more and more that Mr. Brennan is at the center of this ever-mushrooming matrix of scandals around the 2016 election. “Bigger Than Watergate?” the headline in today’s New York Times asks? The mendacity of this once-proud newspaper is really something to behold. Take the following paragraph, for instance:
“Depending on what is eventually proven, the core scandal could rival Watergate, in which a “third-rate burglary” of Democratic National Committee headquarters ultimately revealed a wide-ranging campaign of political sabotage and spying to influence the 1972 presidential election and undercut perceived rivals. In the current case, a hostile foreign power sought to sway the 2016 election and there is evidence that at least some people in Mr. Trump’s circle were willing to collaborate with it to do so.”
You have to really wonder how the Times editors overlooked the other relevant details in the current case pertaining to goings-on initiated by Mr. Brennan and involving obviously criminal misbehavior among the US Intelligence services, and especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in their effort to un-do the election that put the Trump creature in the White House instead of the enchantress known as Hillary. I did like the trope “a hostile foreign power.” Apparently they were too embarrassed to just say “Russia,” since by now it has become the most threadbare hobgoblin in all of US political history.
Rumors are flying that the long-awaited (so long it is nearly forgotten) Department of Justice Inspector General’s report contains a rather severe interpretation of what actually has been going on for the last couple of years in this farrago of charge and countercharge that the legacy news media has been doing its best to garble and deflect — namely, that the highest officers of the government conspired to tamper with the 2016 election. The latest twist is news — actually reported by the Times Thursday — that the FBI placed a “mole” inside the Trump campaign. If the mole discovered anything, then it is the only morsel of information that hasn’t been leaked in two years, which leads the casual observer to infer that the mole found really nothing.
On the other hand, a great deal is already known about the misdeeds surrounding Hillary and her supporters, including Mr. Obama and his inner circle, and some of those incriminating particulars have been officially certified — for example, the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe on recommendations of the Agency’s own ethics committee, with overtones of criminal culpability. There is also little ambiguity left about the origin of the infamous Steele Dossier. It’s an established fact that it was bought-and-paid-for by the Democratic National Committee, which is to say the Hillary campaign, and that many of the dramatis personae involved lied about it under oath. Many other suspicious loose ends remain to be tied. Those not driven insane by Trumpophobia are probably unsatisfied with the story of what Attorney General Loretta Lynch was doing, exactly, with former President Bill Clinton during that Phoenix airport tête-à-tête a few days before FBI Director Jim Comey exonerated Mr. Clinton’s wife in the email server “matter.”
One can see where this tangled tale is tending: to the sacred chamber known as the grand jury. Probably several grand juries. That will lead to years of entertaining courtroom antics at the same time that the USA’s financial condition fatefully unravels. That event might finally produce the effect that all the exertions of the so-called Deep State have failed to achieve so far: the discrediting of Donald Trump. Alas, the literal discrediting of the USA and its hallowed institutions — including the US dollar — may be a much more momentous thing than the fall of Trump.
Personally, I won’t be completely satisfied until the editors of The New York Times have to answer to charges of sedition in a court of law.
Monday, May 21, 2018
Friday, May 18, 2018
SC165-8
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49446.htm
US Embassy Baptized With Blood
On the very hour of the US opening its embassy in Jerusalem, hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children, were being slaughtered by Israeli snipers.
Nearly 60 people, including eight children, were brutally murdered in cold blood by Israeli sharpshooters. At least a thousand others were injured from bullet wounds, many of whom will be maimed for life. More bloodshed is expected in coming days.
What kind of criminal world are we living in? When news channels can report this carnage as if it's somehow normal. Where is the outrage of Western pundits who foam at the mouth over alleged atrocities elsewhere?
While American and Israeli dignitaries were regaling themselves with hosannas about their "shared values" of "democracy" and "peace", only a few miles away thousands of Palestinians in Gaza were being shot at for daring to demand respect for their human rights.
President Donald Trump's decision to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been widely rebuked by the rest of the world. The move is killing whatever little peace process there was between Palestinians and Israelis, with the latter emboldened by Trump to ruthlessly annex all territory.
Trump was not present at the embassy ceremony, sending his congratulations by video link instead. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner headed the American delegation. Kushner in an address praised Israel for its "democratic values" and how the US and Israel were eternal allies. With a solemn face, Kushner said: "those who incite violence cannot be part of any peace process".
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gloated over America's backing for his dream to make Jerusalem the "undivided capital of the Jewish state". Without a hint of shame, Netanyahu crowed that "you can't build peace on a foundation of lies". He called it a "great day".
What Trump has done is give official US endorsement to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians and international law designate as the future capital of a Palestinian state supposedly arrived at through negotiations with the Israelis.
Thus, under Trump, Washington is now blatantly complicit in the illegal annexation of Palestinian territory by Israel. The role of the US in sponsoring Israeli violations was always present, albeit deceptively disguised with claims of being a mediator and "honest broker" between Palestinians and Israelis.
Nearly 25 years after signing the Oslo Peace Accords, under President Bill Clinton, the Israelis with Washington's acquiescence have expanded their illegal settlements and carried out countless massacres against the Palestinian population, who are confined to open-air concentration camps like the Gaza Strip.
And yet, given this audacious unmasking by Trump of America's role as a brazen accomplice to Israeli crimes, the American president has the brass neck to say this week that Washington is still committed to "full and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians".
The opening of the US embassy on Monday was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel as a state in 1948. That foundation was built on pogroms and massacres carried out by Jewish settlers who had migrated to historic Palestine from around the world with their Zionist dream and blessings from the United Nations and Western powers to usurp Palestinian rights.
Netanyahu's speech about peace not being possible on "a foundation of lies" applies, ironically, to the creation of the state of Israel. Appropriately, though despicably, the 70th anniversary and the opening of the US embassy was accompanied with the massacre of unarmed Palestinians.
The following day, Tuesday, is what the Palestinians commemorate as "Nakba" — or the "Catastrophe" — the 70th anniversary marking their dispossession as a people from their historic lands.
Over seven decades, millions of Palestinians have been expelled to refugee camps in neighboring states like Jordan and Lebanon. Others ended up in confined ghettos like Gaza or the West Bank, held under siege by Israeli "defense forces".
Out of these balkanized shards of land, the Palestinians are in theory supposed to gain future statehood. But that is a cynical pipe-dream that neither the Israelis nor the US really believe in. The trite talk of future peace is just a cover for the ongoing slow-motion dispossession of Palestinians until they are driven out altogether by the encroaching Israeli state.
The opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem this week, crushing Palestinians claims to East Jerusalem, is emblematic of the cynical and insidious process of historical ethnic cleansing.
In Gaza, where two million Palestinians subsist in appalling conditions of no clean water or electricity, the UN says that the coastal enclave will become unlivable in a matter of years. Under siege from the Israeli military, the people of Gaza are trapped in an open-air prison. Eventually, when they have been ground down into total destitution, the Israelis will probably evacuate them under some grubby American-backed deal to a compliant neighboring state, and finally, annex Gaza.
It is under these conditions of desperation that the people of Gaza have for the past six weeks taken to protesting at Israeli military penning them in with a so-called "security border". Over the past six weeks, nearly 50 unarmed protesters, including journalists and children, were shot dead by Israeli snipers under orders from high command in a tactic of shoot-to-kill. This week, the death toll more than doubled.
The sickening paradox of Israel is too much for words. The state was set up by Jewish migrants fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. Today, it is maintained by the murderous practices of the Nazi SS and a Western media propaganda system that would marvel Josef Goebbels.
What adds to the horror is how supine European governments, the UN and the Western media are towards the barbarity being inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli state and its American sponsor. The Arab client regimes of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are equally odious in their silence.
European officials have called for "restraint" by "all sides", thus obfuscating the sheer criminality of Israel and the US. Why aren't the EU and UN calling for war crimes prosecutions?
The hypocrisy and double standards shown by Western governments is truly shocking. Only a few weeks ago, they were clamoring over an alleged chemical-weapons incident in Syria, and carried out air strikes on that country in "retribution". It turned out that the incident was a fabrication concocted by Western-backed terrorists.
How many times have we heard Western governments and their media pontificate about alleged Russian "annexation" of Crimea?
But these Western hypocrites say nothing about the ongoing murderous annexation of Palestine by the US-backed Israeli state.
We are living in nefarious, lawless times, where Western governments and media say next to nothing about the murder of civilians when it suits their geopolitics. But these same governments make up accusations on the basis of lies and fulminate with righteous condemnation out of cynical expedience against "enemies" like Syria, Iran and Russia.
The opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem this week was anointed with the blood of innocent people shot down by Israeli snipers. That massacre is surely the grotesque sign of the iniquitous and very dangerous times were are living in.
US Embassy Baptized With Blood
On the very hour of the US opening its embassy in Jerusalem, hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children, were being slaughtered by Israeli snipers.
Nearly 60 people, including eight children, were brutally murdered in cold blood by Israeli sharpshooters. At least a thousand others were injured from bullet wounds, many of whom will be maimed for life. More bloodshed is expected in coming days.
What kind of criminal world are we living in? When news channels can report this carnage as if it's somehow normal. Where is the outrage of Western pundits who foam at the mouth over alleged atrocities elsewhere?
While American and Israeli dignitaries were regaling themselves with hosannas about their "shared values" of "democracy" and "peace", only a few miles away thousands of Palestinians in Gaza were being shot at for daring to demand respect for their human rights.
President Donald Trump's decision to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been widely rebuked by the rest of the world. The move is killing whatever little peace process there was between Palestinians and Israelis, with the latter emboldened by Trump to ruthlessly annex all territory.
Trump was not present at the embassy ceremony, sending his congratulations by video link instead. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner headed the American delegation. Kushner in an address praised Israel for its "democratic values" and how the US and Israel were eternal allies. With a solemn face, Kushner said: "those who incite violence cannot be part of any peace process".
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gloated over America's backing for his dream to make Jerusalem the "undivided capital of the Jewish state". Without a hint of shame, Netanyahu crowed that "you can't build peace on a foundation of lies". He called it a "great day".
What Trump has done is give official US endorsement to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, which Palestinians and international law designate as the future capital of a Palestinian state supposedly arrived at through negotiations with the Israelis.
Thus, under Trump, Washington is now blatantly complicit in the illegal annexation of Palestinian territory by Israel. The role of the US in sponsoring Israeli violations was always present, albeit deceptively disguised with claims of being a mediator and "honest broker" between Palestinians and Israelis.
Nearly 25 years after signing the Oslo Peace Accords, under President Bill Clinton, the Israelis with Washington's acquiescence have expanded their illegal settlements and carried out countless massacres against the Palestinian population, who are confined to open-air concentration camps like the Gaza Strip.
And yet, given this audacious unmasking by Trump of America's role as a brazen accomplice to Israeli crimes, the American president has the brass neck to say this week that Washington is still committed to "full and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians".
The opening of the US embassy on Monday was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel as a state in 1948. That foundation was built on pogroms and massacres carried out by Jewish settlers who had migrated to historic Palestine from around the world with their Zionist dream and blessings from the United Nations and Western powers to usurp Palestinian rights.
Netanyahu's speech about peace not being possible on "a foundation of lies" applies, ironically, to the creation of the state of Israel. Appropriately, though despicably, the 70th anniversary and the opening of the US embassy was accompanied with the massacre of unarmed Palestinians.
The following day, Tuesday, is what the Palestinians commemorate as "Nakba" — or the "Catastrophe" — the 70th anniversary marking their dispossession as a people from their historic lands.
Over seven decades, millions of Palestinians have been expelled to refugee camps in neighboring states like Jordan and Lebanon. Others ended up in confined ghettos like Gaza or the West Bank, held under siege by Israeli "defense forces".
Out of these balkanized shards of land, the Palestinians are in theory supposed to gain future statehood. But that is a cynical pipe-dream that neither the Israelis nor the US really believe in. The trite talk of future peace is just a cover for the ongoing slow-motion dispossession of Palestinians until they are driven out altogether by the encroaching Israeli state.
The opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem this week, crushing Palestinians claims to East Jerusalem, is emblematic of the cynical and insidious process of historical ethnic cleansing.
In Gaza, where two million Palestinians subsist in appalling conditions of no clean water or electricity, the UN says that the coastal enclave will become unlivable in a matter of years. Under siege from the Israeli military, the people of Gaza are trapped in an open-air prison. Eventually, when they have been ground down into total destitution, the Israelis will probably evacuate them under some grubby American-backed deal to a compliant neighboring state, and finally, annex Gaza.
It is under these conditions of desperation that the people of Gaza have for the past six weeks taken to protesting at Israeli military penning them in with a so-called "security border". Over the past six weeks, nearly 50 unarmed protesters, including journalists and children, were shot dead by Israeli snipers under orders from high command in a tactic of shoot-to-kill. This week, the death toll more than doubled.
The sickening paradox of Israel is too much for words. The state was set up by Jewish migrants fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe. Today, it is maintained by the murderous practices of the Nazi SS and a Western media propaganda system that would marvel Josef Goebbels.
What adds to the horror is how supine European governments, the UN and the Western media are towards the barbarity being inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli state and its American sponsor. The Arab client regimes of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states are equally odious in their silence.
European officials have called for "restraint" by "all sides", thus obfuscating the sheer criminality of Israel and the US. Why aren't the EU and UN calling for war crimes prosecutions?
The hypocrisy and double standards shown by Western governments is truly shocking. Only a few weeks ago, they were clamoring over an alleged chemical-weapons incident in Syria, and carried out air strikes on that country in "retribution". It turned out that the incident was a fabrication concocted by Western-backed terrorists.
How many times have we heard Western governments and their media pontificate about alleged Russian "annexation" of Crimea?
But these Western hypocrites say nothing about the ongoing murderous annexation of Palestine by the US-backed Israeli state.
We are living in nefarious, lawless times, where Western governments and media say next to nothing about the murder of civilians when it suits their geopolitics. But these same governments make up accusations on the basis of lies and fulminate with righteous condemnation out of cynical expedience against "enemies" like Syria, Iran and Russia.
The opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem this week was anointed with the blood of innocent people shot down by Israeli snipers. That massacre is surely the grotesque sign of the iniquitous and very dangerous times were are living in.
SC165-7
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49453.htm
US Policy: Provocation & War
The United States, as many observers have noted, appears to be undergoing an historic process of “strategic decline”. In order to stave off deterioration in its political and economic power, the US is resorting to greater dependence on militarism and aggression.
For that to work, a policy of ramping up provocations against other nations is a necessary concomitant. Because militarism and aggression need a pretext of conflict.
This is the unavoidable conclusion from several international interfaces. The US is resorting to more aggression as a means of asserting its power against perceived global rivals and to shore up its debt-ridden, decrepit capitalist economy.
Those rivals are explicitly identified by Washington as Russia and China, as well as to a lesser extent Iran, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. All are viewed as impediments to American ambitions for global hegemony.
The violence in Gaza this week by Israeli military can be seen in the context of a wider policy in Washington of provocation. The shooting dead of over 60 unarmed Palestinians in a single day by Israeli snipers and the maiming of thousands of others, including women and children, was arguably a deliberate attempt to incite greater violence across the Middle East.
It seems no coincidence that the atrocity was carried out on the very day that the US controversially opened a new embassy in the contested city of Jerusalem, despite widespread international warning against the move as a violation of Palestinian rights.
US President Donald Trump has embraced the right-wing Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu to articulate an extreme partisan view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in which Palestinian rights are non-existent.
The gratuitous use of lethal force, while American dignitaries gathered a short distance away in Jerusalem, seems to have been a calculated attempt to provoke a violent reaction.
If the US and Israel incited armed response from Lebanon's Hezbollah or Iran — parties that have long-denounced American imperialism in the Middle East — then the ensuing chaos plays well for Washington. It would give the US and Israel an excuse to step up military force against these rivals. That could take the form of more US-backed Israeli air strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah bases in Syria, despite those bases being legally present.
For the US, the main objective of provoking greater instability and conflict is to undermine Russia and its recently regained stature as a major international power in the Middle East, owing to its successful military intervention in Syria at the end of 2015 to defeat US-backed regime-change proxies.
Russia's intervention in Syria ordered by President Putin has served to accelerate the sense of strategic decline for the US. The American policy of regime change in the Middle East as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere was abruptly stopped in its tracks by Russia's military deployment in Syria. The American bingeing on regime-change was halted too by Iranian and Hezbollah fighters legally requested by the Assad government to defend the state.
The defeat of foreign terrorist proxies in Syria was a major setback for the US and its British, French and Turkish NATO allies, as well as for American client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia which colluded in the covert regime-change assault.
To salvage this momentous defeat, and more generally, strategic decline, the US seems to have embarked on a desperate policy of provocation with the assistance of its client regimes.
The aggressive way that Trump pulled the US out of the international nuclear accord with Iran last week caught many observers and European allies by surprise with his hardline, obstreperous manner.
Everyone knew Trump despised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA) signed in 2015 by President Obama. But few expected Trump to violate the deal with such bellicose threats to intensify economic sanctions on Tehran, as well as on European states doing business with Iran.
Vilifying Iran as a terrorist state and ranting against Tehran over alleged secret nuclear-weapons building, Trump was ostentatiously adopting the Israeli position of demonizing Iran.
The Trump administration's warnings to Europe in particular that its firms and banks would be penalized for continuing to do business with Iran, as is their right under the JCPOA, seemed to be a calculated provocation to crash the accord and incite Iran to resume past nuclear activities, which Trump, as well as Israel, has intimated would be met with military attack.
So far, Trump's provocations over the Iran deal have failed. Iran and the other signatories — Russia, China and the European Union — have agreed to continue implementing the accord.
However, given this failure, so far, to sabotage the JCPOA it can be expected that the US and its regional partners will try to ramp up provocations. The Israeli air strikes on Iranian bases in Syria the day after Trump announced the US pullout from the accord appear to have been a deliberate attempt at antagonizing Iran even further. So too were Saudi claims that a missile attack on Riyadh from Yemen were "an act of war by Iran" owing to its alleged support to the Houthi rebels.
The renewed belligerence from the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East appears to be a systematic effort to stoke conflict.
Syria, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Iraq and Yemen, are in the firing line for embroiling the region in further chaos.
Ultimately, however, the bigger targets for US-induced instability are Russia and China, which Washington views as "great power competitors".
The American supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine earlier this month — the first such supply after years of non-lethal military aid to the Kiev regime — has rankled Russia. The deployment of US military advisors to oversee use of Javelin anti-tank missiles is a move that will likely escalate the violence in Eastern Ukraine on Russia's border.
And, of course, the ongoing buildup of NATO offensive forces from the Balkans to the Black Sea along Russia's Western flank presents an even bigger vista of provocation. The relaunching of the US Second Fleet in the Atlantic after years of being mothballed is evidently part of a massive NATO mobilization.
Elsewhere, increasing American deployment of warships in the South China Sea over alleged "freedom of navigation" concerns near Chinese territorial waters is another manifestation of Washington's foreign policy of provocation.
Trump's superficial diplomatic engagement with North Korea is now being tested with Pyongyang's warning this week that it is not going to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally on the say-so of Washington.
It remains to be seen if Trump's apparent flurry of diplomacy with North Korea will give way to the previous pattern of American belligerence and threats of war.
If the US is indeed operating a systematic foreign policy of provocation, as seems the case, then we can expect the recent detente with North Korea to be quickly abandoned.
After decades of proclaiming itself a benign global power, the stark conclusion is that the US is clearly emerging as a scourge on international peace.
US foreign policy? There seems little else to it other than the US being increasingly wired for provocation and war.
US Policy: Provocation & War
The United States, as many observers have noted, appears to be undergoing an historic process of “strategic decline”. In order to stave off deterioration in its political and economic power, the US is resorting to greater dependence on militarism and aggression.
For that to work, a policy of ramping up provocations against other nations is a necessary concomitant. Because militarism and aggression need a pretext of conflict.
This is the unavoidable conclusion from several international interfaces. The US is resorting to more aggression as a means of asserting its power against perceived global rivals and to shore up its debt-ridden, decrepit capitalist economy.
Those rivals are explicitly identified by Washington as Russia and China, as well as to a lesser extent Iran, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. All are viewed as impediments to American ambitions for global hegemony.
The violence in Gaza this week by Israeli military can be seen in the context of a wider policy in Washington of provocation. The shooting dead of over 60 unarmed Palestinians in a single day by Israeli snipers and the maiming of thousands of others, including women and children, was arguably a deliberate attempt to incite greater violence across the Middle East.
It seems no coincidence that the atrocity was carried out on the very day that the US controversially opened a new embassy in the contested city of Jerusalem, despite widespread international warning against the move as a violation of Palestinian rights.
US President Donald Trump has embraced the right-wing Israeli leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu to articulate an extreme partisan view of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in which Palestinian rights are non-existent.
The gratuitous use of lethal force, while American dignitaries gathered a short distance away in Jerusalem, seems to have been a calculated attempt to provoke a violent reaction.
If the US and Israel incited armed response from Lebanon's Hezbollah or Iran — parties that have long-denounced American imperialism in the Middle East — then the ensuing chaos plays well for Washington. It would give the US and Israel an excuse to step up military force against these rivals. That could take the form of more US-backed Israeli air strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah bases in Syria, despite those bases being legally present.
For the US, the main objective of provoking greater instability and conflict is to undermine Russia and its recently regained stature as a major international power in the Middle East, owing to its successful military intervention in Syria at the end of 2015 to defeat US-backed regime-change proxies.
Russia's intervention in Syria ordered by President Putin has served to accelerate the sense of strategic decline for the US. The American policy of regime change in the Middle East as seen in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere was abruptly stopped in its tracks by Russia's military deployment in Syria. The American bingeing on regime-change was halted too by Iranian and Hezbollah fighters legally requested by the Assad government to defend the state.
The defeat of foreign terrorist proxies in Syria was a major setback for the US and its British, French and Turkish NATO allies, as well as for American client regimes in Israel and Saudi Arabia which colluded in the covert regime-change assault.
To salvage this momentous defeat, and more generally, strategic decline, the US seems to have embarked on a desperate policy of provocation with the assistance of its client regimes.
The aggressive way that Trump pulled the US out of the international nuclear accord with Iran last week caught many observers and European allies by surprise with his hardline, obstreperous manner.
Everyone knew Trump despised the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA) signed in 2015 by President Obama. But few expected Trump to violate the deal with such bellicose threats to intensify economic sanctions on Tehran, as well as on European states doing business with Iran.
Vilifying Iran as a terrorist state and ranting against Tehran over alleged secret nuclear-weapons building, Trump was ostentatiously adopting the Israeli position of demonizing Iran.
The Trump administration's warnings to Europe in particular that its firms and banks would be penalized for continuing to do business with Iran, as is their right under the JCPOA, seemed to be a calculated provocation to crash the accord and incite Iran to resume past nuclear activities, which Trump, as well as Israel, has intimated would be met with military attack.
So far, Trump's provocations over the Iran deal have failed. Iran and the other signatories — Russia, China and the European Union — have agreed to continue implementing the accord.
However, given this failure, so far, to sabotage the JCPOA it can be expected that the US and its regional partners will try to ramp up provocations. The Israeli air strikes on Iranian bases in Syria the day after Trump announced the US pullout from the accord appear to have been a deliberate attempt at antagonizing Iran even further. So too were Saudi claims that a missile attack on Riyadh from Yemen were "an act of war by Iran" owing to its alleged support to the Houthi rebels.
The renewed belligerence from the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East appears to be a systematic effort to stoke conflict.
Syria, Iran and Lebanon, as well as Iraq and Yemen, are in the firing line for embroiling the region in further chaos.
Ultimately, however, the bigger targets for US-induced instability are Russia and China, which Washington views as "great power competitors".
The American supply of lethal weapons to Ukraine earlier this month — the first such supply after years of non-lethal military aid to the Kiev regime — has rankled Russia. The deployment of US military advisors to oversee use of Javelin anti-tank missiles is a move that will likely escalate the violence in Eastern Ukraine on Russia's border.
And, of course, the ongoing buildup of NATO offensive forces from the Balkans to the Black Sea along Russia's Western flank presents an even bigger vista of provocation. The relaunching of the US Second Fleet in the Atlantic after years of being mothballed is evidently part of a massive NATO mobilization.
Elsewhere, increasing American deployment of warships in the South China Sea over alleged "freedom of navigation" concerns near Chinese territorial waters is another manifestation of Washington's foreign policy of provocation.
Trump's superficial diplomatic engagement with North Korea is now being tested with Pyongyang's warning this week that it is not going to give up nuclear weapons unilaterally on the say-so of Washington.
It remains to be seen if Trump's apparent flurry of diplomacy with North Korea will give way to the previous pattern of American belligerence and threats of war.
If the US is indeed operating a systematic foreign policy of provocation, as seems the case, then we can expect the recent detente with North Korea to be quickly abandoned.
After decades of proclaiming itself a benign global power, the stark conclusion is that the US is clearly emerging as a scourge on international peace.
US foreign policy? There seems little else to it other than the US being increasingly wired for provocation and war.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
SC165-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49450.htm
I Am Julian Assange
Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.
In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that’s where WikiLeaks came in.
It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody’s looking or listening.
Julian is not wanted because he’s a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He’s on a most wanted list not for what he’s already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.
He built up WikiLeaks into an organization that acquired the ultimate trust of many people who had access to documents they felt should be made public. They knew he would never betray their trust. WikiLeaks has to date never published any documents that were later found out to be false. It never gave up a source. No documents were ever changed or manipulated for purposes other than protecting sources and other individuals.
Julian Assange built an ’empire’ based on trust. To do that he knew he could never lie. Even the smallest lie would break what he had spent so much time and effort to construct. He was a highly accomplished hacker from a very young age, which enabled him to build computer networks that nobody managed to hack. He knew how to make everything safe. And keep it that way.
Since authorities were never able to get their hands on WikiLeaks, its sources, or its leader, a giant smear campaign was started around rape charges in Sweden (the country and all its citizens carry a heavy blame for what happened) and connections to America’s favorite enemy, Russia. The rape charges were never substantiated, Julian was never even interrogated by any Swedish law enforcement personnel, but that is no surprise.
It was clear from the get-go what was happening. First of all, for Assange himself. And if there’s one thing you could say he’s done wrong, it’s that he didn’t see the full impact from the campaign against him, sooner. But if you have the world’s largest and most powerful intelligence services against you, and they manage to find both individuals and media organizations willing to spread blatant lies about you, chances are you will not last forever.
If and when you have such forces running against you, you need protection. From politicians and from -fellow- media. Assange didn’t get that, or not nearly enough. Ecuador offered him protection, but as soon as another president was elected, they turned against him. So have news organizations who were once all too eager to profit from material Assange managed to obtain from his sources.
That the Guardian today published not just one, not two, but three what can only be labeled as hit pieces on Julian Assange, should perhaps not surprise us; they fell out a long time ago. Still, the sheer amount of hollow innuendo and outright lies in the articles is astonishing. How dare you? Have you no shame, do you not care at all about your credibility? At least the Guardian makes painfully clear why WikiLeaks was needed.
No, Sweden didn’t “drop its investigation into alleged sexual offences because it was unable to question Assange”. The Swedes simply refused to interview him in the Ecuador embassy in London, the only place where he knew he was safe. They refused this for years. And when the rape charges had lost all credibility, Britain asked Sweden to not drop the charges, but keep the pressure on.
No, there is no proof of links from Assange to Russian hackers and/or to the Russian government. No, there is no proof that DNC computers were hacked by Russians to get to John Podesta’s emails. In fact there is no proof they were hacked at all. No, Ecuador didn’t get tired of Julian; their new president, Moreno, decided to sell him out “at the first pressure from the United States”. Just as his predecessor, Correa, said he would.
Julian Assange has been condemned by Sweden, Britain, the US and now Ecuador to solitary confinement with no access to daylight or to medical care. Without a trial, without a sentence, and on the basis of mere allegations, most of which have already turned out to be trumped up and false. This violates so many national and international laws it’s futile to try and count or name them.
It also condemns any and all subsequent truth tellers to the prospect of being treated in the same way that Julian is. Forget about courts, forget about justice. You’ll be on a wanted list. I still have a bit of hope left that Vladimir Putin will step in and save Assange from the gross injustice he’s been exposed to for far too many years. Putin gets 100 times the lies and innuendo Assange gets, but he has a powerful nation behind him. Assange, in the end, only has us.
What’s perhaps the saddest part of all this is that people like Chelsea Manning, Kim Dotcom, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are among the smartest people our world has to offer. We should be cherishing the combination of intelligence, courage and integrity they display at their own risk and peril, but instead we let them be harassed by our governments because they unveil inconvenient truths about them.
And pretty soon there will be nobody left to tell these truths, or tell any truth at all. Dark days. By allowing the smartest and bravest amongst us, who are experts in new technologies, to be silenced, we are allowing these technologies to be used against us.
We’re not far removed from being extras in our own lives, with all significant decisions taken not by us, but for us. America’s Founding Fathers are turning in their graves as we speak. They would have understood the importance of protecting Julian Assange.
To say that we are all Julian Assange is not just a slogan.
I Am Julian Assange
Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.
In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that’s where WikiLeaks came in.
It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody’s looking or listening.
Julian is not wanted because he’s a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He’s on a most wanted list not for what he’s already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.
He built up WikiLeaks into an organization that acquired the ultimate trust of many people who had access to documents they felt should be made public. They knew he would never betray their trust. WikiLeaks has to date never published any documents that were later found out to be false. It never gave up a source. No documents were ever changed or manipulated for purposes other than protecting sources and other individuals.
Julian Assange built an ’empire’ based on trust. To do that he knew he could never lie. Even the smallest lie would break what he had spent so much time and effort to construct. He was a highly accomplished hacker from a very young age, which enabled him to build computer networks that nobody managed to hack. He knew how to make everything safe. And keep it that way.
Since authorities were never able to get their hands on WikiLeaks, its sources, or its leader, a giant smear campaign was started around rape charges in Sweden (the country and all its citizens carry a heavy blame for what happened) and connections to America’s favorite enemy, Russia. The rape charges were never substantiated, Julian was never even interrogated by any Swedish law enforcement personnel, but that is no surprise.
It was clear from the get-go what was happening. First of all, for Assange himself. And if there’s one thing you could say he’s done wrong, it’s that he didn’t see the full impact from the campaign against him, sooner. But if you have the world’s largest and most powerful intelligence services against you, and they manage to find both individuals and media organizations willing to spread blatant lies about you, chances are you will not last forever.
If and when you have such forces running against you, you need protection. From politicians and from -fellow- media. Assange didn’t get that, or not nearly enough. Ecuador offered him protection, but as soon as another president was elected, they turned against him. So have news organizations who were once all too eager to profit from material Assange managed to obtain from his sources.
That the Guardian today published not just one, not two, but three what can only be labeled as hit pieces on Julian Assange, should perhaps not surprise us; they fell out a long time ago. Still, the sheer amount of hollow innuendo and outright lies in the articles is astonishing. How dare you? Have you no shame, do you not care at all about your credibility? At least the Guardian makes painfully clear why WikiLeaks was needed.
No, Sweden didn’t “drop its investigation into alleged sexual offences because it was unable to question Assange”. The Swedes simply refused to interview him in the Ecuador embassy in London, the only place where he knew he was safe. They refused this for years. And when the rape charges had lost all credibility, Britain asked Sweden to not drop the charges, but keep the pressure on.
No, there is no proof of links from Assange to Russian hackers and/or to the Russian government. No, there is no proof that DNC computers were hacked by Russians to get to John Podesta’s emails. In fact there is no proof they were hacked at all. No, Ecuador didn’t get tired of Julian; their new president, Moreno, decided to sell him out “at the first pressure from the United States”. Just as his predecessor, Correa, said he would.
Julian Assange has been condemned by Sweden, Britain, the US and now Ecuador to solitary confinement with no access to daylight or to medical care. Without a trial, without a sentence, and on the basis of mere allegations, most of which have already turned out to be trumped up and false. This violates so many national and international laws it’s futile to try and count or name them.
It also condemns any and all subsequent truth tellers to the prospect of being treated in the same way that Julian is. Forget about courts, forget about justice. You’ll be on a wanted list. I still have a bit of hope left that Vladimir Putin will step in and save Assange from the gross injustice he’s been exposed to for far too many years. Putin gets 100 times the lies and innuendo Assange gets, but he has a powerful nation behind him. Assange, in the end, only has us.
What’s perhaps the saddest part of all this is that people like Chelsea Manning, Kim Dotcom, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are among the smartest people our world has to offer. We should be cherishing the combination of intelligence, courage and integrity they display at their own risk and peril, but instead we let them be harassed by our governments because they unveil inconvenient truths about them.
And pretty soon there will be nobody left to tell these truths, or tell any truth at all. Dark days. By allowing the smartest and bravest amongst us, who are experts in new technologies, to be silenced, we are allowing these technologies to be used against us.
We’re not far removed from being extras in our own lives, with all significant decisions taken not by us, but for us. America’s Founding Fathers are turning in their graves as we speak. They would have understood the importance of protecting Julian Assange.
To say that we are all Julian Assange is not just a slogan.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
SC165-5
https://www.globalresearch.ca/on-u-s-imperialism-capitalism-and-fascism/5640528
On U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism
If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.
For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. It subjugates small countries, corrupts them by backing right-wing dictators, and enables death squads to commit mass murder of all suspected dissidents. During the First Cold War leftists, anti-colonialists, nationalists and intellectuals were called “communists” and imprisoned, tortured and executed. Now they are called “terrorists”.
The foreign policy interests of the U.S. are to promote the neocolonial interests of U.S. corporations, and to project the financial and military power of the U.S. internationally. If the U.S. cannot bully a head of state into collaborating then it backs a military coup d’etat, stirs up internal violence with divide and conquer strategies, and covertly uses mercenaries to start civil wars. If all else fails it will find a pretext or a false flag to invade and overthrow an unfriendly government.
Because of past disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq the U.S. is hesitant to commit large numbers of U.S. boots on the ground. Instead it prefers the safety of “boots in the sky” with its domination of air power to bomb helpless countries into submission. If it cannot get a country to submit then it destroys it mercilessly as an example of the price that other countries will pay if they do not go along to get along with the U.S.A. The U.S. never gives up on its quest for control of worldwide capitalism. Any doubters of U.S. persistence need only to look to North Korea, Cuba and Iran.
U.S. foreign policy is the domain of the elites. The public busies itself with domestic issues, just trying to make a living and raise a family. Sometimes the elites of foreign policy let their masks slip to reveal their true nature. When Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 2009 that “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people” he was not just intellectualizing, as if teaching a Harvard course on political science. Brzezinski was admitting to his personal responsibility for policies that have killed millions of people.
It was Brzezinski that advised President Jimmy Carter to destabilize Afghanistan in the late 1970s early 1980’s. At the time Afghanistan’s socialist government was modernizing the country, developing its economy, educating its people, and improving the standard of living for millions of Afghans. It was also advancing the rights and opportunities for women, which the U.S. is constantly touting as one of its cherished human rights concerns. It was Brzezinski’s destabilization project that set women’s rights back hundreds of years in Afghanistan. When human rights get in the way of U.S. foreign policy objectives, then human rights lose.
In 1979 Brzezinski advised Carter to secretly authorize the CIA to give financial and military aid to further inflame Islamic fanatic mujahideen that were violently opposed to modernization. When the Soviet Union intervened militarily in support of the threatened Afghan government it was not an invasion. It was the legal response of Russia to a neighboring country that was asking for military aid against foreign backed insurgents. Today we see a similar Russian military assistance program in Syria for similar reasons against very similar villains.
Carter feigned indignation and outrage towards Russia and he put the freeze back into the Cold War. He decried the “invasion as a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people”, and Carter claimed it was a Russian plot to control Afghanistan’s oil. Carter declared a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics to punish Russia, and by doing so he dashed the dreams of U.S. athletes that had been training for 4 years in preparation for the Olympic Games. A good time was had by all in Moscow without the U.S. participation. U.S. athletes were sacrificed as pawns in Brzezinski’s game of the Grand Chessboard. It is a blood soaked chessboard where the masters see flesh and blood people as objects to be toyed with.
What Brzezinski and Carter did was to set a trap that the Soviets fell into when they sent their military into Afghanistan. The trap had been laid before the Russian “invasion”, and not afterwards as Brzezinski would brag years later in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur:
“Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
Carter and Brzezinski were overjoyed that the U.S. would then have the sweet revenge of giving Russia a bloody Vietnam experience. Carter and Brzezinski gave Afghanistan a Vietnam experience too, in which millions of people were destroyed.
Global Capitalism and America’s Culture of Empire
Once events in Afghanistan were set into motion, then Carter and Brzezinski added gasoline to the inflamed Islamic fanatics with billions of dollars in U.S. military support funneled through Pakistan. Thousands of mercenaries from Arab countries poured into Afghanistan to join the fight and get paid too. They were called “Afghan-Arabs”. The Brzezinski-Carter scheme would be continued under President Reagan and led to the destruction of Afghanistan, the re-subjugation of Afghan women, and millions of Afghan civilian victims of war. Afghanistan never recovered but from its ashes rose up the Taliban and al Qaeda. The mysteries surrounding the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th 2001 are unresolved. Regardless of whodunit the attacks of 9/11 would be used as justification by President W. Bush to launch another invasion of Afghanistan.
Brzezinski’s egotism to show how smart he thought he was is the smoking gun of George Orwell’s famous quote:
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
For decades the U.S. pretended that the false narrative of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was reality. The U.S. glorified the mujahideen as freedom fighters, when actually they were Islamic fanatics and mercenary proxies used by the U.S. and its co-conspirators. The U.S. and the Saudis funded a heavily armed brand of Islamic terrorism that the U.S. though that it could control, ignore or kill off once it was no longer needed.
As Brzezinski also said in that Le Nouvel Observateur interview:
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
The U.S. thought that it had found the “silver bullet” to destroy all of its enemies and control West Asia with “stirred-up Muslims”. With the illusion of such power the U.S. fed its addiction to regime change projects using Islamic mercenaries. As Brzezinski said, controlling people is difficult. The result of regime change projects has been chaos. For the U.S. chaos is an opportunity. It is of no concern for the elites that chaos costs millions of people in the world to suffer.
Today the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria can be laid posthumously at the feet of Brzezinski. Carter has escaped public blame and he still teaches Sunday School as the Nobel Peace Prize president. Brzezinski was so good at killing millions of people that he went on to advising another Peace Prize president how to do it. President Obama called Brzezinski “one of our most outstanding thinkers”. Obama picked up the killing where W. Bush left off.
Killing millions of people instead of trying to control them is the model for asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is when the U.S. destroys a small country that has a limited ability to defend itself and cannot strike back. The tools of the trade are the CIA, air power, missiles, drones and mercenaries.
The U.S. public has become immune to its government killing millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Arabs, as long as it does not interrupt with the public’s busy daily lives. The opportunity costs to the American people is costing them universal healthcare, affordable higher education, modern mass transportation, modern infrastructure and economic security in old age; but the public does not seem to notice, and cannot connect the dots. They still think that the U.S. has the highest standard of living in the world. The reality is that the U.S. comes in at about 19th on everything from the infant mortality rate to high speed internet; except military spending and political prisoners at which the U.S. is number one.
How did the U.S. fall so low when it started with such high hopes on July 4th 1776 with the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Those words never really meant what most Americans think they mean. American capitalism is a hierarchicalbased class society. Property bestows more rights and privileges on the top of the pyramid of wealth. The Founding Documents of the U.S.A. were written by the elites, for the elites and for future elites in the lottery of capitalism American-style. By “Life” is meant for those that can afford the necessities and luxuries of life. “Liberty” is the liberty to close off the commons from the natives and those that do not own property. “Happiness” is the happiness that comes with owning slaves, and finding foreign sources of cheap labor.
As the greed for more and more land, more slaves and more wealth grew, the elites declared that it was Manifest Destiny for them to spread capitalism and the American way of life across all of North America. It was then that Asia’s destiny became America’s destiny. When the U.S. boundary met the Pacific Ocean the U.S. did not stop its Westward expansion. It kept on going to Hawaii, Japan, China and Korea. The U.S. joined the European scramble for overseas colonies and empire.
Capitalism must expand to survive. Adam Smith’s quaint form of capitalism was based on bartering. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker traded their products with each other providing all with meat, bread and light. Modern capitalism American-style is based on money, and money is based on debt. Debt requires that interest be paid by the borrower to the lender, thus syphoning off capital from the capitalist to the financier. The capitalist must expand production and find sources of cheap labor to pay the interest and to skim a profit too. Expanding production means that more and more natural resources are needed. To produce more requires even cheaper labor and automation. To sell an ever increasing amount of finished products of capitalism requires advertising and expanding to foreign markets. If any link in the chain is broken then the Ponzi scheme of capitalism collapses into an economic depression.
Economic depressions cause social unrest, civil disturbances and class conflict. When the social hierarchy of capitalism is shaken by economic depression, then capitalism must restore order either with violent repression or appeasement by redistributing some of the wealth to reduce tension. The first instinct of the capitalists is to resort to violence and repression to preserve their wealth. That is why capitalism and true democracy cannot coexist. One or the other has to give or the system is in danger of breaking down entirely.
The natural political order for capitalism is right-wing dictatorship, martial law and fascism. Only by continuous expansion, imperialism and the exploitation of others can there be a compromise between capitalism and democracy domestically. When U.S. presidents say that the “American Way of Life” is being threatened by enemies what they mean is that small countries resist being subjugated and exploited by the U.S. Empire.
When the U.S. first began to expand beyond the shores of the Pacific Ocean they were met with rejection. Ancient societies such as in Japan, Korea and China had civilizations with thousands of years of history. They had their own social order, their way of life and they were self-sufficient. They told the U.S. capitalists to go away. Such behavior by Asians was intolerable to the U.S. capitalist and merchant classes who wanted to sell their excess production and make trading profits. The U.S. was outraged that Asians, whom the white supremacists Euro-Americans saw as being non-Christian barbarians and inferior humans, would act so superior as to refuse to buy and sell with U.S. traders. How was the U.S. to expand trade when it was met with such ‘insolence’? The answer that came naturally was to send in the navy with gunboats and the marines with bayonets to subjugate the ‘insolent barbarians’ to either open up to trade or have their cities bombarded with cannon balls and burnt to the ground.
The “West was won” with genocide of the Native Americans, and if genocide was needed to subjugate Asia, then the U.S. would use it, and it did. The U.S. continued its killing spree in the Philippians, Korea, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. The U.S. considers the Pacific Ocean a U.S. lake.
The U.S. is still trying to control the world with cannon balls. The cannon balls keep getting bigger, more technologically complex and more genocidal. The U.S. cannot accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries to, the more destruction, death and chaos it causes. Instead of creating world order the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth is drained off by military expenditures and maintaining a foreign empire.
Vladimir Lenin explained how today’s U.S. foreign policy works in his 1917 thesis on the causes of World War One: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism“. Capitalism leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to imperialism and imperialism leads to war. Capitalism also leads to inequality. Inequality and democracy cannot coexist forever because there are limits to expansion and growth. To preserve inequality requires fascism and a police state. Democracy can only thrive if there is more equality. Eventually, choices will be made between fascism or democracy, and between capitalism or something else?
On U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism
If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future.
For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. It subjugates small countries, corrupts them by backing right-wing dictators, and enables death squads to commit mass murder of all suspected dissidents. During the First Cold War leftists, anti-colonialists, nationalists and intellectuals were called “communists” and imprisoned, tortured and executed. Now they are called “terrorists”.
The foreign policy interests of the U.S. are to promote the neocolonial interests of U.S. corporations, and to project the financial and military power of the U.S. internationally. If the U.S. cannot bully a head of state into collaborating then it backs a military coup d’etat, stirs up internal violence with divide and conquer strategies, and covertly uses mercenaries to start civil wars. If all else fails it will find a pretext or a false flag to invade and overthrow an unfriendly government.
Because of past disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq the U.S. is hesitant to commit large numbers of U.S. boots on the ground. Instead it prefers the safety of “boots in the sky” with its domination of air power to bomb helpless countries into submission. If it cannot get a country to submit then it destroys it mercilessly as an example of the price that other countries will pay if they do not go along to get along with the U.S.A. The U.S. never gives up on its quest for control of worldwide capitalism. Any doubters of U.S. persistence need only to look to North Korea, Cuba and Iran.
U.S. foreign policy is the domain of the elites. The public busies itself with domestic issues, just trying to make a living and raise a family. Sometimes the elites of foreign policy let their masks slip to reveal their true nature. When Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 2009 that “today it is infinitely easier to kill a million people than to control a million people” he was not just intellectualizing, as if teaching a Harvard course on political science. Brzezinski was admitting to his personal responsibility for policies that have killed millions of people.
It was Brzezinski that advised President Jimmy Carter to destabilize Afghanistan in the late 1970s early 1980’s. At the time Afghanistan’s socialist government was modernizing the country, developing its economy, educating its people, and improving the standard of living for millions of Afghans. It was also advancing the rights and opportunities for women, which the U.S. is constantly touting as one of its cherished human rights concerns. It was Brzezinski’s destabilization project that set women’s rights back hundreds of years in Afghanistan. When human rights get in the way of U.S. foreign policy objectives, then human rights lose.
In 1979 Brzezinski advised Carter to secretly authorize the CIA to give financial and military aid to further inflame Islamic fanatic mujahideen that were violently opposed to modernization. When the Soviet Union intervened militarily in support of the threatened Afghan government it was not an invasion. It was the legal response of Russia to a neighboring country that was asking for military aid against foreign backed insurgents. Today we see a similar Russian military assistance program in Syria for similar reasons against very similar villains.
Carter feigned indignation and outrage towards Russia and he put the freeze back into the Cold War. He decried the “invasion as a deliberate effort by a powerful atheistic government to subjugate an independent Islamic people”, and Carter claimed it was a Russian plot to control Afghanistan’s oil. Carter declared a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Moscow-hosted Olympics to punish Russia, and by doing so he dashed the dreams of U.S. athletes that had been training for 4 years in preparation for the Olympic Games. A good time was had by all in Moscow without the U.S. participation. U.S. athletes were sacrificed as pawns in Brzezinski’s game of the Grand Chessboard. It is a blood soaked chessboard where the masters see flesh and blood people as objects to be toyed with.
What Brzezinski and Carter did was to set a trap that the Soviets fell into when they sent their military into Afghanistan. The trap had been laid before the Russian “invasion”, and not afterwards as Brzezinski would brag years later in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur:
“Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”
Carter and Brzezinski were overjoyed that the U.S. would then have the sweet revenge of giving Russia a bloody Vietnam experience. Carter and Brzezinski gave Afghanistan a Vietnam experience too, in which millions of people were destroyed.
Global Capitalism and America’s Culture of Empire
Once events in Afghanistan were set into motion, then Carter and Brzezinski added gasoline to the inflamed Islamic fanatics with billions of dollars in U.S. military support funneled through Pakistan. Thousands of mercenaries from Arab countries poured into Afghanistan to join the fight and get paid too. They were called “Afghan-Arabs”. The Brzezinski-Carter scheme would be continued under President Reagan and led to the destruction of Afghanistan, the re-subjugation of Afghan women, and millions of Afghan civilian victims of war. Afghanistan never recovered but from its ashes rose up the Taliban and al Qaeda. The mysteries surrounding the attacks on the U.S. of September 11th 2001 are unresolved. Regardless of whodunit the attacks of 9/11 would be used as justification by President W. Bush to launch another invasion of Afghanistan.
Brzezinski’s egotism to show how smart he thought he was is the smoking gun of George Orwell’s famous quote:
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
For decades the U.S. pretended that the false narrative of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was reality. The U.S. glorified the mujahideen as freedom fighters, when actually they were Islamic fanatics and mercenary proxies used by the U.S. and its co-conspirators. The U.S. and the Saudis funded a heavily armed brand of Islamic terrorism that the U.S. though that it could control, ignore or kill off once it was no longer needed.
As Brzezinski also said in that Le Nouvel Observateur interview:
“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
The U.S. thought that it had found the “silver bullet” to destroy all of its enemies and control West Asia with “stirred-up Muslims”. With the illusion of such power the U.S. fed its addiction to regime change projects using Islamic mercenaries. As Brzezinski said, controlling people is difficult. The result of regime change projects has been chaos. For the U.S. chaos is an opportunity. It is of no concern for the elites that chaos costs millions of people in the world to suffer.
Today the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria can be laid posthumously at the feet of Brzezinski. Carter has escaped public blame and he still teaches Sunday School as the Nobel Peace Prize president. Brzezinski was so good at killing millions of people that he went on to advising another Peace Prize president how to do it. President Obama called Brzezinski “one of our most outstanding thinkers”. Obama picked up the killing where W. Bush left off.
Killing millions of people instead of trying to control them is the model for asymmetrical warfare. Asymmetrical warfare is when the U.S. destroys a small country that has a limited ability to defend itself and cannot strike back. The tools of the trade are the CIA, air power, missiles, drones and mercenaries.
The U.S. public has become immune to its government killing millions of Koreans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and Arabs, as long as it does not interrupt with the public’s busy daily lives. The opportunity costs to the American people is costing them universal healthcare, affordable higher education, modern mass transportation, modern infrastructure and economic security in old age; but the public does not seem to notice, and cannot connect the dots. They still think that the U.S. has the highest standard of living in the world. The reality is that the U.S. comes in at about 19th on everything from the infant mortality rate to high speed internet; except military spending and political prisoners at which the U.S. is number one.
How did the U.S. fall so low when it started with such high hopes on July 4th 1776 with the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”?
Those words never really meant what most Americans think they mean. American capitalism is a hierarchicalbased class society. Property bestows more rights and privileges on the top of the pyramid of wealth. The Founding Documents of the U.S.A. were written by the elites, for the elites and for future elites in the lottery of capitalism American-style. By “Life” is meant for those that can afford the necessities and luxuries of life. “Liberty” is the liberty to close off the commons from the natives and those that do not own property. “Happiness” is the happiness that comes with owning slaves, and finding foreign sources of cheap labor.
As the greed for more and more land, more slaves and more wealth grew, the elites declared that it was Manifest Destiny for them to spread capitalism and the American way of life across all of North America. It was then that Asia’s destiny became America’s destiny. When the U.S. boundary met the Pacific Ocean the U.S. did not stop its Westward expansion. It kept on going to Hawaii, Japan, China and Korea. The U.S. joined the European scramble for overseas colonies and empire.
Capitalism must expand to survive. Adam Smith’s quaint form of capitalism was based on bartering. The butcher, baker and candlestick maker traded their products with each other providing all with meat, bread and light. Modern capitalism American-style is based on money, and money is based on debt. Debt requires that interest be paid by the borrower to the lender, thus syphoning off capital from the capitalist to the financier. The capitalist must expand production and find sources of cheap labor to pay the interest and to skim a profit too. Expanding production means that more and more natural resources are needed. To produce more requires even cheaper labor and automation. To sell an ever increasing amount of finished products of capitalism requires advertising and expanding to foreign markets. If any link in the chain is broken then the Ponzi scheme of capitalism collapses into an economic depression.
Economic depressions cause social unrest, civil disturbances and class conflict. When the social hierarchy of capitalism is shaken by economic depression, then capitalism must restore order either with violent repression or appeasement by redistributing some of the wealth to reduce tension. The first instinct of the capitalists is to resort to violence and repression to preserve their wealth. That is why capitalism and true democracy cannot coexist. One or the other has to give or the system is in danger of breaking down entirely.
The natural political order for capitalism is right-wing dictatorship, martial law and fascism. Only by continuous expansion, imperialism and the exploitation of others can there be a compromise between capitalism and democracy domestically. When U.S. presidents say that the “American Way of Life” is being threatened by enemies what they mean is that small countries resist being subjugated and exploited by the U.S. Empire.
When the U.S. first began to expand beyond the shores of the Pacific Ocean they were met with rejection. Ancient societies such as in Japan, Korea and China had civilizations with thousands of years of history. They had their own social order, their way of life and they were self-sufficient. They told the U.S. capitalists to go away. Such behavior by Asians was intolerable to the U.S. capitalist and merchant classes who wanted to sell their excess production and make trading profits. The U.S. was outraged that Asians, whom the white supremacists Euro-Americans saw as being non-Christian barbarians and inferior humans, would act so superior as to refuse to buy and sell with U.S. traders. How was the U.S. to expand trade when it was met with such ‘insolence’? The answer that came naturally was to send in the navy with gunboats and the marines with bayonets to subjugate the ‘insolent barbarians’ to either open up to trade or have their cities bombarded with cannon balls and burnt to the ground.
The “West was won” with genocide of the Native Americans, and if genocide was needed to subjugate Asia, then the U.S. would use it, and it did. The U.S. continued its killing spree in the Philippians, Korea, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. The U.S. considers the Pacific Ocean a U.S. lake.
The U.S. is still trying to control the world with cannon balls. The cannon balls keep getting bigger, more technologically complex and more genocidal. The U.S. cannot accept the reality that it cannot control the world. The more it tries to, the more destruction, death and chaos it causes. Instead of creating world order the U.S. keeps creating world disorder. World disorder threatens domestic order as more and more of the U.S. wealth is drained off by military expenditures and maintaining a foreign empire.
Vladimir Lenin explained how today’s U.S. foreign policy works in his 1917 thesis on the causes of World War One: “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism“. Capitalism leads to monopoly, monopoly leads to imperialism and imperialism leads to war. Capitalism also leads to inequality. Inequality and democracy cannot coexist forever because there are limits to expansion and growth. To preserve inequality requires fascism and a police state. Democracy can only thrive if there is more equality. Eventually, choices will be made between fascism or democracy, and between capitalism or something else?
SC165-4
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/05/08/trump-pulls-out-of-iran-deal-u-s-determined-to-become-a-rogue-state/
Trump Pulls Out of Iran Deal – U.S. Determined to Become a Rogue State
Let me cut to the chase. Every single world leader knows Trump’s full of shit. Even more importantly, the citizens of their nations also know it. Everyone with a functioning brain understands that pulling out of the Iran deal has nothing to do with terrorism, nuclear bombs or any other fairytale propagated by U.S. neocons. This is simply about the existence of a non-U.S. client state in a key strategic region sitting on massive oil reserves. It’s about empire — global games of power and money fueled by a desperate attempt to hold on to a unipolar world where the U.S. bosses everyone around.
A global empire will keep pushing and pushing until something snaps. The leaders of empire become convinced of their invincibility right before the end, and the U.S. is no different. Given the rise of China economically and militarily, as well as Russia exerting its influence in Syria, the writing’s already on the wall as far as where the world’s headed. Towards a multi-polar planet in which the U.S. will still have influence, but far less than it’s enjoyed since WW2. While shifts are already well underway beneath the radar, American leadership refuses to admit it. A serious decline of U.S. global power as a result of major mistakes related to Iran will begin to play out publicly from here.
It’s important to understand what a massive mistake pulling out of the Iran deal is. Irrespective of your opinion on its merits, it’s a deal agreed to by all major global powers. The U.S., Iran, France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia signed it. There’s only one country in that wants to scrap it (and did so today), the U.S. This is no small event and the long-term repercussions are enormous. What Trump just did, in no uncertain terms, is tell the entire world that no deal signed with the U.S. means anything. Why even bother negotiating with the U.S. if agreements can just be canceled unilaterally with no evidence of wrongdoing?
If you want to be the world’s leading power and operate in this manner you’d better be prepared to back it up, because you’re essentially flipping the bird to everyone. Trump pulling out of the Iran deal is him saying the perspectives and opinions of other global powers are irrelevant and easily ignored. This is not how you win friends and influence people, it’s how you lose allies, credibility, and eventually a global empire. Trump has now completely isolated the U.S. into an alliance of war-mongers that consist of a grand total of itself and Israel/Saudi Arabia. This is not a winning team. The U.S. is rapidly becoming a rogue state and the long-term consequences are enormous.
I expect this to play out over the next several years, not overnight. Part of the reason is that it’s not in China, Russia or Iran’s strategic interest to respond to provocations. Significantly, just an hour after Trump announced the end of the deal, Israel launched another attack on Iran in Syria (the third attack in the past month).
AP reports:
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian state-run media is reporting an Israeli attack near the capital Damascus, saying Syrian air defenses shot down two missiles.
The official news agency SANA says Tuesday night’s attack occurred in the countryside in Kisweh, just south of Damascus. It took place about an hour after President Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, calling Tehran a main exporter of terrorism in the region.
While Iran keeps saying it will respond, this would be foolish. Israel is clearly trying to provoke Iran into a response so it (and the U.S./Saudi Arabia) can justify further escalation and push aggressively for regime change. I suspect Iran understands this, which is why we haven’t seen any sort of counterattack. The more intelligent strategy for Iran is the one I expect it to employ. Namely, to appear like the sane actor by attempting to stay in the nuclear deal with Europe, Russia and China.
This scenario could pose huge problems for Trump and very publicly make the U.S. look unreasonable and isolated. What would the U.S. do if everyone else keeps the deal intact, sanction the planet?
The U.S. has already justifiably lost an enormous amount of credibly on the world stage since the Iraq war fiasco, and the best way for China and Russia to justify the need for a multi-polar world is to just sit back and let the U.S. continue to ruin its reputation with another series of dangerous geopolitical blunders.
I don’t claim to know exactly how all of this will play out in detail, but I’m highly confident the U.S. will become less and less trusted by virtually all nations in the years ahead and this will have major repercussions. By 2025 at the latest, I suspect the U.S. empire will be a shell of its former self and the world decidedly more multi-polar.
Trump Pulls Out of Iran Deal – U.S. Determined to Become a Rogue State
Let me cut to the chase. Every single world leader knows Trump’s full of shit. Even more importantly, the citizens of their nations also know it. Everyone with a functioning brain understands that pulling out of the Iran deal has nothing to do with terrorism, nuclear bombs or any other fairytale propagated by U.S. neocons. This is simply about the existence of a non-U.S. client state in a key strategic region sitting on massive oil reserves. It’s about empire — global games of power and money fueled by a desperate attempt to hold on to a unipolar world where the U.S. bosses everyone around.
A global empire will keep pushing and pushing until something snaps. The leaders of empire become convinced of their invincibility right before the end, and the U.S. is no different. Given the rise of China economically and militarily, as well as Russia exerting its influence in Syria, the writing’s already on the wall as far as where the world’s headed. Towards a multi-polar planet in which the U.S. will still have influence, but far less than it’s enjoyed since WW2. While shifts are already well underway beneath the radar, American leadership refuses to admit it. A serious decline of U.S. global power as a result of major mistakes related to Iran will begin to play out publicly from here.
It’s important to understand what a massive mistake pulling out of the Iran deal is. Irrespective of your opinion on its merits, it’s a deal agreed to by all major global powers. The U.S., Iran, France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia signed it. There’s only one country in that wants to scrap it (and did so today), the U.S. This is no small event and the long-term repercussions are enormous. What Trump just did, in no uncertain terms, is tell the entire world that no deal signed with the U.S. means anything. Why even bother negotiating with the U.S. if agreements can just be canceled unilaterally with no evidence of wrongdoing?
If you want to be the world’s leading power and operate in this manner you’d better be prepared to back it up, because you’re essentially flipping the bird to everyone. Trump pulling out of the Iran deal is him saying the perspectives and opinions of other global powers are irrelevant and easily ignored. This is not how you win friends and influence people, it’s how you lose allies, credibility, and eventually a global empire. Trump has now completely isolated the U.S. into an alliance of war-mongers that consist of a grand total of itself and Israel/Saudi Arabia. This is not a winning team. The U.S. is rapidly becoming a rogue state and the long-term consequences are enormous.
I expect this to play out over the next several years, not overnight. Part of the reason is that it’s not in China, Russia or Iran’s strategic interest to respond to provocations. Significantly, just an hour after Trump announced the end of the deal, Israel launched another attack on Iran in Syria (the third attack in the past month).
AP reports:
BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian state-run media is reporting an Israeli attack near the capital Damascus, saying Syrian air defenses shot down two missiles.
The official news agency SANA says Tuesday night’s attack occurred in the countryside in Kisweh, just south of Damascus. It took place about an hour after President Donald Trump announced he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, calling Tehran a main exporter of terrorism in the region.
While Iran keeps saying it will respond, this would be foolish. Israel is clearly trying to provoke Iran into a response so it (and the U.S./Saudi Arabia) can justify further escalation and push aggressively for regime change. I suspect Iran understands this, which is why we haven’t seen any sort of counterattack. The more intelligent strategy for Iran is the one I expect it to employ. Namely, to appear like the sane actor by attempting to stay in the nuclear deal with Europe, Russia and China.
This scenario could pose huge problems for Trump and very publicly make the U.S. look unreasonable and isolated. What would the U.S. do if everyone else keeps the deal intact, sanction the planet?
The U.S. has already justifiably lost an enormous amount of credibly on the world stage since the Iraq war fiasco, and the best way for China and Russia to justify the need for a multi-polar world is to just sit back and let the U.S. continue to ruin its reputation with another series of dangerous geopolitical blunders.
I don’t claim to know exactly how all of this will play out in detail, but I’m highly confident the U.S. will become less and less trusted by virtually all nations in the years ahead and this will have major repercussions. By 2025 at the latest, I suspect the U.S. empire will be a shell of its former self and the world decidedly more multi-polar.
Tuesday, May 15, 2018
SC165-3
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49429.htm
An Empire of Nothing at All?
The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hell
As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.
Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They don’t, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably -- in these years, almost uniquely -- bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called “national security.” That’s not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make them -- the denizens of the national security state -- ever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. We’re talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.
In reality, the costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post–9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyone’s breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.
And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugees -- or at least fantasy versions of them -- played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?
Opening the Gates of Hell
America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East -- and ultimately the planet -- as no other imperial power had ever done.
Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the U.S. military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planet’s young to be deprived of homes, parents, educations -- of anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining?
Though few may remember it, I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.” Two years later, in the wake of the actual invasion and the U.S. occupation of that country, he altered his comment slightly. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.”
His assessment has proven unbearably prescient -- and one not only applicable to Iraq. Fourteen years after that invasion, we should all now be in some kind of mourning for a world that won’t ever be. It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did. Otherwise, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president.
I don’t claim to be an expert on hell. I have no idea exactly what circle of it we’re now in, but I do know one thing: we are there.
The Infrastructure of a Garrison State
If I could bring my parents back from the dead right now, I know that this country in its present state would boggle their minds. They wouldn’t recognize it. If I were to tell them, for instance, that just three men -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett -- now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans, they would never believe me.
How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House? How would I explain to them that, while leading congressional Democrats and Republicans couldn’t say often enough that this country was uniquely greater than any that ever existed, none of them could find the funds -- some $5.6 trillion for starters -- necessary for our roads, dams, bridges, tunnels, and other crucial infrastructure? This on a planet where what the news likes to call “extreme weather” is increasingly wreaking havoc on that same infrastructure.
My parents wouldn’t have thought such things possible. Not in America. And somehow I’d have to explain to them that they had returned to a nation which, though few Americans realize it, has increasingly been unmade by war -- by the conflicts Washington’s war on terror triggered that have now morphed into the wars of so many and have, in the process, changed us.
Such conflicts on the global frontiers have a tendency to come home in ways that can be hard to track or pin down. After all, unlike those cities in the Greater Middle East, ours aren’t yet in ruins -- though some of them may be heading in that direction, even if in slow motion. This country is, at least theoretically, still near the height of its imperial power, still the wealthiest nation on the planet. And yet it should be clear enough by now that we’ve crippled not just other nations but ourselves in ways that I suspect -- though I’ve tried over these years to absorb and record them as best I could -- we can still barely see or grasp.
In my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, the focus is on a country increasingly unsettled and transformed by spreading wars to which most of its citizens were, at best, only half paying attention. Certainly, Trump’s election was a sign of how an American sense of decline had already come home to roost in the era of the rise of the national security state (and little else).
Though it’s not something normally said here, to my mind President Trump should be considered part of the costs of those wars come home. Without the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and what followed, I doubt he would have been imaginable as anything but the host of a reality TV show or the owner of a series of failed casinos. Nor would the garrison-state version of Washington he now occupies be conceivable, nor the generals of our disastrous wars whom he’s surrounded himself with, nor the growth of a surveillance state that would have staggered George Orwell.
The Makings of a Blowback Machine
It took Donald Trump -- give him credit where it’s due -- to make us begin to grasp that we were living in a different and devolving world. And none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything until the end of time. They imagined, that is, the sort of world that, in Hollywood, had been associated only with the most malign of evil characters.
And here was the result of their conceptual overreach: never, it could be argued, has a great power still in its imperial prime proven quite so incapable of applying its military and political might in a way that would advance its aims. It’s a strange fact of this century that the U.S. military has been deployed across vast swaths of the planet and somehow, again and again, has found itself overmatched by underwhelming enemy forces and incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation. And all of this occurred at the moment when the planet most needed a new kind of knitting together, at the moment when humanity’s future was at stake in ways previously unimaginable, thanks to its still-increasing use of fossil fuels.
In the end, the last empire may prove to be an empire of nothing at all -- a grim possibility which has been a focus of TomDispatch, the website I’ve run since November 2002. Of course, when you write pieces every couple of weeks for years on end, it would be surprising if you didn’t repeat yourself. The real repetitiousness, however, wasn’t at TomDispatch. It was in Washington. The only thing our leaders and generals have seemed capable of doing, starting from the day after the 9/11 attacks, is more or less the same thing with the same dismal results, again and again.
The U.S. military and the national security state that those wars emboldened have become, in effect -- and with a bow to the late Chalmers Johnson (a TomDispatch stalwart and a man who knew the gates of hell when he saw them) -- a staggeringly well-funded blowback machine. In all these years, while three administrations pursued the spreading war on terror, America’s conflicts in distant lands were largely afterthoughts to its citizenry. Despite the largest demonstrations in history aimed at stopping a war before it began, once the invasion of Iraq occurred, the protests died out and, ever since, Americans have generally ignored their country’s wars, even as the blowback began. Someday, they will have no choice but to pay attention.
An Empire of Nothing at All?
The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hell
As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer dollars that will have gone into America’s war on terror from September 12, 2001, through fiscal year 2018. That figure: a cool $5.6 trillion (including the future costs of caring for our war vets). On average, that’s at least $23,386 per taxpayer.
Keep in mind that such figures, however eye-popping, are only the dollar costs of our wars. They don’t, for instance, include the psychic costs to the Americans mangled in one way or another in those never-ending conflicts. They don’t include the costs to this country’s infrastructure, which has been crumbling while taxpayer dollars flow copiously and in a remarkably -- in these years, almost uniquely -- bipartisan fashion into what’s still laughably called “national security.” That’s not, of course, what would make most of us more secure, but what would make them -- the denizens of the national security state -- ever more secure in Washington and elsewhere. We’re talking about the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. nuclear complex, and the rest of that state-within-a-state, including its many intelligence agencies and the warrior corporations that have, by now, been fused into that vast and vastly profitable interlocking structure.
In reality, the costs of America’s wars, still spreading in the Trump era, are incalculable. Just look at photos of the cities of Ramadi or Mosul in Iraq, Raqqa or Aleppo in Syria, Sirte in Libya, or Marawi in the southern Philippines, all in ruins in the wake of the conflicts Washington set off in the post–9/11 years, and try to put a price on them. Those views of mile upon mile of rubble, often without a building still standing untouched, should take anyone’s breath away. Some of those cities may never be fully rebuilt.
And how could you even begin to put a dollars-and-cents value on the larger human costs of those wars: the hundreds of thousands of dead? The tens of millions of people displaced in their own countries or sent as refugees fleeing across any border in sight? How could you factor in the way those masses of uprooted peoples of the Greater Middle East and Africa are unsettling other parts of the planet? Their presence (or more accurately a growing fear of it) has, for instance, helped fuel an expanding set of right-wing “populist” movements that threaten to tear Europe apart. And who could forget the role that those refugees -- or at least fantasy versions of them -- played in Donald Trump’s full-throated, successful pitch for the presidency? What, in the end, might be the cost of that?
Opening the Gates of Hell
America’s never-ending twenty-first-century conflicts were triggered by the decision of George W. Bush and his top officials to instantly define their response to attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by a tiny group of jihadis as a “war”; then to proclaim it nothing short of a “Global War on Terror”; and finally to invade and occupy first Afghanistan and then Iraq, with dreams of dominating the Greater Middle East -- and ultimately the planet -- as no other imperial power had ever done.
Their overwrought geopolitical fantasies and their sense that the U.S. military was a force capable of accomplishing anything they willed it to do launched a process that would cost this world of ours in ways that no one will ever be able to calculate. Who, for instance, could begin to put a price on the futures of the children whose lives, in the aftermath of those decisions, would be twisted and shrunk in ways frightening even to imagine? Who could tote up what it means for so many millions of this planet’s young to be deprived of homes, parents, educations -- of anything, in fact, approximating the sort of stability that might lead to a future worth imagining?
Though few may remember it, I’ve never forgotten the 2002 warning issued by Amr Moussa, then head of the Arab League. An invasion of Iraq would, he predicted that September, “open the gates of hell.” Two years later, in the wake of the actual invasion and the U.S. occupation of that country, he altered his comment slightly. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.”
His assessment has proven unbearably prescient -- and one not only applicable to Iraq. Fourteen years after that invasion, we should all now be in some kind of mourning for a world that won’t ever be. It wasn’t just the US military that, in the spring of 2003, passed through those gates to hell. In our own way, we all did. Otherwise, Donald Trump wouldn’t have become president.
I don’t claim to be an expert on hell. I have no idea exactly what circle of it we’re now in, but I do know one thing: we are there.
The Infrastructure of a Garrison State
If I could bring my parents back from the dead right now, I know that this country in its present state would boggle their minds. They wouldn’t recognize it. If I were to tell them, for instance, that just three men -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett -- now possess as much wealth as the bottom half of the US population, of 160 million Americans, they would never believe me.
How, for instance, could I begin to explain to them the ways in which, in these years, money flowed ever upward into the pockets of the immensely wealthy and then down again into what became one-percent elections that would finally ensconce a billionaire and his family in the White House? How would I explain to them that, while leading congressional Democrats and Republicans couldn’t say often enough that this country was uniquely greater than any that ever existed, none of them could find the funds -- some $5.6 trillion for starters -- necessary for our roads, dams, bridges, tunnels, and other crucial infrastructure? This on a planet where what the news likes to call “extreme weather” is increasingly wreaking havoc on that same infrastructure.
My parents wouldn’t have thought such things possible. Not in America. And somehow I’d have to explain to them that they had returned to a nation which, though few Americans realize it, has increasingly been unmade by war -- by the conflicts Washington’s war on terror triggered that have now morphed into the wars of so many and have, in the process, changed us.
Such conflicts on the global frontiers have a tendency to come home in ways that can be hard to track or pin down. After all, unlike those cities in the Greater Middle East, ours aren’t yet in ruins -- though some of them may be heading in that direction, even if in slow motion. This country is, at least theoretically, still near the height of its imperial power, still the wealthiest nation on the planet. And yet it should be clear enough by now that we’ve crippled not just other nations but ourselves in ways that I suspect -- though I’ve tried over these years to absorb and record them as best I could -- we can still barely see or grasp.
In my new book, A Nation Unmade by War, the focus is on a country increasingly unsettled and transformed by spreading wars to which most of its citizens were, at best, only half paying attention. Certainly, Trump’s election was a sign of how an American sense of decline had already come home to roost in the era of the rise of the national security state (and little else).
Though it’s not something normally said here, to my mind President Trump should be considered part of the costs of those wars come home. Without the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and what followed, I doubt he would have been imaginable as anything but the host of a reality TV show or the owner of a series of failed casinos. Nor would the garrison-state version of Washington he now occupies be conceivable, nor the generals of our disastrous wars whom he’s surrounded himself with, nor the growth of a surveillance state that would have staggered George Orwell.
The Makings of a Blowback Machine
It took Donald Trump -- give him credit where it’s due -- to make us begin to grasp that we were living in a different and devolving world. And none of this would have been imaginable if, in the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney & Co. hadn’t felt the urge to launch the wars that led us through those gates of hell. Their soaring geopolitical dreams of global domination proved to be nightmares of the first order. They imagined a planet unlike any in the previous half millennium of imperial history, in which a single power would basically dominate everything until the end of time. They imagined, that is, the sort of world that, in Hollywood, had been associated only with the most malign of evil characters.
And here was the result of their conceptual overreach: never, it could be argued, has a great power still in its imperial prime proven quite so incapable of applying its military and political might in a way that would advance its aims. It’s a strange fact of this century that the U.S. military has been deployed across vast swaths of the planet and somehow, again and again, has found itself overmatched by underwhelming enemy forces and incapable of producing any results other than destruction and further fragmentation. And all of this occurred at the moment when the planet most needed a new kind of knitting together, at the moment when humanity’s future was at stake in ways previously unimaginable, thanks to its still-increasing use of fossil fuels.
In the end, the last empire may prove to be an empire of nothing at all -- a grim possibility which has been a focus of TomDispatch, the website I’ve run since November 2002. Of course, when you write pieces every couple of weeks for years on end, it would be surprising if you didn’t repeat yourself. The real repetitiousness, however, wasn’t at TomDispatch. It was in Washington. The only thing our leaders and generals have seemed capable of doing, starting from the day after the 9/11 attacks, is more or less the same thing with the same dismal results, again and again.
The U.S. military and the national security state that those wars emboldened have become, in effect -- and with a bow to the late Chalmers Johnson (a TomDispatch stalwart and a man who knew the gates of hell when he saw them) -- a staggeringly well-funded blowback machine. In all these years, while three administrations pursued the spreading war on terror, America’s conflicts in distant lands were largely afterthoughts to its citizenry. Despite the largest demonstrations in history aimed at stopping a war before it began, once the invasion of Iraq occurred, the protests died out and, ever since, Americans have generally ignored their country’s wars, even as the blowback began. Someday, they will have no choice but to pay attention.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
