A Syrian rebel group’s April pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda’s replacement for Osama bin Laden suggests that the terrorist group’s influence is not waning and that it may take a greater role in the Western-backed fight to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/04/11/syria-al-qaeda-connection/2075323/
Sometimes when I board an airplane the head stew asks passengers to applaud the sacrifices our brave soldiers have made in defending the United States. I don’t applaud. For one thing, no soldier has defended the United States since 1945. For another, any dentist, bus driver, or musician has done more to benefit the country, and less to bankrupt it and give it a bad name, than all the armed services combined. Why don’t we applaud dentists? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35178.htm#.Ua83g9UkUL0.email
Chalmers Johnson was a truth teller and prophet in a political environment where few would stand up to the interests and secrecy of the Pentagon and the intelligence community — and since his passing in November of 2010, many of his prophetic fears have been realized in the Obama administration. Johnson, author of Blowback, Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis,The Last Days of the American Republic, talks in this video interview about the similarities in the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the signs that the U.S. empire is exhibiting the very same symptoms ~ overextension, corruption and the inability to reform. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/05/31/prophet-for-a-dying-empire-chalmers-johnson/
by Ron Paul. From Iraq to Libya to Mali to Syria to Afghanistan, U.S. interventions have an unbroken record of making matters far worse. Yet regardless of the disasters produced, all the interventionists offer is a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy. We must learn the appropriate lessons from the disaster of Iraq. We cannot continue to invade countries, install puppet governments, build new nations, create centrally planned economies, engage in social engineering, and force democracy at the barrel of a gun. The rest of the world is tired of U.S. interventionism, and the U.S. taxpayer is tired of footing the bill for U.S. interventionism. http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2013/06/02/iraq-collapse-shows-bankruptcy-of-interventionism/#.UayHlosQ0qE.email
For well over a decade now the United States has been “a nation at war.” Does that war have a name? It did at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush’s administration wasted no time in announcing that the U.S. was engaged in a Global War on Terrorism, or GWOT. With few dissenters, the media quickly embraced the term. The GWOT promised to be a gargantuan, transformative enterprise. The conflict begun on 9/11 would define the age. In neoconservative circles, it was known as World War IV. Upon succeeding to the presidency in 2009, however, Barack Obama without fanfare junked Bush’s formulation (as he did again in a speech at the National Defense University last week). Yet if the appellation went away, the conflict itself, shorn of identifying marks, continued. Does it matter that ours has become and remains a nameless war? Very much so. Names bestow meaning. When it comes to war, a name attached to a date can shape our understanding of what the conflict was all about. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2013/05/28/the-eternal-war/#.UaYAuoLA2s4.email
The current American political impotence in the Middle East is unprecedented, at least since the rapid disintegration of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990’s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union had ushered in the rise of a unipolar world, wholly managed by the United States. The rise of the uncontested American hegemony represented a shift in historical dialectics, where great powers found their match and the rest of the world, more or less, accommodated the ensuing competition. http://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2013/05/23/from-iraq-to-syria-us-political-impotence-in-the-middle-east/
The new president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is cast in Chavez’s mold. On May 4, he called US president Obama the “grand chief of devils.” Obama, who has betrayed democracy in America, unleashing execution on American citizens without due process of law and war without the consent of Congress, provoked Maduro’s response by suggesting that Maduro’s newly elected government might be fraudulent. Obviously, Obama is piqued that the millions of dollars his administration spent trying to elect an American puppet instead of Maduro failed to do the job. If anyone has accurately summed up Washington, it is the Venezuelans. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/07/washingtons-presumption-paul-craig-roberts/
The U.S. Constitution is the product of 900 years of human efforts to restrain brutal government and to make government subject to law. It only took Bush and Obama eleven years to get rid of it. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/05/01/you-are-the-hope-paul-craig-roberts/
George W. Bush presided over an international network of torture chambers and, with the help of a compliant Congress and press, launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. However, instead of the bloody details of his time in office being recounted at a war crimes tribunal, the former president has been able to bank on his imperial privilege – and a network of rich corporate donors that he made richer while in office – to tell his version of history at a library in Texas being opened in his name. Kill a few, they call you a murderer. Kill tens of thousands, they give you $500 million for a granite vanity project and a glossy 30-page supplement in the local paper. http://original.antiwar.com/jodie-evans/2013/04/24/bushs-legacy-ought-to-be-on-trial/
Confirmation by the Constitution Project nearly a decade late that the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military and ‘intelligence’ services committed acts of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere appears a Rorschach test for the ‘sentiments’ of the American people. However, sentiments aside, formal indictments of culpable officials on war crimes charges and the start of impeachment proceedings against current President Barack Obama are the only relevant responses to the report. Torture is a crime under laws to which the U.S. is signatory. And with his war on Iraq George W. Bush and his administration murdered, or caused the premature deaths of, more than a million people and substantially destroyed a modern nation state. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/19/the-crime-of-torture/
The adulation given to soldiers is especially true if they have been in combat. And this is increasingly the case since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over ten years ago. Never before in American history has such military idolatry gripped the country. Never before have so many Christians bowed before the golden calf of the U.S. military. It has gotten to the point where any soldier who went to Iraq or Afghanistan is a war hero. It should come as no surprise, then, that some men have taken advantage of Americans’ infatuation with soldiers and all things military. According to Mary Schantag, a Marine widow who launched the nonprofit Fake Warriors Project in 1998 with her late husband Chuck, her group, along with partners at similar sites, has revealed more than 4,000 hoaxers who falsely claimed military service or battlefield glory. Mrs. Schantag “uses Internet background searches and files Freedom of Information Requests with government agencies to corroborate a suspicious veteran’s claimed history. She also taps her personal connections with Navy SEALS, Army Special Forces, even military chaplains to double check her detective work.” http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance330.html
George Kennan, who was one of the main architects of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Second World War era, also noted with candidness and prescience: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” Thus we see how after the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union collapsed the U.S. has been flailing to contrive a replacement “enemy” and pretext for its essential militarism. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terror” has fulfilled this purpose to a degree, even though it is replete with contradictions that belie its fraudulence, such as the support given to Al Qaeda terrorist elements currently to overthrow the government of Syria. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article34586.htm#.UWqkAgqcgcc.email
David Stockman rocketed to fame as Ronald Reagan’s chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), his name loosely associated with the “trickle down economics” of the supply-siders, but his recent book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, will correct the record: Stockman is not only a libertarian critic of the Milton Friedman school of monetarism and supply side economics, he is also a principled opponent of American militarism. His new book is a massive 700 pages-plus, but don’t let that deter you: inside you will find a scintillating analysis of where, why, and how America went wrong, starting with the New Deal and ending with the Great Recession of ’08 and the subsequent Obama-Bernanke attempts to re-inflate the bubble of America’s debt-driven “prosperity.” http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/14/the-great-deformation/
It’s become a truism that America is following the road to depravity, dictatorship, and brutality that ancient Rome paved. As the Feds sped down that path in 2001 with their War on Terror, a Canadian writer perused Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was “a rich and rewarding read,” Morgan Wade tells us in his Author’s Note for The Last Stoic. “But what struck me most, in passages describing how the ancient ‘golden age’ had passed from prosperity and relative peace to decay and continual war, is how closely the trajectory of the contemporary American empire mirrors that of the Roman empire.” Indeed, after more research, Mr. Wade “wondered how far one could go” with the parallels. The Last Stoic is his novelistic answer. http://lewrockwell.com/akers/akers202.html
Washington can sleep easy: Rand’s no threat to the status quo. http://original.antiwar.com/steve-breyman/2013/03/26/the-mostly-mainstream-foreign-policy-of-rand-paul/
As President Obama enters his second term with a new Cabinet, the foreign policy legacy of the past four years weighs heavily on their strategic decisions and their empire-building efforts. Central to the analysis of the next period is an evaluation of the past policies especially in regions where Washington expended its greatest financial and military resources, namely the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. We will proceed by examining the accomplishments and failures of the Obama-Clinton regime. We will then turn to the ongoing policy efforts to sustain the empire-building project. We will take account of the constraints and opportunities, which define the parameters resulting from imperial military ambitions, Israeli-Zionist influence in shaping policy and the ongoing anti-imperialist struggles. We will conclude by examining likely polices and outcomes resulting from current strategies. http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/03/selling-death-and-buying-assassins-in-the-middle-east-north-africa-and-south-asia/
The Empire, on the other hand, cannot win. All else aside, its publicized goal of world domination is simply out of reach. All the guns in the world are useless if the other side cannot be compelled to submit. Force can only settle the matters of power, not right. Like Athens of antiquity, the Atlantic Empire crushed the Melians because it could, and squandered its strength on a misguided Syracuse expedition. Yet not only did Athens lose the war to Sparta, its vaunted democracy was lost as well. http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2013/03/21/illusion-of-triumph/
Feith and his co-conspirators not only refuse to own up to authoring the greatest military disaster in American history, they are “proud” of it, as Dick Cheney recently proclaimed. A government investigation into whether Feith and his fellows deliberately palmed off false “intelligence” to justify the Iraq invasion was quashed. To this day, not a single US government official has been held accountable, and the pro-war pundits – who spent over a decade relentlessly agitating for the war – are in their same perches, war-birds screeching for the destruction of Iran. There is much talk of the “lessons” the war has supposedly taught us, and there is a significant debate about this, but what’s clear is the lesson learned by the architects of this war: that being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/03/17/ten-years-later-when-is-the-reckoning/
For more than thirty years, American analysts and policy-makers have put forward a series of myths about the Islamic Republic: that it is irrational, illegitimate and vulnerable. In doing so, pundits and politicians have consistently misled the American public and America’s allies about what policies will actually work to advance U.S. interests in the Middle East. The most persistent — and dangerous — of these myths is that the Islamic Republic is so despised by its own people that it is in imminent danger of overthrow … More than ever before, American interests require rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. Continued U.S. hostility only courts strategic disaster. http://www.agenceglobal.com/index.php?show=article&Tid=2965
John Hagee
“Were it not for the support offered by several tens of millions of evangelicals, militarism in this deeply and genuinely religious country becomes inconceivable.” ~ Andrew Bacevich (Colonel, U.S. Army, Ret.). This is one of the most sobering statements in Dr. Bacevich’s important book The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford, 2005). Whether you agree or disagree with evangelical support for militarism, the fact remains that the largest group of Americans that the government can count on to support the institution of the military, the empire of troops and bases that encircles the globe, large defense budgets, overseas military interventions, the perpetual war on terror, and now torture is evangelical Christians – and the more conservative the more bloodthirsty. Why? If there is any group that should oppose these things, it is conservative Christians who profess to be in subjection to the Bible. There is something gravely wrong with evangelical Christianity when socialists like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky get it right and conservative Christians get it wrong. http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance325.html
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here’s the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don’t get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it’s this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we — and so many others — will pay the price for it for a long, long time. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/worst-mistake-us-history-america-will-never-recover-bushs-great-foreign-policy
A recent poll showed most Americans didn’t know enough about Chuck Hagel to have an opinion on his confirmation as Secretary of Defense. You’d never know that, however, with all the drama emanating from Washington on the subject. So did all that sound and fury signify nothing? What seems like an inside-baseball brouhaha actually maps a seismic shift in the way Americans think about war, American foreign policy, and the peculiarities of our “special relationship” with Israel. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/02/26/what-was-that-all-about/#.US4evBOEATQ.email
In his first inaugural address, back in 2009, Barack Obama announced: “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Improving how the US was perceived among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims was not about winning an international popularity contest but was deemed as vital to US national security. Even the Pentagon has long recognized that the primary cause of anti-American Terrorism is the “negative attitude” toward the U.S.: obviously, the reason people in that part of the world want to attack the U.S. – as opposed to Peru or South Africa or China – is because they perceive a reason to do so. Obama’s most devoted supporters have long hailed his supposedly unique ability to improve America’s standing in that part of the world. In his first of what would be many paeans to Obama, Andrew Sullivan wrote back in 2007 that among Obama’s countless assets, “first and foremost [is] his face”, which would provide “the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan”. Sullivan specifically imagined a “young Pakistani Muslim” seeing Obama as “the new face of America”; instantly, proclaimed Sullivan, “America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm”. Obama would be “the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology” because it “proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can”. Sullivan made clear why this matters so much: “such a re-branding is not trivial – it’s central to an effective war strategy.” None of that has happened. In fact, the opposite has taken place: although it seemed impossible to achieve, Obama has presided over an America that, in many respects, is now even more unpopular in the Muslim world than it was under George Bush and Dick Cheney. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33951.htm#.UR-fnsAlglM.email
If one goes by Obama’s own words (a dangerous proposition when dealing with any politician), the United States will revert to a traditional, less assertive international role embracing a more humble Pax Americana rather than repeatedly intervening militarily to set things right. It will mean abandoning the idea that America is and should be perpetually at war, which was the Bush Doctrine, and is largely a result of diminished resources rather than any desire to relinquish leadership. The first test case will be Afghanistan, which surely will see a major or even total drawdown in 2014. If the country falls to the Taliban shortly thereafter, a la Vietnam, the hawks will try to force a reversion to the old global strategy but Obama is almost certainly banking on the situation continuing to be manageable at least until he is out of office. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/02/04/a-return-to-realism/
If last week’s hearing for Chuck Hagel raised questions about his capacity to be secretary of defense, the show trial conducted by his inquisitors on the tribunal raised questions about the GOP. Is the Republican Party, as currently constituted, even capable of conducting a foreign policy befitting a world power? Or has it learned nothing and forgotten nothing since George W. Bush went home and the nation rejected John McCain for Barack Obama? http://takimag.com/article/the_republican_obsession_patrick_buchanan/print#axzz2K4EEPUmJ
When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire? The question may seem presumptuous. The idea that the American Century is a relic of the past, and we are entering a “new world order” of divided rather than hegemonic power, is relatively new, and still controversial. There are those who insist it ain’t necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we’re still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing “superpower suicide.” To the rest of us, however – that is, to everyone outside the neocons’ cultic universe – the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/01/29/the-american-empire-rip-2/
The Berlin Wall fell. Eastern Europe was suddenly free. The Soviet Union disintegrated. China abandoned Maoism for state capitalism. Now, 20 years on, the wheel has turned again—toward darkness. No longer do we hear chatter about “The End of History” and triumph of democratic capitalism, of America imposing her “global hegemony” or leading mankind into “a second American century.” “When did the internal affairs of foreign nations become the portfolio of American diplomats?” The hubris is gone, and triumphalism has given way to anxiety, apprehension, alarm. http://takimag.com/article/americas_role_in_a_darkening_age_patrick_buchanan/print#axzz2JJIRsRSX
Perhaps, in fact, it is not pretend violence that is causing this crescendo of violence in our culture. Maybe it has something to do with very real killing being perpetrated by our government. Every day — literally every day — an American serviceman sitting in front of a screen somewhere guides a drone toward a target and fires a missile that kills an “alleged” militant, as well as several innocent bystanders, including children. None of these targets is ever named, and the bodies often go uncounted. As Anthony Gregory of the Independent Institute writes: America is a militarized society, seat of the world’s empire. The U.S. government is always at war with a handful of countries. We glorify killing and dying in our patriotic parades. Our Nobel Peace Prize winning president has bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya. http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/14235-militarization-of-america-and-newtown-massacre-cause-and-effect
In the present age, strategy as such has become a dangerous chimera. Strategy sustains the illusion that the United States can and should determine the course of world events, thereby keeping America in the global driver’s seat. Yet whatever is coming down the pike, you can count on one thing: it’s going to be something other than what General Dempsey anticipates as a result of his strategic seminars. Nor should we expect Secretary of State John Kerry (or Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, if he wins confirmation) to do any better. When it comes to looking round the bend, the civilians are no more adept than the soldiers. As always, the United States — like every other nation — will be left to cope as best it can. The one thing that the US actually could do to secure its future is the one thing that it refuses to do: demonstrate a capacity to manage its own affairs; live within its means; set its own house in order. In Washington, talk about global strategy provides an excuse to avoid doing what needs to be done. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8814591/americas-strategic-stupidity/
Throughout American history we see many precursors for U.S. warmaking. Ever since World War I, the United States has maintained an active role in global affairs, at the cost of many thousands of American lives and many domestic freedoms. Yet much more recently than any of those antecedents to the modern war machine, a major shift took place. And that was World War II, the “Good War,” the last clear-cut and most widely celebrated military victory enjoyed by the United States, the one to which liberals unfavorably compare Bush’s adventures, and conservatives invoke as precedents for their own preferred war policies. It was in World War II that the U.S. warfare state blossomed into its modern form. http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/book-review-the-u-s-war-machine/
The greatest threat to world peace is not from nuclear weapons and their possible proliferation. It is from drones and their certain proliferation. Nuclear bombs are useless weapons, playthings for the powerful or those aspiring to power. Drones are now sweeping the global arms market. There are some 10,000 said to be in service, of which a thousand are armed and mostly American. Some reports say they have killed more non-combatant civilians than died in 9/11. I have not read one independent study of the current drone wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the horn of Africa that suggests these weapons serve any strategic purpose. Their “success” is expressed solely in body count, the number of so-called “al-Qaida-linked commanders” killed. If body count were victory, the Germans would have won Stalingrad and the Americans Vietnam. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/10/drones-fools-gold-prolong-wars
So to what extent are both Israel and the United States trending towards a fascist model? In some areas the affinity is clear. Both Israel and the United States claim victimhood from terrorism and have used that as an excuse to maintain aggressive foreign policies that emphasize the use of force as a first option. Both spend far more proportionately on “defense” than other developed countries and both are actively engaged in proxy and shooting wars around the world. Israel exploits its alleged victimhood to occupy Palestinian land while the United States does the same to justify its continued presence in Afghanistan and its threats against both Iran and Syria. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/01/09/are-israel-and-the-u-s-becoming-fascist-states/
Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty. James Madison said: In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. http://www.infowars.com/endless-war-is-a-feature-not-a-bug-of-u-s-policy/
The Pentagon currently has plans for over 100 military and training exercises across Africa as part of its touted Africom effort. The “carefully calibrated” plan to move into Africa was announced in 2007 despite “misgivings across the continent that it could spawn American bases or create the perception of an undue U.S. military influence there,” according to the AP. http://www.infowars.com/pentagon-announces-troop-deployment-in-35-african-nations/
Mars? Venus? Earth-like bodies elsewhere in the galaxy? Who knows? But here, at least, no great power, no superpower, no hyperpower, not the Romans, nor imperial China, nor the British, nor the Soviet Union has ever garrisoned the globe quite the way we have: Asia to Latin America, Europe to the Greater Middle East, and increasingly Africa as well. Build we must. If someday Washington took to the couch for therapy, the shrink would undoubtedly categorize what we’ve done as a compulsion, the base-building equivalent of a hoarding disorder. And you know what else is unprecedented? Hundreds of thousands of Americans cycle annually through our various global garrisons, ranging from small American towns with all the attendant amenities, including fast-food joints, PXes, and Internet cafes to the most spartan of forward outposts, and yet our “Baseworld,” as the late Chalmers Johnson used to call it, is hardly noticed in this country and seldom considered worthy of attention. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/12/11/the-true-costs-of-empire/
Gauging U.S. military policy — at least on a meta level — isn’t as hard as it looks, as long as you remember a few general axioms: like, what seems to be true today, will almost certainly change tomorrow, and never, ever listen to a four-star commander when he says “direct U.S. intervention is unlikely.” http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2012/12/10/anatomy-of-a-mali-intervention/
The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell … More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: “What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred.” Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened. Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/petraeuss-coin-gets-flipped/
Mentored by Madeleine Albright — whose reputation as an interventionist of the “humanitarian” school was secured by her infamous remark that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis due to sanctions was “worth it” — Rice apparently absorbed the Albrightian mindset. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/11/20/susan-rice-is-bad-news/
A central premise of U.S. media coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza — beyond the claim that Israel is justifiably “defending itself” – is that this is some endless conflict between two foreign entitles, and Americans can simply sit by helplessly and lament the tragedy of it all. The reality is precisely the opposite: Israeli aggression is possible only because of direct, affirmative, unstinting U.S. diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does. This self-flattering depiction of the U.S. as uninvolved, neutral party is the worst media fiction since TV news personalities covered the Arab Spring by pretending that the U.S. is and long has been on the side of the heroic democratic protesters, rather than the key force that spent decades propping up the tyrannies they were fighting. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/17/israel-gaza-us-policy
As for the Empire, it may bask in the afterglow of electoral triumph for the moment, but the systemic problems will still be there after it wears off. Unable to solve them, it will turn to war as a distraction. Back in May, the Emperor told the outgoing Russian president he would have “more flexibility” on issues after the election. Indeed, Washington has been reluctant lately to embark on any interventionist projects that might backfire at inopportune times. With opposition to imperialism denied a voice in the corridors of power, expect the re-energized regime to start another little war somewhere, and soon. Options are open as to where, from “liberating” Mali to escalating the civil war in Syria or attacking Iran. In any case, China and Russia will soon find out if all the hostile rhetoric in the past months has been mere campaign posturing, or a true bipartisan consensus about maintaining Imperial dominion. One place to watch for the reaction is the Balkans. There are already signs of discontent in Moscow, with prominent analysts doubting the good faith of the regime in Belgrade. As well they should – but the question is, what do they intend to do about it? http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2012/11/09/winter-of-discontent-2/
Today, Americans are debating, marveling and despairing at Washington’s latest military action – or inaction – abroad. We obsess over the latest White House, CIA or Pentagon cover-up, study and deplore the latest intervention gone wrong. We wonder why it can’t be different. We wonder why the system doesn’t seem to work, and why the actions taken by Washington overseas always lead to more death, more hatred, more destruction, and more war. We wonder what would it be like if the United States conducted a constitutional foreign policy, or maybe, a constitutional domestic policy. We wonder if there really is such a thing as a peace dividend. We wonder if authoritarian and heavily militarized governments in northern and southern hemispheres are the norm, or just a terrible phase through which we are passing through on our way to a bright and blessed 21st century. http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski290.html
Four years ago, a starry-eyed, hopeful, and fatally credulous nation elected Barack Obama to the presidency based largely on some dimwitted notion that he would usher us into a glittering new “post-racial” era where everyone got along, had group orgies, and joyously mixed their genes into a highly agreeable shade of caramel. http://takimag.com/article/cant_we_all_just_get_post_racial_jim_goad/print#axzz2AiXVPavx
In one way or another, the U.S. military is now involved with most of the nations on Earth. Its soldiers, commandos, trainers, base builders, drone jockeys, spies, and arms dealers, as well as associated hired guns and corporate contractors, can now be found just about everywhere on the planet. The sun never sets on American troops conducting operations, training allies, arming surrogates, schooling its own personnel, purchasing new weapons and equipment, developing fresh doctrine, implementing novel tactics, and refining their martial arts. The U.S. has submarines trolling the briny deep and aircraft carrier task forces traversing the oceans and seas, robotic drones flying constant missions and manned aircraft patrolling the skies, while above them, spy satellites circle, peering down on friend and foe alike. Since 2001, the U.S. military has thrown everything in its arsenal, short of nuclear weapons, including untold billions of dollars in weaponry, technology, bribes, you name it, at a remarkably weak set of enemies — relatively small groups of poorly-armed fighters in impoverished nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen — while decisively defeating none of them. With its deep pockets and long reach, its technology and training acumen, as well as the devastatingly destructive power at its command, the U.S. military should have the planet on lockdown. It should, by all rights, dominate the world just as the neoconservative dreamers of the early Bush years assumed it would. Yet after more than a decade of war, it has failed to eliminate a rag-tag Afghan insurgency with limited popular support. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/10/25/a-failed-formula-for-worldwide-war/
It is perhaps human nature to seek to blame someone else for one’s own personal failings. But what is possibly only a misdemeanor in personal interactions becomes rather more serious when entire nations and races are systematically and comprehensively blamed for the failures of other nations to comprehend simple truths. I am, of course, referring to the disastrous foreign policy that we Americans have endured for the past 11 years, which is coming home to roost now in places such as Libya and Syria. Consider what we have been hearing repeated over and over again about the Middle East and other trouble spots. American bullying, preemption, and a policy of might makes right have not been the problem; some ignorant folks just dislike us because of our freedom. The United States is “exceptional,” which means that it should set the standards for the “free world” and even the not-so-free world, whether they all like it or not. Washington has the right to intervene militarily anywhere in the world if there is even the slightest chance that there is some kind of threat lurking. Neither President Barack Obama nor Gov. Mitt Romney has dared to say the truth, which is that the past 11 years have been disastrous for the United States because of a gross overreaction to a terrorism problem that we helped create. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/10/24/blaming-the-muslims/
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it all seemed so obvious. Fate had clearly dealt Washington a royal flush. It was victory with a capital V. The United States was, after all, the last standing superpower, after centuries of unceasing great power rivalries on the planet. It had a military beyond compare and no enemy, hardly a “rogue state,” on the horizon. It was almost unnerving, such clear sailing into a dominant future, but a moment for the ages nonetheless. Within a decade, pundits in Washington were hailing us as “the dominant power in the world, more dominant than any since Rome.” And here’s the odd thing: in a sense, little has changed since then and yet everything seems different. Think of it as the American imperial paradox: everywhere there are now “threats” against our well-being which seem to demand action and yet nowhere are there commensurate enemies to go with them. Everywhere the U.S. military still reigns supreme by almost any measure you might care to apply; and yet — in case the paradox has escaped you — nowhere can it achieve its goals, however modest. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175602/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_disaster_on_autopilot/
The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither can afford to let go of. Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans. Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands. Islamabad returns the favor. It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its indispensability to the Obama administration. At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment. As Barack Obama confided to his aides, this remains his worst foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of the U.S. Army to train a commando unit to retrieve Pakistan’s nukes, should extremists seize some of them or materials to produce a “dirty bomb” themselves. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/10/18/washingtons-pakistan-meltdown/
Speaking on conditions of anonymity, four administration officials have commented that they are actively seeking a target and readying strike forces and drones as retribution for the Sept 11 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. As AP reports, if the administration does find a target, officials say it still has to weigh whether the short-term payoff of exacting retribution on al-Qaida is worth the risk that such strikes could elevate the group’s profile in the region, alienate governments the U.S. needs to fight the group in the future and do little to slow the growing terror threat in North Africa. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-16/will-obama-strike-libya-delayed-pre-election-war
Welcome Mali, our newest crisis! Open your maps. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32745.htm
After the last decade of military failures, stand-offs, and frustrations, you might think that this would be apparent in Washington. After all, the U.S. is now visibly an overextended empire, its sway waning from the Greater Middle East to Latin America, the limits of its power increasingly evident. And yet, here’s the curious thing: two administrations in Washington have drawn none of the obvious conclusions, and no matter how the presidential election turns out, it’s already clear that, in this regard, nothing will change. Even as military power has proven itself a bust again and again, our policymakers have come to rely ever more completely on a military-first response to global problems. In other words, we are not just a classically overextended empire, but also an overwrought one operating on some kind of militarized autopilot. Lacking is a learning curve. By all evidence, it’s not just that there isn’t one, but that there can’t be one. Washington, it seems, now has only one mode of thought and action, no matter who is at the helm or what the problem may be, and it always involves, directly or indirectly, openly or clandestinely, the application of militarized force. Nor does it matter that each further application only destabilizes some region yet more or undermines further what once were known as “American interests.” http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/10/09/overwrought-empire/
The Empire of the United States was launched in 1898, and has since traversed a mere century, experiencing increasing ambition, and suffering increasing difficulties. Could it too last 406 years? The current evidence is not reassuring … This is what the War on Terror has come to mean. It is an attempt to create a universal empire that exists only in the American imagination, by an effort that, because its aim is impossible to achieve, is unlimited in the damage it could do to Americans and others. http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=265
So dangerous is Benghazi, the New York Times reported Friday, FBI agents investigating the ambassador’s assassination have yet to venture into the city. Was U.S. intelligence oblivious to how dangerous Benghazi was when Stevens went in? Was not Benghazi’s reputation as a haven for Islamic jihadi known to us all before we “liberated” Libya? This is the city U.S. air power saved when Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were closing in. It now appears to be an al-Qaidaville where U.S. diplomats and agents dare not tread. http://www.wnd.com/2012/10/the-unraveling-of-obamas-foreign-policy/
Those angry Muslims from Morocco to Bangladesh are not rioting and burning because they hate Christianity, fast food, America’s consumer society, democracy, or feminism, as we are endlessly misinformed by politicians and media. The mass fury does not come because Muslims are somehow irrational, primitive, violent beings. Nor is the hate video, which was actually seen by only a limited number of the world’s one billion Muslims, the real cause of the violence we have been witnessing: it is merely the spark that ignited the combustible haze of anti-Americanism that overlies over much of the Muslim world. Many Americans believe they are innocent bystanders in the Muslim world, or involved there on an altruistic “mission” to uplift the benighted natives, to selflessly shoulder the heavy burden of policing the unruly globe, or abroad to wage an unending struggle against the dark forces of what we call “terrorism.” What they do not at all understand is that the American imperium’s goal is to advance its own strategic, economic and political goals and keep much of the planet under its influence. http://ericmargolis.com/2012/09/why-the-american-raj-is-under-siege/
That’s just how the War Party likes it. They don’t want anyone asking uncomfortable questions about future wars, especially the looming conflict just around the next corner. (Turn right at Election Day, and head straight to Tehran.) But my question is broader, and it’s this: when was the last time the US actually won a war? No, no, I don’t mean Grenada, fer chrissake: I mean a real honest-to-goodness all-out bang ‘em up war, with an opponent who had at least a fighting chance. Before the recent spate of attempted conquests, there was Vietnam — a flat out defeat: and Korea — a draw. On a smaller scale, none of the “anti-communist” insurgencies we sponsored in the 1980s in Nicaragua and El Salvador succeeded in producing anything but trouble for us and untold misery for the inhabitants of those unfortunate countries — all in all, our efforts in Central and South America during the cold war era amounted to the Bay of Pigs writ large. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/09/23/the-hollow-empire/
The question of the political season, then, has nothing to do with Mitt. It’s this: Can the Greater Middle East be managed effectively enough for any potentially embarrassing thing to be swept under some rug until November 7th? And that’s just one region on a planet aboil. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/09/23/obama-against-the-world/
In the 20th century, the West, which was hardly innocent, nevertheless stood for civil liberty, for law as a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of the government. In Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, law was a weapon in the hands of the government. Today the US has caught up with Hitler and Stalin. Law in the US is a weapon in the hands of the government. In my opinion, neoconservative triumphalism has destroyed American morality and left hubris in its place. Americans are overwhelmed by how great and good and moral and indispensable they are. American hubris raises Americans above everyone else in the world. Americans can torture, murder, invade, and still lecture the rest of the world about human rights. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/22/world-without-torture-the-responsibilities-of-the-west/
Presently, our consciousness is focused on the increased effort of the world’s biggest powers to enforce subjugation of their populations. Historically, this is always an endgame move, as the powers grow nearer to the end of their run. In the coming years, we would do well to regularly assess the opening-up of other jurisdictions as the old leaders decline. http://lewrockwell.com/thomas-jeff/thomas-jeff9.1.1.html
The overriding elite military and intelligence agenda remains the conquest of oil and gas resources. 9/11/01 was the first act of desperation among elites to control all significant energy-related geography on the planet, while preventing rival powers from doing the same. Under the “war on terror”, the world has suffered eleven continuous years of false flag terror. Bombings. Destabilizations. Assassinations. Coups and counter-coups. Controlled and co-opted popular revolts and “mob violence”. Regime changes. Criminality beyond redemption. http://www.globalresearch.ca/false-flags-and-imperial-mobilization-the-middle-east-explodes-on-911-anniversary/
Sparked by a deliberate provocation put together by Christian extremists, riots by groups of Islamic extremists are spreading across the world — a convenient symbiosis for both groups, as they use each other’s actions to “justify” their hysterically constricted worldviews. There is an added layer to the reaction in the Muslim countries, as the extremists there can draw on the seething resentments built up by the depredations and atrocities inflicted indiscriminately on Muslims by the Western powers in recent decades, particularly since the launch of Terror War. But of course these depredations and atrocities are the work of yet another group of sectarian extremists gripped by a hysterically constricted worldview: the Western power elites, who are maniacal adherents to the Dominationist cult. This bizarre but very powerful sect holds that American domination of the world, militarily and economically, is part of the divinely ordained structure of the universe. Those who adhere to Dominationist dogma and obey the dictates of the sect’s high priests in Washington are rewarded; but unbelievers, heretics and apostates are to be cast out, cursed, attacked and, when possible, destroyed. In the last 11 years alone, state-backed Dominationist terrorists have killed far more innocent people than their counterparts among the scattered clumps of Islamic extremists around the world. More than a million people have been killed as a result of the Dominationist terrorist attack on Iraq, for example. Hundreds of innocent people in Pakistan have been murdered by the drones fired by Dominationist terrorists. Dozens are dying monthly in violent Dominationist attacks in Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and elsewhere. The senseless violence of the Dominationist sect is well-attested. The sect’s leaders brag openly about their use of violence; indeed, in the constant factional jockeying for power within the sect (a characteristic of all religious and ideological cults, of course), would-be leaders vie to paint themselves as the one most willing to inflict massive death and destruction on all those who dare challenge the Dominationist faith. All would-be leaders trumpet their willingness — their eagerness — to eschew mere man-made laws as they do “whatever it takes” to defend the faith and advance Dominationist supremacy over the earth. Torture, kidnapping, assassination and mass destruction are all considered divinely justified by the Dominationist extremists — and by the millions of people who actively support the factions within the sect. http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2281-the-howling-embassy-riots-a-teapot-in-state-terror-tempest.html
With protests in over 40 locations worldwide against the U.S. in the past week, America should be re-evaluating its foreign policy. American diplomats appear dumbfounded. The UK Guardian posts a headline report that reads: “U.S. media angrily marvels at the lack of Muslim gratitude.” The Guardian article goes on to say: “One prominent strain shaping American reaction to the protests in the Muslim world is bafflement, and even anger, that those Muslims are not more grateful to the U.S. Attacks in Libya that left four U.S. diplomats dead – including Ambassador Christopher Stevens – and a mob invasion of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, in which the U.S. flag was torn to shreds, have left many to wonder: How can people the USA helped free from murderous dictators treat it in such a way?” But Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian’s political commentator, says: “That it was the U.S. who freed Egyptians and ‘allowed them’ the right to protest would undoubtedly come as a great surprise to many Egyptians. That is the case even beyond the decades of arming, funding and general support from the U.S. for their hated dictator. http://lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi239.html
Think of it another way: in the post-2001 era, along with two disastrous wars on the Eurasian mainland, we’ve been regularly sending in the Marines or special operations forces, as well as naval, air, and robotic power. Such acts are, by now, so ordinary that they are seldom considered worthy of much discussion here, even though no other country acts (or even has the capacity to act) this way. This is simply what Washington’s National Security Complex does for a living. At the moment, it seems, a historical circle is being closed with the Marines once again heading back into Latin America as the “drug war” Washington proclaimed years ago becomes an actual drug war. It’s a demonstration that, these days, when Washington sees a problem anywhere on the planet, its version of a “foreign policy” is most likely to call on the U.S. military. Force is increasingly not our option of last resort, but our first choice. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32437.htm
It’s a well-known fact that the Eskimos have 88 words for snow and Baskin-Robbins 57 varieties of ice cream – or is that Heinz Baked Beans? – anyway, my point is that certain subject areas of language are clearly overdeveloped and replete with vocabulary, while others are not. One of the areas less well served by language is politics and geopolitics, where multifaceted phenomenon of great complexity are described and explained using an impoverished vocabulary that does nothing to convey their essence. A case in point is the recent brutal murder of the US ambassador in Libya and his staff. Explaining that these unfortunates were killed by an angry Islamic mob incensed by a movie that the embassy had been pushing, and then quoting Hilary Clinton – “This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the people and government of Libya” – only shows the semantic shortcomings of the geopolitical narrative. Missing from the prim little network reports that brought this news to the uncomprehending public is the whiff of geopolitical naivety, the pong of inept deculturalization, and the stench of reckless destabilization that inevitably emanates from America’s dealings with the non-Jewish Middle East. But most of all these bare accounts miss the exquisite sense of karma that this action actualizes: a few short months after the USA brought about the lynching of the country’s previous leader, its own ambassador is killed in a remarkably similar fashion by the same nasty Islamic id that was unleashed and empowered on that occasion by USA foreign policy. http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/exit-strategies/getting-gaddafied/
by Paul Craig Roberts. During the Vietnam War, Sweden was an independent country with a moral conscience, and Sweden gave sanctuary to US war protestors who refused the draft. Washington realized the cost to itself and purchased the Swedish government in order to prevent a reoccurrence of moral conscience on the part of any Western government. In the aftermath of World War II and during the subsequent decades of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the Western nations presented themselves as the moral conscience of the world. It turns out that this was largely a hoax. The “Western nations” are merely pawns complicit in Washington’s crimes as Washington attempts to shut down all information in its pursuit of world hegemony. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/09/10/the-declining-west-tragedy-comedy-paul-craig-roberts/
Only one thing makes Obama’s policy look geopolitically smart — and that’s Mitt Romney’s prospective foreign policy. On global issues, then, the November elections will offer voters a particularly unpalatable choice: between a Democratic militarist and an even more over-the-top militaristic Republican, between Bush Lite all over again and Bush heavy, between dumb and dumber. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175589/tomgram%3A_john_feffer%2C_the_dumbing_down_of_american_foreign_policy/#more
The buzzwords – America the “exceptional nation,” the equation of military action with efforts to eradicate disease and “uplift” the poor, the valorization of the military as a consecrated priesthood embodying our highest values – coagulate into boilerplate Republican bromides, a mantra of ideological emptiness endlessly repeated by Romney and his surrogates, but McCain gives it a little frisson. In other words: “Bomb, bomb, bomb – bomb bomb Iran!” War with Iran is an enormously unpopular idea – unless you’re a crazed born-again Christian of the sort who believes America is Babylon, the end times are imminent, and loyalty to Israel is God’s will. These deluded doomsday dispensationalists are the bedrock of the GOP’s southern and Midwestern activist base, and revving these people up is what the festivities in Tampa are all about. The question is: how many normal Americans are repulsed by this kind of rhetoric? http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/08/30/foreign-policy-night-in-tampa/
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the nominal end of the Cold War some twenty years back, rather than reducing the size of its mammoth defense spending, the U.S. Congress and all U.S. Presidents have enormously expanded spending for new weapons systems, increased permanent military bases around the world and expansion of NATO not only to former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s immediate periphery; it also has expanded NATO and the U.S. military presence deep into Asia on the perimeters of China through its conduct of the Afghan war and related campaigns. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32474
Although the attacks of this week are tragic, their real significance is political in nature. There has been a sustained destabilization campaign waged by the West, particularly the United States, and aimed at President Putin going back to last December and the beginning of the so-called protest movement. The attempt by the Western imperialists has been to isolate Putin, demonize him, and erode his support within the country in hopes of toppling his government, thereby removing the biggest obstacle they face in implementing their hegemonic agenda. However, despite the financial backing, political demagoguery and media inundation, the attempts have entirely failed. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32442
Past and present leaders reveal the soul of their nations. Arguably America never had one. Current domestic and foreign policies provide convincing evidence. Police state harshness targets defenders of right over wrong everywhere. National resources go for militarism, belligerence, and making super-rich elites richer. Corporations are licensed to steal, exploit, and plunder. Wars ravage one country after another. Humanity is ruthlessly destroyed. Battlefields shift from one theater to another. Gangsterism writ large reflects official policy. Syria is ground zero. Months of Western generated violence left thousands dead, many more injured, and countless numbers displaced. Nothing deters America’s war machine madness. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32204.htm
According to privacy advocates like the EFF, EPIC, UsenetReviewz, and many others, this order gives the DHS the authority to take complete control of public, private, and non-profit facilities…giving them the ability to close off or limit any and all civilian communications. And, on the National Communications Systems official website, the order is further elaborated on, saying that the infrastructure, “includes wireline, wireless, satellite, cable, and broadcasting, and provides the transport networks that support the Internet and other key information systems.” http://www.silverdoctors.com/executive-order-promises-to-give-total-control-of-the-internet-to-the-dhs/#more-11433
From Asia and Africa to the Middle East and the Americas, the Obama administration is increasingly embracing a multifaceted, light-footprint brand of warfare. Gone, for the moment at least, are the days of full-scale invasions of the Eurasian mainland. Instead, Washington is now planning to rely ever more heavily on drones and special operations forces to fight scattered global enemies on the cheap. A centerpiece of this new American way of war is the outsourcing of fighting duties to local proxies around the world. While the United States is currently engaged in just one outright proxy war, backing a multi-nation African force to battle Islamist militants in Somalia, it’s laying the groundwork for the extensive use of surrogate forces in the future, training “native” troops to carry out missions — up to and including outright warfare. With this in mind and under the auspices of the Pentagon and the State Department, U.S. military personnel now take part in near-constant joint exercises and training missions around the world aimed at fostering alliances, building coalitions, and whipping surrogate forces into shape to support U.S. national security objectives. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/08/09/washington-puts-its-money-on-proxy-war/
Other than some minor insignificant detail, “your” government has been consistently lying to you about everything of importance. “Your” government lies to you, because “your” government has an agenda that it most certainly will not tell you about, because if you knew what it is, you would revolt. Putting down the revolt would divert the government from its agenda. It would also alert the rest of the world to the fact that the US government has an undeclared agenda of world domination, despite the costs to the American people and every other people. World War III looms. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/08/04/9905/
Military police are nothing new, but the U.S. Marines seem to be taking the concept to a new level, forming a growing number of new battalions of police meant not to police the military, but to be deployed abroad as a U.S.-imposed police force for other nations. The new “world police” battalions are being presented as a way for the U.S. to quickly deploy police abroad for “anti-terror” or drug war operations, and it seems they won’t necessarily be confined to places under direct U.S. occupation, and could be sent anywhere the U.S. has designs on imposing a police state. http://news.antiwar.com/2012/07/30/us-marines-new-battalions-eyed-as-world-police/
Nations don’t wage permanent wars and survive. Imagine one calling itself a democracy trying. Washington spends more on militarism and imperial wars than the rest of the world combined. At the same time, vital domestic needs go begging. America lives by the sword. One day it’ll perish by it. Perhaps so will humanity. The more wars it wages and longer they continue, the faster homeland and international support erodes. What can’t go on forever won’t. Since 9/11 alone, Paul Craig Roberts says “11 years of failure” hasn’t deterred America’s rage to fight. “(T)he same Washington con artists who have produced a decade of bloodshed and destruction to no worthwhile effect are now preparing more wars doomed to failure.” http://rense.com/general95/permwar.html
Russia’s Putin has drawn a deep hard line in the sand around the survival of Al-Assad and Syria as a stable state. Few ask why Russia is warning of possible world war if Washington persists to demand immediate regime change in Syria as Hillary Clinton is doing. It is not because Russia is intent on advancing its own imperialist agenda in the Middle East. It’s in little shape militarily and economically to do so even if it had wanted. Rather, it is about preserving port rights to Russia’s only Mediterranean naval port at Tartus, the only remaining Russian military base outside the former Soviet Union, and its only Mediterranean fueling spot. In event of a showdown with NATO the base becomes strategic to Russia. Yet there is more at stake for Russia. Putin and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, have made clear were NATO and the USA to launch military action against Assad’s Syria, the consequences would be staggering. http://www.infowars.com/putins-geopolitical-chess-game-with-washington-in-syria-and-eurasia/
The magazine Foreign Policy, an outreach of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is admitting that the US State Department funded U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) is “quietly planning for a post-Assad Syria”. This plot was well thought out and is being implemented under the global Elite’s march toward global domination and ultimate governmental control in the Middle East. With support of the U.S. government the USIP is rewriting the Syrian constitution as a “transition strategy document.” http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_US_and_Israel_Following_Globalist_Script_for_the_Post-Assad_Syria/20720/0/38/38/Y/M.html
His status among American elites is the single most potent fact for understanding the nation’s imperial decline. http://www.salon.com/2012/07/25/the_value_of_tom_friedman/
As it becomes increasingly clear that last week’s “surge” by NATO-backed so-called “Free Syrian Army” terrorists was a failed psychological operation, coordinated with meticulously timed assassinations the day of the UN Security Council vote designed to stampede the Syrian government out of power, the FSA’s foreign sponsors are preparing the public for a more direct intervention while desperately attempting to maintain the illusion of chaos and the imminent collapse of Syria’s government. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=32010
Unfortunately the Republicans are no different despite the claims of so-called “conservatives” like Pat Buchanan, who wrote this piece. http://buchanan.org/blog/obamas-worship-of-centralized-power-5115
Does terror achieve their ends or obtain the results they want? Or isn’t it obvious that the acts of terror are actually achieving the objectives of those who claim to be the victims of the terror, to gain them sympathy and political alliances? History is full of rulers who used fake terror on their own populations to create consent for their policies. The US is known to have actually planned fake terror to create support for an invasion of Cuba. And, it is now well established that FDR not only allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen, but goaded the Japanese into it to get a reluctant US into WWII. http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/goldstein.html
Returning to Washington’s considerations, what do you gain from a national policy toward the Arab world that is almost solely anchored in counterterror? I think we’re producing the Nasrallahs and Yassins of the next generation with every militant and innocent civilian we kill. To the extent that our own national security policy begins to resemble Israel’s, we come to resemble everything Israel has become. We become exemplars of the moral shortcuts and the sophistries used to justify the indefensible. We start down the slippery slope that has led Israel to 45 years of occupation and to a deadening corruption of values. Israel is not something we want to become. http://original.antiwar.com/richard-silverstein/2012/07/16/us-counterterror-policy-brought-to-you-by-our-sponsor-israel/
While the collection of Cold War–era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope. Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and pre-positioned weaponry and supplies. Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/07/15/us-empire-of-bases-grows/
It looks as if an over-confident U.S. government is determined to have a three-front war: Syria, Lebanon, and Iran in the Middle East, China in the Far East, and Russia in Europe. This would appear to be an ambitious agenda for a government whose military was unable to occupy Iraq after nine years or to defeat the lightly-armed Taliban after eleven years, and whose economy and those of its NATO puppets are in trouble and decline with corresponding rising internal unrest and loss of confidence in political leadership. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/07/16/war-on-all-fronts/
They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks. Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa. It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.” In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make. They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nick-turse/obamas-scramble-for-afric_b_1667926.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
The young Hillary Clinton, an admirer of the New Left and activist for the poor, criticized a heartless U.S. foreign policy which plays power politics while shamelessly neglecting urgent humanitarian needs like protecting innocent civilians around the world from being blown up by U.S. cluster bombs. Today, rather than signing the U.N. treaty banning them, she fights to weaken it, ignoring the screams of the victims from the aftermath of U.S. bombing. As a youth she regarded her predecessor Henry Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia as “criminal” and “immoral.” Today, supporting similarly illegal and inhuman U.S. bombing and assassination around the globe, she follows in his footsteps. http://www.alternet.org/world/156215
A speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
The global hegemony of Wall Street and London has been built behind a facade of “human rights,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” As these principles are eroded back home in the West, their use for dressing up otherwise naked imperialism, corporate monopolization, and military aggression abroad has become overt and increasingly ineffective. While the U.S. Secretary of State attempts to blame Russia and China for “holding up progress” in the West’s campaign of premeditated destabilization in Syria, it is more likely that the West’s own loss of legitimacy is the true reason it has not successfully convinced the world to go along with what is increasingly appearing to be a self-serving and very untenable agenda. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31781.htm
Russia and China must “pay a price” for blocking U.N. sanctions that might press Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into stepping down, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said July 6 in some of Washington’s strongest remarks yet on the crisis. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/russia-china-will-pay-price-for-syria-clinton.aspx?pageID=238&nID=24961&NewsCatID=359
Americans may feel more distant from war than at any time since World War II began. Certainly, a smaller percentage of us — less than 1% — serves in the military in this all-volunteer era of ours and, on the face of it, Washington’s constant warring in distant lands seems barely to touch the lives of most Americans. And yet the militarization of the United States and the strengthening of the National Security Complex continues to accelerate. The Pentagon is, by now, a world unto itself, with a staggering budget at a moment when no other power or combination of powers comes near to challenging this country’s might. In the post-9/11 era, the military-industrial complex has been thoroughly mobilized under the rubric of “privatization” and now goes to war with the Pentagon. With its $80 billion-plus budget, the intelligence bureaucracy has simply exploded. There are so many competing agencies and outfits, surrounded by a universe of private intelligence contractors, all swathed in a penumbra of secrecy, and they have grown so large, mainly under the Pentagon’s aegis, that you could say intelligence is now a ruling way of life in Washington — and it, too, is being thoroughly militarized. Even the once-civilian CIA has undergone a process of para-militarization and now runs its own “covert” drone wars in Pakistan and elsewhere. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/07/05/washingtons-militarized-mindset/
Every few weeks, we hear another story on the great danger posed to the security of the Republic if there is even a miniscule reduction in the rate of growth in the Pentagon budget. With wringing hands and furrowed brow and tones of stern alarum, they say the spigot must remain at full spate — must even be increased — if the shining city on the hill is to have the slightest chance to hold off the Yellow Peril, the Persian Menace, the Muslim Horde and all the other unknown unknowns that threaten our sacred way of life. This is currently pitched in the context of budget cuts and austerity measures which have sadly been enforced on us all by the moral imperative of saving our financial elites from bearing the slightest tincture of responsibility or discomfort for the global economic meltdown they inadvertently and accidentally caused by years of systematic, deliberate and well-documented fraud. But of course, the Pentagon has been crying poor for years — and never more so than in the 21st century, when it has commanded budgets beyond all human comprehension: trillions piled upon trillions, a floodtide sluicing off in a myriad of rivulets, coursing in all directions. http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2259-the-naked-and-the-dead-raw-hubris-is-still-the-rule.html
When one considers the investment America has made in the Middle East — the dead and wounded from our wars, the trillions lost in fighting and foreign aid, the endless time and attention of our leaders, scholars, journalists — what do we have to show for it? http://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2012/06/25/has-the-day-of-the-islamist-arrived/
One thing is certain: American war-making (along with its spies and its diplomats) is heading ever deeper into “the shadows.” Expect yet more clandestine operations in ever more places with, of course, ever more potential for blowback in the years ahead. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175557/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_changing_face_of_empire/
Hubris returned to America with the neoconservative ascendency. Americans have become “the indispensable people.” Like the Jacobins of the French Revolution who intended to impose “liberty, equality, fraternity” upon all of Europe, Washington asserts the superiority of the American way and the right to impose it on the rest of the world. Hubris is in full flower despite its defeats. The “three week” Iraq war lasted eight years, and after 11 years the Taliban control more of Afghanistan than the “world’s only superpower.” Sooner or later American hubris is going to run up against Russia and China, neither of which will give way. Either the US, like Napoleon and Hitler, will have its Russian (or Chinese) moment, or the world will go up in thermonuclear smoke. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/06/12/hubris-as-the-evil-force-in-history/
Now that the droning of America has ramped up the mission for the total surveillance society, how long will it be before the “rules of war” apply within our own borders? The dire prospects of a second term Obama presidency loom over the skies with an ominous cloud. http://www.batr.org/totalitariancollectivism/060312.html
U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice emerged from a closed-door meeting of the United Nations Security Council Wednesday and said the Council and the United States are prepared to attack the al-Assad government in Syria. http://www.infowars.com/clinton-and-rice-strike-on-syria-in-the-works/
The leader of the government regularly sits down with his senior generals and spies and advisers and reviews a list of the people they want him to authorize their agents to kill. They do this every Tuesday morning when the leader is in town. The leader once condemned any practice even close to this, but now relishes the killing because he has convinced himself that it is a sane and sterile way to keep his country safe and himself in power. The leader, who is running for re-election, even invited his campaign manager to join the group that decides whom to kill. This is not from a work of fiction, and it is not describing a series of events in the Kremlin or Beijing or Pyongyang. It is a fair summary of a 6,000-word investigative report in The New York Times earlier this week about the White House of Barack Obama. Two Times journalists, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, painstakingly and chillingly reported that the former lecturer in constitutional law and liberal senator who railed against torture and Gitmo now weekly reviews a secret kill list, personally decides who should be killed, and then dispatches killers all over the world — and some of his killers have killed Americans. http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2012/05/30/the-secret-kill-list/
As Americans mindlessly celebrate another Memorial Day with cookouts, beer and burgers, the U.S. war machine keeps churning. As we brutally enforce our will on foreign countries, we create more people that hate us. They don’t hate us for our freedom. They hate us because we have invaded and occupied their countries. They hate us because we kill innocent people with predator drones. They hate us for our hypocrisy regarding democracy and freedom. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-war-pigs-fall-global-empire
The Western forces that occupied Afghanistan in 2001 have failed to achieve their military or political objectives and are now sounding the retreat. All the empty oratory in Chicago about “transition,” Afghan self-reliance, and growing security could not conceal the truth that the mighty U.S. and its dragooned western allies have been bested in Afghanistan by a bunch of mountain warriors from the 12th Century. The objective of war is to achieve political goals, not kill people. The US goal was to turn Afghanistan into a protectorate providing bases close to Caspian Basin oil, and to block China on a strategy level. After an eleven-year war costing $1 trillion, this effort failed as dismally as the much ballyhooed “liberation” of Iraq. http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis294.html
Both Europe and the United States confront great crises; while they are different in certain regards they have important similarities too. America’s crisis is both military and economic; they are interrelated because America has a huge deficit, in large part because it has the chimerical ambition to be the world’s dominating military power, which costs it immense sums of money, which its deficit spending largely funds. At the same time it has lost most of its major conflicts militarily, politically—or both. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/14/why-america-is-doomed-to-one-disaster-after-another/
Will there be autocracy in Iraq or renewed civil war? The country seems headed for either one or the other, as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki tightens the noose on Iraqi democracy and sectarian bombings resume. Mohammed Shayaa al-Sudani, Iraq’s human rights minister, recently declared that casualties in the roughly nine-year period since the American invasion in 2003 have now exceeded 70,000 killed and 250,000 wounded, according to Margaret Griffis of Antiwar.com. This official figure is probably a gross understatement. http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2012/05/15/the-already-forgotten-iraq-war/
Back in the ’70s, I used to expect the government to suffer a financial collapse at which time it would have to quit doing most of the things it’s doing because it would run out of money. That isn’t what has happened. Instead of cutting spending it has printed more money and tried to increase taxes on various things. Like many things historical, there’s a precedent for this. There’s a proverbial saying that “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” but it didn’t collapse in a day either. Probably most of the Romans who lived as the Empire was collapsing didn’t realize that was what was happening, but plenty of them realized they weren’t living in the good old days. http://lewrockwell.com/orig11/sullivan-c9.1.1.html
This month, Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric K. Shinseki announced the addition of some 1,900 mental health nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to its existing workforce of 20,590 mental health staff in attempt to get a handle on the epidemic of suicides among combat veterans. Unfortunately, when presidents misuse our military on an unprecedented scale — and Congress lets them get away with it — the resulting stress causes military suicides to increase dramatically, both among active-duty and retired service members. In fact, military deaths from suicide far outnumber combat deaths. http://original.antiwar.com/paul/2012/04/30/we-were-right-about-the-costs-of-war/
