Archive for the ‘Foreign Policy’ Category
War Heroes
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
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Iran Represents a Deathblow to U.S. Global Hegemony
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
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The Great Deformation
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/
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The Mostly Mainstream Foreign Policy of Rand Paul
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/
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Selling Death and Buying Assassins in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia
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/
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Illusion of Triumph
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/
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Time to Face the Truth About Iran
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
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The Worst Mistake in U.S. History — America Will Never Recover From Bush’s Great Foreign Policy Disaster
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
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What Was That All About?
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
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Obama, the U.S. and the Muslim World: The Animosity Deepens
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
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A Return to Realism?
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/
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The Republican Obsession
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
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America’s Strategic Stupidity
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/
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Drones are Fool’s Gold: They Prolong Wars We Can’t Win
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
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Are Israel and the U.S. Becoming Fascist States?
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/
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Endless War is a Feature of U.S. Policy
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/
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Pentagon Announces Troop Deployment in 35 African Nations
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/
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The True Costs of Empire
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/
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Anatomy of a Mali Intervention
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/
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Susan Rice is Bad News
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/
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Stop Pretending Washington is an Uninvolved, Helpless Party in the Israeli Assault on Gaza
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
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Winter of Discontent
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/
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Blaming the Muslims
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/
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Disaster on Autopilot: America’s Overwrought Empire
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/
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Washington’s Pakistan Meltdown
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/
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Imperial Global Empire Watch — Beware Those Wicked Malians
Welcome Mali, our newest crisis! Open your maps. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32745.htm
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The Unraveling of Obama’s Foreign Policy
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/
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Why the American Imperium is Under Siege
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/
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The Hollow Empire
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/
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Obama Against the World
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/
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False Flags and Imperial Mobilization: The Middle East Explodes on 9/11 Anniversary
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/
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America Paying the Price for Ignoring Ron Paul-Type Foreign Policy
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
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Monopolizing War? What Washington Knows How to do Best
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
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Getting ‘Gaddafied’
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/
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The Dumbing Down of American Foreign Policy
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
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Foreign Policy Night in Tampa
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/
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Obama’s Geopolitical China ‘Pivot’: The Pentagon Targets China
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
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Washington Puts Its Money on Proxy War
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/
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U.S. Marines’ New Battalions Eyed as World Police
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/
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Permanent War — Official U.S. Policy
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
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Putin’s Geopolitical Chess Game With Washington in Syria and Eurasia
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/
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U.S. and Israel Following Globalist Script for Post-Assad Syria
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
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The Glorious Imperial Multicultural Empire Prepares for Direct Intervention in Syria
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
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U.S. Counterterror Policy Brought to You by Our Sponsor, Israel
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/
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The Lily-Pad Strategy
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/
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War On All Fronts
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/
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Obama’s Scramble for Africa
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
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Young Hillary Clinton Used to Think Kissinger Was Criminal and Immoral: Now in Laos, She Follows in His Footsteps
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
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War is a Racket
A speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4377.htm
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Clinton: Russia, China Will Pay Price for Syria
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
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Washington’s Militarized Mindset
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/
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The Naked and the Dead: Raw Hubris is Still the Rule
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
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Has the Day of the Islamist Arrived?
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/
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Clinton and Rice: Strike On Syria in the Works
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/
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Afghanistan – The Warlords of Washington Forgot History and Repeated It
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
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America’s Lasting Stranglehold on the Middle East
People who actually work for the military empire and aren’t running for office tend to be very honest about America’s monstrous foreign policy. The fact that America has helped prop up barbarous dictatorships throughout the Middle East for decades isn’t really allowed in the polite political debates of the day, never mind that they badly want that system to continue. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2012/04/19/americas-lasting-stranglehold-on-the-middle-east/
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Security Companies, the New Warrior Class
As I have stated repeatedly, the Western societies are systematically converted into three classes, just as happened towards the end of ancient Rome or in Japan during the time of the Samurai. Today it is the financial crisis that facilitates the redistribution of wealth from the bottom towards the top. The three classes are: the 99% who own nothing (the slave class), the 1% is who own everything (the hostile elite class) and the warrior class, which protects the elite from the slaves and is waging war for them. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/04/security-companies-the-new-warrior-class/
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Russia Is Not Public Enemy Number One
In response to Barack Obama’s unintended public candor about his greater post-election flexibility on missile defense negotiations with Russia, Mitt Romney reflexively declared in an interview with CNN that Russia is the United States’ “number one geopolitical foe,” adding that Russia “always stands up for the world’s worst actors.” However, Romney is pandering to the gallery for the election rather than looking at the facts of recently improved U.S.-Russian relations. And it is significant that more than two decades after the Berlin Wall fell, and despite the improved bilateral relations, American politicians can still demagogue the issue by dredging up the American public’s lingering fear of Russia from the Cold War. http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2012/03/27/russia-is-not-public-enemy-number-one/
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Selling War From 1917 to 2012
The Espionage Act suppressed dissent so that the one per cent of 1917 could continue making a killing on the war in Europe. Today, a militarised police force that has authorised spying on Americans is doing the same thing: containing unrest at home while the 1 per cent continues to make a killing. And they are making a killing without much regard for the laws that the police enforce. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/2012325104534414953.html
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A Global Empire, Yet a United States of Fear
By the end of 2011, the United States had elite special operations forces in around 120 of the 192 countries recognized by the United Nations, with U.S. military bases in more than half of the world’s nation-states. Yet despite this global empire — some would say because of it — the United States is a country today that is characterized not so much by peace and prosperity as by poverty and anxiety. http://original.antiwar.com/charles-davis-ips/2012/02/08/a-global-empire-yet-a-united-states-of-fear/
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Obama’s New Military Strategy: Targeting Nations which Challenge U.S. Hegemony
Obama’s January 5 Pentagon news conference reeked of duplicity like all his pronouncements. Surrounded by Joint Chiefs of Staff, hawkishness took center stage. Stressing a leaner, more agile/flexible military, he said counterterrorism, intelligence and cyberwarfare will be emphasized without sacrificing America’s superiority against global enemies. So will subversion, destabilization, drone killings, other targeted assassinations, global state terrorism, and permanent war. In other words, new and old tactics are featured. Strategies are unchanged. So are imperial aims. Permanent war remains policy. Merciless high-tech killing and destruction will be featured. Ravaging the world one country at a time is planned. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28527
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Obama Raises the Military Stakes: Confrontation on the Frontiers of China and Russia
After suffering major military and political defeats in bloody ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and failing to buttress long-standing clients in Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia and witnessing the disintegration of puppet regimes in Somalia and South Sudan, the Obama regime has learned nothing: instead he has turned toward greater military confrontation with global powers, namely Russia and China. Obama has adopted a provocative offensive military strategy on the very frontiers of both China and Russia. http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=1883
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Lessons From the Dead in a No-Learning-Curve World
Think of all this as just a partial one-week’s scorecard of American-style war. While you’re at it, remember Washington’s high hopes only a decade ago for what America’s “lite,” “shock and awe” military would do, for the way it would singlehandedly crush enemies, reorganize the Middle East, create a new order on Earth, set the oil flowing, privatize and rebuild whole nations, and usher in a global peace, especially in the Greater Middle East, on terms pleasing to the planet’s sole superpower. That such sky-high “hopes” were then the coin of the realm in Washington is a measure of the way delusional thinking passed for the strategic variety and a reminder of how, for a time, pundits of every sort dealt with those hopes as if they represented reality itself. And yet, it should have come as no shock that a military-first “foreign policy” and a military force with staggering technological powers at its command would prove incapable of building anything. No one should have been surprised that such a force was good only for what it was built for: death and destruction. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/12/01/he-was-22-she-was-12/
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Renewed U.S. Focus on Pacific Region Intended to Distract from Unrest at Home?
One might think that a bitter Central Asian war in Afghanistan, spilling into Pakistan, with no sign of ending, and an as yet ambiguous military commitment to a defeated and incompletely reconstituted Iraq, now overshadowed by Iran and the Arab Awakening across the Middle East, would be enough for President Barack Obama to cope with. He was, after all, elected to reduce American military commitments. He was going to end things in Iraq, fight the “right war” in Afghanistan, which Gen. David Petraeus told him could be wound up in a year. Unaccustomed to generals as he might have been, he surely did not expect “Af-Pak” to turn into a permanent activity and a source of income for the Pentagon and the American arms industry. Why then does he now want a war with China? No one seems to have made much of this in American press reports and comment, but others have noticed, most of all in China. http://www.tmsfeatures.com/columns/political/international/william-pfaff/William-Pfaff.html?articleURL=http://rss.tmsfeatures.com/websvc-bin/rss_story_read.cgi?resid=201111221730TMS_____WPFAFF___tr–v-a_20111122
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Will Washington Thump the Syrian Domino?
I recently attended a conference where a speaker commented that the Obama administration has seemingly become addicted to war and conflict, finding itself unable to turn down any opportunity to intervene militarily in a new country or region. I might have added that where an actual U.S. military presence is lacking, the White House frequently gives the green light to the CIA to unleash a new wave of covert actions using its own fleet of armed Predator drones, a surrogate form of warfare. The result is that the United States now has a military and intelligence-agency presence of some kind in 175 countries, by some estimates comprising over 1,000 bases and stations. It is actively engaged in combat operations on every continent, and it has a self-declared policy whereby armed intervention anywhere and at any time is appropriate if Washington feels “threatened.” One might well think that Washington’s overseas footprint, ostensibly intended to protect the American people from “terrorism” at a cost approaching $1 trillion per year, would appear to be more than adequate, but there is some evidence to suggest that the White House is looking for still more dominoes to tip over. The next presidential election is only one year away, and nothing makes an incumbent look better than a military victory. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/11/16/will-washington-thump-the-syrian-domino/
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The Obama Doctrine: Making a Virtue of Necessity
Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it. He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied U.S. air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya. As a result the budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion; the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels and the recession deepened. Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted.Parallel to Obama’s skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars in dozens of internal security agencies further depleting the treasury. Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while 10 million homes were foreclosed and unemployment reached double digits. Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federal funded medical programs and education. Despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory. By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the U.S. Empire was under siege. http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_64019.shtml
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New U.S. War in Africa Indicates a Shift Into the Shadows
U.S. military intervention is now spanning much of the dark continent, and is all about dictators, drones, CIA, and JSOC. http://news.antiwar.com/2011/11/03/war-in-africa-indicates-a-shift-into-the-shadows/
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Land of the Free Watch: Libyan War Lawsuit Against Obama by 10 U.S. Lawmakers Thrown Out by Judge
President Barack Obama can’t be sued by 10 federal lawmakers who accused him of violating the War Powers Act by ordering the attack on Libyan forces without Congress’s approval, a judge said. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ruled today that members of the House of Representatives failed to demonstrate that they had the right to sue executive branch officials, either as members of Congress or as taxpayers. Welcome to the brave new world of the United States of America, in which an unindicted war criminal President can begin any war he wants without any Congressional oversight, and there will be absolutely no repercussions for such an action. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-20/obama-can-t-be-sued-by-lawmakers-alleging-war-powers-act-breach-over-libya.html
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Obama’s Imperial Arrogance
Candidate Obama promised peace. As president, he double downed Bush and then some, waging multiple direct and proxy wars. The business of America is war. Washington has a permanent war policy. Republicans and Democrats perpetuate it. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29464.htm
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Two Sides (Republican and Democrat), of the Same Bloated War-Mongering Military Over-Spending Debate
There is not much difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to military spending. Most likely your representative is for maintaining bloated military expenditures no matter what their party affiliation. Moreover, key Republicans are even willing to raise your taxes to support this bloat. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/10/two-sides-republican-and-democrat-of.html
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Republican Foreign Policy Follies
Though the United States has far-flung and global relationships, the foreign policy is increasingly Israel-centric, at least as it is defined by the aspirants to high office. If America is ever to become a sane country again, this must stop. My intention is not to demonize Israel. It has legitimate security concerns and must act in its own interests, just like any other country. But the problem is that it is not just any country; it is a tiny state that leads the United States around by the nose because the politicians we send to Washington recognize that it is easier to agree with the powerful Israel Lobby than it is to raise objections to the damaging policies that it supports. The real tragedy is that mindless adherence to what Israel sees as its needs is not good either for Israel or for the United States. It makes the Israelis unwilling to make the concessions that will have to be made to survive in the Middle East, and it makes the United States a pariah among nations for supporting the particular brand of apartheid that Tel Aviv has developed. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/10/12/republican-foreign-policy-follies/
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Will Uncle Sam Go Postal in South Asia?
The U.S. is now risking a military confrontation with old ally Pakistan that is both highly dangerous and unpredictable in the extreme. It’s awfully hard for the world’s greatest power to admit its high-tech military forces are being beaten in Afghanistan by a bunch of lightly-armed mountain tribesmen that we dismiss as “terrorists.” But that’s what’s happening in the “Graveyard of Empires.” Washington can’t and won’t admit it has blundered into a bloody, trillion dollar fiasco in Afghanistan. Right now, Pakistan is the chief whipping boy for US imperial fury. http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis261.html
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Absence of Evidence: The Progressive Policy of Imperial Murder
The president of the United States murdered two American citizens this morning. He had some nameless functionary — who was sitting comfortably and safely at a computer console somewhere on a well-guarded, probably secret military base — push a button. A missile was then fired from a robot drone buzzing maleovently in the sky over Yemen. The missile then murdered two American citizens who — let it be carefully noted — had not even been charged with a crime, much less tried and convicted in a court of law of any offense. It is true that the two American citizens murdered by the president did engage in a great deal of fiery rhetoric urging violent uprising against the American state. This might not be very nice — but it does happen to be protected speech under the Constitution of the United States. Of course, that quaint document from the horse-and-buggy era has long since ceased to apply, even fitfully and imperfectly, to the operations of the United States government. http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2169-absence-of-evidence-the-progressive-policy-of-imperial-murder.html
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Failure in Libya
Libya represents the failure of the interventionist project envisioned by the Obama administration: as rebel gangs run wild, attacking rival tribesmen – and “traitors,” like their former commander-in-chief – the country threatens to become what the more ambitious interventionists love best: a Failed State, that is, a state that fails to maintain its monopoly on the use of force in a given geographical area. For the War Party, every such failure is an opportunity to fill the power vacuum. Faster than you can say “I told you so,” we’ll have boots on the ground. No other course is possible, given what is unfolding in Libya at the moment. The country has no real government – a condition the Powers That Be cannot allow any longer than a few weeks. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/09/27/failure-in-libya/
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How Washington Creates Global Instability
It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them — from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia — Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace. Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war. But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/09/18/how-washington-creates-global-instability/
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Major Discovery: A Purpose of the War in Afghanistan
To summarize: our invasion and occupation is what enables the Taliban to recruit massive numbers of Afghan teenagers into their cause. And now, we have to stay until we either kill all the people who hate us and want us gone from their country or propagandize deradicalize them into meekly accepting our presence. Once there are no more Afghans left who want us gone, then we can leave. For those of you who have been cynically claiming that this war has no discernible purpose other than the generalized benefits of Endless War for political officials and the Security State industry, now you know. http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/16/afghanistan/index.html
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Clueless Republicans Demand More Militarism
Is there any doubt that pervasive militarism has now become a core value of the Republican Party? If there is any confusion, check out the positions being taken by the presidential candidates, with the sole exception of Ron Paul. Front-runner Rick Perry has this to say: “We must renew our commitment to taking the fight to the enemy wherever they are before they strike at home,” an assertion that is not too different from what President Barack Obama is doing, which in turns derives from the Bush Doctrine that the U.S. can respond to any perceived security threat anywhere, at any time, and in any fashion. Perry is also being advised on foreign policy by neoconservatives including Doug Feith, and he identifies strongly with evangelicals. He is also a strong supporter of Israel. But Mitt Romney outdoes Perry. In spite of the fact that Washington spends as much as the rest of the world on what it refers to as defense, Mitt sees weakness. He wants to “restore defense capabilities to ensure security at home and peace abroad…. America must make long-overdue investments in our military. Modernize air and naval forces, weapons systems, and equipment. Grow the number of troops and ensure that funds go to their needs and care. Establish robust missile defense and repair and update our nuclear arsenal. Oppose efforts to cut our military budget.” We must also “bolster our support for Israel, which has always been and will continue to be our strongest ally in the Middle East” and, “building on NATO, establish a global military alliance of democracies dedicated to ensuring security and protecting freedom.” http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/09/14/clueless-republicans-demand-more-militarism/
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Edward Gibbon at America’s Grave
To put it bluntly, every single chapter in the history of the extension of U.S. power has opened with the same sentence: “Innocent Americans were treacherously attacked…” Remember the Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 (274 dead)? The Lusitania torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915 (1,198 drowned, including 128 Americans)? Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916 (18 U.S citizens killed)? Pearl Harbor (2,402 dead)? Same sneak attack, same righteous national outrage. Same pretext for clandestine agendas. In addition, historians will also recall the besieged legation in Peking (1899), Emilio Aguinaldo’s alleged perfidy outside Manila (1899), various crimes against American banks and businessmen in Central America and the Caribbean (1900-1930), the Japanese bombing of the USS Panay in 1938, the Chinese army’s crossing of the Yalu River into Korea (1950), the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam (1964), the North Korean capture of the Pueblo (1968), the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez (1975), the U.S. Embassy hostages in Tehran (1979), the imperiled medical students in Grenada (1983), the harassed American soldiers in Panama (1989), and so on. This list barely scratches the surface: the synchronization of self-pity and intervention in U.S. history is relentless. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/09/13/edward-gibbon-at-americas-grave/
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War Criminal: Attack Imminent if Congress Cuts Defense
The Empire’s war budget will continue to grow under either wing of the two-party perpetual monopoly. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46077
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Winter is Coming
The question is no longer whether interventions might poison the well of Arab democracy, but whether the “democratic revolutions” were anything but a cruel hoax. Iraq, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria – whether by war or by subversion, it is all about the Empire taking control. Freedom, democracy – those are just words in the wind. What will happen once the people, seduced by promises of security and prosperity, realize they’ve only traded one tyrant for another? Even if Empire’s policymakers are intellectually aware they are seeding the world with bitter enemies, they simply don’t care. http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2011/08/26/winter-is-coming/
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Three Cheers for Decline
Of course, the United States still possesses greater military strength than any other country in the world. But what good has being the world’s policeman done for Americans? Wielding that might meant the United States saw more combat deaths overseas last year than any other country, according to data from Uppsala University. Beyond the blood is the treasure: U.S. military spending increased 81 percent between 2001 and 2010 and now accounts for 43 percent of the global total — six times its nearest rival, China. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28844.htm
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Don’t Get It Twisted, the U.S. Government is Already at War With Iran
This week Iran launched an Oil Bourse on Kish Island. At the same time, former CIA officer and middle east expert Robert Baer stated that Israel is preparing to possibly attack on Iran in the Fall. Meanwhile, a U.S. Drone was shot down by Iran and a senior Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes secret activities taking place right now that make it hard to say with any definitiveness what will happen next in this theatre. Importantly, readers must understand that the United States is actually in an active war with Iran. Most think the U.S. is not at war with Iran because the U.S. does not have troops inside Iran such as it does in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and is not engaging in behind-the-scenes support like in Libya, Yemen, and Somalia. The U.S. is involved in active war with Iran in the form of a siege. http://www.thefinancialmarketnews.com/don%E2%80%99t-get-it-twisted-we-are-already-at-war-with-iran
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Hillary Cracks the Whip
To my mind, Turkey is far too nice to Hillary and to Washington. Rather than be lectured, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan might suggest that Clinton go away and find another bone to chew. If the Middle East is in a catastrophic state, it is precisely because of Washington’s meddling and its perennial tilt toward Israel. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2011/07/20/hillary-cracks-the-whip/
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Petraeus Credited With Ramping Up Afghan Killing
After his repeated escalations left the situation dramatically worse, Gen. David McKiernan was replaced as commander in Afghanistan, leaving in failure. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, his replacement, escalated the war further, and after another year of rising death tolls, he was asked to resign in failure. Officials were keen on Gen. David Petraeus, the next replacement, was seen as the silver bullet solution for this war. So after another year of escalation, and worsening violence, Petraeus is leaving too. Incredibly, however, ramping up the killings is being spun as a great success. http://news.antiwar.com/2011/07/19/petraeus-credited-with-ramping-up-afghan-killing/
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Obama’s Secret Wars: How Washington’s Shady Counter-Terrorism Policies Are More Dangerous Than Terrorism
Obama should be held accountable for vastly expanding the military establishment’s worldwide license to kill. http://www.alternet.org/world/151596
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Washington’s War Fever Breaks
Nearly 10 years have passed since Washington set out to redeem the Greater Middle East. The crusades have not gone especially well. In fact, in the pursuit of its saving mission, the American messiah has pretty much worn itself out. Today, the post-9/11 fever finally shows signs of abating. The evidence is partial and preliminary. The sickness has by no means passed. Oddly, it lingers most strongly in the Obama White House, of all places, where a keenness to express American ideals by dropping bombs seems strangely undiminished. http://www.amconmag.com/blog/washingtons-war-fever-breaks/
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The Empire’s Revolution Business
The ancient Greeks had a saying: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.” They named such madness hubris, and the subsequent destruction nemesis. One would think the American Empire would at least try and learn from the wisdom of the ancients; yet not only does it repeat their mistakes, it has managed to develop an entire system of delusions, capable of interpreting ancient wisdom to support the very things it cautioned against. This disconnect was famously documented by Ron Suskind in 2004, who quoted an unnamed Bush administration official (later identified as Karl Rove), contemptuously dismissing the “reality-based community”: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Though Bush II has been out of office for almost three years, there are no indications this worldview departed with him. Quite the contrary; proof is in the current Emperor’s recent attempt to evade Congressional oversight of the adventure in Libya by calling it a “kinetic military action.” Translated from bureaucratese to plain English, that actually means precisely what Obama’s people say it doesn’t: war. http://original.antiwar.com/malic/2011/06/23/invasion-of-the-mind-snatchers/
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Extremism Watch: Washington Now Intensifying War Number Four, This One in Yemen
The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen, exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American officials. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/world/middleeast/09intel.html?_r=1&hp
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Worse Than a Third Bush Term?
Bush’s first term was still perhaps more of a warmongering disaster than Obama’s has been so far. But we must look at the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy at the end of the Bush years and conclude that Obama has not just stayed the course, he has stepped on the gas. He has vastly expanded the war in Afghanistan, upped the violence in Pakistan, continued the Bush path on Iraq, bombed Yemen and Somalia, and started a new war with Libya. On the civil liberties and human rights fronts, he has invoked the Espionage Act more than all earlier presidents combined, persecuted whistleblowers, covered up torturers, and abused habeas corpus and the Fourth Amendment as much as Bush. And surely bin Laden could have been found without these monstrous policies. http://original.antiwar.com/anthony-gregory/2011/05/31/worse-than-a-third-bush-term/
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What Must We Defend?
Consider the situation the U.S. military faces. The useful life of the planes, ships, missiles, guns and armor that date to the Ronald Reagan buildup of the 1980s is coming to an end, and the cost of replacement weapons is far greater. A fleet of 2,440 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, for example, will cost over $1 trillion. Military health care costs have risen 150 percent in 10 years to $50 billion a year. The pay and benefits of today’s forces, which are one-tenth the size of those we deployed in World War II, have seen comparable increases. These costs are eating deeply into the dollars for new weapons systems. And while we no longer face a Soviet Union with nuclear and conventional forces equal to our own, U.S. commitments have not been reduced but augmented since the end of the Cold War. Six Warsaw Pact nations were brought into NATO, along with three republics of the old Soviet Union. http://vdare.com/buchanan/110530_defend.htm
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The Glorious Imperial Multicultural Empire is Never Leaving Iraq
The reality is that empires never dissolve themselves: they hang on to the bitter end, living on dreams of past glory and stubbornly refusing to see the signs of decline that are obvious to any objective observer. Nothing stops them: not war-weariness on the part of the populace, not military defeat, not even impending bankruptcy. The reason is once you become an empire, there’s no turning back: you’ve already invested a great deal of the nation’s resources into the empire-building process, and so much of your economic and political capital is tied up in this project that reversing it is just not possible. What’s needed is some outside stimulus, some undeniably chastening event – like, say, utter collapse, as in the case of the former Soviet Union – to provide a much-needed reality check. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/05/12/remember-iraq-3/
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Peace Laureate Surpasses Reagan in Killing Gadafy Kin
O how wonderful it is to live in such an enlightened age! Just think: not long ago, the U.S. government was seen as little more than a vast war machine — brutal, murderous, inhumane, bent on global domination. Yet now, by some marvelous, miraculous twist of fate, that same government is being led by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate! It’s as if Lyndon Johnson had been turfed out of office back in the day and replaced by Martin Luther King Jr.! So what the modern-day MLK up to today? In what way was the Laureate in the White House advancing the vision and practice of peace? Why, he was murdering children in a “targeted assassination,” of course! He was escalating an increasingly savage “regime change” operation in blatant contradiction to the UN mandate supposedly governing the latest of his escalations and surges around the world. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27999.htm
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When Dictators Fall, Who Rises?
If one-man, one-vote democracy across the Maghreb and Middle East is almost certain to strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood and to liberate Islamists to persecute Christians, why are we for it? When did this idol of modernity called democracy, in which none of our fathers believed, become a golden calf we all must fall down and worship? http://www.vdare.com/asp/printPage.asp?url=http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/110425_dictators_fall.htm
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Imperial Bets That Go Awry
Imperial powers hedge their bets. The most striking recent example we have of this is in Egypt. While the Pentagon was pouring money into the Egyptian military (approximately $40 billion since 1979), it turns out — thank you, WikiLeaks! — that the U.S. government was shuttling far smaller amounts (millions, not billions) to various “American government-financed organizations” loosely connected with Congress or with the Democratic and Republican parties. Some of that money, in turn, was being invested in “democracy-building campaigns” aimed at teaching young Egyptian activists how to organize a movement against their autocratic ruler, how to make the best use of social networking sites, and so on. In other words, in Egypt (and elsewhere in the Middle East), Washington was funding both the autocrats and the young activists who opposed them and who, in Egypt, would be crucial players in the Tahrir Square movement that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/26-1
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Shunning the Word ‘Permanent’ and With Good Reason
Military bases R U.S. Or so it seems. After the invasion of 2003, the Pentagon promptly started constructing a series of monster bases in occupied Iraq, the size of small American towns and with most of the amenities of home. These were for a projected garrison of 30,000 to 40,000 U.S. troops that top officials of the Bush administration initially anticipated would be free to hang out in that country for an armed eternity. In the end, hundreds of bases were built. (And now, hundreds have been closed down or handed over to the Iraqis and in some cases looted). With present U.S. troop strength at about 47,000 (not counting mercenaries) and falling, American officials are now practically pleading with an Iraqi government moving ever closer to the Iranians to let some American forces remain at a few giant bases beyond the official end-of-2011 withdrawal date. Meanwhile, post-2003, the U.S. went on a base-building (or expanding) spree in the Persian Gulf, digging in and enlarging facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, “home” to the U.S. Fifth Fleet. In that island kingdom, an Obama administration preaching “democracy” elsewhere has stood by in the face of a fierce Bahraini-Saudi campaign of repression against a majority Shiite movement for greater freedom. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/22
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America’s Know-Nothing Policymakers
The United States is attacking Libya based on vague hopes that peace will triumph after the NATO bombing ceases. There are plenty of reasons to doubt whether a few hundred cruise missiles will beget harmony in the Libyan desert. But one of the biggest mistakes would be to assume that U.S. government policymakers understand what they are doing. The American media have already uncorked “surprises,” such as the facts that the Libyan opposition is a ragtag mob, not an army, and that Qaddafi’s opponents include organizations formally labeled as terrorists by the U.S. government. But this is only the tip of iceberg of official idiocy. The latest follies are part of a long bipartisan tradition. In the decades since John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, foreign-policy makers have become Washington’s leading con men. Even though Whiz Kids and Dream Teams have dragged America into one debacle after another, the media and politicians still defer to the latest batch of “Best and Brightest” professors and appointees. http://www.counterpunch.org/bovard04142011.html
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Latin America Shakes Off the U.S. Yoke
The current spat with Ecuador is symptomatic of Washington’s failure to grasp that it no longer exercises regional hegemony. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27850.htm
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Libya – The DC/NATO Agenda and the Next Great War
In the 1930s the US, Great Britain, and the Netherlands set a course for World War II in the Pacific by conspiring against Japan. The three governments seized Japan’s bank accounts in their countries that Japan used to pay for imports and cut Japan off from oil, rubber, tin, iron and other vital materials. Was Pearl Harbor, Japan’s response? Now Washington and its NATO puppets are employing the same strategy against China. Protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen arose from the people protesting against Washington’s tyrannical puppet governments. However, the protests against Gaddafi, who is not a Western puppet, appear to have been organized by the CIA in the eastern part of Libya where the oil is and where China has substantial energy investments. http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts299.html
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Obama’s Terror War On Libya
Since WW II, America’s gone to war as much to wage as win them because so many profiteers benefit. The prospect of peace, in fact, terrifies government, military officials, and corporate predators, so new enemies are invented when old ones are vanquished, are no longer of interest, or conflicts end for other reasons. Wars are solely for wealth and power, never humanitarian intervention to liberate oppressed people or promote democracy. They’re notions, in fact, US leaders won’t tolerate, notably Obama, doubling down on Bush, waging his Iraq and Afghan wars, fighting two others in Pakistan and Libya, another allied with Israel against Palestine, as well as proxy wars in Somalia, Central Africa, Yemen, Bahrain, Haiti, Honduras, and Colombia. http://www.countercurrents.org/lendman040411.htm
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The Arab Awakening, Hijacked?
Western attempts to hijack the Arab Awakening are necessarily limited to those countries – few in number – where Washington isn’t allied with the local tyrant. From the steppes of Central Asia, where US-supported potentates sit atop a growing proportion of the world’s oil supply, to the mouth of the Mediterranean, the American eagle has sheltered dozens of emirs, kings, and presidents-for-life under its overstretched wings. If the US winds up trading Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and some of the Gulf states for Libya and possibly Syria, that’s a net loss by any accounting. Hillary Clinton’s State Department, a prime mover behind this war, is determined to reverse this trend. The idea is to turn the crisis into an opportunity for the expansion of US influence, and give the empire a much-needed buttressing. The President, confronted with the full-bore self-righteousness of the “humanitarian” crowd on his left, and amid rising cries of “Who lost Libya?” on his right, realized he was politically boxed in, and retreated from the field. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/04/03/the-arab-awakening-hijacked/
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