Archive for the ‘U.S. Militarism’ Category
Bush’s Legacy Ought to be on Trial
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/
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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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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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The Militarism of Evangelical Christians
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
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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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Militarization of America and Newtown Massacre: Cause and Effect
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
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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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The U.S. War Machine
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/
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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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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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Petraeus’s COIN Gets Flipped
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/
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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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Why Peace
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
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A Failed Formula for Worldwide War
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/
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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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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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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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The American Way
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
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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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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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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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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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War Pigs — The Fall of a Global Empire
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
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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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Why America is Doomed to One Disaster After Another
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/
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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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The Babylonian Captivity of Washington
The Babylonian Captivity is a biblical reference to the conquest of the ancient Israelites by the Babylonians, after which the people of Israel were allegedly removed from their homes and physically transferred to Babylon. A later so-called Babylonian Captivity refers to the abduction of the Medieval papacy, which occurred in 1309 when the French King Philip IV moved the pope and most of his cardinals lock stock and barrel to the delightful city of Avignon, where they remained for 68 years before the Holy See was restored to Rome. The French sought to use the powerful papacy with its vast bureaucracy to support their own foreign policy ambitions. It is perhaps not an inappropriate metaphor for what has occurred between Washington and Tel Aviv, with key decision making for the United States now being transferred to Israel. The State Department message clearly reveals that when it comes to foreign policy the American people are no longer masters of their own destiny and at best can only negotiate issues with the Israelis while at the same time issuing a carte blanche in support of anything Tel Aviv chooses to do. If the Republicans gain the White House in November things will only get worse, as Mitt Romney has explicitly stated that he would defer to Israel on all Middle Eastern security issues. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/04/11/the-babylonian-captivity-of-washington/
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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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America, Afghanistan, and American imperialism
Robert Bales
What is most revealed by the decision to remove Robert Bales from Afghanistan is the American belief that no other country — including those its invades and occupies — can ever impose accountability on Americans. This was seen most recently, and vividly, in Iraq. President Obama’s most swooning supporters love to credit him with “ending the war in Iraq,” but that is simply not what happened. It was President Bush who entered into an agreement with the Iraqi government mandating the removal of all US forces by the end of 2011. Rather than comply with that agreement, the Obama administration tried desperately to persuade and pressure the Iraqis to allow American troops to remain beyond that deadline. But those efforts failed because of one cause: the refusal (or, more accurately, the inability) of the Malaki government to agree that US troops would be immunized and shielded from Iraqi law for any future crimes they commit on Iraqi soil. One prime prerogative of all empires is that it is subject to no laws or accountability other than its own, even when it comes to crimes committed on other nations’ soil and against its people. That was the imperial principle that finally compelled America’s withdrawal from Iraq, and it is apparently what caused the US to quickly remove the accused shooter from Afghanistan. It may be understandable why the US perceives it in its interest to preserve this imperial power, but it should be equally understandable why its victims react with increasing levels of suspicion, resentment and rage. http://www.opednews.com/articles/America-Afghanistan-and-A-by-Glenn-Greenwald-120321-901.html
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From Indochina to Afghanistan, Why America’s Crimes Continue
There will be total legal and moral immunity granted to the people in Washington who have crafted and perpetuated the bloody war policies in Afghanistan. Like Henry Kissinger, who drew up plans for the terrorist bombing in Cambodia, these people will live long lives of fame and fortune and esteem without fear of being held accountable for killing innumerable innocents. Second, we can expect the legacy of the war in Afghanistan to be that it was largely a mistake, despite the best intentions of Washington. The “mistake” part, though, will be framed in terms of the costs borne by America, not by our victims. Robert Bales will not be remembered, nor will the names of those he slaughtered in cold blood. The number of U.S. casualties will be known, but certainly not those of Afghans. http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2012/03/22/from-indochina-to-afghanistan-why-americas-crimes-continue/
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The No-Fault March to War
To put it another way, if Mitt Romney really believes the United States has to go to war with Iran, he should be the first one to volunteer his sons for combat duty. Likewise for Santorum’s seven children. In the Second World War, Washington’s last legally declared armed conflict, children of congressmen were not exempted and many congressmen themselves enlisted voluntarily. If our Republican wannabes really want to set a good example, they might consider enlistment for some close family members. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/03/21/the-no-fault-march-to-war/
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Lost Principles and Social Destruction
In America today, we have quite a few moral relativists at the helm of our government, and many more who would advise them. Ralph Peters, a retired United States Army Lieutenant Colonel and former campaign adviser to John McCain, known for his array of Islamo-fearmongo books and novels, is, in my view, a perfect example of the moral relativist in action. Talking points from his writings are parroted constantly by Neo-Cons and now Neo-Libs who feel compelled to defend Barack Obama’s continued blood-letting in the Middle East. Peters asserts that American troops and warfare tactics must become essentially as monstrous as the enemy we fight in order for victory to be achieved. This is excusable, in his opinion, because America is the “good guy”, and they are the “bad guys”. Ironically, Peters often uses the example of Rome’s genocidal attacks on Carthage as a primer for his arguments, loosely comparing the “barbarians” of Carthage to the “barbarian” Muslims of his War on Terror. His position; that Rome was safest when they were absolute in their brutality. What Peters ignorantly overlooks (or perhaps deliberately overlooks) is that the fall of Rome was not hastened by outside “barbarians”, but by Rome’s own barbarity and stupidity. Rome’s elites provoked and gave birth to enemy hoards through their relentless acts of bloodshed across the known world over the course of centuries. America is set on the same exact path with the help of men like Peters; claiming that our principles stand in the way of our survival, and that all targets are fair game and all means are acceptable as long as we prevail. The problem is, as Peters admits, one should never declare actual victory in the War on Terror. Thus, by his own logic, there can be no conclusion, only an endless cycle of death perpetrated in ever more diabolical ways. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-lost-principles-and-social-destruction
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American Massacres Have Been Common for Centuries
For hundreds of years Americans have been committing massacres of women and children, old men and sometimes even young men, mostly unarmed or armed only with primitive weapons. Most U.S. massacres are totally censored by the U.S. and its Big Media. Some come to light many decades later, as in the case of No Gun Rhi in which the U.S. gunned down unknown numbers of South Koreans. Lt, Calley and his company in South Vietnam massacred somewhere near 500 women and children in the My Lai Massacre. Much to his horror, it got into the Media around the world, so the U.S. carried out a Sweet Heart Show Trial. Only Calley was convicted and sentenced to many years up to life, but he only served about three years in comfy house arrest. American troops know they can massacre innocent civilians and captured POW’s with impunity, as long as they don’t get into the headlines of the world and make the Empire look like a Great Satan. Almost all the Iraqi massacres that did get into the headlines led to Sweet Heart Show Trials. The DOD talks tough and shouts naughty! But, as soon as the headlines go away, the mass murderers go free with sweetheart taps on the wrist or the rump. http://lewrockwell.com/douglas/douglas50.1.html
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Bill Introduced to Force President to Get Congressional Approval for Military Force
Let the president be duly warned. Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr., R-N.C., has introduced a resolution declaring that should the president use offensive military force without authorization of an act of Congress, “it is the sense of Congress” that such an act would be “an impeachable high crime and misdemeanor.” http://www.wnd.com/2012/03/obama-impeachment-bill-now-in-congress/
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Why Can’t Americans Have Democracy?
For a decade Washington has misrepresented its wars of naked aggression as “bringing democracy and human rights to the Middle East.” While Washington was bringing democracy to the Middle East, Washington was destroying democracy in the U.S. Washington has resurrected medieval torture dungeons and self-incrimination. Washington has destroyed due process and habeas corpus. At Obama’s request, Congress passed overwhelmingly a law that permits American subjects to be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial or presentation of evidence. Warrantless searches and spying, illegal and unconstitutional at the turn of the 21st century, are now routine. Obama has even asserted the right, for which there is no law on the books, to murder any American anywhere if the executive branch decides, without presenting any evidence, that the person is a threat to the U.S. government. Any American anywhere can be murdered on the basis of subjective opinion in the executive branch, which increasingly is the only branch of the U.S. government. The other two “co-equal” branches have shriveled away under the “war on terror.” Why is Washington so determined to bring democracy to the Middle East (with the exception of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Emirates), Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, Russia, and China, but is hostile to constitutional rights in America? http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2012/03/02/why-cant-americans-have-democracy/
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Proof that War Is Bad for the Economy
Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs. http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2012/02/proof-that-war-is-bad-for-economy.html
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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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Report: U.S. and Arab States Set to Impose No Fly Zone Over Syria
Reports out of Kuwait suggest that Arab states are set to impose a no fly zone over Syria with US logistical support, advancing the prospect of a military assault to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad under a “humanitarian” pretext. YNet news, the website for Israel’s most widely read newspaper, also carried the report. As part of a plan to cripple the country’s military forces within 24 hours, the “movement of Syrian military vehicles, including tanks, personnel carriers and artillery,” would all be banned under the terms of the no fly zone. http://www.infowars.com/report-us-arab-states-set-to-impose-no-fly-zone-over-syria/
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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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10 Reasons America Will Be Judged as the Most Brutal Empire in History
However, some nations, especially in the last two decades, remained stubborn and have refused to alter their banking systems while also shunning Western companies. Despite the empire’s best efforts to diplomatically bribe or sanction them into submission, they ultimately required an iron military fist to force their compliance. Until recently, military action remained the last resort. But now, preemptive military action seems to have become the preferred, and perhaps necessary, method to conquer the last resource-rich nations out of their grasp. The empire’s populations cheered this strategy out of fear of being attacked by these rogue nations who never attacked or even threatened to attack them. In the fog of fear, killing and stealing became acceptable. In fact, detention without charges and even torture became acceptable in the former capital of freedom. America has determined that the means justifies the end — which is more power. http://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/10-reasons-america-will-be-judged-as.html
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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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America’s Endless Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
The 10th anniversary of Washington’s invasion, occupation and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan was observed Oct. 7, but despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to terminate the U.S. “combat mission” by the end of 2014, American military involvement will continue many years longer. The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out “extremists” and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters. Washington’s tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press Oct. 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring “God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan…. If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.” http://weeklyintercept.blogspot.com/2011/10/americas-endless-wars-in-afghanistan.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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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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Sex and the Single Drone
In reality, it’s not the drones, but our leaders who are remarkably constrained. Out of permanent war and terrorism, they have built a house with no doors and no exits. It’s easy enough to imagine them as beleaguered masters of the universe atop the globe’s military superpower, but in terms of what they can actually do, it would be more practical to think of them as so many drones, piloted by others. In truth, our present leaders, or rather managers, are small people operating on autopilot in a big-machine world. As they definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse — like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals — the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes. It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/09/29/sex-and-the-single-drone/
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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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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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For Officials, 9/11 Means Gushing About Wars and Demanding Continued Funding
President Obama raised more than a few eyebrows with his declaration yesterday that 9/11 made the US “stronger,” but officials past and present seem to have all fallen in line with the general narrative of 9/11 as the start of a glorious new period of American history, defined exclusively by endless wars and runaway military spending. Admiral Michael Mullen, the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, cheered the past decade as “America’s military ventured forth as the long arm and clenched fist of an angry nation at war,” celebrating the “vengeance” visited upon assorted enemies over that period. The “all’s well and ends well” sentiment was shared by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who declared that the terrorist attacks had changed America “mostly in good ways.” For those hoping to look past the gushing, the various self-congratulatory interviews also afforded ample time to shill for more wars going forward, with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisting a terrorist attack was “imminent” if Congress dared to cut the record military budget, which dwarfs even the massive budgets Rumsfeld had to work with. http://news.antiwar.com/2011/09/11/for-officials-911-means-gushing-about-wars-and-demanding-continued-funding/
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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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U.S. to Launch WWIII to Rescue ‘American Empire’
Of course, when we talk about the structure of power in the US, we can not avoid the subject of the role of the Jewish lobby. I’d say that the influence of this lobby in America is exaggerated considerably. Jewish money is easy money. This money is not really vital for the States. The Jews control many spheres there connected with the entertainment industry – show business, alcohol and media market, including advertising. The things that are more important – the things that determine the fate of the American empire such as the defense complex, steel, oil, etc – those things don’t belong to the Jews. The media dollar is thus less important than the petrodollar. http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/18-07-2011/118511-american_empire-0/
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Ballpark Liturgy: America’s New Civic Religion
Fenway Park, Boston, July 4, 2011. On this warm summer day, the Red Sox will play the Toronto Blue Jays. First come pre-game festivities, especially tailored for the occasion. The ensuing spectacle — a carefully scripted encounter between the armed forces and society — expresses the distilled essence of present-day American patriotism. A masterpiece of contrived spontaneity, the event leaves spectators feeling good about their baseball team, about their military, and not least of all about themselves — precisely as it was meant to do. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2011/07/28/ballpark-liturgy-americas-new-civic-religion/
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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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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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Extremism Watch: Pakistan May Be Next Target of Washington Warmongers
The ultimate prize for U.S. imperialism in the Middle East – the jewel in the crown of the emerging American empire – is Iran, long the chief target of the War Party’s attention. Yet they don’t have either the resources or the political support for such an attack, and so the strategy, for the time being, is encirclement. First, Iraq and Afghanistan, buttressing the substantial U.S. military presence in the Gulf – and now, Pakistan. (Azerbaijan, to the north, has replaced Kyrgyzstan as the main way station funneling supplies to American troops in the region.) Shorn of its obstreperous military leaders, who entertain delusions of autonomy, Pakistan will be fully integrated into the American orbit – and Iran will be surrounded on all sides. While keeping the heat on for a direct attack on Iran, the powerful pro-Israel lobby – the driving force behind the anti-Iran crowd – is biding its time, confident they’ll win in the end. In the meantime, they are carefully building up momentum for the final push toward war, and a key part of that is agitating for a complete break in U.S.-Pakistan relations. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/07/10/next-up-pakistan/
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Militarism is Not Patriotism
Americans glorify their military now, but this would have been frowned on by an anti-militaristic founding generation that was suspicious of standing armies and alliances with foreign nations. For example, George Washington warned the country to stay out of “permanent alliances,” and Thomas Jefferson talked of the dangers of “entangling alliances.” In fact, one of the reasons that the framers of the Constitution gave most of the war powers to Congress (they have since migrated extra-constitutionally to the executive branch) was a reaction to European monarchs leading their countries into wars of self-aggrandizement, with the costs in blood and treasure falling on the common citizen. Thus, the United States was founded on principles of anti-militarism. This seems strange nowadays, but if you examine the writings of early foreign observers of America — including the famous Alexis de Tocqueville in the early 1800s — they remarked on Americans’ lack militarism and their preoccupation instead with commerce. America acquired its globe girdling military empire only after World War II, complete with hundreds of military bases, scores of unequal foreign alliances, and scads of questionable military interventions. And all this just when the advent of nuclear weapons added to the nation’s remote location to further enhance its already formidable security — making all of these added measures unnecessary. http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2011/07/05/militarism-is-not-patriotism/
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Against ‘Nation-Building’
Americans are sick and tired of perpetual war: even that champion evader, Barack Obama, had to acknowledge that in his recent Afghanistan speech, in which he said it’s time to start nation-building right here at home. Of course, he’ll say anything to get reelected – except, perhaps, that it’s time to end the wars in Afghanistan (and Pakistan and Yemen and …) and bring all our troops home now. With polls showing 70 percent-plus in favor of doing just that, the President had to make some accommodation with popular sentiment. The War Party, however, has no such political calculation to make: they don’t care about popular sentiment, at least the neoconservatives don’t. Indeed, the neocons are self-consciously elitist, disdaining the hoi polloi, who supposedly live in a world of “myth,” in favor of the alleged wisdom of the “enlightened” minority – the Philosopher-Kings – who supposedly know what’s good for the rest of us. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/07/05/against-nation-building/
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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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U.S. Cost of War at Least $3.7 Trillion and Counting
When President Barack Obama cited cost as a reason to bring troops home from Afghanistan, he referred to a $1 trillion price tag for America’s wars. In addition to the incalculable cost of human life, the financial cost to support ten years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq will likely exceed $4 trillion. Worse still, there’s no end in sight. (AP) Staggering as it is, that figure grossly underestimates the total cost of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the U.S. Treasury and ignores more imposing costs yet to come. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/06/29-0
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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 Search for War
In times of war, U.S. presidents have often talked about yearning for peace. But the last decade has brought a gradual shift in the rhetorical zeitgeist while a tacit assumption has taken hold — war must go on, one way or another. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/26-0
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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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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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Another Imperial Quagmire?
Unbelievably, after experiencing 10 years of quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American foreign policy establishment is now clamoring for the institution of a no-fly zone in Libya. Luminaries on both the Left and the Right have endorsed the concept: for example, Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and John McCain. Even though the U.S. military would have to first attack Libyan radars, air defenses, runways, aircraft, and command, control, and communication facilities, John Kerry argued that a no-fly zone was not a military operation. Traditionally, the foreign policy elites of declining empires have never accepted the need to retrench overseas before it was too late. The U.S. establishment hasn’t either. http://original.antiwar.com/eland/2011/03/15/another-imperial-quagmire/
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Stealing from Social Security to Pay for Wars and Bailouts
by Paul Craig Roberts. The U.S. dollar’s value is likely to fall further in terms of other currencies, because nothing is being done about the U.S. budget and trade deficits. Obama’s budget, if passed, doesn’t reduce the deficit over the next ten years by enough to cover the projected deficit in the FY 2012 budget. Indeed, the deficits are likely to be substantially larger than forecast. The military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned Americans a half century ago, is more powerful than ever and shows no inclination to halt the wars for U.S. hegemony. The cost of these wars is enormous. The U.S. media, being good servants for the government, only reports the out-of-pocket or current cost of the wars, which is only about one-third of the real cost. The current cost leaves out the cost of life-long care for the wounded and maimed, the cost of life-long military pensions of those who fought in the wars, the replacement costs of the destroyed equipment, the opportunity cost of the resources wasted in war, and other costs. The true cost of America’s illegal Iraq invasion, which was based entirely on lies, fabrications and deceptions, is at least $3,000 billion according to economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes. The same for the Afghan war, which is ongoing. If the Afghan war lasts as long as the Pentagon says it needs to, the cost will be a multiple of the cost of the Iraq war. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27644.htm
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U.S. Department of Imperial Expansion
The illegitimacy of the current US State Department fits in well with the overall Constitution-circumventing empire that the American Republic has degenerated into. The current Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gives a daily affirmation of this illegitimacy every time she bellies up to the podium and further makes a mockery of America, its people and its destiny. http://www.activistpost.com/2011/03/us-department-of-imperial-expansion.html
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Cutting $100 Billion? — Easy If Only Washington Had a Brain
It’s important to note that none of the potential cost-cutting measures I’ve mentioned touch the big palooka. I’m talking about the Pentagon budget, a very distinctive “entitlement” program on the American landscape. Given the news reports on “Pentagon cuts” lately, you might think that the Obama administration is taking a hatchet to the Defense Department’s funds, but think again. As defense analyst Miriam Pemberton wrote recently, “The Pentagon is following the familiar tradition of planning ambitious increases, paring them back, and calling this a cut.” In fact, at $553 billion, the proposed Pentagon budget for 2012 actually represents a 5% increase over the already stunningly bloated 2011 version of the same. http://uruknet.com/?p=m75197&hd=&size=1&l=e
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