War and Empire Links: Aug. 26, 2017

Korea, Afghanistan and the Never Ending War trap. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Aug. 23, 2017.

While the US-backed 'Hunger Games' in South Korea plow on, a 'new strategy' for Afghanistan is really all about business. But China is already there

The Lies on Afghanistan. Matthew Hoh, counterpunch. Aug. 21, 2017.

There has never been progress by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, unless you are asking the U.S. military contractors or the Afghan drug barons, of whom an extremely large share are our allies in the Afghan government, militias and security forces, there has only been suffering and destruction. American politicians, pundits and generals will speak about “progress” made by the 70,000 American troops put into Afghanistan by President Obama beginning in 2009, along with an additional 30,000 European troops and 100,000 private contractors, however the hard and awful true reality is that the war in Afghanistan has only escalated since 2009, never stabilizing or deescalating; the Taliban has increased in strength by tens of thousands, despite tens of thousands of casualties and prisoners; and American and Afghan casualties have continued to grow every year of the conflict, with U.S. casualties declining only when U.S. forces began to withdraw in mass numbers from parts of Afghanistan in 2011, while Afghan security forces and civilians have experienced record casualties every year since those numbers began to be kept by the UN. 

Similarly, any progress in reconstructing or developing Afghanistan has been found to be non existent despite the more than $100 billion spent by the United States on such efforts by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR). $100 billion, by the way, is more money than was spent on the Marshall Plan when that post-WWII reconstruction plan is put into inflation adjusted dollars.

Venezuela under siege by US empire. David William Pear, the Real News. July 20, 2017.

It is all about the oil. Whatever else one hears about Venezuela, it is all about the oil. That is what one needs to know first about why the U.S. Empire has Venezuela under siege. It is about the oil.

How Alfred McCoy Stalked the CIA From Its Heroin Trail to the Surveillance State. Alfred McCoy, via naked capitalism. Aug. 25, 2017.

Yves here. Trust me, this is a remarkable post. The fact that McCoy is still alive and publishing says that there are still some things that even the CIA does not dare do. 

By Alfred W. McCoy, the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the forthcoming In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books, September) from which this piece is adapted. Originally published at TomDispatch

brief excerpt:

Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline. 

In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.

Notes On The Junta, An Unnecessary Land-Corridor And A Regular Russian Maneuver. MoA. Aug. 24, 2017.

According to a 1950s political theory The Structure of Power in American Society is mainly build on three elite groups, the high military, the corporation executives and the political directorate. (The "political directorate" can best be described as the bureaucracy, the CIA and their proxies within Congress.) 

On election day I noted that only the military had supported The Not-Hillary President. The corporate and executive corners of the triangle had pushed for Hillary Clinton and continued to do so even after Trump had won. (Only recently did the "collusion with Russia" nonsense suddenly die down.) I wrote: 

The military will demand its due beyond the three generals now in Trump's cabinet. 

That turned out to be right. A military junta is now ruling the United States

The “military-industrial complex” in power. Andre Damon, wsws. Aug. 24, 2017

How “Both Sides” Forge U.S. Supremacy: The Nationalistic Hypocrisies of “Violence” and “Free Speech”. Sam Husseini, Black Agenda Report. Aug. 24, 2017.

The Anti-Empire Report #150: I'm back. William Blum. Aug. 25, 2017.

I still get emails criticizing me for the stand I took against Islamic terrorists earlier this year. Almost every one feels obliged to remind me that the terrorists are acting in revenge for decades of US/Western bombing of Muslim populations and assorted other atrocities. And I then have to inform each one of them that they’ve chosen the wrong person for such a lecture. I, it happens, wrote the fucking book on the subject! 

In the first edition of my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, published in 2001, before September 11, the first chapter was “Why do terrorists keep picking on The United States?” It includes a long list of hostile US military and political actions against the Islamic world during the previous 20 years. 

So I can well see why radical Muslims would harbor a deep-seated desire for revenge against The United States and its allies who often contributed to the hostile actions. My problem is that the Islamic terrorist actions are seldom aimed at those responsible for this awful history –- the executive and military branches of the Western nations, but are more and more targeted against innocent civilians, which at times includes other Muslims, probably even, on occasion, some who sympathize with the radical Islamic cause. These random terrorist acts are thus not defendable or understandable from any revenge point of view. What did the poor people of Barcelona have to do with Western imperialism? 

Civilians are of course much easier to target, but that’s clearly no excuse. As I’ve pointed out in the past, we should consider this: From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States carried out all kinds of very harmful policies against Latin America, including numerous bombings, without the natives ever resorting to the uncivilized, barbaric kind of retaliation as employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists generally took their revenge out upon concrete representatives of the American empire: diplomatic, military and corporate targets – not markets, theatres, nightclubs, hospitals, schools, restaurants or churches.

... 

How could the current distribution of property and wealth reasonably be expected to emerge from any sort of truly democratic process? And if this is the way regulated capitalism works, what would life under unregulated capitalism be like? We’ve long known the answer to that question. Theodore Roosevelt (president of the United States 1901-09) said in a speech in 1912: “The limitation of governmental powers, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power.” 

And what do the corporate elite want? In a word: “everything” … from our schools to our social security, from our health care to outer space, from our media to our sports. 

“We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.” – William James (1842-1910)

The Rohingya Psyops: Waging Covert War on Myanmar. Gearóid Ó Colmáin. Feb 6, 2017.

I should like to stress ‘Muslims who are causing all the trouble’; for it is a minority of the Rakhine State’s Muslims who are attempting to wage Jihad on behalf of Western geopolitical interests and the ongoing Zionist global war on terrorism, euphemistically and erroneously referred to as the ‘clash of civilizations’. 

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The Rohingya refugee story is a gigantic psyops which is intended to manipulate the emotions of ignorant mass media consumers, who do not understand the history and complex geopolitical context of Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal. 

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The Rohingya crisis is the most brutal and blatant example of what Kelly Greenhill calls ‘Weapons of mass migration’, whereby human beings are used by one state as geopolitical weapons against a target state.

72nd Anniversary of Hiroshima’s Gratuitous Mass Murder. Stephen Lendmen via PCR. Aug. 6, 2017.

War in the Pacific was won months before Franklin Roosevelt’s April 12, 1945 death. 

He declined to accept the Japanese offer of surrender. So did Harry Truman when he became president.

War continued for months unnecessarily, countless more casualties inflicted, mainly Japanese civilians – notably from fire-bombing Toyko in March 1945, an estimated 100,000 perishing in the firestorm, many more injured, over a million left homeless.
Around the same time, five dozen other Japanese cities were fire-bombed. Most structures in the country were wooden and easily consumed. 

The attacks amounting to war crimes achieved no strategic advantage. In early 1945, Japan offered to surrender. In February, Douglas McArthur sent Roosevelt a 40-page summary of its terms.

They were nearly unconditional. The Japanese would accept an occupation, would cease hostilities, surrender its arms, remove all troops from occupied territories, submit to criminal war trials, and allow its industries to be regulated. In return, they asked only that their emperor be retained in an honorable capacity. 

Roosevelt spurned the offer as did Truman. Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed on August 6 and 9 respectively. 

They were gratuitous acts of mass murder, killing hundreds of thousands, scaring future generations to this day with birth defects and other serious health issues. 

The bombings weren’t conducted to win a war won months earlier. They displayed America’s new might, what Soviet Russia’s leadership already knew, what might follow against its cities if Washington decided to attack its wartime ally.

Pentagon Denounces American Nazis While Arming Ukrainian Nazis. Finian Cunningham, Strategic Cultural Foundation. Aug. 22, 2017.

In the wake of violent protests involving white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in the US, the Pentagon’s top military brass issued unprecedented condemnations of «racists and extremists». One veterans spokesman said: «Anyone waving a Nazi flag must be rooted out of our society». 

What makes the Pentagon’s response to Swastika-flag-waving American Nazis rather bizarre is that this week the US Defense Secretary, General James Mattis, is reportedly traveling to Ukraine where he is to sign over shipments of lethal weapons to the armed forces of the Kiev regime. That regime openly glorifies Ukrainian regiments that collaborated with the Nazi Third Reich during the World War Two.

... 

The arms dealing trip by Pentagon boss James Mattis to the Neo-Nazis in Ukraine this week is the reality check on what the Washington establishment and the American military-industrial complex really think about Nazism and extremists. 

We could also add to the list the American arms dealing to fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia and the covert arming of head-chopping Wahhabi terrorists. All of them are welcome clients for American militarism, in the service of US hegemonic world dominance. 

Official US condemnation of Nazis, fascists and extremists is just American public relations rhetoric. Evidently, the condemnation has no credibility in terms of objective reality.

Ukrainian Independence Day parade hosts NATO members for the first time. Fort Russ News. Aug. 24, 2017.

In the center of Kiev on Thursday, a parade in honor of the 26th anniversary of Ukraine's independence was held. For the first time, soldiers from NATO member states took part. The parade was watched by defense ministers who came to the Ukrainian capital from all over the world, including the head of the Pentagon, James Mattis. 

"It seems that the procession of NATO symbolizes their personal contribution to the special operation "Maidan" with an unconstitutional coup d'état in Ukraine. 

"All that is happening illustrates the already overcrowded chronicle of Ukraine's loss of sovereignty and the transformation into a territory of external governance,"

The deputy said that the invasion of "NATO and the company" began much earlier, "seeds of Russophobia, ignorance and disrespect for the common history of ancestors, ignorance and nationalism" were artificially sown and cultivated in Ukraine. 

"The Donbass did not submit to such a policy of self-destruction."

All The Countries America Has Invaded... In One Map. Joe Vesey-Berne, indy100. Aug. 23, 2017.

US Budgetary Costs of Wars through 2016: $4.79 Trillion and Counting. Neta C. Crawford, Watson Institute, Boston University. September 2016. (Link to download pdf)

Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security.

What fuels civil war? Energy and the rise of Fascism. Ugo Bardi, Cassanadra's Legacy. Aug. 23, 2017.


Road to Torture: How the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" became legal after 9/11. Joseph Hickman and John Kiriakou, Salon. Sept. 4, 2017.


Photos the U.S. and Saudi Arabia Don't Want You to See. Nicholas Kristof, NYT. Aug. 29, 2017.

That’s a young Yemeni boy, acutely malnourished like two million other children in Yemen — caught up in what the United Nations calls the “world’s largest humanitarian crisis.” 

Their suffering is largely a result of monstrous misconduct by a Saudi-led coalition that is supported by the United States and Britain.

Let’s be blunt: With U.S. and U.K., complicity, the Saudi government is committing war crimes in Yemen.

Plagues. Klaus Madersbacher, Anti-war.com. Sept. 12, 2017.

One indicator of human development is the number of people who die from preventable diseases and epidemics.

For example, the plague, as “Black Death” one of the horrors of the Middle Ages, is extinct in Europe, but still occasionally occurs worldwide – in “underdeveloped” regions, of course. Insufficient hygienic conditions are the first prerequisite for the occurrence and spread of this disease. After all, at least there are effective drugs to treat it.

Smallpox was a very dangerous disease. This epidemic also claimed millions of lives, especially in areas where there was no immunity in the population. The American Indians are to be mentioned here, who were particularly numerous victims of smallpox.

Smallpox is my favorite disease, firstly because it has been eradicated – “only an eradicated epidemic is a good epidemic” – and secondly because I myself have been engaged in eradicating it, working in the Smallpox Eradication Program, the only successful project worldwide carried out by the World Health Organization in the 1970s. With our well-designed approach we quickly could bring even major outbreaks of this epidemic under control.

Cholera is a particularly serious disease. Cholera can spread practically unhindered if there is no clean drinking water and water is contaminated by contaminated waste water. Cholera, dysentery and typhus indicate a lack of clean drinking water and are life-threatening for malnourished people, primarily for children and the elderly.

Perhaps you remember the 500,000 children in Iraq who were killed by the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War – yes, those who according to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were “worth the price”?

I deliberately and intentionally write “were killed” and not “have died”, have “lost their lives” or as can be heard in the mendacious media in this country/in the West, if at all. A report by UNICEF has been slammed in the Security Council by the United States of America and the United Kingdom. In my opinion a https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2017/09/12/plagues/

In Washington and London they certainly know that poor hygiene conditions promote the spread of epidemics. Well, what does this mean for the rulers and commanders of the most aggressive rogue states of our time?

They destroy power stations, drinking water systems and sewage treatment plants by their own and by the war planes of their respective "coalitions".

And then?

Then they impose sanctions to block and prevent the necessary materials for repairs being brought into the country. Or prevent food or medicine from being brought into the country, or whatever evil the criminal brains in these command centers will devise to damage and harass people who do not obey. 

Sooner or later, the desired effect will appear, which can only be described as planned mass murder. This has happened in recent years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and most recently in Yemen. Gaza can be counted as one of the places where this “policy” has also been practiced for years, interrupted only by further bombing of residential buildings and infrastructure. The fact that the Western media hardly ever report about these gigantic crimes against humanity makes these “free media” accomplices in the style of Nazi media.

The terrorist superpower, the United States of America, apparently is not mainly interested in conquering these countries – it is enough for them to have them rendered helpless and defenseless, at least not being able to stand in the way of the aggressive ambitions of those striving for world domination. It easily can be found out on any world map where they are heading to.

Many millions of people killed, crippled and displaced will have to continue to be worth the “prize” that the aspirations of the terrorist superpower and their criminal “community” will require, at least in case things are developing according to their intentions.

As already mentioned the management of preventable diseases is a benchmark for the development of mankind.

If certain states cause the death and unspeakable suffering of countless people with tremendous effort, this is directly directed against the development and the interests of humanity. The fight against such parasitic states and their criminal aspirations is justified in every respect.

The fact, that a terrorist superpower and its terrorist appendage are granted civilizing, cultural or even humanitarian competence in spite of their manifest crimes against peace and against humanity is obviously an outstanding feature – symptom – of a society whose spiritual state is situated deeply in the realm of pathology.

Obviously, we are dealing with an epidemic here, too. A plague that affects people’s brains. Just as cholera bacteria attack the organism by programming its functions to self-destruction.

Guess if there is an “immune system”, too? That can prevent mankind being led into self-destruction?

You may assume that there is one and that you too can be a potential/potent part of this immune system.

As always in such cases it starts at a small scale. The chances of a movement growing against the current madness, that ultimately will prevail, are intact. Mankind at first glance may not appear getting constantly smarter, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that this inevitably must be the case. I would be surprised if the organism of mankind will not, in the foreseeable future, discard the elements that cynically endanger and trample underfoot the fate of mankind as a whole out of selfish interests. So far we have made it anyway…


Dominion Over the World (VII): The Mythology of the "Good Guy" American. Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. Feb. 20, 2007.

The Culture of the Lie, II: The Loathsome Lies in the Service of the Horrors of War. Arthur Silber, Power of Narrative. Jun. 29, 2006.

I know it is a terrible thing to strip people of their apparently necessary delusions. Nonetheless, in the same spirit that children who have been misled into believing in Santa Claus must someday let go of that fantasy if they are to grow up, here we go. Start with this one: the lie that the atomic bombs unleashed on Japan were "necessary" to bring an earlier end to World War II and save many American lives. This fable, recited by schoolchildren everywhere and also by many adults who endlessly apologize for the horrors of war, is nothing but a series of lies, one on top of another

so why were 100s of 1000s of Japanese civilians killed?: to send a message to Russia:

Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller "communicated to us the anxiety of the United States government about the Russian attitude." U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to agree when he turned the anxiety up a notch by explaining how "our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in the East . . . The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America's military might."