War and Empire Links: November 2017

Who gets to push the nuclear button? Paul Craig Roberts. Nov. 17, 2017.

The purpose of diplomacy is to prevent war. However, ever since the Clinton regime attacked Serbia, US diplomacy has been used to cause wars. During the 16-years of George W. Bush and Obama the US destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing and maiming millions of peoples and producing millions of refugees. Not a single one of these wars was justified. Everyone of these wars was based in lies. ... 

Before launching each of these acts of unprovoked aggression, Washington demonized the leader of the country. To get rid of one person, Washington did not flinch at murdering large numbers of people and destroying the infrastructure of the country. This tells you that Washington has no morality. None. Zilch. Therefore, Washington is capable of launching a preemptive nuclear strike. Back when nuclear weapons were puny by today’s standards, Washington nuked two Japanese cities while Japan was trying to surrender. That was in 1945, a lifetime ago. Whatever bits of morality that still existed then are long gone.

Killing More Innocents Than We Admit. Paul Pillar, LobeLog. Nov. 19, 2017.

Anyone willing to think carefully and critically about the use of armed force against a target such as the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) would do well to read the intensively researched piece in The New York Times by investigative journalist Azmat Khan and Arizona State professor Anand Gopal about civilian casualties from the air war waged by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The key conclusion is that those casualties are far higher—probably many times higher—than what the U.S. military acknowledges. 

... 

These findings provide disturbing food for thought in at least three respects. One concerns the values and morality involved in a U.S. military operation in which so many innocents suffer so much. The human faces that Khan and Gopal attach to some of the specific cases of suffering they have investigated underscore the fundamental wrongness of what has been occurring. 

A second concerns the counterproductive aspects of an offensive that is supposed to be combating terrorism. The Donald Rumsfeld question—are we creating more terrorists than we are killing?—is still quite pertinent. The unsurprising resentment against the United States that results from U.S. aircraft killing and maiming innocent people, or destroying their homes, tends to create more terrorists. At a minimum, it fosters the sort of sentiment that existing terrorists exploit and win them support. 

A third implication involves the ability of the American public and political class to assess adequately what is going on with a military campaign of this sort. The biggest problem as always is an unwillingness to pay adequate attention to information at our disposal. But in this case there is the added problem of bum information. Khan and Gopal write that the huge disparity between official numbers and probable actual figures of civilian casualties means that this aerial offensive “may be the least transparent war in recent American history.” 

There are important policy decisions ahead about a continued U.S. military role, if any, in the areas where the IS caliphate once stood. Civilian casualties, and the importance of having an accurate sense of the extent of casualties that U.S. forces cause, need to be part of any debate about those decisions. But probably the lessons of the anti-IS air war apply at least as much to other states and regions where the United States has assumed the role of aerial gendarme, using either manned or unmanned means, against groups such as IS or al-Qaeda. One thinks in particular of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but in the absence of any geographically defined congressional authorization for such use of force, there is no limit to where the United States will bombard from the sky and where, given the intrinsic difficulties in assembling accurate targeting information against such shadowy adversaries, more innocent civilians will die. This is one of the continuing dark sides of a “war on terror” that has been militarized to the extent that ill-chosen metaphor implies.

Mission Creep in Darkest Africa. Eric Margolis, Oriental Review. Nov. 8, 2017.

The British Empire, which at the end of the 19th century ruled one quarter of the earth’s land surface, is long gone. But its robust successor and heir, the United States, has set about enlarging it.

As I sought to explain in my last book ‘American Raj – How the US Rules the Muslim World,’ the US imperium exerts its power by controlling tame, compliant regimes around the world and their economies. They are called ‘allies’ but, in fact, should be more accurately termed satrapies or vassal states. Many states are happy to be prosperous US vassals, others less so.

The US power system has successfully dominated much of the world, except of course for great powers China, Russia and India. Germany and much of Western Europe remains in thrall to post WWII US power. The same applies to Canada, Latin America, Australia, and parts of SE Asia.

There is one part of the globe that has remained free from heavy US influence since 1945, sub-Saharan Africa. But this fact is clearly changing as the US military expands its operations the width and breadth of the Dark Continent.

...

US troops have now stepped into the boots of ‘La Legion.’ Almost unnoticed, US Special Forces – our version of the Legion – have been slipping into Africa, the newest and most exciting market for the Pentagon.

Creation of the new US Africa Command in 2007, with headquarters in Germany, was discreet but it signaled active US military and geopolitical interest in resource-rich Africa, a key target of Chinese interest. No one in Washington seems to know how many US troops operate in Africa, but it’s at least 12,000 not counting mercenary contractors and CIA units. There was consternation in Congress when these facts emerged last week.

The key US base in Africa is at Djibouti, a poxy, fly-blown French colony on the Red Sea that is also shared by the Legion and, curiously, a Chinese naval station. US forces in Djibouti operate into Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and Central Africa. US forces in West Africa operate in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Liberia, Uganda, and anywhere that pro-US regimes are under pressure. Mali and Chad, where nomadic tribes battle the central government, are key operating regions. Both are under nasty dictatorial regimes backed by Washington.

Raqqa Destroyed To Liberate It. Eric Margolis, Oriental Review. Oct. 27, 2017.

The so-called Islamic State organization was primarily a bogeyman encouraged by the western powers. I’ve been saying this for the last four years. 

... 

The western powers, led by the US, sought to emulate this success in Syria by unleashing armies of mercenaries, disaffected, unemployed youth, and religious primitives against the independent-minded regime of President Bashar Assad. The plan nearly worked – at least until Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement intervened and reversed the tide of battle. 

... 

The Islamic State bogeyman was very useful for the western powers. It justified deeper military involvement in the Mideast, higher arms budgets, scared people into voting for rightwing parties, and gave police more powers. 

... 

Once the US-led campaign against Damascus failed, the crazies of IS were no longer of any use so they were marked for death.

Libya: The Forgotten Reason North Korea Desperately Wants Nuclear Weapons. Ted Galen Carpenter, The National Interest. Nov. 9, 2017.

The United States and its allies continue to cajole and threaten North Korea to negotiate an agreement that would relinquish its growing nuclear and ballistic-missile programs.

The latest verbal prodding came from President Trump during his joint press conference with South Korean president Moon Jae-in. Trump urged Pyongyang to “come to the negotiating table,” and asserted that it “makes sense for North Korea to do the right thing.” The “right thing” Trump and his predecessors have always maintained, is for North Korea to become nonnuclear.

It is unlikely that the DPRK will ever return to nuclear virginity. Pyongyang has multiple reasons for retaining its nukes. For a country with an economy roughly the size of Paraguay’s, a bizarre political system that has no external appeal, and an increasingly antiquated conventional military force, a nuclear-weapons capability is the sole factor that provides prestige and a seat at the table of international affairs. There is one other crucial reason for the DPRK’s truculence, though. North Korean leaders simply do not trust the United States to honor any agreement that might be reached.

Unfortunately, there are ample reasons for such distrust.

North Korean leaders have witnessed how the United States treats nonnuclear adversaries such as Serbia and Iraq. But it was the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in 2011 that underscored to Pyongyang why achieving and retaining a nuclear-weapons capability might be the only reliable way to prevent a regime-change war directed against the DPRK.

Partially in response to Washington’s war that ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the spring of 2003, ostensibly because of a threat posed by Baghdad’s “weapons of mass destruction,” Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi seemed to capitulate regarding such matters. He signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in December of that year and agreed to abandon his country’s embryonic nuclear program. In exchange, the United States and its allies lifted economic sanctions and pledged that they no longer sought to isolate Libya.

Qaddafi was welcomed back into the international community once he relinquished his nuclear ambitions.

That reconciliation lasted less than a decade. When one of the periodic domestic revolts against Qaddafi’s rule erupted again in 2011, Washington and its NATO partners argued that a humanitarian catastrophe was imminent (despite meager evidence of that scenario), and initiated a military intervention. It soon became apparent that the official justification to protect innocent civilians was a cynical pretext, and that another regime-change war was underway. The Western powers launched devastating air strikes and cruise-missile attacks against Libyan government forces. NATO also armed rebel units and assisted the insurgency in other ways.

Although all previous revolts had fizzled, extensive Western military involvement produced a very different result this time. The insurgents not only overthrew Qaddafi, they captured, tortured and executed him in an especially grisly fashion. Washington’s response was astonishingly flippant. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton quipped: “We came, we saw, he died.” [she didn't just "quip", she cackled]

The behavior of Washington and its allies in Libya certainly did not give any incentive to North Korea or other would-be nuclear powers to abandon such ambitions in exchange for U.S. paper promises for normal relations. Indeed, North Korea promptly cited the Libya episode as a reason why it needed a deterrent capability—a point that Pyongyang has reiterated several times in the years since Muammar el-Qaddafi ouster. There is little doubt that the West’s betrayal of Qaddafi has made an agreement with the DPRK to denuclearize even less attainable than it might have been otherwise. Even some U.S. officials concede that the Libya episode convinced North Korean leaders that nuclear weapons were necessary for regime survival.

The foundation for successful diplomacy is a country’s reputation for credibility and reliability. U.S. leaders fret that autocratic regimes—such as those in Iran and North Korea—might well violate agreements they sign. There are legitimate reasons for wariness, although in Iran’s case, the government appears to be complying with its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Tehran signed with the United States and other major powers in 2015—despite allegations from U.S. hawks about violations.

When it comes to problems with credibility, though, U.S. leaders also need to look in the mirror. Washington’s conduct in Libya was a case of brazen duplicity. It is hardly a surprise if North Korea (or other countries) now regard the United States as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. Because of Pyongyang’s other reasons for wanting a nuclear capability, a denuclearization accord was always a long shot. But U.S. actions in Libya reduced prospects to the vanishing point. American leaders have only themselves to blame for that situation.

Why the United States will never leave Yemen. Farah Najjar, Al Jazeera. Nov. 13, 2017.

US politicians are set to debate a resolution that would limit "unauthorised" American involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, but the bill is unlikely to move past the House of Representatives, analysts say.

H.CON.RES.81 is expected to be debated on the House floor on Monday. It calls for the invocation of the War Powers Act to end US participation in the war in Yemen.

The act, introduced in 1973, requires Congressional approval for the country's involvement in any war. 

... 

Passed in 2001, the AUMF gives the president the power to "use force" against all "nations, organisations, or persons he determines planned, authorised, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001". 

It has since been used as legal justification to involve the US in various conflicts around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

...

The Obama administration used the same legal basis to support the Saudi-led coalition, which is targeting the Houthis, not al-Qaeda elements in Yemen. 

"The war in Yemen is an entirely separate war from the fight against al-Qaeda, yet Congress has never authorised it," the authors of H.CON.RES.81 highlighted in a statement. 

... a war that is causing so much human suffering and in which all sides, including US ally Saudi Arabia, have been repeatedly accused of international humanitarian law violations," Blecher said.

...

More than 2,000 Yemenis have died in a cholera outbreak, now affecting nearly one million people who are unable to receive adequate medical assistance. According to the UN, the country is also on the verge of famine.

Although the attempt to strike up debate over the war comes more than two years after the Saudi-led coalition waged war on Yemen, analysts say US political and economic interests in the region are also factors behind its initial and continuing support for the war.

"The Obama administration had reservations about the Yemen war from the beginning, but supported the fight largely to show support for Saudi Arabia at a time when the relationship was strained by the Iran nuclear deal," Blecher explained.

Yemen - Having Lost The War Saudis Try Genocide - Media Complicit. Moon of Alabama. Nov. 13, 2017.

The Saudis are starving a whole country - with avid support of the "humanitarian" western world. The UN bureaucracy and leadership was bought off and is complicit. The Saudi tyrant kidnaps and blackmails the Prime Minister of a third country. All this because he fails to overcome the barefooted Houthi fighters in Yemen against which he started a senseless war. The Saudis invent Iranian involvement and the media avidly repeat their claims without any evidentiary support. 

Literally millions are in imminent danger of dying. Meanwhile greedy "western" politicians are ass-kissing the Saudi freak of a clown prince and his senile father. They support whatever lunatic claim the Saudis make about their perceived enemies.

Saudi Propaganda and the Starvation of Yemen. Daniel Larison, American Conservative. Nov. 17, 2017.

A U.N. panel of experts found Saudi Arabia is purposefully obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid into Yemen and called into question its public rationale for a blockade that could push millions into famine. In the assessment, made in a confidential brief and sent to diplomats on November 10, members of the Security-Council appointed panel said they had seen no evidence to support Saudi Arabia’s claims that short-range ballistic missiles have been transferred to Yemeni rebels in violation of Security Council resolutions. 

The coalition would have no right to inflict collective punishment on the civilian population even if their claim about the missile fired at Riyadh were true. Starving the population in retribution would be a criminal and disproportionate response to a missile launch in any case, but it is all the more outrageous when the pretext for doing so is so shaky. According to this panel, there is also no evidence to support the coalition’s missile claim. Since the Saudis and their allies have been exaggerating the extent of Iran’s involvement in Yemen from the start, the claim that the missile was of Iranian origin was always very questionable. It is a measure of how reflexively the U.S. supports the coalition that our government endorsed their story without question. 

Coalition governments have lied so often about so many incidents in which their forces attacked civilian targets that their credibility has been destroyed, so it isn’t possible or desirable to take their self-serving assertions at face value. The Saudi government’s propaganda in particular has been a shameless exercise in blame-shifting and denial of the obvious. Last month, the Saudi ambassador to the U.N. wrote an op-ed full of preposterous and easily debunked claims. The same ambassador has gone so far as to claim that there is no embargo imposed on Yemen. Every aid agency in the country and the U.N. are warning that the blockade threatens the lives of millions of people, but as usual the Saudis tell everyone not to worry.

We already know that the coalition delays or diverts ships that have already been approved by the U.N. verification mechanism, so we can understand that the real purpose of the blockade is not interdicting weapons but depriving the civilian population of essential goods. After the tightening of the blockade over the last two weeks, that has become undeniable. Starving the people of Yemen is an inexcusable outrage, and all of the governments that are making this mass atrocity possible should be held accountable.

NATO: a Dangerous Paper Tiger. Patrick Armstrong, Strategic Culture Foundation. Nov. 16, 2017.

... But there is one obvious question: does NATO take all its Russian threat rhetoric seriously, or is it just an advertising campaign? ... A Russian threat is good for business: there's poor money in a threat made of IEDs, bomb vests and small arms. Big profits require big threats. 

...

There is no reason to bother to read anything that comes out of NATO Headquarters: it's only wind. There is one response. And that is Libya. When they say stability, respond Libya. When they say terrorism, respond Libya. When they say peace, respond Libya. When they say dialogue, respond Libya. When they say values, respond Libya. NATO is dangerous in the way that the stupid and deluded can be. But, when its principal member starts demanding its members "pay their share", and the people of five members see Washington a greater threat than Moscow, maybe its final days are upon us. 

But incessant repetition becomes reality and that's where the danger lies. Hysteria has reached absurd proportions: 2014's "gas station masquerading as a country" decides who sits in the White House; directs referendums in Europe; rules men's minds through RT and Sputnik; dominates social media; every Russian exercise brings panic. This would all be amusing enough except for the fact that Moscow doesn't get the joke. While the NATO forces on their border may be insignificant at the moment, they can grow and all armies must prepare for the worst. The First Guards Tank Army is being re-created. I discuss the significance of that here. When it is ready – and Moscow moves much faster than NATO – it will be more than a match, offensively or defensively, for NATO's paper armies. And, if Moscow thinks it needs more, more will come. And there will be no cost-free bombing operations at 15,000 feet against Russia. NATO's naval strength, which is still real, is pretty irrelevant to operations against Russia. And still the paper tiger bares its paper teeth. 

In other words – and I never tire of quoting him on this – "We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way". NATO has been kiting cheques for years. And rather than soberly examine its bank account, it writes another, listening to the applause in the echo chamber of its mind.

War and Empire Links: September 2017

Why United States Is the Fourth Reich. Finian Cunningham, Strategic Culture. Sep. 27, 2017.

The “secret government” or the “deep state” of the US has been a law unto itself over the past seven decades. The election of Democrat or Republican politicians has no significant bearing on government policy. The shots are called by the CIA and the “deep state” who answer to the ruling elite of corporate power. 

... 

Over the past seven decades, the US rulers have waged overt wars, coups, assassinations and proxy wars against dozens of countries around the world. The global death toll from this American destruction is estimated at 20 million people.

When US leaders extol “American exceptionalism” it is a euphemism for “supremacy” and the “right” to use military violence to further strategic interests. This is no different from the supremacist thinking that the Third Reich invoked to justify its conquest of others.

When Trump and his administration threaten to annihilate North Korea the mindset is not unprecedented. Almost every US leader since the Second World War has promulgated the same unilateral use of violence towards other nations deemed to be “enemy states”. What Trump represents is simply a more naked version of the same aggression.

The Killing of History. John Pilger, informationclearinghouse. Sep 21, 2017.

All this will be familiar to those who have observed how the American media and popular culture behemoth has revised and served up the great crime of the second half of the twentieth century: from The Green Berets and The Deer Hunter to Rambo and, in so doing, has legitimised subsequent wars of aggression. The revisionism never stops and the blood never dries.

... 

Returning to the US, I am struck by the silence and the absence of an opposition – on the streets, in journalism and the arts, as if dissent once tolerated in the “mainstream” has regressed to a dissidence: a metaphoric underground.

There is plenty of sound and fury at Trump the odious one, the “fascist”, but almost none at Trump the symptom and caricature of an enduring system of conquest and extremism.

Trump’s UN Speech. Paul Craig Roberts. Sep 19, 2017.

I listened to part of Trump’s UN speech this morning. I was so embarrassed for him and for my country that I had to turn it off.

I wonder if whoever wrote the deplorable speech intended to embarrass Trump and inadvertantly embarrassed America as well, or whether the speechwriter(s) is so imbued with the neoconservative arrogance and hubris of our time that the speechwriter was simply blind to the extraordinary contradictions that stood out like sore thumbs all through the speech. 

I am not going to describe all of them, just a couple of examples.

Trump went on at great length about how America respects the sovereignty of every country and the people’s will of every country, and how the US, despite its overwhelming military power, never tries to impose its will on any country. 

What was the administration thinking, or can it think? What about Yugoslavia/Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Crimea, Ukraine, Venezuela, Honduras, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, just to mention countries in the 21st century that have been subjected to US military attacks, government overthrows, and removals of political leaders who did not conform to US interests?

Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to force them to support US sanctions against Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela? Is it respect for the sovereignty of countries to impose sanctions on the countries? If this is not imposing Washington’s will on other countries, what is? 

Is it respect for other countries to inform them that unless they do as they are told, “we will bomb you into the stone age”? 

I heard Trump complain that the UN Human Rights commission had as members countries with the worst human rights records of our time, and I wondered if he was talking about the United States. Clearly, Trump, the speechwriter(s), the State Department, the National Security Council, the US Ambassador to the UN, indeed the entire administration, do not think that the endless slaughter, maiming, orphaning, widowing, and dispossessing of millions of peoples in many countries, producing waves of refugees, comprise human rights violations. 

The arrogance conveyed by Trump’s speech is unprecedented.

After assurances that America respects everyone, Trump then made demand after demand and threat after threat against the sovereignty of Iran and North Korea, demanding that the rest of the world back him up.

Neither country is a threat to the US. Unlike the US and Israel, Korea has not been at war since 1953. Iran’s last war was in the 1980s when Iran was attacked by Iraq. Yet both North Korea and Iran are subjected to constant threats from the US. At the UN Trump threatened North Korea with destruction, and Washington is telling more lies about Iran in order to justify military action. 

Here is what former Secretary of State Colin Powell says about how carefully Washington thinks about other peoples: 

“We thought we knew what would happen in Libya. We thought we knew what would happen in Egypt. We thought we knew what would happen in Iraq, and we guessed wrong. In each one of these countries the thing we have to consider is that there is some structure that’s holding the society together. And as we learned, especially in Libya, when you remove the top and the whole thing falls apart . . . you get chaos.” 

That’s what Washington does. It brings chaos to tens of millions of peoples, destroying their lives and the prospects of their countries. This is the behavior that Trump described as American compassion for others. This is what Trump says is respecting others and the sovereignty of their countries. Washington dresses up its crimes against humanity as a “war on terror.” The tens of millions of slaughtered, maimed, and displaced persons are merely “collateral damage.”

Listening to The Donald at the UN. The Saker. Sep 19, 2017.

My only explanation for why this kind of nonsensical drivel was included in this speech is that it has become part of the ritual of typical American “patriotic liturgy”: big hyperbolic sentences which mean nothing, which nobody takes seriously or even listens to, but who have to be included “because they have to”.

... 

What we see here is undeniable evidence that far from being “real warriors” or “strategists” the military gang around Trump (Mattis, McMaster, Kelly, etc.) are either primitive grunts or folks who owe their rank to political protection. Why do I say that? Because none of what Trump describes as a “strategy for victory” is, in fact, a strategy. In fact, the US has not had anything remotely resembling a strategy in Afghanistan for years already. If it wasn’t so sad, it would be laughable, really. What we really see here is the total absence of any strategy and, again, a total reliance on magical thinking.

... 

[Sidebar: When my wife and I watched this pathetic speech we starting laughing about the fact that Trump was so obscenely bad that we (almost) begin to miss Obama. This is a standing joke in our family because when Obama came to power we (almost) began to miss Dubya. The reason why this is a joke is that when Duya came to power we decided that there is no way anybody could possibly be worse than him. Oh boy were we wrong! Right now I am still not at the point were I would be missing Obama (that is asking for a lot from me!), but I will unapologetically admit that I am missing Dubya. I do. I really do. Maybe not the people around Dubya, he is the one who truly let the Neocon “crazies in the basement” creep out and occupy the Situation Room, but at least Dubya seemed to realize how utterly incompetent he was. Furthermore, Dubya was a heck of a lot dumber than Obama (in this context being stupid is a mitigating factor) and he sure did not have the truly galactic arrogance of Trump (intelligence-wise they are probably on par)].

In conclusion, what I take away from this speech is a sense of relief for the rest of the planet and a sense of real worry for the USA. Ever since the Neocons overthrew Trump and made him what is colloquially referred to as their “bitch” the US foreign policy has come to a virtual standstill. Sure, the Americans talk a lot, but at least they are doing nothing. That paralysis, which is a direct consequence of the internal infighting, is a blessing for the rest of the planet because it allows everybody else to get things done. Because, and make no mistake here, if the USA cannot get anything constructive done any more, they retain a huge capability to disrupt, subvert, create chaos and the like. But for as long as the USA remains paralyzed this destructive potential remains mostly unused (and no matter how bad things look now, Hillary President would have been infinitely worse!).

Unmasked: Trump Doctrine vows carnage for new axis of evil. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times. Sep 20, 2017.

"North Korea, Iran, Venezuela are targets in "compassionate" America's war on the "wicked few." It's almost as though Washington felt its hegemony threatened."

Where Are the Brave Military Voices Against Forever War? By Maj. Danny Sjursen, The American Conservative. Sep 19, 2017.

Christmas, 1914: Nearly a million men are already dead, and the war is barely four months old. Suddenly, and ultimately in unison, the opposing German and British troops begin singing Christmas carols. At first light, German troops emerge unarmed from their trenches, and walk out into “no-man’s land.” Despite fearing a ruse, the Brits eventually joined their sworn enemies in the churned earth between the trench lines. Carols were sung, gifts of cigarettes exchanged—one man even brought out a decorative tree. It only happened once. Though the bloody, senseless war raged across three more Christmases, the officers on each side quashed future attempts at a holiday truce. And yet, for that brief moment, in the ugliest of circumstances, the common humanity of Brits and Germans triumphed. It must have been beautiful. 

Ultimately, nearly ten million men would die in battle. For all that, little was settled. It rarely is. The ruling classes still ruled, the profiteers profited, and Europe went to war again not twenty years later. So it went, and so it goes. 

Nonetheless, World War I boasted countless skeptics and anti-war activists both in and out of uniform. Their poetry and prose was dark, but oh was it ever powerful. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen from the Brits; Erich Maria Remarque for the stoic Germans; and our own Ernest Hemingway. A lost generation, which sacrificed so much more than youth: their innocence. They call to us, these long dead dissenters, from the grave. 

They might ask: Where are today’s skeptical veterans? Tragically, silence is our only ready response.

... 

Under the circumstances, perhaps silence is understandable. But it is also complicity. 

By now, the wars are lost, if ever they were winnable. Iraq will fracture, Syria collapse, and Afghanistan wallow in perpetual chaos. It will be so. The people will forget. Our professional, corporate regiments will, undoubtedly, add banners to their battle flags—sober reminders of a job well done in yet another lost cause. Soldiers will toast to lost comrades, add verses to their ballads, and precious few will ask why.

How The Military Defeated Trump's Insurgency. Moon of Alabama. Sep 18, 2017.


Trial and Terror. The Intercept. Sep 21, 2017.

The U.S. government has prosecuted 810 people for terrorism since the 9/11 attacks. Most of them never even got close to committing an act of violence.

Happy Birthday CIA: 7 Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years. Carey Wedler, Anti-Media. Sep 18, 2017.

It’s Time For Everyone — Left, Right And Center — To Admit They Were Lied To About Trump. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Sep. 16, 2017.

as I said in my last article, Trump’s most evil actions have not been those which are unique to Republicans. His replacing Scalia with an ideological clone of Scalia or pulling out of the worthless Paris agreement pale in comparison to the suffering and slaughter caused by his continuation and expansion of Obama’s bloodthirsty neoconservative foreign policy, which was itself a continuation and expansion of Bush’s bloodthirsty neoconservative foreign policy. He’s expanding the same Orwellian surveillance state Bush and Obama worked to expand, he’s facilitating the economic injustice which enables the plutocratic class to rule America, and he’s on track to have dropped more bombs in his first year in office than Obama dropped in his last. People should be worried far less about Trump’s similarities to Adolf Hitler than his similarities to George W. Bush.

"The Vietnam War" - Documentary Or Epic Of Fiction?. Moon of Alabama. Sep 20, 2017.

Arte TV yesterday showed the first parts of The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. It also runs on PBS. 

The first three parts of the ten part "documentary" are a whitewash of the motives of the politicians who sold the war to the public. The CIA's and military "deep state" machinations behind them is not investigated but covered up. 

A comment in the first episode declares that it was a "civil war" of Vietnamese against Vietnamese. That is ahistoric nonsense. ...

Never Forget: The US Government Has A Known History Of Using False Flags. Caitlin Johnstone, Medium. Sep. 10, 2017.

mainstream adherents like to pretend they’re confident that the official narrative is accurate, but they aren’t. A lot of hardcore conspiracy analysts like to pretend they know the real story, but they don’t. There’s simply not enough publicly available information for anyone to be certain exactly how things went down that day; all we can know for sure is that (A) the official story is riddled with plot holes, and (B) the American power establishment has an extensive and well-documented history of using false flags and propaganda to manipulate the public into supporting evil acts of military interventionism.

... 

This is why we’ve been seeing increasingly blatant panic from existing power structures about alternative media. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. It is only by general societal consensus that power exists where it exists, that money works the way it works, etc. At any time the public could stop honoring existing power structures and create an entirely different model for itself, deciding to distribute resources and allocate responsibilities in a way that benefits more people more efficaciously than the current paradigm. It is only by their ability to manipulate and control the mainstream narrative that powerful people have been able to keep this from happening.

If the power elites didn’t need the consent of the public to rule, they wouldn’t have to lie constantly about their reasons for war. The public would never consent to military interventions if politicians were allowed to appear on CNN and say “Yeah well America has become a stronghold for the most powerful plutocracy in the history of civilization and it needs to maintain its status as the world’s only superpower in order to protect the investments of that plutocracy. This is why we have to keep knocking the pillars of support out from underneath Russia and China, and why I get millions in re-election campaign donations.” 

My more pessimistic readers won’t like hearing this, but the reality is that Americans are basically good people who generally want what’s best for the world. If they weren’t, the unelected power establishment which rules over them wouldn’t have to keep making up lies about babies in incubators and protecting their family from Weapons of Mass Destruction in order to secure US hegemony. If they ever told the public the truth, they’d be dealing with hundreds of millions of heavily-armed Americans telling them to get their sociopathic asses out of here.

... 

What this means is that those of us who want what’s best for America and the world instead of endless war and economic oppression are necessarily locked in a media war with the plutocracy and its cronies.

... 

There is no reason to believe anything these lying sociopaths say, especially not about something that has served such a crucial role in their openly stated agenda to ensure US dominance over the world using its military and economic might. When you’ve got the extremely influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century saying in September of 2000 that it would require “a new Pearl Harbor” to advance this agenda, and then getting exactly that one year later in an American tragedy which was used to manufacture support for greatly expanded US military interventionism, there’s no good reason to take all that in with a trusting “Yeah, that sounds legit.”

The Anti-Empire Report #151. William Blum. Sep 26, 2017.

There was a country called Libya. It had the highest standard of living in all of Africa; its people had not only free education and health care but all kinds of other benefits that other Africans could only dream about. It was also a secular state, a quality to be cherished in Africa and the Middle East. But Moammar Gaddafi of Libya was never a properly obedient client of Washington. Amongst other shortcomings, the man threatened to replace the US dollar with gold for payment of oil transactions, create a common African currency, and was a strong supporter of the Palestinians and foe of Israel. 

In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the prime moving force behind the United States and NATO turning Libya into a failed state, where it remains today. 

The attack against Libya was one that the New York Times said Clinton had “championed”, convincing President Obama in “what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as Secretary of State.” 5 The people of Libya were bombed almost daily for more than six months. The main excuse given was that Gaddafi was about to invade Benghazi, the Libyan center of his opponents, and so the United States and NATO were thus saving the people of that city from a massacre. The American people and the American media of course swallowed this story, though no convincing evidence of the alleged impending massacre has ever been presented. The nearest thing to an official US government account of the matter – a Congressional Research Service report on events in Libya for the period – makes no mention at all of the threatened massacre. 6 

The US/NATO heavy bombing sent Libya crashing in utter chaos, leading to the widespread dispersal throughout North African and Middle East hotspots of the gigantic arsenal of weaponry that Gaddafi had accumulated. Libya is now a haven for terrorists, from al Qaeda to ISIS, whereas Gaddafi had been a leading foe of terrorists. He had declared Libya as a barrier to terrorists, as well as African refugees, going to Europe. 7 The bombing has contributed greatly to the area’s mammoth refugee crisis.

Why Won't American Media Tell the Truth About What's Happening in Venezuela? Justin Podur, Alternate. Sep 7, 2017.

A right-wing insurgency, with the United States' backing, threatens a fragile democracy.

The Rohingya refugee crisis and the problem of objectivity. Gearóid Ó Colmáin. Sep 14, 2017.

Human rights agencies financed by the US State-Department and Saudi Arabia, such as Human Rights Watch have blamed all of the violence on the Tatmadaw. As Burmese expert Rick Heizman. has shown, Human Rights Watch have published images of Buddhists fleeing Bengali terrorists, including an image of a Buddhist man being beaten to death by Muslims, and claimed that Rakhine Buddhists were responsible for the attacks. Heizman has called this deliberate disinformation and intends to supply the evidence to the International Criminal Court and pursue Human Rights Watch for crimes against humanity.

In previous articles I have explained the reasons for the media war on Myanmar and the complex ethnic, religious, historical and geo-poltical forces fueling the violence. No researcher – not even the Burmese government- claims that all of the violence is coming from one side. But all the mainstream media and most alternative media sources blame the Myanmar government and ‘fascist, racist Buddhist monks’. I have contested that consensus for the last two years as being a crash oversimplication of a complex ethno-religious conflict and will continue to do so.

... 

When I was in Syria late March 2011, just two weeks after the first attack by Islamists killed several police and civilians, I spoke to many really amiable anti-Assad people. Some of them were in the Muslim Brotherhood. I had dinner with them. They were extremely friendly. They told me things, lots of things. I heard stories about the ‘Shabiha’- government militia etc, about the lack of freedom in the country; about how countries such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia would be better. I listened and noted what they said. Then I had dinner with pro-Assad people. They were extremely friendly and amiable too. I listened to them. They told another story. When I had spoken to people from all sides, I looked at the wider picture, the global powers involved and the reasons for their hostility to Syria and the history of their destabilisation techniques. It was easier for me to contextualise what was happening as I had read many US foreign policy research papers and understood what the goal of Zionism was in the Middle East. I had also been writing about the war in Libya and had studied the build up to the French bombing of Ivory Coast the year before. When you study NATO or Western-led wars closely, you begin to see patterns and motifs that recur like movements in a symphony. Many people were fooled by the Arab Spring because they had not researched the history of US democratisation programmes. Although the US government confirmed that they organised the protest movements, many activists still repeat the slogans and memes diffused by the US agencies. The US empire is not omnipotent but many of its strategists have a higher IQ than their leftist critics. 

The mass media regularly publish horror stories from ‘Syrian refugees’ about Assad’s alleged crimes. Yet they never interview people who support him and who have been protected by the Syrian army from Western-backed terrorists. There are millions of such people. Why are they never heard? Did your reporters investigate the pro-government protests which have taken place in Myanmar denouncing the Bengali terrorists and their human rights lobbying groups? Have you looked into all the examples of fake news, photoshopping etc?

The beginning of the war on Syria was very like the one in Myanmar now.