Tag: perpetual war

Diego Garcia Smells Like War

A significant amount of US military power has been on the move over this past week, including several B-2 strategic bombers which have landed at the US military base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean just over 2,000 miles southeast of Iran. According to press reports this is the most significant B-2 presence on the Island in nearly half a decade. In addition flight trackers are showing increased activity by at least nine KC-135R refueling aircraft in the region. Several C-17 cargo planes have also been spotted by satellites on the Island.

The US President has ordered US Carrier Strike Group Carl Vinson to the Mideast.

While the Administration continues to escalate its illegal bombing campaign against Yemen – some are reporting more than 60 strikes today alone and President Trump promises that they will continue “for a long time” – speculation is increasing that the Diego Garcia build-up is the beginning of the long process of positioning US military muscle for an attack on Iran.

President Trump today warned although his “big preference is we work it out with Iran…if we don’t work it out, bad bad things are gonna happen with Iran.”

So is the US president elected with the promise to end wars rather than start them ready to launch a war against the modern, technologically-advanced nation of 90 million with an extremely complicated terrain, advanced military capabilities, and a newly-signed strategic partnership treaty with Russia?

No one knows.

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War, Doublethink, and the Struggle for Survival: Geopolitics of the Gaza Genocide

In a genocidal war that has spiraled into a struggle for political survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and the global powers supporting him continue to sacrifice Palestinian lives for political gain.

The sordid career of Israel’s extremist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, epitomizes this tragic reality.

Ben-Gvir joined Netanyahu’s government coalition following the December 2022 elections. He remained in the coalition after the October 7 2023 war and genocide, with the understanding that any ceasefire in Gaza would force his departure.

As long as the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their cities continued as long as Ben-Gvir stayed on board – though neither he nor Netanyahu had any real ‘next-day’ plan, other than to carry out some of the most heinous massacres against a civilian population in recent history.

On January 19, Ben-Gvir left the government immediately following a ceasefire agreement, which many argued would not last. Netanyahu’s untrustworthiness, along with the collapse of his government if the war ended completely, made the ceasefire unfeasible.

Ben-Gvir returned when the genocide resumed on March 18. “We are back, with all our might and power!”  he wrote In a tweet on the day of his return.

Israel lacks a clear plan because it cannot defeat the Palestinians. While the Israeli army has inflicted suffering on the Palestinian people like no other force has against a civilian population in modern history, the war endures because the Palestinians refuse to surrender.

Yet, Israel’s military planners know that a military victory is no longer possible. Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon recently added his voice to the growing chorus, stating during an interview on March 15 that “revenge is not a war plan”.

The Americans, who supported Netanyahu’s violation of the ceasefire – thus resuming the killings – also understand that the war is almost entirely a political struggle, designed to keep figures like Ben-Gvir and extremist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in Netanyahu’s coalition.

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Pete Hegseth Requires Everyone in Combat Units to Meet the Same Physical Fitness Standards

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the military services to require everyone who serves in a combat specialty to meet the same physical fitness standard. Hegseth announced the policy was on the way by a video posted on X as he returned to the US from Japan.

Hi, everybody. Pete Hegseth here, and we’re about to land in Washington, DC, on our way back from Japan, where we’ve been meeting with the troops, talking to allies and partners, and reestablishing deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. This Sunday, of course, we’re still working, I want to show you one thing. It’s a new memorandum that’s coming out today on Combat Arms standards. 

You see, for far too long, we have allowed standards to slip. We’ve had different standards for men and women in combat arms MOSs and jobs. That’s not acceptable. We need to have the same standards, male or female, in our combat roles to ensure our men and women who are under our leaders or in those formations have the best possible leaders and the highest possible standards that are not based at all on your sex, if you’re a man or a woman. 

I’m signing this memorandum today. The services will review and see that we have nothing but the highest and equal standards for men and women in combat.

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So Milley was running the whole Ukraine war with Russia without telling the public -report

The first casualty in war is the truth, and now the New York Times has revealed how true that was.

While the U.S. public under the Biden administration was told, via Congress, that the U.S. was supplying arms to Ukraine, actually, the U.S. was pretty much running the whole show.

Its long and interesting report begins this way:

One of the men, Lt. Gen. Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, remembers being led up a flight of stairs to a walkway overlooking the cavernous main hall of the garrison’s Tony Bass Auditorium. Before the war, it had been a gym, used for all-hands meetings, Army band performances and Cub Scout pinewood derbies. Now General Zabrodskyi peered down on officers from coalition nations, in a warren of makeshift cubicles, organizing the first Western shipments to Ukraine of M777 artillery batteries and 155-millimeter shells.

Then he was ushered into the office of Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps, who proposed a partnership.

Its evolution and inner workings visible to only a small circle of American and allied officials, that partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology would become the secret weapon in what the Biden administration framed as its effort to both rescue Ukraine and protect the threatened post-World War II order.

The U.S., during the time of Gen. Mark Milley, was pretty much calling the shots on all aspects of the war — targets, intelligence, trainings, logistics and all kinds of sneaky pete inside Russia itself, ostensibly to keep the information out of Putin’s hands, the idea being to let him think Ukraine was putting up a ferocious fight on its own, without more than U.S. arms sales buttressing it.

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Latest US nuclear gravity bomb enters production

Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) has shown off the United States’ latest nuclear weapon as full production begins seven months ahead of schedule. The B61-13 variable-yield gravity bomb is part of a major program to modernize the American nuclear deterrent.

Nuclear weapons may seem like a relic of the Cold War that isn’t very pleasant to think about, but the are still front and center when it comes to geopolitics.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, cuts to the American and Russian arsenals have drastically reduced the number of combined warheads on alert from a high of between 8,000 and 9,000 to only about 1,800 combined, which includes both strategic and tactical weapons. However, nuclear deterrence has become much more complex as rogue states have striven to acquire atom bombs and China has gone from having an “arsenal in being” with a handful of warheads kept in storage to an estimated 24 weapons on alert as it moves to a more nuclear-centered strategy.

Because of this, the US has embarked on a program to extend the life of and to modernize its nuclear arsenal to make sure it remains safe and reliable as well as being able to counter the threats of the 21st century.

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Sometimes, Appeasement Is the Best Option

Appeasement was a bad idea in 1938, but it’s often a good idea. Ukraine would be wise to appease Russia.

Ukraine’s supporters in the United States and Europe insist that any agreement ending Kyiv’s war with Russia must not involve Ukrainian territorial concessions, or Russia will profit from an inexcusable act of aggression against its neighbor. However, demanding a return to pre-conflict borders ignores current military realities. Russian forces occupy approximately 20 percent of Ukraine’s prewar territory, and there are no signs that Kyiv’s position is likely to improve. Indeed, Ukraine’s latest offensive into Russian-held territory near Kursk has been a spectacular failure.

The long-term prospects for Ukraine in a war of attrition are not encouraging either. Western intelligence agencies issue reports showing high (probably inflated) estimates about the extent of Russian military casualties, trying to sell the message that continued fighting will prove too costly for the Kremlin. However, those same agencies curiously omit estimates of Ukrainian military casualties, an odd stance if Ukraine actually is winning the war. Russia’s prewar population was approximately 140 million, whereas Ukraine’s was less than 50 million. Worse, the drain on the latter’s population from the fighting has been severe.  Experts estimate that Ukraine’s population has dropped by10 million since Russia’s February 2022 invasion: from 48 million to just over 37 million today, while Russia’s total has barely budged. Moscow’s edge in deployable military personnel and hardware is even greater. The brutal truth is that Russia is in a much better position than Ukraine to prevail in a war of attrition.

Insisting that the Kremlin return all conquered territory to Kyiv in a peace accord is profoundly unrealistic. Ukraine is almost certain to lose a war of attrition – after even more death and destruction. Western backers of Ukraine are doing their client no favor if they press Kyiv to persist in its unrealistic, maximalist demands. Recognizing an unpleasant reality and making essential policy adjustments do not constitute cowardice or feckless appeasement. It means having the wisdom to choose the best available option in a difficult situation.

An especially toxic phenomenon in world affairs has been the tendency of Western political leaders to be obsessed with the supposed lessons of the 1930s. It seems that every time a would-be challenger to any aspect of the existing U.S-directed international order surfaces, that individual is demonized as the “new Hitler.” Likewise, the country he controls supposedly poses a threat comparable to the one Nazi Germany posed. That caricature has been applied to political figures as diverse as Ho Chi Minh, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin.

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The Real Outrage in Yemen

Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”

Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.

The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.

Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.

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Key Takeaways From NYT’s Secret History Detailing US ‘Shocking’ Involvement In Ukraine War

It is years too late and alternative and independent media had already done so much work on exposing the reality, including 600+ page books which have been published, but the New York Times on Sunday is out with a lengthy report on The Partnership: The Secret History of America’s Role in the Ukraine War.

Up until very recently, mainstream media gatekeepers wouldn’t so much as admit that a proxy war has been unfolding from the very start of the conflict in Ukraine. This even after the so-called paper of record had earlier in Feb. 2024 acknowledged that the CIA had built 12 “secret spy bases” in Ukraine to wage a shadow war against Russia going back to 2014. 

Again, it comes much too belatedly, but now with Ukrainian forces clearly losing the fight, the Times admits that the prior Biden administration was far more involved in being embedded on a military and intelligence level with Ukraine than was previously made public by official sources.

The report is a deep dive into the “extraordinary partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology” that became Zelensky’s “secret weapon” in countering Russia. It begins by describing that within two months of Putin sending his army across the border, Ukrainian generals in civilians clothes were being secretly whisked away for high-level war planning sessions at US bases in Germany.

“The passengers were top Ukrainian generals,” NY Times describes of men taken by a convoy of unmarked cars from the Ukrainian capital to Western Europe. “Their destination was Clay Kaserne, the headquarters of U.S. Army Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany. Their mission was to help forge what would become one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war in Ukraine.”

The report makes clear that US commanders were much more inter-woven into Ukrainian operations than known, to the point of ‘shocking’ some NATO allies. In essence many counter-Russia operations happening on Ukraine’s battlefields were simply run from the base in Germany. 

“But a New York Times investigation reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood,” the report continues. “At critical moments, the partnership was the backbone of Ukrainian military operations that, by U.S. counts, have killed or wounded more than 700,000 Russian soldiers. (Ukraine has put its casualty toll at 435,000.) Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

Notably, this is essentially US officials and the NY Times also admitting that the Kremlin has all along been right when it insisted this was never really simply about Moscow vs. Kiev – but that NATO countries have militarized Ukraine and weaponized it against Russia. President Putin and Kremlin officials have been fiercely complaining about US intervention all along, but this was dismissed in the West as merely ‘propaganda’.

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Gabbard Calls Trump ‘President of Peace’ Despite Yemen Bombing Campaign, Support for Gaza Slaughter

On Saturday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called President Trump the “president of peace” despite his bombing campaign in Yemen and his support for the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

“President Trump IS the President of Peace. He is ending bloodshed across the world and will deliver lasting peace in the Middle East,” Gabbard wrote on X. “Where Joe Biden failed, President Trump will succeed.”

Gabbard made the comments in a post sharing a quote from President Trump, who claimed his administration was “engaged in relentless diplomacy to forge a lasting peace in the Middle East, building on the historic Abraham Accords.”

Gabbard has been supportive of Trump’s daily bombing campaign in Yemen and was one of the administration officials in the leaked Signal chat that celebrated the bombing of a residential building.

As a member of Congress, Gabbard opposed the first Trump administration’s intervention in Yemen and frequently labeled the Saudi war against the Houthis that the US was supporting at the time “genocidal.”

One reason Gabbard was critical of the US’s involvement in the Saudi war in Yemen was that it was not authorized by Congress, making it illegal under the Constitution. Trump’s current bombing campaign in Yemen has also not been authorized by Congress, a fact recently pointed out by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

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The Militarization Of Europe

While President Trump is conducting peace negotiations in Ukraine, a general hysteria and psychosis of war is emerging in Europe. Fear is slowly taking hold of citizens of the European Union who are used to ordinary “civilian life”, while wars were regularly fought elsewhere.

It should be emphasized that in this entire psychosis that is being created on the Old Continent, politicians are undoubtedly adding fuel to the fire. As a rule, those in power – liberal, while, interestingly, those in opposition – right-wing, who by vocation should be more warlike and ready for wars – seek a more sober approach to the problem and not hasty, emotionally motivated decisions, which are then presented as strategic and achievable. If they are achievable, the question is at what price? Will it end up being too expensive and harmful compared to the benefits that are to be achieved? What will happen to that pile of expensive weapons that should be produced if there is no war in Europe in the end (by the term Europe here I always mean the EU and NATO members)? And, what about the citizens who will be impoverished under the burden of accrued debts, which will be huge, given that the armament must be started “from scratch” and without cash? The money will have to be withdrawn from banks or from the budget that was intended for various social, infrastructural and other projects, which will negatively affect the standard of citizens.

In order for decisions of this type to be strategic at all, a prerequisite is that there are previous in-depth, precise calculations and projections by the state analytical institutes responsible. This is not the case. The agenda is simply hasty and forced, and is by no means the result of in-depth consideration – and all those who deal with it professionally know that, but it is not advisable to talk about it publicly.

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