Tag: perpetual war

The United States Can and Should Reduce Its Defense Spending

Secretary of State Marco Rubio attended his first NATO foreign ministers’ meeting and was more concerned about European sensibilities than American interests. Unfortunately, Rubio embraced the past rather than promoted the future. It would be tragic if the MAGA revolution resulted in more of the same.

Rubio sought to reassure European officials who have begun to do more in their own defense because they have been discomfited by both Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Rather than intensify European fears that the Trump administration finally meant business, the secretary disclaimed any intention to leave the alliance: “The United States is as active in NATO as it has ever been,” he insisted. While speaking next to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Rubio added: “Some of this hysteria and hyperbole that I see in the global media and some domestic media in the United States about NATO is unwarranted.” 

Indeed, Rubio suggested that Trump was apparently a secret alliance enthusiast: “We want NATO to be stronger, we want NATO to be more visible and the only way NATO can get stronger, more visible is if our partners, the nation states that comprise this important alliance, have more capability.” That doesn’t sound like the Trump that most of us know, but the new U.S. ambassador to NATO, Matt Whitaker, similarly opined that “under President Trump’s leadership, NATO will be stronger and more effective than ever before, and I believe that a robust NATO can continue to serve as a bedrock of peace and prosperity.”

In short, per the president’s aides, America plans on sticking around to protect the Europeans. Rubio insisted, “President Trump has made clear he supports NATO. We’re going to remain in NATO.” What the latter dislikes, Rubio explained, is states which lack the capabilities to fulfill their obligations. This is the same message that Joe Biden, both as vice president and president, routinely brought to the continent. Indeed, he spent years actively discouraging the Europeans from doing more on their own behalf.

In contrast, during his first term Trump reportedly told aides he wanted to withdraw from the alliance. His failure to act during the first few weeks of this presidency doesn’t mean he has grown to love what he once sought to delete. Of course, Rubio still echoes his boss in pushing other NATO member governments to do more. But without ill consequences for their failure to act, enthusiasm for reform is likely to quickly wane. After all, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, excoriated the Europeans for their lackadaisical attitude, but his message was drowned out by Biden singing a European variant of Bobby McFerrin’s hit tune “Don’t Worry Be Happy.” 

Nevertheless, the secretary has a tough sales job. Reported Deutsche Welle, “Rubio’s task of putting fellow NATO members at ease was made even harder on Wednesday when Trump announced tariffs that many fear could kick off global trade war. A 10 percent levy now applies to virtually all goods imported into the U.S. Goods from the European Union, which includes 23 of the 31 NATO member states, face tariffs of 20 percent.” The U.S. and Europe are struggling to remain friends, but just as in any other busted romance, Uncle Sam obviously no longer respects his partner. An unnamed European diplomat told the Associated Press, “We need to preempt a rapid retreat, but we’ve had nothing precise from the U.S. yet.” 

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Responsible For Millions Of Deaths, Blinken Tries To Attack Trump Ukraine Policy Of Ending War

Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was one of the chief architects of the disastrous policy of pushing for Ukrainian NATO membership in 2022 and bears partial direct responsibility for the millions of dead and wounded in the Ukraine War, which commenced after then Vice President Kamala Harris declared in Europe Ukraine would join the alliance.

The ghoulish former American official tried to attack Trump’s policy of ending the war and criticized Trump’s accurate description of the Zelenskiy regime’s refusal to work to end the conflict, in an interview with CNBC.

Blinken is part of a group of ‘Neocons’ who pushed for NATO expansion which they knew would cause a kinetic conflict with the Russian Federation.

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Trump Must Cut the Ukraine Albatross Loose

President Trump should avoid a snare of his own making and extricate the United States from the war between Russia and Ukraine.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly indicated that he expected the war between Ukraine and Russia to end quickly once he entered the oval office. He even boasted that he could bring a halt to the fighting within 24 hours. Trump has not been able to achieve his objective. Indeed, he has not been able to secure even a comprehensive ceasefire between Kyiv and Moscow. The most significant accomplishments to date are the agreements between the warring parties to refrain from attacks on infrastructure and to allow some consumer maritime traffic in the Black Sea to resume. Even those limited agreements are marked by numerous alleged violations by both sides.

Trump’s hopes for a wider ceasefire, much less a formal peace agreement, are fading fast, and his level of frustration is beginning to soar. His annoyance with Ukraine’s president Volodymr Zelensky has been apparent on several occasions, most notably during the infamous White House confrontation between Zelensky and both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance on February 28, 2025. Recently, however, Trump’s irritation with Vladimir Putin also has increased. On one occasion, the president expressed extreme anger at the Russian leader for dragging his feet on a more comprehensive ceasefire. Other administration officials also stated that it was time for Putin to make up his mind about whether or not he wants a peace accord.

Trump seemingly has wandered into a trap of his own making. Moreover, it is a snare that resembles the one that kept the United States entangled militarily in Afghanistan throughout most of his first term, despite his rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign about quickly extracting U.S. military forces from that quagmire. Once in office, Trump allowed hawkish advisers, such as Secretary of Defense James Mattis, to talk him into abandoning his own instincts and following the advice of “experts” who had mired the United States in the interminable Afghan conflict.  In the case of Ukraine, there are troubling signs that Trump may be responding favorably to hawks in both the United States and Europe who insist that failing to back Kyiv’s unrealistic position would amount to a shameful betrayal of a beleaguered democracy.

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Protest at Travis AFB Against US Weapons for Israeli Genocide

At 7:30 a.m. on April 9, the heavy traffic flow into California’s Travis Air Force Base came to a sudden stop.  As they have done numerous times, the “People’s Arms Embargo” blocked the main road into the base. The action this time commemorated the recently deceased long-time peace advocate David Hartsough, one of the co-founders of the Peoples Arms Embargo.

With traffic into the base stopped, one angry airman jumped out of his pickup truck and threatened to assault the peaceful protestors. He finally thought better of it and returned to his truck. Other waiting airmen and airwomen were patient and a few indicated support for the protest. One lowered his window and said, “Palestine will be free!” In the workout gym in an adjacent plaza, many people on their workout machines waved and jumped up and down in support.

At the blockade on the six-lane divided highway, about forty police officers were quickly on the scene. They broadcast a recorded message in English and Spanish that anyone blocking traffic would be arrested. Twelve protesters were arrested and cited with the crime.

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Trump White House holds Hamas ‘entirely responsible’ for Israeli execution of Palestinian medics

The Trump administration has doubled down on its position that Hamas is to blame for Israeli troops executing 15 Palestinian medical workers in Gaza, even after a video showed that the Israeli military was lying about the incident.

The Israeli army initially claimed its forces opened fire on vehicles that were advancing “suspiciously” and had no headlights or flashing emergency lights. But a video recorded by one of the executed paramedic’s phone showed the ambulances they were driving had emergency lights on when the Israeli army opened fire.

“Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose. To help people,” said Palestinian medic Refaat Radwan moments before he was killed.

The Israeli soldiers tried to cover up the crime by burying the 15 medics and their ambulances in a shallow grave. The army has since changed its story, acknowledging the lights were flashing and that they opened fire on unarmed men but claiming six of them were linked to Hamas while offering no evidence.

Despite the clear evidence of a war crime, the US is still backing the Israeli army’s conduct. “Hamas uses ambulances and more broadly human shields for terrorism,” White House National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes told Reuters. “President Trump understands the impossible situation this tactic creates for Israel and holds Hamas entirely responsible.”

Before the video came out, State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce was asked about the executions and also said that Hamas was to blame. “Every single thing that is happening in Gaza is happening because of Hamas. Every single dynamic,” she said.

On Monday, Hamas responded to Hughes’s statement and denied that it uses ambulances for military purposes. Hamas wrote on Telegram that the statement represents “a horrific example of unethical solidarity with the Nazis of our time, in their brutal war against innocent civilians and humanitarian organizations.”

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Trump administration weighs drone strikes on Mexican cartels

The Trump administration is considering launching drone strikes on drug cartels in Mexico as part of an ambitious effort to combat criminal gangs trafficking narcotics across the southern border, according to six current and former U.S. military, law enforcement and intelligence officials with knowledge of the matter.

Discussions among White House, Defense Department and intelligence officials, which are still at an early stage, have included possible drone strikes against cartel figures and their logistical networks in Mexico with the cooperation of Mexico’s government, the sources said.

Still, the administration has made no final decision and reached no definitive agreement about countering the cartels. And unilateral covert action, without Mexico’s consent, has not been ruled out and could be an option of last resort, the sources said. It is unclear whether American officials have floated the possibility of drone strikes to the Mexican government.

If Mexico and the United States proceed together with drone strikes or other action, it would not be the first time they have launched a joint effort to take on the cartels, nor would it be the first time that American military and intelligence worked in concert with Mexico’s law enforcement and army.

But what the Trump administration is contemplating could be unprecedented both in the number of U.S. personnel involved and in the use of American unmanned aircraft to bomb cartel personnel and assets.

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NATO’s Operation Condor steamrolls onwards

O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom! ~ Madame Roland

Following what a friend calls my eloquent and excellent article regarding the fate of Ms Ozturk, he writes that we “need to shout loud and often about this growing suppression of free speech, because if we don’t, we will undoubtedly be faced with Operation Condor type disappearances at a future time”. As this article shows, though some of us have long been hoarse, that time is already upon us and, though Latin America is not as jam-packed as it once was with right-wing dictators and former high-ranking Nazis, below the surface, little has changed or will change until we make it change.

The fear factor faucet

As in ancient Rome, we must always be kept on edge, in fear that our “freedoms” are under attack by extraneous powers, Russia’s over-worked President Putin in particular, who is set to conjure up out of thin air a couple of million paratroopers to pop down in front of us and take those illusory freedoms away. To safeguard ourselves against that, we are being urged to stockpile food and, presumably, to give the Ivans a bloody nose with our cans of sardines when they kick in our front doors.

Although crass tommyrot like that is not worth a hearing, it works on its core target markets, most particularly those who are in receipt of State payments and/or who want to aimlessly drift through life, oblivious to the dangerous currents underneath the surface.

Although not all of them will believe that Putin’s paratroopers will shortly be dropping in for afternoon tea, or that every Arab baby is a suicide bomber or that every Latino is a drug dealing cut throat, because enough people will believe there is no smoke without fire, NATO’s charlatans can continue to get away with their scams until they are overthrown.

If one must worry about Putin, it is not his paratroopers that should concern us, but his vast array of state-of-the-art F35 bombers, about which the ordinary Joe is powerless. If we are worried about China annexing the Panama Canal, we should be more worried it is being gifted to Black Rock and the other parasitic companies that are the real powers behind NATO’s machinations.

But, then, fear is only one of our three primary choices, the other emasculating one being freeze, to which we now come and the preferable one being fight, which we will leave to last.

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The All-Devouring Machine: Pentagon Malfeasance and Insatiable Empire

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

The Pentagon’s previously annual list of its bases, the “Base Structure Report,” is notoriously incomplete and, at times, inaccurate. The Pentagon has also failed to release the Congressionally-mandated annual report since the Fiscal Year 2018 version, making an accurate list even more difficult than in prior years. Most observers assume the U.S. military does not know the true number of bases occupied by U.S. forces. It is telling – but not a good sign – that when a recent U.S. Army-funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my 2015 list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s list.

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Israeli Troops Blow Whistle on War Crimes in Gaza ‘Kill Zone’

An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a “kill zone.”

The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel – which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls – decided on a policy of “widespread, deliberate destruction” in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.

“To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip… an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land,” the report states. “The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”

“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence,” the publication continues. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.”

“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions,” the report adds. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

“The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions,” the paper says. “Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that “enough people died or got injured” crossing the unmarked boundary.

Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the “kill zone” to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.

“The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them,’” one reserve warrant officer explained. “People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but… boom,” tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.

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UN Exposes Systematic Israeli Rape of Palestinians

On March 13th, the UN Human Rights High Commission published a horrifying report exposing in oft-emetic detail how the Zionist entity has employed “sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians” on an industrial scale since the Gaza genocide erupted in October 2023. The UN concludes these hideous acts are a central component of Israel’s “broader effort to undermine [Palestinians’] right to self-determination,” their systematic nature pointing unambiguously to endorsement by Tel Aviv’s military and political leaders.

The report records, “sexual and gender-based violence is by no means a new element of the Israeli occupation.” However, in the wake of October 7th, there has been a “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men”, both by Zionist Occupation Forces and settlers. The UN encountered no obstacles collecting voluminous highly incriminating evidence of this vile abuse. In addition to a welter of victim and witness testimony, perpetrators often voyeuristically captured themselves and their confederates openly committing these crimes on camera.

Frequently, these abhorrent images were pridefully posted on the culprits’ personal social media accounts. Such actions amply attest to the culture of total impunity in which ZOF soldiers literally rape and pillage. “Despite the abundance of witness and digital evidence of Israeli soldiers committing crimes in Gaza,” the UN found “there have been no meaningful efforts by Israel to hold the perpetrators accountable.” Requests submitted to Tel Aviv for clarity on investigations into sexual violence committed by Occupation Forces have been ignored:

“The Commission has not seen any evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any effective measures to prevent or stop acts of sexual violence or to identify and punish perpetrators.”

By contrast, the UN documented multiple statements by Zionist entity officials actively supporting ZOF militants accused of sex crimes, and “legitimizing rape and other forms of sexual violence” against Palestinians, particularly detainees. That Israel’s rulers advocate sexually-charged attacks on Palestinians is further reinforced by a deliberate ZOF strike on a women’s rights centre in Gaza, in mid-November 2023. The UN noted the broadside’s “clear gendered dimension,” with soldiers daubing deeply offensive, sexist insults directed at Palestinian women on the building’s inner walls in Hebrew.

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