Tag: perpetual war

U.S. presidential debate delusion: two candidates for one party… the War Party

Two events dominated international news this week: the TV debate between U.S. presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump; and reports that Washington and its NATO allies are gearing up to permit the Ukrainian regime to use their long-range missiles to hit deep into the territory of the Russian Federation. The latter move would be viewed in Moscow as a major escalation from a proxy war to a direct conflict between nuclear powers.

The aforementioned events are tightly connected. The U.S. presidential election is less than two months away with Democrat Harris and Republican Trump vying in a hotly contested and divisive race for the White House. Harris, the incumbent vice president, performed best in the live TV debate, according to polls. Trump, however, with characteristic brashness, claimed that he had won the debate. His subsequent refusal to engage in a follow-up second debate might infer that the Trump campaign fears that Harris was able to get the upper hand over her older opponent, who sounded hackneyed and incoherent. We are talking here about superficial style and not substance, which neither candidate has much of.

Discernibly, the U.S. establishment favors Harris to win. Most of the American media are supportive of what would be the first woman to become president of the United States, and a woman of color too. That credential alone burnishes the image of the American republic as a supposed bastion of democracy and liberal values.

More importantly for the American deep state – or ruling class – is that Harris is more aligned with its imperialist foreign policy. As with her current boss, President Joe Biden, Harris spoke belligerently about confronting Russia and unwavering support for the conflict in Ukraine.

The Washington establishment wants Harris to win on November 5 to ensure the continuation of the proxy war against Russia. The all-dominant military-industrial complex at the heart of U.S. capitalism wants the war racket to keep churning out mega profits. But also in the bigger geopolitical picture, the conflict with Russia is just one element in a wider policy of confrontation with other foreign powers, primarily China, or any other nation that challenges U.S. presumptions of hegemony. As we argued in our editorial last week, the United States is endeavoring to offset its failing global power by pursuing an intensified policy of aggression and bellicosity even if such a policy puts the entire planet at risk of catastrophic world war.

The highly choreographed move this week by the United States and Britain to give the Ukrainian regime permission to use long-range missiles to strike deep into Russia is tightly correlated with the high-stakes presidential election.

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38,000 Russian Troops Committed To Kursk Counteroffensive: Report

Russia is stepping up its pressure on Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region, after launching its counteroffensive there last week. It’s now reported that as many as 38,000 Russian troops have been committed to the operation, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been forced to defend the incursion — which began in August — against mounting criticism.

A report in The Financial Times cites a senior Ukrainian military intelligence official who assessed the number of Russian soldiers now involved in the counteroffensive, with some of these having been redeployed from southern Ukraine. Despite this, the same source says that the counterattack is “still not large-scale,” and Russia will need to introduce more of its combat-proven assault brigades before making more significant gains. In the past, Zelensky has mentioned 100,000 Russian troops being required to fully repulse the incursion.

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Alleged would-be Trump assassin Ryan Routh wrote 2023 memoir about how Ukraine must win ‘unwinnable war’ and advocating for killing Trump

Ryan Wesley Routh, the man under investigation for a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Sunday, wrote a book with his fiancé about how Ukraine must win the “unwinnable war” against Russia in which he discussed Donald Trump being assassinated. The book was published last year.

The book is titled, “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment, and the Global Citizen-Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea, and the End of Humanity.” It was written by Routh and his fiancé Kathleen Schaffer.

While discussing the Russia-Ukraine war, Routh wrote, “I presume that I must be clear, that while on the current path Ukraine will not win, it is imperative for the world that they do win, and that’s why this book is so important, for us to recognize that losing is not an option and what we must do to win.”

Routh wrote of Trump in the book with disparaging terms and supported the assassination of the now-GOP nominee.

“I must take part of the blame for the retarded child that we elected for our next president that ended up being brainless, but I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologize,” he wrote.

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Trump Assassination Attempt Suspect Ryan Routh Was Coordinating with Foreign Soldiers to Fight for Ukraine — Sought to Recruit ‘Revolutionaries’ to ‘Take This Whole System Down’

The man accused of attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, has been connected to a bizarre web of pro-Ukraine activism and a history of erratic behavior.

Routh, who was apprehended in West Palm Beach with a scoped AK-47 before the Secret Service intervened, had previously expressed an obsessive fixation on Ukraine and even conducted interviews boasting of his commitment to die for their cause.

In a now-deleted X (formerly Twitter) post directed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Routh declared his intentions: “I am an American coming to fight with you in Ukraine; I am flying into Krakow and will take any transport to Kyiv to meet you and fight to the death. We must get every civilian in the world to come and join the fight; I will be the example. Attack Moscow now.”

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Putin’s Bluffing ‘Until He Isn’t’: Ex-UK Official

Kim Darroch, Britain’s former national security adviser, said in an interview published Saturday that the West should consider Russian Vladimir Putin’s threat of a major escalation before allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia.

“If they are confident that he’s bluffing, then fine. But he’s bluffing until he isn’t,” he told The Financial Times.

U.S. President Joe Biden and the collective West continue to gamble.

This is a major shift from when Biden told reporters on 11 March 2022, just weeks after the Russian invasion, that providing “offensive” equipment to Ukraine was off-limits.

“Look, the idea… the idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews, just understand – and don’t kid yourself, no matter what you all say – that’s called WWIII,” he said at the time.

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From Carolina Roofer To Ukraine Activist: Would-Be Trump Assassin Ryan Routh Gave Many Interviews With MSM 

Fox News confirmed earlier that the suspect in the second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has been identified as Ryan Wesley Routh. 

Using public records, Routh appears to be from Greensboro, North Carolina (some reports say he now lives in Hawaii) and was or still is part owner of United Roofing and Construction Inc. 

On Yelp, one negative review for “United Roofing” in late 2016 said:

“As a military member trying to buy a home before returning from a deployment, the proprietor, Ryan Routh, insulted me for trying to buy a house site unseen as many military members do returning from overseas.” 

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Would-Be Censors Peddle Yet Another Election Meddle

In early September, the US Department of Justice announced criminal charges against two employees of RT (formerly Russia Today), alleging that the state media outlet “orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil.”

Separately, DOJ announced its theft (“seizure”) of 32 Internet domains supposedly used to “covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election. ”

The victims, per US Attorney Damian Williams? “[T]he American people, who received Russian messaging without knowing it.”

US Attorney General Merrick B. Garland weighed in as well: “The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts.”

Oh, really?

Garland, once nominated to serve on the US Supreme Court, surely knows better. There is no “unless the ideas originate with parties I happen to dislike, or include content I disagree with” exception to the First Amendment’s free speech and free press guarantees.

DOJ doesn’t even enjoy the fig leaf of an “in extremis” excuse, such as a state of war existing between the US and Russia or an imminent threat of attack which the indictments and domain thefts might have thwarted.

Does the Russian regime “meddle” in US elections? Of course it does. All powerful regimes meddle in other countries’ elections.

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US Provoked the 1979 Russian Invasion of Afghanistan: Parallel to the Ukraine War?

The December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan was a watershed event, one that definitively ended “détente” between the global superpowers, the United States and the USSR, and inaugurated a new and more intense phase of tension. The invasion was a clearcut violation of international law and was widely condemned. At the time, it appeared that the Soviet invasion was completely unprovoked, either by the Afghans themselves or by the United States.

In the nearly half century that that has elapsed since the invasion, a large amount of new information has emerged that casts doubt on the benign image of the US government, as a bystander in the Afghan calamity, and suggests that US officials deliberately provoked the invasion; and then, after the invasion occurred, some US officials actively welcomed its occurrence.

A reexamination of the 1979 Afghan case seems especially relevant today, given the obvious parallels to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the US response to the invasion of Afghanistan offers a model of what US officials should seek to achieve in Ukraine. The similarities between the two historical cases are indeed striking: Above all, the 1979 Afghan invasion was widely viewed at the time as being an unprovoked act of aggression, very much the way that the Ukraine invasion is being viewed now. We will see that such claims are contradicted by the historical record. It was US provocation that triggered both conflicts.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was widely presented as a major threat to Western security, but this was largely a propaganda invention. If one surveys the record of declassified documents from 1945 all the way to the late 1970s, one finds little US interest in Afghanistan, which was regarded as a strategic backwater, due to its exceptionally rugged geography and lack of access to the sea. The overarching US perspective was succinctly stated by a 1973 article in the Wall Street Journal, which was entitled: “Do the Russians Covet Afghanistan? If So, it is Hard to Figure Why.” The article went on to characterize Afghanistan as “a vast expanse of desert waste.” From the US National Security Council, a 1974 document stated: “Afghanistan is of no major importance to us.”

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Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the Armageddon Agenda

The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic inequality. In the foreign policy realm, she or he will face vexing decisions over Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, and China/Taiwan. But one issue that few of us are even thinking about could pose a far greater quandary for the next president and even deeper peril for the rest of us: nuclear weapons policy.

Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

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CIA, MI6 Chiefs Praise Ukrainian Invasion of Russia for Inflicting War on ‘Ordinary Russians.’

CIA Director William Burns and MI6 Chief Richard Moore made an unprecedented joint appearance in London on Saturday, discussing the Ukraine war. The event, hosted by the globalist Financial Times, saw both intelligence leaders praise Ukrainian forces’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

Moore commended Ukraine’s controversial counter-invasion of Russia as “typically audacious and bold on the part of the Ukrainians,” praising it for having “brought the war home to ordinary Russians.” The surprise offensive on August 6 has bogged down in recent days but saw success early on, with around 500 square miles of Russian territory seized.

However, while portrayed as a great embarrassment for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the Kursk operation may prove to be a significant strategic mistake. Ukraine has used limited reserves, armed with valuable Western equipment such as American HIMARS artillery systems and British Challenger 2 tanks, for the offensive—meaning they cannot be used to reinvigorate Ukrainian forces buckling under a grinding Russian offensive in the Donbas region.

The Kursk offensive does not appear to have diverted enough Russian resources from the Donbas to halt Russian offensive operations in that theater, with the Ukrainians losing several towns and villages as the Russians close in on the vital logistics hub of Pokrovsk.

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