Tag: perpetual war

‘We Are the Only Ones… Who Can Do This’

The so-called SignalGate scandal centered on the bombing of Yemen is highly revelatory. First, some resources. CNN has a useful annotated account of the chats exchanged at the highest levels of the Trump administration. At their respective Substacks, Lenny Broytman and Caitlin Johnstone have telling dissections of these chats as well. At Jacobin, Branko Marcetic has an important article that reminds us of the illegality of the attacks. As the article’s subheading puts it: The press [mainstream media] is mostly framing the Yemen group chat scandal as a story of incompetence. There’s little attention being paid to the deadliness, illegality, and ineffectiveness of the strikes themselves.

To me, among the most telling “chats” came from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. It highlights the “exceptional” nature of America:

Pete Hegseth to Vice President JD Vance: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.

But Mike [Waltz, the National Security Adviser] is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this. Nobody else even close. Question is timing…

This is precisely the problem for America since the Vietnam War, if not before then. We’ve created a monster military, a “global strike” force, that is capable of destroying any target anywhere around the globe. “Nobody else even close,” SecDef Hegseth correctly says. And because we can do it, because we are exceptional in military force, our leaders believe we should do it, even if it’s only to send a “message” to the world how tough we are, how committed we are to killing others.

Other countries – like those “free-loading” European ones – are PATHETIC because they don’t have America’s military might. Only we can smite evildoers around the globe, only we can do so while also arming Israel to the teeth and covering its flanks while it continues its annihilation of Gaza, and this is something we are immensely proud of.

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Ukrainian Dictator Zelensky Says Putin ‘Will Die Soon’ & War ‘Will Come To An End’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boldly claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin “will die soon” and the ongoing war “will come to an end.”

The comment came during an interview with a French news outlet just after Zelensky met with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday.

Rumors of Putin battling through major health issues have been spread for several years now.

Zelensky’s inflammatory remark could throw a wrench into ongoing peace negotiations between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia last week.

History suggests Zelensky, not Putin, is in danger of coming to an early demise as Western puppet leaders are often discarded after the globalist system is finished using them.

And, if Zelensky’s Western handlers don’t take him out to cover up their loose ends, he could be targeted by the Kremlin or even his own people who he’s been sending into the deadly meat grinder in the war against the Russia.

Infowars founder and host Alex Jones wrote on 𝕏, “If I was placing a bet on who is going to live longer, my money would be 20 to one on Putin. My money is on Putin out living Zelensky.”

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Israeli soldier tells CBS News he was ordered to use Palestinians as human shields in Gaza

The war is back in Gaza. Since abandoning a ceasefire on March 17, the Israel Defense Forces have pounded the Palestinian territory with waves of deadly strikes it says are targeting Hamas terrorists. Those strikes have brought the overall death toll in Gaza to well over 50,000 since the beginning of the war, according to the enclave’s Hamas-run Health Ministry.

CBS News spoke recently with an Israeli soldier who has questioned the military’s tactics. Tommy — not his real name, as he agreed to speak with CBS News on the condition of anonymity — fought in Gaza for the IDF, and his account of the tactics used raises some serious questions.

“We’ve burned down buildings for no reasons, which is violating the international law, of course,” he told CBS News. “…And we used human shields as protection.”

Tommy said his commander ordered his unit to use Gazan civilians to search buildings for explosives instead of dogs.

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Was This ‘Leak’ Accidental or Is It Pro-War Psyops?

There are several curious aspects of this ‘leak’ of internal communication of high ranking members of the Trump administration:

Top national security officials for President Donald Trump, including his defense secretary, texted war plans for upcoming military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in a secure messaging app that included the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, the magazine reported in a story posted online Monday. The National Security Council said the text chain “appears to be authentic.”
…
The material in the text chain “contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Iran-backed Houthi-rebels in Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported.

The Atlantic is the worst magazine in America. Its editor in chief, ..

.. Jeffrey Goldberg, dropped out of an Ivy League University to volunteer to be an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada. In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that he helped cover up serious prisoner abuse.

Goldberg is a neo-conservative who has yet to see a U.S. instigated war he dislikes. To trust his reporting is dangerous.

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Even if the war ended tomorrow, Ukraine could end up broke by 2026

There is no plan in place to fund the Ukrainian budget after 2025.

Even if the war ends by the summer of 2025, it will take some time to reduce military expenditures, leaving European nations on the hook. It’s not clear that European elites have fully understood the political costs, however much longer the war continues.

With intensive, U.S.-brokered negotiations ongoing in Saudi Arabia involving separate Ukrainian and Russian delegations, hopes are rising that the Trump administration will finally be able to bring an end to the war.

But even if the war ends tomorrow, it would be unwise to assume that Ukraine could reduce military spending close to prewar levels.

Ukraine now has almost 900,000 men and women at arms, a threefold increase from peacetime, and that doesn’t take into account irrecoverable losses through death and injury. Estimates vary widely, but the casualty rate is commonly thought to number in the hundreds of thousands, with compensation provided to the injured and families of the deceased.

The war in Ukraine has therefore come at a vast financial cost to that country. Ukraine’s defense spending has risen tenfold since the 2021 budget was announced, when social welfare payments were the country’s biggest expenditure.

This has left a gaping hole in Ukraine’s finances that no amount of tax increases or Western donations will be able to fill over a sustained period without political consequences.

Since 2022, Ukraine has run an average budget deficit of over 22% of GDP. Based on the current exchange rate, Ukraine’s budget shortfall in 2025 amounts to around $41.5 billion. And that assumes defense spending falling slightly this year. In the hopefully unlikely event that war continues to the end of the year, the Ukrainian state would need to revise its budget upwards as it did in 2024.

Today, Ukraine’s domestic revenue, including taxes, excise, and duties, just about covers the cost of the defense effort, which in 2024 accounted for 64% of its total budget expenditure. That includes significant tax increases as the war has gone on. Total tax revenue will have risen by more than 100% since the war started and personal income taxes by over 200%. This in a country in which, according to the Wilson Center, 50% of the population lives at a basic subsistence level.

As Ukraine is cut off from international capital markets, it has had to meet the difference through aid and loans from Western nations.

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It Wasn’t a Leak, It was a Devious “Charlie Foxtrot”

Charlie Foxtrot is a polite euphemism for a crude military term — Clusterfu*k. That describes the first scandal of the Trump Administration. Somehow, whether deliberate or accidentally, a Zionist journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg was added to a Signal chat by Trump’s National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz, or by someone who worked for Waltz. Goldberg suddenly found himself part of a group chat of Trump’s top defense, diplomatic and intelligence officials. The group included CIA Director Ratcliffe, DNI’s Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, among other luminaries.

If you are not familiar with Signal, you create a group chat by naming a group and then adding members from your list of contacts. This tells us that Goldberg was part of Waltz’s list of contacts. Goldberg is a particularly slimy character, not because he published portions of the chat, but because he behaved as a political hack instead of a journalist. A journalist with that unexpected access, would have written an immediate story announcing that the US was going to start bombing Yemen just to make an example of it. What did Goldberg do? He waited till the bombing happened and then hoisted the Trump gang on its own petard. He made the story about Charlie Foxtrot, which he published on Monday in The Atlantic magazine.

This was not a leak. This was a gift to Goldberg. While the contents of the chat are not officially classified, the information being discussed was operationally sensitive. The chat exposed most of the Trump team as shallow and dismissive of the military and diplomatic implications of the decision to start bombing Yemen.

If Waltz and company wanted to discuss the pros and cons of bombing Yemen, he should have convened a Secure Video Conference, aka SVTC (pronounced, CIVITS).

Pete Hegseth’s remarks to the press, responding to the Goldberg article, makes a solid case that he is not qualified to serve as Secretary of Defense. Instead of admitting that this was a fu*kup on the part of Waltz, he decided to attack Goldberg. Moreover, he pretends that the US was hitting hardened, military targets.

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US Intel Report Blasts Jolani’s Forces For ‘Violence, Instability’ In Syria

The US Department of National Intelligence acknowledged in its Annual Threat Assessment of 2025 that Syrian government forces were responsible for the massacres committed against minorities on Syria’s coast earlier this month. 

“The fall of president Bashar al-Assad’s regime at the hands of opposition forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – a group formerly associated with Al-Qaeda – has created conditions for extended instability in Syria and could contribute to a resurgence of ISIS and other Islamist terror groups,” the report noted, adding that “HTS-led interim government forces, along with elements of Hurras al-Din and other jihadist groups, engaged in violence and extrajudicial killings in northwestern Syria in early March 2025 primarily targeting religious minorities that resulted in the death of more than 1,000 people, including Alawite and Christian civilians.”

The report went on to say that “some remaining jihadist groups refuse to merge into the HTS Ministry of Defense, and ISIS has already signaled opposition to HTS’s call for democracy and is plotting attacks to undermine its governance.”

It also highlights that Syrian transitional president Ahmad al-Sharaa, who headed HTS and its precursor group the Nusra Front, “claims to be willing to work with Syria’s array of ethno-sectarian groups to develop an inclusive governance model.” Yet, these groups are skeptical of his intentions, therefore “protracted negotiations could devolve into violence.”

The massacres took place in early March in Syria’s coastal cities and surrounding towns and villages after an armed uprising launched by militants affiliated with Syria’s former army. 

During a widescale security operation to quell the uprising, the Syrian Military Operations Department – consisting of numerous extremist factions who have been incorporated into the country’s new army – carried out a massive campaign of executions.

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“Those Are Some Really Sh*tty War Plans”: Hegseth Ridicules Atlantic ‘Bombshell’ After Signal Chats Released

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has responded to the growing calls among Dems for him to step down. This is hours after The Atlantic published the fuller chat logs, alleging that he’s discussing ‘war plans’ in an insecure and unclassified setting – also with a journalist inadvertently added to the group chat.

Hegseth emphasized on X that there were No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.” And he said sarcastically these these make for “some really shitty war plans.”

Still, this is unlikely to appease the Trump White House’s enemies, who are also now claiming that national security officials ‘lied’ before the Senate yesterday.

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The High Price of War With Iran: $10 Gas and the Collapse of the US Economy

Israel is currently in turmoil, marked by widespread protests demanding Netanyahu’s resignation. Critics accuse him of prolonging war for political gain, while his dismissal of top security officials and ongoing attacks on the judiciary have further intensified the unrest.

Meanwhile, Washington DC’s drumbeat for war never stops. It’s always at the expense of a decent and secure standard of living for people in this country and abroad.

The Trump Administration, after the series of heady airstrikes against Yemen, is at this moment being beseeched by Netanyahu and his associates to prepare for a seemingly consequence-free nuclear strike against Iran, completing the trifecta of Netanyahu’s long-standing dream.

I have consistently warned against the consequences of an attack on Iran, delivering 155 speeches to the House, 63 presentations alone in the 109th Congress, between 2005 and 2007, when the Bush Administration deliberated using nuclear “bunker-busters” as a means of bringing Iran to heel.

I understood the politics then and I understand them today. I warned hundreds of times that it was not in America’s interests to go to war against Netanyahu’s hit list: Iraq, Iran, Libya…

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The Hidden Themes Behind the Syrian Violence

In a tone-deaf statement, strongly reminiscent of “the skirt is too small” school of diplomacy, the European Union condemned the ongoing violence in Syria, blaming it on attacks “reportedly by pro-Assad elements, on interim government forces in the coastal areas of Syria and all violence against civilians.” This is of course absurd, as countless social media posts now show that the Alawites and Orthodox Christians are now the victims of strong retributive violence perpetrated by the Turkish-backed Syrian HTS government. The situation is grim, so much so that the Patriarchate of Antioch and the Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church called on all Syrian civilians, including minority Shiite Muslims, to take shelter in the nearest church they can find; all churches and coastal monasteries are receiving civilians, as well as the Russian bases in Latakia. 

In a joint statement over X, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, the Syriac Patriarchate of Antioch, and the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch called upon the Syrian government to create conditions “conducive to achieving national reconciliation among the Syrian people” and to “reaffirm the unity of Syrian territory and reject any attempts to divide it.” At the time of writing, al-Jolani has been reportedly invited to a donor meeting by the EU. 

Syria’s fate isn’t new or unpredicted. The Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was prophetic at her Senate hearing, when she said, “”I have no love for Assad or any dictator. I just hate Al Qaeda. I hate that our leaders cozy up to Islamist extremists, calling them ‘rebels,’ as Jake Sullivan said to Hillary Clinton, ‘Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.’ Syria is now controlled by Al Qaeda offshoot HTS, led by an Islamist Jihadist who danced in the streets on 9/11, and who was responsible for the killing of many American soldiers.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly echoed that exact sentiment. Recently, with the fall of Assad, he commented, “The United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!” Previously, in a 2015 CNN interview, he said “The problem in Syria is we have no idea who the other side are. Maybe we’re better off with Assad. We give (the Rebels) weapons and ammunition but, to me, Assad looks better than the other side.” Vice President J.D. Vance said the same thing in a now-deleted tweet. 

Yet there’s a hidden dynamic observable between the EU and Syria which might have long term consequences for both European and American security: Turkey has been normalized in the EU, something which has serious implications for the broader ideological project of unifying the EU as a coherent strategic unit. Turkey is the one power that has gained the most in the turmoil spanning the region from the Black sea to the Mediterranean and Aegean. 

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