Aldous Huxley on perpetual war…
Tag: perpetual war
Remember the Atrocities of the Korean War, Not the Propaganda
Today is the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. Almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict. If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army crossing the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War II. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, co-founder of Antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military:
“From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do—where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s U.S.-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after General Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces—a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States—more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
Following Disastrous War On Terror, US Vets Try To Stop Students From Joining Up
March 20 marked the 20th anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq. The war took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, with some estimates of Iraqi casualties putting the number at over 1 million. More than 4,600 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during and after the invasion, and thousands more have died by suicide.
[Related, How Team Bush Escaped Justice Over Iraq and IRAQ 20 YEARS: Joe Lauria — Covering the ‘Vial Display’]
Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, the U.S. military is facing its worst recruitment crisis since the end of the Vietnam War. The Defense Department’s budget proposal for 2024 outlines a plan for the military to slightly cut back on its ranks, but to reach its projected numbers, it will still need to embark on a heavy recruitment push.
Across the country, anti-war veterans and their allies are working together in an effort to stop the U.S. military from reaching its goal.
We Are Not Your Soldiers is a project of New York City-based nonprofit World Can’t Wait. The organization sends military veterans into schools to share honest stories of the harm they have caused and suffered. In doing so, they hope to prevent young people from signing up.
“I wish I had somebody who told me when I was young,” says Miles Megaciph, who was stationed in Cuba and Okinawa with the U.S. Marine Corps from 1992 to 1996. “The experiences I’ve lived, as painful as they are, and as much as I don’t like to relive them, are valuable to help future adults not live those experiences,” Megaciph told me.
“We wanted to get to the people who were going to be the next recruits,” says Debra Sweet, the executive director of World Can’t Wait. When We Are Not Your Soldiers launched in 2008, the experience was often intense for veterans.
“They were all fresh out of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Sweet remembers. “It was very raw, it was very hard. [It was] really hard for them to go talk to people in public about what had happened. And we learned a lot about PTSD, up close and personal, and how it was affecting people.”
US Was Behind Both Crimean Bridge Attacks: Seymour Hersh
Legendary national security journalist Seymour Hersh has published a report this week alleging US intelligence helped the Ukrainians blow up the Kerch Bridge (or also, Crimean Bridge), which happened earlier this month and corresponded to President Putin refusing to renew the Black Sea Grain Initiative deal.
What’s more is that Hersh’s sources described that the US assisted in the initial, larger Kerch Bridge explosion which had initially temporarily disabled it in October 2022. “The Biden administration’s role in both attacks was vital,” he wrote in a Thursday Substack investigative article.
“Of course it was our technology,” an unnamed US official told Hersh, referring to the sea drone which detonated under the vital bridge on July 17. “The drone was remotely guided and half submerged–like a torpedo.”
The source cited is said to be a US intelligence official who is speaking out anonymously “from the point of view of those in the American intelligence community who don’t feel they have the ear of President Joe Biden but should.”
“Our national strategy is that Zelensky can do whatever he wants to do. There’s no adult supervision,” the US official complained.
Some US arms shipments to Ukraine ending up in hands of criminal gangs, arms traffickers, watchdog says
U.S. Defense Department arms shipments to Ukraine have come with very little oversight, and at times end up in the hands of criminal gangs and weapons traffickers.
Criminal gangs within Ukraine have gotten their hands on some U.S. shipments of grenade launchers, machine guns, rifles, bulletproof vests, and thousands of rounds of ammunition since the U.S. began supplying the Ukrainian military with arms, according to a Department of Defense Inspector General report obtained by the Heritage Foundation.
The 19-page report, which was issued last October and only became public after a Heritage Foundation Freedom of Information Act request, details specific instances in which U.S. shipments were intercepted by criminal actors in Ukraine. In one example, Ukraine’s security services, Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU), disrupted a plot by gangs to pose “as members of a humanitarian aid organization who distributed bulletproof vests.”
New York Times admits, then covers up, massive Ukraine casualties
Since January of this year, the New York Times has published dozens of articles claiming that Ukraine’s “spring offensive” would be a decisive turning point in the war with Russia. But this offensive, now six weeks old, has turned into a debacle. While Ukrainian forces have nowhere breached Russia’s main defensive line, tens of thousands of troops have died.
This is the context in which the New York Times published and quickly edited an article presenting a realistic, and therefore nightmarish, depiction of the Ukrainian troops as little more than cannon fodder, “forced into action” to face almost certain death.
Buried on page A9 and not referenced on the front page of the print edition, the extensive and detailed report on Ukraine’s offensive was titled, “Depleted Troops, Unreliable Munitions: Kyiv’s Obstacles in the East.” It included a sub-headline describing the offensive as a “grisly stalemate.”
With equally little notice, that article had been published online the day before under the title, “Weary Soldiers, Unreliable Munitions: Ukraine’s Many Challenges.”
The article presented Ukraine’s offensive as a bloody debacle, in which Ukrainian forces have suffered massive casualties, who are then replaced with older recruits who are “forced” to fight.
The article documented three new, previously undisclosed revelations:
- There exists a unit in Ukraine with a “200 percent” casualty rate, meaning that all of its members were killed or injured, then replaced with recruits, all of whom were killed or injured.
- The munitions provided to Ukraine are often so old that they regularly misfire or accidentally detonate, injuring soldiers.
- After young troops are killed in combat, they are typically replaced with much older people, a sign that Ukraine is running out of fighting-age troops.
Typically, a journalist who uncovered these facts based on firsthand reporting would proclaim each of them a “scoop” and take to Twitter to publicize them.
But the method of the New York Times is that of the buried lede, to take these potentially explosive revelations and stick them in an article on the inside pages, which is quickly removed from the newspaper’s online front page.
In this case, however, merely burying these revelations was insufficient. It was necessary to erase them.
Scary story…
DoD IG: American Weapons in Ukraine Funneled to Arms Traffickers, Criminals
The Pentagon inspector general found the arms Washington sent to Kiev did not undergo the required inspections. A report from the inspector general found weapons the US sent to Ukraine in the hands of criminals and on the black market.
The Arms Control Act requires the White House to establish an inspection system for weapons the US sells or gifts to third countries. The law mandates the monitoring continues to the end-use of the weapon. In Ukraine, the embassy in Kiev has been assigned responsibility for monitoring the weapons transfers.
The Department of Defense inspector general report on American weapons transfers to Ukraine from February to September of last year found that legally required monitoring was not taking place. “The DoD is unable to conduct [End Use Monitoring] in Ukraine because completing [End Use Monitoring] in accordance with DoD policy requires in-person access to the defense equipment provided,” it said. “Intelligence methods provide some accountability for observable platforms, such as missiles and helicopters, but smaller items, such as night vision devices, have limited accountability.”
“The DoD OIG found deficiencies in the DoD’s transfer of military equipment to the Government of Ukraine requiring [End Use Monitoring], including Javelin missiles, Javelin Command Launch Units, and night vision devices; and in Ukraine’s security and accountability of US.-provided military equipment requiring [End Use Monitoring],” the report added.
In a section of the report that is heavily redacted, the inspector general listed some cases of American weapons not making it to their intended recipient. The cases that remained unredacted in the report include: a Moscow-influenced criminal organization that procured grenade launchers and machine guns, a pro-Kev militia that tried to sell dozens of rifles on the black market, and a group of arms traffickers who were selling weapons and ammunition stolen from the front lines.
The Institutionalization of the New Cold War
The 31 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are taking their victory laps over the latest expansion of the political-military alliance. The boastful communique for last week’s NATO summit in Lithuania had more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, and promised modernization for NATO’s nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, and France. There is increased likelihood for the pre-positioning of advanced military weaponry, particularly artillery and air defense systems. The Baltic Sea will become Lake NATO.
When the NATO countries halt their celebration, it will be time to plan for the next Cold War, which will be far worse than the Cold War that dominated the 1950s and 1960s. Cold War 2.0 will be more expensive than its predecessor, and far more difficult to bring to a close. The excessive military spending will complicate far more urgent tasks dealing with the climate crisis and the next pandemic, which will eventually occur. Finally, arms control and disarmament, which was the primary process for pursuing an end to the earlier Cold War, will be more difficult to orchestrate.
The first Cold War was relatively easy for the United States to manage. The twelve founding members of NATO were compatible in terms of policies and processes; and the perception of the threat was shared. In Cold War 2.0, the United States will not be as dominant; the alliance will be divided between the western and eastern members of the alliance; and the perception of the threat will vary due to domestic politics and geographic proximity to Russia. The current difficulties and debates over Ukraine membership; future relations with Russia; and appropriate levels of defense spending are already creating tensions within the alliance.
U.S. supporters of NATO expansion have provided a series of fatuous arguments to defend their position. The New York Times has trumpeted that “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that…could shape warfare for generations to come.” The military-industrial complex couldn’t have written this justification more succinctly. Right-wing ideologues, such as the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, boast that “lessons learned on the Ukrainian battlefield could be used to help Taiwan,” which ignores the differences between an amphibious assault in Taiwan vs. the war of attrition in Ukraine.
Zelensky Blames Failing Counteroffensive On Lack Of Munitions From West, Delayed Training
Despite the row at this month’s NATO summit in Vilnius caused by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s angry tweet, for which he was accused by Western powers (especially the US and UK) of showing ‘ingratitude’, the Ukrainian leader is once again lashing out at his backers. This time, he’s blaming the failing counteroffensive on lack of munitions and delayed training from the West.
“We did have plans to start it in spring. But we didn’t, because, frankly, we had not enough munitions and armaments and not enough brigades properly trained in these weapons,” Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria via a translator in an interview which aired Sunday.
He also complained about training programs set up for Ukrainians to operate advanced systems, which are being sponsored and hosted in European countries under NATO guidance. Kiev has long pressed for a more expedited timeline on receiving US F-16 jets as well, but training has been “delayed” for this as well, set to begin next month.
“Still, more” – he continued of the problem – “that the training missions were held outside Ukraine. But, still, we started. And this is important.” Zelensky said these factors have been key to the stalled counteroffensive, especially that Ukraine’s forces are blowing through munitions at a very high pace to keep up with superior Russian fire.
“And because we started it a bit later on, it can be said, and it will be shared truth understood by all the experts that it provided Russia with time to mine all our lands and build several lines of defense. And, definitely, they had even more time than they needed,” he explained.
“Because of that, they built more of those lines. And, really, they had a lot of mines in our fields. Because of that, a slower pace of our counteroffensive actions,” Zelensky added. “We didn’t want to lose our people, our personnel. And our servicemen didn’t want to lose equipment because of that.”
Very early in the counteroffensive in June, he had acknowledged a “slower than expected” advance. And in recent days and weeks, US mainstream media has increasingly featured pessimistic headlines for the first time in the conflict, suggesting the counter offensive is doomed, especially the longer it drags on without delivering a significant punch to Russian front lines.
Zelensky continued in his remarks to CNN, “Yes, I do understand that it’s always better to see victory come sooner. This is what we also want. But the question is the price … of this victory. So, let us not throw people under tanks literally. Let us plan our counteroffensive as our analysts, our intelligence suggests. And some of our residential areas have been liberated already. So, I do believe in our victory.”
The consistent messaging from Kiev forces has been that Western aid is always insufficient – no matter the tens of billions poured in…
Hellbound and Down 
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