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Tag: perpetual war
Biden Just Said He’s Willing To Go To War With Iran, Mainstream Yawns
US President Joe Biden said in an interview aired Wednesday that he would be willing to go to war with Iran to prevent the country from obtaining a nuclear weapon, a position that drew condemnation from advocacy groups and foreign policy analysts who questioned the moral, strategic, and legal bases for such a stance.
Biden also reiterated in the sit-down interview with Israeli broadcaster N12 that he is committed to keeping the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, even if it means sinking the prospects of a deal to revive the nuclear accord that former President Donald Trump violated in 2018.
While acknowledging that Trump’s decision to abandon the seven-country deal was a “gigantic mistake,” Biden said he would not delist the IRGC to advance nuclear talks that have hit a wall in recent weeks.
Biden offered a one-word answer—”yes”—when asked whether he would keep the IRGC on the terror list “even if that means that kills the deal.”
The US president went on to say that he’s prepared to use military force “as a last resort” to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Iran has repeatedly said it is not pursuing a nuclear weapon and that its nuclear energy program is designed for peaceful domestic purposes.
This Proxy War Has No Exit Strategy
The International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America has released a statement opposing the US government’s ongoing proxy war in Ukraine, saying the billions being funneled into the military-industrial complex “at a time when ordinary Americans are struggling to pay for housing, groceries, and fuel” is “a slap in the face for working people.” The statement advocates a negotiated settlement for peace, saying continuing to pour weapons into the country will “needlessly prolong the war, resulting in more civilian deaths” and that it “risks escalating and widening the war – up to and including nuclear war.”
In response to this entirely reasonable and moderate position, the DSA is currently being raked over the coals with accusations of Kremlin loyalty and facilitation of murder and bloodshed by blue-checkmarked narrative managers on Twitter. This is because the only acceptable positions for anyone of significant influence to have about this war range from supporting continuing current proxy warfare operations to initiating a direct hot war between NATO and Russia.
That’s how narrow the permissible spectrum of debate has been shrunk regarding this conflict: status quo hawkish to omnicidal hawkish. Anything outside that spectrum gets framed as radical extremism. As Noam Chomsky said: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
John Bolton Admits He Helped Plan Foreign Coup Attempts
John Bolton, the former White House national security adviser for the Trump administration, has claimed that he previously helped plan attempted coups of foreign leaders.
Bolton made the comment in an interview with CNN’s “The Lead” on Tuesday, shortly after the Jan. 6 House Select Committee had wrapped up its seventh congressional hearing, regarding the breach of the U.S. Capitol.
Panel lawmakers focused much of Tuesday’s hearing on evidence around testimony provided by former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and alleged ties between former President Trump and “extremist” right-wing groups.
The committee claims that Trump intentionally tried to mount an insurrection against the United States government in a last-ditch effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Speaking to CNN, Bolton insisted that Trump could not have pulled off a “carefully planned coup d’etat aimed at the Constitution” because “that’s not the way Donald Trump does things.”
“It’s not an attack on our democracy,” Bolton said. “It’s Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.”
CNN host Jake Tapper responded, “I don’t know that I agree with you, to be fair, with all due respect” adding that “one doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.”
However, Bolton said he disagreed with this statement before referencing his own alleged experience helping to plan a coup.
FOIA Documents: Nearly 2 Dozen Secret Wars Waged With Your Tax Dollars
As a note to remember: These “wars” took place under President Donald Trump.
RT has the story.
The US has reportedly used a secretive authority called ‘127e’ to launch at least two dozen proxy wars since 2017, according to an article published on Friday by The Intercept. The outlet claims to have obtained never-before-seen documents and spoken to top officials with intimate knowledge of these programs.
The Intercept received the documents through the Freedom of Information Act, claiming these papers are the first ever official confirmation that at least 14 so-called ‘127e programs’ were active in the greater Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions as recently as 2020. In total, the Pentagon reportedly launched 23 separate 127e programs across the globe between 2017 and 2020, which cost US taxpayers $310 million.
The Intercept explains that 127e is one of several virtually unknown authorities granted to the Department of Defense by Congress over the last two decades. It authorizes US commandos to conduct “counterterrorism operations” in cooperation with foreign and irregular partner forces around the world with minimal outside oversight.
Three Illuminating Quotes About The War In Ukraine
Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:
“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”
~ John Pilger
This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.
From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations gave more coverage to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.
And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate. America’s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.
“It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”
~ Noam Chomsky
This quote, from an interview last month with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.
People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.
Biden Falsely Claims US Troops Aren’t Engaged In Combat In The Middle East
President Biden penned an op-ed about his upcoming trip to the Middle East that was published in The Washington Post on Saturday, where he falsely claimed that US troops are not engaged in combat missions in the region.
The president wrote: “Next week, I will be the first president to visit the Middle East since 9/11 without US troops engaged in a combat mission there.” Biden’s claim came not long after he updated Congress on the deployment of US combat troops. In a letter to Congress dated June 8, the president said US troops were stationed in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
In Yemen, Biden said that a “small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS.” He also mentioned that US forces were providing support to the Saudi-led coalition in a “non-combat role” by providing “military advice and limited information.”
In Iraq and Syria, Biden said US troops are “working by, with, and through local partners to conduct operations against” ISIS and al-Qaeda. At the end of 2021, the US formally ended its combat mission in Iraq, but all 2,500 troops that were stationed there stayed, and US operations on the ground didn’t really change.
In Syria, the US maintains an occupation force of about 1,000 troops and keeps a good portion of the eastern part of the country out of the hands of Damascus with the help of local Kurdish groups. While it’s easy to downplay the US role in Iraq, US troops in Syria are more often engaged in combat.
On June 16, US troops carried out a raid in northwestern Syria and captured a top ISIS leader, according to the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, known as Operation Inherent Resolve. US raids in northwest Syria are risky as they are far from US military bases in the eastern part of the country.
The US also continues to launch drone strikes in Syria against al-Qaeda affiliates in northwest Syria. According to US Central Command, a US drone strike killed a leader of al-Qaeda offshoot Hurras al-Din in Syria’s Idlib province.
Earlier in the year, the US was involved in a major ground battle between the Kurdish-led SDF and ISIS in northeastern Syria. Back in January, ISIS launched a major attack to gain control of a prison, and US ground troops helped Kurdish forces take it back.
Biden’s War Machine Is Sending Another $1.7 Billion To Ukraine
The Biden administration is announcing another $1.7 billion in aid to Ukraine, bringing the total taxpayer money spent on the proxy war more than $65 billion since the Russia invaded the European nation.
The additional aid was announced on Tuesday and is partially sponsored by the U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID).
A statement from USAID says, “This additional funding will provide emergency food and cash assistance, safe drinking water, accessible shelter, logistical support, humanitarian coordination and protection, emergency health care, including mental health care and support for survivors of gender-based violence. This funding is in addition to USAID’s support for activities aimed specifically at alleviating shelter concerns during the coming winter months.”
It goes on to state, “The provision of cash will offset increased heating costs through the purchase of fuel for electricity, materials for light renovations (insulation), and the distribution of thermal blankets and winter clothes and shoes, especially for children and the elderly.”
To date, USAID has given the Ukrainian government $4 billion in budgetary support. The organization said these funds have been used to keep gas and electricity flowing to hospitals and schools, get humanitarian supplies to citizens, and pay the salaries of civil servants and teachers.
NATO: The Most Dangerous Military Alliance on the Planet
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp and chemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.
US spending to counter Russian war effort exceeds first 5 years of war costs in Afghanistan
The Biden administration and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pledged to counter Russia’s war in Ukraine and the threat it poses to European security, and the funds so far committed to Kyiv already exceed U.S. costs for the first five years in Afghanistan.
The Biden administration on Friday announced another $400 million military drawdown package to Ukraine as it attempts to fend off Russian advances.
The latest package was reportedly tailored in coordination with Ukrainian officials for what they specifically need on the front lines and comes just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory over the eastern Luhansk region.
Heavy artillery like howitzers and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) are among the big-ticket items that Ukraine has said it needs to target Russian command and control hotspots that sit behind the front lines.
Hellbound and Down 
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