Tag: perpetual war

Obama’s real legacy makes him one of the worst US presidents of all time.

You have to give credit to Obama, he comes across as a genuinely honest guy who’s a great speaker and who has tons of charisma, almost enough to convince you that his 8 years in office were a success and not huge failure. Mainstream media is doing all it can to hype and brainwash people about Obama’s legacy, even years after he left office, while completely whitewashing all of his massive failures both domestic and abroad.

The biggest foreign international crime Barack Obama, nobel peace prize laureate, was responsible for was of course Libya. The US administration headed by Clinton and Obama, backed by NATO , the UK, France and the Gulf states, destroyed Libya and toppled its regime. This was mainly because Obama had no plans as to what to do after Gaddafi was removed from office. He and his then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, thought that just by bombing Libya and destroying the Gaddafi regime, they will make the world a better place. They were wrong, and now Libyans the middle east and countries in south of Europe are having to deal with the consequences. As a result of Obama’s actions, Libya is now a failed state, home to terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, where African slaves ares sold in the streets while an ongoing civil war has ruined the country and claimed the lives of tens of thousnads of Libyans.

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Profiteers of Armageddon

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project.

The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of “The Day After” about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.

Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

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20,000-50,000 Ukrainians Have Lost Limbs Since Russia Invaded

Between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians have lost one or more limbs since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.

The figure is based on estimates made by prosthetics firms, doctors, and charities. The number could be higher as it takes time to register amputees after they undergo surgery, and fighting has intensified since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in June.

The higher-end estimate of 50,000 came from the German prosthetics manufacturer Ottobock, which cited data from the government and medical partners. The estimate of 20,000 was based on data from the Kyiv-based charity Health of the Ukrainian People ICF. The charity estimates the number of serious injuries in the war is at 200,000 and says about 10% of serious injuries typically require amputations.

The number of Ukrainian amputations puts the war on the scale of World War I. According to the report, some 67,000 Germans and 41,000 Britons had to have amputations during the four-year war. Less than 2,000 Americans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century have had amputations.

Ukraine has kept its casualty rates a secret throughout the war for propaganda purposes, but the staggering number of Ukrainians who lost limbs gives an idea of the human cost of the war.

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When Our Weapons Go Missing

Fears of loose weapons in Ukraine have become reality: Once American weapons arrive, Ukrainian criminals steal them. If U.S. arms transfer policies are not changed, Washington will inevitably accidentally arm groups that actively want to harm the United States.

In June, two separate Department of Defense inspector general reports revealed poor monitoring when U.S. weapons are transferred to Ukraine. Challenges in Ukraine’s war zone have made it nearly impossible to track the weapons.

The first report found that the personnel responsible for ensuring accountability were given no “training or guidance.” It concluded that the Pentagon does “not have accountability controls sufficient enough to provide reasonable assurance that its inventory of defense items transferred to [Ukraine] via the air hub in Jasionka was accurate or complete.”

The second report discovered that the Office of Defense Cooperation–Kyiv was unable to monitor how American military equipment was put to use. Indeed, monitors could not “visit areas where equipment provided to Ukraine was being used or stored.”

Such problems are not unique to Ukraine, but the Biden administration has been open to accepting the possibility of weapons dispersion when it comes to Ukraine’s war. Yet discounting these perils comes with four long-term security risks.

First, larger weapons systems have a high value on the black arms market. In Afghanistan, for example, the Taliban has been able to continue funding itself through its already existing smuggling networks by selling U.S. weapons left behind in the withdrawal. These weapons are now used in attacks in Pakistan, Kashmir, and the Gaza Strip.

Even before the war, Ukraine had one of the largest illegally trafficked arms markets in Europe, according to the 2021 Global Organized Crime Index. This has only intensified since the Russian invasion. For example, in August 2022 a criminal organization in Ukraine stole and intended to sell 60 rifles and 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

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Joe Biden to ask Congress to fund Taiwan arms via Ukraine budget

The White House will ask Congress to fund arms for Taiwan as part of a supplemental budget request for Ukraine, in an effort to speed up the supply of weapons to the country amid the rising threat from China. The Office of Management and Budget will include funding for Taiwan in the supplemental request as part of an effort to accelerate the provision of weapons, according to two people familiar with the plan. If passed by Congress, Taiwan would get arms through a US taxpayer-funded system known as “foreign military financing” for the first time. The White House is expected to submit the request this month. The request comes on the heels of a White House announcement that the US would supply Taiwan with $345mn in weapons from stockpiles for the first time, under a system known as “presidential drawdown authority” that has been used to send weapons to Ukraine. The decision to include Taiwan funding in the supplemental budget and use PDA to supply weapons underscores a rising urgency to help Taipei. Critics of the current Taiwan strategy have urged Washington to supply weapons more quickly as China increases military activity around the country. “This would be a monumental step that signals how far the US government is now willing to go to accelerate deterrence across the Taiwan Strait,” said Eric Sayers, managing director at Beacon Global Strategies, a Washington consultancy. “For decades we have chosen to only sell Taiwan military equipment but now . . . we are seeing both the tools of drawdown authority and foreign military financing be deployed, just as they have been so successful in Ukraine,” Sayers added.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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