Category Archives: History

Why the Hell Is the US Occupying Syria? By Jon Reynolds

Posted on March 23, 2023 | 1 comment

In 2016 I wrote a satire about US policy in Syria, Prime Deceit. Seven years later it’s still satire–but even more cynical and black. From Jon Reynolds at antiwar.com:

Why has every US president from Obama to Trump to Biden launched airstrikes inside the country? Is the US mission in Syria actually about fighting terrorism, or does it go deeper?

In early March, Syria’s foreign ministry condemned a surprise visit by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley to an army base in northeast Syria, with Syrian media dubbing it “illegal” and a “flagrant violation of the sovereignty and integrity” of Syrian territory, adding that the US ought to “immediately” cease support for “separatist armed groups”. The article, published by VOA, also casually notes that the US has “about 900” troops deployed in “several bases and posts across northeastern Syria” allegedly as part of the fight against ISIS.

Nearly a decade since US forces officially entered Syria and ISIS is still America’s reason for staying? How is this possible after numerous assurances from US officials – including a US president – that ISIS has been defeated? Why has every American president from Obama to Trump to Biden launched airstrikes inside the country? Is the US mission in Syria actually about fighting terrorism, or does it go deeper? And most puzzling, why the hell is the US occupying Syria?

Breaking numerous promises to the contrary, President Obama announced in late 2015 that the US would be deploying troops into Syria to “fight ISIS”. The number started with 50, which soon became 250. In October 2017, a US general said there are 4,000 troops in Syria, and two months later, the Pentagon put the number at 2,000. As of this article’s publication, the consensus seems to be 900 US troops, although there’s reason to suspect the number may actually be higher or lower. Regardless, US forces have occupied parts of Syria now for almost a decade. But why?

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In Moscow, Xi and Putin bury Pax Americana, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Welcome to the new world order. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

In Moscow this week, the Chinese and Russian leaders revealed their joint commitment to redesign the global order, an undertaking that has ‘not been seen in 100 years.’

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Xi-and-Putin.jpg

What has just taken place in Moscow is nothing less than a new Yalta, which, incidentally, is in Crimea. But unlike the momentous meeting of US President Franklin Roosevelt, Soviet Leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in USSR-run Crimea in 1945, this is the first time in arguably five centuries that no political leader from the west is setting the global agenda.

It’s Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin that are now running the multilateral, multipolar show. Western exceptionalists may deploy their crybaby routines as much as they want: nothing will change the spectacular optics, and the underlying substance of this developing world order, especially for the Global South.

What Xi and Putin are setting out to do was explained in detail before their summit, in two Op-Eds penned by the presidents themselves. Like a highly-synchronized Russian ballet, Putin’s vision was laid out in the People’s Daily in China, focusing on a “future-bound partnership,” while Xi’s was published in the Russian Gazette and the RIA Novosti website, focusing on a new chapter in cooperation and common development.

Right from the start of the summit, the speeches by both Xi and Putin drove the NATO crowd into a hysterical frenzy of anger and envy: Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova perfectly captured the mood when she remarked that the west was “foaming at the mouth.”

The front page of the Russian Gazette on Monday was iconic: Putin touring Nazi-free Mariupol, chatting with residents, side by side with Xi’s Op-Ed. That was, in a nutshell, Moscow’s terse response to Washington’s MQ-9 Reaper stunt and the International Criminal Court (ICC) kangaroo court shenanigans. “Foam at the mouth” as much as you like; NATO is in the process of being thoroughly humiliated in Ukraine.

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IRAQ 20 YEARS: Chris Hedges — The Lords of Chaos

Posted on March 20, 2023 | 1 comment

Chris Hedges on what happened to those who told the truth about Iraq, from personal experience. From Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

The politicians and shills in the media who orchestrated 20 years of military debacles in the Middle East, and who seek a world dominated by U.S. power, must be held accountable for their crimes.

We’re Number One – by Mr. Fish

Two decades ago, I sabotaged my career at The New York Times. It was a conscious choice.

I had spent seven years in the Middle East, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief. I was an Arabic speaker. I believed, like nearly all Arabists, including most of those in the State Department and the C.I.A., that a “preemptive” war against Iraq would be the most costly strategic blunder in American history.

It would also constitute what the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the “supreme international crime.” While Arabists in official circles were muzzled, I was not. I was invited by them to speak at The State Department, The United States Military Academy at West Point and to senior Marine Corps officers scheduled to be deployed to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion.

Mine was not a popular view nor one a reporter, rather than an opinion columnist, was permitted to express publicly according to the rules laid down by the newspaper. But I had experience that gave me credibility and a platform. I had reported extensively from Iraq. I had covered numerous armed conflicts, including the first Gulf War and the Shi’ite uprising in southern Iraq where I was taken prisoner by The Iraqi Republican Guard.

I easily dismantled the lunacy and lies used to promote the war, especially as I had reported on the destruction of Iraq’s chemical weapons stockpiles and facilities by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) inspection teams. I had detailed knowledge of how degraded the Iraqi military had become under U.S. sanctions. Besides, even if Iraq did possess “weapons of mass destruction” that would not have been a legal justification for war.

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20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq, Will the Media’s Complicity Be Flushed Down the Memory Hole? By Jeremy Erp

Posted on March 20, 2023 | 1 comment

They’ll be asking the same question twenty years after Ukraine, if that war ever ends. From Jeremy Erp at antiwar.com:

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.“
— Viet Thanh Nguyen

As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the US invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget – first and foremost, the media’s own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.

But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration’s propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.

The numbers don’t lie. A 2003 report by the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS Newshour featured a total of 267 American experts, analysts, and commentators on camera to supposedly help make sense of the march to war. Of these 267 guests, an astounding 75% were current or former government or military officials, and a grand total of one expressed any skepticism.

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Have There Ever Been More Courageous Men? By Jared Taylor

Posted on March 19, 2023 | 2 comments

This is an incredible story of courage against daunting hardship. From Jared Tayler at unz.com:

Video Link

This video is available on Rumble, BitChute, and Odysee.

I’m going to tell you what may be the most heroic story of courage and endurance in history. It’s the story of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition of 1914 to 1916.

Shackleton, an Anglo-Irish polar explorer, had been deeply disappointed that the British had been beaten to the North Pole by the American Peary expedition in 1909 and that Norwegians under Roald Amundsen had been the first to the South Pole.

Robert Peary, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Peary, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Olav Bjaaland (1873–1961), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Olav Bjaaland (1873–1961), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition would save Britain’s honor.

It was to be the first crossing of the continent, following the line on this map – crossing the pole, then continuing on to Ross Island.

Another team was to leave supplies in several places from the interior to the coast, where a ship would pick up Shackleton and his men.

The expedition was an utter failure. The men never even set foot on Antarctica. And yet, even in failure – in an ordeal that lasted 617 days for most of the men – it was one of the all-time great achievements against incredible odds.

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Separate Money and the State, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on March 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Why should the state control money? It’s a license to steal, and states invariably exercise it. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

The United States once had the finest monetary system in history. It was a system that the U.S. Constitution established. It was a system in which the official money of the United States consisted of gold coins and silver coins.

We often hear that the “gold standard” was a system in which paper money was “backed by gold.” Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no paper money in the United States. That’s because the Constitution did not empower the federal government to issue paper money. It also expressly prohibited the states from issuing paper money.

The Constitution used the term “bills of credit.” That was the term people at that time used for paper money. The Constitution expressly forbade the states from issuing “bills of credit” or paper money. It also did not delegate the power to issue “bills of credit” or paper money to the federal government.

Instead, the Constitution empowered the federal government to “coin” money. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, one does not “coin” money out of paper. One “coins” money out of such metallic commodities as gold and silver.

The Constitution also expressly forbade the states from making anything but gold and silver coins “legal tender,” or official money, which further established the intent of the Framers.

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Posted in Banking, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, History, Law, Money

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ChatGPT knows U.S. War Criminals, by Good Citizen

Posted on March 18, 2023 | 2 comments

The U.S. celebrates an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin from a court whose jurisdiction it won’t recognize. From Good Citizen at thegoodcitizen.substack.com:

Developments in the Investigation Launched at the ICC in The Hague - The Israel Democracy Institute

As the Empire of Lies celebrates the International Criminal Court issuing an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, let’s revisit who the ICC really works for.

Watch war criminal John Bolton threaten to arrest ICC judges and go after their finances if they or any organization or company assist the ICC in taking any action against American war criminals:

I asked ChatGPT about the war crimes of American leaders and the following is what it returned…

Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, a former U.S. Secretary of State, has been accused of being involved in several war crimes during his time in office. Here are some of the main allegations against him:

  1. The bombing of Cambodia: Kissinger played a key role in the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which led to the deaths of thousands of civilians. The bombing was carried out without the knowledge or approval of Congress or the American public.

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3 Years to Slow The Spread: Covid hysteria and the creation of a never-ending crisis, by Jordan Schachtel

Posted on March 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

A never-ending crisis for never-ending expansion of governments’ tyrannical powers. From Jordan Schachtel at dossier.substack.com:

What resulted was a giant human experiment in Public Health tyranny.

Thursday marks the three year anniversary of the infamous “15 Days To Slow The Spread” campaign.

By March 16, yours truly was already pretty fed up with both the governmental and societal “response” to what was being baselessly categorized as the worst pandemic in 100 years, despite zero statistical data supporting such a serious claim.

I was living in the Washington, D.C. Beltway at the time, and it was pretty much impossible to find a like-minded person within 50 miles who also wasn’t taking the bait. After I read about the news coming out of Wuhan in January, I spent much of the next couple weeks catching up to speed and reading about what a modern pandemic response was supposed to look like.

What surprised me most was that none of “the measures” were mentioned, and that these designated “experts” were nothing more than failed mathematicians, government doctors, and college professors who were more interested in policy via shoddy academic forecasting than observing reality.

Within days of continually hearing their yapping at White House pressers, It quickly became clear that the Deborah Birx’s and Anthony Fauci’s of the world were engaging in nothing more than a giant experiment. There was no an evidence-based approach to managing Covid whatsoever. These figures were leaning into the collective hysteria, and brandishing their credentials as Public Health Experts to demand top-down approaches to stamping out the WuFlu.

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My List of America’s Top Ten Worst Presidents, by Chuck Baldwin

Posted on March 17, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s hard to quibble with this list. From Chuck Baldwin at lewrockwell.com:

To be sure, it’s quite a challenge to try and pick America’s top ten worst presidents when so many qualify for the distinction. But then again, I am personally quite convinced that the ones who made my list truly deserve their ignoble entry.

So here goes: America’s top ten worst presidents.

1. Abraham Lincoln (Republican)

Without an ounce of doubt in my mind, Abraham Lincoln is America’s absolute worst president. He did not free a single slave; but what he did do was begin the process of enslaving free men. It is no hyperbole to say that Lincoln truly governed as a dictator, not as a President.

Virtually every single problem we are having today (and have had ever since Lincoln’s presidency) with an overbearing, encroaching, authoritarian federal government in Washington, D.C., came as a result of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. EVERY SINGLE ONE!

Abraham Lincoln destroyed the Washington/Jeffersonian model of American government and replaced it with an imperial White House. His own statements prove that he cared absolutely nothing for the black race and was indeed himself a racist—unlike many leaders of the Confederacy, such as Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, etc., who publicly and adamantly spoke in support of the end of slavery and never said anything remotely derogatory or racist against the black people.

Beyond that, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln actually supported an amendment to the U.S. Constitution proposed by Ohio Congressman Thomas Corwin (which would have been the 13th Amendment) that said,

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution, which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish, or interfere within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

In other words, the amendment would have forever guaranteed the right of people to own slaves.

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The Not-So-Winding Road From Iraq to Ukraine, by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Posted on March 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

There’s more similarities than differences between America’s involvement in Iraq and its involvement in Ukraine. The biggest difference is that U.S. troops have not”officially” entered Ukraine . . . yet. From Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies at antiwar.com:

March 19th marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as US and Western politicians.

While the US was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering US empire.

Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused US entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.

The architects of the US invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.

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