Category Archives: Military

Ukraine Is Sinking. Are Western Elites Bailing Out? by Mike Whitney

Posted on February 2, 2023 | 1 comment

It’s dawning on the people who make decisions in the West that Ukraine was a very bad decision indeed. Next comes the blame-shifting and cover-your-ass phase. From Mike Whitney at unz.com:

What makes the RAND Corporation’s latest report on Ukraine so significant, is not the quality of the analysis, but the fact that the nation’s most prestigious national security think-tank has taken an opposite position on the war than the Washington political class and their globalist allies. This is a very big deal. Keep in mind, wars don’t end because the public opposes them. That is a myth. Wars end when a critical split emerges between elites that eventually leads to a change in policy. The RAND Corporation’s new report, “Avoiding a long war: US policy and the trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine conflict”, represents just such a split. It indicates that powerful elites have broken with the majority opinion because they think the current policy is hurting the United States. We believe this shift in perspective is going to gain momentum until it triggers a more-assertive demand for negotiations. In other words, the RAND report is the first step towards ending the war.

Consider, for a minute, this excerpt from the preamble of the report:

“The costs and risks of a long war in Ukraine are significant and outweigh the possible benefits of such a trajectory for the United States.”

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Tagged

Why Not Defund the Military? By Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on February 2, 2023 | 1 comment

Here’s an idea whose time has come, but too much money flows from the defense and intelligence contractors to Washington politicians and bureaucrats for it to make any headway. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

Amidst all the talk about defunding the police, notice something important: No one talks about defunding the military. That’s because the military establishment is too powerful and has come to be accepted as a permanent feature in American life. Except for libertarians, everyone treats the military as their god.

But defunding the military, whose taxpayer-funded largess is now around $800 billion per year, is precisely what we need to do. This is especially true given the out-of-control spending, debt, and monetary debauchery that is threatening to take our country down from within, not to mention the fact that the military establishment is now doing everything it can to embroil the United States in a nuclear war with Russia, China, or both.

According to a September 7, 2022, article at Omni Financial, the United States has around 450-500 military bases here in the United States. All 50 states have at least one base. Several have dozens of bases. California has 123, Texas 59, Florida 56, Hawaii 49, and Alaska 47.

What purpose does this empire of domestic military bases serve?

Answer: It serves no purpose whatsoever. These bases all exist for their own sake — that is, simply to serve as a place for military personnel to live and work, as they spend that $800 billion in annual taxpayer-funded largess.

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Government, Military

Tagged ,

The Legacy of George W. Bush and His Torturers, by Andrew Napolitano

Posted on February 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to find anything George W. Bush did that was a positive contribution that left a positive legacy. It goes the other way. From Andrew Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

In the days and months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating the attacks on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after bin Ladin was murdered in his home in Pakistan in 2011, the government decided that the true mastermind of 9/11 was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

By the time of bin Ladin’s death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for two years in Pakistan and charged with conspiracy to commit mass murder, to be tried before an American military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Throughout the entire existence of the U.S. military detention camp at Gitmo, no one has been tried for causing or carrying out the crimes of 9/11. The government only tried one person for crimes related to 9/11. That was Zacharias Moussaoui who pleaded guilty in federal court in Virginia to being the 20th hijacker and then was tried in a penalty phase trial where the issue was life in prison or death. The government spent millions in its death penalty case, which it lost. A civilian jury sentenced Moussaoui, who never harmed a hair on the head of anyone, to life in prison.

Mohammed, meanwhile, and four other alleged conspirators, have been awaiting trial since their arrivals at Gitmo in 2006. Since then, numerous government military and civilian prosecutors, as well as numerous military judges, have rotated into and out of the case.

The concept of military tribunals was born in the administration of President George W. Bush, who argued that 9/11, though conducted by civilians, was an attack of military magnitude and thus warranted a military response. This pathetic knee-jerk argument, of course, not only brought us the fruitless and destructive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it also brought a host of legal problems unforeseen by Bush and his revenge-over-justice thirsty colleagues.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Military, Politics, Tyranny, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

Has the War in Ukraine Reached Its Climax? By Ted Snider

Posted on February 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

Is the Biden administration tired of throwing away money on a lost cause yet? From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

On January 25, the US announced that it would send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The M1 Abrams is the US’ primary battle tank and is among the most advanced and powerful tanks in the world. The Biden administration’s decision will be perceived as a serious escalation and as a commitment by the US to help Ukraine go on the offensive and drive Russia out of all of Ukraine. The reality is more nuanced and complicated.

Last week, game changing articles on the war in Ukraine were published in each of America’s two leading newspapers. But the big story was not in either of them. It was in the conjunction of the two.

A January 19 article in The Washington Post got a lot of attention for its breaking report that CIA Director William Burns secretly met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev to brief him on U.S. expectations for Russian military plans. But that is not a breaking story. It has long been known that the US is sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

The game changing story was the message Burns brought Zelensky that was revealed in a line that received much less attention. “People familiar with the meeting” told The Post that “Burns emphasized the urgency of the moment on the battlefield and acknowledged that at some point assistance would be harder to come by.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

A panicked Empire tries to make Russia an ‘offer it can’t refuse’, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. is now putting out feelers about negotiations with Russia. It’s dealing from a position of weakness and Russia well knows it. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Russia-Ukraine-war-2.jpg

Does US Secretary of State Antony Blinken think a Washington Post op-ed will move Russian Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov to postpone his planned military offensive on Ukraine?

Photo Credit: The Cradle

Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall.

Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.

So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front.

As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy.

The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.

In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).

The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.

Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, War

Size Matters – On A U.S. Ground Intervention In Ukraine, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on January 31, 2023 | 1 comment

Anyone who thinks the U.S. is going to kick the Russians out of Ukraine has no understanding of the geography of the situation. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

A European financial research company has sent me one of their quarterly research letters. It is a ‘contrarian review of political and military ramifications’ of the war in Ukraine. It analyzes ‘winners and losers’ of the war.

It is contrarian only in the sense that it counters the false views of ‘western’ mainstream media with reality. The losers of the war are all on the ‘western’ side with the only two winners being the owners of the U.S. defense industry and Russia.

I was sent the courtesy copy because, as the company writes, the discussions at Moon of Alabama were “immensely helpful” in forming their view.

Note to the authors: You are welcome.

I will not quote from the paper as it seems to be a somewhat confidential business product. But I will steal two graphics from it that will help to understand the size of the war in Ukraine and how it will NOT end.

There have been theories that Poland or some U.S. led coalition force would intervene with their troops on the ground in Ukraine to ‘kick the Russians out’.

The two graphics though dispel any hope for such an operation.

The following is an operational map of Desert Storm. The U.S. led operation in spring 1991 to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.


biggerContinue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

Anarchy, American-Style, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on January 31, 2023 | Leave a comment

The left has become the establishment it once supposedly despised. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:

The Left runs Oceania, and we work for their various bureaus.

The 1960s revolution was both anarchic and nihilist. But it was waged against—not from—the establishment. Hippies and the Left either attacked institutions or, in Timothy Leary fashion, chose to “turn on, tune in, drop out” from them.

The current revolution is much different—and far more dangerous—for at least three reasons.

The Establishment Is the Revolution

The current Left has no intention of “dropping out.” Why would it?

It now controls the very institutions of America that it once mocked and attacked—corporate boardrooms, Wall Street, state and local prosecuting attorneys, most big-city governments, the media, the Pentagon, network and most of cable news, professional sports, Hollywood, music, television, K-12 education, and academia.

In other words, the greatest levers of influence and power—money, education, entertainment, government, the news, and popular culture—are in the hands of the Left. They have transformed legitimate debate over gay marriage into a hate crime. Transgenderism went from a modern manifestation of ancient transvestism or gender dysphoria to a veritable litmus test of whether one was good or evil.

Students have no need to jam administrators’ offices because the latter, themselves, are as radical as the protestors and often lead them on in a top-down fashion. Had they not long ago demonstrated they were perfectly willing to subvert meritocracy, free expression, and equality under the law, they would not be occupying their present positions.

Apple, Google, Facebook, and other tech companies are not 1980s and 1990s “alternative” media geeks and hipsters creating neat gadgets for the people. They are not Steve Jobs and his pugnacious Apple battling the evil Microsoft or IBM, or the Macintosh commercial of 1984 depicting a maverick throwing a hammer into Big Brother’s screen. They are the Orwellian screen.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Business, Civil Liberties, Entertainment, Government, Intelligence, Military, Politics

musings on the militarization of covid, by el gato malo

Posted on January 30, 2023 | 1 comment

The military was heavily involved with the Covid response across the globe. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:

when (and why) did respiratory viruses become national security?

a lot of very strange things seem to have happened in the west around covid and covid response.

not only did we take every piece of evidence-based epidemic guideline that had stood in place for 100 years and toss it out the window, but we then immediately adopted its diametric opposite as “proven policy” and recklessly imposed it in draconian fashion as though his was somehow “the science™.”

public panic was pursued as pandemic policy and response rammed down throats as trumped up moral imperative backed by increasingly overt threats and mandates.

dissidents were vilified and silenced. disagreement was disparaged and drowned under demagoguery.

the party line was as relentless and uncriticizable as it was lacking in foundation.

it felt like we were under attack.

it was not so much public health as war and as the fog clears we can increasingly see why: because this was done by soldiers.

this trend was astonishingly endemic. a few examples:

the UK

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Medicine, Military, Privacy

The Other America (Or the Three Missed Chances to Avoid World War III), by Matthew Ehret

Posted on January 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

There have been American politicians and officials who thought that finding a way to get along with the Soviets and then Russians was a wiser course than trying to subjugate and dominate them. Too bad they never carried the day. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

Something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years of the Cold War has awoken, Matthew Ehret writes.

It feels like today’s world is spinning quickly out of control.

Fear of nuclear confrontation between Russia and NATO has increased to a fever pitch and something worse than anything seen even amidst the dark years of the Cold War has awoken.

A strange form of insanity has swept across the collective west as the US Congress infuses billions of dollars of more lethal aid to a regime in Kiev which a smiling Senator Lindsey Graham has said Kiev “will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”.

This is the same American Congress which unabashedly fuels Nazi-infested military units in Ukraine, and ISIS-affiliated groups in Syria and Iraq who additionally chose to declare Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism” with the senate voting unanimously to this effect on July 27, and the House of Representatives following close behind with a resolution that has vast bipartisan support of both parties.

Meanwhile in Brussels, and across the Five Eyes, pressure mounts to ban Russia’s president from the G20, while a glorification of Nazi “heroes” accelerates across the many nations of the former Soviet Union including Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania etc… all of whom having been absorbed into NATO during the past two decades.

Talk of nuclear Armageddon has become commonplace, and it appears that no effort to heal the divide between east and west is considered by any of the neo-liberal politicians occupying positions of authority

What is going on? Has the world gone insane?

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Military, War

US Is Sending Tanks to Ukraine. But Why? By Ted Snider

Posted on January 30, 2023 | 1 comment

By the time U.S. tanks get to Ukraine, the Russians will have won the war. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:

The US announced on January 25 that it will send thirty-one M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. The tanks may take months or even years to arrive and may never see the battlefield. But that may never have been the intent.

The M1 Abrams is the main battle tank of the US military and is one of the most powerful and sophisticated tanks in the world. But, for Ukraine, that is both the advantage and the problem.

According to military analyst Daniel Davis, “it could take a year or more for all these Abrams to make it to Ukraine, so any expectations that these tanks will have an immediate impact on the fighting needs to be tempered.”

In his comments announcing the decision, Biden said that delivering the tanks to Ukraine will “take time” without further specification.

Reporting ahead of the Biden administration’s announcement, the Associated Press said that “it could take months for the tanks to be delivered.” Other reporting by the AP added that “it could take months or years for the tanks to be delivered.” The longer estimate seems to be based on US intentions to purchase new tanks through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative package, which provides longer-range funding for weapons, rather than sending tanks from US stockpiles.

The tanks will be purchased from General Dynamics, the manufacturer of the tank. National Security Council spokesman, John Kirby, says it will take many months for General Dynamics to build them. Kirby says the US doesn’t have the extra tanks in its arsenal and “even if there were excess tanks it would still take many months anyway,” suggesting that the unbuilt tanks will take even longer to arrive.

Continue reading→

1 Comment

Posted in Geopolitics, Governments, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War