Tag Archives: Interventionism

Only Adult Children Still Believe U.S. Propaganda, by Edward Curtin

There is an almost religious belief among a large chunk of the U.S. population in the government’s war propaganda, faithfully spewed by the media. From Edward Curtin at lewrockwell.com:

It should now be quite clear to any reasonable person that the Biden administration is hell-bent on destroying Russia and will risk nuclear war in doing so.  It has already started World War III with its use of Ukraine to light the final match.  The problem is that reasonable people are in very short supply, and, as Ray McGovern recently wrote in “Brainwashed for War with Russia, the Biden administration and their media lackeys

… will have no trouble rallying Americans for the widest war in 77 years, starting in Ukraine, and maybe spreading to China …. Most Americans are just as taken in by the media as they were 20 years ago, when they were told there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They simply took it on faith. Nor did the guilty media express remorse – or a modicum of embarrassment.

Many good writers – all of whom are banned from mainstream media – have  made clear why the corporate media propaganda about the US/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is false and egregiously dangerous.  The government of the U.S.A. is led by morons in the demonic grip of the “The U.S. Should Rule the World” ideology.  It is nothing new.

I don’t wish to debate the facts, for that is a fool’s game created to suggest there is something to debate.  For the evidence is clear, except to the public in the grip of propaganda-induced ignorance or those elites who never learned from the ancient Greek goddess Nemesis that dark Furies will destroy those who in their hubris push the limits.  The Biden administration has already done that, while President Biden mutters inanities as if he were a mafia boss wandering the streets in his pajamas and slippers.  The recent sabotaging of Nord Stream 2 is another example of the treacherous road we are traveling, as Diana Johnstone makes clear in her recent article, “Omerta in the Gangster War.”

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Chris Hedges: The Pimps of War

There are conspiratorial ghouls at the top of the power structure that thinks nothing of either spending trillions of dollars of other people’s money on war or sending other parents’ children off to fight them. Their advocacy of war, anytime and anywhere, nets them millions of dollars of personal remuneration, and they’re never called to account. From Chris Hedges at consortiumnews.com:

The unaccountable coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia.

“Whores of War,” original illustration by Mr. Fish.

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate.

They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute.

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President Joe Biden One Year On… America Is Back, With More Aggression Than Ever, by Finian Cunningham

You’re not a real president, a real man or woman, until you’ve started a war. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

Biden hasn’t started a war yet. But he’s still got three years to go and the first one fills the outlook with dread.

This weekend marks Joe Biden’s first year in office since his inauguration on January 20, 2021, as 46th president of the United States. In that time, it’s quite staggering how rapidly relations have deteriorated between the U.S. and Russia on the one hand and China on the other.

Right now, Europe is on the cusp of a war breaking out between a U.S.-backed regime in Ukraine and Russia. The volatile situation has the potential to drag the U.S. and other NATO powers into a proxy war with Russia, if not a full-blown international military conflict that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Washington’s baleful relations with Beijing have been eclipsed by the recent stand-off with Russia. But make no mistake, U.S.-China tensions have also been heightened with the attendant risk of war. Much of the tension has been increased by the Biden administration’s provocations towards China over the breakaway island province of Taiwan. Under Biden, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan have burgeoned as have the large-scale maneuvers of American military forces near Chinese territory – in the name of “freedom of navigation”.

Let’s rewind to Biden’s inauguration on that cold, sunny day of January 20 last year. There was the usual jamboree that often accompanies a new Democrat president. We saw it when Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were installed in the White House. Likewise, with Biden’s tenure, there were expectations of a more professional president, a more multilateral president, a more proficient president on foreign policy, and, dare we say, a more refined and law-abiding president. As usual, there was rosy rhetoric about how Biden would recover America’s international image that had been tarnished under his boorish predecessor, Donald Trump.

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The Neocons’ Primary War Tactic: Branding Opponents of U.S. Intervention as Traitors, by Glenn Greenwald

The group primarily responsible for America’s decline the last thirty years calls anyone opposed to their disastrous designs traitors. It’s the pot calling the kettle black. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

By rehabilitating neocons and elevating them as thought leaders, liberals live in their framework. Thus are opponents of U.S. involvement in Ukraine deemed treasonous.

Former Bush White House speechwriter David Frum speaks to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about Russia, Nov. 30, 2021

One of the most bizarre but important dynamics of Trump-era U.S. politics is that the most fanatical war-hungry neocons, who shaped Bush/Cheney militarism, have become the most popular pundits and thought leaders in American liberalism. They have not changed in the slightest — they are employing the same tactics they have always invoked, and for the same causes — but they have correctly perceived that their agenda is better served by migrating back to the Democratic Party which originally spawned their bloodthirsty ideology.

The excuse offered by Democrats for their embrace of neocons — we did it only as a temporary coalition of convenience to oppose Trump — is false for many reasons. This unholy alliance pre-dated Trump. In 2014 — long before anyone envisioned Trump descending down an escalator on his path to the White House — the journalist Jacob Heilbrunn wrote a New York Times op-ed entitled “The Next Act of the Neocons.” He predicted, correctly as it turned out, that “the neocons may be preparing a more brazen feat: aligning themselves with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her nascent presidential campaign, in a bid to return to the driver’s seat of American foreign policy.”

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Twenty Years on, We’ve Learned Nothing From 9/11, by Ron Paul

Those who cannot learn from the past are destined for high office or other well-paid, prestigious Washington sinecures. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Nothing upset the Washington Beltway elites more than when in a 2007 presidential debate I pointed out the truth about the 9/11 attacks: they attacked us because we’ve been in the Middle East, sanctioning and bombing the civilian population, for decades. The 9/11 attackers were not motivated to commit suicide terrorism on the Twin Towers and Pentagon because they dislike our freedoms, as then-President Bush claimed. That was a self-serving lie.

They hated – and hate – us because we kill them for no reason. Day after day. Year after year. Right up until just a few days ago, when President Biden slaughtered Zemari Ahmadi and nine members of his family – including seven children – in Afghanistan. The Administration bragged about taking out a top ISIS target. But they lied. Ahmadi was just an aid worker, working for a California-based organization, bringing water to suffering Afghan village residents.

This horror has been repeated thousands of times, over and over, for decades. Does Washington believe these people are subhuman? That they somehow don’t care about their relatives being killed? That they don’t react as we would react if a foreign power slaughtered our families?

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously suggested in an interview that killing half a million Iraqi children with sanctions designed to remove Saddam Hussein from power was “worth it.” It was an admission that the lives of innocents mean nothing to the Washington elite, even as they paint their murderous interventions as some kind of “humanitarian liberation.” The slogan of the US foreign policy establishment really should be, “No Lives Matter.”

The Washington foreign policy elites – Republicans and Democrats – are deeply corrupt and act contrary to US national interests. They pretend that decades of indiscriminate bombing overseas are beneficial to the victims and keep us safer as well. That is how they are able, year after year, to convince Congress to hand over a trillion dollars – money taken directly and indirectly from average Americans. They use fear and lies for their own profit. And they call themselves patriots.

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9/11: Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked, by Joe Lauria

This will be a radical thought to many Americans, but terrorists have their reasons for their attacks and it would be a good idea to listen to them. Hatred of our freedoms often isn’t even on the list. From Joe Lauria at consortiumnews.com:

When Western media discusses terrorism against the West, such as 9/11, the motive is almost always left out, even when the terrorists state they are avenging longstanding Western violence in the Muslim world, reports Joe Lauria.

Lower Manhattan skyline after a Boeing 767 hit the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. (Michael Foran, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

After a Russian commercial airliner was downed over Egypt’s Sinai last October [2015], Western media reported that the Islamic State bombing was retaliation against Russian airstrikes in Syria. The killing of 224 people, mostly Russian tourists on holiday, was matter-of-factly treated as an act of war by a fanatical group without an air force resorting to terrorism as a way to strike back.

Yet, Western militaries have killed infinitely more innocent civilians in the Middle East than Russia has. Then why won’t Western officials and media cite retaliation for that Western violence as a cause of terrorist attacks on New York, Paris and Brussels?

Instead, there’s a fierce determination not to make the same kinds of linkages that the press made so easily when it was Russia on the receiving end of terror. [See Consortium News’s “Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims.”]

For example, throughout four hours of Sky News’ coverage of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London, only the briefest mention was made about a possible motive for that horrific assault on three Underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people. But the attacks came just two years after Britain’s participation in the murderous invasion of Iraq.

Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the Iraq War’s architects, condemned the loss of innocent life in London and linked the attacks to a G-8 summit he’d opened that morning. A TV host then read and belittled a 10-second claim of responsibility from a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda affiliate in Germany saying that the Iraq invasion was to blame. There was no more discussion about it.

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Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars, by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

Mind your own business use to be folk wisdom. Now the mere suggestion of it to the US foreign policy and military establishment is apostasy. From John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Let us resolve that never again will we send the precious young blood of this country to die trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad. This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation. America must be restored to a proper role in the world. But we can do that only through the recovery of confidence in ourselves…. together we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning.”—George S. McGovern, former Senator and presidential candidate

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

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Afghanistan: A Tragically Stupid War Comes to a Tragic End, by Ron Paul

Ron Paul is too polite to say, “I told you so,” but he did warn Washington about what it was getting into. From Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.

Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.

Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.

It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.

That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?

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You Need To Understand That The US Is The Most Tyrannical Regime On Earth, by Caitlin Johnstone

A government can tyrannize both at home and abroad. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

You get a lot of moral clarity when you realize that the US government is the most despotic and corrupt regime on the entire planet by a very wide margin. This clarity informs your perspective in a way that helps you see through a lot of the propaganda narratives that are laid over the public’s vision about what’s going on in our world.

Whenever I say the US is the most tyrannical regime on earth I get a lot of objections from people, and these are always people who simply haven’t thought very hard about the horrific realities of US foreign policy. Sure you can name some governments who are more brutal and oppressive toward their own citizenry than Washington, but you can’t name any who are more brutal and oppressive overall when you zoom out and look at the big picture.

The United States is currently circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and waging wars which have killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. Its sanctions and blockades are starving people to death en masse every single day. It works to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates by toppling their governments via CIA coups, proxy armies, partial and full-scale invasions, and the most egregious number of election interferences in the entire world.

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Wrong Lessons from the Afghanistan Debacle and Defeat, by Jacob G. Hornberger

The “lessons” US interventionists will learn from their failure in Afghanistan is like the the alcoholic who “learns” his problems stem from his preference for gin over vodka. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, interventionists are not learning the real lessons in their defeat in Afghanistan. Instead, they are coming up with all sorts of reasons as to why their Afghanistan intervention turned out to be such a big debacle. They say that they’ve learned how to do better with future interventions.

One of the favorite lessons they have learned from this fiasco is encapsulated in the phrase “forever wars.” Some interventionists now say that converting the Afghanistan war into a “forever war” was the big mistake.  They say that what they should have been done is just invade, quickly capture or kill Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda, and quickly oust the Taliban regime and replace it with a pro-U.S. regime. Then, quickly get out. No “forever war.”

License: Creative Commons

What these interventionists fail to realize is that that is precisely what President George W. Bush wanted to do. Convinced that U.S. military forces had accomplished their mission (well, except for capturing and killing bin Laden), Bush quickly turned his sights toward Iraq, where he aimed to do what his father had failed to do during the Persian Gulf intervention — oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power and replace him with a pro-U.S. regime.

Now, let’s imagine that Bush had done what interventionists now favor — initiated a quick in-and-out intervention in Afghanistan. Wouldn’t the Taliban quickly have gone on the offensive against the new U.S.-installed puppet regime? If the Taliban had quickly retaken power, then what would have been the point of the intervention, especially given that it had not succeeded in taking out bin Laden? The whole reason that U.S. forces had to stay in Afghanistan and make this a “forever war” was to prevent the Taliban from reversing the regime change that the intervention had achieved.

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