Tag Archives: US Interventionism

Go All the Way, by Robert Gore

Posted on August 25, 2021 | 24 comments

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ADE is a metaphor for government—they both make things worse.

A phenomenon known as Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) may be developing from the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines. ADE leaves a population more vulnerable to a disease and its variants after widespread administration of a vaccine during a pandemic. While the early indication may be that the vaccine prevents or ameliorates the disease, if it only kills some of the virus, mutant variants can develop that resist the vaccine and spread to the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. The process is analogous to bacterial resistance. ADE was a known risk of mRNA technology from earlier efforts to develop coronavirus vaccines, which were halted when new exposures to the underlying virus led to lab animal deaths.

A phenomenon known as Monetary Dependent Enhancement (MDE) is a debilitating side effect of contemporary economic prescriptions. The belief is that fiat debt units—Federal Reserve Notes, credit entries on Federal Reserve computers, and Treasury debt—can create economic growth, jobs, and wealth. Injection of fiat debt units may initially stimulate economic activity and elevate asset prices. However, they’re not a substitute for savings, investment, and production, which actually produce growth, jobs, and wealth. Rather, fiat debt debasement discourages savings, eventually retarding investment and production. Of course, as proponents of fiat debt units like to say, in the long run we’re all dead, but MDE has rendered entire economies dead while people are still alive and will do so again.

A phenomenon known as Intervention Dependent Enhancement (IDE) repeatedly presents as an adverse effect of US foreign and military policy. The US foreign policy establishment—“the blob”—believes that its conceptions of governance can and should be exported to other nations. Revolutions are fomented, invasions launched, and regimes changed in benighted nations that refuse to acknowledge the superiority of the American way and accept the blob’s beneficence and guidance.

Intervention carries staggering costs in blood and treasure and leaves both the recipient nation and the US in worse shape than they were before the intervention. The US-backed regime is invariably corrupt and has no real support among the people it purports to rule. The satrapy’s depredations inflame the locals’ antipathy towards it and its US government sponsor. The locals have the incentive, moral imperative, and staying power to fight for their land, all of which the invader lacks. Afghanistan is a classic example of IDE.

IDE has destroyed the goodwill the US government enjoyed after WWII as leader of the free world. It has produced death and destruction across the globe, and helped plunge the US government into debt. The US’s self-anointed designation as the world’s exceptional nation are fingernails grating across the global backboard. The dollar’s reserve currency status, which allows the blob to fund its empire with IOUs, has much of the world searching for alternatives to the buck.

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A phenomenon known as Law Dependent Enhancement (LDE) stems from the ever-growing mountain of statutes, regulations, executive orders, and administrative promulgations emanating from every level of government. A problem is identified and a solution proposed. The proponents’ interest lasts only until a law is passed and regulations are imposed, then they’re on to the next problem. Those who must then live with the laws and regulations have every incentive to bend them to their own ends.

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Haiti and Washington’s Braindead Interventionists, by Doug Bandow

Posted on July 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

For interventionist hammers, every perturbation anywhere is a nail waiting to be hit. Haiti is the current nail, so let’s hit it! From Doug Bandow at theamericanconservative.com:

Their only solution to any problem is to invade. Does anyone have a better idea?

It’s been just another day at the office in Port-au-Prince.

President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. The murder might have been organized by Haitian expatriates. It could have been an inside job. Perhaps it was criminal gangs. Or, suggest the conspiracy-minded, the CIA was back to its old tricks.

Amid two constitutions, desiccated institutions, and multiple factions, at least four men claimed to be Moise’s successor. The lower house of the legislature is empty, with elections long overdue. Only a third of the members of the upper house remain in office. The head of the country’s supreme court died of COVID-19.

Haiti’s imbroglio trumps any drama in Washington, D.C., even during the Trump years. Unfortunately, Haiti has suffered through similarly unnerving events throughout its history.

Originally a French colony which implemented a particularly brutal and deadly form of slavery, the country of Haiti emerged from an extended slave revolution. Over the years, decades, and centuries there have been dictators, populists, crooks, coups, elections, murders, revolts, demonstrations, and poverty, always terrible, overwhelming, grinding poverty. Throughout the country’s history, outsiders—including France, Dominican Republic, the U.S., and United Nations—have added to Haiti’s misery.

So what is the solution to Haiti’s latest offense against good governance? Foreign occupation, of course! The Washington Post pushed “swift and muscular international intervention.”

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The United States Has Declared Defeat in Two More Wars, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on April 25, 2021 | 1 comment

The US military is pulling back from Afghanistan and Iraq after achieving none of its stated objectives in those two countries. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

President Biden announced last week that he planned to remove all combat troops from Afghanistan by September, which he says will mark the end of what is now a twenty-year war in the central Asian country.

A week earlier, the US and Iraq reaffirmed a deal to withdraw “any remaining combat forces” from Iraq, and to further wind down the US involvement there, which dates back to the 2003 invasion.

In both cases, of course, the stated plans to end military intervention have been framed in polite language designed to make it look like the US is leaving on its own terms—and also to allow the US regime some level of plausibility when it claims “mission accomplished.”

In reality, of course, both Iraq and Afghanistan are just two more wars that the United States has lost in a long list of botched military interventions dating back to Vietnam and Korea. Moreover, these withdrawals signal the US’s continued geopolitical decline in a world that is becoming multipolar and highly motivated to bring to a final end the US’s vanishing “unipolar moment.”

But what exactly do we mean by “lost” in this context? Well, by the standards of the objectives presented by the US regime itself when these wars began, these wars are complete failures.

For example, we were told Iraq and Afghanistan would become “democracies” where Western-style human rights are protected and valued. That was the humanitarian justification.

We were also told these countries would become reliable allies of the United States, sort of like Germany or Japan. That was the geopolitical justification.

The US has failed on both fronts.

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Ten Years Since Beginning of Failed Regime-Change Operation Against Syria, by Paul Antonopoulos

Posted on March 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

When does a long war become a forever war? A decade seems like a good dividing line. From Paul Antonopoulos at antiwar.com:

The initial coalition against Syria has collapsed, with Turkey frustrated over the U.S.’ sustained support for the Kurds and the Arabs pivoting back to Syria.

On this exact day ten years ago, NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel began a coordinated campaign of regime change against President Bashar al-Assad and the destruction of Syria. This has led to the death of over 500,000 people, millions of refugees, destroyed infrastructure and an economy in crisis. Despite numerous political maneuvers, this alliance against Syria catastrophically failed and could not achieve regime change. Not only did Assad survive the onslaught, but the geopolitical situation dramatically changed as a result.

Each aggressor had its own ambitions in Syria but was united in the goal to achieve regime change. Thanks to the contributions made by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the Syrian government survived the coordinated aggression. Whilst NATO and Turkey continue to insist on regime change, Arab states, most prominently Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were forced to normalize their relations with Syria to counter the growing threat of Turkish expansionism and influence into the Arab World that they had not anticipated when they decided to destroy Syria ten years ago.

Although a U.S.-dominated unipolar system was consolidated with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s 2008 intervention to defend the de facto republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia against NATO-encouraged Georgian forces was the first sign of an emerging multipolar system. A multipolar system, where there is a more equal distribution of power compacted into spheres of influence, was strengthened whilst the US could only helplessly watch as Russia successfully defended South Ossetia and Abkhazia in a region that falls under Moscow’s sphere of influence.

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U(nspeakably) S(adistic) Foreign Policy, by Sheldon Richmond

Posted on March 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to see the nobility of US intentions when you’re just a poor, innocent peasant and you run the risk every day that US bombs or bullets might kill you. From Sheldon Richmond at antiwar.com:

If you had set out to construct a foreign policy designed to impose indescribable suffering on millions of innocent people around the world, you’d have a tough time coming up with anything more systematic and effective than U.S. foreign policy. An inventory of US direct military and covert operations, aid to savage governments and murderous “rebels,” and economic sanctions would easily lead one to think that the architects of this constellation of policies aimed to inflict death and maximum pain on innocent bystanders. It has been one series of crimes against humanity.

That would be an oversimplification of course. Clearly, the makers and executors of those policies have not merely aimed to inflict such suffering on innocents. Larger geopolitical goals have always been in play. But that by no means mitigated the results, which have been foreseeable and avoidable. Besides, the geopolitical goals are themselves to be condemned, seeing as how they flow from US rulers’ “exceptional nation” zeal to shape the world according to their idea of what’s good.

Nor does it help to point out that the foreign regimes and other targets of US policy have often perpetrated unfathomable brutality against innocents. The fact is that US intervention predictably enlarges local and regional violence by orders of magnitude. So other people’s crimes are no excuse for US piling on.

Over many years, from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East, and throughout Asia, US policymakers have imposed great hardship in a variety of forms: open combat through invasion and occupation, covert activities, and aid to allied repressive governments and insurgent groups aiming at regime change.

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Consent That’s Manufactured By Propaganda Is Not Informed Consent, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on March 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Informed consent and fraud are mutually exclusive. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

A new Twitter post by Secretary of State Tony Blinken reads as follows:

“We will never hesitate to use force when American lives and vital interests are at stake, but we will do so only when the objectives are clear and achievable, consistent with our values and laws, and with the American people’s informed consent – together with diplomacy.”

Like pretty much everything ever said by Blinken, and indeed by every US secretary of state, this is an absolute lie.

Firstly, US military force is never used to protect “American lives” in modern times, unless you count the lives of US troops and mercenaries in foreign lands they have no business occupying in the first place. The US military is never used to defend American lives against an invading enemy force; that simply does not happen in our current world order. It is only ever used to protect the agenda of unipolar planetary domination, which would be the “vital interests” which Blinken obliquely refers to above.

Secondly, Blinken’s claim that the Biden administration will never use military force without “the American people’s informed consent” has already been blatantly invalidated by Biden’s airstrikes on Syria last month. The American people never gave their consent to those airstrikes, informed or uninformed. A nation the US invaded (Syria) was bombed because troops are being attacked in a second nation the US invaded (Iraq) on the completely unproven claim that a third country against whom the US is currently waging economic warfare (Iran) supported those attacks. At no time were the people asked for their consent to this, and at no time was any attempt made to ensure that they were informed of the situation before it happened.

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The Blob is Addicted to Overseas Interventions, by Doug Bandow

Posted on January 29, 2021 | Leave a comment

An excellent analysis of the hubris that permeates American foreign policy, by Doug Bandow at theamericanconservative.com:

Whichever party wins elections, the foreign policy establishment will find a war to get involved in and a means to justify it.

Aerial view of the Pentagon. (By Jeremy Christensen/Shutterstock)
 

Since the end of the Cold War there have been few external constraints on U.S. foreign policy. The Soviet Union’s collapse left America as the unipower. “What we say goes,” declared President George H.W. Bush. Washington’s foreign policy establishment, later termed “the Blob,” saw an opportunity to transform the world.

The 1990s featured military interventions in the Balkans, Somalia, Haiti, Panama, and Iraq. All were unnecessary wars of choice, though Panama was close geographically and hosted the important Panama Canal. Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait unsettled the Mideast, but less than had other conflicts, such as the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Overall, these interventions had only modest consequences for the U.S. All were limited, imposed minimal direct costs, and came to an expeditious end. No one spoke of “endless wars.”

However, the 9/11 attacks triggered a dramatic transformation of U.S. foreign policy. Although President George W. Bush had campaigned for a “humble foreign policy,” he delivered a toxic mix of arrogance, hypocrisy, sanctimony, and incompetence. In Afghanistan he turned a counterterrorism mission against al-Qaeda and the Taliban into endless nation-building.

Much worse, he invaded Iraq—which had no WMDs, as he had falsely claimed—triggering a devastating sectarian war. Thousands of allied troops were killed; tens of thousands were injured; hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed; millions were displaced; trillions of dollars were wasted. Religious cleansing destroyed the indigenous Christian community and was followed by devastating attacks on other faith minorities, such as the Yazidis. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was loosed, mutating into the even more destructive Islamic State.

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Endless Interventionist Clichés: Washington’s Bipartisan War Party is Never at a Loss on Why War Is Necessary, by Doug Bandow

Posted on January 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

The War Party has never seen a war it didn’t like, and always has a glib explanation of why the war being fought with other people’s money and lives is vital, crucial, essential, etc. to America’s “interests.” From Doug Bandow at antiwar.com:

Starting last Spring the coronavirus pandemic kept me at home, encouraging me to watch webinars. Many webinars. Washington, D.C.’s gaggle of think tanks have filled online space with seemingly endless discussions of what to do about the world. With an emphasis on do.

Members of the infamous Blob, the Washington foreign policy establishment, bridle at criticism of their uniformity of views. Why, they insist, they argue about everything. Like whether we should sanction a country before bombing it. Whether the post-invasion occupation of a nation will require 50,000 or 100,000 troops.

Whether the U.S. should remove a government from power or merely create a “political process” that ensures its departure. Whether American officials should limit themselves to being hypocritical or whether it is okay for them to be sanctimonious as well. And whether rejecting just one of Washington’s righteous demands is a casus belli, or at least two denials are necessary.

Absolutely, there is an incredible diversity of views within the Blob.

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Barack Obama & the Death of Idealism, by James Bovard

Posted on December 7, 2020 | Leave a comment

Barack Obama embraced US interventionism and war as fervently as any neocon. From James Bovard at consortiumnews.com:

The former president’s deception and warmongering killed the “hope and change” he promised on the campaign trail, writes James Bovard.

President Barack Obama saluting coffins of dead U.S. soldiers returned from Afghanistan to Dover Air Force Base, Aug. 9, 2011. (White House/Pete Souza)

Americans are sickened of an “idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious,” as H.L. Mencken wrote a hundred years ago. Though Mencken was condemning President Woodrow Wilson, the same verdict could characterize the legacy of former president Barack Obama.

Obama is now on a book tour issuing calls for honest government, civic virtue, and similar tripe. But Obama did more to discredit idealism than any president since Wilson.

A dozen years ago, Americans were enthralled by the newly elected president from Illinois. After the deceit and demagoguery of the George W. Bush era, Obama’s first presidential campaign with its “Yes, We Can” motto swayed Americans that he could personally restore the moral grandeur of government. Its idealism was epitomized by the famous “Hope” campaign poster that practically deified the candidate.

Shortly before his first inauguration, Obama announced, “What is required is the same perseverance and idealism that our founders displayed.” After Obama’s inaugural address, the media rejoiced as if a new age of political idealism had arrived.

Practically the entire world joined the race to canonize the new president. Less than 12 days after he took office, Obama was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize — which he received later that year. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared at a White House state dinner, “We warmly applaud the recognition by the Nobel Committee of the healing touch you have provided and the power of your idealism and your vision.” Shortly after receiving the Peace Prize, Obama announced he would triple the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The Peace Prize helped insulate him from criticism as he proceeded to bomb seven nations during his presidency.

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A Long-Forgotten CIA Document From WikiLeaks Sheds Critical Light on Today’s U.S. Politics and Wars, by Glenn Greenwald

Posted on November 25, 2020 | Leave a comment

Barack Obama was a great salesman for the warfare state and perpetual wars. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

The Agency knew that their best asset for selling their wars was Barack Obama — the same reason so many in the security state were eager to get rid of Donald Trump.

(Photo Illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks was back in early 2010, when the group was still largely unknown. What prompted my attention was a small article in The New York Times which began this way:

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

The NYT explained that the Pentagon had prepared a secret 2008 plan in which they plotted how to destroy WikiLeaks, including by purposely leaking to it false documents with the hope that the group would publish the fakes and forever obliterate their credibility — a dastardly scheme which was ironically leaked to WikiLeaks, which promptly posted the document on its website.

Any group that the U.S. security state includes on its “list of enemies” by virtue of publishing its secrets is one that is going to attract my interest, and likely my support. As a result — months before they made international headlines with publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs and diplomatic cables from Hillary Clinton’s State Department — I immediately investigated everything I could about the group’s founding and mission; interviewed its founder Julian Assange; and urged readers to help support the fledging group, concluding that “one of the last avenues to uncover government and other elite secrets are whistle blowers and organizations that enable them. WikiLeaks is one of the world’s most effective such groups, and it’s thus no surprise that they’re under such sustained attacks.”

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