Neocon think tanks rat John Bolton -- a cowardish chickenhawk who pretend to be reckless and bloodthirsty imperialist (leaving
to other to die in unleashed wars)
Appointment of this war criminal, remnant from the neocon clique of Bush II administration, which unleashed Iraq war,
means that Trump can can have a tattoo on his forehead -- I am Sheldon Adelson stooge.
John Robert Bolton (born November 20, 1948) is an American attorney, political commentator, Republican consultant,
government official and former diplomat who for over a year somehow served as the 27th National Security Advisor of the United States
(April 9, 2018 -- Sep 10, 2019). The appointment of this remnant from Bush II neocon clique, the person who
was intumental in unleahing Iraq war (and as such a war criminal) mean that Trump can have a tattoo on
his forehead -- I am Sheldon Adelson stooge.
Bolton served as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 to December 2006 as a recess
appointee by President George W. Bush. He resigned at the end of his recess appointment in December 2006 because
he was unlikely to win confirmation from the Senate, which the Democratic Party had gained control of at the time.
Bolton is a former senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Fox News Channel commentator. He
was a foreign policy adviser to 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Bolton has been involved with numerous
conservative organizations, including the anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, where he served as the organization
Chairman until March 2018.
Bolton is a foreign policy hawk and is an advocate for regime change in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen
and North Korea. He has also repeatedly called for the termination of the Iran nuclear deal. He was an advocate of
the Iraq War and continues to support the decision to invade Iraq. He has continuously supported military action
and regime change in Syria, Libya, and Iran.
His political views have been described as American nationalist, conservative, and "neoconservative". Bolton
rejects the last term and uses the term "pro-American" instead.
Bio trivia
Bolton was born on November 20, 1948, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Virginia Clara "Ginny" (née Godfrey), a
housewife, and Edward Jackson "Jack" Bolton, a Baltimore City fireman. He grew up in the working-class
neighborhood of Yale Heights and won a scholarship to the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, Maryland, graduating in
1966. He also ran the school's Students For Goldwater campaign in 1964.
Bolton attended Yale University, earning a B.A. and graduating summa cum laude in 1970. He was a member of the
Yale Political Union. He attended Yale Law School from 1971 to 1974, where he shared classes with his friend
Clarence Thomas, earning a J.D. in 1974. In 1972, Bolton was a summer intern for Vice President Spiro Agnew. He
was hired for the position by David Keene.
Vietnam War
Bolton was a supporter of the Vietnam War, but purposely avoided military service in Vietnam. During the 1969
Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers were assigned by birth date.) As a result of the
Johnson and Nixon administrations' decisions to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces,
joining a Guard or Reserve unit became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War, although 42 Army Reserve units
were called up with 35 of them deployed to Vietnam shortly after the Tet offensive in 1968–69. Before graduating
from Yale in 1970, Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard rather than wait to find out if his draft
number would be called. (The highest number called to military service was 195.) He saw active duty for 18 weeks
of training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, from July to November 1970. After serving in the National Guard for four
years, he served in the United States Army Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later.
Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman alleged that Bolton played a role in encouraging the inclusion of statement
that British Intelligence had determined Iraq attempted to procure yellowcake uranium from Niger in Bush's 2003
State of the Union Address. These statements were claimed by critics of the President to be partly based on
documents found to be forged. Waxman's allegations could not be confirmed as they were based on classified
documents.
Deceptions as the method to advance his goals
Bolton stated in June 2004 congressional testimony that Iran was lying about enriched uranium contamination:
"Another unmistakable indicator of Iran's intentions is the pattern of repeatedly lying to ... the IAEA ... when
evidence of uranium enriched to 36 percent was found, it attributed this to contamination from imported centrifuge
parts." However, later isotope analysis supported Iran's explanation of foreign contamination for most of the
observed enriched uranium. At their August 2005 meeting the IAEA's Board of Governors concluded: "Based on the
information currently available to the Agency, the results of that analysis tend, on balance, to support Iran's
statement about the foreign origin of most of the observed highly enriched uranium contamination."
Bolton has often been accused of attempting to pressure the intelligence community to endorse his views. According
to former coworkers, Bolton withheld information that ran counter to his goals from Secretary of State Colin
Powell on multiple occasions, and from Powell's successor Condoleezza Rice on at least one occasion
April 9, one John R.
Bolton is scheduled to take the place of H.R. McMaster as President Trump’s National Security Advisor — a position
that doesn’t require congressional confirmation. No, this isn’t the long-haired crooner who once released a
mediocre rendition of “When a Man Loves a Woman”; you’re thinking of Michael
Bolton. This Bolton served a relatively obscure post in the George W.
Bush administration (Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security), yet proved highly
influential in the administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 (a decision he
still seems proud of). As a reminder, this American military aggression in Iraq resulted in
hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, cost American taxpayers more than
$2 trillion, and led to the formation of
ISIS.
The mustachioed madman in question has lately spent
much of his free time as a Fox News pundit and a traveling fanboy for a
cult-like Iranian terrorist organization known as the Mujahedeen Khalq (or “MEK”). This Persian posse, which was
formed in the 1960s, is known for
killing American civilians during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, forging an
alliance with Saddam Hussein, and its likely
involvement in the assassinations of four Iranian scientists in recent years. After massive
lobbying and PR efforts, the MEK was removed from the U.S. State Department’s terror list in 2012. The group
has high hopes for overthrowing and replacing the current Iranian government, theoretically with the assistance of
Western warlords like
Bolton himself.
The fanatical interventionist views of Mr. Bolton have
remained remarkably consistent for decades. The man is like the goddamn Bernie Sanders of American imperialism. In
1966, he even
wrote an editorial for his school newspaper entitled “No Peace in Vietnam,” in which he expressed skepicism
toward (in his view) naïve calls for an end to the violence in Southeast Asia. Bolton has always looked fondly
upon war, as long as he didn’t have to fight in one. “I confess that I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asia
rice paddy,” the chickenhawk later
explained.
As if John Bolton’s obsession with mass murder isn’t
bad enough, the guy is also a known bully and mafioso wannabe. In a recent episode of
Deconstructed, former assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of
International Security and Nonproliferation Thomas Countryman discussed Bolton’s tendency to “emotionally abuse”
his staff, and former director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons José Bustanirecounted an ominous and chilling personal encounter with the statesman in question:
“I had convinced them, Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi, to join in the organization, which meant that inspections
should take place 30 days after their cities are at the convention. […] [Bolton] showed up in The Hague, and he
came to my office, and he said, ‘Cheney wants you out. You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you
don’t comply with the decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you.’ […] I said, ‘Well, I’m
not ready to do that. I have no reason to do that. Secretary of State Colin Powell has written me a letter
praising my mandate so far, so I cannot understand why is it that I have to leave the organization?’ And he
said, ‘You have to be ready to face the consequences, because we know where your kids live.’”
(For more context, listen to the full interview here.)
That’s right; the incoming
advisor is so deeply haunted by the prospects for peaceful solutions that he’s willing to threaten the family of a
prominent diplomat in attempt to quash them. I hate to say it, folks, but this John Bolton character might be a
prime example of a proverbial “bad hombre.”
John R. Bolton has an extensive political resume that
includes past positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations and a stint as a U.N. ambassador; he is certainly
qualified for the National Security Advisor position. However, he’s also an unhinged lunatic who intimidates and
threatens people, abhors peaceful diplomacy, and advocates military action as a
first resort. His barbaric neoconservatism reduces the global population
to a Brzezinskian “grand
chessboard” beholden to the whims of American primacy. The man makes me ashamed of my own mustache, for
Christ’s sake!
As a famous cinematic hippie once said, “This
aggression will not stand, man!” We need to band together with anti-war conservatives, libertarians, hell, even
other species (I’m lookin’ at you, lemurs!), and keep this monster at bay by any means possible. With U.S.-Russia
tensions
escalating and the
Doomsday Clock set at two minutes before midnight, cock-blocking the imperialistic ambitions of this ferocious
thug may very well be a prerequisite to the survival of the human race and life on Earth as we know it.
The first and the most important fact that there will no elections in November -- both candidates represent the same oligarchy,
just slightly different factions of it.
Look like NYT is controlled by Bolton faction of CIA. They really want to overturn the
results of 2020 elections and using Russia as a bogeyman is a perfect opportunity to achieve this
goal.
Neocons understand very well that it is MIC who better their bread, so amplifying rumors the simplify getting additional budget
money for intelligence agencies (which are a part of MIC) is always the most desirable goal.
Notable quotes:
"... But a new assessment says China would prefer to see the president defeated, though it is not clear Beijing is doing much to meddle in the 2020 campaign to help Joseph R. Biden Jr. ..."
"... The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's confidence in our democratic process." ..."
"... But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences", "increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections? ..."
"... But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn? ..."
"... Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any evidence. ..."
"... Is there a secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S. people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China? ..."
"... If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them? ..."
"... Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off their budget. ..."
"... Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose. ..."
But when one reads the piece itself one finds no fact that would support the 'Russia
Continues Interfering' statement:
Russia is using a range of techniques to denigrate Joseph R. Biden Jr., American intelligence
officials said Friday in their first public assessment that Moscow continues to try to
interfere in the 2020 campaign to help President Trump.
At the same time, the officials said China preferred that Mr. Trump be defeated in
November and was weighing whether to take more aggressive action in the election.
But officials briefed on the intelligence said that Russia was the far graver, and more
immediate, threat. While China seeks to gain influence in American politics, its leaders have
not yet decided to wade directly into the presidential contest, however much they may dislike
Mr. Trump, the officials said.
The assessment, included in a
statement released by William R. Evanina, the director of the National
Counterintelligence and Security Center, suggested the intelligence community was treading
carefully, reflecting the political heat generated by previous findings.
The authors emphasize the scaremongering hearsay from "officials briefed on the
intelligence" - i.e. Democratic congress members - about Russia but have nothing to back it
up.
When one reads the
statement by Evanina one finds nothing in it about Russian attempts to interfere in the
U.S. elections. Here is the only 'evidence' that is noted:
For example, pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about
corruption – including through publicizing leaked phone calls – to undermine
former Vice President Biden's candidacy and the Democratic Party. Some Kremlin-linked actors
are also seeking to boost President Trump's candidacy on social media and Russian television.
After a request from Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal attorney, a Ukrainian
parliamentarian published Ukrainian
evidence of Biden's very real interference in the Ukraine. Also: Some guest of a Russian TV
show had an opinion. How is either of those two items 'evidence' of Russian interference in
U.S. elections?
The statement then claims: "Ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections, foreign states will continue to use covert and overt
influence measures in their attempts to sway U.S. voters' preferences and perspectives, shift
U.S. policies, increase discord in the United States, and undermine the American people's
confidence in our democratic process."
But how do the 'intelligence' agencies know that foreign states want to "sway preferences",
"increase discord" or "undermine confidence" in elections?
The mainstream view in the U.S. media and government holds that the Kremlin is waging a
long-haul campaign to undermine and destabilize American democracy. Putin wants to see the
United States burn, and contentious elections offer a ready-made opportunity to fan the
flames.
But ascribing motive and intent is a tricky business, because perceived impact is often
mistaken for true intent. [...] Where is the evidence that Russia actually wants to bring
down the liberal world order and watch the United States burn?
Well there is none. And that is why the 'intelligence' agencies do not present any
evidence.
Even the NYT writers have to
admit that there is nothing there:
The release on Friday was short on specifics, ...
and
Intelligence agencies focus their work on the intentions of foreign governments, and steer
clear of assessing if those efforts have had an effect on American voters.
How do 'intelligence' agencies know Russian, Chinese or Iranian 'intentions'. Is there a
secret policy paper by the Russian government that says it should "increase discord" in the
United States? Is there some Chinese think tank report which says that undermining U.S.
people's confidence in their democratic process would be good for China?
If the 'intelligence' people have copies of those papers why not publish them?
Let me guess. The 'intelligence' agencies have nothing, zero, nada. They are just making
wild-ass guesses about 'intentions' of perceived enemies to impress the people who sign off
their budget.
Nowadays that seems to be their main purpose.
Posted by b on August 8, 2020 at 18:08 UTC |
Permalink
"There's no difference between John Bolton, Brian Hook or Elliott Abrams," Iranian Foreign
Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi said in
a tweet with the hashtag #BankruptUSPolicy on Friday.
"When U.S. policy concerns Iran, American officials have been biting off more than they can
chew. This applies to Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump and their successors," Mousavi added.
Indeed in perhaps one of the greatest symbols or representations of the contradictions and
absurdity inherent in US foreign policy of the past few decades, and a supreme irony that can't
be emphasized enough: the new US envoy to Iran who will oversee Pompeo's 'maximum pressure'
campaign remains the most publicly visible face of the 1980's Iran-Contra affair .
Elliott Abrams has been named to the position after Brian Hook stepping down. This means the
man who will continue to push for the extension of a UN arms embargo against Iran once himself
was deeply involved in illegally selling weapons to Iran and covering it up .
Most famously, or we should say infamously, Abrams pleaded guilty to lying to Congress in
1991 following years of the Iran-Contra scandal engulfing the Reagan administration; however,
he was also pardoned by outgoing president George H.W. Bush at around the same time.
"Pardoned by George H.W. Bush in 1992, Abrams was a pivotal figure in the foreign-policy
scandal that shook the Reagan administration, lying to Congress about his knowledge of the plot
to covertly sell weapons to the Khomeini government and use the proceeds to illegally fund the
right-wing Contras rebel group in Nicaragua ,"
NY Mag reviews.
Some are noting this heightens the chances that Washington could get dragged into a war
involving Israel and Iran.
Recall too that Abrams has been Trump's point man for ousting Maduro from Venezuela, and it
appears he'll remain in the post of special envoy for Venezuela as well.
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The Grayzone journalist, Anya Parampil, who has frequently reported from Venezuela, alleged
this week that Abrams will "try and destroy Venezuela and Iran at the same time".
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4879&num_ads=18&cf=1258.5.zerohedge%20190919&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fmarkets%2Fno-difference-between-john-bolton-brian-hook-or-elliott-abrams-iran-fm Wild Bill Steamcock , 14 hours ago
Abrams is a disgrace. This Administration should be dying in it's own shame bringing this
swine back into government.
He's a leach. He's about lining his own pockets. He can't even own a .22 single shot, yet
he's shaping international policy.
This country is dead. And the fact Trump has democrat and zionist Kushner as advisor,
bringing in guys like Bolton and Abrams, Reince Priebus, H.R. McMaster and that Ukranian pet
goblin of his, in not firing Comey et. al day 1 means he's not the answer. Face it.
And to be fair, it doesn't matter anymore who is POTUS. It hasn't really mattered in quite
some time. The Plan rolls along.
Kinskian , 15 hours ago
Trump is a clumsy and transparent Zionist stooge.
PT , 14 hours ago
Gotta admit, if you're going to have a Zionist stooge then you are better off having a
clumsy and transparent one.
Dank fur Kopf , 14 hours ago
Elliott Abrams is a moron. He's been running the exact same stupid coup strategy for
decades, and can't conceive of a world where the enemy has worked out how to defeat that.
Venezuela was set to be US foreign policies most embarrassing failure--but maybe Iran will
be worse.
Dank fur Kopf , 14 hours ago
Let's predict what Abrams will attempt:
Running out of the US/UK embassies, Abrams will attempt to identify a potential
alternative leader who is corrupt and controllable. They'll throw political support behind
this false leader, and try and find enough military to support him. Then, protests in the
streets, and the small faction of the military--supported by foreign forces--will attempt to
establish control.
Counter: China and Russia will import anti-coup specialists. Individuals in the Iranian
military will pretend to be on board claiming to have thousands at call, and when the false
leader gives the call, they won't answer. All the conspirators will be caught out on the
street, and have to flee to embassies for political asylum. Like what happened in Venezuela
recently, and Turkey in 2016. This will allow Iran to do a purge of all the real threats
(remembering that Iran has the death penalty for sedition), and give them enough
justification to end diplomatic missions in the country that are being used as launch
pads.
Ambassador John Bolton hinted that he doesn't like being called a hawk, since foreign policy labels are simplistic.
But first of all, he labeled libertarian Sen. Rand Paul an isolationist, rather than say, a non- interventionist. And after
nearly 500 pages (all but the epilogue), what you will absorb is absolutely the worldview of a geopolitical hawk. He is not technically
a neoconservative (like, say, Paul Wolfowitz) because the latter were more focused on nation building and spreading democracy.
Bolton sees what he's promoting as defense, but it requires a constant offense.
Bolton is very bright, as Jim Baker noted decades ago, and very well-read, even endorsing his fellow Baltimorean and my teacher
Steve Vicchio's book on Lincoln's faith. But his intelligence is all put into an ideological reading of situations. As Aristotle
would put it, the problem is not lack of theoretical wisdom, but the deficiency in practical wisdom and prudential judgment. Certainly
there are bad actors in the world, and vigilance is required. But when is aggressive action called for, and when is it better
to go with diplomacy? In this book, I find few cases of such restraint. For Bolton, it seems that the goal of peace and security
requires the constant threat of war and presence on every continent. All this intervention around the world requires troops, soldiers,
real men and women and their lives and those of their families, requiring lots of sacrifice. At times, his theorizing seems distant
from these realities on the ground.
So Bolton is critical of the "axis of adults" in the Trump administration, the "generals", but not Kelly and not much on his
predecessor McMaster, much less the eccentric Flynn. So his beef is with Mattis, another fine student of history. Bolton says
he went by the rules, as James Baker had said that Bush 41 was "the one who got the votes". He tried to influence Trump within
the rules, while Mattis, Tillerson and Haley pursued their own foreign policy. I'm sure that Mattis was sometimes right and sometimes
wrong, but I would trust his prudential judgment above that of the equally bright Bolton, because of his life experience, being
the one on the ground and knowing what war is like.
When Bolton was considered for secretary state right after the 2016 election, I said, well I don't care for the guy, but at
least I've heard of him and we know what we're dealing with. His opponent in GOP foreign policy is the libertarian and non-interventionist
Sen. Rand Paul. What does Bolton say about the big players in the Trump administration? Nikki Haley is dismissed as a lightweight
who was posing for her political future. Well, that's basically what Trump, "the one that got the votes", put her there for. But
it's interesting that Bolton is so anti-Haley, when she was for Rubio and the more hawkish platform.
Tillerson's successor Mike Pompeo had sort of a love-hate relationship with Bolton.
Steve Mnuchin is the epitome of the globalist establishment, along with Javanka. Jared Kushner is dismissed as no Kissinger,
but when it comes to China, his soft stance is blamed on Kissinger! While Bolton didn't testify in the impeachment, Fiona Hill
is mentioned only with respect in this book.
Everybody's flaw, from Bolton's point of view, is being less belligerent than Bolton. (Even in the Bush administration, the
only name I can think of would be Michael Ledeen). He even defends the concept of Middle Eastern "endless wars" on the grounds
that we didn't start them and can't dictate when they end. Obama was a dove, but in 2016 the GOP marked a shift, with Trump, Paul,
Ben Carson and even Ted Cruz opposing the "invade every country on earth" philosophy that this book promotes. It's true that Trump
is not an ideologue and thinks in terms of individual transactions. But the movement I see is a dialectic of alternating between
aggression and diplomacy, or as he sees it, friendly relationship among leaders.
Bolton is a superhawk on North Korea and Iran throughout, while China and Russia are our hostile rivals. Other matters are
Syria, Iraq and ISIS, Venezuela, Afghanistan and finally Ukraine, which by the end of the book I had almost forgotten. If Bolton
is dovish anywhere, it's on the Saudis, the rivals with Iran in the Sunni-Shiite dispute chronicled recently in the book "Black
Wave".
You can learn a lot from this book, but just keep in mind that it's filtered through the mind of a strong ideologue, so other
people's faults are seen through that lens. But he has great knowledge of the details of policy. Bolton would like to be an inter-generational
guru like Henry Kissinger or Dean Acheson, but both parties have turned away from the "endless wars" philosophy.
If you are looking for anti-Trump material, I don't really see the point of investing this time and intellectual effort. The
more sensational parts have been reported-the exchanges involving Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, and to a lesser extent Erdogan.
As most reviewers have said, it's about 100 pages too long, but Bolton is looking for a scholarly work like Kissinger's Diplomacy
or World Order, and this is the one that he hopes people will read.
John Bolton, on some fundamental level, is a brilliant, dedicated conservative intent on improving the future of the country
he and I love. THAT similarity is probably the only point we share.
I wanted to love this book, because I knew it would be jam-packed with juicy tidbits that justify me derision of the biggest
failure ever to assume the office of POTUS. Instead, quite early on, I realized the reason Trump became President was the enormous
ineptitude of those otherwise brilliant people who, in short, simply felt that somebody opposing those the person they despise,
on principle, was better for America than the other guy or gal.
Throughout this book, Bolton reminds us of Trump's inability to focus attention on the information provided by his handlers.
Yes, Trump is naive and intellectually lazy. Yes, so, too, are many of those aiding and abetting Mr. Trump. But, yes, Mr. Bolton
also suffers from gross naïveté, and, is just plain foolish. His ego led him to join the Trump Administration, as he admits in
"The Room Where It Happened."
Bolton's greatest error, however, was in refusing to tell the country what he chose to sell to the public through this book.
The writing is, mechanically, quite good. But, Bolton comes across as thinking he is the only person of intelligence. That
becomes clear by page two, and never changes, except for his insight that he was wrong about Trump.
Unfortunately, Bolton also was wrong about Bolton.
Whoa. Hold on. Just about everyone in both political parties is no better than Bolton. A few exceptions would be Former governor
John Kasick and Utah Senator Mitt Romney. Oh, and former Vice President Joe Biden, I believe. Yet, to be honest, I need to see
him prove me right. I would hate to make the same mistake regarding Biden as Bolton did regarding Trump.
Americans need to take a good, hard look at how we are governed and at those whom we support.
BOTTOM LINE
Writing quality, passable. But don't expect to gain a great deal of new knowledge.
P
resident Donald Trump's third National Security Advisor opens his memoir with this quote from the
Duke of Wellington at Waterloo: 'Hard Pounding, this, gentlemen. Let's see who will pound the longest.' And
pound for pound, that's the (nearly) 500 page memoir in a nutshell. Unremitting pounding is both the theme
and the style. As John Bolton urged the White House to take a 'harder line" on Iran and North Korea, Trump's
chief of staff "urged me to keep pounding away in public, which I assured him I would.' China 'pounded away
during my tenure, sensing weakness at the top.' As with Bolton's mission, so too with America's statecraft,
that must 'keep moving and keep firing, like a big grey battleship.'
From his infamous unsubtle moustache to his bellicosity,
Bolton traffics on a self-image of straight shooter who sprints towards gunfire. He does not set out to
offer a meditation on a complex inner life. This image is also slightly misleading. For all the barrage,
Bolton turns out to be a more conflicted figure, especially when his supporting fire is most called upon.
The Room Where it
Happened
is Bolton's account of his part in
the power struggles within Trump's almost medieval court, his attempt to steer the executive branch towards
the right course, unmasked supremacy everywhere, and his failure and disillusion with Trump's chaotic,
self-serving and showbiz-driven presidency.
The
room where it happened: A White House memoir, by John Bolton
The memoir itself is a non-trivial political event.
Other reviewers have assailed it for being turgid. Bolton, though, has at least done the state some service
by habitually recording and recounting every meeting. This is an important record of an important eighteen
months packed with the escalating brinksmanship with Iran, an impeachment inquest, the return of great power
competition and a fierce struggle to control the policy levers in Washington itself. For that detail,
especially when contrasted with the exhausting melodrama of the era, Bolton deserves a little credit. The
Trump administration's determined effort to suppress it on the grounds of classified information suggests
there is substance to Bolton's allegations of corruption and turmoil at the heart of government.
It is also, though, a work of self-vindication. Bolton's
life is an adversarial one. A former attorney, he became a policy advocate and a Republican Party
institution, consistently taking the hardest of lines. He was ever drawn to aggressive combatants – like
Hillary Clinton, in his formative years he supported Barry Goldwater. He interned for Vice-President Spiro
Agnew, the "number one hawk." As a measure of Bolton's faith that war works and that co-existence with
"rogue states" is impossible, he advocated attacking a heavily (and nuclear)-armed North Korea in 2018, an
adversary that lies in artillery range of Seoul and thousands of Americans as effective hostages, and
offered up a best-case scenario in doing so.
Bolton brought to government a world view that was
dug-in and entrenched. For Bolton, the world is hostile, and to survive America must be strong (wielding and
brandishing overwhelming force) at all times. Enemy regimes cannot be bargained with or even co-existed with
on anything less than maximalist terms dictated by Washington. The US never gives an inch, and must demand
everything. And if those regimes do not capitulate, America must topple or destroy them: Iran, Syria, Libya,
Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen and North Korea, and must combat them on multiple fronts at once. In doing so,
America
itself must remain unfettered with an absolutely free hand, not nodding even hypocritically to law or custom
or bargaining.
If Bolton's thoughts add up to anything, it is a general
hostility, if not to talking, certainly to diplomacy – the art of giving coherence and shape to different
instruments and activities, above all through compromise and a recognition of limits. The final straw for
Bolton was Trump's cancelling an airstrike on Iran after it shot down a drone. An odd hill to die on, given
the graver acts of corruption he as witness alleges, but fitting that the failure to pull the trigger for
him was Trump's most shocking misdemeanour.
What is intended to be personal strength and clarity
comes over as unreflective bluster
This worldview is as personal as it is geopolitical.
Importantly for Bolton, in the end he fights alone, bravely against the herd. He fights against other
courtiers, even fellow hawks, who Bolton treats with dismissive contempt – Nikki Haley, Steve Mnuchin, Mike
Pompeo, or James Mattis who like Bolton, champions strategic commitments and views Iran as a dangerous
enemy, but is more selective about when to reach for the gun. The press is little more than an "hysterical"
crowd. Allies like South Korea, who must live as neighbours with one of the regimes Bolton earmarks for
execution, and who try conciliatory diplomacy occasionally, earn slight regard. Critics, opponents or those
who disagree are 'lazy,' 'howling' or 'feckless.'
For a lengthy work that distils a lifetime's experience,
it is remarkably thin regarding the big questions of security, power and order. The hostile world for him
contains few real limits other than failures of will. He embraces every rivalry and every commitment, but
explanations are few and banal. 'While foreign policy labels are unhelpful except to the intellectually
lazy,' he says, 'if pressed, I like to say my policy was "pro-American".' Who is lazy, here?
The purpose of foreign policy, too, is largely absent.
Armed supremacy abroad, and power-maximisation, seems to be the end in itself, regardless of what is has
wrought at home. This makes his disdain for Trump's authoritarian ways especially obtuse: what does he think
made possible an imperial presidency in the first place?
There's little room for principled or reasonable
disagreement. What is intended to be personal strength and clarity comes over as unreflective bluster, in a
town where horse-trading and agility matter. Unintentionally, it is a warning to anyone who seeks to be
effective as well as right, and to those of us who debate these questions.
The most provocative part of the book comes at the end,
and points to a man more conflicted than his self-image of the straight shooter. Bolton issues an extended,
uneasy defence of his decision not to appear as a witness before the House impeachment inquiry against a
president he believed to be corrupt. Having celebrated the need to "pound away" with inexhaustible energy,
it turned out his ammunition was low. 'I was content to bide my time. I believed throughout, as the line in
Hamilton
goes,
that "I am not throwing away my shot".' Drawing on a characteristic claim to certainty, 'it would have made
no significant difference in the Senate outcome.' How can he know this? And even if the odds were long, was
there not – for once – a compelling basis in civic virtue to be that relentless grey battleship, pounding
away? He now hopes "history" will remember Trump as a one-term president. History needs willing agents.
Other reviews have honed in on Bolton's decision to
delay his revelations for a book pay-day. But consider another theme – the war-hawk who is in fact torn and
agonised around combat when it comes to himself. It echoes his retrospective rationale for not fighting in
Vietnam, a war he supported, and (as he has recorded) the detailed efforts he made to avoid service in that
tragic theatre after being drafted. It was, he decided, bound to fail given that the anti-war Democrats
would undermine the cause, a justification he later sheepishly regretted.
So twice the advocate of forceful confrontation refused
the call to show up, generously awarding to himself a rationale for non-intervention that relieves him of
commitment. He refuses to extend that same exonerating, prudential logic to his country, when it debates
whether to wade in to conflict abroad. Neither does he extend it to other Americans who think the nation,
like Bolton, might be better off sometimes holding its fire, biding its time, dividing its enemies, and
keeping its powder dry.
Given that Bolton failed in the end to attend the "room
where it happened", his title is unwittingly ironic. In his favour, Bolton's testy defence of his absence at
least suggests something. In contrast with the front cover of another
forthcoming,
Trump-era memoir
, he retains a modest
capacity for embarrassment.
By middle of last week
we observed of the Russian bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan story that "at
this point this non-story looks to be dead by the weekend as it's already unraveled."
Indeed by Thursday and Friday, as more Congressional leaders received closed door
intelligence briefings on the allegations which originated with an anonymously sourced NY Times
report claiming Trump supposedly ignored the Russian op to target Americans, the very Democrat
and Republican lawmakers previously hyping it as a 'major scandal' went conspicuously silent
.
Recall too that John Bolton, busy with a media blitz promoting his book,
emerged to strongly suggest he had personal knowledge that Trump was briefed on the matter
. The former national security adviser called the Trump denial of being briefed "remarkable".
Well, look who is now appearing to sing a different tune. A week ago Bolton was all too wiling
to voluntarily say Trump had "likely" been briefed and that was a big scandal. The whole story
was indeed dead by the weekend:
Bolton: 'Fickle' Trump would sell out Israel for photo op with Iran's leaders
U.S. should consider sanctions if bounty reports true: Bolton
Bolton book hits shelves, bruises Trump's ego
Viral Finland PM quote about US being under Russian control 'not true' | #TheCube
Bolton's New Claims
Bolton Claims Trump Asked China's XI to Help Win Re-Election
Bolton book creates shockwaves
Senator Who Voted Against Bolton Testifying Is Now Angry Bolton Didn't Testify
Other reports said Bolton has been telling people he had personally
briefed the president :
Former national security adviser John Bolton told colleagues that he personally briefed
President Donald Trump about intelligence that Russia offered Afghan militants bounties to
kill American troops , U.S. officials told the Associated Press .
Bolton briefed Trump on the matter in March of 2019, according to the report, a year
earlier than previously
reported by The New York Times . The information was also included in at least one
presidential Daily Brief, according to the AP,
CNN and
The Times . The AP earlier reported that it was also
included in a second presidential Daily Brief earlier this year and that current national
security adviser Robert O'Brien discussed the matter with Trump.
His Sunday refusal to even address the question - again after he was all too willing to
speak to the issue a week ago when it was driving headlines - speaks volumes.
Now that even The Washington Post
awkwardly walked back the substance of much of its reporting on the 'Russian bounties'
story, Bolton has conveniently gone silent .
"... the essential backdrop for the timing of this story. It really reveals how completely decayed mainstream media is as an institution, that none of these reporters protested the story, didn't see fit to do any independent investigation into it. At best they would print a Russian denial which counts for nothing in the US, or a Taliban denial which counts for nothing in the US. And then and this gets into the domestic political angle because so much of Russiagate, while it's been crafted by former or current intelligence officials, depends on the Democratic Party and it punditocracy, MSNBC and mainstream media as a projection megaphone, as its Mighty Wurlitzer. ..."
"... That took place in this case because, according to this story, Donald Trump had been briefed on Putin paying bounties to the Taliban and he chose to do nothing. Which, of course Trump denies, but that counts for nothing as well. But, again, there's been no independent confirmation of any of this. And now we get into the domestic part, which is that this new Republican anti-Trump operation, The Lincoln Project, had a flashy ad ready to go almost minutes after the story dropped. ..."
"... They're just, like, on meth at Steve Schmidt's political Batcave, just churning this material out. But I feel like they had an inkling, like this story was coming. It just the coordination and timing was impeccable. ..."
"... And The Lincoln Project is something that James Carville, the veteran Democratic consultant, has said is doing more than any Democrat or any Democratic consultant to elect Joe Biden. ..."
"... the Carter Administration, at the urging of national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, had enacted what would become Operation Cyclone under Reagan, an arm-and-equip program to arm the Afghan mujahideen. The Saudis put up a matching fund which helped bring the so-called Services Bureau into the field where Osama bin Laden became a recruiter for international jihadists to join the battlefield. And, you know, the goal was, in the words of Brzezinski, as he later admitted to a French publication, was to force the Red Army, the Soviet Red Army, to intervene to protect the pro-Soviet government in Kabul, which they proceeded to do. ..."
"... What he means is by basically paying bounties, which the US was literally doing along with its Gulf allies, to exact the toll on the allies of Assad, Russia. So, let's just say it's true, according to your question, let's just say this is all true. It would be a retaliation for what the United States has done to Russia in areas where it was actually legally invited in by the governments in charge, either in Kabul or Damascus. And that's, I think, the kind of ironic subtext that can hardly be understated when you see someone like Dan Rather wag his finger at Putin for paying the Taliban as proxies. But, I mean, it's such a ridiculous story that it's just hard to even fathom that it's real. ..."
"... just kind of neocon resistance mind-explosion, where first John Bolton was hailed as this hero and truthteller about Trump. ..."
"... And then you have this and it, you know, today as you pointed out, Chuck Todd, "Chuck Toddler", welcomes on Meet the Press John Bolton as this wise voice to comment on Donald Trump's slavish devotion to Vladimir Putin and how we need to escalate. ..."
"... This is what Russiagate has done. It's taken one of the most Strangelovian, psychotic, dangerous, bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters in US foreign policy circles and turned him into a sober-minded, even heroic, truthteller. ..."
Max Blumenthal breaks down the "Russian bounty" story's flaws and how it aims to prolong the
war in Afghanistan -- and uses Russiagate tactics to continue pushing the Democratic Party to
the right
Multiple US media outlets, citing anonymous intelligence officials, are claiming that Russia
offered bounties to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan, and that President Trump has taken no
action.
Others are contesting that claim. "Officials said there was disagreement among
intelligence officials about the strength of the evidence about the suspected Russian
plot," the New York Times reports. "Notably, the National Security Agency, which specializes in
hacking and electronic surveillance, has been more skeptical."
"The constant flow of Russiagate disinformation into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party
and its base is moving that party constantly to the right, while pushing the US deeper into
this Cold War," Blumenthal says.
Guest: Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone and author of several books, including his
latest "The Management of Savagery."
TRANSCRIPT
AARON MATÉ: Welcome to Pushback, I'm Aaron Maté. There is a new supposed
Trump-Russia bombshell. The New York Times and other outlets reporting that Russia has
been paying bounties to Afghan militants to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan. Trump and the
White House were allegedly briefed on this information but have taken no action.
Now, the story has obvious holes, like many other Russiagate bombshells. It is sourced to
anonymous intelligence officials. The New York Times says that the claim comes from
Afghan detainees. And it also has some logical holes. The Taliban have been fighting the US and
Afghanistan for nearly two decades and never needed Russian payments before to kill the
Americans that they were fighting; [this] amongst other questions are raised about this story.
But that has not stopped the usual chorus from whipping up a frenzy.
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC: Vladimir Putin is offering bounties for the scalps of American
soldiers in Afghanistan. Not only offering, offering money [to] the people who kill Americans,
but some of the bounties that Putin has offered have been collected, meaning the Russians at
least believe that their offering cash to kill Americans has actually worked to get some
Americans killed.
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign
of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin. He had has [sic] this information
according to The Times, and yet he offered to host Putin in the United States and sought
to invite Russia to rejoin the G7. He's in his entire presidency has been a gift to Putin, but
this is beyond the pale.
CHUCK TODD, NBC: Let me ask you this. Do you think that part of the that the
president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he
doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?
SENATE MINORITY LEADER CHUCK SCHUMER: I was not briefed on the Russian military
intelligence, but it shows that we need in this coming defense bill, which we're debating this
week, tough sanctions against Russia, which thus far Mitch McConnell has resisted.
Joining me now is Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, author of The Management of
Savagery . Max, welcome to Pushback. What is your reaction to this story?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, it just feels like so many other episodes that we've
witnessed over the past three or four years, where American intelligence officials basically
plant a story in one outlet, The New York Times , which functions as the media wing of
the Central Intelligence Agency. Then no reporting takes place whatsoever, but six reporters,
or three to six reporters are assigned to the piece to make it look like it was some
last-minute scramble to confirm this bombshell story. And then the story is confirmed again by
The Washington Post because their reporters, their three to six reporters in, you know,
capitals around the world with different beats spoke to the same intelligence officials, or
they were furnished different officials who fed them the same story. And, of course, the story
advances a narrative that the United States is under siege by Russia and that we have to
escalate against Russia just ahead of another peace summit or some kind of international
dialogue.
This has sort of been the general framework for these Russiagate bombshells, and of course
they can there's always an anti-Trump angle. And because, you know, liberal pundits and the,
you know, Democratic Party operatives see this as a means to undermine Trump as the election
heats up. They don't care if it's true or not. They don't care what the consequences are.
They're just gonna completely roll with it. And it's really changed, I think, not just US
foreign policy, but it's changed the Democratic Party in an almost irreversible way, to have
these constant "quote-unquote" bombshells that are really generated by the Central Intelligence
Agency and by other US intelligence operations in order to turn up the heat to crank up the
Cold War, to use these different media organs which no longer believe in reporting, which see
Operation Mockingbird as a kind of blueprint for how to do journalism, to turn them into keys
on the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer. That's what happened here.
AARON MATÉ: What do you make of the logic of this story? This idea that the
Taliban would need Russian money to kill Americans when the Taliban's been fighting the US for
nearly two decades now. And the sourcing for the story, the same old playbook: anonymous
intelligence officials who are citing vague claims about apparently what was said by Afghan
detainees.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: This story has, as I said, it relies on zero reporting. The only
source is anonymous American intelligence officials. And I tweeted out a clip of a former CIA
operations officer who managed the CIA's operation in Angola, when the US was actually fighting
on the side of apartheid South Africa against a Marxist government that was backed up by Cuban
troops. His name was John Stockwell. And Stockwell talked about how one-third of his covert
operations staff were propagandists, and that they would feed imaginary stories about Cuban
barbarism that were completely false to reporters who were either CIA assets directly or who
were just unwitting dupes who would hang on a line waiting for American intelligence officials
to feed them stories. And one out of every five stories was completely false, as Stockwell
said. We could play some of that clip now; it's pretty remarkable to watch it in light of this
latest fake bombshell.
JOHN STOCKWELL: Another thing is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's
minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into
the gathering of information. You, you have contact with a journalist, you will give him true
stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.
OFF-CAMERA REPORTER: Can you do this with responsible reporters?
JOHN STOCKWELL: Yes, the Church Committee brought it out in 1975. And then Woodward
and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred
journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, basically, I mean, you get the flavor of what someone who was in
the CIA at the height of the Cold War I mean, he did the same thing in Vietnam. And the
playbook is absolutely the same today. These this story was dumped on Friday in The New York
Times by "quote-unquote" American intelligence officials, as a breakthrough had been made
in Afghan peace talks and a conference was finally set for Doha, Qatar, that would involve the
Taliban, which had been seizing massive amounts of territory.
Now, it's my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, that the Taliban had been fighting
one of the most epic examples of an occupying army in modern history, just absolutely chewing
away at one of the most powerful militaries in human history in their country for the last 19
years, without bounties from Vladimir Putin or
private-hotdog-salesman-and-Saint-Petersburg-troll-farm-owner Yevgeny Prigozhin , who always comes up
in these stories. It's always the hotdog guy who's doing everything bad from, like, you know,
fake Facebook ads to poisoning Sergei Skripal or whatever.
But I just don't see where the Taliban needs encouragement from Putin to do that. It's their
country. They want the US out and they have succeeded in seizing large amounts of territory.
Donald Trump has come into office with a pledge to remove US troops from Afghanistan and ink
this deal. And along comes this story as the peace process begins to advance.
And what is the end-result? We haven't gotten into the domestic politics yet, but the
end-result is you have supposedly progressive senators like Chris Murphy of Connecticut
attacking Trump for not fighting Russia in Afghanistan. I mean, they want a straight-up proxy
war for not escalating. You have Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, someone who's aligned with the Democratic Party, who supported the war in Iraq and,
you know, supports just endless war, demanding that the US turn up the heat not just in
Afghanistan but in Syria. So, you know, the escalatory rhetoric is at a fever pitch right now,
and it's obviously going to impact that peace conference.
Let's remember that three days before Trump's summit with Putin was when Mueller chose to
release the indictment of the GRU agents for supposedly hacking the DNC servers. Let's remember
that a day before the UN the United Nations Geneva peace talks opened on Syria in 2014 was when
US intelligence chose to feed these shady Caesar photos, supposedly showing industrial
slaughter of Syrian prisoners, to The New York Times in an investigation that had been
funded by Qatar. Like, so many shady intelligence dumps have taken place ahead of peace summits
to disrupt them, because the US doesn't feel like it has enough skin in the game or it just
simply doesn't want peace in these areas.
So, that's what happened here. That's really, I think, the essential backdrop for the timing
of this story. It really reveals how completely decayed mainstream media is as an institution,
that none of these reporters protested the story, didn't see fit to do any independent
investigation into it. At best they would print a Russian denial which counts for nothing in
the US, or a Taliban denial which counts for nothing in the US. And then and this gets into the
domestic political angle because so much of Russiagate, while it's been crafted by former or
current intelligence officials, depends on the Democratic Party and it punditocracy, MSNBC and
mainstream media as a projection megaphone, as its Mighty Wurlitzer.
That took place in this
case because, according to this story, Donald Trump had been briefed on Putin paying bounties
to the Taliban and he chose to do nothing. Which, of course Trump denies, but that counts for
nothing as well. But, again, there's been no independent confirmation of any of this. And now
we get into the domestic part, which is that this new Republican anti-Trump operation, The
Lincoln Project, had a flashy ad ready to go almost minutes after the story dropped.
THE LINCOLN PROJECT AD: Now we know Vladimir Putin pays a bounty for the murder of
American soldiers. Donald Trump knows, too, and does nothing. Putin pays the Taliban cash to
slaughter our men and women in uniform and Trump is silent, weak, controlled. Instead of
condemnation he insists Russia be treated as our equal.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, maybe they're just really good editors and brilliant
politicians who work overtime. They're just, like, on meth at Steve Schmidt's political Batcave, just churning this material out. But I feel like they had an inkling, like this story
was coming. It just the coordination and timing was impeccable.
And The Lincoln Project is something that James Carville, the veteran Democratic consultant,
has said is doing more than any Democrat or any Democratic consultant to elect Joe Biden.
They're always out there doing the hard work. Who are they? Well, Steve Schmidt is a former
campaign manager for John McCain 2008. And you look at the various personnel affiliated with
it, they're all McCain former McCain aides or people who worked on the Jeb and George W. Bush
campaigns, going back to Texas and Florida. This is sort of the corporate wing of the
Republican Party, the white-glove-country-club-patrician Republicans who are very pro-war, who
hate Donald Trump.
And by doing this, by them really taking the lead on this attack, as you pointed out, Aaron,
number one, they are sucking the oxygen out of the more progressive anti-Trump initiatives that
are taking place, including in the streets of American cities. They're taking the wind out of
anti-Trump more progressive anti-Trump critiques. For example, I think it's actually more
powerful to attack Trump over the fact that he used, basically, chemical weapons on American
peaceful protesters to do a fascistic photo-op. I don't know why there wasn't some call for
congressional investigations on that. And they are getting skin in the game on the Biden
campaign. It really feels to me like this Lincoln campaign operation, this moderate Republican
operation which is also sort of a venue for neocons, will have more influence after events like
this than the Bernie Sanders campaign, which has an enormous amount of delegates.
So, that's what I think the domestic repercussion is. It's just this constant it's the
constant flow of Russiagate disinformation into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party and its
base that's moving that party constantly to the right, while pushing the US deeper into this
Cold War that only serves, you know, people who are associated with the national security state
who need to justify their paycheck and the budget of the institutions that employ them.
AARON MATÉ: Let's assume for a second that the allegation is true, although, you
know, you've laid out some of the reasons why it's not. Can you talk about the history here,
starting with Afghanistan, something you cover a lot in your book, The Management of
Savagery, where the US aim was to kill Russians, going right on through to Syria, where
just recently the US envoy for the coalition against ISIS, James Jeffery, who handles Syria,
said that his job now is to basically put the Russians in a quagmire in Syria.
JAMES JEFFREY: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Vietnam. This isn't a quagmire. My
job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I mean, it feels like a giant act of psychological and
political projection to accuse Russia of using an Islamist militia in Afghanistan as a proxy
against the US to bleed the US into leaving, because that's been the US playbook in Central
Asia and the Middle East since at least 1979. I just tweeted a photo of Dan Rather in
Afghanistan, just crossing the Pakistani border and going to meet with some of the Mujahideen
in 1980. Dan Rather was panned in The New York in The Washington Post by Tom
Toles [Tom Shales], who was the media critic at the time, as "Gunga Dan," because he was so
gung-ho for the Afghan mujahideen. In his reports he would complain about how weak their
weaponry was, you know, how they needed more how they needed more funding. I mean, you could
call it bounties, but it was really just CIA funding.
DAN RATHER: These are the best weapons you have, huh? They only have about twenty
rounds for this?
TRANSLATOR: That's all. They have twenty rounds. Yes, and they know that these are
all old weapons and they really aren't up to doing anything to the Russian weaponry that's
around. But that's all they have, and this is why they want help. And he is saying that America
seems to be asleep. It doesn't seem to realize that if Afghanistan goes and the Russians go
over to the Gulf, that in a very short time it's going to be the turn of the United States as
well.
DAN RATHER: But I'm sure he knows that in Vietnam we got our fingers burned. Indeed,
we got our whole hands burned when we tried to help in this kind of situation.
TRANSLATOR [translating to the Afghan man and then his reply]: Your hands were burned
in Vietnam, but if you don't agree to help us, if you don't ally yourself with us, then all of
you, your whole body will be burnt eventually, because there is no one in the world who can
really fight and resist as well as the as much and as well as the Afghans are.
DAN RATHER: But no American mother wants to send her son to Afghanistan.
TRANSLATOR [translating to the Afghan man and then his reply]: We don't need
anybody's soldiers here to help us, but we are being constantly accused that the Americans are
helping us with weapons. What we need, actually, are the American weapons. We don't need or
want American soldiers. We can do the fighting ourselves.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: And a year or several months before, the Carter Administration, at
the urging of national security chief Zbigniew Brzezinski, had enacted what would become
Operation Cyclone under Reagan, an arm-and-equip program to arm the Afghan mujahideen. The
Saudis put up a matching fund which helped bring the so-called Services Bureau into the field
where Osama bin Laden became a recruiter for international jihadists to join the battlefield.
And, you know, the goal was, in the words of Brzezinski, as he later admitted to a French
publication, was to force the Red Army, the Soviet Red Army, to intervene to protect the
pro-Soviet government in Kabul, which they proceeded to do.
And then with the introduction of
the Stinger missile, the Afghan mujahideen, hailed as freedom fighters in Washington, were able
to destroy Russian supply lines, exact a heavy toll, and forced the Red Army to leave in
retreat. They helped create what's considered the Soviet Union's Vietnam.
So that was really but the blueprint for what Russian for what Russia is being accused of
now, and that same model was transferred over to Syria. It was also actually proposed for Iraq
in the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998. Then Senate Foreign Relations chair Jesse Helms actually
said that the Afghan mujahideen should be our model for supporting the Iraqi resistance. So,
this kind of proxy war was always on the table. Then the US did it in Syria, when one out of
every $13 in the CIA budget went to arm the so-called "moderate rebels" in Syria, who we later
found out were 31 flavors of jihadi, who were aligned with al-Qaeda's local affiliate Jabhat
al-Nusra and helped give rise to ISIS. Michael Morell, I tweeted some video of him on Charlie
Rose back in, I think, 2016. He's the former acting director for the CIA, longtime deputy
director. He said, you know, the reason that we're in Syria, what we should be doing is causing
Iran and Russia, the two allies of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, to pay a heavy
price.
MICHAEL MORELL: We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make
the Russians pay a price. The other thing
CHARLIE ROSE: We make them pay the price by killing killing Russians?
MICHAEL MORELL: Yes.
CHARLIE ROSE: And killing Iranians.
MICHAEL MORELL: Yes, covertly. You don't tell the world about it, right? You don't
stand up at the Pentagon and say we did this, right? But you make sure they know it in Moscow
and Tehran.
MAX BLUMENTHAL:What he means is by basically paying bounties, which the US was
literally doing along with its Gulf allies, to exact the toll on the allies of Assad, Russia.
So, let's just say it's true, according to your question, let's just say this is all true. It
would be a retaliation for what the United States has done to Russia in areas where it was
actually legally invited in by the governments in charge, either in Kabul or Damascus. And
that's, I think, the kind of ironic subtext that can hardly be understated when you see someone
like Dan Rather wag his finger at Putin for paying the Taliban as proxies. But, I mean, it's
such a ridiculous story that it's just hard to even fathom that it's real.
AARON MATÉ: Let me read Dan Rather's tweet, because it's so it speaks to just
how pervasive Russiagate culture is now. People have learned absolutely nothing from it.
Rather says, "Reporters are trained to look for patterns that are suspicious, and time and
again one stands out with Donald Trump. Why is he so slavishly devoted to Putin? There is a
spectrum of possible answers ranging from craven to treasonous. One day I hope and suspect we
will find out."
It's like he forgot, perhaps, that Robert Mueller and his team spent three years
investigating this very issue and came up with absolutely nothing. But the narrative has taken
hold, and it's, as you talked about before, it's been the narrative we've been presented as the
vehicle for understanding and opposing Donald Trump, so it cannot be questioned. And now it's
like it's a matter of, what else is there to find out about Trump and Russia after Robert
Mueller and the US intelligence agencies looked for everything they could and found nothing?
They're still presented as if it's some kind of mystery that has to be unraveled.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: And it was after, like, a week of just kind of neocon resistance
mind-explosion, where first John Bolton was hailed as this hero and truthteller about Trump.
Then Dick Cheney was welcomed into the resistance, you know, because he said, "Wear a mask." I
mean, you know, his mask was strangely not spattered with the blood of Iraqi children. But, you
know, it was just amazing like that. Of course, it was the Lincoln project who hijacked the
minds of the resistance, but basically people who used to work on Cheney's campaign said, "Dick
Cheney, welcome to the resistance." I mean, that was remarkable. And then you have this and it,
you know, today as you pointed out, Chuck Todd, "Chuck Toddler", welcomes on Meet the
Press John Bolton as this wise voice to comment on Donald Trump's slavish devotion to
Vladimir Putin and how we need to escalate.
CHUCK TODD, NBC: Let me ask you this. Do you think that part of the that the
president is afraid to make Putin mad because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he
doesn't want to make him mad for 2020?
MAX BLUMENTHAL: I mean, just a few years ago, maybe it was two years ago, before
Bolton was brought into the Trump NSC, he was considered just an absolute marginal crank who
was a contributor to Fox News. He'd been forgotten. He was widely hated by Democrats. Now here
he is as a sage voice to tell us how dangerous this moment is. And, you know, he's not being
even brought on just to promote his book; he's being brought on as just a sober-minded foreign
policy expert on Meet the Press . That's where we're at right now.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and when his critique of Trump is basically that Trump was not
hawkish enough. Bolton's most the biggest critique Bolton has of Trump is, as he writes about
in his book, is when Trump declined to bomb Iran after Iran shot down a drone over its
territory. And Bolton said that to him was the most irrational thing he's ever seen a president
do.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, Bolton was mad that Trump confused body bags with missiles,
because he said Trump thought that there would be 150 dead Iranians, and I said, "No, Donald,
you're confused. It will be 150 missiles that we're firing into Iran." Like that's better!
Like, "Oh, okay, that makes everything all right," that we fire a hundred missiles for one
drone and maybe that wouldn't that kill possibly more than 150 people?
Well, in Bolton's world this was just another stupid move by Trump. If Bolton were, I mean,
just, just watch all the interviews with Bolton. Watch him on The View where the only
pushback he received was from Meghan McCain complaining that he ripped off a Hamilton
song for his book The Room Where It Happened , and she asked, "Don't you have any
apology to offer to Hamilton fans?" That was the pushback that Bolton received. Just
watch all of these interviews with Bolton and try to find the pushback. It's not there. This is
what Russiagate has done. It's taken one of the most Strangelovian, psychotic, dangerous,
bloodthirsty, sadistic monsters in US foreign policy circles and turned him into a
sober-minded, even heroic, truthteller.
AARON MATÉ: And inevitably the only long-term consequence that I can see here is
ultimately helping Trump, because, if history is a pattern, these Russiagate supposed
bombshells always either go nowhere or they get debunked. So, if this one gets forcefully
debunked, because I think it's quite possible, because Trump has said that he was never briefed
on this and they'll have to prove that he's lying, you know. It should be easy to do. Someone
could come out and say that. If they can't prove that he's lying, then this one, I think, will
blow up in their face. And all they will have done is, at a time when Trump is vulnerable over
the pandemic with over a hundred thousand people dead on his watch, all these people did was
ultimately try to bring the focus back to the same thing that failed for basically the entirety
of Trump's presidency, which is Russiagate and Trump's supposed―and non-existent in
reality―subservience to Vladimir Putin.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: But have you ever really confronted one of your liberal friends who
maybe doesn't follow these stories as closely as you do? You know, well-intentioned liberal
friend who just has this sense that Russia controls Trump, and asked them to really defend that
and provide the receipts and really explain where the Trump administration has just handed the
store to Russia? Because what we've seen is unprecedented since the height of the Cold War, an
unprecedented deterioration of US-Russia relations with new sanctions on Russia every few
months. You ask them to do that. They can't do it. It's just a sense they get, it's a feeling
they get. And that's because these bombshells drop, they get reported on the front pages under
banners of papers that declare that "democracy dies in darkness," whose brand is something that
everybody trusts, The New York Times , The Washington Post , Woodward and
Bernstein, and everybody repeats the story again and again and again. And then, if and when it
gets debunked, discredited or just sort of disappears, a few days later everybody forgets about
it. And those people who are not just, like, 24/7 media consumers but critical-minded media
consumers, they're left with that sense that Russia actually controls us and that we must do
something to escalate with Russia. So, that's the point of these: by the time the
disinformation is discredited, the damage has already been done. And that same tactic was
employed against Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, to the point where so many people were left with the
sense that he must be an antisemite, although not one allegation was ever proven.
AARON MATÉ: Yeah, and now to the point where, in the Labour Party―we
should touch on this for a second―where you had a Labour Party member retweet an article
recently that mentioned some criticism of Israel and for that she was expelled from her
position in the shadow cabinet.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, well, you know, as a Jew I was really threatened by that
retweet [laughter]. I don't know about you.
I mean, this is Rebecca Long Bailey. She's one of the few Corbynites left in a high position
in Labour who hasn't been effectively burned at the stake for being a, you know, Jew hater who
wants to throw us all in gas chambers because she retweets an interview with some celebrity I'd
never heard of before, who didn't even say anything that extreme. But it really shows how the
Thought Police have taken control of the Labour Party through Sir Keir Starmer, who is someone
who has deep links to the national security state through the Crown Prosecution Service, which
he used to head, where he was involved in the prosecution of Julian Assange. And he has worked
with The Times of London, which is a, you know, favorite paper of the national security
state and the MI5 in the UK, for planting stories against Jeremy Corbyn. He was intimately
involved in that campaign, and now he's at the head of the Labour Party for a very good reason.
I really would recommend everyone watching this, if you're interested more in who Keir Starmer
really is, read "Five Questions for [New Labour Leader] Sir Keir Starmer" by Matt Kennard at
The Grayzone. It really lays it out and shows you what's happening.
We're just in this kind of hyper-managed atmosphere, where everything feels so much more
controlled than it's ever been. And even though every sane rational person that I know seems to
understand what's happening, they feel like they're not allowed to say it, at least not in any
official capacity.
AARON MATÉ: From the US to Britain, everything is being co-opted. In the US
it's, you know, genuine resistance to Trump, in opposition to Trump, it gets co-opted by the
right. Same thing in Britain. People get manipulated into believing that Jeremy Corbyn, this
lifelong anti-racist is somehow an antisemite. It's all in the service of the same agenda, and
I have to say we're one of the few outlets that are pushing back on it. Everyone else is
getting swept up on it and it's a scary time.
We're gonna wrap. Max, your final comment.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, yeah, we're pushing back. And I saw today Mint Press
[News], which is another outlet that has pushed back, their Twitter account was just
briefly removed for no reason, without explanation. Ollie Vargas, who's an independent
journalist who's doing some of the most important work in the English language from Bolivia,
reporting on the post-coup landscape and the repressive environment that's been created by the
junta installed with US help under Jeanine Áñez, his account has been taken away on
Twitter. The social media platforms are basically under the control of the national security
state. There's been a merger between the national security state and Silicon Valley, and the
space for these kinds of discussions is rapidly shrinking. So, I think, you know, it's more
important than ever to support alternative media and also to really have a clear understanding
of what's taking place. I'm really worried there just won't be any space for us to have these
conversations in the near future.
AARON MATÉ: Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, author of The Management
of Savagery , thanks a lot.
Bolton is just "yet another MIC puppet", who has complete vacuum in his head as for morality
and decency. In other words he is a typical Washington psychopath. Like many sociopaths he is a
compulsive liar, undeniable careerist and self-promoter.
This week on Empire Has No Clothes, we spoke with Elizabeth Shackelford, a former Foreign
Service Officer and author of
The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age . Kelley Vlahos, Matt Purple
and I talked about demoralization in the department, the reasons for her resignation, U.S.
policy in South Sudan and Africa, and the need for greater accountability in our foreign
policy. We also covered John Bolton's new book, his outdated foreign policy views, and whether
anything he says can be trusted.
Listen to the episode in the player below, or click the links beneath it to subscribe using
your favorite podcast app. If you like what you hear, please give us a rating or review on
iTunes or Stitcher, which will really help us climb the rankings, allowing more people to find
the show.
This is an attempt to move Trump in the direction of more harsher politics toward Russia. So not Bolton's but Obama ears are
protruding above this dirty provocation.
Notable quotes:
"... According to the anonymous sources that spoke with the paper's reporters, the White House and President Trump were briefed on a range of potential responses to Moscow's provocations, including sanctions, but the White House had authorized no further action. ..."
"... Bolton is one of the only sources named in the New York Times article. Currently on a book tour, Bolton has said that he witnessed foreign policy malfeasance by Trump that dwarfs the Ukraine scandal that was the subject of the House impeachment hearings. But Bolton's credibility has been called into question since he declined to appear before the House committee. ..."
"... "Who can forget how 'successful' interrogators can be in getting desired answers?" writes Ray McGovern, who served as a CIA analyst for 27 years. Under the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," Khalid Sheik Mohammed famously made at least 31 confessions, many of which were completely false. ..."
"... This story is "WMD [all over] again," said McGovern, who in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President's Daily Brief. He believes the stories seek to preempt DOJ findings on the origins of the Russiagate probe. ..."
"... The bungled media response and resulting negative press could also lead Trump to contemplate harsher steps towards Russia in order to prove that he is "tough," which may have motivated the leakers. It's certainly a policy goal with which Bolton, one of the only named sources in the New York Times piece, wholeheartedly approves. ..."
"... Not only did CIA et al.'s leak get even with Trump for years of insults and ignoring their reports (Trump is politically wounded by this story), but it also achieved their primary objective of keeping Putin out of the G7 and muzzling Trump's threats to withdraw from NATO because Russia is our friend (well his, anyway). ..."
"... Point 4: the whole point of the Talibans is to fight to the death whichever country tries to control and invade Afghanistan. They didn't need the Russians to tell them to fight the US Army, did they? ..."
"... Point 5: Russia tried to organise a mediation process between the Afghan government and the Talibans already in 2018 - so why would they be at the same time trying to fuel the conflict? A stable Afghanistan is more convenient to them, given the geographical position of the country. ..."
"... As much as I love to see everyone pile on trump, this is another example of a really awful policy having bad outcomes. If Bush, Obama, trump, or anyone at the pentagon gave a crap about the troops, they wouldn't have kept them in Afghanistan and lied about the fact they were losing the whole time. ..."
"... the idea is stupid. Russia doesn't need to do anything to motivate Afghans to want to boot the invaders out of their country, and would want to attract negative attention in doing so. ..."
"... Contrast with the CIA motivations for this absurd narrative. Chuck Schumer famously commented that the intelligence agencies had ways of getting back at you, and it looks like you took the bait, hook, line and sinker. ..."
"... And a fourth CIA goal: it undermines Trump's relationship with the military. ..."
"... Having failed in its Russia "collusion" and "Russia stole the election" campaigns to oust Trump, this is just the latest effort by the Deep State and mass media to use unhinged Russophobia to try to boost Biden and damage Trump. ..."
"... The contemporary left hate Russia , because Russia is carving out it own sphere of influence and keeping the Americans out, because it saved Assad from the western backed sunni head choppers (that the left cheered on, as they killed native Orthodox, and Catholic Christians). The Contempary left hate Russia because it cracks down on LGBT propaganda, banned porn hub, and return property to the Church , which the leftist Bolsheviks stole, the Contempaty left hate Russia because it cracked down on it western backed oligarchs who plundered Russia in the 90's. ..."
Bombshell report
published by The New York Times Friday alleges that Russia paid dollar bounties to the Taliban in Afghanistan to kill U.S
troops. Obscured by an extremely bungled White House press response, there are at least three serious flaws with the reporting.
The article alleges that GRU, a top-secret unit of Russian military intelligence, offered the bounty in payment for every U.S.
soldier killed in Afghanistan, and that at least one member of the U.S. military was alleged to have been killed in exchange for
the bounties. According to the paper, U.S. intelligence concluded months ago that the Russian unit involved in the bounties was also
linked to poisonings, assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe. The Times reports that United States intelligence
officers and Special Operations forces in Afghanistan came to this conclusion about Russian bounties some time in 2019.
According to the anonymous sources that spoke with the paper's reporters, the White House and President Trump were briefed
on a range of potential responses to Moscow's provocations, including sanctions, but the White House had authorized no further action.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in a statement Saturday night that neither Trump nor Vice President Pence
"were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday."
On Sunday night, Trump tweeted that not only was he not told about the alleged intelligence, but that it was not credible."Intel
just reported to me that they did not find this info credible, and therefore did not report it to me or @VP" Pence, Trump wrote Sunday
night on Twitter.
Ousted National Security Advisor John Bolton said on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday that Trump was probably claiming ignorance
in order to justify his administration's lack of response.
"He can disown everything if nobody ever told him about it," said Bolton.
Bolton is one of the only sources named in the New York Times article. Currently on a book tour, Bolton has said that
he witnessed foreign policy malfeasance by Trump that dwarfs the Ukraine scandal that was the subject of the House impeachment hearings.
But Bolton's credibility has been called into question since he declined to appear before the House committee.
The explanations for what exactly happened, and who was briefed, continued to shift Monday.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany followed Trump's blanket denial with a statement that the intelligence concerning
Russian bounty information was "unconfirmed." She didn't say the intelligence wasn't credible, like Trump had said the day before,
only that there was "no consensus" and that the "veracity of the underlying allegations continue to be evaluated," which happens
to almost completely match the Sunday night statement from the White House's National Security Council.
Instead of saying that the sources for the Russian bounty story were not credible and the story was false, or likely false, McEnany
then said that Trump had "not been briefed on the matter."
"He was not personally briefed on the matter," she said. "That is all I can share with you today."
It's difficult to see how the White House thought McEnany's statement would help, and a bungled press response like this is communications
malpractice, according to sources who spoke to The American Conservative.
Let's take a deeper dive into some of the problems with the reporting here:
1. Anonymous U.S. and Taliban sources?
The Times article repeatedly cites unnamed "American intelligence officials." The Washington Post and The
Wall Street Journal articles "confirming" the original Times story merely restate the allegations of the anonymous
officials, along with caveats like "if true" or "if confirmed."
Furthermore, the unnamed intelligence sources who spoke with the Times say that their assessment is based "on interrogations
of captured Afghan militants and criminals."
That's a red flag, said John Kiriakou, a former analyst and case officer for the CIA who led the team that captured senior
al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002. "When you capture a prisoner, and you're interrogating him, the prisoner is going to tell you what he thinks you want to hear,"
he said in an interview with The American Conservative . "There's no evidence here, there's no proof."
Kiriakou believes that the sources behind the report hold important clues on how the government viewed its credibility.
"We don't know who the source is for this. We don't know if they've been vetted, polygraphed; were they a walk-in; were they
a captured prisoner?"
If the sources were suspect, as they appear to be here, then Trump would not have been briefed on this at all.
With this story, it's important to start at the "intelligence collection," said Kiriakou. "This information appeared in the
[CIA World Intelligence Review] Wire, which goes to hundreds of people inside the government, mostly at the State Department and
the Pentagon. The most sensitive information isn't put in the Wire; it goes only in the PDB."
"If this was from a single source intelligence, it wouldn't have been briefed to Trump. It's not vetted, and it's not important
enough. If you caught a Russian who said this, for example, that would make it important enough. But some Taliban detainees saying
it to an interrogator, that does not rise to the threshold."
2. What purpose would bounties serve?
Everyone and their mother knows Trump wants to pull the troops out of Afghanistan, said Kiriakou.
"He ran on it and he has said it hundreds of times," he said. "So why would the Russians bother putting a bounty on U.S. troops
if we're about to leave Afghanistan shortly anyway?"
That's leaving aside Russia's own experience with the futility of Afghanistan campaigns, learned during its grueling 9-year
war there in the 1980s.
The Taliban denies it accepted bounties from Russian intelligence.
"These kinds of deals with the Russian intelligence agency are baseless -- our target killings and assassinations were ongoing
in years before, and we did it on our own resources," Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, told The New York Times
. "That changed after our deal with the Americans, and their lives are secure and we don't attack them."
The Russian Embassy in the United States called the reporting
"fake news."
While the Russians are ruthless, "it's hard to fathom what their motivations could be" here, said Paul Pillar, an academic
and 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, in an interview with The American Conservative. "What would they
be retaliating for? Some use of force in Syria recently? I don't know. I can't string together a particular sequence that makes
sense at this time. I'm not saying that to cast doubt on reports the Russians were doing this sort of thing."
3. Why is this story being leaked now?
According to U.S. officials quoted by the AP,
top officials in the White House "were aware of classified intelligence indicating Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban
for the deaths of Americans" in early 2019. So why is this story just coming out now?
This story is "WMD [all over] again," said McGovern, who in the 1980s chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the
President's Daily Brief. He believes the stories seek to preempt DOJ findings on the origins of the Russiagate probe.
The NYT story serves to bolster the narrative that Trump sides with Russia, and against our intelligence community estimates and
our own soldiers lives.
The stories "are likely to remain indelible in the minds of credulous Americans -- which seems to have been the main objective,"
writes McGovern. "There [Trump] goes again -- not believing our 'intelligence community; siding, rather, with Putin.'"
"I don't believe this story and I think it was leaked to embarrass the President," said Kiriakou. "Trump is on the ropes in the
polls; Biden is ahead in all the battleground states."
If these anonymous sources had spoken up during the impeachment hearings, their statements could have changed history.
But the timing here, "kicking a man when he is down, is extremely like the Washington establishment. A leaked story like this
now, embarrasses and weakens Trump," he said. "It was obvious that Trump would blow the media response, which he did."
The bungled media response and resulting negative press could also lead Trump to contemplate harsher steps towards Russia
in order to prove that he is "tough," which may have motivated the leakers. It's certainly a policy goal with which Bolton, one of
the only named sources in the New York Times piece, wholeheartedly approves.
Barbara Boland is TAC's foreign policy and national security reporter. Previously, she worked as an editor for the Washington
Examiner and for CNS News. She is the author of Patton Uncovered , a book about General George Patton in World War II, and her work
has appeared on Fox News, The Hill , UK Spectator , and elsewhere. Boland is a graduate from Immaculata University in Pennsylvania.
Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC .
Caitlin Johnstone was the first journalist to question this NYT expose' several days ago in her blog. After looking into
it, I had to agree with her that the story was junk reporting by a news source eager to stick it to Trump for his daily insults.
NYT must love the irony of a "fake news" story catching fire and burning Trump politically. After all, paying people to kill
their own enemies? That is a "tip," not a bounty. It is more of an intel footnote than the game-changer in international relations
as asserted by Speaker Pelosi on TV as she grabbed her pearls beneath her stylish COVID mask.
I was surprised that Ms. Boland could not think of any motivation for leaking the story right now given recent grousing
on the Hill about Trump's inviting Putin to G7 over the objections of Merkel and several other NATO heads of state. I even
posted a congratulatory message in Defense One yesterday to the US Intel community for mission accomplished.
Not only did CIA
et al.'s leak get even with Trump for years of insults and ignoring their reports (Trump is politically wounded by this story),
but it also achieved their primary objective of keeping Putin out of the G7 and muzzling Trump's threats to withdraw
from NATO because Russia is our friend (well his, anyway).
That "bounty" story never passed the smell test, even to my admittedly untrained nose. My real problem is that it's a story
in the first place, given that Trump campaigned on a platform that included bringing the boys home from sand hills like Afghanistan;
yet here we are, four years later, and we're still there.
Point 4: the whole point of the Talibans is to fight to the death whichever country tries to control and invade Afghanistan.
They didn't need the Russians to tell them to fight the US Army, did they?
Point 5: Russia tried to organise a mediation process between the Afghan government and the Talibans already in 2018 - so
why would they be at the same time trying to fuel the conflict? A stable Afghanistan is more convenient to them, given the
geographical position of the country.
This whole story is completely ridiculous. Totally bogus.
As much as I love to see everyone pile on trump, this is another example of a really awful policy having bad outcomes. If
Bush, Obama, trump, or anyone at the pentagon gave a crap about the troops, they wouldn't have kept them in Afghanistan and
lied about the fact they were losing the whole time.
Of course people are trying to kill US military in Afghanistan. If I lived in Afghanistan, I'd probably hate them too. And
let's not forget that just a few weeks ago the 82nd airborne was ready to kill American civilians in DC. The military is our
enemy too!
Moreover, the idea is stupid. Russia doesn't need to do anything to motivate Afghans to want to boot the invaders out of
their country, and would want to attract negative attention in doing so.
The purported bounty program doesn't help Russia, but the anonymous narrative does conveniently serve several CIA purposes:
1. It makes it harder to leave Afghanistan.
2. It keeps the cold war with Russia going along.
3. It damages Trump (whose relationship with the CIA is testy at best).
Then there's the question of how this supposed intelligence was gathered. The CIA tortures people, and there's no reason
to believe that this was any different.
1. Russia wants a stable Afghanistan. Not a base for jihadis.
2. The idea that Russia has to encourage Afghans to kill Invaders is a hoot. They don't ever do that on their own.
3. Not only do Afghans traditionally need no motivation to kill infidel foreign Invaders, but Russia would have to be incredibly
stupid to bring more American enmity on itself.
Contrast with the CIA motivations for this absurd narrative. Chuck Schumer famously commented that the intelligence agencies
had ways of getting back at you, and it looks like you took the bait, hook, line and sinker.
Either that, or you're just cynical. You'll espouse anything, however absurd and full of lies, as long as it damages Trump.
I don't have a clue if this bounty story is correct, but I can imagine plenty of reasons why the Russians would do it. It's
easy enough to believe it or believe it was cooked up by CIA as you suggest.
There will be one of these BS blockbusters every few weeks until the election. There are legions of buried-in democrat political
appointees that will continue to feed the DNC press. It will be non-stop. The DNC press is shredding the 1st amendment.
Not shredding the First Amendment, just shining light on the pitfalls of a right to freedom of speech. There are others
ramifications to free speech we consider social goods.
These aren't buried-in democrats. These people could care less which political party the President is a member of. They
only care that the President does what they say. Political parties are just to bamboozle the rubes. They are the real power.
The best defence that the WSJ and Fox News could muster was that the story wasn't confirmed as the NSA didn't have the same
confidence in the assessment as the CIA. "Is there anything else to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious
incident of the denial from the White House", "There was no denial from the White House". "That was the curious incident".
I note that Fox News had buried the story "below the scroll" on their home page - if they had though the story was fake,
the headlines would be screaming at MSM.
Pravda was a far more honest and objective news source than The New York Times is. I say that as someone who
read both for long periods of time. The Times is on par with the National Enquirer for credibility, with the
latter at least being less propagandistic and agenda-driven.
Having failed in its Russia "collusion" and "Russia stole the election" campaigns to oust Trump, this is just the latest
effort by the Deep State and mass media to use unhinged Russophobia to try to boost Biden and damage Trump.
The extent to which the contemporary Left is driven by a level of Russophobia unseen even by the most stalwart anti-Communists
on the Right during the Cold War is truly something to behold. I think at bottom it comes down to not liking Putin or Russia
because they refuse to get on board with the Left's social agenda.
The contemporary left hate Russia , because Russia is carving out it own sphere of influence and keeping the Americans out,
because it saved Assad from the western backed sunni head choppers (that the left cheered on, as they killed native Orthodox,
and Catholic Christians). The Contempary left hate Russia because it cracks down on LGBT propaganda, banned porn hub, and return
property to the Church , which the leftist Bolsheviks stole, the Contempaty left hate Russia because it cracked down on it
western backed oligarchs who plundered Russia in the 90's.
The Contempary left wants Russia to be Woke, Broke, Godless, and Gay.
The democrats are now the cheerleaders of the warfare -welfare state,, the marriage between the neolibs-neocons under the
Democrat party to ensure that President Trump is defeated by the invade the world, invite the world crowd.
"The Trumpies are right in that this was obviously a leak by the intel community designed to hurt Trump. But what do you
expect...he has spent 4 years insulting and belittling them. They are going to get their pound of flesh."
Intel community was behind an attempted coup of Trump. He has good reason not to trust them and insulting is only natural.
Hopefully John Durham will indict several of them
Interesting take. I certainly take anything anyone publishes based on anonymous sources with a big grain of salt,
especially when it comes from the NYT...
Control freaks that cannot even control their own criminal impulses!
...They suffer from god-complexes, since they do not believe in God, they feel an obligation to act as God, and decide the fates
of over 7 billion people, who would obviously be better off if the PICs were sent to the Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants!
Bolton, of course, dismissed the entire concept of diplomacy from the very start. He never
bought into the notion that North Korean officials could be talked to sensibly because they
were, well, insane. Bolton's version of North Korea diplomacy was to tighten the
economic screws, brandish the U.S. military, and wait until one of two things happened: 1) the
Kim regime surrendered its entire nuclear weapons program like Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, or
2) the Kim regime continued to spur Washington's demands, in which the White House would have
no option but to use U.S. military force. Bolton's
record is analogous to a stereotypical linebacker on an obscene amount of steroids -- smash
your opponent to pieces and don't think twice about it. Top Beauty Surgeon Says "Forget Facelifts, This at Home Tip is My #1 Wrinkle Red Del Mar
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The only problem:
North Korea isn't some helpless punter with string bean arms and a lanky midsection. It's a
nuclear weapons state fiercely proud of its independence and sovereignty, constantly on guard
for the slightest threat from a foreign power, and cognizant of its weakened position relative
to its neighbors. This is one of the prime reasons Bolton's obsession with the Libya-style
North Korea deal, in which Pyongyang would theoretically discard its entire nuclear apparatus
and allow U.S. weapons inspectors to take custody of its nuclear warheads before flying them
back to the U.S. for destruction, was
unworkable from the start. The Libya-model trumpeted by Bolton was a politically correct
way of demanding Pyongyang's total surrender -- an extremely naive goal if there ever was one.
When one remembers the fate of Qaddafi 8 years after he traded sanctions relief for his weapons
of mass destruction -- the dictator was assaulted and humiliated before being executed in the
desert -- even the word "Libya" is treated by the Kim dynasty as a threat to its existence. As
Paul Pillar wrote
in these pages more than two years ago, "Libya's experience does indeed weigh heavily on the
thinking of North Korean officials, who have taken explicit notice of that experience, as a
disincentive to reaching any deals with the United States about dismantling weapons
programs."
One can certainly take
issue with Trump's North Korea policy. Two years of personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un have yet to
result in the denuclearization Washington seeks (denuclearization is more of a slogan than a
realistic objective at this point, anyway). But Trump's strategy aside, Bolton's alternative
was worse. The president knew his former national security adviser's public insistence on the
Libya model was dangerously inept. He
had to walk back Bolton's
comments weeks later to ensure the North Koreans didn't pull out of diplomacy before it got
off the ground. Trump hasn't forgotten about the experience; on June 18, Trump tweeted
that "Bolton's dumbest of all statements set us back very badly with North Korea, even now. I
asked him, "what the hell were you thinking?"
Personally he is a bully and as such a coward: he can attack only a weaker opponent. His new
book shows that however discredited and intellectually thin his foreign policy views are, they
always rise to the top. To Bolton the country is simply a vehicle for smiting his enemies
abroad.
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton's hawkishness is combined with an equally striking lack of originality. It is possible to be an unorthodox or partisan hawk, as we see in populists who want to get out of the Middle East but ramp up pressure on China, or Democrats who have a particular obsession with Russia. Bolton takes the most belligerent position on every issue without regards for partisanship or popularity, a level of consistency that would almost be honorable if it wasn't so frightening. No alliance or commitment is ever questioned, and neither, for that matter, is any rivalry. ..."
"... Bolton lacks any intellectual tradition or popular support base that he can call his own. Domestic political concerns are almost completely missing from his book, although we learn that he follows "Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society," is happy with Trump's judicial appointments, and favors legal, but not illegal, immigration. Other than these GOP clichés, there is virtually no commentary or concern about the state of American society or its trajectory. Unlike those who worry about how global empire affects the United States at home, to Bolton the country is simply a vehicle for smiting his enemies abroad. While Bolton's views have been called "nationalist" because he doesn't care about multilateralism, nation-building, or international law, I have never seen a nationalist that gives so little thought to his nation. ..."
"... Bolton recounts how his two top aides, Charles Kupperman and Mira Ricardel, had extensive experience working for Boeing. Patrick Shanahan similarly became acting Secretary of Defense after spending thirty years at that company, until he was replaced by Mark Esper, a Raytheon lobbyist. Why working for a company that manufactures aircraft and weapons prepares one for a job in foreign policy, the establishment has never felt the need to explain, any more than it needs to explain continuing Cold War-era military commitments three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The most important question raised by the career of John Bolton is how someone with his views has been able to achieve so much power. While Bolton gets much worse press and always goes a step too far even for most of the foreign policy establishment, in other ways he is all too typical. Take James Mattis, a foil for Bolton throughout much of the first half of the book. Although more popular in the media, the "warrior monk" slow-walked and obstructed attempts by the president to pull out of the Middle East, and after a career supporting many of the same wars and commitments as Bolton, now makes big bucks in the private sector, profiting off of his time in government. ..."
The release of John Bolton's book today has become a Washington cultural event, because he
is, by all measures, Washington's creature.
Those who dislike the Trump administration have been pleased to find in The Room Where It
Happened confirmation in much of what they already believed about the Ukraine scandal and
the president's lack of capacity for the job. Some accusations in the book, such as the story
about Trump seeking reelection help from China through American farm purchases, are new, and in
an alternative universe could have formed the basis of a different, or if Bolton had his way,
more comprehensive, impeachment inquiry.
While Bolton's book has been found politically useful by the president's detractors, the
work is also important as a first-hand account from the top of the executive branch over a
19-month period, from April 2018 to September 2019. It also, mostly inadvertently, reveals much
about official Washington, the incentive structures that politicians face, and the kind of
person that is likely to succeed in that system. Bolton may be a biased self-promoter, but he
is nonetheless a credible source, as his stories mostly involve conversations with other people
who are free to eventually tell their own side. Moreover, the John Bolton of The Room Where
It Happened is no different from the man we know from his three-decade career as a
government official and public personality. No surprises here.
There are three ways to understand John Bolton. In increasing order of importance, they are
intellectually, psychologically, and politically -- that is, as someone who is both a product
of and antagonist to the foreign-policy establishment -- in many ways typical, and in others a
detested outlier.
On the first of these, there simply isn't much there. Bolton takes the most hawkish position
on every issue. He wants war with North Korea and Iran, and if he can't have that, he'll settle
for destroying their economies and sabotaging any attempts by Trump to reach a deal with either
country. He takes the maximalist positions on great powers like China and Russia, and third
world states that pose no plausible threat like Cuba and Venezuela. At one point, he brags
about State reversing "Obama's absurd conclusion that Cuban baseball was somehow independent of
its government, thus in turn allowing Treasury to revoke the license allowing Major League
Baseball to traffic in Cuban players." How this helps Americans or Cubans is left
unexplained.
Bolton's hawkishness is combined with an equally striking lack of originality. It is
possible to be an unorthodox or partisan hawk, as we see in populists who want to get out of
the Middle East but ramp up pressure on China, or Democrats who have a particular obsession
with Russia. Bolton takes the most belligerent position on every issue without regards for
partisanship or popularity, a level of consistency that would almost be honorable if it wasn't
so frightening. No alliance or commitment is ever questioned, and neither, for that matter, is
any rivalry.
Anyone who picks up Bolton's over 500-page memoir hoping to find serious reflection on the
philosophical basis of American foreign policy will be disappointed. The chapters are broken up
by topic area, most beginning with a short background explainer on Bolton's views of the issue.
In the chapter on Venezuela, we are told that overthrowing the government of that country is
important because of "its Cuba connection and the openings it afforded Russia, China, and
Iran." The continuing occupation of Afghanistan is necessary for preventing terrorists from
establishing a base, and, in an argument I had not heard anywhere before, for "remaining
vigilant against the nuclear-weapons programs in Iran on the west and Pakistan on the east."
Iran needs to be deterred, though from what we are never told.
Bolton lacks any intellectual tradition or popular support base that he can call his
own. Domestic political concerns are almost completely missing from his book, although we learn
that he follows "Adam Smith on economics, Edmund Burke on society," is happy with Trump's
judicial appointments, and favors legal, but not illegal, immigration. Other than these GOP
clichés, there is virtually no commentary or concern about the state of American society
or its trajectory. Unlike those who worry about how global empire affects the United States at
home, to Bolton the country is simply a vehicle for smiting his enemies abroad. While Bolton's
views have been called "nationalist" because he doesn't care about multilateralism,
nation-building, or international law, I have never seen a nationalist that gives so little
thought to his nation.
The more time one spends reading Bolton, the more one comes to the conclusion that the guy
just likes to fight. In addition to seeking out and escalating foreign policy conflicts, he
seems to relish going to war with the media and the rest of the Washington bureaucracy. His
book begins with a quote from the Duke of Wellington rallying his troops at Waterloo: "Hard
pounding, this, gentlemen. Let's see who will pound the longest." The back cover quotes the
epilogue on his fight with the Trump administration, responding "game on" to attempts to stop
publication. He takes a mischievous pride in recounting attacks from the media or foreign
governments, such as when he was honored to hear that North Korea worried about his influence
over the President. Bolton is too busy enjoying the fight, and as will be seen below, profiting
from it, to reflect too carefully on what it's all for.
Bolton could be ignored if he were simply an odd figure without much power. Yet the man has
been at the pinnacle of the GOP establishment for thirty years, serving appointed roles in
every Republican president since Reagan. The story of how he got his job in the Trump
administration is telling. According to Bolton's account, he was courted throughout the
transition process and the early days of the administration by Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner,
ironic considering the reputation of the former as a populist opposed to forever wars and the
latter as a more liberal figure within the White House. Happy with his life outside government,
Bolton would accept a position no lower than Secretary of State or National Security Advisor.
Explaining his reluctance to enter government in a lower capacity, Bolton provides a list of
his commitments at the time, including "Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; Fox
News contributor; a regular on the speaking circuit; of counsel at a major law firm; member of
corporate boards; senior advisor to a global private-equity firm."
Clearly, being an advocate for policies that can destroy the lives of millions abroad, and a
complete lack of experience in business, have proved no hindrance to Bolton's success in
corporate America.
Bolton recounts how his two top aides, Charles Kupperman and Mira Ricardel, had
extensive experience working for Boeing. Patrick Shanahan similarly became acting Secretary of
Defense after spending thirty years at that company, until he was replaced by Mark Esper, a
Raytheon lobbyist. Why working for a company that manufactures aircraft and weapons prepares
one for a job in foreign policy, the establishment has never felt the need to explain, any more
than it needs to explain continuing Cold War-era military commitments three decades after the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
Ricardel resigned after a dispute over preparations for the First Lady's trip to Africa, an
example of how too often in the Trump administration, nepotism and self-interest have been the
only checks on bad policy or even greater corruption ("Melania's people are on the warpath,"
Trump is quoted as saying). Another is when Trump, according to Bolton, was less than vigorous
in pursing destructive Iranian sanctions due to personal relationships with the leaders of
China and Turkey. At the 2019 G7 summit, when Pompeo and Bolton try to get Benjamin Netanyahu
to reach out to Trump to talk him out of meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, Jared
prevents his call from going through on the grounds that a foreign government shouldn't be
telling the President of the United States who to meet with.
The most important question raised by the career of John Bolton is how someone with his
views has been able to achieve so much power. While Bolton gets much worse press and always
goes a step too far even for most of the foreign policy establishment, in other ways he is all
too typical. Take James Mattis, a foil for Bolton throughout much of the first half of the
book. Although more popular in the media, the "warrior monk" slow-walked and obstructed
attempts by the president to pull out of the Middle East, and after a career supporting many of
the same wars and commitments as Bolton, now makes big bucks in the private sector, profiting
off of his time in government.
In the coverage of Bolton, this is what should not be lost. The former National Security
Advisor is the product of a system with its own internal logic. Largely discredited and
intellectually hollow, and without broad popular support, it persists in its practices and
beliefs because it has been extremely profitable for those involved. The most extreme hawks are
simply symptoms of larger problems, with the flamboyant Bolton being much more like mainstream
members of the foreign policy establishment than either side would like to admit.
Richard Hanania is a research fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace
Studies at Columbia University.
"... Bolton's account sheds light on how it happened: hawks in the administration, including Bolton himself, wanted U.S. forces in Syria fighting Russia and Iran. They saw the U.S.-Kurdish alliance against ISIS as a distraction -- and let the Turkish-Kurdish conflict fester until it spiralled out of control. ..."
The drama eventually ended with President Donald Trump pulling U.S. peacekeepers out of
Syria -- and then sending them
back in . One hundred thousand
Syrian civilians were displaced by an advancing Turkish army, and the Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces turned to Russia for help. But U.S. forces never fully withdrew -- they are
still stuck in Syria defending oil wells .
Bolton's account sheds light on how it happened: hawks in the administration, including
Bolton himself, wanted U.S. forces in Syria fighting Russia and Iran. They saw the U.S.-Kurdish
alliance against ISIS as a distraction -- and let the Turkish-Kurdish conflict fester until it
spiralled out of control.
Pompeo issued a statement on Thursday night denouncing Bolton's entire book as "a number of
lies, fully-spun half-truths, and outright falsehoods."
"... let us not forget that bolton threatened a un officials kids because they guy wasn't going along with the iraq war propaganda. ..."
"... Close -- the threatened official was Jose Bustani, at that time (2002) the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)as he had been for five years. ..."
"... Bustani had been working to bring Iraq and Libya into the organization, which would have required those two countries to eliminate all of their chemical weapons. ..."
"... The US, though, had other ideas -- chiefly invading and destroying both of those nations, and when Bustani insisted on continuing his efforts then Bolton threatened Bustani's adult children. ..."
The political establishment in Canada appeared dismayed at the prospect of Bolton as National
Security Adviser. See these interviews with Hill + Knowlton strategies Vice-chairman, Peter
Donolo, from 2018:
So Bolton gets in, Meng Wangzhou is detained in Vancouver on the US request (that's
another story), and in time, Canada appoints a new Ambassador to China - Mr. Dominic
Barton.
Close -- the threatened official was Jose Bustani, at that time (2002) the head of the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)as he had been for five
years.
Bustani had been working to bring Iraq and Libya into the organization, which would
have required those two countries to eliminate all of their chemical weapons.
The US, though, had other ideas -- chiefly invading and destroying both of those
nations, and when Bustani insisted on continuing his efforts then Bolton threatened Bustani's
adult children.
let the lobbyists with the most money win... that's what defines the usa system, leadership
and decision making process... no one in their right mind would support this doofus..
At least the one saving grace about John Bolton's memoir is that it might be a tad closer to
reality than Christopher Steele's infamous dossier and might prove valuable as a source of
evidence in a court of law. Maybe
Yosemite Sam himself should start quaking in his boots.
Yes why not? If Obama awarded the Noble prize even before he begins serving his first term
I can't see why Bolton not nominated now. America is a joke, not a banana republic. It
deserves Obama, Trump, Bolton or Biden another stoopid joker.
@ Jpc
When faced with Trump's behavior of employing warmongers, including several generals, some
observers opined that Trump wanted people with contrasting opinions so that he could consider
them and then say "no." He did more with Bolton eventually, sending him to Mongolia while he
(Trump) went to Singapore (or somewhere over there).
re Ian2 | Jun 17 2020 23:08 utc | 19
who hazarded : My guess Trump went along with the tough guy image that Bolton projected in
media and recommendations by others.
Not at all, if you go back to the earliest days of the orangeman's prezdency, you will see
Trump resisted the efforts by Mercer & the zionist casino owner to give Bolton a gig.
He knew that shrub had problems with the boasts of Bolton and as his reputation was as an
arsehole who sounded his own trumpet at his boss's expense orangeman refused for a long time.
Trump believes the trump prezdency is about trump no one else.
Thing was at the time he was running for the prez gig trump was on his uppers, making a few
dollars from his tv show, plus licensing other people's buildings by selling his name to be
stuck on them. trump tower azerbnajan etc.
He put virtually none of his own money into the 'race' so when he won the people who had put
up the dosh had power over him.
Bolton has always been an arse kisser to any zionist cause he suspects he can claw a penny
outta, so he used the extreme loony end of the totally looney zionist spectrum to hook him
(Bolton) up with a gig by pushing for him with trump.
It was always gonna end the way it did as Bolton is forever briefing the media against
anyone who tried to resist his murderous fantasies. Trump is never gonna argue for any scheme
that doesn't have lotsa dollars for him in it so he had plenty of run ins with Bolton who
then went to his media mates & told tales.
When bolton was appointed orangey's stakes were at a really low ebb among DC warmongers, so
he reluctantly took him on then spent the next 18 months getting rid of the grubby
parasite.
div> Yosemite Sam did it better. I would prefer a Foghorn Leghorn-type
character, for US diplomacy.
Real History: Candidate Trump praised Bolton and named him as THE number one Foreign Policy
expert he (Trump) respected.
Imagine the mustachioed Mister Potatoe (sic) Head and zany highjinks!
Bolton and one of his first wives were regulars at Plato's Retreat for wife swapping
orgies. The wife was not real keen on the behavior, but she allegedly found herself verbally
and physically abused for objecting.
Trump is at fault for hiring him to appease the Zionist lobby. We all knew the guy was a
warmonger and a scumbag. It's not a surprise. Trump surrounds himself with the worst people
Did John Bolton put his personal interests above the will of congress in an attempt to extort
the Ukrainian government? You're making a false equivalence. You seem to have a soft spot for
Trump. Bolton is an in-your-face son of a bitch, but Trump, Trump is just human garbage.
Pretty much a nothing burger if thats all he has got. Just a distraction. Trumps outrage just
meant help Bolton sell some books. Lol. People are so easy to fool.
I still think Bolton managing the operations as COG in Cheneys old bunker. Coming out for
a vacation while next phase is planned
Bolton is just another American arsehole. Nothing new. When they do not get their way, the y
always turn on their superiors, or those in charge. Bolton is just another "Anhänger"
personal gain is what motivates him.
He should have been a blot on his parents bedsheets or at least a forced abortion, but
unfortunately that did not happen...
The self-appointed Deep State has pretty much thwarted him (Trump) and his voters.
Posted by: bob sykes | Jun 17 2020 20:55 utc | 11
Trump thwarted Trump. Before he got elected, Trump mentioned his admiration of Bolton more
than once. Voters of Trump elected a liar and an incoherent person -- at time,
incomprehensible, a nice bonus. But it is worth noticing that Trump never liked being binded
by agreement, like, say, an agreement to pay money back to creditors, or whatever
international agreement would restrict USA from doing what they damn please.
Superficially, it is mysterious why Trump made an impression that he wants to negotiate
with North Korea with some agreement at the end. Was he forced to make a mockery from the
negotiation by someone sticking knife to his back?
Some may remember that Trump promised to abolish Affordable Care Act and replace it with
"something marvelous". The latest version is that he will start thinking about it again after
re-election. If you believe that...
Granted, Trump is more sane than Bolton, but just a bit, unlike Bolton he has some moments
of lucidity.
In conclusion, I would advocate to vote for Biden. If you need a reason, that would be
that Biden never tweets, or if he does, it is forgettable before the typing is done. Unlike
the hideous Trumpian productions.
"men fit to be shaved," Tiberius, on Bolton and Friedman.
he is the best & brightest we have. when a dreadful mouth is called for. his insights
into the Trump WH are probably as deep as his knowledge of VZ, Iran, Cuba, etc. he's a useful
idiot, a willing fool. like Trump, he's the verbal equivalent of the cops on the street, in
foreign "policy." another abusive father figure
reading the imperial steak turds - an American form of reading the tea leaves or goat
livers or chicken flight or celestial what have you. an emperor craps out a big hairy one
like Bolton and the priests and hierophants and lawyers and scribes come for a long, close up
inspection and fact-gathering smell of another steaming pile of gmo-corn-and-downer-cow-fed,
colon cancer causing, Kansas feed-lot raised, grade A Murkin BEEF. guess what they in their
wisdom find? Trump stinks.
Scotch Bingeington @ 6 -- "Take a look at his face. It's obvious to me that even John Bolton
does not enjoy being John Bolton. That mouth, it's drooping to an absurd degree. Comparable
to Merkel's face, come to think of it.
At last, someone who notices physionomy!
That face drips with false modesty, kind of trying to make his face say, "... look at
harmless old me..."
That walrus bushiness points at an attempt to hide, to camouflage his true thoughts, his
malevolence.
That pretended stoop, with one hand clutching a sheaf of briefing papers, emulating the
posture of deferential court clerks, speaks to a lifetime of a snake in the grass "fighting"
from below for things important to himself.
But those of us who have been around the block a couple times will know to watch our backs
around this type. Poisoned-tipped daggers are their fave weapons, and your backs are their
fave "battle space". LOL
This statement by Jeffrey Sachs may as well also describe America's leadership crisis: "At
the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among
America's political and economic elite."
GeorgeV @ 8 -- "It's like standing on a street corner watching two prostitutes calling each
other a whore! How low has the US sunk."
And the US "leadeship" sends these types out to lecture other peoples on "values"? on how
to become "normal nations"? on how to "contain" old civilisations such as Iran, Russia,
China?
It is axiomatic that the stupid do not know they are stupid. Same goes for morals. The
immoral do not know they are immoral. Or, perhaps, as Phat Pomp-arse shows, they know they
are immoral, but do not care. Which makes one rightly guess that people like Bolt-On and him
must be depraved.
Yes, it may take centuries before the leadership in this depraved Exceptionally
Indispensable Nation to become truly normal again.
Of course, Trump actually campaigned to leave Afghanistan and Syria, and he was elected to do
so. The self-appointed Deep State has pretty much thwarted him and his voters. by: bob sykes
11
I wondered about He King claims that Trump actually attempted to do those awful things, .
.. , I looked for evidence to prove the claim.. I asked just about every librarian I could
find to please show me evidence that confirms the deep state over rode Mr. Trump's actual
attempt to remove USA anything from Afghanistan and Syria. thus far, no confirming or
supporting facts have been produced. to support such a claim. Mr. Trump could easily have
tweeted to his supporters something to the effect that the damn military, CIA, homeland
security, state department, foreign service, federal reserve, women's underwear association
and smiley Joe's hamburger stand in fact every militant in the USA governed America were
holding hands, locked in a conspiracy to block President Trumps attempt to remove USA
anything from Afghanistan or Syria.. If Mr. Trump has asked for those things, they would have
happened. The next day there would have been parties in the streets as the militant agency
heads began rolling as Mr. Trump fired them each and everyone.. No firings happened, the
party providers were disappointed, no troops, USA contractors or privatization pirates left
any foreign place.. as far as I can tell. 500 + military bases still remain in Europe none
have been abandoned.. and one was added in Israel. BTW i heard that Mr. Trump managed to get
17 trillion dollars into the hands of many who are contractors or suppliers to those foreign
operations. I can't say I am against Trump, but i can ask you to show me some evidence to
prove your claim.
Trump searches for new slogan as he abandons Keep America Great amid George Floyd and covid
turmoil
The president has taken to inserting the term 'Transition to Greatness' into his remarks.
His 2016 slogan was 'Make America Great Again'. After election he polled audiences on whether
to go with 'Keep America Great'. He told CPAC this year and said at the State of the Union
'The Best is Yet to Come'. Tweaks come as he trails Biden in new NBC and CNN polls, as the
nation struggles with the coronavirus and protests over police violence.
Ukrainian police seize $6 Million in bribes paid to kill the new case into crooked
Burisma.
This money is a Followup to the multi-millions in bribes Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and
President Poroshenko earned to leverage their offices to kill the original case.
goals that you consider important are different from personal interests.
What personal interests has Trump actually advanced during his time as president. Leaving out
the fake allegations, I'm hard put to think of any. If you look at Trump's actual behaviour
rather than his bullshit or the bullshit aimed at him, I'm also hard put to think of anything
illegal he's done while in office that wasn't done by previous administrations.
US President Donald Trump sought help from Xi Jinping to win the upcoming 2020 election,
"pleading" with the Chinese president to boost imports of American agricultural products,
according to a new book by former national security adviser John Bolton. The accusations were
included in an excerpt from The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, which is set to
be released on June 23. Bolton also wrote that Trump demonstrated other "fundamentally
unacceptable behaviour", including privately expressing support for China's mass interment of
Uygur Muslims and other ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang.*This video has been updated to
fix a spelling mistake.
@42 Mao I'm struggling to see how "pleading" with any country for it to purchase more US
goods is "fundamentally unacceptable behaviour" from a US President.
Pleading to Xi for China to give, say, Israel preferential access to markets, sure.
I have lived in the United States for a total of 24 years and I have witnessed many crises
over this long period, but what is taking place today is truly unique and much more serious
than any previous crisis I can recall. And to explain my point, I would like to begin by
saying what I believe the riots we are seeing taking place in hundreds of US cities are not
about. They are not about:
* Racism or "White privilege"
* Police violence
* Social alienation and despair
* Poverty
* Trump
* The liberals pouring fuel on social fires
* The infighting of the US elites/deep state
They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.
It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of "cause" and
"pretext". And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at least to some
degree, and without looking at the distinction between cause and effect), none of them are
the true cause of what we are witnessing. At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you
want, but the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of the US
society.
Don't really want to take sides between those two odious characters, but I think there's a
difference in what the paper is saying.
One is about someone pursuing policy goals they favour, the other "personal interest".
From what I have seen so far, Bolton's main definition of Trump's "personal interest" is his
chances for re-election (rather than any personal business interest).
I think Bolton was happy for Trump to pursue the policy goals he favoured, at least when
they coincided with Bolton's!
How many people have cashed in on Trump so far? Countless numbers of them. An ocean of them.
Scathing books about Trump is one way to cash in on thr Trump effect, and the authors, many
of whom don't even write the book themselves, get promoted and their books promoted in the
mainstream media and elsewhere.
There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to Trump. We know everything there is to
know about Trump. Some of us knew everything there was to know about him before he became
POTUS. And yet, there he is, sitting like the Cheshire Cat in the Oval Office, untouchable
and beyond reproach. Meanwhile, even more scathing books are in the pipeline because there's
money, so much money, to be made don't you know.
Bolton is a shitbird every bit as much as Trump is and in fact an argument can be made
Bolton is even worse and even more dangerous than Trump because if Bolton had his druthers,
Iran would be a failed state right about now and America would be bogged down in a senseless
money-making (for the defense contractors owned by the extractive wealthy elite) quagmire in
Iran just as it was in Iraq and still is in Afghanistan.
Colbert is all into the Bolton book because he and his staff managed to secure an
interview with Bolton. Bolton, of course, has agreed to this because it's a great way to
promote his book to the likes of Cher who is the perfect example of the demographic Colbert
caters to with his show. Some of the commercials during Colbert's show last night? One was an
Old Navy commercial where they bragged about how they're giving to the poor. The family they
used for the commercial, the recipients of this beneficence, was a black family. Biden is
proud of Old Navy because don't you know, poor and black are one and the same. In otherwords,
there are no poor people except black people. No, that's not racist. Not at all. Also,
another commercial during Colbert's show was for the reopening of Las Vegas amidst the
spreading pandemic. This is immediately after a segment where Colbert is decrying Republican
governors for opening southern states too early. The hypocritical irony is so stark, you can
cut it with a chainsaw.
Mao @ 45 quoting The Saker -- ".... the real cause of what is taking place today is the
systemic collapse of the US society."
And the cause of American societal collapse has been corrupt US leadership.
In my 50 years of studying American society, I have learned to watch what US leaders do,
not what they preach. More profitable is to look at what declassified US documents tell us
about the truth, not what the presstitudes of the day pretend to dish up. Also, what other
world leaders might, in a candid moment, tell us about America.
And the cause of American societal collapse has been corrupt US leadership.
I would argue that this is a symptom or a feature versus the root of the problem.
Afterall, a system that allows for creeping entrenched endemic corruption, is a crappy
system. It's the system that's the root of this and it's not just isolated to the United
States. It's civilization itself that's the root and what enabled civilization -- the spirit
in our genes as Reg asserts.
I'm fully expecting the Dem "left" to try and praise the monsterous Bolton for "going
against Trump", as they did with war criminal Mad Dog Matis and Bush. Bolton has to be one
of the most evil mass murders on the face of the Earth. The world will be an infinitely
better place when he and his ilk like Netanyahu, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Chertoff..etc finally go
back to hell.
I agree. They would, because they already have and continue to do so, coddle and provide
apologia for any and all monsters who decry Trump. Hell, I'm convinced they would clamor for
Derek Chauvin's exoneration if he vocally decried Trump. Chauvin would make the rounds on the
media circuit excoriating Trump and telling the world, contritely of course, that it was
Trump who made him do it and now he sees the error of his ways. He'd be on Morning Joe and
Chris Cuomo's and Don Lemon's shows not to mention Ari Melber and Anderson Cooper and
Lawrence O'Donnell. The conservatives and their networks, who have provided apologia for
Chauvin thus far, would now be his worst enemy. Colbert and Kimmel would have him on and
guffawing with him asking him how it felt to choke the life out of someone, laughing all the
way so long as he hates Trump and tells the world how much he hates Trump.
This world is an insane asylum, especially America. All under the banner and aegis of
progress. And to think, humanity wants to export this madness to space and the universe at
large. Any intelligent life that would ever make its way to Planet Earth, if ever, would be
well-advised to exterminate the species human before it spread its poison to the universe at
large. Not that that is possible, but just in case the .000000000001% chance of that does
miraculously manifest.
Concerning Trump "pleading" with Xi, it is only right for a leader to request others to
buy more US farm produce. We have only Bolton's word that the request was a plea. We also
have only Bolton's word that the request / plea was to seek "help from Xi Jinping to win the
upcoming 2020 election". Too early to believe Bolton. Wait till we see the meeting
transcripts.
Bolton also alleged that Trump exhibited "fundamentally unacceptable behaviour" concerning
the Uygurs. Again, only Bolton's word. Even so, saying it is "unacceptable behavior" presumes
that China does wrong to incarcerate Uygurs. If not, ie, China either does not incarcerate
them, or if China has good moral grounds to do so, then Bolton is wrong to disagree with his
boss for uttering the right sentiment. Judging by how the anglo-zios shout about China's
"crime", I tend to think the opposite just might be the truth, and that says that Bolton is
simply mudslinging to sell books; score brownie points with the anglo-zios, virtue-signalling
for his next gig.
NYT writes Bolton direct US policy to fit his own political agenda,
while Bolton emphasizes Trump direct US policy in the way that pocket him most money.
Politician Bolton is consistent with his politician job (like it or not), Trump is
corrupted.
@56, I would argue that if one person could be both at the same time, that one person would
be Donald Trump. He's already proven, like Chauncey Gardner, he can walk on water. Seriously,
that excellent movie, Being There , starring the incomparable Peter Sellers, was about
Donald Trump's ascension to the Oval Office.
Using this 'quod licet jovi ...' the author apparently knows quite a bit of Latin, the dead
language!
But seriously, the nomination of Bolton who had always behaved like 2nd rate advisor, a 3rd
rate mcarthist cold warrior was a surprise to me. Such a short sighted heavily biased person
could be, yes, chosen a Minister or advisor in a banana Republic but was picked up by the
United states.
One can only conclude such a choice was driven by very specific interests of the deep
state.They needed a bulldog and got it for one year and half and threw the stinky perro soon
as the job was done.
And the cause of American societal collapse has been corrupt US leadership.
I would argue that this is a symptom or a feature versus the root of the problem.
Posted by: 450.org | Jun 18 2020 12:30 utc | 52
The primary cause of corrupt leadership is corrupt and corruption-accepting
population.
Without a population that is fundamentally corrupt and immoral, corrupt leadership is
unstable. Conversely - and this is important to recognise as the same phenomenon - democracy
cannot exist if the population accepts and takes for granted corruption, as the two are
mutually exclusive. In other words if you root out the corrupt leadership without dealing
with the mentality of the population, the corruption will quickly come back and any
democratic experiment will collapse very quickly.
There is one important qualifier - an overwhelming external influence (since WWII always
the USA, either directly or as secondary effect) can leverage latent corruption so that it
becomes more exaggerated than it normally would be.
What is clear from only this account of the crucial role of big money foundations behind
protest groups such as Black lives Matter is that there is a far more complex agenda driving
the protests now destabilizing cities across America. The role of tax-exempt foundations tied
to the fortunes of the greatest industrial and financial companies such as Rockefeller, Ford,
Kellogg, Hewlett and Soros says that there is a far deeper and far more sinister agenda to
current disturbances than spontaneous outrage would suggest.
Bolton pretended to be President, screwing up negotiations with his Libya Model talk,
threatening Venezuela (and anywhere generally) and directing fleets all over the world
(including Britain's to capture that Iranian oil tanker). Vindman revered "Ambassador" Bolton
because he was keeping the Ukraine corruption in Americans (and Ukrainian Americans') hands,
and daring the Russians to "start" WWIII. Bolton might have been a bit more bearable if he
had ever been elected, but was happy to see him go. Trump seemed mystified by him.
b has presented us (knowingly or not, but I wouldn't put it past him) with the Socratic
question of the presumed identity between the morality of the State and personal morality, as
best encountered in Plato's dialogue, 'The Republic' ['Politeia' in the Greek] That dialogue
begins by examining personal morality, but changes to an examination of what would bring into
being a perfect state. In doing the latter, however, it is how to create public spirited
persons, in the best sense, which is the actual concern, and the conversation ranges far and
wide, becoming more and more complex.
I've always thought that to consider the perfect state had to be an impossibility if the
individual, the person him or herself isn't up to the task - and that is the point of the
Politeia enterprise. Like the ongoing relay race on horseback that is happening at the same
time in the Piraeus, the passing of the argument one person to another that happens in the
dialogue demonstrates that what is most crucial for the state as well as for the individual
is personal integrity.
I take as an example the message of Saker's essay, linked by Down South and commented on
above by others. Saker is pointing out that the protests have been seized upon by the
anti-Trumpists who have been disrupting things from the beginning of his administration. But
he also says:
"My personal feeling is that Trump is too weak and too much of a coward to fight his
political enemies"
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The discussion of different kinds of states,
which we often have here pursued, or the discussion of what makes a person able to function
in one or another state? I don't think Plato was saying that Greece had it made, that Greece
needed to throw its weight around more to be great. He's pointing out that it had lost
greatness, the same way every empire loses when it forgets that individual spark that is in a
single person, his virtue. And the sad thing is it all comes down to the education of our
young people in the values, the virtues that apply both to his own personal life and to the
life of the state.
At its heart, the protests which are beginning, only beginning, and which are peaceful,
may be politeia vs. republic, the 'polis' itself against 'things political'. A new and true
enlightenment, multipolar.
Corruption's been a fact of life in North America ever since it was "discovered."
Bernard Bailyn captured it quite well in his The New England Merchants in the
Seventeenth Century , that is during the very first stages of plantation, with most
corruption taking place in Old England then exported to the West. Even the Founders were
corrupt, although they didn't see themselves as such. Isn't Adam & Eve's corruption
detailed in Genesis merely an indicator of a general human trait that needs to be managed via
culture? That human culture has generally failed to contain and discipline corruption speaks
volumes about both. John Dos Passos in his opus USA noted that everyone everywhere was
on the "hustle"--from the hobo to the banker. "Every child gots to have its own" are some of
the truest lyrics ever written. Will humanity ever transcend this major failure in its
nature?
Who is behind the claim that China is imprisoning vast numbers of Uighurs in concentration
camps and what evidence has been presented? See the Greyzone for its recent report on this.
Thanks to all of you for your insights on Bolton.
I still don't see anything to explain why he got a second gig in the Whitehouse.
Or anything that he did that enhanced US security long term.
And another guy who dodged active service.
Strange angry dude,!
Pat Lang believes that Bolton has breached a law requiring US Officials with access to Top
Secret Stuff to submit personal memoirs for scrutiny before publishing. Col Lang is awaiting
similar approval for a memoir of his own and thinks Bolton didn't bother waiting for the
Official OK.
There's a diverse range of comments. Most commentators like the idea of Bolton being tossed
in the slammer. Others speculate that as a Swamp Creature, Bolton will escape prosecution.
It's interesting that no-one has asked to see the publisher's copy of the USG's signed &
dated Approval To Publish document, relevant to Bolton's book.
Yes why not? If Obama awarded the Noble prize even before he begins serving his first term
I can't see why Bolton not nominated now. America is a joke, not a banana republic. It
deserves Obama, Trump, Bolton or Biden another stoopid joker.
As Ben Garrison recent noted, in an
interview Bolton stated that it was OK for the government agencies to lie to the American
people if national security is at stake. And it always seems to be at stake for dominant men
who want secrecy and power. Bolton is a dangerous liar and his anti-Trump screed cannot be
trusted.
Re: the Nuremberg trials , I became fascinated by the writings of Paul R. Pillar who
pointed out that U.S. sanctions are frequently peddled as a peaceful alternative to
war fit the definition of 'crimes against peace' . This is when one country sets up an
environment for war against another country. I'll grant you that this is vague but if this is
applicable at all how is this not an accurate description of what we are doing against Iran
and Venezuela?
In both cases, we are imposing a full trade embargo (not sanctions) on basic civilian
necessities and infrastructures and threatening the use of military force. As for Iran, the
sustained and unfair demonization of Iranians is preparing the U.S. public to accept a
ruthless bombing campaign against them as long overdue. We are already attacking the civilian
population of their allies in Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
How Ironic that the country that boasts that it won WW2 is now guilty of the very crimes
that it condemned publicly in court.
Security screening of manuscripts I t is the law in the United States that those who
have had legal access to the secrets of the government must submit private manuscripts for
removal of such secrets BEFORE they are published or even presented to a potential publisher.
Every department of government has an office charged with such work.
I know this process well because my memoir "Tattoo" has been in the hands of the appropriate
Defense Department office for nigh on six months. The book is long, and I was so unlucky as to
have DoD shut down its auxiliary services during my wait. I have thought of withdrawing it from
screening but, surprisingly, the screeners tell me it has some worth for those who will come
after. So, I will wait.
All this applies to John Bolton, a career State Department man whose adult life has been
soaked in government secrets. I first noticed Bolton as a glowering presence at briefings I
gave to selected State Department people with regard to national command authority projects I
was running. His attitude was consistent. If the idea was not his, it was simply wrong.
Bolton's "kiss and tell" book about Trump is IMO as much caused by wounded ego as a desire
to make money. He submitted the book for security review to DoD and the CIA. Why not State? Ah,
Pompeo would tear it to pieces. Bolton evidently grew impatient with the pace of clearance and
decided to go ahead with publication without clearance
To do this is a felony. The release of the book today completes the elements of proof for
the crime.
Bolton should be arrested and charged with any of a number of possible crimes. pl
Let's see what Trump does with Bolton now that he has committed a felony.
My bet is that other than crying on Twitter, he'll not do much. His previous
actions/inactions on these matters show weakness.
In any case bitching on Twitter makes him look like an executive with poor hiring
judgement as he was the one that hired him. Just like he hired Mattis and Kelly as well as
Rosenstein and Wray.
Bolton being successfully charged with violations associated with his sour grapes hit piece
memoir is analogous to Al Capone finally going down for tax evasion. But if that's the way it
goes I will not be sad.
Re "Tattoo", your Memorial Day "Ap Bu Nho" extract alone makes "some worth" an amusingly
ludicrous understatement. I wish you luck with the censors & very much look forward to
one day reading "Tattoo".
"He was a convert - - -"
I was going to ask what went wrong with Bolton: was he dropped on his head as an infant? No
father in the home? The Dulles brothers spent their childhoods being harangued by their
bible-thumping Calvinist grandfather (reports Kinzer in his useful bio on the brothers).
In Jeff Engel's book about the decision-making behind G H W Bush's decision to wage war
against Saddam re Kuwait, he recounts that an argument by Brent Scowcroft was significant,
AND that "Scowcroft, who was very short," confronted taller-than-average Bush while
knees-to-knees in an airplane.
Bolton is shorter than the average American male. Does he have 'short-person' compulsion to
compensate?
People psychologize Trump constantly, usually from ignorance and malice. But something is
very wrong with Bolton. Pompeo as well. What is it?
"What huge imago made a psychopathic god?" (Auden, Sept. 1939)
#1 I read this WaPo article that argued because the recent DOJ's lawsuit against the
release of the book is based on "prior restraint on speech before it occurs", meaning the
Trump administration cannot censor speech before it happens, therefore there is no 1st
amendment breach against the Trump admin by Bolton. As the court elaborated in Nebraska Press
Association v. Stuart, prior restraints are "the most serious and the least tolerable
infringement on First Amendment rights" and "one of the most extraordinary remedies known to
our jurisprudence."
#2 Bolton took all of his notes containing classified intelligence with him after he was
fired and nobody took an issue. How is that possible?
#3 The Wapo article says his manuscript was reviewed for four months by one Ellen Knight,
an official (doesn't mention which department) responsible for reviewing publishing material
and she gave it the green light for publication on April 27th.
#4 During a press conference, Bill Barr gave an unusual take on Bolton's book as if he was
giving publicity to the book. He said he had never seen a book being written on Trump with
such pace and in such quick time and that it had a lot of sensitive information and stuff. It
sounded really odd what Bill Barr said. I dunno maybe I am reading to much between the
lines...
#5 With regards to Pompeo, back in September during a press conference at the State, when
asked by a reporter about Bolton's firing I specifically remember watching him on TV giving a
big meaningful chuckle and a smile... it was revealed later that they clearly did not get
along with each other and Pompeo had complained on numerous times that Bolton as NSA, who
does not have executive authorities, had been doing a lot of policy stuff and running his own
show in shadow.
On a final note, I don't think Bolton is a neocon in the mold of Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith,
Abrams, Kagan, Kristol etc...There is this long piece by New Yorker published last year that
really gets into detail of how and why Bolton is not a neocon, but adheres to a more hawkish
Jacksonian nationalism approach rather than the liberal idealism of arch neocons I mentioned
above. However, he does have quite similar F.P. views with neocon oldies such as Irving
Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.
If Bolton does NOT get the book thrown at him, it will be pretty good evidence of the
existence of the Deep State allowing those it favors to write their own rules. Of course, we
already knew that after Clapper lied with impunity to Wyden when he was under oath.
He'll never be prosecuted and neither will Comey, Clapper and the rest of the swamp scum.
Strozk (lower on the food chain) might be the human sacrifice (with a sentence of "community
service") but no one of any significance (or "royal" title) is ever prosecuted in the
swamp.
Trump has tried, but his miserable lack of hiring experience and skill has not made a dent
I feel like I have a few words to say about Bolton if I may,
IMHO Bolton's view of the world is very dark and extremely Hobbesian. He is no slouch by
any stretch of imagination, in fact he is extremely knowledgeable and masterful when it comes
to policy-making and that basically how things are done in D.C. He has made a brand for
himself as the most hawkish national security expert in all of America in my opinion.
Honestly I cannot think of anyone else who espouses more hawkishness and zero diplomacy than
Bolton, ever... maybe Tom Cotton or Liz Cheney but still not close. This is the reason why
Trump hired him. In fact Trump did not want to hire him as the top brass in first place,
citing his mustache as one reason that would not look good on TV and wanted to give him 2nd
tier jobs at the State or as NSA early on, but Bolton refused. Trump, wanted to hire Bolton's
"brand" not his policies or hawkishness to intimidate Nkorea, Iran, and China to force them
come into making deals with him and him personally.
IMO Trump found out after the first Kim summit that Bolton was
such an ambitious and counterproductive foreign policy maker and one-man-team that if he
allowed Bolton to get his way, there would be world war III (Trump's own words) and his most
important promise to keep America out of forever wars which was his wining platform over
neocons such as Hilary, Jeb and Rubio during 2016 election would disappear into thin air.
So, Trump found ways to check Bolton and keep him out of the loop in sensitive and crucial
moments by Mattis, Kelly, Joe Dunford, Pompeo and even Melania (in the case of getting rid of
Bolton's close confidant and neocon Mira Ricardel when she called for bombing Iranian forces
back in September 2018 in respone to several rockets by iraqi militias hitting the ground
close to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad), and even sent him to Mongolia last year on a goose
chase to make an embarrassing example of him for undermining him (i.e. Trump's) authority in
the case of sitting down with the Taliban in Camp David to discuss military pullout from
Afghanistan back in Sep. whereas at the same time Pompeo was smart enough to tow the same
line as Trump and survive.
I few years ago I came across this interesting but odd piece by B on the Moon of Alabama
on Bolton. I honestly dunno what to make of it.
The book is already released in the hundreds. It will be on-line soon enough regardless of
the niceties of Barr's attempt to slam shut the barn door, or what the legal system does with
Bolton going fwd.
Those close to Trump know his emotional state must be appeased or they will soon be departing
- unless there's a DNA match.
Reaction to it will be a test of one's ability to distinguish Bolton from the events he
describes & their veracity. Is there anything of Trump's statements & acts (released
so far) that surprises anyone... that rings untrue?
Those ideologically (or religiously) dependent upon the Trump Phenomenon for validating their
core beliefs will demonstrate how creative true believers can be when attached to a
personality.
For what its worth I am looking forward to buying it, should scratch that Peter Scholl Latour
itch.
Another thing is that I just dont get the Neocons.
Their politics are bad both from a Machieavellian (dilutes US forces, creates enemies,
considerably restricts creative ways in which US power could be employed) and from a moral
(obviously) point of view. I also dont get their power, stupid/evil tends to be competed out.
Heck, even if they are stupid/evil but very good at beurocratic backbiting stuff, they are
still supposedly disadvantadged against skilled beurocratic backbiters that arent stupid/evil
(or at least only evil and not stupid).
Is it internal cohesion or a much higher degree of ruthlessness that maintains their
position?
I've for many years thought that the Bolton problem was best solved with a speedy trial and a
swift execution, with remains thrown overboard somewhere in the Indian ocean.
He signed an oath to safeguard the secrecy of the information when "read on" for it and
another such when he was "read off." The 1st Amendment does not come into it at all
I'm fully expecting the Dem "left" to try and praise the monsterous Bolton for "going against
Trump", as they did with war criminal Mad Dog Matis and Bush. Bolton has to be one of the
most evil mass murders on the face of the Earth. The world will be an infinitely better place
when he and his ilk like Netanyahu, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Chertoff..etc finally go back to hell.
Poor Johnny! What's sadder than being a crook, but an ineffective one? I think that's what he
is. He may be infamous enough to be a household name, but he never really managed to make a
career. Hardly ever did he stay on a job for more than 2 years, before his fellow crooks
deemed him unfit for his position, again and again. Says a lot.
I hope they will confiscate his book on some flimsy pretext, only to lose the piles of
copies in storage, so they cannot possibly be released to bookstores again. Maybe some mice
will make use of it to furnish their nests?
Take a look at his face. It's obvious to me that even John Bolton does not enjoy being
John Bolton. That mouth, it's drooping to an absurd degree. Comparable to Merkel's face, come
to think of it.
John Bolton's tell all book about his tenure with the Trump administration is a perfect
example of the pot calling the kettle burned. It is a fitting description of the leadership
of the US government and it's capitol city as a den of backstabbing, corkscrewing and double
dealing vipers. It's like standing on a street corner watching two prostitutes calling each
other a whore! How low has the US sunk.
Of course, Trump actually campaigned to leave Afghanistan and Syria, and he was elected to do
so. The self-appointed Deep State has pretty much thwarted him and his voters.
The political establishment in Canada appeared dismayed at the prospect of Bolton as National
Security Adviser. See these interviews with Hill + Knowlton strategies Vice-chairman, Peter
Donolo, from 2018:
So Bolton gets in, Meng Wangzhou is detained in Vancouver on the US request (that's
another story), and in time, Canada appoints a new Ambassador to China - Mr. Dominic
Barton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Barton
Then Bolton gets fired. 'Nuff said. Just to let everyone know that Bolton is well and truly
hated, as a government official, in certain circles.
Close -- the threatened official was Jose Bustani, at that time (2002) the head of the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)as he had been for five years.
Bustani had been working to bring Iraq and Libya into the organization, which would have
required those two countries to eliminate all of their chemical weapons.
The US, though, had other ideas -- chiefly invading and destroying both of those nations,
and when Bustani insisted on continuing his efforts then Bolton threatened Bustani's adult
children.
let the lobbyists with the most money win... that's what defines the usa system, leadership
and decision making process... no one in their right mind would support this doofus..
At least the one saving grace about John Bolton's memoir is that it might be a tad closer to
reality than Christopher Steele's infamous dossier and might prove valuable as a source of
evidence in a court of law. Maybe
Yosemite Sam himself should start quaking in his boots.
@ Jpc
When faced with Trump's behavior of employing warmongers, including several generals, some
observers opined that Trump wanted people with contrasting opinions so that he could consider
them and then say "no." He did more with Bolton eventually, sending him to Mongolia while he
(Trump) went to Singapore (or somewhere over there).
re Ian2 | Jun 17 2020 23:08 utc | 19
who hazarded : My guess Trump went along with the tough guy image that Bolton projected in
media and recommendations by others.
Not at all, if you go back to the earliest days of the orangeman's prezdency, you will see
Trump resisted the efforts by Mercer & the zionist casino owner to give Bolton a gig.
He knew that shrub had problems with the boasts of Bolton and as his reputation was as an
arsehole who sounded his own trumpet at his boss's expense orangeman refused for a long time.
Trump believes the trump prezdency is about trump no one else.
Thing was at the time he was running for the prez gig trump was on his uppers, making a few
dollars from his tv show, plus licensing other people's buildings by selling his name to be
stuck on them. trump tower azerbnajan etc.
He put virtually none of his own money into the 'race' so when he won the people who had put
up the dosh had power over him.
Bolton has always been an arse kisser to any zionist cause he suspects he can claw a penny
outta, so he used the extreme loony end of the totally looney zionist spectrum to hook him
(Bolton) up with a gig by pushing for him with trump.
It was always gonna end the way it did as Bolton is forever briefing the media against
anyone who tried to resist his murderous fantasies. Trump is never gonna argue for any scheme
that doesn't have lotsa dollars for him in it so he had plenty of run ins with Bolton who
then went to his media mates & told tales.
When bolton was appointed orangey's stakes were at a really low ebb among DC warmongers, so
he reluctantly took him on then spent the next 18 months getting rid of the grubby
parasite.
Real History: Candidate Trump praised Bolton and named him as THE number one Foreign Policy
expert he (Trump) respected.
Imagine the mustachioed Mister Potatoe (sic) Head and zany highjinks!
Bolton and one of his first wives were regulars at Plato's Retreat for wife swapping
orgies. The wife was not real keen on the behavior, but she allegedly found herself verbally
and physically abused for objecting.
Trump is at fault for hiring him to appease the Zionist lobby. We all knew the guy was a
warmonger and a scumbag. It's not a surprise. Trump surrounds himself with the worst people
If we view Bolton as Adelson puppet, such a behaviour clearly does not make much sense. Or this is a single from Israel lobby to
Trump "moor did his duty, moor can go"?
Notable quotes:
"... "a variety of instances when he sought to intervene in law enforcement matters for political reasons." ..."
"... "in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked," ..."
"... "The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't accept," ..."
"... "bombshells" ..."
"... "exactly the right thing to do." ..."
"... "systematic use of indoctrination camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and other minorities in China." ..."
"... "Panda Hugger." ..."
"... The mustachioed warhawk had served as Trump's national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. While the exact reason for his firing was never revealed, Trump has since commented that Bolton was interfering with his peace initiatives and had "never seen a war he didn't like." ..."
"... Indeed, the "most irrational thing" Bolton accuses Trump of was to refuse to bomb Iran in June 2019, according to the New York Times excerpt. ..."
"... "soft on China" ..."
"... As for Trump supporters, many were indifferent about Bolton's betrayal, noting that Trump hired the neocon in the first place and kept him on for over a year, while ditching the faithful General Michael Flynn after less than two weeks on the job, following a FBI ambush and a Washington Post hit job. ..."
Former national security adviser John Bolton has leaked excerpts of his book to major newspapers, accusing President Donald Trump
of colluding with leaders in China and Turkey, and obstruction of justice "as a way of life." Facing a DOJ lawsuit seeking to
block the publication of his memoir for containing classified information, Bolton decided to go to the press, leaking parts of
the book to the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
Breaking News: John Bolton says in his new book that the House should have investigated President Trump for potentially impeachable
actions beyond Ukraine https://t.co/8lpd4xAzYu
Bolton famously refused to testify before the Democrat-led impeachment proceedings against Trump over his alleged abuse of power
regarding Ukraine, but now claims that they should have expanded the probe to "a variety of instances when he sought to intervene
in law enforcement matters for political reasons."
He accuses Trump of wanting to "in effect, give personal favors to dictators he liked," bringing up companies in China
and Turkey as examples, according to the Times. "The pattern looked like obstruction of justice as a way of life, which we couldn't
accept," the Times quotes him as saying.
One of the Bolton "bombshells" is that he sought China's purchase of US soybeans in order to get re-elected, during trade
negotiations with President Xi Jinping.
SOYBEAN DIPLOMACY: The WSJ has published an excerpt of
@AmbJohnBolton 's forthcoming book, revealing
Trump-Xi conversation and how the American president pleaded his Chinese counterpart to buy U.S. soybeans so he could win farm
states in the 2020 presidential elections |
#OATT pic.twitter.com/XKAogLCCtN
An excerpt in the Wall Street Journal has Trump telling Xi that – alleged – concentration camps for Uighur Muslims in China's
Xinjiang province were "exactly the right thing to do." It also alleges that Trump did Xi a favor by relaxing US sanctions
on ZTE, a Chinese telecom company.
WSJ excerpt of Bolton book has Trump & China bombshells. Trump told Xi building concentration camps for Muslims "was exactly
the right thing to do." Trump pleaded w/ Xi to help him w/ re-election by making US farm product buys. And Trump helped Xi w/
ZTE. https://t.co/4CSflQQqcL
This comes as Trump signed into law
the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which mandates US sanctions against Chinese officials over "systematic use of indoctrination
camps, forced labor, and intrusive surveillance to eradicate the ethnic identity and religious beliefs of Uyghurs and other minorities
in China."
Another excerpt has Bolton referring to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as a "Panda Hugger."
According to Bolton, Trump told Xi to "go ahead with building the camps" for imprisoned Uighurs.
As another proof of Trump's perfidy, Bolton writes that the president told Xi that he would like to stay in office beyond the
two terms the US Constitution would allow him. Bolton's one-time colleague Dinesh D'Souza commented that Bolton was unable to recognize
a clear joke.
Really? This is it? John Bolton's smoking gun? Trump has been jokingly putting out memes about this for four years. This conversation,
if it occurred at all, seems obviously jocular. Bolton, however, whom I knew quite well from AEI, doesn't have a jocular bone
in his body pic.twitter.com/Qe8sXCAT58
Trump has on more than one occasion shared a meme showing him staying in power forever, triggering Democrats into denouncing him
as an aspiring dictator. Apparently, Bolton thought the same.
According to John Bolton posting this meme was an impeachable offense https://t.co/q2BHlfVTEu
-- Will Chamberlain 🇺🇸 (@willchamberlain)
June 17, 2020
The mustachioed warhawk had served as Trump's national security adviser from April 2018 to September 2019. While the exact
reason for his firing was never revealed, Trump has since commented that Bolton was interfering with his peace initiatives and had
"never seen a war he didn't like."
Indeed, the "most irrational thing" Bolton accuses Trump of was to refuse to bomb Iran in June 2019, according to the New York
Times excerpt.
Pretty telling that the episode which pissed off Bolton the most during his tenure was Trump calling off airstrikes which would
have killed dozens of Iranian soldiers in June 2019 https://t.co/ruFSInj2Mu
pic.twitter.com/5zO7UrxMTM
Arguing that Trump is being "soft on China" and colluding with Xi also happens to be a Democratic Party strategy for the
2020 presidential election, outlined in April
and reported by Axios.
While Democrats and the mainstream media welcomed Bolton's bombshells as validating their position on Trump, he is unlikely to
become a #Resistance hero, simply because they still remember he refused to say these things under oath during the impeachment hearings,
when they – in theory – could have bolstered their case for getting Trump out of office.
As for Trump supporters, many were indifferent about Bolton's betrayal, noting that Trump hired the neocon in the first place
and kept him on for over a year, while ditching the faithful General Michael Flynn after less than two weeks on the job, following
a FBI ambush and a Washington Post hit job.
Do I care that Bolton is stabbing Trump in the back? Not at all. General Flynn was NSA and Trump made his choices. Being outraged
on behalf of a 70+ year old man who makes poor choices is well beyond my job description.
The OPCW is claimed to be an independent agency but we know that it suppressed the results of
its own engineers when it reported that the Syrian government was responsible for the alleged
chemical attack in Douma. The former head of the agency has publicly asserted that when John
Bolton demanded that he step down, he added, "We know where your children live." The US has a
history of corruption and intimidation. Any investigation would result in finding China
responsible just as Russia was found to be responsible for the airliner that was shot down
over Ukraine.
Given some time and currency, I guess Morocco would offer more value for money if you want
some exotic customs and landscapes. If you have more money, you could spend them on a
carbon-free cruise with stunning vistas and off-the-beaten route: North Pole on board of
nuclear-powered ice breaker! It is wise to have swimming costume (a pool is on board, heated,
I presume) and sensible apparel -- enough for normal winter (in Moscow). The number of places
is below 150, with a little hospital on board too. In the latest ads I read about discounts,
but the deal was that you can pay in rubbles with prices below the rubble plunged by 25%,
still, for 27 k USD you can see John Bolton's relatives in natural environment (like mommy
walrus taking care of youngsters), polar bears, seals, and landscapes of Franz Josef Land.
Helicopter rides included. You can also take a plunge into the arctic water -- with safety
precautions .
Miss Lacy and Arby both draw our attention to the obscenity of the US using this crisis in
order to put pressure on governments that it dislikes by cutting off medicine and other
resources.
Among the places where people are currently dying in large numbers because Washington
chooses that they should are Cuba-under an oil embargo-, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Iran.
Those who cannot bring themselves to believe that government could be so evil as to deploy
a virus as a weapon to weaken another state, only have to look at what is happening today:
Venezuela desperately needs funds, much of its foreign exchange having been seized illegally
by the US and its satellites, in order to weather the pandemic.
Anyone supporting such a policy, condoning the killing of vulnerable people to embarrass
another state, is an accessory to murder.
Posted by: arby | Mar 18 2020 14:32 utc | 11
Posted by: Miss Lacy | Mar 18 2020 18:15 utc | 50
Posted by: bevin | Mar 18 2020 18:33 utc | 55
Anyone supporting such a policy, condoning the killing of vulnerable people to
embarrass another state, is an accessory to murder.
Although many argue that the foreign policies of the US government don't really reflect
the views and desires of ordinary citizens, the comments in the Fox News report on this story
suggest otherwise (caveat - be prepared to be appalled).
"... The Democrats did not want Adam Schiff to have to answer questions about the whistleblower, and they don't want the whistleblower's identity to be officially revealed. Such things do not contribute to the greatest cause of our time, the destruction of Donald Trump. ..."
"... The whole point of having the House impeachment investigation proceed from the House Intelligence Committee, headed by Adam Schiff, was to send the signal that Trump is unacceptable to the nefarious powers that make up the Deep State, especially the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA. ..."
"... What a world, then, when OP Democrats are cheering on John Bolton, hoping again for a savior to their sacred resistance cause, and meanwhile they aren't too excited about Rand Paul's intervention. For sure, it is a sign that a "resistance" isn't real when it needs a savior; it's not as if the French Resistance sat back waiting for Gen. de Gaulle. In any case, in the procession of horrible reactionary figures that Democrats have embraced, Bolton is probably the worst, and that's saying quite a lot. ..."
"... People are even talking about "getting used to accepting the help of the CIA with the impeachment," and the like. (I realize I'm being repetitious here, but this stuff blows my mind, it is so disturbing.) At least they are recognizing the reality -- at least partially; that's something. But then what they do with this recognition is something that requires epic levels of TDS -- and, somehow, a great deal of the Left is going down this path. ..."
"... The USA Deep State is a Five Eyes partner and as such Trump must be given the proverbial boot for being an uneducated boor lacking political gravitas & business gravitas with his narcissistic Smoot-Hawley II 2019 trade wars. Screw the confidence man-in-chief. He is a liability for the USA and global business. Trump is not an asset. ..."
"... Almost as a by product of his 2016 victory, Trump showed up the MSM hacks for what they were, lying, partisan shills utterly lacking in any integrity and credibility. The same applies to the intrigues and corruption of the Dirty Cops and Spookocracy. They had to come out from behind the curtain and reveal themselves as the dirty, lying, seditious, treasonous, rabid criminal scum they are. The true nature of the State standing in the spotlight for all the world to see. This cannot be undone. ..."
First , the whistleblower was ruled out as a possible witness -- this was
essentially done behind the scenes, and in reality can be called a Deep State operation, though
one exposed to some extent by Rand Paul. This has nothing to do with protecting the
whistleblower or upholding the whistleblower statute, but instead with the fact that the
whistleblower was a CIA plant in the White House.
That the whistleblower works for the CIA is a matter of public record, not some conspiracy
theory. Furthermore, for some time before the impeachment proceedings began, the whistleblower
had been coordinating his efforts to undermine Trump with the head of the House Intelligence
Committee, who happens to be Adam Schiff. It is possible that the connections with Schiff go
even further or deeper. Obviously the Democrats do not want these things exposed.
... ... ...
In this regard, there was a very special moment on January 29, when Chief Justice John
Roberts refused to allow the reading of a question from Sen. Rand Paul that identified the
alleged whistleblower. Paul then held a press conference in which he read his question.
The question was directed at Adam Schiff, who claims not to have communicated with the
whistleblower, despite much evidence to the contrary. (Further details can be read at
here
.) A propos of what I was just saying, Paul is described in the Politico article as
"a longtime antagonist of Republican leaders." Excellent, good on you, Rand Paul.
Whether this was a case of unintended consequences or not, one could say that this episode
fed into the case against calling witnesses -- certainly the Democrats should not have been
allowed to call witnesses if the Republicans could not call the whistleblower. But clearly this
point is completely lost on those working in terms of the moving line of bullshit.
One would think that Democrats would be happy with a Republican Senator who antagonizes
leaders of his own party, but of course Rand Paul's effort only led to further "outrage" on the
part of Democratic leaders in the House and Senate.
The Democrats did not want Adam Schiff to have to answer questions about the whistleblower,
and they don't want the whistleblower's identity to be officially revealed. Such things do not
contribute to the greatest cause of our time, the destruction of Donald Trump.
However, you see, there is a complementary purpose at work here, too. The whole point of
having the House impeachment investigation proceed from the House Intelligence Committee,
headed by Adam Schiff, was to send the signal that Trump is unacceptable to the nefarious
powers that make up the Deep State, especially the intelligence agencies, especially the
CIA.
The only way these machinations can be combatted is to pull the curtain back further -- but
the Republicans do not want this any more than the Democrats do, with a few possible exceptions
such as Rand Paul. (As the Politico article states, Paul was chastised publicly by McConnell
for submitting his question in the first place, and for criticizing Roberts in the press
conference.)
What a world, then, when OP Democrats are cheering on John Bolton, hoping again for a
savior to their sacred resistance cause, and meanwhile they aren't too excited about Rand
Paul's intervention. For sure, it is a sign that a "resistance" isn't real when it needs a
savior; it's not as if the French Resistance sat back waiting for Gen. de Gaulle. In any case,
in the procession of horrible reactionary figures that Democrats have embraced, Bolton is
probably the worst, and that's saying quite a lot.
... ... ...
Now we are at a moment when "the Left" is recognizing the role that the CIA and the rest of
the "intelligence community" is played in the impeachment nonsense. This "Left" was already on
board for the "impeachment process" itself, perhaps at moments with caveats about "not leaving
everything up to the Democrats," "not just relying on the Democrats," but still accepting their
assigned role as cheerleaders and self-important internet commentators. (And, sure, maybe
that's all I am, too -- but the inability to distinguish form from content is one of the main
problems of the existing Left.)
Now, though, people on the Left are trying to get comfortable with, and trying to explain to
themselves how they can get comfortable with, the obvious role of the "intelligence community"
(with, in my view, the CIA in the leading role, but of course I'm not privy to the inner
workings of this scene) in the impeachment process and other efforts to take down Trump's
presidency.
People are even talking about "getting used to accepting the help of the CIA with the
impeachment," and the like. (I realize I'm being repetitious here, but this stuff blows my
mind, it is so disturbing.) At least they are recognizing the reality -- at least partially;
that's something. But then what they do with this recognition is something that requires epic
levels of TDS -- and, somehow, a great deal of the Left is going down this path.
They might think about the "help" that the CIA gave to the military in Bolivia to remove Evo
Morales from office. They might think about the picture of Donald Trump that they find
necessary to paint to justify what they are willing to swallow to remove him from office. They
might think about the fact that ordinary Democrats are fine with this role for the CIA, and
that Adam Schiff and others routinely offer the criticism/condemnation of Donald Trump that he
doesn't accept the findings of the CIA or the rest of the intelligence agencies at face
value.
The moment for the Left, what calls itself and thinks of itself as that, to break with this
lunacy has passed some time ago, but let us take this moment, of "accepting the help of the
CIA, because Trump," as truly marking a point of no return.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The USA Deep State is a Five Eyes partner and as such Trump must be given the proverbial boot
for being an uneducated boor lacking political gravitas & business gravitas with his
narcissistic Smoot-Hawley II 2019 trade wars. Screw the confidence man-in-chief. He is a liability for the USA and global business. Trump is not an asset.
paul ,
Trump, Sanders and Corbyn were all in their own way agents of creative destruction.
Trump tapped into the popular discontent of millions of Americans who realised that the
system no longer even pretended to work in their interests, and were not prepared to be
diverted down the Identity Politics Rabbit Hole.
The Deep State was outraged that he had disrupted their programme by stealing Clinton's seat
in the game of Musical Chairs. Being the most corrupt, dishonest and mendacious political
candidate in all US history (despite some pretty stiff opposition) was supposed to be
outweighed by her having a vagina. The Deplorables failed to sign up for the programme.
Almost as a by product of his 2016 victory, Trump showed up the MSM hacks for what they were,
lying, partisan shills utterly lacking in any integrity and credibility. The same applies to
the intrigues and corruption of the Dirty Cops and Spookocracy. They had to come out from
behind the curtain and reveal themselves as the dirty, lying, seditious, treasonous, rabid
criminal scum they are. The true nature of the State standing in the spotlight for all the
world to see. This cannot be undone.
For all his pandering to Adelson and the Zionist Mafia, for all his Gives to Netanyahu, Trump
has failed to deliver on the Big Ticket Items. Syria was supposed to have been invaded by
now, with Hillary cackling demonically over Assad's death as she did over Gaddafi, and
rapidly moving on to the main event with Iran. They will not forgive him for this.
They realise they are under severe time pressure. It took them a century to gain their
stranglehold over America, and this is a wasting asset. America is in terminal decline, and
may soon be unable to fulfil its ordained role as dumb goy muscle serving Zionist interests.
And the parasite will find it difficult to find a replacement host.
George Mc ,
Haven't you just agreed with him here?
He thinks the left died in the 1960s, over a half century ago. It's pretty simple to
identify a leftist: anti-imperialist/ anti-capitalist. The Democrats are imperialists.
People who vote for the Democrats and Republicans are imperialists. This article is a
confused mess, that's my whole point;)
If the Democrats and Republicans (and those who vote for them) are imperialists (which they are) then the left are indeed
dead – at least as far as political representation goes.
Koba ,
He's sent more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan he staged several coups in Latin America and
wanted to take out the dprk and thier nukes and wants to bomb Iran! Winding down?!
sharon marlowe ,
First, an attempted assassination-by-drone on President Maduro of Venezuela happened. Then
Trump dropped the largest conventional bomb on Afghanistan, with a mile-wide radius. Then
Trump named Juan Guido as the new President of Venezuela in an overt coup. Then he bombed
Syria over a fake chemical weapons claim. He bombed it before even an investigation was
launched. Then the Trump regime orchestrated a military coup in Bolivia. Then he claimed that
he was pulling out of Syria, but instead sent U.S. troops to take over Syrian oil fields.
trump then assassinated Gen. Solemeni. Then he claimed that he will leave Iraq at the request
of the Iraqi government, the Iraqi government asked the U.S. to leave, and Trump rejected the
request. The Trump regime has tried orchestrating a coup in Iran, and a coup in Hong Kong. He
expelled Russian diplomats en masse for the Skripal incident in England, before an
investigation. He has sanctioned Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, and Venezuela. He has
bombed Yemen, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Those are the things I'm
aware of, but what else Trump has done in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America you
can research if you wish. And now, the claim of leaving Afghanistan is as ridiculous as when
he claimed to be leaving Syria and Iraq.
Dungroanin ,
Yeah yeah and 'he' gave Maduro 7 days to let their kid takeover in Venezuela! And built a
wall. And got rid of obamacare and started a nuke war with Rocketman and and and ...
sharon marlowe ,
There were at least nine people killed when Trump bombed Douma.
Only a psychopath would kill people because one of its spy drones was shot down. You don't
get points for considering killing people for it and then changing your mind.
People should get over Hillary and pay attention to what Trump has been doing. Why even
mention what Hillary would have done in Syria, then proceed to be an apologist for what Trump
has done around the world in just three years? Trump has been quite a prolific imperialist in
such a short time. A second term could well put him above Bush and Obama as the 21st
century's most horrible leaders on earth.
Dungroanin ,
...If you think that the potus is the omnipotent ruler of everything he certainly seems to be
having some problems with his minions in the CIA, NSA, FBI..State Dept etc.
Savorywill ,
Yes, what you say is right. However, he did warn both the Syrian and Russian military of the
attack in the first instance, so no casualties, and in the second attack, he announced that
the missiles had been launched before they hit the target, again resulting in no casualties.
When the US drone was shot down by an Iranian missile, he considered retaliation. But, when
advised of likely casualties, he called it off saying that human lives are more valuable than
the cost of the drone. Yes, he did authorize the assassination of the Iranian general, and
that was very bad. His claims that the general had organized the placement of roadside bombs
that had killed US soldiers rings rather hollow, considering those shouldn't have been in
Iraq in the first place.
I am definitely not stating that he is perfect and doesn't do objectionable things. And he
has authorized US forces to control the oil wells, which is against international law, but at
least US soldiers are not actively engaged in fighting the Syrian government, something
Hillary set in motion. However, the military does comprise a huge percentage of the US
economy and there have to be reasons, and enemies, to justify its existence, so his situation
as president must be very difficult, not a job I would want, that is for sure.
The potus is best described (by Assad actually) as a CEO of a board of directors appointed
by the shareholders who collectively determine their OWN interests.
Your gaslighting ain't succeeding round here – Regime! So desperate, so so sad
🤣
"... "Bolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years - particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president," ..."
"... "It's important that someone who was an unrepentant advocate for the Iraq War, who didn't learn the lessons of the Iraq War, shouldn't be the secretary of state for a president who says Iraq was ..."
Senator Rand Paul said Tuesday in an
op-ed for Rare
that he would oppose President-elect Donald Trump's rumored selection of former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton as Secretary of State.
"Bolton is a longtime member of the failed Washington elite that Trump vowed to oppose, hell-bent on repeating virtually
every foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made in the last 15 years - particularly those Trump promised to avoid as president,"
Paul wrote citing U.S. interventions in Iraq and Libya that Trump has criticized but that Bolton strongly advocated.
Reports since have indicated that former New York City mayor and loyal Trump ally, Rudy Giuliani is being considered for the post.
The Washington Post's David Weigel
reports , "Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a newly reelected member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this morning that
he was inclined to oppose either former U.N. ambassador John Bolton or former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani if they were nominated
for secretary of state."
"It's important that someone who was an unrepentant advocate for the Iraq War, who didn't learn the lessons of the Iraq
War, shouldn't be the secretary of state for a president who says Iraq was a big lesson," Paul told the Post. "Trump
said that a thousand times. It would be a huge mistake for him to give over his foreign policy to someone who [supported the war].
I mean, you could not find more unrepentant advocates of regime change."
Bolton is a typical "Full Spectrum Dominance" hawk, a breed of chickenhawks that recently
proliferated in Washinton corridors of power and which are fed by MIC.
Notable quotes:
"... the way the IRGC came to be designated as an FTO is itself predicated on a lie. ..."
"... The person responsible for this lie is President Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton, who while in that position oversaw National Security Council (NSC) interagency policy coordination meetings at the White House for the purpose of formulating a unified government position on Iran. Bolton had stacked the NSC staff with hardliners who were pushing for a strong stance. But representatives from the Department of Defense often pushed back . During such meetings, the Pentagon officials argued that the IRGC was "a state entity" (albeit a "bad" one), and that if the U.S. were to designate it as a terrorist group, there was nothing to stop Iran from responding by designating U.S. military personnel or CIA officers as terrorists. ..."
"... The memoranda on these meetings, consisting of summaries of the various positions put forward, were doctored by the NSC to make it appear as if the Pentagon agreed with its proposed policy. The Defense Department complained to the NSC that the memoranda produced from these meetings were "largely incorrect and inaccurate" -- "essentially fiction," a former Pentagon official claimed. ..."
"... This was a direct result of the bureaucratic dishonesty of John Bolton. Such dishonesty led to a series of policy decisions that gave a green light to use military force against IRGC targets throughout the Middle East. ..."
President Trump's decision to assassinate Qassem Soleimani back in January took the United
States to the brink of war with Iran.
Trump and his advisors contend that Soleimani's death was necessary to protect American
lives, pointing to a continuum of events that began on December 27, when a rocket attack on an
American base in Iraq killed a civilian translator. That in turn prompted U.S. airstrikes
against a pro-Iranian militia, Khati'ab Hezbollah, which America blamed for the attack.
Khati'ab Hezbollah then stormed the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in protest. This reportedly
triggered the assassination of Soleimani and a subsequent Iranian retaliatory missile strike on
an American base in Iraq. The logic of this continuum appears consistent except for one
important fact -- it is all predicated on a lie.
On the night of December 27, a pickup truck modified
to carry a launchpad capable of firing 36 107mm Russian-made rockets was used in an attack
on a U.S. military compound located at the K-1 Airbase in Iraq's Kirkuk Province. A total of 20
rockets were loaded onto the vehicle, but only 14 were fired. Some of the rockets struck an
ammunition dump on the base, setting off a series of secondary explosions. When the smoke and
dust cleared, a civilian interpreter was dead and
several other personnel , including four American servicemen and two Iraqi military, were
wounded. The attack appeared timed to
disrupt a major Iraqi military operation targeting insurgents affiliated with ISIS.
The area around K-1 is populated by Sunni Arabs, and has long been considered a bastion of
ISIS ideology, even if the organization itself
was declared defeated inside Iraq back in 2017 by then-prime minister Haider al Abadi. The
Iraqi counterterrorism forces based at K-1 consider the area around the base an ISIS sanctuary
so dangerous that they only enter in large numbers.
For their part, the Iraqis had been warning their U.S. counterparts for more than a month
that ISIS was planning attacks on K-1. One such report, delivered on November 6, using
intelligence dating back to October, was quite specific: "ISIS terrorists have endeavored to
target K-1 base in Kirkuk district by indirect fire (Katyusha rockets)."
Another report, dated December 25, warned that ISIS was attempting to seize territory to the
northeast of K-1. The Iraqis were so concerned that on December 27, the day of the attack, they
requested that the U.S. keep functional its
tethered aerostat-based Persistent Threat Detection System (PTSD) -- a high-tech
reconnaissance balloon equipped with multi-mission sensors to provide long endurance
intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) and communications in support of U.S. and
Iraqi forces.
Instead, the U.S. took the PTSD down for maintenance, allowing the attackers to approach
unobserved.
The Iraqi military officials at K-1 immediately suspected ISIS as the culprit behind the
attack. Their logic was twofold. First, ISIS had been engaged in nearly daily attacks in the
area for over a year, launching rockets, firing small arms, and planting roadside bombs.
Second, according
to the Iraqis , "The villages near here are Turkmen and Arab. There is sympathy with Daesh
[i.e., ISIS] there."
As transparent as the Iraqis had been with the U.S. about their belief that ISIS was behind
the attack, the U.S. was equally opaque with the Iraqis regarding whom it believed was the
culprit. The U.S. took custody of the rocket launcher, all surviving ordnance, and all warhead
fragments from the scene.
U.S. intelligence analysts viewed the attack on K-1 as part of a continuum of attacks
against U.S. bases in Iraq since early November 2019. The first attack took place on November
9,
against the joint U.S.-Iraqi base at Qayarrah , and was very similar to the one that
occurred against K-1 -- some 31 107mm rockets were fired from a pickup truck modified to carry
a rocket launchpad. As with K-1, the forces located in Qayarrah were engaged in ongoing
operations targeting ISIS, and the territory around the base was considered sympathetic to
ISIS. The Iraqi government attributed the attack to unspecified "terrorist" groups.
The U.S., however, attributed the attacks to Khati'ab Hezbollah, a Shia militia incorporated
with the Popular Mobilization Organization (PMO), a pro-Iranian umbrella organization that had
been incorporated into the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. The PMO
blamed the U.S. for a series of drone strikes against its facilities throughout the summer
of 2019.
The feeling among the American analysts was that the PMO attacked the bases as a form of
retaliation.
The U.S.
launched a series of airstrikes against Khati'ab Hezbollah bases and command posts in Iraq
and Syria on December 29, near the Iraqi city of al-Qaim. These attacks were carried out
unilaterally, without any effort to coordinate with America's Iraqi counterparts or seek
approval from the Iraqi government.
Khati'ab Hezbollah units had seized al-Qaim from ISIS in November 2017, and then crossed
into Syria, where they defeated ISIS fighters dug in around the Syrian town of al-Bukamal. They
were continuing to secure this strategic border crossing when they were bombed on December
29.
Left unsaid by the U.S. was the fact that the al-Bukamal-al Qaim border crossing was seen as
a crucial "land bridge," connecting Iran with Syria via Iraq. Throughout the summer of
2019, the U.S. had been watching as Iranian engineers, working with Khati'ab Hezbollah,
constructed a sprawling base that straddled both Iraq and Syria. It was this base, and not
Khati'ab Hezbollah per se, that was the reason for the American airstrike. The objective in
this attack was to degrade Iranian capability in the region; the K-1 attack was just an excuse,
one based on the lie that Khati'ab Hezbollah, and not ISIS, had carried it out.
The U.S. had long condemned what it called Iran's "malign intentions" when it came to its
activities in Iraq and Syria. But there is a world of difference between employing tools of
diplomacy to counter Iranian regional actions and going kinetic. One of the reasons the U.S.
has been able to justify attacking Iranian-affiliated targets, such as the al-Bukamal-al-Qaim
complex and Qassem Soleimani, is that the Iranian entity associated with both -- the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC -- has been designated by the U.S. as a Foreign Terrorist
Organization (FTO), and as such military attacks against it are seen as an extension of the
ongoing war on terror. Yet the way the IRGC came to be designated as an FTO is itself
predicated on a lie.
The person responsible for this lie is President Trump's former national security
adviser John Bolton, who while in that position oversaw National Security Council (NSC)
interagency policy coordination meetings at the White House for the purpose of formulating a
unified government position on Iran. Bolton had stacked the NSC staff with hardliners who were
pushing for a strong stance. But
representatives from the Department of Defense often pushed back . During such meetings,
the Pentagon officials argued that the IRGC was "a state entity" (albeit a "bad" one), and that
if the U.S. were to designate it as a terrorist group, there was nothing to stop Iran from
responding by designating U.S. military personnel or CIA officers as terrorists.
The memoranda on these meetings, consisting of summaries of the various positions put
forward, were doctored by the NSC to make it appear as if the Pentagon agreed with its proposed
policy. The Defense Department complained to the NSC that the memoranda produced from these
meetings were "largely
incorrect and inaccurate" -- "essentially fiction," a former Pentagon official
claimed.
After the Pentagon "informally" requested that the NSC change the memoranda to accurately
reflect its position, and were denied, the issue was bumped up to Undersecretary of Defense
John Rood. He then formally requested that the memoranda be corrected. Such a request was
unprecedented in recent memory, a former official noted. Regardless, the NSC did not budge, and
the original memoranda remained as the official records of the meetings in question.
This was a direct result of the bureaucratic dishonesty of John Bolton. Such dishonesty
led to a series of policy decisions that gave a green light to use military force against IRGC
targets throughout the Middle East. The rocket attack against K-1 was attributed to an
Iranian proxy -- Khati'ab Hezbollah -- even though there was reason to believe the attack was
carried out by ISIS. This was a cover so IRGC-affiliated facilities in al-Bakumal and al-Qaim,
which had nothing to do with the attack, could be bombed. Everything to do with Iran's alleged
"malign intent." The U.S. embassy was then attacked. Soleimani killed. The American base at
al-Assad was bombarded by Iranian missiles. America and Iran were on the brink of war.
All because of a lie.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author of several books, most
recently, Deal of the Century: How Iran
Blocked the West's Road to War (2018).
Iran hawks never talk about diplomacy except as a way to discredit it.
Notable quotes:
"... And even if Iran were to accept and proceed comply in good faith, just as Iran complied scrupulously with the JCPOA, what's to prevent any US administration from tearing up that "new deal" and demanding more? ..."
Daniel
Larison Two Iran hawks from the Senate, Bob Menendez and Lindse Graham, are
proposing a "new deal" that is guaranteed to be a non-starter with Iran:
Essentially, their idea is that the United States would offer a new nuclear deal to both
Iran and the gulf states at the same time. The first part would be an agreement to ensure
that Iran and the gulf states have access to nuclear fuel for civilian energy purposes,
guaranteed by the international community in perpetuity. In exchange, both Iran and the gulf
states would swear off nuclear fuel enrichment inside their own countries forever.
Iran is never going to accept any agreement that requires them to give up domestic
enrichment. As far as they are concerned, they are entitled to this under the Non-Proliferation
Treaty, and they regard it as a matter of their national rights that they keep it. Insisting on
"zero enrichment" is what made it impossible to reach an agreement with Iran for the better
part of a decade, and it was only when the Obama administration understood this and compromised
to allow Iran to enrich under tight restrictions that the negotiations could move forward.
Demanding "zero enrichment" today in 2020 amounts to rejecting that compromise and returning to
a bankrupt approach that drove Iran to build tens of thousands of centrifuges. As a proposal
for negotiations, it is dead on arrival, and Menendez and Graham must know that. Iran hawks
never talk about diplomacy except as a way to discredit it. They want to make a bogus offer in
the hopes that it will be rejected so that they can use the rejection to justify more
aggressive measures.
The identity of the authors of the plan is a giveaway that the offer is not a serious
diplomatic proposal. Graham is one of the most incorrigible hard-liners on Iran, and Menendez
is probably the most hawkish Democratic senator in office today. Among other things, Menendez
has been a
booster of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), the deranged cult of Iranian exiles
that has been buying the support of American politicians and officials for years. Graham has
never seen a diplomatic agreement that he didn't want to destroy. When hard-liners talk about
making a "deal," they always mean that they want to demand the other side's surrender.
Another giveaway that this is not a serious proposal is the fact that they want this
imaginary agreement submitted as a treaty:
That final deal would be designated as a treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate, to give Iran
confidence that a new president won't just pull out (like President Trump did on President
Barack Obama's nuclear deal).
This is silly for many reasons. The Senate doesn't ratify treaties nowadays, so any "new
deal" submitted as a treaty would never be ratified. As the current president has shown, it
doesn't matter if a treaty has been ratified by the Senate. Presidents can and do withdraw from
ratified treaties if they want to, and the fact that it is a ratified treaty doesn't prevent
them from doing this. Bush pulled out of the ABM Treaty, which was ratified
88-2 in 1972. Trump withdrew from the INF Treaty just last year. The INF Treaty had been
ratified with a
93-5 vote. The hawkish complaint that the JCPOA wasn't submitted as a treaty was, as usual,
made in bad faith. There was no chance that the JCPOA would have been ratified, and even if it
had been that ratification would not have protected it from being tossed aside by Trump.
Insisting on making any new agreement a treaty is just another way of announcing that they have
no interest in a diplomatic solution.
Menendez and Graham want to make the obstacles to diplomacy so great that negotiations
between the U.S. and Iran can't resume. It isn't a serious proposal, and it shouldn't be taken
seriously.
And even if Iran were to accept and proceed comply in good faith, just as Iran complied
scrupulously with the JCPOA, what's to prevent any US administration from tearing up that
"new deal" and demanding more?
"... Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment. ..."
"... In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump slightly deviated. ..."
As for "evil republican senators", they would be viewed as evil by electorate if and only only if actual crimes of Trump regime
like Douma false flag, Suleimani assassination (actually here Trump was set up By Bolton and Pompeo) and other were discussed.
Currently they can wrap themselves into constitution defenders flag and be pretty safe from any criticism. Because charges
that Schiff brought to the floor are bogus, and probably were created out of thin air by NSC plotters. Senators on both sides
understand this, creating a classic Kabuki theater environment.
Both sides are afraid to discuss real issues, real Trump regime crimes.
Schiff proved to be patently inept in this whole story even taking into account limitations put by Kabuki theater on him, and
in case of Trump acquittal *which is "highly probable" borrowing May government terminology in Skripals case :-) to resign would be a honest thing
for him to
do.
Assuming that he has some honestly left. Which is highly doubtful with statements like:
"The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there so we don't have to fight Russia here."
And
"More than 15,000 Ukrainians have died fighting Russian forces and their proxies. 15,000."
Actually it was the USA interference in Ukraine (aka Nulandgate) that killed 15K Ukrainians, mainly Donbas residents
and badly trained recruits of the Ukrainian army sent to fight them, as well as volunteers of paramilitary "death squads" like Asov
battalion financed by oligarch Igor Kolomyskiy
In any case, it is clear that Trump is just a marionette of more powerful forces behind him, and his impeachment does not means
much, if those forces are untouchable. Impeachment Kabuki theatre is an attempt of restoration of NSC (read neocons) favored foreign policy from which Trump
slightly deviated.
"... Bolton targeted every arms control and disarmament agreement over the past several decades, and played a major role in abrogating two of the most significant ones. As an arms control official in the Bush administration, he lobbied successfully for the abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. As soon as he joined the Trump administration, he went after the Intermediate-Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was abrogated in 2018. He criticized the Nunn-Lugar agreement in the 1990s, which played a key role in the denuclearization of former Soviet republics, and maligned the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as well as the Iran nuclear accord. He helped to derail the Biological Weapons Conference in Geneva in 2001. ..."
It isn't enough for the corporate media to praise John Bolton for his timely manuscript that
confirms Donald Trump's explicit linkage between military aid to Ukraine and investigations
into his political foe Joe Biden. As a result, the media have made John Bolton a "man of
principle," according to the Washington Post, and a fearless infighter for the
"sovereignty of the United States." Writing in the Post , Kathleen Parker notes that
Bolton isn't motivated by the money he will earn from his book (in the neighborhood of $2
million), but that he is far more interested in "saving his legacy." Perhaps this is a good
time to examine that legacy.
Bolton, who used student deferments and service in the Maryland National Guard to avoid
serving in Vietnam, is a classic Chicken Hawk. He supported the Vietnam War and continues to
support the war in Iraq. Bolton endorsed preemptive military strikes in North Korea and Iran in
recent years, and lobbied for regime change in Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria,
Venezuela, and Yemen. When George W. Bush declared an "axis of evil" in 2002 consisting of
Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, Bolton added an equally bizarre axis of Cuba, Libya, and
Syria.
When Bolton occupied official positions at the Department of State and the United Nations,
he regularly ignored assessments of the intelligence community in order to make false arguments
regarding weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Cuba and Syria in order to promote the
use of force. When serving as President Bush's Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and
Disarmament, Bolton ran his own intelligence program, issuing white papers on WMD that lacked
support within the intelligence community. He used his own reports to testify to congressional
committees in 2002 in effort to justify the use of military force against Iraq.
Bolton presented misinformation to the Congress on a Cuban biological weapons program. When
the Central Intelligence Agency challenged the accuracy of Bolton's information in 2003, he was
forced to cancel a similar briefing on Syria. In a briefing to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee in 2005, the former chief of intelligence at the Department of State, Carl Ford,
referred to Bolton as a "serial abuser" in his efforts to pressure intelligence analysts. Ford
testified that he had "never seen anybody quite like Secretary Bolton in terms of the way he
abuses his power and authority with little people."
The hearings in 2005 included a statement from a whistleblower, a former contractor at the
Agency for International Development, who accused Bolton of using inflammatory language and
even throwing objects at her. The whistleblower told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
staff that Bolton made derogatory remarks about her sexual orientation and weight among other
improprieties. The critical testimony against Bolton meant that the Republican-led Foreign
Relations Committee couldn't confirm his appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
President Bush made Bolton a recess appointment, which he later regretted.
The United Nations, after all, was an ironic assignment for Bolton, who has been a strong
critic of the UN and most international organizations throughout his career because they
infringed on the "sovereignty of the United States." In 1994, he stated there was no such thing
as the United Nations, but there is an international community that "can be led by the only
real power left in the world," the United States. Bolton stated that the "Secretariat Building
in New York has 38 stories," and that if it "lost ten stories, it wouldn't make any
difference."
Bolton said the "happiest moment" in his political career was when the United States pulled
out of the International Criminal Court. Years later, he told the Federalist Society that
Bush's withdrawal from the UN's Rome Statute, which created the ICC, was "one of my proudest
achievements."
Bolton targeted every arms control and disarmament agreement over the past several
decades, and played a major role in abrogating two of the most significant ones. As an arms
control official in the Bush administration, he lobbied successfully for the abrogation of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. As soon as he joined the Trump administration, he went
after the Intermediate-Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was abrogated in 2018. He criticized the
Nunn-Lugar agreement in the 1990s, which played a key role in the denuclearization of former
Soviet republics, and maligned the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons as well
as the Iran nuclear accord. He helped to derail the Biological Weapons Conference in Geneva in
2001.
U.S. efforts at diplomatic reconciliation have drawn Bolton's ire. The two-state solution
for the Israeli-Palestinian situation as well as Richard Nixon's one-China policy have been
particular targets. He is also a frequent critic of the European Union, and a passionate
supporter of Brexit. From 2013 to 2018, he was the chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a
well-known anti-Muslim organization. He was the director of the Project for the New American
Century, which led the campaign for the use of force against Iraq. The fact that he was a
protege of former senator Jesse Helms should come as no surprise.
It is useful to have Bolton's testimony at the climactic moment in the current impeachment
trial, but it should't blind us to his deceit and disinformation over his thirty years of
opposition to U.S. international diplomacy. As an assistant attorney general in the Reagan
administration, he fought against reparations to Japanese-Americans who had been held in
internment camps during World War II. Two secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condi Rice,
have accused Bolton with holding back important information on important international issues,
and Bolton did his best to sabotage Powell's efforts to pursue negotiations with North Korea.
Bolton had a hand in the disinformation campaign against Iraq in the run-up to the U.S.
invasion of 2003. The legacy of John Bolton is well established; his manuscript will not alter
this legacy. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Melvin GoodmanMelvin A. Goodman is a
senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns
Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence:
The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The
Cost of American Militarism . and A Whistleblower at the
CIA . His most recent book is "American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump" (Opus
Publishing), and he is the author of the forthcoming "The Dangerous National Security State"
(2020)." Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org .
"We can't beat him so we have to impeach him" no truer words were ever spoken. Too bad
they couldn't come up with a reason. I think November will be a Democrat Slaughter.
Bolton is a war mongering narcissist that wanted his war, didn't get it, & is now
acting like a spoilt child that didn't get his way & is laying on the floor kicking &
screaming!
Trump excoriates Bolton in tweets this morning:
"For a guy who couldn't get approved for the Ambassador to the U.N. years ago, couldn't get
approved for anything since, 'begged' me for a non Senate approved job, which I gave him
despite many saying 'Don't do it, sir,' takes the job, mistakenly says 'Libyan Model' on T.V.,
and ... many more mistakes of judgement [sic], gets fired because frankly, if I listened to
him, we would be in World War Six by now, and goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty &
untrue book. All Classified National Security. Who would do this?"
IMO, Trump is a fantastic POTUS for this day and age, but he wasn't on his A game when he
brought Bolton onboard. He should have known better and, was, apparently, warned. Maybe Trump
thought he could control him and use him as a threatening pit bull. Mistake. Bolton is greedy
as well as vindictive.
The U.S. was having some success with turning protest messaging against Iran – until,
that is – its killing and wounding of so many Iraqi security force members last week
(Ketaib Hizbullah is a part of Iraq's armed forces).
Escalation of maximum-pressure was one thing (Iran was confident of weathering that); but
assassinating such a senior official on his state duties, was quite something else. We have not
observed a state assassinating a most senior official of another state before.
And the manner of its doing, was unprecedented too. Soleimani was officially visiting Iraq.
He arrived openly as a VIP guest from Syria, and was met on the tarmac by an equally senior
Iraqi official, Al-Muhandis, who was assassinated also, (together with seven others). It was
all open. General Soleimani regularly used his mobile phone as he argued that as a senior state
official, if he were to be assassinated by another state, it would only be as an act of
war.
This act, performed at the international airport of Baghdad, constitutes not just the
sundering of red lines, but a humiliation inflicted on Iraq – its government and people.
It will upend Iraq's strategic positioning. The erstwhile Iraqi attempt at balancing between
Washington and Iran will be swept away by Trump's hubristic trampling on the country's
sovereignty. It may well mark the beginning of the end of the U.S. presence in Iraq (and
therefore Syria, too), and ultimately, of America's footprint in the Middle East.
Trump may earn easy plaudits now for his "We're America, Bitch!", as one senior White House
official defined the Trump foreign policy doctrine; but the doubts – and unforeseen
consequences soon may come home to roost.
Why did he do it? If no one really wanted 'war', why did Trump escalate and smash up all the
crockery? He has had an easy run (so far) towards re-election, so why play the always
unpredictable 'wild card' of a yet another Mid-East conflict?
Was it that he wanted to show 'no Benghazi'; no U.S. embassy siege 'on my watch' –
unlike Obama's handling of that situation? Was he persuaded that these assassinations would
play well to his constituency (Israeli and Evangelical)? Or was he offered this option baldly
by the Netanyahu faction in Washington? Maybe.
Some in Israel are worried about a three or four front war reaching Israel. Senior Israeli
officials recently have been speculating about the likelihood of regional conflict occurring
within the coming months. Israel's PM however, is fighting for his political life, and has
requested immunity from prosecution on three indictments – pleading that this was his
legal right, and that it was needed for him to "continue to lead Israel" for the sake of its
future. Effectively, Netanyahu has nothing to lose from escalating tensions with Iran -- but
much to gain.
Opposition Israeli political and military leaders have warned that the PM needs 'war' with
Iran -- effectively to underscore the country's 'need' for his continued leadership. And for
technical reasons in the Israeli parliament, his plea is unlikely to be settled before the
March general elections. Netanyahu thus may still have some time to wind up the case for his
continued tenure of the premiership.
One prime factor in the Israeli caution towards Iran rests not so much on the waywardness of
Netanyahu, but on the inconstancy of President Trump: Can it be guaranteed that the U.S. will
back Israel unreservedly -- were it to again to become enmeshed in a Mid-East war? The Israeli
and Gulf answer seemingly is 'no'. The import of this assessment is significant. Trump now is
seen by some in Israel – and by some insiders in Washington – as a threat to
Israel's future security vis à vis Iran. Was Trump aware of this? Was this act a gamble
to guarantee no slippage in that vital constituency in the lead up to the U.S. elections? We do
not know.
So we arrive at three final questions: How far will Iran absorb this new escalation? Will
Iran confine its retaliation to within Iraq? Or will the U.S. cross another 'red line' by
striking inside Iran itself, in any subsequent tit for tat?
Is it deliberate (or is it political autism) that makes Secretary Pompeo term all the Iraqi
Hash'd a-Sha'abi forces – whether or not part of official Iraqi forces – as
"Iran-led"? The term seems to be used as a laissez-passer to attack all the many Hash'd
a-Sha'abi units on the grounds that, being "Iran-linked", they therefore count as 'terrorist
forces'. This formulation gives rise to the false sequitur that all other Iraqis would somehow
approve of the killings. This would be laughable, if it were not so serious. The Hash'd forces
led the war against ISIS and are esteemed by the vast majority of Iraqis. And Soleimani was on
the ground at the front line, with those Iraqi forces.
These forces are not Iranian 'proxies'. They are Iraqi nationalists who share a common Shi'a
identity with their co-religionists in Iran, and across the region. They share a common
zeitgeist, they see politics similarly, but they are no puppets (we write from direct
experience).
But what this formulation does do is to invite a widening conflict: Many Iraqis will be
outraged by the U.S. attacks on fellow Iraqis and will revenge them. Pompeo (falsely) will then
blame Iran. Is that Pompeo's purpose: casus belli?
But where is the off-ramp? Iran will respond Is this affair simply set to escalate from
limited military exchanges and from thence, to escalate until what? We understand that this was
not addressed in Washington before the President's decision was made. There are no real U.S.
channels of communication (other than low level) with Iran; nor is there a plan for the next
days. Nor an obvious exit. Is Trump relying on gut instinct again?
"... "Since President Donald Trump ordered the drone strike that killed [Soleimani – justified in terms of deterrence, and allegedly halting an attack] a handful of Trump's advisers, however, [espied another] strategic benefit to killing Soleimani: Call it regime disruption ..."
"... "The case for disruption is outlined in a series of unclassified memos sent to [John Bolton]in May and June 2019 their author, David Wurmser, is a longtime adviser to Bolton who then served as a consultant to the National Security Council. Wurmser argues that Iran is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Its leadership, he writes, is divided between camps that seek an apocalyptic return of the Hidden Imam, and those that favour of the preservation of the Islamic Republic. All the while, many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime's incompetence and corruption. ..."
"... "Wurmser's crucial insight [is that] – were unexpected, rule-changing actions taken against Iran, it would confuse the regime. It would need to scramble," he writes. Such a U.S. attack would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the regime depends for stability and survival." Such a moment of confusion, Wurmser writes, will create momentary paralysis -- and the perception among the Iranian public that its leaders are weak. ..."
"... "Wurmser's memos show that the Trump administration has been debating the blow against Soleimani since the current crisis began, some seven months ago After Iran downed a U.S. drone [in June], Wurmser advised Bolton that the U.S. response should be overt and designed to send a message that the U.S. holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. "This could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top deputies," Wurmser wrote in a June 22 memo. ..."
"... In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran. He says the U.S. response "does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be)." Rather, he stresses that the U.S. response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime's domestic legitimacy crisis. ..."
That was how the English protestant leader saw Catholic Spain in 1656. And it is very close
to how key orientations in the U.S. sees Iran today : The evil of religion – of
Shi'ism – subjecting (they believe) Iranians to repression, and to serfdom. In Europe,
this ideological struggle against the 'evil' of an imposed religious community (the Holy
'Roman' Axis, then) brought Europe to 'near-Armageddon', with the worst affected parts of
Europe seeing their population decimated by up to 60% during the conflict.
Is this faction in the U.S. now intent on invoking a new, near-Armageddon – on this
occasion, in the Middle East – in order, like Cromwell, to destroy the religious
'community known' as the Shi'a Resistance Axis, seen to stretch across the region, in order to
preserve the Jewish "peoples' desire for simple liberties"?
Of course, today's leaders of this ideological faction are no longer Puritan Protestants
(though the Christian Evangelicals are at one with Cromwell's 'Old Testament' literalism and
prophesy). No, its lead ideologues are the neo-conservatives, who have leveraged Karl Popper's
hugely influential The Open Society and its Enemies – a seminal treatise, which
to a large extent, has shaped how many Americans imagine their 'world'. Popper's was history
understood as a series of attempts, by the forces of reaction, to smother an open society with
the weapons of traditional religion and traditional culture:
Marx and Russia were cast as the archetypal reactionary threat to open societies. This
construct was taken up by Reagan, and re-connected to the Christian apocalyptic tradition
(hence the neo-conservative coalition with Evangelists yearning for
Redemption , and with liberal interventionists, yearning for a secular millenarianism). All
concur that Iran is reactionary, and furthermore, the posit, poses a grave threat to Israel's
self-proclaimed 'open society'.
The point here is that there is little point in arguing with these people that Iran poses no
threat to the U.S. (which is obvious) – for the 'project' is ideological through and
through. It has to be understood by these lights. Popper's purpose was to propose that only
liberal globalism would bring about a "growing measure of humane and enlightened life" and a
free and open society – period.
All this is but the outer Matryoshka – a suitable public rhetoric, a painted image
– that can be used to encase the secret, inner dolls. Eli Lake,
writing in Bloomberg , however, gives away the next doll:
"Since President Donald Trump ordered the drone strike that killed [Soleimani –
justified in terms of deterrence, and allegedly halting an attack] a handful of Trump's
advisers, however, [espied another] strategic benefit to killing Soleimani: Call it regime
disruption
"The case for disruption is outlined in a series of unclassified memos sent to [John
Bolton]in May and June 2019 their author, David Wurmser, is a longtime adviser to Bolton who
then served as a consultant to the National Security Council. Wurmser argues that Iran is in
the midst of a legitimacy crisis. Its leadership, he writes, is divided between camps that seek
an apocalyptic return of the Hidden Imam, and those that favour of the preservation of the
Islamic Republic. All the while, many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime's
incompetence and corruption.
"Wurmser's crucial insight [is that] – were unexpected, rule-changing actions
taken against Iran, it would confuse the regime. It would need to scramble," he writes. Such a
U.S. attack would "rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them
upon which the regime depends for stability and survival." Such a moment of confusion, Wurmser
writes, will create momentary paralysis -- and the perception among the Iranian public that its
leaders are weak.
"Wurmser's memos show that the Trump administration has been debating the blow against
Soleimani since the current crisis began, some seven months ago After Iran downed a U.S. drone
[in June], Wurmser advised Bolton that the U.S. response should be overt and designed to send a
message that the U.S. holds the Iranian regime, not the Iranian people, responsible. "This
could even involve something as a targeted strike on someone like Soleimani or his top
deputies," Wurmser wrote in a June 22 memo.
In these memos, Wurmser is careful to counsel against a ground invasion of Iran. He says
the U.S. response "does not need to be boots on the ground (in fact, it should not be)."
Rather, he stresses that the U.S. response should be calibrated to exacerbate the regime's
domestic legitimacy crisis.
So there it is – David Wurmser is the 'doll' within: no military invasion, but just a
strategy to blow apart the Iranian Republic. Wurmser, Eli Lake reveals, has quietly been
advising Bolton and the Trump Administration all along. This was the neo-con, who in 1996,
compiled Coping with Crumbling States (which flowed on from the infamous Clean
Break policy strategy paper, written for Netanyahu, as a blueprint for destructing
Israel's enemies). Both these papers advocated the overthrow of the Secular-Arab nationalist
states – excoriated both as "crumbling relics of the 'evil' USSR" (using Popperian
language, of course) – and inherently hostile to Israel (the real message).
Well (
big surprise ), Wurmser has now been at work as the author of how to 'implode' and destroy
Iran. And his insight? "A targeted strike on someone like Soleimani"; split the Iranian
leadership into warring factions; cut an open wound into the flesh of Iran's domestic
legitimacy; put a finger into that open wound, and twist it; disrupt – and pretend that
the U.S. sides with the Iranian people, against its government.
Eli Lake seems, in his Bloomberg piece, to think that the Wurmser strategy has
worked. Really? The problem here is that narratives in Washington are so far apart from the
reality that exists on the ground – they simply do not touch at any point. Millions
attended Soleimani's cortege. His killing gave a renewed cohesion to Iran. Little more
than a dribble have protested.
Now let us unpack the next 'doll': Trump bought into Wurmser's 'play', albeit, with Trump
subsequently admitting that he did the assassination under
intense pressure from Republican Senators. Maybe he believed the patently absurd narrative
that Iranians would 'be dancing in the street' at Soleimani's killing. In any event, Trump is
not known, exactly, for admitting his mistakes. Rather, when something is portrayed as his
error, the President adopts the full 'salesman' persona: trying to convince his base that the
murder was no error, but a great strategic success – "They like us", Trump claimed of
protestors in Iran.
Tom Luongo has
observed : "Trump's impeachment trial in the Senate begins next week, and it's clear that
this will not be a walk in the park for the President. Anyone dismissing this because the
Republicans hold the Senate, simply do not understand why this impeachment exists in the first
place. It is [occurring because it offers] the ultimate form of leverage over a President whose
desire to end the wars in the Middle East is anathema to the entrenched powers in the D.C.
Swamp." Ah, so here we arrive at another inner Matryoshka.
This is Luongo's point: Impeachment was the leverage to drive open a wedge between
Republican neo-conservatives in the Senate – and Trump. And now the Pelosi pressure on
Republican Senators is
escalating . The Establishment threw cold water over Trump's assertion of imminent
attack, as justification for murdering Soleimani, and Trump responds by painting himself
further into a corner on Iran – by going the full salesman 'monte'.
On the campaign trail, the President goes way over-the-top, calling Soleimani
a "son of a b -- -", who killed 'thousands' and furthermore was responsible for every U.S.
veteran who lost a limb in Iraq. And he then conjures up a fantasy picture of protesters
pouring onto the streets of Tehran, tearing down images of Soleimani, and screaming abuse at
the Iranian leadership.
It is nonsense. There are
no mass protests (there have been a few hundred students protesting at one main Tehran
University). But Trump has dived in pretty deep, now
threatening the Euro-Three signatories to the JCPOA, that unless they brand Iran as having
defaulted on JCPOA at the UNSC disputes mechanism, he will slap an eye-watering 25% tariff on
their automobiles.
So, how will Trump avoid plunging in even deeper to conflict if – and when –
Americans die in Iraq or Syria at the hands of militia – and when Pompeo or Lindsay
Graham will claim, baldly, 'Iran's proxies did it'? Sending emollient faxes to the Swiss to
pass to Tehran will not do. Tehran will not read them, or believe them, even if they did.
It all reeks of stage-management; a set up: a very clever stage-management, designed to end
with the U.S. crossing Iran's 'red line', by striking at a target within Iranian
territory. Here, finally, we arrive at the innermost doll.
Cui bono ? Some Senators who never liked Trump, and would prefer Pence as
President; the Democrats, who would prefer to run their candidate against Pence in November,
rather than Trump. But also, as someone who once worked with Wurmser observed tartly: when you
hear that name (Wurmser), immediately you think Netanyahu, his intimate associate.
After the Trump Administration's 75-minute briefing to the US Senate on the assassination of
Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani,
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was deeply critical , calling it the worst briefing he'd gotten in his
nine years in the Senate.
Saying the administration's briefers offered little on the legal or practical justification
for the attack, Sen. Lee particularly took umbrage at them warning the Senators that they must
not debate the War Powers authorization for a war with Iran .
Those giving the briefing objected to the very idea of the Senate discussing the matter
publicly, saying it would "embolden Iran." Sen. Lee noted that this is a power Constitutionally
reserved explicitly for the legislature.
"For them to tell us ... for us to debate and discuss these things on the Senate floor
would somehow weaken the American cause and embolden Iran in any other actions, I find very
insulting ," Lee said, who did not specify to reporters on Capitol Hill which briefer made
the assertion.
"It is not acceptable for officials within the executive branch of government -- I don't
care if they're with the CIA, the Department of Defense or otherwise -- to come in and tell
us that we can't debate and discuss the appropriateness of military intervention against
Iran, " Lee added.
-- ABC
Not only did Lee express annoyance that there was no pushback from any of the briefers on
telling the Senate not to debate something legally in their purview, but he said that while
he'd had problems with the language of Sen. Tim Kaine's (D-VA) resolution, he has now decided
that he will support the resolution, on condition of some amendments.
"Trump is too stupid, or willfully ignorant to know that Soleimani was at the
forefront of the US led
coalition to
eradicate ISIS from Northern Iraq in March 2015.
Soleimani also, as a commander of the Iranian Quds Force, was part of the American-led
coalition under US General Tommy Franks fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan in the October
2001 Battle
of Herat .
Moreover, Soleimani worked to
protect Eastern Christians against
ISIS in both Syria and Iraq, and
empowered them to
defend themselves as best they could.
As for the flunkie at State, Pompeo put up a clip of a few Iraqis celebrating the death of
Soleimani while parroting Trump's own lies that Iranians
"hated and feared him."
However, Pompass didn'tshow the millions mourning
Soleimani in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, including the minorities in Sunni states such as Saudi
Arabia and Bahrain.
That's not "hate and fear," that's "honor and respect."
Most Americans never heard of Soleimani -- a soft-spoken man of high refinement -- until
his murder last week. Now they're clamoring as if Trump had slain the devil himself."
When World?
Have you not had enough of the *** monstrosity Yet?
Iran has incentives to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the
great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term
Two.
Notable quotes:
"... Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump. He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4 pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in your face in an hour, Sir ". ..."
"... Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on the military (which likely will obey). ..."
"... These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper. ..."
"... As a thank you to Trump calling the Israel occupied Golan a part of Israel Netanyahu called an (iirc also illegal) new Golan settlement "Ramat Trump" ..."
"... I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have? ..."
"... The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking. ..."
"... Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ..."
"... Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. ..."
"... We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies. If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL ..."
You have just several thousand soldiers in Iraq and Syria. These countries have large proxy
forces of Iran's allies in the form of Shia militias in Iraq and actual Iranian Quds Force
troops in Syria. These forces will be used to attack and kill our soldiers.
The Iranians have significant numbers of ballistic missiles which they have already said
will be used against our forces
The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the IRGC
Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed. In that
process the US Navy will loose men and ships.
In direct air attacks on Iran we are bound to lose aircraft and air crew.
The IRGC and its Quds Force will carry out terrorist attacks across the world.
Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Don't let the neocons like Pompeo sell you on war.
Make the intelligence people show you the evidence in detail. Make your own judgments.
pl
re " Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people "
Are you sure? I am not.
Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump.
He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4
pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in
your face in an hour, Sir ".
A good number of the so called grownups who gave such advice were (gameshow style) fired,
sometimes by twitter.
Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on
the military (which likely will obey).
These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even
after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper.
Israel could, if politically just a tad more insane, bomb Iran and thus invite the
inevitable retaliation. When that happens they'll cry for US aid, weapons and money because
they alone ~~~
(a) cannot defeat Iran (short of going nuclear) and ...
(b) Holocaust! We want weapons and money from Germany, too! ...
(c) they know that ...
(d) which does not lead in any way to Netanyahu showing signgs of self restraint or
reason.
Netanyahu just - it is (tight) election time - announced, in his sldedge hammer style
subtlety, that (he) Israel will annect the palestinian west jordan territory, making the
Plaestines an object in his election campaign.
IMO that idea is simply insane and invites more "troubles". But then, I didn't hear
anything like, say, Trump gvt protests against that (and why expect that from the dudes who
moved the US embassy to Jerusalem).
as for Trump and Netanyahu ... policy debate ... I had that here in mind, which pretty speaks
for itself. And I thought Trumo is just running for office in the US. Alas, it is a Netanyaho
campaign poster from the current election:
I generously assume that things like that only happen because of the hard and hard
ly work of Kushner on his somewhat elusive but of course GIGANTIC and
INCREDIBLE Middle East peace plan.
Kushner is probably getting hard and hard ly supported by Ivanka who just said that
she inherited her moral compass from her father. Well ... congatulations ... I assume.
I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has
cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate
nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have?
The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our
military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force
us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking.
Need I trot out Goering's statement regarding selling a war once more?
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back
to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor
in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the
matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can
declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are
intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy
does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we
could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies.
If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL
The 'ivestigations are a formality. The Saudis (with U.S. backing) are already saying that
the missiles were Iranian made and according to them, this proves that Iran fired them. The
Saudis are using the more judicious phrase 'behind the attack' but Pompeo is running with the
fired from Iran narrative.
How can we tell the difference between an actual Iranian manufactured missile vs one that
was manufactured in Yemen based on Iranian designs? We only have a few pictures Iranian
missiles unlike us, the Iranians don't toss them all over the place so we don't have any
physical pieces to compare them to.
Perhaps honest investigators could make a determination but even if they do exist they
will keep quiet while the bible thumping Pompeo brays and shamelessly lies as he is prone to
do.
These kinds of munition will leave hundreds of bits scattered all over their targets. I'm
waiting for the press conference with the best bits laid out on the tables.
I doubt that there will be any stencils saying 'Product of Iran', unless the paint smells
fresh.
1. I am still waiting to read some informed discussion concerning the *accuracy* of the
projectiles hitting their targets with uncanny precision from hundreds of miles away. What
does this say about the achievement of those pesky Eye-rainians? https://www.moonofalabama.org/images9/saudihit2.jpg
2. "The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the
IRGC Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed.:
Ahem, Which forces are utterly destroyed? With respect colonel, you are not thinking
straight. An army with supersonic land to sea missiles that are highly accurate will make
minced meat of any fool's ship that dare attack it. The lesson of the last few months is that
Iran is deadly serious about its position that if they cannot sell their oil, no one else
will be able to either. And if the likes of the relatively broadminded colonel have not yet
learned that lesson, then this can only mean that the escalation ladder will continue to be
climbed, rung by rung. Next rung: deep sea port of Yanbu, or, less likely, Ra's Tanura.
That's when the price of oil will really go through the roof and the Chinese (and possibly
one or two of the Europoodles) will start crying Uncle Scam. Nuff Sed.
It sounds like you are getting a little "help" with this. You statement about the result
of a naval confrontation in the Gulf reflects the 19th Century conception that "ships can't
fight forts." that has been many times exploded. You have never seen the amount of firepower
that would be unleashed on Iran from the air and sea. Would the US take casualties? Yes, but
you will be destroyed.
We will have to agree to disagree. But unless I am quite mistaken, the majority view if not
the consensus of informed up to date opinion holds that the surest sign that the US is
getting ready to attack Iran is that it is withdrawing all of its naval power out of the
Persian Gulf, where they would be sitting ducks.
Besides, I don't think it will ever come to that. Not to repeat myself, but taking out
either deep sea ports of Ra's Tanura and/ or Yanbu (on the Red Sea side) will render Saudi
oil exports null and void for the next six months. The havoc that will play with the price of
oil and consequently on oil futures and derivatives will be enough for any president and army
to have to worry about. But if the US would still be foolhardy enough to continue to want to
wage war (i.e. continue its strangulation of Iran, which it has been doing more or less for
the past 40 years), then the Yemeni siege would be broken and there would be a two-pronged
attack from the south and the north, whereby al-Qatif, the Shi'a region of Saudi Arabia where
all the oil and gas is located, will be liberated from their barbaric treatment at the hands
of the takfiri Saudi scum, which of course is completely enabled and only made possible by
the War Criminal Uncle Sam.
AFAIK the only "US naval power" currently is the Abraham Lincoln CSG and I haven't seen any
public info that it was in the Persian Gulf. Aside from the actual straits, I'm not sure of
your "sitting ducks" assertion. First they wouldn't be sitting, and second you have the
problem of a large volume of grey shipping that would complicate the targeting problem. Of
course with a reduced time-of-flight, that also reduces target position uncertainty.
Forts are stationary.
Nothing I have read implies that Iran has a lot of investment in stationary forts.
Millennium Challenge 2002, only the game cannot be restarted once the enemy does not behave
as one hopes. Unlike in scripted war simulations, Opfor can win.
I remember the amount of devastation that was unleashed on another "backwards nation"
Linebackers 1 - 20, battleship salvos chemical defoliants, the Phoenix program, napalm for
dessert.
And not to put to fine a point on it, but that benighted nation was oriental; Iran is a
Caucasian nation full of Caucasian type peoples.
Nothing about this situation is of any benefit to the USA.
We do not need Saudi oil, we do not need Israel to come to the defense of the USA here in
North America, we do not need to stick our dick into the hornet's nest and then wonder why
they sting and it hurts. How many times does Dumb have to win?
3. Also, I can't imagine this event as being a very welcome one for Israeli military
observers, the significance of which is not lost on them, unlike their US counterparts. If
Yemen/ Iran can put the Abqaiq processing plant out of commission for a few weeks, then
obviusly Hezbollah can do the same for the giant petrochemical complex at Haifa, as well as
Dimona, and the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/239251
It was late at night when I wrote this. Yeah, Right. the Iranians could send their massive
ground force into Syria where it would be chewed up by US and Israeli air. Alternatively they
could invade Saudi arabia.
Thank you for the reply but actually I was thinking that an invasion of Afghanistan would be
the more sensible ploy.
To my mind if the Iranian Army sits on its backside then the USAF and IAF will ignore it
to roam the length and breadth of Iran destroying whatever ground targets are on their
long-planned target-list.
Or that Iranian Army can launch itself into Afghanistan, at which point all of the USA
plans for a methodical aerial pummelling of Iran's infrastructure goes out the window as the
USAF scrambles to save the American forces in Afghanistan from being overrun.
Isn't that correct?
So what incentive is there for that Iranian Army to sit around doing nothing?
Iran will do what the USAF isn't expecting it to do, if for no other reason that it upsets
the USA's own game-plan.
There seems to be a bit of a hiatus in proceedings - not in these columns but on the ground
in the ME.
Everyone seems to be waiting for something.
Could this "something" be the decisive word fron our commander in chief Binyamin
Netanyahu?
The thing is he has just pretty much lost an election. Likud might form part of the next
government of Israel but most likely not with him at its head.
Does anyone have any ideas on what the future policy of Israel is likely to be under Gantz
or whoever? Will it be the same, worse or better?
The correct US move would be to ignore an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan and continue
leaving the place. The Iranian Shia can then fight the Sunni jihadi tribesmen.
Oh, I completely agree that if the Iranians launch an invasion of Afghanistan then the only
sensible strategy would be for the US troops to pack up and get out as fast as possible.
But that is "cut and run", which many in Washington would view as a humiliation.
Do you really see the beltway warriors agreeing to that?
A flaw in your otherwise sound argument is that the US military has not been seriously
engaged for several years and has been reconstituting itself with the money Trump has given
them.
Re-positioning of forces does not indicate that a presidential decision for war has been
made. The navy will not want to fight you in the narrow, shallow waters of the Gulf.
I would think that Mr. Trump would have a hard time sell a war with Iran over an attack on
Saudi Arabia. The good question about how would that war end will soon be raised and I doubt
there are many good answers.
The US should have gotten out of that part of the world a long time ago, just as they
should have paid more attention to the warnings in President Eisenhower's farewell
address.
The Perfumed Fops in the DOD restarted Millennium Challenge 2002,because Gen Van Riper had
used 19th and early 20th century tactics and shore based firepower to sink the Blue Teams
carrier forces. There was a script, Van Riper did some adlibbing. Does the US DOD think that
Iran will follow the US script? In a unipolar world maybe the USA could enforce a script,
that world was severely wounded in 1975, took a sucking chest wound during operation Cakewalk
in 2003 and died in Syria in 2015. Too many poles too many powers not enough diplomacy. It
will not end well.
We would crush Iran at some cost to ourselves but the political cost to the anti-globalist
coalition would catastrophic. BTW Trump's "base" isn't big enough to elect him so he cannot
afford to alienate independents.
Even if Rouhani and the Iranian Parliament personally designed, assembled, targeted and
launched the missiles (scarier sounding version of "drones"), then they should be
congratulated, for the Saudi tyrant deserves every bad thing that he gets.
prawnik (Sid) in this particular situation goering's glittering generalization does not
apply. Trump needs a lot of doubting suburbanites to win and a war will not incline them to
vote for him.
Looks like President Trump is walking it back, tweet: I have just instructed the Secretary of
the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
I doubt there will be armed conflict of any kind.
Everything Trump does from now (including sacking the Bolton millstone) will be directed at
winning 2020, and that will not be aided by entering into some inconclusive low intensity
attrition war.
Iran, on the other hand, will be doing everything it can to increase the chance of a Democrat
administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of
anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
This may be a useful tool for determining their next move, but the limit of their actions
would be when some Democrats begin making the electorally damaging mistake of critising Trump
for not retaliating against Iranian provocations.
"... 38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another 31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night. Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to scale back U.S. involvement overall. ..."
"... The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more support for negotiations and non-intervention: ..."
"... With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons ..."
"... There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they want. It is long past time that Washington started listening. ..."
he Eurasia Group Foundation's new survey of public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy finds that support for greater restraint continues to rise:
Americans favor a less aggressive foreign policy. The findings are consistent across a
number of foreign policy issues, and across generations and party lines.
The 2019 survey results show that most Americans support a more restrained foreign policy,
and it also shows an increase in that support since last year. There is very little support for
continuing the war in Afghanistan indefinitely, there is virtually no appetite for war with
Iran, and there is a decline in support for a hawkish sort of American exceptionalism. There is
still very little support for unilateral U.S. intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons,
and support for non-intervention has increased slightly:
In 2018, 45 percent of Americans chose restraint as their first choice. In 2019, that has
increased to 47 percent. Only 19 percent opt for a U.S.-led military response and 34 percent
favor a multilateral, UN-led approach to stop humanitarian abuses overseas.
38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another
31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of
Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that
there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night.
Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to
scale back U.S. involvement overall.
The report's working definition of American exceptionalism is a useful one: "American
exceptionalism is the belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be
unconstrained by the parochial interests or international rules which govern other countries."
This is not the only definition one might use, but it gets at the heart of what a lot of hawks
really mean when they use this phrase. While most Americans still say they subscribe to
American exceptionalism either because of what the U.S. represents or what it has done, there
is less support for these views than before. Among the youngest respondents (age 18-29), there
is now a clear majority that rejects this idea.
The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with
its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran
has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been
nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to
elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this
year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more
support for negotiations and non-intervention:
A strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats continue to seek a diplomatic
resolution involving either sanctions or the resumption of nuclear negotiations. This year,
there was an increase in the number of respondents across party lines who would want
negotiations to resume even if Iran is a nuclear power in the short term, and a bipartisan
increase in those who believe outright that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to
defend itself. So while Republicans might be more likely than Democrats to believe Iran
threatens peace in the Middle East, voters in neither party are eager to take a belligerent
stand against it.
With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against
Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons, and it
isn't doing that. It may be that the failure of the "maximum pressure" campaign has also
weakened support for sanctions. Support for the sanctions option dropped by almost 10 points
overall and plunged by more than 20 points among Republicans. In 2018, respondents were evenly
split between war and sanctions on one side or negotiations and non-intervention on the other.
This year, support for diplomacy and non-intervention in response to this imaginary nuclear
weapons program has grown to make up almost 60% of the total. If most Americans favor diplomacy
and non-intervention in this improbable scenario, it is safe to assume that there is even more
support for those options with the real Iranian government that isn't pursuing nuclear
weapons.
There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and
avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant
constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right
now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they
want. It is long past time that Washington started listening.
This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a
chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department.
Interestingly she came from working class background. So much about Marx theory of class struggle. Brown, David (March 4, 2017).
"Miner's daughter
tipped as Trump adviser on Russia" . The Times.
She also illustrate level pf corruption of academic science, because she got
PhD in history from Harvard in 1998 under Richard
Pipes, Akira Iriye, and
Roman Szporluk. But at least this was history, not
languages like in case of Ciaramella.
Such appointment by Trump is difficult to describe with normal words as he understood what he is buying. So he is himself to blame for his current troubles and his inability
to behave in a diplomatic way when there was important to him question about role of CrowdStrike in 2016 election and creation of Russiagate
witch hunt.
There is something in the USA that creates conditions for producing rabid female neocons, some elevator that brings ruthless female
careerists with sharp elbows them to the establishment. She sounds like a person to the right of Madeline Albright, which is an achievement
With such books It is unclear whether she is different from Max Boot. She buys official Skripal story like hook and sinker. The
list of her book looks like produced in UK by Luke Harding
Being miner daughter raised in poverty we can also talk about betrayal of her class and upbringing.
This also rises wisdom of appointing emigrants to the Administration and the extent they pursue policies beneficial for their
native countries.
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019. [12] While being
questioned by Steve Castor , the counsel for the House Intelligence
Committee's Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon
Sondland 's involvement in the Ukraine matter: "It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's
emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right," she said.
"Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And
those two things had just diverged." [13] In response
to a question from that committee's chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff
, Hill stated: "The Russians' interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency. The goal of the Russians [in 2016]
was really to put whoever became the president -- by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale -- under a cloud."
[
Bolton Opposed Ukraine Investigations; Called Giuliani "A Hand Grenade" by
Tyler Durden Tue, 10/15/2019 - 12:25 0 SHARES
Former national security adviser John Bolton was 'so alarmed' by efforts to encourage Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and 2016
election meddling that he told an aide, Fiona Hill, to alert White House lawyers, according to the
New York Times
.
When Hill confronted Sondland, he told her that he was 'in charge' of Ukraine, "a moment she compared to Secretary of State Alexander
M. Haig Jr.'s declaration that he was in charge after the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, according to those who heard the testimony,"
according to the Times.
Hill says she asked Sondland on whose authority he was in charge of Ukraine, to which he replied 'the president.' She would later
leave her post shortly before a July 25 phone call with Ukraine's president which is currently at the heart of an impeachment inquiry.
Meanwhile, the Times also notes that "House Democrats widened their net in the fast-paced inquiry by summoning Michael McKinley,
a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who abruptly resigned last week, to testify Wednesday."
Career diplomats have expressed outrage at the unceremonious
removal of Ambassador Marie L. Yovanovitch from Ukraine after she came under attack by Mr. Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr. and
two associates who have since been arrested on charges of campaign violations.
Three other Trump admin officials are scheduled to speak with House investigators this week, including Sondland - who is now set
to appear on Thursday. On Tuesday, deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent will testify, while on Friday, Laura K. Cooper
- a a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia policy, will speak with lawmakers as well.
Looks like we have our whistleblower. My only question is, how does one whistle with such a bristly moustache draping their
hairlip?
So now we have Mr. Neocon and Mr. Liddle Kidz conjugating as the strangest of bedfellows? How will this play to their respective
bases? Are we to assume these people think this nations top law enforcement agent (POTUS) is to abdicate his duties therewith
just because the criminal is (at least according to our two tiered justice system) supposed to be beyond reproach?
Mr. Bolton, bright and determined as he is, has hitched his wagon to mad mare galloping full tilt over a precipice.
Looking for a return of uranium one to the headlines soon. In due time we will stich this Russia/Ukraine narrative back together
from a patchwork of facts. You traitors are fucked...royally fucked...and you know it.
So, Mr bolton, explain to us in simple terms how you appraise America's security and her related interests. Your camp is in
eclipse.
John Bolton:
"I was appauled...just flabbergasted...that the president was concerned that our intelligence apparatus was politicized to
the extent that its highest echelons were arrayed in an attempt to subvert a lawful and legitimate election. Never mind that six
other nations were tasked with abetting this treasonous plot...this is an outrage!!! The whole point of intelligence agencies
is to skirt the law with impunity, and once we (the unelected permanent breacracy) tell one of our minions like Biden or Hillary
that they're permanently immune from prosecution, we can't have some earnest pact of Patriots running around demanding law and
order."
What a sorry bunch of cretians.
We were so close...so close...to losing it all. But since the enemy is making clear we're playing zero sum, we're going to
end up with everything.
Brace yourself, California. If I were you, I'd study the legal framework of Reconstruction. Your plight will be of a kind.
Your state has been engaged in a systematic attempt to overthrow the government. Your leaders will be appointed for a generation
after this all comes out. Don't look to Beijing to save you...they kinda have their hands full.
So, I guess Bolton is no longer collecting free money like Hunter Biden was. I get it now how all these politicians have kids
overseas and open foreign corporations which our tax money goes in to by way of cutting deals overseas public officials to line
their pockets with our money. This how they get into government poor and become very rich! Giuliani is pointing this fact out
to the public with Trump and the swamp HATES IT!
The public now knows how these corrupt PUBLIC OFFICIALS in America have been fleecing the tax payers. This is a major hit on
the swamp.
Trump & Giuliani we're behind you thank you for showing us how the swamp has been ******* us for all these years.
Understand that the reason Schitt head won't allow public hearings is because the former Ambassador to Ukraine--Volker, shot
this whole **** fest down when he testified. There is no "there" there.
Bolton and the others are crying because of Trump's pull out. The left jumped on the war bandwagon under Billary a long time
ago. Necons work both parties.
If Bolton dislikes Guiliani that's the best endorsement of Rudy I can imagine. Bolton is a complete warmongering traitor who,
like McShitstain, desires a nice case of brain cancer.
Go Rudy, expose the corrupt Demonrats! We deplorables love human hand grenades. That's why we elected the Donald, and you apparently
are the perfect lawyer for our great God emperor.
"Schiff simply does not have the gravitas that a weighty procedure such as impeachment requires," Biggs wrote in an opinion
piece for Fox News. "He has repeatedly shown incredibly poor judgment. He has persistently and consistently demonstrated that
he has such a tremendous bias and animus against Trump that he will say anything and accept any proffer of even bogus evidence
to try to remove the president from office."
@b - "Iran has thereby plausible deniability when attacks like the recent one on Abquiq
happen. That Iran supplied drones with 1,500 kilometer reach to its allies in Yemen means
that its allies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq and elsewhere have access to similar means."
I read the Tyler Rogoway WarZone article you linked to, and it was the first time I'd seen
the concept that Iran "has built a plausible deniability environment" for itself, but I think
Rogoway is missing a serious point. If Iran has such deniability, I don't think this exists
by contrivance. I think the truth of the situation has created such plausible deniability, if
in fact such a thing even exists, or if such a thing is even desired by Iran or any of its
allies.
I would like to offer a more nuanced view of the relationship between Iran and its allies.
Specifically regarding your view that Iran's allies are "willing to act on Iran's behalf
should the need arise."
I get the impression that it's more a case that all these allies see themselves in the
same existential position, and have developed, and are continuing to refine, an "all for one
and one for all" approach to the regional security of all the sovereign allies.
Sharmine Narwani explained this very thing in her recent interview with Ross Ashcroft,
where she said that if one of the allies is attacked by the US or Israel, all of the allies
will join in immediately and without reservation, because for each of them it is the same
existential threat: What's the real plan
with Iran?
And the interview you link to by Nader Talebzadeh with IRGC General Amir Ali Hajizadeh
concludes with the general's statement that "...in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen;
now Muslims are all a coalition standing next to each other". How likely is the
possibility of a military conflict between Iran and the US?
~~
I'm not trying to split hairs here, but it strikes me as important to note that these
countries have moved on from being isolated, and are in fact in a coalition, albeit still
coalescing. Their militaries have trained together and established joint command centers in
recent times.
As the general explained, when the threat of attack by the US seemed imminent - at the
time Iran downed the drone - Iran was fully prepared to attack and destroy several US bases.
One hopes that the Pentagon can understand that any attack on one of these members of the
coalition will be met with a coordinated and unreserved response by all allies.
Given such a geopolitical situation now throughout the region, the concept of Iran's
having "plausible deniability" for other countries to act on its behalf seems too narrow a
view. And this is why all the fevered discussion about who "owns" the Houthi strike is
missing the main strategic point that the whole region "owns" it - and why it is sufficient
that the Houthi did in fact act alone, but not alone, because none of these forces is now
alone. It is, one gathers, a brotherly coalition that has formed and is becoming yet
stronger
So it need not be the case that everything flows from Iran, or revolves around Iran. The
whole region is now the steel trap not to step on.
Iran has incentives to increase the chance of a Democrat administration, bearing in mind the
great deal they got from the last one and the lack of anything they can expect from Trump Term
Two.
You have several thousand soldiers in Iraq and Syria. These countries have large proxy
forces of Iran's allies in the form of Shia militias in Iraq and actual Iranian Quds Force
troops in Syria. These forces will be used to attack and kill our soldiers.
The Iranians have significant numbers of ballistic missiles which they have already said
will be used against our forces
The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the IRGC
Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed. In that
process the US Navy will loose men and ships.
In direct air attacks on Iran we are bound to lose aircraft and air crew.
The IRGC and its Quds Force will carry out terrorist attacks across the world.
Do you really want to be a one term president? Pompeo can talk big now and then go back to Kansas to run for senator. Where will you be able to take refuge? Don't let the neocons like Pompeo sell you on war.
Make the intelligence people show you the evidence in detail. Make your own judgments.
pl
Vegetius,
re " Trump knows that he can't sell a war to the American people "
Are you sure? I am not.
Reflection, self criticism or self restraint are not exactly the big strengths of Trump.
He prefers solo acts (Emergency! Emergency!) and dislikes advice (especially if longer than 4
pages) and the advice of the sort " You're sure? If you do that the the shit will fly in
your face in an hour, Sir ".
A good number of the so called grownups who gave such advice were (gameshow style) fired,
sometimes by twitter.
Trump can order attacks and I don't expect much protest from Mark Esper and it depends on
the military (which likely will obey).
These so called grownups have been replaced by (then still) happy Bolton (likely, even
after being fired, still war happy) and applauders like Pompeo and his buddy Esper.
Israel could, if politically just a tad more insane, bomb Iran and thus invite the
inevitable retaliation. When that happens they'll cry for US aid, weapons and money because
they alone ~~~
(a) cannot defeat Iran (short of going nuclear) and ...
(b) Holocaust! We want weapons and money from Germany, too! ...
(c) they know that ...
(d) which does not lead in any way to Netanyahu showing signgs of self restraint or
reason.
Netanyahu just - it is (tight) election time - announced, in his sldedge hammer style
subtlety, that (he) Israel will annect the palestinian west jordan territory, making the
Plaestines an object in his election campaign.
IMO that idea is simply insane and invites more "troubles". But then, I didn't hear
anything like, say, Trump gvt protests against that (and why expect that from the dudes who
moved the US embassy to Jerusalem).
Vegetius,
as for Trump and Netanyahu ... policy debate ... I had that here in mind, which pretty speaks
for itself. And I thought Trumo is just running for office in the US. Alas, it is a Netanyaho
campaign poster from the current election:
I generously assume that things like that only happen because of the hard and hard
ly work of Kushner on his somewhat elusive but of course GIGANTIC and
INCREDIBLE Middle East peace plan.
Kushner is probably getting hard and hard ly supported by Ivanka who just said that
she inherited her moral compass from her father. Well ... congatulations ... I assume.
I disagree. Trump maybe the only person who could sell a war with Iran. What he has
cultivated is a rabid base that consists of sycophants on one extreme end and desperate
nationalists on the other. His base must stick with him...who else do they have?
The Left is indifferent to another war. Further depleting the quality stock of our
military will aid there agenda of international integration. A weaker US military will force
us to collaborate with the world community and not lead it is their thinking.
Need I trot out Goering's statement regarding selling a war once more?
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a
farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back
to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor
in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after
all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a
Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the
matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can
declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell
them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
We have been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that Iran and Russia are
intrinsically and immutable evil and hostile that the thought of actual two sided diplomacy
does not occur. IMO neither of these countries are what we collectively think them. So, we
could actually give it a try rather than trying to beggar them and destroy their economies.
If all fails than we have to be prepared to defend our forces. DOL
The 'ivestigations are a formality. The Saudis (with U.S. backing) are already saying that
the missiles were Iranian made and according to them, this proves that Iran fired them. The
Saudis are using the more judicious phrase 'behind the attack' but Pompeo is running with the
fired from Iran narrative.
How can we tell the difference between an actual Iranian manufactured missile vs one that
was manufactured in Yemen based on Iranian designs? We only have a few pictures Iranian
missiles unlike us, the Iranians don't toss them all over the place so we don't have any
physical pieces to compare them to.
Perhaps honest investigators could make a determination but even if they do exist they
will keep quiet while the bible thumping Pompeo brays and shamelessly lies as he is prone to
do.
These kinds of munition will leave hundreds of bits scattered all over their targets. I'm
waiting for the press conference with the best bits laid out on the tables.
I doubt that there will be any stencils saying 'Product of Iran', unless the paint smells
fresh.
1. I am still waiting to read some informed discussion concerning the *accuracy* of the
projectiles hitting their targets with uncanny precision from hundreds of miles away. What
does this say about the achievement of those pesky Eye-rainians? https://www.moonofalabama.org/images9/saudihit2.jpg
2. "The US Navy has many ships in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The Iranian Navy and the
IRGC Navy will attack our naval vessels until the Iranian forces are utterly destroyed.:
Ahem, Which forces are utterly destroyed? With respect colonel, you are not thinking
straight. An army with supersonic land to sea missiles that are highly accurate will make
minced meat of any fool's ship that dare attack it. The lesson of the last few months is that
Iran is deadly serious about its position that if they cannot sell their oil, no one else
will be able to either. And if the likes of the relatively broadminded colonel have not yet
learned that lesson, then this can only mean that the escalation ladder will continue to be
climbed, rung by rung. Next rung: deep sea port of Yanbu, or, less likely, Ra's Tanura.
That's when the price of oil will really go through the roof and the Chinese (and possibly
one or two of the Europoodles) will start crying Uncle Scam. Nuff Sed.
It sounds like you are getting a little "help" with this. You statement about the result
of a naval confrontation in the Gulf reflects the 19th Century conception that "ships can't
fight forts." that has been many times exploded. You have never seen the amount of firepower
that would be unleashed on Iran from the air and sea. Would the US take casualties? Yes, but
you will be destroyed.
We will have to agree to disagree. But unless I am quite mistaken, the majority view if not
the consensus of informed up to date opinion holds that the surest sign that the US is
getting ready to attack Iran is that it is withdrawing all of its naval power out of the
Persian Gulf, where they would be sitting ducks.
Besides, I don't think it will ever come to that. Not to repeat myself, but taking out
either deep sea ports of Ra's Tanura and/ or Yanbu (on the Red Sea side) will render Saudi
oil exports null and void for the next six months. The havoc that will play with the price of
oil and consequently on oil futures and derivatives will be enough for any president and army
to have to worry about. But if the US would still be foolhardy enough to continue to want to
wage war (i.e. continue its strangulation of Iran, which it has been doing more or less for
the past 40 years), then the Yemeni siege would be broken and there would be a two-pronged
attack from the south and the north, whereby al-Qatif, the Shi'a region of Saudi Arabia where
all the oil and gas is located, will be liberated from their barbaric treatment at the hands
of the takfiri Saudi scum, which of course is completely enabled and only made possible by
the War Criminal Uncle Sam.
AFAIK the only "US naval power" currently is the Abraham Lincoln CSG and I haven't seen any
public info that it was in the Persian Gulf. Aside from the actual straits, I'm not sure of
your "sitting ducks" assertion. First they wouldn't be sitting, and second you have the
problem of a large volume of grey shipping that would complicate the targeting problem. Of
course with a reduced time-of-flight, that also reduces target position uncertainty.
Forts are stationary.
Nothing I have read implies that Iran has a lot of investment in stationary forts.
Millennium Challenge 2002, only the game cannot be restarted once the enemy does not behave
as one hopes. Unlike in scripted war simulations, Opfor can win.
I remember the amount of devastation that was unleashed on another "backwards nation"
Linebackers 1 - 20, battleship salvos chemical defoliants, the Phoenix program, napalm for
dessert.
And not to put to fine a point on it, but that benighted nation was oriental; Iran is a
Caucasian nation full of Caucasian type peoples.
Nothing about this situation is of any benefit to the USA.
We do not need Saudi oil, we do not need Israel to come to the defense of the USA here in
North America, we do not need to stick our dick into the hornet's nest and then wonder why
they sting and it hurts. How many times does Dumb have to win?
3. Also, I can't imagine this event as being a very welcome one for Israeli military
observers, the significance of which is not lost on them, unlike their US counterparts. If
Yemen/ Iran can put the Abqaiq processing plant out of commission for a few weeks, then
obviusly Hezbollah can do the same for the giant petrochemical complex at Haifa, as well as
Dimona, and the control tower at Ben Gurion Airport. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/239251
It was late at night when I wrote this. Yeah, Right. the Iranians could send their massive
ground force into Syria where it would be chewed up by US and Israeli air. Alternatively they
could invade Saudi arabia.
Thank you for the reply but actually I was thinking that an invasion of Afghanistan would be
the more sensible ploy.
To my mind if the Iranian Army sits on its backside then the USAF and IAF will ignore it
to roam the length and breadth of Iran destroying whatever ground targets are on their
long-planned target-list.
Or that Iranian Army can launch itself into Afghanistan, at which point all of the USA
plans for a methodical aerial pummelling of Iran's infrastructure goes out the window as the
USAF scrambles to save the American forces in Afghanistan from being overrun.
Isn't that correct?
So what incentive is there for that Iranian Army to sit around doing nothing?
Iran will do what the USAF isn't expecting it to do, if for no other reason that it upsets
the USA's own game-plan.
There seems to be a bit of a hiatus in proceedings - not in these columns but on the ground
in the ME.
Everyone seems to be waiting for something.
Could this "something" be the decisive word fron our commander in chief Binyamin
Netanyahu?
The thing is he has just pretty much lost an election. Likud might form part of the next
government of Israel but most likely not with him at its head.
Does anyone have any ideas on what the future policy of Israel is likely to be under Gantz
or whoever? Will it be the same, worse or better?
The correct US move would be to ignore an Iranian invasion of Afghanistan and continue
leaving the place. The Iranian Shia can then fight the Sunni jihadi tribesmen.
Oh, I completely agree that if the Iranians launch an invasion of Afghanistan then the only
sensible strategy would be for the US troops to pack up and get out as fast as possible.
But that is "cut and run", which many in Washington would view as a humiliation.
Do you really see the beltway warriors agreeing to that?
A flaw in your otherwise sound argument is that the US military has not been seriously
engaged for several years and has been reconstituting itself with the money Trump has given
them.
Re-positioning of forces does not indicate that a presidential decision for war has been
made. The navy will not want to fight you in the narrow, shallow waters of the Gulf.
I would think that Mr. Trump would have a hard time sell a war with Iran over an attack on
Saudi Arabia. The good question about how would that war end will soon be raised and I doubt
there are many good answers.
The US should have gotten out of that part of the world a long time ago, just as they
should have paid more attention to the warnings in President Eisenhower's farewell
address.
The Perfumed Fops in the DOD restarted Millennium Challenge 2002,because Gen Van Riper had
used 19th and early 20th century tactics and shore based firepower to sink the Blue Teams
carrier forces. There was a script, Van Riper did some adlibbing. Does the US DOD think that
Iran will follow the US script? In a unipolar world maybe the USA could enforce a script,
that world was severely wounded in 1975, took a sucking chest wound during operation Cakewalk
in 2003 and died in Syria in 2015. Too many poles too many powers not enough diplomacy. It
will not end well.
We would crush Iran at some cost to ourselves but the political cost to the anti-globalist
coalition would catastrophic. BTW Trump's "base" isn't big enough to elect him so he cannot
afford to alienate independents.
Even if Rouhani and the Iranian Parliament personally designed, assembled, targeted and
launched the missiles (scarier sounding version of "drones"), then they should be
congratulated, for the Saudi tyrant deserves every bad thing that he gets.
prawnik (Sid) in this particular situation goering's glittering generalization does not
apply. Trump needs a lot of doubting suburbanites to win and a war will not incline them to
vote for him.
Looks like President Trump is walking it back, tweet: I have just instructed the Secretary of
the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!
I doubt there will be armed conflict of any kind.
Everything Trump does from now (including sacking the Bolton millstone) will be directed at
winning 2020, and that will not be aided by entering into some inconclusive low intensity
attrition war.
Iran, on the other hand, will be doing everything it can to increase the chance of a Democrat
administration, bearing in mind the great deal they got from the last one and the lack of
anything they can expect from Trump Term Two.
This may be a useful tool for determining their next move, but the limit of their actions
would be when some Democrats begin making the electorally damaging mistake of critising Trump
for not retaliating against Iranian provocations.
Should the warrior who currently inhabits the position of Secretary of State use his
influence to persuade Donald Trump to enter what would likely be a very lengthy war of
attrition in Iran, it may prove to be a very costly move for the Republican Party in November
of 2020 given the level of support for such actions among Main Street Americans.
Trump speaks at Washington rally against the Iran deal back in September 2015. Credit:
Olivier Douliery/Sipa USA/Newscom Paul Pillar comments
on the attack on the Saudi oil facility at Abqaiq, and he connects it to the administration's
dangerous, failing "maximum pressure" campaign:
Iranian leaders have been explicit in warning that if Iran could not export its oil, then
other Persian Gulf producers would not be able to either. Was anyone in the Trump
administration listening?
To borrow another formulation from Pompeo's tweet, there is no evidence that in the
absence of the administration's economic warfare against Iran, Iran would do anything like
attack the Abqaiq facility or have any incentive to conduct such an attack. If Iran did do
the attack, then it was a direct and unsurprising result of the administration's policy of
unrelenting hostility and of inflicting economic pain with no apparent end.
The Trump administration's economic war on Iran has not achieved anything except to
destabilize the region further and impoverish the Iranian people. It is the cause of the
current crisis with Iran, and were it not for this economic war we can reasonably assume that
there would have been no attacks on tankers, pipelines, and possibly oil facilities in the last
few months. As Pillar notes, the administration has shown Iran unrelenting hostility, and they
have continued to apply one set of sanctions after another, and then the administration
pretends that its own actions have not created the present mess. A smart administration would
start lifting sanctions, but then a smart administration would never have imposed them in the
first place.
Under no circumstances should the U.S. increase its involvement in Yemen and do more to
devastate that country, as
this former admiral has suggested that we do in an interview with Foreign Policy .
The U.S. should have ended our involvement in the war on Yemen long ago. It is an ongoing
disgrace that the administration continues to support and arm the governments that have been
destroying and starving Yemen. Our involvement in the war is already unauthorized and illegal,
and directly launching attacks alongside the Saudi coalition would make things even worse.
Deescalating tensions with Iran is the only sane way forward, so of course the only thing
being seriously considered right now in Washington is a possible attack on Iran. It can't be
stressed enough that the U.S. has no justification, legal or otherwise, to launch an attack on
Iran. Not only is the U.S. not obliged to come to the defense of Saudi Arabia, but our
government is bound by the U.N. Charter that prohibits using force against another state except
in self-defense. No one can seriously claim that a U.S. strike on Iran right now would be
anything other than an illegal attack in clear violation of international law.
The only sane thing MBS can do is to declare defeat and withdraw from Yemen, tout
suite .
The problem is that there is no way for him to do so without humiliation. Shame and
honor are paramount in Saudi society, and MBS has just gotten a very nasty and very public
punch in the nose. Anything less than brutal escalation, and his honor and prestige will be
seriously damaged.
The Saudi tyrants are stuck in Yemen so deep, that they have little choice but to keep
doubling down.
The U.S. thought it was cleverly choking the regime, but now it's clear that 'maximum
pressure' goes both ways.
• The Saturday attack on Saudi oil facilities, which
took 5.7 million barrels of oil per day offline, is the escalation that wasn't supposed to
happen. Now that it has happened, we enter perilous new terrain.
America has blamed Iran and
hinted at some sort of retaliation . Iran has denied responsibility, while the Houthis
gladly take it. There are conflicting reports of where the missiles or drones were launched
from, which we will learn more about in the coming days.
In the meantime, Trump is in a tight spot of his own making, with neither escalation nor
retrenchment looking to be attractive options.
It is still uncertain when Saudi Aramco can get everything back on line. The attack showed
sophistication. Critical nodes were hit. If the facilities are quickly repaired, that lessens
the gravity of this event. The Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s showed the resiliency of oil
installations, as Iraqi bombers pounded Kharg Island, where Iran exported much of its oil, yet
the Iranians managed to keep the exports flowing. This suggests that a war of attrition today
would be possible without major disruptions, though the impact of new technologies of attack
and resistance makes any guess hazardous.
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If past crises are any indication, a sustained loss of 5.7 million barrels per day, over
five percent of world oil consumption, would likely quadruple oil prices. Strategic petroleum
reserves can cover this to a certain extent: the U.S. system can pump 4.4 million barrels per
day. But it would exhaust its reserves in 150 days at that pace. We do not know whether more
strikes will be forthcoming or whether such efforts can be successfully suppressed with
airpower or invigorated defenses. All we can say is that the great game has advanced to a new
stage.
From the beginning, escalation has seemed the likely consequence of the Trump
administration's decision to asphyxiate the Iranian regime by cutting off its ability to export
oil. This was a declaration of economic war. That is the polite term, as it is an action every
international lawyer on the planet, back in the day when these things mattered, would have
called an act of war without any precious qualifiers.
It turns out that there may be some street cred to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's
assertion that if Iran isn't allowed to export oil, others will face obstacles too. Tit for
tat. Got a quid? Here's a quo. The funny thing is that any significant threat to Saudi capacity
creates a pressing need to get Iran's spare capacity onto the world market. As to which side
now has more leverage, in a position to squeeze harder, that's a tough question. Putting it
nicely, the Iranians can, if their will is stout, impose huge costs on the United States and
the world economy. They would only consider that if pressed extremely hard, yet the United
States has been pressing them extremely hard for over a year now.
Remember that the purpose of America's economic war on Iran was to force Iran to submit to
12 demands issued by Pharaoh Mike Pompeo
in his edict delivered on May 21, 2018. It was really disappointing that Pompeo didn't
raise the obvious thirteenth demand and insist that the embargo would not be lifted until an
American regent was appointed in Tehran, taking the Islamic Revolution under neoliberal
guidance until circumstances changed, after which Iranian democracy would be restored to its
former lack of glory. That was implied, to be sure, but we didn't get much straight talk from
Mr. Pompeo on that point.
This ultimatum was reminiscent of the demands that the Austro-Hungarians made on the Serbs
on a certain date in 1914. Make them as extreme as you can, said the inspired diplomatists
looking for war. World reaction was then unfavorable. Winston Churchill, in charge of Britain's
navy, called it "the most insolent document of its kind ever devised." The resemblance to
Pompeo's ultimatums hardly shows the imminence of a 1914-like crisis today, but there is a
certain arrogance to both the U.S. warmongers and Austro-Hungarians. The Austrians got the war
they were looking for; the neocons may yet get theirs.
Trump's renunciation of the Iran nuclear deal is mostly about Israel and its perceived
security requirements. Not only must Iran not have a single nuclear weapon, it must not have
the theoretical capability to produce a weapon, were the Iranians to break from their pledges
under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the JCPOA. This imposes a requirement on the Islamic
Republic that no other medium-sized power has had to endure. That the Iranians are bearers of
an ancient civilization makes the humiliation all the more painful. Those 12 demands were not
designed to produce a settlement; they were designed to produce a crisis, as they now have
done. Regime change lies back of them -- that or simply the immiseration of another Muslim
country.
American policy toward Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has recently been mostly about arms
sales. People say all the time that the oil companies are the heavyweights in this drama. In
fact, they are secondary. What has driven events in the recent past is the military-industrial
complex salivating over the sales of high-priced and high-tech U.S. armaments to sheikdoms with
money to burn. The MIC plunderers, like the Hollywood moguls, understand that you simply must
have the foreign market to make the big profits. Politicians see such sales as a way of making
our own arms purchases remotely affordable and thereby politically palatable. For these
reasons, foreign arms sales to reprehensible characters is Washington's go-to move, a win-win
for the plutocrats and the praetorians.
The United States acted under no prompting of national interest in so aiding and abetting
the Saudi war in Yemen, but its hankering after all those lucrative contracts was just too much
temptation. When the flesh is weak, as it seems to be in Washington, burning flesh is not a
problem. Trump saw it as a great business deal and had no compunctions about the human fallout
in Yemen. The Democrats -- a certain Democrat, especially -- did what was once said of Austrian
Queen Maria Theresa after the Partition of Poland in 1772: "She wept, but she took."
The president may have outsmarted himself this time. He got rid of National Security Adviser
John Bolton because he didn't like Bolton's across-the-board hawkish recommendations, but he
signed on to the very big change in U.S. policy towards Iran that Bolton had recommended. Trump
thought he was in control of the escalation. But when you declare your intention to asphyxiate
another country, you've committed an act of war. Retaliation from the other side usually
follows in some form or fashion. You can then advance to your ruin or retreat in ignominy.
Trump has threatened retaliation, but he surely does not want a big war with Iran. His
supporters definitely do not want a war with Iran. Americans in general are opposed to a war
with Iran. Mysteriously, however, the U.S. declaration of war on Iran in fact -- though not, of
course, in name, heaven forbid -- escaped notice by the commentariat this past year. The
swamp's seismograph doesn't record a reading when we violate the rules, but when the other guy
does, it's 7.8 on the Richter Scale.
The whole drama, in a nutshell, is just the old-fashioned hubris of the imperial power,
issuing its edicts, and genuinely surprised when it encounters resistance, even though such
resistance confirms for the wunderkinds their view of the enemy's malevolence.
Is Trump trapped? That is the question of the hour. He faces strong pressure to do something
in retaliation, but that something may aggravate the oil shock and imperil his re-election. As
he dwells on that possibility, he will probably look for ways to back down. He will try to get
out of the trap set by the U.S. economic war on Iran without abandoning the economic war on
Iran. But that probably won't work; that was Iran's message over the weekend. Were he to
abandon the economic war, however, he would get a ton of flak from both sides of the aisle in
Congress. The commentators would scream "appeasement!" In Washington lobby-land, we'd be back
to 1938 in a flash.
Does the president have the gumption to resist that tired line? I hope so.
David Hendrickson teaches history at Colorado College and is the author of Republic
in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition.
Bibi is desperate for war with Iran to avoid election defeat and prison and Bolton is
fired/resigns only to predict "Iranian deception" on the way out the door.
Today, Brent climbed as much as 12% towards $70 per barrel and the US crude oil rose 10%
to nearly $61. Historically, Brent crude oil reached an all time high of 147.50 in July of
2008. Remember what happened next?
Qui Bono?
KSA, UAE, Qatar
Russia
US Oil Majors, State of Texas
OPEC
UK
Norway
Who suffers?
China
Japan
India
Transportation costs and cost of goods
Commuters costs
Heating costs going into winter
Airlines and air travel
Iraq, Libya, Venezuela and Iran are a mess and cannot produce to make a difference.
This will be the catalyst for the economic downturn.
The key question is why Trump hired Bolton in the first place, not why he was sucked...
This guy is a reckless imperialist, staunch neocon and a war criminal. No person who promoted
or voted in the Congress for Iraq war can held government or elected position. They are
compromised for the rest of their miserable lifes.
This is a bit like rearranging the chairs on the deck of Titanic.
The problem is we do not know who pressed Trump to appoint Bolton., Rumors were that it was Abelson. In this case nothing
changed.
The other problem with making Bolton firing a significant move is the presence in White House other neocon warmongers. So one
less doe not change the picture. For example Pompeo remains and he is no less warmongering neocon, MIC stooge, and no less
subservant to Israel then Bolton.
Notable quotes:
"... Firing National Security Advisor John Bolton gives US President Donald Trump a chance to move foreign policy in a more peaceful direction – as long as he's not replaced with another hawk, former congressman Ron Paul told RT ..."
"... Bolton has "been a monkey-wrench in Donald Trump's policies of trying to back away from some of these conflicts around the world," Paul observed on Tuesday ..."
"... "Every time I think Trump is making progress, Bolton butts in and ruins it," Paul added. Negotiations with Afghanistan and talks with North Korea and Iran have reportedly been scuttled by his aggressive tendencies, with Pyongyang declaring him a "defective human product." ..."
"... "A lot of people here didn't even want his appointment, because he was only able to take a position that did not require Senate approval," Paul said, suggesting that perhaps the "Deep State" pressure had forced the president to keep Bolton around long past his sell-by date. ..."
"... As for whether Bolton's departure would change the White House's policy line significantly, though, Paul was less certain. "I don't think it will change a whole lot," he said, pointing out that "we have no idea" who will replace Bolton. Trump said he would make an announcement next week. ..."
Firing National Security Advisor John Bolton gives US President Donald Trump a chance to
move foreign policy in a more peaceful direction – as long as he's not replaced with
another hawk, former congressman Ron Paul told RT.
Bolton has "been a monkey-wrench in Donald Trump's policies of trying to back away from some
of these conflicts around the world," Paul observed on Tuesday, after news of Bolton's
dismissal from the White House.
Also on rt.com Bolton out: Trump ditches hawkish adviser he kept for 18 months despite
'disagreements'
"Every time I think Trump is making progress, Bolton butts in and ruins it," Paul added.
Negotiations with Afghanistan and talks with North Korea and Iran have reportedly been scuttled
by his aggressive tendencies, with Pyongyang declaring him a "defective human product."
Foreign leaders weren't the only ones who had a problem with Trump's notoriously belligerent
advisor, either.
"A lot of people here didn't even want his appointment, because he was only able to take a
position that did not require Senate approval," Paul said, suggesting that perhaps the "Deep
State" pressure had forced the president to keep Bolton around long past his sell-by date.
While the uber-hawk's firing came "later than it should be," Paul hoped it would clear the
way for Trump to follow through on the America First, end-the-wars promises that won him so
much support in 2016. "Those of us who would like less intervention, we're very happy with
it."
Also on rt.com War and whiskers: Freshly-resigned John Bolton gets meme-roasting
As for whether Bolton's departure would change the White House's policy line
significantly, though, Paul was less certain. "I don't think it will change a whole lot," he
said, pointing out that "we have no idea" who will replace Bolton. Trump said he would make an
announcement next week.
"... However satisfying it may be to see him leave, whoever is picked to succeed him may not be much of an improvement. No one should cheer the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of this administration. Its boss revels in divisions and factionalism among his staff, which allows him to continue governing by his whims, kneejerk reactions and vanity. ..."
"... It is more likely that he was fired because he dented his boss's ego than because his advice was so bad: Mr Trump liked Mr Bolton's bellicose style when he saw it on Fox News, not when it clashed with his own intentions. ..."
"... The national security adviser may have been the most ferocious of the voices urging Mr Trump to turn up the pressure on Iran, but he was certainly not alone . Mr Bolton's presence in the White House was frightening. But its continued occupation by the man who hired him is much more so. ..."
"... As far as Pompeo's "moderation" goes, don't expect anything moderate. But general mailiciousness and opportunism aside, as an evangelical he'll certainly get along perfectly with Pence. ..."
The Guardian view on John Bolton: good riddance, but the problem is his
boss
Many will rightly celebrate the departure of the US national security adviser. But
however welcome the news, it reflects the deeper problems with this administration
...
However satisfying it may be to see him leave, whoever is picked to succeed him may not be
much of an improvement. No one should cheer the chaotic and dysfunctional nature of this
administration. Its boss revels in divisions and factionalism among his staff, which allows
him to continue governing by his whims, kneejerk reactions and vanity.
It is neither normal nor desirable for the national security adviser to be excluded
from meetings about Afghanistan – even if it is a relief, when the individual concerned
is (or was) Mr Bolton. It is more likely that he was fired because he dented his boss's ego
than because his advice was so bad: Mr Trump liked Mr Bolton's bellicose style when he saw it
on Fox News, not when it clashed with his own intentions.
The national security adviser may have been the most ferocious of the voices urging
Mr Trump to turn up the pressure on Iran, but he was certainly not alone . Mr Bolton's
presence in the White House was frightening. But its continued occupation by the man who
hired him is much more so.
I read that the main drivers of getting him kicked or retire himself were Mnuchin and
Pompeo, both afflicted by that nasty goofy smile disease. I am always happy when I see
Mnuchin's hands on the table, eliminating one explanation for the smile.
There is that reported sentence about Bolton - that there is no problem for which war was
not his solution. I read about similar sentence about Pompeo - that he has an IR seeker for
Donald's ass.
That written, good riddance indeed. Likely, if Bolton had his way, the US would likely be
at war with North Korea and Iran.
When I studied I was at the UNFCCC for a time during Bush Jr. presidency and talked about
what Bolton did at the UN with my superior, a 20 year UN veteran.
A 'malicious saboteur arsonist' is a polite summary of what he did there directly and
indirectly, and with given his flirt with MEK and regime change in Iran he has likely not
changed at all.
As far as Pompeo's "moderation" goes, don't expect anything moderate. But general
mailiciousness and opportunism aside, as an evangelical he'll certainly get along perfectly
with Pence.
I don't usually find much value at the Atlantic but this article (written before Trump even
fired Bolton) about Trump's FP timeline (and flip flops) and Bolton who was acting like he
was President is very, very good.
It will allow Trump loyalist to more easily support Trump and give everyone else a tad bit of
hope that Trump really won't go bonkers and start any wars.
Since President Trump appears to talk about things and stuff with Tucker Carlson, perhaps he
should ask Tucker Carlson to spend a week thinking . . . and then offer the President some
names and the reasoning for offering those names.
If the President asks the same Establishment who gave him Bolton, he will just be handed
another Bolton. "Establishment" include Pence, who certainly supported Bolton's outlook on
things and would certainly recommend another "Bolton" figure if asked. Let us hope Pence is
not consulted on Bolton's successor.
different clue,
re "Let us hope Pence is not consulted on Bolton's successor."
Understandable point of view but then, Trump still is Trump. He can just by himself and
beyond advice easily find suboptimal solutions of his own.
Today I read that Richard Grenell was mentioned as a potential sucessor.
As far as that goes, go for it. Many people here will be happy when he "who always only
sais what the Whitehouse sais" is finally gone.
And with Trump's biggest military budget in the world he can just continue the arms sale
pitches that are and were such a substantial part of his job as a US ambassador in
Germany.
That said, they were that after blathering a lot about that we should increase our
military budget by 2%, 4%, 6% or 10%, buy US arms, now, and of course the blathering about
Northstream 1 & 2 and "slavedom to russian oil & gas" and rather buy US frack gas of
course.
He could then also take a side job for the fracking industry in that context. And buy
frack gas and arms company stocks. Opportunities, opportunities ...
"... But Bolton coupled the Fox and AEI sinecures with gnarlier associations -- for one, the Gatestone Institute, a, let's say Islam-hostile outfit, associated with the secretive, influential Mercer billionaires. ..."
"... Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he didn't. ..."
"... It doesn't matter whether Bolton's "time is up" or not, because his departure wouldn't change anything. If he goes, Trump will replace him with some equally slimy neocon interventionist. ..."
"... It won't end until we muck out the White House next year. Dumping Trump is Job One. ..."
"... Oh. Yes. You want to get rid of Trump's partially neocon administration, so that you could replace it with your own, entirely neocon one. Wake me up when the DNC starts allowing people like Tulsi Gabbard to get nominated. But they won't. So your party will just repeat its merry salsa on the same set of rakes as in 2016. ..."
No major politician, not even Barack Obama, excoriated the Iraq war more fiercely than did
Trump during the primaries. He did this in front of a scion of the house of Bush and in the
deep red state of South Carolina. He nevertheless went on to win that primary, the Republican
nomination and the presidency on that antiwar message.
And so, to see Bolton ascend to the commanding heights of the Trump White House shocked many
from the time it was first rumored. "I shudder to think what would happen if we had a failed
presidency," Scott McConnell, TAC' s founding editor, said in late 2016 at our foreign
policy conference, held, opportunely, during the presidential transition. "I mean, John
Bolton?"
At the time, Bolton was a candidate for secretary of state, a consideration scuttled in no
small part because of the opposition of Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. As McConnell
wrote in November of that year: "Most of the upper-middle-level officials who plotted the Iraq
War have retreated quietly into private life, but Bolton has kept their flame alive." Bolton
had already been passed over for NSA, losing out early to the doomed Michael Flynn. Rex
Tillerson beat him for secretary of state. Bolton was then passed over for the role of
Tillerson's deputy. When Flynn flamed out of the White House the following February, Trump
chose a general he didn't know at all, H.R. McMaster, to replace him.
Bolton had been trying to make a comeback since late 2006, after failing to hold his job as
U.N. ambassador (he had only been a recess appointment). His landing spots including a Fox News
contributorship and a post at the vaunted American Enterprise Institute. Even in the early days
of the Trump administration, Bolton was around, and accessible. I remember seeing him multiple
times in Washington's Connecticut Avenue corridor, decked out in the seersucker he notoriously
favors during the summer months. Paired with the familiar mustache, the man is the Mark Twain
of regime change.
But Bolton coupled the Fox and AEI sinecures with gnarlier associations -- for one, the
Gatestone Institute, a, let's say Islam-hostile outfit, associated with the secretive,
influential Mercer billionaires. He also struck a ferocious alliance with the Center for
Security Policy, helmed by the infamous Frank Gaffney, and gave paid remarks to the National
Council for the Resistance of Iran, the lynchpin organization of the People's Mujahideen of
Iran, or MEK. The latter two associations have imbued the spirit of this White House, with
Gaffney now one of the most underrated power players in Washington, and the MEK's "peaceful"
regime change mantra all but the official line of the administration.
More than any of these gigs, Bolton benefited from two associations that greased the wheels
for his joining the Trump administration.
The first was Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist. If you want to
understand the administration's Iran policy under Bolton to date, look no further than a piece
by the then-retired diplomat in conservative mainstay National Review in August 2017,
days after Bannon's departure from the White House: "How to Get Out of the Iran Deal." Bolton
wrote the piece at Bannon's urging. Even out of the administration, the former Breitbart
honcho was an influential figure.
"We must explain the grave threat to the U.S. and our allies, particularly Israel," said
Bolton. "The [Iran Deal's] vague and ambiguous wording; its manifest imbalance in Iran's
direction; Iran's significant violations; and its continued, indeed, increasingly, unacceptable
conduct at the strategic level internationally demonstrate convincingly that [the Iran deal] is
not in the national-security interests of the United States."
Then Bolton, as I
documented , embarked on a campaign of a media saturation to make a TV-happy president
proud. By May Day the next year, he would have a job, a big one, and one that Senator Paul
couldn't deny him: national security advisor. That wasn't the whole story, of course. Bolton's
ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has helped drive
Trump's Israel policy. If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely be because Adelson
failed to strenuously object.
So will Trump finally do it? Other than White House chief of staff, a position Mick Mulvaney
has filled in an acting capacity for the entire calendar year, national security advisor is the
easiest, most senior role to change horses.
A bombshell Washington Post story lays out the dire truth: Bolton is so distrusted on
the president's central prerogatives, for instance Afghanistan, that he's not even allowed to
see sensitive plans unsupervised.
Bolton has also come into conflict with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to three
senior State Department officials. Pompeo is the consummate politician. Though an inveterate
hawk, the putative Trump successor does not want to be the Paul Wolfowitz of the Iran war.
Bolton is a bureaucratic arsonist, agnostic on the necessity of two of the institutions he
served in -- Foggy Bottom and the United Nations. Pompeo, say those around him, is keen to be
beloved, or at least tolerated, by career officials in his department, in contrast with Bolton
and even Tillerson.
The real danger Bolton poses is to the twin gambit Trump hopes to pull off ahead of, perhaps
just ahead of, next November -- a detente deal with China to calm the markets and ending
the war in Afghanistan. Over the weekend, the president announced a scuttled meeting with the
Taliban at Camp David, which would have been an historic, stunning summit. Bolton was
reportedly instrumental in quashing the meet. Still, there is a lot of time between now and
next autumn, and the cancellation is likely the latest iteration of the president's showman
diplomacy.
Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and
day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security
advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor,
Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired
General Jack Keane.
Bolton seems to be following the well-worn trajectory of dumped Trump deputies. Jeff
Sessions, a proto-Trump and the first senator to endorse the mogul, became attorney general and
ideological incubator of the new Right's agenda only to become persona non grata in the
administration. The formal execution came later. Bannon followed a less dramatic, but no less
explosive ebb and flow. James Mattis walked on water until he didn't.
And Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he didn't.
You confuse "politician" and "liar" here, whereas he is "consummate" at neither politics
nor lying. His politicking has been as botched as his diplomacy; his lying has been
prodigious but transparent.
Bolton has been on the way out now for how many months? I will believe this welcome news
when I see his sorry ___ out the door.
I think much of America and the world will feel the same way.
It doesn't matter whether Bolton's "time is up" or not, because his departure wouldn't
change anything. If he goes, Trump will replace him with some equally slimy neocon
interventionist.
It won't end until we muck out the White House next year. Dumping Trump is Job One.
Oh. Yes. You want to get rid of Trump's partially neocon administration, so that you could
replace it with your own, entirely neocon one. Wake me up when the DNC starts allowing
people like Tulsi Gabbard to get nominated. But they won't. So your party will just repeat
its merry salsa on the same set of rakes as in 2016.
Trump whole administration is just a bunch of rabid neocons who will be perfectly at home (and some were) in Bush II
administration. So firing of Bolton while a step in the right direction is too little, too late.
Notable quotes:
"... Whatever the reason for Bolton's departure, this means one less warmongering neocon is left in the DC swamp, and is a prudent and long overdue move by Trump, one which even Trump's liberals enemies will have no choice but to applaud. ..."
"... Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor, Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired General Jack Keane. ..."
While there was some feverish speculation as to what an impromptu presser at 1:30pm with US
Secretary of State Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and National Security Adviser Bolton
would deliver, that was quickly swept aside moments later when Trump unexpectedly announced
that he had effectively fired Bolton as National Security Advisor, tweeting that he informed
John Bolton "last night that his services are no longer needed at the White House" after "
disagreeing strongly with many of his suggestions. "
... ... ...
Whatever the reason for Bolton's departure, this means one less warmongering
neocon is left in the DC swamp, and is a prudent and long overdue move by Trump, one which even
Trump's liberals enemies will have no choice but to applaud.
While we await more details on this strike by Trump against the military-industrial
complex-enabling Deep State, here is a fitting closer from Curt Mills via the American
Conservative:
Ending America's longest war would be a welcome rebuttal to Democrats who will, day in and
day out, charge that Trump is a fraud. But to do so, he will likely need a national security
advisor more in sync with the vision. Among them: Tucker Carlson favorite Douglas Macgregor,
Stephen Biegun, the runner-up previously, or the hawkish, but relatively pragmatic retired
General Jack Keane.
Bolton seems to be following the well-worn trajectory of dumped Trump deputies. Jeff
Sessions, a proto-Trump and the first senator to endorse the mogul, became attorney general
and ideological incubator of the new Right's agenda only to become persona non grata in the
administration. The formal execution came later. Bannon followed a less dramatic, but no less
explosive ebb and flow. James Mattis walked on water until he didn't.
And Bolton appeared the leading light of a neoconservative revival, of sorts, until he
didn't.
"... Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton believes and does? ..."
"... Personally, I'm not interested in trying to starve Iran into submission or attack it on behalf of Israel. And I would be interested in actually pursuing a meaningful attempt to resolve the Korea issue. Bolton is not only on the wrong side of these issues, he is in general the principal malign force pushing foreign policy insanity in this administration (as opposed to Adelson et all pushing policy insanity from outside the administration.) ..."
"... Heinrich Himmler also was consistent and sincere. By your logic, that must mean that Himmler was a credit to the Nazi regime. ..."
"... You can't serve a president well if you're constantly at odds with him. The Commander-in-Chief has to have his or her own mind about things, advisors are there to advise. If you want to do one thing but you're being counseled to do otherwise, what purpose does such a relationship serve? ..."
"... It was clearly Adelson and his ilk who got Bolton hired in the first place when Trump had initially been unimpressed. In "Fire and Fury," Steve Bannon allegedly says that Trump didn't think Bolton looked the part of NSA. And it's even more significant that Adelson and others of a similar cast--e.g., Safra Catz, the dual-national CEO of Oracle-- engineered a whispering campaign against McMaster that paved the way for what was effectively his firing. ..."
"... Bolton's ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has helped drive Trump's Israel policy ..."
"... Besides, it's not like Bolton was a military man, he openly acknowledges that he didn't want to go and 'die on some rice paddy' in Vietnam. But, he's willing to send other people's kids to fight and die in some pointless show of geopolitical power, If he goes, good riddance. ..."
"... Israel and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia drive Trump's Iran policy, and Pompeo is their messenger. ..."
"I have to think that NSA Bolton actually believes what he advocates."
There are and have been lots of people who believe what they advocate--Lenin, Trotsky,
Mao, Robespierre, and the Neoconservatives in general among them.
Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton
believes and does?
Personally, I'm not interested in trying to starve Iran into submission or attack it on
behalf of Israel. And I would be interested in actually pursuing a meaningful attempt to
resolve the Korea issue. Bolton is not only on the wrong side of these issues, he is in
general the principal malign force pushing foreign policy insanity in this administration
(as opposed to Adelson et all pushing policy insanity from outside the administration.)
Sorry, but Bolton's "service" sure ain't appreciated by me!
Hyperbole much I see.
If you want to honestly assess someone, you might want to avoid that tact. To my knowledge NSA Bolton is not building concentration camps to send undesirables to
an early grave.
I would be curious what you know about what his agenda is or why.
You can't serve a president well if you're constantly at odds with him. The
Commander-in-Chief has to have his or her own mind about things, advisors are there to
advise. If you want to do one thing but you're being counseled to do otherwise, what
purpose does such a relationship serve?
Nah, they (Bolton and all the neocons) are celebrating the death of another American
soldier killed in a suicide attack just prior to a planned peace summit with the Taliban.
The Taliban and the neocons are two sides that deserve each other, but at the cost of many
innocents.
Its easy to depose any third world government with our military, but one cannot
eradicate an ideology with today's humanitarian standards. So we should just leave and tell
the Taliban they can even take power in Afghanistan again, but if they harbor any groups
that want to attack our country, we'll be back. It only takes a month or so to depose a
third world government. Then we leave again. We can do this over and over again and it'll
be way cheaper than leaving troops there and many fewer casualties.
I don't think Bolton will be in there for the rest of Trump's presidency. Presidential
appointments rarely ever last through the whole administration. Now I'm not when he goes
cause anyone's guess is as good as mine. And will policy actually change for the better or
remain the same?
" If only the Tsar knew how wicked his advisers are! "
We've been hearing of Bolton's imminent demise since the time Trump appointed the
unindicted criminal, and to a position that isn't subject to Congressional advice and
consent.
Bolton is still in office, still making policy, still stovepiping "intelligence" to
Trump, still plotting away like Grima Wormtongue.
If Trump wasn't so close to Bolton, why was he in regular contact with the man before
appointing him, and why does he allow Bolton to control what information Trump gets?
And if you read the latest news, it seems that the occupation of Afghanistan isn't going
anywhere either. Bolton wins again, but some writers at TAC keep holding out hope for
Trump.
"If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely be because Adelson failed to
strenuously object."
Well, isn't that nice? Trump's decision on whether to keep or fire his national security
advisor depends on the whim of the hideous, Israel-uber-alles ideologue Adelson. That sure
makes me feel good. (And by the way, Curt Mills, this is called burying the lede.)
Of course it's only logical. It was clearly Adelson and his ilk who got Bolton hired in
the first place when Trump had initially been unimpressed. In "Fire and Fury," Steve Bannon
allegedly says that Trump didn't think Bolton looked the part of NSA. And it's even more
significant that Adelson and others of a similar cast--e.g., Safra Catz, the dual-national
CEO of Oracle-- engineered a whispering campaign against McMaster that paved the way for
what was effectively his firing.
This piece misses what's important about the Trump administration's foreign/security
policy saga and reduces it to a mere matter of personalities and petty politics. File this
under the heading of discretion being the better part of valor.
"Bolton's ace in the hole was Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate who has
helped drive Trump's Israel policy. If Trump finally moves against Bolton, it will likely
be because Adelson failed to strenuously object."
So -- Ilhan Omar was right??? I thought she was a vile anti-Semite echoing an ancient
slur!!
If Bolton does leave, I won't be sorry to see him go. Bolton's Hawkish opinions are
dangerous to the US' economic health.
Want to go into a deep Recession? Start another long-term foreign war that goes on for
decades - and do it on credit, AGAIN.
Besides, it's not like Bolton was a military man, he openly acknowledges that he didn't
want to go and 'die on some rice paddy' in Vietnam. But, he's willing to send other people's kids to fight and die in some pointless show of
geopolitical power, If he goes, good riddance.
The photo accompanying the article sums it up. Pompeo flanked by an American flag, and both
of them dwarfed by a huge projection of the flag of Israel.
Israel and to a lesser extent Saudi Arabia drive Trump's Iran policy, and Pompeo is
their messenger.
"I have to think that NSA Bolton actually believes what he advocates."
There are and have been lots of people who believe what they advocate--Lenin, Trotsky,
Mao, Robespierre, and the Neoconservatives in general among them.
Yeah, consistency may be nice, but what about the actual substance of what Bolton
believes and does?
G W Bush was responsible for North Korea developing nuclear weapons, the North Koreans did a
deal whereby the US would supply several light water reactors and 500,000 tons of oil per
year in exchange for NK not pursuing its nuclear program, the US accused the Koreans of
cheating [with no proof] and cancelled the agreement, thinking that sanctions and military
pressure would force Korea to capitulate. North Korea then decided to go nuclear. That same
US mistake is happening again with Iran, US hubris is on full display,but this time Iran has
the 'arc of resistance. on its side plus Russia and China. Trump will not go back to the
JCPOA it is not in his nature, the only thing we can hope for is a Trump defeat at the next
election, and hope an adult wins.
Harry Law #15. Harry, have you seen the people running for the Democratic nomination? Hope is
not a word I would use. Gabbard at least wants peace, but she will not be allowed to win the
nomination (she is too young in any case). And if by some miracle she were to be nominated
and win, she would not be allowed to carry out her own goals for peace. She would be defeated
or failing that, killed. As would anyone who really went up against the most powerful
political party in America, the War Party.
PATRICK
COCKBURN: I'm a bit doubtful about it. They have done a certain amount, this offer of a $15
billion credit line, to make up for the loss of Iranian oil revenue It was a French idea
originally, but they are asking Iran to step right back into the old nuclear deal, but the
Iranians are not likely to do that while they're subject to US sanctions. US sanctions and the
sanctioning of European companies or banks that deal with Iran, basically means that Iran is
facing an economic siege.
So these are maneuvers. The Iranians want to show they're being kind of moderate. They want
to preserve this deal as they do. At the same time, they don't want to look as though they're
pushovers, that sanctions are squeezing them to death, and they've got no alternative but to
give up. This would be to surrender to what Trump calls the policy of maximum pressure. I think
we're a long way from any real agreement on this. It's still escalating. GREG WILPERT: Iran
also just recently announced that it is releasing seven of the 23 crew members it is holding of
a Swedish-owned, but British-registered tanker that Iran had seized last July. Iran's
Revolutionary Guard seized that tanker in retaliation for the British seizing an Iranian tanker
near Gibraltar in early July, but the Iranian tanker has now been released. Now, how do you see
the situation of these tankers evolving? Could such seizures of oil tankers eventually lead to
an escalation and to even war?
PATRICK COCKBURN: Yes, they could. This is sort of a game of chicken. As you said, it
started off on the 4th of July when the British rather melodramatically dropped 30 Royal Marine
commandos on the deck of this vessel saying, "It was heading for Syria. This had nothing to do
with sanctions on Iran, but was a breach of sanctions on Syria imposed by the EU." This never
sounded right because it's a peculiar moment for Britain to suddenly put such energy into
enforcing EU sanctions, when we all know that Britain is trying to leave the EU at the moment.
There's a great political crisis here in Britain about this. This looked as though it was on
the initiative of Washington. Then, as was inevitable, the Iranians retaliated against
British-flagged vessels in the Gulf. There was an escalation that seems to have died down at
the moment.
As I see it, the Iranian policy is to maintain pressure by sort of pinprick attacks. There
were some small mines placed on oil tankers of the United Arab Emirates. Then when we had the
shooting down of the American drone, a whole series of events to show that they're not
frightened, that they can retaliate, but not bring it up to the level of war. That's sort of
the way the Iranians often react to this sort of thing, with some covert military measures and
to create an atmosphere of crisis, but not bring a war about.
Of course, once you start doing this, it could slip over the edge of the cliff at any
moment. The Iranians did a sort of mirror image of the British takeover of their tanker when
they took over the British tanker crew, which are just being released, as you mentioned. They
dropped 30 commandos on the deck. There was a British Naval vessel not so far away, not far
enough to stop this, but let's say that Naval vessel had been closer. Would they have opened
fire on a helicopter dropping these 30 Iranian commandos on the boat? That would have brought
us – would have been a war, and could have very rapidly escalated. We're always on, as I
said, the edge of the cliff in the Gulf with each side sort of daring the other to go further.
PATRICK COCKBURN: Well, it's falling apart by inches, but there's still quite a long way to go
on that. I think the one thing that has emerged is that the US, Trump and Iran, don't want war.
At one time, the US was calling on – some of its senior officials were calling for a
regime change. How far do they really believe this? When Trump decided not to retaliate for the
drone being shot down, that shows that he wants to rely on sanctions on this sort of very
intense economic siege of Iran, but I don't think the Iranians are going to come running. Once
they know there isn't going to be an all-out war, they'll try to sustain these sanctions, and
the situation isn't quite as desperate as it looks. Obviously, they're suffering a lot. On the
other hand, they're not isolated. China and Russia give them a measure of support.
The EU, rather pathetically, says it's trying to maintain the nuclear deal of 2015, but it's
rather underlining the political and military weakness of the EU that they haven't been able to
do much about it. Big companies are too frightened of US sanctions against them if they have
any relations with Iran. So the Europeans aren't coming well out of it. Obviously, their
relations with Trump are pretty frosty. They also probably don't think it's worth a really big
crisis between the EU, the European states, and America on this issue, but they are looking
pretty feeble at the moment.
There's one thing that continues to puzzle me about the sanctions.
My understanding of these sanctions is that they are designed to prevent the Iranians from
importing certain goods from Western countries, and prevent export of and payments for
Iranian goods to Western countries.
Why are these sanctions effective?
Iran has demonstrated that they can manufacture. They have open trading relations with
Russian and China, which gives them access to materials and manufactures they might not be
able to source within Iran.
They can trade oil for goods, and that oil can readily be absorbed by China or re-packaged
and sold by Russia if it chose to. Both Russia and China are highly motivated to bypass the
SWIFT payments system.
Both Russia and China have a roughly analagous situation re: trade with the West, and they
have been coping with it for over a decade in the case of Russia, somewhat less for
China.
Why isn't Iran re-directing external purchasing toward domestic sources, and using that
pressure as a means to build their internal economic capacity?
My two cents worth.
Alas, this is now a sort of, kind of, globalized economic system. Even prior to the
'Neo-Liberal Dispensation,' the world had international trade in raw materials and some
manufactured goods. As a side effect of this, internal national development of all sorts of
materials and merchandise languished. Why build an expensive factory or mine to get something
when you could buy it cheaper overseas? Where your idea has merit is in 'national security'
goods production. The things that make a country 'safe' should be sourced, if at all
possible, at home, where supply can be protected and controlled.
The second point I'd like to stress is how that oil is paid for and delivered. If I read
aright, most Persian oil is shipped to the end user. Thus, control of the seaways and vessles
plying same is crucial. That's why these somewhat symbolic oil tanker 'grabs' are important.
This demonstrates to the world at large one's ability to control the trans-shipment of oil,
from anywhere, to anywhere. The seizure of the oil transit ships was a message to the entire
oil using world: "We can shut down your economy whenever we want." As Lambert sometimes
quotes from Frank Herbert: "The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over
it."
The replacement of the SWIFT system would free the world from American economic thuggery.
When oil is finally priced, in significant amounts anyway, in something other than American
dollars, then will the world economy begin to regain equitability.
Of course if the option of trade is available, it's in everyone's interest to trade, under
the "caparative advantage" principle which underlies the dogma of free trade.
However, there isn't free trade for Iran, China, Russia, N. Korea, etc. So, they have to
improvise. Some countries, like China, are re-directing trade inwards. If Google won't
license the Android OS to Huawei, for example, Huawei makes their own smart phone OS.
So the question becomes "why hasn't Iran instituted a crash program to build Iran-based
companies to enable Iran to substitute Iran-manufactured/sourced products for ones formerly
obtained abroad?
Russia and China have both done this very successfully, and there are many economic as
well as "security" reasons to do it.
With respect to the "selling oil to end-users .vs. to brokers" the end-user would probably
prefer to buy direct from the source, to cut out the middle-man's fee. I don't see how that
presents an obstacle to buying Iran's oil.
Lastly, if it's a question of whether or not the oil can be delivered, the rest of the
world won't side with the U.S. if we seize cargoes on the high seas. That's what the fiasco
with the Grace 1 demonstrated. Furthermore, the sales contract could simply specify that the
goods are to be picked up dockside @ Iran, transferring the transport risk to the buyer (e.g.
China, for ex). Nobody is going to hijack a Chinese oil freighter.
Another farthings worth of comment.
For the last point, I see two possibilities. First, the Neocons in Washington may not care
what the rest of the world thinks, under the (fallacious) assumption that America IS the
world. Second, the 'disruptions' of oil sea transport can be carried out by "arms length"
third parties, viz. the recent spate of tanker 'minings' in the Persian Gulf being 'sourced'
to dissident elements within the Arab world. So, some "Somali Pirates" would be the obvious
choice for 'hijackings' of Chinese flagged tankers, or "Yemeni Pirates," or "Baluch Pirates,"
etc. etc.
In reference to other points you raise, there is a lag time in the implementation of
industrial policy. During WW2, America already had heavy industry available for war
production. The lag time was determined by the length of time needed for retooling of those
extant factories. When there is no extant heavy industry plant available, the lag time
becomes much longer. Having worked in commercial construction during my life, I attest that
planning, preparing for, and building industrial capacity, takes years. Iran could well be in
the middle of an industrial building phase right now. Add to the usual worries attendant to
industrial construction the worry of some outside hostile actor coming over and bombing your
shiny new factory back to rubble and you have added a new layer of complexity to the
endeavour. Air defense for industrial base has not usually been part of an average country's
economic planning regime.
One reason I can think of as to why Russia and China have embarked on an "internalization"
program way in advance of, say, Iran's is that the two former State Socialist countries have
weathered nearly a centuries worth of hostility, both rhetorical and military, emanating from
the West. Their latest 'internalization' programs could be the result of several generations
worth of institutional memory residing within the nomenklaturas of the two states.
Iran, on the other hand, has had an up and down relationship with the West.
At one time, a client state of the West, at another, in a fiercely nationalistic
confrontation with the West, in both regimes, a trading partner with the West as far as oil
goes.
The promise of present day Iran for the world in general is that it is finally trying to
forge an independent self-identity. Someone in power in the West must realize that, if Iran
slips the leash of the West, then other countries will follow. Nothing less than Western
Hegemony is at stake.
Or if oil is progressively transcended and deleted from more and more of the world's
energy portfolio.
That would give those who "don't need oil anymore" some new post-petro freedom of action.
One area where oil will be needed for the foreseeable future is in the lubrication of
moving parts. I have yet to see a true "Buckey Ball" lubricant on the market.
Good question. No answers here, but another observation and question:
While I don't endorse it, what about the legitimacy of Nation-states to pursue their best
interest, and the implied hubris/ arrogance that counters with actions and policy precluding
that autonomy? The Great Game ™?
Cuba blockades. They have done pretty well, despite nearly 70 years of very harsh
blockade. Look how much the US has punished the least amongst the Cuban human beings, some
for their entire life
Venezuela?
North Korea and Iran aspire to have the ultimate WMD. Why does the US get to have the say?
My measuring stick senses that the US hardly holds the moral high ground.
Then, the counter-point that we have never tried in the recent history of man–global
cooperation and no more war. The image of our earth floating in space, the big blue marble,
akin to a Star Trek enterprise ship, with all of the war-ing beyond-memory enemies all on
board. Give every deck and wing some nukes. Avail them with the information on how to
conserve and create renewable energy, to grow and put food by, to access clean drinking
water, modest but efficient shelter, and access to books, education, and the arts. Awareness
of ecology, full life cycle of plants, animals, and man-made products. The experiment that we
must ever allow. Sharing.
The big question in my mind is, why does the rest of the world allow that sort of
bullying, or more to the point, allow themselves to be vulnerable to it? Somebody's been
careless. We now see both Russia and China taking steps to be more autarkic, and even the EU
waking up to the danger. It may be they just haven't had time to develop new
institutions.
The rest-of-the-world could straight-up GIVE Iran the survival-critical things that Iran
would otherwise have to import. The rest of the world could do that in return for Iran
staying in the agreement till the next American election. This would give everyone time to
see if America would elect a pro-deal-ante Democrat to the Presidency.
( This would require the rest of the world to actually be willing to give Iran that kind
of c"cold-war-support" aid till the American election. It would also require the IranGov to
be willing to stay in the agreement until the American election results shake out. It would
need a lot of people to be willing to take a lot of slow long-term chances. Would everyone
involved be willing to do that in a harmonized way?)
The EU LeaderLords have no bravery and no taste for conflict with the TrumpAdmin. Not only
will they not lift a fear-quivering finger to save the accords, they will not even buy and
donate to Iran the goods and services Iran would need to survive until the next American
election.
It is too bad that Rouhani ( and his boss the Supreme Leader Khamenei) cannot have a
remote long-distance Vulcan mind-meld with the DemParty nominee-wannabes in this country.
Because if they could have such a remote long-distance Vulcan mind-meld, here is what they
might well decide. Every DemParty nominee-wannabe would PROMise ( and MEAN IT) to take
America right back into the JCPOA if elected, and to rescind every re-sanction that the
TrumpAdmin imposed. And Rouhani ( at Supreme Leaders's direction) would agree to keep Iran
"in" the JCPOA till the winner of the American Presidential election were announced. Maybe
such a remote mind-meld agreement openly and overtly stated might raise the chances of a
DemParty victory and lower the chances of an Iran-America war.
US Sanctions Are Designed to Kill
By Kevin Cashman and Cavan Kharrazian
Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recently visited the Group of Seven (G7) at
the invitation of French president Emmanuel Macron, in what was seen as an overture to the
Trump administration to negotiate over sanctions that have plagued the Iranian economy. Back
in 2018, after months of increasingly hostile rhetoric, the US government withdrew from the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or "Iran Deal," and imposed a "maximum pressure" campaign
that included unilateral, economy-wide sanctions. The Iran Deal was an agreement that
provided Iran relief from existing sanctions in exchange for limits on its enrichment of
uranium, among other concessions. These sanctions hampered trade between the European Union,
whose leaders have sought to salvage the Iran Deal.
When President Trump reimposed sanctions in November 2018, it cut off Iran's oil exports
and access to the international financial system. At the time, he announced that Iran could
comply with new US demands or face "economic isolation." Additional US sanctions issued since
then have specifically targeted a thousand individuals and entities with the goal of reducing
Iran's oil revenues to "zero." More recently, Trump said that although "[Iran's] economy is
crashing...it's very easy to straighten [it] out or it's very easy for us to make it a lot
worse."
And so, according to Trump himself, the United States has the power to solve -- or
exacerbate -- Iran's current economic problems. What is left unsaid, including by much of the
media, is that sanctions that "crash" the economy are an attack on the country's civilian
population and create widespread human misery. Indeed, they appear to be contributing to
widespread shortages of medicine and medical equipment, particularly affecting cancer
patients. In Venezuela, which is under a similar US sanctions regime, there have been similar
effects, with more than 40,000 people estimated to have died from 2017 to 2018 due to the
"collective punishment" inflicted on them.
Yet other statements from US administration officials often contend that sanctions have
negligible economic or social effects on the general population of Iran. For example, the US
State Department's special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, recently denied that US
sanctions on Iran affect the availability of medicine and agricultural products. In this
argument, Hook divorces the connection between the economic damage caused by sanctions in
Iran and the lack of basic necessities like medicine and food, preferring to instead lay
blame on the Iranian government, not what the Trump administration calls "targeted"
sanctions.
Are the sanctions causing Iran's economic problems, or simply a way to punish individual
actors? Answering this question requires an examination of the impact sanctions have on
Iran's economy and the mechanisms by which sanctions work -- two important areas of inquiry
that seldom receive attention in the US press.
Sanctions are severely impacting Iran's oil production
Looking at Iran's oil sector, which has been directly targeted by the sanctions regime, is
a good way to get a sense of how the sanctions have affected the country's economy, which
remains dependent on the production and export of oil, according to a number of indicators.
For example, around 70 percent of Iran's merchandise exports consists of fuel. Although this
dependence on oil production has decreased over the last decade, in large part due to
government efforts to diversify the economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported
in March 2018 (before the announcement of the resumption of US sanctions) that oil revenues
accounted for nearly 40 percent of government revenues in fiscal year 2016–17, and
projected a similar number for fiscal year 2017–18 (assuming, then, that there would be
no new sanctions). Clearly, a large reduction in Iran's oil production would pose significant
challenges to its ability to provide services to its people, as well as maintain essential
imports including some foreign-produced medicines and other healthcare and life-saving
goods.
Unsurprisingly, Iran's oil production moves very much in tandem with the enactment and
repeal of broad sanctions over time (see the figure below). US sanctions in 2010 affected
investment in Iran's oil infrastructure and prohibited some international transactions. Then,
in early 2012, the United States and the European Union banned oil imports from Iran and
froze its central bank assets. Shortly thereafter, oil production plummeted and reached its
nadir in late 2012. After the Iran Deal was enacted in early 2016 and US and EU sanctions
were repealed, Iran's oil production rapidly recovered to 2007 levels. This level of
production was maintained until the announcement by the Trump administration in May 2018 that
the United States was withdrawing from the Iran Deal. Since May 2018, Iran's oil production
has fallen precipitously; it is down by over 40 percent over the last year. Waivers the
United States issued to purchasers of Iranian oil have expired over the last few months,
eliminating one of the remaining factors that put upward pressure on production.
[Graph]
To get a sense of the size of these impacts, it's useful to compare what they would look
like in the US economy. If applied to the United States, they would be comparable to a budget
reduction of $521 billion or 16 percent in 2018. However, this would also represent about 85
percent of nonmilitary discretionary spending. While the United States would be able to
borrow or create money to fill this deficit, Iran has much less capacity to do either without
triggering more economic difficulties.
Broader economic impacts are also visible. The IMF lowered growth projections for Iran due
to the "crippling effect of tighter US sanctions" in its July update. Based on this
projection, it is estimated that the economy will contract by 9.3 percent in 2019. This is a
downward revision from a previous projection in April of a decline of 6.0 percent. (Before
the sanctions, the economy was projected to grow by 4.0 percent.) Other indicators also
worsened after the reimposition of sanctions: the unemployment rate is estimated to be 25
percent; inflation has risen to 80 percent; and the currency has lost over half its
value.
Sanctions are exacerbating social problems
The main mechanism by which oil production has fallen is the same mechanism that prevents
Iran from importing food and medicine: Iran cannot find buyers for its oil on the open
market, just like it cannot buy food or medicine on the open market. In effect, it is cut off
from the US-dominated international financial system.
Uniquely, the United States exerts broad control over international banking transactions.
One way is via the SWIFT and CHIPS systems, which handle the vast majority of those
transactions. The SWIFT system, which provides a common communication system for banks, is
controlled by US banks, which own the majority of the system and have officials on its board.
On top of that, despite not being located in the United States, SWIFT makes all of the
system's data available to the US government, even if those transactions do not involve the
United States. The CHIPS system, which provides communication as well as settlement
functions, is governed by US law, has many US banks as owners, and is directly overseen by US
authorities. These systems rely on a network of correspondent banks -- which link banks that
might not have relationships with one another -- to complete transactions. The apex of the
correspondent system is the New York Federal Reserve Bank, under the control of US banking
authorities, which also serves as a lender of last resort to other central banks.
A system designed in this way ensures that banks with no relationship with each other
still can transact in a common currency (dollars) via a common bank (the New York Fed) in an
agreed-upon framework (SWIFT and CHIPS). However, it also means that the United States has
disproportionate power over transactions. Formally, the United States government, via the
Office of Foreign Assets Control, can prohibit transactions involving Iran to pass through
systems and banks in which it has jurisdiction. More informally, the US government can
pressure SWIFT, other central banks, correspondent banks, and even specific firms to adopt
policies of refusing to do business with Iran. Since these players fear retribution from US
authorities (e.g., being sanctioned themselves), they are usually unwilling to take the risk
of doing business with Iran unless they have no other business that might involve the United
States or financial entities that can be pressured by the United States.
Because the international banking system is designed in this way, US sanctions on the
Iranian economy effectively mean that not only can Iran not easily sell oil on the open
market, it cannot easily buy food or medicine either, even if the latter are nominally
exempt, as Hook says. This is because sanctioned Iranian banks and officials are ultimately
involved in these transactions in the same way that they are with oil, often by virtue of the
position they hold in the Iranian banking system. It is telling that hours after an October
2018 ruling by the International Court of Justice ordering the United States to "remove any
impediments" that affect the importation of medicine, food, and civil aviation products
(including impediments to payments and other transfers of funds related to these products),
the US withdrew from the treaty that formed the basis of the ruling, instead of complying
with it. Unsurprisingly, efforts at importing food and medicine via the technical exemptions
that do exist often fail. It appears that the technical exemptions are used more to deflect
criticism of sanctions overall than to actually permit the importation of food and
medicine.
But on top of these issues, even if food and medicine were, in reality, exempt from the
sanctions regime, the "crippling effect" on Iran's economy would impact the Iranians'
financial ability to acquire food and medicine anyway. Iran would have fewer resources to
devote to domestic food and medicine production, and many fewer resources to import the same
products.
Adapting to US sanctions
It is surprisingly difficult to bypass this financial system because it is so entrenched,
although it is not impossible. For example, countries might set up a bilateral or
multilateral system to carry out transactions in their own currencies and settle accounts in
a currency other than the dollar. Iran could negotiate bilateral trades with India: in
exchange for oil, Iran would accept rupees, and then use those rupees to purchase Indian
products. The downsides are that mechanisms would be needed to support these transactions
(i.e., establishing parallel payment and banking functions). In addition, Iran would need to
find a use for the rupees it received in exchange for oil, usually by buying Indian goods
(this is because it would be difficult to exchange rupees for other currencies on the open
market due to the sanctions).
One promising new multilateral mechanism, dubbed INSTEX, would allow trade between EU
countries and Iran without relying on direct transfer of funds or the use of the US-dominated
financial system. While in its beginning stage it will only deal with humanitarian trade,
INSTEX's model could potentially create a new path to buy Iranian oil. It is telling,
however, that EU countries set up an entirely different financial mechanism to use for
humanitarian trade, rather than risk drawing the ire of the United States by using
established channels.
Yet these alternative mechanisms are not immune from US influence either. In recent cases
where countries have announced intentions to develop alternative trade arrangements, the
United States has applied political pressure to nip them in the bud. This involves overt
economic threats as well as rhetoric urging countries like India to refrain from using a
"narrow bilateral lens" in economic trade.
In the meantime, Iran is able to sell some oil to countries such as China, Russia, and
India; either to pay back debt or because some banks in these countries do not have a
significant business that can be impacted by US retaliation. It also has had some success in
covertly transferring oil to buyers, but this does not always escape US control. Similarly,
Iran is able to maintain imports of some items, like bananas, outside of the established
financial system primarily due to the experience and ingenuity of importers, although usually
at lower volumes.
It should be clear that the US is uniquely positioned to choke off imports and exports
from a targeted country using sanctions, with deep, negative consequences for that country's
economy as well as severe constraints on its government's ability to address economic
problems.
In Iran's case, US sanctions mean that production of oil -- a vital export -- is in free
fall, unemployment is on the rise, and record inflation due to scarce imports has made it
harder for everyday Iranians to buy basic goods and access life-saving medicine. Recent
reports have detailed harrowing stories of hospitals running out of crucial cancer medicines
and patients struggling to afford or even find their prescriptions. As in Venezuela and other
targeted countries, US sanctions undoubtedly have a human toll associated with them, which
will only grow as time goes on. This human impact is one of the main reasons that experts in
international law argue unilateral sanctions are illegal under the United Nations Charter and
international human rights law.
While Iran has been exploring alternative ways of exporting and importing goods, it's
unclear what more it could do absent relief from sanctions. Even so, US officials will
typically place responsibility for the social and economic problems resulting from the
sanctions on the Iranian government, as Hook does. But Trump's comments are more revealing.
Sanctions only work because they cause suffering in the first place. In effect, the United
States is risking -- and sometimes ending -- the lives of thousands of Iranians with the hope
that the Iranian government acquiesces to its demands or is replaced by a more compliant
government. That the United States could carry out such a strategy in the first place should
raise serious questions among concerned US citizens and within the international community,
especially among those who respect international law.
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
Pat Buchanan continues to be one of the few publicly visible political analysts currently
active who dares to tell it like it is when it comes to Israel's power in America. His
article
last week "Will Israel's War Become America's War" as always gets to the heart of the
problem, i.e. that the completely contrived "special relationship" with Israel could easily
lead the United States into another totally unnecessary war or even a series of wars in the
Middle East.
Pat starts with "President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran after the
shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a war. But the same
cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu." He observes that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing
re-election on September 17 th , and though most polls indicate that he will win,
the opposition to him is strong based on his personal corruption and his pandering to the
country's most extreme right-wing parties. So Bibi is concerned that he might lose and even go
to jail and there is nothing like a little war to make a leader look strong and righteous, so
he is lashing out at all his neighbors in hopes that one or more of them will be drawn into
what would be for Israel, given its massive military superiority, a manageable
confrontation.
Buchanan sums up Netanyahu's recent escalation, writing that on "Saturday, Israel launched a
night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel claims was a plot by Iran's
Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force Sunday, two Israeli drones crashed outside the media offices
of Hezbollah in Beirut. Israel then attacked a base camp of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine-General Command in north Lebanon. Monday, Israel admitted to a strike
on Iranian-backed militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. And Israel does not deny
responsibility for last month's attacks on munitions dumps and bases of pro-Iran militias
[also] in Iraq. Israel has also confirmed that, during Syria's civil war, it conducted hundreds
of strikes against pro-Iranian militias and ammunition depots to prevent the transfer of
missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon."
So, Israel has staged literally hundreds of attacks against targets in Lebanon, Syria and
now Iraq while it is also at the same time shooting scores of unarmed demonstrators inside Gaza
every Friday. Netanyahu has also threatened both perennial foe Iran and the Houthi rebels in
Yemen. As the Jewish state is not at war with any of those countries it is engaging in war
crimes. Both Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force are vowing
revenge.
Pat Buchanan goes on to make the case that Netanyahu is willy-nilly pulling the United
States into a situation from which there is no exit. Indeed, one might well conclude that the
trap has already been sprung as the Trump Administration is reflexively blaming Israel's
actions on Iran. The Jewish state's escalation produced a telephone call to Bibi by American
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo promising that the United States would unconditionally support
Israel. Vice President Mike Pence
also joined in , boasting of a "great conversation" with Netanyahu and tweeting that "The
United State fully supports Israel's right to defend itself from imminent threats. Under
President @realDonaldTrump, America will always stand with Israel!"
So, if a war in the Middle East does begin one can count on a number of developments in
Washington, all of which favor Netanyahu. As Pompeo and Pence have made clear, the Trump
Administration already accepts that whatever Israel does is fully justified and there are even
reports that the White House will endorse Israeli
annexation of all the illegal settlements on the West Bank at some point either before
or
immediately after the upcoming Knesset election to help Bibi. And don't look for any
dissent from even the most extreme views developing inside the White House or the State
Department. The president has completely surrendered to the Israel Lobby while National
Security Adviser John Bolton, Pence and Pompeo are all outspoken supporters of war with Iran.
And nearly all the important government posts dealing with the Middle East are staffed by
Jewish Zionists, to include the president's son-in-law and two Donald Trump lawyers. The most
recent addition to that sorry line-up is Peter Berkowitz, who has been appointed head of the
Policy Planning Staff at State. Berkowitz studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and is
co-founder and director of
the "Israel Program on Constitutional Government."
And Congress would also be singing the "amen" chorus in support of U.S. intervention to help
the country it has ridiculously but nevertheless repeatedly described as America's "best friend
and closest ally." The occupied mainstream media would echo that line, as would the millions of
Christian Zionists and every one of the more than 600 American Jewish organizations that in one
way, shape or form support Israel.
Buchanan warns that the U.S. could find itself in real trouble, particularly given the
attacks on Iraq, where Washington still has 5,000 troops, hugely outnumbered by the local
pro-Iranian militias. And American aircraft carriers could find themselves vulnerable if they
dare to enter the Straits of Hormuz or Persian Gulf, where they would be in range of the
Iranian batteries of anti-ship missiles. He concludes that a war for Israel that goes badly
could cost Trump the election in 2020, asking " have we ceded to Netanyahu something no nation
should ever cede to another, even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their
choosing but not of ours?"
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected] .
The president has completely surrendered to the Israel Lobby while National Security
Adviser John Bolton
To be fair, Trump never promised to curb Israeli aggression during his campaign. He promised
to back them and that's what he's doing. So this suggestion that "he's letting us all down"
is just silly. Now, on other stuff, yeah, you can make a case. And let's be real, if Jeb Bush
or Bernie Sanders or Hillary were in office they'd be backing "our ally in the Middle East"
too.
@Lot Iran was invited by
Syrian legit gov. Lebanon was prevented from total rout by Hezbollah from the actions of the
evil Zionist .Hezbollah sought and received help to confront evil Zionist. Who ever asked the
Jews to show up in ME anywhere in the ME? Who? Yemen is a war that ahs been fought by Houthis
. Houthis has been there for centuries They are fighting a war instigated by Israeli vassal
Saudi . Iraq has been turned into dust by Jew run USA attack It is slowly coming to life.
Now don't read the script from the middle Start from the beginning . Start from the
beginning ad be ready for the end . End will not be written by devious Jewish country .
"'But there is an even more important reason to give two cheers for Israel and to think of
it, despite its excesses, as exemplary: Israel is nationalist."'
Maybe McConnell is paid to praise Israel or maybe he just your typical simple minded
tunnel vision conservative. I gotta say my kind of conservative values, or maybe they should
be called traditional values will likely stay the same but what wont stay the same is my
voting for any of these conservative stupids.
I'm a registered Independent voter independent because I believed Americans should be
independent of 'political parties' and not follow them like sheep, but vote for the closest
thing they can get to a candidate of good character, some brains and a sense of fairness for
the people. I voted for the actual America first GOP presidents, the elder Bush I and Nixon,
otoh I also voted for the Dem America first presidents Kennedy and Carter.
Independent voters like myself make up 37% of registered voters in the US .that makes both
the dems and repubs 'minority parties' ..neither of them can win without us.
Independent voters got to be independent because they paid more attention to the big picture
and issues in politics overall than the followers of the parties .most of them are more
'traditional', including objecting to US entanglement with foreign nations. .the exact
opposite of current GOP conservatism.
So it is absolute nitwittery to try and attract traditional voters by championing Israel as a
model for US nationalism. Israel gives nationalism a bad name. It is asking us to step in a
pile of steaming cow shit to pattern the US after Israel.
A lot of these Israeli provocations are, as noted, Netanyahu electioneering. Hence, they are
likely to stop or be diminished (the Gaza border massacres excepted) if Bibi either wins the
election and can form a new government or loses and is driven from power with the opposition
forming a new government. Worst case scenario is a continuation of the present situation with
Bibi unable to form a government and having to fight yet another election. This would result
in still further Israeli escalation until finally Iran or Hezbollah retaliates and the US is
dragged in. Or he might just formally annex the West Bank and drive out the Palestinians to
the applause of Trump and his supporters.
There are other dangers as well, especially the collapse of Saudi Arabia and the UAE as a
result of their defeat in Yemen. The US is sending 5,000 troops to SA just in time to defend
the House of Saud from a possible overthrow or to fight on behalf of one part of that
sociopathic family against another part.
"President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran after the shoot-down of a
U.S. Predator drone to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a war. But the same cannot be
said of Bibi Netanyahu." He observes that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is facing
re-election on September 17th, and though most polls indicate that he will win, the
opposition to him is strong based on his personal corruption and his pandering to the
country's most extreme right-wing parties. So Bibi is concerned that he might lose and even
go to jail and there is nothing like a little war to make a leader look strong and
righteous, so he is lashing out at all his neighbors in hopes that one or more of them will
be drawn into what would be for Israel, given its massive military superiority, a
manageable confrontation.
It's a good analysis, but a little different to the subjugation of US interests to Israeli
ones that is normally talked about inasmuch Netanyahu personal advantage is the key factor. I
don't think many people in Israel would approve of Netanyahu doing something so obvious as
getting Israel into an inconclusive war just before an election. Especially as the war is one
that might bring the US in but would be unlikely to motive the US to destroy the Iranian
regime, wiche had time to make their facilities (nuclear) too duplicated and dispersed for
airstrikes to work.
The Palestinians are the ones Israelis are happy to get tough with, even the supposedly
leftist Ehud Barak has said the Palestinians of Gaza must be deterred more. Talk of war with
Iran is just that, it really is, unless they do something stupid.
For Israel, getting the US to totally crush Iran would be great, but that will require
America to be provoked by Iran, which is something they are loath to do. Iran is not going to
fight a war they cannot possibly hope to win if they can help it, and they have said there
will not be one. I don't think Bolton is any influence on Trump, and Pompeo is a
never-Trumper turned Trump boot licker rather that a force in the administration in his own
right.
He concludes that a war for Israel that goes badly could cost Trump the election in
2020, asking " have we ceded to Netanyahu something no nation should ever cede to another,
even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their choosing but not of
ours?"
Trump never loses sight of his own self interest. A war before the Israeli election is not
going to help Trump win reelection, and he did say recently he was open to talks with Iran,
which left a distraught Netanyahu unsuccessfully trying to get through to Trump and gave Ehud
Barack one of his few opportunities to criticise the utility for Israel of Netanyahu's
relationship with Trump.
"... As for the Israelis, they don't want the man who thinks he might be "King of Israel" talking to the Hitlerite Persians. They suddenly sprayed Iran's local Middle East proxies with drone-fired rockets – in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – just in case the wretched, financially broken and inflation-doomed Iranians were tempted to chat to the crackpot in the White House. But the Israelis wasted their ammunition. Rouhani is not mad. America has to drop its sanctions against Iran if Trump wants to talk, he said. ..."
"... And when Rouhani made it clear that he was not interested in "photo-ops" – an obvious allusion to the pictures of Trump and Little Rocket Man – what did the po-faced Washington Post ..."
"... Indeed, had Ahmadinejad's further political ambitions not been firmly crushed by his country's "supreme leader", Ayatollah Khamenei, we might just have witnessed a meeting between two of the world's leading political nutcases. Ahmadinejad, it may be recalled, was the Iranian who claimed that a holy cloud was suspended over his head for 20 minutes when he addressed the United Nations in New York. Now that is a phenomenon which Trump may also have experienced – although at least he had the good sense not to tell us of it. ..."
"... In the first eight months after Rouhani became president in 2013, the Iranian state hanged at least 537 people. In January of 2014, he had, according to a report in the Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat ..."
"... When the shah of Iran wanted to acquire nuclear technology in 1974, according to documents in the US National Security Archive, he said that Iran had an "inalienable right" to the nuclear cycle and that it would not accept obligations "dictated by the nuclear-have nations". ..."
"... In theory, what Macron is trying to do, if Le Monde ..."
"... But what Macron is really doing – which is what almost every EU leader is doing – is trying to preserve the peace of the Middle East long enough for the Americans to elect a serious, intelligent, boring and moderately honest political leader to replace the mentally unbalanced and very dangerous current holder of the highest office in the US. ..."
"... Robert Fisk writes for the Independent , where this column originally appeared. ..."
History in the Middle East is unkind to us westerners. Just when we thought we were the good
guys and the Iranians were the bad guys, here comes the ghostly, hopeless possibility of a
Trump-Rouhani summit to remind us that the apparent lunatic is the US president and the
rational, sane leader who is supposed to talk to him is the president of the Islamic Republic
of Iran . All these
shenanigans are fantasy, of course – like the "imminent" war between America and Iran
– of which more later.
As for the Israelis, they don't want the man who thinks he might be "King of Israel"
talking to the Hitlerite Persians. They suddenly sprayed Iran's local Middle East proxies with
drone-fired rockets – in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – just in case the wretched,
financially broken and inflation-doomed Iranians were tempted to chat to the crackpot in the
White House. But the Israelis wasted their ammunition. Rouhani is not mad. America has to drop
its sanctions against Iran if Trump wants to talk, he said.
It still amazes me that we have to take all this stuff at face value. No sooner had Trump
waffled on about Rouhani being "the great negotiator" than we saw all the White House
correspondents dutifully taking this nonsense down in their notebooks – as if the
American president was presidential, as if the old dream-bag was real, as if what he was saying
had the slightest bearing on reality.
And when Rouhani made it clear that he was not interested in "photo-ops" – an
obvious allusion to the pictures of Trump and Little Rocket Man – what did the po-faced
Washington Post tell us in its subsequent report? Why, that Rouhani had "dashed hopes
of a potential meeting with his US counterpart". Ye Gods! What "hopes" do they still have in
their homegrown crackpot president after these two and a half years of his threats and lies and
racism? Have they learned nothing?
It's as if – for the American media – Trump is unhinged in Washington but a
Kissinger the moment he lands in Biarritz (or London or Riyadh or Panmunjom or a Scottish golf
course, or perhaps, one day, Greenland). And Rouhani – who may be a "great negotiator"
but is also a very ruthless man – is therefore supposed to play the role of Iran's
previous president, the raving, crazed, Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Indeed, had Ahmadinejad's further political ambitions not been firmly crushed by his
country's "supreme leader", Ayatollah Khamenei, we might just have witnessed a meeting between
two of the world's leading political nutcases. Ahmadinejad, it may be recalled, was the Iranian
who claimed that a holy cloud was suspended over his head for 20 minutes when he addressed the
United Nations in New York. Now that is a phenomenon which Trump may also have experienced
– although at least he had the good sense not to tell us of it.
Ahmadinejad, you may also remember, was the president whose claim to have won the 2009
presidential elections brought millions of protestors onto the streets of Iranian cities until
they were brutalised and imprisoned into submission. His cheeky smile, chipmunk eyes and
Spanish armada beard could not persuade Iranians that the "alternative facts" of his
presidential victory were real.
Everyone knew that Ahmadinejad would never be given a finger on any nuclear button –
many doubted if he knew the difference between nuclear physics and electricity – but he
provided at the time a hate figure to rival Gaddafi or any other of the ravers of the Middle
East.
But now Trump wears Ahmadinejad's international mantle of insanity and the Iranian
presidential seat is today held by a far more pragmatic individual. For let's not be romantic
about Hassan
Rouhani . Back in 1999, when he was a humble deputy chief of Iran's Supreme National
Security Council, Rouhani condemned pro-democracy demonstrators as " muhareb " and "
mofsad " (corrupt on earth) – opponents of the Islamic Republic, whose
punishment would be death.
In the first eight months after Rouhani became president in 2013, the Iranian state
hanged at least 537 people. In January of 2014, he had, according to a report in the Arabic
daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat , visited Ahwaz to deal with "a number of sensitive files"
left untouched by Ahmadinejad. These included Hashem Shaabani and Hadi Rashedi – both
human rights activists in the minority Arab community in southwest Iran – who had been
condemned to death for "waging war on God", "spreading corruption on earth" and "questioning
the principle of velayat-e faqih" (guardianship of the jurist).
Shaabani's poetry, in both Persian and Arabic, was famous; he was a founder of an institute
which encouraged Arabic literature and culture among Iranians. Rouhani signed off on the
executions; Shaabani and Rashedi were hanged in a still-unidentified prison.
But it is Rouhani's negotiating skill which has apparently impressed Trump, who also has
little time for minorities. And when you recall that one of Trump's Republican predecessors in
the White House, Ronald Reagan, arranged for the Israelis to deliver missiles to Iran in 1985
in return for the release of US hostages in Beirut, you can see why Trump might think it
strange that Rouhani would turn down a meeting with him. After all, during the Iran-Contra
affair the then Iranian speaker of parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, was deeply involved in
the enterprise.
But even if Rouhani was fool enough to flirt with Trump's offer – which he was not
– his fate would have been similar to the poet Shaabani's if he had dared to talk to the
US president without the full restoration of the nuclear treaty.
It doesn't take much spreading of "corruption on earth" in Iran – let alone disavowing
the views of the Supreme Leader Khamanei – to catapult a learned cleric into prison.
Having learned from his foreign minister in Biarritz what the American deal was supposed to be,
Rouhani wisely did not touch it. The US had broken the nuclear treaty and reimposed sanctions
– so Trump would have to rejoin the treaty signatories and lift sanctions for any hope of
a meeting with the president of the Islamic Republic.
Of course, the Iranians will no more go to war with America than America will go to war with
Iran. We all know that – except for those who blast us all with "brink-of-war" scenarios
in the Gulf. We've been through Iranian ship-minings in 1987 without declarations of war.
Besides, what's so new about an Iran insisting on its "sovereign" right to peaceful nuclear
power?
When the shah of Iran wanted to acquire nuclear technology in 1974, according to
documents in the US National Security Archive, he said that Iran had an "inalienable right" to
the nuclear cycle and that it would not accept obligations "dictated by the nuclear-have
nations".
Which is pretty much what Iran did accept in the nuclear agreement which Trump tore
up on behalf of the United States. And I still have a clipping from The Times of
November 1972, in which my then colleague David Housego was reporting from Tehran that the shah
had declared that Iran's defensive frontiers extended beyond the Persian Gulf into the Indian
Ocean!
In five years, the shah calculated, his arms build-up would make Iran the largest military
power in the Middle East. The shah ruled with torture and executions, was crazed about the
dangers of communism, and power-mad to the extent of celebrating his empire's rule in 1971 with
what he called "the biggest party on earth" in the ruins of Persepolis. How Trump would love to
have been there.
Well, Macron may be able to turn himself into the "Great G7 Intermediary", although all
others who have tangled with Iran have been brought low by the experience. Think poor old Jimmy
Carter, destroyed by the hostage-takers at the US embassy in Tehran. Think Reagan, almost
brought low by Irangate. Think Colonel Oliver North. Or envoy Robert McFarlane. Or Terry Waite.
Or Barack Obama, for that matter, his Iranian policy torn up by Trump.
In theory, what Macron is trying to do, if Le Monde has got it right, is
persuade Trump to allow Iran's principal petroleum importers to continue buying oil from the
Islamic Republic. This includes Turkey, China, Japan, India and South Korea. In return, Iran
would itself return to the original nuclear agreement. That's the message Macron sent back to
Tehran with Iran's foreign minister, who airbussed into Biarritz for his briefest of meetings
with the French president.
But what Macron is really doing – which is what almost every EU leader is doing
– is trying to preserve the peace of the Middle East long enough for the Americans to
elect a serious, intelligent, boring and moderately honest political leader to replace the
mentally unbalanced and very dangerous current holder of the highest office in the US.
Well, good luck to the Americans. For at present, they are confronting not the lunatic rogue
state which Messers Bolton and Pompeo have nightmared up for Trump, but a nation governed by
bravely defiant, ruthless, and – yes – devious men. For Iranians understand America
far better than Americans will ever understand Iran.
Will Trump's intimations about meeting with Rouhani win the footrace? His competitor?
Israel's determination to get the Mideast theater of WW3 started in earnest. Racking up two
declarations of war in as many days (Lebanon and Iraq) ain't too shabby a head-start. The
game is to deprive Trump of the initiative. The Israelis are smelling capitulation and a
fresh outbreak of post-JCPOA yakking. The time is now. Trump had better get with the program.
He still has a chance to look like Presidential Instigator. Failing that, he'll just have to
be dragged in unceremoniously and then scramble post facto to look like Instigator. It's a PR
dilemma. His military's already there, poised for action. This may be the first war to launch
right over the head -and better judgement- of JCS Head Dunsford himself. False flag momentum
is a funny thing. The time couldn't be riper for war to get a jump on cooler heads.
After all, War has its own thoughts on the matter and will only let human beings dither
for so long before taking the helm and asserting its own predilections:
"Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation
survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."
--Lincoln Second Inagural
Magnier on Nuttyahoo's escalating provocations encapsulates the most recent series of
events, although he doesn't attempt to link the actions to the upcoming elections. Hezbollah
threatened direct retaliation against Occupied Palestine; Iraq chose to blame the Outlaw US
Empire; Syria remained silent; the G-7 said nothing. The recent proposal by Iran to refurbish
one pipeline and build another to Syria's coastline would certainly become a Zionist target.
So, for the project to have the proper security, Occupied Palestine needs to be liberated.
Nasrallah isn't known as a bluffer, while Nuttyahoo's prone to be too aggressive. Do the
Zionists see the current situation as possibly the final time they have some sort of an
advantage as Magnier seems to imply and attack since they know the Outlaw US Empire won't?
Iran for Multilateralism and Rule of Law, trusting themselves to abide by JCPOA, even if,
as defined as failing, an invitation to Europeans to decide not be tempted by the US to
remove themselves from their only future, and an appeal to the US to honour the
responsibility of their veto sit on the UNSC where the lengthiest document was signed.
BTW, it has become very clear to me that the US withdrawal from the JCPOA with Iran was
co-ordinated with the western European signatories (France, United Kingdom, Germany and EU)
so that "maximum pressure" can be maintained on Iran while F/UK/DE/EU do nothing to honour
their commitments at the same time making it appear that it's Iran in breach rather than the
US/F/UK/DE/EU.
Iran is aware of this and taking action to ensure its preservation . War is coming and
F/UY/DE/EU will be involved on the side of the Great Satan.
"... Contrary to the official rationale, the detention of the Iranian tanker was not consistent with the 2012 EU regulation on sanctions against the Assad government in Syria. The EU Council regulation in question specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel "under the jurisdiction of a member state." ..."
"... The notice required the Gibraltar government to detain any such ship for at least 72 hours if it entered "British Gibraltar Territorial Waters." Significantly, however, the video statement by Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo on July 4 explaining the seizure of the Grace 1 made no such claim and avoided any mention of the precise location of the ship when it was seized. ..."
"... There is a good reason why the chief minister chose not to draw attention to the issue of the ship's location: it is virtually impossible that the ship was in British Gibraltar territorial waters at any time before being boarded. The UK claims territorial waters of three nautical miles from its coast, whereas the Strait of Gibraltar is 7.5 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. That would make the limit of UK territory just north of the middle of the Strait. ..."
"... But international straits must have clearly defined and separated shipping lanes going in different directions. The Grace 1 was in the shipping lane heading east toward the Mediterranean, which is south of the lane for ships heading west toward the Atlantic and thus clearly closer to the coast of Morocco than to the coast of Gibraltar, as can be seen from this live view of typical ship traffic through the strait . So it is quite implausible that the Grace 1 strayed out of its shipping lane into British territorial waters at any time before it was boarded. ..."
"... Such a move clearly violates the global treaty governing the issue -- the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea . Articles 37 through 44 of that agreement, ratified by 167 states, including the UK and the European Union, establish a "regime of transit passage" for international straits like the Strait of Gibraltar that guarantees freedom of navigation for merchant ships. The rules of that regime explicitly forbid states bordering the strait from interfering with the transit passage of a merchant ship, with very narrowly defined exceptions. ..."
"... The evidence indicates, moreover, that the UK's actions were part of a broader scheme coordinated with the Trump administration to tighten pressure on Iran's economy by reducing Iran's ability to export goods. ..."
"... On July 19, Reuters London correspondent Guy Falconbridge reported , "[S]everal diplomatic sources said the United States asked the UK to seize the vessel." ..."
"... Detailed evidence of Bolton deep involvement in the British plan to seize the Iranian tanker has surfaced in reporting on the withdrawal of Panamanian flag status for the Grace 1. ..."
"... The role of Panama's National Security Council signaled Bolton's hand, since he would have been the point of contact with that body. The result of his maneuvering was to leave the Grace 1 without the protection of flag status necessary to sail or visit a port in the middle of its journey. This in conjunction with the British seizure of the ship was yet another episode in the extraordinary American effort to deprive Iran of the most basic sovereign right to participate in the global economy. ..."
"... Back in 2013 2013 there was a rumour afoot that Edward Snowden, who at the time was stuck in the Moscow airport, trapped there by the sudden cancellation mid-flight of his US passport, was going spirited away by the President of Bolivia Evo Morales aboard his private jet. So what the US apparently was lean on it European allies to stop him. This they duly and dutifully did. Spain, France, and others denied overflight rights to the Bolivian jet, forcing it to turn back and land in Austria. There was even a report that once on the ground, the Spanish ambassador to Austria showed up and asked the Bolivian president if he might come out to the plain for a coffee--and presumably to have a poke around to see he could catch Snowden in the act of vanishing into the cargo hold. ..."
"... The rumor turned out to be completely false, but it was the Europeans who wound up with the egg on their face. Not to mention the ones who broke international law. ..."
"... Bolton persuaded the British to play along with the stupid US "maximum pressure" strategy, regardless of its illegality. (Maybe the British government thought that it would placate Trump after Ambassadorgate.) And then of course Pompeo threw them under the bus. It's getting hard to be a US ally (except for Saudi Arabia and Israel.) ..."
"... Spain lodged a formal complaint about the action, because it considers the sea around Gibraltar to be part of its international waters, "We are studying the circumstances and looking at how this affects our sovereignty," Josep Borell, Spain's acting foreign minister, said. So Gibraltar or Spanish waters? Gibraltar – Territorial Waters (1 pg): ..."
"... Worse than the bad behavior of Bolton, and the poodle behavior of Britain, is the utter failure of our press to provide us a skeptical eye and honest look at events. They've been mere stenographers and megaphones for power doing wrong. ..."
"... And this just in. A UK government official has just stated, related to the Iranian tanker stopped near Gibraltar, the UK will not be part of Trump's 'maximum pressure' gambit on Iran. We shall see if Boris Johnson is for or against that policy. ..."
"... John Bolton, war criminal. ..."
"... John Bolton has been desperate for a war with Iran for decades. This is just another escalation in his desperate attempt to get one. He's the classic neocon chicken hawk who is bravely ready to risk and sacrifice other people's lives at the drop of a hat. ..."
"... Since UK is abusing its control of Gibraltar by behaving like a thug, maybe it is better for the international community to support an independent state of Gibraltar, or at least let Spain has it. It will be better for world peace. ..."
"... While I agree with the gist of the article, remember that Bolton has no authority except that which is given to him. So stop blaming Bolton. Blame Trump. ..."
"... The provocations will go on and on until Iran shoots back and then Wash. will get the war it's been trying to start for some time now to pay back all those campaign donors who will profit from another war. ..."
"... The MIC needs constant wars to use up munitions so new ones can be manufactured. It's really just about business and politicians working together for mutual benefit to keep those contributions coming in. With all the other issues facing America, a war with Iran will just add to the end of the USA which is coming faster than you think. ..."
Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis? Evidence suggests he pressured the Brits to seize an
Iranian ship. Why? More war. By Gareth
Porter •
July 23, 2019
While Iran's seizure of a British tanker near the Strait of Hormuz on Friday was a clear response to the British capture of an
Iranian tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4, both the UK and U.S. governments are insisting that Iran's operation was illegal
while the British acted legally.
The facts surrounding the British detention of the Iranian ship, however, suggest that, like the Iranian detention of the British
ship, it was an illegal interference with freedom of navigation through an international strait. And even more importantly, evidence
indicates that the British move was part of a bigger scheme coordinated by National Security Advisor John Bolton.
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called the Iran seizure of the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero "unacceptable" and insisted
that it is "essential that freedom of navigation is maintained and that all ships can move safely and freely in the region."
But the British denied Iran that same freedom of navigation through the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4.
The rationale for detaining the Iranian vessel and its crew was that it was delivering oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions.
This was never questioned by Western news media. But a closer look reveals that the UK had no legal right to enforce those sanctions
against that ship, and that it was a blatant violation of the clearly defined global rules that govern the passage of merchant ships
through international straits.
The evidence also reveals that Bolton was actively involved in targeting the Grace 1 from the time it began its journey in May
as part of the broader Trump administration campaign of "maximum pressure" on Iran.
Contrary to the official rationale, the detention of the Iranian tanker was not consistent with the 2012 EU regulation on
sanctions against the Assad government in Syria. The
EU Council regulation in question
specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business
entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel "under the jurisdiction of a member state."
The UK government planned to claim that the Iranian ship was under British "jurisdiction" when it was passing through the Strait
of Gibraltar to justify its seizure as legally consistent with the EU regulation. A
maritime news outlet has reported that on July 3, the day before the seizure of the ship, the Gibraltar government, which has
no control over its internal security or foreign affairs, issued
a regulation to provide what it would claim
as a legal pretext for the operation. The regulation gave the "chief minister" of the British the power to detain any ship if there
were "reasonable grounds" to "suspect" that it had been or even that it was even "likely" to be in breach of EU regulations.
The notice required the Gibraltar government to detain any such ship for at least 72 hours if it entered "British Gibraltar
Territorial Waters." Significantly, however, the video statement
by Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo on July 4 explaining the seizure of the Grace 1 made no such claim and avoided any
mention of the precise location of the ship when it was seized.
There is a good reason why the chief minister chose not to draw attention to the issue of the ship's location: it is virtually
impossible that the ship was in British Gibraltar territorial waters at any time before being boarded. The UK claims
territorial waters of three nautical miles from its coast, whereas
the Strait of Gibraltar is 7.5 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. That would make the limit of UK territory just north of
the middle of the Strait.
But international straits must have clearly defined and separated shipping lanes going in different directions. The Grace
1 was in the shipping lane heading east
toward the Mediterranean, which is south of the lane for ships heading west toward the Atlantic and thus clearly closer to the
coast of Morocco than to the coast of Gibraltar, as can be seen from this
live view of typical ship traffic
through the strait . So it is quite implausible that the Grace 1 strayed out of its shipping lane into British territorial waters
at any time before it was boarded.
But even if the ship had done so, that would not have given the UK "jurisdiction" over the Grace 1 and allowed it to legally
seize the ship. Such a move clearly violates the global treaty governing the issue -- the
United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea . Articles 37 through 44 of that agreement, ratified by 167 states, including the UK and the European Union,
establish a "regime of transit passage" for international straits like the Strait of Gibraltar that guarantees freedom of navigation
for merchant ships. The rules of that regime explicitly forbid states bordering the strait from interfering with the transit passage
of a merchant ship, with very narrowly defined exceptions.
These articles allow coastal states to adopt regulations relating to safety of navigation, pollution control, prevention of fishing,
and "loading or unloading any commodity in contravention of customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations" of bordering
states -- but for no other reason. The British seizure and detention of the Grace 1 was clearly not related to any of these concerns
and thus a violation of the treaty.
The evidence indicates, moreover, that the UK's actions were part of a broader scheme coordinated with the Trump administration
to tighten pressure on Iran's economy by reducing Iran's ability to export goods.
The statement by Gibraltar's chief minister said the
decision to seize the ship was taken after the receipt of "information" that provided "reasonable grounds" for suspicion that it
was carrying oil destined for Syria's Banyas refinery. That suggested the intelligence had come from a government that neither he
nor the British wished to reveal.
BBC defense correspondent Jonathan Beale reported: "[I]t appears
the intelligence came from the United States." Acting Spanish Foreign Minister Joseph Borrell commented on July 4 that the British
seizure had followed "a demand from the United States to the UK." On July 19, Reuters London correspondent Guy Falconbridge
reported , "[S]everal diplomatic sources said the United States asked the UK to seize the vessel."
Detailed evidence of Bolton deep involvement in the British plan to seize the Iranian tanker has surfaced in reporting on
the withdrawal of Panamanian flag status for the Grace 1.
Panama was the flag state for many of the Iranian-owned vessels carrying various items exported by Iran. But when the Trump administration
reinstated economic sanctions against Iran in October 2018, it included prohibitions on industry services such as insurance and reinsurance.
This decision was accompanied by
political pressure on Panama to withdraw Panamanian flag status from 59 Iranian vessels, many of which were owned by Iranian
state-affiliated companies. Without such flag status, the Iranian-owned vessels could not get insurance for shipments by freighter.
That move was aimed at discouraging ports, canal operators, and private firms from allowing Iranian tankers to use their facilities.
The State Department's Brian Hook, who is in charge of the sanctions,
warned those
entities last November that the Trump administration believed they would be responsible for the costs of an accident involving a
self-insured Iranian tanker.
But the Grace 1 was special case, because it still had Panamanian flag status when it began its long journey around the Southern
tip of Africa on the way to the Mediterranean. That trip began in late May, according to Automatic Identification System
data cited by Riviera Maritime Media . It was no coincidence that the Panamanian Maritime Authority
delisted the Grace 1 on May 29 -- just as the ship was beginning its journey. That decision came immediately after Panama's National
Security Council issued an alert
claiming that the Iranian-owned tanker "may be participating in terrorism financing in supporting the destabilization activities
of some regimes led by terrorist groups."
The Panamanian body did not cite any evidence that the Grace 1 had ever been linked to terrorism.
The role of Panama's National Security Council signaled Bolton's hand, since he would have been the point of contact with
that body. The result of his maneuvering was to leave the Grace 1 without the protection of flag status necessary to sail or visit
a port in the middle of its journey. This in conjunction with the British seizure of the ship was yet another episode in the extraordinary
American effort to deprive Iran of the most basic sovereign right to participate in the global economy.
Now that Iran has detained a British ship in order to force the UK to release the Grace 1, the British Foreign Ministry will claim
that its seizure of the Iranian ship was entirely legitimate. The actual facts, however, put that charge under serious suspicion.
Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative . He is also the author
of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Honestly the Brits are such idiots, we lied them into a war once. They knew we were lying and went for it anyway. Now the are
falling for it again. Maybe it is May's parting gift to Boris?
Same EU legislation only forbids Syria exporting oil and not EU entities selling to Syria (albeit with some additional paperwork).
However, it doesn't forbid other non-EU states to sell oil to Syria. They are not behaving like the US. And this is also not UN
sanctioned. In fact, UK is also acting against the spirit of JPCOA towards Iran. Speak about Perfidious Albion (others would say
US lapdog).
Back in 2013 2013 there was a rumour afoot that Edward Snowden, who at the time was stuck in the Moscow airport, trapped
there by the sudden cancellation mid-flight of his US passport, was going spirited away by the President of Bolivia Evo Morales
aboard his private jet. So what the US apparently was lean on it European allies to stop him. This they duly and dutifully did.
Spain, France, and others denied overflight rights to the Bolivian jet, forcing it to turn back and land in Austria. There was
even a report that once on the ground, the Spanish ambassador to Austria showed up and asked the Bolivian president if he might
come out to the plain for a coffee--and presumably to have a poke around to see he could catch Snowden in the act of vanishing
into the cargo hold.
The rumor turned out to be completely false, but it was the Europeans who wound up with the egg on their face. Not to mention
the ones who broke international law.
Now we find that once again a European country had (apparently) gone out on a limb for the US--and wound up with egg on its
face for trying to show its loyalty to the US in an all-too-slavish fashion by doing America's dirty work.
Bolton persuaded the British to play along with the stupid US "maximum pressure" strategy, regardless of its illegality. (Maybe
the British government thought that it would placate Trump after Ambassadorgate.) And then of course Pompeo threw them under the
bus. It's getting hard to be a US ally (except for Saudi Arabia and Israel.)
The very fact that the UK tried to present its hijack of Iran Oil as an implementation of EU sanctions dovetail well with Bolton's
objective of creating another of those "international coalitions" without a UN mandate engaging in 'Crimes of Aggression".
The total lack of support from the EU for this UK hijack signals another defeat to both the UK and the neocons of America.
Too bad there isn't an international version of the ACLU to argue Iran's legal case before the EU body. What typically happens
is that Iran will refuse to send representation because that would in effect, acknowledge their authority. The EU will have a
Kangaroo court and enter a vacant decision. This has happened numerous times in the U.S.
Would anyone in the U.S. or EU recognize an Iranian court making similar claims? Speaking of which, the entire point of UN
treaties and international law is to prevent individual countries from passing special purpose legislation targeting specific
countries. Why couldn't Iran pass a law sanctioning EU vessels that tried to use their territorial waters, what is so special
about the EU, because it is an acronym?
Spain lodged a formal complaint about the action, because it considers the sea around Gibraltar to be part of its international
waters, "We are studying the circumstances and looking at how this affects our sovereignty," Josep Borell, Spain's acting foreign
minister, said. So Gibraltar or Spanish waters? Gibraltar – Territorial Waters (1 pg):
https://www.academia.edu/30...
Worse than the bad behavior of Bolton, and the poodle behavior of Britain, is the utter failure of our press to provide us
a skeptical eye and honest look at events. They've been mere stenographers and megaphones for power doing wrong.
Thanks for the investigative reporting. Trump has lied almost 11,000 times, so I think nobody expects the truth from The Trump
Administration anytime soon. Especially if it goes against the narrative.
And this just in. A UK government official has just stated, related to the Iranian tanker stopped near Gibraltar, the UK will
not be part of Trump's 'maximum pressure' gambit on Iran. We shall see if Boris Johnson is for or against that policy.
OK, so why did the Brits go along with it? Are they so stupid as to not figure out that Iran might respond in kind, or did the
Brits not also want war?
John Bolton has been desperate for a war with Iran for decades. This is just another escalation in his desperate attempt to
get one. He's the classic neocon chicken hawk who is bravely ready to risk and sacrifice other people's lives at the drop of a
hat.
Since UK is abusing its control of Gibraltar by behaving like a thug, maybe it is better for the international community to
support an independent state of Gibraltar, or at least let Spain has it. It will be better for world peace.
While I agree with the gist of the article, remember that Bolton has no authority except that which is given to him.
So stop blaming Bolton. Blame Trump.
The provocations will go on and on until Iran shoots back and then Wash. will get the war it's been trying to start for some time
now to pay back all those campaign donors who will profit from another war.
The MIC needs constant wars to use up munitions so
new ones can be manufactured. It's really just about business and politicians working together for mutual benefit to keep those
contributions coming in. With all the other issues facing America, a war with Iran will just add to the end of the USA which is
coming faster than you think.
The key problem for Trump is reaction of China and Russia... If Russia supports Iran the USA attack onIran might well be the
second Vietnam and KSA will probably seize to exit.
Notable quotes:
"... The bottom-line is this -- if Trump launches military strikes against Iranian military targets it is very likely he will ignite a series of events that will escalate beyond his control, expose him as a paper tiger full of empty bellicose threats and risk a war with other countries, including Russia and China. ..."
"... The "War" class in Washington and the media are exhorting tough action and doing all within their power to portray Iran as an imminent threat to the West. The mantra, "the must be stopped," is being repeated ad nauseam in all of the media echo changers. President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when it comes to employing military force. He reminds me of Lyndon Johnson during the early stages of the Vietnam War -- i.e., being exhorted to take action, increase forces and not back down rather than lose face on the international front. ..."
"... it is more likely the Brits intended this as a provocation, in coordination with some members of Trump's team, that would bait the Iranians to respond in similar fashion. Iran has taken the bait and given the Brits what Iran sees as a dose of its own medicine. ..."
"... There is a dangerous delusion within the Trump National Security team. They believe we are so dominant that Iran will not dare fight us. I prefer to rely on the sage counsel of Colonel Patrick Lang -- the Iranians are not afraid to fight us and, if backed into a corner, will do so. ..."
"... The tanker is too big to use the Suez canal and too big to discharge oil in a Syrian port. It was possibly going to a Mediterranean port, but Iran will not back-down to the UK. ..."
"... As the Saudi's appear to be losing their war with Yemen, the UAE has announced that they are not desirous of being in the middle of any US-Iran conflict. Qatar is doing a huge nat gas deal with Iran. ..."
"... A 50% reduction in oil & LNG output for greater than 3 months would crush already weakening Asian economies who are the manufactured products supply chain for most of the world and in particular the US. Will voters in Ohio, Wisconsin & Michigan cheer Trump's military strikes on Teheran when prices at Walmart double? ..."
"... I have no faith in Donald Trump when it comes to Israeli's interests. Embassy moved to Jerusalem check, Golan Heights check. Deal of the Century by his Anti-Christ Son-In-Law check. Not sure if that is a joke or not. ..."
"... "Trump's advisers have a demented obsession with Iran. They've been spoiling for a fight with Iran for decades. They have no idea how destructive it would be. It would make Iraq look like a tea party." ..."
"... Yes. A demented obsession that is not in US interests. Is it really in Saudi and Israeli interests when they may be hurt too? ..."
"... The same idiots running the show seem to believe that American oil and gas fracking makes it impervious to the loss of Middle Eastern oil (in fact, a secret motivation might be to save American frackers economically), but they forget that oil is a fungible commodity and always flows to the highest bidder. They could try of ban oil exports, but the Europe and Japan's economies would be utterly toast as there would be virtually no oil available to them, especially if Russia backed Iran and cut them off. ..."
"... Rather than blaming this on the media, neocons or the Pentagon, put the blame where it lies - with President Trump. Trump campaigned on tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement which he did once he was elected. The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions on Iran which are meant to inflict serious hardship on the Iranian people. Trump hired Bolton and Pompeo - both hawks from previous administrations. Trump is attempting to enforce the sanctions. Is there anyone else to blame but Trump? ..."
"... The use of the golden rule suggests problems with your logic. Would we sit still, for example, if Russia and/or China started fostering guerrilla movements in South America? Of course not. We would actively intervene in support of what we see as our local security imperatives. That appears to me to be all Iran is doing in its region. ..."
"... If the Gulf oilfields in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily rocketed and put out of commission along with tanker loading docks and pipeline infrastructure, there won't be any oil to ship out of the Gulf anyway. ..."
"... The primary damage from a war with Iran will be economic. Oil flowing through the Staits will come to a halt and that will hit China, Japan and the rest of Asia very hard and their buying power will decrease significantly hurting our exports. Even though the U.S is self-sufficient in oil if oil prices hit $100+ on the world market look for the U.S. oil companies to increase their prices to approach the world price driving gas prices into the $5.00+/gallon range. Trump will undoubtably prohibit U.S oil exports but the damage to the economies world wide will still negatively impact the U.S. ..."
"... Post Scriptum: Signs of a dying paradigm as the western elite have gone into total sclerotic mode. Dangerous as a rabid dog. ..."
Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of doing what the "Never Trumpers" could not--destroy his Presidency and make re-election
impossible. It all boils down to whether or not he decides to launch military strikes on Iran. The bottom-line is this -- if
Trump launches military strikes against Iranian military targets it is very likely he will ignite a series of events that will escalate
beyond his control, expose him as a paper tiger full of empty bellicose threats and risk a war with other countries, including Russia
and China.
The "War" class in Washington and the media are exhorting tough action and doing all within their power to
portray Iran as an imminent threat to the West. The mantra, "the must be stopped," is being repeated ad nauseam in all of the media
echo changers. President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when it comes to
employing military force. He reminds me of Lyndon Johnson during the early stages of the Vietnam War -- i.e., being exhorted to take
action, increase forces and not back down rather than lose face on the international front.
The media is busy pushing the lie that Iran launched an unprovoked "attack" on a British flagged ship. They ignore the British
action two weeks ago, when the British Navy seized an Iranian flagged tanker heading to Syria. Britain justifies its action as just
keeping the sanction regime in place. But it is more likely the Brits intended this as a provocation, in coordination with some
members of Trump's team, that would bait the Iranians to respond in similar fashion. Iran has taken the bait and given the Brits
what Iran sees as a dose of its own medicine.
There is a dangerous delusion within the Trump National Security team. They believe we are so dominant that Iran will not
dare fight us. I prefer to rely on the sage counsel of Colonel Patrick Lang -- the Iranians are not afraid to fight us and, if backed
into a corner, will do so.
I see at least four possible scenarios for this current situation. If you can think of others please add in the comments section.
"two weeks ago, when the British Navy seized an Iranian flagged tanker"
Via Associated Press:
Royal Marines took part in the seizure of the Iranian oil tanker by Gibraltar, a British overseas territory off the southern
coast of Spain. Officials there initially said the July 4 seizure happened on orders from the U.S." .......
It gets even better than on orders from the U.S.
"Britain has said it would release the vessel, which was carrying more than 2 million barrels of Iranian crude, if Iran could
prove it was not breaching EU sanctions"
We are supposed to believe that Syria is importing oil on ships which sail through the Straights of Gibraltar rather than getting
oil from, say, Russia! or going from Iran (it is Iranian oil, so they say) through the Suez Canal? What did they
do, sail around the continent of Africa to stage this?
So the brilliant minds at GCHQ that brought us Christopher Steele and the dossier have decided that they really, really, need
to get rid of the Orange Man and they don't care how many Iranian or American lives it takes. I wonder just how many people the
man not in the news, Jeffrey Epstein, had the dirty goods on and just which government was behind his operation.
The tanker is too big to use the Suez canal and too big to discharge oil in a Syrian port. It was possibly going to a Mediterranean
port, but Iran will not back-down to the UK.
Thanks for the comment. I did a bit more research. It seems strange to me that Iran would use a ship to large for the canal
to make such a shipment to Syria, if indeed that was where it was heading.
Larry, your intel about the JCS not advising caution is most disheartening. I wouldn't be surprised if the warmongers surrounding
Trump are also telling him that his rally attending base is all for taking it to the raghead terrorists. That may not be far off.
Sure those who support Trump for his professed aversion to adventurism will be appalled at war with Iran, but his more rabid base
may follow him anywhere. Trump has no ideological need for war, but he does have a psychological need for adoration. That's not
a good situation.
"...his rally attending base is all for taking it to the raghead terrorists.."
TTG
I have seen private surveys commissioned by a deep pocketed hedge fund of working class folks in the mid-west & the south.
When the consequences of a military confrontation with Iran are described the overwhelming majority oppose it.
Larry is spot on. Trump will lose his re-election bid if he kowtows to Bibi & MbS. The short-term financial & economic effects
would crush his base and the half-life of jingoism after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, & Syria will be rather short. Trump will be
blamed by the "right" for cocking up teaching Iran a lesson and demonized by the "left "for getting us into another ME quagmire.
How does one wake POTUS Trump to the reality that his NEOCONS and Israel Firsters in his Cabinet will destroy his Presidency if
he doesn't jettison them out the door.
There is an effort underway to undermine Israeli influence in the US, and I think the calculus might be to use the exact thing
Israelis want most (war with Iran) to do that. I think the resurrection of the Epstein case is also part of that effort. Thus,
war with Iran is inevitable.
"There is an effort underway to undermine Israeli influence in the US"
Is it an organized effort? Where do I sign up?
Rick Wiles heads TruNews, a Christian evangelical network. He's been outspoken in his criticism of zionism, calls out Christian
zionists, and deplores that "the US has been taken over by zionists." To be sure, ADL has labeled Wiles an "antisemite." If TruNews
survives, it may be part of game-changing.
"From what I am hearing from knowledgeable sources [is that] no one on the Joint Chiefs of Staff at DOD are advising caution."
We should probably ignore the notion that the Joint Chiefs are bullish about a war with Iran -- the situation in the area is
terrible for us and the Joint Chiefs know it.
For example, Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan have military understandings with Iran and the former is now installing advanced S-400
Russian missiles to defend itself from us. Furthermore, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Azerbajian and Armenia will not allow
transit of war materiel or aircraft en-route to Iran. So how does the US project anything into that country?
Then again, US Central Command is located in Iran friendly Quatar, which merely hosts us and could require us to leave. How
come? Wouldn't you know it, Quatar is developing a massive gas reserve with Iran in the Gulf, is now very, very friendly with
big-brother Turkey and presently negotiating with Russia for S-400 missiles -- clearly against us.
Well, what about our Navy?
Alas, recent improvements in missiles have rendered our deep water Navy a liability -- not that the narrow Persian Gulf / Sea
of Oman is deep in any case. (President Trump learned about our Navy's vulnerability to missile attack last year as the Pentagon
quickly pulled our three carrier group force from Korea and parked those impressive ships on the south coast of Australia! )
Then there is Iran's near east client / ally Hezbollah, which has made clear that any bombing of Iran, a huge country, would
trigger heavy missile attack on postage-stamp Israel.
The Neocons may have managed to silence public Pentagon doubts, but President Trump is clearly attempting to avoid military
adventures. "No, the Iran downed drone was old and not that expensive." "The UK captured an Iranian tanker and the Iranians have
reciprocated. The two should sit down and work the situation out."
I believe that Iran is going to want to avoid war if they can. Their program of adding precision guidance to Hezbollah missiles
in Lebanon means that the longer they postpone war, the better for them. If they get to a point where they have 10,000 precision
guided missiles in Lebanon then the next Israel-Lebanon war will force Israel into a humiliating defeat.
Eighty percent of Israel's water comes from water desalination plants - and then there are electricity generation plants, sewage
treatment plants, and numerous other infrastructure targets that can be hit. Israeli civilians are soft and will cry uncle as
soon as their air conditioning cuts out.
Why not, then, have the Americans initiate the deed now... destroy Iran and Lebanon, and then, with France, the UK, Germany,
Canada et al. spend billions to rebuild Israel, with the Palestinians being sent to Jordan (if not worse).
Israel has gambled on a broader war several times in the past, and they believe (despite the fiasco in Lebanon) that each was
a win.
When did this group, leading the charge overseas in D.C. for the past 20 years, once get it right, as far as assumptions and expectations
of military necessities or outcomes? I am beginning to think this creating a greater danger out of a lesser mess is a feature,
not a defect. If so, why? To what end? Or is the policy process that broken?
Saddam ain't around any more, neither is Muammar Gaddafi. The neocons take those as great victories since the sacred state
of Israel is safe from those two.
imo a war with iran is theatre and will not take place.
should iran be attacked imo you can kiss the UAE goodbye as well as most if not all of the Saudi oil infrastructre along the
gulf. i would also expect a massive direct bombardment of israeli cities and other important targets from hezbollah starting with
the massive ammonia storage system in haifa whose destruction would annihilate that entire region. all of useful israel is in
the middle to upper third of the country closest to lebanon and easy reach for all of hezbollahs missiles.
the persian gulf upon the start of the war becomes the hotel california for any warship within. none would likely escape. and
the coup de gra for iran is whether they have the ballistic missile reach and or can gain access to russian long range bombers
fitted with kalibr or better cruise missiles able to smash diego garcia absolutely critical american relaestate in the indian
ocean.
trump imo is not crazy and can read a map as well as anyone with help from his REAL pentagon military professionals.
we have not even gotten to what happens to all those oil and interest rate derivatives far out of the money right now in somewhat
normal times. if war starts they go from notional to real fast and the western financial system implodes even with a force majeure
declaration
An Iran war would indeed most probably kill off Trump's chance of re-election. The almost inevitable spike in the price of oil
which it would bring about would have two implications:
1/ ROTW xUS manufacturing is already in recession, with services close to joining it in many countries. The US is clearly slowing
down and appears headed on the same course. The global economy is in no shape to withstand even a relatively short-lived surge
in oil prices.
2/ There is no knowing what lurks out there in the oil derivatives market, but the banking system - particularly the European
banking system - is far too fragile to sustain another bout of counterparty risk aversion along the lines of 2007/08. (And amongst
the trillions of gross derivatives exposure, one has to wonder just how many US and other banks are sitting across from Deutsche
Bank oil positions and happily netting off the counterparty risk.)
Regretably, from my side of the Atlantic the US looks like a traditional imperial power, addicted to war and conquest and with
a significant proportion of the population fetishizing (probably not a real verb) all things military. Whether Trump can be truly
damaged by extending the 'forever war' to Iran depends very much on how it goes - and I doubt he has the knowledge required to
think through all the plausible scenarios. We can be a lot more confident that carrying the blame for an unnecessary recession
into the election campaign has a solid chance of sinking him.
Just what good has the past two decades of "war and conquest" done for America, whether flyover country, Jussie Smollett's
"Maga Country" section of Chicago or the homeless encampments of Seattle, LA or Portland?
As the Saudi's appear to be losing their war with Yemen, the UAE has announced that they are not desirous of being in the
middle of any US-Iran conflict. Qatar is doing a huge nat gas deal with Iran.
Bolton is heading to Japan to "mediate" the
current economic disagreements between Japan and S. Korea.
Pompeo is declaring that the Iranian Ballistic Missile program is suddenly on the table. It would appear that the whole Iranian
atomic bomb thing was smoke and mirrors and hasbara.
There is a deal available, preparation for making the deal will involve political kabuki, grand posturing, the beating of drums
without rhythm and the flooding of the Old American Infotainment outlets with much wailing and whining about "the only democracy
in the MENA."
A deal will eventuate that allows both the USA and Iran to move on, about a week before the 2020 presidential election. Or
maybe not.
I have a question for those of you well versed with Iranian military capability. What are the capabilities of Iranian ballistic
missiles in terms of range, precision and payload lethality?
As Col. Lang has noted in the transition to war, before the US
Navy gets its ducks in a row, that is the window of opportunity that Iran has to strike back. What damage could they inflict on
oil & gas infrastructure including LNG, port & pipelines across UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia?
A 50% reduction in oil & LNG output for greater than 3 months would crush already weakening Asian economies who are the
manufactured products supply chain for most of the world and in particular the US. Will voters in Ohio, Wisconsin & Michigan cheer
Trump's military strikes on Teheran when prices at Walmart double?
As Larry notes "..President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when
it comes to employing military force.." , but I believe he has good political instincts and as his Reality TV/Twitter presidency
shows he has an excellent sense of how it plays both in the MSM and social media. He must know that while the "shock & awe" and
"boom-boom" videos may give him an instant boost the stock market that he has rested his presidency on may not soar but in fact
plummet. And he can't blame Jay Powell for that.
He must also instinctually know that November 2020 is a year away and a lot can go wrong as it is economically and in financial
markets since he's been harping at the Fed to lower rates in supposedly the best economy evah. Uncertainty spikes volatility and
the credit markets are already stressed particularly in offshore eurodollar funding which is an order of magnitude larger than
mortgage credit markets were in 2007.
Maybe Rand Paul is his counter to the ziocon fifth column? I don't think he's that foolish to pull the trigger on Iran and
sink his presidency when the Deep State & NeverTrumpers are out for his blood. He must know he'll lose immunity from legal jeopardy
when he's no longer POTUS.
As Col. Lang has repeatedly observed, the decisions to go to war do not necessarily follow economic, nor domestic political logic.
It is therefore better to speculate on the players state of mind rather than looking at the aforesaid rational drivers like economics
and votes.
I have no faith in Donald Trump when it comes to Israeli's interests. Embassy moved to Jerusalem check, Golan Heights check.
Deal of the Century by his Anti-Christ Son-In-Law check. Not sure if that is a joke or not.
Israeli wants Iran destroyed and their ability to pressure US Presidents to do their bidding all the way back to President
Truman is 100% success. Trump so cravenly promotes the Zionist interest that I see no reason he will not pursue regime change
in Iran to its logical conclusion.
The plan is ultimately Greater Israeli and the leaders of Iran are well aware of this.
Many comments say that Israeli will be badly damaged by any regional war. Why do you believe Israeli is just going to take
the blows? Analysis is not advocacy as Col. Lang says.
My fear is the ultimate weapons of mass destruction are introduced into the Middle East.
"Trump's advisers have a demented obsession with Iran. They've been spoiling for a fight with Iran for decades. They have no idea
how destructive it would be. It would make Iraq look like a tea party."
Option 1 - Diplomatic solution: The UK will do what it must do, ie what the US allows it to do. The GB Imperial project is no
more and the UK is riding along somewhere in the wake of the Imperial City. Whatever influence it exerts on power there is by
flattery or deception (Steele dossier.) Trump slapped the UK Ambassador out of Washington as if he were a fly. Moreover, the UK
alone carries no stick to wield against Iran. Iran is no Falklands.
Options 2 thru 4 - some degree of military attack on Iran:
as you point out, the return on investment for any kind of attack on Iran is highly unpredictable. It depends entirely on how
Iran chooses to respond and whether it decides to roll the dice, go all in, and endure the onslaught, and inflict what damage
it can where it can, which it very well may. Does anyone in Washington have an intel based fix on Iran's intentions when attacked?
I doubt it.
Not a single intervention in the last 18 years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya resulted in the anticipated outcome. Do they
have rear view mirrors in Washington?
My weakly held expectation, especially now with the passing of a few days, is that Washington will decide to temporize and
tell the UK to accept the humiliation, in effect kicking the can down the road. Everyone will know it is only doing what it has
been told to do.
Of course they will announce more face saving sanctions. The Donald will hope that he will be able to gut it out to 2020 without
having to make a decision that could blow him up, and likely would - but who knows? Iran will hope to gut it out to 2020 and in
the interim pray to God that some Democrat floats back down to earth with some issues, like the Donald once espoused, that will
be used to beat the Donald and send him and his family back to the upper East Side.
With the escalation game fully in play, it's going to be a close call.
I find it a bit hard to believe that leaders like Dunford, Selva, Milley, Richardson, and the others on the Joint Chiefs are
not advising caution. Milley, the next Chairman, for sure has advised caution at his recent Senate hearing. Dunford has only pushed
for an international coalition Task Force to guard ships transiting the Strait. Selva and Richardson appear to be more worried
about China.
Let us all hope that your knowledgeable sources are wrong.
The real danger is if Fred Fleitz gets to be DNI. If that happens be prepared for another scam like the Office of Special Plans
a la Wolfowicz and Feith. Probably Bolton and/or PomPom already have one hiding in the basement ready to go.
Iran's FM Zarif made a peaceful impression during Fareed Zakaria's interview. But all the headlines focus on his one statement:
"Start a war with Iran and we will end it" . Although those were NOT his words, what he said was "We will never start
a war,...But we will defend ourselves, and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who ends it."
The question is whether he speaks for the hardliners.
You forgot to mention what will happen to the world economy if the Strait of Hormuz is closed to all shipping by Iranian missiles
an mines. Stock marks would collapse and a deep recession if not depression would ensue quickly.
The same idiots running the show seem to believe that American oil and gas fracking makes it impervious to the loss of
Middle Eastern oil (in fact, a secret motivation might be to save American frackers economically), but they forget that oil is
a fungible commodity and always flows to the highest bidder. They could try of ban oil exports, but the Europe and Japan's economies
would be utterly toast as there would be virtually no oil available to them, especially if Russia backed Iran and cut them off.
Rather than blaming this on the media, neocons or the Pentagon, put the blame where it lies - with President Trump. Trump
campaigned on tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement which he did once he was elected. The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions
on Iran which are meant to inflict serious hardship on the Iranian people. Trump hired Bolton and Pompeo - both hawks from previous
administrations. Trump is attempting to enforce the sanctions. Is there anyone else to blame but Trump?
Iran is also not entirely innocent in the affairs of the Middle East. Israel believes with some evidence that Iran is building
forward bases in Syria - an unacceptable condition for Israel considering the thousands of missiles owned by Hezbollah and the
ballistic missile testing by Iran. Iran is also supplying weapons directly to Hezbollah (as they always have). In addition, Iran
is supplying weapons and (likely) ballistic missile technology to the Houthis. The Houthis have used ballistic missiles to attack
the Saudis. Yemen is on the border of Saudi Arabia - and a (Shia) Houthi government is unacceptable to the Saudis. The Trump administration
tore up the nuclear agreement because of the destabilizing political agenda of Iran (to US interests).
Trump campaigned on a more isolationist foreign policy so option 1 is still the most likely possibility for the moment (IMO).
The use of the golden rule suggests problems with your logic. Would we sit still, for example, if Russia and/or China started
fostering guerrilla movements in South America? Of course not. We would actively intervene in support of what we see as our local
security imperatives. That appears to me to be all Iran is doing in its region.
Your third paragraph is a stretch. Iran's actions that you describe are realistic (in the strategic sense of the word) responses
to Israel's overt hostility, overwhelming superiority in air power and its possession of scores of nuclear weapons.
I'm wondering if in case of war, Iran would need to "close the Gulf" at all.
If the Gulf oilfields in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily rocketed and put out of commission along with tanker loading
docks and pipeline infrastructure, there won't be any oil to ship out of the Gulf anyway.
The primary damage from a war with Iran will be economic. Oil flowing through the Staits will come to a halt and that will
hit China, Japan and the rest of Asia very hard and their buying power will decrease significantly hurting our exports. Even though
the U.S is self-sufficient in oil if oil prices hit $100+ on the world market look for the U.S. oil companies to increase their
prices to approach the world price driving gas prices into the $5.00+/gallon range. Trump will undoubtably prohibit U.S oil exports
but the damage to the economies world wide will still negatively impact the U.S.
Insurance on oil vessels will become almost impossible to get. The U.S will have to indemnify ship owners and I suspect
many will not trust the U.S. to come through with the money for claims. Trump has a history of this and thus many ships will stay
in port.
A war with Iran will not be won or lost militarily, but economically. Iran is 4 times the size of Iraq and has 3 times the
population and I simply do not think we can successfully occupy the country. That being the case, I don't think the U.S can permanently
prevent sabatoge in the Staits - meaning an oil induced recession will linger world wide for many years.
UNO: increased false flag incident instigated by the anglo-zionist
DUE:Increased takfiri movements in Idlib and provocatiev
attacks InnAleppo ,Hama Dara and Dier Ezurr as the Syrian Arab Army is consolidating around Northern Hama and Around Idlib .
TRE: More tanker siezures by the Nato cohorts and portraying Iran as breachoing the JCPCOA treaty. Nevr mentioning the breach
of contract from the western alliance from Pax-Americana and its Western European vassals
Quattro Russia and China will be either utilised as middle men or further labelled as agressors and Iranian?Syrian?Yemeni apologist.
Post Scriptum: Signs of a dying paradigm as the western elite have gone into total sclerotic mode. Dangerous as a rabid
dog.
Last week it was all fire and brimstone. The US was threatening more sanctions on Iran, the
Brits were seizing oil tankers and Iran was violating the JCPOA.
I thought National Security Advisor John Bolton said the US would apply pressure until "the
pips squeak."
Where the pips are squeaking is on the Arabian Peninsula, not across the Persian Gulf in
Bandar Abbas. Specifically, I'm talking about the United Arab Emirates. The UAE sent a
delegation to Tehran recently that coincided with its partial withdrawal of troops from
Yemen.
"The UAE would like to avoid seeing their country transformed into a battlefield between
the US and Iran in case of war, particularly if Trump is re-elected. The Emirates officials
noted that the US did not respond to Iran's retaliation in the Gulf and in particularly when
the US drone was downed. This indicates that Iran is prepared for confrontation and will
implement its explicit menace, to hit any country from which the US carries out their attacks
on Iran. We want to be out of all this ", an Emirates official told his Iranian counterpart
in Tehran.
Iran promised to talk to the Yemeni officials to avoid hitting targets in Dubai and Abu
Dhabi as long as the UAE pulls out its forces from the Yemen and stops this useless war.
Saudi Crown Prime Mohammad Bin Salman is finding himself without his main Emirates ally,
caught in a war that is unwinnable for the Saudi regime. The Yemeni Houthis have taken the
initiative, hitting several Saudi strategic targets. Saudi Arabia has no realistic objectives
and seems to have lost the appetite to continue the war in Yemen.
So, with the Houthis successfully striking major targets inside Saudi Arabia and the UAE
abruptly pulling forces out, the war in Yemen has reached a critical juncture. Remember, the
Republican-controlled Senate approved a bill withdrawing support for the war back in March,
which the White House had to veto in support of its fading hopes for its Israeli/Palestinian
deal pushed by Jared Kushner.
But things have changed significantly since then as that deal has been indefinitely
postponed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu facing a second election this fall
after he failed to secure a stable coalition.
After that there was the failed economic conference in
Bahrain in June where Kushner revealed the economic part of the plan to a half-empty room
where only the backers of the plan showed any real support.
And that's the important part of this story, because it was Kushner's plan which was the
impetus for all of this insane anti-Iran belligerence in the first place. Uniting the Gulf
states around a security pact leveraging the U.S/Israeli/Saudi alliance was part of what was
supposed to pressure the Palestinians to the bargaining table.
By placing maximum economic sanctions on both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iran while continuing
to foment chaos in Syria was supposed to force Israel's enemies to fold under the pressure
which would, in turn, see the Palestinians surrender to the will of Kushner and Bibi.
The problem is, it didn't work. And now Trump is left holding the bag on this idiotic policy
which culminated in an obvious provocation when Iran shot down a $220 million Global Hawk
surveillance drone, nearly sparking a wider war.
But what it did was expose the US and not Iran as the cause of the current problems.
Since then Trump finally had to stand up and be the grown-up in the room, such as he is, and
put an end to this madness.
The UAE understood the potential for Iran's asymmetric response to US belligerence. The
Saudis cannot win the war in Yemen that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began. The fallout
from this war has been to push Qatar out of the orbit of the rest of the Gulf Cooperation
Council, cutting deals with Iran over developing the massive North Pars gas field and pipelines
to Europe.
And now the UAE has realized it is facing an existential threat to its future in any
confrontation between Iran and the US
What's telling is that Trump is making Yemen the issue to negotiate down rather than Iran's
nuclear ambitions. Because it was never about the nuclear program. It was always about Iran's
ballistic missile program.
And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo would have us believe that for the first time Iran's
missile program is on the negotiating table. I have no idea if that's actually true, but it's a
dead giveaway that it's what the US is after.
The main reason why Trump and Netanyahu are so angry about the JCPOA is the mutual
outsourcing of the nuclear ballistic missile program by Iran and North Korea. North Korea was
working on the warhead while Iran worked on the ballistic missile.
Trump tweeted about this nearly two years ago, confirming this link. I wrote about it when
he did this. Nearly everything I said about North Korea in the blog post is now applicable
to Iran. This was why he hated the JCPOA, it didn't actually stop the development of Iran and
North Korea into nuclear states.
But tearing up the deal was the wrong approach to solving the problem. Stop pouring hundreds
of billions of dollars in weapons to the region, as Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif pointed out
recently, is the problem . By doing this he took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Chinese Premier Xi Jinping off his side of the table.
Now he stands isolated with only the provocateurs – Israel, the U.K., Saudi Arabia
– trying to goad him forward into doing something he doesn't want to do. And all of those
provocations that have occurred in the past month have failed to move either Trump or the
Iranians. They've learned patience, possibly from Putin. Call it geopolitical rope-a-dope, if
you will.
I said last month that the key to solving Iran's nuclear ambitions was solving the
relationship with North Korea. Trump, smartly, went there, doing what only he could
do , talk with DPRK Chairman Kim Jong-Un and reiterate his sincere desire to end
proliferation of nuclear weapons.
He can get Iran to the table but he's going to have to give up something. So, now framing
the negotiations with Iran around their demands we stop arming the Saudis is politically
feasible.
Trump can't, at this point, back down directly with Iran. Yemen is deeply unpopular here and
ending our support of it would be a boon to Trump politically. Trading that for some sanctions
relief would be a good first step to solving the mess he's in and build some trust.
Firing John Bolton, which looks more likely every day, would be another.
He's already turning a blind eye to Iranian exports to China, and presumably, other places.
I think the Brits are acting independently trying to create havoc and burnish Foreign Secretary
Jeremy Hunt's resume as Prime Minister against Boris Johnson. That's why they hijacked the oil
tanker.
But all the little distractions are nothing but poison pills to keep from discussing the
real issues. Trump just cut through all that. So did Iran. Let's hope they stay focused.
"... Daniel R. DePetris is a foreign policy analyst, a columnist at ..."
"... , and a frequent contributor to ..."
"... That TAC columnists continue to hold out hope that Trump will revert to his 2016 form astounds me. ..."
"... It's like watching Obama cultists convince themselves that The Real Obama®, the hopey changey guy from 2008, will finally put in an appearance, even as he betrays them over and over again. ..."
If there is any direct communication between American and Iranian officials, it is hidden
from public view. All of this has made Senator Rand Paul's initiative to open dialogue with
Tehran urgent, necessary, and prudent.
According to a July 17 story
in Politico , Paul recently pitched himself to President Trump as a possible
presidential emissary to the Iranians -- someone who could sit down with Foreign Minister
Mohammed Javad Zarif and begin a conversation on the issues that have nearly resulted in
military conflict. Trump apparently accepted Paul's pitch while the two were on the golf course
last weekend. His decision, while not yet confirmed by the White House, suggests that Trump is
slowly beginning to recognize the deficiencies of the maximum pressure policy that National
Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and outside counsels like the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Mark Dubowitz have peddled for years. Far from forcing
Tehran's surrender, economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation have yielded more Iranian
aggression. Iran is now a wounded animal backed into a corner, ready to fight rather than
submit. The chances of a clash have increased substantially.
In a town filled with tough talkers who see foreign policy as an extension of domestic
politics, Rand Paul is one of those strange creatures who is willing to throw himself in front
of a bus for the sake of preventing a war. His foes (of which there are many, from Bill Kristol
and Lindsey Graham to Marco Rubio and Liz Cheney) use the lazy isolationist epitaph to paint
him as a gadfly on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But at his core, Paul is neither a
gadfly nor an isolationist. The junior senator from Kentucky is a non-interventionist who has
the audacity to search for diplomatic solutions before doing what most of his colleagues on
Capitol Hill would have long preferred -- involuntarily reaching for more punitive options.
This isn't the first time Paul has tried to create space for dialogue with a U.S. adversary.
Last year, when so much as talking to a Russian was universally frowned upon by the political
class, Paul flew to Moscow and delivered
a letter on behalf of President Trump to Russian parliamentarians. A month later, he
introduced an
amendment that would have lifted travel restrictions on Russian lawmakers if Moscow did the
same for their American counterparts. The amendment was a small and reasonable gesture that
removed largely symbolic sanctions in order to encourage Americans and Russians to familiarize
themselves with each other. It was lambasted in committee and
killed .
Paul's latest initiative with Iran could run into the same brick wall. The fact that the
arrangement was leaked to the media is an indication that somebody in the Trump administration
is totally opposed to the idea and wants to bury any potential conversations with the Iranians
before they begin. One can almost picture John Bolton, holed up in the White House basement,
hearing the news and frantically ordering his minions on the National Security Council to
expose it in the press.
There are also practical questions that need to be answered. With Zarif only in New York for
another few days, does Paul have the time for a one-on-one meeting? Would the Iranians be
interested in meeting with the senator, even if he does have the president's ear? Or is
Khamenei, still seething over the administration's withdrawal from the nuclear deal and
watching his government's oil exports disappear, dead set on banning any contact with the
Americans for as long as Trump remains in the Oval Office?
Organizing a backchannel with the Iranians could be difficult, in large measure because it
will be fought tooth-and-nail by the usual suspects. But Rand Paul's potential role as an envoy
should be pursued. After all, it isn't like the hawks have such a great track record.
Daniel R. DePetris is a foreign policy analyst, a columnist at Reuters , and a
frequent contributor to The American Conservative.
That TAC columnists continue to hold out hope that Trump will revert to his 2016 form
astounds me.
It's like watching Obama cultists convince themselves that The Real Obama®, the
hopey changey guy from 2008, will finally put in an appearance, even as he betrays them
over and over again.
That TAC columnists continue to hold out hope that Trump will revert to his 2016 form
astounds me.
It's like watching Obama cultists convince themselves that The Real Obama®, the
hopey changey guy from 2008, will finally put in an appearance, even as he betrays them
over and over again.
Your pessimism is certainly warranted and frequently seconded by Larison and others at TAC.
Agreed. But, what choice do we have but to encourage proposals like this one and recognize
that Trump, as infuriatingly inconsistent as he has been, needs to be encouraged when he
does something sensible.
Rand at least seems to have his ear, no small feat.
I am not saying that such moves, if they come to pass, should not be encouraged.
But let's see if anything comes of it, or if the Boltons, Pompeos and Haspels of this
world make sure that Rand fails and then chant "But we have to go to war because we tried
so hard we tried everything ZOMG war war war!"
The best reason I can think of to choose to send someone other than Rand Paul to negotiate
with Iran is that Paul was NOT one of the seven WPP senators who didn't sign Tom Cotton's
odious open letter to Iran trying to put the kibosh on the Obama nuke deal with Iran.
Maybe try Corker, or Alexander or Murkowski...someone whom the Iranians might have some
reason to trust.
I seriously doubt that Rand Paul has a whit more credibility in Tehran than Trump does,
and why would he?. I can't think of a single reason why Iran should trust him.
Good and very to the point made in this article about the hawks, these neo-cons, these war
lovers, not having a good track record.
They have a record of death and destruction and they could care less about people
suffering.
Just why do they want America to continue attacking and threaten and make war on numerous
nations?
Why...
Trailer Trash is exactly right about brittle supply chains. To "maximize Shareholder value"
(the Prime Directive from Wall Street), corporations are maximizing (not optimizing)
efficiency, at the expense of long-term priorities.
Summer Diaz is sorta right about what I might describe as US cultural/political obesity,
but I don't look forward to living here after the shit hits the fan. There are lotsa crazy
bastards with guns. We'll see real race war, starvation, all 4 Horsemen.
Re questions about Israel's fate in Marandi's scenario: I think it's smart that he/they
don't talk about retaliation against Israel. Everybody knows that Iran has the ability to
really hurt Israel (sans Nukes, they probably can't obliterate it); but this threat is much
better left unsaid, just hanging in the air. Threatening Israel would be bad PR, decreasing
chances that EU, Russia, & China can talk the US back from the brink of WWIII. And making
sure Israel knows they're in danger - without bragging about it - gets (non-crazy) Zionists
in USA to help prevent all-out war!
It's OK for Iran to talk about the threat to KSA, UAE, etc, because everybody hates them
anyway, and cutting off the world's energy supply is their Doomsday Bomb. They need to remind
the world that if the US attacks Iran, everybody loses.
Three main antagonists have aimed at post-revolution Iran: The Outlaw US Empire, Occupied
Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, the latter being the most recent and vulnerable, while the first
two have already waged varying degrees of war with the Empire's Economic War having existed
for 40+ years. The Levant's former Colonial powers--Turkey, France, UK--are feeble, and in
Turkey's case is allied with Iran while being spurned by NATO and EU. Lurking in the
background are Russia and China's designs for Eurasian Integration which only the Outlaw US
Empire seeks to prevent as such integration benefits Saudi Arabia, Occupied Palestine, France
and UK. Thus the only entity that might benefit from non-hybrid war with Iran is the Outlaw
US Empire--Occupied Palestine's interests actually lie with becoming part of an Integrated
Eurasia not in trying to impede it. And the same goes for the other nations occupying the
Arabian Peninsula--but they all need to come to their senses by deeply examining their actual
long term interests as Qatar seems to have done in its rapprochement with Iran.
But, just how would a non-hybrid conflict with Iran benefit the Outlaw US Empire if it
consumes its regional allies? Would it bring more riches or create greater debt atop the
human cost? Most analysts have pointed to the Empire's vulnerability upon the trashing of the
current global economic structure. Indeed, the only visible benefit might accrue from slowing
Eurasian Integration. Then there's the highly negative result to the Empire's global
credibility which is already scrapping rock bottom and the likely end of Dollar Hegemony and
the Free Lunch it's lived on for the past 70+ years. But what about the fulfillment of the
Christian Rapture Myth? Sorry, but there should be no need to answer that fantastical,
magical, thinking. Not a very good balance sheet is it as liabilities seem to vastly outweigh
assets. Unfortunately, such logic is ignored by ideologues drunk on magical thinking. And
these results don't take into consideration an escalation into global nuclear conflict that's
in nobody's interest.
But as noted, Trump's up a tree and keeps climbing higher onto ever thinner, more
precarious branches. Iran offered him a chance to climb down if he removes illegal sanctions
and returns to JCPOA, which Pompeo promptly replied to with a lie that Iran would negotiate
on its ballistic missiles, thus giving the overall goal away.
So, Trump can't/won't climb down and non-hybrid conflict would do great damage to Outlaw
US Empire interests, which is where we were at July's beginning.
Iran will respond to a limited military strike with a massive and disproportionate
counterstrike targeting both the aggressor and its enablers.
Which will be the green light for an even more violent & disproportionate counterstrike
on Iran. Make no mistake - there are plenty of gung-ho Washington & Tel Aviv power
brokers who want to trash Iran. And they will do it, given the chance. The above scenario is
precisely what the war gods are hoping for.
I don't know about that. The US and Israel would really be opening up a can of worms. Any
over reaction by the USA and Israel gives Russia, India, and China a precedent to follow.
China might it easy to settle their difficulties with Taiwan. Kiev might go up in a mushroom
cloud. The USA isn't the only country in the world with problems. If they don't play by the
rules it just leads to more rule breakers.
An Alternate Scenario
There is a saying in Persian language called "Namad Maali" translates as "feltman massag", it
means slow killing.
This proverb is very often used in contemporary Persian language but most of the people do
not know the actual origin of the proverb.
There is an interesting legend behind it. Holagu Khan, a Mongol ruler, the grandson of
Chengiz Khan conquered Baghdad on year 1258, and captured the Caliph Al-Mo'tasam, the last
Caliph of Abbasid dynasty. Holagu decided to execute the Caliph and finish the 500 years
Muslim caliphate.
Many statesmen begged him to hold on. They told him that the caliph is legitimate successor
of prophet Mohammad. Caliphate is the pillar of the world, if you remove this pillar there
will be sun eclipse, thunder storm and total darkness. Holagu, with his shamanistic believes
fearing sky revenge was yielding, but he consulted his prime minister a Persian mullah, Nasir
al-Din Tusi. Nasir told him do not worry, these are total nonsense, all of our great Shai
twelve imams were direct descendants of prophet Mohammad, they were inherently innocent,
while Abbasid are not direct descendants of prophet. See that our imams, eleven out of
twelve, were martyred, there was no sun eclipse, no thunder storm, no darkness of the
world.
Holagu was bold enough to carry out the execution. Other statesmen brought forward a group of
astrologists who searched through their horoscopes and studied signs of stars and concluded
that all the signs are catastrophic, if a drop of caliph's blood drops on earth, there will
be a devastating thunder storm, rain of bloods pours down from sky and end of world ...
Holagu consulted Nasi again. Nasir being a great humorist, told him not worry, we can devise
a pretty easy solution for your peace of mind, send the caliph to hot bath of feltman
workshop, order to be wrapped in felt, they will give him a hot water bath with soap, they
will roll him slowly over and over, as they are crafting a felt, his life will be ended
peacefully in massage, without a drop of blood, meanwhile I will assign one of my intelligent
apprentice who is familiar with sky ways ( Nasir was a great mathematician and Astronomer, he
founded a famous observatory, he was inventor of trigonometry), to sit on the roof top of the
feltman workshop, he will monitor any changes on sky if there is a minor change, he will
signal to the feltman to release the caliph.
President Vladimir Khan has been giving warnings to Ayatollah do not burn JCPOA, do not close
Strait of Hurmoz. Ayatollah is telling him do not worry we are giving a feltman massage. Just
tell Xi khan do not lean his back against the wall street pillar, clean up your hands from
future fund casino, the pillars are collapsing slowly.
the US and its allies are bluffing. don't get caught up in wars and rumors of it. the only
way it was going to happen was if syria and iraq fell and both of them didn't.
when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy.
@C I eh? #14
I don't see China as the same situation as Russia.
The Russians who have largely supported Putin despite economic ill-effects from sanctions
are, at best, 1 generation removed from 1991-1996 post-Soviet collapse privation. They
remember the bad times and how to get through them.
The mainland Chinese today are 2 generation removed from the famines in the 50s and 60s, and
furthermore there is a largely generational break due to the Cultural Revolution.
I don't see China collapsing, but I also don't see the mainstream population taking a
oil-starvation induced economic collapse well at all, because the deal is social repression
if the economy and standards of living continue to improve.
The difference is French cheese and EU fruits and vegetables - luxury goods vs. oil = energy
= everything.
There seems to be misconception about Kuwait, in particular.
Kuwaitis are fed up with the Saudis and are more Iranophile than anything. They see who is
a true regional power.
Recently, I happen to be invited to a diplomatic function, welcoming a new Kuwaiti
ambassador (Not in US). There were several businessmen associates of the new ambassador at
that function. In an impromptu conversation, they professed their love for anything Iranian
or Persian, from culture and history to food and the people, and their disdain for the Saudis
and their ruling family.
In fact, one of them, much to my shock, uttered the circulating rumor that the ruling
family in SA are actually Jews. He said everyone in the region knows about this open secret
but afraid to talk about. That was a revelation for me coming from a Kuwaiti since I never
did pay attention to those rumors.
I think in the event of a regional conflict, Kuwait will be spared by Iran. What would
happen to the ruling family will be another story.
thanks Seyed Mohammad Marandi.. i agree with your headline...
the usa is not agreement friendly.. everything is on their terms only... they rip up
contracts when a new president doesn't like it, and make endless demands of others under
threat, just like bullies do. they sanction countries and don't mind killing, starving and
subjecting people in faraway lands to their ongoing and desperate means of domination..
nothing about the usa is friendly... they spend all their money on the military not just
because it works so well for wall st and the corporations but because they think they can
continue to bully everyone and anyone indefinitely.. they get support from the obvious
suspects and all the other colonies of the usa - europe, canada and etc - turn a type of
blind eye to it all, fearful they might be next if they step out of line.. thus, all these
chattel countries fail in line with the usa regime sanctions...
basically, the prognosis isn't good.. none of the colonies are capable of speaking up to
the usa regime, largely because they lack strong leadership and independence of thought in
all this... we continue to slip towards ww3 and at present all the observing countries sit on
their hands waiting for the next shoe to drop.. that is where we are at present with regard
the ramp up to war on iran...
The Gulf states know they would be in the front lines in any conflict, Saudi and UAE
infrastructure destruction would mean Kings, Princes and Emir's scurrying from their
destroyed countries because of their inability to sell oil and feed their people, as one
Iranian General said.. the US bases in the region are not threats, "they are targets". Its
true Iran has an army of 500,000, they also have millions of military aged men who would form
militias and have the reputation of taking their shrouds with them into battle.
I think a major miscalculation by Trump, initiating this kind of scenario is unlikely, those
other whack jobs Pence, Pompeo and Bolton are a cause for concern, just hear this nutcase
Lindsey Graham threatening the Europeans....
"The United States should sanction "to the ground" European countries that continue to trade
with Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal and refuse to join America's pressure campaign against
the Islamic Republic, says top Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
"I will tell the Europeans, 'If you want to side with the Iranians, be my guest, but you
won't use an American bank or do business with the American economy,'" Graham said".
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/07/16/601067/US-Graham-Trump-Iran-JCPOA-EU-sanction-to-ground
Punitive sanctions against nations with a powerful military establishment have an incredibly
poor track record. Germany after WWI. Japan prior to Pearl Harbor. And one might add Russia
today. The more "effective" the sanctions, the closer to war.
But, of course, military planners in the U.S. and Israel have already picked out the
targets for nuclear strikes during the very first wave of attacks on Iran. It will be nuclear
first, ask questions later. Heil Trump has already said he will use nuclear weapons:
"obliterate". But will even that work? I doubt it. Iran must expect nuclear attacks in the
first wave. Yes, their urban populations will be destroyed, but their military? I doubt
it.
The folks who now are called Iranian once fought the most militaristic society ever - the
Spartans. There is likely a memory of that conflict still, and the lessons learned. They face
a military that no longer remembers Vietnam or its lessons. Sanctions are an act of war, not
military war but war against another who have been made into enemies nonetheless. Be mightily
careful who you make your enemy, one sage reminds that you become like them. Look at those
the U.S. has made enemy: Hitler and National Socialism; Mussolini and Fascism; Stalin and
State Authoritarianism; Franco and Military Repression; and the list continues substantially,
and then look at the U.S. in a distortion free mirror and what does one see?
Taking into consideration the novel Rand Paul intervention, the likely way forward is this,
and I'm sure it is what Putin (the master negotiator) has in mind: Trump blundered badly by
throwing out the JCPOA, but he needs a way out that allows him to save face and even turn it
into a partial "win". On the world stage (ie. for the public) it needs to look like Trump
accedes to reinstate the JCPOA IN EXCHANGE for Iran withdrawing from Syria! This will not
only save the nuclear deal, thereby reducing tensions, but it will force Israel to back down
and shut up. Israel can't complain and Trump can sell it as an achievement of his, "without
having to go to war". The US, of course will have to give Iran, Syria and Russia something in
exchange: Iran and Russia ultimately bolstered their forces in Syria in order to save Assad.
All things considered, Assad has won the war, so the reason for the bolstered Iranian and
Russian presence no longer applies. What the US must agree to is to suspend its efforts to
overthrow Assad (which Trump has been trying to do via the withdrawal of US troops in
northern Syria), thereby returning the country to the status quo ante. The wild card in all
of this, however, is Turkey's presence in Syria. Perhaps China can lend a helping hand on
that issue?
@35 "when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy."
I agree with that comment, though I will add that for this Administration "looking busy"
has a Keystone Cops look about it.
I mean, let's be real here: Norman Schwarzkopf did not make a single move against Iraq
until he had well over 500,000 GI's at his command, and Tommy Franks was not willing to
restart the Crash Boom Bang until he had built up his army to just shy of 500,000
soldiers.
And Iraq then was nowhere near as formidable as Iran is now.
Where are the troop buildups? Where is the CENTCOM army?
Nowhere. And no sign of it happening.
There is a real possibility that Bolton might get his way and start his dinky little war,
only to find that the USA loses a great big war before he even manages to get out of bed.
CENTCOM is not ready for war, nowhere close to it, and for that reason alone Iran is
correct to tell the USA that if Trump launches a "limited strike" then their response will be
"it's on, baby".
@ William Herschel 61. If the U.S. or anyone else uses any type of Nuclear weapons against
Iran, a declared ally of Russia, it will result in an immediate and full scale Nuclear
retaliation. This is a recent statement made by Vladimir Putin. Pompeo, Bolton et all are
well aware of this. The U.S. might talk of using tactical nukes but despite their Hubris,
even the most pro war in the Pentagon know what the results of that type of planned
anihilation will have on the U.S. mainland. People like Lindsey Graham are merely empty
vessels making a lot of noise.
Why would Iran allow any Western nation to save face through negotiations or
otherwise?
Khamenei yesterday tweeted several statements that were later posted to his website:
"At this meeting, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran stressed that Western
governments' arrogant behavior is the main obstacle in establishing ties and maintained:
Western governments' major vice is their arrogance. If they face a weak government, their
arrogance will be effective. But if that country knows the truth about them and resists, the
Western governments will be defeated.
"Referring to problems rising between Iran and the European partners of the JCPOA,
Ayatollah Khamenei said: Now, in the matters between us and the Europeans, the problems
persist, because of their arrogance.
"The Leader of the Islamic Revolution highlighted Iran's commitment to the JCPOA -- also
known as the Iran Deal -- and criticized European dignitaries of the deal for breaching it,
saying: As stated by our Foreign Minister, who works hard, Europe has had eleven commitments,
none of which it has met. The Foreign Minister, despite his diplomatic considerations, is
clearly stating that. But what did we do? We acted based on our commitments, and even beyond
that.
"Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated that Iran continued to stay within the JCPOA despite the
fact that the EU partners of the JCPOA as well as the British government violated the
international plan of action and yet demanded Iran to stay with its promises: Now that we
have started to reduce our commitments, they step forward. They are very insolent, and they
have not abided by their eleven commitments. We have just started to reduce some of our
commitments, and this process will surely continue."
The hypothetical suggestion Zarif made in his interview with NBC News was just
that--hypothetical--as it had to spell out again for the
apparently illiterate, deaf or both SoS Pompeo and BigLie Media presstitutes.
In his arrogance, Trump climbed up the tree he's now stuck within; and as I've pointed out
again and again, Iran isn't going to help him in his climb down--they'll be no face saving
for the arrogant Western nations. I mean, how clear can the Iranians make that?! They quite
well understand the very real interests at stake I put forth in my comment @32. And the Turks
on their own have upped the stakes with Erdogan
assuring :
"that his country is prepared to leave NATO during a meeting with Russian Deputy Vladimir
Zhirinovsky.
"'I met twice with Turkish President Recep Erdogan and he told me personally that Turkey
was willing to withdraw from NATO,' Zhirinovsky wrote."
Trump seems desperate for a way to climb down from his tree. Controversial Kentucky
Senator Rand Paul apparently volunteered his services as an emissary
to Iran , which Trump okayed but Paul's office is being mum about. As noted, Iran isn't
going to talk unless tangible, visible concessions are made prior to any talks
occurring--concessions Zarif and Rouhani have already stated as the minimum required: Ending
all illegal sanctions and return to JCPOA.
Iran just announced that they would be open to talk about ballistic missiles when US stops
selling arms in the Middle East.
You have to hand it to the Iranians. In the one-up-manship game, they are a formidable
opponent. Obviously, there is less than zero chance that would ever happen, but they are
super smart in driving the message of US arrogance home. I am happy to see they don't take
any shit from the Empire.
Tom Wright
makes some good observations about Trump's foreign policy here, but I think he
underestimates Bolton's determination to cling to power:
It's hard to see how Bolton can stay. Trump has long known that Bolton wanted war more
than he does. He sidelined him on North Korea and overruled him on Iran. For his part, Bolton
has privately attacked Pompeo, long a Trump favorite, as falling captive to the State
Department bureaucracy and has predicted that the North Korea policy will fail.
Bolton has given an unusually large number of interviews to reporters and has been
rewarded with positive profiles lauding his influence and bureaucratic prowess. Those of us
who predicted that he would cling to the post of national security adviser, as it would be
the last job he'd ever get, may have been wrong. In fact, Bolton looks and sounds as if he is
preparing to exit on his own terms. Better that than being sent on a never-ending tour of the
world's most obscure places. For Bolton, leaving because he's too tough for Trump is the
perfect way to save face. Otherwise, he may be remembered as the man who presided over one of
the weakest national security teams in modern American history and someone whose myopic
obsessions -- like international treaties or communism in Venezuela -- meant the United
States lost precious time in preparing for the national security challenges of the
future.
Bolton has been allowed to drive Iran policy to the brink of war, and I can't believe that
he would voluntarily leave the position he has when he still has a chance of getting the war
with Iran that he has been seeking for years. It is true that Bolton was sent to Mongolia to
keep him out of sight during the president's visit with Kim at the DMZ, but where is the proof
that Trump has abandoned the maximalist demands that Bolton has long insisted on? On Iran,
Trump is still reciting hawkish talking points, sanctioning anything that moves, and
occasionally making more deranged threats against the entire country. Unless Trump decides to
get rid of Bolton, I don't see why Bolton would want to leave. He gets to set policy on the
issue he has obsessed over for decades, and he gets to pursue a policy of regime change in all
but name. Bolton will probably be happy to let Pompeo have all the "credit" for North Korea
policy, since there is none to be had, and he'll keep stoking the Iran obsession that has
already done so much harm to the Iranian people and brought the U.S. dangerously close to a war
it has no reason to fight.
Banishing Bolton to Mongolia was briefly entertaining for those of us that can't stand the
National Security Advisor, but it doesn't mean very much if administration policies aren't
changing. Since Bolton is the one running the policy "process," it seems unlikely that there
will be any real change as long as he is there. For whatever reason, Trump doesn't seem willing
to fire him. Maybe that's because he doesn't want to offend Sheldon Adelson, a known Bolton
supporter and big Trump donor, or maybe it's because he enjoys having Bolton as a lightning rod
to take some of the criticism, or maybe it's because their militaristic worldviews aren't as
dissimilar as many people assume. It doesn't really matter why Trump won't rid himself of
Bolton. What matters is that Bolton is supposedly "humiliated" again and again by Trump actions
or statements, and then Bolton gets back to promoting his own agenda no matter what the
president does.
For that matter, Bolton's absence from the DMZ meeting may have been exactly what he wanted.
Graeme Wood suggested
as much just the other day:
Carlson has inserted himself into the frame of this bizarre and impromptu diplomatic trip,
and that is exactly where the Boltonites want him: forever associated with a handshake that
will be recorded as a new low in the annals of presidential gullibility.
Many observers have assumed that Bolton won't be able to stay in the administration at
different points over the last several months. When Trump claimed that he didn't want regime
change in Iran, that was supposed to be a break with Bolton. The only hitch is that Bolton
maintains this same fiction that they aren't trying to bring down the Iranian government when
they obviously are. The second summit with North Korea and the possibility of some initial
agreement caused similar speculation that Bolton's influence was waning, and then he managed to
wreck the Hanoi summit by getting Trump to make demands that he and everyone else must have
known were unacceptable to the North Koreans. Every time it seems that Bolton's maximalism is
giving way to something else, Bolton gets the last laugh.
Demolishing the architecture of arms control has been one of Bolton's main ambitions
throughout his career. He has already done quite a bit of damage, but I assume he will want to
make sure that New START dies. Bolton likely will "be remembered as the man who presided over
one of the weakest national security teams in modern American history and someone whose myopic
obsessions -- like international treaties or communism in Venezuela -- meant the United States
lost precious time in preparing for the national security challenges of the future," but as
long as he has the chance to pursue those obsessions and advance his agenda I don't think he's
going to give it up. He is an abysmal National Security Advisor, a fanatic, and a menace to
this country, and I would love it if he did resign, but I just don't see it. I doubt that
Bolton cares about "saving face" as much as he does inflicting as much damage as he can while
he has the opportunity. The only thing that Bolton believes in quitting is a successful
diplomatic agreement that advances U.S. interests. That is why it is necessary for the
president to replace him, because I don't see any other way that he is going to leave.
Bolton quitting? Heck! He's just getting started. Britain, on orders from Bolton, detained
an Panamanian flagged supertanker heading to Syria with Iranian oil. Spanish officials said
the Grace 1, was seized by British patrol ships off Gibraltar, and boarded by Royal Marines
and detained on Wash.'s orders.
Bolton's power is becoming unlimited because Trump and the rest of the gov. is doing
nothing to stop his agenda, which most of Wash., must share, of starting a war with Iran, N.
Korea, or anywhere else he can stir up trouble.
It's so obvious Wash. wants Iran to fire the first shot in order to go to war and make
political donors like Sheldon Adelson happy, as well as Netanyahu who has more to say about
US foreign policy than the American people who just want to stop the wars and concentrate on
the issues and problems here at home.
After all, it's OUR MONEY going to finance all the atrocities abroad that the war industry
and other countries benefit from. Unbelievable stuff going on in Wash. and seems everyday it
gets worse and more absurd.
You gotta love the SCI. This shallowly-disguised Russian propaganda arm writes in the most
charming awkward idiomatic English, bouncing from a "false neutral" tone to a jingoistic
Amercia-phobic argot to produce its hit pieces.
Russian propaganda acts like Claude Raines in "Casablanca" : "i am shocked, shocked to
discover (geopolitics) going on here!" Geeeee, Europe and the US are in a struggle to
avoid Europe relying on Russia for strategic necessities like fuel, even if it imposes costs
on European consumers. If you have a dangerous disease, and your pharmacist is known for
cutting off their customers' vital drugs to extort them, you might consider using another
provider who not only doesn't cut off supplies, but also provides the police department that
protects you from your pharmacist's thugs who are known to invade customers' homes using the
profits from their own business.
The US provides the protective umbrella that limits Putin's adventurism. Russia cuts of
Ukraine's gas supplies in winter to force them into submission. Gasprom is effectively an arm
of the Russian military, weaponizing Russia's only product as a geopolitical taser. Sure, it
costs more to transport LNG across the Atlantic and convert it back to gas, but the profits
from that business are routinely funneled back to Europe in the form of US trade,
contributions to NATO, and the provision of the nuclear umbrella that protects Europeans from
the man who has publicly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, called for the return of the
former SSRs, and violated the IRM treaty to place nuclear capable intermediate-range missiles
and cruise missiles within range of Europe and boasted about his new hypersonic weapons'
theoretic capability to decapitate NATO and American decision-making within a few minutes of
launch.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia
in your post can be said of the U.S. I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's
their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary
warfare , and thereby influence events abroad. Depending on their size and
infrastructure, they can be used as staging areas or for logistical,
communications and intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have
resulted in overseas military bases being established in large numbers by world powers and the
existence of bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and
military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The
U.S. has 36 listed here with none of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the
New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it
for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, who met
with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving
Washington that "there's no decision, but I think it's unlikely" the treaty would be
renewed.
Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed
because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery
systems. "So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into
account would be malpractice," he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.
Like all of his complaints about arms control agreements, Bolton's criticisms of New START
are made in bad faith. Opponents of New START have long pretended that they oppose the treaty
because it did not cover everything imaginable, including tactical nuclear weapons, but this
has always been an excuse for them to reject a treaty that they have never wanted ratified in
the first place. If the concern about negotiating a treaty that covered tactical nuclear
weapons were genuine, the smart thing to do would be to extend New START and then begin
negotiations for a more comprehensive arms control agreement. Faulting New START for failing to
include things that are by definition not going to be included in a strategic arms reduction
treaty gives the game away. This is what die-hard opponents of the treaty have been doing for
almost ten years, and they do it because they want to dismantle the last vestiges of arms
control. The proposal to include China as part of a new treaty is another tell that the Trump
administration just wants the treaty to die.
The article concludes:
Some experts suspect talk of a three-way accord is merely a feint to get rid of the New
Start treaty. "If a trilateral deal is meant as a substitute or prerequisite for extending
New Start, it is a poison pill, no ifs, ands or buts," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive
director of the Arms Control Association. "If the president is seeking a trilateral deal as a
follow-on to New Start, that's a different thing."
Knowing Bolton, it has to be a poison pill. Just as Bolton is ideologically opposed to
making any deal with Iran, he is ideologically opposed to any arms control agreement that
places limits on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The "flaws" he identifies aren't really flaws that
he wants to fix (and they may not be flaws at all), but excuses for trashing the agreement. He
will make noises about how the current deal or treaty doesn't go far enough, but the truth is
that he doesn't want any agreements to exist. In Bolton's worldview, nonproliferation and arms
control agreements either give the other government too much or hamper the U.S. too much, and
so he wants to destroy them all. He has had a lot of success at killing agreements and treaties
that have been in the U.S. interest. Bolton has had a hand in blowing up the Agreed Framework
with North Korea, abandoning the ABM Treaty, killing the INF Treaty, and reneging on the JCPOA.
Unless the president can be persuaded to ignore or fire Bolton, New START will be his next
victim.
If New START dies, it will be a loss for both the U.S. and Russia, it will make the world
less secure, and it will make U.S.-Russian relations even worse. The stability that these
treaties have provided has been important for U.S. security for almost fifty years. New START
is the last of the treaties that constrain the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and when it
is gone there will be nothing to replace it for a long time. The collapse of arms control
almost certainly means that the top two nuclear weapons states will expand their arsenals and
put us back on the path of an insane and unwinnable arms race. Killing New START is irrational
and purely destructive, and it needs to be opposed.
bolton is opposed to any treaty, to any agreement, whereby the other side can expect to
obtain equally favorable terms-he wants the other side on their knees permanently without
any expectation of compromise by the empire.
Miss Gabbard just served two tours in the ME, one as enlisted in the HI National Guard.
Brave Mr. Bolton kept the dirty communists from endangering the US supply of Chesapeake
crab while serving in the Maryland Guard. Rumor also has it that he helped Tompall Glaser
write the song Streets of Baltimore. Some say they saw Mr. Bolton single handily defending
Memorial Stadium from a combined VC/NVA attack during an Orioles game. The Cubans would have
conquered the Pimlico Race Course if not for the combat skill of PFC Bolton.
Sixty-six years later, I am witnessing how another "Ugly American" is walking in the
footsteps of Roosevelt. His name is John Bolton, a chief advocate of the disastrous US invasion
of Iraq, a nefarious Islamophobe, and former chairman of the far-right anti-Muslim Gatestone
Institute. This infamous institution is known for spreading
lies about Muslims - claiming there is a looming "jihadist takeover" that can lead to a
"Great White Death" - to incite hatred against them and intimidate, silence, and alienate
them.
In his diabolical plans to wage war on Iran, Bolton is taking a page from Roosevelt's
playbook. Just as the CIA operative used venal Iranian politicians and fake news to incite
against the democratically elected Iranian government, today his successor, the US national
security adviser, is seeking to spread misinformation on a massive scale and set up a false
flag operation with the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a militant terrorist organisation. Meanwhile,
he has also pressed forward with debilitating sanctions that are further worsening the economic
crisis in the country and making the lives of ordinary Iranians unbearable.
... ... ...
Bolton is the dreadful residue of the pure violence and wanton cruelty that drive Zionist
Christian zealots in their crusades against Muslims. He is the embodiment of the basest and
most racist roots of American imperialism.
The regime he serves is the most naked and vulgar face of brutish power, lacking any
semblance of legitimacy - a bullying coward flexing its military muscles. At its helm is an
arrogant mercantile president, who - faced with the possibility of an impeachment - has no
qualms about using the war machine at his disposal to regain political relevance and line his
pockets.
But the world must know Americans are not all ugly, they are not all rabid imperialists -
Boltons and Roosevelts. What about those countless noble Americans - the sons and daughters of
the original nations that graced this land, of the African slaves who were brought to this land
in chains, of the millions after millions of immigrants who came to these shores in desperation
or hope from the four corners of the earth? Do they not have a claim on this land too - to
redefine it and bring it back to the bosom of humanity?
"... Just as Obama turned out to be a slightly more articulate version of Dubya, Trump has turned out to be a meaner, more dysfunctional, more reckless version of Dubya. ..."
"... Bolton is a neo-con, neo-cons are Trotskyites. They believe in an eternal revolution. Bolton believes in eternal war. ..."
"... Sid, the natural conclusion is that the 'deep state' is real, and for the most part runs the country. Whoever is President is less important than the goals of the American elite, most importantly the 'War Party' (the MIC and the IC) and Wall Street, but including Health Care. A side party of equal importance is the Israel Lobby. What happens in America is pretty much what the leaders of those groups want. ..."
"... Trump is too weak to push back on Bolton. He likes bluster. If starting a war will make Trump look macho, he very well might start one. Bolton wants war, Trump may let us stumble into one. ..."
"... "What will it take to get Bolton fired?" One phone call from Israel. Then again, one phone call from Israel would also stop Trump from firing him, and there's no reason to suspect that Bibi is anything other than ecstatic over Bolton's performance. ..."
"... Find out who "told" Donald Trump he HAD to hire Bolton (and Pompeo and others as well) and you'll probably learn the identity of the real puppet master pulling the strings in the "Deep State." It's simply impossible to believe Trump – who ran for president on a platform of "non-interventionism" – appointed this guy on his own volition. ..."
"... The headline asks, "What Will It Take to Get Bolton Fired?" This is a great question. If he CAN'T be fired, this tells us who is really running our country. Another question along the same lines: What will it take to get America to cease its support of Saudi Arabia? ..."
"... The petodollar makes these wars possible; it also defends or preserves the Status Quo, which makes so many of our elite ultra wealthy and powerful. Our carte blanche support of Saudi Arabia is telling us something important just like Trump's appointment of Bolton told us something important. ..."
For
someone "not playing along," Trump has obediently given Bolton and the Iran hawks practically
everything they have wanted so far. He has gone much further in laying the groundwork for war
with Iran than any of his predecessors, and the only reason that many people seem confident
that he won't order an attack is their mistaken belief that he is a non-interventionist when
all of the evidence tells us that he is no such thing. Trump presumably doesn't want to start a
multi-year, extremely expensive war that could also throw the economy into a recession, but
then every president that launches an illegal war of choice assumes that the war would be much
easier and take less time than it does. No one ever knowingly opts for a bloody debacle. The
absurdly optimistic hawkish expectations of a quick and easy triumph are always dashed on the
rocks of reality, but for some reason political leaders believe these expectations every time
because "this time it's different." There will come a point where Bolton will tell Trump that
attacking Iran (or Venezuela) is the only way to "win," and Trump will probably listen to him
just as he has listened to him on all of these issues up until now.
There is no question that Bolton should lose his job. Even if you aren't an opponent
of Trump, you should be unhappy with the way Bolton has been operating for the last year. He
has made a point of sabotaging administration policies he doesn't like, resisting decisions he
doesn't agree with, and effectively reversing policy changes while pretending to be carrying
out the president's wishes. His mismanagement of the policy process is a bad joke, and the
reason he runs the National Security Council this way is so that he can stop views and
information that don't suit his agenda from reaching the president. But Trump pays little or no
attention to any of this, and as long as Bolton remains loyal in public and a yes-man in person
he is likely safe in his job. If Bolton gets his wish and the U.S. starts a war with Iran, he
may not be in that job for much longer, but the damage will have already been done. Instead of
counting on Trump to toss Bolton overboard, Congress and the public need to make absolutely
clear that war with Iran and Venezuela is unacceptable and Trump will be destroying his
presidency if he goes down that path in either country.
Obama entered office in 2008 promising to close Guantanamo and end
the stupid wars.
Not only did Obama fail to end a single war, he gave us new and stupider wars in Syria,
Yemen and Ukraine, to name but three. Guantanamo is still open.
Just as Obama turned out to be a slightly more articulate version of Dubya, Trump has turned
out to be a meaner, more dysfunctional, more reckless version of Dubya.
" some reason political leaders believe these expectations every
time because "this time it's different."
Like communists, political leaders think 'this time we'll get it right. Bolton is a neo-con, neo-cons are Trotskyites. They believe in an eternal revolution. Bolton
believes in eternal war.
As much of a disaster for American institutions Trump has been, I
believe he does not want to go to war. The times are a'changin'. Average Americans have figured
out that these wars are self-defeating nonsense. Trump knows that, and doesn't want to alienate
the middle American types who support him and would go to war.
But he does want to sound and look tough, hence Bolton. The problem is that while Trump may
believe he's just blustering, reneging on the nuclear deal, cranking back brutal sanctions and
sending US flotillas to the Strait of Hormuz looks and feels like war to the Iranians.
We could stumble into a very big and ugly war like America stumbled into the ugly era of
Trump. And Trump is the absolute last person I would want to serve as a commander in chief
during war time.
Sid, the natural conclusion is that the 'deep state' is real, and
for the most part runs the country. Whoever is President is less important than the goals of
the American elite, most importantly the 'War Party' (the MIC and the IC) and Wall Street, but
including Health Care. A side party of equal importance is the Israel Lobby. What happens in
America is pretty much what the leaders of those groups want.
Trump is too weak to push back on Bolton. He likes bluster. If
starting a war will make Trump look macho, he very well might start one. Bolton wants war,
Trump may let us stumble into one.
Of course the "Deep State", the "permanent government" the "Borg" or
whatever you want to call it is real.
Every winning candidate since arguably Bush 1.0 ("kinder gentler nation") ran for office as
a non-interventionist. Even Dubya promised a humbler foreign policy in 2000.
Once inaugurated, each candidate morphed into a foaming-at-the-mouth hawk.
I don't pretend to know how the process works, or even if it is the same for every
president, but the results speak for themselves. I suspect without evidence that it is
something like what we saw in "Yes, Minister".
The neo-cons are busy studying the Israeli playbook of declaring
themselves surrounded and launching a preemptive strike. Pompeo's view is that the occupation
of Iraq is/was so difficult because the US isn't as ruthlessly efficient as the IDF in the West
Bank and allowed Iraq some self-governance.He won't allow that in the conquered Iran.
Step 1: send a doctored telegram to Kaiser Trump and leak it to the press. Step 2: Get the GOP Senate to pass the "Gulf of Hormuz" declaration. Step 3: sink a ship, perhaps one called USS Maine or USS Liberty.
The first question is "What did it take to get Bolton hired?"
The answer to the author's question is that making Trump look bad (in a way that Trump
recognizes) is what will get Bolton fired. But like Dick Cheney, Bolton has a very good sense
of what a Richelieu needs to do to seem loyal and obedient to an idiot king. Rummy appended
Bible verses to schemes that he wanted Bush to approve. Bolton does something similar, no
doubt.
"What will it take to get Bolton fired?" One phone call from Israel. Then again, one phone call from Israel would also stop Trump
from firing him, and there's no reason to suspect that Bibi is anything other than ecstatic
over Bolton's performance.
The mammoth "donations" from Adelson et al to Trump and the corrupt Republicans have paid
off royally for Israel. With Trump and Bolton in the White House, Israel barely even needs a
foreign ministry, a treasury, or a military anymore. Uncle Sam does it all for free.
Find out who "told" Donald Trump he HAD to hire Bolton (and Pompeo
and others as well) and you'll probably learn the identity of the real puppet master pulling
the strings in the "Deep State." It's simply impossible to believe Trump – who ran for president on a platform of
"non-interventionism" – appointed this guy on his own volition.
Also, if it was so important to appoint Bolton, why would this be the case?
I think it's because – in the minds of those pulling the strings – it's crucial
to them that America does the things Bolton wants to do.
That is, Bolton wasn't named National Security Advisor to do nothing.
The headline asks, "What Will It Take to Get Bolton Fired?" This is a great question. If he CAN'T be fired, this tells us who is really running our
country. Another question along the same lines: What will it take to get America to cease its support
of Saudi Arabia?
We know the answer to this one. NOTHING. Consider that
We will support a nation whose leader orders the gruesome murder of a journalist.
We will support a nation that is committing war crimes and attrocities against a poor
nation like Yemen, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent children.
We will support a nation that beheads 37 citizens in one day – some whose alleged
crimes occurred when the victims were teenagers, or whose alleged offenses include practicing
homosexuality or simply criticizing the government.
The answer (Saudi Arabia can do whatever it wants with no risk of incurring the wrath of
America) begs the question: Why is "letting Saudi Arabia do whatever it wants" so important to
America?
This answer, I believe, has everything to do with the vital role the petrodollar plays in
maintaining the Status Quo.
If the Deep State is calling the shots, what is most important to the Deep State?
Answer: Protecting the U.S. dollar (fiat) printing press. Absent this printing press and the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency, none of
our current wars and future wars would even be possible.
And the fact we are willing to wage these wars sends a vital message to the nations of the
world: We WILL use our military against anyone who threatens the Status Quo.
The petodollar makes these wars possible; it also defends or preserves the Status Quo, which
makes so many of our elite ultra wealthy and powerful. Our carte blanche support of Saudi Arabia is telling us something important just like
Trump's appointment of Bolton told us something important.
The only way people like Bolton get fired is the same way Bannon
got dumped. It is when Trump sees on Fox News that they are getting more press coverage than
him.
The post of national security advisor needs to be subject to Senate
confirmation.
Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter
administration were both more powerful/influential than the respective secretaries of state,
William Rogers and Cyrus Vance.
The Senate needs to assert itself and ensure that national security advisors are appointed
in the same way as secretaries of state. This would help to a certain extent.
"...as Stratfor, put it, "Trump, fearing a much bigger escalation, got cold feet."
One is reminded of the scene from Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a General in the Joint
Chiefs comments disparagingly about Kennedy for keeping his finger "on the chicken switch"
with regard to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Lyndon Johnson in the White House with Henry Cabot Lodge in 1963 declares: "Gentlemen, I
want you to know I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way China did. I'm personally committed.
I'm not going to take one soldier out of there 'til they know we mean business in Asia (he
pauses) You just get me elected, and I'll give you your damned war ."
Another question exists: should the US resist the allure of military action against Iran,
what can Iran do?
US sanctions against Iran amount to an act of war. Iran can bust sanctions up to some point
-- but for how long? Will Iran suffer half a million dead children & elderly people as
Iraq did in the 90's ? SHOULD Iran have to suffer such a criminally imposed loss of life?
Where is the way out of this insanity?
Iran won't negotiate with the US for the very good reason that the US clearly wants to
sterilize Iranian sovereignty (ie the US won't accept ANY Iranian missiles -- that is, Iran
has no right to self defense).
Sad to say, Trump does not need to launch military action against Iran, merely continue to
economically terrorise Iran until it has NO choice but to initiate military action against
its tormentors.
The war on Iran will continue till kingdom come, until it falls. Its clear as day that both
Russia and China back their Iranian allies against US provocations. China hasn't flinched
under US threats to embargo Iranian crude, and continues to purchase it, and Russia has an
oil swap agreement with Iran, where it buys Iranian oil and sells it as Russian on the
international market. This must be a severe irritation to the imperialists in Washington and
London as it renders their Iran sanctions regime practically toothless.
The imperialists are not backing down in their quest for subduing Iran. Seems like the idea
here is to put as many large ships in harms way as possible....and provoke Iran to attack one
of these......This will ensure the probability of miscalculation and/ or accidents becomes
almost unavoidable. There must be regime change in Tehran, on the road to Beijing and Moscow:
Iran has every right to defend itself from US imperialisms constant violence, as is the case
with China and Russia. It is also pleasing to see the almighty war machine get a bloody nose.
But we should never lose sight of the fact that it is always the working class that
suffers the most in terms of death, injuries and destitution.
End all wars!
End production for profit and the Nation state upon which it is built!
America's history demonstrates that loss of (foreign) life is of little concern to those in
power.
The Manhattan Project was established, and mightily financed because of reasonably well
established fears that Nazi Germany was on track to build its own A-bombs.
With the defeat of Germany that fear was gone. Nevertheless, knowing full well that Imperial
Japan had no such program, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vapourised. A clear demonstration that
they, atomic weapons, WMD, worked and a warning to the Soviet Union that it too could be
annihilated.
Robert Oppenheimer and others refused to take part in building an H-bomb for class and humane
reasons. This fell on Truman's deaf ears.
American Imperialism is indifferent to death and destruction of billions.
As WSWS has stated, Trumps announcement that the loss of 150 Iranian lives is the the reason
he pulled backs so much bilge.
Trump is in a catch 22. When push has come to shove , he simply cannot sell another war to
the US working class, and he knows it , and he's been well and truly spooked by the Iranian
response.
All the US garbage of itself as ''victim'', all the 'good cop bad cop' routines are
wearing thin. Nobody is buying it anymore , especially from a gangster.
Perhaps a predicted massive spike in global temperatures will clear out the collective
cobwebs further.
Good point about the possibility of Iran sinking a carrier. The Chinese have developed
advanced anti-ship weapons that, if the results of a RAND corporation war game can be
believed, will be able to neutralize carriers. This highlights the fact that, whatever the
salesmen of advanced weaponry might say, it will not win wars alone. All of the smart weapons
in the world have not ended the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in the favour of American
imperialism.
We can see an historical precedent in the British development of the dreadnought, the
modern battleship, in the arms race that preceded WWI. Dreadnoughts were supposed to be the
decisive super weapons of the day, but the British and German battle fleets remained in their
moorings for most of the war for fear that these expensive ships would fall prey to torpedos.
The sinking of the HMS Formidable in 1915 is a case in point. The only major engagement
between dreadnoughts was at Jutland and it was inconclusive.
For all of the contemporary bluster about super weapons and the fetishism of smart bombs
and cyber weapons, they will not decisively win a war alone. As in the world wars of the last
century, the bourgeoisie will be forced to mobilize society for a war. This will mean
bringing the working class - against its will - into the maelstrom.
Yet again the WSWS demonstrates the incredible foresight and clarity of Marxist analysis. I
would like to extend my thanks to Comrade Andre and the editors of the WSWS for their
indefatigable efforts to impart Marxist consciousness to the masses. For all of the naysayers
who have attacked the WSWS as "sectarian" or as not involved in "practical work," need we
point to anything other than the WSWSs explanation of the connection between eruption of
American imperialism and the decline of the productive forces of that nation state? That
analysis has placed the WSWS in the position of being better prepared politically for the
consequences of war than the imperialists, as the latest farce in the Middle East
demonstrates.
A quote from Trotsky will further emphasize my point:
"We will not concede this banner to the masters of falsehood! If our generation happens to
be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to
our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of
individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind."
The official story, as usual, is a bunch of hooey. Trump wouldn't bat an eye over the death
of 150 Iranians. In addition to the worries about losing an aircraft carrier: the military
high command probably let him know that the much vaunted, and outlandishly expensive, force
of F-35s, will quickly lose its effectiveness if exposed to probing by the high tech radars
the Russians have developed, and that are used in conjunction with at least the S-400
antiaircraft and antimissile defense system. So the question is, if the stealth advantage of
the F-35 is only good for a limited time, is this particular geostrategic confrontation worth
using up that particular asset??
Then there is the whole question of whether the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz
in response to a major air raid on their nuclear facilities; this leads to some much more
important issues. Despite the blathering about "international waters" and "freedom of
navigation" the facts are that the Straits of Hormuz are only 21 miles wide. So all the water
in them is either in Iranian territory to the north or Omani to the south. They would be
entirely within their rights, as elucidated in the International Law of the Sea, to close the
straits after some sort of military strike against them (for what that is worth, which is
something at least as far as public opinion outside of the U.S. is concerned). The Iranians
have stated that if and when they close the straits they will announce it publicly, no
subterfuge or secret operations will be involved.
Since nearly 30% of the World's oil moves through those straits cutting them off will
cause an immediate spike in oil prices. Prices of $100 - $300 a barrel would be reached
within a few days. If the Straits of Hormuz were closed for a longer period we could easily
see prices rise to $1,000 a barrel according to Goldman Sachs projections (see Escobar
article cited below). Anything over $150 a barrel would trigger an economic, industrial, and
financial crisis of immense proportions around the world. The financial and speculative house
of cards, that the ruling classes of the U.S.-led Finance Capital Bloc depends on for their
dominance of world capital and markets, would likely come tumbling down. The amount of
derivatives that are swirling about the planet and that are traded and created constantly is
estimated to be from $1.2 - $2.5 Quadrillion. That's right from $1,200 - $2,500 Trillion or
$1,200,000 - $2,500,000 Billion {remember Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who once said "a
billion here and a billion there and first thing you know, You're talking BIG MONEY!!} (See
"World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As $1.2 Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight
Efforts to Rein It In", March 26, 2013, Yves Smith, "Naked Capitalism", at <
https://www.nakedcapitalism... >, and "Iran Goes for 'Maximum Counter-pressure' ",
June 21, 2019, Pepe Escobar, "Strategic Culture Foundation", at <
https://www.strategic-cultu... >, and "Global Derivatives: $1.5 Quadrillion Time
Bomb", Aug 24, 2015, Stephen Lendman, Global Research, at
<
https://www.globalresearch.... >). Just like during the 2007 - 2008 crisis the various
elements of shadow banking, and speculation would collapse. Remember that total world
production of and trade in actual products is only about about $70 - $80 Trillion, or perhaps
less than 1/31st the size of the Global Derivatives markets.
All the world's elite capitalists, be they Western or Asian or from elsewhere, maintain
homes in numerous places. One reason for this is so they have somewhere to go, if they need
to flee from environmental and/or socioeconomic disaster and the resultant chaos in their
primary place of residence. As we move ever deeper into this extremely severe and ongoing
Crisis of Capitalism, these issues will continue to become more acute.
So we can rest assured that; in addition to the crazed war-mongers Bolton and Pompeo (and
their supporters and backers) whispering in Trump's ear to "go ahead and attack the
Iranians"; and in addition to the somewhat more sober counsel of General Dunford and other
members of the top military command; that titans of finance capital were undoubtedly on the
phone warning "Bone-Spur Don" that his digs in Manhattan and Florida might not be entirely
safe if the worst were to happen in response to a military strike. The absurd story of Don
worrying about 150 Iranians is so ludicrous that it did not even pass the smell test with the
corporate controlled media for very long.
"Thirty years of endless war have created a veritable cult of militarism within the American
ruling elite, whose guiding assumption seems to be that wars can be waged without drastic
global consequences, including for the United States itself."
The military/security surveillance state is a trillion dollar enterprise that instigates
conflicts to expand its profits. Militarism works hand-in-hand with the neoliberal
corporatists who deploy the military to secure natural resources, wage slaves, and
geostrategic hegemony. It should be noted, that the US imperialist agenda left unhindered
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only intensified.
However, in order for the US ruling class to achieve the "ultimate goal" of unilateral
hegemony in the Middle East the military must confront Iran a powerful sizable country with
economic and political ties to China and Russia. This is the dilemma confronting the
warmongering psychopaths
who are influenced by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
A significant military attack against Iran will NOT go unanswered and if the Iranian
Military destroys a US warship and kills hundreds of sailors it would unleash another major
war in the Middle East igniting the entire region and possibly leading to a world war.
What should traumatize the US population and awaken them from their hypnotic warmongering
stupur created by propaganda proliferated on FOX, MSNBC, and CNN is that the United States
came within minutes of launching a war whose military consequences it had NOT seriously
examined.
In light of these dangerous events it is obvious that a faction of the American ruling class
circles including Trump were not prepared to face the consequences of a strike against Iran.
That is precisely why Trump aborted the mission last Friday. Just yesterday Trump himself
admitted for the first time that if it was up to John Bolton then we would be fighting the
whole world. Today Pompeo has been sent to Middle East to broaden his alliance with Gulf
Monarchical regimes most notably Saudi Arabia and UAE. It is aimed to prepare the ground for
possible confrontation with Iran.
Trump's comment re Bolton that the US "would fight the whole world" sums up what the US is
really about. Take it from me, The US hates virtually every country save one: Israel. Illegal
US Sanctions regimes now extend to almost 50% of the world's population. The US does not even
like the advanced countries such as Europe and Japan. They tolerate them because of
diplomatic support and large investment and trade ties. Outside that they have no affinity or
connection. Until we all realise the true nature of The US and its exclusive cultural mindset
[NFL, NBA, MLB etc etc], populations will merely continue to enable the US to attack and
sanction everybody and anyone of their demented choosing. The tragedy is that if the other
countries became united and were committed to ending this US terror by eg dumping the US
Dollar as international reserve currency and sanctioning all US corporations, the US would
face severe turmoil and its reign of endless terror brought to a sudden end.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
I believe things simple didn't go as planned as an airplane was threatened to be taken
down. Bolton was in Israel after that to most likely assure Netanyahu that a new attack would
be conducted, Bolton Warned Iran Not to 'Mistake U.S. Prudence and Discretion for
Weakness'...
There needs to be a correction in the article on the older Raad system not having been used
but instead the newer, 'Third of Khordad' system which brought down the MQ-4C Triton.
Pictures/ Info on the Third of Khordad reveals that it is in effect an Iranian version of the
Soviet Buk-M2 of the MH-17 downing fame which the western backed Kiev junta used from its
hand me down Soviet weapons arsenal, to shoot down the ill fated Malaysian Airliner over the
Ukraine. The system also is stark evidence of the close defense relationship between the
Russians and the Iranians, confirming the suspicions in the west that whatever weaponry Putin
transfers to Syria or Iraq is by default also available to Iran.
Not to be outdone by his failure to bring Iran to its knees, Trump ordered a massive cyber
attack on Iran's missile batteries and its command and control centers after rescinding the
military order to physically attack Iran for downing the drone. The Iranians today announced
the failure of this desperate US cyber attack:
This is in addition to the CIA placing an agent within the Iranian oil ministry for
conducting sabotage. She has been arrested and faces the death penalty for espionage:
The deep State in the US will not stop trying to subdue Iran until it capitulates. Iran
must fall to Washington in order for the US to effectively counter and sabotage both Putin's
Eurasian Integration and president Xi's BRI projects.
Trump's alterration at this moment can be due to Iran's internal coherence against American
imperialism. With santions being reinforced, one can anticipate more and more impovershment
and quality of life geting lower unabated to the point that the basis for internal coherence
gets eroded substantially. We saw working class uprisings in Iran recently and leadership
accused imperialist as rabble-rousers to find a way out.That is why we need building
SEP/IYSSE in Iran to hatch revolutionary force in Iran for Iran to join the peer in the rest
of the world. Morsi in Egypt was overthrown by Sisi with the backing of US imperialism headed
by Obama at that time. So is the imperialism and it will continue to work to weaken Iran as a
force successfully confronting imperialism in the middle east currently. Let us therefore
empower international working class to empower it to overthrow imperialism on one hand and
Stalinism on the other hand. Russia too depend largely on its arms sale to maintain its
economy. But human needs, not wepons, but basic needs including clean environment. Long live
the socialist revolution in Iran and internationally. Death to imperialism. Thank you comrade
Andre Damon.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
Economically it would be Armageddon. Although some think America does not rely on Mideast
oil, the world economy does and America is a part of that despite what nationalists dream.
Bolton is making threats from Israel and clearly some believe they stand to gain from war but
militarily too it would be Armageddon. The Pentagon would answer the sinking of a carrier by
nuking Iran to preserve American "credibility" i.e. fear. China and Russia would have to
react, China at least to keep its oil supplied. India pushed against China could add more
mushroom clouds not to mention Pakistan. Israel itself with Tel Aviv bombarded from Lebanon
and maybe invaded unable to stop this might nuke Lebanon and maybe Tehran if any of it
remains and Damascus besides. Just as ww1 started because military train timetables had to be
followed there are nukewar plans in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing that won't take long. So
world workers need to start our plan before others begin. Preemptive general strikes, antiwar
and socialist revolutionary agitation and propaganda within imperialist rank and files and
human blockades of war material networks should happen at an early date like now. Now also
WikiLeaks should put out whatever it hasn't while people exist to read it. The rich are
determined to kill Assange anyway and full wartime censorship is not far off.
Some people have speculated that if the U.S. does attack Iran then Iran will launch missiles
at Saudi Arabia's oil fields which will then send oil prices skyrocketing to $130 dollars a
barrel. The article also notes that:
"While Trump's foreign policy team -- headed by National Security Advisor John Bolton and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- 'unanimously' supported the attack, General Joseph Dunford,
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 'cautioned about the possible repercussions of a
strike, warning that it could endanger American forces,' the Times wrote."
Apparently the good general cannot get too worked up at the sight of thousands and
thousands of Iranian children, women, and old men who would be slaughtered and grievously
wounded by U.S. bombs and the water supply which would be contaminated when those bombs would
land at a nuclear power plant. But these horrific actions by the United States are of no
consequence because, as Madeline Albright observed on a television a few decades ago, the
deaths of a half million Iraqi children by the U.S. was worth it. It would appear that the
lives of foreigners are of little consequence to those who are in power. Threatening to start
a war against another country for the most specious of reasons is simply another reason why a
malignant narcissist like Trump needs to be removed from office as quickly as possible. Or
perhaps Trump believes that the best way to improve his low poll numbers is to start dropping
500 lb. bombs on a country which does not in any remote way pose a threat to the United
States.
"Almost all propaganda is designed to create fear. Heads of governments and their
officials know that a frightened people is easier to govern, will forfeit rights it would
otherwise defend, is less likely to demand a better life, and will agree to millions and
millions being spent on 'Defense'."-John Boynton Priestly [1894-1984], English writer
"Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill
everyone, and you are a god."-Jean Rostand [1894-1977], French philosopher and biologist
After Hezballah had booted Zionist colonizers out of Lebanon, Zionist apartheid had lost its
image of "invincibility".
Now even ghetto Gaza is fighting back.
The CIA payrolled press whores like CNN's Christiane Amanpour for example a prime warmonger
and there are countless others embedded in every western media source.
Ironically, Amanpour is Iranian background, an avowed revolution hater and a devoted Iranian
Pahlavi monarchist. She's on the record for saying that she wants to see the Shah's exiled
son back on the throne in Iran, serving US imperialism for the 'benefit of the Iranian
nation'.
The sinking of an aircraft carrier, especially one as well known as the USS Lincoln, would
have been one of the biggest PR disasters for both Trump and the military. It probably would
have sparked demands from the people to know how, despite pouring trillions of dollars into
the mouths of greedy defense contractors for decades, a supposedly inferior military could so
easily take down one of our ships.
Khrushchev once said of the Sverdlov class cruisers built in the early 1950's that their only
practical purpose was as targets for anti ship missile training because of how outdated they
where considering they where armed with guns.
Maybe the anti-ship missile now stands at the point where it can make carriers obsolete
similar to how the battleship was made obsolete by the carrier.
There are some who argue that surface navies became obsolete in the 1950's with the advent of
long range missiles. For many years now, China has been helping to build up Iranian area
defences...
Cold war weapons are unsuitable for countering Iran's asymmetric warfare doctrine. A dozen or
two highly advanced US warships are no match for a thousand missile boats and thousands of
Iranian anti-ship missiles in the narrow confines of the shallow gulf.
Minutes or hours, or Trump never signed on to them, as the accounts from different US media
outlets and Trump have differed at several points. Fog of war indeed.
That's good line of attack on Trump. People do not want yet another war and they are against
overinflated military expenditures. and Trump essentially behaves like a rabid subservant to
Israel neocon in those area. So he might share the Hillary destiny in 2020
The Dem debaters want the failed JCPOA back, except one wants a more punitive one. So it's
Obama/Trump redux with all of them, worthless people. We're less safe with Iranians . .
.under the bed!
McClatchy
Klobuchar said that Trump's strategy on Iran had "made us less safe," after debate
moderators took note of increased military tensions in the Strait of Hormuz last week.
Washington has accused Iran of targeting shipping vessels, and Tehran acknowledged it shot
down an unmanned U.S. drone on Thursday, nearly prompting Trump to order a retaliatory
military strike. The 2015 nuclear deal "was imperfect, but it was a good deal for that
moment," Klobuchar stated, characterizing the agreement's "sunset periods" – caps on
Iran's enrichment and stockpiling of fissile material set to expire five to 10 years from
the next inauguration– as a potential point of renegotiation.
The Democratic field has roundly criticized Trump for his approach to Iran. Many of the
leading candidates said last week's military confrontation spawned from a crisis of the
president's own making, precipitated by his withdrawal from that landmark accord.
But up until now, the Democratic candidates have not specified how they would salvage a
deal that continues to fray – and that may collapse completely under the weight of
steadily broadening U.S. sanctions by the time a new president could be sworn in.
Few Democrats had thus far hedged over adopting the agreement entirely should they win
the presidency even if the deal survives that long. Leading candidates have characterized
the nuclear agreement as "imperfect" and in need of "strengthening," suggesting subtle
distinctions within the field over the potential conditions of U.S. re-entry into a pact. .
. here
I've got a deal for them to salvage, get off your GD pedestals and say hello to the real
world! . . .There, I feel better now.
Iran's foreign minister has dismissed US President Donald Trump 's claim that a
war between their countries would be short-lived, as Washington sought NATO's help to build an
anti-Tehran coalition.
"'Short war' with Iran is an illusion," Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter on Thursday, a
day after Trump said he did not want a war with Iran but warned that if fighting did
break out, it "wouldn't last very long".
Tehran has accused the United States of "economic
terrorism" and "psychological warfare" over the Trump administration's application of punishing
sanctions after the US president last year unilaterally withdrew Washington from an historic
nuclear deal with world powers. Under the 2015 agreement, Iran agreed to scale back its nuclear
programme in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
In his Twitter post, Zarif said the reimposed and tightened US sanctions "aren't an
alternative to war - they are war".
"... Iran hawks want to force Iran out of the deal to give them a pretext for conflict. These waivers are their latest target because without them other governments may be leery of cooperating on the nuclear projects that give Iran an incentive to remain in the deal. Iran has very few reasons to remain in the deal at this point, and canceling the waivers would likely be the last straw. This is what Bolton and his allies have been working towards all along. When the waivers came up for renewal this spring, the administration extended them, but now there is a real danger that they won't do that again. The last time this came up, Jarrett Blanc explained why extending the waivers is the obviously correct thing to do: ..."
"... Canceling the waivers would be another escalation by the Trump administration, and it would almost certainly prompt Iranian countermoves to further reduce or end their compliance with the deal. The Iran hawks in the administration may think they want a bigger crisis with Iran, but they may not like it when they get one. ..."
Politico reports that the most rabid Iran hawks
in the Senate and inside the administration are pushing to cancel the remaining waivers that
enable international cooperation on civilian nuclear projects in Iran. Their explicit goal is
to destroy the last pieces of the deal that the U.S. hasn't directly attacked yet.
The
report has some
interesting details, but the framing of the debate is awful:
Proponents of the nuclear deal have argued that the international nuclear projects
facilitated by the waivers help give the U.S. greater visibility and intelligence into
Iranian activities; critics say they give an international stamp of approval to Iran's
illicit activities.
This is a great example of how ostensibly "neutral" reporting favors the side acting and
arguing in bad faith. What "illicit activities" are supported by these waivers? There aren't
any. The report makes it sound as if there are two equally valid, competing positions, but one
of them is completely false. The hawks' objections to them have nothing to do with opposition
to "illicit activities" and everything to do with their hatred for the deal. The activities
that the waivers facilitate are endorsed by the JCPOA and a U.N. Security Council resolution.
They cannot be illicit because they are entirely consistent with Iran's obligations and
international law. The U.S. has been providing these waivers up until now because of the
obvious nonproliferation benefits that everyone derives from the deal, and the people that want
to end the waivers are doing so because they don't care about nonproliferation.
Iran hawks want to force Iran out of the deal to give them a pretext for conflict. These
waivers are their latest target because without them other governments may be leery of
cooperating on the nuclear projects that give Iran an incentive to remain in the deal. Iran has
very few reasons to remain in the deal at this point, and canceling the waivers would likely be
the last straw. This is what Bolton and his allies have been working towards all along. When
the waivers came up for renewal this spring, the administration extended them, but now there is
a real danger that they won't do that again. The last time this came up, Jarrett Blanc
explained why extending the waivers is the obviously correct thing to do:
Failing to renew the waivers would be indefensible. The fact that there is even an
internal debate is illuminating: At least some Trump advisors want a crisis with Iran, and
the sooner the better.
Withdrawing waivers for civil nuclear cooperation may sound less aggressive than steps
like the overhyped Guard Corps designation, but it is one of the most dangerous steps the
administration has left, threatening the international nuclear cooperation that is Iran's
only remaining practical benefit from the deal.
Canceling the waivers would be another escalation by the Trump administration, and it
would almost certainly prompt Iranian countermoves to further reduce or end their compliance
with the deal. The Iran hawks in the administration may think they want a bigger crisis with
Iran, but they may not like it when they get one.
Very few Americans have any realisation at all (certainly non that I have spoken to below
the rank of Army Colonel or Navy Captain anyway) that a war with Iran will leave 100s of
thousands if not millions of Americans dead, many capital ships at the bottom of the Gulf and
the Med (think hard about how that will happen in the Med), and the US a broken 3rd world
nation, if the states even stay together to maintain a 'US'.
You need to realise that the middle east (to include Cyprus and Turkey) will be cut off to
you. No resupply, no support, no evac. There will be no troops left in the middle east to
bring home after a few days of fighting exhaust all ammp and supplies and all positions are
then overun or destroyed.
Every last troop in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan will be wiped out, and there will be no
way at all of deploying any more troops (think why).
The shock to the weak American Psyche will be amplified by assymetrical spec ops /
gorrilla warefare in every US city.
To begin with there will be gas station fires and power line cuts in every US town and
city, followed by bridge collpases, interstate highway failures, railroad failures and then
destruction, food and medical warehouse fires, forest fires, container port sabotage, cell
phone and radio tower destruction, water mains destruction, sewage mains destruction, and of
course contamination of water reservoirs - all of which are very simple and easy assymetrical
attacks that can be rolled out nationwide by only by a few hundred well trained individuals
(already well embedded).
Add these simple WW2 partisan style acts to other acts of sabotage against fire,
ambulance, and police infrastruture (again, all very simple and easy assymetrical attacks)
and the worst elements of your own society will continue and further amplify the
conflageration.
The cities will implode and feed upon themselves, and when the carnage reaches a platau,
or simply a stage that invites escalation, then the next phase begins - think MANPADS at
every airport to bring down all relief flights and national guard units, ATGMs and HMG
against military and police units, snipers against any opertunistic target - anywhere at any
time.
There are further steps which I wont describe lest it give certain people ideas, but in
the space of just 2 weeks the entire US could brought to its knees and made to realise that
every nation on the earth, except the us, hates war and tries to avoid it.
If the US people think they can nuke Iran, kill millions more muslims, and then go back to
watching the ball game they should think again.
The Iranians (and Russians and Chinese too) have been planning for a war with the US for
decades.
The Iranians know full well that their cities will be nuked, but the Iranians believe the
US is the embodyment of Satan (and they have lots of evidence to suggest this is indeed true)
so they will fight without regard to life, to pain and to massive losses.
They, and there allies will utterly wipe out ever last US military unit in the middle east
and bring the Continental US to its knees in ways few can yet imagine.
Yes, Iran will be glass, but the US will be ashes, or at least no longer a us - as much a
victim of its own complexity and ignorance as any missiles or explosives used by Iranian spec
ops.
A war with Iran will be the last war the US ever fights. It may 'win' but at what
cost.
@ Capt. Abdul Hassan 76
Thank you for that, very insighful, perhaps a little over the top, but right on.
Sunny Runny Burger , Jun 27, 2019 10:59:29 AM |
139
Don Bacon I think you're right and in addition the amendment won't matter because the
exceptions are so encompassing nearly anything goes.
I'm going to crosspost the scenario (all I posted was the scenario, not the stuff
afterwards):
1. US false flags in Iranian vicinity.
2. US military deaths due to provoked Iranian action.
3. US limited strikes.
4. US false flag Iranian dirty bomb in US city using surplus enriched material bought from
Iran.
5. US submits evidence of Iranian nuclear attack in UNSC.
6. US attacks Iran using nuclear weapons.
A few (?) didn't buy 1 but the US got stuck on 2 so far and might get stuck on 3 as
well.
How can one make 4 fail except to talk about it so people have a chance to think of it as
a possibility when it happens?
5 is for "perception" and narrative, it doesn't matter if the UNSC doesn't agree with what
the US says or the entire world ridicules the US or if the entire world starts marching like
they "magically" and "spontaneously" did before the Iraq war (what was that about? Controlled
opposition galore?).
Russia and China are repeatedly telling the US (and everybody else) what 6 will
mean.
Looks like Bolton is dyed-in-the-wool imperialist. He believes the United States can do what wants without regard to
international law, treaties or the роlitical commitments of previous administrations.
Notable quotes:
"... Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean ..."
...Zionists know what they want, are willing to work together towards their goals, and put their money where their mouth
is. In contrast, for a few pennies the goyim will renounce any principle they pretend to cherish, and go on happily proclaiming
the opposite even if a short while down the road it'll get their own children killed.
The real sad part about this notion of the goy as a mere beast in human form is maybe not that it got codified for eternity
in the Talmud, but rather that there may be some truth to it? Another way of saying this is raising the question whether the goyim
deserve better, given what we see around us.
Israel is an Anglo American aircraft carrier to control the Eastern Mediterranean and prevent a Turko Egyptian and possibly Persian
invasion of Greece & the West
"... But if a ground war is ruled out, then Iran is engaged in the sort of limited conflict in which it has long experience. A senior Iraqi official once said to me that the Iranians "have a PhD" in this type of part political, part military warfare. They are tactics that have worked well for Tehran in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria over the past 40 years. The Iranians have many pressure points against the US, and above all against its Saudi and Emirati allies in the Gulf. ..."
"... Saddam Hussein sought to throttle Iran's oil exports and Iran tried to do the same to Iraq. The US and its allies weighed in openly on Saddam Hussein's side – an episode swiftly forgotten by them after the Iraqi leader invaded Kuwait in 1990. From 1987 on, re-registered Kuwaiti tankers were being escorted through the Gulf by US warships. There were US airstrikes against Iranian ships and shore facilities, culminating in the accidental but very avoidable shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner with 290 passengers on board by the USS Vincennes in 1988. Iran was forced to sue for peace in its war with Iraq. ..."
But the dilemma for Trump is at a deeper level. His sanctions against Iran, reimposed after
he withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, are devastating the Iranian economy. The
US Treasury is a more lethal international power than the Pentagon. The EU and other countries
have stuck with the deal, but they have in practice come to tolerate the economic blockade of
Iran.
Iran was left with no choice but to escalate the conflict. It wants to make sure that the
US, the European and Asian powers, and US regional allies Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates,
feel some pain. Tehran never expected much from the EU states, which are still signed up to the
2015 nuclear deal, and has found its low expectations are being fulfilled.
A fundamental misunderstanding of the US-Iran confrontation is shared by many commentators.
It may seem self-evident that the US has an interest in using its vast military superiority
over Iran to get what it wants. But after the failure of the US ground forces to win in Iraq
and Afghanistan, not to mention Somalia, no US leader can start a land war in the Middle East
without endangering their political survival at home.
Trump took this lesson to heart long before he became president. He is a genuine
isolationist in the American tradition. The Democrats and much of the US media have portrayed
Trump as a warmonger, though he has yet to start a war. His national security adviser John
Bolton and secretary of state Mike Pompeo issue bloodcurdling threats against Iran, but Trump
evidently views such bellicose rhetoric as simply one more way of ramping up the pressure on
Iran.
But if a ground war is ruled out, then Iran is engaged in the sort of limited conflict in
which it has long experience. A senior Iraqi official once said to me that the Iranians "have a
PhD" in this type of part political, part military warfare. They are tactics that have worked
well for Tehran in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria over the past 40 years. The Iranians have many
pressure points against the US, and above all against its Saudi and Emirati allies in the
Gulf.
The Iranians could overplay their hand: Trump is an isolationist, but he is also a populist
national leader who claims in his first campaign rallies for the next presidential election to
"have made America great again". Such boasts make it difficult to not retaliate against Iran, a
country he has demonised as the source of all the troubles in the Middle East.
One US military option looks superficially attractive but conceals many pitfalls. This is to
try to carry out operations along the lines of the limited military conflict between the US and
Iran called the "tanker war". This was part of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and the US came
out the winner.
Saddam Hussein sought to throttle Iran's oil exports and Iran tried to do the same to Iraq.
The US and its allies weighed in openly on Saddam Hussein's side – an episode swiftly
forgotten by them after the Iraqi leader invaded Kuwait in 1990. From 1987 on, re-registered
Kuwaiti tankers were being escorted through the Gulf by US warships. There were US airstrikes
against Iranian ships and shore facilities, culminating in the accidental but very avoidable
shooting down of an Iranian civil airliner with 290 passengers on board by the USS Vincennes in
1988. Iran was forced to sue for peace in its war with Iraq.
Some retired American generals speak about staging a repeat of the tanker war today but
circumstances have changed. Iran's main opponent in 1988 was Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Iran was
well on its way to losing the war, in which there was only one front
"Trump took this lesson to heart long before he became president. He is a genuine
isolationist in the American tradition."
Mr. Cockburn does not understand the meaning of isolationist. Trump has been pro-empire
since the day he took office.
I have better stuff in my blog:
June 22, 2019 – Iran
People familiar with US military history know what just happened off Iran. American
aircraft and drones have violated Iranian airspace every week for years, either by accident
or because American officers like to screw with them, especially when lots of high-level
American officials want war with Iran. Complaints were filed and ignored, so the Iranians
shot one down. Note there is no international airspace in the Strait of Hormuz. Half belongs
to Iran and the other to UAE and Oman. It is an international waterway, so all ships have the
right to transit, but aircraft require permission from one of these nations.
The American people are clueless about this stuff since most only know what our
warmongering media tells them, as Jimmy Dore explains in this video. I was shocked and
pleased that President Trump saw through this ruse and bravely did nothing. If we bomb Iran
they will hit back, maybe openly with a missile barrage, or covertly using Shia militias in
Iraq, Bahrain, and Afghanistan. The USA has tens of thousands of soldiers and contractors all
over the Arab world. I'm sure local teams have spent years scouting targets and preparing to
attack after a green light from Tehran. Trump wisely cancelled this chaos, at least until
after his reelection.
"He is a genuine isolationist" Oh please; Mr. Cockburn, you're old enough to have heard of
projection. There is nothing genuine about Trump's public persona, except for his
greed and egotism. He's a world-class grifter and charlatan–i.e., still not to be
underestimated. His calculation will probably be "Can I get re-elected without jumping into
the breach? Then that's fine too. If the polls look awful, I'll roll the dice and be a
War-Time President like Dubya."
At least, Mr. Cockburn understands that the "crippling sanctions" (the way Americans are
always proud of those show that they're just knee-capping mafiosi) are leaving Iran no choice
but to fight back. So the decision may not be in Donald's hands; he may be smarter than his
media caricature, and yet not as smart as he thought.
Once American servicemen start dying for this rather nebulous cause, it will be the
reaction of American voters that will ultimately determine the extent and duration of yet
another Middle East military, nation re-engineering "adventure".
"Note there is no international airspace in the Strait of Hormuz. Half belongs to Iran and
the other to UAE and Oman. It is an international waterway, so all ships have the right to
transit, but aircraft require permission from one of these nations."
You might want to examine the UNCLOS agreement. It's created some sticky issues in the
South China Seas and in the straight in question, Iran and Oman are leaning very heavily on
that the policy. In their view it is for use exclusively for noncombatant enterprise as part
of their claim as territorial waters, they have a say in its use.
Pakistan is nuclear, pal.
Israel is nuclear, pal.
India is nuclear, pal.
North Korea is nuclear, pal.
Nobody attacks their territory these days, pal.
But Iran chose a long time ago not to go nuclear, pal.
The American Mullahs want their oil money back and so have issued yet another fatwah through
their Supreme Leader.
KiwiAntz , June 24, 2019 at 04:08
Old Geezer are you familiar with the term"Mutual Assured Destruction"? Any Nuclear attack
will be met with a Nuclear response by the Country attacked! This isn't 1945 where America
could nuke Japan & get away with it? It's 2019 & alot of Nations have the Nukes to
deter US Nuclear attacks? That's MAD in a nutshell!
Zhu , June 24, 2019 at 06:03
Who says Iran is going nuclear, Gezzer? If he usual liars.
AnneR , June 24, 2019 at 09:31
So *what* if the Iranians developed nuclear weapons? (Not that they are going to –
as they have stated over and over again. But then they are not as bloodthirsty as
Anglo-Americans always seem to be.)
Frankly, if they had done so, the US-IS-UK would be a lot less eager to bomb their country
into smithereens – all for the benefit of their more westerly neighbor (the middle
country above). NK understands this. Unfortunately, Qaddafi didn't.
And again – I repeat: which nation state is it that *has* used such weapons: twice?
Only one. (Not to mention that same country's eager use of depleted uranium – far from
its shores, of course – in bullets and shells.) Charming.
heathroi , June 24, 2019 at 09:45
is that you, John?
Steve in DC , June 24, 2019 at 09:47
Iran should go nuclear. The US doesn't f#%* with countries that have the bomb. The sooner
Iran can thwart Washington the better off the world will be. Washington will have to get
another hobbyhorse.
Tick Tock , June 24, 2019 at 11:45
How many generations has your family been inbreeding? Was it part of the US Guvment plan
to create the race of morons? Without a doubt it has been a success in making you, make
Forrest Gump look like an Einstein. Keep posting at least it might keep you off the
streets.
Ol' Hippy , June 24, 2019 at 11:58
They won't need to. All they have to do is barricade the Strait of Hormuz and collapse the
world economy that relies on oil from the Gulf States. Never mentioned in the corporate(MSM)
media circles that want war. The ensuing depression would be like no other, ever.
My friend, you've been getting too much of your news from Israel-influenced mainstream
media. Iran has not had a nuclear weapons program since 2003 (if it had one even then, which
is doubtful). That is the consensus position of all U.S. intelligence agencies, Mossad, and
several european intelligence agencies. See the reference links in my article at
https://relativelyfreepress.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-question-about-ron-wydens-intelligence.html
Moreover, as Don Bacon summarizes, Iran doesn't need nukes to hold the U.S. at bay.
Finally, Iran's unquestionable ability to close all shipping of oil through the Hormuz
Strait (30 percent of the world's supply) means that Iran has the ability to bring the
western economic system to its knees. Who needs nukes?
DH Fabian , June 24, 2019 at 13:08
Are China and Russia nuclear-armed countries, in a world that has largely come to see the
US as an unpredictable and dictatorial threat? Possibly too great of a threat to allow it to
continue?
Linda Furr , June 24, 2019 at 13:12
Who's the 'they'? US officials have already talked of nuclear attacks on areas of Iran.
The great 'democracy' of USA just ain't so. Its criminal psychopathy comes straight from
Israel – against most Americans' desires. Washington DC is sick.
Not to in any way absolve Trump, but as long as Bolton and Pompeo are on the scene there will
be blood. Bolton in particular should be in jail for crimes against humanity. He is a madman.
Scary times.
This recent 19 May piece from Ha'aretz documents precisely the manipulation of
American policy by Israeli charlatans and their agents of influence in the US. The title
says it all just by itself: "Netanyahu's Iran Dilemma: Getting Trump to Act Without
Putting Israel on the Front Line." It goes on to assess that:
"In this conflict, Israel is hoping to have its cake and eat it too. Ever since Trump
was elected president two and a half years ago, Netanyahu has been urging him to take a
more aggressive line toward Iran, in order to force it to make additional concessions on
its nuclear program and disrupt its support for militant organizations.
"Trump acceded to this urging a year ago when he withdrew America from the nuclear
agreement with Iran. That was followed by tighter sanctions on Iran, as well as
publication of a plan by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo detailing 12 steps Tehran
must take to satisfy Washington.
"But Israel isn't interested in being part of the front. That is why Jerusalem has
issued so few official statements on the Iranian issue, and why Netanyahu has urged
ministers to be cautious in what they say."
I'd say that passage captures the situation perfectly, and it just goes to show that
when you want to know about what chicanery Israel and its lobby are up to in the US, you
have to go and look at what Israelis are saying when they aren't particularly careful about
who's observing. That sort of truth is sanitized from any MSM accounts in the US.
@ OP 2
Israel is an important part of Middle East US policy decisions but not the only part, and not
the most important one. Going back to the Carter Doctrine, and before, the US has intended to
be the top dog in the Middle East but instead, through its mistakes, has become second fiddle
to Iran. The US and its allies have tens of thousands of troops with tons of military gear in
the area and are still losing influence, replaced by Iran and its Shia Crescent. That must be
reversed!
In Danielle Ryan’s article in RT's Op-ed “US will not ‘stumble into’
war with Iran by mistake. If it happens, it will be by design” she notes the prevalence
of “strange terminology” used by mainstream media to describe how the US gets
into wars. I have added to her list and checked that all have been used in the current
US-Iran scenario. The US is in danger of being: “dragged into, sucked into, sliding
into, stumbling into, slouching towards, lured into, bumbling into, blundering into and
sleepwalking into” war with Iran.
Who are they trying to kid when they have already declared economic war on Iran,
asphyxiating the Iranian economy, knowing full well that Iran has to respond.
John Bolton “sleepwalking” into war with Iran? He’ll be wide awake and
so excited he’ll probably have to relieve himself.
NemesisCalling , Jun 23, 2019 11:23:57 AM |
12Oscar Peterson , Jun 23, 2019 11:25:56 AM |
13
@Don Bacon #4
"Israel is an important part of Middle East US policy decisions but not the only part,
and not the most important one. Going back to the Carter Doctrine, and before, the US has
intended to be the top dog in the Middle East but instead, through its mistakes, has become
second fiddle to Iran. The US and its allies have tens of thousands of troops with tons of
military gear in the area and are still losing influence, replaced by Iran and its Shia
Crescent. That must be reversed!"
Have to disagree with a good deal of this.
Israel's strategic preferences have indeed become the most important single influence on
US Middle East policy. Up to a certain point in the past, that was not true, but it is now.
The Carter Doctrine has, in effect, been undermined by the distortions that the ever-growing
power of pro-Israel political Jewry in the US in both its neoconservative and Likudnik
expressions are able to impose on our policy.
Neither big oil, nor Saudi Arabia, nor anything that could objectively be called US
strategic considerations wields anything like the heft of political Jewry. And even
metastasizing Christian Zionism is only an ideological adjunct to Zionism proper, primarily a
function of the cultural damage stemming from Jewry's march through the institutions since WW
II.
That said, I must also disagree that Iran has become "the top dog" in the Middle East.
They are nowhere close, though, with their cultural and technological attainments, backed by
oil and gas deposits, their long-term strategic position has a lot of promise. A "top dog"
would not be in Iran's current underdog position vis-a-vis Israel and its US golem and having
to fight back with the stratagems we are currently seeing.
The Shia crescent is essentially a myth, and Iran's ability to exercise dominating
influence on Shia Arabs is largely a function of the hostility of Sunni Arabs to the Shia
Arab empowerment of recent years. Yes, the US is losing influence, but that is mostly a
function of our own policy dysfunction induced by dual-loyalist political Jewry and the
Israel-Über-Alles strategic preferences it imposes.
@Don Bacon
That clarifies.
I do agree that Israel is one of the 2 important factors in US calculation in south-west
Asia, the other being strategic leverage over big-league competitors. And, it is true that US
military presence in the Persian Gulf has been the Carter doctrine's making - although one
might argue the doctrine itself was created to fill the vacuum created with the departure of
the British and the subsequent independence given to the southern Sheikhdoms. The issue with
the current US strategy in the region is that it defies the reality with such an obstinance
that it completely undermines its own goals. The origin of this obstinance is well known to
everyone.
NJDuke , Jun 23, 2019 11:45:09 AM |
18Don Bacon , Jun 23, 2019 11:52:24 AM |
19
Israel or no, failure is not an option for the US in the Middle East, especially Syria which
was Hillary's Job-One during her SecState tenure.
AP, Dec 14, 2011-- US: Assad's Syria a 'dead man walking'
The State Department official, Frederic Hof, told Congress on Wednesday that Assad's
repression may allow him to hang on to power but only for a short time. And, he urged the
Syrian opposition to prepare for the day when it takes control of the state in order to
prevent chaos and sectarian conflict.
"Our view is that this regime is the equivalent of dead man walking," said Hof, the State
Department's pointman on Syria, which he said was turning into "Pyongyang in the Levant," a
reference to the North Korean capital. He said it was difficult to determine how much time
Assad has left in power but stressed "I do not see this regime surviving.". . .
here
And Syria is only the most important US target country in the ME, the Iraq challenge still
exists, Lebanon is important (receives some US military aid) and of course the old bugaboo
Iran has become more vital than ever. Iran has a heavy political influence in Iraq and Syria,
and that highway from Tehran to Beirut is a problem especially considering Iran ally (and
"terrorist") Hezbollah. So. . .that's why 50,000+ US troops, an air force, and the Navy's
Fifth fleet are there.
The main point is that the US world hegemon has to be strong everywhere, especially in
Asia, and if it's forced out of anywhere it would set a bad example, going back to 'losing
China.'
"The issue with the current US strategy in the region is that it defies the reality with
such an obstinance that it completely undermines its own goals. The origin of this
obstinance is well known to everyone."
Yes, I think that's the issue exactly, and Israel is at the heart of it all. We are
undermining our own goals (and scoring own goals.) Your point here captures the current
bottom line of US "strategy" in the region.
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what
it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is
conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." . ."I wouldn't go to
war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two
things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of
Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.". . .General Smedley Butler, USMC, two
Congressional Medals of Honor, veteran of wars in Central America, Europe and China
Is Israel responsible for the US enmity toward North Korea? the bombing of Libya and Somalia?
Eighteen years in Afghanistan?
No. In the US, to quote Randolph Bourne (1918), war is the health of the state.
. . .With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government,
with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the
negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it
into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country
into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the
intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit
of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to
war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a
bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where
the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which
has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the
nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State
in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an
absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the
difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of
empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war,
are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally
exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass
themselves.
"Is Israel responsible for the US enmity toward North Korea? the bombing of Libya and
Somalia? Eighteen years in Afghanistan?"
First, I did not claim that every move the US makes is Israel-induced. I said that Israel
is at the heart of our overall strategic dysfunction in the Middle East. Libya and Somalia
are peripheral, and Afghanistan is not truly in the region at all.
But let's be clear that the rise of both al Quaeda and, as a follow-on, the Islamic State
have been greatly facilitated by the resentment generated by the imposition of Jewish state
on the region at the expense of the local Arabs. Both bin Laden and Zawahiri have mentioned
the Zionist conquest and its wars as formative experiences.
And the rise of IS was a direct result of the US invasion of Iraq, itself induced by the
overlapping strains of Jewish neoconservatism and Likudnik hyper-Zionism. The overthrow of
Saddam created the political and strategic space for IS to emerge and thrive, and the
concerted attempt to overthrow Assad--another Israeli strategic preference--weakened the
Syrian state so much that it permitted the establishment of a "caliphate" which then invaded
Iraq. This expanding dynamic played a role in Libya as well.
With regard to Saudi Arabia, we have to ask why the US put its weight behind the
replacement of Muhammed bin Naif (MbN) with Muhammed bin Salman (MbS) when almost all the USG
wanted to tell Salman that we preferred staying with the known and trusted MbN. Almost
certainly, Trump's ignorant support of MbS originated with the pro-Israel Jews who dominate
his thinking. MbS has been a bonanza for Israel but a disaster for us (and the region.)
And with regard to Afghanistan, the denuding of that theater to resource the
Iraq-Iran-Syria invasion/regime change scheme demanded by Israel and its operatives in the US
had a definitively negative outcome on US policy in Afghanistan from which, it is now clear,
it will never recover.
In East Asia, the negative impact of US Israel-centric Middle East policy can be seen as
well. The neocon/Likudnik-induced morass of Iraq into which we marched distracted us from the
Asia-Pacific and particularly China's move into the South China Sea, which might have been
deterred, if we weren't expending the overwhelming majority of our energy, attention and
resources in the Middle East.
And since you bring up North Korea, the Israeli influence on US policy there is certainly
secondary but definitely not zero. Israel and its lobby seek an ultra-hard line on any US
negotiations with North Korea because they see it as an extension of Iran policy, so in their
view, any concession to North Korea is a bad example for Iran. This contributes to impeding
any possible negotiated solution to the complex of issues on the Korean Peninsula.
It is truly amazing how far the insidious reach of Israel, its nefarious lobby and the
"Is-it-good-for-the-Jews?" obsessions of political Jewry extends into US foreign policy. Our
current strategy is, as ATH noted, self-undermining. There really is no historical precedent
for it.
After all, this is what our elected, alleged representatives posit when they state
collectively, in unison, loudly, repeatedly, on their knees, that "the USA maintains an
irrevocable bond with Israel".
That statement should bring the condescension and the wrath of the USA public.
For what reason would the USA maintain an "irrevocable bond" with ANY other nation?
Regardless of the fact that ISrael is an apartheid state by its own definition as "The
Jewish State of ISrael".
You both have valid points, but I've always believed it's the dog that wags its tail.
Sure, if it was simply Palestine, one could expect different nuances of US policy. But any
qualitative difference? I don't see it.
The US would still back undemocractic strong men who would treat American interests as
paramount in return for US backing of their regime and turning a blind eye to their
enrichment at the expense of the general population. The US would be hellbent against any
pan-Arab nationalism or anything resembling socialism or sovereignty.
The proof? Well take a look at how the US treats the rest of the world.
The US and Israel have overlapping interests as it relates to the Middle East with the added
accelerator of the many dual nationals in seats of power.
lysias , Jun 23, 2019 2:21:16 PM |
57bevin , Jun 23, 2019 2:22:35 PM |
58
"Israel's strategic preferences have indeed become the most important single influence on US
Middle East policy. Up to a certain point in the past, that was not true, but it is now. The
Carter Doctrine has, in effect, been undermined by the distortions that the ever-growing
power of pro-Israel political Jewry in the US in both its neoconservative and Likudnik
expressions are able to impose on our policy."
Oscar Peterson is correct not because Israel's interests are of such importance-they
really are not- but because US Foreign policy has become totally incoherent.
This is because it is entirely aimed at fund raisers and influencers of the electorate. It is
founded on the theory that the United States can do whatever it pleases, and need never care
about consolidating its power or defending its positions because it is far more powerful than
all its potential rivals added together. This being the case its Foreign Policy becomes a
saleable commodity, just as its armed forces-which can never be defeated- are at the disposal
of the highest bidders.
Note to Psychohistorian: the open democracy website has an article on Costa Rica's public
banking today.
with regard to iran, the usa is tied at the hip to israel.. that is a fact... now, maybe it
can change, but i think phil at mondoweiss lays it out pretty clearly for anyone interested..
as i see it, this is just temporary... israel is gunning hard for war on iran.. anyone who
can't see that is in fact very blind..
meanwhile - Trump: “I have some hawks. John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was
up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time.“
bolton is in this position due the fact trump owed sheldon adelson one... at least trump
can see it, but i don't know that he can avoid where this is going... that would be putting
too much faith in a con artist - grifter..
I suggest you download Douglas Reed's comprehensive review of Zionism's activities in "The
Controversy of Zion" over the period you describe from a singular perspective and read it
thoroughly. IN fact I commend that book to everyone on this site. Reed was a correspondent
through WW2 and before and his work is detailed and readable, with extensive references.
"CBS News Analyst And Iran "War Mongering Maniac" Also Raytheon Board Member: Dore"
"How do you know the MSM is nothing more than the media wing of the
military-industrial-complex? A Raytheon board member masquerading as an objective analyst is
a good start."
"On Friday, CBS News analyst and retired Navy Admiral James Winnefeld Jr. slammed
President Trump for calling off retaliatory strikes on Iran over a downed US drone, while
insisting we must strike Iran or else the United States will "lose a lot of credibility."
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also said financial restrictions would be imposed on
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif later this week. ............... Zarif, viewed as
Iran's most skilled diplomat, was lead negotiator in the multi-party nuclear accord reached
in 2015 under the Obama administration that Trump has since rejected.
If this was about a real estate deal in New York, Trump's bully-boy tactics might seem
reasonable. Deliberately pissing off the real leader of Iran, and sanctioning their head
diplomat means he doesn't want "negotiations". Only total surrender is permissible in light
of his foolishness.
I've got a bad feeling about all of this. Time is running out for the apartheid Jewish
state, and they're going to be mighty tempted to arrange for a bunch of US military men or
women to be brought home in body bags. That's because they can't be absolutely positive one
of the neocon Democrats will be in the White House soon.
"Trump is in danger of being crushed between a Fed that sees the US dollar's role as the
world's reserve currency collapse, and the need for the Fed to blame someone not linked to
the real causes of the collapse, that is to say, the monetary policies adopted through QE to
prolong the post-crisis economic agony of 2008....
"As foolish as it may seem, a war on Iran could be the perfect option that satisfies all
power groups in the United States. The hawks would finally have their war against Tehran, the
world economy would sink, and the blame would fall entirely on Trump. The Donald, as a
result, would lose any chance of being re-elected so it makes sense for him to call off
possible strikes as he did after the US drone was shot out of the sky."
The author echoes my words from yesterday:
"I wonder if Europeans will understand all this before the impending disaster. I doubt
it."
Regarding what I wrote about Sanders in my reply to Stever, here we have the Chancellery
of the People's Republic of China spokesman, Hua Chun Ying:
"The American leaders say that 'the era of the commercial surrender of their country has
come to an end', but what is over is their economic intimidation of the world and their
hegemony.
"The United States must again respect international law, not arrogate to itself
extraterritorial rights and mandates, must learn to respect its peers in safeguarding
transparent and non-discriminatory diplomatic and commercial relations. China and the United
States have negotiated other disputes in the past with good results and the doors of dialogue
are open as long as they are based on mutual respect and benefits."
No, I didn't cite everything in the article. There's much more of importance there to
read!
After a somewhat quiet weekend the Trump administration today engaged in another push against
Iran.
Today the Treasury Department sanctioned the leaders of
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It also sanctioned Iran's Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Khamenei and his office! There will be no more Disney Land visits for them.
Mnuchin: "The president has instructed me that we will be designating [Iran's foreign
minister Javad] Zarif later this week." cc: @JZarif
The Treasury Secretary will designate Javad Zarif as what? A terrorist? Zarif is quite
effective in communicating the Iranian standpoint on Twitter and other social media. Those
accounts will now be shut down.
The Trump administration's special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook, said today that Iran should
respond to U.S. diplomacy with diplomacy. Sanctioning Iran's chief diplomat is probably not
the way to get there.
All those who get sanctioned by the U.S. will gain in popularity in Iran. These U.S.
measures will only unite the people of Iran and strengthen their resolve.
Iran will respond to this new onslaught by asymmetric means of which it has plenty.
On Saturday Trump said that all he wants is that Iran never gets nuclear weapons. But the
State Department wants much more. Hook today said that the U.S. would only
lift sanctions if a comprehensive deal is made that includes ballistic missile and human
rights issues. Iran can not agree to that. But this is not the first time that Pompeo
demanded more than Trump himself. Is it Pompeo, not Trump, who is pressing this expanded
version to make any deal impossible?
Brian Hook is by the way a loon who does not even understand the meaning of what he
himself says:
US Hook says Iran knew what getting into when struck deal with president who had 1 1/2
yr left in office. "They knew what they were getting into...They knew that there was a
great possibility that the next president could come in & leave the deal." Note: US
elections 17 months away
Those are two good arguments for Iran to never again agree to any deal with the
'non-agreement-capable' United States.
It seems obvious from the above that the Trump administration has
no real interest in reasonable negotiations with Iran:
"The administration is not really interested in negotiations now," said Robert Einhorn, a
former senior State Department official who was involved in negotiations with Iranian
officials during the Obama administration. "It wants to give sanctions more time to make
the Iranians truly desperate, at which point it hopes the negotiations will be about the
terms of surrender."
That is part of the strategy. But the real issue is deeper:
Pro tip: Sanctions against #Iran aren't to retaliate for the downed drone or to punish
tanker attacks or to improve the nuclear deal or to help the Iranian people but to foment
revolution against the regime. The strategy is regime change with velvet gloves.
... ... ...
Pompeo was hastily sent to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Brian Hook is now in Oman and Bolton
is in Israel. The U.S. will also pressure Europe and NATO to join a new 'coalition of the
willing'. The UK will likely follow any U.S. call as it needs a trade deal to survive after
Brexit.
Other countries are best advised to stay out.
Posted by b at
02:05 PM |
Comments (183) Our leaders have gone out of their tiny minds, first Trump confirms our
suspicions that the deal he wants must include those legal ballistic missiles, then that
nutcase Hunt pledged to stand by the US in the event of conflict with Iran, you could not
make it up.
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who is running against Boris Johnson for the Conservatives'
leadership, has pledged to stand by the US even if its confrontation with Iran leads to a
military conflict, according to The Daily Mail.
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201906241076032533-uk-foreign-secretary-hunt-admits-britain-could-follow-us-into-war-with-iran/
Trump is such a con man... He said he told Shinzō Abe, before the Japanese prime
minister visited Tehran on 12 June: "Send the following message: you can't have nuclear
weapons. And other than that, we can sit down and make a deal. But you cannot have nuclear
weapons."
This whole saga is not about nuclear weapons, it is about those conventional ballistic
missiles which Iran is manufacturing perfectly legally and changing the equation in the
region. These are precision missiles and could turn Tel Aviv and Saudi oil infrastructure
into rubble, US/Israel want to make Iran defenseless. It is not going to happen.
The US faced empire is the largest state sponsor of terror
The big lie technique works when all levels of communication are controlled. Otherwise it
makes you the laughing stock, which Trump will be at the G20 before he leaves
In dealing with Iran Pompeo & Bolton are following the infantile pattern that Israel uses
with Palestinians and Hezbollah: Make them suffer so they turn against their leaders and
provoke a regime change
It never worked because the middle easterners do not think like the Jews or Westerners. They
are resilient and have little to loose. The more hardship they get from foreign and hostile
powers the more they unite and resist. Despite the overwhelming persecution of the
Palestinians by Israel and its western allies for 50 years they are still resisting. Iran is
not different.
They are under siege for 30 years and still defiant.
Many US presidents and Boltons have passed and disappeared in oblivion after attempting and
failing regime changes in the middle east. Trump is not different.
Well, the end is most certainly nigh. Figure the US or Israel will resort to using nuclear
weapons which will result in Russia and China unleashing theirs. At least we can expect Wash
DC to be obliterated. May solve one of our problems.
Expect all nuclear facilities, military bases, and major airports to be targeted. Hopefully,
major population centers would be spared but doubt the US will reciprocate so expect all
major metropolitan areas to also be targeted.
Here is the double down on stupid which should have been expected.
Double sanctions, double demands, double threats, double censorship and the assemblage of
a fake posse - aka the coalition of the lapdogs.
Who will join the coalition of dumbfuckery? Here are the coalition members from Dubya's
Iraqi invasion in 2003:
Of the 48 countries on the list, three contributed troops to the invasion force (the
United Kingdom, Australia and Poland). An additional 37 countries provided some number of
troops to support military operations after the invasion was complete.
The list of coalition members provided by the White House included several nations that
did not intend to participate in actual military operations. Some of them, such as Marshall
Islands, Micronesia, Palau and Solomon Islands, did not have standing armies. However,
through the Compact of Free Association, citizens of the Marshall Islands, Palau and the
Federated States of Micronesia are guaranteed US national status and therefore are allowed to
serve in the US military. The members of these island nations have deployed in a combined
Pacific force consisting of Guamanian, Hawaiian and Samoan reserve units. They have been
deployed twice to Iraq. The government of one country, the Solomon Islands, listed by the
White House as a member of the coalition, was apparently unaware of any such membership and
promptly denied it.[5] According to a 2010 study, the Federal States of Micronesia, the
Marshall Islands and Palau (and Tonga and the Solomon Islands to a lesser extent) were all
economically dependent on economic aid from the United States, and thus had an economic
incentive to join the Coalition of the Willing.[6]
In December 2008, University of Illinois Professor Scott Althaus reported that he had
learned that the White House was editing and back-dating revisions to the list of countries
in the coalition.[7][8] Althaus found that some versions of the list had been entirely
removed from the record, and that others contradicted one another, as opposed to the
procedure of archiving original documents and supplementing them with later revisions and
updates.[3]
By August 2009, all non-U.S./UK coalition members had withdrawn from Iraq.[9] As a result,
the Multinational Force – Iraq was renamed and reorganized to United States Forces
– Iraq as of January 1, 2010. Thus the Coalition of the Willing came to an official
end.
Thanks to fastfreddy with the Iraq related Coalition of the Willing history
Over on another thread it was noted that today Trump is trying to build another Coalition
of the Willing to "protect" the shipping lanes.
My response was
@ Don Bacon and SRB with the comments about the crybaby defense over "protecting" shipping
lanes
I think China will tell empire like I tell the guy in front of the Post Office wanting to
protect my bicycle while I go in....."Why should I give you money to protect me from you?
100% Gangsterism. The Outlaw US Empire learned it cannot defeat Iran militarily, so it
invites other nations to become outlaws too. The G-20's in 4 days. I'll wager Trump leaves
before it's over having accomplished nothing other than absorbing abuse from most attendees.
And just what will Trump do when this move fails as it will? IMO, he just dealt Sanders a
great set of cards. The crowd expecting a repeat of Shock & Awe will grow smaller as they
slowly realize the truth of my second sentence. Instead of climbing down the tree, Trump
climbs higher onto thinner branches. What's more, Trump opens himself up to being challenged
within the Republican Party for POTUS nominee as the Current Oligarchy cannot like this
choice.
"realDonaldTrump is 100% right that the US military has no business in the Persian Gulf.
Removal of its forces is fully in line with interests of US and the world. But it's now clear
that the #B_Team is not concerned with US interests -- they despise diplomacy, and thirst for
war."
It appears Zarif concedes policy isn't made by Trump. The ignorance displayed in the
thread's comments is astounding.
The only times I can think of when a country switched sides, ie: overthrew their leaders, was
when they were caught in a squeeze between two other powers and decided to go with the
winner. Example: Italy in 1943. External pressures causing people to overthrow their leaders?
Essentially Nada.
So, what happens to derivatives if a shooting war ends up with the Straits closed? Escobar's
recent piece on the derivatives implosion that would result from a shooting war suggests that
the US/Saudi/Bibi axis is like a boys playing with matches around a can of gasoline or that
they believe they have a work-around for the derivatives problem. I would like to know
whether the BIS-types are on board with this fiasco or are trying to apply the brakes.
Bernie Sanders suggested that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was "the worst foreign policy
blunder in the history of the country." Bernie you ain't seen nothing yet, if those slavering
imbeciles have anything to do with it. The costs [including long term costs] of the
Iraq/Afghan wars [still ongoing] are estimated at 6 Trillion dollars. Here is what just one
Trillion dollars looks like http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
"Yet the nation's longest and most expensive war is the one that is still going on. In
addition to nearly 7,000 troops killed, the 16-year conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan will
cost an estimated US$6 trillion due to its prolonged length, rapidly increasing veterans
health care and disability costs and interest on war borrowing. On this Memorial Day, we
should begin to confront the staggering cost and the challenge of paying for this war".
http://theconversation.com/iraq-and-afghanistan-the-us-6-trillion-bill-for-americas-longest-war-is-unpaid-78241
I've replied to numerous people lacking knowledge that they must listen to Nasrallah when it
comes to what will occur if the Outlaw US Empire or any other entity attacks Iran. This short clip
is one of several I'm referring to. I'd say it's very likely Trump needs to be included on
the list of those needing to hear Nasrallah.
That does not change the fact that Trump foreign policy is a continuation of Obama fogirn policy. It is neocon forign policy directed
on "full spectrum dominance". Trump just added to this bulling to the mix.
Notable quotes:
"... When pressed on the dangers of having such an uber-hawk neo-conservative who remains an unapologetic cheerleader of the 2003 Iraq War, and who laid the ground work for it as a member of Bush's National Security Council, Trump followed with, "That doesn't matter because I want both sides." ..."
"... I was against going into Iraq... I was against going into the Middle East . Chuck we've spent 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East right now. ..."
"... Bolton has never kept his career-long goal of seeing regime change in Tehran a secret - repeating his position publicly every chance he got, especially in the years prior to tenure at the Trump White House. ..."
"... Bolton! So much winning! And there's also Perry: Rick Perry, Trump's energy secretary, was flagged for describing Trumpism as a "toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition." ..."
"... Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton was one of the architects of the Iraq War under George W. Bush, and now he's itching to start a war with Iran -- an even bigger country with almost three times the population. ..."
In a stunningly frank moment during a Sunday
Meet the Press interview focused on President Trump's decision-making on Iran, especially last week's "brink of war" moment which
saw Trump draw down readied military forces in what he said was a "common sense" move, the commander in chief threw his own national
security advisor under the bus in spectacular fashion .
Though it's not Trump's first tongue-in-cheek denigration of Bolton's notorious hawkishness, it's certainly the most brutal and
blunt take down yet, and frankly just plain enjoyable to watch. When host Chuck Todd asked the president if he was "being pushed
into military action against Iran" by his advisers in what was clearly a question focused on Bolton first and foremost, Trump responded:
"John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time, okay?"
Trump began by explaining, "I have two groups of people. I have doves and I have hawks," before leading into this sure to be classic
line that is one for the history books: "If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time, okay?"
During this section of comments focused on US policy in the Middle East, the president reiterated his preference that he hear
from "both sides" on an issue, but that he was ultimately the one making the decisions.
When pressed on the dangers of having such an uber-hawk neo-conservative who remains an unapologetic cheerleader of the 2003 Iraq
War, and who laid the ground work for it as a member of Bush's National Security Council, Trump followed with, "That doesn't matter
because I want both sides."
And in another clear indicator that Trump wants to stay true to his non-interventionist instincts voiced on the 2016 campaign
trail, he explained to Todd that:
I was against going into Iraq... I was against going into the Middle East . Chuck we've spent 7 trillion dollars in the Middle
East right now.
It was the second time this weekend that Trump was forced to defend his choice of Bolton as the nation's most influential foreign
policy thinker and adviser. When peppered with questions at the White House Saturday following Thursday night's dramatic "almost
war" with Iran, Trump said that he "disagrees" with Bolton "very much" but that ultimately he's "doing a very good job".
Bolton has never kept his career-long goal of seeing regime change in Tehran a secret - repeating his position publicly every
chance he got, especially in the years prior to tenure at the Trump White House.
But Bolton hasn't had a good past week: not only had Trump on Thursday night shut the door on Bolton's dream of overseeing a major
US military strike on Iran, but he's been pummeled in the media.
Even a Fox prime time show (who else but Tucker of course) colorfully described him as a "bureaucratic tapeworm" which periodically
reemerges to cause pain and suffering.
It's great that the biggest war mongers are the ones that not only never served but in the case of Bolton, purposely avoided
serving. They should send that ****** to Iran so we can see just how supportive he is when he's actually in danger.
This guy is a worthless piece of **** and Trump's an idiot for hiring him.
Being a cheerleader for the Iraq war is as ridiculous as that ******* mustache. He's just letting neocons have a front row
seat to power. That's how he's keeping them from jumping ship to become democrats. They have no principles. They're just power
worshippers.
Do ya all remember when Trump took office? Losers use military strategy that is overwhelming bombardment b4 land attack. I
thought that Donnie can not survive this pressure. Looks like now he is riding horse with banner in hands. Thumb up, MJT
I was against going into the Middle East...$7 Trillion? So why is Jared trying to give away $50 Billion more? People thought
they voted for MAGA, but they got Jared...MMEGA.
How about MJANYA?...Make Jared a New Yorker Again. Send Jared and Ivanka back to New York before it's $10 Trillion.
Bolton! So much winning! And there's also Perry: Rick Perry, Trump's energy secretary, was flagged for describing Trumpism
as a "toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition."
Trump "unleashes"? For those who think, he also said Bolton is doing a good job. Crap headline. I think Solomon said, "In a
multitude of counselors there is victory".
What kind of unprofessional dingus talks openly about employee issues? That's not how you run a organization. That's how you
run a reality television show.
Sides? I could hire Hobo Joe, the bum that huffs paint and drinks scotch out of plastic bottle while yelling at traffic by
the intersection, as my advisor. He'd probably tell me to do some whacky stuff. But why would I do that?
There is no side to hear. Bomb everyone. That is John Bolton's side. It isn't worth hearing. The man shouldn't be drawing a
paycheck. He shouldn't be drawing breath. He should be pushing up daisies. He the same as ISIS.
Reading is fundamental....and certainly not needed to spout opinions. In fact, reading, combined with critical thinking, logic
and reason, just gets in the way of forming opinions. Or should I say "repeating" other's opinions.
"Chuck we've spent 7 trillion dollars in the Middle East right now."....Yes, just like your *** bosses wanted and needed and
you dumb ******* sheep still think voting matters.
Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton was one of the architects of the Iraq War under George W. Bush, and now he's
itching to start a war with Iran -- an even bigger country with almost three times the population.
Democrats in Congress have the power to pull us back from the brink , but they need to act now. Once bombs start falling and
troops are on the ground, there will be massive political pressure to rally around the flag.
"... That could mean that it was there specifically for observation (of the P8, as much as Iranian defenses); and of course could mean that much of the equipment, particularly the active equipment, was no longer aboard ..."
"... Wouldn't be needed, after all, if the job was just to record what was hoped to be an Iranian reaction, and would want to minimize the amount of equipment potentially falling into enemy hands if things went bad. ..."
"... Secondly, the 35 souls on board the P8 comment by Iran was brilliant. For one thing, it put the US on the defensive and once again called world attention to the fact that the Iranians have striven to avoid loss of life (so much so that Trump even used it to partly save face on the whole thing). ..."
"... But either way, it is unquestionable that Iranian intelligence has penetrated the base, or operations, to a degree that must be causing all sorts of trepidation amongst the US hawks. ..."
Re the Boeing and the drone. With both planes apparently close together for the flight, they
were not there for maritime surveillance. Iranians most likely only picked up floating debris
initially and electronic hardware may be rovered later, but there is a possibility the drone
was stripped of hardware for its job as decoy. 35 to 38 people on the Boeing are too many for
a simple photoshoot.
The decoy entering Iranian airspace the beginnings of a US strike... it draws fire from
multiple SAM sites, the Boeing P-8 videoing the shootdown to justify the strike while
locating launch positions and directing immediate strikes onto these positions. Comes unstuck
when Iran launches a single missile. Trump cancels the strike.
Re the Boeing - if the strike was planned in advance, as the pentagon does with its
contingency plans the aircraft would have been equipped for detecting SAM sites.
To add to my post @80, the US captured the missile strike on video. One of the pics put out
by the Pentagon was of the drone exploding. This means they were videoing the drone at the
moment the missile struck. The only reason for having a video camera filming the drone that I
can see, is that the US expected it to be hit.
Why have 35 (or, according to Trump 38) people on a spy plane that is normally crewed by
9?
Because you need double-digit numbers of American casualties to get Americans'
attention.
As PavewayIV pointed out in a previous thread, the P-8 spy plane was to the east of
the drone. That means it was between the missile launcher and the drone. The P-8 has a
hundred times or more the radar cross section of the drone, despite them both being about the
same size, so electronic countermeasures or not it stands out like a sore thumb relative to
the drone to Iran's radar. It is impossible that these issues were overlooked by the people
who put this mission together.
The Navy has a bunch of P-8s. They only had one RQ-4.
The conclusion is obvious:
The drone was there to collect evidence of the destruction of the P-8.
I had noticed the directions in the in the video pics but had forgotten about that.
Makes it more complex as the crewed aircraft was to the east of the drone (closest to Iran),
yet videoing the drone expecting it to be hit...
The video also had coordinates of the aircraft taking the video and the target aircraft (in
this case the drone) I have not cross checked this with the Iranian coordinates and bringing
them up on google maps did not show the positions in relation to Iranian airspace. That the
US includes the coordinates in the pics makes me wonder if the information in the video shots
has been changed - possibly by resetting the video recorder prior to the op.
J Swift | Jun 23, 2019 7:42:55 PM | 152
A couple of random thoughts on the drone/P8. Firstly, there was earlier a fair amount of debate on the stealthiness of the
drone. I would just mention that the Iranians did not say it was a stealth drone they were tracking...they said it was in
"stealth mode." I originally thought that was just an offhand reference to the craft turning off its transponder, making it
somewhat less obvious although hardly a true stealth craft. But perhaps they meant that it was noted to be in fully passive
mode with respect to its surveillance equipment.
That could mean that it was there specifically for observation (of the P8, as much as Iranian defenses); and of course
could mean that much of the equipment, particularly the active equipment, was no longer aboard
Wouldn't be needed, after all, if the job was just to record what was hoped to be an Iranian reaction, and would want
to minimize the amount of equipment potentially falling into enemy hands if things went bad.
Secondly, the 35 souls on board the P8 comment by Iran was brilliant. For one thing, it put the US on the defensive
and once again called world attention to the fact that the Iranians have striven to avoid loss of life (so much so that Trump
even used it to partly save face on the whole thing).
As Paveway IV commented, it could have technically been an empty, remotely controlled plane, in which case the Iranian
reference to a highly unusual number of crewmen may have been a tongue-in-cheek jab at the Yanks--or there may have been an
unusually high number of crewlambs, which might also have alerted the Iranian intelligence that a set-up was unfolding.
But either way, it is unquestionable that Iranian intelligence has penetrated the base, or operations, to a degree
that must be causing all sorts of trepidation amongst the US hawks.
karlof1 | Jun 23, 2019 7:52:23 PM | 154
Jen @143--
As myself and others noted, the usual crew for P-8 is 7: two on the flight deck and 5 distributed at the 5 work stations.
The plane's equipped with a bomb/torpedo/sonobouy bay as it's primary mission's ASW. Jamming in an additional 28-30 people
would be rather difficult at best. IMO, the only way would be to remove all ordinance to make room for what could only be 3
Special Forces squads and their gear--they would paradive into Iran to do their thing, presumably. Otherwise, the plane
wasn't a P-8. I don't recall the Iranians providing the plane type, although it's clear they could have since they readily
identified the drone. That leaves us with the following:
Iran's incorrect about the # of people they "saw" on other plane.
USA's playing along with Iranian mistake, but added 3 more.
Iran's correct. USA's lying about plane type.
Iran's correct. USA correct, but altered mission and added troops.
Iran's correct. USA correct; but if shadowing drone, why so many people--trial run?
Iran's correct. Both US planes deliberately entered Iranian airspace to provoke a response that wasn't obtained
earlier in the week as Zarif just informed. If so, why so many on non-drone?
There're probably more that could be obtained, but the above seem to be the most logical. It's also possible that Iran
toppled the planes into its airspace using EW; although that possibility surprised PavewayIV, I'm not in the least.
Regardless if there were 7, 35 or 38 people on the second plane, they all probably needed new trousers upon landing. I also
wonder if the Iranian system actuates the radar-lock warning alarm giving the pilot a chance to evade? If I'm correct in my
evaluation of Iran's system, it won't and the air crew won't have time to say a final prayer.
"... This whole saga is not about nuclear weapons, it is about those conventional ballistic missiles which Iran is manufacturing perfectly legally and changing the equation in the region. These are precision missiles and could turn Tel Aviv and Saudi oil infrastructure into rubble, US/Israel want to make Iran defenseless. It is not going to happen. ..."
Trump is such a con man... He said he told Shinzō Abe, before the Japanese prime
minister visited Tehran on 12 June: "Send the following message: you can't have nuclear
weapons. And other than that, we can sit down and make a deal. But you cannot have nuclear
weapons."
On further questioning he added the demand that Tehran should not have a ballistic missile
programme, and suggested he wanted a tougher inspection regime.
This whole saga is not about nuclear weapons, it is about those conventional ballistic
missiles which Iran is manufacturing perfectly legally and changing the equation in the
region. These are precision missiles and could turn Tel Aviv and Saudi oil infrastructure
into rubble, US/Israel want to make Iran defenseless. It is not going to happen.
"... Trump and the Trump administration have no credibility; lying is simply the nature of this administration. ..."
"... Nobody is going to believe anything put out by the US government for a long time. And yes, it's really sad when Iran or North Korea are deemed more credible than my own government. ..."
"... This whole affair is about nothing except smashing yet another nation because the apartheid Jewish state wants that to happen. ..."
Laying aside political and nationalistic biases, both the United States and Iran have credibility issues. While Iran is not
known for its honesty, Trump and the Trump administration have no credibility; lying is simply the nature of this administration.
As such, the matter cannot be settled by an appeal to credibility -- although, sadly, Iran seems to be less inclined to
relentless lying than Trump.
Nobody is going to believe anything put out by the US government for a long time. And yes, it's really sad when Iran or
North Korea are deemed more credible than my own government.
The author does miss the point here:
If the United States removes the existing ruling class, it is not clear that we would be able to build a functional government
in the new Iran -- even if we airdropped billions upon billions of dollars onto the country.
This whole affair is about nothing except smashing yet another nation because the apartheid Jewish state wants that to
happen.
"... "Lying sometimes, not always lying, sometimes it's manipulations, but yeah," Merry replied. "America's warmaking history indicates that there's been significant instances of that kind of maneuvering, manipulations, and in some instances lying–Vietnam is a great example–to get us into wars that the American people weren't clamoring for." ..."
Carlson's first guest, The American Conservative 's Robert Merry, plainly stated
the likely reason for Bolton's deceitful manipulations, saying that Americans are typically
reluctant to go to war and citing a few of the historical instances in which they were
tricked into consenting to it by those who desire mass military violence.
"So, you're saying that there is a long, almost unbroken history of lying our way into
war?" Carlson asked his guest rhetorically.
"Lying sometimes, not always lying, sometimes it's manipulations, but yeah," Merry
replied. "America's warmaking history indicates that there's been significant instances of
that kind of maneuvering, manipulations, and in some instances lying–Vietnam is a great
example–to get us into wars that the American people weren't clamoring for."
Both men are correct. The US empire does indeed have an extensive and well-documented history of using
lies, manipulations and distortions to manufacture consent for war from a populace that would
otherwise choose peace, and a Reuters poll released last month found that only 12 percent of Americans favor
attacking Iranian military interests without having been attacked first.
<...>
What we are watching with Iran is a war propaganda narrative failing to get airborne. It
was all set up and ready to go, they had the whole marketing team working on it, and then it
faceplanted right on the linoleum. This is what a failed narrative management campaign looks
like. It is possible for us to see this more and more.
Today I have a lot more hope. It's becoming clear that the manipulations of the US war
machine are becoming more and more obvious to more and more people and that everyday, regular
Americans are reacting with a healthy amount of horror and revulsion. There was always the
risk that the US population would already be sufficiently paced ahead of these revelations
and there would be little to no reaction, but that didn't happen. Americans are seeing what
they're doing, and they don't like it, and they don't want it.
And that makes me so happy. Come on Captain America. Save the day. The world is counting
on you.
Our leaders seem interested in toppling Iran's theocracy. But do they want a new U.S. military draft? Because make no mistake,
that's what it will take.
<...>
Any serious effort to end the Iranian theocracy will not only require American troops, but will also almost certainly break
our vaunted All-Volunteer Force If you like the idea of regime change in Iran, you had better love the idea of a new American
draft.
We have seen for decades that American air power alone is insufficient to topple a government, [...]. Our Sunni Arab allies
are stalemated in Yemen and distinctly averse to sending troops to Syria. The idea that they would invade or occupy Iran is risible.
The Washington regime change crowd's preferred Iranian proxy is a hated cult called Mujahideen-e Khalq.
But if the mullahs are to be overthrown, it will be by American soldiers and Marines. Even if the Islamic Republic were to
somehow collapse on its own, concerns about radiological material, the security of the Strait of Hormuz or another massive wave
of refugees would probably drive the U.S.to intervene with ground troops.
U.S. politicians and generals sometimes like to point out that the volunteer military has successfully endured a decade and
a half of sustained combat and a ceaseless cycle of deployments. This is not the whole story.
Despite the enormous amount of money expended there, Iraq was by historical measures a low-intensity war. Total combat deaths
for American forces over eight years were about the size of a brigade, and losses in Afghanistan roughly half that. Yet a modest
increase in force structure required the military to greatly lower its standards, doubling felony waivers for Army recruits from
2003 to 2006, for instance.
A massive increase in the use of civilian contractors (more than 50 times the ratio in Vietnam) also hid the volunteer system's
cracks. The All-Volunteer Force was barely able to sustain two large, but low-casualty, campaigns -- neither of which has resulted
in anything resembling a U.S. strategic victory.
Occupying Iran would be a challenge of an entirely different magnitude than Iraq or Afghanistan.
<...>
The force with which we would occupy Iran is also not as resilient as most Americans probably think. Even now, in a time when
most troops are not seeing direct combat, the the volunteer force is struggling just to maintain numbers and standards. The Air
Force, Marine Corps, and Navy are each short of a full quarter of their required fighter pilots. The Army recently announced that
it is already 12,000 recruits behind on its recruiting goal for 2018 and will not make mission.
The Pentagon stated last year that 71% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military,
most for reasons of health, physical fitness, education, or criminality. The propensity of this age group to serve is even lower.
The likely demands and casualties of a war in Iran would spell the end of the All-Volunteer Force, requiring the conscription
of Americans for the first time since 1973.
There is ample evidence that American foreign policy elites haven't learned much from Iraq or Afghanistan; one need only look
at the latest headlines from Libya or Syria. But perhaps even our modern Bourbons in Washington can grasp one simple lesson from
the post-9/11 campaigns: Wars have an uncanny tendency to take on a life of their own.
Regime change in Iran would bring a host of consequences, many of them unknowable, but almost all of them negative for America
and the region. There is one outcome we can be sure of, however: Occupying Iran would be the death of America's all-volunteer
military and necessitate a return to a draft.
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...
How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem
appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others,
deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist
violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues
to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to
be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States
and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears
convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For
instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military
and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and
even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben
Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United
Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than
other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson
administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's
Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against
Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with
Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no
better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial
overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never
passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if
outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those
most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon
of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington
adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to
create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated
into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to
make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had
killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant
those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary
to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died.
Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests
being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government.
This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the
full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone
campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious
hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the
Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand
Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state
could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington
expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against
the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials
anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own
interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed:
"She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination
of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more
than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established
by Washington's far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel
apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No
wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would
have an aneurysm."
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking
that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she
admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out
Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s
fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified
to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash
murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal
of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for
Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any
one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline
The Blob.
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the
existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John
Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.
"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory,
threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that
America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and
alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of
force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.
"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends
a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a
diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals
that cannot be reasoned with.
They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the
region, and Iran won't stand for that."
At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a
full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.
"... Russia, China and the Europeans all want Iran to remain in JCPOA and Putin is worried about Iran acting irrationally. ..."
"... Asians all worried about the security of oil flows to Asia. Japan especially dependent on Middle East oil flows, even if they've moved out of Iranian purchases. ..."
"... The IRGC knuckle dragger in charge at Hormuz will get a medal or two, and a promotion. The U.S. is waging a total economic war on Iran. It cuts off all its exports and imports. Iran is fighting back by all means. It has no other choice. Iran now implements a "strategy of tension" that is designed to put "maximum pressure" on Trump. The tanker attacks, the mortars on U.S. troops in Iraq, the Houthi strikes an Saudi desalination plants and the shoot down of that drone are all part of that Iranian strategy. ..."
"... High Iranian officials, including its president, have multiple times announced: "If we can sell no sell oil than none of our neighbors in the gulf will be able to sell their oil." They mean that and they have the plans and means to achieve that. ..."
"... These strikes will continue, and will become stronger. I most cases Iran will have plausible deniability. That is easy to create when CentCom and the White House are know to lie left and right as they do. ..."
"... It is Trump, not Iran, who killed JCPOA. It is Trump, not Iran, who will be blamed for that war. ..."
"... Exactly! There's one striking characteristic of the "resistance" leaders, including Khamenei, Syrian President Assad, and Hezbollah's Nasrallah, and that is that they are reliable: they do what they say they are going to do. They have integrity, that quality so clearly absent from all US and Western European leaders, all beholden to their Ziodonors to assure reelection. ..."
"... Additionally, any standoff missile attack or "March of the B52s" will be met with immediate regional attacks on US (Saudi and Israeli) assets, military personnel and civilians that will destabilize the entire region and destroy the global economy. Not the best scenario for a reelection bid, is it? I'm with b. There is no knuckle dragger at Hormuz, only competent officers carrying out their orders. ..."
"... How blame is apportioned will matter little to Iran if it miscalculates one iota. Yes it cannot sit idle until it is strangled by economic sanctions. But neither can it escalate beyond the destruction of civil and military hardware alone. One dead American is all the neocons need. A counter strike would then be inevitable and the uncontrollable escalation they are counting on the likely result. ..."
"... Col. Lang has described here the catastrophic consequences for America's enemies when they have doubted its resolve. And the sure route to galvanizing that resolve is for Iran to escalate into targeting US forces. ..."
"... The only way this ends without a war which would be catastrophic for both sides is if Trump realizes the reality of the situation he is in and ditches the neocons right now. Iran has got its message across and must now desist to allow Trump breathing room to de-escalate. Let us pray that Suleimani and the Iranian leadership are men enough to understand that holding the moral high ground confers no advantage in warfare. ..."
"... Privately, phone calls to China and Russia begging for assurances of support ..."
"... This is delusional thinking. The Iranians realized a long time ago not to rely on other countries for assistance. Every Iranian knows not to trust Russians from history. China might be the only hope, not for support, but to convince that this war is as much about them. ..."
"... The Chinese should close Adelson's Macau casinos for health and safety violations. Zionist donors for Trump's election campaign are driving this. Adelson's boy Bolton needs removing before anything positive can happen, Tucker Carlson needs some help with his campaign to oust him. ..."
"... Could you explain how the concept that economic sanctions are a belligerent act of war is anti-American? This is a historical concept that you, as a teacher and student of military history, are well aware of. The Iranians are using the means that they have available to respond to these acts of war. ..."
"... They are not equipped to confront the US military directly, so they are using tactics to place pressure on the US in other areas, primarily by threatening the global economy by plausibly deniable acts against shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is a masterstroke right out of the pages of Sun Tze's Art of War. ..."
"... Trump has painted himself into a corner. He can offer sanctions relief if he wants to negotiate, or he can attack, and we can hope that the US military learned some of the lessons taught by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge 2002. ..."
"... The neocons are playing out provocations until Congress is forced to vote on War just before election. The provocations will continue -- Israel's Rational Institute & expert game theorists have done this so many times they're just going through the motions. Iranians have watched that game play out before and, perhaps, know how to handle provocations in a disruptive manner. ..."
"... Hook repeated, emphasized & repeated again that "finance is the basis of war," and US / Trump strategy is to "not to bankrupt Iran," but to "deny Iran access to financial ability to fund Hezbollah, Hamas, and other of the #1 state sponsor of terror's proxies." ..."
"... The congressmen questioning Hook nodded sagely. None of them so much as hinted at the fact that the USA is so deep in debt it can never pay its way out. ..."
"... --One of the expectations of the JCPOA was that with sanctions lifted, Iran would enter into the mainstream economy, trading with states throughout the world. This normalization of commerce would constrain Iran from taking actions that would jeopardize its trade relationships. Why does Trump & the zioncons not wish Iran's commercial normalization to take place? Is it because Israel cannot stand the competition? ..."
"... -- by what right USA violates UN Charter demands that internal affairs of a member state must not be interfered with. Congressmen crowned themselves with laurel as they proclaimed that "the people of Iran are not our enemy; it is the government; we act on behalf of the Iranian people, especially Iranian women." ..."
"... Trump thinks that he can f*** Iran and sit it out? Not gonna happen. ..."
"... He gets that he cannot be an LBJ or a Harry Truman with the Albatross of an unwinnable war hung around his neck. ..."
"... But, I am afraid the chosen true believers on his staff do not believe nor care that Iran has prepared a massive disproportionate non-nuclear response that will destroy the global economy. ..."
"... John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have other agendas than the President's re-election and what is in the USA's national interests. We are not out of the woods. ..."
"... The IRGC knuckle dragger at Hormuz wisely and prudently targeted the unmanned drone and not the manned P8 aircraft. ..."
"... No, this action was appropriate in the face of our policy of maximum pressure to starve out the Iranian people and force a regime change. ..."
"... I applaud Trump's decision not to engage in a shooting war. The way he got to that decision was messy, but the final decision was right. Those calling him weak for not engaging in a war of choice are craven fools. Chief among those is Bolton. ..."
"... Trump should throw his ass and his mustache out of the WH before the sun goes down. Trump brought this situation upon himself with his pulling out of the JCPOA and initiating his "war" of maximum pressure. It is he who can deflate this crisis, not Kamenei. ..."
"... This is all one big PsyOp imo. The US has no popular support for an attack on Iran, internally or externally. We are going to attack, but want to make it seem like they showed restraint and have been left with no choice. ..."
"... And this nonsense about Iran allowing the US to make some window dressing attack on innocuous targets to save face/ All I can say is Iranians are not Arabs. ..."
"... PS -- C Span ramped up an orgy of war hysteria over Trump's threat, then stand-down over Iran's shoot-down of an un-manned drone. The public was, as usual, confined to a narrow frame of reference and range of responses: "Trump was a coward," vs. "Trump was wise." Congressmen who were interviewed emphasized that "no American was killed." ..."
"... No one mentioned that Lyndon Johnson called back flights sent to rescue crewmen on the USS Liberty when Israel attacked the ship, strafed the wounded and those in life boats. ..."
"... Everyone remembers the shootdown of Iranian Air flight 655 on July 3, 1988 by the guided missile cruiser Vincennes, under the command of the late Captain Will Rogers, in which 290 people were killed. President Reagan said America will never apologize. President Clinton ultimately paid the Iranians $130 million. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson seems like the only realist in the MSM. https://youtu.be/Rf2cS4g0pes ..."
"... It is no secret that the Neocons and the Israeli zionists (I am repeating myself here) do want a war between Iran and the United States. First, there were a few tanker attacks which were brushed off by Trump. Then this, which was more difficult to brush off. Is it possible that the drone actually went to Iranian airspace but GPS coordinates were spoofed (by insiders on the American side) so that Trump (and the administration) believed that it stayed in international airspace? ..."
"... Sorry. Here's the ink to Tucker on the Iran war brink. https://youtu.be/3PQW2tMMn2A ..."
"... Why did Donald Trump hire neocons Bolton & Pompeo as well as torturer Gina Haspel? Couldn't he find people who shared his views (at least what he said during the last campaign) that our ME regime change wars were a disaster that we shouldn't repeat? ..."
"... As Tucker noted in his segment yesterday Bolton & the neocons have been plotting a war with Iran for some time. They don't care if it sinks Trump's presidency. They have no loyalty to him only condescension. ..."
"... Yet as Tucker notes in his segment yesterday the neocons are "bureaucratic tapeworms" that some how manage to survive failure after failure with the same regime change prescriptions. Trump better wise up like right now or he can kiss his re-election goodbye. ..."
I am not now nor have I ever been a fan of Trump. However, if he does not start a war, he
will end (in my mind, at least) as a vast improvement over his immediate predecessors.
Wait a minute. Obama blew it with Libya. However,
-he reached a good deal with Iran
-he didn't bomb Syria when the crossed his "red line" and managed to make it look like the R
controlled Senate made the decision .
-He didn't kiss Bibi's ring.
look at a decent map of this area. the us naval base in Bahrain and air base Qatar are an
Iranian missiles equivalent of firing from lower Manhattan to hit something in Hoboken.
The USA military assets within the Persian gulf have if war breaks out checked into the hotel
California.
It is a logistical nightmare for the Pentagon to protect and resupply in the event of
serious hostilities. Trump surely has been told by real us military professionals the giant
hairball he takes on if he gets into a war with Iran and what it means for us servicemen
station there and throughout the larger middle east.
it is unfortunate that the usa media uses fools like bolton and pompeo as clickbait to
generate revenue fore their business at the expense of whats best for the nation but there it
is... the msm has an agenda which is not at all in the service of the nation.
Yes, a grown up has the right to change a decision. Now, ball is in Khomeini court. Abe asked
him to release some Iranian-American prisoners. If Khomeini wants to lower threshold of
conflict, he can do this gesture without losing any face. Humanitarian action.
Russia, China
and the Europeans all want Iran to remain in JCPOA and Putin is worried about Iran acting
irrationally.
See what kind of other pressure comes down on Iranians. Asians all worried
about the security of oil flows to Asia. Japan especially dependent on Middle East oil flows,
even if they've moved out of Iranian purchases. US more able to go it alone with extensive
domestic and other sources.
Khamenei should call Trump and setup a media spectacle of a summit in Switzerland. They
can agree on the same deal as before but as long as the headline says "Iran agrees to not
build nukes", Trump will be happy and Khamenei will be his new best pal.
The same playbook as KJU where nothing tangible is likely to happen except that KJU has stopped nuke & missile
tests that create media hysteria among the Never Trumpers.
IMO, the ball hasn't left Trump's court. How long is he going to tolerate the neocons in
his inner circle who are likely to keep coming up with another casus belli? Can he find some
distance from being Bibi's lapdog? How long is he going to allow his conflicted son-in-law to
meddle in the Middle East?
Trump must calculate the potential of where escalation leads and what a full on war with
Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon means for his re-election campaign. Bernie is
banging the table hard against any military action in Iran. The probability that 50,000 votes
in Michigan, Pennsylvania & Wisconsin changes sides the next election would be rather
high in the event of an unpredictable full-scale war.
I hope Khamenei takes any offer Trump makes for direct talks. Trump is heavily influenced by
the last person he meets.
I get that Khamenei doesn't want to meet on the premise that the JCPOA is flawed and must
be changed but if he can get an audience on the basis of airing mutual grievances in an
unfiltered environment, it would be an opportunity. Currently, the only people Trump talks to
are Neocon loons. They are innumerable but the FDD seems to be the center of gravity.
I was shocked-- but not surprised-- to see visibly-pained CBS Pentagon flack David Martin on
the boob tube this morning quoting an unnamed source that speculated that the reason Trump
cancelled the bombing of Iran was that he got "cold-feet." Thank you, Vasili Arkhipov, for
getting cold-feet, too! Madness, our nation is afflicted with madness.
The IRGC knuckle dragger in charge at Hormuz will get a medal or two, and a promotion. The U.S. is waging a total economic war on Iran. It cuts off all its exports and imports.
Iran is fighting back by all means. It has no other choice. Iran now implements a "strategy of tension" that is designed to put "maximum pressure" on
Trump. The tanker attacks, the mortars on U.S. troops in Iraq, the Houthi strikes an Saudi
desalination plants and the shoot down of that drone are all part of that Iranian
strategy.
High Iranian officials, including its president, have multiple times announced: "If we can
sell no sell oil than none of our neighbors in the gulf will be able to sell their oil." They
mean that and they have the plans and means to achieve that.
These strikes will continue, and will become stronger. I most cases Iran will have
plausible deniability. That is easy to create when CentCom and the White House are know to
lie left and right as they do.
Trump has two choices.
He can pull back on the sanctions and other U.S. violations of JCPOA, or he can start a
full war against Iran that will drown his presidency, put the world economy into a depression
($300/bl oil) and kill many U.S. soldiers.
It is Trump, not Iran, who killed JCPOA. It is Trump, not Iran, who will be blamed for
that war.
Exactly! There's one striking characteristic of the "resistance" leaders, including Khamenei,
Syrian President Assad, and Hezbollah's Nasrallah, and that is that they are reliable: they
do what they say they are going to do. They have integrity, that quality so clearly absent
from all US and Western European leaders, all beholden to their Ziodonors to assure
reelection.
The Iranians will NOT contact Trump to arrange a meeting. The Iranians will NOT
meet with Trump because the JCPOA is flawed. The Iranians will NOT meet with Trump after a
brief suspension in sanctions to ask for permanent sanctions relief. The Iranians WILL meet
with Trump when he lifts most or all of the sanctions in good faith and rejoins the JCPOA. Is
it just a coincidence that the two ships attacked last week were carrying petrochemicals,
just days after Trump and the US placed sanctions on the largest Iranian petrochemical
producer? What is it about "If we cannot ship oil/petrochemicals, nobody can." that people
don't understand?
Additionally, any standoff missile attack or "March of the B52s" will be met with
immediate regional attacks on US (Saudi and Israeli) assets, military personnel and civilians
that will destabilize the entire region and destroy the global economy. Not the best scenario
for a reelection bid, is it? I'm with b. There is no knuckle dragger at Hormuz, only
competent officers carrying out their orders.
How blame is apportioned will matter little to Iran if it miscalculates one iota. Yes it
cannot sit idle until it is strangled by economic sanctions. But neither can it escalate
beyond the destruction of civil and military hardware alone. One dead American is all the
neocons need. A counter strike would then be inevitable and the uncontrollable escalation
they are counting on the likely result.
Col. Lang has described here the catastrophic consequences for America's enemies when they
have doubted its resolve. And the sure route to galvanizing that resolve is for Iran to
escalate into targeting US forces.
The only way this ends without a war which would be catastrophic for both sides is
if Trump realizes the reality of the situation he is in and ditches the neocons right now.
Iran has got its message across and must now desist to allow Trump breathing room to
de-escalate. Let us pray that Suleimani and the Iranian leadership are men enough to
understand that holding the moral high ground confers no advantage in warfare.
Publicly, much chest thumping over how Iran has the cowardly Great Satan on the run like a
beaten dog.
Privately, phone calls to China and Russia begging for assurances of support and attempted offers of negotiations
with Trump complete with wildly unrealistic demands.
This is delusional thinking. The Iranians realized a long time ago not to rely on other
countries for assistance. Every Iranian knows not to trust Russians from history. China might
be the only hope, not for support, but to convince that this war is as much about them.
The Chinese should close Adelson's Macau casinos for health and safety violations. Zionist
donors for Trump's election campaign are driving this. Adelson's boy Bolton needs removing
before anything positive can happen, Tucker Carlson needs some help with his campaign to oust
him.
Could you explain how the concept that economic sanctions are a belligerent act of war is
anti-American? This is a historical concept that you, as a teacher and student of military
history, are well aware of. The Iranians are using the means that they have available to
respond to these acts of war.
They are not equipped to confront the US military directly, so
they are using tactics to place pressure on the US in other areas, primarily by threatening
the global economy by plausibly deniable acts against shipping in the Persian Gulf. This is a
masterstroke right out of the pages of Sun Tze's Art of War.
Trump has painted himself into a corner. He can offer sanctions relief if he wants to
negotiate, or he can attack, and we can hope that the US military learned some of the lessons
taught by Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper in the Millennium Challenge 2002.
The neocons are playing out provocations until Congress is forced to vote on War just
before election.
The provocations will continue -- Israel's Rational Institute & expert game theorists
have done this so many times they're just going through the motions.
Iranians have watched that game play out before and, perhaps, know how to handle provocations
in a disruptive manner.
Hook repeated, emphasized & repeated again that "finance is the basis of war," and US /
Trump strategy is to "not to bankrupt Iran," but to "deny Iran access to financial ability to
fund Hezbollah, Hamas, and other of the #1 state sponsor of terror's proxies."
The congressmen questioning Hook nodded sagely. None of them so much as hinted at the fact that the USA is so deep in debt it can never
pay its way out. Nor was any congressman sage enough, or moral enough, or consistent enough, to
question:
-- International policy pundits & think tankers opine that the greatest guarantee of
peace is economic stability. US is deliberately seeking to destabilize Iran economically. To
what end?
--One of the expectations of the JCPOA was that with sanctions lifted, Iran would enter into
the mainstream economy, trading with states throughout the world. This normalization of
commerce would constrain Iran from taking actions that would jeopardize its trade
relationships. Why does Trump & the zioncons not wish Iran's commercial normalization to
take place? Is it because Israel cannot stand the competition?
-- by what right USA violates UN Charter demands that internal affairs of a member state must
not be interfered with. Congressmen crowned themselves with laurel as they proclaimed that
"the people of Iran are not our enemy; it is the government; we act on behalf of the Iranian
people, especially Iranian women."
When I visited Iran in 2008, "Iranian women" spoke with us and asked if we could please
provide several days' warning before bombing Iran so that they could shelter their children.
Iranian women are some of the toughest you'll meet.
-- what casus belli legitimizes aggression against Iran? Does the USA no longer
subscribe to Just War theory? Several years ago I heard Notre Dame's Mary Ellen O'Connell
discuss Just War theory with respect to Iran -- https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/jlia/vol2/iss2/6/.
US claims to uphold "universal values" ring hollow if such basic steps in framing policy are
ignored.
I deal in facts, not in 'deeply bigoted anti-Americanism'. Interesting that you do not want to recognize those facts. They are right before your
eyes. Just I give it a day or two until the next 'incident' happens.
Trump thinks that he can
f*** Iran and sit it out? Not gonna happen.
The question has been raised of my denigration of b. He has a long history on SST He is an
excellent military analyst but the long and so far as I can remember unbroken record of
interpreting EVERY situation as demonstrating the demonic nature of the US causes me to
discount anything he writes on other than military subjects narrowly defined. IMO b's
hostility to the US is a permanent burden that he carries.
The NYT report that Donald Trump ordered the attack and then pulled back is in Jimmy
Carter's "been there done that" territory. Although a New Yorker and he never had to sit in a
gasoline line, Donald Trump, personally and legally, cannot be a one term President. He is a
political savant.
He gets that he cannot be an LBJ or a Harry Truman with the Albatross of an
unwinnable war hung around his neck.
My assumption is that someone in the chain of command
after the surveillance drone was shot down triggered a preplanned strike package that was
stopped once it got to the President for approval. Once again global media moguls strike back
at the nationalist President with Fake News.
But, I am afraid the chosen true believers on
his staff do not believe nor care that Iran has prepared a massive disproportionate
non-nuclear response that will destroy the global economy.
John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have
other agendas than the President's re-election and what is in the USA's national interests.
We are not out of the woods.
Do we know for sure Trump is the one who initially ordered the strike? Or did someone down
the line interpret the rules of engagement (do I presume correctly that some such would be in
place at the present time?) to allow him or her to order it?
In a situation of this degree of geo-political gravity, nobody in the chain of command
below the CinC would have had the authority or temerity to attempt to order this strike
package.
Neither Pompeo nor Bolton is in the chain of command and attempts by them to order
such attacks would have been rejected by the military. BTW if Trump aborted the strikes only
10 minutes out from the targets he was cutting it too close. Communications can always
fail.
The IRGC knuckle dragger at Hormuz wisely and prudently targeted the unmanned drone and not
the manned P8 aircraft. Since it was the Iranians who recovered the wreckage, it will be hard
for the US to maintain the drone was well outside Iranian airspace.
No, this action was
appropriate in the face of our policy of maximum pressure to starve out the Iranian people
and force a regime change.
I applaud Trump's decision not to engage in a shooting war. The way he got to that
decision was messy, but the final decision was right. Those calling him weak for not engaging
in a war of choice are craven fools. Chief among those is Bolton.
Trump should throw his ass
and his mustache out of the WH before the sun goes down. Trump brought this situation upon
himself with his pulling out of the JCPOA and initiating his "war" of maximum pressure. It is
he who can deflate this crisis, not Kamenei.
This is all one big PsyOp imo. The US has no popular support for an attack on Iran,
internally or externally. We are going to attack, but want to make it seem like they showed
restraint and have been left with no choice.
I don't foresee the Iranians talking to Trump unless and until the US walks back its
sanctions, or Trump himself goes and sits down with the Ayatollah.
And this nonsense about Iran allowing the US to make some window dressing attack on
innocuous targets to save face/ All I can say is Iranians are not Arabs.
PS -- C Span ramped up an orgy of war hysteria over Trump's threat, then stand-down over
Iran's shoot-down of an un-manned drone.
The public was, as usual, confined to a narrow frame of reference and range of responses:
"Trump was a coward," vs. "Trump was wise."
Congressmen who were interviewed emphasized that "no American was killed."
No one mentioned that Lyndon Johnson called back flights sent to rescue crewmen on the USS
Liberty when Israel attacked the ship, strafed the wounded and those in life boats.
This seems like Professional Wrestling theater where you have the wrestlers hamming it up for
the drama and you wonder what the script is. We only get to see what the camera frames.
I am thankful that our military acknowledges that our President is the Commander-in-Chief. He
commanded, they obeyed. As for all the pundits on all sides, their lack of perspective or
even understanding of history leaves me terrified. There seems to be no understanding of how
Iran is capable of retaliation. An example:
Everyone remembers the shootdown of Iranian Air flight 655 on July 3, 1988 by the guided
missile cruiser Vincennes, under the command of the late Captain Will Rogers, in which 290
people were killed. President Reagan said America will never apologize. President Clinton
ultimately paid the Iranians $130 million.
Few remember what happened next -- some 8 months later, in March, 1989, Capt. Roger's
spouse Sharon, was in her van stopped at a traffic light in San Diego. A pipe bomb went off
under the back of the van. It was small -- she was unhurt, fortunately, but definitely shaken
up, and the van did catch fire. Despite an intensive investigation, the FBI has never solved
this case.
Never let us become so blind and arrogant in our strength that we are unable to conceive
retaliation by those weaker.
Has anyone considered the possibility that the drone was sent there to be shot down by the
Iranians?
It is no secret that the Neocons and the Israeli zionists (I am repeating myself here) do
want a war between Iran and the United States. First, there were a few tanker attacks which
were brushed off by Trump. Then this, which was more difficult to brush off. Is it possible
that the drone actually went to Iranian airspace but GPS coordinates were spoofed (by
insiders on the American side) so that Trump (and the administration) believed that it stayed
in international airspace?
The Americans do seem to really believe that the drone was in
international airspace and no one can make a point that it is to Iran's benefit to target an
American asset in international airspace, especially now when tensions are so high. Iran has
the most to lose in the event of a war with the Americans (no points for guessing which
country has the most to win - Israel). And it is a coincidence that the guy heading the Iran
mission Centre, Michael D'Andrea, was previously the head of drone operations. Or is it a
coincidence?
What would I do if I were a neocon who wants war between the US and Iran, a war that Trump
doesn't. For the start of hostilities, it is essential that both sides, US and Iran, feel
that they are in the right - which of course this situation is. I would create a context, an
excuse/rationale for the start of actual hostilities to the US administration (and of course
for the consumption of the American public). Then I will make the case to Trump that we
should have a 'limited' retaliation. I know that the Iranians will strike back after the
'small scale' bombing. And the Americans have to retaliate to that also. What chances are
there that any retaliation by the Americans will not end up in total war with Iran??
Trump doesn't want war and probably saw through the machinations to get him to agree to a
'small' bombing campaign as retaliation that would surely lead to a larger conflagration and
total war with Iran that the neocons want so much. This particular provocation was
unsuccessful in its aim. However, I think that provocations by the neocons will continue and
at an ever increasing pitch - enabled by the neocons within the administration and the
Israelis. Trump doesn't want war but his administration filled with neocons does and they
will find a way maneuver Trump into it. Israel will fight Iran till the last standing
American in the Middle East.
Why did Donald Trump hire neocons Bolton & Pompeo as well as torturer Gina Haspel?
Couldn't he find people who shared his views (at least what he said during the last campaign)
that our ME regime change wars were a disaster that we shouldn't repeat?
As Tucker noted in his segment yesterday Bolton & the neocons have been plotting a war
with Iran for some time. They don't care if it sinks Trump's presidency. They have no loyalty
to him only condescension.
Hopefully Trump learns from this near miss of a catastrophe for his presidency. But he has
seemed weak and indecisive on these matters all along. He never fought back for example with
all the tools at his disposal against the attempted coup by law enforcement & the
intelligence agencies.
All he did was constantly tweet witch hunt. He's once again delegated
it to Barr after Sessions sat on it.
He allowed Pompeo & Bolton to bring on fellow neocon
Elliott Abrams who previously screwed up in Nicaragua to attempt another regime change in
Venezuela, which has been another botched example of how everything that the neocons touch
turns to shit.
Yet as Tucker notes in his segment yesterday the neocons are "bureaucratic
tapeworms" that some how manage to survive failure after failure with the same regime change
prescriptions. Trump better wise up like right now or he can kiss his re-election
goodbye.
"... That admission along with the stark mostly unreported economic realities of any armed conflict in the Gulf region is what restrains the war mongers. The Money Power and the Current Oligarchy won't allow war is what I see. And that makes this Friday morning pleasant despite the fog. ..."
"... The risks are just too great (for what the US public is prepared to accept). And we've just seen it happen again. They might be able to screw themselves up to go through with it, and accept the losses and stalemate that will come, but it will do no good at all for Trump's re-election chances. ..."
"... Netanyahu has reiterated his desire for war with Iran -- a war that the US will fight–and is meeting with his Arab allies to help bring it about. As Ha'aretz described Netanyahu's Iran dilemma last month, the goal is to get Trump to go to war without putting Israel on the front line. ..."
"... Listen to this horse manure coming from Brain Hook, "special" representative for Iran: "According to him, Washington was doing everything possible to defuse tensions with Iran and return the containment system in the region. ..."
"... The Zionists are smack dab in the middle of the front line with a massive crosshairs imprinted on their entirety. Occupied Palestine sits at Ground Zero, and it seems that the Zionists are finally waking up to the ultimate betrayal they'll experience at the hands of The Christian Rapturists -- they are to be Genocided in the pursuit of attempting to make a myth come to life. ..."
"... Watch the brilliant George Galloway on the consequences of war with Iran. Bottom line: only hardline Likudniks and FDD Likud USA types would approve such a disastrous move. ..."
"... If America attacks and destroys Iran after doing the same to Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, the Islamic religion should semi-officially adopt anti-Americanism until the Empire falls, and it would be totally deserved. If we all go in, let us get a good thrashing. ..."
"... It is true that Trump needs to fire acting President Bolton. Bolton who was appointed to the NSA by Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli/American oligarch, will not allow Trump to fire Bolton; otherwise, he loses millions of $$$$. The pressure is also from Adelson and his neocon ilk. ..."
"... Iran is a big country, and won't be defeated unless the people are ready to abandon the regime. They aren't as far as I can detect. The exiles, and the middle class in Iran, hate the regime. I've just had a lot of that poured into my ears, during my visit to Iran a month ago. The popular feeling though doesn't seem to have abandoned the regime. I think we can expect a nationalist resistance, if indeed Trump does attack Iran. ..."
"... China has been complying with US sanctions on Iran, for example this article notes that China stopped buying oil from Iran . US direct trade with Iran isn't so much as issue as the US stopping Europe and China from trading with Iran. ..."
The most important Item I've read so far this morning is
this report on the Ufa, Russia Security Conference that was attended by both Iranian and Outlaw US Empire officials. The entire
article requires reading, but this is the most relevant excerpt that has some links in the original I won't duplicate:
"Given current global events, the most significant attendees in Ufa are a senior US National Security Council member and the
Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani.
As of now, the only official news comes from Ali Shamkhani's words concerning the possibility of mediation with the US and
the possibility of Iran acquiring weapons systems to fend off US threats. Shamkhani stated:
"'We currently face demonstrative threats. Nevertheless, when it comes to air defense of our country, we consider using
the foreign potential in addition to our domestic capacities Mediation is out of question in the current situation. The United
States has unilaterally withdrawn from the JCPOA, it has flouted its obligations and it has introduced illegal sanctions against
Iran. The United States should return to the starting point and correct its own mistakes. This process needs no mediation.'
"'This [gradually boosting of uranium enrichment and heavy water production beyond the levels outlined in the JCPOA] is a serious
decision of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] and we will continue doing it step by step until JCPOA violators move toward agreement
and return to fulfilling their obligations. [If JCPOA participants do not comply with the deal, Iran will be reducing its commitments]
step by step within legal mechanisms that the JCPOA envisions.'"
It was noted by b that the Outlaw US Empire faces a growing international coalition against its actions, which results from
sentiments made at the rather many recent international conferences that have already occurred in June that will be topped by
G-20 in 8 days.
That admission along with the stark mostly unreported economic realities of any armed conflict in the Gulf region is what
restrains the war mongers. The Money Power and the Current Oligarchy won't allow war is what I see. And that makes this Friday
morning pleasant despite the fog.
Posted by: Anon | Jun 21, 2019 8:04:55 AM | 29 (boring that it's yet another Anon, who can't be bothered to distinguish himself
all from the other thousands of Anons)
the stage is now maximum restraint and effort at co-operation, which Iran will be expected to respect. That means one more
act against US (or false flag by US) and strikes will occur. Not comparable to hostage crisis, here US is projecting being
reasonable, even if you read that as being weak.
It's not me who reading the US as weak. It will be the attitude of the Iranians, who haven't forgotten the US failure in 1980
(April 24, 1980), as opposed to the US public for whom it is so many crises ago that they've forgotten. And the Iranians are right.
Trump hesitated, as every previous attempt to launch a strike on Iran has finished finally in a stand-down.
The risks are just too great (for what the US public is prepared to accept). And we've just seen it happen again. They
might be able to screw themselves up to go through with it, and accept the losses and stalemate that will come, but it will do
no good at all for Trump's re-election chances.
Mikael Kallavuo , Jun 21, 2019 12:19:06 PM |
91jsb , Jun 21, 2019 12:20:15 PM |
92
Well it looks like Elijah Magnier has finally written the piece he was hinting at releasing yesterday.
Here it is:
Iran is pushing US President Donald Trump to the edge of the abyss, raising the level of tensions to new heights in the Middle
East. After the sabotage of four tankers at al-Fujairah and the attack on the Aramco pipeline a month ago, and last week's
attack on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC – now categorized by the USA as a terrorist
body) yesterday shot down a US Navy drone, sending two clear messages. The first message is that Iran is ready for an all-out
war, no matter what the consequences. The second message is that Iran is aware that the US President has cornered himself;
the embarrassing attack came a week after Trump launched his electoral campaign.
According to well-informed sources, Iran rejected a proposal by US intelligence – made via a third party – that Trump be
allowed to bomb one, two or three clear objectives, to be chosen by Iran, so that both countries could appear to come out as
winners and Trump could save face. Iran categorically rejected the offer and sent its reply: even an attack against an empty
sandy beach in Iran would trigger a missile launch against US objectives in the Gulf.
...
Moreover, Iran has established a joint operations room to inform all its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan
of every step it is adopting in confronting the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East. Iran's allies have increased
their level of readiness and alert to the highest level; they will participate in the war from the moment it begins if necessary.
According to sources, Iran's allies will not hesitate to open fire against an already agreed on bank of objectives in a perfectly
organised, orchestrated, synchronised and graduated response, anticipating a war that may last many months.
Sources confirmed that, in case of war, Iran aims to stop the flow of oil from the Middle East completely, not by targeting
tankers but by hitting the sources of oil in every single Middle Eastern country, whether these countries are considered allies
or enemies. The objective will be to cease all oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world.
...
Iran's economy is under attack by Trump's embargo on Iranian oil exports. Trump refuses to lift the embargo and wants to
negotiate first. Trump, unlike Israel and the hawks in his administration, is trying to avoid a shooting war. Netanyahu
has reiterated his desire for war with Iran -- a war that the US will fight–and is meeting with his Arab allies to help bring
it about. As Ha'aretz described Netanyahu's Iran dilemma last month, the goal is to get Trump to go to war without putting
Israel on the front line.
EXCLUSIVE: In an exclusive interview with Chuck Todd, President Donald Trump says he hadn't given final approval to Iran
strikes, no planes were in the air.
The first message is that Iran is ready for an all-out war, no matter what the consequences. The second message is that Iran
is aware that the US President has cornered himself; the embarrassing attack came a week after Trump launched his electoral
campaign. According to well-informed sources, Iran rejected a proposal by US intelligence – made via a third party – that Trump
be allowed to bomb one or two clear objectives, to be chosen by Iran, so that both countries could appear to come out as winners
and Trump could save face. Iran categorically rejected the offer and sent its reply: even an attack against an empty sandy
beach in Iran would trigger a missile launch against US objectives in the Gulf.
...
Iran has established a joint operations room to inform all its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan of every
step it is adopting in confronting the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East. Iran's allies have increased their level
of readiness and alert to the highest level; they will participate in the war from the moment it begins if necessary. According
to sources, Iran's allies will not hesitate to open fire against an already agreed on bank of objectives in a perfectly organised,
orchestrated, synchronised and graduated response, anticipating a war that may last many months.
...
Sources confirmed that, in case of war, Iran aims to stop the flow of oil from the Middle East completely, not by targeting
tankers but by hitting the sources of oil in every single Middle Eastern country, whether these countries are considered allies
or enemies. The objective will be to cease all oil exports from the Middle East to the rest of the world.
Still, there remained doubt inside the United States government over whether the drone, or another American surveillance aircraft,
this one flown by a military aircrew, did violate Iranian airspace at some point, according to a senior administration official.
..
The delay by United States Central Command in publicly releasing GPS coordinates of the drone when it was shot down -- hours
after Iran did -- and errors in the labeling of the drone's flight path when the imagery was released, contributed to that
doubt, officials said.
A lack of provable "hard evidence" about the location of the drone when it was hit, a defense official said, put the administration
in an isolated position at what could easily end up being the start of yet another war with a Middle East adversary -- this
one with a proven ability to strike back.
Listen to this horse manure coming from Brain Hook, "special" representative for Iran: "According to him, Washington was doing
everything possible to defuse tensions with Iran and return the containment system in the region.
However, Hook blamed Tehran for rising tension in the region because of the refusal of any diplomatic initiatives.
"Our diplomacy does not give Iran the right to respond with military force. Iran needs to meet diplomacy with diplomacy, not
military force," the envoy added."
Diplomacy needs to be met with diplomacy......Really???
Iran should impose sanctions on all of SA, UAE and US oil exports. How's that for diplomacy Mr. Hook? In case you missed it
that is exactly what they are doing. Meeting your brand of diplomacy head on.
We are living in the realm of absurd. How is it that we have left the welfare of our kids, families and the future of our country
in the hands of these incompetent morons?
And why is the rest of the world sitting with their popcorn watching this horror show?
After reading the wiki item on P-8s having a normal crew of 7, I got to thinking about the 35 number either being a botched
translation or how many bodies were noted via thermal imaging radar, something I doubt Iran was thought to possess. As I wrote,
Iran can see everything to its West, which is a very BigDeal.
I digested Magnier's latest. The following is an extremely important point:
"Ha'aretz described Netanyahu's Iran dilemma last month, the goal is to get Trump to go to war without putting Israel on
the front line ."
Except that is an impossibility. The Zionists are smack dab in the middle of the front line with a massive crosshairs imprinted
on their entirety. Occupied Palestine sits at Ground Zero, and it seems that the Zionists are finally waking up to the ultimate
betrayal they'll experience at the hands of The Christian Rapturists -- they are to be Genocided in the pursuit of attempting
to make a myth come to life.
Every writer, Magnier, b, Escobar, and most all barflies, etc, are saying the decision lies with Trump. As I've written before
and again above, I disagree. The decision to go to war with Iran rests with the Current Oligarchy running the Outlaw US Empire.
And it's my belief that such a war will not bring them A Few Dollars More and instead make their Fistful of Dollars evaporate
rapidly. thanks to their great outstanding, naked, risks. For perhaps the very first time, the Current Oligarchy is exposed
to the risks involved in a war it initially though it could win. Last night, it seemed to awaken to the potential consequences
and blinked. The Philadelphia refinery blast may be shear coincidence or not, but it also has likely helped since its right down
the street from the Current Oligarchies penthouses.
Now, it's just about the time of day when the Houthis launch their attacks.
Blooming Barricade , Jun 21, 2019 4:14:14 PM |
155
Watch the brilliant George Galloway on the consequences of war with Iran. Bottom line: only hardline Likudniks and FDD Likud
USA types would approve such a disastrous move.
If America attacks and destroys Iran after doing the same to Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, the
Islamic religion should semi-officially adopt anti-Americanism until the Empire falls, and it would be totally deserved. If we
all go in, let us get a good thrashing.
_____
George Galloway has warned the US and its allies in the Gulf that if they were to start "World War III" with an attack on Iran
they will live to regret it because, unlike Iraq in 2003, they are capable of fighting back.
The Scottish firebrand, who famously took US lawmakers to task over the Iraq war when he testified in front of the senate in
2005, has given his take on the recent ratcheting-up of tension in the Gulf region after Iran shot down a US drone, which, it
says, had entered its airspace.
Washington maintains its UAV was shot down while patrolling over international waters in an "unprovoked attack." On Friday
President Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim the US were 10 minutes away from bombing three Iranian sites, before calling off
the strikes.
Galloway believes that many Iranians would see it as a great "pleasure to fight the United States and its allies in the region."
In a stark warning to US allies such as Qatar, the UAE and Saudia Arabia, Galloway insisted that any country that allows "its
land to be used for the launching for an American attack on Iran will itself be immediately in flames."
The former Labour MP concludes his passionate message to the world by declaring: "No more war. No more war in the Gulf. No
war on Iran."
It is true that Trump needs to fire acting President Bolton. Bolton who was appointed to the NSA by Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli/American
oligarch, will not allow Trump to fire Bolton; otherwise, he loses millions of $$$$. The pressure is also from Adelson and his
neocon ilk.
I don't think my opinion has changed. There've been several cases where they've been about to attack Iran, but then have drawn
back. Spring 2018 (Israel), 2012, even the event of 1980, where they tried but failed. Trump's aborted attack is just another
case.
Iran is a big country, and won't be defeated unless the people are ready to abandon the regime. They aren't as far as I
can detect. The exiles, and the middle class in Iran, hate the regime. I've just had a lot of that poured into my ears, during
my visit to Iran a month ago. The popular feeling though doesn't seem to have abandoned the regime. I think we can expect a nationalist
resistance, if indeed Trump does attack Iran.
China has been complying with US sanctions on Iran, for example this article notes that
China stopped buying
oil from Iran . US direct trade with Iran isn't so much as issue as the US stopping Europe and China from trading with Iran.
[Jun 22, 2019] this report on the Ufa, Russia Security Conference by both Iranian and Outlaw US Empire officials. The entire article requires reading, but this is the most relevant excerpt that has some links in the original I won't duplicate:
"Given current global events, the most significant attendees in Ufa are a senior US National
Security Council member and the Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC),
Ali Shamkhani. As of now, the only official news comes from Ali Shamkhani's words concerning
the possibility of mediation with the US and the possibility of Iran acquiring weapons systems
to fend off US threats. Shamkhani stated:
"'We currently face demonstrative threats. Nevertheless, when it comes to air defense of our
country, we consider using the foreign potential in addition to our domestic capacities
Mediation is out of question in the current situation. The United States has unilaterally
withdrawn from the JCPOA, it has flouted its obligations and it has introduced illegal
sanctions against Iran. The United States should return to the starting point and correct its
own mistakes. This process needs no mediation.'
"'This [gradually boosting of uranium enrichment and heavy water production beyond the
levels outlined in the JCPOA] is a serious decision of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] and we
will continue doing it step by step until JCPOA violators move toward agreement and return to
fulfilling their obligations. [If JCPOA participants do not comply with the deal, Iran will be
reducing its commitments] step by step within legal mechanisms that the JCPOA envisions.'"
It was noted by b that the Outlaw US Empire faces a growing international coalition against
its actions, which results from sentiments made at the rather many recent international
conferences that have already occurred in June that will be topped by G-20 in 8 days. That
admission along with the stark mostly unreported economic realities of any armed conflict in
the Gulf region is what restrains the war mongers. The Money Power and the Current Oligarchy
won't allow war is what I see. And that makes this Friday morning pleasant despite the
fog.
Posted by: Anon | Jun 21, 2019 8:04:55 AM | 29 (boring that it's yet another Anon, who
can't be bothered to distinguish himself all from the other thousands of Anons)
the stage is now maximum restraint and effort at co-operation, which Iran will be
expected to respect. That means one more act against US (or false flag by US) and
strikes will occur. Not comparable to hostage crisis, here US is projecting being
reasonable, even if you read that as being weak.
It's not me who reading the US as weak. It will be the attitude of the
Iranians, who haven't forgotten the US failure in 1980 (April 24, 1980), as opposed to
the US public for whom it is so many crises ago that they've forgotten. And the Iranians
are right. Trump hesitated, as every previous attempt to launch a strike on Iran has
finished finally in a stand-down. The risks are just too great (for what the US public is
prepared to accept). And we've just seen it happen again. They might be able to screw
themselves up to go through with it, and accept the losses and stalemate that will come,
but it will do no good at all for Trump's re-election chances.
Posted by: Mikael Kallavuo | Jun 21, 2019 12:19:06 PM |
91 Well it looks like Elijah Magnier has finally written the piece he was hinting at
releasing yesterday. Here it
is:
Iran is pushing US President Donald Trump to the edge of the abyss, raising the level
of tensions to new heights in the Middle East. After the sabotage of four tankers at
al-Fujairah and the attack on the Aramco pipeline a month ago, and last week's attack
on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC –
now categorized by the USA as a terrorist body) yesterday shot down a US Navy drone,
sending two clear messages. The first message is that Iran is ready for an all-out war,
no matter what the consequences. The second message is that Iran is aware that the US
President has cornered himself; the embarrassing attack came a week after Trump
launched his electoral campaign.
According to well-informed sources, Iran rejected a proposal by US intelligence
– made via a third party – that Trump be allowed to bomb one, two or three
clear objectives, to be chosen by Iran, so that both countries could appear to come out
as winners and Trump could save face. Iran categorically rejected the offer and sent
its reply: even an attack against an empty sandy beach in Iran would trigger a missile
launch against US objectives in the Gulf.
...
Moreover, Iran has established a joint operations room to inform all its allies
in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan of every step it is adopting in
confronting the US in case of all-out war in the Middle East. Iran's allies have
increased their level of readiness and alert to the highest level; they will
participate in the war from the moment it begins if necessary. According to sources,
Iran's allies will not hesitate to open fire against an already agreed on bank of
objectives in a perfectly organised, orchestrated, synchronised and graduated response,
anticipating a war that may last many months.
Sources confirmed that, in case of war, Iran aims to stop the flow of oil from the
Middle East completely, not by targeting tankers but by hitting the sources of oil in
every single Middle Eastern country, whether these countries are considered allies or
enemies. The objective will be to cease all oil exports from the Middle East to the
rest of the world.
...
Iran's economy is under attack by Trump's embargo on Iranian oil exports. Trump
refuses to lift the embargo and wants to negotiate first. Trump, unlike Israel and the
hawks in his administration, is trying to avoid a shooting war. Netanyahu has
reiteratedhis desire for war with Iran -- a war that the US will fight–and is
meeting with his Arab allies to help bring it about. As Ha'aretz described Netanyahu's
Iran dilemma last month, the goal is to get Trump to go to war without putting Israel
on the front line.
EXCLUSIVE: In an exclusive interview with Chuck Todd, President Donald Trump says he
hadn't given final approval to Iran strikes, no planes were in the air.
The first message is that Iran is ready for an all-out war, no matter what the
consequences. The second message is that Iran is aware that the US President has
cornered himself; the embarrassing attack came a week after Trump launched his
electoral campaign. According to well-informed sources, Iran rejected a proposal by US
intelligence – made via a third party – that Trump be allowed to bomb one
or two clear objectives, to be chosen by Iran, so that both countries could appear to
come out as winners and Trump could save face. Iran categorically rejected the offer
and sent its reply: even an attack against an empty sandy beach in Iran would trigger a
missile launch against US objectives in the Gulf.
...
Iran has established a joint operations room to inform all its allies in Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan of every step it is adopting in confronting the US
in case of all-out war in the Middle East. Iran's allies have increased their level of
readiness and alert to the highest level; they will participate in the war from the
moment it begins if necessary. According to sources, Iran's allies will not hesitate to
open fire against an already agreed on bank of objectives in a perfectly organised,
orchestrated, synchronised and graduated response, anticipating a war that may last
many months.
...
Sources confirmed that, in case of war, Iran aims to stop the flow of oil from the
Middle East completely, not by targeting tankers but by hitting the sources of oil in
every single Middle Eastern country, whether these countries are considered allies or
enemies. The objective will be to cease all oil exports from the Middle East to the
rest of the world.
Still, there remained doubt inside the United States government over whether the drone,
or another American surveillance aircraft, this one flown by a military aircrew, did
violate Iranian airspace at some point, according to a senior administration
official.
..
The delay by United States Central Command in publicly releasing GPS coordinates of the
drone when it was shot down -- hours after Iran did -- and errors in the labeling of
the drone's flight path when the imagery was released, contributed to that doubt,
officials said.
A lack of provable "hard evidence" about the location of the drone when it was hit,
a defense official said, put the administration in an isolated position at what could
easily end up being the start of yet another war with a Middle East adversary -- this
one with a proven ability to strike back.
Posted by: b | Jun 21,
2019 1:23:18 PM |
107 b, how can you believe any of Trump's versions? I can't see that one is more
trustworthy than another
Listen to this horse manure coming from Brain Hook, "special" representative for Iran:
"According to him, Washington was doing everything possible to defuse tensions with
Iran and return the containment system in the region.
However, Hook blamed Tehran for rising tension in the region because of the refusal of
any diplomatic initiatives.
"Our diplomacy does not give Iran the right to respond with military force. Iran needs
to meet diplomacy with diplomacy, not military force," the envoy added."
Diplomacy needs to be met with diplomacy......Really???
Iran should impose sanctions on all of SA, UAE and US oil exports. How's that for
diplomacy Mr. Hook? In case you missed it that is exactly what they are doing. Meeting
your brand of diplomacy head on.
We are living in the realm of absurd. How is it that we have left the welfare of our
kids, families and the future of our country in the hands of these incompetent
morons?
And why is the rest of the world sitting with their popcorn watching this horror
show?
Posted by: Uncle Jon | Jun 21, 2019 2:53:41 PM |
131 h @124--
After reading the wiki item on P-8s having a normal crew of 7, I got to thinking about
the 35 number either being a botched translation or how many bodies were noted via
thermal imaging radar, something I doubt Iran was thought to possess. As I wrote, Iran
can see everything to its West, which is a very BigDeal.
I digested Magnier's latest. The following is an extremely important point:
"Ha'aretz described Netanyahu's Iran dilemma last month, the goal is to get Trump
to go to war without putting Israel on the front line ."
Except that is an impossibility. The Zionists are smack dab in the middle of the front
line with a massive crosshairs imprinted on their entirety. Occupied Palestine sits at
Ground Zero, and it seems that the Zionists are finally waking up to the ultimate
betrayal they'll experience at the hands of The Christian Rapturists--they are to be
Genocided in the pursuit of attempting to make a myth come to life.
Every writer, Magnier, b, Escobar, and most all barflies, etc, are saying the decision
lies with Trump. As I've written before and again above, I disagree. The decision to go
to war with Iran rests with the Current Oligarchy running the Outlaw US Empire. And it's
my belief that such a war will not bring them A Few Dollars More and instead make their
Fistful of Dollars evaporate rapidly. thanks to their great outstanding, naked, risks.
For perhaps the very first time, the Current Oligarchy is exposed to the risks
involved in a war it initially though it could win. Last night, it seemed to awaken
to the potential consequences and blinked. The Philadelphia refinery blast may be shear
coincidence or not, but it also has likely helped since its right down the street from
the Current Oligarchies penthouses.
Now, it's just about the time of day when the Houthis launch their attacks.
Watch the brilliant George Galloway on the consequences of war with Iran. Bottom line:
only hardline Likudniks and FDD Likud USA types would approve such a disastrous move.
If America attacks and destroys Iran after doing the same to Iraq, Palestine, Libya,
Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, the Islamic religion should semi-officially adopt
anti-Americanism until the Empire falls, and it would be totally deserved. If we all go
in, let us get a good thrashing.
_____
George Galloway has warned the US and its allies in the Gulf that if they were to
start "World War III" with an attack on Iran they will live to regret it because, unlike
Iraq in 2003, they are capable of fighting back.
The Scottish firebrand, who famously took US lawmakers to task over the Iraq war when
he testified in front of the senate in 2005, has given his take on the recent
ratcheting-up of tension in the Gulf region after Iran shot down a US drone, which, it
says, had entered its airspace.
Washington maintains its UAV was shot down while patrolling over international waters
in an "unprovoked attack." On Friday President Donald Trump took to Twitter to claim the
US were 10 minutes away from bombing three Iranian sites, before calling off the
strikes.
Galloway believes that many Iranians would see it as a great "pleasure to fight the
United States and its allies in the region."
In a stark warning to US allies such as Qatar, the UAE and Saudia Arabia, Galloway
insisted that any country that allows "its land to be used for the launching for an
American attack on Iran will itself be immediately in flames."
The former Labour MP concludes his passionate message to the world by declaring: "No
more war. No more war in the Gulf. No war on Iran."
It is true that Trump needs to fire acting President Bolton. Bolton who was appointed to
the NSA by Sheldon Adelson, the Israeli/American oligarch, will not allow Trump to fire
Bolton; otherwise, he loses millions of $$$$. The pressure is also from Adelson and his
neocon ilk.
I don't think my opinion has changed. There've been several cases where they've been
about to attack Iran, but then have drawn back. Spring 2018 (Israel), 2012, even the
event of 1980, where they tried but failed. Trump's aborted attack is just another case.
Iran is a big country, and won't be defeated unless the people are ready to abandon
the regime. They aren't as far as I can detect. The exiles, and the middle class in Iran,
hate the regime. I've just had a lot of that poured into my ears, during my visit to Iran
a month ago. The popular feeling though doesn't seem to have abandoned the regime. I
think we can expect a nationalist resistance, if indeed Trump does attack Iran.
@Oscar Peterson #151
China has been complying with US sanctions on Iran, for example this article notes that
China
stopped buying oil from Iran .
US direct trade with Iran isn't so much as issue as the US stopping Europe and China from
trading with Iran.
The first thing to say here is that we have no means to know what really happened. At the
very least, there are two possible hypotheses which could explain what took place:
1) a US provocation: it is quite possible that somebody in the US chain of command decided
that Iran should be put under pressure and that having US UAV fly right next to, or even just
inside, the international border of Iran would be a great way to show Iran that the US is ready
to attack. If that is the case, this was a semi-success (the Iranians had to switch on their
radars and attack the UAV which is very good for US intelligence gathering) and a semi-failure
(since the Iranians were clearly unimpressed by the US show of resolve).
2) an Iranian provocation: yup, that is a theoretical possibility which cannot reject
prima facie : in this scenario it was indeed the Iranians who blew up the two tankers
last week and they also deliberately shot down the US UAV over international waters. The goal?
Simple: to show that the Iranians are willing and ready to escalate and that they are confident
that they will prevail.
Now, in the real world, there are many more options, including even mixes of various
options. What matters is now not this, as much as Trump's reaction:
Now, whether this was a US provocation or an Iranian one – Trump's reaction was the
only correct one. Why? Because the risks involved in any US "more than symbolic strike" would
be so great as to void any rationale for such a strike in the first place. Think of it: we can
be very confident that the Iranian military installations along the Persian Gulf and the
southern border of Iran are highly redundant and that no matter how successful any limited US
missile strike would have been, the actual military capabilities of Iran would not have been
affected. The only way for the US to effectively degrade Iranian capabilities would be to have
a sustained, multi-day, attack on the entire southern periphery of Iran. In other words, a real
war. Anything short of that would simply be meaningless. The consequences of such an attack,
however, would be, in Putin's words "catastrophic" for the entire region.
If this was an Iranian provocation, then it was one designed to impress upon the Empire that
Iran is also very much "locked, cocked and ready to rock". But if that is the case, there is
zero change that any limited strike would achieve anything. In fact, any symbolic US attack
would only signal to the Iranians that the US has cold feet and that all the US sabre-rattling
is totally useless.
I have not said such a thing in many months, but in this case I can only admit that Trump
did the right thing. No limited attack also makes sense even if we assume that the Empire has
made the decision to attack Iran and is just waiting for the perfect time. Why? Because the
longer the Iranian feel that an attack is possible, the more time, energy and money they need
to spend remaining on very high alert.
The basic theory of attack and defense clearly states that the attacking side can gain as a
major advantage if it can leave the other side in the dark about its plans and if the costs of
being ready for a surprise attack are lower than the costs of being on high alert (those
interested in the role and importance of surprise attack in the theory of deterrence can read
Richard Betts' excellent book "
the longer the Iranian feel that an attack is possible, the more time, energy and money
they need to spend remaining on very high alert.
Yep. Men and material getting tired. Tired men and material make mistakes.
Smart.
As I've said plenty of times before, the "beauty" of the setup is that TPTBs simply create a
climate for a mistake resulting in loss of life of American personnel. BANG.
Or, you put two combat forces next to each other and ramp up the tension. Just a matter of time.
I am currently very slightly optimistic (48-52%) that the US will not attack Iran in the
short term. In the long term, however, I consider that an AngloZionist attack is a quasi certainty.
Yep. Short term being 3 months (related to the first paragraph).
Sean Hannity lives in the largest Mansion in Lloyd Neck I have driven past his Mansion to get
a look as to just how big it is IT'S HUGE ..Lloyd Neck has the most expensive zip code in the
US ..Hannity the Chicken-Hawk thinks he is even tougher Chicken-Hawk War Hawk now that he
studies MMA Serra Brazilian Ji-jitsu on Jericho Turnpike ..Yesterday Sean Hannity"My
philosophy is you hit me .I hit you back ten times harder" .of course, Sean will be hiding in
his mega-Mansion in Lloyd Neck .as the US Cargo Planes land in Virginia with a 100 stainless
steel coffins containing the bodies headless bodies of Native Born White American Working
Class Young Men Donald and Melania step inside the cargo bay to view the stainless steel
coffins ..
Military action needs to support the underlying political goals. And, the political goal is
to stop the Iranian regime from threatening and destabilizing the region.
Would killing 150+ Iranians help dislodge the violent regime? No. Thus, the proposed
strike did not align with the political goal. Trump was right to cancel it.
Think of it as the Putin Playbook. Did Putin go for mass casualties when Turkey shot down
one of its fighters in 2015? No. Both Putin and Trump show similar strength. Restraint
against precipitous, ill conceived, and overly bloody actions.
_____
Trump realizes that the Iranian people are the victims of sociopath Kahmeni. There will be
a response with minimal bloodshed. Instead it will focus on the regime. Deepening the divide
between the Iranian people and their despotic leaders prepares the path for internal
forces to replace those leaders.
Oil storage is a likely choice. The tanks are large and spilled oil is highly visible. It
would demonstrate the inability of the regime to stop the U.S. Storage facilities are visible
to the public, so the government would have trouble denying or misrepresenting the event.
Port facilities would also be a good choice, although that would be harder to time for few to
no casualties.
That's going overboard on precision though. And what's with the oil refinery in Pennsylvania going up into balls of flame. I hope this
won't get dragooned into an "Iranian sleeper cell attack".
The provocations have to be such that domestic acquiescence in elite war profit taking will
not be disturbed. That requires a series of propaganda events ramping up for domestic
consumption.
10 minutes from striking is worryingly close, and Trump's disclosures on the matter are
troubling. Apparently it was only at this late hour that Trump came around to asking for
specifics on how many Iranians his order would kill. The generals told him approximately
150.
This was the game-changer, and Trump was nominally ordering this attack over the shoot
down of a single US surveillance drone, and he rightly noticed that killing 150 people was
not very proportionate to that, fortunately, he called the attack off before the first
missiles were fired.
Trump went on to issue a flurry of Tweets saying Iran would never be allowed to have
nuclear weapons, which of course this entire almost-attack had not a thing to do with. He
also bragged about how much damage the US sanctions have done to Iran and how weakened Iran
already is.
Troublingly though, administration hawks were still able to get Trump to sign off on the
attack earlier on Thursday, and his assurances on Twitter suggest that the loss of the
single drone really didn't enter into it as a big issue for him. This raises ongoing
concerns that having called off the Thursday attack, Trump might be sold on a lesser attack
at any time, or at least something nominally different that gets carried out before he gets
around to asking about the casualties.
Why would you end your mis-analysis where you justify war with the word PEACE? Spelling it out in all CAPS? You are seriously proposing that the US has the right to judge the government of another
country and to deliberately destabilize that country in order to oerturn its governemtn?
Do you realize that economic sanctions are considered to be acts of war? In other words, you support acts of war and think that is PEACE? Are you insane?
Military action needs to support the underlying political goals. And, the political goal
is to stop the Iranian regime from threatening and destabilizing the region.
Yeah. Makes total sense from an Israeli/Saudi perspective. When bullshit is all there is,
Hollywood logic can be used to explain the world!
Trump realizes that the Iranian people are the victims of sociopath Kahmeni.
I hope you have been given a sheet with talking points, otherwise I pity you.
The Deep State never rests.
Dual treason sandwich via Reuters for Mr. Trump. It's really like living in a Nazi regime, with Heydrich walking the corridors,
blackmailing and manipulating and "disposing of" problem factors.
Iran's top national security official has denied a Reuters report claiming that Tehran
had received a low-key message via Oman from the US warning of an imminent attack on the
Islamic Republic.
"The US didn't send any message," Keyvan Khosravi, spokesman for the National Security
Council, told Iranian television.
The comment dismissed a previous report by Reuters, which cited unnamed Iranian
officials as saying that Donald Trump had warned Tehran of a military strike and also gave
a time to respond. The message was reportedly delivered via Oman and followed the downing
of a US spy UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) earlier in the week.
Hmm, so they shot down a drone; would they be able to shoot down every American plane that
entered their airspace? A good reason to call off the strike; if the Iranians had a missile
lock on every American plane. Having all their planes shot down would be an even worse defeat
for the United States than just calling off an attack.
Putin checks Trump.
The Iranians might be deciding to stand firm against US sanctions and other provocations as
de facto acts of war before the sanctions do materially impact the Iranian
economy and its military capability.
Recall the chicanery through which the United States surreptitiously provoked Japan into
attacking the United States at Pearl Harbor so that FDR, a committed Anglophile, could enter
the European war through the back door to save his British friends.
1. Via economic sanctions, the United States and its European colonial allies
systematically denied Japan the resources it needed to sustain its population and its
industrial economy.
2. Japan decided that it would have to act to obtain those resources or, accept its
eventual demise as a nation state.
3. FDR hinted to the Dutch that the newly-positioned naval resources at Pearl Harbor would
attack and cut the Japanese lines-of-communication per chance Japan struck south to obtain
oil, rubber, and other resources in Southeast Asia. This was intentionally leaked to the
Japanese.
4. The United States monitored the locations and progress of the Japanese fleet en route
to Pearl Harbor to protect its exposed flank per the above. Japanese naval resources were
under a communications blackout. However, the Japanese merchant marine supporting those
forces were not. The US monitored their locations as a proxy for the location of the Japanese
fleet. The rest is history
The Iranians are in a similar position: either fight now at the peak of their military
power or, fight for survival later at a significant economic and military disadvantage. Like
the Japanese, the Iranians would be wise to do the former. This strategy optimizes their
chances for national survival.
The first thing in is missiles that target air defense batteries. I doubt
the US is worried about Iran shooting down every plane. The drone probably was flying a
steady even course and took no evasive maneuvers unlike an attacking aircraft. The success
rate of surface to air missiles is not very high.
@TheJester1. Via economic sanctions, the United States and its European colonial
allies systematically denied Japan the resources it needed to sustain its population and its
industrial economy.
BS. The embargo was because Japan continued to occupy part of China. All they had to do
was go back home. Did FDR do it to get us into the war? Maybe, but Hitler was under no
obligation to declare war on the US since Japan did not declare war on the USSR when Hitler
attacked the USSR.
No limited attack also makes sense even if we assume that the Empire has made the
decision to attack Iran and is just waiting for the perfect time. Why? Because the longer
the Iranian feel that an attack is possible, the more time, energy and money they need to
spend remaining on very high alert.
Then
this might also be a strategic PSYOP destined to lull the Iranians into a false sense of
security. If that is the plan, it will fail: the Iranians have lived with a AngloZionist
bullseye painted on their heads ever since 1979 and they are used to live under constant
threat of war.
Trump Claims He Canceled an Airstrike Against Iran at the Very Last Minute
I one hundred percent support letting The Orange One continue on with his awesome cowboy
delusions as long as it keeps a war from starting.
My reaction:
"Wow, sir! You have such self-control! Those Iranians don't know how close they were to you
just kicking them back to the Stone Age! It's great that the better (wiser and more patient)
side of you won out in the end – you are awesome!"
WASHINGTON -- Maintaining that the unmanned aerial vehicle was simply going about its day
without posing a threat to anyone, U.S. Department of State officials claimed Thursday that
one of their drones was minding its own business on its way to church when Iran attacked it
out of nowhere. "This was an outrageous, unprovoked attack by the Islamic Republic of Iran on
an innocent drone who merely wanted to attend mass in peace," said acting Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo, emphasizing the drone's upstanding moral character by pointing out its history
of donating to charity, volunteering at soup kitchens, and making homemade cookies for school
bake sales. "We're talking about a drone that sings in the church choir and coaches little
league baseball games on the weekends -- an absolute pillar of the community. This is an
upstanding family drone who did nothing to deserve any sort of attack. What kind of world do
we live in where an innocent drone can't fly through Iranian air space on its way to church?"
At press time, Department of Defense officials confirmed that their request for Iran to
return the drone's body back to the U.S. for a proper burial had gone unanswered.
@MarkinLA Read Frazier Hunt, The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur.
TheJester is right.
Yes, China was under Japanese occupation. The Chinese Communists were fighting the Japs.
The USA was supporting the side that was not fighting the Japs but the Communists, being, the
USA, fanatically anti-communist.
My guess is that the USA forced Japan into war because of the economic potential of China,
i.e. they wanted to take Japan's place.
And the USA didn't side with Hitler but with the other side because they didn't know
Indian independence would come immediately after the War. So they sided with the Brits
because of the apparent economic potential of the British Empire. If India had gained
independence just before the war the USA would have sided with Hitler, because then, without
India, German Europe would have had a greater economic potential than the British Empire.
The Iranians claim that a manned spy plane was next to the drone (i.e. that it also was in
their territory) but that they chose not to shoot it down since 35 soldiers were on board.
"Along with the American drone was an American P8 aircraft with 35 on board, and it was
also violating our airspace and we could have downed it too," he said, adding, "But we did
not do [shoot down] it, because our aim was to warn the terrorist forces of the US."
To me, a total cynic, it looks like the Americans attempted a repeat of the incident when
they deliberately misled their sailors so that they sailed into Iranian territorial waters. I
guess they messed up the GPS for them.
"Iran releases video of captured American sailor crying "
I too would cry if I realised that my superiors had set me up as a sacrificial lamb.
Let's not forget the attempt to sink the USS Liberty. That was a joint operation between
the US Deep State and Israel to try and get the US to attack Egypt.
"'But Sir, It's an American Ship.' 'Never Mind, Hit Her!' When Israel Attacked USS
Liberty"
@TheJester But why were sanctions imposed on Japan? Because Japan was acting in violation
of international law? Well yes due to Japanese imperial aggression against China. In 1935-40
Japan was no angelic virgin. It committed unprovoked aggression against China, committed
massive war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yes FDR likely wanted to have USA enter the
Pacific war to enable war against Hitler but the crippling sanctions against Japan had a
legitimate basis. To punish Japan for aggression in China
It looks like the Americans are having a false flag feast.
The positions in Iraq – whether directly or indirectly connected to the US
interests in Iraq – for example Baghdad, Basra and al-Taji base to Northwest of Baghdad
and Nineveh operations command headquarters in Northern Iraq have come under Katyusha missile
attacks in recent day, the Al-Akhbar newspaper reported.
The paper reiterated that the missile attacks have taken place as a result of recent
regional tensions, and said that the US officials are trying to portray the attacks as
messages by Iran after al-Fujaira and the Sea of Oman mishaps.
It noted that no group has claimed responsibility for the recent missile attacks on Iraqi
cities.
Sources close to Hashd al-Sha'abi Commander Abu Mohandes al-Mahdi, meantime, categorically
dismissed any accusations against the Iraqi popular and resistance forces, and said that the
Americans themselves are most probably behind some of these attacks because some of the
missiles are made in the US.
@HEREDOT Mr. Saker left out the inconvenient fact that while that drone was indeed flying
over Iranian air space, a much larger target, the Poseidon P8 was flying nearby. The P8 is a
converted Boeing 737, making for a much larger radar profile for that missile. The P8 has
many ASW capabilities, and also can control drones.
It's usual crew numbers nine, but this one had 35 sacrificial lambs packed onboard, to be
murdered by the (((Deep State))) to push Trump into the corner, with the (((MSM))) screaming
that it was Iran's fault, no proof needed or lies fabricated–just like the illegal
invasion of Iraq–to give Israel what it's demanding that its American colony do: Bomb,
bomb, bomb Iran.
My guess is that the American thugs behind this latest FF attempt were hoping the
Iranian surface-to-air missile would of shifted its initial target–the drone– and
went for the much larger P8.
That Butcher Boy Bolton and his fellow homicidal maniacs failed means that more Americans
are being lined up in their cross-hairs, ready to be sacrificed for the glory of Apartheid
Israel.
If that is the plan, it will fail: the Iranians have lived with a AngloZionist bullseye
painted on their heads ever since 1979 and they are used to live under constant threat of
war.
Wrong, Saker, the Iranians have been getting attacked by America and the Brits since we
overthrew their democratically elected prez in 1953, because he had the audacity to think and
say that the majority of Iran's oil revenues should be going to Iranians, not Wall Street
.
@BengaliCanadianDude Agreed. If Israel want to attack Iran, go ahead, but they won't,
because they know they'd get their asses kicked unless Uncle Sucker was leading the way.
Or maybe Israel could send in its fearsome DIAPER BRIGADES to wreak havoc in
Tehran?
The diaper reference is not a joke, it's fact that the IDF has issued combat nappies to
their troops, who let loose their bladder anytime they engage REAL men with guns who shoot
back. But let's give credit where its due, when it comes to shooting Palestinian kids with
slingshots or medics, Israel is #1.
@peterAUS Iran has been living with the same threat since 1979. The result is a hugely
popular military and IRGC which is one of the best career choices in the country. It's a way
of life for the nation to be under siege by now and for Shia Muslims the idea of being ready
to fight to the death always hovers due to the history of Islam with respect to the
Sunni/Shia divide. This disagreement is extreme, to be a Muslim and understand it is to feel
horror! ; and despair at the idea any reconciliation is even possible between the two sects
and a shared history does not make for a shared point of view. Shias have always been
outnumbered and it was us who were targeted for extreme violence in the end (or the
begginning) when a dispute over leadership turned bitter. Successive Islamic powers have
attempted to exterminate Shias and the latest incarnation of the Salafis begginning with
Wahhabism (nurtured by the Rothschild controlled British SS at the end of the Ottoman Empire)
and lately morphed into Takfirism which is Daesh and their ilk, have always sought out Shias
first and foremost for attack.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is firstly an Islamic Republic in full revolutionary mode,
(as opposed to 'fundamentalist') it is also in a close second the "Capital" of Shia Islam and
what I have described is the history of Iran and the times the Persian state was not an
Islamic one are no less a part of the historical memory of the nation. Even those times
(which invariably ended in defeat for Persia) reinforce the idea that it is as an Islamic
state Iran stands best chance of survival and the confidence that if they remain true to
these principles they will prevail is backed by an unbroken history of successful defense as
a righteous Islamic state. This may be beyond many of the younger generation and ignored by
the wealthy older generation Iranians but it must be ingrained in the political and social
cosnciousness of the political and religious and intellectual elite.
Iran is ready. They have always been ready in one sense. Saddan Hussein who attacked them
when they were at their weakest and still lived to regret it could attest to that if he was
still around to talk. That war in which the USA gave full and unconditional support to their
protege Saddam who only became their enemy when he became a better man and leader later on in
time, was a wake up call to Iranian leadership and the nation as one. They knew that they
needed missiles and a very strong defensive posture and that is what they have. F^ck with
them at your peril I say.
I doubt myself the USA will attack Iran, at least as long as they have ships and troops
within 1000 miles of Iran. That includes towing their static aircraft carrier "Israel" out of
range as well.
@2stateshmustate agree, the comment that "the USA is taking the events to the UN is
loaded with false something or other..
Iran initiated the UN hearing AFAIK and IRAN says it will present evidence that it was the
USA's intention.. to do the deeds ..<=personally, my feeling is neither Russia nor China
will veto .. anything about these deeds.. the only veto will come from Article II of the COUS
, present leader [one Mr. Trumpy]. who is elected not by popular vote of the govern people
in America but instead by the hidden behind the scene, state to state vote of the
electoral college.. .. <== you mean all that to-do every four years to elect a president:
democrats vs republicans beating each other up, newspapers collecting billions in
contribution dollars to publish fake I hate you slogans, and he saids, you saids: dey all
be fake news, propaganda erotic ? yep.. sure enough is. dem guys dat rites dem
Konstitutions ain't no dummies deys knows vat ve good fore dem. Read Article II, sections 2
and 3.. you see..
Popular vote elects the Article I folks ( 525 in all: 425 members of the house of
congressional districts (Art. 1, Section 2), and 100 Senators (amendment 17, proposed 1912,
approved 1913federal reserve(act of congress), income tax (amendment 16) both also 1913
),
=>but Article I (section 2 and amendment 17 ) folks have no power to act.. as powerless
buffoons ..they are authorized only to approve a few things, try cases of Treason, and make
the laws, fund the actions, wants and needs demanded by Article II persons. It takes 2/3 of
each a divided Senate and 2/3 of a divided House [Art. I, sec 7[2,3] to over-power the Art II
privilege of veto.. and
==get this=> Article II persons are charged to enforce the law( Art II, section
2 [3] he[the President} shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Where is
Hillary? I see no words making such duty to enforce the law optional (so does the AG have an
option that the President does not, .) ?
I am in full agreement with the author about who was most likely behind the attacks on the
ships and how the two separate attacks were done. Even down to accepting the possibility Iran
was behind some or all of this as provocation for the reasons given. If so it would mean they
are hurting badly and need to bring things to a head fast. This does not fit with my
observations of Iranian leadership which has always demonstrated a very long term and
patient, typically oriental approach to logjams in diplomacy and nothing has happened to
suggest they are suddenly feeling extremely more pain than previously. In short it is
possible but I doubt it.
To my mind the things which speak against the Iranians having attacked the tankers the
second time at least are substantial: Both ships were Japanese owned. This attack as such was
against Japanese interests WHILST the Japanese PM (Japanese death cult and mafia associations
and all) was making a historical visit to Tehran! What sort of dung for brains clowns would
invite someone for dinner and then send the kids out to set fire to their car whilst they
dined? Of course Washington would do something like this (shooting missiles at Syria whilst
enjoying a lovely piece of cake with their Chinese ally ffs ) but Iran? Give me a break.
Secondly if Iran was guilty, how come the USA is lying like a cheap rug from the get go?
The video the US Navy quickly produced is PROOF they are lying. The black and white imagery
does NOT hide the distinctly different paint jobs on the ship depicted and the actual one
involved. Whatever that video is, it is NOT a video of either of the ships involved in the
second incident. So if Iran was guilty why is the USA using fabricated evidence to assert
it?
The claim that the Iranians tried unsuccesfully to shoot down a Reaper drone which was
according to the USA monitoring the ship BEFORE IT WAS ATTACKED was what stuck in my craw
from the start. What the hell was a REAPER Drone doing monitoring that particular ship at
that particular time? Is this a common practice? Reaper drones are NOT recon drones they
carry hellfire missiles and kill things! When you consider the reports by the crew, as
relayed by the Japanese company owner about a flying object just before the explosion and the
pictures of the damage which clearly show fairly small holes about half way between the
gunwale and waterline the conclusion these were small missiles is hard to avoid. Indeed
HELLFIRE missiles would fit the bill nicely.
As for attacking Iran I do not believe that the USA will dare start anything, especially
now, so long as they have troops and ships within range of Iranian missiles. Iranian missiles
power is immense and an unknown because they do not know where it all is, and they do know
much of it is very, very well hardened against attack. IF they do start a war with Iran
whilst they have assets in the region, invluding "Israel" then they have completely lost
their minds and I'd say the war will end very fast and hard for them. Not even going nuclear
will do it. They are deluded if they think so. Nukes are not magic, they are just big bombs
and even the radiation component is not a big deal these days. (few realise it but modern
nukes are quite 'clean') Iran is a vast country and well dug in over millenia. However
unleashing a full nuclear war against a non nuclear state will end the USA forever as a world
citizen in every way. There is no solution for the USA except to make peace or back off. They
can plan and scheme all they like but Allah is the best of planners.
@Fran Macadam Well if that line of turkeys pecking at the crumbs of provocations
unfolding which purport to involve Iran keep on gobbling on cue they are going to realise too
late they just walked into the slaughter house. Iran will send home many thousands of their
boys and girls in body bags and sink their ships but the real hurt will be the end of the US
economy. They'll be missing even allegorical crumbs when they only have dirt to eat.
@MarkinLA Japan continued to occupy part of China (and viciously so, clearly stamping on
the foot of white-colonial interests with their homegrown late-comer colonialism) but i
mainly started to challenge US power in the Pacific, and with strong determination.
Israel does not have the ability to deceive the US, and why would it need to with Trump in
power? American fracking technology has greatly limited Iranian ability to cause trouble. If
it was the Iranians that did the limpet mine attack on international shipping then what would
their objective have been? Clearly they don't want more any real war or even more sanctions.
What they do want is create demand for their oil and sell it at a good price. The price of
oil is already up from the mere tension over the limpet mine and shootdown and had there been
US military action oil prices would have gone much higher. I see this whole affair as a sign
that the Iranian regieme is getting desperate, because America's slow smothering strategy is
working. Iran wants to breack out of its current situation and Trump is walking them into
that.
Israel will do nothing, the partisan supporters of Israel in the US can be kept quiet on
the immigration Issue by throwing them a bone (as Trump has been doing). Iran want to rase
oil prices and create demand for its oil, that is all. Hitting Iran, but quite lightly, is
the best option for Trump if he wants to win reelection. And so he will hit Iran at a time of
his choosing, which will probabally be closer to the election. The armed forces of America or
any other country are not for enforcing international law or notions of fair play, but rather
for defending that country's interests. Iran and Trump's agendas converge on a clash well
short of all out war in the very near future.
Occam's Razor suggests Trump got news that the drone was indeed inside Iranian airspace and
decided for once to call BS.
Besides, in the great scheme of things, one lost drone doesn't make up for the USS
Vincennes killing 290 people on Iran Air 655 by shooting it down in Iranian Airspace. When
the Empire warned that civil aircraft were not safe in the airspace, it wasn't the Iranian
forces they were warning about.
@Miggle Sorry, "My guess" covers all that follows. It's only my guess that the USA would
have sided with Hitler if they'd known India would not be part of the British Empire.
@TheJester But it wasn't wise for the Japanese as they were completely defeated.
The key difference between Japan and Iran is that the Japanese Empire was an aggressor,
endlessly invading its neighbours. Iran has not fought an offensive war in 40 years.
Also have to question you on the time element. Time is on the side of the Asian countries.
It's countries, like Israel, who see this as peak time for military action. Iran has survived
40 years of sanctions and can certainly survive this time, especially with the support of
Russia and China. Yet they still must react to military planes threatening their air space.
Plus they have no control over oil tankers being targeted by third parties.
The more I see of this, the more convinced I am that the US as a society is clinically
insane.
Its borders are under attack by what can only be described as an invasion is taking place
with millions off illegal immigrants pour across the border to commit crime, steal jobs or
mooch of the welfare programs.
Its cities are decaying with armies of homeless, shit and drugs flooding the streets in
ever greater numbers while the working class people flee in great waves.
Masked and armed criminals roam the streets of major US cities, attack anyone they deem to
be a wrong thinker when not busy rioting, stealing and chanting for the deaths of others.
Its economy is in a bi-polar mood. On one hand the GDP is as high as ever with tons of new
jobs getting created, on the other hand the physical economy is shrinking as stores closes
and houses go unsold due to half the nation being unable to buy anything but food and
clothes.
In the face of all of these problems, the US Government has decided to put its full
attention on overthrowing the government of Venezuela and starting a war with Iran because
somehow, those two nations who posed no danger to the US have been declared high priority
targets that requires the full spectrum attention and political intervention by the US.
@A123 "There will be a response with minimal bloodshed." Yes, we are noted for the
delicate, nearly bloodless nature of our military reactions, merely focusing on regimes with
the full-throated applause of the grateful populaces. It would be a cake-walk, to quote our
valiant SecDef Rumsfeld prior to our 2003 Iraqi minimally bloody response.
And speaking of armchair generalship, I wonder where Trump's multi-starred consultant got
the figure "150" in answer to the question of civilian casualties. This is the kind of
clear-sighted strategic vision that has a U. S. victory in Afghanistan just around the
corner, to quote our junior Clausewitz's.
But it is also plausible (if by no means certain) that at least two groups could have
opposed such a strike:
1) The planners at CENTCOM and/or the Pentagon.
Yes, it's reported that the Pentagon advised Trump not to retaliate militarily for the
drone shoot down.
Given advanced missile technologies, surface warships of any stripe are sitting ducks. I'm
guessing that Iran has a plethora of missile batteries up and down its coast. If Iran
launched a barrage of missiles simultaneously (10? 20? 30?) at a single surface warship in
the Persian Gulf, what would be the probability that the ship's self-defense systems could
neutralize them all?
If a single multi-billion dollar warship were sunk, the credibility of U.S. naval "power
projection" would evaporate. In that context, the Pentagon's reluctance may be because they'd
rather not establish that their hyper-expensive blue-water surface Navy is an
anachronism.
There is a very simple solution to all this, and the sooner it happens the better.
Everyone who conspired to defraud the US taxpayer into illegal wars (dating back to 2002),
should be forced to pay for the cost of the wars they lied us into.
All the assets of these "deceivers" should be "seized" .to pay down the 22 trillion war
debt their lies created.
If there is anything left over , it should be placed in an " Iran War Escrow Account
".
This would ensure that the burden of the war costs falls directly on "their" shoulders and
NOT the US taxpayers.
This seems like a just and fair solution for everybody ., doesn't it ?
An authentic act of war before even before firing the first bullet. First, make the
economy scream in the tradition of yet another thug masquerading as head of state (Nixon).
Second, starve them into submission. Does the first Iraq war resulting in the death of an
estimated half a million children denied essential medicines ring a bell? Venezuela is
similarly being starved into surrender. Meanwhile Guaido is embezzling the humanitarian aid
intended for his needy countrymen.
All said, the history of our country's lies and deception going back a long ways, more
than speaks for itself.
@Justsaying Of course, starvation is a favorite tactic of OUR international Communist
overlords. They've used it for decades and killed hundreds of millions of people using it.
It's cheap and easy.
On direct orders from Donald Trump ..the US Military is illegally occupying the sovereign
Nation of Syria .and Trump took a direct order from JEW ONLY ISRAEL to do this think about it
A case can be made that the US strategy is not to go to war with Iran .but rather, use the
boogey man of Iran to justify a 100 year illegal US Military occupation of Syria on behalf of
JEW ONLY ISRAEL .
The late Fat Cockroach Christopher Hitchens justified murdering thousands of Iraqis
because it would be good for the Kurds Well, here is what I say:THE CRYPTO JEW KURDS WERE
NEVER WORTH IT .Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq always meant an IDF presence in Northern
Iraq
The best analysis of the 225 million dollar MQ-4C drone(more expensive than the F-35) shoot
down in my opinion is that of Jim Stone:
"The drone shot down was an MQ-4C, which is basically a more advanced clone of the Global
Hawk. A better score for Iran than a Global Hawk. ADDITIONALLY IMPORTANT: Iran was the one
that recovered the debris, the U.S. navy did not, which means Iran was telling the truth
about where it was flying to begin with. If they got it, it fell on their turf. It is really
blown to smithereens, a direct hit. That's good for Iran because it proves their missile
systems can do it, but it is bad because they don't have any big pieces. Additionally, there
was an American P-8 spy plane accompanying the drone, Iran was able to differentiate between
the two, and hit the drone. The P-8 was a much easier target. Iran obviously opted not to hit
it because killing it's crew would have meant war."
What everyone needs to be aware of here is "stealth" technology is a total farce, and can
be defeated with long wave radar, basically the same system used by England during WWII. The
drone shot down was considered a Max Stealth aircraft, same as the F-35. The F-35 and F-22
are basically "hanger queens"(many hours of maintenance required for every hour of flying
time), and with their stealth capabilities being defeatable, they are pretty much worthless.
Trump did not pull the trigger on this because he figured out the whole thing could go real
bad real quick.
Everyone who conspired to defraud the US taxpayer into illegal wars (dating back to
2002), should be forced to pay for the cost of the wars they lied us into.
Everyone who conspired to defraud the US taxpayer into illegal wars, their heirs and all
who profited from (dating back to 1812), should be forced to pay for the cost of the wars
they lied us into.
@Justsaying You are correct. This is economic and siege warfare. Flying bullets, etc.,
add to the drama and consequences, but the war on Iran began many years ago. The vicious
clowns are up to the same old tricks, but bullshitting only the willing gulls.
No, it's not. Clearly the Nazis were on the defensive . Lying Abe Lincoln was, in
fact, much worse than the Nazis ever thought of being; in a totally different category
even.
Iran has not started a war in over 300 years and is not a terrorist nation and does not
export terrorism, that title belongs the the unholy trinity of the zio/US and Israel and
Britain, the creators and funders and suppliers of AL CIADA aka ISIS and all the various off
shoots thereof.
This war on Iran is a zionist project of the zionists who control the governments of the
zio/US and zio/Britain as has been the case in every war in Iraq and Libya and Syria and
Yemen and Lebanon , Israel has been the agent provocateur in every one of these wars!
The zionists have a goal of a satanic zionist NWO and are hell bent to get there if they
have to kill off all the goyim and muslims to accomplish it and they are well on their
way!
Read the book Blood In The Water by Joan Mellen on the zio/US and Israeli attack on the
USS Liberty for a look at how these two terrorist nations operate!
A handful of psychopaths determine our destiny. What makes us different from
animals?
I don't think other animals have psychopaths of the same species ruling over them nor do
they have hasbara clowns spouting sewage and doing worse 24/7, such as the alphanumeric zero,
above.
Mr. Saker left out the inconvenient fact that while that drone was indeed flying over
Iranian air space, a much larger target, the Poseidon P8 was flying nearby. The P8 is a
converted Boeing 737, making for a much larger radar profile for that missile. The P8 has
many ASW capabilities, and also can control drones.
If this is true the stupid bastards in control of this country better take note. If the
missile, that Iran says they developed, is cabable of distinguishing between a P8 and a drone
the US may have a big problem.
More likely, Trump and his Neocons knew that Iran had proof that the spy drone was shot down
over Iran's territory, that the truth would come out after the U.S. strike, earning the
world's condemnation and making Trump et al look like warmongering fools. That's what they
are, of course, but it gave Trump the chance to pose as a big humanitarian, stopping the
strike because, since it was only a plane, with no Americans on board, he didn't want to
"disproportionately" kill anybody. Yeah. Just wait until the Israeli puppets send another
plane with Americans on board, it'll give Israel and our traitorous Neocons the war they've
been lusting after for a decade or more.
In fact it's my understanding that the Japanese were bending over backwards in an attempt
to avoid war with the US but the Wall Street Commie catamite FDR and his henchmen foiled and
insulted them at every turn. The story of how they were repeatedly humiliated would raise the
hackles of the least sensitive among us.
The big picture is that the Wall Street and London Commies were aiming for world hegemony
even at their own populations' expense, of course, and Japan and Germany had to be castrated
even if populated and run by angels and innocent choir boys to ensure that they could be
turned into industrial slave states. It's apparent that the scum of the Earth won't rest
until they've accomplished their goals as we can clearly see here.
Sean Hannity lives in the largest Mansion in Lloyd Neck I have driven past his Mansion
to get a look as to just how big it is IT'S HUGE ..Lloyd Neck has the most expensive zip
code in the US
A simple Google search reveals Hannity sold his Lloyd Neck home in 2014, and has lived in
Oyster Bay for several years. Also, Lloyd Neck isn't even in Forbes' Top 50 Most Expensive
Zip Codes; the list is headed by four communities in California and one in Florida.
I'm not saying Sean isn't a pussy and a faggot, but your facts are suspect.
Bolton was notoriously a draft dodger during the Vietnam War, like his current boss, not due
to any scruples regarding what was occurring, but out of concern for his own sorry ass.
Iran has been abiding by the nuclear agreement. So why does it feel like the Trump
administration is edging the United States towards a war? #iran#iransanctions#trump
Ironic, politicians don't do any of the fighting but their soldiers do. The soliders don't
know why are fighting and get killed, politicians do know why they are fighting but don't get
killed. "War: A massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who
know each other but don't massacre each other" Paul Valery
I feel bad for the brainwashed American citizens From school to military to sleeping ships
that are entertained with consumption Very dumbed down society
"> This whole situation, is Americas last stand along with Saudi and their local
cousins in Israel to maintain the Petro dollar system which , if Iran could trade its
resources equitably would be finished...This is the system that pays for the thousands of US
military bases surrounding China, Russia ,Iran etc...
that provides billions of dollars to maintain Israeli nuclear and military superiority in
Palestine and Western Asia
..and maintains the Saudi monopoly and high crude prices, and so the Saudi dictator
monarchist establishment...
Nobody is claiming Iran is perfect, yet lets see this for what it is..as with Trumps
attacks , tariffs and sanctions leveled across global trade and industry...The desperate
actions of a dying empire...
There is a reason is the Obama administration went back to negotiating. To keep them Iran
busy while it was launching the Stuxnet Virus on the industrial control systems in Iran.
Watch the documentary Zero Days. It is extremely eye opening.
ole="article"> The World should stand together to stop this kind of bullying....! The
Trump administration had already planned ... that it needs to invade IRAN to choke China,
Korea, Japan & now India who gets their Oil from Iran. The unilateral tearing up of an
International Agreement is evidenced that US will rather this World go to Hell and to give-up
its No. 1 place in Commerce and Defence. This kind of arrogance & "superiorority"
attitude is dangerous for one who claims the title "Sherif - of-the - World"..! USA via the
Trump Administration is HELL BENT on invading IRAN. The tearing-up and dishonouring the
wishes of the International Community in order to provoke IRAN to retaliate by also NOT
complying with the provisions of the said Agreement is evidence that the USA had already
decided to invade IRAN. They nearly did invade last year but probably decided that they can
conspire to create more incidents to justify their attack. AN INVASION ON IRAN IS PRICELESS
TO USA.... WHY..? 1) They get to plunder USD Tens/Hundreds of Trillions to enrich THEIR
coffers/ economy. 2) IRAN has the 2nd largest oil reserves. Rebrand the Oil as "American
Oil".. 3) Take control of the most important shipment ports in the world with regards to Oil
Commodity.. 4) Get rid of Out-dsted Military wears and bill them to Saudi at a premium. 5)
Introduce their latest Military Wears to the World and again Bill them to Saudi at a double
premium ;and. - to get new orders from other countries. - to send a message to China of USA's
military capabilities.. 6) To Warn China that it has a penchant to settle issues through the
Military if negotiations do not work in favour of the USA.. 7) Choke East Asian countries who
are a threat to USA's No. 1 position. 8 ) Take another step towards acknowledging ISREALS
legitimate presence of the Middle East. 9) To help Isreal fulfill their prophesy to take
control of the Middle East. Saudi will not know, what hits them when the time comes. 10)
There is another 3 more serious points but I will leave it to you guys to challenge yourself
to decipher it. 11) To put onto action his perspectives, opinion & views while he can,
should he not be elected next Term. And if Trump is able to control the War, he will be
popular enough to be elected next term. Or if the War gets out of hand, then the US
Presidential Elections may be postpone. Therefore this invasion may be his best chance to
continue on as President. THEREFORE, UNLESS THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY STEPS IN AND STRONGLY
OBJECT TO THIS BULLYING... ;;; AMERICA WILL INVADE IRAN.....! USA PROVE ME & THE WORLD
WRONG....
A very good analysis. Trump essentially morphed into Hillary or worse. Essentially the same type of warmonger and
compulsive liar.
Notable quotes:
"... The American people appear largely uninterested in this idea. But unless some real mass pressure is mounted against it, there is a good chance Trump will launch the U.S. into another pointless, disastrous war. ..."
"... At time of writing, the Washington Post has counted 10,796 false or misleading claims from Trump himself since taking office. Abject up-is-down lying is basically the sine qua non of modern conservative politics. ..."
"... Pompeo insists " there is no doubt " that Iran carried out the attacks -- the exact same words that Vice President Dick Cheney said in 2002 about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his intention to use them on the United States, neither of which were true. (This is no doubt why several U.S. allies reacted skeptically to Trump's claims.) ..."
"... What's more, the downside risk here is vastly larger than tax policy. A great big handout to the rich might be socially costly in many ways, but it won't cause tens of thousands of violent deaths in a matter of days. War with Iran could easily do that -- or worse . ..."
"... Who else might have done the attacks? Saudi Arabia springs to mind. ..."
"... At a minimum, anybody with half a brain would want to be extremely certain about what actually happened before taking any rash actions. It's clear that Bolton and company, by contrast, just want a pretext to ratchet up pressure on Iran even further. ..."
"... On the other hand, sinking Iran's navy, as Stephens suggests in his column, would likely be a lot more dangerous than he thinks. Americans have long been fed a lot of hysterical nationalist propaganda from neocons like him about the invincibility of the U.S. military, and the ease with which any possible threat could be defeated. But while U.S. forces are indeed powerful, there is a very real risk that Iran's navy -- which is full of fast-attack boats, mini-subs, and disguised civilian vessels specifically designed to take out large ships with swarm attacks -- could inflict significant damage. Just a few lucky hits could kill thousands of sailors and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage. This is before you even get to the primary lesson of the Iraq War which is that an initial military victory is completely useless and probably counterproductive without a plan for what comes next. ..."
"... Finally, attacking Iran would be illegal. It would violate U.S. treaties , and thus the Constitution. The only justification is the claim that the 2001 authorization to attack Al Qaeda covers an attack on Iran . This is utterly preposterous -- akin to arguing it covers attacking New Zealand to roll back their gun control efforts -- but may explain Pompeo's equally preposterous attempt to blame Iran for a Taliban attack in Afghanistan. ..."
"... Pompeo and Bolton are clearly hell-bent on war. But Trump himself seems somewhat hesitant , sensing (probably accurately) that starting another war of aggression would tank his popularity even further. It's high time for everyone from ordinary citizens up to Nancy Pelosi to demand this rush to war be stopped. ..."
The Trump regime is attempting to gin up a war with Iran. First Trump reneged on Obama's nuclear deal with the country for no
reason, then he slapped them with more economic sanctions for no reason, and then, pushed by National Security Adviser John Bolton
and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he moved massive military forces onto Iran's doorstep to heighten tensions further. Now, after
a series of attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman -- none of which were American -- that the administration blames on Iran,
Pompeo says the U.S. is "considering a full range of options," including war. (Iran has categorically denied any involvement.)
The American people appear
largely uninterested
in this idea. But unless some real mass pressure is mounted against it, there is a good chance Trump will launch the U.S. into
another pointless, disastrous war.
The New York Times ' Bret Stephens, for all his #NeverTrump pretensions, provides a good window into the
absolute witlessness of the pro-war
argument . He takes largely at face value the Trump administration's accusations against Iran -- "Trump might be a liar, but
the U.S. military isn't," he writes -- and blithely suggests Trump should announce an ultimatum demanding further attacks cease,
then sink Iran's navy if they don't comply.
Let me take these in turn. For one thing, any statement of any kind coming out of a Republican's mouth should be viewed with extreme
suspicion. Two years ago, the party passed a gigantic tax cut for the rich which they swore up and down would "
pay
for itself " with increased growth. To precisely no one's surprise,
this did not happen
. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) was just
one
flagrant example of many who got elected in 2016 while
lying through their teeth about their party's efforts to destroy ObamaCare and its protections for preexisting conditions.
At
time of writing, the Washington Post has counted
10,796 false or misleading claims
from Trump himself since taking office. Abject up-is-down lying is basically the sine qua non of modern conservative politics.
Republican accusations of foreign aggression should be subjected to an even higher burden of proof. The Trump regime has provided
no evidence of Iranian culpability aside from
a video of a ship the Pentagon says is Iranians removing something they say is a mine from an oil tanker -- but a Japanese
ship owner reported at least one attack came from a "
flying object ," not a mine. Pompeo insists "
there is
no doubt " that Iran carried out the attacks -- the
exact same words that Vice President
Dick Cheney said in 2002 about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his intention to use them on the United
States, neither of which were true. (This is no doubt why several U.S. allies
reacted skeptically
to Trump's claims.)
What's more, the downside risk here is vastly larger than tax policy. A great big handout to the rich might be socially costly
in many ways, but it won't cause tens of thousands of violent deaths in a matter of days. War with Iran could easily do that --
or worse .
Who else might have done the attacks? Saudi Arabia springs to mind. False flag attacks on its own oil tankers sound outlandish,
but we're talking about a ruthless dictatorship run by a guy who had a Washington Post columnist
murdered and chopped into pieces because he didn't like
his takes. And the Saudis have already been conducting a years-long war in Yemen with catastrophic humanitarian outcomes in order
to stop an Iran-allied group from coming to power. It's by no means certain, but hardly outside the realm of possibility.
At a minimum, anybody with half a brain would want to be extremely certain about what actually happened before taking any
rash actions. It's clear that Bolton and company, by contrast, just want a pretext to ratchet up pressure on Iran even further.
But let's grant for the sake of argument that some Iranian forces actually did carry out some or all of these attacks. That raises
the immediate question of why. One very plausible reason is that all of Trump's provocations have strengthened the hand of Iran's
conservative hard-liners, who are basically the mirror image of Pompeo and Bolton. "It is sort of a toxic interaction between hard-liners
on both sides because for domestic political reasons they each want greater tension," as Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on
Foreign Relations told
the New York Times . This faction might have concluded that the U.S. is run by deranged fanatics, and the best way to
protect Iran is to demonstrate they could choke off oil shipping from the Persian Gulf if the U.S. attacks.
This in turn raises the question of the appropriate response if Iran is actually at fault here. It would be one thing if these
attacks came out of a clear blue sky. But America is very obviously the aggressor here. Iran was following its side of the
nuclear deal to the letter before Trump reneged, and
continued to do so as of February . So far the
European Union (which is still party to the deal) has been unwilling to sidestep U.S. sanctions, prompting Iran to
threaten to restart
uranium enrichment . So Iran is a medium-sized country with a faltering economy, hemmed in on all sides by U.S. aggression. Backing
off the threats and chest-thumping might easily strengthen the hand of Iranian moderates, and cause them to respond in kind.
On the other hand, sinking Iran's navy, as Stephens suggests in his column, would likely be a lot more dangerous than he thinks.
Americans have long been fed a lot of hysterical nationalist propaganda from neocons like him about the invincibility of the U.S.
military, and the ease with which any possible threat could be defeated. But while U.S. forces are indeed powerful, there is a very
real risk that Iran's navy -- which is full of fast-attack boats, mini-subs, and disguised civilian vessels
specifically
designed to take out large ships with swarm attacks -- could inflict significant damage. Just a few lucky hits could kill
thousands of sailors and cause tens of billions of dollars in damage. This is before you even get to the primary lesson of the Iraq
War which is that an initial military victory is completely useless and probably counterproductive without a plan for what comes
next.
Taken together, these factors strongly militate towards de-escalation and diplomacy even if Iran did carry out these attacks,
which again, is not at all proven. The current standoff is almost entirely our fault, and Iranian forces are far from defenseless.
America has a lot better things to do than indulge the deluded jingoist fantasies of a handful of armchair generals who want lots
of other people to die in battle.
Finally, attacking Iran would be illegal. It would violate
U.S. treaties , and thus the Constitution. The only justification
is the claim that the 2001 authorization to attack Al Qaeda
covers an attack on Iran .
This is utterly preposterous -- akin to arguing it covers attacking New Zealand to roll back their gun control efforts --
but may explain Pompeo's
equally preposterous attempt to blame Iran for a Taliban attack in Afghanistan.
Pompeo and Bolton are clearly hell-bent on war. But Trump himself seems
somewhat hesitant ,
sensing (probably accurately) that starting another war of aggression would tank his popularity even further. It's high time for
everyone from ordinary citizens up to Nancy Pelosi to demand this rush to war be stopped.
As President Donald Trump was in Florida kicking off his bid for a second term, his national
security team was in Washington hatching plans that make that prospect much less likely.
The architects of the failed George W. Bush foreign policy rightly derided by Trump as a
"big, fat mistake" on the campaign trail today exercise undue influence inside this White
House. The end result could be a war with Iran.
Just as their last turn at the wheel wrecked the Bush presidency and eventually left Barack
Obama in power alongside three-fifths Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the
Republican Party's wildest hawks could now ensure that Trump is a one-term president. The
president once understood this, telling Jeb Bush, "Your brother and his administration gave us
Barack Obama . Abraham Lincoln couldn't have won."
Trump defeated Jeb, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio, running on a foreign policy of "America
First" and repudiating a decade and a half of unwinnable wars. He then won in an upset over
Hillary Clinton, who voted to invade Iraq, pushed "kinetic military action" in Libya, and
otherwise hasn't seen a war she hasn't liked since Vietnam.
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Now Trump is on the precipice of ceding the war issue to his political opponents, as the
border crisis metastasizes and the suburbs turn blue. Joe Biden would be the third Democratic
presidential nominee to have voted for the Iraq war -- the exception, Obama, twice won the
White House -- just as Chuck Schumer is the third straight Senate Democratic leader to have
done so.
If Trump follows Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Bush retread national security
advisor John Bolton into a preventive war with Iran, he will make Biden and Schumer look like
Tulsi Gabbard -- and perhaps pave the way for a different Democratic nominee against whom the
anti-Hillary playbook of 2016 will prove less useful.
The president began the year promising to end the war in Syria, which Congress never
authorized in the first place, and wind down the war in Afghanistan. Alongside low
unemployment, the job growth that followed deregulation and tax cuts, and remaking the Supreme
Court in Antonin Scalia's image, keeping ISIS at bay without launching a new war in the Middle
East -- though he has surely escalated some ongoing conflicts -- stands among his top
accomplishments.
Perhaps that is the soft bigotry of low expectations, to use a Bush-era phrase, but in an
era of forever war, it counts for something. That is, it will count for something until the
Trump team invokes the congressional authorization of force used for the Afghan war to start a
new one in Iran, a move too brazenly unconstitutional for even the Bush-Cheney contingent of
old.
The cakewalk crowd has reemerged to assure us that pinprick strikes against Iranian nuclear
facilities are possible and that the regime in Tehran will prove a paper tiger. But everywhere
their promises have turned to ash. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or
cheering throngs greeting America's finest as liberators. Groups ideologically similar to the
Islamists who attacked us on 9/11 emerged from Iraq and Libya as more powerful, not less.
Iran has long been the unprincipled exception to Trump's opposition to Middle Eastern
quagmires. His desire to undo the Obama presidency predisposed him to unraveling the nuclear
deal and led him to folly in Yemen. Now it might prompt him to redo the foreign policy mistakes
that toppled the Bush dynasty, paving the way for a socialist to become the next
commander-in-chief.
Still, there remains a powerful voice inside the White House who could halt this march to
war. "The president, who campaigned against getting the U.S. bogged down in unnecessary foreign
wars, is considered the primary internal obstacle to a counterattack," Politicoreports .
Not even Trump's opinion should matter most. The Constitution vests the power to declare war
in Congress. To justify a new war based on an outdated resolution passed nearly 20 years ago to
authorize retaliation against the 9/11 attackers would be an unconscionable power grab by the
executive branch that lawmakers should not countenance. Yet time and again, Congress has
shirked its constitutional duties.
The Democrats in the House have an opportunity to put their money where
their mouths are . But maybe they won't. An Iraq-like war in Iran would go a long way
toward accomplishing their main goal: making Donald Trump a one-term president.
"... There are two possibilities. Trump wants a war with Iran and what we see is a good cop, bad cop strategy in which Trump plays the good guy for his voters until some 'grave incident' happens that lets him says that he has no choice but to 'hit back' at Iran. The other scenario is that Trump is a fool and that the war hawks use him as their tool to implement their preferred policies. ..."
"... Former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke says that the second scenario is the real one : ..."
"... Crooke describes how Bolton, and Netanyahoo behind him, outmaneuver the U.S. intelligence services over Iran. They stovepipe "intelligence" to the president and the media just like the crew of then Vice President Dick Cheney did in the run up to the war on Iraq: ..."
"... Bolton chairs at the NSC, the regular and frequent strategic dialogue meetings with Israel – intended to develop a joint action plan, versus Iran. What this means is that the Israeli intelligence assessments are being stovepiped directly to Bolton (and therefore to Trump), without passing by the US intelligence services for assessment or comment on the credibility of the intelligence presented (shades of Cheney confronting the analysts down at Langley). ..."
"... Bolton and Pompeo are representative of Trump's rabid evangelical base and Israel. The kabuki friction towards the shared goals is just that. To the degree that we are hearing shrillness from these folk reflects the increasing failure of their tactics to maintain control of the global narrative. ..."
"... I'm definitely of the good cop/bad cop belief. It fits with the entirety of his campaign and presidency: say one thing, do another, and blame somebody else. Trump wanted Bolton for NSA since the campaign. Both Bolton and Trump have had a position of confrontation with Iran for a long time ..."
"... Sheldon Adelson is Trumps biggest doner "Adelson's promotion of Bolton dates back at least to the days immediately after Trump's November 2016 election. According to The New York Times, Adelson strongly supported Bolton for the position of deputy secretary of state as Trump was putting together his cabinet" https://lobelog.com/trumps-choice-of-bolton-satisfies-his-biggest-donor/ So Trump could find it difficult to sack Bolton. ..."
"... It just seems like Iraq deja vu: GWB was the ignorant, dumb public face masking Lukidniks controlling US policy then, DJT the face masking the same now. ..."
"... US bombs falling on Iran seems awfully close to Moscow in my view. I cannot help wondering if one of Putin's cards is his own red line: not allowing Likudniks to subjugate US military power for their "interests" wrt Iran. ..."
"... It's about 1500 miles from Tehran to Moscow. That's about equal to the distance between Kansas City and San Francisco. ..."
"... As B (and many other media ) pointed out: the crew of the Japanese tanker all said the ship was hit by an air borne projectile. This was not a mine. Seems obvious if US was interested in the truth, they would recover and identify the projectile. ..."
"... IMO President's are just members of the Deep State team. Presidents lead the team that's "on the field" - like a quarterback in American football. But the Deep State 'coach' calls the plays. And the 'coach' is, in turn, ultimately responsible to the owners (capitalists) ..."
"... Sadly, I find that I disagree with both of b's latest theories: the "Iranian stealth attack" theory and the "President Bolton" theory. IMO these are propaganda narratives. ..."
"... "As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron". ..."
"... Now look at the U.S., the tanker was sitting their in broad daylight for about 10hrs and we couldn't even get ONE decent picture of an unexploded bomb sitting on the side of hull. And when the IRGC finally did show up, even our high resolution pictures were a joke and we are the SIGINT champions with hi-tech drones. Also, this means that the IRGC was able to slip into a port on the other side of the Persian Gulf and attack mines to 4 tankers undetected. ..."
"... By minimizing the Oman Gulf incidents, maybe it is way for the White House under Bolton's control to show that it is not impressed nor feeling threatened. it is also encouraging the perpetrators of the attacks to do more provocations and ideally to kill an American... ..."
"... That Iranian seaman who is alleged to have pulled off a possibly unstable, unexploded mine wearing nothing but a rubber life jacket thus endangering his life and all his crew mates and survivors in the small boat is the action of a lunatic. Or maybe it never happened. ..."
"... There's been a shift in the dialogue, to some degree, to a discussion of the overall US role in the Gulf area. ..."
"... A broadening of the security mission in the Gulf area would be a positive step. Imagine the navies of China, India and Japan taking a role! The price would be a removal of Iran sanctions, because these countries want Iran oil! . . .I can dream. ..."
Jeff Bezos' blog, the Washington Post ,
has some bits on the discussion and infighting in the Trump administration about the march
towards war on Iran. The piece opens with news of a new redline the Trump administration set
out:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has privately delivered warnings intended for Iranian leaders
that any attack by Tehran or its proxies resulting in the death of even one American service
member will generate a military counterattack, U.S. officials said.
...
While such attacks were common during the Iraq War, Pompeo told Iraqi leaders in a message he
knew would be relayed to Tehran that a single American fatality would prompt the United
States to hit back.
That warning was sent in May when Pompeo visited Baghdad. The issue may soon become
critical. Throughout the last days there were rocket attacks in Iraq against targets where U.S.
personnel is present. The AFP correspondent in Baghdad lists six of them:
Maya Gebeily - @GebeilyM - 10:20 UTC - 19 Jun 2019
Timeline of attacks on US interests in #Iraq
Fri: Mortars hit Balad base, where US troops based
Sun: Projectiles hit #Baghdad mil airport
Mon: Rockets on Taji, where coalition forces based
Tues: Mortars on #Mosul ops HQ
Wed: Rockets on housing/ops center used by IOCs near #Basra
#IRAQ: @AFP learns there were at least *two* attacks near US oil interests in #Basra in
last 24 hours - ExxonMobil + Baker Hughes, a GE Company Their senior staff are being
evacuated.
At least some of these attacks came from areas where Islamic State underground groups are
still active. The weapons used were improvised and
imprecise.
That shows how stupid the red line is that Pompeo set out. He would attack Iran if an errant
ISIS rocket by chance kills some U.S. soldier? That is nuts.
Back to the WaPo piece:
Speaking during a visit to U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa on Tuesday, Pompeo said
Trump "does not want war" but stressed the United States would act if assaulted. "We are
there to deter aggression," he said.
The U.S. violated the nuclear agreement and is waging an economic war on Iran. That was the
aggression that started the conflict. Anything that follows from that was caused by the Trump
administration.
Colonel Pat Lang
thinks that Pompeo was in Tampa to bring the military in line with his aggressive
policies:
Ole First in his Class is down in Tampaland today jawboning the leaders of CENTCOM (Mideast),
and SOCOM (badass commandos worldwide). Why is he there? The Secretary of State has no
constitutional or legal role in dealing with the armed forces. That being the case one can
only think that there is push-back from senior commanders over the prospect of war with Iran
and that Trump has been persuaded to let him do this unprecedented visit to wheedle or
threaten his way into their acquiescence.
WaPo again:
The sudden departure Tuesday of Patrick Shanahan, who has served as acting defense secretary
since January, could further sideline the Pentagon, which has campaigned to reduce the
potential for hostilities. Shanahan's withdrawal followed revelations of a complicated
domestic dispute.
The
'complicated domestic dispute ' is not so complicate at all and the case is undisputed. In
a several years long process Shanahan's ex-wife went crazy and physically attacked him and
their kids. Finally one of the kids hit back at her with a baseball bat. In court Shanahan
argued for a mild punishment for the kid. All the kids, mostly grown up now, are with him and
do not want to see their mother. All that was documented by the police and by courts. Shanahan
is not guilty of anything in that case. It was not a reason to resign.
Pat Lang
believes that the real reason was Pompeo's trip to Tampa:
Shanahan withdrew his name from confirmation process today. IMO he did it because DJT let
Pomp circumvent his authority.
The Pentagon was the last hold out against the aggressive anti-Iran policy says WaPo
:
Concerns about an escalation are particularly pointed at the Pentagon, where the absence of a
confirmed secretary has fueled worries that hawks in the White House and State Department
could push the military beyond its specific mission of destroying the remnants of the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria, raising the potential for conflict with Iran.
It has been reported several times and by different outlets that Trump is somewhat isolated
from anti-war opinions in his administration. All he sees and hears is Fox News , Bibi
Netanyahoo and John Bolton. The WaPo piece again confirms that:
Administration officials interviewed by The Washington Post said that national security
adviser John Bolton has dominated Iran policy, keeping a tight rein on information that gets
to the president and sharply reducing meetings in which top officials gather in the White
House's Situation Room to discuss the policy.
...
The intensification of [the "maximum pressure"] campaign has triggered internal debates over
how best to execute the president's orders. At the State Department this spring, an argument
among officials over how hard to squeeze Iran with sanctions ended with those favoring the
toughest possible approach prevailing. In particular, hard-liners at the White House
squelched waivers that would have allowed Iran to keep selling oil after a May 1 deadline.
White House aides also ended waivers that allowed Iran to swap its enriched uranium for
natural uranium, an integral part of the nuclear deal.
...
While State Department officials sought to achieve a "sweet spot" that would weaken Iran
through sanctions but not push so hard that Iran would withdraw from the nuclear deal, others
have argued that Trump's goal is to destroy the accord at any cost and pursue a more
expansive policy that seeks to cripple Iran's proxy forces throughout the region.
Pentagon and State Department officials have complained, however, about the difficulty of
getting an adequate hearing for these debates under Bolton. As a result, arguments about
policy frequently are not aired and do not reach the president. The process is "very
exclusionary, and Bolton has very sharp elbows," the senior administration official said.
...
At the Pentagon, officials have quietly voiced concerns for months that the current
trajectory might make military conflict a self-fulfilling prophecy.
...
One person familiar with the recent discussions said that Pentagon officials, including
Shanahan, have been "the ones putting the brakes" on the State Department and the White
House. "DOD is not beating the drums of war," the person said.
One can quibble with that. It is the regional military commander who always asks for more
troops. More ships and more troops increase the chance for "accidents" and make a war more
likely. That is why John Bolton uses each and every small incident to send more troops to the
Middle East:
"Does the president want to send more troops? No. Will he be convinced to do it? Yes," the
senior administration official said.
Trump, in contrast to some of his advisers, has seemed to downplay the significance of
Iran's actions. In an interview published Tuesday by Time magazine, he said the recent oil
tanker attacks were "very minor."
Trump is the president. He hired those people and is responsible for what they do. But does
he know what they do?
There are two possibilities. Trump wants a war with Iran and what we see is a good cop, bad cop strategy in which Trump
plays the good guy for his voters until some 'grave incident' happens that lets him says that
he has no choice but to 'hit back' at Iran. The other scenario is that Trump is a fool and that
the war hawks use him as their tool to implement their preferred policies.
Former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke says that the second scenario is
the real one :
The consensus on 'no conflict' unfortunately, may turn out to have been overly sanguine. This
is not because Trump consciously desires war, but because the hawks surrounding him,
particularly Bolton, are painting him into a corner – from which he must either back
down, or double down, if Iran does not first capitulate.
And here is the point: the main Trump misconception may be that he does believe that Iran
wants, and ultimately, 'will seek a deal'.
Crooke describes how Bolton, and Netanyahoo behind him, outmaneuver the U.S. intelligence
services over Iran. They stovepipe "intelligence" to the president and the media just like the
crew of then Vice President Dick Cheney did in the run up to the war on Iraq:
Bolton chairs at the NSC, the regular and frequent strategic dialogue meetings with Israel
– intended to develop a joint action plan, versus Iran. What this means is that the
Israeli intelligence assessments are being stovepiped directly to Bolton (and therefore to
Trump), without passing by the US intelligence services for assessment or comment on the
credibility of the intelligence presented (shades of Cheney confronting the analysts down at
Langley). And Bolton too, will represent Trump at the 'security summit' to be held later this
month in Jerusalem with Russia and Israel. Yes, Bolton truly has all the reins in his hands:
He is 'Mr Iran'.
'Mr Anti-Iran' is a more precise moniker. Or one may just call him President Bolton.
Posted by b on June 19, 2019 at 02:20 PM | Permalink
The US is now saying that they will only protect ships in the gulf if the usual NATO suspects
come along for the ride. If they do, then when the US attacks Iran they are committed for the
regional war that follows. Bolton has done a great job of putting the band back together
again.
Its all on Trump. No excuses. When the bodybags start to flow and the gas prices go to 8 or 9
dollars a gallon he will be toast. He'll never be able to show his face in public again
without a small army around him. What a legacy.
The similarities, to me, are a poor pantomime of Nixon and Kissinger. Milhaus was always the
"madman" with his finger on the nuclear trigger which made the Nazi employment campaigner,
Kissinger, seem like one to reason with if you didn't want nuclear annihilation.
There is an interesting book, "The Fire And The Fury", that has some insight into the
administration. Trump never thought he would win and didn't intend to. He wanted to be
"Crooked Hillary's" victim. Also, the book makes a great case for Israeli collusion, not
Russia.
That said, the book makes a large showing of DJT's ignorance and indifference. Like many
ignorant presidential hopefuls, I think DJT thought he could make a difference but we all
know he's just a shill.
My favorite part of the book stated that DJT ate at Mickey D's because he's afraid of
being poisoned, not because of a great love of fast food.
The present goobermint can run Donald up and down the flag pole and blame everything in
the world on him and no one will know the difference.
The war on Iran will be different to other US/Western wars.
Previously, it has only become apparent after the war has been going for some time (they
never really end) that the war was a crime.
This time the whole of the US and the West knows full well that a war crime is being
perpetrated. This will mean a definite end of the illusions that the West has held about it's
self since WWII (or WWI). Can Empires and Civilisations continue if they no longer believe
the stories they tell themselves?
Trump has not been fooled or misled, neither have the American people, neither the
UK/European governments or peoples. We are destroying ourselves with this act.
Bolton has more brain cells than the entirety of the European peoples.
I bet soon we'll learn Shanahan was pushed out by the usual Bolton tactic of threats and
extortion -- both on the personal and familial level.
Shanahan should blow the whistle -- soon!
Thanks b. Trump is likely both a fool and a barking mad President with a narcissistic
personality. A dangerous mix open to malicious behaviour and vulnerable to manipulation. I
have no doubt that he revels in the gravitas of it all, the Napoleonic pomp and ceremony etc.
That the planet has to suffer this and Netanyahu and Pence Pentecostal ignorance is
appalling.
There wont be any summit meeting between Iran and Trump, the insult would be intolerable
and the outcome of no value to Iran. They know very well what the game is.
Bolton is just the killer for the job right where he is but will Trump find an equally
malign player for his army? I am sure there is no shortage of 'suitable' candidates.
One bright side for the planet could well be a calamitous rise in oil price and a chaotic
spin of global economic circumstances resulting in a drop in greenhouse gas emissions. On the
dark side small pockets of survival.
@uncle tungsten (8) One bright side for the planet could well be a calamitous rise in oil price and a chaotic
spin of global economic circumstances resulting in a drop in greenhouse gas emissions. On the
dark side small pockets of survival.
I am one of the supporters of the good cop/bad cop scenario.
While the existential question that has been on the table for some time is who owns the
world of finance, here we are again following the spinning of the Iran plate by late
empire.
Bolton and Pompeo are representative of Trump's rabid evangelical base and Israel. The
kabuki friction towards the shared goals is just that. To the degree that we are hearing
shrillness from these folk reflects the increasing failure of their tactics to maintain
control of the global narrative.
Something stupid is coming and it will be sad.....very sad if is our extinction instead of
difficult evolution.
thanks b... pompeo has the same agenda as israel with regard to attacks on the golan heights
or americans - same messed up logic.. nothing like having your (usa-ksa-israel-uae) proxy
army involved too.."these attacks came from areas where Islamic State underground groups are
still active." the 500 lb gorilla is ''there to deter aggression''.. right!
as for trump.. the guy is a self serving twit and fool... perfect person to represent the
usa at this point which is why so many hate him and like him, depending on where one lives..
whatever bolton does - it is on trump and the falling usa empire as i see it.. it can't fall
soon enough..
I'm definitely of the good cop/bad cop belief. It fits with the entirety of his campaign and
presidency: say one thing, do another, and blame somebody else. Trump wanted Bolton for NSA
since the campaign. Both Bolton and Trump have had a position of confrontation with Iran for
a long time. The fact that people still buy into the lies of *any* politician is a sad state
of affairs. It sure does make the job of lying far easier.
Trump's tactical nukes mounted on Trident missiles will be ready in October - end of
September according to the earlier news articles. I guess team Trump will be desperately
trying to provoke a reaction from Iran so Trump can reluctantly use his nukes. (NPR
specifically names Iran as a country that these may be used against).
Good cop bad cop is Trump's game at the moment. He needs to be judged by the people he
appoints and keeps on.
DG @1
Don't feel too sorry for the American fatality. It will probably be a US soldier who
volunteered to go overseas and kill for oil.
Might be a female soldier. That would make for better press.
Remember Nedā Āghā-Soltān? She was a beautiful Iranian woman, only 26
years old, shot in the head by a sniper in the 2009 Color (Green) Revolution attempt in Iran,
a few blocks from the actual protests.
For some odd reason, a photographer was there to take pictures, and within a couple of hours,
it was spread all over the world's media. We now call that "going viral". It takes a Mighty
Wurlitzer to make a viral spread, I've noticed.
Tucker Carlson has interviewed Tulsi Gabbard several times and has generally been anti-war
on many of his programs, and was certainly very anti-Russiagate. So, watching Fox News
isn't as horrible as say CNN, NBC, MSNBC to name the three worst.
Yes, as I wrote on the last thread, Trump's boxed into several corners, Iran not being the
only one. Really can't wait for the moment Pompeo clutches at his chest and crumples to the
ground a la Morsi. Pompeo's clearly forgotten what Putin told him. Speaking of Putin,
tomorrow he'll conduct the 17th edition of his Direct Line conversation with Russia's people
and press. Information in Russian here :
"The programme will be broadcast live by Channel One, Rossiya 1, Rossiya 24, NTV, Public
Television of Russia (OTR) and Mir TV, and by radio stations Mayak, Vesti FM and Radio
Rossii."
Unfortunately, the start time isn't provided. Questions in Russian can be submitted at the
above link.
Would never have guessed there existed a Foundation for European Progressive Studies, but
it does and its hosting a forum this
Friday:
"On Friday #21June, #IAIEvent with @FEPS_Europe in #Brussels to mark the completion of our
joint one-year research on #Europe-#Iran relations after the US withdrawal from the
#JCPOA.
"With the participation of Seyed Sajjadpour, Deputy FM of Iran."
As far as the damage done to the two tankers, if an actual limpet mine of the sort Iran
employs were used, the damage would be far more extensive than what was sustained. IMO,
continuing attacks by the sort of kamikaze drones employed would be impossible to stop; and
since the remains of the drone sink into the sea, virtually impossible to collect any
evidence that might link Iran to the attack.
The Outlaw US Empire has no cards to play other than bluff and bluster.
"That shows how stupid the red line is that Pompeo set out." Even b, one of the commenters I
respect most, falls for the canard "Yanks R stoopid LOL". If you feverishly want an
Iran war against the wishes of the majority of the planet, this is how it's done. Israel also
drops some dud mortar shells into an empty patch on the Golan (itself or by proxy) any time
it wants a mini casus belli in the Syria dossier.
I feel the Iranians have been pretty complicit propping up this image of Americans and
Israelis as untouchable demigods, who only kill and can never be killed even once. The US
should have gotten a steady stream of heroes coming home in boxes and wheelchairs the moment
they crossed the Syrian border. Then the war fevers would've cooled considerably by now;
that's how the Taliban made the orcs feel ... unwelcome in their slice of heaven. B opined at
the time "This occupation is unsustainable", but nobody has properly contested it apart from
a handful of ISIS holdouts. Eyes have been taken off balls it seems.
And again, no. That reminds of the old 'if the Führer knew'. No, Tronald is not - at
least not in this sense - a fool. He has promoted these people now said to trick him into
their respective position. Tronald is - and was - well informed about Boltons and Pompeo's
views.
No, it's the first possibility that applies. Any moment now Act 3 is staged, an 'Iranian
attack' on u.s. interests - and then Tronald will open Pandora's box - and suffer we will.
There were stories recently that Trump was about to sack Bolton. Whatever the truth of that,
there's a fundamental problem that Trump doesn't want to spend his nights in the war room. He
spends his time watching Fox News, tweeting, and his weekends at Mar-a Lago. A serious war is
beyond him, and I think he'll say no, beyond a one night big bang.
May be the intention was never to sink the tanker - but just to draw attention with some
heavy smoke. The limpet mines may exists in various size, so they may have intentionally used
a small one for this. What were doing the IRGC along the tanker if not removing something
from the hull. How do they even know there was something there of interest.
The US has no leadership,,, just a bunch of mafioso hoods vying to be at the head of the
Globalists table. The Europeons / West are little better going along to get a piece of the
action... picture a Viking feast a few thousand years ago. Difference is we are the food
they're devouring.
I am so happy 'b' explained the domestic violence attributed to Mr.Shanahan. I bit just
like MSM wanted thinking he somehow abused his family. I imagine it was because it would have
looked bad for the kind little woman.
Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration. Look at what we in the US
have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the right. I suppose we deserve
this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.
Jeremy Hunt said that no other state or non state actor could possibly be responsible for the
tanker explosions. That is the most ignorant statement any potential Prime Minister could
make. There are so many potential culprits, any one of whom would find it more than tempting
to take Pompeo at his word and lob a bomb at a US base. The same scenario applied to Syria,
the US positively encouraged a gas attack by the head choppers by declaring such an attack
would mean US intervention. Sheldon Adelson is Trumps biggest doner "Adelson's promotion of
Bolton dates back at least to the days immediately after Trump's November 2016 election.
According to The New York Times, Adelson strongly supported Bolton for the position of deputy
secretary of state as Trump was putting together his cabinet" https://lobelog.com/trumps-choice-of-bolton-satisfies-his-biggest-donor/
So Trump could find it difficult to sack Bolton.
If this is mostly correct then the US is heading into a huge strategic catastrophe with epic
blow back. That many millions in the MENA will suffer is as usual of no consequence to
Americans but this time America will suffer a rapid irreversible decline and will deserve it.
b: Thanks for posting Lang's take on Shanahan being "outed" by Pompeo. Kind'a makes sense,
given bigger picture you paint of Israeli "interests" being "stovepiped" through Bolton to
DJT. Nothing I heard/read last night or this morning touched on this, it was all different
takes on poor/no Shanahan vetting.
The irony of Shanahan being "dumped" for what the record seems to support: he did nothing
wrong, maybe even showed noteworthy restraint vs. trump f***ing porn stars, stiffing
sub-contractors for years (etc. etc.) is mind numbing.
...
Madison James @ Jun 19, 2019 2:47:33 PM
Also, the book makes a great case for Israeli collusion, not Russia.
More like CEDING Iran policy authority to hard line Likud hawks, as B describes in this
post:
Bolton chairs at the NSC, the regular and frequent strategic dialogue meetings with Israel
– intended to develop a joint action plan, versus Iran. What this means is that the
Israeli intelligence assessments are being stovepiped directly to Bolton (and therefore to
Trump), without passing by the US intelligence services for assessment or comment on the
credibility of the intelligence presented ( shades of Cheney confronting the analysts
down at Langley ).
(my emphasis)
It just seems like Iraq deja vu: GWB was the ignorant, dumb public face masking Lukidniks
controlling US policy then, DJT the face masking the same now.
WRT war fears w/Iran: one little factoid rarely mentioned early on in Iraq
"liberation"(did B write about this?): the PNAC crowd was openly advocating for a
simultaneous military action towards Iran. Putin moved several battleships and destroyers
right off the Iranian coast in a clear signal he would defend Iran. And that was the end of
that.
Putin always holds his cards very close to his vest, but when he acts he does so
decisively and with precision (aka his Syria military maneuvers). US bombs falling on Iran
seems awfully close to Moscow in my view. I cannot help wondering if one of Putin's cards is
his own red line: not allowing Likudniks to subjugate US military power for their "interests"
wrt Iran.
psycho @ 10 opined;"I am one of the supporters of the good cop/bad cop scenario."
Add me, to the believers column.
ADKC @ 5 said;"Trump has not been fooled or misled, neither have the American people,
neither the UK/European governments or peoples. We are destroying ourselves with this
act."
james @ 11 said;" it is on trump and the falling usa empire as i see it.. it can't fall
soon enough.."
Yes, absolutely, to both above statements..
And I'll add another major player, to the joke, the U$A has become, the corporate MSM for
it's failure to honestly inform the public of reality..
...the IRGC along the tanker...
Could s/o kindly point-out a confirmation from Iran that [1] subject boat was operated/manned
by the IRGC? I'll check back for your input; thanks in advance.
"This is a very balanced approach to the #US-#Iran crisis in the Gulf from an #EU point of
view."
It links to a short CNN produced video. The few comments show the intensely high level of
ignorance of my fellow Americans that are educational all by themselves.
It's about 1500 miles from Tehran to Moscow. That's about equal to the distance between
Kansas City and San Francisco.
It is not in Russia's interest to have Iran attacked. Iran is a piece that offers a twofer
to the Anglo Zio empire. It follows the edicts of the Yinon Plan and it antagonizes
Russia.
If a war with Iran is orchestrated I will be very disappointed if Tel-Aviv is not destroyed.
At some point in time Israel must pay for its' crimes.
I read today that an Egyptian news agency blamed Israel for the recent attacks on the 2
tankers. I find this heartening. However, I fear Israel is not beyond sinking an US naval
vessel. re: USS LIBERTY. and albeit with Bolton's foreknowledge.
Shanahan was forced out. His family troubles pre-date today.
May be the intention was never to sink the tanker - but just to draw attention with some
heavy smoke. The limpet mines may exists in various size, so they may have intentionaly
used a small one for this.
As B (and many other
media ) pointed out: the crew of the Japanese tanker all said the ship was hit by an
air borne projectile. This was not a mine. Seems obvious if US was interested in the
truth, they would recover and identify the projectile.
Just for shits and giggles, a brief reminder of some of US "evidence" and false flags (all
lies) in service of these "endeavors" previously:
- reading the several excellent books and released CIA docs of the CIA engineered
Mosaddegh coup, among other things was CIA bombs set off in Mosques (this was before the
Ayatollahs were political), then flooding media with "accesssments" Mosaddegh was
responsable. Kermit Roosevelt literally boasted about this.
- Collin Powell's "clear and convincing" evidence of Sadam's mobile missile lauchers (aka
mobile weather balloons). And the GWB admin's attempts to literally destroy Hans Blix'
reputation, and as it turned out Blix was right about everything.
- Fake Satellite photos of Sadam's troops on Saudi border.
- "Incubator baby" lies to US Senate, swaying Desert Storm I approval by 1 vote (many
senators said that fabrication was the difference in their vote). And this after Sadam's
incursion into Kuwait was after 18 months of US vetoing Iraq UN resolutions seeking to
condemn Kuwait's angle drilling into Iraq's largest southern oil fields.
That's just a few from memory. At what point do US lawmakers finally put all this together
(especially given Bolton's association with those who drove GWB's Iraq invasion) and refuse
to even consider the non persuasive evidence (not to mention contradictory... aka crew says
air borne attack), remind their colleagues and America of the cost of these lies just in last
20 years, and DEMAND proof that can be verified with THEIR OWN EYES.
Judging from the headline and the quoting approvingly from "Former MI6 agent Alastair
Crooke", I'd say b believe in the "President Bolton" theory.
Like other commenters, I believe in the bad cop/good cop theory. In fact I wrote of this
only yesterday (
here and
here , and
here ):
The media promote Doublethink ...
... the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct,
often in distinct social contexts. Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy
and neutrality... Doublethink is notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance -- thus
the person is completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction.
... such that Trump is both peace-loving nationalist and empire-loving
antagonist. Except that the latter is expressed as a positive: "staunch ally", "tough
negotiator", "protector", etc instead of a negative. Some people fall for it (Kool-Aid
drinkers) and MSM ignores those that talk about the meta issues of MSM complicity.
And it's not just Trump. Whenever a President does things that might cause cognitive
dissonance, apologists and the feckless press explain it away as a positive or blame
subordinates for "sabotaging" the hero President .
= = = =
IMO President's are just members of the Deep State team. Presidents lead the team that's
"on the field" - like a quarterback in American football. But the Deep State 'coach' calls
the plays. And the 'coach' is, in turn, ultimately responsible to the owners
(capitalists)
= = = =
I sense that there's now an effort to essentially 'shout down' or otherwise sideline
those that argue that the attacks are more likely to be a false flag by an anti-Iranian
organization (probably connected to Mossad or CIA) and question the efficacy of a
Iranian strategy stealth attacks.
karlof1 and Peter AU 1 described the likely subterfuge of the US claim that Iran
attached a "limpet mine". But I haven't seen much desire to discuss or spread their theory.
Reporting by Israeli media (picked up worldwide) about USA plans to bomb Iran (really
just rumors) have worked their magic and turned the page on the question of who attacked
the ships. How convenient!
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
Sadly, I find that I disagree with both of b's latest theories: the "Iranian stealth
attack" theory and the "President Bolton" theory. IMO these are propaganda narratives.
there is some confusion amongst commenters here; as to what the Iranian boat was doing next
to the tanker? The first thing one should ask is; what is the source of the video? and when
was it taken? Next, the Iranians have been credited with rescuing the crew from at least 1
tanker, if not both. Which explains the large # of persons on a boat that usually operates
with a crew of 5.
Except the 2007 "Iranian proxy" attacks on US forces illegally occupying Iraq were never
proven.
Meaning the fable of Iranians being behind attacks in Iraq is hardly new. The infamous Michael Gordon--the lead "reporter" on the "Judith Miller" fall 2002 Iraqi
WMDs "reporting" in the NY Times--claimed that such "attacks" were proven in the pages of the
NYT in March 2007. (He wasn't fired–only leaving the NYT after 30 years in 2017.)
Except his "reporting" made bogus claims like the Iraqis weren't able to follow armor
penetrating shell designs that had been worked out in the 1920s.
In early 2007, there was a push by Cheney to strike Iran, the rumor is that W said
"no". So Pompeo can't even lie as well as Cheney, in that the NY Times' main Pentagon reporter
reported the 2007 events as fact at the time. (A secondary reporter, James Glanz also in Iraq in 2007, did manage to point out that the
"Iranian" shells were marked in English and the US commanders provided nothing more than
unsupported assertions regards the shells' origins. Glanz only writes for the NY Times about
once every 6 months now.)
Houthis attack Jizan--on Red Sea just North of Yemen -- power plant with cruise missile causing
large fire to erupt. Yemeni Armed Forces
Spokesman :
"There are big surprises coming soon, God willing, with higher sensitive impact on the
Saudi regime, if its aggression continues."
Expect renewed attacks on oil infrastructure.
Not so long ago, it appeared the Saudi/UAE/Merc coalition had the initiative and was
winning. That no longer appears to be the case with the invasion of Saudi territory by ground
forces accompanied by missile and drone assaults that have reached as far as Riyadh. Earlier
today,
Southfront posted videos of two successful Houthi assaults that destroyed 11 armored
vehicles and additional technicals--attacks Saudi appears incapable of stopping.
"IMO President's are just members of the Deep State team. Presidents lead the team that's
"on the field" - like a quarterback in American football. But the Deep State 'coach' calls
the plays. And the 'coach' is, in turn, ultimately responsible to the owners
(capitalists)"
IMO, the perfect analogy. Maybe the U$A posters will "get it."
Bolton is Trump's Colonel House. House was influential in plucking Woodrow Wilson out of
academia and getting him elected President in 1912 and then he moved into the White House
with Wilson. He became in Wilson's words his "alter ego." House was right next to Wilson when
he signed the Federal Reserve Act, something Wilson later said he bitterly regretted doing.
House was a most shadowy figure – he wasn't even a real colonel -, having performed
similar roles with various governors of Texas as if in preparation for his moment on the big
stage – and a long moment it was with an allegedly decisive role in Versailles in 1919.
I saw warning signals back on the campaign trail when Trump was asked who he admired in
politics and he replied after a pause John Bolton. Then I thought of Obama and Rahm Emanuel,
his chief of staff. It struck me that maybe all of us are susceptible to somebody who can get
a hold on us, who can grasp our insecurities and ingratiate themselves into our thinking
processes. The elites work on this. Jack Kennedy had his brother as his sort of alter-ego so
there was no opportunity there – which is maybe why he got shot.
Trump's father became so frustrated with Donald's bullying and reckless behavior that he
packed him off to military academy to learn some manners and self-control. Legend has it that
Trump thrived in that environment and graduated in 1964. He also studied economics and has a
Law degree. One imagines that a military academy graduate must have learned something about
governance, leadership, pecking orders, power plays and the US Constitution.
Anyone who assumes DJT is stupid or naive probably needs to do some homework...
Hoarsewhisperer "Anyone who assumes DJT is stupid or naiive probably needs to do some
homework". I think prospective Private Donald 'bone spurs' Trump would have made a good
General, [too late now, he is too old] maybe one of the greatest Generals in history. If only
he had signed up. /S
Seems Rex Tillerson was right about Trump and agrees with this HL Mencken quote.
"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the
inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will
reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright
moron".
The Middle East a smoking ruin. Floods of Arab refugees pouring into Europe. Russia and China
sitting back and waiting to pick up the pieces. Do those people actually think beyond the
next step? I wouldn't want to be a European Jew for the next few decades. You can be burnt
from the bottom up, as easily as from the top down. Lets just go kick the hornets nest, cause
we are tough guys. Where. Are. The. Brain. Cells?
Promotion of War Crimes: Wheat as a Weapon :
"A fellow at a think tank bankrolled by the US gov, NATO, and arms industry insists that
'wheat is a weapon' that can 'be used to apply pressure on the Assad regime.' "The impact this would have on civilians was not mentioned, of course."
Now we know what nation's responsible for the recent firing of wheat and other
agricultural fields in Syria--The Outlaw US Empire of course: Never met a War Crime it didn't
want to employ itself as current and historic evidence proves. Such people ought to be
lobotomized.
Iran did it, they are competent, we can't find our rear end
CENTCOM gave a scenario that finally made sense, they said that an IRGC boat approached
the two tankers at night and attacked the 'mines'. This would explain why it was above the
waterline and it would take great skill to do this with no injury and without being
detected.
Now look at the U.S., the tanker was sitting their in broad daylight for about 10hrs and
we couldn't even get ONE decent picture of an unexploded bomb sitting on the side of hull.
And when the IRGC finally did show up, even our high resolution pictures were a joke and we
are the SIGINT champions with hi-tech drones. Also, this means that the IRGC was able to slip
into a port on the other side of the Persian Gulf and attack mines to 4 tankers
undetected.
Prediction: if we do get into a fight with the Iranians we are in for a very rude
awakening. All of this talk about their rusted out military is total BS. If ONLY that fool
Tom Cotton would be the one to pay the price instead of some 20 yr old kid.
Perhaps the admin senses that the end is approaching and are trying to wreak maximum havoc
and damage while they are able. Like Bolton will serve in next admin.
By minimizing the Oman Gulf incidents, maybe it is way for the White House under Bolton's
control to show that it is not impressed nor feeling threatened.
it is also encouraging the perpetrators of the attacks to do more provocations and ideally to
kill an American...
It is an open invitations to whoever wants to harm Iran to come out more brutally.
". . . [Trump] studied economics and has a Law degree."
He has a BA in economics and was given an honorary law degree from Liberty so-called
"University," a diploma mill dedicated to churning out brain-dead, right-wing religious
fanatics.
Yes, it does matter. Millions of American are ready to send their loved ones to die for
"freedom and democracy" that propaganda claims USA champions. Trump as "useful idiot" just
means that they elected the wrong guy. Trump as complicit in the dog and pony show means
there is no democracy.
Smart people have already described how the system is rigged so that we have a "managed
democracy" that mostly works for the "those that matter". Research from Princeton economists
have described America as a plutocracy with an "inverted totalitarian" form of government. I
have written many times at MoA of a adjunct to that theory: the faux populist
leadership model. Obama and Trump are the poster boys for this, though it was mostly
developed in the Clinton years.
That Iranian seaman who is alleged to have pulled off a possibly unstable, unexploded mine
wearing nothing but a rubber life jacket thus endangering his life and all his crew mates and
survivors in the small boat is the action of a lunatic. Or maybe it never happened.
What is the particular childish naïveté of Americans who believe that learning
a system inevitably leads to a willingness to support and uphold it instead of exploiting it
for personal gain?
>> Posted by: blues | Jun 19, 2019 6:52:22 PM | 53
Do tell!
With trillion dollar deficits pre-recession, the fiscal situation looks dire. Once
recession hits, tax revenue will plummet. Then, either they QE even more trillions or they
cut the MIC (measured in terms of purchasing power, if not nominally). Or both. But, the rest
of the world will suffer nominally as well. So, the dollar might remain a "cleaner dirty
shirt".
It's a difficult environment to invest in. Everything seems pricey. But, with currency
depreciation via QE, everything might become even pricier.
Life jackets aren't rubber! Try and get the story straight! Plus, you missed that the
limpet mine comes with a cloaking device that once placed onto the deck of any Iranian boat
it's rendered invisible! Honestly, we spend a lot of time dreaming up these narratives, so
the very least you can do is copy/paste properly!
On a serious note, I scanned a great many pictures of small boats and didn't come up with
one example of the one shown in the video. Finding one ought to be easy since it has numerous
unique features, most of which I commented upon. Has USN released a complete undoctored video
of the limpet removal yet? I thought not. As with the incident with the Russian ship where
USN didn't release the entire video taken from the stand-off helo because it proved USN at
fault, there won't be any release of this other video for the same reason--it proves zip,
nada, nothing.
Otherwise, I'd like to get myself one of those Iranian boats, minus the machine gun, as it
looks like an excellent fishing platform, although it lacks a cuddy and below deck stowage
room.
There's been a shift in the dialogue, to some degree, to a discussion of the overall US role
in the Gulf area.
Speaking to TIME, Trump argued that the Gulf of Oman[sic] is less strategically important
for the United States now than it used to be, citing China and Japan as nations that still
rely on the region for significant proportions of their oil. "Other places get such vast
amounts of oil there," Trump said. "We get very little. We have made tremendous progress in
the last two and a half years in energy. And when the pipelines get built, we're now an
exporter of energy. So we're not in the position that we used to be in in the Middle East
where some people would say we were there for the oil." . . here
Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters
at a roundtable that countries that benefit most from the movement of oil through the Gulf
need to take an active role in its security. . . ."The circumstances are very different now
than they were in the 1980s," Selva said. "If you think back to the reflagging operation, the
'Tanker War,' as it was nicknamed, where we reflagged and escorted tankers so that they could
flow in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, we got a substantial amount of our oil from the
Persian Gulf.. . ."We are now in a position where the bulk of that oil goes to countries in
Asia, and none of those countries have shown any predilection to pressing Iran to stop what
they are doing. What was true in the 1980s, is not true today. We are not wholly dependent on
the movement of Saudi, Kuwaiti, Qatari and Emirati oil in and out of the Gulf to sustain our
economy.". .
here
A broadening of the security mission in the Gulf area would be a positive step. Imagine
the navies of China, India and Japan taking a role! The price would be a removal of Iran
sanctions, because these countries want Iran oil! . . .I can dream.
In the current circs (esp after announcement of the latest Red Line) why write only about the
possibility of an ISIS missile landing on a US position being that it wd be "errant"?
After reading WL's comments, I had a vision of the photographer contacting the sniper by
mobile phone and berating the fellow for killing Neda Agha Soltan in the head and telling him
to find another beautiful young Iranian woman protester and to shoot her in the chest.
There is so much disinformation that it is difficult to judge the Israeli news report below
that the US is planning a military attack on Iran. Israel wants the US to attack Iran and the
report could be an attempt to push events in that direction.
There is no valid reason for Washington to serve Israeli interests.
It would be extremely irresponsible for Washington to risk starting another war.
As Russian and Chinese interests could be threatened by a US war with Iran, the situation
could become uncontrollable.
If there is a real prospect of a US attack on Iran, it would be a responsible action for
Russia and China to block it in advance by taking a firm position.
U.N. officials: U.S. planning a 'tactical assault' in Iran
By SHLOMO SHAMIR/MAARIV ONLINE
06/17/2019
The military action under consideration would be an aerial bombardment of an Iranian
facility linked to its nuclear program, the officials further claimed.
Is the US going to attack Iran soon?
Diplomatic sources at the UN headquarters in New York revealed to Maariv that they are
assessing the United States' plans to carry out a tactical assault on Iran in response to the
tanker attack in the Persian Gulf on Thursday.
According to the officials, since Friday, the White House has been holding incessant
discussions involving senior military commanders, Pentagon representatives and advisers to
President Donald Trump.
The military action under consideration would be an aerial bombardment of an Iranian
facility linked to its nuclear program, the officials further claimed.
"The bombing will be massive but will be limited to a specific target," said a Western
diplomat.
It is not a secret that the USA have a very powerful MIC lobby that by-and-large defines the USA foreign policy. Israel can be considered
as a yet another MIC lobbyist. This lobby in interesting in launching the war (especially pro-Israel faction of the MIC lobby)
The USA can definitely crush Iran military, but the cost might be higher that in case of Iraq. Also without occupation of the country
that will not be anything like a decisive victory. In Iraq, the USA was helped by the fact that military quickly crumbed and was undermined
by betrayals of several high ranking generals. Whether the same will be the case in Iran is difficult to predict.
Theocratic regimes tend to became more fragile with time, so at that stage is Iran now is difficult to predict without being in
the country. So counting on the fragility of the regime might be a valid consideration. But the war typically unites nations so to exploit
those weaknesses with war is more difficult task, then just waiting for the regime collapse.
That USA has at least two firm allied in such a war: Israel and Saudis.
Notable quotes:
"... It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 million people, three times as large as
Iraq. It would become the defining issue of his presidency, as the Iraq War became the defining issue of George W. Bush's presidency.
..."
"... Trump's repudiation of the treaty was followed by his reimposition of sanctions and a policy of maximum pressure. This was
followed by the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist" organization. ..."
"... U.S. policy has been to squeeze Iran's economy until the regime buckles to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's 12 demands, including
an end to Tehran's support of its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. ..."
"... Sunday, Pompeo said Iran was behind the attacks on the tankers in the Gulf of Oman and that Tehran instigated an attack that
injured four U.S. soldiers in Kabul though the Taliban claimed responsibility. ..."
"... Tehran has denied any role in the tanker attacks, helped put out the fire on one tanker, and accused its enemies of "false
flag" attacks to instigate a war. ..."
"... Writing in The Wall Street Journal Monday were Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, a neocon nest funded by Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson. In a piece titled, "America Can Face Down a Fragile
Iran," the pair make the case that Trump should squeeze the Iranian regime relentlessly and not fear a military clash, and a war with
Iran would be a cakewalk. ..."
"... "Iran's fragile theocracy can't absorb a massive external shock. That's why Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has, for the most part,
adhered to the JCPOA (the nuclear pact) and why he is likely angling for negotiation over confrontation with the Great Satan." ..."
"... This depiction of Iran's political crisis and economic decline invites a question: If the Tehran regime is so fragile and the
Iranian people are so alienated, why not avoid a war and wait for the regime's collapse? ..."
"... Who wants a U.S. war with Iran? Primarily the same people who goaded us into wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and who
oppose every effort of Trump's to extricate us from those wars. ..."
"... Should they succeed in Iran, it is hard to see how we will ever be able to extricate our country from this blood-soaked region
that holds no vital strategic interest save oil, and America, thanks to fracking, has become independent of that. ..."
Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's seaborne
oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump's reelection.
It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 million people, three times as large
as Iraq. It would become the defining issue of his presidency, as the Iraq War became the defining issue of George W. Bush's presidency.
And if war comes now, it would be known as "Trump's War."
For it was Trump who pulled us out of the Iran nuclear deal, though, according to U.N. inspectors and the other signatories
– Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China – Tehran was complying with its terms.
Trump's repudiation of the treaty was followed by his reimposition of sanctions and a policy of maximum pressure. This
was followed by the designation of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist" organization.
Then came the threats of U.S. secondary sanctions on nations, some of them friends and allies, that continued to buy oil from
Iran.
U.S. policy has been to squeeze Iran's economy until the regime buckles to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's 12 demands,
including an end to Tehran's support of its allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Sunday, Pompeo said Iran was behind the attacks on the tankers in the Gulf of Oman and that Tehran instigated an attack
that injured four U.S. soldiers in Kabul though the Taliban claimed responsibility.
The war hawks are back.
"This unprovoked attack on commercial shipping warrants retaliatory military strikes," said Senator Tom Cotton on Sunday.
But as Trump does not want war with Iran, Iran does not want war with us. Tehran has denied any role in the tanker attacks,
helped put out the fire on one tanker, and accused its enemies of "false flag" attacks to instigate a war.
If the Revolutionary Guard, which answers to the ayatollah, did attach explosives to the hull of the tankers, it was most likely
to send a direct message: If our exports are halted by U.S. sanctions, the oil exports of the Saudis and Gulf Arabs can be made
to experience similar problems.
Yet if the president and the ayatollah do not want war, who does?
Not the Germans or Japanese, both of whom are asking for more proof that Iran instigated the tanker attacks. Japan's prime
minster was meeting with the ayatollah when the attacks occurred, and one of the tankers was a Japanese vessel.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal Monday were Ray Takeyh and Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the Foundation for
the Defense of Democracies, a neocon nest funded by Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson. In a piece titled, "America Can Face Down
a Fragile Iran," the pair make the case that Trump should squeeze the Iranian regime relentlessly and not fear a military clash,
and a war with Iran would be a cakewalk.
"Iran is in no shape for a prolonged confrontation with the U.S. The regime is in a politically precarious position. The sullen
Iranian middle class has given up on the possibility of reform or prosperity. The lower classes, once tethered to the regime by
the expansive welfare state, have also grown disloyal. The intelligentsia no longer believes that faith and freedom can be harmonized.
And the youth have become the regime's most unrelenting critics.
"Iran's fragile theocracy can't absorb a massive external shock. That's why Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has, for the most
part, adhered to the JCPOA (the nuclear pact) and why he is likely angling for negotiation over confrontation with the Great Satan."
This depiction of Iran's political crisis and economic decline invites a question: If the Tehran regime is so fragile and
the Iranian people are so alienated, why not avoid a war and wait for the regime's collapse?
Trump seems to have several options:
Negotiate with the Tehran regime for some tolerable detente.
Refuse to negotiate and await the regime's collapse, in which case the president must be prepared for Iranian actions that
raise the cost of choking that nation to death.
Strike militarily, as Cotton urges, and accept the war that follows, if Iran chooses to fight rather than be humiliated
and capitulate to Pompeo's demands.
One recalls: Saddam Hussein accepted war with the United States in 1991 rather than yield to Bush I's demand he get his army
out of Kuwait.
Who wants a U.S. war with Iran? Primarily the same people who goaded us into wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and
who oppose every effort of Trump's to extricate us from those wars.
Should they succeed in Iran, it is hard to see how we will ever be able to extricate our country from this blood-soaked
region that holds no vital strategic interest save oil, and America, thanks to fracking, has become independent of that.
There is a
report that the Trump administration may be preparing an attack on Iran:
Diplomatic sources at the UN headquarters in New York revealed to Maariv that they are
assessing the United States' plans to carry out a tactical assault on Iran in response to the
tanker attack in the Persian Gulf on Thursday.
According to the officials, since Friday, the White House has been holding incessant
discussions involving senior military commanders, Pentagon representatives and advisers to
President Donald Trump.
The military action under consideration would be an aerial bombardment of an Iranian
facility linked to its nuclear program, the officials further claimed.
If this report is true, that would mean that the worst of the Iran hawks in the
administration are prevailing once again. The report goes on to say that "Trump himself was not
enthusiastic about a military move against Iran, but lost his patience on the matter and would
grant Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is pushing for action, what he wants." If that is
true, that is an absurdly casual way to blunder into an unnecessary war. Trump should
understand that if he takes the U.S. into a war against Iran, especially without Congressional
authorization, it will consume the rest of his presidency and it should cost him his
re-election. Starting an unnecessary war with Iran would go down as one of the dumbest, most
reckless, illegal acts in the history of U.S. foreign policy.
Congress must make absolutely clear that the president does not have the authority to
initiate hostilities against Iran. Both houses should pass a resolution this week saying as
much, and they should block any funds that could be used to support such an action. There is no
legal justification for attacking Iran, and if Trump approves an attack he would be violating
the Constitution and should be impeached for it.
The risk of war with Iran is greater than it was six months ago, and it is much greater than
it was two and a half years ago when Trump took office. The U.S. and Iran are in this dangerous
position solely because of the determined efforts of Iran hawks in and around this
administration to drive our country on a collision course with theirs. Those efforts
accelerated significantly thirteen months ago with the U.S. withdrawal from the JCPOA and the
reimposition of sanctions, and things have been getting steadily worse with each passing month.
It is not too late to avert the collision, but it requires the U.S. to make a dramatic change
in policy very soon. Since we know we can't count on the president to make the right decision,
Congress and the public need to make him understand what the political price will be if he
makes the wrong one.
"... Abe will be pissed because Japan needs continuing access to Iran's hydrocarbons and Bolton isn't smart enough to gain their complicity beforehand. ..."
"... At first I had simply typed a one word post: Israel but then thought, "what about Saudi Arabia?", then thought, "Saudi Arabia is known for their incompetence and some-one else would have to step up", then thought, "but Israel would get some-one else to do their dirty work". ..."
"... This is classic USA Gulf of Tonkin, Remember the Maine, WMD, Yellow Cake stuff.... ..."
"... The US threat to bring Iranian oil sales to zero is a act of war, if they were successful, [unlikely] Iran's population would starve and die in their millions, just as in Yemen. ..."
Bolton's big moment 'the gulf of oman incident' will not work. It is a transperant attempt to
stitch up Iran by insinuating that the Houtis did this to stop any deal between Iran and
trump which Abe is trying to put together.
They cannot implicate Iran so they will fit up Yemen and then say "Iran encouraged them
Mommy".
Abe will be pissed because Japan needs continuing access to Iran's hydrocarbons and Bolton
isn't smart enough to gain their complicity beforehand.
I was just about to post the same "One word" and then spotted your post.
At first I had simply typed a one word post: Israel
but then thought, "what about Saudi Arabia?",
then thought, "Saudi Arabia is known for their incompetence and some-one else would have to
step up",
then thought, "but Israel would get some-one else to do their dirty work".
The One we know for sure didn't do it is: Iran.
The One group we have been witnessing attacking multiple countries will have their media
shout in unison: Iran.
Iran and the Yemeni rebels both follow branches of the Shia sect of Islam but Tehran has
always denied providing more than moral support to the rebels.
That's like saying that Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants both follow
Christianity.
The home secretary, Sajid Javid, has revealed he has signed a request for Julian Assange to
be extradited to the US where he faces charges of computer hacking.
Speaking on the Today Programme on Thursday, Javid said: "He's rightly behind bars.
There's an extradition request from the US that is before the courts tomorrow but yesterday
I signed the extradition order and certified it and that will be going in front of the
courts tomorrow."
I always thought that Tory ministers were a bunch of sniveling little shits, and they've
just proved me right. Don't think it was just Sajid David who made this decision, it was
the entire cabinet including Theresa May .
The next time someone farts on about how oppressed the media is in Russia just remember
the different outcomes (so far) for Ivan Golunov and Julian Assange. The Russians don't need
disinformation operations to discredit western government and institutions, they only have to
stand aside and let those western governments and institutions do it themselves.
This report:
Zerohedge
claims that one of the ships is Japanese owned.
The manager of one of the tankers, the Panama-flagged, Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous,
which had been carrying a cargo of methanol from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, said the vessel
had been damaged as the result of "a suspected attack," though the manager added that the
ship's cargo was secure.
"The hull has been breached above the water line on the starboard side," Bernhard
Schulte GmbH & Co KG said in a statement on its website.
Ironic - it makes direct Iranian involvement pretty unlikely
"Saudi Arabia is known for their incompetence and some-one else would have to step up"
Pulease. Every now and then I get the urge to edit the internet and today is one of those
days. Hope you don't mind.
"Saudi Arabia and Israel are both known for their incompetence and some-one else would have
to step up"
Israel depends for its continued existence on a couple of hundred highly capable pilots
some of whom might be American contractors, the rest of the IDF and Mossad are worth less
than jack shit.
The UAE is slightly less incompetent than Saudi Arabia or Israel, so why not them. The UAE
is part of the anti-Iran coalition of the morons and does have frontage on the Gulf of Oman,
so that gives them motive and opportunity. As for means, there are reports the more severely
damaged one was hit by a torpedo, and the UAE does have a navy with helicopters.
This has dual US/Israeli citizen John Bolton's fingerprints all over it, especially with the
rumors of his potential ouster soon forcing him to ramp up his push for an attack on Iran.
False flag attempt for sure. The real question is whether the world sees through it.
@3 "then thought, 'Saudi Arabia is known for their incompetence and some-one else would have
to step up',"
Well, heck, there are signs of incompetence here. One of the ships caught fire and will, in all likelihood, sink.
The other, apparently, has not caught fire. That second ship is therefore going to be studied verrrrrry carefully.
If it took a torpedo hit then the damage will be below the waterline and the hull plates
will be bent inwards.
If it is sabotage then the damage is more likely to be above the waterline and the hull
plates will be bent outwards.
It is unlikely to be Iran if the damage indicates the latter rather than the
former.
@11 The Q "This has dual US/Israeli citizen John Bolton's fingerprints all over it,"
I have two comments on that.
1) Is Bolton an Israeli citizen? I've heard it repeated many times, without ever once
having it confirmed by anything other than the rumour-mill. He is the wrong religion, for one
thing.
2) According to the NYTimes (aka the paper of record) "On a visit to the U.A.E. about two
weeks ago, John Bolton, President Trump's national security adviser, said ".... I don't really give a s**t what Bolton has to say, since it is almost certain to be a
falsehood."
But he was chin-wagging with UAE officials "about" two weeks ago, which is more than
enough time to gin up a false-flag operation.
From the zerohedge article: "Another tanker, Norwegian-owned and Marshall Islands-flagged
Front Altair, sent a distress signal to the UAE port of Fujairah. It had loaded an oil
shipment in Abu Dhabi not long before the incident. The ship was reportedly hit with three
explosions. Officials said it appeared the ships had been attacked with torpedoes."
@18 b The key will be where the damage is: above the waterline, or below the waterline.
If Iran specifically targeted those two ships then we can rule out mines, unless it is
limpet-mines attached while the ships were in harbour. But these ships were underway, which
tends to make that unlikely, and were from different harbours, which makes it even more
unlikely.
Torpedoes from a midget-submarine are still a possibility, but by definition the damage
would be below the waterline. And the Iranian midget-subs have only two torpedoes, which
means some mighty fine shootin'
Any indication of damage above the waterline would tend to rule out Iranian involvement.
Certainly would rule out anti-ship missiles or shelling. And Iranian sabotage would mean they
circumvented security in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which is doubly-difficult.
But a false-flag? That's another matter, as the UAE and the Saudis can both be in on it.
Damage below the waterline could be Iran, or a competent false-flag.
Damage above the waterline suggests an incompetent false-flag.
The US threat to bring Iranian oil sales to zero is a act of war, if they were
successful, [unlikely] Iran's population would starve and die in their millions, just as in
Yemen. In those circumstances Iran does have the right to say 'if we can't sell oil, our
putative enemies Saudi Arabia, UAE et al will not be allowed to either. In those
circumstances the Iranians should quietly arm any group wishing the Saudis harm, the Saudis
are a bunch of US ass licking scumbags who deserve everything coming to them.
I copied and pasted this very interesting comment below which was found on the Iranian News
site 'Press TV'.
"The 'Rumours from the Dark Web team' (a Russian based group recently shut down on youtube
and delisted on google) are reporting that prior to this incident they have heard chatter
that there was more 'UUV activity in area than usual' (a UUV is an unmanned underwater
vehicle / drone which can be used for exploration, spying, or for combat).
The team also mentioned that UUV's from various nations (including arms and drug smugglers)
had been regularly entering and leaving the area under cover of hiding beneath tankers or
sometimes actually attached to tankers.
Chatter suggests that a UUV or weaponised drone or smugglers drone of some description
exploded or was taken out by another UUV or drone outside the Persian Gulf.
The team stressed that 'this incident occurred outside of the Persian Gulf for a specific
reason' (not given).
The team also reminded people that several tankers had previously been armed with ATGM's of
soviet era type for potential use in a planned false flag attack against a US warship, but
they had already been taken out of service to prevent this (is this the previous tanker
incident involving mines?).
The team suggested that it was possible that these tankers were again pre-emptively hit by a
state actor to prevent another false flag involving them, or to simply destroy advanced
Iranian or Saudi missiles and arms on route to Yemen or Syria.
The full report is not out yet but there is no mention on the Dark Web of Iran being
responsible for this yet."
Don't rule out the MEK assistance in something like this. The MEK was formerly ruled a
terrorist organization by the US. As soon as the US started using Jihadists (i. e. al-quada
branches) to continue its battle against the government of Assad, the MEK were reclassified
as a non-terrorist organization. I remember hearing reports about members of MEK trying to
buy the sae fast boats used by the IRG.
"Naphtha" can be of various levels of volatility - from lighter fluid to more or less raw
gasoline. Withal it is lighter than water, more or less. Methanol (CH3OH) is the simplest
alcohol. It too is lighter than water.
It does not seem that tanker with either fluid can sink. They can burn quite well,
however.
Tankers are notoriously difficult to sink. Modern tankers are double bottom double hull,
generally speaking. Yes indeed, a supertanker (these just now are small tankers not
supertankers, but the facts are similar), can probably "take" three torpedoes and not sink,
especially if loaded with fluid lighter than seawater.
The attacks seem to have been by flying objects, not torps.
The result is going to be something like escorts and vastly high insurance costs...jus'fer
starters...
Walter , Jun 13, 2019 9:02:36 AM |
38Walter , Jun 13, 2019 9:09:40 AM |
39
Assumption about plates bending in or out due to torps is not valid. Torps can detonate under
ship, or inside it, or on contact. The under ship detonation breaks the ship in half. This
was a big deal in 1940...
Thank-you for helping Trump with his dirty work! Honestly, do you think your article helps
Iran in any way???
Do you have concrete proof? NO. Iran threatened many things in the past it never followed
through on. Why don't you just apply for a job with Trump Ministry of Propaganda digging for
dubious dirt Trump can tweet and act on?
Why didn't you just write that Iran has a right to defend itself? Why do you put
statements in bold? How about putting up a billboard instead?
Speaking of billboard: The keyword here is "petrochemical". In quotes too!
Followed by your smoking torpedo:
Now we can apply the keyword Khamenei used today to these sentences:
What lying-ass Trump is doing is an ACT OF WAR. He is trying to destroy a sovereign
nation!
U.S. President Trump tries to move Iran towards negotiations with him.
REALLY? You call an ACT OF WAR ne go tia tions ? Is cutting off a critical industry
negotiation or mafia strongarm???
Then you follow up with: Even while Iran rejects negotiations with the U.S.
Good Trump wants to negotiate--baaad Iran doesn't.
Yeah-yeah you couched this hit-job in a couple of understated phrases like someone else
might have initiated it and Iran has no interest in disturbing current diplomacy .
But boy, you sure went out of your way to try to disprove it!
If Trump cut off Russia's oil industry, would you be so quick to provide him with
unsubstantiated proof in bold of acts that could be JUSTIFIED even though TOTALLY UNPROVEN
who committed them? Never mind, Russia wouldn't bother picking up the crew of whatever
vessels it would blow sky high in retaliation AND NEITHER WOULD TRUMP,
Commander-in-crime!
Yeah, you allude that it could be a false flag after you torpedo'd it in bold
lettering!
Wow! Still carrying Emperor Trump's water here, I see. There is NOTHING redeeming in this
tool expose, or the update that is merely a twist of the knife. Neocon Bolton is grinning all
his yellow teeth under his bushy mustache: he couldn't have laid it out better himself!
Hired!
So, what's next: yellow cake and aluminum tubes?
Such a gift at the service of Trump deception and destruction for total domination. I'm
appalled. All this misguided effort to whitewash Trump that could be directed at Sanders who
is trying to expose the Regime Change that Zionists had a hand in in Brazil.
Not a bad word about Trump in all this. Trump tries to negotiate...Is that what you call
what he's doing? I call what he's doing casus belli, on second thought, this piece might be
the casus belli Trump needs to carry out his plan for Iran in the next 4-year installment of
high crimes. Ugh.
"The Iranian Search and Rescue ship Naji picked up the 44 crews members of both ships
and brought them to Bandar-E Jash."
Therefore, the potential witnesses are in Iranian custody, and can be interrogated at
Iran's leisure. One wonders if Iran's accusers will tone down the rhetoric whilst the crew
remain in Skripal-type custody, and whether Iran will delay their release until Iranian
authorities and medical experts are confidant that their health is A-OK?
b's argument for suspecting Iran involvement makes some sense because USA can just sit
back and let sanctions take their toll, strangling Iran's economy and destabilizing the
country.
Recall the oil sanctions against Japan in the 1040's. Ultimately, Japan attacked Pearl
Harbor.
HOWEVER , USA+allies have a very real and pressing reason to ramp up tensions in
the region: Idlib .
The war in Syria is NOT over. The Idlib occupation is strategic, not tactical (as are the
other occupations in Syria). And a US response to the tanker attack might well be to show its
strength elsewhere: Idlib.
If I'm right we will see some dramatic developments in Syria in the coming days.
I'm not ready to say Iran did it, but will say that,
1) Iran has every right to hinder as much as possible the exports of KSA and UAE, since
they are the second biggest instigators (after Israel) of hostility towards Iran.
2) If Abe is acting as Trump's pawn and not an honest mediator, then to hell with him. And
it wouldn't be crazy for Iran to let him know they are completely unimpressed with his false
mediation.
3) It would really be ironic if the world has suffered so much false flag fatigue that the
very few times something isn't a false flag, the intended audience assumes that it is.
That said, I do not believe Iran did this. I do think it is a false flag and the authors
of it are too tone deaf to realize people don't trust them anymore.
I agree that USA/Trump is not really interested in negotiation but only in the appearance
of seeking peace.
b's belief that "... Trump tries to move Iran towards negotiations with him"
doesn't adequately express the reality: USA/Trump offers to negotiate with 'no preconditions'
after previously establishing the conditions required to force Iran's surrender (the oil
embargo). Naturally, Iran's most important "pre-condition" for talks is for USA to release
it's hostage (the Iranian economy).
Forgot to add to my comment in 50, that it would be extremely easy for UAE and KSA to
sabotage their own ships, since they would only have to pass through their own security, not
penetrate someone else's. And they are exactly the types who would want to implicate Iran and
also the ones to dumb to realize false flags aren't automatically believed anymore.
Japan's PM is in Tehran for talks. This is by itself unusual. Then two tankers ultimately
owned by Japan are attacked in the Gulf. Very unusual.
Bad timing wouldn't begin to describe this if Iran was to blame. They normally are quite
cautious with international relations, especially with countries they are trying to woo away
from ther US.
Just this would point to a false flag in my book.
But what else hit the news cycle in the last 24 hours? Britain relishes in its poodle status
as it signs extradition order for Assange. Should be big news, but who cares about press
freedom when we've got "a new Middle eastern war?"
What else? Turkish observation posts in Idlib come under attack and they reportedly call the
coordinates in to the Russians to bomb them. Again, should be tectonic news, but "war war
war!".
There is simply a snowball's chance in Trump's asscrack that Iran attacked those tankers.
Trump/Bolton/whatever_moron has now created a situation where US proxies (plus anybody
depending on oil from the Strait of Hormuz) urgently need an agreement with Iran, whilst an
isolationist US do not need this.
US proxies will now have to bribe Trump to have him step down from the brink or jump the
fence.
In other news Houthis have taken positions in Saudi's Najran and bombed a Saudi
airport.
I agree with those that have pointed out that attacking Japanese vessels while talking with
the Japanese PM is nonsensical. Any country that does such a thing is acting against their
own interest.
If Iran wants to "send a message", it's likely that they can do so without shooting
themselves in the foot.
The attack pressures Iran, but IMO it ALSO offers an excuse for USA to stall/stop the
SAA+Russia attack on Idlib by claiming to confront Iranian proxies.
Yeah. The first attacks seemed too minor to be a "message" but are a great backdrop (for
propaganda purposes) to the attacks today which nonsensically occur while meeting with the
Japanese PM.
"... From what I have read, including excerpts of JCPOA, it seems that Iran's move to restart some low level enrichment is captured in the agreement as something that Iran could do if the other party(ies) are in breach of the agreement. And at this time, the US is not a party any longer and the EU is in breach by stopping any economic intercourse with Iran. ..."
"... This should be reiterated again and again, because just mentioning that Iran unilaterally is starting enrichment puts a target on their back especially in the United States of Amnesia, while they are still just doing only what is prescribed by the JCPOA. ..."
"... Bolton's lying goes with his broad contempt for the American people. He treats us like contemptible sheep, he lies to us, and then he tries to manipulate Trump into sending our sons and daughters to fight wars for his foreign buddies. ..."
"... It is indeed remarkable in a very bad way that Bolton has any credibility to speak on issues. He has a very long track record of lie after lie after lie, going back to the build up for Iraq war. Indeed, he has never acknowledged that Iraq war a monumental tragedy. ..."
John Bolton
repeats one of the Trump administration's biggest and most important lies:
Donald Trump's national security adviser said Wednesday there was "no reason" for Iran to back out of its nuclear deal with
world powers other than to seek atomic weapons, a year after the U.S. president unilaterally withdrew America from the accord.
Bolton and other administration officials have promoted the lie that Iran seeks nuclear weapons for months. Unfortunately, members
of Congress and the press have largely failed to call out these lies for what they are. There is no evidence to support the administration's
claims, and there is overwhelming evidence that they are wrong, but if they can get away with saying these things without being
challenged they may not need evidence to get the crisis that Bolton and others like him want.
In this case, the AP story just relays Bolton's false and misleading statements as if they should be taken seriously, and their
headline trumpets Bolton's dishonest insinuations as if they were credible. This is an unfortunate case of choosing the sensationalist,
eye-catching headline that misinforms the public on a very important issue. Bolton's latest remarks are especially pernicious because
they use Iran's modest reactions to Trump administration sanctions as evidence of Iran's imaginary intent to acquire weapons. The
U.S. has been trying to push Iran to abandon the deal for more than a year, and at the first sign that Iran begins to reduce its
compliance in order to push back against the administration's outrageous economic warfare Bolton tries to misrepresent it as proof
that they seek nuclear weapons. Don't fall for it, and don't trust anything Bolton says. Not only does he have a record of distorting
and manipulating intelligence to suit his purposes, but his longstanding desire for regime change and his ties to the Mujahideen-e
Khalq (MEK) make him an exceptionally unreliable person when it comes to any and all claims about the Iranian government.
The story provides some context, but still fails to challenge Bolton's assertions:
Bolton said that without more nuclear power plants, it made no sense for Iran to stockpile more low-enriched uranium as it
now plans to do. But the U.S. also earlier cut off Iran's ability to sell its uranium to Russia in exchange for unprocessed
yellow-cake uranium [bold mine-DK].
Iran has set a July 7 deadline for Europe to offer better terms to the unraveling nuclear deal, otherwise it will resume
enrichment closer to weapons level. Bolton declined to say what the U.S. would do in response to that.
"There's no reason for them to do (higher enrichment) unless it is to reduce the breakout time to nuclear weapons," Bolton
said.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration ended the sanctions waivers that enabled Iran to ship its excess low-enriched uranium
out of the country. They made it practically impossible for Iran to do what they have been reliably doing for years, and now Bolton
blames Iran for the consequences of administration actions. The administration has deliberately put Iran in a bind so that they
either give up the enrichment that they are entitled to do under the JCPOA or exceed the restrictions on their stockpile so that
the U.S. can then accuse them of a violation. Left out in all of this is that the U.S. is no longer a party to the deal and violated
all of its commitments more than a year ago. Iran has patiently remained in compliance while the only party to breach the agreement
desperately hunts for a pretext to accuse them of some minor infraction.
Iran's record of full compliance with the JCPOA for more than three years hasn't mattered to Bolton and his allies in the slightest,
and they have had no problem reneging on U.S. commitments, but now the same ideologues that have wanted to destroy the deal from
the start insist on treating the deal's restrictions as sacrosanct. These same people have worked to engineer a situation in which
Iran may end up stockpiling more low-enriched uranium than they are supposed to have, and then seize on the situation they created
to spread lies about Iran's desire for nukes. It's all so obviously being done in bad faith, but then that is what we have come
to expect from Iran hawks and opponents of the nuclear deal. Don't let them get away with it.
The reason that Iran is threatening to enrich its uranium to a higher level is that the U.S. has been relentlessly sanctioning
them despite their total compliance with the terms of the JCPOA. The Trump administration has done all it could to deny Iran the
benefits of the deal, and then Bolton has the gall to say that they have no other reason to reduce their compliance. Of course Iran
does have another reason, and that is to put pressure on the other remaining parties to the deal to find a way to get Iran the benefits
it was promised. It is a small step taken in response to the administration's own destructive policy, and it is not evidence of
anything else. Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, and it is grossly irresponsible to treat unfounded administration claims about
this as anything other than propaganda and lies.
From what I have read, including excerpts of JCPOA, it seems that Iran's move to restart some low level enrichment is captured
in the agreement as something that Iran could do if the other party(ies) are in breach of the agreement. And at this time, the
US is not a party any longer and the EU is in breach by stopping any economic intercourse with Iran.
This should be reiterated again and again, because just mentioning that Iran unilaterally is starting enrichment puts a target
on their back especially in the United States of Amnesia, while they are still just doing only what is prescribed by the JCPOA.
Bolton's lying goes with his broad contempt for the American people. He treats us like contemptible sheep, he lies to us,
and then he tries to manipulate Trump into sending our sons and daughters to fight wars for his foreign buddies.
It is indeed remarkable in a very bad way that Bolton has any credibility to speak on issues. He has a very long track record of lie after lie after lie, going back to the build up for Iraq war. Indeed, he has never
acknowledged that Iraq war a monumental tragedy.
I think NK has it right to assert that Bolton is a defective human product.
"... Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN ..."
"... It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order to weaken it, perhaps even fatally. ..."
"... Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed with deep personal failings hidden from public view. ..."
"... It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all other nations and isn't afraid to say so. ..."
"... Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly threatened the children of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to invade Iraq. ..."
"... We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe. But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it." ..."
"... Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in Venezuela and of course Bolton organized the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election ..."
"... This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit of profits and power. ..."
"... Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology. ..."
"... Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions. ..."
"... Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. ..."
"... It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow them away with cruise missiles." ..."
"... The New York Times that day reported : "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it." ..."
"... Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks. ..."
"... But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the "military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views. ..."
"... Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi! ..."
"... To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS ..."
"... Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades. ..."
"... The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason. Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets! ..."
"... John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized. ..."
"... Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, ..."
"... But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign, with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like. ..."
"... Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS! Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh we have nothing to do with it." ..."
"... Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor. ..."
"... Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush! ..."
"... I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons ..."
"... The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security Advisers. What a joke of a nation! ..."
"... I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq, and Syria. ..."
"... "Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees." ..."
"... Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes. ..."
"... They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel." ..."
"... The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today. ..."
John Bolton has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his move. But this time he
may have gone too far, writes Joe Lauria.
I knew John Bolton and interacted with him on a nearly daily basis with my colleagues in the press corps at United Nations headquarters
in New York when Bolton was the United States ambassador there from August 2005 to December 2006.
Most diplomats, officials, and journalists were shocked that Bolton (evading confirmation with a recess appointment) had
actually become the U.S. representative, given his long, public disdain for the UN. But that turned out to be the point.
It's been the strategy of Republican administrations to appoint the fiercest critic to head an agency or institution in order
to weaken it, perhaps even fatally.
Bolton's most infamous quote about the UN followed him into the building. In 1994 he had
said : "The Secretariat building
in New York has 38 stories. If it lost ten stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."
But a more telling comment in that same 1994 conference was when he said that no matter what the UN decides the U.S. will do
whatever it wants:
Bolton sees such frank admissions as signs of strength, not alarm.
He is a humorless man, who at the UN at least, seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room. He once gave a
lecture in 2006 at the U.S. mission to UN correspondents, replete with a chalk board, on how nuclear enrichment worked. His aim,
of course, was to convince us that Iran was close to a bomb, even though a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate being prepared
at the time said Tehran had
abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
I thought I'd challenge him one day at the press stakeout outside the Security Council chamber, where Bolton often stopped to
lecture journalists on what they should write. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically elected government
in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?' I asked him.
"That's an interesting question," he told me, "but for another time and another place." It was a time and a place, of course,
that never came.
More Than an Ideology
Bolton possesses an abiding self-righteousness rooted in what seems a sincere belief in the myth of American greatness, mixed
with deep personal failings hidden from public view.
He seemed perpetually angry and it wasn't clear whether it was over some personal or diplomatic feud. He seems to take personally
nations standing up to America, binding his sense of personal power with that of the United States.
It is more than an ideology. It's fanaticism. Bolton believes America is exceptional and indispensible and superior to all
other nations and isn't afraid to say so. He'd have been better off perhaps in the McKinley administration, before the days
of PR-sugarcoating of imperial aggression. He's not your typical passive-aggressive government official. He's aggressive-aggressive.
And now Bolton is ordering 120,000 troops to get ready and an aircraft carrier to steam towards Iran.
Bolton's all too willing to make his bullying personal on behalf of the state. He implicitly
threatened the children
of José Bustani, who Vice President Dick Cheney wanted out of his job as head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons because Bustani had gotten Iraq to agree to join the chemical weapons protocol, thereby making it harder for the U.S. to
invade Iraq.
After Bolton's failed 2005 confirmation hearings, Tony Blinken, the then staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
told The New Yorker
's Dexter Filkins:
"We saw a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to manipulate intelligence to justify his views. If it had happened once, maybe.
But it came up multiple times, and always it was the same underlying issue: he would stake out a position, and then, if the
intelligence didn't support it, he would try to exaggerate the intelligence and marginalize the officials who had produced it."
Bolton is no fan of democracy if things don't go his way. He is a vociferous instigator of the so-far failed U.S. coup in
Venezuela and of course Bolton organized
the "Brooks Brothers riot" that disrupted the recounting of votes in Florida in the disputed 2000 presidential election.
What is alarming about the above video is not so much that he justifies lying, but the example he gives: lying to cover up military
plans like the invasion of Normandy. This is a common ruling class tactic in the U.S. to portray disobedient leaders ripe for
overthrow as Hitler. Saddam was Hitler, Milosevic was Hitler, Noriega was Hitler and Hillary Clinton called Putin Hitler. It is
a false revival of U.S. glory from World War II to paint foreign adventures as moral crusades, rather than naked aggression in pursuit
of profits and power.
Bolton is the distillation of the pathology of American power. He is unique only in the purity of this pathology.
Regime Change for Iran
The U.S. national security adviser has been saying for years he wants the Iranian government overthrown, and now he's made his
move. But this time John Bolton may have flown too high.
He was chosen for his post by a president with limited understanding of international affairs -- if real estate is not involved
-- and one who loves to be sucked up to. Trump is Bolton's perfect cover.
But hubris may have finally bested Bolton. He had never before maneuvered himself into such a position of power, though he'd
left a trail of chaos at lower levels of government. Sitting opposite the Resolute desk on a daily basis has presented a chance to implement
his plans.
At the top of that agenda
has been Bolton's stated aim for years: to
bomb and
topple
the Iranian government.
Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York Times,
on May 14 , it was he who
"ordered" a Pentagon
plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf. These were to be deployed "if Iran attacked American forces or accelerated its
work on nuclear weapons."
Two months after Bolton was appointed national security adviser, in June 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation
deal that has seen Tehran curtail its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for relaxation of U.S. and international sanctions.
At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman, who had been undersecretary of state for arms control and
international security, as had Bolton,
predicted
to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment after the U.S. left the deal, it "would be the kind of excuse that a
person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation or direct attack on Iran."
In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said on May 5 (May 6 in Tehran) that it would indeed
restart partial nuclear enrichment. On the same day, Bolton
announced the carrier strike group was headed to the Gulf.
Bolton Faces Resistance
If this were a normally functioning White House, in which imperial moves are normally made, a president would order military
action, and not a national security adviser.
"I don't think Trump is smart enough to realize what Bolton and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo are doing to him,"
former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel told RT's Afshin Rattansi
this week.
"They have manipulated him. When you get the national security adviser who claims that he ordered an aircraft carrier flotilla
to go into the Persian Gulf, we've never seen that. In the days of Henry Kissinger, who really brought sway, he never ordered
this, and if it was ordered it was done behind closed doors."
Bolton claimed he acted on intelligence that Iran was poised to attack U.S. interests close to Iran.
Both Israel and Saudi Arabia, lacking the military firepower of the United States, have long tried to get the U.S. to fight
its wars, and one no more important than against its common enemy. An
editorial on May 16 in the Saudi English-language news
outlet, Arab News , called for a U.S. "surgical strike" on Iran. But The New York Times reported on the
same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack
Iran causing a full-scale war.
The
intelligence alleged Iran was fitting missiles on fishing boats in the Gulf. Imagine a government targeted by the most powerful
military force in history wanting to defend itself in its own waters.
Bolton also said Iran was threatening Western interests in Iraq, which led eventually to non-essential U.S. diplomatic staff
leaving Baghdad and Erbil.
It is the typical provocation of a bully: threaten someone with a cruise missile and the moment they pick up a knife in self-defense
you attack, conveniently leaving the initial threat out of the story. It then becomes: "Iran picked up a knife. We have to blow
them away with cruise missiles."
But this time the bully is being challenged. Federica Mogherini, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs and security
policy,
resisted the U.S. on Iran when she met Pompeo in Brussels on May 13.
"It's always better to talk, rather than not to, and especially when tensions arise Mike Pompeo heard that very clearly today
from us," said Mogherini. "We are living in a crucial, delicate moment where the most relevant attitude to take – the most responsible
attitude to take – is and we believe should be, that of maximum restraint and avoiding any escalation on the military side."
The New York Times that day
reported
: "Privately, several European officials described Mr. Bolton and Mr. Pompeo as pushing an unsuspecting Mr. Trump through a series
of steps that could put the United States on a course to war before the president realizes it."
Ghika: No new threat from Iran. (YouTube)
British Maj. Gen. Chris Ghika then said on May 14: "There has been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq or
Syria." Ghika was
rebuked by U.S. Central Command, whose spokesman said, "Recent comments from OIR's Deputy Commander run counter to the identified
credible threats available to intelligence from U.S. and allies regarding Iranian-backed forces in the region."
A day later it was Trump himself, however, who was said to be resisting Bolton. On May 15 The Washington Post reported:
"President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military
confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S.
officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran's leaders."
"President Trump has told his acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, that he does not want to go to war with Iran, according
to several administration officials, in a message to his hawkish aides that an intensifying American pressure campaign against
the clerical-led government in Tehran must not escalate into open conflict."
Then it was the Democrats who stood up to Bolton. On Tuesday Pompeo and Shanahan briefed senators and representatives behind
closed doors on Capitol Hill regarding the administration's case for confronting Iran.
"Are they (Iran) reacting to us, or are we doing these things in reaction to them? That is a major question I have, that I still
have," Sen. Angus King told reporters after the briefing. "What we view as defensive, they view as provocative. Or vice versa."
Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego told reporters after the briefing: "I believe there is a certain level of escalation
of both sides that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The feedback loop tells us they're escalating for war, but they could
just be escalating because we're escalating."
Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian
and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's quite
possible that Iran was behind" the attacks.
Bolton was conspicuously absent from the closed-door briefing.
It's Up to Trump
Trump has pinballed all over the place on Iran. He called the Times and Post stories about him resisting Bolton
"fake news."
"The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot, poorly
sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good thing!"
Trump tweeted on May 17.
The Fake News Media is hurting our Country with its fraudulent and highly inaccurate coverage of Iran. It is scattershot,
poorly sourced (made up), and DANGEROUS. At least Iran doesn't know what to think, which at this point may very well be a good
thing!
Then he threatened what could be construed as genocide against Iran. "If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of
Iran. Never threaten the United States again!" he tweeted on Sunday.
But also last Sunday he told Fox News that the
"military-industrial complex" is real and "they do like war" and they "went nuts" when he said he wanted to withdraw troops from
Syria. Trump said he didn't want war with Iran, here possibly reflecting Israel's views.
On Monday he implied that the crisis has been drummed up to get Iran to negotiate.
"The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up a negotiation
with Iran. This is a false report ."
The Fake News put out a typically false statement, without any knowledge that the United States was trying to set up
a negotiation with Iran. This is a false report....
John Bolton must be stopped before he gets his war. It is beyond troubling that the man we have to count on to do it is Donald
Trump.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for T he Wall Street Journal,
Boston Globe , Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected]and followed on Twitter @unjoe .
Or as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is US." As in the lies that created the Vietnam war and the waste of 58,000
American soldiers and thousand of Vietnamese. Or the lie that Iran is our enemy when we funded and encouraged Saddam to attack
them and destroyed their attempt to have a secular government.
Or the lie of the WMD's and the 9/11 attack which was funded by Saudi Arabia, and run by Saudis and NOT Iraq.
Or the lies of Afghanistan which was economically and culturally better off when it was controlled by the USSR...
John Hawk , May 26, 2019 at 16:56
Joe, nice piece of work covering the psycho-pathology of America's leading nazi!
To correct one of your statements: Trump DID NOT appoint him National Security Adviser, but Adelson and Mercer did. Trump
is a brain-dead, blackmailed puppet who fancies himself as POTUS.
It can't get any more delusional than this. Everybody I know who is following the Washington Beltway histrionics of Trump
et al know full-well that a certain intelligence agency of a small Middle East domiciled country have THE definitive dossier
on Trump and have been building it for the last five decades.
After all, deception is their game and they use it liberally, like feeding their agenda to Bolton as 'intelligence' info
of the highest order. The Bolton-Pompeo-Pence presidency is destined to go down in history as one of infamy and treason.
Trump? dead-man walking, more than likely by a stroke-heart attack when he's popping out one of his idiotic and manic tweets!
Zhu , May 26, 2019 at 03:20
If Bolton were struck by lightning tomorrow morning, would anything change much? I doubt it. We Americans are as warlike
as the ancient Assyrian. We've been slaughtering Indians, Koreans, SE Asians, Central Americans, and multiple Middle Eastern
people for a looong time. It is flattering to blame this individual or th t country, but no. We, as a community, are all responsible
to some degree. Even me, on the far side of the world.
Alex , May 25, 2019 at 21:50
Bolton's choosing destroyed IRAN but staying friends with Saudi Arabia it's so contradicting, and so obvious that he is influenced
to behave this way is because Israelies influence. Saudy Kingdom using Bolton to get IRAN so Saudy will be only country promote
Extreme version of Wahhabi Islam which is didn't existed In Islam's history.
So Bolton's obsession with destruction of Iran is ignorance as its best. September 11th suspects were most of them Saudy
nationals, yet nobody wanted to talk about it, because there is irony that, George W Bush was and probably still doing business
with Saudy. So how can you explain that to American people? No you can not.
Perhaps collectively hypnotism !
OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 02:58
" So how can you explain that to American people?"
Given that useful fools are useful, why would you want to?
" No you can not."
An illustration of the benefits of dumbing down do not accrue solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, facilitating
the minimising of blowback during implementation of strategies based on "How to drown a drowning man with the minimum of blowback",
given that many believe that critical mass is a function of linear notions of 50% +1 and above; a further conflation of quantity
with quality to which the opponents are prone.
William , May 25, 2019 at 19:06
John Bolton is a psychopath, He should be dismissed immediately, but I think that he should be institutionalized.
Put him in a strait jacket and keep him in a padded cell. He poses a threat to millions of people.
Eddie S , May 25, 2019 at 11:26
Yeah Joe, it wasn't just you and other reporters who were stunned by Bolton's recess appt to the UN by W -- - many of
us were staggered by the jaw-dropping inappropriateness of it, IF it was assessed from a pro-peace perspective.
But, as you accurately mentioned, the Republicans had long-ago (I recall first hearing about it during Nixon's reign,
with Earl Butz) used that gambit to effectively sabotage regulatory agencies & depts. Rather than try to dissolve an agency
that most people want, they can neutralize it by appointing some hack or lobbyist for the entity being regulated so that nothing
meaningful gets done, AND it has the 'beneficial' effect of discrediting the agency involved, and government in general, which
is what many libertarian-inclined Republicans like.
Good article about a reprehensible politician.
renfro , May 25, 2019 at 11:18
"But The New York Times reported on the same day that though Israel was behind Bolton's "intelligence" about an Iranian
threat, Israel does not want the U.S. to attack Iran causing a full-scale war. "
________________________________
Israel doesnt want the US to attack Iran Well that is BS!
Israel and its Fifth Column in the US have agitated for the US to attack Iran for years .we've all seen and heard it .and now
they want to try to wipe our memories of their war mongering with their typical hasbara in the NYT and Netanyahu claiming .'oh
we have nothing to do with it."
Bolton is a psychopath but he is Sheldon Adelson's errand boy .who Bolton met with in Las Vegas the week before Trump
appointed him and Adelson is the Orange carnival barker's 100 million dollar donor.
Seriously, how stupid do they think we are? If we attack Iran it will be for the Zionist and Saudis and we all know it.
Luther Bliss , May 25, 2019 at 10:57
Trump's incoherent mixture of neoconservative & isolationism almost make him a Bush!
Remember it wasn't until Bush JR's second term that he asked his father, "What's A Neocon?" to which Pappy Bush replied,
"Israel."
I assume Trump knows what a 'neocon' but is so indebted to Israel and intoxicated by Islamophobic rhetoric that he cannot
free himself from his addiction to surrounding himself with more neo-cons.
The progression from Flynn to McMaster to Bolton was just selecting between neocon flavors for his National Security
Advisers. What a joke of a nation!
Mark , May 25, 2019 at 02:30
I appreciate the article, but it doesn't mention Israel, which is the fountainhead of the agenda to take out Iran, Iraq,
and Syria. Bolton stands out for his extremity among extremists, but he's a means rather than the end. The agenda is something
into which he bought, passionately by all indications, but which a paucity of other people created strictly to advance their
own, tiny, exclusive clan, not for the benefit of the United States.
Hank , May 25, 2019 at 09:43
To think that this administration campaigned on a promise to restrict future wasteful and needless interventions and then
hired this dinosaur of a warmonger makes my blood curl! Everyone with half a brain knows what Bolton's agenda is yet here he
is leading the USA into a war at the behest of a foreign nation led by a felon and terrorist! The American people who want peace
and their tax dollars invested into improving the USA have once again been stabbed in the back by a conniving administration.
Will this cycle of non-democracy ever end? Until it does, future administrations will continue on just like previous ones- kowtowing
to special interests, in particular the military/industrial mafia and the apartheid criminal state of Israel! All this massive
business of holding "elections" in the USA, all the talk about "Russian collusion" and the REAL collusion is right there in
front of us all- the US administration has once again COLLUDED to go back on a campaign promise and once again open the money
trough for the military/industrialist pigs!
Mark , May 26, 2019 at 05:31
I get the idea, but it's necessary to look 'behind' back-stabbing, conniving, colluding administrations, and Bolton, and
the military/industrial complex, and to bring Israel and some barely known U.S. history, at least back to World War I, explicitly
to the fore for public scrutiny. That's a monumental task, to say the least, owing to American attention spans and the contrary
interests of the powers that be.
Taras77 , May 24, 2019 at 20:24
Bolton has his own well funded PAC, from which he is free to "contribute" (bribe) sychophant congress individuals. What a
situation for the fix for war.
"Overall, 28 sitting senators have received sizable contributions from John Bolton PAC during the election cycle, as
have nine representatives on the House defense, foreign affairs, and homeland security subcommittees."
ricardo2000 , May 24, 2019 at 17:29
By far the most productive, and most verifiable, way to eliminate weapons is at a negotiating table. The easiest way to start
a war is with ignorant blather.
O Society , May 24, 2019 at 16:09
Don't forget who told Donald Trump to hire John Bolton. It was Steve Bannon and Roger Ailes.
They like Bolton because he is "incapable of empathy and good on Israel."
Trump initially declined on Bolton because "he doesn't like Bolton's moustache."
Kool Aid drinkers and idiots. We're being lead by a cult of morons who worship the bombs, money, and a white separatist state.
i doubt the iranians will test a nuke until after djt is out of office. after that you might wake up one morning and everything
you knew before becomes quite obsolete.
my guess is israel has stealth cruise missiles with h bombs. it would be very foolish of them to not have them. those descendants
of egyptian slaves are anything but foolish.
Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:33
@ CitizenOne: Thank you for your long comment. I agree with much of what you wrote, but would like to know why you claimed,
"Iran is surely guilty of vowing the destruction of Israel " . According to what I've read, Iran has not initiated hostilities
with any nation for over a century – a clear, peaceful contrast to the rogue states of Israel & the U.S. Are you referring to
the long-ago-debunked claim that Iran claimed to 'wipe Israel off the map'?
(See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/14/post155
? "So there we have it. Starting with Juan Cole, and going via the New York Times' experts through MEMRI to the BBC's monitors,
the consensus is that Ahmadinejad did not talk about any maps. He was, as I insisted in my original piece, offering a vague
wish for the future.
"A very last point. The fact that he compared his desired option – the elimination of "the regime occupying Jerusalem" –
with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran makes it crystal clear that he is talking about regime change, not the end of Israel.
")
Or perhaps you're referring to Revolutionary Guard deputy leader Hossein Salami's warning that if Israel starts an aggressive
war against Iran, it 'will end with {Israel's} elimination from the global political map'? IMHO, warning an extremely aggressive,
self-obsessed, Apartheid-practicing rogue state against trying to attack your nation is wise ;-) .
I look forward to your response. Thanks very much.
Sam F , May 27, 2019 at 06:12
Sam: please use an identifier initial as I do, to prevent confusion.
I have asked you twice before; perhaps not the same person.
It is unfair to expect others to make the clarification, and easy to prevent.
How is it that crazies like Bolton can end up high in our government hierarchy? It is because the whole damned government
is crazy through and through
Joe , May 23, 2019 at 20:48
His Dad probably made a huge donation to Yale just like Bush's Dad. That's what happens when the system is gamed.
Art Thomas , May 25, 2019 at 09:22
Yes, in my opinion. The state stripped of patriotic rhetoric and other obfuscations that keep us devoted to it is nothing
more than a criminal gang that hides behind the law.
Some basic examples. 1. The law: taxation, the crime: theft. 2. The law: monetary credit expansion, i.e. debt financing,
the crime: counterfeiting, i.e. creating money out of thin air. 3. The invasion of countries not a threat to the invading state.
Etc. etc.
Tiu , May 23, 2019 at 18:30
If the US "political establishment" was working for America's benefit, things would look very different.
They are instead working on the "globalist" agenda, which will, if successful, destroy all nations as we know them today and
what remains will be ruled over by a bunch of sociopaths who are the same group that has inflicted John Bolton on the world.
Bolton's a tool, a bit like a hammer, to get their project done. The Democrats have equivalent tools e.g. H R Clinton.
Mark Thomason , May 23, 2019 at 18:04
The problem is if he hasn't gone too far. If he gets his war.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:53
John Bolton should get to ride the missile in the remake of Dr. Strangelove.
evelync , May 23, 2019 at 19:53
hah hah hah
I loved that movie :)
and yes Bolton is a perfect caricature of Slim Pickens AKA Dr Strangelove.
I also refer to him as Yosemite Sam
one difference for our current real life war monger is that the movie character was simply insane and didn't justify his
craziness with explanations.
Bolton, OTOH, blames "national Security" and "the national interests" of this country .say what????
if we look at the horrific human costs and the enormous financial costs of the wars that were fought for U.S. "national interests"
one would want to ask, once the rubble had cleared, what "interests" were actually served and whose "security" did they actually
improve?
The answers always take us back to Eisenhower's MIC and Ray McGovern's MICIMATT (maybe I got a couple of these letters wrong?).
Whoever profited from the mayhem don't represent either our "national interest' or our "national security" IMO and yet those
two phrases are used to shut down any discussion or criticism in the lead up .
whew
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:20
Strictly about the movie – Slim Pickens plays the ranking officer on the B-52 (I think?) which is actually dropping the bomb.
Dr Strangelove is a totally different character, one of a few played by Peter Sellers in that movie, and is a (mostly!) wheelchair-bound
German scientist.
And the wheelchair bound psychopathic scientist of Dr. Strangelove was inspired by Kubrick meeting Henry Kissinger at a cocktail
party and recognizing that Kissinger was the most evil person on this planet because he looked and sounded so responsible and
rational.
Now that Saddam, bin Laden, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler are dead, Kissinger holds the record of the person still alive who has
needlessly killed more people, both Americans and non-Americans, than any other person on this planet.
Hillary's idea of destabilizing Libya and creating a political vacuum there was from her training when working for Kissinger.
Abe , May 23, 2019 at 16:51
The Pathology:
John Bolton
Senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Chairman of Gatestone Institute (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former board member of Project for the New American Century (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Former Adviser to Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (pro-Israel Lobby organization) https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/john-bolton/
Mike Pompeo
Christian Zionist: "We will continue to fight these battles, it is a never ending struggle until the Rapture."
Associate of Center for Security Policy (pro-Israel Lobby organization)
Sponsor of ACT! for America (pro-Israel Lobby organization) https://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/mike-pompeo/
Sam , May 27, 2019 at 00:38
@ Abe: Thanks for the info!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:42
John Bolton is obviously a very sick puppy.
This is patently obvious to any observer with the least desgree of psyhological sophistication and insight.
If he lived on your block and made such statements about his neighbors, or a woman living nearby, he would be looking at restraining
orders.
He is an out-of-control abusive pig who belongs in an institution where a course of shock therapy might actually help him. I
reckon any basic psychological test would find that he has a least borderline personality and at worst is actually insane and
incapable of taking responsibility for the consequences of his action.
Bolton has permanent termporary insanity.
Letting this tortured, psychopathic individual run the military is itself an enormous crime, one of murderous negligence, one
for which Trump truly should and could be impeached. Congress must take all possible steps to get this man out of the Executive
Branch.
Threaten Trump with impeachment if he doesn't fire Bolton.
His appointment of Bolton is reckless negligence and endangers this country.
James , May 23, 2019 at 19:09
I wonder how good American politicians of the past, if there were any, would react to the appointment of this psychopath
as what he is now. Whom should be blamed for it? Donald Trump? The pro-Israeli lobbies? Or the American nation? A glance at
the man's face is enough to realize that he is deeply sick. To me, he doesn't look like a human being at all! He looks like
a monkey out of a stuffy room. Why don't psychotherapists do anything about him? Shouldn't he be hospitalized for the safety/security
of the world population? By the way, I wonder where Netanyahu, the psychopath's provoker, is. He has been very quiet for about
a month or so. Maybe he is waiting for the war to ignite without getting himself directly involved in it. Let Americans and
Iranians kill one another while he waits to pick up the fruit in the end.
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:27
Where does the blame lie? Who hired him? Who's the chief of the executive branch? Who's a person who could actually fire
him (as he's so famous for doing on reality TV shows) instead of wringing his hands on friendly TV networks declaring he doesn't
want to actually go to war, but if he's 'forced' to, he'll erase Iran from the map?
Druid , May 26, 2019 at 03:16
He would have to get permission from Adelson and the Mercers first.
CitizenOne , May 24, 2019 at 20:52
Bolton and Pompeo are the only things keeping him from impeachment. As long as Trump satisfies the bloodthirsty war mongers
and the insatiable appetite of the MIC and the Pro Israel lobby and the Oil Lobby or Koch Industries he cannot lose. So far
Trump is bangin on all cylinders. I really think he knows what he needs to do to survive. All this impeachment talk is just
fantasy by the left dreaming about getting him out of office "somehow".
bjd , May 23, 2019 at 16:13
That the mono-maniacal psychopath Bolton is a walking exhibit of the Dunning–Kruger effect is no surprise to me. It is extra
frightening though.
Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:00
What was Bolton's day job before he started mucking around in politics and foreign policy? Master waterboarder or testicular
electrificator in extraordinary renditions for the CIA? He seems the sort to have spent much time at Abu Ghraib, and not just
to take notes. Honestly, his major goals seem to be the eradication of entire cultures and societies, which will somehow redound
to the magnificence of the United States of America. Clearly a sociopathic personality. A lot in common with Cheney.
Jimmy G , May 23, 2019 at 15:57
Again the panic is stirred by .. The NYT! (The source of such good info regarding Russia gate) .
The statement regarding Bolton " ordering" anything is just one more example of the media and the intel bureaucrats trying to
put the President in a jam politically . (Remember how a month ago we were invading Venezuela?)
Bolton is doing nothing more than getting enough rope to hang himself, and the military intelligence service, congressional
and media Trumpophobes are willing to stir this to the very edge, and we all know Congress could (if it could act in good Constitutional
faith, rather than pretending to be the judicial branch) unite for the good of this country and Trump would be amenable to whatever
they came up with. Trump is far less of a warmonger than any POTUS we've had in a very long time.
Realist , May 23, 2019 at 16:18
If Congress is the only branch of government with the constitutional power to declare a war, surely it has the power to FORBID
the executive branch from fomenting such a war against their judgement.
In fact, wasn't the Boland Amendment such a legislative act passed with the intent of preventing the Reagan administration
from pursuing military action in Central America, most notably Nicaragua and El Salvador?
What's to prevent the Congress, if it were so inclined (which I doubt it is) to instruct the president (especially if he
seems trigger-happy) to refrain from initiating any unprovoked attacks upon Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or any other country,
for that matter?
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:56
Ollie North worked for Reagan, didn't he?
RnM , May 25, 2019 at 17:27
Trump is very aware that 'Stache Bolton and Mike "Mumbles" Pompeo are significant threats to his re-election. Would not be
surprised to see them removed before January.
CitizenOne , May 25, 2019 at 21:02
The NYT has indeed supported wars but it is not alone nor is this a recent trend. There is a very old trend of the commercial
news establishments becoming war hawks and regurtitators of official propaganda whenever the USA wants to pick a fight. It goes
back to the period after the establishment of the nation when expansionism set its roots down and what grew out of that is pretty
much the same kind of nationalistic propaganda we see today.
I agree with your statement that Trump is far less vulnerable based on his history but I am sure that the war planners are
always concocting special information diets that are carefully prepared to appeal to the particular tastes of the leader of
the day. Whatever Trumps opinion is he will be surrounded by the hand picked lunatics of the day who will entice and enjoin
him to agree with plans for war based on their carefully prepared menu of propaganda specifically designed to be appealing to
the palate of whoever is in charge.
It is less certain that Trump's long history of opposing military action will have real staying power as he is served up
courses of a sumptuous meal prepared specially for his palate designed to engage him in support for military action all over
the World.
Trump is particularly susceptible to flattery and appeals to his greatness and his very stable genius. He wants to be the
great leader and for that he needs a plan to deal with the geopolitical situation in many countries.
Trump is a man who knows what to do too.
He advised Germany that it was a puppet of Russia until he didn't
He advised Teresa May how to do Brexit the right way until he didn't
He announced to the World he had forged deep connections with North Korea until he didn't
He had high hopes for an alliance with Russia until he didn't.
He specified the right type of fire fighting to be used to fight the Notre Dame Cathedral fire until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the fight in Syria until he didn't
He wanted to walk away from the war in Syria again until he didn't
He wanted to cut the military budget until he didn't
Ordinarily if we were in the middle of a democratic presidency the press would be raising the "flip flopper" argument every
second of their available airtime.
Democrats are the flip floppers but never a republican even when he is. It all depends on the way the flips and the flops
land. If they land on conservative positions then a flop or a flip never occurred. With republicans, flip flopping is just a
corrective action to realign the president on the correct course. If it is a democrat then their hypocrisy and flip flopping
are broadcast 24/7 and are portrayed a fundamentally disqualifying events which demonstrate a fundamental lack of principles
and weakness of character deserving of condemnation. When errant republicans flip flop over to the "correct" vision they are
welcomed with open arms into the fold.
Trump wants to be accepted so badly that the democrats hounding him are in fact herding him into the fold of the conservatives
who will shelter him and support him at all costs and the media will never ever ever never call this flip flopping.
In short, if a political candidate shifts to the left his integrity will be destroyed as his character will be portrayed
as weak and built on shifting sands. He will be deemed not to be trusted like some loose cannon.
On the other hand, if a political candidate shifts to the right he will be greeted as a prodigal son returning to the fold
and will be welcomed with open arms.
So I am not as sure as you that Trump's background will be any indicator of his future ideas about how to succeed in the
environment he is in where both democrats by their antagonism and republicans by their defense of him both push him over to
the right.
He may once have been far less of a war hawk but politicians on both sides of the aisle are pushing him further to the right
every day.
Consortium News editor Joe Lauria may wish to contribute a follow up series of articles detailing the purity of pro-Israel
Lobby pathology exemplified by Bolton, Pompeo, and the beyond troubling Trump preferably before the next war.
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 19:33
"the wider extent of pro-Israel Lobby pathology in the US government. "
That's it in a nutshell.
KiwiAntz , May 24, 2019 at 18:46
Thanks Joe for the great article. Bolton (aka the moustache) truly is a humourless, warmongering, depraved psycho? This is
a cowardly man who dodged the Vietnam draft as he didn't want to die in some foreign patty field! But this lunatic has no qualms
to send other peoples sons & daughters into a Iranian war zone as cannon fodder to satisfy his deluded & perverted bloodlust
to destroy Iran? If "the moustache" wants a War with Iran he should be forced to fight on the frontlines with his troops along
with POTUS Bonespurs Trump, another cowardly draft dodger? Let the moustache & the Dotard make a stand, like Jon Snow in the
Battle of the bastards, sword in hand, facing down the so called Iranian, bogeyman enemy, but this would never happen as cowards
& bastards like Bolton & Trump don't personally fight in the battles they start, they hide in safety in a Washington situation
room, as far away from any War zone as possible! If Bolton gets his War with Iran, Trump will pay the price for this suicide
mission because he would be blamed for the fallout of any Military defeat! America's already sorry record of Military humiliation
& defeat in Regime change operations around the Globe would reach a crescendo if they ever dared to try to attack & overthrow
Iran as it would be the endgame of the US Empire!
mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:28
Trump is just Israel's bitch.
incontinent reader , May 24, 2019 at 01:08
Good comment, Abe. We've missed you. Keep posting more of the same.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:37
We Americans were bloodthirsty long before Israel existed.
anon , May 25, 2019 at 06:35
What an absurd zionist troll post. Try it with someone dumb, Zhu.
Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 15:17
First Joe, McKinley did not implement American submission to British Imperialism, though it began with the end of Grant's
administration as with the twice elected Groucher Cleveland, but it's confirmation as US policy began with Teddy Roosevelt.
The Roosevelt Corollary destroyed JQA's Community of Principle in the Americas which should be known as the true Monroe Doctrine,
contrary to popular opinion today which has incorrectly replaced the Monroe Doctrine with the Roosevelt Corollary (as Bolton
is especially want to do). TR signalled the end of the Lincoln Era of American industrial development and global cooperation,
which was best represented by Grant, the most overlooked of great Presidents (and perhaps we see similarities of Grant to Trump
today). Bolton indeed is Captain Kangaroo, presiding over his Court as the Queen of No Hearts would in Alice's confrontation
with British rule once she penetrates behind the facade of British Lockean empiricism. With insight only equalled to Lincoln's,
who said "We can't fight two wars at once, so first the Confederacy and then the British," Trump has identified the fascist
nexus within our government as that same British foe, a nexus led by Brennan, Rice, Clapper, Jarrett, et al, which works on
behalf of what Eisenhower (another overlooked great President and General) called the Military Industrial Complex. The MIC is
a British Intelligence deployment to fundamentally undermine our Constitution and put the US into a state of perpetual war and
police surveillance. It is now over 70 years in the making, and is enforcing a new Cold War and attempted coup of our elected
Government, and yet, it may have finally found its match, not just in Trump, but in Trump's intended cooperation with Putin
of Russia and Xi of China. These three nations, along with Modi of India (just reelected) are a true threat to this rotten British
system, from Fabian liberals to Bolton chickenhawks, the true enemy is this British System. If we move on that effectively,
we may just have a chance to win this revolutionary moment now unfolding throughout the trans-Atlantic world. Let us return
to JQA's community of principle for the entire world. Let us work with Trump to end this fascist British nexus. Let us celebrate
our true heritage as Americans!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:51
Your comments read with interesting and well taken.
BUT: The bottom line is that Trump hired Bolton (and Pompeo) and has wound him up and set him loose goosewalking across the
globe.
Why?
The buck for Bolton's suicidal buffonery stops with Trump.
So, I can't see him as a genuine foe of the Deep State-MIC as you describe.
Michael Steger , May 23, 2019 at 18:10
Bolton is loyal to Trump, even though he is a failed chickenhawk. Look at McMaster, at the leaking, and outright betrayal
of the President. Same with Tillerson, betrayal. Pompeo and Bolton have ridiculous views and bloated war rhetoric, but they're
personally loyal, perhaps opportunistically, and even temporarily, but nonetheless right now they are, and when they're not,
I bet they're gone. But Trump does control the policy. Look at North Korea, any war? Media said there would be, then worked
to undermine a deal. Venezuela, war? They're talking in Norway now, how'd that happen? Syria, troops out? MIC, Dems and Media
opposed, and Trump called them out for the first time since Eisenhower! Pompeo to Sochi to see Putin, progress. How'd that happen?
Trump is fighting the MIC and too many good Americans are spinning so fast from the propaganda machine they can't see straight.
anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 18:40
Interesting, but it is easy for a president to fight the MIC: simply fire and arrest anyone who acts against efforts to control
them. He could send any federal enforcement agency, FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, reserves, national guard, or even the Coast
Guard, Secret Service, DC police, or private guards to arrest them and prosecute any resisters as traitors. It is not one man
against the MIC.
And they cannot assassinate him once he has announced that intention, without exposing their hand and unleashing a generation
of purges and strict controls. If he is surrounded by traitors, he has only to say that and fire the lot of them. He could leak
that anonymously to Wikileaks or tweet it and they would be terrified.
Mork D , May 25, 2019 at 01:48
Bolton has been working DC bureaucracy like a pro for decades. He's using Trump like a marionette while he runs circles around
the amateur. He was helping orchestrate foreign wars of choice back when Trump was still playing a pretend boss on TV. Bolton
has no loyalty except as a facade for those he needs to suck up to.
Your examples of non-wars are terrific. Trump is amazing! – because he's running the government so badly that the State Dept
doesn't know what the Pentagon is doing doesn't know and vice versa. He chose to ignore the Iran nuclear deal, which had prevented
Iran from developing nuclear weapons. So now, the Iranians declare (out of self defense) that they're now going to pursue nuclear
weapons. Trump then says that he doesn't want to attack Iran, but they must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. This
is a circular argument exactly of the type the MIC uses to engage in war. Pompeo then indicates that laughable, ineffectual
attempts at sabotage are most likely Iranian. This grave threat to our nation can't even do enough damage to an oil tanker to
make it take on water.
Just because someone fails to do something doesn't mean that they were against it the whole time. Maybe they're just awful
at it. Sure, Trump says some things that are heartening to the anti-war and anti-interventionist crowd. But the next day he'll
say something heartening to rabid neocons. He needs to grow a spine, but it's far too late. He's a dandy, a spoiled rich kid
fop who's never had to answer for his mishaps, because why, when you have inherited money and a stout legal team?
anon4d2 , May 24, 2019 at 19:06
The idea that "the MIC is a British Intelligence deployment" is fantastical, as the US MIC is several times the size of UK's
entire MIC, and such a secret could never be kept. The US MIC has engaged UK secret agencies to subvert the US Constitution
by serving as agents to pass intercepted US communications back to the US to pretend that the MIC didn't do it, or that it was
foreign intel. But that is a long way from UK controlling the US MIC.
There are certainly confluences of interests between the US and UK oligarchies, but I see no basis for the contention that
"American submission to British Imperialism began with the end of Grant's administration" when the US prosecuted Britain for
building the Alabama etc. to break the Union blockade, and was outraged that Britain considered recognition of the Confederacy
until it lost at Gettysburg. The US under TR was not submitting to anyone when it sent the Great White Fleet on tour, or when
it seized Cuba and the Philippines. Nor under Wilson when it stayed out of WWI until very late in the war, despite the Lusitania
loss. Nor under FDR when it stayed out of WWII until attacked, despite the passionate pleas of Churchill.
Some detailed argument with credible references would be needed to support those assertions.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:44
Scapegoating is real popular with lefties & rughties alike. American Exceptionalism forbids we ever accept respobility for
what we've done.
Zhu , May 25, 2019 at 01:45
No, the rest of humanity is not any better.
anon4d2 , May 25, 2019 at 06:48
The commenter was searching for causes, and some UK conspiracy is simply too far from any available evidence. In fact it
much appears to be a wild attempt to distract from the obvious causes including zionism, which you pretend is "scapegoating."
No, zionism is a principle corrupting factor in US politics, especially foreign policy.
If you don't see that, you must start learning the evidence, rather than relying on the presumption that it is mere scapegoating.
Otherwise you are serving their wrongful and racist tribal purposes, and others will presume that you know that.
Oscar Shank , May 26, 2019 at 07:24
Zhu knows it.
Vera Gottlieb , May 23, 2019 at 14:56
How much more peaceful the life on our entire planet would be if the Americans weren't around.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 16:58
Extend that to all humans, and the head of PETA would support the project.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:16
I doubt that. Nature hates a void.
Bethany , May 24, 2019 at 17:50
Exactly. Very well put.
Abe , May 23, 2019 at 14:19
Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, the first director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),
only served about one year of his second term.
Bustani was forced out by the U.S. government in April 2002 because he wanted international chemical weapons monitors inside
Iraq and thus was seen as impeding the US push for war against Iraq. The US accused Bustani of "advocacy of inappropriate roles
for the OPCW".
Since 2011, the United Nations has stood by a US-Saudi-Israeli Axis financed and armed the mercenary terrorist forces attacked
Syria. In addition to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, major support for terrorist mercenaries has provided
via NATO-member state Turkey, as well as Jordan. Israel has launched repeated air attacks and provided direct support for terrorist
forces in Syria.
From July 2010 to 2018, the Director-General of the OPCW was Turkish career diplomat Ahmet Uzumcu. Uzumcu served ambassador
to Israel from 1999 to 2002, and as the Permanent Representative of Turkey to NATO between 2002 and 2004.
Turkey has been the primary channel for mercenary terrorist forces assaulting the Syrian state. The remaining terrorist forces
in the Idlib Governorate continue to be supplied through Syria.
Since Uzumcu announced the creation of the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria on 29 April 2014, not a single OPCW report
has acknowledged these basic facts concerning the conflict in Syria.
Following a consensus recommendation by the OPCW Executive Council in October 2017. Spanish career diplomat Fernando Arias
was appointed to replace Uzumcu as Director-General of the OPCW. Previously, Arias served as Ambassador of Spain to the Netherlands
and the Permanent Representative of Spain to the OPCW. He also has served as Permanent Representative of Spain to the United
Nations in New York.
Uzumcu, and now Bustani, obviously understand that the appropriate role of the OPCW is to provide propaganda support for
"regime change" operations, and to say nothing contrary to the "narrative" endorsed by the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 17:52
The OPCW has certainly disgraced themselves in Syria. What a sham.
Randal Marlin , May 23, 2019 at 13:48
John Bolton's questioner in the second clip should have made the distinction between deception used to lead the country into
war, and deception used to pursue a war already constitutionally declared and already underway.
In the first case there is a violation of democratic principle. When the people are the ultimate sovereign, they need to be
properly informed. They can agree to deception, like where and when D-Day will occur, during war; but not in the case of leading
the people into war. Lying to Congress is always unacceptable, and those who do lie to Congress should be made to suffer serious
penalties.
zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 02:13
I read a report that the aircraft carrier strike force and preparation of 120,000 US troops, to Persian Gulf was ordered
sometime ago and that Bolton took advantage of that fact to make it look that 'Bolton ordered it'?
vinnieoh , May 24, 2019 at 10:54
What I'd read is that the carrier strike force and bomber detachment were previously scheduled: there had been a previous
drawdown and this deployment represents a return to a level similar to the end of the Iraq war, and that does sound like Bolton/Pompeo
opportunism. The 120,000 troops plan sounds like something Bolton prodded pentagon scribes to produce. How to interpret when
Bolton says that then Trump denies it, and then a new troop deployment (1% of the previous) is announced/suggested/leaked? I
see it as Trump taking his dogs out for a walk to snarl at the neighbors.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 13:07
"Thus Bolton was the driving force to get a carrier strike force sent to the Persian Gulf and, according to The New York
Times, on May 14, it was he who 'ordered' a Pentagon plan to prepare 120,000 U.S. troops for the Gulf."
That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton, may be giving
such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.
The National Security Advisor is, as the title states, merely an advisor – not confirmed by the Senate, and therefore not,
in constitutional terms, an "officer of the United States" with the authority to carry out the policy of the government. Other
than his assistant fetching him lunch, nobody in government should be following Bolton's orders at all while he holds this job.
But this is nothing new. I had the same concern, on an even larger scale, during the first Bush Jr. administration when Cheney
was running around reshaping the government in his own warped image. Despite the Vice President's elected status, he has no
executive power under the Constitution – no power at all, in fact, except when sitting as President of the Senate. There was
a time when everyone knew that.
With all the perennial crowing we see about the greatness of the Constitution, and the mewling about how Trump is degrading
it, it would be nice if Congress and the media could spare a moment to care about whether the people giving orders to the world's
largest military and covert/intelligence apparatus are legally empowered to do so.
Ash , May 23, 2019 at 17:17
> That the National Security Advisor, irrespective of whether the job is currently held by a lunatic like Bolton,
> may be giving such orders should in and of itself be a subject of serious inquiry by Congress and the media.
It does kind of have an Alexander Haig flavor to it, doesn't it?
David G , May 23, 2019 at 22:08
When Bolton gets up and says "I'm in control here", I'm definitely finding a rock to hide under.
Zenobia van Dongen , May 23, 2019 at 13:06
The question that Joe Lauria asked of John Bolton, i.e. "If the United States and Britain had not overthrown a democratically
elected government in Iran in 1953 would the United States be today faced with a revolutionary government enriching uranium?"
seems to imply that Iran seeks revenge against the US for the CIA's 1953 coup d'état against prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
However the current leaders of Iran are not entitled to consider themselves the heirs of Mossadeq, nor are they morally justified
in avenging him, since the CIA coup relied largely on support from the very same clerical establishment that now rules Iran.
As a matter of fact in the 1950s and 60s Shia clerics in Iran were routinely considered CIA agents. Consequently the Iranian
elite's pretense of carrying on Mossadeq's anti-imperialist struggle is profoundly hypocritical. I grant that the current reactionary
clique that governs Iran defends Iran's sovereignty against US imperialism as Mossadeq did. But the underlying concept of the
Iranian nation is profoundly different. The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty
that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist
revolution of 1909. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Constitutional_Revolution
Indeed, Iran has no hesitation in crushing underfoot the aspirations to independence of other nations. It ruthlessly conducts
ethnic cleansing in Syria, commits assassinations in South America, and in general behaves with imperialist ruthlessness that
is moreover unmitigated by any concern for human rights or international law.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 14:27
As to your last paragraph please provide proof for your allegations. As to your second paragraph you assume to know the meaning
behind the question Mr. Lauria asked. Could it be possible (this I believe is more likely) that what Mr. Lauria meant or realizes
that absent the '53 coup would there now be an Islamic theocracy ruling Iran?
Again making the disclaimer that I'm no expert on the region or Iran particularly I have followed many leads of reading and
investigation to understand the ramifications of that seminal event (the '53 coup.) What I believe I've understood is that Iran
prior to and until the '53 coup was on its own unique trajectory of reclaiming its sovereignty and rejecting its status as a
(UK) colonial vassal. There seemed to be a somewhat fluid acceptance of the rising democratic movement of Mosaddeq et. al.,
a fading nod to the former royal house, and an acceptance of Shiite religiosity of some considerable social legitimacy.
So, three centers of power and influence working its unique way to an unique Iranian future.
With the US/UK engineered coup the imperialists destroyed the legitimate democratic evolution happening there. With the re-installation
of the Shah Reza Pahlavi as the puppet ruler of the US, that traditional center of power and legitimacy was likewise forever
delegitimized in the eyes of most Iranians. That sentiment was cemented with the creation of SAVAK by the US, UK, and Israel
to be the iron fist of the Shah and his new imperial master.
That left only one center of power or authority which retained legitimacy in the eyes of Iranians – the Shiite theocrats,
and that is why when Iranians kicked the US out it was the Islamic theocracy doing the booting. You are correct that there was
at least one Shiite cleric (I've forgotten his name,) jealous and fearful of the rising influence of democratic governance,
who is a known and recorded collaborator with the US/UK machinations of the coup. Without the help of the US/UK his part in
the affair would probably have been inconsequential.
It is not Iran that is funding and establishing Islamic madrasses in Pakistan, India, China, Indonesia, Africa and elsewhere.
It is the Wahhabist Sunnis and they preach intolerance and violent jihad. Furthermore, of the total global population of adherents
of Islam, 75% are Sunni affiliated, and 25% are Shiite affiliated. Those percentages hold true in the immediate region of the
ME as well. The repeated claims of Iranian desires of empire are a shibboleth emanating from KSA and UAE.
The leaders of the Islamic Revolution used Mossadegh's image to help get people on board against the Shah, The National Front
was allowed to be a party again for a short time, and a Street in Tehran was renamed post-revolution for Mohammad Mossadegh.
This was a cynical ploy by the Mullahs to get people on board with their revolution and make people believe that they were indeed
the true heirs of Mossadegh and committed to democracy. It was all a sham. The National Front was made illegal again at some
point in the 80s, and the street named for Mossadegh was renamed around the same time. These people are the heirs of the Shah
whether they like it or not.
anon4d2 , May 23, 2019 at 16:59
Joe's question points out that, had the US not overthrown Mossadegh, there would have been a secular democratic government.
That is true throughout the Mideast, where in the 1950s-70s the US supported radical Islamic movements that suppressed secular
movements and overthrew secular governments, pretending that the USSR was moving in. There was no evidence of USSR interest
there, as it was preoccupied with such factions in its central Asian republics, and apparently only some arms from the USSR
in Egypt were ever found as "evidence."
Similar US actions have continued to date, almost 30 years after the collapse of the USSR, the US always supporting fanatics
against moderates like Assad and Ghaddafi, and pretending to support "democracy."
Compare the US support of Saudi Arabia, a fanatical fundamentalist monarchy engaged in terrorism throughout the region, including
against their only neighbor that defends minority rights, Syria. Again falsely claiming the need to protect oil supply, which
it can buy anywhere without bombing anyone, like any other oil buyer. Again falsely claiming to support democracy which it overthrows
everywhere at the pleasure of its own oligarchy, always to "protect Israel" or attack socialism, which is always to get political
bribes.
There is no evidence of any "ethnic cleansing" by Iran in Syria or elsewhere. Where do you get that idea? Iran is majority
Shiah, defending the majority Sunni population of Syria from Sunni fundamentalists. You certainly have no evidence that Iran
"commits assassinations in South America" or opposes "aspirations to independence of other nations" and made that up to deceive
others. Your comments on this site have been knowingly false.
zhenry , May 24, 2019 at 03:44
The above, re the current Iranian religious govt, very informative, thankyou.
Re Joe's article I cannot take seriously that Trump is against war and the Deep State.
If Trumps rhetoric during his electioneering, supporting the middle class (deeply deprived after the US corporations abandoned
them for low paid Chinese labour) was in any way honest he would not have chosen the cabinet he did (and keeps on choosing).
Trump has not chosen one cabinet member that would support that supposed sympathy for the middle class.
Reporting that assumes Trump is fighting for moderation (against his own cabinet) and to establish policies in the direction
of that sympathy, is without evidence, it seems to me, regardless of what he might suggest to Fox News.
Vonu , May 23, 2019 at 17:00
"The present régime has no respect for the principles of democracy and popular sovereignty that pervaded Iran's anti-imperialist
struggle in the 1950s and was derived from the democratic ideals of the Persian constitutionalist revolution of 1909."
And the American government has equal respect for the Constitution.
Bolton didn't order a carrier group to the Persian Gulf. He doesn't have the authority. The carrier group left because of
the deployment was already planned. Bolton does not have the power that has been ascribed to him. He is a grandiose clown who
knows how to play the press. I don't think he will have his job six months from now.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 12:16
"At the time of Bolton's appointment in April 2018, Tom Countryman predicted to The Intercept that if Iran resumed enrichment
after the U.S. left the deal, it 'would be the kind of excuse that a person like Bolton would look to to create a military provocation
or direct attack on Iran.' In response to ever tightening sanctions, Iran said that it would indeed restart partial nuclear
enrichment."
Two problems with this part of the article:
• The link in the main text here goes to an Intercept article about Bolton, but it has no mention of Tom Countryman, or even
of Iran.
• It isn't accurate to say that Iran may now, or is saying it will, "resume" or "restart" nuclear enrichment, since it never
ceased, nor did it ever commit to cease, such activity. The JCPOA merely imposed strict *limits* and monitoring on nuclear enrichment
and stockpiling, some of which Iran is saying it will now depart from.
I also disagree with the imputation elsewhere in the article that Donald Trump has a good understanding of real estate. His
disastrous, decades-long record in that business suggests otherwise. But I suppose some people will always believe what they
see on TV.
lou e , May 23, 2019 at 12:06
Creeping fascism works like fishing with a rod and reel. You hook the fish and it runs off 100 ft of line . You reel in 50
ft and the fish takes 30 feet back. Do the Math! Some times burning down the village IS the only way to get rid of the infestation.
Bit hard on the USSA, but as Ben Franklin put it you have a democratic republic IF ypu can Keep It.
Remember at an earlier time with Bolton, someone described him as a kiss up kick down kind of guy, i.e., a real jerk. I defended
Trump against Russiagate because it was a threat to the office of the president. Unless, he gets his head straight, his "political"
moves in the Middle East and Southwest Asia can spin out of control. He is not negotiating a new deal with some city to build
another hotel, and his rhetoric makes him sound like that is the way he thinks he should act with other countries.
One can defend him by saying maybe it will work, but then maybe not and it is not a matter of your target taking his papers
and leaving the room.
Great article, Mr. Lauria. Have you posted your resume on your site? Interested in your confrontation with Bolton.
Trump wants to be reelected more that being the President but in his defense we know what he will face if he decides to enter
into honest negotiations. He's going to have a heck of a time finding people to cover his back. He can count on one presidential
aspirant, Tulsi Gabbard but she's on the other side.
Jeff Harrison , May 23, 2019 at 11:42
If we have to rely on Thump for anything other than social controls, we're screwed.
David G , May 23, 2019 at 11:40
These personal reminiscences of Bolton at the U.N. by Joe Lauria unfortunately only confirm the man's very public record.
The fact that such a creature has been accepted for so long in the heart of U.S. foreign "policy" is yet more evidence that
the country's crisis of political culture started long before Trump came on the scene.
I don't quite accept the slight comfort implied in the formulations here that this time Bolton has "gone too far", or "flown
too high", since to me they imply that there is some moral or rational bedrock that he has struck beneath which the establishment
is not willing to go.
I don't think that's true, as a general proposition. For example, the U.S. continues less noisily but inexorably on its long-term
collision course with China, which will be even more catastrophic than war with Iran, not to mention the ultimate one with the
planet's environmental limits.
For me it's enough that, for a number of contingent reasons, Bolton's (and MBS's and Netanyahu's) lunge at Iran has fallen
flat with both U.S. and European policy and media elites – for now, and I hope forever.
I just called WH 202-456-1111 to tell President Trump that Bolton should be fired; had to wait 8 min to talk. Trump certainly
has lots of problems, but he'll have plenty more if he starts a war! Pox Americana!
Litchfield , May 23, 2019 at 16:58
Great idea.
I'll do the same.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:04
Thank you Mr. Lauria. I'm tending to believe that not only has Bolton flown too high, but Trump's predictable method of trying
to get what he wants was completely miscalculated wrt Iran. There is no better treaty or deal to be had concerning keeping Iran
from developing a nuclear weapon. The failures of the JCPOA that Trump is probably griping about all have to do with matters
of Iran's necessary and legitimate right to security and self-defense. No sane nation would willingly give in to this bullying.
Thanks again.
vinnieoh , May 23, 2019 at 11:44
Also, wrt Trump's predictable patterns, note that little if anything has changed regarding the US and the DPRK, so if he
is a crafty and effective negotiator I'm having a hard time seeing it.
David G. Horsman , May 23, 2019 at 18:22
Good example Vinnieoh. NK and SK are reaching out and (more importantly) shoving out the US. More winning.
I love Trump. He is useful. Fascism, NAFTA, generic racism you name it, he really shines a light on issues.
Here again. (Currently) SA, GAZA, Israel, Syria and of course Iran. Hell, the entire region. What a train wreck he is.
What about the dollar? The EU? Yikes.
By gosh this man could single handedly take down an empire! MAGA!
Well done, Joe Lauria. Of course our dilemma is Donald Trump says one thing and contradicts himself 5 minutes later. You
could say he "changes his mind" but I do not think his mind is stable to begin with. He's far too nuts to put any faith in for
"doing the right thing,"
Bolton and his neoconservative pox on the world serve the interests of the war machine and fossil fuel corporations. When
will be rid of them? When We the People grow a set of testicles and throw them all into prison. Trump isn't going to save us,
but he might let Bolton get us all killed.
Seems that Trump is so small minded that what we observe cannot be explained mechanistically, we need quantum mechanics.
Rather that a particular state of mind we have a stochastic distribution, wave patterns and spin.
Yes, Joe Lauria has presented the problem very well.
A major factor is certainly the persuasiveness of the NSC and other MIC entities which surround the president, and comprise
much of official DC. Try persuading anyone in the MIC that war is ever inappropriate: they are all full of extreme scorn and
false accusations, and have endless "evidence" of threats behind every tree, and rationales to attack this or at least that,
just to make "statements" and "warnings" to invisible foreign monsters. The MIC is a completely and permanently logic-proof
subculture of bullying, which bullies every member of its own tribe to line up behind tyrants like Bolton and a million other
puerile bullies devoid of humanity.
No doubt you know that this was all well understood by the founders of the US, who restricted federal military powers to
repelling invasions and knew that any standing military was a threat to democracy. The Federalist Papers should be required
reading in the US. All of those understandings were gradually lost after the War of 1812 and the 1820s, as the founders died
off. As the US became confident that it could repel any invasion, it lost the sense of the necessity of unity and cooperation
of regions, and Congress degenerated into a battle of intransigent factions leading to the completely unnecessary Civil War.
With the ebullient emergence of the middle class, no effort was made to correct the defects of the Constitution in failing to
protect the institutions of democracy from the rising power of economic concentrations. With WWI and WWII, the power of oligarchy
over mass media was consolidated, and by WWII the oligarchy and MIC effectively controlled elections, mass media, and the judiciary,
the tools of democracy. Democracy has been a facade ever since.
The US has zero security problems that the MIC has not created, and could at any time re-purpose 80% of the MIC to developing
infrastructure in the poorest nations with positive effects upon its security. Had it done so since WWII, we would have rescued
the poorest half of humanity from poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease, and would have had a true American Century.
Instead we have killed over 20 million innocents and mortgaged the lives of our children to serve the infantile psychopaths
of the MIC.
The solution is not only to eliminate the 2000-member NSC, cut the military by at least 80 percent, prohibit acts of war
or surveillance by the executive branch, tax the rich so that no one has income above upper middle class, and demand amendments
to the Constitution restricting funding of the mass media and elections to limited and registered individual donations. We also
desperately need a fourth branch of federal government, which I am calling the College of Policy Debate, to conduct moderated
textual debates of policy issues in all regions, protecting and representing every viewpoint, in which all views are challenged
and must respond, and all parties must come to common terms. The CPD should produce commented debate summaries available to
the public with mini-quizzes and discussion groups. Without that rational analysis and access to the core debates, we do not
have a democracy at all, we are all no more than the fools and pawns of these oligarchy scammers, who must be actively excluded
from all government capacities.
Sorry for the lecture.
Linda Wood , May 24, 2019 at 01:59
Please don't apologize, Sam F. Your brilliant and humane words give me hope at a time in which I am in shock at the blatancy
of fascism in our government.
Doggrotter , May 23, 2019 at 10:33
Where is a drone strike when you need one?
OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 10:23
" seemed to always think he was the smartest person in the room."
Useful fools are often most useful when they are believers that they are not fools.
Once upon a time there was a discussion of which of the opponents' should be proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize – the list
being relatively long.
After extensive analysis and discussion the short-list consisted of two opponents in alphabetical order Mr. John Bolton and
Mr. Karl Rove.
However in light of the notion "Do you think your opponents are as stupid as you are? " the proposal question was left in
abeyance, not only as a function of decorum but also through understanding that "Useful fools are often most useful when they
are believers that they are not fools." and that even small dogs can seem tall when you are lying on your stomach.
OlyaPola , May 24, 2019 at 17:33
Since omniscience can't exist perhaps Mr. Bolton was/is subject to misrepresentation and misunderstanding?
"Pompeo told a radio interviewer after the briefing that the U.S. had still not determined who attacked two Saudi, a Norwegian
and an Emirati oil tanker in the Gulf last week, which bore the hallmarks of a provocation. Pompeo said "it seems like it's
quite possible that Iran was behind" the attacks."
What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships? Smells of another false flag.
I would not be so sure. A delicate signal that Iran has more capabilities concerning stopping in-out-Gulf traffic than naive
people like Bolton realize has a sobering potential. By the way of contrast, what kind of black flag it is if it is instantly
put in doubt, "we do not know" etc. When there were "chemical incidents" in Syria, no one in Washington claimed the need for
more facts, uncertainty etc.
Instead, UAE initially denied that it happened at all, subsequently, together with KSA, they did not have any "certain knowledge".
Somehow no government appears to promote the incident. Even USA.
BTW, the allegation that Iran is placing missiles on fishing boats staggers the mind. First of all, "missile boats" of which
Iran has plenty are small ships, BUT NOT VERY small, ca. 500-800 tons, which are fast, 40 kt, but not as fast as their predecessors,
torpedo boats (200-300 tons, 50-60 kt). They are still faster than any of the larger naval vessels, can trail them, and attack
from small distance in the case of start of hostilities. That Iran places missiles on such boats can be learned from videos
proudly provided by PressTV.ir.
Using "fishing boats" for that purpose is dubious, and the largest question mark would be: WHY? The reason that missile boats
are larger and heavier than torpedo boats is that you need more stability to launch missiles than torpedoes. Then you need a
radar etc. Placing missiles on fishing boats would be a waste of missiles. Hardly an escalation.
OlyaPola , May 23, 2019 at 12:47
"Hardly an escalation."
Perhaps you are being deflected by framing?
One of the escalations is the escalation of belief in, requirement of, and resort to, the dumbed-downess of the "target audience".
One of the salient questions being deflected is why, and as ever investigation requires some knowledge of Mr. Heisenberg
and his principles.
mark , May 23, 2019 at 22:34
Perhaps the Iranians are putting missiles on fishing boats to stun the fish and catch them that way. Fishing boats aren't
exactly very fast.
Anyone who actually believes the oil tanker incidents were carried by Iran should seek an immediate consultation with their
doctor. These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools and Iranians are not fools.
Brian , May 23, 2019 at 17:22
Exactly. According navel personnel, Iran has been using fishing boats to transfer rockets from land to it's vessels for years,
supposedly because the gulf is too shallow. I don't have hydrographic maps of the area, anyone know if this is true?
Clearly, Persian Gulf has routes for the largest ships on Earth, but the supply bases for missiles may be away from ports,
and it would make sense to place them so they are not easily accessible to a big ship navy, and in general, to disperse them.
Tim , May 26, 2019 at 06:43
"Thomas"
> These blatant false flags clearly are the work of fools
Since neither you nor I know who did it, and there are a whole slew of plausible suspects, we don't know why they did it,
either. So it is silly to claim they are fools.
Since the Saudis and UAE are in the midst of waging war on Yemen, the most obvious suspects are their enemies there, al-Ansara.
(And by the way, contrary to what another commentator claimed, it was not a "few dents", but a gaping hole in the hull just
below the waterline. And since the local authorities spoke of an impact by an unidentified object, these were presumably torpedo
strikes.)
OlyaPola , May 26, 2019 at 07:58
"What possible advantage could accrue to Iran from putting a few dents in the ships?"
Quite a few including but not limited to further data on the opponents' perception of what constitutes plausible belief for
the opponents' target audience, and the opponents' increasing resort to, amplitude, scope and velocity of "misrepresentations".
As is the case with the benefits of dumbing down not accruing solely to those actively engaged in dumbing down, the benefits
of creation and implementation of "false flags" do not accrue solely to those engaged in "false flags", and are enhanced when
the creators and implementers of "false flags" are immersed in amalga of projection and notions of sole/prime agency, facilitating
potential benefits to many others not restricted to Iran.
The fiasco of the latest obviously unsuccessful US attempt to topple twice
democratically-elected President Nicolas Maduro made a laughing stock of the US government
throughout the world and is now exposing new splits in the Trump administration in Washington.
It is also exposing a dangerous but also ridiculous myth that Washington has credulously
swallowed for generations – the idea that National Security Adviser John Bolton is
actually competent.
No one among the carefully trained castrated geldings of the US mainstream news media and
their pseudo-liberal and libertarian outliers has ever dared to ask how able Bolton actually
is. He is held in awe and even fear for his supposed brilliant intellect and for his undoubted
energy and relentless determination to push the policies he supports with tunnel vision and
fanatical relentlessness as hard as he can.
Yet given such undeniable "qualities" what is truly astonishing is how useless Bolton has
been in pursuing his own primary foreign policy goals for more than 40 years. He failed to
prevent the first president to take him seriously, Ronald Reagan to conduct sweeping nuclear
arms reductions with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and to push ahead with Gorbachev to
dismantle the Cold War. These policies were anathema to Bolton who prophesied – falsely
– that war and catastrophe would flow from them. But Reagan ignored him and pushed them
through anyway.
Now Bolton has destroyed Reagan's legacy of peace by convincing current President Donald
Trump to scrap one of Reagan's greatest achievement, the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty.
He succeeded in helping provoke the US invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq under
President George W. Bush in 2003 but failed to persuade even Bush, Junior and his top foreign
policy adviser, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to pull out
of any arms control treaties whatsoever.
Then, the Iraq misadventure was so appallingly bungled that Bolton failed to get any
traction whatsoever for his priority project of toppling the government of Iran, even if it
took a full scale war to do it.
In Washington, even Bolton's greatest critics among libertarians and paleo-conservatives
have spoken for decades with awe of his supposed brilliant intellect, command of all details,
endless energy and ability to read and keep track of everything. But now, the latest failed
coup in Venezuela instead reveals an ignorant, simplistic rash adventurer and gambler who
charges head on into dangerous situations and who relies on bullying and bluster alone to get
his way.
Bolton showed none of the ruthless, devious subtlety of a Dwight D. Eisenhower in
masterminding a coup and fragrant breach of international law without appearing to have
anything to do with it (a skill which Ronald Reagan, though far less masterful than the revered
Eisenhower also attempted in Iran-Contra).
Bolton's fingerprints were all over the hard-charging policy of propping up ridiculous Juan
Guiado as America's cardboard cutout puppet to run Venezuela, even though he had no credibility
whatsoever.
Bolton is in fact is an awesomely bad judge of choosing his own allies in other countries.
His combination of recklessness and vanity means he is always a sucker for whatever
smooth-talking sociopath can worm his way into his presence.
This explains how the late, unlamented Ahmed Chalabi was able to convince Bolton and his
neocon friends that he (Chalabi)) would be welcomed by tens of millions of Iraqis as soon the
US armed forces invaded ("liberated" was the politically approved term) his country and how
Zalmay Khalizad, a catastrophic clown, was acclaimed as an infallible guru on Afghanistan.
Bolton is widely known to have no small talk, private interests, charm or social skills
whatsoever. Far from confirming his "genius", as his many worshipful courtiers claim, this only
confirms his haplessness.
If Bolton played poker he would be skinned alive. He cannot read people and being an
obsessive courtier and flatterer himself, he always falls flat on his face for the flattery of
others. The arch-manipulator is in reality the easiest of figures to manipulate.
Once the strange miasma of worshipful myth is stripped from Bolton, all the confusions and
bungles of the April 30 Coup That Never Was in Venezuela become clear.
The US is closer to war with Iran
than it has been since the Bush years, or perhaps ever. And Bolton is largely to blame
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited.' Photograph: Jim Young/Reuters Donald
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton wants the United States to go to war with
Iran .
And everything that the Trump administration has done over its Iran policy, particularly since Bolton became Trump's top foreign
policy adviser in April of 2018, must be viewed through this lens, including the alarming US military posturing in the Middle East
of the past two weeks.
Just after one month on the job, Bolton
gave Trump
the final push he needed to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, which at the time was (and still is, for now) successfully
boxing in Iran's nuclear program and blocking all pathways for Iran to build a bomb. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)
– as the Iran deal is formally known – was the biggest obstacle to Bolton's drive for a regime change war, because it eliminated
a helpful pretext that served so useful to sell the war in Iraq 17 years ago.
Since walking away from the deal, the Trump administration has claimed that with a "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, it
can achieve a "better deal" that magically turns Iran into a Jeffersonian democracy bowing to every and any American wish. But this
has always been a fantastically bad-faith argument meant to obscure the actual goal (regime change) and provide cover for the incremental
steps – the crushing sanctions, bellicose rhetoric, and antagonizing military maneuvers – that have now put the United States closer
to war with Iran than it has been since at least the latter half of the Bush administration, or perhaps ever.
In his White House statement 10 days ago announcing (an already pre-planned) carrier and bomber deployment to the Middle East,
Bolton cited "a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" from Iran to justify the bolstered US military presence.
But multiple sources who have seen the same intelligence have since
said
that Bolton and the Trump administration blew it "out of proportion, characterizing the threat as more significant than it actually
was". Even a British general operating in the region pushed back this week,
saying he has seen no evidence of an increased Iranian threat.
What's even more worrying is that Bolton knows what he's doing. He's "a
seasoned bureaucratic infighter
who has the skills to press forcefully for his views" – and he has a long history of using those skills to undermine American
diplomacy and work toward killing arms control agreements.
As a senior official in the George W Bush administration,
he played key role
in the collapse of the Agreed Framework, the Clinton-era deal that froze North Korea's plutonium nuclear program (the North Koreans
tested their first bomb four years later).
He said
he "felt like a kid on Christmas day" after he orchestrated the US withdrawal from the international criminal court in 2002.
And now as a senior official in the Trump administration, he
pushed
for the US to withdrawal from a crucial nuclear arms treaty with Russia.
While it's unclear how much of a role he played in scuttling Trump's negotiations with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi last year, he publicly
called for the so-called
"Libya model" with the North Koreans (in other words, regime change by force). Just months before joining the administration, he
tried to make the
legal case for a preventive war against Pyongyang. And if you think he cares about the aftermath of war with North Korea, he
doesn't. Bolton was reportedly
"unmoved" by a presentation during his time in the Bush administration of the catastrophic consequences of such a war. "I don't
do war. I do policy," he said then.
So far, Bolton has been successful in moving the United States toward his desired outcome with Iran – if getting the Pentagon
to draw up plans to send
120,000 US troops to the region to confront Iran is any indication. There are hopeful signs that we can avoid war, as US officials
and our European allies, seemingly alarmed by what Bolton is up to, are
sounding the alarm about
the Trump administration skewing intelligence on Iran.
But Bolton is on a fast track, seemingly aware that Trump's time in office may be limited. The question, ultimately, is whether
the president can stick to his instincts of avoiding more military conflict, or acquiesce to a man hellbent on boxing him into a
corner with no way out other than war with Iran.
Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress
@FB Yeah brother that
POS was called out during his confirmation hearings during baby bush's presidency. Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to
anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced
to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions.
Someone said they saw him proposition a teenage girl outside one of the swinger clubs he frequented.
@SeekerofthePresence
Thank you your comment is very much appreciated. But I'm definitely not a spokesman for moral truth, just the truth. I just watch
in amazement from Mexico at what the US government has become. A den of the most vile people ever assembled in the world far worse
than the people that demanded the crucification of Jesus Christ. We just went through a serious political conversion, but the
people had to hit the streets for it to succeed. I just don't think the American people feel they are in a do or die situation,
and they couldn't more wrong.
U.S. Foreign Policy used to have only two instruments in
dealing with rest of the world, namely carrots and sticks. Since the fall of Soviet Union and
certainly after 9/11, only sticks remain. Now the World including the so-called allies are
getting tired of the threats and start ignoring the Empire, hence the diminishing
effectiveness, paving the way for polymorphic World. This transition is fraught with dangers as
pointed out by the Author.
Lovely post by Ret. Col. Douglas Macgregor on the end of empire:
"John Bolton is the problem"
"Trump's national security adviser is getting dangerous particularly to the president's
ideals"
Douglas Macgregor https://spectator.us/john-bolton-problem/
Could also be titled, "How to Exhaust an Empire."
Sun Tzu warned of the same demise in the "Art of War."
Didn't they used to teach that book at West Point?
@El Dato
And also the 90 minute Trump-Putin phone call, where Venezuela was the main subject
From the way I understand Trump's comments afterward, it seems the military option is off
the table the two presidents agreed that humanitarian aid is the priority
This is great news I have to give Trump credit here Justin Raimondo presciently opined a
week ago that Trump may have been giving the 'walrus' just enough rope on Venezuela to hang
himself
I have to wonder what Vlad whispered in carrot top's ear
When we take a close look at the American Government and it's elected officials, we can only
come to one conclusion. The US is a thriving criminal enterprise that uses force to get what
they want. The military's role is that of enforcers and the US President is no different than
a Mafia Don. In no other time in US history has Government and Organized Criminal Gangs been
so indistinguishable. George H.W. Bush with his New World Order announcements, his CIA drug
dealing operations and military invasion of Panama to steal the drug cartel's money deposited
in that county's banks, came close. Bill Clinton working with George H.W. Bush protecting
drug shipments smuggled into Mena, AK, the cover up of murdered witnesses and numerous sexual
assault allegations also came pretty close.
But when George W. Bush, Dick Chaney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld came into power,
that was a Mafia if there was ever one. That group of criminals stole more money and murdered
more people than any criminal organization in history. They even conned the American people
into believing some rag-heads in Afghanistan hiding in caves did it. It was the first time
since Pancho Villa that anyone attacked the US on its own soil. Not only did they steal all
the gold stored in bank vaults located in the Twin Towers, but they put money on the stock
market. In true gangster fashion the next move was to retaliate against the Muslim Mafia who
was fingered by Mayer Lanski (Benjamin Nuttenyahoo) and their own paid snitches (MSM). It was
time to hit mattresses and send their enforcers to get payback so the Purple Gang (Israel)
can take over their territory.
There is a big difference between the US Government and the Mafia when it comes to war,
the Mafia adheres to a strict code of ethics, they do not target their enemies families.
In 2016 the American people elected a true gangster from New York city. A known con man, a
swindler, a tax evader and known associate of the criminal underground. A man with numerous
court cases and 23 accusations of sexual assault. A man who was screwing a porn star while
his wife was given birth. A man who's mentor was Roy Cohen a mob attorney and practicing
homosexual who died of AIDS. A man that surrounded himself with the most perverted group of
people in New York such as: Roger Stone a well known swinger and gay pride participant. Paul
Manafort a convicted criminal and swinger who attended the same clubs as Stone along with
their wives. They liked to watch their wives get screwed by other men. Lets not forget John
Bolton who was exposed by Larry Flint for also being a swinger. His ex-wife accused him of
forcing her to perform sex acts with multiple men at the same clubs the other 2 cuckolds
attended. A Russian agent once commented that the best place to find government people to
blackmail was the New York swingers scene.
Jeffery Epstein tops the list of perverted friends of Donald Trump. Epstein is the worst
kind of perverted human being. The predator pedophile that uses his money to lure young girls
into his sick world. Epstein holds the key to uncovering the nation wide pedophile ring that
include some of the most famous people in the US. This is Trump's Mafia, a Mafia not like the
Gambinos or Luchesis. A Mafia full of Perverts, Criminals, Pedophiles and Cuckolds. These are
just a few of the people in Trump's circle of friends. If these are your leaders, what does
that say about the American people!
My dad used to tell me tell me who you hang around with, and I'll tell you who you are!
Every single person in DC government is compromised! And this incompetent Mafia of Perverts
want you to believe that Madurro is a corrupt leader and Iran is a threat to the US!
Bolton power over Trump is connected to Adelson power over Trump. To think about Bolton as pure advisor is to seriously
underestimate his role and influence.
Notable quotes:
"... But I always figured you needed to keep the blowhards under cover so they wouldn't stick their feet in their mouths and that the public position jobs should go to the smoothies..You, know, diplomats who were capable of some measure of subtlety. ..."
"... A clod like Bolton should be put aside and assigned the job of preparing position papers and a lout Like Pompeo should be a football coach at RoosterPoot U. ..."
"... "Once he's committed to a war in the Mideast, he's just screwed," ..."
"... Not only Trump, at the same time the swamp creatures risk losing control over the Democrat primaries, too. With a new major war in the Mideast, Tulsi Gabbard's core message of non-interventionism will resonate a lot more, and that will lower the chances of the corporate DNC picks. A dangerous gamble. ..."
"... The other day I was thinking to myself that if Trump decides to dismiss Bolton or Pompeo, especially given how terrible Venezuela, NKorea, and Iran policies have turned out (clearly at odds with his non-interventionist campaign platform), who would he appoint as State Sec and NS adviser? and since Bolton was personally pushed to Trump by Adelson in exchange for campaign donation, would there be a backlash from the Jewish Republican donors and the loss of support? I think in both cases Trump is facing with big dilemmas. ..."
"... Tulsi for Sec of State 2020... ..."
"... Keeping Bolton and Pompeo on board is consistent with Trump's negotiating style. He is full of bluster and demands to put the other side in a defensive position. I guess it was a successful strategy for him so he continues it. Many years ago I was across the table from Trump negotiating the sale of the land under the Empire State Building which at the time was owned by Prudential even though Trump already had locked up the actual building. I just sat there, impassively, while Trump went on with his fire and fury. When I did not budge, he turned to his Japanese financial partner and said "take care of this" and walked out of the room. Then we were able to talk and negotiate in a logical manner and consumate a deal that was double Trump's negotiating bid. I learned later he was furious with his Japanese partner for failing to "win". ..."
"... You can still these same traits in the way that Trump thinks about other countries - they can be cajoled or pushed into doing what Trump wants. If the other countries just wait Trump out they can usually get a much better deal. Bolton and Pompeo, as Blusterers, are useful in pursuing the same negotiation style, for better or worse, Trump has used for probably for the last 50 years. ..."
"... I have seen this style of negotiations work on occasion. The most important lesson I've learned is the willingness to walk. I'm not sure that Trump's personal style matters that much in complex negotiations among states. There's too many people and far too many details. ..."
"... Having the neocons front & center on his foreign policy team I believe has negative consequences for him politically. IMO, he won support from the anti-interventionists due to his strong campaign stance. While they may be a small segment in America in a tight race they could matter. ..."
"... Additionally as Col. Lang notes the neocons could start a shooting match due to their hubris and that can always escalate and go awry. We can only hope that he's smart enough to recognize that. I remain convinced that our fawning allegiance to Bibi is central to many of our poor strategic decision making. ..."
"... I agree that this is Trump's style but what he does not seem to understand is that in using jugheads like these guys on the international scene he may precipitate a war when he really does not want one. ..."
"... "Perhaps the biggest lie the mainstream media have tried to get over on the American public is the idea that it is conservatives, that start wars. That's total nonsense of course. Almost all of America's wars in the 20th century were stared by liberal Democrats." ..."
"... So what exactly is Pussy John, then, just a Yosemite Sam-type bureaucrat with no actual portfolio, so to speak? I defer to your vastly greater knowledge of these matters, but at times it sure seems like they are pursuing a rear-guard action as the US Empire shrinks ..."
"... If were Lavrov, what would I think to myself were I to find myself on the other side of a phone call from PJ or the Malignant Manatee? ..."
It's time for Trump to stop John Bolton and Mike Pompeo from
sabotaging his foreign policy | Mulshine
"I put that question to another military vet, former Vietnam Green Beret Pat Lang.
"Once he's committed to a war in the Mideast, he's just screwed," said Lang of Trump.
But Lang, who later spent more than a decade in the Mideast, noted that Bolton has no direct
control over the military.
"Bolton has a problem," he said. "If he can just get the generals to obey him, he can start
all the wars he wants. But they don't obey him."
They obey the commander-in-chief. And Trump has a history of hiring war-crazed advisors who
end up losing their jobs when they get a bit too bellicose. Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley
comes to mind."
" In Lang's view, anyone who sees Trump as some sort of ideologue is missing the point.
"He's an entrepreneurial businessman who hires consultants for their advice and then gets
rid of them when he doesn't want that advice," he said.
So far that advice hasn't been very helpful, at least in the case of Bolton. His big mouth
seems to have deep-sixed Trump's chance of a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. And
that failed coup in Venezuela has brought up comparisons to the failed Bay of Pigs invasion
during the Kennedy administration." Mulshine
--------------
Well, pilgrims, I worked exclusively on the subject of the Islamic culture continent for the
USG from 1972 to 1994 and then in business from 1994 to 2006. I suppose I am still working on
the subject. pl
I don't get it I suppose. I'd always thought that maybe you wanted highly opinionated Type A
personalities in the role of privy council, etc. You know, people who could forcefully
advocate positions in closed session meetings and weren't afraid of taking contrary
positions. But I always figured you needed to keep the blowhards under cover so they wouldn't
stick their feet in their mouths and that the public position jobs should go to the smoothies..You, know, diplomats who were capable of some measure of subtlety.
But these days it's the loudmouths who get these jobs, to our detriment. When will senior
govt. leaders understand that just because a person is a success in running for Congress
doesn't mean he/she should be sent forth to mingle with the many different personalities and
cultures running the rest of the world?
A clod like Bolton should be put aside and assigned
the job of preparing position papers and a lout Like Pompeo should be a football coach at RoosterPoot U.
No. I would like to see highly opinionated Type B personalities like me hold those jobs. Type
B does not mean you are passive. It means you are not obsessively competitive.
"Once he's committed to a war in the Mideast, he's just screwed,"
Not only Trump, at the same time the swamp creatures risk losing control over the Democrat
primaries, too. With a new major war in the Mideast, Tulsi Gabbard's core message of
non-interventionism will resonate a lot more, and that will lower the chances of the
corporate DNC picks. A dangerous gamble.
Interesting post, thank you sir. Prior to this recent post I had never heard of Paul
Mulshine. In fact I went through some of his earlier posts on Trump's foreign policy and I
found a fair amount of common sense in them. He strikes me as a paleocon, like Pat Buchanan,
Paul Craig Roberts, Michael Scheuer, Doug Bandow, Tucker Carlson and others in that mold.
The other day I was thinking to myself that if Trump decides to dismiss Bolton or Pompeo,
especially given how terrible Venezuela, NKorea, and Iran policies have turned out (clearly
at odds with his non-interventionist campaign platform), who would he appoint as State Sec
and NS adviser? and since Bolton was personally pushed to Trump by Adelson in exchange for
campaign donation, would there be a backlash from the Jewish Republican donors and the loss
of support? I think in both cases Trump is facing with big dilemmas.
My best hope is that
Trump teams up with libertarians and maybe even paleocons to run his foreign policy. So far
Trump has not succeeded in draining the Swamp. Bolton, Pompeo and their respective staff
"are" indeed the Swamp creatures and they run their own policies that run against Trump's
America First policy. Any thoughts?
Keeping Bolton and Pompeo on board is consistent with Trump's negotiating style. He is full
of bluster and demands to put the other side in a defensive position. I guess it was a
successful strategy for him so he continues it. Many years ago I was across the table from
Trump negotiating the sale of the land under the Empire State Building which at the time was
owned by Prudential even though Trump already had locked up the actual building. I just sat
there, impassively, while Trump went on with his fire and fury. When I did not budge, he
turned to his Japanese financial partner and said "take care of this" and walked out of the
room. Then we were able to talk and negotiate in a logical manner and consumate a deal that
was double Trump's negotiating bid. I learned later he was furious with his Japanese partner
for failing to "win".
You can still these same traits in the way that Trump thinks about other countries - they
can be cajoled or pushed into doing what Trump wants. If the other countries just wait Trump
out they can usually get a much better deal. Bolton and Pompeo, as Blusterers, are useful in
pursuing the same negotiation style, for better or worse, Trump has used for probably for the
last 50 years.
I have seen this style of negotiations work on occasion. The most important lesson I've learned is the willingness to
walk. I'm not sure that Trump's personal style matters that much in complex negotiations among states. There's too many people
and far too many details. I see he and his trade team not buckling to the Chinese at least not yet despite the intense
pressure from Wall St and the big corporations.
Having the neocons front & center on his foreign policy team I believe has negative
consequences for him politically. IMO, he won support from the anti-interventionists due to
his strong campaign stance. While they may be a small segment in America in a tight race they
could matter.
Additionally as Col. Lang notes the neocons could start a shooting match due to
their hubris and that can always escalate and go awry. We can only hope that he's smart
enough to recognize that. I remain convinced that our fawning allegiance to Bibi is central
to many of our poor strategic decision making.
Just out of curiosity: Did the deal go through in the end, despite Trump's ire? Or was
Trump so furious with the negotiating result of his Japanese partner that he tore up the
draft once it was presented to him?
I agree that this is Trump's style but what he does not seem to understand is that in
using jugheads like these guys on the international scene he may precipitate a war when he
really does not want one.
Mulshine's article has some good points, but he does include some hilariously ignorant bits
which undermine his credibility.
"Jose Gomez Rivera is a Jersey guy who served in the State Department in Venezuela at the
time of the coup that brought the current socialist regime to power."
Wrong. Maduro was elected and international observers seem to agree the election was
fair.
"Perhaps the biggest lie the mainstream media have tried to get over on the American
public is the idea that it is conservatives, that start wars. That's total nonsense of
course. Almost all of America's wars in the 20th century were stared by liberal Democrats."
So what exactly is Pussy John, then, just a Yosemite Sam-type bureaucrat with no actual
portfolio, so to speak? I defer to your vastly greater knowledge of these matters, but at
times it sure seems like they are pursuing a rear-guard action as the US Empire shrinks and
shudders in its death throes underneath them, and at others it seems like they really have no
idea what to do, other than engage in juvenile antics, snort some glue from a paper bag and
set fires in the dumpsters behind the Taco Bell before going out into a darkened field
somewhere to violate farm animals.
If were Lavrov, what would I think to myself were I to
find myself on the other side of a phone call from PJ or the Malignant Manatee?
In this case he looks like Bill Clinton impersonalization ;-) That's probably how Adelson controls Bolton ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... Larry Flint had offered a Million dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions. ..."
@FB Yeah brother,
that POS was called out during his confirmation hearings during baby Bush's presidency. Larry Flint had offered a Million
dollars to anyone who had proof of republican sexual exploits. He was quickly fingered by someone who attended those clubs. He
was forced to accept a temporary position and quietly resigned after a few months so as to avoid facing questions.
Someone said they saw him proposition a teenage girl outside one of the swinger clubs he frequented.
Bolton? NSA? Do you mean NSC? Everything we hear about Bolton lately is ideological
labeling as a so-called Neocon, more ambiguous bullshit, or tainting him by association with
Israelis. Funny how everybody just forgot what Bolton did at the UN, when Bush shoehorned him
in there without congressional consent. Bolton personally constipated the drafting of the
Summit Outcome Document to remove awkward mentions of the magic word impunity. The old perv
put up 700 amendments to obstruct the process.
Now, who cares that much about impunity? And why would it be such a big deal, unless you
had impunity in municipal law but the whole world was committed to ending impunity? Cause if
you think about it, that's what the whole world has been doing for 70 years, codifying the
Pre-CIA Nuremberg Principles as international criminal law and developing state
responsibility for internationally wrongful acts as customary and then conventional
international law. Who doesn't want that?
CIA. Impunity is CIA's vital interest. They go to war to keep it all the time.
@DESERT FOX
Wisely, DESERT FOX recalled Colonel Fletcher Prouty, and wrote: " the CIA is the zionist
chain dogs that rule America!"
Dear DESERT FOX,
As you know, for some very dramatic time, Attorney Garrison held Clay Shaw's
feet-to-the-fire while demonstrating the latter businessman's connection to the Israeli
company, Permindex.
So naturally, a reasonable & respectful question arises, for which there is likely no
available & conclusive determination.
Are CIA, Mossad, and M16 joined as one (1) ruling and globally unaccountable
"(Western) Zionist chain dog" link? Tough one, D.F., but am confident you can intelligently
handle it. Thanks & salud!
@ChuckOrloski
From what I have read, MI6 is under zionist control and is the template for the CIA and the
Mossad and is the controller of both the CIA and the Mossad and all three are under zionist
control.
Another good book is The Committee of 300 by Dr. John Coleman a former officer in MI6 and
his videos on youtube.
"... On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions ..."
"... John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy despite his explicit campaign promises to do so. ..."
"... More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of Americans is totally unacceptable. ..."
On June 12, 2018 The Washington Post ran an overlooked story where they
disclosed that National Security Advisor John Bolton had accepted money from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Deutsche Bank and HSBC
to return for his participation in speeches and panel discussions. These three entities have been linked to various kinds of corruption
including sanctions evasion for Iran, money laundering on behalf of drug cartels, provision of banking services to backers of Islamic
terror organizations and controversial donations to the Clinton Foundation.
The financial ties between Bolton and these institutions highlight serious ethical concerns about his suitability for the position
of National Security Advisor.
I. Victor Pinchuk Foundation
John Bolton accepted $115,000 from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation to speak at multiple events hosted by the Foundation including
one in September 2017 where Bolton assured his audience that President Donald Trump would not radically change US foreign policy
despite his explicit campaign promises to do so.
The Victor Pinchuk Foundation was blasted in 2016 over their donation of $10 to $25 million to the
Clinton Foundation between 1994 and 2005. The donations lead to accusations
of influence peddling after it emerged that Victor Pinchuk had been invited
to Hillary Clinton's home during the final year of her tenure as Secretary of State.
Even more damning was Victor Pinchuk's participation in activities that constituted evasions of sanctions levied against Iran
by the American government. A 2015 exposé by Newsweek highlighted the fact
that Pinchuk owned Interpipe Group, a Cyprus-incorporated manufacturer of seamless pipes used in oil and gas sectors. A now-removed
statement on Interpipe's website showed that they
were doing business in Iran despite US sanctions aimed to prevent this kind of activity.
Why John Bolton, a notorious war hawk who has called for a hardline approach to Iran, would take money from an entity who was
evading sanctions against the country is not clear. It does however, raise serious questions about whether or not Bolton should
be employed by Donald Trump, who made attacks on the Clinton Foundation's questionable donations a cornerstone of his 2016 campaign.
II. HSBC Group
British bank HSBC paid Bolton $46,500 in June and August 2017 to speak at two gatherings of hedge fund managers and investors.
HSBC is notorious for its extensive ties to criminal and terror organizations for whom it has provided illegal financial services.
Clients that HSBC have laundered money for include Colombian drug traffickers
and Mexican cartels who have terrorized the country and recently
raised murder rates to the highest levels in Mexico's history . They have
also offered banking services to Chinese individuals
who sourced chemicals and other materials used by cartels to produce methamphetamine and heroin that is then sold in the United
States. China's Triads have helped open financial markets in Asia to cartels
seeking to launder their profits derived from the drug trade.
In 2012, HSBC was blasted by the US Senate for for allowing money from
Russian and Latin American criminal networks as well as Middle Eastern terror groups to enter the US. The banking group ultimately
agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine for this misconduct as well as their involvement
in processing sanctions-prohibited transactions on behalf of Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma.
Some of the terror groups assisted by HSBC include the notorious Al Qaeda. During the 2012 scrutiny of HSBC, outlets such as
Le Monde , Business Insider
and the New York Times revealed that HSBC had maintained ties to Saudi
Arabia's Al Rajhi Bank. Al Rajhi Bank was one of Osama Bin Ladin's "Golden Chain" of Al Qaeda's most important financiers. Even
though HSBC's own internal compliance offices asked for the bank to terminate their relationship with Al Rajhi Bank, it continued
until 2010.
More recently in 2018, reports have claimed that HSBC was used for illicit
transactions between Iran and Chinese technology conglomerate Huawei. The US is currently seeking to extradite Huawei CFO Meng
Wanzhou after bringing charges against Huawei related to sanctions evasion
and theft of intellectual property. The company has been described as a "backdoor" for elements of the Chinese government by certain
US authorities.
Bolton's decision to accept money from HSBC given their well-known reputation is deeply hypocritical. HSBC's connection to
terror organizations such as Al Qaeda in particular is damning for Bolton due to the fact that he formerly served as the chairman
of the Gatestone Institute , a New York-based advocacy group that purports
to oppose terrorism. These financial ties are absolutely improper for an individual acting as National Security Advisor.
III. Deutsche Bank
John Bolton accepted $72,000 from German Deutsche Bank to speak at an event in May 2017.
Deutsche Bank has for decades engaged in questionable behavior. During World War II, they
provided financial services to the Nazi Gestapo and financed construction
of the infamous Auschwitz as well as an adjacent plant for chemical company IG Farben.
Like HSBC, Deutsche Bank has provided illicit services to international criminal organizations. In 2014
court filings showed that Deutsche Bank, Citi and Bank of America had all
acted as channels for drug money sent to Colombian security currency brokerages suspected of acting on behalf of traffickers.
In 2017, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $630 million fine after working with
a Danish bank in Estonia to launder over $10 billion through London and
Moscow on behalf of Russian entities. The UK's financial regulatory watchdog
has said that Deutsche Bank is failing to prevent its accounts from being used to launder money, circumvent sanctions and
finance terrorism. In November 2018, Deutsche Bank's headquarters was raided
by German authorities as part of an investigation sparked by 2016 revelations in the "Panama Papers" leak from Panama's Mossack
Fonseca.
Two weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush administration signed
an executive order linking a company owned by German national Mamoun Darkazanli to Al Qaeda. In 1995,
Darkazanli co-signed the opening of a Deutsche Bank account for Mamdouh
Mahmud Salim. Salim was identified by the CIA as the chief of bin Laden's computer operations and weapons procurement. He was
ultimately arrested in Munich, extradited to the United States and
charged
with participation in the 1998 US embassy bombings.
In 2017, the Office of the New York State Comptroller opened an investigation into accounts that Deutsche Bank was operating
on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The PFLP is defined by both the United States and the European
Union as a terrorist organization. It is ironic that Bolton, who is a past recipient of the "Guardian of Zion Award" would accept
money from an entity who provided services to Palestinian groups that Israel considers to be terror related.
IV. Clinton-esque Financial Ties Unbecoming To Trump Administration
Bolton's engagement in paid speeches, in some cases with well-known donors to the Clinton Foundation, paints the Trump administration
in a very bad light. Donald Trump criticized Hillary Clinton during his
2016 Presidential campaign for speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs that were
labeled by her detractors as "pay to play" behavior. John Bolton's acceptance of money from similar entities, especially the Victor
Pinchuk Foundation, are exactly the same kind of activity and are an embarrassment for a President who claims to be against corruption.
More broadly, John Bolton's work for the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, HSBC and Deutsche Bank shows that while he preaches
hardline foreign policy approaches towards nations such as Iran and North Korea he has no issue tying himself to those who openly
flaunt American sanctions and diplomatic attempts to pressure these states. For an individual who is the President's National
Security Advisor to have taken money from banks who provide financial services to terror groups who have murdered thousands of
Americans is totally unacceptable.
It is embarrassing enough that Donald Trump hired Bolton in the first place. The next best remedy is to let him go as soon
as possible.
Just how
weak a president has Donald Trump become? For an illustration, see a terrific Washington
Post article on the
foreign-policy decision-making process since John Bolton became Trump's national security
adviser. Or, rather, the absence of anything resembling a process.
As Heather Hurlburt
pointed out when Bolton took the job, he's ill-suited for it. Bolton is a policy advocate,
not the honest broker that the position calls for. That's a particular problem for Trump.
Because the president is inexperienced in national-security matters, he doesn't know whether
Bolton is speaking for the experts on a policy question or just advocating for his own
preferences. Because Trump knows little about the executive branch, Bolton can use his
bureaucratic skills to advance his own agenda -- including impeding Trump's plan to withdraw
U.S. troops from Syria.
This isn't to say that Bolton's policies are necessarily wrong; that's for others to judge.
But it creates a real problem for the presidency when top advisers are looking out for their
own interests and not the president's.
On this point, Ronald Reagan's administration is instructive. By all accounts, Reagan was
more informed about policy than Trump is. He was also a pragmatic politician, capable of
compromising or even backing down entirely when it was in his interests. Reagan's weakness,
however, was that he could be curiously passive at times, and (like many presidents) too easily
swayed by anecdotes. That meant he needed high-level staffers who could serve as honest
brokers. His first-term chief of staff, James Baker, allowed him to make good decisions.
Baker's replacement, Donald Regan, failed to do so. Partly as a result, Reagan's presidency had
almost completely collapsed by the time Regan was fired amid the Iran-Contra scandal.
Attempts by Russian gov. to intimidate Amb. Wallace & @UANI are unacceptable. If
President Putin is serious about stabilizing the Middle East, confronting terrorism &
preventing a nuclear arms race in the region, he should stand with UANI & against
Iran.
Why would the national security advisor care what the Russian Foreign Ministry has to say
about a New York-based nonprofit's letter writing campaign, especially when those remarks got
virtually no notice in the media?
Bolton's personal finances and the president's biggest campaign funder offer a couple
clues.
Bolton's financial disclosures show that between September 2015 and April 2018, he
received $165,000 from the Counter-Extremism Project (CEP), a group with overlapping
staffers, board members, and finances with UANI. According to the Bolton's disclosures, the
payments were "consulting fees."
"He threatened the head of OPCW I believe as well."
Your belief is correct; The one threatened was José Bustani, then --- head of the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons
"Bolton -- then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International
Security Affairs -- arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a
warning to the organization's chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words.
'Cheney wants you out,' Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president
of the United States. 'We can't accept your management style.'
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: 'You have 24 hours to leave the
organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to
retaliate against you.'
There was a pause. 'We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York'."
Dismal economic performance of Venezuelan economy and impoverishment of population created perfect environment for the color revolution...
Notable quotes:
"... But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world's largest oil reserves. ..."
"... CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means "resistance" in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame -- and Hollywood-level promotion -- by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan Milosevic. ..."
Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington's elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion
of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.
Before the fateful day of January 22, fewer
than one in five Venezuelans had heard of Juan Guaidó. Only a few months ago, the 35-year-old was an obscure character in a politically
marginal far-right group closely associated with gruesome acts of street violence. Even in his own party, Guaidó had been a mid-level
figure in the opposition-dominated National Assembly, which is now held under contempt according to Venezuela's constitution.
But after a single phone call from from US Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself president of Venezuela. Anointed
as the leader of his country by Washington, a previously unknown political bottom-dweller was vaulted onto the international stage
as the US-selected leader of the nation with the world's largest oil reserves.
Echoing the Washington consensus, the New York Times editorial board
hailed Guaidó as a "credible
rival" to Maduro with a "refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward." The Bloomberg News editorial board
applauded
him for seeking "restoration of democracy" and the Wall Street Journal
declared him "a new democratic leader."
Meanwhile, Canada, numerous European nations, Israel, and the bloc of right-wing Latin American governments known as the Lima Group
recognized Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
While Guaidó seemed to have materialized out of nowhere, he was, in fact, the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming
by the US government's elite regime change factories. Alongside a cadre of right-wing student activists, Guaidó was cultivated to
undermine Venezuela's socialist-oriented government, destabilize the country, and one day seize power. Though he has been a minor
figure in Venezuelan politics, he had spent years quietly demonstrated his worthiness in Washington's halls of power.
"Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance," Marco Teruggi, an Argentinian sociologist and leading
chronicler of Venezuelan politics, told The Grayzone . "It's the logic
of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between
laughable and worrying."
Diego Sequera, a Venezuelan journalist and writer for the investigative outlet Misión Verdad, agreed: "Guaidó is more popular
outside Venezuela than inside, especially in the elite Ivy League and Washington circles," Sequera remarked to The Grayzone, "He's
a known character there, is predictably right-wing, and is considered loyal to the program."
While Guaidó is today sold as the face of democratic restoration, he spent his career in the most violent faction of Venezuela's
most radical opposition party, positioning himself at the forefront of one destabilization campaign after another. His party has
been widely discredited inside Venezuela, and is held partly responsible for fragmenting a badly weakened opposition.
"'These radical leaders have no more than 20 percent in opinion polls,"
wrote Luis Vicente León, Venezuela's leading pollster. According to León, Guaidó's party remains isolated because the majority
of the population "does not want war. 'What they want is a solution.'"
But this is precisely why he Guaidó was selected by Washington: He is not expected to lead Venezuela toward democracy, but to
collapse a country that for the past two decades has been a bulwark of resistance to US hegemony. His unlikely rise signals the culmination
of a two decades-long project to destroy a robust socialist experiment.
Targeting the "troika of tyranny"
Since the 1998 election of Hugo Chávez, the United States has fought to restore control over Venezuela and is vast oil reserves.
Chávez's socialist programs may have redistributed the country's wealth and helped lift millions out of poverty, but they also earned
him a target on his back.
In 2002, Venezuela's right-wing opposition briefly ousted Chávez with US support and recognition, before the military restored
his presidency following a mass popular mobilization. Throughout the administrations of US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama,
Chávez survived numerous assassination plots, before succumbing to cancer in 2013. His successor, Nicolas Maduro, has
survived
three attempts on his life.
The Trump administration immediately elevated Venezuela to the top of Washington's regime change target list, branding it the
leader of a
"troika of tyranny." Last year, Trump's national security team
attempted
to recruit members of the military brass to mount a military junta, but that effort failed.
According to the Venezuelan government, the US was also involved in a plot, codenamed Operation Constitution, to capture Maduro
at the Miraflores presidential palace; and another, called
Operation Armageddon , to assassinate him at a military parade in July 2017. Just over a year later, exiled opposition leaders
tried and failed to kill Maduro with drone bombs during
a military parade in Caracas.
More than a decade before these intrigues, a group of right-wing opposition students were hand-selected and groomed by an elite
US-funded regime change training academy to topple Venezuela's government and restore the neoliberal order.
Training from the "'export-a-revolution' group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions"
On October 5, 2005, with Chávez's popularity at its peak and his government planning sweeping socialist programs, five Venezuelan
"student leaders" arrived in Belgrade,
Serbia to begin training for an insurrection.
The students had arrived from Venezuela courtesy of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS. This
group is
funded largely through the
National Endowment for Democracy , a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government's main arm of promoting regime change; and
offshoots like the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. According
to leaked internal emails
from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the "
shadow CIA ,"
CANVAS "may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle."
CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by
Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade.
Otpor, which means "resistance" in Serbian, was the student group that gained international fame -- and Hollywood-level
promotion -- by mobilizing the protests that eventually toppled Slobodan
Milosevic.
This small cell of regime change specialists was operating according to the theories of the late Gene Sharp, the so-called "Clausewitz
of non-violent struggle." Sharp had worked with a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, Col.
Robert Helvey , to conceive a strategic blueprint that
weaponized protest as a form of hybrid warfare, aiming it at states that resisted Washington's unipolar domination.
Otpor at the 1998 MTV Europe Music Awards
Otpor was supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and Sharp's Albert Einstein Institute. Sinisa Sikman, one
of Otpor's main trainers, once
said the group even received
direct CIA funding.
According to a
leaked email
from a Stratfor staffer, after running Milosevic out of power, "the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS
or in other words a 'export-a-revolution' group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into
U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like
;)."
Stratfor revealed that CANVAS "turned its attention to Venezuela" in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO
regime change operations across Eastern Europe.
While monitoring the CANVAS training program, Stratfor outlined its insurrectionist agenda in strikingly blunt language: "Success
is by no means guaranteed, and student movements are only at the beginning of what could be a years-long effort to trigger a revolution
in Venezuela, but the trainers themselves are the people who cut their teeth on the 'Butcher of the Balkans.' They've got mad skills.
When you see students at five Venezuelan universities hold simultaneous demonstrations, you will know that the training is over and
the real work has begun."
Birthing the "Generation 2007" regime change cadre
The "real work" began two years later, in 2007, when Guaidó graduated from Andrés Bello Catholic University of Caracas. He moved
to Washington, DC to enroll in the Governance and Political Management
Program at George Washington University, under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top
Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a
former executive director of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) who spent more than a decade working in the Venezuelan energy sector, under the old oligarchic regime that was
ousted by Chávez.
That year, Guaidó helped lead anti-government rallies after the Venezuelan government
declined to to renew the license of Radio Caracas Televisión
(RCTV). This privately owned station played a leading role in the 2002 coup against Hugo Chávez. RCTV helped mobilize anti-government
demonstrators, falsified information blaming government supporters for acts of violence carried out by opposition members, and banned
pro-government reporting amid the coup. The role of RCTV and other oligarch-owned stations in driving the failed coup attempt was
chronicled in the acclaimed documentary The Revolution Will Not
Be Televised .
That same year, the students claimed credit for stymying Chavez's constitutional referendum for a "21st century socialism" that
promised "to set the legal framework for the political and
social reorganization of the country, giving direct power to organized communities as a prerequisite for the development of a new
economic system."
From the protests around RCTV and the referendum, a specialized cadre of US-backed class of regime change activists was born.
They called themselves "Generation 2007."
The Stratfor and CANVAS trainers of this cell identified Guaidó's ally – a street organizer named Yon Goicoechea – as a "key factor"
in defeating the constitutional referendum. The following year, Goicochea was
rewarded for his efforts with the Cato Institute's
Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with a $500,000 prize, which he promptly invested into building his own Liberty
First (Primero Justicia) political network.
Friedman, of course, was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial junta
leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical "shock doctrine"-style fiscal austerity. And the Cato Institute is the libertarian
Washington DC-based think tank founded by the Koch Brothers, two top Republican Party donors who have become
aggressive supporters of the right-wing across Latin America.
Wikileaks published a 2007 email from American
ambassador to Venezuela William Brownfield sent to the State Department, National Security Council and Department of Defense Southern
Command praising "Generation of '07" for having "forced the Venezuelan president, accustomed to setting the political agenda, to
(over)react." Among the "emerging leaders" Brownfield identified were Freddy Guevara and Yon Goicoechea. He applauded the latter
figure as "one of the students' most articulate defenders of civil liberties."
Flush with cash from libertarian oligarchs and US government soft power outfits, the radical Venezuelan cadre took their Otpor
tactics to the streets, along with a
version of the group's
logo, as seen below:
"Galvanizing public unrest to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez"
In 2009, the Generation 2007 youth activists
staged their most provocative demonstration yet, dropping their pants on public roads and aping the outrageous guerrilla theater
tactics outlined by Gene Sharp in his regime change manuals. The protesters had mobilized against the arrest of an ally from another
newfangled youth group called JAVU. This far-right group "gathered funds from a variety of US government sources, which allowed it
to gain notoriety quickly as the hardline wing of opposition street movements," according to academic George Ciccariello-Maher's
book, "Building the Commune."
While video of the protest is not available, many Venezuelans have
identified Guaidó as one of its key participants.
While the allegation is unconfirmed, it is certainly plausible; the bare-buttocks protesters were members of the Generation 2007
inner core that Guaidó belonged to, and were clad in their trademark Resistencia! Venezuela t-shirts, as seen below:
That year, Guaidó exposed himself to the public in another way, founding a political party to capture the anti-Chavez energy his
Generation 2007 had cultivated. Called Popular Will, it was led by
Leopoldo López , a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand
heavily involved in National Endowment for Democracy programs and elected as the mayor of a district in Caracas that was one of the
wealthiest in the country. Lopez was a portrait of Venezuelan aristocracy, directly descended from his country's first president.
He was also the first cousin of
Thor Halvorssen , founder of the US-based Human Rights Foundation that functions as a de facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government
activists in countries targeted by Washington for regime change.
Though Lopez's interests aligned neatly with Washington's, US
diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks highlighted the
fanatical tendencies that would ultimately lead to Popular Will's marginalization. One cable identified Lopez as "a divisive figure
within the opposition often described as arrogant, vindictive, and power-hungry." Others highlighted his obsession with street confrontations
and his "uncompromising approach" as a source of tension with other opposition leaders who prioritized unity and participation in
the country's democratic institutions.
By 2010, Popular Will and its foreign backers moved to exploit the worst drought to hit Venezuela in decades. Massive electricity
shortages had struck the country due the dearth of water, which was needed to power hydroelectric plants. A global economic recession
and declining oil prices compounded the crisis, driving public discontentment.
Stratfor and CANVAS – key advisors of Guaidó and his anti-government cadre – devised a shockingly cynical
plan to drive a dagger through the heart of
the Bolivarian revolution. The scheme hinged on a 70% collapse of the country's electrical system by as early as April 2010.
"This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system,"
the Stratfor internal memo declared. "This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition
group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation
and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs."
By this point, the Venezuelan opposition was receiving a staggering $40-50 million a year from US government organizations like
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, according to
a report by the Spanish think tank, the FRIDE Institute. It also had massive wealth to draw on from its own accounts, which were
mostly outside the country.
While the scenario envisioned by Statfor did not come to fruition, the Popular Will party activists and their allies cast aside
any pretense of non-violence and joined a radical plan to destabilize the country.
Towards violent destabilization
In November, 2010, according to emails obtained
by Venezuelan security services and presented by former Justice Minister Miguel Rodríguez Torres, Guaidó, Goicoechea, and several
other student activists attended a secret five-day training at the Fiesta Mexicana hotel in Mexico City. The sessions were run by
Otpor, the Belgrade-based regime change trainers backed by the US government. The meeting had
reportedly received the blessing of Otto Reich, a fanatically anti-Castro Cuban exile working in George W. Bush's Department
of State, and the right-wing former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.
At the Fiesta Mexicana hotel, the emails stated, Guaidó and his fellow activists hatched a plan to overthrow President Hugo Chavez
by generating chaos through protracted spasms of street violence.
Three petroleum industry figureheads – Gustavo Torrar, Eligio Cedeño and Pedro Burelli – allegedly covered the $52,000 tab to
hold the meeting. Torrar is a self-described "human rights activist" and "intellectual" whose younger brother Reynaldo Tovar Arroyo
is the representative in Venezuela of the private Mexican oil and gas company Petroquimica del Golfo, which holds a contract with
the Venezuelan state.
Cedeño, for his part, is a fugitive Venezuelan businessman who claimed asylum in the United States, and Pedro Burelli a former
JP Morgan executive and the former director of Venezuela's national oil company, Petroleum of Venezuela (PDVSA). He left PDVSA in
1998 as Hugo Chavez took power and is on the advisory
committee of Georgetown University's Latin America Leadership Program.
Burelli insisted that the emails detailing his participation had been
fabricated and
even hired a private investigator to prove it. The investigator
declared that Google's records showed the emails
alleged to be his were never transmitted.
Yet today Burelli makes no secret of his desire to see Venezuela's current president, Nicolás Maduro, deposed – and even dragged
through the streets and sodomized with a bayonet, as Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi was by NATO-backed militiamen.
The alleged Fiesta Mexicana plot flowed into another destabilization plan revealed in a
series of documents produced by the Venezuelan government. In May 2014, Caracas released documents detailing an assassination
plot against President Nicolás Maduro. The leaks identified the Miami-based Maria Corina Machado as a leader of the scheme. A hardliner
with a penchant for extreme rhetoric, Machado has functioned as an international liaison for the opposition,
visiting President George W. Bush in 2005.
"I think it is time to gather efforts; make the necessary calls, and obtain financing to annihilate Maduro and the rest will fall
apart," Machado wrote in an email to former Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria in 2014.
In
another email , Machado claimed that the violent plot had the blessing of US Ambassador to Colombia, Kevin Whitaker. "I have
already made up my mind and this fight will continue until this regime is overthrown and we deliver to our friends in the world.
If I went to San Cristobal and exposed myself before the OAS, I fear nothing. Kevin Whitaker has already reconfirmed his support
and he pointed out the new steps. We have a checkbook stronger than the regime's to break the international security ring."
Guaidó heads to the barricades
That February, student demonstrators acting as shock troops for the exiled oligarchy erected violent barricades across the country,
turning opposition-controlled quarters into
violent fortresses known as guarimbas . While international media portrayed the upheaval as a spontaneous protest against
Maduro's iron-fisted rule, there was ample evidence that Popular Will was orchestrating the show.
"None of the protesters at the universities wore their university t-shirts, they all wore Popular Will or Justice First t-shirts,"
a guarimba participant said at the time. "They might
have been student groups, but the student councils are affiliated to the political opposition parties and they are accountable to
them."
Asked who the ringleaders were, the guarimba participant said, "Well if I am totally honest, those guys are legislators
now."
Around 43 were killed during the 2014 guarimbas . Three years later, they erupted again, causing mass destruction of public
infrastructure, the murder of government supporters, and the
deaths of 126 people, many of whom were Chavistas. In several
cases, supporters of the government were burned alive by armed gangs.
Guaidó was directly involved in the 2014 guarimbas . In fact, he tweeted video showing himself clad in a helmet and gas
mask, surrounded by masked and armed elements that had shut down a highway that were engaging in a violent clash with the police.
Alluding to his participation in Generation 2007, he proclaimed, "I remember in 2007, we proclaimed, 'Students!' Now, we shout, 'Resistance!
Resistance!'"
Guaidó has deleted the tweet, demonstrating apparent concern for his image as a champion of democracy.
On February 12, 2014, during the height of that year's guarimbas , Guaidó joined Lopez on stage at a rally of Popular Will
and Justice First. During a lengthy diatribe against the government, Lopez
urged the crowd to march to the office of Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz. Soon after, Diaz's office came under attack by armed
gangs who attempted to burn it to the ground. She denounced what she called "planned and premeditated violence."
In an televised appearance in 2016, Guaidó
dismissed deaths resulting from guayas – a guarimba tactic involving stretching steel wire across a roadway in
order to injure or kill motorcyclists – as a "myth." His comments whitewashed a deadly tactic that had
killed unarmed civilians like Santiago Pedroza and
decapitated a
man named Elvis Durán, among many others.
This callous disregard for human life would define his Popular Will party in the eyes of much of the public, including many opponents
of Maduro.
Cracking down on Popular Will
As violence and political polarization escalated across the country, the government began to act against the Popular Will leaders
who helped stoke it.
Freddy Guevara, the National Assembly Vice-President and second in command of Popular Will, was a principal leader in the 2017
street riots. Facing a trial for his role in the violence, Guevara
took shelter in the Chilean embassy, where he remains.
Lester Toledo, a Popular Will legislator from the state of Zulia, was wanted by Venezuelan government in September 2016 on charges
of financing terrorism and plotting assassinations. The plans
were said to be made with former Colombian President Álavaro Uribe. Toledo escaped Venezuela and went on several speaking tours with
Human Rights Watch, the US government-backed Freedom House, the Spanish Congress and European Parliament.
Carlos Graffe, another Otpor-trained Generation 2007 member who led Popular Will, was
arrested in July 2017. According to police, he was in possession of a bag filled with nails, C4 explosives and a detonator. He
was released on December 27, 2017.
Leopoldo Lopez, the longtime Popular Will leader, is today under house arrest, accused of a key role in deaths of 13 people during
the guarimbas in 2014. Amnesty International
lauded Lopez as a "prisoner of conscience" and slammed his transfer from prison to house as "not good enough." Meanwhile, family
members of guarimba victims introduced a petition for
more charges against Lopez.
Yon Goicoechea, the Koch Brothers posterboy and US-backed founder of Justice First, was arrested in 2016 by security forces who
claimed they found
found a kilo of explosives in his vehicle. In a New York Times
op-ed , Goicoechea protested
the charges as "trumped-up" and claimed he had been imprisoned simply for his "dream of a democratic society, free of Communism."
He was
freed in November 2017.
David Smolansky, also a member of the original Otpor-trained Generation 2007, became Venezuela's youngest-ever mayor when he was
elected in 2013 in the affluent suburb of El Hatillo. But he was stripped of his position and sentenced to 15 months in prison by
the Supreme Court after it found him culpable of stirring the violent guarimbas .
Facing arrest, Smolansky shaved his beard, donned sunglasses and
slipped into Brazil disguised as a priest with
a bible in hand and rosary around his neck. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he was hand picked by Secretary of the Organization
of American States Luis Almagro to lead the working group on the Venezuelan migrant and refugee crisis.
This July 26, Smolansky held what he called a "cordial reunion" with Elliot Abrams, the convicted Iran-Contra felon
installed by Trump
as special US envoy to Venezuela. Abrams is notorious for overseeing the US covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during
the 1980's in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. His lead role in the Venezuelan coup has stoked fears that another blood-drenched
proxy war might be on the way.
Four days earlier, Machado rumbled another violent threat against Maduro,
declaring that if he "wants to save his
life, he should understand that his time is up."
A pawn in their game
The collapse of Popular Will under the weight of the violent campaign of destabilization it ran alienated large sectors of the
public and wound much of its leadership up in exile or in custody. Guaidó had remained a relatively minor figure, having spent most
of his nine-year career in the National Assembly as an alternate deputy. Hailing from one of Venezuela's least populous states, Guaidó
came in second place during the 2015 parliamentary elections, winning just 26% of votes cast in order to secure his place in the
National Assembly. Indeed, his bottom may have been better known than his face.
Guaidó is known as the president of the opposition-dominated National Assembly, but he was never elected to the position. The
four opposition parties that comprised the Assembly's Democratic Unity Table had decided to establish a rotating presidency. Popular
Will's turn was on the way, but its founder, Lopez, was under house arrest. Meanwhile, his second-in-charge, Guevara, had taken refuge
in the Chilean embassy. A figure named Juan Andrés Mejía would have been next in line but reasons that are only now clear, Juan Guaido
was selected.
"There is a class reasoning that explains Guaidó's rise," Sequera, the Venezuelan analyst, observed. "Mejía is high class, studied
at one of the most expensive private universities in Venezuela, and could not be easily marketed to the public the way Guaidó could.
For one, Guaidó has common mestizo features like most Venezuelans do, and seems like more like a man of the people. Also,
he had not been overexposed in the media, so he could be built up into pretty much anything."
In December 2018, Guaidó sneaked across the border and junketed to Washington, Colombia and Brazil to coordinate the plan to hold
mass demonstrations during the inauguration of President Maduro. The night before Maduro's swearing-in ceremony, both Vice President
Mike Pence and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called Guaidó to affirm their support.
A week later, Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Rick Scott and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart – all lawmakers from the Florida base of the right-wing
Cuban exile lobby – joined President Trump and Vice President Pence at the White House. At their request, Trump
agreed that if Guaidó declared himself president, he would back him.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met personally withGuaidó on January 10, according to the Wall Street Journal. However, Pompeo
could not pronounce Guaidó's name when he mentioned him in a press briefing on January 25, referring to him as "Juan Guido."
By January 11, Guaidó's Wikipedia page had been
edited 37 times, highlighting the struggle to
shape the image of a previously anonymous figure who was now a tableau for Washington's regime change ambitions. In the end, editorial
oversight of his page was handed over to Wikipedia's elite council of "librarians," who pronounced him the "contested" president
of Venezuela.
Guaidó might have been an obscure figure, but his combination of radicalism and opportunism satisfied Washington's needs. "That
internal piece was missing," a Trump administration
said of Guaidó. "He was the piece we needed for our strategy to be coherent and complete."
"For the first time," Brownfield, the former American ambassador to Venezuela,
gushed to the
New York Times, "you have an opposition leader who is clearly signaling to the armed forces and to law enforcement that he wants
to keep them on the side of the angels and with the good guys."
But Guaidó's Popular Will party formed the shock troops of the guarimbas that caused the deaths of police officers and
common citizens alike. He had even boasted of his own participation in street riots. And now, to win the hearts and minds of the
military and police, Guaido had to erase this blood-soaked history.
On January 21, a day before the coup began in earnest, Guaidó's wife delivered a
video address calling on the military
to rise up against Maduro. Her performance was wooden and uninspiring, underscoring the her husband's limited political prospects.
At a press conference before supporters four days later, Guaidó
announced his solution to the crisis: "Authorize a humanitarian
intervention!"
While he waits on direct assistance, Guaidó remains what he has always been – a pet project of cynical outside forces. "It doesn't
matter if he crashes and burns after all these misadventures," Sequera said of the coup figurehead. "To the Americans, he is expendable."
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling
Republican Gomorrah
, Goliath ,
The Fifty One Day War , and
The Management of Savagery . He has
produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including
Killing Gaza . Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic
light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Dan Cohen Dan Cohen is a journalist and filmmaker.
He has produced widely distributed video reports and print dispatches from across Israel-Palestine. Dan is a correspondent at RT
America and tweets at @ DanCohen3000 .
http://www.dancohenmedia.com/
@Tyrion 2 good, as Venezuela "resists" America." This is complete nonsense. "Doing
things" is corrupt" ? Thus, doing nothing is "good ? I mean, WHAT ? Venezuela is not "good",
per se, except that in this particular case of international relations its largely
innocent . The US has unilaterally decided that the election loser is the election
winner
( Clinton actually "won" in 2016; she's the real president).
US sanctions, threats & striving for a civil war is not just "doing something"
–but doing something wrong (but then, who gives a fuck for international law ?
Who respects sovereignty ?)
What a despicable ideology makes people think like that? It is cloying and maudlin and
resentful.
US sanctions, threats & striving for a civil war is not just "doing something"
–but doing something wrong (but then, who gives a fuck for international law ? Who
respects sovereignty ?
Sovereignty is exercised by the legitimate government. Maduro is not the legitimate head
of the Venezuelan government. Expecting him to step down or at least call a proper
Presidential election is respecting this.
We can argue about that, but pearl clutching appeals to "but America is competent so
America is bad" are gross.
@Tyrion 2 Your mindless postmodernism is astonishing. So you think that facts don' t
matter and you haven't noticed that people are commenting facts based on what is happening,
what different acteurs have done? If you have no idea about Venezuela, why don't you read
what Mark Weisbrot or Max Blumenthal and others have written about the theme recently?
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The United States will continue to use all measures available to stop
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro's revenue streams, National Security Advisor John Bolton
said in a statement on Friday.
"The US will continue to use all tools to separate Maduro [and] his cronies from money that
rightfully belongs to the people of Venezuela", Bolton said via Twitter. "Those who continue to
plunder the resources of Venezuela & stand against its people will not be forgotten".
He also called on Russia and other nations to recognise Juan Guaido as Venezuelan
President.
Bolton added that countries and companies buying Venezuelan oil must take steps to ensure
that President Nicolas Maduro and his government cannot access and divert the payments for
their own use. In late January, the United States blocked all assets of Venezuela's state
energy giant PDVSA in its jurisdiction and imposed a ban on deals with the company. US Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin explained the United States was taking care of the PDVSA in the
interests of the Venezuelan people and also protecting its own market.
On January 23, opposition leader Juan Guaido proclaimed himself interim president of
Venezuela after the opposition-controlled National Assembly claimed Maduro has usurped power.
The United States and some of its allies have recognised Guaido as interim
president.
Russia, China, Mexico and several other countries have said they recognise Maduro
as Venezuela's only legitimate president.
Maduro has accused the United States of orchestrating a coup and informed the US of his
decision to sever diplomatic relations. Washington, however, has refused to withdraw its
diplomatic mission personnel from the Latin American country.
"... The US State Department announced last month that Washington froze some $7 billion in assets belonging to Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA in order to make some of that money available to Guaido and his team. ..."
"... Maduro, after launching a signature-gathering campaign against alleged US interference, has repeatedly stressed his sentiment that the main objective behind Washington's interest in the political outcome in Venezuela is the nation's oil reserves, said to the largest in the world. ..."
The US intelligence community is directly communicating with members of Venezuela's military
in attempts to convince them to abandon beleaguered President Nicolas Maduro while also
considering additional sanctions to ramp up the pressure, a senior White House official
divulged to Reuters. Despite the fact that only a few senior officers have to date abandoned
Maduro, the Trump administration expects additional military personnel to jump ship.
In late January, Juan Guaido, the head of the opposition-led National Assembly, proclaimed
himself the South American nation's interim president, in a move swiftly recognized by the US
and a handful of other countries.
"We believe these to be those first couple pebbles before we start really seeing bigger
rocks rolling down the hill," the unnamed White House official speaking on a condition of
anonymity, told Reuters. "We're still having conversations with members of the former Maduro
regime, with military members, although those conversations are very, very limited."
The unnamed official did not provide additional details regarding what form motivation was
being offered to top military officials to gain their support, according to Reuters.
Many members of the Venezuelan military remain loyal to Maduro, mostly in fear of being
targeted by the embattled leader. To convince those on-the-fence members to abandon Maduro, the
US must offer something that makes a turncoat move worthwhile, noted Eric Farnsworth, vice
president of the Council of the Americas think tank in Washington.
"It depends on what they're offering," Farnsworth told Reuters. "Are there incentives built
into these contacts that will at least cause people to question their loyalty to the
regime?"
A few European nations have joined the Trump administration in its support of Guaido as the
interim president, although those nations professing political support have not taken the
additional step of backing US sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil giant PDVSA as well as
other restrictions on financial transactions imposed by Washington.
The US State Department announced last month that Washington froze some $7 billion in
assets belonging to Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA in order to make some of that
money available to Guaido and his team.
According to the US official who spoke anonymously to Reuters, the Trump administration is
also considering imposing sanctions on Cuban military and intelligence officials who are
thought to be assisting Maduro.
Maduro, after launching a signature-gathering campaign against alleged US interference,
has repeatedly stressed his sentiment that the main objective behind Washington's interest in
the political outcome in Venezuela is the nation's oil reserves, said to the largest in the
world.
"... Recently, Guaido addressed both Russia and China, trying to convince them that a change in government would actually be in their economic interests. "What most suits Russia and China is a change of government," he said. "Maduro does not protect Venezuela, he doesn't protect anyone's investments, and he is not a good deal for those countries." ..."
"... But despite these power projection ploys, Russia's real capabilities to influence the outcome of the crisis seem limited. After a new US oil embargo against PDVSA was announced last week, Maduro's regime was cut off from its main source of revenue. Analysts say that the fate of Venezuela now rests in the hands of the military – on whether, and how long, it will remain loyal to Maduro. ..."
As of 2017, Russia controlled 13% of Venezuela's crude exports, Reuters
reported . According to some experts, Rosneft has been taking advantage of Venezuela's
difficulties to secure deals which will be profitable in the long term.
The Kremlin's point man for Venezuela is Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian state-owned company
Rosneft and a close Putin ally, who has made frequent visits to Caracas in recent years.
Rosneft has provided $6 billion in loans to PDVSA, which is repaying them with oil. Rosneft has
also gained a share of ownership in five of Venezuela's petroleum projects, while playing a
middleman role in global markets, selling Venezuelan oil on to customers worldwide.
However, Russia's investments in Venezuela look far from lucrative. In 2017 the two
countries agreed to restructure Venezuela's debt, amounting to over $3 billion, by shifting the
repayment terms to 2027.
The beleaguered country's economy is on the verge of collapse and the oil sector, which
accounts for over 90% of national export revenues, has not been spared. Last year, oil
production dropped by 37% compared with 2017. So, Maduro has been struggling to pay back the
loans and last year, Sechin had to fly to Caracas to negotiate with the Venezuelan leader over
delayed oil supplies.
Russia's concern about a collapse in Venezuela's economy is tangible. A delegation of
high-ranking Russian officials flew to Caracas in October to advise the government on how to
overcome the crisis. With the country in a state of turmoil, Russia's Deputy Minister of
Finance Sergei Storchak
said he expects Venezuela to struggle to repay its debt, and the next $100 million tranche
is due next month.
... ... ...
Recently, Guaido addressed both Russia and China, trying to convince them that a change in
government would actually be in their economic interests. "What most suits Russia and China is
a change of government," he said. "Maduro does not protect Venezuela, he doesn't protect
anyone's investments, and he is not a good deal for those countries."
But Russia's switch of sides is highly unlikely at this point, for economic interests are
not the only factor involved.
Russian bridgehead
As Krutikhin pointed out, supporting Maduro is a matter of principle for Russia. Betraying
Maduro at this point would make the Kremlin look weak in front of its domestic audience.
Also, Russia's support for the Maduro regime is based on geopolitics. Together, with
Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba, Maduro's regime is a key Russian ally on the American continent.
This alliance is essentially a Cold War legacy, dating back to when the Kremlin actively
supported anti-US governments in Latin America, such as Fidel Castro's Cuba and the Sandinista
regime in Nicaragua.
Today, Putin's Russia is defying the US-led world order by supporting leaders such as
Syria's Bashar Assad and Maduro's Venezuela, even though, in the case of the latter, that comes
with substantial economic costs.
In return, Venezuela has been taking Russia's side in international disputes. One example
came after the brief Russo-Georgian conflict in 2008. Venezuela was among the few states
recognizing the Russia-backed breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
On the strategic front, Russia has been granting Venezuela multi-billion dollar loans to buy
Russian heavy weaponry, such as Sukhoi fighter jets, T-72 tanks and S-300 air defense
systems.
In return, Maduro has been offering Russia a platform to showcase its military power right
in the US backyard. In late 2018, Russian TU-160 strategic bombers – which are capable of
carrying nuclear weapons – flew to Caracas for joint exercises. That provided proof of
Russia's global reach in a region a long way from its traditional area of influence.
According to Reuters, Russian military contractors arrived recently in Caracas to protect
Maduro from a possible violent coup. The mercenaries reportedly belong to the secretive private
military company "Wagner," which has been defending Russian interests in both Syria and Eastern
Ukraine. The Kremlin, however, denied these claims.
But despite these power projection ploys, Russia's real capabilities to influence the
outcome of the crisis seem limited. After a new US oil embargo against PDVSA was announced last
week, Maduro's regime was cut off from its main source of revenue. Analysts say that the fate
of Venezuela now rests in the hands of the military – on whether, and how long, it will
remain loyal to Maduro.
For Russia, a best-case scenario looks unlikely.
If Guaido's revolution succeeds, Russia will lose a major ally in the region. If Maduro
manages to hold on to power, the Kremlin will preserve its geopolitical foothold, but at a
hefty economic price.
The problem for the USA military intervention is whether the Venezuelan resistance can make
it a second Iraq?
Notable quotes:
"... It is stupid and dangerous for Guaido to be talking about U.S. military intervention, and in doing so he is almost certainly making it more difficult to resolve the crisis in Venezuela peacefully. ..."
"... Floating the idea of a foreign invasion for any reason gives the top military commanders an added incentive to stick with Maduro and resist attempts to depose him, and they already have several reasons to remain on his side. ..."
"... An all-or-nothing approach to the crisis is likely to lead to escalation, and so far that has been the only kind of approach that the Trump administration knows how to do. Military intervention would be the absolute worst form that approach could take, and Congress and the public need to oppose any moves by this administration in that direction. ..."
Venezuela's self-proclaimed acting president Juan Guaido refused to rule out on Friday the
possibility of authorizing United States intervention to help force President Nicolas Maduro
from power and alleviate a humanitarian crisis.
National Assembly leader Guaido told AFP he would do "everything that is necessary to save
human lives," acknowledging that US intervention is "a very controversial subject."
It is stupid and dangerous for Guaido to be talking about U.S. military intervention,
and in doing so he is almost certainly making it more difficult to resolve the crisis in
Venezuela peacefully. The military's support for Maduro remains the largest and most
significant obstacle to the opposition's claim to power. Floating the idea of a foreign
invasion for any reason gives the top military commanders an added incentive to stick with
Maduro and resist attempts to depose him, and they already have
several reasons to remain on his side.
U.S. military intervention in Venezuela must not happen, and members of Congress should make
clear that it is not an option. Rep. Ro Khanna responded to Guaido's statements earlier
today:
Attacking Venezuela would be a costly and unnecessary war for the U.S., but more than that
it would be a calamity for the people of Venezuela, whose country would be plunged into even
worse conditions for the duration of the conflict. The U.S. needs to be willing to consider
some sort of compromise solution, whether it is a power-sharing arrangement or negotiations
that lead to the holding of early elections. An all-or-nothing approach to the crisis is
likely to lead to escalation, and so far that has been the only kind of approach that the Trump
administration knows how to do. Military intervention would be the absolute worst form that
approach could take, and Congress and the public need to oppose any moves by this
administration in that direction.
From oil to infrastructure, why China has plenty to lose from political turmoil in
Venezuela
Caracas needs Chinese loans and investment in various sectors, but the relationship
offers mutual benefits
Instability and a struggling economy in the South American country have already cost
Beijing dearly
As Venezuela's biggest creditor, China is bound to be affected by the outcome.
Here are some of the Chinese investments that have already hit trouble in Venezuela:
Oil-for-loan deals
The last loan Maduro got from China was one of US$5 billion in September 2017. This was in
addition to US$65 billion loaned by China to Caracas over the past decade, which the South
American nation has been repaying in oil shipments.
Several state-owned Chinese oil corporations have bought stakes in or entered joint
ventures with Venezuelan counterparts.
But after the escalating political chaos, it was reported last week by Reuters that
PetroChina planned to drop Petroleos de Venezuela as a partner in a planned US$10 billion oil
refinery and petrochemical project in southern China.
China has provided more than US$100 billion in loan commitments to Latin American
countries and firms since 2005. This would mean China's loans to Venezuela accounted for well
over half of its loans to South America.
China, as the biggest oil importer in the world, is receiving 240,000 barrels of oil a day
– mostly as debt repayment – from Venezuela, which has the world's biggest oil
reserves.
Latin America's high-speed railway
Even before the current chaos over the presidential race, Venezuela's economy had long
been hampered by its political instability. This led to the abandonment in 2016 of a
Chinese-backed high-speed rail project that had cost US$7.5 billion.
The 462km Tinaco-Anaco line was intended to become part of South America's first
high-speed rail route and carry 5 million passengers and 9.8 million tonnes of cargo a
year.
Beijing-backed China Railway Engineering Corporation had a stake of 40 per cent in the
project, with Venezuela holding the rest, and construction began in 2009.
But it fell behind schedule and was abandoned by the Chinese state company in 2015,
according to an Associated Press report. By 2016, the construction sites and factories had
been ransacked for power generators, computers, metals, ceramics and other materials.
Mining opportunities
In 2017, China agreed to help diversify Venezuela's oil-dependent economy by developing
its mining sector. A US$400 million joint venture was established between the Corporacion
Venezolana de Mineria, Chinese firms CAMCE and Yankuang Group, and Colombia's Inter-American
Coal to boost Venezuela's coal mining and port operations.
CAMCE, a construction engineering affiliate of state-owned China National Machinery
Industry Corporation, and Yankuang, a Shandong-based coal company, have also promised to
invest US$180 million to develop the country's nickel industry.
No progress has been reported from the project so far, but other mining projects in the
country have been hindered.
Baoji Oilfield Machinery Company suspended its activities in Venezuela in 2015 following a
series of political protests. In March 2016, a gang gunned down 17 miners in an area of the
Orinoco Mining Arc site that was licensed to Yankuang.
Everything is as usual. Old American slogan: Do you have oil? We are going to you to teach
you democracy (that is, we will rob, but democratically). And after that, Americans sincerely
wonder why the rest of the world (except for Israel and Saudi Arabia) "loves" them so
much.
The USA has no interest in other communist regimes of the world that have no gold or oil.
Seems to me the MO is obvious. The use of the outdated MSM planting lies is also worth noting
because it's not even on the fringe of expansion or acceptance, it's dying a slow death.
The old American way of invading a country because it has oil and, coincidentally, is
experiencing a "humanitarian crisis" while using corrupt MSM outlets is so friggin'
old.......
I went to Venezuela to drink some beer. I find that it's pointless to try to tell the
truth about Venezuela to most Americans. People say that, because I went to a small town
instead of Caracas, I couldn't possibly know the 'real' situation.
Zorov description of Caracas is a giant Potemkin Village. The refugees flooding into
Columbia and Brazil are just actors hired by CIA to make Maduro look bad. Sounds like
paradise!
Gresham's Law is reversed in the socialist paradise and good money drives the bad from
circulation? Right. Got it. If this trolling reporter actually believes that, I have some
Continentals for him. I'll print them up to order.
I start to think that I don't feel sorry for Maduro at all. He really corrupted en
entire country with such generous handouts. And they willingly take, but no one says "thank
you," just that they want more and more.
Sounds familiar, I see this **** in the US and the left is setting up it's constituents to
starve and suffer.
Our Air France flight was grounded in Paris for 5 hours; no one wants to land in
Venezuela in the middle of the night, due to the "dangerous criminal situation."
So what would you call the situation in Paris, exactly? Mayberry? And this is precisely
why journalistic bias works better than anything else when it comes to exposing the kind of
stupidity that rivals what existed during the Dark Age. They call themselves out, shout "Hey!
I'm a moron!", and then we all laugh.
I don't know what ZH has gone but on the fake news this morning the experts were telling
me Maduro was stopping humanitarian aid sent from the US at the border.
This is the same thing that happens to anybody that questions Trump. Doing that means they
support Honest Hill'rey or is a "libtard". Without knowing much at all about Maduro, US
intervention in Venezuela is somthing I do not support at all and the maverick outside is
POTUS. So right or wrong I blame him.
This is the personal view of the correspondent on today's life of Caracas.
Translated by Scott
Day one...
Our Air France flight was grounded in Paris for 5 hours; no one wants to land in Venezuela
in the middle of the night, due to the "dangerous criminal situation." The airliner is half
empty, the passengers, judging by nervous conversations, are only Venezuelans. A taxi driver,
while leaving the airport, locks the doors, and sweetly warns that after dark, bandits scatter
spikes on the roads and rob the stranded cars. "Oh, don't worry, Amigo, I have an old car. They
are not interested in old, cars." That's where you understand why Caracas is ranked first in
the ranking of the most dangerous cities in the world. It's too late for supper, but I at least
want to exchange my US dollars for Venezuelan bolivars. I ask my cab driver. He violently
shakes his head:
"No, no, no. I do not mess with such things, it's illegal!"
"Whatever," I laugh at him.
"Tomorrow, someone will take the dollars, maybe even with my hands torn off." I was
wrong
The following morning, no one at the hotel wants to look at my dollars.
The hotel employee tells me to go to one of the official "exchange stores" but honestly
adds: "only Americans, or complete jerks go there."
In Venezuela, the official dollar exchange rate is 200 bolivars, and the "black market"
exchange rate is 2,715. And if you exchange your currency in a bank, then according to this
calculation, a bottle of ordinary water will cost 330 rubles, and a modest lunch in an
inexpensive cafe -- 7,000 rubles per person. Judging by the stories on the Internet, in
Venezuelan people should simply kill each other for dollars, but this is not the case.
There is also other things different from perception. On western news, it is shown that
demonstrators fight with police daily, tens killed, hundreds wounded, the sea of blood. But in
Caracas, all is quiet. In an afternoon, people are sitting in cafes and idly sipping rum with
ice, while maintenance crews sweep the streets. It turns out that the world 's leading TV new
sources (including CNN and the BBC) show some fantasy film about Venezuela. "Demonstrations?"
yawns Alejandro, a street vendor selling corn. "Well, Saturday there will be one, sort of. On
one end of the city will be a rally of opposition supporters, and on the other, Maduro
supporters. The police keep them separate to prevent fights."
Amazing.
You browse the Internet, you turn on the TV, and you see the revolution, the people dying on
streets to overthrow the "evil dictator Maduro." And you come here, and nobody cares.
Then it got even better. Never in my life have I had so many adventures while trying to
exchange one currency for another. The country has a problem with cash money, long queues
waiting for the ATM, and even the street dealers of "currency" have no "efectivo," as they call
cash. I wander inside a jewelry store and ask if they want some "green." The answer is "No."
Everyone acts like law-abiding citizens. I am told that police recently started arresting
people for private exchange, that's why people don't want to associate. One owner of the
jewelry store almost agrees.
"What do you have? Dollars? No, I won't take that."
"Why now?"
"I take only the Euros dollar, man, is the currency of the aggressor, they try to tell us
how to live!"
Damn it! I have money in my pocket, and I can't even buy lunch! Finally, a certain woman,
nursing a baby in a workplace, very reluctantly agrees to exchange 2,200 bolivars for a "buck."
I want to curse her out, but I have to live somehow. Bolivars seem like a beautiful,
unattainable currency, which hides all the benefits of the world, that's why they are so hard
to get. I'm nodding in agreement. The woman calls somewhere, and asks to wait. After 15 minutes
she tells me that "there is a problem." Of course, money is not to be found. Her man couldn't
withdraw them from the ATM, everywhere the ATMs are on a strict daily rate.
"President Maduro is fighting for the strengthening of the national currency," explained
the nursing mother. "We all use our cards to pay for everything."
I don't know how it works, but yesterday an exchange rate was 3,200 bolívars for 1
dollar, and today the "bucks" fell to 2,700. I have started to realize that in the very next
few days I'll starve to death with dollars in my pocket. A unique fate, perhaps, that has never
happen in history.
In the next kiosk cash for gold place I am offered a plastic debit card loaded with local
money, and then I would try my luck withdrawing bills from neighboring ATMs. "Or, maybe not, if
you're not lucky." Well, of course. By the way, an attempt to buy a SIM card for the phone also
fails. They don't sell them to foreigners, you need a Venezuelan ID card. Yes, and I have
nothing to pay for it. The feeling is that the dollar is a gift that no one wants. Sadly, I
walk by stores. People come out of there with packages of eggs, bread, packs of butter. The
range is not like in Moscow, of course, but again, if you believe the news on TV, Venezuela is
suffering from a terrible famine, supermarkets are empty, and people are fighting each other
for food. Nothing like that. There are queues, but not kilometers long. In general, television
stations in the United States and Europe (and ours too) created their own Venezuela, drawn like
a terrible cartoon. I walk into a cafe at random.
"Will you accept dollars for lunch?" I ask hopelessly.
"Yes, at the rate of "black market" they whispered to me.
"But the change will also be in dollars... sorry, no bolivars at all...we've been hunting
for them ourselves for weeks."
My first day in Venezuela is over. How unusual. I've been here for 24 hours, and I've not
held a Bolivian bill in my hand. Oh, but there will be more...
Day two...
60 liters of gasoline here cost five cents, and a basket of basic food products - 50 rubles
(about 90 cents).
"The gas station," my driver reaches into his purse and takes out a banknote of 2 Bolivar.
The exchange rate of the Venezuelan currency changes every day, and today it is 2,580 bolivars
per one dollar. In Russian money, that is 10 cents. "We must now fill a full tank," says the
taxi driver. 60 liters of gasoline cost 1 bolívar, but we give the 2 bolivars bill,
because there is no 1 bolivar bill. I can't believe that is a full tank of fuel costs FIVE
CENTS?
"And how much can you even fill at this price?"
"Once a day for every citizen. And it's enough for me."
All the way to the center city, the driver scolds President Maduro, and tells me how much he
loves America, and how it will be good when the "guy with mustache" is finally overthrow by the
Americans.
I start to think that I don't feel sorry for Maduro at all. He really corrupted en entire
country with such generous handouts. And they willingly take, but no one says "thank you," just
that they want more and more.
On the street there is a long line into a "social supermarket," a place you can buy 400
types of goods at the solid low prices. These shops were established by the late President Hugo
Chavez "to fight inflation and protect the poor." The stores are funded by the Venezuelan
government. The buyer comes with a passport, gets a number, and waits in line until they are
allowed to enter and buy a certain set of products. The selection isn't very impressive, only
the essentials: chicken, bananas, pineapples, sausages, milk. A box of these food items costs
of equivalent of 50 rubles. CNN and the BBC show videos of Venezuelans wrapped in rolls of
toilet paper and sadly wandering across the border with Colombia. The toilet paper is found in
absolutely every store, and without any problems. I am once again simply amazed: Western TV
news is something from Hollywood, they are not reporting but making fantasy blockbusters. On
the BBC website I read that hungry Venezuelan children after school go to take a look at the
street vendors cooking meat. I've been all over the town. Restaurants, cafes, eateries, during
the lunch hour are crowded, and people look well-dressed. The mass hunger, the Western media
paints for us, doesn't exist in reality.
I take a few pictures inside the supermarket, and I am immediately approached by the workers
or "Maduro followers."
"It's forbidden to take pictures here."
"Is this a military facility?"
"Leave or we'll call the police."
"Listen, everywhere on TV they tell us that there is hunger in Venezuela. I want to prove
that the reality is different."
"We are not interested, we just work here: leave immediately!"
I started to understand perfectly well why Nicolas Maduro lost the information war. Hugo
Chavez was often praised even in private conversations, but even Chavez supporters find little
positive to say about Maduro. When people protested against Hugo's endless nominations as the
head of state, he used to meet them with the open arms, smiling and saying : "Guys, what's the
problem? I'm your President, I love you, let's sit down and talk!" Maduro doesn't have this
image of being one of the guys. He is not able to communicate with the public, and his
assistants, like the employees of the social store, can only push and ban and threaten with the
police.
On the streets, provincial farmers sell fruits and vegetables: mango, tomatoes, cucumbers.
All about the same price of 25 rubles per kilogram. Here, a dozen eggs from street vendors is
4,800 bolivars or about 130 rubles, and that is not cheap . During the peak of oil prices, when
a barrel of oil was sold for $150, Venezuela lived on the principle of a rich fool. To develop
domestic production? No, what is that nonsense? We can buy every triviality abroad. Even the
managers of the oil production weren't local, they hired specialists from Europe, and paid them
a lot of money. Food imports into the country reached 95 percent. And now the situation is not
too different. When I order my meal in a cafe (incidentally, still paying in dollars, all
attempts to change dollars to bolivars failed), I get excellent pork. "Where is it from?" "From
Colombia." "And chicken?" "From Brazil, that's why it's so expensive." Even flour for bread
comes from neighboring Guyana. Chavez and his successor Maduro wanted to be "people's
presidents," handing out money left and right. But then oil prices collapsed, food shortages
began, and people rebelled. People demand as before: cheap food in supermarkets, gasoline for
nothing, and they don't want to hear anything more or less.
"Chavez was a great guy!" says a fan of the former president, 75-year-old Raul Romero,
dressed in a red "chavist" shirt.
"Maduro is nothing like him! There is speculators on the streets, he does nothing. In his
time, Chavez arrested the dealers raising food prices, closed their shops, confiscated land
from landowners, and gave it to the people. We need a firm hand, a real dictatorship!"
In the TV world, Maduro is portrayed as a dictator and executioner, although in Venezuela,
he is openly scolded for being meek; they draw cartoon of him, and insult him as much as they
can. But who cares about the truth? Much more colorful to show the suffering for the toilet
paper.
Day three...
"I got robbed by a COP for my phone. I'm talking on the cell phone outside, he walks over
to me, pokes in my side with his gun. "Give me your mobile." I don't understand immediately,
and automatically continue the conversation. He cocks his gun, and says, "Kill." I give him
my phone. It's still good, I love being robbed by cops. They are not bandits from the
"Barrios," the poor neighborhoods in the mountains, who can shoot you first and then rummage
your corpse's pockets. I'm lucky, I've lived in Venezuela for 27 years and this was the first
time I was "hop-stopped." A lot of people get robbed every year.
I am talking to Mikhail, a citizen of Russia living in Venezuela since the beginning of the
nineties. He helps me move around Caracas and instructs me on how to visit the local slums.
"You don't have protection? Oh, who would doubt that. Then leave your watch, phone, and camera
at the hotel. Take some money for a taxi, you also have to have some cash in case you get
ambushed, otherwise they might get offended and kill you. Sometimes, people get shot in an arm
and a leg, that survivable." After such a nice story, I still go to the "Barrios." It is there
that the supporters of President Nicolas Maduro mainly live. According to CNN and BBC,
impoverished people in Venezuela are revolting against the government. Nothing can be further
from the truth; it's a wealthy middle class that goes to demonstrate. Maduro is applauded in
poor neighborhoods, because the President gives their residents free food sets enough for a
month and gives free (!) apartments. Formally, they belong to the state, but people live in
them for generations.
"I will cut a throat for the President," a heavily-tattooed man smiles menacingly, and
introduces himself as Emilio.
"Who else would give me food and a 'roof ' for free? He is our father and benefactor."
Maduro deliberately does not touch such people, which is why crime in Caracas gushes over
the edge. I am advised not to stop on the street to look at anything, but just to keep going,
otherwise bandits will have time to look closely at me. That's why they have constant robberies
on the streets, plus the police and the national guard can easily take away your favorite
things. No one can be happy about all these. "I love Russians," told me the businessman Carlos
while conversing over coffee near the Plaza de Bolivar.
" But you'd better send Maduro economic advisers. Teach him a lesson! He doesn't know
anything about economy. He has one recipe for everything, to give more money to the poor,
more free apartments, free food, free gasoline, to build a full communism here. But with
this, sorry, any state would collapse ."
The opposition rally in the Western part of Caracas is huge, at least 100 thousand people
gathered. The protesters are friendly to me, Russia here is respected. It is not considered an
enemy. Zero aggression at all and then I wonder about what I see on CNN, videos of the
opposition being rolled into a pancake by tanks. The police keep the neutrality, it disappears
from the streets, to not give a cause to provocateurs. People are happily waving flying in the
sky military helicopter. Many-in t-shirts with the American flag, a man passes by, holding a
hand-written poster with the altered slogan of Donald Trump -"Make Venezuela great again."
"Do you love the U.S.?"
"Yes, adore it!"
"I remember you already had a pro-American President in 1993, Carlos Andrés
Pérez. He sharply raised the price of gasoline, 80% of the goods were imported, he
drove the republic into billions of IMF debts. People went to demonstrations, and
Pérez drowned them in blood, killing 2,000 people then he fled to America."
The man freezes, with his mouth open. Finally, he gets the gift of speech back.
"I hope this time the pro-American President will be different."
"Are you sure?"
"Sorry, I have nothing to say."
Asking the girl from the opposition how she feels about the US:
"The US is our neighbor, let them change the power here." "In countries where the US changed power like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, hundreds of
thousands people were killed. Are you ready for this?"
Again, she pauses and sighs.
"No, no, no. We are not Africa or Asia. All will go peacefully. Venezuelans will not kill
each other."
Where the opinions splits is the question of whether the free gasoline and free food
packages will remain with an American-instilled government. Many are sincerely sure that the
"freebies" will remain under a new president. How else? The minority that recognizes that state
gifts will be canceled say that they at least "we will be free." As I said, the protesters are
mostly well-dressed, well-off people. By the way, the leader of the opposition, Juan Guido,
also has no real economic program promising to "quadruple the oil production." No one thinks
that after that price will fall four times. In short, I get a feeling that neither the
President, nor the opposition, know anything about the economy in Venezuela.
The demonstrations in support of Maduro take place at the other end of the city, to prevent
the opponents from fighting.
"You Americans are insolent!" screamed an old woman in a red t-shirt rushing towards
me. "Bastards! You should be hanged on a first tree! Cheers to socialism!"
"I'm Russian, grandma."
The old lady recoils.
"Sorry, please." "Don't get that upset, senora."
Many people gathered here are joyful, dancing and singing. A soldier stands in front of me and doesn't allow me to take any pictures. Not just me, but
also other passers-by.
"You can't take pictures here." "Says who?" "President Maduro."
No, Maduro is definitely doing everything he can to be disliked. Those gathering here are
poor, blue-collared workers and farmers from the suburbs. I am interested , honestly, were you
brought here on the busses? "Yes, he did!" says one grandfather, proudly displaying a portrait
of Che Guevara.
"But I would walk here for Maduro! It's a lie that we were paid to be here."
Other people applaud him happily. I shake hands. "Russians are welcome! Venezuela loves you,
you're home."
The day of rallies is over. The maintenance crews came to the sidewalk, strewn with plastic
bottles, crumpled packs of cigarettes, and other debris left after by a cloud. At the entrance
of an old house, old people drink coffee.
"They say that today some general has defected to the side of the opposition," says one of
them. "Some significant person." "What's this guy's name?" "Who knows?"
It is all moving same pieces of capitalistic BS around. Basic imperialistic struggle among
former hegemon who is going down due to stupidity and bad choices and newly rising hopefuls.
Once USA is safely put out and hopefully down, new great powers will suck lesser powers
dry probably by smarter and less aggressive means but nevertheless.
Souverenity is being used as a tool now, but truly sovereign can be only few great powers
in capitalistic world and Venezuela will never be sovereign.
Sacker as usually lacks imagination to go beyond his narrow views. He is also
contradictory.
Fighting the only successful socialist state in the world which was the only one capable
to put his anglozios in place yet defending this pathetic entity pretending to be
socialist.
If it is socialist how come all those oligarchs and their base is still around to keep
creating troubles? They should have gotten rid off long time ago and their all assets and
capitals nationalized for common good.
Regarding USA I have never had any illusions about this entity. Not even in 80s. All those
birth Mark's were there from the start. As with every old person they turned into marasm at
certain age.
Venezuela has claimed to have unveiled a mass conspiracy involving military personnel
and politicians trying to unseat the country's government by force, as well as plans of
potential U.S. military action.
Venezuelan Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez has alleged that Julio Borges, an
opposition politician and former head of the National Assembly, was behind both a failed
2014 coup and an assassination attempt last August against Venezuelan President
Nicolás Maduro. The information was allegedly gathered by confessions from
recently-arrested Colonel Oswaldo García, who was behind another unsuccessful
conspiracy to unseat Maduro last year and was seen confessing on video during Thursday's
conference.
I am not so sure the Pinochet would be able to overthrow Allende government so early without
CIA support and infiltration (people, money, intelligence)
Notable quotes:
"... what more do you to see or hear or read before you believe that US had been hyper -focused and heavily engaged and entirely illegally to destroy Valenzuela independence form crony capitalism? ..."
@mike k I try to separate the effects of US aggression from that effects of the
Venezuelan governments own failures.
I agree with what another commentator pointed out. US influence in Latin America is often
overestimated. In my opinion by both the "left" who see it as cause of most problems and the
"right" who tend to see it positive.
Certain groups in Latin America tend to ally with the US. But they do this so they can
easier to pursue their own interests. For example imho Pinochet would have successfully
overthrown Allende in Chile even without US support. Latin Americans aren't mindless puppets
that are controlled and played from Washington. Moscow or Beijing.
@EliteCommInc. I don't advocate and American (supposed you are American or British)
intervention in Venezuela. I merely wanted to point out that this article/interview one sided
and and therefore not better that the bullshit the Murdoch media and their likes are probably
spreading lately.
@Captain Willard A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in
the electricity sector. There is the grave possibility that some 70 percent of the
country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010. Water
levels at the Guris dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption
sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry. This could be the watershed event,
as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system.
This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition
group could ever hope to generate. At that point in time, an opposition group would be best
served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.
Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public
unrest and rejection of the presidency, malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide
to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support. This has been the
pattern in the past three coup attempts. Where the military thought it had enough support,
there was a failure in the public to respond positively (or the public responded in the
negative), so the coup failed. --
The GiFiles,
Files released: 5543061
The GiFiles
Specified Search
@Matthias Eckert For example imho Pinochet would have successfully overthrown Allende in
Chile even without US support"
This is called softening of arguments and doubt and making room for possible exoneration
of US.
Tomorrow we will hear that Haiti's Aristides would have been forced by Haitian to board
plane and leave
Tomorrow we will know that Honduran president would have been anyways sent to the pasture
of retirement by some military without Clinton's ( Mrs this time ).
@Matthias Eckert 1 "Soldiers eat out of garbage cans & their families go hungry in
Venezuela while Maduro & friends live like kings & block humanitarian aid," Mr. Rubio
wrote. He then added: "The world would support the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide
to protect the people & restore democracy by removing a dictator."
2
In a speech in April, when he was still White House policy chief for Latin America, Mr.
Cruz issued a message to the Venezuelan military. Referring to Mr. Maduro as a "madman," Mr.
Cruz said all Venezuelans should "urge the military to respect the oath they took to perform
their functions. Honor your oath."
3
Roberta Jacobson, a former ambassador to Mexico who preceded Ms. Aponte as the top State
Department official for Latin America policy, said that while Washington has long regarded
the Venezuelan military as "widely corrupt, deeply involved in narcotics trafficking and very
unsavory," she saw merit in establishing a back channel with some of them
4. Mr. Tillerson raised the potential for a military coup.
"When things are so bad that the military leadership realizes that it just can't serve the
citizens anymore, they will manage a peaceful transition," he said.
what more do you to see or hear or read before you believe that US had been hyper
-focused and heavily engaged and entirely illegally to destroy Valenzuela independence form
crony capitalism?
Analyst Canthama agrees with Pepe (BTL SyrPer #286513):
The Saker has a nice article on Venezuela, few days old, but quite balanced on his
analysis, people could disagree with one or two things but in general quite to the point on
all fronts.
Though Colombia and Brazil border Venezuela on its West and South, any sort of military
invasion from those directions will first have to conquer nature.
So there are only two ways to remove Maduro:
1) US cruise missiles hitting hundreds of spots in Venezuela would be completely
unacceptable for any Latina America population, a violence that would cause the US to lose
support even its most vassal States.
In parallel, such violence would spark the return of the Colombian guerrilla, blowback will
be very bad and wide spread. Thus military intervention is not likely.
2) The second option is assassination of Maduro , and this is where some of
Venezuela's allies are trying to help, either with security guards, intel and direct
protection.
As in Syria, time is an ally for Venezuela, the Venezuela Government will become stronger
and diplomacy will take shape, There is a real danger though for a false flag, and this is in
fact what Bolton and Pompeo are preparing with Guaidó's supporters knowledge [as in
Syria].
Time is also important since the US regime and its dying fiat economy, 2019 will be a
tough year for the G7, meaning theses regimes will either have to create another massive QE
that will bring them down or start a big war, which the vast majority of their country
citizens will never support, see France with yellow vest, many more countries would see the
same -- even the US.
So, time is good friend to the Venezuela, they must push it as long as they can, and
things will be all right.
Pepe Escobar gives the global view; with Venezuela, Iran, Russia and China abandoning the
mythical petrodollar, Uncle $cam's fiat currency is heading for the dustbin of history:
https://thesaker.is/venezuela-lets-cut-to-the-chase/
"That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that
they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it's not the safe
place as it once was," he said.
"One of the few things left for Britain is to be the financial center that London has been
for so long. And one of the ways you stay a financial center is if you don't play games with
other people's money," he said.
Listening to David Graeber in this interview there is no mention of declining energy
surpluses in the discussion of the economic paradigm of the coming future. No consideration
of the role of the labour of fossil fuels in the economy of the past two centuries.
It's amazing, the argument seems not to have reached them, such that it is doesn't even get a
look in. (Listen from 40 min mark, and you will hear a completely opposite view of what is to
come -- " We are not going to have the problem of how to deploy scarce resources, given an
only moderate level of productivity ").
https://novaramedia.com/2019/02/01/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs-direct-democracy-the-end-of-capitalism/
Fittingly, there is a fascinating section (52.min 30 sec onwards) exploring Graeber's new
book project about how much of the enlightenment thinking of pre-revolutionary France was
either a pilfering of, or a reaction to, the ideas of social organisation coming from
pre-European Americans.
The Graun seems to have been anti-Chavez from the get go. With a set of 'journalists' who
seem to jave made it their lifes work to reverse that democratic revolution. It is not easy
to find their biogs.
This whole business of "recognizing a president" not yet in power has a precedent: Rwanda.
When the bUgandan army invaded Rwanda (with US, Canadian, British and Belgian backing) in
1990 (1 October), or in propaganda terms, the RPA started its "liberation," the US moved its
embassy to Mulindi, and sent the bUgandan chief of intelligence from his IMET junket at Fort
Leavenworth, to take over in northern Rwanda. I refer to Paul Kagame.
International institutions also started to deal with Mulindi, rather than Kigali.
Accusations of genocide within a year
Loathsome though he is, Bolton is probably the only honest neocon around. In Iraq, while the
likes of Blair were banging on about 45 minutes, human rights and democracy etc, Bolton
always made it clear that is was simply a matter of US interests. AKA Oil. He has never
pretended to represent anything but rapacious US self interest.
Fair play. At least you know what you're getting with that tash.
Prior to being assigned to Latin America, Phillips was the Guardian's China correspondent for
five years or so. His task, which he diligently accomplished, was to produce a couple of
articles a week on "Why China Is No Good" . I don't think he ever once found anything
positive to say about the place.
As an individual he's a complete Jodrell, but there are few to compare with him in his
ability to relentlessly toe the Washington neocon line. You couldn't get a fag paper in
between him and Luke Harding. I wonder if he's paid for it, or whether it's just that
seductive sense of 'belonging' that comes from rubbing shoulders with really powerful
people .
Principally, the principles , better said the absence of statute & principle in Law,
behind mass surveillance, was what Snowden was desperate to highlight and that the public's
principal concern of the Guardian's hard drives, were the least of our problems, legally
speaking , coz' other copies existed already elsewhere, anyway
OFFG could always ask Glen Greenwald to explain why he ceased to 'copulate' with the
Guardian and maybe even 'intercept' an opinion or two from Snowden, whilst he's at it
intercepting. Indeed , a few extra nails in the Guardian's coffin , could be delivered quite
speedily & succinctly , with some professional journalistic exchange of Question &
Answer, with nail-gun loaded & mutual benefit would seem to be an all round obvious
win-win debate on matters of principle, legal permissions & submissions.
In some ways it is refreshing to have these power hungry narcissists in charge of the US as
they cannot seem to not blurt out their naked ambitions, which in this example ftom the ft
basically shows kidnap is an agreeable part of trade negotiation.
'Five days after a top executive of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms group, was arrested on a
US request in Canada, President Donald Trump said he was willing to intervene -- if it helped
secure "the largest trade deal ever made". The detention of Meng Wanzhou, one of China's best
known executives, was undoubtedly an incendiary step, escalating trade tensions with Beijing.
But presidential interference in the case would send entirely the wrong message about the US
justice system -- and about how the administration conducts international affairs.
The US and western allies have legitimate concerns about China's reputation for digital
espionage and theft of intellectual property. They agree a more robust stance is needed
towards Beijing. But arresting a star of Chinese business -- Ms Meng has been called China's
Sheryl Sandberg -- on a Canadian stopover en route to Mexico from Hong Kong is not the way to
persuade Beijing to change its behaviour.
Even if the Huawei chief financial officer was held on unrelated charges of violating US
sanctions on Iran, the move smacks of using individuals as pawns in negotiations. It is seen
in Beijing as Washington rewriting the rules of engagement. Such waywardness and
unpredictability from a country that used to portray itself as a pillar of the international
rules-based order will tempt China to respond in kind, leading to a downward spiral of
tit-for-tat behaviour. Indeed, the detention of a former Canadian diplomat, Michael Kovrig,
in Beijing looks worryingly like retaliation.
It may be necessary to take at face value Mr Trump's claims that he was unaware of the US
extradition application, and of the detention itself -- which occurred on the day he was
holding talks on a trade truce with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires. Had
he known, even Mr Trump seems unlikely to have been cynical enough not to mention the arrest
to Mr Xi. Presidential ignorance, however, offers little reassurance.
That Mr Trump would not be notified of such a sensitive case by his justice department
strengthens the impression of a dysfunctional administration, whose different arms pursue
their agendas with little co-ordination, if not in open competition. It strains credibility
that his recent presidential predecessors would have been left in the dark in similar
situations. The Huawei incident comes in the same week that John Kelly's departure as chief
of staff seemed to confirm the extent to which the Trump White House defies conventional
management.
The president's offer to do "whatever's good for this country" regarding Ms Meng's case
reflects a dealmaker's desire to put his talks with Mr Xi back on track, while extracting
whatever advantage he can. But it amounts, in effect, to saying he is holding the Huawei CFO
hostage as a trade negotiating chip. The situation carries echoes of the White House's
reversal in July of a seven-year executive ban on ZTE, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker,
on purchasing critical equipment from the US, in what appeared a tactical concession to
Beijing.
Presidential interference in Ms Meng's case would send a worse signal: that rule of law in
the US is a function of the whim of the chief executive, or that illegal behaviour can be up
for negotiation. It risks creating an impression that there is little difference between
America's judicial system and that of, say, Turkey -- or indeed China. The Huawei executive's
detention was damaging. It is, however, not for the White House, but for independent courts
in Canada and -- if Ms Meng is extradited -- the US to determine what happens next.'
It all depends on your acceptance of "legality" of American sanctions on Iran. I don't,
therefore American action against Ms Meng imo is political and nothing to do with the rule of
law. Mr Trump's opinions are irrelevant.
President Trump's comments and opinions as expressed on Twitter will become relevant in
Sabrina Meng's court case. Her legal defence could use Trump's opinions as evidence that her
arrest was politically motivated and therefore she should not be extradited.
Canadian PM Justin Bieber Trudeau sacked the Ambassador to China for saying this and
expressing other opinions, among them Canada's view as to whether the current (and new) US
sanctions on Iran are binding on Canada.
The hypocrisy of the MSM in all this is yet again. So blatant it is sickening. At the same
time as Yemen is being battered by bombs with the Wests names on them. Deliberately starved
to death. With Western MSM indifference. Not to even mention. All the other countries Western
powers have illegally devastated. The hand ringing over the plight of the Venezuelan people
under Maduro is suddenly more then they can all bare. Western sanctioning and deliberate
sabotage by the West against the country. Undermining any chance of peace. Don't get a peep
of a mention by the MSM.
Here we go again. Roll up roll up. This is the latest hypocritical propaganda media show.
Maduro is evil we must save his country from this evil. Saintly peace bringing Western
alliance must save Venezuela. All that's needed is a more pliant Western puppet or chaos and
civil war. Oil Opps sorry shh don't mention the oil. Does any one really buy into this
deranged demented narrative any more. For gods sake how many more times do we have to say. NO
NOT IN MY NAME.
$13 billion in Venezuelan assets have been stolen by Uncle Sam and his satraps over the past
few days. Why oh why oh why do countries and foreign individuals persist in keeping their
assets in the US/ UK??????. Billions were stolen from Libya in a few days in 2011. Where it
all went is one of life's big mysteries. Cameron even stole a boat load of Libyan currency
that had been printed in the UK.
A Parliamentary Committee has been set up to agitate for sanctions against China on behalf of
the "poor oppressed Uighurs" in China. Shedding buckets of tears over the lack of "yuman
rights." While supplying British sniper rifles to the Zionists to gun down Palestinian kids
with dum dum bullets and planes, cluster bombs and RAF advisors to slaughter kids in Yemen.
Trump imposed broader economic sanctions on Venezuela because;
*serious human rights abuses (by Maduro),
*antidemocratic actions, and,
*responsibility for the deepening humanitarian crisis. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10715.pdf
So definitely nothing to do with the oil, or international relations between Venezuela and
other powers that neocons are at war with (wars being conducted in the media, financial
markets and on the ground) while the phony who preceeded Trump (Obama) claimed Venezeula
posed an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to US national security (which is a bit like
Tyson Fury saying he is frightened by a 90 year old woman who is blind and only has one
leg). https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12885
Isn't there just one soul at the Guardian who will stand up for what is really happening
here (as in all other parts of the world where the US has harmed so many people because of
its insatiable pursuit of oil and power) -- just one?
I must admit I am not getting my hopes up -- while the Guardian excels at drawing
attention to Maduros failings they seem to be deaf, dumb and blind to the geopolitical
context in which Venezuela is doing its utmost to escape the tentacles of US-backed neocons
in their endless quest for violent regime change.
In general those in the know loath the MSM because of the role they play in backing the
gangsters.
"Our own fate as Latin American writers is linked to the need for profound social
transformations. To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an
effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy
exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy
of collective imbecilization through the mass media. (Open veins of Latin America -- Eduardo
Galeano)
Ingwe, I started reading the Counter Punch, agreed it was not _only_ the oil so what were the
other motives for U$ Grand Theft Larceny Fraud with Violence? Got as far as this:
"It should be remembered that the Obama Administration had imposed sanctions against
Moscow in March 2014 over the Russian annexation of Crimea, and later involvement in the
civil war in Eastern Ukraine."
Could not read follow that, because I remember no such things as Russian annexation of
Crimea (at least, not since Catherine the Great), nor do I remember a civil war in Eastern
Ukraine (though quite aware that the U$-imposed Jewish Junta with their neo-Nazi stormtroops
are continually shelling Russian-speaking Eastern Ukraine).
vexarb, pity you didn't bother to read further for, if you did, you'd get a rather more
serious analysis than "USA bad and after the oil; Russia good and bringing enlightenment to
the world" .
I think the reason some of us still look at the Graun is that we can't quite believe how
appalling it's got, especially when, like me, you're old enough to remember the old newspaper
from the time when it had some principles and a lot of good writing. It has the sickly
fascination of something you know is really bad for you, like Nutella or reality TV shows.
You end up wallowing in its sheer awfulness, unlike, say, the Mail and the Sun, which you
always know from the start are going to be barking mad and have no element of surprise.
It's pretty obvious Anthony. Because the Guardian, like the BBC and C4 News, presents itself
as and is widely regarded to be an authorititative, non-biased news source. Hence it is
hugely influential in forming opinion in the corridors of power and in educated society.
Opinion that allow bad things to happen and ends up impacting lives. That is reality
regardless of comments dismissing these news sources on the internet. And it is why it is
appropriate for offguardian and others to try and highlight and expose the dangerous lies and
omissions of these wide-reaching propagandists.
It's good for cricket: the best paper in Canada for cricket news. Also for cycling. Since I
first began to read the Manchester Guardian for Neville Cardus's famous writing on cricket, I
stick with it.
As for foreign affairs, once it has been told by the Foreign Office, who the current enemies
are it goes for them. Those who recall the 'good old days' when Latin America and the Middle
East, including Palestine got reasonable coverage which sometimes was very good indeed, ought
to bear in mind that, in those Cold War days, the main enemy was the Soviet Union and it was
necessary to be equivocal about liberation struggles. After all, 'we' were pretending to be
desperately sorry about the sufferings of the Russian people, and those of eastern Europe, so
it was necessary to tone down the imperialist message.
Now the Establishment is dead set on recovering Latin America in toto, banishing alien
(Chinese Russian) influences and consolidating its base in the western hemisphere.
Here comes the Atlantic Treaty Organisation ATO.
The oft-used cliche of the kid (not brain washed yet) saying out loud that the emperor has
no clothes amongst a crowd propagandized, hypnotized and incentivized not to see and not to
know truth from falsehood.
The role of the MSM it seems is to perpetrate this mass denial. Thanks to kids like Kit
and those that support sites such as this other kids are catching on. But, alas we are just
kids after all and the grown ups have the power to spank us for such blasphemy. It is a risk
we kids take to speak the truth we see. When you see and when you know remaining silent can
make you sick (despair, anhedonia, addiction etc.). I'll take my chances with the spanking
and say as loud as I can that the emperor is a fucking war-mongering liar and thief.
I have uploaded various things to DTube and Steemit This film from the Guardian is very
good and relevant to Venezuela its on Bit CHute and survives on Youtube for now.
Thank you Kit (and others) for starting up OffGuardian. Its a very precious place to vent,
and to read the very enlightened, highly informative, and at times profound comments of all
the other commenters here. Have made numerous comments about the situation in Venezuela on
other recent stories here, so not going to keep repeating myself. Regards the state of the
World: surreal and orwellian and just plain bonkers much of the time seems to be the case. At
least Bolton was honest in stating the bleedin obvious, which anyone with even one eye open
already knew. Thanks for your work.
Indeed. I came across Off Guardian not long ago and I'm highly impressed by the quality. A
site to vent -- yes but that's just a small part of it. What is it now -- 3,000 articles
published in just nearly 4 years?. A level of committment by its founders not matched in many
places elsewhere that I can see.
What I like about this is the quality and depth of the articles -- and the fact each
attracts a large number of readers commenting.
I've been looking around various sites lately. It seems to be a mixture of those which
produce good articles but don't seem to have the following -- or at least there's a lack of
reader participation. Or sites where the analysis is not so good but attract a large volume
of comments not necessarily of great quality.
Off G seems to have struck a really good balance which I think means it has more potential
to grow further and build on its success.
I wonder (maybe this has been done before) if Off G thought about organising an event to
celebrate its next birthday. Might be a good way to raise funds and further interest.
I am surprised that the Guardian even mentioned oil and Venezuela in the same story. Did they
also say it has lots of gold, coltron, and many other natural resources. Neoliberals just
can't stand seeing all those profits going to "waste on the serfs".
Very likely McCain. Fortunately though, he already croaked. There was never a regime change
or war he did not support, or demand. The sooner his warmongering Fascist buddies follow him,
the better for mankind. I can imagine what "Bomb. bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" would have
said about Venezuela. As I said before, Venezuela is venomous to those who want to destroy
it. For all American sheeple to understand: The Bucket stops here. Exactly here.
Bolton's casual mention of U.S. oil corporations going into Venezuela and controlling
operation of the nation's oil sector, as if it's already a "done deal", goes right along with
Pompeo's focused use of the term "former president Maduro" in the psychological operation
aspect of the fully-mapped out coup's full court press. Someone famously described the
U.S.-led coup in Ukraine of February 2014 as the most blatant, obvious coup ever, but
amazingly this one involving Venezuela has even surpassed Ukraine in insane illegal boldness.
USA Inc.'s use of criminal aggressive war as a business tactic since false flag 9/11
resulted in the self-destruction of American reputation in the Middle East and North Africa
region. For that reason the attack on the Venezuelan people for their oil was not surprising.
Who will stand for peace? People might think creatively and act to prevent any repeat of
senseless violence and horror as experienced by people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria,
Ukraine and Yemen.
For the record, the "USA Inc.'s use of criminal aggressive war as a business tactic since
false flag 9/11 resulted in the self-destruction of American reputation " Globally.
Sorry to correct you, but no matter where I go, my first test of any persons intellect is
"What do you think happened to WTC 7 ?" and until you get that sorted , the USA is the
laughing stock of the 'brave new world' outside Government & MSM >>> Fact ,
clearly "you cannot be serious", nor the Guardian nor the BBC nor Die Zeit nor Swiss national
Television, nor Le Monde &&& and the whole damn network of partners in deep state
crimes against innocent people , to further corporate goals.
to even contemplate something in Venezuela is so absurd , when US Governance is so
infiltrated with Deep State Dictators & actors, bolstered by Hollywood >>> get
own house in order , before becoming guests elsewhere. This clearly applies to Britain &
France , as well, indeed all NATO partners.
Trump is gonna' have a real tough time with Xi, coz' you don't get to insult the Chinese
in public & arrest CFO's for extradition , without some form of comeback &
consequence and Chinese & Russian Military towards region Panama seems almost assured and
the USS Fitzgerald warning ? how quickly people forget the 7 dead ! from just a container
ship, lol connect the 9 Dot line -- -- --
The world does not want and never needed policing by the U$A, nor their methods of
financial control & strangulation with credit on a scale far greater than Ponzi himself.
And as for WTC 7 , this made not only the USA a laughing stock in the minds of all
intelligent people, it dragged down & outed the very IN-credibility of every single
politician in the western world , who accepted the award winning WTC 7 TonyAndyPandy story
for CHILDREN !
it's time we got adults back into politics , coz' at present all we have, without
exception, is precisely what George Carlin described in 'a few cultural issues' "Garbage in
Garbage out" !
and we can be 100% sure that they are all GARBAGE, because they cannot even recognise a
controlled explosion, let alone cooking the history books >>> not even one !
The USA has YANKed all their strings, on behalf of Zion and corporate control >>>
fact, not one politician permitted to call a spade a spade or WTC 7 a controlled demolition
let alone MSM.
Long live the revolution & evolution of political conscience !
1. Switch payment for Venezuelan oil from yuan back to dollars.
2. Confiscate Chinese and Russian oil investments in Venezuela.
3. Privatise Venezuelan oil to Wall Street at knock down prices.
Or, as the Orange Baboon himself croaked like a two bit Mafia hood, "Grab the oil! Grab
the oil! Grab the oil!!"
This interview is a whitewash for the Venezuelan government. While I don't doubt that the
described sabotage and subversion orchestrated by the US the Chavistas are clearly
incompetent and corrupt.
They had 20 years to diversify the Venezuelan economy and failed completely. Instead of
decreasing the reliance on oil exports the increased it.
Most of what was left off the venezuelan agricultural sector got destroyed by handing it to
Chavez followers. Similar with almost all other economic sectors. Even the oil production is
much lower than it was in 1998 and this is not because of sanctions. They simply didn't
invest enough into replacing equipment that got worn out. They had 20 years to build
refineries for venezuelan oil in Venezuela, China or somewhere else out of US influence, they
didn't.
@Matthias Eckert Same goes for almost anything else. Why does Venezuela still have gold
deposited in the US and Britain? it's not like these never seized (not to say stole) foreign
assets before.
Just because the Chavistas are enemies of the American oligarchy doesn't mean the aren't
oligarchs themselves.
ps. That Anglo habit to start nationalities with a capital letter even when used as
adjective is an insult to logic
@Johnny Walker Read Natural resources get its value by the knowledge to create something
useful out of them. The economy is human activities, the way we create value by using our
knowledge and talents.
As Hudson say Chavez tried to create at mixed economy. Its not an easy task, something that
takes long time, e.g. raising the general educational level, infrastructure, health and so
on.
If Chavez and PSUV did approach this task good or bad I do not know.
As I understand are Venezuela a country riddled with enormous obstacles to achieve this. It
probably needs a high amount of social capital. Add on western hostility that third world
countries do this.
The prime example of success in fairly modern times are countries in Asia with national unity
and rather authoritarian government.
@Matthias Eckert "This interview is a whitewash for the Venezuelan government They had 20
years "
-- You are not a child, aren't you? How about the industrial base in the mighty US?
There is also the US infrastructure, the improvement of which requires some $4 trillion
"They" (the richest country in the world) had how many years?
Besides, the main point of the article is in a color graph showing % of votes /% of all
registered voters .
Look again at the graph, carefully. What are the numbers for Mr. Guaido? Have not we seen
enough of "democracy on the march" and other US-led "improvements" and "humanitarian
interventions" in Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine?
These pro-U.S. policies made Venezuela a typically polarized Latin American oligarchy.
Despite being nominally rich in oil revenue, its wealth was concentrated in the hands of a
pro-U.S. oligarchy that let its domestic development be steered by the World Bank and
IMF.
No amount of needle point proof can pop the balloon that is the collective brains of
Americans that have a CIA propaganda(via the media) myth inserted in their head that "it's
because of socialism!" Venezuela is in economic turmoil.
Other CIA created myths(that happen to work):
"They need democracy restored"
"They need our help"
"They have weapons of mass destruction"
"They harbor terrorists"
"They peddle fake news"
"They hack our elections"
Etc .
Collect your own, and trade them with your friends.
At least China and Russia can provide an alternative bank clearing mechanism to SWIFT,
so that Venezuela can bypass the U.S. financial system and keep its assets from being
grabbed at will by U.S. authorities or bondholders. And of course, they can provide
safe-keeping for however much of Venezuela's gold it can get back from New York and
London.
There's a good general rule here to keep independent country assets and financial
transactions away from the US – especially making them non- US dollar based.
This would confront U.S. financial strategists with a choice: if they continue to treat
the IMF, World Bank, ITO and NATO as extensions of increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign
policy, they will risk isolating the United States. Europe will have to choose whether to
remain a U.S. economic and military satellite, or to throw in its lot with Eurasia.
Europe would have to make this choice – and it looks like the European public is in
fact already starting to make it – which greatly troubles the US's elite European
collaborators.
Refusal of England and the U.S. to pay Venezuela means that other countries realize that
foreign official gold reserves can be held hostage to U.S. foreign policy, and even to
judgments by U.S. courts to award this gold to foreign creditors or to whoever might bring
a lawsuit under U.S. law against these countries.
True. Now is reflection time for any country that holds physical gold in New York or
London. Also time to think in general about reserves held in US dollars (Treasury bonds).
Being a Roman Catholic country, Venezuela might ask for papal support for a debt
write-down and an international institution to oversee the ability to pay by debtor
countries without imposing austerity, emigration, depopulation and forced privatization of
the public domain.
Whatever happens Venezuela is going to get austerity, but it could be a difficult self
respecting and self sufficient kind, excluding the US (the primary source of its problems)
and taking assistance from any friends that it may have.
Another Saker article that ignores the elephant in the room completely
Looking ahead, therefore, China, Russia, Iran and other countries need to set up a new
international court to adjudicate the coming diplomatic crisis and its financial and military
consequences. Such a court – and its associated international bank as an alternative to
the U.S.-controlled IMF and World Bank – needs a clear ideology to frame a set of
principles of nationhood and international rights with power to implement and enforce its
judgments.
A great idea but the world banks are NOT US controlled. They are run by the Rothschilds,
and until writers like Saker face up to this fact the problems will not be resolved.
Rothschild has to be dealt with, put out of business and closed down permanently.
What Mr Hudson's answers make clear is that Putin is increasingly bogged down in yet another
fight, a fight which Mr Hudson tacitly believes to be unwinnable.
@Michael Kenny Putin does not need to win, only impose more pain on the US than he
himself suffers. If Maduro stays in power, that is a big win for Russia and further proves
their ability to stand up the US of A.
Venezuela would prove Syria was not just luck but the start of a changing tide. If Guaido
eventually takes power, it will have costed the US much more now that Russia is there.
A couple old planes and 400 Russian special forces means that the US needed to put 5000
troops in Colombia.
When you stand up to a bully, you don't need to win, but to prove it's not worth going
after you in the future.
Which means that Maduro movement is isolated within is own continent.
Notable quotes:
"... Since there can be no intervention without the presence of force or threats of its use the actions taken and threats made against Venezuela constitute the crime of aggression under international law. ..."
"... The US and Canada are now threatening the use of armed force against Venezuela. John Bolton stated that all options are on the table and has even threatened Maduro with imprisonment in the US torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay. Britain has seized Venezuelan funds sitting in London banks, and the US and its flunkies are now trying to stop Venezuela and Turkey from dealing in Venezuelan gold, and, to add to their net, accuse them of sending the gold to Iran in violation of their illegal "sanctions." ..."
"... "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations." ..."
"... "refrain from any threats or acts, direct or indirect, aimed at impairing the freedom, independence or integrity of any State, or at fomenting civil strife and subverting the will of the people in any state."' ..."
"... "1. No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. Consequently, armed intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements, are condemned.' ..."
"... "2. No State may use or encourage the use of economic, political or any other type of measures to coerce another state in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights or to secure from it advantages of any kind. Also, no state shall organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities directed toward the violent overthrow of the regime of another State, or interfere in civil strife in another State." ..."
"... "refrain from armed intervention or the promotion or organization of subversion, terrorism or other indirect forms of intervention for the purpose of changing by violence the existing system in another State or interfering in civil strife in another State." ..."
"... "to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in acts of civil strife or terrorist acts in another State or to allow such acts to be operated from its territory." ..."
"... Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel " Beneath the Clouds . He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook." https://journal-neo.org/2019/02/04/the-lima-group-international-outlaws/ ..."
The covert and overt interventions taking place against Venezuela by the United States and
its allies are a form of aggression and a violation of the fundamental principles of the United
Nations Charter making the nations involved international outlaws.
The attempted coup against President Maduro of Venezuela may have failed so far but the
jackals that instigated it have not given up their objective of forcing the majority of
Venezuelans benefiting from the Bolivarian revolution begun by President Chavez, back to the
misery the revolution is trying to save them from. The United States and its allied governments
and media, working with American military and civilian intelligence services, are pumping out a
constant flow of propaganda about the start of affairs in Venezuela to mislead and manipulate
their own peoples so that they support their aggression and to undermine Venezuelans support
for their revolution.
We have seen this type of propaganda before, the fake stories about "human rights" abuses,
economic conditions, the cries of "democracy," the propaganda about an "authoritarian" leader,
a "tyrant," "dictator", all labels they have used before against leaders of nations that they
have later murdered; President Arbenz, Allende, Torrijos, Habyarimana, Milosevic, Hussein,
Ghaddafi are examples that come quickly to mind, so that the same threats against Maduro are
not just propaganda but direct physical threats.
We see the same pretexts for military aggression used and same euphemisms being employed,
the same cries for "humanitarian intervention," which we now know are nothing more than modern
echoes of Hitler's pretexts for the invasion of Czechoslovakia, to "save the oppressed
Germans."
We see the same smug lies and hypocrisy about the rule of law as they openly brag about
their violation of international law with every step they take and talk as if they are gods
ruling the world.
The United States is the principal actor in all this but it has beside it among other
flunkey nations, perhaps the worst of them all, Canada, which has been an enthusiastic partner
in crime of the United States since the end of the Second World War. We cannot forget its role
in the aggression against North Korea, the Soviet Union, China, its secret role in the American
aggression against Vietnam, against Iraq, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine,
Haiti, Iran, and the past several years Venezuela.
Canada will take the lead in the aggression against Venezuela on Monday February 4
th when it hosts a meeting in Ottawa of a group of international war crime
conspirators, known as The Lima Group, a group of Latin American and Caribbean lackeys of the
United States, including Mexico and Canada which was set up by the United States at a meeting
in Lima, Peru on August 8, 2017 with the express purpose of overthrowing President Maduro.
Canada's harridan of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland, stated to the press recently that
"Canada needs to play a leading role in the Lima Group because the crisis in Venezuela is
unfolding in Canada's global backyard. This is our neighbourhood. We have a direct interest in
what happens in our hemisphere."
"In Canada's global backyard?" It's astonishing to read it. Canada regards the globe as its
backyard? She manages to reveal a severe case of megalomania and insult the rest of the nations
of the world at the same time. Her statement that Venezuela "is our neighbourhood" is almost a
direct adoption of the American claim to hegemony and "interventionism" in the western
hemisphere as if Canada completely identifies itself with the United States, that is, in terms
of foreign policy, has completely merged with the United States.
But, by doing so, the Canadian elite show themselves to be the enemies of progress and
economic and social justice; shows them to be the antihuman reactionaries that they are. They
also make themselves world outlaws.
Freeland claims that the Lima Group meeting will "address the political and economic crisis
in Venezuela," yet it is Canada that, along with the United States that has created the very
crisis they are using as a pretext to attack President Maduro. It is they that have tried to
topple both him and Chavez through assassination plots, threatened military invasion and
economic warfare that has the sole purpose of disrupting the social and economic life of
Venezuela, of making life as miserable as possible in order to foment unrest while conspiring
with internal reactionary forces.
The Lima Group, began its dirty work in 2017 by issuing statements condemning the Bolivarian
revolution, claimed that there was a break down of law and order in Venezuela and attempted to
cancel the elections just held which gave President Maduro a solid majority of 68% of the votes
in what all international elections observers judged free and fair.
Following the election of Maduro all of these nations withdrew their ambassadors from
Venezuela. They did all this while claiming that their actions were taken "with full respect
for the norms of international law and the principle of nonintervention" when they are plainly
violating all norms of international law and the principle of non-intervention. They are also
violating the UN Charter that prohibits any nation or group of nations from taken action
outside the framework of the UN Security Council against any other nation.
The Ottawa meeting is in fact a meeting of criminal conspirators that are intent on
committing acts of aggression, the supreme war crime against a sovereign nation and people.
Intervention is generally prohibited under international law because it violates the concept of
independent state sovereignty. All nations have the right to govern themselves as they deem fit
and that no nation could rightfully interfere in the government of another. Since there can
be no intervention without the presence of force or threats of its use the actions taken and
threats made against Venezuela constitute the crime of aggression under international
law.
The US and Canada are now threatening the use of armed force against Venezuela. John
Bolton stated that all options are on the table and has even threatened Maduro with
imprisonment in the US torture chambers of Guantanamo Bay. Britain has seized Venezuelan funds
sitting in London banks, and the US and its flunkies are now trying to stop Venezuela and
Turkey from dealing in Venezuelan gold, and, to add to their net, accuse them of sending the
gold to Iran in violation of their illegal "sanctions."
The hypocrisy hits you in the face especially when some of the same nations in the Lima Gang
recognised as far bas as 1826 at the Congress of Panama the absolute prohibition of
intervention by states in each other's internal affairs. In attendance, were the states of
Columbia, Central America, Mexico, and Peru. Led by Simon Bolivar, the Congress declared its
determination to maintain "the sovereignty and independence of all and each of the confederated
powers of America against foreign subjection."
At the Seventh International Conference of American States held in Montevideo in 1933, The
Convention on Rights and Duties of States, issued at the conclusion of the conference, to which
the U.S. was a signatory, declared that "no state has the right to intervene in the internal or
external affairs of another." The legal position of the doctrine of nonintervention was
solidified three years later at Buenos Aires with the adoption of the Additional Protocol
Relative to Non-Intervention. This document declared "inadmissible the intervention of any of
the parties to the treaty, directly or indirectly, and for whatever reason, in the internal or
external affairs of any other of the Parties." The U.S. government agreed to this treaty
without reservation as well.
The United Nations has become the primary source of the rules of International behavior
since World War II. The principle of nonintervention between states is everywhere implicit in
the Charter of the United Nations. Article 1 of the U.N. Charter sets out the four purposes of
the organization, one of which is "to maintain international peace and security," a task which
includes the suppression of "threats to the peace," "acts of aggression" and "other breaches of
the peace." Another is "to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the
principle of equal rights and self-determination of people." Article 2(1) goes on to base the
organization on "the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members."Articles 2(3) and
2(4) require Member States to utilize peaceful means in the settlement of disputes and to
refrain from the use of force.
Article 2(4) states:
"All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of
force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any
manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
Thus, Article 2(4) prohibits the use of the economic and political pressures and the
indirect subversion which is an integral part of covert action.
That covert action is forbidden under the law of the U.N. is supported
by the numerous resolutions passed by the General Assembly which assert the right to
national sovereignty and the principle of nonintervention in general, while specifically
condemning particular tactics used in covert action.
At the risk of tiring the reader, I think it is worthwhile to reiterate what the General
Assembly of the United Nations has stated over and again beginning with Resolution 290 (iv) in
1949. Referred to as the "Essentials of Peace"
Resolution, this enactment called upon every nation to "refrain from any threats or
acts, direct or indirect, aimed at impairing the freedom, independence or integrity of any
State, or at fomenting civil strife and subverting the will of the people in any
state."'
Resolution 1236(XII)passed in 1957, declared that "peaceful and tolerant relations among
States" should be based upon "respect for each other's sovereignty,equality and territorial
integrity and nonintervention in one another's internal affairs.'
The first General Assembly resolution specifically prohibiting covert action was Resolution
213 1(XX). Entitled the "Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic
Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty," this resolution
was based on proposals made by the Soviet Union, nineteen Latin American States, and the United
Arab Republic, whose draft resolution
was co-sponsored by 26 other non-aligned countries. The declaration restated the aims and
purposes of the U.N. and noted the importance of recognizing State sovereignty and freedom to
self-determination in the current political atmosphere. The eighth preambular paragraph of
Resolution stated that, "direct intervention, subversion and all forms of indirect intervention
are contrary" to the principles of the U.N. and, "consequently,
constitute a violation of the Charter of the United Nations."' The operative portion of the
declaration consists of eight paragraphs, the first of which makes clear there can be no
"intervention as of right":
"1. No State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason
whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. Consequently, armed
intervention and all other forms of interference or attempted threats against the personality
of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements, are condemned.'
In another paragraph the Resolution precisely defined the scope of its prohibition against
intervention, demonstrating the illicit status of covert activities:
"2. No State may use or encourage the use of economic, political or any other type of
measures to coerce another state in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise
of its sovereign rights or to secure from it advantages of any kind. Also, no state shall
organize, assist, foment, finance, incite or tolerate subversive, terrorist or armed activities
directed toward the violent overthrow of the regime of another State, or interfere in civil
strife in another State."
Resolution 2225(XXI) reaffirmed the principles and rules ex-pressed in Resolution 2131 (XX),
and urged "the immediate cessation of intervention,in any form whatever, in the domestic or
external affairs of States," and condemned "all forms of intervention . . . as a basic source
of danger to the cause of world peace."
Finally, the Resolution called upon all states to, "refrain from armed intervention or
the promotion or organization of subversion, terrorism or other indirect forms of intervention
for the purpose of changing by violence the existing system in another State or interfering in
civil strife in another State."
By Resolution 2625 (XXV), the General Assembly adopted the "Declaration on Principles of
International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in Accordance
with the Charter of the United Nations." The Declaration had its origins with the first meeting
of the Special Committee on the Principles of International Law held in 1964 in Mexico City.
This document asserted seven basic principles of international law, then elaborated how these
principles were to be realized. The seven principles embodied in the Declaration were: a) the
principle prohibiting the threat or use of force in international relations;b) the principle
requiring the peaceful settlement of disputes; c)the duty of nonintervention; d) the duty of
states to cooperate with each other; e) the principle of equal rights and self-determination of
all people;f) the principle of sovereign equality of states; and g) the good faith duty of
states to fulfill their obligations under the Charter.
In its discussion of the first principle – that states refrain from the threat or use
of force – the Declaration emphasizes the duty of each state "to refrain from organizing
or encouraging the organization of irregular forces or armed bands, including mercenaries, for
incursion into the territory of another state." In addition, the Declaration insists that every
state has a duty "to refrain from organizing, instigating, assisting or participating in
acts of civil strife or terrorist acts in another State or to allow such acts to be operated
from its territory."
I can go on listing other UN resolutions stating the same. Again and again the General
Assembly hammered home the importance of the principle of nonintervention as a central maxim of
international law.
Resolution 34/103 addressed the inadmissibility of the policy of "hegemonism" in
international relations and defined that term as the "manifestation of the policy of a State,
or a group of States, to control, dominate and subjugate, politically, economically,
ideologically or militarily, other States, peoples or regions of the world."' The
resolution,inter alia, called upon states to observe the principles of the Charter and the
principle of nonintervention. By this resolution it was declared that the General Assembly,
"Resolutely condemns policies of pressure and use or threat of use of force, direct or indirect
aggression,occupation and the growing practice of interference and intervention,overt or
covert, in the internal affairs of states."'
In 1981, the "Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the
Internal Affairs of States" was adopted by the General Assembly through Resolution 36/103. One
of the duties imposed upon states by the Declaration was: "The duty of a State to refrain from
armed intervention, subversion, military occupation or any other form of intervention and
interference,overt or covert, directed at another State or group of States, or any act of
military, political or economic interference in the internal affairs of another State,
including acts of reprisal involving the use of force.' In addition, the Declaration called
upon states to refrain from any action which seeks to disrupt the unity or to undermine or
subvert the political order of other States, training and equipping mercenaries or armed bands,
hostile propaganda, and the use of "external economic assistance" programs or "transnational
and multinational corporations under its jurisdiction and control as instruments of political
pressure and control."'
So, there you have it; the law. The world can see that the Lima Gang, who like to use the
phrase "the rule of law" in their diktats to others, are committing egregious crimes under
international law and together these crimes are components of the supreme war crime of
aggression. The Lima Group therefore is a group of international criminal conspirators and the
every individual involved is a war criminal. So when the Lima conspirators issue their press
statement after the Ottawa meeting, planning aggression against Venezuela, calling for the
overthrow, for the head of President Maduro and dressing it up in the usual language of the
aggressor, of "human rights" and "democracy" and their fake and illegal doctrine of
"responsibility to protect" it will not be issued by nations interested in peace or who have
respect for international law but by a gang of criminals, of international outlaws.
"... Interview conducted by The Saker with Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is ..."
"... . Cross-posted from Hudson's site . ..."
"... Maduro's defensive move is showing other countries the need to protect themselves from becoming "another Venezuela" by finding a new safe haven and paying agent for their gold, foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro areas. ..."
"... The Trump administration is destroying illusion more thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do! ..."
Interview conducted by The Saker with Michael Hudson, a
research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research
associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is J is for
Junk Economics . Cross-posted
from Hudson's site .
1. Could you summarize the state of Venezuela's economy when Chavez came to power?
Venezuela was an oil monoculture. Its export revenue was spent largely on importing food and
other necessities that it could have produced at home. Its trade was largely with the United
States. So despite its oil wealth, it ran up foreign debt.
From the outset, U.S. oil companies have feared that Venezuela might someday use its oil
revenues to benefit its overall population instead of letting the U.S. oil industry and its
local comprador aristocracy siphon off its wealth. So the oil industry – backed by U.S.
diplomacy – held Venezuela hostage in two ways.
First of all, oil refineries were not built in Venezuela, but in Trinidad and in the southern
U.S. Gulf Coast states. This enabled U.S. oil companies – or the U.S. Government –
to leave Venezuela without a means of "going it alone" and pursuing an independent policy with
its oil, as it needed to have this oil refined. It doesn't help to have oil reserves if you are
unable to get this oil refined so as to be usable.
Second, Venezuela's central bankers were persuaded to pledge their oil reserves and all
assets of the state oil sector (including Citgo) as collateral for its foreign debt. This meant
that if Venezuela defaulted (or was forced into default by U.S. banks refusing to make timely
payment on its foreign debt), bondholders and U.S. oil majors would be in a legal position to
take possession of Venezuelan oil assets.
These pro-U.S. policies made Venezuela a typically polarized Latin American oligarchy.
Despite being nominally rich in oil revenue, its wealth was concentrated in the hands of a
pro-U.S. oligarchy that let its domestic development be steered by the World Bank and IMF. The
indigenous population, especially its rural racial minority as well as the urban underclass,
was excluded from sharing in the country's oil wealth. The oligarchy's arrogant refusal to
share the wealth, or even to make Venezuela self-sufficient in essentials, made the election of
Hugo Chavez a natural outcome.
2. Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he
do right, and what did he do wrong?
Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue –
mainly from oil, of course – to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health
care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity for his electoral
constituency.
What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income
from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its
wealth and moving it abroad – while running away themselves.
This was not "wrong". It merely takes a long time to change an economy's disruption –
while the U.S. is using sanctions and "dirty tricks" to stop that process.
3. What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela –
is it primarily due to mistakes by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage,
subversion and sanctions?
There is no way that's Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at
achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United
States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under
Dick Cheney's regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy,
running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S.
banks.
By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits
and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for
Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope
to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela's oil resources and seize its foreign assets much
as Paul Singer's hedge fund sought to do with Argentina's foreign assets.
Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile's "economy scream," so the U.S. is
following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a "demonstration effect"
to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their
economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.
4. What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does
not overthrow him) to rescue the Venezuelan economy?
I cannot think of anything that President Maduro can do that he is not doing. At best, he
can seek foreign support – and demonstrate to the world the need for an alternative
international financial and economic system.
He already has begun to do this by trying to withdraw Venezuela's gold from the Bank of
England and Federal Reserve. This is turning into "asymmetrical warfare," threatening what to
de-sanctify the dollar standard in international finance. The refusal of England and the United
States to grant an elected government control of its foreign assets demonstrates to the entire
world that U.S. diplomats and courts alone can and will control foreign countries as an
extension of U.S. nationalism.
The price of the U.S. economic attack on Venezuela is thus to fracture the global monetary
system. Maduro's defensive move is showing other countries the need to protect themselves
from becoming "another Venezuela" by finding a new safe haven and paying agent for their gold,
foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro
areas.
The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the
ante to move "outside the box." His plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan –
is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S. dollar standard.
It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it can emerge from this
fight as an honest financial broker, honest banking system and supporter of democratically
elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more thoroughly than any
anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!
Over the longer run, Maduro also must develop Venezuelan agriculture, along much the same
lines that the United States protected and developed its agriculture under the New Deal
legislation of the 1930s – rural extension services, rural credit, seed advice, state
marketing organizations for crop purchase and supply of mechanization, and the same kind of
price supports that the United States has long used to subsidize domestic farm investment to
increase productivity.
Along with the USA there is a group La countries (and Canada) with the specific goal of "regime change" in Venezuela. Much
like multinational forces in Iraq. From Wikipedia: ... established following the Lima Declaration on 8 August 2017 in the Peruvian
capital of Lima, where representatives of 12 countries met in order to establish a peaceful exit to the crisis in Venezuela.[1]
Among other issues, the now 14-country group demands the release of political prisoners, calls for free elections, offers
humanitarian aid and criticizes the breakdown of democratic order in Venezuela under the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela.
Notable quotes:
"... Not everyone agreed that Guaido and his Popular Will party should be the one to be pushed forward as "Interim President" but the moment it happened, this forced the opposition to immediately unify behind him, based on the no turning back momentum created : ..."
"... The results of that fateful decision are still being played out in the streets, and on the international stage as countries line up for and against Maduro (China, Russia and Turkey among Maduro supporters, with the US and European countries backing Guaido as legitimate leader). ..."
"... However, the WSJ report closes with crucial bombshell information regarding what it took for the opposition to cross that line, and for Guaido to step out in confidence. What was the key factor in the final push? First, Canada and US allies in Latin America initiated something dramatic... ..."
"... But most importantly, Washington came calling at a key moment the opposition was fractured and still indecisive and divided , in what is a central revelation concerning the anti-Maduro movement's calculations : ..."
"... And there it is -- a stunning mainstream media admission that the political drama and crisis now unfolding in Venezuela, now quickly turning into a global geopolitical pressure spot and conflagration -- was pushed forward and given assistance directly from the White House from the very beginning . ..."
A new WSJ report asks what the Hell is going on? in Venezuela and provides new information
behind
How a Small Group Seized Control of Venezuela's Opposition to make the extremely risky move
of pushing forward 35-year old opposition leader and National Assembly head Juan Guaido to
declare himself "Interim President" -- precipitating the crisis that's seen the noose tighten
around President Nicolas Maduro's rule as over a dozen countries led by the US have declared
him "illegitimate".
For starters, the report paints current events as having started with a "big gamble" that
was largely unplanned and unexpected within even the political opposition itself, and which
further had the hidden hand of the White House and State Department behind it from the very
beginning, pushing the opposition forward at the most critical juncture . Outlining the past
difficulties of Venezuela's "notoriously fractious opposition" and the deep divide over the
question of whether to enter direct negotiations or take more aggressive action to undermine
Maduro,
the WSJ describes :
When Juan Guaidó declared himself Venezuela's interim president on Jan. 23 in front
of a crowd of 100,000 people under a broiling sun, some leading opposition figures had no
idea he would do so, say people who work with Mr. Guaidó and other top leaders . That
included a few standing alongside him. A stern look of shock crossed their faces. Some
quietly left the stage.
"What the hell is going on?" one member of a group of politicians wrote to the others in a
WhatsApp group chat. "How come we didn't know about this."
The plan was so risky -- especially to Guaido personally as he had been arrested and
briefly detained after his vehicle was rushed by secret police only less than two weeks
prior -- that the final decision of public confrontation with the Maduro regime was left
entirely up to him in the hours leading up to the Jan.23 rally.
Not everyone agreed that Guaido and his Popular Will party should be the one to be pushed
forward as "Interim President" but the moment it happened, this forced the opposition to
immediately unify behind him, based on the no turning back
momentum created :
Mr. Guaidó himself only agreed to act the day before he declared himself interim
president, his aides said. Some politicians -- including those in the traditional Democratic
Action Party, the largest opposition party -- weren't told of the plan .
"We didn't want them to mess it up," said one opposition leader who knew of the
strategy.
The results of that fateful decision are still being played out in the streets, and on the
international stage as countries line up for and against Maduro (China, Russia and Turkey among
Maduro supporters, with the US and European countries backing Guaido as legitimate leader).
The high stakes maneuver "was largely devised by a group of four opposition leaders -- two
in exile, one under house arrest and one barred from leaving the country" and was predictably
immediately denounced by Maduro "as part of a U.S.-backed coup to overthrow his government."
But as the WSJ concludes, "The act of political skulduggery paid off. The crowd reacted
ecstatically to Mr. Guaidó, and one nation after another recognized him within hours."
Among the "plotters" included Guaido's political mentor Leopoldo López, now under house
arrest in Caracas, and Edgar Zambrano, vice president of the National Assembly of power allied
opposition party Democratic Action.
Zambrano related to the WSJ that the risk was so high that
in the end the "final decision" to pull the trigger laid with Guaido:
Mr. Zambrano, one of the opposition leaders who appeared surprised on stage on Jan. 23,
said the possibility of Mr. Guaidó assuming the presidency had been discussed in the
weeks before, but that the final decision was in the hands of the young leader because of the
risks it entailed .
However, the WSJ report closes with crucial bombshell information regarding what it took for
the opposition to cross that line, and for Guaido to step out in confidence. What was the key factor in the final push? First, Canada and US allies in Latin America
initiated something dramatic...
A breakthrough came on Jan. 4, when the Lima Group of 14 Latin American countries and
Canada issued a letter calling on Mr. Maduro to hand over power to the National Assembly. The
near-bellicose nature of the letter surprised opposition leaders, reinforcing the idea they
should take action .
But most importantly, Washington came calling at a key moment the opposition was fractured
and still indecisive and divided , in what is a central revelation concerning
the anti-Maduro movement's calculations :
When Mr. Guaidó should try to assume the interim presidency was up for debate. Some
argued that it should happen before Mr. Maduro took the oath. Others proposed creating a
commission to challenge Mr. Maduro's claim to office.
As late as Jan. 22, the day before it happened, Mr. Guaidó wasn't fully convinced .
He came around after Vice President Mike Pence called to assure that, if he were to invoke
the Venezuelan constitution in being sworn in as the country's rightful leader, the U.S.
would back the opposition.
And there it is -- a stunning mainstream media admission that the political drama and crisis
now unfolding in Venezuela, now quickly turning into a global geopolitical pressure spot and
conflagration -- was pushed forward and given assistance directly from the White House from the
very beginning .
Guaido: "Gee I can't wait for all that Western oil money to fill up meh pockets.
EhhhrrMMMmm I can't wait to sell out the Venezuelan people to the FED, BoE and ECB. D'oh-
where'd my CIA handler go?"
Also, lol at the Journal for this gem " The act of political skulduggery paid off. The
crowd reacted ecstatically to Mr. Guaidó, and one nation after another recognized him
within hours. " Translation: "Wow- we're SO surprised that the Western vassal states all
followed their master's lead by kowtowing in quick succession! Gee whiz- mind BLOWN!"
The WSJ has provided the "House" plausible deniability, will the "House" take it, or will
the minions sabotage? Stay tuned folks, as we discover who's honorable, who's courageous, and
who's pragmatic...
Further proof this guy is a treasonous little bitch that needs to be arrested and
prosecuted by the Supreme Tribunal Court of Venezuela. He's a traitor to ALL Venezuelans by
colluding with foreign powers to overthrow his elected president.
Lets be honest, sending in the US military was the first choice and all the rest of this
has been setting the stage. It's been 2 years, time for Trump to start a war, by the
prevailing MIC schedule.
Oh please. Maduro the elected president? He won his election after blocking the opposition
parties to take part. Please read the Venezuelan Constitution before commenting. Not any
election is valid or democratic. Maduro should be in jail. Guaido is asking for new and fair
elections. ... OOOOH how undemocratic!!! I am against foreign intervention, but in this case
the 3 million Venezuelan real refugees (10% of the Venezuelan population and not organised
political caravans trying to reach the USA) in neighbour countries tips my view. Therefore I
support the constitutional president Guaido and any help the international community can give
him.
Idiot . The opposition boycotted the election as they couldn't win. International
observers (usa wouldn't come) say it was fairer than usa elections lol. Sure maduro isn't a
saint. He also gave out prizes to collect after voting . But that's not bribing people could
vote for anyone and still collect a few foods in a bag
That a boy Trumpy! You got the right FukWits on the job. Bibi and Sheldon are jumping for
joy with the addition of Abrams. Now you got your Zio dream team. BoltON, PompAss, and
Abram's. Just think what a murderous war mongering team for IsraHell you could have if ya
rolled **** Chenney in the mix. Now there's someone who won't **** around getting a Zio war
going.
Cheney , the virtue less, honor less, 2 time OUI conviction,electricians apprentice , went
as far as helping to murder 3,000 Americans . All so he could impress his societal status
ambitious wife . A Rumsfeld ass kissing loser . Spineless goy are 50% of the problem .
Guaido is obviously an agent of the CIA. This fact does not absolve Maduro of his crimes.
But it does show that the US is balls deep in the Venezuela problem.
@50 bobzibub... your link doesn't bring me to the article, but i suspect it is more then just
crystallix - the canuck gold mining company - that are pushing for a change in power in
venezuala.. as i understand it, there are a number of canuck mining and oil related interests
where they would like to exploit venezuala and can't seem to get around the democractically
elected gov't of maduros..
looks like
this might be related, or the article you were trying to post? an american judge says
crystallex can have citgo, lol....
" Second, Venezuela's central bankers were persuaded to pledge their oil reserves and all
assets of the state oil sector (including Citgo) as collateral for its foreign debt. This
meant that if Venezuela defaulted (or was forced into default by U.S. banks refusing to make
timely payment on its foreign debt), bondholders and U.S. oil majors would be in a legal
position to take possession of Venezuelan oil assets."
Solid proof that it was the empire who invented the practice of "debt trap" and is still
flourishing with it.
hunor, February 7, 2019 at 6:24 am GMT
Thank you ! Made it very clear. Perfect reflection of the " Values of Western Civilization ".
Reaching to grab the whole universe, with no holds barred . And never show of any interest for the " truth". They are not
even pretending anymore , awakening will be very painful for some.
Reuben Kaspate, February 7, 2019 at 2:38 pm GMT • 100 Words
Why would the U. S. based White-Protestant aristocracy care a hoot about the Brown-Catholic elites in the far off land?
They don't! The comprador aristocracy in question isn't what it seems It's the same group that plagues the Americans.
The rootless louts, whose only raison d'ê·tre is to milk everything in sight and then retire to coastal cities, i.e. San
Francisco, if you are a homosexual or New York City and State, if you are somewhat religious.
Poor Venezuelans don't stand a chance against the shysters!
"... Qatar's ambassador in Mauritania allegedly offered his Syrian counterpart an advance payment of US$1 million and a monthly salary of $20,000 over 20 years, trying to convince the diplomat to defect and voice support for the opposition. ..."
"... All they need is a couple of snipers to kill protesters and the Mighty Wurlitzer of propaganda will supply the war, to paraphrase William Randolph Hearst. ..."
"... Elliot Abrams seems to be having trouble getting this coup off the ground. He must wonder what happened to the good old days of death squads and contras.... ..."
A day after the U.S. coup attempt in Venezuela the
U.S. game plan was already quite obvious:
The opposition in Venezuela will probably use access to that 'frozen' money to buy weapons
and to create an army of mercenaries to fight a 'civil' war against the government and its
followers. Like in Syria U.S. special forces or some CIA 'contractors' will be eager to
help. The supply line for such a war would most likely run through Colombia. If, like 2011
in Syria, a war on the ground is planned it will likely begin in the cities near that
border.
The U.S. is using the pretext of 'delivering humanitarian aid' from Columbia to Venezuela
to undermine the government and to establish a supply line for further operations. It is
another attempt to pull
the military onto the coup plotter's side:
[I]f the trucks do get across, the opposition can present itself as an answer to
Venezuela's chronic suffering, while Mr. Maduro will appear to have lost control of the
country's borders. That could accelerate defections from the ruling party and the military.
Dimitris Pantoulas, a political scientist in Caracas, called the opposition's aid
delivery plan a high-stakes gamble.
...
"This is 99 percent about the military and one percent about the humanitarian aspects," he
said. "The opposition is testing the military's loyalty, raising their cost of supporting
Maduro. Are they with Maduro, or no? Will they reject the aid? If the answer is no, then
Maduro's hours are numbered."
A New York Times op-ed by a right-wing former foreign minister of Mexico, Jorge
G. Castañeda, details the
escalation potential :
According to Mr. Guaidó and other sources, $20 million in American medicines and
food will be unloaded this week just outside Venezuelan territory in Cúcuta,
Colombia; Brazil, and on a Caribbean island -- either Aruba or Curaçao -- near the
Venezuelan coast.
Venezuelan military officials and troops in exile will then move these supplies into
Venezuela, where if all goes well, army troops still loyal to Mr. Maduro will not stop
their passage nor fire upon them. If they do, the Brazilian and Colombian governments may
be willing to back the anti-Maduro soldiers.
The threat of a firefight with their neighbors
might just be the incentive the Venezuelan military need to jettison Mr. Maduro, making the
reality of combat unnecessary.
This escalation strategy is unlikely to work unless some additional provocation is
involved. The Venezuelan government blocked the border bridge between Cúcuta in
Colombia and San Cristobal in Venezuela. Its military stands ready to stop any violation of
the country's border.
The U.S. responded to the blocking of the road with a sanctimonious tweet:
The Venezuelan people desperately need humanitarian aid. The U.S. & other countries
are trying to help, but #Venezuela's military under Maduro's orders is blocking aid with
trucks and shipping tankers. The Maduro regime must LET THE AID REACH THE STARVING PEOPLE.
#EstamosUnidosVE
The U.S. government, which actively helps to starve the people of Yemen into submission,
is concerned about Venezuela where so far no one has died of starvation? The lady ain't gonna
believe that.
The Venezuelan military has shown no sign of interest to change its loyalty. The fake aid
will be rejected.
The government of Venezuela does not reject aid that comes without political interference.
Last year it accepted modest UN
aid which consisted mostly of medical supplies from which Venezuela had been cut off due
to U.S. sanctions. The UN claimed that around 12 percent of Venezuelans are undernourished.
But such claims have been made for years while reports from Venezuela (vid) confirmed only some
scarcity of specific products. There is no famine in Venezuela that would require immediate
intervention.
The International Red Cross, the Catholic church's aid organization Caritas and
the United Nations rejected U.S. requests to help deliver the currently planned 'aid'
because it is so obviously politicized:
"Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or other objectives,"
UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York on Wednesday.
...
"What is important is that humanitarian aid be depoliticised and that the needs of the
people should lead in terms of when and how humanitarian aid is used," Dujarric added.
Rejecting aid out of political reasons is not unusual. When the hurricane Katrina in 2005
caused huge damage along the U.S. gulf coast, a number of countries offered humanitarian and
technical aid. U.S. President Bush accepted help from some countries, but rejected aid from
other ones
:
An offer of aid from the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, which included two
mobile hospital units, 120 rescue and first aid experts and 50 tonnes of food, has been
rejected, according to the civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson.
Mr Jackson said the offer from the Venezuelan leader, whom he recently met, included 10
water purification plants, 18 power generation plants and 20 tonnes of bottled water.
The U.S. intent to establish a 'humanitarian aid' supply line into Venezuela has a
secondary purpose. Such aid is the ideal cover for weapon supplies. In the 1980s designated
'humanitarian aid' flights for Nicaragua were filled with weapons . The
orders for those flights were given by Elliot Abrams who is now Trump's special envoy for
Venezuela.
While the trucks from Colombia are blocked at the border other 'humanitarian aid' from the
United States
reached the country .
Officials in Venezuela have accused the US of sending a cache of high-powered rifles and
ammunition on a commercial cargo flight from Miami so they would get into the hands of
President Nicolás Maduro's opponents.
Members with the Venezuelan National Guard [GNB] and the National Integrated Service of
Customs and Tax Administration [SENIAT] made the shocking discovery just two days after the
plane arrived at Arturo Michelena International Airport in Valencia.
Inspectors found 19 rifles, 118 magazines and 90 wireless radios while investigating the
flight which they said arrived Sunday afternoon. Monday's bust also netted four rifle
stands, three rifle scopes and six iPhones.
The pictures show
sufficient equipment for an infantry squad. Fifteen AR-15 assault rifles (5.56), one
squad automatic weapon (7.62) with a drum magazine, and a Colt 7.62 sniper gun as well as
accessory equipment. What is missing is the ammunition.
Where one such weapon transport is caught multiple are likely to go through. But to run a
war against the government pure weapon supplies are not enough. The U.S. will have to
establish a continuous supply line for heavy and bulky ammunition. That is where
'humanitarian aid' convoys come in.
Unless a large part of the Venezuelan military changes sides, any attempt to overthrow the
Venezuelan government by force is likely doomed to fail. The U.S. could use its full military
might to destroy the Venezuelan army. But the U.S. Senate is already quarreling about the potential use of U.S.
forces in Venezuela. The Democrats strongly reject that.
A Senate resolution to back Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, once expected to get
unanimous support, has been torpedoed by a disagreement over the use of military force,
according to aides and senators working on the issue.
...
"I think it's important for the Senate to express itself on democracy in Venezuela,
supporting interim President Guaido and supporting humanitarian assistance. But I also
think it should be very clear in fact that support stops short of any type of military
intervention," [Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.] told NBC News.
It is unlikely that Trump would order a military intervention without bipartisan
support.
The a clandestine insertion of a mercenary 'guerrilla' force into Venezuela is surely
possible. Minor supply lines can be established by secret means. But, as the war on Syria
demonstrates, such plans can not be successful unless the people welcome the anti-government
force.
Under the current government most people in Venezuela are still better off than under the
pre-Chavez governments. This lecture and this thread explain the
economic history of Venezuela and the enormous progress that was made under Chavez and
Maduro. The people will not forget that even when the economic
situation will become more difficult. They know who is
pulling the strings behind the Random Guy Guaido who now claims the presidency. They know
well that these rich people are unlikely to better their plight.
U.S. politicians are making the same mistakes with regards to Venezuela as they made with
the regime change wars on Iraq and Syria. They believes that all people are as corrupt and
nihilistic as they are. They believe that others will not fight for their own believes and
their own style of life. They will again be proven wrong.
Never Mind the
Bollocks , Feb 7, 2019 2:20:56 PM |
link
US now has enough bootlickers signed up to the project that there will be no move against
the US at the UNGA. 'Protecting' its diplomats will be a big enough fig leaf for the Trump
admin.
thanks b, for this and all the links to read... i liked your line here "The U.S. government,
which actively helps to starve the people of Yemen into submission, is concerned about
Venezuela where so far no one has died of starvation?" indeed and as you note in the last
paragraph - "U.S. politicians are making the same mistakes with regards to Venezuela as they
made with the regime change wars on Iraq and Syria. They believes that all people are as
corrupt and nihilistic as they are. They believe that others will not fight for their own
believes and their own style of life. They will again be proven wrong."
all these people preaching this kind of crap, must be getting good returns from who is
paying them... the other person in the usa, europe and etc - don't believe this b.s.
anymore..
Bulletin Bulletin Bulletin. This just posted on RT. According to geography challenged (!!!!!)
Pompous Pompeo = Hezbollah is now in Zenezuela. Yes. You read that right. And further more
it's an Iranian Hezbollah. Look out.
Here's the money quote: "People don't recognize that Hezbollah has active cells -- the
Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela and throughout South America," adding that "We
have an obligation to take down that risk for America."
He also is now referring to Guido-chump as "the duly elected president of Zenezuela."
Transmutation Does exist. Amazing.
"throughout South America" Wow. A population explosion!
Is this guy Pompous Pompeo very very very confused?
Thanks for the ongoing reporting of this spinning plate of late empire.
It is encouraging to read that others are standing up to empire in their own little ways
that all add up.
From reading comments here and on other sites I am also happy to be reading less BS about
Trump being some sort of hidden savior as compared to Clinton II. He is a front for the elite
just like Clinton II is/would have been.
"Indeed ,the more America began to lose its hold on its noncommunist allies, the closer
America
and the Soviet Union drew together, precisely to threaten Europe and Asia with what
Henry Kissinger called a new condominium, that is, joint imperialism of America and
Russia against their respective satellites."
This is what Kissinger and Trump are now trying to do.
Trumps friendliness toward Russia has nothing to do with peace and goodness and
everything to do with US domination of Asia and Europe.
@mauisurfer #9: The reason your link breaks the page is that it does not have enough hyphens
in it. So it stretches the page until there's a hyphen (between "michael" and "hudson"),
whereupon the link finally wraps to the next line. This is not the first time you are ruining
the page. In fact, we've talked about this quite recently. I will repeat what I wrote then:
press "Preview" button before posting, check that everything looks right, only then press
"Post". Please respect other posters.
Bloody Canada: Cheerleading the Lima Group's Plot to Overthrow the Government of
Venezuela
by Maria Paez Victor
(María Páez Victor, Ph.D. is a Venezuelan born sociologist living in Canada).
Guaidó, a son of Spanish immigrants, is a useful idiot, a thug who will be thrown
into the trashcan of history for his treason. He does not command any type of institution,
not one policeman, not one ministry, no official agency of any sort. He is a president in
his own mind and that of the USA Embassy where he is holed out.
Are there any bounds to indecency and intellectual bankruptcy of these people? Is there a
line, however desperate, they will not cross in order to achieve their goal? the answer is
NO. This is a lost country morally, socially and economically. US is a country that needs a
direct military intervention.......by all.
At Hudson's website, he gave the interview with Saker this
title : "Venezuela as the pivot for New Internationalism?" Spread out in answer to
Saker's questions are Hudson's suggestions for the institutions and mechanisms for such a new
internationalism:
"The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the
ante to move "outside the box." His plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan
– is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S.
dollar standard. It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it
can emerge from this fight as an honest financial broker, honest banking system and supporter
of democratically elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more
thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!...
"Looking ahead, therefore, China, Russia, Iran and other countries need to set up a new
international court to adjudicate the coming diplomatic crisis and its financial and military
consequences. Such a court – and its associated international bank as an
alternative to the U.S.-controlled IMF and World Bank – needs a clear ideology to
frame a set of principles of nationhood and international rights with power to implement and
enforce its judgments.
"This hostage-taking [of gold and other assets] now makes it urgent for other countries
to develop a viable alternative , especially as the world de-dedollarizes and a
gold-exchange standard remains the only way of constraining the military-induced balance of
payments deficit of the United States or any other country mounting a military
attack."...
"Given the fact that the EU is acting as a branch of NATO and the U.S. banking system,
that alternative would have to be associated with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization,
and the gold would have to be kept in Russia and/or China ."...
"The best thing neighboring Latin American countries can do is to join in creating a
vehicle to promote de-dollarization and, with it, an international institution to oversee the
writedown of debts that are beyond the ability of countries to pay without imposing austerity
and thereby destroying their economies .
" An alternative also is needed to the World Bank that would make loans in domestic
currency, above all to subsidize investment in domestic food production so as to protect
the economy against foreign food-sanctions – the equivalent of a military siege to
force surrender by imposing famine conditions. This World Bank for Economic Acceleration
would put the development of self-reliance for its members first , instead of promoting
export competition while loading borrowers down with foreign debt that would make them prone
to the kind of financial blackmail that Venezuela is experiencing."...
" Two international principles are needed. First, no country should be obliged to pay
foreign debt in a currency (such as the dollar or its satellites) whose banking system acts
to prevent payment .
" Second, no country should be obliged to pay foreign debt at the price of losing its
domestic autonomy as a state: the right to determine its own foreign policy, to tax and to
create its own money, and to be free of having to privatize its public assets to pay foreign
creditors . Any such debt is a "bad loan" reflecting the creditor's own irresponsibility
or, even worse, pernicious asset grab in a foreclosure that was the whole point of the loan."
[Emphasis mine to highlight Hudson's suggestions.]
It ought to be clear that Hudson's proposing a new international financial and
political/judicial system to ultimately replace the UN and Bretton Woods created
institutions. This is certainly the minimum requirement since the Outlaw US Empire has
completely trashed the post WW2 system itself designed. Unfortunately, there's still the
issue of containing and disciplining the Outlaw US Empire and subduing it so it cannot
threaten the newly established institutions.
According to the German newspaper Junge Welt the border bridge between Cúcuta in
Colombia and San Cristobal in Venezuela, which you mentioned, has not been closed, since it
has never been open. The article says, the alleged closure of the bridge is fake news to
support the coup.
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/348717.kampf-um-venezuela-no-pasar%C3%A1n.html
Nevertheless, thank you for your thoughts and information and please keep up the good work!
Couldn't agree more - we are such a US flunky. Also, the cbc has become increasingly
pathetic and irrelevant - they're getting a good rogering on other sites such as Babble for
their extraordinarily biased coverage of everything imperial.
In case no one has linked to it, here's a letter sent to the EU re May 20 elections in
Venezuela:
"They know well that these rich people are unlikely to better their plight."
This is certainly correct but a terrible understatement. It should read: 'They know only to
well out of experience, that the Venezuelan Sucker class will take bloody revenge if they
succeed to gain power again.'
hope you are right, b. We will see how resilient the government is when the first public
massacre of demonstrators happen which appears to be imminent as we all have seen this so
many times.
to Zanon. # 7 Yes of course they are allies. However, you must, I hope, admit that the idea
of Hezbollah "cells" all over south america is a wee bit comical. The fact that the two
countries are allies does not necessarily translate to "we must take them down." The way His
Pomposity puts it, those cells are just sprouting up every where. It's a bit ridiculous.
B, don't forget the regime change playbook also involves bribing public officials to come
over to their side. Here's any example of how it was done Syria:
Qatar's ambassador in Mauritania allegedly offered his Syrian counterpart an advance
payment of US$1 million and a monthly salary of $20,000 over 20 years, trying to convince the
diplomat to defect and voice support for the opposition.
All they need is a couple of snipers to kill protesters and the Mighty Wurlitzer of
propaganda will supply the war, to paraphrase William Randolph Hearst. You would think that the propaganda receivers would learn by now, with the same propaganda
used time after time, year after year, war after war.
You would be wrong. I am losing sympathy for the people of the imperial countries, and their
inability to learn from experience.
@40 wagelaborer. Therein lies the challenge. Will Humanity keep listening to Ole Wurly's tune
til the end or will it learn from its mistake and abandon the old schemes? In other words,
will Man (and Woman, or course) become sovereign or will he/she stay a slave? Recent
developments in Ukraine and especially Syria give hope that Homo Sapiens Ethicus is
emerging..
According to military expert Yuri Liamin Venezuela has S-300VM Antey-2500 and Buk-M2E
long range air defenses, and Pechora-2M middle range air defenses. T-72B1V, BMP-3,
BTR-80A,
SAU Msta-S tanks. Noah-SVK, MLRS Grad and Smerch automatic propulsion arms. Su-30MK2
fighters.
Well trained ground troops with Igla-S MANPADS and ZU-23 / 30m1-4.
And thousands of armed and well trained militias, expected to grow
to over a million strong ( as per Fidel Castro instructions, haha)
Elliot Abrams seems to be having trouble getting this coup off the ground. He must wonder
what happened to the good old days of death squads and contras....
>Elliott Abrams, who leads the Trump administration's special envoy to Venezuela, said
on Thursday that several countries have offered to take in Venezuelan dictator Nicolás
Maduro.
"I think it is better for the transition to democracy in Venezuela that he be outside the
country," Abrams said. "And there are a number of countries who are willing to accept
him." "Which ones?" Bloomberg reporter Nick Wadhams asked. "He's got friends in places like Cuba and Russia," Abrams said. "And there are some other
countries actually, that have come to us privately and said they would be willing to take
members of the current illegitimate regime, if it would help the transition." "Can you name any?" Wadhams asked. "No," Abrams responded.<
Nice
graphic to support fact that "Unlike UK and most of EU - and contrary to BBC repetition -
'the international community' has not fallen into line behind Trump on Venezuela."
Victor J @44--
Pepe
Escobar posits there're "arguably 15,000 Cubans who are in charge of security for the
Maduro government; Cubans have demonstrated historically they are not in the business of
handing over power." They're likely well versed in the use of those Russian armaments. It's
also likely that there's a Russian or Chinese satellite in geosync orbit above the region
using its sophisticated sensors to detect infiltration attempts, something Central Americans
lacked during the Contra-Terror.
The embarassment of being associated with Trump must now be getting through even
to the most fanatical fascists such as Freeland. And the Europeans.
From a PR point of view statements such as Abrams' "The time to negotiate
with Maduro is long past." Or the original ultimatum demanding elections within 8 days!
Are completely over the top. And likely to be seen as such. Sanctioning members of the
Constituent Assembly- the elections to which were uncontroversial-also indicates that
what the opposition and the United States want is war, they will continue to turn down
peremptorily all offers to mediate or compromise.
If they don't end things soon they will be completely discredited everywhere outside
the political caste. Even the MSM are going to find it hard to keep up looking the other
way and pretending not to know the most elementary facts.
Yes, the corrupt Trump and his administration will be proven wrong as were Obama's and Bush's
administrations, but unfortunately Venezuelans, and perhaps Iranians soon, will be used as
pawns, and people will suffer, their lives will be destroyed as hell is being unleashed on
their lives. Meanwhile the media, damn them as well, are useful tools for the Administration,
spouting regime-change humanitarian propaganda, just like they did with the Syrian
Observatory's reports and White Helmet footage.
Debunking this avalanche of bull is what you do best as demonstrated with this article.
Let's not forget that alongside the proxy regime change civil war, a propaganda and mass
deception war is waged on the minds of Venezuelans deprived by sanctions and on all of us
sick and tired, weary, of the AZ Empire's successive wars. So pull down on to your
anti-bullshet visor cause it's just starting again, the worst is yet to come, and so far
Russia's hardly around to help with the pushback.
(I see someone unwittingly mucked up this thread misusing tags with an excessively long
link making it impossible to read comments. It's even difficult to comment. 😕)
@ bevin - i agree with @49 psychohistorian.. the msm is a huge part of the problem.. here in
canada, our national outlet - cbc - are a disgrace.. here) is
today's fluff piece on guaido and hit piece on maduro... the cbc have become so predictable
for carrying water for the empire, that many are getting ready turned off by them.. for a
national news outlet paid for by canuck taxpayers, it is truly pathetic.. they need to do hit
pieces on this fascist freeland, but instead want to turn reality upside down..
on a positive note, i am quite sure when the federal election happens in oct of this year,
as memory serves - the liberals will not remain in power and Freeland can get back to writing
George Soros memoirs..
"... There are also three or four books written by Anna Lilia Perez with regard to the sacking of PEMEX by the previous 4 presidents. She names Blackrock, the Carlyle Group and numerous Banks in the conspiracy. 60% of Mexican oil was being loaded on Tankers and sold in the Black Market. Google her name and you can get a list of her books. ..."
"... New York Times Article: Mexico could press bribery charges, it just hasn't https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/world/americas/mexico-odebrecht-investigation.html ..."
The US has been working to get to the point of invading Venezuela for a while now. They just
needed to wait for 2 things to fall into place. The election of Duque in Colombia and
Bolsanado in Brazil. Now that they have these two ultraright wing leaders to provide the
brunt of the invasion force, they can begin to execute their plan. There's a youtuber in
Florida that has been on top of this plan for a while now, informing his followers.
Here's a
link to his Florida Maquis site:
10 steps to understand what really happened in Venezuela
... ... ...
I'll attach a couple more links about Chavez talking about the Jews and the Assasination
of Chavez.
Shocking! Netanyahu
... ... ...
The Assasination of Hugo Chavez
... ... ...
Blackstone Intelligence has an interesting video that focuses on articles from The
Economists. I will also attach:
How NeoCons are helping the Bankers take over Venezuela
... ... ...
There are also three or four books written by Anna Lilia Perez with regard to the sacking
of PEMEX by the previous 4 presidents. She names Blackrock, the Carlyle Group and numerous
Banks in the conspiracy. 60% of Mexican oil was being loaded on Tankers and sold in the Black
Market. Google her name and you can get a list of her books. There is so much information in
her books, information she had to fight in court to get copies. She had to move to Germany
because of threats she received.
Today the new president shut down 26 of the 56 shell companies created under another shell
company of PEMEX, PEMEX International. The government is having a hard time investigating
these company's books because they claim to be private companies. They found a refinery in
Texas that they didn't even know existed, that is half owned by Royal Dutch Shell. 200
million dollars a year in business and none of it is shown on PEMEX's books.
Anyone with a brain always knew that Maduro is more legitimate than Trump, May, Sanchez, or
Macron. Now we have the numbers confirming that. Anyone with a brain knew that the Guaido
personage is no more than the puppet of the Empire, a nonentity with zero legitimacy.
But key point is, the US actions against Venezuela are not about legitimacy, they are
about oil and money. A robber takes your valuables not because you are not legitimate enough,
but because he is a robber. That's the whole point, the rest is hot air.
Guaido's party Voluntad Popular (VP), is the most violent and right wing opposition party
in Venezuela. One of its leaders, Maria Corina Machado was interviewed on the public Canadian
Broadcasting Company (CBC) on Feb. 1. She has openly, repeatedly, shamelessly and in front of
numerous TV and radio cameras, urged mobs to violence and she has most recently publicly
threatened the life of President Maduro. She has also been invited to speak with Ottawa
politicians.
Guaidó and his party carried out the terrible street violence of 2014, which they
named "La Salida" (The Exit). It resulted in 114 innocent people being killed. Several young
men were burned alive suspected of being "Chavistas". This was the worst street violence ever
seen on the streets of Venezuela. The leader of the party, Leopoldo López was jailed,
after a long and fair trial with the best lawyers money can buy, sentenced for his
responsibility for unleashing this terror and the ensuing 114 deaths.
Guaidó, a son of Spanish immigrants, is a useful idiot, a thug who will be thrown
into the trashcan of history for his treason. He does not command any type of institution,
not one policeman, not one ministry, no official agency of any sort. He is a president in his
own mind and that of the USA Embassy where he is holed out.
Exxon Mobil wants the oil. The international banks want the gold. Colombia wants to
control or possess the eastern oil rich area next to its border. Brazil wants carte blanche
for its big energy corporation. Guyana wants the Esequivo region on the eastern border handed
to them – that is, to Exxon Mobil, and Paraguay wants the huge debt it owes to
Venezuela to quietly disappear. And it is not a wild guess to think that Canada obtained its
recent Free Trade deal with Trump as a quid-pro-quo: lead the charge against Venezuela and
you get your deal. And the oil producers in Canada (mostly USA owned) will shed no tears over
the destruction of Venezuelan crude production. Make no mistake about it, these are the
modern carpetbaggers.
Just the kind of thing I come to Unz to read, and get a glimmer at the man behind the
curtain.
I'll share an anecdote, for what it's worth. Some years back I went into the local bank.
The (young and attractive) gal who helped me out, was -- it turned out, from Venezuela.
This was when Chavez was still alive, and after he had mocked the chimp at the UN, talking
about the smell of sulfur. I remember being impressed by his antics, and thinking 'wow,
there's a guy who not only hates Dubya almost as much as I do, but has the cajones to call
the bitch out in front of the whole world.
So I was curious what this pretty (many of them are) Venezuelan girl thought of Chavez,
and I asked her.
She did not like him. No effn' way. It turns out her father was a hard working schlep who
came from nothing, but had worked his arse off his entire life, to build a second home, and
to rent the first one out, as a retirement income of sorts.
Well, according to this gal, the Chavez regime had confiscated the rental home because it
was exploitation in their view. So I had to re-think my opinion of this guy, if her story is
true. Why don't these commies ever go after the One Percent's wealth? Why do they always go
after the working and middle class?
Just an anecdote for what it's worth.
Also glad someone posted the Economic Hit Man video.
The last sentence of this article, (in particular) made me think of that video.
But folks thinking we have designs on Venezuela are just nuts
the first thing that's necessary is to define who "we" are.
Because there are two Americas, and we should make the distinction.
First there is the America of the American people. Poor, working class, middle class, and
somewhat well-off upper-middle class. These are the "we" that had nothing whatsoever to do
with the wars, except to vote relentlessly for politicians to end them, and are always
betrayed.
Which brings us to the other "we". The Deepstate scumfucks who bomb and loot nations, when
they aren't looting the American working and middle class to fund their Eternal Wars, or
selecting cannon fodder from the working class or poor, to act as their Janissaries for
globo-domination and rapine.
Joe the Plumber is the poster boy for the first "we", and yes, there are lots and lots of
butt-hurt arseholes who would like to pin it all on Joe. He's white, CIS, American and the
perfect scapegoat for butt-hurt loser's (of all stripes) hate.
John McBloodstain in the perfect (if rotting) poster boy for the other "we". The Deepstate
scumfucks who are just as much the enemy of the American people as they are the enemy of all
who don't bow down to the Fiend.
So there are two very separate and very distinct "we"s.
The reason we can be sure the problems being caused in Venezuela are being done so by the
Deepstate 'Americans', is because Trump appointed one of the worst Deepstate scumfucks to
look after "our" interests down there; Eliot Abrams – a scumfuck of the highest order,
and an existential enemy of Joe the Plumber and all Americans of good will.
It would be good if this distinction between the two "we"s, could be made more routinely.
IMHO
"... Nixon and Kissinger, according to the notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to 'make the economy scream' in Chile; they were 'not concerned [about the] risks involved'. War was acceptable to them as long as Allende's government was removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with $10 million as a first installment to begin the covert destabilisation of the country. ..."
"... Emboldened by Western domination, monopoly firms act with disregard for the law. ..."
"... Unable to raise money from commodity sales, hemmed in by a broken world agricultural system and victim of a culture of plunder, countries of the Global South have been forced to go hat in hand to commercial lenders for finance. ..."
"... Impossible to raise funds, trapped by the fickleness of international finance, governments are forced to make deep cuts in social spending. Education and health, food sovereignty and economic diversification – all this goes by the wayside. International agencies such as the IMF force countries to conduct 'reforms', a word that means extermination of independence. Those countries that hold out face immense international pressure to submit under pain of extinction, as the Communist Manifesto (1848) put it. ..."
"... The migration out of Venezuela is not unique to that country but is now merely the normal reaction to the global crisis. Migrants from Honduras who go northward to the United States or migrants from West Africa who go towards Europe through Libya are part of this global exodus. ..."
"... Venezuela has faced harsh US sanctions since 2014, when the US Congress started down this road. The next year, US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela a 'threat to national security'. The economy started to scream. ..."
"... This is what the US did to Iran and this is what they did to Cuba. The UN says that the US sanctions on Cuba have cost the small island $130 billion. Venezuela lost $6 billion for the first year of Trump's sanctions, since they began in August 2017 ..."
On 15 September 1970, US President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry
Kissinger authorised the US government to do everything possible to undermine the incoming
government of the socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Nixon and Kissinger,
according to the notes kept by CIA Director Richard Helms, wanted to 'make the economy scream'
in Chile; they were 'not concerned [about the] risks involved'. War was acceptable to them as
long as Allende's government was removed from power. The CIA started Project FUBELT, with $10
million as a first installment to begin the covert destabilisation of the country.
CIA memorandum on Project FUBELT, 16 September 1970.
... ... ...
US business firms, such as the telecommunication giant ITT, the soft drink maker Pepsi Cola
and copper monopolies such as Anaconda and Kennecott, put pressure on the US government once
Allende nationalised the copper sector on 11 July 1971. Chileans celebrated this day as the Day
of National Dignity (Dia de la Dignidad Nacional). The CIA began to make contact with sections
of the military seen to be against Allende. Three years later, on 11 September 1973, these
military men moved against Allende, who died in the regime change operation. The US 'created
the conditions' as US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put it, to which US President
Richard Nixon answered, 'that is the way it is going to be played'. Such is the mood of
international gangsterism.
Phone Call between Richard Nixon (P) and Henry Kissinger (K) on 16 September 1973.
... ... ...
Chile entered the dark night of a military dictatorship that turned over the country to US
monopoly firms. US advisors rushed in to strengthen the nerve of General Augusto Pinochet's
cabinet.
What happened to Chile in 1973 is precisely what the United States has attempted to do in
many other countries of the Global South. The most recent target for the US government –
and Western big business – is Venezuela. But what is happening to Venezuela is nothing
unique. It faces an onslaught from the United States and its allies that is familiar to
countries as far afield as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The formula is
clichéd. It is commonplace, a twelve-step plan to produce a coup climate, to create a
world under the heel of the West and of Western big business.
Step One: Colonialism's
Traps.
Most of the Global South remains trapped by the structures put in place by colonialism.
Colonial boundaries encircled states that had the misfortune of being single commodity
producers – either sugar for Cuba or oil for Venezuela. The inability to diversify their
economies meant that these countries earned the bulk of their export revenues from their
singular commodities (98% of Venezuela's export revenues come from oil). As long as the prices
of the commodities remained high, the export revenues were secure. When the prices fell,
revenue suffered. This was a legacy of colonialism. Oil prices dropped from $160.72 per barrel
(June 2008) to $51.99 per barrel (January 2019). Venezuela's export revenues collapsed in this
decade.
Step Two: The Defeat of the New International Economic Order.
In 1974, the countries of the Global South attempted to redo the architecture of the world
economy. They called for the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) that would
allow them to pivot away from the colonial reliance upon one commodity and diversify their
economies. Cartels of raw materials – such as oil and bauxite – were to be built so
that the one-commodity country could have some control over prices of the products that they
relied upon. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960, was a
pioneer of these commodity cartels. Others were not permitted to be formed. With the defeat of
OPEC over the past three decades, its members – such as Venezuela (which has the world's
largest proven oil reserves) – have not been able to control oil prices. They are at the
mercy of the powerful countries of the world.
Step Three: The Death of Southern
Agriculture.
In November 2001, there were about three billion small farmers and landless peasants in the
world. That month, the World Trade Organisation met in Doha (Qatar) to unleash the productivity
of Northern agri-business against the billions of small farmers and landless peasants of the
Global South. Mechanisation and large, industrial-scale farms in North America and Europe had
raised productivity to about 1 to 2 million kilogrammes of cereals per farmer. The small
farmers and landless peasants in the rest of the world struggled to grow 1,000 kilogrammes of
cereals per farmer. They were nowhere near as productive. The Doha decision, as
Samir Amin wrote , presages the annihilation of the small farmer and landless peasant. What
are these men and women to do? The production per hectare is higher in the West, but the
corporate take-over of agriculture (as Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Senior
Fellow P. Sainath shows) leads to increased hunger as it pushes peasants off their land and
leaves them to starve.
Step Four: Culture of Plunder.
Emboldened by Western domination, monopoly firms act with disregard for the law. As
Kambale Musavuli and I write of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its annual budget of $6
billion is routinely robbed of at least $500 by monopoly mining firms, mostly from Canada
– the country now leading the charge against Venezuela. Mispricing and tax avoidance
schemes allow these large firms (Canada's Agrium, Barrick and Suncor) to routinely steal
billions of dollars from impoverished states.
Step Five: Debt as a Way of Life.
Unable to raise money from commodity sales, hemmed in by a broken world agricultural system
and victim of a culture of plunder, countries of the Global South have been forced to go hat in
hand to commercial lenders for finance. Over the past decade, debt held by the Global South
states has increased, while debt payments have ballooned by 60%. When commodity prices rose
between 2000 and 2010, debt in the Global South decreased. As commodity prices began to fall
from 2010, debts have risen.
The IMF points out that of the 67 impoverished countries that they
follow, 30 are in debt distress, a number that has doubled since 2013. More than 55.4% of
Angola's export revenue is paid to service its debt. And Angola, like Venezuela, is an oil
exporter. Other oil exporters such as Ghana, Chad, Gabon and Venezuela suffer high debt to GDP
ratios. Two out of five low-income countries are in deep financial distress.
Step Six:
Public Finances Go to Hell.
With little incoming revenue and low tax collection rates, public finances in the Global
South has gone into crisis. As the UN Conference on Trade and Development points out, 'public
finances have continued to be suffocated'. States simply cannot put together the funds needed
to maintain basic state functions. Balanced budget rules make borrowing difficult, which is
compounded by the fact that banks charge high rates for money, citing the risks of lending to
indebted countries.
Step Seven: Deep Cuts in Social Spending .
Impossible to raise funds, trapped by the fickleness of international finance, governments
are forced to make deep cuts in social spending. Education and health, food sovereignty and
economic diversification – all this goes by the wayside. International agencies such as
the IMF force countries to conduct 'reforms', a word that means extermination of independence.
Those countries that hold out face immense international pressure to submit under pain of
extinction, as the Communist Manifesto (1848) put it.
Step Eight: Social Distress Leads
to Migration.
The total number of migrants in the world is now at least 68.5 million. That makes the
country called Migration the 21st largest country in the world after Thailand and ahead of the
United Kingdom. Migration has become a global reaction to the collapse of countries from one
end of the planet to the other. The migration out of Venezuela is not unique to that country
but is now merely the normal reaction to the global crisis. Migrants from Honduras who go
northward to the United States or migrants from West Africa who go towards Europe through Libya
are part of this global exodus.
Step Nine: Who Controls the Narrative?
The monopoly corporate media takes its orders from the elite. There is no sympathy for the
structural crisis faced by governments from Afghanistan to Venezuela. Those leaders who cave to
Western pressure are given a free pass by the media. As long as they conduct 'reforms', they
are safe. Those countries that argue against the 'reforms' are vulnerable to being attacked.
Their leaders become 'dictators', their people hostages. A contested election in Bangladesh or
in the Democratic Republic of Congo or in the United States is not cause for regime change.
That special treatment is left for Venezuela.
Step Ten: Who's the Real President?
Regime change operations begin when the imperialists question the legitimacy of the
government in power: by putting the weight of the United States behind an unelected person,
calling him the new president and creating a situation where the elected leader's authority is
undermined. The coup takes place when a powerful country decides – without an election
– to anoint its own proxy. That person – in Venezuela's case Juan Guaidó
– rapidly has to make it clear that he will bend to the authority of the United States.
His kitchen cabinet – made up of former government officials with intimate ties to the US
(such as Harvard University's Ricardo Hausmann and Carnegie's Moisés Naím)
– will make it clear that they want to privatise everything and sell out the Venezuelan
people in the name of the Venezuelan people.
Step Eleven: Make the Economy Scream.
Venezuela has faced harsh US sanctions since 2014, when the US Congress started down this
road. The next year, US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela a 'threat to national
security'. The economy started to scream. In recent days, the United States and the United
Kingdom brazenly stole billions of dollars of Venezuelan money, placed the shackles of
sanctions on its only revenue generating sector (oil) and watched the pain flood through the
country.
This is what the US did to Iran and this is what they did to Cuba. The UN says that
the US sanctions on Cuba have cost the small island $130 billion. Venezuela lost $6 billion for
the first year of Trump's sanctions, since they began in August 2017. More is to be lost as the
days unfold. No wonder that the United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy says that
'sanctions which can lead to starvation and medical shortages are not the answer to the crisis
in Venezuela'. He said that sanctions are 'not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of
disputes'. Further, Jazairy said, 'I am especially concerned to hear reports that these
sanctions are aimed at changing the government of Venezuela'. He called for 'compassion' for
the people of Venezuela.
Step Twelve: Go to War.
US National Security Advisor John Bolton held a yellow pad with the words 5,000 troops in
Colombia written on it. These are US troops, already deployed in Venezuela's neighbour. The US
Southern Command is ready. They are egging on Colombia and Brazil to do their bit. As the coup
climate is created, a nudge will be necessary. They will go to war.
None of this is inevitable. It was not inevitable to Titina Silá, a commander of the
Partido Africano para a Independència da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) who was
murdered on 30 January 1973. She fought to free her country. It is not inevitable to the people
of Venezuela, who continue to fight to defend their revolution. It is not inevitable to our
friends at CodePink: Women for Peace, whose Medea Benjamin walked into a meeting of the
Organisation of American States and said – No!
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump lambasted America's endless and wasteful wars. But
as president, he has surrounded himself with individuals who have made defending and advancing
American empire a full-time career. Why did Trump cave and what could be the consequences for
him and his presidency?
CrossTalking with George Szamuely, Jeff Deist, and Lee Spieckerman.
That Lee guy demonstrated perfectly why the world should fear the USA. Dangerous stupid.
71 Likes
You are correct!
21 Likes
The danger comes from the arrogance with the stupidity. American exceptionalism at its
ugliest, on par with bolton and pompeo for sure.
I don't think tRump really knows what he is saying, as in big disconnect between brain and
mouth. More empty bluster than arrogance with his 5th grader stupidity.
23 Likes
The scary part is a lot of Americans are like him
23 Likes
Show 2 more replies
The "Lee" entity encapsulates everything that is wrong with consecutive US governments:
arrogant, obnoxious, I'll mannered, undiplomatic, belligerent, misinformed and dangerously
stupid.
43 Likes
Thanks for having this Lee Spieckerman on. It proves RT tries to show all sides and is a
shocking example of how crazy the far right is.
Keep it real!
37 Likes
Spickerman is living in cuckoo land with his claim US is a force for good and billions are
so happy to live under a bunch of mobster's Wrong
22 Likes
Lee Spickerman is a typical Sociopath
18 Likes
Lee Spickerman is mad like the US Governement.!!
The Monroe Doctrine gets evoked yet again. In written form it was "anti-colonial", but in
practice it was "imperial anti-colonialism" and used as a declaration of hegemony and a right
of unilateral intervention over the Americas.
This is why I feel we need to stop using the term "regime change" which also hides the
reality of what are really coup d'etats and imperialist wars. It's not a regime being changed,
but a regime trying to do the changing. Like Peter says at the end, it would take a long show
to talk about them all.
Do us all a favor and take Mr. Spieckerman off your guest list. He advances our knowledge
not a bit. He is merely one of the Bush claque. As for his admired public servant, John Bolton,
rarely does this country produce so maniacal a political operator. Giving Bolton a responsible
position was Trump's most egregious personnel error.
The country is in deep economic crisis with rampant inflation and high unemployment rate. As such it is an easy target for color
revolutions...
Venezuela has around 32 Million population. unemployment is around total: 14.6% (2015 est.) Growth rate is negative -14% (2017 est.)
-16.5% (2016 est.). -6.2% (2015 est.) . Inflation rate is 254.4% (2016 est.) Exchange rate is 3,345 bolivars per dollar (2017 est.).
University professor salary is around US$ 27,449. The cost of living is three times lower then in the USA.
Venezuela was one of three countries that emerged from the collapse of Gran Colombia in 1830 (the others being Ecuador and New
Granada, which became Colombia). For most of the first half of the 20th century, Venezuela was ruled by generally benevolent military
strongmen who promoted the oil industry and allowed for some social reforms. Democratically elected governments have held sway since
1959. Under Hugo CHAVEZ, president from 1999 to 2013, and his hand-picked successor, President Nicolas MADURO, the executive branch
has exercised increasingly authoritarian control over other branches of government. In 2016, President MADURO issued a decree to
hold an election to form a "Constituent Assembly." A 30 July 2017 poll approved the formation of a 545-member Constituent Assembly
and elected its delegates, empowering them to change the constitution and dismiss government institutions and officials. The US Government
does not recognize the Assembly, which has generally used its powers to rule by decree rather than to reform the constitution. Simultaneously,
democratic institutions continue to deteriorate, freedoms of expression and the press are curtailed, and political polarization has
grown. The ruling party's economic policies have expanded the state's role in the economy through expropriations of major enterprises,
strict currency exchange and price controls that discourage private sector investment and production, and overdependence on the petroleum
industry for revenues, among others. Current concerns include human rights abuses, rampant violent crime, high inflation, and widespread
shortages of basic consumer goods, medicine, and medical supplies.
Location
: Northern South America, bordering the Caribbean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, between Colombia and Guyana
Geographic coordinates
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territorial sea: 12 nm exclusive economic zone: 200 nm contiguous zone: 15 nm continental shelf: 200-m depth or to the depth
of exploitation Climate
: tropical; hot, humid; more moderate in highlands
Terrain.
Andes Mountains and Maracaibo Lowlands in northwest; central plains (llanos); Guiana Highlands in southeast
Elevation: 450 m elevation extremes: 0 m lowest point: Caribbean Sea 4978 highest point: Pico Bolivar
Natural resources
: This entry lists a country's mineral, petroleum, hydropower, and other resources of commercial importance, such as rare earth
elements (REEs). In general, products appear only if they make a significant contribution to the economy, or are likely to do so
in the future. petroleum, natural gas, iron ore, gold, bauxite, other minerals, hydropower, diamonds
Land use
: This
entry contains the percentage shares of total land area for three different types of land use: agricultural land, forest, and other;
agricultural land is further divided into arable land - land cultivated for crops like wheat, maize, and rice that are replanted
after each harvest, permanent crops - land cultivated for crops like citrus, coffee, and rubber that are not replanted after each
harvest, and includes land under flowering shrubs, fruit trees, nut trees, and vines, and permane . . .
more
Population distribution
: most of the population is concentrated in the northern and western highlands along an eastern spur at the northern end of the
Andes, an area that includes the capital of Caracas
Natural hazards
: This entry lists potential natural disasters. For countries where volcanic activity is common, a volcanism subfield highlights
historically active volcanoes.
subject to floods, rockslides, mudslides; periodic droughts
Environment - current
issues Acidification - the lowering of soil and water pH due to acid precipitation and deposition usually through
precipitation; this process disrupts ecosystem nutrient flows and may kill freshwater fish and plants dependent on more neutral or
alkaline conditions (see acid rain). Acid rain - characterized as containing harmful levels of sulfur dioxi . . .
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sewage pollution of Lago de Valencia; oil and urban pollution of Lago de Maracaibo; deforestation; soil degradation; urban and
industrial pollution, especially along the Caribbean coast; threat to the rainforest ecosystem from irresponsible mining operations
Environment - international
agreements : This entry separates country participation in international environmental agreements into two levels - party to
and signed, but not ratified. Agreements are listed in alphabetical order by the abbreviated form of the full name.
party to: Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species,
Hazardous Wastes, Marine Life Conservation, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical Timber 94, Wetlands
signed, but not ratified: none of the selected agreements
Geography - note
: This entry includes miscellaneous geographic information of significance not included elsewhere.
note 1: the country lies on major sea and air routes linking North and South America
note 2: Venezuela has some of the most unique geology in the world; tepuis are massive table-top mountains of the western Guiana
Highlands that tend to be isolated and thus support unique endemic plant and animal species; their sheer cliffsides account for some
of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world including Angel Falls, the world's highest (979 m) that drops off Auyan Tepui
Birth rate
18.5 births/1,000 population (2018 est.) country comparison to the world:
Death rate
5.3 deaths/1,000 population (2018 est.) country comparison to the world:
187
Social investment in Venezuela during the CHAVEZ administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011,
increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation
through social investment. "Missions" dedicated to education, nutrition, healthcare, and sanitation were funded through petroleum
revenues. The sustainability of this progress remains questionable, however, as the continuation of these social programs depends
on the prosperity of Venezuela's oil industry. In the long-term, education and health care spending may increase economic growth
and reduce income inequality, but rising costs and the staffing of new health care jobs with foreigners are slowing development.
While CHAVEZ was in power, more than one million predominantly middle- and upper-class Venezuelans are estimated to have emigrated.
The brain drain is attributed to a repressive political system, lack of economic opportunities, steep inflation, a high crime rate,
and corruption. Thousands of oil engineers emigrated to Canada, Colombia, and the United States following CHAVEZ's firing of over
20,000 employees of the state-owned petroleum company during a 2002-03 oil strike. Additionally, thousands of Venezuelans of European
descent have taken up residence in their ancestral homelands. Nevertheless, Venezuela has attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants
from South America and southern Europe because of its lenient migration policy and the availability of education and health care.
Venezuela also has been a fairly accommodating host to Colombian refugees, numbering about 170,000 as of year-end 2016. However,
since 2014, falling oil prices have driven a major economic crisis that has pushed Venezuelans from all walks of life to migrate
or to seek asylum abroad to escape severe shortages of food, water, and medicine; soaring inflation; unemployment; and violence.
As of October 2018,an estimate 3 million Venezuelans were refugees or migrants worldwide, with 2.4 million in Latin America and the
Caribbean (notably Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Chile, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Aruba, and Curacao).
Asylum applications
increased significantly in the US and Brazil in 2016 and 2017. Several receiving countries are making efforts to increase immigration
restrictions and to deport illegal Venezuelan migrants - Ecuador and Peru in August 2018 began requiring valid passports for entry,
which are difficult to obtain for Venezuelans. Nevertheless, Venezuelans continue to migrate to avoid economic collapse at home.
Age structure
: This entry provides the distribution of the population according to age. Information is included by sex and age group as follows:
0-14 years (children), 15-24 years (early working age), 25-54 years (prime working age), 55-64 years (mature working age), 65 years
and over (elderly). The age structure of a population affects a nation's key socioeconomic issues. Countries with young populations
(high percentage under age 15) need to invest more in schools, while countries with older population . . .
more
urban population: 88.2% of total population (2018) rate of urbanization: 1.28% annual rate of change (2015-20 est.)
Major urban areas
- population : 2.935 million CARACAS (capital), 2.179 million Maracaibo, 1.734 million Valencia, 1.178 million Maracay, 1.189 million Barquisimeto
(2018) Sex ratio
: This entry includes the number of males for each female in five age groups - at birth, under 15 years, 15-64 years, 65 years
and over, and for the total population. Sex ratio at birth has recently emerged as an indicator of certain kinds of sex discrimination
in some countries. For instance, high sex ratios at birth in some Asian countries are now attributed to sex-selective abortion and
infanticide due to a strong preference for sons. This will affect future marriage patterns and fertilit . . .
more
Life expectancy
at birth Total population: 76.2 years (2018 est.) male: 73.2 years (2018 est.) female: 79.3 years (2018 est.) country comparison to the
world: 93
Total fertility
rate : 2.3 children born/woman (2018 est.) country comparison to the world:
87
Unemployment, youth
ages 15-24 : total: 14.6% (2015 est.) male: NA (2015 est.) female: NA (2015 est.) country comparison to the world:
92
Economy - overview
: Venezuela remains highly dependent on oil revenues, which account for almost all export earnings and nearly half of the government's
revenue, despite a continued decline in oil production in 2017. In the absence of official statistics, foreign experts estimate that
GDP contracted 12% in 2017, inflation exceeded 2000%, people faced widespread shortages of consumer goods and medicine, and the central
bank's international reserves dwindled. In late 2017, Venezuela also entered selective default on some of its sovereign and state
oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A., (PDVSA) bonds. Domestic production and industry continues to severely underperform and
the Venezuelan Government continues to rely on imports to meet its basic food and consumer goods needs.
Falling oil prices since 2014 have aggravated Venezuela's economic crisis. Insufficient access to dollars, price controls, and
rigid labor regulations have led some US and multinational firms to reduce or shut down their Venezuelan operations. Market uncertainty
and PDVSA's poor cash flow have slowed investment in the petroleum sector, resulting in a decline in oil production.
Under President Nicolas MADURO, the Venezuelan Government's response to the economic crisis has been to increase state control
over the economy and blame the private sector for shortages. MADURO has given authority for the production and distribution of basic
goods to the military and to local socialist party member committees. The Venezuelan Government has maintained strict currency controls
since 2003. The government has been unable to sustain its mechanisms for distributing dollars to the private sector, in part because
it needed to withhold some foreign exchange reserves to make its foreign bond payments. As a result of price and currency controls,
local industries have struggled to purchase production inputs necessary to maintain their operations or sell goods at a profit on
the local market. Expansionary monetary policies and currency controls have created opportunities for arbitrage and corruption and
fueled a rapid increase in black market activity.
GDP (purchasing
power parity) : $381.6 billion (2017 est.) $443.7 billion (2016 est.) $531.1 billion (2015 est.) note: data are in 2017 dollars country comparison
to the world: 47
GDP - real growth
rate : -14% (2017 est.) -16.5% (2016 est.) -6.2% (2015 est.) country comparison to the world:
222
GDP - per capita
(PPP) : This entry shows GDP on a purchasing power parity basis divided by population as of 1 July for the same year.
$12,500 (2017 est.) $14,400 (2016 est.) $17,300 (2015 est.) note: data are in 2017 dollars country comparison to the world:
126
Gross national saving
: 12.1% of GDP (2017 est.) 8.6% of GDP (2016 est.) 31.8% of GDP (2015 est.) country comparison to the world:
150
GDP - composition,
by end use : household consumption: 68.5% (2017 est.) government consumption: 19.6% (2017 est.) investment in fixed capital: 13.9% (2017 est.)
investment in inventories: 1.7% (2017 est.) exports of goods and services: 7% (2017 est.) imports of goods and services: -10.7% (2017
est.)
GDP - composition,
by sector of origin : agriculture: 4.7% (2017 est.) industry: 40.4% (2017 est.) services: 54.9% (2017 est.)
Agriculture - products
: This entry is an ordered listing of major crops and products starting with the most important.
corn, sorghum, sugarcane, rice, bananas, vegetables, coffee; beef, pork, milk, eggs; fish
Labor force
: 14.21 million (2017 est.) country comparison to the world:
40
Unemployment rate
: This entry contains the percent of the labor force that is without jobs. Substantial underemployment might be noted.
27.1% (2017 est.) 20.6% (2016 est.) country comparison to the world:
199
Central bank discount
rate : This entry provides the annualized interest rate a country's central bank charges commercial, depository banks for loans
to meet temporary shortages of funds.
29.5% (2015) country comparison to the world:
1 Commercial bank
prime lending rate : This entry provides a simple average of annualized interest rates commercial banks charge on new loans,
denominated in the national currency, to their most credit-worthy customers.
21.1% (31 December 2017 est.) 20.78% (31 December 2016 est.) country comparison to the world:
12 Stock of narrow
money : This entry, also known as "M1," comprises the total quantity of currency in circulation (notes and coins) plus demand
deposits denominated in the national currency held by nonbank financial institutions, state and local governments, nonfinancial public
enterprises, and the private sector of the economy, measured at a specific point in time. National currency units have been converted
to US dollars at the closing exchange rate for the date of the information. Because of exchange rate moveme . . .
more
$149.8 billion (31 December 2017 est.) $163.3 billion (31 December 2016 est.) country comparison to the world:
29 Stock of broad money
: This entry covers all of "Narrow money," plus the total quantity of time and savings deposits, credit union deposits, institutional
money market funds, short-term repurchase agreements between the central bank and commercial deposit banks, and other large liquid
assets held by nonbank financial institutions, state and local governments, nonfinancial public enterprises, and the private sector
of the economy. National currency units have been converted to US dollars at the closing exchange r . . .
more
Exports - partners
: US 34.8%, India 17.2%, China 16%, Netherlands Antilles 8.2%, Singapore 6.3%, Cuba 4.2% (2017)
Exports - commodities
: This entry provides a listing of the highest-valued exported products; it sometimes includes the percent of total dollar value.
petroleum and petroleum products, bauxite and aluminum, minerals, chemicals, agricultural products
Imports : This
entry provides the total US dollar amount of merchandise imports on a c.i.f. (cost, insurance, and freight) or f.o.b. (free on board)
basis. These figures are calculated on an exchange rate basis, i.e., not in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.
$11 billion (2017 est.) $16.34 billion (2016 est.) country comparison to the world:
100 Imports - commodities
: This entry provides a listing of the highest-valued imported products; it sometimes includes the percent of total dollar value.
agricultural products, livestock, raw materials, machinery and equipment, transport equipment, construction materials, medical
equipment, petroleum products, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, iron and steel products
Imports - partners
: This entry provides a rank ordering of trading partners starting with the most important; it sometimes includes the percent
of total dollar value. US 24.8%, China 14.2%, Mexico 9.5% (2017)
"... There is a great deal of controversy about the true shape of the Venezuelan economy and whether Hugo Chavez' and Nicholas Maduro's reform and policies were crucial for the people of Venezuela or whether they were completely misguided and precipitated the current crises. Anybody and everybody seems to have very strong held views about this. But I don't simply because I lack the expertise to have any such opinions. So I decided to ask one of the most respected independent economists out there, Michael Hudson, for whom I have immense respect and whose analyses (including those he co-authored with Paul Craig Roberts ) seem to be the most credible and honest ones you can find. In fact, Paul Craig Roberts considers Hudson the " best economist in the world "! ..."
"... I am deeply grateful to Michael for his replies which, I hope, will contribute to a honest and objective understanding of what really is taking place in Venezuela. ..."
"... : Could you summarize the state of Venezuela's economy when Chavez came to power? ..."
"... : Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he do right, and what did he do wrong? ..."
"... : What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela – is it primarily due to mistakes by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage, subversion and sanctions? ..."
"... : What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does not overthrow him) to rescue the Venezuelan economy? ..."
"... What about the plan to introduce a oil-based crypto currency? Will that be an effective alternative to the dying Venezuelan Bolivar? ..."
"... Trade, Develpoment and Foreign Debt ..."
"... : How much assistance do China, Russia and Iran provide and how much can they do to help? Do you think that these three countries together can help counter-act US sabotage, subversion and sanctions? ..."
"... : Venezuela kept a lot of its gold in the UK and money in the USA. How could Chavez and Maduro trust these countries or did they not have another choice? Are there viable alternatives to New York and London or are they still the "only game in town" for the world's central banks? ..."
"... Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ..."
"... : What can other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and, maybe, Uruguay and Mexico do to help Venezuela? ..."
"... : Thank you very much for taking the time to reply to my questions! ..."
Introduction: There is a great deal of controversy about the true shape of the Venezuelan economy and whether Hugo Chavez'
and Nicholas Maduro's reform and policies were crucial for the people of Venezuela or whether they were completely misguided and
precipitated the current crises. Anybody and everybody seems to have very strong held views about this. But I don't simply because
I lack the expertise to have any such opinions. So I decided to ask one of the most respected independent economists out there,
Michael Hudson, for whom I have immense respect and whose analyses (including those he
co-authored with Paul Craig Roberts
) seem to be the most credible and honest ones you can find. In fact, Paul Craig Roberts considers Hudson the "
best economist in
the world "!
I am deeply grateful to Michael for his replies which, I hope, will contribute to a honest and objective understanding
of what really is taking place in Venezuela.
The Saker
The Saker : Could you summarize the state of Venezuela's economy when Chavez came to power?
Michael Hudson : Venezuela was an oil monoculture. Its export revenue was spent largely on importing food and other necessities
that it could have produced at home. Its trade was largely with the United States. So despite its oil wealth, it ran up foreign debt.
From the outset, U.S. oil companies have feared that Venezuela might someday use its oil revenues to benefit its overall population
instead of letting the U.S. oil industry and its local comprador aristocracy siphon off its wealth. So the oil industry – backed
by U.S. diplomacy – held Venezuela hostage in two ways.
First of all, oil refineries were not built in Venezuela, but in Trinidad and in the southern U.S. Gulf Coast states. This enabled
U.S. oil companies – or the U.S. Government – to leave Venezuela without a means of "going it alone" and pursuing an independent
policy with its oil, as it needed to have this oil refined. It doesn't help to have oil reserves if you are unable to get this oil
refined so as to be usable.
Second, Venezuela's central bankers were persuaded to pledge their oil reserves and all assets of the state oil sector (including
Citgo) as collateral for its foreign debt. This meant that if Venezuela defaulted (or was forced into default by U.S. banks refusing
to make timely payment on its foreign debt), bondholders and U.S. oil majors would be in a legal position to take possession of Venezuelan
oil assets.
These pro-U.S. policies made Venezuela a typically polarized Latin American oligarchy. Despite being nominally rich in oil revenue,
its wealth was concentrated in the hands of a pro-U.S. oligarchy that let its domestic development be steered by the World Bank and
IMF. The indigenous population, especially its rural racial minority as well as the urban underclass, was excluded from sharing in
the country's oil wealth. The oligarchy's arrogant refusal to share the wealth, or even to make Venezuela self-sufficient in essentials,
made the election of Hugo Chavez a natural outcome.
The Saker : Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he do right, and what did
he do wrong?
Michael Hudson : Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue – mainly from oil, of course
– to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity
for his electoral constituency.
What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable
to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad – while running away themselves.
This was not "wrong". It merely takes a long time to change an economy's disruption – while the U.S. is using sanctions and "dirty
tricks" to stop that process.
The Saker : What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela – is it primarily due to mistakes
by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage, subversion and sanctions?
Michael Hudson : There is no way that Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic
independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on
oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney's regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy,
running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.
By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco,
the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats
hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela's oil resources and seize its foreign assets much as Paul Singer hedge fund sought
to do with Argentina's foreign assets.
Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile's "economy scream," so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela.
It is using that country as a "demonstration effect" to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents
their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.
The Saker : What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does not overthrow him) to
rescue the Venezuelan economy?
Michael Hudson : I cannot think of anything that President Maduro can do that he is not doing. At best, he can seek foreign support
– and demonstrate to the world the need for an alternative international financial and economic system.
ORDER IT NOW
He already has begun to do this by trying to withdraw Venezuela's gold from the Bank of England and Federal Reserve. This is turning
into "asymmetrical warfare," threatening to de-sanctify the dollar standard in international finance. The refusal of England and
the United States to grant an elected government control of its foreign assets demonstrates to the entire world that U.S. diplomats
and courts alone can and will control foreign countries as an extension of U.S. nationalism.
The price of the U.S. economic attack on Venezuela is thus to fracture the global monetary system. Maduro's defensive move is
showing other countries the need to protect themselves from becoming "another Venezuela" by finding a new safe haven and paying agent
for their gold, foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro areas.
The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the ante to move "outside the box." His
plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan – is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S. dollar
standard. It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it can emerge from this fight as an honest financial
broker, honest banking system and supporter of democratically elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more
thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!
Over the longer run, Maduro also must develop Venezuelan agriculture, along much the same lines that the United States protected
and developed its agriculture under the New Deal legislation of the 1930s – rural extension services, rural credit, seed advice,
state marketing organizations for crop purchase and supply of mechanization, and the same kind of price supports that the United
States has long used to subsidize domestic farm investment to increase productivity.
The Saker: What about the plan to introduce a oil-based crypto currency? Will that be an effective alternative to the dying
Venezuelan Bolivar?
Michael Hudson : Only a national government can issue a currency. A "crypto" currency tied to the price of oil would become a
hedging vehicle, prone to manipulation and price swings by forward sellers and buyers. A national currency must be based on the ability
to tax, and Venezuela's main tax source is oil revenue, which is being blocked from the United States. So Venezuela's position is
like that of the German mark coming out of its hyperinflation of the early 1920s. The only solution involves balance-of-payments
support. It looks like the only such support will come from outside the dollar sphere.
The solution to any hyperinflation must be negotiated diplomatically and be supported by other governments. My history of international
trade and financial theory, Trade, Develpoment and Foreign Debt , describes the German reparations problem and how its hyperinflation
was solved by the Rentenmark.
Venezuela's economic-rent tax would fall on oil, and luxury real estate sites, as well as monopoly prices, and on high incomes
(mainly financial and monopoly income). This requires a logic to frame such tax and monetary policy. I have tried to explain how
to achieve monetary and hence political independence for the past half-century. China is applying such policy most effectively. It
is able to do so because it is a large and self-sufficient economy in essentials, running a large enough export surplus to pay for
its food imports. Venezuela is in no such position. That is why it is looking to China for support at this time.
The Saker : How much assistance do China, Russia and Iran provide and how much can they do to help? Do you think that these
three countries together can help counter-act US sabotage, subversion and sanctions?
Michael Hudson : None of these countries have a current capacity to refine Venezuelan oil. This makes it difficult for them to
take payment in Venezuelan oil. Only a long-term supply contract (paid for in advance) would be workable. And even in that case,
what would China and Russia do if the United States simply grabbed their property in Venezuela, or refused to let Russia's oil company
take possession of Citco? In that case, the only response would be to seize U.S. investments in their own country as compensation.
At least China and Russia can provide an alternative bank clearing mechanism to SWIFT, so that Venezuela can by pass the U.S.
financial system and keep its assets from being grabbed at will by U.S. authorities or bondholders. And of course, they can provide
safe-keeping for however much of Venezuela's gold it can get back from New York and London.
Looking ahead, therefore, China, Russia, Iran and other countries need to set up a new international court to adjudicate the coming
diplomatic crisis and its financial and military consequences. Such a court – and its associated international bank as an alternative
to the U.S.-controlled IMF and World Bank – needs a clear ideology to frame a set of principles of nationhood and international rights
with power to implement and enforce its judgments.
This would confront U.S. financial strategists with a choice: if they continue to treat the IMF, World Bank, ITO and NATO as extensions
of increasingly aggressive U.S. foreign policy, they will risk isolating the United States. Europe will have to choose whether to
remain a U.S. economic and military satellite, or to throw in its lot with Eurasia.
However, Daniel Yergin reports in the Wall Street Journal (Feb. 7) that China is trying to hedge its bets by opening a back-door
negotiation with Guaido's group, apparently to get the same deal that it has negotiated with Maduro's government. But any such deal
seems unlikely to be honored in practice, given U.S. animosity toward China and Guaido's total reliance on U.S. covert support.
The Saker : Venezuela kept a lot of its gold in the UK and money in the USA. How could Chavez and Maduro trust these countries
or did they not have another choice? Are there viable alternatives to New York and London or are they still the "only game in town"
for the world's central banks?
Michael Hudson : There was never real trust in the Bank of England or Federal Reserve, but it seemed unthinkable that they would
refuse to permit an official depositor from withdrawing its own gold. The usual motto is "Trust but verify." But the unwillingness
(or inability) of the Bank of England to verify means that the formerly unthinkable has now arrived: Have these central banks sold
this gold forward in the post-London Gold Pool and its successor commodity markets in their attempt to keep down the price so as
to maintain the appearance of a solvent U.S. dollar standard.
Paul Craig Roberts has described how this system works. There are forward markets for currencies, stocks and bonds. The Federal
Reserve can offer to buy a stock in three months at, say, 10% over the current price. Speculators will by the stock, bidding up the
price, so as to take advantage of "the market's" promise to buy the stock. So by the time three months have passed, the price will
have risen. That is largely how the U.S. "Plunge Protection Team" has supported the U.S. stock market.
The system works in reverse to hold down gold prices. The central banks holding gold can get together and offer to sell gold at
a low price in three months. "The market" will realize that with low-priced gold being sold, there's no point in buying
more gold and bidding its price up. So the forward-settlement market shapes today's market.
The question is, have gold buyers (such as the Russian and Chinese government) bought so much gold that the U.S. Fed and the Bank
of England have actually had to "make good" on their forward sales, and steadily depleted their gold? In this case, they would have
been "living for the moment," keeping down gold prices for as long as they could, knowing that once the world returns to the pre-1971
gold-exchange standard for intergovernmental balance-of-payments deficits, the U.S. will run out of gold and be unable to maintain
its overseas military spending (not to mention its trade deficit and foreign disinvestment in the U.S. stock and bond markets). My
book on Super-Imperialism explains why running out of gold forced the Vietnam War to an end. The same logic would apply today to
America's vast network of military bases throughout the world.
Refusal of England and the U.S. to pay Venezuela means that other countries realize that foreign official gold reserves can be
held hostage to U.S. foreign policy, and even to judgments by U.S. courts to award this gold to foreign creditors or to whoever might
bring a lawsuit under U.S. law against these countries.
This hostage-taking now makes it urgent for other countries to develop a viable alternative, especially as the world de-dedollarizes
and a gold-exchange standard remains the only way of constraining the military-induced balance of payments deficit of the United
States or any other country mounting a military attack. A military empire is very expensive – and gold is a "peaceful" constraint
on military-induced payments deficits. (I spell out the details in my Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire
(1972), updated in German as Finanzimperium (2017).
The U.S. has overplayed its hand in destroying the foundation of the dollar-centered global financial order. That order has enabled
the United States to be "the exceptional nation" able to run balance-of-payments deficits and foreign debt that it has no intention
(or ability) to pay, claiming that the dollars thrown off by its foreign military spending "supply" other countries with their central
bank reserves (held in the form of loans to the U.S. Treasury – Treasury bonds and bills – to finance the U.S. budget deficit and
its military spending, as well as the largely military U.S. balance-of-payments deficit.
Given the fact that the EU is acting as a branch of NATO and the U.S. banking system, that alternative would have to be associated
with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the gold would have to be kept in Russia and/or China.
The Saker : What can other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba and, maybe, Uruguay and Mexico do to
help Venezuela?
Michael Hudson : The best thing neighboring Latin American countries can do is to join in creating a vehicle to promote de-dollarization
and, with it, an international institution to oversee the writedown of debts that are beyond the ability of countries to pay without
imposing austerity and thereby destroying their economies.
An alternative also is needed to the World Bank that would make loans in domestic currency, above all to subsidize investment
in domestic food production so as to protect the economy against foreign food-sanctions – the equivalent of a military siege to force
surrender by imposing famine conditions. This World Bank for Economic Acceleration would put the development of self-reliance for
its members first, instead of promoting export competition while loading borrowers down with foreign debt that would make them prone
to the kind of financial blackmail that Venezuela is experiencing.
Being a Roman Catholic country, Venezuela might ask for papal support for a debt write-down and an international institution to
oversee the ability to pay by debtor countries without imposing austerity, emigration, depopulation and forced privatization of the
public domain.
Two international principles are needed. First, no country should be obliged to pay foreign debt in a currency (such as the dollar
or its satellites) whose banking system acts to prevents payment.
Second, no country should be obliged to pay foreign debt at the price of losing its domestic autonomy as a state: the right to
determine its own foreign policy, to tax and to create its own money, and to be free of having to privatize its public assets to
pay foreign creditors. Any such debt is a "bad loan" reflecting the creditor's own irresponsibility or, even worse, pernicious asset
grab in a foreclosure that was the whole point of the loan.
The Saker : Thank you very much for taking the time to reply to my questions!
As the US strives to overthrow the democratic and independent Venezuelan government, the
historical record regarding the short, middle and long-term consequences are mixed.
We will proceed to examine the consequences and impact of US intervention in Venezuela over
the past half century.
We will then turn to examine the success and failure of US 'regime changes' throughout Latin
America and the Caribbean.
Venezuela: Results and Perspectives 1950-2019
During the post WWII decade, the US, working through the CIA and the Pentagon, brought to
power authoritarian client regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Peru, Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and
several other countries.
In the case of Venezuela, the US backed a near decade long military dictatorship (Perez
Jimenez ) roughly between 1951-58. The dictatorship was overthrown in 1958 and replaced by a
left-center coalition during a brief interim period. Subsequently, the US reshuffled its
policy, and embraced and promoted center-right regimes led by social and christian democrats
which alternated rule for nearly forty years.
In the 1990's US client regimes riddled with corruption and facing a deepening
socio-economic crises were voted out of power and replaced by the independent, anti-imperialist
government led by President Chavez.
The free and democratic election of President Chavez withstood and defeated several US led
'regime changes' over the following two decades.
Following the election of President Maduro, under US direction,Washington mounted the
political machinery for a new regime change. Washington launched, in full throttle, a coup by
the winter of 2019.
The record of US intervention in Venezuela is mixed: a middle term military coup lasted less
than a decade; US directed electoral regimes were in power for forty years; its replacement by
an elected anti-imperialist populist government has been in power for nearly 20 years. A
virulent US directed coup is underfoot today.
The Venezuela experience with 'regime change' speaks to US capacity to consummate long-term
control if it can reshuffle its power base from a military dictatorship into an electoral
regime, financed through the pillage of oil, backed by a reliable military and 'legitimated' by
alternating client political parties which accept submission to Washington.
US client regimes are ruled by oligarchic elites, with little entrepreneurial capacity,
living off of state rents (oil revenues).
Tied closely to the US, the ruling elites are unable to secure popular loyalty. Client
regimes depend on the military strength of the Pentagon -- but that is also their weakness.
Regime Change in Regional-Historical Perspective
Puppet-building is an essential strategic goal of the US imperial state.
The results vary over time depending on the capacity of independent governments to succeed
in nation-building.
US long-term puppet-building has been most successful in small nations with vulnerable
economies.
The US directed coup in Guatemala has lasted over sixty-years – from 1954 -2019. Major
popular indigenous insurgencies have been repressed via US military advisers and aid.
Similar successful US puppet-building has occurred in Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic
and Haiti. Being small and poor and having weak military forces, the US is willing to directly
invade and occupy the countries quickly and at small cost in military lives and economic
costs.
In the above countries Washington succeeded in imposing and maintaining puppet regimes for
prolonged periods of time.
The US has directed military coups over the past half century with contradictory
results.
In the case of Honduras, the Pentagon was able to overturn a progressive liberal democratic
government of very short duration. The Honduran army was under US direction, and elected
President Manual Zelaya depended on an unarmed electoral popular majority. Following the
successful coup the Honduran puppet-regime remained under US rule for the next decade and
likely beyond.
Chile has been under US tutelage for the better part of the 20th century with a brief
respite during a Popular Front government between 1937-41 and a democratic socialist government
between 1970-73. The US military directed coup in 1973 imposed the Pinochet dictatorship which
lasted for seventeen years. It was followed by an electoral regime which continued the
Pinochet-US neo-liberal agenda, including the reversal of all the popular national and social
reforms. In a word, Chile remained within the US political orbit for the better part of a
half-century.
Chile's democratic-socialist regime (1970-73) never armed its people nor established
overseas economic linkage to sustain an independent foreign policy.
It is not surprising that in recent times Chile followed US commands calling for the
overthrow of Venezuela's President Maduro.
Contradictory Puppet-Building
Several US coups were reversed, for the longer or shorter duration.
The classical case of a successful defeat of a client regime is Cuba which overthrew a
ten-year old US client, the Batista dictatorship, and proceeded to successfully resist a CIA
directed invasion and economic blockade for the better part of a half century (up to the
present day).
Cuba's defeat of puppet restorationist policy was a result of the Castro leadership's
decision to arm the people, expropriate and take control of hostile US and multinational
corporations and establish strategic overseas allies – USSR , China and more recently
Venezuela.
In contrast, a US military backed military coup in Brazil (1964) endured for over two
decades, before electoral politics were partially restored under elite leadership.
Twenty years of failed neo-liberal economic policies led to the election of the social
reformist Workers Party (WP) which proceeded to implement extensive anti-poverty programs
within the context of neo-liberal policies.
After a decade and a half of social reforms and a relatively independent foreign policy, the
WP succumbed to a downturn of the commodity dependent economy and a hostile state (namely
judiciary and military) and was replaced by a pair of far-right US client regimes which
functioned under Wall Street and Pentagon direction.
The US frequently intervened in Bolivia, backing military coups and client regimes against
short-term national populist regimes (1954, 1970 and 2001).
In 2005 a popular uprising led to free elections and the election of Evo Morales, the leader
of the coca farmers movements. Between 2005 – 2019 (the present period) President Morales
led a moderate left-of-center anti imperialist government.
ORDER IT NOW
Unsuccessful efforts by the US to overthrow the Morales government were a result of several
factors: Morales organized and mobilized a coalition of peasants and workers (especially miners
and coca farmers). He secured the loyalty of the military, expelled US Trojan Horse "aid
agencies' and extended control over oil and gas and promoted ties with agro business.
The combination of an independent foreign policy, a mixed economy , high growth and moderate
reforms neutralized US puppet-building.
Not so the case in Argentina. Following a bloody coup (1976) in which the US backed military
murdered 30,000 citizens, the military was defeated by the British army in the Malvinas war and
withdrew after seven years in power.
The post military puppet regime ruled and plundered for a decade before collapsing in 2001.
They were overthrown by a popular insurrection. However, the radical left lacking cohesion was
replaced by center-left (Kirchner-Fernandez) regimes which ruled for the better part of a
decade (2003 – 15).
The progressive social welfare – neo-liberal regimes entered in crises and were ousted
by a US backed puppet regime (Macri) in 2015 which proceeded to reverse reforms, privatize the
economy and subordinate the state to US bankers and speculators.
After two years in power, the puppet regime faltered, the economy spiraled downward and
another cycle of repression and mass protest emerged. The US puppet regime's rule is tenuous,
the populace fills the streets, while the Pentagon sharpens its knives and prepares puppets to
replace their current client regime.
Conclusion
The US has not succeeded in consolidating regime changes among the large countries with mass
organizations and military supporters.
Washington has succeeded in overthrowing popular – national regimes in Brazil, and
Argentina . However, over time puppet regimes have been reversed.
While the US resorts to largely a single 'track' (military coups and invasions)in
overwhelming smaller and more vulnerable popular governments, it relies on 'multiple tracks'
strategy with regard to large and more formidable countries.
In the former cases, usually a call to the military or the dispatch of the marines is enough
to snuff an electoral democracy.
In the latter case, the US relies on a multi-proxy strategy which includes a mass media
blitz, labeling democrats as dictatorships, extremists, corrupt, security threats, etc.
As the tension mounts, regional client and European states are organized to back the local
puppets.
Phony "Presidents" are crowned by the US President whose index finger counters the vote of
millions of voters. Street demonstrations and violence paid and organized by the CIA
destabilize the economy; business elites boycott and paralyze production and distribution
Millions are spent in bribing judges and military officials.
If the regime change can be accomplished by local military satraps, the US refrains from
direct military intervention.
Regime changes among larger and wealthier countries have between one or two decades
duration. However, the switch to an electoral puppet regime may consolidate imperial power over
a longer period – as was the case of Chile.
Where there is powerful popular support for a democratic regime, the US will provide the
ideological and military support for a large-scale massacre, as was the case in Argentina.
The coming showdown in Venezuela will be a case of a bloody regime change as the US will
have to murder hundreds of thousands to destroy the millions who have life-long and deep
commitments to their social gains , their loyalty to the nation and their dignity.
In contrast the bourgeoisie, and their followers among political traitors, will seek revenge
and resort to the vilest forms of violence in order to strip the poor of their social advances
and their memories of freedom and dignity.
It is no wonder that the Venezuela masses are girding for a prolonged and decisive struggle:
everything can be won or lost in this final confrontation with the Empire and its puppets.
Did you know this information? January 18, 2019 The US Has Military Forces in Over 160
Countries, but the Pentagon Is Hiding the Exact Numbers
The US has 95% of the world's foreign military bases, with personnel in more than 160
countries. But the Pentagon is leaving hundreds of outposts out of its official reports.
The U.S. and its allies have decided to throw their weight behind yet another coup attempt
in Venezuela. As usual, they claim that their objectives are democracy and freedom. Nothing
could be farther from the truth...
On January 23rd, 2019 Venezuela's opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself
acting president, and called on the armed forces to disobey the government. Very few had ever
heard of this man -- he had never actually run for president. Guaidó is the head of
Venezuela's national assembly; a position very similar to speaker of the house.
Within minutes of this declaration U.S. president Donald Trump took to twitter and
recognized Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela; writing off the administration of
Nicolas Maduro as "illegitimate". U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo followed by urging
Venezuela's military to "restore democracy", affirming that the US would back Mr Guaidó
in his attempts to establish a government. They also promised
20 million dollars in "humanitarian" aid . To put this into context, Trump is on record
saying he was " Not
Going to Rule Out a Military Option " in Venezuela.
This is roughly the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi or Mitch Mcconnell declaring themselves
president, calling on the military to overthrow Trump, and having China pledge to fund and
assist the effort.
Now if you happen to be in the camp that wouldn't actually mind seeing Donald Trump forcibly
removed from office, I would encourage you to imagine replacing Trump's name with Obama, Bush,
Merkel or Macron.
You know there have been a lot of protests in France, and the Yellow Vests have demanded
that Macron step down Why don't we restore democracy in Paris?
Let's get this straight. Trump is an illegitimate president and should be removed from
office (because of Russian interference), but you're perfectly comfortable with that same
illegitimate president toppling foreign governments via twitter?
Though support for Guaidó was quickly parroted by Washington's most dependable
allies, and lauded by virtually every western media outlet, the Venezuelan military responded
by condemning the coup, and reconfirmed
their loyalty to Maduro .
That same day Pompeo announced that Elliott Abrams -- the man who oversaw regime change wars
in Nicaragua and El Salvador , was
deeply involved in the Iran Contra scandal, and who was an architect of both the Iraq war and
the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela (which culminated in the kidnapping of Maduro's predecessor
Hugo Chavez) -- would be in charge of the effort to "restore democracy and prosperity to their
country".
So why do you suppose Washington really wants regime change in Venezuela? You'd have to be
pretty naive to buy the "democracy and prosperity" drivel.
They talk about how the Venezuelan economy is in shambles, but by their own admission (
and according to the U.N. ) U.S. sanctions have played a significant role in creating that
situation.
"With respect to Libya I'm interested in Libya if we take the oil. If we don't take the
oil no interest. We have to have Look, if we have wars, we have to win the war. What we do is
take over the country and hand the keys to people who don't like us. I'll tell you what Iraq,
100% Iran takes over Iraq after we leave, and what really happens with Iraq is they want the
oil fields. And I have it on very good authority that Iran probably won't even be shooting a
bullet because they are getting along better with the Iraqi leaders better than we are. After
all of those lives, and after all of the money we spent. And if that's going to happen we
take the oil."
Maduro's predecessor Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry and used the proceeds to fund
his socialist vision for the country. Now you could make the case that this vision was flawed,
and horribly mismanaged, however he had strong public support for this mandate; so much support
in fact, that when U.S. backed coup plotters kidnapped Hugo Chavez in 2002 crowds took to the
streets en mass and he was quickly reinstated.
Which brings us back to Juan Guaidó. There's not much information available on Mr.
Guaidó, but if you look up the man who tapped him to lead the opposition party Voluntad
Popular you'll find Washington's fingerprints all over the place. Leopoldo Lopez, the founder
of Voluntad Popular,
orchestrated the protests in 2002 that led up to the kidnapping of Hugo Chavez .
Compared to who? Which paragon of good governance will we refer to as the model? Trump?
Theresa May? Angel Merkel? Macron? Take your time.
This isn't democracy, it's a neo-colonial power grab. Juan Guaidó never ran for the
office he claimed, and the fact that he directly colluded with a foreign nation to overthrow
the man who was elected president marks him as a traitor.
Juan Guaidó is a puppet. If installed, he will serve the interests who bought his
ticket. Venezuela's oil industry will be privatized, and the profits will be sucked out of the
country by western corporations.
What's happening in Venezuela right now is a replay of the 1973 U.S. backed coup in Chile,
where the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown, and
replaced with the military dictatorship of Pinochet. Pinochet murdered over 3000 political
opponents during his rule, and tortured over 30,000, but he was friendly to American business
interests so Washington looked the other way.
One could make the case that Maduro is incompetent. One could make the case that his
economic theories are trash. (The same can be said for the haircuts in suits calling for his
removal.) But the reality of the matter is that unless you happen to be a Venezuelan citizen,
how Venezuela is governed is actually none of your business.
Given how things turned out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine you'd think
people would get the hint. When it comes to spreading democracy, you suck. U.S. regime change
operations have left nothing but chaos, death and destruction in their wake. If you want to
make the world a better place, maybe, just maybe, you should start at home.
Venezuelan officials have announced the seizure of a large shipment of American weapons
which they say were bound for anti-Maduro "terrorist groups" . This comes following US national
security advisor John Bolton's pledge to deliver "humanitarian aid" into the country, covertly
if need be, despite embattled President Nicolas Maduro's vow to prevent such unauthorized
shipments from entering.
WASHINGTON -- In an impassioned call for preemptive action against the Middle Eastern
nation, United States national security advisor John Bolton insisted Thursday that Iran was
likely harboring the dangerous terrorist Osama bin Laden. "For the good of our nation, we must
act immediately," said Bolton, citing several intelligence reports providing significant
evidence that Iran is currently providing sanctuary to the Al-Qaeda leader and mastermind of
the Sept. 11 attacks.
"We must never rest until this fugitive is brought to justice, and the only way to achieve
that is through repeated and prolonged military strikes on Iran.
We have reason to believe that he's living in a compound there where he's training a legion
of bloodthirsty Iranian civilians to take up arms as the next generation of terrorists. It is
our solemn duty as the international safeguard of freedom to prevent this at all costs."
At press time, Bolton had left the podium to follow up on an important tip that Iranian
leaders had hired American nuclear physicist Otto Gunther Octavius.
Sanctions without an approval by UN are criminal and represent a war crime.
Notable quotes:
"... Russia shows no signs of abandoning its increasingly beleaguered and isolated ally. Mr. Putin has called Mr. Maduro to relay his support for the regime, and Russian officials reacted angrily to President Trump's suggestion Sunday that U.S. military action was an option to resolve the crisis. ..."
"... "The international community's goal should be to help [ Venezuela ], without destructive meddling from beyond its borders," Alexander Shchetinin, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Latin American department, told the Interfax news agency Monday. ..."
"... Russia has repeatedly opposed U.S. suggestions of foreign intervention to install opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela 's interim president, and supported Mr. Maduro 's calls for mediation on the crisis. ..."
"... But with Mr. Maduro defying calls to step down, the Russian mission may be more extensive than reported, said John Marulanda, a U.S.-trained intelligence officer and adviser to conservative Colombian President Ivan Duque, an opponent of Mr. Maduro . Mr. Marulanda said the recent Russian arrivals are special forces -- Spetsnaz -- who are being embedded among Venezuela 's elite military units to better resist any U.S. intervention or internal coup against Mr. Maduro . ..."
Under anti-U.S. populist leader Hugo Chavez, Mr. Maduro 's late predecessor and
political mentor, Russia became one of Venezuela 's strongest allies with
economic ties including crude oil, loans and arms sales. That helps explain why Moscow has emerged as one of Mr. Maduro 's most
vocal defenders and one of the biggest critics of the pressure campaign waged by Washington and a number of
countries in Latin America.
The pressure grew Monday as France, Germany, Britain and 13 other European countries
announced that they were withdrawing their recognition of Mr. Maduro and called for new
national elections as soon as possible. The EU powers held off in joining the U.S. pressure
campaign to see whether Venezuela would agree to new
elections. "We are working for the return of full democracy in Venezuela : human rights, elections and
no more political prisoners," Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told reporters in Madrid on
Monday.
But Russia shows
no signs of abandoning its increasingly beleaguered and isolated ally. Mr. Putin has called Mr. Maduro to relay his support for
the regime, and Russian officials reacted angrily to President Trump's suggestion Sunday that
U.S. military action was an option to resolve the crisis.
"The international community's goal should be to help [ Venezuela ], without destructive meddling
from beyond its borders," Alexander Shchetinin, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Latin
American department, told the Interfax news agency Monday.
Russia has
repeatedly opposed U.S. suggestions of foreign intervention to install opposition leader Juan
Guaido as Venezuela 's interim president, and
supported Mr.
Maduro 's calls for mediation on the crisis.
The arrival of 400 Russian military contractors after Mr. Trump's Jan. 23 recognition of Mr.
Guaido, the head of the National Assembly, triggered speculation that Moscow was reinforcing Mr. Maduro 's personal security
or even preparing his evacuation.
But with Mr.
Maduro defying calls to step down, the Russian mission may be more extensive than reported,
said John Marulanda, a U.S.-trained intelligence officer and adviser to conservative Colombian
President Ivan Duque, an opponent of Mr. Maduro . Mr. Marulanda said the
recent Russian arrivals are special forces -- Spetsnaz -- who are being embedded among
Venezuela 's
elite military units to better resist any U.S. intervention or internal coup against Mr. Maduro .
The strong support for Venezuela has another motive for
Moscow , analysts
say: to increase the diplomatic, economic and military cost of any campaign by Washington to oust
Mr. Maduro
.
Joseph Humire, a lecturer for the U.S. Army's 7th Special Forces Group, said in an interview
that Russia wants to
"draw the U.S. into a quagmire," which Mr. Maduro has warned that would be
"worse than Vietnam."
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino recently announced that he was inviting Russian
combat pilots who fought in Syria's civil war to "share their experience" with Venezuela's air
force. Playing the long game
Mr. Marulanda said Moscow is playing a long-term game aimed at
pressuring the U.S. along its southern borders to counter NATO moves along Russia 's border with the Baltic states
and Ukraine. Recent visits to Venezuela by nuclear-capable Tupolev 106
strategic bombers represented a clear show of force and support.
" Russia wants to
at least have a 'symbolic involvement' in Latin America as payback for U.S. intervention in the
[Russian] 'Near Abroad,'" Vladimir Rouvinski, a foreign policy analyst at Icesi University in
Colombia, recently told the Al Jazeera news website.
Then there's the money aspect.
Venezuela ,
with the world's largest proven oil reserves helping fill government coffers, is Russia 's second-biggest arms
client after India, the Pentagon said. U.S. analysts calculate that Caracas has purchased more
than $11 billion in Russian hardware over the past decade.
Acquisitions include high-performance Sukhoi Su-30 fighter jets equipped with cruise-type
BrahMos missiles; Mi-35m attack helicopters; surface-to-air SS-200 and Pechorev missile
batteries; T-72 tanks; and production plants for AK-103 rifles.
Russia is also
building a cyberwarfare base on the island of Orchila off Venezuela 's northern coast operated by
Cuban technicians. Through military leverage, Russia has gained major oil concessions in
mainly offshore drilling blocs between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.
Russia is interested
in keeping Venezuelan oil production at reduced levels to maintain high world prices for its
own oil, energy analysts say.
Russian companies also have been using Venezuela to penetrate the U.S. and other
energy markets closed off to them by sanctions. Russia 's main state oil company, Rosneft,
has lent $6 billion to Venezuela in recent years through
negotiations in which Venezuela 's state-owned oil firm, PDVSA,
offered its U.S. subsidiary, Citgo, as collateral, according to U.S. intelligence sources.
The Trump administration has tried
to head off such maneuvers by placing PDVSA's U.S.-based assets under control of the
alternative government that Mr. Guaido is trying to form.
Some say the Kremlin isn't looking for a "win" in Venezuela so much as it is trying to
entangle the Trump administration in
another long, grinding foreign policy crisis with no resolution in sight.
"It would demonstrate the failure of the American strategy of unlawful regime change and the
success of the Russian line of supporting legitimate power," Vladimir Frolov, a Russian foreign
policy analyst, wrote in a recent commentary on the Republic.ru news website.
Mr. Marulanda said Russia is building an anti-U.S. "tripod" in
the Caribbean region linking leftist governments in Venezuela , Cuba and Nicaragua. The strategy is unlikely
to please military planners in Washington .
" Russia has
taken a big gamble," said Evan Ellis, a Latin America specialist with the U.S. Army War
College.
"If Maduro falls, Moscow 's position in the Western
Hemisphere would collapse, as its other allies would soon be equally pressured by democratic
revolts."
This reminds me EuroMaydan. Poland, Sweden and Germany were very active promoters of opposition.
Notable quotes:
"... Imposing some decisions or trying to legitimize an attempt to usurp power, in our view, is both direct and indirect interference in the internal affairs of Venezuela," ..."
The UK, France, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Netherlands,
Germany, Portugal,among a number of countries, have announced their recognition of Juan Guaido
as Venezuela's interim president Domino effect ensues as EU leaders line up to recognise
Venezuela's Guaido
Europe has begun turning its back on Venezuela's incumbent president, Nicolas Maduro, after
he missed his Sunday deadline to call for presidential elections to take place. One by one, European leaders publicly announced their recognition of National Assembly chief,
Juan Guaido, as the country's interim president. But according to Reuters , diplomatic sources said Italy blocked a joint EU position to
recognise Guido as the interim leader, as the government in Rome is deeply divided over the
issue.
Italy
vetoed EU recognition of Venezuelan opposition leader Guaido
4 Feb, 2019
Rome has effectively derailed an EU statement meant to recognize
Juan Guaido as Venezuela's interim leader if President Nicolas Maduro fails to set up snap
elections, a Five Star Movement source confirmed to RT. Italy announced the veto at an informal
meeting of EU foreign ministers that started on January 31 in Romania, the source said. The
statement, which was supposed to be delivered by EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini
recognized Guaido as interim president if snap elections were not held.
EU states' recognition of Guaido is 'direct interference' in Venezuela's affairs –
Kremlin
Moscow slammed EU states for trying to legitimize "an attempt to usurp power" in
Venezuela after a number of key European countries recognized opposition figure Juan Guaido as
interim president. " Imposing some decisions or trying to legitimize an attempt to usurp
power, in our view, is both direct and indirect interference in the internal affairs of
Venezuela," Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the media
on Monday, while commenting on the recognition of Guaido.
The freezing of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England is a signal to all countries out of
step with US interests to withdraw their money, according to economist and co-founder of
Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff. He told RT America that Britain and its central
bank have shown themselves to be "under the thumb of the United States."
"That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that
they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it's not the safe
place as it once was," he said.
This was true in 2015 for Syria. Now this is true for Venezuela... So one can expect iether chemical attack opposition from Madura
government or "Snipergate" in EuroMaydan style. Or may some some more sophisticated, more nasty "false flag" operation in British style
like Skripal poisoning.
It will be interesting if Madura manage to survive despite the pressute...
Notable quotes:
"... Sorry but you're wrong. The funding a training of rebel forces by the west has done exactly what is was intended to do, mainly destabilise an entire region, sell billions in extra arms, introduce extra anti-terrorism laws in the west, create more fear and panic, then destabilise Europe through the mass-migration. This was the plan and it worked! ..."
"... To the great disappointment of those of us who voted for Obama, the first time out of hope for change, and the second time out of fear for someone even worse, he is a weak and chameleonic leader whose policies are determined by the strongest willed person in the room. Recall that he was also "talked into" bombing Libya! ..."
"... This isn't Bay of Pigs; its a bloated military trying to figure out what to do with its extra cash. Financially, it doesn't matter if the program is a failure. The cost is minuscule for the budget they have. ..."
"... Bush reached the Oval Office not because he was bright, for indeed he was not, he reached the Oval Office because he was dumb enough not to realise he was clearly easily manipulated, believed in neoliberalism and was rich and rich backers and a rich Dad. ..."
"... In Iran, we have a saying which says; take off a Mullah's turban and you will find the words "Made in England" stamped on his head. ..."
"... ISIS/ISIL is a creation of the US in an attempt to remove Assad. The long-term goal being to isolate Iran before going in there for the natural resources. ..."
"... The White House statement specifically refers to the "Syrian opposition". That's the term we use to describe anti-government forces. This recruitment and training programme has gone awry because the people originally recruited would have been anti-Assad. Now the Obama administration has tried to change the same people to fighting to ISIS instead. No wonder there's only "four to five" left. This is one big fustercluck! ..."
"... The CIA has probably been the greatest destabalising force in the world since the second world war and seem like more a subsidiary of the weapons trade than a government department. ..."
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and expect
better results the next time?
As pretty much everyone who was paying attention predicted, the $500m program to train and arm "moderate"
Syrian rebels is an unmitigated, Bay of Pigs-style disaster, with the head of US central command
admitting to Congress this week that the year-old
program now only has "four or five" rebels fighting inside Syria, with dozens
more killed or captured.
Even more bizarre, the White House is
claiming little to do with it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to distance Obama from the program, claiming that
it was actually the president's "critics" who "were wrong." The
New York Times reported, "In effect, Mr Obama is arguing that he reluctantly went along with those who said it was the way to
combat the Islamic State, but that he never wanted to do it and has now has been vindicated in his original judgment."
This bizarre "I was peer pressured into sending more weapons into the Middle East" argument by the president is possibly the most
blatant example of blame shifting in recent memory, since he had every opportunity to speak out against it, or veto the bill. Instead,
this is what
Obama said at the time: "I am pleased that Congress...have now voted to support a key element of our strategy: our plan to train
and equip the opposition in Syria."
But besides the fact that he clearly did support the policy at the time, it's ridiculous for another reason: years before Congress
approved the $500m program to arm the Syrian rebels, the CIA had been running its own separate Syrian rebel-arming program since
at least 2012. It was
reported prominently by the New York Times
at the time and approved by the president.
In fact, just before Congress voted, Senator Tom Udall
told Secretary of State
John Kerry, who was testifying in front of the foreign relations committee, "Everybody's well aware there's been a covert operation,
operating in the region to train forces, moderate forces, to go into Syria and to be out there, that we've been doing this the last
two years." In true Orwellian fashion, Kerry responded
at the time: "I
hate to do this. But I can't confirm or deny whatever that's been written about and I can't really go into any kind of possible program."
Also conveniently ignored by Congress and those advocating for arming the rebels was a
classified
study the CIA did at the time showing that arming rebel factions against sitting governments almost always ends in disaster or
tragedy.
You'd think whether or not the current weapons-running program was effective – or whether any similar program ever was – would
have been a key factor in the debate. But alas, the CIA program is never mentioned, not by politicians, and not by journalists. It's
just been conveniently forgotten.
It is true that perhaps the best advocate for why we never should've armed the Syrian rebels to begin with came from President
Obama himself. He told the
New Yorker in early 2014 that "you have an opposition that is disorganized, ill-equipped, ill-trained and is self-divided. All
of that is on top of some of the sectarian divisions." Critically,
he cited that same above-mentioned
classified study:
Very early in this process, I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency
in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn't come up with much.
He didn't mention the CIA's already-active weapons-running program. Why he didn't stick to his guns since he supposedly was weary
of getting the US military involved in yet another quagmire
it could not get out of is beyond anyone's comprehension. Instead, he supported Congress's measure to create yet another program
that sent even more weapons to the war-torn region.
Per usual, Republicans are taking the entirely wrong lessons from this disaster, arguing that if only there was more force then
everything would've worked out. Marco Rubio exclaimed
during the GOP presidential debate on Wednesday that if we armed the rebels earlier – like he allegedly wanted, before
voting against arming them when he had the chance – then the program would've worked out. Like seemingly everyone else in this
debate, Rubio has decided to ignore the actual facts.
Sadly, instead of a debate about whether we should continue sending weapons to the Middle East at all, we'll probably hear arguments
that we should double down in Syria in the coming days and get US troops more cemented into a war we can call our own (that still
to this day has not been authorized by Congress). There are already reports that there are
US special operations forces on the ground in Syria
now, assisting Kurdish forces who are also fighting Isis.
When the vicious and tragic cycle will end is anyone's guess. But all signs point to: not anytime soon.
Oliver2014 19 Sep 2015 21:27
" Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and
expect better results the next time? "
Because the US doesn't understand the culture of the people it meddles with.
The US goes in with a messianic belief in the righteousness of its objective. This objective is framed in naive terms to convince
itself and the people that it's motives are benevolent - such as "we must fight communism" or "we will bring democracy to Iraq"
or "Saddam Hussein is an evil man who uses chemical weapons on his own people and hence must be ousted" or "Assad is an evil man
who is fighting a civil war with his own people".
As a superpower it feels compelled to interfere in conflicts lest it be seen as impotent. When it does not interfere, as in
WW2, things do indeed get out of control. So it's damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.
The CIA did not understand Afghan history of fighting off invaders when it was arming the Mujaheddin and that after the Soviets
were defeated it would perceive the Americans as invaders and not as liberators who were there to bring them democracy and teach
them that growing poppy was bad. (Like alcohol in the 1930s, a national addiction problem cannot be solved on the supply side
- as the CIA and DEA learnt in South America.)
Bush Sr. was right when he left Saddam alone after bloodying his nose for invading Kuwait because he understood that Saddam
was playing a vital Tito-esque role in keeping his country and the neighborhood in check. He had no WMDs but wanted his adversaries
in the region to believe otherwise. If Saddam were alive today we wouldn't have an Iraq problem, an ISIS problem, an Iran problem
and a Syria problem.
Smedley Butler 19 Sep 2015 21:12
"Why he didn't stick to his guns since he supposedly was weary of getting the US military involved in yet another quagmire
it could not get out of is beyond anyone's comprehension."
Maybe it's because he hasn't stuck to his guns on anything during the entire time he's been President. He always takes the
path of least resistance, the easy way out, and a "conservative-lite" position that tries to satisfy everyone and actually satisfies
no one.
What an utter disappointment.
DavidEG 19 Sep 2015 20:01
The Machiavellian machinations of the empire become less relevant with every passing day. It's Europeans now who are eating
sweet fruits of "mission accomplished". And they may rebel, and kick out last remnants of their "unity", and sacred NATO alliance
alongside.
PamelaKatz AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 18:33
Obama said the US would take 10,000 Syrian refugees. When I heard this, I thought surely a zero must be missing from this figure.
And what no one has publicly mentioned is the immigration process for these few will require at least a year of investigative
background checks.
PamelaKatz jvillain 19 Sep 2015 18:15
The largest manufacturers and global distributors of weaponry are the US, the UK, France, Russia and China, in that order.......
also known as the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council. One should read the UN Charter, which states the purpose and
parameters for forming this international organization. The word 'irony' comes to mind.
ID108738 19 Sep 2015 17:36
Saddam Hussein was a friend while he gassed the Iranians, then he invaded Kuwait; as long as Bin Laden fought the Russians,
he was tolerated and funded; now there's Syria. The only thing needed to take the strategy to new levels of idiocy was a compliant
nincompoop as prime minister in Britain. Will they ever learn?
Toi Jon 19 Sep 2015 17:27
The US understands how to create a market for their military hardware industry but has never understood how their interference
in the Middle East creates mass human misery.
Samantha Stevens 19 Sep 2015 17:09
Quite simply the US is breaking international law by doing this. Every time they do it the world ends up with another shit
storm. If they cannot behave responsibly they should be removed from the security council of the UN. Same goes for the Russians
and any other power abusing their position.
Syria may not have been the epitome of humanity before being destabilised but it is certainly worse now. The same is true of Iraq.
In fact have the US successfully overturned any government they deem un-American (LOL) without it leading to a civil war?
Andy Freeman 19 Sep 2015 17:06
Sorry but you're wrong. The funding a training of rebel forces by the west has done exactly what is was intended to do,
mainly destabilise an entire region, sell billions in extra arms, introduce extra anti-terrorism laws in the west, create more
fear and panic, then destabilise Europe through the mass-migration. This was the plan and it worked!
People will call for a solution, the solution will be tighter integration in Europe, the abolition of national governments,
the removal of cash to stop payments to "terrorists", more draconian spying laws, less from and eventually compulsory registration
and ID for all Europeans.
Meanwhile, we'll have a few more false flag attacks supposedly caused by the refugees and more fear in the news. Open your
eyes
Laurie Calhoun 19 Sep 2015 16:49
"Why he didn't stick to his guns..." Not the most felicitous metaphor in this case, but here is the answer to your question:
To the great disappointment of those of us who voted for Obama, the first time out of hope for change, and the second time
out of fear for someone even worse, he is a weak and chameleonic leader whose policies are determined by the strongest willed
person in the room. Recall that he was also "talked into" bombing Libya!
Sad but true. For more details on how this works, read Daniel Klaidman's book Kill or Capture: The war on terror and the soul
of the Obama presidency.
after the libya disaster the US should have abandoned plans for regim change in syria.
and the US missed a golden opportunity to recitfy what had already become a syria disaster by allowing turkey and the ludicrous
SNC to so thoroughly undermine the Geneva talks.
The U.S and U.K's commitment should be to those in Iraq. Secure, rebuild and invest in helping that Nation come with the
best solution to a, rid itself of ISIS, b, be able to stay that way, c have a government that is inclusive to the needs of
the Sunni's, Shia's and Kurds
Just as I thought that you can not surpass yourself in writing stupid comments, and you are immediately reassured me.
Thus, the US and the UK spent nearly ten years in Iraq and failed to make any of this what you write, but but the whole mess practically
they themselves have created. And now you're saying that if the US and UK troops returned again to Iraq they will be able to fix
everything that they had previously screwed and to create an "inclusive society" of Iraq. So, if the US and UK troops set foot
again on the soil of Iraq, it will be the strongest reason for Iraqi Sunnis to reject the inclusion in the Iraqi society. Iraqi
officials themselves are aware of this very well, and for that reason they are the first to oppose such an intervention.
BAGHDAD - Iraq's prime minister strongly rejected the idea of the U.S. or other nations sending ground forces to his country
to help fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, saying Wednesday that foreign troops are "out of the question."...
Al-Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker who faces the enormous task of trying to hold Iraq together as a vast array of forces threaten
to rip it apart, welcomed the emerging international effort, but stressed that he sees no need for other nations to send troops
to help fight ISIS.
"Not only is it not necessary," he said, "We don't want them. We won't allow them. Full stop."
"The only contribution the American forces or the international coalition is going to help us with is from the sky," al-Abadi
said. "We are not giving any blank check to the international coalition to hit any target in Iraq."
He said that the Iraqi military will choose and approve targets, and that the U.S. will not take action without consulting
with Baghdad first. Failure to do so, he warned, risks causing civilian casualties like in Pakistan and Yemen, where the U.S.
has conducted drone strikes for years.
Well, Well, whether i notice here distrust even of Iraqi Shiites toward the US Air Force. On the other hand, they want to strengthen
friendship with neighboring governments in Syria and Iran: ;
Al-Abadi,
however, said that Iraq doesn't have the luxury of testy relations with Damascus, and instead pushed for some sort of coordination.
"We cannot afford to fight our neighbor, even if we disagree on many things," al-Abadi said. "We don't want to enter into
problems with them. For us sovereignty of Syria is very important." The two countries, both of which are allies of Iran, appear
to already be coordinating on some level, and Iraq's national security adviser met Tuesday with Assad in the Syrian capital,
where the two agreed to strengthen cooperation in fighting "terrorism," according to Syria's state news agency.
The U.S. hopes to pull together a broad coalition to help defeat the extremist group, but has ruled out cooperating with
neighboring Iran or Syria, both of which also view ISIS as a threat. Both countries were excluded from a conference this week
in Paris that brought the U.S., France and other allies together to discuss how to address the militant threat.
Al-Abadi said that excluding Damascus and Tehran was counterproductive.
So, it is obvious that the Iraqi government is not against inclusion, but they're for such inclusion, which will exclude the US
and UK of interfering in their internal affairs. I think it is a good step towards reconciliation with their Sunni brothers because
they also seem to support such a thing. And if they managed to do it, maybe Ukrainians will also draw some lesson from it and
be able to reconcile with their brothers Russians.
Ieuan ytrewq 19 Sep 2015 14:04
ytrewq said: "USSR and China supplied a lot of support and material to N. Vietnam."
Very true.
However the Viet Minh were formed and initially supplied by OSS (later called the CIA) forces from the US. In fact Ho Chi Min
had a naive hope that the US would support him in his struggle against foreign occupation of the country after the war (French
colonialism) and made several appeals to President Truman for help (all of which were ignored).
Instead of which, the US supported the French, so Ho asked around and got help from the Russians and Chinese. The rest we know.
marginline AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 13:54
The UK and France [...], they destroyed Libya.
The causality of which led to an Islamic terror attack on June 26th, 2015 ten kilometers north of the city of Sousse, Tunisia,
where thirty-eight people; thirty of whom were British - were murdered.
sashasmirnoff JoJo McJoJo 19 Sep 2015 13:40
The US is always wrong, and always responsible for every bad thing that happens on Earth.
They are always wrong, and are indeed responsible for almost every geopolitical disaster, usually a result of overthrowing
governments and installing their own tyrant, or else leaving a vacuum that Islamists fill.
Zaarth 19 Sep 2015 13:34
This $500m program cost less than 0.1% of the US annual defense budget. When you're dealing with sums of money as obscenely
large as the US spends on its military, its inevitable that huge quantities will be wasted because you've passed the point where
there's worthwhile things to spend it on. This isn't Bay of Pigs; its a bloated military trying to figure out what to do with
its extra cash. Financially, it doesn't matter if the program is a failure. The cost is minuscule for the budget they have.
In recent years the right has been very concerned with balancing the national budget and shrinking debt. They're willing to
cut spending for social programs and research, but god forbid you take money away from the military. It just wouldn't be patriotic.
marginline -> GeneralMittens 19 Sep 2015 13:14
Great summary GeneralMittens. You have expressed in layman's terms the facts eluded to by journalist Mehdi Hasan when he quantified
the depth of the strategic disaster the Iraq war actually was – or, as the Conservative minister Kenneth Clarke put it back in
a 2013 BBC radio discussion...
the most disastrous foreign policy decision of my lifetime [ ] worse than Suez
The invasion and occupation of Iraq undermined the moral standing of the western powers; empowered Iran and its proxies; heightened
the threat from al-Qaeda at home and abroad; and sent a clear signal to 'rogue' regimes that the best (the only?) means of deterring
a preemptive, US-led attack was to acquire weapons of mass destruction. [ ] Iraq has been destroyed and hundreds of thousands
of innocent people have lost their lives, as the direct result of an unnecessary, unprovoked war that, according to the former
chief justice Lord Bingham, was a...
serious violation of international law
This leads me to the conclusion and I apologies for flogging this dead horse yet again BUT...why are Bush and Bliar not being
detained at The Hague?
Ieuan 19 Sep 2015 12:45
" I actually asked the CIA to analyze examples of America financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually
worked out well."
Well, they (the OSS at the time) supplied arms and training to the Viet Minh. When they were fighting the Japanese. Which worked
out well, when they were only fighting the Japanese.
But when they used their expertise (and the arms they had left over) to carry on fighting the French, and later the Americans
themselves, it worked out very well for the Viet Minh, not so well for the French and Americans.
GangZhouEsq 19 Sep 2015 12:27
The first President Bush, who decided not to topple President Saddam Hussein after routing his military forces out of Kuwait,
and instead to leave him in power for the sake of the Middle East stability is, in retrospect, probably the wisest foreign policy
decision ever made by the 41st President, thanks not only to his own personal judgment but also to his foreign policy aides' wisdom.
Though it is now too late for the son to learn from his father, it is still not too late for the present administration to learn
a thing or two from the former senior President Bush.
twoheadednightingale 19 Sep 2015 12:25
Nice to read an article coming at the war from this angle, seems like people are finally starting to question the effectiveness
US foreign policy - ie bombing for peace. However the article is fairly nieve in places - like who actually believes the president
of the US has control over all its intelligence agencies? JFK told the world in april '61, not long after the CIA had set him
up over the bay of pigs and months before being assassinated exactly that. So enough of the 'blame the president' bullshit, it
doesn't get to the root of the problem
GangZhouEsq 19 Sep 2015 12:17
The last major armament, including heavy guns, tanks and armored personnel carriers, as sent by the United States to the now
notoriously incompetent Iraqi military forces is now reportedly in the hands of ISIS after these US-trained Iraqi military personnel
simply abandoned their posts of defense and deserted for their own dear lives, thus leaving the centuries-old, formerly safe haven
of Mosul for Iraqi Christians to the mercy of ISIS. See "60 Minutes", Sunday, September 13, 2015, "Iraq's Christians", at
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/iraqs-christians-the-shooting-at-chardon-high-king-of-crossfit.
pfox33 19 Sep 2015 12:04
The fact that Putin is coming to Assad's aid is a game-changer that the US was unprepared for. For one thing, it's highlighted
how inconsequential US efforts to bolster "moderate" rebels and degrade ISIS capabilities have been.
From the time it was reported that the Russians were upgrading an airbase at Latakia to the time that it was reported that
they had dispatched helicopters and jets and that the Syrians had started to take the fight to ISIS in Raqqah and Palmyra was
only a matter of weeks. The CIA's program, after a year, had produced five soldiers at a cost of 500 million.
Previously the US had free reign over Syrian skies as did Israel who would bomb what they deemed to be convoys of military
supplies for Hezbollah. Things aren't so free and easy now with the Russians in town. And both the Americans and Israelis now
realize they have to check in with them before them they make sorties over northern Syria.
It's fairly obvious, to me anyway, that the US and Israel's only endgame was the fall of Assad and that ISIS had their tacit
approval. Assad's good relations with Iran and Hezbollah meant he was a marked man. Putin, as is his wont, has complicated their
plans and the results are yet to be seen.
BradfordChild TastySalmon 19 Sep 2015 11:58
"Iraq, Libya, Syria. What do/did these countries have in common? Unfriendly leaders who want nothing to do with the US."
Actually, Gaddafi had shown an interest in engaging with the West-- happened under Bush, but was never really followed up on.
Still, it was headed in a more positive direction until Obama rather arbitrarily decided that Gaddafi had to go.
The real net effect of US intervention in the Middle East has been to destabilize Europe.
Tony Page bravo7490 19 Sep 2015 11:32
I would agree but, as a former intelligence professional, I'd remind you that there's always a story behind the story. Not
that it's a "good" story! But more must be going on there...
ByThePeople 19 Sep 2015 11:12
"Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before and
expect better results the next time?"
It depends on how you define better. To think that these ops take place with the intent to solve an issue is naive, they don't.
You state yourself that the CIA freely admits it's never worked.
The reason the United States funds and arms groups in the Middle East is that 9 times out of 10, these same groups are then
later labeled 'terrorists' and a new US war campaign is justified.
It's not about solving problems - unless the problem being solved is: How do we create more opportunities to half-ass justify
engaging in another war effort so the US coffers can be continuously raped.
Iraq is the perfect example of succeeding in achieving this goal. Years before the Iraq war ever began, US war planners knew
that a power vacuum, attracting the likes of Al-Qaeda and or ISIS would subsequently result. Thus, providing a for a second war,
derived from the first seemingly pointless invasion. The Iraq plan worked fabulously as not only did the newly created enemy materialize,
they also became a much more formidable enemy once they conveniently came into possession of all the military equipment we let
behind.
Point is, they wouldn't continue implementing all these operations if the goal wasn't being achieved.
I will add too - McCain and Co. clamored so hard to arm the al-Assad opposition McCain might as well have claimed that if we
did not, then America would be blown up in its entirety in 48 hours the same as all the other fear mongering done in a effort
to continue the war efforts. Who knows, maybe he did, I try not to listen to him anymore - he needs to be put out to pasture.
TastySalmon 19 Sep 2015 11:10
Iraq, Libya, Syria. What do/did these countries have in common? Unfriendly leaders who want nothing to do with the US.
To suggest that funding radicals to overthrow these governments is a "whoops" or something that will never work is completely
wrong. The plan has worked exactly as planned: destabilize the region by promoting dissent, covertly arm and fund "rebels" through
back-channels (Saudi, UAE, Turkey, etc.), create a new boogeyman (ISIS), and reforge alliances with enemies (AQ) who will then
turn on us again in the future.
The goal is to flatten Syria, and it seems to be working out very well. When you consider what the ultimate outcome will be,
it starts becoming fairly clear: push Russia into a corner militarily and economically, open new LNG pipelines, appease allied
caliphates, and put billions of dollars into the pockets of the wealthiest people.
Their policy is chaotic and consists of repeating the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results, which
is, as we all know, the definition of madness.
I think the problem may well be the bloated MIC in the US. Too many strategic game plans for to many, often contradictory ends.
There are no doubt there are intelligence analysts in the US MIC who have a genuine interest in collecting actual information
and present it honestly. The numerous leaks show us this.
The problem is, this often good information, once it's been spun through political/economic vested interests, think tanks,
cold war jar head imperialists and so forth, it (foreign policy) ends up complete fubar.
To the point where, as you rightly say imo, their foreign policy looks like nothing more than "malicious wily manipulators,
deliberately buggering up the world to make money out of the consequences."
david wright 19 Sep 2015 10:49
For a full century now, from the Balfour Declaration and the secret Sykes-Picot arrangement, the currently-top 'Western' dog
(UK; then US) has been meddling and futzing around in the Middle East, notionally in someone's 'National Interest.'
Oil, access to Empire (route to India etc) and 'national prestige' have been the usual excuses. The result has been unmitigated
disaster.
Ignoring everything up to Gulf 1 (1991) we've a quarter century century of determined scoring of own-goals. This shows no sign
of changing. This is a helter-skelter race to destruction, greatly presently aided and abetted by Asad. So far, it's lasted two-and-a-half
times longer than the combined lengths of both World Wars.
One conclusion is that by any rational assessment, we don't deserve to 'win', whatever that would constitute, any more than
did one side or the other in the 16th -17th century's European religious wars. An equally rational assessment is that we neither
have, nor can. The final rational conclusion, that we find a way to disengage - remarkably simply, by stopping doing all the things
we have been - is a fence refused by the relevant horses - again, mainly US and (as very eager, jr partner indeed) UK.All apart
from the monstrous outcomes for the people in the region, we destabilize our own security then make things worse by tightening
our own internal 'security' at the expense of civil liberties. This gives away, at no gain, the slow and scrabbling accretion
of these, over centuries. And Cameron and co remain sufficiently delusional to want to keep on bombing, but whatever toys they
have, whatever seems a good idea on the day. How can we win? the war isn't on 'terror', but ion logic. Ours. |Neither the US nor
UK governments have ever shown much interest in the fates of the millions of people their casual actions have ended, or made hell.
Of the multiple ironies (shall I count the ways?) attending all this is that Saddam, while a murderous thug, and no friend to
his own people, was doing for us, for free, what we've been unable to do for ourselves - keep Iraq al-Quaida free. AS to his murderous
propensities, clearly far fewer of his people (alone) would have been killed had we not intervened, than we have directly or indirectly
killed. Much of this stems from the fact that during the same recent period (1991 on) there has been no effective counter to Western
power and inclination, which has simply projectile-vomited its baneful influence. Ironic too that the reason we armed and greatly
helped create al-Quaida was to destabilize Russia by getting it bogged down in Afghanistan. Thus the only real fear which limited
US action, was removed when that policy was successful. We removed the brakes as the train was beginning to accelerate down the
incline. Wheeee!
teaandchocolate smifee 19 Sep 2015 10:47
Bush reached the Oval Office not because he was bright, for indeed he was not, he reached the Oval Office because he was
dumb enough not to realise he was clearly easily manipulated, believed in neoliberalism and was rich and rich backers and a rich
Dad.
As to "not having a serious mark against his name", forgive me if I laugh hysterically while crying with pain.
The least said about the moron Reagan and his jolly pal Thatcher the better. Oh how well their unregulated market shenanigans
have turned out.
Crackpots the lot of them.
LethShibbo AndyMcCarthy 19 Sep 2015 10:35
Doing nothing and minding your own business is kinda the same thing.
And the civil war in Syria isn't purely a result of what happened in neighbouring Iraq.
What you're essentially saying is 'America, you've started this fire. Now let it burn.'
pansapians DrDrug 19 Sep 2015 10:28
Well of course ISIS were miffed that the U.S. was paying lip service to not arming ISIS. If you think there was ever any serious
difference between the FSA and ISIS then I hear that the Queen having to sell Buckingham palace due to losses gambling on corgi
races and I can get you a good deal for a cash sale
IrateHarry Havingalavrov 19 Sep 2015 10:17
Make Iraq work first..
ROFLMFAO...
Iraq has been so thoroughly screwed over by the UKUSA clusterfuck, there is no chance of it working ever again.
AndyMcCarthy LethShibbo 19 Sep 2015 10:12
Sorry, the US doesn't HAVE to make a choice, do nothing or bomb. All the US needs to do is mind it's own business.
We wouldn't be having this refugee crises if the US hadn't invaded Iraq.
Tomasgolfer 19 Sep 2015 10:10
For a little insight, see "The Red Line and the Rat Line", by Seymour M. Hersh. Published in the
London Review of Books
The US (and the UK and France for that matter) has been openly arming and training the "rebels". The US had a vote in congress
to openly do just that last year. Covertly, they've been doing it since 2012, again this has been well reported and admitted to.
The problem for the US is their so called "moderates" don't exist. They either switch allegiance once back in Syria or end
up captured or killed just as quickly.
Your user name seems somewhat of a parody.
ArtofLies richardoxford 19 Sep 2015 10:00
How does that compute ?
it computes once one answers this slightly naive question from the article
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East, make things even more chaotic than they were before
and expect better results the next time?
surely at some point people have to realise that chaos is the result the US is looking for.
IrateHarry 19 Sep 2015 09:56
Why does the US continually send deadly weapons to the Middle East
Because that is the backbone business of America - making and selling deadly weapons. Deadlier the better, and no matter whom
they are supplied to. If foreign governments don't buy, does not matter, just supply it to "rebels", and they will be paid for
by the tax payers across the west (not just the American ones, NATO has been set up as the mechanism to tap into European tax
payers as well).
The rest of the bullshit like democracy, freedom, etc are marketeers' crap.
No wonder there's only "four to five" left. This is one big fustercluck!
There was a report in the NY Times last year by a reporter who was kidnapped by the FSA (his mission was to find them and find
out who they were) and handed straight over to Al-Nusra. Twice. He was imprisoned and tortured by them.
In his revealing report, talking of the couple of days he spent back with the "FSA", his release having been negotiated by
the west, he asked the "FSA" fighters about the training they received from the US in Jordan. The reporter put it to the fighters
that the training was to fight AN/IS. Their response? "We lied to the Americans about that".
The WSJ also recently reported that the CIA mission to arm/train "moderates/FSA" had gone totally tits up. Most of them reported
as defecting to one of the number of more extreme groups, some having been captured or killed.
It's been clear for about 2 years now that these so called "moderates" only exist in the deluded minds of western policy makers.
JacobHowarth MushyP8 19 Sep 2015 09:51
ISIS do not control that large a number of people. Many Kurds are fleeing because of IS, that's true, but for the most part
the civil war is a horror show from both sides and Syrians are - rightly - getting the hell out of there.
Or are all of those 'taking advantage of the opportunity to move to Europeans [sic] countries' proposing to do so by going
to Lebanon and Jordan?
The suspiciously unasked questions as to motives of all parties at Benghazi, by all twelve (12) members of the Select Committee,
suggests collaboration to question Hillary Clinton to make her appear responsible only for bungling security and rescue, for the
sole purpose of diverting attention from Hillary Clinton's role in the CIA and the CIA operative Ambassador Stevens' arming of
terrorists. The obvious question to ask would have gone to motives: "What activities were Stevens and the CIA engaged in, when
they were attacked at Benghazi?"
GreenRevolution 19 Sep 2015 09:10
The use of religion(Islam specifically) in politics was first employed by the British in the Middle East in the early parts
of the 20th century. In Iran, we have a saying which says; take off a Mullah's turban and you will find the words "Made in
England" stamped on his head.
nnedjo 19 Sep 2015 09:09
Even more bizarre, the White House is claiming little to do with it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to distance
Obama from the program, claiming that it was actually the president's "critics" who "were wrong."
Yes, it seems that it has become a tradition of US presidents to boast with the fact that "they do not interfere much in their
own job".
For example, in the last campaign for the GOP candidate for the US president, Jeb Bush defended his brother George for a false
pretext for war in Iraq in the form of non-existent WMD, claiming that everyone else would bring the same decision on the start
of the war, if the same false intelligence would be presented to him.
Thus, the president of the United States can not be held accountable for its decisions if the CIA deliver him false intelligence,
or deliberately conceal the true intelligence. On the other hand, since no one has heard of any person from the CIA which is held
responsible for the wrong war in Iraq, it turns out that nobody is responsible for this war.
And, to us, mere mortals, it remains only to conclude that the most powerful war machine in the world moves "without a driver",
or maybe it is "driven by some automatic pilot".
So, how tragic it is, and yet we can not help laughing. :-)
mikiencolor 19 Sep 2015 09:06
It was obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense from the beginning that the "moderate" rebel training programme would be an
utter disaster. But if the lessons you are taking is that nothing should be done at all, I'd submit you are taking the wrong lessons
from the debacle. Doing nothing at all would have condemned tens of thousands more to genocide. Doing something saved thousands
of Yezidi and saved Rojava.
Wherever the Kurds have been supported they have proved capable, trustworthy and have created functional civil societies. To
broadly and undiscerningly dismiss "sending weapons to the Middle East" is disingenuous. Something must be done, and things can
be done to help rather than harm if there is a sensible policy maker, and doing nothing certainly can be more immoral and evil
than doing something - as I thought we'd learned from Nazi Germany.
The reality is one that neither right wing nor left wing hardliners are willing to face: the Sunni Arab jihadis are the source
of most of the problems and the reason is entirely to do with their noxious genocidal and imperialistic ideology and culture.
They are a source of instability, enmity and fear, and not just in the Middle East either. And they are being supported and bankrolled
by Western allies in the Gulf. The world is a big place with many peoples and ways of thought, and many disagreements - but we
nearly all of us seem able to find a way to coexist in this new globalised technological human civilisation. The jihadis are a
barbarian throwback, a movement of violent primitivists. There is no place for jihadism in the future and they are a threat to
everyone in the world.
ID0020237 -> teaandchocolate 19 Sep 2015 09:01
Insanity I believe, not madness, but what's the difference. The CIA may get it right, but after political interference and
manipulation, they change their conclusions. We've seen this with the Iraq debacle and elsewhere. Just as political interference
in military operations, Viet Nam for example, causes imminent failure, so it is with intelligence ignored.
GeneralMittens 19 Sep 2015 09:01
So basically America invades and bombs the shit out of everywhere and the europeans have to clean up the mess and deal with
the resulting refugee crisis?
At some point America should be held accountable for their actions in the middle east. Whether thats taking their fair share
of refugees from syria or footing the bill for this clusterfuck.
At the very least, other countries should stop enabling their warmongering.
LittleGhost 19 Sep 2015 08:58
US foreign policy in the ME proves Einstein's maxim
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
GreenRevolution 19 Sep 2015 08:57
It has been 14 years since 911 and Bush's so called "war on terror". Not only barbaric wahabi terror has not been defeated
it has grown its barbarism to magnitudes unimaginable previously. Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been allowed to arm them
to the teeth by the very states who claim to be waging "war on terror". Since Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are close allies
of the west and one is a member of NATO, it follows that the west is in fact arming the wahabi terrorists who have turned the
Middle East into a wasteland murdering and looting at will. Millions are now refugees, countries laid to waste and yet Mr Kerry
and Hammond talk as if they have done such magnificent jobs and Russian involvement would only "complicate" things.
teaandchocolate 19 Sep 2015 08:56
I don't think they have the brightest people working in the CIA and the military in the USA. They are probably bullies, relics
from the Cold War, jar-heads, devout 6000-year-old-world Christians, neocons and fruitcakes. Their policy is chaotic and consists
of repeating the same thing over and over again hoping to get different results, which is, as we all know, the definition of madness.
smifee 19 Sep 2015 08:52
To be honest, I don't see any confusion.
Obama comes across as a (comparatively) humane person, and I am sure that his personal preference would be for there to be
no violence in the middle east. As President of the USA, however, he has to set aside his personal preferences and act in the
wider interests of his country.
The US set out to realign the political make up of the middle east. No doubt, they want to make sure Islam will never again
be able attack US interests.
Successive Administrations have controlled the funding and arming of various factions within the Middle East to ensure that
Muslims kill each other and weaken social structures. The US will fill the ensuing political vacuum and economic waste-land with
local leaders loyal to 'freedom, democracy and the American Way'. The next Administration will continue to stoke up the violence,
and the one after, and the one after that until the US is satisfied it has achieved its objective.
It seems almost all of us have to contain our personal views if we want to succeed in our place of work. Even the P of the
USA.
GoldMoney -> celloswiss 19 Sep 2015 08:51
True, in a democracy, moderates don't need bombs and assault weapons.
Consider this - how would you feel if foreign governments were arming and funding the IRA in Northern Ireland?
What if foreign governments recognised the IRA as a legitimate opposition to the Belfast government and gave them bombs to
take over the country?
MichaelGuess 19 Sep 2015 08:46
Who are the real terrorists, the group that bombs indiscriminately, the group that sells arms to both sides, the group that's
lies to its "coalition" partners, the group that spies on all its friends, the group that is happy to be starting wars everywhere
and then blame other parties for their lack of support.
These are the real terrorists.
MushyP8 19 Sep 2015 08:46
ISIS/ISIL is a creation of the US in an attempt to remove Assad. The long-term goal being to isolate Iran before going
in there for the natural resources.
Assad won 89% of the vote in a 74% turnout, how many world leaders have 65% of the population supporting them, hence why Assad
hasn't fallen. Naturally the US refuted this alongside its lapdogs, the EU and the UK, as it disproves all the propaganda they've
been feeding the west. RT news did an interview with Assad which was very insightful.
Putin seems to be the only one who's got his head screwed on in this situation, which is of course leading to hissy fits by
the US because he's proving a stumbling block. More nations need to get behind Putin and Assad, although of course the US wont.
GoldMoney DrDrug 19 Sep 2015 07:52
Moderates do, when the simple act of protesting against the mutilation of children detained by the states secret police
are met with a volley of snipers.
No such evidence has been bought to the UN security council. Even the chemical attack that the media claimed from day one was
Assad's forces doing turned out to be IS rebels actions. The two human rights groups operating in Syria are western funded NGO's
- hardly a neutral point of view given the US's long stated aim of removing Assad (even before 2011).
geedeesee 19 Sep 2015 07:25
This $500 million from June 2014 was for recruiting Syrian rebels seeking to oust President Bashar al-Assad - not to fight
iSIS.
The White House said at the time:
"This funding request would build on the administration's longstanding efforts to empower the moderate Syrian opposition,
both civilian and armed, and will enable the Department of Defense to increase our support to vetted elements of the armed
opposition."
The White House statement specifically refers to the "Syrian opposition". That's the term we use to describe anti-government
forces. This recruitment and training programme has gone awry because the people originally recruited would have been anti-Assad.
Now the Obama administration has tried to change the same people to fighting to ISIS instead. No wonder there's only "four to
five" left. This is one big fustercluck!
kingcreosote 19 Sep 2015 07:12
The CIA has probably been the greatest destabalising force in the world since the second world war and seem like more a
subsidiary of the weapons trade than a government department.
@Bill Instead of looking at this issue using a microscope, reading history about how
Empires fall lends wisdom and insight. Arrighi's book, (I believe) is called "The Long
Twentieth Century." He details how empires and huge trading giants rise and fall.
He details the rise of Italy's banking system during the Middle Ages as well as Spain's
Empire, the Dutch trading hegemonies and most enlightening how the British Empire rose and
fell.
We are seeing tell-tale symptoms of a US that's in trouble with a slow erosion of the US
$$ hegemony. The financial growth of China has begun degrading the US market with hi-tech and
other products. Thusly, you see Tim Cook of Apple apoplectic over China's Huwaii (sp?)
flooding the European market with less expensive computers, cellulars, notebooks, etc.
We see the practical nature of Exxon Mobile that views the short geographic distance
between the US (its military) to Venezuela's oil and mineral-rich soil. An easy pick, rather
than becoming further embroiled in the Middle East.
Targeting Venezuela suggests a geopolitical shift away from the Middle East (and Israel)
to countries that are less expensive to plunder yet with vast resources to be stolen. A
telling sign in the slow deteriorating US Hegemony.
Anglo Zionists have been working this scheme to take Venezuela for many years --
The Chávez Plan to Steal Venezuela's Presidential Election: What Obama Should
Do
September 19, 2012
Ray Walser
Former Senior Policy Analyst
Ray is the former Senior Policy Analyst
Abstract: On October 7, 2012, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez will stand for re-election
against opposition candidate Henrique Capriles. The Venezuelan presidential election
matters to the U.S.: Venezuela is a major oil supplier to the U.S.; Chávez's
anti-American worldview has led to alliances with Iran, Syria, and Cuba; and Chávez
offers safe havens to FARC and Hezbollah. Chávez also works to weaken democratic
governance throughout the Americas. Under the Obama Administration, the U.S. has offered no
comprehensive strategy or policy for dealing with the man who continuously demonstrates his
ruthlessness in implementing an anti-American, socialist, Bolivarian Revolution across the
Americas, but there is still time for the U.S. to support democratic freedoms before the
election. [becuz zio-bolshies luvs them their "democratic freedoms," and if that doesn't
work, bump off Chavez. Cancer. Poor guy. Prolly caught it from Arafat.].
https://www.heritage.org/americas/report/the-chavez-plan-steal-venezuelas-presidential-election-what-obama-should-do
Small counties in LA are essentially defenseless against 300 pound gorilla -- the USA. And neoliberalism still can take
revenge, as it recently did in Argentina and Brazil.
Notable quotes:
"... Agence France-Press ..."
"... As monarchs were forced to realize, they served a function to society, in order to be served by it. It was a two way street. Now finance is having a, "Let them eat cake." moment, as they become more predator than organ of society. It is the heart telling the hands and feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. As well as telling the head it better go along, or else. ..."
"... As this regime change process unfolds, it is difficult not to feel deep sadness for Venezuelans. Chavez failed to lift the poor into a permanent middle class, Maduro failed to protect the accomplishments that had been achieved, and now, the state seems unprepared to cope with what was inevitable. ..."
"... It's a tragic moment in Latin American history. Though Maduro has some backing from the four most Resistant of all Resistors, Russian, China, Cuba and Iran, the nation's geography is too distant for them to flex their full restraint. The lesson of Nicaragua in the 80's should have been learned. ..."
"... "The wealthy few have declared war on the many poor. They should not be allowed to lose their bet and maintain their stakes. The world doesn't work that way. " Unfortunately Bevin I think that is exactly how the world works. The real never ending war is between the haves and have nots. ..."
"... I'm a bit more pessimistic. Washington seems united on getting rid of Maduro and installing a friendly regime. While Maduro can hang in there for awhile, the economic sanctions and covert operations (including sabotage, killings, bribery etc.) will cause severe problems for the government. Maduro is not Assad and lacks friendly neighbors--in fact, Latin America has pretty much returned to direct Washington rule. ..."
"... Like with the attacks on Syria, Trump becomes presidential when he attacks the likes of Iran and Venezuela. ..."
"... I wonder how many of the pro-USA protesters, willing to take the US coin to protest on the street, are also willing to take the US coin to die on the street. ..."
"... A U.S. military incursion could have significant unintended consequences, "including a deterioration of our relationship with currently supportive countries in the region." -- Gustavo Arnavat, a former Obama administration official and a senior advisor to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ..."
"... I don't justify intervention anywhere (except in D.C. where the Tyranny and Hegemon resides). I point to missed opportunities, failures, corruption and not taking advice from your closest friends (China, Russia, Cuba). If they had brought in the Chinese petroleum experts and Russian economic experts, much of the disaster would have been avoided. When you have a huge enemy and you are weak and relatively small, you need help. Maduro waited until too late. ..."
"... Self-evidently all the governments which have followed the US are not only agreeing but are acting in compliance with a pre-set US timetable. They all waited for the US to give the signal, then like synchronized swimmers performed according to choreography pre-determined by the US. ..."
"... Maduro to his navy --- "Today the future of Venezuela is decided: if it becomes one more star of the United States flag or if it will continue to fly its eight tricolor stars," said the president. ..."
"... As usual, the AZ regime change machine is mightily backed up by billions of puff dollars (printed out of thin air), but among the puppets, the tie-eating Saakashvili is Optimus Prime compared with the Murky Guy's leadership. ..."
"... Ha, how 40 tons of the "barbaric relic" which disappeared from Ukraine after a similar "revolution" got to be mentioned also in relation to Venezuela. ..."
"... Well, the headline of this post is kinda problematic now ("U.S. Coup Attempt In Venezuela Lacks International Support"). I think it was problematic from the start, b, because 1) several countries had already joined with USA; 2) Europe's falling in line was never really in doubt. Note: The EU poodles have toed the line on Russia, Iran*, and now Venezuela. ..."
"... Instead, Guaido called for further "pressure", which is at this point limited to a further tightening of the economic isolation of the country. Canada seems to have anticipated this position by announcing a $53 million aid package which will be focussed on assisting current and future "refugees" headed to Columbia and Brazil. ..."
"... Hugo Chavez has repatriated most of Venezeulan gold whilst still alive. This is how the CIA and the Venezuelan Central Bank could invent the story that a part of this gold is being sent to Russia by Maduro. The 41 ton of Venezuelan gold still remain in Bank of England was a necessary collateral for buying naphtha (for pre-processing oil for export) and subsidised food for the Venezurlan population. ..."
U.S. Coup Attempt In Venezuela Lacks International SupportZanon , Feb 3, 2019
12:44:33 PM |
link
There is little doubt where 'western' media stand with regards to the U.S. led
coup-attempt (vid) in Venezuela. But their view does not reflect the overwhelming
international recognition the Venezuelan government under President Nicolás Maduro
continues to have.
The Rothschild family's house organ, the Economist , changed the background of
its Twitter account to a picture of the Random Dude™, Juan Guaidó, who the U.S.
regime changers
created to run the country.
The supposedly neutral news agencies are no better than the arch-neoliberal
Economist . The Reuters ' Latin America office also changed its header
picture to Random Dude. It reverted that after being called out.
Agence France-Press stated at 11:10 utc yesterday that "tens of thousands" would
join a rally.
Cont. reading: U.S. Coup Attempt In Venezuela Lacks International Support "Lacks
international support" unfortunately doesnt matter much. Regardless, even if a majority of
nations backed the coup doesnt mean its right. Also remember Ukraine coup, majority didnt
support that - but it didnt matter.
Empire is testing the waters of support by its DazzleSpeak about the spinning plate of
Venezuela. I hope it is learning that much of the world no longer wants to live in a world
motivated by fear.
Threat of US global default on Reserve Currency is coming soon because empire is out of
ammunition to maintain and extend supremacy. It will be interesting to see what the fall back
status will be and how maintained....the last thralls of Might-Makes-Right.....one would
hope.
The Bank of England should be holding closer to 30 tonnes of Venezuela's gold, not the 14
tonnes they're holding from Marudo under U.S. orders. The Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) just
closed a huge gold swap with someone and now should have a total of maybe 2500 gold bars in
the BoE dungeons with their original serial numbers and weights. Custodians of gold like this
can't melt it down and make new bars - that's why state depositors stamp all of them with
serial numbers and precise weights. They want to be sure THEIR gold is there and THEIR gold
is returned.
The news isn't the U.S. demand that it won't be returned. The real news is that neither
the BCV nor the BoE will show anyone the original or current gold bar inventory list.
Usually, nobody cares. But with the U.S. and BoE chosing a new, rightful owner (Random Guy),
they should at the very least provide the inventory list.
It shouldn't be a secret - there is absolutely no security risk. The gold belongs to the
(starving) people of Venezuela. Or at least it did. What are the BoE and Rothschild BCV
hiding? Did they melt it down or sell it to someone else?
I think the deeper conceptual issues need to be considered, that would place the political
and social situations going on around the world, from France, to Venezuela, in perspective.
That money is the social contract enabling mass societies to function, not a commodity to
be mined from society and stored as government debt, to finance militaries, as well as making
the entire economy subservient to the gambling addictions of Wall St.
Humanity went through s similar evolutionary process, when monarchies, as private,
hereditary governments, reached the limits of their effectiveness. As the executive and
regulatory function, government is the central nervous system of society, while finance is
its circulation mechanism, basically the head and heart.
As monarchs were forced to realize, they served a function to society, in order to be
served by it. It was a two way street. Now finance is having a, "Let them eat cake." moment,
as they become more predator than organ of society. It is the heart telling the hands and
feet they don't need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get. As well as
telling the head it better go along, or else.
As it is now, all this government debt is setting the world up for predatory
lending/disaster capitalism, when the governments cannot run up more debt and those holding
the old debt start trading it for more public properties, from mineral rights to roads.
After watching the whole central meeting in Bolívar Avenue, Caracas,live
broadcasted by RTSpanish, which extended for several hours, in which were projected images of
other regions´meetings as well, and after watching live too, broadcasted by the same
channel, the pro-Random Dude meeting only in that rich neighborhood, which extended for about
half an hour and dispersed itslef very fast, I would calculate the numbers at both meetings
just in reverse as you have done.
I would say 200-300 thousands for Maduro´s supporters ( and i would say I get it
short..) and 20-30 thousands ( in the best case )for the Random Dude....
I notice that that photo you are basing your estimations on corresponds only to the front
of the square where the tribune for speechers of the pro-Maduro rallie was placed, but other
people has showed the whole Bolívar Avenue ( the longest and largest in Caracas ) full
of pro-Maduro people as long as the sight can catch ....See for example, Abby Martin´s
capture:
Blooming Barricade , Feb 3, 2019 1:31:10 PM |
link
The European Parliament voted on the Venezuela issue a few days ago, and naturally, the
centre-right wing European People's Party (Merkel, Tusk), the Liberals (Macron), and most of
the so-called Socialists voted to recognise the US coup minion as president. The European
United Left and most of the Greens along with the far-right wing voted against this, which
just shows you that the so-called liberal democrats are bought and paid for employees of
US/NATO multinational imperialism.
With the "Electoral College" method determining winners not in current favor, perhaps the US
MSM may wish to state that by world population, Maduro beats Guaidó by a factor of at
least 4 to 1 in public opinion.
thanks b... it is interesting @5 sashas comments if they can be verified..
@3paveway - it is much as @4 john merryman says, with the additional note that the boe are
essentially stealing venezualas gold in a might makes right type of undemocratic and
undignified way.. i always thought the federal reserve was an extension of the boe... both of
them are privately run, with some minor face saving image that they belong to the respective
gov'ts.. they don't... they are controlled and run by the 1% that are quite okay starving off
venezuala, or going to the next step - military intervention.. they are one sick group of
predators only focused on the god of mammon.. we have to figure out a way to get rid of them
before they completely destroy the planet..
Other than Russia../China/Iran....practically the entire world is under uncle sham's
thumb now.
The outlook is very depressing indeed.
Don't worry, China has an enormous amount of leverage:
"
Boeing predicts China will need more than 7,200 new aircraft worth over $1 trillion in
the 20 years through 2036."
Trump slaps some tariffs, here and there, on a few billion dollars of China's products.
But this is trivial compared to what China can do to Boeing, if Trump really annoys Xi. And
Boeing is just of many US companies that the Chinese can retaliate against.
Juan Guaido enjoys legislative immunity to arrest but Venezuela's Supreme Court barred him
from leaving the country, and the court also approved a request that all of Guaido's
financial assets be frozen.
As we have seen he's rather harmless, without any real power in the country, and so the
longer he's free and obviously ineffective the better. Plus it enables Maduro to appear
reasonable and unafraid of the young man.
The 800 lb elephant in the room here is the reality of class struggle in Caracas. Those
backing the imperialists seem to constitute the majority of Venezuela's small elite of rich
people. Despite their complaints, continual sabotage of the economy and outright treason in
their collaboration with its enemies they have been allowed to hold onto their ill gotten,
and inherited, wealth.
How long is that likely to last?
On the other side of the divide are millions of poor people, their livelihoods and their
democracy at risk. Many of them are having difficulty finding food to feed their families-
the deliberate result of sanctions supported by the wealthy, and the light skinned. Many are
finding it impossible to find the medicines their sick people desperately need.
If Venezuela is to maintain its independence it will do so because the poor refuse to give
it up. Their rewards and the means of rebuilding the economy lie in the wealth of the
rich.
The wealthy few have declared war on the many poor. They should not be allowed to lose
their bet and maintain their stakes. The world doesn't work that way.
As this regime change process unfolds, it is difficult not to feel deep sadness for
Venezuelans.
Chavez failed to lift the poor into a permanent middle class, Maduro failed to protect the
accomplishments that had been achieved, and now, the state seems unprepared to cope with what
was inevitable.
To assume that the Hegemon would keep its hands off the nation, return the gold, leave the
assets in the US untouched, not use the neighboring countries to mount an insurgency, seems
naive at best. The lessons learned from Cuba's 60 year fight for dignity taught the regime nothing.
Watching the tear down of Brazil's socialist leadership (two of them) taught the regime
nothing. Stupidity atop corruption atop a blind belief in an ideology that destroyed the wealth of
the nation (or at least crippled it) has led to the moment of truth. Will enough poor people
and some middle class defend the sovereignty of the nation? And will the military leadership and rank and file remain patriots?
It's a tragic moment in Latin American history. Though Maduro has some backing from the four most Resistant of all Resistors, Russian,
China, Cuba and Iran, the nation's geography is too distant for them to flex their full
restraint. The lesson of Nicaragua in the 80's should have been learned.
Now he faces invasion of convoys of aid on three borders. He must control his borders. The
odds are very long he can.
I am not sure if anyone has posted about this, my apologies if it is redundant. I was
wondering where our Random Dude was now located and what he was up to:
"For the role of President they chose a "poster boy" who doesn't represent anything and
who shouted out something at a meeting with 30,000-40,000 protesters, and after this he
immediately ran to the Embassy of Colombia, where he still sits to this day.
This boy refuses
any contact with the authorities. But since you are being informed by "different media
agencies" and certain authors on "Aftershock" – he communicated with army Generals on
twitter however the Generals are unaware of this but he communicated "in secret". Or he
appointed a certain official from among the immigrants in the US also on twitter "
Your analysis of the economic problems is too harsh directed at Chavez/Marduro and their
"ideology". Nafeez Ahmed's piece in Medium, which has been shared on this forum, does a much
better job describing the perfect storm of coinciding events which have combined to sink
Venezuela's economy. Short of two or three of these events, and the situation could be bad
but not as terrible as it is.
The programs instituted by the government over the past twenty
years remain extremely popular, as was acknowledged yesterday when Guaido made a vague
promise of government "subsidies" to those in need.
The aid caravans will be entirely symbolic, and offer little to nothing to a population of
over 30 million people. The sponsors of the aid caravans are also the same people who have
placed harsh economic sanctions on the country, a fact which will not be lost.
"The wealthy few have declared war on the many poor. They should not be allowed to lose their
bet and maintain their stakes. The world doesn't work that way. " Unfortunately Bevin I think that is exactly how the world works. The real never ending war
is between the haves and have nots.
Why don't the coup mongers name Hillary president of Venezuela. The biggest sore loser of all
time is currently "resting", as they say of out-of-work actors, and desperately wants to be
president of SOMETHING. Not being a native Venezuelan should be no drawback in her case. She
would simply trade her old Cubs/Yankees hat for a big V and probably discover some Venezuelan
great-great-grandmother hanging on her family tree. The coup mongers' current choice, the
sock puppet "Guido" Guadio, is about as legit as a Confederate nickel. And coups are by
definition NOT legit. So haul out those unused "I'm With Her" signs and ship them down there.
In the meantime, she can head for the Venezuelan Embassy and hole up there (a la Julian
Assange?) while awaiting the moment to parachute into Caracas. Mission Accomplished!
Let's remember that the US position is that Guaido is only the interim president of a
transitional government, which suggests that (1) the US has its real choice under cover in
Miami somewhere, possibly a Rubio house guest, or (more likely) (2) the US really doesn't
have a clue about what to do next. Hey, humanitarian aid, that's a good regime change
strategy (??).
Meanwhile they can demonstrate all they want, it never accomplishes anything (MLK
attendance the exception).
I'm a bit more pessimistic. Washington seems united on getting rid of Maduro and installing a
friendly regime. While Maduro can hang in there for awhile, the economic sanctions and covert
operations (including sabotage, killings, bribery etc.) will cause severe problems for the
government. Maduro is not Assad and lacks friendly neighbors--in fact, Latin America has
pretty much returned to direct Washington rule.
I suspect the Trump admin does have a plan for Venezuela and will push it through no
matter what anybody thinks. Trump's opinion of the bobbling heads or trained seal lot that
call themselves heads of state is about the same as he showed the Iraqi's when visiting the
US base in Iraq.
Trumps plans will only be stopped by the likes of Russia, China, Iran ect. No matter how
outlandish the claims of the lies of Bolton or himself are, MSM seems to take it up with all
seriousness.
Like with the attacks on Syria, Trump becomes presidential when he attacks the likes of Iran
and Venezuela.
USAMO . Same Old. First, engineer sanctions through compliant UN, then squeeeeze the
population until they understand the changing electoral requirements and their howl reaches
pitch
-in the meantime picking a favourite pony to front the 'peoples will' regime change op;
training him/her up in latest provocateur methodology and introducing them to their master
racketeers back in DC
then,
with malevolent mercenary gangs helping stirring street protest
offer emergency security assistance and food AID thru sanctified UN allowing your chosen
one to ride the front of the food wagon, saving the day.
Democracy, Yankee Doodle Dandy style.
Scotch Bingeington , Feb 3, 2019 7:16:18 PM |
link
jayc | 33
"The aid caravans will be entirely symbolic, and offer little to nothing to a population
of over 30 million people." Yes, and also those of the 30 million who support the Anti-Maduro movement are probably
not in need of basic foodstuffs, but will want their iPhone and their Netflix account.
I think this is the guy they would like to install--Leopoldo Lopez
Yes, good chance of that, if they could work it somehow (unlikely) and it would tie into
Guaido's reference to Feb 12.
wiki--During the crisis in Bolivarian Venezuela, Leopoldo Lopez called for protests in
February 2014. López, a leading figure in the opposition to the government, began to
lead protests. . .He was arrested on 18 February 2014 and charged with arson and conspiracy;
murder and terrorism charges were dropped. Human rights groups expressed concern that the
charges were politically motivated. . .Leopoldo López, a leading figure in the
opposition to the government, began to lead protests.. .
In September 2015, he was found
guilty of public incitement to violence through supposed subliminal messages, being involved
with criminal association, and was sentenced to 13 years and 9 months in prison. He was later
transferred to house arrest on 8 July 2017 after being imprisoned for over three years.
re: Trump's state of the union speech Tuesday night.
on VZ-- from WaPo Trump will
"... actively intervene in the political upheaval in Venezuela, aides said in previewing the
speech Friday."
here
I wonder how many of the pro-USA protesters, willing to take the US coin to protest on the
street, are also willing to take the US coin to die on the street.
I suspect these protests
are paper thin at best, the poor are unlikely to support the rich without financial
inducement, but the one thing the coup organisers have is plenty of money. If these are
indeed poor people protesting (who knows) then it would be interesting to know what quantity
of cash was offered to the participants. Maybe 30 USD for half a day of protesting? Decent
money for the protesters, easily affordable to the USA.
A countries domestic issues need to be kept separate from US attacks on a country. US is
not attacking Venezuela for humanitarian reasons. This is aside from the fact as Jen pointed
out, that Venezuela's economy has been under attack from the US for some time.
The expectations that a country that is under US attack should have a leader that is far
above average in terms of ability to withstand the economic attack of a superpower with
perfect, far seeing decisions is unreasonable. People lie that are rare and only occurred
occasionally in history.
What does matter is that the Maduro government is doing the best it can for its people,
rather than working in the interests of a foreign power to the detriment of its people.
As for a better leader - one that will resist the US and provide a better economy for
Venezuela while under US sustained attack....
Bart Hansen@20 - Oil production costs are complex, secret and mostly lies. With that caveat,
Venezuela was thought to have about $10 - $15 production costs on average. That includes
their light and medium crude, and zero investment in repair of their distribution networks.
Well over half of Venezuela's reserves are Orinco extra-heavy, sour crude. Essentially tar
sands, but buried 500m - 1500m deep that require solvent or steam extraction. So (guess)
maybe $30-range/bbl for production. Those tar sand oils produced are so heavy that they need
pre-processing and dilution before they can be refined or exported. Naphtha or other refined
products are used as dilutent and cost maybe $55/bbl today, but were around $75/bbl last
October.
U.S. refineries were pretty much the only ones paying cash for their 500,000 b/d of
Venezuelan crude. Trump's sanctions not only ban those imports, but also ban the 120,000 b/d
of naphtha and other dilutents we sold them.
Interesting to note that part of Trump's beat-down of the Venezuela little people is a ban
on the 120,000 b/d of dilutent last week. That will completely shut down their exports. They
could find another source of naphtha, but that source will be looking for $6.6 million a day
hard cash for it.
Maduro needs to sell Venezuela's gold to buy naphtha to export oil for ANY revenue. The
$2.5 billion the Bank of England can't find and won't deliver is meant to hasten the food
riots and CIA-orchestrated coup. But Mercy Corps is setting up concentration camps on the
Colombian border and we're delivering food aid, so the U.S. is really the hero, here. God
bless America! Obey, or die.
expectations that a country that is under US attack should have a leader that is far above
average
I appreciate your discussion of leaders, but let's not forget the people. It has been the
goal of the US to demonize leaders and go after them. Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, Bashar
Assad, Osama Binh Laden etc. etc.
But it's the people not the leaders that have formed the most resistance. It took the US Army
little time to track down big bad Saddam Hussein, but Baghdad wasn't pacified (controlled)
for four years, and people elsewhere in Iraq fought the "liberators" like the very devil.
Apply that to Venezuela. Heck, you and me, we'd all respond the same way given a foreign
invasion, right?
There are some warnings about avoiding dialogue and pushing a Venezuelan military option. The
opposition's courting of military officers carries potential dangers. If it leads to a schism
in the armed forces, that could be disastrous for the country, said Michael Shifter,
president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy anti-VZ forum.
A U.S. military incursion could have significant unintended consequences, "including a
deterioration of our relationship with currently supportive countries in the region." --
Gustavo Arnavat, a former Obama administration official and a senior advisor to the Center
for Strategic and International Studies.
Juan Guaido hopes that the United States will not use force in Venezuela, instead limiting
pressure on Maduro's government to diplomatic and economic measures, the Colombian newspaper
Tiempo reported Monday. . . here
If corruption or mismanaging a country's economy were justification for foreign
intervention to remove a leader, Israelis should be lobbying Washington DC to remove Binyamin
Netanyahu as their prime minister since he and his wife Sara have been charged by police for
fraud and bribery.
Indeed, depending on how it defines corruption, whether vaguely or narrowly, and on what
criteria, the US would have its work cut out for decades hunting down "corrupt"
politicians.
If I'm not mistaken the front page of the Washington Post, today showed a picture of a large pro-government protest, and
claimed that it was an opposition protest.
This will be something to watch and may be part of the answer to why now, why did the US go
after Venezula at this point. I think it is because Venezuela was historically captive to US
refineries, but no longer. India is capable of refining Venezuela oil and has a significant demand for it. If India
decides to do ignore the sanctions, I wonder if the US will impound tankers going to
India?
And tankers to China as China is building a refinery just for Venezula oil, it isn't
scheduled to come online until 2020, but perhaps China will push to make it happen asap?
to Paveway lV and Bart Hansen. It doesn't really matter the breakeven point for Venezuelan
oil if they can't access the money. I just read (15 minutes ago) on Seeking Alpha, that Trump
et al is blocking payments for Venezuelan oil. He is trying to force the payments into a
blocked account such that Maduro's gov cannot access it but Guido can. There are still
refineries in the US which need Venezuelan heavy crude to blend w/ the frack=crap. Volero is
stated to have two tankers which it cannot unload due to the payments issue. This is an
unusual way to provide "humanitarian aid."
Sorry I cannot give a link - the Seeking Alpha site seems to be done.
Re the Indian refineries, I believe they are currently buying Iranian oil so they may
resist sanctions against Venezuela. However, according to Paeway lV, without naphtha
Venezuela cannot pump oil. Maybe a swap with someone?
The aid caravans will be entirely symbolic, and offer little to nothing to a population
of over 30 million people.
I agree, Guaido's aid caravans will probably be something like 5% humanitarian and 95% for
smuggling arms into Venezuela.
However, China has the largest container ships in the world. Just one visit from a vessel
like the COSCO Shipping Universe could deliver more than 20,000 truckloads of stuff, which
would probably dwarf anything Guano is envisaging (even if his "humanitarian" caravans were
totally legitimate).
Would the Empire let it happen? I have little doubt that Bolton's sick enough to want to
stop a true humanitarian effort, but as I'm not as sick as Bolton is (at least I hope so), I
have a hard time imagining what excuse he could use to stop it -- especially after Guano's
caravans.
I don't justify intervention anywhere (except in D.C. where the Tyranny and Hegemon
resides). I point to missed opportunities, failures, corruption and not taking advice from your
closest friends (China, Russia, Cuba).
If they had brought in the Chinese petroleum experts and Russian economic experts, much of
the disaster would have been avoided. When you have a huge enemy and you are weak and relatively small, you need help. Maduro waited until too late.
There were many object lessons for better practices and better preparation for the
inevitable. Now, we can hope and pray that the Venezuelan people demonstrate their own will to resist
against intervention and regime change. Because if it comes, their wealth will be stolen
completely.
A sane government which really wanted the best for the people would've launched a crash
program to break free of the oil dependency which not only guarantees one remains at best a
US-colonized power, but which requires the physical destruction of one's own land and the
basis of one's future life.
I'm not just saying this about Venezuela, although destroying the Orinoco rain forest
necessary for our very lives in order to extract heavy oil is perhaps the most extreme
example on Earth of the self-destroying paradigm.
But any country afflicted with the oil curse ought to treat the deposits like very hot
radioactive waste and enforce at all costs a Chernobyl-type non-go zone. This also would
conserve critical ecological zones like the Amazon. If enough places did that simultaneously
it would prevent the US from "opening them up" by force and accelerate the collapse of the
empire and its globalization system. But any place which doesn't do this automatically
becomes a de facto colony and a target for aggression intended to turn them into a de jure
colony, as we see in this case.
From the evidence it seems that in the end a thing like Bolivarianism isn't offering any
real alternative to the US paradigm. Both equally want to burn every last fossil BTU's worth,
pump every last CO2 molecule, hack down and burn every last acre of forest. Both are on the
same mass murder-suicide ride.
Do the Venezulean people really want a better life than this? The American people sure
seem to want the worst.
It's my understanding that when Chavez was President, he did bring Chinese and Vietnamese
agriculture experts to Venezuela to study the country's potential for growing food staples.
The Vietnamese experts identified areas which originally had been considered by their former
wealthy owners as unproductive but which turned out to be ideal for growing rice.
Although Venezuela imports huge quantities of wheat from Russia, it's doubtful that
Russians can give much agricultural advice as Venezuela lies in the tropics and Russia does
not.
On the other hand, the way the Venezuelan government appears to be dealing with Juan Guaido, allowing him to shout in the wilderness and making himself look a fool, seems similar
to the way Russia treats Alexei Navalny, letting him make an idiot of himself, and might
suggest that Venezuela is taking advice from or copying Russia in this respect. Russia also
sold two S300 anti-missile defence systems to Venezuela though I do not know how often the
Venezuelans maintain them.
Thanks for the correction. I tend to skim history. I think the point still stands, that
politicians can't be left in control of the money supply. The impulse to abuse it is strong
The Maduro demo seems to have taken place on the Avenue Bolivar which is about 20 meters wide
and about 1.25 km long. The demo crowd appears to be packed so there could be 50 to 80
thousand people there. I haven't been able to locate the Guiado demo but it is possibly in
the upscale Las Mercedas district not far from the US Embassy. The photos of the Guiado are
generally close in and from a low angle which tends to exagerate the numbers. Even so, it
does not appear to be as densely packed / extensive as the Maduro event.
More disgraceful news:
Major EU nations recognize Guaido as Venezuela's acting president
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands and Germany's
coordinated move came after the expiry of an eight-day deadline set last weekend for Maduro
to call a new election. Austria and Lithuania also lined up behind the self-declared
interim president Guaido.
Self-evidently all the governments which have followed the US are not only agreeing but
are acting in compliance with a pre-set US timetable. They all waited for the US to give the
signal, then like synchronized swimmers performed according to choreography pre-determined by
the US.
These European governments already were illegitimate in that they had surrendered
sovereignty to the EU. Now they're doubly illegitimate in that they've openly exposed
themselves as nothing but extensions of US policy. These are puppet governments.
So I'm not just joking when I say that any truly radical parties in Europe, "right" or
"left", should declare these fake national governments illegitimate and set up their own
shadow presidencies/premierships and governments.
Maduro to his navy --- "Today the future of Venezuela is decided: if it becomes one more star of the United
States flag or if it will continue to fly its eight tricolor stars," said the president.
"You saw the failed coup plotters yesterday ... with the gringo flag behind them. They no
longer hide, they no longer hide their identity. They no longer hide what they have inside,
they want to deliver our country, in pieces, to the gringo empire and the local
oligarchies."
Haiti is one of the countries that recognize Guano as president of Venezuela---
"Haiti's economy is reeling as unemployment & hunger is on the rise due to corruption
& mismanagement under #PHTK ruling party. On Jan. 31 many businesses shuttered in many
parts of the country as exchange rate of HT Gourd to US Dollar reached highest inflation
yet.
Exactly. They are US puppets.
Most obviously what we see is the most obvious top puppets in the EU; nordic, western europe
and the baltics. The meddling is apparent, still the corrupt EU/US governments keep on with their
aggression:
Russ: "So I'm not just joking when I say that any truly radical parties in Europe, "right" or
"left", should declare these fake national governments illegitimate and set up their own
shadow presidencies/premierships and governments."
This, so totally this, so absolutely and definitively this.
All these governments should be discarded and sued for breaching international norms.
Spain is specially ridiculous. Isn't Sanchez supposed to be "left", and not liberal scum?
I would not call the puppet character a Random Guy because he was clearly groomed for the
role over a number of years. Yet, he is obviously not a very capable guy because his claim to
fame is, for example, stringing a metal wire across the road to kill random motorbike riders
in a poor part of Caracas. Selection of such an untalented Murky Guy is another sign of the
desperation of the AngloZionist empire to grab resources after the Syrian debacle.
As usual,
the AZ regime change machine is mightily backed up by billions of puff dollars (printed out
of thin air), but among the puppets, the tie-eating Saakashvili is Optimus Prime compared
with the Murky Guy's leadership.
Ha, how 40 tons of the "barbaric relic" which disappeared from Ukraine after a similar
"revolution" got to be mentioned also in relation to Venezuela. And nobody even remembers
what happened to all the Ghadaffi's gold. You do not really think that hippo's Wooden Puppet
Guido (lol) will ever get to even touch this banksters' secret favorite? It will just
disappear into the Atlantic Ocean on the way to Guido. Just as carpenter Mastro Geppetto
carved his Pinocchio out of block of wood, so did the hippo carve his Guido out of another
block of rotting wood. This is why only the Italians, of all Europeans, could see through the
mischievous acts of the long-nosed Guido and his puppet master.
Yesterday I linked to an AP article
here on Charge d' Affaires James "Jimmy" Story who manages the US embassy in Caracas. In
the article was: "Chief among his interlocutors is Rafael Lacava, governor of the central
state of Carobobo, who presented him with a painting of two joined fists in the colours of
the U.S. and Venezuelan flags that now hangs in the entrance to Story's official residence in
Caracas."
So I looked up Rafael Lacava's twitter here which includes some glimpses of local
life in the small state of Carabobo just west of Caracas. Carabobo State was the site of the
Battle of Carabobo on 24 June 1821, a decisive win in the war of independence from Spain, and
was led by Simón Bolívar. The capital city of this state is Valencia, which is
also the country's main industrial center.
The tweets include some from Nicolas Maduro, including warnings that Trump wants another
Vietnam in Venezuela.
Russia has no choice than to boost the military to stand with Maduro. That may bring violence
including possibly the physical elimination of Guaido. That may trigger the West to intervene
militarily like in Libya without a UNSC approval.
That would rally the Venezualians around Maduro and the army.
As the american ( except the neocons) are against a war at their borders, Trump will have to
find a compromise.
Ultimately the Russians may push for a military takeover once they identified a military
leader.
Trump will have to accept that if he does not want to invade Venezuela
Well, the headline of this post is kinda problematic now ("U.S. Coup Attempt In Venezuela
Lacks International Support"). I think it was problematic from the start, b, because 1) several countries had already
joined with USA; 2) Europe's falling in line was never really in doubt. Note: The EU poodles have toed the line on Russia, Iran*, and now Venezuela.
=
* EU countries pretend to support JCPOA but have dragged their feet. Most commercial
interests will not cross USA and the EU states have done little to discourage that. It has
been announced that EuroSWIFT will be for humanitarian aid only.
It is important to remain as properly informed and nuanced as possible given the difficulties
of access to reliable information in the world of today. I, therefore, contribute this link
in which a Venezuelan sociologist presents a different view of the support Maduro has in the
country : https://therealnews.com/stories/defusing-the-crisis-a-way-forward-for-venezuela.
I have no way of knowing the de facto situation, as most of us. I do, however, have
experience of such turmoil, divisions, rallies and counter-rallies, lies, threats, etc. from
a country, my country, that, sadly, no longer exists. I would say - we should listen to the
people on the ground, always with a critical mind.
The implications of this barbaric assault for our world as whole, for South America and,
of course, for Venezuela, are far reaching. The role of the EU and its largest states in this
barbarism has been consistent and in the service of the US and European ruling class. The EU
has been supporting, promoting and awarding the Venezuelan opposition for a long time. Now it
is recognising the self-proclaimed person who wants to make Venezuela great again. Yet, my
fellow Europeans are more or less silent, more or less indifferent and very badly informed.
Being European is becoming a source of deep shame and we Europeans are starting to make
excuses when we introduce ourselves, just like the better informed Americans have been doing.
But there is a good side to this - all the masks have fallen off now. Everyone can see what
the US and the EU really are.
If not today, tomorrow their barbarism will be recognised as their defining feature. One
would think that change is then inevitable, even if long overdue.
One piece in the article you linked to does not seem to match events. Maduro was elected
president in what international observers said were a fair election. A number of opposition
figures chose, of there own accord not to run in the election.
Your article says the majority of Venezuelans do not want Maduro as president, yet on a few
weeks ago he was elected as president in a fair election.
@3 PavewayIV The Bank of England gold issue is pretty crazy to think about. If the Bank of
England can just give the Gold of a nation to a guy who just declares himself President
without running for office than their is no rule of law regarding the gold stored by BoE from
other countries. Surely any country that has assets held by other major UK, US banks should
be moving towards retrieving their gold after this fiasco. Its very scary to see the highest
parts of the banking sector; use of the Swift system; access to the US dollar and seizure of
assets by the US courts being increasingly used in the aggressions of the empire. If Maduro
is able to weather this storm and Venezuela is returned to some degree of stasis than Maduro
will ask to repatriate all of the gold held in Europe in order to prevent its future seizure
in case a Chavista is elected again next election. The BoE can't possibly just steal it based
on politics can it?
One sure sign of Maduro's popularity in Venezuela is the calls for a new election in which
Maduro is not allowed to participate. This was the same for Assad in Syria. The US know that
in any free and fair election, both Assad and Maduro would at anytime gain the most
votes.
Although Maduro was only recently inaugurated, the elections were May 2018. Maduro received
67.8 percent of the vote with a 46 percent voter turnout the next runners received 20.9 and
10.8 percent of the vote.
The wikipedia page has the vote numbers, but the article mostly goes on about Maduro blocking
opposition. If this were correct, then the US would not be vehemently opposed to Maduro even
running in another election.
What an embarrassment - Canada refused press credentials to Sputnik, RIA Novosti, and Telesur
for its multi-national celebration of "smart power".
"Richard Walker, a spokesman for Canada's foreign ministry, explained to Sputnik's
correspondent that the agency was denied accreditation because it "hasn't been cordial" with
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland in the past."
That is, the Russian media published factually correct information which demonstrated
Freeland as less than candid regarding her family history. Her feelings were hurt, and her
feelings apparently take precedent in her position as Foreign Minister.
The rational and sensible way forward in Venezuela - international mediation - continues
to be rejected by the "interim president", the USA, and Canada's pet Lima Group project.
Instead, Guaido called for further "pressure", which is at this point limited to a further
tightening of the economic isolation of the country. Canada seems to have anticipated this
position by announcing a $53 million aid package which will be focussed on assisting current
and future "refugees" headed to Columbia and Brazil.
Hugo Chavez has repatriated most of Venezeulan gold whilst still alive. This is how the
CIA and the Venezuelan Central Bank could invent the story that a part of this gold is being
sent to Russia by Maduro. The 41 ton of Venezuelan gold still remain in Bank of England was a
necessary collateral for buying naphtha (for pre-processing oil for export) and subsidised
food for the Venezurlan population.
Once Western sanctions are imposed on a country, the only
way anyone would trade with such credit-worthless country, is if hard assets are used as
collateral. Maduro will probably be forced to send a part of the repatriated gold to Shanghai
gold market, forcing the Venezuelan Centeral Bank by military force to dispatch, or the
Venezuelans will go hungry. Having national gold under the Central Bank control is only
second worst to having it under control of the Central Bank's foreign masters in BoE.
I cannot think of one Central Bank in all the countries of the World which is not under
the control of the international (Jewish) banking cartel. If the "revolution" succeeds, the
gold inside Venezuela will disappear just as the gold in BoE. Since 2017 Bolshevik
Revolution, the revolutions are fueled by gold.
@Peter AU 1 | Feb 4, 2019 1:28:47 PM | 85 Maduro was elected president in what international observers said were a fair
election.
The May 20, 2018 election it self was declared "free and fair" here by four independent committees who had
camped outside the polling places but (as in the US and other "democratic" countries) the
shenanigans leading up to the election called the fairness into question.
The elections were boycotted by the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) coalition of opposition
parties and dismissed as illegitimate by the United States, the European Union (EU), and14
Western Hemisphere nations (the Lima Group). So we can say for sure that the boycott was a
tool to later call the elections illegitimate .
[How ironic since the US doesn't even (de facto) allow "opposition parties" (plural) but
restricts the quadrennial show to two look-alike parties, which Ralph Nader referred to as
tweedledum and tweedledee. Obviously neither of the two parties would ever boycott an
election.]
UN rapporteur to Venezuela and expert on international law Alfred de Zayas:
"I believe in democracy. I believe in the ballot box. If you believe in democracy, you can
not boycott an election. The name of the game is that you actually have to put your candidate
out and expect that the people will vote for you or against you," he said, referring to the
Venezuelan opposition's decision to boycott the recent presidential election, which saw
Maduro re-elected. . . here
Secretary of state John Kerry. "During my most recent visit to Kyiv, I was deeply impressed
by all you have accomplished in the more than two years since the Revolution of Dignity."
Secretary of state Pompeo. "The United States stands with the brave people of Venezuela as
they strive for a return to dignity and democracy."
This lot haven't much of an imagination. Just reading thev lines that were printed for the
Ukraine show.
The whole US and vassal States plan was for a swift removal of Maduro, that did not happen
thus time now runs in Maduro's favor. There won't a military invasion of Venezuela, there is
no apetite for that in Latin America at all, nor the vast majority of the Latin Americans
would support any sort of military intervention, even if head of States would promote it,
thus leaving two options for the US:
1) A cruise missile attack to destroy Venezuela Military and Government building, following a
false flag prepared and conducted by CIA's and Guaidó's supporter, such an attempt
would be received worldwide as an aggression, though the false flag would be used as
justification, that would not be tolerated by many many countries and could escalate in a
ugly way, and or
2) An attempt to assassinate Maduro to be blamed on the Venezuelan Military thus leaving
Guaidó out of it to legitimize him for power.
The second is a very likely scenario and may be in progress as of now.
Seriously, Ron Paul or Tulsi Gabbard speaking of democracy is one thing, but having
gangsters and psychopathic thugs like Pompeo, Bolton or Abrams in charge really sends a message
and that message is that we are dealing with a banal case of highway robbery triggered by two
very crude considerations:
First, to re-take control of Venezuela's immense natural
resources. Second, to prove to the world that Uncle Shmuel can still, quote , " pick up some small crappy
little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business ",
unquote.
The obvious problem is that 1) nobody takes the US seriously because 2) the US has not been
capable of defeating any country capable of resistance since many decades already. The various
US special forces, which would typically spearhead any invasion, have an especially appalling
record of abject failures every time they stop posing for cameras and have to engage in real
combat. I assure you that nobody in the Venezuelan military cares about movies like "Rambo" or
"Delta Force" while they carefully studied US FUBARs in Somalia, Grenada, Iran and elsewhere.
You can also bet that the Cubans, who have had many years of experience dealing with the (very
competent) South African special forces in Angola and elsewhere will share their experience
with their Venezuelan colleagues.
"... Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish friends with all the victimization BS. ..."
"... I think Israel is just a capitalist creation, nothing to do with Jews, just a foothold in he middle east for Wall St to have a base to control the oil and gas there, they didn't create Israel until they discovered how much oil was there, and realized how much control over the world it would give them to control it. ..."
"... It is the love of money, the same thing the Bible warned us about. Imperialism/globalism is the latest stage of capitalism, that is what all of this is about, follow the money. ..."
I heartily dislike and find despicable the socialist government of Maduro, just as I did
Hugo Chavez when he was in power. I have some good friends there, one of whom was a student
of mine when I taught in Argentina many years ago, and he and his family resolutely oppose
Maduro. Those socialist leaders in Caracas are tin-pot dictator wannabees who have wrecked
the economy of that once wealthy country; and they have ridden roughshod over the
constitutional rights of the citizens. My hope has been that the people of Venezuela,
perhaps supported by elements in the army, would take action to rid the country of those
tyrants.
Hard to take this guy seriously when he spouts Fox News level propaganda.
Why does everyone make Trump out to be a victim, poor ol Trump, he's being screwed by
all those people he himself appointed, poor ol persecuted Trump. Sounds like our Jewish
friends with all the victimization BS.
Its clear that voting no longer works folks, this is an undemocratic and illegitimate
"government" we have here. We let them get away with killing JFK, RFK, MLK, Vietnam, we let
them get away with 9/11, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria. They've made a mess in Africa. All
the refugees into Europe, all the refugees from Latin America that have already come from CIA
crimes, more will come.
We wouldn't need a wall if Wall St would stop with their BS down there!
You can't just blame Jews, yes there are lots of Jews in Corporate America, bu t not all
of them are, and there are lots of Jews who speak out against this. We were doing this long
before Israel came into existence. You can't just blame everything one one group, I think
Israel/Zionist are responsible for a lot of BS, but you can't exclude CIA, Wall St,
Corporations, Banks, The MIC either. Its not just one group, its all of them. They're all
evil, they're imperialists and they're all capitalists.
I think Israel is just a capitalist creation, nothing to do with Jews, just a foothold
in he middle east for Wall St to have a base to control the oil and gas there, they didn't
create Israel until they discovered how much oil was there, and realized how much control
over the world it would give them to control it.
Those people moving to Israel are being played, just like the "Christian Zionists" here
are, its a cult. Most "Jews" are atheists anyhow, and it seems any ol greedy white guy can
claim to be a Jew. So how do you solve a "Jewish Problem" if anybody can claim to be a Jew? I
think solving the capitalist problem would be a little easier to enforce.
All of the shills can scream about communists, socialists and marxists all they want.
Capitalism is the problem always has been always will be. Its a murderous, immoral,
unsustainable system that encourages greed, it is a system who's driving force is maximizing
profits, and as such the State controlled or aligned with Corporations is the most advanced
form of capitalism because it is the most profitable. They're raping the shit out of us,
taking our money to fund their wars, so they can make more money while paying little to no
taxes at all. Everything, everyone here complains about is caused by CAPITALISM, but nobody
dares say it, they've been programmed since birth to think that way.
We should nationalize our oil and gas, instead of letting foreigners come in and steal it,
again paying little or no taxes on it, then selling the oil they took from our country back
to us. Russia and Venezuela do it, Libya did it, Iraq did it, and they used the money for the
people of the country, they didn't let the capitalists plunder their wealth like the traitors
running our country. We're AT LEAST $21 trillion in the hole now from this wonderful system
of ours, don't you think we should try something else? Duh!
It is the love of money, the same thing the Bible warned us about.
Imperialism/globalism is the latest stage of capitalism, that is what all of this is about,
follow the money. Just muh opinion
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said "we're getting ready to defend our country" as the
U.S. presses him to cede power.
While President Donald Trump signaled he's confident a transition of power to opposition
leader Juan Guaido is under way and said the use of U.S. military force in Venezuela remains
"an option," Maduro went on Spanish television to denounce foreign meddling.
... ... ...
"Nobody in the world can come and disavow our constitution and our institutions and try and
impose ultimatums," Maduro told broadcaster La Sexta in comments aired Sunday, referring to
attempts by Spain and other European Union countries to set a deadline for an early
presidential election. Venezuela's armed forces and civilian militias are preparing for an
invasion, he said...
... ... ...
The allegiances of the military, Venezuela's most powerful institution, may determine the
outcome of the power struggle between Maduro and Guaido...
Three miles away, Maduro ... told thousands of red-clad supporters and soldiers: "Venezuela
doesn't surrender. Venezuela charges forward."
"Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel -- throwing
things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a
madman."
"... Historically those kinds of gangs are among the prime recruiting grounds for coup-supporting thugs. So the US propaganda lies about them also indicates coup planner interest in recruiting them to help Guano's usurpation attempt. ..."
Historically those kinds of gangs are among the prime recruiting grounds for
coup-supporting thugs. So the US propaganda lies about them also indicates coup planner
interest in recruiting them to help Guano's usurpation attempt.
"... This coup has entered bizarro land even for a coup. The lack of current military action suggests to me that Trump is bluffing. And by the way he will lose in 2020 if he opens up a flagrant military intervention in another country. Just Air strikes are possible but without a real ground support, I"m not sure they'll do much and I think these will also cost him 2020. ..."
"... This is almost 'destabilisation by numbers and it is so obvious and in-you-face that it is deeply offensive to any person of conscience. But therein lies the point....psychopaths have no conscience, and the team running this gig probably all got to the top leaving a trail of sh1t and corpses behind them. ..."
"... Anyone remember the notorious Operation Fast and Furious scandal about ten years ago in which the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) ran a sting operation allowing licensed gun dealers to sell firearms to buyers working for Mexican drug cartels, in the belief that tracking the guns would lead to making arrests of their ultimate owners? ..."
"... How much of the gang violence in Venezuela is associated with drugs, the US War on Drugs in other parts of Central and South America, and the United States' own involvement in selling drugs through the CIA and other agencies in those areas, and the gang networks that have benefited and allowed to grow from there into other countries in the Western Hemisphere: that would be interesting to know. ..."
"... An article published at Stalkerzone , gives a glimpse of what could be described as an informational coup, where fake news with fake images are spreaded, mainly through Twitter, and this way they the US and its puppets in Venezuela try to create and "alternative reality" in which crowds who belong to events where supporters of President Maduro take part, are presented as the crowd supporting that unknown personage till some days ago, Guaido, and assertions about alleged meetings of the US appointed new president of Venezuela with members of the FANB are also presented as facts without any graphic evidence and the very FANB denying any contact with the coupist. ..."
"... The crisis in Venezuela is not simply a matter of left wing versus right wing political and economic systems. It is also rooted in competing ideas about racial and cultural worth. The ugly truth is that for some, it is still a matter of civilisation versus barbarism ..."
"... Claiming a commitment to ending foreign wars while threatening Venezuela with a coup is the epitome of Orwellian doublespeak. Is it really necessary to get in to the semantics of "war"? ..."
"... anyone who was really committed to peace wouldn't have psycho war hawks like Bolton and Pompeo around. Even dusting off a Reagan-era war criminal speaks volumes. ..."
"... Also have to give a tip of the hat to SST/W. Patrick Lang for linking his 12 page paper "Bureaucrats Versus Artists " While it's always easy to hate the CIA and U.S. IC, he reminds me that they do or at least did have an crucial politically-neutral information gathering mission for leaders in a democratic republic, and that mission has mostly been usurped by internal forces over the years. ..."
"... The idea that government policies are a well oiled machine, well, not so much. More like psychotic many multiples of the three stooges. Galbraith comments elsewhere about the military hardliners, wanting total victory. He points out that what they are actually advocating is total annihilation. Suicide. ..."
"... "Nothing has changed." You got that wrong. Now if Hillary, the Libya destruction architect, had been elected that would be true. But Trump has been a fresh air to anarchists especially. ..."
"... Half a million children under 5 were killed in Iraq just from the sanctions. The dead, the injured, and the displaced are still dead, injured, and displaced regardless of what weapon was used. ..."
"... Since the West cannot complete its World Order project they must revitalize the war strategy into a long term cold war type. What we see is a circling of wagons and threats against any who are not "with us". I think the speed with which steps are being taken are because of the threat of questions about finance that need to be silenced with more war and fear of any sort. ..."
"... I hope what folks are seeing by the actions of the West is that Rule-Of-Law is really just Rule-Of-Power/Control begat by owning the global tools of finance with a myth cover of Rule-Of-Law just like economics is a myth cover for the elite making all the big investment decisions and those results trickling down so to speak.... ..."
"... The [Trump's] agenda is not to destroy the Empire but to transform it to meet the challenge from Russia and China. Anyone that sees those changes and reads 'disintegration' is only seeing what they want to see. ..."
"... The transformation is to a much darker place and far from anything like democracy. For those of us that don't truck in misguided fantasies, the psyops, economic warfare, and militarism tells us all we need to know. Is it any wonder that the one chosen to lead us down the garden path to dystopia is an egotistical maniac? Trump was SELECTED, not elected, by the likes of: Hillary, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, Clapper, Kissinger, and Schumer. ..."
"... Sorry but does Mr. Maduro have a fetish of repeating every step from the Maidan playbook. You just let foreigners run around Caracas inciting the coup? Remember, the very last step from that playbook, of Russian spetznatz coming to rescue your sorry ass, is not available to you because you live a bit out of the way. These regime-change "journalists" are foreign agents who must be rounded up pronto (for their own protection of course). ..."
"... I remember how Reagan started to wobble a bit towards the end of his term. Part of me suspects that Trump is himself in a bit of a decline and is thus the best vehicle for his cadre of Iagos to subvert his power into their projects. Clinton would have been even better in that respect. ..."
"... More on topic, however, is the general characteristic of South and Central American rebellion. Savage, well-armed, even if only with Machetes, and shades of evil rather than a clear moral choice. If your hobby is pouring billions of dollars into the fire to sow mayhem there is no better place. ..."
"... I would predict that given the well-orchestrated push to recognize Guaido that the plan to overthrow Maduro's government is both inevitable and long-expected. The question is how the aftermath will roll out depending on whether or not the Columbian rebel groups link up with the Venezuelan resistance and the whole region explodes. Just a question. But I would bet that such a scenario is not unforseen by the American puppeteers. ..."
"... 'Old habits die hard', or as Pindar via Herodotus opined, 'Custom rules'. Key elements of the customary process for Empires' regime change efforts are to demonize the targeted leader, economic warfare on the targeted country, make up lurid stories, infiltrate with foreign saboteurs and NED-type internal subversion. John Perkin's 'Economic Hit Man' described the process of gaining leverage via financial means, debt the key. As Perkins noted, then there are the assassination squads, and then finally the US military, which has of late been heavily supplemented with mercenaries and private armies. ..."
"... Grayzone ..."
"... Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists, is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund... ..."
"... Elliott Abrams is notorious for overseeing the U.S. covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. ..."
"... Historically those kinds of gangs are among the prime recruiting grounds for coup-supporting thugs. So the US propaganda lies about them also indicates coup planner interest in recruiting them to help Guano's usurpation attempt. ..."
"... They would make Venezuela the new Pinochet-era Chile. Trump is not alone in supporting Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi terrorists acting, as Lyndon Johnson put it, "Bastards, but they're our bastards." ..."
"... The proof that what the US and its appointed fake president Guaido are looking for is a civil war in Venezuela, which would dismantle the sate and transform it into a failed state, is to e found in Guaido´s beligerent speech in front of the crowd concetrated to hear him in an Eastern rich neighborhood, people who dispersed themselves quite fast, after showing so excited by what Guaido was saying, once his disapassionate and clearly anti-Venezuelan speech finished.. ..."
"... The oil part may be the selling point for Trump but the real deep state motive is to crush socialism. ..."
"... Is Bolton in charge, or is Pence? Pence certainly has been the face of much of the Venezuela policy. Is it because 1) He's modeling the office of the VP after GHW Bush's and Cheney's lead? 2)Trump has been so consumed with the congressional showdown and govt. shutdown, that he's let Pence, Pompeo and Bolton take the lead on Venezuela? 3) Trump is planning to go out in a blaze of glory -- declare Mission Accomplished on his agenda (even if he has to declare a State of Emergency to get his Wall) and resign, leaving Pence in charge (with the power to pardon him if need be). ..."
"... On thing I left out of my original coverage was that during the Q&A the Coup representatives were asked about how they would treat international agreements signed by the Maduro government and they basically said 1) that would not acknowledge any agreement signed by Maduro's government since 2015 and 2) they specifically called out Russia & China saying that if they wanted any of their agreements with Venezuelan honoured they would need to remove their support for Maduro - needless to say I don't think talking smack to the Russians or Chinese will accomplish much for the coup plotters. Nor do I think the Cuban government is threatened in the least by the latest threats to Cuba ..."
"... Finally, in regard to the coup in Venezuela, I just finished watching a documentary about the torture and murder of Victor Jara after the Chilean coup. A man who had been an 18 year Chilean Military conscript and participated in the human rights abuses after the coup said he still suffered from the guilt of his actions. He appeared very sad and old beyond his years. Meanwhile a retired CIA officer expressed no regret for his actions and looked great. It helps to be a psychopath or sociopath. I'm sure that Trump, Bolton, Pompeo, etc. will not suffer if their actions regarding Venezuela result in death and suffering. ..."
"... That's some convoluted reasoning and you are clearly very invested in it and are able to adapt it to anything Trump does. Failure isn't a strategy for success and appointments of rabid neocons isn't a strategy for peace. ..."
To demonize the President of Venzuela, Nicolás Maduro, and Venezuelan government forces, a concerted effort is made to falsely
depict gang violence, and the police reaction to it, as a confrontation between coup supporting protesters and the Maduro government.
Gang violence in the various slums in Caracas and elsewhere has been a problem for decades. The phenomenon is by far not exclusive
to Venezuela. The gangs mostly fight each other over territory, but sometimes collide with the police that tries to keep the violence
level down. This violence has nothing to do with the recently attempted coup or the anti-government protest by the mostly well-off
people who support it.
On January 29 the Washington Post , the CIA's
favored outlet ,
launched the campaign . As
detailed yesterday an incident of gang violence and the police's reaction to it was manipulated into a story of anti-government
protest.
The first three paragraph of the story told of an alleged anti-government protests in a slum in Caracas which included the arson
of a culture center. The next day the police arrested some culprits which led to more violence. Some twenty propaganda filled paragraphs
about the coup attempt follow. Only at the end of the Washington Post piece was revealed what really happened. The arson
incident took place a January 22, a day before the coup attempt. It was a gang attack:
Around midnight, neighbors say, a group of hooded boys threw molotov cocktails at the culture center.
The following day the police arrested some of the arsonists. More rioting followed:
A group set fire to barricades, threw stones and attacked an outpost of the National Guard. ... Neighbors said that criminal gangs
were among the crowd and created havoc by violently confronting the police .
The whole tit for tat incident was typical gang vs. police violence. It likely had nothing to do with the coup attempt.
BigLie Media tries again with the same old lies inside a somewhat new package. BigLie Media can't seem to make up its mind--first
it attacks Trump and his policies, then it supports Trump and his policies. How many others notice do ya think?
Lather, rinse, repeat. In France police are targeting nonviolent gilets jaunes protesters which has resulted in many serious injuries,
amputations, and loss of eyesight from rubber bullets. The plan here is to link black bloc violence with the protests as a way
of discrediting the movement and justifying a violent crackdown. One wonders to what level black bloc is acting as agents provocateurs,
as evidence shows is the case from past events. Check out Vanessa Beeley's reporting from France:
Demonization and propaganda are the normal operating mode of the US regime. If the the Washington Post is the CIA's favored outlet
then the NYT is a close second.
Many Thanks B. The garbage I am reading on MSM and sites that purport to be alternative news like zerohedge indicate war is imminent
and maybe necessary to prevent bloodshed. It's the WMD and babies killed in incubaters thing all over again. Your piece explains
the violence and gives great in depth and insight rather than drum beating.
This coup has entered bizarro land even for a coup. The lack of current military action suggests to me that Trump is bluffing.
And by the way he will lose in 2020 if he opens up a flagrant military intervention in another country. Just Air strikes are possible
but without a real ground support, I"m not sure they'll do much and I think these will also cost him 2020.
The longer this goes on, the worse Guiado looks. If it drags on he loses his legitimacy among the rather illegitimate coup
supporters. The question is what happens next?
Emmanuel Goldstein , Feb 1, 2019 4:49:13 PM |
link
This is almost 'destabilisation by numbers and it is so obvious and in-you-face that it is deeply offensive to any person
of conscience. But therein lies the point....psychopaths have no conscience, and the team running this gig probably all got to
the top leaving a trail of sh1t and corpses behind them.
I wonder what stunts they will pull in the U.K if Corbyn&Co come
to power. They really, really don't like socialism of any sort. Will they refuse to recognise Corbyn an PM and only deal through
the Maybot? That's the logical outcome of this new MO...
"...Gang violence is a huge problem in Venezuela. Like in other countries it is a side-effect of rapid urbanization and the
uncontrolled growth of new city quarters or slums. Other factors are drugs and the availability of weapons. Some six million guns
are believed to be in civilian hands and drug dealing is rampant. Youth unemployment exacerbates the problem ..."
One might want to ask where the weapons originally were made and sold, and where the drugs originally came from and who supplied
them.
Anyone remember the notorious Operation Fast and Furious scandal about ten years ago in which the US Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) ran a sting operation allowing licensed gun dealers to sell firearms to buyers working for Mexican
drug cartels, in the belief that tracking the guns would lead to making arrests of their ultimate owners? Eventually so many
guns ended up south of the US border in Mexico that the ATF couldn't track any of them. Quite a few of those guns ended up killing
US border patrol police. We would be naive to think that some version of Operation Fast and Furious hasn't been repeated elsewhere.
How much of the gang violence in Venezuela is associated with drugs, the US War on Drugs in other parts of Central and
South America, and the United States' own involvement in selling drugs through the CIA and other agencies in those areas, and
the gang networks that have benefited and allowed to grow from there into other countries in the Western Hemisphere: that would
be interesting to know.
Blooming Barricade , Feb 1, 2019 5:13:21 PM |
link
These people are completely embarrassing and just sad. Another weapons-company funded talking point, pushed out via the Foundation
for Defence of Democracies, says that Maduro is a representative of "Russian Imperialism," or even "Cuban(!) Imperialism." Such
nonsense is meant to deflect the obvious imperialism of the USA and has sadly been repeated by so-called anarchists at Libcom.
Even the Wall Street Journal is more honest about the fact that this is obviously a US-led regional coup plan. Parroting Lockheed-Martin
to own the "tankies."
Note that most real world anarchists not backed by disinfo agencies are not insane and don't believe FDD sludge
Blooming Barricade , Feb 1, 2019 5:21:35 PM |
link
The New York Slimes had a front page story on the alleged "extermination units" of Maduro, needless to say all of their information
came from "human rights and civil society groups" OBVIOUSLY funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and therefore worthy
and democratic organizations such as Exxon-Mobil, McDonald's, Goldman Sachs, Boeing, CitiGroup, the US Chamber of Commerce, Visa,
Hilton Hotels, and more. See here:
https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2019/01/us-regime-change-in-venezuela.html
Blooming Barricade , Feb 1, 2019 5:25:16 PM |
link
Abby Martin on the beat:
"War danger is very real. Bolton threatens to send Maduro to US torture house Guantanamo if he doesn't resign in insane,
unhinged interview where he claims Russian & Cuban agents are in Venezuela assassinating peaceful protesters on behalf
of the government" https://twitter.com/AbbyMartin/status/1091443808636522496
The business of conflation of gang violence with protest is not new. See the kidnapping of Aristide in 2004 by US special forces,
and the associated coup.
The Canadian government was working with former police chief of Gonaives, turned international cocaine trader, Guy Philippe
(see the confession of 9 November 2004 in the Canadian parliament, as made by then Canadian ambassador the Haiti, Hon. Dr. Claude
Bucher re cooperation with Philippe, and Internet archive backups of DEA fugitive lists for Miami Florida circa 2013 e.g. for
Philippe's involvement in the cocaine trade; there were much earlier indications, but they have been scrubbed off the internet,
e.g. a 2007 Reuters article regarding a DEA raid on Philippe's compound).
In cooperation with the Canadian government, Philippe illegally returned to Haiti. When the leader of the "Cannibal Army" street
gang was killed in a intergang shootout, Philippe took over leadership of the Cannibal Army gang, and accused Aristide of killing
said leader, which the financial press parroted (the Cannibal Army became peaceful opposition protesters in the official propaganda),
and after the coup, former Haitian prime minister Yvon Neptune was held for two years on genocide charges (sic), regarding the
gang shootout.
When Phillipe took over leadership of the Cannibal Army gang, be renamed it several times, settling on "the national revolutionary
front for the liberation of Haiti."
The reason the press felt that they could get away with such a lie was that certain gangs had agreed not to attack the police,
including both the Cannibal Army, and the gang which killed the then leader of the Cannibal Army. The financial press (including
notoriously The Economist) had been referring for some time prior to the coup to such gangs as "Aristide supporters" and to gangs
that refused, as "political opposition."
The reason for such arrangements (police negotiating with gangs) was a Clinton law, nominally passed against the Cedras junta,
but only enforced upon Aristide's return, preventing the Haitian the government from importing automatic arms, thus putting the
police at a disadvantage relative to the gangs.
When the coup started, and the Cannibal Army started attacking the Gonaives police, said police started fighting back. When
it became obvious that the police would win, the US special forces conducted their kidnapping of Aristide. For an overview, see
Kevin Pina's Haiti We Must Kill the Bandits.
Since the coup, Canada and USA have run several fraudulent elections in Haiti, in violation of the Haitian constitution. Tactics
have included burning dumpsters full of ballots, preventing Aristide's party from running, and outright ballot stuffing, with
an attendant drop in voter participation.
One correction to my above comment: Not ballot stuffing, but giving fraudulent counts for ballot boxes. After five boxes were
checked in the last fraudulent US run Haitian election, in which the actual ballots were anti-US puppet while the official count
was in favour of the US puppet, the US corrected the totals for the examined boxes, while refusing to allow recounts of any other
boxes, thereby giving the US puppet a win.
I'm amazed that you can read through the drivel and lies published by the likes of the New York Times and Washington Post regards
Venezuela. Once the NYT, on day one of the coup, pretended there some some question regards the legitimacy Maduro's election,
I lost all patience. I watch Jimmy Dore talking to Abby Martin, someone who has been there recently.
But thank you for posting on this further spewing of idiocy and lies from the NYT and WashPost. Those publications don't even
seem to care to base their critiques of Venezuela and Maduro on some kind of verifiable reality.
Fixing Bloomberg's text to apply to events closer to home:
The capitalist regime has regularly sent the police forces racing into slums in personnel carriers. Its masked and helmeted
members, equipped with full military gear, helmets, batons, and shields, attack demonstrators with weapons including tear gas,
guns and even grenades.
By the way, Guy Philippe now
is appealing
his own plea bargain (money laundering in cocaine trade related activities). In one of the articles that was scrubbed off
the internet, an interview with "before it is news" with Philippe, Philippe protested that US puppet dictator of Haiti (and former
pole dancer / rapper, Michel Martelly aka Sweet Mickey) was far more involved in the international cocaine trade than Philippe
ever had opportunity to be. Also, Philippe has been involved in the cocaine trade since at least
1999 .
Duterte has a solution to drug and gang violence. The west protests vigorously, now why is that? Duterte learned from the events
in Haiti that the west will use the gangs to destroy him. Eh Maduro!! learn from Duterte.
Since nothing about any of this makes sense, let me run another theory past you.
Trump accused of 'stopping working' as schedule reveals he averaged one event per day in January. As the link says,
if Trump has stopped doing anything except "hate-tweeting" and watching Fox News, this would be an opening for Pence and his friends
to do whatever they please. Venezuela might be as simple as killing some time and gaining some practice while waiting for events
in the mideast to come to a boil.
I've seen claims Trump was desperately looking to get out of the Shutdown while still saving face. If being President isn't
fun anymore, he may be looking for a "heroic" way out of that position as well.
"Anyone remember the notorious Operation Fast and Furious scandal about ten years ago in which the US Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) ran a sting operation allowing licensed gun dealers to sell firearms to buyers working
for Mexican drug cartels, in the belief that tracking the guns would lead to making arrests of their ultimate owners?"
I recall reading there was a further goal of the Fast and Furious project; when the guns eventually showed up in the US it
would be used as justification for draconian gun control as clearly regulating dealers didn't "work." I don't recall where I read
that, it was sometime ago.
It is estimated that 5 million Colombians entered Venezuela in the last two decades, some of whom brought a culture of violence
with them (a sort of Jihad)...
Thanks b, as always, you just cut right through the BS.
Jen@14 -My thoughts exactly. Drugs, money, guns, and violence. The gangs should be considered proxy forces of the Empire. Their
role is to destabilize and terrorize.
In the US, heavily militarized police forces have impunity to kill unarmed, non-threatening people of color, even children,
with barely a peep from the presstitutes. That thought leads to the white-suprematist nature of the Empire and how the genocide
and ethic cleansing of the US has been so complete that indigenous people today are less than 1% of the population and are still
viewed by the ptb as an impediment to "progress". Remember how the Standing Rock protests ended?
The hubris and hypocracy of the Empire knows no bounds.
By the way, that pinnacle of journalism the Daily Mail is blocking pro Maduro posts on its Vz stories, people are noticing it
and posting comments complaining on other stories.
Sorry, reference from 2015: 5 millones de colombianos han huido hacia Venezuela (5 million Colombians have escaped to Venezuela).
Sabemos que Semana, El Tiempo, El Espectador, Caracol, RCN (por nombrar algunos) mantienen una incesante campaña mediática
desde Colombia contra Venezuela y la Revolución Bolivariana. La matriz derrocha tinta y baba cotidianamente contra el país
mientras hace caso omiso de los problemas internos colombianos (que, por fuerza, se han impuesto por actores foráneos).
EL CIUDADANOMARCH 2, 2015
(We know that Semana, El Tiempo, El Espectador Caracol, RCN to mention only some have created an incessant media campaign
against Venezuela and the Bolivarian Revolution.)
Colombia is less violent overall than Venezuela, on a per capita basis, by about a factor of two. Colombia banned
leaded petrol in the early 1990s, although smuggling of subsidized and leaded Venezuelan petrol (until 2005) has resulted in Colombian
border towns having higher murder rates than the nearby Venezuelan towns from where the petrol was smuggled. If excessive violence
in Venezuela is being perpetrated by Colombians, they will largely be from border areas.
Oh, Come on, do you not know how the fucking empire works? Colombia is what Cuba was pre 1959, a playground for elites with prostitution
the major dollar earner.
In his latest
, Pepe Escobar gives Bolton a new moniker--"psycho killer"--which I find quite apt. An excellent addition to Hudson's essay, Pepe's
piece provides new information for us:
"Psycho killer Bolton's by now infamous notepad stunt about '5,000 troops to Colombia', is a joke; these would have no
chance against the arguably 15,000 Cubans who are in charge of security for the Maduro government; Cubans have demonstrated
historically they are not in the business of handing over power."
Brazil has said they'll be no invasion from its land. I seem to recall similar noise coming from Colombia despite the Outlaw
US Empire's having leased 8 bases. The upshot is Economic War is the worst aggression the Outlaw US Empire is capable of visiting
on Venezuela. But has Hudson details, a method of resisting/counter-attacking now exists and continues to gain strength. The old
"Core" nations are slowly being relegated to the periphery while committing treason to the principles they once sought to impose
globally. No, the Hybrid Third World War isn't yet over, but we can now discern how it will end.
"President Donald Trump will reaffirm his intention to end US involvement in foreign military conflicts when he delivers his
State of the Union (SOTU) address next week, a senior administration told reporters.
"'In terms of protecting America's national security, the president will update Congress on his diplomatic and military
efforts around the world and reaffirm his determination to protect American interest and bring to an end our endless foreign
wars,' the official said on Friday."
I learned a lot from Hudson's piece, but I fact-checked one statement of his and it seems wrong - he claims the President of the
World Bank is traditionally a post for US Secretary of Defense (presumably after being SecDef), but looking at the list of past
World Bank Presidents, I only see one secdef, and 2ish assistant/deputy secdefs. The others seem unrelated to the US Dept of Defense.
Does anyone know more about this? Is Hudson mistaken? Or is there more to it than what I found out?
@ karlof1 | Feb 1, 2019 8:04:07 PM | 41
I don't doubt that Trump wants to end foreign wars, which the US is consistently losing, a no-brainer decision, it's his lack
of sensibility that's a worry when he also supports --
>a large increase in the size of the army, which is only required for foreign wars (Mexico and Canada are quite benign).
> an Army general for Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, out of rotational order (which would have favored Air Force).
> big bucks going for Army modernization
The fact is that the US doesn't need a standing army* at all, and having one only contributes to the chance of (plans for) foreign
wars.
My guess is Trump's trying to buy loyalty, what with all the impeachment talk, which is serious, but who knows. He offers no explanation.
* Constitutional scholars out there know about Article I, Section 8 which favors a standing navy, but not a standing army:
1: The Congress shall have Power. . .
12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
13: To provide and maintain a Navy;
An article published at Stalkerzone , gives a glimpse of what could be described as an informational coup, where fake
news with fake images are spreaded, mainly through Twitter, and this way they the US and its puppets in Venezuela try to create
and "alternative reality" in which crowds who belong to events where supporters of President Maduro take part, are presented as
the crowd supporting that unknown personage till some days ago, Guaido, and assertions about alleged meetings of the US appointed
new president of Venezuela with members of the FANB are also presented as facts without any graphic evidence and the very FANB
denying any contact with the coupist.
Also, gets debunked the general message on Maduro´s incompetency to manage Venezuelan economy and state, spreaded, not only
by the US and its puppet media/governments, but also by those who are supposed to be in the "resistance" side, those whose anti-socialist
views makes them contribute to the informational coup.
On the same vein, debunking all the lies who make Maduro and the Bolivarian system and government responsible for the straits
produced by an organized harassment which started not this month but several years ago,
a Spanish professor has written a letter to Spanish president,
Sánchez , so as to, not only ashame him, but also warn him about the posible outcome of allowing this outrage to happen and
the breaking point reached with what at all ights seem the full abolishment of International Law...he is offering economic data
to defintiely debunk all the authors, "analysts", and commenters out there spreading plain lies, without offering any fact to
support their claims against Maduro
"Mr. President You, as your party has done so many times, have had the cowardice to put aside a new aggression against a
country that defends its sovereignty at all costs, aligning itself with the US guidelines in this respect.
But, Mr. President, you know very well that Venezuela is the most advanced democracy in all of Latin America, which has
held some 29 elections since 1999 (the year in which Chávez arrived at the head of state), the majority under international
supervision, and with the system of "The most advanced electoral count in the world" according to the Jimmy Carter Foundation.
In fact, the last legislative elections were won by the opposition.
You know, because in your office it is impossible not to know, that Venezuela has some of the most important achievements
of the continent. It appears as the country of the area with the greatest reduction in the percentage of poverty, which went
from 28.9% in 1998 to 19.6% in 2013; and the percentage of households in extreme poverty decreased from 10.8% to 5.5% in the
same period.
You also know, how could you not know? That Venezuela is the country in the region that has fought the most against inequality.
The Gini coefficient (according to which 0 is the maximum equality and 1 the superlative inequality) in 1998 was 0.486 and
in 2013 it reached 0.398, the lowest in Latin America.
Also, if you do not know for sure that some of the diplomats of your government did, Unesco declared Venezuela under
the Chávez government "Free of Illiteracy Territory", and this country has a net primary schooling rate of 95.90. %.
I would also have to know that the evolution of child malnutrition in children under 5 years of age went from 7.70% in
1990 to 2.53% in 2013. This country deserves recognition from the United Nations Food and Nutrition Organization. Agriculture-FAO.
While the vacancy rate went from 15.2% in 1999 to 7.1% in April 2014 (the one that the Kingdom of Spain already wanted far
away). Venezuela reached 0,771 in the HDI, which includes it in the group of countries considered with a "High Level of Human
Development", to be above the average of Latin America and the Caribbean. You also know, I am sure, that the government of
Venezuela provides housing for its population and that there are no evictions.
You must also know, how you will not know if even your party mate Rodríguez Zapatero let you see when he was a mediator
in Venezuela, that the serious crisis in this country is caused by the ruthless economic war that is perpetrated against him,
launched first of all by USA and seconded by subaltern countries as unfortunately is the Kingdom of Spain.
I remind you of some of the characteristics of that war. The unilateral closure of bank accounts of the Venezuelan State
to make it difficult for suppliers to pay essential goods and to meet other commitments. The cancellation, for exclusively
political reasons, of vital imports, as was the case of treatments for malaria. Withholding crucial currencies to purchase
basic goods (for example, in November 2017, financial services provider Euroclear retained 1.65 billion dollars of Venezuela
that were destined to the purchase of foods and medicines). The Venezuelan Executive has retained close to 2.5 billion dollars
of international operations, in different banks, either for debt or import payments, or for oil bills. Wells Fargo Bank withheld
and canceled payments of 7.5 million dollars for the sale of energy to Brazil. It also has retained foreign currency to pay
back payments to pensioners abroad. And they have been retaining food shipments for the population that were already paid (for
example, in December 2017, 2,200 tons of pork were kept for two weeks at the Colombian border, rotting during retention).
Now they also want to take away their gold reserves from foreign banks and steal the profits from their oil. To which
is added the internal economic warfare that the Venezuelan business class carries out, hoarding all kinds of products to cause
a widespread shortage, or playing with currency exchange rates to destabilize the country.
And afterwards, governments like yours that collaborate with all of this proclaim that it is necessary to send "humanitarian
aid" to Venezuela.
Size cynicism is also part of that brutal economic war to which I referred, whose steps and specific objectives I already
explained in this same medium and that seeks to cause deaths and suffering without limits in the Venezuelan population, in
order to surrender and lift up against your government. That war is accompanied by a terrible media bombardment that is almost
unprecedented. The means of mass dissemination have always been used to "soften" the consciences of societies before initiating
a war against any population. They did it recently in Iraq, in Yugoslavia, in Ukraine, in Libya, in Syria ... but what Venezuela
is suffering is already truly long and exhausting. In fact, this monotonous bombardment is so insistent that it already convinces
almost all European people that something bad has to have that government so that they persecute him so much. When in reality
they should ask themselves what a good government does so that all the powerful and the extreme-right, starting with the "crazy"
Trump, want to sink him.
And it is that the main weapon of massive destruction of the USA, that has no rival in the world, is the monopolistic
control of mass media, the dictation of world news (with the consequent systematic and planned disinformation), or which is
the same, the reality construction machine.(...)
But I suppose that if the great world powers that give instructions to your government resort to such a crude option,
it is because things go very badly for them and they must be quite desperate, enough to put the world in a new phase without
rules, where war and aggression between countries prevails over any convention. Because you, with your position, are also complicit
in a probable military intervention of unpredictable consequences in the heart of the Great American Homeland. It will make
all of Spain complicit in it.
Mr President, you know perfectly, to finish, that any European government would have reacted by totally closing the democratic
space before a threat of external interference, coup d'état or armed insurgency sponsored by third parties. Look, if not, how
the Spanish governments have reacted just because someone asks for urns in Catalonia. Or how Britain closed the "freedom of
the press" for the Falklands war that was thousands of kilometers away. All this has been faced by Venezuela, however, without
leaving a permanent path of dialogue, as again our former head of government, Zapatero, can testify.
I believe that you do not feel any remorse for your crude ultimatum to the legitimate president of Venezuela, but do
you really feel no concern before the free way that is giving to others in the Kingdom of Spain? A country, which as its name
indicates, can not choose its head of state, nor (at least not yet) has it chosen you either.
I am with you. Results given to DJT will have to be in terms measured in a tangible wind-down to these occupations. He is not
a politician who excels in Orwellian-speak as those above mention. His apolitical nature is the only true bright spot in his presidency.
His contributions have given terminology like "globalism" back its weight for the public to peruse, when of course they are not
frothing at the mouth with TDS. He deserves a lot of credit and speaking on a soapbox about this important terminology and turning-point
can truly affect the impressionable in the coming generations.
There is a racial and cultural angle to the Venezuela discord (which the US and its puppets are taking advantage of). Chavez was
and Maduro is at least partly indigenous, and that rankles some who favor the white Spanish..
. . .from a 2017 article on the web...
. . .While the Chávez government attracted international attention for its economic and political programmes, it also addressed
cultural injustices. Through new cultural policies and social programmes, such as Misión Cultura, Chavismo raised the symbolic
status of the historically excluded poor and mixed-race masses.
The opposition protests that have flared up since Chávez first came to power need to be understood within this cultural
and racial context. Radical sectors of the right wing opposition have repeatedly refused to accept the legitimacy of Chavismo
and what it represents. In 2002, they helped organise both a short-lived US-backed coup and oil strikes meant to create chaos
and bring the government down. The street demonstrations raging today are aimed at achieving regime change, but the opposition
has not indicated what policies they would introduce and how they would deal with the country's problems if they were in power.
The crisis in Venezuela is not simply a matter of left wing versus right wing political and economic systems. It is
also rooted in competing ideas about racial and cultural worth. The ugly truth is that for some, it is still a matter of civilisation
versus barbarism. . .
here
Yes, I particularly like the way he kicks in the teeth the old alliances of the
US and its world-wide puppet networks favored by the establishment which Trump has threatened and acted against. Yet they still
persist. From the news
As part of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress required the Secretary of Defense, in concert with the
Secretary of State, to "assess the foreign military and non-military activities of the People's Republic of China that could
affect the regional and global national security and defense interests of the United States. // Wow, "regional and global
national security and defense interests of the United States" leaves nothing out.
thanks b... if we could send bolton to gitmo, that'd be the beginning of something truly relevant and worthwhile - let him go
with all the other neo cons down the line since before bush2's time too.. nyt /wapo and etc...water carriers for the same evil
empire.. no surprise.. lies are all they have and they have endless reams of them...
@don bacon and nemesiscalling.. you two are still in love with trump, lol... i suppose you figure it's all an accident and
he really does want to stop the wars of aggression on various countries and etc... give it up.. the guy is off the charts unstable
and doesn't know his ass from the hole in his head.. nothing has stopped under his watch.. it has only gotten worse and now he
threatens venezuala... he will sell what the corporatocracy wants him to sell, plain, simple and just as vacuous as it sounds..
Claiming a commitment to ending foreign wars while threatening
Venezuela with a coup is the epitome of Orwellian doublespeak. Is it really necessary to get in to the semantics of "war"?
Read that second sentence very carefully, it is a case study in obfuscation.
Very interesting, thank you. I wonder how widely noticed, read or discussed this letter will be in Spain, or outside of Spain
for that matter? I've sent a heads-up to GlobalResearch.ca re Andrés Piqueras's letter.
Interdasting! No tweets, but who THEY follow is rather telling.
Related: I hate 'list of' or 'rules for' articles, but I'll make an exception for this Jefferson Morley article published yesterday
on Salon's site. Nothing earth-shattering for the whiskey bar crowd, but certainly worth a read for the history lessons.
We have not devoted a cent to toppling Venezuela as of yet, other than the career diplomats and their salaries whose job is
to fuck with their brains down in Socialist-land.
Huge difference btw the perilous chasms in the ME and Afghanistan and those in LA. How is that for obfuscation?
No one is allowed by the USA and its poodle nations to nationalize oil or any other resources. No one is allowed to do anything
tangible for poor people. However, every country is entitled to "self-determination" as long as its resources are handed over
to multinational corporations approved of by the USA.
It is the stuff of Lewis Carroll's "Through The Looking Glass".
Like it or not, James, what I said about Trump reintroducing concepts like globalism back into the public lexicon can be laid
only at the feet of one DJT.
You don't do any service to the movement by constantly decrying his poor points and not recognizing the positive or that which
we can build off.
Fuck me! Who's this AOC? The lady who has yet to mention the term "globalism" or relate to any of those that have suffered
under its ghastly load. Yeah...heap on the green jobs or we'll be dead in 12 years!
yeah, sure... someone thinks the usa neo cons haven't
Tpent a cent on trying to topple venezuala leadership, in spite of the fact they have been trying since the era of chavez!!
lets forgot about however many 100's of millions that have been spent on this ongoing exercise, not to mention probably a whole
lot more and hey - it's only money... if a few innocent people die, whatever... trump is clean, lol...
nemesiscalling.. i am not picking a side... the whole 2 party system in the usa is fucked... and while i thought trump was a breathe
of fresh air at the time he was running for the presidency, i think we have had enough time to see him for who he is - another
person who happily rubber stamps the same bs that has been an ongoing byproduct of usa foreign policy - wars, murder and mayhem
around the world 24/7... and, as a canuck, i am just as disgusted by the shills running canada at present - tru dope and unfreeland
- 2 losers from the get go... so, i am not taking sides in any of this.. i don't see any good from trump at this point.. sorry..
Apparently james and some others would be quite pleased if only the outsider Trump coming to Washington, against a continuing
establishment resistance, would start a war (like Bush did) or send 70,000 fresh troops to an existing war (as Obama did in his
first year), killing injuring and displacing millions. Well I'll go with Trump and his ending of the Afghan and Syria commitments,
and finally ending the Korea war. Perfection in life? Doesn't exist. You gotta settle for good enough.
no don... trump hasn't stopped any wars.. that is the reality, in spite of any pretensions otherwise...and there is constant talk
of more wars... sorry, but trump has been a disaster for anyone who thought something was going to change.. nothing has changed..
NemesisCalling@56
Obfuscation? Yep, you nailed it with that sentence. Lol
Since James already responded to your claim about the money I won't, but I will point out that anyone who was really committed
to peace wouldn't have psycho war hawks like Bolton and Pompeo around. Even dusting off a Reagan-era war criminal speaks volumes.
Also have to give a tip of the hat to SST/W. Patrick Lang for linking his 12 page paper
"Bureaucrats Versus Artists
" While it's always easy to hate the CIA and U.S. IC, he reminds me that they do or at least did have an crucial
politically-neutral information gathering mission for leaders in a democratic republic, and that mission has mostly been
usurped by internal forces over the years.
You are wrong because you fail to see that his actions are paving the way. Every minor concession now will not be able to be
won back by the neocon estab. Not unless they want to start WW3. With a Trump presidency, for the neocon/neolib estab, it is death
by a thousand cuts. Lickily DJT has the patience and wisdom to realize this. Like I have said many times before, he clearly idolizes
Putin and his long-game strat.
The reason there has always been a fever pitch about toppling Trump is because the estab is aware of this slow, impending death
under DJT. Hell, I have even conceded that he may not even be mindful of his own role in this slow-mo disintegration. But an ignorant
harbinger of death I would take anyway.
Sometimes, imo, we lose sight of how many different cliques and cults and agendas and interests and inertia and customs and
stupidities etc go to make up a government.
Here is a quote from J.K. Galbraith, from 1961, when he was serving under JFK as ambassador to India.
"It is hard in this job not to develop a morbid dislike for the State Department. It is remote, mindless, petty, and above
all pompous, overbearing, and late."
The idea that government policies are a well oiled machine, well, not so much. More like psychotic many multiples of the
three stooges. Galbraith comments elsewhere about the military hardliners, wanting total victory. He points out that what they
are actually advocating is total annihilation. Suicide.
Often brainy people seem especially geared to inflict massive destruction and mass murder. It has been pointed out that the
carnage the US inflicted on Indochina in the nineteen sixties and seventies was presided over by a bunch of Rhodes Scholars and
other brainy folk.
Sometimes very pleasant and good people can combine conventional success with extreme deficits in knowledge. A person of some
accomplishment once asked me if there was gravity on the moon. I checked for a moment to see if he was serious, and he was. I
answered, yes, but less than we have on Earth. On the moon, I explained, people can leap like kangaroos and kangaroos are in danger
of achieving escape velocity. But I think my humor went over his head.
So Donald Trump may not be the worst thing to happen to us. We'll have to see how this develops.
"Nothing has changed." You got that wrong. Now if Hillary, the Libya destruction
architect, had been elected that would be true. But Trump has been a fresh air to anarchists especially. Talk about a bull
in a china shop, or a tweet in a twitter shop, nothing is the same any more. Wake up and smell the coffee, james!
It's Friday night, so I bet most barflies are out at their local watering holes given the paucity of responses to Trump's planned
announcement. Smacks of Owrellianism to be sure. Ending "neverending" wars to begin anew? IMO, the Economic Wars being waged against
Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and others count as neverending endeavors.
Most of us realize the degree of Evil deeply bound-up within the Outlaw US Empire and its network providing domestic support.
It's been several generations since the entire edifice faced a concerted push-back effort; but within the public at large, several
factions not yet coalesced are trying differing approaches--although we hear/read little thanks to BigLie Media's blackout. Much,
as we read, is happening internationally since not all sources of information are censored or blacked-out. And the push-back on
that level is very serious indeed. The point is that little victories are far better than none--history shows Paradigm Changes
do not occur rapidly--so patience is required as is a Long Game strategy. IMO, much about the Outlaw US Empire is exposed to light
now than ever before thanks to the efforts of many and advances in technology. We must keep working on our push-back-- everywhere
, in Europe most especially to get it turned from West to East, and from EU back to the European Family of Sovereign Nations.
Duterte has a solution to drug and gang violence. The west protests vigorously, now why is that? Duterte learned from the events
in Haiti that the west will use the gangs to destroy him.
Not sure where you are sourcing your information from, perhaps the MSM? Duterte is just another filipino gangster/politician.
I used to think that Philippine politics was just like American politics, but a cruder version. America has now caught up with
the Philippines. Oh, and there has been no solution to the drug and gang violence. Just a lot of dead poor sods who had done nothing
wrong other than buy from the wrong dealer. In the dead of night, the back alleys are still swarming in a fog of Shabu, and gang
violence in the Philippines is almost exclusively an activity of police and military gangs fighting over turf.
Ending "neverending" wars to begin anew? IMO, the Economic Wars being waged against Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and others
count as neverending endeavors.
Nothing economic compares with dropping one ton exploding bombs on buildings full of people, leaving them dead injured and
displaced. Nothing. And it has gone uninterrupted for too many years.
I expect the reason that the aforementioned incident of gang violence is getting so much coverage is because it was organized
by team Guaidó, as it seems a little too convenient that the corporate media and people like Bolton can now reference it as an
example of what they claim to be the repressive nature of the Maduro government towards the poor. It wouldn't take much to pay
off one of the gangs to create an incident like this in order to provoke a police crackdown, and none the gangs would have any
loyalty to the Maduro government, given that gangs consider the police to be the enemy and the police work for the government.
Yes, Prof Hudson made a few errors in his hastily written essay, but some of his observations have simmered for awhile:
"This break has been building for quite some time, and was bound to occur. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would
become the catalytic agent? No left-wing party, no socialist, anarchist or foreign nationalist leader anywhere in the world could
have achieved what he is doing to break up the American Empire. The Deep State is reacting with shock at how this right-wing real
estate grifter has been able to drive other countries to defend themselves by dismantling the U.S.-centered world order. To rub
it in, he is using Bush and Reagan-era Neocon arsonists, John Bolton and now Elliott Abrams, to fan the flames in Venezuela. It
is almost like a black political comedy. The world of international diplomacy is being turned inside-out. A world where there
is no longer even a pretense that we might adhere to international norms, let alone laws or treaties.
"The Neocons who Trump has appointed are accomplishing what seemed unthinkable not long ago: Driving China and Russia together
– the great nightmare of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. They also are driving Germany and other European countries into
the Eurasian orbit, the 'Heartland' nightmare of Halford Mackinder a century ago....
"Trump's agenda may really be to break up the American Empire, using the old Uncle Sucker isolationist rhetoric of half a century
ago. He certainly is going for the Empire's most vital organs. But is he a witting anti-American agent? He might as well be
– but it would be a false mental leap to use 'cui bono' to assume that he is a witting agent. [My Emphasis]
"After all, if no U.S. contractor, supplier, labor union or bank will deal with him, would Vladimir Putin, China or Iran be
any more naïve? Perhaps the problem had to erupt as a result of the inner dynamics of U.S.-sponsored globalism becoming impossible
to impose when the result is financial austerity, waves of population flight from U.S.-sponsored wars, and most of all, U.S. refusal
to adhere to the rules and international laws that it itself sponsored seventy years ago in the wake of World War II."
IMO, what prompted Hudson to write was the publication of Bolton's threats to the ICC justice that forced him to resign that
I provided an article about several threads back. Note that he devoted an entire section of his essay to that topic and more generally
on Law. Plus, the essay's not nearly as well edited as his usually are. So, I forgive his tiny errors as they don't detract from
his essay's main thrust.
One thing about Trump I believe we'd all agree upon: He certainly isn't a rabid Neoliberalcon like the person he defeated for
POTUS. That and he's roiled domestic and international politics more than anyone would have imagined on 8 November 2016.
We both want the carnage to cease ASAP, along with all the other damage being inflicted. You've read enough of my views to
know how I feel, and vice-versa. Have you heard of Dr. Francis Boyle?
Here's a link to a review
of one of his many works and one that's as germane today as it was in 2008. I mention him because IMO the only surefire way to
defeat the War Party is through the courts as what they've been doing since 1945 is unconstitutional and illegal, and IMO can
be easily proven as such.
Don Bacon@72 Half a million children under 5 were killed in Iraq just from the sanctions. The dead, the injured, and the displaced are
still dead, injured, and displaced regardless of what weapon was used.
I have some big picture thoughts I want to share. China is a growing threat to the existence of the Western way because it seems
to be successfully mostly socialist and is projecting that win-win around the world. Empire has used the ME and SE Asia for war
focus until now but are stymied there and need to have an "enemy" (real of made up) to continue fueling the war economies.
Since the West cannot complete its World Order project they must revitalize the war strategy into a long term cold war type.
What we see is a circling of wagons and threats against any who are not "with us". I think the speed with which steps are being
taken are because of the threat of questions about finance that need to be silenced with more war and fear of any sort.
I hope what folks are seeing by the actions of the West is that Rule-Of-Law is really just Rule-Of-Power/Control begat
by owning the global tools of finance with a myth cover of Rule-Of-Law just like economics is a myth cover for the elite making
all the big investment decisions and those results trickling down so to speak....
I hope folks also grok that the elite have known about the power of "intelligence" long before countries created groups to
gather such information. To think that those who run our world do not have access to the intelligence of all Western country's
governments is in error. Look at for how many centuries the elite have maintained control and ask yourself how.....they own the
leadership.....money buys access.
I'm not sure which is worse, the Trump apologists or the Empire detractors that spin every apparent set-back or assumed over-reach
into a hopeful "this too shall pass" fantasy. Now we have the twisted conspiracy theory of Trump as "unwitting agent" of the Empire's
demise.
The [Trump's] agenda is not to destroy the Empire but to transform it to meet the challenge from Russia and China. Anyone
that sees those changes and reads 'disintegration' is only seeing what they want to see.
The transformation is to a much darker place and far from anything like democracy. For those of us that don't truck in
misguided fantasies, the psyops, economic warfare, and militarism tells us all we need to know. Is it any wonder that the one
chosen to lead us down the garden path to dystopia is an egotistical maniac? Trump was SELECTED, not elected, by the likes of:
Hillary, McCain, Brennan, Mueller, Clapper, Kissinger, and Schumer.
A very unanticipated announcement: (Trump's intention to end US involvement in foreign military conflicts) ... Reactions
from the bar?
Posted by: karlof1 | Feb 1, 2019 8:04:07 PM | 41
The world dodged a bullet when Trump won the 2-horse race from that lazy, demented old nag, Crooked Hillary. I couldn't believe
she'd be dopey enough to pretend that she didn't know about the Electoral College factor.
Trump must thoroughly enjoy uphill battles. How else to explain his Drain the Swamp declaration as the hallmark of his first
term? I took it to mean that he's putting them on notice and there's not much, short of JFK-ing him, that they can do to stop
him. And that's the way it's panning out.
I hope he's as smart as he thinks he is because his Drain the Swamp promise, and self-preservation, guaranteed that the course
of his Presidency would be hard to follow and impossible to predict. I'm in the Open Slather demographic i.e. ANYTHING he decides
to do is OK EXCEPT start a new war.
I'm expecting his SOTU to be as ambiguous as everything else he says because he's the only one with a Drain the Swamp plan
and he hasn't explained which ducks have to be lined up, in which sequence, before he'll be ready to deliver the coup de grâce.
I don't understand why there's so much anti-Trump bitching. The Swamp was winning and the Little People were F**ked financially
and peace-wise long before Trump came along. He's already done some unusually and comparatively sane things and I expect him to
do more of the same.
Sorry but does Mr. Maduro have a fetish of repeating every step from the Maidan playbook. You just let foreigners run around
Caracas inciting the coup? Remember, the very last step from that playbook, of Russian spetznatz coming to rescue your sorry ass,
is not available to you because you live a bit out of the way. These regime-change "journalists" are foreign agents who
must be rounded up pronto (for their own protection of course).
Then once this is over, Washington can have them back in exchange for the stolen billions. Remember, impunity is the Dark Throne's
greatest weapon; give them some skin in the game, and suddenly it's their side that has to think twice.
Posted by: Ma Laoshi | Feb 2, 2019 1:50:06 AM |
link
I remember how Reagan started to wobble a bit towards the end of his term. Part of me suspects that Trump is himself in
a bit of a decline and is thus the best vehicle for his cadre of Iagos to subvert his power into their projects. Clinton would
have been even better in that respect.
If you consider the size of potholes and mass suicide by opiate to be indicators, the decline of the USA is well underway.
More on topic, however, is the general characteristic of South and Central American rebellion. Savage, well-armed, even
if only with Machetes, and shades of evil rather than a clear moral choice. If your hobby is pouring billions of dollars into
the fire to sow mayhem there is no better place. The miraculous banana that is stocked in every grocery store even up in
Calgary or Alaska may well get there by the grace of tribute paid to local warlords. The cocaine that is sniffed in Hollywood
and New York by the ton comes from Colombia or Peru. Worldwide, restaurants thrive on beef from Argentina... as well as horse
meat from Mexico.
I would predict that given the well-orchestrated push to recognize Guaido that the plan to overthrow Maduro's government
is both inevitable and long-expected. The question is how the aftermath will roll out depending on whether or not the Columbian
rebel groups link up with the Venezuelan resistance and the whole region explodes. Just a question. But I would bet that such
a scenario is not unforseen by the American puppeteers.
Invoking Auschwitz liberation, and the anti-semitism of Maduro, Venezuela 'president' Juan Guaido WELCOMES Israel recognition!!
Referring to Soviet troops' victory, Juan Guaido thanks Netanyahu for supporting him 'just as our country is also fighting for
its freedom' Trump's special envoy for international negotiations, (((Jason Greenblatt))), applauded Jerusalem for its "courageous
stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people." Israel takes a courageous stand in solidarity with the Venezuelan people!
https://t.co/9i8z9NOHA1
-- Jason D. Greenblatt (@jdgreenblatt45) January
27, 2019
While Venezuela once had one of the largest Jewish communities in the region, numbering some 25,000 in 1999, only about 6,000
Jews are believed to remain in the country, with many of the rest having fled to Israel, Canada, the US and elsewhere.
Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez, who broke off ties with Israel in 2009, have both been strident critics of Israel,
and some Jewish community leaders have expressed fears of the government stoking anti-Semitism.
At the United Nations on Saturday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged all nations to end Venezuela's Auschwitz "nightmare"
and support Guaido.
"Now is the time for every other national to pick a side," Pompeo told the Security Council.
"No more delays, no more games. Either you stand with the (((forces of freedom))), or you're in league with Maduro and his
anti-semitic mayhem."
'Old habits die hard', or as Pindar via Herodotus opined, 'Custom rules'. Key elements of the customary process for
Empires' regime change efforts are to demonize the targeted leader, economic warfare on the targeted country, make up lurid stories,
infiltrate with foreign saboteurs and NED-type internal subversion. John Perkin's 'Economic Hit Man' described the process of
gaining leverage via financial means, debt the key. As Perkins noted, then there are the assassination squads, and then finally
the US military, which has of late been heavily supplemented with mercenaries and private armies.
What has changed in recent
years has been the context in which this customary process takes place. Some of that: Russia and China are now stronger militarily,
and their presence and technology is spreading, the ability of the Empire to bomb with impunity is being reduced. Countries are
setting up alternative financial arrangements. The lurid story routine has lost some of its punch and audience.
The false nature of the self-congratulatory advertisements of the Empire are widely recognized. Its 'might is right' doctrine
and repudiation of common law and and common decency and common sense and common honesty is palpable.
Then along comes Donald Trump, and here it is very important to distinguish between the real character, real motives, real
plans of someone, and what actually occurs or is actually strengthened or weakened.
So, for example, one can accurately designate someone as a dishonest criminal, and still applaud that criminal's act of catching
a child as he is tossed from three stories up out of a burning building to the criminal below.
As Hudson points out, it is Trump's actual impact that is the important matter. As I've pointed out previously, Trump, Putin
and Hitler are arguably the three most frequently and harshly denigrated public figures over the last century. I don't think Stalin
and Mao are in the same league, when it comes to sheer quantity of denigration. And why has Trump been so harshly targeted: Trump
was viewed as ideologically anti-Empire, a nationalist, and Trump's effect has been to accelerate the weakening of the Empire's
full spectrum domination ways and means and ambition.
And among the many loud howls of outrage vs Trump, his stated preference/intention of removing American troops from Syria,
and his musing over vaccines and autism, are two examples.
Now note again that this is not a discussion about his 'real' motives. I'm not a mind reader. But in the case of the vaccine
and autism issue, Trump handed something of a baton to Robert Kennedy Junior, who was recently given the opportunity to speak
on the subject for five minutes on I think it might have been FOX. Kennedy said it was only the second time in ten years that
he had been given the opportunity in MSM to do do so. Trump deserves some credit here. Note that in Italy recently a common vaccine
was found to be a phony gimmick, though any reference to this in mass media was along the lines of the Italian government being
anti-science, etc.
In so far as Trump's getting out of Syria statement is concerned, the point is that by saying that Trump created a new dynamic
of sorts. It for example opened a slight door/opportunity for Tulsi Gabbard to advance her anti-war theme. Trump's statement also
made it necessary for the outraged responders to attempt to assemble some kind of rationale for leaving American troops in Syria.
They didn't come off looking all that wonderful. "So why are we in Syria again?' became part of the discussion. The best they
could do was if we leave (our ISIS) creation might metastasize, and Russia and Syria and Iran will have 'won'. In other words,
Trump's sudden 'we're getting out of Syria' declaration had to some extent a 'lancing of a boil' effect, irregardless of whether
or not it actually happens or to what extent.
First: to personne #83. In fact, the zionists have a long history of involvement in coups in central america. Read up on Sam Zemurray
and United Fruit, and also his practice run in Honduras. Second, to Sasha #47. Thank you very much for posting that letter. It
is amazing (!!!!) that the gov of Spain can be so hypocritical regarding "democracy" in Venezuela, having ruthlessly crushed the
Catalan Independence movement and Jailed (!!) it's leaders.
Finally, regarding the press and the Lima group: the mainstream press seems to be touting the same line as the US press. Trump
et al are the heroes, "Guido" is the new savior, and Maduro is a "dictator." I am not going to provide links, but I will give
examples and websites for those who wish to check. Example: the Mercurio in chile, which mostly reprints NY Times. AP and Wall
Street Journal stories portraits the coup as a done deal, with photos of "Giuido" kissing babies. Please to remember that "it's
just business." The family of chile president, Pinera, has large holdings in Latam and MasterCard. Other major chilean interest
are mining and lumber. There is already much salivating over the prospect of clear cutting the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Venezuela
has great riches in natural resources. Qui bono? I think is the expression. website: www.emol.com. There is push back. the Tercera
has printed a two full page interview with Jorge Arreaza, Canceller de Venezuela, denouncing Pinera. "El Presiente Pinera vendio
su soberania y su autonomia a Estados Unidos." President Pinera sold his sovereignty and autonomy to the united states.
www.latercera.com edition of friday, 1 february.
It's difficult to know where this patently illegal - well - crime against humanity, in the sense that starving people to "free"
them is criminal - will end. If you strip off the expensive suits, it just looks like a gang rape to me.
On subject of Venezuela and propaganda - Excellent article about pattern of propaganda from NYT.
Article at TruthDig
But the above article is limited in background -
WIKI article on Yellow Journalism
Pulitzer himself was know for/sort of invented "Yellow Journalism".
Individuals (as in author of the 1st article) may speak contrary to the status quo, but no organization can for long and no
idividual within an organization. I've tried speaking against my boss on occassion - did not pan out well career-wise.
In short, it's not a bug, it's a feature. It's not to express dismay about but to know and understand and proceed accordingly.
The alt media does well to educate the public on this issue but also needs to present a positive alternative.
Great post, sir. You eloquently examine the effect of a DJT presidency, which many can not realize has shifted the full spectrum
dominance doctrine of the empire and rendered it gasping for air in a ditch.
We don't like DJT because he is president that models himself after Kant's Categorical Imperative. We like Trump because he
is not a true believer and that because of his inaction, unlike the last 30 years of Prezs who have taken it upon themselves to
blow up at least one country, his presidency has been marked with frequent threats of withdrawing from the ME entirely and rendering
our presence there ineffectual while also sparring with the IC community which has consistently gone on record spouting the BS
that Trump is a dangerous hand at the wheel of our FP, which has been part and parcel of the smearing attempt by the MSM to make
DJT look like an imbecile who is leading us to ruin.
But for those of us in the know, this is a good thing that we should be applauding DJT for. I will watch his SOTU with keen
interest.
After a single phone call from from U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, Guaidó proclaimed himself as president of Venezuela...
CANVAS is funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy...
CANVAS "turned its attention to Venezuela" in 2005 after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations
across Eastern Europe...
Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists, is a former executive
director of the International Monetary Fund...
Milton Friedman was the godfather of the notorious neoliberal Chicago Boys who were imported into Chile by dictatorial
junta leader Augusto Pinochet to implement policies of radical "shock doctrine"-style fiscal austerity...
Leopoldo López is a Princeton-educated right-wing firebrand heavily involved in National Endowment for Democracy programs
and elected as the mayor of a district in Caracas that was one of the wealthiest in the country...
Elliott Abrams is notorious for overseeing the U.S. covert policy of arming right-wing death squads during the 1980s
in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
@Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Feb 1, 2019 10:07:51 PM | 54
@Posted by: mourning dove | Feb 1, 2019 10:59:07 PM | 65
@Posted by: Grieved | Feb 1, 2019 11:12:04 PM | 69
Thanks to you all for reading and, obviously, indulging on my poor translation ( in which I have detected several grammar and
spelling mistakes...), but, you must know that I did it at wee hours here in Europe, with my eyes falling from sleep over the
keyboard...I was almost incapable of proofread the last paragraph of the letter which I added to the previous part i had selected
to translate.
Related to this I must say that I did not translate the whole letter, but almost all, leaving without translation some few
less relevant parts in the fear the comment would be banned here because of its longitude.
The letter was originally published at Spanish newspaper Público.es , which I found republished at Spanish site Rebelión.org
, both sites I fear with wide readership at least amongst Spanish, European left and of the world too .
I would only wish to be able to express myself better in English than I do, anyway, only I would wish you get to understand
me. You can contribute by spreading amongst your network of friends and relatives, and may be, even perfectioning my clumsy translation
to get it better shaped to be psublished at other media.
I do as much as I can, many times sacrifying too much hours of sleep to be healthy to just post comments, the reason why i can
not engage in long discussions here, or responding every one who adresses me here, since many times i have not time availale at
all to read all the comments and so your adressing may get without response. So sorry, but I prioritize forwarding the message
or the interesting article/information over discussion, for which I regrettably have not time, and which, in any way, should not
get us without the time to direct the fight to where is most needed, directly adressing our representatives on responding for
their clear transgressions of International and National Laws and the basic principles and values we deem mandatory to assure
a dign human existence on planet Earth.
Finally, I would wish saying that I do this only for solidarity and compassion towards my Venezuelan comrades, but the reality
is that I do it out of selfish interest since what is being built in front of our very eyes is the "New Totalitarian Order", where
any human right known to this date will be abolished in the benefit of transnational capital and corporations.
Historically those kinds of gangs are among the prime recruiting grounds for coup-supporting thugs. So the US propaganda lies
about them also indicates coup planner interest in recruiting them to help Guano's usurpation attempt.
In an interview with Russia's RIA Novosti news agency that aired Wednesday, Maduro said he has sent letters to the governments
of Bolivia, Mexico, Russia and Uruguay to involve them in a new process of dialogue with the opposition. Russia, which has been
Maduro's most vocal international supporter and is a major investor in Venezuela, applauded his willingness to negotiate. "The
fact that President Maduro is open to dialogue with the opposition deserves high praise," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told
reporters in a phone call. . .
here
Mexico calls for "peace and dialogue" in Venezuela -- The Mexican government recognizes Nicolas Maduro as Venezuela's president
and sees dialogue as the answer to political strife blamed for 13 deaths, Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Thursday, citing
his country's tradition of not interfering in the affairs of other nations.
"Mexico will maintain its stance. In synthesis: no intervention and a readiness to contribute however we can to any process that
leads to peace and dialogue," he said during President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's daily morning press conference. .
here
UN chief urges dialogue in Venezuela to avert 'disaster' --
DAVOS, Switzerland: UN chief Antonio Guterres on Thursday (Jan 24) appealed for dialogue to stop Venezuela's political crisis
spiralling out of control, after opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president. "What we hope is that dialogue
can be possible, and that we avoid an escalation that would lead to the kind of conflict that would be a disaster for the people
of Venezuela and for the region," he said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. . .
here
Canada joins efforts by the Venezuelan right-wing opposition, the United States, and right-wing governments in Latin America
to oust democratically elected President Nicolas Maduro, Canada's Labour Congress, representing over three million Canadian workers,
issued a statement Wednesday calling on the Justin Trudeau government to promote dialogue instead of intervention and a military
coup. "Venezuelans need to resolve their differences through constructive dialogue and democratic processes without resorting
to violence," said CLC President Hassan Yussuff. .. .
here
"Let's be clear," [Pence] said. "This is no time for dialogue. This is time for action. And the time has come to end the
Maduro dictatorship once and for all." . .
here
I have just returned from Germany and seen a remarkable split between that nation's industrialists and their political leadership.
For years, major companies have seen Russia as a natural market, a complementary economy needing to modernize its manufacturing
and able to supply Europe with natural gas and other raw materials. America's New Cold War stance is trying to block this commercial
complementarity. Warning Europe against "dependence" on low-price Russian gas, it has offered to sell high-priced LNG from
the United States (via port facilities that do not yet exist in anywhere near the volume required). President Trump also is
insisting that NATO members spend a full 2 percent of their GDP on arms – preferably bought from the United States, not from
German or French merchants of death.
The U.S. overplaying its position is leading to the Mackinder-Kissinger-Brzezinski Eurasian nightmare that I mentioned above.
In addition to driving Russia and China together, U.S. diplomacy is adding Europe to the heartland, independent of U.S. ability
to bully into the state of dependency toward which American diplomacy has aimed to achieve since 1945.
The World Bank, for instance, traditionally has been headed by a U.S. Secretary of Defense. Its steady policy since its
inception is to provide loans for countries to devote their land to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves.
That is why its loans are only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency needed to provide price supports and agricultural
extension services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive. By following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves
open to food blackmail – sanctions against providing them with grain and other food, in case they step out of line with U.S.
diplomatic demands.
They would make Venezuela the new Pinochet-era Chile. Trump is not alone in supporting Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi terrorists
acting, as Lyndon Johnson put it, "Bastards, but they're our bastards."
Venezuelan general recognises opposition leader Guaido as president: Twitter video. A high-ranking Venezuelan air force general
said he had disavowed President Nicolas Maduro and now recognised opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim head-of-state, according
to a video circulating on Twitter on Saturday. In the video, General Francisco Yanez, a member of the air force's high command,
called on other members of the military to defect. He also reportedly claimed that 90 percent of the armed forces no longer support
Maduro.
The high command's web page lists Yanez, along with a photo, as the air force's head of strategic planning.
On its Twitter account, the high command of the military accused the general of treason.
Yanez is the first active Venezuelan general to recognise Guaido since he proclaimed himself president on Jan. 23.
Al Jazeera's Latin America editor Lucia Newman, reporting from Caracas, said the defection of the first active general is "another
blow" to the Maduro administration.
"Juan Guaido has been publicly appealing to the armed forces to defect, to abandon Nicolas Maduro, whose main support comes
from the military. Without it, he would have a difficult time to stay in power."
But the question now is whether Yanez commands a number of troops, and orders members of the armed forces to follow him, our
correspondent said.
F
Twitter report of a supposed Air Force general defecting to Guaido. Abrams was surely bound to be able to corrupt a few officers
but I doubt it will be enough to tip the scales..
https://twitter.com/oulosp/status/1091697589307797504?s=21
There is theory being bantered about that goes like this:
Trump is leaving Syria and Afghanistan. The move on Venezeula signals a turn toward neighborhood concerns. And Trump is so
foolish that he is helping to bring down the Empire (which he hates because he's an "America First" nationalist).
This "paper tiger" hopium has the feel of other false assertions such as: "Erdogan is turning east!" and "Putin is a Zionist!"
The reality is:
Expect lies/fibs/misleading statements/distracts The establishment has a long history of deceit that MSM works hard
to smooth over, cover-up, and memory-hole. They litterally think you're stoopid.
Trump 'good intentions' haven't produced anything concrete We have, in fact, only seen 'back-tracking' on the 'good
intentions' announcements. US is still assisting the genocide in Yemen. Trump's "immediate" Syrian troop withdrawal was delayed.
And the rumored reduction in US forces in Afghanistan was nothing more than a rumor.
Furthermore: It's clear that IF THERE IS any US 'pull-out' from Syria, the territory will not be returned to Syria. That
means US would likely provide support for whatever proxy forces take their place and that could lead to increasing US involvement
in Syria over time.
There is no evidence that Venezuela represents a 'turn' by the AZEmpire Venezuela has long been on their radar.
Trump is a faux populist front man for the Deep State He is the Republican Obama. We are seeing the same sort
of duplicity from Trump as we saw from Obama. What I call the 'Obama psyop' embodied peace via inclusiveness but that was a
smokescreen for covert war. The 'Trump psyop' embodies peace via anti-interventionalism but that is also a smokescreen. It
masks economic war; propaganda war; increased belligerence (INF treaty) and militarism (space force); etc.
Welcome to the rabbit hole.
Blooming Barricade , Feb 2, 2019 11:46:29 AM |
link
@104
@105
Isn't it lovely how they are now making their coup appeals right out in the open? Not hidden, and yet no condemnation, only
cheers from the corporate/government media NYTimes, BBC, CNN, Guardian, which I say should be renamed the counterinsurgency media
as they (attempt to) act to sway hearts and minds of neocolonial subjects (Read: everyone not in the elite class) backed by the
multinational imperialists Exxon, Jair Bolsonaro, Israel, etc and their mouthpieces. We really need to work on reestablishing
basic norms that this sort of thing should not be backed. In the Vietnam/Chile era this would be shameful...here we are listening
to the songs of the mockingbirds...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 2, 2019 11:48:44 AM |
link
Again, they are calling for a MILITARY COUP. How is the opposition frontman even allowed to walk free and solicit attacks on the
people of his country, backed to the hilt by the forces of ecocide and greed.
>Gen. Francisco Yañez (controls nothing) - A high-ranking Air Force general announced his support for Mr Guaidó in a video
message posted online.. . here . In response,
the Air Force's high command called him accused him of treason.
"No se podía esperar menos del TRAIDOR GD Francisco Esteban Yanez Rodriguez, sobrino del corrupto Gral Yanez Mendez que por cierto
tiene un expediente en la Contraloría General de la #FANB por corrupto!" . .
here
google translation: "You could not expect less from the GD TRAITOR Francisco Esteban Yanez Rodriguez, nephew of the corrupt Gral
Yanez Mendez who incidentally has a file in the General Comptroller's Office of the #FANB for corrupt!"
>MIAMI -- Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are preparing massive protests in cities worldwide today to pressure the country's
president, Nicolás Maduro out of office. Venezuelans are planning to fill the streets in more than 70 cities around the world,
including Caracas, Miami, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Melbourne, Athens, and Beirut.
>Canada to convene Lima Group and other countries about Venezuela crisis Monday -- The Honourable Chrystia Freeland, Minister
of Foreign Affairs, today announced that Canada will host the 10th ministerial meeting of the Lima Group in Ottawa, Ontario on
February 4, 2019. The Lima Group was established in August 2017, in Lima, Peru, to co-ordinate participating countries' efforts
and apply international pressure on Venezuela until democracy is restored. The group's meetings have included representatives
from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru
and Saint Lucia. -- Canada rules the world on anti-Venezuela as a US stooge to avoid the "Yankee go home" and 'stupid gringo"
tags.
Trumps statements about the endless or the expensive wars must be balanced against his military build up and his statements
on taking the oil in countries the US has attacked. According to a current piece in Sputnik, Raytheon began building facilities
for short and medium range missiles shortly after Trump came to power.
https://sputniknews.com/us/201902021072066039-satellite-images-inf/
Production of low yield nuclear warheads or tactical nukes has begun, with the intention of having sufficient numbers for military
use (operational capability) by September of this year.
It is useful to look at this situation through the perspective that Hudson offers in his article. The petrodollar which has buttressed
US power since 1971 is crumbling. The ability of the US Treasury to print inflation proof dollars and buy anything it wants is
coming to an end. So is US domination over the world financial system, SWIFT etc.
The card game is ending with the US ruling class as the loser. But, instead of throwing in its hand, smiling and returning to
the serious business of real life (climate change, pollution, ecocide, famine etc) it decides on one last gamble. A desperation
move. (You don't let Bolton retrieve Elliot Abrams from his tomb for anything less.)
And that is where the sudden decision to
change course in Venezuela, from the slow steady squeezing of sanctions and full spectrum pressure to a coup, literally a devastating
blow, aimed at leveling the regime in Caracas because America's last chance requires a dictatorship over Latin America.
Already it looks, according to Pepe Escobar, as if Bolsonaro is being pushed aside to serve as a figurehead and nothing more,
for a military dictatorship. He will welcome that. Honduras is already under such a dictatorship. Ecuador is doing what it is
told again. My guess is that Argentina, falling apart under neo-liberal fanatics is going to return to military rule too. Chile
is not far from it.
In short the US response to losing its reserve currency monopoly is going to be to strengthen its own bloc-in which its currency
will rule- and, soft power having failed, turn to brutal military measures.
That's not to suggest that such a lunatic plan will succeed. I don't think it can. But that is no reason to believe that narcissistic
Washington, drunk on its own propaganda, its ruling class completely invested in exceptionalist, militaristic projects, won't
give it a try.
And kill a few tens of millions, maybe billions if things go nuclear, in the attempt. Fascism generally ends in the way that
it did in Hitler's bunker. La lutte finale may be coming.
Concentration pro-coupist
Guaido aleardy dispersing , once concluded theri well payed duty, after a speech composed of one line slogan after another,
hailed in a crazy shouting way by the crowd concetrated in an obviously very rich neighborhood...( one wonders why is that they
have complaints agaisnt Maduro when they are doing so well already ) all seasoned with high-sounding hymns like "Odd to Joy"
( all very Venezuelan..) and the so worn-out of so much use, "Sí se puede" ( "Yes, we can" if more was needed to show that
this stooge is pretended to remind Obama...)
Maduro asks the astonishing crowd concentrated in Bolivar Avenue now for ours already if they want new elections to reinforce
the power of the people and the people answers "Yes"...!
This disarticulates clearly the EU position....and the Pence´s position on non negotiation under any circunstances.... The
plotters, looters and undemocratic forces at work, left bottom up unveiled before the whole world to see.... Now he is claiming
to all workers and employers to continue the path of development and recovering.....
The strategy of calling in new parliamentary elections once Guaido has been unmasked as foreign agent is the best to clean the
National Assembly from traitors sold to foreign actors and capital.
Venezuelans take to streets in push to force Maduro from power Demonstrators say they are close to achieving objective
of forcing president to step down Tens of thousands of Venezuelan protesters streamed on to the streets of the nation's
capital on Saturday for what they described as the final push to force Nicolás Maduro from power.
There are not enough of them on the street. If the report mentioned hundreds of thousands or millions, then I'd say that Maduro
might be deposed but as it is no.
If they want more bottom-feeders to turn out for their fake rallies, why are they being so stingy with the freebees? They ought
to offer free booze. The US coupsters got the money for it. It worked for George Washington, and various Roman politicians.
Can someone tell me (despite tag I am not North American based) what the average Trump voter thinks of all this? Is this a vote
winner amongst his support base?
"We have decided to steal Venezuela's oil and gold" - maybe a lot of Americans support him? Please someone enlighten me.
Hudson overstates his case, mostly by making Trump central to his thesis.
1) Russia and China were driven together long before Trump.
2) Virtually all countries looking to de-dollarize were already at odds with USA (before Trump)
3) The number of countries that have supported USA's Venezuelan coop attempt actually demonstrates the strength of the AZEmpire.
4) European SWIFT is a nothing burger. The European poodles complain but go along with USA on anything that USA cares about.
Example: Europe now says that they will EuroSWIFT only to trade in humanitarian goods for Iran.
5) USA 'meddling', duplicity and hegemonic intentions have been long known by other countries. What has changed is NOT that
countries have 'woken up' to this, but that China and Russia offer an alternative.
6) IMO the move to the right in the West has been long anticipated. And Trump has co-opted the right in the US as effectively
as Obama co-opted the left. Expect the right in other countries to be co-opted also.
A backlash against the left's support and encouragement for large immigrant populations has been building for two decades.
Cui bono? Western society is increasingly resembling Israel and Saudi Arabia which have large population of poor service workers
with few rights (Palestinians, "guest workers").
7) Hudson ignores the fact that AZEmpire has woken to the threat posed by Russia and China to their hegemonic NWO plans -AND-
ignores the real failure of neocon asshats: that they 'lost the peace' after the Cold War by their abusive treatment of Russia
as they hoped for Russia's total capitulation. This failure was magnified by the fact that they NEEDED Russia to join with the
West so that China could be isolated. Assisting China's "peaceful rise" without isolating her was a recipe for disaster: a disaster
that is now playing out.
@ Sasha | Feb 2, 2019 12:44:02 PM | 114 "Yes, we can" if more was needed to show that this stooge is pretended to remind Obama...)
I saw the boy wonder Guaidó walking with some people in a video today, and his mannerisms reminded me of Obama. . . Could it be?
Hugo Chavez was sworn in as Venezuela president twenty years ago today, Feb 2 1999. The anti-US presstitutes, especially NBC's
Carmen Sesin, are predicting large demonstrations today: "Venezuelans are planning to fill the streets in more than 70 cities
around the world, including Caracas, Miami, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Melbourne, Athens, and Beirut." . . .and of course the "news"
can be predictive also, so the headline reads "Venezuelans take to the streets worldwide calling for an end to Maduro's presidency."
.
here . . . . We'll see.
1. Why tell me? All I did was describe the lay of the land under your capitalism and your general authoritarian political system.
People are right to distrust it in general. If that leads some to make objectively incorrect decisions (and I'm not saying non-vaccination
in any particular case is right or wrong), blame your leaders and cadres who systematically destroyed all bonds of social trust.
If some epidemics become more likely because more and more people find it impossible to trust doctors, scientists, and government
officials who all are clearly corporate shills, that's the fault of your system, not of the people who don't trust. Don't blame
the people. You sound like a specimen of the exact boot-licking conformist authoritarian yahoos I was talking about.
2. In spite of the best rigged efforts of your corporate researchers, non-vaccinators have never been found to have caused
an epidemic. Meanwhile your globalization, your climate change, and your forcing tens of millions of people off their land and
into immiseration camps (shantytowns) all are driving new epidemics and reviving old ones. A handful of non-vaccinators could
never injure the public health remotely as much even if they deliberately tried for a thousand years.
3. If you really care about public health (in my experience members of the lynch mob are invariably frauds), what have you
done to help put a stop to the systematic campaign of corporations and governments to destroy antibiotics as a medically effective
treatment? Through systematic abuse of antibiotics in factory farms, genetic engineering, and the slathering of the environment
with herbicides (the most used herbicides like glyphosate are also broad-scale antibiotics), industrial agriculture is deliberately
and massively generating a pandemic of antibiotic resistant pathogens. This is guaranteed to generate lethal pandemics among humans.
By orders of magnitude this is a vastly worse campaign against the public than a handful of ad hoc non-vaccinators could ever
be. So if you have such venom left over for this fugitive handful, your actions against the corporate/government campaign to destroy
the efficacy of antibiotics must be extraordinary. Please direct me to your record here. I want links. Otherwise you're a total
fraud, like every other mobber I've encountered.
4. I have no doubt if you were handed a gun and ordered to be part of a firing squad you'd wet your pants and start crying.
Most people in US could not find Venezuela on a map even with the current news cycle. Most Trump supporters are interested
in jobs. Most are not war hawks. Anti war Trump supporters hope he is draining the swamp. Exposing, disgracing and getting rid
of neocons. (From the political scene)
Scotch Bingeington , Feb 2, 2019 3:14:26 PM |
link
I have yet to read about a halt in Venezuelan crude-oil shipping to the US. And whatever became of the request for US-embassy
personnel to leave the country? Is anything actually being followed through?
More and more I get the feeling that the Maduro administration is just not up to it. War has been declared on them, but what do
they do? If you challenge the US – and that's exactly what they did, by circumventing the dollar, by trying to increase business
with the US's minions in the Caribbean, by inviting Russia to get a foothold in the USA's mainland oil business, by doling out
free heating oil to charitable institutions and families in need across the US, by publicly aligning with Syria and China and
so on – surely you would have contingency planning in place? Trying to foresee the USA's reaction and how to respond to it, in
turn?
So I recon CITGO is still being supplied by PDVSA. Imagine that. Possibly employees are still getting their pay checks by cash-deprived
Venezuela, too. It's insane. Guiado still free and able to diligently follow his script.
Crude shipments to CITGO should have been stopped completely two weeks ago. Non-domestic staff at CITGO should have been laid
off asap. Venezuelans among staffers should have been offered to return home or be expatriated. Given the current volatility in
Western economies and especially the impending doom coming for the US shale business, such measures might have put considerable
further strain on the West, might even have sent us on a downward spiral towards a full-blown economic crisis.
In the meantime, the embassy in Washington plus the various (!) consulates across the US should have seen to it that business
is wound down. Then leave. After that, expel diplomats at the US embassy in Caracas – by all means. Also sever ties with any other
country that has supported Guiado's blatant act of high treason. I wonder how the Netherlands would have reacted, given its vulnerability
in Curacao.
Guiado should simply have been deported, GDR-style. Why bother with him in a trial? Just get rid of him. Let him move to Miami,
to follow in Marco Rubio's footsteps.
As a reciprocal step in light of what the Bank of England did with Venezuela's gold, one or two of Royal Caribbean's flagship
cruisers should be captured, or "forfeited". Disrupt the happy-go-lucky cruising business in the Caribbean a little. Now, any
further gold transport, to the UAE or wherever, should only be conducted by the Navies of the two countries involved.
Finally, spread the word that any country volunteering to become the staging ground for a US invasion will be considered an enemy
at war. That should make at least some people in Colombia, Brazil, Aruba and Curacao gulp.
The Washington regime won't let go. So for Maduro to try and just sit it out is a patently insane idea. Because for now, time
is on the US side.
And what about firing squads for those who have murdered untold millions by giving them cancer by poisoning the food, water, air,
and general environment? I missed the part where you already joined those firing squads, or called for them to exist.
I can say w/o fear of contradiction that Trump feels like me, that this Venna-zwala thing will fail, providing another opportunity
to fire some more old guard neocons and Make America Great Again. Maybe all three: Pence, Pompeo and Bolton. Package deal. Like
it was fun doing Mad Dog.
"I have yet to read about a halt in Venezuelan crude-oil shipping to the US. And whatever became of the request for US-embassy
personnel to leave the country? Is anything actually being followed through?
More and more I get the feeling that the Maduro administration is just not up to it. War has been declared on them, but what
do they do?"
If a nation has committed itself to (1) a de facto colonized extraction-based economy (which also involves physically destroying
your own country, just as much as if it were from an external military attack), (2) which is at the mercy of a global commodity
system, (3) which is controlled by vastly more powerful forces which are aggressive, militarist bullies under the best of circumstances
and are irrationally hostile toward that nation in particular; then I don't see any way to exist other than at the mercy of such
hostile forces.
I don't know what possible way out Venezuela has within the framework of the globalized extreme energy civilization.
@ Scotch Bingeington | Feb 2, 2019 3:14:26 PM | 133 . . .Because for now, time is on the US side.
Why? This exercise is actually about more than Maduro, as the Wall Street Journal published
here , shortened by paywall:
U.S. Push to Oust Venezuela's Maduro Marks First Shot in Plan to Reshape Latin America
The Trump administration's
broader aim is to gain leverage over Cuba and curb recent inroads in the region by Russia, Iran and China
WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration's attempt to force out the president of Venezuela marked the opening of a new strategy
to exert greater U.S. influence over Latin America, according to administration officials.
In sight isn't just Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, but also Cuba, an antagonist that has dominated American attention in the
region for more than 50 years, as well as recent inroads made by Russia, China and Iran.
Russia and China especially have lots of money invested so we can bet that Maduro is listening very closely to what they are telling
him, and acting accordingly. So far, it's working. There is no indication that the US efforts will be successful, is there? Meanwhile,
it seems to me that time is on Maduro's side.
Following your recommended script would be serving US wish for war/military invasion in a silver plate. What Maduro is doing,
as got clear during his speech at Bolivar Avenue in front of the crowd concentrated there to celebrate the 20 anniversay of Bolivarian
Revolution, is following a similar path Russian is doing, by keeping in the side of law abiding countries, while unveiling the
real thuggish character of the US, most naked than ever....
He stated that the fight to recover Venezuelan assests seized y the US and UK will e claimed at the corresponding tribunals,
he claimed for time for things to develop and fall by their own weight.
He most probably finds no point in harming other countries populations, including those of the countries who are openly participating
in this outrage and assault on the Venezuelan people. By doing so, he will be behaving like the warmonger scoundrels currently
ruling in the US/UK/Canada/EU/Colombia/Brazil/Peru/Argentina, and so on....Most of them are most probably going off in the next
elections at heir respective countries....due their approvation ratings... Why rush at all?
He called the Venezuelan people to continue working hard without falling into provocations, and took the opoortunity to dismantle
part of the plot y calling for new parliamentary elections...That he did not follow the path and script wished by the US and his
minion Guaido does not mean he is succumbing to threats.
"The Washington regime won't let go. So for Maduro to try and just sit it out is a patently insane idea."
Madero isn't sitting it out: he has called for new elections, is getting vote in Parliament and is asking a people's referendum
on it as well The wannabe President didn't run in the election because polls indicated that they would lose badly. This is a sensible
tactical move on Madero's part IMO, both the call for elections and the people's referendum
Its not sensible to call for elections for Maduro. The oppostion will reject the elections again along with the US/EU. Does anyone
really believe west will somehow accept Mauduro if is there was an election (how many is necessary? They just had one!) one is
naive as Maduro seems to be himself.
The proof that what the US and its appointed fake president Guaido are looking for is a civil war in Venezuela, which would
dismantle the sate and transform it into a failed state, is to e found in Guaido´s beligerent speech in front of the crowd concetrated
to hear him in an Eastern rich neighborhood, people who dispersed themselves quite fast, after showing so excited by what Guaido
was saying, once his disapassionate and clearly anti-Venezuelan speech finished..
The regular parliamentary elections were expected to be held in Venezuela in 2020. However, Maduro said that the body needs
to be "re-legitimized" as he addressed a large crowd of his supporters during a rally in Caracas.
The president said that he would consult the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly – a body elected in 2017 to draft the new constitution
– on the issue. If the assembly backs the proposal the vote will be scheduled for some time this year. Earlier, Venezuela's
Supreme Court declared all acts of the National Assembly, headed by Guaido, as null and void.
Meanwhile, Venezuela continues to witness both pro and anti-government rallies. Tens of thousands of people took to the
streets of the Venezuelan capital on Saturday to join a pro-government demonstration to celebrate 20 years since the late Venezuelan
president, Hugo Chavez, launched the Bolivarian revolution.
A sea of people can be seen flooding a kilometers-long stretch of Bolivar Avenue in downtown Caracas to listen to Maduro's
speech. Crowds were waving Venezuela's national flags and holding placards with portraits of Chavez.
Tens of thousands of people also gathered in the eastern part of the capital for a rally organized by the opposition. The
national flag-waving crowds also occupied a long stretch in the city as they came to listen to Guaido.
In his speech, Maduro hailed the determination and "deep loyalty" of the people as demonstrated over the last 20 years,
and called on Guaido-led opposition to engage in a dialog.
The president appealed to the reason of the opposition politicians and said he is ready to meet them "the day they want."
He also said economics and "national peace" would be the focus of the conversation .
The opposition leader's statements were more belligerent, however. He declared that the upcoming month would become a
"breaking point" in the opposition's struggle for power and called for new massive protests on February 12. He also claimed
that 90 percent of Venezuelans "want change" and "no one here fears a civil war ."
I saw the boy wonder Guaidó walking with some people in a video today, and his mannerisms reminded me of Obama. . . Could it
be? Posted by: Don Bacon | Feb 2, 2019 2:19:46 PM | 126
Hmm. The suggestion being that both politicans are barbaric products of a God-forsaken and eternally-damned CIA laboratory factory-farm?
That is a far-fetched thesis, I think. Still, this Guaidó character is a certifiable doppleleganger for the richie Crassus
who led the Roman Legions into one of their most humiliating defeats against the Parthians.
IS it within the realm of possiblity
that the ghost of Crassius, stuck in the desert out there in what is now West Iran, can't locate the golden ray, so he is animating
Obama and Guidó? Inquiring minds want to know. As the big-shots always say: nothing is off the table, so...
See minutes 0:22 and 1:00 and tell me that Crassus is not Guidó. And at 1:22: Do eyes deceive? does the young Bolton appear
in the Guidó's royal entourage?
Repy to: Zanon 143
"It's not sensible to call for elections for Maduro. The opposition will reject the elections again along with the US/EU. Does
anyone really believe west will somehow accept Mauduro if is there was an election (how many is necessary? They just had one!)
one is naive as Maduro seems to be himself."
I respectfully disagree. This fellow wants to be president, fine go for it, apply for the job; run for office. Does he feel
the election will be stolen, fine have election observers from all over the world. If he still says no, then he shows himself
to be a fraud to the world.
The UN will back Maderos on this; Maderos is using the Russian playbook, stay calm, stay sane, call for the rule of law.
A far-left faction within Germany's socialist Left Party goes briefly where no one is allowed to go, concerning Venezuela...
then gets reminded of all those revisionists who are imprisoned in Germany
so they instantly reverse themselves, grovel on their knees, apologize profusely...
When will they ever learn who you are not allowed to criticize or even make fun of?
German Left Party group slammed over "anti-Semitic" Venezuela cartoon
The Cuba Si Hessen group posted the image on Facebook on Wednesday. It shows a grim reaper cloaked in a United States flag
and holding a bloody scythe painted to resemble the flag of Israel.
The figure knocks at a door titled "Venezuela." Blood spills out of other opened doors marked "Iraq," "Libya," "Syria" and
"Ukraine."
The group captioned the image with: "We stand on the side of the legitimate Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, and oppose
any form of intervention. Yankee go home!"
Why have elections if you arent sure you will win?
Maduro would likely win, yes - but its not sensible since Guiado and other will not participate since they will risk losing,
besides election observers from EU/US will say the election result is a fraud.
For US/EU Guaido, the issue isnt with "elections", the issue is Maduro/socialist party.
UN and have no power when the bullets, chaos is ignited by US/EU.
Call for the rule of law, why? Neocons dont give a damn about it.
This is the reality. Maduro should play hard too, not appease anyone with "elections" or "dialogue", not because that is wrong,
but because it doesnt work with the parties (US/EU Guiado) involved.
I appreciate your thoughtful analysis of the vaccination crisis. It's bitterly amusing that pro-vaccination orthodoxy purports
to have sole, exclusive ownership and occupancy of both the scientific and ethical high ground, and superciliously denounces and
condemns any rational skepticism of the current state of the Big Pharma (as opposed to "medical science") driven Total
Vaccination imperative as mad or bad heresy.
I don't have children, but my experience in recent years 1) avoiding dubious "flu shots", and 2) dutifully, and so far unsuccessfully,
submitting to the vexing, Kafkaesque ordeal of getting the newest shingles vaccine is more than enough to make me a proud
heretic.
If vaccinations were developed and marketed with the same exemplary scientific and ethical standards manifested by Jonas Salk,
the horror-story "side-effects" and abuses (e.g., the CIA using vaccination programs as a cover for black ops) wouldn't exist--
at least on a scale that causes some of the public to rightly doubt their virtue and efficacy.
The Stern Adult "their blood is on your hands" j'accuse is pathetic. Moderate progressives who loyally supported the
abominable "Obamacare" health-corporation bailout used the same shrill invective: "Obamacare saved my granny's life! If you dare
to criticize it, why, you're either expressing self-absorbed 'privilege' or sociopathy!"
Age of Autism, a very useful compendium of vaccine issues.
Just viewed a segment on Sharyl Attkisson's show how Paraguay has all but eradicated malaria since 2011. To bring back towards
topic, you can bet that Big Pharma is itching to get back into Venezuela to roll out its vaccine programmes. Ask India how that
has been going.
Zanon
where do you get this crap about an presidential election for Venezuela. Maduro has called for a parliamentary election, not a
presidential election.
Parliament members like this Guiado have now shown their colors. most will be booted out of the parliament if an election is held
now.
@Peter that would be a great maneuver, sure to be torpedoed by the Opp/US as it wont bring the desired results. If & when sniper
fire starts we'll get a clear understanding of Venezuela's ennemies resolve. Until then, I dont think this putch attempt is working
very well..
History proves that you can't appease this kind of aggressor. For those who think Maduro needs to make every kind of concession,
I don't know who the target audience for that is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, judging from how you froth at the mouth and spew death threats upon hearing mention of a small group engaged in
civil disobedience, you're definitely in need of the Big Pharma Medication Regime you so ardently worship. Just pray you never
need those antibiotics you're content to see destroyed!
I've had bad experiences with doctors myself, and heard horror stories from many other people. Not involving vaccines in my
case, but the same principle and enough to make me regard all doctors as not just corporate agents but effectively extensions
of the police state.
As for my corporate troll here, as I demonstrated his type doesn't really care about public health at all. That's why I call
them "proxxers", because their hysteria over the non-vaccinators is clearly a proxy for something else. Part of it is that they
regard this type of civil disobedience as an intolerable affront to their cult of scientism and statism.
Maduro/his party will likely win such an election, but no point since the other side - EU/US Guaido will reject that, they
have already shown their real colors in not reconizing Maduro/his party, they have nothing to lose now unfortunately.
>>>>: NemesisCalling | Feb 2, 2019 3:39:12 PM | 140
Besides the measles being relatively innocuous
Tell that to the one hundred and fifty thousand people who die from it each year
In 2011, the WHO estimated that 158,000 deaths were caused by measles. This is down from 630,000 deaths in 1990. As of 2013,
measles remains the leading cause of vaccine-preventable deaths in the world . In developed countries, death occurs
in one to two cases out of every 1,000 (0.1–0.2%). In populations with high levels of malnutrition and a lack of adequate healthcare,
mortality can be as high as 10%. In cases with complications, the rate may rise to 20–30%. In 2012, the number of deaths due
to measles was 78% lower than in 2000 due to increased rates of immunization among UN member states.
For comparison:
The death rate from diarrhoeal diseases decreased by almost 1 million between 2000 and 2016, but still caused 1.4 million deaths
in 2016. Similarly, the number of tuberculosis deaths decreased during the same period, but is still among the top 10 causes
with a death toll of 1.3 million. HIV/AIDS is no longer among the world's top 10 causes of death, having killed 1.0 million
people in 2016 compared with 1.5 million in 2000.
So, measles has 10% of the lethality of tuberculosis. Please go and peddle your anti-vaccine conspiracy theories elsewhere.
Parliamentary elections will not appease the US, but for Venezuela they will clean out the crap that has shown its colors.
This will put Venezuela in a stronger, more united position to resist the US.
I agree with you, that would work in a normal world yes, but they arent interested in elections. They already have the backing
of their neighbous, EU, US. All this saying about they will look like fools is long overdue by now. Its not about "looks" but
who gains the power by any means. Simply, they play dirty and so shall also Maduro play IMO.
What conspiracy theory pray tell am I peddling?
That people should have a choice as to how they want to approach a relatively innocuous disease. Yes I highly doubt your WHO stats.
Sanitation has been the prime mover with regards to disease eradication the world over. I am speaking as an American for Americans.
Go peddle your compulsory vaccine agenda for 3rd worlds elsewhere.
The US have been very public about trying to buy the Venezuelan military, hoping, as in the early days of Syria, many will swap
sides. An election that kicks out of parliament all those flying the US flag will make it much more difficult for the US to cause
defections in the military.
Russia has done a good job (although still a work in progress) of reuniting Syria and I can see Russia's hand in Maduro's call
for parliamentary elections.
I think the people who are discussing here about vaccines should wait for the possible imminent Open Thread of every weekend here
to discuss there that topic, so as to not derail the important discussion about Venezuela here at this thread.
Just thinking about the folks who credit Trump for not starting any wars. Seems to me the the empire starting wars kinda hit a
brick wall when Russia stuck its nose in Syria and that precedes Donald by a couple of years.
I hope it (your first link) was picked at random, because this author is not doing his cause any favors:
As it turns out, all it takes to find out what is really in the vaccines is to break rank, seize a sample of what is being
injected into the children, put it in a real lab that is not compromised by kikes , and VOILA!!! suddenly it is known that
the vaccines are not at all what they are claimed to be.
I think a Vz parliament vote on having parliament elections early and a citizens referendum on such a vote helps Maduros rally
his base and shores up Russian calls for the rule of law to be upheld.
Sure the US and co will disparage the effort but it would not be done for them but for the Vz people.
If he holds the people, he wins the war.
And my apologies, I thought the proposed election would include the office of President, I was wrong.
The call by Maduro for elections is brilliant IMO.
This was one of the Empire's demands--
'Spain, France, Germany and Britain have given embattled Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro an ultimatum, saying the nations
would recognise opposition leader Juan Guaido as president unless he calls elections within eight days."
At this point, the pro-vaxxers are a Mengele death cult. The vaccine schedule amounting to dozens of vaccinations, before infants
even have a developed immune system, is creating generations of cretins and invalids. Just the hpv vaccine alone has caused horrific
injuries, including total debilitation and paralysis,just like the polio vaccines in India caused 100s of thousands of cases of
paralysis. It is probable that the mortality from vaccinations exceeds the mortality from the contagious diseases themselves,
but the pro-vaxxer cult think they have the right to play god.
The pro-vaxxer cult has the blood and suffering of countless individuals on their hands, and the people who cover up the deaths
of infants from vaccinations with fancy sounding syndromes like shaken baby syndrome and SIDS should be hanged form lampposts.
My South American friends say that most with money and critical skills have left and are living in other South American countries
until the mess clears itself up. I have worked with a few of key types of workers kicked out in the early days by Chavez for not
being sufficiently Marxist. According to them it was a be one of us or die proposition. That type of expertise is critical, not
easy to replace, and not prone to lean Marxist. It takes 15 to 20 years to earn your bones in those types of businesses.
As the Marxists grabbed all the means of production the economy collapsed. Their enemies have deep pockets and are experts
at regime change. A propaganda war to soften the hearts and minds of the taxpayers is usually the first step. The people suffer,
the empire howls, the people suffer. If the Empire wins; the people suffer, the Marxists howl, the people suffer. Not many options
there but to leave.
Don Bacon@135
Re: Pence, Pompeo, and Bolton
Trump picked all 3 of them, nobody forced them on him. He can replace Pompeo and Bolton today if he wants to, he doesn't need
an excuse or an opportunity to do that. His appointments are a much clearer expression of his intentions and policy that anything
he says or tweets.
The Pretender has a cunning plan; free money, free food and if you like your oil co, you can keep your oil company:
from a zerohedge commenter:
"President Guaidó Unveils Giant Government Program to Fix Venezuela
The plan consists of three key elements: social renewal, economic renewal, and control of petroleum supplies. First, the government
would create 11 social programs, all part of a larger social security plan, that would help Venezuelans back on their feet. The
economic plan would consist of government subsidies to "every family that needs them," as well as heavy investment in government
education and health care.
The petroleum plan saw Guaidó's government vow to return Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state-run oil company, to pre-socialist
production levels. The opposition team promised not to privatize the industry, but to return it to the hands of capable oil experts
who can adequately find and process the crude oil.
key takeaway "..return it(the oil co) to the hands of capable oil experts." That would be Exxon et al. At the old rates of
70% US and 30% Vz is my guess, and didn't Vz have to repay the US for all upfront costs before they ever saw the 30%??
Is Bolton in charge, or is Pence? Pence certainly has been the face of much of the Venezuela policy. Is it because 1) He's
modeling the office of the VP after GHW Bush's and Cheney's lead? 2)Trump has been so consumed with the congressional showdown
and govt. shutdown, that he's let Pence, Pompeo and Bolton take the lead on Venezuela? 3) Trump is planning to go out in a blaze
of glory -- declare Mission Accomplished on his agenda (even if he has to declare a State of Emergency to get his Wall) and resign,
leaving Pence in charge (with the power to pardon him if need be).
The Venezuelans taking to the streets worldwide today as promised by NBC
here didn't happen. Even CNN "breaking news" couldn't find a few Venezuelans loitering on the street somewhere in any city
besides Caracas.
Guaido has his marching orders from Washington, refusing mediation from Mexico and Uruguay.
tweet
Ratificamos a los gobiernos de México y Uruguay nuestra posición de restituir el orden constitucional en Venezuela. Tenemos una
ruta clara:
1. Cese de la usurpación
2. Gobierno de transición
3. Elecciones libres
¡Únanse a nuestro llamado democrático! . . here
google translate
We ratify to the governments of Mexico and Uruguay our position of restoring the constitutional order in Venezuela. We have a
clear route:
1. Cessation of usurpation
2. Transitional government
3. Free elections
Join our democratic call!
Maduro called his bluff with his snap election suggestion.
Guaido is obeying Pence: "Let's be clear," [Pence] said. "This is no time for dialogue. This is time for action. And the time
has come to end the Maduro dictatorship once and for all." . .
here
I posted a comment in the prior thread's comments (venezuela-coup-attempt-part-of-a-larger-project-military-intervention-likely-to-fail
#173), that is relevant to this discussion, I won't repost in full but the gist is last Thursday I watched the Atlantic council's
livestream of their "Supporting the New Venezuelan Interim Government" forum, featuring two representatives of the Guaido Coup
(Carlos Vecchio & Julio Borges) as well as The Ambassadors of the EU, Paraguay & Chile. All of whom were extremely hostile to
the true Venezuelan government and stressed the new for a rapid response to drive Maduro and that this coup was just the first
step in a larger mission and that the entire region must go through a "fall of the Berlin Wall" process [their terminology) ending
the influence of Cuba throughout Latin America. This the process must be irreversible and redefine the ideological prism of the
economic and human rights, a historic change in the direction of Latin America. This was openly and bluntly stated at the forum.
On thing I left out of my original coverage was that during the Q&A the Coup representatives were asked about how they
would treat international agreements signed by the Maduro government and they basically said 1) that would not acknowledge any
agreement signed by Maduro's government since 2015 and 2) they specifically called out Russia & China saying that if they wanted
any of their agreements with Venezuelan honoured they would need to remove their support for Maduro - needless to say I don't
think talking smack to the Russians or Chinese will accomplish much for the coup plotters. Nor do I think the Cuban government
is threatened in the least by the latest threats to Cuba
Juan Guaido, Venezuela's self-proclaimed president, has been recognized by president Trump and the European Parliament as interim
president of Venezuela, but on his twitter account here Guaido still
calls himself the president of the national assembly of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Such humility by the boy wonder!
@ mourning dove, Rusty Pipes
President Trump's MO is that for him to succeed others have to fail. So he set up Mattis to fail in Afghanistan and Syria, which
he did, and was fired. Now we're onto a new generation of failures, including Pence Pompeo and Bolton. Clever, what?
El Cartero Atómico , Feb 2, 2019 8:32:07 PM |
link
I have no position in the pros and cons of the vaccine discussion but laws such as the one below make me wonder. If vaccines are
safe why is this law in place and did the pharmaceutical companies lobby for this.
U.S. Code Title 42. THE PUBLIC HEALTH AND WELFARE (1) No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising
from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or
death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper
directions and warnings.
After doing research about other drugs such as statins I think the secrecy and misleading actions of Big Pharma can lead people
to lose faith in them.
Finally, in regard to the coup in Venezuela, I just finished watching a documentary about the torture and murder of Victor
Jara after the Chilean coup. A man who had been an 18 year Chilean Military conscript and participated in the human rights abuses
after the coup said he still suffered from the guilt of his actions. He appeared very sad and old beyond his years. Meanwhile
a retired CIA officer expressed no regret for his actions and looked great. It helps to be a psychopath or sociopath. I'm sure
that Trump, Bolton, Pompeo, etc. will not suffer if their actions regarding Venezuela result in death and suffering.
I think it had to do with the protests in so far that the thugs saw a chance to commit their violence under the cover of wider
protests. Much like the fringe violent elements of the Gilets Jaunes.
I am going to assume that the coup in Venezuela is going to fail given the early movements by both parties. So that plate of empire
becomes maybe like the Ukraine spinning plate. What comes next? We can't be out of plates and spinners for money.
On the road
to a multi-polar world will there be a time of total breakdown in trade and border porosity? Will there be 2 global internet backbones
and traffic between each will be restricted and monitored? Maybe we even get 2 UN organizations which would be a hoot if there
was any sort of transparency.
Guaido is an Apprentice that is about to be fired by the Venezuelan people in the election he called for....after lots of money
spent on the spinning plate.
That's some convoluted reasoning and you are clearly very invested in it and
are able to adapt it to anything Trump does. Failure isn't a strategy for success and appointments of rabid neocons isn't a strategy
for peace.
These things are self evident, but ultimately irrelevant if you are committed to maintaining an untenable position.
"EU lawmakers voted 439 in favor to 104 against, with 88 abstentions, at a special session
in Brussels to recognize Venezuelan congress head Guaido as interim leader. In a statement
with the non-binding vote, the parliament urged the bloc's 28 governments to follow suit and
consider Guaido "the only legitimate interim president""
"lawmaker" aka the EU pseudo-parliament.
In Venezuela the people can trigger a recall referendum on the government/president (is
there any country in EU where the people can do this?)
The process to instigate a recall referendum in Venezuela:
The image we are getting from MSM are that almost all Venezuelans hate Maduro
"dictatorship", how hard could it be to get 20% of the voters for a referendum?
INSTEX seems to be set up to fail. US-poodle UK as its supervisory board. It was UK that
refused to ship gold to Venezuela just this week.
No way the EU misleadership will do something to make life better for its citizens.
"to promote an unconditional transition in Cuba to democracy, the rule of law and the free market." is code words for the
neoliberal coup and stealing resources of the country. just look at Ukraine.
Notable quotes:
"... So how does the "Merkelization" concern relate to the US plans to start nation-breaking in Latin America? ..."
"... Now to the main points of the Journal article . It stresses that Cuba and Venezuela have been aiding each other, with Venezuela donating oil to Cuba and Cuba providing support to Venezuela's military and security forces. ..."
"... The U.S. strategy carries major risks. If the administration's support for opposition leader Juan Guaidó in Venezuela fails to unseat Mr. Maduro, or if it fails to weaken ties between Caracas and Havana, the desperate conditions in Venezuela could worsen and tether the U.S. more closely with the crisis. An estimated three million Venezuelans have fled their country. ..."
"... Mr. Cutz laid out options to escalate pressure on the Maduro regime, including a financial strike at Venezuela's oil exports. At first, the administration held back, fearing such an action would allow Mr. Maduro to blame the country's woes on Washington. ..."
"... Mr. Bolton, named national security adviser last year, has long taken a tough line on Cuba and Venezuela. He was later joined by Mr. Claver-Carone, who took over western hemispheric affairs at the National Security Council and shared Mr. Bolton's view. ..."
"... An archived edition of Capitol Hill Cubans described Mr. Claver-Carone as the co-founder and director of U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, a donation vehicle for House and Senate members. It was founded in 2003 "to promote an unconditional transition in Cuba to democracy, the rule of law and the free market." ..."
"... The story describes in detail how the US perceived that, "The decision by two of Venezuela's major opposition parties and past rivals -- First Justice and Popular Will -- to join forces a year ago provided for the first time a potential alternative to the Maduro regime." ..."
"... The US decided to leverage street protests at the time of the inauguration for Maduro's second term, on January 10. Other plans: ..."
"... The imposition of sanctions on Venezuela's oil company, PdVSA, announced by the U.S. on Jan. 28, could be worth as much $11 billion in U.S. crude oil sales. ..."
"... Among the next steps, U.S. officials said, are proposed new measures against Havana, such as restoring Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. That could hit financing and investments from countries outside the U.S. that now do business there, as well as the funds the country gets from international tourists. ..."
"... I am similarly depressed. I don't think we'll see any real improvement in the situation until the last of the neo-cons die off (hopefully slow, painful deaths.) ..."
"... There is an appalling scene in Fahrenheit 119 where Obama rips his mask off to the people of Flint. Far too many of today's leaders are sociopaths. ..."
"... Link to Bolton's statement about US wanting Venezuela's oil: ..."
"... "Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, also announced the settlement of their country's oil exports would be in euros. Was this not a stab in American backs?" ..."
"... "It's been depressing to be an American for a very long time." That really is an understatement. I came across this yesterday and it just blew me away. https://grayzoneproject.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/ This is not the type of thing that I want to read about my country's doings .but you feel like you need to know. ..."
"... why are so many people fleeing their home countries? ..."
The Wall Street Journal has
just published an important, disheartening story,
U.S. Push to Oust Venezuela's Maduro Marks First Shot in Plan to Reshape Latin America .
The Trump Administration has apparently decided to embark on a large-scale interventionist
campaign to reverse supposed undue influence of Russia, China, and Iran in Latin America.
Venezuela and Cuba are the first targets, and Nicaragua is next on the list. John Bolton, in
too obvious a nod to Bush's "axis of evil" has called them the "troika of tyranny".
One would think the fact that our "remake the world in our image" plans worked out so well
in the Middle East might curb US adventurism. And it isn't just that we made a mess of Iraq,
failed to break Iran, and failed to install new regimes in Afghanistan and Syria. The New
American Century types are deep in denial that this geopolitical tussle not only cost the US
greatly in terms of treasure, but it also wound up considerably enhancing Russia's
standing.
Consider another bad outcome from US war-making in the Middle East: the rise of the radical
right in Europe. American nation-breaking had produced a flood of refugees trying to enter
Europe. In a misguided show of humanitarianism, European countries welcomed the over one
million migrants that arrived in 2015, with the upsurge due mainly to the civil war in Syria.
Angela Merkel in particular backed the idea of taking in the refugees, in part because German
has a lower-than-replacement birth rate, and Syrian has a high level of public education.
However, the EU members had patchy and generally poor programs for helping the migrants
assimilate and find jobs. The result was what one hard core left wing political scientist who
has spent a considerable amount of time in Germany calls "Merkelization": a rise of nativist
right wing parties like AfD in response to large-scale, poorly-managed migrant inflows.
Consider how this tendency might play into US nation-breaking near our borer. Many readers
have pointed out that the "caravans" from Central America are heavily populated with people
from countries like Honduras that our tender ministrations have made much worse. My colleague
was warning of Merkelization of the US even before the US launched its coup attempt, that it is
one thing to have an immigration process that is generous towards asylum-seekers, and quite
another to have open borders when political and economic conditions in countries to the South
are unlikely to get better.
Bernie Sanders was browbeaten into holding his tongue after pointing out early in his
Presidential campaign that "open borders" is a Koch Brothers position, and that the top 10%
professional class that has become the base of the Democratic party are now heavy employers of
servants, in the form of nannies and yard men. When I was a kid, even the few times we lived in
middle/upper middle class suburbs full of senior corporate managers and professionals, no one
had servants. Men worked full time and wives did the housework; the most you'd see would be a
housekeeper in once a week to give the wife some relief.
In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, "Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically,
socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on
basic fairness grounds alone." In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that "immigration reduces
the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants" and that "the fiscal burden of
low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear." His conclusion: "We'll need to reduce the inflow
of low-skill immigrants."
That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, "When I see Mexican
flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic
resentment. When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I
feel a certain frustration."
The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack
Obama.
Prominent liberals didn't oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits
to America's economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented.
Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled
American workers and strained America's welfare state. And they were far more likely than
liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, "immigration is an intensely
painful topic because it places basic principles in conflict."
A larger explanation [for the change] is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats
became more and more confident that the country's growing Latino population gave the party an
electoral edge .
Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America,
especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import
workers .
According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine, "Groups comparable to immigrants in terms of their skill may
experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply."
But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists
and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received
funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations.
I suggest you read the Beinart piece in full; it makes clear that immigration is a thorny,
complex problem, which is not something you'd infer from either party now.
So how does the "Merkelization" concern relate to the US plans to start nation-breaking in
Latin America? Republicans may feel they can tolerate the risk of increased levels of refugees
seeking to enter the US because it could work out in their favor. Right now. Trump looks
screechy to anyone but true believers when he tries to whip up fears about border security. But
what happens if the levels of arrivals were to increase three or four fold, as they did from
2014 to 2015 in Europe? You have realistic odds of a backlash with high migration levels
overwhelming systems that already were doing only a so-so job of handling them.
Now to the main points of
the Journal article . It stresses that Cuba and Venezuela have been aiding each other, with
Venezuela donating oil to Cuba and Cuba providing support to Venezuela's military and security
forces.
Interestingly, it isn't all gung ho for the Trump plans. It points out, for instance, that
while the US has some international support for mixing it up in Venezuela, the US won't find
backers for getting aggressive with Cuba. Similarly:
The U.S. strategy carries major risks. If the administration's support for opposition
leader Juan Guaidó in Venezuela fails to unseat Mr. Maduro, or if it fails to weaken
ties between Caracas and Havana, the desperate conditions in Venezuela could worsen and
tether the U.S. more closely with the crisis. An estimated three million Venezuelans have
fled their country.
Failure also would hand both countries a David-and-Goliath diplomatic victory and
potentially strengthen the hand of China, Moscow and Iran in the region. The chief reason
President Obama pursued an entente with Cuba was his administration's conclusion that decades
of tough measures had failed to topple the Castro regime to make way for a democratic
alternative.
The article presents US allegations against a key Maduro official, including ties to
Iran:
One of the Trump administration's first actions after the election was to dust off an
unused plan from the Obama administration to sanction Tareck El Aissami, Mr. Maduro's vice
president until last year:
U.S. law-enforcement officials say they have evidence Mr. Maduro directed state resources
to create what they allege has become one of the most powerful international
narco-trafficking operations in the world, and with links to Hezbollah, the Lebanese group
designated by the U.S. as a terror organization.
Part of why U.S. officials express concern about Iran's influence in the region is that
Iran is a major backer of Hezbollah, and its South American operations are a significant
source of cash
Among the first officials to lay out options for the Trump administration was Fernando
Cutz, a career USAID foreign-service officer, who had previously worked on the rapprochement
with Cuba for the Obama administration
Mr. Cutz laid out options to escalate pressure on the Maduro regime, including a financial
strike at Venezuela's oil exports. At first, the administration held back, fearing such an
action would allow Mr. Maduro to blame the country's woes on Washington.
Mr. Bolton, named national security adviser last year, has long taken a tough line on Cuba
and Venezuela. He was later joined by Mr. Claver-Carone, who took over western hemispheric
affairs at the National Security Council and shared Mr. Bolton's view.
Mr. Claver-Carone, an adviser to the Trump campaign, rose to prominence in foreign-policy
circles for running a blog called the Capitol Hill Cubans.
An archived edition of Capitol Hill Cubans described Mr. Claver-Carone as the co-founder
and director of U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC, a donation vehicle for House and Senate members. It
was founded in 2003 "to promote an unconditional transition in Cuba to democracy, the rule of
law and the free market."
The PAC has raised and spent about $4.7 million since its inception. It contributed
$20,000 to Mr. Rubio's Senate campaign since June 2016 and gave Diaz-Balart's campaign $5,000
in February 2018, records show.
Mr. Claver-Carone also led the nonprofit group Cuba Democracy Advocates from 2004 to 2017.
And he ran a small lobbying firm called the Cuba Democracy Public Advocacy Corp for about 10
years, ending in 2016.
True believers in the driver's seat is not a good sign.
The story describes in detail how the US perceived that, "The decision by two of Venezuela's
major opposition parties and past rivals -- First Justice and Popular Will -- to join forces a
year ago provided for the first time a potential alternative to the Maduro regime." The US
opened up communications with Juan Guaidó. Over the New Year break, Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo met with senior officials in Brazil and Colombia to develop plans. The US decided
to leverage street protests at the time of the inauguration for Maduro's second term, on
January 10. Other plans:
The imposition of sanctions on Venezuela's oil company, PdVSA, announced by the U.S. on
Jan. 28, could be worth as much $11 billion in U.S. crude oil sales.
Among the next steps, U.S. officials said, are proposed new measures against Havana, such
as restoring Cuba's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. That could hit financing and
investments from countries outside the U.S. that now do business there, as well as the funds
the country gets from international tourists.
Also on the list: new sanctions on Cuban officials and their networks and ending a waiver,
known as Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, signed by every U.S. administration since its
inception in 1996.
Ending the waiver would allow U.S. citizens to sue individuals and companies in U.S.
courts for property seized by the Cuban government. Its impact would likely be to freeze
billions of dollars worth of foreign investment in Cuba including hotels, golf courses and
other projects.
The Trump administration is expected to announce new measures against Cuba in coming
weeks, with the goal of crippling Havana's ability to bolster the Maduro regime.
I had really hoped that Trump would tire of Bolton's aggressiveness and need for the
limelight, but that clearly isn't happening fast enough, if at all. In the meantime, kicking
small and poor countries who pose no threat is not the behavior of a confident superpower. And
grabbing Venezuela's oil because we can is theft. It's been depressing to be an American for a
very long time, and there's no prospect for improvement.
I'd like to prefrece my comment by saying that I am very angry about this coup and the US
messing about in its "back yard".
What is one of the most depressing aspects of this saga is that we are literally replaying
what we have been doing for the past 20 years. And it's never worked. Never. We won't get the
oil. People will needlessly die in awful deaths. People will be torn from their home and do
desperate things. And we will continue to punish them, hurt them for their attempts to live.
Perhaps this is what always happens to US Presidents since Truman – "Now I am become
Death, the destroyer of worlds." (Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita) And they must
transform totally into Death.
I will end with Dr. Thompson again (in this instance discussing our invasion of Iraq by
Dubya)
"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world – bullies and bastards
who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and
fear in our hearts."
Dr Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the
Final Days of the American Century
I am similarly depressed. I don't think we'll see any real improvement in the situation
until the last of the neo-cons die off (hopefully slow, painful deaths.)
Thanks for these comments (and thanks Yves for highlighting this latest adventure in
imperialism). I'd only add one point. We've been doing this for much longer than 20 years,
and it predates the existence of the neocons (at least as an official entity). As a long time
observer, if there is one tiny positive I take from this, it is that the internet allows
critics of the Empire to follow its offenses in nearly real time today. The Mighty Wurlitzer
is more powerful than ever, but it no longer takes months, years, or even decades for the
truth to trickle out for those who know where to look.
Many Americans have had, and will continue to have, their eyes wide shut, as Ives alluded
to in her post and that includes both the credentialed 10-20%ers (WHERES MY CHEAP FOREIGN
INDENTURE !!) and many lowly shlubs as well ( AMERICA – F#UKIN A .. Let's Kick some
Romulan Ass !!!)
So, the only eventual outcome I see .. is where the Romulans kick ours back, good-n-hard
!
Maybe after such an event, we'll come to our senses. I believe more likely that that's when
secession, in its various forms, makes a strong appearance.
This saga has been going on since the end of WW2. For 70 years. In 1948 we were headed for
recession and Truman sent us off to fight the Korean War. Before WW2 it was a similar story
but less brutal, as I read it. Maybe not. But the last 20 years has been astonishing brutal,
I'll give you that.
And add to the obvious failures (or depending how you look at it, successes) Libya where
slaves are today for sale at knockdown prices: the conduit for African migrants to Europe,
courtesy of the UK, France and, 'very discretely', the USAians Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton (Wasn't that something about 'leading from behind'?, maybe one of the all-time acmes
of doublespeak. I'd nearly forgotten how Obama was such a master at uttering deceptive
inanities with a straight face, yet tinged with a shadow of a smile.)
Saw that the night before last. Didn't Moore go on to say that black voter turnout dropped
off a cliff in 2016 in numbers that would have made all the difference for Clinton in that
State? I saw how he kept his lips closed and the water level stayed the same. Probably even
had Vaseline on his lips too for protection. I hope that people will never forget that
performance.
Just so you know, reported reserves are not a good metric. Matt Simmons wrote about this a
ton when he was alive. OPEC member would regularly increase them by not-credible amounts.
Why? OPEC quotas based on a country's reported oil reserves. I don't doubt that Venezuela has a lot of oil. But consider this view:
The U.S. holds more oil reserves than anyone else in the world, including Saudi Arabia,
Russia, and Venezuela.
That conclusion comes from a new independent estimate from Rystad Energy, a Norwegian
consultancy. Rystad estimates that the U.S. holds 264 billion barrels of oil, more than
half of which is located in shale. That total exceeds the 256 billion barrels found in
Russia, and the 212 billion barrels located in Saudi Arabia.
The findings are surprising, and go against conventional wisdom that Saudi Arabia and
Venezuela hold the world's largest oil reserves. The U.S. Energy Information
Administration, for example, pegs Venezuela's oil reserves at 298 billion barrels, the
largest in the world. Rystad Energy says that these are inflated estimates because much of
those reserves are not discovered. Instead, Rystad estimates that Venezuela only has about
95 billion barrels, which includes its estimate for undiscovered oil fields.
Moreover, Rystad argues that there are not uniform ways of measuring oil reserves from
country to country. Some countries report proven reserves, using conservative estimates
from existing oil fields. Other countries, like Venezuela, report undiscovered reserves.
But Rystad applied similar metrics to all countries in its report to make comparisons
easier. "
Completely agree. Canada is a case in point since a large part of those reserves are in
tar sands if I am not mistaken. I am not particularly fond of the argument that the US wants
Venezuela's oil but the US oil companies might like the idea of going back in after if the
1976 nationalization policy is canned a very likely price for US support to oust Maduro
Bolton said so on TV this week. Quite a few tweets with the clip.
Due to the hour I'm not going to track it down now but hopefully an obliging reader also
saw it and won't find it hard to provide a link. Otherwise I will come back and give the
link, but I desperately need to turn in and have non-blog stuff I must attend to when I get
up, so it will be a while for me to deliver the evidence.
Indeed, Venezuela oil is sweet, probably the best quality in OPEC, and better than most
USA oil. Many refineries on the Gulf can't run Sands (or Alaskan) Oil, which is why much is
exported to China, who can run Saudi Oil (among the worst quality).
Venezuela has both "sweet" and "heavy" oil, which the latter is predominately shipped to
only a few refineries (many in the US) which are set up for "heavy" oil.
Expanding on my earlier comment, last week I posted a link to John Pilger's excellent
documentary film The War On Democracy – https://vimeo.com/16724719
While John's focus in the film is primarily on Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, and the Bolivarian /
Chaveznista Revolution the film also presents deep background on US interventions in Chile,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, ect.
Pilger's style of interview reminds of Det. Columbo. The complete film is worth watching,
but if you're in a hurry / too busy at least watch the interview segment (57:00 > 1:07:00)
with
Duane Clarridge, Head of CIA Latin America Division from 1981 to 1987. Mr. Clarridge puts the
UGLY in Ugly American. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Clarridge
It would not be a stretch to think that Duane Clarridge and Elliot Abrams were close
associates back then.
My father worked in Riyadh for 21 years, after the RAF, and never believed any of the
stats coming out from there. He worked for the ruling family and military and in public
health and academia. He often tells the story about the kingdom's AIDS stats to the WHO. The
kingdom denied it had any problem, a problem often incurred by wealthy men visiting
"Natashas" in the Gulf playgrounds and Thais on their home ground. There was one hospital
ward in Riyadh dedicated to AIDS patients alone. The other stats not kept, or kept under lock
and key, were about the tiny Jewish and Christian communities along the Red Sea coast. Dad
imagined that the oil stats were similarly mythical.
The recent DeGolyer and McNaughton report on Saudi Arabia is probably accurate. There is
more oil there than they thought. D and M are not going to sell themselves out, I don't
believe. So that means SA remains the giant we thought it was.
Hmm. Venezuela is one of only 16 countries to recognize Taiwan. Taiwan is about the same
distance from mainland China as Cuba is from mainland US. Qiao Liang specifically mentioned
Venezuela in ' One Belt One Road ':
"Russian President Vladimir Putin, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez, also announced the settlement of their country's oil exports would be
in euros. Was this not a stab in American backs?"
Not a prediction, but Venezuela and Cuba look like excellent spots to park wei qui stones.
Just sayin'.
The interventions in favour of the coup by "plucky, little" Belgium, la France perfide and
Spain were timely reminders that after Brexit neo con and neo liberal "racaille" remain in
the EU27. It's too convenient to blame the UK for the neo con and neo liberal plague in
Europe and imagine that things will be better after Brexit.
With regard to servants, it's not just the US. Last year, some figures were published that
there are as many people "in service" in the UK as there were in 1860. Another study
suggested that there were more people in service than in the UK armed forces.
With regard to Germany, my employer and some of its clients have recruited some of the
refugees. Some of the stories have been published on the intranet. Our team PA mentors one
recent recruit, a Syrian of Palestinian origin. It has suited much of the German business
elite and its political puppets (CDU, CSU, FDP and, let us never forget, the SPD and Greens)
to import workers and keep German workers from getting uppity. The chief economist of the IMF
recently commented on how little many Germans earn, how much pay has stagnated this century
("Danke vielmal, Herren Hartz, Schroeder und Eichel!") and how she was not surprised by the
rise of the AfD.
A couple of days ago, when discussing Brexit with a Frankfurt based colleague, a German,
he said that a German exit from the EU was not inconceivable. There's a lot of discontent and
any EU related vote risked being influenced by other matters, just like Brexit. I have heard
a lot of this from German banksters, officials and academics in London since last summer.
French and Italians, too.
I forgot to mention that one commentator on the BBC said that Hizbollah and Iranian
Revolutionary Guards were in Venezuela, supporting the government crackdown and also in
business. It was all part of the UK MSM messaging before a military intervention. It's not just American oligarchs salivating. The Vestey family, "Victorian millionaires,
not one of our old families" (Agatha Christie about someone else), are itching to get their
own back and more.
According to the rousing song I once sang along to with such shared gusto and near-tears
credulity, "This land is your land, this land is my land, from California to the New York
Island," and all that -- well, he had the "bicoastal" part right, but as we mopes are maybe
starting to recognize, "this land," that was "settled" by genocide, theft and corruption,
does not and never has "belonged to you and me." You and I are "American" by accident of
birth, that's all. And are just along for the ride, chivvied and herded by the few who
actually, "legally," own it all, and control and mandate all the "policy," that undefined
term that is the reality of "rule of law."
Bushie used the term "rule of law" and fooled a lot of people. Most people don't realize
that the more money you have more you can exercise the "rule of law".
Very well researched article by the always insightful Max Blumenthal. The page also
publishes polling data showing huge numbers of Venezuelans opposed to military intervention
and sanctions, something both sides making their case about what to do in Venezuela routinely
ignore.
I have been making it a habit to (quite literally) troll my congress-critter on a daily
basis for the past couple of years, and those along with the Elliott Abrams profile were
today's contributions to the cause. These people really do disgust me, and never let it be
said that I have not made it my project to say so.
An excellent, if somewhat sickening, long-form article on the lead-up to what we are now
witnessing. It seems there is no limit to the lengths the U.S. government will go to in order
to destroy any government that refuses to acquiesce to U.S. hegemony and implement a
neoliberal economic system. Thanks for the link.
Canada has supported Guaido so I sent the grayzone article to the PM and the Minister of
Foreign Affairs. It is very depressing to read about how countries are destabilized by
others. If only we respected each other's aspirations instead of imposing ideology on each
other.
You have to see:
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Chavez – Inside the Coup.
It's free on YouTube. From 2002.
I saw it back in 2002ish when it came out.
A British (or Aussie?) film crew was covering the election of Chavez.
Then they ended up being on the ground capturing the coup from the streets to inside the
palace.
Watch as millions of Venezuelans, largely poor, give a lesson in Big D Democracy.
They hit the streets in such large numbers and the miltary turned on the coup leaders.
You have to see it.
And I fear for them. The USA will probably send troops this time.
Is it naive to think that Bolton and Pompeo are playing on Trump's crude insecurities and
he is enabling them to act out theirs? That this is a crucial aspect in addition to greed? I
always thought that a key motivation for the Iraq war was Cheney playing on Bush's fragile
male ego. I think leadership factors for good or ill are important if not exclusively so.
It's the same in the industry where many NC commentators and I work. "Bid 'em Bruce" got
his name from that ability to play on fragile male egos. Mr Botin at Santander and his
adviser Andrea Orcel played the same trick on Fred Goodwin at RBS.
You are getting insider-y even for Americans, or at least non-investment bankers, and even
then of a certain age.
"Bid 'em up Bruce" = Bruce Wasserstein, one of the top M&A bankers of the 1980s (in
the 1990s, he was still a big player, but corporate preferences move to greyer technocrats).
He was famed for amping up CEOs to keep fighting to win competitive bids for companies with
his "Dare to Be Great" speeches.
The term "Merkelization" should be used with caution. While an uncontrolled flood of
illegal aliens inciting racist rhetoric may indeed be a threat to the USA, also because it
has in fact happened over many years, it did not happen in Germany 2015. In 2015 masses of
refugees, many of them originally displaced by the catastrophic failure of the American
invasion of Iraq, trekked across southeastern Europe seeking safety and opportunity in
Western Europe. The vast majority of those who entered Germany entered legally, were
identified and registered by German immigration authorities and were given support by German
federal and state offices. The vast majority of those who remain in Germany remain legally in
Germany. There are surely some unregistered refugees living underground in Germany but the
number is effectively zero. The refugees are used by neo-Nazi groupings to win support among
the not insignificant racist demographic in Germany, and they are in Germany legally. I
understand that relatively few of them have real prospects of remaining permanently in
Germany. The majority live tenuous and legal existences in Germany, and accordingly enjoy a
degree of security and comfort that was not available to many of them in countries of origin
after the cascade of disasters that began with the American invasion of Iraq.
Often forgotten in American discussions of immigration is that the American way of doing
immigration is not the only way of doing immigration. In fact it is deeply flawed. Many
leading first-world democracies use citizen registration. Accordingly travellers can enter,
in some cases with a visa, and if they want to stay they must register with the local
authorities. Access to essential residential services and privileges is dependent on this
registration. Every change of address requires a new registration. Accordingly what happens
at points of entry is relatively unimportant because local authorities are responsible for
who is in fact using services and enjoying privileges.
This system is in contrast to the American model in which effectively the only control on
entry is at legal points of entry. If travellers can avoid the legal points of entry or can
enter as tourists then there is effectively no further tracking of their presence.
With all due respect, you are missing the point my colleague made, who reads the German
press daily, spent years studying in Germany, has many professional and personal contacts
(including individuals at a high level in government, the party structures and academia), and
he also wind up going to Europe for typically 2-3 months a year, a lot of that in Germany. In
other words, he's extremely well plugged for a non-German.
His point was that Merkel was naive and idealistic about Germany's ability to integrate so
many foreigners, with no language skills. This has nothing to do with legality of the
process. It has to do with the capacity of a society to help large numbers of people
assimilate (language, culture, work place norms), give them additional training if needed,
and help match them with employers.
Even if a program of this scale were developed and implemented successfully, which it
wasn't, you then run into second order problems: resentment. "Why are we spending so much on
foreigners when we have all these domestic needs [list]?"
Or put it another way: differences of degree become differences of kind. I don't know
where the tipping point is, but there are operational and political issues when annual
immigration levels exceed a certain point. Blaming it on neo-Nazis is simplistic. The US had
precisely the same issue with the big immigrant wave around the turn of the 20th century and
a very contentious political debate. Tell me how that had anything to do with neo-Nazis or
fascists.
I didn't mean to seem harsh, and I may not have given a long form enough explanation of
the idea. Merkel was operating from both noble motives as well as pragmatic ones, but badly
misjudged what she was taking on, and even if the #s had been more manageable, neglected to
address the huge challenge of integration and making sure the refugees wound up getting jobs.
It was a deadly mistake for her and the EU.
Agree that Merkel's rationale was complex. Did she make a deadly mistake? Interestingly
the UK does not have citizen registration.
To clarify: under citizen registration regimes, for example in many continental European
countries, all residents, non-natives as well as natives, are required to register with the
local authorities whenever they change address.
The UK does not have citizen registration and it experienced, as a result of agreeing to
EU treaties that guarantee freedom of movement, a larger influx of foreigners than Germany
did in 2015. In other words decades of neoliberal deregulation and the arrival of 3 million
EU citizens did enough damage to the living standards of registered voters in the UK to
produce a simple majority in favor of Brexit. While the lack of citizen registration in the
UK was not the cause of Brexit, this abscence of practical controls may have contributed to
the present crisis.
In contrast Germany did not surrender completely to deregulation of the labor market
– though there has been liberalization particularly in unskilled sectors, wages in
major industries continue to be governed by collective bargaining agreements that extend
across employers. And the influx of foreign labor is tracked and controlled through the
citizen registration regime.
I think that it's more likely that Blair et al. made a deadly mistake in not establishing
greater controls in the wake of both EU as well as native liberalization fantasies. I think
Germany and the EU will survive and Merkel, though a lame duck chancellor today, will go down
in history as a great European.
That all depends on who writes the history books. An honest assessment of Merkel would
admit, though, that she was one of the last truly savvy European politicians and demagogues.
This a woman, who even in a weakened position, staved off three consecutive coup attempts
from the hard-right of her party in as many years, and still managed to get her pick of
replacement on the way out of the party leadership. So to characterize her as in anyway naive
is to my mind is not really fair. That she misjudged the situation may be closer to the mark.
It was definitely the key factor in her downfall. Regardless of her motives or the perceived
results of her policy, allowing asylum, even to so many, was absolutely the right thing to
do! And one has to remember that when she had taken enough heat from the long racist right of
her party she shut that policy down. As someone who stood out in the cold at large
pro-refugee rallies here in Munich, I'm loath to believe it was a waste of my time.
A remark about Merkels rationale: It was to a great extent a marketing- (or propaganda)
driven decision from Merkel and her entourage: After making Greece more or less
single-handedly into a debt colony, Merkel was looking for an improvement of her damaged
image; a journalist from the german newspaper DIE WELT, Robin Alexander, showed in his book
about the migration crisis that all the necessary administrative arrangements were in place
to close the german border in September 2015 but home secretary de Maizière was
overruled by Merkel and her advisors – they did not want to have ugly pictures because
of Merkels still damaged image from the mishandling of Greece.
Thanks for the insightful article about the US & Latin America and the great
discussion!
thanks but bitte – it wasn't vanity that opened the doors to a million refugees.
Like Greece, Brexit is a lesson in the incoherencies of the EU. The truly disturbing
evidence tends to turn up after the shit has hit the fan. Greece had (still has?) a deeply
dysfunctional public purse. They had (still have?) no objective and reliable public record of
private property ownership, which for example could serve as the basis for property taxation.
They should never have been allowed to enter the monetary union. Similarly England
liberalized its labor market and then took little or no action to defend it when the EU
expanded to eastern Europe allowing millions of talented and energetic if not highly
qualified, low-wage (from the perspective of the British labor market) workers to enter and
compete. The Germans were a little better at defending their labor market. The point is that
every EU member should have been prepared appropriately for the consequences of EU expansion
to the east and the availability of effectively underpriced human resources.
We have occasional interest pieces in the local media following some refugee immigrants
and the paths they have followed since arriving. They are quite eye-opening in terms of
describing the challenges involved, which can include cultural dislocation, finding
employment and social connections, and trauma and ongoing issues around the situation they
were escaping. Kids and teens especially seem to have a hard time, as they have frequently
lost siblings or family members or been separated from them, have had traumatic or disturbing
experiences that they struggle to process, and find little that's familiar about their new
environment and living situation.
You also get to see the support structure and community resources at their disposal to
help them manage, which can be substantial. New Zealand only takes a relatively small number
(1000 or so) of refugees per year and it's easy to see why.
FWIW Moon of Alabama blogger Bernhard, who lives in Germany, has said that Merkel's policy
was at least in part about depressing wages.
And Dimitri Orlov gives his take on the US coup attempt.
Here's the real problem: the fracking bonanza is ending. Most of the sweet spots have
already been tapped; newer wells are depleting faster and producing less while costing
more; the next waves of fracking, were they to happen, would squander $500 billion, then $1
trillion, then $2 trillion The drilling rate is already slowing, and started slowing even
while oil prices were still high. Meanwhile, peak conventional (non-fracked) oil happened
back in 2005-6, only a few countries haven't peaked yet, Russia has announced that it will
start reducing production in just a couple years and Saudi Arabia doesn't have any spare
capacity left.
A rather large oil shortage is coming, and it will rather specifically affect the US,
which burns 20% of the world's oil (with just 5% of the world's population). Once fracking
crashes, the US will go from having to import 2.5 million barrels per day to importing at
least 10 -- and that oil won't exist. Previously, the US was able to solve this problem by
blowing up countries and stealing their oil: the destruction of Iraq and Libya made
American oil companies whole for a while and kept the financial house of cards from
collapsing. But the effort to blow up Syria has failed, and the attempt to blow up
Venezuela is likely to fail too because, keep in mind, Venezuela has between 7 and 9
million Chavistas imbued with the Bolivarian revolutionary spirit, a large and well-armed
military and is generally a very tough neighborhood.
"FWIW Moon of Alabama blogger Bernhard, who lives in Germany, has said that Merkel's
policy was at least in part about depressing wages. "
Don't know tons about Germany's economy. But I will point out that Costas Lapavitsas, in
his book "Profiting Without Producing", makes the argument that a big factor in Germany
realizing such large surpluses relative to other countries in the EU is Germany being able to
minimize nominal unit labor costs. According to the data in the book, the nominal unit labor
costs have flatlined in Germany, while they increased in a number of peripheral countries. He
talked about how German capitalists have been able to also successfully exploit non-unionized
labor forces. It wouldn't surprise me if that was at least one of the motivations.
But if we were rational (we being the US collectively), if our government weren't a
bi-partisan train wreck, we would be figuring out ways to compensate countries like Venezuela
for keeping the oil in the ground. It has a market value, but the environmental damage isn't
obviously included in the market price. If it was, if we could truly price such a thing, I
think it would clearly show a net aggregate cost for humanity on the whole. Instead of
stealing and consuming Venezuela's oil, we would be paying them and countries like them to
keep it in the ground, and then radically change the structure of the domestic and
international economic system to deal with the environmental crisis. I think in some ways
that liberals are just as deluded about the changes needed as many on the right. Trump,
though, is doing things horribly wrong on every level in Venezuela, and previous presidents
were great either. Ecuador at one point asked the world to pay it to leave the oil in the
ground. We didn't, of course. We could pay Brazil to not cut its forests down too, but kind
of problematic, given who now runs the country, and I don't know whether we would devote
enough resources to monitor the forests thereafter anyway.
FWIW Moon of Alabama blogger Bernhard, who lives in Germany, has said that Merkel's
policy was at least in part about depressing wages.
I believe that this is generally recognized as a deliberate part of an effort to maintain
export competitiveness. Iirc they were able to pull the feckless SPD into collaboration after
the Soviet bloc collapse led to an influx of labor, some of it quite skilled, that was
already lowering wages.
On another note, we're talking about an increase an immigration in a way that slides over
what a coup would set off. My impression is that Chavista support among working class
Venezuelans and both strong and armed. At worst, the army will be divided, though writers
like Moon of Alabama think they are pretty much behind Maduro. (It's not for nothing that the
Times ran a piece a couple of days ago playing up divisions in the army.) I don't think this
will be a "put tanks in the streets, kill some demonstrators, send in the death squads to mop
up" kind of deal.
> differences of degree become differences of kind
uh, the source on that, in a paragraph about nazis, umm
"so also has the European boy inherited an aptitude for a certain moral life, which to the
Papuan would be impossible." ["Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human", 1856]
Maybe a joint China-Russia deployment of their most advanced first strike missiles
stationed in Cuba and aimed directly at America would do the trick of slamming the U.S back
to reality. Let America feel what China and Russia feel, when they see the U.S. massing arms
along their border.
Well, the US is not alone. The European Parliament, in its plenary session today, voted
the recognition of 'Guido' as the legitimate president of Venezuela. One reason they invoke
is article 233 of the constitution. But that article says that when the presidency is vacant
(not true!), the vice-president takes over, not some US-selected dimwit. (the full text as
adopted is here ).
And in other news, Israel is "aligning" with autocratic regimes in Africa and other
regions, indicating, as an aside for the mopes, its "distaste" for having to do so "to
preserve the nation and its democracy," and prove that the Likud rule really has yuuuge
international support.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/netanyahu-is-welcoming-authoritarians-to-israel-sparking-debate-1.6242028
Another kind of Bernaysian log-rolling, akin to the works of the trio of troubles, Bolton,
Pompeo and Abrams, and their adherents.
"Democracy," like "war," has become an undefined, maybe undefinable, shibboleth. What does
anything mean, any more? All there appears to be is power and wealth and domination, serving
up sacrifices to Moloch to extend and expand the rule of the destroyers of course the
neo-neos would just note that it has always been thus, for humankind, those who eat, and
those whose destiny it is to serve, die, and be eaten
I worked in and with "Brussels" from 2007 – 16 and know how venal many of that lot
are.
From the behaviour that I observed on Thursday evenings in Brussels (as the European
Parliament does not sit on Fridays and MEPs are encouraged to visit their constituencies) and
their away weeks in Strasbourg, I suspect that spooks are active and keeping an eye out for
material to enable "chantage".
The European Parliament did but they still have to urge their members to go along with
them. I have seen this Parliament in action before and remain seriously unimpressed-
One would think the fact that our "remake the world in our image" plans worked out so
well in the Middle East might curb US adventurism. And it isn't just that we made a mess of
Iraq, failed to break Iran, and failed to install new regimes in Afghanistan and Syria. The
New American Century types are deep in denial that this geopolitical tussle not only cost
the US greatly in terms of treasure, but it also wound up considerably enhancing Russia's
standing.
Should any of these things really be perceived as failures for the New American Century
types? They've been conducting an incredibly successful looting project, as Kelley Vlahos has
documented in The American Conservative.
They may be in denial about the moral virtues of what they do, or any ostensible benefits
to regular Americans, but it's tough to deny the material success that it has brought to war
profiteers and their enablers, measured in terms of things like real-estate values in DC
suburbs.
The 'grow or die' mantra needs oil to keep on keeping on, and the Venezuela gambit came as
news that fracking wasn't all that was made public. Interesting intersection.
The only actions a bully responds to is force. Russia and China especially will need to
become more aggressive even if that means the end of the human race via nuclear war. The
current situation perpetuated by the nihilists that run things is so painful to watch given
the loss of life of millions of innocents that ending the whole thing quickly sometimes seems
merciful.
I think that there are some people in Washington that have really not thought this all the
way through. Look, it is one thing to blow up countries like Iraq, Libya and Syria but apart
from all the blood and treasure lost, America has two things in its favour shielding it from
the worse effects – the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. America has never had to deal
with the waves of refugees released that Europe has had to deal with. A side effect of this
is the rise of right wing movements in response to tone deaf governments as well as local
terrorist attacks.
But, if America now starts to blow up countries in South America, the effects will not be
limited to just those countries alone but will ricochet around the whole continent and up the
isthmus. Then you will see not caravans of refugees but human waves. Is this why Trump is so
gung-ho on building a wall? To keep all those fleeing refugees out of America to warp the
politics there like it has in Europe? Is America ready for a bunch of Vietnams in South
America? Look, Vietnam in size is about the same size as California but the Vietnamese were
never defeated there. How about something similar throughout a whole continent? Do they
really want to find out?
The U.S. blew up a string of South and Central American countries in the 1960-70s –
Brazil, Argentina, Chile and others. Much as I would like to believe there will be negative
effects on the U.S. this time around I can't say I remember hearing of any then. In the
1990-2000s there was a backlash against U.S. control and this is what is being rolled back
now.
Americans have been wreaking Central and South America since William Walker temporarily
took over Central America using private American armies in the 1840s. The aim was to
establish slave plantations. Southern style Manifest Destiny.
All of the present day coups and embargoes is normal for the United States even
when we didn't have an army we had the navy, the marine, and banks.
Vietnam might be a different case. Seems to me there was more of a sense of peoplehood
there than in a lot of the central and South American places, with their colonial histories
and geographic and demographic divides. Not so sure if there would be resistance to invasion
and subversion on the scale of Vietnam's in a lot of those places, where the "legitimate
authorities" are in the bag already, have a long schooling in oppression and looting, and the
Empire has done so much groundwork and homework prepping the military and police forces (and
various militias and of course the narco sub-governments) to pile on to any popular unrest
and solidarity notions. What are the Guatemalan and Venezuelan and Colombian and Brazilian
etc. equivalents of the Gilet Jaune? What is the life expectancy of a peasant or labor
organizer in a lot of those places, or of a determined investigative reporter?
And let us remember that the Empire has been kicking a$$ and taking names in "our
backyard" since the commercial classes declared (many of them at least) that the Divine Right
of the English King, at least, did not float across the Atlantic in their little wooden
ships.
Recall the observations of that old guy, Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, regarding the nature of
what he reduced to a simplification, "war," and explained from his long experience as a thug
for the Empire that all the stuff the Marines and Navy and the rest were doing through the
latter half of the 19th and his part of the 20th Centuries was "nothing but a racket." (Note
that the Marines still nominally "revere" Butler as a successful general officer, the
quintessential multiple-Medal-of-Honor-holding Marine, but completely obfuscate his
"sedition" in exposing the real nature of all that Valorous Glorious Victorious "carrying of
guns to every clime and place "
Human waves which will strengthen right-wing politicians and their police state, while
depressing wages. I'm sure Trump and the PNAC crowd would never want anything like that. How
silly of them.
An interesting article on the aftermath of oil rich Ecuador adopting the US$ as their
currency. It brought stability to a country wracked by hyperinflation, but the knock-on
economic effects make for a nasty hangover.
Every day since 2015, thousands of Ecuadorians have crossed the bridge from Tulcán,
Ecuador to the border town of Ipiales, Colombia to go shopping. Goods they purchase in
Colombia include food, cars, television, and even bulldogs. On a holiday weekend between
May 27 and 29, more than 50,000 Ecuadorians crossed the border to Ipiales. Some shoppers
come from as far as Quito, a five-hour drive south of the border. Ecuadorians purchase
goods in Colombia en masse due to a simple fact: prices in Colombia have become
significantly cheaper. For example, a 50-inch TV costs $1,300 USD in Ecuador, but less than
$800 USD in Colombia.[2] The situation has become of such concern to the Ecuadorian
government that last year, President Rafael Correa issued a "call of conscience" to
Ecuadorians, asking his compatriots to "offer support to the national production" by buying
Ecuadorian products.
In addition to Panama and El Salvador, Ecuador is one of the Latin American countries
that uses the U.S. dollar as the only official currency. Ecuador does not print its own
bank notes. In recent years, the U.S. dollar has continuously appreciated against other
currencies in Latin America, making the price of goods in Ecuador higher than that in
neighboring Colombia and Peru. Ecuador abandoned its old currency, the sucre, during a
severe economic crisis in 2000 and has been using U.S. dollars ever since. With the
appreciation of the U.S. dollar, doubts have emerged regarding the fate of dollarization. A
recent Wall Street Journal article stated that Ecuador "has the misfortune to be an oil
producer with a 'dollarized' economy that uses the U.S. currency as legal tender."The
appreciation of the U.S. dollar against other currencies has decreased the net exports of
non-oil commodities from Ecuador, which, coupled with the fall in oil prices, has
constrained the country's potential for economic growth.
I don't think Guaidó has any plan to sell PDVSA to foreign countries. So far
his plans are to replace Chavistas in the company and put his own guys in charge. The
same has occured during any government change in Venezuela after oil nationalization. (sorry
link in spanish )
As Karl Rove famously said "we're an Empire now ."–I think people continually miss
this simple statement of fact. The USA is an Empire and like the period of Augustus still has
the old republican institutions including "elections" that we all would have to admit are not
particularly democratic. The ideals those of us from the baby-boom generation grew up with
were only partially bullshit then and are completely bullshit now. Washington sees its
opportunity to open Venezuela up for "bidness" and is taking steps to get rid of a weak
President of a democratic country and, by now, we should understand that the official
Washington does not like democracy abroad or domestically. Immigration from Venezuela and
other countries is always good, as many people above have pointed out, because it depresses
wages, eliminates workers ability to bargain with bosses, makes working conditions worse and
so on. All good things for the rulers. Just face the fact that we are ruled by oligarchs and
we have, really, no say in what they do and haven't had any say for some decades. They do
what they want to do whether we think it is moral or not.
The people at the top are gangsters–some of them just like hurting people for fun,
most just do it for profit which comes in many forms usually outside public scrutiny.
Americans have a tendency to hide in illusions–particularly on the left we believe that
the System is reformable–it isn't. As for Europe following along, they are vassal
states and, when it's important, and it's no skin of their asses they'll step into line.
Though European leadership has some concern for the average citizen (unlike American
leadership of both parties) Europeans (ruling elites and citizens) love the comfort and
security of the Empire as did people in other great empires of Rome and the Ottomans. At any
rate, European firms can descent on Venezuela and loot to their heart's content when the US
takes it.
On the other hand, if the US fails at taking Venezuela then the Empire is on its way
out.
Poverty has a cost. And this cost is always paid by the workers. Massive (and possible
artificially organized) immigration is the price rich countries' workers pay for poverty
everywhere else. It seems they are targeting the wrong responsible.
What depresses me about all this is the propaganda push isn't even trying to make sense
anymore. We are supposed to believe that they had a invalid election and want genuine
democracy but then just pick a guy who never even ran for president and pretend that he's
legit.
And that we are so concerned for the suffering of its people, but the first thing we do is
cut off all their oil money.
It reminds me of violent cops who continue beating a suspect when he's down and then wonder
why he's not cooperating.
Just sick beyond words.
I see the US move against Venezuela as having a domestic political agenda as well.
Look at how democratic socialism is being demonized by the MSM and leaders of both
parties.
How long before AOC and Bernie are labeled as Bolivarian sympathizers?
I agree. How soon until we see adjacent images of AOC and Maduro in some media context or
other? Odds are you can already find this somewhere on ZeroHedge, perhaps sourced from The
Mises Institute.
It's already happening. A writer for the conservative Lake County Journal yesterday
referred to Illinois as "the Venezuela of the Midwest," apparently referring to the new
governor and his (fairly) progressive agenda.
I want to give this title again – free doc on YouTube.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Chavez Inside the Coup.
From 2002 shows the first coup attempt against Hugo Chavez. How it failed. You don't see
any "authoritarianism" but you will get a big dose of Democracy in action as the storm the
streets and get their President back.
Okay, I took a look. Massive street demonstrations effectively turned the tide. No
doubt.
Now imagine that happening in the US. Oh, wait. It did happen. In the Sixty's and then
again in 2000's, in an attempt to stop the genocide in Vietnam and more recently the
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Livable wages for the American Working Class and open borders are incompatible.
What would be less expensive and quicker to implement? Building the wall?, or making
E-Verify mandatory if a business wants to write off an employee's wages against income?
If the government can administer Medicare and Social Security, they can make E-Verfiy
work.
Of course Medicare fraud of all descriptions is a constant challenge to "government
administration." We got a new FL senator who managed to walk away "Scott-free" after
presiding over the looting of Medicare and MEdicaid of some what, $4 or was it $5 billion?
https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2010/11/rick-scott-alex-sink-florida/
Social Security might be a better exemplar, though a lot of people are harmed by the way
benefits are ruled on by the administrative processes and institutionalized tight-fistedness
there. https://thinkprogress.org/paul-ryan-legacy-toward-the-poor/
"We could do better." Will the Empire ever "do better," at anything other than chaos and
exploitation and corruption of the sort that lets the California ag cartel keep on using
virtual slave labor from south of the border? And the 10% having their house slaves and yard
workers?
If there is such a plan to remake america (I doubt it) it is clear that Venezuela was the
weakest piece in the move. The least we can say about Maduro is that he has grossly
mismanaged the best resource of the country and nobody outside Venezuela likes him.
It is not Maduro's fault that the oil price stumbled between 2014-2015, and it is not his
fault that more
than 80% of Venezuelan exports are Oil and oil-derived products . It is not probably
Maduro's fault that 2,5 million venezuelans migrated after the fall in oil prices.
Nevertheless, they blame Maduro. But it is Maduro's fault that oil production in Venezuela
has been reduced making a big problem bigger (and now US sanctions make it even worse). But
this is not all.
Most Venezuelan oil exports go to China to repay the enormous debt that Venezuela
accumulated (I believe during Chaves tenure mostly) So, the real income that Venzuela obtains
from oil has decreased dramatically due to 1) oil price crash 2) repay chinese debt with oil
and 3) lower pproduction, and now we add 4) US sanctions. Maduro was already in a very weak
position before the sanctions. Anyway I wonder if Guaidó can do anything except pray for
oil price rise.
Venezuela exports to China account to about 5% of China Oil imports and I was thinking if
Trumps move was just an indirect move to put China in jeopardy, and by the way, get rid of a
leftist government that doesn't get along with the US. The fact is that China has motives to
be angry with Maduro but migth take bigger losses with Guaidó. Anyway 5% is not a big
share of imports.
I'm hesitant to comment on this with any criticism of Maduro or challenging the narrative
that he is a 21st century Allende for fear of being called the Blob (as commenters have been
doing), but it is undeniable that Maduro has far less support than Chavez did, and I would
add that there are real doubts as to the legitimacy of the 2018 constitutional convention
elections. Of course, Guaidó has even less legitimacy and popular support.
Here is an
interview (in English!) with a chavista development expert I actually got to meet in
person years ago whose opinions I still trust. His take: the Venezuelan right wing+US-led
international neoimperialist forces are a big part of the crisis. However, the biggest issue
is the collapse in the price of oil and Venezuela's dependence on oil (partly the fault of
chavismo) and official corruption. In the face of this, Maduro cracked down on dissent both
legally and illegally, buying temporary power at the cost of sacrificing support.
With the ebbing of progressive forces of the region, we see the right staging violent
protests in 2014 and 2017, rejecting election results in 2013, and sabotaging the economy.
Then comes a covert blockade and then later an open one together with interference by the
United States and other right-wing governments. All this has made [Maduro's] government
very weak since its coming into being in 2013. The government manages to stay in power, but
it fails to overcome the crisis, to say nothing about maintaining the program of a
democratic transition to socialism.
A part of the Chavez leadership took control of the state apparatus and the PSUV
[Maduro's party]. It closed ranks and carried out purges, opting for a strategy that
implies the progressive elimination of democratic spaces. That group legitimizes its
actions by pointing to the economic war and the conspiracy of the right – which are
very real – and then its proceeds to limit various forms of expression of the popular
will.
This takes place in relation to questions of state. Examples include cancelling the
recall referendum promoted by the opposition, delaying by one-year the elections for
governors, deciding not to do a popular referendum to convene the constituent assembly. But
it also takes place in popular organizational spaces. In 2016, they suspended the elections
of the Communal Councils throughout the country, and, in 2017, the new line was that only
PSUV members could head up these institutions.
In one way there is, if not a silver lining, at least something new in this current bout
of dollar diplomacy in Venezuela: Trump and Bolton getting on the TV in all their piggish and
crass glory showing the nation exactly what drives US foreign policy. Perhaps it will be an
education for some of our less informed citizens helping to recast previous gory
interventions "for democracy" in their proper light. Truthfully its not like the US
government is doing anything different than any other state does: wielding the violent,
brutal power it has on behalf of its ruling class. Perhaps now we can do away with the
pretense of spreading freedom and democracy once and for all. The incessant duplicity and
false righteousness is almost as sickening as the death dealing. At least from afar.
1. We should be also talking about how we do support in the region. Say Venezuela's
neighbor, Colombia. Deadliest place in the world for union organizers, among the deadliest
places for journalists and human rights workers. Thousands of politicians and activists on
the left have been killed in recent decades, over 80 priests killed since the 1980's. The US
government event admits that violent death squads (which the CIA helped to create and which
are responsible for most of the human rights abuses in the country) have been eliminating
dozens of indigenous groups through violent land grabs. The country has among the largest
number of internally displaced people in the world, and many politicians in the government
have strong ties to death squads and cartels. As of a few years ago, millions of Colombians
were living in Venezuela, and the CIA data on net migration flows shows massive amounts of
people fleeing Colombia. Does the media talk about this? Have we attacked the country like we
have Venezuela? No, Colombia has gotten more US aid than any country in the world, not named
Egypt and Israel. And Colombia is helping to overthrow the government in Venezuela right now,
the media just calls the country an "ally" of ours. Bush gave Uribe, the former right wing
president, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Uribe was identified in the early 1990's by
the DEA as being among the worst offenders in Colombia's government regarding connections to
cartels, there is evidence that hits were planned on his ranch with death squads, his family
has ties to these groups too. Obama, as many know, also signed a "free trade" deal with the
country. So, take that activists in the US trying to organize unions and places like car
factories in the South.
2. Chomsky and Herman had two books on the political economy of human rights, and they
showed the strong correlation between US financial and military support, and human rights
abuses. We support the overwhelming majority of the world's dictatorships right now, and
William Blum has a great book (Killing Hope) showing the CIA's role in supporting coups,
dictatorships and destabilization in the last half of the 20th century. The NED and USAID are
right there too, as are private organizations like the Atlas Network (which gets money from
the NED), the AFL-CIO and the International Republican Institute. This is to say nothing of
our murderous wars, going back decades. We are in no position to lecture anyone on democracy
and human rights, and it is absurd to accept those things as the reasons we are doing this to
Venezuela.
3. Venezuela's economic situation is complex. Maduro is corrupt, the Venezuelan government
has failed to diversify the economy, and there has been mismanagement. However, the economy
shrank by 26% in the decades leading into Chavez taking over, a majority of the country was
in extreme poverty as of the mid-1990's, and as the country became increasingly under the
control of the IMF, riots and coups ensued. Inflation was high under Chavez, but it was much
higher in the years before he took over than it was most of his time in office, and the
hyperinflation started years after he died, when the economic war intensified. Venezuela also
suffers from many problems other major oil producers struggle with and other developing
countries struggle with.
4. The economic war has been devastating, and is in violation to international law,
domestic law and the OAS charter. Cut off needed exports, cut off access to foreign capital,
barred it from re-negotiating its debt with creditors, stolen gold, among other things. The
opposition controls key markets and produces many of the basic products working people depend
on, and they have intentionally cut back production to cause harm, which has also contributed
to the hyperinflation. The opposition has set up many companies that steal state subsidized
goods and sell them at a mark-up in places like Colombia.
5. The US developed behind what was among the largest industrial tariffs among what are
now OECD countries in the 19th and early 20th century. We were highly protectionist
thereafter, and still have a highly protectionist agricultural system. Ha Joon Chang has
written a lot about how countries like the US rose up with certain policies, like that, but
when they got to the top, they kicked away the ladder, so other countries couldn't implement
those very policies. China has also developed by radically violating the types of policies
that the WTO and the IMF force on countries, it is responsible for the overwhelming majority
of the decline in worldwide poverty in recent decades (directly and indirectly), but it is an
exception, not the rule, on policy. Raul Prebisch wrote about infant industry protection in
places like Venezuela, and he talked a lot about the overdependence of developing and
underdeveloped countries on raw material exports, which generally have poor terms of trade.
The IMF has said that about two thirds of developing countries rely on a small handful of raw
material exports for at least 60% of their export revenue, and other developing countries
with comparable oil reserves (like Saudi Arabia and Iran) also heavily rely on oil export
revenue. So, to the extent that Venezuela hasn't diversified, all previous governments failed
to do this, and it is hard for countries like Venezuela to actually diversify their
economies, especially in the modern economy with the way it has been set up.
7. If I were to go on TV and threaten John Bolton, I could get thrown in jail. He, on the
other hand, can threaten entire countries, and pushed for a war in Iraq that has killed
millions, and destabilized an entire region. Over 80% oppose the US militarily intervening,
and over 80% oppose the sanctions. However, in 2004, polling Iraq showed that a similar
number of people there opposed the privatization of the country's oil, and our leaders and
fascists like Bolton didn't care. Both Kerry and Bush at the time essentially supported the
privatization, and so did horrible people like Abrams and Bolton. There really is no justice
in the world if immoral people like him and Abrams can not only remain free, but continue to
be re-hired by this government of ours. Bolton is even given space by our media to call for
violence against countries like Iran that pose no threat to us.
Wow Great article about a complex subject with long term historical roots and more recent
causes that have been only superficially plumbed. Wouldn't know how to even begin a
conversation about this emotionally laden and complicated topic. Thank you.
Perceptive take on the neocons' current view of the involvement of other foreign nations
in the region and Venezuela's oil. Have had questions about the extent to which US engagement
in the MENA presented China et al with a strategic opportunity given a perceived US policy
focus vacuum in Latin America (other than looting by the usual suspects); as well as the
historical and current involvement and roles of US military and contractor elements and
training in various countries; that of transnational banks and corporations (palm oil and
other agricultural products, money laundering) that may have indirectly contributed to the
emigration issues; as well as the rise of criminal cartels and gangs and the emergence of
near narco-states against a backdrop of the Whys of U.S. demand. How is the imposition of
sanctions against Venezuela a constructive policy measure? Setting aside the damaging effects
on the nations' people and other considerations, It has not been notably successful as a tool
to impose regime change.
Hard not to agree with the concluding paragraph of this post and many of the comments.
FWIW Moon of Alabama blogger Bernhard, who lives in Germany, has said that Merkel's
policy was at least in part about depressing wages.
I believe that this is generally recognized as a deliberate part of an effort to maintain
export competitiveness. Iirc they were able to pull the feckless SPD into collaboration after
the Soviet bloc collapse led to an influx of labor, some of it quite skilled, that was
already lowering wages.
On another note, we're talking about an increase an immigration in a way that slides over
what a coup would set off. My impression is that Chavista support among working class
Venezuelans and both strong and armed. At worst, the army will be divided, though writers
like Moon of Alabama think they are pretty much behind Maduro. (It's not for nothing that the
Times ran a piece a couple of days ago playing up divisions in the army.) I don't think this
will be a "put tanks in the streets, kill some demonstrators, send in the death squads to mop
up" kind of deal.
The fact that the entire establishment is behind this coup is not altogether surprising
but the level of hypocrisy on display is absolutely family bloggin insane.
The Russiagaters and their media partners, who have been screaming for the last two years
about the Russkies "meddling" in our election and Trump "colluding" with Putin, do not even
blink as they brazenly advocate the overthrow of a sovereign government and the
destabilization of a country (a move that could well lead to civil war).
The blatant doubles-standard at play here and the public's wholesale acceptance of it is
just one more sign that as a society we are moving away from "reality based" thinking and
letting emotions and tribal affiliation (which are,of course, manipulated by TPTB) guide our
actions and reactions.
At some point people will have to learn how to think critically again and how to socialize
and communicate without an intermediary layer of tech, and the people who control it,
observing their every thought, word and action and using this god's eye view to run psyops on
them.
And we will all have to make the shift from compulsivey consuming information, and hoping
that we can elect our way to a more just and sane society, to taking decisive action in the
real world. If/when a revolution happens or we reach a critical mass of discontented and
angry citizens desiring real change we will realize just how deeply the establishment has
hooked into our brains and our lives via the tools and toys they so generously provide us
with.
When the family blog hits the fan, the sinister, and totalitarian, nature of the Facebook,
Amazon, Palintir etc. partnership with the CIA/NSA and state and local LEAs will suddenly be
very real indeed. Here's hoping that day comes soon so we can start working on the next
level.
Do the people who advocate for open borders and unlimited immigration ever stop and think
about how many people actually want to leave their homes, friends and families
behind and risk their lives and well-being escaping to the United States or Europe to work
thankless low-paying Jobs in societies that are doing away with upward social mobility?
How many Syrians, Afghans, Guatemalans, Malians, Mexicans would rather be able to make a
respectable living in their home countries? With the IMF/World Bank/gobalized capitalism,
NATO, a belligerent dying empire and a few of its shame inhibited lackeys, rigging their
nations economies to make corrupt leaders and western businesspeople rich and richer (while
consigning their governments to never ending debt peonage) or raining bombs and shells on
their heads and/or fomenting social chaos and civil war it is no wonder many thousands of
people are heading north to try their luck in the lands of freedom, liberty and
"Enlightenment values." But these are desperate people fleeing death, chaos and
grinding poverty not "emigrants" from stable societies deciding to live somewhere else for a
while.
Many western leftists have a wholly warped and unrealistic view of crisis immigration.
They don't ask the most obvious questions such as why are so many people fleeing their
home countries? and who benefits from that situation? And many are so afraid of
being labeled racist (a fate worse than death) they don't dare move past the virtue signaling
stage.
Ideally the internationalist left would be forging partnerships with parties and
organizations in the global south to build a bulwark against western imperialism – both
economic and military – and putting pressure on their own governments to stop these
practices. But that requires more than slinging around self-righteous rhetoric and would
involve actual work and stuff. So
Likewise, the demagoguery from the anti-immigrant right is willfully disingenuous in that
the root causes of mass migration are ignored and the most desperate and powerless people are
scapegoated and made into lightning rods for all the bigotry and projected existential angst
of people living in failing societies of their own.
Meanwhile those responsible for the current upheaval – i.e. the captains of
industry, "wealth creators", generals, heads of state who champion overt and covert
imperialism – are left largely unscathed.
The amount of BS, "fake news" and wildly contradictory and irrational nonsense that gets
pumped out by TPTB and the media with nary an incredulous peep from the weary or braindead
citizenry indicates that there will likely have to be some sort of crisis before more people
begin to take notice of their surroundings and let the scales fall from their eyes.
I think preventing the current order from dragging us into a dark abyss will be an
incredibly difficult slog. But so was every fight against unjust power in the history of the
world. Now all we have to do is organize as a group/class/whatever and come up with a battle
plan to put into action when the crisis hits ;-)
Looks like Trump is counting that "slam dunk" color revolution will lift his reelection
chances. Will it?
Notable quotes:
"... First parallel to today comes from Oberholtzer's brief description of Cleveland in Volume 5 of his History of the United States Since the Civil War. "His horizons were narrow. His mind had not been enlarged by travel." "It was only necessary to implant in his mind" a notion to "stir him to a moral fury". Ring any bells? ..."
"... Cleveland drifted along on the international front until he installed Richard Olney as Secretary of State. Olney did his damnedest to provoke a conflict with Britain about a boundary issue in Venezuela by sending that nation the dumbest and most most arrogant declaration of American Exceptionalism ever seen till then. Likely Olney was an arrogant bonehead, but 2019 Secretary of State Michael "Pompous" Pompeo is all of that and a Rapture Fan as well. Maybe this time Jesus will finally get off the can . ..."
Mini Rant: I propose to attempt a comparison of the situation in 2019 Venezuela with the
Crisis of 1895 – also involving Venezuela. From what I can tell both are/were as fake
as a stack of $3 bills. (This is a slightly modified version of a post which disappeared
elsewhere in "moderation".)
The Republican elites of the earlier era seem to have been a bunch of wealthy
industrialists who had been coasting along as the Morally Superior "Party of Lincoln". They
had spread a wide and tightening net of tariffs to protect their enterprises, and the
Voters were getting tired of the situation. But the election of Democrat Grover Cleveland
turned out badly for those Voters (don't ask me why!) and having nowhere else to go
they returned to the Republicans in 1888. Benjamin Harrison was a wishy-washy nobody and
the Republicans raised the tariffs to astronomical levels during his "administration". By
the midterms of 1890, the rage of the Voters was such that the Republicans were crushed in
the House and Senate.
Here is where it gets interesting. Harrison's slimy but brilliant Secretary of State
James Blaine understood something must be done. His solution was to distract the Voters
with Foreign Adventures so they'd have something to talk about besides the tariffs. So he
began raising a ruckus in the nations of Hawaii and Chile. But before the new program could
get very far along, those same furious Voters returned Cleveland to the White House.
First parallel to today comes from Oberholtzer's brief description of Cleveland in
Volume 5 of his History of the United States Since the Civil War. "His horizons were
narrow. His mind had not been enlarged by travel." "It was only necessary to implant in his
mind" a notion to "stir him to a moral fury". Ring any bells?
Cleveland drifted along on the international front until he installed Richard Olney
as Secretary of State. Olney did his damnedest to provoke a conflict with Britain about a
boundary issue in Venezuela by sending that nation the dumbest and most most arrogant
declaration of American Exceptionalism ever seen till then. Likely Olney was an arrogant
bonehead, but 2019 Secretary of State Michael "Pompous" Pompeo is all of that and a Rapture
Fan as well. Maybe this time Jesus will finally get off the can .
Cleveland was immediately on board with the intervention. Congress was overjoyed in a
bipartisan way. Mostly the US people loved it too – We're Number One! The News Media
of the day - even the Republican papers - were delighted with Cleveland's truculence, just
as the likes of the Bezos' Blog Washington Post is thrilled with Trump's new 2019 nuttery.
Naturally when Cleveland left office and the warmongering Republicans returned to office,
the Kingdom of Hawaii was taken over, the USS Maine "somehow" got itself sent to Cuba and
sunk there by mysterious villains, a whole lot of Spanish islands were grabbed, and a few
hundred thousand Philippine folks ended up dead. Will bullying 2019 Russia/China work out
as well as kicking around 1895 Britain? And what are they trying to distract us from this
time?
BTW, this is cut/paste stuff from some of my history books, and I may be quite off base.
Feel free to tear these remarks to itty bitty pieces if that's what they deserve.
:)
"... it seems that crystia freeland is working directly for soros, or something like that... perhaps soros is still young enough to profit from another try at disaster capitalism on venezuala? ..."
"... Canada to host Lima group in effort to find solution to Venezuela crisis .. what a friggin witch she is! and this will be on the lima groups meeting agenda too.. ah yeah.. give it a human rights, humanitarian type twist.. ..."
CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's opposition-run congress on Tuesday issued a resolution
calling deals between state-run oil company PDVSA [PDVSA.UL] and U.S. and French companies
announced this week illegal, since they had not been sent to lawmakers for approval.
The body said the oilfield deals with France's Maurel & Prom (MAUP.PA) and little-known
U.S. company Erepla violated article 150 of Venezuela's constitution, which requires that
contracts signed between the state and foreign companies be approved by the National
Assembly, as Venezuela's congress is known.
"They are giving concessions that violate the law," said lawmaker Jorge Millan, mentioning
the two contracts.
Congress, largely stripped of its power since the opposition took it over in 2016, is
unlikely to be able block the deals from going forward. But the rejection could create legal
complications under a future government. " more at link... i don't fully understand it, or
necessarily believe the way it is being presented in the reuters article, but it is worth
reading and might reflect some of the reality on the ground..
@46 bevin and @58 mandrau...
it seems that crystia freeland is working directly for soros, or something like
that... perhaps soros is still young enough to profit from another try at disaster capitalism
on venezuala?
"... Here's an article written by a self-professed Progressive and published on a self-professed Progressive website espousing "A Progressive Alternative to Trump's Dangerous Venezuela Policy." Yet the writer fails to even mention two salient facts of the utmost importance: First, that Trump's actions are Illegal, and second that they're Unconstitutional, both of which provide grounds for Impeachment of Trump, Pence, Bolton, and Pompeo at minimum. ..."
Here's an article written by a self-professed Progressive and published on a
self-professed Progressive website espousing "A Progressive Alternative to Trump's Dangerous
Venezuela Policy." Yet the writer fails to even mention two salient facts of the utmost importance: First,
that Trump's actions are Illegal, and second that they're Unconstitutional, both of which
provide grounds for Impeachment of Trump, Pence, Bolton, and Pompeo at minimum.
Thus the writer unwittingly provides an excellent example of what I described on the
previous thread as Civic Illiteracy. So far, I know of no public figure who has stood up and
said: Trump, you can't do what you're doing as it's illegal and unconstitutional!
Now I know why Dean Acheson called his book Present at the Creation as it was
during his tenure at the State Department when Illegal and Unconstitutional acts by the
executive become the norm.
The US, we have been repeatedly told, is the chief repository of democracy in the world, and
seeks to promote democracy everywhere.
from the US State Department:
Democracy and respect for human rights have long been central components of U.S. foreign
policy. Supporting democracy not only promotes such fundamental American values as
religious freedom and worker rights, but also helps create a more secure, stable, and
prosperous global arena in which the United States can advance its national interests. . .
here
And what is the US definition of democracy? Reading further to see its ultimate
meaning:
Identify and denounce regimes that deny their citizens the right to choose their leaders in
elections that are free, fair, and transparent.
So democracy mainly consists of choosing leaders, and has nothing to do with affecting
governmental policy, war and peace, aid to the poor and disadvantaged, etc. In the US that
means an occasional choice between two people, bad and worse, then sit down and shut up.
For foreign countries this mainly works in the negative for the US government, with a
determination that selected foreign leaders have not measured up to US standards.
Personalizing the enemy in order to gain control of the country is the way it's done. Saddam!
Assad! Maduro! These leaders according to Washington were not properly selected (not true in
most cases) and that justifies US military and/or economic warfare against that country,
mostly including its citizens of course. Kill them! Destroy their "human rights!" The
citizens were deprived of a free vote so let's deprive the citizens with sanctions and death!
. . . It makes no sense, but that's how it is done.
Jason Raimondo's hopes that the tide slowly was turning against the War
Party with Trump's appointment of Tillerson are dashed for good with the appointments of
Abrams, Bolton and Pompeo. The thugs for Wall Street have taken DC.Trump might as well go
home. Raimondo wrote of Abrams in 2017 in "The End of Globalism":
Excerpt:
Oh yes, the times they are a changin', as Bob Dylan once put it, and
here's the evidence :
"Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered his department to redefine its mission and
issue a new statement of purpose to the world. The draft statements under review right now are
similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing – any mention of promoting
democracy is being eliminated."
All the usual suspects are in a tizzy .
Elliott Abrams , he of Contra-gate fame , and one of the purest of
the neoconservative ideologues , is cited in the
Washington Post piece as being quite unhappy: "The only significant difference is the
deletion of justice and democracy. We used to want a just and democratic word, and now
apparently we don't."
Abrams' contribution to a just and democratic world is well-known : supporting a
military dictatorship in El Salvador during the 1980s that slaughtered thousand s, and then
testifying before Congress that massive human rights violations by the US-supported regime were
Communist "propaganda." US policy, of which he was one of the principal architects, led to the
lawlessness that now plagues that country, which has a higher murder rate than Iraq: in Abrams'
view, the Reagan policy of supporting a military dictatorship was "a fabulous achievement." The
same murderous policy was pursued in
Nicaragua while Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian
Affairs, as the US tried to overthrow a democratically elected government and provoked a civil
war that led to the death of many thousands . In Honduras
and Guatemala
, Abrams was instrumental in covering up heinous atrocities committed by US-supported
regimes.
And, now, Venezuela. The economic hit man has arrived.
" 'I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I
spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of
half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that
Standard Oil went on its way unmolested." --
Smedley Butler
The plan might be is to unleash Venezuelan civil war and install pro-US regime by force, using uprising as a ram to depose the
current governmnet. Which looks somewhat neoliberal to me with some deals with foreign companies what probably harm long
term Venezuelan interests, so it might be credible to attach it for corruption like they did with Yanukovich. With full
understanding that the next. more neoliberal Venezuelan government will be even more corrupt and top 1% oriented.
In other work Venezuela looks like Ukraine in 2014 but with oil as a huge price. Discontent with the current government
is real and can be exploited.
Notable quotes:
"... A Venezuelan civil war would result in mass death and even more economic misery!" CashMcCall, 2 hours ago Ron Paul used to be the darling of ZH. But with Trumptards, now RP is discredited because he doesn't support Trump's Tariffs, bullying, economic sanctions, weaponizing the dollar reserve, bombing Syria, or any of the rest of the Trump bullying **** head garbage. ..."
"It's ironic that a president who has spent the first two years in office fighting charges
that a foreign country meddled in the US elections would turn around and not only meddle in
foreign elections but actually demand the right to name a foreign country's president!
" According to press reports, Vice President Mike Pence was so involved in internal
Venezuelan affairs that he actually urged Guaido to name himself president and promised US
support. This is not only foolish, it is very dangerous.
A Venezuelan civil war would result in
mass death and even more economic misery!" CashMcCall, 2 hours ago Ron Paul used to be the
darling of ZH. But with Trumptards, now RP is discredited because he doesn't support Trump's
Tariffs, bullying, economic sanctions, weaponizing the dollar reserve, bombing Syria, or any of
the rest of the Trump bullying **** head garbage.
The Thrust of Trumptards is the ruder the US Acts the better. Bullying everyone is the way
to doe it. Trump is a punk, a draft dodging punk and he is wrecking the country.
But his self dealing is the underlying root. His phony work vacations. He fills rooms at
Trump resorts with secret service. Last year alone Trump Organization was paid half a billion
dollars for these phony work vacations.
Trump claims he works for free. But he donates his salary and deducts the full amount off
his taxes. He is being paid Trumptards. He is a self dealer. He is a slime and a con artist.
That is all Trump is.
Jason Raimondo's hopes that the tide slowly was turning against the War
Party with Trump's appointment of Tillerson are dashed for good with the appointments of
Abrams, Bolton and Pompeo. The thugs for Wall Street have taken DC. Trump might as well go
home. Raimondo wrote of Abrams in 2017 in "The End of Globalism":
Excerpt:
Oh yes, the times they are a changin', as Bob Dylan once put it, and
here's the evidence :
"Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has ordered his department to redefine its mission and
issue a new statement of purpose to the world. The draft statements under review right now are
similar to the old mission statement, except for one thing – any mention of promoting
democracy is being eliminated."
All the usual suspects are in a tizzy .
Elliott Abrams , he of
Contra-gate fame , and one of the purest of
the neoconservative ideologues , is cited in the
Washington Post piece as being quite unhappy: "The only significant difference is the
deletion of justice and democracy. We used to want a just and democratic word, and now
apparently we don't."
Abrams' contribution to a just and democratic world is
well-known : supporting a
military dictatorship in El Salvador during the 1980s that slaughtered thousand s, and then
testifying before Congress that massive human rights violations by the US-supported regime were
Communist "propaganda." US policy, of which he was one of the principal architects, led to the
lawlessness that now plagues that country, which has a higher murder rate than Iraq: in Abrams'
view, the Reagan policy of supporting a military dictatorship was "a fabulous achievement." The
same murderous policy was pursued in
Nicaragua while Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian
Affairs, as the US tried to overthrow a democratically elected government and provoked a civil
war that led to the death of many thousands . In
Honduras
and Guatemala
, Abrams was instrumental in covering up heinous atrocities committed by US-supported
regimes.
And, now, Venezuela. The economic hit man has arrived.
" 'I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I
spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the
bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a
decent place for the National city Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of
half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light
to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras
right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that
Standard Oil went on its way unmolested." --
Smedley Butler
Brazen Heist II, 4 hours ago (Edited)
...The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in some
cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that.
napper, 4 hours ago (Edited)
He will, if he gets a second term!!!
Abrams' appointment is no accident or mistake. By now even the most casual (but intelligent) observer should have seen
through Donald Trump's contemptuous disregard for legal institutions and a criminal propensity for lawlessness.
Brazen Heist II, 4 hours ago(Edited)
And most American sheeple are dumb as a pile of rocks. The few good people left are largely powerless and have to deal
with so much BS in all directions. I hope they will get through the coming implosion with their sanity intact.
Glad I left that shithole. I saw it coming. What's coming won't be pretty.
CananTheConrearian1, 3 hours ago
OK, Great Mind, name a populace that is as smart as Americans. Europeans? Chinese? We're glad you left, ********.
"... War with Russia will be the agenda just as the left wanted to begin with. The " pick sides" is the warring cry of the old Bush regime of " either you're with us or against us" theme. ..."
"... Radical capitalism on the left and conservative traditional capitalism on right.... Both fighting for the same select few who run the show generation after generation. ..."
"... He's not really attacked by anyone. Its a bipartisan play to distract the gullible from the sick and subhuman policy they enact while you are distracted with the wall or fantasizing bout his tiny mushroom. ..."
"... So Trump jerks a couple of gators from the swamp, but only to make room for the T-Rex. Amazing. And why the hell is Bolton still involved in our government? He penned an article during the bush admin explaining why the posse comitatus doesn't really mean what it really says. Scary sob ..."
"... Trump is Zahpod Beeblebrox. Anyone remember the Hitchhiker's Guide? The role of the galactic president was not to wield power, but to distract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was remarkably good at his job. ..."
"... When he bombed Syria in the first weeks of his presidency, giving the MIC, a $100 million of bomb sales ( to a company he had shares in, raytheon) was enough for me that tRump is what he always has been, a bankrupt, loud mouth yankee puppet who the plutocrats chose to continue the usual US empire evil ****. ..."
"... I had my suspicions prior with his choice of vp, mad eyes pence, a protege and smoker of **** cheney. Then pompous pompeo, 150% arsehole bolton and now this official pos. Only a trumptard or patriotard would accept this ****. ..."
"... it's just too much to keep track of it all. My scorecard booklet was all used up about the 1st week in after all the neocons and bankster slime who galloped into the WH on Trump's coattails. ..."
"... After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly elected President George W. Bush appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief. ..."
Abrams is obviously a Bush plant from left over CIA Bushys.
Abrams lied to Congress twice about his role with the Contras. He pleaded guilty to both counts in 1991 but was pardoned
by George H.W. Bush just before the latter left office.
A decade later, while working as special Middle East adviser to President George Ws Bush, Abrams was an enthusiastic advocate
of the disastrous Iraq invasion.
Abrams was also in the Bush White House at the time of the abortive coup in 2002 against the late Venezuelan President
Hugo Chávez.
Abrams helped lead the U.S. effort to stage a coup to overturn the results of the 2006 Palestinian elections, complete
with murder and torture.
War with Russia will be the agenda just as the left wanted to begin with. The " pick sides" is the warring cry of the old
Bush regime of " either you're with us or against us" theme.
This is the precise crap people were hoping to avoid with Trump, but the left has put Trump administration in a vice by having
constant fires to put out and disyractions with FALE RUSSIAN COLLUSION
... It's a psychological ploy to wear down the President and search for legitimate excuse to gain public opinion to go against
Russia and they found it. Venezuela is a **** hole from socialism which AOL and dems are embracing now. Of course having sorry
liberal advisors like Kushner doesn't help... That is a huge mistake to have the opposition ( democrate Kushner and wife) in the
hen house with great pursasive power over an overwhelm Trump... Strategy working.
But politics as it is run mostly out of " The City of London" and old lynn Rothschild wanted puppet Hillary in ( Rothschild's
play dirty to get what they want and hold a full house of cards with the financial tools to " persuade people to their way of
thinking"... A battle us penny picker uppers must live with.... It's the only change we get.
Radical capitalism on the left and conservative traditional capitalism on right.... Both fighting for the same select few
who run the show generation after generation.
He's not really attacked by anyone. Its a bipartisan play to distract the gullible from the sick and subhuman policy they
enact while you are distracted with the wall or fantasizing bout his tiny mushroom.
So Trump jerks a couple of gators from the swamp, but only to make room for the T-Rex. Amazing. And why the hell is Bolton
still involved in our government? He penned an article during the bush admin explaining why the posse comitatus doesn't really
mean what it really says. Scary sob
Abrams was convicted of lying to congress meanwhile congress lies to us all day everyday and what happens to those bastards?
They vote themselves raises and sit on their *** all day taking bribes from their paymasters and writing laws and regulations
to control their chattel. Yes I hate politicians because they're ******* criminals and all of them and the useless bureaucrats
that infest that cesspool in D.C should be out of work permanently.
Trump is Zahpod Beeblebrox. Anyone remember the Hitchhiker's Guide? The role of the galactic president was not to wield
power, but to distract attention away from it. Zaphod Beeblebrox was remarkably good at his job.
When he bombed Syria in the first weeks of his presidency, giving the MIC, a $100 million of bomb sales ( to a company
he had shares in, raytheon) was enough for me that tRump is what he always has been, a bankrupt, loud mouth yankee puppet who
the plutocrats chose to continue the usual US empire evil ****.
I had my suspicions prior with his choice of vp, mad eyes pence, a protege and smoker of **** cheney. Then pompous pompeo,
150% arsehole bolton and now this official pos. Only a trumptard or patriotard would accept this ****.
You're excused...it's just too much to keep track of it all. My scorecard booklet was all used up about the 1st week in
after all the neocons and bankster slime who galloped into the WH on Trump's coattails.
Seriously though, it's interesting that ZH has said nothing about the big corruption scandal going on now in Brasil. The guy
who won on platform of anti-corruption has been exposed within a month of taking office, surprise...surprise, as part of one of
the worst. Talk is vp taking over with the backing of the military. "soft-hard" coup you could say.
I too, got very angry about the exact things you mention. However, I perspective is something that keeps me grounded. Remember
what was happening in 2016, and what the options were. Remember BLM, march's in like every city, and Cops getting ambushed every
few weeks?
Remember, "We came, We saw, he died", from Queen Hillary? Or how about Queen Hillary calling Putin a Thug, and saying we had
to stand up to him in Ukraine, and Syria?
dude, we all know she is part of the same ****. The ******** election is over, the plutocracy chose their puppet. Think of
it, sure Killary would have done the same, but she wouldn't have been able to get away with it and the schizoid msm would have
had a breakdown trying to sell the same ol, same ol us empire games. People don't like surprises. Repubelicans as aggressive warmongers
doesnt surprise. Sadly they think they cant do anything about it. But they can, and not by talking **** on ZH.
See Ralph Nader's, How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress for tips.
It's 10 dimensional to the fifth power chess right? Just kidding. It's a big club and you ain't in it. Trump is not going to
save you. Did you really think one guy defied the odds and overcame the voter fraud and beat Hillary? Puhleez. All by design.
You're watching a movie...
After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly elected President George W. Bush
appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief.
Didn't W run on a 'bring the troops home and world leave us alone' platform in 2000?
when i think about what Trump did so far I think about that mandatory Obama care tax that I had to pay if I* didn't get Obama
care Well it's gone and that was a big deal for me cause I've got four kids that would have to pay it and that would be six thousand
out of pocket every year that's for starters with out Trump running interference in the FL house and senate elections we'd have
Obama lite new and antique Bill still that makes a huge difference in things like taxes and EPA enforcement in this state I really
think he has made the general public more aware of the Mexican invasion cause I see less and less Latinos on the jobs sites around
here He has really caused the Dems to lose it Trump did that not any other politician he has exposed election fraud he has exposed
the deep state like never before
Yes I'm a Trump supporter a thoughtful one I consider the options and will go with this till it impacts me negatively on an
economic personal level not an emotional one brought on by pundits and MSM never Trump ilk
why don't you ask me if I think he is perfect I think his wife is pretty much ok however I hate that he is from NYC and acts
like it his friends are not much to be proud of and his social skills are lacking but I think he showers regularly and has good
hygiene and moral habits except for golf but that's just me He's a bossy kind of guy and I might not get along with him He doesn't
do things country folks do and wouldn't fit in around here his hair sucks and is a narcissistic affectation for sure but i like
his foreign policy so far how am i doing think I'm being killed slowly I liked Ike but he was weak and I liked Buchanan bur preferred
Goldwater and on and on they are politicians and deserve the loyalty they give and " that's all I have to say about that"
Trump is a psychopath and he loves to hire even bigger psychopaths. Your whole admin is a swamp of sociopaths, psychopaths
and other sick deranged people.
Who is next? Paul
Wolfowitz now would be the most logical choice. Id the invasion of Venezuela decided already,
like Iraq war under Bush II.
That means that Rump can say goodbye to independents who votes for him because of his
anti-foreign wars noises during previous election campaign
Notable quotes:
"... Abrams, who had served in the Reagan State Department, faced multiple felony charges for lying to Congress and defying U.S. law in his role as a mastermind of the Iran-Contra debacle. Abrams' dishonesty almost destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency and put Reagan in jeopardy of impeachment. Abrams was allowed to plead guilty to two reduced charges and later was pardoned by George H.W. Bush, who feared impeachment because of his own role in Iran-Contra. ..."
"... Abrams was even more consequential as nation-wrecker. He was one of the principal architects of the invasion of Iraq. He is an inveterate advocate of "regime change" against countries whose policies he doesn't like. He has a track record in attempting to overthrow foreign governments both by covert action and outright military invasion. ..."
"... At the beginning of the Trump administration, foreign policy establishment types lobbied clueless Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to accept the convicted criminal Abrams as deputy head of the department - the person running all day-to-day affairs at State. ..."
"... Abrams suddenly appeared deus ex machina at the side of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said in a news conference that Abrams was appointed, "effective immediately" as special envoy to deal with resolution of the situation in Venezuela in a way that supposedly would advance U.S. interests. ..."
"... Abrams' special envoy post will be far more powerful than that of an ordinary ambassador or assistant secretary of state -- offices that require Senate confirmation. Should the Senate acquiesce in letting Abrams work without Senate confirmation? ..."
"... Abrams is a close friend and constant collaborator of Bill Kristol and Max Boot, both of whom are waging campaigns to impeach Trump or deny him re-election. There are no -- repeat, no -- policy differences between Abrams, Kristol, and Boot. ..."
"... If the appointment is supposed to be a sharp move to "hug your friends close and your enemies closer," then the test of its efficacy would be that Kristol, Boot, Jonah Goldberg, David French et. al., would halt their anti-Trump campaigns. One would think that if the Abrams appointment is one side of a shrewdly calculated transaction, then silencing Team Kristol would be a necessary condition. ..."
"... The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in some cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that. ..."
On Friday, following the dramatic arrest of a prominent Trump supporter on charges of lying
to Congress, President Trump gave one of the nation's most sensitive national security and
diplomatic posts to another controversial figure who already had been convicted of lying to
Congress.
Has the NeverTrump Republican echo chamber gone berserk over this irresponsible
appointment?
Have Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio taken to the Senate floor to speak out against the
president's defiance of honesty in government? Have they demanded hearings and a confirmation
vote?
Has House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that Trump's action is so egregious it might call for
an article of impeachment?
Not at all. Turns out, the appointee is one of the president's worst enemies, a man
forcefully opposed to almost all of Trump's policies and campaign promises, a man who
repeatedly has said Trump is morally unfit for his office. He is Elliott Abrams, the
71-year-old éminence grise of the NeverTrump movement.
Abrams is the pre-eminent prophet and practitioner of hyper-interventionist approaches to
destabilize or overthrow governments - of foes and friends alike - that do not pass his
democracy-is-the-end-all-and-be-all litmus test. His closest friends and associates, from whom
his political positions are indistinguishable, include some of President Trump's most rabid
enemies, false-flag "conservatives" Bill Kristol and Max Boot.
Abrams, who had served in the Reagan State Department, faced multiple felony charges for
lying to Congress and defying U.S. law in his role as a mastermind of the Iran-Contra debacle.
Abrams' dishonesty almost destroyed Ronald Reagan's presidency and put Reagan in jeopardy of
impeachment. Abrams was allowed to plead guilty to two reduced charges and later was pardoned
by George H.W. Bush, who feared impeachment because of his own role in Iran-Contra.
After having expressed antagonism towards nation-building during the 2000 campaign, newly
elected President George W. Bush appointed Abrams as deputy national security adviser, where
Abrams' role was essentially nation builder-in-chief. Abrams was even more consequential as nation-wrecker. He was one of the principal architects
of the invasion of Iraq. He is an inveterate advocate of "regime change" against countries
whose policies he doesn't like. He has a track record in attempting to overthrow foreign
governments both by covert action and outright military invasion.
At the beginning of the Trump administration, foreign policy establishment types lobbied
clueless Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to accept the convicted criminal Abrams as deputy
head of the department - the person running all day-to-day affairs at State. Trump, who would
have had to sign off on the nomination, rejected Abrams when he learned of Abrams' background.
The truth about Abrams, while not by any means a secret,
came to Trump's attention from Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul, who held a deciding vote in
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he would block Abrams if he were nominated.
Abrams already knew then what Trump took nearly a year to discover, that Tillerson was
hopelessly unprepared to serve as the nation's chief diplomat and indeed was, as Trump
colorfully put it, "dumb as a rock." Nothing about Abrams, the NeverTrumper who believes Trump cannot govern effectively without
him, has changed since then.
Following his rejection by Trump, Abrams wrote a sour-grapes article for
Politico , disparaging the president, along with Vice President Pence and Abrams' erstwhile
patron Tillerson, for not having international human rights policies identical to Abrams' own
views.
Abrams has been outspoken against sensitive Trump international policies right up to the
moment of his surprise appointment. He is unapologetic about his role in masterminding the Iraq
war. He has opposed Trump concerning American troops in Syria and America's relationship with
Saudi Arabia. As recently as January 14, 2019, he published a withering
attack on Trump's Middle East policies and diplomacy.
As events in Venezuela last week reached a crisis with rival claimants to the nation's
presidency, Abrams suddenly appeared deus ex machina at the side of Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, who said in a news conference that Abrams was appointed, "effective immediately" as
special envoy to deal with resolution of the situation in Venezuela in a way that supposedly
would advance U.S. interests.
Immediately? An appointee to a sensitive post needs a background investigation and security
clearance. These investigations can take months. If he indeed has a valid clearance, that means
his appointment was decided long ago.
Abrams' special envoy post will be far more powerful than that of an ordinary ambassador or
assistant secretary of state -- offices that require Senate confirmation. Should the Senate
acquiesce in letting Abrams work without Senate confirmation?
What is Pompeo thinking? Has Pompeo read Abrams' anti-Trump articles? In particular, has he
read Abrams' January 14 anti-Trump article that mocks Pompeo with a hugely unflattering photo
of the secretary of state?
What is going on?
Abrams is a close friend and constant collaborator of Bill Kristol and Max Boot, both of
whom are waging campaigns to impeach Trump or deny him re-election. There are no -- repeat, no
-- policy differences between Abrams, Kristol, and Boot.
If the appointment is supposed to be a sharp move to "hug your friends close and your
enemies closer," then the test of its efficacy would be that Kristol, Boot, Jonah Goldberg,
David French et. al., would halt their anti-Trump campaigns. One would think that if the Abrams
appointment is one side of a shrewdly calculated transaction, then silencing Team Kristol would
be a necessary condition.
So far there are no signs of this.
What did Trump know about the new Abrams appointment, and when did he know it?
It's amazing seeing the holdout Trump supporters continually writhe in mental contortions
to support his every move..as I've said all along..TDS affects the sheep on both right and
left equally.
Brazen Heist II 4 minutes ago (Edited)
... The Orange Buffoon might as well open the door to Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle. Hell even get Scooter Libby in
some cameo. You know, keep them enemies closer and all that.
uhland62, 5 minutes ago
This guy is just picking up a couple more paychecks. He may think he can whip up Trump for more wars, Trump may think he
can control this guy because 'I am President and you are not'. The main thing is that the military can make more wars and
destroy more countries.
The-Post, 15 minutes ago
Trump loves those Bush criminals.
readerandthinker
Venezuelan army defectors appeal to Trump for weapons
Caracas, Venezuela (CNN)Venezuelan army defectors are calling on the Trump administration to arm them, in what they call
their quest for "freedom."
Former soldiers Carlos Guillen Martinez and Josue Hidalgo Azuaje, who live outside the country, told CNN they want US
military assistance to equip others inside the beleaguered nation. They claim to be in contact with hundreds of willing
defectors and have called on enlisted Venezuelan soldiers to revolt against the Maduro regime, through television broadcasts.
"As Venezuelan soldiers, we are making a request to the US to support us, in logistical terms, with communication,
with weapons, so we can realize Venezuelan freedom," Guillen Martinez told CNN.
Tell me who is your friend and I will tell who you are. With friends like Pompeo and
Bolton...
Notable quotes:
"... Trump-bashing Iraq war architect Elliott Abrams to lead US regime change in Venezuela ..."
"... Abrams is already not well-liked in El Salvador and Nicaragua, so I can't imagine the Venezuelans welcoming him with open arms. ..."
"... Elliot Abrams, George W. Bush lackey and arch-Neocon: (1) senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at Council on Foreign Relations (2) core member of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) along with such greats as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and John Bolton. ..."
Ever since the Trump administration announced that it was
no longer recognizing the legitimacy of the elected government of Venezuela I've been
arguing with people on social media about this president's brazen coup attempt in that
country.
The people arguing with me in favor of Trump's interventionism are almost exclusively Trump
supporters, with leftists and antiwar libertarians more or less on my side with this issue and
rank-and-file centrists mostly preferring to sit this one out except to periodically mumble
something about it being a distraction from the Mueller investigation.
... ... ...
this one is easily the most common and most stupid of all the arguments i've been receiving.
i'm not familiar enough with pro-trump punditry to be able to describe how the maga crowd got
it into their heads that attacking venezuela has something to do with fighting socialism, but
it's clear from my interactions over the last couple of days that that is the dominant
narrative they've got swirling around in their collective consciousness. most of my arguments
on this issue have either begun as or very quickly spun into an attempt to turn the debate
about us interventionism in yet another south american nation into a debate about socialism vs
capitalism.
Which is of course absurd. The campaign to topple Venezuela's government has nothing to do
with socialism, it's about oil and regional hegemony. The US has long treated South America as
its personal supply cabinet and destroyed anyone who tried to challenge that, and the fact that
Venezuela has
the most confirmed oil reserves of any nation on the planet makes it all the more central
in this agenda. Yes, the fact that large sectors of its economy are centrally planned means
there are fewer hooks for the corporatocracy to find purchase to manipulate it with, but that
just helps explain why the US is targeting it with more aggressive measures, it doesn't excuse
the aggressive targeting. Venezuela does not belong to the United States, and attempting to
control what happens with its resources, its economy and its government is an obscene violation
of its national sovereignty.
Trying to turn a clean-cut debate about US interventionism into a debate about socialism is
like if your family found out that your sister had just been raped, and you all started
bickering about the pros and cons of feminism instead of focusing on the crime that had just
happened to your loved one. It wouldn't matter what kind of economic system Venezuela had;
trying to overthrow its government is not okay. The narrative that this has something to do
with championing capitalism is just a hook used to get Trump's base on board with another
unconscionable foreign entanglement.
... ... ...
Oh yes it is interventionism.
Crushing economic sanctions ,
CIA covert ops , illegally occupying embassies ,
and a
campaign to delegitimize a nation's entire government are absolutely interventionism, and
that is happening currently . It's stupid to make "boots on the ground" your line in the sand
when, for example, vast amounts of US resources can easily be poured into fomenting a "civil"
war that could kill hundreds of thousands and displace millions as we saw with Syria. And from
today's news about the Trump administration's appointment of bloodthirsty psychopath Elliot
Abrams as the special envoy to Venezuela, it's very reasonable to expect things to get a whole
lot bloodier. Modern warmongering isn't limited to the form of "boots on the ground", and
making that your litmus test is leaving yourself open to all the same disasters ushered in by
the Obama administration.
... ... ...
Again, that's not the argument. The argument is whether it's okay for the US government and
its allies to violate Venezuela's sovereignty with starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, an
active campaign to delegitimize its government, and possibly much worse in the future in order
to advance the agenda of overthrowing its political system.
Of course there are people in Venezuela who don't like their government; that's true in your
own country too. That doesn't make it okay for a sprawling imperialist power to intervene in
their political affairs. You'd think this would be obvious to everyone, but over and over again
I run into people conflating Venezuelans sorting out Venezuelan domestic affairs with the
US-centralized empire actively meddling in those affairs.
The US government doesn't give a shit about the Venezuelan people; if it did it wouldn't be
crushing them with starvation sanctions. It isn't about freedom, and it isn't about democracy.
The US backs 73 percent of the world's dictatorships because those dictators facilitate the
interests of the US power establishment , and a leaked State Department memo in 2017 spelled
out the way the US government coddles US allies who violate human rights while attacking
nonconforming governments for those same violations as a matter of policy. Acting like Trump's
aggressions against Venezuela have anything to do with human rights while he himself remains
cuddly with the murderous theocracy of Saudi Arabia in the face of intense political pressure
is willful ignorance at this point, and it's inexcusable.
5. "You don't understand what's going on there! I talk to Venezuelans online!"
Do you now?
First of all, this common argument is irrelevant for the reasons already discussed here;
sure there are Venezuelans who don't like their government, but their existence doesn't justify
US interventionism. Secondly, it's a known fact that online trolls will be employed to help
manufacture support for all sorts of geopolitical agendas, from Israel's shill army to the MEK
terror cult's anti-Iran troll farm to the Bana Alabed psyop for Syria. And here's this example,
just for your information, of a Twitter account talking about how much fun she's having in
Paris and then a few days later claiming she's in Venezuela waiting in "5+ hour queues to buy a
loaf of bread."
Be skeptical of what strangers on social media tell you about what's happening inside a
nation that's been targeted by the empire, please.
And that's about it for this article. Let's all try and talk about this thing with a little
more intelligence and sanity, please.
* * *
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I'm surprised ZH hasn't posted anything about this yet! Abrams is already not well-liked
in El Salvador and Nicaragua, so I can't imagine the Venezuelans welcoming him with open
arms.
Elliot Abrams, George W. Bush lackey and arch-Neocon: (1) senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at Council on Foreign Relations
(2) core member of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) along with such
greats as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and John Bolton.
Elliott Abrams was born into a Jewish family [6] in New York in 1948.
His father was an immigration lawyer. Abrams attended the
Little Red School House in New
York City, a private high school whose students at the time included the children of many of
the city's notable left-wing activists and artists. [7] Abrams'
parents were Democrats .
[7]
British Playwright Harold Pinter says 1980s chaos in Nicaragua was for to protect "Casino"
interests - - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/12/pint-d09.html
- Jews control the casinos in Central America (think Meyer Lansky in Cuba) - throughout the
80's, our media warned us of a communist threat in Central America -- there was no goddam
threat -0 our media was protecting Jewish interests in Central America -- Eliott Abrams was one of the ringmasters back then
in the Central American conflict ...
that oil belongs to the usa fair and square. the dictator maduro stole it from exxon. the
usa is jusr returning the oil to its rightful owner. you christian people out to understand
that concept.
This article is asinine. By the book, Bolton takes orders from Trump... not the other way
around. Bolton is just being used as an excuse. Trump was never serious about getting the US
out of any wars. I confidently predict that US troops will still be in Syria this time next
year.
"Was he aware of Bolton's request for a menu of targets in Iran for potential U.S.
strikes? Did he authorize it? Has he authorized his national security adviser and secretary
of state to engage in these hostile actions and bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iran? "
Yes, Yes and Yes, that's why he's an orange fucktard.
Bolton's former deputy, Mira Ricardel, reportedly told a gathering the shelling into the
Green Zone was "an act of war" to which the U.S. must respond decisively.
This war mongering harpy fortunately was kicked to the curb by melania trump!
Send the House, Senate, FBI, CIA, IRS & all others state operatives to fight in Iran.
Include the TSA for gods sake. Include the Obamas, Clintons and Bush's. So they can verify
that their weapons are all delivered again and work properly. Bring our troops home to defend
are border. Include NYT, WaPo and most of our current media in the Iran light brigade, so
they can charge with the rest of the parasites. Many problems will be solved in very short
order.
He's a temporary useful idiot for Trump who will flush him at his convenience. He's handy
to have around to encourage the Hawks do a group masturbation.
Seriously, if Ertogen tells Bolton to go **** off, he has no sauce. He's been neutered.
Let him act all important and play in the sand box all he wants.
trust the plan. there are white hats in government who have your best interest in mind.
you don't need to do anything other than pretend like everything is fine, they'll take care
of the rest. go to work and continue accepting continually devalued worthless fiat in
exchange for time you spend away from your family and doing things you love. trust the plan,
it's all going to be alright
"... By Jessica Corbett, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams ..."
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, called the news "a reminder that when it comes to Iran, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are batshit insane ..."
"... Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), tweeted, "Make no mistake: Bolton is the greatest threat to the security of the United States!" Parsi, an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations and longtime critic of Bolton, called for his immediate ouster over the request detailed in Journal ..."
"... Bolton: Chickenhawk-in-Chief ..."
"... Great point. None of my fellow comrades who actually participated in firefights (not just drove trucks behind the lines) are eager to be led into battle by National Guard and bone-spur deferrals, much less student deferral draft dodgers. ..."
"... Why did Trump appoint Bolton? ..."
"... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
"... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
"... Steven Cohen has an interesting editorial in RT, not about directly about Bolton but about the war parties' demand for ongoing M.E. conflict. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/448688-trump-withdrawal-syria-russia/ ..."
"... see what we could do ..."
"... Trump is interested in what is good for Trump. Why he thinks Bolton at his side is good for him is a mystery. Rather a hand grenade with the pin pulled in your pocket than Bolton. Much the same can be said of Pompeo. ..."
"... I agree with author Nicholas Taleb's view of the military interventionists, who include Bolton, that have repeatedly urged that we "intervene in foreign countries -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria -- whose governments did not meet their abstract standards of political acceptability." Besides the losses suffered by our troops and economy, as Taleb observed each of those interventions "made conditions significantly worse in the country being 'saved'. Yet the interventionists pay no price themselves for wrecking the lives of millions. Instead they keep appearing on CNN and PBS as 'experts' who should guide us in choosing what country to bomb next." Now, after imposing economic sanctions on Iran, they're evidently again seeking war. ..."
Posted on
January 14, 2019 by Yves Smith Yves here. I am surprised
that Bolton has lasted this long. Bolton has two defining personal qualities that are not
conducive to long-term survival with Trump: having a huge ego and being way too obvious about
not caring about Trump's agenda (even with the difficulties of having it change all the time).
Bolton is out for himself in far too obvious a manner.
By Jessica Corbett, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
Reminding the world that he is, as one critic put it, " a reckless advocate
of military force ," the Wall Street Journalrevealed
on Sunday that President Donald Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton "asked the
Pentagon to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year, generating
concern at the Pentagon and State Department."
"It definitely rattled people," a former U.S. official said of the request, which Bolton
supposedly made after militants aligned with Iran
fired mortars into the diplomatic quarter of Baghdad, Iraq that contains the U.S. Embassy
in early September. "People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about
hitting Iran."
"The Pentagon complied with the National Security Council's request to develop options for
striking Iran," the Journal reported, citing unnamed officials. "But it isn't clear if
the proposals were provided to the White House, whether Mr. Trump knew of the request, or
whether serious plans for a U.S. strike against Iran took shape at that time."
Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy at Tufts University, called the news "a reminder that when it comes to Iran, John
Bolton and Mike Pompeo are batshit insane."
Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), tweeted, "Make no
mistake: Bolton is the greatest threat to the security of the United States!" Parsi, an expert
on U.S.-Iranian relations and longtime critic of Bolton, called for his immediate ouster over
the request detailed in Journal 's report.
"This administration takes an expansive view of war authorities and is leaning into
confrontation with Iran at a time when there are numerous tripwires for conflict across the
region," NIAC president Jamal Abdi warned in a statement . "It is
imperative that this Congress investigate Bolton's request for war options and pass legislation
placing additional legal and political constraints on the administration's ability to start a
new war of choice with Iran that could haunt America and the region for generations."
In a series of moves that have elicited concern from members of Congress, political experts,
other world leaders, and peace activists, since May the Trump administration has
ditched the Iran nuclear deal -- formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
(JCPOA) -- and reimposed
economic sanctions .
NIAC, in November, urged the new Congress that convened at the beginning of the year to
challenge the administration's hawkish moves and restore U.S. standing on the world stage by
passing measures to block the sanctions re-imposed in August and November , and
reverse Trump's decision to breach the deal -- which European and Iranian diplomats have been
trying to salvage .
Iran continues to comply with the terms of JCPOA, according to the United Nations nuclear
watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's
nuclear chief, told state television on Sunday
that "preliminary activities for designing modern 20 percent (enriched uranium) fuel have
begun." While Iran has maintained that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, the nation would
still have to withdraw from the deal if it resumed enrichment at the level.
As Iran signals that it is considering withdrawing from the JCPOA, the Journal
report has critics worried that Bolton and Pompeo have the administration on a war path -- with
Bolton, just last week, insisting without any evidence that Iranian leadership is committed to
pursuing nuclear weapons. Some have compared that claim to former Vice President Dick Cheney's
infamous lie in 2002, to bolster support for the U.S. invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.
As the Journal noted, "Alongside the requests in regards to Iran, the National
Security Council asked the Pentagon to provide the White House with options to respond with
strikes in Iraq and Syria as well."
So Bolton wants war with Iran? Pretty tall talk from a man who during the war in 'Nam
ducked into the Maryland Army National Guard because he had no desire to die in a Southeast
Asian rice paddy as he considered the war in Vietnam already lost. His words, not mine. The
Iranian military will not be the push over the Iraq army was. They are much better equipped
and motivated and have a healthy stock of missiles. They even have the Russian-made S-300
anti-aircraft missile system up and running.
Once you start a war, you never know where it will go. Suppose the Iranians consider –
probably correctly – that it is Israel's influences that led to the attack and so
launch a few missiles at them. What happens next? Will Hezbollah take action against them as
well. If the US attacks Iran, then there is no reason whatsoever for Iran not to attack the
various US contingents scattered around the Middle East in places like Syria. What if the
Russians send in their Aerospace Forces to help stop an attack. Will they be attacked as
well? Is the US prepared to lose a carrier?
And how will the war end? The country is mountainous like Afghanistan so cannot be occupied
unless the entire complete total of all US forces are shipped over there. This is just lunacy
squared and surely even Trump must realize that if the whole thing is another Bay of Pigs, it
will be his name all over it in the history books and so sinking his chances for a 2020
re-election. And if the justification for the whole thing is a coupla mortars on a car park,
how will he justify any American loses? At this point I am waiting for Bolton to finish each
one of his speeches and tweets with the phrase-
Great point. None of my fellow comrades who actually participated in firefights (not just
drove trucks behind the lines) are eager to be led into battle by National Guard and
bone-spur deferrals, much less student deferral draft dodgers.
Calling Bolton on Pompeo "batshit crazy" cries out for revisions in the APA Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual (DSM).
Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn, might
illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent
pissing in."
Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to
guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that
like a feudal fiefdom?
Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there"
gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant
threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson
factor.
Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but
Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite
capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.
The point might be, sure the Dems as part of the duopoly created the context within which
Trump now acts as president. Nonetheless there is a direct linear responsibility for his
actions that rests with him.
Unless you consider him so impaired as not to be responsible for his actions ;-)
So will the buck stop with Obama/Hillary for destroying Libya, the half million dead in
Syria, the covert support for the Saudis in Yemen which started under Obama, the coup in
Honduras, the deterioration in US/Russia relations to the point where nuclear war has once
again started to become thinkable? By these standards Trump's wrecking ball is quite
tiny.
It's not like the Obama administration and the EU didn't strike a nuclear deal with Iran
to freeze nuclear capable production and allow for lifting of sanctions -- how could they
have gone further? How could its deal be worse then the saber rattling of Trump/Bolton? Not
saying this as a fan of the Obama administration in general.
Pied Piper Memo. It's up in Wikileaks. Clinton campaign laid out a strategy to help Trump along so he would be their opponent.
They bet that he was too far out there for the general public to vote him in as
president.
...Everyone
including Trump was shocked he won. He has made an only partly successful hostile takeover of
the Republican party. The fact that he got only at best the second string, and mainly the
fourth string, to work in his Administration, Trump's repudiation of international
institutions and his trade war with China are all evidence that he was chosen by anyone, much
the less a cabal you create out of thin air called "the oligarchy"
As Frank Herbert said in Dune, the most enduring principles in the universe are accident
and error. Trump did not want to win. This was a brand-enhancing stunt for him that got out
of control.
Something for our would be Croesus and his minions: If you go to war with Persia, you will
destroy a mighty empire OK, not so mighty, but an empire nevertheless.
The US has previously run multiple conventual war simulations and in all cases the US lost
against Iran, only when the US used its nuclear option did the US prevail. The implications of a nuclear strike and how the Russian Federation will react, to having
yet another one of its allies attacked is unknown?
Really -- who cares? Any claim of 'all' is difficult to support under the best of
circumstances and unwise. Besides, suppose we could 'prevail' in a war with Iran -- why
should or would we want to? Are you OK with a little war with Iran if a couple of
conventional war simulations suggest we could win?
1) I really hope jim webb gets the def sec job. That would be a strong signal.
2) if the TDS infected bi-partisan consensus wants to impeach. They can build on this. I
suspect they won't though.
3) Keep in mind Trump like some trash talk. Pompeo seems here to stay. Not sure about
Bolton. But, as we saw with N. Korea, sometimes the crazy gets dialed up to 11, right before
things get calmed down.
Because that worked so well in the Balkans and Iraq and Libya, etc, etc etc. The world is
not what you think it is. Let us compare Iran as a country with America's loyal ally Saudi
Arabia as an example. Would you believe that Iran has a Jewish population that feel safe
there and have no interest in moving to Israel? In Saudi Arabia, if you renounce Islam that
is a death sentence. Women have careers in Iran and drive cars. Woman have burkas in Saudi
Arabia and have very few freedoms. Iran has taken in refugees from the recent wars. Saudi
Arabia has taken virtually none from Syria. Iran wants to have their own country and work out
their own problems as they are a multicultural country. Saudi Arabia is a medieval monarchy
that has been exporting the most extremist view of Islam around the world using their oil
money. Ideologically, all those jihadists the past few decades can be traced to Wahhabi
teachings. Now tell me that if you had a choice, which country sounds more attractive to live
in?
Having been to Iran, it is an amazing place and they are the most welcoming of people. One
of the few places I have seen female taxi drivers, too. Women are very self-assured there
– they will blow past men to get to what they want to do. Lots of people don't like the
Islamic government (and they will note that to you), but as you mentioned, they are NOT
medieval.
The government praises science and technology in roadside ads up and down the
country. The ads, by the way, are almost always in Farsi and English, as English is the 2nd
language of the country. And I'd like to add that they love Americans. It didn't matter what
town I was in and we went to some small towns. I literally had people yelling "We love
America" and asking for my autograph. And no – I am not famous. They are the most
generous, gregarious people I have ever met in my life.
I have odd memories of my trip like being in a taxi going into Tehran listening to a
instrument only version of Madonna's La Isla Bonita (they really like Madonna). And going to
beautiful mosques which are filled with mirrors and coloured light so it's almost like a
disco (mirrors and water are ancient pre-Islamic symbols). And the gardens – in odd
places like underpasses that happen to have a bit of opening to light and rain. Where ever
they can stick a garden they will do it.
Iran is a hodgepodge of so many thoughts, peoples, and currents. One thing they are though
– is fiercely loyal to Iran. Not the government, but to their homeland, to their
people. There is no way we would win. Due to geography and due to the losses they would be
willing to sustain we would be destroyed. We would lose so badly that it would look like the
First Anglo-Afghan War where only one Brit got back after the entire army was destroyed. We
tussle with them on their own land at our peril.
Saudi Arabia is America's loyal ally! You mean the SA that financed, planned, and manned
the 9/11 attacks?
Because SA is a bigger shithole than Iran is no argument. What does need to be faced is that
SA has a lock on American politics through its financial control of Washington DC swamp
dwellers.
The Balkans is quiet now. Iraq became a mess when Paul Bremer snatched defeat from near total
victory.
Libya, Syria and Ukraine are the victims of malevolent US meddling (as was Vietnam). I am
hoping that President Trump can reverse course and create a foreign policy that puts the
interests of people first, particularly the interests of the people of the USA. Forlorn hope
perhaps.
I would not want to live in either of them.
Well said. All religious fundamentalists are dangerous because they believe they are the
"chosen ones" and therefore superior to "non-believers", whose lives are less important and
therefore expendable if and when they feel so inclined.
(1) Echoing other responses, I suggest we ask the "Iranian people" if they would like the
U.S. to help them into modernity. Given our track record in Iran and other ME nations, I'm
not sure they would welcome our assistance, particularly if it involved "a few explosions" or
so.
(2) It is "the people" that are always hurt first, and the most, in such interventions,
not the government.
I wasn't sure if this was a serious comment or one meant to provoke. It did provoke me to
make an earlier response. I thank the moderators for blocking it (sincerely – not being
sarcastic).
Bah, who cares about a little collateral damage. The Iranian people obviously don't know
what's good for them. We just need to bring back Wolfowitz to make sure they are on hand to
lay down palm fronds before the US forces as they enter Baghdad after we nuke it into rubble.
Speaking of sociopaths, I am sure Darth Vader would make himself available to advise from
Wyoming. Where the hell is Elliot Abrams when you need him. What's Rumsfeld doing these days?
How great would it be to get the old gang together again, under the maniacal leadership of
Bolton. Maybe Dubya would be willing to do the "mission accomplished" as the smoke clears
over the whole MENA region. What a great bunch of guys.
You're a regular humanitarian bomber. Reminds me of "Assad must go" and the fact 'we'
never bombed him but all the people, all around the nation of the ilk you pretend to want to
help by doing the same thing in Iran.
At best, you are speaking a bunch of hooey without thinking. Oh, and last I heard Iran has
not invaded another country for something like 400 years. Look in your mirror.
Are the Iranian people asking us to invade their country? In the U.S. there seems to be
this bizarre nonchalance about war, which used to be considered a terrible scourge. After the
recent disasters in Libya, Ukraine, and Iraq, "regime change" should be discredited. The U.S.
has caused nothing but misery in the third world. We should focus on our own human rights and
democracy problems. If we want to do something abroad I favor ending our support for Israeli
crimes against Palestinians.
Gotta keep the military industrial complex well fed.
George Orwell was right, sadly; constant state of military alert and occasionally shifting
loose alliances between three competing major military powers.
What a waste of human resources.
IMHO, Bolton serves two roles in the Trump Administration.
As a symbol for the hawkier folks in Congress and the media
As a foil to Trump in a good cop-bad cop, or bad cop-worse cop role, if you prefer
The first provides air cover and the second forestalls ground action. The air cover says
see what we could do , and the ground action blusters to draw attention by
the media thereby serving to defuse any escalationist tendencies pushed by neo-cons.
Bolton is a price of admission, and will not have much of a purpose as the effects of the
Iran sanctions become more evident and that regime becomes more pliable. The people on the
ground in Iran seem to want de-escalation and more normal lives, like so many around the
world and at home.
Trump is interested in what is good for Trump. Why he thinks Bolton at his side is good
for him is a mystery. Rather a hand grenade with the pin pulled in your pocket than Bolton.
Much the same can be said of Pompeo.
I have never understood the lust for war with Iran it looks entirely irrational to me. The
Iranian government may not be to your taste and pursue policies you dislike in the
extreme, but is this a reason to gin up a war. I could never support such a conflict and would
do whatever I could to thwart it.
This is not news and while concerning is not fundamental.
Bolton was hired precisely because of his uberhawk obsession with Iran. That is in fact
the central credential that he brought to the table and as such there should be zero surprise
in this. Indeed the only real shocker is that he asked for plans rather than pulling them out
of his own fevered mind as he usually does.
And as others have noted the Pentagon draws up plans like this all the time. This kind of
speculative planning is a big part of what the Pentagon does and somewhere no doubt is
someone who is paid to prepare for the "inevitable" war in Jamaca.
The question really is whether we will act upon these plans, or some others, and from what
I read of this article that is no more likely than it was a few months ago. Scary yes but no
scarier than it already was.
Well, what do they want us to think? Of course this is predictable–even
SOP–for Bolton. But someone in the Pentagon is offering some pushback, or wants to
suggest there is resistance. Or someone in the CIA. Some of these people prefer wars to
quagmires, especially after an exhausting 20 years. And climbing into bed with the Saudis and
Israelis to fight Iran may not appeal to everyone.
Some may even see that Iran is a much more promising place for consumer and capital
growth, and implementation of bourgeois democracy, than Saudi Arabia. But Mr. Bolton might
say that that's the point.
I think we may be closer to war with Iran than most of us care to think. Trump is under
siege from multiple investigations with no room to run, the Democrats now have the House and
will only intensify the pressure, Pompeo and Bolton–both Iran hawks–are now in
charge of our foreign policy, and a former Boeing executive (with stock options?) is in
charge of the Pentagon, Trump is also being pushed into war by Saudi Arabia and
Israel–his two closest buddies–and probably the two most malign influences on US
policy, and finally, our economy is beginning to look shakey, and the normal functions of
government are now in shutdown. Shock doctrine holds that now is the time to act.
I recall a piece by Chris Hedges and Ralph Nader posted by another commenter here that he
would likely do so BEFORE the Dems took control of the House. I thought there was a lot of huffing and puffing going on, except for the likelihood of
wagging the dog, a tried and true tactic of US presidents.
Was chatting to a someone who was a junior official in the GWB administration. He
suggested the first thing Bolton does when he joins an administration is request these plans.
If you didn't, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of any interesting events to bomb Iran.
Besides, he hasn't actually implemented them yet!
Amusingly its standard bureaucratic form to ensure you have plans on file. Otherwise when
asked to list the options, how would you make sure your plan for covert opps, or democracy
subsidizing/subverting payments appeared to be the most reasonable plan on the table?
Bolton is the same paleoconservative he ever was. And in that sense he is refreshing. One
gets tired of seeing Israelis and Saudis make proposals for spending American lives on
countless critically important projects.
There's also word that the US and Bolton have been giving quiet encouragement, with the
new President in Brazil, for a Venezuela intervention.
I think it's important, though, not to simply characterize these people as monsters but to
finger the system behind them. There was word before the election that Ms. Clinton has become
chummy with Bolton and some of the other neocons; we might be looking at much the same if she
had been elected.
Also, Kissinger bombed Cambodia and set off a genocide. Bolton is awful, but nothing
whatsoever will make me yearn for Mr. K. I have a friend who's still unhappy with me because
I turned down an invite to dine with him long ago, but I was just too frightened of what I
might say in his presence.
We can take it for granted that they are nuts–but nuttiness is like monstrousness,
not always so useful as explanation. They're also operating out of the logic of a
contradictory and decaying system. The neocons are the ideological successors of the
neoliberals (who liked to follow with the velvet fist rather than lead with it, but hardly
eschewed it). . . the culmination of much of the same logic. Egalite and fraternite trail far
behind these days.
I agree with author Nicholas Taleb's view of the military interventionists, who include
Bolton, that have repeatedly urged that we "intervene in foreign countries -- Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria -- whose governments did not meet their abstract standards of political
acceptability." Besides the losses suffered by our troops and economy, as Taleb observed each
of those interventions "made conditions significantly worse in the country being 'saved'. Yet
the interventionists pay no price themselves for wrecking the lives of millions. Instead they
keep appearing on CNN and PBS as 'experts' who should guide us in choosing what country to
bomb next." Now, after imposing economic sanctions on Iran, they're evidently again seeking
war.
The National Security Advisor is a senior official in the executive branch. Who placed
these people in charge of our nation's foreign policy and to act in our name?
There is no threat to the United States involved here. I don't recall being given the
opportunity to vote on them or the policies they represent and push. It's past time these
individuals be removed from positions of power and influence and for American soft power and
diplomacy to be restored to preeminence. I want this country to stand for peace, freedom,
equal opportunity and hope; not war, chaos, fear and death.
The US foreign policy generally doesn't depend on individual people. It is the Swamp which
drive neolib/neocon policy which is driven mostly by the Deep State which means the coalition of
MIC, Wall Street and intelligence agencies and their agents of influence within the
government.
The most important question is how he managed to get into administration?
bolton is a bully and such people have no friends.
Notable quotes:
"... The National Security Advisor has had a reputation of being an abrasive and obnoxious colleague for a long time, and his attempts to push his aggressive foreign policy agenda have made him even more enemies. ..."
"... If Bolton is "under attack" from within the administration, it is because he has behaved with the same recklessness and incompetence that characterize his preferred policies overseas. He should be attacked, and with any luck he will be defeated and driven from office. Unfortunately, we have been seeing the opposite happen over the last few weeks: more Bolton allies are joining the administration in important positions and at least one major rival has exited. ..."
"... the longer he remains National Security Advisor the worse it will be for U.S. interests. ..."
Henry Olsen is
very worried that other people in the administration might be out to get Bolton:
Whatever the motive, conservatives who favor more robust U.S. involvement abroad should
sit up and take notice. One of their strongest allies within the administration is under
attack. Whether Bolton's influence wanes or even whether he remains is crucially important
for anyone who worries that the president's impulses that deviate from past American foreign
policy will weaken American security.
There have been a number of unflattering reports about Bolton in the last few weeks, but for
the most part those stories are just proof that Bolton has no diplomatic skills and does a
terrible job of managing the administration's policy process. If Bolton had done a better job
of coordinating Syria policy, the administration's Syria policy wouldn't be the confused mess
that it is. If he hadn't made such a hash of things with the Turkish government, there would
have been no snub by Erdogan for anyone to report. There may be quite a bit of hostile leaking
against Bolton, but that is itself a testament to how many other people in the administration
loathe him.
The National Security Advisor has had a reputation of being an abrasive and obnoxious
colleague for a long time, and his attempts to push his aggressive foreign policy agenda have
made him even more enemies.
If Bolton is "under attack" from within the administration, it is because he has behaved
with the same recklessness and incompetence that characterize his preferred policies overseas.
He should be attacked, and with any luck he will be defeated and driven from office.
Unfortunately, we have been seeing the opposite happen over the last few weeks: more Bolton
allies are joining the administration in important positions and at least one major rival has
exited.
Bolton's influence in the administration is an important indication of what U.S. foreign
policy will look like in the months and years to come, and the longer he remains National
Security Advisor the worse it will be for U.S. interests.
In any case this was a positive step by Trump. Which was done after several disastrous,
typical neocon style actions.
Notable quotes:
"... Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of ..."
"... "Trump being Trump?" Seriously? He's proven through his actions and his appointments that he's a full-blown neocon ..."
"... If nothing else, appointing Bolton as national security advisor speaks volumes. Personnel is policy, as they say. ..."
"... Nothing to wonder at, war is the most lucrative racket going, for those who profit mightily from supplying weapons. It's become so important to an otherwise shrunken manufacturing base, that downsizing would affect employment, and there's nowhere domestic to absorb the overseas demobilized. ..."
"... Bolton is a national disgrace. This vile piece of trash is desperate to get the USA into a disastrous war with Iran. The quicker Bolton is removed the better. Any stooge who supported the Iraq invasion should be precluded from consideration. ..."
"... "Before we credit Trump with stumbling on something sensible for once, it might be wise to remember that we're still talking about -- Trump. Who now says that American troops still in Iraq can still raid into Syria as necessary, and by the way, they'll be staying in Iraq. So already it's shaping up as not so much a withdrawal as a reshuffling. After a minor adjustment to the game board, play can continue as necessary, such as whenever Bolton or Fox media whispers into the casino bankrupt's ear. Always always always a swindle, with Trump. It's an iron law." ..."
"... You do know that Trump wants to increase the military budget. Yet you maintain that he wanted to pull us out of foreign wars. Curious. Where would all that extra money go? ..."
"... Only an incompetent imbecile with no experience in leadership or government could be so dim-witted as to appoint people who would willfully defy and disregard his agenda. Surely our country would never put give such an incompetent so much authority. Oh wait sorry, never mind. ..."
"... I took his decision of withdrawal from Syria and seemingly from Afghanistan is his survival strategy for 2020 presidential election to appeal to war weariness American voters because Mr. Cohen's plea deal and the revelation of Trump signature on the license agreement for Moscow Trump Tower project would kill his 2020 chance. It is a good strategy but over the last two days his approval rating has not been improved." ..."
"... Those of us who want to see Bolton gone should first ask why he was chosen in the first place. Clearly Trump had to appease Adelson in order to make that appointment because he depends on his campaign donations. ..."
"... To those who say Trump has no foreign policy vision, you are wrong. His vision is simple, dismantle parts of the Empire, become a little more isolationist, and focus on 'America First'. Trump is not very intelligent, but he has the right instincts. He is up against the War Party, the most influential power center in the US, and that is not easy. Obama is more intelligent than Trump, but the results were very bad add one more destroyed country, Libya to his credit, and almost another, Syria (although thankfully the Russians stopped that). ..."
After Syria, Trump Should Clean Out His National Security BureaucracyThey're
undermining his positions and pursuing their own agendas. John Bolton should be the first to
go.
President Donald Trump has at last rediscovered his core foreign policy beliefs and ordered
the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. Right on cue, official Washington had a collective
mental breakdown. Neocons committed to war, progressives targeting Trump, and centrists
determined to dominate the world unleashed an orgy of shrieking and caterwauling. The
horrifying collective scream, a la artist Edvard Munch, continued for days.
Trump's decision should have surprised no one. As a candidate, he shocked the Republican
Party establishment by criticizing George W. Bush's disastrous decision to invade Iraq and
urging a quick exit from Afghanistan. As president, he inflamed the bipartisan War Party's
fears by denouncing America's costly alliances with wealthy industrialized states. And to
almost everyone's consternation, he said he wanted U.S. personnel out of Syria. Once the
Islamic State was defeated, he explained, Americans should come home.
How shocking. How naïve. How outrageous.
The president's own appointees, the "adult" foreign policy advisors he surrounded himself
with, disagreed with him on almost all of this -- not just micromanaging the Middle East, but
subsidizing Europeans in NATO, underwriting South Korea, and negotiating with North Korea. His
aides played him at every turn, adding allies, sending more men and materiel to defend foreign
states, and expanding commitments in the Middle East.
Last spring, the president talked of leaving Syria "very soon." But the American military
stayed. Indeed, three months ago, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced an entirely
new mission: "We're not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders
and that includes Iranian proxies and militias."
That was chutzpah on a breathtaking scale. It meant effectively that the U.S. was entitled
to invade and dismember nations, back aggressive wars begun by others, and scatter bases and
deployments around the world. Since Damascus and Tehran have no reason to stop cooperating --
indeed, America's presence makes outside support even more important for the Assad regime --
Bolton was effectively planning a permanent presence, one that could bring American forces into
contact with Russian, Syrian, and Turkish forces, as well as Iranians. As the Assad government
consolidates its victory in the civil war, it inevitably will push into Kurdish territories in
the north. That would have forced the small American garrison there to either yield ground or
become a formal combatant in another Middle Eastern civil war.
The latter could have turned into a major confrontation. Damascus is backed by Russia and
might be supported by Ankara, which would prefer to see the border controlled by Syrian than
Kurdish forces. Moreover, the Kurds, under threat from Turkey, are not likely to divert forces
to contain Iranians moving with the permission of the Damascus government. Better to cut a deal
with Assad that minimizes the Turks than be Washington's catspaw.
The Pentagon initially appeared reluctant to accept this new objective. At the time,
Brigadier General Scott Benedict told the House Armed Services Committee: "In Syria, our role
is to defeat ISIS. That's it." However, the State Department envoy on Syria, Jim Jeffrey, began
adding Iran to his sales pitch. So did Brian Hook, State's representative handling the
undeclared diplomatic war on Iran, who said the goal was "to remove all forces under Iranian
control from Syria."
Apparently this direct insubordination came to a head in a phone call between President
Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. "Why are you still there?" the latter asked
Trump, who turned to Bolton. The national security advisor was on the call, but could offer no
satisfactory explanation.
Perhaps at that moment, the president realized that only a direct order could enforce his
policy. Otherwise his staffers would continue to pursue their militaristic ends. That
determination apparently triggered the long-expected resignation of Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis, who deserves respect but was a charter member of the hawkish cabal around the
president. He dissented from them only on ending the nuclear agreement with Iran.
Still in place is Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who so far has proven to be a bit more
malleable though still hostile to the president's agenda. He is an inveterate hawk, including
toward Tehran, which he insists must surrender to both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as part of any
negotiation. He's adopted the anti-Iran agenda in Syria as his own. His department offered no
new approach to Russia over Ukraine, instead steadily increasing sanctions, without effect, on
Moscow. At least Pompeo attempted to pursue discussions with North Korea, though he was
certainly reluctant about it.
Most dangerous is Bolton. He publicly advocated war with both Iran and North Korea before
his appointment, and his strategy in Syria risked conflict with several nations. He's
demonstrated that he has no compunctions about defying the president, crafting policies that
contradict the latter's directives. Indeed, Bolton is well-positioned to undermine even obvious
successes, such as the peaceful opening with North Korea.
Supporting appointments to State and the National Security Council have been equally
problematic. Candidate Trump criticized the bipartisan War Party, thereby appealing to
heartland patriots who wonder why their relatives, friends, and neighbors have been dying in
endless wars that have begotten nothing but more wars. Yet President Trump has surrounded
himself with neocons, inveterate hawks, and ivory tower warriors. With virtually no aides
around him who believe in his policies or were even willing to implement them, he looked like a
George Bush/Barack Obama retread. The only certainty, beyond his stream of dramatic tweets,
appeared to be that Americans would continue dying in wars throughout his presidency.
However, Trump took charge when he insisted on holding the summit with North Korea's Kim
Jong-un. Now U.S. forces are set to come home from Syria, and it appears that he may reduce or
even eliminate the garrison in Afghanistan, where Americans have been fighting for more than 17
years. Perhaps he also will reconsider U.S. support for the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen.
Trump should use Secretary Mattis's departure as an opportunity to refashion his national
security team. Who is to succeed Mattis at the Pentagon? Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan
appears to have the inside track. But former Navy secretary and senator Jim Webb deserves
consideration. Or perhaps it's time for a second round for former senator Chuck Hagel, who
opposed the Gulf war and backed dialog with Iran. Defense needs someone willing to challenge
the Pentagon's thinking and practices. Best would be a civilian who won't be captured by the
bureaucracy, one who understands that he or she faces a tough fight against advocates of
perpetual war.
Next to go should be Bolton. There are many potential replacements who believe in a more
restrained role for America. One who has been mentioned as a potential national security
advisor in the past is retired Army colonel and respected security analyst Douglas
Macgregor.
Equally important, though somewhat less urgent, is finding a new secretary of state.
Although Pompeo has not so ostentatiously undermined his boss, he appears to oppose every
effort by the president to end a war, drop a security commitment, or ease a conflict. Pompeo's
enthusiasm for negotiation with Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin is clearly lagging. While the
secretary might not engage in open sabotage, his determination to take a confrontational
approach everywhere except when explicitly ordered to do otherwise badly undermines Trump's
policies.
Who to appoint? Perhaps Tennessee's John Duncan, the last Republican congressman who opposed
the Iraq war and who retired this year after decades of patriotic service. There are a handful
of active legislators who could serve with distinction as well, though their departures would
be a significant loss on Capitol Hill: Senator Rand Paul and Representatives Justin Amash and
Walter Jones, for instance.
Once the top officials have been replaced, the process should continue downwards. Those
appointed don't need to be thoroughgoing Trumpists, of whom there are few. Rather, the
president needs people generally supportive of his vision of a less embattled and entangled
America: subordinates, not insubordinates. Then he will be less likely to find himself in
embarrassing positions where his appointees create their own aggressive policies contrary to
his expressed desires.
Trump has finally insisted on being Trump, but Syria must only be the start. He needs to
fill his administration with allies, not adversaries. Only then will his "America First" policy
actually put America first.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.
After two years in office, I am utterly flabbergasted that there are still people out
there who take seriously the notion that Trump wants to extricate us from our wars around the
globe and refrain from starting new ones. Virtually every foreign policy decision he has made
has been contrary to that.
Finally, for once, he decides to pull out of Syria (a mere few weeks after he announced we
would stay there indefinitely) and somehow this one, as yet unimplemented decision represents
"Trump being Trump?" Seriously? He's proven through his actions and his appointments that
he's a full-blown neocon . Maybe I'll rescind the "full-blown" part of that judgment if
he actually does withdraw from Syria. But it would still be a pretty tiny exception to his
thoroughly neocon actions up to this point.
If nothing else, appointing Bolton as national security advisor speaks volumes.
Personnel is policy, as they say. And you'd have have spent the last two decades in a
coma living on another planet not to know that Bolton is the biggest warmonger around. He
makes most of the neocons look like pacifists by comparison. Even the people who think Trump
a complete idiot can't really imagine that Trump didn't know what he was getting when he
hired Bolton.
Let's get real here. It'll be great if he withdraws from Syria. It'd be even better if he
replaces his national security team along the lines suggested in this article. But don't hold
your breath. It would go against nearly everything he has done since taking office.
It's time to come to grips with the non-existence of the tooth fairy.
"heartland patriots who wonder why their relatives, friends, and neighbors have been
dying in endless wars that have begotten nothing but more wars."
Nothing to wonder at, war is the most lucrative racket going, for those who profit
mightily from supplying weapons. It's become so important to an otherwise shrunken
manufacturing base, that downsizing would affect employment, and there's nowhere domestic to
absorb the overseas demobilized.
The downside of this, therefore, is it may only be redirection and consolidation, to be able
to concentrate forces on Iran instead. The budget's not getting any smaller, so there's got to
be compensatory warmaking somewhere.
Bolton is a national disgrace. This vile piece of trash is desperate to get the USA into
a disastrous war with Iran. The quicker Bolton is removed the better. Any stooge who supported
the Iraq invasion should be precluded from consideration.
"Yet President Trump has surrounded himself with neocons, inveterate hawks, and ivory
tower warriors."
In fairness to Trump, there just was nobody else. He had nobody lined up to be an
administration that believed what he did. Republicans were all hawks. Democrats wouldn't think
of helping, and were also all hawks anyway.
Trump's first effort to break out of that with second or third-line people went bust with
the likes of Gen. Flynn, and he was left with going back to the very people he'd defeated.
At this point in time I don't think Trump will be able to win a second term, such is the
chaos he's brought about to his Presidency. So that leaves to question which of the men you
have suggested to help lead Trump to a less warlike America would choose to serve? Perhaps
first, we need an "Adult" as POTUS and maybe then, we can get "men of wisdom" who can help
America get out of it's "Military Misadventures" in the Middle East.
There is no problem replacing someone who should never have been tapped in the first place.
John Bolton. Never too soon to right a wrong. Get rid of neocon Bolton and his types now. Not
later. He marches to another drummer not to USA interests. I doubt Trump can even beat Kamila
Harris (darling of the illiberal left) in 2020 if he keeps Bolton and Co. around.
I wouldn't get overly excited about this. Trump has habitually initiated all levels of chaos
throughout his incompetent administration. This is nothing new but more of the same. If anyone
believes Trump actually found his brain, they are smoking something
What a joke. Trump has no "foreign policy vision," just a series of boisterous, bellicose
talking points that to his isolationist base and his own desire to be the strongman.
"Before we credit Trump with stumbling on something sensible for once, it might be
wise to remember that we're still talking about -- Trump. Who now says that American troops
still in Iraq can still raid into Syria as necessary, and by the way, they'll be staying in
Iraq. So already it's shaping up as not so much a withdrawal as a reshuffling. After a minor
adjustment to the game board, play can continue as necessary, such as whenever Bolton or Fox
media whispers into the casino bankrupt's ear. Always always always a swindle, with Trump.
It's an iron law."
However, just 6 days ago sglover said on another thread ("Washington Melts Down Over Trump's
Syria Withdrawal" -- Dec 21, 3:26 pm):
"I despise Trump, but if he's managed to stumble on doing something sensible, and actually
does it (never a certainty with the casino swindler) -- great! There's no sane reason for us
to muck about in Syria. However it comes about, we should welcome a withdrawal there. If the
move gives Trump some of the approval that he plainly craves, maybe he'll repeat the
performance and end our purposeless wallow in Afghanistan. It doesn't say anything good about
the nominal opposition party, the Dems, that half or more of them -- and apparently *all* of
their dinosaur 'leadership' -- can't stifle the kneejerking and let him do it. Of course many
of them are "troubled" because their Israeli & Saudi owners, er, 'donors' expect it. But
some of them seem to have developed a sudden deep attachment to 'our mission in Syria' for no
better reason than, Trump is for it, therefore I must shout against it. And then, of course,
there's the Russia hysteria. Oh yeah, what a huge win for Moscow if it scores the 'prize' of
occupying Syria! If that's Putin's idea of a big score, how exactly does it harm any American
to let him have it? I wonder if the Democratic Party will ever be capable of doing anything
other than snatching defeat from the jaws of victory?"
The problem with they article begins with it's first sentence "President Donald Trump has at
last rediscovered his core foreign policy beliefs " I can't find any core foreign policy
beliefs. What I have seen is a mosh-mosh of sound bites that resound well with his audiences at
rallies, and various people attempt to link those together and fill in the white space between
with what they WANT his foreign policy beliefs to be. But to go so far as to say he has any
consistent beliefs that combine to form a foreign policy is going way too far.
Replace Bolton with Mike Flynn after all charges are dropped against him. Then have Robert
Mueller et al. arrested to be tried and put to death for High Treason. Then liberate Britain,
Bomb the Vatican, and put a naval blockade on China.
You do know that Trump wants to increase the military budget. Yet you maintain that he
wanted to pull us out of foreign wars. Curious. Where would all that extra money go? I'd
look for it at the top of Trump Tower. Certainly not in the pockets of ordinary citizens.
Hmm This article makes it seem like there's these renegades who have somehow held onto power
and are charting America's course on their own. But doesn't the President hand pick the members
of his cabinet? Wasn't every single one of them given their authority *by Donald Trump*?
Only an incompetent imbecile with no experience in leadership or government could be so
dim-witted as to appoint people who would willfully defy and disregard his agenda. Surely our
country would never put give such an incompetent so much authority. Oh wait sorry, never
mind.
We have a "peaceful opening" with North Korea? How many months ago did Mr. Bandow last read
about the NoKos counter-proposal to unconditional nuclear disarmament? And what about all the
Trump saber-rattling that preceded this so-called opening? If Trump was "played" by his own
advisers on Afghanistan, he was equally duped by the mirage offered by Kim.
Trump had no lofty notions underpinning this decision. He did it in an impetuous, chaotic
manner in which he obtained nothing in return from Russia or Turkey or Iran to address our
broader strategic interest in the region, such as ending the war in Yemen. Like everything he
does, it reeks of corruption and no doubt will be added to Muellers investigation.
Contrary to Bandows libertarian take, it is an expression of Trumps imperial presidency. The
Syrian involvement has strong bipartisan support even if lacking a resolution in support (and
the Libertarian Sen. Paul never got anywhere with a resolution against.) Leaving Syria was the
correct long term strategic decision.
I'm sure 99% of democrats in Congress supported the action. Only trump, with his
narcissistic incompetence could take an action that his opponents would overwhelmingly support
if done in a credible manner and turn it into controversy. Trump looks like the servant of
Russians and Turks in his conduct. Jan 2021 can't come soon enough.
I find it interesting that so many people (the author apparently included) are still so slow
to understand that Trump can't afford to get rid of people, because he literally can't find new
cabinet members.
He started with mostly C-listers, and most of them are gone. He is on to hiring TV hosts,
bloggers, professional political grifters, his family, or just being stuck with straight-up
vacant posts.
Only the worst sorts would voluntarily work for such an angry, undisciplined, chaotic boss
in the smoking shambles of an organization like this administration.
You just go ahead and ask Chuck Hagel if he would join this train wreck.
I blogged on December 22 when I read a similar article like this;
"Every time I read such article as this about Mr. Trump's decisions of any sort, I always
wonder if the authors believe that he has solid political philosophy or consolidated policy
agenda.
I took his decision of withdrawal from Syria and seemingly from Afghanistan is his
survival strategy for 2020 presidential election to appeal to war weariness American voters
because Mr. Cohen's plea deal and the revelation of Trump signature on the license agreement
for Moscow Trump Tower project would kill his 2020 chance. It is a good strategy but over the
last two days his approval rating has not been improved."
Mr. Trump seems to have delivered a speech in Iraq saying that the withdrawal from Syria
would not give any adverse effect on Israel security because the US government gives more than
$45 billion every year according to a local newspaper of Middle East.
This is another tactic to appeal to AIPAC to make sure his own security for 2020 candidacy,
isn't it?
First 2000 troops is not much more than a reinforced battalion the USMC shuffles that many
warriors and more around the Mediterranean every six months. I think the issue with Trump is,
as it's always been, his gut seat of his pants way of handling virtually everything he does.
There's no control or consideration apparent in any action other than to pitch chum at his
largely illiterate followers.
In this case he's handed a huge victory to Putin (my my what a surprise that is) and
essentially screwed the Kurds. If nothing else those 2000 troops were at least keeping a cap on
things to some small degree. That's out the door now and I can't help but think that ISIS (aka
the enemy here) will have a vote on what happens next.
Those of us who want to see Bolton gone should first ask why he was chosen in the first
place. Clearly Trump had to appease Adelson in order to make that appointment because he
depends on his campaign donations. What makes anyone think that the situation has changed
in such a way as to permit Trump more autonomy in his choice of his cabinet?
To those who say Trump has no foreign policy vision, you are wrong. His vision is
simple, dismantle parts of the Empire, become a little more isolationist, and focus on 'America
First'. Trump is not very intelligent, but he has the right instincts. He is up against the War
Party, the most influential power center in the US, and that is not easy. Obama is more
intelligent than Trump, but the results were very bad add one more destroyed country, Libya to
his credit, and almost another, Syria (although thankfully the Russians stopped that).
What is mysterious is the following from the article:
'Yet President Trump has surrounded himself with neocons, inveterate hawks, and ivory tower
warriors. With virtually no aides around him who believe in his policies or were even willing
to implement them, he looked like a George Bush/Barack Obama retread.'
Why he does this, I don't know.
Pulling out of Syria will be a good thing for everyone. The reason is largely nonsense, as
it was Russia/Syria that destroyed Isis (we did manage to destroy another city, Raqqa), but I
don't care, and neither will the American Public, who understand nothing of Syria.
The Kurds will make an arrangement for limited autonomy with Damascus (already happening as
they just asked for protection from Turkey in Manbij). Turkey will not invade Syria as long as
they feel Damascus can control the border. Syria, Russia, and maybe even the Kurds will wipe
out the last of Isis and those militants in Idlib that would rather die than give up the fight
(the fanatics), will be killed.
Then, the reconstruction of Syria can begin in earnest, and it is to be hoped that the
Chinese will get off their butt and provide some assistance.
Israel is probably unhappy, which pleases me no end, and I hope this is an indication that
there is some limit to the number of people we are willing to murder on their behalf.
@ NEexpert.Integrity is a quality severely lacking in many politicians in the US.Not being
American , but watching closely, if Senator hagel is such a man , it would do American politics
much good ,not only for the US but the US standing in the world .Gods speed in chnaging the
likes of Bolton and Pompeo to begin with.
@ Kurt Gayle -- I don't think you'll find any contradiction between my two remarks.
All I'm saying is that in all the ways that really matter the sudden "withdrawal" from Syria
is already shaping up to be a typical Trump bait-and-switch. Sure, troops won't be bivouacing
in Syria. Instead, they'll be stationed next door in Iraq, so they can continue to muck around
in Syria. And Trump emphasized that as far as he's concerned we'll be staying in Iraq.
(Of course, that "strategic doctrine" is only valid until his next Fox media wallow in front
of the idiot box. I.e., maybe until tomorrow afternoon)
Melania slap of Bolton face might be a good sobering measure. But neocons can't probably recover from their
addition
Notable quotes:
"... Ricardel is a longtime friend and associate of national security adviser John Bolton, who brought her into the National Security Council from the Department of Commerce, where she served as Undersecretary for Export Administration. Ricardel reportedly angered Ms. Trump over seating arrangements on a flight by Ms. Trump to Africa two weeks ago. Ricardel, who was to accompany the First Lady, did not make the trip. Ms. Trump, in an interview conducted with ABC News during the trip, said there were people in the White House she did not trust. Apparently, Ricardel was one of them. ..."
"... Perhaps no one in recent memory brought such a degree of ethnic baggage to her job like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright's Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the post-World War II theft of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by the woman who would represent the United States at the United Nations and then serve as America's chief diplomat. Albright's hatred for Serbia was not much different than Zbigniew Brzezinski's Polish heritage evoking an almost-pathological hatred of Russia, while he served as Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser. ..."
"... In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Valdas Adamkus as the regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the Mid-West states. Retiring from the US government after 29 years of service, Adamkus was elected to two terms as President of Lithuania. ..."
"... One might ask whether Ilves and Adamkus were kept on the US government payroll merely to support them until they could return to their countries in top leadership positions to help lead the Baltic nations into NATO membership. ..."
"... From 1993 to 1997, Army General John Shalikashvili served as Chairman of the Joint Chefs of Staff. Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw, Poland to a Georgian and Polish mother. During World War II, his father served in the Georgian Legion, a special unit incorporated into the Nazi German "SS-Waffengruppe Georgien." General Shalikashvili served as commander of all US military forces during a time of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. It was no surprise that he was an avid cheerleader for NATO's expansion to the East. ..."
America has always fancied itself as a "melting pot" of ethnicities and religions that form
a perfect union. The Latin phrase, E Pluribus Unum, "out of many, one," is even found on the
Great Seal of the United States.
However, as seen in a recent blow-up between First Lady Melania Trump and now-former Deputy
National Security Adviser Mira Ricardel, old feuds from beyond the borders of the United States
can result in major rifts at the highest echelons of the US government.
On November 13, Ms. Trump's communications director, Stephanie Grisham, fired off a tweet
that read: "it is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she [Ricardel] no longer
deserves the honor of serving in this White House." The White House announced Ricardel's
departure the next day, November 14.
Ricardel is a longtime friend and associate of national security adviser John Bolton, who
brought her into the National Security Council from the Department of Commerce, where she
served as Undersecretary for Export Administration. Ricardel reportedly angered Ms. Trump over
seating arrangements on a flight by Ms. Trump to Africa two weeks ago. Ricardel, who was to
accompany the First Lady, did not make the trip. Ms. Trump, in an interview conducted with ABC
News during the trip, said there were people in the White House she did not trust. Apparently,
Ricardel was one of them.
The bitter feud between Melania Trump and Mira Ricardel likely has its roots in their
backgrounds in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel was born Mira P. Radielović, the daughter
of Peter Radielovich, a native of Breza, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia. Ricardel
speaks fluent Croatian and was a member of the Croatian Catholic Church. Melania Trump was born
Melanija Knavs [pronounced Knaus] in Novo Mesto in Slovenia, also in the former Yugoslavia.
Villagers in the village of Sevnica, where Ms. Trump was raised, claim she and her Communist
Party parents were officially atheists. Ms. Trump later converted to Roman Catholicism. She and
her son by Mr. Trump, Barron Trump, speak fluent Slovenian. The Yugoslav Civil War, which began
in earnest in 1991, pitted the nation's ethnic groups against one another. There are ample
reasons, political, ethnic, and religious, for bad blood between the Slovenian-born First Lady
and a first-generation Croatian-American. The "battle royale" between Ms. Trump and Ricardel is
but one example of a constant problem in the United States when individuals with foreign ties
bring age-old inter-ethnic and inter-religious squabbles to governance.
Perhaps no one in recent memory brought such a degree of ethnic baggage to her job like
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright's Czech roots and the Yugoslav warrant issued
for the arrest of her professor-diplomat father, Joseph Korbel, for the post-World War II theft
of art from Prague, brought forth extreme anti-Serbian policies by the woman who would
represent the United States at the United Nations and then serve as America's chief diplomat.
Albright's hatred for Serbia was not much different than Zbigniew Brzezinski's Polish heritage
evoking an almost-pathological hatred of Russia, while he served as Jimmy Carter's National
Security Adviser.
Albright's bias against Serbia saw her influence US policy in casting a blind eye toward the
terrorism carried out by the Kosovo Liberation Army and its terrorist leader Hashim Thaci. That
policy resulted in Washington backing an independent Kosovo, a state beholden to organized
criminal syndicates protected by one of the largest US military bases in Europe, Camp
Bondsteel.
Ties by US foreign policy officials to their countries of origin continued to plagued
administrations after Carter. For example, Kateryna Chumachenko served in the Reagan White
House and State and Treasury Departments and later worked for KPMG as "Katherine" Chumachenko.
She also worked in the White House Public Liaison Office, where she conducted outreach to
various right-wing and anti-communist exile groups in the United States, including the Friends
of Afghanistan, on whose board Afghan refugee and later George W. Bush pro-consul in Iraq,
Zalmay Khalilzad, sat. Khalilzad, like Chumachenko, worked in the Reagan State Department.
Chumachenko was married to Ukrainian "Orange Revolution" President Viktor Yushchenko, and,
thusly, became the First Lady of Ukraine. Khalilzad became the Bush 43 ambassador to the UN,
where he often was at loggerheads with Iran, Libya, Syria, and other Muslim states. As was the
case with Albright and her anti-Serb underpinnings, it was difficult to ascertain whose agenda
Khalilzad was serving.
After being fired from the White House, there were reports that Ricardel was offered the
post of ambassador to Estonia. That Baltic country was no stranger to hauling foreign baggage
into the US government. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a bow-tie wearing
former Estonian language broadcaster for the Central Intelligence Agency-funded Radio Free
Europe ; long time resident of Leonia, New Jersey; could have just as easily ended up in a
senior State Department position rather than President of Estonia. Such is the nature of
divided loyalties among senior US government officials of both major political parties.
In 1981, Ronald Reagan appointed Valdas Adamkus as the regional administrator for the US
Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for the Mid-West states. Retiring from the US
government after 29 years of service, Adamkus was elected to two terms as President of
Lithuania.
One might ask whether Ilves and Adamkus were kept on the US government payroll merely to
support them until they could return to their countries in top leadership positions to help
lead the Baltic nations into NATO membership.
From 1993 to 1997, Army General John Shalikashvili served as Chairman of the Joint Chefs of
Staff. Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw, Poland to a Georgian and Polish mother. During World
War II, his father served in the Georgian Legion, a special unit incorporated into the Nazi
German "SS-Waffengruppe Georgien." General Shalikashvili served as commander of all US military
forces during a time of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. It was no surprise that he was an
avid cheerleader for NATO's expansion to the East.
Natalie Jaresko served in positions with the State Department, the Departments of Commerce,
Treasury, the US Trade Representative, and Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). In
2014, she became the Finance Minister for Ukraine. Earlier, she served as a financial adviser
to Yushchenko. The United States is not the only "melting pot" in North America that suffers
from officials burdened by ethnic dual loyalties. Halyna Chomiak, the Ukrainian-born
émigré mother of Canada's Foreign Minister, Chrystia Freeland, weighs heavily on
Freeland's ability to advance Canada's interests over those of the nation of her mother's
birth.
Trump's entire White House Middle East police team is composed of individuals who place
Israel's interests ahead of the United States. Trump takes his Middle East advice from
principally his son-in-law Jared Kushner, a contributor to and member of the board of the
"Friends of the IDF," an American non-profit that raises funds for the Israeli armed forces.
Kushner was named by Trump as a "special envoy" to the Middle East, while Jason Greenblatt, a
former attorney with the Trump Organization, was named as special envoy in charge of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Although the two positions appear to overlap, Kushner and
Greenblatt, both Orthodox Jews who have little time for Palestinians, are on the same page when
it comes to advancing the West Bank land grabbing policies of the Binyamin Netanyahu government
in Israel. Trump thoroughly Zionized his administration's Middle East policy with the
appointment of another Israel supporter, David M. Friedman, as US ambassador to Israel.
Friedman had been a bankruptcy lawyer with the Trump Organization's primary law firm, Kasowitz,
Benson, Torres & Friedman.
Trump has nominated as US ambassador to South Africa, handbag designer Lana Marks, who was
born in South Africa. Marks, who is known only to Trump from her membership in his Mar-a-Lago,
Florida "billionaires club," left South Africa in 1975, when the country was under the
apartheid regime. Marks claims to speak Afrikaans, the language preferred by the apartheid
regime, and Xhosa, the ethnic language of the late President Nelson Mandela. Because Marks
embellished her professional tennis career by claiming, without proof, participation in the
French Open and Wimbledon in the 1970s, her mastery of Xhosa can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, too, can her ability to deal with the current African National Congress government led by
President Cyril Ramaphosa, who had just been released from prison when Marks left the country
in 1975. The claims and politics of Marks and every official and would-be US official who
failed to shed their biases from their native and ancestral homelands, can all be taken with a
metric ton of salt.
Melting pots are fine, so long as they truly blend together. However, that is not the
situation in the United States as high government officials have difficulty in consigning the
bigotry inherent in family folklore and beliefs to the family scrapbooks.
by Justin
Raimondo Posted on November 15,
2018 November 14, 2018 We don't really hear all that much about Melania Trump in the
media except occasional digs at her immigration status and a few daring photos. That's
because the FLOTUS is one of the few unreservedly good things about this administration, and
of course the media doesn't want to go there. Her grace, her reserve, her remarkable calm at
the epicenter of a tumultuous White House, and, strikingly, her sense of style (and I don't
just mean her clothes) puts her on a different plane from the Washington circus that
surrounds her.
She had managed to keep her distance from the cutthroat politics of the Beltway, that is,
until her
collision with Mira Ricardel, National Security Advisor John Bolton's top aide and
enforcer. Ricardel apparently disparaged the First Lady to other members of the White House
staff, and tried to withhold resources from her on her recent trip to Africa. Whatever
personal interactions of an unpleasant nature may have passed between these women, it's hard
to imagine what provoked the office of the FLOTUS to issue the following statement :
"It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the
honor of serving in this White House."
Ricardel is described by those who know her as abrasive, a bureaucratic in-fighter, and
one "who doesn't suffer fools lightly." Having mistaken the First Lady for a fool, Ms.
Ricardel is the one who will suffer – along with Bolton, who has protected her since
her appointment from a chorus of critics, but who cannot stand against Melania.
So Team Bolton is on the outs, which means the America Firsters within the administration
who oppose our foreign policy of globalism and perpetual war are on the rise. Which leads us
to contemplate the meaning of this incident. The War Party's ranks are not filled with Mr.
Nice Guys. They are nearly all of them pushy self-serving aggressive SOBs, with about as much
personal charm as a rattlesnake.
I'm reminded of an essay by the
conservative philosopher Claes Ryn, professor of politics at Catholic University, in which he
describes the obnoxious behavior of the children of our political class in a local
MacDonald's just inside one of the Beltway's more prestigious neighborhoods:
"Deference to grown-ups seems unknown. I used to take offense, but the children have
only taken their cue from their parents, who took their cue from their parents. The adults,
for their part, talk in loud, penetrating voices, some on cell phones, as if no other
conversations mattered. The scene exudes self-absorption and lack of self-discipline.
"Yes, this picture has everything to do with U.S. foreign policy. This is the emerging
American ruling class, which is made up increasingly of persons used to having the world
cater to them. If others challenge their will, they throw a temper tantrum. Call this the
imperialistic personality – if 'spoilt brat' sounds too crude."
The Imperialistic Personality, indeed! It seems Ms. Ricardel had one too many temper
tantrums so that even in the permissive atmosphere of Washington, D.C., it was too much.
There are a lot of imperialistic personalities in that particular location, it seems, for one
reason or another. But things are different in Donald Trump's Washington, and even if we have
to take down the Ricardels one by one, just think of the numbers we can rack up in the next
six years.
A NOTE TO MY READERS : My apologies for the short column: I have some medical
issues to take care off this week and I'm a bit pressed for time.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
You can check out my Twitter feed by going here . But please note that my tweets are sometimes
deliberately provocative, often made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out
loud.
If this is Trump policy, then Trump is 100% pure neocon. It took just three months for the Deep state to turn him.
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton shrugged off the reality that Iran is still doing business internationally, saying that he believes Iran is "under real pressure" from the sanctions, and that he's determined to see it keep getting worse. ..."
With the newly reimposed US sanctions against
Iran having little to no perceivable economic impact, national security adviser John Bolton
is talking up his plans to continue to escalate the sanctions track, saying he will "
squeeze
Iran until the pips squeak ."
Bolton shrugged off the reality that Iran is still doing business internationally, saying
that he believes Iran is "under real pressure" from the sanctions, and that he's determined
to see it keep getting worse.
Bolton went on to predict that the European efforts to keep trading with Iran would
ultimately fail. He said the
Europeans are going through the six stages of grief , and would ultimately led to
European acceptance of the US demands.
Either way, Bolton's position is that the US strategy will continue to be
imposing new sanctions
on Iran going forward. It's not clear what the end game is, beyond just damaging
Iran.
Sort of like how Bolton and his merry band of neocons seized upon Ahmad Chalabi and his merry
men as some sort of Authentic Voice of Resistance to teh Evil Saddam. Does anyone else
remember that?
Bolton et al. know better. As long as this gets them the regime change that they and their
owners in Jerusalem and Riyadh demand, they do not care.
You can always tell just how deep our understanding is of a country by the opposition we
choose to support.
As @Sid Finster pointed out, the fraudulent Chalabi was a good bellwether of our true
understanding of Iraq, and the MEK shows just how equally deep we understand Iran.
Can't say if Bolton is just a nut; but Giuliani, et. al are probably just being paid; like
any other prostitute. IF the $$ stop; they will then say "who knew?" .
AS with Trump; S.A. would have no problem paying enough for them to perform any act demanded.
So Obama sees a "Responsibility to Protect" MEK war criminals and the business interests of
Dean, Bolton, Guiliani et.al, but is perfectly happy to let the Saudis "cross the blood red
line" for years to save himself some headaches on JCOPA – an "agreement" that was not
worth the paper it was written on without Congress actually binding itself by ratification.
But his minions did consider designating the Houthi "terrorists".
The intended Clinton-Obama "transition" had all the marks of a protection racket, all
governance transient and passing and resting on the edifice of unconstitutionally expansive
claims of executive power.
@rayray, thank you for the kind words, but my position is more accurately stated as follows:
I suspect that in 2003, Bolton knew and knew full well that Chalabi was an opportunist at
best. A fraudster, a monster, a sociopath, delusional, to put it more bluntly. That his
support in Iraq was nil, and that Chalabi would be rejected immediately and rightfully, as an
American puppet. Bolton may even have known that Chalabi was in the pay of Iran.
Like the MEK now, as long Bolton gets the war he so craves, he doesn't care about any of
that.
John Bolton suffers a crippling shortage of olives.
Notable quotes:
"... "As far as I remember, the US coat of arms features a bald eagle that holds 13 arrows in one talon and an olive branch in another, which is a symbol of a peace-loving policy," ..."
"... "Looks like your eagle has already eaten all the olives; are the arrows all that is left?" ..."
Meeting with US national security adviser John Bolton in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir
Putin made a comment about Washington's hostility that went right over the hawkish diplomat's
head. "As far as I remember, the US coat of arms features a bald eagle that holds 13 arrows
in one talon and an olive branch in another, which is a symbol of a peace-loving policy,"
Putin said in a meeting with Bolton in Moscow on Tuesday.
"I have a question," the Russian president added. "Looks like your eagle has
already eaten all the olives; are the arrows all that is left?"
About 15-20 minutes to get through (the facilitator seems like a bit of a wet blanket), but
fascinating to read, if like me, most of what you hear about Putin has been filtered through
the MSM.
A couple of reflections:
Putin does detail. He is courteous and patient. He is highly pragmatic and appears to be
widely (and, for my money, effectively) briefed.
For those of us lucky enough to follow VVP in his native language – it is indeed a
delight. (And – mind you – it was only after I took the time to follow him in his
native language that I was able to appreciate this person and his leadership abilities. If one
follows him through NYT – no chance that would give one an accurate picture.) He is erudite, informed, and has a wicked sense of humour, as shown in this clip: https://www.rt.com/news/442068-putin-olives-eagle-bolton/
Bolton pushes for the US to break out of the 1987 INF Treaty. Not surprising considering
that all those ABM components they are deploying around Russia are dual use and violate the
INF. The INF is also a joke (showing us what a comprador Gorby was) since it allows the US to
deploy unlimited range nuclear missiles in its Naval assets. So Russia cannot have any land
based intermediate range nukes, but the US can park its ships in EU harbours and deploy
unlimited amounts of the "banned" class of missiles.
I say let the US break the INF. The INF helps the USA and its NATzO minions more than it
helps Russia.
There may be several motivations for Bolton
– an attempt to force Russia into a ruinously expensive arms race;
– to create a regional Cold War to reverse the nascent rapprochement between Western
Europe and Russia;
– an attempt to limit war to the European/Russian region as much as possible if a war
against Russia is needed by the US.
Bolton is an idiot carrying out a moron's strategy. What could go wrong?
Bolton is a certified retard if he thinks he will bankrupt Russia with an arms race.
1) I find the theory that the USSR couldn't afford the 1970-80s arms race and went
bankrupt to be of zero credibility. The USSR was a command economy and various estimates of
how much it allegedly spent on the economy to be ridiculous western attempts to impose their
capitalist accounting on a command economy.
The USSR collapsed due to internal political rot and not some "budget deficit" which was
meaningless in command economics and never exiting in reality anyway. The only valid metrics
of deficits in command economies if there are labour shortages in various industries.
The USSR had more than enough engineers, researchers, workers and material resources to
keep up with the arms race.
This is why command economics is vastly superior to capitalist profiteering. Capitalism
only triumphs because humans are genetically deficient to live optimally under a command
economy since they need all sorts of superfluous incentives and feel-good junk.
2) Nuclear weapons are the cheapest option out of all military costs. Tanks, ships and
armed troops are much more expensive. In the current rocket era, these expensive options are
outdated and much less potent. Russia can neutralize any US move by deploying appropriately
designed missiles and warheads.
"... Earlier today, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo spoke to the hard-line, misleadingly-named pressure group, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), and delivered their usual attacks on and threats against Iran. ..."
"... An agreement that eliminates any pretext for preventive war, imposes no costs on America, and succeeds through cooperation with multiple governments is anathema to someone like Bolton, because it is proof that diplomacy works and can achieve things that coercive and punitive policies never could. ..."
"... UANI audience members react this way to bad economic news from Iran because they desire the destabilization and overthrow of the government. The fact that the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor headlined their event this week confirms for us that this is the administration's goal as well. ..."
Earlier today, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo spoke to the hard-line, misleadingly-named pressure group, United Against
Nuclear Iran (UANI), and delivered their usual attacks on and threats against Iran. One line from Bolton's speech
stood
out for being as delusional as it was representative of the Iran hawk worldview:
The Iran Deal was the worst diplomatic debacle in American history [bold mine-DL]. It did
nothing to address the regime's destabilizing activities or its ballistic missile development and proliferation.
Worst of all, the deal failed in its fundamental objective: permanently denying Iran all paths to a nuclear bomb.
Bolton loathes diplomacy. That is the key thing to understand about him, and it helps explain almost everything he
has done in his career. He regards any successful diplomatic agreement as something of a debacle because it involves
striking a compromise with another government, usually an adversary or rival, and because it means that the other side
wasn't forced to give in to our every demand. When he denounces the JCPOA as "the worst diplomatic debacle in American
history," he is simply expressing the intensity of his hatred for the government with which the agreement was made. His
previous and ongoing support for the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) shouldn't be forgotten when we try to make sense of this
fanatical rhetoric.
If Bolton considers something to be the "worst diplomatic debacle" of our entire history, that
tells us that the agreement required very little of the U.S., that it reinforced habits of multilateral cooperation,
and that it successfully resolved an outstanding dispute that Bolton wished to resolve through regime change and war.
An agreement that eliminates any pretext for preventive war, imposes no costs on America, and succeeds through
cooperation with multiple governments is anathema to someone like Bolton, because it is proof that diplomacy works and
can achieve things that coercive and punitive policies never could.
The venue for Bolton and Pompeo's speeches was no accident. It was an audience of
hard-liners that detest Iran being addressed by like-minded speakers. UANI intensely
opposed the nuclear deal and recited the usual false claims about it. Their vehement
hostility to the most important and successful nonproliferation agreement of its kind is a
testament to how little they care about actually restricting Iran's nuclear program. Like other
Iran hawks, UANI is simply against Iran, and therefore they hate anything that might relieve
international pressure on Iran. The group celebrates Trump administration sanctions and its
members laugh about the deteriorating economic conditions inside Iran:
UANI audience members react this way to bad economic news from Iran because they desire the
destabilization and overthrow of the government. The fact that the Secretary of State and
National Security Advisor headlined their event this week confirms for us that this is the
administration's goal as well.
Well, more evidence that the three stooges still drink Bibi's kool-aid. Perhaps AIPAC has
promised to arrange for the Pompeo-Haley GOP Ticket to succeed Trump, with Bolton as Sec of
State and Defence all-in-one.
John Bolton is, I believe, the scariest character in Trump's administration. How did Trump
pick him? It makes no sense, but this whole mess literally makes none. There has got to be a
way to get him out of there. Sheldon Adelson's money is the connection between Trump, Haley,
Bolton. Bolton wants war with Iran, has been intent on it since Bush 2 administration. He is
quite dangerous, and has connections to Netanyahu and even Meir Dagan of Mossad. I can't copy
this link to Gareth Porter's article but maybe Joe or someone can, it's cited below. Everyone
should read it. The facts in the article are quite alarming about Bolton. With all the
political drama going on from the Mueller probe, there are possibilities of dreadful
consequences, and I think Bolton could bring disaster. He may be the origin as well as the
mouthpiece of this latest provocative threat about Assad using chemicals. Here is the
article:
"The Untold Story of John Bolton's Campaign for War with Iran", by Gareth Porter, in The
American Conservative, March 22, 2018.
With Mueller Trump is on a very short leash indeed, so I doubt that he has great freedom of maneuver.
Notable quotes:
"... Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal of the Cold War. ..."
"... John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is! ..."
"... People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed. ..."
"... Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'être , and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc. ..."
"... Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be different this time. ..."
"... My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun & other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced. ..."
"... A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to spike the upcoming Putin summit. ..."
On a gestalt basis it seems to me from all the bits and pieces of information and rumor that DJT is attempting "The Deal of the
Century!" (an episode or two of his soon to be award winning series on the subject of "The Greatest President.")
Russian cooperation in this is clearly needed. Trump is blessedly lacking in ideological fervor. His Deplorable base is also a
bit short on ideology being focused on wages, prices, taxes and other everyday living issues. Their patriotism expresses itself in
devotion to the flag and the anthem and a willingness to serve in the armed forces, something increasingly absent in the "resistance."
Trump has a free hand from his base to negotiate peaceful coexistence with Russia, but he nevertheless must successfully deal
with the passion of the neocon wing of the Borg (foreign policy establishment). They still swoon at the thought of the ongoing renewal
of the Cold War.
John Bolton is an arch-neocon, a neocon's neocon. Trump has sent him to Moscow to arrange an agenda, date and location for a meeting
with Vladimir Putin. IMO this is a stroke of genius. What it does is put an enemy of good US-Russia relations in charge of arranging
the schedule for discussions to improve US-Russia relations. In LBJ's vulgarism, Bolton is going to be inside the tent peeing out
rather than outside peeing in. Having arranged the meeting, he will be personally invested in its success. How sweet that is!
Trumps is IMO trying for a grand ME bargain to be achieved with Russian help:
Peace in Syria in the context of abandonment of regime change. Trump the pragmatist recognizes that the R+6 forces have won
the civil war and, therefore he wishes to accept the sunk costs of previous American ineptitude in Syria and to walk away. US Embassy
Amman has signaled to the FSA rebels in SW Syria that they should not expect the US to defend them. This is a traditional American
stab in the back for guerrilla allies but the warning indicates to me that some group in the US Government (probably the CIA) has
enough conscience to want to give warning. As soon as that warning was issued the rate of surrenders to the SAA rose.
The US has thus made it clear that the SAA and Russian forces in Syria have a free hand in the SW and it seems that Israeli
air and missile attacks are unlikely against the SW offensive. This has been insured through a Russian mandate that Hizbullah and
IRGC dominated Shia militias stay out of the fight in Deraa and Quneitra Provinces.
The Egyptians have been talking to Hamas about their willingness to enter into a hudna (religiously sanctioned truce) with
Israel. Hamas has frequently offered this before. Such truces are renewable and are often for 10 years. Kushner's team thinks it
has attained Natanyahhu's support for this. The deal would supposedly include; a Gaza-Egyptian industrial zone in the area of Raffa,
an airport, a seaport. In return Hamas would be expected to police the truce from their side of the border. People on SST who have
deep access in Israel doubt the sincerity of apparent Israeli assent, but there is little doubt I think that DJT considers this part
of the Grand Bargain he is attempting to forge.
Nowhere in any of this is anything concerning Iran and I assume that regime change remains the policy. Nor is there anything about
Saudi Arabia and the UAE's mercenary manned war in Yemen. Ah, well, pilgrims, everything in its time. pl
People want to believe so badly. I also want to believe, but I live in the real world. What happened the last time Trump made
noises about leaving Syria to its own devices, most recently in April? Instant false flag, that's what. With Trump, it's worked
twice already, I see no reason that it will not work a third or fourth time, or as often as needed.
Without Russia as a selected enemy the US Army, with its expanding budget and end-strength has no important raison d'être
, and what will the Borg do about that? First we can expect a large increase in the "Russia-bad" propaganda, similar to that on
Iran (the greatest state sponsor of this and that). So I suppose Bolton is busy on his back-channel, etc.
No, I mean the Army is especially invested in Europe and has been. I attended C&GSC at the peak of Vietnam and in exercises they
were still mostly concerned with the Fulda Gap, division trains, etc. Big Army. Similar to how Army is going now, back to their
roots so to speak. Even when they claimed they were short of funds, they found a way to send forces to Europe based on the claims
that after Crimea, Russia was (and is) a threat to. . .the U.S.?
Peace with Russia would be a severe blow to Army especially
with the shift to Indo-Pacific which involves Navy and Marines, and Army not much. I know Army was greatly involved with island
operations in WWII, but China is not Japan regarding imperialism, IMO, and anyhow island invasions are not popular in Army.
So I look for a beefed up "Russia threat" campaign to counter Trump, and insider Bolton to be a big part of it.
Good analysis of the political implications of having Bolton establishing a summit as it worked with Pompeo. Always keep your
friends close and your enemies closer good way to clean up the nest of venomous asps.
Gen Sisi must have made an offer too good to resist. We know the House of Saud will finance it. Are they going to political legitimatize
Hamas, turn Gaza in a statelet ? Perhaps Hamas sees, or is being threaten with the money spigot being turned off ? The only way
to get money will be their share of offshore Natural Gas ? All for Hamas perhaps ? Nothing buys peace faster then lining a whole
lot of pockets. With more money and Airports and a Shipping port, opens dangerous doors. Is Israel ready for that ? How will that
be monitored ? So many damn questions. This may prove more problematic then the status quo, in the long run. Something does have
to be done, the conditions in Gaza are unacceptable.
Excellent analysis. In related news, a week or so ago semi-official Russian Vzglyad made a first media shot across the bow for
Iran in which it stressed that the manner of Iran's "presence" in Syria is a complicating factor.
Russia doesn't want to "dislodge" Iran from Syria but she needs Iran out of the border area with Israel. This is the key to a
new arrangement, including, in the long run, Iran's security.
Is there a new ABM Treaty in the works? Another SALT? Another Peace of Yalta?
First two are important but are not clear and present danger for Russia for a number of reasons. Militarization of space is
more important now. The last point, however, is extremely important because either there will be some kind of new geopolitical
arrangement or we will see probability of a global military conflict grow exponentially.
Iranians do not need to be at the border area. All they need is to deploy their true and tested method of arming Syria with tens
of thousands of precision rockets aimed at Haifa and Tel-Aviv. It worked for North Koreans.
No global peace is in the works.
Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars.
Let us hope it be different this time.
Between the end of Peace of Vienna and the start of Peace of Yalta there
was a 50-year interval - filled with 2 world wars. Let us hope it be
different this time.
It must be different, plus I disagree with historic parallel--two entirely different paradigms both in warfare, geopolitical
balance and media.
Well I certainly wish The Greatest President luck. Who knows, I'm done underestimating the guy.
My biggest concern remains that Bibi's support itself will not guarantee acquiescence from the ultra-nationalist elements
in Israel and their supporters elsewhere, who want to drag the US into the war. If the folks that carried out Khan Sheikhoun &
other false flag CW attacks can be controlled, peace may have a chance. Otherwise, Trump's hand could still be forced.
The point of maximum danger appears to be at hand, given your characterization of the Daraa op as "betting the farm". Today's
grant of new powers to the OPCW to apportion blame (designed to side-step the Russian veto at the UNSC) now means this body can
effectively determine casus belli . Let us pray the OPCW will not have reason to exercise its new powers in Syria.
A stroke of genius. Bolton either demonstrates his obedience or is sacked, along with most of other neocons, for trying to
spike the upcoming Putin summit.
On topic #2. If the SAA isn't feeling it's oats by now, forcing them fight a major battle that culminates a campaign by themselves
would seem to be the ideal way to exorcise any remaining self doubts and engender a lasting esprit de corps. Stupid is what stupid
does... Once these guys finish up in the SW and head east enforce it'll be show time.
"... There is no indication that Bolton was aware that Cambridge Analytica was exploiting the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users -- but he was certainly aware that it was using an extensive trove of personal data to target voters ..."
"... What Bolton was paying Cambridge Analytica to do is, perhaps, more damning than his use of the shady data firm. "The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues," Wylie told the Times . "That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview," he added. ..."
"... "That's what they said they wanted, anyway." Cambridge Analytica produced fear-mongering advertisements aimed at drumming up support for Bolton and other hawkish Republicans. The relationship between the firm and the Super PAC grew "so close that the firm was writing up talking points" for Bolton after only a few months of collaboration. ..."
Speaking at CPAC in 2017, John Bolton boasted that his Super
PAC's implementation of "advanced psychographic data" would help elect "filibuster majorities"
in 2018. According to a New York Times
report published on Friday, Bolton's Super PAC paid $1.2 million to Cambridge Analytica,
the British firm that has come under scrutiny for its misuse of Facebook data to influence
voters. Bolton's Super PAC, moreover, was heavily funded by the Mercer family, who gave
millions to Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential campaign.
There is no indication that Bolton was aware that Cambridge Analytica was exploiting the
personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users -- but he was certainly aware that it was
using an extensive trove of personal data to target voters. "The data and modeling Bolton's PAC
received was derived from the Facebook data," Christopher Wylie, the co-founder of Cambridge Analytica turned whistleblower, told the Times . "We definitely told them about how we
were doing it. We talked about it in conference calls, in meetings."
What Bolton was paying Cambridge Analytica to do is, perhaps, more damning than his use of
the shady data firm. "The Bolton PAC was obsessed with how America was becoming limp wristed
and spineless and it wanted research and messaging for national security issues," Wylie told
the Times . "That really meant making people more militaristic in their worldview," he
added.
"That's what they said they wanted, anyway." Cambridge Analytica produced fear-mongering
advertisements aimed at drumming up support for Bolton and other hawkish Republicans. The
relationship between the firm and the Super PAC grew "so close that the firm was writing up
talking points" for Bolton after only a few months of collaboration.
"... In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting intense pressure on [José] Bustani to quit as director-general of the [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. ..."
"... Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you." ..."
"... John Bolton was also behind a campaign against the IAEA and its chief Mohamed ElBaradei. ElBaradei's phone was tapped and rumors were launched against him to oust him from his office. ..."
In early 2002, a year before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was putting
intense pressure on [José] Bustani to quit as director-general of the [Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons].
...
Bolton -- then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International
Security Affairs -- arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a
warning to the organization's chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words.
"Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president
of the United States. "We can't accept your management style."
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave
the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to
retaliate against you."
There was a pause.
"We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York."
José Bustani successfully negotiated to get OPCW inspectors back into Iraq. They
would have found nothing. That would have contradicted the U.S. propaganda campaign to wage war
on Iraq. When Bustani did not leave voluntarily, the U.S. threatened to cut the OPCW's budget
and "convinced" other countries in the executive council to kick
him out .
John Bolton was also behind a campaign against the IAEA and its chief Mohamed ElBaradei.
ElBaradei's phone was tapped and rumors were launched against him to oust him from his
office.
The U.S. administration, the neoconservatives and the media are running
a remake (recommended) of the propaganda campaign they had launched to wage war on Iraq.
This time the target is Iran:
As with Iraq, it's easier for Bolton and Netanyahu to achieve that goal if they discredit the
current system of international inspections. Bolton has called the inspection efforts
established by the Iran nuclear deal "fatally inadequate" and declared that "the
International Atomic Energy Agency" is "likely missing significant Iranian [nuclear]
facilities." In his 2015 speech to Congress attacking the Iran deal, Netanyahu insisted that
"Iran not only defies inspectors, it also plays a pretty good game of hide-and-cheat with
them."
Anyone who counters their propaganda must go. Bolton, who demands to
bomb Iran , is back in charge. One of his natural targets is the IAEA which certifies that
Iran sticks to the nuclear deal. It seems that Bolton
succeeds with his machinations:
The chief of inspections at the U.N. nuclear watchdog has resigned suddenly, the agency said
on Friday without giving a reason.
The departure of Tero Varjoranta comes at a sensitive time, three days after the United
States announced it was quitting world powers' nuclear accord with Iran, raising questions as
to whether Tehran will continue to comply with it.
Varjoranta, a Finn, had been a deputy director general of the International Atomic Energy
Agency and head of its Department of Safeguards, which verifies countries' compliance with
the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since October 2013.
Another
casualty is the State Department bureaucrat who certified Iran's compliance with the
nuclear deal:
One of the State Department's top experts on nuclear proliferation resigned this week after
President Donald Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, in what
officials and analysts say is part of a worrying brain drain from public service generally
over the past 18 months.
Richard Johnson, a career civil servant who served as acting assistant coordinator in
State's Office of Iran Nuclear Implementation, had been involved in talks with countries that
sought to salvage the deal in recent weeks, including Britain, France, and Germany -- an
effort that ultimately failed.
...
The office Johnson led has gone from seven full-time staffers to none since Trump's
inauguration.
The man who launched the war on Iraq now gets
awards . Netanyahoo is
agitating for war on Iran just like he agitated
for war on Iraq. Shady groups of
nutty "experts"peddle
policy papers for 'regime change'. U.S. "allies" are put under pressure. With their
willingness to "compromise" they actually further the prospect of
war . When they
insist on sticking to international rules malign
actors prepare
measures to break their resistance. All that is still just a "shaping operation", a
preparation of the battlefield of public opinion. This buildup towards the war will likely take
a year or two.
What is still needed is an event that pushes the U.S. public into war fever. The U.S.
typically uses false-flag incidents - the Tonkin incident, the sinking of the Maine, the
Anthrax murders - to create a psychological pseudo-rationale for war. An Israel lobbyist
begs for
one to launch war on Iran.
One wonders when and how a new 9/11 like incident, or another Anthrax scare, will take
place. It will be the surest sign that the countdown to war on Iran has started.
Posted by b on May 12, 2018 at 06:35 AM | Permalink
John Bolton's a man? Does a coward who instigated others to fight get to be called a man?
Likewise Cheney Bush Clinton Obama Trump Bibi etc etc etc.
Easy to be ruthless when others take the risks and pay the costs.
isn't the same unity throughout the powers that be, particularly in the mainstream media,
that there was when Bush was President. Trump through the hatred he generates theoughout the
'upper crust', makes it hard for many deep staters to get on board a war drive he would lead.
And as you said, b, Trump needs a real or false flag, one with many casualties, and
something that won't fall apart from lack of evidence and a few days of rational scrutiny.
Sounds like a job for the Saudi mercenaries, Al Qaeda or ISIS.
People in high places are leaving due to team Trump threats.
Receiving mail from team trump employed black cube is no small thing. Kudos to you b for
sticking with it.
Two thoughts on US going to war with Iran. 10 It will destroy the US or certainly the US
empire and hegemony. 2) Iran needs plenty of help and respect during and after as they will
destroy the US. Not physically, but they will destroy US power.
The question we all want to know is, did Trump appoint lunatic Bolton entirely of his own
volition, or was he forced to appoint this psychopath? The reach of the US deep state seems
to be limitless. A curious thing happened the other day when someone in the US administration
announced that America would no longer be funding the white helmets propaganda outfit. Over
here in the UK parliament an opposition member of parliament was practically foaming at the
mouth with rage and demanded of prime minister Mrs May that the UK would be continuing to
fund the white helmets. When she assured him that the UK was fully behind the white helmets
and that funding would remain in place, there was a cheer from around the house. I'm amazed
that Bolton allowed the administration to cut off funding when even the UK idiots in
parliament want to fund the propaganda arm of the head choppers.
I am just curious to know how much influence John Bolton can exercise as National Security
Advisor: is his position part of the President's Executive Office and does he (Bolton, that
is) have a department to answer to him and a budget? Is his position any more secure than,
say, Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State?
The more that Trump is pushed into a corner by investigations of various scandals, the more
he needs something to distract from them. A war in a far-off country would be the perfect
thing to get people rallying around the President.
Jen @9:
From what I understand, Pompeo is much higher on the food chain. The SoS is in the line of
succession; advisors are not. I believe the position is just a single individual with closer
access to the POTUS.
I said it many times before, and I can safely repeat it again, there wont be a hot war with
Iran. Entire NATO couldnt defeat Iran, and US would go alone (maybe Israel would piggyback
few shots). It would end as catastrophe for US and de-facto end as the main superpower.
Pentagon (and even CIA) are many things, but suicidally stupid isnt one of them, neither is
Trump, or even Nutjobyahoo.
What we will see is more sanctions (to try to create civil unrest) and another "color
revolution" endeavor, and it will fail too.
Trump coopted by the neo-cons? Exactly what lever would they have on Trumpty Dumbdy that
isn't already public knowledge? Misogyny, Philandering?... already tried that pussy-grabbing
Stormy front. Financial improprieties? That Trump Inc. was/is a serial bankrupt corporation,
even screwing low-income students and any building contractor it could?... Old news. That
Trumpty Dumbdy is too stupid to read the full documentation presented to him, that he can't
write/deliver a coherent, logical line of thought?... obvious from well before the day he
officially declared his candidacy.
Trump (and his real estate "empire") was and is a product of the Rothschild cabal, and he
was deliberately foisted on the US electorate to be the only one in the country Killary could
beat... OOPS!
So we are now seeing Plan-B, where Trumpty is manipulated and browbeaten to shed the few
shreds of intelligence and decency he still possessed. All the Deep State/Rothschild-enablers
have to do is appeal to Trumpty's fragile ego, or Melania's emotional jags, and they are in
control.
But even Bolton's ilk must know Russia and China will not stand by while FUKUS/Nutty/MBS
openly attack Iran. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya show the likely course of events where the
Zionists are allowed to carry on with the Yinon Plan. Syria is the line in the sand, despite
Erdogan trying to play the US off Russia for historical gotcha gains. Don't forget, Erdogan
owes his life to Putin, who ensured the US coup failed by targeting the rogue Turk jets
tasked with shooting Erdogan's plane down... I'd bet the Turk pilots were told that if they
even turned on their targeting systems, they would be shot down... self preservation is a
strong deterrent.
Israel/Saudi on their own cannot withstand even Syria, Hizbolla and Iran directly, even if
the russian military only backstopped the Syrian alliance. Ahe US public won't tolerate
another Iraq debacle, as zero body bags landing at Edwards AFB is the limit. Let alone that
Iran would be Iraq on steroids especially for the several 1,000 in the western Syria caldron.
It's a big caldron right now, but with Russian-manned mobile S-400's/etc. protecting all
Syrian, Iranian and possibly Iraqi airspace, those soldiers/mercenaries are sitting ducks
after the first bomb lands in Iran.
Apologies if following musings are a bit disjointed.
American chronic hostility towards Iran, and long standing American economic and
informational and low-level war gainst Iran, has an insane, out-of-touch with reality,
ideological/mythological tinge/component to it. I won't try a broad psycho-analysis, or
assemble many possible reasons why that might be.
But among those possible components there is a long standing implacable totalitarian bent
to US power wielders, reflected in their ordained geo-political communications in the United
States. The American economic sanctions and continuously variously hostile policy towards
Cuba over more than half a century is an example. The former 'brothel dof the Caribbean' was
apparently fine for the US, and the death squad ridden countries of Central America are quite
acceptable, but Cuba out of the capitalist orbit? Cuba as attempting a different ideology,
and approach: terrible recalcitrant. The very demon of the hemisphere.
In his revelatory book The Praetorian Guard, former CIA John Stockwell noted that as he
was growing up, basically nobody questioned the prevailing American ideology and system. Real
searching basic debate was absent. Within the context of a culture where freedom of speech is
technically prioritized, lauded as an ideal, somehow self-censorship and discussion is
limited to within-the-box of convention, thus discussion as scripted theatre, propaganda,
dominated overwhelmingly.
No real debate, but what was repeated ad infinitum were messianic messages'we swear
allegiance to the flag', we're number one, we're the free world, we're the good guys.
After the JFK coup d'etat, basically everything in American media became an exercise in
controlling all political discourse and trying like crazy to make sure pretense prevailed.
This was if anything accentuated after the 9/11 false flag treasonous mind-f**k.
There was also a deadly military doctrine adopted by the US after WW2, when segments of US
power decided to go for global military domination, basically permanent war and war
preparation. The cliche is that the first casualty of war is truth, but in the case of the
United States, doubly so, as that train had already left the station.
The United States is a kind of astonishingly cautionary historical example of the deranged
trajectory that dishonesty, pretense and censorship as normalized and dominant will ensure.
So many natural advantages, but the external manifestation of the US became mass murder and
subterfuge; internal problems of the US are festering, metastisizing, and tens of millions of
Americans are deeply demoralized, anxiety ridden, emotion-related
drug-medication-dependent.
Back to Iran. A few years ago while driving in the evening I turned on the car radio and
the first words I heard from a (Jewish) talk show host on a Toronto station was the question:
Do you think the Americans have the balls to nuke Iran? Really bizzarre sick question that
apparently could be sent out glibly and sefely into the Canadian political discussion
universe as an intellectual feat. And on numerous occasions for many years it has been
commonplace in Canadian mass media to depict Iran in a hostile, negative light. And as German
writer Udo Ulfkotte bravely told us before his untimely death, the CIA also influences and
controls and thus contaminates much of European mass media communication.
So the American insanity and dishonesty and war mongering is playing itself out on a broad
stage, (witness the truly crazy pathetic British government's behaviour of late) and crazy
people do crazy things, so yah, Iran is still in the crosshairs. But there is a kind of
desperate, fading, dated quality to the American obsession with 'evil Iran', and lies and
make-believe and insanity cannot escape colliding with reality. The collision can make a
helluva a mess, but at some point hopefully the pendulum swings towards a reassertion of
sanity and decency and honesty.
How many times will Americans shoot themselves in the foot for Israel and fairy tales?
"But even Bolton's ilk must know Russia and China will not stand by while FUKUS/Nutty/MBS
openly attack Iran"
It appears Putin and Russia have decided to sit all this out. While Putin was enjoying the
Victory Parade with Netanyahu,,, Netanyahu was bombing his ally Syria. Putin was all smiles
and so far all we hear is crickets.
Putin will sell his S-400 systems to anyone that wants them EXCEPT Syria and all they want
is the S-300.
I don't know what's going on but as far as Russia is concerned I wouldn't bank on their
helping Iran.
China? China can be purchased like cloths on a rack.
No,,, I think it's pretty open right now for the US to attack Iran. Whether it can survive
a war with Iran is doubtful,,, but that's never stopped them before.
Yes "take out" as I defined not through occupation/invasion but fighter jet strikes and/or
from sea. That wont take more than 1 day for 3 top Nato nations.
I wonder what is going through the minds of Kim and the South Korean leadership. It is
obvious that the US is not agreement capable. What sort of guarantees can the US provide.
Even if China and Russia provide guarantees it may not be enough. Kim sees that if a deal is
made, then the crippling sanctions could be reimposed or remain. Kim and his sister are not
stupid.
Neocons and Bolton are Trotskyites. Permanent Revolutionists
The ruling elite never really knew how dumb people were until the internet and social
media. With the help of Trumps supporter and Facebook investor Thiel and his company Palintir
and Facebook to help them figure out all the data they collected, they know they can make the
cattle believe anything without making it believable to anyone with an IQ under 120
The few that figure it out without being members of the cult are isolated and
inconsequential.
Plato told us what he hoped would happen. Leo Straus who is the godfather of the neocons
emphasized Platos Noble Lie which is behind all of todays fake news/history . Plato was
heavily influenced by Irans Zoroastrianism
I believe elements behind the reformation in the 16th century and Sabbateans from the 17th
century, Frankists , Freemasons and Jesuits from the 18 th century and Zionists , and
Martinists and Marxists from the 19th century joined forces to create a NWO that is a
Luciferian cult of Global Synachrists
The neocons are the latest manifestation of the Synarchists, and unfortunately for the
world this means global terror much like the Rothschild back Trotsky hoped to accomplish
in
the 20th century before being thwarted by Stalin. It also means the end of Religion as
Neocons corrupt Protestant Christianity, in US and Across the Atlantic while CIA controlled
Jesuit Pope Francis destroys Catholicism. Zionism and the Holocaust wiped out Torah believers
and the GWOT and neocons are proceeding to destroy Islam after corrupting it with Islamism
with help from the Saudi Arabias corrupt Wahhabism which has spread Islamic extremism along
with US and Israel
For those who believe the US can be destroyed, you are in denial. There is no stopping the
US/Israel//British/EU alliance. The only hope is that once the perpetual revolution is over
that the philosopher kings described by Plato will be merciful. Unfortunately, given many of
them are neo-malthusians who think most of humanity are worthless consumers of Gaias precious
resources, i am not optimistic
However you would define war US (Israel) and Iran is at war footing for decades, nothing new
here, so I would not panic here that Bolton would do something.
It cannot be more clear that as much as Trump is a flaccid clown of ignorance and
belligerence to cover up his tax evasion crimes from Muller, Bolton plays role of barking
poodle that all, did not get anything done what global oligarchic interests tell him or he
will be put down.
And Please do not compare Iran to Iraq especially after two Iraqi wars, Iran is in
position to cause major damage to global oligarchic interests and hence there will be no
escalation despite fire and fury rhetoric as it was in NK case, it is all about reintegration
of Iranian oligarchy to global oligarchic country club and what we witness is negotiating of
condition of selling out Iranians to neoliberal globalists and by that advance a step in
isolating Russia to achieve the same purpose, surrender to globalism.
Also I do not see Netanyahu welcoming hundreds of Iranian missiles landing in Tel Aviv as
Saddam only shot few Soviet museum item at Israel and back then all hit their however random
targets. There would be no random targets this time so there would be death and vital damage,
not to mention that Israel could loose Golan Height in the process. Also there is no way in
hell for US to invade Iran, or gather 600k troops as it was in 1991 for one quarter Iran size
Iraq.
I know that spreading fear brings clicks but here on this blog we know better than
that.
Don't underestimate Trump. He came to office on an audacious promise to drain The Swamp. It's
a very specialized task. It was never going to be easy and I'm quite certain that he went in
knowing that his first misjudgment would probably be his last. I don't know how to drain The
Swamp but if Trump thinks he can then I do too. I've been pleasantly surprised at his ability
to engage with senior officials on the World Stage and appear Presidential. Compared with
bumbling fools like Ronny Raygun, Jimmy Carter and Dubya, Trump leaves them for dead in the
"100% on the ball" stakes. Whilst I'm waiting, with fingers crossed, I console myself with
the following thoughts:
1. Hillary would have been worse.
2. The non-people he wants to neutralise are the worst bunch of scum and arseholes on the
planet.
3. Since he's the only person with a Swamp plan, we shouldn't be too picky about his timing
and tactics.
4. Trump is an extremely clever individual.
thanks b... and thanks for the Atlantic article from peter beinart... i thought it was a good
article.. here's a quote from it "More than 60 percent of Republicans, according to a March
Pew Research Poll, think the United States was right to invade Iraq. George W. Bush's
approval rating among Republicans, according to a January CNN poll, is 76 percent." and "It's
rare to see non-Americans on political talk shows. That matters because non-Americans
overwhelmingly think pulling out of the Iran deal is nuts. And non-Americans are more likely
to raise fundamental questions about American nuclear policy -- like why America isn't
pushing for inspections of Israel's nuclear program, and why America keeps demanding that
other nations denuclearize while building ever more nuclear weapons of its own."
then you can read @20 Robert Snefjella post - thanks robert - and note the radio interview
from toronto..
sorry to say, but this 'neo-con' term is a quick term to describe so much of what looks
like the koolaid american citizens drink regularly.. and there is plenty of it to go around
in canada too..
americans by and large look like a nation of idiots, spoon fed everything they know..
i tend to agree with harrys view @13... colour revolution will continue.. but unlike
harry, i do believe the bombs will fall and we will enter some type of ww3 scenario.. the
usa-israel are too much led by the neo con koolaid to step away from any of their ongoing
insanity.. i just can't see the insanity stopping with rational, reasonable people having a
say.. so, maybe i don't fully agree with harry other then in the short term..
I agree with your assessment that Trump is a very clever individual - when it comes to
manipulating the media and distracting from his words and actions, but I disagree with every
other assertion you have made and find that he has filled his administration with grifters
and con artists that rival the days of Grant or Harding.
And if you have grown up in America under DACA and are about to be deported or are losing
your health insurance coverage because key provisions of ACA have been overturned, just try
reciting "Hillary would have been worse!"
Utter nonsense. The US and Israel are coward bullies. They will pounce when the odds are
good, but they are quite rational about when they are not. There have been endless threats
and sabre rattling by the US and Israel against Iran for decades, but they never followed
through. They will most certainly not do so now, when the relative military position of Iran
is better than ever. And this "crying wolf" article will join the the countless others
written before on the junkpile of historical falsification...
There is a strong delusion that maintains its satanic grip on the "leadership" in DC.
The depiction of Mordor in Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Rings" series is very fitting in
describing the present pure evil and absolute darkness of those who plan for war and
destruction in the secret chambers in the upper echelons of our society.
What will stop the madness, death, and destruction that has rained down and continues to
rain down on so many millions of hapless men, women, and children in the Middle East and
abroad? Will it take a few US cities completely destroyed and hundreds of thousands of
Americans vaporized before the insanity of US Empire is stopped?
I pray for peace for the sake of my children and grandchildren. I pray for a "great
awakening" amongst the nations of the world to demand an end to the evil US/Zionist madness
before it is too late.
Any US attack on Iran will be by air, not ground. Though special ops will be inserted in the
Afghan border provinces (where the last protests were the largest, fertile ground for
insurgents).
Missiles of all kinds will fall on the regime, the military, the Quds, the militias.
And it will be huge, maybe the largest, heaviest attack ever. Once the air defenses are
down, bombers will cover the major infrastructure sites with the heaviest bombing since
Belgrade and Nam.
Only when the UNSC convenes, probably, no sooner than five or six days, will the attack
slow or cease.
Iran will have been set back a few decades. That is the soft goal. The harder goal will be
the insurgency and destabilization of the regime and final regime change.
It will take nothing special for this attack to happen. Trump has already made up his
mind.
When it will happen is when the US and Israel feel they can suppress the Hezbollah missile
threat. Until they have a workable plan for that, not much can happen on a large scale.
But it will come. Small or large, a missile attack will come to Iran. The regime is in the
sights of the Hegemon.
Top 3 nato countries could take out Iran military within a day, but nato cannot invade,
occupy it in my opinion.
Rubbish.
I assume you're referring to countries other than the United States. In which case, you do
know that Germany has about half-a-dozen airworthy attack aircraft, the Royal Navy and
France's aircraft carriers would require just about every ship in the other European navies
to protect them and part of the reason the British and French begged the United States to
intervene in Libya was because they'd run out of PGMs.
Give the European NATO countries a couple of years to build up their forces and force
projection skills and European NATO might be in a position to bomb Iran, but as soon as they
started building up their forces in the Gulf States, Iran could go to the UNSC to demand that
this obvious aggression should be stopped and when FUKUS veto any resolution, Iran has carte
blanche to launch preemptive strikes across the Persian Gulf. End of European NATO's war on
Iran
And after the Iraq fiasco, I suspect the only country that would go to war without a UNSC
resolution is the United States. Germany would almost certainly decide to sit it out, France
most probably would and the UK would probably also sit it out.
Finally, even if the top 3 NATO countries did try to get away with a limited air attack,
the best response for Iran would be to sink every ship in the Persian Gulf and go on doing so
until the United States invades and becomes bogged down in a quagmire far worse than Iraq or
Afghanistan.
I have to agree with those who say a direct attack on Iran is imminent. Sure, some would love
this to happen whether Yahoo or Bolton but for now will be happy to apply the "squeeze" of
sanctions, ostracism/propaganda. The goal seems to have been to destroy and if not that, then
to set the countries back ... under the thumb as it were.
Yes, the US with some assistance could rip Iran's military apart but not take over the
country. A majority are somewhat satisfied with the theocratic setup. They know the history
with the US/West. And how would Iran react? Long range attacks on Israel or much
closer-to-home attacks on the Gulf States and the Saudis as well as blocking at Hormuz?
Saddam lobbed a few Scuds at Israel and Riyadh but didn't have much. Iran has more and better
missile tech ... which TPTB are going after now ... while Yahoo still pushes "nuclear
programs" since he knows (like Iraq) there are no real weapons there.
The US will do everything possible to reimpose sanctions. Hence gaining control of the IAEA
and inspection process. This is designed to offer the Europeans a face saving way to back
down and submit to US will regarding sanctions. It will probably succeed. Europe, whether it
likes it or not, is playing good cop in the game.
War, as in an actual US attack in Iran itself, is pretty much out if the question. A false
flag designed to be blamed on Iran and big enough to warrant a war will be placed under
enormous scrutiny. Not by the US MSM, of course, but by the rest of the world and the
alternative media.
The fact is, before anyone can attack Iran, they have to win in Syria and it doesn't look
like they are going to.
As far as sanctions, Iran's best bet may be to give the EU 3 weeks to prove its intent to
confront the US (which is unlikely) Then Iran can resume its civilian nuclear development at
the fastest possible pace, with the offer to discontinue once the US returns to the
JCPOA.
Peter Beinart, the author of the "As with Iraq" piece above, gets all wound up in the details
of nuclear inspections and forgets that in 2003 he supported the misbegotten Iraq invasion
and war because a (supposed) peaceful aftermath would help the people of Iraq, and so the
people who oppose the war were wrong.
The truth is that liberalism has to try to harness American military power for its purposes
because American tanks and bombs are often the only things that bring evil to heel.
Opposing this war might have helped liberals retain their purity, but it would have done
nothing for the people suffering under Saddam. If liberals are betrayed a second time in
the Gulf, hawkish liberalism may well go into temporary eclipse. But one day we, and they,
will need it again. . . here
That's akin to the position that Trump has taken on Iran.
In this effort, we stand in total solidarity with the Iranian regime's longest-suffering
victims: its own people. The citizens of Iran have paid a heavy price for the violence and
extremism of their leaders. The Iranian people long to -- and they just are longing, to
reclaim their country's proud history, its culture, its civilization, its cooperation with
its neighbors. . . here
Old Microbiologist , May 12, 2018 11:12:51 AM |
38
IMHO what we are seeing are the last ditch efforts of a failing nation. Russia isn't sitting
it out but is taking a wait and see attitude. The same for China. All the bluster and twitter
tweets in the world mean nothing until someone actually does something. Israel managed to
shoot off a massive strike which at best was 50% effective. This was against "old" Pantsir
S-1 systems which were quite effective. No one has seen the S-300 yet in action and Russia is
holding it back keeping the ECM signature still secret until it is absolutely necessary.
Russia cannot fight the US or Israel in Syria. They simply doesn't have the forces present.
But, what they can do is push gently and make the FUKUS+I over-commit. Don't forget that the
US is working at a current $22 Trillion of debt and these debacles are going to burn money
faster than they can print. In the mean time Russia/China are creating an alternate economic
system to bypass the petrodollar and especially the SWIFT banking. That is in place and
perhaps we will see more countries deciding to bail on the dollar and join the growing crowd.
The US has demonstrated a complete lack of respect for sovereignty and has so far reneged
on every treaty. This means that the US is at best an unreliable partner. The South Koreans
have wised up seeing that the US is very willing to sacrifice the entire peninsula and every
soul living there to kill off the DPNK. That should scare the bejeezus out of every nation
friendly to the US anywhere in the world. They are losing friends so fast now it is scary.
This only forces the inevitable and the US is going to have to bet the farm to try and keep
the hegemony alive. It won't work and the US has the worst record of war fighting imaginable.
They can't beat the goat-herders in Afghanistan for example over a span of now 17 years.
Fighting a real military such as Iran would be impossible and especially if China throws in
her weight. Iran is very important to China and to a lesser extent Russia as well. There is
no danger of the US or NATO winning there. However, this could break the bank if it goes
south. So, what we are seeing is an existential threat to the US in the form of rebellion
against the dollar. Finally, we are seeing countries that have the weight of forces (nuclear)
with serious resistance. It is for this reason we are not seeing a counter-attack against
Israel. As Napoleon said "Never interfere with the enemy when he is in the process of
destroying himself".
The two FUKUS mass missile attacks on Syria, as well as Israel's latest jab, were a test of
the Russian systems and general Syrian ability to interdict said missiles. If the missiles
can't get through even at such short range, it is obvious Israeli/FUKUS aircraft can't
either. Attempting the same "air war" stunt in Iran will just give the US MIC a big boost
replacing virtually every piece of hardware sent over Iran airspace.
Again, the US soldiers/mercenaries currently in eastern Syria are in a caldron-in-making.
They can no longer count on escaping via land transport through Iraq or Turkey, and without
any air support/transport, they are trapped. Does anyone think the US public will tolerate
the Deep State sacrificing about 5,000 soldiers/mercenaries immediately after the bombing of
Iran starts? The handful of body bags from other recent US misadventures were not
well-received at home, so the potential for another Vietnam?
Iran will not be the turkey-shoot Iraq was, Saddam was still under the delusion Rumsfeld's
handshake gave him immunity from Deep State/Zionist machinations. Iran's leadership is under
no such delusion, remembering the admitted 1953 CIA overthrow of democratically elected
Mossadegh and the installation of the Shah.
Putin and Assad know time is on their side, and the longer they can delay a major
FUKUS/Israeli/Saudi offensive, the better prepared they are and the less effect Zionist
propaganda has worldwide. The IDF murdering unarmed Palestinians using a Gandhiesque tactic
of showing how venal Nuttyyahoo's regime is... like Britain in India... there is no way to
make this slaughter seem justified, and attempting to keep it out of the public consciousness
has not worked.
"But it will come. Small or large, a missile attack will come to Iran. The regime is in the
sights of the Hegemon."
That would be 'former Hegemon'.
The likelihood of war other than the predictable guerrilla campaigns launched from abroad,
campaigns with which Iran has been successfully dealing for decades, seems to me to be
low.
While everyone is watching Iran and Syria, the most important developments are those taking
place in Korea, where some sort of peace agreement seems inevitable. And where anything short
of war will mean an immense strengthening of the positions of Russia and China.Not least
because Japan and Taiwan will be forced to adjust to the new reality.
In Korea... and in western Europe.
This is where the worst cracks in the US hegemonic facade are beginning to show: the logic of
Eurasia and the illogic of Atlanticism are inescapable. The western european economies,
including Germany's, France's and (the weakest link of all?) Italy's are dying for access to
the eastern markets. Historically Germany has shared its technologies and culture with
Russia, which has been the great source of its raw materials and food. The ending of the Iran
deal seems to be the excuse needed to slip back into that relationship.
Those who rave against Putin's 'betrayal' understand nothing. It is necessary to lower the
tension internationally in order for the tectonic movements, which are already well advanced,
to settle.
Bolton and the warmongers depend on perpetuating war but all the momentum, internationally,
is against war. The propaganda which has been their main weapon, is failing, their
credibility is rapidly declining.
Outside Israel, the rump of the Saud family court which supports the Riyadh regime and the
degenerated dregs of NATO trotskyism-inhabited by elderly, aethereal creatures who live in
the Academy and know nothing of the world- the only people who want war are the speculators.
And they are just as happy to have peace, anything that excites the market.
Those who claim that Iran could be defeated in a couple of days are, presumably, talking of
nuclear weapons. Do they really believe that such an attack would not be deterred by Iran's
allies?
Trump is "clever", not intelligent. He is the personification of "bullshit baffles brains"
methodology. Indications are he is marginally literate, as all info briefs have to be a
couple pages at most and point form. It is obvious he has no patience to work through the
finer details of complex situations, simply taking the position of whatever of his advisers
can spread the BS in the most eloquent or forceful way.
But mostly whatever panders to his ego. Make Trumpty think he is being "the decider" (like
Gerge W. Stupid) or that he is being the "tough guy" and he'll sign or say anything.
@ 33, It took NATO 73 days to bring Serbia down, and in the end it required trickery
(promising Milosovich he can stay then color revolutionizing him out)
Serbia did not have the means to close the straights of Hormuz. Nor did it have a missile
arsenal that could strike at several regional US bases. Nor could it destroy Saudi and
Kuwaiti oil refineries. Nor did Serbia have several thousand US ground troops in easy
reach.
Serbia also had the misfortune of being attacked during the weakest point in Russian
history since the 1600s. Russia is quite certain to help Iran because it has a strong
interest in Iran repelling a US attack. Even if you believe Russia is 100% cynical, they will
have an enormously strong reason to see the US bogged down for a decade and bled white.
The Pentagon is aware of all of this and they aren't idiots. The fact is, the US was in a
much better position to attack Iran in 2006 or 7, and they still didn't do it, because it was
a terrible idea even back then. They will not do it now when it is a much worse idea.
Simply put, if attacking Iran were so easy, they would have done it a long, long time
ago.
Now, attempts to destabilize and possibly preach rebellion to Iran's minorities, that they
will do (without much success) But open war is a line they won't cross.
@38 -- "This was against "old" Pantsir S-1 systems which were quite effective. No one has
seen the S-300 yet in action and Russia is holding it back keeping the ECM signature still
secret until it is absolutely necessary."
My reading is the S-300 has a range that would cover commercial airports in Tel-Aviv and
it is probably too much risk for Putin to deliver these to Damascus in case an 'event' occurs
and a civilian jet goes down. In any case, some suggest there are more effective equipment
solutions for Syrian defense/response. Of course, in the wryly Russian way, Israeli
destruction of "old" Pantsir S-1 systems simply opens up the rational and legal opportunity
to provide a whole lot of 'new' updated replacement Pantsir S-1 systems. Background:
https://sputniknews.com/military/201804171063644024-pantsir-top-facts/
I think that the UN has always been mostly a circus court for empire....make it look like US
is benevolent.
So now when the fig leaf comes off in public people are aghast. Empire only works like
empire and when the wheels start to come off, the whole facade is exposed for the dog and
pony show it has always been.
Will this be enough to change the world of global private finance? Iran, remember, refuses
to become a member of the Western banking/elite cabal.
So just why might Trump be directed to attack Iran in his regular pompous manner. Is this
a religious war we are fighting for Israel?
NO!!! It is all about the continuation of the Western form of social organization that has
as its core religion the God of Mammon. Those at MoA who read me know that the God of Mammon
that I write about have the tenets of private finance and property along with the rules of
inheritance which has resulted in the elite of the past few centuries.
I continue to posit that all that is happening relates to that issue and the struggles
around it not discussed in public for whatever reasons.
But carry on educating me and others about all the proxy shit going down and its relevance
to how our society works....or doesn't........I want evolution and I want it this
morning!!!!!!!
The coming "war on Iran" will be an excuse for all kinds of mischief. Some possibilities:
>> seizing western Iraq further isolate Syria by blocking Iran-Syria land route
>> attack and occupation of Lebanon to clear Hezbollah and allow for Israeli land grab up to Litani river (a goal previously
expressed)
>> new round of terror attacks (from new/re-branded groups) focused on
Syria, Iranian, and Russian interests (with a few attacks on the West to muddy the
waters) The psychological part of a war of attrition
>> intensified Ukraine-Russian frictions full court press
>> ISIS expansion into Central Asia accelerate what has already begun
>> Shut down of North Stream and Turk Stream expect the 'cage match' with "recividist nations" to get nasty
Curious how things have calmed down on the Israel front. Things not gone quite as well as
hoped? Or perhaps it is that they've figured out that there's nothing to do. SOHR, opposed to
the Syrians, but with good telephone connections in Syria, has now come up with a list of a
handful of Iranian dead. So I suppose a few Iranian camps were actually hit. But the only
actual videoed strikes were against Syrians. It's what you'd call a nothing-burger, much like
the 102 missile strike.
And this is the launch of a campaign against Iran?? Strange way of showing it. In my view,
the US and Israel are so boxed in by their constraints, that it's very difficult to act
decisively. No casualties, so no overflights of Syria, let alone Iran. No interruption of
Gulf oil exports, as the Gulfies wouldn't like it. Gulf emirates not to be overturned. I'm
sure I can think of some more....
@40 -- "The handful of body bags from other recent US misadventures were not well-received at
home, so the potential for another Vietnam?"
More likely an unlearned repeat of 'rhyming' history with Trump playing Jimmy Carter and
the "5,000 soldiers/mercenaries" playing the suckers (in summer heat). How's the Big 'D'
going to negotiate that deal over the mid-terms?
But that was Democrat 'smart' -- perhaps this re-mix will be closer an up-scaled rerun of
Reagan's Iran–Contra scandal? Who's playing Oliver North?
Another great post. Thank you. Implied I think in your musings is, 'What will people
remember of the U.S.' in a hundred years? The 20th century popular music. Blues, Jazz, Rock
'n Roll, and Country & Western for starters.
When have UNSC ever done to stop aggression by the same states that commit the
aggression?
The topic wouldnt even raised in the UNSC.
Of course Iran wont start a "preemptive" war. Not atleast since that will be a suicide
mission for themselves.
Russia wont do anything then (us attack on iran), just look how they treated previous US
wars, everytime people have said the same that RUssia will help and repel an attack, it have
never happend and will never happen.
At 51...uh, you do realize Russia has an expeditionary force that is actually fighting and
keeping Syria alive as we post, right? Perhaps they are not fighting as much as you would
like, but they are fighting and Syria continues to exist because of it. As regards Iran, if
Iran falls the Syria falls and Russian bases will be gone. Fortunately for all, that won't
happen.
It is difficult to say what kind of scope the false flag would need to be to rally public
opinion at home for an Iranian incursion. In many ways, pre-9/11, the antiwar movement was
much stronger as was shown by the rallies against leading up to the Iraqi invasion. And yet
this couldn't forestall it.
OTOH, independent media has come a long way in its reach and so cries of "false flag" have
already been sounded, and, by and large, I believe America is fatigued with the ME. It is
doubly ironic that dems like Schumer have been crying foul against DJT for playing soft with
NoKo. I know that the current dem/lib establishment has thrown its antiwar credentials out
the window, in favor of color revolutions, freedom, and LGBTQUIOGDTFBJK rights to fornicate
in public spaces, but, my god, I would never have imagined the globalists to be THAT stupid
in their disregard for basic human needs the world over for soverignty and national
pride.
People have touched on it before, but is this whole current theater just an old money vs.
new money second showing? The return of the repressed, with the globalist/neolib model being
rundowned and usurped by nationalist oligarchs? It would seem the DJT has chosen to err to
the old money side to the betterment of the world. And I, for one, as an American would
rather have my elites localized so we would actually have access to their asses when we
decide to put a pitchfork up them. It is very difficult to get past TSA with weaponized
peasant tools.
Israel's a bit late there then. The disturbances were at the beginning of the year.
They're over now. The effect of the sanctions will be to swing people behind the regime, for
the moment, at any rate.
No thats wrong too, Russia is not on a mission to save Syrians state, they are in Syria
due takfiri threat. Nothing else, as we all see proof of past days...
As for your other statment, I am well sure that Syria have fallen long long before Iran
(if they ever do that).
@52 Lysander. I agree (btw never mind anon's trolling attempts). Simply put, the road to
Tehran goes through Damascus and last I checked the Jasmine City was doing fine ;) If
US/KSA/IL attempts a hot war on Iran it will only precipitate its fall..
Am reminded of the 3 Stooges, whenever I read about these warmongers, like " Bombs Away"
Bolton. Moe tells a group of people, "We will fight till the last drop of.....", then points
to Curly and finishes, "....your blood!" These bastards love war, but never are at the front
line, fighting and dying along side our best. They sit at their plush offices and conference
halls in the best hotels, sipping champagne and eating the best foods, making six or seven
figure incomes. While our brothers, neighbors, fathers, sons, uncles die overseas, or come
back a mental mess, and get crapped on by out government. What these no good for nothing rat
bastards need is to experience the hell they unleash upon us and the rest of the world.
i read this line a lot, from all spheres, and it always perplexes me. to be
fatigued you'd have to be overwhelmed, inundated, and i'd wager that the ME and what's
going on there hardly crosses the vast majority of minds in more than a peripheral way, you
know, like beyond certain key words they hear on tv.
one thing's for sure though, the ME is most definitely fatigued with America!
Looks like there might not be a Coalition Of The Willing in any anti-Iran military operation.
Quite the opposite, it's a further lessening of US world hegemony.
. . .Cartoon of Trump giving the middle finger Goodbye,
Europe! in Der Spiegel.
Why are commentators assuming that, *if* the US does launch a war of aggression against Iran,
it will do so in tandem with its NATO allies--and the UK, France, and Germany in particular?
It is doubtful that these allies will even abide by the new US economic sanctions imposed
upon Iran. Why think that they will be willing, or even politically able, to follow the US
orders for war?
b is right that the neocons are setting up a replay of the 2001-2003 Iraq propaganda
campaign. But the global and domestic conditions that enabled the success of that campaign no
longer hold. The US is far weaker now than then; Iran is more powerful and unified than Iraq
ever was; NATO countries have hundreds of billions of dollars of trade contracts in place or
projected with Iran; Russia and China are far stronger. It just doesn't add up.
I suppose what I was trying to say is that the narrative TPTB have spun over the last
twenty years has gone beyond the realm of convoluted to the average American and now has
completely unwound into chaos. It was only three years ago that we were being told about the
surging threat of ISIS to Americans. Well...that didn't last long...and now they are back to
Iran which the west knows very little about and really doesn't care to. Us Americans like the
good guy/bad guy fight. But if you can't drum up a good enough backstory for the black hats,
I'm afraid that the average American will simply change the channel.
That being said...a compelling backstory isn't really needed for pyschopaths to wage their
war anyway.
Several here ave wondered what kind of false flag could motivate the populace in NA and the
EU to support an attack on Iran. May I propose one?
First stage - Israel (using the EW cover from AlTanf) bombs the Iranian nuclear plant.
Radiation release threatens tens of thousands.
Second stage - Supposed 'Iranian' counter-attack sets oil tankers ablaze (For maximum PR
effect do not sink them) in the Hormuz straights closing the gulf to shipments of Gulf
sourced oil. Oil prices temporarily spike to over $200 a barrel,
Europe's supply of oil is cut drastically, industries world-wide are paralysed and the US
(secure with its' supply sourced outside the gulf)is free to ride to the rescue - all while
RUSSIA (and China) have NO LEGITIMATE REASON to oppose the aggression.
bevin 41 The likelihood of war other than the predictable guerrilla campaigns launched from abroad,
campaigns with which Iran has been successfully dealing for decades, seems to me to be
low.
Yes, the US Army is demonstrably weak especially for any foreign invasion.
Historically Germany has shared its technologies and culture with Russia, which has
been the great source of its raw materials and food. The ending of the Iran deal seems to be
the excuse needed to slip back into that relationship.
And also China's BRI -- coming up June 28-- -- The China Germany BRI Summit 2018
As the first and third largest exporters globally, China and Germany will prove crucial
drivers of trade along the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road.
Together these form the Belt and Road Initiative, a landmark shift in the global economic
order that will touch over 65 countries across four continents.
The China Germany BRI Summit 2018 will dispel myths on what the Belt and Road Initiative
means for the world, tackle the challenges for global financial institutions and
corporations looking to leverage the initiative, and identify the enormous opportunities in
M&A, capital markets and trade finance. here .
@ Anon 64 Dont bet on that, May, Trump Agree to Counter Iran's 'Destabilising Activity' - Downing
Street
OMG, not the powerful UK military!! (heh)
Besides, haven't you heard? The UK isn't in Europe any more, or soon won't be.
Posted by: Don Bacon , May 12, 2018 1:45:05 PM |
73
@ Anon 64 Dont bet on that, May, Trump Agree to Counter Iran's 'Destabilising Activity' - Downing
Street
OMG, not the powerful UK military!! (heh)
Besides, haven't you heard? The UK isn't in Europe any more, or soon won't be.
Posted by: Don Bacon | May 12, 2018 1:45:05 PM |
73 /div
The extremely complex entanglement of Germany with (roughly) the NATO/EU alliance on the
one hand and Russia/China on the other is a prime reason why I do not believe that Germany
(which is by far the biggest economy in the EU) will be able to be strong armed or enticed
into signing up with another Zionist driven US war of aggression with a country as major as
Iran.
Re the possibility of a "united front" of western powers confronting Iran, the truth is that
no one knows for certain at this point how it this will play out.
We have to remember the deafening silence of the western media during the obvious
Skripjal-Ghouta fakery, so there's a good chance the US/Israel axis will again have a
relatively free hand to concoct any number of escalating false flags, not all of which will
stick, but some probably will. So that is a cause for concern re any future "coalition".
As for enforcing the sanctions, I've seen people argue both ways - that this is a bridge
too far for Europe, and accepting it will both do too much economic damage and make Europe
appear too obviously as US toadies; and OTOH, Europe will be blackmailed into knuckling under
when confronted with illegal US fines and secondary sanctions.
> Curious how things have calmed down on the Israel front. Things not gone quite as
well as hoped?
This is all that needs to be noted about the absurdity of even the idea that the US regime
is capable of attacking Iran.
This delusion appears to be the same type thinking as the "Generals Always Fight the
Previous War" saying.
The days of the Israeli regime flying at will over countries bombing at will are over. And
the days of the US regime parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of a country and
leisurely taking out its air defense network are long gone.
Russian air defense and electronic warfare tech are now being shown to be significantly
superior to US regime offensive capabilities in real world combat. So much so that the most
common reaction has been to try to rationalize the fact with crazy conspiracy theories about
behind the scenes wink and nod agreements between the US regime and Russia.
Trump foolishly trying to attack Iran to distract from his political problems would end up
as the first modern US regime leader who lost an aircraft carrier and ten dollar gas
prices.
Israeli's were cowering in their sewers while their junk air defense network repeatedly
failed to defend against a minor Syrian retaliatory barrage while Syrians in Damascus were
cheering on their rooftops as their Russian air defense network knocked Israeli missiles from
the sky.
Syria smacking down the Israeli regime is going to have Trump's military advisors sitting
him down and giving him a hard dose of reality about the Israeli/Saudi/Neocon delusions about
attacking Iran.
Pompeo(US) and Zarif(Iran) are currently making the diplomatic rounds, the former looking for
a new & improved plan, and the latter emphasizing that the US never adhered to the old
plan and united opposition to sanctions is in everyon'e best interest.
from the Iran statement:
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has not only made explicit and official statements against
the agreement in violation of its provisions, but has in practice also failed to implement
U.S. practical – and not merely formal commitments under the JCPOA. The Islamic
Republic of Iran has recorded these violations in numerous letters to the Joint Commission
convened under the JCPOA, outlining the current U.S. Administration's bad faith and
continuous violations of the accord. Thus Mr. Trump's latest action is not a new
development but simply means the end of the obstructionist presence of the United States as
a participant in the JCPOA. . .
here
The apparent US line now, as before, is to "change the regime's malign behavior" which is
ridiculous and thus doomed.
@ MISchi 69: There have been Russian-operated S-400's in Syria for years. Even the US
propaganda rags admit it is significant in reducing FUKUS attacks. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34976537
So just because Russia isn't giving the SAA S-300's doesn't mean Syria has no protection.
The fact the updated S-200s and Pantsirs are doing the job reasonably well will give FUKUS
and Israeli/Saudi military planners pause. Note that the cowardly Israeli jets attack from
Lebanese or Jordanian airspace.
And Nuttyyahoo merely crashed the Victory Day festivities, and Putin is too gracious a
host to kick Nutty out. But the body language between them was obvious, Putin was not happy
to see Nutty trying to capitalize on Putin's good manners.
@ Ian 77 According to Reuters it is.
Reuters doesn't take comments so I'm telling you (and others), if you don't mind, because you
are misleading people with something that isn't true.
As much as Bolton and his ilk would love to attack Iran, I have to disagree that a
full-fledged war is likely. USrael will ratchet up tensions all they can, hoping that Iran
will take the bait and actually respond, but the only way an actual war MAY be fought is with
a massive false flag attack. However, it took a massive false flag attack to allow the
neocons to invade Iraq, so said black op would have to be on that magnitude. Here's the thing
though, the neocons seem to be getting worse at false flags and more over the world ain't
buying them like they used to.
Sure you can get your European lackeys to sign up to a few sanctions, but will anyone
actually support the utter tanking of the world economy? Because that will be the end result
of war with Iran and behind closed doors everyone knows this. Look up the Millennial War
Games simulation that pitted the US against Iran. And how did that $200 million exercise turn
out? The US had to "refloat" its fleet in order to win. Using older Chinese anti- ship
missiles the Iranians decimated US naval assets. The US hasn't developed counter measures
against these while the Iranians have undoubtedly improved on these missiles. No matter what
happens to its ground forces and population centers, shipping in the Persian Gulf will be
shut down. That one action will raise the price of oil to over $200 a barrel overnight,
possibly much higher. And with that the global economy will be left in tatters. Too many of
the world's leaders understand this completely and simply will not go along with the US and
line up against Iran like they did with Iraq.
no, Netanyahu was invited. I read about it a week before the parade. Lavrov always says that
you don't need to negotiate with your friends, but you do with your enemies. Hence the
invite.
Like the Godfather said in the eponymous movie "Keep your friends close but your enemies
closer."
UKs military is of course far stronger than Iran,
we will see renewed sanctions against Iran and EU will be onboard and have already mentioned
they "need" to pressure Iran more.
The attacks on Iran will be only financial, not military, is my guess. The big news in the
military sector is often on cyber attacks. Cyber will be a "new military front."
Financial is akin to cyber. No shooting. The military experts don't discuss financial, I
guess because the U.S. is the only country capable of it, controlling world finance as it
does. But a full-on sanctions regime on another small country like Iran could do a lot of
damage and hurt a lot of people, as it did in Iraq previously. Sort of like what the U.S. did
to Japan to precipitate the war in the Pacific, except Iran's reactions must be much more
limited.
So the big question is Europe, and if it is able to legislate any significant
counter-sanction laws that would encourage Iran-Europe business. France looks good on this,
Germany is more significant.
I do wish people would stop calling themselves Anon. It's very difficult to know which is
which. It's easy enough to anonymise yourself with a distinctive handle. Maybe b should ban
it as a handle.
Many years ago I got to hear Sir Edmond Hillary speak to the assembled students at my
school, just a few years after his amazing climbing feat. No multimedia or lasers pointers or
cheesy-brand tee-shirt cannons, ... just an electric performance by an incredible man that
shaped my life, one foot at a time.
Several decades later, I watched SEH demonstrate Simple Green soap at REI. So incredibly
sad. I'll never forget either presentation. The Man in the Moon had become another Soapy
Salesman.
At the same time I first heard SEH speak, my father, an international businessman, brought
home a Buddhist monk exchange student from Asia for the holiday. It was spellbinding to meet
a bright and well-off monk, who knew all this amazing arcane reality, that we call the Wheel.
It shaped my entire approach to the summit.
Several decades later, in fact, just recently, I watched a performance by a Tibetan monk
troupe, after which they essentially begged for sponsors for the remaining exiled monks now
starving in India by the 1000s. They are dying out, like the 1,000s, the 10,000s of
aboriginal valley cultures that once walked the Earth.
Soapy Sales and Starving Monks, who only decades ago were both sitting on Top of the
World. Kind of like everyone's experience, even John Bolton's, former UN ambassador, now a
sleazy salesman-demonstrator for Death Inc, too proud to sell soap, or to busker for alms.
He's pathetic.
So let me bring it on home.
A student of mine is a senior monk in Asia. His charge is to free the spirits of the just
dead. Not the two monks chanting and incense and sprinkling with flower petal water in front
of a cherished photo. No, he blesses the *dying*, the human roadkills from the reckless
Chinese Escalades bombing through SEAsian commute traffic, the black and blue herion addicts
with the needle still in their arm, bright red blood bubbling out of their noses, the raped,
strangled, discarded and bloating young girls, dumped in the nearest rice paddy ditch.
He gets those calls. He never talks about his work, never shows the horror pictures or
trashes the perps. He sends selfies, pics of meals, flowers and temples. So I asked him,
doesn't this bother you at night, the carnal evil, the rape, the murder? Don't you wanna see
justice done?
He said simply, we're all going to die, many of us soon, we have very little time away
from the Wheel. We should spend every precious second of free time uplifting those who are
below us, the poor, the infirm, the feeble, the indentured, the slave, ...because we're all
gonna die as beggars some day. We should hold faith with the beggars.
Bolton is a sick fuck, in a pantheon of sick fucks. Why squander a nanosecond meditating
on any of them? They are nothingness, the void. MoA seems to have a fascination with evil and
death, and making Death's bit players into pop-idols. Selling a different brand of soap, I
guess.
Closing Hormuz would likely be the Iranian response to a sustained bombing campaign. A
single strike on a nuclear facility could elicit a missile strike on the attacking party (US,
Isreal or both.) Or it could involve multiple attacks on vulnerable US troops in Iraq and
Syria. Iran has several rungs in its escalation ladder. It doesn't have to jump to the top
one all at once.
Of course financial sanctions are the main, if not the only, US war-winning tactic
available today. Mainly the control of the VISA and SWIFT exchange systems. But I'm not
financially knowledgeable. It was one reason that Iran signed in 2015. I remember well, about
10 years ago, the husband of an Iranian student arriving with $20K (?) sewn into his
overcoat, to pay for his wife's studies.
However, the US has used this tactic so often now, that people must be looking to ways of
getting round the problem. I'm not quite sure how much success they may have had. People talk
about Russia-China erecting a parallel to the SWIFT system. I hope this does happen, though
it must be expensive. Non-US allies need it.
@lLaguerre: Russia already has set up its version of SWIFT. As has China, as well as both
agreeing to transactions in rubles/yuan first for petroleum, then recently for all other
trade, to bypass the US$ SWIFT system. The US gets a "cut", every time a corporation/country
converts from local currency to US$, then again when that same US$ cash is converted to the
currency of the second trading partner. To avoid this, non-US countries keep US$ reserves to
trade between themselves. This scam was set up at Bretton Woods after WW2 when the US economy
was the only economy/industrial-base left unscathed.
"In 2017, the head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, said at a meeting with
President Vladimir Putin that Russia is ready for disconnection from SWIFT."
Because of their large inertia, these things, when they get moving, cannot be stopped and
proceed to the inevitable. The ziocons have pushed the boulder and it's starting to roll.
That is what a lot of panicky people said in 2013, that Obama's invasion of Syria was
inevitable because Assad was gassing his people in Ghouta. It didn't happen. As it turned
out, the "massive momemtum" was in the Zionist propangda, hoping to sucker the U.S. into the
Middle East again.
i think swift and bis are linked in with imf.. unfortunately i don't know how it all works,
but russias central bank is part of imf.. the way imf is set up favours the developed
countries over the developing countries.. they have some other tricks to keep control over it
too, but i do believe it is tricky navigating moving away from it all, which is why the
financial system is the first line of action to put other countries deemed out of line - into
line.. some have tried to get the imf to change without success which is why i believe brics
was working towards an alternative.. of course the b in brics went thru a type of regime
change under a different facade and i am not sure where they are at with that at this moment
in time...
Julian Assange
@JulianAssange
There is something very odd about the Joseph Mifsud story and the role of the UK in the 2016
US presidential election:
(thread)
5:07 PM · Mar 22, 2018
DEVELOPING: A major new front is opening in the political espionage scandal. In summer 2016,
Brennan with his FBI liaison Strzok, along with help from Kerry @ State, were trying to set
Russian espionage traps for minor players in the Trump campaign through cultivated intel
assets
@MISchi: Israel may have been "invited", but only as a standard diplomatic courtesy, not as a
"guest of honour" as the MSM and Hasbara would have us beleive. The US was probably invited
too... and didn't have the grace to show up? The US and EU were for sure in 2014, but
"boycotted" it over the US coup in Ukraine. Nuttyyahoo was just looking for MSM cover for the
illegal bombing he knew was going to happen, making it look like Putin was "in on it".
I'd guess Putin is simply giving Nutty all the rope Nutty needs to hang himself in the
court of world public opinion. When I see an official statement from Putin (or any Russian
senior official) saying Putin gave any approval of Israel's past and present illegal
incursions in Syria, let alone the illegal occupation of the Golan, I'll believe Nutty being
at the Victory Parade was some sort of endorsement by Putin of Nutty's insanity.
I agree with Lysander's logic. Iran will not be attacked in the "normal" manner; it will be
asymmetrical. The performance of not-so antiquated air defenses in Syria are the big game
changer as Iran has those and its own S-300 version. Plus all those big stationary targets.
Plus, I figure Bolton has a target on his back, as do other neocons--you don't murder over a
million without creating some enemies. I see lots of bluster to foment as much chaos as
possible to accentuate the asymmetrical impact. But as for an actual military assault, Bolton
and company are a decade plus too late.
To negate the potential effect of another Operation Northwoods, I think it wise to pull up
those old pdf docs and spread them around the world via social media--a move I'm frankly
surprised has yet to be made--along with some additional contemporary context.
@james: The Russian central bank is a member of the IMF/World Bank/BIS/SWIFT system as are
nearly every other central bank in the world. Not being "in" this club severely restricts the
ability to do international trade. Russia and China are quietly spearheading the move to
conduct international trade in local currencies, outside the US$-reserve-currency scam
(sorry, system). Both Russia and China have set up alternative systems, which along with the
SCO/AIIB offer participating countries a way to side-set US economic terrorism and sanctions.
The Rothschilds may have managed to stall the BRICS for now, but that won't last long.
Roger Stone said that he has known John Bolton since the Reagan years. Stone claims Bolton is
not a neocon warmonger but a guy who is a staunch believer in the old doctrine of peace
through strength. Interesting as Stone despises neocons. Bolton went to Yale undergrad and
Yale Law. Haley has a degree in accounting from Clemson, a mediocre land grant public
university in South Carolina.
Ok, you all, I have a personal story about John Bolton that I'm gonna drop here. This story
comes from someone who used to live next door to John Bolton in Bethesda (or Chevy Chase?).
Bolton's former (and current?) neighbor is a Harvard-trained medical doctor and a liberal
Jewish guy. He has two daughters who are now grown. One is now a veterinarian in North
Potomac. Anyway, his daughters were like 10 and 12-years old when they would water Bolton's
plants when he was away on travel. One time when Bolton was traveling he asked the older girl
to water his plants and he'd pay her $25. She agreed. Then a few days later she had something
come up and would not be able to do it and asked her younger sister if she could take care of
it she could have the full $25. The younger sister agreed. After Bolton returned from his
trip the younger sister went over to Bolton and explained what happened and that she, not her
older sister, had taken care and watered his plants. Bolton told her that he was not going to
pay her because the agreement was strictly between him and her older sister. That was last
interaction they had with Bolton. End of story.
I've posted the following deep in the previous thread, so here for those who missed
it:
As to the OPCW making "political decisions", The Intercept had an
interesting piece by Mehdi Hasan recently, about a certain John Bolton.
In 2001, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had penned a letter to [OPCW head
José] Bustani, thanking him for his "very impressive" work. By March 2002, however,
Bolton -- then serving as under secretary of state for Arms Control and International
Security Affairs -- arrived in person at the OPCW headquarters in the Hague to issue a
warning to the organization's chief. And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words.
"Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice
president of the United States. "We can't accept your management style."
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the
organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to
retaliate against you."
There was a pause.
"We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York."
Looks like Iran is Carnage for Bolton and neocon fellow travelers in Trump administration
such as Haley and Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... Wall Street Journal ..."
"... In that vein, it is Bolton who merits historical comparison: to Cato the Elder, a conservative-yet-eccentric Roman statesman who, according to Plutarch, would often and invariably call for the destruction of Carthage, even though the Carthaginian threat was neither imminent nor apparent. Eventually, Cato's words wended their way into the ears of power and hundreds of thousands of Carthaginians were pointlessly slaughtered. According to the Greek historian Polybius, Scipio Aemilianus, the young Roman General who led the attack, at seeing the carnage of a great people, "shed tears and wept openly." ..."
"... Michael Shindler is an Advocate with Young Voices and a writer living in Washington, D.C. Follow him @MichaelShindler . ..."
Last week, John Bolton ascended to the office of National Security Advisor, following in the
hurried footsteps of Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster. Two peculiar characteristics set Bolton
apart from most folks in D.C.: an unabashedly luxurious
mustache and an unmatched penchant for unjustified preemptive violence.
At the University of Chicago in 2009, Bolton warned
, "Unless Israel is prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iran's program, Iran will have
nuclear weapons in the very near future." Thankfully, Israel didn't take Bolton's advice and,
as most predicted, Iran never lived up to his expectations. Similarly, in a 2015 op-ed in the
New York Times , Bolton opined ,
"The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will
sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure . Time is terribly short,
but a strike can still succeed." Three short months later, a non-proliferation deal wherein
Iran agreed to a 98 percent reduction in its enriched uranium stockpile and a 15-year pause in
the development of key weapons infrastructure was negotiated.
More recently in February, Bolton advised in
the Wall Street Journal that "Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence about North Korea,
we should not wait until the very last minute . It is perfectly legitimate for the United
States to respond to the current 'necessity' posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons by striking
first."
By this point Bolton's record of calling for war in every possible situation had lost the
ability to shock. Still, the Founding Fathers would probably be appalled.
A comparatively irenic vision pervades the philosophy of the founders. James Wilson, in his
Lectures on Law, wrote that when a nation
"is under an obligation to preserve itself and its members; it has a right to do everything"
that it can "without injuring others." In Federalist 4, John Jay
advised that the American people ought to support steps that would "put and keep them in
such a situation as, instead of inviting war, will tend to repress and discourage it." And in
his Farewell Address, George Washington asserted that the United States should be "always
guided by an exalted justice and benevolence."
A preemptive nuclear strike justified on the flimsy basis of "gaps in U.S. intelligence"
hardly seems concordant with such military restraint and "exalted justice." And lest it be
thought these ideals were mere lofty notions, consider how, as American history proceeded, they
became enshrined in American diplomacy.
In 1837, Canadian rebels sailing aboard the Caroline fled to an island in the
Niagara River with the help of a few American citizens. British forces boarded their ship,
killed an American member of the crew, and then set the Caroline ablaze before forcing
it over Niagara Falls. Enraged, American and Canadian raiders destroyed a British ship. Several
attacks followed until the crisis was at last ended in 1842 by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. In
the aftermath, the Caroline test was established, which stipulates that an attack made in
self-defense is justifiable only when, in the words of Daniel Webster, the necessity is
"instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." This
principle remains the international standard, though some like Bolton think it's outdated.
With the Caroline test in mind, Bolton wrote while
arguing in favor of a preemptive strike against North Korea, "The case against preemption rests
on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile
times." In other words, Bolton believes that we can no longer afford to wait for the situation
to be "instant" and "overwhelming," and makes an offense out of abstaining from immediate
preemptive action, regardless of the potential costs involved.
Relatedly, one of Bolton's most colorful jabs at President Obama involved likening him to
Æthelred the Unready, a medieval Anglo-Saxon king remembered for his tragic
indecisiveness. Yet given the costs of groundless preemption, indecisiveness is often a midwife
to careful contemplation and peace. Had Prime Minister Netanyahu or Obama been persuaded by
Bolton's retrospectively warrantless calls for preemption in Iran, tragedy would have
followed.
In that vein, it is Bolton who merits historical comparison: to Cato the Elder, a
conservative-yet-eccentric Roman statesman who, according to Plutarch, would often and
invariably call for the destruction of Carthage, even though the Carthaginian threat was
neither imminent nor apparent. Eventually, Cato's words wended their way into the ears of power
and hundreds of thousands of Carthaginians were pointlessly slaughtered. According to the
Greek historian Polybius, Scipio Aemilianus, the young Roman General who led the attack, at
seeing the carnage of a great people, "shed tears and wept openly."
In order that we never find ourselves standing alongside Scipio knee-deep in unjustly spilt
blood, Bolton should reconsider whether the flimsy merits of rash preemption truly outweigh the
durable wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the lessons of history.
Michael Shindler is an Advocate with Young Voices and a writer living in Washington,
D.C. Follow him @MichaelShindler .
During the 1969 Vietnam War draft lottery, Bolton drew number 185. (Draft numbers
corresponded to birth dates.) As a result of the Johnson and Nixon administrations' decisions
to rely largely on the draft rather than on the reserve forces, joining a Guard or Reserve
unit became a way to avoid service in the Vietnam War. Before graduating from Yale in 1970,
Bolton enlisted in the Maryland Army National Guard rather than wait to find out if his draft
number would be called. (The highest number called to military service was 195.) He saw
active duty for 18 weeks of training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, from July to November
1970.
After serving in the National Guard for four years, he served in the United States Army
Reserve until the end of his enlistment two years later.[1]
He wrote in his Yale 25th reunion book "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast
Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton
discussed his comment in the reunion book, explaining that he decided to avoid service in
Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me that
opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
Why is it that the US leads the world in production of chicken-hawks? Even these mangy
ex-colonial countries like the UK and France do not have as many chicken-hawks as we do.
Comparing Obama to Athelred is absurd. Athelred's problem was not that he was indecisive, but
rather that he refused to listen to advice from anyone (the moniker "Unready" actually meant
"Uncounseled" in Old English) and that he was extremely impulsive and deeply bigoted. Hence
he ordered a general massacre of the Danes in England. Luckily it was only carried out in a
limited region, unluckily the victims included the King of Denmark's sister and her children,
leading to an open blood feud war, and also cost Aethelred any support he might have had from
his wife's kinsman, the Duke of Normandy. If anyone is a good match for old Aethelred, it's
Donald Trump.
"... Given that a key function of that position is to ensure that the bureaucracy provides the relevant options and most accurate information to the president before major national security decisions, it is hard to think of anyone more ill-suited to that duty. Bolton's method of policy formation has been to try to bully any part of the bureaucracy that does not subscribe to his personal agenda, and to try to bully away any part of the truth that does not serve his objectives. ..."
"... The Senate is about to have an opportunity to weigh in on another highly important foreign policy position, that of secretary of state, for which President Trump has nominated Mike Pompeo. Senators ought to consider that nomination in tandem with the appointment of Bolton as national security adviser, even though the Senate formally has a role with only one of those appointments and not with the other. Senators should consider the two as a package deal. They should not vote to confirm Pompeo if they are uncomfortable with either part of the package. ..."
"... The main reason to approach the Pompeo nomination this way is that the nation currently has a president who, sad to say, needs restraint. He will need restraint all the more during the coming months as troubles of his own making increase the chance that he will lash out in destructive ways . ..."
"... But both Pompeo and Bolton are more likely to accentuate Trump's impulses than to restrain them. Bolton got his job because the sort of things he says on Fox are more what Donald Trump likes to hear than the briefings that H.R. McMaster gave him, which evidently were too long for Trump's taste or for his short attention span. ..."
"... Pompeo did not rise so quickly from being a relatively junior congressman functioning as a partisan attack dog to where he is now, on the verge of occupying Thomas Jefferson's chair, by telling Trump what he needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear. ..."
This week John Bolton assumes the job of national security adviser. Given that a key
function of that position is to ensure that the bureaucracy provides the relevant options and
most accurate information to the president before major national security decisions, it is hard
to think of anyone more ill-suited to that duty.
Bolton's method of policy formation has been to try to bully any part of the bureaucracy
that does not subscribe to his personal agenda, and to try to bully away any part of the truth
that does not serve his objectives. Bolton's objectives are characterized by never meeting
a war or prospective war he didn't like. He still avows that the Iraq War -- with all the costs
and chaos it has caused, from thousands of American deaths to the birth of the group that we
now know as ISIS -- was a good idea. That someone with this perspective has been entrusted with
the job Bolton now has is a glaring example of how there often is no accountability in
Washington for gross policy malpractice.
Appointments as national security adviser are not subject to Senate confirmation. If they
were, it would be appropriate for the Senate to react as it did the last time Bolton came
before that body as a nominee for a job that does require confirmation. In 2005 the Senate
turned down his nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations. The Senate review brought to
light some of the uglier aspects of Bolton's conduct in his previous job as an undersecretary
of state. President George W. Bush gave him a recess appointment to the U.N. job, but
fortunately that meant there was a time limit to the destruction Bolton could wreak in that
position.
The Senate is about to have an opportunity to weigh in on another highly important
foreign policy position, that of secretary of state, for which President Trump has nominated
Mike Pompeo. Senators ought to consider that nomination in tandem with the appointment of
Bolton as national security adviser, even though the Senate formally has a role with only one
of those appointments and not with the other. Senators should consider the two as a package
deal. They should not vote to confirm Pompeo if they are uncomfortable with either part of the
package.
The main reason to approach the Pompeo nomination this way is that the nation currently
has a president who, sad to say, needs restraint. He will need restraint all the more during
the coming months as troubles of his own making increase the chance that
he will lash out in destructive ways . The copious commentary during the fifteen
months of the Trump presidency about having "adults in the room" to restrain the worst urges of
an inexperienced and impulsive president speaks to an important truth. Whether adult
supervision of this sort succeeds or fails depends on the collective impact of all of the
president's senior subordinates. To the extent any one subordinate is especially influential in
this regard on foreign policy, it probably is the national security adviser who is best
positioned either to accentuate or to restrain Trump's impulses. Having Bolton in that job
makes the restraining ability of the secretary of state all the more important.
But both Pompeo and Bolton are more likely to accentuate Trump's impulses than to
restrain them. Bolton got his job because the sort of things he says on Fox are more what
Donald Trump likes to hear than the briefings that H.R. McMaster gave him, which evidently were
too long for Trump's taste or for his short attention span. P
Pompeo's winning of favor with Trump, during what reportedly has been lots of face time with
him at the White House during the past year, has a similar dynamic. Pompeo did not rise so
quickly from being a relatively junior congressman functioning as a partisan attack dog to
where he is now, on the verge of occupying Thomas Jefferson's chair, by telling Trump what he
needs to hear rather than what he wants to hear.
Senators hold up confirmation of nominees, and sometimes vote against them, for all kinds of
reasons unrelated to the resumé of the nominee. It would be proper for them to vote
against a nominee for secretary of state partly because of who the national security adviser
is, given that both of them are in service to an unstable president.
There are other reasons to consider Pompeo and Bolton in tandem. In several respects they
are two hazardous peas in a pod. On North Korea, Bolton's bellicose posture is matched by
Pompeo's statements about seeking ways to
"separate" Kim Jong Un from his nuclear weapons , suggesting a priority to regime change
over keeping a volatile situation on the Korean peninsula from blowing up. Both Pompeo and
Bolton, along with Trump, have sworn eternal hostility to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA), the multilateral agreement that closed all possible paths to an Iranian nuclear
weapon. Neither man bothers to explain how destruction of the agreement, which would free Iran
to produce as much fissile material as it wants and would end the intrusive international
inspections of the Iranian program, could possibly
"... North Korea's negotiating position has not really changed with the announcement. They have repeatedly said for years they are willing to agree to denuclearization of the Peninsula in return for security guarantees. I find the media trumpeting this as a new development rather vexing. Anyways, China has been putting the screws on them since about September/October (Apparently, they told Kim Jongun they know they can't overthrow the DPRK government, but they can get rid of him personally), which is also why there have not been any new nuclear tests. ..."
"... I think Yves has got it right: USA threatens PRC with tariffs, so PRC pressures NK to make concessions to the USA. i.e. Two big guys screwing the little guy. ..."
"... In the USA, imperialist machtpolitik is a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It doesn't matter how faithfully NK or PRC might fulfill obligations. Trump's successors, whoever they may be, will simply apply more pressure and demand more concessions. They won't stop until somebody else stops them. ..."
I believe Trump could negotiate a deal. But I also believe he could blow up the whole talk
before it even happens. He has shown that he'll bend quickly to neocon pressure, with
increased interest in foreign war (Bolton hiring) and the ramping up of hostilities by
bouncing Russians from the U.S. over the phony poisoning story in the UK.
I don't disagree with your comment, but not comfortable with the term "bend to". Trump
gets enamored with different people at different times, but he always is looking
down at them. They may get enough rope to scare the rest of us, but they are still on a
rope.
Bolton is horrible, but a lot of other horrible people have come and gone in this really
quick year.
Bolton is horrible but probably won't last long. Nobody at Trump's ear has, including his
own children.
Trump just announced that we're withdrawing from Syria. That's more than Obama ever
did.
Part of being a nationalist demagogue is that you're not as interested in foreign wars
unless they enrich the country. Not a single one of our wars does that. There's nothing
interesting in mercantilism, for instance, that we can't do at home (drill baby drill).
I'm not saying I agree with that view, I'm just saying that if he's a nationalist
demagogue, it only follows that he's not interested in, uh, "non-for-profit warmaking".
I am NO Trump fan or voter, but it does appear that he's the first one to apply sanctions
to those specific Chinese banks handling the trade with North Korea.
(Somewhat) OT, but it strikes me that the best way to look at Trump is through the lense
of what he is – the US version of Sylvio Berlusconi. A sleazy billionaire Oligarch with
no core principles and a fondness for Bunga Bunga parties.
Rather than as LITERALLY HITLER as per the verbiage of hashtag the resistance.
Thus, rather than as a crazed madman bent on "evil" at all times one wonders whether Mr.
Bunga Bunga would do a deal with Lil' Kim. Sure he would, assuming that the ruling military
Junta allows him to. It might be in the interest of the latter to de-escalate this particular
hotspot (as NK crisis/hype fatigue may set in) and simply push Iran as the next flashpoint to
hype.
Indeed! They even sound quite similar -- I recall in a speech that Berlusconi gave when he
was still the Italian president and the Italian left was screaming for his resignation,
Sylvio claimed such demands were making him uneasy, since if he was to go home, and he had 20
homes, it would be difficult for him to decide which house or mansion to go to!
It seems the bottom line for negotiations with North Korea have little to do with this
article which covers Trump's thoughts on nuclear proliferation between major powers that have
massive stockpiles.
North Korea is mainly interested in protecting itself from regime change and from becoming
a US outpost (as in target) butt up against China. It is hard to believe that Kim Jong-Un
would get any advantage whatsoever out of dismantling his nuclear arsenal, however small. One
assumes he is aware of Gaddafi in particular and US's track record on keeping it's promises
– particularly over the span of different administrations – in general.
The above comment assumes full disarmament as the minimum condition of any "negotiation"
since Trump has gone so far out of his way to make that clear.
Oh, and now see the lead story at the Financial Times, China uses economic muscle to bring
N Korea to negotiating table:
China virtually halted exports of petroleum products, coal and other key materials to
North Korea in the months leading to this week's unprecedented summit between Kim Jong Un,
the North Korean leader, and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping.
The export freeze -- revealed in official Chinese data and going much further than the
limits stipulated under UN sanctions -- shows the extent of Chinese pressure following the
ramping up of Pyongyang's nuclear testing programme. It also suggests that behind Mr Xi's
talk this week of a "profound revolutionary friendship" between the two nations, his
government has been playing hard ball with its neighbour.
I would normally agree but Kim Jong-Un was just summoned to China. Not even given a state
visit. The Chinese announced North Korea would denuclearlize:
North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un pledged his commitment to denuclearization and to meet
U.S. officials, China said on Wednesday after his meeting with President Xi Jinping, who
promised China would uphold friendship with its isolated neighbour.
China has heretofore pretended that it couldn't do anything about North Korea. It looks
like Trump's tariff threat extracted China jerking Kim Jong-Un's chain as a concession. I
don't see how Kim Jong-Un can defy China if China is serious about wanting North Korea to
denuclearlize. Maybe it will merely reduce its arsenal and stop threatening Hawaii (even
though its ability to deliver rockets that far is in doubt) and just stick to being able to
light up Seoul instead.
Agree. I wasn't aware of the details you mention above regarding the export freeze. (I
won't use Google and my normal 'trick' doesn't work to get around FT's paywall – and I
won't use the trial membership either). I'm hopeless.
Anyway, you make a very convincing case. I can only imagine that Kim Jong Un is one
miserable scared rat. My point about a "silk noose" below was perhaps on the mark.
Kim might agree on paper or through an insincere promise to denuclearize, but I don't see
a closed authoritarian regime like the North agreeing to an inspection regime that would
insure that such a pledge would be lived up to. Reduction, but build-up on the sly w/o
inspections.
China may be interested in a deal to the extent that it prevents a bloody war breaking out
that they'll probably expend manpower to help clean up and it insures the security of a North
Korean buffer that keeps American troops off their border; After all, they've got to keep the
powder dry for "reunification" with Taiwan.
I also don't believe that the US would agree to concessions, such as removing American
troops from the peninsula. the pentagon wouldn't like it, the hawks around Trumps wouldn't
like it, and I believe the SK leadership would not be too crazy about the potential
ramifications for their security with such an agreement.
But, can Trump (by extension, the US), make an agreement that can be relied on over its
term?
For any hope of NK trusting any deal with the US he would have to stand by the Iranian
deal. Then there's Bolton and the Neocon Will To War, for deeply pathological reasons which
by nature cannot be debated.
In this case, the mere possibility of a "deal" is possible, but only if there is a third
party to hold both of them to it.
That's the crazy thing about this. What possible inducement could Kim Jong-Un have gotten
to attend his own funeral? Why would anyone trust the US an inch?
I suppose if he can keep his own people in a suspended state of extreme propaganda, then
he might be vulnerable to his own medicine, but that seems at odds with his behavior so far
(such as the assassination of his uncle). If anything, he would be especially leery of
anything coming out of the US.
And then can he really be that psyched out by Bolton, Pompeo and Torture Lady so
that good cop Trump can hand him is own death certificate with a space for his signature?
Whatever happened during this China trip, the overarching theme must have been how to
manage the US. Here's one rough scenario:
NK 'disarms' to some definition, under the auspices of China, acquiring in return an
explicit Chinese security umbrella for the buffer it presents between them and SK. Nobody
really wants a unified Korea in any case. In return, the US vacates SK militarily, ever so
discretely and over time.
Done correctly, and with the finesse necessary for Trump, China is in a position to
extract all sorts of concessions from the US on other fronts as well. Nothing positive is
going to happen here without China, and they hold most of the cards. If nothing positive
happens, we have to consider the pressure that'd build on Trump to do something, anything,
and that probably being something rash. (Better a big disaster over there than a mammoth one
over here thinking).
"he can't go willy nilly and set nukes a-flying just because it struck him as a good idea
that day."
I mean sure. His "button" isn't literally connected to a missile somewhere, but he sure as
hell can ask that nukes be fired whenever and wherever he wants. You could argue that someone
in the chain of command would prevent that from happening, but that's more of a hope than a
guarantee. For a really good read on how this all works and the history of the nuclear
program I highly recommend https://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illusion/dp/0143125788
With Bolton on board and seemingly everyone with half a brain, a little logic and the
ability to hold their tongue for more than about 5 seconds out, I highly doubt anything will
come of these negotiations. In fact, I'm more worried that the US will get steamrolled by
China and NK.
That isn't true. See the link I provided, which you clearly did not bother to read.
Various people can refuse his order as illegal. Former Secretary of State Jim Baker, in a
Financial Times, before Trump was elected, said the same thing. Bolton is the National
Security Adviser. He may have a lot of informal power by having direct access to the
President, but he does not tie in to the formal chain of command, either at the DoD or
State.
Oh I read it and I've read many other articles and a lot of non-fiction on the issue.
Again, I would call your position and the position of this article hopeful at best. Trump has
the football, he has the codes in his jacket pocket and everyone responsible for carrying out
the order to launch has been raised up through a military system that ensures no one
questions an order from their superior. Relying on various people to refuse his order as
illegal in this system is not a fail-safe I feel comfortable with. I do find it interesting
that you just assume I didn't read the article as if this one article is the end all be all
on the subject.
The article seems a bit confused about what it's trying to say. Stopping nuclear
proliferation has been a major policy priority of the US and other western governments since
the 1960s, and if I recall correctly it was one of Bolton's priorities when he was in Bush
the Lesser's administration. It's something in which all of the declared nuclear powers have
an interest, because the smaller the number of nuclear powers in the world, the greater the
difference between them and the rest. This is much more important than wild fantasies about
rogue attacks: if N Korea becomes a de facto nuclear power like India, Israel and Pakistan,
then all sorts of other countries might be tempted to have a go, starting with S Korea (which
has the capacity and has been caught cheating before). Whilst this risk is objectively small,
an end to the NK programme would make it even smaller. I suspect the deal will be that NK
denuclearizes and China guarantees its security: a non-nuclear NK will be even more of a
client state than it is now.
Nuclear competition among the superpowers is quite different and involves a whole set of
different issues.
Less warfare = more wall
But remember the last time Trump said something in Syria's favor? A chemical attack happened
in small village for no logical reason and the hawks immediately took to framing Assad. Trump
then backed off and took harder line on Assad, launching missiles into Syria.
So I'm inclined to think he wants a deal. But look out for screaming hawks immediately
trying to scuttle anything.
Perhaps 30 years ago, Trump was an international defense luminary, but I see little
evidence of the boasted emotional control and cool Trump claimed. He is unarguably a
successful grifter. Is that what it takes to make peace? What happens when the other guy
realizes he has been lied to by a congenital liar? Back to square 1.
In my take, the recent meeting between the heads of China and N Korea just Trumped any
leverage the US might have had in peace talks. Trump will be there only if a scapegoat is
needed. Both S. Korea and Japan have expressed doubts about our reliability as a defense
shield against powerful China – Japan and the Koreans' neighbor. What Little Rocketman
has likely achieved is diplomatically checkmating the US. Now Trump's tariff threats serve
only to push US allies in the region closer to China. Should that turn out to be the case,
the economic repercussions are as dangerous and unpredictable as nukes in the air or as Trump
himself. I sure hope I got this all wrong.
"no enduring principles" is a feature of politicians everywhere today. Their concern is to
represent the rich and their qualification is to present those biased arguments in a way that
beguiles the electorate into supposing its a good idea for them as well. Step Two is the "who
would have thought it?" response after the country catches on.
In former times the candidate for public office would assert his principles on the
hustings and the voters would remember what they knew of him before voting. Sure, there were
ambitious unreliable people who were willing to exchange their reputations for office but
they were few. We should get back to those days.
We allowed our merchants and spooks to drive USSR to the precipice without any thoughts
about the nukes they had. It appeared then that warheads supposedly in Ukraine were missing.
We will likely discover what happened to them in due course. It is possible that surveillance
of communications is the main reason they are not a thread for the time being but that does
not mean they have dropped out of existence.
Thank you NC for introducing an issue that should concern economists as much as everyone
else.
North Korea's negotiating position has not really changed with the announcement. They have
repeatedly said for years they are willing to agree to denuclearization of the Peninsula in
return for security guarantees. I find the media trumpeting this as a new development rather
vexing. Anyways, China has been putting the screws on them since about September/October
(Apparently, they told Kim Jongun they know they can't overthrow the DPRK government, but
they can get rid of him personally), which is also why there have not been any new nuclear
tests.
Don't forget the United States has itself promised to denuclearize, under the NPT.
It would certainly bring me great pleasure if Trump of all people were to bring about some
great positive change in regards to the Forever War with North Korea. Imagine all the whining
liberals if Trump, unlike Obama, actually did something worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
I think Yves has got it right: USA threatens PRC with tariffs, so PRC pressures NK to make
concessions to the USA. i.e. Two big guys screwing the little guy.
PRC and NK leaders might think that all they have to do is get through a short patch of
bad weather until 2020. If so, they are badly kidding themselves.
In the USA, imperialist machtpolitik is a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It doesn't
matter how faithfully NK or PRC might fulfill obligations. Trump's successors, whoever they
may be, will simply apply more pressure and demand more concessions. They won't stop until
somebody else stops them.
Sebastian Rotella reports
on how many of the people that worked with Bolton remember his tendency to distort intelligence
and ignore facts that contradicted his assumptions:
"Anyone who is so cavalier not just with intelligence, but with facts, and so
ideologically driven, is unfit to be national security adviser," said Robert Hutchings, who
dealt extensively with Bolton as head of the National Intelligence Council, a high-level
agency that synthesizes analysis from across the intelligence community to produce strategic
assessments for policymakers. "He's impervious to information that goes against his
preconceived ideological views." [bold mine-DL]
That assessment lines up with what I understood about Bolton, and it points to one of the
biggest problems with his appointment. I wrote this shortly
before Trump announced that he was choosing Bolton:
The real danger is that he is such an ideologue that he would keep information from the
president that contradicts his views and prevent Trump from getting the best available
advice. Trump is poorly informed to begin with, and having Bolton as his main adviser on
matters of national security and foreign policy would make sure that he stays that way.
Trump is especially susceptible to being manipulated by his advisers into endorsing the
policies they want because he knows so little and responds so favorably to flattery, and he has
shown that he is already more than willing to select a more aggressive option when he is told
that it is the "presidential" thing to do. We should expect that Bolton will feed Trump bad or
incomplete information, present aggressive options in the most favorable light while dismissing
alternatives, and praise Trump's leadership to get him to go along with the hard-line policies
Bolton wants. Bolton will run a very distorted policy process and he will be the opposite of an
honest broker. That won't serve Trump well, and it will be terrible for our foreign policy.
"... It should also be noted that Bolton is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations , an organization whose members have influenced the state of geopolitics for the last few generations. Bolton was also a member of the neo-conservative, warhawk think tank, "Project for the New American Century," which was enthusiastically promoting the lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction. ..."
"... In 2000, PNAC released a report titled Rebuilding America's Defenses which outlined a strategy of regime change in Iraq and beyond. Under a section titled "Creating Tomorrow's Dominant Force," the think tank wrote the following controversial line: ..."
"... "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor." ..."
This article was written by Derrick Broze and originally published at
Activist Post
The latest neo-conservative warmonger to join the Trump Administration does not bode well for the people of Iran.
On Thursday Donald Trump announced that John Bolton, a former official in George W. Bush's administration and former ambassador
to the UN, would be his new National Security Advisor. Bolton is a warhawk who called for the invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent
weapons of mass destruction and has for years called for the invasion of Iran.
Middle East Eye collected
a number of quotes from Bolton over the years that indicate his plans for Iran and other nations viewed as a threat to national
security of the U.S. government. And by that I mean the people who secretly wield control of corporate and state power.
In 2009, Bolton said that regime change is "ultimately, the only thing that will stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons." As recent
as 2015 Bolton call for a U.S./Israel joint bombing campaign."Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran's
opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran."
Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul questioned the appointment. "It concerns me that Trump would put someone in charge who is unhinged
as far as believing in absolute and total intervention,"
Paul stated. Bolton's appointment
was also criticized by Trita Parsi, leader of the National Iranian American Council.
Further, it seems that Bolton and former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani have already promised the regime change would be happening
within the next year. "Just eight months ago, at a Paris gathering, Bolton told members of the Iranian exile group, known as the
Mujahedeen Khalq, MEK, or People's Mujahedeen, that the Trump administration should embrace their goal of immediate regime change
in Iran and recognize their group as a 'viable' alternative,"
The Intercept
reports.
"The behavior and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime
itself," newly appointed National Security Advisor John Bolton told the crowd. The Intercept also noted that Iranian expatriate
journalist Bahman Kalbasi reported that Bolton ended his talk by promising, "And that's why, before 2019, we here will celebrate
in Tehran!"
At a recent celebration of the Persian New Year, Rudy Giuliani promised the audience that "if anything, John Bolton has become
more determined that there needs to be regime change in Iran, that the nuclear agreement needs to be burned, and that you need to
be in charge of that country." Disturbingly, Giuliani reportedly led the crowd in a chant of "regime change!".
It should also be noted that Bolton is a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations , an organization whose members have influenced the state of geopolitics for the last few
generations. Bolton was also a member of the neo-conservative, warhawk think tank, "Project for the New American Century," which
was enthusiastically promoting the lie about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction.
In 2000, PNAC released a report titled
Rebuilding America's Defenses which outlined a strategy of regime change in Iraq and beyond. Under a section titled "Creating
Tomorrow's Dominant Force," the think tank wrote the following controversial line:
"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
Less than a year later, 10 of the 18 men who signed the paper became members of the Bush administration. The attacks of 9/11 would
come soon after and the neocons had their "catastrophic and catalyzing event" and an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,
and soon possibly, Iran.
The men included Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of
State Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition; William Kristol, editor of
the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, and Richard Perle, chairman of the advisory Defense Science Board.
In addition to the well-known Pearl Harbor quote, the paper goes on to describe the eventual outcome of the initial regime change.
"Thus, this report advocates a two-stage process of change – transition and transformation – over the coming decades." If the last
15 years of war, violence, and death in the Middle East have been the "transition" phase, John Bolton and Trump may be preparing
to shift gears and move into the "transformation" phase – beginning with the invasion of Iran. However, based on PNAC's track record,
they might be looking for a new catastrophic event to generate support for intervention in Iran.
Humans are primates. Thus, they are stupid, ignorant, malicious and fearful - mostly the
latter. Pretty much explains everything in human history.
I subscribe to the concept of survival at any cost. But in a rational society that would
entail being aware of the long-term consequences. This, however, is not a rational
society.
Off topic - or maybe not given the topic of human heartlessness - here we have John
Bolton:
Apparently he told the M.E.K. cult that the US would end Iran's leadership before the 40
year anniversary which is February 11, 2019.
That of course is absurd unless somehow the US manages to decapitate the Iranian
leadership with an airstrike or nuclear attack. What actually will happen if the US attacks
Iran is that Iran will fight for the next several decades until the US backs off. There is no
chance short of nuclear bombardment for the US to "defeat" Iran. The US couldn't even
"defeat" Iraq in less than five years and hasn't defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in 17
years. Iran will be a far harder nut to crack than either of those.
John Bolton Tapped for NSA: What Does It Mean for US-Russia Relations?
John Bolton, a Yale-educated lawyer known as a
foreign policy hawk , has been appointed National Security Adviser (NSA), in a major
reshuffle of President Trump's administration. He officially takes office on April 9. No Senate
confirmation is required. Welcome back, Mr. Straight Talker!
Mr. Bolton has a long history of government service, including in the positions of
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and ambassador to the UN, the organization he once
described as "no such thing" and wants to be defunded . John Bolton
scorns international institutions and
does not believe that engaging much with the world is in keeping with US interests.
This soon-to-be NSA is an experienced lawyer and "think tanker," as well as a foreign-policy
pundit who has written a multitude of books and articles. He's a deft and ready speaker whose
gift of gab can win over an audience at any time. The National Security Advisor-designate even
considered entering the presidential races in 2012 and 2016.
In his frequent television commentaries
, Mr. Bolton has
always advocated tough approaches and never missed an opportunity to support using force
rather than wasting time on fruitless diplomacy. For instance, he has advocated for a military
option to solve the problem with North Korea and for boosting cooperation with Taiwan in order
to irk China. He takes a very hard line on Iran. "
To stop Iran's bomb, bomb Iran ," sums up his position.
Mr. Bolton believes the JCPOA was a blunder. He
wants the US to push Iran out of Syria and topple President Assad's Tehran-friendly government.
With his appointment, the chances of the US certifying the Iran nuclear deal appear to be
somewhere between zero and zilch. Mr. Bolton has always been pro-Israel and backed the idea of
a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran to knock out the facilities there related to its
nuclear program.
The late Jesse Helms, a well-known hawk, once claimed Mr. Bolton would
be the right man "to stand with at Armageddon."
The newest appointee has championed the idea of raising tariffs to unleash trade wars.
With these two very hawkish Republicans -- John Bolton and
Mike Pompeo -- Donald Trump will be under strong pressure to adopt a get-tough approach to
all major issues. Gina Haspel, another hawk, will have frequent access to Donald Trump in her
role as the newly appointed CIA director. The spirit of Barry Goldwater lives on.
John Bolton has always been critical of Moscow and it is almost unanimously believed that
his appointment does not augur well for US-Russia relations.
In response to President Putin's speech in which he unveiled the existence of his new super
weapons, Bolton emphasized the need for "a strategic response ." He
has
called on NATO to offer a strong reaction to what is known as the Scripal case, expressing
his conviction that the POTUS was considering such a response. The latest choice for National
Security Advisor
endorses
the idea of providing Ukraine with lethal weapons and wants the West to take a much tougher
stance on Russia. John Bolton will certainly advocate for expediting Georgia's and Ukraine's
membership in the North Atlantic alliance, as well as granting those nations the status of
Major Non–NATO ally of the US.
He strongly criticized President Obama's "reset policy." Yet despite all that, he never
launched personal attacks against Vladimir Putin. He always seemed to genuinely enjoy his
visits to Russia, including press conferences and visits to think tanks. Despite his tough
talk, he has always been amicable and ready to communicate. He has a long list of personal
acquaintances, including many in senior government positions and academia. John Bolton worked
with Sergey Kiriyenko, Russia's First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration,
back when the latter headed Russia's State Commission on Chemical Disarmament.
Mr. Bolton is an experienced negotiator on strategic arms-control issues. John Bolton was a
strong advocate of the US withdrawal from the 1972 BM Treaty. He took part in the talks over
the 2002 Strategic Offensive
Reductions Treaty (SORT) that was in effect until the New START went into force. John
Bolton sees the New START as a unilateral
disarmament agreement that is at odds with US interests. President Trump
has also decried that treaty.
Being a hawk does not make him a hopeless prospect. He views the interests of his nation in
his own way, but he wants America to lead, not perish in a war it can't win. His experience in
strategic arms talks is invaluable. Mr. Bolton has a good understanding of security-related
issues.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan was a Russia hawk, a tough guy no one could make a deal with.
Remember his " joke "
about dropping bombs on the USSR in five minutes? Or his "Evil Empire" speech? During his
second term, the landmark INF Treaty was
signed and the friendly environment of the US-USSR summits were proof that that bilateral
relationship had clearly evolved beyond its Cold War roots.
The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev believes that
"He has already entered history as a man who was instrumental in bringing about the end of the
Cold War." President Reagan ended the Cold War and made it possible to ease the nuclear
tensions in the 1990s.
Agreements will remain elusive on many issues and negotiations on some key matters may even
break down, but dialog on arms control will probably continue because it meets vital US
interests and Mr. Bolton knows that well.
In the end, the decisions are made by the president, and while advisers may have influence,
they only advise. President Trump has many people around him to help him see issues from
different viewpoints.
John Bolton is in all likelihood a Zionist asset due to the Israelis having some very
powerful kompromat on him.
Numerous sources allege that Bolton forced his wife (now ex-wife) into group sex at a
swinger's club. Did someone get it on film, tape, or some other recording media?
Given the extreme fervor of Bolton's Zionism, the answer seems obvious.
Bolton, to me, is worse than McMaster, is decidedly a neocon, and may well end up being the
intellectual impetus behind a shiny new war in the ME or the Korean peninsula.
Although Trump the candidate offered a sketch of his FP views, including his well known
declaration about the catastrophic Iraq war, today one can itemize where the US military is
currently robustly engaged.
If Bolton can dial back his hawkishness with respect to Russia, not mention--too
much--Iraq, he and POTUS may likely find alignment about which will be the first regime to be
targeted by our standoff capabilities. imao
I agree, people shouldn't imply, they should say straight out what they think.
So allow me.
It appears that the uber Israeli Sheldon Adelson who was the largest campaign donor to
Trump and Nikki Haley and also employs John Bolton is dictating US policy to Trump.
If it trots and barks like an Adelson, then its a Adelson poddle.
Don't forget that Bolton was the one who immediately blamed the Hariri assassination on
Syria.
Immediately assigning blame is one of the signs of a false-flag operation. If Mossad killed
Hariri, Bolton would know about it. He would also know if Mossad whacked the Skripals.
The political dividing line in America may not be Left vs. Right or Democrats vs. Republicans
or anti-war vs. pro-war but Russiagate believers vs. realist who know it is all a false-flag.
Thierry Meyssan believes that Rex Tillerson fell for the
Skripal hoax and that is why Trump fired him. I said something similar
here on MoA
This is about American Imperialism and MIC. Neocons are just well-laid MIC lobbyists. Some
like Bolton are pretty talented guys. Some like Max Boot are simply stupid.
Notable quotes:
"... What sort of political system allows someone with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous war, never expresses a moment's regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again? [bold mine-DL] ..."
"... So by all means worry. But the real problem isn't Bolton -- it's a system that permits people like him to screw up and move up again and again. ..."
The conclusion of Stephen Walt's column on
John Bolton is exactly right:
Don't get me wrong: I'm not trying to "normalize" this appointment or suggest that it
shouldn't concern you. Rather, I'm suggesting that if you are worried about Bolton, you
should ask yourself the following question: What sort of political system allows someone
with his views to serve in high office, where he helps talk the country into a disastrous
war, never expresses a moment's regret for his errors, continues to advocate for more of the
same for the next decade, and then gets a second chance to make the same mistakes again?
[bold mine-DL]
So by all means worry. But the real problem isn't Bolton -- it's a system that permits
people like him to screw up and move up again and again.
There is a strong bias in our foreign policy debates in favor of "action," no matter how
stupid or destructive that action proves to be. That is one reason why reflexive supporters of
an activist foreign policy will never have to face the consequences of the policies they
support. Bolton has thrived as an advocate of hard-line policies precisely because he fills the
assigned role of the fanatical warmonger, and there is always a demand for someone to fill that
role. His fanaticism doesn't discredit him, because it is eminently useful to his somewhat less
fanatical colleagues. That is how he can hang around long enough until there is a president
ignorant enough to think that he is qualified to be a top adviser.
Bolton will also have reliable supporters in the conservative movement that will make
excuses for the inexcusable. National Review recently published an article by
David French in defense of Bolton whose conclusion was that we should "give a hawk a chance."
Besides being evasive and dishonest about just how fanatical Bolton is, the article was an
effort to pretend that Iraq war supporters should be given another chance to wreck U.S. foreign
policy again. It may be true that Bolton's views are "in the mainstream of conservative
foreign-policy thought," but that is an indictment of the so-called "mainstream" that is being
represented. Bolton has been wrong about every major foreign policy issue of the last twenty
years. If that doesn't disqualify you from holding a high-ranking government position, what
does?
Hawks have been given a chance to run our foreign policy every day for decades on end, and
they have failed numerous times at exorbitant cost. Generic hawks don't deserve a second chance
after the last sixteen-plus years of failure and disaster, and fanatical hard-liners like
Bolton never deserved a first chance.
French asserts that Bolton is "not extreme," but that raises the obvious question: compared
to what?Bolton has publicly, repeatedly urged the U.S. government to launch illegal preventive
wars against Iran and North Korea, and that just scratches the surface of his fanaticism. That
strikes me as rather extreme, and that is why so many people are disturbed by the Bolton
appointment. If he isn't "extreme" even by contemporary movement conservative standards, who
is? How psychopathic would one need to be to be considered extreme in French's eyes? If
movement conservatives can't see why Bolton is an unacceptable and outrageous choice for
National Security Advisor, they are so far gone that there is nothing to be done for them and
no point in listening to anything they have to say.
I have to laugh at the people trying to portray Bonkers Bolton as somehow less insane than he
is.
Yesterday in my Youtube recommended list was at least half a dozen channels with headlines
expressing horror at the appointment of Bolton as National Security Adviser. Clearly there
has been a backlash in quite a few quarters that this appointment is simply lunatic - of a
lunatic.
So naturally today we see people trying to play down the absolute stark insanity of Trump
appointing this clown.
The only thing we can hope for is that before Bolton does too much damage that Trump gets
tired of him, as he has everyone else in his administration, and fires him. But given Trump's
history, all we can expect then is that he appoints Nikki Haley to the same post.
Russia, ever patient, issued a statement saying they're ready to work with Bolton.
Privately they must be wondering why they didn't develop Novichok so they could use it on
him.
Meanwhile the Democrats are trotting out all the hot women they claim had affairs with
Trump. Hello, Democrats! Anyone remember Bill Clinton? At least Trump has a wife good-looking
enough to maybe keep him home at night.
The more I think about it the more convinced I am that the real danger from Bolton is that,
in Trumpian fashion, he will return to those good old days when the Cold War was ending and the
US went hog wild in Central America.
Like a bruised and beaten bully who's just had his come-uppance in the pub who, returning home,
angry and impotent beats up the wife and kids and threatens the neighbours, Uncle Sam is
returning, his tail between his legs, from the middle east to his home turf.
Look out Cuba! Look out Venezuela!
The Contras are back in business. Ecuador-sorry Julian- looks about to crumble. Honduras,
Paraguay, Haiti, Brazil and Argentina have all been rescued from their own people. Things are
beginning to look like the 80s again except that this time there are hardly any 'communists'
left to kill. Military dictatorships are back, death squads are bigger than ever.
And, best of all, from the Bolton/Trump viewpoint, the dangers of running into Russian or
Chinese backed resistance is negligible, the money to be made is infinite. One Continent from
north pole to south, run by a mafia based in Washington.
Its what Making America Great Again means-a return to the Monroe Doctrine and letting up on the
mad dream of global hegemony. There's plenty of poor suckers for everyone to exploit a billion
or so.
There's only one caveat-Israel. Israel undoubtedly wants a war with Iran, just as it wants to
smash up Syria (or get the US to do it for them) but I just can't see the many local interested
parties allowing it. Perhaps moving the Embassy to Jerusalem and getting the Guatemalans,
Hondurans and Solomon Islanders to do the same, is all that they are going to get from Trump- a
gesture without meaning. A con from the grifter himself.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have become accustomed to taking flak from
Democratic (and even some G.O.P.) legislators when she testifies on Capitol Hill, but some of
the most ferocious criticism she has recently faced comes from an unlikely source: John Bolton,
the fiery conservative who served under Rice as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In his
new memoir, Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and
Abroad, Bolton -- known to be close to Vice President Dick Cheney -- outlines some of the
internal foreign policy battles in the Administration of George W. Bush, and paints President
Bush himself as betraying his own gut instinct.
Bolton's book covers his childhood as the son of a Baltimore fireman, his days at Yale Law
School and his service in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But it's
the brickbats he reserves for Rice and fellow diplomats and civil servants in the current
Administration that grab the most attention. First as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
and then as U.N. ambassador, Bolton emerges as an outspoken unilateralist and an opponent of
treaties and international institutions ranging from the Kyoto climate convention to the
International Court of Criminal Justice. And he has been a vocal opponent, both inside and
outside the Administration, of negotiations with North Korea and Iran over their nuclear
programs.
Bolton's outspoken policy views have long been familiar, but what's most interesting about
his new book is the sheer enthusiasm with which he has adopted the mantle of the most vocal
neoconservative critic of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, only months after resigning
from the Bush team when the Senate for the second time refused to confirm his nomination to the
U.N. post.
Bolton accuses the Administration of laxity in dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea and
an Iran intent on obtaining the bomb, not to mention its efforts to arrange a Middle East peace
conference. But implicit in Bolton's bomb-throwing is a startling admission: that his
never-ending battle against "pragmatists" and those less ideologically committed inside the
most conservative administration in decades has been lost. In an interview with TIME, Bolton
said: "Secretary Condoleezza Rice is the dominant voice on national security and there is no
one running even a close second; her ascendancy is undisputed."
So where does that leave Bolton allies like Cheney and his hard-line advisers, and the few
remaining neocons scattered through the national security bureaucracy? "You will never know
what the VP's exact interaction with the President is," says Bolton, "But the VP is still
closer to the President's basic instincts than anyone else." Bolton's explanation for the shift
in White House policy: "The President may be distracted by the Iraq war or other events... but
there's no doubt that the President has moved heartbreakingly away from his own deepest
impulses on the three principal issues of controversy (North Korea, Iran and Middle East
peace); what is happening now is contrary to his basic instincts."
On Iran, Bolton says former Secretary of State Colin Powell was too intent on mollifying
U.S. allies like France, Britain and Germany. This caused Powell to offer Iran too many
"carrots" -- trade and commercial inducements -- if Tehran would rein in its pursuit of atomic
materials. To a large degree Rice, in Bolton's view, perpetuated this strategy even though, he
believes, there is almost no chance that Iran will give up its nuclear ambitions. As a result,
he says, the U.S. has wasted time on "four and half years of failed diplomacy" indulging Iran
with unnecessarily accommodationist negotiations, a period Iran has used to advance its nuclear
acquisitions and research.
On North Korea, Bolton cites (unconfirmed) reports of the Hermit Kingdom's collaboration
with Syria on a secret nuclear facility as evidence that the denuclearization deal between the
U.S. and North Korea is not working. Talks with North Korea continue, he notes, and the U.S.
looks set to invite Syria to its Middle East peace conference later this month. Uncomfortable
issues are not being raised, Bolton charges, for fear of disrupting negotiations that he sees
as pointless to begin with.
So what are the prospects for a return to the muscular unilateralism that Bolton favors?
"There's a possibility that events in the external world will validate our position and give
the President a means to return to his gut," the former U.N. ambassador told TIME. "But until
and unless external events prove that current policies are on the wrong track, there is no
countervailing or obvious force inside this administration that is going to produce a course
correction. "
John Bolton, US President Donald Trump's incoming hawkish
national security adviser, is reportedly planning a massive dismissal of staff at the National
Security Council, aiming to remove dozens of White House officials.
Sources aware of the changes told Foreign Policy that Bolton is preparing to "clean house"
and remove nearly all of the political appointees brought in by his predecessor.
"Bolton can and will clean house," one former White House official told Foreign Policy. One
other source said, "He is going to remove almost all the political [appointees] McMaster
brought in."
Another former official said that any National Security Council officials appointed under
former President Obama "should start packing their shit."
Trump and Bolton see eye to eye on their hawkish foreign policy, especially when it comes to
North Korea and Iran, and are equally averse to multilateral diplomacy, whether that means the
UN or working with the European Union.
A history of bellicosity
Bolton, an outspoken advocate of military action who served in the administration of former
US president George W. Bush, has called for action against Iran and North Korea.
While serving under Secretary of State Colin Powell, Bolton was also both a cheerleader
and early architect of the Iraq war.
In a February
op-ed for The Wall Street Journal , Bolton made the "legal case for striking
North Korea first" to stop what he deems an "imminent threat" from the nation's nuclear
program.
Bolton is also strongly opposed to the Iran nuclear deal and has been obsessed for many
years with going to war against the Islamic Republic.
"He is unabashed about this," said Mark Groombridge, a former top adviser to Bolton at the
State Department and United Nations pointing to his views on preemptive warfare.
"He has no problems with the doctrine of preemption and feels the greatest threat that the
United States faces is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
The Washington Post reports that at the White House, Bolton is likely to reinforce Trump's
"America First" view of the world. Both Trump and Bolton share a long-standing animosity toward
any treaties, international laws or alliances that limit America's freedom to act on the world
stage.
"... When the relevant analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) refused to agree with Bolton's language, the undersecretary summoned the analyst and scolded him in a red-faced, finger-waving rage. ..."
"... The director of INR at the time, Carl Ford, told the congressional committee considering Bolton's nomination that he had never before seen such abuse of a subordinate ..."
> The most egregious recent instances of arm twisting arose in George W. Bush's
administration but did not involve Iraq. The twister was Undersecretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security John Bolton, who pressured intelligence officers to
endorse his views of other rogue states, especially Syria and Cuba. Bolton wrote his own
public statements on the issues and then tried to get intelligence officers to endorse
them.
According to what later came to light when Bolton was nominated to become ambassador to
the United Nations, the biggest altercation involved Bolton's statements about Cuba's
allegedly pursuing a biological weapons program. When the relevant analyst in the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) refused to agree with Bolton's
language, the undersecretary summoned the analyst and scolded him in a red-faced,
finger-waving rage.
The director of INR at the time, Carl Ford, told the congressional committee
considering Bolton's nomination that he had never before seen such abuse of a
subordinate -- and this comment came from someone who described himself as a
conservative Republican who supported the Bush administration's policies -- an orientation I
can verify, having testified alongside him in later appearances on Capitol Hill.
> When Bolton's angry tirade failed to get the INR analyst to cave, the undersecretary
demanded that the analyst be removed. Ford refused. Bolton attempted similar pressure on the
national intelligence officer for Latin America, who also inconveniently did not endorse
Bolton's views on Cuba. Bolton came across the river one day to our National Intelligence
Council offices and demanded to the council's acting chairman that my Latin America colleague
be removed.
"... "With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully lining up his war cabinet. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict," ..."
"... "John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran & striking North Korea with nuclear weapons first without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to the American people & a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is gearing up for military conflict," ..."
"... "If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security Advisor," ..."
"... "drumbeats of war." ..."
"... "absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor now," ..."
"... "John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and has supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed as UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor now," ..."
"... "John Bolton is a dangerous radical. President Trump's decision to make Bolton his National Security Advisor is deeply disturbing," ..."
"... "John Bolton has spent his entire career pushing fringe conspiracy theories, espousing radical ideas about multilateralism, and undermining key alliances across the world." ..."
"... Like this story? Share it with a friend! ..."
Donald Trump's cabinet reshuffles have fueled concerns, not least after the latest
appointment of hawkish John Bolton as national security adviser, just days after installing a
former CIA chief as the new secretary of state. On Thursday afternoon Donald Trump decided to
sack Gen. HR McMaster from his national security adviser post, replacing him with John Bolton.
The former US envoy to the United Nations will assume office on April 9 – just days after
Mike Pompeo is set to replace Rex Tillerson as the new secretary of state.
The newly formed doublet has caused shockwaves among the Democrats, who have alleged that
Trump seems to be preparing for war. Democratic Senator from Massachusetts Ed Markey warned
that Trump is creating a "war cabinet," warning of "grave danger" following
Bolton's appointment.
John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran and conducting a first strike on North Korea
without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to the American
people and a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is
gearing up for military conflict.
"With the appointments of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, @realDonaldTrump is successfully
lining up his war cabinet. Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us
into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible
conflict," he tweeted.
"John Bolton supports proactively bombing Iran & striking North Korea with nuclear
weapons first without provocation. Appointing him to be Nat Sec Advisor is a grave danger to
the American people & a clear message from @realDonaldTrump that he is gearing up for
military conflict," Senator Markey added.
John Bolton:
Wanted war w Cuba, arguing wrongly that Cuba had WMD
Wanted war w Iraq, arguing – wrong again – that Iraq had WMD
Believes – wrongly – that Islamic law is taking over America
If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security
Advisor
-- Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) March 22,
2018
The choice of Bolton as the national security adviser has also been questioned by Senator
Jeff Merkley from Oregon, who has pointed out many flaws with the new appointee's policies.
"If you're always wrong on security, you're the wrong person to be National Security
Advisor," Merkley tweeted.
This is dangerous news for the country and the world. John Bolton was easily one of the
most extreme, pro-war members of the Bush Administration.
Imagine what havoc he could wreak whispering in Donald Trump's ear...I hear the drumbeats
of war. https://t.co/A6ZIyORAM7
Rep. Barbara Jean Lee of California's 13th congressional district was also disappointed by
Trump's choice, claiming she is hearing the "drumbeats of war."
The President is surrounding himself with combative lawyers. He's replacing Tillerson and
McMaster with Pompeo and Bolton.
It's almost like the President is preparing to go to war in the legal and foreign
relations sense...
Fears expressed by some Capitol Hill members and the public seem justified. The notoriously
hawkish former United Nations ambassador was a chief architect of the George W. Bush
administration's justification for the war in Iraq in 2003, that was based on false accusations
that Baghdad possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Trump's choice of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Mike Pompeo as the new
secretary of state also made many in Washington uneasy. Unlike his predecessor, Rex Tillerson,
Pompeo seems better aligned with Trump's confrontational foreign policy, namely on the Iran
nuclear deal, on North Korea, and on the shift of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Besides politicians, the American public also expressed concern about the feasibility of a
looming armed conflict.
John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and has
supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed as
UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor
now.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called Bolton "absolutely the wrong person to be national
security advisor now," recalling how he deceived the public about the Iraq war.
"John Bolton was part of the effort to mislead the US into the disastrous Iraq war and
has supported military action against North Korea and Iran. He was too extreme to be confirmed
as UN ambassador in 2005 and is absolutely the wrong person to be national security advisor
now," Sanders tweeted.
"John Bolton is a dangerous radical. President Trump's decision to make Bolton his
National Security Advisor is deeply disturbing," Congressman Brendan F. Boyle (PA-13) said
in a written statement. "John Bolton has spent his entire career pushing fringe conspiracy
theories, espousing radical ideas about multilateralism, and undermining key alliances across
the world."
So on the 15th anniversary of the Iraq debacle, a neocon who cheered it on is rewarded
with a national security post where he can cue up the attack on Iran that was always the
ultimate prize for Israel's US stooges?
Guess we'll be out marching again, just like last time. Bolton's walrus mustache is the
21st century version of Adolph H's toothbrush mustache. Down with the Persian Untermenschen!
/sarc
Of course while working for Cheney Bolton was pretty confident about getting Dubya to
start a war with Iran and that didn't happen. Here's a backgrounder that suggests that Bolton
is tight with both Adelson and the Mossad so one way of looking at this has Russia fading as
a target and Iran falling under the bulls eye. Trump's recent friendly phone call with Putin
was contrary to instructions from his NSC and therefore presumably McMaster.
Looked at optimistically it could be out of the frying pan and into a smaller frying pan
(for us if not for Iran but that remains to be seen).
Of course looked at pessimistically it's terrible news but if the public and Congress are
afraid of Trump gratuitously starting a new war then perhaps they should take away his power
to do so. Seems the Constitution did have something to say about that.
Tol'ja so these miserable wretches simply cannot die resurrection a promise any time a
misfit administration takes power all that audition time on FoxNews paid off Trump stripping
the cable channels of right-wing bloviators "best people for the jawb", don't you know.
The worst thing about the appointment of anti-Iran hawk John Bolton is that the Clinton
wing of the Democratic Party 100% supports war with Iran. In fact Hillary was attacking Trump
from the war hawk right on this issue in 2016 (of course alienating key voters as she did
so). So, just like in 2002 with Iraq, the two-party mainstream and all the mainstream media
will be overwhelmed by pro-war voices, and the arguments in favor of peace and basic sanity
will be ostracized. Note in the RT piece below that the only Democrats expressing real,
concrete concern/revulsion are the usual, sheepdog leftie suspects.
'Trump lining up war cabinet'? Bolton's elevation to NSC adviser fuels alarm
@66 Say what you will about Bolton he is a shrewd political animal. Here it looks as though
he is trying to appear sane and reasonable....perhaps even likeable.
"... Kelly and, only later on Mattis will likely be the next to get fired. That will eliminate the last people with access to Trump who have some marginal sanity on war and peace issues. Trump will be completely isolated and easy to manipulate. ..."
"... Fortunately the media in the US has had it's credibility with just about everyone, including anti-Trump people, shredded and I don't think they'll be able to prepare people for a war like they did before the 2016 election, people are finally awake or have a sense of agency. ..."
"... If Mattis will be out at some point along with Kelly, thus destroying the tempering influence of these generals, who hated Iraq as much as Vietnam, the next question is how Trump's apparent judgment on Iraq as disastrous will play out with a Bolton crowd (Bolton one of the first signatories of PNAC in 1998) on what to do when the North Koreans say fuck you loudly and clearly. ..."
"... Trump has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so much anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark Prince is already there. ..."
"... global oligarchy live in harmony while concocting massive Orwellian propaganda of great enemies that must be defeated at all cost, cost of your freedom and your purse. ..."
"... Face it b, Bolton is just a impotent loud barking dog to scare ordinary people for his temporary owner , a flaccid clown of global oligarchy. ..."
...He is also an exceptionally avid bureaucrat who knows how
to get the things he wants done. That quality is what makes him truly dangerous. Bolton is
known for sweet-talking to his superiors, being ruthless against competitors and for kicking
down on everyone below him.
Soon Netanyahoo will have the cabinet in place in DC he always dreamed of. A hawkish Pompeo
at State, a
real torturer as head of the CIA and now Bolton are already sufficient to protect Israel's
further expansion. Kelly and,
only later on Mattis will likely be the next to get fired. That will eliminate the last
people with access to Trump who have some marginal sanity on war and peace issues. Trump will
be completely isolated and easy to manipulate.
Bolton has a hammer and he will find lots of nails. Like
Hillary Clinton he will want to fight with Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and others in no
particular order. He will want to destroy Syria. He is cozy with the Kurds and the
Iranian terror cult MEK. He addressed (vid) their congress eight years in a row
and made lots of money for saying things like this :
"[B]efore 2019, we here will celebrate in Tehran."
Bolton has little concern for U.S. allies except, maybe, for Israel.
His first
priority will be to prevent the announced summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un. He will
want more sanctions on North Korea and may argue for a 'preventive' strike against it. He does
not care that such a strike will certainly kill tens of thousands of Koreans in the north and
south and several thousand U.S. soldiers and civilians.
New sanctions on North Korea are problematic as Trump has just
put additional tariffs on $60 billion of U.S. imports of Chinese goods. (The Chinese
response is smart: Tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods from states that Trump won.) Why should
China and Russia (and South Korea) help the U.S. to strangulate North Korea when they
themselves are under fire? To prevent a U.S. strike that may come anyway the very next day?
The Europeans who were part of the nuclear agreement with Iran have to answer
a similar question . Why offer Trump a 'compromise' over the JCPOA when the chances are now
high that he will destroy it anyway?
What will Bolton do on Syria? Will he try to find a new agreement with Erdogan and drag
Turkey away from endorsing Russia's polices in Syria? If he manages to do so, Syria's north
will become a shared Turkish-U.S. entity and will be lost for a long time. New attacks on the
Syrian government, from the north, south and east, where the U.S. re-trains ISIS into a new
'moderate rebel' army, would then open the next phase of the war.
So far the mean time of survival for Trump appointees is some six to eight months. Let us
hope that John Bolton's appointment will - in the end - lower that average.
Posted by b on March 23, 2018 at 11:50 AM | Permalink
These appointments are weird. Ultimately Trump doesn't seem to have an appetite for
large-scale war. What does seem like a dangerous possibility is if Bolton can et al can
provoke a situation that traps Trump in his responses, maybe with a tight timeframe to
respond and leads to a conflict starting that way.
Fortunately the media in the US has had it's credibility with just about everyone,
including anti-Trump people, shredded and I don't think they'll be able to prepare people for
a war like they did before the 2016 election, people are finally awake or have a sense of
agency.
Ultimately it doesn't seem like Trump's election has changed much in terms of foreign
policy among prospective successors. So it seems like eventually they will get their war with
Iran during Trump's term or afterwards. It's utterly incredible how implacable the neo-cons
are despite constant exposure over the last 15-20 years and with at least one President being
elected on the basis of disgust with them. (Obama, could maybe include Trump too)
Kim Jong-un has no good reason for a "summit" with Trump. Indeed, there is no reason for him
or his country to have anything to do with the USA or its catamites.
The best path for Korea is for North and South to plan reunification, as early as
possible. They might as well retain the North's nuclear weapons, just in case anyone cuts up
rough. If the Americans try to interfere, the nuclear weapons are there. Any American attempt
to escalate, right on China's and Russia's front door, would meet with an extremely frigid
response from them.
We must always remember that there was never any "North" or "South" Korea until President
Truman's bureaucrats conjured them up out of thin air - apparently with the aid of a school
atlas - to avoid the hideous tragedy of the whole of Korea "going communist". South Korea is
an occupied nation, and should take immediate steps to kick the American occupiers out. By
force if necessary.
Optimism on Bolton as relatively harmless in yesterday's thread is given an interesting
perspective by this piece (from today), adding to b's pessimism above:
It seems the apparently contradictory move by Trump to appoint Bolton after getting rid of
McMaster, who had a similar view to Bolton (North Korea had to be attacked because it is too
late for diplomacy, their rocket programs too advanced), could be part of a scheme for a "big
victory" effort by Trump who is, according to this view, amidst an artful deal-making moment
of allowing faux-optimism re South-North Korean negotiations.
Bolton calls this "diplomatic shock and awe":
Bolton said Trump had short-circuited North Korea's plan of obtaining the capability to
strike the United States with a nuclear weapon and then stretching out negotiations for
months that could distract the American government before making an official announcement
about achieving the capability. Bolton envisioned the meeting between Trump and Kim as an
opportunity to deliver a threat of military action:
"I think this session between the two leaders could well be a fairly brief session
where Trump says, 'Tell me you have begun total denuclearization, because we're not going to
have protracted negotiations, you can tell me right now or we'll start thinking of something
else.' "
Trump, who only a few weeks back condemned (again) the Iraq War as disastrous, may be
thinking Bolton is just the man to nail down a quivering retreat of the North Koreans into
denuclearizing or else, now that they've had a nice taste of how sweet it could be in talking
with Moon and the South.
If Mattis will be out at some point along with Kelly, thus destroying the tempering
influence of these generals, who hated Iraq as much as Vietnam, the next question is how
Trump's apparent judgment on Iraq as disastrous will play out with a Bolton crowd (Bolton one
of the first signatories of PNAC in 1998) on what to do when the North Koreans say fuck you
loudly and clearly.
This analysis also points out how disturbed Asia is over this appointment, and indicates
that despite his views McMaster had been working with South Korea on the problem, and now has
been jerked. This sounds like what happened in Iraq also, jerking out people who were
building relationships and replacing them with hardnose "bring 'em on" thinking from the
brilliant leadership in that war.
p has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so
much anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark
Prince is already there.
Trump has surrounded himself with real men who want to go to Tehran. Syria, not so much
anymore. Besides, Ukraine 3.0 will be great until the Russians show up. The CIA's Dark Prince
is already there.
I understand that Syrian situation can drive people insane but unfortunately it was and is
interpreted wrongly as a preparation to nuke war, it is not. It is same old same old thing,
it is just more exposed by internet.
US military is in shambles what they showed in Iraq and Syria last year is all they got,
nothing more but a capability of a chicken hawk and D.C. is run by chicken hawks whose
business is intimidation not war about which they have no idea and they know that US military
can only take on shoeless peasants with dilapitated AK 47 and call it even like in
Afghanistan which was utter defeat no one even here want to talk about.
Like Roman Empire before US emporium is an empty shell, and its myth is maintained by US
INSTALLED ELITES to control their own populations.
Recent military posturing on all sides of a global country club dinner table is just
nothing but bail out of MIC and its wall street backers .
Open your even globalization has been accomplished and global oligarchy live in
harmony while concocting massive Orwellian propaganda of great enemies that must be defeated
at all cost, cost of your freedom and your purse.
Face it b, Bolton is just a impotent loud barking dog to scare ordinary people for his
temporary owner , a flaccid clown of global oligarchy.
Show must go on. 160 years after collapse of Roman Empire Roman circuses and theater
continued like Nothing happened.
"Bolton said Trump had short-circuited North Korea's plan of obtaining the capability to
strike the United States with a nuclear weapon and then stretching out negotiations for
months that could distract the American government before making an official announcement
about achieving the capability."
--as, Bolton believes the North Koreans are playing around with negotiations only to delay
toward capability, that Trump knows this, and all of it's a game toward resurrection of the
hostilities.
This attitude suggests a foregone conclusion that the Trump-Kim meeting will fail, which
could set up the next step at (from Bolton): "You see, it's hopeless, we just have to attack
and take out this country, as we did with Iraq and are trying to do with Syria."
Israel has the Epstein tapes which show Trump having sex with underage girls, Saudi Arabia
has billions of dollars to bribe Trump with arms deals, both of these immoral nations want
Iran eliminated as an threat to their agendas. Israel and Saudi Arabia demand that Trump try
and neutralize Iran before Trump is removed from office which will happen before his first
term is up if this nation has any sense of self preservation. Trump is replacing those
opposed to a war against Iran with those who support it. Trump is seriously compromised by
foreign agendas.
1. Iran nuclear deal is dead, EU poodles will fall in line (but not entirely) with
sanctions against Iran. I'm curious how Iran will respond, IMHO will restart all centrifuges
and raise enrichment level? I still think its unlikely Iran would go for the nukes as
ultimate deterrent.
2. US will be more involved in Syria. We can most definitely expect more false flag CW
attacks and "retaliation" missiles. The big question mark if Russia will live up to its
promise to retaliate on launch sites or US planes.
3. There will be no overt war against Iran, Pompeo/Bolton or not, US simply cannot win it.
Covert - most definitely. More sabotage, assassinations, sanctions, etc.
It will be hard to do Libya 3.0 as well, but USrael might try anyway. Arm kurds and
baluchis radicals, activate MEK network, it wont be anywhere as bad as in Syria, but some
damage would be done. Thats the most what they can do.
Bolton is a fruitcake. Imo Trump only hired him to expose his nuttiness and fire him. When he
does, the World will breathe a sigh of relief and Trump's popularity will improve.
Bolton's Achilles Heel is that he doesn't do low-profile and talks too much.
@9 sid.. thanks.. i get that... i am more inclined to view bolton like @8 kalen.. it really
does seem that way to me and if so, suggests trump is still in control and happy to have
these bozos talk the talk, while knowing they are not able to walk the walk.. trump would
throw a real monkey wrench in the spanner if he was to engage in the talks and come away with
a positive resolution.. it would be a a nightmare for the military industrial complex and neo
cons.. i still think he is capable of this...
@11 harry.. i hope you are wrong, but it is completely conceivable and tends to be the
usa/israels pattern when confronted with a loss..
@ 12 When you're powerless, give the opposition what they want and hope they choke on it.
Trump is being underestimated. Dunford, Mattis, Pompeo and Kelly lined up
behind Trump against Tillerson and the White Helmets in Ghouta.
"Trump will be completely isolated and easy to manipulate."
This is nonsense. And you know it B. But you still fancy your idea about a
non-interventionistic Trump, and now, by the time this belief is definitely shattered, you
try a reasoning dangerously near to 'wenn das der Führer wüsste'.
This discussion suggests why Mattis has been successful with a naïve blowhard
president, including the following interesting comment:
John Bolton's arrival in April as the president's new national security adviser will
give Mattis a more ardent and skillful adversary at the National Security Council. Mattis
outranked McMaster in military terms and always considered him his junior, even though Mattis
is retired. He likely won't view Bolton that way, and Bolton prizes his ability to corral the
bureaucracy for his purposes.
We're looking at an upcoming contest Mattis vs. Bolton on such matters as wars with Iran,
North Korea, and whoever.
Glad to see all the optimism here on how harmless Bolton is but would like a little more
substance versus the automatic dismissals.
I don't see the financial thread in all of this and I seriously believe that is #1 on Trumps
mind. He would love for his legacy to be the POTUS that turned around the global economic
collapse and opened the door big business everywhere.
That is his history wrt foreign relations and he could care less for the "blow shit up"
mentality. Not saying that he can't be talked into it, just saying he would prefer the
headline "Trump opens up the world for more US business". I honestly think that he believes
that a trade war (business by other means) leads to US becoming a Mfg powerhouse again. Those
around him might convince him that blowing shit up will have the same outcome.
Banking/finance learned a long time ago that you are better off keeping your customers
around to continue borrowing than imprisoning or kill them off. The world is a market place
and Trump wants to "make deals-not war" as long as America gets the better part of the
deal.
Only other thing that makes since is what CM @ 10 proposes, that Trump is compromised.
Kalen @8 you must have followed the Bolton divorce case.
Iran doesn't need nuclear weapons it just needs a treaty with Russia and China. It might be
of assistance to the dimwitted in Washington if the treaty specifically stated that Iran is
under a nuclear umbrella.
We ought to acknowledge that, as the camarilla of generals surrounding Trump turns into a
junta of bullshitters and blowhards, the dictatorship in DC has never been anything more than
an alliance between billionaires, bullshitters and the American Gestapo.
@20 Trump may be all about deals but he's having a terrible effect on the stock markets. If a
trade war with China wasn't bad enough now they have Bolton to worry about.
What you mean about Bolt-man is he'll be safe in his office, while YOUR father, mother, son,
uncle, brother, sister or other family member dies for HIS idea of how the world should be.
"We will fight fight "till the last drop of.....your blood!" The "inside the Beltway"
gangsters sicken me.
@ 10 Charles,
In New-York Trump's been known as The FRONT GOY even before the Atlantic city heist. Without
Kompromat tapes they can bury him six million different ways before sunday...
A day before Bolton got the job, still a very interesting read as usual, up to the end,
because Nothing can go wrigth in DC those days, in fact nothing can be done.
The Trump meeting with KJU, if it comes off, will give an indication of where Trump is
headed. Much showtime shock and awe and hyperbole leading up to his suddenly agreeing to the
meeting which caught all the US political animals on both sides of the fence by surprise.
Haley constantly yapping like an annoying little dog has achieved what? Haley seems be just
another prop in the shock and awe show.
At the same time, Trump could miscalculate and stumble into major war, or he may be actually
planning a war. Always room for both pessimism and optimism with Trump, depending on the day.
I rather agree with Kalen. Trump is genuinely a blowhard - loud mouth and little action.
Bolton is an unpleasant warmonger, though he didn't get much through before. He was never
confirmed by the Senate as ambassador to the UN. Since then he's had various sidelined
positions as thinktank fellow.
My impression of Trump is that he is too lazy to get the US into a major war. A major war
would be a lot of work, and, whatever the advice from the help, I don't think he'd go for it.
Especially he wouldn't like months or years in a nuclear bunker. He couldn't dandle young
thighs at Mar-a-Lago. That would be a major argument.
An important issue with Trump is that he is unable to keep staff. He must be running out
of potential candidates. That's why Bolton.
re: "libertarian hawk" is an oxymoron . .Bolton is not a libertarian
Libertarianism (from Latin: libertas, meaning "freedom") is a collection of political
philosophies and movements that uphold liberty as a core principle. There are various
interpretations of what libertarianism means to various people, such as the freedom to do as
one pleases.
Bolton is a libertarian in a national sense. His liberty is national liberty. He is
anti-globalist and unilateralist, believing that the country's values should never be
superseded by international agreements and treaties. This thinking coincides with Trump's
position declared during the campaign. "We will no longer surrender this country or its
people to the false song of globalism," Trump said in his defining foreign policy speech as a
candidate in the spring of 2016. "The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness
and harmony. I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America
down."
Following from this concept of national libertarianism, Bolton goes further to the ready and
unilateral use of armed force to advance foreign policy, without bilateral or multilateral
agreement. He's a hawk, but that's not unusual for Americans in government.
The planet isn't going to survive much longer with Americans and the Tribe infesting it.
Fumigation is in order. Pack the Americans and the antisemite semites into an ICBM and send
them flying into the heart of the sun. A solution as good as any other.
@ 27 and 20: thanks Charles re link to the Alastair Crooke article which reflects Jef's
earlier comment: that is, Trump would likely say: me for war? hell no I'm a peace lover but
I'll drive the good bargain including war threat as needed in my "art of making a deal"(hence
tools to this end such as Pompeo and Bolton). Crooke makes a good point that Tillerson was
too much a conventional diplomat; Trump likes tough, unpredictable guys like Mattis to model
himself after.
But all this is in the fundamentals of the same megalomaniacal type thinking that
drove/drives PNAC and smart-ass know-it-all-ism of the Iraq Invasion and continuation of this
mindset (see Bremer) after "mission accomplished."
This mind-set at base is the problem. I call it megalomania, others might call it hubris
on steroids, or daydreams of the psychopath. For me it's difficult to pull Trump out of this
mindset, because he's essentially the same. At the same time HIS version of it clashes with
State Department Egomania--possibly toward doing some good at times (as with changing the
course of US action in Syria last year; as with low-key response to the Skripal nonsense at
this time) but nonetheless presenting the possibility of a new set of tripwires a la invasion
of Iraq 2003, in terms of North Korea-Iraq.
It seems apparent at this time that Trump is clueless that for North Korea to denuclearize
that would mean a quid pro quo of US forces leaving South Korea--which will never be
acceptable to the neocons or Trump.
I wonder if there are people in the military thinking about resigning before WW3? There is
isn't even a believable narrative put forward in bombing Damascus nor Tehran except for
murder, destruction and conquest, there is literally zero self defensive aspect. I wonder how
special forces troops in Syria who are about to attack the Syrian army and Syrian people on
the side if HTS, Al Qaeda, IS, Nouri al Zinki, FSA feel about their mission; many must know
they are basically committing treason.
Bolton may or may not be a blowhard but the malignant idiocy that billows forth from his
mouth is frightening in its combination of willful ignorance and unrestrained rage. He is the
new National Insecurity Advisor--that would be his more accurate title.
From Off Guardian:
"...as of today, it appears that long battle for Jobar and its neighboring suburbs is finally
over after an agreement was put in place with the primary militant groups there.
"According to a military report from Damascus, the Syrian Army and Faylaq Al-Rahman have
agreed to peace terms in four East Ghouta suburbs, with the latter agreeing to leave to
Idlib.
"Based on the agreement, Faylaq Al-Rahman will surrender all of their weapons, except for
their small arms; they will release all Syrian Army prisoners from their jails; they will
inform the government of all explosives they placed around the suburbs of Zamalka, Jobar,
'Ayn Tarma, and Arbin; and agree to exit these suburbs on Saturday.
"The militants are now scheduled to leave these four East Ghouta suburbs by noon
tomorrow..."
It is evident that US policy in Syria is failing. The original plan was to divide Syria into
weak independent cantons, much as the French wanted in the 1920s. The French didn't succeed.
It would be surprising of the US did.
The only parts which remain, are the jihadis in Idlib, and the Kurds in Jazira. Two
elements which are opposed to one another.
Supposing that the US wants to revive the war in Syria, as the Neocons do, what are they
going to do? Decapitation of the regime in Damascus was a way of getting the Jihadis into
power (you have to wonder about US support for jihadis). Unfortunately, the Russians put
troops into Damascus a few weeks ago to prevent that. Otherwise it's a bit of a nothing. The
Kurds can stay in Jazira, Nobody's going to stop them.
Great analysis - as usual. The thing missing is that this guy is a rabid zionist and the
White House is now a governorate of the AN orthodox American province of Israel.
One of the most discouraging aspects of the musical chairs being played among the members of
the White House inner circle is that every change reflects an inexorable move to the right in
foreign policy, which means that the interventionists are back without anyone at the White
House level remaining to say "no." President Donald Trump, for all his international experience
as a businessman, is a novice at the step-by-step process required in diplomacy and in the
development of a coherent foreign policy, so he is inevitably being directed by individuals who
have long American global leadership by force if necessary.
The resurgence of the hawks is facilitated by Donald Trump's own inclinations. He likes to
see himself as a man of action and a leader, which inclines him to be impulsive, some might
even say reckless. He is convinced that he can enter into negotiations with North Korean leader
Kim Jong-un with virtually no preparations and make a deal that will somehow end the crisis
over that nation's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, for example. In so doing, he
is being encouraged by his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his Pentagon chief James
Mattis, who believe that the United States can somehow prevail in a preemptive war with the
Koreans if that should become necessary. The enormous collateral damage to South Korea and even
Japan is something that Washington planners somehow seem to miss in their calculations.
The recent shifts in the cabinet have Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. A leading hawk, he
was first in his class of 1986 at the United States Military Academy but found himself as a
junior officer with no real war to fight. He spent six years in uniform before resigning, never
having seen combat, making war an abstraction for him. He went to Harvard Law and then into
politics where he became a Tea Party congressman, eventually becoming a leader of that caucus
when it stopped being Libertarian and lurched rightwards. He has since marketed himself as a
fearless soldier in the war against terrorism and rogue states, in which category he includes
both Iran and Russia.
Pompeo was not popular at the CIA because he enforced a uniformity of thinking that was
anathema for intelligence professionals dedicated to collecting solid information and using it
to produce sound analysis of developments worldwide. Pompeo, an ardent supporter of Israel and
one of the government's leading Iran haters, has been regularly threatening Iran while at the
Agency and will no doubt find plenty of support at State from Assistant Secretary of State for
the Near East David Satterfield, a former
top adviser of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Pompeo has proven himself more than willing to manipulate intelligence produce the result he
desires. Last year, he declassified and then cherry picked
documents recovered from Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan that suggested that
al-Qaeda had ties with Iran. The move was coordinated with simultaneous White House steps to
prepare Congress and the public for a withdrawal from the Iran nuclear arms agreement. The
documents were initially released to a journal produced by the neocon Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, where Pompeo has a number of times spoken, to guarantee wide exposure in all the
right places.
Pompeo's arrival might only be the first of several other high-level moves by the White
House. Like the rumors that preceded the firing of Secretary of State Tillerson two weeks ago,
there have been recurrent suggestions that McMaster will be the next to go as he reportedly is
too moderate for the president and has also been accused of being
anti-Israeli , the kiss of death in Washington. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has been
a frequent visitor at the White House and it is believed that he is the preferred candidate to
fill the position. He is an extreme hawk, closely tied to the Israel Lobby, who would push hard
for war against Iran and also for a hardline position in Syria, one that could lead to direct
confrontation with the Syrian Armed Forces and possibly the Russians.
Bolton, who
has been described by a former George W. Bush official as "the most dangerous man we had
during the entire eight years," will undoubtedly have a problem in getting confirmed by
Congress. He was rejected as U.N. Ambassador, requiring Bush to make a recess appointment which did not need
Congressional approval.
"... President Trump was said to complain that Tillerson disagreed with him and McMaster talked too much. Bolton seems likely to combine both of those traits in one pugnacious, mustachioed package. ..."
"... Bolton may find that in this job, he's the midlevel munchkin. Remember, the national security adviser is supposed to be the coordinator, conciliator, and honest broker among Cabinet officials, managing a process by which all get a fair say and the president makes well-informed decisions. Outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly lost favor with Defense Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly for failing to defer to them, and for being too emotional . ..."
John Bolton has been one of liberals' top bogeymen on national security for more than a decade now. He seems to relish the
role, going out of his way to argue that the Iraq War wasn't really a failure, calling for U.S.-led regime change in Iran and
preventive war against North Korea, and writing the foreword for a
book
that proclaimed President Obama to be a secret Muslim. He is a profoundly partisan creature, having started a
super-PAC whose largest donor was leading Trump benefactor Rebekah Mercer and whose provider of analytics was Cambridge
Analytica, the firm alleged to have improperly used Facebook data to make voter profiles, which it sold to the Trump and
Brexit campaigns, among others.
Recently Bolton's statements have grown more extreme, alarming centrist and conservative national security professionals along
with his longtime liberal foes. He seemed to
say
that the United States could attack North Korea without the agreement of our South Korean allies, who would face the
highest risk of retaliation and casualties; just two months ago he
called for
a regime change effort in Iran that would allow the U.S. to open a new embassy there by 2019, the 40th
anniversary of the Iranian Revolution and the taking of Americans hostage in Tehran. His
hostility toward Islam
points toward a set of extreme policies that could easily have the effect of abridging American
Muslims' rights at home and alienating America's Muslim allies abroad.
As worrying as these policies are, it's worth taking a step back and thinking not about Bolton, but about his new boss, Donald
Trump. Trump reportedly considered Bolton for a Cabinet post early on, but then
soured
on him, finding his mustache unprofessional. His choice of Bolton to lead the National Security Council reinforces
several trends: right now, this administration is all about making Trump's opponents uncomfortable and angry. Internal
coherence and policy effectiveness are not a primary or even secondary consideration. And anyone would be a fool to imagine
that, because Bolton pleases Trump today, he will continue to do so tomorrow.
Yes, Bolton has taken strong stances against the policies of Russian President Vladimir Putin (though he has also been
quoted
praising Russian "democracy" as recently as 2013). That's nothing new: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, incoming
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster have called for greater pushback on
Russia as well. But there's every reason to think that, rather than a well-oiled war machine, what we'll get from Bolton's
National Security Council is scheming and discord – which could be even more dangerous.
President Trump was said to complain that Tillerson disagreed with him and McMaster talked too much. Bolton seems likely
to combine both of those traits in one pugnacious, mustachioed package.
Their disagreements are real – Bolton has
famously pooh-poohed the kind of summit diplomacy with North Korea that Trump is now committed to. While Trump famously backed
away from his support for the 2002 invasion of Iraq, courting the GOP isolationist base, Bolton continues to argue that the
invasion worked, and seldom hears of a war he would not participate in. Trump
attempted
to block transgender people from serving in the military, but Bolton has declined to take part in the right's
LGBT-bashing, famously hiring gay staff and
calling for
the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
That's all substance. What really seems likely to take Bolton down is his style, which is legendary – and not in a good way.
His colleagues from the George W. Bush administration responded to Trump's
announcement
with
comments like
"the obvious question is whether John Bolton has the temperament and the judgment for the job" – not exactly
a ringing endorsement. One former co-worker
described
Bolton as a "kiss up, kick down kind of guy," and he was notorious in past administrations for conniving and
sneaking around officials who disagreed with him, both traits that Trump seems likely to enjoy until he doesn't. This is a
man who can't refrain from
telling Tucker Carlson
that his analysis is "simpleminded" – while he's a guest on Carlson's show. Turns out it's not true
that he threw a stapler at a contractor – it was a
tape dispenser.
When Bolton was caught attempting to cook intelligence to suggest that Cuba had a biological weapons
program, he bullied the analyst who had dared push back, calling him a "
midlevel
munchkin
." How long until Trump tires of the drama – or of being eclipsed?
Bolton may find that in this job, he's the midlevel munchkin. Remember, the national security adviser is supposed to be
the coordinator, conciliator, and honest broker among Cabinet officials, managing a process by which all get a fair say and
the president makes well-informed decisions. Outgoing National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster reportedly lost favor with
Defense Secretary Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly for failing to defer to them, and for being
too emotional
.
Love Bolton or hate him, no one imagines he will be a self-effacing figure, and no one hires him to run a no-drama process.
It's also hard to imagine that many of the high-quality professionals McMaster brought into the National Security Council
staff will choose to stay. McMaster repeatedly had to fight for his team within the Trump administration, but Bolton seems
unlikely to follow that pattern, or to inspire the kind of loyalty that drew well-regarded policy wonks to work for McMaster,
regardless their views of Trump.
So even if you like the policies Bolton espouses, it's hard to imagine a smooth process implementing them. That seems likely
to leave us with Muslim ban-level incompetence, extreme bellicosity, and several very loud, competing voices – with
Twitter feeds
– on the most sensitive issues of war and weapons of mass destruction.
WASHINGTON -- Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer tapped
as President Trump's national security adviser last year to stabilize a turbulent foreign
policy operation, will resign and be replaced by John R. Bolton, a hard-line former United
States ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said Thursday.
General McMaster will retire from the military, the officials said. He has been discussing
his departure with President Trump for several weeks, they said, but decided to speed up his
departure, in part because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his
conversations with foreign officials.
The officials also said that Mr. Trump wanted to fill out his national security team before
his meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un. He
replaced Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson with the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, last
week.
Officials emphasized that General McMaster's departure was a mutual decision and amicable,
with none of the recrimination that marked Mr. Tillerson's exit. They said it was not related
to a leak on Tuesday of
briefing materials for Mr. Trump's phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia.
In the materials, Mr. Trump was advised not to congratulate Mr. Putin on his re-election,
which the president went ahead and did during the call.
Mr. Bolton, who will take office April 9, has met regularly with Mr. Trump to discuss
foreign policy, and was on a list of candidates for national security adviser. He was in the
West Wing with Mr. Trump to discuss the job on Thursday.
Another chickenhawk in Trump administration. Sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton's high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence. ..."
"... Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton was also the administration's main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney's backing, he was able to flout normal State Department rules by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003 and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department's Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs. ..."
"... During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had unannounced meetings, including with the head of Mossad, Meir Dagan, without the usual reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit, those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S. strike against Iran. ..."
"... Unfortunately, John Bolton is not just your typical neocon pathological liar and warmonger. Even by their abysmal standards he's pretty unhinged. He is one of the most dangerous people around these days. ..."
"... Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the whole warmongering crowd that frequent the air waves at FOX will not rest until they have us at war with Iran and Russia. ..."
"... So Trump is thinking of hiring a loudmouthed incompetent who is a known conduit for botched Israeli spy service forgeries used to gin up war with Iran. What a sick farce. ..."
"... Bolton is a cancer for the US. As a warmonger, he thrives in hostile environnements so no wonder Bolton wants to create them with no regards for consequences. ..."
"... I doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that Bolton was duped by Israeli forgers (very droll story, by the way). You'd think that no serious person would consider giving him a National Security Council post, particularly given the current level of concern about "foreign meddling". ..."
"... I do not agree that Iran could prevent a conventional bombing/invasion of their country. But they could make it sooo expensive, the dollar ceases to be the world reserve currency, and if they do that, they will have done mankind a favor. ..."
"... But after the conquest, imagine the guerrilla war! The US basically had to fight an insurgency from amongst 5 million Sunni Arabs in Iraq. Iran is much more ethnically homogeneous. So even if you get some minorities to turncoat and work for the occupiers, you are still left with about 60 million ethnically Persian Shiites. That is a 12 times larger insurgency than what you had in Iraq. ..."
"... Bolton and Cheney must have been livid about Stuxnet, for all the wrong reasons ..."
"... Hiring a ghoul like Bolton will mark a new low even for the Trump administration. And that's saying something. These chickenhawk bastards should all be required to fight on the front lines of the wars they push. That was true, I'll guarantee you Bolton would shut up in a hurry. ..."
"... Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to ..."
John Bolton (Gage Skidmore/Flikr)
In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the
United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time -- in
2007
,
in
2008,
and again in 2011
-- those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging
attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government.
But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose John Bolton as his next
national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative
hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing
Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of
such a policy.
His is not merely a rhetorical stance: Bolton actively conspired during his tenure as
the Bush administration's policymaker on Iran from 2002 through 2004 to establish the political conditions necessary for
the administration to carry out military action.
More than anyone else inside or outside the Trump administration, Bolton has already
influenced Trump to tear up the Iran nuclear deal. Bolton parlayed his connection with the primary financier behind both
Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump himself -- the militantly Zionist casino magnate Sheldon Adelson -- to get Trump's ear
last October, just as the president was preparing to announce his policy on the Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He spoke with Trump by phone from Las Vegas after
meeting
with Adelson
.
It was Bolton who
persuaded
Trump
to commit to specific language pledging to pull out of the JCPOA if
Congress and America's European allies did not go along with demands for major changes that were clearly calculated to
ensure the deal would fall apart.
Although Bolton was passed over for the job of secretary of state, he now appears to
have had the inside track for national security advisor.
Trump
met with Bolton on March 6
and told him, "We need you here, John," according
to a Bolton associate. Bolton said he would only take secretary of state or national security advisor, whereupon Trump
promised, "I'll call you really soon." Trump then replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with former CIA director
Mike Pompeo, after which White House sources
leaked
to the media
Trump's intention to replace H.R. McMaster within a matter of
weeks.
The only other possible candidate for the position
mentioned
in media accounts
is Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was
acting national security advisor after General Michael Flynn was ousted in February 2017.
Bolton's high-profile advocacy of war with Iran is well known. What is not at all well
known is that, when he was under secretary of state for arms control and international security, he executed a complex
and devious strategy aimed at creating the justification for a U.S. attack on Iran. Bolton sought to convict the Islamic
Republic in the court of international public opinion of having a covert nuclear weapons program using a combination of
diplomatic pressure, crude propaganda, and fabricated evidence.
Despite the fact that Bolton was technically under the supervision of Secretary of
State Colin Powell, his actual boss in devising and carrying out that strategy was Vice President Dick Cheney. Bolton
was also the administration's main point of contact with the Israeli government, and with Cheney's backing, he was able
to
flout
normal State Department rules
by taking a series of trips to Israel in 2003
and 2004 without having the required clearance from the State Department's Bureau for Near Eastern Affairs.
Thus, at the very moment that Powell was saying administration policy was not to
attack Iran, Bolton was working with the Israelis to lay the groundwork for just such a war. During a February 2003
visit, Bolton
assured Israeli
officials in private meetings
that he had no doubt the United States would
attack Iraq, and that after taking down Saddam, it would deal with Iran, too, as well as Syria.
During multiple trips to Israel, Bolton had
unannounced
meetings, including with the head of Mossad,
Meir Dagan, without the usual
reporting cable to the secretary of state and other relevant offices. Judging from that report on an early Bolton visit,
those meetings clearly dealt with a joint strategy on how to bring about political conditions for an eventual U.S.
strike against Iran.
Mossad played a very aggressive role in influencing world opinion on the Iranian
nuclear program. In the summer of 2003, according to journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in their book
The
Nuclear Jihadist
, Meir Dagan created a new Mossad office tasked with
briefing the world's press on alleged Iranian efforts to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The new unit's
responsibilities included circulating documents from inside Iran as well from outside, according to Frantz and Collins.
Bolton's role in a joint U.S.-Israeli strategy, as he
outlines
in his own 2007 memoir
, was to ensure that the Iran nuclear issue would be
moved out of the International Atomic Energy Agency and into the United Nations Security Council.
He
was determined to prevent IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei from reaching an agreement with Iran that would make
it more difficult for the Bush administration to demonize Tehran as posing a nuclear weapons threat.
Bolton began accusing Iran of having a covert nuclear weapons program in mid-2003, but
encountered resistance not only from ElBaradei and non-aligned states, but from Britain, France, and Germany as well.
Bolton's strategy was based on the claim that Iran was hiding its military nuclear
program from the IAEA, and in early 2004, he came up with a dramatic propaganda ploy: he sent a set of satellite images
to the IAEA showing sites at the Iranian military reservation at Parchin that he claimed were being used for tests to
simulate nuclear weapons. Bolton demanded that the IAEA request access to inspect those sites and leaked his demand to
the Associated Press in September 2004. In fact, the satellite images showed nothing more than bunkers and buildings for
conventional explosives testing.
Bolton was apparently hoping the Iranian military would not agree to any IAEA
inspections based on such bogus claims, thus playing into his propaganda theme of Iran's "intransigence" in refusing to
answer questions about its nuclear program. But in 2005 Iran allowed the inspectors into those sites and even let them
choose several more sites to inspect. The inspectors found no evidence of any nuclear-related activities.
The U.S.-Israeli strategy would later hit the jackpot, however, when a large cache of
documents supposedly from a covert source within Iran's nuclear weapons program surfaced in autumn 2004. The documents,
allegedly found on the laptop computer of one of the participants, included technical drawings of a series of efforts to
redesign Iran's Shahab-3 missile to carry what appeared to be a nuclear weapon.
But the whole story of the so-called "laptop documents" was a fabrication. In 2013, a
former senior German official
revealed
the true story
to this writer: the documents had been given to German
intelligence by the Mujahedin E Khalq, the anti-Iran armed group that was well known to have been used by Mossad to
"launder" information the Israelis did not want attributed to themselves. Furthermore, the drawings showing the redesign
that were cited as proof of a nuclear weapons program were clearly done by someone who didn't know that Iran
had
already abandoned the Shahab-3's nose cone
for an entirely different design.
Mossad had clearly been working on those documents in 2003 and 2004 when Bolton was
meeting with Meir Dagan. Whether Bolton knew the Israelis were preparing fake documents or not, it was the Israeli
contribution towards establishing the political basis for an American attack on Iran for which he was the point man.
Bolton reveals in his memoirs that this Cheney-directed strategy took its cues from the Israelis, who told Bolton that
the Iranians were getting close to "the point of no return." That was point, Bolton wrote, at which "we could not stop
their progress without using force."
Cheney and Bolton based their war strategy on the premise that the U.S. military would
be able to consolidate control over Iraq quickly. Instead the U.S. occupation bogged down and never fully recovered.
Cheney proposed taking advantage of a high-casualty event in Iraq that could be blamed on Iran to
attack
an IRGC base in Iran in the summer of 2007.
But the risk that pro-Iranian
Shiite militias in Iraq would retaliate against U.S. troops was a key argument against the proposal.
The Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were also well aware that Iran had the
capability to retaliate directly against U.S. forces in the region, including against warships in the Strait of Hormuz.
They had no patience for Cheney's wild ideas about more war.
That Pentagon caution remains unchanged. But two minds in the White House unhinged
from reality could challenge that wariness -- and push the United States closer towards a dangerous war with Iran.
I believe "War With Iran" is on the agenda.
I wrote the article below some time ago.
"Will There Be War With Iran"?
Is it now Iran's turn to be subjected to the planned and hellish wars that have already engulfed Iraq, Libya,
Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan and other countries? Will, the gates of hell be further opened to include an attack
on Iran?
Unfortunately, John Bolton is not just your typical neocon pathological liar and warmonger. Even by their abysmal
standards he's pretty unhinged. He is one of the most dangerous people around these days.
The re-emergence of Bolton is the result of Trump's electoral victory, a phenomenon that resembles the upheavals
that followed when an unhinged hereditary ruler would take the reins of power in bygone empires.
There's a big difference between the wars with Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and a war with Iran. The
difference is, this is a war the United States could lose. And lose very, very badly. As Pompeo remarked, it would
take "only" 2000 airstrikes to eliminate the Iranian nuclear facilities. But what will it take to land 20,000
marines on the northern coast of the Persian Gulf to secure the straits, and there fend off 1.7 million Iranian
regulars and militia on the ground? How will the navy cope with hundreds and hundreds of supersonic cruise
missiles fired in volleys? What about the S-300 missiles that are by now fully operational in Iran?
A look at
the map shows that this is a war that the US simply cannot win.
Unless it uses nuclear weapons and simply sets out to kill every last man, woman, and child in Iran, all 80
million of them.
Which I suppose is not out of the question. As all options are sure to be on the table.
"Everyone worshipped the dragon because he had given his authority to the beast. They worshipped the beast also,
saying, 'Who is like the beast? Who can fight against it?'" Revelation 13:4
Who can fight against the U.S/NATO?
Bolton, Gen. Jack Keane, Lt. Col. Ralph Peters and the whole warmongering crowd that frequent the air waves at
FOX will not rest until they have us at war with Iran and Russia.
So Trump is thinking of hiring a loudmouthed incompetent who is a known conduit for botched Israeli spy service
forgeries used to gin up war with Iran. What a sick farce.
Bolton is a cancer for the US. As a warmonger, he thrives in hostile environnements so no wonder Bolton wants to
create them with no regards for consequences.
Well, we need the John Bolton's of this world for times in which a uncompromising use of force is required.
But I don't need background to know that advocating for wars that serve little in the way of US interests
because we simply are not in any "clear and present danger".
Odd that so many "old schoolers" have abandoned some general cliche's that serve as sound guide.
Just when you think you've heard the last of the various catastrophes, blunders, and odd capering about involving
Bolton, you hear that voice from the old late night gadget commercials barking "wait,
there's more
!!"
I
doubt anyone will be surprised to learn that Bolton was duped by Israeli forgers (very droll story, by the way). You'd think that no serious person would consider giving him a National Security Council post, particularly
given the current level of concern about "foreign meddling".
"The Boltons, Frums, and Boots of the world never have to fight the wars they start."
Hey now, Bolton's service
in the Maryland National Guard made sure the North Vietnamese never landed in Baltimore. Can you imagine the
horror if the Russians had captured our supply of soft shell crab?
John Bolton a 75 year old loser, a has Never-been, which is the mouth piece of the Zionists who keep him on the
pay roll. He likes to hear his own voice and to feel important because he wants war with Iran or all the Middle
East. He's actions and speeches are all emotional and lack logic and reasoning.
So, what is he good for?!
Re: "Well, we need the John Bolton's of this world for times in which a uncompromising use of force is required."
Not sure about that. We definitely need Roosevelts and Lincolns, Grants and Shermans and Eisenhowers and Pattons.
I'm not clear on what function the likes of Bolton serve.
I do not agree that Iran could prevent a conventional bombing/invasion of their country. But they could make it
sooo expensive, the dollar ceases to be the world reserve currency, and if they do that, they will have done
mankind a favor.
But after the conquest, imagine the guerrilla war! The US basically had to fight an insurgency
from amongst 5 million Sunni Arabs in Iraq. Iran is much more ethnically homogeneous. So even if you get some
minorities to turncoat and work for the occupiers, you are still left with about 60 million ethnically Persian
Shiites. That is a 12 times larger insurgency than what you had in Iraq.
And if the Iranians had any sense RIGHT NOW, they would make sure every family had a stock of 10 powerful
anti-vehicle mines, REALLY powerful mines. Make sure all are safely buried with locations memorized. And make sure
everyone had the training to use them, even older children (who will be the front-line guerrillas in 5 years).
So if that devil Bolton gets his way, his own country will pay a price too, and deservedly too. I want my
country to be peaceful and friendly to the world like the Germans are now. But it may take the same type of "WWII
treatment" to get my hateful war-loving countrymen to walk away from their sin.
The guerrilla war in Iraq was fought against only 5 million Sunni Arabs, the US occupiers having successfully
pealed away the Kurds and Shia to be collaborators, or at least stay uninvolved with the insurgency.
But Iran is
not just bigger than Iraq, but much more ethnically and religiously homogeneous. Imagine what kind of insurgency
you might get from 60 million ethnically Persian Shiites?
My advice to the Iranians RIGHT NOW is to mass-produce the most lethal anti-vehicle mines possible and
distribute them to the entire civilian population. Train everyone how to use them, then once trained, bury maybe
20 mines per family, all in known but hidden locations.
THAT will stop the Bolton/Zionist plan dead in its tracks.
Maybe it was a career-enhancing move. It is a legitimate question, along
with "follow the money"? Regardless of why sociopaths like Keith Payne or John Bolton become obsessed with
"winning nuclear war" or "bombing Iran" . How do they make a living? Who would bankroll somebody – over many decades – to not just consider or plan, but actively provoke illegal
acts of aggressive war, against declared policy of the government and the demands of the Constitution they have
sworn an oath to uphold?
It is also educational to see that the fabrications and other "war-program related activities" in regards to
Iran resemble the same stovepipelines that provide the Iraq 2003 pretexts – with Powell reprising his role as
useful idiot – which clashes badly with the "blunder" narrative that anybody in the US government actually
believed Iraq had WMD – was beyond "the point of no return".
This also bodes ill for a Bolton-formulated policy on Korea, and any "National Security Advice" he would see
fit to fabricate and feed to the Bomber In Chief.
Furthermore, we learn just how unhinged Cheney et.al. really were – expecting Iraq to be a mere stepping stone
along their adventures on the "Axis of Evil" trail. If these are our gamblers, nobody would suspect them of
counting cards.
We must look into our very national soul and ask why are we entertaining a war with Iran? The answer is clear. It
is to further the goals of a fanatical, right-wing, group of Zionists. When a truthful history is written about
this era of endless wars, the errant and disgraceful behavior of this group will be clearly identified and they
will not have anywhere to hide. You may fool some of the folks, some of the time, but not all the folks, all of
the time.
Hiring a ghoul like Bolton will mark a new low even for the Trump administration. And that's saying something.
These chickenhawk bastards should all be required to fight on the front lines of the wars they push. That was
true, I'll guarantee you Bolton would shut up in a hurry.
Israel and the Zionists are exactly the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington warned us about. Bolton is
a neocon-Zionist who wants the United States blood and taxes to ensure Israel's dominance of the Middle East.
So Gareth Porter cites his own Truthout article as authority for the assertion that the "laptop documents" are
fabrications. Most of the cited article seems to be devoted to "Curveball", the impeached source of Iraqi
intelligence, in order to prop up the bona fides of the German who claims the Iranian intelligence is a forgery.
Any other sourcing for this allegation available?
Judging from a quick look at what else Truthout has on offer,
I'm not sure about the credibility of Mr. Porter.
Thank you Mr. Porter for your insightful and intelligent articles, being that I am from Iran Originally brings
tears to my eyes to even imagine such tragedy, I pray this will never happen. Having lived in America more than
half of my life and having children that are Americans makes these thoughts even more horrifying . I am however
thankful to read all the comments from so many intelligent , decent and true Americans and that gives me hope that
such disaster will not take place. The people of Iran are decent and kind and cultured , I am hopeful that they
will find their way and bring about a true democracy soon and again become a positive force to the humanity.
"... "We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation -- Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following what critics have called a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal. ..."
If H.R. McMaster is on his way out of the White House, he's going out with two middle fingers raised and pointed in the direction
of the Kremlin.
"Russia is also complicit in [Syrian dictator Bashar] Assad's atrocities," McMaster, President Trump's national security adviser,
said Thursday during an appearance at a discussion of the Syrian civil war held at the U.S. Holocaust memorial museum.
His voice raised, McMaster used harsher and more moralistic language than his boss does in characterizing Russia's geopolitical
influence, and unequivocally blamed the Kremlin for "the abhorrent nerve agent attack" on a former double agent,
Sergei Skripal , and proposed "serious political and economic consequences" for Russian aggression.
"We believe that Russia was responsible for this attack, and we call on the Russian government to answer all questions related
to this incident, and to provide full information to the OPCW [Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons]. No nation --
Russia, China, or anybody else, any other nation -- should be using chemical weapons and nerve agents," McMaster said, following
what critics have called
a belated Wednesday statement casting blame on Moscow for the attack on Skripal.
McMaster's brief remarks, lasting under 20 minutes, came as the Army three-star general is the subject of furious speculation
that Trump will soon fire him and install hardliner ex-ambassador John Bolton atop the National Security Council. His capstone achievement
thus far has been a Russia-and-China-centric
security strategy
that has been conspicuously out of step with Trump's rhetoric and actions toward both countries.
"Russia has done nothing to encourage Assad to ensure delivery of humanitarian aid, to respect ceasefires and de-escalation agreements
or to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254's call for a U.N.-monitored political process," McMaster said.
Those remarks suggested that Trump got suckered during his 2017 rounds of personal diplomacy with Vladimir Putin. In November,
Trump and Putin issued a joint statement firmly
pledging support for what is known as the 2254 Process -- though critics considered it a cover for Moscow to continue ensuring support
for its client, Assad -- that "took note" of Assad's "recent commitment to the Geneva process and constitutional reform and elections
as called for under UNSCR 2254."
So one year ago McMaster was under attack and survived. Note that this was the time of
appointment of the Special Prosecutor which changed the dynamics, probably preserving his scalp.
This time might be different.
The Afghanistan strategy McMaster is pushing, with the support of Defense Secretary James
Mattis, would send roughly 3,000-5,000 U.S. and NATO troops to Afghanistan, according to a
separate source familiar with the internal deliberations. These troops would be sent to help
bulk up the Afghan National Security Forces, which, after years of U.S. assistance, are still
struggling against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and a small Islamic State presence in the
country.
According to the Washington Post , the new strategy "would authorize the Pentagon, not the White
House, to set troop numbers in Afghanistan and give the military far broader authority to use
airstrikes to target Taliban militants." The hope is that by increasing pressure on the
Taliban, it will force them to the negotiating table with more favorable terms for Kabul and
Washington. Sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan follows a decision made last year by
then-President Barack Obama, who
announced in July that 8,400 U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan through January 2017
because of the "precarious" security situation there, undoing his previous plan to draw down to
5,500 by the time he left office.
The Post reported that "those opposed to the plan have begun to refer derisively to
the strategy as 'McMaster's War,'" and this particular criticism is repeated in a handful of
negative stories about McMaster that have already cropped up this week. For those plugged into
the dicey world of Trump administration power plays, this slur has the hallmarks of a hit job
by Bannon's team. (It's worth noting that the same people who oppose McMaster are no fans of
Mattis's moderating influence on the president, but he's seen as politically untouchable for
now.)
In January, McMaster quashed rumors of his departure, telling reporters "I have a job and it is my
intention to go as long and hard as I can in service of the President of the nation," adding that it
was "a tremendous honor to do this job every day."
Trump's first National Security Advisor, Michael
Flynn, resigned shortly after taking office amid a controversy over whether he lied to Vice President
Mike Pence about his contacts with Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
On Thursday, the Pentagon directed all inquiries about McMaster to the White House. "General
McMaster works for President Trump. Any decision with regards to staff, the White House will make
those determinations," said chief spokesperson Dana White. Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary
Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that Trump "still has confidence in General McMaster."
A Source within the White House, leaking to CNN, reports that Trump can't stand McMaster's demeanor
during briefings - and that the President considers his National Security Advisor to be "gruff and
condescending."
He prefers the briefing style of someone like CIA Director Mike Pompeo or Defense Secretary
James Mattis, who patiently answer his questions, regardless of the premise. McMaster, meanwhile,
is the person who delivers the news that Trump doesn't want to hear on a daily basis, according to
the senior Republican source.
The issue is not political but mostly stylistic, as McMaster and Mattis tend to discuss
information before it is presented to the President, the same source added. -
CNN
Kelly and McMaster both declined to comment,
however Reuters' sources were quick to add that
"tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the
president and other top officials who have fallen out of favor."
McSinister is the essence of Goldfinger in the old James Bond fiction. One
couldn't envision a more stereotypical "worm-tonguesque" villain in charge
of our armed forces and acting presidential "advisor".
McMaster Finally Out? Pentagon Paving Way For Return To Military:
Report
My response: Looks like the POTUS is prepping for the Return
of General Flynn.
McMaster has some very suspicious associations and has been
referenced in Q-ANON posts. He was an "OBOZO" plant.
Also, it appears that "OBOZO's" LEGAL problems are growing by the
day.
"OBOZO" maybe the first POTUS in US history to be charged
with TREASON. Also, KERRY is in a DEEP PILE OF SHIT as well. He
directed the US State Department to provide 9 million dollars to her
charity. This is ladies and gentlemen of ZH is BULLSHIT!!!!!!
CORRUPTION and CRIME as far as the EYE can see for the last four
POTUS office holders. It make me ashamed of my nation at times.
May GOD bless, guide and protect President TRUMP and the TRUMP
administration as they "DRAIN THE SWAMP".
Flynn blew the whistle on Pure Evil War Criminal Treasonous
Seditious Psychopath Obama, the CIA & State Dept. arming,
funding & training terror organizations.
The Criminal Deep State has had it for him ever since.
Boy you sure get a different news feed than I do.... Mine says we
have heavy ground presence in Syria (didnt under Obowel), are on
the verge of war with the NORKs after the Olympics, and our CIA
has been stirring the shit pot in Iran....
Does your news
coverage come before of after the episodes of My little pony?
The only difference between Trump and Hillary is Hillary has
better hair. Follow what Trump actually does and not what he
Tweets, HUGE difference. WE ARENT WINNING.
SecDef knows him (from in the sandbox) and might want/need him to fill a CinC
slot. The pussified O crowd cut off the balls of many of the flag ranks and
they need to be purged (Regan did that and brought in/up Starry and Papa Bear
and Vuono and Art C-ski and the other knuckle draggers).
POTUS might be
getting his foreign policy situation sorted out. McMaster hasn't ever been a
smooth team player within the Army structure--that would also endear him to
Jim, but not suit him to a staff/advisor role.
We can always blame it on Global Climate Change and the Rooskies--cover all
the bases.
Monster McMaster opening greeting to the Munich security conference, "I know OUR
good friend John McCain can't be here, as unfortunately he can't, but he brings you
good wishes"....Then he proceeded to outline Russian Election bullshit. Cyber bot
farm meddling invading Georgia BLA BLA BLA. This is why war is plausible, McMaster
is Military SWAMP.
Oh boy, some oversized ego tripping....the sheer hubris of it all....fuckers cannot
see or admit to the gross amount of meddling they have done to the world, and yet
react like little bitches when allegations are merely cooked up.
I cannot believe
that this is the
lowly
state of American political discourse in 2018 AD.
Just another Rome, only with a much bigger budget for bullshit and weaponry.
Fire him. Forget the fourth star. He is undeserving. Another scumbag trying to
upend President Trump's agenda/objectives. The scumbag conveniently doesn't
mention that the Russian Hacking didn't have an impact on the election. This
untrustworthy piece of shit never should have been brought into the fold. And
don't even think about allowing him back into the military. Fuck off you
turncoat.
This guy was the commanding officer of 3rd ACR while I was in. Only time I saw
him in Iraq was when he flew down to tell us how sorry he was, or something like
that, after we lost 1/3 of our platoon. The rest of the time he was in northern
Iraq where it was safe. While those of us unlucky enough to be in 3rd Squadron
were stuck down on the south side of Baghdad. If you read his bio they make it
out like he personally did all kinds of Rambo shit. I guess that's they way it is
for officers. Those guys will slit your throat for the next shiny thing to stick
on their uniform.
Even back then my buddy SSG Judy, just talked to him an hour
ago, told me McMaster was being groomed for bigger roles. He definitely nailed
that one.
These two and Mad Dog keep whispering "Evil Russia" at Trump and demanding US
troops keep poking a stick at the bear - meanwhile Trump knows there is no
collusion. How does that square up?
"... General Flynn had warned Trump during the campaign before election and afterward that CIA briefers were lying to him. Flynn took over briefing Trump himself and that ended when they got Flynn out. ..."
In the WH it will be NSC adviser and chief lunatic McMaster. He will levitate with
enthusiasm for more war.
The briefings Trump gets are packed with lies and he has grown to trust them.
The entire foreign policy is so different from his stated goals and intentions that it is
clear he is fed fairy tales of success and bogus estimates of what the US can accomplish.
Last weeks Voltairnet.org piece by Thierry Meyssan indicated that Trump did not know what
his planners were doing.
"The president Trump had not been informed of the plan Votel-McGurk. The secretary of
Defense, James Mattis, confirmed to his men the instructions of the White House against the
jihadists. However Votel and McGurk are still in place." -- Thierry Meyssan
General Flynn had warned Trump during the campaign before election and afterward that
CIA briefers were lying to him. Flynn took over briefing Trump himself and that ended when
they got Flynn out.
We have a President misled who is told bogus results based on biased input data and
reports.
Meyssan has been crazy in love with Trump for a year, so for him to report this shows he
knows things are being setup for Trump to be trapped in Syria.
Donald Trump's second national security advisor, want him out. This week,
they've made their campaign against him public, leaking to reporters details
about the rocky relationship he has with his boss and trying to paint him as
someone hellbent on overseas nation-building projects that are doomed to fail.
The timing isn't accidental. The effort to damage McMaster comes as the Trump
administration decides what its policy should be in Afghanistan, a debate that's
pitting McMaster against Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist.
"McMaster is pushing this Afghanistan policy through. I think some people
are giving him the rope to get it through, hoping he hangs himself with it,"
one senior intelligence official said. The Afghanistan strategy McMaster is
pushing, with the support of Defense Secretary James Mattis, would send roughly
3,000-5,000 U.S. and NATO troops to Afghanistan, according to a separate source
familiar with the internal deliberations. These troops would be sent to help
bulk up the Afghan National Security Forces, which, after years of U.S. assistance,
are still struggling against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and a small Islamic State
presence in the country.
According to the
Washington Post , the new strategy "would authorize the Pentagon,
not the White House, to set troop numbers in Afghanistan and give the military
far broader authority to use airstrikes to target Taliban militants." The hope
is that by increasing pressure on the Taliban, it will force them to the negotiating
table with more favorable terms for Kabul and Washington. Sending more U.S.
troops to Afghanistan follows a decision made last year by then-President Barack
Obama, who
announced in July that 8,400 U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan through
January 2017 because of the "precarious" security situation there, undoing his
previous plan to draw down to 5,500 by the time he left office.
Trump is fond of boasting about "his" generals. But over the short course of his presidency's
first months, the possession and control have reversed themselves. Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly
have banished all opposition and now pour the neo-con agenda straight into Trump's ear.
By Whitney Webb
August 27, 2017 "
Information Clearing House
" - WASHINGTON
– The U.S., long known for its meddling in the affairs of other nations, also has a long
and sordid history of supporting military juntas abroad, many of which it forced into power
through bloody coups or behind-the-scenes power grabs. From
Greece
in the 1960s to
Argentina
in the
1980s to the current al-Sisi-led junta in
Egypt
, Washington has actively
and repeatedly supported such undemocratic regimes despite casting itself as the world's
greatest promoter of "democracy."
Finally in 2017, karma appears to have come back to roost, as the current presidential
administration has now effectively morphed into what is,
by definition
, a military junta. Though
the military-industrial complex has long directed U.S. foreign policy, in the administration of
President Donald Trump a group of military officers has gathered unprecedented power and, for
all intents and purposes, rules the country.
Three generals at the center of power
In a recent article in
The Washington Post
, titled "Military Leaders Consolidate Power In Trump
Administration,"
Post
reporters Robert Costa and Philip Rucker noted that "At the core
of Trump's circle is a seasoned trio of generals with experience as battlefield commanders:
White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security
adviser H.R. McMaster. The three men have carefully cultivated personal relationships with the
president and gained his trust."
"This is the only time in modern presidential history when we've had a small number of
people from the uniformed world hold this much influence over the chief executive," John E.
McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA who served in seven administrations,
told the
Post
. "They are right now playing an extraordinary role."
This role, however, appears to reach beyond "extraordinary". Although Trump is fond of
calling them "my generals," they now, Costa and Rucker report, "manage Trump's hour-by-hour
interactions and whisper in his ear – and those whispers, as with the decision this week
to expand U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, often become policy." Another
Washington
Post
article, published last Tuesday,
led with the headline
"The Generals Have Trump Surrounded."
Also notable is the fact that this trio of generals has overseen the firing of more
independent, "outsider" voices, notably
Derek Harvey
and Steve Bannon. Bannon, in particular, was
a thorn in the side
of the generals, in light primarily of his staunch opposition to the
American "empire project" and new wars abroad.
Bannon had
opposed
Trump's strike against Syria, troop surges in Iraq, and the dropped hint of a
"military option" to deal with the crisis in Venezuela.
The New
York Times
referred to McMaster as Bannon's "nemesis in the West Wing," precisely due
to McMaster's commitment to American empire building.
With Bannon's relatively recent departure, the tone of the Trump administration – now
unequivocally ruled by "the generals" – has changed significantly -- as illustrated by
Trump's decision to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, a measure both
Bannon
and Trump himself once opposed.
In addition, last Thursday,
Politico
published
a report detailing the control exercised by Kelly over the president, as he
personally vets "everything" that comes across Trump's desk.
Politico
referenced two
memos that laid out a system "designed to ensure that the president won't see any external
policy documents, internal policy memos, agency reports and even news articles that haven't
been vetted."
The Hill
further noted
that Kelly is also "keeping a tight leash" on who gets to meet directly with
the President in the Oval Office, which is now strictly appointment-only and also dependent
upon Kelly's approval.
"... Powerful Republican "megadonor" Sheldon Adelson has privately told an ally that he supports a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster that depicts him as anti-Israel and seeks to remove him from the White House, according to a new report. ..."
Powerful Republican "megadonor" Sheldon Adelson has privately
told an ally that he supports a campaign against National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster that
depicts him as anti-Israel and seeks to remove him from the White House, according to a new
report.
Adelson wrote in an email to Mort Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of
America who is running the campaign: "Now that I have talked to somebody with personal
experience with McMaster, I support your efforts,"
according
to Axios.
The support from Adelson -- arguably the most influential donor in Republican politics -- comes after his spokesman said he had nothing to do with ZOA's campaign against McMaster and
was "perfectly comfortable" with the job he was doing.
... ... ...
A White House source tried to downplay the email, telling Axios that the Israel team -- which
included "noted right winger Ambassador Friedman" – feels that McMaster is "remarkably
pro-Israel and he just had a meeting with senior Israeli officials where he won plaudits from
them for understanding their unique security needs."
Adelson's email is a blow to McMaster, who is under heavy criticism for ousting political
opponents inside the National Security Council who wanted to implement the president's "America
First" foreign policy agenda.
"I think Trump may have so deeply surrounded (embedded may be the better word) himself
primarily to protect himself from the intelligence community. JFK was not a one off in my opinion
and probably not in Trump's mind."
"...At the core of Trump's circle is a seasoned trio of generals with experience as
battlefield commanders: White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster...."
These three basically complete the militarization of the executive branch and the
Political Elites. They've all pushed for or have been intimately involved in wars in which
the US has lost or never been able to 'win'. This is Trump's best and the brightest
Kelly: In 2002, Kelly again served with the 1st Marine Division, this time as the assistant
division commander. Much of Kelly's two-year assignment was spent deployed in Iraq. In March
2003, while in Iraq, Kelly was promoted to brigadier general..... later, he served as the
commanding general of the Multi-National Force West in Iraq from February 2008 to February
2009....
Mattis: During the initial planning for the War in Afghanistan, Mattis led Task Force 58
in operations in the southern part of the country; In May 2004, Mattis ordered the 3:00 a.m.
bombing of a suspected enemy safe house near the Syrian border, which later came to be known
as the Mukaradeeb wedding party massacre, and which resulted in the deaths of 42 civilians;
Mattis played key roles in combat operations in Fallujah, including negotiation with the
insurgent command inside the city during Operation Vigilant Resolve in April 2004, as well as
participation in planning of the subsequent Operation Phantom Fury in November; responsible
for American military operations in the Middle East, Northeast Africa, and Central Asia, from
August 11, 2010, to March 22, 2013; etc etc
In other words, Mattis is responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity during
the destruction of Fallujah.....
H.R. McMaster: Director of the Combined Joint Interagency Task Force-Shafafiyat at the
International Security Assistance Force Headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan... He is known for
his roles in the Gulf War, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. From
August 2007 to August 2008 McMaster was part of an "elite team of officers advising US
commander" General David Petraeus on counterinsurgency operations (perhaps known as how to
kill Iraqis who resisted the US invasion and occupation)
Carol Davidek-Waller | Aug 24, 2017 3:13:23 PM | 30
What you are saying is that General Jack D Ripper is now president and Dr. Strangelove is
Trump's top security advisor?
The Mini-Skirt Deception: How McMaster Got His Afghan 'Surge'
A photo of Soviet era Afghanistan won Trump over
by
Justin Raimondo
Posted on
August 23, 2017 August 22, 2017
According to
reports
, Gen. H. R. McMaster convinced President Trump to give up his longstanding
opposition to the Afghan war by showing him this photograph, below, of Afghan women in what
the media are describing as "miniskirts." As the
Washington Post
put it:
"One of the ways McMaster tried to persuade Trump to recommit to the effort was by
convincing him that Afghanistan was not a hopeless place. He presented Trump with a
black-and-white snapshot from 1972 of Afghan women in miniskirts walking through Kabul, to
show him that Western norms had existed there before and could return."
The irony is that, in 1972, when this photo was taken on the grounds of Kabul University,
Afghanistan was firmly in the orbit of the Soviet Union, as it had been since 1953, when
Prime Minister
Mohammed Daoud Khan
rose to
power and instituted a series of progressive reforms, including equal rights for women. The
next year, Khan deposed King Mohammed Zahir Shah, and Soviet aid poured in, alongside the Red
Army.
More irony: it was the United States, alongside Washington's then-ally Osama bin Laden,
that overthrew the communist regime, and conducted a guerrilla war against the Afghan
government and their Soviet sponsors. The last Soviet troops left in 1989 -- and there were no
more miniskirts to be seen anywhere in Afghanistan.
Gen. McMaster knows all this: our President does not. Does McMaster think he can bring
communism back to Afghanistan? I jest, but with serious intent. Because the commies attempted
what our President has vowed not to do in Afghanistan: they sought to create a nation out of
a collection of mountain-guarded valleys, isolated bastions untouched by time or the vaunted
ambitions of their many would-be conquerors.
Here is Trump
, trying to justify the prolongation of the longest war in our history:
"I am here to talk about tonight, that nearly 16 years after September 11 attacks,
after the extraordinary sacrifice of blood and treasure, the American people are weary of war
without victory.
"Nowhere is this more evident than with the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in
American history – 17 years. I share the American people's frustration. I also share
their frustration over a foreign policy that has spent too much time, energy, money, and most
importantly, lives trying to rebuild countries in our own image instead of pursuing our
security interests above all other considerations."
How to reconcile this abjuration of hubris with that photo of mini-skirted Afghan women?
It can't be done, but then again Trump is all about contradictions:
"Shortly after my inauguration, I directed Secretary of Defense Mattis and my national
security team to undertake a comprehensive review of all strategic options in Afghanistan and
South Asia.
"My original instinct was to pull out, and historically I like following my instincts.
But all my life, I have heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk
in the oval office. In other words, when you are president of the United States."
Has such a confession of betrayal ever been uttered by a public figure? For years he told
us Afghanistan was a waste of lives and treasure, and that we had to get out. And now he's
flip-flopped because McMaster showed him a photo of Afghan women in mini-skirts! Oh, how easy
it was – too easy!
"So I studied Afghanistan in great detail and from every conceivable angle," he claims.
Really? Did he study it enough to realize that no one has ever conquered Afghanistan? Did he
contemplate the storied history of that unforgiving land, which caused even Alexander the
Great to turn back? Did he study the provenance and
context
of that photograph, in
which Afghan women dared to show their knees?
Of course not!
"After many meetings over many months," Trump continued,
"[W]e held our final meeting last Friday at Camp David with my cabinet and generals to
complete our strategy. I arrived at three fundamental conclusions about America's core
interests in Afghanistan.
"First, our nation must seek an honorable and enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous
sacrifices that have been made, especially the sacrifices of lives. The men and women who
serve our nation in combat deserve a plan for victory. They deserve the tools they need and
the trust they have earned to fight and to win."
What is the moral meaning of this? That lives wasted in a futile crusade must be matched
by yet more sacrifices on the altar of the war god? We are told that Trump met with five
enlisted soldiers before making his decision to go along with the generals' war plan: I'd
like to know what they said. The White House won't tell us.
From this moral inversion Trump descends into an inversion of the facts:
"Second, the consequences of a rapid exit are both predictable and unacceptable. 9/11,
the worst terrorist attack in our history, was planned and directed from Afghanistan because
that country by a government that gave comfort and shelter to terrorists. A hasty withdrawal
would create a vacuum that terrorists, including ISIS and al Qaeda, would instantly fill,
just as happened before September 11."
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were planned and directed
from Hamburg, Germany
, and right here in the United States – indeed,
not too
far from Mar-a-Lago
-- not Afghanistan. This "safe haven" argument is so tattered and
overused that it comes apart under the most cursory inspection. And what are we to make of
someone who describes ending a 16-year war as "a hasty withdrawal"?
We are then treated to the myth of "victory denied in Iraq," which attributes the rise of
ISIS to US withdrawal from Iraq – when it reality ISIS was created by our "ally" Saudi
Arabia and the Arab sheikhs of the Gulf states who have funded and encouraged their
co-co-religionists in the Sunni-versus-Shi'ite civil war that has sundered the Muslim world.
And of course there would be no ISIS if not for the invasion of Iraq – but even Trump
knows this quite well.
Drifting off into vague threats against Pakistan, Trump reiterates his determination to
solve "big and intricate problems." But how? How will it be different, this time?
"As a result of our comprehensive review, American strategy in Afghanistan and South
Asia will change dramatically in the following ways: A core pillar of our new strategy is a
shift from a time-based approach to one based on conditions. I've said it many times, how
counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to
begin or end military operations.
"We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities.
Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy from now on.
America's enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out."
A child could see through this rodomontade. Because unless we intend to stay in
Afghanistan forever, what is to prevent the Taliban from simply waiting us out? We have to
leave sometime. So what is the purpose of this vow of silence? It is simply to keep the truth
from the American people. We won't know how many troops are in Afghanistan, nor will we know
when more are sent in: it's all to be conducted under the radar, so that Trump's voters
– who took seriously his tirades against foreign wars – won't know the extent to
which he has betrayed his mandate, and them.
The absurdities accumulate like refuse during a garbage strike:
"We are not nation building again. We are killing terrorists." Yet Gen. McMaster, a
disciple of
Gen. David
Petraeus
and his "
COINdistas
," are the original nation-builders – aside from the Soviets, that is, from whom they
cadged their "strategy."
"We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars, at the same time they are
housing the same terrorists that we are fighting. But that will have to change. And that will
change immediately." No it won't.
Remember
when Sen. Rand Paul tried to end US aid to Pakistan? It didn't happen then and it won't
happen now.
"As the prime minister of Afghanistan has promised, we are going to participate in
economic development to help defray the cost of this war to us." So Afghanistan is going to
pay for this war, just like Mexico is going to pay for the Great Wall of Texas! In your
dreams, Mr. President.
"Our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check." The history of
the past 16 years refutes this, as does the content of the President's peroration. Of
course
we're giving them a blank check: that's because the Afghan government only has
such resources as we give to it. And since Trump is refusing to say when or even if we're
leaving, then our commitment is indeed potentially unlimited. Does he imagine our Afghan
puppets, who are happily stealing us blind, don't know this?
I can't bear to go on cataloging the lies, the contradictions, the flip-flops – it
pains me to even think about it, much less write about it. The "America First" foreign policy
Trump promised during the campaign is just a memory, and his baffled supporters are left to
contemplate the most brazen betrayal in modern American political history.
Yet there are some benefits, here, for anti-interventionists to reap, which may not be
readily apparent. Because Trump's supporters, who took seriously his anti-interventionist
rhetoric, are now wondering what hit them. They had to go through this experience: betrayal
can be enlightening. And we here at Antiwar.com are ready, willing, and able to enlighten
them. That is, after all, what we're about.
On step forward, two steps back – this is how progress, however agonizingly slow, is
made.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE TO MY READERS
Take heart: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Trump's brazen
reversal on Afghanistan and the triumph of the generals is provoking a movement in the
opposite direction – the anti-interventionist movement is growing and getting more
visible. Many of Trump's supporters are
in open rebellion
, and we here at Antiwar.com are getting more visibility:
check out this
Washington Post
piece
which reads like it was taken from our front
page.
We're making progress – but we can't do it without your help. We need your
tax-deductible donations to keep Antiwar.com going.
Donate today!
Last night President Trump issued a statement
affirming his support for National Security adviser H.R. McMaster
in the face of a storm of
criticism from rightwing outlets. The statement is a sign that Trump and his new chief of staff
are taking the realist side of the debate inside his administration over foreign policy.
So while Trump claims to be doing everything he can to trash the Iran deal, the good news is
that his foreign policy team is for it. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson clearly advocated
for the
deal at a press briefing
earlier this week, while suggesting that he could differ with the
president on how effective it's been.
I think there are a lot of alternative means with which we use the agreement to advance
our policies and the relationship with Iran.
Tillerson is one of the "adults" who are thought to be able to rein in Trump's worst
tendencies on Iran, as
Paul
Pillar wrote
:
Reportedly the adults, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense
Jim Mattis, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, last month
urged
a resistant Trump
to recognize reality and certify that Iran was complying with the JCPOA
[Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].
Further comfort comes from the fact that three days ago, General McMaster
fired Ezra Cohen-Watnick
, an enigmatic thirtyish intelligence aide who was vehemently
opposed to the Iran deal, leading to calls to get rid of McMaster. Like Tillerson, McMaster is
plainly a realist. And he is thought to have job security because his predecessor, General Mike
Flynn, lasted barely three weeks and went out with a splash. The Atlantic says McMaster is
cleaning house at the NSC; two weeks ago he got rid of an
ideologue who spread anti-Muslim
conspiracies.
Supporters of Israel are upset by the personnel changes. The Israeli-American hothead
Caroline Glick writes
at her Facebook page that
McMaster is "deeply hostile" to Israel as an occupying power.
The Israel angle on McMaster's purge of Trump loyalists from the National Security Council
is that all of these people are pro-Israel and oppose the Iran nuclear deal, positions that
Trump holds.
McMaster in contrast is deeply hostile to Israel and to Trump. According to senior
officials aware of his behavior, he constantly refers to Israel as the occupying power and
insists falsely and constantly that a country named Palestine existed where Israel is located
until 1948 when it was destroyed by the Jews.
McMaster not only shuns Israel, he is also historically challenged on Arab-Israeli
affairs, according to the sources.
"McMaster constantly refers to the existence of a Palestinian state before 1947," a senior
West Wing official tells CR (there was never an independent Palestinian state), adding that
McMaster describes Israel as an "illegitimate," "occupying power."
The NSC chief expressed great reluctance to work with Israel on counterterror efforts, as
he shut down a joint U.S.-Israel project to counter the terrorist group Hezbollah's efforts
to expand Iran's worldwide influence.
One of the main indictments of McMaster by neoconservatives (right-wing Israel supporters
who favor regime change) is that he restrained the president on his tour of occupied
territories in May (
as Allison Deger reported
at the time
). In this White House briefing, McMaster refused to say that the western wall
in occupied East Jerusalem is part of Israel.
"... The war veteran has never quite clicked with the president, but other West Wing staff members recoiled at a series of smears against General McMaster by internet allies of Mr. Bannon. ..."
Mr. Bannon's disdain for General McMaster also accelerated his demise.
The war veteran
has never quite clicked with the president, but other West Wing staff members recoiled at a
series of smears against General McMaster by internet allies of Mr. Bannon.
The strategist denied involvement, but he also did not speak out against them.
By the time Charlottesville erupted, Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump had a powerful ally in Mr.
Kelly, who shared their belief that Mr. Trump's first statement blaming "many sides" for the
deadly violence needed to be amended.
Mr. Bannon vigorously objected. He told Mr. Kelly that if Mr. Trump delivered a second, more
contrite statement it would do him no good, with either the public or the Washington press
corps, which he denigrated as a "Pretorian guard" protecting the Democrats' consensus that Mr.
Trump is a race-baiting demagogue. Mr. Trump could grovel, beg for forgiveness, even get down
on his knees; it would never work, Mr. Bannon maintained.
"They're going to say two things: It's too late and it's not enough," Mr. Bannon told Mr.
Kelly.
Later in the day, the lead story on the site was "
McMaster Of Disguise: Nat'l Security Adviser Endorsed Book That Advocates Quran-Kissing Apology Ceremonies
." This piece from frequent McMaster critic Aaron Klein said that McMaster endorsed a book that "calls
on the U.S. military to respond to any 'desecrations' of the Quran by service members with an apology
ceremony, and advocates kissing a new copy of the Quran before presenting the Islamic text to the
local Muslim public."
The article went on to say that McMaster has "troubling views" on Islamic terrorism.
The site also published two articles Sunday critical of Ivanka. One of them is an
aggregate of a Daily Mail report that claimed Ivanka helped push Bannon out of the White House.
Shortly after the story was published, the article received an update that said a White House senior
aide stated the Daily Mail report is "totally false."
Breitbart also wrote a
piece that highlighted six times Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner's displeasure with President
Trump had been leaked to the media.
Bannon said in interviews after his departure from the White House that he will use Breitbart
to fight for the president's agenda.
"In many ways, I think I can be more effective fighting from the outside for the agenda President
Trump ran on," Bannon told
The New York Times . "And anyone who stands in our way, we will go to war with."
Breitbart News, the media outlet helmed by President Trump's former chief strategist Stephen Bannon,
published an article on Sunday casting national security adviser H.R. McMaster as soft on Islamist
extremism and terrorism.
The former chief strategist's exit from the White House on Friday immediately raised questions
about the future of Bannon's relationship with Trump, as well as how Breitbart would cover the administration
with Bannon at the helm again.
In an interview last week on NBC's "Meet the Press," McMaster repeatedly dodged questions about
whether he could work with Bannon, saying simply that he is "ready to work with anybody who will
help advance the president's agenda and advance the security, prosperity of the American people."
"I get to work together with a broad range of talented people, and it is a privilege every day
to enable the national security team," McMaster told the show's host Chuck Todd.
Hedge fund insiders say that quant funds, whose trading profits typically depend on
volatility, have been hurt by what has been a surprisingly steady market environment in the
second quarter, most notably in June, when the CBOE Volatility Index, or VIX � which
reflects investors� views of expected stock market volatility � gained between
10 percent and 12 percent, half of its 52-week highs. The Republicans� failure to pass
a health care bill, a steady drumbeat of news about the Russia-Trump investigation, and
nuclear missile tests of North Korea did little to jar investor confidence in the stock
market. The S&P 500 gained 0.6 percent during the month, putting it up 9.3 percent this
year
Thanks for the Escobar link. The story makes great sense. It's good to know about Mercer
and to see that Trump and Bannon are tight. Oddly, it did seem that with all the jackals
circling around Trump's neck, in this one case, Bannon is more use outside the tent pissing
in than inside pissing out. And Breitbart has now received a massive profile lift, it'll
become a national player in the narrative, one would expect.
By the way, I was pondering lately this whole aspect of a grass roots movement. Funny you
should bring it up. The only question here about the US is, will the people actually get a
voice in this society? If the electoral system keeps bringing liars and betraying promises,
then it's time to Occupy the Ballot and have new movements. This is happening I think, with
Trump actually being one of the precursor litmus tests.
~~
As for the generals, what does a ruler need except the people and the army? Trump has them
both. It makes him harder to take down with all those generals around. Of course, Caesar will
have to accord with his praetorian guard or the guard will get a new Caesar. But the US is a
banana republic now, this is how it's done - and I'm serious about this, these are real
dynamics I think.
Surely the generals will end up being more conservative in action than in rhetoric? And if
they get a little giddy and actually send their soldiers out into the real world, they'll
quickly receive more of those globally public humiliations that are lowering the empire to
the ground so effectively. What can go wrong, that couldn't always go wrong anyway,
regardless of who's in charge, or thinks they're in charge?
We express things differently, but think very much alike.
The water and sewage system is a good example, but you could take any basic utility/ basic
human need: Everyone needs it, but there's no need for 'growth' and little if any room for
efficiency gains. So the only ways to profit as a private investor are to overcharge users or
to pay miserable wages and let the infrastructure rot.
Private enterprise and competition can work miracles when an economic sector is rapidly
developing, expanding and advancing technologically. Governments should encourage this, so I
don't think they're (purely) socialistic. But once the sector is 'grown-up' and enters a more
or less 'steady state', there's neither room nor justification for profits. It becomes more
important to provide high-quality services to everyone(!) while using as little natural
resources as possible - and for this, a democratic form of organization is much more fitting
than a private profit-driven one (which strives to maximize throughput).
I'm cautiously optimistic. My impression is that more and more people realize that in our
time, 'democracy', 'equal rights' and 'sustainability' more important than 'profits' and
'growth'...don't you think?
nb...'posit' - I just learned a new word, thanks!
@somebody 98
Thanks for pointing out the uncertainty and 'volatility'/ VIX bit. I agree it's what
speculative investors like hedge funds need and thrive on - so it's what they try to promote
by all means (cf. certain websites).
Especially now that we are saying goodbye to the 'growth' phase of the economy and entering a
'steady state' (s.ab.), financial market volatility is increasingly the only thing to reap
(relevant) profits from. It's a fight between the pro-stability and the 'profit at all cost'
factions - luckily, the former is winning.
For months, U.S. President Donald Trump's national security adviser and his chief strategist
have battled for influence behind the scenes, and their feud may force another shake-up at the
White House.
The dispute between Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster and political strategist Stephen Bannon
has reached a level of animosity that is destabilizing Trump's team of top advisers just as the
administration tries to regain lost momentum, three senior officials said.
Under pressure from moderate Republicans to fire Bannon, Trump declined to publicly back him
on Tuesday, although he left his options open. "We'll see what happens with Mr. Bannon," he
told reporters at Trump Tower in New York.
"... He was then moved quickly to contain the influence of chief strategist Steve Bannon, who McMaster removed from the National Security Council. If you recall, he was appointed to contain other Trump loyalists such as Michael Flynn, as well. ..."
"... Recently, a campaign accusing him of being anti-Israel has been waged with the support of billionaire Sheldon Adelson by a coalition of alt-right nationalists that includes Steve Bannon ..."
Remember Lieutenant-General Herbert Raymond McMaster? He was appointed as President Trump's national
security adviser back in February. He was then moved quickly to contain the influence of chief
strategist Steve Bannon, who McMaster removed from the National Security Council. If you recall,
he was appointed to contain other Trump loyalists such as Michael Flynn, as well.
Recently, a campaign accusing him of being anti-Israel has been waged with the support of
billionaire Sheldon Adelson by a coalition of alt-right nationalists that includes Steve Bannon
and extreme right-wing Zionists such as the president of the Zionist Organization of America, Morton
Klein, as well as by Israeli journalist Caroline Glick from the Jerusalem Post. President Trump,
in response to all of this, called McMaster "a good man, very pro-Israel," and Israeli officials
have also come forward calling McMaster a friend of Israel.
On to talk about these connections and tensions is Shir Hever. Shir is a Real News correspondent
in Heidelberg, Germany. Of course, he covers Israel and Palestine for us extensively. I thank you
so much for joining us, Shir.
SHIR HEVER: Thanks for having me, Sharmini.
SHARMINI PERIES: Shir, President Trump is now six months into his office as president. He initially
has appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to take up the Israel file, but there are these allegations
flying against General McMaster. Explain to us what's going on. Why are these individuals like Sheldon
Adelson even concerned about how Trump is responding in terms of Israel and Israel policy?
SHIR HEVER: I think there's very little that General McMaster can actually do about Israel or
against Israel. It really doesn't matter much. The only issue that has come up was the Iran nuclear
deal, and I think this is going to be a decision taken directly by President Trump and not by McMaster.
Also, what exactly is the Israel interest regarding the Iran nuclear deal? It is not so clear. Obviously,
Prime Minister Netanyahu has a certain opinion, but other Israeli politicians have other opinions.
I think this is really a symbolic issue. There are people in the alt-right and also the extreme Zionism
who are using this old worn-out accusation that somebody is anti-Israel in order to get their own
people into the National Security Council, in order to exert influence on the Trump administration.
This coalition between extreme right nationalists, white nationalists in the United States, and Jewish
Zionists, which traditionally were on opposing sides, are now working together because of this very
strange rise of this alt-right.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Now, give us a greater sense of the connection or the tensions between
these alt-right organizations and McMaster and Bannon. Map this for us.
SHIR HEVER: Yeah. I've been looking through these accusations that Caroline Glick, deputy editor
of the Jerusalem Post, and Steve Bannon himself, and also Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization
of America. What problem do they have with McMaster? They make very vague things about some statements
that he made, but they couldn't put them in context. He said that Israel is an occupying power. Of
course, Israel is an occupying power, but they couldn't place that statement. The only thing that
their criticism boils down to is they say McMaster is a remnant of the Obama administration. He continues
the Obama policies, and therefore he's not loyal to Trump.
I think this is the crux of the matter, because actually, for people like Caroline Glick and I
think also for Sheldon Adelson, their relation to Trump borders on religious. They consider Trump
to be some kind of messiah or savior that will allow Israel once and for all to annex the occupied
territory, expand its borders, and then the land will be redeemed. They talk about this in religious
terminology.
Here's the problem. Trump has been president for six months now, and Israel did not annex the territory.
It did not expand its borders. In fact, it has gone from one crisis to the next, and the Israeli
government is not able to cement its power over the Palestinians. Palestinian resistance is not tied
down. They're looking for an explanation. The explanation is that something is not pure in the Trump
administration, and they're pointing the finger at McMaster saying, "Because of people like him who
are sabotaging Trump's own policies from the inside, then this is preventing the Trump administration
from reaching its full potential."
SHARMINI PERIES: Right. Obviously, Netanyahu and the Israeli government doesn't agree with this
assessment. In fact, they have come out supporting McMaster as being a good supporter of Israel.
How does this play out here?
SHIR HEVER: Absolutely. Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing real politics. He knows that there's nothing
that President Trump can do that will actually make Israel suddenly conquer more territory. That's
not the point. Netanyahu is trying to balance a very complicated system with pressure from different
points, and he is a populist, and he's only in power because of his populism. Now, his administration
is under threat because of corruption allegations, so this is a problem for him. When people expect
that the Trump administration will free his hands to do whatever he wants, Netanyahu suddenly has
a problem because he needs to come up with a new excuse. Why doesn't he annex all the occupied territory?
Of course, for him, it's not a good time to get into a fight with the Trump administration. He
wants to create the impression that things are happening under the surface, that he is in the know,
that his friends are involved in this, but I think the fact that Sheldon Adelson, the big financial
supporter of Netanyahu, is now switching to support extreme right groups that have nothing to do
with the interests of the Israeli current administration, but are actually trying to push the Israeli
administration to move further to the extreme right and to annex territory, that puts Netanyahu in
trouble. I think it also spells some clouds over the warm relationship between Netanyahu and Adelson.
SHARMINI PERIES: Coming back to this side of things here in the United States, in light of the events
of Charlottesville, Shir, showing a direct link between the alt-right and hardcore racists and neo-Nazis,
why would extreme right-wing Zionist Jewish organizations and individuals like Glick and Klein agree
to cooperate with the alt-right in this way?
SHIR HEVER: I think people on the left tend to forget that, just like the left considers itself
to be a kind of universalist movement, and that leftists around the world should have solidarity
with each other, the right also has a kind of solidarity, especially the extreme right. Extreme right
movements in different countries consider the extreme right in other countries to be their allies.
One of the things we saw in Charlottesville is that some of these neo-Nazi groups and white nationalist
groups are big supporters of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, because they see him as the kind of strong
leader they would like to see in the United States as well.
For people who see Donald Trump talking about America first, then they're saying, "Okay, that's exactly
the kind of administration we want to see in Israel, somebody taking about Israel first." For Caroline
Gluck or for a Morton Klein, they are willing to accept a very heavy load of racism and even anti-semitism
against Jews from the Trump administration and from its supporters in exchange for being allowed
to copy that same kind of racism and that same kind of right-wing policy towards their minorities.
Just like the American administration has its minorities, Muslims, Mexicans which are being targeted,
Israel also has its minorities, Palestinians and asylum-seekers, and they want those people to be
targeted in the same harsh language and the same harsh policies, so that we can [inaudible] a great
compromise.
I have to say, the events in Charlottesville had a profound impact on Israeli public opinion.
In fact, there are a lot of Israelis who are very concerned about this kind of coalition. They are
saying, "No, there's not that much that we're willing to take in order to keep the relations with
the Trump administration on good footing." Because of that, the president of Israel, President Rivlin,
and also the education minister Naftali Bennett issued statements condemning white nationalists and
neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. I think Naftali Bennett, who is the head of the Jewish Nationalist
Party in Israel, and he's actually of the same political camp as Caroline Glick, as Morton Klein,
when he makes that statement, that shows that even he thinks that they have gone too far.
SHARMINI PERIES: Interesting analysis, Shir. I thank you so much for joining us today. I guess the
situation in Charlottesville is evolving, and it would be interesting to continue to keep an eye
on what's developing here against what's happening in Israel as well. Thank you so much.
SHIR HEVER: Thank you, Sharmini.
SHARMINI PERIES: Thank you for joining us here on the Real News Network.
Confusing, at least to me, in any case I believe that the Zionists learned a lot from the Nazis
and there is very little difference between the two groups. I would say that the main difference
lies in the fact that the Zionists are sneakier and know how to play with popular opinion. That's
why it doesn't surprise me that they are making a common cause with the white supremacists groups.
The only surprise here is that they are doing it openly now. They have become brave and have
decided to take the backlash. Perhaps they are doing so because they know they have the support
of Trump.
Divide and conquer. Soon we will be fighting on our own streets against each other. It will
be the death of the US...
"For Caroline Gluck or for a Morton Klein, they are willing to accept a very heavy load of
racism and even anti-semitism against Jews from the Trump administration and from its supporters
in exchange for being allowed to copy that same kind of racism and that same kind of right-wing
policy towards their minorities."
I have great respect for Shir Hever, he has great insight into Israel society and politics.
However, his statement that Klein and Glick (and maybe Adelson) want to be "allowed" to copy Trump's
supporter's racism and right-wing policies towards minorities in Israel is beyond hilarious. Minorities
in Israel have been and continue to be subjected to racist and supremacist policies (much worse
than anything Trump supporters can even imagine) by the Zionists since the theft of Palestinian's
land in 1948. The Israelis are not just pursuing racist policies but as Israeli historian Ilan
Pappe said, they are committing slow motion genocide against the Palestinians.
"... McMaster's was spewing nonsense. The same was said about the Soviet Union and China when they became nuclear weapons states. North Korea just became one . Conventional deterrence of both sides has worked with North Korea for decades. Nuclear deterrence with North Korea will work just as well as it did with the Soviet and Chinese communists. If North Korea were really not deterrable the U.S. should have nuked it yesterday to minimize the overall risk and damage. It is the McMaster position that is ideological and not rational or "grown up" at all. ..."
"... Compare that to Steve Bannon's take on the issue: ..."
"... "There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about, there's no military solution here, they got us." ..."
"... But looking at things now, rather than a spoilt paranoid kid, perhaps someone trained from an early age for leadership, and perhaps rather than being paranoid (Russia/China), perhaps a leader that finds it more important to create a deterrence against the US. Third generation at war with the US and his seen his father was fucked over when trying to make a deal with the US. NK's nuke and missile tech have come a long way in the few short years Kim Jong Un has been in power. ..."
"... "Deterrence is a strategy intended to dissuade an adversary from taking an action not yet started, or to prevent them from doing something that another state desires." ..."
"... Classic deterrence strategy IS working for NK perfectly. ..."
"... All one has to do to know what Bannon's position on Iran is to read Breitbart on any given day. Unless we are supposed to believe that Bannon's opinions are not reflected by the website he ran for four years. Bannon is for war against Islam in general, there is nothing "realist" about his foreign policy. ..."
"... @12... "Bannon is a fascist" I'm not so sure. Mussolini defined fascism as being an alliance of corporate and state powers... but Bannon (and most of his followers) have no trust in the corporate sector as they [the corporate sector] are to a large degree Globalists - they used the US and then threw it aside in pursuit of profit elsewhere. For that, he would even call them traitors. So you could call him a Nationalist. ..."
"... Bannon makes sense. That must be why many want him gone especially the neocons. As to North Korea, the US should have admitted "facts on the ground" long ago and worked to sign the official end of the war and work to get the two Koreas talking and working together. ..."
The Democrats and the media
love
the Pentagon generals in the White House. They are the "grown ups":
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., had words of praise for Donald Trump's new pick for national
security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster -- calling the respected military officer a
"certified, card-carrying grown-up,"
Who is really the sane person on, say, North Korea?
The "grown-up" General McMaster, Trump's National Security Advisor, is not one of them. He
claims North Korea is not deterrable from doing something insane.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But your predecessor Susan Rice wrote this week that the U.S. could tolerate
nuclear weapons in North Korea the same way we tolerated nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union
far more during the Cold War. Is she right?
MCMASTER: No, she's not right. And I think the reason she's not right is that the
classical deterrence theory, how does that apply to a regime like the regime in North Korea?
A regime that engages in unspeakable brutality against its own people? A regime that poses a
continuous threat to the its neighbors in the region and now may pose a threat, direct
threat, to the United States with weapons of mass destruction?
McMaster's was spewing nonsense. The same was said about the Soviet Union and China when
they became nuclear weapons states. North Korea just
became one
. Conventional deterrence of both sides has worked with North Korea for decades.
Nuclear deterrence with North Korea will work just as well as it did with the Soviet and
Chinese communists. If North Korea were really not deterrable the U.S. should have nuked it
yesterday to minimize the overall risk and damage. It is the McMaster position that is
ideological and not rational or "grown up" at all.
"There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody
solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in
the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about,
there's no military solution here, they got us."
It was indeed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea which "got" the United States and
stopped the U.S. escalation game. It is
wrong
to think
that North Korea
"backed off"
in the recent upheaval about a missile test targeted next to Guam. It was the U.S. that pulled
back from threatening behavior.
Since the
end
of May
the U.S. military trained extensively for decapitation and "preemptive" strikes on
North Korea:
Two senior military officials -- and two senior retired officers -- told NBC News that key to
the plan would be a B-1B heavy bomber attack originating from Andersen Air Force Base in
Guam.
...
Of the 11 B-1 practice runs since the end of May, four have also involved practice bombing at
military ranges in South Korea and Australia.
In response to the B-1B flights North Korea published plans to launch a missile salvo next
to the U.S. island of Guam from where those planes started. The announcement
included a hidden
offer
to stop the test if the U.S. would refrain from further B-1B flights. A deal was made
during
secret negotiations
. Since then no more B-1B flights took place and North Korea
suspended
its Guam test plans. McMaster lost and the sane people, including Steve Bannon,
won.
But what about Bannon's "ethno-nationalist" ideology?
Isn't he responsible
for the
right-wing nutters of Charlottesville conflict? Isn't he one of them?
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it:
"Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too
much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
Bannon sees China as an economic enemy and wants to escalate an economic conflict with it.
He is said to be against the nuclear deal with Iran. The generals in Trump's cabinet are all
anti-Iran hawks. As Bannon now turns out to be a realist on North Korea, I am not sure what
real position on Iran is.
Domestically Bannon is pulling the Democrats into the very trap I had several times warned
against:
"The Democrats," he said, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want
them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go
with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
This worked well during the presidential election and might continue to work for Trump. As
long as the Democrats do not come up with, and fight for, sane economic polices they will
continue to lose elections. The people are not interested in LGBT access to this or that
bathroom. They are interested in universal healthcare, in personal and economic security. They
are unlikely to get such under Bannon and Trump. But, unlike the Democrats, the current White
House crew at least claim to have plans to achieve it.
Posted by b on August 16, 2017 at 11:51 PM |
Permalink
A couple of very interesting links from the last thread were the one to the Bannon article,
and also the link to the Carter/NK article.
Kim Jong Un, 3rd generation like his father and grandfather leader of NK. From what I have
read this is a cultural thing t hat predates communism and the Japanese occupation prior. Many pictures of Kim show an overweight youngster amongst gaunt hungry looking
generals.
Gave the impression of a spoilt kid simply handed power. Not going to the May 9 parade in
Russia when invited also gave the impression he was paranoid.
But looking at things now, rather than a spoilt paranoid kid, perhaps someone trained from
an early age for leadership, and perhaps rather than being paranoid (Russia/China), perhaps a
leader that finds it more important to create a deterrence against the US. Third generation at
war with the US and his seen his father was fucked over when trying to make a deal with the US. NK's nuke and missile tech have come a long way in the few short years Kim Jong Un has been
in power.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Kim Jong Un and Trump have a meet one day.
b said: "The people are not interested in LGBT access to this or that bathroom. They are
interested in universal healthcare, in personal and economic security. They are unlikely to
get such under Bannon and Trump. But, unlike the Democrats, the current White House crew at
least claim to have plans to achieve it."
"There's no military solution [to North Korea's nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody
solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don't die in
the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don't know what you're talking about,
there's no military solution here, they got us."
Doesn't that at least show Bannon as the adult in the room?
I would say so.
So lets start parsing this economic nationalism that Bannon is making happen with Trump.
Economic nationalism is a term used to describe policies which are guided by the idea of
protecting domestic consumption, labor and capital formation, even if this requires the
imposition of tariffs and other restrictions on the movement of labour, goods and capital. It
is in opposition to Globalisation in many cases, or at least on questions the unrestricted
good of Free trade. It would include such doctrines as Protectionism, Import substitution,
Mercantilism and planned economies.
Examples of economic nationalism include Japan's use of MITI to "pick winners and losers",
Malaysia's imposition of currency controls in the wake of the 1997 currency crisis, China's
controlled exchange of the Yuan, Argentina's economic policy of tariffs and devaluation in
the wake of the 2001 financial crisis and the United States' use of tariffs to protect
domestic steel production.
Think about what a trade war with China would do. It would crash the world economy as
China tried to cash in on it US Treasury holdings with the US likely defaulting......just one
possible scenario.
At least now, IMO, the battle for a multi-polar (finance) world is out in the open.....let
the side taking by nations begin. I hope Bannon is wrong about the timing of potential global
power shifting and the US loses its empire status.
Bannon thinks the bombast on display between the Kim and Trump has been "a sideshow". The
real show, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the dramatic sparring between the two
leaders. The Mother Of All Policies, according to Bannon, is an all-bets-on trade war with
China, whose endgame admits to only one outcome,--that is to say-- that only one hegemon will
remain standing at the end of this struggle.
There can be only one King-of-the-Hill. But where is the Greek Chorus?--the prophetic
warning that goes by the name of necessity?-- that tries to ward off hubris? "One must never
subscribe to absurdities" (it was Camus who aptly said that).
I had read this before; interesting to say the least.
Truth be told, I'd never heard of Bannon prior to Trumps election and still know little about
him.
Politics aside Bannon seems a straight shooter; I certainly can't argue his statement re:
what would happen if we attacked NK. His statement is echo'd by many long before today.
I do plan to start paying attention from this point forward.
Oh, and I did read that Trump is afraid of Bannon, but don't remember the reason stated.
"Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too
much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."
"These guys are a collection of clowns," he added.
No, whoever planned that "United Right" rally walked Trump into the trap.
As Trump was incapable to disassociate himself clearly from people who protest against the
take down of a statue of General Lee. Trump now owns the race issue.
Steve Bannon is
a
fascist
. That does not mean he is stupid.
The generals are clearly dangerous. They have the power to walk everybody to world war
III. Trump has pledged to spend even more on the US military, the military already has the
highest spending world wide. The generals don't want to admit that they cannot solve
anythings by military power.
Trump going off script in that press conference into a stream of consciousness was bad. He
reminded everybody of their rambling demented great-grandfather. He tried to get the
discussion to economic issues, he did not succeed.
In stepped more lies and garbage, this time more fake than the other, with chaos theory and
psychological warfare organizations drowning in capabilities from the overfunded phony war
on terror and too much time on their hands now lending their useless talents toward
disinforming the general public.
The result has been a divided US where "alternative facts" fabricated for a vulnerable
demographic now competes with the "mainstream" now termed, and I believe rightly so, "fake
news" to support different versions of a fictional narrative that resembles reality only in
the most rarified and oblique manner.
...
America has left itself open to dictatorship. It long since gave up its ability to
govern itself, perhaps it was the central bank, the Federal Reserve in 1913 or more recent
erosions of individual power such as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2005.
Whatever milestone one chooses, the remains of democratic institutions in the US are now
difficult to find.
What we are left with is what increasingly seems to be factions, mistakenly defined as
"right" or "far right" jockeying for control over America's military, and with that,
control over the planet itself.
You see, whoever controls the American military controls the world, unless a power bloc
appears that can challenge, well, challenge what? If the Pentagon controls America's
military and the Pentagon is controlled by a cabal of religious extremists as many claim or
corporate lackeys as most believe, then where does the world stand?
Then again, if Trump and his own Republican congress are at war over impeachment, and I
assure you, little else is discussed in Washington, two sides of the same coin, servants of
different masters, has all oversite of the newfound military power over American policy
disappeared?
Bannon can be perfectly mature, adult and realist on some points and be totally blinded by
biases on others - him wanting total economic war against China is proof enough. So I don't
rule out that he has a blind spot over Iran and wants to get rid of the regime. I mean, even
Trump is realist and adult in a few issues, yet is an oblivious fool on others.
Kind of hard to find someone who's always adult and realist, actually. You can only hope to
pick someone who's more realist than most people. Or build a positronic robot and vote for
him.
More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive
publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump's election were
"Resisting Trump" and "Containing Trump") and assume that a possible convergence of views
on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.
The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is
also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the
press. He's probably the most media-savvy person in America.
I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the
ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump's
reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using
Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump's
base.
He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it:
"Ethno-nationalism!it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too
much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more."
Explanation a) He wants to explain the climbdown of his boss on North Korea.
Not really helpful to Trump.
b) He wants to save his reputation as the association with the KKK and White Suprematists
has become toxic.
I think Bannon is an authentic economic nationalist, and one that Trump feels is good counsel
on those matters. If this is so, then Bannon cannot be trying to provoke a trade war with
China, since that would be an economic catastrophe for the US (and China and the rest of the
world). I'm hoping he's playing bad cop and eventually Trump will play good cop in
negotiations for more investment by China in the US and other goodies in exchange for 'well,
not much' from the US. Similar to what the US dragged out of Japan in the 80s nd 90s.
psychohistorian at 4: 'as China tried to cash in on it US Treasury holdings with the US
likely defaulting...'
as a sovereign currency issuer of that size the usa can not run out of dollars
to default on their obligations would be a voluntary mistake the federal reserve will
avoid
meanwhile the chinese are investing in africa and other countries securing their position in
the world
c | Aug 17, 2017 6:59:32 AM | 17
as a sovereign currency issuer of that size the usa can not run out of dollars
to default on their obligations would be a voluntary mistake the federal reserve will
avoid
meanwhile the chinese are investing in africa and other countries securing their position in
the world
Very good; and I agree with your POV; the usa can not run out of dollars.
And therein lies its power; a very dangerous situation that I do not think the world is
equipped to deal with in toto...
Every political swindler today starts off by pretending Trump won the election instead of the
Electoral College, including Steve Bannon. It is the Republican Party, not Trump and his
Trumpery who holds majorities in the House, the Senate and the nation's statehouses. Anybody
who wants to think that "economic nationalism" will crush the Democrats has forgotten that
Trump lost the popular vote on this ticket.
It appears that as a purely nominal Republican, an owner in a hostile takeover, Trump has
no qualms about trashing the system. Practically speaking, this is the very opposite of
draining the swamp, which requires effective leadership.
Kim Jong Un, 3rd generation like his father and grandfather leader of NK. From what I have
read this is a cultural thing that predates communism and the Japanese occupation prior.
But looking at things now, rather than a spoilt paranoid kid, perhaps someone trained
from an early age for leadership, and perhaps rather than being paranoid (Russia/China),
perhaps a leader that finds it more important to create a deterrence against the US.
Posted by: Peter AU 1 | Aug 17, 2017 1:05:52 AM | 1
OR, looked at another way:
Perhaps the gurning wunderkind Kim's ascent to the North Korean Throne was completely
predictable and was predicted a long time ago, and plans were set in motion to ensure that he
was co-opted as a kid, and now works with the US to help counter the rising Chinese
power.
Perhaps the alleged face-off Trump, Kim and the western MSM treated the world to over the
past while, was merely nothing but a pre-scripted choreographic display, a piece of theater
agreed upon beforehand by all participants except China
I wouldn't be surprised to see Kim Jong Un and Trump have a meet one day.
I wouldn't be surprised if Kim Jong Un and Trump actually play for the same side.
Every political swindler today starts off by pretending Trump won the election instead of
the Electoral College, i
Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 17, 2017 8:18:55 AM | 19
Actually as far as I can tell the real political swindlers are the ones who refuse to
acknowledge that a US Presidential election is, (and has been for nearly whole time the US
has been in existence, which is more than 200 years for those who have problems keeping track
of such simple matters) decided NOT by the popular vote but by the results of the Electoral
College voting.
Anybody who wants to think that "economic nationalism" will crush the Democrats has
forgotten that Trump lost the popular vote on this ticket.
Again, just to repeat the actual reality regarding US Presidential elections: They are
decided on the basis of Electoral Collage voting and NOT on the basis of the popular vote, as
political swindlers would now like everyone to believe.
He is doubling down now defending General Lee statues as beautiful. He is doing the same
strategy as he did in his duel with Hillary Clinton when everybody thought he was insane,
playing to his core Republican base to make sure Republicans have to stay in line or face a
primary challenge.
Breitbart is doing the same threatening "Republican traitors".
The problem with this strategy is that Trump won because Hillary Clinton was so unpopular,
because their pollsters outsmarted Nate Silver and Co. and possibly because she was a
woman.
But Republicans who have to pretend they are religious right wing nuts in the primaries,
then have to appeal to independents to win the actual election.
So they cannot go against Trump but cannot defend him. They are paralysed.
That what it comes down to. That the main aim of the president of the United States is to
paralyze the party he hijacked.
They are decided on the basis of Electoral Collage voting and NOT on the basis of the
popular vote, as political swindlers would now like everyone to believe
indeed, though, speaking of political swindlers,
there's
mucho
evidence
that Trump may have won the popular vote as well.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Aug 17, 2017 8:18:55 AM | 19
Every political swindler today starts off by pretending Trump won the election instead
of the Electoral College, including Steve Bannon. It is the Republican Party, not Trump and
his Trumpery who holds majorities in the House, the Senate and the nation's statehouses.
Anybody who wants to think that "economic nationalism" will crush the Democrats has forgotten
that Trump lost the popular vote on this ticket.
Have you read the Constitution of the USA? The Electoral College elects the President by
the rank and file voters electing the Electors to the College on November election day.
That's how the system works.
Ask Al Gore; he won the popular vote.
Oh and btw, the Hillary won the popular 2016 vote meme. Take a look at Detroit, MI heavy
Democrats' precints - more votes than voters - and the millions of illegal aliens' vote in
California who voted after the invite of Obama.
Trump won the election. Period. End of story. Done. Finished. Get over it and get on with
your life. He didn't compete to win the popular vote. He competed and campaigned to win the
election. Advice to Democrats - nominate a candidate beside a senile old neocon woman who is
corrupt to her ugly core, and then maybe you can beat a former reality show star.
The problem with this strategy is that Trump won because Hillary Clinton was so unpopular,
because their pollsters outsmarted Nate Silver and Co. and possibly because she was a
woman.
Posted by: somebody | Aug 17, 2017 9:45:00 AM | 23
Nope - first part of the sentence is correct but the rest of is just you, as usual, repeating
crap you found on the Internet and then repeating it here pretending it is profound and that
you actually understand what you are talking about, which you clearly don't as evidenced by
the fact that you then go on to reference Nate Silver whose fame was never anything but media
created hype with little or nothing to back it up.
Silver's feet of clay were evident long before the latest Prez election. It became obvious
that his alleged electoral statistical prowess rested as much on luck as anything else. Lucky
in prediction when it came to the 2008 election but by 2010 things started to go wrong but
the media ignored his feet of clay and kept hyping him as a stats genius.
By the time 2016 rolled round Silver was exposed for the lucky fraud he is.
The real truth of Hillarys inability to win lies not in her being female as you and many
others disingenuously (at best) try to claim, but simply lies in the fact that she is a
thoroughly unpleasant person with a complete lack of charisma and a massive sense of
entitlement.
Blacks and others, minorities generally and independents, who came out in droves for the
Obama elections simply refused to go and vote for her.
The Republican vote however changed very little - pretty much the exact same demographic
voted republican as voted for Romney.
Trump won partly because of Clintons massive hubris in refusing to campaign in several key
states. Cambridge analytical were not required to give him the win, no matter what you read,
without analysing it, elsewhere on the web and are now repeating here in an effort to pretend
you know what you are talking about.
CA probably helped somewhat but it unlikely that they were central to the win. Clintons
hubris and her complete lack of charisma, ensured low black/minority/independent for her in
key states, especially those where she had refused to even bother to campaign, which was
enough to seal the win for Trump
You simply repeating crap you heard on the net and pretending that if you say it in an
authoritative fashion it will magically become true, just ends up making you look completely
clueless, as usual. (or dishonest)
@ Everybody who bought into the MSM Steve Bannon promoted white supremacy and through
Breitbart. Suggested you read his world view expressed in remarks at Human Dignity Institute,
Vatican Conference 2014
Posted by: likklemore | Aug 17, 2017 10:51:54 AM | 28
Anyone with any intelligence would be wise to treat with great caution anything Bannon
claims in public interviews about himself or his alleged political beliefs,
US politics is a great big clusterfeck - worse than ever, which is hard to believe. Bannon's big liar. He did heaps to create this very situation with the White
Supremacists. Of course the Democrats are worse than useless. All they're doing is presenting themselves
as "We're not Trump" and whining about Putin. All of them are clowns. Every last one. Including the so-called "Generals." Worthless.
"Since then no more B-1B flights took place and North Korea suspended its Guam test
plans."
but: "Yesterday (...) two US B-1 strategic bombers, operating with Japanese fighter jets,
conducted exercises to the southwest of the Korean Peninsula." says WSWS. ?
everything about the usa today is divisive... i can't imagine the usa being happy if this
didn't continue until it's demise..the 2 party system hasn't worked out very well as i see
it.. failed experiment basically.. oh well..
If I remember correctly, wasn't it both the President Elect and the Republican Congressmen
who won clear majorities in nearly 80 percent of congressional districts? Presuming an issue
like the gerrymandering of districts wasn't significant, that's a far more legitimate victory
than an extra million Democrats voting in California (determining the future of national
policy). I'm not a fan of the Republicans, but denying the short term efficiency of 'populist
rhetoric' isn't helping the left win any substantial electoral victories in the future.
Good Lord. Can't people read anymore? The election is all about the EC. Keep talking and
running for the popular vote, and Trump will keep winning the Electoral College. You either
want to win or you don't. I hope you keep preaching the popular vote personally.
Keep the proles spilt in their little "identity groups", their micro-tribes, and continue
building the Kleoptocracy/Prison/Military State while the dumbed down demos are busy hunting
micro-aggressions/fighting gender & race wars etc etc
During the last 5 Prez Election cycles the population spilt on utterly retarded lines such
as Gay-marriage, Gender-free toilets etc. All this while the US fought or financed numerous
very expensive wars in the Middle East ukraine etc, resulting hundreds of thousands of lives
lost.
The 2008 elections had one of the highest ever voter turnout rates for the Democrats and
the 2016 elections had one of the lowest ever. The turnout rates (abysmal if ever compared to
voter turnout rates in Germany and Japan) easily explain the initial victory and the eventual
defeat, not 'Detroit fraud' or 'the millions of illegals' voting in your head. Racial
gerrymandering against black voters in the Southern States is a far more real issue.
somwbody @ 12: Good link thanks..Interesting read about "The Forth Turning"
psycho @ 5: good link also..
WJ @ 27 said:" Advice to Democrats - nominate a candidate beside a senile old neocon woman
who is corrupt to her ugly core, and then maybe you can beat a former reality show star."
Yep, so-called "Russian hacking" wasn't the problem, HRC was the problem...
Just Sayin' @ 41 said:"It should by now be clear to anyone paying attention that while both
Bannon & Trump certainly TALK a lot, they seem to actually do very little."
Kinda' waitin' myself to see all those "accomplishments"....
I understand and respect your point, but I was responding to the initial comment's
implicit argument on public opinion: "a common argument is the
lower-middle-to-upper-middle-class social base of the Republicans is less receptive to the
short term effects of Protectionist policy and this would reduce political morale, as well as
grassroots and voting organization. However, the Democrats 'won the popular vote.' So, it's
'obvious' in saying the classless definition of 'the American people' oppose this Republican
policy, and naturally, the social base of the Republican Party isn't especially relevant to
consider when organizing voters and grassroots movements for a renewed Democratic Party."
To be fair, I think like the early Unionist and Communist circles, and presume public
opinion translates to expressions of grassroots politics between conflicting classes (more so
than it actually happens in American class society).
If one proceeds on the assumption that politics in the United States closely follows themes,
scripts and production values pioneered by WWF, then all becomes clear. It's simply
pro-wrestling on a global scale with nuclear weapons and trillions of dollars in prize money.
@42 just sayin'.. yes to all you say - it is quite sad actually.. not sure of the way out at
this point, short of complete rebellion in the streets which looks like a longs ways off at
this point..
not sure of the way out at this point, short of complete rebellion in the streets which
looks like a longs ways off at this point..
Posted by: james | Aug 17, 2017 2:58:51 PM | 49
Most of the younger generation seem to be much to busy, obsessing over non-existent things
like "Micro-agressions" or "hetero-normative cis-gender oppression", to pay attention to, let
alone acknowledge, the enormous global macro-aggressions their own country is engaged in on a
world-wide scale.
But, unlike the Democrats, the current White House crew at least claim to have plans to
achieve it.
Is there a "don't" missing from that sentence?
I must disagree that DPRK nuclear missiles are a qualitatively similar threat to those
possessed by the Soviet Union and China. DPRK's guiding
Suche
ideology is a literal
cult that goes far beyond the cult-of-personality that held sway over the Soviet Union and
China when Stalin and Mao ruled. And by the time the Soviets developed delivery capabilities
Stalin was dead and his cult was done. By the time the Chinese developed delivery
capabilities Mao was declining into figurehead status and Zhou Enlai, who as commander of the
PLA realized how weak China really was militarily, had no illusions about what would happen
in a military confrontation with the US. But DPRK is still ruled by a cult that believes the
Kims are ordained with supernatural powers that allowed them to drive the Japanese off the
peninsula then fight off an American "invasion." They truly don't mention the role of the
Soviets and the Chinese in saving their bacon. In terms of face-saving, the Kims have set the
bar pretty high for themselves by fostering their cult. Their legitimacy would be threatened
if their statecraft as rational actors undermined their Suche cult.
DPRK have been rogue actors against ROK and Japan out of sheer spitefulness, fully
exploiting the umbrella provided by the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Assistance
with China. They have done extraterritorial kidnappings and murders not for perceived
strategic reasons but merely to intimidate. DPRK has pointedly refused to enter talks for a
formal peace between them and the ROK. Those kinds of motives do not bespeak of someone who
can be trusted with nukes.
Bannon is someone whom I hold quite responsible for contributing to the rise of White
Supremacy in the USA, which I consider a clear and present danger. Bannon's dismissive hand
waving yesterday is meant to dissemble. Guess some are willing to buy what he was selling
yesterday. Not me.
What are your reasons for believing this about Bannon? What counts as contributing, and
how did you come to your decision?
It's not that I don't believe you. It's rather important to establish in what way his
words (whether the ones you found or the recent ones in
American Prospect
) are lies
or misdirection, so that I, and anyone interested, can evaluate this for ourselves and come
to similar or different conclusions.
I don't think Bannon wants a "trade" war with China but he is right that there is an economic
war going on. The "silk roads" and the various new organisations that the Chinese-Russians
have set up, (Major Banks, "Swift" equivalent, Glossnass satellites, card payment systems,
industrial independence, and food self-sufficiency etc), plus the use of currencies other
than the dollar - are all examples of a break-away from a US-EU domination.
However, they have not suddenly introduced everything at once to "bring the US house
down". Why? One possible reason could be that they are expecting the US to collapse anyway.
Another is that viable alternatives also take time to set up.
b has mentioned the "grown ups" v the Idealogues". The impact of the military on the
economic war seems to be underestimated. How much longer can the US afford the more than
trillion dollars per year of the "visible" arms? This does not include hidden costs
("Intelligence agencies and pork). Nor does it include costs borne by other countries. ie.
Italy has about 80 US bases (the most in the EU) and about 77 nuclear warheads on its soil.
Italy PAYS for those bases, and even that does not include infrastucture (roads, increased
airport capacity, sewage, water mains, etc) which are paid for by the Italians themselves.
Other countries will have similar systems. Some like Kuwait are "paying" back the amounts
spent on arms for example.
The total cost is astronomical.
A brief reminder the USSR collapsed because of massive overspending on arms and military
projects - leaving the rest of the economy in the lurch. Presumably the Chinese and Russians
are expecting the same thing to happen again.
(Aside - yes, you can print dollars as a sovereign state, but printing roubles didn't help
the soviets either)
So McMasters and the others are in fact just spoilt brats who think that the good times are
forever.
----
One example of the new "bluff-calling" cheaper method of economic warfare (*NK is the
another) were the recent NATO/US manoeuvres in Georgia (country) on the anniversary of the
Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. The number of troops and means involved would have been
enough to carry out a "surprise" attack this time too. The Russians - sent in Putin, who
declared that the Russians supported S.Ossetia and were ready to deal with any threat -
exactly as they did "last" time. Cost? One plane trip.
(*The NK threat by the US would have seen about 40'000 men from S. Korea and Japan sent
against about 700'000 motivated local troops and massive artillery arrays. It was a
non-starter, even with nukes)
You are forgetting to mention the main sticking point to talks is our refusal to halt our
annual̶d̶e̶f̶e̶n̶s̶i̶v̶e̶
̶d̶r̶i̶l̶l̶s̶ invasion practice before they will come to
the table. At least from what I read.
Even with China's international financial position growing more robust with SWIFT
independence, AIDB, the New Silk Road and such, they still have an interest in the
Dollar-based western financial system as long as they can make money off of it. They are not
going to shoot themselves in the foot by deliberately causing it to collapse. They might even
prop it up in a crisis, but I suspect they would drive a hard bargain.
Thirdeye says, "But DPRK is still ruled by a cult that believes the Kims are ordained with
supernatural powers." What is American Exceptionalism?
MCMASTER: Says classic deterrence strategy won't work with NK.
"Deterrence is a strategy intended to dissuade an adversary from taking an action not yet
started, or to prevent them from doing something that another state desires."
Classic deterrence strategy IS working for NK perfectly.
What I base my analysis of Bannon is his leadership at Bretibart which may or may not be
continuing right now. Just read Breitbart if you think Bannon isn't fully behind the White
Supremacists rising up right now.
The idea that people (a people) have to suffer a big war in order to cleanse themselves
from moral depravity is fascism pure and simple as who should force people to do this but a
dictator.
All one has to do to know what Bannon's position on Iran is to read Breitbart on any given
day. Unless we are supposed to believe that Bannon's opinions are not reflected by the
website he ran for four years. Bannon is for war against Islam in general, there is nothing
"realist" about his foreign policy.
That's a different issue from entering talks for a formal peace with with ROK. DPRK has
been refusing that for years. Did you ever consider that DPRK's constant saber rattling
against ROK was what lent impetus to US exercises in the region in the first place? The US
knows that China would not tolerate a US invasion of DPRK. Why take the risk of invading
across great defensive terrain when you can simply destroy?
57 Madhatter67
Thirdeye says, "But DPRK is still ruled by a cult that believes the Kims are ordained
with supernatural powers." What is American Exceptionalism?
That's a dumb analogy and a pathetic attempt at deflection. Criticize American
Exceptionalism all you want, but don't compare it to a supernaturalist cult. That's just
stupid.
DPRK has a history of doing whatever they think they can get away with, exploiting their
treaty with China. If their delusional
Suche
ideology leads them to miscalculate or
paints them into a corner trying to prop it up, it could lead to war.
If there's any bright spot in the whole picture it's China's chilly stance towards DPRK
after recent events. The excesses of DPRK's ruling cult have occurred largely because they
figured China had their back. But China's regional interests have changed dramatically over
the past 30 years. ROK is no longer a competitive threat to China and is economically more
important to China than DPRK ever was. DPRK's military power is of much less benefit to China
than it was in the past. It might even be considered a liability.
61 Stonebird
It wouldn't be cash, it would be be assets and/or the means of controlling them. Big
Chinese money is already coming into the west coast of the US and Canada. Oh well, we fucked
things up here; maybe the Chinese will do a better job.
Bannon is against the nuclear deal, and is one of the top people in the administration
arguing for Trump to move the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Bannon has been
cited as promoting Sheldon Adelson's Israel policy in meetings with Trump.
http://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-abbas-lauder-hawkish-adelson-battling-to-influence-trump-on-mideast/
If anything Bannon/Breitbart push an even harder line on Israel than most politicians and
media do.
First of all, I will now declare that I am 99% confused! So please let me review the 1% that
comes through my little keyhole. What has been said?
/~~~~~~~~~~
<< = Just Sayin' | Aug 17, 2017 11:01:18 AM | 30
Anyone with any intelligence would be wise to treat with great caution anything Bannon
claims in public interviews about himself or his alleged political beliefs,
\~~~~~~~~~~
Well sure! The guy's a political operative -- One does not get to be a political operative
by being some kind of a Dudly Do-Right. Damn.
@12... "Bannon is a fascist" I'm not so sure. Mussolini defined fascism as being an
alliance of corporate and state powers... but Bannon (and most of his followers) have no
trust in the corporate sector as they [the corporate sector] are to a large degree Globalists
- they used the US and then threw it aside in pursuit of profit elsewhere. For that, he would
even call them traitors. So you could call him a Nationalist.
\~~~~~~~~~~
Well since we can't believe anything from Bannon... And aside from that I am sick of
hearing Mussolini's definition of fascism -- After all, he was a psycho-villain -- so why
believe it?!
UNTIL WE HAVE STRATEGIC HEDGE SIMPLE SCORE VOTING WE WILL BE SADDLED WITH THE TWO-PARTY
"SYSTEM" (really only one party). Who cares if we really have no choice whatsoever. We are
held hostage to the false alternatives of the vast legion of the election methods
cognoscenti.
@35, please refer to post 69. If Bannon was not a Zionist, he would not have ran a site which
brags of being conceived in Israel and which pushes a harder line on Israel than almost any
other, and he would not be promoting Adelson's Israel policy within the administration.
Bannon makes sense. That must be why many want him gone especially the neocons. As to North
Korea, the US should have admitted "facts on the ground" long ago and worked to sign the
official end of the war and work to get the two Koreas talking and working together.
"That's a different issue from entering talks for a formal peace with with ROK. DPRK has been
refusing that for years."
I doubt any substantial transcripts from early talks will ever be released, so whoever had
diplomats offering the 'fairest' compromises for terms of an early framework (resulting in a
later settlement) cannot be known (regarding specifics).
If I remember correctly, there has been at least three Chinese-sponsored peace conferences
(on Korea) since 2007, where the general position of the U.S. was: North Korea had to freeze
total nuclear production, accept existing and additional (U.N.) verification missions, and
dismantle all warheads PRIOR to the signing of any peace treaty. How is demanding
unconditional surrender not intransigence? Are we going to just pretend the United States
hadn't sponsored military coups in Venezuela and Honduras and hadn't invaded Iraq and Libya
(in a similar time frame)?
During peace talks, any terms are argued, refused, and eventually compromised (usually
over years and sometimes over decades). Why presume the United States and South Korea had the
fairest offers and general settlements in a handful of conferences (especially when we have
no transcripts)?
"Did you ever consider that DPRK's constant saber rattling against ROK was what lent
impetus to US exercises in the region in the first place?"
You're presuming your case and not giving specific information on what you might know.
Personally, I don't know who 'started it' (I would guess Japan 'started it' by forcing
through the Protectorate Treaty of 1905, or the United States 'started it' by forcing through
the Amity and Commerce Treaty of 1858), but if North Korea isn't testing missiles near Guam
and the United States isn't flying specific planes over South Korea, a compromise WAS made
this last week, and more can be made to ensure peace.
But the fired adviser, Rich Higgans, is only the latest chip to fall in an ongoing "purge"
of "America-first" stalwarts from the National Security Council.
The idea that an alliance of Obama holdovers consisting of globalists and Islamists are
working inside the government as part of a "deep state" effort to destroy the Trump presidency
has been a common theme put forth by outside analysts trying to explain the intrigue behind
Trump's first six months in the White House.
But the idea apparently was not confined to outsiders. Higgins, a high-level official inside
the president's National Security Council, sent a memo up the chain of command in May, warning
of just such a plot. Higgins' memo caught the eye of McMaster and cost him his job.
According to a report Wednesday by the Atlantic
, McMaster removed Higgins from his post as
director of strategic planning on July 21 after reading the memo, which was considered too
"conspiratorial."
The memo alleged that leftists, globalists, Islamists and "deep state" actors are engaged in
"political warfare" against Trump. It states:
"Through the campaign, candidate Trump tapped into a deep vein of concern among many
citizens that America is at risk and slipping away. Globalists and Islamists recognize that
for their visions to succeed, America, both as an ideal and as a national and political
identity, must be destroyed."
The memo described the insurrection against Trump as "Maoist" in nature.
"In Maoist insurgencies, the formation of a counter-state is essential to seizing state
power," the memo reads. "Functioning as a hostile complete state acting within an existing
state, it has an alternate infrastructure. Political warfare operates as one of the
activities of the 'counter-state.'
"Because the left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local, national, and
international levels, recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly
interoperate through coordinated synchronized interactive narratives. These attack narratives
are pervasive, full spectrum, and institutionalized at all levels. They operate in social
media, television, the 24-hour news cycle in all media and are entrenched at the upper levels
of the bureaucracies."
Several sources told the Atlantic they believed the memo made its way to Trump's desk, but
that has not been confirmed.
Higgins spent a little more than two months on the job before he was ousted. Prior to
joining the government, Higgins hit on similar issues in his writings, asserting Islam is in an
alliance with secular, Marxist-oriented global elites in an effort to destroy America.
"National Security officials are prohibited from developing a factual understanding of
Islamic threat doctrines, preferring instead to depend upon 5th column Muslim Brotherhood
cultural advisors," he wrote in a September 2016
op-ed for the Washington Times
.
The exit of Higgins and another official within the NSC apparatus, Senior Director for the
Middle East Derek Harvey, could be an indication that the "deep state," if it exists, is
gunning for its ultimate enemy within the White House – former Breitbart executive
chairman Steve Bannon.
Bannon, the president's chief strategist, has already been removed,
at McMaster's behest, from the daily briefings of the NSC.
McMaster recoils at 'list' of Obama holdovers
Like Higgins, Harvey is a Bannon ally. Harvey reportedly kept a list of Obama holdovers who
were seeking to undermine the Trump agenda.
McMaster declined to fire any of the persons on the list and, in fact, made statements at a
NSC town-hall meeting that "there is no such thing as a holdover." He said career federal
staffers were among the most loyal public servants.
Yet, that would seem to conflict with comments made by Obama's own top domestic-policy
adviser, Cecilia Muñoz, in April 2015.
As reported by WND
,
Muñoz, speaking at a symposium of the White House Task Force on New Americans
live-streamed over the Internet, said it was her top priority to "institutionalize" Obama's
policies throughout all federal agencies so they would live on long after she and her boss left
the White House.
In addition to the terminations of Harvey and Higgins, McMaster also purged from the NSC
staff Tera Dahl, a former Breitbart writer and congressional aide to Michele Bachmann.
A fourth Trump conservative, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, has been fired from his position as senior
director for intelligence on the National Security Council, according to a report by
Conservative Review on Wednesday
.
As for the future, continued volatility could be in the cards, depending on McMaster's
ability to retain the president's confidence, said Philip Haney, a former DHS immigration
officer who co-authored the whistleblower book "
See Something, Say Nothing
."
"If you are Trump, you need to realize your people are being purged out of the agencies, one
by one, and if there are no holdovers why is McMaster firing people?" Haney told WND.
"The people he's letting go are not Obama holdovers. He's keeping those designated as
holdovers and purging the people who helped President Trump get elected. So if he's seeking
unity, he seems to be replacing people who are loyal to Trump or prominently supportive of
Trump.
"If you are (presidential deputy assistant) Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon, you've got to
be pretty nervous right now."
More important than the faces of the people leaving or entering the administration is the
future of American foreign policy as it relates to Islamic terrorism and its more subtle
counterpart – civilizational jihad.
Higgins may have tipped his hand to what he believes a responsible national security policy
would look like in his op-ed last fall in the Washington Times.
A strategic reassessment of the entire combating terrorism effort that is free from
politically correct nonsense is long overdue. The "Islam has nothing to do with terrorism"
narratives have effectively shut down the intelligence process for the war in any meaningful
sense. Sure, we CT officers could look at organizations and people and places, some of which
had Islamic names, but we could never dig into the political and ideological reasons the
enemy was attacking us – which is supposed to be the first order of business in any
strategic threat assessment.
He tried to provide a vivid picture to his higher ups of what he believed they were up
against, and he was rewarded with a pink slip.
"... This isn't merely a story of palace intrigue and revolving chairs in the corridors of power. Brave Americans in the uniform of their country will continue to be sent into far-off lands to intercede in internecine conflicts that have little if anything to do with U.S. national security. Many will return physically shattered or mentally maimed. Others will be returned to Andrews Air Force Base in flag-draped coffins, to be saluted by serial presidents of both parties, helpless to stop the needless carnage. ..."
"... Ron Maxwell wrote and directed the Civil War trilogy of movies: ..."
"... Great piece. Thank you, Mr. Maxwell. Reading this, I burn with anger -- then a sense of utter futility washes over me. I think history will show that the Trump era was the moment the American people realized that the Deep State is more powerful than the presidency. ..."
"... The rogues' gallery of neocons and apprentice neocons described above is really disturbing. We didn't vote for this. ..."
"... Re Nikki Haley, she's already an embarrassment, an ignorant neocon-dependent. She's dragging us down the same old road of anti-Russia hysterics and Middle East meddling. The best that can be said of her presence at the UN is that by putting her there Trump promoted one of his allies into the SC governor's mansion. I don't think he was under any illusions as to her foreign policy knowledge, competence, or commitment to an America First policy. But she's become a vector for neocons to reinfect government, and she needs to be removed. ..."
"... Neoconism and neoliberalism is like a super-bug infection. None of the anti-biotics are working. We have only one hope left. Rand Paul, the super anti-neocon/neoliberal. ..."
"... In this country we can talk about resenting elites all we want, but when it comes to making American foreign policy there still is an American foreign policy elite – and it's very powerful. Why has there been no debate? Actually, Michael Mandelbaum, an author with whom I seldom agree on anything, but in his book "The Frugal Superpower" he actually tells you why there's no debate in the foreign policy establishment. ..."
"... And to be part of the establishment you have to buy into it – to its ideology, to its beliefs system, and that is a very hard thing to break. And so before we all jump up and down and say, "Wow! Donald Trump won! NATO is going to be changed. Our commitments in East Asia are going to change. The Middle East may change!" We'd better take a deep breath and ask ourselves, and I think Will Ruger raised this point on the first panel, where is the counter-elite? ..."
"... Where is a Trumpian counter-elite that not only can take the senior positions in the cabinet like Defense Secretary and Secretary of State, but be the assistant secretaries, the deputy assistant secretaries, the NSC staffers. ..."
"... I think that elite doesn't exist right now, and that's a big problem, because the people who are going to be probably still in power are the people who do not agree with the kinds of foreign policy ideas that I think most of us in this room are sympathetic to. So, over time maybe that will change. ..."
"... The problem with the neocons is that their ambition vastly exceeds their ability. ..."
Rex Tillerson, formidably accomplished in global business, was nevertheless as much a neophyte
as his boss when it came to navigating the policy terrain of the D.C. swamp. As is well known, in
building his team he relied on those two neocon avatars, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, who had
originally promoted his own candidacy for secretary of state. But Rice had been a vocal part of the
neocon Never Trump coalition. Her anti-Trump pronouncements included: "Donald Trump should not be
president .He doesn't have the dignity and stature to be president." The Washington Post greeted
her 2017 book, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom , as "a repudiation of Trump's
America First worldview."
Thus it wasn't surprising that Rice would introduce Elliott Abrams to Tillerson as an ideal candidate
for State's No. 2 position. This would have placed a dyed-in-the-wool neocon hardliner at the very
top of the State Department's hierarchy and given him the power to hire and fire all undersecretaries
across the vast foreign policy empire. Rice, one of the architects of George W. Bush's failed policies
of regime change and nation building, would have consolidated a direct line of influence into the
highest reaches of the Trump foreign policy apparatus.
Not only was Abrams' entire career a refutation of Trump's America First foreign policy, but he
had spent the previous eighteen months publicly bashing Trump in harsh terms. Cleverly, however,
he had not signed either of the two Never Trump letters co-signed by most of the other neocon foreign
policy elite. Abrams almost got the nod, except for a last-minute intervention by Trump adviser Steve
Bannon, who was armed with every disparaging anti-Trump statement Abrams had made. Examples: "This
is a question of character. He is not fit to sit in the chair of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
.his absolute unwillingness to learn anything about foreign policy .Hillary would be better on foreign
policy. I'm not going to vote for Trump ."
But Abrams' rejection was the exception. As a high profile globalist-interventionist he could
not easily hide his antipathy toward the Trump doctrine. Others, whose track records and private
comments were more easily obscured, were waived in by gatekeepers whose mission it was (and remains)
to populate State, DoD, and national security agencies with establishment and neocon cadres, not
with proven Trump supporters and adherents to his foreign policy.
But how did the gatekeepers get in? Romney may have disappeared from the headlines, but he never
left the sidelines. His chess pieces were already on the board, occupying key squares and prepared
to move.
Once the president opened the door to RNC chairman Reince Priebus as his chief of staff, to Rex
Tillerson at State, to James Mattis as defense secretary, and to H. R. McMaster at NSC, the neocons
just walked in. While each of these political and military luminaries may publicly support the president's
policies and in some instances may sincerely want to see them implemented, their entire careers have
been spent within the establishment and neocon elite. They don't know any other world view or any
other people.
Donald Trump ran on an America First foreign policy, repeatedly deriding George W. Bush for invading
Iraq in 2003. He criticized Clinton and Obama for their military interventions in Libya and their
support for regime change in Syria. He questioned the point of the endless Afghan war. He criticized
the Beltway's hostile obsession with Russia while it ignored China's military buildup and economic
threat to America.
Throughout the campaign Trump made abundantly clear his foreign policy ethos. If elected he would
stop the policy of perpetual war, strengthen America's military, take care of U.S. veterans, focus
particularly on annihilating the ISIS caliphate, protect the homeland from Islamist radicalism, and
promote a carefully calibrated America First policy.
But, despite this clear record, according to Politico and other Beltway journals, the president
has been entreated in numerous White House and Pentagon meetings to sign off on globalist foreign
policy goals, including escalating commitments to the war in Afghanistan. These presentations, conducted
by H.R. McMaster and others, were basically arguments to continue the global status quo; in other
words, a foreign policy that Clinton would have embraced. Brian Hook and Nadia Schadlow were two
of the lesser known policy wonks who participated in these meetings, determining vital issues of
war and peace.
Brian Hook, head of State Department policy planning, is an astute operative and member in good
standing of the neocon elite. He's also a onetime foreign policy adviser to Romney and remains in
close touch with him. Hook was one of the founders, along with Eliot Cohen and Eric Edelman, of the
anti-Trump John Hay Initiative. Hook organized one of the Never Trump letters during the campaign,
and his views are well-known, in part through a May 2016 piece by Julia Hoffe in Politico Magazine.
A passage: "My wife said, 'never,'" said Brian Hook, looking pained and slicing the air with a long,
pale hand. .Even if you say you support him as the nominee," Hook says, "you go down the list of
his positions and you see you disagree on every one."
One might wonder how a man such as Hook could become the director of policy planning and a senior
adviser to Rex Tillerson, advising on all key foreign policy issues? The answer is: the Romney network.
Consider also the case of Margaret Peterlin, assigned as a Sherpa during the transition to guide
Tillerson through the confirmation process. Another experienced Beltway insider, Peterlin promptly
made herself indispensable to Tillerson and blocked anyone who wanted access to him, no matter how
senior. Peterlin then brought Brian Hook onboard, a buddy from their Romney days, to serve as the
brains for foreign policy while she was serving as the Gorgon-eyed chief of staff.
According to rumor, the two are now blocking White House personnel picks, particularly Trump loyalists,
from appointments at State. At the same time, they are bringing aboard neocons such as Kurt Volker,
executive director of the McCain Institute and notorious Russia hawk, and Wess Mitchell, president
of the neocon Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). As special representative for Ukraine negotiations,
Volker is making proclamations to inflame the conflict and further entangle the United States.
Meanwhile, Mitchell, another Romney alumnus and a Brian Hook buddy from the John Hay Initiative,
has been nominated as assistant secretary of state for European and Erurasian affairs. Brace yourself
for an unnecessary Cold War with Russia, if not a hot one. While Americans may not really care whether
ethnic Russians or ethnic Ukrainians dominate the Donbass, these guys do.
Then there's Nadia Schadlow, another prominent operative with impeccable neocon credentials. She
was the senior program officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, where her main job was to underwrite
the neocon project by offering grants to the many think tanks in their network. For the better part
of a decade she pursued a PhD under the tutelage of Eliot Cohen, who has pronounced himself a "Never
Trumper" and has questioned the president's mental health. Cohen, along with H.R. McMaster, provided
editorial guidance to Schadlow for her book extolling nation-building and how we can do more of it.
Relationships beget jobs, which is how Schadlow became deputy assistant to the president, with
the task, given by her boss H.R. McMaster, of writing the administration's National Security Strategy.
Thus do we have a neocon stalwart who wrote the book on nation building now writing President Trump's
national security strategy.
How, we might ask, did these Never Trump activists get into such high positions in the Trump administration?
And what was their agenda at such important meetings with the President if not to thwart his America
First agenda? Put another way, how did Trump get saddled with nearly Mitt Romney's entire foreign
policy staff? After all, the American people did not elect Mitt Romney when they had the chance.
Trump is a smart guy. So is Barack Obama. But even Obama, Nobel Peace Prize in hand, could not
prevent the inexorable slide to violent regime change in Libya, which resulted in a semi-failed state,
tens of thousands killed, and a foothold for Al Queda and other radical Islamists in the Maghreb.
He also could not prevent the arming of Islamist rebels in Syria after he had the CIA provide lethal
arms strictly to "moderate rebels." Unable or unwilling to disengage from Afghanistan, Obama acquiesced
in a series of Pentagon strategies with fluctuating troop levels before bequeathing to his successor
an open ended, unresolved war.
Rumors floating through official Washington suggest the neocons now want to replace Tillerson
at State with Trump critic and Neocon darling Nikki Haley, currently pursuing a one-person bellicose
foreign policy from her exalted post at the United Nations. Not surprisingly, Haley and Romney go
way back. As a firm neocon partisan, she
endorsed his presidential bid in 2011 .
As UN ambassador, Haley has articulated a nearly incoherent jumble of statements that seem more
in line with her own neocon worldview than with Trump's America First policies. Some samples:
"I think that, you know, Russia is full of themselves. They've always been full of themselves.
But that's – its more of a façade that they try and show as opposed to anything else."
"What we are is serious. And you see us in action, so its not in personas. Its in actions and
its what we do."
"The United States calls for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a
part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over
the peninsula to Ukraine."
One must ask: Is Ambassador Haley speaking on behalf of the Trump administration when she says
it is official U.S. policy that Russia, having annexed Crimea, must return it to Ukraine? Is the
Russo-American geopolitical relationship to be held hostage indefinitely because in 2014 the people
of Crimea voted for their political reintegration into Russia, which they had been part of since
1776?
Since there is as much chance of Russia ceding Crimea back to Ukraine as there is of the United
States ceding Texas back to Mexico, does this mean there is no possibility of any meaningful cooperation
with Russia on anything else? Not even in fighting the common ominous threat from Islamist radicalism?
Has Haley committed the American people to this dead-end policy on her own or in consultation with
the President?
On July 14, the Washington Examiner wrote that "Haley's remarks set the tone for Trump's
reversal from the less interventionist, 'America First' foreign policy he campaigned on." Little
wonder, then, that in a little-noticed victory lap of her own, coinciding with the release of her
book, Condoleezza Rice acknowledged the near complete takeover of Trump's foreign policy team. "The
current national security team is terrific," she said. She even gave Trump her anointed blessing
following their recent White House meeting, during which the septuagenarian schoolboy received the
schoolmarm's pat on the head: " He was engaging," she said. "I found him on top of his brief .asking
really good questions." That's a far cry from her campaign-season comment about Trump that he "doesn't
have the dignity and stature to be president."
American foreign policy seems to be on auto-pilot, immune to elections and impervious to the will
of the people. It is perpetuated by an entrenched contingent of neocon and establishment zealots
and bureaucratic drones in both the public and private sector, whose careers, livelihoods, and very
raison d'etre depend on an unchallenged policy of military confrontation with the prestige,
power, and cash flow it generates. Those who play the game by establishment rules are waived in.
Those who would challenge the status quo are kept out. This is the so-called Deep State, thwarting
the will of President Trump and the people who voted for him.
This isn't merely a story of palace intrigue and revolving chairs in the corridors of power.
Brave Americans in the uniform of their country will continue to be sent into far-off lands to intercede
in internecine conflicts that have little if anything to do with U.S. national security. Many will
return physically shattered or mentally maimed. Others will be returned to Andrews Air Force Base
in flag-draped coffins, to be saluted by serial presidents of both parties, helpless to stop the
needless carnage.
Ron Maxwell wrote and directed the Civil War trilogy of movies: Gettysburg, Gods and
Generals, Copperhead.
This is all very convincing, but the point remains: Trump won and is the one responsible for allowing
all these neocons through the door. Had Pat Buchanan won the nomination and the Presidency back
in the nineties, does anyone believe he would make the same blunders, and not be equipped to find
the right traditional conservatives instead of the establishment DC neocons that try and swamp
every GOP Administration now since Reagan? Trump is simply too naive and doesn't have any feel
for the political ideologies of all of these people, being not much of a political animal himself.
And replacing Priebus with General Kelly isn't likely to change all that. He should be talking
to Ann Coulter and Buchanan as unofficial advisers or something.
Interesting argument, though you ignore other factors besides the conspiratorial-sounding "Romney
network" that account for American interventionist neo-conservatives finding their way back into
power: 1) that they are by far the largest group of people available to staff the government because
of a) the dominance of aggressive liberal internationalism over more restrained realism in graduate
schools which educate these foreign policy specialists; b) an inherent bias of these specialists
not to admit that America cannot influence world events (that would be like a social worker who
didn't believe s/he could usually mediate conflicts). Also, 2) Trump's alleged non-interventionist
beliefs are less well-formed than you imply, you just project on him what you wish to see; a)
you ignore his comments about taking the oil of other countries, an idea the neo-conservatives
had as a way to pay for operations in Iraq; and b) Beliefs closer to Trump's core: that others
not paying their fair share and that America is being taken advantage of, are not incompatible
with the American interventions you oppose.
You can't hijack an executive's policy unless the executive is either hopelessly weak or a faker.
Doesn't matter which.
The only good part is that the fake image of a somewhat less warlike "Trump", stirred up by
the media to destroy Trump, is actually DOING what a real non-interventionist Trump would have
done. EU is breaking away from US control, just as a real antiwar Trump would have ordered it
to do.
Great piece. Thank you, Mr. Maxwell. Reading this, I burn with anger -- then a sense of utter
futility washes over me. I think history will show that the Trump era was the moment the American
people realized that the Deep State is more powerful than the presidency.
It's good to see Ron Maxwell published in these pages. I watch Gettysburg at least once a year.
And don't think Virginians aren't grateful for Maxwell's role in helping put paid to Eric Cantor's
political career.
The rogues' gallery of neocons and apprentice neocons described above is really disturbing.
We didn't vote for this. And we don't want it.
Re Nikki Haley, she's already an embarrassment, an ignorant neocon-dependent. She's dragging
us down the same old road of anti-Russia hysterics and Middle East meddling. The best that can
be said of her presence at the UN is that by putting her there Trump promoted one of his allies
into the SC governor's mansion. I don't think he was under any illusions as to her foreign policy
knowledge, competence, or commitment to an America First policy. But she's become a vector for
neocons to reinfect government, and she needs to be removed.
Neoconism and neoliberalism is like a super-bug infection. None of the anti-biotics are working.
We have only one hope left. Rand Paul, the super anti-neocon/neoliberal.
"Trump is a smart guy" ..
??
If so; why does he not see this happening all around him? Except for his pompous, ignorant, hands-off
method of governing, that is . The Emperor has no clothes but doesn't seem to know, nor care that
he doesn't
Christopher Layne, Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security, Texas A&M at the American Conservative
Conference "Foreign Policy in America's Interest" (Nov 15 2016) said:
"In this country we can talk about resenting elites all we want, but when it comes to making
American foreign policy there still is an American foreign policy elite – and it's very powerful.
Why has there been no debate? Actually, Michael Mandelbaum, an author with whom I seldom agree
on anything, but in his book "The Frugal Superpower" he actually tells you why there's no debate
in the foreign policy establishment.
You see, debate is – basically goes from here to there [Dr. Layne puts his two index fingers
close together in front of his face], like from the 45-yard-line to the 45-yard-line. And why
does it stop there? Because people who try to go down towards the goal line have their union cards
taken away. They're kicked out of the establishment. They're not listened to. They're disrespected.
And to be part of the establishment you have to buy into it – to its ideology, to its beliefs
system, and that is a very hard thing to break. And so before we all jump up and down and say,
"Wow! Donald Trump won! NATO is going to be changed. Our commitments in East Asia are going to
change. The Middle East may change!" We'd better take a deep breath and ask ourselves, and I think
Will Ruger raised this point on the first panel, where is the counter-elite?
Where is a Trumpian
counter-elite that not only can take the senior positions in the cabinet like Defense Secretary
and Secretary of State, but be the assistant secretaries, the deputy assistant secretaries, the
NSC staffers.
I think that elite doesn't exist right now, and that's a big problem, because the people who
are going to be probably still in power are the people who do not agree with the kinds of foreign
policy ideas that I think most of us in this room are sympathetic to. So, over time maybe that
will change.
Over time maybe a counter-elite will emerge. But in the short term I see very little prospect
for all the big changes that most of us are hoping to see, and so for me the challenge that we
face is really to find ways to develop this counter-elite than can staff an administration in
the future, that has at least what we think are the views that Donald Trump holds."
We're in a new period – a period of learning for President Trump and for those in the administration
who back his anti-establishment foreign policy view. And while it is true that (as Chris Layne
said) "in the short term I see very little prospect for all the big changes that most of us are
hoping to see," as we move into the medium and long term, many of us are hopeful that these big
Trumpian foreign policy changes can begin to be made.
A senior administration official familiar with the work of Nadia Schadlow, a national security
expert brought on to help draft the National Security Strategy, tells CR that she will attempt
to produce an NSS as "iconoclastic as our new commander in chief," adding, "the era of milquetoast
boilerplate is over."
The problem with the neocons is that their ambition vastly exceeds their ability. Neocons developed
their minds in the Cold war dealing with a western power, the USSR. The problem is that once one
enters the Middle East and Asia one is dealing with languages and cultures of which they [knew]
next to nothing. How many speak Arabic, Farsi, Turkish and Urdu such that they understand every
nuance of what is said and unsaid?
When dealing with the arabs and many in Afghanistan everything is personnel and this can go
back 5 generations and includes hundreds if not thousands of people.
Trump has the common sense not to become involved in that he does not understand.
They come back in boxes while those who sent them to their deaths remain in the bags of the "America
Second" group which highjacked our Congress. It's no longer "God Bless America"; it's "God Help
America."
Assured Ukraine Sanctions Against Russia Won't Change
Jason Ditz Posted on
April 24, 2017 Categories
News Tags Crimea ,
Russia ,
Tillerson ,
Ukraine Hopes that the US sanctions
against Russia would be quickly rolled back when President Trump was elected in November didn't
pan out, and the latest comments from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggest that the administration
has no intention of removing the sanctions at all.
Speaking with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over the weekend, Tillerson reported told
him that the US sanctions on Russia will remain wholly in place "
until Russia returns control of the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine. " Needless to say, Russia
isn't going to do that.
Crimea was an autonomous oblast within Ukraine until 2014, when they held a referendum and
seceded. After that secession, they sought and gained accession into the Russian Federation, which
the US doesn't recognize. US officials have repeatedly presented this as Russia "invading Crimea"
or "taking Crimea by force," though the peninsula's ethnic Russian majority was able to effectively
secede outright without anything nearly so dramatic happening.
Nobody seriously expects Russia to "give back" Crimea, even if there was a mechanism by which
they could conceivably do so, which there isn't. Conditioning sanctions relief on that is tantamount
to announcing the sanctions as a permanent feature of US policy, a stance which will likely suit
the many Russia hawks in Congress and across Western Europe quite well.
How can a realist bear Nikki Haley and demand return of Crimea ? Only neocon can...
Notable quotes:
"... Specifically Tillerson turned neocon foreign policy orthodoxy on its head by arguing that a foreign policy based on promoting US 'values' carried the risk of obstructing US national security and economic interests: ..."
"... In some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting our values, we probably can't achieve our national security goals. It really creates obstacles to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests. ..."
"... At this point an essential qualification is needed. When US politicians and diplomats talk of a foreign policy based on 'values' they do not mean a foreign policy constructed exclusively around the 'values' Tillerson referred to: "freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world over." People in Saudi Arabia or in the occupied Palestinian territories are not the object of US sympathy despite being denied all these things. ..."
"... Rather when US politicians and diplomats talk of a foreign policy based on 'values' they mean one where the US seeks to use these 'values' as leverage to increase its geopolitical influence as part of an ideological mission to entrench its global position. This is the foreign policy that Tillerson appears to be repudiating ..."
"... On Russia, Tillerson said ''there's almost no trust'' between the world's greatest nuclear powers, but that the administration was trying to rebuild trust by looking at one issue at a time. First up is Syria, as Washington and Moscow see if they can get a cease-fire that can hold. ..."
In first address to State Department and before meeting Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov US Secretary
of State Tillerson repudiates neocon ideas and supports a 'realist' foreign policy.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, delivering his
first address to the staff of the State Department, has set out a vision of US foreign policy
which if different would be radically different from anything seen over the last few decades.
Specifically Tillerson turned neocon foreign policy orthodoxy on its head by arguing that
a foreign policy based on promoting US 'values' carried the risk of obstructing US national security
and economic interests:
In some circumstances, if you condition our national security efforts on someone adopting
our values, we probably can't achieve our national security goals. It really creates obstacles
to our ability to advance our national security interests, our economic interests.
At this point an essential qualification is needed. When US politicians and diplomats talk of
a foreign policy based on 'values' they do not mean a foreign policy constructed exclusively around
the 'values' Tillerson referred to: "freedom, human dignity, and the treatment of people the world
over." People in Saudi Arabia or in the occupied Palestinian territories are not the object of US
sympathy despite being denied all these things.
Rather when US politicians and diplomats talk of a foreign policy based on 'values' they mean
one where the US seeks to use these 'values' as leverage to increase its geopolitical influence as
part of an ideological mission to entrench its global position. This is the foreign policy that Tillerson
appears to be repudiating . Interestingly, in the same speech he is reported to have spoken
about the need to work for better relations with Russia, the country that the neocons have cast as
the US's primary ideological and geopolitical adversary:
On Russia, Tillerson said ''there's almost no trust'' between the world's greatest nuclear
powers, but that the administration was trying to rebuild trust by looking at one issue at a time.
First up is Syria, as Washington and Moscow see if they can get a cease-fire that can hold.
It need hardly be said that within Official Washington these ideas are heresy and it is far from
certain whether most of the other officials in the Trump administration share them.
The President has however spoken similarly in the past and it seems that for the moment Tillerson
has his support.
Ok, dunno the official Naked Capitalism stance on Mike Cernovich. So if all links to him are verboten,
no probs . (from April 8)
Given that above link citing a McMaster aide, throwing out this Cernovich article on his observation
on how the NSC has been filled w/McMaster loyalists (aka Neocon/preemptive-strikers) versus the
Flynn/Bannon camp (aka pragmatic-realists).
McMaster was called Petraeus' golden child by some commenters, noting the strong influence
Petraeus had over McMaster. Petraeus was considered for the position of NSA, but withdrew his
name from consideration once McMaster's name was included on the short-list. McMaster's appointment
allowed Petraeus to maintain control over the NSC without bringing his considerable baggage to
the position ."
oho, I used to look at a lot of right wing stuff and be very skeptical of it. Than my skepticism
of "mainstream" has gone up to be equivalent to my skepticism of the right wing stuff.
You just have to read the stuff and decide for yourself if it is credible AND relevant. I have
found very few "reporters" really are even trying to be objective. I carry no water for Trump
or for Obama – its a very lonely place other than at NC .
EXAMPLE: Napolitano of Fox is suspended because of the article about Obama admin using foreign
intelligence sources.
Now the mediamatters article I link below is critical of Napolitano. I link to it specifically
to distinguish between facts in an article and spin. In my view the article is trying to "spin"
(or emphasize – I'm really not trying to "spin" my comment) the story as to it being about discredited
"wiretapping" and that foreign surveillance was specifically ORDERED by the Obama admin – now,
I AGREE that is a very, very important point that Obama did not order specifically foreign searches
(at least that we know of now) and that as far as that is concerned, the mediamatters point appears
CORRECT.
But in my view, it is NOT THE ONLY POINT. The real point to me is that surveillance on US citizens
can occur without a warrant when it happens overseas, that this is happening constantly, and apparently
this information can come back to the US, again, apparently without any safegrards***. I leave
it to people's own sense of skepticism if this arrangement is ever used to circumvent getting
a warrant on a US citizen (HECK, I leave it to people's skepticism if the FISA court is nothing
but a circumlocution of the US constitution)
The FACT is that there are FACTS out there, and certain people have FACTS they want to emphasize,
and other FACTS they want to de-emphasize ..
***does anyone know when the British have surveillance of US citizens and they send it to the
US, what procedures or constraints on those conversations are???
I believe the controlling law is section 702 of the Patriot Act and Executive Order 16333.
To be sure you should check out Emptywheel's website because she has done a thorough analysis
of all of this and it is all archived in her website.
Unfortunately you are probably right. And a certain portion of the so-called liberal intelligentsia
aka Clinton wing I am exposed to, loves them some General Petraeus. Scary, I know.
Chernovich is considered by NC to be a very reliable source, I think. And his analysis of McMaster's
push for more troops is accurate. I didn't like the article because I felt it failed to account
for the difference in Mattis and McMaster in any coherent way. And Trump just gave the Pentagon
the ability to make its best decisions and follow through on them. (this was reported after Chernovich's
article). Amazing really. But that puts Mattis in charge and he would rather work with the other
interests fighting in Syria than unilaterally. McMaster, it was implied by Chernovich, was all
for sending 150,000 troops in to finish the job. So there is a huge leeway of possibilities according
to Chernovich. Maybe the military is softening up the public to accept what seems to be an attitude
of having had enough and wanting to just go in and take care of business. They all seem to agree
on that.
Also today's link from Reuters re McMaster getting down to business with Russia. McMaster wants
to have the tough talks to sort it all out. Because "Syria's government has got to go." OK, and
McMaster thought Tillerson's trip to Moscow and his meeting with Lavrov was a good start because
relations are so bad right now that there's "nowhere to go but up." I think my compass is pointing
to an agreement with the Russians to remove Assad. But they will never say it. If I were Assad,
I'd want to get out – Syria is rubble, there's not much left to govern; even if his enemies would
leave him alone. They're all just positioning themselves for the best deal they can get. And the
threat of 150K troops on the ground is saying loud and clear that we will be the ones to decide
the new direction for Syria. To my thinking.
You may be right. But that will be the end of Syria. The country is still filled with foreign
backed jihadis who really want to establish an islamic state. The US may think it can take someone
currently residing in France or the US and install them. But there is no one available with any
popular support that I know of. Things almost definitely will get worse for Syria – the carnage
will continue.
And Putin must realize that those insisting that Assad must go also want Putin out as well.
Surely, he sees that he has to draw a line somewhere.
maybe, but I've come to suspect that we like and want Putin there, but we don't want Russian
nationalists to know it it's so convoluted you can almost read anything into it so the best way
to grok it is to imagine the most useful and beneficial solutions. Which are few.
IMHO, you could not be more wrong. Russians went into Syria in Sept. 2015 – after notifying
the whole world via a UN speech. The decision must have taken months to complete. What makes you
think that after all the work and effort this took, Russians would suddenly reverse course? If
they were to give up on Assad so quickly, why go in in the first place? Remember – they have a
VERY LONG-TERM VIEW (just like the Chinese). The problem with demonising Assad (and anyone, for
that matter) is that the US public ends up with a totally unrealistic view of the subject at hand
(and not just a negative one). Just like with Putin – the story is not just about one man. There
is a large power structure connected to each man. Neither one makes decisions in a vacuum. Russians
and Iranians understand that if they give up on a unified Syria- which is what Assad represents
– they would be next (Chechnya war, anyone?). One must assess these things from the perspective
of the other – not from what the US would like.
The army is scattered to the four winds. Can McMaster render up 150,000 soldiers? 150 k means
450,000. one third in the field, one third recovering, and one third on stand by according to
the Shinseki ratio.
"... Given that above link citing a McMaster aide, throwing out this Cernovich article on his observation on how the NSC has been filled w/McMaster loyalists (aka Neocon/preemptive-strikers) versus the Flynn/Bannon camp (aka pragmatic-realists). ..."
"... "Petraeus' influence in the NSC remains strong. McMaster was called Petraeus' golden child by some commenters, noting the strong influence Petraeus had over McMaster. Petraeus was considered for the position of NSA, but withdrew his name from consideration once McMaster's name was included on the short-list. McMaster's appointment allowed Petraeus to maintain control over the NSC without bringing his considerable baggage to the position . ..."
"... maybe, but I've come to suspect that we like and want Putin there, but we don't want Russian nationalists to know it. It's so convoluted you can almost read anything into it so the best way to grok it is to imagine the most useful and beneficial solutions. Which are few. ..."
"... In 2017 Putin has become the reliable constant in international affairs, especially next to the idiots who've been doing U.S. foreign policy. People will miss him when he's gone. ..."
"... The problem with demonising Assad (and anyone, for that matter) is that the US public ends up with a totally unrealistic view of the subject at hand (and not just a negative one). Just like with Putin – the story is not just about one man. ..."
"... The army is scattered to the four winds. Can McMaster render up 150,000 soldiers? 150k means 450,000. one third in the field, one third recovering, and one third on stand by according to the Shinseki ratio. ..."
Ok, dunno the official Naked Capitalism stance on Mike Cernovich. So if all links to him are verboten,
no probs . (from April 8)
Given that above link citing a McMaster aide, throwing out this Cernovich article on his observation
on how the NSC has been filled w/McMaster loyalists (aka Neocon/preemptive-strikers) versus the Flynn/Bannon
camp (aka pragmatic-realists).
"Petraeus' influence in the NSC remains strong. McMaster was called Petraeus' golden child
by some commenters, noting the strong influence Petraeus had over McMaster. Petraeus was considered
for the position of NSA, but withdrew his name from consideration once McMaster's name was included
on the short-list. McMaster's appointment allowed Petraeus to maintain control over the NSC without
bringing his considerable baggage to the position ."
oho, I used to look at a lot of right wing stuff and be very skeptical of it. Than my skepticism
of "mainstream" has gone up to be equivalent to my skepticism of the right wing stuff.
You just have to read the stuff and decide for yourself if it is credible AND relevant. I have
found very few "reporters" really are even trying to be objective. I carry no water for Trump
or for Obama – its a very lonely place other than at NC .
EXAMPLE: Napolitano of Fox is suspended because of the article about Obama admin using foreign
intelligence sources.
Now the mediamatters article I link below is critical of Napolitano. I link to it specifically
to distinguish between facts in an article and spin. In my view the article is trying to "spin"
(or emphasize – I'm really not trying to "spin" my comment) the story as to it being about discredited
"wiretapping" and that foreign surveillance was specifically ORDERED by the Obama admin – now,
I AGREE that is a very, very important point that Obama did not order specifically foreign searches
(at least that we know of now) and that as far as that is concerned, the mediamatters point appears
CORRECT.
But in my view, it is NOT THE ONLY POINT. The real point to me is that surveillance on US citizens
can occur without a warrant when it happens overseas, that this is happening constantly, and apparently
this information can come back to the US, again, apparently without any safegrards***. I leave
it to people's own sense of skepticism if this arrangement is ever used to circumvent getting
a warrant on a US citizen (HECK, I leave it to people's skepticism if the FISA court is nothing
but a circumlocution of the US constitution)
The FACT is that there are FACTS out there, and certain people have FACTS they want to emphasize,
and other FACTS they want to de-emphasize ..
***does anyone know when the British have surveillance of US citizens and they send it to the
US, what procedures or constraints on those conversations are???
I believe the controlling law is section 702 of the Patriot Act and Executive Order 16333.
To be sure you should check out Emptywheel's website because she has done a thorough analysis
of all of this and it is all archived in her website.
Unfortunately you are probably right. And a certain portion of the so-called liberal intelligentsia
aka Clinton wing I am exposed to, loves them some General Petraeus. Scary, I know.
Chernovich is considered by NC to be a very reliable source, I think. And his analysis of McMaster's
push for more troops is accurate. I didn't like the article because I felt it failed to account
for the difference in Mattis and McMaster in any coherent way. And Trump just gave the Pentagon
the ability to make its best decisions and follow through on them. (this was reported after Chernovich's
article). Amazing really. But that puts Mattis in charge and he would rather work with the other
interests fighting in Syria than unilaterally. McMaster, it was implied by Chernovich, was all
for sending 150,000 troops in to finish the job. So there is a huge leeway of possibilities according
to Chernovich. Maybe the military is softening up the public to accept what seems to be an attitude
of having had enough and wanting to just go in and take care of business. They all seem to agree
on that.
Also today's link from Reuters re McMaster getting down to business with Russia. McMaster wants
to have the tough talks to sort it all out. Because "Syria's government has got to go." OK, and
McMaster thought Tillerson's trip to Moscow and his meeting with Lavrov was a good start because
relations are so bad right now that there's "nowhere to go but up." I think my compass is pointing
to an agreement with the Russians to remove Assad. But they will never say it. If I were Assad,
I'd want to get out – Syria is rubble, there's not much left to govern; even if his enemies would
leave him alone. They're all just positioning themselves for the best deal they can get. And the
threat of 150K troops on the ground is saying loud and clear that we will be the ones to decide
the new direction for Syria. To my thinking.
You may be right. But that will be the end of Syria. The country is still filled with foreign
backed jihadis who really want to establish an islamic state. The US may think it can take someone
currently residing in France or the US and install them. But there is no one available with any
popular support that I know of. Things almost definitely will get worse for Syria – the carnage
will continue.
And Putin must realize that those insisting that Assad must go also want Putin out as well.
Surely, he sees that he has to draw a line somewhere.
maybe, but I've come to suspect that we like and want Putin there, but we don't want Russian
nationalists to know it. It's so convoluted you can almost read anything into it so the best way
to grok it is to imagine the most useful and beneficial solutions. Which are few.
In 2017 Putin has become the reliable constant in international affairs, especially next
to the idiots who've been doing U.S. foreign policy. People will miss him when he's gone.
IMHO, you could not be more wrong. Russians went into Syria in Sept. 2015 – after notifying
the whole world via a UN speech. The decision must have taken months to complete.
What makes you think that after all the work and effort this took, Russians would suddenly
reverse course? If they were to give up on Assad so quickly, why go in in the first place? Remember
– they have a VERY LONG-TERM VIEW (just like the Chinese).
The problem with demonising Assad (and anyone, for that matter) is that the US public ends
up with a totally unrealistic view of the subject at hand (and not just a negative one). Just
like with Putin – the story is not just about one man. There is a large power structure connected
to each man. Neither one makes decisions in a vacuum. Russians and Iranians understand that if
they give up on a unified Syria- which is what Assad represents – they would be next (Chechnya
war, anyone?). One must assess these things from the perspective of the other – not from what
the US would like.
The army is scattered to the four winds. Can McMaster render up 150,000 soldiers? 150k
means 450,000. one third in the field, one third recovering, and one third on stand by according
to the Shinseki ratio.
Arnaldo Claudio, a retired senior US Military Police officer, discusses his 2005 investigation
of human rights abuses of detainees in Tal Afar, in a camp commanded by then-Colonel H.R. McMaster,
whom Claudio threatened to arrest. According to Claudio, detainees were kept in overcrowded conditions,
handcuffed, deprived of food and water, and soiled by their own urine and feces. A so-called "good
behavior program" was implemented by McMaster, that held detainees indefinitely (beyond a rule
requiring release after 2 weeks) unless they provided "actionable intelligence."
"... Donald Trump – and/or the alphabet soup of US intelligence agencies, with no detailed investigation – are convinced that the Russian Ministry of Defense is simply lying. ..."
"... Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, stressing "fully objective and verified" information, identified a Syrian Air Force strike launched against a "moderate rebel" warehouse east of the town of Khan Sheikhoun used to both produce and store shells containing toxic gas. ..."
"... Konashenkov added the same chemicals had been used by "rebels" in Aleppo late last year, according to samples collected by Russian military experts. ..."
"... And Western public opinion conveniently forgot that before Barack Obama's theoretically trespassed red line on chemical weapons, a secret US intelligence report had made it clear that Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria, had mastered the sarin gas-making cycle and was capable of producing it in quantity. ..."
"... So those toxic weapons that "disappeared" – en masse - from Gaddafi's arsenals in 2011 ended up upgrading al-Qaeda in Syria (not the Islamic Stare/Daesh), re-baptized Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and widely described across the Beltway as "moderate rebels". ..."
"... Trump's ambassador to the UN, Heritage Foundation asset Nikki Haley, predictably went ballistic, monopolizing the whole Western news cycle. Lost in oblivion, also predictably, was Russia's deputy UN ambassador Vladimir Safronkov shattering to bits the West's "obsession with regime change" in Syria, which is "what hinders this Security Council." ..."
"... Idlib Chemical Attack: West Blames Assad Even Before Probe Launched Safronkov stressed the chemical attack in Idlib was based on "falsified reports from the White Helmets", an organization that has been "discredited long ago". Indeed; but now the Helmets are Oscar winners , and this pop culture badge of honor renders them unassailable – not to mention immune to the effects of sarin gas. ..."
"... The dead "children of Syria" are now pawns in a much larger, perverse game. The US government may have killed a million men, women and children in Iraq – and there was no serious outcry among the "elites" across the NATO spectrum. A war criminal still at large admitted , on the record, that the snuffing out, directly and indirectly, of 500,000 Iraqi children was "justified." ..."
"... For his part, Nobel Peace Prize Barack Obama instrumentalized the House of Saud to fund – and weaponize - some 40 outfits "vetted" by the CIA in Syria. Several of these outfits had in fact already merged with, or were absorbed by, Jabhat al-Nusra, now Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. And they all engaged in their own massacres of civilians. ..."
"... The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik. ..."
"These heinous acts by the Assad regime cannot be tolerated." Thus spoke the President of
the United States.
Instant translation;
Donald Trump – and/or the alphabet soup of US intelligence agencies, with no
detailed investigation – are convinced that the Russian Ministry of Defense is simply lying.
Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, stressing
"fully objective and verified" information,
identified a Syrian Air Force strike launched against a "moderate rebel" warehouse east of the
town of Khan Sheikhoun used to both produce and store shells containing toxic gas.
Konashenkov added the same chemicals had been used by "rebels" in Aleppo late last year, according
to samples collected by Russian military experts.
Still, Trump felt compelled to telegraph what is now his own red line in Syria; "Militarily, I
don't like to say when I'm going and what I'm doing. I'm not saying I won't do anything one way or
another, but I certainly won't be telling you [the media]."
By his side at the White House lawn, the pathetic King Playstation of Jordan praised Trump's "realistic
approach to the challenges in the region." This might pass as a Monty Python sketch. Unfortunately, it's reality.
And Western public opinion conveniently forgot that before Barack Obama's theoretically trespassed
red line on chemical weapons, a secret US
intelligence
report had made it clear that Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria, had mastered the sarin
gas-making cycle and was capable of producing it in quantity.
Not to mention that the Obama administration and its allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar had
made a secret pact in 2012 to set up a sarin gas attack and blame Damascus, setting the scene for
a Shock and Awe replay. Funding for the project came from the NATO-GCC connection coupled with a
CIA-MI6 connection, a.k.a.
rat line , of transferring all manner of weapons from Libya to Salafi-jihadis in Syria.
So those toxic weapons that "disappeared" – en masse - from Gaddafi's arsenals in 2011 ended up
upgrading al-Qaeda in Syria (not the Islamic Stare/Daesh), re-baptized Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and widely
described across the Beltway as "moderate rebels".
'Red Line' Revisited? What's Behind Trump Accusing Damascus of Reported Chemical Attack in Syria
Cornered in Idlib province, these "rebels" are now the top target of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA)
and the Russian Air Force. Damascus and Moscow, unlike Washington, are bent on smashing the whole
Salafi-jihadi galaxy, not only Daesh. If the SAA continues to advance, and if these "rebels" lose
Idlib, it's game over.
So the offensive by Damascus had to be smeared, no holds barred, in full view of global public
opinion.
Yet it does not make any sense whatsoever that only two days before another international conference
on Syria, and immediately after the White House was forced to admit that "the Syrian people should
choose their destiny" and "Assad must go" is over and done with, Damascus should launch a counterproductive
gas attack antagonizing the whole NATO universe.
This walks – and talks - more like the tsunami of lies that predated Shock and Awe on Iraq in
2003, and certainly walks and talks like the renewed turbo-charging of an "al-CIAda" campaign. Jabhat
al-Nusra never ceased to be the CIA's babies in the preferred Syrian regime change scenario.
Your kids are not toxic enough
Trump's ambassador to the UN, Heritage Foundation asset Nikki Haley, predictably went ballistic,
monopolizing the whole Western news cycle. Lost in oblivion, also predictably, was Russia's deputy
UN ambassador Vladimir Safronkov shattering to bits the West's "obsession with regime change" in
Syria, which is "what hinders this Security Council."
Whatever Trump and the Pentagon may eventually come up with an independent US intel analyst, averse
to groupthink, is adamant; "Any air attack on Syria would require coordination with Russia, and Russia
will not allow any air attack against Assad to take place. Russia has the defensive missiles there
that can block the attack. This will be negotiated out. There will be no attack as an attack can
precipitate a nuclear war."
The dead "children of Syria" are now pawns in a much larger, perverse game. The US government
may have killed a million men, women and children in Iraq – and there was no serious outcry among
the "elites" across the NATO spectrum. A war criminal still at
large admitted , on the
record, that the snuffing out, directly and indirectly, of 500,000 Iraqi children was "justified."
For his part, Nobel Peace Prize Barack Obama instrumentalized the House of Saud to fund –
and weaponize - some 40 outfits "vetted" by the CIA in Syria. Several of these outfits had in fact
already merged with, or were absorbed by, Jabhat al-Nusra, now Jabhat Fatah al-Sham. And they all
engaged in their own massacres of civilians.
Meanwhile, the
UK keeps merrily weaponizing the House of Saud in its quest to reduce Yemen to a vast famine
wasteland pinpointed by "collateral damage" graveyards. The NATO spectrum is certainly not crying
for those dead Yemeni children. They are not toxic enough.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the official position of Sputnik.
The publication of The Ugly American in 1958 created a sensation in the United States. A scathing critique of arrogant and
inept American diplomatic provincialism, the novel was written as a warning by two Americans - Eugene Burdick and William Lederer
- to their fellow Americans. It is a damning indictment of the stupidity and ignorance, arrogance and ineptitude of those who
were charged with representing the country.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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January 20, 2020 © Photo: Flickr / DonkeyHotey On the 17 September 1656, Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant Puritan, who had won a civil war, and had the English king beheaded in public, railed against England's enemies. There was, he told Parliament that day, an axis of evil abroad in the world. And this axis – led by Catholic Spain – was, at root, the problem of a people that had placed themselves at the service of 'evil'. This 'evil', and the servitude that it beget, was the evil of a religion – Catholicism – that refused the English peoples' desire for simple liberties: " [an evil] that put men under restraint under which there was no freedom and under which, there could be 'no liberty of individual consciousness'".
© AP Photo / Ariana Cubillos Montevideo Calls Venezuela's Guaido 'More Non-Legitimate' Than Maduro's Gov't
