The United States Imperial Government (USIG) claims to be keeping the peace, underwriting the liberal, rules-based international order and safeguarding the global security architecture. This is not true. What the USIG is actually doing is killing people, helping get lots of people killed, and assisting foreign states as they commit corporate suicide. Israel’s ongoing, “plausibly genocidal” slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank is the latest example of this.
The United States is an empire and empire is murder-suicide. Since 9/11, U.S. soldiers have directly killed more than 400,000 civilians and indirectly contributed to the deaths of more than four million civilians. Meanwhile, more soldiers who served in the U.S. government’s Global War On Terror have committed suicide than have been killed in combat. Four times more.
The American People have not escaped suffering as the USIG and its empire have dished out catastrophic devastation in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Mali. The cost of living has exploded. Our infrastructure is in shambles. Public trust in government has collapsed. The military’s “recruitment landscape” is in free fall. And things are so bad at home the government has found a new job: attacking “tent cities” filled with “under-sheltered” people. Murder-suicide.
Then there are the vassal or “client” states. In the propaganda, the empire defends these states from…whatever. But in reality, it helps these states murder people all while creating the conditions for these states to kill themselves. This has been demonstrated recently in Afghanistan (state committed suicide), Ukraine (state is trying to commit suicide) and Israel (state is thinking about committing suicide).
In October, 2001, the USIG invaded Afghanistan and smashed the Taliban-controlled state. In its place was installed a new state with a new military, which Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton describes:
“The new regime was also largely a coalition government of ethnic minorities, the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, being leveraged against the 40 percent plurality Pashtuns, dominant in the east and south of the country where the Taliban are from.”
This coalition regime could not exist without billions of U.S. dollars in its coffers, U.S. boots on the ground, and U.S. air power in the sky. As predicted by Horton, as soon as U.S. forces began their withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan state (along with its military) immediately killed itself. The Taliban resurrected their state which the U.S. had smashed almost twenty years earlier.
In February 2014, the USIG backed a violent, neo-Nazi led coup in Ukraine. Instead of smashing the entire state, the coup overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration. Unlike Afghanistan’s anti-Taliban government in a box, the Ukrainian government under new management was capable of existing without a massive U.S. military presence. It was not, however, capable of winning a war with Russia. It took eight years, but the USIG managed to provoke a war with Russia.
Ukraine has been defeated but the imperial wizards in DC refuse to admit this truth and seek peace. There could have been a peace deal two years ago, when it was still fashionable for Americans to fly the Ukrainian flag outside their front doors, but the USIG crushed it. The Ukrainian state is bleeding out and continuing the war at this point puts the entire Ukrainian nation at risk. Russia could seize all of Ukraine and downgrade it from sovereign nation to a Russian aircraft carrier.
Israel has been fortunate to never have its state murdered or regime changed by the USIG. Quite the opposite; Israel has intervened in USIG affairs to a shocking extent. The Israel lobby wields massive influence in Washington DC, so much so that President Joe Biden is risking his re-election chances by refusing to stop producing Israel’s “plausibly genocidal” mass killing spree in Gaza.
This gleeful and live streamed spree of sadism has not been good for Israel. Its state is provoking the global community to view it as a deranged pariah, including the great powers of Russia and China. Even within America, the people want a ceasefire. We want it to stop.
Meanwhile, Israeli society is cracking. Approximately 200,000 Israelis have been displaced from their homes in the south and north of the country. The IDF has suffered thousands of casualties, the economy is destabilized, and fear has blanketed the land.
And now Israel is planning an invasion of southern Lebanon. Such an invasion would be a hoped for but unexpected gift to Hamas. Experts such as Col. Douglas Macgregor, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Lt. Col Daniel Davis, Alastair Crooke, John Mearsheimer and Robert Pape have all warned against the invasion. They have argued that Israel risks catastrophic fallout from such a move, from mass causalities to provoking a regional war and even suffering strategic defeat.
Israel supporters seem confident in its security state, despite its massive failure on October 7. Tel Aviv appears to be operating with the assurance that the U.S. military will step in with strike packages and boots on the ground if and when needed. And yes, DC will let American cities die while it views Israel as too big to fail.
But the empire is beset by incompetence and anyone who paid attention to the self-immolation of the Afghan state and the slow suicide of the Ukrainian state knows this isn’t going to end well.
Taiwan, watch your six.
