Since the George W. Bush era, when it comes to presidential elections, the American people have come to expect that the final contestants will be jingoes. After the primaries have finished and the nominees have been named, it can be presumed that both candidates will support, among other horrible things, an indefinite continuation of the overseas economic warfare, endless counter terrorism missions, support for authoritarian governments, and the assorted regime change operations synonymous with American foreign policy.
At this point, we have entered an era where the options are even worse. It almost goes without saying that whomever the process turns out will still back the above hyper-interventionist foreign policy. But now it is practically certain that the so called ‘serious’ or ‘electable’ contenders will be ultra-belligerent toward Russia and China, the next two greatest nuclear superpowers. With hindsight, we can say this was ultimately true even in former President Donald Trump’s case.
Contrary his orange, cartoonish caricature in the corporate press, Trump was a dangerous hawk on Russia. By his second month in office, he was sending U.S. troops and tanks to Russia’s next-door neighbor, Estonia, to participate in NATO military exercises. In February 2018, while illegally occupying eastern Syria, the Trump administration actually bombed and killed Russians. An early Reuters report said some 300 mercenaries “working for a Kremlin-linked Russian private military firm“ were killed or injured in a battle with US occupation forces and their allies. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman claimed these numbers were wildly exaggerated, but said five of those killed were Russians. Trump bombed Syria’s government over chemical weapons attack allegations that turned out to be false flags. This was the case in Douma, where elements in the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons perpetrated a cover-up since exposed by whistleblowers. Trump imposed myriad sanctions on Russia and expanded NATO. He sent anti-tank missiles to the U.S. installed regime in Ukraine, something even Obama, who launched the coup there, as well as a devastating proxy war backing al Qaeda against Moscow’s allies in Syria, wouldn’t do.
He also directed massive amounts of taxpayer money, more than a trillion dollars over three decades, toward revamping U.S. nukes. This focus on the nuclear arsenal was largely done with an eye toward Moscow.
As Caitlin Johnstone has written, “…Trump’s Department of Defense rolled out a Nuclear Posture Review which CNN itself called ‘its toughest line yet against Russia’s resurgent nuclear forces.’”
“In its newly released Nuclear Posture Review, the Defense Department has focused much of its multibillion nuclear effort on an updated nuclear deterrence focused on Russia,” CNN reported last year.
This revision of nuclear policy includes the new implementation of “low-yield” nuclear weapons, which, because they are designed to be more “usable” than conventional nuclear ordinances, have been called “the most dangerous weapon ever” by critics of this insane policy. These weapons, which can remove some of the inhibitions that mutually assured destruction would normally give military commanders, have already been rolled off the assembly line.”
During their first call together, President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin successfully saved the New Start Treaty. Post-Trump administration, New Start is the only significant arms control agreement between Washington and Moscow left standing. Trump withdrew the U.S. from both the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and Open Skies. New Start, negotiated during the Obama administration, restricts the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons between the two countries. For all of humanity, this five-year extension is very good news.
But that’s where the good news abruptly runs out. Biden is continuing this trend of bellicosity aimed at Russia and China.
Biden has done more than taunt Moscow. It was recently reported that Biden is deploying four B-1 bombers to Norway in a message to Putin. Following the Trump administration, Biden seeks to increase US military assets and personnel in the Arctic baiting Russia.
Russia hawks and NATO are hoping the U.S. keeps up the military activity in the Black Sea this year.
According to Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Navy spent 82 days in the Black Sea in 2020, down 19 days from the previous year.
Later that weekend, a Russian fighter plane made a low pass over the USS Donald Cook. The next day, the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet stated the USS Porter was conducting military drills in the Black Sea with the Ukrainian Navy.
Biden would include Ukraine and Georgia in NATO; which, before the ink is dry, would start a war pitting the U.S. against Russia. Antony Blinken, Biden’s Secretary of State and right hand man on foreign policy, also supports bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.
It could be worse. War criminal Michele Flournoy, an arch anti-China hawk, was originally assumed to be Biden’s Defense Secretary pick. In the event of a war, she advocates for the U.S. to build the capability to sink the entire Chinese military and civilian merchant fleet within the first 72 hours.
Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies have described Flournoy’s weapons wish list, “Flournoy’s solution to what she presents as a growing threat from China is to invest in a new generation of weapons, including hypersonic and long-range precision missiles and more high-tech unmanned systems.”
Back in December, Trump’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley echoed similar recommendations calling for US superiority in advanced weapons systems. Saying as well that, “If you put in artificial intelligence and you do man-machine teaming, add that to robotics, put in precision munitions and the ability to sense and see, throw in a few hypersonic weapons, and you’ve got a fundamental shift.”
Flournoy likely still holds great influence over the current administration’s foreign policy being the former business partner of Antony Blinken at WestExec Advisors, their military-industrial complex linked consulting firm. Their slogan was “bringing the situation room to the board room.” Also critical is her role as founder at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the neoconservative think tank, where Victoria Nuland was CEO. CNAS is one of the think tanks where multiple people on Biden’s Pentagon team hail from, including another China hawk recently appointed as an advisor to Defense Secretary Austin, Ely Ratner. Ratner said, in report for CNAS, the US must counter China with a “combat-credible posture in the Indo-Pacific.”
In 2016, Flournoy was tipped as Hillary Clinton’s choice for Secretary of Defense, and she co-authored a CNAS report titled “Expanding American Power” with a team of hawks that included former Cheney aide Eric Edelman, PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan and Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. The report was seen as a view of how Clinton’s foreign policy would differ from Obama’s, with calls for higher military spending, arms shipments to Ukraine, renewed military threats against Iran, more aggressive military action in Syria and Iraq…all of which Trump has adopted.
CNAS is funded by, among others, the US State Department, Taiwan’s de facto embassy, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Comcast, Microsoft, Exxon, Mastercard, the Japanese Embassy to the United States, Citigroup, Facebook, Georgetown University, Google, and Raytheon.
Kurt Campbell, former CEO at CNAS and one of the main players behind Obama’s “Asia Pivot,” has been selected by Biden to be the National Security Council’s coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs. In the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, Campbell recently co-authored a piece that argued the US should counter China by “…investing in long-range conventional cruise and ballistic missiles, unmanned carrier-based strike aircraft and underwater vehicles, guided-missile submarines, and high-speed strike weapons.”
Here’s Decamp again, ““[she] said she believes the US should take an “aggressive stance” against Beijing. Haines said that as DNI, she will prioritize countering the threat of China’s “counterintelligence.””
The “diplomats” are no better. Linda Thomas-Greenfield, Biden’s nominee for UN ambassador, has sworn to, if confirmed, act “aggressively against Chinese malign efforts.” Following in the ultra-hawkish former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s footsteps, Blinken has reaffirmed the US rejection of all Beijing’s claims over the waters in the South China Sea. Conducting what it calls “Freedom of Navigation Operations” (FONOPS), the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet will continue to unnecessarily insert itself into disputes between regional actors there who all have overlapping claims over the waters. Blinken has also said former President Donald Trump “was right in taking a tougher approach to China.”
Trump sold Taipei Lockheed Martin’s upgraded F-16s, not since George H.W. Bush has a president sold such arms to the Taiwanese. He also sold them Boeing’s AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missiles (SLAM) that can be fired from the F-16s to hit military and civilian targets inside China’s Nanjing region.
…[U.S. policy shifted] sharply toward a much more aggressive stance on the geo-strategic island at the heart of military tensions between the United States and China.
Branded “Fortress Taiwan” by the Pentagon, the ambitious arms deal was the engineered by Randall Schriver, a veteran pro-Taiwan activist and anti-China hardliner whose think tank had been financed by America’s biggest arms contractors and by the Taiwan government itself.
Since assuming the post of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in early 2018, Schriver has focused primarily on granting his major arms company patrons the vaunted arms deals they had sought for years.
The arms sales Schriver has overseen represent the most dangerous U.S. escalation against China in years.
The British and French will be getting in on the action this year. On the eve of 2021, Lyle Goldstein, Research Professor at the U.S. Naval War College, wrote,
A recent NATO report broke new ground by fingering China as a military threat to Europe for the first time. At first glance, this would seem to indicate that Europe has been listening to Washington’s repeated warnings and has finally come around to the American point of view on the salience of “great power competition” that recognizes both Moscow and Beijing as dangers, with the latter perhaps constituting a more ominous threat.
Next year, both the French and British navies are planning major naval exercises, together with the U.S. and Japan, in the Western Pacific, namely in maritime domains proximate to China.
This week, a French Navy ship and submarine made “patrols” of the South China Sea. The U.S. sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to conduct drills there as well for the first time since last July.
In late January, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech warning against a “new Cold War.” He said “we should respect and accommodate differences, avoid meddling in other countries’ internal affairs and resolve disagreements through consultation and dialogue.”
In response to a question about the speech, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki replied “…our approach remains what it has been…” “We’re in a serious competition with China,” she said.
In its final days as the global hegemon, the American Empire is lashing out. In our lifetimes, this new Cold War could possibly soon morph into a hot war, or a World War, which would imperil all human life.
There is perhaps no greater imperative for the peace movement, the antiwar movement, or the libertarian movement than to expose and oppose these constant military provocations against Russia and China. These occur mostly out of sight and out of mind for the vast majority of the American population. The antiwar movement should permanently change that, as well as dismantle the mass media and government created artificial consensus of enmity toward both countries which could easily translate into war fever as economic and social conditions worsen. The hawks exploit the U.S. government’s numerous failures, political and financial, as well as in dealing with the pandemic, to redirect anger American anger at these targeted states. The American people should shut the U.S. Empire down. It is putting all human life in the crosshairs; it costs us more than a trillion dollars each year. The Empire is what is bankrupting America, along with the Federal Reserve System used to distort the economy to temporarily stave off the inevitable results of all the spending and money printing necessary to fund the endless wars year by year. As these crises spiral out of control, the harsh domestic consequences of U.S. polices are reframed as Russian and Chinese abuses. This occurs while the corporate press and Congress ensure the targeted governments are painted as the ultimate evil. We must smash the bipartisan propaganda paradigm and prevent this imperialist strategy from causing the very conflicts being fomented by the military, neoconservatives, arms dealers, and think tankers.
Some 70% of the Yemeni population live in northern Yemen’s Houthi territory. Since the war began, north Yemen has been under a savage U.S.-backed, Saudi naval blockade. 80% of the country relies on aid to survive and north Yemen is where the widespread malnutrition is most intense. In essence, the designation was a death sentence for those civilians. The Houthis have been in power in Sanaa for six years. The U.S.-backed, Saudi puppet President has spent much of that time on house arrest in Riyadh. Aid groups who wished to help Yemenis in the north, would necessarily have to work with the Houthis and therefore open themselves up to being hit with U.S. sanctions. This policy was designed to tie the hands of the Biden administration as well, who had, during the campaign, already indicated their intention to end the war.
It remains to be seen what “offensive” operations and “relevant” arms sales means exactly. As they say, the devil is in the details. But tentatively, there seems to be reasons for hope. But make no mistake, right now is the time for activists, and concerned citizens opposed to the brutal Yemen war, to redouble their efforts and apply the most pressure on the administration, as well as Congress.
The laughable campaign sales pitch the American people were suffocated with over the past year and before was that Joe Biden, apartheid “Israel’s man in Washington” as well as the de facto author of the Patriot Act, was going save us from President Donald Trump’s fascism and restore “normalcy.”
We were endlessly told that the Trump era’s racism and authoritarianism were an unfortunate, ugly aberration, a hiccup, in the long, progressive arc of history. An arc we are all encouraged to simply love and adore. Of course, all of this is ludicrous.
Biden, as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with his right-hand man and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in their role overseeing hearings on whether or not to invade Iraq lied the American people into the second of almost four American wars. For thirty years, since this January, the U.S. has been bombing Iraq. As a result of the Iraq War, more than a million people were killed.
In his new book covering the sordid history of U.S. interventions and wars in the Middle East, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, Scott Horton tells the story of Biden’s role rolling America into the invasion of Iraq:
Biden did not just support the war. He served as Bush and Cheney’s Senate gatekeeper and whip, guaranteeing a majority vote for the war in the upper chamber while controlled by the opposition party. If Biden had any moral courage at all, he would have stopped that war. All he would have had to do was bring in real experts like former UN weapons inspection chief Scott Ritter and former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni to debunk the case that Iraq was stockpiling banned weapons of mass destruction or had programs that necessitated that war. The senator could have asked Gen. Scowcroft to testify. He could have held up the authorization vote and refused to support an aggressive war. Instead, Biden conspired with the White House to force the authorization through.
Blinken, along with Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Samantha Power, Biden’s pick to head the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), helped engineer the disastrous wars in Libya and Syria. Power served on Barrack Obama’s National Security Council at the time, before being promoted to be UN ambassador, and was one of the main players advocating for the Libyan war.
As Dave Decamp, news editor at Antiwar.com, reported,
Reports from 2011 say the pressure from Power, Rice, and Clinton is what led Obama to intervene militarily in Libya, even though his other top advisors were against it. Then-Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates would later say that in a “51 to 49” decision, Obama decided to bomb Libya.
The U.S.-NATO intervention in Libya that led to the brutal murder of former Libyan ruler Moammar Gaddafi was an absolute disaster. Destabilizing Libya turned the country into a haven for al-Qaeda-linked militants, resulted in targeted killings of black Africans, sparked a refugee crisis in North Africa, and even led to the creation of slave markets.
Additionally, the aforementioned Rice has been tapped to be Biden’s Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Just over a week into his term, a spokesmen from Biden’s State Department said the administration intends to continue Trump’s policy of an indefinite occupation of northeastern Syria. Of course, instead of saying it’s to ‘take the oil,’ like Trump, the Foggy Bottom spokesman said this is now about supporting the Kurds.
Blinken, and the Obama/Biden administration, deliberately took the side of the Saudi/UAE coalition in its war against the people of Yemen, the Middle East’s poorest country. By January 2015, the Houthis, north Yemen’s Zaydi Shi’ite tribesmen, who seized the capital from the Saudi backed puppet government there in late 2014, had an active alliance with CENTCOM against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This was when General Lloyd Austin, Biden’s pick for Defense Secretary, led the Middle East command. The Houthis were then betrayed by the likes of Blinken, then Deputy Secretary of State, and John Kerry, then Secretary of State now Climate Czar. The U.S. backstabbed the Houthis in favor of their enemies AQAP and the Islamic State, both of whom fight for and alongside the Saudis’ coalition. Austin oversaw the double cross and while he gossiped about how he was displeased about it behind the scenes, he never resigned and did what he was told. Before being recently confirmed as ‘War Secretary,’ Austin left CENTCOM and found a seat on the Raytheon board, so he could profit off the war’s countless civilian deaths. The U.S. Navy and Air Force, along with the Saudis, launched effectively a full blockade of the country, where, even prior to the war, 90% of food was imported. The country has since been decimated with conservative UN estimates of nearly a quarter of a million dead, about half due to violence and half from mass starvation, as well as widespread disease, and malnutrition. For years human rights groups and UN agencies have declared this war to be the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis.”
In his Senate confirmation hearings, Blinken promised the Biden regime would end U.S. support for the Saudis’ war in “short order.” Some arms sales have been paused and are under review. The war continues, Yemeni children are still being starved to death and bombed. When will they get to have some “normalcy?”
More than anyone else she is the face of the US-led violent coup against a democratically-elected government in Ukraine in 2014. Nuland not only passed out snacks to the coup leaders, she was caught on a phone call actually plotting the coup right down to who would take power once the smoke cleared.
Unlike the fake Capitol “coup,” this was a real overthrow. Unlike the buffalo horn-wearing joke who desecrated the “sacred” Senate chamber, the Ukraine coup had real armed insurrectionists with a real plan to overthrow the government. Eventually, with the help of incoming Assistant Secretary of State Nuland, they succeeded – after thousands of civilians were killed.
Since 2020, Americans have been implored, even trained, to accept fiat realities at home that would not so long ago have seemed inconceivable. The “new normal” includes arbitrary lockdowns, curfews, censorship, the burgeoningdomestic terror war, and a de facto government economic assault on small businesses, the poor, and the middle class. The American people have been encouraged to wear two masks and binge Tiger King on Netflix instead of rightfully objecting to this faux humanitarian tyranny.
Now it seems the ruling class is preparing us to not only accept but support an ever intensifying, hostile stance against China. This other potentially catastrophic “new normal” is rapidly morphing into a war footing.
Even during this pandemic and financial crisis, cash strapped Americans are expected to pay the tab, one way or the other, now or in the future, for military budgets and government spending levels greater than those of the George W. Bush and Barrack Obama years. This is in accordance with the 2018 National Defense Strategy’s absurd priority to redouble efforts toward so called ‘great power competition’ with Russia and China. In keeping with this new strategy, President Joe Biden said, while on the campaign trail, that he expected the military budget to increase during his rule.
As Dave Decamp, news editor at Antiwar.com reported,
According to a Beijing-based think tank that monitors flights in the region, the U.S. flew at least 60 warplanes near China’s coast in September, The South China Morning Post reported on Tuesday.
The South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) recorded 41 US flights over the disputed South China Sea, six over the East China Sea, and 13 over the Yellow Sea.
In a report released on Monday, the SCSPI said, based on refueling activity, the U.S. could be preparing for long-distance attacks on targets in the South China Sea. The report said the US sent planes from Guam to refuel surveillance planes over the South China Sea.
Fox News’ Tucker Carlson inflamed the anti-China mania before his audience on an almost nightly basis. Considering Carlson’s resume includes working for Bill Kristol at The Weekly Standard, hosting shows on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and applying for a position with the CIA, one wonders how he has been able to so successfully market himself as a populist, anti-establishment hero. Vis a vis China, he has essentially assumed the Rachel Maddow role. This all seems less puzzling given who his father, Dick Carlson, was. Richard W. Carlson was the public liaison for the U.S. Information Agency, director of Voice of America during the Cold War’s final years, and President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tucker now plays an anti-neocon on TV, but bizarrely from 2003-2011, his father was the Vice Chairman of the anti-Iran, neoconservative think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Other significant aspects of Carlson’s term as director included opening a Moscow bureau and coverage of the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations in 1989, the end of Soviet jamming, and establishment of the Creole Service. He also oversaw the newly-launched Radio Martí broadcasting to Cuba.
It seems obvious where Tucker gets his knack for assisting America’s propaganda campaigns against its Cold War foes.
The early days of Biden’s tenure as President should serve as a warning to us all. Ostensibly Biden was elected to mercifully restore “normalcy.” However, he has already continued to turn up the heat on Washington’s cold war with Beijing. Four days into his term, Biden sent an aircraft carrier group into the South China Sea. Seven U.S. warplanes were spotted flying in the area as well.
President Donald Trump seems uninterested in ending any “endless wars.” Before leaving office, he could and should do so in Afghanistan, for example, where U.S. forces—while losing the longest war in our history—have led a brutal occupation for nearly 20 years.
Afghanistan is just one of the places where Donald Trump has set records for the numbers of bombs dropped, in yet another country sadistically and ceaselessly attacked by the U.S. This goes for the unconstitutional, illegal, genocidal wars in Yemen and Somalia as well. Of course, none of these countries, nor their long-suffering populations pose any threat whatsoever to the American people.
In a previous column, this author covered the appointment of the antiwar, retired Col. Douglas Macgregor as senior adviser to Christopher Miller, the new acting Secretary of Defense. Many were cautiously optimistic that the recent Pentagon personnel shake up, that included the appointment of both aforementioned men, could herald an era of genuine last minute ‘America First’ foreign policy decisions. Namely, full U.S. exits from not only Afghanistan, but potentially Iraq and Somalia too.
Last month, the news arrived that after all the rosy predictions by some and the mainstream media pearl clutching over the appointments, Trump delivered virtually nothing.
The War Department announced that troop levels would be down to 2,500 in both Iraq and Afghanistan by January 15.
But under the U.S./Taliban peace plan, the timeline already established was to have troop levels down to 2,500 in Afghanistan by early January.
Due to the previous troop withdrawals from Iraq, which were initiated by Trump to his credit, there are approximately 3,000 soldiers deployed there now. So, all this amounted to was essentially that Trump made plans to take a token 500 troops out of Iraq. The Iraqis have been bombed and savaged by the U.S. military for nearly 30 years, including with chemical weapons such as white phosphorous and depleted uranium. Successive administrations have killed upwards of 2 million people there.
The president has ordered the removal of nearly all ground troops from Somalia, whom were mostly sent there by Trump himself. Even if he withdraws all the boots on the ground, if he doesn’t end America’s air war in Somalia based out of Kenya and Djibouti, where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed, and where these ground troops will largely be relocated, this does not constitute ending the war at all. This is a cynical, empty gesture. It is all too transparent that he is not “bringing troops home from Africa” as Rand Paul claims, this is just optics.
Unfortunately, the likelihood is that Joe Biden will not change his stance on Afghanistan and will use that number, 2,500, as a floor not a ceiling for future deployments. He will probably keep US forces there indefinitely. Biden has said he will also maintain the troop presence in Syria and Iraq, without any plans for extrication, because its ‘complicated.’
With Trump, the people thought they voted for something different, but what they received was more of the same. Like Obama and Bush II, Trump was lying to his base, despicably pretending to be opposed to unnecessary wars in faraway lands. Trump made snide comments about the military industrial complex, etc. while looting the American people to pay for it all. He carried on with his “antiwar” façade while bombing to smithereens the same far flung countries that Bush and Obama nearly destroyed. At the same time, he was starving some of the poorest people in the world, from Venezuela to North Korea, with “maximum pressure” sanctions. He prioritized satiating the Israel first crowd first, and set the stage for brinksmanship with Beijing, as well as Moscow, while ensuring ever higher military budgets.
Cholera, along with the coronavirus pandemic, has further devastated the country as a result of the strategic deprivation of the civilians there. Yemen has seen the greatest cholera epidemic in recorded history, with over 2 million cases and thousands of deaths.
In the waning days of his administration, Trump is not shutting down this moral catastrophe he has forever bylined. Experts agree, the U.S. has the power to end the war but Trump has refused to many times before. This is a president, after all, who infamously celebrated U.S.-Saudi arms sales with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Crown Prince and butcher of Yemen, in his oval office as a great boon for the weapons industry. No instead, his administration is working to designate the Houthis as a terrorist group, further thwarting the delivery of what little aid is able to get through the U.S./Saudi blockade and reach Houthi controlled areas. This measure is designed to prevent Biden from ending the war and further tighten the blockade strangling Yemen. He has also threatened to veto resolutions opposing new arms sales to the UAE including reaper drones, thousands of munitions, and F-35 fighter jets. Trump has previously used his veto powers to block bills that attempted to end the war, including War Powers resolutions. The UAE is allied with al Qaeda on the ground in Yemen, and have been for years, Trump can read about it in the Associated Press. In Yemen, there is little to no distinction between the Islamic State fighters and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This reminds one of Trump’s “bomb the shit” out of ISIS quote. He is, in effect, selling them weapons instead. In the end, Trump did not even have to veto the above efforts, tragically the Senate voted against all the endeavors to block the arms sales.
Trump’s foreign policy was brutal. The UN has said nearly a quarter of a million people have been killed in the treasonous Yemen genocide alone. His trademark sanctions, for instance, have killed more than one hundred thousand Venezuelans.
The president has let his base down. And his base encouraged this by rallying to his defense repeatedly, without ever pressuring him to follow through on his myriad unfulfilled “antiwar” promises. For one thing, maybe they could have used their power to force him to leave Syria, the war he ran most against in 2016. Instead, Trump illegally occupies the country with ground troops ostensibly to take Syria’s oil, further hobbling their recovery after the war.
The antiwar movement knows the hawks will not give up their wars and the loot of said wars easily. The powers that be understand their wars are growing unpopular and have learned to accept that, going forward, the usual, overt John McCain/Hillary Clinton style, across the board jingoism may not win elections. Trump is part of a larger pattern. In the last several years, we have seen a stream of “anti-establishment,” so called “outsiders” who market themselves as “antiwar” by comparison with the former, but who have their own hawkish foreign policies: Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, and Tulsi Gabbard to name a few. Furthermore, Ilhan Omar opposed Trump’s talk of withdrawals from Syria, saying it would empower, among others, Russia. Astoundingly, she even put her signature on an AIPAC circulated, anti-Iran letter. The letter supported an extension of the now lifted, imperialist, UN arms embargo.
The silver lining here is that that Trump has cynically, and for his own nefarious reasons, convinced his base that they are “antiwar.” Thus, he has substantially enlarged the already sizeable ranks of many on the broad right who consider themselves “antiwar.” Perhaps this can be exploited by non-interventionists and the antiwar movement during the coming Biden years. His base may have been too reluctant to call out Trump’s hypocrisy and mass murder. However, they should have no qualms full throatily opposing Biden and his trigger-happy cabinet, insisting they listen up and do what we say.
The American people have grown tired of trillion dollar, “endless wars” but they must cease being placated with mere rhetoric and persona. We must begin demanding, everywhere, that the US immediately get “out now.”
Leading up to his White House exit, President Donald Trump has dramatically increased tensions with Iran, possibly making war inevitable.
In mid-November, The New York Timesreported that, in an oval office meeting, Trump asked his top aides for options for attacking Iran’s civilian nuclear sites. The main target was the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. Trump’s advisers apparently talked him out of the move, citing the unpredictable and far reaching war such a decision could catalyze. Yet he has been said to have left other options on the table.
Natanz had previously been hit with the Stuxnet virus by the US and Israel. The facility was bombed this summer by Israel as part of a protracted covert campaign of sabotage and terrorism against Iran. After the Natanz bombing, Iran decided to move this main center for enriching uranium and building centrifuges underground.
The US congress has shamelessly decided to join Trump, Mike Pompeo, Benjamin Netanyahu, the UAE, and Bahrain in exploiting the mirage of these recent “historic Middle East peace deals.” There is an effort underway to provide US weaponry to Israel that can destroy the nuclear facility wherever it may be.
When Israel sabotaged Iran’s Natanz civilian nuclear enrichment facility on July 3, 2020, Iran would respond by renovating the plant underground. Iran has followed this legal nuclear security strategy before. Israel does not need to acquire bunker buster bombs to maintain a military edge over the new UAE, it needs them to restore an edge over Iran.
So, bipartisan legislation in the US congress takes care of that. If passed, new legislation would permit the sale to Israel of 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs, also known as MOPs, or massive ordnance penetrators, that can penetrate even facilities that are deep underground. Representative Josh Gottheimer, one of the authors of the legislation, offers the assurance that the Mops would “shore up Israel’s qualitative military edge.” But not against the UAE, who will be receiving the US weapons as part of their deal with Israel: against Iran.
These signatory countries to the Abraham Accords, such as Bahrain and the UAE, were no enemies of Israel. This is an American corporate welfare scheme and a sham. It is intended to codify the precedent, as Pompeo has made clear, where so called “peace” agreements can be made between Arab countries and Israel without addressing the Palestinians’ plight. The authoritarian, Gulf fiefdoms are once again backstabbing the Palestinians, whom of course live under the boot of the Israelis in what is the longest modern military occupation, as well as a brutal apartheid regime.
The other goal here is to isolate and box Iran in by surrounding her with enemies armed to the teeth with U.S. weaponry.
The sharp uptick in the already highly aggressive US-Iran policy is owed ostensibly to the fact that Iran has been violating the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). However, upon analysis, it becomes obvious that this is a negotiating tactic. Firstly, the US abrogated itself from the deal. Secondly, the Europeans failed to provide sanctions relief to Iran, for fear of secondary sanctions placed on them by the Americans. Third, the deal itself, in Articles 26 and 36, permits Iran to walk back its commitments under the agreement if the other parties have done so and the US, as well as the Europeans, have left their obligations unfulfilled. Iran waited an entire year before they began to increase their stockpiles of low-enriched uranium and then only enriched slightly above the limits set by the JCPOA.
A bill was just approved in the Iranian parliament to increase enrichment up to 20%. Dave Decamp, assistant news editor at Antiwar.com, breaks the details down,
Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report detailing violations of the JCPOA. The IAEA said Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium reached 2,442.2 kg, which is 12 times the amount allowed under the deal of 202.8kg. The uranium is only being enriched at 4.5 percent, slightly higher than the 3.67 percent permitted under the JCPOA and vastly lower than the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade.
Before the JCPOA was signed, the highest Iran’s uranium enrichment reached was 20 percent, the same amount the new bill calls for. This is not an arbitrary number. The Tehran Research Reactor, which was built by the US in 1967, requires uranium fuel enriched at 20 percent to run. With the fuel enriched at 20 percent, the Tehran Research Reactor can produce medical isotopes, which can be used for things like radiation therapy and advanced medical imaging.
…if Iran does adopt the strategy, it will likely be hyped by the US as the Islamic Republic racing to develop a nuclear bomb. But in reality, the plan would be another calculated transparent effort by Iran to gain leverage for sanctions relief and boost its domestic industries in the meantime.
In an official statement, Pompeo recently boasted, “[t]oday, Iran’s economy faces a currency crisis, mounting public debt, and rising inflation. Prior to the Maximum Pressure campaign, Iran was exporting nearly 2.5 million barrels of oil per day. Now it struggles to export even a quarter of that volume.”
The sanctions and other measures have designedly crippled Iran’s civilians during the Coronavirus crisis. As Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold, of Code Pink, have said “[these sanctions] have affected everything from the price of food and housing to Iran’s ability to obtain life-saving medicines during the pandemic. [Trump] has blocked Iran from getting an IMF $5 billion emergency loan to deal with the pandemic.”
Elliot Abrams, the arch neocon and special envoy to Iran, has said that more sanctions will be piled on Iran with each coming week for the duration of the Trump Presidency. He has gloated that he doubts if it will be even possible for Joe Biden to return to the JCPOA. Sanctions are a precursor to war. Israel’s Settlement Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, a member of the Likud party, said Israel would go to war with Iran if Biden wins the election and tries to return to the JCPOA.
In the last month, military escalations against Iran have significantly increased. Israel has considerably stepped up its bombings of what it usually identifies as Iranian or Iranian linked targets inside Syria, something Tel Aviv has done hundreds of times. It isn’t often though that Israel officially takes credit for its countless bombings of Syria. But after a particular attack on November 18, the IDF took to Twitter to post a video documenting their bombings. Reports show that dozens of people have been killed in these recent weeks’ attacks. It is crucial to note that the Syrian war was fomented from without by aggressors such as Israel, with its American and Gulf allies, through their years of clandestine support for al Qaeda and their fellow travelers against the Bashar al-Assad government. Absurdly, the Israeli ambassador to the UN has demanded the Security Council take action against the invited Iranian presence in Syria. They also dropped leaflets in the south of the country demanding the Syrian Arab Army cut ties with Iran, probably their greatest ally against said terrorists.
In what was seen as a clear message intended for Iran, the US deployed long-range bombers, US Air Force B-52s, to the Middle East. A State Department official, in Abu Dhabi traveling with Pompeo at the time, told the Associated Press “all options are on the table.” Israeli officials told Axios that Israel’s military has recently been ordered to prepare for an impending US strike on Iran during the “sensitive period” before Trump leaves office. The US military ensured tensions simmered further when the USS Nimitz carrier group headed into the Persian Gulf and F-16s were moved from a base in Germany to the UAE.
U.S. Central Command said a detachment of U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets moved from Germany to the UAE. The base in the UAE the F-16s moved to has been at the center of operations for planes patrolling the Persian Gulf to monitor Iran’s navy. The F-16 movement could be a sign the U.S. is preparing for a wider conflict in the region…
The journalist Elijah Magnier told Joanne Leon, of the Around the Empire podcast, that Iran had noted the above actions as preparations for some future event to anticipate. Thus they applied strategic restraint when Israel, likely with the Marxist-Islamist Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) terrorist group, assassinated their top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, outside of Tehran last week. The Israelis have not officially claimed responsibility, although in the pages of the New York Times and elsewhere, they have unofficially taken credit and even demanded that the hit be celebrated.
In fact, investigative journalist Gareth Porter has reported extensively on how the MEK and Mossad forged documents used to cultivate the propaganda narrative behind the phantom Iranian nuclear weapons program allegedly headed by Fakhrizadeh.
After Fakhrizadeh’s murder, there were subsequent reports out of Iraq, denied by Iran, of possibly another high-profile assassination, a drone strike possibly from the US or Israel, this time of an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in Syria.
In advance of the Fakhrizadeh killing, a source speaking to the Washington Post who was said to be familiar with the previously mentioned oval office meeting, said Trump was ready to respond immediately to the death of any American which could be attributed to Iran. Iran has no interest in starting the very war its worst enemies want. Nevertheless, this tired “redline” tactic is often used by US administrations wherein the announcement acts as a de facto solicitation for somebody to commit a false flag attack that can be pinned quickly on Iran or one of its allies, providing a casus belli.
This was likely the case late last year in Iraq. A rocket attack in Kirkuk was blamed on Iranian backed militias. But according to Iraqi intelligence the rockets more likely came from ISIS. Although the U.S. ignored their Iraqi counterparts investigating the matter. And before this intelligence was revealed, the death of an American defense contractor was used to justify US bombings that killed dozens of militiamen belonging to the Kataib Hezbollah group, the Islamic State’s enemies. This led to massive protests at the US embassy and Trump’s January drone strike assassination, at the Baghdad International Airport, that killed Qasem Soleimani, the top Iranian General and national figure.
According to a Daily Beast report published soon after Fakhrizadeh’s assassination, Trump has essentially gifted over his Iran policy to his most hawkish aides in these waning weeks of his term. Chiefly Pompeo and Abrams have been handed the reigns by Trump with his only condition being don’t start “World War III.” The former torturer, now CIA director, Gina Haspel is “intimately involved” as well. Based on the article, their policy is to discreetly support, and assist with intelligence, cloak and dagger actions by allies like Israel. The president is content to have Israel bomb and assassinate Iranian targets. He just wishes to avoid a situation where US soldiers might get killed. Yet, if this war starts before he leaves office, American soldiers will certainly die. There will doubtless be asymmetrical retaliations and casualties probably immediately in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, so this policy is contradictory.
This is the usual pattern with Trump. He completely eschews his base and their antiwar desires to please his most hawkish, pro-Israel backers and neoconservative advisers. Worse, his base rarely, if ever, holds him accountable. If Trump wishes to have another shot at the presidency in 2024, he should fire the hawks and stop this war in its tracks. He must lift the sanctions, regain control over his Iran policy, and turn toward peace and diplomacy.
The deal itself was to prevent the war the neocons and the Israelis wanted; it was unnecessary from the standpoint of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Ayatollah Khomeini prohibited such weapons during the Iran-Iraq war and Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Iran is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of which they have never been shown to have violated. Of course, Israel is not a signatory.
But this is the way Israel operates, much like the U.S. hawks, they project their crimes onto their enemies. They lie and say Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map, when their state’s raison d’être is to wipe Palestine and its people off the map. They attempt to deceive the world saying Iran has nukes, when, in the Middle East, only they do. They say Iran is the greatest state sponsor of terror and point to Hezbollah. But Hezbollah was born in resistance to a nearly 20-year Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon that killed 20,000 people and partly led to the 9/11 attacks. Israeli intelligence even cultivated the creation of Hamas. Tel Aviv is behind the MEK and supported al Qaeda in Syria. And in the occupied territories, the IDF regularly commits acts of terror. Videos flood the internet daily of the IDF in the West Bank kidnapping children, beating civilians, overseeing settler attacks, conducting home demolitions, shooting unarmed protestors, etc.
The Iranians desire independence which used to mean something to Americans too. The Trump base should stand against these provocations most of all, especially those who feel they were robbed in this most recent US election. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah, the fascist dictator whom the CIA, with British intelligence, installed in a 1953 coup. To do this, the CIA overthrew the dually elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
Whether their case is sound or not, given the reaction of a great deal of Trump’s base to the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election, they should empathize with the Iranians.
As Ron Paul says. “…on a human level people resent that kind of interference in their affairs.”
Ironically, this would apply as well to all the Democrats who erroneously believed Russia intervened in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump. But again this was pure projection, the same political factions that backed the National Endowment for Democracy’s coup in Ukraine made up this nonsense about Russia.
Unfortunately, as much as those on the side of diplomacy would like to see Biden come through on his promises to return to the JCPOA, there have been indications from his ultra-hawkish soon-to-be cabinet that imply the brinksmanship described above may continue, regardless, with the new administration.
Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and US intelligence officer, has said,
Biden and his team have been paying lip service to the notion of rejoining the JCPOA. However, the preconditions they have attached to such an action – Iran would have to return to full compliance first, and commit to immediate follow-on negotiations on a deal that would be more restrictive – were widely seen as a deal-breaker. The fact is, many of Biden’s closest advisers – including Secretary of State-designee Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor-designee Jake Sullivan – have indicated that Biden may have no choice but to continue the Trump policy of sanctions-based ‘maximum pressure.’
Such follow on negotiations, will likely be nonstarters for the Iranians who will not jeopardize their independent foreign policy, i.e. backing their allies in the region, and their national self-defense, i.e. their ballistic missile program. Those missiles and alliances are their primary deterrence.
Americans seem to detest coups or imaginary coups when they affect themselves. But they allow their imperialist government to impose sanctions, interfere in democratic elections, wage aggressive wars, and overthrow governments all over the world. American exceptionalism is a hell of a drug but just say no. The American people must rapidly sober up and choose peace.
Donald Trump may or may not be president much longer. But he has an opportunity to actually follow through on the better promises he’s teased his base with for years. Namely, he could end some “endless wars.”
Since he launched his campaign five years ago, Trump has been rhetorically good on various foreign policy issues, albeit very sporadically. Yet as early as the 2015 primary debates, it was nearly always obvious that he had a fondness for surveillance, torture, “bombing the shit out” of ISIS, and Fox News style jingoism.
Commendably though, a key difference between Donald Trump’s base as compared to the Biden camp, or even the Bernie Sanders types, is that they seem to really respond to and even demand that the president stand against the establishment. Other rightful objects of their contempt include the Bushes, the Clintons, “stupid wars,” “endless wars,” the military industrial complex, and even NATO, the anachronistic, war seeking military alliance.
Trump’s talking points may seem supremely disingenuous to those that judge him by his actions and his rhetoric as a whole. But those aforementioned aberrations mean a lot to a great many Americans.
But impressively, more than any other President in memory, he has won himself the support of regular people for his nominal stance against the war party. That the new right tolerates this mostly oratorical position from Trump, and often supports him for it, is a massive, positive shift in political and cultural values from the Bush II, Obama years. Though it leaves much to be desired, this development should not be taken lightly. It’s more than we can say for the bulk of the American left who accepted, without a fight, Sanders’ long history of hawkishness, Zionism, ties to the military industrial complex, and support for anti-Russian sanctions.
In the last few months, with election day nearing, Trump talked more and more about taking the troops out of Afghanistan. In February, a peace deal was signed between the United States and the Taliban for a complete withdrawal by Spring 2021. On Twitter, Trump has hyped the possibility of having all American troops in Afghanistan back home by Christmas.
Unfortunately, violence in the country is on the rise and the Doha talks between the Kabul government and the Taliban are reportedly faltering. To continue the war, this situation can and will likely be exploited by the incoming Biden administration, and other hawks both in Kabul and D.C.
Biden has said he does not intend to withdraw, claiming the situations in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, are too ‘complicated,’ indefinitely prohibiting our extrication. This must be “normalcy’s” great return.
However, this week Trump fired his War Secretary, the Raytheon lobbyist and arch anti-China, anti-Russia hawk, Mark Esper. The acting Secretary is now Christopher Miller, formerly the Counterterrorism Chief, who seems to be signaling “it’s time to come home.” What’s more, the antiwar, retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor has been appointed as a senior advisor to Miller. For anybody who wishes to end the endless wars, that is undoubtably a good sign.
Macgregor is on the record opposing the war in Syria. And as for the 19-year-old war in Afghanistan, he advocates a running not walking, immediate withdrawal.
Dave Decamp, assistant news editor at Antiwar.com, covered the personnel change and quoted the retired Colonel:
“There is one man, only one man who can take decisive action and end this. His name is Donald Trump. He promised to do that a long time ago. He’s disappointed a lot of us because he hasn’t,” Macgregor said. “He could stand up tomorrow and pull us out, but he needs to send everyone out of the Oval Office who keeps telling him, ‘If you do that and something bad happens, it’s going to be blamed on you, Mr. President.’”
Trump should heed Macgregor’s advice and thwart the hawks.
Additionally, Trump has said he wants to finally take the troops out of Iraq. As the indispensable, former congressman and presidential candidate, Ron Paul wrote back in August,
Earlier this month, while meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister, President Trump reaffirmed his intent to remove all US troops from Iraq. “We were there and now we’re getting out. We’ll be leaving shortly,” the president told reporters at the time…Over the weekend, the Administration announced it would be drawing down troops currently in Iraq from 5,200 to 3,500. That’s a good start.
The Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi has since confirmed that, at least, 2,500 troops have been removed. Regrettably, this is apparently part of a three-year long withdrawal process. While he is still able to, Trump should jettison the protracted policy and bring the remaining troops home immediately.
Trump kicked off 2020 with the brutal and illegal drone strike assassination at the Baghdad International Airport of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the mastermind of the anti-ISIS war. The general was a top Iranian political and national figure. Soleimani, who was reportedly in Iraq on a diplomatic mission, wasn’t alone when he was murdered. Among others, also bombed were Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces deputy. Had the Iranians been less restrained in their retaliation, Trump could have easily started a new war.
Following Soleimani’s extrajudicial killing, the Iraqi parliament voted unanimously to end the nearly 18-year-old U.S. occupation. Trump responded by threatening to block the Iraqi government’s access to their Oil Ministry’s bank account at the New York Federal Reserve. This account holds 90% of their revenue. Trump’s threat, if seen through, would have instantly obliterated the country’s economy. He further menaced Iraq with the possibility of sanctions “like they’ve never seen before ever.”
The infamous U.S.-backed, 1990s UN sanctions regime doubtless already slaughtered Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands.
Iraq War II, Biden’s war that followed, was not a mere “blunder,” as so many pundits casually lament. It was an illegal, aggressive war, based on lies, that killed a million Iraqis, most of whom were civilians. Experts say when Biden championed the war, as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he knew full well Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It was known more than a decade prior to the “Shock & Awe” bombings that Saddam Hussein’s government destroyed what so called WMD they had, mostly chemical weapons supplied by the U.S. and their allies during his 1980s war with Iran. Incidentally, the Iran-Iraq war killed a million people, half on both sides. Saddam fought the war with ample support from the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan administrations, part of the anti-Iran containment strategy. Paul has discussed, at length, the lasting reverberating effects, the “blowback,” our government’s long war with Iran has had, and continues to have, throughout the region and on U.S. policy at large.
After the Iraqi parliamentary vote, the Trump administration refused to leave, absurdly describing the unwanted U.S. military presence as a “force for good,” in the region. Predictably, the usual spiel followed; we must stay to defeat ISIS anyway. Of course, Iraq’s ISIS problem was directly caused by Obama’s treasonous CIA program backing al Qaeda and their affiliates in Syria in the first place. As for that flimsy excuse to remain, here’s, Antiwar.com news editor, Jason Ditz:
The U.S. troop presence in Iraq, as U.S. officials are so often eager to remind us, is at the voluntary request of the Iraqi government. Currently, that is predicated on fighting ISIS, even though ISIS isn’t really active in Iraq anymore. There had already been talk, before the U.S. started attacking the Baghdad airport and assassinating people, that the invitation had worn out its usefulness.
The popular Iraqi nationalist, Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr held a million-man march demanding that all U.S. troops leave the country. After successive decades of unprovoked U.S. proxy war, occupation, sanctions, and devastation, as a people, the least we can do for the Iraqis is to listen to them and get out now.
Trump has also expressed a desire to remove hundreds of troops from Somalia. These are troops he largely deployed in another decades long, undeclared war in another country that poses zero threat to the U.S. population. When Trump inquired with his War Department as to why we even need to be there, former Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis lied to Trump. He claimed that we are involved there to stop Times Square bombing attacks. The truth is the 2010 attempted Time Square bombing was blowback, from a well to do Pakistani American who witnessed the aftermath of a drone strike in his home country. He was attempting to avenge deaths caused by Obama’s drone war in Pakistan, which killed civilians by the tens of thousands. Trump has bombed Somalia more just in the first seven months of this year than the entire Bush II and Obama administrations combined. And in 2019, Trump bombed the country 63 times, the most in a single year so far. One of the alleged reasons for the shake up between the Pentagon and Trump was a disagreement over the pace of his planned withdrawal there. Trump should promptly end the deadly air war, as well as order all troops and Special Operations Forces back home from Somalia.
Enough is enough. Trump should listen to Macgregor and get to work ending the endless wars such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan before it’s too late. We know President Joe Biden won’t.
Trump knows these unprecedented moves would cement his legacy as a hero to his antiwar base and beyond. Contrarily, if he doesn’t follow through here, he’ll always just be another war criminal who lied his way in and out of the Oval Office.
It’s time we had one of those “national conversations,” we’re incessantly admonished to have by teachers, feds and talking heads. Only this conversation should be about the National Defense Strategy.
Indeed, Trump’s new war, namely against Beijing and Moscow, has been declared, though not by the proper authority, yet declared nonetheless. Worse, this war of all wars has bi partisansupport.
Way, way back in 2018, the Donald Trump administration announced it was shifting overall defense priorities over from what they call “counterterrorism” to “great power competition,” with Russia and China.
So many relish saying Trump hasn’t started any new wars but this isn’t that kind of a war. This is a Cold War, this war was already being waged; Trump, since taking office, has been ceaselessly heating it up in various unprecedented ways.
The disorienting smoke grenade thrown by the intelligence community to obscure this plain reality, and compromise people’s judgment on all sides, is the baselessmyth of Trump as Putin’s puppet, the White House dwelling sycophant to assorted, targeted “dictators.” (the “dictator” smear is never applied, however, to his pal Bibi Netanyahu who presides over an imperialist, apartheid state, and has been shown far more deference by Trump than even previous administrations).
Russia decided to intervene, to defend an ally, Syria, where they have maintained a base for decades, and thankfully prevented Obama’s would’ve been invasion and bloody, Iraq style war.
Thus, Putin defiantly short-circuited the neocons’ and Charles Krauthammer’s Unipolar Moment.
Consequentially, this treasonous US regime change/proxy war policy, benefited Iran, along with Hezbollah, as they were further empowered having formed a great bulk of the fighting force that defeated the infamous ISIS caliphate. The so called “Islamic State” was knowingly cultivated by the U.S., and its allies. In 2012, the DIA was well aware, of this latent byproduct of the CIA’s al Nusra mujahedeen strategy. Together with the Russians and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), they pummeled and drove the assorted al Qaeda affiliates into their ultimate retreat into the Idlib province. ISIS still exists, though to a much lesser degree. However, in pockets south of Idlib and Aleppo there’s recently been some heavy fighting between the remaining ISIS and the SAA.
The fact that the neoconservatives’ war on Assad, and his Shi’ite allies, blew up in their face, and really benefited Iran and further battle-hardened Hezbollah, in and of itself, shouldn’t phase Americans one bit. The less al Qaeda and ISIS around, the better. We don’t need to be involved at all in that war, on either side, for or against Ayman al-Zawahiri’s men. In any case, we shouldn’t have provoked the Axis of Resistance’s reaction by launching the covert war in the first place. Those who did ought to be held accountable.
However, this development, viewed as a failure by the war party, is a major stick in the craw of the neoconservative, foreign policy establishment. Robbie Martin, the neocon researcher, has shown this cabal is all too adept at infecting the broader journalistic culture with propaganda. They have become increasingly capable of adapting to cultural changes and exploiting them to turn collective, domestic screws. They are the “Blob’s” radical imperial extremists. The “Blob,” is now a commonly used term but it was originated by Ben Rhodes, a former Obama advisor. Daniel Larison, foreign policy critic, has said the phrase, “…refers in part to the tendency towards groupthink, aggression, and interference in other countries’ affairs among foreign policy pundits and think tankers.”
Trump essentially ran against the war in Syria, and is still viewed largely as opposed to it, though he has escalated the war during his whole term. He did officially end Operation Timber Sycamore, after it became so unpopular, in contrast to Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s Afghanistan mujahedeen Holy War (which culminated with possibly one million dead). Although after Trump’s decision, reports began cropping up soon afterward that showed the collusion and support for the terrorists shifted from the CIA elsewhere. Israel certainly continued to back al Qaeda in the south for years, Saudi continued supporting their favored terrorists, as NATO member Turkey still does in the northwest in the Idlib province of the embattled country.
Retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen, former West Point history professor, and antiwar author has blasted the way US troops have been deployed in this endless war. Trump has them stealing Syria’s oil and risking their lives in unfriendly territory where they’ve illegally invaded and squatted. Sjursen incisively summarizes the chaotic nature of the ill-defined and hare brained mission:
So back to that inevitably future dead American soldier(s). Let us review just what he or she will die for exactly when his or her vehicle accidentally rolls over, aircraft crashes, patrol is bombed, or a futile firefight goes south. Well there’s always the ISIS—defeat sub-mission (disingenuously billed as Inherent Resolve’s inherent resolution raison d’être)—but the caliphate is kaput and the pervading presence of America’s infidel crusaders only justifies the jihadis lingering terror campaign. Then there’s the mission that speaks Trump’s language—protecting the corrupt and illegal concessions of Delta Crescent Energy. In other words staying on in Syria, “only for the oil”—according to the president. Of course, it’s not much oil—only an anemic 24,000 barrels per day—something like 1/500th the daily output of Saudi Arabia. So that by itself won’t do.
Netanyahu has illegally and constantly bombed Syria. In 2019, the BBC said, “Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes in Syria since the civil war broke out in 2011.”
Israeli bombings have been killing people, including in Damascus, repeatedly throughout the entire MAGA run. Jason Ditz, veteran Antiwar.com news editor, reported back in June that, “Israel attacks targets in Syria almost weekly, though they rarely discuss it publicly. The official narrative is that they’re hitting Iran, even when they aren’t, and that more attacks are to be expected.”
These Israeli attacks are never retaliated against. Here’s Ditz again, “Early on Syria often threatened to retaliate for such attacks at a time of their choosing. This has never happened, and in general Syria no longer threatens retaliation as Israel’s attacks have gotten even more frequent.”
Israel gets away with murder, and breaking international law, presumably because Syria, and her allies, are afraid that any retaliation, while justified in national self-defense as well as by traditional just war criteria, would trigger the wider regional war Israel is fostering. For the Israeli and neocon hawks, a longstanding desire for a war pitting the US versus Iran is the goal. Gareth Porter, the great investigative reporter, has written at length on this larger campaign to start said war before Trump leaves office.
In July, Muhammad Sahimi, a Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, reported on 2020’s long, hot summer of protracted U.S./Israeli covert terrorism against Iran. There were cyber-attacks and sabotage carried out against, among other targets, the Shahid Rajaee Port, the Parchin military complex, and Natanz uranium enrichment facility, “Iran’s main center for manufacturing centrifuges and enriching uranium in Iran.”
On the incessant bombings of Syria during the MAGA reign, Sahimi has said:
For over two years Israel tried to provoke Iran by attacking Iranian-backed Shiite forces in Syria, but Iran has opted not to retaliate. Since the attacks did not provoke Iran to retaliate, and also failed to dislodge Iran’s military advisers and the Shiite forces that it trained, armed, and dispatched to Syria, Israel has seemingly turned to attacking Iran directly within its borders.
Additionally, in keeping with Trump’s characteristic servility to Israel, the U.S. has recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights, which Tel Aviv has militarily, illegally occupied since 1973.
As Dave Decamp, Antiwar.com news editor and columnist, wrote recently,
President Trump has arguably been the most pro-Israel president of all time, recognizing Jerusalem as the country’s capital, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, changing US policy to no longer consider Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal, and the so-called “Vision for Peace” that would essentially formalize apartheid rule over Palestinians.
Trump had the gall to send the vapid, rabid neocon, “ambassador” Nikki Haley down to the UN to practically be a diplomat for ISIS, al Qaeda in Idlib, and elsewhere, covering for their false flags, on numerous embarrassing occasions.
Foreign policy expert, Daniel McAdams, longtime advisor and partner to the antiwar former Congressman and three-time presidential candidate Ron Paul, eviscerated Haley on many occasions while she was the UN Ambassador. From September 2017, here’s McAdams:
…she decided to opine on the utterly failed six year US regime change operation in Syria. Today, as Deir Ezzor has finally been liberated by the Syrian government from the scourge of ISIS, Nikki Haley chose to go on record defending ISIS and al-Qaeda by repeating Obama’s line that Assad must go.
Ponder this for a minute: Assad has just defeated ISIS in Deir Ezzor. ISIS is the reason the US has invaded Syrian sovereignty and initiated military action. Yet according to Nikki Haley Assad’s reward for wiping out ISIS is that he must be deposed — presumably in favor of US-backed rebels who have been in bed with ISIS for six years!
Is Nikki Haley pro-ISIS? Is she pro-al-Qaeda? Is she evil or just stupid?
You decide.
And now we have the Trump administration’s, bi-partisan supported Caesar Act sanctions, targeting particularly the construction and engineering sectors, crushing the life out of this country by targeting any individuals, of any nationality, for trading with Syria. This imperial legislation uses the big boot of the American empire to thwart the Syrian people in their attempts to rebuild their lives after nearly a decade of total war fomented within from without.
Of course, this is after Israel and Saudi Arabia, Trump’s greatest foreign allies, lobbied the hegemon to help obliterate Syria almost ten years ago. Benjamin Netanyahu, disclosed in Wikileaks’ Hillary Clinton email archive, actually blackmailed Obama into starting this war, threatening to unilaterally attack Iran’s nuclear sites and spark his long-desired war mentioned earlier. This endless, disastrous war on Syria has been one of Washington’s conciliation prizes, for itself and the above allies, for the Bush II neocons getting conned themselves by Ahmed Chalabi into the multi trillion-dollar Iraq war II. This was a war where they foolishly installed a theocratic, Shi’ite-Iranian backed government in Baghdad. Of course, all while killing a million people in the process. This led to the infamous “Redirection” policy, where Bush and then Obama backed Saudi’s terrorist allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, etc.
It’s never enough for the neocons though, whether they’re advising Clinton, Bush II, Obama, or Trump, more American taxpayer money must always be spent, while more people always have to suffer and die overseas. And that makes sense, Andrew Cockburn has been said to have concluded that essentially the neoconservative movement can be best understood as where the military industrial complex meets the Israel lobby. Put into perspective, this characterization helps us clarify why half a million people were slaughtered. After all, Assad “must go.”
This is not what will make America great again. The broad right should use their political power to insist that Trump carries out the full withdrawal he has teased them with for years, not just in Syria but in Afghanistan as well. The left needs to start holding its fake “anti-establishment” types such as Senator, and former Presidential primary candidate, Bernie Sanders’ feet to the fire. Incidentally, Sanders’ 2020 campaign website’s Syria page still basically blames Assad for the war and for the Turkish-al Qaeda-White Helmet false flag chemical weapons attacks. He says in a world of vicious dictators, Assad “tops the list.” He supports the illegal US airstrikes against ISIS he says are “authorized under the current law,” though in violation of International Law, not to mention Article 1, Section 8 of our Constitution. He then, most egregiously, insists that the duly elected President of sovereign Syria must be “phased out.”
With political “allies” like this, who needs enemies?
If the U.S. is to ever come home from Syria, a robust anti-war, anti-sanctions, anti-neocon movement is needed. Composed of a principled bunch, and hopefully a politically diverse coalition. If the Democratic Socialist left or the new right is truly antiwar and they want to be taken seriously, they should ruthlessly hold all their politicians to the Ron Paul standard: we just marched in, now let’s just march out.
Many young liberals truly believe that by voting for Joe Biden they’re somehow helping evict racism and fascism from the Oval Office. If only it were that easy.
This columnist is thinking, in particular, of an illustrative, albeit anecdotal example. A recent conversation with a well-meaning, 20-year-old fellow pleb may help us comprehend what makes America racist. This girl is my coworker, who proudly announced, the other day, that she voted for the first time and excitedly so.
The aforementioned interlocutor was solidly convinced that the United States is a “racist country.”
She laughed with disdain when recalling an interaction, from another week, with a fellow college educated young person who dared to question, in a debate setting on campus, how America could be racist? After all, Americans elected, and reelected, a “black president?”
How stupid, another employee scoffed in the chat “…can she even cross the street by herself?…How did she get into college?”
Your columnist, attempting to find common ground with my coworkers and their stylistically vague “anti-racist” sentiments, agreed that they were, in fact, right. Barack Obama, as President, committed unspeakable genocides against some of the poorest black people in the world, namely Somalis and Yemenis. (The devastation caused by Obama’s treasonous, illegal, and callous war in Libya, and the subsequent return of chattel slavery there, would have been another obvious example.)
There was no real response; that wasn’t what they meant. The comment wasn’t dismissed so much as it was ignored, much like the majority American population and mainstream media tend to treat the wars themselves.
American Presidents committing some holocaust, big or small, against brown, black, or often yellow people somewhere “over there,” to Americans, is like background music or having coffee with breakfast. So routine, we hardly ever think about it. The “expert” class has said, repeatedly, that it can be no other way; and you’d better support the guys, gals, and trans folk dropping the bombs and doing the shooting.
Think about how little most Americans pay attention to what the troops are doing “over there” anyway, then contrast that with the ridiculous consensus that they’re essentially our society’s best, bravest, and most admirable figures.
America’s long war on Iraq throughout the 1990s—an era of yellow ribbon fascism—is a potent case in point. During those days, immediately after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell, our intellectual and political enthusiasts for “full spectrum dominance,”—that is American global hegemony—attempted to purge the citizenry of our “sickly inhibitions” against massive shows of military force. Therefore, Iraq was brutally sacrificed so that the so called “Vietnam syndrome” could give way to a heartless, neo jingoist culture more hospitable to the much coveted “unipolar moment,” that was now at hand.
Right now, our politics at home seem so polarized, confusing, hysterical, dire, and hateful. It makes some sense when we realize that, dozens of years ago, Americans probably lost their collective empathy somewhere over Iraq. Mercifully and very memorably, Ron Paul alerted the electorate and broader American culture of this ugly, forgotten history back in 2007 with his famous “Giuliani moment.”
Clinton’s “Iraq War I and ½,” as Scott Horton calls it, killed hundreds of thousands.
In 1996, half way through killing these people, Madeline Albright, who served as UN Ambassador and then Secretary of State during these years, said it was “worth it.” Ironically, she’s since rebranded herself as a neoliberal, anti-fascist, even feminist icon. In this country, some people really can do anything.
Shortly thereafter, the next Bush regime lied us into a full-on invasion, the regime change war, where one million Iraqis died.
That’s the “bad war” though, Iraq war II, the one Joe Biden championed as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That’s the one everyone remembers; although most Americans are likely unaware that their government killed that many people, in, as Ron Paul has said, “an impoverished Third World nation that lacked an air force, anti-aircraft weapons, and a navy. This was supposed to be the great threat, requiring urgent action.”
Is this the old “normalcy” pined for by so many Americans?
Back to our anecdote, another coworker, attempting to comfort this newest member of the voting class, assured her that, “I’m sure Trump has been more destructive than Obama was with that stuff.”
Depending on the regions, that point has merits. As Dave Decamp of Antiwar.com has pointed out, Trump has escalated the bombing campaigns and wars on Somalia, Yemen, and, until relatively recently, Afghanistan as well.
Uncle Sam’s genocide in Yemen is another example, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The U.S.-Saudi coalition’s total war against the poorest Middle Eastern civilian population (a war of famine, terrorism, treason, terror bombings, blockades, record shattering epidemics, and deliberate starvation) was commenced, in early 2015, under the Obama-Biden administration. After nearly four years of Trump executing this war, with the gloves off, so to speak, according to the UN at least 233,000 people have died; almost half were killed violently, the rest have died due to deprivation, and disease. The U.S.-Saudi axis are purposely crippling Yemen’s population, its economy, and healthcare systems. As with Palestine, Yemen’s desperately needed aid has been largely cut. Additionally, Trump has vetoed multiple Congressional resolutions, including War Powers Act challenges, demanding an end to America’s illegal/unconstitutional support for the Saudi coalition’s war there.
And despite Trump’s ostensible progress working toward a full withdrawal from Afghanistan in Spring 2021, he set records for the number of munitions dropped on the long battered country. He doubled the number of troops left there by Obama, in 2017; and Afghanistan was bombed nearly 15,000 times between 2018-2019.
Beyond these campaigns, both parties, their constituents and leadership, seem all too content to have neocon apparatchiks continually forcing our whole population further into conflict, and possibly eventual hot wars, with China and Russia. Given all the hydrogen bombs involved, this is the issue of our time and surely one that all Americans, young people especially, should be united against.
For example, how many Americans know that Trump, in an incident during the early February of 2018, had hundreds of Russian mercenaries bombed in Syria, which is still illegally occupied by the U.S.? That’s some puppet Putin has there.
Speaking of Latin America, for all the criticism Trump gets for racism, one would assume now that the estimated death toll of his sanctions on Venezuela has reached 100,000 people, that we’d see quite the controversy. Evidently, these poor people will only be given the time of day when their misery—largely U.S. induced—can be intermittently exploited by CNN for regime change efforts against Maduro’s government.
In many diverse parts of the world, people are living through some version of hell because it’s profitable for our Military-Industrial-Congressional-Security Complex, it benefits their neocon think tank partners in crime, as well as their corporate and often foreign benefactors. Until we reject empire and the paper-thin propaganda it’s built on, we will be inextricably tied with this racism and fascism everybody is debating over. This racism/fascism discussion cannot remain a muddled and ambiguous partisan debate. Indeed, to be truly anti-racist, as an American, is to be an anti-imperialist.
If the terms mean anything, both candidates are fascist imperialists. For sure, those who would vote, this time, for either candidate because they think they’re fighting racism, authoritarianism, or fascism with that vote are likely not racist or fascist themselves. However, a culture and government that has so cynically and systematically coddled “the folks” into such delusions most certainly is.
Connor Freeman is a writer and college student, based in Arizona, primarily covering American imperial politics and foreign policy. He has written for the Libertarian Institute and the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also been featured at Antiwar.com and Information Clearing House. You can follow him on Twitter at @FreemansMind96.
It’s time for the dinosaur media and the U.S. government to conduct their annual ‘let’s scare the hell out of the American people during the holidays’ psychological operations.
The State does not refer to it in exactly that way and is it not yet official policy. But it has come to be every bit as American as apple pie.
It has been more than sixteen years since the attacks of September 11, 2001. And in those years, the establishment news and the regime have never missed a season.
As Americans celebrate the holidays and transition into 2018, they will no doubt be subjected to the highest quality fear mongering money can buy.
In fact, the macabre journalism has already begun.
The article is boiling over with fear mongering and reads as if it was written circa 2002, not 2017.
Notable quotes include:
“An ominous poster of Santa Claus standing next to a box of dynamite in Times Square appeared in a pro-ISIS forum earlier this week with the headline “we meet at Christmas in New York soon.” A picture of a masked jihadi, with a rifle in the front seat of a car driving toward the Vatican marked with the banner “Christmas Blood so wait” appeared a few days before that. Christmas markets in Germany and Queen Elizabeth of England have also been the targets of Islamic State threats over the past month.”
As well as,
“It is symbolism, however, that would be the biggest driver of ISIS’s holiday terror. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other festivities celebrated at year’s end are a special time for America and Europe. For the fanatics of ISIS, there is no better time to inflict their misery and hatred upon us. Our holiday joy is an affront to their nihilistic sadism.”
And finally,
“They not only hate us for our freedom, but for the displays of happiness, prosperity, and unity from now until 2018.”
The worst part of the ‘forever war’ industry is the mass murder of civilians.
Since 1991, the U.S. has been responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis alone.
There is an ample supply of well meaning people in this country who continue to be suckered into sacrificing their progeny’s future and liberty at the altar of imperialism and the military-industrial complex.
For decades, U.S. bombings and occupations have been creating terrorists via the blowback phenomenon. And often the U.S. finds itself and its allies directly, albeit covertly, supporting terrorists as well.
There are Israeli fingerprints on the Syrian war as well. Correspondence from 2012 between then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and James Rubin, the former diplomat and journalist, detail the Israeli government’s role in agitating Obama toward his ultimate Syrian strategy. This correspondence is documented in Clinton’s WikiLeaks email archive. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government essentially blackmailed the former president, threatening him with the much larger war that would necessarily result, absent a ‘more aggressive’ U.S. Syrian policy, from an Israeli ‘surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities’. Jason Ditz reported at AntiWar.com, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said in January 2016 that “ ‘he’d much rather see ISIS rule all of Syria‘, and consequently be directly on Israel’s border, than have the pro-Iran government remain in power.” In June 2016, as ISIS was losing increasingly more ground to Syrian forces, Israel’s military intelligence chief, Major General Herzi Halevy said that ‘the Israeli military is looking at direct support for ISIS as a matter of policy, and not just rhetoric’. Israeli support and medical aid for al Nusra (AQ) and other rebel factions in Syria has been reported extensively.
In the Trump era, as with all other options, also on the table is collusion with ISIS. The BBC and Phil Giraldi recently reported on how the U.S., with its British and Kurdish allies, helped ISIS fighters escape death at the hands of Syrian and Russian forces in Raqqa.
“In the event, trucks and busses were assembled on October 14th, formed into a convoy, and were loaded with more than 4,000 fighters and families. More than 100 ISIS-owned vehicles also were allowed to leave and there were ten trucks filled with weapons. The convoy stretched for more than four miles and film footage shows trucks pulling trailers filled with militants brandishing their weapons. The fighters were not allowed to display flags or banners but they were not forced to disarm and in fact loaded all the vehicles with as many weapons as they could carry, so much so that one truck broke its axle from the weight. The BBC reported that “This wasn’t so much an evacuation – it was the exodus of so-called Islamic State.”
Also from the article, “The evacuees made it safely to ISIS controlled territory and presumably will be ready, willing and able to fight again.”
The State and its military continually prove they are not fit to represent the American people. There is no American master plan. It is frequently the case that our disastrous policies in the Middle East were originally hatched up by neoconservatives working for the Likud, Israel, and Gulf oil money. On the other hand, the American people take the blame for enormities committed by their ‘leaders’ because democracy is a way for power holders to evade their actions’ consequences. After all, the people voted for politicians who supported this war or that policy. True enough, but Americans are besieged day in and day out by a trans-media propaganda network that would have made George Orwell blush.
Who knows how much more the Bill O’Reillys, Joy Reids, Rush Limbaughs, and Sean Hannitys of the world know than their duped fans. The State prefers to have deluded buffoons lying to the American people, giving them their (fake) news. It’s easier that way. Too much internal cynicism amongst propagandists leads to hubris and carelessness. See CNN.
Blowback, while horrible and inexcusable, is understandable. People whose lands are indiscriminately rained upon year after year with billions of dollars’ worth of cluster bombs, white phosphorous, Hellfire missiles, depleted uranium, etc., who live under endless foreign occupations, and suffer under Western backed Jihadi tyrannies can identify the responsible parties. Western democracies largely make up the coalitions dropping the bombs that kill their loved ones. Conversely, the victims suffer under despotisms. They assume, mistakenly, that these democracies represent the will of their people. However, these democracies are controlled by powerful special interests who do not give a damn about the will of the people. Whether it is a truck driving through a crowd of people in the West or an airstrike on an Iraqi family’s home, innocents are almost always the victims. Americans have been convinced by the regime and it’s kept media that the terrorism’s raison d’être is to literally terrorize innocent people and scare them. However, the definition of terrorism is: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.
These people want the West to stop killing their children, colonizing, and occupying their land. The radicals amongst them who commit these comparatively small and sporadic acts of terrorism give us a vivid idea of what it is like to have a mother, sister, brother, father, or friend murdered randomly and without reason.
House Concurrent Resolution 81 (H.Con.Res.81) is sponsored by Representatives, Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Walter Jones (R-NC), Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.), Thomas Massie (R-KY), and 39 other lawmakers. The resolution commands an end to U.S. participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
The sponsors of this resolution contend that such participation, which began in March 2015, was never authorized under the War Powers Act of 1973. Per the War Powers Act, any congressman can pose a legal challenge and is guaranteed a floor vote on the issue. This is known as a privileged resolution.
On November 1st, the night before the vote was scheduled to take place, House leadership swiftly pushed through a Rules Committee vote, denying the resolution’s privileged status. Thus, preventing the guaranteed floor vote.
What was their justification? Apparently, the House Rules Committee feels that the war in Yemen has yet to ‘rise to a level’ where the War Powers Act is applicable.
After preventing the vote on H.Con.Res.81, the House Leadership has said it shall permit a ‘compromise’ resolution on the war in Yemen. The debate, scheduled for the week of November 13th, will discuss the legality of U.S. involvement in the war. The vote will be non-binding.
Five peace activist groups, heavily engaged in promoting the resolution, said just after the Rules Committee vote:
“We remind the House leadership that under the War Powers Resolution of 1973,
“‘introduction of United States Armed Forces ’includes the assignment of member of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged…’
U.S. refueling of Saudi-UAE planes bombing Houthi targets in Yemen meets that definition.'”
Therefore the War Powers Act, clearly applies to the war on Yemen.
The House leadership is lying to the American people, supporting the continuation of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, violating the War Powers Act, and attempting to prevent Congress from stopping yet another illegal and unconstitutional war.
Conservatively, since the beginning of 2017, at least 10,000 people have been killed in this war. The heroic and indispensable Yemeni journalist Nasser Arrabyee has said the toll could be as high as 60,000 deaths.
The Saudis are ruthlessly bombarding the Yemenis and their civilian infrastructure. The coalition wants to cripple the people of Yemen to the point of submission. Their end goal is to force Yemen’s civilians to stop supporting the northern tribesmen if only to alleviate their suffering.
U.S. involvement is most critical to the Saudi effort in this war. The U.S. military is training Saudi Arabian forces. The U.S. is refueling the coalition’s warplanes not just in the air with tanker sorties, but also on its bases peppered throughout the region.
As of February, according to an article written by Oriana Pawlyk for Military.com:
“Saudi Arabian coalition jets bombing Houthi rebel sites in Yemen increasingly turn to U.S. Air Force tankers for refueling support almost two years after the conflict began. Since April 2015, the Air Force has logged 1,778 tanker sorties for the operation, Air Forces Central Command spokeswoman Capt. Kathleen Atanasoff told Military.com on Tuesday. That includes 1,069 over the past year, an increase of 360, or 50 percent, from the 709 in the previous period. ‘These operations are ongoing, with aircraft refueling occurring daily,’ Atanasoff said in an email. The service’s tankers such as KC- 135 Stratotankers and KC-10 Extenders participated in 7,564 refueling ‘events’ with coalition aircraft, with ‘about 54 million pounds of fuel off-loaded in support of Saudi operations in Yemen,’ Atanasoff said.”
Donald Trump, doing his best Barack Obama impression, has been more than happy to sell the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons to continue their genocide. These include planes, ships, rockets, precision-guided bombs, cluster bombs, etc. American defense contractors, particularly Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are likewise more than happy to rake in their handsome profits from Yemen’s destruction. With Jared Kushner playing the role of matchmaker for Mohammed bin Salman and Marillyn A. Hewson (CEO of Lockheed), the profits will surely escalate.
However, the Saudis have another powerful ally in this war, al Qaeda. This certainly makes the upcoming debate on Yemen a great opportunity for the House to finally get around to discussing the legality of high treason. Or more specifically, fighting another war for al Qaeda.
In addition to the coalition’s sadistic air campaign, Yemini civilians are threatened and attacked on the ground day in and day out by Sudanese mercenaries, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and a local Islamic State affiliate. All of whom support the coalition.
In an article published in The Hill, Gareth Porter and retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff) said:
“U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials have regarded AQAP as even more of a foreign terrorist threat to the United States than ISIS. It mounted efforts to bring down U.S. airlines three times between 2009 and 2012, and nearly succeeded twice. But the Saudi/UAE war in Yemen has made them the most powerful indigenous armed group in southern Yemen, with more money, arms and territorial control than ever before. The Saudi-led coalition and the forces of the Saudi backed former regime have allied openly with AQAP and even fought alongside them. As a result of the war AQAP is now poised for the first time to compete for national power in Yemen.”
See the map below of the military situation in Yemen as of this July for an idea of just how much territory AQAP has consolidated. The areas shaded white are controlled by AQAP, the pink areas are controlled by Hadi-loyal forces, and the green areas are controlled by the Houthi/Saleh alliance:
This is further evidence that U.S. involvement in the Saudi war is illegal. When asked for a justification for U.S. involvement in the Saudi/UAE war, both Barrack Obama and Donald Trump’s administrations have cited the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). That AUMF permits military action only against those entities who perpetrated the attacks on 9/11. In other words, military action is only permitted against al Qaeda. Yet, this war is being fought on behalf of al Qaeda against their enemies, the Houthis.
Indeed, Asher Orkaby made the point in Foreign Affairs that, “far from being aligned with extremists, the Houthi movement has repeatedly clashed with the Islamic State and AQAP” So, in addition to the fact that this war was never authorized under the War Powers Act, it is also clearly not covered under the current AUMF.
Since the Obama administration, this is at least the third major conflict wherein the U.S. has found itself aligned with, fighting along side, arming, and/or supporting al Qaeda. This was official policy notably during the regime change operation in Libya and in the failed regime change operation in Syria. It is very important to note that if things had gone to plan in Syria, al Qaeda would have almost certainly taken Damascus.
Neoconservatives are now calling for a new AUMF to explicitly define ‘the enemy’ more broadly as proponents of so called, ‘radical Islam’. The ‘radical Islam’ handle is a red herring callously promoted by the fake news establishment. It is meant to dumb down and obscure the realities of these conflicts for domestic audiences. The cynical neoconservatives are pleased to have Americans view all Arabs and Muslims as one homogenous and terrifying collective. Most Americans are designedly oblivious to the differences between Sunnis, Shiites, and other branches of Islam. It is in the interests of the War Party for American voters to see such radically opposed groups as Daesh and Hezbollah as cut from the same cloth. This is obviously done in order to prevent rational discussion of these conflicts from ever taking place. For if the American people were well informed of the consequences of U.S. policy abroad, especially in the Middle East, they would probably not even passively support their regime’s policies.
In 2013, popular sentiment from people of all political stripes helped to prevent Obama’s would have been Iraq-style invasion of Syria. I believe one of the primary reasons for this was the effectiveness of the famous ‘I will not fight for al Qaeda in Syria’ social media campaign undertaken by active military personnel. Americans do not want to support and subsidize al Qaeda in Syria, Libya, Yemen, or anywhere else for that matter. The reason these horrific policies persist is not the peoples’ apathy, it’s their ignorance.
This is a particularly indefensible war, even by U.S standards. If they choose to, this is a war the American people can end. The establishment is certainly not comfortable publicly debating and defending their Yemen policy. Exposing the realities of this conflict and ending the war in Yemen could trigger an anti-war domino effect. Not since the Vietnam War has there been more fertile soil for an American anti-war movement.
Please continue to call your Congressmen and women and tell them to vote against the war on November 13th. Give them some good talking points for the debate. Please share, retweet posts from Yemenis on the ground, post news items, write blog posts, write articles, and speak your mind about the war in Yemen on social media. Do not be afraid to talk about the U.S.-Saudi/AQAP alliance. We have the truth on our side.
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