Newly-installed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doesn’t have a huge amount of experience as a diplomat so what can we expect from the former Kansas congressman now that he is heading US foreign policy?
Pompeo landed the top job in the State Department on Tuesday after US President Donald Trump ousted Rex Tillerson. Here’s a flavor of his previous comments on the most pressing foreign policy issues.
Russia
Pompeo was appointed CIA director in November 2016. He began his tenure by talking tough on Russia, describing it as a major threat to US interests. “[Russia] has reasserted itself aggressively, invading and occupying Ukraine, threatening Europe, and doing nearly nothing to aid in the destruction and defeat of ISIS.”
He continued with the hawkish rhetoric throughout his time in the CIA. On Sunday he said that Americans are safe from Russia because it has weapons to counter any Russian threat.
“Americans should rest assured that we have a very good understanding of the Russian program and how to make sure that Americans continue to be kept safe from threats from Vladimir Putin,” the then-CIA chief said.
China
However Russia isn’t the only ‘bad guy’ out there, according to Pompeo. In a revealing interview with the BBC the then-US spy chief attacked alleged Chinese efforts to exert covert influence in the West. He claimed China attempts to post spies in schools and hospitals, as well as trying to steal information from US companies.
“We can watch very focused efforts to steal American information, to infiltrate the United States with spies – with people who are going to work on behalf of the Chinese government against America,” according to Pompeo. “We see it in our schools. We see it in our hospitals and medicals systems. We see it throughout corporate America. It’s also true in other parts of the world… including Europe and the UK.”
North Korea
After becoming CIA director Pompeo spoke of a desire to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula because of the danger of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un possessing weapons of mass destruction. In recent days he reaffirmed this position, asserting that the Trump administration has “its eyes wide open” on North Korea as Kim agreed to pause nuclear testing ahead of forthcoming negotiations between the two nations.
“The pressure will continue to mount on North Korea,” he told CBS. “There is no relief in sight until the president gets the objective that he has set forth consistently during his entire time in office.”
Iran
Pompeo, who, like Trump, had a career as a businessman before turning to politics, has reserved his strongest rhetoric for Iran and the nuclear deal signed by former US President Barack Obama.
His opposition dates back to his time as a congressman when he said that the deal “won’t stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb and places Israel at more risk.” Pompeo also criticized the Obama administration for not demanding that Iran cease calling for Israel’s destruction as part of the deal.
Before becoming CIA director Pompeo broached the possibility of using force to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity. “In an unclassified setting, it is under 2,000 sorties to destroy the Iranian nuclear capacity,” he said in 2014. “This is not an insurmountable task for the coalition forces.”
Edward Snowden
Pompeo’s dramatic comments on Iran pale in comparison to the fate he thinks National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden deserves. The new secretary of state said that Snowden, who leaked classified NSA information, should be brought back to the US and sentenced to death.
“[He] should brought back from Russia and given due process, and I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” Pompeo said in February 2016. He also lashed out at Snowden’s appearance via video link at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, in 2014, fearing it would cause “lawless behavior” in the crowd. The talk went ahead without incident.
Pompeo also had harsh words about WikiLeaks, referring to the whistleblowing organization as a “hostile intelligence service” in April 2017.
The Pentagon helps Hollywood to make money and, in turn, Hollywood churns out effective propaganda for the brutal American war machine.
The US has the largest military budget in the world, spending over $611 billion – far larger than any other nation on Earth. The US military also has at their disposal the most successful propaganda apparatus the world has ever known… Hollywood.
Since their collaboration on the first Best Picture winner ‘Wings’ in 1927, the US military has used Hollywood to manufacture and shape its public image in over 1,800 films and TV shows. Hollywood has, in turn, used military hardware in their films and TV shows to make gobs and gobs of money. A plethora of movies like ‘Lone Survivor,’ ‘Captain Philips,’ and even blockbuster franchises like ‘Transformers’ and Marvel, DC and X-Men superhero movies have agreed to cede creative control in exchange for use of US military hardware over the years.
In order to obtain cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD), producers must sign contracts that guarantee a military approved version of the script makes it to the big screen. In return for signing away creative control, Hollywood producers save tens of millions of dollars from their budgets on military equipment, service members to operate the equipment, and expensive location fees.
Capt. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera what the military expects for their cooperation: “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.”
Phil Strub, the DOD chief Hollywood liaison, says the guidelines are clear. “If the filmmakers are willing to negotiate with us to resolve our script concerns, usually we’ll reach an agreement. If not, filmmakers are free to press on without military assistance.”
In other words, the Department of Defense is using taxpayer money to pick favorites. The DOD has no interest in nuance, truth or – God forbid – artistic expression; only in insidious jingoism that manipulates public opinion to their favor. This is chilling when you consider that the DOD is able to use its financial leverage to quash dissenting films it deems insufficiently pro-military or pro-American in any way.
The danger of the DOD-Hollywood alliance is that Hollywood is incredibly skilled at making entertaining, pro-war propaganda. The DOD isn’t getting involved in films like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘X-Men,’ ‘Transformers’ or ‘Jurassic Park III’ for fun. They are doing so because it’s an effective way to psychologically program Americans, particularly young Americans, not just to adore the military, but to worship militarism. This ingrained love of militarism has devastating real-world effects.
Lawrence Suid, author of ‘Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film’told Al Jazeera, “I was teaching the history of the Vietnam War, and I couldn’t explain how we got into Vietnam. I could give the facts, the dates, but I couldn’t explain why. And when I was getting my film degrees, it suddenly occurred to me that the people in the US had never seen the US lose a war, and when President Johnson said we can go into Vietnam and win, they believed him because they’d seen 50 years of war movies that were positive.”
As Suid points out, generations of Americans had been raised watching John Wayne valiantly storm the beaches of Normandy in films like ‘The Longest Day,’ and thus were primed to be easily manipulated into supporting any US military adventure because they were conditioned to believe that the US is always the benevolent hero and inoculated against doubt.
This indoctrinated adoration of a belligerent militarism, conjured by Hollywood blockbusters, also resulted in Americans being willfully misled into supporting a farce like the 2003 Iraq War. The psychological conditioning for Iraq War support was built upon hugely successful films like ‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg, and ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, that emphasized altruistic American militarism. Spielberg and Bruckheimer are two Hollywood heavyweights considered by the DoD to be their most reliable collaborators.
Another example of the success of the DoD propaganda program was the pulse-pounding agitprop of the Tom Cruise blockbuster ‘Top Gun’ (1986). The movie, produced by Bruckheimer, was a turning point in the DoD-Hollywood relationship, as it came amid a string of artistically successful, DoD-opposed, ‘anti-war’ films, like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Platoon’ and ‘Full Metal Jacket,’ which gave voice to America’s post-Vietnam crisis of confidence. ‘Top Gun’ was the visual representation of Reagan’s flag-waving optimism, and was the Cold War cinematic antidote to the “Vietnam Syndrome”.
‘Top Gun,’ which could not have been made without massive assistance from the DoD, was a slick, two-hour recruiting commercial that coincided with a major leap in public approval ratings for the military. With a nadir of 50 percent in 1980, by the time the Gulf War started in 1991, public support for the military had spiked to 85 percent.
Since Top Gun, the DoD propaganda machine has resulted in a current public approval for the military of 72 percent, with Congress at 12 percent, the media at 24 percent, and even Churches at only 40 percent. The military is far and away the most popular institution in American life. Other institutions would no doubt have better approval ratings if they too could manage and control their image in the public sphere.
It isn’t just the DoD that uses the formidable Hollywood propaganda apparatus to its own end… the CIA does as well, working with films to enhance its reputation and distort history.
For example, as the ‘War on Terror’ raged, the CIA deftly used ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ (2007) as a disinformation vehicle to revise their sordid history with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and to portray themselves as heroic and not nefarious.
The CIA also surreptitiously aided the film ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), and used it as a propaganda tool to alter history and convince Americans that torture works.
The case for torture presented in ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ was originally made from 2001 to 2010 on the hit TV show ‘24,’ which had support from the CIA as well. That pro-CIA and pro-torture narrative continued in 2011 with the Emmy-winning show ‘Homeland,’ created by the same producers as ‘24,’ Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa.
A huge CIA-Hollywood success story was Best Picture winner ‘Argo’ (2012), which ironically is the story of the CIA teaming up with Hollywood. The CIA collaborated with the makers of ‘Argo’ in order to pervert the historical record and elevate their image.
The fact that this propaganda devil’s bargain between the DoD/CIA and Hollywood takes place in the self-declared Greatest Democracy on Earth™ is an irony seemingly lost on those in power who benefit from it, and also among those targeted to be indoctrinated by it, entertainment consumers, who are for the most part entirely oblivious to it.
If America is the Greatest Democracy in the World™, why are its military and intelligence agencies so intent on covertly misleading its citizens, stifling artistic dissent, and obfuscating the truth? The answer is obvious… because in order to convince Americans that their country is The Greatest Democracy on Earth™, they must be misled, artistic dissent must be stifled and the truth must be obfuscated.
In the wake of the American defeat in the Vietnam war, cinema flourished by introspectively investigating the deeper uncomfortable truths of that fiasco in Oscar-nominated films like ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Coming Home,’ ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ‘Platoon,’ ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ all made without assistance from the DoD.
The stultifying bureaucracy of America’s jingoistic military agitprop machine is now becoming more successful at suffocating artistic endeavors in their crib. With filmmaking becoming ever more corporatized, it is an uphill battle for directors to maintain their artistic integrity in the face of cost-cutting budgetary concerns from studios.
In contrast to post-Vietnam cinema, after the unmitigated disaster of the US invasion of Iraq and the continuing quagmire in Afghanistan, there has been no cinematic renaissance, only a steady diet of mendaciously patriotic, DoD-approved, pro-war drivel like ‘American Sniper’ and ‘Lone Survivor.’ Best Picture winner ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008), shot with no assistance from the DoD, was the lone exception that successfully dared to portray some of the ugly truths of America’s Mesopotamian misadventure.
President Eisenhower once warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex.”
Eisenhower’s prescient warning should have extended to the military industrial entertainment complex of the DoD/CIA-Hollywood alliance, which has succeeded in turning Americans into a group of uniformly incurious and militaristic zealots.
America is now stuck in a perpetual pro-war propaganda cycle, where the DoD/CIA and Hollywood conspire to indoctrinate Americans to be warmongers and, in turn, Americans now demand more militarism from their entertainment and government. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The DoD/CIA-Hollywood propaganda alliance guarantees Americans will blindly support more future failed wars and will be willing accomplices in the deaths of millions more people across the globe.
Michael McCaffrey is a freelance writer, film critic and cultural commentator. He currently resides in Los Angeles where he runs his acting coaching and media consulting business. mpmacting.com/blog/
Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.
Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.
At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”
One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:
Lieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.
And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”
Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:
This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”
He continued:
And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”
Wilkerson highlighted the hypocrisy of Netanyahu and his cohorts in more ways than one. For example, Wilkerson referred to Netanyahu’s grandiose speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he directly challenged Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif while holding remnants of a drone allegedly downed over Israeli airspace. Israel claimed the drone was Iranian-manufactured. Wilkerson noted that in response, Iran found itself being rescued by Lebanon’s Defense Minister, who said he had an Israeli drone over his head virtually 24 hours a day.
Further, the mainstream media and the governments that benefit from their narratives pay close to zero attention to the fact that Israel routinely violates Lebanese airspace with its sophisticated aircraft. Rather, Iran is constantly painted as the major threat and violator of international law.
“Of late of course,” Wilkerson continued, “Tel Aviv is increasingly using Iran’s presence in Syria, its support for Bashar al-Assad, and its alleged drive– and I love this one, and my military comrades love it, too– for a Shia corridor from Tehran to Aden, as the hoary beast that must not be at any cost, including of course America’s treasure and lives, as his probable cause and existential prompt for action.”
But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:
I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.
“It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.
“In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”
Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance
According to a Politico report, during the Obama years, Israel drew up a military strike option but never really used it. Deep down, Israel knew its effectiveness lied in its ability to pressure the U.S. government into taking further action of its own lest it be dragged into a catastrophic war with Iran that it may or may not be prepared to fight. From the Politico report:
They [the Israelis] ordered the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence arms to prepare for a huge operation: an all-out air attack in the heart of Iran. Some $2 billion was spent on preparations for the attack and for what the Israelis believed would take place the day after – a counterattack either by Iranian warplanes and missiles or by its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The latter could use either the 50,000 missiles it had stockpiled (by 2018, Israeli intelligence estimated the number had increased to 100,000), or it could activate its terror cells abroad, with the assistance of Iranian intelligence, to strike at Israeli or Jewish targets. This is what it did in 1992 and 1994 when it responded to Israeli attacks in Lebanon by blowing up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the Jewish community center AMIA in that city, with a massive number of casualties in both attacks.”
The strike plan never took place, of course, but according to Politico, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to use it to put pressure on the U.S. government to achieve its anti-Iranian objectives. Every day, the likelihood that a war might erupt between Israel and Iran, in turn involving the United States, which has sworn to come to Israel’s defense if attacked by Iran, continues to inch that much closer to reality.
Watch | Is the US Ramping Up Its Military Presence in Syria and Planning to Attack Iran for Israel?
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security advisor during the Reagan administration. Wilkerson is an outspoken critic of the current US foreign policy.
Darius Shahtahmasebi is a practicing attorney with an interest in human rights, international law, and journalism. He is a graduate of the University of Otago, where he obtained degrees in Law and Japanese. Follow him on Twitter at @TVsLeaking.
US envoy to the UN Nikki Haley has warned that the US will take action in Syria on its own if the UN Security Council fails to do so. The official cited last year’s attack on a Syrian airbase as an example of possible US action.
“It is not the path we prefer, but it is a path we have demonstrated we will take, and we are prepared to take again,” Haley told the UN Security Council meeting on Monday. “When the international community consistently fails to act, there are times when states are compelled to take their own action.”
When the Security Council “failed to act” after the Khan Sheikhoun chemical incident last year, the US “successfully struck the airbase from which Assad had launched his chemical attack,” Haley stated. It should be noted that the US attacked the base only three days after the incident, without any investigation into it, while the blame was promptly pinned on Damascus.
The US diplomat blamed Russia for not observing the 30-day ceasefire in Syria and accused Moscow of deliberately putting an anti-terrorism “loophole” in the February UNSC resolution.
“With that vote, Russia made a commitment to us, to Syrian people and to the world to stop the killing in Syria. Today, we know that Russians did not keep their commitment,” Haley said, claiming that Russia and Damascus continue to bomb “innocent civilians” under a pretext of fighting terrorism.
Haley announced a new US-sponsored draft of a ceasefire resolution for Syria, which will not have any “anti-terrorism loopholes.” The resolution, if adopted, would take effect immediately and call for a complete cessation of hostilities in Syria. It remains unclear exactly how the US plans to enforce the measure on terrorist groups.
A study shows weapons imports to the Middle East and Asia have soared over the past five years, with Saudi Arabia leading the steep rise amid its bloody war on Yemen.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), arms imports to the Middle East between 2013 and 2017 jumped by 103 percent compared with the previous five-year period.
Saudi Arabia is now the world’s second largest importer of arms after India. The kingdom registered a 225-percent rise in military purchases – almost all from the US and Europe – during the period, the study released on Monday said.
American weapons constitute 61 percent of arms imports to Saudi Arabia and British weapons 23 percent. During the period, the Saudis received 78 combat aircraft, 72 combat helicopters, 328 tanks and 4,000 vehicles, the SIPRI noted.
The same period, it said, saw Israel increasing its arms exports by 55 percent.
“The US and European states remain the main arms exporters to the region and supplied over 98 percent of weapons imported by Saudi Arabia,” it said.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia signed a preliminary deal to buy 48 Typhoon jets worth as much as $10 billion.
Saudi Arabia already operates more than 70 Typhoon jets. They have been used extensively in the Yemen war, and the deal is likely to spark outrage among rights groups and campaigners.
Arms remain the main component of UK-Saudi trade and the UK government has approved the export of $6.4 billion in weapons since the start of the war in Yemen, despite allegations that Saudi-led forces have committed war crimes.
The United Kingdom has increased its weapons sales by around 500 percent since March 2015, The Independent reported last November.
Last May, US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia in his first foreign visit, signing a $110-billion deal to sell weapons to the kingdom.
“Widespread violent conflict in the Middle East and concerns about human rights have led to political debate in Western Europe and North America about restricting arms sales,” said senior SIPRI researcher Pieter Wezeman.
“Yet the US and European states remain the main arms exporters to the region and supplied over 98 percent of weapons imported by Saudi Arabia.”
More than 13,600 people have died since the Saudi-led invasion began, and Yemen has turned into the scene of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Events in the US since President Trump agreed to South Korean President Moon’s proposal that he meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un show (1) the extent to which the US elite including large sections of the US government’s bureaucracy are willing President Trump to lose despite the huge damage this threatens the US; and (2) how President Trump’s foreign policy instincts are often superior to those of the foreign policy veterans or “adults” which whom he has become surrounded.
Firstly, it is now clear that President Trump’s decision to agree to President Moon’s proposal for a summit meeting with Kim Jong-un was his own.
Apparently when he was told of the proposal by the South Korean delegation which came to brief him about the talks the South Koreans had just had with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, he immediately and enthusiastically agreed to it without first consulting any of his advisers.
Moreover it seems his excitement was so great that he even let slip news of the big announcement which was coming at the Gridiron Dinner.
It seems that none of the key officials of the government – Secretary of State Tillerson (currently on a tour of Africa), Defense Secretary Mattis or National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster – were consulted.
Not only were key officials of the US government not consulted, but there is no secret about their concern and displeasure, whilst the US media is now united with expressions of concern that by agreeing to meet with Kim Jong-un President Trump has walked into some kind of trap. In his typical earthy way President Trump has even tweeted about it
In the first hours after hearing that North Korea’s leader wanted to meet with me to talk denuclearization and that missile launches will end, the press was startled & amazed. They couldn’t believe it. But by the following morning the news became FAKE. They said so what, who cares!
Not surprisingly, there are already attempts to hedge the summit meeting with preconditions, with White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders already talking about unspecified ‘concrete steps’ North Korea must take place before the summit meeting can happen at all
The president will not have the meeting without seeing concrete steps and concrete actions take place by North Korea, so the president will actually be getting something
It is also being said – apparently in all seriousness – that President Trump’s agreement to meet with Kim Jong-un reverses a previously unknown US policy not to meet with North Korea’s leaders lest this might lend them ‘legitimacy’.
Apparently Kim Jong-un’s father Kim Jong-il had repeatedly sought a summit meeting with the US President, only for his requests to be spurned by the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
All I would say about that is that I have never heard of such a policy before, but that if such a policy does exist then it is wrong, has visibly failed, and should be immediately reversed.
Suffice to say that when Kim Jong-il apparently first requested a summit meeting with US President Bill Clinton in the 1990s North Korea did not have nuclear weapons or intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Now it has both.
In other words refusing to meet with North Korea’s leaders has not denied them ‘legitimacy’; it has merely made them pursue their strategic weapons programme more aggressively, resulting in the opposite outcome to the one intended.
If President Trump has indeed reversed a policy of not meeting with North Korea’s leaders, then he should be commended – not criticised – for reversing a policy which has utterly and completely failed.
In any event this criticism ignores the fact that this latest proposal for a summit did not originate with the North Koreans. It clearly comes from the South Koreans whose President Moon Jae-in is looking to President Trump for political cover so that he can press ahead with his dialogue with the North.
Refusing the proposal for a summit would deal a major political blow to President Moon Jae-in, quite possibly inclining him to cut the US further out of the steps he is taking to pursue dialogue with the North, which cannot be in the US’s interests.
US critics of the Trump-Kim summit need to understand that the US is not the only player in this game and that it is a mistake to see this is as a one-to-one confrontation between North Korea and the US.
Not only are the South Koreans taking an active and independent role in the diplomacy, but President Trump himself has just got a call from a very powerful player with a big stake in the game who will have made it very clear that he wants the summit to go ahead.
That player was no less a person than Chinese President Xi Jinping, who took time off from a key meeting of China’s National People’s Congress to telephone President Trump in order to make clear China’s wish that the Trump-Kim summit takes place and that progress towards a comprehensive settlement of the Korean conflict takes place.
Speaking by telephone, Xi told Trump that he appreciates the US president’s desire to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue politically, hoping that the United States and the DPRK will start dialogue as soon as possible and strive for positive results.
Xi added that he hopes all parties concerned will show goodwill and avoid doing anything which might affect or interfere with the improving situation on the peninsula, calling on them to maintain the positive momentum on the Korean Peninsula issue.
Xi also told Trump that China and the United States should focus on cooperation, control differences, promote win-win economic cooperation, and push for new advancement of bilateral relations in the new year.
Regarding the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Trump said the nuclear issue has shown positive development recently, adding that a high-level meeting between the United States and the DPRK meets the interests of all parties, hoping for an eventually peaceful solution to the nuclear issue.
It has been proved that President Xi is right to insist on a dialogue between the United States and the DPRK, Trump said, adding that the US side highly appreciates and values China’s significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue, and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue, Trump said.
Xi pointed out that China remains persistent in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, and resolving the nuclear issue through talks.
At present, the positive changes in the situation on the Korean Peninsula are conducive to putting the denuclearization process back on the right track of settlement through dialogue, which is also in line with the direction set by UN Security Council resolutions concerning the DPRK, Xi said.
“I believe that as long as all parties adhere to the general direction of political and diplomatic settlement, we will surely push forward the Korean Peninsula issue in the direction that the international community has been looking forward to,” Xi said. (bold italics added)
It is unusual for Xinhua to quote words Xi Jinping actually used in a telephone call with another world leader, yet this is what it has just done in relation to the conversation Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have just had with each other. Moreover the words which Xinhua has quoted make clear China’s concern that the dialogue be continued.
On any objective assessment the storm of anger and criticism that the news of the Trump-Kim summit has provoked is baffling.
The critics have no alternative to offer other than the same policy of endless confrontation that has failed so dismally up to now.
As for the summit itself, what exactly is it that they fear? President Trump is hardly in a position to give the whole US position away. No one is expecting a comprehensive settlement of the whole conflict emerging from a single summit, and it is absurd to talk as if that is what might happen. Months and probably years of hard negotiating lie ahead.
However if a negotiation is going to succeed the parties must at some point meet, and that is all the South Koreans and the North Koreans are proposing, and all that President Trump has agreed to.
Personally I cannot escape the feeling that the true cause of the alarm of at least some of the critics of the proposed Trump-Kim summit is that they do not want President Trump – who they have spent years ridiculing as an infantile narcissist – to prove them wrong by achieving a major diplomatic success. President Trump’s tweet which I have quoted above shows that he thinks the same.
However there is almost certainly a more sinister agenda at work as well.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that some people in the US do not want to see the confrontation with North Korea end, not just because they balk at the idea of the US making concessions and because the Korean conflict is for the US’s military industries highly lucrative but because they fear that an end to the Korean conflict might undermine the US’s position in the north east Pacific and might result in South Korea going its own way.
Some of the criticisms which have been made of the President Trump’s agreement to attend the Trump-Kim summit look suspiciously like the start of a campaign by these people to abort prospects for a Korean settlement.
Given the entrenched positions these people hold in the US government and in the US media, there is no guarantee they will fail, and no guarantee that in the face of the obstacles they are putting before it the Trump-Kim summit will take place.
It is to be earnestly hoped that President Trump this time sticks to his decision and presses ahead with the summit. As I have said previously, a great opportunity to make the deal of his life stands before him. In his own interests and in the interests of the US he should not spurn it but seize it.
Last Sunday’s Oscar Awards were interrupted by an incongruous propaganda exercise featuring a Native American actor and Vietnam vet, featuring a montage of clips from Hollywood war movies.
The actor, Wes Studi, said that he “fought for freedom” in Vietnam. But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of that war, including for instance the millions of viewers who watched Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, knows that it was the Vietnamese who were fighting for freedom – while Studi and his comrades were fighting, killing and dying, often bravely and for misguided reasons, to deny the people of Vietnam that freedom.
Studi introduced the Hollywood movies he was showcasing, including “American Sniper,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” with the words, “Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to these powerful films that shine a great spotlight on those who have fought for freedom around the world.”
To pretend to a worldwide TV audience in 2018 that the U.S. war machine is “fighting for freedom” in the countries it attacks or invades was an absurdity that could only add insult to injury for millions of survivors of U.S. coups, invasions, bombing campaigns and hostile military occupations all over the world.
Wes Studi’s role in this Orwellian presentation made it even more incongruous, as his own Cherokee people are themselves survivors of American ethnic cleansing and forced displacement on the Trail of Tears from North Carolina, where they had lived for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, to Oklahoma where Studi was born.
Unlike the delegates at the 2016 Democratic National Convention who broke out in chants of “no more war” at displays of militarism, the great and the good of Hollywood seemed nonplussed by this strange interlude. Few of them applauded it, but none protested either.
From Dunkirk to Iraq and Syria
Perhaps the aging white men who still run the “Academy” were driven to this exhibition of militarism by the fact that two of the films nominated for Oscars were war movies. But they were both films about the U.K. in the early years of the Second World War – stories of British people resisting German aggression, not of Americans committing it.
Like most cinematic paeans to the U.K.’s “finest hour,” both these films are rooted in Winston Churchill’s own account of the Second World War and his role in it. Churchill was roundly sent packing by British voters in 1945, before the war was even over, as British troops and their families instead voted for the “land fit for heroes” promised by the Labour Party, a land where the rich would share the sacrifices of the poor, in peace as in war, with a National Health Service and social justice for all.
Churchill reportedly consoled his cabinet at its final meeting, telling them, “Never fear, gentlemen, history will be kind to us – for I shall write it.” And so he did, cementing his own place in history and drowning out more critical accounts of the U.K.’s role in the war by serious historians like A.J.P. Taylor in the U.K. and D.F. Fleming in the U.S.
If the Military Industrial Complex and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are trying to connect these Churchillian epics with America’s current wars, they should be careful what they wish for. Many people around the world need little prompting to identify the German Stukas and Heinkels bombing Dunkirk and London with the U.S. and allied F-16s bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and the British troops huddled on the beach at Dunkirk with the destitute refugees stumbling ashore on Lesbos and Lampedusa.
Externalizing the Violence of War
In the past 16 years, the U.S. has invaded, occupied and dropped 200,000 bombs and missiles on seven countries, but it has lost only 6,939 American troops killed and 50,000 wounded in these wars. To put this in the context of U.S. military history, 58,000 U.S. troops were killed in Vietnam, 54,000 in Korea, 405,000 in the Second World War and 116,000 in the First World War.
But low U.S. casualties do not mean that our current wars are less violent than previous wars. Our post-2001 wars have probably killed between 2 and 5 million people. The use of massive aerial and artillery bombardment has reduced cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Sirte, Kobane, Mosul and Raqqa to rubble, and our wars have plunged entire societies into endless violence and chaos.
But by bombing and firing from a distance with very powerful weapons, the U.S. has wreaked all this slaughter and destruction at an extraordinary low rate of U.S. casualties. The U.S.’s technological war-making has not reduced the violence and horror of war, but it has “externalized” it, at least temporarily.
But do these low casualty rates represent a kind of “new normal” that the U.S. can replicate whenever it attacks or invades other countries? Can it keep waging war around the world and remain so uniquely immune from the horrors it unleashes on others?
Or are the low U.S. casualty rates in these wars against relatively weak military forces and lightly armed resistance fighters giving Americans a false picture of war, one that is enthusiastically embellished by Hollywood and the corporate media?
Even when the U.S. was losing 900-1,000 troops killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan each year from 2004 to 2007, there was much more public debate and vocal opposition to war than there is now, but those were still historically very low casualty rates.
U.S. military leaders are more realistic than their civilian counterparts. General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has told Congress that the U.S. plan for war on North Korea is for a ground invasion of Korea, effectively a Second Korean War. The Pentagon must have an estimate of the number of U.S. troops who are likely to be killed and wounded under its plan, and Americans should insist that it makes that estimate public before U.S. leaders decide to launch such a war.
The other country that the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia keep threatening to attack or invade is Iran. President Obama admitted from the outset that Iran was the ultimate strategic target of the CIA’s proxy war in Syria.
Israeli and Saudi leaders openly threaten war on Iran, but expect the U.S. to fight Iran on their behalf. American politicians play along with this dangerous game, which could get thousands of their constituents killed. This would flip the traditional U.S. doctrine of proxy war on its head, effectively turning the U.S. military into a proxy force fighting for the ill-defined interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq, with more than double its population. It has a 500,000 strong military and its decades of independence and isolation from the West have forced it to develop its own weapons industry, supplemented by some advanced Russian and Chinese weapons.
In an article about the prospect of a U.S. war on Iran, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen dismissed American politicians’ fears of Iran as “alarmism” and called his boss, Defense Secretary Mattis, “obsessed” with Iran. Sjursen believes that the “fiercely nationalistic” Iranians would mount a determined and effective resistance to foreign occupation, and concludes, “Make no mistake, U.S.military occupation of the Islamic Republic would make the occupation of Iraq, for once, actually look like the ‘cakewalk’ it was billed to be.”
Is This America’s “Phony War”?
Invading North Korea or Iran could make the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look in hindsight like the German invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland must have looked to German troops on the Eastern front a few years later. Only 18,000 German troops were killed in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and 16,000 in the invasion of Poland. But the larger war that they led to killed 7 million Germans and wounded 7 million more.
After the deprivations of the First World War reduced Germany to a state of near starvation and drove the German Navy to mutiny, Adolf Hitler was determined, like America’s leaders today, to maintain an illusion of peace and prosperity on the home front. The newly conquered people of the thousand-year Reich could suffer, but not Germans in the homeland.
Hitler succeeded in maintaining the standard of living in Germany at about its pre-war level for the first two years of the war, and even began cutting military spending in 1940 to boost the civilian economy. Germany only embraced a total war economy when its previously all-conquering forces hit a brick wall of resistance in the Soviet Union. Could Americans be living through a similar “phony war”, one miscalculation away from a similar shock at the brutal reality of the wars we have unleashed on the world?
How would the American public react if far greater numbers of Americans were killed in Korea or Iran – or Venezuela? Or even in Syria if the U.S. and its allies follow through on their plan to illegally occupy Syria east of the Euphrates?
And where are our political leaders and jingoistic media leading us with their ever-escalating anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda? How far will they take their nuclear brinksmanship? Would American politicians even know before it was too late if they crossed a point of no return in their dismantling of Cold War nuclear treaties and escalating tensions with Russia and China?
Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war was a response to the public reaction to what were in fact historically low U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Obama waged war on the quiet, not war on the cheap. Under cover of his dovish image, he successfully minimized the public reaction to his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, his global expansion of special operations and drone strikes and a massive bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
How many Americans know that the bombing campaign Obama launched in Iraq and Syria in 2014 has been the heaviest U.S. bombing campaign anywhere in the world since Vietnam? Over 105,000 bombs and missiles, as well as indiscriminate U.S., French and Iraqi rockets and artillery, have blasted thousands of homes in Mosul, Raqqa, Fallujah, Ramadi and dozens of smaller towns and villages. As well as killing thousands of Islamic State fighters, they have probably killed at least 100,000 civilians, a systematic war crime that has passed almost without comment in the Western media.
“… And It Is Late”
How will the American public react if Trump launches new wars against North Korea or Iran, and the U.S. casualty rate returns to a more historically “normal” level – maybe 10,000 Americans killed each year, as during the peak years of the American War in Vietnam, or even 100,000 per year, as in U.S. combat in the Second World War? Or what if one of our many wars finally escalates into a nuclear war, with a higher U.S. casualty rate than any previous war in our history?
In his classic 1994 book, Century of War, the late Gabriel Kolko presciently explained,
“Those who argue that war and preparation for it is not necessary to capitalism’s existence or prosperity miss the point entirely: it simply has not functioned in any other way in the past and there is nothing in the present to warrant the assumption that the coming decades will be any different…”
Kolko concluded,
“But there are no easy solutions to the problems of irresponsible, deluded leaders and the classes they represent, or the hesitation of people to reverse the world’s folly before they are themselves subjected to its grievous consequences. So much remains to be done – and it is late.”
America’s deluded leaders know nothing of diplomacy beyond bullying and brinksmanship. As they brainwash themselves and the public with the illusion of war without casualties, they will keep killing, destroying and risking our future until we stop them – or until they stop us and everything else.
The critical question today is whether the American public can muster the political will to pull our country back from the brink of an even greater military disaster than the ones we have already unleashed on millions of our neighbors.
US President Trump claims to be an imaginative deal-maker. We will soon see. His announcement this week that he is willing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for direct talks is stunningly good news.
The next few weeks will be make-or-break for a historic peace settlement to the decades-old Korean conflict. Washington’s next moves and words are crucial.
Kim made the offer in a letter to Trump conveyed by a South Korean delegation to Washington DC. Trump has responded positively, and a possible meeting is to take place in May. That would be the first time a sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader.
Trump must forgo the temptation for macho posturing, and summon the maturity to act responsibly in the interests of regional and indeed world peace.
Washington bears a heavy responsibility for the conflict that has racked the Korean Peninsula since the 1950-53 civil war, in which the US backed its South Korean ally against the Communist North.
It is futile for American leaders to point the finger at Pyongyang as a “rogue state” while denying Washington’s own baleful role in the legacy of conflict and insecurity.
The quickening pace of inter-Korean peace diplomacy is a much welcome change from the war rhetoric that was endangering world security only a few months ago. This week it was reported that the North and South Korean leaders are ready to meet next month in what would be the biggest dialogue event in more than a decade for the Peninsula. Now President Trump has also agreed to talks with North Korea’s Kim.
North Korea’s reported willingness this week to freeze its nuclear weapons program is ground-breaking. It should be reciprocated by Washington moving, at long last, to sign an armistice to definitively end the 1950-53 Korean War.
North Korea – the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – has long maintained, with sound reason, that its nuclear weapons program has been impelled by the existential fear of a US-led war being thrust on it. Given the horrendous devastation inflicted on the people of North Korea during the 1950-53 war in which millions died from American aerial bombing campaigns, it is incumbent on Washington to commit to a full peace treaty to finally and formally end that war. Why not?
If, however, Washington insists on unilateral North Korean disarmament then the prospect for a peaceful settlement is doomed.
It is counterproductive to look back at past failed negotiations with recrimination about one side or the other reneging on obligations.
Surely, the imperative of the present hour is to seize the opportunity for peace by both sides making a mutual commitment to resolving grievances through solely peaceful means.
This is the diplomatic process which Russia and China have been urging all sides to embrace. North and South Korean leaders have stepped up to the plate and shown an admirable willingness to engage in earnest dialogue.
Since the beginning of this year, North and South Korean delegates have held several rounds of sincere talks to find a way forward for the security and peace of all the Korean people who share the one Peninsular homeland. The results have been promising and underscore the vital need for mutual engagement.
It is evident from the respective leaderships in Pyongyang and Seoul that the people of Korea, North and South, yearn for a peaceful coexistence.
What the Trump administration needs to do is listen to the wishes of the Korean people. Washington’s bellicose rhetoric towards North Korea must be somehow replaced with humility to genuinely resolve the Korean conflict – a conflict which Washington is a protagonist in.
These are far from unreasonable demands on Washington, as several former American diplomats and leaders such as President Jimmy Carter have recognized and endorsed.
Washington is insisting on imposing new punitive sanctions on Pyongyang, as well as carrying out forthcoming military exercises which have continually offended North Korea’s national pride and security.
Washington is acting like the master of the situation issuing ultimatums instead of pursing diplomacy.
There is a pragmatic way forward to achieve a peaceful resolution over Korea. Russia and China must prevail on the US to meet its international obligations of peaceful diplomacy.
Is Washington a law-abiding peaceful state, as it so often claims to be, or is it a rogue state that sees itself above the law and international moral consensus? A moment of truth is at hand.
Ubiquitous IT giant Google has silently inked a partnership with the Department of Defense to militarize artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, reinvigorating fears of a Terminator-style apocalyptic scenario.
Google has been secretly working with the Pentagon in order to help its 1,100-strong fleet of drones to detect images, faces, and behavioral patterns, and plans to scour through massive amounts of video footage in order to improve bombing accuracy for autonomous drones. The endgame is to improve combat performance by automating the decision-making process in locating and targeting combatants, The Interceptreported on Tuesday.
Project Maven was launched in April 2017 to establish an “Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team,” which advocates using sophisticated algorithm-based technologies to combat rising “competitors and adversaries”.
According to a Pentagon memo, dated April 26, 2017, its objective is to accelerate the process of using big data and machine learning together during combat situations and speed up the process of analyzing collected data. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed off on the initiative.
Project Maven also aims to “augment or automate Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination (PED) for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)” in order to “reduce the human factors burden of [full motion video] analysis, increase actionable intelligence, and enhance military decision-making,” he wrote.
The Pentagon has become increasingly worried that it will become displaced as the world’s top AI developer. At a February 13 hearing, Senators Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and others lamented Chinese efforts to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, leaving the US behind.
Another DOD report, “Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap”, notes that there are three primary impetuses driving the push towards AI, which are “department budgetary challenges, evolving security requirements, and a changing military environment.” The report reflects another US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which addressed problems with human-piloted drones, including fatigue, human error, and demoralization.
“Downward economic forces will continue to constrain Military Department budgets for the foreseeable future. Achieving affordable and cost-effective technical solutions is imperative in this fiscally constrained environment,” it also pointed out.
“People and computers will work symbiotically to increase the ability of weapon systems to detect objects,” Marine Corps Colonel Drew Cukor said during a 2017 Defense One Tech summit. “Eventually we hope that one analyst will be able to do twice as much work, potentially three times as much, as they’re doing now. That’s our goal.”
Cukor also mentioned the program would help to identify 38 classes of objects essential to detect in warfare, especially when “fighting” Islamic State militants. He also addressed plans to carry out Project Maven by the end of last year.
“We are in an AI arms race […] It’s happening in industry [and] the big five Internet companies are pursuing this heavily. Many of you will have noted that Eric Schmidt […] is calling Google an AI company now, not a data company,” he said.
Google is no stranger to the Department of Defense. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of its parent company Alphabet, chaired the DOD Defense Innovation Board under the Obama administration.
Some Google employees were outraged that the company would share its technology with the military, according to Gizmodo, while others said the project raised ethical questions about machine learning.
A company spokeswoman told Bloomberg that Google was sharing TensorFlow API with the military for “non-offensive uses only.”
“Military use of machine learning naturally raises valid concerns. We’re actively discussing this important topic internally and with others,” the unnamed spokeswoman said.
Three days after the January 13 false alarm of a North Korean nuclear attack on Hawaii, Japan’s public TV broadcaster NHK issued its own false alarm around 7 p.m., warning in error that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan. As reported by CNN, Jan. 17, and by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Reuters Jan. 16, the shocking message was received by Japanese smart phone users and by NHK TV website viewers.
Like in Hawaii, the Japanese public was amazed to read, according to a translation from Reuters: “NORTH KOREA APPEARS TO HAVE LAUNCHED A MISSILE. THE GOVERNMENT URGES PEOPLE TO TAKE SHELTER INSIDE BUILDINGS OR UNDERGROUND.”
Unlike Hawaii’s scare, which threw the state’s population of 1.4 million into a panic, NHK Japan’s fake news was broadcast nation-wide to about 127 million people. The TV network blamed the terror alert on a “switching error” and corrected it in less than 10 minutes. “We are deeply sorry,” NHK announced on its 9:00 p.m. news Jan. 16.
In Arsenals of Folly, author Richard Rhodes documents how US government “officials frequently and deliberately inflated their estimates of military threats facing the United States, beginning with … exaggerated Soviet military capabilities.” A review in the Feb. 7, 2008 New York Review of Books said, “The exaggeration of foreign threats, however pernicious, is a tactic,” and quotes Rhodes’ study: “Threat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets… Fear was part of the program …”
The New York Review also noted that in 1998, the US Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States “warned that Iran and North Korea could hit the US with missiles within five years.” Twenty years later, neither country can do so. Still the success of the steady drum beat of anti-North Korea messaging from the White House, State Dept. and the Pentagon is showcased by National Public Radio online which announced: “Both Hawaii and Japan have been increasingly concerned about North Korea’s continued weapons testing. AsNPR’s Scott Neuman reported, North Korea ‘routinely conducts test launches of its ballistic missiles over Japanese territory.
But like with most news organizations’ superficial reporting, NPR never asks what North Korea could possibly hope to gain by attacking Japan or the United States.The Reuters report of Japan’s false alarm continued in this vein, noting: “The mistake took place at a tense time in the region following North Korea’s largest nuclear test to date in September and its claim in November that it had successfully tested a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the entire US mainland.” China, Russia and Pakistan nuclear powers considered hostile to the United States, but today’s fearmongering is pointed instead at North Korea.
Following shooting wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and throughout the Cold War, the US public learned that well-publicized threats or provocations that became “common knowledge” were in fact unreal, notably the famously false 1957-59 “missile gap” favoring Russia, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin “incident” which led to the US invasion of Vietnam, and Iraq’s fake weapons of mass destruction that led to the US’s 2003 invasion.
After decades living with the fearsome “Soviet threat,” dozens of news accounts in 2001 reported that “every major assessment from 1974 to 1986 ‘substantially’ overestimated” the Soviet threat, according to an internal CIA review. In 1988, wire services reported that “The Soviet Union is highly unlikely to launch a sudden military attack on NATO forces in Europe, despite Western military leaders’ fear about a Pearl Harbor-type strike, a congressional study said.” On Oct. 1, 1991 the AP reported that “American taxpayers may have wasted tens of billions of dollars arming to confront a Soviet empire that was in a state of decline…”
A 2004 Star-Tribune headline corrected the record noting: “No Iraq Links to Al-Qaida: 9/11 Panel’s Report Contradicts a US Justification for Going to War.” Iraq’s missing arsenal voided the other justification for war, but too late to prevent the waste of many more tens of billions in tax dollars.
Today’s endless “war on terrorism” likewise requires that manufactured fear which be endlessly hyped. Dick Meyer reported for Newsday in 2015 how the threat of terror “is massively exaggerated in both the public and official mind.” This is crucial, as Rhodes wrote in Arsenals of Folly, especially with the new military budget jumping to $786 billion (including $182 billion in military spending outside the Pentagon), $80 billion over last year’s.
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia would use its nuclear weapon only as a response measure.
“As far as this issue is concerned, I should note that it’s extremely important and sensitive. I want to tell you so that the international community knew this. Our plan on the nuclear weapon is to use them as a response measure,” Putin said.
“The decision on the use of the nuclear weapon can be taken only if our air defense systems record not only the launch of missiles but their trajectory and the time they hit Russia’s territory,” Putin added.
“Yes, this will be a global catastrophe for the world, but as a Russian citizen, as the Russian president, I want to ask a question: who needs the world without Russia?” Putin said.
Speaking further, the Russian president said that Russia, unlike the US, has never used nuclear weapons against other countries.
“As far as the nuclear push-button is concerned, the issue is not quite correct. Foremost, we haven’t begun this ourselves. The first nuclear missile was built by the US. Secondly, we have never used a nuclear weapon, the US used it against Japan,” Putin noted.
The issue has also been commented on by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, who said that the US was paving the way for future nuclear war.
“It is not clear why Berlin and other capitals have not yet been alarmed by Washington’s disproportionate approach to the use of nuclear weapons, which makes it possible to use them in case of extraordinary circumstances, as is written there, not limited to military scenarios. Such an understanding of its role as the guarantor of global security is fraught with delivering a nuclear strike on all whom the United States deems to be an aggressor,” Zakharova said.
“By reserving the right to a preventive nuclear strike, including with by means of low-power nuclear warheads, the United States creates dangerous prerequisites for the emergence of a missile and nuclear war even during a low-intensity conflict,” she told reporters.
Last week, Putin made his annual address to the country’s bicameral parliament, the Federal Assembly, which comprises the Federation Council and State Duma. The Russian leader announced his country’s development of new types of armaments, including intercontinental underwater drones, nuclear-powered cruise missiles, and a prospective hypersonic missile, and showed footage featuring tests of these weapons.
The Russian president stressed that Russia’s efforts toward enhancing its defense capabilities were being carried out within the framework of existing international accords. According to Putin, Russia is creating advanced weapon systems in response to the deployment of US missile defense systems, and these arms present no threat to other states.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says the Israeli regime is in no position to call Iran a threat to the Middle East, stressing the development of the country’s missile program is aimed at safeguarding peace and security.
“Those who have over the past 70 years created tension, launched wars and caused destruction in the region and have committed genocide and caused [the] Sabra and Shatila [massacre] are in no position to portray Iran as a threat,” Rouhani said during a cabinet session on Wednesday.
“Iran is no threat to anyone. Iran is [the pillar] of stability and security for the entire region. But of course it will strongly defend its rights,” he added.
The Iranian president made the remarks a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was responsible for “darkness descending” on the Middle East and said Israel faced threats from the Islamic Republic.
In a hawkish address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Washington on Tuesday, Netanyahu also alleged that Iran was increasing its influence in the Middle East and sought to dominate regional countries.
Rouhani criticized attempts by certain nations of the region to promote Iranophobia, saying Iran had never invaded and would not invade any country.
“History shows that the Iranian nation has never… occupied any country. We have never bombarded our neighbors or piled up pressure on regional nations. Not only haven’t we driven people out of their countries, but we have welcomed refugees,” he noted.
Iran seeks the progress and prosperity of all regional countries, Rouhani said, stressing Iran’s economic, political and military power was for deterrence not attacking other countries.
“Our weapons are meant to promote peace, strengthen stability and security, and to prevent others from thinking about invading our country. Therefore, no one should be concerned about Iran’s weapons, missiles or strengthening of its defense might,” Rouhani stressed.
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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