US sends largest ammo shipment in 20yrs to Germany amid ongoing European buildup
RT | November 10, 2016
The US military sent over 600 containers of ammunition to Europe, the largest single shipment in more than 20 years. The move comes just a week after the Pentagon announced the deployment of a 6,000-strong tank brigade to Eastern Europe next year.
Some 620 shipping containers packed with ammunition arrived at the northern German port of Nordenham at the end of October. There they were loaded onto trains and transported to the Miesau Army Depot for storage and distribution to other locations across Europe, the US Army said in a statement.
“This is about deterrence. We could have 1,000 tanks over here, but if we didn’t have the ammunition for them they would not have any deterrent effect,” said Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of US Army Europe.
He added that German military and civilian staff have been helpful in moving the ammunition supplies to the Miesau depot, which was “only possible because our ally, Germany, allows it to happen.”
By enabling the movement of US Army ammunition and equipment through its territory, Germany is contributing to “deterrence,” Gen. Hodges said.
“We’re bringing ammunition into the theater to resupply and set the stage for the European theater for any type of exercises or potential future missions that may come about,” said Lt. Col. Brad Culligan, commander of the US Army’s 838th Transportation Battalion.
The shipment is yet another part of the massive military buildup taking place in Eastern Europe, where the US and NATO are developing military infrastructure and headquarters as well as building weapons and ammunition stockpiles to defend the region against what they describe as “Russian aggression.”
Earlier in November, the Pentagon announced deployment of two heavily-armed army units, the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team (3rd ABCT) of the Colorado-based 4th Infantry Division as well as the New York-based 10th Combat Aviation Brigade, to Europe in January 2017.
Meanwhile, Gen. Hodges said in early October that he also wants to see anti-drone weapons systems in future arms deliveries to counter Russia, according to Military.com.
Those weapons systems would include the Avenger, a Humvee equipped with eight FIM-92 Stinger missiles, as well as the German-made Gepard, a twin-33mm cannon mounted on a Leopard tank chassis.
The US Army also plans to equip the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Europe with the new version of the M1126 Stryker infantry fighting vehicle armed with a more powerful 30mm cannon in May of 2018, according to the website.
Armaments aside, the buildup is also coupled with numerous exercises taking place in the Baltic states, Poland and in the Black Sea, with the stated goal of assuring Eastern European allies of NATO’s commitment to defending them.
Russia has consistently referred to the buildup as a provocative measure which undermines European security, promising to take reciprocal steps.
Donald Trump won the election… so what now?
By Kit | OffGuardian | November 10, 2016
In the wake of the shocking result of the US Presidential election, we take a look at some of the key questions left up in the air. How did things go so wrong for Hillary Clinton? How will the world look when the dust has settled? Is this really a sign of any kind of change?
Question 1: What the hell just happened?
Most people, most pundits most media outlets were predicting a Clinton victory. The pundits and reporters, because Hillary was “qualified” and “competent”. Everyone else…because she could follow Obama’s example and mobilise the virtue-signalling vote, and even if she didn’t it would just be rigged. As the primaries evidently were.
The vast majority of the media were behind Clinton. The banks were too. As was Wall Street, big pharma, arms manufacturers, senior figures from both major political parties and (seemingly, anyway) the military and intelligence services. How could that much collective clout possibly fail to pull out the W? How did they let this happen?
You are left with three possibilities.
1, elections aren’t rigged. Simply put, all the weight behind Clinton could only exercise legitimate and transparent power. They could give interviews, write opinion pieces and campaign…and that’s all. They fought hard, and they lost. Fair and square. Given what we know about 2000, 2004 and the democratic primaries this seems unlikely.
2, elections can be controlled, but only in a limited fashion. This was talked about at length following the Brexit vote (which many people have suggested was nothing like as close as the “official figures” made it look). This idea posits that numbers can be manipulated, but not controlled. You can fudge them up and down, but full-on fakery leaves too much evidence, or is simply too difficult. It’s possible that Clinton was just SO mistrusted, SO hated, SO incredibly unpopular, that even with the collective might of 90% of the political and media establishment behind her… they just couldn’t swing the vote. This is plausible, especially if you paid attention to the crowd sizes at their respective rallies.
[Note: These situations both come with the rider that, much like sports, it may only be possible to rig an election if both sides are willing to cooperate. Maybe Trump wouldn’t let it slide the way Al Gore or Bernie Sanders were happy to do.]
3, somebody changed sides. Maybe the election was rigged, but in the other direction. Maybe the sudden, unexpected reopening of the e-mail investigation was a deliberate ploy by the FBI (and others, behind the scenes) to swing public opinion against Hillary. Maybe the rumors of immediate impeachment should Hillary win, and of possible ties to paedophiles and human trafficking, were the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s possible that an establishment already creaking alarmingly under the weight of Clinton’s baggage, decided Clinton was now simply too much trouble. And that it might be easier to chance their arm on a man who might be willing to play ball, and was less likely to throw up a constitutional crisis and/or suddenly drop dead.
It’s recently become obvious, given the flip-flopping over Ukraine and Syria, that the American political establishment is far from a monolith of drive and purpose. There are internal divisions. There are factions. Trying to distill any kind of rational plan from their resulting actions is like trying to follow the score in a game of Rugby where four teams are playing at once, and they’re all wearing the same uniform.
Question 2: Will Trump Be Allowed to take office?
Just as happened following the Brexit vote (and to a lesser extent Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader), already this result has sprouted protest movements, petitions and articles either directly challenging its legitimacy, or simply questioning the “democratic value” of the American electoral system.
As the results were coming in last night, I personally witnessed tweets suggesting Obama should refuse to relinquish his office to Trump. Protest marches have already been held in many cities across America. If these protests escalate to riots, or street battles, Obama could declare a state of emergency which “delays” the swearing-in of the new president, Trump supporters would see this (rightly) as a possible coup attempt, leading to further violent unrest and the declaration of martial law. Extreme, but not impossible. Any move to replace Trump before he’s even in office would be totally unprecedented and grossly unconstitutional. But so was Gitmo.
Before the vote was held, the democrats were fervently and hysterically blaming the Russians for “interfering” with the election, baseless rumors which the media eagerly and unquestioningly repeated. You could argue this was done to preemptively defend themselves in the event of a Trump win. Undermining the result before there even was one. The Russian “hacks” are cited as the main cause behind this petition, calling for an overthrow of a Trump government, on the grounds he stole the election. This issue could be picked up more widely in the media in the coming days.
The long, long, long delay before Hillary finally appeared to make her concession speech makes one wonder if, behind the scenes, there may have been wheels turning. Think tanks furiously going over the options and outcomes should Clinton simply refuse to concede the election and publicly call into question the fairness of the vote. In the end, what would have finally sunk that possibility is the pompous way Clinton’s team responded to Trump’s own suggestion there may be vote rigging. To turn around and “disrespect our democracy” after she lost would have laid Clinton open to justified claims of hypocrisy.
There are more old fashioned methods of removing an unwanted president, of course. It’s very telling that “assassination” was shooting up the google search ranks as the results were announced last night. And America has never been short a lone wolf assassin when it really, really needed one.
Question 3: What sort of man is Donald Trump?
It’s tempting, at moments such as this, to blindly and joyfully accept outcome as a win for good guys. I’m not going to deny I was, more than anything, relieved when I saw the result. The possibility of a psychopathic war hawk pushing for a war with Russia, with the full weight of a self-deluded middle-class high on their own moral outrage behind her, was terrifying. But not so long ago Barack Obama was… for want of a better phrase…the great white hope. He was going to change things…but didn’t. In the end he was simply an Orwellian controlled alternative. It’s possible that’s all Trump is, too.
It’s possible Trump is just a pompous windbag who would say or do anything to get into power, simply for the sake of having power. It’s possible he’s an elaborate ploy designed to satiate an angry public thirsty for real change, and buy the oligarch elite more time to milk us dry or blow us all up for some crazy reasons of their own. Both plausible, but let’s put them aside for now.
Let’s say that Trump is sincere in his goals, and let’s say he is allowed to take office and try to introduce his policies – both big ifs, but still. How much institutional and bureaucratic resistance will he encounter? How many threats and extortions will he face? Does he have the strength of character to face down that opposition? Very few people do. Most politicians sell their souls for power, or resign themselves to impotence. It takes an extraordinary person to keep a hold of themselves and their ideals, in a political environment double loaded with both temptation and threat.
All through the election cycle the democrats were far more interested in talking about punch lines, snappy quotes and identity politics than discussing policy. That’s because any real discussion of policies would only push a lot of people into voting for Trump. He want’s to cut-out hostilities with Russia and cooperate in combating terrorism. He wants to slash defense spending and rebuild industry. He wants to pull American bases out of Japan, Germany, South Korea and others, and relinquish America’s self-styled title of “World Policeman”. He wants to stop corporations from employing illegal immigrants to get around paying minimum wage. He has posited leaving NATO.
These are all, on the face of it, reasonable policies that could bring America back from the brink. And they are all, on their own, potentially career ending for any other politician in the Western world.
Will he ever be allowed to enact a single one of them? I guess we’ll see.
Andrew Korybko – We shouldn’t be surprised about Trump’s victory
Katehon Think Tank | November 9, 2016
Hillary versus Donald: Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead! Victory for the Wizard of Oz!
By Diana Johnstone | Global Research | November 9, 2016
“There’s no place like home.”
That’s the lesson. Even when home is Kansas.
The real meaning of this election is not, as bitterly disappointed Hillary supporters still maintain with tears in their eyes and fear in their throats, a victory for racism and sexism.
The real meaning of this upset is that Wall Street’s globalization project has been rejected by the citizens of its homeland.
This has major implications for the European nations that have been dragged along into this ruinous project.
Hillary Clinton was the candidate of the military industrial complex and international finance capital. She designed herself to be the figurehead of those forces, as queen of regime change. She aspired to be the one to remake the world in the image Wall Street dictates. It was a project enthusiastically and expensively supported by the one percent who profit from arms contracts and the trade deals they write themselves for their own interests.
To distract from the genuine significance of her candidacy, the Clinton campaign appealed to the desire for respectability of educated city dwellers, portraying Trump supporters as racist yokels motivated by a hateful desire to scapegoat minorities as revenge for their own inadequacies. They were “deplorables”, and you wouldn’t want to be one of them, would you?
Trump was sexist, because he referred to certain women as “bimbos”. Elizabeth Warren called him out for this, on a platform where Hillary sat listening, mouth wide open in delight – she who had referred to Bill’s girlfriends as “bimbo eruptions”. Sleaze and hypocrisy drowned out policy discussions. The worst the Clinton campaign could come up with was an eleven-year-old locker room exchange – just words, hardly comparable to Bill’s chronic actions.
Still, millions who were taken in by the Clinton campaign line are devastated, terrified, convinced that the only reason Trump won was the “racism” and “sexism” of that lower caste in globalized society: white heterosexual working class males.
But no, Virginia, there were other reasons to vote for Trump. Racism and sexism are surely low on the list.
Trump voters were scandalized by Hillary’s lies and corruption. Many of them would have voted for Bernie Sanders if they had the choice. That choice was taken away from them by Democratic Party manipulators who were sold on their own advertising campaign to elect “the first woman President.” A brand new product on the Presidential election market! Be the first to vote for a woman President! New, improved!
Bernie’s success already showed that millions of people didn’t want that woman. But the Democratic Party manipulators and their oligarch sponsors went right ahead with their plans to force Hillary Clinton on an unwilling nation. They brought this defeat on themselves.
Contrary to what you could believe by reading the New York Times, there were even intellectuals who voted for Trump, or at least refused to vote for Hillary, for the simple reason that Trump appears less likely to lead the world into its third and final Great War. He said things giving that impression, but such statements were ignored by mainstream media as they worked overtime to inflate the ogre image. No war with Russia? You must be a Putin puppet!
Trump voters had several reasons to vote for Trump other than “racism”. Most of all, they want their jobs back, jobs that have vanished thanks to the neoliberal policy of transferring manufacturing jobs to places with low wages.
But racism is the only motive recognized by the globalized elite for rejecting globalization. British citizens who voted to leave the European Union in order to recover their traditional democracy were also stigmatized as “racist” and “xenophobe”. Opposition to racism and xenophobia is the natural moral defense of a project of global governance that deprives ordinary citizens of any important power of decision.
This extraordinarily vicious campaign has brought out and aggravated sharp divisions within the United States. The division between city and countryside is most evident on the electoral maps. But these real divisions are exacerbated by a campaign that portrayed Donald Trump as a racist madman, a new Hitler about to bring fascism to America. The antiracism of this campaign, denouncing “hate”, has actually spawned hate.
No, Virginia, Trump is not Hitler. He is the Wizard of Oz. He is a showman who pulled off an amazing trick thanks to the drastic moral and intellectual decline of the American political system.
He is neither as dangerous as his opponents fear, nor as able to “make American great again” as his supporters hope. He is the Lesser Evil. What will become of him in Washington is anybody’s guess.
Copyright © Diana Johnstone, Global Research, 2016
Trump Wins: Welcome to the new world
The BRICS Post | November 9, 2016
Modern history will record November 8, 2016 as the day when the United States of America officially decided to vote for a global retreat – from the heady rhetoric of ‘Let’s make the world a better place’ to “Let’s make America great again”.
Americans have voted for building a wall to protect what they have, against the dream of global dominance. This surely marks the end of the uni-polar world as we know it.
The tenor and assertions (of rebuilding American infrastructure, erecting border walls, keeping immigrants away, and dismantling Obamacare) during Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign trail followed by his massive victory on Tuesday completes this US retreat.
The resulting void comes at a time when no one nation is ready to fill this space which will be left empty – and this could fuel the rise of real multi-polarity.
At the moment, and surely for many years now, China remains America’s biggest economic rival. That juggernaut continues with Beijing’s ambitious new Silk Road (One Belt One Road) project across Asia and Europe.
China is the world’s second largest economy after the United States and the biggest trading partner for most Asian and African economies. With over 160 cities hosting 1 million+ inhabitants and new cities emerging, China continues to be one of the fastest growing consumer markets.
However, its biggest domestic challenge is to continue to guard against any slips in its politically conservative agenda and that internal social upheaval does not go out of those “iron hands”.
But there is no denying that China will continue as the centerpiece of the global economic discourse even as Trump takes stock of US economic health indicators.
Enter Russia
The next biggest tension point on the global agenda is strategic geopolitics.
Unpalatable as it may be to many, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia – which is facing severe economic difficulties – is ready, willing and able to play an important role here.
Among the Republican leader’s most discussed campaign promises was that America would outsource the fight against ISIS to Putin in Syria.
For Putin, to manage public opinion at home, it’s important to be doing things which can divert attention from local to global affairs.
We are likely to hear more and more of Russia in the coming days, especially since Trump spoke about working with Putin “to wipe out shared enemies”.
They say establishment always resists change.
So it’s likely that Trump might continue on the path set by his predecessors on foreign policy in the short term. But it is quite clear that his focus would be inwards rather than outwards.
Trump might find friendly right-wing dispensations in India and Brazil that could be further persuaded to become Washington’s proxies in their struggle against economically-asserting China and strategically-defiant Russia. In turn, India and Brazil are likely to benefit from this dependence.
Rise of strategic blocs
But in order to understand the likelihood of an American retreat, one needs to look at the recent announcements of Asian countries like the Philippines and Malaysia that have openly rebuffed US meddling in the region vis-à-vis the South China Sea or of the eagerness of EU countries in joining the new China-led financial institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Now more than ever, strategic groupings are likely to wield more eminence – BRICS is one such group.
Former UK Vice Finance Minister, Jim O’Neill, who is the father of this acronym, has recently said that BRICS has outperformed his expectations and – as things stand today – it seems he is in for an even bigger surprise.
Meanwhile, Germany’s Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen has already asked President-elect Trump to reassure US allies of his commitment to NATO following some bitter comments during his 2016 campaign.
The EU is another big grouping.
If it succeeds in fighting the growing right-wing onslaught and continues to work with other groups like BRICS and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the EU is likely to gain from this US retreat.
What Americans have done today is historic. They may not have made history by electing the first female president but they have, unintentionally, initiated steps towards a historic retreat.
They have sent an outsider to the White House with a mandate to look within.
The American Dream has opened its eyes to the new realities.
Welcome to the new world order.
Trump’s Victory Should Not Obfuscate Election Fraud
By Doug Steil | Aletho News | November 9, 2016
As luck would have it Hillary Clinton’s landslide loss was so big that massive election fraud by Democratic Party operatives in various cities could not overcome her deficit.
The “shock” by insiders of having lost obviously reflects their earlier certainty of prevailing, which hints at the extent of their vote rigging schemes. The unverifiable system of voting in America is so flawed that foreign observers are now being blocked from monitoring US elections. The topic of fraud can no longer be swept under the rug.
Surely Clinton and the media will try to make a big deal of having “received more votes” than Trump in the popular vote total, which according to the current tabulation has already occurred, with an even higher differential to come once West Coast state results are all counted.
Those inside the DC Beltway and within elite campuses will claim that this is “unfair” and that Hillary really “should have won”.
However, this assertion should be vociferously challenged. Surely this surplus is artificial. Is it really possible that so many Americans would have ignored the prospect of going to war with Russia?
The question needs to be raised publicly: How many hundreds of thousand votes were switched from Trump to Clinton altogether and how many invalid (illegal) votes were registered for her?
Aside from that — assuming all the votes were legitimate — the electoral college system is intended to prevent, say, a concentration of votes in urban centers to the detriment of rural voters across the country. As is the case in Maine and Nebraska, voters in individual states can decide how to allocate their electoral votes, so it doesn’t have to be a winner-take-all system.
It is a tribute to the designers of the US Constitution that the Electoral College mechanism still exists. It’s almost as if though they might also have already suspected long ago that there could be illicit efforts in the future to change an election outcome simply by stuffing the ballots in a few locations. The indirect US electoral system has saved the country from a big crisis brought on by election fraud. Instead of changing the Constitution future election reforms should focus on making vote fraud impossible or extremely difficult to carry out.
Reasons to Risk Nuclear Annihilation
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | November 8, 2016
Obviously, I never wanted to see a nuclear war, which would likely kill not only me but my children, grandchildren, relatives, friends and billions of others. We’d be incinerated in the blast or poisoned by radiation or left to starve in a nuclear winter.
But at least I always assumed that this horrific possibility would only come into play over something truly worthy, assuming that anything would justify the mass extinction of life on the planet.
Now, however, Official Washington’s neocons and liberal interventionists are telling me and others that we should risk nuclear annihilation over which set of thieves gets to rule Ukraine and over helping Al Qaeda terrorists (and their “moderate” allies) keep control of east Aleppo in Syria.
In support of the Ukraine goal, there is endless tough talk at the think tanks, on the op-ed pages and in the halls of power about the need to arm the Ukrainian military so it can crush ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine who dared object to the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 that ousted their elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
And after “liberating” eastern Ukraine, the U.S.-backed Ukrainian army would wheel around and “liberate” Crimea from Russia, even though 96 percent of Crimean voters voted to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia – and there is no sign they want to go back.
So, the world would be risking World War III over the principle of the West’s right to sponsor the overthrow of elected leaders who don’t do what they’re told and then to slaughter people who object to this violation of democratic order.
This risk of nuclear Armageddon would then be compounded to defend the principle that the people of Crimea don’t have the right of self-determination but must submit to a corrupt post-coup regime in Kiev regardless of Crimea’s democratic judgment.
And, to further maintain our resolve in this gamble over nuclear war in defense of Ukraine, we must ignore the spectacle of the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev wallowing in graft and corruption.
While the Ukrainian people earn on average $214 a month and face neoliberal “reforms,” such as reduced pensions, extended years of work for the elderly and slashed heating subsidies, their new leaders in the parliament report wealth averaging more than $1 million in “monetary assets” each, much of it in cash.
A Troubling Departure
The obvious implication of widespread corruption was underscored on Monday with the abrupt resignation of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili who was the appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region.
Though Saakashvili faces charges of abusing power back in Georgia, he was nevertheless put in charge of Odessa by current President Petro Poroshenko, but has now quit (or was ousted) amid charges and counter-charges about corruption.
Noting the mysterious wealth of Ukraine’s officials, Saakashvili denounced the country’s rulers as “corrupt filth” and accused Poroshenko and his administration of sabotaging real reform.
“Odessa can only develop once Kiev will be freed from these bribe takers, who directly patronize organized crime and lawlessness,” Saakashvili said. Yes, that would be a good slogan to scribble on the side of a nuclear bomb heading for Moscow: “Defending the corrupt filth and bribe takers who patronize organized crime.”
But the recent finger-pointing about corruption is also ironic because the West cited the alleged corruption of the Yanukovych government to justify the violent putsch in February 2014 that drove him from office and sparked Ukraine’s current civil war.
Yet, the problems don’t stop with Kiev’s corruption. There is the troubling presence of neo-Nazis, ultranationalists and even Islamic jihadists assigned to the Azov battalion and other military units sent east to the front lines to kill ethnic Russians.
On top of that, United Nations human rights investigators have accused Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service of hiding torture chambers.
But we consumers of the mainstream U.S. media’s narrative are supposed to see the putschists as the white hats and Yanukovych (who was excoriated for having a sauna in his official residence) and Russian President Vladimir Putin as the black hats.
Though U.S. officials, such as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, helped organize or “midwife” the coup ousting Yanukovych, we are told that the Ukraine crisis was a clear-cut case of “Russian aggression” and Crimea’s decision to secede (and rejoin Russia) was a “Russian invasion” and an “annexation.”
So, all stirred up with righteous indignation, we absorbed the explanation that economic sanctions were needed to punish Putin and to destabilize Russian society, with the hoped-for goal of another “regime change,” this time in Moscow.
We weren’t supposed to ask if anyone had actually thought through the idea of destabilizing a nuclear-armed power and the prospect that Putin’s overthrow, even if possible, might lead to a highly unstable fight for control of the nuclear codes.
Silencing Dissent
Brushing aside such worries, the neocons/liberal-hawks are confident that the answer is to move NATO forces up to Russia’s borders and to provide military training to Ukraine’s army, even to its neo-Nazi “shock troops.”
After all, when have the neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks ever miscalculated about anything. No fair mentioning Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or other lucky countries that have been on the receiving end of a benighted “regime change.”
An American who protests or even mentions the risk of nuclear war is dismissed as a “Kremlin stooge” or a “Putin puppet” or a “useful fool” repeating “Russian disinformation” and assisting Moscow’s “information war” against the U.S. government.
But if you’re still a bit queasy about risking nuclear annihilation to keep some Ukrainian kleptocrats in power, there is the other cause worth having the human race die over: protecting Al Qaeda terrorists and their “moderate” rebel comrades holed up in east Aleppo.
Since these modern terrorists turn out to be highly skilled with video cameras and the dissemination of propaganda, they have created the image for Westerners that the Syrian military and its Russian allies simply want to kill as many children as possible.
Indeed, most Western coverage of the battle for Aleppo whites out the role of Al Qaeda almost completely although occasionally the reality slips through in on-the-ground reporting, along with the admission that Al Qaeda and its fellow fighters are keeping as many civilians in east Aleppo as possible, all the better to put up heartrending videos and photos on social media.
Of course, when a similar situation exists in Islamic State-held Mosul, Iraq, the mainstream Western media dutifully denounces the tactic of keeping children in a war zone as the cynical use of “human shields,” thus justifying Iraqi and U.S. forces killing lots of civilians during their “liberation.” The deaths are all the enemy’s fault.
However, when the shoe is on the Syrian/Russian foot, we’re talking about “war crimes” and the need to invade Syria to establish “safe zones” and “no-fly zones” even if that means killing large numbers of additional Syrians and shooting down Russian warplanes.
After all, isn’t the protection of Al Qaeda terrorists worth the risk of starting World War III with nuclear-armed Russia? And if Al Qaeda isn’t worth fighting a nuclear war to defend, what about the thieves in Ukraine and their neo-Nazi shock troops? Calling Dr. Strangelove.
The Neocon-Liberal alliance: Clinton coalition that could trigger WWIII
By Neil Clark | RT | November 8, 2016
The 2016 US Presidential election has seen a coming together of hard-core Bush-era neocons and the anti-Bush liberal-left in support of the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The unofficial coalition, which looks likely to help propel the Democratic nominee to the White House (if the polls are to believed), will have surprised many, but it’s not the first time self-identified progressives have – wittingly or unwittingly – aided the cause of the most reactionary people in western politics.
The neocons: a group of ultra-hawkish hard-right imperialists, who are quite happy for the US to illegally invade other sovereign states and drop bombs all over the world. The liberal-left: who profess their support for human rights, internationalism and progressive causes.
At first sight, these two groups don’t appear to have much in common. But the truth is the liberal-left have for a long time been the accomplices of the endless war lobby.
Think back to 1999 and the US-led bombing of Yugoslavia. Never mind that the Balkan state was a multi-party democracy that operated an economy with very high levels of public/social ownership: the liberal-left cheered as bombs rained down on Belgrade, Nis and Kragujevac. Many ‘progressives’ swallowed hook, line and sinker the lurid claims of a ‘genocide’ being committed in the province of Kosovo, which were later dismissed by a UN court.
Although it was promoted as a ‘humanitarian’ venture, the bombing of Yugoslavia was in fact a hard-right project pushed by fiercely anti-socialist/anti-communist Cold War warriors.
It’s worth noting the names on the Executive Committee of the ‘Balkan Action Committee’ which lobbied hard for war against Yugoslavia in 1999. They included Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld – three men we would all hear a lot more from in the build-up to war with Iraq.
The liberal-left were also broadly on board for the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, an assault we were told would greatly help women’s rights.
However, in 2003, there was a break between most of the liberal-left and the neocons over the invasion of Iraq. This military aggression, unlike the one against Yugoslavia, was led by a Republican president. George W. Bush, the man at the helm, was too much of a Texan ‘redneck’ for educated liberal-leftists to support.
Progressives who had no problem with backing an illegal war against Yugoslavia, found they did have a problem backing an illegal war against Iraq.
In the end, the only ‘liberals’ who supported the Iraq invasion were neo-cons masquerading as liberals, and we all saw through their disguise.
In 2011, though it was ‘business as usual’ for the neocon/liberal-left alliance as a ‘nice’ Democrat administration helped destroy Libya – the country which had the highest living standards in Africa – and whose ‘tyrannical’ government provided free health care, education, and electricity to all of its citizens.
Again, this was a military assault which was pushed by neocons, the same crowd who’d lobbied for war against Yugoslavia and Iraq. Once again the liberal-left didn’t seem to notice, or indeed to care, who was behind it.
The toppling of Muammar Gaddafi (the latest neocon-designated ‘New Hitler’ who was hell-bent on ‘genocide’), would lead to a more democratic Libya with major advances in human rights, liberal-leftists assured us. In fact, the NATO attack on Libya turned the country into a failed state and a haven for jihadists.
Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State in 2011, played a prominent role in the destruction of Libya – so much so that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, in a recent interview with John Pilger, has labelled it ‘Hillary’s war.’
But Libya has been quietly forgotten during the Presidential election campaign, as indeed has the Iraq war.
Liberal-leftists who couldn’t bear the sight of George W. Bush are lining up with pro-Iraq war hawks to try and get HRC elected.
Film-maker Michael Moore, who made the fiercely anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9-11, finds himself on the same side as Bush’s speechwriter David Frum and Robert Kagan, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. That would have seemed unthinkable a few years back, but it’s happening today, folks.
Why are America’s liberal-left doing this? It’s not as if Trump or Clinton are the only options: Dr Jill Stein’s policies on social justice, war and peace, and climate change are far more progressive than Clinton’s. Why, instead of backing Stein, are they enabling Washington’s war lobby again, just as they did in 1999 and in 2011 during the bombing of Libya? Don’t they ever learn their lesson? How naive are liberals to be fooled by the sudden neo-con concern for ‘women’s rights’ and the rights of immigrants and gay people?
Make no mistake, the PNAC crowd are backing Clinton, not because they are appalled at sexist/racist or politically incorrect statements made by Donald Trump, but because they believe HRC will be the candidate who is more likely to continue the policy of endless war. More specifically, in regards to Syria, they want a US President who will prioritize on toppling the secular government of President Assad – not defeating ISIS. Trump’s great ‘crime’ in their eyes is that he does want to prioritize on ISIS – and horror of horrors – to work with Russia to defeat terrorism.
As America goes to the polls today, the stakes could not be higher. Clinton’s support for the imposition of a No-Fly Zone against Russian and Syrian aircraft risks starting World War Three, and the deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.
Is that what the ‘progressives’ who are lining up with the destroyers of Iraq really want?
Follow Neil Clark on Twitter @NeilClark66
Read more:
Raqqa rift: State Dept says US leaves once ISIS ousted, military plan to hold & govern city
RT | November 8, 2016
US officials are split over the future of Raqqa, Syria, with some claiming all international forces will leave the city once it is freed from terrorists, and others announcing plans to stay to ‘govern’ it along with Turkey.
As Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters, backed by US advisers and coalition airstrikes, slowly advance on the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) stronghold of Raqqa, US officials have been voicing their opinions on what will happen to Raqqa once it is liberated. The US State Department says that after the terrorists are defeated, all foreign forces will leave the city to let the Syrians run it.
“How the liberation takes place, how we get local governance re-established after the liberation: our expectation, as has been elsewhere, is that outside forces would then withdraw,” US State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in a daily press briefing on Monday. He then clarified that US forces will supervise the re-establishment of local authority in the city, but other than that will not intervene in its governance.
“We don’t want to see semi-autonomous zones. The reality is, though, as territory is liberated from [Islamic State], you’ve got to get some kind of governance back into these areas, but by no means are we condoning… any kind of semi-autonomous areas in northern Syria.
“Ultimately, we want to see a sovereign, intact Syria,” Toner stressed.
The US military’s position, however, differs slightly from that of the State Department.
“The coalition and Turkey will work together on the long-term plan for seizing, holding and governing Raqqa,” US General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Sunday, following a meeting with his Turkish counterpart General Hulusi Akar in Ankara.
He went further, saying that taking and holding Raqqa requires a “predominantly Arab and Sunni Arab force.”
“And there are forces like that. There is the moderate Syrian opposition, the vetted Syrian forces and the Free Syrian Army forces, and there is some initial outreach to forces in Raqqa proper,” the general added.
Syrian political analyst, Taleb Ibrahim, called these statements “a language for war,” and said the US has no right to impose any governance in Syria given the fact that it is an independent state which has a government, while the United States have never even received permission from Syrian authorities to participate in the conflict on Syrian land.
“I don’t think this is an appropriate language and it indeed is not the language of peace. It is not a language of political resolution, it is not a language for reconciliation – it is a language for war, it is a language for making new maps [in] the Middle East which were called in the past time the maps of blood,” Ibrahim said.
“This indicates a very dangerous concept and I am very much concerned about the future of Syria… They are intervening illegally in an independent state which has a government, an elected president and a real authority on the ground. But [the US uses Islamic State] as justification to occupy large areas of Syria for their geopolitical goals,” he noted.
Dr. Max Abrahms, assistant professor of public policy in the department of political science at Northeastern University, said the US is counting their chickens before they are hatched, deciding the fate of Raqqa at this stage.
“It’s almost premature to talk about governance. This Raqqa mission is going to take a long time,” Abrahms told RT.
The Syria Democratic Forces, or SDF, an alliance of predominantly Kurdish fighters and Arab tribal militia, is currently advancing on Raqqa. While the US has been supporting the SDF with weapons and airstrikes, General Dunford said he does not see the group as capable of governing Raqqa after the fighting is over.
“We always knew the SDF wasn’t the solution for holding and governing Raqqa. What we are working on right now is to find the right mix of forces for the operation.” He added that in deciding what these “right forces” are, the US military will rely on none other than Turkey.
“They will be helpful in identifying the right forces to do that,” he said.
Turkey, meanwhile, has been vocally opposing the SDF, or rather the dominant part of it – the YPG militia – from being the leading force in the Raqqa operation. Ankara sees the group as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and is worried that Kurdish advances in Syria will inflame a three-decade-old Kurdish insurgency in Turkey and lead to the establishment of a Kurdish state.
Turkish General Akar once again told Dunford on Sunday of Turkey’s frustration at the presence of Kurdish forces in Manbij, a strategically important northern Syrian city, whose liberation prompted Turkish intervention, as it is close to the Turkish border. Earlier this Tuesday, alluding to the YPG, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara wants to ensure that the “wrong groups” do not participate in the Raqqa operation, and most importantly do not enter the city, although they may take part in the siege. He warned that Turkey was “taking measures” to guarantee this outcome, but did not specify what measures exactly, Reuters reported.
The Kurds themselves have been calling Turkey an “obstacle” to the attack on Raqqa all along, with SDF official Rezan Hiddo warning the group would halt the advance on Raqqa if Turkish forces moved against the Kurds in northern Syria, which even the US State Department sees as possible.
“Any attempt by Turkey to make an aggression against Manbij will certainly impede liberation of Raqqa and we will not remain silent. Our priority is confronting Turkey’s aggression against Manbij. The ball is now in the coalition’s court and its seriousness will be shown in forcing the Turks to withdraw from the region,” Hiddo was quoted as saying by Fars News Agency.
The US State Department says that in this “complicated climate,” the US will try and “keep pressure on what is the common enemy here, which is [Islamic State],” but Max Abrahms believes it is not likely they will succeed.
“I think that the US is really just trying to placate Turkey [but] I think that there’s a real concern that Turkey is going to go on the offensive even more on Kurdish fighters,” he stated.
The SDF has meanwhile moved south towards the city despite fierce resistance from IS militants. Alliance forces captured at least 10 villages and advanced on two fronts, including at least 10 kilometers (six miles) south towards the city from the towns of Ein Issa and Suluk, SDF spokeswoman Jihan Sheikh Ahmed told AFP on Tuesday.
In both locations, the SDF is still some distance away from Raqqa, but the offensive is said to be going according to plan. The SDF says it has some 30,000 fighters taking part in the operation dubbed “Wrath of Euphrates,” aiming to surround and isolate terrorists inside Raqqa before launching an assault on the city itself. The US-led coalition said it carried out 16 airstrikes on Islamic State positions on Sunday, hitting the group’s tactical units and several car bombs near Ein Issa.
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