It just might be that the two Koreas are figuring out a way to avoid war, much to the anger and chagrin of President Trump and the U.S. national-security establishment, who are obviously increasingly viewing war as inevitable and even in the best interests of the United States.
Why, even the U.S. mainstream press, which oftentimes seems to operate as an ex officio spokesman for the U.S. government, appears irritated over North Korea’s initiation of talks with South Korea. The press describes North Korea’s overtures not as an attempt to avoid war but instead as a cynical attempt to “drive a wedge” between the United States and South Korea.
Actually, it’s President Trump, who is obviously upset that the Koreas are marginalizing him, that is using his ridiculous and dangerous tweeting abilities to further provoke North Korea, with the obvious intent of “driving a wedge” between North Korea and South Korea, a wedge that could conceivably sabotage talks between them.
Let’s first get to the root of the problem in Korea. That root is the U.S. government, specifically the U.S. national-security branch of the government, i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA. That’s the reason there is a crisis in Korea. That’s the reason why war could suddenly break out, killing hundreds of thousands of people and more if it the war turns nuclear.
The U.S. government and its acolytes in the mainstream press say that the problem is with North Korea’s nuclear development program.
Balderdash! The problem is with the Pentagon’s and CIA’s decades-old aim to effect regime change in North Korea, a Cold War aim that they have never been able to let go of. That’s why the Pentagon has some 35,000 troops stationed in South Korea. That’s why they have regular military exercises over there. That’s why they have those bomber fly-overs. They want regime change, bad, just like they still do in Cuba and Iran, and just like they wanted (and got) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and so many other countries.
That’s why North Korea wants nuclear bombs — to protect its communist regime by deterring the United States from attacking and fulfilling its decades-old aim of regime change. North Korea knows that a nuclear deterrent is the only thing that might deter the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking.
The nuclear deterrent strategy certainly worked for Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Once the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, that stopped the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking and invading the island again and even caused President Kennedy to vow that the Pentagon and the CIA would not again invade the island.
North Korea also has seen what happens to impoverished Third World regimes that don’t have nuclear weapons, like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. They go down quickly to defeat and regime change at the hands of an all-powerful First World country.
Here’s the big point: Korea is none of the U.S. government’s business. Never has been and never will be. The Korean conflict was always nothing more than a civil war. A civil war in an Asian country is none of the U.S. government’s business. It wasn’t in the 1950s when the war broke out. It still isn’t. Korea is the business of the Korean people.
Keep in mind also that U.S. interventionism into the Korean War was always illegal under our form of constitutional government. The Constitution, which the president, the Pentagon, and the CIA, swear to uphold, requires a congressional declaration of war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against North Korea. That means that U.S. troops and CIA agents had no legal right to kill anyone in Korea, not with rifles, artillery, carpet bombing, or with the use of germ warfare against the North Korean people.
The Pentagon and the CIA claimed that it was necessary to illegally intervene in Korea because the communists were coming to get us. It was a lie, just as the entire Cold War was a lie. It was all just one great big fear-mongering racket to solidify the power and control of the military and intelligence services over the American people.
Those 35,000 U.S. troops in Korea today have no business being there, not only because the communists are still not coming to get us but also because they are simply the outgrowth of the original illegal intervention in the 1950s. The Pentagon has those troops there for one reason and only one reason: No, not to defend and protect the South Korean people, who are of minor importance to U.S. officials compared to the United States, but rather to serve as “tripwire” to guarantee U.S. involvement should war once again break out between the two Koreas.
In other words, no congressional deliberation on a declaration of war on whether to get involved should war break out. No national debate. Once tens of thousands of troops are automatically killed, the United States is, as a practical matter, stuck, trapped, committed. That’s why the Pentagon and the CIA have those troops there — to box in the American people — to deprive them of a choice on whether to get involved in another land war in Asia or not.
That makes U.S. soldiers in Korea nothing more than little pawns. Their assigned role is to die in order to ensure that Congress has no say on whether the U.S. gets involved in another land war in Asia. The Pentagon and the CIA, not Congress, remain in charge.
Why hasn’t the U.S. already attacked North Korea? One big reason: China. It says that if the United States starts the war, it’s coming in on the side of North Korea. China has lots of troops that could easily be sent into Korea to fight against U.S. forces. It also has a nuclear capability that can easily hit the United States.
So, that leaves Trump and his national security establishment doing their best to provoke North Korea into “firing the first shot,” or at least making it look like they have fired the first shot, like what happened at the Gulf of Tonkin or what the Pentagon hoped to accomplish with Operation Northwoods and a concocted war against Cuba.
If Trump can successfully taunt, tease, antagonize, and provoke North Korea into attacking first, then he and his national-security establishment can exclaim, “We’ve been attacked by the communists! We’re shocked! We’re innocent! We have no choice but to protect America by carpet-bombing North Korea again, this time with nuclear bombs.”
And as long as it’s not the United States that suffers the death and destruction, it will all be considered acceptable. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be dead. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans will also be dead. Both countries will be devastated. But the United States will remain intact and, equally important, will no longer be threatened by North Korea’s growing nuclear capability. It will all be considered a victory as far as the United States is concerned.
That’s why the South Koreans are smart in agreeing to talk to North Korea. If they were really smart, they would give Trump, the Pentagon, and the CIA the boot. The best thing South Korea could ever do is immediately kick out every U.S. soldier and every CIA agent out of their country. Send them packing back to the United States.
Sure, Trump would be hopping bad, just as the Pentagon and the CIA would be. So what? It would be the best thing that could ever happen to Korea, the United States, and the world.
The Yemeni Ministry of Health says the Saudi-led military coalition has either killed or wounded some 35,000 people of Yemen during the ongoing war Riyadh imposed on the impoverished nation almost three years ago.
In a report read out in a press conference in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a on Tuesday, the ministry said that the appalling number of casualties occurred in just 1,000 days since the Saudi regime began its military aggression against the Yemeni people in March 2015.
The report added that nearly all of Yemen’s provinces sustained losses in the war with the northwestern province of Sa’ada, the west-central province of Sana’a and the western province of Hajjah suffering the most in a descending order.
The ministry also said that 415 health facilities were destroyed, either completely or partially, as a result of direct Saudi airstrikes, pointing out that more than 55 percent of the health facilities did not function due to the ceaseless aggression, and that the remaining 45 percent operated with a minimum capacity.
The report also revealed figures showing that more than 95,000 Yemeni patients needed to travel abroad for proper treatment, stressing that the closure of airports, due to a total blockade of the country by the Saudi-led coalition, led to the death of 32 patients every day in all provinces.
The ministry further said that, according to figures provided by the World Food Programme, more than 21 million Yemenis needed humanitarian assistance, and that more than 9 million others were expected to enter the stage of starvation.
According to the ministry’s figures, some 2 million Yemeni children suffer from some form of malnutrition, of which half a million are dying of severe malnutrition and 52,000 children died in 2016 for preventable causes.
The report also said that 2,236 people had so far lost their lives due to a cholera outbreak triggered by the Saudi war.
The international committee of the Red Cross says more than one million people have contracted cholera in Yemen amid Saudi Arabia’s war.
Saudi Arabia has been leading a deadly campaign against Yemen from the air, land, and sea since March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate former President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh, and to undermine the Houthi Ansarullah movement. Over the past two years, the Houthis have been running state affairs and defending Yemeni people against the Saudi aggression.
The campaign has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories. The offensive has, however, achieved neither of its goals despite the spending of billions of petrodollars and the enlisting of the cooperation of Saudi Arabia’s regional and Western allies.
American daily Wall Street Journal had said it clearly six months ago: The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization in Iran aimed at spying on the Islamic Republic.
“The Central Intelligence Agency has established an organization focused exclusively on gathering and analyzing intelligence about Iran, reflecting the Trump administration’s decision to make that country a higher priority target for American spies,” theWSJreported last June, citing US officials.
The report said that the mission center “will bring together analysts, operations personnel and specialists from across the CIA to bring to bear the range of the agency’s capabilities, including covert action.”
The CIA did not announce the Iran Mission Center at that time, but it likened it to the Korea Mission Center that the CIA announced earlier in May to address North Korea’s efforts to develop long-range nuclear missiles.
Talking more about the move, the report described CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a longtime Iran hawk, citing his first public remarks since taking the helm at the spy agency, when he warned that Iran was “on the march.”
“Whether its enormous increased capacity to deliver missile systems into Israel from Hezbollah, their increased strength in and around Mosul with the Shia militias, the work that they’ve done to support the Houthis to fire missiles against the Saudis—the list of Iranian transgressions has increased dramatically since the date that the JCPOA was signed,” the WSJ quoted Pompeo as saying then, referring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that Iran struck with the US and other world powers to limit its nuclear program.
“We’re actively engaged in a lot of work to assist the president, making sure he has an understanding of where the Iranians are complying and where they might not be,” the report quoted Pompeo as saying at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in April.
The report also quoted Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official as saying that the center in Iran was an effort by the agency to bring all its experts together in one place, from the spies who gather information to the analysts who make sense of it.
“We know that combining [intelligence] collectors and analysts together you end up with better analysis and better operations,” Lowenthal said, noting that the center model has been used successfully in other areas.
The Trump regime proclaimed that the vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations regarding the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was a strategic US decision.
Both President Trump and his bombastic UN Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened that all decisions and agreements regarding alliances, loans, aid and diplomatic relations were at stake.
Moreover, the Trump regime clearly defined the style and substance of US imperial dictates: All UN member nations (large and small) must grovel in the most abject manner to his orders. Ambassador Haley demanded that each nation on earth accept Trump’s and the racist-Zionist Netanyahu’s declaration that the ancient city of Jerusalem is the eternal, undivided and ethnically managed capital of the Jews. Trump’s message was loud and clear – he was the great ‘decider’ and the UN votes would identify America’s true friends and enemies. “We are making a list… and there will be consequences…”
Clearly Trump’s boast of US power and Haley’s assumption that her terrifying threats would ensure that Washington had a majority vote in the ‘gifting’ of Jerusalem to Zio-fascism. They believed that US dominance and global hegemony was absolute and unassailable. The vote proved something else, something very new was happening.
The US suffered an overwhelming and humiliating defeat, one that kept Ambassador Haley’s dexterous fingers busy ‘taking notes’: 128 nations demanded that the Trump regime withdraw its declaration that Jerusalem was Israel’s undivided capital for Jews. Only 9 micro-nations (some mere postage stamps and a few death-squad banana-stans) voted with the Trump-Haley decision, 35 mendicant-states put their heads down and abstained while 21 timorous ambassadors chose to hide their shamelessness in the toilet stalls rather than show up for this important vote.
Political Context
First and foremost it is important to discuss the steps leading up to the US suffering such a crushing debacle. In other words, who was responsible for leading the Trump Administration by the nose down the blind alley of submission to the dictates of Zio-fascism.
The leader and driving force behind the UN disaster was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose quest to seize Jerusalem and convert it into the ‘eternal’ capital of the Jews was his top priority. For decades the entire world has rejected Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem and its conversion into an ethnically cleansed capital for the ‘Jewish’ state. The UN and international jurists denounced Israel’s colonial conquest and ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Netanyahu took charge with the election of Donald Trump as President. Operation Jerusalem was his first order to Puppet Donald. A number of Israel-First multi-billionaires, who financed Trump’s electoral campaign, demanded an immediate pay-off from their puppet: The Administration’s unconditional support for Netanyahu’s agenda. Despite protests from the rest of the world, especially the US closest European allies, Trump plunged the nation right into the Zionist soup: a Jewish Jerusalem; the systematic eviction of all Arabs, Christian, Muslim and secular, and the eventual annexation of all of Palestine; as well as an increasing military confrontation with Iran.
Real estate speculator, Jared Kushner, Trump’s pampered son-in- law, and a complete Netanyahu flunky, became the senior advisor for the Middle East. Kushner pressured Trump’s National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn to intervene with Russia on behalf of Israel’s take-over of Jerusalem. Flynn was subsequently prosecuted for discussing global US Russian relations and the ‘good soldier’ is falling on his sword on behalf of the Zionists. Not surprising, the Congressional Democrats, the FBI and the Special Prosecutor found it easier to prosecute Flynn for his discussion regarding de-escalating the tense US-Russian relations provoked by the Obama administration than his discussions with the Kremlin in support of Israel’s seizure of Jerusalem!
Netanyahu’s operational weapons in manipulating US policy involved Jared Kushner, the billionaire Israel-First donors, the AIPAC and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Tel Aviv succeeded in securing Trump’s commitment to the Israeli agenda, despite opposition from the entire UN National Security Council and the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly. In the style of a typical authoritarian, US President Trump grovels at the feet of his ‘superior’, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while tearing at the throats of his ‘inferiors’, the 193 member nations of the UN General Assembly.
Netanyahu’s vitriolic bar room threats against the entire membership of the UN prior to the vote ensured the repudiation of all Security Council representatives with the exception of his South Carolina puppet, Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump and Haley backed the blustering Netanyahu by issuing gangland threats to all UN representatives who dare to oppose Washington’s dictates.
In this way, Prime Minister Netanyahu secured the greatest diplomatic and political success of his career – the total submission of the US to his agenda, at the risk of a major humiliation in the UN. This, in effect, formalized Israeli hegemony over Washington, for the world to see.
In contrast to Netanyahu’s beaming success, the US suffered a historic diplomatic defeat: Fourteen times as many nations voted against the demands of the US President over– Netanyahu’s grab of Jerusalem.
What makes the defeat even more striking is the fact that all major allies and most of the biggest aid recipients openly defied the US threats. Eight of the ten biggest US aid recipients voted against Trump–Netanyahu–Haley. This bizarre troika is now left with an enemy list circling the entire globe, and a few timorous allies in the South Pacific and among the death squads of Guatemala.
Trump’s total and puerile embrace of the raving Netanyahu has exposed and widened fissures in US global hegemony.
Apart from ‘capturing’ Netanyahu’s vote, the other pro Trump nations included a handful of insignificant Pacific islands (Marshall Islands, Palau, Micronesia), Togo, a corrupt African mini-state and two banana-sized ‘death squad democracies’, Honduras and Guatemala. The latter two regimes hold power via stolen elections backed by narco-thugs in the pay (dubbed ‘foreign aid’) of the US.
All of the leading Asian and Western European countries voted against Trump. They openly rejected the crude blackmail of the US-Israel duet. Subservient regimes in Eastern Europe, corrupt regimes in Latin America and some horrifically impoverished nations in Africa and Asia chose to abstain or excuse themselves to the bathrooms of Times Square. Narco-neo-liberal regimes in Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Panama and the Dominican Republic abstained. Even rightwing Eastern European regimes, which usually give unquestioned support to all US demands, like Romania, Bosnia, Poland and Latvia defied Nikki Haley’s ‘name taking’ by abstaining. The ‘no-shows’ (hiding in the toilets) included US puppets like Georgia, Samoa, St Kitts and Tonga.
An openly humiliated UN Ambassador Haley was left with the task of thanking the abstainers and ‘no-shows’ for their courage and preparing a few bags of goodies (matzos, Mogan David wine and discounts to the brothels of Tel Aviv) for the torturers of Honduras and half-drowned ‘leaders’ of Palau in gratitude for such loyalty.
Conclusion
Clearly Trump’s championing of a racist, colonialist, ethnic cleansing state like Israel is viewed as a strategic diplomatic disaster. The Manhattan egomaniac has tied the US fortunes to the whims of a pariah state led by a complete lunatic.
Trump’s decision to demonstrate total loyalty to his Zionist billionaire campaign ‘donor-owners’ and his Israel-First son-in-law in his first major foreign policy decision failed to impress any of the influential nations of the world – East or West. Indeed, it showed how fractured and dangerously dysfunctional the US Administration had become.
Most important, Trump’s proclamation of a unipolar world based on his notion of the US’s economic power has collapsed. Israel, despite Haley’s bluster and list-taking, has no legitimacy. It’s continued Mossad assassinations of leading Palestinians and others and the increasing IDF slaughter of the spontaneous Palestinian civilian resistance has failed to improve its international standing – except among Guatemalan torturers.
However, it is not clear that the US has lost its big power influence regarding other regional conflicts. The subsequent UN Security Council vote in favor of Washington’s demands for added sanctions against North Korea demonstrated Trump’s power to intimidate the oligarchs and leaders of China and Russia.
In other words, limits on US power still depend on the issues, the allies, the diplomatic appeals, the adversaries and the distribution of benefits and costs.
In the case of Jerusalem, Real Estate Mogul Trump’s bizarre decision to hand an entire city over to the Zionists alienated all Muslims and Christians the world over, as well as the secular Western liberal nations and emerging powers, like Russia and China. The US tied its prestige to the whims of a paranoid nation arrogantly flaunting its racist superiority complex, backed by groups of immensely wealthy overseas dual citizens.
Diplomatically, Israel’s vituperative responses to any legal criticism from world bodies undermines its chances of coalition building.
Finally, Washington’s support for Israel’s perpetual and overt violation of international law and its bombing of humanitarian missions makes Israel a very costly ally.
A backlash against New Zealand singer Lorde continues in the wake of her decision to call off her concert in Israel amid pressure from her fans following Trump’s Jerusalem move.
A full-page advertisement calling Lorde a bigot and accusing New Zealand of harboring a bias against Israel appeared on the fifth page of the Washington Post’s December 31 edition.
The ad features Lorde’s photo over the picture of men running through ruins with babies and Israeli flags streaming in the wind. The headline says “Lorde and New Zealand ignore Syria to attack Israel.”
It slams the 21-year-old singer’s decision to cancel a concert in Tel Aviv following a wellspring of Muslim fans urging her not to go there, noting that she had joined the global boycott of Israel but “will perform in Russia, despite Putin’s support for Assad’s genocide in Syria.”
The advertisement adds that Lorde’s move shows how a “growing prejudice against the Jewish State” in New Zealand is “trickling down to its youth.”
As for New Zealand, the ad points out the country’s support for the UN resolution urging the US to revoke its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while citing New Zealand’s co-sponsorship of a UN resolution condemning illegally-built Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories. The resolution, which was approved by every member of the UN Security Council except the US (which abstained), was endorsed by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
“Let’s boycott the boycotters and tell Lorde and her fellow bigots that Jew-hatred has no place in the twenty-first century,” the ad reads.
Commenting on the advertisement in the Post, the New Zealand Jewish Council said that the council is “committed to dialogue and tolerance and distances itself from the inflammatory and aggressive material that stoops to the level of BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] rather than rising above it.”
“We are disappointed with Lorde’s decision to cancel her show after pressure from the discriminatory BDS movement and invite Lorde to continue learning about the region,” the council’s statement reads.
Lorde called off her June concert in Tel Aviv, giving in to the mounting pressure from activists of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), which aims “to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law,” according to its official website.
She was also influenced by an open letter written by her fans from New Zealand, which stated that the show in Tel Aviv would demonstrate support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
“I’ve received an overwhelming number of messages & letters and have had a lot of discussions with people holding many views, and I think the right decision at this time is to cancel the show,” Lorde said, as quoted by Naranjah, the Israeli promoters of her show.
The decision was made after what the New Zealand pop star deemed as her “learning all the time” and “considering all options” available to her.
Israel’s government has approved an agreement with the EU that includes a provision excluding funding for settlements, seemingly consenting to the EU’s boycott of settlements.
The agreement centers on Israel’s part in the EU’s ENI Cross-Border Cooperation in the Mediterranean (CBC Med) program, which provides funds for projects for non-EU countries in the Mediterranean area, such as Israel, Egypt and Jordan, Haaretzreports. The projects are largely focused on promoting development, education, technology and environmental sustainability.
As per EU policy, the ENI CBC Med agreement contains a provision which excludes areas outside Israel’s 1967 borders from receiving grants. This means Israeli settlements inside the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights (which were occupied by Israel in the conflict) cannot receive funding under the program.
Israeli settlements inside Palestinian territories are considered both an impediment to the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, and to be in violation of a number of UN resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Israel’s Culture and Sport Minister, Miri Regev, voiced her objections to the agreement to the cabinet secretary earlier in the month. She fought against the deal at the cabinet meeting, the Jewish Pressreports, but no other minister agreed to second her motion to delay the vote pending further debate.
The deal was given final approval by the government Sunday, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on the measure last week. It’s also been approved by the Justice Ministry and Foreign Ministry, Haaretz reports. The foreign ministry is said to have led the charge for Israel to be part of the program.
The agreement is at odds with the Israeli government’s stance on settlements, which it continues to develop within the occupied territories in disregard of the EU and others’ condemnation. Netanyahu is also a fierce opponent to the international Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement which calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel.
“My fundamental position is that the Israeli government should reject agreements from the outset that require us on a de facto basis to boycott portions of the homeland or populations living in the Golan Heights, Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] other than with very limited exceptions,” Regev wrote in her letter.
“I do not see the justification to compromise and with one hand sign the agreement while with our other demanding that the world give de facto recognition to our right to a united Jerusalem and even to move embassies to Israel’s capital,” she added.
Aside from the settlement matter, Regev’s letter to Cabinet Secretary Tzachi Braverman also took issue with the text of the agreement referring to the Palestinian Authority “as if it were a neighboring country.”
It is “not acceptable to me,” she said.
The far-right Regev managed to halt a similar agreement with the EU last year. A Creative Europe culture and media program contained a similar provision excluding settlements, and, although Netanyahu had given consent, Regev stopped it from going ahead. Earlier this month, Regev succeeded in forcing the NBA remove a reference to Palestine as being “occupied territory.”
Trumpwashing—defined as whitewashing, obscuring or rewriting the broader US record by presenting Donald Trump as an aberration (FAIR, 6/3/16)—was on full display Thursday in a nominally straight news report from the New York Times’ Mark Landler (12/28/17) on how Trump has reshaped US foreign policy. Buried in the otherwise banal analysis was this gem of US imperial agitprop:
Above all, Mr. Trump has transformed the world’s view of the United States from a reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order into something more inward-looking and unpredictable. That is a seminal change from the role the country has played for 70 years, under presidents from both parties, and it has lasting implications for how other countries chart their futures.
There’s lots of ideology to unpack here, but let’s start with the empirically false assertion that the “world” viewed the United States as a “reliable anchor of the liberal, rules-based international order.” Poll (Guardian, 6/15/06) after poll (Pew, 3/14/07) after poll (PRI, 1/3/14) throughout the years has shown that much of the world views the United States as threat to peace, often taking the top spot as the single greatest threat. What evidence Landler has for the world viewing the US as a sort of good-natured global babysitter is unclear, as he cites nothing to support this hugely important claim (since if Trump’s cynical disregard for “human rights” is nothing new, then there’s no real story here). It’s just thrown out with the assumption the Times readership is sufficiently nationalistic and/or amnesiac to either not notice or not care. It’s designed to flatter, not to elucidate.
The US invasion of Iraq in defiance of international law
The second dubious assertion is the idea that the US is “viewed” as being (or, by implication, objectively is) concerned with “liberal, rules-based international order.” Perhaps Landler missed the part where the US runs offshore penal colonies for untried political prisoners, and a decade-long drone war that’s killed thousands—both entirely outside the scope of international law. Or the time the US invaded and destroyed Iraq without any international authorization, killing hundreds of thousands. Or perhaps he missed the part where the United States refuses to sign “liberal, rules-based international order” treaties such as the International Criminal Court or the ban on bombs and or a prohibition on nuclear weapons. Or the part where the US not only doesn’t recognize the International Criminal Court, but has a law on its books (dubbed “the Hague Invasion Act,” passed in 2002) that if an American is ever held by the ICC for committing war crimes, the US is obligated to literally invade the Hague and free them.
And this is just in the past 15 years. Landler, even more laughably, starts the clock in 1947, which would include dozens of non-“liberal,” non-“rules-based” coups, invasions, bombing campaigns, assassinations, extrajudicial murders and so forth. The number of actions carried out by the US not sanctioned by even the thinnest pretext of “international order” is too long to list.
What exactly is this “liberal, rules-based international order,” and when did “the world” view the United States as its most reliable anchor? Landler doesn’t say, he simply asserts this highly contestable and ideological claim, and moves on to pearl-clutch about Trump ruining the US’s hard-won moral authority. He has some 100 percent uncut pro-US ideology to push under the guise of criticizing Trump, and no amount of basic historical facts will get in his way.
On Saturday buses arrived in the villages of Mugr al-Mir and Mazaria Beit Jinn in the so-called ‘Hernon Pocket’ to transport the fighters of al-Nusra Front to Idlib and Daraa governorates. The pocket extended into government-held territory southwest of Damascus from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. According to a Syrian Arab Army (SAA) military strategic analyst, Brig. Gen. Heitham Hassun, the move will help liberate the southwestern part of Syria from terrorists.
“This will allow [the SAA] to free the entire southwestern region of Damascus from terrorists,” Brig. Gen. Hassun told Sputnik Arabic. “It is especially important to take under the SAA’s control [the territories] north of the province of Quneitra, which the Israelis had planned to manage with the assistance of the militants. Now, by retaking Mugr al-Mir and Mazaria Beit Jinn, the army will be able to conduct an operation to liberate all the terrorist-controlled areas adjacent to the occupied Golan Heights.”
The local government managed to strike a deal with the al-Nusra jihadists through intermediaries on joining the program of reconciliation and establish a ceasefire regime in the area. The victories of the SAA, which allowed the government forces to gain control over the dominant terrain, contributed to the success of the talks.
According to the military analyst, residents of local villages are making every effort to facilitate the advancement of the Syrian government forces. For instance, they provide information to the SAA about the location and the numerical force of jihadists.
Brig. Gen. Hassun said that, for its part, Israel is providing the extremists with intelligence concerning Syrian government troops. Additionally, the Israelis continue to supply weapons to terrorist groups and provide fire support if necessary, the military analyst underscored. It appears that Syria’s southern neighbor is unwilling to give up its plans for this part of Syria, the brigadier general suggested.
The Golan Heights remain an apple of discord for Damascus and Tel Aviv, prompting tit-for-tat strikes in border areas. Israel’s occupation of the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights (known in Syria as Quneitra governorate) prevents the states from signing a peace treaty. The annexation of the disputed area started during the Six-Day War in 1967 and has been repeatedly condemned by the UN in 1981 and 2008.
The eastern Golan Heights, which remained in Syrian hands following the Six-Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, became the target of the al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front, as well as Daesh terrorists and other Syrian opposition forces, during the ongoing war.
Meanwhile, according to Sputnik’s source, on Friday the Syrian government forces expelled terrorists from the Abu Dali settlement in the north-east of Hama province.
Located on the border between Hama and Idlib, the settlement was used by the terrorists to disrupt the supplies from one city to another.
The SAA continues to crack down on terrorists following Russia’s partial withdrawal from Syria after a two-year-long aerial campaign. The decision to pull out was announced on December 11 by Russian President Putin, who specified, however, that the bases in Tartus and Hmeymim, as well as the center for Syrian reconciliation, would continue to operate.
On December 26, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu signaled that Russia has started to form a permanent group in Syria’s Tartus and Hmeymim. The Russian military contingent is armed with advanced weaponry systems including the cutting edge S-400 system, while S-300 surface-to-air missile systems, as well as the Bastion coastal missile systems with cruise missiles.
The invasion of Iraq was unforgivable. It remains unforgivable. It will always be unforgivable. Its architects should be tried in The Hague and imprisoned, and nobody who helped inflict that unfathomable evil upon our world should ever be employed anywhere they could do any more damage or mislead anyone else. All behaviors of the mainstream media, US intelligence agencies and US defense agencies should be viewed through the lens of those unforgivable lies and murders forevermore, and nobody should ever take them at their word about anything ever again.
Instead what has actually happened is that nothing whatsoever has changed since the invasion, Americans still take it on faith that Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and Kim Jong Un are world-threatening enemies in sore need of ousting, and bloodthirsty psychopaths like Max Boot who have been consistently wrong about everything are still hailed as experts worth listening to.
Oh yeah, and now they’re being adored as progressive heroes.
Boot, who is a PNAC signatory and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, published an article yesterday in Foreign Affairs which perfectly matches the newfound love of progressivism in his neocon soulmate Bill Kristol. The article, titled “2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White Privilege”, details in halting, equivocation-laden prose the months-long journey into awakening that this lying warmonger claims to have experienced during the Trump administration.
This spectacularly evil man, who wrote an essay titled “The Case for American Empire” just weeks after 9/11 in which he called in plain English for America to “unambiguously to embrace its imperial role,” is now seeing his latest essay shared eagerly by Democrats everywhere enthusiastically exclaiming “Look! See? This conservative gets it!”
I’m seeing some progressives arguing that Boot’s sudden public recognition of his white male privilege is intrinsically worthy of praise and acceptance, and that the proper response is to applaud him for it, not spit in his face. These people are wrong. Max Boot did not have some personal epiphany about race and gender dynamics which he felt like sharing in Foreign Policy magazine (the obvious place everyone goes for publication of their enlightening insights into privilege and inequality); Max Boot is courting Democrats because his war-hungry ideology is being increasingly rejected by Republicans.
If you want to see why neocons are courting Democrats with increasing desperation, check out the response to Boot’s latest essay by Fox’s Tucker Carlson, who has come to align with the popular anti-interventionist sentiments of Trump’s base, or Carlson’s debate with Boot on his show back in July:
Meanwhile what have Democrats been doing? Supporting escalations with Russia based on accusations with no evidence that are reported as fact by the mainstream media in the exact sort of manic, violent, fact-free climate we saw in the lead up to the Iraq invasion (an invasion that Max Boot says nobody needs to repent for). Resistance hero Keith Olbermann says he owes George W Bush and John McCain an apology for the times he disagreed with them, and MSNBC’s Joy Reid openly admitted that she prefers people like Boot as allies instead of actual leftists and progressives:
One of the most amazing outcomes of the Trump administration is the number of neo-conservatives that are now my friends and I am aligned with. I found myself agreeing on a panel with Bill Kristol. I agree more with Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, and Max Boot than I do with some people on the far left. I am shocked at the way that Donald Trump has brought people together. [Laughs.]
~ Joy Reid
Reid’s comments are typical of the way the cult of anti-Trumpism has mainstream Democrats swooning over Bush-era neocons like they’re the Kennedys reincarnated instead of a bunch of child-butchering war profiteers. Just check out the top comments under this “Gosh I’m so woke all of a sudden!” tweet by neocon psychopath Bill Kristol.
In reality, nothing Trump has done in his administration so far is anywhere remotely close to as evil as the invasion of Iraq. The fact that hatred of the sitting president has Democrats so desperate they’re not only forgiving the crimes of vestigial Bush neocons but also helping them in their agenda to sabotage any movements toward detente with Russia shows just how brutally efficient the psychological manipulations of the establishment propaganda machine have become.
It was just in 2012 that these same Democrats were laughing along with their president at the Russia fearmongering of Mitt Romney.
Neoconservatism first rose to prominence in the 1970s, and right off the bat one of its key principles was an opposition to detente with the USSR. This never changed. Not when neocons moved from the Democratic party to the Republican party, not when the Soviet Union fell, and not when neocons began migrating back from the Republican party to their old home in the Democratic party. Neocons have always been fixated on the world-threatening agenda of aggressively crushing Russia, and today the Democrats have picked up that flag and run with it right alongside them.
Which is why now we have depraved psychopaths like Max Boot and Bill Kristol acting out the bizarre performance of suddenly woke progressives. Their new Democratic buddies have already helped them resurrect the cold war on the same amount of evidence as was needed to manufacture support for the Iraq invasion, and with a little tweaking they hope to eventually convince them to help satiate their bloodlust in Iran and Syria as well.
The neocons don’t oppose Trump because he is evil, they oppose Trump because he isn’t evil enough. The slight bit of inertia he’s been placing on their death cult has been enough for them to pivot full-scale toward the Democratic party, which they hope to rebuild and lead into power with full sympathy for all the wars on their infernal wish list.
The extremely influential neocon think tank Project for a New American Century’s most well-known publication, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century”, argued extensively in the year 2000 that America’s victory in the Cold War against the USSR means the US must step into a planetary leadership role and maintain that leadership role by any means necessary, including military force.
“As the 20th century draws to a close,” PNAC’s 1997 Statement of Principles reads, “the United States stands as the world’s preeminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”
The answer to this question came after 9/11: yes, yes it does. The New American Century has seen an immense increase in military interventionism across the globe to ensure the hegemony of the US dollar and prevent Russia and China from climbing the global power ladder unchecked.
That’s all we’re seeing here in Woke Max Boot and Woke Bill Kristol. Neoconservatism has always been an ideology/military-industrial complex war profiteering scheme which advocates bullying and sabotaging all governments that could pose a threat to the planetary dominance of the US power establishment, and lately rank-and-file Republicans have been proving less useful in facilitating that agenda than rank-and-file Democrats. So they’re saying and doing whatever they need to in order to win the approval of the Dems.
The good thing to have come out of #Brexit and #Trump? Discovering new alliances with people you might once have thought only adversaries https://t.co/dDhhXGTwpB
Brave piece and thank you @MaxBoot:
“ People like me, in other words. Whether I realize it or not, I have benefitted from my skin color and my gender — and those of a different gender or sexuality or skin color have suffered because of it.” https://t.co/XqLSIinwOy
It’s not okay to be a neoconservative. In a healthy world, being a neocon would carry as much social weight as being a child molester or a serial killer. These people should not be embraced, they should be recoiled from. Always.
Until Democrats turn away from neoconservatism, the fact that they don’t should be pointed to at every opportunity. The correct response when any Democrat tries to tell you about Russia or Syria is “Get out of here with that Saddam-has-WMDs filth, neocon.”
That omnicidal death cult deserves nothing but our most sincere revulsion.
A US National Security Council (NSC) source has confirmed to Sputnik that Tel Aviv and Washington have worked out a plan to counter “malign Iranian activities.” Speaking to Radio Sputnik, Mohammad Marandi, a political analyst and professor at the University of Tehran, explained why the US and Israel are so hostile towards Iran.
Sputnik: What is your take on the so-called Iranian threat that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump are looking to confront now? What could they be truly trying to achieve by demonizing Iran?
Mohammad Marandi:They have always been demonizing Iran; they have always [harbored] hostility towards the country. When the Israeli regime occupied Lebanon and the Iranians supported the national liberation movement which ultimately led to the creation of Hezbollah, that led to the ultimate defeat of the regime and its withdrawal from the country. And Iran took support for Palestinian people and Iran’s opposition from the beginning of the revolution to apartheid, whether in apartheid South Africa or in Palestine. That was also an enormous reason to show antagonism towards Iran.
I think more recently, though, Israeli support for extremist groups in Syria, this was carried out alongside countries like Saudi Arabia. Even now we see that al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, is still [located alongside] the Syrian-Israeli border and the Israeli regime continues to treat their wounded militants. And on that part of the joint border we still have ISIS (Daesh) and as we all know the Israelis have never attacked the ISIS (Daesh) coalition alongside its border.
So, the Israelis have been trying to weaken Syria and I think that over the last couple of years with the help of Hezbollah, Russia, Iran and others the gradual defeat of the extremist groups both in Syria and Iraq have led to a situation where the Israelis feel weakened. But I don’t think that any meetings between the United States and Israel will come up with anything new because they have been cooperating all along alongside with Saudi Arabia for many years now.
Sputnik: The plan also aims to target Iran’s activities across the Middle East. So, if implemented, what consequences could it entail for the region in local conflicts?
Mohammad Marandi: Yes, this is again, I think, a very important point because it’s contrary to what we see in the Western media, which is usually either silence or a very misleading representation. US allies in the region, alongside the United States, supported ISIS [Daesh]. Even though, I still speak to some Americans [and they express] outrage. If you look at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents of 2012 that were partially released by Judicial Watch, they speak about US allies in the region supporting extremist groups in Syria and [they] have had the upper hand according to that document, from almost the very beginning of the fighting. And these groups were focused on the border between Syria and Iraq.
We know that later on, those groups were named ISIS, or they called themselves even after that Islamic State. And the United States, according to General [Michael] Flynn [former DIA director and former national security adviser to President Trump] who was the head of that organization [DIA] — later in an interview with Al Jazeera he admitted — that the United States took a willful decision to support its allies in the region. And there is a host of other evidence as well, such as WikiLeaks documents and emails which stated that Saudi Arabia and others supported ISIS in 2014. So then, of course, we have the admission of former US Secretary of State [John] Kerry who had a secret meeting with Syrian opposition activists admitted that the United States allowed ISIS to advance on Damascus in order to put pressure on President Assad.
So, the United States is deeply involved in allowing ISIS to rise; they were deeply involved in, of course, al-Qaeda, the al-Nusra Front, […] And, of course, Israel, as I’ve pointed out, has been involved in supporting al-Qaeda and has been silent regarding the presence of ISIS on its border. So, Iran has helped the Syrian government to defeat extremist groups. Of course, the Russians, Hezbollah, all of these countries, all of these groups together [won] this victory over extremism and if Syria had fallen, without any doubt Iraq would had fallen.
Iraq was on the verge of falling despite the fact that ISIS had a large number of troops fighting the Syrian government. If they had defeated the Syrian government, they would have sent a lot more troops into Iraq and it would have fallen. And of course Lebanon would have faced a very new and dangerous situation with these extremists. So Iran’s support for the Iraqi government and the Syrian government helped defeat these extremist groups and this is a major point of contention between Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia and, of course, the United States. […]
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis says he is expecting to see a larger US civilian presence in Syria, where there are already 2,000 American troops without the authorization of the Syrian government.
Mattis said Friday that the US would deploy more contractors and diplomats to the war-torn country, with which Washington has suspended diplomatic relations.
“What we will be doing is shifting from what I would call an offensive, shifting from an offensive terrain-seizing approach to a stabilizing… you’ll see more US diplomats on the ground,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon.
“Well when you bring in more diplomats, they are working that initial restoration of services, they bring in the contractors, that sort of thing,” he added.
“There is international money that has got to be administered, so it actually does something, it doesn’t go into the wrong people’s pockets.”
He also claimed that the diplomats and contractors might train local forces in parts of the country retaken from Daesh to clear improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and hold territory to help ensure that Daesh does not take back territory.
“It is an attempt to move towards the normalcy and that takes a lot of support,” said Mattis.
He did not give any specific information about the number of US diplomats who would serve in Syria and when.
Daesh unleashed a campaign of bloodshed and destruction in Syria in 2014, overrunning considerable expanses of territory.
The same year saw the United States launch a so-called campaign against the terrorists together with a coalition of its allies.
The military alliance had done little in the fight against Daesh, and has instead been repeatedly accused of targeting and killing civilians and hampering Syrian government operations against the Takfiri group.
The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported on November 23 that 2,759 civilians, including 644 minors and 470 women, had been killed in US-led aerial attacks against civilian areas in Syria over the past 38 months.
The American forces support the anti-Damascus Kurdish militants in the north, who have, according to Syria, been seeking to gain more territory under the pretext of fighting terror.
In light of the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea bringing frequent comparisons to the Cuban Missile Crisis and discussion of hypothetical worst-case scenarios, it’s worth reviewing the United States’ record and examining whether North Korea is really the belligerent nuclear menace the world needs to liberate itself from. As critics of American foreign policy have noticed, the United States’ leaders, its media and its citizens never quite seem to recognize the full consequences of their country’s actions in other regions, or investigate its long history of conflict with North Korea.
To begin in chronological order, touring around the globe, it’s been noted by international relations scholars and historians that the Korean War is partly known as “The Forgotten War” because Americans have largely forgotten “the utter ruin and devastation” the United States inflicted upon North Korea. It’s not widely known that the United States’ own leaders have admitted to have “killed off” approximately 20% of North Korea’s population throughout the war by targeting “everything that moved.” Or that the United States destroyed more cities in North Korea than it did in Germany or Japan during World War II by dropping more bombs than it did throughout the entire Pacific Theatre. When there were few urban targets left to bomb, the United States began to bomb dams that supplied water for the production of rice—one of the quintessential food commodities in Asia—which led to mass starvation during and after the war. While Americans may not remember the carnage across the other side of the world, North Koreans have never forgotten the destruction on its own peninsula, nor the American threats to use nuclear weapons during the war which first inspired Kim Il-Sung to obtain his own nuclear deterrent decades ago.
Looking at events throughout the next few decades, it’s apparent that American policymakers either fail to consider, or disregard, how their duplicitous dealings and illegal military interventions across the world could inspire smaller countries like North Korea to seek more cost-effective and credible deterrents to an American invasion than large standing armies, in the form of nuclear weapons.
While American officials compare the situation in North Korea with the 1960s Cuban Missile Crisis by depicting North Korea as an irrational and unpredictable adversary willing to initiate nuclear destruction, the real comparison lies in the United States’ refusal to live under the same threat it subjects to other countries, which forms a straight line of continuity to the present.
Historians have long known that John F. Kennedy lied to the American public by claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administrations had allowed a dangerous missile gap to grow in the Soviet Union’s favor, despite the opposite being the case. And that Nikita Khrushchev was inspired to equalize the balance of power by dispatching Soviet nuclear weapons to Cuba upon learning that the United States had stationed its nuclear weapons near the Soviet Union in Turkey, and to deter the United States from launching an invasion of Cuba. This fear of invasion was a justifiable concern considering the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the previous year and the CIA’s ongoing Operation Mongoose at the time, which tried to undermine the Castro regime through assassination attempts and sabotage.
However, the United States found the mere perception of an even playing field intolerable as it dispatched a naval blockade, considered an act of war in international law, to prevent further missiles from reaching Cuba. All of this happened despite Kennedy’s own assessment that the blockade would increase the probability of war to climb as high as 50%. We now know that even top-level decision makers like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara were rendered speechless decades later upon learning that both the United States and Cuba had severely underestimated the risk of nuclear war at the time.
In the end, nuclear war was barely averted by the heroism of Soviet submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov, who disobeyed orders to to launch a nuclear torpedo in response to his superiors’ panic over depth charges dropped by American ships during the blockade. The United States struck a deal with the Soviet Union to lift the blockade, provide a promise not to invade Cuba and to secretly remove the missiles in Turkey in exchange for the public removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. The mere semblance of a rational quid pro quo was unacceptable to the United States, which insisted on the risky optics of humiliation in order to reinforce its hegemonic principles that Cuba had no right to possess a deterrent to what seemed like an imminent American invasion, and that the United States should enjoy an offensive nuclear capacity denied to the Soviet Union.
Later on during the Reagan era, the United States illegally invaded Grenada to enact regime change in 1983, while simultaneously ratcheting up the annual joint United States-South Korea war games simulating possible invasions of North Korea near its borders. Kim Il-Sung was reportedly unsettled by the idea that the United States could perceive the tiny spice island of Grenada as a threat, and feared that nothing less than a nuclear deterrent would be sufficient to keep Pyongyang outside the crosshairs of Washington. Three years after the invasion of Grenada, the North Korean regime established its Ministry of Atomic Energy Industry to formally declare its intent to develop a nuclear weapons program, which exists to this day.
Moving towards the twenty-first century, the Bush 43 administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in March 2003, which had long given up Iraq’s nuclear weapons despite the Bush 43 administration’s lies about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), would serve as one example of a dictatorship being toppled due to the lack of a credible nuclear deterrent. Another example would follow with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who announced that Libya would also give up its biological and chemical weapons stockpiles in addition to its infant nuclear weapons program in December 2003. Even though George W. Bush celebrated Libya’s decision at the time, declaring that the world should take away the lesson that “leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them, will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations,” the succeeding Obama administration would go on to deliver the exact opposite lesson by assisting in the ouster of Gaddafi in 2011. Observing the situation in Libya, a North Korean official at the time explicitly remarked that the “Libyan crisis is teaching the international community a grave lesson,” claiming the West’s deal with Libya was “an invasion tactic to disarm the country.”
More towards the present, President Trump’s decision to “decertify” the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in October—despite worldwide acknowledgment that Iran has fully kept its side of the deal—has led some journalists to note that it’s more accurate to report that the United States was reneging on its JCPOA commitments, drawing parallels with its inconsistent foreign policy in Libya. The United States’ refusal to honor its agreement has bolstered the popularity of the hardline Iranian view that the United States and Saudi Arabia can’t be trusted.
There is remarkable irony in the United States betraying its JCPOA commitments considering the previous hysteria claiming that Iran was “the gravest threat to world peace,” despite not having invaded a single country in over 200 years. It’s a little known fact that Iran’s own Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Javad Zarif, actually critiqued the JCPOA because it didn’t go far enough towards ensuring peace in the Middle East—calling on Israel to join Iran in establishing a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East—which Iran incidentally first proposed to the UN General Assembly in 1974.
The irony is only heightened when we consider that the United States possesses an additional obligation to engage in good faith efforts towards establishing a NWFZ in the Middle East as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), as well as the Bush administration’s appeal to UN Security Council Resolution 687 to provide some pseudo-legal basis for its invasion of Iraq—claiming that Iraq had failed to live up to the resolution’s obligation to disarm itself of WMDs—when Article 14 of Resolution 687 called for the elimination of Iraqi WMDs for the explicit purpose of creating a NWFZ in the Middle East.
Aside from North Korea, another nuclear power the United States is presently antagonizing is Russia, which has led some observers to liken the current relationship to be that of a new Cold War for quite some time. One can recite a litany of American provocations against Russia ranging from the still unproven allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election to the United States’ proven interference in Russian elections, from the hypocritical accusations of war crimes in Syria that the American-backed rebel forces seeking regime change also committed, to the Obama administration’s use of deceit in persuading Russia not to veto a UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya, which would teach Vladimir Putin the “lesson” that weakness and compromise would be exploited by the United States.
But these examples ignore the United States’ more direct contributions to heightened nuclear tensions with Russia. Despite the Bush 41 administration’s verbal “iron-clad guarantees” made to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward,” in exchange for the reunification of West and East Germany in 1990 and agreements to halt the arms race, ban chemical weapons and drastically reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, succeeding administrations began to treat Russia as a defeated nation who “lost” the Cold War ever since.
The succeeding Clinton administration would proceed to illegally bomb Serbia and violate prior promises by expanding NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries, tarnishing the Russian population’s perception of the United States. Currently, NATO’s eastern expansion has reached Russia’s borders with NATO troops deployed in Poland and the Baltic States, which would be analogous to the United States finding Mexico, Cuba, Canada and most of South America welcoming Russian bases and troops in a military alliance against it. Notwithstanding the barrage of propagandistic charges of “Russian aggression,” NATO’s expansion and the Obama administration’s support for a violent coup ousting pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is responsible for provoking Russia’s actions in Ukraine and Crimea.
Adding insult to injury, the Obama administration’s placement of ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems near Russian borders was a continued reversal of the short-lived Nixon-Ford administrations’ policy of détente. It’s common knowledge among nuclear strategists around the world that BMD systems are offensive weapons by nature—designed to secure a nuclear first-strike advantage by neutralizing the threat of retaliatory nuclear strikes—and serve as a “Trojan Horse” for the militarization of outer space, as BMD systems depend on satellites that must be protected from the anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons readily available to other nations. The threat BMD systems pose to international stability was what led the United States and the Soviet Union to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972.
The ABM Treaty was promptly violated by the Reagan administration’s infamous Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or “Star Wars” program—a large subsidy for American high-tech industry under the guise of its fantastical aims of constructing orbiting “battle platforms,” with uranium and plutonium powered hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons—with the ABM Treaty later being unilaterally abrogated by the Bush 43 administration in 2001. Concerns about the destabilizing effects of deploying BMD systems have already materialized with Russia recently testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) designed to penetrate them.
But even critics of dishonest American foreign policy around the globe for fostering North Korea’s distrust often neglect to mention the history of the United States reneging on its commitments with North Korea itself. The Clinton administration was able to get North Korea to freeze its plutonium production for eight years (1994-2002) through the Agreed Framework of 1994, signed an additional agreement to mutually cease bearing “hostile intent,” and had indirectly worked out another deal to buy all of its medium and long-range missiles until the Bush 43 administration named North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil,” threatening it with the possibility of “preemptive” war.
In spite of this setback, the Bush 43 administration was able to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons under the six-party talks in 2005—in return for a light-water nuclear reactor for its medical and energy needs and an end to aggressive rhetoric—only for the same administration to quickly undermine the agreement by renewing its threats of force, withdrawing its offer of a light-water reactor and freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks.
The situation has only deteriorated under the Trump administration with its destabilizing statements and policies around the world, which is increasing pressure on other nations to pursue nuclear weapons. President Trump and his fellow Republicans have illegally threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and cause its “extinction.” Despite the corporate media’s frequent barrage of misleading headlines implying that the North Korean leadership won’t surrender its nuclear weapons under any circumstances—and refusal to report the timing of North Korea’s missile tests in the context of the annual joint American and South Korean war games simulating nuclear first-strikes, invasions, and assassinations of the North Korean leadership near its borders—the truth is that North Korea has repeatedly offered to give up its nuclear weapons program. The Trump administration has rejected China and North Korea’s numerous proposals to freeze North Korea’s nuclear and missile program in exchange for ceasing the threatening joint war games. It’s possible that the offers are insincere and that North Korea can’t be trusted to follow through on its commitments, but the point remains that diplomacy hasn’t been seriously pursued and that the United States’ own trustworthiness is hardly any better.
While there are some differences between the Trump administration’s foreign policy and its predecessors’, the United States’ general pursuit of overwhelming supremacy in all terrains of warfare including land, air, sea and outer space (also known as “full-spectrum dominance”), has remained largely intact. President Trump has called for a tenfold expansion of the United States’ nuclear stockpile in spite of the numerous arms reduction treaties the United States is committed to. His administration is also rushing to enact Obama administration programs to “modernize” the “nuclear triad,” estimated to cost over $1 trillion across three decades, to improve precision targeting and reducing blast yields to make nuclear first-strikes more thinkable.
The “Trojan Horse” for the militarization of space represented by the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) BMD system in South Korea—to secure a nuclear first-strike advantage against China and North Korea—is expected to trigger a new arms race in the region in addition to another arms race for space weapons. Despite virtually universal support for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) Treaty in the UN since 1985, including Russia and China, the United States has continually refused to negotiate the PAROS Treaty in the UN’s Conference on Disarmament because of its large technical advantages in BMD systems and potential space weaponry.
South Koreans and American military officials, academics, and journalists are certainly correct to note that North Korea’s “realist” foreign policy has remained remarkably consistent and predictable in comparison to President Trump’s unpredictability and frequent commitments to keeping “all options on the table.” However, to imagine that the Trump administration’s unpredictable posture regarding nuclear weapons is a large deviation from the norm of past administrations is a mistake. The United States has consistently refused to adopt a “no-first-use” pledge in order to keep the option of a nuclear first-strike open. A 1995 STRATCOM report entitled the Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence during the Clinton administration mentioned that it would be detrimental for the United States to portray itself as “too fully rational and cool-headed,” and recommended that it project an “irrational and vindictive” national persona with some “potentially ‘out of control’” elements instead.
The hegemonic principles are consistent: the United States and its allies should possess an offensive nuclear capacity to destroy their enemies denied to other nations, and can flout international law and their foreign obligations on a whim.
The North Korean government is a contemptible and authoritarian regime that’s justly condemned for its numerous human rights violations, but as foreign policy critics like Noam Chomsky have pointed out, there’s no logical connection between a regime’s domestic brutality and the threat it poses abroad. Although the United States is increasingly degenerating into an impoverished and totalitarian society with its own internal human rights abuses, there’s no doubt that American citizens enjoy a greater degree of liberties than North Koreans. There’s also little question that the United States has unleashed far more violence and aggression abroad. The latest international poll found that the United States is considered to be the greatest threat to world peace, beating out all other competitors—including North Korea—by decisive margins. A casual examination of the United States’ record abroad can yield similar damning conclusions: the United States is the world’s nuclear menace, not North Korea.
Joshua Cho is a recent graduate of Boston College, aspiring journalist and former intern at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
Former Pfizer chief toxicologist Helmut Sterz presents a critical examination of the development, approval, and global rollout of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines—particularly those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech. The Vaccine Mafia details the failure of pharmaceutical companies, regulatory authorities, politicians, and international organizations to follow established scientific and ethical standards during the pandemic. Drawing on the author’s decades of experience in pharmaceutical toxicology, Sterz reveals the many ways the vaccines’ inadequate or omitted preclinical safety testing put the world’s population at risk.
Sterz demonstrates how “emergency” approvals allowed manufacturers to bypass long-standing international guidelines governing toxicity testing, especially with regard to reproductive and cancer risks. They also allowed governments and health authorities to ignore or conceal evidence of serious adverse effects that occurred, including myocarditis, reproductive harm, and other long-term health risks.
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
Aletho News
