After terrorists retaliated for the U.S. government’s interventionist antics in the Middle East, the “terrorists” (or the Muslims) became the new official enemy. The “war on terrorism” became as lucrative as the 45-year “war on the Reds.”
I entered Virginia Military Institute as a freshman in 1968. By that time, the Vietnam War was in full swing. During the four years that I was at the school, VMI graduates were among the tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers who were being killed or injured for nothing.
Everyone at VMI was required to be in the corps. Naturally, as a military school, we would periodically have field training exercises, which usually were supervised and run by military officers in the military-science department.
Since I was going into army infantry, my field training exercises were based on hypothetical situations entirely involving Vietcong or North Vietnamese forces.
For example, we would be told that a North Vietnamese unit was known to use a particular path through the jungle. Our mission, as platoon leaders, was to prepare an ambush of the unit employing our three squads. (We were trained to align all three squads on the same side so that they wouldn’t be firing at each other.)
This went on for four years. All of the field training exercises — without exception — were based on hypothetical situations involving Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces.
During the year I graduated — 1972 — President Nixon began withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam. I was offered the option of trading a two-year active-duty commitment for an 8-year commitment in the Reserves, which included 3 months of active duty attending infantry school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. I readily accepted the offer.
In 1974, I temporarily dropped out of law school to fulfill my 3-month commitment. By this time, it was clear that the U.S. government was completely leaving the Vietnam War behind.
Of course, I was wondering what they were going to do with those field-training exercises. They didn’t skip a beat. From Day 1 of infantry school, they had a brand new official enemy that became the subject of infantry training. That new official enemy was the Russians.
$40 billion is still a great deal of money – even in the Biden Thing’s America. Except it’s not going to help Americans. Rather, the Biden Thing has taken $40 billion out of the pockets of Americans, to finance all-but-war with nuclear-armed Russia by arming and abetting Ukraine.
When the government – and the corporations that own the government – want war, they usually get what they want.
Some 108 years ago, the government of Woodrow Wilson and the arms peddlers and financial interests behind Wilson wanted war with Germany – something few if any Americans wanted as they’d be the ones paying for it, in blood and treasure. To drag them into what was then styled the “war to end all wars,” Wilson’s government colluded with Britain’s government and the interests that owned both of them to arrange a pretext. A passenger liner called the Lusitania was loaded with war materiel and provocatively sailed into the war zone. The Germans rose to the bait. A submarine fired a couple or more torpedoes into the Lusitania’s flanks and she quickly sank – resulting in the drowning of about 1,198 “innocent civilians,” which they were.
But the governments of America and Britain weren’t.
They knew that, by goading the Germans into sinking Lusitania, they could feign outrage and cause Americans to actually be outraged. Sufficiently so as to drown out any voices who might raise a hand and ask why Lusitania, a passenger liner (loaded with war material from America meant to help Germany’s foe in the war) was sailed into the war zone, right in front of German subs.
Instead, Americans were roused to blood lust over “the hun” and sent to die (and kill) in a war that was as relevant to them as a wall phone is a to a Millennial.
Some twenty years after the “war to end all wars,” another war began. The government – and corporate interests – of the United States were, once again, extremely interested in getting Americans to fight in it. But – chastened by the carnage of the prior war – few Americans were interested.
The clown of Ukrainian Oligarchs and American politicians’ sons is wrapping up his transatlantic tour of victimhood and grievance through the sacred halls of empire corruption. The western empire loves a victim with an evil oppressor to paint their animosities upon, especially if he’s a white male from Russia.
The clown used all the usual American buzzwords to stroke the neoconservative and neoliberal war mongers of the blood thirsty western hyena war den known as District of Counterglobalwarfareintoperpituity. He gave them the full reach around experience complete with Pearl Harbor and 9/11 references and even threw in a Martin Luther King Dream reference just before they climaxed.
War and death and suffering really gets them off when they’re not transferring the next ten generations’ of American taxpayer money to the corporate assholes who pay them back millions to get them elected.
The poor janitors of the Congressional hyena auditorium will be cleaning for weeks. The blood that was dripping from their mouths will require all the seats be reupholstered. Of course, they’ll just bill the taxpayers again.
For them it was worth it. It was worth every minute of the Clown’s performance. They acted like they didn’t know him, like he was a stranger in a strange land, like half of them haven’t visited him or him them in their hyena dens, on the cocktail circuit, at the cocaine clubs in Miami.
The clown played his role well. He pretended he didn’t know his audience. He made it clear that his handlers want more missiles and rockets and toys that will require more thank-you cards from Putin.
The clown put on his happy face by saying the skies should be closed over Ukraine. How noble. How heroic.
He’s not only willing to sacrifice a few thousand more Ukrainian civilians, he’s willing to turn the entire continent into rubble for the sake of his ego and pride. Both of which are directly connected to the aims of global management who own him and are negotiating a continuation of the war by all means because it is they who need a world war from which nothing will be left standing. Ashes and dust, the perfect conditions from which to ‘build back better’.
The latest negotiations were a hysterical farce. They’re so hellbent on keeping the war going, Putin could offer them all of Russia on a gold platter with a side of his own head and they’d refuse because they need more bodies, more shelled out buildings, more dead journalists killed by Ukrainian militias to be pinned on evil Russians. Most importantly they need Putin.
Anyone following social media’s “Community Standards” knows how selectively they are enforced. Your humble writer was permanently banned from Twitter in 2019 for using a word to describe Sean Hannity’s mental slowness that is otherwise used perhaps millions of times per day by others with full impunity. Likewise, calls for violence against Sen. Rand Paul are also made routinely with impunity, in direct violation of the stated “Community Standards.”
But even the hypocrisy and cynicism we have seen to this point by Big Social Media does not prepare one for a shocking development today, as first reported by Reuters and then picked up by the Washington Post: Facebook (and Facebook-owned Instagram) have “updated” their “Community Standards” guidelines and will now allow calls for violence against Russians.
Yes that’s right. Russians – not the Russian government or the Russian economy, or even top Russian political figures but just plain old Russians – are now subject to new guidelines that ALLOW rather than forbid “Hate Speech” and even actual calls for violence!
For those who felt that Japanese internment camps and “colored” drinking fountains were a disgusting chapter, thankfully relegated to the dustbin of history, who were sure that we’ve moved far beyond such primitive racism and violence, here’s a reminder that lurking just below the surface and subject to re-activation by the powers-that-be in the propaganda machine is that same old violent hatred of others. And social media is more than happy to accommodate the wishes of its governmental masters.
It is very clear that we are not progressing as a society toward ever-more liberal values. We are regressing to a violent, feral state. Endlessly looking inward for enemies to destroy. “Anti-vaxxers,” Trump voters, and now just plain old everyday Russians. Kill them. They are evil. Is this OK?
Facebook, a de facto arm of government, is now encouraging calls for violence against innocent people who happen to be of a particular race or ethnic background or linguistic group.
Race-hate of an unpopular ethnic and religions group? Haven’t we seen this horrific movie before?
April, 2004: In the attack on Fallujah, which ended after 3 weeks in defeat of the “coalition”:
“Forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, U.S. forces began allowing everyone to leave except for what they called ‘military age males,’ men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war.
“The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the Americans shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.
“In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Spectre gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers criss-crossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic only five were ‘military-age males.’ I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head
“One thing that snipers were very discriminating about every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujahedin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the U.S. military.
“The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.“
“A hospital has been razed to the ground in one of the heaviest U.S. air raids in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Witnesses said only the facade remained of the small Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the center of the city. A nearby medical supplies storeroom and dozens of houses were damaged as US forces continued preparing the ground for an expected major assault.“
“In a series of actions over the weekend, the United States military and Iraqi government destroyed a civilian hospital in a massive air raid, captured the main hospital, and prohibited the use of ambulances in the besieged city of Fallujah.“
“NEAR Fallujah, Iraq Nov. 12, 2004 — Hundreds of men trying to flee the assault on Fallujah have been turned back by U.S. troops following orders ‘We assume they’ll go home and just wait out the storm or find a place that’s safe,’ one 1st Cavalry Division officer, who declined to be named, said Thursday. Army Col. Michael Formica, who leads forces isolating Fallujah, admits the rule sounds ‘callous.’ But he insists it’s key to the mission’s success.
“Tell them ‘Stay in your houses, stay away from windows and stay off the roof and you’ll live through Fallujah,’ [Army Col. Michael] Formica, of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 2nd Brigade, told his battalion commanders in a radio conference call Wednesday night.
“Troops have cut off all roads and bridges leading out of the city. Relatively few residents have sought to get through On Wednesday and Thursday, American troops sunk boats being used to ferry people across the river. “
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“Insurgent attacks across Iraq stretched American forces to their limits yesterday when rebels appeared to be in control of at least two cities, and the operation in Fallujah entered its most dangerous phase. Some of the toughest street fighting encountered so far erupted during the day as rebels reemerged in areas already secured by U.S. Marines in the north of the city. Gunmen resumed positions on the roofs of mosques which had earlier been cleared
“‘I’m supposed to shoot into the houses before our troops go in,’ said Marine Cpl. Will Porter “
— “U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004
“Her shins, shattered by bullets from U.S. soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, are both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage backs filled with red fluid sit upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.
“Fatima Harouz, 12 years old, lives in Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Just three days ago soldiers attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us says, ‘They attacked our home and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.’ Her brother was shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers. ‘Before they left, they killed all of our chickens,’ added Fatima’s mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.“
— Slash and Burn, Dahr Jamail, November 17, 2004
“Journalists with the troops speak of a city that is gradually being devastated. Scarcely a single house does not bear some form of weapons scar and many have been rendered uninhabitable.
“Tactics handed down from years of urban warfare in Israel mean that troops sometimes search rows of buildings by punching holes through walls with high velocity bullets rather than moving from house to house through doors, thus reducing the risk of booby traps and increasing the element of surprise.“
— “The Telegraph: U.S. troops stretched to limit as insurgents fight back,” Robin Gedye, Nov. 13, 2004
“The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer [Bilal Hussein] stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of [Fallujah] In the hours and days that followed, heavy bombing raids and thunderous artillery shelling turned Hussein’s northern Jolan neighborhood into a zone of rubble and death. The walls of his house were pockmarked by coalition fire.
“‘Destruction was everywhere. I saw people lying dead in the streets, wounded were bleeding and there was no one to come and help them. U.S. soldiers began to open fire on the houses, so I decided that it was very dangerous to stay in my house,’ he said. Hussein moved from house to house — dodging gunfire — and reached the river. ‘I decided to swim but I changed my mind after seeing U.S. helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river.’
“He watched horrified as a family of five was shot dead as they tried to cross. ’I kept walking along the river for two hours and I could still see some U.S. snipers ready to shoot anyone who might swim.’“
— “AP Photographer Flees Fallujah,” Katarina Kratovac, Nov. 14, 2004
“No outside aid has reached civilians in the city since the offensive began last Monday, and yesterday U.S. forces kept an Iraqi Red Crescent aid convoy of seven trucks and ambulances waiting at the main hospital near a bridge on the edge of the city. Reports from within Fallujah yesterday said bodies lay in the streets, homes and mosques were destroyed, and power and telephone lines were down.
“However, [Marine] Col. [Mike] Shupp said the Red Crescent did not need to deliver aid to civilians in Fallujah and questioned whether there were any. He said: “There is no need to bring supplies in because we have supplies of our own for the people.
“[U.S.-chosen Iraqi Prime Minister] Mr. [Iyad] Allawi also said he doubted reports of civilians in the city. This contradicted accounts from residents inside the city
“‘Our situation is very hard,’ said one resident [Abu Mustafa] contacted by telephone in the central Hay al Dubat neighborhood. ‘We don’t have food or water. My seven children all have severe diarrhea.’
“‘One of my sons was wounded by shrapnel last night and he’s bleeding, but I can’t do anything to help him.’
“It is thought about half of Fallujah’s 300,000 people fled the fighting in the city. In April, 2,000 U.S. Marines fought for three weeks and failed to take Fallujah. This time, six times that number were sent Major General Richard Natonski of the U.S. Marine Corps: ‘We had the green light this time and we went all the way.’ [M]ore than 20 different types of planes were used in bombing swarms as U.S. soldiers began clearing weapons and fighters from every one of Fallujah’s 50,000 buildings, bands of insurgents were still roaming freely in some neighborhoods.“
— “Bodies litter streets in rubble of Fallujah,” Calum MacDonald, Nov. 15, 2004
“[T]he command in Baghdad thought there were at least 2,000 insurgents, and perhaps as many as 5,000. But the coalition forces have failed to find large clusters and now think that there might have been less than 1,000, military sources said yesterday. The senior defense official said some generals now think there might have been 600 or fewer.“
“Fallujah has been under relentless aerial and artillery bombardment and without electricity since Monday. Reports have said residents are running low on food. An officer here said it was likely that those who stay in their homes would live through the assault, but agreed the city was a risky and frightening place to live.
“U.S. military says it does all it can to prevent bombing buildings with civilians inside them.“
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85 percent of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 meters, i.e., they hit within 10 meters of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 meters.“
“Once the battle ends, military officials say all surviving military-age men can expect to be tested for explosive residue, catalogued, checked against insurgent databases and interrogated about ties with the guerrillas. U.S. and Iraqi troops are in the midst of searching homes, and plan to check every house in the city for weapons.“
— “GIs Force Men Fleeing Fallujah to Return,” Associated Press, Nov. 16, 2004
“[A]ll the excuses Mr. Bush gave for attacking the people of Iraq were either wrong or lies. We’ll only mention in passing that the domestic price for ‘our’ sarkar attacking Iraq, a country with no WMD, no al-Qaeda links, and no connections to 9/11 so far has been $87 billion, a good chunk of our civil liberties — and 1,239 or so American soldier’s lives, not to mention a minimum of approximately 8,000 more wounded and/or maimed.“
— L. Reichard White, “The Only Way to Make Your Vote Count,” Oct. 31, 2004
So, are Putin and the Russians as good at invading countries and murdering men, women and children as these guys?
>HERE for updates, additions, comments, and corrections.
AND, “Like,” “Tweet,” and otherwise, pass this along!
L. Reichard White [send him mail] taught physics, designed and built a house, ran for Nevada State Senate, served two terms on the Libertarian National Committee, managed a theater company, etc. For the next few decades, he supported his writing habit by beating casinos at their own games. His hobby, though, is explaining things he wishes someone had explained to him. You can find a few of his other explanations listed here.
As Russia’s population has declined, the Chinese side of the border looks increasingly like a source of political instability and ethnic incursion into Russian territory. Beyond the near term, this is likely to lead to more conflict over the exact location of the border and who dominates the region.
In the wake of mounting tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine, one now finds countless media stories on the “China-Russia axis” and the “bond between Russia and China.” The ideological benefit of connecting Russia to China is undoubtedly clear to anti-Russia hawks. Russia is a relatively weak state with a small economy. China, on the other hand, tends to look more formidable. By connecting Russia to China in a new version of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” it becomes easier to downplay calmer voices noting the many limitations Russia faces in terms of its geopolitical ambitions.
But just how secure is this supposed Sino-Russian friendship? While the two states may broadly agree on the need to limit US hegemonic power, the two are likely to also find many reasons to view each other as more immediate sources of conflict.
In his book Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, China scholar Michael Beckley notes there are many issues mitigating China-Russia “unity”:
Russia and China currently maintain a strategic partnership, but this relationship is unlikely to become a genuine alliance…. In parts of the world that matter most to them, Russia and China are more rivals than allies…. For every example of Sino-Russian cooperation, there is a counterexample of competition. For instance, Russia sells weapons to China, but it recently reduced sales to China while increasing sales to China’s rivals, most notably India and Vietnam. Russia and China conduct joint military exercises, but they also train with each other’s enemies and conduct unilateral exercises simulating a Sino-Russian war. The two countries share an interest in developing Central Asia, but Russia wants to tether the region to Moscow via the Eurasian Economic Union whereas China wants to reconstitute the Silk Road and link China to the Middle East and Europe while bypassing Russia.
The potential for an ongoing border dispute between Russia and China remains as well. For its part, China has as many as eighteen border disputes going on right now, and Russia continues to deal with several border issues with both Ukraine and Georgia. In Siberia, however, Russia and China face a low-intensity conflict over their border that is an ongoing source of division between the two states. While unlikely to lead to violent conflict in the near future, this border situation does provide an informative example of one of many ways that the Russia-China “partnership” faces many pitfalls.
What Is Russia’s Far East Problem?
As Russia’s population has declined, the Chinese side of the border looks increasingly like a source of political instability and ethnic incursion into Russian territory. Beyond the near term, this is likely to lead to more conflict over the exact location of the border and who dominates the region.
Many have noted this. In 2008, for example, the Hudson Institute’s Laurent Murawiec published “The Great Siberian War of 2030,” which explored the possibility for rising tensions along the Russia-China border. Murawiec notes that as Russia’s population continues to decline and withdraw from Siberia—a term in this context meaning everything east of the Ural Mountains—relative Chinese geopolitical strength in the region will continue to decline:
A hollowed out Siberia will be similar to a vacuum hole sucking in outside forces to make up for the vanishing Russian presence. Conflict is neither inexorable nor prescribed by some mechanical inevitability, but the likelihood that disequilibrium may lead to turmoil must be taken into account as a realistic possibility.
A similar thesis appeared inthe New York Times in 2015 in an article titled “Why China Will Reclaim Siberia.” The author, Frank Jacobs, lays out the basic dynamics:
By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 – “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” – the expansion was already happening.
As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”
Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:
I’ve learned to hate the Russians All through my whole life If another war comes It’s them we must fight To hate them and fear them To run and to hide And accept it all bravely With God on my side
In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.
Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”
During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions – shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.
On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.
The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its US leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.
Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream US media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the US is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized – NATO enlargement – there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the US forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the US nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
Whether or not they know much about such history, the USA’s media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.
Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel – editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert – said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”
Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and US allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.
The last US ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”
But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.
A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.
“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”
By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 – “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” – the expansion was already happening.
As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”
If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much US corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”
Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could?
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
The US continues to insist that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could come “at any moment,” while the Russians insist they have no interest in an invasion. Is Russia about to call Biden’s bluff? Also today: Trudeau claims extraordinary powers to clear out Freedom Truck protesters. And…what happened to Covid?
The Saudis, however, for their part have learned the lessons well what happens when you get into a price war with Russia. You lose. So, instead of fighting Russia for market share, they’ve decided to coordinate production for the big win-win for everyone while the U.S. continues to grapple with the reality that its empire is not only crumbling, but being actively dismantled from within.
For more than fifty years the Saudis have helped prop up U.S. foreign policy by exporting their oil to the world and taking only dollars in return.
Their currency, the Riyal, has been pegged to the U.S. dollar since then Secretary of State under President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, brokered that deal that built the so-called petrodollar system.
Now, in the intervening decades the petrodollar has been a buzzword thrown around by many, including myself, to explain the architecture of the U.S.’s imperial ambitions. In many ways, it has served a crucial part of that, at times. But, it was most needed during the early years of the dollar reserve standard, helping to legitimize this new currency regime and provide a market for U.S. debt around the world to replace gold.
After that it was just one aspect of a much bigger game built on the ever-expanding Ponzi scheme of fake funny money. In reality, the eurodollar shadow banking system is just a lot bigger than the petrodollar.
That said, I don’t discount it completely, as I understand this is real money changing hands for real goods, rather than the vast quantities of dollars out there supporting an increasingly creaky financialized system. Real trade matters and what currency that trade occurs in, also matters.
The U.S. closely defended the petrodollar famously going to war with any country that dared to offer oil on international markets in any currency other than the dollar, c.f. Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But, times change and so do the structure of capital markets.
So, when evaluating the health of the petrodollar system and its importance today it’s important to realize that the oil market is far more fragmented in payment terms than its been since the early 1970’s.
As a system, the petrodollar was always going to die a death of a thousand cuts. To my reckoning the first inklings of this began in late 2012 after President Obama finally used the financial nuclear weapon, expulsion from the SWIFT payment system, on Iran for pretty much no reason.
The fact that the Obama administration politicized SWIFT when it did ended an era of international finance. The world financial system ended any illusions it had over who was in charge and who dictated what terms.
The problem with that is once you go there, there’s no going back, which was {Jim} Sinclair’s point over a decade ago.
Threatening Switzerland with SWIFT expulsion wasn’t a sign of strength, however, it was a sign of weakness. Only weak people bully their friends into submission. It showed that the U.S. had no leverage over than the Swiss other than SWIFT, a clear sign of desperation.
And that’s what the U.S. did when it pushed the big red ‘history eraser’ button.
The Swiss knuckled under. Its vaunted banking privacy is now a part of history.
Iran, however, in 2012, facing a similar threat from Obama, didn’t knuckle under and forced Obama to make good on his threat. Once you uncork the nuclear weapon you can’t threaten with lesser weapons, they have no sway. This is a lesson Donald Trump would learn the hard way since 2018.
Iran bucked the petrodollar to sell its oil by making a goods-for-oil swap arrangement with India. Iran was laughed at by U.S. foreign policy wonks at the time. Then we found out that Turkey was laundering oil sales for Iran through its banks using gold.
Its currency, the Rial, since then has been under constant attack by the U.S., most viciously under President Trump who sought to do what Obama couldn’t do, drive Iran’s oil exports to zero. The goal was regime change.
I chronicled this in detail, over these past four years, saying explicitly that the strategy was stupid and short-sighted. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work.
Iran’s resistance to Trump’s bullying only further entrenched the existing power structures there and hardened the Iranian people to become more disagreeable, more disdainful of America and, likely, Americans.
All it did was force Iran to develop alternate plans and find new markets. Those alternatives meant courting better relations with China, Russia and Turkey, which the U.S. tried hard to sabotage. As long as Iran was as good as its word, supplying oil and acting as a reliable partner in diplomacy, eventually deals would come to them.
by Tyler Durden
MCViewPoint 