A new report says the administration of US President Joe Biden has authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel in recent days amid the regime’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Pentagon and State Department officials said the new arms packages include more than 1800 bombs, The Washington Post reported.
According to the report, these are 2000-pound devices that can demolish entire city blocks and are rarely used in populated areas. Israel, however, has used them extensively in Gaza.
Some Democrats, including allies of President Biden, say the US government has a responsibility to withhold weapons in the absence of an Israeli commitment to limit civilian casualties during a planned operation in Rafah, and ease restrictions on humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, which is on the brink of famine.
“The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview. “We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
Last week, the State Department also authorized the transfer of 25 F-35 fighter jets and engines to Israel.
Earlier reports said the US had quietly made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel since the onslaught on Gaza began on October 7.
The arms supplies go against the US call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
A new report says the administration of US President Joe Biden has authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel in recent days amid the regime’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Pentagon and State Department officials said the new arms packages include more than 1800 bombs, The Washington Post reported.
According to the report, these are 2000-pound devices that can demolish entire city blocks and are rarely used in populated areas. Israel, however, has used them extensively in Gaza.
Some Democrats, including allies of President Biden, say the US government has a responsibility to withhold weapons in the absence of an Israeli commitment to limit civilian casualties during a planned operation in Rafah, and ease restrictions on humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, which is on the brink of famine.
“The Biden administration needs to use their leverage effectively and, in my view, they should receive these basic commitments before greenlighting more bombs for Gaza,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said in an interview. “We need to back up what we say with what we do.”
Last week, the State Department also authorized the transfer of 25 F-35 fighter jets and engines to Israel.
Earlier reports said the US had quietly made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel since the onslaught on Gaza began on October 7.
The arms supplies go against the US call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Israel began hostilities in Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The regime has also cut off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
Israel has killed more than 32,500 Palestinians and injured nearly 75,000 others in Gaza since the October day.
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The Yemeni SABA news agency in Sanaa says the American-Israeli-British aggression launched multiple airstrikes on the capital Sanaa and the provinces of Hodeidah, Saada, and Dhamar.
A US official told CNN on Friday that the US military has launched strikes against multiple targets in Yemen, adding that “the strikes were from fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles.”
The Yemeni SABA news agency in Sanaa also reported that the American-Israeli-British aggression launched multiple airstrikes on the capital Sanaa and the provinces of Hodeidah, Saada, and Dhamar.
Al Mayadeen Correspondent reported that The US-British aggression targeted the vicinity of Al-Hudaydah Airport and areas in Zabid District in the same coastal governorate on the Red Sea in Western Yemen.
Our correspondent added that the raids targeted Kahlan camp, east of the city of Saada, in northern Yemen.
The Pentagon has announced that the US aggression has targeted 12 sites in Yemen and was conducted by warplanes, cruise missiles, and submarines.
Politico cited an official from the US Department of Defense as saying that the US and the UK, with support from Australia, the Netherlands, Bahrain, and Canada, carried out strikes against targets in Yemen.
The New York Times on the other hand reported that the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, and Bahrain provided logistical, intelligence, and other forms of support to the aggression.
Earlier reports regarding imminent strikes
Earlier, Deputy Head of the Moral Guidance Department in the Yemeni Ministry of Defense in the Sanaa government, Brigadier Abdullah ben Amer, affirmed that there are significant preparations to confront the anticipated US-British aggression on Yemen.
This comes amid media reports that the US and the UK are mulling possible strikes against the Yemeni forces in an attempt to curb their operations in the Red and the Arabian seas against Israeli and Israeli-bound ships, The Financial Times reported, citing informed sources.
The report mentioned that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was expected to authorize strikes on Thursday as part of a US-led coalition and even convened an urgent call of his cabinet at 7:45 p.m. GMT following a meeting of the National Security Council.
On X, Ben Amer stressed that “readiness has been underway for several days” in Sanaa, pointing out that opening the airspace to US and British warplanes for attacking Yemen is “clear participation in the assault and direct involvement in the aggression.”
He also urged Yemenis to take part in protests on Friday and pay no attention to what some hostile sides have started to spread, such as talk of collapses, confusion, and “other foolish and naive lies.”
هناك عدوان متوقع وهناك استعدادات كبيرة للتصدي والمواجهة وهناك جاهزية بدأت منذ عدة أيام وما على أحرار اليمن الا الاستعداد للمشاركة في التظاهرات اليوم الجمعة وعدم الالتفات الى ما بدأت بعض الجهات المعادية في نشره كالحديث عن انهيارات وارتباك وما الى ذلك من الأكاذيب الغبية والساذجة.
Ben Amer revealed that US reconnaissance aircraft are flying at the moment south of the Red Sea.
On his part, Fadel Abu Taleb, a member of the Political Bureau of the Yemeni Ansar Allah movement, underlined that the Yemeni people are fully prepared and completely ready to engage in any battle or confrontation with the enemies, no matter its intensity, until achieving victory for both the Palestinian and Yemeni peoples.
Abu Taleb said that the United States and the US claim that targeting the Yemeni people is part of supporting the Zionist entity, while the Yemeni people assert that their military operations at sea are in the context of supporting the Palestinian people and backing the Resistance.
معادلة واضحة .. يؤكد الأمريكي والبريطاني أن التوجه لاستهداف الشعب اليمني يأتي في إطار دعم الكيان الصهيوني. وفي المقابل يؤكد الشعب اليمني بأن عملياته العسكرية في البحر تأتي في إطار دعم الشعب الفلسطيني وإسناد المقاومة، وأنه على استعداد تام وجهوزية كاملة لخوض أي معركة أو مواجهة مع…
According to Israeli media reports, in the United States, the Pentagon held urgent security consultations, highlighting that expanding the confrontation in the Middle East into a comprehensive one is one of the important topics being discussed.
Israeli media mentioned that weapon and missile storage facilities and drones will be attacked as part of the planned attack from Washington and London against Sanaa. Western sources were cited as saying that the selected targets would be limited in order to avoid expanding the scope of the confrontation.
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Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters on January 17, 1973, outside the Federal Building in Los Angeles as his co-defendant, Anthony Russo, center right, looks on (AP)
Daniel Ellsberg was responsible for leaking the Pentagon’s highly classified secrets regarding US actions in the Vietnam War.
The “most dangerous man” in the United States died at the age of 92 on Friday, leaving behind him a long legacy of exposing Washington’s policies during its war on Vietnam.
The title in question was given to Daniel Ellsberg by infamous US diplomat Henry Kissinger.
A military analyst, historian, and journalist, Ellsberg was responsible for leaking highly classified internal Pentagon documents, known as the Pentagon Papers or officially titled Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force, in 1971.
The 7,000-page-long papers issued by the Department of Defense recorded secrets of the US political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, shedding light on how US top officials were deceiving the American public about why their sons are dying in Vietnam.
A controversial person who once fought in Vietnam and later turned into a peace activist, Ellsberg was considered by some a hero and by others a traitor, nevertheless it remained true that Ellsberg made a major impact on the United State’s politics.
“He had concluded the violence in Vietnam was senseless and therefore immoral. His conscience told him he had to stop the war,” Neil Sheehan, the journalist who was the first to publish parts of the exposed documents, wrote in “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.”
“Ellsberg, in whatever incarnation and in any job, was no ordinary man,” David Halberstam wrote in his 1979 book “The Powers That Be.”
“He was an obsessive man. That which he saw, others must see, that which he believed, others must believe. Thus as he became increasingly disillusioned, he also became a force. No one entered an argument with him lightly or left it exactly the same,” Halberstam added.
Former US President Lyndon Johnson made vows during the 1960s not to send America’s sons to die in wars in Asia.
After Ellsberg joined the Pentagon in 1964 as a strategic analyst, he was tasked to work on a project to increase US presence in Vietnam. During his Vietnam deployment, the journalist saw firsthand what the United States military was doing with Vietnamese civilians.
“Nothing else,” Ellsberg wrote later, “seemed so purely incomprehensibly evil as the deliberate bombing of women and children.”
Halberstam wrote that he [Ellsberg] “became fascinated by the question of war crimes.”
After his return from Vietnam, the now-reformed Ellsberg tried to explain the mess of the war to then-National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, but he was brushed off by Rostow and told “You don’t understand,” and “victory is near”.
“It wasn’t that we were on the wrong side,” Ellsberg said later. “We were the wrong side.”
It was through his job at the RAND Corporation that Ellsberg gained access to the documents, where he was able to sneak copies of the Pentagon Papers.
The New York Times began on June 13, 1971 to publish parts of the vast material handed to them by Ellsberg. Nixon biographer John Farrell called that day as “the Sunday morning that sired the flames that came to claim his presidency.” Washington then barred the NYT from further publishing the material, however, Ellsberg had already sent copies to other major newspapers.
Enemy of the government
His efforts were not recognized by some others as anti-war, but as anti-government during a time of war.
“The press should be able to fulfill its secular role of exposing rascals and mistakes in government without making common cause with the enemies of government,” General Maxwell Taylor, retired head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in a New York Times op-ed then.
As the DoJ went after Ellsberg to put him on trial, Nixon also ordered his officials to gather information to discredit him. “We’ve got to get him,” the president demanded then.
After the full Pentagon Papers were declassified and released in 2011, the anti-war journalist called on others to proceed to pursue and expose the US secrets regarding the wars in the Middle East.
“The personal risks are great,” Ellsberg wrote in The Guardian. “But a war’s worth of lives might be saved.”
For decades, whenever a whistleblower leaked secrets, Ellsberg would invariably be asked to comment. “I think he’s done an enormous service, incalculable service.”
Ellsberg praised NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who leaked America’s spy practices against its citizens in June 2013. “I think he’s done an enormous service, incalculable service.”
The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as “weapons of mass destruction” and “rogue state” were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
To understand the Iraq war you don’t need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.
Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair’s plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student’s website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister’s bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair’s speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?
Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.
Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don’t explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.
The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn’t fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.
Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn’t a diplomat. She wasn’t even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as “the queen of Madison Avenue.” On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben’s Rice and another for Head and Shoulder’s dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.
At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell’s words, “the branding of U.S. foreign policy.” She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.
“Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time,” said Beers. “All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world.” Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.
Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It’s a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.
The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of “freedom” to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: “This war is about peace.”
Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.
Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria “Torie” Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld’s mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world’s great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton’s D.C. office.
Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington’s top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon’s forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.
The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR’s Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money’s worth. Boggs’ felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.
According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent “messaging advice” to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld’s mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn’t an “axis” at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.
Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .
At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington’s heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.
As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.
Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group’s work there.
But it’s not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war’s signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. “Where do you think they got those American flags?” clucked Rendon in 1991. “That was my assignment.”
The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.
So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. “I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician,” said Rendon. “I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.”
What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: “actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning.” In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.
Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. “You can have the corpse,” said Rumsfeld. “You can have the name. But I’m going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have.”
At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America’s most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.
Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction. Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam’s regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn’t have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn’t even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.
This charade wouldn’t have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: “Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception.”
During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.
What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as “our protectors.” The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do “anything and everything they can ask of us.”
When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war’s first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.
The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon’s montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.
“A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion,” predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.
Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post’s pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.
Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post’s editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings “a quirk of war.”
The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn’t object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan’s personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a “strategic setback for the United States.” This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, “Where’d you get that? Iraqi television?”
The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times’ Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled “Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast,” arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam’s secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation’s most bellicose Islamophobe. “The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar,” wrote Mylroie and Pipes. “The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad.”
In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation’s most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador’s assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.
Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. “There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way,” said Benador. “If not, people get scared.” Scared of intentions of their own government.
It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration’s gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn’t want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.
Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC’s firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network’s executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue’s show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered “a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.”
The memo warned that Donahue’s show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, “a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.
It’s war that sells.
There’s a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.
With Russia’s military operation in Ukraine going on for more than a month now, it seems that the Ukrainian army, which has gradually been losing its positions, has an unlimited supply of weapons and ammunition. Does this mean that Zelensky’s government has been smart enough to make huge stockpiles of weapons, and numerous allegations by the Ukrainian opposition and the Russian media about most of the money allocated to Kiev for the rearmament of the Ukrainian armed forces over the past eight years having been stolen simply hold no water? Or, maybe it means that Russian shelling of military warehouses have been absolutely ineffective? No, sir, it only means that Kiev has an ideal and virtually inexhaustible source of arms and ammo.
On March 28, the well-known Bulgarian investigative journalist Dilyana Gaytandzhieva published a detailed analysis of arms supplies to Ukraine, backed up by documents from the Pentagon. As it turned out, most of the weapons and ammunition for the Ukrainian army has been coming from Bulgarian military factories. Small wonder, since the pro-Western Kiev regime has done nothing for the sake of rebuilding the country’s military-industrial complex during the past eight years. Kiev lost its last remaining cartridge-making factory, along with Donetsk, in 2014. However, this did not prevent President Poroshenko and his successor Zelensky from selling their stockpiles of old Soviet-made weapons to countries in Asia and Africa. And all that time, the Ukrainian leaders were making half-hearted attempts to rearm their military according to NATO standards – something they never really succeeded in. As a result, all Ukraine could boast about at the start of the conflict with Russia were old Soviet weapons. Modern warfare requires huge outlays on ammunition, as a single day of war eats up tons of shells, cartridges, mines, etc. Without them, you simply can’t go on fighting.
Luckily for Kiev, however, some NATO and EU countries have preserved the old Soviet-era legacy, above all Bulgaria with its Arsenal, VMZ, Arcus and Emco factories. Sofia has for many years been supplying Soviet-designed weapons to African and Arab countries. Some of these weapons were even sent to anti-government militant groups in Syria.
Even though Bulgaria, which never tires of reiterating its non-participation in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, is making no direct arms deliveries to Kiev, the details of the very unpretentious scheme exposed by Dilyana Gaytandzhiyeva show that Bulgarian weapons are exported to Ukraine via a network of middlemen, namely two Polish companies, “Arm Techsp. Zo.O” and “Vismag Jacek Jakubczyk,” and the Czech firm “Excalibur Army Spol.S.R.O.” Moreover, all information about these “arms deals” is openly available on government websites, which is exactly where Gaytandzhiyeva found it. The problem is, however, that according to international law, weapons can only be re-exported with permission from their country of manufacture, which has never come, at least officially.
As for the Pentagon, which is behind this whole arrangement, it considers such permission just as an empty and unnecessary formality. What really matters is that the Ukrainian buyer – Spetstechnoexport Company – is regularly receiving weapons that are desperately needed by the Ukrainian army. Moreover, this scheme was earlier tested out in Syria where supplying the jihadist rebels with familiar Soviet weapons proved cheaper than arming them with the most advanced US-made weapons. The very same scheme is now at work also in Ukraine.
In spite of all the evidence pointing to the illegal re-export of weapons, the Bulgarian government would certainly prefer to avoid a scandal over military supplies to a de facto warring country, all the more so since its arms manufacturers, who are making money hand over fist, just couldn’t care less about international law. As for Ukraine, the generous supply of arms and ammo it has been getting from Bulgarian gunsmiths will allow it to keep fighting for several more months or weeks, thus increasing the number of victims.
The United States sent a significant number of Patriot antimissile interceptors to Saudi Arabia upon an urgent request from Riyadh, reports suggested, amid intensified retaliatory strikes on the kingdom from the Yemeni side.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington transferred the interceptors to the kingdom within the past month.
The report added that the move was aimed to enable the kingdom to fend off drone and missile strikes conducted by the Yemeni resistance in retaliation for the years-long Saudi aggression and siege.
A senior official within the US administration of President Joe Biden, who asked not to be named, confirmed the news on Sunday night, telling the Associated Press that the transfer of the interceptors was in line with Biden’s promise that “America will have the backs of our friends in the region.”
Throughout the course of the war, the United States has supported and armed Saudi Arabia. Despite his promise to end “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales,” Biden last year approved the sale of 280 air-to-air missiles valued at up to $650 million to Saudi Arabia.
Late in 2021, Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin told a Middle East conference that Washington was “significantly enhancing Saudi Arabia’s ability to defend itself.”
Saudi Arabia launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, leading a military coalition consisting of its regional allies, including the UAE, and supported by major Western powers, especially the United States.
Although the kingdom estimated at the beginning of the war that it would come out victorious within just a few weeks, the war has continued for seven years, leaving hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead and displacing millions more.
Yemeni armed forces and allied Popular Committees, however, have grown steadily in strength against the Saudi-led invaders, and left Riyadh and its allies bogged down in the country.
The transfers also come as the US and its allies have been seeking help from Saudi Arabia to pump more oil to contain a surge in energy prices following Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine.
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The Russian Defence Ministry continues to study materials received from employees of Ukrainian laboratories on the implementation of military biological programs of the United States and its NATO allies on the territory of Ukraine.
Western mass media and some biologists, who most often have a second American citizenship, express doubts about the reliability of the materials published by us. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the documents have the signatures of real officials and are certified by the seals of organizations.
We believe that components of biological weapons were created on the territory of Ukraine.
Here is a document dated March 6, 2015, confirming the Pentagon’s direct participation in the financing of military biological projects in Ukraine.
According to established practice, American projects in the field of sanitation in third countries, including in Africa and Asia, are funded through national health authorities.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the agreement on joint biological activities was concluded between the US Military Department and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine. However, the real recipient of funds are the laboratories of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence located in Kiev, Odessa, Lvov and Kharkov. The total funding amounted to $32 million.
It is no coincidence that these biolabs were chosen by the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the contractor company Black & Veatch as the executors of the U-P-8 project aimed at studying the pathogens of the Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, leptospirosis and hantaviruses. The corresponding request of the Pentagon to involve Ukrainian laboratories for the implementation of the project is presented on the slide. From our point of view, the interest of US military biologists is due to the fact that these pathogens have natural foci both on the territory of Ukraine and in Russia, and their use can be disguised as natural outbreaks of diseases. That is why this project has received additional funding, and the terms of its implementation have been extended.
A study of the documents in the part of the P-781 project on the study of ways of transmitting diseases to humans through bats showed that the work was carried out on the basis of a laboratory in Kharkov together with the infamous R. Lugar Center in Tbilisi. The total costs of the Pentagon for its implementation in Ukraine and Georgia amounted to $ 1.6 million, most of which was received by Ukraine as the main contractor.
The documents received by the Russian Ministry of Defence indicate that research in this area is systematic and has been conducted since at least 2009 under the direct supervision of specialists from the United States within the framework of projects P-382, P-444 and P-568. One of the curators of this activity was the head of the DTRA office at the US Embassy in Kiev, Joanna Wintrall. Maybe journalists should talk to her?
During the implementation of these projects, six families of viruses (including coronaviruses) and three types of pathogenic bacteria (pathogens of plague, brucellosis and leptospirosis) were identified. This is due to the main characteristics of these pathogens that make them favourable for the purposes of infection: resistance to drugs, rapid speed of spread from animals to humans, etc.
It is necessary to note a number of documents confirming the transfer of bioassays selected in Ukraine to the territory of third countries, including Germany, Great Britain, Georgia.
Here are official documents confirming the transfer of five thousand samples of blood serum of Ukrainian citizens to the R. Lugar Center affiliated with the Pentagon in Tbilisi, 773 bioassays were transferred to the reference laboratory of Great Britain. An agreement has been signed for the export of unlimited quantities of infectious materials to the Leffler Institute in Germany.
An analysis of the information received indicates that Ukrainian specialists are not aware of the potential risks of transferring biomaterials, are being used essentially blindly, and have no real idea of the true purpose of the research being conducted.
I would like to draw attention to outbreaks of economically significant diseases on the territory of the Russian Federation. In 2021 alone, the damage from highly pathogenic avian influenza exceeded 1.7 billion rubles, and 6 million heads of poultry were destroyed. At the same time, in European countries, the losses of the agricultural industry from it amounted to about 2.0 billion. euro.
Within the framework of the FLU-FLYWAY project, the Kharkov Institute of Veterinary Medicine studied wild birds as vectors for the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza. At the same time, the conditions under which spread processes can become unmanageable, cause economic damage and pose risks to food security have been assessed.
These documents confirm the involvement of the Kharkov Institute in the collection of avian influenza virus strains with high epidemic potential and capable of overcoming the interspecific barrier. The activities of this institute should be the subject of an international investigation. Information continues to be received about attempts to destroy biomaterials and documentation in laboratories in Ukraine.
We know that during the liquidation measures in the laboratory of veterinary medicine in Khlebodarskoye, working employees (citizens of Ukraine) were not even allowed into the building! This laboratory cooperates with Anti-Plague Research Institute named after Mechnikov in Odessa, which conducts research with pathogens of plague, anthrax, cholera, tularemia, arboviruses.
In an attempt to cover their tracks, biological waste from the laboratory in Khlebodarskoye was taken 120 km away towards the western border to the area of Tarutino and Berezino settlements. All these facts are recorded by the Ministry of Defence for subsequent legal assessment.
It is necessary to mention the emergency destruction of documents in Kherson biological laboratory.
One of the reasons for such a rush may be the concealment of information about the outbreak of dirofilariasis, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes, that occurred in Kherson in 2018. The question arises why four cases of infection were detected in February, which is unusual for the life cycle of these insects. In April 2018, representatives of the Pentagon visited local healthcare institutions, where they got acquainted with the results of the epidemiological investigation and copied medical documentation.
However, no documentary evidence has been found concerning this outbreak in Kherson laboratory. Proceeding from this, we believe that the urgency of destroying such documentary evidence is explained by the desire to prevent them from getting to Russian specialists.
In addition, attention is drawn to the fact of a sharp increase in cases of tuberculosis caused by new multi-resistant strains among citizens living in Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics in 2018. These data are confirmed by specialists of Rospotrebnadzor. During the mass outbreak recorded in the area of Peski settlement, more than 70 cases of the disease were detected, which ended in a rapid fatal outcome. This may indicate a deliberate infection, or an accidental leakage of the pathogen from one of the biolabs located on the territory of Ukraine.
In accordance with the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological and Toxin Weapons, the participating States submit to the UN information about objects and ongoing biological activities.
These are Confidence-building measures that are published in order to monitor the implementation of the Convention. Since 2016 – the moment of the beginning of the implementation of the projects mentioned by us (including UP-4, UP-8 and P-781), the USA and Ukraine have been deliberately silent about them in international reporting, despite their obvious military-biological orientation.
Such secrecy is another reason to think about the true goals of the Pentagon in Ukraine.
I would like to remind you of the historical facts when such irresponsible activities of the United States outside of national jurisdiction ended only with formal apologies from the American administration. So, in October 2010, US President Obama acknowledged the fact of conducting illegal research on Guatemalan citizens who were intentionally infected with syphilis and gonorrhea pathogens with the approval of the White House.
The Russian Federation has repeatedly called for the publication of data on the military biological activities of the Pentagon on the territory of third countries, but the collective West, led by the United States, consistently blocks this initiative, preferring to conduct research bypassing international obligations with “someone else’s hands”.
We will continue to study the evidence and inform the world community about the illegal activities of the Pentagon and other US government agencies in Ukraine.
European governments are approaching the US government and defense contractors with a shopping list of arms, with the Ukraine crisis driving an increase in demand.
A US Air Force MQ-9 Reaper drone sits in a hanger at Amari Air Base, Estonia, July 1, 2020 (Reuters)
As Russia’s operation in Ukraine ramps up, Europe’s governments have readied shopping lists of arms for the US government and its defense contractors.
The list includes drones, missiles, and missile defenses. Germany, which is nearing a deal for 35 F-35 jet fighters, inquired about systems to defend against ballistic missiles, while Poland was looking to purchase Reaper drones from the US according to a Polish government official.
“This order is an answer to (the) … security situation, particularly in central and eastern Europe,” Krzysztof Platek, a spokesperson for the Polish Defence Ministry’s Armament Agency, said in an interview on Wednesday.
Other countries in Eastern Europe have also submitted requests for weapons being used by Ukraine against Russia’s forces, such as anti-aircraft Stinger missiles and anti-tank Javelin missiles.
Keeping up with demand
Mara Karlin, a Pentagon assistant secretary of defense said last week that the US’ European allies are “doubling down” on their defense spending.
Moreover, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Administration is having weekly meetings to review requests related to the approval of arms sales to foreign governments by US contractors. A team has been set up to respond to the increased demand.
“The Department of Defense is exploring options to support Ukraine’s needs, rapidly replenish U.S. inventories and backfill depleted stocks of allies and partners,” a senior Defense official said according to Reuters, adding that the Pentagon was working with contractors on ways to “mitigate supply chain constraints (and) accelerate production timelines.”
The potential surge in sales of US weaponry raised Lockheed Martin’s stock by 8.3% and Raytheon’s by 3.9%. The two manufacturers jointly produce Javelins, while Raytheon produces Stingers.
The US so-called war on terror has taken almost one million lives across the globe and cost the country $8 trillion, over the past two decades, says a new report.
A report issued by Costs of War Project at Brown University, at end of the disastrous US withdrawal from Afghanistan, estimated 897,000 to 929,000 people have lost their lives as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire, in some 80 countries.
“The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries,” said co-director of Costs of War, Catherine Lutz on Wednesday.
The death toll, includes US military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists and humanitarian aid workers, the report said.
The figure, however, does not include the many indirect deaths the war has caused by way of disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.
“The deaths we tallied are likely a vast undercount of the true toll these wars have taken on human life,” said Neta Crawford, another co-founder of the project.
The project also revealed that the wars have cost the US an estimated $8 trillion in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Syria.
Of the $8 trillion, $2.3 trillion is attributed to the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone.
“The Pentagon and the US military have now absorbed the great majority of the federal discretionary budget, and most people don’t know that,” said Lutz.
“Our task, now and in future years, is to educate the public on the ways in which we fund those wars and the scale of that funding,” she added.
Another researcher of the project, Stephanie Savell said, “Twenty years from now, we’ll still be reckoning with the high societal costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars – long after US forces are gone.”
Source: Costs of War Project – Brown University
The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 as part of the so-called war on terror. While the invasion ended the Taliban’s rule in the country back then, it is now ended with the return of the group to power.
On August 31, the picture of US Army general Chris Donahue appeared on the news as the last US soldier to leave Afghanistan. US media outlets had headlines indicating that the US war in Afghanistan was finally over.
US President Joe Biden also addressed the nation, and defended his decision to withdraw, saying, “I was not going to extend this forever war, and I was not extending a forever exit” and “It’s time to end the war in Afghanistan.”
For the first time in 20 years now, there is no US military presence in Afghanistan, but observers say no troops on the ground does not mean that the US war in the country is over.
They said the withdrawal simply means that one method of waging war in Afghanistan is no longer occurring.
All flags are on half-mast in the US of A. The cause are the 13 American soldiers killed in this huge suicide bombing outside Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, on Thursday, 26 August.
As it stands, at least 150 people – Afghans, including at least 30 Taliban – plus 13 American military – were killed and at least 1,300 injured, according to the Afghan Health Ministry.
The Islamic State (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the bombing via Amaq Media, the official Islamic State (ISIS) news agency. The perpetrators, the message says, were members of the ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K.
Rt further reports, “The bombing provoked the US into launching two drone strikes, one targeting an alleged “planner” and “facilitator” with the group responsible, and another supposedly wiping out “multiple” would-be suicide bombers but reportedly annihilating a family and children alongside them.
Why was nothing done to prevent this bloody, atrocious attack? – In fact, the Pentagon announced just yesterday that another massive attack was likely, meaning they have information that another mass-killing may take place?
In the meantime, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) confirmed that the last three US military transport planes have departed the Hamid Karzai Airport just ahead of the August 31, 2021, deadline, officially ending the American withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“The war is over. America’s last troops have just left Kabul airport,” RT’s Murad Gazdiev tweeted from Kabul, adding that the war lasted “19 years, 10 months and 25 days.”
What he didn’t say is that the monetary cost of the war was at least 3 trillion dollars, that about 241,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan and Pakistan war zone since 2001. More than 71,000 of those killed have been civilians. These figures include (through April 2021) 2,448 American service members; 3,846 U.S. contractors, and some 66,000 Afghan national military and police. See this https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan . —- Twenty years of war – and only ten days to defeat the US military.
Really? – Is this really the end of the US involvement in Afghanistan? Too many strange events and occurrences are pointing in a different direction.
Let’s have a closer look. The Islamic State – ISIS claims responsibility. As we know by now and since quite a while, ISIS is a creation of the CIA. The sophistication of the attack, the Pentagon non-interference, despite their prior knowledge, might, just might – indicate that this attack may have been a well-coordinated “false flag”?
Who benefits? Cui Bono?
On August 19, 2021, the Washington Post, referring to President Trump’s Peace Agreement with Taliban in Doha, Qatar, in February 2020, reports – “As President Donald Trump’s administration signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February 2020, he optimistically proclaimed that “we think we’ll be successful in the end.” His secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, asserted that the administration was “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”
“Eighteen months later, President Joe Biden is pointing to the agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, as he tries to deflect blame for the Taliban overrunning Afghanistan in a blitz. He says it bound him to withdraw U.S. troops, setting the stage for the chaos engulfing the country.”
So, again who benefits from such an atrociously deadly attack, like the one of 26 August at Kabul Airport?
President Biden, though unjustified, can and does blame President Trump for the chaos he left behind by negotiating this “irresponsible” Peace Deal. Why “irresponsible”? Wasn’t it time after 20 years without apparent “success” – whatever that means, or may have meant at some point in time – to end this senseless bloodshed and destruction of a sovereign Afghan society – let alone the killing of hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians?
It seems that Mr. Trump may have done the right thing. Peace over war should always win, on the ground as well as in the minds of people, and foremost of politicians. However, there are several reasons, why Peace is not welcome. And chaos and destruction and death as demonstrated by the 26 August suicide attack, and who knows, maybe more to follow, might justify sending back US troops?
There are several other irons in the fire about which hardly anybody talks and the bought anti-Trump and pro-Biden mainstream media are silent.
The Heroin Trade
There is a multi-multi-billion, perhaps up to a trillion-dollar heroin trade at stake, for the US and for the US and European pharma-industry – the huge and deadly opioid-market.
As reported by Michel Chossudovsky on 21 August 2021, “One of the key strategic objectives of the 2001 war on Afghanistan was to restore the opium trade following the Taliban government’s successful 2000-2001 drug eradication program which led to a 94% collapse in opium production. This program was supported by the United Nations. (For details, see below) In the course of the last 19 years following the US-NATO October 2001 invasion, there has been a surge in Afghan opium production. In turn the number of heroin addicts in the US has increased dramatically. Is there a relationship?
There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).
Both, China and Russia have already indicated that they would help the new Taliban regime to gain stability – and to develop towards a newly independent, sovereign state. Afghanistan’s border with China, only about 70 km wide, but it forms a crucial connection to China’s western most Province, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It is a vital pivot for China’s Belt and Road, or “One Belt One Road” – OBOR – also called the New Silk Road.
While transit routes already go through Pakistan to the Indian Ocean, an OBOR rail and road transit through Afghanistan would connect China directly with Iran, facilitating among other trade, hydrocarbon transport from Iran to China. OBOR would also be an effective development instrument for war destroyed Afghanistan – a reconstruction and economic development scheme for Afghanistan could bring Afghanistan back to a respected nation state – even through the Taliban.
Furthermore, Afghanistan might be prepared for becoming an active member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), one of the world’s most significant political, economic and strategic defense organization. In addition to China and Russia and the Central Asian former Soviet Republics, India and Pakistan are already full members, while Iran, Malaysia and Mongolia are, so far, in observer and associate status.
SCO covers almost half of the world population and controls some 30% of the world’s GDP. Afghanistan would be in a solid and guiding association as an SCO member. Afghanistan’s socioeconomic development and improvement of war-damaged people’s standard of living, could benefit enormously.
Washington however dislikes OBOR with a passion. They see it as Chinese expansionism and competition. It is actually neither. China has in her thousands of years of history never had expansionist trends, or ambitions, and always respected other countries’ sovereignty. OBOR, an ingenious idea of President Xi Jinping, is patterned according to the ancient Silk Road, a trading route of 2100 years ago connecting Asia with Europe and the Middle East.
OBOR is an instrument to help develop and connect the world, while respecting each nation state’s independence and sovereignty. ——
The hugely profitable Heroin Trade and the further development of China’s OBOR – and particularly bringing Afghanistan under the wings of the east through association with the SCO – would spoil America’s multi-multibillion heroin trade, as well as another Middle East country would orient itself to the east – and away from the fangs of the ever weakening and crumbling Anglo-US empire.
Hence, commanding US-created ISIS to sow chaos and death in Afghanistan, blaming the Taliban, might be a good reason for Biden to bring back US troops – to fight a new kind war – fighting for the continuing highly profitable heroin trade and, simultaneously, fighting against OBOR. On top of it all, it would suit the Biden’s and his globalist agenda’s image – and standing in a totally misinformed world.
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He is also a a non-resident Sr. Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
One cannot but feel mildly amused at the theatrical spectacle of the US troop pullout from Afghanistan, its completion day now postponed for maximum PR impact to 9/11, 2021.
Nearly two decades and a staggering US$2 trillion after this Forever War was launched by a now immensely indebted empire, the debacle can certainly be interpreted as a warped version of Mission Accomplished.
“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus – but in all of the vastness of the Pentagon there sits not a single flack who could imagine getting away with baldfacedly spinning the Afghan wasteland as peaceful.
Even the UN bureaucratic machinery has not been able to properly account for Afghan civilian deaths; at best they settled for 100,000 in only ten years. Add to that toll countless “collateral” deaths provoked by the massive social and economic consequences of the war.
Training and weaponizing the – largely inefficient – 300,000-plus Afghan Army cost $87 billion. “Economic aid and reconstruction” cost $54 billion: literally invisible hospitals and schools dot the Afghan landscape. A local chapter of the “war on drugs” cost $10 billion – at least with (inverted) tangible results: Afghanistan now generates 80% of the world’s opium.
All these embarrassing facts disappear under the shadow play of 2,500 “official” departing troops. What really matters is who’s staying: by no means just a few out of some 17,000 “contractors,” over 6,000 of whom are American citizens.
“Contractor” is a lovely euphemism for a bunch of mercenaries who, perfectly in tune with a shadow privatization drive, will now mingle with Special Forces teams and covert intel ops to conduct a still lethal variation of hybrid war.
Of course this development won’t replicate those David Bowie-style Golden Years in the immediate post-9/11 era. Ten years ago, following the Obama-Petraeus surge, no fewer than 90,000 contractors were dancing to the Hindu Kush groove, lavishly compensated by the Pentagon and dabbling in everything from construction, transportation and maintenance to “enhanced interrogation services.”
Collectively, this shadow army, a triumph of private enterprise many times cheaper than the state-sponsored model, bagged at least $104 billion since 2002, and nearly $9 billion since 2016.
Now we’re supposed to trust CENTCOM commander General Kenneth McKenzie, who swears that “the U.S. contractors will come out as we come out.” Apparently the Pentagon press secretary was not briefed: “So on the contractors, we don’t know exactly.”
Some contractors are already in trouble, like Fluor Corporation, which is involved in maintenance and camp construction for no fewer than 70 Pentagon forward operating bases in northern Afghanistan. Incidentally, no Pentagon PR is explaining whether these FOBs will completely vanish.
Fluor was benefitting from something called LOGCAP – Logistics Civil Augmentation IV Program – a scheme set by the Pentagon at the start of Obama-Biden 1.0 to “outsource logistical military support.” Its initial five-year deal was worth a cool $7 billion. Now Fluor is being sued for fraud.
Enhancing stability forever
The current government in Kabul is led by a virtual nonentity, Ashraf Ghani. Like his sartorially glamorous predecessor Hamid Karzai, Ghani is a US creature, lording it over a rambling military force financed by Washington to the tune of $4 billion a year.
So of course Ghani is entitled to spin a rosy outlook for an Afghan peace process on the pages of Foreign Affairs.
It gets curioser and curioser when we add the incandescent issue that may have provoked the Forever War in the first place: al-Qaeda.
A “former security coordinator for Osama bin Laden” is now peddling the idea that al-Qaeda may be back in the Hindu Kush. Yet, according to Afghan diplomats, there is no evidence that the Taliban will allow old-school al-Qaeda – the Osama/al-Zawahiri incarnation – to thrive again.
That’s despite the fact that Washington, for all practical purposes, has ditched the Doha Agreement signed in February 2020, which stipulated that the troop pullout should have happened this past Saturday, May 1.
Of course, we can always count on the Pentagon to “enhance security and stability” in Afghanistan. In this Pentagon report we learn that “AQIS [al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent] routinely supports and works with low-level Taliban members in its efforts to undermine the Afghan government, and maintains an enduring interest in attacking US forces and Western targets.”
Well, what the Pentagon does not tell us is how old-school al-Qaeda, pre-AQIS, metastasized into a galaxy of “moderate rebels” now ensconced in Idlib, Syria. And how contingents of Salafi-jihadis were able to access mysterious transportation corridors to bolster the ranks of ISIS-Khorasan in Afghanistan.
The CIA heroin ratline
All you need to know, reported on the ground, about the crucial first years of the imperial adventure in Afghanistan is to be found in the Asia Times e-book Forever Wars, part 1.
Two decades later, the politico-intel combo behind Biden is now spinning that the end of this particular Forever War is an imperative, integrated to the latest US National Security Strategy.
Shadow play once again reigns. Withdrawal conditionals include the incompetence and corruption of the Afghan military and security forces; that notorious Taliban-al-Qaeda re-engagement; the fight for women’s rights; and acknowledging the supreme taboo: this ain’t no withdrawal because a substantial Special Forces contingent will stay in place.
In a nutshell: for the US deep state, leaving Afghanistan is anathema.
The real heart of the matter in Afghanistan concerns drugs and geopolitics – and their toxic intersection.
Everyone with transit in the Dubai-Kandahar axis and its ramifications knows that the global-spanned opium and heroin business is a matter very close to the CIA’s heart. Secure air transport is offered by bases in Afghanistan and neighboring Kyrgyzstan.
William Engdahl has offered a concise breakdown of how it works. In the immediate post-9/11 days, in Afghanistan, the main player in the opium trade was none other than Ahmed Wali Karzai, presidential brother and a CIA asset. I interviewed him in Quetta, Balochistan’s capital, in October 2001 (the interview can be found in Forever Wars). He obviously did not talk about opium.
Ahmed Karzai was snuffed out in a Mafia-style hit at home, in Helmand, in 2011. Helmand happens to be Afghanistan’s Opium Central. In 2017, following on previous investigations by Seymour Hersh and Alfred McCoy, among others, I detailed the workings of the CIA heroin ratline in Afghanistan.
New Great Game 3.0 is on
Whatever happens next will involve layers and layers of shadow play. CENTCOM’s McKenzie, at a closed-door hearing at the US House Armed Services Committee, basically said they are still “figuring out” what to do next.
That will certainly involve, in McKenzie’s own assessment, “counter-terrorism operations within the region”; “expeditionary basing” (linguistic diversion to imply there won’t be any permanent bases, at least in thesis); and “assistance” to Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (no details on what this “assistance” will consist of).
Now compare it with the view by major Eurasian powers: Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran, three of them members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with Iran as an observer and soon full member.
Their number one priority is to prevent any mutating Afghan jihadi virus to contaminate Central Asia. A massive 50,000 troop-strong Russia-Tajikistan military exercise in late April had exactly that in mind.
Ministers of defense of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) met in Dushanbe with the objective of further fortifying the porous Tajik-Afghan border.
And then there’s the Turkmen-Afghan border, from which the opium/heroin trail reaches the Caspian Sea and diversifies via Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Moscow, even more than the CSTO, is particularly worried by this stretch of the trail.
The Russians are very much aware that even more than different opium/heroin routes springing up, the top danger is a new influx of Salafi-jihadis into the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Even if analyzing it from completely different perspectives, Americans and Russians seem to be equally focused on what Salafi-jihadists – and their handlers – may come up with in post-9/11, 2021 Afghanistan.
So let’s go back to Doha, where something really intriguing is afoot.
On April 30, a so-called extended troika – Russia, the United States, China and Pakistan – issued a joint statement in Doha on their discussions regarding a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan.
The extended troika met with the Kabul government, the Taliban and host Qatar. At least they agreed there should be “no military solution.”
It gets curioser and curioser again: Turkey, backed by Qatar and the UN, is getting ready to host a conference to further bridge the gap between the Kabul government and the Taliban. Realpolitik cynics will have a ball wondering what Erdogan is scheming at.
The extended troika, at least rhetorically, is in favor of an “independent, sovereign, unified, peaceful, democratic, neutral and self-sufficient Afghanistan.” Talk about a lofty undertaking. It remains to be seen how Afghanistan’s “neutrality” can be guaranteed in such a nest of New Great Game serpents.
Beijing and Moscow will be under no illusions that the newly privatized, Special Forces Afghan-American experiment will eschew using Salafi-jihadis, radicalized Uighurs or other instant assets to destabilize what in effect should be the incorporation of Afghanistan to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (where it’s already an observer) and the larger Eurasia integration project.
An extra-intriguing piece of the puzzle is that a very pragmatic Russia – unlike its historical ally India – is not against including the Taliban in an overall Afghan settlement. New Delhi will have to go along. As for Islamabad, the only thing that matters, as always, is to have a friendly government in Kabul. That good old “strategic depth” obsession.
What the major players – Russia and China – see in the framework of a minimally stabilized Afghanistan is yet one more step to consolidate the evolution of the New Silk Roads in parallel with the Greater Eurasia partnership. That’s exactly the message Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov delivered during his recent visit to Pakistan.
Now compare it with the – never explicit – strategic deep state aim: to keep some sort of military-intel “forward operating base” in the absolutely crucial node between Central and South Asia and close, oh so close, to national security “threats” Russia and China.
The New Great Game 3.0 is just beginning at the graveyard of empires.
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It hardly made the evening news, but the New York Times reported last week that after twenty years of fighting the Taliban are confident that they will fully control Afghanistan before too long whether or not the United States decides to leave some kind of residual force in the country after May 1st. The narrative is suggestive of The Mouse that Roared, lacking only Peter Sellers to put the finishing touches on what has to be considered a great humiliation for the U.S., which has a “defense” budget that is larger than the combined military spending of the next seven countries in order of magnitude. Those numbers include both Russia and China. The Taliban, on the other hand, have no military budget to speak of. That enormous disparity, un-reflected in who has won and lost, has to nurture concerns that it is the world’s only superpower, admittedly self-proclaimed, which is incapable of actually winning a war against anyone.
In fact, some recent wargaming has suggested that the United States would lose in a non-nuclear conflict with China alone based on the obsolescence of expensive and vulnerable weapons systems that the Pentagon relies upon, such as carrier groups. Nations like China, Iran and Russia that have invested in sophisticated and much cheaper missile systems to offset U.S. advantages have reportedly spent their money wisely. If the Biden foreign policy and military experts, largely embroiled in diversifying the country, choose to take on China, there may be no one left around to pick up the pieces.
Those who are warning of the apparent ineffectiveness of the U.S. armed forces in spite of their global presence in more than one thousand bases point most commonly to the historical record to make their case. Korea, fought under United Nations auspices, was a stalemate, with the peninsula divided to this day and a substantial American military force continuing to be a presence along the DMZ to enforce the armistice that not quite ended the war. Vietnam was a defeat, resulting in more than 58,000 Americans dead as well as an estimated 3 million Vietnamese, most of whom were civilians. The real lesson learned from Vietnam was that fighting on someone else’s turf where you have no real interests or stake in the outcome is a fool’s game, but the Pentagon instead worked to fix the mechanics in weapons and training at great cost without addressing why people fight wars in the first place. The other lesson was that the United States’ military was perfectly willing to lie to the country’s civilian leadership to expand the war and keep it going, a performance that was repeated in 2001 with the “Iraq is supporting terrorists and will have nuclear weapons” lies and also with the current crop of false analogies used to keep thousands of Americans in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
As a veteran of the Vietnam War army, I can recall sitting around with fellow enlisted men reading “Stars & Stripes,” the exclusive in-house-for-the-military newspaper that was covering the war. The paper quoted a senior officer who opined that the Soviets (as they were at that time) were really envious of the combat experience that the United States Army was obtaining in Vietnam. We all laughed. That same officer probably had a staff position away from the fighting but we draftees knew well that the war was a very bloody mistake while he may have tested his valor post-retirement working for Lockheed-Martin. The “Soviets” in any event demonstrated just how much they envied the experience of combat when they fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s, eventually withdrawing with their tails between their legs just as the U.S. had done in Vietnam after they lost 15,000 men. The “Grave of Empires,” indeed.History: Reversing the Vietnam Verdict
Since Vietnam there have been a number of small wars in places like Panama and Grenada, but the global war on terror has been a total disaster for American arms. Afghanistan, as it was for the Russians, is the ulcer that keeps on bleeding until it ends as a major defeat for the United States with the Taliban fully in control, as they are now predicting. Likewise, the destruction of a secular Iraq, regime change in Libya, and a continuing war against a non-threatening Syria have all failed to make Americans either safer or more prosperous. Iran is next, apparently, if the Joe Biden Administration has its way, and relations with major adversaries Russia and China have sunk even lower than they were during Donald Trump’s time as president. The White House has recently sent a shipload of offensive weapons to Kiev and the Ukrainian government has repeated its intention to retake Crimea from Russia, a formula for a new military disaster that could easily escalate into a major war. What is particularly regrettable is the fact that the United States has no compelling national interest in encouraging open warfare between Moscow and Kiev, a conflict that it will be unable to avoid as its is supplying Ukraine with weaponry.
There was almost no discussion of America’s wars during the recent election. One should take note, however, of a recent article by former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb that appeared on National Review which seeks to provide an explanation for “The Real Reason the U.S. Can’t Win Wars Anymore” in spite of the fact that it is “the most powerful country in the history of the world.” To be sure, Kolb largely blames the policymakers for the defeat in Vietnam, aided and abetted by a culture of silence in the military where many officers knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which escalated the conflict, was a fraud but chose to say or do nothing. He also observes that the war itself was unwinnable for various reasons, including the observation by many working and middle class Americans that they were little more than cannon fodder while the country’s elites either dodged the draft or exploited their status to obtain national guard or reserve commissions that were known to be mechanism to avoid Vietnam. Kolb notes that “…the four most recent presidents who could have served in Vietnam avoided that war and the draft by dubious means. Bill Clinton pretended to join the Army ROTC; George W. Bush used political connections to get into the Air National Guard, when President Johnson made it clear that the reserve component would not be activated to fight the war; Donald Trump, of course, had his family physician claim he had bone spurs, (Trump himself cannot remember which foot); and Joe Biden claimed that the asthma he had in high school prevented him from serving even though he brags about his athletic exploits while in high school.”
Kolb also reveals how America’s presumed prowess on the battlefield has distorted its “democracy building” endeavors to such an extent that genuine national interests have been ignored. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, success in overthrowing the Taliban was derived from critical assistance from Iran, which correctly regarded the extremist Sunni group as an enemy. But the Bush White House, far from showing gratitude, soon thereafter added Iran to its “axis of evil” list. A golden opportunity was wasted to repair a relationship which has poisoned America’s presence in the Middle East ever since.
One might add something else to Kolb’s assessment of failure at war. Most American soldiers have been and are proud of their service and consider it an honor to defend their country but the key word is “defend.” There was no defending going on in Vietnam nor in Afghanistan, which did not attack the U.S. and was willing to turn over Osama Bin Laden if the White House could provide evidence that he was involved in 9/11. Nor was there anything defensive about Obama’s destruction of Libya and the decades long “secret” wars to overthrow the Syrian and Iranian governments. Soldiers are trained to fight and obey orders but that does not mean that they can no longer observe and think. Twenty years of “Reconstruction” duty in Afghanistan is not defending the United States and the morale of American soldiers in the combined Democratic and Republican Parties’ plan to reconstruct the world is not a sufficient motivator if one is being asked to put one’s life on the line. Sure, American soldiers can still win wars, but it has to be a real war where there is something genuine at stake, like protecting one’s home and family. That is what the people who run Washington, very few of whom are veterans and most of whom first ask “But what’s in it for me?” fail to understand.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Biden’s diverse Strangelove Pentagon dropped an undisclosed number of bombs on undisclosed areas of eastern Syria near the Iraqi border, around 1830 Langley time, 25 February.
Taking a war criminal page from little urchin Hollande who war criminally bombed Syria after a French national engaged in terrorism in Paris (who then bombed Syria again after the Frenchman magically escaped to Brussels, which is in Belgium which is not Syria), Centcom reported on the Pentagon statement that the US aggressive bombings were of an Orwellian self-defensive nature, somehow in fascist retaliation for the recent bombings of some US military bases in Iraq, which is not in Syria.
War criminal Centcom utilizing Newspeak for US war crimes.
The Biden diverse Strangelove Pentagon issued a statement “attributed to” Press Secretary John Kirby who was adamant that the latest round of US war crimes against the Syrian Arab Republic were “defensive.”
The Pentagon paid perfunctory lip service to President Biden being in charge of the most recent war criminal bombing of the SAR by the US, but let us show some integrity in sharing this pre-inaugural screenshot when Dr. Jill let go of hubby’s arm for a moment, and he started to wander just prior to the time they were to head down the ramp:
At this writing, the Syrian Arab Republic has not released an official statement of the Biden regime/Strangelove Pentagon war crimes against the homeland.
This is the 4th US/ Israeli illegal bombing of Syria since Biden’s diverse regime took over from his predecessor war criminal Trump, blatant aggression against a sovereign state and founding member of the United Nations by a permanent member state of the Security Council supposedly responsible for painting peace and security around the world and upholding international law and the UN Charter, not breaching each article of them the way the US is doing with no accountability.
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في معرض الردّ على تصريحات منسوبة إليه يهاجم فيها الجنود الأميركيين فتح الرئيس الأميركي النار على قادة البنتاغون قائلاً: ربما يكون كبار المسؤولين في البنتاغون لا يحبونني لأنهم لا يريدون فعل شيء سوى خوض الحروب، ولذا فإنّ كلّ تلك الشركات الرائعة التي تصنع القنابل والطائرات وكلّ شيء آخر ستكون سعيدة.”
وجاءت هذه الإشارة السلبية من ترامب تجاه البنتاغون في سياق عملية تجاذب منذ ان هدّد ترامب باستخدام قانون التمرّد للاستعانة بقوات إنفاذ القانون خلال الاحتجاجات التي أعقبت وفاة المواطن من أصول أفريقية جورج فلويد على يد أحد ضباط الشرطة في جريمة وحشية ما زالت تداعياتها مستمرة حتى اليوم.
يومها أعرب الجنرال مايك بيلي رئيس هيئة الأركان المشتركة عن أسفه لانه سار مع ترامب في ساحة لافييت.
ويعتبر هذا السجال المتصاعد بين الرئيس الأميركي وكبار جنرالاته الذين عيّنهم بنفسه، كما عيّن أيضاً وزير الدفاع مارك اسبر (الذي كان مسؤولاً تنفيذياً ومقاول دفاع في شركة “رايثيون” التي تعدّ من أكبر الشركات المتخصصة في أنظمة الدفاع) تعبيراً جديداً عن عمق الأزمة البنيوية التي يعيشها النظام الأميركي، كما كان يردّد دائماً أخي وصديقي الدكتور زياد حافظ منذ عشرين عاماً، والتي يبدو أنها على ملامح انفجار كبير مع الانتخابات الرئاسية الأميركية في اوائل نوفمبر/ تشرين الثاني المقبل حيث يعلن الطرفان الجمهوري والديمقراطي رفضهما منذ الآن لنتائج الانتخابات اذا لم تأت لصالحه الى درجة انّ أحد كبار المسورلين في الحزب الديمقراطي قد أشار الى دعوة القوات المسلحة الأميركية الى إخراج ترامب من البيت الأبيض في حال رفضه الاعتراف بهزيمته.
لكن هذا السجال المستجدّ بين البيت الابيض والبنتاغون، المضاف الى سلسلة سجالات تملأ الساحة السياسية والشعبية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية الأميركية، يذكر بمقولة ردّدها الجنرال دوايت ايزنهاور رئيس الولايات المتحدة بين عام 1952 -1960، عشية مغادرته البيت الابيض محذراَ من مخاطر “المجمع العسكري الصناعي على الدولة الأميركية وسعيه لانتهاج سياسات حربية تؤمّن لشركات السلاح موارد لا تنضب، فيما تؤمّن هذه الشركات وظائف مجزية لكبار الجنرالات بعد مغادرتهم الخدمة العسكرية.
اليوم يأتي ترامب، وهو رئيس “جمهوري” أيضاً، كما ايزنهاور، ليشير الى هذه العلاقة بين كبار الجنرالات وكبار المقاولين في تعبير عن غضبه من عدم تجاوب البنتاغون مع خططه بإعاد انتشار القوات العسكرية الأميركية خارج الولايات المتحدة (وهو مطلب يرتاح اليه المواطن الأميركي)، كما لعدم تجاوبه مع رغبته بتطبيق قانون التمرّد الذي يضع بنظر أميركيين كثر، أكثريتهم من البيض، حداً للفوضى الأمنية التي تعيشها المدن والبلدات الأميركية منذ أشهر.
لا شك انّ هذه التحوّلات تستحقّ دراسة معمّقة على أكثر من صعيد، ولكن لا بدّ من دراستها على مستوى تداعياتها على حجم النفوذ الأميركي خارج الولايات المتحدة، وخصوصاً في بلادنا، حيث ما زال الكثير من الحكام والمحللين أسرى تحليل قديم يرى بأنّ “واشنطن قدر”، وأنّ سياستها تمتلك من القوة ما لا يسمح لأحد بمواجهتها.
انّ اشارة ترامب الى العلاقة بين كبار الجنرالات وكبار المقاولين، مجدّداً تحذيرات سلفه في الرئاسة والحزب الجمهوري، دوايت ايزنهاور، من تغوّل “المجمع’ الصناعي العسكري، الذي لا يستبعد بعض المحللين دوره في جريمة اغتيال الرئيس الديمقراطي جون فيتزجرالد كنيدي عام ١٩٦٣، وشقيقه روبرت عام ١٩٦٦، ليصبح الأمر تماماً بقبضة “المجمع” الذي لم يتوقف عن شنّ الحروب على شعوب العالم، وبشكل خاص على الشعوب العربية والإسلامية…
انها قراءة من خارج السياق، ولكنها ضرورية لكي نفهم أكثر السياسة الأميركية في منطقتنا او بالأحرى اللاسياسة الأميركية التي لا تحركها إلا مصالح الكيان الصهيوني وأمنه…
انها قراءة ضرورية لكلّ من يضع كلّ أوراقه بالسلة الأميركية وهو التحليل الذي أدخل الأمة كلها منذ عام 1977(زيارة السادات للكنيست) في اتفاقات متعدّدة باسم “السلام” الذي لم ينجب سوى الحروب لهذه المنطقة…
US President Donald Trump accused the Pentagon’s top brass of starting wars in order to hand billions to arms makers, drawing shocked reactions from his liberal critics and foreign policy hawks – some playing both roles at once.
“I’m not saying the military’s in love with me – the soldiers are,” Trump said at a White House press conference on Monday.
“The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy”, he added.
Trump went on to say there was “one cold-hearted globalist betrayal after another”, championing the withdrawal of American troops from “endless wars” and condemning NATO allies for “ripping us off”.
His comments come as his latest response to a September 3 story in the Atlantic, which said that Trump had denigrated fallen American soldiers throughout his time in office, reportedly dubbing them “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump denied the allegations, which were based on the claims of anonymous officials and aides, reiterating on Monday: “Who would say a thing like that? Only an animal would say a thing like that.”
His scathing critique of the Pentagon’s top leadership prompted a new wave of controversy, however, as a number of media pundits, Democratic lawmakers and bellicose foreign policy commentators lined up to voice horror at the “unprecedented public attack” on the military.
Despite his withering attack on the Pentagon’s revolving door, Trump has frequently boasted of “rebuilding” the US armed forces with vast military expenditures, which continue to outspend the world’s next 11 largest military budgets combined. He has also repeatedly touted multi-billion dollar weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and other allies, insisting they support American jobs and bring money into the country.
بعد أن اجتاح وباء كورونا حاملات الطائرات الأميركية، ومن بعدها المستشفى العسكري العائم العملاق، سفينة المستشفى كومفورت (Comfort)، الرئاسية قبالة شواطئ نيويورك، ها هو فيروس كورونا يجتاح القوات الأميركيّة، المرابطة في كوريا الجنوبية منذ عام 1957، والبالغ عديدها 30 ألف عسكري، يتبعون من ناحية قيادة العمليات لقيادة المحيط الهادئ، التي تسمّى بالانجليزية (PACOM) انتصاراً لكلمة US – PACIFIC COMMAND.
وعلى الرغم من أنّ مصادر عسكرية خاصة أكدت أنّ قيادة القوات الأميركية في كوريا، وكذلك البنتاغون، على علم بانتشار هذا الوباء بين القوات الأميركيّة في كوريا الجنوبية منذ 20/2/2020، إلا أنّ البنتاغون لم يتخذ الإجراءات الصحية الضرورية لمواجهة انتشار الوباء بين جنودها، المرابطين في القاعدة العسكرية الأميركية دايجو، ولا زالت تواصل فحصهم بواسطة شمّ خلّ التفاح، كما نشرت صحيفة «ستارت آند ستريبس» الكورية الجنوبية يوم 6/4/2020، التي نقلت تطوّرات انتشار الوباء عن قائد القاعدة الأميركية، الجنرال ادوارد بالانكو، الذي ظهر على وسائل الإعلام وهو يحمل علبة فيها قطعة إسفنجية، مبللة بخلّ التفاح، ليشرح للصحافيّين طريقة فحص جنوده، التي قال إنها تتبع أيضاً في مستشفيات كوريا الجنوبية.
علماً انّ وباء الكورونا يواصل انتشاره بين القوات الأميركيّة في اليابان ايضاً، مما أجبر القيادة العسكرية الأميركية، وعبر إعلان قائد هذه القوات في اليابان شخصياً للصحافة، اللفتنانت جنرال كيفين شنايدر، يوم أول أمس الاثنين 6/4/2020، عن حالة الطوارئ بين صفوف القوات الأميركية هناك، بسبب انتشار وباء الكورونا بين أفرادها، البالغ تعدادهم 38 الف جندي أميركي، الى جانب خمسة آلاف متعاقد مدني أميركي و25 ألف متعاقد مدني ياباني.
وعليه فقد أصبحت هذه القوات ومعها القوات الأميركية في كوريا الجنوبية وحاملة الطائرات ثيودور روزفلت ورونالد ريغان خارج الخدمة. أيّ أنّ 80 % من القدرات العسكرية الأميركية في غرب المحيط الهادئ وبحر اليابان وبحار الصين اصبحت خارج الخدمة. وهو أمر كانت محطة «سي أن أن» الأميركية قد اشارت إلى خطورته قبل أيّام قليلة.
من جهة أخرى فمنذ أيّام عدة، وتحديداً منذ 4/4/2020، أعلنت وزارة الدفاع الأميركية عن إصدارها أمراً لحاملة الطائرات الأميركية هاري ترومان بالتحرّك، مع المجموعة القتالية البحرية المرافقة لها، من منطقة عملياتها في بحر عمان، من دون أن يحدّد أمر العمليات هذا وجهة انطلاق الحاملة. الأمر الذي دعا المتابعين للاعتقاد بأنها ستحلّ محلّ حاملة الطائرات، ثيودور روزفلت، التي خرجت من الخدمة في منطقة عملياتها، غرب المحيط الهادئ/ قرب جزيرة غوام، وذلك بسبب انتشار وباء كورونا بين بحارتها وإخلاء اربعة آلاف منهم الى اليابسة، وبقاء ألف جندي فقط على متنها، لمتابعة تشغيل المفاعل النووي الذي يولِّد الطاقة اللازمة لعمليات الحاملة وحركتها.
ما توجّب طرح السؤالين الرئيسيين التاليين حول:
الجهة التي اتجهت اليها حاملة الطائرات هذه، التي تحمل على متنها ما مجموعه 90 مقاتلة ومروحية قتالية أميركية، ولماذا صدر هذا الأمر لها ولمجموعتها القتالية الكاملة بالانتقال الى منطقة عمليات أخرى؟ ولماذا لم يصدر أمر التحرك للحاملة فقط، مع الإبقاء على القوة المرافقة، /مجموعة قوامها عشر قطع بحرية بين مدمّرة وبارجة وفرقاطة وزورق حراسة وسفينة إنزال وسفن إمداد/ في منطقة عملياتها، بحر عمان، حتى إصدار الأمر، أيّ حتى يوم 4/4/2020؟ وللإجابة عن هذين السؤالين يجب على المرء أن يعود قليلاًً الى الوراء، ودمج الإجابة عن السؤالين في إجابة واحدة، ويتذكّر عنجهية الرئيس الأميركي، وتهديداته لجمهورية الصين الشعبية، واتهاماته لها بخرق القانون الدولي البحري، في بحار الصين المختلفة.
آنذاك، وتحديداً في النصف الثاني من شهر أيلول 2019، قرّر الرئيس الأميركي، بعنجهية لا حدود لها، إرسال فخر سلاح البحرية الأميركية، حاملة الطائرات رونالد ريغان، التي وصلت تكلفة صناعتها الى ثلاثة عشر مليار دولار، دون سفن مرافقة، أيّ دون مجموعتها القتالية، الى بحر الصين الجنوبيّ.
وقد وصلت هذه الحاملة العملاقة فعلاًً إلى بحر الصين الجنوبي، يوم 28/9/2019، وعند اقترابها من جزر سبراتلي (Spratly Islands) الصينية، الواقعة في أقصى جنوب بحر الصين، قبالة السواحل الفيتنامية غرباً والفلبينية شرقاً، أطبقت عليها خمس قطع بحرية أجنبية وقامت بتثبيتها في نقطة تمركزها، حسب الأصول القانونية المتعلقة بالقانون البحري، وأجبرتها لاحقاً على تغيير وجهتها واستخدام ممر بحري حدّدته لها القطع البحرية الصينية، التي أوقعت هذه الحاملة في كمين بحري محكم، لم تتمكن رونالد ريغان لا من اكتشافه ولا من تفادي الوقوع فيه، لمتابعة إبحارها شرقاً، بعيداً عن المياه الإقليمية الصينية، حسب المعلومات ووصول الأقمار الصناعية التي نشرتها صحيفة «سوهو» (Sohu) الصينية يوم 28/9/2019.
هذا هو الدرس الذي تعلّمه سلاح البحرية الأميركي، من الحضور الدائم والاستعداد الكامل للقوات البحرية الصينية، في مختلف بحار الصين وتلك المحيطة بها شرقاً وغرباً.
وهو الأمر الذي أرغم قيادة سلاح البحرية الأميركية على عدم الإفصاح عن وجهة حاملة الطائرات، هاري ترومان، واضطرها أيضاً الى تحريك المجموعة القتالية البحرية المرافقة لهذه الحاملة الى بحر اليابان، ومن ثم الى منطقة جزيرة غوام، وذلك خوفاً من الكمائن البحرية الصينية التي لا تراها الأقمار الصناعية الأميركية.
أما الأهمية الاستراتيجية لهذا التطور اللافت فتكمن في انّ الصين الشعبية قد ثبتَت سيادتها على كلّ تلك الجزر، التي يعتبرها الأميركيون متنازعاً عليها، وأنها (الصين) لن تسمح لأيّ سفن او طائرات عسكرية أجنبية بالاقتراب من هذه الجزر، سواء كانت طبيعية او صناعية، لانّ اختراق أجوائها او مياهها الإقليمية يعتبر خرقاً للسيادة الصينية. وعليه فانّ الصين، وفي حال إصرار الولايات المتحدة على تحرشاتها بالصين فانّ جمهورية الصين الشعبية ستجد نفسها مضطرة لوضع حدّ أبدي لتلك التحرشات وذلك من خلال إنهاء خط الدفاع الأميركي الممتدّ من تايوان، الصينية المنشقة، في بحر الصين الجنوبي، الى كوريا الجنوبية، في البحر الأصفر شمالاً، وصولاً الى اليابان وكلّ بحر اليابان وحتى غرب المحيط الهادئ، على سواحل اليابان الشمالية الشرقية.
وباختصار: إنهاء الوجود العسكري الأميركي في تلك المنطقة من العالم والى الأبد.
من هنا فقد ذهبت مصادر عسكرية أميركية الى الاعتقاد بانّ الصينيين ربما يفكّرون جدياً في تكرار هجوم على أحد الموانئ الأميركية الغربية لتكرار سيناريو پيرل هاربر، ولكن صيني هذه المرة كما تتحدّث عن خطر قيام الصين بهجوم مفاجئ على تايوان لاستعادتها للسيادة الوطنية الصينية، أيّ الاستيلاء على الجزيرة في ظلّ شلل أميركي تام بسبب كورونا، وأن يمتدّ الهجوم ليشمل كلّ البحار المحيطة، وصولاً الى غرب الولايات المتحدة من هونولولو الى كاليفورنا وفلوريدا، وهو ما تشبّهه تلك المصادر بهجوم اليابان على ميناء پيرل هاربر الشهير في الحرب العالمية.
The US Pentagon issued an order last week commanding top generals to come up with a plan to step up the action against Iraqi resistance group which the US claims is the force behind a string of rocket attacks at bases hosting international troops, New York Times reported Friday.
Citing officials with knowledge on the matter, NYT said the Pentagon was seeking a plan to destroy Kataib [Brigades] Hezbollah in a drastic escalation against the resistance group which is formally operating within the Iraqi chain of command.
The order was authorized by US War Secretary Mark Esper, the officials told the paper.
However, Lt. Gen. Robert White, who is head of Operation Inherent Resolve — the alleged US mission in Iraq against Daesh [the Arabic acronym for terrorist ‘ISIS/ISIL’ group] — reportedly pushed back on the order.
In his memo, as cited by the NYT, he warned that a campaign against Kataib Hezbollah could result in a full-fledged war with Iran, as they claim it is the side backing the resistance group. It would also require additional troops and resources at a time when the US military is seeking to cut its footprint in the region to re-deploy with China’s containment in mind.
On Thursday, two rockets landed in Baghdad’s Green Zone in an apparent attack at the US diplomatic compound, which is located in the area. Earlier, two Americans and a Briton were killed in another rocket attack at Taji airbase near Baghdad.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 