The allies about whom Der Furor speaks are actual or effectively fascist and racist or otherwise violently exclusionary states like Hungary, Russia, China, Poland, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. These and others are all models spawned and encouraged by the worst instincts and practices of the United States and which had leaned or become fascistic even before Trump came along. Now Trump's America is its ersatz leader and inspiration.
This group is also the core of an already developing future fascist alliance that will ascend to an effective political supremacy across 'The West' (with 'junior' allies elsewhere) and begin waging utter militarism and outright wars and economic sabotage and re-exploitation across the world against states attempting to remain democratic, including against China also, against which I think the United States will turn at some point.
Germany is more or less the new leader of what's been called The Free World. France still keeps its own fascist cadres in check too. Merkel is weakened politically now though thanks to Trump's shunning and Germany's own longstanding burgeoning fascist underbelly and it will likely soon cede governing to a further 'right' government, which will be only one step removed from a checkmate against democratic institutions internationally, as Britain is already 'right'-oriented and further shrinking from a democratic role.
This, to me, represents a very possible immediate future. It's later than we think. This scenario is not 100% inevitable at this moment, but I'd guess it's well over 50% and rising fast (like a Hitler salute), given the hatefully blind sociopathic wrongheadedness of those in charge of the United States and those countries and of this entire mess.
Fiction doesn’t always turn into reality, but in this case it’s halfway there already. So the odds are good that it will to a considerable degree. Look at the increasing proliferation of toll roads as an example. Who wants that?!
I meant to add further that please keep speaking up so that your voice will be amplified. Even run for office if you're serious enough about ending stupidity and ignorance in decisions about whether to promote actual peace. Go deeper into your own wrong mindset at the time of cadetship. Explain why revenge and following charlatan fake populists is the true evil that causes problems, along with the greed that pays for and the intolerance promoted by those troublemakers. Expose the American political and cultural and religious War Ayatollahs who specialize in urging and causing mayhem abroad and shutting down dissent at home. There's only one voice that can equal the force and violence of the Warmakers' high-priced voice, and that is of the sustained raised public voice for rationality and peace.
You wrote a nice piece, but this you wrote is the fallacy: "Of course, at the time, just about no one in this country was listening to such voices." That's not true. There were plenty of voices to listen to, which I describe in the second paragraph. That is the truth. What's also true is that the so-called conservatives were running things, but look, a real conservative doesn't act rashly and irrationally thrash an innocent people without regard for the survival of their country afterward. The so-called conservatives, including your father if he was eager for a revenge war, were actually nihilists and radicals, fools who wanted to make a name for themselves or a special type of sadist who wants to inflict physical harm because they themselves feel emotionally harmed.
You may have been too young and ambitious for violent glory to turn to the wiser and more experienced voices, but half the people in the country not only felt and intuitively understood that war would be a horrendous genocidal mistake, but many millions of them even turned out in the streets in the largest concerted protestations in the history of the country over the course of weeks. These people did not need to listen to anyone else's voice. They had their own inner voice to listen to, as you have now.
It's that mostly violence minded and profit-minded and vengeance-minded and ignorant-minded and vain-minded and hubris-minded people had most of the podiums and news desks and highest offices in the federal government.
The cure for bloodlust and ignorance at those crucial communications and governing positions?
Your article is helpful. But quit blaming generalized ignorance. Blame your own ignorance and your father's ignorance and every ignorant person around you for the world beginning to blow up shortly after Iraq was illegally invaded (for no valid reason whatsoever) and brutally divided and occupied. Look at the war-worshipping fascism here at home and internationally that has grown by leaps and evil bounds since ignorance triumphed even before Iraq was drawn and quartered.
Listen harder to the "Democratic side", it's there and vocal. Read more sources. If you're depending on major news media to hear what's going on and what's being said, it's no wonder you say you hear "deathly quiet". It's the news media's silence that's deafening.
I agree with all except for one part. Trump does understand civilication in a significant way. He knows what furthers his avaricious hubris and what works against it. He knows who to intimidate and break down in order to advance it. He knows how to break down a person; see his business dealings for evidence of this. He's now working to intimidate and break down the system and ethic that has mostly governed the world since the successful suppression of the fascist element by 1945. That fascist element is on the rise again, with Russia taking the lead. Trump is fine with that and wants to break down any opposition to greater authoritarian control in the U.S. and abroad. Just look at his behaviors and alliances. So Trump does have an understanding of the world, simplistic though it is. And he wants to co-lead the world back into authoritarianism. The Putin flattery is a sideshow, meant to distract from the breakdown of democratic participation and control within the U.S. It's working currently.
It's very clear that Putin and Trump and the Republicans share the goal of the dissipation of American democracy (specific-voter voting rights reduction, diminishing non-fascistic democratic participation, oligarchic/plutocratic participation increasing, elimination of checks and balances, et al).
Another Trump goal is to continue to hide his later-stage enrichment from Russian oligarchic and likely criminal sources and to continue and maximize his ability to do so.
He needs to commandeer and neutralize American investigative and prosecutorial apparati to maintain his power, therefore.
There may be other more personal reasons for Trump's apparent toadyism to Putin, besides the shared white supremacist beliefs and fascistic tendencies, but mostly it's no mystery whatsoever. Trump and the Republicans are in the process of forever altering what made America what it is, even the bad parts, though in Trump's America the bad parts will only get worse, much worse.
How many sides of the argument can you take at one time? It looks like you take all the sides. And back in the real world, the "political integrity of the electors" is very often if not usually not able to withstand insidious outside interference. So the "subject nation" gets to make the laws it needs to keep from being ruled in the interest of an outside interest. Your opposition to this is what's baffling.
Most American Jews Are AGAINST Israel's Treatment of Palestinians And DON'T Want War With Iran. That's One Major Reason American Jews Always Vote Majority Democratic In National Elections. They Feel Democrats Are Actually More Rational Than Republicans And Won't Start Unnecessary Wars In The Mideast Like The Bushes And Other Republicans Did And Do.
Yes the tail Israel does not wag the dog the United States. The tail only shows that the dog is happy in the U.S. imperial realm. The dog is leading the way. That's the way power works, not the other way around.
The United States was becoming a great imperial power long before the advent of Israel, and Israel is only an adjunct to the great historic misguided power that is imperial America. Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and other leaders in previous, current and subsequent U.S. administrations will always bring in advocates of its policies to help run the imperium. That brings Jewish people into prominence in the government, and while they're helping run policies that they favor they're doing the bidding of superior officials. Most functionaries ARE NOT JEWS, but Jews are thrust into the limelight to take the heat from racists and rightist fascists away from those truly forming and implementing the policies.
For someone like Giraldi to reverse the order of power is a sign of frustration but also a sign that the simplistic and misleading scapegoating of Jews continues. I don't let off Israel's government from culpability though. Israel's successive governments since 1967, especially since the rightist faction came to power in the later 1970s, have been the cause of much suffering in its own conquered lands and a primary cause in the region in general.
Even then there are other primary causes, regional and European. However, the Prime Primary Cause is, has been, and will be the United States imperium in the region and its imperatives of predominance and commercial/resource nihilism in the region, all in the service of maximizing its influence over resources and peoples.
Typical Republican tactic - secretly sell out your country for private oligarchical financial and domestic political advantage. Republicans are the enemy of the United States but domestically and in foreign matters.
What you describe would be happening with or without pursuit of still-current corruptive actions by Mueller and news media, and they need to be pursued to determine the degree of acquiescence by the administration to foreign interests and its inevitable quid pro quo. So the tracking doesn't seem at all prurient to me, and the "political past" you mention is NOT AT ALL IN THE PAST BUT CURRENTLY IS RUNNING THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT [into the ground], making your thoughts above most definitely a 'value judgement'.
I agree with what spyguy says here: "Basically this is a suicide mission to protect trump ego." Like Bush and Obama before him in Afghanistan, and like Nixon would have and Gerald Ford faced in southern Vietnam, no one wants to be the leader who cries uncle. Ford cried uncle and left. That and his pardon of Nixon, in tandem I believe, is what cost him election on his own in 1976 (and Reagan's losing harassment campaign as well). They all perpetuate others' suffering for their own ego, political and personal. Ford was courageous to take the withdrawal onto his own shoulders, and I'm still grateful to him for doing so. I think Trump's ego would keep the U.S. there more or less permanently if he became Dear Leader for life.
I've thought all along that the U.S. foreign policy and war departments were just fine with Saudi manipulation of the price of oil because it WOULD weaken Venezuela (and Russia) a significant degree, and that the U.S. shale oil producers would mostly survive and then come back strong once. Given D.C.'s belligerent warmongering Latin America policy since forever, why wouldn't the U.S. government be on board with this Saudi manipulation?
It's all kabuki, but not fiction. The collusion, it's all true and very real, the criminal foreign power money laundering, the unprecedented undue influence (with a Russian chess strategy flavor) on a U.S. president, himself and his spoiled idiot family squeezed between the foreign power and the host country's justice system host reacting against its 'body' being invaded and occupied by its indigenous dupe the Trump parasite. Now the public gnashing of teeth by the elite Russian actors to remind Trump of who calls the shots, appealing to his Manchurian Candidate vanity and manipulating his id-istic idiocy. Praise the Prosecutor and pass the popcorn.
Thanks for clearing the mud from the situation, even though unfortunately what remains is the core confusion and idiot's bullying at the heart of the Trump maladministration.
I assume that anything coming out of the Oval Office, and that means Bannon, Miller and Kushner also, is intended to 1) intimidate, 2) mislead, and 3) ultimately pave the way for unilateral right-wing Israeli government's triumph. The underlying thinking is going to be dangerously - insanely - wrongheaded and counterproductive to even their own goals. But that of course doesn't prevent it from happening.
Good questions! Thanks for delineating the matter. I doubt Kushner's a master of anything except servility to the Trump wealth and resentment of the federal government for rightfully imprisoning his corrupt father. Kushner junior might have been part of a go-between team with Russia. though. Definitely something fishy happening.
What I don't seem to read anywhere is that Trump and his sick ilk see Russia and the U.S. as white supremacist nations that should act mutually in that regard. Trump et al know how Putin disemboweled Chechnya and want to do the same to Muslims themselves. Look at Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia - DRIVE THEM OUT, DRIVE THEM OUT, DRIVE THEM OUT. I'll never be convinced that Trump's not an amoral hate-spewing eliminationist waiting for the chance to do that big-time 'over there' and also at home to the degree he thinks he can get away with it. We have to stop that from happening.
Also in common is homophobia. Putin's proactive anti-LGBTQ agenda also appeals strongly to Trump and his sick ilk. When Roy Cohn's homosexual activities were made public, remember how Trump totally rejected Cohn (his former lawyer and his father's lawyer and a mentor to Trump Jr.) and is said to never have had contact with him again. That's my recollection of that situation anyway.
Trump doesn't dare tempt Putin to drip-drip further hints and evidence of secret Trump-Russian dealings, and Putin, as the extortionist, has the challenge of not demanding too much too soon of Trump because of the risk of exposing the game before he gets more of what he really wants such as lifting of sanctions.
Given Roy Cohn's having been Donald J. Trump's personal attack dog lawyer for a number of years, and surrogate father after Trump Senior's death, I doubt Donald J. has the least actual objection to McCarthyism. In fact, Cohn was around Trump Jr. long enough to totally corrupt his thinking - willingly on Trump's part of course - and render Trump the real enemy of the people. Think of Cohn as the devil on Trump's shoulder schooling him on how to live an evil life and get away with it. I'm assuming Bannon has stepped in to replace Cohn's agitation and guidance.
Remembering the final tv ad of the Trump campaign. It featured 4-5 major people making speeches, while the announcer whipped up hate and resentment about the purported deteriorating weakened state of the country. Each one of those speaking were prominent Jews. That was the final dog whistle to the klan/stormfront/alt-nazi/otherwise lunatic 10% that the time had finally come to begin the American counter-revolution. Muslims and Hispanics first, and then Jews. First they will try to accomplish their atrocities without the military. Then in the face of widespread revulsion and resistance, they will try to bring in the military. How will the military respond?
That scenario would seem to be wacko fiction. No longer.
The six-months provision blocking ALL immigration into the United States is aimed at intimidating Americans opposed to Trumpism and subliminally make them more docile. There is no actual earthly practical reason to stop all immigration from every country.
Subliminally, this is how it works. It's like kidnapping someone and isolating them. Think Patty Hearst in the closet. It psychologically shocks her and gains a larger measure of control over her. Patty Heart locked in a closet is cut off from the outside world. She becomes docile. But in our case, it's the United States that is kidnapped for six months and held in an immigration-free closet - we are psychologically cut off more from the world in this picture. We are the hostages, even though we (for now) have the right to leave.
This is how part of our minds analyzes the six-months provision: If Trump can block all people from immigrating INTO the United States, he can also block any people from LEAVING the United States. Get it? It may seem illegal to stop all inbound immigration, but it also seems illegal that he could stop outbound immigration (or travel!) from the U.S. as well.
It makes most of us more docile, even if just a little. We assume he won't stop at any length to get what he wants. We assume he could violate The Constitution (he already does already with emoluments, etc.) and block our exits from the Trump Closet. We reason that maybe the Supreme Court would overturn this. We also understand that the Supreme Court might not overturn it or that it would even take months if not years to overturn it. Scary.
Right indeed, Gary. "John Wilson" (heh heh) mentions the word 'coup', which is a projection of what happened electorally in the U.S. election due to interference and voter suppression. Trump backers like "Wilson", if not paid dupes, have no qualms about lying and dissembling and pretending to be who they're not.
He doesn't owe Merkel, the EU, BMW, NATO, et al, huuuge amounts of money he will never be able to pay back from loans by Putin's corrupt circle of organized crime-linked oligarchs. Trump either makes nice with Russia or loses a couple of kneecaps and members of his family due to 'accidents' as payment to the sterling 'businessmen' he has sold what's left of his soul to.
I always suspected America could someday 'elect' a president who is even more of a paranoid self-obsessed asshole than Nixon was. I wish I could say it was worth the wait.
Reader Adrift, I think you're right to focus on Flynn's unaccountability. Looking objectively at what he believes in and stands for, it is frightening to see a mind reeling in and out of ignorant cynical political fantasies. They can only get people killed, innocents mostly of course. I read where someone considers him America's Rasputin, and I think that might be a little tame compared to the revolving serial damage such delusional thinking can enact. His psychoactivated ideo-religious delusions of infallibility makes him a chronic deadender. He's very bad news for the world.
Billy, stop making sense! You're killin' me! While reading your comment I had the thought that since Trump and Putin are white nationalists they might prefer the Iranian people as allies over the Arab peoples. I think they will form an alliance with Iran to include the 'Shia Crescent' extending from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. That would be a geopolitical winner backed by the the remaining one and one-half military superpowers, who will also be allied together against China's rise to further prominence. No one could stand against them if Trump and Putin stay allied. But will their pact go the way of the Hitler-Stalin pact? Stay tuned (on the shortwave from your fallout shelter).
I think you're on the right track, super390. Only months ago it would have seemed almost impossible to believe, but the U.S. under Trump will become as prototypically fascistic as he and his fantasist active conspirators can make it while embracing the Putin's already fascistic Russia. They are already natural allies. I think the next stage in the proliferation and development of allied autocracies will include the smaller European (eastern and western) countries, which will put additional pressure on Germany and France to elect their own homegrown rightist fascists to power. It's all rather uncharted after that. Unless someone can point in the direction of similar past situations, near to the present or ancient, I'm guessing things are just going to hell sooner rather than later. Save your American greenbacks, because the Union states will rise again!
If anything, 'Wibberly', Assange has shown himself to be duplicitous in his dealings with the public in what he presents and what he holds back. He has become in thrall to known prevaricators and political provocateurs for his 'information'. And this was in evidence long before this election. It only came to further bright light during the campaigns and has been exposed by some of the people he has worked most closely with. And as you say, no, Trump didn't start this, but as in everything else he touches, he is ruinous and displays only contempt for the truth and disdain for actual people and any other ideas or opinions but his own warped crackpottery. His Lootocracy will bring down this country like Yeltsin's crony billionaires' oligopoly brought down Russia, stripping its resources and greatly impoverishing its people. People like you make weak excuses for and personally enable the meanness and corrupt proto-facism we now have on our plate 'big time'. You are a 'good German', IMO.
R.A., however sincere your thoughts on a 3rd Party are, they are the exact opposite of what's needed. A 3rd Party with a core of disaffected Democratic voters will ONLY elect more Republicans. The process required is to take over the Democratic Party like the right-wing extremist Tea Party and others took over the GOP. You might have to work hard to do so, instead of take the easy rhetorical way out like you do, but Bernie and his supporters and others have already started the job for you. Join in. Despair less.
Yes and no. I think it's an ideal time to educate my fellow Americans (the clueless ones) about the truer nature of our country. It can contribute to a better world of understanding and fair treatment. In other words, your idea of censorship sucks, and yes censorship it would be no matter what your intention.
Dr. Cole, why have you concluded that the U.S.-led attack was accidental? Don't U.S. policymakers want to poke 'The Bear' so to speak and signal that they still are in charge and want to dump Assad?
Professor Cole, why do you assume the air strikes were accidental and not intentional? Aren't U.S. policymakers wanting to send Russia a signal that it had better not assume they will be getting entirely what they want in Syria, and aren't those same U.S. policymakers wanting to show American neocons and the public that it is serious about removing Assad from power? I just don't believe that the strike was accidental, given the cynical game the U.S. is playing there.
Obama was actually much less neocon-ish and way less 'invasive' than Bush-Cheney or any GOP candidate since (except white supremacist Ron Paul), Obama having successfully fought and resisted a high percentage of the neocon agenda during his two terms. And yes, Hillary's a neocon, but you can't seriously say that anyone but Bush-Cheney is the progenitor of and responsible for blowing up the Middle East starting with Iraq, and then negotiating and signing the treaty with the new Iraq government to withdraw all of the American forces after he left office. Obama and no president could have renegotiated that deal with Bush's Shia Iraqi government. So if you don't want Hillary, and seem to not want Trump (you didn't say for sure, so you may be a soulless Trump shill after all), but sure go ahead and vote for Gary Johnson. That'll help the world, right?
Israel is too weak and afraid to practice actual democracy. It's too weak and afraid to be its actual best self. As an Isaiah or Jeremiah might say today, woe is to a people who falsely believe in their superiority while amorally acting from their worst instincts, because their punishment will be great and relief not forthcoming.
I say moosaraza's comment above is a false flag comment. And I have as much evidence to back it up as he has for his mindless assertion that the coup was a false flag operation.
The U.S. and Britain have allied with and otherwise actively used such terror groups (even helping create them as well as supply, train, and fund them) since the 1950s, starting in Egypt, though there may have been earlier or other such support elsewhere as well. Blowback was never supposed to blow as far back as the United States itself, as in 9/11. U.S. and British adherents of using this extremist paramilitary anarchy to gain advantage and continue power in western Asia however merely used the 9/11 blowback as a cynical rationalization to intensify and expand their unholy sadistic alliance with terror 'over there'. U.S. and British "State Terror" therefore is used both directly and indirectly to assert hegemony against made-up and cornered 'enemies'. The so-called homeland U.S. and Britain can just go to hell as far as these U.S. and British manipulators are concerned.
Yes to all Juan says. Also, ultimately Israel's violent appropriation of others' lands and sadistic treatment of the people they've isolated and oppressed, leaving them also stateless and without any true legal recourse whatsoever, will spell Israel's downfall and doom in one way or another, and for all the right reasons.
It's a Russian chess grandmaster versus American 11th-dimensional checkers, but with a more evenly matched hybrid meta game of Risk on The Grand Chessboard.
It's amazing how blinded by propaganda are Americans to the U.S.-led western hegemonic geopolitical encirclement campaign against Russia, which began long before the Syrian tragedy and also before the CIA/State Department Ukraine coup. Again, chess versus checkers. American King took Ukraine, and Russian Queen took back Crimea.
"...these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities." Cockburn's article is important analysis of the underlying realpolitick of neoliberalism and continuing western colonialism in action. The West is ultimately a plague unto the world. Regarding the quote, what is left out of this essay is Israel's further reversion to violent racial purging and intensified oppression, which itself is part of and parallel to the west's vile influence.
Thanks for the well-deserved acknowledgement of Muhammad Ali's beneficence and accomplishment, as well as his funeral and its significance.
BTW, I'm American and Jewish, and it would never occur to me to think about or consider Jerusalem when I choose to pray, and Israel is not on my list of good company. Also, I don't need any religion whatsoever nor religious background in order to pray, if I choose to do so.
"The Saudi government was not behind 9/11 or in the know about it." Maybe so, but years ago and just yesterday I read in credible sources that the two 9/11 plane hijackers living in San Diego had received payments from a bank account belonging to Bandar. Do you know about this? Is it more nuanced and plausibly deniable than what I describe?
Nel, not meaning to offend you, but your ... parroting of some ... ignoramus' assumption that the U.S. has lost soverereignty is ridiculous. The only sovereignty threatened is that illegal and unfair advantage held within the U.S. by white male bullies including rich ones like Trump since the inception of this country...
Good recounting of a vital aspect of the two candidates to help consider which one to support. I think associating with Kissinger and giving him credibility like Clinton does shows the kind of dangerous leadership she'd bring, even though I sincerely sympathize with her candidacy. I suppose there's a chance she wouldn't be a provocateur warmongering president though the chance would be a small one. Surely it was Clinton's State Department that began plotting to overthrow the duly elected government of Ukraine to install a rightist, neo-nazi-laden coup regime in its place. And yes the Ukraine government before the rightist coup was 'duly elected', just like the less Soviet-friendly government duly elected previous to the overthrown one was. The elections there aren't perfect but each side has one an election or two, showing that Ukrainian democracy had been evolving toward credibility. The U.S.-led overthrow of Ukraine's government - just to stick it to Russia and to try to comandeer Russia's historic and current Crimean naval base (as well as to 'win' Ukraine for western banking monopolies, of course) - was a sadistic tragic and genocidal intentional horror that has killed thousands of innocent people and caused deprivation and suffering where before there was little of those horrific conditions. That's why I would never prefer an imperial neocon such as Clinton unless she were the only one running in a general election against the even more amoral monsters of the Republican Party.
...and the possibility of non-state terrorism against Russian ships plying the straits or Sea of Marmara, and it exacerbating Russian-Turkish enmity, or cloaked Israeli terrorism...
William, you neglect to point out the similarities to the Great Pirates of 'The West', whose ideology primarily embraced armed conquest of areas where resources could be extracted and which installed colonial trading regimes, dividing local peoples between a few self-interested abetters and everyone else - as still exists around the world to a very large extent, and which has been the primary form of government (corrupt dictatorship still supported and overly influenced by the colonial/occupying/and now 'trading partner' Western power. It's just as brutal initially as anything ISIS has done, and only in time does it settle down into a semi-barbaric routine under the watchful diplomacy of Western gunboats. Get it? The West was just as bad, if not worse, and ISIS is a parallel invention, barbaric in its desperation (the best defense is a good offense) to maintain its territorial gains. Sure, some piracy similarities exist, and they're important strategically, but mostly its a Western-style (with cultural differences) invention of a new territorial power, as was Israel at its gestation and later birth. Only with ISIS, it's the Saudis and Gulf allies doing the funding and recruiting, as opposed to England, the United States, and other European colonial/imperial powers doing the preparatory work. Get it? ISIS doesn't equal Israel, but the genesis is the same, and ISIS is the antimatter that has evolved finally to oppose Israel in a region where the United States and England have generally exploded the old order, which England and the U.S. (and France) had created in the first place. It's all to make Israel and "our" oil safer, but the antimatter was created as a byproduct. And now The West is trying to strangle ISIS in its cradle. ISIS is dangerous but has already begun to flail around to help sustain its momentum and try to guarantee some sort of survival for itself. Wither and whittle and eventual dissipation is The West's strategy against it.
Yes, including not only the Republican Party, with near-unanimity as a warmongering right-wing ideologic force, but including also a portion of the Democratic Party, its substantial conservative wing that votes with Republicans more times than not for revanchivist issues across the board, especially the jingoistic ones, And I say that as someone who votes Democratic. My wing is the progressive/pro-peace one.
And let's remember forever, with all the deserved sneering and denouncing they earned, the major news media liars - all of them except Knight-Ridder - all of whom couldn't have been bothered to learn the truth or actually cared less that they were handmaidens and joiners of the Lies. If they'd cared, they'd have known better, as did you, me, and the rest of the world easily learned because we sought the truth, Professor Cole.
And look around today, and you see the same pack of ignorant self-glorifying news media jackals and their newer career-worshipping accomplices lying down and taking it up their corrupted 'information' channels about Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, et al, and the suffering people, animals, and land therein.
A rare oppositional point, Professor Cole -- The authors of the lie are named Bush/s, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Kristol/s, Perle, Wurmser, Feith, Kagan/s, Pipes, et al. The age of [Those] Lies won't pass until they are all welcomed into hell and not a minute sooner. And their chief enablers too, such as Judith Miller, Michael Gordon (STILL primary NYT liar and now chief military correspondent), oh yeah and the Sulzberger nest of lying warmongers.
Also, any age of lies won't end until the still-ongoing damage ends that was spawned (intentionally) by the authors and propagaters of the lie. The destruction and suffering wrought by the lie has already lasted 12 years, and it will take 20-30 more years for it to lose its inertia.
Respectfully and in the spirit of inquiry: You said Iran's support for Assad is shameful. But wouldn't Iran and the rest of the world allowing extremist ISIS, et al, adherents of Middle Ages 'justice' and mass murder and enslavement of opposing religious and secular groups come to power be more shameful, and a worse outcome? And I'm no supporter of barbaric 'Greater Israel', by the way.
U.S. warmakers are closely observing and analyzing Russian military actions and capabilities and folding this current information into its own strategic and tactical assessments of Russian power estimates and projections. The U.S. wastes no opportunity to turn lemons into shrapnel. This has nothing to do with the military/political goals of Russia in Syria - for now.
Dr. Cole, would you please use a post to dissect what the United States government's actual intentions and preferences are in Syria? There's so much rhetorical smokescreen and omission from news reporting - even alternative news reporting - that getting a clear picture of U.S. intent is. For instance, I've read that now in Iraq the U.S. is not really bothering to bomb ISIS targets for the most part, even ignoring ISIS' frequent oil tanker truck traffic deliveries that they derive significant income from, even though those trucks are greatly exposed for hundreds of miles in open ground. Is a negotiated stalemate in the cards in both Iraq and Syria?
Austria and the U.A.E. don't have 100's of nukes. I wish it weren't the case but Israel's nukes are its guarantor of being taken seriously out of proportion to its size. It will remain the regional hegemon. It will continue getting away with slow-motion gradual mass murder.
The entire U.S.-British-Western deconstruction of the previously colonized Middle East has broken down the area into nearly powerless political cantons and military districts at odds with each other or in weak temporary alliances and all dependent on mostly Western arms. Israel and the West have won again, preserving hegemony for another 40-50 years to come (perhaps). Russia's increased entry into Syria is a boon for the West's hegemony as well, as it helps contain the West's deconstructing wild-card titular ally ISIS and also allows Russia to become part of the functional hegemony in the process.
And Israel, as you mention, benefits from the Russian presence too, as Assad continues to be marginalized but the burgeoning eventual Salafi existential threat to Israel begins to be more contained. As long as Assad is greatly weakened, Israel and the West are happy enough.
Now Iraq's gone. Iran is kept at bay by the agreement for years to come, until it either more or less politically capitulates or until the West upgrades its technological and logistical military advantages in the region such that it can successfully withstand an Iranian counterattack if the nuclear deal breaks apart. So the West wins again, and Israel, a Western colony that won a modified independence through military aggression and its nuclear weapon stockpile, wins as well.
I strongly believe though that Israel's best chance to survive has always been through plowshares not war. Sooner or later someone's going to find a way to nuke Tel Aviv if Israel is not a crucial economic boon and partner with the entire region. Israel and Palestine need to become one state for all, with one-person-one-vote, and integrate its economy and its agricultural and hydro technologies with the region. The greater safety is still in numbes and in being indispensable - not a horrific declared enemy.
I know destroying historical treasures is self-refuting and despicable, an atrocity really. However, how about describing what the United States has done in Iraq (to mention only one of America's victim nations targeted) in the same terms, such as:
The United States Assault on Modern Life Itself: Blows Up 21st Century Infrastructure for Health, Life, and Even Subsistence While Destroying Iraq.
I think Professor Cole would agree with my assertion, but just posting to make the point clear.
I join your defense of Obama - even though I passionately wish he'd been the passionate progressive he campaigned as. I'll add that he added more wildnerness, national parks, and other preservations of nature and historic sites than any other president in the history of the country. He made 100's of positive changes, mostly through executive orders (because what was his alternative?). I beg to differ on your calling the Affordable Care Act originally a Republican plan. That's a common counterproductive misunderstanding. No Republican EVER formulated, advanced, or introduced into legislation a healthcare system or program that covers millions of people like Obama's Medicaid expansion has. Nor did any Republican offering ever include ending Big Insurance's policies of exclusion from healthcare, ending lifetime allowances for coverage, and many other people-first policies that Obama's ACA instituted and are now law. Let's let that 'Obamacare was a Republican program' myth die right now. The GOP doesn't want people to have fair and accessible healthcare, or they would have introduced and passed it long ago. The GOP has ONLY ever adamantly opposed healthcare for the people, including Medicare and Medicaid. They opposed Social Security too, of course, and still want to end it.
Marches don't move the 1%. Only threats to their economic dominance move them into action. Usually that action is violent repression. See Occupy. There is plenty of progressive organization and action. I don't know how you're missing it unless you're looking only on the front pages of papers for 'important' marches.
Trump is a media creation. He is a virtual character, a cartoon thought balloon vacuous through and through. He is seen through a filter of commercials, and he is one big self-promotion only. If America buys him as candidate, the system will intensify its disintegration. Trump is a fraud perpetrated by the 1% on the rest of us.
Dssmith, thanks for your excellent comment. Your last sentence made me think twice though. I really do not believe that "We are better than that", neither in your state of South Carolina, my original home state of Mississippii, nor my present home state of Texas, nor in any of the states in the nation that continue to discriminate against minority voters and others such as the elderly or ill by enacting cynical and unethical (if not amoral) restrictive voting laws. The same goes for state and federal laws that intentionally target minority citizens more than majority citizens, as well as the egregious unequal enforcement of even those awful laws, all tilted to commit as many minority citizens as possible to the prison systems for many years of their lives, both inside and outside of the walls. It's a reverse underground railroad, and it needs to be completely dismantled along with the symbols of racial oppression.
Maybe someday we will "be better than that", but certainly we have not proven such a thing to any significant degree and are far from being "better than that" today.
Good point, John. As you said, it has never shown respect for life. It even demeaned those who originally followed it. Those who still do are even further devolved and debased. Ignorance retreats nowhere but deeper and deeper into itself.
Biil Bodden, yes, yes. We all know about what you're talking about. Gaza, Balkans, Central America. All truly tragic and all too horribly true. But an atrocity is still an atrocity. And for you to argue otherwise is regressive, counterproductive, and bizarrely contrary and without good reason. The readers at this blog know all this stuff you're talking about and have it in perspective. YOU are the one who has lost perspective. The Charleston shooting is an atrocity, both in and of itself, and especially now in the long and lengthening line of similar atrocites across the country these last especially six or so years, by cops or ordinary civilians. Please keep up! Find a place that could use your political erudition and use it, appropriately, there.
Michael, you can't wave your magic wand and make everyone else turn off TV. TV remains a huge part of the problem despite you personally opting out. I opt out. But you can't blame others for not doing so. Do you have an actually relevant point?
Robert, I agree with your thoughts and sentiments, but could you please quit pretending that any nation or people is responsible for the disaster Iraq has become other than the nation and people that perpetrated the whole fiasco, which is the United States through its illegal, amoral, deceitful, and unjustified invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq?
And I think that given a vote, the people of Ramadi would rather have Daesh/IS/ISIL in power than the Shiite government in Baghdad, which has discriminated and persecuted Sunnis since its inception under American domination.
Nice list. Thanks. Regarding #5, the U.S. invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq under Bush-Cheney is the original sin of the present-day dilemma and strife. Bush-Cheney proved the U.S. could destroy but not build or protect, and that the U.S. had no intention or desire to actually do so. If it really desired to do so, then the Iraqi Army would not have been utterly disbanded and its governing state apparati and its technicians and other human infrastructure would not have been likewise uprooted so entirely. Bush-Cheney proved that the U.S. is NOT A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLES OF THE MIDDLE EAST NOR EVEN OF ITS ALLIES IN THE REGION. Bush-Cheney and the subsequent regional chaos proved to the indigenous leaders in the region that it needed to discount U.S. interests in order to survive and also to make a show of defiance of U.S. interests so that their own populations wouldn't rise up as one mass against the regional leaders. The U.S., thanks to Bush-Cheney, are the #1 enemy of the region now and will be far into the future, and the regional peoples know this reflexively and instinctually now. Their regional leaders know they ignore this at their own peril. So of course Obama or any U.S. leader's calls for anything will be ignored and shunned. So calling Obama apparently toothless, by itself, is a sop to American ignorance and its pretend exceptionalism, in other words, just as much of the victim of propaganda as any false WMD argument was. Come out of the propaganda more fully when you make your otherwise excellent arguments, please.
I guess this method could be interestingly used, but this video isn't an example of that. If anything, the 3D method will be used mostly to illustrate the glorious American 'defensive' Navy's awesome destructive bullying.
A strategic oligarchic Praetorianization of government has succeeded in purposefully precipitating an undermining delegitimatization of The Commons. Great private wealth has authorized and enabled a victorious predatory corporate usurpation of natural human rights. Money and technology have been supremely weaponized for enforcement purposes. Is there any coming back from this scenario that has played out in the shadows just beyond our ability to recognize it fully?
The "West" is still fighting Saladin: "Jerusalem now and forever" is the inalterable mindset. American Jewry, which includes me, will lose a small but significant portion of support for Israel, but when push comes to shove an overwhelming existential urge for Israel to survive no matter what - despite medievally amoral Israeli standards and practices - will prevent their cooptation to an equitable, even rational U.S. approach to Israel. The Bible-story mentality of a large majority of Americans, and what happened to Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, is too strong and unchallenged culturally and politically to overcome. That is a permanent condition, unfortunately, I believe.
Neocons love the idea of an ISIL-dominated northern & central Iraq and Shiite Iran and southern Iraq going to war against one another. Why wouldn't they? They fomented, supplied, and coordinated the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. The Middle East is much more of a tinderbox now than it was then, so the consequences would be far worse, of course, as described above. Juan doesn't mention Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Turkey, and the Gulf States, but they would be affected too, if not directly involved. Obama and the sane party realize all this and are doing the right thing by trying to defuse the situation, while the insane GOP wants to explode it like they did with Iraq in 2003. The neocons and GOP and Likud are all sadistic opportunistic nihilists who think they'll profit from the absolute misery and destruction of an all-out war in the Middle East.
I suppose many people have a primitive way of being in the world, wherein they need to have some anchor stabbing into a spot on the planet that they can call their own, and where they can identify with and relate to 'their kind'. Unfortunately, different people can stab their anchors into the same place, or create competing places even far apart, creating pain and harm where there needs be none. I consider it barbaric to let your primitive instincts - which everyone has - rule your thinking mind and create problems and suffering that need not exist. There's beauty in the real world as it exists every moment, and the past and its sects and divisions can be appreciated and even lauded without giving them full sway to carry the destructive impulse from generation to generation, ruining the chances for a good life for the greatest number of people and disallowing the greater good to exist more fully in a world desperately in need of it.
I think this has been the under-the-radar plan all along, outside of Israel's brief fling with Rabin's relative generosity of spirit. It's not destiny, but, to me, a more likely possibility, and definitely what the intentional ratcheting by Israel's organized destabilization has been leading up to.
Thanks for this enlightening post. Your analyses help make better sense of what comes across the news transom. It's both satisfying to know more (and better) and helpful to one's sanity.
Ah, right! I shoulda realized sooner that The Antichrist would speak with a British accent. Lord Blair, as journalist extraordinaire Robert Fisk calls him, fills the bill quite well. And we know as well that Blair is all a-Gog about Bush and Iraq.
"There is no legitimate reason why the Free Syrian Army can not consolidate and build momentum once they demonstrate gains."
The Free Syrian Army runs away when attacks. That's how Syrian Army soldiers characterize the so-called FSA, which is barely in existence and will never coalesce as a fighting force. You really need to do more than try and use correlation or your logic. Read more sources. You are either a hack or a fool. Your choice.
If the military situation dangerously deteriorated in Iraq, with or without U.S. airpower, with IS seriously threatening Baghdad and other Shiite cities and towns especially to the south, and the Iranian army entered in very substantial numbers, effectively defended the Shiite cities and towns, and then began encroaching on Anbar and Mosul (Sunni areas), what might Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do or threaten? Could hostilities break out between Iran and Riyadh? Could the oil fields in each place come under attack and the Gulf become an all-out war zone? Do I worry too much?
You make an excellent point about the young jihadis reacting to shock and awe from earlier previous western imperial jihadis. Round and round it goes, and with news media stupidly blundering along with its usual witless standards.
Oh, man. If this wasn't an American-led Crusade in 2003, it's sure turned into one. Just superimpose, paper doll-like, chain mail and swords on the players, and substitute flying machines for cavalry, and we've got ourselves some real fine Medieval imagery to entertain us from afar. Maybe the problem is that we're both too bored and too insecure.
Thanks to you Dr Cole for presenting William Polk's very excellent summation of the situation in 1948 and the years leading up to it. I read this just after viewing "The Violence of Architecture" which is about Israeli building patterns in the West Bank. This Polk essay and that 25-minute video make for a good juxtaposition. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/2014/06/architecture-violence-2014629113556647744.html
Joel, knowledge comes easy these days. You should try it. You don't think the 12 years of very severe sanctions crippled Iraq, left it hanging on by a thread? Killed a couple hundred thousand of its children (as Sec. of State Madelaine Albright admitted) through 12 years of bombing water purification plants and other infrastructure, barring crucial medicines, and such? Plus the no-fly zones, which had real on-the-ground consequences? Well, it most certainly did, including its armed forces. We left it vulnerable to invasion and collapse, which was the intention. Bush Sr. thought he'd invade his second term, but Clinton won and refused to invade, "only" bombing and sanctioning. That's how it went down. Do you know what's easier than "blaming America"? It's easier to just be ignorant. Unfortunately, that makes you part of the problem and someone to blame.
Yes, good point, Tony. Seeing this in full is important. It's describing the entire 'elephant'. First it was bait and attack in 1991. Then siege warfare for 12 years. Then full-scale invasion-occupation. Now withdraw and retain some control. It's classic how to manage an empire of war and resource plunder.
To me, it seems there's a chance that way down the list of important reasons why Obama chose to aid the Yazidis and other Iraqi minorities is that he wanted to send a signal that shows the Israeli government and people, however subliminally, that there was a limit to how much ethnic cleansing he could allow and tolerate - in Gaza and in the West Bank - before doing something to deter it.
Obama wouldn't attack the IDF, but he might cut off military resupply if the long-threatened expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine begins to occur.
Yes to all you wrote. The American neocons intended to destroy the area for generations to come, and they've succeeded. What they couldn't control, they were more than content to destroy. Israel's supposed to feel safe now that the neocons have succeeded, but I think the opposite will come to pass.
Look at all that damage! It's astonishing that Sawyer would think for even a millisecond that the rockets from Gaza could have caused it. The breadth of blindering ignorance would be unthinkable, and she would be instantly fired, if the U.S. press had any interest in actual journalism. The bible story version of reporting is an incredibly destructive fairy tale, and it shows the U.S. is just as primitive as the people the news media frame as savages. I think the photo used for your posting show who the real savages are. It's not exclusive to Israel, of course, but U.S news reporting would have us think it was universal across the Arabic-speaking world. Thanks for highlighting this example of U.S. cultural bias, Juan. It's sick, and it's a huge problem, as you know.
I'd say exceptionalism is mostly useful myth, useful to the powerful wealthy whose purse strings expand and contract the economy at will and do double duty as marionette strings for our leaders and at least half our citizens, probably a lot more.
There should be no surprise and no doubt as to the ultimate purpose of these training programs. The eternal and unchanging U.S. aim is to have the most radically pro-U.S. leadership in power in any given country. Mr. Polk describes how its training of indigenous special operations forces creates the very thing the U.S. desires the most. It's an organic Lord of the Flies zero sum game that is propagated both intentionally and unconsciously from the American establishment bureaucracy and among the establishment leaders, in every generation and of either major party.
Thank you for this, Juan. I'm crying after this Happy video. The sheer and unbelievable and massive missed opportunity since 1948 is just heartbreaking. People are people; period.
The allies about whom Der Furor speaks are actual or effectively fascist and racist or otherwise violently exclusionary states like Hungary, Russia, China, Poland, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. These and others are all models spawned and encouraged by the worst instincts and practices of the United States and which had leaned or become fascistic even before Trump came along. Now Trump's America is its ersatz leader and inspiration.
This group is also the core of an already developing future fascist alliance that will ascend to an effective political supremacy across 'The West' (with 'junior' allies elsewhere) and begin waging utter militarism and outright wars and economic sabotage and re-exploitation across the world against states attempting to remain democratic, including against China also, against which I think the United States will turn at some point.
Germany is more or less the new leader of what's been called The Free World. France still keeps its own fascist cadres in check too. Merkel is weakened politically now though thanks to Trump's shunning and Germany's own longstanding burgeoning fascist underbelly and it will likely soon cede governing to a further 'right' government, which will be only one step removed from a checkmate against democratic institutions internationally, as Britain is already 'right'-oriented and further shrinking from a democratic role.
This, to me, represents a very possible immediate future. It's later than we think. This scenario is not 100% inevitable at this moment, but I'd guess it's well over 50% and rising fast (like a Hitler salute), given the hatefully blind sociopathic wrongheadedness of those in charge of the United States and those countries and of this entire mess.
Fiction doesn’t always turn into reality, but in this case it’s halfway there already. So the odds are good that it will to a considerable degree. Look at the increasing proliferation of toll roads as an example. Who wants that?!
I meant to add further that please keep speaking up so that your voice will be amplified. Even run for office if you're serious enough about ending stupidity and ignorance in decisions about whether to promote actual peace. Go deeper into your own wrong mindset at the time of cadetship. Explain why revenge and following charlatan fake populists is the true evil that causes problems, along with the greed that pays for and the intolerance promoted by those troublemakers. Expose the American political and cultural and religious War Ayatollahs who specialize in urging and causing mayhem abroad and shutting down dissent at home. There's only one voice that can equal the force and violence of the Warmakers' high-priced voice, and that is of the sustained raised public voice for rationality and peace.
You wrote a nice piece, but this you wrote is the fallacy: "Of course, at the time, just about no one in this country was listening to such voices." That's not true. There were plenty of voices to listen to, which I describe in the second paragraph. That is the truth. What's also true is that the so-called conservatives were running things, but look, a real conservative doesn't act rashly and irrationally thrash an innocent people without regard for the survival of their country afterward. The so-called conservatives, including your father if he was eager for a revenge war, were actually nihilists and radicals, fools who wanted to make a name for themselves or a special type of sadist who wants to inflict physical harm because they themselves feel emotionally harmed.
You may have been too young and ambitious for violent glory to turn to the wiser and more experienced voices, but half the people in the country not only felt and intuitively understood that war would be a horrendous genocidal mistake, but many millions of them even turned out in the streets in the largest concerted protestations in the history of the country over the course of weeks. These people did not need to listen to anyone else's voice. They had their own inner voice to listen to, as you have now.
It's that mostly violence minded and profit-minded and vengeance-minded and ignorant-minded and vain-minded and hubris-minded people had most of the podiums and news desks and highest offices in the federal government.
The cure for bloodlust and ignorance at those crucial communications and governing positions?
Your article is helpful. But quit blaming generalized ignorance. Blame your own ignorance and your father's ignorance and every ignorant person around you for the world beginning to blow up shortly after Iraq was illegally invaded (for no valid reason whatsoever) and brutally divided and occupied. Look at the war-worshipping fascism here at home and internationally that has grown by leaps and evil bounds since ignorance triumphed even before Iraq was drawn and quartered.
Listen harder to the "Democratic side", it's there and vocal. Read more sources. If you're depending on major news media to hear what's going on and what's being said, it's no wonder you say you hear "deathly quiet". It's the news media's silence that's deafening.
I agree with all except for one part. Trump does understand civilication in a significant way. He knows what furthers his avaricious hubris and what works against it. He knows who to intimidate and break down in order to advance it. He knows how to break down a person; see his business dealings for evidence of this. He's now working to intimidate and break down the system and ethic that has mostly governed the world since the successful suppression of the fascist element by 1945. That fascist element is on the rise again, with Russia taking the lead. Trump is fine with that and wants to break down any opposition to greater authoritarian control in the U.S. and abroad. Just look at his behaviors and alliances. So Trump does have an understanding of the world, simplistic though it is. And he wants to co-lead the world back into authoritarianism. The Putin flattery is a sideshow, meant to distract from the breakdown of democratic participation and control within the U.S. It's working currently.
It's very clear that Putin and Trump and the Republicans share the goal of the dissipation of American democracy (specific-voter voting rights reduction, diminishing non-fascistic democratic participation, oligarchic/plutocratic participation increasing, elimination of checks and balances, et al).
Another Trump goal is to continue to hide his later-stage enrichment from Russian oligarchic and likely criminal sources and to continue and maximize his ability to do so.
He needs to commandeer and neutralize American investigative and prosecutorial apparati to maintain his power, therefore.
There may be other more personal reasons for Trump's apparent toadyism to Putin, besides the shared white supremacist beliefs and fascistic tendencies, but mostly it's no mystery whatsoever. Trump and the Republicans are in the process of forever altering what made America what it is, even the bad parts, though in Trump's America the bad parts will only get worse, much worse.
How many sides of the argument can you take at one time? It looks like you take all the sides. And back in the real world, the "political integrity of the electors" is very often if not usually not able to withstand insidious outside interference. So the "subject nation" gets to make the laws it needs to keep from being ruled in the interest of an outside interest. Your opposition to this is what's baffling.
Most American Jews Are AGAINST Israel's Treatment of Palestinians And DON'T Want War With Iran. That's One Major Reason American Jews Always Vote Majority Democratic In National Elections. They Feel Democrats Are Actually More Rational Than Republicans And Won't Start Unnecessary Wars In The Mideast Like The Bushes And Other Republicans Did And Do.
Yes the tail Israel does not wag the dog the United States. The tail only shows that the dog is happy in the U.S. imperial realm. The dog is leading the way. That's the way power works, not the other way around.
The United States was becoming a great imperial power long before the advent of Israel, and Israel is only an adjunct to the great historic misguided power that is imperial America. Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush and other leaders in previous, current and subsequent U.S. administrations will always bring in advocates of its policies to help run the imperium. That brings Jewish people into prominence in the government, and while they're helping run policies that they favor they're doing the bidding of superior officials. Most functionaries ARE NOT JEWS, but Jews are thrust into the limelight to take the heat from racists and rightist fascists away from those truly forming and implementing the policies.
For someone like Giraldi to reverse the order of power is a sign of frustration but also a sign that the simplistic and misleading scapegoating of Jews continues. I don't let off Israel's government from culpability though. Israel's successive governments since 1967, especially since the rightist faction came to power in the later 1970s, have been the cause of much suffering in its own conquered lands and a primary cause in the region in general.
Even then there are other primary causes, regional and European. However, the Prime Primary Cause is, has been, and will be the United States imperium in the region and its imperatives of predominance and commercial/resource nihilism in the region, all in the service of maximizing its influence over resources and peoples.
Typical Republican tactic - secretly sell out your country for private oligarchical financial and domestic political advantage. Republicans are the enemy of the United States but domestically and in foreign matters.
Good point about the devious quid pro quo and the foreign policy realignment/shakedown, LivingInQatar.
What you describe would be happening with or without pursuit of still-current corruptive actions by Mueller and news media, and they need to be pursued to determine the degree of acquiescence by the administration to foreign interests and its inevitable quid pro quo. So the tracking doesn't seem at all prurient to me, and the "political past" you mention is NOT AT ALL IN THE PAST BUT CURRENTLY IS RUNNING THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT [into the ground], making your thoughts above most definitely a 'value judgement'.
I agree with what spyguy says here: "Basically this is a suicide mission to protect trump ego." Like Bush and Obama before him in Afghanistan, and like Nixon would have and Gerald Ford faced in southern Vietnam, no one wants to be the leader who cries uncle. Ford cried uncle and left. That and his pardon of Nixon, in tandem I believe, is what cost him election on his own in 1976 (and Reagan's losing harassment campaign as well). They all perpetuate others' suffering for their own ego, political and personal. Ford was courageous to take the withdrawal onto his own shoulders, and I'm still grateful to him for doing so. I think Trump's ego would keep the U.S. there more or less permanently if he became Dear Leader for life.
I've thought all along that the U.S. foreign policy and war departments were just fine with Saudi manipulation of the price of oil because it WOULD weaken Venezuela (and Russia) a significant degree, and that the U.S. shale oil producers would mostly survive and then come back strong once. Given D.C.'s belligerent warmongering Latin America policy since forever, why wouldn't the U.S. government be on board with this Saudi manipulation?
It's all kabuki, but not fiction. The collusion, it's all true and very real, the criminal foreign power money laundering, the unprecedented undue influence (with a Russian chess strategy flavor) on a U.S. president, himself and his spoiled idiot family squeezed between the foreign power and the host country's justice system host reacting against its 'body' being invaded and occupied by its indigenous dupe the Trump parasite. Now the public gnashing of teeth by the elite Russian actors to remind Trump of who calls the shots, appealing to his Manchurian Candidate vanity and manipulating his id-istic idiocy. Praise the Prosecutor and pass the popcorn.
Thanks for clearing the mud from the situation, even though unfortunately what remains is the core confusion and idiot's bullying at the heart of the Trump maladministration.
I assume that anything coming out of the Oval Office, and that means Bannon, Miller and Kushner also, is intended to 1) intimidate, 2) mislead, and 3) ultimately pave the way for unilateral right-wing Israeli government's triumph. The underlying thinking is going to be dangerously - insanely - wrongheaded and counterproductive to even their own goals. But that of course doesn't prevent it from happening.
Good questions! Thanks for delineating the matter. I doubt Kushner's a master of anything except servility to the Trump wealth and resentment of the federal government for rightfully imprisoning his corrupt father. Kushner junior might have been part of a go-between team with Russia. though. Definitely something fishy happening.
What I don't seem to read anywhere is that Trump and his sick ilk see Russia and the U.S. as white supremacist nations that should act mutually in that regard. Trump et al know how Putin disemboweled Chechnya and want to do the same to Muslims themselves. Look at Trump's speech in Saudi Arabia - DRIVE THEM OUT, DRIVE THEM OUT, DRIVE THEM OUT. I'll never be convinced that Trump's not an amoral hate-spewing eliminationist waiting for the chance to do that big-time 'over there' and also at home to the degree he thinks he can get away with it. We have to stop that from happening.
Also in common is homophobia. Putin's proactive anti-LGBTQ agenda also appeals strongly to Trump and his sick ilk. When Roy Cohn's homosexual activities were made public, remember how Trump totally rejected Cohn (his former lawyer and his father's lawyer and a mentor to Trump Jr.) and is said to never have had contact with him again. That's my recollection of that situation anyway.
Yes, but what country would readily ally with Russia or trust Russia otherwise if Putin forcibly had Assad removed?
Trump doesn't dare tempt Putin to drip-drip further hints and evidence of secret Trump-Russian dealings, and Putin, as the extortionist, has the challenge of not demanding too much too soon of Trump because of the risk of exposing the game before he gets more of what he really wants such as lifting of sanctions.
Given Roy Cohn's having been Donald J. Trump's personal attack dog lawyer for a number of years, and surrogate father after Trump Senior's death, I doubt Donald J. has the least actual objection to McCarthyism. In fact, Cohn was around Trump Jr. long enough to totally corrupt his thinking - willingly on Trump's part of course - and render Trump the real enemy of the people. Think of Cohn as the devil on Trump's shoulder schooling him on how to live an evil life and get away with it. I'm assuming Bannon has stepped in to replace Cohn's agitation and guidance.
Remembering the final tv ad of the Trump campaign. It featured 4-5 major people making speeches, while the announcer whipped up hate and resentment about the purported deteriorating weakened state of the country. Each one of those speaking were prominent Jews. That was the final dog whistle to the klan/stormfront/alt-nazi/otherwise lunatic 10% that the time had finally come to begin the American counter-revolution. Muslims and Hispanics first, and then Jews. First they will try to accomplish their atrocities without the military. Then in the face of widespread revulsion and resistance, they will try to bring in the military. How will the military respond?
That scenario would seem to be wacko fiction. No longer.
This is a good point, Dieter. P.T. Barnum at work using W.C. Fields' great line: Never give a sucker an even break.
The six-months provision blocking ALL immigration into the United States is aimed at intimidating Americans opposed to Trumpism and subliminally make them more docile. There is no actual earthly practical reason to stop all immigration from every country.
Subliminally, this is how it works. It's like kidnapping someone and isolating them. Think Patty Hearst in the closet. It psychologically shocks her and gains a larger measure of control over her. Patty Heart locked in a closet is cut off from the outside world. She becomes docile. But in our case, it's the United States that is kidnapped for six months and held in an immigration-free closet - we are psychologically cut off more from the world in this picture. We are the hostages, even though we (for now) have the right to leave.
This is how part of our minds analyzes the six-months provision: If Trump can block all people from immigrating INTO the United States, he can also block any people from LEAVING the United States. Get it? It may seem illegal to stop all inbound immigration, but it also seems illegal that he could stop outbound immigration (or travel!) from the U.S. as well.
It makes most of us more docile, even if just a little. We assume he won't stop at any length to get what he wants. We assume he could violate The Constitution (he already does already with emoluments, etc.) and block our exits from the Trump Closet. We reason that maybe the Supreme Court would overturn this. We also understand that the Supreme Court might not overturn it or that it would even take months if not years to overturn it. Scary.
Right indeed, Gary. "John Wilson" (heh heh) mentions the word 'coup', which is a projection of what happened electorally in the U.S. election due to interference and voter suppression. Trump backers like "Wilson", if not paid dupes, have no qualms about lying and dissembling and pretending to be who they're not.
He doesn't owe Merkel, the EU, BMW, NATO, et al, huuuge amounts of money he will never be able to pay back from loans by Putin's corrupt circle of organized crime-linked oligarchs. Trump either makes nice with Russia or loses a couple of kneecaps and members of his family due to 'accidents' as payment to the sterling 'businessmen' he has sold what's left of his soul to.
I always suspected America could someday 'elect' a president who is even more of a paranoid self-obsessed asshole than Nixon was. I wish I could say it was worth the wait.
Reader Adrift, I think you're right to focus on Flynn's unaccountability. Looking objectively at what he believes in and stands for, it is frightening to see a mind reeling in and out of ignorant cynical political fantasies. They can only get people killed, innocents mostly of course. I read where someone considers him America's Rasputin, and I think that might be a little tame compared to the revolving serial damage such delusional thinking can enact. His psychoactivated ideo-religious delusions of infallibility makes him a chronic deadender. He's very bad news for the world.
Billy, stop making sense! You're killin' me! While reading your comment I had the thought that since Trump and Putin are white nationalists they might prefer the Iranian people as allies over the Arab peoples. I think they will form an alliance with Iran to include the 'Shia Crescent' extending from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. That would be a geopolitical winner backed by the the remaining one and one-half military superpowers, who will also be allied together against China's rise to further prominence. No one could stand against them if Trump and Putin stay allied. But will their pact go the way of the Hitler-Stalin pact? Stay tuned (on the shortwave from your fallout shelter).
I think you're on the right track, super390. Only months ago it would have seemed almost impossible to believe, but the U.S. under Trump will become as prototypically fascistic as he and his fantasist active conspirators can make it while embracing the Putin's already fascistic Russia. They are already natural allies. I think the next stage in the proliferation and development of allied autocracies will include the smaller European (eastern and western) countries, which will put additional pressure on Germany and France to elect their own homegrown rightist fascists to power. It's all rather uncharted after that. Unless someone can point in the direction of similar past situations, near to the present or ancient, I'm guessing things are just going to hell sooner rather than later. Save your American greenbacks, because the Union states will rise again!
If anything, 'Wibberly', Assange has shown himself to be duplicitous in his dealings with the public in what he presents and what he holds back. He has become in thrall to known prevaricators and political provocateurs for his 'information'. And this was in evidence long before this election. It only came to further bright light during the campaigns and has been exposed by some of the people he has worked most closely with. And as you say, no, Trump didn't start this, but as in everything else he touches, he is ruinous and displays only contempt for the truth and disdain for actual people and any other ideas or opinions but his own warped crackpottery. His Lootocracy will bring down this country like Yeltsin's crony billionaires' oligopoly brought down Russia, stripping its resources and greatly impoverishing its people. People like you make weak excuses for and personally enable the meanness and corrupt proto-facism we now have on our plate 'big time'. You are a 'good German', IMO.
R.A., however sincere your thoughts on a 3rd Party are, they are the exact opposite of what's needed. A 3rd Party with a core of disaffected Democratic voters will ONLY elect more Republicans. The process required is to take over the Democratic Party like the right-wing extremist Tea Party and others took over the GOP. You might have to work hard to do so, instead of take the easy rhetorical way out like you do, but Bernie and his supporters and others have already started the job for you. Join in. Despair less.
False Equivalence John Wilson, your new nickname.
Not true, Bill. Easy for you to say, but not true.
Yes and no. I think it's an ideal time to educate my fellow Americans (the clueless ones) about the truer nature of our country. It can contribute to a better world of understanding and fair treatment. In other words, your idea of censorship sucks, and yes censorship it would be no matter what your intention.
Dr. Cole, why have you concluded that the U.S.-led attack was accidental? Don't U.S. policymakers want to poke 'The Bear' so to speak and signal that they still are in charge and want to dump Assad?
Professor Cole, why do you assume the air strikes were accidental and not intentional? Aren't U.S. policymakers wanting to send Russia a signal that it had better not assume they will be getting entirely what they want in Syria, and aren't those same U.S. policymakers wanting to show American neocons and the public that it is serious about removing Assad from power? I just don't believe that the strike was accidental, given the cynical game the U.S. is playing there.
Danny Thomas and Marlo Thomas!
Obama was actually much less neocon-ish and way less 'invasive' than Bush-Cheney or any GOP candidate since (except white supremacist Ron Paul), Obama having successfully fought and resisted a high percentage of the neocon agenda during his two terms. And yes, Hillary's a neocon, but you can't seriously say that anyone but Bush-Cheney is the progenitor of and responsible for blowing up the Middle East starting with Iraq, and then negotiating and signing the treaty with the new Iraq government to withdraw all of the American forces after he left office. Obama and no president could have renegotiated that deal with Bush's Shia Iraqi government. So if you don't want Hillary, and seem to not want Trump (you didn't say for sure, so you may be a soulless Trump shill after all), but sure go ahead and vote for Gary Johnson. That'll help the world, right?
Israel is too weak and afraid to practice actual democracy. It's too weak and afraid to be its actual best self. As an Isaiah or Jeremiah might say today, woe is to a people who falsely believe in their superiority while amorally acting from their worst instincts, because their punishment will be great and relief not forthcoming.
Cynicism is not necessarily thought, David, and in your case I'd say that's even more true than usual.
I say moosaraza's comment above is a false flag comment. And I have as much evidence to back it up as he has for his mindless assertion that the coup was a false flag operation.
The U.S. and Britain have allied with and otherwise actively used such terror groups (even helping create them as well as supply, train, and fund them) since the 1950s, starting in Egypt, though there may have been earlier or other such support elsewhere as well. Blowback was never supposed to blow as far back as the United States itself, as in 9/11. U.S. and British adherents of using this extremist paramilitary anarchy to gain advantage and continue power in western Asia however merely used the 9/11 blowback as a cynical rationalization to intensify and expand their unholy sadistic alliance with terror 'over there'. U.S. and British "State Terror" therefore is used both directly and indirectly to assert hegemony against made-up and cornered 'enemies'. The so-called homeland U.S. and Britain can just go to hell as far as these U.S. and British manipulators are concerned.
Yes to all Juan says. Also, ultimately Israel's violent appropriation of others' lands and sadistic treatment of the people they've isolated and oppressed, leaving them also stateless and without any true legal recourse whatsoever, will spell Israel's downfall and doom in one way or another, and for all the right reasons.
This is why I referred to the Bush-Cheney cabal from the beginning as Oily Bubba and the Corporate Thieves.
Global power requires controlling the oil and its delivery routes.
What Erik above says, and this alternative quote for Tacitus', They make a desert and call it peace:
They took deserts, made them even less habitable, and carved them into pieces.
It's a Russian chess grandmaster versus American 11th-dimensional checkers, but with a more evenly matched hybrid meta game of Risk on The Grand Chessboard.
It's amazing how blinded by propaganda are Americans to the U.S.-led western hegemonic geopolitical encirclement campaign against Russia, which began long before the Syrian tragedy and also before the CIA/State Department Ukraine coup. Again, chess versus checkers. American King took Ukraine, and Russian Queen took back Crimea.
"...these years have, that is, seen a remarkable reversion to religious, ethnic, and tribal identity, to movements that seek to establish their own exclusive territory by the persecution and expulsion of minorities." Cockburn's article is important analysis of the underlying realpolitick of neoliberalism and continuing western colonialism in action. The West is ultimately a plague unto the world. Regarding the quote, what is left out of this essay is Israel's further reversion to violent racial purging and intensified oppression, which itself is part of and parallel to the west's vile influence.
Only in your head, quax.
Too elementary on your part, though I do wish Democrats would gain permanent control (and not get totally corrupted).
Thanks for the well-deserved acknowledgement of Muhammad Ali's beneficence and accomplishment, as well as his funeral and its significance.
BTW, I'm American and Jewish, and it would never occur to me to think about or consider Jerusalem when I choose to pray, and Israel is not on my list of good company. Also, I don't need any religion whatsoever nor religious background in order to pray, if I choose to do so.
"The Saudi government was not behind 9/11 or in the know about it." Maybe so, but years ago and just yesterday I read in credible sources that the two 9/11 plane hijackers living in San Diego had received payments from a bank account belonging to Bandar. Do you know about this? Is it more nuanced and plausibly deniable than what I describe?
Nel, not meaning to offend you, but your ... parroting of some ... ignoramus' assumption that the U.S. has lost soverereignty is ridiculous. The only sovereignty threatened is that illegal and unfair advantage held within the U.S. by white male bullies including rich ones like Trump since the inception of this country...
To paraphrase Lewis' book title: American Journalism: Fascism Can, Has, and Does Happen Here.
Good recounting of a vital aspect of the two candidates to help consider which one to support. I think associating with Kissinger and giving him credibility like Clinton does shows the kind of dangerous leadership she'd bring, even though I sincerely sympathize with her candidacy. I suppose there's a chance she wouldn't be a provocateur warmongering president though the chance would be a small one. Surely it was Clinton's State Department that began plotting to overthrow the duly elected government of Ukraine to install a rightist, neo-nazi-laden coup regime in its place. And yes the Ukraine government before the rightist coup was 'duly elected', just like the less Soviet-friendly government duly elected previous to the overthrown one was. The elections there aren't perfect but each side has one an election or two, showing that Ukrainian democracy had been evolving toward credibility. The U.S.-led overthrow of Ukraine's government - just to stick it to Russia and to try to comandeer Russia's historic and current Crimean naval base (as well as to 'win' Ukraine for western banking monopolies, of course) - was a sadistic tragic and genocidal intentional horror that has killed thousands of innocent people and caused deprivation and suffering where before there was little of those horrific conditions. That's why I would never prefer an imperial neocon such as Clinton unless she were the only one running in a general election against the even more amoral monsters of the Republican Party.
...and the possibility of non-state terrorism against Russian ships plying the straits or Sea of Marmara, and it exacerbating Russian-Turkish enmity, or cloaked Israeli terrorism...
William, you neglect to point out the similarities to the Great Pirates of 'The West', whose ideology primarily embraced armed conquest of areas where resources could be extracted and which installed colonial trading regimes, dividing local peoples between a few self-interested abetters and everyone else - as still exists around the world to a very large extent, and which has been the primary form of government (corrupt dictatorship still supported and overly influenced by the colonial/occupying/and now 'trading partner' Western power. It's just as brutal initially as anything ISIS has done, and only in time does it settle down into a semi-barbaric routine under the watchful diplomacy of Western gunboats. Get it? The West was just as bad, if not worse, and ISIS is a parallel invention, barbaric in its desperation (the best defense is a good offense) to maintain its territorial gains. Sure, some piracy similarities exist, and they're important strategically, but mostly its a Western-style (with cultural differences) invention of a new territorial power, as was Israel at its gestation and later birth. Only with ISIS, it's the Saudis and Gulf allies doing the funding and recruiting, as opposed to England, the United States, and other European colonial/imperial powers doing the preparatory work. Get it? ISIS doesn't equal Israel, but the genesis is the same, and ISIS is the antimatter that has evolved finally to oppose Israel in a region where the United States and England have generally exploded the old order, which England and the U.S. (and France) had created in the first place. It's all to make Israel and "our" oil safer, but the antimatter was created as a byproduct. And now The West is trying to strangle ISIS in its cradle. ISIS is dangerous but has already begun to flail around to help sustain its momentum and try to guarantee some sort of survival for itself. Wither and whittle and eventual dissipation is The West's strategy against it.
Yes, including not only the Republican Party, with near-unanimity as a warmongering right-wing ideologic force, but including also a portion of the Democratic Party, its substantial conservative wing that votes with Republicans more times than not for revanchivist issues across the board, especially the jingoistic ones, And I say that as someone who votes Democratic. My wing is the progressive/pro-peace one.
And let's remember forever, with all the deserved sneering and denouncing they earned, the major news media liars - all of them except Knight-Ridder - all of whom couldn't have been bothered to learn the truth or actually cared less that they were handmaidens and joiners of the Lies. If they'd cared, they'd have known better, as did you, me, and the rest of the world easily learned because we sought the truth, Professor Cole.
And look around today, and you see the same pack of ignorant self-glorifying news media jackals and their newer career-worshipping accomplices lying down and taking it up their corrupted 'information' channels about Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, et al, and the suffering people, animals, and land therein.
A rare oppositional point, Professor Cole -- The authors of the lie are named Bush/s, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Wolfowitz, Kristol/s, Perle, Wurmser, Feith, Kagan/s, Pipes, et al. The age of [Those] Lies won't pass until they are all welcomed into hell and not a minute sooner. And their chief enablers too, such as Judith Miller, Michael Gordon (STILL primary NYT liar and now chief military correspondent), oh yeah and the Sulzberger nest of lying warmongers.
Also, any age of lies won't end until the still-ongoing damage ends that was spawned (intentionally) by the authors and propagaters of the lie. The destruction and suffering wrought by the lie has already lasted 12 years, and it will take 20-30 more years for it to lose its inertia.
Respectfully and in the spirit of inquiry: You said Iran's support for Assad is shameful. But wouldn't Iran and the rest of the world allowing extremist ISIS, et al, adherents of Middle Ages 'justice' and mass murder and enslavement of opposing religious and secular groups come to power be more shameful, and a worse outcome? And I'm no supporter of barbaric 'Greater Israel', by the way.
U.S. warmakers are closely observing and analyzing Russian military actions and capabilities and folding this current information into its own strategic and tactical assessments of Russian power estimates and projections. The U.S. wastes no opportunity to turn lemons into shrapnel. This has nothing to do with the military/political goals of Russia in Syria - for now.
Dr. Cole, would you please use a post to dissect what the United States government's actual intentions and preferences are in Syria? There's so much rhetorical smokescreen and omission from news reporting - even alternative news reporting - that getting a clear picture of U.S. intent is. For instance, I've read that now in Iraq the U.S. is not really bothering to bomb ISIS targets for the most part, even ignoring ISIS' frequent oil tanker truck traffic deliveries that they derive significant income from, even though those trucks are greatly exposed for hundreds of miles in open ground. Is a negotiated stalemate in the cards in both Iraq and Syria?
It's always good to see a bully constrained.
Austria and the U.A.E. don't have 100's of nukes. I wish it weren't the case but Israel's nukes are its guarantor of being taken seriously out of proportion to its size. It will remain the regional hegemon. It will continue getting away with slow-motion gradual mass murder.
The entire U.S.-British-Western deconstruction of the previously colonized Middle East has broken down the area into nearly powerless political cantons and military districts at odds with each other or in weak temporary alliances and all dependent on mostly Western arms. Israel and the West have won again, preserving hegemony for another 40-50 years to come (perhaps). Russia's increased entry into Syria is a boon for the West's hegemony as well, as it helps contain the West's deconstructing wild-card titular ally ISIS and also allows Russia to become part of the functional hegemony in the process.
And Israel, as you mention, benefits from the Russian presence too, as Assad continues to be marginalized but the burgeoning eventual Salafi existential threat to Israel begins to be more contained. As long as Assad is greatly weakened, Israel and the West are happy enough.
Now Iraq's gone. Iran is kept at bay by the agreement for years to come, until it either more or less politically capitulates or until the West upgrades its technological and logistical military advantages in the region such that it can successfully withstand an Iranian counterattack if the nuclear deal breaks apart. So the West wins again, and Israel, a Western colony that won a modified independence through military aggression and its nuclear weapon stockpile, wins as well.
I strongly believe though that Israel's best chance to survive has always been through plowshares not war. Sooner or later someone's going to find a way to nuke Tel Aviv if Israel is not a crucial economic boon and partner with the entire region. Israel and Palestine need to become one state for all, with one-person-one-vote, and integrate its economy and its agricultural and hydro technologies with the region. The greater safety is still in numbes and in being indispensable - not a horrific declared enemy.
I know destroying historical treasures is self-refuting and despicable, an atrocity really. However, how about describing what the United States has done in Iraq (to mention only one of America's victim nations targeted) in the same terms, such as:
The United States Assault on Modern Life Itself: Blows Up 21st Century Infrastructure for Health, Life, and Even Subsistence While Destroying Iraq.
I think Professor Cole would agree with my assertion, but just posting to make the point clear.
I join your defense of Obama - even though I passionately wish he'd been the passionate progressive he campaigned as. I'll add that he added more wildnerness, national parks, and other preservations of nature and historic sites than any other president in the history of the country. He made 100's of positive changes, mostly through executive orders (because what was his alternative?). I beg to differ on your calling the Affordable Care Act originally a Republican plan. That's a common counterproductive misunderstanding. No Republican EVER formulated, advanced, or introduced into legislation a healthcare system or program that covers millions of people like Obama's Medicaid expansion has. Nor did any Republican offering ever include ending Big Insurance's policies of exclusion from healthcare, ending lifetime allowances for coverage, and many other people-first policies that Obama's ACA instituted and are now law. Let's let that 'Obamacare was a Republican program' myth die right now. The GOP doesn't want people to have fair and accessible healthcare, or they would have introduced and passed it long ago. The GOP has ONLY ever adamantly opposed healthcare for the people, including Medicare and Medicaid. They opposed Social Security too, of course, and still want to end it.
Marches don't move the 1%. Only threats to their economic dominance move them into action. Usually that action is violent repression. See Occupy. There is plenty of progressive organization and action. I don't know how you're missing it unless you're looking only on the front pages of papers for 'important' marches.
Trump is a media creation. He is a virtual character, a cartoon thought balloon vacuous through and through. He is seen through a filter of commercials, and he is one big self-promotion only. If America buys him as candidate, the system will intensify its disintegration. Trump is a fraud perpetrated by the 1% on the rest of us.
Dssmith, thanks for your excellent comment. Your last sentence made me think twice though. I really do not believe that "We are better than that", neither in your state of South Carolina, my original home state of Mississippii, nor my present home state of Texas, nor in any of the states in the nation that continue to discriminate against minority voters and others such as the elderly or ill by enacting cynical and unethical (if not amoral) restrictive voting laws. The same goes for state and federal laws that intentionally target minority citizens more than majority citizens, as well as the egregious unequal enforcement of even those awful laws, all tilted to commit as many minority citizens as possible to the prison systems for many years of their lives, both inside and outside of the walls. It's a reverse underground railroad, and it needs to be completely dismantled along with the symbols of racial oppression.
Maybe someday we will "be better than that", but certainly we have not proven such a thing to any significant degree and are far from being "better than that" today.
Good point, John. As you said, it has never shown respect for life. It even demeaned those who originally followed it. Those who still do are even further devolved and debased. Ignorance retreats nowhere but deeper and deeper into itself.
Exactly, super390. There are studies proving what you've described. It's a well-known strategy of a venal majority.
Pray in the streets, friend, with others.
Biil Bodden, yes, yes. We all know about what you're talking about. Gaza, Balkans, Central America. All truly tragic and all too horribly true. But an atrocity is still an atrocity. And for you to argue otherwise is regressive, counterproductive, and bizarrely contrary and without good reason. The readers at this blog know all this stuff you're talking about and have it in perspective. YOU are the one who has lost perspective. The Charleston shooting is an atrocity, both in and of itself, and especially now in the long and lengthening line of similar atrocites across the country these last especially six or so years, by cops or ordinary civilians. Please keep up! Find a place that could use your political erudition and use it, appropriately, there.
Michael, you can't wave your magic wand and make everyone else turn off TV. TV remains a huge part of the problem despite you personally opting out. I opt out. But you can't blame others for not doing so. Do you have an actually relevant point?
Robert, I agree with your thoughts and sentiments, but could you please quit pretending that any nation or people is responsible for the disaster Iraq has become other than the nation and people that perpetrated the whole fiasco, which is the United States through its illegal, amoral, deceitful, and unjustified invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq?
And I think that given a vote, the people of Ramadi would rather have Daesh/IS/ISIL in power than the Shiite government in Baghdad, which has discriminated and persecuted Sunnis since its inception under American domination.
Nice list. Thanks. Regarding #5, the U.S. invasion, occupation, and destruction of Iraq under Bush-Cheney is the original sin of the present-day dilemma and strife. Bush-Cheney proved the U.S. could destroy but not build or protect, and that the U.S. had no intention or desire to actually do so. If it really desired to do so, then the Iraqi Army would not have been utterly disbanded and its governing state apparati and its technicians and other human infrastructure would not have been likewise uprooted so entirely. Bush-Cheney proved that the U.S. is NOT A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLES OF THE MIDDLE EAST NOR EVEN OF ITS ALLIES IN THE REGION. Bush-Cheney and the subsequent regional chaos proved to the indigenous leaders in the region that it needed to discount U.S. interests in order to survive and also to make a show of defiance of U.S. interests so that their own populations wouldn't rise up as one mass against the regional leaders. The U.S., thanks to Bush-Cheney, are the #1 enemy of the region now and will be far into the future, and the regional peoples know this reflexively and instinctually now. Their regional leaders know they ignore this at their own peril. So of course Obama or any U.S. leader's calls for anything will be ignored and shunned. So calling Obama apparently toothless, by itself, is a sop to American ignorance and its pretend exceptionalism, in other words, just as much of the victim of propaganda as any false WMD argument was. Come out of the propaganda more fully when you make your otherwise excellent arguments, please.
I guess this method could be interestingly used, but this video isn't an example of that. If anything, the 3D method will be used mostly to illustrate the glorious American 'defensive' Navy's awesome destructive bullying.
A strategic oligarchic Praetorianization of government has succeeded in purposefully precipitating an undermining delegitimatization of The Commons. Great private wealth has authorized and enabled a victorious predatory corporate usurpation of natural human rights. Money and technology have been supremely weaponized for enforcement purposes. Is there any coming back from this scenario that has played out in the shadows just beyond our ability to recognize it fully?
The "West" is still fighting Saladin: "Jerusalem now and forever" is the inalterable mindset. American Jewry, which includes me, will lose a small but significant portion of support for Israel, but when push comes to shove an overwhelming existential urge for Israel to survive no matter what - despite medievally amoral Israeli standards and practices - will prevent their cooptation to an equitable, even rational U.S. approach to Israel. The Bible-story mentality of a large majority of Americans, and what happened to Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, is too strong and unchallenged culturally and politically to overcome. That is a permanent condition, unfortunately, I believe.
Neocons love the idea of an ISIL-dominated northern & central Iraq and Shiite Iran and southern Iraq going to war against one another. Why wouldn't they? They fomented, supplied, and coordinated the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. The Middle East is much more of a tinderbox now than it was then, so the consequences would be far worse, of course, as described above. Juan doesn't mention Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Turkey, and the Gulf States, but they would be affected too, if not directly involved. Obama and the sane party realize all this and are doing the right thing by trying to defuse the situation, while the insane GOP wants to explode it like they did with Iraq in 2003. The neocons and GOP and Likud are all sadistic opportunistic nihilists who think they'll profit from the absolute misery and destruction of an all-out war in the Middle East.
I suppose many people have a primitive way of being in the world, wherein they need to have some anchor stabbing into a spot on the planet that they can call their own, and where they can identify with and relate to 'their kind'. Unfortunately, different people can stab their anchors into the same place, or create competing places even far apart, creating pain and harm where there needs be none. I consider it barbaric to let your primitive instincts - which everyone has - rule your thinking mind and create problems and suffering that need not exist. There's beauty in the real world as it exists every moment, and the past and its sects and divisions can be appreciated and even lauded without giving them full sway to carry the destructive impulse from generation to generation, ruining the chances for a good life for the greatest number of people and disallowing the greater good to exist more fully in a world desperately in need of it.
The conditions are not perfect enough yet. The time is not right.
Surface-to-air missiles. Accurate long-range targeted rockets that some nations in the region possess. And more.
I think this has been the under-the-radar plan all along, outside of Israel's brief fling with Rabin's relative generosity of spirit. It's not destiny, but, to me, a more likely possibility, and definitely what the intentional ratcheting by Israel's organized destabilization has been leading up to.
Thanks for this enlightening post. Your analyses help make better sense of what comes across the news transom. It's both satisfying to know more (and better) and helpful to one's sanity.
Ah, right! I shoulda realized sooner that The Antichrist would speak with a British accent. Lord Blair, as journalist extraordinaire Robert Fisk calls him, fills the bill quite well. And we know as well that Blair is all a-Gog about Bush and Iraq.
"There is no legitimate reason why the Free Syrian Army can not consolidate and build momentum once they demonstrate gains."
The Free Syrian Army runs away when attacks. That's how Syrian Army soldiers characterize the so-called FSA, which is barely in existence and will never coalesce as a fighting force. You really need to do more than try and use correlation or your logic. Read more sources. You are either a hack or a fool. Your choice.
If the military situation dangerously deteriorated in Iraq, with or without U.S. airpower, with IS seriously threatening Baghdad and other Shiite cities and towns especially to the south, and the Iranian army entered in very substantial numbers, effectively defended the Shiite cities and towns, and then began encroaching on Anbar and Mosul (Sunni areas), what might Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do or threaten? Could hostilities break out between Iran and Riyadh? Could the oil fields in each place come under attack and the Gulf become an all-out war zone? Do I worry too much?
You make an excellent point about the young jihadis reacting to shock and awe from earlier previous western imperial jihadis. Round and round it goes, and with news media stupidly blundering along with its usual witless standards.
Oh, man. If this wasn't an American-led Crusade in 2003, it's sure turned into one. Just superimpose, paper doll-like, chain mail and swords on the players, and substitute flying machines for cavalry, and we've got ourselves some real fine Medieval imagery to entertain us from afar. Maybe the problem is that we're both too bored and too insecure.
Thanks to you Dr Cole for presenting William Polk's very excellent summation of the situation in 1948 and the years leading up to it. I read this just after viewing "The Violence of Architecture" which is about Israeli building patterns in the West Bank. This Polk essay and that 25-minute video make for a good juxtaposition. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/2014/06/architecture-violence-2014629113556647744.html
Joel, knowledge comes easy these days. You should try it. You don't think the 12 years of very severe sanctions crippled Iraq, left it hanging on by a thread? Killed a couple hundred thousand of its children (as Sec. of State Madelaine Albright admitted) through 12 years of bombing water purification plants and other infrastructure, barring crucial medicines, and such? Plus the no-fly zones, which had real on-the-ground consequences? Well, it most certainly did, including its armed forces. We left it vulnerable to invasion and collapse, which was the intention. Bush Sr. thought he'd invade his second term, but Clinton won and refused to invade, "only" bombing and sanctioning. That's how it went down. Do you know what's easier than "blaming America"? It's easier to just be ignorant. Unfortunately, that makes you part of the problem and someone to blame.
Yes, good point, Tony. Seeing this in full is important. It's describing the entire 'elephant'. First it was bait and attack in 1991. Then siege warfare for 12 years. Then full-scale invasion-occupation. Now withdraw and retain some control. It's classic how to manage an empire of war and resource plunder.
To me, it seems there's a chance that way down the list of important reasons why Obama chose to aid the Yazidis and other Iraqi minorities is that he wanted to send a signal that shows the Israeli government and people, however subliminally, that there was a limit to how much ethnic cleansing he could allow and tolerate - in Gaza and in the West Bank - before doing something to deter it.
Obama wouldn't attack the IDF, but he might cut off military resupply if the long-threatened expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine begins to occur.
Yes to all you wrote. The American neocons intended to destroy the area for generations to come, and they've succeeded. What they couldn't control, they were more than content to destroy. Israel's supposed to feel safe now that the neocons have succeeded, but I think the opposite will come to pass.
Look at all that damage! It's astonishing that Sawyer would think for even a millisecond that the rockets from Gaza could have caused it. The breadth of blindering ignorance would be unthinkable, and she would be instantly fired, if the U.S. press had any interest in actual journalism. The bible story version of reporting is an incredibly destructive fairy tale, and it shows the U.S. is just as primitive as the people the news media frame as savages. I think the photo used for your posting show who the real savages are. It's not exclusive to Israel, of course, but U.S news reporting would have us think it was universal across the Arabic-speaking world. Thanks for highlighting this example of U.S. cultural bias, Juan. It's sick, and it's a huge problem, as you know.
And it's not for the first time. Brand's a bit of all right, eh?
I'd say exceptionalism is mostly useful myth, useful to the powerful wealthy whose purse strings expand and contract the economy at will and do double duty as marionette strings for our leaders and at least half our citizens, probably a lot more.
There should be no surprise and no doubt as to the ultimate purpose of these training programs. The eternal and unchanging U.S. aim is to have the most radically pro-U.S. leadership in power in any given country. Mr. Polk describes how its training of indigenous special operations forces creates the very thing the U.S. desires the most. It's an organic Lord of the Flies zero sum game that is propagated both intentionally and unconsciously from the American establishment bureaucracy and among the establishment leaders, in every generation and of either major party.
Thank you for this, Juan. I'm crying after this Happy video. The sheer and unbelievable and massive missed opportunity since 1948 is just heartbreaking. People are people; period.