The Nature of Foxes

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 26, 2022 4:08 pm

THE US MILITARY IS OPERATING IN MORE COUNTRIES THAN WE THINK
Jim Lobe

25 Nov 2022 , 1:08 p.m.

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Military officer in training camp for the Sierra Leone army (Photo: US Army Africa)

The US military has engaged in unauthorized assaults in many more countries than the Pentagon has disclosed to Congress, let alone the public, according to a major new report released last week by the Brennan Center for Justice at the College of Law from New York University.

"Afghanistan, Iraq, maybe Libya. If you asked the average American where the United States has been at war for the last two decades, you would probably get this short list," according to the report, Secret War: How the United States Uses Collaborations and proxy forces to wage war under the radar . "But this list is wrong, for at least 17 countries in which the United States has engaged in armed conflict through ground forces, proxy forces, or air strikes."

"This proliferation of secret wars is a relatively recent phenomenon as well as being undemocratic and dangerous," the report's author, Katherine Yon Ebright, wrote in the introduction. "The conduct of undisclosed hostilities in unreported countries contravenes our constitutional design. It results in increased military operations that are invisible to the public, Congress, and even to diplomats tasked with managing US foreign relations."

The 39-page report focuses on so-called "security cooperation" programs authorized by Congress pursuant to the 2001 authorization for the use of military force, or AUFM, against certain terrorist groups. One of these, known as Section 127e, authorized the Department of Defense to "provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups, or individuals engaged in supporting or facilitating ongoing operations authorized by a United States special operations forces unit to combat terrorism."

According to the report, that "endorsement" has been interpreted broadly, or more specifically, too broadly, by the Pentagon. In effect, it has enabled the US military to "develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of and sometimes alongside US forces," and to use armed force to defend their local partners against adversaries (in what the Pentagon terms as "collective self-defense") regardless of whether those adversaries pose a threat to the territory or people of the United States, and, in some cases, whether these adversaries have been officially designated legitimate targets under the 2001 AUFM.

In Somalia in 2016, for example, US forces called for "collective self-defense" to launch an attack against a rival militia from the Puntland Security Force, an elite brigade that had originally been recruited, trained and equipped by the CIA and subsequently taken over by the Pentagon in 2011.

In addition, the Pentagon deployed the PSF, which was largely independent of the Somali government, to fight al-Shabaab and the Islamic State of Somalia, sometimes alongside US forces, for several years before the executive branch appointed al-Shabaab as a legitimate target. It has never so designated the ISS.

Similarly, in Cameroon, US forces were accompanying a partner force on an "advise and assist" mission where they ended up shooting and killing an adversary. The Pentagon has used a Section 127 program there to go after the leaders of Boko Haram, a terrorist group that "has never been publicly identified as a force associated with Al-Qaeda, and therefore a legal target according to the AUFM." 2001," according to the report.

Congress rarely hears about such incidents because, according to the report, the Defense Department insists they are too minor or "episodic" to rise to the level of "hostilities" that would trigger reporting requirements under the Resolution. of War Powers in 1973.

However, an exception was made in October 2017, with four US soldiers deployed to Niger under a related "security cooperation" program known as Section 333, which authorizes the Pentagon to "train and equip" foreign forces at any time. part of the world. However, his presence in the field was authorized under a permanent executive order, or EXORD that allows US forces to engage in combat under particular circumstances, a parallel authority of which Congress had not previously been informed. The incident surprised lawmakers who were unaware that US troops were operating on the ground in Niger.


"I have guys in Kenya, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Tunisia who are doing the same kinds of things as the guys in Somalia, exposing themselves to the same kind of danger, and not just in 127 echoes," boasted Brigadier General Donal Bolduc (ret. ), who commanded the United States Special Forces in Africa until 2017 and is currently running as a Republican for the United States Senate in New Hampshire. "We've had injuries on all the types of missions we do."

The report, which is based on published work by investigative journalists, interviewers with expert officials and congressional staff, official documents and records, as well as the author's legal analysis, identifies 13 countries with section 127e programs in addition to Somalia and Cameroon. . These include: Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. But he stressed that the list is almost certainly not exhaustive.

Fifty countries, from Mexico to Peru in the West to Indonesia and the Philippines (where US forces are known to have participated in combat operations) in the East, and covering 22 countries in North and sub-Saharan Africa alone (not to mention Ukraine) had programs in place. of Section 333 in force in mid-2018, all this according to the report.

Perhaps even more dangerous than Section 127e counterterrorism programs, according to the report, are security cooperation programs conducted pursuant to Section 1202 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018. Using language that mirrors Section 127e, that provision goes beyond the counterterrorism purposes of section 1273e by authorizing "support" to associated forces "engaged in supporting or facilitating irregular warfare operations by United States Special Operations Forces."

"Irregular warfare" is defined by the Department of Defense as "competition...below traditional armed conflict" or "total warfare." Pentagon officials have described Section 1202 as "a very useful tool to enable irregular warfare operations... To deter and defeat revisionist powers and rogue regimes." They also insisted that there is likely to be an increasing reliance on "irregular warfare" as the Department of Defense begins to "prioritize great power competition."

"Broadly speaking, the purpose of (Section) 1202's authority is to take the department's (Section) 127e approach of creating and controlling partner forces and use it against countries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea," according to the report. "Section 1202, in short, raises the same potential as § 127e for hostilities that Congress has not authorized, but with much more serious consequences because the enemy could be a powerful nuclear-armed state."

Given the increased risks, simply repealing or reforming "outdated and overburdened AUFMs… is insufficient," the report concludes. "Congress should repeal or reform Department of Defense security cooperation authorities, until that happens, the nation will continue to be at war, in some cases, without the consent or knowledge of its people."

Jim Lobe is Senior Consultant and Contributing Editor at Responsible Statecraft . Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 2016. Best known for his coverage of the neoconservative movement's influence on US foreign policy, he ran LobeLog.com , which focused primarily on United States policy in the Middle East, from 2007 to 2020. In 2015, LobeLog became the first weblog to win the Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy for distinguished reporting and analysis on issues exteriors. Lobe graduated with highest honors in history from Williams College and received a law degree from UC Berkeley School of Law.

This article was originally published in English by Responsible Statecraft on November 8, 2022 , the translation for Misión Verdad was done by Camila Calderón.

https://misionverdad.com/traducciones/e ... e-pensamos

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 01, 2022 3:54 pm

The Crisis of Western Imperialism and the Imperative of War and Repression
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 30 Nov 2022

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Mural in Caracas, Venezuela (Photo: Erik Cleves Kristenson)

The world as we know it must change. Humanity cannot survive under imperialist and capitalist structures.



Presentation at World Anti-Imperialist Conference

Ajamu Baraka, Member of Secretariat, U.S. Peace Council

Hanoi, Vietnam, November 25, 2022



History demands: Turn Imperialist wars into wars against imperialism


Comrades, brothers, and sisters,

As we gather today in Hanoi, Vietnam, less than two months before we enter 2023, the weight of this historical moment has been reflected in all of the sober analysis and passionate calls to action to meet the epoch-changing circumstances and conditions that what might be the final period of the Western Imperialist crisis that confront collective humanity.

We say final because the intensification of the contradictions of the global colonial/capitalist project that first made its appearance on the world stage in 1492, has reached a point in the historical dialectic where either a new epoch of economic and social conditions will emerge that will transcend and bring into being new ethics, new social-economic conditions, and new social institutions and structures dedicated to life and new forms of existence, or, the desperate attempts by international capital, through its control of various states that give it its enormous power to destroy collective humanity, will do just that, i.e., will destroy human life on our planet before it allows itself to sweep into the dustbin of history.

This is what makes this historic moment more unique than any other historical moment since 1492, when Europe began its conquest of the territory that became the Americas, and created, through that conquest and the African slave trade, the material basis for what also became Europe or the “West.”

That conquest and plantation slavery informed what Marx correctly understood as the pedestal for the emergence of capitalism and the eventual global imposition of the capitalist system through the mechanism of colonialism. It is the contradictions of this historical process that we are forced to grapple with today.

It is this material reality and the contradictory logic of imperialism at the present conjuncture that must inform our understanding of the revolutionary tasks we face.

The international bourgeoisie, under the leadership of U.S.-based capital has declared war on collective humanity — and it does not hide its intent.

Year after year it openly declares its commitment to U.S. and Western global hegemony in documents shared with the public! In its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy papers, it has never wavered from its commitment to global “Full Spectrum Dominance,” which emerged as strategy in the 1990s when the U.S. found itself without an international rival as a result of the successful counterrevolution in the Soviet Union led by the chauvinist “great Russians” that Lenin was always concerned about.

In October of this year, that process continued with the Biden administration’s release of the 2023 National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy documents.

That is why for anti-imperialists there can be no confusion regarding the primary enemy of humanity.

The abstraction of something referred to as “world imperialism” must be rejected. Nowhere there is any equivalency with Western imperialism under the leadership of the U.S., with its over 800 bases and thousands of “defense sites,” and a military budget that is larger than the military budgets of the next nine nations combined. The U.S. and Western imperialism represent the primary global contradiction that constitutes an existential threat to human life on our planet.

The historic task and responsibility for anti-imperialists should be clear for no other reason than that the enemy has declared its tasks, its programs, and its objectives that it intends to realize in order to maintain its capitalist global hegemony and the parasitic colonial/capitalist system.

It is clear who the enemy is, and so we must be clear, too. We are at war with imperialism and our task, therefore, is to win.

For the U.S. Peace Council (USPC), where I serve as a member of its Secretariat, it is also clear that while the USPC continues to build tactical unity with liberal and pro-peace organizations and movements who do not share our analysis of the objective forces that are driving the U.S. and Western war machine, we believe it is also necessary to struggle with those forces in order to move them away from the abstract, idealist framework which can easily be manipulated by imperial propaganda — with Ukrainian war being one of the most dramatic examples.

However, while there is strategic value in waging struggles within the pro-peace and anti-war movements, we understand that the development and consolidation of a more effective anti-imperialist movement that has deep roots in the working classes and anti-colonial movements must be the strategic priority.

And to accomplish that, we must be prepared to successfully wage the ideological war.

Hybrid War:

Hybrid war is real. From illegal economic sanctions, political subversion, and coups to proxy wars and direct military confrontation, the basis for either popular support or lack of opposition (same political effect) from the public can only be understood as a result of one of the most effective elements of hybrid warfare — the ideological weapon.

When George Kennan worked at the U.S. State Department at the end of the second imperialist war, known as World War Two, he concluded that with the emergence of the U.S. and the Soviet Union as the two great powers at the end of the war, representing two different social systems, antagonistic competition would characterize the relationship between the two nations.

As the strategy for managing that competition and, from the perspectives of policy makers in the U.S., the victory of the U.S. over the Soviet Union, Kennan advanced what became known as “containment.”

But unlike the popular belief that containment was mainly a doctrine of military containment, the strategy had at its center an understanding of the fundamental importance of ideology. In other words, Kennan identified ideological struggle as a key component of his strategy of containment.

What is important to note for our conversation here is that the ideological war was not just something that had to be fought abroad, but that it also had a domestic component. The confrontation with the Soviet Union in the battle for global hegemony meant that domestic ideological conformity was also necessary. This was the rationale for the McCarthy period of domestic repression in the U.S. in the early 1950s.

And while we don’t have the time here to go into all of the brilliant ideological innovations produced by imperialism since that time, it is noteworthy to mention that two of the most innovative, interrelated frames that were ever produced were the idea of “humanitarian Intervention” and its corollary the “responsibility to protect.” Purely genius: playing on liberal paternalism in the form of white saviorism and utilizing an almost reflexive anti-authoritarianism — at least as it is expressed supposedly in non-European nations. Authoritarianism is at the center of the capitalist dictatorship in the U.S., but that reality appears to be below conscious awareness.

The Disappearance of Anti-imperialism in the West

Bourgeois propaganda scored an amazing ideological victory with the end of cold war in the 1990s. They were able to almost eliminate the frame, and even the awareness, of imperialism, not only from popular discourse but also from left discourse ! Imperialism was given an innocent and benevolent face with concepts like humanitarian intervention and its corollary, the responsibility to protect.

This while the neoliberal project was consolidating and extracting devastating consequences on the lives and nations in the global South; consequences that were sharpening the ongoing parasitic structural contradictions between the South and Northern colonial nations and would erupt in popular opposition in the 2000s, especially in places like Latin America.

But for the left in the U.S., the ideological weapon resulted in pushing the left to the right . Here is a dramatic, but fairly typical position among a growing sector of the “left” in the U.S. regarding the war in Ukraine and U.S. competition with Russia and China.

In an article in Socialist Forum, one of the publications of the social democratic left, entitled “Breaking Camp: The US Left and Foreign Policy after the War in Ukraine,” Georgetown University Professor Greg Afinogenov argues that “the left” must abandon its opposition to American imperialism in order to confront Russia and China.

Economic sanctions, Afinogenov writes, “will not be enough to compel a retreat, let alone to overthrow Putin, and Ukrainian leaders themselves have lost hope in NATO protection.”

But while many are retreating, we must instead prepare our forces for even more intense struggle.

As the Black Alliance for Peace has correctly stated, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” We do not fight for ideas in people’s heads, we fight the structures of oppression.

Anti-imperialist revolutionaries are rational. We love peace and believe in the possibilities of the human family once freed from the anti-people and anti-life project of capitalism and the rule of the global capitalist dictatorship. But the dictatorship of capital has declared war on the people. And, as a rational people, we must not only respond but must advance our forces strategically to strike at the heart of this monster.

We did not choose this war, but we cannot afford to lose it either.

History demands: Turn Imperialist wars into wars against imperialism

“Now is the time to throw off all hesitation, open up new fronts of struggle and launch every protest, demonstration, and anti-imperialist action – from the ballot box to the barricades – as an act to deepen crisis of imperialism.” (Black is Back Coalition, USA)


Onward to victory,

For the people, for the Planet and for Peace!!

All Power to the people!!


https://www.blackagendareport.com/crisi ... repression
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 31, 2022 2:58 pm

Woman, Life, Freedom…and NATO
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 29, 2022
Ariana Mohammadi

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A superpower in decline still retains a vast appetite for irregular, proxy warfare to slow down the imminent multipolar order. Iran, Russia, China are its big targets and all tools will be employed.

To maintain its global hegemony in the face of a rapidly emerging multipolar world, the US seeks to restrict the redistribution of power in all regions where its clout is foundering.

While Washington can no longer afford the high costs of engaging in direct, hot wars, its military-industrial complex – the powerhouse of the US economy – is likewise unable to afford disengaging from global conflict. Therefore, US military strategy has shifted from waging war to taking its war to its adversaries, via proxies.

The idea is to capitalize on sending weapons and military equipment to US proxies to sink its adversaries in long-term quagmires. The Pentagon’s 21st century wars are “full spectrum,” which means all tools of warfare are employed, including sanctions, disinformation, and sabotage in order to cause major disruptions in an adversary state’s social, political, and economic stability.

Washington’s end-goal is to reshape their adversaries into subordinate client states, or to neutralize them to such extent that they cannot resist US hegemony anymore.

As US congressman Adam Schiff made clear as far back as January 2020, “the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” By February 2022, Russia began fighting back against the US in Ukraine, with no end in sight for that conflict.

Unconventional warfare

The US military-industrial complex has already started planning and promoting China’s war with Taiwan with a projected $22.69 billion budget allocated for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. These “deterrence initiatives” generally include a large military presence in the proxy’s territories, thereby provoking the adversary into a confrontation.

Washington’s strategy towards its long-time Iranian foe has been more complex and involves using sanctions, assassinations, cyberattacks, and information warfare to counterbalance Tehran in West Asia, both directly and via US regional client states.

While the US dream has always been to “Libya-fy” Iran – clearly impossible, else the Pentagon would have already done it – plan B seeks to drag the country into a protracted civil conflict and replicate the Syrian model to partition and plunder the country.

Iran’s military capabilities have grown in unprecedented sophistication and reach over the past years, making it a resilient force to counter NATO’s ambitions in West Asia. It is why Washington’s old all-options-are-on-the-table promise has increasingly morphed into a hybrid warfare scenario.

Propaganda and the Iran protests

Following the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody last September, many Iranians took to the streets to demand justice and accountability. Within a few days of protests, a civil movement focused specifically on women’s rights rapidly took on the characteristics of a hybrid war operating on multiple fronts – from astroturfing on social media to lynching of police officers and security forces by mobs of trained and armed young males.

Western media, which gets most of its cues from anonymous sources, rarely, if at all, reported on these all-male mob attacks, likely because it would have clashed with their charmed narrative of a “feminist revolution.”

Much of the cyber propaganda is largely credited to members of the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), now rebranded as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Once a US-designated terrorist group that fought alongside Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war – for which it is widely reviled among Iranians of all political stripes – the MEK is today staunchly supported by the likes of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, respectively, US national security advisor and Secretary of State for the Trump administration.

The MEK has for years been running troll farms from their “camps” in Albania, and have long formed the backbone of online propaganda against the Iranian state.

In the Fall, a story-line to justify armed conflict – with some hint of femininity – began to be widely propagated in foreign media. Since September, western-funded Persian-language media has openly encouraged Iranians to join the “war” and resort to “honorable sabotage” (خرابکاری شرافتمندانه).

Iran International, a London-based and Saudi-funded news agency invited Virginia Tech academic researcher Shukriya Bradost to opine on the events in Iran. Like Amini, the young woman at the center of the protest movement, Bradost is of Kurdish origin, and called for the killing of Kurds who cooperate with the Iranian government. While affirming that those individuals are now being identified, she added:

“This is a great tactic in the battlefield because it creates fear in the enemy. The fear of being identified will force those who cooperate with the regime to stop cooperation because as we have seen in Bukan and other cities, the fate of such people is what they should get, which is being killed for cooperation with the regime.”

As the killing of police and security forces intensified, another guest, dubbed an “Iranian-Canadian activist” by Canada’s CBC, appeared on Iran International and urged Iranians to kill the police:

“In a war, it is not possible to be bound by morality. We must recognize that we are at war with the Islamic Republic… killing police officers is moral. If you have the opportunity [to kill a police officer] and refuse to do so, that would be immoral.”

Illogically, when later interviewed by CBC News, the same “activist” claimed that Iran’s charges of violence against arrested rioters are false. In the report, she informs her Canadian audience that she “focuses on fact-checking and propaganda … because the regime is often able to ‘distort the truth’ by amplifying false charges.”

Following a series of Iranian arrests and prosecutions, a former Voice of America (VOA) reporter offered bounties on Twitter for the assassination of Iranian lawyers, investigators, and judges involved in protest-related cases, offering payment in bitcoin for the killings, having doxxed their names and addresses online. He later announced on Twitter that he had to remove his posts due to the company’s policies, but that his offer still stands.

The incitement of violence through surrogates is a common tactic in subversive western hybrid warfare, and is intended to either exploit the consequences if security forces respond, or portray them as weak and ineffective if they do not.

Unsurprisingly, the “honorable sabotage” and “moral murder” slogans, along with western media coverage soon lost momentum after Iran resumed nuclear talks with EU countries ravaged by a global energy crisis, and in need of cheap energy.

Employing Azerbaijan in the hybrid war against Iran

After the second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020 between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Iran has increasingly come into conflict with Baku. One point of contention is President Ilham Aliyev’s aspirations for the creation of a Turan Corridor to alter the international borders between Iran and Armenia. Iran has vehemently opposed Baku’s encroachments into the Syunik region in Armenia and has vowed to use any necessary means to prevent changes to its national borders.

The Research Center of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations recently published an article suggesting that the second Karabakh War was a cover for creating NATO’s Turan Corridor in Zangezur, a corridor similar to Hitler’s Danzig Corridor whose creation was ideological and aimed at making geopolitical changes prior to the inception of the Second World War.

The article argues that the Turan Corridor is designed to bring NATO directly onto Iran’s northern borders, Russia’s southern borders, and China’s western borders in Xinjiang – and encircle Russia from the Black Sea, China from the South China Sea, and Iran from the Persian Gulf.

NATO’s Turan Corridor will also weaken Iran, Russia, and China geopolitically and will enable the western military alliance to foment ethnic unrest among Azaris in Iran, Tatars in Russia, and Uyghurs in China.

Inexplicably, at the height of Iran’s “feminist” protests, an ISIS terrorist attack in Shiraz took the life of 15 people. Tensions between Baku and Tehran further intensified after it came to light that the perpetrator entered Tehran from Heydar Aliyev International airport in Baku. Shortly after these reports surfaced, Baku arrested five Azerbaijanis charged with spying for Tehran.

There are also reports dating back over a decade that warn about the presence of the Albania-based MEK in Baku, which has executed bombings and assassinations in Iran over many decades.

Following Aliyev’s recent visit to Albania, unofficial reports have suggested that there may be plans to partially resettle the members of MEK in Baku. Iran has warned that allowing Azerbaijan to become a safe haven for terrorists and malign actors will be seen as an act of war and will bring an end to Aliyev’s rule.

Woman, Life, Freedom…and NATO

The western “Woman, Life, Freedom” construct became even more transparent when thousands gathered in Berlin, the capital of a country that until recently was Europe’s Russian gas hub and resisted toeing NATO’s line on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Tens of thousands of protesters joined forces in Berlin to support Iranian women – all while waving the flag of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (a US-backed Kurdish regime), the flag of the Free Syrian Army, the flag of Iraqi Kurdistan, the flag of Jaish al Adl terrorists who operate on Iran’s Pakistani border, and the flag of Al-Ahwaz, a Saudi-backed terrorist group that seeks to seize southern Iranian territory. The flags of Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and Israel were also among the supporters of “women in Iran.”

And they gathered to narrate a “dream,” a dream in which “… the neighboring countries [of Iran] will have peace,” a dream in which “there is no chaos and conflict in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq,” a dream in which “no one gives weapons to Putin to kill Ukrainians,” a dream in which “oil [reserves] are a blessing, not a blight…,” and “this dream will come true only with toppling the Islamic Republic.”

On the same day, US President Joe Biden promised to support the “Iranian dream.” The United States has once again mobilized its “moderate rebels” and “freedom armies” to turn the blight of oil in another West Asian country into a blessing. This time, however, the global energy crisis is ravaging NATO countries, and the stakes are higher.

A destabilized Iran not only scrambles Russia’s key West Asian strategic partner bordering strategically-vital South Caucasus, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also provides an opportunity to green light NATO’s Turan Corridor with catastrophic geopolitical consequences for Iran, Russia, and China.

Woman, Life, Freedom – whatever its provenance – is now a slogan for irregular warfare in a US adversary state.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/12/ ... mand-nato/

Declassified Intelligence Files Expose Inconvenient Truths of the US-NATO Proxy War in Bosnia
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on DECEMBER 30, 2022
Kit Klarenberg and Tom Secker

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A trove of intelligence files sent by Canadian peacekeepers expose CIA black ops, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

The established mythos of the Bosnian War is that Serb separatists, encouraged and directed by Slobodan Milošević and his acolytes in Belgrade, sought to forcibly seize Croat and Bosniak territory in service of creating an irredentist “Greater Serbia.” Every step of the way, they purged indigenous Muslims in a concerted, deliberate genocide, while refusing to engage in constructive peace talks.

This narrative was aggressively perpetuated by the mainstream media at the time, and further legitimized by the UN-created International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) once the conflict ended. It has become axiomatic and unquestionable in Western consciousness ever since, enforcing the sense that negotiation invariably amounts to appeasement, a mentality that has enabled NATO war hawks to justify multiple military interventions over subsequent years.

However, a vast trove of intelligence cables sent by Canadian peacekeeping troops in Bosnia to Ottawa’s National Defence Headquarters, first published by Canada Declassified at the start of 2022, exposes this narrative as cynical farce.

The documents offer an unparalleled, first-hand, real-time view of the war as it developed, with the prospect of peace rapidly degrading into grinding bloodshed that ultimately caused the painful death of the multi-faith, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

The Canadian soldiers were part of a wider UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) dispatched to former Yugoslavia in 1992, in the vain hope tensions wouldn’t escalate to all-out-war, and an amicable settlement could be reached by all sides. They stayed until the bitter end, long past the point their mission was reduced to miserable, life-threatening failure.

The peacekeepers’ increasingly bleak analysis of the reality on the ground provides a candid perspective of the war’s history that has been largely concealed from the public. It is a story of CIA black ops, literally explosive provocations, illegal weapon shipments, imported jihadist fighters, potential false flags, and stage-managed atrocities.

Read the complete Canadian UNPROFOR cables here. https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uplo ... F-Copy.pdf
See key excerpts of the files referred to in this article here. https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uplo ... age-17.pdf

“Outside interference in the peace process”

It is a little-known but openly acknowledged fact that the US laid the foundations for war in Bosnia, sabotaging a peace deal negotiated by the European Community in early 1992. Under its auspices, the country would be a confederation, divided into three semi-autonomous regions along ethnic lines. While far from perfect, each side generally got what it wanted – in particular, self-governance – and at the least, enjoyed an outcome preferable to all-out conflict.

However, on March 28th, 1992, US Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman met with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, a Bosniak Muslim, to reportedly offer Washington’s recognition of the country as an independent state. He further promised unconditional support in the inevitable subsequent war, if rejected the Community proposal. Hours later, Izetbegovic went on the warpath, and fighting erupted almost immediately.

Received wisdom dictates the Americans were concerned that Brussels’ leading role in negotiations would weaken Washington’s international prestige, and assist in the soon-to-be European Union emerging as an independent power bloc following the collapse of Communism.

While such concerns were no doubt held by US officials, the UNPROFOR cables expose a much darker agenda at work. Washington wanted Yugoslavia reduced to rubble, and planned to bring the Serbs violently to heel by prolonging the war as long as possible. To the US, the Serbs were the ethnic group most determined to preserve the troublesome independent republic’s existence.

These aims were very effectively served by Washington’s absolutist assistance to the Bosniaks. It was an article of faith in the Western mainstream at the time, and remains so today, that Serb intransigence in negotiations blocked the path to peace in Bosnia. Yet, the UNPROFOR cables make repeatedly clear this was not the case.

In cables sent July – September 1993, the time of a ceasefire and renewed attempt to amicably partition the country, the Canadian peacekeepers repeatedly attribute an obstinate character to Bosniaks, not Serbs. As one representative excerpt states, the “insurmountable” goal of “satisfying Muslim demands will be the primary obstacle in any peace talks.”

Various passages also refer to how “outside interference in the peace process” did “not help the situation,” and “no peace” could be achieved “if outside parties continue to encourage the Muslims to be demanding and inflexible in negotiations.”

By “outside” assistance, UNPROFOR of course meant Washington. Its unconditional support for the Bosniaks motivated them to “[negotiate] as if they had won the war,” which they had to date “lost”.

“Encouraging Izetbegovic to hold out for further concessions,” and “clear US desires to lift the arms embargo on the Muslims and to bomb the Serbs are serious obstacles to ending the fighting in the former Yugoslavia,” the peacekeepers recorded on September 7th 1993.

The next day, they reported to headquarters that “Serbs have been the most compliant with the terms of the ceasefire.” Meanwhile, Izetbegovic was basing his negotiating position on “the popular image of the Bosnian Serbs as the bad guys.” Validating this illusion had a concomitant benefit – namely, precipitating NATO airstrikes on Serb areas. This was not lost on the peacekeepers:

“Serious talks in Geneva will not occur as long as Izetbegovic believes that airstrikes will be flown against the Serbs. These airstrikes will greatly strengthen his position and likely make him less cooperative in negotiations.”

Simultaneously, Muslim fighters were “not giving peace talks a chance, just going hell for leather,” and very much willing and able to assist in Izetbegovic’s objective. Throughout the final months of 1993, they launched countless broadsides on Serb territory throughout Bosnia, in breach of the ceasefire.

In December, when Serb forces launched a “major attack” of their own, a cable that month asserted that since early Summer, “most of the Serb activity has been defensive or in response to Muslim provocation.”

A September 13th UNPROFOR cable noted that in Sarajevo, “Muslim forces continue to infiltrate the Mount Igman area and shell BSA [Bosnian Serb Army] positions around the city daily,” the “assessed aim” being to “increase Western sympathy by provoking an incident and blaming the Serbs.”

Two days later, “provocation” of the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) was continuing, although “the BSA is reported to be exercising restraint.” This area remained a key Bosniak target for some time afterwards. The July – September volume concludes with an ominous cable:

“BSA occupation of Mount Igman is not adversely affecting the situation in Sarajevo. It is simply an excuse for Izetbegovic to delay negotiations. His own troops have been the worst violators [emphasis added] of the [July 30th] ceasefire agreement.”

Enter the Mujahideen: “The Muslims are not above firing on their own people or UN areas”

Throughout the conflict, the Bosnian mujahideen worked ceaselessly to escalate the violence. Muslims from all over the world flooded into the country beginning in the latter half of 1992, waging jihad against the Croats and Serbs. Many had already gained experience on the Afghan battlefield through the 1980’s and early 90’s after arriving from CIA and MI6-infiltrated fundamentalist groups in Britain and the US. For them, Yugoslavia was the next recruitment ground.

The Mujahideen frequently arrived on “black flights”, along with an endless flow of weapons in breach of the UN embargo. This started off as a joint Iranian and Turkish operation, with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia, although as the volume of weapons increased the US took over, flying the deadly cargo to an airport in Tuzla using fleets of C-130 Hercules aircraft.

Estimates of the Bosnian mujahideen’s size vary vastly, but their pivotal contribution to the civil war seems clear. US Balkans negotiator Richard Holbrooke in 2001 declared that Bosniaks “wouldn’t have survived” without their help, and branded their role in the conflict a “pact with the devil” from which Sarajevo was yet to recover.

Mujahideen fighters are never explicitly mentioned in the UNPROFOR cables, and neither are Bosniaks – the term “the Muslims” is used liberally. Still, oblique references to the former are plentiful.

A Winter 1993 intelligence report observed that “the weak and decentralized command and control systems” of the three opposing sides produced “widespread proliferation of weapons and the existence of various official and unofficial paramilitary groups, who often have individual and local agendas.” Among those “unofficial” groups was the Mujahideen, of course.

More clearly, in December that year, the peacekeepers recorded how David Owen, a former British politician who served as the European Community’s lead negotiator in the former Yugoslavia, “had been condemned to death for being responsible for the deaths 0f 130,000 Muslims in Bosnia,” his sentence “passed by the ‘Honour Court of Muslims’.” It was understood that “45 people were in place all over Europe to carry out the sentence.”

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Owen certainly wasn’t responsible for the deaths of 130,000 Muslims, as nowhere near that many Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs were killed over the course of the war in total. Nor were the Bosniaks religious extremists with a network of operatives across the continent, on standby to carry out fatwas passed down by an “Honour Court.”

Subsequent to this incident, which has never previously been publicly revealed, there are reports of “the Muslims” preparing false flag provocations. In January 1994, one cable observed:

“The Muslims are not above firing on their own people or UN areas and then claiming the Serbs are the guilty party in order to gain further Western sympathy. The Muslims often site their artillery extremely close to UN buildings and sensitive areas such as hospitals in the hope that Serb counter-bombardment fire will hit these sites under the gaze of the international media.”

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Another cable records how “Muslim troops masquerading as UN forces” had been spotted wearing UNPROFOR’s blue helmets and “a combination of Norwegian and British combat clothing,” driving vehicles painted white and marked UN. The peacekeepers’ Director General feared that if such connivance was to become “widespread” or “be used for infiltration of Croat lines,” it would “greatly increase the prospects for legitimate UN forces to be targeted by the Croats.”

“This may be exactly what the Muslims intend, possibly to provoke further pressure for airstrikes on the Croats,” the cable adds.

That same month, UNPROFOR cables speculated “the Muslims” would target Sarajevo airport, the destination for humanitarian aid to the Bosniaks, with a false flag attack. As “the Serbs would be the obvious culprits” in such a scenario, “the Muslims would gain a great deal of propaganda value from such Serb activity,” and it was “thus very tempting for the Muslims to conduct the shelling and blame the Serbs.”

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US proxy wars, then and now

Against this backdrop, cables related to the Markale Massacre take on a particularly striking character. On February 5th 1994, an explosion tore through a civilian market, causing 68 deaths and 144 casualties.

Responsibility for the attack – and the means by which it was executed – has been hotly contested ever since, with separate official investigations yielding inconclusive results. The UN at the time was unable to make an attribution, although UNPROFOR troops have since testified they suspected the Bosniak side may have been responsible.

Accordingly, cables from this time refer to “disturbing aspects” of the event, including journalists being “directed to the scene so quickly,” and “a very visible Muslim Army presence in the area.”

“We know that the Muslims have fired on their own civilians and the airfield in the past in order to gain media attention,” one concluded. A later memo observes, “Muslim forces outside of Sarajevo have, in the past, planted high explosives in their own positions and then detonated them under the gaze of the media, claiming Serb bombardment. This has then been used as a pretext for Muslim ‘counter-fire’ and attacks on the Serbs.”

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Nonetheless, in its 2003 conviction of Serb general Stanislav Galić for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, the ICTY concluded the Massacre was deliberately perpetrated by Serb forces, a ruling held up on appeal.

The authors of this article make no judgment on what did or did not happen at Markale that fateful day. However, the murkiness surrounding the event foreshadowed pivotal events that justified escalations in every subsequent Western proxy war, from Iraq to Libya to Syria to Ukraine.

Since the onset of the Ukraine proxy war this February 24th, deliberate war crimes, real incidents misleadingly framed as war crimes, and potentially staged events are virtually daily occurrences, along with accompanying volleys of claims and counterclaims of culpability. In some cases, officials on one side have even gone from celebrating and claiming credit for an attack to blaming the other within days, or simply hours. Substance and spin have become inseparable, if not symbiotic.

In years to come, who did what to whom and when could well, in the manner of the ICTY, become matters decided in international courts. There are already moves to set up a similar body once the war in Ukraine is over.

Parliamentarians in the Netherlands have demanded that Vladimir Putin be tried in The Hague. France’s Foreign Ministry has called for a special tribunal to be created. Kiev-based NGO Truth Hounds is collecting evidence every day of purported Russian atrocities across the country, in service of such a tribunal.

There can be little doubt that both Kiev and Moscow’s forces have committed atrocities and killed civilians in this conflict, just as it’s indisputable all three sides in the Bosnian War were guilty of heinous acts, and massacres of innocent and/or defenseless people. It’s reasonable to assume the savagery will become ever-more merciless as the war in Ukraine grinds on, in the precise manner as Yugoslavia’s breakup.

Just how long the fighting will continue isn’t certain, although EU and NATO officials have forecast it could be several years, and Western powers clearly intend to keep the proxy war active for as long as possible. On October 11th, The Washington Post reported that the US privately conceded Kiev was incapable of “winning the war outright,” but had also “ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table.”

This highlights another myth that arose as a result of the Yugoslav wars and which endures to this day. It is the widely-held notion that negotiation and attempts to secure a peaceful settlement only emboldened Serb “aggressors.”

This dangerous myth has served as justification for all manner of destructive Western interventions. Citizens of these countries live with the consequences of those actions to this day, often as migrants after fleeing cities and towns scorched by regime change wars.

Another toxic legacy of the Balkan wars also endures: Westerners’ concern about human life is determined by which side their governments back in a given conflict. As the Canadian UNPROFOR cables demonstrate, the US and its allies have cultivated support for their wars by concealing a reality even their own militaries documented in clinical detail.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sat Mar 11, 2023 3:54 pm

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin—Former Member of Raytheon Board of Directors—Has Awarded Over $30 Billion in Contracts to Raytheon Since His Confirmation in January, 2021
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - March 10, 2023 0

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General Lloyd J. Austin III at his confirmation hearing. [Source: euractiv.com]

[This article was originally published in April, 2021 at which time Raytheon had obtained $2.36 billion in Pentagon contracts since Austin’s appointment. Since that time, CAM has kept tabs on Raytheon’s contracts and the article has been updated.—Editors]

The Pentagon has awarded the defense giant Raytheon Technologies, the second largest weapons-maker in the world, over $30 billion in government contracts since Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III’s confirmation on January 22nd, 2021.

Austin was on Raytheon’s board of directors prior to his confirmation.

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[Source: twitter.com]

Austin at the time had made a commitment to resign from Raytheon’s board and recuse himself from all matters concerning Raytheon for four years and agreed to divest from his financial holdings in the company, amounting to between $500,000 and $1.7 million in stock.

These initiatives, however, have not prevented Austin from using his position to bolster Raytheon’s fortunes. Nor those of other defense contractors on whose board he has sat such as Booz Allen Hamilton, the world’s “most profitable spy organization,” according to Bloomberg News, and Pine Island Capital, a private equity firm that invests in military industry.[1]

At Austin’s nomination hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) questioned him about his ties to Raytheon—whose headquarters are based in Warren’s home district (Waltham, Massachusetts).

A year earlier, Warren had proposed legal changes to strengthen ethics at the Defense Department by blocking the revolving door between the Pentagon and giant defense contractors like Raytheon, including by prohibiting big defense contractors from hiring former Pentagon officials for four years after they leave government.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren [Source: npr.org]

Warren paradoxically voted to confirm Austin’s appointment as Defense Secretary—even though he embodies the danger of the revolving door.

Mark Pocan (D-WI), who with Barbara Lee wrote a letter in November 2020 to President-elect Joe Biden requesting that he nominate a Secretary of Defense with no previous ties to weapons manufacturers, stated that “American national security should not be defined by the bottom lines of Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon.”

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Mark Pocan [Source: wikipedia.org]

With men like Austin at the helm, however, it is very clearly being defined in this way.

Raytheon

Reporting revenues of more than $67 billion in 2022, up from $64 billion in 2021 and $56 billion in 2020, Raytheon began its corporate life in 1922 as the American Appliance Company. It developed refrigerators and radio parts and made advances in vacuum tube technology and related electronics.

The company was drawn into military contracting during World War II when it manufactured magnetron tubes for use in radar systems.

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[Source: radiomuseum.org]

One of Raytheon’s founders, Vannevar Bush, became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and chairman of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War II, which initiated the Manhattan Project that led to the development of the atomic bomb.

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Vannevar Bush [Source: wikipedia.org]

Today, Raytheon is best known as the maker of Patriot and Tomahawk missiles.

It has also been a pioneer in the development of surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles and precision weapons—including guided missiles and laser-guided bombs—and manufactures air-launched nuclear missiles that are part of the U.S. nuclear triad.

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[Source: nytimes.com]
Raytheon’s profits have increased considerably as a result of the Ukraine War: it manufactures Stinger and Javelin missiles, “the world’s premier shoulder-fired anti-armor system” that have been sold to Ukraine along with the Patriot Defense system.

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Ukrainian soldiers use a launcher with US Javelin missiles during military exercises in Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, January 12, 2022. [Source: stripes.com]

Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes said the Ukraine War had boosted demand for Raytheon products as governments raise defense budgets. “We remain in lockstep with the U.S. government to ensure we can continue to support our allies,” Hayes told analysts on the company’s earnings call.

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Greg Hayes: a true merchant of death. [Source: cnbc.com]

Back in 2003, Raytheon put out a press release bragging that half of all air-to-ground precision guided missiles (PGMs) used by coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom were made by Raytheon.

Raytheon was also the first major defense contractor to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia, selling the kingdom over 1,000 cluster bombs designed to maximize civilian casualties between 1970 and 1995. The company hired members of the Saudi Royal Family as consultants, and opened a branch in Riyadh in 2017.

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Opening of Raytheon exhibit in Riyadh. [Source: eyeofriyadh.com]

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[Source: raytheon.com]

After the Yemen war began in 2015, Raytheon, according to an analysis by The New York Times, booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales to the Saudis, causing its stock prices to increase from about $108 to more than $180 per share.

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Protests against Raytheon outside the University of Massachusetts, Lowell where it was recruiting. [Source: masspeaceaction.org]

In 2019, Raytheon sold an estimated $8 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are centrally involved in the war in Yemen.

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Part of a Raytheon-made GBU-12 bomb that struck a vehicle packed with women and children. Above: Remnants of the civilian truck after the airstrike. [Source: nytimes.com]

After an October 2016 Saudi airstrike on a funeral home in Sana’a that killed 140 people and wounded 500 more, human rights workers discovered a bomb shard bearing the identification number of Raytheon.[2]

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A Saudi-led bombing of a funeral hall in Sana’a, Yemen, in 2016 killed at least 140 people and injured another 500. A bomb shard was linked to Raytheon. [Source: nytimes.com]

It was one of at least 12 attacks on civilians that human rights groups tied to Raytheon’s ordnance during the first two years of the war.

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[Source: nytimes.com]

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Blood-stained shirt of three or four-year old child killed in attack using Raytheon laser-guided bombs in Al-Dhihar district, Ibb province, September 24, 2016. [Source: nytimes.com]

In order to secure the lucrative Saudi deals, Raytheon took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials to lobby their former colleagues, and later benefitted by having their former top lobbyist, Mark Esper, appointed as Defense Secretary in June 2019 in a precursor to General Austin’s hiring.

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Mark Esper [Source: wikipedia.org]

Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think-tank, told The Intercept that since “Raytheon manufactures the bomb components that are used in Yemen, [General Austin] bears a direct responsibility [for war crimes and civilian deaths]. He was making money as a board member of this company that is directly responsible for the death and destruction there.”

William Hartung, the director of the arms and security project for the Center for International Policy, said that “picking Austin was tantamount to making the position of Secretary of Defense the Secretary of Defense contractors.”

Profiting Off of Death

Fitting with Hartung’s assessment, Raytheon has benefitted from multi-million-dollar government contracts on a near-daily basis since Austin has taken charge at the Pentagon.

On February 1st, 2021, the company secured a whopping $290,704,534 government contract to produce equipment for depot maintenance facilities and services in support of the F-35 Lightning II, which military analyst Pierre Sprey characterized as “overweight and dangerous.”

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F-35. [Source: nationalinterest.org]

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Pierre Sprey [Source: safeskiescleanwaterwi.org]

Sprey stated that “It’s as if Detroit suddenly put out a car with lighter fluid in the radiator and gasoline in the hydraulic brake lines: That’s how unsafe this plane is” and “full of bugs.”

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An AIM-120 AMRAAM mounted on the wingtip launcher of an F-16 Fighting Falcon. [Source: wikipedia.org]

On March 26th, 2021, Raytheon received another huge contract valued at $518,443,821 to produce advanced medium range air-to-air missiles (AMRAAM), which have been credited with air-to-air kills in conflicts over Iraq, Bosnia, Kashmir and Syria and are being supplied now to Ukraine.

Raytheon has also been awarded massive contracts for the Javelin anti-tank missile; the missile that allegedly “keeps Putin up at night;” and a $32,853,210 contract for autonomous swarm strike loitering munitions, or “suicide drones,” which can be launched from unmanned surface and underwater vessels.

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“Suicide drones” made by Raytheon. [Source: thedrive.com]

On November 30, 2022, Raytheon’s Tewksbury Massachusetts branch was awarded a $1 billion contract for procurement of surface-to-air missile systems, associated equipment, services and spares in “support of the efforts in Ukraine.”

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[Source: mma.prnewswire.com]
The very same day, Raytheon’s McKinney Texas branch was awarded a $9 million contract for upgrading helicopter night vision systems; in mid February 2023, the McKinney branch got a $77 million contract for radar system upgrades for the U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon aircraft.

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Patriot missile defense system sent by the U.S. to Ukraine. [Source: nbcnews.com]

In response to this kind of profiteering, activists with the group Resist and Abolish the Military-Industrial Complex (RAM Inc.) occupied the roof of a Raytheon building in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March 2022 and draped banners over the railing which read: “End All Wars, End All Empires” and “Raytheon Profits From Death in Yemen, Palestine, and Ukraine.”

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[Source: commondreams.org]

One activist said in a statement: “With every war and every conflict, Raytheon’s profits multiply as bombs fall on schools, wedding tents, hospitals, homes, and communities. Living, breathing, human beings are being killed. Lives are being destroyed, all for profit.”

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[Source: commondreams.org]

Promoting More War
Though Austin claims to have recused himself from decisions involving Raytheon, the Pentagon under his direction is very clearly providing his old company with huge contracts on a daily basis that is bolstering its profits and stock price.

Austin furthermore has used his new bully pulpit to advocate for yet greater levels of military spending—to the benefit of Raytheon.

On February 25th, 2021, for example, on a visit to the U.S.S. Nimitz, Austin emphasized the need for U.S. warships throughout the globe to deter security threats—from China to Iran. A week later on a tour of Southeast Asia with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Austin warned about China again and the North Korean nuclear threat and pledged that the U.S. would maintain a robust military presence in the Indo-Pacific.

He further cautioned North Korea that the United States, following military exercises with South Korea, was “ready to fight tonight.”

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General Lloyd Austin III, next to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, speaks at a press conference in Seoul on March 18, 2021. [Source: stripes.com]

In a recent CNN interview, Austin touted U.S. military aid to Ukraine for “changing the dynamics on the battlefield” in the war against Russia, saying that it would in the future allow Kyiv’s forces to “breach Russian defenses.”

“We’re training and equipping several brigades of mechanized infantry — that’s a pretty substantial capability,” Austin said. “In addition to that, additional artillery, and so they’ll have the ability to breach Russian defenses and maneuver, and I think that will create a different dynamic.”

Previously, Austin took to Twitter to reaffirm the U.S.’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and Euro-Atlantic aspirations.” The latter implied the joining of the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which would portend the outbreak of World War III.

In April of last year, Austin announced that the United States would increase its military presence in Germany by about 500 personnel and was scuttling plans introduced by President Donald Trump for a large troop reduction in Europe.

Austin around the same time in Tel Aviv affirmed the U.S. “ironclad commitment” to Israel, which receives a record $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid each year, and on a visit to Afghanistan stated that the Biden administration wanted to see a “responsible end” to the Afghan war, but that the “level of violence must decrease” for “fruitful diplomacy” to have a chance.

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Lloyd Austin at conference with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz on April 11th where Austin affirmed an “iron-clad commitment” to Israel’s security. [Source: defense.gov]

These comments and many others were music to the ears of Raytheon, which gave $506,424 in donations to Biden’s presidential campaign.

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Austin walks on the red carpet in Kabul on March 21st with Acting Afghan Defense Minister Yasin Zia. [Source: apnews.com]

A Soldier’s Soldier

Besides his connection to Raytheon, Austin’s appointment as Pentagon chief was controversial because he had not been retired from the military for the requisite seven years and required a legal waiver.

Traditionally, the role of Defense Secretary is supposed to be a civilian position, ensuring the U.S.’s military apparatus is led not by a warfighter, but a policymaker. That requirement is laid out in the National Security Act of 1947 that established the Defense Department.

Heralded as a “soldier’s soldier” who would endure hardships with his troops, the 6’4” tall Austin graduated from West Point in 1975, and led infantry troops in the capture of Baghdad during the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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General Lloyd Austin III [Source: sandboxx.us]

After a stint commanding the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, Austin was appointed as chief of staff of the U.S. Central Command at McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, a high-tech command post where military officers could watch live imagery on plasma screens and order air-strikes through the Pentagon’s secure internet server.

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General Austin with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a meeting in Kandahar, December 4, 2003. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Groomed for high military command by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011, Austin was appointed as Commanding General of U.S. forces in Iraq in 2010, and Commander of the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is responsible for all military operations in the Middle East, by President Obama in 2013.

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General Austin and Admiral Mike Mullen en route to Baghdad in 2011. [Source: defense.gov]

In this latter capacity, Austin drafted a war plan—approved by Obama—that allowed the U.S. military for the first time to directly provide ammunition and weapons to Syrian opposition forces, who included Islamic jihadists.

President Obama also endorsed General Austin’s idea to increase the air campaign on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.

The result was an increase in civilian deaths. Journalists Anand Gopal and Azmat Khat determined that one in five of the 27,500 coalition air strikes in the 2nd Iraq War resulted in at least one civilian death, more than 31 times the number that was publicly acknowledged.

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A silk rose lies amidst the rubble following a U.S. air strike in Sinjar, Iraq, in November 2015 where four civilians, including a child, were killed. [Source: defensenews.com]

Just this week, before the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Austin made a surprise visit to Iraq, where he assured Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani that the U.S. would sustain its 2,500 occupying troops and continue to advise and train the Iraqi Armed Forces fighting against ISIS.

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U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin embraces Major General Matthew McFarlane during his unannounced trip to Baghdad, Iraq, on March 7, 2023. [Source: cbsnews.com]

Austin’s personal history and connection to the military and Raytheon mark him as a fitting Pentagon chief in an era of destructive militarism and creeping fascism in the U.S.

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Joe Biden and General Lloyd Austin III. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

When civilians no longer control the key institutions of government and war industries ensure the perpetuation of endless wars from which they make obscene profits, the political system can no longer be defined as a democracy.

* The author thanks Puneet Kaur for her research assistance on this article.


1.Secretary of State Antony Blinken was a partner at Pine Island Capital. ↑

2.“People were on fire, and some people were burned alive,” one survivor, 42-year-old Hassan Jubran, told human rights workers. “There were also many children,” he said. “There were three children whose bodies were completely torn apart and strewn all over the place.” ↑

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Sun Mar 12, 2023 5:07 pm

Eight Contradictions of the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’: The Tenth Newsletter (2023)

MARCH 9, 2023

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Boris Mikhailov (Ukraine SSR), Red, 1968–1975.



Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has now moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has been to the symbolic time of the annihilation of humanity and the Earth since 1947. This is alarming, which is why leaders in the Global South have been making the case to halt the warmongering over Ukraine and against China. As Namibia’s Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila said, ‘We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities’.

In line with the alarm from the Doomsday Clock and assertions from people such as Kuugongelwa-Amadhila, the rest of this newsletter features a new text called Eight Contradictions in the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’ (which you can download as a PDF here). It was drafted by Kyeretwie Opoku (the convenor of the Socialist Movement of Ghana), Manuel Bertoldi (Patria Grande /Federación Rural para la producción y el arraigo), Deby Veneziale (senior fellow, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), and me, with inputs from senior political leaders and intellectuals from across the world. We are offering this text as an invitation to a dialogue. We hope that you will read, circulate, and discuss it.

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We are now entering a qualitatively new phase of world history. Significant global changes have emerged in the years since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. This can be seen in a new phase of imperialism and changes in the particularities of eight contradictions.

1. The contradiction between moribund imperialism and an emerging successful socialism led by China.

This contradiction has intensified because of the peaceful rise of socialism with Chinese characteristics. For the first time in 500 years, the Atlantic imperialist powers are confronted by a large, non-white economic power that can compete with them. This became clear in 2013 when China’s GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) overtook that of the United States. China accomplished this in a much shorter period than the West, with a significantly larger population and without colonies, enslaving others, or military conquest. Whilst China stands for peaceful relations, the US has become increasingly bellicose.

The US has led the imperialist camp since World War II. Post-Angela Merkel and with the advent of the Ukraine military operation, the US strategically subordinated dominant sections of the European and Japanese bourgeoisie. This has resulted in weakening intra-imperialist contradictions. The US first permitted and then demanded that both Japan (the third-largest economy in the world) and Germany (the fourth-largest economy) – two fascist powers during World War II – greatly increase their military expenditure. The result has been the ending of Europe’s economic relationship with Russia, damage to the European economy, and economic and political benefits for the US. Despite the capitulation of most of Europe’s political elite to full US subordination, some large sections of German capital are heavily dependent on trade with China, much more than on their US counterparts. The US, however, is now pressuring Europe to downgrade its ties to China.

More importantly, China and the socialist camp now face an even more dangerous entity: the consolidated structure of the Triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan). The US’s growing internal social decay should not mask the near absolute unity of its political elite on foreign policy. We are witnessing the bourgeoisie placing its political and military interests over its short-term economic interests.

The centre of the world economy is shifting, with Russia and the Global South (including China) now accounting for 65% of the world’s GDP (measured in PPP). From 1950 until the present, the US share of the global GDP (in PPP) has fallen from 27% to 15%. The growth of the US’s GDP has also been declining for more than five decades and has now fallen to only around 2% per year. It has no large new markets in which to expand. The West suffers from an ongoing general crisis of capitalism as well as the consequences of the long-term tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

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Maksud Mirmuhamedov (Tajikistan), Hearth, 2020.

2. The contradiction between the ruling classes of the narrow band of imperialist G7 countries and the political and economic elite of capitalist countries in the Global South.

This relationship has undergone a major change from the heydays of the 1990s and the height of US unilateral power and arrogance. Today, there are growing cracks in the alliance between the G7 and Global South power elites. Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, India’s largest billionaires, need oil and coal from Russia. The far-right Modi-led government represents India’s monopoly bourgeoisie. Thus, the Indian foreign minister now makes occasional statements against US hegemony in finance, sanctions, and other areas. The West does not have the economic and political ability to always provide what power elites in India, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey need. This contradiction, however, has not sharpened to the degree that it can be a focal point of other contradictions, unlike the contradiction between socialist China and the US-led G7 bloc.

3. The contradiction between the broad urban and rural working class and sections of the lower petty bourgeoisie (collectively known as the popular classes) of the Global South versus the US-led imperial power elite.

This contradiction is slowly becoming sharper. The West has a great soft power advantage in the Global South amongst all classes. Yet, for the first time in decades, young Africans have come out to support the expulsion of French troops in Mali and Burkina Faso in West Africa. For the first time, the popular classes in Colombia were able to elect a new government that rejected the country’s status as a vassal outpost of US military and intelligence forces. Working-class women are at the forefront of many critical battles of both the working class and society at large. Young people are rising up against the environmental crimes of capitalism. Growing numbers of the working class are identifying their struggles for peace, development, and justice as explicitly anti-imperialist. They are now able to see through the lies of US ‘human rights’ ideology, the destruction of the environment by Western energy and mining companies, and the violence of US hybrid war and sanctions.

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Zayasaikhan Sambuu (Mongolia), Survivors, 2013.

4. The contradiction between advanced rent-seeking finance capital versus the needs of the popular classes, and even some sections of capital in non-socialist countries, regarding the organisation of societies’ requirements for investment in industry, environmentally sustainable agriculture, employment, and development.

This contradiction is a result of the decline in the rate of profit and the difficulty of capital to increase the rate of exploitation of the working class to a sufficient level able to finance increasing investment requirements and remain competitive. Outside of the socialist camp, in almost all of the advanced capitalist countries and in most of the Global South – with some exceptions, especially in Asia – there is an investment crisis. New types of firms have arisen that include hedge funds such as Bridgewater Associates and private equity firms such as BlackRock. ‘Private markets’ controlled $9.8 trillion worth of assets in 2022. Derivatives, a form of fictitious and speculative capital, are now worth $18.3 trillion in ‘market’ value but have a $632 trillion notional value – a value more than five times higher than the world’s total actual GDP.

A new class of information technology-based network-effect monopolies, including Google, Facebook/Meta, and Amazon – all under full US control – have emerged to attract monopoly rents. US digital monopolies, under the direct supervision of US intelligence agencies, control the information architecture of the whole world, outside of a few socialist and nationalist countries. These monopolies are the basis for the rapid expansion of US soft power in the last 20 years. The military-industrial complex, the merchants of death, also attract growing investments.

This intensified speculative and monopoly rentier accumulation phase of capital is deepening a strike by capital against necessary social investments. South Africa and Brazil have seen dramatic levels of deindustrialisation under neoliberalism. Even advanced imperialist countries have ignored their own infrastructure, such as the electricity grid, bridges, and the railway. The global elite has engineered a tax strike by providing huge reductions in tax rates and taxes as well as legal tax havens for both individual capitalists and their corporations to increase their share of surplus value.

Tax evasion by capital and the privatisation of large swathes of the public sector have decimated the availability of basic public goods like education, healthcare, and transportation for billions of people. It has contributed to Western capital’s ability to manipulate and gain high interest income from the ‘manufactured’ debt crisis facing the Global South. At its highest level, hedge fund profiteers like George Soros speculate and destroy the finance of entire countries.

The impact on the working class is severe, as their work has become increasingly precarious and permanent unemployment is destroying large sections of the world’s youth. A growing section of the population is superfluous under capitalism. Social inequality, misery, and desperation are abundant.

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Owusu-Ankomah (Ghana), Bapende, 1993.

5. The contradiction between the popular classes of the Global South and their domestic political and economic power elites.

This manifests quite differently by country and region. In socialist and progressive countries, contradictions amongst the people are resolved in peaceful and varied ways. However, in several countries in the Global South where the capitalist elite has been fully in bed with Western capital, wealth is held by a small percentage of the population. There is widespread misery amongst the poorest people, and the capitalist development model is failing to serve the interests of the majority. Due to the history of neocolonialism and Western soft power, there is a decidedly pro-West middle-class consensus in most of the large Global South countries. This class hegemony of the local bourgeoisie and the upper stratum of the petty bourgeoisie is used to block the popular classes (who make up most of the population) from accessing power and influence.

6. The contradiction between US-led imperialism versus nations strongly defending national sovereignty.

These nations fall into four main categories: socialist countries, progressive countries, other countries rejecting US control, and the special case of Russia. The US has created this antagonistic contradiction through hybrid warfare methods such as assassinations, invasions, NATO-led military aggression, sanctions, lawfare, trade war, and a now incessant propaganda war based on outright lies. Russia is in a special category, as it suffered more than 25 million deaths at the hands of European fascist invaders when it was a socialist country. Today, Russia – which notably has immense natural resources – is once again a target for complete annihilation as a state by NATO. Some elements of its socialist past are still present in the country, and there remains a high degree of patriotism. The US’s goal is to finish off what it started in 1992: at a minimum, to permanently destroy Russia’s nuclear military capacity and install a puppet regime in Moscow in order to dismember Russia in the long term and replace it with many smaller, permanently weakened vassal states of the West.

Image
Taisia Korotkova (Russia), Technology, 2007

7. The contradiction between the millions of discarded working-class poor in the Global North versus the bourgeoisie who dominate these countries.

These workers are showing some signs of rebellion against their economic and social conditions. However, the imperialist bourgeoisie is playing the white supremacist card to prevent a larger unity of working people in these countries. At this moment, workers are not consistently able to avoid falling prey to racist war propaganda. The number of people present at public events against imperialism has diminished precipitously over the last thirty years.

8. The contradiction between Western capitalism versus the planet and human life.

The inexorable path of this system is to destroy the planet and human life, threaten nuclear annihilation, and work against the needs of humanity to collectively reclaim the planet’s air, water, and land and stop the nuclear military madness of the United States. Capitalism rejects planning and peace. The Global South (including China) can help the world build and expand a ‘zone of peace’ and commit to living in harmony with nature.

Image
Victor Ehikhamenor (Nigeria), Lagos Hide and Seek, 2014.

With these changes in the political landscape, we are witnessing the rise of an informal front against the US-dominated imperialist system. This front is constituted by the convergence of:

*Popular sentiment that this violent system is the main enemy of the people of the world.
*Popular desires for a more just, peaceful, and egalitarian world.
*The struggle of socialist or nationalist governments and political forces for their sovereignty.
*The desires of other Global South countries to reduce their dependence on this system.

The main forces against the US-dominated imperialist system are the peoples of the world and the socialist and nationalist governments. However, there must be space provided for integrating governments that wish to reduce their dependency on the imperialist system.

The world currently stands at the beginning of a new era in which we will witness the end of the US global empire. The neoliberal system is deteriorating under the weight of numerous internal contradictions, historical injustices, and economic unviability. Without a better alternative, the world will descend into even greater chaos. Our movements have revived hope that something other than this social torment is possible.

Image
Norma Bessouet (Argentina), Abracadabra, 1947.

We hope that Eight Contradictions in the Imperialist ‘Rules-Based Order’ will stimulate debate and discussion and assist us in our broader Battle of Ideas against toxic social philosophies that seek to suffocate rational thought about our world.

Warmly,

Vijay

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 14, 2023 3:00 pm

THE TRAP BEHIND THE "RULES-BASED INTERNATIONAL ORDER"
Mar 13, 2023 , 6:01 p.m.

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The "global power", in reference to the United States, would prefer that there was no alternative to the unilateral imposition of the rules of the game in today's world (Photo: File)

The political manipulation of the rules governing international relations has entered a new phase, and the United States is being its main protagonist, with a kind of legal nihilism that has the mantra of "rules-based international order" in most of the world. speeches by its officials.

In foreign policy, the White House has been supplanting the precepts of the United Nations (UN) Charter, a basic document that serves as a general framework for international relations between States since 1945, by its own designs in terms of praxis. and of speech. This has been going on since the 1990s, during the height of the American unipolar moment, but has been brewing more vigorously since the 2010s.

Every time China, Russia, Iran and/or Venezuela make decisions that lead to steps to protect their sovereignties or in favor of a dynamic that is contrary to the unipolar commandment, Washington declares that the so-called "rules-based order" is injured, even when there is no conceptual clarification of said locution nor is it circumscribed in any text of current international law.

If we take into account that the current world order is based on norms of international law (which are mandatory, as is known), based on the UN Charter, and on applicable non-binding international rules that contain a normative element, such as the international rules provided for in the documents of intergovernmental organizations and conferences, interstate political agreements and other mutually accepted rules, formed in the contemporary practice of international relations, then the American adage loses meaning within the framework of all provisions.

But White House officials are used to placing themselves above the law, "claiming that they are the law," as Vasily Nebenzya, Russia's permanent representative to the UN, put it. In fact, it has been the Russians who have been the most critical of this conception.

During the G20 meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov argued that "in order to provide ideological and political 'cover' for its aggressive steps, the West is promoting the neocolonial concept of 'rules-based order'", and judges that " meanwhile, the practical application of these 'rules' undermines the fundamental principles of the UN Charter, including the sovereign equality of States."

The People's Republic of China, through a fundamental document from its Foreign Ministry, has a similar vision: "Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the United States has exacerbated the bloc policy and fueled conflict and confrontation. It has exaggerated the concept of national security, has abused export controls and imposed unilateral sanctions on others, has taken a selective approach to international law and standards, using or discarding them as it sees fit, and has tried to impose rules that would serve their own interests in the name of defending a 'rules-based international order'".

It could be argued that these "norms", as Lavrov did before the Russian Duma, which are not very clear but serve as a catchphrase in multilateral forums and political speeches, were formulated by Washington, Brussels and London, adapted to their needs .

This imposition of the will of one State on another would be a norm of the "order" promoted by the Western powers, according to the praxis of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU). The recognition of Juan Guaidó as the "interim president" of Venezuela, to name another example , plus the kidnapping and theft of Venezuelan assets in the United States (CITGO) and England (gold reserves), together establish in practice what this "rules-based order", since none of these actions comply with international law and were conducted within the framework of a political effort (regime change).

The same is reinforced by the EU and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), entities that in a joint declaration on January 10 insisted on using all economic, political and military means so that the rest of the world behaves accordingly. accordance with the precepts of that "rules-based international order".

It seems, then, that a global system is described where certain "values" govern, fundamentally in the political and economic field with a legal name that is not registered in international precepts. Liberal democracy and the free market economy would be the "ideals" that drive this vision, connected to the globalized version of international trade.

But the reality is very different. There is no "world order" as such, no "global threat" facing all the countries on the planet (as The Wall Street Journal reminds us ), no interconnected international trade (especially after Washington's sanction frenzy against the rest of the world). of the world and the consequences of the covid pandemic). That "rules-based order" rather seeks to shape the entire globe according to the prerogatives of the US unipolar aegis, after all.

It is an "order" discursively constituted under the fallacy that the world is still governed by the unipolar moment of the United States, but that it is sustained under neocolonial practices (Lavrov dixit) and illegal in the eyes of International law.

That unipolar circumstance no longer exists, it gave way to a new era, in which emerging powers such as China and Russia make decisions that affect the different global dynamics and, at the same time, defend the terms proposed by the UN Charter, for example. Every time they defend spaces for agreement and dialogue between nations, under the assumption that all countries are equal to each other and there is no subjugating power over a weaker one.


However, the United States insists on directly influencing the rest based on its decadent hegemony, with its main weapon -the dollar- as the main tool for political manipulation. American capital still has its tentacles ready to obtain higher profits and eager to capture markets taking advantage of the geopolitical and economic earthquakes of the day: the case of Western Europe is luminous if we take into account that the sabotage in Russian-Russian energy cooperation The European market led to the capture of that market and, therefore, a profit surplus on the part of the largest North American oil and gas companies.

In addition to the gigantic North American country, other partner states defend tooth and nail the diffuse conception of "rules-based order", integrated into their foreign policy narratives, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany , and we already mentioned that both the EU and NATO see it as a real benchmark in its principles, even without binding legality.

Perhaps the most important thing here is to oppose the global changes that have been taking place for a few years, with an unprecedented American excess leading this front, and for this reason a notion of a world vision that is already outdated and does not respond is imposed. to the world reality of today.

The international system born in 1945, with its institutions and regulations, is far from what is established today. The US effort to frame its own "norms" as international rules and impose them on other countries has damaged the international system it has helped build, attempting to replace it with the so-called "rules-based international order." The recurring tactic has been to "change the rules to make life easier for yourself and harder for others", and to introduce "the law of the jungle", "where the mighty is right and the big one intimidates the small": this was described by the Chinese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Xie Feng in July 2022.

A paper by a group of Russian academics examines this conceptuality in the light of international law and concludes the following:

it would imply the erosion of the normative hierarchy in the international legal system and the diminution of the legitimacy of existing legal procedures. As a factor undermining international peace and security, the concept of 'rules-based order' is negative, since it points to the rejection of the existing values ​​of the international legal system in favor of questionable alternatives. Finally, as an institutional challenge, the concept of 'rules-based order' acquires a negative meaning if it is realized de facto through some international agreements, contacts or associations, thus claiming universality”. 'rules-based order' is negative, as it points to a rejection of the existing values ​​of the international legal system in favor of questionable alternatives. Finally, as an institutional challenge, the concept of 'rules-based order' acquires a negative meaning if it is realized de facto through some international agreements, contacts or associations, thus claiming universality”. 'rules-based order' is negative, as it points to a rejection of the existing values ​​of the international legal system in favor of questionable alternatives. Finally, as an institutional challenge, the concept of 'rules-based order' acquires a negative meaning if it is realized de facto through some international agreements, contacts or associations, thus claiming universality”.

Finally, the degradation of global institutions, the erosion of the principles of collective security, the replacement of international law by the so-called "norms", would be aimed at, as defined by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a debate at the Valdai Club , "an attempt to establish a rule: that the powers, I mean the global power, can live without any rules at all, and that they are allowed to do what they want, get away with it."

The "global power", in reference to the United States, would prefer that there was no alternative to the unilateral imposition of the rules of the game in today's world, however, the arrival of another order that is not based on "American rules". finds a contention in the form of imperial wars and concepts that face the legal and even theoretical vacuum in order to maintain an unprecedented share of power. It is a trap into which only those countries already engulfed by the discursive logic and US subjugation fall.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... -en-normas

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Wed Mar 15, 2023 2:34 pm

Forever Wars vs. Armageddon
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 15 Mar 2023

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The call for the U.S. to end military involvements is often made in order to advocate for new wars against more powerful countries. It appears that the only choices are forever wars or the end of the world.

While the world’s attention is focused on the US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, 900 US troops continue to occupy Syria, as they have since 2017 , and 2,000 remain stationed in Iraq, 20 years after the US attacked, overthrew its government, and hung its president. Around 500 have been in Somalia since Biden redeployed them in June 2022.

On March 8, the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees voted for resolutions to repeal the 1991 and 2002 Authorizations of Military Force (AUMFs) against Iraq, but that was hardly a victory for the antiwar community because US troops remain with the acquiescence of the current Iraqi government, and even so, it’s not clear that the Senate and House will pass the resolutions.

Also on March 8, the House of Representatives voted down House Concurrent Resolution 21 to withdraw all US troops from Syria within 180 days in accordance with the 1973 War Powers Act, which states that US armed forces cannot be sent to war unless Congress declares war or unless a national emergency is created by attack on the US.

The resolution’s advocates argued that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed 22 years ago, after 9/11, does not legally justify ongoing US wars. Opponents of the resolution argued that ISIS remains a threat and the 22-year-old AUMF is still legally valid.

According to the “Costs of War Project” at Brown University, the US has invoked the post-09/11 AUMF as the legal basis for air strikes and operations in eight countries, detention in 1 (Guantanamo, Cuba), and support for “counter terrorism partners” in 13.

Resolution 21

In the debate preceding the vote on Resolution 21, no one mentioned the military industrial motive for continuing the war, but South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson did note that withdrawal would mean losing the Al-Omar oil field , the largest in Syria and the site of the largest US base there. Of course, Wilson didn’t say that would mean returning Syria’s oil to Syria. He said, “Upon withdrawal terrorists will also have unfettered access to the Omar oilfield.”

No one pointed out that Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” making the US occupation an international crime, because US officials don’t talk about that. International law is for other nations to obey.

Florida Republican Matt Gaetz explained why he had introduced the resolution:

“Most Americans don't know a single Syrian. And so people watching this debate might wonder how has it come to be that Syria has become the great platform of great power competition in the world. It begins in 2011, during the Arab Spring, when Assad, who is undeniably a madman, and a despot, opens fire on his own people protesting. Then part of the Syrian army defects, they engage in warfare against Assad, and all of a sudden, they’ve got a whole lot of weapons and money being sent from the rich Gulf monarchies through Jordan, in Syria.

“So Iran is not just going to watch this Assad's their ally, they activate Hezbollah, they then invade Syria. So now you've got Jordan, the Gulf monarchies, Iran, but wait, Russia is pitching their vision of the world as a regime preservation force, whether you're Maduro or Assad, so they get involved, and what do they get for their time, a warm water port in the eastern Mediterranean.

“So we've got Russia, the Gulf monarchies. Israel starts to get worried about Hezbollah and Iran. So Israel cuts a deal with Russia to keep Iran out of southern Syria. And if it doesn't get any worse than that. Now, all of a sudden, you've got the Kurds who declare war on Syria. And it makes it a little messy, that the Kurds are also in conflict with Turkey, which is a NATO ally.

“And then somehow, the United States in 2015 says, ‘You know what, we need to get involved in this mess in Syria.’ And since we've been there, we have seen Americans die, we've seen 10s of billions of dollars wasted.

And what is hilarious about the 2001 AUMF that the neoconservatives wave around like some permission slip for every neoconservative fantasy of turning an Arabian desert into a Jeffersonian democracy, is that that very 2001 AUMF would justify attacking the people that we're fighting against, and the people we're funding, because both have ties to al Qaeda, and of course, the 2001 AUMF dealt with al Qaeda, all this talk about a reemergence of ISIS.

“I would encourage my colleagues to go read the Inspector General's report of the last quarter that indicates that ISIS is not a threat to the homeland. And with the Turks conducting operations in Syria, against ISIS, with Assad and Russia having every incentive to create pressure on ISIS. I do not believe that what stands between a caliphate and not a caliphate are the 900 Americans who have been sent to this hellscape with no definition of victory, with no clear objective, and purely existing as a vestige to the regime change failed foreign policies of multiple former presidents.”

Gaetz introduced the 2016 LA Times article headlined, “In Syria militias armed by the Pentagon, fight those armed by the CIA .”

Montana Democrat, Ryan Zinke, responded that we have to fight ISIS in Syria, or fight them in the streets here:

“But there is no doubt that Syria also remains a center for radical Islamic forces and terrorism, like ISIS, like PKK. These are organizations that will never stop ever. They are committed to destroy this nation and our allies, and we should be aware of their objectives. Lastly, the hard truth is this. Either we fight him in Syria, or we'll fight them here, either we fight and defeat them in Syria, or we'll fight in the streets of our nation.”

Gaetz’s argument for withdrawal was hardly ideal, but his response to Zinke was apt:

“My patriotic colleague, Mr. Zinke of Montana gave up the game when he said ISIS will never be gone. So presumably the position of those holding that viewpoint is that we have to stay in Syria forever, maybe make it the 51st state.”

In the most disturbing and ominous moment of the hearing, Florida Republican Anna Polina said we need all the troops we’ve got to go up against China:

“We need to be focusing on his bigger issues like China. Make no mistake if we take China at their word, a peer to peer fight is coming, and it will require 100% of our military.”

In other words, we have to get out of all these “forever wars” to prepare for Armageddon. That sentiment was confirmed in a report in the military publication Task and Purpose headlined, “Military buying more missiles and other weapons to fight China, Russia .”

The House ultimately voted the resolution down 103 to 321, with 47 Republicans voting yes, 171 no, while 56 Democrats voted yes, 150 no, and 11 congresspersons did not vote. The Democrats’ House Progressive Caucus reportedly endorsed a yes vote, but the caucus claims 101 members, so barely more than half, at best, actually voted for the resolution.

Some resistance to some US wars is better than none, but in Congress, for now, that’s as good as it gets.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/forev ... armageddon

On the Twentieth Anniversary of Invasion of Iraq It Must Be Clear: The U.S. is the Greatest Threat To World Peace and Collective Humanity
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist 15 Mar 2023

History teaches that the greatest threat to peace today is the United States. No other nation creates dangers as great as those emanating from the U.S. commitment to the doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance.

As anti-imperialist and Anti-war activists are preparing to mobilize in Washington D.C. on the 20th anniversary of the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and its Western colonial allies, it is imperative that authentic anti-imperialist forces and those earnestly committed to an Anti-war principle recognize two things: the U.S. based transnational ruling class is fully invested in the doctrine of U.S. “Full Spectrum Dominance,” and as a consequence the U.S. state has become an existential threat to collective humanity on our planet.

The recognition of these two “facts” are the only basis of a politics that can unite Anti-war and anti-imperialists and mitigate the ideological and political confusion that permeates progressive politics in the U.S. that has resulted in progressives and even self-defined radicals supporting pro-imperial policies under the guise of humanitarianism and anti-authoritarianism. The Eurocentric and social-imperialist left has played a nefarious role also providing left ideological and moral cover for those same politics under the guise of opposing “authoritarianism,” usually in the global South, and in Russian or Chinese imperialism.

There is a discussion among left forces in the West that poses as a debate point the question of whether or not Western colonial/imperialist powers represent the main global contradiction or should an equal moral and political focus be on all “imperialisms,” meaning great powers such as Russia and China and nations seen as “sub-imperialist.”

This debate has an abstract character to it that reflects the kinds of speculations that petit-bourgeois forces engage in that are completely divorced from the terrible realities that one force – the Pan European Colonial/capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy – has unleashed on global humanity, beginning in 1492 when European barbarians started to spill out of Europe into what became the Americas.

The invasion and conquering of the peoples of the Americas and the international slave trade shifting to the Americas, which resulted in millions of Africans providing free labor on indigenous lands, literally created Europe, as Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Gerald Horne and other anti-colonial scholars have pointed out.

The material consolidation of European rule in the form of colonial and settler-colonial imperialism was consolidated in major parts of the world, though not all, by the latter part of the 19th century. The “internal” competition among those colonial powers and confrontations with the other existing empires created the competitive redivision of the world that after two horrendous wars in the first half of the 20th century that cost the lives of millions, produced a relative global equilibrium between the colonial/capitalist camp now under the hegemonic leadership of the United States settler state and the Soviet Union. The bipolar world constituted the main configuration of power relationships for most of the 20th century, even with the de-colonizing non-aligned movement of the global South and the entry of China with the Chinese revolution of 1949.

The Chinese project of national development and the successful right-wing counter-revolution in the Soviet Union shaped the politics of last decade of the 20th century and the context of this century, including the absence of a countervailing restraint on the U.S., and an arrogant triumphalism represented in the delusional positions of Francis Fukuyama and the “Project for a New American Century.” It is the unrestrained colonial hubris of the U.S. that drove its disastrous belief that it could conduct two simultaneous wars that led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with an operational defeat in both theaters.

Yet, the expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe continued and its use as an expansionary force for Western imperialism was normalized. The U.S. military budget expanded to obscene levels that exceeded its military spending at the height of the Vietnam war. The U.S. basing system expanded and was strengthened with the creation of the U.S. African Command and the Obama Administration’s initiation of the “pivot to Asia” that generated significant support for the reorganized Indo-Pacific Command. Coups were executed and/or supported over the last two decades, and especially under the Obama Administration, in Honduras, Egypt, and Ukraine. Attempted and constitutional coups were carried out against Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Iran. Wars were initiated with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen with a greenlight given to slaughter Palestinians and for Rwanda and Uganda to wage war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and against political dissidents in Mozambique. More than forty nations are under crippling economic sanctions by the U.S. and the Western powers.

With over 800 to perhaps 1,000 military installations, depending on how one defines bases and installations, a military budget of over $800 billion that exceeds the next nine nations combined, and a national security strategy that openly declares that its strategic objective is “Full Spectrum Dominance,” we are supposed to be debating the primary contradiction and principal threat to humanity?

For the African working classes and other colonized and exploited peoples, the “debate” is one that only the comfortable petit-bourgeois, Eurocentric, national chauvinist, social imperialist left engages in. The rest of us do not have that luxury. That is not to say that there are not serious questions that have been produced by the specific geo/political and economic realities of this conjuncture. We say that despite the complexities of the moment, what is consistent is the hegemony of U.S. criminality on a global scale. Instigating a war in Europe, carrying out a terrorist attack on Nord Stream pipelines, antagonizing the Chinese on Taiwan and engaging in the reckless talk of winning a nuclear war reflect the dangerous psychopathology of decision makers in the U.S. that make them a threat to everyone.

As we come off a National Day of Action Against Police Terror in the settler-colonial state of the U.S., conscious Africans understand our relationship to the colonial state domestically and abroad. We understand that the war being waged against the Palestinians, the subversion against the revolutionary nations of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, Cop City in Atlanta and the militarization of the domestic army known as the police, the strengthening of AFRICOM, the proxy war in Ukraine, are all part of the commitment to Full Spectrum Dominance. We are clear.

This is what we are reminded of on this anniversary of the U.S. war against the people of Iraq. As we said in the Black Alliance for Peace when the second stage of the manufactured war in Ukraine that began in 2014 was launched last February, to understand Ukraine we should de-center Ukraine and focus on the geo-strategic interests of imperialism, U.S. and Western imperialism!

Can this approach be the basis of a possible strategic and tactical unity between the Anti-war peace movement and the anti-imperialist movement? Perhaps. We say the Black radical peace tradition offers a way.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy."

Today, that is still the call and must be the commitment. We want peace, but we understand there will be no peace without justice and justice means altering the international balance of forces away from the hegemony of the European colonial/imperialist states and their ruling classes.

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Mon Mar 20, 2023 2:33 pm

The State of Democracy in the United States: 2022
mfa.gov.cn | Updated: 2023-03-20 11:01


Contents

I. Preamble

II. American democracy in chronic ills

1. American democracy in further decline

2. Political polarization intensified by partisan fights

3. Money politics surged

4. "Freedom of speech" in name only

5. The judicial system blind to public opinion

6. Americans increasingly disillusioned with American democracy

III.  The United States' imposition of "democracy" has caused chaos around the world

1. Foreign policy held hostage by political polarization

2. Inciting confrontation and conflict in the name of democracy

3. Doubling down on unilateral sanctions

4. Undermining democracy in international relations

5. Foisting a trumped-up narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism"

IV. Conclusion

I. Preamble

In 2022, the vicious cycle of democratic pretensions, dysfunctional politics and a divided society continued in the United States. Problems such as money politics, identity politics, social rifts, and the gulf between the rich and poor worsened. The maladies afflicting American democracy deeply infected the cells of US politics and society, and further revealed US governance failure and institutional defects.

Despite mounting problems at home, the US continued to behave with a sense of superiority, point fingers at others, usurp the role of a "lecturer of democracy", and concoct and play up the false narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism". To serve the interests of none other than itself, the US acted to split the world into two camps of what it defined as "democracies and non-democracies", and organized another edition of the so-called "Summit for Democracy" to check how various countries had performed on meeting US standards for democracy and to issue new orders. Be it high-sounding rhetoric or maneuvers driven by hidden agenda, none can hide the real designs of the US — to maintain its hegemony by playing bloc politics and using democracy as a tool for political ends.

This report collects a multitude of facts, media comments and expert opinions to present a complete and real picture of American democracy over the year. What they reveal is an American democracy in chaos at home and a trail of havoc and disasters left behind as the US peddled and imposed its democracy around the globe. It helps remove the facade of American democracy for more people worldwide.

II. American democracy in chronic ills

The US refuses to acknowledge the many problems and institutional crises confronting its democracy at home and stubbornly claims to be the template and beacon of democracy for the world. Such imperiousness perpetuates the ills of its democracy and causes dire consequences for other countries.

1. American democracy in further decline

The functioning of American democratic institutions may look as lively as a circus, with politicians of all stripes showing off themselves one after another. But however boisterous the show is, it cannot hide the lethargy in addressing the long-standing, grave problems. Le Monde points out that 2022 is a year of doubt for US democracy. A silent civil war has taken root in the US, and repairing damaged democracy requires a sense of nation and public interest, both of which are currently lacking. This is sad for a country that has long held itself up as a model. In 2022, the Swedish think tank International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance added the US to its "list of regressive democracies".


The Capitol Hill in Washington DC, Dec 4, 2019. [Photo/Xinhua]
Two years after the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021, the US system of democracy still has difficulty in learning the lessons, as political violence continued to grow and deteriorate. The Washington Post and The New Yorker observe that American democracy is in a worse state than ever before, with the congressional riots fully exposing social rifts, political divisions and rampant misinformation. The two parties, although not unaware of the age-old ills of American democracy, have neither the resolve nor the courage to pursue changes, given the increasingly polarized political atmosphere, as well as their focus on party interests.

In 2022, the US Congress was brought into another paralysis, not by riots, but by partisan fights. The farce of failing to elect the 118th House speaker lasted four days and a decision was only reached after 15 rounds of voting. In the last round, divisions were such that Republicans and Democrats voted strictly along party lines. The New York Times warned that Congress could see repeated chaos like this over the next two years. Brad Bannon, president of a US political consultancy, put it bluntly, "The impasse in the US House of Representatives over the election of the Speaker is another demonstration of the decline in our political institutions."

This has aroused concerns among the general public. The Brookings Institution concludes in a 2022 report that the once proud American democracy is facing a systemic crisis and is accelerating its decline. The impact is spreading to all fronts in domestic politics, the economy and society, posing a mortal threat to the legitimacy and health of capitalism. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns in a report that American democracy is at a dangerous inflection point, declining faster as the inherent ills of American capitalism worsen. Multiple challenges such as voting restrictions, election fraud, and loss of trust in government are accelerating the disintegration of American democracy. Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, writes that America's dysfunctional politics raises fears that the 2024 presidential election would again provoke deadly violence in the country. A large number of hot button issues continued to provoke public anger and questions on the legitimacy of the US political establishment. Many worried about how long American democracy could continue to function.

2. Political polarization intensified by partisan fights

With radical factions rising in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, the two were increasingly at odds in many aspects, such as voter base, ideology and identity. As a result, the traditional inter-party balance based on policy compromise became more difficult to sustain. The two parties saw each other not only as political opponents, but also as a threat to the country. The New York Review of Books points out that America is already "a binational state" with the Republicans and Democrats leading two sharply opposed national communities that effectively operate as confederations under a single federal government. The United States of America has become the disunited states. The discord between "the two Americas" was deepening day by day, and political polarization reached an unprecedented level.

Amid the escalating political battles, politicians put the interests of their political parties and factions above those of the country and acted in an unbridled way to attack and pin blames on each other. On 8 August 2022, law enforcement raided former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence, and Trump accused the Justice Department of playing politics to stop his second presidential bid and of political persecution. The Republicans, on their part, were relentless on the discovery of classified documents in President Joe Biden's residence, launched investigations into the Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan and demanded accountability. US state apparatus was reduced to a tool for political parties' self-interest.

Party politics increasingly followed race and identity lines. According to the Financial Times, Republicans are white, small town and rural while Democrats are now almost entirely urban and multi-ethnic. More than a third of Republicans and Democrats today believe violence is justified to achieve their political ends. When one party loses, its voters feel as though their America is being occupied by a foreign power. Political scientist Barbara Walter considers the US "a factionalized anocracy" — the halfway state between autocracy and democracy.

Political polarization was more of an obstacle to policy decision-making. GovTrack, an online non-governmental source of legislative information and statistics, reveals a steady fall in the number of laws successive US Congresses could enact — from 4,247 by the 93th to 98th Congresses down to 2,081 by the 111st to 116th. The drop was even more pronounced when one considers how many bills could become laws, from 6% in the 106th Congress to 1% in the 116th, a slide of 5 percentage points over two decades.

The tactics used in partisan fights were more scandalous. Professor Larry Diamond of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University believes the norms of democracy, such as self-restraint in the exercise of power and rejection of violence, which should have been observed by the participating parties in elections, have begun disintegrating in the US. A growing number of politicians and elected officials in the US have been willing to bend or abandon democratic norms in the quest to achieve or retain power. And as common political ground vanishes, rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Democracy in the US is at serious risk of breaking down.

3. Money politics surged

"Make money your god, and it will plague you like the devil," so admonished British playwright Henry Fielding. In the US, money is the breast milk of politics and elections increasingly morph into monologues of the wealthy, while the public call for democracy is made only "a jarring note". With the devil of money lurking in every corner of American politics, fairness and justice is naturally strained.

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People walk on Times Square in New York, the United States, Nov 23, 2021. [PhotoXinhua]

The latest illustration is the 2022 midterm elections. The whole exercise has a price tag of more than US$16.7 billion — breaking the 2018 record of US$14 billion — as found by Reveal, an online platform tracking the flow of political donations in the country. This amount dwarfs the 2021 GNPs of more than 70 countries. Federal Senate races in some states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Ohio sucked in more than US$100 million on average. Over 90% of those elected as lawmakers won by splurging funds. It was impossible to identify how much "dark money", or funds from undisclosed sources, was involved.

American politics has increasingly revealed its nature as the "game of the rich". US think tank the Brennan Center for Justice finds that the top 21 families making political donations contributed at least US$15 million each, totaling US$783 million, far more than the US$3.7 million of small donations. Billionaires provided 15.4% of federal election funds, and most of it went to super PACs that can accept unlimited donations.

The enormous bills did not bring effective national governance in return. They only stimulated pork barrel politics. An article on Lianhe Zaobao observes that the past few decades has witnessed a decay in Western democracy. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, making the poor poorer and the rich richer. Politics is controlled by the rich and politicians to serve their own interests. Despite a right to vote, the public does not have real sway over politics. This sense of powerlessness and loss of confidence in political parties and government has given rise to populism, and the problem remains unresolved.

4. "Freedom of speech" in name only

The United States has always prided itself on free speech. In reality, however, freedom of speech in the United States is upheld according to self-centered "US standards". Partisan interest and money politics have become the "two big mountains" that weigh on free speech. Any speech that is detrimental to the interests of the US government or capital is subject to strict restrictions.

The US government has all-encompassing regulations on media and technology companies to intervene in public opinion. In December 2022, Twitter CEO Elon Musk and journalist Matt Taibbi posted back-to-back tweets that exposed "Twitter files", revealing that the US government is heavily scrutinizing all social media companies. Sometimes it directly intervenes in big media companies' reporting, like frequently having Google remove certain links. Twitter censored sensitive information about presidential candidates ahead of the 2020 election, creating "blacklists" to limit the exposure of unpopular accounts and even hot topics, and working with the FBI to monitor social media content, all the while giving the US military the green light to spread disinformation online. All this has undoubtedly torn off the fig leaf of free speech in the United States.

Capital and interest groups basically can get anything they want when it comes to public opinion. In the face of capital and interest groups, American media's "freedom of speech" smacks of hypocrisy. Most American media firms are privately owned and serve the powerful and the rich. Whether it's the owner of the media or the investment and advertisement income that the media depends on, all of them are related to capital and interest groups. In his book The Hypocritical Superpower, Micheal Lueders, a well-known German writer and media professional, elaborated in detail how the "filtering mechanism" of American media, under the influence of interest groups, chooses and distorts facts. In January 2023, Project Veritas, an American right-wing group, published a video about Pfizer that went viral. It recorded Jordon Trishton Walker, a senior executive at Pfizer, saying that Pfizer was exploring plans to "mutate" the coronavirus, that the coronavirus vaccine business was a "cash cow", and that US regulators had vested interests in drug companies. To deal with the PR crisis, in addition to issuing a statement, Pfizer even had YouTube remove the video immediately on ground of "violating community guidelines".

The US uses social media to manipulate international public opinion. In December 2022, the independent investigation website "The Intercept" revealed that agencies affiliated to the US Department of Defense had long interfered in public opinion in Middle Eastern countries by manipulating topics and waging deceptive propaganda on social media such as Twitter. In July 2017, US Central Command official Nathaniel Kahler sent to the Twitter public policy team a form containing 52 Arabic-language accounts, asking for priority services for six of them. Following Kahler's request, Twitter put these Arabic accounts on a "white list" to amplify messages favorable to the United States. Eric Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, an anti-war organization, commented on this incident that Congress and social media companies should investigate and take action to ensure that, at the very least, the citizens are fully informed when their tax money is being spent on putting a positive spin on the endless wars.

In September 2022, the explosion of the "Nord Stream" natural gas pipeline shocked the world, and the international community was eager to know the identity and motive of the perpetrator. On 8 February 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article exposing the US government as the culprit of the incident. However, American and European mainstream media, known for their sensitivity to such scoops, stayed eerily quiet on this piece of explosive news. As observed by Canadian website Western Standard and German television channel ZDF, Hersh's report was one of the biggest stories of the decade, but few media in North America wanted to talk about it because the West does not want anyone to find out about the truth and the surveillance technologies it has deployed in the Baltic Sea. Western media even try to bypass the crux of the issue by questioning the authenticity of Hersh's report. On 15 February, Hersh wrote another article, accusing the US government and mainstream media of covering up the truth of the "Nord Stream" pipeline explosion. Analysts pointed out that given Western media's obedience to the US, their blocking of Hersh's revelations is not surprising.

5. The judicial system blind to public opinion

As an institution undergirding the country's Constitution, the US Supreme Court, like the American society, has become deeply divided. Judicial power is hijacked by public opinion, and partisan struggle has spread to the judicial system. Increasingly, Supreme Court decisions reflect the huge chasm between "two Americas"—the conservatives and liberals, and have been reduced to a tool of political warfare. The "separation of powers" is constantly being eroded. Partisanship has abandoned tradition and crossed the line.

Both parties pursue their agenda by changing the political orientation of the Supreme Court. The presidential election has in some ways become a partisan battle for the right to appoint judges. The passing away of Supreme Court justices gave Trump the opportunity to appoint during his term three justices who took a conservative stance, giving conservative justices an overwhelming advantage over liberal ones. After Trump, radical white evangelical fundamentalists have taken the reins of the Supreme Court, according to an article on the South African website Daily Maverick. It's hardly surprising that the Supreme Court almost always makes decisions in favor of Christian evangelicals, big corporations and the Republican Party.

The US Supreme Court's decision on abortion rights fully demonstrates the consequences of being involved in partisan warfare and out of touch with society. On 24 June 2022, the Supreme Court flagrantly endorsed religious conservatism by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and removing constitutional protections for women's abortion rights. The decision triggered protests across the United States. Polls show that more than half of Americans believe that stripping away abortion rights is a setback for the country. Israeli media "Haaretz" commented that on the issue of abortion rights, the Supreme Court has undermined democracy in the name of defending it, which is a typical case of "tyranny of the minority". Here is an unrepresentative Supreme Court, with its justices appointed by an unrepresentative president and confirmed by an obviously unrepresentative Senate; but it has made a decision that will affect the United States till 2030, 2040, and even 2050.

The Supreme Court also struck down a New York state law that had been in place since 1913 restricting people from carrying concealed firearms. As the nation reflects on gun violence, such a reckless reversal of New York's gun control law is intolerable, noted the governor of New York. American political commentator Matthew Dowd pointed out that the problems facing the United States today are rooted in the fragmentation of democracy. What American citizens want are a fair ruling in Roe v. Wade, a real gun reform, higher minimum wages, steeper taxes on the super-rich, better health care for all, and other reforms that heed popular calls.

6. Americans increasingly disillusioned with American democracy

Americans' pride in their democracy has dropped sharply, from 90% in 2002 to 54% in 2022, according to a joint Washington Post-University of Maryland survey. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that Californian voters have widespread concern that American democracy is going off track, with 62% saying the country is headed in the wrong direction, 46% pessimistic about the prospect of Americans with different political views working together to resolve differences, and 52% dissatisfied with the current way American democracy works. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 67% of respondents believe that American democracy is in danger of collapse, and 48% think there could be another Capitol riot in the United States. According to a Pew Center poll, 65% of Americans believe that the American democratic system needs major reforms, while 57% of respondents believe the United States is no longer a model of democracy. A UCLA study shows that the US government has been losing its ability to govern and its sense of democratic responsibility in recent years, and lacks effective measures to push forward large-scale reforms or address issues such as electoral justice and media fraud.

III. The United States' imposition of "democracy" has caused chaos around the world

In spite of all the problems facing its own democracy, the United States refuses to reflect on itself, but instead continues to export American democratic values to other countries, and use the pretext of democracy to oppress other countries and serve its own agenda. What the US has done is exacerbating division in the international community and bloc-based confrontation.

1. Foreign policy held hostage by political polarization

"Politics stops at the water's edge" is a popular proverb in American political circles, which means that partisan struggle should be confined to domestic politics and that a united front should be formed when dealing with foreign affairs. However, with the intensification of political polarization, Democrats and Republicans are increasingly divided on major foreign affairs issues, and America's foreign policy has become more and more "extreme". "Politics crossing the water's edge" has become the norm. It is not only harmful to many developing countries, but also poses a threat to America's own allies.

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People walk by a mobile coronavirus disease (COVID-19) testing center near Port Authority bus terminal in New York City, US, Oct 26, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the Trump administration and some extreme politicians have concocted all kinds of lies and rumors against China on coronavirus origins-tracing. The most typical is in 2021, when the US intelligence agency issued the so-called origins-tracing report, which, in total disregard of science, fabricated the "lab leak" story and claimed that China lacked transparency and obstructed international investigations. Tracing the origins of the coronavirus is a matter of science, but the true purpose of the US' doing is to obscure the views of the public and manipulate the issue to shift the blame onto China and suppress and contain China. This fully exposes the hypocrisy of American democracy and the ill effects of political polarization.

Under the Biden administration, the US ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan with a hasty withdrawal of troops. It just walked away, after shattering a whole country and destroying the future of several generations. Although its troops have left, the US government continued to sanction Afghanistan, and illegally froze the assets of the Afghan central bank, making life even worse for the local people. A UN-backed report published in May 2022 showed that nearly 20 million people in Afghanistan were facing acute hunger. Even after the devastating earthquake in Afghanistan in June 2022, the US still refused to lift the sanctions.

Political polarization in the US is spilling over. According to a report released by the University of Ottawa, there is open support from conservative media, including Fox News, and conservative politicians in the US for the far-right extremists in Canada. It represents a greater threat to Canadian democracy than the actions of any other state, and the implications of democratic backsliding in the US for Canada must be reflected upon. Professor Gordon Laxer at the University of Alberta believes the forces moving the US toward autocracy already exist. It is ingrained among Canadians that the US is their greatest friend and will always champion democracy. That can no longer be taken for granted.

2. Inciting confrontation and conflict in the name of democracy

Democracy is a common value of humanity and must not be used as a tool to advance geopolitical agenda or counter human development and progress. However, in order to maintain its hegemony, the US has long been monopolizing the definition of "democracy", instigating division and confrontation in the name of democracy, and undermining the UN-centered international system and the international order underpinned by international law.

Since its outbreak in early 2022, the Ukraine crisis has hit the country's economy and the livelihood of its people hard. In October 2022, the World Bank released a report suggesting that Ukraine would need at least US$349 billion, or 1.5 times the country's total economic output for the whole year of 2021, to rebuild after the war. The US saw the Ukraine crisis as a lucrative opportunity. Instead of taking any measures conducive to ending hostilities, the US kept fueling the flames and made a huge fortune from the war business including the arms industry and the energy sector. It described its arms supply to Ukraine as a move to support "democracy versus authoritarianism". A July 2022 report by Serbia's Center for Strategic Prognosis pointed out that the US saw Russia's 1999 attack on Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, as a crime, but called a similar American operation in Fallujah, an Iraqi city about the size of Grozny, liberation. America's so-called democracy has long been hijacked by interest groups and capital, and brought instability and chaos to the world.

In August 2022, then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a provocative visit to China's Taiwan region in disregard of China's firm opposition and serious representations. It was a major political provocation that upgraded official contact between the US and Taiwan, and aggravated tensions across the Taiwan Strait. Yet, Pelosi argued that the visit "honors America's unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan's vibrant democracy". The crux of Pelosi's provocative visit is not about democracy, but China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. The US action was by no means defending or preserving democracy, but challenging and violating China's sovereignty and territorial integrity. Pelosi's fallacy was unbearable even to some US politicians. Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Greene challenged Pelosi, saying that "Americans have had enough with a woman obsessed with her own power she's held for decades while our entire country crumbles ... Enough of this fake ‘courage' defending democracy."

The international community is seeing the US approach more and more clearly. Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, wrote that the US, as a self-proclaimed "high priest", has wreaked havoc around the world under the disguise of "true democracy", and used money, allies and high-end weapons to crudely impose its will. An article published on Ahram Online, an Egyptian news website, argued that "liberalism" and "democracy" had been turned into a weaponized ideology that the US uses to destabilize other countries, delegitimize their governments, and intervene with forms of sociopolitical engineering that often backfires in drastic ways. None of it has to do with the liberalism, democracy and freedom the US claims to promote. Chairman of the Indonesian People's Wave Party Anis Matta pointed out that American cleverness is making other countries a battlefield. Anti-China sentiment and polarization in Indonesia are also America's work. Muslims must understand that.

3. Doubling down on unilateral sanctions

Under the pretext of human rights and democracy, the US has long been using unilateral sanctions and "long-arm jurisdiction" against other countries based on its domestic laws and its own values. In the past decades, the US imposed unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction on Cuba, Belarus, Syria, Zimbabwe and other countries, placed maximum pressure on countries including the DPRK, Iran and Venezuela, and unilaterally froze US$130 million in military aid to Egypt under the excuse of the country's lack of progress in human rights. Such actions have seriously damaged the economic development and people's livelihood in the countries concerned, and jeopardized the right to life, the right to self-determination and the right to development, constituting a continual, systematic and massive violation of human rights in other countries. In recent years, US unilateral sanctions have been increasing and its "long arm" has been extending further. In order to preserve its hegemony, the US has wilfully harmed the interests of other countries, especially the legitimate and lawful interests of developing countries, in disregard of international law and the basic norms of international relations.

An article published by the Turkish Anadolu News Agency in March 2022 argued that in the name of promoting democracy, the US invaded Iraq on unsubstantiated grounds and brought immense sufferings to the local population. First, the abuse of sanctions aggravated livelihood challenges. Between 1990 and 2003, the severe economic sanctions by the US took a heavy toll on the local economy and the well-being of the Iraqi people. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the hunger rate in Iraq reached a very high level as a result of the US sanctions and embargo. Between 1990 and 1995 alone, 500,000 Iraqi children died of hunger and poor living conditions. Second, the incessant war caused enormous civilian casualties. According to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, about 120,000 Iraqi civilians were killed between 2003, when the US started the Iraq War, and 2011, when the US announced its withdrawal. Third, the imposed political model failed to adapt. The US forced the American-style democracy upon Iraq in disregard of the latter's national conditions, only to aggravate the political fight between different factions in the country.

The unilateral sanctions imposed by the US fully demonstrate its arrogance and indifference toward humanitarianism. On 11 February 2022, President Biden signed an executive order to split in half the US$7 billion in Afghan central bank assets frozen in the US. Half of the assets were to fund financial compensations for 9/11 victims, and the other half were transferred to an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Such blatant stealing from the Afghan people has been widely condemned by the international community. SINDOnews.com, a news website of Indonesia, reported in March 2022 that people of Afghan descent rallied at the US Embassy in Jakarta to protest the US government's looting of assets from the Afghan government. The indignant protesters argued that the assets of the former Afghan government belonged to the Afghan people and should be used to aid the Afghan people who were experiencing an economic crisis.

4. Undermining democracy in international relations

International affairs bear on the common interests of mankind, and should be conducted through consultation by all countries. Yet, the US has never truly observed the principle of democracy in international relations. Under the pretext of "multilateralism" and "international rules", and clinging to the Cold War mentality, the US has exercised fake multilateralism and bloc politics, instigated division and antagonism, created bloc confrontation, and practiced unilateralism in the name of multilateralism. Its hegemonic, domineering and bullying acts seriously impede the development of true multilateralism.

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This photo shows the White House and a stop sign in Washington DC, the United States. [Photo/Xinhua]

The US places its domestic law above international law, and adopts a selective approach to international rules, applying and discarding such rules as it sees fit. Since the 1980s, the US has withdrawn from 17 important international organizations or agreements, including the UN Human Rights Council, WHO, UNESCO, the Paris Agreement on climate change, the JCPOA, the Arms Trade Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Treaty on Open Skies.

The US flagrantly violates the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and the basic norms governing international relations, waging wars and creating division and conflict across the world. Throughout its history of 240-plus years, the US has been at peace for only 16 years — it is indeed the most belligerent country in world history. Since the end of World War II, the US has waged or participated in many wars overseas, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War, which caused immense civilian casualties and property losses as well as humanitarian catastrophes. Since 2001, the wars and military operations that the US launched in the name of fighting terrorism have killed more than 900,000 people, including some 335,000 civilians, injured millions and displaced tens of millions.

Paying no heed to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and principles of international law, or to the democratic rights of Asia-Pacific countries and Pacific island countries in regional and international affairs, the US has emboldened Japan by expressly supporting its decision to discharge the nuclear waste water from Fukushima, even though the government of Japan has not yet fully consulted stakeholders and relevant international agencies on the disposal, not yet provided sufficient scientific and factual grounds for its behavior, and not yet addressed the legitimate concerns of the international community. On the other hand, the US administration, citing "radionuclide contamination", banned the import of Japanese food and agricultural products from areas around Fukushima, exposing the hypocrisy of typical US-style double standards.

Advancing the Cold War mentality in the South Pacific region, the  US has ganged up with the UK and Australia to put together AUKUS, a racist clique, and pledged to help Australia build at least eight nuclear submarines together with the UK. The move constitutes a serious violation of the principles of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, treading a reckless line on the brink of nuclear proliferation and creating tremendous risks. It has also opened the Pandora's box of regional arms race, casting a shadow over regional peace, security and stability.

Prior to the ninth Summit of the Americas in June 2022, Julio Yao, a Panamanian expert on international issues, wrote in local media that today's US is an absolute renegade of international law, and the most genuinely authentic personification of the use of brute force in international relations. The US is the only country that has not signed or ratified any human rights treaty, and is not a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is the only country that does not ban secret biological weapons, with more than 200 laboratories outside its borders. The only thing that the US intends to do with the Summit of the Americas is to involve Latin America and the Caribbean in the war in Ukraine and to divide and weaken them.

In August 2022, a South China Morning Post article noted that the so-called "democracies" of the US and the West have been relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of international rules and exploiting them when it's convenient. While the US and the West denounce Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine, they forget their serial interventions, subversions and interference across the globe. What the US did has smashed up the world economy, thereby exposing more middle-income countries to debt crises. When the big powers are selective in following the rules they wrote, the whole system loses credibility.

5. Foisting a trumped-up narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism"

Harboring the Cold War mentality, a hegemonic logic and a preference for bloc politics, the US administration has framed a narrative of "democracy versus authoritarianism", and labeled countries as "autocracies", with a view to using ideology and values as a tool to suppress other countries and advance its own geostrategy under the disguise of democracy.

In 2021, the US held the first "Summit for Democracy", attempting to divide the international community into so-called "democratic and undemocratic camps" by openly drawing an ideological line. The move drew questions extensively, including from within the US. Both Foreign Affairs and The Diplomat carried articles criticizing the summit as chasing the wrong goal, not only failing to achieve unity among democratic countries, but also drawing criticism for the representation issue. The US has long lacked a set goal in its promotion of democracy around the world, and has been slow in following up its rhetoric. When democracy in the US is in such a mess, holding a democracy summit cannot boost democracy around the world, but more likely create a greater geopolitical crisis. Hitoshi Tanaka, Chairman of the Institute for International Strategy of Japan, pointed out that the US has been imposing "democracy" on other countries, advancing the "democracy versus authoritarianism" campaign, and expanding global division. Japan should not blindly follow suit.

To brand oneself as democracy while others as autocracies is in itself an act contrary to democracy. The so-called "democracy versus authoritarianism" narrative does not reflect the realities of today's world, nor is it in line with the trend of the times. "Belarus 1", a state television station of Belarus, commented that the list of participants to the summit was clearly based on the US standard of "freedom", but the question was how could the US believe that it could monopolize the definition and interpretation of democracy, and tell others what democracy should look like. Singapore's Straits Times carried a column that said the US must realize that American democracy has lost its former luster, and is no longer the gold standard. There is no fixed model of democracy, and the US no longer has an absolute say over what democracy means. That is the truth. The US should pragmatically reassess its diplomatic methods and focus on cooperation instead of confrontation.

Despite unprecedentedly low ratings of US democracy at home and abroad, the country's hysteria to export US-style democracy and values continues unabated. The US has not only cobbled together values-based alliances such as AUKUS, the Quad and the Five Eyes, but also attempted to disrupt and undermine normal international cooperation in economy, trade, science, technology, culture and people-to-people exchanges by drawing ideological lines and trumpeting the Cold War mentality. Al Jazeera observed that the US insistence on holding a democracy summit and acting as a global democratic leader even when trust in its own democratic system is declining has raised widespread suspicion. James Goldgeier, professor of international relations at American University, said the US has lost its credibility, and that its administration should hold a domestic democracy summit to focus on injustice and inequality, including issues such as voting rights and disinformation. Emma Ashford, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, questioned how can the US spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home. The South China Morning Post pointed out that the summit reflected two myths about US democracy: First, global advance of democracy since the end of the Cold War is backsliding and it needs the US to reverse it; second, the US is the most important democracy in the world and its global leadership is paramount for other countries. These two myths completely ignore the democratic backsliding in the US, the rejection of the overwhelming majority of countries to being kidnapped by the hypocritical "concept of democracy" of the US, and the strong desire of developing countries to grow their economies and raise living standards.

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Children warm themselves by a bonfire in front of a store in Afghanistan's Fayzabad district on Feb 10. The war in Afghanistan launched by the US lasted 20 years, killing tens of thousands of civilians and displacing millions. [Photo/Agencies]
IV. Conclusion

Democracy is humanity's common value; however, there is no single model of political system that is applicable to all countries in the world. Human civilization, if compared to a garden, should be a diverse place in which democracy in different countries blooms like a hundred flowers. The US has American-style democracy, China has Chinese-style democracy, and other countries have their own unique models of democracy that suit their respective national conditions. It should be up to the people of a country to judge whether the country is democratic or not and how to better promote democracy in their country. The few self-righteous countries have no right to point fingers.

Those who have many flaws themselves have little credibility to lecture others. Attempts to undermine others for one's own profit and destabilize the world must be unanimously opposed. A black-and-white division of countries as democratic or authoritarian is both anachronistic and arbitrary. What our world needs today is not to stoke division in the name of democracy and pursue de facto supremacy-oriented unilateralism, but to strengthen solidarity and cooperation and uphold true multilateralism on the basis of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. What our world needs today is not to interfere in other countries' internal affairs under the guise of democracy, but to advocate genuine democracy, reject pseudo-democracy and jointly promote greater democracy in international relations. What our world needs today is not a "Summit for Democracy" that hypes up confrontation and contributes nothing to the collective response to global challenges, but a conference of solidarity that focuses on taking real actions to solve prominent global challenges.

Freedom, democracy and human rights are the common pursuit of humanity, and values that the Communist Party of China (CPC) always pursues. China commits to and advances whole-process people's democracy, and puts into action the principle of people running the country in the CPC's exercise of national governance in specific and concrete ways. China stands ready to strengthen exchanges and mutual learning with other countries on the issue of democracy, advocate humanity's common values of peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom, promote greater democracy in international relations, and make new and greater contributions to human progress.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... b5710.html

American democracy in terminal decline
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-03-20 17:12

In 2022, the vicious cycle of democratic pretensions, dysfunctional politics and a divided society continued in the United States, according to a report published on the website of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday.

Based on facts, media comments and expert opinions, the report, titled "The State of Democracy in the United States: 2022", reveals American democracy was in chaos at home and left a trail of disasters behind as the US peddled and imposed its democracy around the globe.

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http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... 790_1.html

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Geopolitical Rumblings Leave U.S. Behind
Over the last month we have seen astonishing geopolitical developments.

In February China publicly lambasted U.S. hegemony, launched a global security initiative and offered a peace plan for Ukraine.

On March 10 China mediated an agreement which restored relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

On March 15 Moscow rolled out the red carpet for the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Yesterday al-Assad and his wife Asma arrived in the UAE for talks with Sheikh Mohammed

Also yesterday Iran and Iraq signed a security cooperation agreement that will stop the CIA sponsored Kurdish activities against Iran.

Also yesterday King Salman of Saudi Arabia invited the President of Iran to a visit in Riyadh.

For the last 30 years the U.S. considered the Middle East as its backyard. Twenty years ago it illegally invaded Iraq and caused 100,000nds of death and decades of chaos. Now China, by peaceful means, changed the balance in the Middle East within just one month.

Today China's President Xi arrived in Moscow for three days of talks with Russia's President Putin. An article by President Putin was published in the People's Daily while Russian media published a signed article by President Xi.

The U.S. is afraid that China's peace initiative for Ukraine will gain ground. It has openly come out against a cease-fire and peace talks. I had thought that was for Ukraine to decide?

It is likely that Putin will publicly endorse the Chinese peace plan while the U.S. is paranoid that peace might indeed happen. It may even want to sabotage the Saudi Iranian deal.

China's people are by the way the most happy in the world.

Xi and Putin are now running the multilateral global show. Biden and the hapless 'unilateral' people around him are left aside.

Posted by b on March 20, 2023 at 10:21 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/03/g ... l#comments

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20 years of the US invasion of Iraq
March 20, 13:09

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the US attack on Iraq. The aggression was committed on a fabricated pretext - Saddam Hussein was accused of developing chemical weapons, having links with al-Qaeda and being involved in the September 11 attacks. In practice, Saddam Hussein's WMD was never found, Saddam Hussein had no links with Al-Qaeda, and was not involved in the September 11 attacks.

However, the truth did not bother anyone.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed (not counting Albright's famous admission that US sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlCd6NGhUOo ), and the war in Iraq became, in fact, permanent - combat actions with changing opponents on its territory are still ongoing. American occupying troops still remain in Iraqi territory.





No one has been held accountable for the aggression committed and organized war crimes.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8236732.html

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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 21, 2023 2:00 pm

Imperialism of Our Time
18-03-2023
Aijaz Ahmad

In the essay ‘Imperialism of Our Time’, Aijaz Ahmad grounds the 2003 invasion of Iraq in its historical conjuncture, following the defeat of the Soviet Union and in the context of imperialism’s long assault on the Third World and national liberation struggles during the 20th century. He also analyses the character of the George W. Bush presidency, including both its continuities as the culmination of a long-term backlash by the US New Right to the anti-war, Black liberation and women’s struggles of the 1960s, as well as its unique ‘will to radically re-make the United States itself as it sets out to re-map the globe’.

Deeming as inadequate both the contemporary ideas of ‘New Imperialism’ as well as overly rigid readings of Lenin’s thesis in characterising this new era for imperialism, Ahmad describes the ‘imperialism of our time’ as being the ‘first fully post-colonial imperialism, not only free of colonial rule but antithetical to it’ and being structurally dependant on preserving the nation-state form for the operation of globalised capital and commodities.

The essay identifies Iraq ‘03 as inaugurating a new phase of imperialism following the inter-imperialist rivalries of the early 20th century and the ‘inter-systemic rivalry’ between the US and the Soviet Union, with the Bush government presiding over a ‘moment when history’s greatest concentration of force can be exercised without any restraint.’

In contextualising the new doctrine of the ‘War on Terror’, the essay narrates the West’s older war on the Third World, with the undermining of communist, socialist, and radical nationalist governments alike – including through nurturing reactionary ‘Islamist’ movements upon whom the US had now set its guns: ‘Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until not long ago.’

Elsewhere in the essay, Ahmad describes the high hubris of the G.W. Bush administration as a government seizing the opportunity presented by global dominance without challenge: ‘The post-Second World War settlement was based on a combination of a clear-cut US leadership and a complex network of multilateral institutions… With hindsight, one can now see that the great emphasis on multilateralism in the past was itself perhaps a function of the fact that the US faced challenges from communism and Third World nationalism… Now, with those challenges gone, the leadership firmly secured, and a much more belligerent US Administration in office, many aspects of this multilateralism are being allowed to lapse.’

In subsequent years, both with the strategic ‘failures’ of the Iraq invasion remaining a blight on its resume and as systemic challenges have rendered that dominance more fragile, the question of US global leadership and multilateralism has become a vexed issue for its governments today.

It is with the backlash to Iraq in mind that Obama pursued a stated strategy of ‘leading from behind’ in Libya, enabling France’s Sarkozy government to ostensibly take leadership in NATO’s destruction of the state in 2011, while Obama’s similarly ‘covert’ approach in Syria helped give rise to the myth of American absence from the war on that state. Trump’s infamous rhetorical attacks on multilateralism provoked extreme discomfort from America’s allies, and it was with this that the Biden government entered the fray with frequent affirmations of the ‘rules-based order’ – a rebranding of US leadership under the auspices of multilateralism – all the while ratcheting up the US policy of illegal unilateral sanctions without UN approval. And the latest administration’s headline achievement of galvanising support for NATO in light of the Russo-Ukraine war has served to subordinate its European allies to US leadership at a huge cost. It remains a unity riven by contradictions, which are likely to develop in potentially ugly forms as Europe lurches further to the right.

Not all of the essay’s assessments have been borne out completely. While correctly describing Europe’s ultimately subordinate role to the US, its claim that ‘The most the Europeans do in the Third World is look for markets and investment opportunities. There is no power projection, for the simple reason that there is no power’, stands against the reality of France’s aggressive imperialist intervention in the Sahel region of Africa since 2013, for one. It is also belied by the fact that EU ambitions for its own ‘strategic autonomy’, still flickering in the hearts of some of its leaders despite its prostrations before Biden’s America, take the form of an independently militarised EU, seeking to export military soft (and likely hard) power into strategic regions such as Africa.

Yet despite the many ways that history has asserted itself in curious or unexpected ways over the past two decades, it remains, fundamentally, a history written in the blood of the Iraqi people. Ahmad remains prescient and precise with his sobering assessment that the G.W. Bush government – as another incarnation of US imperialism – represented ‘a force so overdetermined in their ideology and projects that they recognize no limits to their own venality or criminality or global ambition.’

With the efforts to exculpate leaders, on both sides of the Atlantic, for their role in the destruction of Iraq, and the manifold attempts to cleanse the public’s palette for warfare since, the singular fact remains that – twenty years on – Iraq and the region remains a site of unconscionable injustice. With the devastation of the invasion and the many interventions since, the people of the Arab World found themselves thrown back a century, with their futures held hostage to the imperialism of our time. The twentieth anniversary of this invasion remains a fitting time, as ever, for the British left to recommit to its fundamental responsibility to set itself against the gears of imperialism at home.



This essay is an edited excerpt of Aijaz Ahmad’s essay Imperialism of Our Times as published in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time (Leftword books: 2004).

Imperialism of Our Time

One of the salient features of the present conjuncture is that the United States, the leading imperialist country with historically unprecedented global power, is today governed by perhaps the most rightwing government in a century. The chickens of the most hysterical forms of authoritarianism that the US has been routinely exporting to large parts of the globe seem to be coming home to roost, with national as well as global consequences, including military consequences.

I also use the simple phrase ‘imperialism of our time’ with the more modest aim of avoiding terms like ‘New Imperialism’ which have been in vogue at various times, with varying meanings. Imperialism has been with us for a very long time, in great many forms, and constantly re-invents itself, so to speak, as the structure of global capitalism itself changes.

The first fully post-colonial imperialism
The fundamental novelty of the imperialism of our time is that it comes after the dissolution of the two great rivalries that had punctuated the global politics of the twentieth century, namely what Lenin called ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ of the first half of the century as well as what we might, for lack of a better word, call the inter-systemic rivalry between the US and the USSR that lasted for some seventy years.

The end of those rivalries concludes the era of politics inaugurated by the First World War and it is only logical that the sole victor, the United States, would set out most aggressively to grab all possible spoils of victory and to undo the gains that the working classes and oppressed nations of the world had been able to achieve during that period.

This new face of imperialism arises not only after the dissolution of the great colonial empires (British and French, principally) and colonial ambitions of the other, competing capitalist countries (Germany and Japan, mainly) but also the definitive demise of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie in much of the so-called Third World (anti-colonialism, wars of national liberation, the Bandung project, non-alignment, the protectionist industrialising state) which had itself been sustained considerably by the existence of an alternative pole in the shape of the communist countries.

The three objectives for which the US fought a war of position throughout the twentieth century – the containment/disappearance of communist states, its own primacy over the other leading countries, the defeat of Third World nationalism – have been achieved.

Far from being an imperialism caught in the coil of inter-imperialist rivalries, it is the imperialism of the era in which

(a) national capitals have interpenetrated in such a manner that the capital active in any given territorial state is comprised, in varying proportions, of national and transnational capital;
(b) finance capital is dominant over productive capital to an extent never visualized even in Lenin’s ‘export of capital’ thesis or in Keynes’ warnings about the rapaciousness of the rentiers; and
(c) everything from commodity markets to movements of finance has been so thoroughly globalized that the rise of a global state, with demonstrably globalized military capability, is an objective requirement of the system itself, quite aside from the national ambitions of the US rulers, so as to impose structures and disciplines over this whole complex with its tremendous potential for fissures and breakdowns.

Empires without colonies have been with us, in one corner of the globe or another, throughout the history of capital, sometimes preceding military conquest (commercial empires), at other times coming after decolonization (South America after the dissolution of Spanish and Portuguese rule), and sometimes taking the form for which Lenin invented the term ‘semi-colonial’ (Egypt, Persia etc). However, this is the first fully post-colonial imperialism, not only free of colonial rule but antithetical to it; it is unlikely that the current occupation of Iraq will translate itself into long-term colonial rule, however long the quagmire may last and even if the superhawks of the Pentagon take US armies into Syria, Iran or wherever.

It is not a matter of an ideological preference for ‘informal’ empire over ‘formal’ empire, so-called. It is a structural imperative of the current composition of global capital itself. The movement of capital and commodities must be as unimpeded as possible but the nation-state form must be maintained throughout the peripheries, not only for historical reasons but also to supplement internationalization of capitalist law with locally erected labour regimes so as to enforce what Stephen Gill calls ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ in conditions specific to each territorial unit.

Europe subordinates itself before Bush
During the decision-making process over the invasion of Iraq, Britain threw in its lot with the US, with complete disregard of even procedural consideration for the EU but in keeping with the role of loyal subordinate that the US imposed upon it soon after the second World War, and from which neither Wilson nor Thatcher nor Blair have ever deviated.

Then, as France and Germany sought to distinguish themselves from that position and the US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed them contemptuously as ‘old Europe’, everyone from Derrida to Habermas marched to television studios to express dismay on Europe’s behalf. Eventually, Rumsfeld did line up Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal and a host of little/new countries of ‘Europe’ on his side, and it was in the Azores that Bush made the final decision to ignore the Security Council and proceed with the invasion.

Equally significant is the fact that in the last round of negotiations at the Security Council before the invasion began, the Franco-/German alliance proposed a thirty-day warning to Saddam (and the inspectors) after which they too were willing to condone the invasion.

Bush pointedly snubbed them by keeping to the schedule set by the Pentagon and ignoring the Security Council from that point on. The US instructed the UN to withdraw its inspectors forthwith and Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, did not even bother to call the Security Council in session, even though the inspectors had been sent there not by the US but by a Security Council Resolution; Annan simply instructed the inspectors to comply with US orders.

Hans Blix, the chief inspector, was to say later that he had long believed that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and the whole thing was a charade anyway. Once the invasion got into full swing, even the Franco-German alliance began to pray publicly for a quick US victory and, only slightly less publicly, began begging for contracts for European firms in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. When the US decided to establish itself as the occupying force and grant the UN no appreciable role in it, the Franco-German alliance complied.

Meanwhile, on the completely different issue of a Belgian law which grants Belgian courts the jurisdiction to try foreign nationals for war crimes, a stern warning from Rumsfeld that he might move the NATO headquarters from Brussels if the laws were not changed brought a swift promise of compliance from the Belgian government.

So much for the claim by high-minded European intellectuals that respect for universal human rights is an integral aspect of the emerging European identity. Belgium apparently has no right to have laws of its own even on issues such as war crimes, even though these laws have no relevance to global trade, finance or commercial contracts. The doctrine of limited sovereignty that is emerging as a major component in US policy, with its vast implications for the new imperial constitutionalism, is to be applied, apparently, not only to the Third World countries but even, selectively, to Europe’s own ability to promulgate laws for itself.

The declaration of the Bush administration that it has the sovereign right to make war – what it calls ‘pre-emptive war’ – against any or all states that it perceives as a threat, while reserving the right to judge what constitutes a threat, is in fact an extension of a doctrine already in place since earlier Administrations. What we are witnessing is the making of an imperial sovereignty claimed for itself by a state which is at once the state of a nation as well as a globalized state of contemporary capitalism. The US arrogates to itself a limitless sovereignty which is arbitrary by nature, and can only exist in so far as its might is so superior to that of all others that its action would necessarily go unchallenged by other components of the global state system however resentful they might be otherwise.

Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be
The US fought as hard against radical Third World nationalism, as it did against communism during the second half of the century.

Having championed decolonization as a precondition for the emergence of a globally integrated empire under its own dominion, it set its face against national liberation movements, whether led by communists (as in Indochina) or by radical nationalists (as in Algeria); against non-alignment (the rhetoric of ‘for us or against us’ of Bush Jr. today comes straight out of John Foster Dulles’ speeches during the 1950s); as well as against particular nationalist regimes, be it Nasser’s or Nkrumah’s or Sukarno’s or even Prince Sihanouk’s in Cambodia.

Instead, it kept monarchies in power where it could and imposed dictators wherever it needed to. The failure of the national bourgeois project in the Third World has all kinds of domestic roots but the implacable undercutting of it by the US was a very large part of it.

One now tends to forget that in his post-war vision, Keynes himself had recommended not only state restrictions on rentiers in the advanced capitalist countries, but also regular long-term transfers of capital to the underdeveloped countries to guarantee real growth, and hence domestic peace, and hence stability of the global capitalist system as a whole, not to speak of more prosperous markets for the advanced capitalist countries’ own commodities.

This latter recommendation was rejected out of hand by the US which kept a tight control over the making of the Bretton Woods architecture. This undercutting of the national-bourgeois project – precisely because the project required high levels of protectionism, tariffs, domestic savings and state-led industrialization, with little role for imperialist penetration – certainly made all those states much weaker in relation to foreign domination but also made those societies much more angry and volatile, eventually even susceptible to all kinds of irrationalism, with little popular legitimacy for the indigenous nation-state.

This phenomenon itself has required not only globalized supervision but also an increasingly interventionist global state. Little fires have – more and more – to be put out everywhere and now the whole system has to be ‘re-ordered’, as Bush and Blair keep saying. The Cold War was never cold for many outside the NATO and Warsaw Pact zones, and US military interventions in the Third World, direct and indirect, was a routine affair throughout that period. Now, winning the Cold War has opened the way not to world peace but for an ideology of permanent interventionism on part of the United States: ‘a task that never ends’, as Bush put it some ten days after the 11 September catastrophe.

Defeat of all the forces which Hobsbawm cumulatively and felicitously calls ‘the Enlightenment left’ – communism, socialism, national liberation movements, the radical wings of social democracy – has led to a full-blown ideological crisis across the globe. Terrorism is now where national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until not long ago

‘Regime change’ is a catchy phrase
War against Iraq began not in 2003 but in the course of the so-called ‘Gulf War’, in 1991, which continued through sanctions and no-fly zones, for over a decade – longer than the combined duration of the First and Second World Wars – under three consecutive US Presidents, two Republicans (father and son) and one Democrat (Clinton, the ‘New Democrat’ who inspired ‘New Labour’ across the Atlantic).

It was during the Clinton Presidency that the US Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998. When the sanctions regime was estimated by some UN agencies to have killed half a million Iraqi children, and journalists asked Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright whether their death was worth the price of upholding the sanctions, she said ‘the price was worth it’.

The so-called no-fly zones in northern and eastern Iraq were declared by Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General, to be illegal, and yet under that scheme the Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq became the longest aerial campaign since the Second World War; in 1999 alone 1800 bombs were dropped and 450 targets hit. Cumulatively, over some twelve years, the tonnage dropped on Iraq came to equal seven Hiroshimas.

‘Regime change’ is a catchy phrase, and the Bush Administration has undoubtedly raised it to the status of a legitimate right of imperial sovereignty. However, the US has been doing it for decades. It did so in Iraq itself when the CIA helped overthrow the progressive regime of Abd al-Karim Kassem in 1964 and brought in the Ba’ath party regime (‘We came to power on a CIA train’, exulted the General-Secretary of Saddam’s parent party), paving the way for the eventual personal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein who remained a close US ally throughout the 1980s when he fought a US-assisted war against Iran.

‘Regime change’ is what the CIA brought to Iran in 1953 and the US military to Grenada and Panama more recently. And the history of the US coming as ‘liberators’ and staying as occupiers goes back to the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century.

Continuities and ruptures
What is specific to the Bush regime is the combination of an intensification of such long-standing trends as well as a cluster of novelties which, taken together, amount to something of a historic break.

Intensification of trends is obvious enough. What are the novelties internal to Bush Jr’s Presidency? First, the manner of his election: he was elevated to the Presidency by a judicial decision of dubious merit, combined with widely suspected disenfranchisement of a considerable section of the black electorate in the state of Florida which happened to be run by his brother, Jeb. Jeb Bush’s other major contribution to Bush Jr’s campaign was that he was the one who assembled that cabal of the neo-conservatives, drawn from the think-tanks of the far right and supervised by Dick Cheney, who came to define the domestic as well as foreign policies, the civilian as well as military structures, of the United States after the elections: they captured the Pentagon, hence the US military machine, just as the Bush brothers captured the White House.

The second novelty of this Presidency, which distinguishes it from the preceding ones, is the will to radically re-make the United States itself as it sets out to re-map the globe. Dick Cheney’s bland prediction that the war against terrorism may last for fifty years or more, and General Tommy Frank’s prediction even before the invasion of Iraq that US troops may have to be stationed there fairly indefinitely, on the model of Korea, is matched by a politics of permanent hysteria at home, invoking a mixture of extreme insecurity and atavistic patriotism.

Meanwhile, the already existing policies of shifting incomes upward and offering tax bonanzas to corporations and the rich while bankrupting the social state have been accelerated to a degree that a successor government may not even have the resources to save such things as Social Security in its present form even if it had the desire to do so. What is being reversed, thus, is not only the so-called ‘Vietnam syndrome’ but even aspects of American social life dating back to the New Deal.

In ‘Re Building America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century’, a report prepared by an impressive cross-section of the neo-conservative elite including Paul Wolfowitz, and issued by The Project for a New American Century in September 2000, the authors remarked that the kind of sweeping changes they are proposing may take some time unless some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbour, were to occur.

11th September 2001 was the event they were waiting for. Condoleeza Rice urged her colleagues the next morning that ways be found to ‘capitalize on these opportunities’, while Donald Rumsfeld urged immediate invasion of Iraq.

We may be witnessing an imperial overreach. Overdetermined by their own ideological delusions, Bush’s neocons may be pursuing policies that far exceed the logic of global capitalism or the requirements of the imperial US state; even George Soros seems to think so. Two former Presidents, including the current President’s father, opposed the invasion of Iraq before it happened. Ever the mildly Presbyterian Trilaterist, Bush Sr. emphasized that the US needed alliance with Europe and the war on Iraq would undermine it. As we have seen, the Franco-German alliance has accepted the consequences, however resentfully. But Iraq may yet prove to be a quagmire that cures the US populace of any appetite for the real wars that are fought on the other side of their TV screens. They may yet come to comprehend what a menace this Administration is for their own security, especially as old age sets in, and to the security of their children.

At the same time, the global revolt against imperial America that we witnessed on the eve of the Iraq invasion may regain momentum. This moment of neo-conservative extremity may yet pass as one of many murderous episodes in imperial history.

Aijaz Ahmad
Aijaz Ahmad (1941-2022) was an Indian/Pakistani Marxist academic. Closely associated with the subcontinental communist movements, Aijaz’s work including writing on imperialism, literature, the rise of Hindutva and the strident defences of Marxism against postcolonialism and post-Marxism for which he became famed for with his 1992 book In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Verso: 1992).

His other books include Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia (Verso: 1996), The Political Marx with Vijay Prashad (Leftword: 2023) and Iraq, Afghanistan and the Imperialism of Our Time (Leftword: 2004), from which this essay has been excerpted. Ahmad died in March 2022.

https://www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/imp ... -our-times
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Re: The Nature of Foxes

Post by blindpig » Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:33 pm

The Fabulist Arrogance of US Power
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 22 Mar 2023

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The U.S. reserves for itself the right to commit crimes all over the world. Yet it also refuses to participate in any war crimes prosecution and even passed a law giving itself the right to invade the International Criminal Court at the Hague should an American or an ally face justice.

Anyone who feels compelled to acknowledge the full horror of the Iraq War can visit the “Birth defects in Fallujah ” Facebook page to see photos of the unspeakably cruel deformities the US imposed on the most innocent—the unborn—with the Iraq War. In the documentary film “Fallujah: A Lost Generation ,” a doctor reports that one in five children in Fallujah General Hospital is born with deformities, and urges women in the region not to have children.

But of course this isn’t new. Vietnam and Korea still suffer birth defects consequent to the US saturating both nations with napalm and Agent Orange. Children in these two countries still suffer grave injury and even die after stepping on unexploded ordnance left behind during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. A famously and horrifically deformed pair of enjoined Vietnamese twins were named “North” and “South.”

In Iraq, this isn’t only the consequence of the war that began with the US attack on March 23, 2003. As Kali Rubaii wrote in the Middle East r esearch and Information Project, these horrifying birth defects and high rates of cancer are the result of “decades of war, bombing campaigns, burn pits, sanctions and other military interventions that not only shatter the public infrastructures necessary for health and well being, but also trigger cascades of environmental degradation.”

How then can the US possibly claim any moral authority anywhere in the world in any context? But of course it does, every single day, in one sick joke after another.

This week’s most prominent was the International Criminal Court indictment of Vladimir Putin for allegedly forcibly displacing Ukrainians and even stealing Ukrainian babies. Babies? The US and its stenographic corporate press has no moral authority to talk about this without making massive reparations for the irreparable crimes committed against the unborn in Iraq, Southeast Asia, Yugoslavia, and no doubt Syria in time.

The stealing-Ukrainian-babies story echoed Nariyah, who, after being coached by Amnesty International, told Congress that Iraqi troops were ripping babies out of their incubators, throwing them on the floor, then stealing the incubators. It eventually came out that she was the Kuwaiti Ambassador’s daughter.

Whether there is any real crime identified in the Putin indictment or not, this US-controlled court should never be taken seriously. No “international court” that has not indicted a single US official or officer for the crime of the century—the Iraq War—should be. And the US, for obvious reasons, The US isn’t even signatory to the Rome Statute that created the court, for obvious reasons.

In another sick pretense to moral authority, on the heels of the Putin indictment, Antony Blinken made a speech and the State Department issued a press release announcing that it had investigated crimes committed during the two-year Ethiopian civil war and “determined” that:

The Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), the Eritrean Defense Force (EDF), Amhara forces, and the Tigray Peoples’ Liberation Front are all guilty of war crimes;
the ENDF, EDF, and Amhara forces are all guilty of crimes against humanity; and
Amhara forces are guilty of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing in “Western Tigray.”
In other words, Tigrayans are the “worthy victims,” as defined by Chomsky and Herman in “Manufacturing Consent,” guilty of only the most relatively minor crimes, while all the other parties to the war—whom the US has condemned all along—are the “unworthy victims,” and the “unworthy victims,” like Russia and, most of all, Vladimir Putin have to be punished.

The State Department press release also said that, “The United States will partner with Ethiopia as it implements a credible transitional justice process for the benefit of all victims and affected communities. We will stand with Ethiopia as it honestly faces the abuses in its past, provides accountability for the harms committed against its citizens, and moves toward a future of lasting peace.”

The obvious implication is that the US will somehow take action against Ethiopia if its investigation does not lead to the same conclusions that the State Department has come to. More unilateral sanctions against Ethiopia and Eritrea would no doubt be the first aggressive response, although Eritrea could hardly be sanctioned any more punitively than it already is, given that it’s already one of the four nations—Eritrea, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—that are excluded from using the SWIFT system for executing financial transactions and payments between banks worldwide.

The most aggressive trajectory of this arrogance would be indictments of Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki at the US/International Criminal Court. Of course, the US potential for military violence should never be underestimated, but it seems unlikely in Ethiopia now that the war is over and the US proxy, the TPLF, has been defeated.

The Hague Invasion Act

US arrogance is writ large all over the world, including in the perhaps little known Hague Invasion Act passed by Congress and signed by George W. Bush in 2002, roughly seven months before the US attacked Iraq.

Formally known as the American Service-Members' Protection Act, this choice bit of legislation makes it lawful—not internationally, but lawful according to US statute—for the US to invade the Netherlands to save any US official, service member, or citizen, or those of any of its allies, should they ever be brought before the International Criminal Court, no matter how heinous or well-documented the crime.

This is US arrogance taken into a fabulist realm, but why should we be surprised?

International law is a laudable ideal now seeming less out of reach as a multipolar world manifests itself on the UN Security Council and in the General Assembly, but international criminal justice will not approach justice so long as its implementation remains in the hands of the most violent, destructive and arrogant empire of all time.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/fabul ... e-us-power
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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