How the American War Machine Is Sucking Up Vast Amounts of Cash to Screw Up the World | Alternet

President Obama and Senator John McCain, who have clashed on almost every conceivable issue, do agree on one thing: the Pentagon needs more money. Obama wants to raise the Pentagon’s budget for fiscal year 2016 by $35 billion more than the caps that exist under current law allow. McCain wants to see Obama his $35 billion and raise him $17 billion more. Last week, the House and Senate Budget Committees attempted to meet Obama’s demands by pressing to pour tens of billions of additional dollars into the uncapped supplemental war budget.

What will this new avalanche of cash be used for? A major ground war in Iraq? Bombing the Assad regime in Syria? A permanent troop presence in Afghanistan? More likely, the bulk of the funds will be wielded simply to take pressure off the Pentagon’s base budget so it can continue to pay for staggeringly expensive projects like the F-35 combat aircraft and a new generation of ballistic missile submarines. Whether the enthusiastic budgeteers in the end succeed in this particular maneuver to create a massive Pentagon slush fund, the effort represents a troubling development for anyone who thinks that Pentagon spending is already out of hand.

Mind you, such funds would be added not just to a Pentagon budget already running at half-a-trillion dollars annually, but to the actual national security budget, which is undoubtedly close to twice that. It includes items like work on nuclear weapons tucked away at the Department of Energy, that Pentagon supplementary war budget, the black budget of the Intelligence Community, and war-related expenditures in the budgets of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security.

Despite the jaw-dropping resources available to the national security state, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Martin Dempsey recently claimed that, without significant additional infusions of cash, the U.S. military won’t be able to “execute the strategy” with which it has been tasked. As it happens, Dempsey’s remark unintentionally points the way to a dramatically different approach to what’s still called “defense spending.” Instead of seeking yet more of it, perhaps it’s time for the Pentagon to abandon its costly and counterproductive military strategy of “covering the globe.”

A Cold War Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

Even to begin discussing this subject means asking the obvious question: Does the U.S. military have a strategy worthy of the name? As President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it in his farewell address in 1961, defense requires a “balance between cost and hoped for advantage” and “between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable.” Eisenhower conveniently omitted a third category: things that shouldn’t have been done in the first place -- on his watch, for instance, the CIA’s coups in Iran and Guatemala that overthrew democratic governments or, in our century, the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Eisenhower’s underlying point holds. Strategy involves making choices. Bottom line: current U.S. strategy fails this test abysmally.

Despite the obvious changes that have occurred globally since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military is still expected to be ready to go anywhere on Earth and fight any battle. The authors of the Pentagon’s key 2014Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), for instance, claimed that its supposedly “updated strategy” was focused on “twenty-first-century defense priorities.” Self-congratulatory rhetoric aside, however, the document outlined an all-encompassing global military blueprint whose goals would have been familiar to any Cold War strategist of the latter half of the previous century. With an utter inability to focus, the QDR claimed that the U.S. military needed to be prepared to act in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America. In addition, plans are now well underway to beef up the Pentagon’s ability to project power into the melting Arctic as part of a global race for resources brewing there.

Complete story at - How the American War Machine Is Sucking Up Vast Amounts of Cash to Screw Up the World | Alternet

The New Cold War Resolution: A DIY Guide to Heating Things Up / Sputnik US - News, Opinion, Radio

The US House of Representatives passed a resolution Thursday condemning Russia for its alleged policy of aggression against neighboring countries. Critics are calling it a dangerous provocation that highlights U.S. hypocrisy and threatens to further damage relations, already at a historic low.
Former congressman Ron Paul has called House Resolution 758 "16 pages of war propaganda that should have made even neocons blush, if they were capable of such a thing."

Indeed, the resolution will likely only serve to bring the "New Cold War" closer to a frightening boiling point. But after all, there's money to be made in this madness. And here's how it's done:

Step 1: Note that moves to decrease the size of the U.S. military threaten the profits of the military industrial complex. That just won’t do. Proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Determine a new enemy that it will be easy to provoke. Like a bear. A bear! Yes! Russia! I mean, taxpayers spent more than $20 trillion — yes, trillion! — on a decades-long war-non-war with the Soviet Union. And what’s good for Lockheed Martin is good for… well, Lockheed Martin.

Step 3: Find a country that neighbors the target country. Ukraine seemed ripe for a change, didn't it? What with that democratically elected, but Moscow-friendly president they had. Do Americans know where Ukraine is? Meh, doesn’t matter. The ones that don’t know where it is will want to intervene even more. This is ‘Merica, after al!

Complete story at - The New Cold War Resolution: A DIY Guide to Heating Things Up / Sputnik US - News, Opinion, Radio

Washington plays Russian roulette | Oriental Review

By Pepe ESCOBAR (Brazil)

These are bleak times. I’ve been in serious conversation with some deep sources and interlocutors – those who know but don’t need to show off, privileging discretion. They are all deeply worried. This is what one of them, a New York strategic planner, sent me:

The propaganda attack against Putin equating him with Hitler is so extreme that you have to think that the Russians cannot believe their ears and cannot trust the United States anymore under any circumstances.

I cannot believe how we could have gotten ourselves into this situation to protect the looters in the Ukraine that Putin would have rid the Ukraine of, and even had the gall to place in a leadership role one of the worst of the thieves. But that is history. What is certain is that MAD [mutually assured destruction] is not a deterrent today when both sides believe the other will use nuclear weapons once they have the advantage and that the side that gains a decisive advantage will use them. MAD is now over.

That may sound somewhat extreme – but it’s a perfectly logical extension, further on down the road, of what the Russian president intimated in his already legendary interview with Germany’s ARD in Vladivostok last week: the West is provoking Russia into a new Cold War.

Mikhail Gorbachev just stressed a few days ago the new Cold War is already on. Princeton’s Stephen Cohen says the Cold War in fact never left. The Roving Eye reported about Cold War 2.0 months ago. Brits – still stranded in the 19th century new Great Game – prefer to spin the “strident toxic personality” of “diminutive Putin”; he is the “ruthless, charming and ultimately reckless” man who “put the cold war back in vogue”. The Council on Foreign Relations, predictably, mourns the end of the post-Cold War world, blasts the current “disorder”, and dreams of the good ol’ unchallenged exceptionalist days.

For arguably the best detailed background on how we came to this perilous state of affairs, it’s hard to beat Vladimir Kozin of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Read him carefully. And yes, it’s Cold War 2.0, the double trouble remix; between the US and Russia, and between NATO and Russia.

Complete story at - Washington plays Russian roulette | Oriental Review

American Peace Movement and the New Cold War : Une parole franche

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

In this brief essay I present my observations as an attendee of plenary sessions and co-chair of a Workshop in the Massachusetts Peace Action at the MIT campus on Saturday, 8 November. My ‘sample of one’ method to characterize the American peace and anti-nuclear movements might be dismissed as anecdotal evidence were it not for the high visibility and high quality of the event in question.

The keynote speaker for a day dedicated to the principle of ‘A Foreign Policy for All’ was the great American dissident MIT Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky. His well-constructed speech, delivered in a calm and reflective tone, covered the waterfront of wrongs in Americans’ conceptualization of their place in the world, beginning with ‘exceptionalism’ and extending to the bizarre notion that they own the world and any ‘loss’ of some piece of it is a direct challenge to their national security.

Other featured speakers included veteran NY Times journalist and academic Stephen Kinzer, noted journalist and activist on the Israeli occupation Phyllis Bennis and Black affairs – labor activist and writer Bill Fletcher, Jr., all of whom delivered informative presentations with great passion.

The national reputations of these speakers assured the event’s relative popularity. The 300-seat auditorium was filled with a cross section of ages and occupations. To be sure, gray heads predominated, veterans of the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of the 60’s and ‘70’s, of the SANE and nuclear freeze movements of the ‘80’s. They ran the show, unlike the days of their own training in protest when youth called the shots in the post-1968 world. However, though they were observers rather than leaders, the students from the many universities of the Greater Boston area constituted close to 50% and one workshop was dedicated to recruitment of sympathizers on campus.

The organizers and participants clearly shared an identity as the Progressive Left, with strong anti-corporate, anti-Washington biases. For all that it was unmistakable how very strongly their priorities have been shaped by the narrative coming from the nation’s capital and from the mass media. Put simply, this community of peaceniks is concerned about what CNN and Fox News tells it to be concerned about – whether Ebola or the ISIS threat in Syria and Iraq. In a misguided approach to risk appraisal, it allows itself to panic over Jaws while pooh-poohing the risks inherent in driving automobiles.

Complete story at - American Peace Movement and the New Cold War : Une parole franche

Why the West will surrender in its new cold war with Russia » The Spectator

After months of escalating tensions over Ukraine and talk of a new cold war, Russia and the West could soon reach a surprising rapprochement. The eurozone economy is suffering badly and sanctions against Russia are partly to blame. Winter is also upon us, and that reminds every-one Vladimir Putin still holds the cards when it comes to supplying gas.

The clincher, though, is that Ukraine is heading towards financial meltdown. Unless an extremely large bailout is delivered soon, there will be a default, sending shockwaves through the global economy. That’s a risk nobody wants to take — least of all Washington, London or Berlin.

Sanctions against Russia were always going to hit western Europe hard. The eurozone did 12 times as much trade with Russia as the United States did last year — that’s one reason Washington’s attitude towards corralling Russia’s economy has been somewhat more gung-ho.

Most big European economies, particularly Germany, only explicitly backed western sanctions after flight MH17 was shot down over Ukrainian airspace in July, killing 298. After that tragedy, which was instantly blamed on Moscow, it was politically impossible to suggest that sanctions might be counterproductive. The result was the biggest clampdown on Russian trade since the Soviet era — mainly targeting energy, defence and financial services companies — and the deterioration of East-West relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War.

The western economy that’s suffered most, by far, is the largest one in the eurozone. Germany’s manufacturing thoroughbreds have sunk tens of billions of euros into Russian production facilities in recent years. Volkswagen has several full-cycle Russian plants and is the middle-class brand of choice in what will soon be Europe’s largest car market. Siemens is central to the upgrade of Russia’s vast rail network and the specialised manufacturer Liebherr has a big presence too. Numerous ‘Mittelstand’ firms — those are the medium-sized enterprises that account for over half the German economy — have also built lucrative trading links since Russia opened up 20 years ago, selling everything from plaster-board to machine tools. Over 6,000 such of them operate across the country, with 350,000 German jobs directly dependent on Russian trade. And they’re feeling the pinch.

Complete story at - Why the West will surrender in its new cold war with Russia » The Spectator

The New Cold War and the Necessity of Patriotic Heresy | The Nation

I prepared the text below for remarks to the annual US-Russia Forum in Washington, DC, on June 16. Though held in the Hart Senate Office Building, and well attended, the event was privately organized, without any official auspices. In order to fit the time allocated to speakers, I had to abridge my text. I have restored the deletions here and spelled out a number of my impromptu comments. In addition, I refer to a few subsequent developments to illustrate some of my themes. I have not, however, significantly revised words written to be spoken into the prose I prefer for published articles. —SFC

We meet today during the worst and potentially most dangerous American-Russian confrontation in many decades, probably since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The Ukrainian civil war, precipitated by the unlawful change of government in Kiev in February, is already growing into a proxy US-Russian war. The seemingly unthinkable is becoming imaginable: an actual war between NATO, led by the United States, and post-Soviet Russia.

Certainly, we are already in a new cold war, which escalating sanctions will only deepen and institutionalize, one potentially more dangerous than its US-Soviet predecessor the world barely survived. This is so for several reasons:

—The epicenter of the new cold war is not in Berlin but on Russia's borders, in Ukraine, a region absolutely essential in Moscow's view to its national security and even to its civilization. This means that the kinds of miscalculations, mishaps and provocations the world witnessed decades ago will be even more fraught with danger. (The mysterious shoot down of a Malaysian jetliner over eastern Ukraine in July was an ominous example.)

—An even graver risk is that the new cold war may tempt the use of nuclear weapons in a way the US-Soviet one did not. I have in mind the argument made by some Moscow military strategists that if directly threatened by NATO's superior conventional forces, Russia may resort to its much larger arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. (The ongoing US-NATO encirclement of Russia with bases, as well as land and sea-based missile defense, only increases this possibility.)

Complete story at - The New Cold War and the Necessity of Patriotic Heresy | The Nation

​Ready, reset, go! ...to Cold War 2.0 — RT Op-Edge

by Pepe Escobar

The New Great Game in Eurasia never ceases to thrill with extreme plot twists. The Big Three players remain the same: the US, Russia and China. The devil is in the concentric subplots.

In Washington, the deep state Russia ‘policy’ has revealed itself to be sanctions, sanctions, sanctions; because of Crimea, because of support for federalists in Eastern Ukraine, because of the MH17 tragedy.

Sanctions are targeting Russia’s energy, defense and finance – and are fast on their way towards all-out economic war, which in itself is a declaration of war. As with Cuba; as with Iraq (until there was regime change); as with Iran (until there is a nuclear deal, and even that is a major ‘if’).

Beware the wrath of the Empire of Chaos. The prescription is always the same; sanctions; no holds barred geo-economic/political warfare; internal subversion (NED, assorted NGOs); and non-stop vitriol marinated in hubris.

In Moscow, there are no illusions; no matter what the Kremlin does on Ukraine, there won’t be any ‘reset’. Washington’s sanction hysteria – which has far surpassed the level of containment - is even regarded as a means towards (what else?) regime change, Putin’s huge popularity notwithstanding. No wonder US Think Tankland is drooling about it.

Roughly, in Russian spheres of power, an Atlanticist – neoliberal – school, appeasing the Empire of Chaos, is pitted against the Eurasianists, who strive to be respected in the US as equals. The Empire of Chaos, by default, does not accept equals; one just needs to consult the Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.

Complete story at - ​Ready, reset, go! ...to Cold War 2.0 — RT Op-Edge

Ukraine, Arab Spring, Cold War II and Price Wars Hardly Disguised

2014-06-08 by Phil Butler

Ukraine, Kiev’s Maidan Square protests, the current US versus Russia mess, all this is about gas and profit, and nothing else.

When US President Barack Obama began the campaign to “punish” Vladimir Putin and Russia over interference in Ukraine, we all should have known there was more to the story. And there is. As it turns out, Ukraine’s violence, and most of the unrest abroad in fact, is a competition in between huge investment partners, gas companies like Exxon Mobile, and Russia’s Gazprom. As for the people, the public? They are just collateral damage, pawns or meaningless in a worldwide corporate game for profit. The Obama administration, and almost all the western governments are involved in one way or other, are fighting a price war over gas against Russia.

Sounds conspiratorial and unfeasible, doesn’t it? But the intuitive and honest reader somehow knows it’s all true. All you have to do is ask a few fairly simple questions, know a few key names, and see the logic bankers and investors always apply. Here’s a few questions to head your thinking into the right direction:

1. Why were economic sanctions applied to swiftly and forcefully against Putin’s and Russia’s oligarchs and industrialists?
2. Who will benefit from the Ukraine/natural gas situation if an alternative to Russia supply of Europe is created?
3. Who, and for how long is involved in capitalizing on a European market for alternative liquid natural gas (LNG) shipments?
4. What other factors involving LNG amplify the need for disrupting Russia’s market for natural gas?

The Answers – More Complicated Than the Questions

Before I answer some of these for you, please think about why the son of a US Vice President ends up working for the biggest Ukrainian gas company. Then wonder why a college chum of Secretary of State John Kerry ends up at the same Cyprus based Burisma Holdings? These two are bit players though, in a money power play of staggering proportions. Like something straight out of an Orwellian nightmare, industrialists who pull the strings on powerful politicians now hide in plain sight, dealing in lives, greed, corporate skulduggery all disguised as lobbying, aggressive business, economic upturn, and so on. Look at the dogma, then look at the separate reality hidden in each:

1. President Obama‘s “Climate Action Plan” (Billionaire Richard Branson is in love) – The plan promotes natural gas above all other energy sources
2. Whatever you heard about the “Odessa Massacre“ – it’s about ensuring an investment from the west in the only LNG “regasification” plant in Ukraine
3. Russia’s Gazprom & A Secret UN Gas Cadre – Fox broke this gas conspiracy, but Obama’s constituents represent another energy cartel
4. A licensing melee (Lebanon offshore) has begun in between energy companies like Royal Dutch Shell, Marathon oil in the US, and others
5. Mega-firm Baker & McKenzie instrumental in world natural gas – here’s their guide (and above from the PDF) showing North Africa (Arab Spring states’) potential
6. Smaller players like former PR/lobbying firm MWW’s VP Ankit Desai, who’s migration from a key Obama supporter to the energy sector (LNG in focus, Cheniere) show the ever widening spider web of connections in between big government, big business, and big profits

Complete story at - Ukraine, Arab Spring, Cold War II and Price Wars Hardly Disguised

Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Paul Craig Roberts

The Cold War made a lot of money for the military/security complex for four decades dating from Churchill’s March 5, 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri declaring a Soviet “Iron Curtain” until Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War in the late 1980s. During the Cold War Americans heard endlessly about “the Captive Nations.” The Captive Nations were the Baltics and the Soviet bloc, usually summarized as “Eastern Europe.”

These nations were captive because their foreign policies were dictated by Moscow, just as these same Captive Nations, plus the UK, Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, Columbia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Georgia, and Ukraine, have their foreign policies dictated today by Washington. Washington intends to expand the Captive Nations to include Azerbaijan, former constituent parts of Soviet Central Asia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.

During the Cold War Americans thought of Western Europe and Great Britain as independent sovereign countries. Whether they were or not, they most certainly are not today. We are now almost seven decades after WWII, and US troops still occupy Germany. No European government dares to take a stance different from that of the US Department of State.

Not long ago there was talk both in the UK and Germany about departing the European Union, and Washington told both countries that talk of that kind must stop as it was not in Washington’s interest for any country to exit the EU. The talk stopped. Great Britain and Germany are such complete vassals of Washington that neither country can publicly discuss its own future.

Complete story at - Cold War Renewed With A Vengeance While Washington Again Lies -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Why Ukraine's Civil War Is of Global Historical Significance | The Smirking Chimp

Ukraine’s civil war started on 2 May 2014, when supporters of the February-coup-imposed (click on that link if you don't know about that coup) Ukrainian central government firebombed Odessa's Trade Unions Building, incinerating hundreds of Odessans who opposed the coup.

This civil war is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War, this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an ideological battle between “capitalism” versus “communism,” but instead more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging aristocracies of Russia and of China. Like had happened in World War I, this global war is between two contending aristocratic alliances. (That's the standard thing, we historians know; it’s nothing unusual there.) However, the documentation of the history is much clearer and far faster for this new war, than for former global wars, regarding which of the two sides had really initiated it, and why.

The "players" in "The Great Game," this time around, are, broadly speaking, West versus East; those are the two contending "teams," of aristocracies. USA is the leading participant on the western side, and has the backing of Europe's aristocracies via the IMF; and Russia is the leading participant on the eastern side, and has wrangled the backing of China's aristocrats. The West is far better-funded than the East, and, so, this is a war that the East did not want, and had hoped to avoid, but that has been thrust upon them, by the Obama-initiated coup that took place in Ukraine during late February 2014, and also by the Obama-initiated massacre that occurred in Odessa on May 2nd (the event that immediately sparked Ukraine’s civil war).

As I have previously documented, Obama is knowingly falsifying (he’s lying), when he claims that Ukraine's civil war is wanted and was initiated by Putin, and that Obama didn't want and initiate it via the February overthrow. I also have explained, by use of charts and graphs, the broader background, "How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War)."

Complete story at - Why Ukraine's Civil War Is of Global Historical Significance | The Smirking Chimp

The Russians are coming! (or maybe not) | Counterfire

They have been like headlines from darkest days of the Cold War: “Russian troops massing on the border! Tanks set to roll”

Will they invade? When will they attack?

That Crimea would only be the start of campaign of seizures by Russia has become an underlying assumption of much of the commentary. Hasn't Russia always been an expansionist power after all?

Then Putin announced that Russia was pulling its troops back from the border and called for the referendums in the east to be called off, and this narrative was called into question.

Either it must just be a ruse on his part, or the dominant narrative wrong.

No guesses which formulation the media has gone for. The wily fox is just trying to keep everyone off guard. The "War on Ukraine" continues. We must prepare for the worst.

Rhetoric with a purpose

This Cold war rhetoric is serving a purpose though.

It is acting as a justification for increased arms spending and further Nato expansion.

For instance in just one recent statement, after accusing Russia of expansionism and militarism, the head of Nato Anders Fogh Rassmussen said that “Above all, we must stop the decline of our defence budgets. And start reinvesting in our security.”

Not wanting to let a good crisis go to waste Nato leaders have sought to use the Russian menace to once again justify its own existence and the waste billions on useless baroque and useless military technology.

After a twenty years of having to find new missions (“nation building”, “liberal intervention”) it can now get back to its original mission, defence of the “western civilization” against the Russian hordes.

Complete story at - The Russians are coming! (or maybe not) | Counterfire

Michael Hudson: The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit | naked capitalism

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.” This article is from a new book, Flashpoint in Ukraine, edited by Stephen Lendman. It is currently available from Clarity Press as an e-book, and soon to be printed.

----------

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.

In a recent interview in The New York Review of Books, George Soros outlines what he thinks should be done for the Ukraine. It should “encourage its companies to improve their management by finding European partners.”[2]

This means that kleptocrats should sell major ownership shares in their companies to Westerners. This would give the West a stake in protecting them, pressuring their government to tax labor rather than the wealthy, and helping them cash out and keep their takings in London and New York to finance Western economies, not that of Ukraine.

The West’s Ideological Conquest of the Post-Soviet Economies

That is not how replacing Soviet communism with a free market was supposed to work out – at least, not for the Soviet side. Mikhail Gorbachev and his supporters hoped that ending the Cold War would enable Russia to dismantle the arms race whose costly military overhead prevented the Soviet Union from devoting resources to produce consumer goods and adequate housing. In addition to the peace dividend, the aim was to establish a price feedback system that would raise industrial productivity and living standards.

The West’s ideological victory – or more to the point, the neoliberal anti-labor, anti-government and pro-Wall Street game plan – was sealed at the Houston summit in July 1990. Russian Prime Minister Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders endorsed the World Bank/USAID plan for shock therapy, privatization, deindustrialization and a wipeout of domestic personal savings (characterized as an “overhang”) to start by impoverishing the population at large and vesting an overclass with the most unequal distribution of wealth in the Northern Hemisphere.

Complete story at - Michael Hudson: The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit | naked capitalism

Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com

This is American foreign policy Version 2014: Often disrespectful, often unlawful, purposefully destructive of order, possessing no idea of limits. There is no more Saddam Hussein, and it takes some doing to bring him in for reconsideration, no more Gadhafi, no Morsi, no Yanukovych, there would be no more Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela if Washington had its way. You have to climb over a mountain of prejudice and misinformation to consider what Washington has done wrong in these cases, but it is wrong. The quality of these leaders has nothing to do with it.

“The first casualty of war is truth.” Most journalists, at least of my cohort, know this sentence from the Philip Knightley book “The First Casualty,” a history of war correspondents that begins, ironically, in mid-19th century Crimea. Maybe we should be talking about the State Department’s war, not its policy, because the reporting of it has been near to fatally awful.

This is my other point of clarity. The media entered the post-Cold War era in bad shape, having surrendered almost all ground that separates them from power (political, corporate, financial by way of the stock market). But they are now not short of craven.

There have been red-handed cases to match the WMD-in-Iraq bit Judith Miller made infamous: Washington’s role in the Egyptian coup, the gas attack last August in Syria, now the State Department’s provocative manipulations in Ukraine. But beyond these, you find a day-to-day effort to slant and mislead, a grinding, relentless use of vocabulary, juxtaposition, innuendo and other such devices that poisons the news columns.

Again, we have our saving grace. I harbor no illusions: Millions of people read and watch these Washington-generated narratives and believe them. But the forward edge of the phenomenon is how many people no longer do or never have.

Complete story at - Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com

The American New World Order is Dead -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net

Putin isn't dragging the world back to the 19th century. Obama just needs to stop pretending it's 1991.

Russia is dragging the world back into the 19th century, at least according to Barack Obama's administration. "You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext," said Secretary of State John Kerry, following Moscow's annexation of Crimea. "What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President [Vladimir] Putin to address problems," added another senior administration official. "Sending in troops and, because you're bigger and stronger, taking a piece of the country -- that is not how international law and international norms are observed in the 21st century," President Obama declared a few weeks later.

As Moscow continues to threaten a broader invasion -- most recently demanding that Kiev withdraw its troops from eastern Ukraine -- America's indignant response reveals a great deal about how its leaders think about international norms.

Unfortunately, it is the Americans, not the Russians, who are trapped in a time warp. They believe that the legal norms promoted by the United States during its brief period of global hegemony -- which started in 1991 and has eroded over the last decade -- are still in force. They aren't.

In the 1990s, it was possible to believe that a new international order had replaced the bipolar system of the Cold War. Memorably dubbed the "new world order" by President George H.W. Bush, it was characterized by the peaceful settlement of disputes through international courts, universal human rights, international criminal justice, and free trade and investment. Above all, the new liberal order emphasized international rule of law -- the idea that international law and legal institutions would be the major source of global organization.

Complete story at - The American New World Order is Dead -- Puppet Masters -- Sott.net



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China paper slams West's "Cold War mentality" over Ukraine | Reuters

(Reuters) - China's top newspaper criticised the West on Thursday for remaining locked in a "Cold War mentality" against Russia in the contest for influence over Ukraine, calling for the shackles of such outmoded thinking to be cast off to deal with the crisis.

The commentary published in the People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, was the strongest reaction yet in Beijing to the rift between the West and Russia that has been growing since the ouster of Moscow's ally Viktor Yanukovich as president following weeks of protests.

"The theories related to politics, economics and security during the Cold War period are still influencing many people on their concept of the world, and some Western people are still imbued with resentment towards Russia," the paper said.

It called on Western countries to "abandon their outdated thinking" and expand cooperation.

"Ridding the shackles of the Cold War mentality will reduce unnecessary confrontation, thereby allowing for a smoother transition in international relations."

Complete story at - China paper slams West's 'Cold War mentality' over Ukraine | Reuters



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Gunboat Diplomacy, Round-2 — USS Donald Cook Gives Odessa a Miss, Sails Southeast | Dances With Bears

By John Helmer, Moscow

On Thursday President Vladimir Putin described NATO missile batteries aimed at Russia’s Black Sea coastline as threatening the nuclear defences of southwestern Russia. It was the first time the president or Russian defence officials have put Crimea into Russian strategic survival doctrine. US Navy deployment in the Black Sea of ships armed with Aegis missiles is one of the concrete threats Putin was referring to. This has made the current Black Sea cruise of the USS Donald Cook, an Aegis-armed destroyer, of special importance. It is the reason a Russian military aircraft buzzed the Cook as it steamed towards Constanta port, in Romania.

It is also the reason why, as Putin was speaking in Moscow, the Cook pulled away from the Constanta dock, setting a course to the southeast from Constanta towards Georgia and Turkey, and not a northward course towards Odessa. In that Ukrainian port, public demonstrations against a port call by the Cook have been under way for several days.

US Navy deployments inside the Black Sea are now consecutive, one vessel arriving as another leaves, since February 2, when the USS Mount Whitney passed through the Bosphorus, the Turkish straits, guarded by the frigate, the USS Taylor. The Mount Whitney is a floating headquarters for NATO strike forces aimed at Russia from Romania to Hungary and Poland. It had sailed into the Georgian port of Poti in September of 2008 as Russian air, ground and naval forces surrounded the port. The BBC reported the mission as the delivery of humanitarian aid. In July of 2011 the Mount Whitney was off the Libyan coast to coordinate US and NATO operations to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi.

Complete story at - Gunboat Diplomacy, Round-2 — USS Donald Cook Gives Odessa a Miss, Sails Southeast | Dances With Bears

The 4th Media » The Infantile Diplomacy Behind Demonising Russia

Are Western diplomats and media outlets being serious when they accuse the Russian government of launching a new Cold War? Do they really believe their own rhetoric when they say Putin has expansionary ambitions and wants to rebuild the Soviet Empire?

Did Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state, mean it when she said Russia’s actions in Crimea are similar to ‘what Hitler did back in the 1930s’? Other anti-Russian observers have also claimed that Russia’s incorporation of Crimea is analogous to the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Do all these people sincerely believe this interpretation of current geopolitical events?

It is always difficult, if not dangerous, to speculate about the thought processes that drive powerful diplomats and political leaders to say and do certain things. It is especially difficult to make sense of the dynamics that turned the crisis in Ukraine into a perilous international dispute.

In a recent interview, a Russian journalist asked me why Western media outlets have become so careless about fact-checking in relation to Ukraine and Russia more broadly. I wasn’t sure if I could answer the question, so I was forced to say that I would have to reflect on it further.

After analysing the statements about Ukraine made by Western diplomats over the past two weeks, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that the motives behind the current campaign to demonise Russia are based on genuine convictions. Of course, there is a great deal of propaganda, wilful distortion and a significant element of fantasy in this campaign – but the outlook it expresses has been so firmly internalised by many in the West that it now constitutes their reality.

And the fact that the West’s new breed of would-be Cold War crusaders have convinced themselves of their own rhetoric is likely to have far more destabilising consequences than if this campaign were simply a cynical example of old-fashioned realpolitik. At least realpolitik has the merit of being rooted in the real world; the current anti-Russian campaign, by contrast, is based on confusion and, even worse, on self-deception.

Complete story at - The 4th Media » The Infantile Diplomacy Behind Demonising Russia

The Vineyard of the Saker: The painful issue of today's Europe - what are Russia's options?

The painful issue of today's Europe - what are Russia's options?

I think that it is time for me to directly address the issue of today's Europe role in world affairs.  In this blog I have often voiced very harsh criticisms of both "old Europe" and "new Europe" - to use Rumsfeld's classification - but I have never addressed this issue head-on, and this is what I propose to do now.

Let me begin by a little disclaimer and say that while I am ethnically and culturally Russian, I was born in the heart of Western Europe from in a family of refugees.  I spent most of my life in Europe, and I have become especially close to what I call my "2nd homeland" - the northern Mediterranean from Spain to Greece (which I consider as one coherent - if diverse - cultural zone).  So for all my criticisms of Europe, part of me is most definitely European.  Furthermore, and regular readers of this blog know that, I have spent a good part of my life in an absolute opposition to the Soviet regime and then the AngloZionist colonial regime of Eltsin which followed it.  So while I am ethnically and culturally Russian, I am hardly an automatic supporter of everything "Russian".  In fact, I repeatedly have to pinch myself to check if I am dreaming every time I say something positive about the Kremlin or Putin (who is, after all, an ex-KGB officer).  I am so used to be disgusted, outraged and even ashamed by everything which comes out of the Kremlin that, if anything, I have to struggle with my kneejerk suspicion, if not hostility, towards anything "Kremlin".  And yet, here I am, in 2014, a longtime Cold War participant (on many levels - private, corporate and even professional) catching myself in the undeniable fact that I am becoming a "Putin groupie".  I can hardly convey how weird this still feels to me.

I wanted to begin by clarifying all this because what I will write next I do not write as "a Russian bashing Europe" but as a European disgusted with his own birthplace.  So here we go:

First, for all its rights and wrongs, and even though we have been more or less a US colony since 1945, I still believe that Western Europe was the "good guy" during the Cold War.  Yes, I know, Churchill and the rest of the Anglosphere created that Cold War much more than the Soviets and, yes, the Soviets were not nearly as bad as our propaganda said, nor were we nearly as good as we fancied ourselves to be.  And yet, Europe, Western Europe was a continent, a society, which was free, especially compared to Eastern Europe.  Anyone doubting this today should watch the beautiful German movie "Das Leben der Anderen" ("The lives of the others") of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (preferable in the original German language - with subtitles if needed).  Here are a few links to this remarkable movie:

(Links removed by the original author.  I'm not sure what kind of trouble he was having, but there shouldn't have been a problem, as far as I know.)  

SORRY - I HAD TO REMOVE THESE LINKS AS I DID NOT WANT TROUBLE WITH BLOGGER.  YOU WILL HAVE TO LOOK FOR THIS MOVIE BY YOURSELF

THE SAKER

This movie shows, without any exaggerations, what life was like in the last years of the former GDR and I think that for those who might be tempted to forget what daily life was under Soviet rule, this is a very good refresher.

I feel that I want to mention this because I then felt - and still do today - that in those years one could be if not proud, then maybe at least grateful to live in a society which was comparatively wealthy and comparatively free.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: The painful issue of today's Europe - what are Russia's options?

The Vineyard of the Saker: A new Cold War has begun - let us embrace it with relief!

Considering the relative lull which seems to be taking place in the Ukraine, this might be a good time to look at the impact which the dramatic developments in the Ukraine have had upon the internal political scene in Russia and what that, in turn, could mean for the international (dis)order.  In order to do that, I would like to begin by a short summary of a thesis which I have already mentioned in the past (for a discussion please see here, here, here and here):

Setting the Russian part of the stage

First, some bullet-style reminders on topics previously covered on this blog:

There is no real Parliamentary opposition in Russia.  Oh, not at all because "Putin is a dictator" or because "Russia is not a democracy", but simply because Putin has brilliantly managed to either co-opt or defang any opposition.  How? By using his personal authority and charisma to promote an agenda which the other parties could not openly oppose.  Formally, opposition parties do, of course, still exist, but they completely lack credibility.  This might eventually change with the new Law on Political Parties.

The only "hard" opposition to Putin in modern Russia are the various openly pro-US individuals (Nemtov, Novodvorskaia, etc) and their associated movements and parties.  At best, they represent something in the range of 5% (max!) of the population.

Putin did a "judo move" on his real opponents (more about them later) by using the strongly "presidential Constitution" adopted in 1993 to basically concentrate all the power in his hands.

The *real* "opposition" to Putin and his project can only be found *inside* the Kremlin, the "United Russia" party and some influential figures.  I refer to this real opposition as the "Atlantic Integrationists" (AI) because their key aim is to integrate Russia into the AngloZionist worldwide power structure.

The *real* power base of Putin is in the Russian people themselves who support him personally, the All-Russian People's Front, and in the group which I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" (ES) whose primary aims is to develop a new, multi-polar, world order, to to break free from the current AngloZionist controlled international financial system, to re-orient as much of the former USSR as possible towards an integration with the East, and to develop of the Russian North.

If I wanted to simplify things further, I would say that in 1999 the AI and the ES jointly made the push to put Putin into power to replace Eltsin.  The AI (roughly representing the interests of big money and big business) wanted a rather gray and dull bureaucrat like Putin (or so they thought!) to assure continuity and not rock the boat too much after Eltsin's departure.  The ES (roughly representing the interests of a certain elite of the former KGB, especially, its First Chief Directorate) and Putin himself, brilliantly used the power given to him by the 1993 Constitution (adopted under Eltsin and the AI!) to slowly but surely change the course of Russia from a total submission to, and colonization by, the USA to a process which Putin and his supporters call "sovereignization" i.e. national liberation.  A long tug-of-war ensued, mainly behind the scenes, but with regular visible flare-ups such as the open clash between Putin and Medvedev on Iran and Libya or the sacking of Kudrin by Medvedev (the two had been set on a collision course by Putin, of course).  As a last over-simplification I would say that Medvedev represents the Atlantic Integrationists and Putin the Eurasian Sovereignists.

Again, I have very much over-simplified all of the above to keep this short, but if any of this is new to you, please do go and read the four previous articles I mention above, including the comments.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: A new Cold War has begun - let us embrace it with relief!

The Terrible Shadow - LuoJie, China Daily

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