War and Politics - September 15, 2015

• Who’s Going to Foot the Bill for Ukraine?
• Putin: The Only World Leader Speaking Sense on Syria & The Migrant Crisis
• IMF head is "extremely encouraged" by the economic disaster in Ukraine
• Cyber Berkut's Latest Hack May Reveal UAF deliberately targeted Schools
• Half a million refugees gather in Libya to attempt perilous crossing to Europe
• Refugee Crisis: What The Media Is Hiding
• Sovereign Debt as Weapon: Subverting Democracy in Greece
• Media Rubbish about Venezuelans Who Have Left to Live Abroad
• Uruguay To Withdraw From Free Trade Deal on Services
• China intends to oust dollar from oil trade

War and Politics - September 14, 2015

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• Ukraine: The Market Does Not Care About Your Values
• The Murky Myth of the “2000 Russian War Dead” in Ukraine
• Kyiv one of the world's most unliveable cities, survey finds
• New Ukrainian Textbook Erases Crimea From Country’s List of Territories
• Land Destroyer: US Seeks Occupation as US Fighters Flood Syria
• U.S. Drops Bombs; EU Gets Refugees & Blame. This is insane.
• How Neocons Destabilized Europe
• Lebanon Protest Leaders Reveal Connections To Western Color Revolution Apparatus
• Read This Before the Media Uses a Drowned Refugee Boy to Start Another War
• "Some People Just Don't Fit In The Economy" Buffett Explains: "We'll Send Them Off To Afghanistan"

War and Politics - September 10, 2015

Kiev Chief of Staff: Intelligence reports have 90% margin of error
New Violence in Kiev - But Nobody Seems to Care Much
Odessa governor says state machinery in Ukraine demoralized, power may change
As Major Culprit in Creating Crisis, US Rebuked for Failing Refugees
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad: Secret Back Story Reveals Why The West Cannot Topple His Government
Blowback on a NATO beach
The March of Shame
There Goes Europe
US State Dept fails to explain Washington's decision to extend sanctions on Russia
Something Major Is On The Horizon For This Fall.
Too Many Big Chess Pieces Have Been Positioning Themselves Around The Table
The Empire Files — The Rise of History's Biggest Empire

War and Politics - September 9, 2015

• Why Are Leaders of Arab States Flocking to Moscow?
• Putin Achieves Political Draw in Sanctions War with Europe 
• Putin’s Asia-Eurasia Pivot: ‘Isolation’ from the West Spurs Eurasian Integration and Russian Globalization
• Maidan 2.0 Erupting in Ukraine?
• The Art of Propaganda: Why is Russia Called the Main Threat to World Peace?
• Syrian refugees find Arctic route towards western Europe
• The CIA and the Media: 50 Facts the World Needs to Know
• The Real Enemy Is Within
• NYT Claims U.S. Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality
• On This Labor Day, How We Can Honor the Men and Women Who Fought for Workers’ Rights 

5 Reasons Why Arab Spring States are Dumping Obama and Reaching for Russia / Sputnik International

Obama has a Middle East problem. Almost all states which went through the Arab Spring revolutions are dumping the US and looking to Russia for help. Here are five reasons why.

As Obama's foreign policy falters, even former US allies are turning toward Russia for support. In February, high-profile visits to Moscow were made by Libya's prime minister and Yemen's ruling coalition. On February 10, Putin made a visit to Egypt which has been labelled as historic by analysts, and led to multiple high-level visits since.

However, the leaders are not only seeking access to Russia's historically strong military industry, but also its economic cooperation and political clout at the United Nations Security Council as they realize that dealing with the United States is a dead end. There are five main reasons why post-Arab Spring states are yearning for Russia's support.

1. The US Only Provides Weapons When it Serves Its Doctrine

Following the NATO intervention which led to the overthrow of Muammar Gadhafi during the 2011 Libyan Civil War, the country was discarded by the West. A conflict between secular and Islamist factions who came to power led to a second civil war in 2014. Now, the secular government is yearning for Russia' support as it battles the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Islamist faction as well as jihadists, including the Islamic State, is yearning for Russia's support.

"The United States and Britain have been supporting armed groups while at the same time denying weapons to the Libyan army," the country's internationally-recognized Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thani told Sputnik on Tuesday.

Al-Thani, previously announced that Libya hopes for a military cooperation with Russia, in both weapons supplies and training, during a press conference at the Rossiya Segodnya press center in Moscow on February 5.

2. Infrastructure Projects With the West Mean IMF Debt Traps

Having lost a considerable amount of infrastructure in the Civil War, Libya cannot afford expensive Western technologies other than through IMF and World Bank loans which have political strings attached, such as austerity policies. The other choice is Russia, which is willing to finance deals on much more generous terms and at a lower price.

Complete story at - 5 Reasons Why Arab Spring States are Dumping Obama and Reaching for Russia / Sputnik International

Our Wars, Our Victims by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

Jon Stewart: “Right now, the Middle East is spiraling out of control. What should America do about this?”
Bassem Youssef, Egyptian comedian and satirist: “Well, how about… nothing.”
—The Daily Show, February 9, 2015

Since we rarely see real images of our wars today and have to fall back on simulated ones in Hollywood movies that make us look good, I wonder what Americans would say if they were shown graphic footage of the results of US drone attacks, some of the many wedding parties or funerals we mistook for gatherings of terrorists and reduced to “bug splats,” in the parlance of those dispatching our missiles. The idea that wiping out a bunch of innocents along with a few bad guys will make us safer at home and not make us more enemies everywhere is nuts, and so is the argument that the atrocities we find appalling in others are acceptable when perpetrated by us.

All this ought to be obvious to our leaders in Washington, but apparently it isn’t. President Obama’s new request for war authorization, now pending before Congress, to fight ISIS over the next three years with further airstrikes and “limited” combat operations, despite the complete failure of all our previous attempts in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen to do any good, may make our wars legal, but no less foolish.

What Czeslaw Milosz said of the last century is unfortunately already true of this one: Woe to those who think they can save themselves without taking part in a tragedy. Millions of Americans certainly continue to think so, even after September 11 and all the wars we have fought since and are still fighting. Television footage and newspaper photographs do not convey the scale of destruction and death in New York City on that day. One needed to have stood at least once under the twin towers to grasp their immense height and magnitude. Although I did, it took me days and months to comprehend fully what had occurred. Even after the second airliner struck the towers, it didn’t cross my mind that they might collapse. When they did, my mind had trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing. It was like a movie, people said afterward. We’d exit the dark movie theater with a shudder and go back to our lives. I thought Americans would finally begin to understand what being bombed is like.

Complete story at - Our Wars, Our Victims by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

The Atlantic Can't Figure Out Why U.S. Loses Wars - Washington's Blog

The cover of the January-February 2015 The Atlantic asks “Why Do The Best Soldiers in the World Keep Losing?” which leads to this article (at the link below), which fails to answer the question.

The main focus of the article is the by now endlessly familiar discovery that most U.S.-Americans are not in the military. The article is accompanied by another advocating a draft. The claim in the main article is that because most people are disconnected from the military they are more willing to send it off into unwinnable wars.

Nowhere does the author, James Fallows, attempt to so much as hint at what makes the wars unwinnable. He does claim that the last war that was in any way victorious for the United States was the Gulf War. But he can’t mean that it resolved a crisis. It was a war followed by bombings and sanctions and, in fact, the repeated revival of the war, ongoing and escalating even now.

What Fallows must mean is that once the U.S. military had done what it can do — namely, blow stuff up — in the Gulf War, it more or less stopped. The early days in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq 2003 saw very similar “victories,” as did Libya 2011 and numerous other U.S. wars. Why Fallows ignores Libya I don’t know, but Iraq and Afghanistan go down as losses in his book, I think, not because there’s no draft or because the military and Congress are corrupt and build the wrong weapons, but because after blowing everything up, the military stuck around for years trying to make people like it by murdering their friends and family members. Such occupations are virtually unwinnable, as in Vietnam and numerous other places, because people will not accept them, and because military attempts to create acceptance are counterproductive. A better military with more self-criticism, a draft, and an audited budget would not alter this fact in the slightest.

Fallows’ contention that nobody pays any attention to wars and militarism misses the point, but it is also overstated. “I’m not aware,” he writes, “of any midterm race for the House or Senate in which matters of war and peace . . . were first-tier campaign issues.” He’s forgotten 2006 when exit polls showed ending the war on Iraq as the number one motivator of voters after numerous candidates opposed the war they would escalate as soon as they were in office.

Complete story at - The Atlantic Can't Figure Out Why U.S. Loses Wars Washington's Blog

ClubOrlov: How to start a war and lose an empire

A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update.

At that time the stakes weren't very high yet. There was much noise around a fellow named Magnitsky, a corporate lawyer-crook who got caught and died in pretrial custody. He had been holding items for some bigger Western crooks, who were, of course, never apprehended. The Americans chose to treat this as a human rights violation and responded with the so-called “Magnitsky Act” which sanctioned certain Russian individuals who were labeled as human rights violators. Russian legislators responded with the “Dima Yakovlev Bill,” named after a Russian orphan adopted by Americans who killed him by leaving him in a locked car for nine hours. This bill banned American orphan-killing fiends from adopting any more Russian orphans. It all amounted to a silly bit of melodrama.

But what a difference a year and a half has made! Ukraine, which was at that time collapsing at about the same steady pace as it had been ever since its independence two decades ago, is now truly a defunct state, with its economy in free-fall, one region gone and two more in open rebellion, much of the country terrorized by oligarch-funded death squads, and some American-anointed puppets nominally in charge but quaking in their boots about what's coming next. Syria and Iraq, which were then at a low simmer, have since erupted into full-blown war, with large parts of both now under the control of the Islamic Caliphate, which was formed with help from the US, was armed with US-made weapons via the Iraqis. Post-Qaddafi Libya seems to be working on establishing an Islamic Caliphate of its own. Against this backdrop of profound foreign US foreign policy failure, the US recently saw it fit to accuse Russia of having troops “on NATO's doorstep,” as if this had nothing to do with the fact that NATO has expanded east, all the way to Russia's borders. Unsurprisingly, US–Russia relations have now reached a point where the Russians saw it fit to issue a stern warning: further Western attempts at blackmailing them may result in a nuclear confrontation.

The American behavior throughout this succession of defeats has been remarkably consistent, with the constant element being their flat refusal to deal with reality in any way, shape or form. Just as before, in Syria the Americans are ever looking for moderate, pro-Western Islamists, who want to do what the Americans want (topple the government of Bashar al Assad) but will stop short of going on to destroy all the infidel invaders they can get their hands on. The fact that such moderate, pro-Western Islamists do not seem to exist does not affect American strategy in the region in any way.

Complete story at - ClubOrlov: How to start a war and lose an empire

Russia and Saudi Arabia – the new Gulf partnership? | Russia Direct

Moscow’s diplomatic blitzkrieg in Saudi Arabia marks a new era in bilateral relations with one of the Middle East’s key players, and possibly a major shift in regional alliances.

Recent weeks have seen an escalation of violence in the Middle East, with ISIS advancing into Iraq and effortlessly taking over large swathes of territory there. The growing instability in the region has highlighted the enormous shifts taking place within established political alliances.

At a time when the White House is considering sending military aid to Baghdad, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is visiting Saudi Arabia – a longtime U.S. ally in the region and key stakeholder in the Iraqi crisis.

Russia has been looking to play a bigger role in the Middle East, but Moscow’s inability to win over the Gulf – the key to influencing the Middle East – has continuously prevented it from replacing the United States as a reliable partner to the regional powers. Against this backdrop, Lavrov’s visit to Saudi Arabia has presented Moscow with an opportunity to prove to the Gulf countries that it is in fact the Kremlin, and not the White House, that nowadays holds sway over a troubled Syria and disobedient Iran.

Complete story at - Russia and Saudi Arabia – the new Gulf partnership? | Russia Direct

Guest Post: The Slow Death Of The Old Global Order | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Robert Merry via The National Interest,

In the spring of 2012, The National Interest produced a special issue under the rubric of “The Crisis of the Old Order: The Crumbling Status Quo at Home and Abroad.” The thesis was that the old era of relative global stability, forged through the crucibles of the Great Depression and World War II, was coming unglued. In introducing the broad topic to readers, TNI editors wrote, “Only through a historical perspective can we fully understand the profound developments of our time and glean, perhaps only dimly, where they are taking us. One thing is clear: they are taking us into a new era. The only question is how much disruption, chaos and bloodshed will attend the transition from the Old Order to whatever emerges to replace it.”

Since publication of that special issue of the magazine, events have seemed to bolster the thesis that the current global situation and the American domestic political situation are inherently unstable, and stability will return only with the emergence of some kind of new order. Leaving aside the U.S. domestic scene for purposes of this digression, the gathering global crisis got a penetrating survey the other day from William Pfaff, the longtime geopolitical analyst for the International Herald Tribune (recently renamed the International New York Times).

Pfaff said the world faces an “international disorder unmatched since the interwar 1930s,” fostered by the ongoing Ukraine crisis, the “self-destructive forces” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, growing instability within the world of Islam, and the “serious risk of collapse” of the European Union. Pfaff notes with a small measure of relief that the world isn’t beset these days by ideological dictatorships on the march or any new waves of totalitarianism. Today’s problems, he says, are merely “confusion, incompetence, and intellectual and moral disorder.” He adds: “But these are bad enough, in an over-armed world.”

What’s most troubling about all this is that today’s national leaders seem utterly lacking in any serious consciousness of just how dangerous the global situation is. The current Ukraine crisis , for example, is the product of a long-term Western tendency (the word “strategy" hardly qualifies here, given the lack of any coherent logic involved) to push eastward through what once were the buffer territories of Eastern Europe and press right up to the Russian border.

Though highly provocative, this didn’t generate any serious crisis when Russia remained weak after the Soviet collapse and the eastward push didn’t extend into territories that for centuries had been part of Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. But the United States, European Union and NATO remained blithely unmindful of the consequences when they kept pushing as Russia gained sufficient power to resist incursions into its areas of crucial national interest. What were the leaders of these Western entities thinking?

Complete story at - Guest Post: The Slow Death Of The Old Global Order | Zero Hedge

New American Reality: An Empire beyond Salvation | Foreign Policy Journal

US Secretary of State John Kerry couldn’t hide his frustration anymore as the US-sponsored peace process continued to falter. After eight months of wrangling to push talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority forward, he admitted while in a visit to Morocco on April 4 that the latest setback had served as a ‘reality check’ for the peace process. But confining that reality check to the peace process is hardly representative of the painful reality through which the United States has been forced to subsist in during the last few years.

The state of US foreign policy in the Middle East, but also around the world, cannot be described with any buoyant language. In some instances, as in Syria, Libya, Egypt, the Ukraine, and most recently in Palestine and Israel, too many calamitous scenarios have exposed the fault lines of US foreign policy. The succession of crises is not allowing the US to cut its losses in the Middle East and stage a calculated ‘pivot’ to Asia following its disastrous Iraq war.

US foreign policy is almost entirely crippled.

For the Obama administration, it has been a continuous firefighting mission since George W. Bush left office. In fact, there have been too many ‘reality checks’ to count.

Per the logic of the once powerful pro-Israel Washington-based neoconservatives, the invasion of Iraq was a belated attempt at regaining initiative in the Middle East, and controlling a greater share of the energy supplies worldwide. Sure, the US media had then made much noise about fighting terror, restoring democracies and heralding freedoms, but the neo-cons were hardly secretive about the real objectives. They tirelessly warned about the decline of their country’s fortunes. They labored to redraw the map of the Middle East in a way that they imagined would slow down the rise of China, and the other giants that are slowly, but surely, standing on their feet to face up to the post-Cold War superpower.

Complete story at - New American Reality: An Empire beyond Salvation | Foreign Policy Journal