by MELVIN GOODMAN
Counterpunch

There is no better introduction to the militarism and callousness of the Trump era than the budget proposal for 2018. Much has been written about the miserly cuts to Meals on Wheels, housing aid, and other community assistance, but it’s just as important to examine the unjustified and unnecessary increases in defense spending. The Trump budget is clearly designed to enable another cycle of militarized national security policy and, in the words of Steve Bannon, to “deconstruct the administrative state.”

In April 1953, soon after the death of Joseph Stalin, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his “cross of Iron” speech, warning against “destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” Eisenhower wanted to avoid the enormous domestic price that would accompany unwarranted military spending. And military spending, he emphasized, meant “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” This is exactly what Trump is calling for in a federal budget that takes direct aim at scientific and medical research, the endowments for the arts and humanities, and the block grants for food and housing support. Even the Department of Energy’s tiny program to help insulate the houses of the poor would be eliminated.

The over-financed military will received an increase of $54 billion, which is equal to the former budget of the Department of State as well as the entire defense budget of Russia. Defense spending and procurement should be linked to actual threats to the United States, which faces no existential threat. If this were done, Trump’s administration would have to take into account that the United States is the only country in the world with a global military presence that can project air and naval power to every far corner.

Meanwhile, the over-financed military will received an increase of $54 billion, which is equal to the former budget of the Department of State as well as the entire defense budget of Russia. Defense spending and procurement should be linked to actual threats to the United States, which faces no existential threat. If this were done, Trump’s administration would have to take into account that the United States is the only country in the world with a global military presence that can project air and naval power to every far corner. The Russian navy is an operational backwater, and the Chinese navy is a regional one, not global. There is no air force to rival the U.S. Air Force, and no other country has huge military bases the world over or even access to countless ports and anchorages. As a result, no other country has used lethal military power so often and so far from its borders in pursuit of dubious security interests.

The sad reality is that every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget, including research and development, procurement, operations and maintenance, and infrastructure, could be scrutinized for additional savings. The excessive spending on the Air Force is the most wasteful of all military expenditures. The Air Force is obsessed with fighter superiority in an era without a threat. The Air Force has not been threatened by air power since the end of the Second World War, and the U.S. Air Force holds an advantage over any combination of air powers. There was no adversary for the F-22, the world’s most effective and lethal air-to-air combat aircraft, but the program was killed in 2011 to make way for the more costly and contentious F-35, the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons program. Even Senator John McCain (R-AZ) referred to the program as a “train wreck.”

Military spending (official), in 2011. The proportions are telling, not to mention uses.

As with the Air Force and its dominance of the skies, the Navy has had total dominance at sea since the end of the Second World War. Even the chief of naval operations concedes that the United States enjoys a “degree of overmatch [with any potential adversary] that is extraordinary.” The Navy has its own air force, its own army, and its own strategic weapons, and it is equal in size to all the navies of the world combined. The Navy has a subordinate organization, the Coast Guard, which represents the world’s seventh-largest fleet. Second to the F-35 nightmare is the worst-case costs for the next generation of aircraft carriers, which Donald Trump inadvertently highlighted when he toured the USS Gerald R. Ford, the Navy’s most expensive warship at $14 billion. China’s success with inexpensive anti-ship missiles questions the strategic suitability of U.S. aircraft carriers.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he very existence of the Marine Corps, which has more planes, ships, armored vehicles, and personnel than the entire British military, is questionable. The Marines have not conducted an amphibious landing in 65 years, and there is no other nation in the world that has such a Corps in terms of numbers and capabilities. The Marines’ V-22 Osprey, a futuristic vertical takeoff and landing hybrid aircraft is neither reliable nor safe, and even President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney tried to kill the program 25 years ago. The Marine version of the F-35, with an expensive and unwieldy vertical take-off and landing program, should be canceled.
The budget proposal does not address how the Pentagon would spend its latest windfall, but surely there will be unneeded increases for our huge nuclear force, which could be significantly reduced. Other nuclear powers such as Britain, France, China, and even Israel, India, and Pakistan, believe that 200-300 nuclear weapons are sufficient for deterrence. Several years ago two U.S. Air Force officers wrote an authoritative essay that pointed specifically to 331 nuclear weapons as providing an assured deterrence capability. But Russia and the United States have thousands of warheads; Russian President Vladimir wants to cut the inventory, but Donald Trump wants to keep building. Trump had to interrupt a phone call with Putin last month in order to learn about the New START Treaty that the Kremlin would like to use as a stepping stone to a round of deeper cuts in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. Trump was uninterested.

President Eisenhower was spot-on in describing the social costs of defense spending and in warning that “humanity was hanging from a cross of iron.” In view of the counterproductive use of U.S. military power over the past two decades in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, cutting the defense budget would be a realistic way to begin to reduce the operational tempo of the U.S. military, control the deficit, and reorder U.S. priorities. The United States is in an arms race with itself; it must be stopped.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. His latest book is A Whistleblower at the CIA. (City Lights Publishers, 2017). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

by CONN HALLINAN

“Chaos,” “dismay,” “radically inept” — those are just a few of the recent headlines analyzing Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

In truth, disorder would seem to be the strategy of the day. Picking up the morning newspaper or tuning on the national news sometimes feels akin to opening up a basket filled with spitting cobras and Gabon Vipers.

But the bombast emerging for the White House hasn’t always matched what the Trump administration does in the real world. The threat to dump the “one-China” policy and blockade Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea has been dialed back. The pledge to overturn the Iran nuclear agreement has been shelved. And NATO’s “obsolesce” has morphed into a pledge of support.

Is common sense setting in, as a New York Times headline suggests: “Foreign Policy Loses Its Sharp Edge as Trump Adjusts to Office”?

Don’t bet on it.

Obsessed with Iran

First, this is an administration that thrives on turmoil, always an easier place to rule from than order. What it says and does one day may be, or may not be, what it says or does another. And because there are a number of foreign policy crises that have stepped up to the plate, we should all find out fairly soon whether the berserkers or the calmer heads are running things.

The most dangerous of these looming crises is Iran, which the White House says is “playing with fire” and has been “put on notice” for launching a Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile. The missile traveled 630 miles and exploded in what looks like a failed attempt to test a re-entry vehicle. Exactly what “on notice” means has yet to be explained, but Trump has already applied sanctions for what it describes as a violation of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Program of Action — UN Security Council Resolution 2231 — in which Iran agreed to dismantle much of its nuclear energy program.

A 2010 UN resolution did indeed state that Iran “shall not undertake activity related to ballistic missiles.” But that resolution was replaced by UNSCR 2231, which only “calls upon Iran not to test missiles,” wording that “falls short of an outright prohibition on missile testing,” according to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter.

The Iranians say their ballistic missile program is defensive, and given the state of their obsolete air force, that is likely true.

The Trump administration also charges that Iran is a “state sponsor of terror,” an accusation that bears little resemblance to reality. Iran is currently fighting the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq, and, through its Houthi allies, al-Qaeda in Yemen. It has also aided the fight against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

As Ritter points out, “Iran is more ally than foe,” especially compared to Saudi Arabia, “whose citizens constituted the majority of the 9/11 attackers and which is responsible for underwriting the financial support of Islamic extremists around the world, including Islamic State and al-Qaeda.”

In an interview last year, leading White House strategist Steve Bannon predicted, “We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” Since the U.S. has pretty much devastated its former foes in the region — Iraq, Syria, and Libya — he could only be referring to Iran.

The administration’s initial actions vis-à-vis Tehran are indeed worrisome. U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis recently considered boarding an Iranian ship in international waters to search it for weapons destined for the Houthis in Yemen. Such an action would be a clear violation of international law and might have ended in a shoot-out.

The Houthi practice a variation of Shiism, the dominant Islamic school in Iran. They do get some money and weapons from Tehran, but even U.S. intelligence says that the group is not under Tehran’s command.

The White House also condemned a Houthi attack on a Saudi warship— which Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially called an “American” ship — even though the Saudis and their Persian Gulf allies are bombing the Houthis, and the Saudi Navy — along with the U.S. Navy — is blockading the country. According to the UN, more than 16,000 people have died in the three-year war, 10,000 of them civilians.

Apparently the Trump administration is considering sending American soldiers into Yemen, which would put the U.S troops in the middle of a war involving the Saudis and their allies, the Houthis, Iran, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and various separatist groups in southern Yemen.

Putting U.S. ground forces into Yemen is a “dangerous idea,” according to Jon Finer, chief of staff for former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. But a U.S. war with Iran would be as catastrophic for the Middle East as the invasion of Iraq. It would also be unwinnable unless the U.S. resorted to nuclear weapons, and probably not even then. For all its flaws, Iran’s democracy is light years ahead of most other U.S. allies in the region and Iranians would strongly rally behind the government in the advent of a conflict.

Nuclear Escalation

The other foreign policy crisis is the recent missile launch by North Korea, although so far the Trump administration has let the right-wing prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, carry the ball on the issue. Meeting with Trump in Florida, Abe called the Feb. 12 launch “absolutely intolerable.” Two days earlier Trump had defined halting North Korean missile launches as a “very, very high priority.”

The tensions with North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile program are long standing, and this particular launch was hardly threatening. The missile was a mid-range weapon and only traveled 310 miles before breaking up. The North Koreans have yet to launch a long-range ICBM, although they continue to threaten that one is in the works.

According to a number of Washington sources, Barack Obama told Trump that North Korea posed the greatest threat to U.S. military forces, though how he reached that conclusion is puzzling. It is estimated North Korea has around one dozen nuclear weapons with the explosive power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, about 20 kilotons. The average U.S. warhead packs an explosive force of from 100 to 475 kilotons, with some ranging up to 1.2 megatons. The U.S. has more than 4,000 nuclear weapons.

While the North Koreans share the Trump administration’s love of hyperbole, the country has never demonstrated a suicidal streak. A conventional attack by the U.S., South Korea, or Japan would be a logistical nightmare and might touch off a nuclear war, inflicting enormous damage on other countries in the region. Any attack would probably draw in China.

What the North Koreans want is to talk to someone, a tactic that the Obama administration never really tried. Nor did it consider trying to look at the world from Pyongyang’s point of view. “North Korea has taken note of what happened in Iraq and Libya after they renounced nuclear weapons,” says Norman Dombey, an expert on nuclear weapons and a professor of theoretical physics at Sussex University. “The U.S. took action against both, and both countries’ leaders were killed amid violence and chaos.”

The North Koreans know they have enemies — the U.S. and South Korea hold annual war games centered on a military intervention in their country — and not many friends. Beijing tolerates Pyongyang largely because it worries about what would happen if the North Korean government fell. Not only would it be swamped with refugees, it would have a U.S. ally on its border.

Obama’s approach to North Korea was to isolate it, using sanctions to paralyze to the country. It has not worked, though it has inflicted terrible hardships on the North Korean people. What might work is a plan that goes back to 2000 in the closing months of the Clinton administration.

That plan proposed a non-aggression pact between the U.S., Japan, South Korea, and North Korea, and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations. North Korea would have been recognized as a nuclear weapons state, but would agree to forgo any further tests and announce all missile launches in advance. In return, the sanctions would be removed and North Korea would receive economic aid. The plan died when the Clinton administration got distracted by the Middle East.

Since then the U.S. has insisted that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons, but that’s not going to happen — see Iraq and Libya. In any case, the demand is the height of hypocrisy. When the U.S. signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, it agreed to Article VI that calls for “negotiations in good faith” to end “the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”

All eight nuclear powers — the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, and Israel — have not only not discussed eliminating their weapons. All are in the process of modernizing them. The NPT was never meant to enforce nuclear apartheid, but in practice that is what has happened.

A non-aggression pact is essential. Article VI also calls for “general and complete disarmament,” reflecting a fear by smaller nations that countries like the U.S. have such powerful conventional forces that they don’t need nukes to get their way. Many countries — China in particular — were stunned by how quickly and efficiently the U.S. destroyed Iraq’s military.

During the presidential campaign, Trump said he would “have no problem” speaking with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. That pledge has not been repeated, however, and there is ominous talk in Washington about a “preemptive strike” on North Korea, which would likely set most of north Asia aflame.

Dangerous Flashpoints

There are a number of other dangerous flashpoints out there besides Iran and North Korea.

+ The Syrian civil war continues to rage, and Trump is talking about sending in U.S. ground forces — though exactly who they would fight is not clear. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent once called Syria a three-dimensional chess game with nine players and no rules. Is that a place Americans want to send troops?

+ The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan — now America’s longest running war — is asking for more troops.

+ The war in eastern Ukraine smolders on, and with NATO pushing closer and closer to the Russian border, there is always the possibility of misjudgment. The same goes for Asia, where Bannon predicted “for certain” the U.S. “is going to go to war in the South China Sea in five to 10 years.”

How much of the White House tweets are provocation and grandiose rhetoric is not clear. The president and the people around him are lens lice who constantly romance the spotlight. They have, however, succeeded in alarming a lot of people. As the old saying goes, “Boys throw rocks at frogs in fun. The frogs die in earnest.”

Except in the real world, “fun” can quickly translate into disaster, and some of the frogs are perfectly capable of tossing a few of their own rocks.

NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS • PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE

Conn Hallinan can be read at dispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com

Dispatch from Beijing

With Jeff J. Brown

US bases are sprinkled throughout the island.

If you live on Okinawa, Japan, count your blessings if you don’t get murdered, assaulted, raped, robbed, burglarized, arsoned and vandalized by one of the 49,000 Americans occupying this tiny island the size of Luxembourg, not to mention the disgusting environmental degradation. You don’t have to look hard. There is one US occupier for every 30 local citizens. Pictured above, a map of Okinawa showing where the 34 American military bases are installed.

Eighty-five percent of Okinawans are against the American occupation of their land and for good reason. The statistics and reality of daily life there tell a typically tragic story of empire. Listen to author Jeff J. Brown of China Rising Radio Sinoland, based in China and invited on Press TV, to explain why Okinawans are rightfully indignant. [All of the basic facts, speaking to democratic wishes of the population are simply ignored and buried by both the US media and much of the Japanese media.]

Press TV video news program:

You can also listen to and/or download this audio podcast on Stitcher Radio and iTunes (links below), as well as at the very bottom of this web page:

F-22 Raptor fighters. Within striking distance of China’s strategic perimeter.

ABOUT JEFF BROWN

Jeff J. Brown—TGP’s Beijing correspondent— is the author of 44 Days (2013), Reflections in Sinoland – Musings and Anecdotes from the Belly of the New Century Beast (summer 2015), and Doctor WriteRead’s Treasure Trove to Great English (2015). He is currently writing an historical fiction, Red Letters – The Diaries of Xi Jinping, due out in 2016. In addition, a new anthology on China, China Rising, Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations, is also scheduled for publication this summer. Jeff is commissioned to write monthly articles for The Saker and The Greanville Post, touching on all things China, and the international political & cultural scene

In China, he has been a speaker at TEDx, the Bookworm Literary Festival, the Capital M Literary Festival, the Hutong, as well as being featured in an 18-part series of interviews on Radio Beijing AM774, with former BBC journalist, Bruce Connolly. He has guest lectured at international schools in Beijing and Tianjin.

Jeff grew up in the heartland of the United States, Oklahoma, and graduated from Oklahoma State University. He went to Brazil while in graduate school at Purdue University, to seek his fortune, which whet his appetite for traveling the globe. This helped inspire him to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in Tunisia in 1980 and he lived and worked in Africa, the Middle East, China and Europe for the next 21 years. All the while, he mastered Portuguese, Arabic, French and Mandarin, while traveling to over 85 countries. He then returned to America for nine years, whereupon he moved back to China in 2010. He currently lives in Beijing with his wife, where he writes, while being a school teacher in an international school. Jeff is a dual national French-American.

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=By= Moon of Alabama

[PHOTO: “Guided missile destroyer USS Nitze (DDG 94) has launched Tomahawk missiles against Yemen’s Houthi fighters …” (Naval Today)]

Editor's Note

Does it not scare us anymore how easily the US slips into war? Undeclared war? One can certainly see why the Houthi's might be a bit upset with the US since it is US munitions raining down on their heads - relentlessly. You know all the reports about Aleppo? Why has there been nothing about the overkill bombing of Houthi's in Yemen, where the Saudi goal seems to be blasting every Houthi in Yemen to Hell and back? If the Navy video shows the exact extent of missiles launched at Houthi positions, at least 5 missiles were fired. However, the article also carefully states (emphases mine): "These strikes represent the first direct U.S. military involvement with Yemen’s Houthi fighters ...". MoA's report below provides excellent insight into a war the press has largely ignored.

Yesterday (10/13/16) the U.S. openly attacked Yemen by firing cruise missiles against old Yemeni radar stations. This, allegedly, in response to four missiles fired on two days against a U.S. destroyer at the Yemeni coast. The U.S. Navy said the missiles fell short. They were unable to reach the ship. No one but the navy, especially no one in Yemen, has seen or reported any such missile launches – short or long.

The U.S. is in alliance with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other countries in bombing Yemen for 18 month now. They totally blockade the coast of the country that depends on imports of food and medicines. The actively fighting countries are heavily supported by the U.S. military. This has been widely admitted by U.S. officials and in military reports. The U.S. government even feared of being help legally responsible for the carnage it causes.

But since the launch of the cruise missile U.S. media have totally forgotten all of this. Now the U.S. “has been attacked”, without any recognizable reason, and is only “defending” itself. No legal consequences are to fear now. Anyone who believes that the U.S. is somehow responsible for the at least 10,000 dead and the many starving people in Yemen must somehow believe in a mysterious conspiracy.

Just consider this New York Times headline, from today, after the U.S. attack on Yemen.

Yemen Sees U.S. Strikes as Evidence of Hidden Hand Behind Saudi Air War.

The NYT tweeted the piece with this text:

New York Times World @nytimesworld
For the U.S., it was retaliation; for Yemen’s Houthi rebels, it confirmed a long-held belief nyti.ms/2e9mKyb
6:30 PM – 13 Oct 2016

Wow. The Houthi rebels “believe” in a “hidden hand”. Must be crazy people. They unreasonably attacked. And they deserve such strikes.

The NYT piece reads:

WASHINGTON — For the United States, it was simple retaliation: Rebels in Yemen had fired missiles at an American warship twice in four days, and so the United States hit back, destroying rebel radar facilities with missiles.But for the rebels and many others in Yemen, the predawn strikes on Thursday were just the first public evidence of what they have long believed: that the United States has been waging an extended campaign in the country, the hidden hand behind Saudi Arabia’s punishing air war.

How could the Houthis come to “believe” of such a “hidden hand”? Was it really because the strike was the “first public evidence”? Or was it because the NYT and all other media reported many times over that the U.S. actively supports the Saudi attacks? Did the Houthi probably read yesterday’s NYT piece on Yemen written by the very same main authors?

Up to now, the Obama administration put limits on its support for the Saudi-led coalition, providing intelligence and Air Force tankers to refuel the coalition’s jets and bombers. The American military has refueled more than 5,700 aircraft involved in the bombing campaign since it began, according to statistics provided by United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East.

So the “first evidence” of the “hidden hand” were, unlike the NYT today claims, not yesterdays strikes but official reports on the public CentCom website? Maybe frequent discussions of the war on Yemen the U.S. Congress held since a year ago also count as evidence? Various public reports over the last 18 month detailing the enormous amount of ammunition the U.S. openly sells to the Saudis were also just sightings of “hidden” hands?

Such reporting as in today’s NYT is just laughable. It flies in face of all reports of the last 18 month as well as extensive evidence given by the U.S. and other governments. The strikes on the radar sites were just “retaliation”. They have no larger context. This is a typical reflection of the U.S. myth of “immaculate conception” of U.S. foreign policy. According to that believe the U.S. always only reacts to being “attacked” or “threatened” for completely incomprehensible reasons when it bombs this or that country and kills thousands or even millions of foreign people.

That is even more evident in the reports by CNN and others. These reports only mention the 18 month of extensive U.S. support for the Saudi campaign down in the middle to end of their pieces. For any but a thorough reader the alleged “missile attacks” and all Yemeni enmity against the U.s. has no history at all. It comes from unreasonable and hostile people who willfully misunderstand U.S. well-meaning.

Thus no U.S. attack is ever unjustified or just a cruel continuation of decades of U.S. insidiousness, hostility and greed. It is always the other side that initiates the fight.

It is easy for the U.S. government propaganda to make such false claims. And U.S. media don’t report such but perpetrate anticipatory stenography. They write what the U.S. government wants and U.S. imperialism demands even when not directly ordered to. That is no longer astonishing.

Astonishing is how easy the U.S. public swallows this without any self awareness and protest.

Source: Moon of Alabama.

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By BAR executive editor Glen Ford

While Obama, like most presidents, has been an all-out flatterer of the US military, and has done his job as an imperialist leader, top sectors in the Pentagon and intel community still regard him as “soft” for not finishing off Assad by direct US intervention.

The American bombing of Syrian soldiers was no “mistake” – it was a mutiny by the War Party in the U.S. military and government, who want victory for the jihadists. “The war hawks have never forgiven Obama or ceased denouncing his failure to ‘finish off’ Assad” in 2013. They hope that a President Hillary Clinton “will launch the final, crushing strike” against Assad – “if the jihadists can just hang on until Inauguration Day.”

“The big question that has to be asked is, ‘Who is in charge in Washington?’”

The decades-long U.S. policy of deploying Islamic jihadists as foot soldiers in U.S. imperial wars — the world’s most unholy alliance — has led to a catastrophic split at the highest civilian and military levels of the U.S. State. Last weekend’s American air attack on Syrian Army positions at Deir al-Zor that killed more than 60 Syrian soldiers and resulted in a temporary victory for ISIS forces was a blatant bid by the Pentagon and the CIA to sabotage any prospect of cooperation between U.S. and Russian forces in Syria. In a very real sense, it is a mutiny [3] against a lame duck president who, certainly since 2013, has attempted to achieve regime change in Syria without allowing the jihadists to take power in Damascus.

The mutineers include civilian and military elements of the Pentagon — probably including Obama’s own Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter – the CIA and other intelligence services (but not the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose analysts warned of the rise of ISIS in 2012). They are encouraged and emboldened by the prospect that a President Hillary Clinton will declare a “no fly zone” over Syria – a move that would necessitate, under U.S military doctrine, an all-out attack on all of that country’s aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons systems, resulting in a war with Russian forces. The Russians know what’s up, and they are distressed and alarmed. “The big question that has to be asked is, ‘Who is in charge in Washington?” said Russia’s UN Ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, on Saturday. “Is it the White House or the Pentagon?’”

Washington’s addiction to Jihadism has wrecked the Empire’s system of government — bin Laden’s revenge — and brought humanity to the very brink of obliteration.

The cease-fire agreement arrived at between Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart calls for the U.S. and Russian armed forces to collaborate, after a period of seven days, in targeting both ISIS and the al Qaida force formerly known as the al Nusra Front, the military backbone of the West’s proxy war against the Syrian government. If the U.S. superpower, whose military assets in the arena far outweigh Russia’s, honestly adhered to the agreement, the war against the Assad government would collapse. The mutineers see the waning weeks and months of the Obama presidency as a make-or-break moment for their jihadist proxy strategy in the region. The contradictions of that strategy have now come fully home to roost, confronting President Obama with a real-life “Seven Days In May [4]”-type scenario.

“They are encouraged and emboldened by the prospect that a President Hillary Clinton will declare a ‘no fly zone’ over Syria.”

It is impossible to fully comprehend the current crisis unless one understands why the U.S. has acted as “both midwife and sugar daddy [5]” to the international jihadist network since the rise of a left-wing government in Afghanistan, nearly four decades ago. Although the U.S. is a superpower, there is no large social base of potential support for U.S. imperial aims among the peoples of the region. (In recent decades, the stateless and desperate Kurds have become an exception.) The colossal failure of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq made it domestically impossible to repeat the deployment of massive U.S. forces on the ground. America’s allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies are fat, kleptocratic, feudal regimes whose militaries are largely made up of mercenaries. Turkey is a former imperial power whose troops would not be welcome in the old “provinces” of the Ottoman Empire. In 2011, the U.S. lost its big proxy Arab military “stick” in the region, with the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

US soldiers in Afghanistan: conditioned by propaganda, precious few figure out the true motives for which they are fighting.

US soldiers in Afghanistan: conditioned by propaganda, precious few figure out or care about the true motives for which they are fighting.

The Arab monarchies, especially Saudi Arabia, which partnered with the U.S. in nurturing the global jihadist network in Afghanistan, were terrified that the rebellion in Tunisia and the (at least, temporary) sidelining of Egypt’s huge standing army would expose their own corrupt regimes to insurrection — fears shared by the U.S. and western Europe. Their answer to the so-called “Arab Spring” was to attack Muammar Gaddafi’s secular government in Libya, acting as an air force for jihadists on the ground. Once Gaddafi had been removed (“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton cackled), the West and the Gulf monarchies and Turkey mobilized the entire international jihadist network to bring the same fate to Bashar al-Assad, in Syria, at a cost, so far, of nearly half a million deaths. The jihadists were not merely auxiliaries, but the irreplaceable, frontline soldiers of empire.

“The DIA was warning that ISIS was about to emerge as a direct result of the West’s policies.”

With Gaddafi gone, the Obama administration thought it was on a roll, recouping ground and prestige lost in Bush’s failed war in Iraq. As we wrote [5] in May of 2012:

“The Americans doubtless think they are in control of events in the Mideast and North Africa, but the jihadis know better. The Arab world wants the U.S. and the Europeans out of their countries. That certainly includes the jihadis – who are glad to take the West’s weapons, but have dedicated their lives to a Higher Power whose address is not London, Paris or New York. The Mother of All Blowbacks is coming. And when those jihadis turn on the Americans, Washington will have no place else to go.”

1979: The communist government (fiercely resisted in the conservative countryside) gave women complete equality. Soon, Afghanistan saw women in all the professions, wearing miniskirts, and enjoying freedoms undreamt of just a few years earlier. Washington, naturally, sided with the reactionaries.

Afghanistan 1979: The communist government (fiercely resisted in the conservative countryside) gave women complete equality. Soon, Afghanistan saw women in all the professions, wearing miniskirts, and enjoying freedoms undreamt of just a few years earlier. Washington, naturally, sided with the reactionaries. The solution was to create an anti-Soviet Jihad, to “give the Commies their own Vietnam” in the words of Carter’s national security advisor Z. Brzezinski.

Analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency attempted to sound the alarm [6], warning that jihadists might soon establish a “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and “this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition [meaning, America’s allies] want in order to isolate the Syrian regime.”

In other words, the DIA was warning that ISIS was about to emerge as a direct result of the West’s policies, and that this seemed to be the intention of “the supporting powers.” The DIA charged that the Pentagon was suppressing or altering its reports – which is why the agency went “off channel” with its complaint in a memo that was not made public until years later. The split in the military over Syria — or, at least, in military intelligence – goes back at least four years.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e cannot know if President Obama was made aware of the memo at the time, but the next year he certainly behaved as if he had reconsidered the logic of the U.S. jihadist strategy. Following the (false flag) chemical attack on civilians in suburban Damascus in late August of 2013, Obama was under great pressure to bomb Syria for having crossed his “line in the sand.” But, instead, he cancelled the attack and opted for Russia’s proposal that Syria rid itself of all chemical weapons. The conventional wisdom is that Obama was deterred by the British Parliament’s moves to disassociate the UK from any U.S. assault on Syria, and by the threat that the French might do the same. But, since when has the U.S. allowed the opinions of other countries’ legislatures to deter its military actions? Obama had only recently defied a huge block of opinion in his own legislature, refusing to acknowledge the relevance of the War Powers Act to his conquest of Libya. No, what stopped Obama from bombing Syria in August of 2013 was the realization that that al Nusra and ISIS, which had announced its presence in April of that year, would be marching into Damascus if Syria’s army were destroyed.

The war hawks have never forgiven Obama or ceased denouncing his failure to “finish off” Assad. Hillary Clinton has encouraged them to believe that she will launch the final, crushing strike — if the jihadists can just hang on until Inauguration Day. The cease-fire agreement, to be followed by a joint Russian-American blitzkrieg against al Nusra and ISIS, could so deplete the jihadist ranks, there would not be enough of them for Hillary to rescue.

“What stopped Obama from bombing Syria in August of 2013 was the realization that that al Nusra and ISIS would be marching into Damascus.”

The war hawks in the State Department feared that Russia and Syrian successes on both the battlefield and in world political forums threatened to doom their jihadist enterprise. In June of this year, more than 50 co-called “diplomats” [7] signed an internal memo calling for “a judicious use of stand-off and air weapons, which would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process” – diplo-speak for a bombing campaign against Syrian government targets. It was a Foggy Bottom mutiny of the militarists, on an unprecedented scale, by people who would not take such political risks unless they believed they were protected by comrades in high places and would soon serve under a more jihadist-friendly president.

The contradictions inherent in sponsoring international jihad have caught up with America, splitting its ruling circles and fomenting defiant insubordination within its military. Last weekend, the United States acted as an air force for ISIS, helping them to overrun a Syrian army base. It was not a mistake, not an elaborate ploy orchestrated at the White House; it was the result of a mutiny by the War Party, which refuses to wait for Hillary’s arrival to assert its will. Jihadism has wrecked the Empire’s system of government — bin Laden’s revenge — and brought humanity to the very brink of obliteration.

NOTES

Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/us_rulers_split_over_syria

Links

[1] http://blackagendareport.com/us_rulers_split_over_syria

[2] http://blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/war-against-syria

[3] http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/20/rogue-mission-did-the-pentagon-bomb-syrian-army-to-kill-ceasefire-deal/print/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May

[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/bragging-about-killing-osama-bin-laden-old-blowbacks-and-new

[6] http://www.globalresearch.ca/defense-intelligence-agency-create-a-salafist-principality-in-syria-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/5451216

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/middleeast/syria-assad-obama-airstrikes-diplomats-memo.html

[8] mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

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