War Pigs Squeal for More Military Intervention

Now that they are riding high over humiliating Russian leader Vladimir Putin with a cluster bombing of disgraceful propaganda related to the Sochi Olympics and feeling their oats after their meddling led to the toppling of the democratically elected president of Ukraine the U.S. establishment war freaks have once again set their sights on Syria. Putin was the fly in the ointment that prevented Obama and Kerry from sending the bombers and cruise missiles into Damascus back in September on the pretense that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had “gassed his own people” – it worked to perfection when they took out Saddam Hussein and the sheeple swallowed it again hook, line and sinker until Putin’s intervention took the wind out of the war machine’s sails. It is always very easy to dupe the American people into support for more war even while the domestic infrastructure crumbles and as their pensions and retirement benefits are looted so as to not impede the war machine.

The hypocrisy of the American empire  is strutting around like the proverbial cock of the walk today after having engineered the ouster of  Viktor Yanukovich with their typical horseshit about democracy. What happened in Kiev would never have been tolerated in the U.S of A. it would be like if the so-called tea party had taken up arms after being instigated by fascists to march on Washington D.C. to demand the removal of Barack Obama from the presidency, staging street battles with police and setting buildings and cars on fire. Just how long do you think that would have been allowed to go on?  The paramilitary police response to such a thing would have made the defacto imposition of martial law on a large chunk of Beantown during the search for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that pales in comparison to what would have happened were the Ukraine model were used here in The Homeland. It’s not just Obama either, what would Bush have done? For too long this country’s power elite have relied on mob violence to implement ‘democracy’ which really translates into leaders who will protect the economic interests of American corporations and energy cartels.  But the most important thing to take away from Ukraine and the continually morphing situation on the ground is that it was really an operation that was a part of the larger proxy war against Putin

The dominoes were all set up to fall perfectly for the opening of a new front in Syria before the damned gay-hating Putin interfered, the war porn videos of the Ghouta victims had prepped the public, they were a masterpiece of war propaganda, right up there with Saddam’s soldiers ripping Kuwaiti infants out of incubators back in 1991 (which was a lie) to Saddam having ties to al Qaeda (more bullshit) and last week’s  incredible movie like footage and stills of Kiev alight with fires and clashes between ‘freedom fighters’ clad in improvised Medieval gear and the state police. The Ghouta use of Sarin gas on civilians has never to this day definitively been proven to have been an official act of the Assad regime so the bloodsucking parasites who continue to feed off of the American taxpayer will have to find something new to roll out when justifying an attack on Syria. Don’t worry though, there are billions of dollars of money pumped into a network of state media organizations, public relations firms and other official and underground lie factories to do what the father of modern propaganda Edward Bernays tabbed the “engineering of consent”. They will soon find some other outrage to sell to the schmucks.

While getting the military into Syria is the primary objective the apple of the eye of the neocons, a war with Iran is still possible and a number of renegade Senators continue the relentless push  to sink the P5+1 talks, this time with the language to impose a wave of onerous new sanctions deviously tucked within an unrelated bill as an obvious gift to "King Bibi" when he arrives for his latest visit to D.C. You have to give it to the fuckers, they never give up and a new round of sanctions would almost certainly scuttle the talks and punch the nation’s ticket for yet another ruinous war. This is really on the verge of getting dangerous with Syria and Iran the venues for the next two stops on the PNAC’s world domination tour and the agitation in Ukraine we are getting closer to a nightmarish scenario in which Russia will be sucked in and then we are talking WW III. I know that this would send the neocons, the lunatic right-wing in Israel and their Armageddonist foot soldiers that are the American Christian Zionists who need a global eruption of apocalyptic violence to bring Jesus back but it would bode ill for billions of other humans who don’t have either vested ideological or financial interests in such a conflagration.

My regular morning review of the news always begins with a visit Antiwar.com which is far and away the best foreign and domestic policy information source in regards to our addicted to war nation and the fascist surveillance state that it needs to quash dissent. This morning writer Justin Raimondo delivers his usual excellent commentary in a column entitled “A World of Trouble” from which I excerpt:

Of the above listed trouble spots I would rate Syria as potentially the most worrying. This is true for two reasons: 1) Geography – the country is smack dab in the center of the world’s most contentious region, the Middle East, bordering volatile Lebanon, conflict-torn Palestine, and the shaky regime in Iraq – with US-aligned Jordan adding a base of US operations to the south. Another important factor is: 2) Politics, i.e. domestic US politics, which is always the decisive factor in determining how and when the War Party will strike. The interventionist lobby, concentrated as it is almost exclusively within the political class, doesn’t take defeat easily, and they are running true to form in this case. Prominent voices have called on the President to reconsider his stance, and the pro-Israel lobby in collusion with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both stepping up the pressure.

US military intervention in Syria would have serious consequences for the region, first and foremost the derailing of the US-Iranian peace talks. Assad’s Syria is one of the mainstays of Tehran’s defensive alliance, the other leg being Hezbollah: air strikes or other US military moves against Assad would give Iranian hardliners all the excuse they need to call for an end to the negotiations – and the Supreme Leader would be under considerable pressure to take heed.

The end of the peace talks would set the clock ticking again on the prospect of a US and/or Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. As I wrote here, Iran is the biggest foreign policy issue the US faces in 2014, and the reason is fairly simple: war with Iran, a country twice the size and population of Iraq, would make "Operation Iraqi Freedom" look like a Sunday school picnic. Every nation in the region would be drawn in, with Russia not likely to stand on the sidelines.

War with Tehran would mean economic disaster for the West, with the price of oil skyrocketing, shortages, and real suffering here at home. "Sticker shock" doesn’t even begin to describe the consequences: sticker trauma is more like it.

With the possible exception of Venezuela, none of these multiple crises can be considered in isolation: the key connecting factor is Russia. Vladimir Putin has set himself up as the antipode to the US and its dream of constructing a "new world order" based on unipolarity and America’s undisputed military dominance. Ideologically, Putin has positioned Russia as the conservatizing factor in world affairs, as opposed to the "progressive" and revolutionary character of American influence abroad. In effect, Washington and the Kremlin have switched positions as a new cold war breaks out, with the former leading a global effort to overturn the old order of sovereign nation-states and the latter resisting US-backed revolutionary movements throughout the world.

My fellow Americans – how does it feel to be citizens of the new “Evil Empire”? There has always been that drive to having to be “number one” that we have been indoctrinated to believe as though it is holy gospel. Well rejoice for we are now thanks to our warmongering establishment the “number one” threat to not only the rest of the planet but also to the continuing existence of the human race itself thanks to our elected representatives being corrupt fools with no foresight given to what will happen when their real life war games lead to a scenario where the nukes are unleashed.

Foreign Policy Holiday Follies

The sheer incompetence of the Barack Obama administration and the corrupt duplicitous swine in the U.S. Congress are on full display for the world this weekend. Like some bizarre form of diorama in the front window of Macy’s set up to perform a weird holiday spectacle the wheels are coming off in a very ugly way so let the planet be placed on warning that 2014 could bring our national stupidity full-circle in a very serious apocalyptic manner.  First and foremost the once promising P5+1 talks with Iran on ending the nuclear problem are now on life support, stick a fork in any prospect for a peaceful and rational resolution. This was inevitable with many in congress working on behalf of foreign powers to sabotage negotiations with additional crushing sanctions. The two-pronged assault at pushing a collapsing empire into another war was being led in the Senate by right-wing Israeli lackey Senator Mark Kirk and New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, he who recently was alleged to have been frolicking with underage prostitutes. In the House which is chock a block with fanatical Christian Zionists hellbent on triggering Armageddon to bring Jesus back and launching them skyward like so many ballistic missiles dirty, nasty naked to sit at the foot of God’s throne and watch all of us heathens suffer plagues and nuclear fallout  Eric ‘Iranium’ Cantor is the point man. But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and the Obama administration themselves beat the treacherous anti-Americans to the punch by imposing new sanctions on their own sending Iranian leaders into fits and for the time being they have left the table.

With the talks on life support it will be a joyous Christmas indeed for the war freaks and the military industrial complex who are both salivating over the billions of dollars in arms spending and singing joy to the world. This country is so screwed at this point thanks to the poisonous addiction to war and profiting obscenely off of human misery that there is no way to avert that which is inevitable: collapse. There will never be peace again in our time, the culture of corruption is just dug in too deeply and the average American psyche has been permanently altered to accept war as our national birthright. The jobs have gone overseas to low cost shitholes where workers toil like slaves in hideous conditions for a pittance, the markets cannot function without a never-ending infusion of government created money to gamble with and inflation is eating the average schmuck alive no matter how much the shills lie about the lack of such a thing.  I was pretty shocked when the war with Syria was averted despite the best efforts of Obama and Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry to lie the country into attacking Damascus. The entire reason for war, the Assad regime gassing civilians has been exposed as total horseshit most prominently last week in a London Review of Books piece by journalist Seymour Hersh that the was radioactive to the state-corporate media here in The Homeland. It was always a dubious claim that the radical Islamic fanatics that were being backed by the U.S. could be trusted and it was likely elements amongst them, backed by Bandar Bush and the Saudis who were responsible for the gassings. The other shoe has yet to drop on that one but we were spared a war in Syria for the time being.

The latest violation of the national interest that has torpedoed the Iran talks is consistent with the militarized state. We have never really scaled down after the end of World War II and the defeat of Hitler and the Japanese Empire only made it necessary to create new enemies to feed the war machine and the blood barters whose bottom line is tied to death and destruction that can never, ever end.  I was recently forwarded a long essay by liberal blogger Bob Alexander and would recommend it to everyone whatever their philosophical leanings may be. What Alexander does is connect the dots by boiling down the trajectory of the victorious post-war U.S. into today’s fascist surveillance state, where the Constitution is as George W. Bush so eloquently put it “nothing but a goddamned piece of paper” and the Obama Stasi spies on everyone and everything, the only thing that prevents them from spying on people’s thoughts is that the technology does not exist yet. I excerpt the following:

In 2008 Barack Obama said everything we wanted to hear, and after being swept into office dutifully did everything he was told. I can only assume his life-long ambition was to be a footnote president - the guy with an asterisk next to his name. And at the bottom of the page it’ll say, “The First African-American President.” In a few more years Hillary Clinton should be able to join the pantheon of footnote presidents.

The major differences between the current and previous governments should be alarming … but they don’t seem to concern the public very much if at all.

Presently, Americans have a Now-You-See-It-Now-You-Don’t-Constitution. Remember when Keith Olbermann on MSNBC crossed off the Bill of Rights one by one after the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts were passed? It was more than just a civics lesson. He was telling us that what we took for granted didn’t exist anymore. Americans now live in a country where extra-ordinary rendition and extra-judicial decisions can leave them extra-crispy.

Americans recognize coups when they happen in other countries but remain oblivious to the ones that have occurred in their own. Why? The answer cannot be as simple as they weren’t told about it in the papers or on television. That is a part of it, I’m sure but it’s a topic scrupulously avoided everywhere, even among ourselves. Even though massive changes have occurred right before our eyes we treat this current iteration of the government as if it has always been The Government we read about in history books. This present government, among other things, spies on 5 billion cell phones every day. The President of The United States has boasted, “I’m really good at killing people.” How does that jibe with the notion that America is the land of the free and home of the brave? Is it just too goddamned scary to admit to ourselves that the government, supposedly of, by, and for the people, is completely out of our control?

Mr. Alexander’s essay is entitled "The Flag Remains the Same"  and can be read at either OpEd News or TV News Lies.  Often pieces such as this tend to get bogged down in too much detail and as a result too many people who would benefit from such reading would be discouraged.  Some may disagree with certain interpretations of history but for the most part the important thing to understand is that the entire country has changed into something very ugly with the exception of our blessed symbol of the flag. Children pledge allegiance to it, anyone who refuses to stand during the obligatory rendition of the national anthem at a sporting event risks harassment or worse yet there is never a question asked as to whether such enforced worship of a national symbol would be accepted in a truly free country.

With the Iran war back on again and Barry and the boys full of piss and vinegar after the repair of the Obamacare website, the establishment Republican Night of the Long Knives purge of the so-called tea party and Helicopter Ben’s successor, the bankster friendly Janet Yellen standing on the brink of confirmation and the continuation of the 85 billion dollar a month heroin injections into Wall Street banks it is breaking that there will be no reform of NSA Stasi surveillance practices. Not that it could have been expected with a pack of traitors in Congress providing cover for the unconstitutional programs nor the committee that Obama empaneled that included notorious schemer Cass Sunstein and shadow government figure Richard Clarke. It was as packed with fixers, liars and defenders of the national security state as either the Warren Commission or the Kean Commission. There was an expectation of at least cosmetic changes to warrantless surveillance but the establishment is now going to give Americans the big red, white and blue middle finger.

But what would foreign policy shenanigans be without American’s foremost warmonger the deranged old bastard John McCain? McCain just cannot keep himself away from travelling across the pond to whichever country that at the time happens to be on the brink of war to conduct media dog and pony shows and act as a whore to the arms industry. This time it is in Ukraine where he is holding court with the anti-government protesters who were only a few days ago set upon by government goons wielding truncheons and chainsaws. It was a brutal act of a desperate regime but really is none of our business here in the United States, any notions that we can't act as the global policeman have long been cast aside when there are defense industry dollars to be harvested, just like General Smedley Butler put it, "War is a Racket" and Senator McCain has been it's top sales rep for a long time now. I haven't seen the schedules for tomorrow's Sunday morning state propaganda shows but don't be surprised if the old man just happens to drop by either live or from satellite hookup to act as Santa Claus for Raytheon, General Electric and hundreds of others looking to gain market share in Kiev.

It all just continues to rot but Americans just couldn't be bothered, after all, the flag remains the same.