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The Neoconservatives’ Hegemonic Goal Of Making Sovereign Countries Extinct Is Bringing Instead The Extinction Of Planet Earth

December 14, 2015

The Neoconservatives’ Hegemonic Goal Of Making Sovereign Countries Extinct Is Bringing Instead The Extinction Of Planet Earth

My warning that the neoconservatives have resurrected the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which was removed by Reagan and Gorbachev, is also being given by Noam Chomsky, former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, and other sentient observers of the neoconservatives’ aggressive policies toward Russia and China.

Daily we observe additional aggressive actions taken by Washington and its vassals against Russia and China. For example, Washington is pressuring Kiev not to implement the Minsk agreements designed to end the conflict between the puppet government in Kiev and the break-away Russian republics. https://www.rt.com/news/325687-ukraine-rhetoric-sabotage-churkin/ Washington refuses to cooperate with Russia in the war against ISIS. Washington continues to blame Russia for the destruction of MH-17, while preventing an honest investigation of the attack on the Malaysian airliner. Washington continues to force its European vassals to impose sanctions on Russia based on the false claim that the conflict in Ukraine was caused by a Russian invasion of Ukraine, not by Washington’s coup in overthrowing a democratically elected government and installing a puppet answering to Washington.

The list is long. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), allegedly a neutral, non-political world organization, has been suborned into the fight against Russia. Under Washington’s pressure, the IMF has abandoned its policy of refusing to lend to debtors who are in arrears in their loan payments to creditors. In the case of Ukraine’s debt to Russia, this decision removes the enforcement mechanism that prevents countries (such as Greece) from defaulting on their debts. The IMF has announced that it will lend to Ukraine in order to pay the Ukraine’s Western creditors despite the fact that Ukraine has renounced repayment of loans from Russia.

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Embracing The Dark Side: A Short History Of The Pathological Neocon Quest For Empire

October 28, 2015

Embracing The Dark Side: A Short History Of The Pathological Neocon Quest For Empire

When Bill Kristol watches Star Wars movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media disturbance in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed “benevolent global hegemony.”

Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine The Weekly Standard,responded to scandalized critics by linking to a 2002 essay from the Standard’s blog that justifies even the worst of Darth Vader’s atrocities. In “The Case for the Empire,” Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can’t make a “benevolent hegemony” omelet without breaking a few eggs.

And what if those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt who were gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers in their home on the Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued, Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were “traitors” who were aiding the rebellion and deserved to be field-executed.

A year after Kristol published Last’s essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of neocons like Kristol and Last.

That war was similarly justified in part by the false allegation that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of Fallujah, one of the most brutal episodes of the war, was also specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring Zarqawi.

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Will The Crazed Neocons Bring Us Nuclear Winter?

October 20, 2015

Will The Crazed Neocons Bring Us Nuclear Winter?

As readers know, I have emphasized that the declared neoconservative intention of achieving global hegemony has resurrected the threat of nuclear armageddon as Russia and China are most definitely not going to submit, as every European country, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, and Japan have submitted, to being Washington’s vassals.

The president of Russia and the president of China have made this completely clear.

If the arrogance, ignorance and incompetence of the Western political systems permit the continuation of the crazed, totally unrealistic, neoconservative agenda, the planet will die.

Ronald Reagan is the only US president during the era of nuclear weapons who was committed to removing them from all arsenals. I know because I was a part of his effort. If you can’t believe me, ask Pat Buchanan who was with Reagan at Reykjavik. In previous columns on my website, I quoted Buchanan’s response to my statements. Buchanan wrote to me that I was correct, that Reagan wanted rid of every nuclear weapon. That was President Reagan’s primary goal and is the reason for his economic program, which he placed in my hands. Reagan reasoned that if the US economy could be restored, the inability of the Soviet economy to be restored would allow him to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the cold war and rid the world of nuclear weapons. When I get letters from those denouncing Reagan for his crimes, I wonder at the pride that the writers show in their utter ignorance and stupidity.

What the neocons have done is to throw away every treaty and violate every agreement that had the world on the path to nuclear disarmament. These evil persons have caused massive moderization of Soviet and Chinese nuclear forces. There is no prospect whatsoever of American hegemony over the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Do-Gooders Can Do Bad

October 11, 2015

How Do-Gooders Can Do Bad

“Human rights” organizations have become purveyors of bloody chaos as they advocate Western big-power military attacks on weak countries in the name of “responsibility to protect” – one of several purportedly well-intentioned strategies gone awry – as Coleen Rowley and Diana Johnstone describe.

Organizers and participants in the “Creating a Workable World” conference (held this weekend at the University of Minnesota) are undoubtedly sincere. No one wants to live in an unworkable world. The sponsoring World Federalist Movement has historically exercised a strong attraction on progressives, appealing to their generous sentiments and wish for world peace.

However, such a grand, overarching ideal as world federalism or global democracy must be evaluated in light of current circumstances and its track record.

At the end of World War II, it was widely believed that nationalism was the main cause of the horrors that had just devastated much of the world. It was easy to imagine that abolishing nation states would be a step toward ending wars by removing their cause. This sentiment was particularly strong in Western Europe, forming the ideological foundation of the movement that led to European integration, now embodied in the European Union.

In that same period, there was a historic movement going in the opposite direction: the national liberation movements in various colonized countries of the Third World. The political drive for national liberation from European powers — Britain, France, the Netherlands — contributed to establishing national sovereignty as the foundation of world peace, by outlawing aggression. Newly liberated Third World countries felt protected by the principle of national sovereignty, seeing it as essential to independence and even to survival.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?

September 17, 2015

Was Turkey Behind Syria Sarin Attack?

From the Archive: As Washington pundits again demand Syrian President Assad’s ouster, a top talking point is that he “gassed his own people” in a Sarin attack in 2013. But that rush to judgment was picked apart by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and others, as Robert Parry reported in spring 2014.

In late August 2013, the Obama administration lurched to the brink of invading Syria after blaming a Sarin gas attack outside Damascus on President Bashar al-Assad’s government, but evidence – reported by investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh – implicates Turkish intelligence and extremist Syrian rebels instead.

The significance of Hersh’s report is twofold: first, it shows how Official Washington’s hawks and neocons almost stampeded the United States into another Mideast war under false pretenses, and second, the story’s publication in the London Review of Books reveals how hostile the mainstream U.S. media remains toward information that doesn’t comport with its neocon-dominated conventional wisdom.

In other words, it appears that Official Washington and its mainstream press have absorbed few lessons from the disastrous Iraq War, which was launched in 2003 under the false claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was planning to share hidden stockpiles of WMD with al-Qaeda, when there was no WMD nor any association between Hussein and al-Qaeda.

A decade later in August and September 2013, as a new war hysteria broke out over Assad allegedly crossing President Barack Obama’s “red line” against using chemical weapons, it fell to a few Internet sites, including our own Consortiumnews.com, to raise questions about the administration’s allegations that pinned the Aug. 21 attack on the Syrian government.

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Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

September 16, 2015

Are Neocons an Existential Threat?

Exclusive: Despite a record of unprecedented error, American neocons remain the dominant foreign policy force in Official Washington, demanding more “regime change” in the Middle East and a new Cold War that could heat up and end all life on the planet, writes Robert Parry.

The neoconservatives arguably have damaged American national interests more than any group in modern history. They have done more harm than the marginal Communists pursued by Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, more than the Yippies of the 1960s, more than Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in the 1970s or the Iran-Contra conspirators in the 1980s.

The neocons have plunged the U.S. government into extraordinarily ill-considered wars wasting trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and destabilizing large swaths of the planet including the Middle East, much of Africa and now Europe. Those costs include a swelling hatred against America and a deformed U.S. foreign policy elite that isno longer capable of formulating coherent strategies.

Yet, the neocons have remained immune from the consequences of their catastrophes. They still dominate Washington’s major think tanks as well as the op-ed pages of virtually all the leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They hold down key positions in the State Department, and their “liberal interventionist” pals have the ear of President Barack Obama.

Clearly, the neocons are skilled operatives, knowing how to arrange a steady stream of funding for themselves, from military contractors donating to think tanks, from U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, and from ideological billionaires set on aligning U.S. foreign policy with hard-line Israeli desires.

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Who’s to Blame for Syria Mess? Putin!

September 14, 2015

Who’s to Blame for Syria Mess? Putin!

Exclusive: Official Washington’s new “group think” is to blame Russia’s President Putin for the Syrian crisis, although it was the neocons and President George W. Bush who started the current Mideast mess by invading Iraq, the Saudis who funded Al Qaeda, and the Israelis who plotted “regime change,” says Robert Parry.

Sen. Lindsey Graham may have been wrong about pretty much everything related to the Middle East, but at least he has the honesty to tell Americans that the current trajectory of the wars in Syria and Iraq will require a U.S. re-invasion of the region and an open-ended military occupation of Syria, draining American wealth, killing countless Syrians and Iraqis, and dooming thousands, if not tens of thousands, of U.S. troops.

Graham’s grim prognostication of endless war may be a factor in his poll numbers below one percent, a sign that even tough-talking Republicans aren’t eager to relive the disastrous Iraq War. Regarding the mess in Syria, there are, of course, other options, such as cooperation with Russia and Iran to resist the gains of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda and a negotiated power-sharing arrangement in Damascus. But those practical ideas are still being ruled out.

Official Washington’s “group think” still holds that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “must go,” that U.S. diplomats should simply deliver a “regime change” ultimatum not engage in serious compromise, and that the U.S. government must obstruct assistance from Russia and Iran even if doing so risks collapsing Assad’s secular regime and opening the door to an Al Qaeda/Islamic State victory.

How Neocons Destabilized Europe

September 8, 2015

How Neocons Destabilized Europe

Exclusive: The neocon prescription of endless “regime change” is spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into Europe, yet the neocons still control the mainstream U.S. narrative and thus have diagnosed the problem as not enough “regime change,” as Robert Parry reports.

The refugee chaos that is now pushing deep into Europe – dramatized by gut-wrenching photos of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey – started with the cavalier ambitions of American neocons and their liberal-interventionist sidekicks who planned to remake the Middle East and other parts of the world through “regime change.”

Instead of the promised wonders of “democracy promotion” and “human rights,” what these “anti-realists” have accomplished is to spread death, destruction and destabilization across the Middle East and parts of Africa and now into Ukraine and the heart of Europe. Yet, since these neocon forces still control the Official Narrative, their explanations get top billing – such as that there hasn’t been enough “regime change.”

For instance, The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt on Monday blamed“realists” for the cascading catastrophes. Hiatt castigated them and President Barack Obama for not intervening more aggressively in Syria to depose President Bashar al-Assad, a longtime neocon target for “regime change.”But the truth is that this accelerating spread of human suffering can be traced back directly to the unchecked influence of the neocons and their liberal fellow-travelers who have resisted political compromise and, in the case of Syria, blocked any realistic efforts to work out a power-sharing agreement between Assad and his political opponents, those who are not terrorists.

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The Myth of a Russian ‘Threat’

September 2, 2015

The Myth of a Russian ‘Threat’

Not a week goes by without the Pentagon carping about an ominous Russian “threat”.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey entered certified Donald “known unknown” Rumsfeld territory when he recently tried to conceptualize the “threat”; “Threats are the combination, or the aggregate, of capabilities and intentions. Let me set aside for the moment, intentions, because I don’t know what Russia intends.”

So Dempsey admits he does not know what he’s talking about. What he seems to know is that Russia is a “threat” anyway — in space, cyber space, ground-based cruise missiles, submarines.

And most of all, a threat to NATO; “One of the things that Russia does seem to do is either discredit, or even more ominously, create the conditions for the failure of NATO.”

So Russia “does seem” to discredit an already self-discredited NATO. That’s not much of a “threat”.

All these rhetorical games take place while NATO “does seem” to get ready for a direct confrontation with Russia. And make no mistake; Moscow does view NATO’s belligerence as a real threat.

It’s PGS vs. S-500

The “threat” surge happens just as US Think Tankland recharges the notion of containment of Russia. Notorious CIA front Stratfor has peddled a propaganda piece praising Cold War mastermind George Kennan as the author of the “containment of Russia” policy.

The US intel apparatus don’t do irony; before he died, Kennan said it was now the US that had to be contained, not Russia.

Containment of Russia – via the expansion of the EU and NATO — has always been a work in progress because the geopolitical imperative has always been the same; as Dr. Zbigniew “The Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski never tired of stressing, it was always about preventing the – threatening — emergence of a Eurasian power capable of challenging the US.

Pushing the Edge on Nuclear War

August 29, 2015

Pushing the Edge on Nuclear War

Exclusive: Official Washington’s neocons and liberal hawks are ratcheting up tensions again over Ukraine with the goal of humiliating and even destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia – and there’s no modern-day JFK to tamp down the enthusiasm, an existential risk that ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk examines.

Decisions on nuclear weapons are and will remain the most important part of our quest for world security since even small mistakes or wrong actions would probably be catastrophic. We now seem to be moving closer to the danger point of provoking their use. So I want particularly to emphasize four points on the issues we all face and then raise a few other general considerations:

–Technical mistakes are always possible. More have happened than is generally known. In the Eisenhower administration, NORAD at least once spotted on radar a flight of geese over Iceland and went to Red Alert. It took a critical period of minutes to recognize the cause and stand down the alert. During that time, the danger of a missile launch or an aircraft attack was clear and present.

Some years later, a nuclear bomb was actually dropped on America (by a U.S. Air Force bomber flying where it should not have been while carrying a weapon it should not have been carrying). Fortunately, the firing mechanism was faulty and the bomb did not go off. Had it detonated, in the confusion SAC and other formations would have been hard to stop from reacting to the supposed attacker. These are just two of many incidences of dangerous times.

I fear that we are again heading into dangerous times.

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Liberty Movement Needs More Innovations To Counter Technological Tyranny

July 22, 2015

Liberty Movement Needs More Innovations To Counter Technological Tyranny

The great lesson from history that each consecutive generations seems to forget is that the tools of tyranny used outward will inevitably be turned inward. That is to say, the laws and weapons governments devise for supposed enemies abroad will ALWAYS and eventually be used against the people they are mandated to protect. There is no centralized system so trustworthy, no political establishment so free of corruption that the blind faith of the citizenry is warranted. If free people do not remain vigilant they will be made slaves by their own leadership. This is the rule, not the exception, and it applies to America as much as any other society.

The beauty of the con game that is the “war on terror” is that such a war is ultimately undefinable. An undefinable war has no set enemy; the establishment can change the definition of the “enemy” at will to any culture, country, or group it wishes. Thus, the war on terror can and will last forever. Or, at least, it will last as long as corrupt elitists remain in positions of power.

As I have outlined in past articles, most terror groups are creations of our nation’s own covert intelligence apparatus, or the covert agencies of allied governments.

ISIS is perhaps the most openly engineered terror organization of all time (surpassing Operation Gladio), with U.S. elites and purported anti-Muslim terror champions like Sen. John McCain and Gen. Paul Vallely making deals with “moderate” Free Syrian Army rebels who immediately turn out to be full fledged ISIS fighters (I’m sure they were not “surprised” by this outcome) and the Obama Administration blatantly funding and arming more “moderates” which again in turn seem to be crossing over into the hands of ISIS. Frankly, the whole idea that there is a moderate front in places like Syria where alphabet agencies reign supreme is utterly absurd.

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The US Hand in the Syrian Mess

July 21, 2015

The US Hand in the Syrian Mess

Exclusive: Neocons and the mainstream U.S. media place all the blame for the Syrian civil war on President Bashar al-Assad and Iran, but there is another side of the story in which Syria’s olive branches to the U.S. and Israel were spurned and a reckless drive for “regime change” followed, writes Jonathan Marshall.

Syria’s current leader, Bashar al-Assad replaced his autocratic father as president and head of the ruling Ba’ath Party in 2000. Only 35 years old and British educated, he aroused widespread hopes at home and abroad of introducing reforms and liberalizing the regime. In his first year he freed hundreds of political prisoners and shut down a notorious prison, though his security forces resumed cracking down on dissenters a year later.

But almost from the start, Assad was marked by the George W. Bush administration for “regime change.” Then, in the early years of Barack Obama’s presidency, there were some attempts at diplomatic engagement, but shortly after a civil conflict broke out in 2011, the legacy of official U.S. hostility toward Syria set in motion Washington’s disastrous confrontation with Assad which continues to this day.

Thus, the history of the Bush administration’s approach toward Syria is important to understand. Shortly after 9/11, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark learned from a Pentagon source that Syria was on the same hit list as Iraq. As Clark recalled, the Bush administration “wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”

Sure enough, in a May 2002 speech titled “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” Under Secretary of State John Bolton named Syria as one of a handful of “rogue states” along with Iraq that “can expect to become our targets.” Assad’s conciliatory and cooperative gestures were brushed aside.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Seeking War to the End of the World

July 20, 2015

Seeking War to the End of the World

Exclusive: Despite the disastrous Iraq War, neocons still dominate Official Washington’s inside-outside game, government policymakers coordinating with think-tank opinion leaders to keep world tensions high and money flowing to military projects, a process personified by Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland, says Robert Parry.

If the neoconservatives have their way again, U.S. ground troops will reoccupy Iraq, the U.S. military will take out Syria’s secular government (likely helping Al Qaeda and the Islamic State take over), and the U.S. Congress will not only kill the Iran nuclear deal but follow that with a massive increase in military spending.

Like spraying lighter fluid on a roaring barbecue, the neocons also want a military escalation in Ukraine to burn the ethnic Russians out of the east and the neocons dream of spreading the blaze to Moscow with the goal of forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Kremlin. In other words, more and more fires of Imperial “regime change” abroad even as the last embers of the American Republic die at home.

Much of this “strategy” is personified by a single Washington power couple: arch-neocon Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and an early advocate of the Iraq War, and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who engineered last year’s coup in Ukraine that started a nasty civil war and created a confrontation between nuclear-armed United States and Russia.

Kagan, who cut his teeth as a propaganda specialist in support of the Reagan administration’s brutal Central American policies in the 1980s, is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post’s neocon-dominated opinion pages.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Propaganda Reigns In The West: Guest Post by Vladimir Putin

June 24, 2015

Propaganda Reigns In The West: Guest Post by Vladimir Putin

The lies about Russia and Russia’s president have grown so thick, threatening the world with devastating war, that distinguished Americans have formed the American Committee for East-West Accord. The members of the founding board are former US senator Bill Bradley, Amb. Jack Matlock who was US ambassador to the Soviet Union during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, William J. vanden Heuvel who was US ambassador to the UN during the Carter administration, John Pepper who is the former chairman and CEO of Proctor Gamble, Gilbert Doctorow who is a businessman with a quarter century of business experience with Russia, and professors Ellen Mickiewicz of Duke University and Stephen Cohen of Princeton University and New York University.

It is extraordinary that the cooperation between Russia and the US created over the decades by successive administrations, beginning with John F. Kennedy and culminating in the end of the Cold War with the Reagan-Gorbachev agreements, has been destroyed by a handful of American neoconservative warmongers in the past year and one-half. The achievement of a 40-year struggle has been wiped out overnight by a handful of insane warmongers who believe that Washington has a right to world hegemony. Thanks to the crazed neoconservatives, nuclear war is again a specter that haunts mankind.

The problem began with President Clinton violating the promises given to the Russians that NATO would not be taken into Eastern Europe. This breach of American promise was followed by the George W. Bush regime withdrawing from the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty and changing US war doctrine to permit pre-emptive nuclear attack by the US on other countries, principally Russia.

These provocations were followed by announcement of US missile bases on Russia’s borders.

The Obama regime added a coup in Ukraine, long a province of Russia, and the establishment of a US vassal government that threatens Russian security.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crisis and the Politics of Possibility

June 6, 2015

Crisis and the Politics of Possibility

The Marketplace Belongs Only to Those Who Can Pay For It

Following in the tradition of his father and Bill Clinton before him, in 2003 George W. Bush launched a ‘liberal’ war to, in the words of the agreed upon rationales; protect the ‘homeland’ from attack and remove a dangerous tyrant from office. Enlisted in selling the ‘war of liberation’ were liberal hawks who apparently believed, against considerable history, that the American military is a force of liberation and trusting feminists who believed, against considerable history, that exporting Western liberalism at the point of a gun would free women from religious patriarchy to realize themselves. Reliably, the result was grim destruction beyond the imagination of most mere mortals— the only liberation that took place was of one million Iraqis from their mortal coils.

The point isn’t retrospective finger pointing, but rather to pin down where liberal goals departed from the social mechanisms that were believed to support them? Part of the calamity generation resulted from people— American liberals, who were free to have opinions without bearing their consequences. The sympathetic frame put forward was of ‘speaking for the voiceless,’ many of whom apparently believed the American liberation myth themselves. But the more serious shortcoming was in not understanding the motivations of the political leadership, the nature of the corporations and other economic interests seeking to benefit from war and the complexity of the social relations that were destroyed. Put differently, the conception of ‘freedom’ at work left unconsidered the divergent interests; military contractors, infrastructure rebuilders and multinational oil companies, whose life-blood is economic plunder.

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