Category Archives: NATO

France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning

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As developments in West Africa demonstrate, the francophone countries are no longer willing to accept French neo-colonialism. With the fear factor finally removed, Africa’s quest for genuine independence is steadily coming to fruition.

By Brad Pearce

Source: TheCradle.co

The 26 July coup in the West African nation of Niger, which threatens to undermine French and US military presence in the region, has shed light on the historical exploitation and continued practices of Francafrique – the term used to describe the persistent exploitation by the former French Empire in Africa.

France heavily relies on nuclear energy, with 68 percent of its power coming from nuclear plants. It obtains 19 percent of the uranium required to run these plants from Niger. Despite this significant contribution toward France’s energy needs, only 14.3 percent of Nigeriens have access to a power grid, and even that is often unreliable. This stark contrast highlights the disparities and ongoing exploitation by rapine foreign powers throughout the African continent. 

The Legacy of Francafrique

Francafrique has been known for its exploitative systems designed to profit from African resources, using pressure, capital, and frequently outright force to maintain control over its former empire. As a result, many African states, including Niger, continue to face poverty and underdevelopment.

Burkina Faso’s young, charismatic leader Ibrahim Traore recently spoke at the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg and decried the fact that Africa is resource-rich, but its people are poor, and criticized African leaders seeking hand-outs from the west, as they perpetuate dependency and poverty. He also described what is being imposed on Africa as a form of slavery, stating:

“As far as what concerns Burkina Faso today, for more than eight years we’ve been confronted with the most barbaric, the most violent form of imperialist neo-colonialism. Slavery continues to impose itself on us. Our predecessors taught us one thing: a slave who cannot assume his own revolt does not deserve to be pitied. We do not feel sorry for ourselves, we do not ask anyone to feel sorry for us.”

France’s inability to justify its presence in Africa with a coherent narrative further complicates the situation. Paris cannot openly confess its greed, feign a “civilizing mission,” or admit to any responsibility due to its past crimes. This lack of purpose weakens French power on the continent, leading to violence and poverty in its wake.

West Africa’s drive for further independence has left Atlanticists concerned about the opening this leaves for Eurasian powers like Russia and China to increase their influence in Africa. The west’s reaction reflects a lack of respect for the sovereignty of African countries, viewing the continent merely as a theater to maintain global dominance.

Since the Ukraine war’s onset in early 2022, Atlanticists have expressed alarm over the unwillingness of Global South states to support the west’s anti-Russia policies, a trend further amplified by the shift to multipolarism everywhere. This weakening of western hegemony has opened a path for many nations to avidly explore their geopolitical options and diversify their economies.

A report from the Munich Security Conference held in February highlighted this very real schism with the west:

“Many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have steadily lost faith in the legitimacy and fairness of an international system which has neither granted them an appropriate voice in global affairs, nor sufficiently addressed their core concerns. To many states, these failures are deeply tied to the west. They find that the western-led order has been characterized by post-colonial domination, double standards, and neglect for developing countries’ concerns.”

Fleeced by the CFA Franc

The aftermath of the Second World War marked a significant shift in global power dynamics, and the victorious powers sought to establish a new world order that would maintain peace and promote economic balance. 

In the context of African colonies, where colonial troops played a major role in the allied victory, the victorious powers, including France, aimed to retain economic control and benefit from their former colonies even as the world moved towards decolonization.

This included the establishment of new currency systems, with French leader Charles De Gaulle creating two currencies collectively known as the CFA Franc in 1945 for former colonies in the Western and Central zone.

As the push for political independence grew stronger in the late 1950s, France organized referendums in its African colonies to vote on accepting a constitution drafted by the French. 

Guinea, led by former trade unionist Sekou Toure, opposed accepting the French constitution and voted overwhelmingly against it. In a furious response, De Gaulle’s government withdrew all French administrators from Guinea and took action to sabotage the country’s infrastructure and resources. The harsh measures by Paris aimed to serve as an example of what would happen to any former French colony that resisted France’s agenda.

During the Cold War, the Communist states exploited such actions by presenting themselves as liberators and allies of African countries that sought independence from European influence. This stance has led to some Africans viewing countries like Russia as more equitable partners compared to France.

Over the years, France has demonstrated a pattern of intervening militarily – over 50 times since 1960 – in African countries to secure governments that remain compliant with French economic interests, particularly related to the continued use of the CFA Franc.

The system by which the CFA Franc operates has historically been one of a fixed exchange rate where the currency has unlimited convertibility but is permanently pegged to the French currency, previously the Franc and then the Euro. 

African currency under French control

This means that African countries cannot influence the value of their own currency, and the difference in value makes it so that France can buy African products artificially cheap while Africans are able to buy fewer goods with the money they exchange.

Worse yet, France had requirements to store, and thus profit from, the foreign reserves owned by its former colonies, though the requirement of holding 50 percent of their foreign exchange reserves in a French-ran bank was dropped for the western zone in 2019. 

Under this scheme, African states received a nominal amount of interest, but the bank benefited from lending that capital out at higher rates and attaining massive profits off of African resources and labor. This is despite the fact that many countries in Francophone Africa are major gold exporters and thus have a multitude of options for storing wealth to back a currency in alternative central banks.

While the CFA Franc system has provided some benefits in terms of stability and preventing Zimbabwean-style hyperinflation, it has also come under scrutiny for imposing requirements on African countries that are not placed on more powerful nations. The lack of control over their own currency has hindered economic growth and made these countries vulnerable to global economic shocks.

Northern African states such as Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco chose to leave the CFA Franc upon gaining independence and have experienced relatively higher prosperity. Similarly, Botswana’s success with its own national currency demonstrates that proper management can lead to stable democracy and economic growth, even for less developed nations.

Exclusive rights and privileges

The CFA Franc system has been the geopolitical equivalent of one’s father insisting he manages their savings while leaving them out of his will. There are benefits to having a trade and currency zone, such as the current ECOWAS union that covers the Western part of the continent, but by design under the CFA Franc system, independence has been an illusion by which France has fleeced these countries. 

France has been dependent on Africa for its status as a world power for more than a century. Among other privileges it has carved out for itself in post-colonial treaties, France has had the exclusive right to sell military equipment to former colonies, and enjoys the first right to any natural resources discovered. Paris makes great use of these privileges: as just one example, 36.4 percent of France’s gas is sourced from the African continent.

Moreover, a vast network of French business interests, which include major multinational companies, dominate industries such as energy, communications, and transportation in many African countries. France’s government also supports French businesses in Africa in several ways, including through an enormous public company called COFACE which guarantees French exports into these underdeveloped markets. 

Towards independence and self-reliance

This economic dependence has contributed to the perpetuation of a system where African states remain weak, pliant, and reliant on resource exports, primarily benefiting French companies and interests. Additionally, African states are obligated to ally with France in any major conflict, further eroding their national sovereignty. 

The African continent suffers from many ailments, but perhaps the most persistent and nefarious are a lack of sovereignty and access to capital. Meanwhile, much of Europe’s prosperity has been derived from looting the Global South for centuries. 

The case of Brussels, built on the wealth derived from the brutal exploitation of the Congo under Belgian King Leopold II, is a stark reminder of the deep-rooted impact of colonialism. When the monarch’s crimes against humanity were discovered, he was ultimately forced to bequeath the majority of his fortune to the Belgian state upon his death. 

Not wanting to do so, he embarked on an enormous series of public works to spend his ill-gotten gains, creating modern Brussels. Now the EU and NATO meet there and audaciously give disingenuous lectures about universal human rights while surrounded by the profits of some of the most brutal cases of oppression in human history. 

While military governments often face challenges in achieving their stated goals, it is evident that western-backed “civil democracies” have also struggled to significantly improve the security and well-being of the African public. 

The path to solving Africa’s problems lies in transformative leaders who can shrug off the legacy and remaining shackles of colonialism and enable the continent to carve out a genuine, homegrown path to independence and self-reliance.

The Ukraine Mess is Animal Farm in Reverse: Starring Blackrock and Other Pigs

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By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

Recently, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said that the European Union should double its assistance to Ukraine. She went on to say the EU should create a support fund of 50 billion euros by the end of the year and that everything should be done to ensure victory on the battlefield for the Ukrainians.

The European Union has created a “support package” for Ukraine for 2023 of up to €18 billion. This money, however, is not in the form of gifts, grants, or to create an emergency war chest. These billions are a loan under an EU macro-financial assistance program dubbed the MFA+ Instrument. In the fine print, EU member states are guaranteeing these loans as well as paying the interest for the Ukrainians. The move is extraordinary given that Ukraine is not an EU member and that, even before the current conflict, was one of the most corrupt governments on Earth. This begs the question, “Why?”

The EU is issuing special bonds to be sold to investors for this purpose at a time when many people in the European Union go without proper healthcare, services, and even employment. The European Union, EU Member States, and European financial institutions have already dispersed some €49 billion to President Zelensky’s regime. This figure, added to the $76.8 billion already funneled to Ukraine, dwarfs any assistance given to any other country in the world. This very conservative report from the Council of Foreign Relations shows the U.S. alone has shoveled more into Zelensky’s coffers than Afghanistan, Israel, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Iraq combined in 2020.

In all, some 47 countries have given money and arms to Ukraine. As of now, EU Institutions (?) handed Zelensky over €30 billion. The UK has forked over about €10 billion as their pensioners worry about what’s for dinner next. Germany has given somewhere around €8 billion, and Japan almost €7 billion. The Netherlands, Canada, and Poland have pitched in about €5 billion each, and the list of others about €14 billion. The numbers, as you would expect, do not all add up. A U.S. News & World Reports story from earlier this year claimed total aid to Zelensky’s country had exceeded €150 billion as of January of this year. Again, why?

The answer, this time, is really simple. BlackRock, and the new investment initiative to rebuild Ukraine (whatever’s left of it). You already knew this, right? Zelensky and BlackRock’s BlackRock CEO Larry Fink met late last year, and in November, the Ukrainian Ministry of the Economy (MoE) and BlackRock Financial Markets Advisory (FMA) signed a memorandum to structure Ukraine’s reconstruction funds (PDF). Also, in on the moneymaking schemes in war-torn Ukraine are Nestlé, International Finance Corporation, the private investment arm of the World Bank, Australia’s Tattarang Group,

Zelensky has called the rebuilding of his country, once it’s been used up as a proxy NATO against Russia, “the greatest opportunity in Europe since World War Two.” Earlier this year, Fink told Barron’s and other financial magazines that Western investors will be “flooding” Ukraine post-war and the country could become “a beacon to the rest of the world of the power of capitalism”. Also, JPMorgan Chase is joining BlackRock to help Ukraine set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital.

This American Conservative report says, “BlackRock Plots to Buy Ukraine,” in a recent editorial. Author Bradley Devlin outlines the Ukraine case, while also revealing how Fink and BlackRock are transforming America into a nation of renters by artificially elevating the prices of normal houses. If ever a man were appropriately named, Fink is that man.

“Why?” Is there any doubt about why some poor untrained bartender from Kyiv is in a foxhole being bombarded by Russian artillery? Doesn’t all the misleading media, inflated Ukraine military gains, and Joe Biden’s cock of the walk attitude toward a peace deal make more sense now? And Ursula, the lady I fondly refer to as Frau von der Clucky for her chicken-like pecking and strutting about while millions either die or are in harm’s way because of all the Western world barnyard antics right out of Orwell’s Animal Farm. While someone’s Dad takes a bullet or shrapnel in Donetsk, our leaders keep crowing, snorting, braying, and hog-wallering in their capitalistic farm dream.

Why? Greed, that’s why.

The Dynamics of War Insanity: NATO’s Ukraine Roulette

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By Alfred de Zayas

Source: Information Clearing House

Deliberate provocations of a nuclear rival, coups d’état, colour revolutions, broken promises, broken treaties, escalation of tensions, demonization, invective, double-standards — all this while asserting adherence to international legal norms and playing innocent about our aggressions, our violations of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, of articles 1(2)[1], 2(3)[2], 2(4)[3] and 39[4] of the UN Charter.

Abrams tanks, Leopard tanks, F-16, indiscriminate weapons, depleted uranium, cluster bombs. Summits illustrate how the moral compass of the collective West is lost in the avalanche of fake news[5], fake history, fake law, bellicose rhetoric, media hyperbole, serial mobbing of dissenters, persecution of whistleblowers, censorship. The Western binary mindset continues to divide the world into good and bad countries, democracies and autocracies. There is little room to accommodate a comprehensive picture of the pre-history, root causes of conflicts, and nuances. One observes an almost total absence of a sense for proportions.

The Global Majority in Latin America, Africa and Asia is increasingly alarmed by the surrealistic spectacle of a collective West that seems out of control, developing its own lethal dynamic, displaying a paroxysm of Russophobia and Sinophobia, incitement to hatred, cancel culture, refusal to entertain serious dialogue, doubling-down on eschatological demands. Many non-Western thinkers and politicians are articulating justified warnings that the on-going intestinal conflicts in the West are adversely impacting the economies of third-world countries and may ultimately result in Apocalypse for the entire planet. The West is not playing the classical Russian roulette – it has developed its own version: Ukrainian roulette, compulsive apocalyptic vabanque.

Meanwhile the Western media, notably Reuters, AP, CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Le Monde, Figaro, FAZ, der Spiegel, even the Swiss NZZ ensure the daily indoctrination doses for the Western public, purveying skewed narratives that repeat and embellish what Washington and Brussels ordain, blithely ignoring other views and perspectives and the principle audiatur et altera pars. Freedom of the media in the collective West seems to mean the right to repeat NATO narratives ad nauseam, even when they have been proven wrong. This “freedom” also includes the freedom to ignore every critical voice about NATO and to refrain from asking critical questions at NATO press conferences.

Western media systematically fail to report on the fears of billions of human beings in the rest of the world, Brazilians, Mexicans, South Africans, Ugandans, Indians, Chinese, who want peace and stability in the world as well as a chance for sustainable development. Many in these countries blame not Russia but Washington and Brussels for provoking the Ukraine conflict. This Global majority is not interested in whether Crimea lies in Russia or Ukraine. They demand a peaceful solution to an internal Western strife, so that the spill-over does not dislocate the economies of non-Western countries. Peace must be sought and achieved at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

The power of propaganda

On the legal, moral and political arenas, truth is less important than the perception of truth. Since time immemorial language has shaped our perception of reality, coloured it according to the political agenda of the powerful. Propaganda was not invented in the 21st century. It has always existed and generated an opportunistic pseudo-reality, an epistemology that subverts our understanding of facts and events. Labels, caricatures, generalizations serve as shortcuts to judgment and influence our daily behaviour in making choices. We are not obliged to use these templates, but most people unthinkingly do so.

The narrative managers of the mainstream media are bent on persuading us into believing who is good and who is bad, what politicians we should like, whom we should despise, what “metaphysic” we should consider valid within the mainstream epistemology. Of course, we still have our own brains and can use them – sapere aude! As Horatius used to say[6]. The sad thing is that even highly educated persons, graduates of Harvard, Oxford, Science-Po, continue to put their trust in media outlets that do not deserve our trust. As Julius Caesar put it: quae volumus, ea credimus libenter — we believe what we want to believe[7]. Indeed, it takes temerity to realize that our own politicians and media lie to us, that they are purveyors of dis-information and practitioners of Orwellian doublethink.

The human being has an innate desire to believe in a positive metaphysic, wants to look up to some authority, needs to have benchmarks, orientation points. That is why we are all to some degree negationists, resilient to bad news. In spite of the egregious official dis-information that preceded Western aggressions in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, we still want to believe that our governments are really champions of the rule of law and human rights, that they “mean well”, even if occasionally they inadvertently “make mistakes.”

Of course, it is painful to accept that some things that affect us are ugly, but the realization actually opens new vistas. If we reject blind faith in our leaders and practice a healthy scepticism, if we pro-actively look for other views and perspective, we grow up, become mature and experience a sense of liberation from illusions, acquiring a new purpose based on the facts as they stand, and not as we would like them to be.

The function of law

Law has an epistemological function in defining what is allowed and what is reprehensible. Law is not immutable or God-given, but constitutes a codification of the rules of the game at a particular moment in time and in a particular context. Law should not be confused with justice. Law is only the expression of a certain order of things, past and future generations and other civilizations may have entirely different legal orders and different ideas as to what justice entails.

Education teaches us to respect certain “red lines” established by the scribes of our society – the law makers in Parliaments, in the United Nations, in international conferences, such as those organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have concretized the ius in bello, the laws of war. These codifications include the rejection of indiscriminate weapons such as land mines and cluster bombs. The international Convention banning Cluster Munition (123 signatories, 111 states parties)[8] of 3 December 2008 was signed by many states that now consider furnishing cluster bombs to Ukraine. Go figure!

Judges apply the laws that have been codified by institutions possessing law-making authority. This is what we like to call the “rule of law”, which must not be confused with the “rule of justice”. Moreover, the “rule of law” is systematically undermined when the legal profession engages in brazen double-standards and international tribunals like the International Criminal Court[9] practice selectivity, investigating only some crimes, while letting the crimes committed by Western countries go unpunished.

Criminal Organizations

Articles 9 and 10 of the London Agreement of 8 August 1945, the Statute of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, as well as the Nuremberg judgment of 1 October 1946[10] created a precedent for a previously uncodified crime – membership in a “criminal organization”. Several NAZI organizations including the SS, the Gestapo and the Reich Cabinet were found to be criminal organizations, a problematic concept that flies in the face of the legal principle of the presumption of innocence.

If we fast-forward to the 21st century and consider the activities of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, targeted assassinations, overt and covert actions in violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, what is the relevance of the Nuremberg precedent to these organizations and to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization itself. If we compile the evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by NATO forces over the past 30 years, this would largely suffice for the International Criminal Court to issue indictments for violations of article 7 (crimes against humanity) and 8 (war crimes) of the Statute of Rome.

Initially NATO had its raison d’être under its 1949 Treaty. But the moment that the Warsaw Pact was dismantled in 1991 this justification fell away, and it gradually morphed into an imperialistic hegemonic military bloc, bent on imposing the Weltanschauung of the collective West on the rest of the world.

While Chapter VIII of the UN Charter recognizes the legitimacy of “regional arrangements” (articles 52-54) in the field of collective security, this requires that these regional arrangements be subordinated to the higher authority of the Security Council, which has a monopoly over the legal use of force. Since the 1990’s NATO has conspired to usurp the functions of the Security Council and thus far gotten away with it, although the NATO treaty must yield to the primacy of the UN Charter, pursuant to article 103 of the Charter, the “supremacy clause”. If States are dissatisfied with the current state of international law, it is for them to seek an amendment to the UN Charter pursuant to article 108.

Undoubtedly it was contrary to the UN Charter for NATO countries to use military force against Yugoslavia in 1999 in the absence of a Security Council resolution under Chapter VII and a finding under article 39 of the Charter that there had been a previous threat or breach of international peace and security and a failure of peaceful negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations. Without approval by the Security Council, NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia and elsewhere were simply illegal and engaged State civil and penal responsibility, including the obligation to pay reparations to the victims of the aggression. NATO actions since the entry into force of the Statute of Rome in 2001 deserve to be investigated under the rubric “crime of aggression” (article 5 off the Rome Statute) as complemented by the Kampala definition of aggression, and, of course under articles 7 and 8.

The end never justifies the means

The Florentine diplomat Nicolo Machiavelli never wrote the phrase “the end justifies the means” in his famous book The Prince. However, the thrust of the entire book is precisely that. Throughout the ages wielders of power have always claimed that because their goals were supposedly noble, the means to achieve those ends should be allowed. The same idea is expressed in the common idiom that you cannot make an omelette without cracking some eggs. But this is a lame excuse. What must be understood is that the evil means contaminate the end and render it evil as well.

Politicians and media in the collective West try to justify the unjustifiable, including the delivery of indiscriminate weapons to Ukraine, covering up the US involvement in the blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines[11], the responsibility of Ukraine for the bombing of the Zaporozhe nuclear plant and the Kakhovka dam[12] and other dams[13]. Politicians and media systematically engage in apologetics about the war crimes committed by NATO forces. Beyond merely whitewashing the crimes, they engage in a form of totalitarian censorship and practice a vicious persecution of whistleblowers who tell us what crimes are being committed in our name. Indeed, secrecy is an enabler of crime. Few people know that the Holocaust, the greatest crime of the twentieth century, was largely perpetrated under the cover of secrecy, that Hitler’s Führerbefehl Nr. 1 required absolute secrecy about government practices[14], that the killers of the Einzatzgruppen had to sign on pain of death that they would never reveal anything about the killings, why Heinrich Himmler reminded the killers in his 1943 Posen speech of the absolute necessity of secrecy. That is why there was the Nazi Operation 1005[15] to attempt to erase the evidence of the killings by the Einsatzgruppen, digging up mass graves and churning the skeletons, why most concentration camps in the East were evacuated and destroyed before their capture by the Soviet Army. Secrecy and denial were indispensable elements of the criminal conspiracy[16].

UN Rapporteur Nils Melzer’s book The Trial of Julian Assange[17] documents the egregious violations of the rule of law in the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador in connection with the Assange frame-up and “prosecution”. Indeed, Nils Melzer is the Emile Zola of the 21st century, demonstrating far worse judicial misconduct than Zola revealed in the 1890’s in connection with the frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus by a French military court. The Assange scandal is much worse than the Dreyfus Affair[18], but the mainstream media today has totally failed in its watchdog duty and many journalists have even joined the wolves.

What future for NATO?

Professors like John Mearsheimer[19], Richard Falk[20], Jeffrey Sachs[21], Stephen Kinzer[22] and others have expressed their concern about the dangers that NATO poses for the survival of humanity, of the logic that it should be dismantled. The best that could be hoped for is that NATO be phased out and that the Global Majority will succeed in rejecting NATO’s ambition to further expand not only in Europe but also in the Asia-Pacific region. Perhaps if the Global Majority exposes the multiple war crimes of NATO forces over the past 30 years and demands accountability from NATO countries, the perception of NATO as a “defence alliance” will be replaced by the label “criminal organization”.

When the media indoctrination and propaganda about NATO is exposed as false, when the perception in Western countries moves from positive to negative, when people realize that NATO is a Machiavellian institution that has exhausted its usefulness, it will be possible to gradually wind it down.

Ultimately, NATO must be recognized not only as a criminal organization, a blustering vestige of a moribund Western imperialism, but as a mortal danger to the survival of civilization on Earth. NATO is on the wrong side of history.

==== 

1. Among the purposes of the UN “To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace” ↑

2. All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. ↑

3. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. ↑

4. The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace…. ↑

5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-13/key-takeaways-from-nato-day-two-putin-zelenskyy-matter/102595358.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/12/politics/biden-nato-summit/index.html.Compare https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/the-mask-is-off-why-ukraine-will-never-be-a-nato-member/ ↑

6. Dare to think by yourself, dare to know! Horatius, First book of Letters (20 BC). Immanuel Kant also used the expression in his 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?”

7. De bello civile, 2, 27, 2 ↑

8. https://www.clusterconvention.org/ ↑

9. A. de Zayas, Chapter 4, The Human Rights History, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2023. ↑

10. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/judgen.asp ↑

11. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream ↑

12. https://abcnews.go.com/International/strategically-vital-nova-khakovka-dam-blown-border-ukraine/story?id=99863763

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-accuses-ukraine-destroying-kakhovka-dam-behest-west-2023-06-07  / ↑

13. https://www.npr.org/2022/09/06/1121201310/ukraine-flooded-village-dam-blown-up  ↑

14. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/staatsgeheimnis-1989490.html  ↑

15. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/aktion-1005  ↑

16. A de Zayas, Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis, Olzog Verlag, Munich 2011. ↑

17. Verso Books, New York, 2022. ↑

18. https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-Dreyfus-Affair  ↑

19. The Great Delusion, Yale University Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24483306  ↑

20. https://richardfalk.org/2022/03/31/make-peace-not-war-in-ukraine/  ↑

21. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/the-war-in-ukraine-was-provoked-and-why-that-matters-if-we-want-peace  ↑

22. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/stephen-kinzer-on-the-uss-immoral-proxy-war-in-ukraine/id1525433436?i=1000605659299  ↑ 

More Warmongers Elevated In The Biden Administration

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com.au

The Biden administration looks set to become even more warlike than it already was if you can imagine, with virulent Russia hawk Victoria Nuland and virulent China hawk Charles Q Brown now being elevated to lofty positions by the White House.

Nuland, the wife of alpha neocon Robert Kagan, has been named acting deputy secretary of state by President Biden, at least until a new deputy secretary has been named. This places her at second in command within the State Department, second only to Tony Blinken.

In an article about Nuland’s unique role in souring relations between the US and Russia during her previous tenure in the State Department under Obama, Responsible Statecraft’s Connor Echols writes the following of the latest news:

Nuland’s appointment will be a boon for Russia hawks who want to turn up the heat on the Kremlin. But, for those who favor a negotiated end to the conflict in Ukraine, a promotion for the notoriously “undiplomatic diplomat” will be a bitter pill.

A few quick reminders are in order. When Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, she had a now-infamous leaked call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. As the Maidan Uprising roiled the country, the pair of American diplomats discussed conversations with opposition leaders, and Nuland expressed support for putting Arseniy Yatseniuk into power. (Yatseniuk would become prime minister later that month, after Russia-friendly former President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country.) At one memorable point in the call, Nuland said “Fu–k the EU” in response to Europe’s softer stance on the protests.

The controversy surrounding the call — and larger implications of U.S. involvement in the ouster of Yanukovych — kicked up tensions with Russia and contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to seize Crimea and support an insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Her handing out  food to demonstrators on the ground in Kyiv probably didn’t help either. Nuland, along with State Department sanctions czar Daniel Fried, then led the effort to punish Putin through sanctions. Another official at State reportedly asked Fried if “the Russians realize that the two hardest-line people in the entire U.S. government are now in a position to go after them?”

In a 2015 Consortium News article titled “The Mess That Nuland Made,” the late Robert Parry singled out Nuland as the primary architect of the 2014 regime change operation in Ukraine, which, as Aaron Maté explained last year, paved the way to the war we’re seeing there today. Hopefully her position winds up being temporary.

In other news, the Senate Arms Services Committee has voted to confirm Biden’s selection of General Charles Q Brown Jr as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Mark Milley. A full senate vote will now take place on whether to confirm Brown — currently the Air Force Chief of Staff — for the nation’s highest military office.

Brown is unambiguous about his belief that the US must hasten to militarize against China in the so-called Indo-Pacific to prepare for confrontation between the two powers, calling for more US bases in the region and increased efforts to arm Taiwan during his hearing before the Senate Arms Services Committee earlier this month.

Back in May, Moon of Alabama flagged Brown’s nomination in an article which also noted that several advocates of military restraint had been resigning from their positions within the administration, including Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state who Nuland has taken over for.

It’s too soon to draw any firm conclusions, but to see voices of restraint stepping down and proponents of escalation stepping up could be a bad portent of things to come.

America’s Constitutional Government Is Gone

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

The few people who benefit from the U.S. Government’s being the world’s most powerful are U.S.-and-allied billionaires, who profit from the enormous sales of U.S.-made war-weapons and from the international extraction corporations such as Exxon-Mobil which rely upon its military, but all of this comes at the expense of the publics in every country including that of America itself. Any empire serves only its aristocracy, at the expense of the public. In modern times, the publics need to be deceived by the media and by the billionaires’ other agencies, so as to become deceived to vote for the billionaires’ candidates. This requires massive censorship, notwithstanding that America’s Constitution bans such censorship.

Freedom of the press, and freedom of expression, are ‘guaranteed’ in the U.S. Constitution, but if the controlling owners of the press are a small group of people who benefit from the fact that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns, and that the “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S., then how likely will the ‘news’-media be to accept for publication or to broadcast news reports that threaten this status-quo from which all of them have made and keep their enormous wealth? Not only do those billionaires own or control virtually all of the ‘news’-media, but the other corporations that they also own or control advertise in them; and, so, they select to hire editors and producers who will reject job-applicants who would report the types of things that those controllers want the public not to know — things such as these. The most-important realities are thus effectively censored-out.

For an example of the most-important realities, here is an entirely truthful 10-minute-long entirely independently produced compendium video that shows the key evidences that the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 was definitely not the democratic revolution that all of the U.S.-and-allied press pretend it was, but was instead a U.S. coup. And here is the complete showing of the smoking-gun piece of evidence in it, so that one can now see this crucial item of evidence within its broader context, and understand how it fits into that context, to produce crucial history instead of the ‘news’-media-promulgated myth that strings together lie-upon-lie. It’s documentation of how the war inside Ukraine (and to which U.S. taxpayers donated over a hundred billion dollars last year) actually started — via this U.S. coup. And here is an even broader contextual documentation of how that U.S. coup started this war, which U.S.-and-allied Governments and their ‘news’-media blame against Russia — as-if it were the case that Russia had expanded up to NATO’s border, instead of NATO’s having expanded up to Russia’s border.

Is that evidence consistent with what has been widely reported by the ‘news’-media about the overthrow of Ukraine’s Government in February 2014 and about how the war in Ukraine started (supposedly on 24 February 2022)? Did America’s Government start this war, or did Russia’s Government start it? And how important is the answer to that question, to the public’s ability to make fact-based choices when elections are held to determine whom will be occuping seats in Congress, and in the White House? As the brilliant geostrategist who anonymously writes the “Moon of Alabama” blog headlined on July 25th, “Who Can Give Security Guarantees To Ukraine?”, and he concluded there that the U.S. Government and its stooges in its NATO military alliance against Russia now clearly have no intention of providing any such, but that Russia can — and that the longer that America’s war against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine and killing Ukraine’s soldiers continues, the more onerous to the people of Ukraine will be the peace-terms that Russia will be able to offer to Ukraine for there to be any peace at all in Ukraine. It’s America’s war, but Russia will settle it.

Here is an interview of a very successful Asian journalist for major news-media, who had been participating in the so-called ‘democracy’ demonstrations in Hong Kong until he discovered that they had been initiated behind-the-scenes by the U.S. Government, and then he wrote a book about that, and he describes in this interview how the news-reporting that he and the rest of the press were doing had been fooled by the U.S. Government’s very elaborate and highly bribe-based operation against (i.e., to weaken) China’s Government.

The broader picture of that deeply corrupt management of ‘the news’ by America’s very wealthiest, is documented in detail here. It all started when U.S. President FDR died and his successor, Harry Truman (influenced by the advice from Winston Churchill and especially General Dwight Eisenhower), decided on 25 July 1945 for the U.S. Government to ultimately take control over all nations. This hegemonic or global-imperialist U.S. Government has made the world we live in today. But what percentage of the public know anything about this reality, of the world in which all of us are living? The ignorance and deception of the masses is the basis for these ‘democracies’.

Another key provision of the U.S. Constitution is that ONLY the U.S. Congress can authorize a war and the sending of U.S. forces abroad in order to participate in a war. However, this provision of the U.S. Constitution is likewise now being routinely violated by the U.S. Government. It has to be done because the key beneficiaries of U.S. imperialism are America’s billionaires, who control the U.S. Government. And this is the reason why after WW II, the U.S. Government has invaded and otherwise participated in 297 wars though none of them were ever declared by the U.S. Congress as the U.S. Constitution requires.

Politics is now a puppet-show in these ‘democracies’; and the ‘news’-media are merely a part of that puppet-show.

These realities are ugly, but they are real.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

Ukraine and the great revival of American empire

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By Andrew J. Bacevich

Source: Information Clearing House

Amidst the dross that clutters the New York Times op-ed page on most days, glimmers of enlightenment occasionally appear. A recent guest column by Grey Anderson and Thomas Meaney offers a case in point.

“NATO Isn’t What It Says It Is,” declares the headline. Contrary to the claims of its architects and defenders, Anderson and Meaney argue persuasively that the central purpose of the alliance from its founding was not to deter aggression from the East and certainly not to promote democracy, but to “bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order.” In return for Cold War-era security guarantees, America’s European allies offered deference and concessions on issues like trade and monetary policy. “In that mission,” they write, NATO “has proved remarkably successful.” A plot of real estate especially valued by members of the American elite, Europe thereby became the centerpiece of the postwar American imperium.

The end of the Cold War called these arrangements into question. Desperate to preserve NATO’s viability, proponents claimed that the alliance needed to go “out of area or out of business.” NATO embraced an activist posture, leading to reckless state building interventions in Libya and Afghanistan. The results were not favorable. Acceding to U.S. pressure to venture out of area proved to be costly and served chiefly to undermine NATO’s credibility as a militarily capable enterprise.

Enter Vladimir Putin to save the day. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine provided the U.S. with an excuse to forget its own post-9/11 military failures, so too it has enabled NATO to once more constitute itself as the chief instrument for defending the West—and, crucially, to do so without actually exacting a blood sacrifice from either Americans or Europeans.

In this context, the actual fate of Ukraine itself figures as something of an afterthought. The real issue centers on reviving damaged aspirations of American global primacy. With something like unanimity, the U.S. national security establishment is devoted to the proposition that the United States must remain the world’s sole superpower, even if this requires ignoring a vast accumulation of contrary evidence suggesting the emergence of a multipolar order. On that score, Putin’s recklessness came as an impeccably timed gift.

There is an element of genius at work here. Defeating Russia without having to do any actual fighting becomes the means to restore the image of American indispensability squandered during the decades that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Washington, as Anderson and Meaney appreciate, the true stakes in Ukraine go far beyond the question of whose flag flies over Crimea. If Ukraine “wins” its war with Russia—however “winning” is defined and however great the price Ukrainians must pay—NATO itself (and the NATO lobby in Washington) will claim vindication.

Rest assured that major European nations will then quietly renege on promises to boost their military spending, with actual responsibility for European security once more falling to the United States. With the centennial of World War II now within hailing distance, U.S. troops will remain permanently garrisoned in Europe. This will serve as cause for celebration throughout the U.S. military industrial complex, which will prosper.

Flexing its muscles, the United States will inevitably prod a greatly expanded NATO into turning its attention to enforcing the “rules-based international order” in the Asia-Pacific, with China as the chosen adversary. Ukraine will thereby serve as a template of sorts as the U.S. and its allies throw their weight around many thousands of miles from Europe proper.

The U.S. global military footprint will expand. U.S. efforts to put its house in order domestically will founder. Pressing global problems like the climate crisis will be treated as afterthoughts. But the empire that has no name will persist, which ultimately is the purpose of the game.

President Biden is fond of saying that the world has arrived at an “inflection point,” implying the need to change directions. Yet the overarching theme of his approach to foreign policy is stasis. He clings to the geopolitical logic that prompted NATO’s founding in 1949.

Back then, when Europe was weak and Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, that logic may have possessed some merit. But today the importance attributed to NATO testifies chiefly to the bankruptcy of American strategic thought and an inability to prioritize actually existing U.S. national interests, both foreign and domestic.

A sound revision of U.S. national security strategy would begin with announcing a timeline for withdrawing from NATO, converting it into an arrangement wholly owned and operated by Europe. The near impossibility of even imagining such an action by the United States testifies to the dearth of imagination that prevails in Washington.

Geopolitical Chessboard Shifts Against US Empire

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

The geopolitical chessboard is in perpetual shift – and never more than in our current incandescent juncture.

A fascinating consensus in discussions among Chinese scholars – including those part of the Asian and American diasporas – is that not only Germany/EU lost Russia, perhaps irretrievably, but China gained Russia, with an economy highly complementary to China’s own and with solid ties with the Global South/Global Majority that can benefit and aid Beijing.

Meanwhile, a smatter of Atlanticist foreign policy analysts are now busy trying to change the narrative on NATO vs. Russia, applying the rudiments of realpolitik.

The new spin is that it’s “strategic insanity” for Washington to expect to defeat Moscow, and that NATO is experiencing “donor fatigue” as the sweatshirt warmonger in Kiev “loses credibility”.

Translation: it’s NATO as a whole that is completely losing credibility, as its humiliation in the Ukraine battlefield is now painfully graphic for all the Global Majority to see.

Additionally, “donor fatigue” means losing a major war, badly. As military analyst Andrei Martyanov has relentlessly stressed, “NATO ‘planning’ is a joke. And they are envious, painfully envious and jealous.”

A credible path ahead is that Moscow will not negotiate with NATO – a mere Pentagon add-on – but offer individual European nations a security pact with Russia that would make their need to belong to NATO redundant. That would assure security for any participating nation and relieve pressure on it from Washington.

Bets could be made that the most relevant European powers might accept it, but certainly not Poland – the hyena of Europe – and the Baltic chihuahuas.

In parallel, China could offer peace treaties to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and subsequently a significant part of the US Empire of Bases might vanish.

The problem, once again, is that vassal states don’t have the authority or power to comply with any agreement ensuring peace. German businessmen, off the record, are sure that sooner or later Berlin may defy Washington and do business with the Russia-China strategic partnership because it benefits Germany.

Yet the golden rule still has not been met: if a vassal state wants to be treated as a sovereign state, the first thing to do is to shut down key branches of the Empire of Bases and expel US troops.

Iraq is trying to do it for years now, with no success. One third of Syria remains US-occupied – even as the US lost its proxy war against Damascus due to Russian intervention.

The Ukraine Project as an existential conflict

Russia has been forced to fight against a neighbor and kin that it simply can’t afford to lose; and as a nuclear and hypersonic power, it won’t.

Even if Moscow will be somewhat strategically weakened, whatever the outcome, it’s the US – in the view of Chinese scholars – that may have committed its greatest strategic blunder since the establishment of the Empire: turning the Ukraine Project into an existential conflict, and committing the entire Empire and all its vassals to a Total War against Russia.

That’s why we have no peace negotiations, and the refusal even of a cease fire; the only possible outcome devised by the Straussian neocon psychos who run US foreign policy is unconditional Russian surrender.

In the recent past, Washington could afford to lose its wars of choice against Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it simply can’t afford to lose the war on Russia. When that happens, and it’s already on the horizon, the Revolt of the Vassals will be far reaching.

It’s quite clear that from now on China and BRICS+ – with expansion starting at the summit in South Africa next month – will turbo-charge the undermining of the US dollar. With or without India.

There will be no imminent BRICS currency – as noted by some excellent points in this discussion. The scope is huge, sherpas are only in the initial debating stages, and the broad outlines have not been defined yet.

The BRICS+ approach will evolve from improved cross border settlement mechanisms – something everyone from Putin to Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina have stressed – to eventually a new currency way further down the road.

This would probably be a trade instrument rather than a sovereign currency like the euro. It will be designed to compete against the US dollar in trade, initially among BRICS+ nations, and capable of circumventing the hegemonic US dollar ecosystem.

The key question is how long the Empire’s fake economy – clinically deconstructed by Michael Hudson – can hold out in this wide spectrum geoeconomic war.

Everything is a ‘national security threat’

On the electronic technology front, the Empire has gone no holds barred to impose global economic dependency, monopolizing intellectual property rights and as Michael Hudson notes, “extracting economic rent from charging high prices for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.”

In practice, not much is happening other than the prohibition for Taiwan to supply valuable chips to China, and asking TSMC to build, as soon as possible, a chip manufacturing complex in Arizona.

However, TSMC chairman Mark Liu has remarked that the plant faced a shortage of workers with the “specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.” So the much lauded TSMC chip plant in Arizona won’t start production before 2025.

The top Empire/vassal NATO demand is that Germany and the EU must impose a Trade Iron Curtain against the Russia-China strategic partnership and their allies, thus ensuring “de-risk” trade.

Predictably, US Think Tankland has gone bonkers, with American Enterprise Institute hacks rabidly stating that even economic de-risking is not enough: what the US needs is a hard break with China.

In fact that dovetails with Washington smashing international free trade rules and international law, and treating any form of trade and SWIFT and financial exchanges as “national security threats” to US economic and military control.

So the pattern ahead is not China imposing trade sanctions on the EU – which remains a top trade partner for Beijing; it’s Washington imposing a tsunami of sanctions on nations daring to break the US-led trade boycott.

Russia-DPRK meets Russia-Africa

Only this week, the chessboard went through two game-changing moves: the high-profile visit by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to the DPRK, and the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg.

Shoigu was received in Pyongyang as a rock star. He had a personal meeting with Kim Jong-Un. The mutual goodwill leads to the strong possibility of North Korea eventually joining one of the multilateral organizations carving the path towards multipolarity.

That would be, arguably, an extended Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). It could start with an EAEU-DPRK free trade agreement, such as the ones struck with Vietnam and Cuba.

Russia is the top power in the EAEU and it can ignore sanctions on the DPRK, while BRICS+, SCO or ASEAN have too many second thoughts. A key priority for Moscow is the development of the Far East, more integration with both Koreas, and the Northern Sea Route, or Arctic Silk Road. The DPRK is then a natural partner.

Getting the DPRK into the EAEU will do wonders for BRI investment: a sort of cover which Beijing does not enjoy for the moment when it invests in the DPRK. That could become a classic case of deeper BRI-EAEU integration.

Russian diplomacy at the highest levels is going all out to relieve the pressure over the DPRK. Strategically, that’s a real game-changer; imagine the huge and quite sophisticated North Korean industrial-military complex added to the Russia-China strategic partnership and turning the whole Asia-Pacific paradigm upside down.

The Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, in itself, was another game-changer that left collective West mainstream media apoplectic. That was nothing less than Russia publicly announcing, in words and deeds, a comprehensive strategic partnership with the whole of Africa even as a hostile collective West wages Hybrid War – and otherwise – against Afro-Eurasia.

Putin showed how Russia holds a 20% share of the global wheat market. In the first 6 months of 2023, it had already exported 10 million tons of grain to Africa. Now Russia will be providing Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Eritrea with 25-50 thousand tons of grain each in the next 3-4 months, for free.

Putin detailed everything from approximately 30 energy projects across Africa to the expansion of oil and gas exports and “unique non-energy applications of nuclear technology, including in medicine”; the launching of a Russian industrial zone near the Suez Canal with products to be exported throughout Africa; and the development of Africa’s financial infrastructure, including connection to the Russian payment system.

Crucially, he also extolled closer ties between the EAEU and Africa. A forum panel, “EAEU-Africa: Horizons of Cooperation”, examined the possibilities, which include closer continental connection with both the BRICS and Asia. A torrent of free trade agreements may be in the pipeline.

The scope of the forum was quite impressive. There were “de-neocolonialization” panels, such as “Achieving Technological Sovereignty Through Industrial Cooperation” or “New World Order: from the Legacy of Colonialism to Sovereignty and Development.”

And of course the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) was also discussed, with major players Russia, Iran and India set to promote its crucial extension to Africa, escaping NATO littorals.

Separate from the frantic action in St. Petersburg, Niger went through a military coup. Although the end-result remains to be seen, Niger is likely to join neighboring Mali in reasserting its foreign policy independence from Paris. French influence is also being at least “reset” in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Burkina Faso. Translation: France and the West are being evicted all across the Sahel, one-step at a time, in an irreversible process of decolonization.

Beware the Pale Horses of Destruction

These movements across the chessboard, from the DPRK to Africa and the chip war against China, are as crucial as the coming, shattering humiliation of NATO in Ukraine. Yet not only the Russia-China strategic partnership but also key players across the Global South/Global Majority are fully aware that Washington views Russia as a tactical enemy in preparation for the overriding Total War against China.

As it stands, the still unresolved tragedy in Donbass as it keeps the Empire busy, and away from Asia-Pacific. Yet Washington under the Straussian neocon psychos is increasingly mired in Desperation Row, making it even more dangerous.

All that while the BRICS+ “jungle” turbo-charges the necessary mechanisms capable of sidelining the unipolar Western “garden”, as a helpless Europe is being driven to an abyss, forced to split itself from China, BRICS+ and the de facto Global Majority.

It doesn’t take a seasoned weatherman to see which way the steppe wind blows – as the Pale Horses of Destruction plot the trampling of the chessboard, and the wind begins to howl.

$850 Billion Chicken Comes Home to Roost.

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War Reveals U.S. Military’s Longtime Disinterest in War.

Signe’s second toon du jour SIGN17e Military

By Andrew Cockburn

Source: Spoils of War

Watching a recent video of Ukrainian troops scrambling out of a U.S.-supplied Bradley armored fighting vehicle just after it hit a mine, I remembered how hard the U.S. Army bureaucrats and contractors who developed the weapon had fought to keep this vehicle a death trap for anyone riding inside. As originally designed, Bradleys promptly burst into flame when hit with anything much more powerful than a BB pellet, incinerating anyone riding inside. The armor bureaucrats were well aware of this defect, but pausing development for a redesign might have hurt their budget, so they delayed and cheated on tests to keep the program on track. Prior to one test, they covertly substituted water-tanks for the ammunition that would otherwise explode. Only when Jim Burton, a courageous air force lieutenant colonel from the Pentagon’s testing office, enlisted Congress to mandate a proper live fire test were the army’s malign subterfuges exposed and corrected. His principled stand cost him his career, but the Bradley was redesigned, rendering it less potentially lethal for passengers. Hence, forty years on, the survival of those lucky Ukrainians.

This largely forgotten episode serves as a vivid example of an essential truth about our military machine: it is not interested in war.

How else to understand the lack of concern for the lives of troops, or producing a functioning weapon system? As Burton observed in his instructive 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, the U.S. defense system is “a corrupt business — ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.”

Nothing has happened in the intervening years to contradict this assessment, with potentially grim consequences for men and women on the front line. Today, for example, the U.S. Air Force is abandoning its traditional role of protecting and coordinating with troops on the ground, otherwise known as Close Air Support, or CAS. Given its time-honored record of bombing campaigns that had little or no effect on the course of wars, CAS has probably been the only useful function (grudgingly) performed by the service.

The Air Force has always resented the close support mission, accepting the role only because handing it to the Army would entail losing budget share. Thus the A-10 “Warthog” aircraft, specifically dedicated to CAS, was developed by the air force only to ward off a threat from the Army to steal the mission with a new helicopter. As it turned out, the A-10, thanks to the dedicated genius of its creators, notably the late Pierre Sprey, was supremely suited to the mission. But its successful record cuts no ice with the air force, which has worked with might and main to get rid of the A-10 ever since the threat of an army competitor in the eternal battle for budget share had been eliminated.

That campaign is now entering its final stages. The air force is not only getting rid of its remaining fleet of A-10s, it is also eliminating the capability to perform the close air support mission by phasing out the training for pilots and ground controllers essential for this highly specialized task. True, the service claims that the infamously deficient F-35 “fighter” can and will undertake the mission, but that is a laughable notion for many reasons, including the fact that the plane’s 25 mm cannon cannot shoot straight. The consequences for American troops on the ground in future wars will be dire, but their fate apparently carries little weight when set against the unquenchable urge of the air force to assert its independence from the messy realities of ground combat, where wars are won or lost. Thus its hopes and budget plans are focussed on costly systems of dubious relevance to warfare such as the new B-21 bomber, the new Sentinel ICBM, and the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter, none of which will fly for years to come, except in the form of cash out of our pockets.

Pentagon spending this year is projected to nudge $850 billion. (The total national security bill is already way past a trillion, but that’s another story.) Yet, even when endowed with such a gigantic pile of cash, the system is apparently incapable of furnishing the wherewithal for even a limited war, such as the one currently underway in Ukraine. The conflict has been marked by successive announcements that progressively more potent weapon systems are being shipped to the Ukrainians -Javelins anti-tank missiles, 155 mm Howitzers, HIMARS precision long range missiles, Patriots air defense missiles, Abrams tanks, with F-16 fighters in the offing. A U.S. military intelligence officer pointed out to me recently the actual basis on which these systems are selected: “when we run out of the last system we were sending.”

Now Biden has generated global outrage by promising to send cluster bombs, known for their ability to kill and maim children fifty years after the relevant war has ended, as any Laotian farmer could tell you. The military rationale for their use is their supposed utility against “soft” targets such as dismounted infantry, radars, and wheeled vehicles. However, a former armor officer and veteran of the 1991 Gulf war recalled to me that “we disliked them intensely and pleaded with the artillery and Air Force not to employ them. They simply damaged support elements and wheels that followed us into action. After the war we treated numerous people wounded by them including our own soldiers, as well as civilians (children).”

Biden has admitted that these devices are being sent only because the U.S. is running out of the artillery ammunition that the Ukrainians actually require. “This is a war relating to munitions. And they’re running out of that ammunition, and we’re low on it,” he told a TV interviewer. So off go the cluster bombs, their passage lubricated by crocodile tears from administration officials: “I’m not going to stand up here and say it was easy…It’s a decision that required a real hard look at the potential harm to civilians” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters. (Back when it was reported that the Russians were using cluster bombs in Ukraine, then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki denounced such action as “a war crime.”)

So, the richest war machine in history, having scraped its cupboard bare, is now reduced to fielding a device of dubious military utility deemed illegal by over a hundred countries. That’s what we get for our $850 billion.