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Category: United States

  • Imperial Visits: US Emissaries in the Pacific

    For some time, Washington has been losing its spunk in the Pacific. When it comes to the Pacific Islands, a number have not fallen – at least entirely – for the rhetoric that Beijing is there to take, consume, and dominate all. Nor have such countries been entirely blind to their own sharpened interests. This largely aqueous region, which promises to submerge them in the rising waters of climate change, has become furiously busy.

    A number of officials are keen to push the line that Washington’s policy towards the Pacific is clearly back where it should be. It’s all part of the warming strategy adopted by the Biden administration, typified by the US-Pacific Island Country summit held last September. In remarks made during the summit, President Joe Biden stated that “the security of America, quite frankly, and the world, depends on your security and the security of the Pacific Islands. And I really mean that.”

    Not once was China mentioned, but its ghostly presence stalked Biden’s words. A new Pacific Partnership Strategy was announced, “the first national US strategy for [the] Pacific Islands”. Then came the promised cash: some $810 million in expanded US programs including more than $130 million in new investments to support, among other things, climate resilience, buffer the states against the impact of climate change and improve food security.

    The Pacific Islands have also seen a flurry of recent visits. In January this year, US Indo-Pacific military commander Admiral John Aquilino popped into Papua New Guinea to remind the good citizens of Port Moresby that the eyes of the US were gazing benignly upon them. It was his first visit to the country, and the public affairs unit of the US Indo-Pacific Command stated that it underscored “the importance of the US-Papua New Guinea relationship” and showed US resolve “toward building a more peaceful, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.”

    In February, a rather obvious strategic point was made in the reopening of the US embassy in the Solomon Islands. Little interest had been shown towards the island state for some three decades (the embassy had been closed in 1993). But then came Beijing doing, at least from Washington’s perspective, the unpardonable thing of poking around and seeking influence.

    Now, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare finds himself at the centre of much interest, at least till he falls out of favour in the airconditioned corridors of Washington. His policy – “friends to all, enemy to none” – has become a mantra. That much was clear in a May 2022 statement. “My government welcomes all high-level visits from our key development partners. We will always stand true to our policy of ‘Friends to All and Enemies to None’ as we look forward to continuing productive relations with all our development partners.”

    For the moment, the US interim representative, Russell Corneau, was satisfied in noting that the embassy would “serve as a key platform” between Washington and the Solomon Islands. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in fairly torturous language, declared that the reopening “builds on our efforts to place more diplomatic personnel throughout the region and engage further with our Pacific neighbours, connect United States programs and resources with needs on the ground, and build people-to-people ties.” Sogavare, adopting his hard-to-get pose, absented himself from the ceremony.

    This month, the Deputy Assistant to the US President and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific National Security Council Kurt Campbell has been particularly busy doing his rounds. The Solomon Islands has been of particular interest, given its security pact with Beijing. No sooner had Sogavare had time to compose himself after two high profile visits from Japan and China, there was Campbell and his eight-member delegation.

    “We realise that we have to overcome in certain areas some amounts of distrust and uncertainty about follow through,” Campbell explained in his usual middle-management speak to reporters in Wellington. “We’re seeking to gain that trust and confidence as we go forward. Much of what we are doing has been initiated by the president, but I want to underscore that it’s quite bipartisan.”

    In Honiara, Campbell was forward in admitting that the US had not done “enough before” and had to be “big enough to admit that we need to do more, and we need to do better.” Doing more and doing better clearly entailed dragging out from Sogavare a promise that his country would not create a military facility “that would support power projection capabilities” for Beijing.

    Earlier in the month, Qian Bo, China’s Pacific Island envoy, was also doing his bit to win support for the cause. His Vanuatu sojourn was a wooing effort directed at the Melanesian Spearhead Group, comprising Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak independence movement in New Caledonia. But as with any muscle-bound hegemon seeking to impress, the crumbs left were treated with some circumspection.

    A leaked letter from Micronesia’s President David Panuelo took a more dim view of China’s offerings. In the March 9 document, the cogs and wheels of calculation were busy, taking into account the US proposal of US$50 million into Micronesia’s national trust fund and annual financial assistance of US$15 million. “All of this assistance, of course, would be on top of the greatly added layers of security and protection that come from our country distancing itself from the PRC.” Micronesian officials, he charged, had been the targets of bribes and offers of bribes from the Chinese embassy.

    Not all his colleagues in the Pacific are in accord with Panuelo, though the view suggests that both Beijing and Washington are finding, in these small countries, political figures more than willing to exploit the rivalry. To that end lie riches.

    The post Imperial Visits: US Emissaries in the Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Batteries now worth $17bn to the economy by 2030: FBICRC

    The Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre has more than doubled its 2030 forecast for the value of a diversified battery industry to the Australian economy to $16.9 billion, but argues stronger economic alliances will be needed to realise it. A 2021 report commissioned by the Future Batteries Industries Cooperative Research Centre (FBICRC) had initially…

    The post Batteries now worth $17bn to the economy by 2030: FBICRC appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

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  • 20 years on — Iraq war costs still rising

    March 19–20 marked 20 years since United States forces invaded Iraq. A new report documents the ongoing human, social, economic and environmental toll, reports Brett Wilkins.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us

    There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.

    — Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor

    It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.

    Don’t be fooled, not even a little.

    We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.

    This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

    What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.

    We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.

    The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.

    More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.

    After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

    Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.

    The facts speak for themselves.

    We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held onto the money for months. Homeowners are losing their homes over unpaid property taxes (as little as $2300 owed) that amount to a fraction of what they have invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging them with a crime.

    We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Journalist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation lands the citizenry in worse straits.

    We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”

    We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”

    We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong—more than 80,000 annually—that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”

    We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now domestic extremism, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have not ended terrorism but merely sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have caught few terrorists while subjecting all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have done little to decrease crime while turning communities into warzones. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.

    We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army. As if it weren’t enough that the American military empire stretches around the globe (and continues to leech much-needed resources from the American economy), the U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances.

    Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.

    To our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our once-constitutional republic.

    The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.

    Consider it: the penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.

    You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

    We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.

    For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.

    We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.

    How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.

    For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

    As French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:

    “Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

    The bait towards slavery. The price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.

    Yes, that sounds about right.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” have learned only too well how to be slaves.

    The post Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • National Indigenous Space Academy launches

    A NASA internship for First Nations Australian university students has been launched with funding support from the Australian Space Agency. The National Indigenous Space Academy (NISA) will enable five university students who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander to undertake a 10-week summer internship program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. This…

    The post National Indigenous Space Academy launches appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

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  • Patriotism and Sinophobia

    People such as former US military men like Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor provide excellent analysis on the geopolitics and warring in Ukraine. Ritter and McGregor are two Americans apparently able to relay a perspective based on their own take of a situation, a take independent of government pronouncements and home media reports. Nonetheless, despite reporting their government’s involvement in a proxy war and being well aware of US imperialism and war crimes, these men feel the need to profess their love of country. This is despite their country stirring up wars abroad; stealing oil and wheat in Syria; withholding money that belongs to the poor people of Afghanistan; having overthrown or trying to overthrow governments in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Peru, Russia, etc.; leaving Americans without healthcare to fend for themselves as well as the homeless and destitute; carrying out a slow-motion assassination of Julian Assange; forcing Edward Snowden to live in exile; and a war against several other whistleblowers, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, to name a few. So why the need to express an undying love for country?

    One must not be harsh, as one can assume that to not declare an unwavering patriotism would put these independent speakers at risk of a harsh backlash.

    I admire Ritter and MacGregor for their independent streak. (I also appreciate the analysis of former US marine Brian Berletic who does not engage in rah-rah for the United States, but then he is an ex-pat).

    Of course, that an ex-military man can provide excellent military analysis does not mean that views expressed outside one’s bailiwick are equally profound. Such views may even be deserving of criticism or censure.

    In a recent video, MacGregor is interviewed by Stephen Gardner (who displays a large Star and Stripes in the background). MacGregor imparts a perspective that is at odds with that trotted out by his government and the US monopoly media concerning warring in Ukraine.

    However, a final question that Gardner posed to MacGregor was rather revealing in a very negative light.

    Gardner tendentiously asks (around 29:25), “You mentioned that the humane thing would be for the United States to step in and say this war is over; let’s be done. Don’t you feel like China is trying to fill that vacuum, where they are now saying, ‘Oh Saudi Arabia and Iran, there’s a lot of money to be made, let’s broker peace. Russia, Ukraine, hey, the United States is not going to step in; we are going to step in and broker peace.’ Is this one more way for China to try to eclipse the United States on the world stage?”

    What basis does Garner have for posing such a loaded question? Gardner ascribes selfish motives to China’s seeking to broker peace. One assumes that making war is preferable in Garner’s estimation. When has China ever boasted that it aspires to eclipse any country or be top dog? China eschews hegemony, and it consistently states its preference for a multipolar world, a world of peace, and developing win-win relationships with countries. Africans, long pillaged by Europeans and the Anglo diaspora, know this well.

    MacGregor responded well, at first, “Well, first of all, I do not subscribe to the view that China wants to eclipse us.” Fine, but this was immediately and emphatically followed by: “They know they can’t.” This comes across as chest thumping, USA, USA, USA, from a former military man.

    This is followed by a several assertions: “They [China] have serious problems internally, as well.” He opines that China “is too big to do more than it has already done.” He asserts that China’s chairman Xi Jinping wakes everyday wondering how to hold the country together. He does not cite one example to substantiate what he says. Under Xi, China eliminated extreme poverty and it is on the path to moderate prosperity. If only the US could come close to such monumental achievements for its citizenry. China is forging ties with nations from around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This is what Xi thinks about each day – not the nonsense MacGregor espouses.

    Most disturbingly, MacGregor reveals himself in the video to be a Sinophobe by making all kinds of wild racist assertions; e.g., (at 32:14) “No one in central Asia trusts the Chinese; no one in Asia beyond the China’s borders trusts the Chinese [followed by snickering].”

    “People… are all very concerned about the Chinese… the Chinese do what they have always done, if you leave it on the table, they’ll steal it. That’s what they do; they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

    Now replace the word “Chinese” with “Jews” and imagine the torrent of outrage that would flow in the West.

    The post Patriotism and Sinophobia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On

    The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.

    Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.

    The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

    The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.

    This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

    Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”

    In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.

    Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.

    Despite its unmistakable political flavour – the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.

    The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.

    In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”

    Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”

    The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.

    The post Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • U.S. and Allies Seek Regime-Change in Russia

    On 10 March, Canada’s National Post headlined “Regime change in Moscow ‘definitely’ the goal, Joly says,” and reported that “Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly raises the possibility of regime change in Moscow. … ‘The goal is definitely to do that, is to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account,’ she said. ‘I always make a difference between the regime and the people of a given country, which is fundamental.’”

    On 26 March 2022, Bloomberg News bannered “Joe Biden Calls for Regime Change in Moscow as He Likens Invasion to Ww2 Horrors,” and reported that, “Joe Biden directly appealed to the Russian people with comparisons between the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the Second World War as he called for Vladimir Putin to go. ‘For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,’ the US president said, calling for regime change in Moscow during a speech from Poland on Saturday. He told Russians they are not ‘our enemy’.”

    Why were there not calls, within the United States and its allies, for “regime-change in America” when U.S. President George W. Bush blatantly lied Americans into invading and destroyed a country that posed no threat to America, Iraq (which — by contrast — Ukraine definitely did and does constitute to Russia)?

    Contrary to U.S.-and-allied propagandists, that war in Ukraine wasn’t started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but back in February 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had started by no later than June of 2011 to plan, and by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S.’s Ukrainian Embassy to execute the plan, and then on 20 February 2014 to culminate the U.S. coup that overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist President, and replaced him and his Government with the U.S. selected leaders of the new, and rabidly Russia-hating, U.S.-controlled, Ukrainian regime.

    And, now, on 17 March 2023, NBC News headlines “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes”  and reports that the U.S.-and-allied regimes are starting a case in the International Criminal Court — which has no jurisdiction over Russia and over Ukraine and over the United States, all three of which nations refused to ratify and therefore are not subject to that Court’s jurisdiction (since it’s not a “Universal” court like the U.N.’s  International Court of Justice is) — initiating this purely propaganda case against Russia. Why did they not do that against America and the UK, when those regimes invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis only of lies (which Russia certainly did not do in the case of the now U.S.-controlled Ukraine)?

    Wikipedia makes this elementary fact about that Court quite clear, by saying:

    It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.

    The U.S. and its allies are bringing this case as a propaganda-vehicle, but the Court itself, by ‘investigating’ this case that falls outside its jurisdiction, is destroying whatever pitiful international credibility that it had. Any court that ever serves a purely-propaganda function cannot ever again be taken seriously by any serious person. It is groveling to someone. It is simply embarrassing itself. The U.S. and its allies are contemptuous not only of the public but of this Court, to do this.

    Furthermore: the U.S.-and-allied allegations that regime-change is being sought only against a country’s leadership, and not against the country’s people, is ludicrous, because those aggressor-countries’ long histories of imposed regime-changes against Governments they wanted to topple — such as Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and all the rest — have always been from bad to worse against the targeted countries’ publics. Moreover, the U.S. regime has repeatedly made explicitly clear that, though all of the devastation that its invasion and continued occupation and massive thefts from Syria have brought hell upon its people, the U.S. Government absolutely refuses to allow any reconstruction to occur in Syria unless the U.S. is controlling that country.

    Although the U.S. and its allies demand regime-change in both Russia and China, the leaders of those two countries have long had far higher approval-ratings by their citizens than the leaders in U.S.-and allied countries have by theirs; the regime-changes should rather be done in the U.S.-and-allied countries than in their targeted countries.

    The U.S., and its allies, lie pathologically, such as they do as NATO:

    “NATO is not a threat to Russia.”

    “NATO has tried to build a partnership with Russia, developing dialogue and practical cooperation in areas of common interest. Practical cooperation has been suspended since 2014 in response to Russia’s illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea, Ukraine, which NATO will never recognise.”

    “NATO is not at war with Russia.”

    How can anyone respect such Governments?

    The post U.S. and Allies Seek Regime-Change in Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • My Lai, “Killing Ideology,” and Disobeying Orders

    “We weren’t there to kill human beings, really. We were there to kill ideology.” (Lt. William Calley)

    Officially termed an “incident” (as opposed to a “massacre”), the events of March 16, 1968, at My Lai — a hamlet in South Vietnam — are widely portrayed and accepted to this day as an aberration. While the catalog of U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia is far too sordid and lengthy to detail here, it’s painfully clear this was not the case.

    In fact, on the very same day that Lt. William Calley entered into infamy, another U.S. company entered My Khe, a sister sub hamlet of My Lai. That visit has been described as such:

    “In this ‘other massacre,’ members of this separate company piled up a body count of perhaps a hundred peasants — My Khe was smaller than My Lai — ’flattened the village’ by dynamite and fire, and then threw handfuls of straw on corpses. The next morning, this company moved on down the Batangan Peninsula by the South China Sea, burning every hamlet they came to, killing water buffalo, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and destroying crops. As one of the My Khe veterans said later, ‘what we were doing was being done all over.’ Said another: ‘We were out there having a good time. It was sort of like being in a shooting gallery.’

    Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai killings, put it succinctly in 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”

    Of the 26 U.S. soldiers brought up on charges related to My Lai, only Calley was convicted. However, his life sentence was later reduced to three and a half years under house arrest.

    Never forget, my friends: This is what we’re up against.

    But let’s also never forget the actions of a man named Hugh Thompson.

    Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. wanted to fly choppers so badly that after a four-year stint in the Navy, he left his wife and two sons behind to re-up into the Army and train as a helicopter pilot. Thompson arrived in Vietnam on December 27, 1967, and quickly earned a reputation as “an exceptional pilot who took danger in his stride.”

    In their book, Four Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim also describe Hugh Thompson as a “very moral man. He was absolutely strict about opening fire only on clearly defined targets.”

    On the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson’s sense of virtue would be put to the test.

    Flying in his H-23 observation chopper, the 25-year-old Thompson used green smoke to mark wounded people on the ground in and around My Lai. Upon returning a short while later after refueling, he found that the wounded he saw earlier were now dead.

    Thompson’s gunner, Lawrence Colburn, averted his gaze from the gruesome sight.

    After bringing the chopper down to a standstill hover, Thompson and his crew came upon a young woman they had previously marked with smoke. As they watched, a U.S. soldier, wearing captain’s bars, “prodded her with his foot, and then killed her.”

    What Thompson didn’t know was that by that point, Lt. Calley’s Charlie Company had already slaughtered more than 560 Vietnamese—primarily women, children, infants, and elderly people. Many of the women had been gang-raped and mutilated.

    All Thompson knew for sure was that the U.S. troops he saw pursuing civilians had to be stopped.

    Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Thompson ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children.

    Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in.

    With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23.

    Never forget, my friends: This is how we can choose to live.

    The post My Lai, “Killing Ideology,” and Disobeying Orders first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine


    U.S. soldiers breaking into a home in Baquba, Iraq, in 2008   Photo: Reuters
     
    March 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
     
    While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
     
    Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
     
    The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
     
    The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
     
    Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
     
    For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
     
    And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
     
    Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
     
    PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
     
    Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
     
    It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
     
    What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
     
    At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
     
    In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
     
    Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
     
    Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
     
    So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
     
    But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
     
    The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
     
    As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.

    The post The Not-So-Winding Road from Iraq to Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Coalition Rises to ‘Stop the Merger’ of Kroger and Albertsons



    A progressive coalition of more than 100 unions and consumer advocacy groups from across the United States has come together to build the “Stop the Merger” campaign, a national and state-level effort to prevent Kroger from acquiring Albertsons and establishing the country’s most powerful grocery cartel.

    On Tuesday, the coalition announced the launch of NoGroceryMerger.com, which includes information about the negative impacts of the proposed $25 billion merger between two of the nation’s largest grocery chains, testimony from unionized grocery workers and elected officials, and tools for people to express their opposition to the potential deal.

    Individuals and organizations can sign the coalition’s letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is currently reviewing the grocery giants’ proposal and has the regulatory authority to reject it.

    If approved, the merger would likely “lead to store closures, worsen food deserts, increase prices for consumers, and destroy thousands of unionized grocery jobs,” the letter warns. “This deal is an antitrust travesty and it must be stopped.”

    Since the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted international supply chains—rendered fragile by decades of neoliberal globalization—Kroger, Albertsons, and other mega-grocers have capitalized on these crises as well as the bird flu outbreak, citing them to justify price hikes that far outpace the increased costs of doing business.

    Such price gouging has been exacerbated by preceding rounds of supermarket consolidation, and the coalition warns that if the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons goes through, it “will no doubt create a monopoly in the grocery industry.”

    Less competition, says the coalition, would result in even higher food prices and hundreds of shuttered stores—intensifying unequal access to healthy food. It also threatens to destroy thousands of jobs and hurt the ability of farmers and other suppliers to sell their products.

    “It’s simple: This merger will be bad for workers, bad for customers, and bad for our communities.”

    Cincinnati-based Kroger trails only Walmart in grocery sales, while Boise-based Albertsons is the fourth largest grocery chain in the U.S., behind Costco. Together, Kroger and Albertsons, including their numerous subsidiaries, employ more than 700,000 workers at roughly 5,000 retail stores and more than 50 manufacturing facilities across 48 states plus Washington, D.C.

    According to the campaign’s fact sheet, “If this merger goes through, the resulting company will become the largest supermarket by revenue in the United States with a current national market share of 36% and a combined annual sales of more than $200 billion.”

    As Michelle Freitas, a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 member who works at a Safeway in Gunnison, Colorado, noted: “My town only has two standalone grocery stores. If one closes and we only have one option, it will be a monopoly which means this new grocery company could raise food prices to exorbitant amounts.”

    “If the prices for essential goods go up, how are people who are lower-income or middle-income going to be able to survive?” she asked. “Many people who work at my store live paycheck to paycheck, including parents with small children and single moms.”

    Lawanna Archer, a UFCW Local 770 member who works at a Vons in Gardena, California, described the devastation that accompanied a merger between Albertsons and Haggen eight years ago.

    “The deal between Albertsons and Haggen in 2015 was really bad for workers,” said Archer. “I saw massive layoffs, cars being repossessed, foreclosures, and loss of benefits. I am a single mother and I provide for my daughter and myself. The Kroger and Albertsons merger could possibly impact us in the most harmful way ever.”

    Christina Robinett, another UFCW Local 770 member who endured that merger and now works at a Vons in Ojai, California, said, “After Haggen went bankrupt and shut down my store, I applied for work at four different stores.”

    “I wasn’t able to get a job for three months and I had to take side jobs as a seamstress and cleaning houses to make ends meet,” she said. “That merger caused me a lot of anxiety. No worker should go through this kind of hardship again.”

    The campaign’s website features several videos, including one in which Robert Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and former U.S. labor secretary, explains how the proposed merger “could send skyrocketing food prices through the stratosphere unless government sees the deal for what it is: a rotten egg.”

    Soon after the proposed deal was announced in October, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) implored the FTC to block it.

    Although consolidation in the grocery sector has, according to the American Economic Liberties Project, “previously been mismanaged by antitrust enforcers,” approval of Kroger’s buyout of Albertsons—the largest supermarket deal since Supervalu, CVS, and a group of investment firms bought Albertsons for $9.7 billion in 2006—is far from guaranteed.

    Federal officials, including FTC Chair Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, have both taken a more hard-nosed approach to mergers following decades of lax enforcement.

    The decision before regulators should be easy, the coalition argues.

    Its members have “written numerous letters to the FTC and state attorneys general, held meetings with federal and state elected officials and regulators, held press conferences and virtual town halls, attended public events on the merger hosted by government officials, and participated in various local community activities opposing the merger,” the coalition said in a statement. “All this activity has helped reveal growing evidence that shows the real motives for the proposed merger: corporate greed at the hands of C-suite executives and the private equity firms that are significant owners of their stock.”

    “It’s simple: This merger will be bad for workers, bad for customers, and bad for our communities,” reads the campaign website. “Union grocery workers, consumers, elected officials, and community members are standing together to fight for access to nutritious food, safe shopping experiences, and investment in good jobs in our communities.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ‘Really Scary Stuff’: US Drone Crashes During Encounter With Russian Fighter Jet



    Fears of an escalation between nuclear superpowers Russia and the United States mounted Tuesday after a U.S. Air Force Reaper drone went down in international waters in the Black Sea during an encounter with a Russian fighter jet, with both sides giving varying accounts of the incident.

    According to U.S. European Command (EUCOM):

    Two Russian Su-27 aircraft conducted an unsafe and unprofessional intercept with a U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance unmanned MQ-9 aircraft that was operating within international airspace over the Black Sea today. At approximately 7:03 am (CET), one of the Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of the MQ-9, causing U.S. forces to have to bring the MQ-9 down in international waters. Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound, and unprofessional manner. This incident demonstrates a lack of competence in addition to being unsafe and unprofessional.

    “This incident follows a pattern of dangerous actions by Russian pilots while interacting with U.S. and allied aircraft over international airspace, including over the Black Sea,” EUCOM added. “These aggressive actions by Russian aircrew are dangerous and could lead to miscalculation and unintended escalation. “

    U.S. Air Force Gen. James B. Hecker said in a statement that “U.S. and allied aircraft will continue to operate in international airspace and we call on the Russians to conduct themselves professionally and safely.”

    The Russian Ministry of Defense issued a statement on the incident claiming that the U.S. drone had its transponders turned off and denying that Russian aircraft came into contact with the MQ-9. The ministry said the U.S. aircraft “violated the boundaries” of an area demarcated by Moscow “for the purpose of conducting a special military operation”—an invasion—in Ukraine, and that the drone “went into uncontrolled flight with a loss of altitude and collided with the water surface” as “a result of sharp maneuvering.”

    An unnamed U.S. Air Force official told The War Zone that American officials do not believe the Russians deliberately tried to bring down the drone, but that the alleged collision “seems to be simple incompetence.”

    War Zone reporters Howard Altman and Joseph Trevithick wrote that “today’s incident does, of course, come amid long-standing concerns about the potential for the conflict in Ukraine to spill out more broadly in the region.”

    “Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, routinely issue nebulous threats to retaliate against the United States, other members of NATO, and other countries over military aid and other support for Ukraine,” the pair added. “How either side will react to the loss of the MQ-9 remains to be seen.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The AUKUS Submarine Announcement

    History is filled with failed planners and plans, threats thought of that did not eventuate, and threats unthought of that found their way into the books. The AUKUS agreement is an attempt to inflate a threat by developing a number of fictional capabilities in an effort to combat an inflated adversary.

    The checklist of imminent failure for this security pact between the United States, the UK and Australia is impressive and comically grotesque. In terms of the nuclear-powered submarine component, there are issues of expertise, infrastructure, hurdles of technology transfer, the hobbling feature of domestic politics, and national considerations. There are also matters of irresponsible costs, of the exhaustion of public money best spent elsewhere.

    To put it bluntly, Australia and all its resources spanning across a number of industries will be co-opted in this enterprise against a phantom enemy, subjugating an already subordinate state to the US war-making enterprise.

    All of this was laid bare at San Diego’s Point Loma Naval Base on March 13, where the US imperium, backed up by a number of lickspittles from Australia and the United Kingdom, betrayed the cause of peace and announced to the world that war with China was not only a possibility but distinctly probable.

    Central to the project is a staggering outlay of A$368 billion for up to thirteen vessels over three decades. Canberra will purchase at least three US-manufactured nuclear submarines while contributing “significant additional resources” to US shipyards. (Bully for the US builders.) Given that the United States is unable to make up its own inventory of Virginia class nuclear submarines at this stage, the purchase will be second hand, a point which is bound to niggle members of Congress. Two more vessels are also being thrown in as a possibility, should the “need” arise.

    During this time, design and construction will take place on a new submarine dubbed the SSN-AUKUS, exploiting the work already undertaken by the UK on replacing the Astute-class submarines. It will be, according to the White House, “based upon the United Kingdom’s next generation SSN design while incorporating cutting edge US submarine technologies, and will be built and deployed by both Australia and the United Kingdom.”

    This point was also reiterated by the UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. “The Royal Navy will operate the same submarines as the Australian Navy and we’ll share components and parts with the US Navy.” Five of these are intended for the Royal Australian Navy by the middle of the 2050s, with one submarine being produced every two years from the early 2040s.

    The speech by the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was more than a touch embarrassing. It certainly did its bit to bury conventional understandings of sovereignty. “This will be an Australian sovereign capability, commanded by the Royal Australian Navy and sustained by Australians in Australian shipyards, with construction to begin within the decade.” The lexically challenged are truly in charge.

    And what about the submarine personnel themselves? Australian submariners as yet unacquainted with nuclear technology would be trained in the US. “I am proud to confirm that they are in the top 30 per cent of their class.” Can the Australians do a bit better than that?

    The US President could only express satisfaction at such displays of unflagging, wobbly free obedience. “Today, as we stand at the inflection point of history, where the hard work of announcing deterrence and enhancing stability is going to reflect peace and stability for decades to come, the United States can ask for no better partners in the Indo-Pacific where so much of our shared future will be written.”

    As the White House statement promises, visits by US nuclear submarines to Australia will begin this year, with Australian personnel joining US crews for “training and development”. The UK will take its turn at the start of 2026.

    Australia promises to become even busier on that front, with a US-UK rotational presence commencing in 2027 which will be named the “Submarine Rotational Force-West” (SRF-West). One UK Astute class submarine, and as many as four Virginia class submarines will find themselves at HMAS Stirling near Perth.

    The effusive punditry on the Australian morning proved indigestible. For those inclined towards peace, this must have seemed like a chance to initiate a few citizen arrests. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, who also holds the defence portfolio, was a quivering sight. He remarked about the scale of the enterprise, justifying it against “the biggest conventional military build-up” in the region – those sneaky authoritarians in Beijing again – in an environment hostile to the “international rules-based order”. Failure to do so would see Australia “condemned”. (No mention here that the US military budget remains the largest on the planet.)

    As for the issue of budgetary costs, Marles bizarrely and brazenly suggested that these would be “neutral” in the context of defence, despite the likelihood that cuts will have to be made, and various policy priorities jettisoned.

    For morning viewers already fearing for their lives, there was a beaming South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas thrilled that his state would eventually be producing the SSN-AUKUS at the as yet non-existent Submarine Construction Yard in Adelaide. The fact that his state has neither the resources, infrastructure nor the personnel for such a task, was hardly reason to spoil the flag fluttering show. “There are smiles all around,” he beamed to the hosts of the ABC Breakfast show.

    US commentators, notably Charles Edel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, emphasised that Australian defence was being vastly improved, or “augmented”, along with its military industrial base. Blame China, suggested Edel, for exploiting a “permissive security environment” and exciting such urges on the part of the three countries. The US Ambassador to Australia, Caroline Kennedy, even thought that this colossal waste of resources would add to the quotient of regional prosperity.

    The opposite is very much the case: a profligate exercise that serves to turn Australia into a multi-generational garrison state at the beckon call of Washington’s war machine that will host, at stages, nuclear weapons. The latter aspect is bound to fly in the face of the Treaty of Rarotonga, otherwise known as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty. But the Alice in Wonderland quality to the AUKUS agreement is bound to paper over that inconvenience. For a warring peace is exactly what awaits.

    The post The AUKUS Submarine Announcement first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood

    The extraordinary March 10, 2023 announcement that China’s top diplomat, Mr. Wang Yi, helped broker a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran suggests that major powers can benefit from believing that, as Albert Camus once put it, “words are more powerful than munitions.”

    This concept was also acknowledged by General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff who said on January 20, 2023, that he believes Russia’s war in Ukraine will conclude with negotiations rather than on the battlefield. In November of 2022, asked about prospects for diplomacy in Ukraine, Milley noted that the early refusal to negotiate in World War One compounded human suffering and led to millions more casualties.

    “So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved … seize the moment,” Milley told the Economic Club of New York.

    Twenty years ago, in Baghdad, I shared quarters with Iraqis and internationals in a small hotel, the Al-Fanar, which had been home base for numerous Voices in the Wilderness delegations acting in open defiance of the economic sanctions against Iraq. U.S. government officials charged us as criminals for delivering medicines to Iraqi hospitals. In response, we told them we understood the penalties they threatened us with (twelve years in prison and a $1 million fine), but we couldn’t be governed by unjust laws primarily punishing children. And we invited government officials to join us. Instead, we were steadily joined by other peace groups longing to prevent a looming war.

    In late January 2003, I still hoped war could be averted. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s report was imminent. If it declared that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction (WMD), U.S. allies might drop out of the attack plans, in spite of the massive military buildup we were witnessing on nightly television. Then came Secretary of State Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003, United Nations briefing, when he insisted that Iraq did indeed possess WMD. His presentation was eventually proven to be fraudulent on every count, but it tragically gave the United States enough credibility to proceed at full throttle with its “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign.

    Beginning in mid-March 2003, the ghastly aerial attacks pounded Iraq day and night. In our hotel, parents and grandparents prayed to survive ear-splitting blasts and sickening thuds. A lively, engaging nine-year-old girl completely lost control over her bladder. Toddlers devised games to mimic the sounds of bombs and pretended to use small flashlights as guns.

    Our team visited hospital wards where maimed children moaned as they recovered from surgeries. I remember sitting on a bench outside of an emergency room. Next to me, a woman convulsed in sobs asking, “How will I tell him? What will I say?” She needed to tell her nephew, who was undergoing emergency surgery, that he had not only lost both his arms but also that she was now his only surviving relative. A U.S. bomb had hit Ali Abbas’s family as they shared a lunch outside their home. A surgeon later reported that he had already told Ali that they had amputated both of his arms. “But,” Ali had asked him, “will I always be this way?”

    I returned to the Al-Fanar Hotel that evening feeling overwhelmed by anger and shame. Alone in my room, I pounded my pillow, tearfully murmuring, “Will we always be this way?”

    Throughout the Forever Wars of the past two decades, U.S. elites in the military-industrial-Congressional-media complex have manifested an insatiable appetite for war. They seldom heed the wreckage they have left behind after “ending” a war of choice.

    Following the 2003 “Shock and Awe” war in Iraq, Iraqi novelist Sinan Antoon created a main character, Jawad, in The Corpse Washer, who felt overwhelmed by the rising numbers of corpses for whom he must care.

    “I felt as if we had been struck by an earthquake which had changed everything,” Jawad reflects. “For decades to come, we would be groping our way around in the rubble it left behind. In the past there were streams between Sunnis and Shi͑ites, or this group and that, which could be easily crossed or were invisible at times. Now, after the earthquake, the earth had all these fissures and the streams had become rivers. The rivers became torrents filled with blood, and whoever tried to cross drowned. The images of those on the other side of the river had been inflated and disfigured . . . concrete walls rose to seal the tragedy.”

    “War is worse than an earthquake,” a surgeon, Saeed Abuhassan, told me during Israel’s 2008-2009 bombing of Gaza, called Operation Cast Lead. He pointed out that rescuers come from all over the world following an earthquake, but when wars are waged, governments send only more munitions, prolonging the agony.

    He explained the effects of weapons that had maimed patients undergoing surgery in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital as the bombs continued to fall. Dense inert metal explosives lop off people’s limbs in ways that surgeons can’t repair. White phosphorus bomb fragments, embedded subcutaneously in human flesh, continue to burn when exposed to oxygen, asphyxiating the surgeons trying to remove the sinister material.

    “You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza,” Abuhassan said. “And this also is why it’s worse than an earthquake.”

    As the world enters the second year of war between Ukraine and Russia, some say it’s unconscionable for peace activists to clamor for a cease-fire and immediate negotiations. Is it more honorable to watch the pile-up of body bags, the funerals, the grave digging, the towns becoming uninhabitable, and the escalation that could lead to a world war or even a nuclear war?

    U.S. mainstream media rarely engages with professor Noam Chomsky, whose wise and pragmatic analysis rests on indisputable facts. In June 2022, four months into the Russia-Ukraine war, Chomsky spoke of two options, one being a negotiated diplomatic settlement. “The other,” he said, “is just to drag it out and see how much everybody will suffer, how many Ukrainians will die, how much Russia will suffer, how many millions of people will starve to death in Asia and Africa, how much we’ll proceed toward heating the environment to the point where there will be no possibility for a livable human existence.”

    UNICEF reports how months of escalating devastation and displacement affect Ukrainian children: “Children continue to be killed, wounded, and deeply traumatized by violence that has sparked displacement on a scale and speed not seen since World War II. Schools, hospitals, and other civilian infrastructure on which they depend continue to be damaged or destroyed. Families have been separated and lives torn apart.”

    Estimates of Russian and Ukrainian military casualties vary, but some have suggested that more than 200,000 soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded.

    Gearing up for a major offensive before the spring thaw, Russia’s government announced it would pay a bonus to troops that destroy weapons used by Ukrainian soldiers which were sent from abroad. The blood money bonus is chilling, but on an exponentially greater level, major weapons manufacturers have accrued a steady bonanza of “bonuses” since the war began.
    In the last year alone, the United States sent $27.5 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, providing “armored vehicles, including Stryker armored personnel carriers, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled vehicles.” The package also included air defense support for Ukraine, night vision devices, and small arms ammunition.

    Shortly after Western countries agreed to send sophisticated Abrams and Leopard tanks to Ukraine, an adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry, Yuriy Sak, spoke confidently about getting F-16 fighter jets next. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he told Reuters.

    Ukraine isn’t likely to get nuclear weapons, but the danger of nuclear war was clarified in a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists statement on January 24, which set the Doomsday Clock for 2023 to ninety seconds before the metaphorical “midnight.” The scientists warned that effects of the Russia-Ukraine war are not limited to an alarming increase in nuclear danger; they also undermine global efforts to combat climate change. “Countries dependent on Russian oil and gas have sought to diversify their supplies and suppliers,” the report notes, “leading to expanded investment in natural gas exactly when such investment should have been shrinking.”

    Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says the Doomsday Clock sounds an alarm for all humanity. “We are on the brink of a precipice,” she said. “But our leaders are not acting at sufficient speed or scale to secure a peaceful and livable planet. From cutting carbon emissions to strengthening arms control treaties and investing in pandemic preparedness, we know what needs to be done. The science is clear, but the political will is lacking. This must change in 2023 if we are to avert catastrophe. We are facing multiple existential crises. Leaders need a crisis mindset.”

    As do we all. The Doomsday Clock indicates we’re living on borrowed time. We needn’t “always be this way.”

    Over the past decade, I was fortunate to be hosted in dozens of trips to Kabul, Afghanistan, by young Afghans who fervently believed that words could be stronger than weapons. They espoused a simple, pragmatic proverb: “Blood does not wash away blood.”

    We owe to future generations every possible effort to renounce all war and protect the planet.

    The post Blood Does Not Wash Away Blood first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • US Increases Dominance as World’s Top Arms Exporter

    A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world’s weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.

    The report—entitled Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022—was published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and listed the United States, Russia, France, China, and Germany as the world’s top five arms exporters from 2018-22. The five nations accounted for 76% of worldwide weapons exports during that period.

    The five biggest arms importers over those five years were India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia, and China.

    “The United States has much room for improvement.”

    The United States saw a 14% increase in arms exports over the previous five-year period analyzed by SIPRI. U.S. arms were delivered to 103 nations from 2018-22, with 41% going to the Middle East.

    “Even as arms transfers have declined globally, those to Europe have risen sharply due to the tensions between Russia and most other European states,” Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement. “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states want to import more arms, faster. Strategic competition also continues elsewhere: Arms imports to East Asia have increased and those to the Middle East remain at a high level.”

    According to the report, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year “had only a limited impact on the total volume of arms transfers in 2018–22, but Ukraine did become a major importer of arms in 2022.”

    Ukraine was the 14th-largest arms importer from 2018-22 and the third-biggest last year.

    Wiliam Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote Monday that “the impacts of the global arms trade aren’t just about the volume of weapons delivered. The question is how those weapons are likely to be used, and the extent to which they promote stability versus fueling conflict or propping up repressive regimes with abysmal human rights records.”

    “On this score the United States has much room for improvement,” he continued. “Transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for use at the peak of their brutal war in Yemen, and sales to major human rights violators from the Philippines, Egypt, and Nigeria are a few examples of how U.S. arms deliveries can make the world a more dangerous place.”

    “There are a number of promising steps that Congress can take—as articulated by a new coalition, the Arms Sales Accountability Project—that would mandate closer scrutiny of U.S. sales,” Hartung asserted.

    “There is also some useful language in the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy directive, that, if implemented, would significantly rein in the most egregious sales,” he added. “Only time will tell if U.S. policy can be moved towards one based on arms sales restraint rather than arms sales promotion.”

  • The Realities of the International Power Struggle

    Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Michael T. Klare for his current thoughts.

    Michael Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts; defense correspondent of The Nation magazine; and author of The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (2012), Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (2009), and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum (2000). He has a BA and MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Union Institute & University.

    We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of the U.S. in the tensions and its capacity to reduce them. We are looking for paradigm-shift ideas for improving the prospects for peace. His responses below of are exactly as he provided.

    Here is what Michael had to say.

    Q: We hear a lot of terms and acronyms bandied about. ‘Deep State’ … ‘MIC’ … ‘FIRE sector’ … ‘ruling elite’ … ‘oligarchy’ … ‘neocons’. Who actually defines and sets America’s geopolitical priorities and determines our foreign policy? Not “officially”. Not constitutionally. But de facto.

    Michael T. Klare: From my experience, US foreign policy is set by what some have called the “blob” – the unelected, bipartisan, self-replicating network of senior Washington policymakers (NSC, DoD, CIA) plus the chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees; engaged former generals, admirals, and ambassadors; major defense contractor lobbyists; and key think-tank and media pundits (usually interchangeable with the other categories).

    Q: We’ve had decades of international tensions. Recent developments have seen a sharp escalation in the potential for a major war. The U.S. apparently cannot be at peace. “Threats” against the homeland are allegedly increasing in number and severity. The trajectory of our relations with the rest of the world appears to be more confrontations, more enemies, more crises, more wars.

    Is the world really that full of aggressors, bad actors, ruthless opponents? Or is there something in our own policies and attitudes toward other countries which put us at odds with them, thus making war inevitable and peace impossible?

    MK: I believe that the United States, like all major military powers, strives for global hegemony in competition with other major military powers. This “great-power competition,” as the military calls it, is built into the DNA of major US political institutions and has full bipartisan support. It means that when America’s strategic overseas interests clash with those of another great power, say in Ukraine or over Taiwan, tensions are bound to rise and the risk of war increases.

    Q: Our leaders relentlessly talk about our “national interests” and our “national security”, warning that both are under constant assault. Yet, we spend more than the next nine countries combined on our military. Why does such colossal spending never seem to be enough?

    MK: The United States is, at present, the only so-called great power which seeks to exert its power on a global basis, on every continent. This requires lots of troops, planes, ships, and overseas bases. Maintaining this global military presence is very, very expensive. No other nation is event attempting to replicate this posture, so they needn’t spend so much on defense.

    Q: It’s evident that you, and the many individuals who follow you and support your work, believe that America’s direction in both the diplomatic sphere and in the current conflict zones represents exercise of government power gone awry. Can you paint for us in broad strokes the specific changes in our national priorities and policies you view as necessary for the U.S. to peacefully coexist with other nations, at the same time keeping us safe from malicious attacks on our security and rightful place in the world community?

    MK: The United States is not the only major power that is well-armed and threatening regional and global stability – China, Russia, and even India and Turkey are doing so as well. So the U.S. priority must be to manage international competition in ways that reduce the risk of a major war. This means pursuing additional arms control measures and installing conflict-avoidance and crisis-management measures. In particular, it means working with China to reduce the risk of war over Taiwan.

    Q: The general public, especially when it’s aware of the self-sabotaging results of our current foreign policies and military posturing, clearly wants less war and militarism, preferring more peaceful alternatives on the world stage and greater concentration on solving the problems at home. As peace activists, we are thus more in line with the majority of citizens on issues of war and peace, than those currently in power.

    What happens if we determine that those shaping current U.S. policy don’t care what the citizenry thinks, are simply not listening to us? What if we conclude that our Congress, for example, is completely deaf to the voice of the people? What do we do? What are our options then? What are the next concrete steps for political activists working toward a peaceful future?

    MK: Calling for diplomacy, not war with China.

    *****

    We are grateful to Michael T. Klare for sharing his valuable and thought-provoking views. The interview was arranged by John Rachel, Director of the Peace Dividend Project. The Peace Dividend strategy is not a meme or a bumper sticker. It is an end-to-end methodology for challenging the political establishment and removing from power those compromised individuals who work against the interests of the great majority of U.S. citizens. The only hope for our hyper-militarized nation is each and every one of us having a decisive voice in determining the future we want for ourselves and our children.

    The post The Realities of the International Power Struggle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Should be ASHAMED of What They’re Doing in Syria

    The House of Representatives voted not to end the U.S. occupation of Syria on Wednesday. This is disappointing but not surprising. Although all is not lost, 103 leaders voted for it with 56 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to vote in favor of the bill, showing that there is at least some appetite for peace. Opponents of the bill said that they feared that troop withdrawal would revive terrorist groups n the region. Which is a good joke because the U.S. has backed terrorists groups in the region by supporting the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra since the Obama administration.

    The post The US Should be ASHAMED of What They’re Doing in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries

    Read Parts 1, 2, and 3.

    A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

    — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980

    All people opposed to war must be anti-imperialist. To not be anti-imperialist would render a declared antiwar position as a contradiction.

    Scott Ritter, steeped in military knowledge, has compellingly put forth the legal argument that Russia’s special military operation against the Ukrainian forces is legal. Ritter contends that the Russians are fighting the war with kid gloves, bending over backwards to limit civilian casualties. Ritter has gravitas since he was a US Marines intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector. Said Ritter,

    … the military imperative, the military necessity of shutting this [conflict] down is real, but Russia didn’t do it. Why? Because Russia isn’t viewing this as we viewed the war against the Iraqis. Russia is viewing this as a special military operation — people make fun of that word — but it’s not war because if it was war, Ukraine would be gone today, eliminated… [view from 49:16]

    To Rid the World of Warmaking, Target the Apex of Warmaking

    If one truly wants to rid the world of war, one needs to target the warmaker, the aggressor, the initiator of violence: the United States. The violence of the US even gave pause to the pacifist sentiments of Martin Luther King, Jr who said:

    … I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

    Noted linguist Noam Chomsky ridiculed the Orwellian notion of a defense department in the US:

    … the Pentagon is in no sense a defense department. It has never defended the United States from anyone: it has only served to conduct aggression, and I think the American people would be better off without a Pentagon.

    The world would be better off without a Pentagon. To rid the world of war, as the preeminent superpower and rogue nation, the US has the moral obligation to seek a worldwide demilitarization. This will require full transparency verified through monitoring and compliance enforced by an independent and empowered body. After that, those entities and individuals responsible for US aggression and other war crimes should stand trial and be prosecuted, as should all responsible individuals in all nations that perpetrate war crimes.

    Of Course, War Should be Abolished

    Most people will distinguish between offensive warmaking and warring in self-defense. To draw an equivalency in criticism between an aggressor and and a war of resistance to attack is, palpably, wrongheaded. Worse, it provides succor to the aggressor since it fares no worse than its targeted enemy. Thus, a principled antiwar position would abjure scapegoating and falsely assessing equivalency in blame to a country that only seeks mutual security yet finds itself cornered by a hegemon. As T.P. Wilkinson compellingly argued:

    … the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.

    Prominent antiwar activist David Swanson wrote, “But unless we get back to disarmament, the long-term prospects for humanity are grim.

    I agree with Swanson’s assessment. As for disarmament, that is what Russia is carrying out right now in Ukraine. Weapons companies won’t be happy about that. However, it is high time that the Kellogg-Briand Pact be adhered to.

    Swanson continues, “Of course, NATO and everyone else have always wanted a neutral Ukraine, so this shouldn’t be such a huge hurdle.”

    This is puzzling. If NATO had wanted a neutral Ukraine all along, then why did NATO say yes to future Ukraine membership, albeit without specifying a date for joining? NATO even recognized Ukraine as an “enhanced opportunity partner.” Moreover, if the US-financed military biological program in Ukraine becomes verified, then it puts an emphatic kibosh to any talk of NATO having wanted a neutral Ukraine.

    Regarding the Russian demands, Swanson writes, “Of course, it is a horrible precedent to meet the demands of a warmaker.”

    But Ukraine is also a “warmaker” according to Swanson’s definition because it also wages war with Russia. Question: Did Swanson ever call Ukraine a “warmaker” back in 2014 for shelling Donbass? And just who made the war in Ukraine? Why did Russia “invade” Ukraine? Was it not Ukraine’s shelling of Donbass that precipitated an exodus of ethnic Russians into Russia and Ukraine’s refusal to abide by the Minsk Agreements that caused Russia, exasperated at the infidelity of its negotiating partners, to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics? Was it not Ukraine that made war — specifically, that was the initiator of making war? Was Ukraine not undermining Russian state security by seeking NATO membership and being loaded up with NATO weaponry? Ukraine became a proxy of the US. In actuality, the initiator of warmaking is not Ukraine but the US. Swanson has failed to point this out.

    And why does a wide swath of antiwar types focus inordinately on Russia in Ukraine? Israel (an occupier of historical Palestine) has been aggressing Palestine, Syria, Iran, Lebanon for several years. The US is occupying a large chunk of Syria and stealing its oil and wheat. The US military refuses to remove its military from Iraq although ordered to do so by the Iraqi parliament — in essence, a de facto military occupation. Meanwhile the continental US sits in occupation of Indigenous nations territory, in occupation of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, Guantánamo Bay, Guam, Saipan, the ethnically cleansed Chagos archipelago. How do Israel and the US escape sanctions and continual censure for their warmaking?

    Yet, by “invading” Ukraine, Russia is poised to very quickly become a war-ender. The timetable for the war from the Russian side is undisclosed, but it appears Russia has been proceeding slowly to ensure minimal civilian casualties. This is not a prediction, however, with Ukraine becoming militarily depleted, it is not out of the question that by summer Russia will have ended a war that has raged since 2014 between Ukraine and Donbass.

    Swanson’s final paragraph reads: “One way to negotiate peace would be for Ukraine to offer to meet all of Russia’s demands and, ideally, more, while making demands of its own for reparations and disarmament. If the war goes on and ends someday with a Ukrainian government and a human species still around, such negotiations will have to happen. Why not now?”

    Fine, peace now would be great. But what is the reasoning behind Swanson’s demand that Russia should pay for reparations and disarmament to Ukraine? Will Swanson also demand that Ukraine pay reparations to Donbass? Will Ukraine pay reparations to Russia for dragging it into the mess it created at the behest of the US?

    If Ukraine should be demanding reparations, then it should be demanding them from US-NATO that in an abjectly cowardly manner abandoned (and thank goodness it did) its prospective NATO member to face Russia alone. And Swanson would do well to argue that the US-NATO pay reparations to Ukraine, Donbass, and Russia. And then the US should be demanded to pay reparations to a historical list of countries that it has criminally devastated.

    Nonetheless, I find it strange that the US warmaker extraordinaire and a neo-Nazi-infiltrated Ukraine are glanced over while blame is laid on Russia.

    Although I may dissent on the facts and logic proffered on the warring, I am unequivocally in solidarity with worldwide disarmament and ending war forever. That day, unfortunately, has not arrived yet.

    A Principled Antiwar Coalition

    The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) appears to have reached a principled antiwar position. I posed some questions based on their statement of Principles:

    Kim Petersen: “UNAC holds that the U.S. government…” From this I understand that the US military-industrial-governmental-etc nexus is the primary obstacle to a world without war. Is this correct?

    UNAC: Yes, the US government is the main imperialist power in the world and the main cause of war. It has about 20 times the number of foreign military bases as all other countries in the world and has a military budget that represents about 45% of the total military budget of all other countries. It has militarily intervened in other countries over 65 times in the past several decades. It is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on people.

    KP: “We support the right of all oppressed peoples, including colonized and formerly colonized countries, to determine their own road to liberation.” Does this grant the oppressed peoples the right to violently resist (at least equivalent to) the violence of oppression to liberate themselves?

    UNAC: Yes, the countries that the US has attacked and provoked have the right to defend themselves against US/NATO military aggression. The problem is that the US military has been much stronger than the countries it attracted until now.  This time, however, Russia is winning the proxy war against the combined might of the US-NATO and countries around the world are seeing that the “West” can be defeated. Even with its strong military, the people of Vietnam and Afghanistan were about to defeat the US military. Today to avoid the people of the US turning against their wars, they conduct proxy wars where others fight the battles. This was true in Libya, Syria and now they are showing their willingness to fight the war in Ukraine to the last Ukrainian.

    KP: Since UNAC supports “Mutual self-defense” how does UNAC view the denial of mutual security sought by Russia as justification to gain security through a special military operation?

    UNAC: The denial of Russian security was a deliberate strategy on the part of the US to provoke the war we are seeing today. The US thought that the war and the sanctions would cause regime change and the break-up of Russia. It is proving to be a mistake. The US provoked them by moving NATO up to their border, despite pledges not to do so. They have conducted “war games” on the Russian border and put nuclear capable missiles close to their borders. They created a coup in Ukraine to get rid of a government that wanted good relations with its neighbor and built the Ukraine military to the strongest in Europe. They trained them, armed them, gave them logistic support and paid for their military, all to try and defeat the Russian military. The US has never been interested in stability in the region or in Russian security. This has led to the war in Ukraine.

    *****
    If there is a warmaker or warmakers, then there must be a war-ender or war-enders. If by resisting a warmaker that one ends a war, then that should be, if not applauded, then, at least, tolerated by antiwar types. This holds especially true in the case of serial warmakers like the US. They say the bigger they are, the harder they fall. It appears that the US warmaking colossus is tottering toward an ungraceful fall in Ukraine. If so, then the peacemakers worldwide can breathe easier.

    The Antiwar Costa Rican Example

    In 1946, the pacifist physicist Albert Einstein wrote in a letter: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war. We must all do our share, that we may be equal to the task of peace.”

    In 1949, the Central American country of Costa Rica courageously embraced the logic expressed by Einstein. Costa Rica set the example for other genuinely antiwar countries to follow when it abolished its army.

    Worldwide disarmament is required. This will, undoubtedly, be a most difficult fight — dismantling the military-industrial complex in the US and disassembling other militaries abroad. Yet peace would be the glorious reward for people everywhere. Imagine what could be achieved with military spending redirected to job creation, healthcare, education, infrastructure construction and maintenance, social security, environmental protection and enhancement, space exploration, a living wage, etc. Is a perpetual state of spending on killing really what people should accept from their governments?

    The post Total Worldwide Disarmament: Security Must Be for All Countries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Henry Kissinger, AWOL Soldiers, VD & the “Good” War

    Henry Kissinger as he launched his long and murderous career

    To believe and perpetrate the “Good War” and “Greatest Generation” myths, we must ignore many sordid realities. I’ve written about some of them here, here, and here (and several other posts).

    This time, I’ll focus on the memory-holed topic of AWOL American soldiers running wild in Europe.

    “Paris was full of them,” remarks historian Michael C.C. Adams.

    Journalist Chet Antonine has written of U.S. troops “looting the German city of Jena where the famous Zeiss company made the best cameras in the world.”

    The U.S. compiled a list of “Continental AWOLs” that included as many as 50,000 men. Many of them turned to the black market.

    “Allied soldiers [in Italy] stole from the populace and the government, and once, GIs stole a trainload of sugar, complete with the engine,” writes Adams.

    V.S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation (April 7, 1945), wrote about GIs stealing cameras, motorbikes, wine glasses, and books.

    In the New York Herald Tribune, the legendary John Steinbeck reported on three soldiers arrested for selling stolen watches.

    In October 1945 alone, American GIs sent home $5,470,777 more than they were paid.

    One illegal form of currency for GIs — AWOL or otherwise — was whiskey. As alcohol dependency rose, desperate soldiers resorted to such homegrown brews as Aqua Velva and grapefruit juice or medical alcohol blended with torpedo fluid.

    The buying and trading weren’t limited to moonshine. Throughout the European theater of operations, the Allied soldiers did their best to exploit desperate and vulnerable females.

    “In a ruined world where a pack of cigarettes sold for $100 American, GIs were millionaires,” says Antonine. “A candy bar bought sex from nearly any starving German girl.”

    “Soldiers had sex, wherever and whenever possible,” Adams reports. “Seventy-five percent of GIs overseas, whether married or not, admitted to having intercourse. Unchanneled sexual need produced rape, occasionally even murder. Away from home, where nobody knew them, some GIs forced themselves on women.”

    In northern Europe, venereal diseases caused more U.S. casualties than the German V-2 rocket. In France, the VD rate rose 600 percent after the liberation of Paris.

    Where did those 50,000 AWOL GIs go after doing their part to soil the image of a “good” war? Nearly three thousand were court-martialed and one was executed, Private Eddie Slovik of G Company, 109th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division. The Detroit native deserted in August 1944, surrendered in October of that same year and was put on trial a month later.

    General Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the execution order of December 23, 1944, and Slovik faced a twelve-man firing squad at St. Marie aux Mines in eastern France shortly thereafter. None of the eleven bullets (one is always a blank) struck the intended target — Slovik’s heart —and it was a full three minutes before he died. Outrage spread quickly and there were no further executions.

    Eddie Slovik, minutes before his grisly death

    As for the rest of the AWOL GIs, Antonine’s guess seems as good as any: “A goodly number of them undoubtedly stayed on in Europe as they had after World War One. Perhaps some of them got bogged down in ordinary life, marrying and having children. Others may have continued their lives of crime and ended up in prison. Only nine thousand of them had been found by 1948.”

    That generation being “great” in Bensheim

    Then there was a certain staff sergeant who used his authority to anoint himself the absolute lord of the German town of Bensheim during those black market days: future Nobel Peace [sic] Prize winner, Henry Kissinger.

    “After evicting the owners from their villa,” Antonine writes, “Kissinger moved in with his German girlfriend, maid, housekeeper, and secretary and began to throw fancy parties.”

    These fancy parties were not the norm in Bensheim, an area where the average German made do with fewer than 850 calories per day. FYI: That’s less food than was given to prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

    Seventy-eight years later, Kissinger the parasite continues to see himself as an absolute lord. Here’s something I recently wrote about him:

    Take-home message: Challenge all myths.

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  • United States: Behind the derailment in Ohio — anti-worker deregulation, corporate greed

    The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, highlighted safety regulation failures, indifference and anti-union bias, writes Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • To See Real Foreign Influence, Check out Canada’s Military

    If you believe the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and Conservatives, the Chinese own a backbench Liberal MP, which has been front page news recently. But no one mentions Washington’s possession of our military.

    According to a leak reportedly from CSIS, the Chinese consulate in Toronto assisted Han Dong win the Liberal party nomination for the riding of Don Valley North. A source in the intelligence agency claims the consulate bused Chinese international students and seniors to vote for Han during a tightly contested Liberal party vote in 2019. Conservative MP Blaine Calkins, National Post columnist Terry Glavin and others have openly labeled Han an “agent of China”.

    But Han and the Liberal Party deny the claims. Additionally, Karen Wen Lin Woods, a harsh critic of the Chinese government, points out that Han’s main competitor for the nomination, Jiang Banggu, was “also very China Friendly. So essentially, the Chinese Consulate had no skin in the game whether or not Han or Jiang wins in the end, they will get a ‘pro China’ Liberal MP.” (Or to put it differently, the Chinese speaking community in that riding is not hostile to Beijing and wanted a candidate to reflect that.)

    Other peculiarities about this story are how and why the information was released. One of the principal reporters in relaying CSIS’ recent claims about Chinese interference, Robert Fife, also quoted unnamed CSIS sources to justify the imprisonment of Maher Arar. In the official “Report of the events relating to Maher Arar”, former Associate Chief Justice of Ontario Dennis R. O’Connor, concluded the purpose of a leak Fife relayed was to “influence public opinion against Mr. Arar at a time when his release from imprisonment in Syria was being sought by the Government of Canada, including the Prime Minister.”

    The recent uproar about Chinese interference seems to be part of a broader campaign CSIS has joined to contain China’s rise. Its partner in the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement, the US National Security Agency (NSA) pressed Ottawa to ban Chinese-owned Huawei from Canada’s 5G network and Ottawa recently followed the US in banning TikTok from government devices.

    As part of laying the groundwork for more conflictual relations with China, the House of Commons unanimously endorsed a resolution last month reiterating its claim that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang and calling for Canada to accept 10,000 Uyghur refugees. The group driving the initiative was the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project, which said on its website the “Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacy work in Canada.” Other Canadian organizations are also funded by the US government to target China.

    Connecting the dots draws a picture of much larger US interference in Canadian affairs than Chinese. But to only consider direct US interventions into Canadian politics is to miss the forest for the trees. From top-40s music to Hollywood blockbusters, best-selling books to news outlets, Canada’s cultural and media sphere is massively influenced by the US. Ditto the economy.

    Probably the most important institution pushing an anti-China outlook — Canada’s military — offers a unique window into US influence. “Over the last 15 years or more, there has not been one Chief of Staff who has not been vetted or trained by the U.S. Armed Forces”, wrote Tony Seed in a 2017 article titled “‘Interoperability’ — Euphemism for integration and annexation of Canadian Forces in the service of empire-building.”

    Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) from 2005-08, Rick Hillier graduated from the US Army War College and was the first Canadian Deputy Commander of General III Corps, which is based in Texas. The next CDS, Walter Natynczk, also attended US Army War College and became Deputy Commanding General III Corps. Through this role Natynczk helped plan the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq from Kuwait and then served as Deputy Commanding General of the Multi-National Corps in Baghdad in charge of 35,000 troops. Natynczk’ successor as CDS was Tom Lawson who led the military until 2015. Deputy Commander of NORAD in Colorado Springs in 2011–2012, Lawson previously attended the United States Air Force Air Command and Staff College and United States Air Force Air War College. The current CDS Wayne Eyre was Deputy Commanding General of Operations for the US Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and was the first non-American deputy commander of the US-led United Nations Command in South Korea.

    A March 2017 dispatch from the US embassy in Ottawa to the State Department in Washington entitled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy” highlighted Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Canada-US Relations) Andrew Leslie’s close ties to the US military. The former Chief of Transformation and Chief of the Land Staff, reports the memo, “has extensive ties to U.S. military leaders from his tours in Afghanistan.”

    (The “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy” cable also notes that Chrystia Freeland was appointed foreign minister “in large part because of her strong U.S. contacts”. Uncovered through a freedom of information request, the memo notes that Freeland’s “number one priority” was working closely with Washington.)

    From the weapons it employs to its doctrine, the US greatly influences Canada’s military. Through NORAD the US Commander of the alliance has de facto control over a number of military installations in Canada. In some circumstances US forces are authorized to enter Canada under that country’s command. During the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, for instance, US troops were quietly deployed. Canadian military leaders have repeatedly instigated secret discussions to further integrate the two countries’ militaries, which politicians have often had to restrain. 

    The depth of the Canada-US military alliance is such that if US forces attacked this country it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Forces to defend our soil. In fact, given its entanglements with their southern counterparts the CF, would likely enable a US invasion. As with the 2003 invasion of Iraq — which Ottawa officially opposed — some Canadian troops on exchange in the US might march north and, as is the norm when the US invades another country, Canadian officers would likely operate NORAD systems aiding the aggression.

    Unpalatable as it may be to some, the USA is the only nation that could realistically invade Canada. In 1812 Britain/Canada fought a war with the US. In the decades after the War of 1812 border disputes led to the 1846 Oregon Treaty and Irish Fenians attacked Canada from the US in the 1860s. In 1848 the US seized more than half of its southern neighbour’s territory.

    In 1898 a 200-man Yukon Field Force was created out of fear the US might seek to seize the region in the wake of the Klondike Gold Rush. During that decade Canadian officials feared war between the US and Britain because they were in conflict over a Venezuela-Guyana territorial dispute. Through the 1920s and 30s US military planners crafted detailed invasion plans. Ostensibly for a war with Britain, Canada War Plan Red included abolishing the Canadian government and holding territory “in perpetuity”. A 1928 draft of the plan added, “it should be made quite clear to Canada that in a war she would suffer grievously.” The invasion plans, which were approved by the Secretary of War and Secretary of Navy, remained current until WWII.

    Today, the US and Canada have multiple territorial disputes. Most significantly, Washington doesn’t recognize Canadian control over the North West passage.

    Directly and indirectly, the hullabaloo about China is largely an outgrowth of US influence. On Twitter Alex Boykowich recently noted, “‘Chinese interference’ in Canadian elections or politics is really American interference.” That’s not far from the mark.

    The post To See Real Foreign Influence, Check out Canada’s Military first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Anti-Plastic Coalition: East Palestine Disaster Exposes Need for ‘Systemic Change’

    One month after a fiery train crash in East Palestine, Ohio sparked an ongoing environmental and public health crisis, an anti-plastic coalition on Friday highlighted how the petrochemical industry poisons communities across the United States and called for “systemic change.”

    The Norfolk Southern-owned train that derailed and ignited near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border on February 3 was overloaded with hazardous materials, many of them derived from fossil fuels. To avert a catastrophic explosion, authorities released and burned vinyl chloride—a carcinogenic petrochemical used to make plastic—from five tanker cars, provoking residents’ fears about the long-term health impacts of toxic air pollution and groundwater contamination.

    “This is a plastics and petrochemical disaster,” the global Break Free From Plastic (BFFP) coalition said Friday in a statement.

    According to the coalition:

    A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that the train derailment was caused by a hot axle that heated one of the train cars carrying polypropylene plastic pellets, according to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. These plastic pellets serve as the pre-production materials that corporations manufacture into shampoo bottles, plastic cups, and other single-use items. The highly combustible, fossil fuel-derived pellets ignited the initial fire aboard the Norfolk Southern train, which led to its derailment.

    In addition to the pellets, yet another plastic building block is at the heart of this disaster: vinyl chloride. Vinyl chloride is a known human carcinogen used almost exclusively to produce polyvinyl chloride, also known as PVC plastic, which is often turned into pipes, flooring, shower curtains, and even plastic food wrap. Not only is vinyl chloride toxic and harmful itself, Norfolk Southern’s burning of the chemical likely resulted in dioxins, one of the most persistent and toxic chemicals, even at low levels of exposure.

    In response to public pressure, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Thursday ordered Norfolk Southern to test for dioxins, a class of highly toxic industrial byproducts that the agency had previously opted to ignore in the East Palestine disaster zone.

    “While we’re glad to see this announcement, we wish it had come sooner,” said Graham Hamilton, U.S. policy officer at BFFP. “Justice delayed is justice denied, and we expect more from an administration that claims to prioritize environmental justice.”

    Mike Schade, director of Toxic-Free Future’s Mind the Store campaign, said that “the EPA must not only test for dioxins in soil, but also in indoor dust, sediments, fish, and on farms impacted by the massive plume.”

    “Importantly, the EPA should be conducting the testing itself and/or hiring independent scientists to test for dioxins, rather than requiring the community of East Palestine to rely on Norfolk Southern for that accountability,” said Schade.

    “This disaster is yet another painful reminder of the dangers of making, transporting, using, and disposing of chemicals in plastics, especially polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic,” Schade added. “Governments, retailers, and brands must redouble their efforts to phase out PVC plastic and other highly hazardous plastics and chemicals and move towards safer solutions.”

    The U.S. is home to more than 1,000 train derailments per year, and according to one estimate, the country is averaging one chemical disaster every two days.

    Low-income communities in the Ohio River Valley and along the Gulf Coast are disproportionately harmed by the petrochemical industry.

    “These communities subsidize the cost of cheap disposable plastic at the fenceline of oil rigs, petrochemical plants, incinerators, and the trains and trucks used for transporting the toxic and deadly chemicals,” said Yvette Arellano, the founder and director of Fenceline Watch, a Texas-based advocacy group and BFFP member.

    “The price we pay is with our lives, from shortened lifespans [to] reproductive harm [and] developmental issues; these toxics trespass our bodies and harm our communities for generations,” added Arellano, whose organization helped pressure the EPA to halt the 1,300-mile shipment of contaminated wastewater from East Palestine to the Houston area, where it had been slated to be injected underground.

    “The petrochemical industry is inherently unsafe. Even standard operations pollute and damage communities, and regulators continue to fail to do the bare minimum to hold polluters accountable.”

    As BFFP pointed out, the ongoing East Palestine disaster “is not the only petrochemical crisis” hurting residents of the Ohio River Valley.

    “Less than 15 miles from the derailment site,” a new Shell facility in Beaver County, Pennsylvania “has received numerous violations and exceeded its annual emissions limits since coming online in November of 2022,” the coalition pointed out.

    As Andie from the Eyes on Shell watchdog group observed: “With the community already on edge, just one week following the release and burn in East Palestine, Shell activated an enormous emergency flare which, without warning, continued flaring for hours. The derailment and emergency flare are terrifying reminders of the risks the petrochemical industry poses to our community every single day.”

    Earthworks campaigner Anaïs Peterson stressed that “the petrochemical industry is inherently unsafe.”

    “Even standard operations pollute and damage communities,” said Peterson, “and regulators continue to fail to do the bare minimum to hold polluters accountable.”

    Amanda Kiger of River Valley Organizing (RVO)—a Columbiana County-based group that has been working to support East Palestine residents since the derailment—said that “nobody should have their entire lives upended because Norfolk Southern and makers of these hazardous chemicals put their profits ahead of the safety of our communities and our country.”

    “With people developing rashes and breathing problems, it’s clear people are still being exposed to dangerous chemicals,” said Kiger. “Norfolk Southern should give residents the resources to relocate and should pay for independent testing of the soil, water, and air, as well as medical exams and follow-up for years to come.”

    Ultimately, BFFP argued, “we need systemic reforms to stop the petrochemical industry from having carte blanche to profit off of poisoning people and the planet.”

    Despite BFFP’s demands for a robust, legally binding global plastics treaty that prohibits corporations from manufacturing an endless stream of toxic single-use items, Inside Climate News reported this week that the initial proposal from the Biden administration’s delegation to the United Nations was described as “low ambition” and “underwhelming” because it “sidesteps calls for cuts in production, praises the benefits of plastics, and focuses on national priorities versus global mandates.”

  • Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan


    Photo credit: GlobelyNews

    There’s something irrational about President Biden’s knee-jerk dismissal of China’s 12-point peace proposal titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.”

    “Not rational” is how Biden described the plan that calls for de-escalation toward a ceasefire, respect for national sovereignty, establishment of humanitarian corridors and resumption of peace talks.

    “Dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis,” reads the plan. “All efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of the crisis must be encouraged and supported.”

    Biden turned thumbs down.

    “I’ve seen nothing in the plan that would indicate that there is something that would be beneficial to anyone other than Russia if the Chinese plan were followed,” Biden told the press.

    In a brutal conflict that has left thousands of dead Ukrainian civilians, hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, eight million Ukrainians displaced from their homes, contamination of land, air and water, increased greenhouse gasses and disruption of the global food supply, China’s call for de-escalation would surely benefit someone in Ukraine.

    Other points in China’s plan, which is really more a set of principles rather than a detailed proposal, call for protection for prisoners of war, cessation of attacks on civilians, safeguards for nuclear power plants and facilitation of grain exports.

    “The idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational,” said Biden.

    Instead of engaging China–a country of 1.45 billion people, the world’s largest exporter, the owner of a trillion dollars in US debt and an industrial giant–in negotiating an end to the crisis in Ukraine, the Biden administration prefers to wag its finger and bark at China, warning it not to arm Russia in the conflict.

    Psychologists might call this finger-wagging projection–the old pot calling the kettle black routine. It is the US, not China, that is fueling the conflict with at least $45 billion dollars in ammunition, drones, tanks and rockets in a proxy war that risks–with one miscalculation–turning the world to ash in a nuclear holocaust.

    It is the US, not China, that has provoked this crisis by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, a hostile military alliance that targets Russia in mock nuclear strikes, and by backing a 2014 coup of Ukraine’s democratically elected Russia-friendly president Viktor Yanukovych, thus triggering a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, regions Russia has more recently annexed.

    Biden’s sour attitude toward the Chinese peace framework hardly comes as a surprise. After all, even former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett candidly acknowledged in a five-hour interview on YouTube that it was the West that last March blocked a near-peace deal he had mediated between Ukraine and Russia.

    Why did the US block a peace deal? Why won’t President Biden provide a serious response to the Chinese peace plan, let alone engage the Chinese at a negotiating table?

    President Biden and his coterie of neo-conservatives, among them Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, have no interest in peace if it means the US concedes hegemonic power to a multi-polar world untethered from the all-mighty dollar.

    What may have gotten Biden unnerved—besides the possibility that China might emerge the hero in this bloody saga—is China’s call for the lifting of unilateral sanctions. The US imposes unilateral sanctions on officials and companies from Russia, China and Iran. It imposes sanctions on whole countries, too, like Cuba, where a cruel 60-year embargo, plus assignment to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, made it difficult for Cuba to obtain syringes to administer its own vaccines during the COVID pandemic. Oh, and let’s not forget Syria, where after an earthquake killed tens of thousands and left hundreds of thousands homeless, the country struggles to receive medicine and blankets due to US sanctions that discourage humanitarian aid workers from operating inside Syria.

    Despite China’s insistence it is not considering weapons shipments to Russia, Reuters reports the Biden administration is taking the pulse of G-7 countries to see if they would approve new sanctions against China if that country provides Russia with military support.

    The idea that China could play a positive role was also dismissed by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who said, “China doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

    Ditto from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who told ABC’s Good Morning America, “China has been trying to have it both ways: It’s on the one hand trying to present itself publicly as neutral and seeking peace, while at the same time it is talking up Russia’s false narrative about the war.”

    False narrative or different perspective?

    In August of 2022, China’s ambassador to Moscow charged that the United States was the “main instigator”of the Ukraine war, provoking Russia with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders.

    This is not an uncommon perspective and is one shared by economist Jeffrey Sachs who, in a February 25, 2023  video directed at thousands of anti-war protesters in Berlin, said the war in Ukraine did not start a year ago, but nine years ago when the US backed the coup that overthrew Yanukovych after he preferred Russia’s loan terms to the European Union’s offer.

    Shortly after China released its peace framework, the Kremlin responded cautiously, lauding the Chinese effort to help but adding that the details “need to be painstakingly analyzed taking into account the interests of all the different sides.” As for Ukraine, President Zelinsky hopes to meet soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping to explore China’s peace proposal and dissuade China from supplying weapons to Russia.

    The peace proposal garnered more positive response from countries neighboring the warring states. Putin’s ally in Belarus, leader Alexander Lukashenko, said his country “fully supports” the Beijing plan. Kazakhstan approved of China’s peace framework in a statement describing it as “worthy of support.” Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán–who wants his country to stay out of the war– also showed support for the proposal.

    China’s call for a peaceful solution stands in stark contrast to US warmongering this past year, when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member, said the US aims to weaken Russia, presumably for regime change–a strategy that failed miserably in Afghanistan where a near 20-year US occupation left the country broke and starving.

    China’s support for de-escalation is consistent with its long-standing opposition to US/NATO expansion, now extending into the Pacific with hundreds of US bases encircling China, including a new base in Guam to house 5,000 marines. From China’s perspective, US militarism jeopardizes the peaceful reunification of the People’s Republic of China with its break-away province of Taiwan. For China, Taiwan is unfinished business, left over from the civil war 70 years ago.

    In provocations reminiscent of US meddling in Ukraine, a hawkish Congress last year approved $10 billion in weapons and military training for Taiwan, while House leader Nancy Pelosi flew to Taipei – over protests from her constituents–to whip up tension in a move that brought US-China climate cooperation to a halt.

    A US willingness to work with China on a peace plan for Ukraine might not only help stop the daily loss of lives in Ukraine and prevent a nuclear confrontation, but also pave the way for cooperation with China on all kinds of other issues–from medicine to education to climate–that would benefit the entire globe.

    The post Why Biden Snubbed China’s Ukraine Peace Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine

    Syria has been at war since 2011. The conflict is in a stalemate. US troops control nearly a third of the country. The US finances the operation and a secessionist army with oil and wheat they take from the area. It funds them and deprives the Syrian government from their own resources. In the northern province of Idlib, the Syrian version of Al Qaeda is in control, receiving the majority of aid from Europe while the 90% of Syrians who live in government controlled areas go hungry and have electricity only three hours per day.

    Meanwhile in Ukraine, the bloodshed continues as Russian troops battle Ukrainian soldiers while the US and NATO pour in weapons. Russian troops have taken control of much of the eastern region, the Donbass.

    How did we get here and what is driving the process?

    The Rise of the US Exceptionalism

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, influential neoconservatives said it was time for US interests and priorities to be dominant. There was only one superpower. This was to be a New American Century with no challengers. This perspective went from being a fringe element to increasingly influential. Over the course of the 1990s, it took hold and became US foreign policy. They said it explicitly: The US should not permit any country to challenge US supremacy and dominance.

    With the Soviet Union gone and Russia in disarray, there was no counter-force in international organizations or the United Nations. The US manipulated existing agencies and created new institutions to its advantage. History and international agreements were rewritten. For example, with US and Israeli pressure, the UN resolution affirming that Zionism is a form of racism was overturned.

    US foreign policy became increasingly aggressive. Sanctions on Iraq, aimed to drive the country into total submission, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Children were especially vulnerable to sickness from contaminated water. Chlorine for purification was prohibited while the US hailed itself a leader in gender equality with the first female Secretary of State, Madeline Albright.

    Recalcitrant countries were subject to attack. The multi-ethnic country of Yugoslavia was a prime target. Divisions were promoted while the CIA funded an extremist separatist army. NATO went on the attack, bombing Serbia without authorization from the UN Security Council. The plan was clear: divide and conquer.

    Simultaneously, the creation of the European Union in 1993 made it harder for individual countries to act in their own best interests and easier for the US to dominate the whole.

    The military alliance binding them together is NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Although this is a military alliance, there is no doubt which country is paramount. The US spends more than all others combined.

    The September 11 attacks in 2001 were a watershed moment. The attacks provided a “Pearl Harbor” moment and justification for increased US aggression abroad. The official explanation of who carried out the attacks and why has been seriously challenged. Whoever perpetrated the attacks, neoconservatives used 9-11 to push their agenda. The US commenced their attack and occupation of Afghanistan.

    The next major violation of international law was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraq was devastated, extremism and sectarianism exploded. Today, US troops remain there despite the Iraqi parliament and government requesting they leave.

    Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction as claimed by US “intelligence”. Instead, a form of chemical weapons was created in Iraq by the US military. Dust from depleted uranium bullets and missiles vaporized and mixed with the environment. Iraq has experienced a huge increase in birth defects and cancer.

    Russia Restabilizes

    While this was happening, Russia was starting to restabilize under the Putin administration. After a decade of chaos, corruption and the collapse of the communist safety net, Russia was getting back on its feet in the early 2000s. The standard of living and life expectancy started to increase. Western advisors were no longer in charge. Oligarchs were no longer able to rob at will.

    Even though the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist, NATO refused to disband. On the contrary, despite promises to Russian leaders, NATO expanded in 1999, 2004 and 2009.

    When NATO invited Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO in 2008, Russia loudly said NO. They said that would cross a red line for them. NATO was clearly an OFFENSIVE alliance and to permit it on the Ukraine border less than 500 miles from Moscow would jeopardize Russian security. Russia kept asking that security for ALL be considered.

    War in Libya and Syria

    Unrest in Libya erupted in early 2011. Western media started propagating stories of pending massacres and the UN Security Council, with China and Russia abstaining, authorized a “no fly zone” and “necessary measures to protect civilians”. This became the pretext for the US plus NATO and other allies to attack Libyan government forces. They overthrew the Libyan government and unleashed a civil war that continues to today. Later evidence revealed the sensational claims of rape and pending massacre were falsehoods, just like in the past.

    At the same time, the West and allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey were funding, training and supporting extremists and foreigners travelling to Syria. After the overthrow of the Libyan government, the CIA took control of Libyan military arsenals and started sending weapons to jihadists in Syria.

    Extremists were trained in camps in Turkey on the Syrian border. Weapons were flown into Incirlik US Air Base in southern Turkey. Thus started the US war on Syria which continues to today.

    In the Fall of 2013, a sarin gas attack killed hundreds of civilians in outer Damascus. Neocons were itching to attack Syria as they had attacked Libya and Iraq. President Obama claimed, “We know the Assad regime was responsible.” He also said “I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”

    The US attack was deterred after Russia persuaded Syria to give up all their chemical weapons – which had been developed as a deterrent against Israel’s nuclear weapons. Russian Putin praised the agreement but cautioned, “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.”

    Later, Seymour Hersh revealed that the chemical attacks were not carried out by the Syrian government as claimed by Obama. Rather, they had been perpetrated by Syrian extremists with Turkish support. The purpose was to provide a pretext for US and NATO direct attacks on Syria.

    War in Ukraine

    Meanwhile, 1200 miles north of Damascus, protests in the Maidan main square of Kyiv Ukraine were growing in intensity. There was a combination of peaceful protesters and a small but violent faction of ultra nationalist extremists. Western billionaires and US agencies were instrumental in promoting pro-western organizations and the Ukraine protests. US politicians and officials such as Victoria Nuland and John McCain showed up to offer symbolic and tangible support.

    On February 7, 2014, Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador planned who would take leadership after the pending Ukraine coup. Nuland summed it up: “Yats is the guy” (Arseny Yatsenyuk). Referring to a compromise agreement preferred by European leaders, Nuland said, “Fuck the EU.” From the conversation, we also know that Jake Sullivan (current National Security Advisor) and then Vice President Biden were involved. US neoconservatives were not satisfied with a mixed Ukraine. They wanted an anti-Russia Ukraine.

    With the Winter Olympics in Sochi Russia drawing toward a close, someone decided to expedite the coup. Timing is important. On February 20, snipers killed over 50 protesters and police to ignite the events. Ukrainian-Canadian Professor Ivan Katchanovoski of the University of Ottawa has rigorously researched the events and shows that the shootings were by snipers located in opposition controlled buildings.

    On the first day of the coup government, on 27 February, they removed Russian as an official language despite 30% of the population having it as a first language. It would be comparable to a coup in Ottawa Canada with the coup government removing French as an official language of Canada. The new leader was the same Arseny Yatsenyuk as planned by Nuland weeks earlier.

    Opponents of the coup government were attacked with 42 killed in Odessa. In Crimea, they quickly organized a referendum on whether to secede from Ukraine. With 83% turnout, 97% of the population said they wanted to join the Russian Federation. In eastern Ukraine north of Crimea, called the Donbas, there was also a majority of the population deeply opposed to the coup and coup government. They confronted the authorities and many military units defected to join the secessionists. The regions were cut off by the Kiev government, with pensioners no longer receiving retirement checks and government services stopped. The Ukrainian Army attacked and thousands died. The regions were excluded from national elections. Eventually they organized themselves as the Donetsk and Lugansk Peoples Republics. Thus the war in Ukraine did not begin one year ago; it began nine years ago, in February 2014.

    In late 2014 and again in 2015, peace agreements to resolve the civil war in Ukraine were signed in Minsk. France and Germany were to help insure the implementation. Russia supported this as a way to resolve the conflict. The UN Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the agreement.

    Instead of implementing this, Kiev ignored their promises while the US and NATO began arming and training the Ukraine Army. In effect, Ukraine became an unofficial member. The arming and NATO-ization continued and escalated. First it was only “defensive” weapons. Then, under Trump, they began supplying “offensive” weapons.

    NATO plans to destabilize and weaken Russia were explicit. The Pentagon thinktank, the RAND Corporation, published reports discussing strategic options to weaken and destabilize Russia. The longer term goal: to break it up as plotted by Brzezinkski in his US foreign policy bible The Grand Chessboard.

    It has recently been revealed by the former Ukrainian, French and German leaders that the 2015 Minsk peace agreement was a ruse. By their own statements and admissions, it was never a genuine effort to peacefully resolve the civil war in eastern Ukraine. The goal was to stall for time while NATO trained and equipped the Ukrainian Army, to solidify the anti Russian attitude and crush those not in agreement.

    NeoCons do not want peace in Ukraine

    The neocons driving Washington’s foreign policy do not want to end the Ukraine war; they want to prolong it. They dream of repeating what happened in the 1980’s when Russian intervention in Afghanistan led to the weakening and ultimate breakup of the Soviet Union. The former boss of Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton, said explicitly in March “That [Afghanistan] is the model that people are now looking toward.”

    The immorality of US policy is breathtaking. Afghanistan went through hell beginning in 1979 as the US and Saudi Arabia supported and armed religious fanatics to destabilize Afghanistan and create trouble for the Soviet Union. Afghanistan has endured over four decades of conflict and extremism and is still suffering.

    Today, US neocons running foreign policy are sacrificing Ukraine with the same goal of undermining Russia. They could not live with a neutral Ukraine and have promoted and allied with ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements. Previously Washington did not want anything to do with the neo-Nazis but this has changed.

    NeoCons and Syria

    The US has also allied with extremists in Syria. In late 2014 and early 2015, ISIS and Nusra (the Syrian Al Qaeda) made major assaults. Syrian and foreign extremists poured across the Turkish border. There were dozens of Canadians, hundreds of Brits, thousands of Europeans and North Africans. The Canadian and British secret services were well aware of the plans of their citizens who were being recruited by Al Qaeda and ISIS. They did nothing because, as Jake Sullivan said, “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.”

    With weapons and training from western military and intelligence forces, the extremists were able to capture a large area of northern Syria and the outskirts of Damascus.

    In September 2015 Russia came to the assistance of the Damascus government. They provided airplanes and pilots to attack the advancing extremists. Uninvited, the US began also overflying Syria and then establishing US bases in the east and south. They rarely attacked ISIS but attacked Syrian troops at critical times. Then they began cultivating Kurdish secessionist elements. They rebranded them as the “Syrian Democratic Forces”. They are still there today – stealing the Syrian nation’s wealth in oil and wheat. The US has imposed draconian sanctions on the majority of the country. The dirty war on Syria continues.

    Neoconservative belief in US supremacy and impunity are exemplified by former Deputy Director of the CIA, Michael Morell. In an 2016 interview, he was outraged that Russia supported the Syrian government resisting extremist attacks. In a 2016 interview, Morell publicly suggested “covertly” killing Russians who are on the ground in Syria. “They got to pay a price for what they’re doing. Just like we made the Russians pay a price in Afghanistan …. We have to make them want to go home.”

    Russian Intervention in Ukraine

    One year ago, Russia troops went into Ukraine with the stated goal of de-nazifying and de-militarizing the country. Many Ukrainian civilians have fled the fighting with more that 3 million going to Russia, by far the most of any country.

    Did Russia have a choice? They could have continued waiting, hoping for a change in attitude by the US and NATO. They tried. In December 2021 Russia proposed peace treaties with the US and NATO. Instead of negotiating, the US and NATO dismissed the proposals out of hand.

    The US-Ukraine Stategic Partnership, signed in November 2021, made it clear there was no intention to respect the will of the overwhelming majority of people in Crimea or to implement the Minsk Agreement to resolve the eastern Ukraine conflict peacefully. On the contrary, Ukraine with US support was building its forces to attack the Donbass and perhaps Crimea.

    After 30 years of NATO provocations and escalating threats, Russia acted. While this has been condemned in the West, there is widespread understanding and support for their position in the Global South. A recent poll indicates that a big majority continue to feel positively about Russia.

    What happens in Ukraine will have a profound impact on the globe. The “New American Century” dreamed by US hawks has been challenged.

    It is high time to end US delusions of superiority and exceptionalism. The USA should become a normal nation.

    We need a multipolar world with respect for the UN Charter and international law.

    Let the people in Crimea and the Donbass choose their destinies. Let the war end and Ukrainians recover and prosper in an independent country which is neither a tool of the US or Russia. Let Syria rebuild and recover without the cruel US sanctions.

    Let the US turn from fomenting conflicts, undermining and attacking other countries to reforming and improving itself.

    The post US Exceptionalism and the Wars in Syria and Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • United States ramps up threats against China, Russia

    What began as an overblown diplomatic response by Washington to a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the continental United States, before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean, has morphed into a major confrontation, writes Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Highway of Death

    “Persons taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, color, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.” (Common Article 3 to the four 1949 Geneva Conventions of 1949)

    High above a swamp, over 60 miles of coastal Highway 8 from Kuwait to Iraq, a division of Iraq’s Republican Guard withdrew on February 26-27, 1991.

    Baghdad radio had just announced Iraq’s acceptance of a cease-fire proposal and, in compliance with UN Resolution 660, retreating Iraqi troops were ordered to withdraw to positions held before August 2, 1990.

    Nonetheless, President George H.W. Bush derisively called the announcement “an outrage” and “a cruel hoax.”

    The Home of the Brave™, it seems, wasn’t quite ready to stop the massacre.

    “U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours,” says Joyce Chediac, a Lebanese-American journalist.

    “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” one U.S. pilot said.

    Randall Richard of the Providence Journal filed this dispatch from the deck of the U.S.S. Ranger: “Air strikes against Iraqi troops retreating from Kuwait were being launched so feverishly from this carrier today that pilots said they took whatever bombs happened to be closest to the flight deck. The crews, working to the strains of the Lone Ranger theme, often passed up the projectile of choice because it took too long to load.”

    “When you see the battlefield littered with dead bodies as far as you can see and there’s smoke swirling around, and the smell of the dead bodies, the ammunition, the fuel, the explosions; it’s very overpowering,” said Paul Sullivan, a combat veteran from Operation Desert Storm who went on to create the National Gulf War Resource Center.

    Sullivan later described the so-called “Highway of Death” as “miles and miles and miles of charred trucks, tanks, blown up buildings, pieces of arms, pieces of legs every which way.”

    “Many of those massacred fleeing Kuwait were not Iraqi soldiers at all,” adds U.S. Attorney General-turned-peace activist, Ramsey Clark, “but Palestinians, Sudanese, Egyptians, and other foreign workers.”

    “Every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments,” Chediac reported after visiting the “Highway of Death” scene in 1991. “No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.”

    “At one spot,” Bob Drogin reported in the Los Angeles Times, “snarling wild dogs had reduced two corpses to bare ribs. Giant carrion birds picked at another — only a boot-clad foot and eyeless skull are recognizable.”

    “Even in Vietnam, I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Army intelligence officer and eyewitness, Major Bob Nugent.

    When you’re talking about America, it’s not pathetic… it’s policy.

    The post Highway of Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US and EU Groups Call for ‘Ceasefire’ on Trade Challenges to Climate Policies



    A coalition of more than three dozen progressive advocacy groups based in the United States and the European Union on Monday implored E.U. policymakers to stop pursuing challenges to the Inflation Reduction Act and urged governments on both sides of the Atlantic to start prioritizing decarbonization over corporate-friendly trade rules.

    “As part of any E.U.-U.S. transatlantic sustainable trade initiative, we urge the E.U. to refrain from challenging the IRA with trade instruments. And we call on the U.S. and E.U. to commit to a Climate Peace Clause to protect climate policies around the world from trade disputes, as well as to make good on climate financing and green technology transfer to countries in the Global South,” says a letter sent to the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council.

    The letter comes as European Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis travels to Washington, D.C. for meetings this week with top U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

    Amid an ongoing disagreement over North American electric vehicle manufacturing incentives, renewable energy tax credits, and other green provisions in the IRA, Dombrovskis plans to “negotiate better outcomes for the E.U.,” according to Politico, just as the U.S. Treasury Department prepares to release “a list of criteria for what qualifies as a free trade agreement, potentially making more countries eligible to receive tax credits under the IRA,” which was passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Joe Biden last August.

    “Countries desperately need to enact bold climate measures and cannot allow outdated trade rules to get in the way.”

    The letter’s 41 signatories—including the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Transnational Institute, and other civil society organizations representing millions of people—noted that “at the most recent meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council, the Global Trade Working Group announced its intent to embark on a transatlantic sustainable trade initiative.”

    Melinda St. Louis, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, said Monday in a statement that if the U.S. and the E.U. are serious about this, “they first need to commit to ‘do no harm’ by refraining from attacking one another’s climate legislation.”

    While the IRA “was far from the comprehensive legislation needed to address the urgent climate crisis,” states the letter, “it was the result of a difficult compromise negotiated in a narrow but historic window of political opportunity and is a critical step that the U.S. has taken to meet its climate commitments.”

    Despite this, the E.U. “claims that the structure and the domestic content requirements of tax incentives for electric vehicle, electric battery, and renewable energy production offered through the IRA violate World Trade Organization (WTO) rules,” the letter continues. “And it has repeatedly threatened to refer the matter to the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, attempting to force the U.S. to change this law. The E.U. even publicly complained about the incentives before the bill had passed, potentially threatening passage of the important legislation, which passed by the narrowest of margins.”

    “Time is running out to meet our climate commitments,” it adds. “Investments in green jobs and production of green products will be needed to usher in the clean energy transition the world needs,” and that requires “adapt[ing] the rules to accelerate a just transition.”

    “Will the Biden administration stand up to these trade threats and implement the law as intended to create green jobs and boost manufacturing in the clean energy economy?” asked St. Louis. “And will they commit to supporting other countries as they enact their own bold climate policies?”

    Fabian Flues, a trade campaigner with PowerShift Germany, insisted that there is no other reasonable choice.

    “This is simple: climate action has to take precedence over trade rules,” said Flues. “The E.U. would do the fight against climate change a huge disservice if it challenged the Inflation Reduction Act in trade tribunals. Instead, the E.U. should increase its efforts to pursue a genuine ecological and fair industrial policy. Such efforts must be accompanied by increased climate financing and green technology transfer so that countries in the Global South don’t lose out from increased climate action in the U.S. and E.U.”

    According to the coalition:

    As advanced economies and major current and historic emitters of greenhouse gases, it would be a powerful step for the U.S. and E.U. to agree to a Climate Peace Clause—a binding commitment by these governments to refrain from using dispute settlement mechanisms in the WTO or other trade and investment agreements to challenge each other’s climate policies. Not only should the E.U. refrain from using trade rules to challenge the IRA, but both should commit to refraining from challenging other countries’ policies meant to hasten the green transition. This would set an example and create the much-needed space for governments to adopt and maintain the climate policies needed to create green jobs and meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

    Such an agreement between these two powers must also include climate financing for countries in the Global South and the sharing of green technologies, as outlined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris agreement, to support/contribute to climate solutions that are truly sustainable and equitable for all. This will be necessary to support the clean energy transition in countries that cannot afford similar subsidy-based incentives. A true transatlantic collaboration to address catastrophic climate change, and related global social, health, and biodiversity crises, will entail supporting—rather than undermining—green industrial policies on both sides of the Atlantic. Further, we must work together to meet commitments for financial support and technological transfer to developing countries and to transform inequitable global structures in order to facilitate a just transition for all.

    This is not the first time labor and environmental groups have demanded that policymakers stop impeding sorely needed climate action by weaponizing global trade rules. As Biden hosted French President Emmanuel Macron just before a December meeting of the U.S.-E.U. Trade and Technology Council, activists held a protest outside the White House to denounce the leading role that Macron has played in fostering E.U. opposition to the IRA.

    On the same day, the Sierra Club and the Trade Justice Education Fund published an analysis outlining the need for a Climate Peace Clause.

    As the groups’ research explained, North American production requirements were key to securing the political support needed to enact the IRA, but progress on creating green jobs and slashing planet-heating pollution remains at risk of being derailed by Investor-State Dispute Settlement complaints and other objections filed at neoliberal trade institutions.

    As Trade Justice Education Fund executive director Arthur Stamoulis said Monday, “Countries desperately need to enact bold climate measures and cannot allow outdated trade rules to get in the way.”

    “By committing to not challenge other nations’ climate initiatives as violations of old trade rules,” Stamoulis added, “the United States can simultaneously encourage countries to take more ambitious climate action and better defend its own climate-focused industrial policy.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • ‘Time Is Up’: Greenpeace Warns Global Ocean Treaty Under Threat of Failure



    Greenpeace warned Monday that nations are “once again stalling” as they enter the final week of talks on the United Nations Ocean Treaty, a pact the environmental group says would “safeguard marine life and be the biggest conservation victory for a generation” if negotiators get it right.

    A new draft of the landmark treaty “still contains major areas of disagreement,” said Greenpeace, whose activists displayed a large banner supporting the treaty outside United Nations headquarters in New York City on Monday.

    U.N. members are gathered inside in an effort to draft a unified agreement on the conservation and sustainable exploitation of marine ecosystems located outside national boundaries on the high seas—an area encompassing nearly two-thirds of the Earth’s oceans. A previous round of talks on the treaty last year failed to produce an agreement.

    According to Greenpeace:

    Finance remains a key issue. Global North countries like the U.K., U.S., and European Union member states must urgently put the money on the table for capacity building and implementing the treaty. They must also resolve the mechanics of sharing financial benefits from Marine Genetic Resources. China will play a critical role in the outcome of these negotiations. China led from the front at Biodiversity COP15 in delivering the 30×30 agreement, but here it is falling behind. China, along with the Global North, must show more flexibility, or these talks will fail.

    “We are now in the last week of negotiations for what we hoped would be a historic and ambitious treaty to protect the oceans and change the trajectory of life on this planet. Instead, we are once again on the brink of these talks falling apart as countries have chosen not to rise to the occasion as they quibble over minor points,” Greenpeace USA senior ocean campaigner Arlo Hemphill said in a statement.

    “Time is up,” Hemphill added. “Negotiations must accelerate, and member states should work harder to reach compromises, keeping in mind the big picture of what this could mean for our oceans, biodiversity, and the billions of people who rely on it for their lives and livelihoods.”

    Laura Meller, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace Nordic, lamented that “negotiations have been going around in circles, progressing at a snail’s pace, and this is reflected in the new draft treaty text.”

    “It is far from where it should be as we enter the endgame of these negotiations,” she continued. “Negotiations must accelerate and Global North countries like the U.K., U.S., and European Union member states must seek compromises.”

    “China must urgently reimagine its role at these negotiations,” Meller added. “At COP15, China showed global leadership but at these negotiations, it has been a difficult party. China has an opportunity to transform global ocean governance and broker, instead of break, a landmark deal on this new Ocean Treaty.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Behind the Self-Defeating Approach toward the National Protest against the US War on Russia in Ukraine

    The Rage Against the War Machine, which stood up against the US war on Russia in Ukraine, was the first national anti-war demonstration in the capital in years. This was a groundbreaking event, showing that the anti-war movement has revived on a national scale after years of relative quiescence. Yet this success was not welcomed by some leftist anti-war activists. People may be acquainted with the issue of Libertarians as a key sponsor of the rally, and some of the views or alleged views of some of the speakers — views unrelated to the demands of the demonstration. 

    Underlying this are deeper causes for the conflict.

    A lefty anti-war coalition?

    Some consciously, some not, seek to build a “left” anti-war coalition, an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist one. This confuses an anti-war movement with a left organization. It isolates you from possible allies. It is a myth that anti-war movements are led by leftists, a myth that anti-war movements consist mostly of leftists. Most people protest war because they are sick of war, are against new wars – not because they are leftist, but because they have human feeling. This should not be some new revelation. 

    Movement building means we need to win over the people. And we need committed activists and experienced organizers. Whether they hold an anti-imperialist worldview is secondary. People become anti-imperialist — if they do at all — after becoming politically active, combined with some period of study. Often they become so only temporarily, as we see today with so many on the left supporting US regime change in Ukraine, Nicaragua, Syria, Iran, Hong Kong, or Russia. 

    The root of these leftists’ mixed-up thinking goes back to the purge of the working class left-wing from the trade union movement after World War II. US government operations drove this class struggle force out of its home base in the working class. The left has not rebuilt its natural home there, nor does it focus on reestablishing the working class as its base. Instead, they orient to the multi-class socially progressive milieu with its nebulous relation to the means of production. 

    A left that exists separate from a working class left-wing is homeless, cast adrift. In the socially progressive milieu, it rotates around Democratic Party voters, its liberal identity politics, and its disdain for the “deplorables.” Ironically, those who articulated that the Democratic Party is the more effective evil are living proof of the accuracy of this statement.

    A left-wing grounded working class would not make such foolish mistakes as not supporting the February 19 demonstration against imperialist war. Nor would a working class left-wing, in contrast to today’s left, have any greater hostility to Trump voters than to Obama, Clinton or Biden voters. 

    Left-right alliance?

    The February 19 anti-war demonstration was dubbed a “left-right” alliance, a term first used by left supporters of US regime change in Syria. These left apologists for the “Syrian Revolution” smeared opponents of that military operation as allied with “fascists” in a “red-brown” alliance. Now this has been picked up by some left opponents of the US war on Russia to attack a demonstration against the present imperial war. 

    A reality check is in order. People who attack demonstrations against US imperial wars are the ones who are reactionary, not the people who organize the demonstrations. That has always been the case.

    Fortunately, many of these have called another anti-war rally on March 18, even if not for the best of reasons.

    The demands of the Rage Against the War Machine rally were: Not One More Penny for War in Ukraine; Negotiate Peace; Stop the War Inflation; Disband NATO; Global Nuclear De-Escalation; Slash the Pentagon Budget; Abolish the CIA and Military Industrial Deep State; Abolish War and Empire; Restore Civil Liberties; and Free Julian Assange.

    While it is not clear what is meant by “left” and “right,” the demands of the rally are directed against the national security state, the actual government of this country. If you confront it, then you are not supporting it, and we are on the same side.

    Why did some lefty people set up a litmus test on other issues unrelated to the Rage Against the War Machine demands to determine who should be allowed to participate? If you want to weaken a movement, that is what you would do. Shun people who hold dissimilar beliefs on issues unrelated to the demands of the demonstration? That is a definition of sectarian.

    A demonstration gives us the opportunity to explain our anti-imperialist message to other participants. If we don’t use that opportunity, then we don’t do our job.

    School of Americas Watch protests at Fort Benning

    SOA Watch organized annual rallies outside Fort Benning against US military intervention and murder in Latin America. The protests were staged and funded by different orders and groups of the Catholic Church. Most participants came from Catholic orders and schools. These are organizations opposed to women’s right to choose, opposed to LGBT rights. Were the SOA Watch rallies a “left-right” alliance we should attack instead of joining? Attack the protests for being a platform legitimizing anti-woman and anti-gay groups? 

    The “Left-Right” Alliance Fred Hampton Built

    Fred Hampton and Bobby Lee of the Chicago Black Panthers showed how class-conscious activists work with seemingly hostile groups. In the late 1960s these Panthers helped create a Rainbow Coalition of poor blacks, Puerto Ricans, and southern whites to fight for fair housing, economic equality, and against police brutality. The whites, Young Patriot Organization (YPO) was based in Hillbilly Harlem, in uptown Chicago. They wore the Confederate flag as their emblem, and many were racist. But like blacks and latinos, the Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination — being poor and from the South. Fred Hampton tolerated YPO members wearing their Confederate flag patches at meetings and rallies. It came to take on a new meaning within the Rainbow Coalition. The YPO began wearing the Confederate flag with black power symbols and slogans. Despite the racial divisions, the BPP and YPO found common cause in the fight against their oppression. Through their joint work, the Young Patriots cast off their white supremacy views, including the Confederate flag. They saw they had in much common with the Black Panthers and latino Young Lords. This is but one example of people, focused on taking on the imperialist power structure, overcame their “left-right” divisions and worked together to fight their common oppressor. 

    Medea Benjamin

    Medea Benjamin, a sensible and highly respected anti-war activist, no sectarian, had this to say about Rage Against the War Machine:

    Many people have asked me why I am not speaking at the Rage Against the War Machine rally in DC on Feb. 19. Here’s why: I supported the Rage Against the War Machine Rally from the time of its conception and I support it today, even though I will not be one of the speakers because the organization I have been associated with for 20 years, CODEPINK, urged me not to speak…

    So why do I support the rally?

    Because I am heartbroken by a war that is causing such death and destruction in Ukraine.

    Because I have real fears that this war could lead us into World War III or a nuclear confrontation.

    Because both political parties are complicit in giving over $100 billion to Ukraine to keep this war going.

    Because the Biden administration is pushing this war to weaken Russia instead of promoting solutions.

    Because we urgently need as many voices as possible, from a broad variety of perspectives, to speak out so we can be much more effective at pressuring Congress and the White House to move this conflict from the bloody battlefield to the negotiating table. The future of our world stands in the balance.

    Those are the key issues. To emphasize: on the anniversary of Ukraine war, the two superpowers are in combat. The US government states it remains committed to driving Russia out of the Ukraine; Russia says defeat threatens its very existence. Recall Biden said a year ago that US and European sanctions would make Russia leave Ukraine. The war has only escalated since then. Where will it lead?

    Tulsi Gabbard began her speech with the day in January 2018 when Hawaiians were warned on their cell phones “Ballistic missile inbound. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill.” To think the leaders of the US and Russia will not blunder into a nuclear war, given all the previous incidents over the years, reveals a naïve faith in our leaders. To refuse to work with “the right” to avoid Ukraine becoming a nuclear war is mind-boggling in its stupidity. The Libertarians show their approach is not so sectarian. Those who brought us Rage Against the War Machine recognized if we are to defeat the non-stop imperial war machine that rules over our lives, we must work with all people possible under its boot. Until we all do, we defeat ourselves.

    The post Behind the Self-Defeating Approach toward the National Protest against the US War on Russia in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The 20th Anniversary of the Sociocide of Iraq by Bush-Cheney

    I wrote the following column ten years ago. Note the absence of any accountability or regret by Bush, Cheney and their co-war criminals.

    Ten years ago [now 20 years ago, on March 19, 2003] George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, as war criminals, launched the sociocide of the people of Iraq – replete with embedded television and newspaper reporters chronicling the invasion through the Bush lens. That illegal war of aggression was, of course, based on recognized lies, propaganda and cover-ups that duped or co-opted leading news institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

    Wars of aggression – this one blowing apart a country of 25 million people ruled by a weakened despot surrounded by far more powerful adversaries – Israel, Turkey, and Iran – are major crimes under international law and the UN Charter. The Bush-Cheney war was also unconstitutional, never declared by Congress, as Senator Robert Byrd eloquently pointed out at the time. Moreover, many of the acts of torture and brutality perpetrated against the Iraqi people are illegal under various federal statutes.

    Over one million Iraqis died due to the invasion, the occupation and the denial of health and safety necessities for infants, children and adults. Far more Iraqis were injured and sickened. Birth defects and cancers continue to set lethal records. Five million Iraqis became refugees, many fleeing into Jordan, Syria and other countries.

    Nearly five thousand U.S. soldiers died. Many other soldiers committed suicide. Well over 150,000 Americans were injured or sickened, far more than the official Pentagon under-estimate which restricts nonfatal casualty counts only to those incurred directly in the line of fire.

    So far, the Iraq War has monetarily cost taxpayers about $2 trillion. Tens of billions more will be spent for veteran’s disabilities in addition to continuing expenses in Iraq. Taxpayers are paying over $600 million a year to guard the giant U.S. Embassy and its personnel in Baghdad, more than what our government spends for OSHA, whose task is to reduce the number of American workers who die annually from workplace disease and trauma – currently about 58,000.

    All for what results? Before the invasion, there was no al-Qaeda in Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship. Now a growing al-Qaeda in Iraq is terrorizing the country with ever bolder car bombings, and suicide attacks taking dozens of lives at a time and spilling forcefully over into Syria.

    Iraq is a police state with sectarian struggles between the dominant Shiites and the insurgent Sunnis who lived together peacefully and intermarried for centuries. There were no sectarian slaughters of this kind before the invasion, except for Saddam Hussein’s bloodbath against rebellious Shiites. The Shiites were egged on by President George H.W. Bush, who promptly abandoned them to the deadly strafing by Saddam’s helicopter gunships at the end of the preventable first Gulf War in 1991.

    Iraq is a country in ruins with a political and wealthy upper class raking off profits from the oil industry. The U.S. is now widely hated in that part of Asia. Bush-Cheney ordered the use of cluster bombs, comprised of white phosphorous and depleted uranium, against the people of Fallujah where infant birth deformities have skyrocketed.

    As Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi-American analyst observed, “Complete destruction of the Iraqi national identity.” Moreover, the sectarian system introduced by the U.S. invaders in 2003, resulting in Iraqis being favored or excluded based on their sectarian and ethnic affiliations, laid the basis for the current cruel chaos and violence – a nasty, brutish form of divide and rule.

    The results back home in our country are soldiers and their extended families suffering in many ways from broken lives. Phil Donahue’s gripping documentary Body of War follows the pain-wracked life of one soldier returning in 2004 from Iraq as a paraplegic. That soldier, Tomas Young, nearing the end of his devastated life, has just written a penetrating letter to George W. Bush, which every American should read.

    The lessons from this unnecessary quagmire should be: first, how to stop any more wars of aggression by the Washington warmongers – the same neocon draft dodgers are at it again regarding Iran and Syria. And second, the necessity to hold accountable the leading perpetrators of this brutal carnage and financial wreckage who are presently at large – fugitives from justice earning fat lecture and consulting fees.

    In the nine months running up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, at least three hundred prominent, retired military officers, diplomats and national security officials publicly spoke out against the Bush-Cheney drumbeats to war. Their warnings were prophetically accurate. They included retired Generals Anthony Zinni and William Odom, and Admiral Shanahan. Even Brent Scowcroft and James Baker, two of President George H.W. Bush’s closest advisors, strongly opposed the invasion.

    These outspoken truthsayers, notwithstanding their prestige and experience, were overwhelmed by a runaway White House, a disgraceful patsy mainstream media and an abdicatory Congress. Multi-billionaire George Soros was also courageously outspoken. Unfortunately, prior to the invasion, he did not provide a budget and secretariat for these men and women to provide continuity and to multiply their numbers around the country, through the mass media and on Capitol Hill. By the time he came around to organizing and publicizing such an organized effort, it was after the invasion, in July 2003.

    Nine months earlier, I believe George Soros could have provided the necessary resources to stop Bush-Cheney and their lies from stampeding our government and our country into war.

    Mr. Soros can still build the grassroots pressure for the exercise of the rule of law under our Constitution and move Congress toward public hearings in the Senate designed to establish an investigative arm of the Justice Department to pursue the proper enforcement against Bush/Cheney and their accomplices.

    After all, the Justice Department had such a special prosecutors’ office during the Watergate scandal and was moving to indict a resigned Richard Nixon before President Ford pardoned him.

    Compare the Watergate break-in and obstruction of justice by Nixon, with the horrendous crimes coming out of the Bush and Cheney war against Iraq – a nation that never threatened the U.S. but whose destruction takes a continuing toll on our country.

    [Additional note: As Senators, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voted for the Iraq war in 2003. Will President Biden, Congress and other Americans recognize the massive war crimes committed against the Iraqi people with appropriate declarations and actions on March 19, 2023?].

    The post The 20th Anniversary of the Sociocide of Iraq by Bush-Cheney first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.