necropolitics: pinker ignores the megadeath we inflict on others unfortunate enough to live on resources we covet

prospect |  “Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries,” Steven Pinker writes in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. The celebrated Harvard professor of psychology is discussing what he calls “the Long Peace”: the period since the end of the second world war in which “the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.” As a result of “this blessed state of affairs,” he notes, “two entire categories of war—the imperial war to acquire colonies, and the colonial war to keep them—no longer exist.” Now and then there have been minor conflicts. “To be sure, [the super-powers] occasionally fought each other’s smaller allies and stoked proxy wars among their client states.” But these episodes do not diminish Pinker’s enthusiasm about the Long Peace. Chronic warfare is only to be expected in backward parts of the world. “Tribal, civil, private, slave-raiding, imperial, and colonial wars have inflamed the territories of the developing world for millennia.” In more civilised zones, war has all but disappeared. There is nothing inevitable in the process; major wars could break out again, even among the great powers. But the change in human affairs that has occurred is fundamental. “An underlying shift that supports predictions about the future,” the Long Peace points to a world in which violence is in steady decline.

A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Was the immense violence that ravaged southeast Asia after 1945 a result of immemorial backwardness in the region? Or was a subtle and refined civilisation wrecked by world war and the aftermath of decades of neo-colonial conflict—as Norman Lewis intimated would happen in his prophetic account of his travels in the region, A Dragon Apparent (1951)? It is true that the second world war was followed by over 40 years of peace in North America and Europe—even if for the eastern half of the continent it was a peace that rested on Soviet conquest. But there was no peace between the powers that had emerged as rivals from the global conflict.

In much the same way that rich societies exported their pollution to developing countries, the societies of the highly-developed world exported their conflicts. They were at war with one another the entire time—not only in Indo-China but in other parts of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. The Korean war, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, decades of civil war in the Congo and Guatemala, the Six Day War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Iran-Iraq war and the Soviet-Afghan war—these are only some of the armed conflicts through which the great powers pursued their rivalries while avoiding direct war with each other. When the end of the Cold War removed the Soviet Union from the scene, war did not end. It continued in the first Gulf war, the Balkan wars, Chechnya, the Iraq war and in Afghanistan and Kashmir, among other conflicts. Taken together these conflicts add up to a formidable sum of violence. For Pinker they are minor, peripheral and hardly worth mentioning. The real story, for him, is the outbreak of peace in advanced societies, a shift that augurs an unprecedented transformation in human affairs.

***

While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation.

the 1914 war was called ‘the war to end all wars.’ the 2014 war will be that...,

commondreams | And here comes World War I, wrapped in World War II, wrapped in the Cold War: tremors on one of Planet Earth’s human fault lines.

We have enough angry, manipulable people on this planet to carry out the game plan of the political ideologues and war profiteers, who are always on the lookout for the next war, the one that’s too volatile and “inevitable” to stop. As David Swanson, author of War Is a Lie, put it: “The search for a good war is beginning to look as futile as the search for the mythical city of El Dorado. And yet that search remains our top public project.”

And the searchlight stops at Ukraine, full of neo-Nazis, corrupt oligarchs, nuclear reactors, an unelected government, a wrecked economy, a simmering civil war. God help us. Old animosities and ideological divisions come back to life. The United States and NATO stand off against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Thirty-one people — maybe more — die in a burning building in Odessa. This kind of thing could be the pretext for a world war. Sanity is up in flames.

“The crisis in Ukraine is serious,” Floyd Rudmin writes at Common Dreams. “At some point soon, reality needs to become the priority. No more name-calling. No more blaming. If there are any adults in the room, they need to stand up. The crisis in Ukraine is going critical, and that is a fact.”

What if one of the adults were an elected official, specifically, the president of the United States? In an open letter, a group calledVeteranIntelligence Professionals for Sanity has urged Barack Obama to look beyond John Kerry and Washington’s neocon consensus for advice and direction on Ukraine — as, it turns out, he ultimately did with Syria — and “schedule a meeting, one-on-one, with President Putin as quickly as possible.”

There are numerous acts of geopolitical rationality and goodwill — e.g., rescind Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO — that could avert the crisis. That’s all that matters.

“In 2014, on the one century anniversary of World War I, European nations are again mobilizing for war,” Rudmin writes. “As in 1914, so in 2014, war is not for repelling an attack, but for loyalty to an alliance, even when some members of the alliance are belligerent. The 1914 war was supposed to be over by Christmas, but went on and on and on for years, killing 9 million people. The 2014 war, if its starts in earnest, will be over in one week, maybe less, and could kill a 100 million people depending on how many nuclear reactors break open and how many nuclear missiles are launched.”

He adds: “The 1914 war was called ‘the war to end all wars.’ The 2014 war will be that.”

soldaten - soldiers accounts of rape, murder, and genocide

Spiegel | The public discourse about war is characterized by contempt for the bloody sides of the military profession, a contempt to which soldiers themselves conform when they are asked to describe their experiences. But there is also another view of war, one in which it is not only an endless nightmare, but also a great adventure that some soldiers later remember as the best time of their life.

In World War II, 18 million men, or more than 40 percent of the male population of the German Reich, served with Germany's military, the Wehrmacht, and the Waffen-SS. Hardly any other segment of time has been as carefully studied in academia as the six years that began with Germany's invasion of neighboring Poland in September 1939 and ended with the total capitulation of the German Reich in May 1945.

Even historians find it difficult to keep track of the literature on the deadliest conflict in human history. The monumental "Germany and the Second World War," which was completed three years ago by the Military History Research Institute in Potsdam near Berlin and is seen as the standard German work on the war, encompasses 10 volumes alone.

Every battle in this monstrous struggle for control over Europe has its fixed place in the historical narrative today, as does, of course, the horrible violence that left 60 million dead around the world, including the suffering of the civilian population, the murder of the Jews and the partisan war in the East.

Sugarcoating Reality
But how the soldiers experienced the war, how the constant presence of death and violence changed them, what they felt and feared, but also enjoyed -- all of this tends to be marginalized in historical accounts. History was long suspicious of the subjective view of the events it considers, preferring to stick to verifiable dates and facts.

But this also has to do with the incompleteness of sources. Military letters, reports by contemporary witnesses or memoirs provide a sugarcoated version of reality. The recipients of these personal accounts were the wives and families of soldiers or the broader public. Descriptions of the daily business of war, in which soldiers just happened to massacre the residents of a village or "brush" a few girls, as rape was called in the troops' jargon, had no place in these accounts.

It isn't just that the recipients' expectations stood in the way of soldiers providing truthful accounts of what had actually happened -- the time that had passed since the war also distorted the soldiers' views of their experiences. In other words, anyone who wants to obtain an accurate picture of how soldiers see a war must gain access to them and gain their trust as early as possible, so that they can speak openly without the fear of being called to account afterwards.

What already seems hardly feasible for current military operations like the war in Afghanistan is nearly impossible when it comes to an event that happened so long ago as World War II. Nevertheless, two German historians have managed to produce precisely such a documentary of perceptions of the war using live historical recordings.

In Their Own Words

The material that historian Sönke Neitzel uncovered in British and American archives is nothing short of sensational. While researching the submarine war in the Atlantic in 2001, he discovered the transcripts of covertly recorded conversations between German officers in which they talked about their wartime experiences with an unprecedented degree of openness. The deeper Neitzel dug into the archives, the more material he found. In the end, he and social psychologist Harald Welzer analyzed a total of 150,000 pages of source material. The result is a newly published book with the simple title of "Soldaten" ("Soldiers"), published by S. Fischer Verlag. The volume has the potential to change our view of the war.

The recordings, which were made using special equipment that the Allies used to secretly listen in on conversations between German prisoners of war in their cells starting in 1939, offer an inside view of World War II. In doing so, they destroy once and for the myth of a "clean" Wehrmacht.

In "Soldiers," which is subtitled "Transcripts of Fighting, Killing and Dying," the soldiers talk about their views of the enemy and their own leaders, discuss the details of combat missions and trade astonishingly detailed accounts of the atrocities they both witnessed and committed.

Joe Biden Indisputably The Worst President In U.S. History

caitlinjohstone |  Antiwar libertarian hero Scott Horton has a viral tweet going around which reads simply, “Biden’s refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history.”

Biden's refusal to attempt to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the greatest scandal in American political history.

— Scott Horton (@scotthortonshow) May 5, 2022

Kind of smacks you in the face, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen anyone put it quite like that before, but if you think about it, how could it not be true?

It’s just a simple fact that the Biden administration is actually hindering diplomatic efforts to negotiate an end to this war, and that it has refused to provide Ukraine with any kind of diplomatic negotiating power regarding the possible rollback of sanctions and other US measures to help secure peace. Washington’s top diplomats have consistently been conspicuously absent from any kind of dialogue with their counterparts in Moscow.

Statements from the administration in fact indicate that they expect this war to drag on for a long time, making it abundantly clear that a swift end to minimize the death and destruction is not just uninteresting but undesirable for the US empire. Ukrainian media report that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Zelensky on behalf of NATO powers that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”

And this isn’t just another war. This is a proxy war being waged by one of the world’s two top nuclear forces against the world’s other top nuclear force. This is more serious than Iraq. It is more serious than Vietnam. It is more serious than any US war that has happened in the lifetime of anyone likely to be reading these words, because Russia has increasingly valid reasons to believe its very existence as a nation is being threatened. This is therefore a war that could very easily result in the death of everyone on earth.

The US Secretary of “Defense” has openly said that America’s goal is to “weaken” Russia in this war. Biden himself has made statements which can only be interpreted as calls for regime change in Moscow. US officials have been leaking to the press claims that US intelligence has directly facilitated the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of a Russian war ship.

The imperial political/media class are not even denying that this is a US proxy war anymore. In an alarmingly rapid pivot from the mass media’s earlier position that calling this a proxy war is merely an “accusation” promoted solely by Russia, we’re now seeing the use of that term becoming more and more common in authorized news outlets. The New Yorker came right out and declared that the US is in “a full proxy war with Russia” the other day, and US congressman Seth Moulton recently told Fox News that the US is at war with Russia through a proxy.

“At the end of the day, we’ve got to realize we’re at war, and we’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians,” Moulton said. “We’re fundamentally at war, although it’s somewhat through proxy, with Russia. And it’s important that we win.”

 

Tigrayans WERE The Most Formidable Fighters On The African Continent (REDUX Originally Posted 11/27/21)

NC |  There’s a simple lesson here: Tigrayans are the bulk of combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance. They weren’t supposed to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896, either–or the Ethiopian Derg in the 1980s. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”

One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one outside TPLF circles seems to have admitted to themselves how much of the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic Tigrayans. Admitting that would be politically unwise, especially in Ethiopia. Officially, Ethiopia is a federal, multi-ethnic state in which all ethnic groups are equal. But that’s a polite fiction. The Ethiopian state is the product of 19th-c. conquests by the “Habesha,” which is what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, call themselves. Ethiopia was created by Habesha armies pushing south and east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples who became Ethiopian citizens, but had very little share in ruling the country.

The real struggle for power was always between the two Habesha peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara. Since Menelik II moved the capital southward to Shewa, the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two groups. Amhara are a much bigger group, for starters. Tigrayans are only about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%.

But after the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed the Derg in the late 20th c., it was the Tigrayans of the TPLF who really ruled Ethiopia. Their domination was so clear that the TPLF tried to minimize their power, dutifully talking about their multi-ethnic coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). No one was fooled; it was the TPLF who had the power in Ethiopia.

The TPLF leader Meles Zenawi was the ultimate power in the country all through the first two decades of this century. Zenawi knew that the TPLF was so much better organized than the other members of the EPRDF coalition that he and his fellow Tigrayans could let the EPRDF make a show of ethnic equality while keeping Tigrayan control. Henri IV went through the motions of converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias from other ethnic groups share the credit.”

Zenawi’s PR campaign worked so well that Ethiopians forgot the hard truth that it was the Tigrayans who had the real combat power.

The Tigrayans’ only rival in terms of military power was the Eritrean army (EDF.) The “Eritrean” label made people forget that the EDF is also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.

That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans are the most formidable people in the Horn.

The Tigrayans Are The Most Formidable People On The African Continent

NC |  There’s a simple lesson here: Tigrayans are the bulk of combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance. They weren’t supposed to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896, either–or the Ethiopian Derg in the 1980s. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”

One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one outside TPLF circles seems to have admitted to themselves how much of the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic Tigrayans. Admitting that would be politically unwise, especially in Ethiopia. Officially, Ethiopia is a federal, multi-ethnic state in which all ethnic groups are equal. But that’s a polite fiction. The Ethiopian state is the product of 19th-c. conquests by the “Habesha,” which is what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, call themselves. Ethiopia was created by Habesha armies pushing south and east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples who became Ethiopian citizens, but had very little share in ruling the country.

The real struggle for power was always between the two Habesha peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara. Since Menelik II moved the capital southward to Shewa, the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two groups. Amhara are a much bigger group, for starters. Tigrayans are only about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%.

But after the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed the Derg in the late 20th c., it was the Tigrayans of the TPLF who really ruled Ethiopia. Their domination was so clear that the TPLF tried to minimize their power, dutifully talking about their multi-ethnic coalition, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). No one was fooled; it was the TPLF who had the power in Ethiopia.

The TPLF leader Meles Zenawi was the ultimate power in the country all through the first two decades of this century. Zenawi knew that the TPLF was so much better organized than the other members of the EPRDF coalition that he and his fellow Tigrayans could let the EPRDF make a show of ethnic equality while keeping Tigrayan control. Henri IV went through the motions of converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias from other ethnic groups share the credit.”

Zenawi’s PR campaign worked so well that Ethiopians forgot the hard truth that it was the Tigrayans who had the real combat power.

The Tigrayans’ only rival in terms of military power was the Eritrean army (EDF.) The “Eritrean” label made people forget that the EDF is also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.

That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans are the most formidable people in the Horn.

The American People Want No Part Of The Blob's Failed War On Russia

 

businessinsider | A new poll suggests that many Americans are growing weary as the US government continues its support of Ukraine in its war with Russia and want to see diplomatic efforts to end the war if aid is to continue. 

According to a poll conducted by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Data for Progress, 57% of likely voters strongly or somewhat support the US pursuing diplomatic negotiations as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine, even if it requires Ukraine making compromises with Russia. Just 32% of respondents were strongly or somewhat opposed to this.

And nearly half of the respondents (47%) said they only support the continuation of US military aid to Ukraine if the US is involved in ongoing diplomacy to end the war, while 41% said they support the continuation of US military aid to Ukraine whether the US is involved in ongoing diplomacy or not.

The Biden administration and Congress need to do more diplomatically to help end the war, according to 49% of likely voters, while 37% said they have done enough in this regard, the poll showed.

"Americans recognize what many in Washington don't: Russia's war in Ukraine is more likely to end at the negotiating table than on the battlefield. And there is a brewing skepticism of Washington's approach to this war, which has been heavy on tough talk and military aid, but light on diplomatic strategy and engagement," said Trita Parsi, executive vice president at the Quincy Institute. 

"'As long as it takes' isn't a strategy, it's a recipe for years of disastrous and destructive war — conflict that will likely bring us no closer to the goal of securing a prosperous, independent Ukraine. US leaders need to show their work: explain to the American people how you plan to use your considerable diplomatic leverage to bring this war to an end," Parsi added.

The poll found close to half of likely US voters (48%) somewhat or strongly oppose the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if long-term global economic hardship, including in the US, occurs. Meanwhile, the poll showed that only four-in-10 Americans somewhat or strongly support the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if this occurs. 

The poll also found 58% of Americans somewhat somewhat or strongly oppose the US providing aid to Ukraine at current levels if there are higher gas prices and a higher cost of goods in the US, while just 33% somewhat or strongly support continuing aid if this occurs. 

A majority of poll respondents (57%) also said that they think the Russia-Ukraine war will end with a negotiated peace settlement between the two countries, while 61% said they believe the war has impacted them financially on some level.

President Joe Biden has warned that US sanctions on Russia could hurt the US economy, but he has maintained that supporting and defending Ukraine is worth the cost. He's framed the war as a battle between democracy and autocracy.

"Every day, Ukrainians pay with their lives, and they fight along — and the atrocities that the Russians are engaging in are just beyond the pale. And the cost of the fight is not cheap, but caving to aggression is even more costly," Biden said in May. "That's why we're staying in this."

The US has provided over $15 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia launched its unprovoked war in late February. The Ukrainian armed forces have received numerous weapons packages from the US and other partner nations, packages that have included anti-tank missiles, air-defense systems, and long-range rocket artillery that have allowed Ukrainian troops to not only halt Russian advances but even drive Russian forces back.

While Western support has aided Ukraine's war efforts, recent data indicates there are growing concerns about what further support without diplomacy and a continuation of this brutal conflict could mean not just for Russia and Ukraine, but for other countries as well.

"Policymakers are far too sanguine about the risks posed by an indefinite continuation of this war, even minimizing the dangers posed by Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats," said Marcus Stanley, advocacy director at the Quincy Institute.

"Americans largely agree that efforts to strengthen Ukraine's hand on the battlefield need to be accompanied by efforts to secure lasting peace at the negotiating table. However, as Congress approaches another vote to approve military aid to Ukraine this week, there's no sign Washington is exploring opportunities to seek a settlement that preserves and protects Ukraine's independence."

towards a world war III scenario

Globalresearch | The war on Libya is an integral part of the broader military agenda in the Middle East and Central Asia which until recently consisted of three distinct areas of conflict: Afghanistan and Pakistan (the AfPak War), Iraq, Palestine.

These four war theaters are interrelated. They are part of a broader region of conflict, which extends from North Africa and the Middle East, engulfing a large part of the Mediterranean basin, to China's Western frontier with Afghanistan, and Northern Pakistan.

The Battle for Oil

More than 60 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves lie in Muslim lands. “The Battle for Oil” waged by the US-NATO-Israel military alliance requires the demonization of the inhabitants of those countries which possess these vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

Iran possesses ten percent of global oil and gas reserves. The US is the first and foremost military and nuclear power in the world, but it possesses less than two percent of global oil and gas reserves.

The US-led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region.

Demonization is applied to an enemy which possesses three-quarters of the world’s oil reserves. “Axis of evil”, “rogue states”, “failed nations”, “Islamic terrorists”: demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America’s “war on terror”. They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.

The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. The oil fields are encircled by NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN “peacekeeping” operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea deployed as part of the “war on terrorism”.

The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under “free market” supervision. This control also extends to strategic oil and gas pipeline corridors (e.g. Afghanistan).

Demonization is a psy-op, used to sway public opinion and build a consensus in favor of war. Psychological warfare is directly sponsored by the Pentagon and the US intelligence apparatus. It is not limited to assassinating or executing the rulers of Muslim countries; it extends to entire populations. It also targets Muslims in Western Europe and North America. It purports to break national consciousness and the ability to resist the invader. It denigrates Islam. It creates social divisions. It is intended to divide national societies and ultimately trigger “civil war”.

Is a World War III Scenario Unfolding?

The US and its NATO allies are preparing to launch a nuclear war directed against both Iran and North Korea with devastating consequences. This military adventure in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity. While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality.

The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

It is not Iran and North Korea which are a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.

Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. War preparations to attack Iran are in an advanced state of readiness. Hi-tech weapons systems including nuclear warheads are fully deployed.

This military adventure has been on the Pentagon’s drawing board since the mid-1990s: first Iraq, then Iran, according to a declassified 1995 US Central Command document.

Escalation is part of the military agenda. While Iran is the next target together with Syria and Lebanon, this strategic military deployment also threatens North Korea, China and Russia.

Incapacitated, Incompetent, Impotent - The Reasons, The Reasons That We're Here...,

johnhelmer  |  In the history of the world wars, or the last century of wars in Europe, or the wars the US has waged since 1945, it has never happened that what the President of the US says, and what the head of the front-line country which the US is fighting to defend says, have mattered less than what Joseph Biden and Vladimir Zelensky say now.

The reason is that no US president running a war has ever been as incapacitated in command and control as Biden, nor as impotent among his own officials as Zelensky. Rule by crock and rule by stooge aren’t rule at all.

US public opinion polls measuring Biden’s job approval rating demonstrate that most American voters already realize this. The growing spread between American voters’ disapproval and approval of Biden’s performance since the Russian operation began on February 24 indicates also that this understanding is growing.

But this isn’t anti-war sentiment, let alone an American stop-the-war movement. At present US officials headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken aim to fight the war to the capitulation or destruction of Russia; they will fight to the last Ukrainian to achieve this goal; they will negotiate no end-of-war terms;  they are not influenced or constrained by American public opinion or votes. Not yet.

Zelensky has declared he is in favour of negotiations to end the war; he has declared he is opposed to the terms which President Vladimir Putin and the Russian leadership have made clear, long before the war began and ever since, were the casus belli, the objectives for which they are fighting. The reason Zelensky regularly contradicts himself is that his power – his survival in office – depends on the Galician faction headquartered around Lvov, whose  only occupation is permanent warfighting, and whose only income flows from the US and the NATO alliance. They are as committed as Blinken to operating the Ukraine as a gun platform targeted at Russia; the Galicians will destroy all of eastern Ukraine as they withdraw, in order to keep firing. The Germans thought and did as much on the same battlefields eighty years ago.

Biden, Blinken, Zelensky, and the Galicians also hate Russians with more racial virulence than has ever been shown by Americans towards a European enemy in the history of American wars.

Race hatred towards Russians now far exceeds American public opinion measured towards Germans during World War I or World War II.  It is only matched, according to the US War Department’s surveys of American soldiers, by hatred towards the Japanese. During that war, six times the number of GIs polled said they “would really like to kill” a Japanese soldier as said the same for a German. When combat veterans were asked “what would you like to see happen to the Japanese and the Germans after the war”, almost one in two GIs from the Pacific theatre supported wiping out the entire Japanese nation; one in eight from the European theatre said that of Germany. During the Vietnam War, US race hatred for the Vietnamese was even less.

If these lessons are true, or if the commands in Moscow and in Washington believe them, what end to the war can be negotiated short of the destruction of one side or the other?

The simpleton’s conclusion is none – there can be no end to this war unless the Ukraine is destroyed, or Russia, or Europe, or the US. How simple-minded is that?

why there is no peace on earth

davidstockman |  After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

The world had descended into what had been a 77-year global war, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into the world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.

To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

I have elaborated more fully on this proposition in “The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War“, but the seminal point cannot be gainsaid. The end of the cold war meant world peace was finally at hand, yet 25 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.

In fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation’s capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war; they ensure endless waste on armaments and the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st century high tech warfare and the terrorist blowback it inherently generates among those upon which the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.

So there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-year war ended. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.

So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1990 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night.

In fact, during the past 25 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.

Back then a few months after the slaughter had been unleashed, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, singing and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell.

The truthful answer is that there was no good reason. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.

The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time for the same reasons. Historians can readily name the culprits from 100 years ago, such as the German general staff’s plan for a lightening mobilization and strike on the western front called the Schlieffen Plan or Britain’s secret commitments to France to guard the North Sea while the latter covered the Mediterranean.

Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastisized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.

the secret back story to russia and ukraine that americans never learned in school

zerohedge | America Launched the Cold War Even Before World War II Had Ended 

Joseph Stalin and the Soviets were key in helping the U.S. to defeat the Nazis.  20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis in World War II.

And yet the U.S. started competing against Stalin – and treating him like an enemy – before WWII had even ended.

Specifically, dropping atomic bombs on Japan had a duel purpose: defeating the Japanese, and sending a message to Stalin that the U.S. was in charge.

History.com notes:

In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective …. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.

New Scientist reports:

The US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 was meant to kick-start the Cold War rather than end the Second World War, according to two nuclear historians who say they have new evidence backing the controversial theory.

Causing a fission reaction in several kilograms of uranium and plutonium and killing over 200,000 people 60 years ago was done more to impress the Soviet Union than to cow Japan, they say. And the US President who took the decision, Harry Truman, was culpable, they add.

[The conventional explanation of using the bombs to end the war and save lives] is disputed by Kuznick and Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, US.

New studies of the US, Japanese and Soviet diplomatic archives suggest that Truman’s main motive was to limit Soviet expansion in Asia, Kuznick claims. Japan surrendered because the Soviet Union began an invasion a few days after the Hiroshima bombing, not because of the atomic bombs themselves, he says.

According to an account by Walter Brown, assistant to then-US secretary of state James Byrnes, Truman agreed at a meeting three days before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima that Japan was “looking for peace”. Truman was told by his army generals, Douglas Macarthur and Dwight Eisenhower, and his naval chief of staff, William Leahy, that there was no military need to use the bomb.

“Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan,” says Selden.

John Pilger points out:

The US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.”

University of Maryland professor of political economy – and former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State – Gar Alperovitz says:

Increasing numbers of historians now recognize the United States did not need to use the atomic bomb to end the war against Japan in 1945. Moreover, this essential judgment was expressed by the vast majority of top American military leaders in all three services in the years after the war ended: Army, Navy and Army Air Force. Nor was this the judgment of “liberals,” as is sometimes thought today. In fact, leading conservatives were far more outspoken in challenging the decision as unjustified and immoral than American liberals in the years following World War II.

Instead [of allowing other options to end the war, such as letting the Soviets attack Japan with ground forces], the United States rushed to use two atomic bombs at almost exactly the time that an August 8 Soviet attack had originally been scheduled: Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. The timing itself has obviously raised questions among many historians. The available evidence, though not conclusive, strongly suggests that the atomic bombs may well have been used in part because American leaders “preferred”—as Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Martin Sherwin has put it—to end the war with the bombs rather than the Soviet attack. Impressing the Soviets during the early diplomatic sparring that ultimately became the Cold War also appears likely to have been a significant factor.

The most illuminating perspective, however, comes from top World War II American military leaders. The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that … most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.

Shortly before his death General George C. Marshall quietly defended the decision, but for the most part he is on record as repeatedly saying that it was not a military decision, but rather a political one.

General Dwight Eisenhower said, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary” and “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Ukraine Is Crawling With Western Special Forces And Spies

caitlinjohnstone | "American intelligence agencies have less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military, its planned operations and its successes and failures," NYT told us earlier this month. "U.S. officials said the Ukrainian government gave them few classified briefings or details about their operational plans, and Ukrainian officials acknowledged that they did not tell the Americans everything."

It seems a bit unlikely that US intelligence agencies would have a hard time getting information about what's happening in a country where they themselves are physically located. Moon of Alabama theorized at the time that this ridiculous "We don't know what's happening in our own proxy war" line was being pushed to give the US plausible deniability about Ukraine's failures on the battlefield, which have only gotten worse since then.

So why are they telling us all this now? Well, it could be that we're being paced into accepting an increasingly direct role of the US and its allies in Ukraine.

The other day Antiwar's Daniel Larison tweeted, "Hawks in April: Don't call it a proxy war! Hawks in May: Of course it's a proxy war! Hawks in June: It's not their war, it's our war!"

This is indeed exactly how it happened. Back in April President Biden told the press the idea that this is a proxy war between the US and Russia was "not true" and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said "It's not, this is clearly Ukraine's fight" when asked if this is a proxy war. The mainstream media were still framing this claim as merely an "accusation" by the Russian government, and empire spinmeisters were regularly admonishing anyone who used that term on the grounds that it deprives Ukrainians of their "agency".

Then May rolled around and all of a sudden we had The New Yorker unequivocally telling us that the US is in "a full proxy war with Russia" and hawks like US congressman Seth Moulton saying things like, "We’re not just at war to support the Ukrainians. We’re fundamentally at war, although somewhat through a proxy, with Russia, and it’s important that we win.”

And now here in June we've got war hawks like Max Boot coming right out and saying that this is actually America's war, and it is therefore important for the US to drastically escalate the war in order to hand the Russians "devastating losses".

So the previously unthinkable idea that the US is at war with Russia has been gradually normalized, with the heat turned up so slowly that the frog doesn't notice it's being boiled alive. If that idea can be sufficiently normalized, public consent for greater escalations will likely be forthcoming, even if those escalations are extremely psychotic. 

Back in March when I said the only "agency" Ukraine has in this conflict is the Central Intelligence kind, empire loyalists jumped down my throat. They couldn't believe I was saying something so evil and wrong. Now they've been told that the Central Intelligence Agency is indeed conducting operations and directing intelligence on the ground in Ukraine, but I somehow doubt that this will stir any self-reflection on their part.

 

if europe is a culture of peace, why nato?

aljazeera | It is undoubtedly true that the greatest unacknowledged achievement of the European Union is to establish "a culture of peace" within its regional enclosure for the 68 years since 1944. This has meant not only the absence of war in Europe, but also the absence of "war talk", threats, crises, and sanctions - with the single important exception of the NATO Kosovo War of 1999 that was part of the fallout from the breakup of former Yugoslavia. This legally controversial intervention was undertaken by the US-led alliance to achieve several goals: to rescue Albanian Kosovars from a feared imminent humanitarian catastrophe at the hands of their oppressive Serb occupiers; to facilitate the de facto independence of Kosovo from Serbian rule; to demonstrate the post-Cold War viability of NATO; and to reinforce the victory claims of the 1991 Gulf War, thereby showing that the West could win wars with minimal casualties on its side due to a recently acquired technological ability to shift the human burdens of war almost entirely to the adversary.

The contrast with the first half of the 20th century is stark when Europe seemed definitely the global cockpit of the war system in the East-West struggle for global supremacy. Tens of millions of Western soldiers and civilians died in response to the two German attempts by force of arms to gain a bigger role within this European nexus of geopolitics, as organised in the West. Germany challenged the established order, not only by recourse to massive aggressive wars in the form of World Wars I and II, but also by establishing a political infrastructure that gave rise in the 1930s to the violently genocidal ideology of Nazism, the most diabolical rendering of fascism.

'Culture of peace'

Even during the Cold War decades, Europe was not really at peace, but always at the brink of an unimaginably devastating third world war.

For the more than four decades of the Cold War there existed a constant threat of a war fought with nuclear weapons, a conflict that could have produced the scourge of apocalyptic warfare resulting from provocative US-led deployments of nuclear weapons or inflammatory Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe, or even from the periodically tense relations in the divided city of Berlin, or due to such mundane causes as human error and technological accident as with the misidentification of innocent behaviour as hostile.

Russia warns US over missile-defence shield

Also, to some extent the Soviet Union, with its totalitarian variant of state socialism, was as much European as it was Asian, and thus to a degree the Cold War was being fought within Europe, although its violent dimensions were prudently "outsourced" to the global periphery.

Despite the current plans to surround Russia with "defensive" missile systems, purportedly to construct a shield to stop Iranian missiles, there seems little threat of any war being fought within European space, and even a war-threatening diplomatic confrontation seems improbable at this point.

In many respects, the EU has incubated a culture of peace in its homeland, which although partial and precarious, has been transformative for Europeans - even if this most daring post-Westphalia experiment in regional integration and sovereignty has been wrongly assessed. It is almost always evaluated from an economistic perspective best appreciated by examining trade and investment statistics, monetary union, and regional economic management.

why did truman really fire macarthur?

Video - MacArthur gets fired.

HNN | The obscure history of nuclear weapons and the Korean War provides the answer. The media claim that North Korea is trying to obtain and use weapons of mass destruction. Yet the United States, which opposes this strategy, has used or threatened to use such weapons in northeast Asia since the 1940s, when it did drop atomic bombs on Japan.

The forgotten war -- the Korean war of 1950-53 -- might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States' air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons (1), and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. Yet this episode is mostly unknown even to historians, let alone to the average citizen, and it has never been mentioned during the past decade of media analysis of the North Korean nuclear problem.

Korea is also assumed to have been a limited war, but its prosecution bore a strong resemblance to the air war against Imperial Japan in the second world war, and was often directed by the same US military leaders. The atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been examined from many different perspectives, yet the incendiary air attacks against Japanese and Korean cities have received much less attention. The US post-Korean war air power and nuclear strategy in northeast Asia are even less well understood; yet these have dramatically shaped North Korean choices and remain a key factor in its national security strategy.

Napalm was invented at the end of the second world war. It became a major issue during the Vietnam war, brought to prominence by horrific photos of injured civilians. Yet far more napalm was dropped on Korea and with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than North Vietnam. In 2003 I participated in a conference with US veterans of the Korean war. During a discussion about napalm, a survivor who lost an eye in the Changjin (in Japanese, Chosin) Reservoir battle said it was indeed a nasty weapon -- but "it fell on the right people." (Ah yes, the "right people" -- a friendly-fire drop on a dozen US soldiers.) He continued: "Men all around me were burned. They lay rolling in the snow. Men I knew, marched and fought with begged me to shoot them . . . It was terrible. Where the napalm had burned the skin to a crisp, it would be peeled back from the face, arms, legs . . . like fried potato chips." (2)

Soon after that incident, George Barrett of the New York Times had found "a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war" in a village near Anyang, in South Korea: "The inhabitants throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, 50 boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No 3,811,294 for a $2.98 'bewitching bed jacket -- coral'." US Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of "sensationalised reporting," so it could be stopped. (3)

One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested "to have the following towns obliterated" by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: "fired 11 villages." (4) Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.

In a major strike on the industrial city of Hungnam on 31 July 1950, 500 tons of ordnance was delivered through clouds by radar; the flames rose 200-300 feet into the air. The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. (5) Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.

Air force sources delighted in this relatively new weapon, joking about communist protests and misleading the press about their "precision bombing." They also liked to point out that civilians were warned of the approaching bombers by leaflet, although all pilots knew that these were ineffective. (6) This was a mere prelude to the obliteration of most North Korean towns and cities after China entered the war.

LBJ Not Seeking A Second Term Was THE Defining Moment In Contemporary American Politics

newstatesman |  The tendency to treat political struggles and disagreements as forms of conspiracy is not only a polarising feature of the current moment, but also, paradoxically, a stabilising one. American political development over the past several decades has not merely been divided into opposing camps, around, for example, questions of race and gender equality, reproductive rights, or gun ownership; it has also been locked into a dynamic of partisan competition that encourages threat inflation, yielding important contributions from both parties to expansively coercive institutions, in the name of collective security. From the early Cold War, US partisanship revolved around which party was better prepared to fight communism, leading to covert actions, proxy wars and full-scale military invasions, culminating in a disastrous, immoral war in Vietnam. By the 1970s, this morphed into a question of which party was tougher on crime – a policy orientation that delivered a regime of mass incarceration unprecedented in world history. The attacks of 9/11 raised the question of which party would keep the American “homeland” safe from foreign predators, leading to two more decades of fruitless war in the Middle East and west Asia, and a deportation delirium that has swept up millions. What if the banal revelation at the end of the US wars on communism, crime and terror is simply that Americans are their own worst enemies?

The spectre of civil war might be better understood as a metaphor for waning confidence in the (liberal) US empire. The breakdown of the “rules-based international order” as a regulative ideal is part of an attrition of what Raymond Geuss has called the “sheltered internal space of… Homo liberalis” fashioned during the post-1945 golden age of American pluralism, rising affluence, increasing tolerance and expanding civil rights. The “Great Society”, the name that was given to the effort to institute social democratic liberalism inside the US, and the civil rights revolution that made the country a formal multi-racial democracy for the first time in its history, was its high watermark. With the war in Vietnam raging, and the protests of impoverished black residents and rising crime roiling American cities, however, President Lyndon Johnson concluded that the US now faced a “war within our own boundaries”, before abdicating instead of pursuing a second full term. Americans have been talking about civil war ever since.

Why did the NGO borg pivot to niche identities? Because the cause of substantive black equality is so much harder than declaring the gender binary defunct through acts of bureaucratic stipulation and language change

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) July 15, 2022

In these same years, a conception of politics as civil war by other means captured the imagination of the modern US right on its ascent to power. The politician and GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater laid down the gauntlet in the 1960s with a famous declaration that “extremism in defence of liberty is no vice”. Ronald Reagan was his successful heir, rising to the presidency while declaring himself a “state’s righter” against an overweening federal government. Shrinking the welfare state would go hand in hand with expanding the carceral state: “running up the battle flag”, as Reagan put it, against a feral, drug-abusing, black “underclass”. In 1994, forging the first GOP majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in four decades, Newt Gingrich made these inner war analogies explicit. Our politics is a “war [that] has to be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true of civil wars”, he argued. “While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefield, nonetheless, it is a true civil war.” Trump’s “American carnage” was something of a belated echo.

The modern GOP has avidly fought Gingrich’s version of civil war at the ballot box and in the courts, leveraging counter-majoritarian institutions and using the individual states as laboratories for reactionary politics: advancing model legislation against public regulations; periodically mobbing local school boards; gerrymandering congressional districts; undermining public unions; funnelling federal spending on health, welfare and police via block grants to maximise state discretion; defending a right of foetal personhood that trumps a woman’s right to bodily autonomy; making it more difficult to register to vote and to cast a vote; stimulating white revanchism and moral outrage against expressions of public disorder and anti-normative behaviour at every opportunity.

In the process, they successfully captured the commanding heights of the judiciary, and have now successfully rolled back landmark, 50-year-old national civil rights gains: striking down federal voting-rights protections, ending a national right to abortion and overturning legal protections for criminal suspects in police custody. Winning two of the last five national presidential elections with a minority of the popular vote, and deploying the Senate filibuster during periods in the congressional minority, the GOP has pursued civil war by other means as a well-honed and effective strategy.

In the face of this challenge, it is difficult to judge the Democratic Party as anything more than a feckless, mildly recalcitrant partner. Over the past 40 years, it has alternatively sought to ratify, in gentler tones, GOP-driven projects and demands to lower corporate taxes, get tough on crime, end welfare as we know it, expand the ambit of deportation and sustain open-ended military authorisations. It has sought to placate vulnerable constituents with forms of symbolic recognition and modest regulatory action, often undergirded by weak executive authority and moral sentiment. It is the undeniably saner and more constructive of the two electoral options Americans are forced to choose between. But it also operates an effective pincer movement against alternatives further to the left that seek to transform skewed imbalances in the power of capital and labour, police authority and public safety. When constituents choose to fight, for example, against police abuse, or for labour rights, Democrats are missing in action, or else warning against unpopular opinions that will awaken the monster on the right. Forever counselling that we choose the lesser evil, they have instead grown habituated to living with the fox inside the chicken coop.

Iran: The Threat

Thomas Powers in the NY Review of Books brings yet further insight into the makings of WW-III. First the escalation in foreign policy, then the escalating resistance to this movement from within the Pentagon;

At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, "is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world's oil must pass on its way to market.

Keep in mind that the rising price of oil already threatens the world's economy. Iran also has a large army and deep ties to the population of Shiite coreligionists next door in Iraq. The American military already has its hands full with a hard-to-manage war in Iraq, and is proposing to send additional combat brigades to deal with a growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And yet with all these sound reasons for avoiding war with Iran, the United States for five years has repeatedly threatened it with military attack. These threats have lately acquired a new edge.

Whether the threats of massive escalation materialize, or not, the consequences to the American way of life are going to be pretty much indistinguishable.

With its time in power rapidly running out, the Bush administration is mired in two frustrating wars, stretched thin militarily, living on borrowed money, and exhausted intellectually. It would be hard to name a time when the United States faced a wider range of political problems, or had better reasons to avoid additional military entanglements. Bush and Cheney concede nothing of the kind, but promise "serious consequences" for continued Iranian defiance. It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon, where an insider told the reporter Seymour Hersh two years ago, "There is a war about the war going on inside the building." When the administration planned to add a third aircraft carrier group to the Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, the move was blocked by the then newly promoted chief of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who told friends that war with Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch."

Until his resignation in March, Fallon often contradicted and undermined the tough talk of the administration, speaking dismissively about the prospects of war with Iran. "Another war is just not where we want to go," he told the Financial Times. "This constant drumbeat of conflict...is not helpful and not useful," he said to al-Jazeera television. In recent months Fallon also traveled in Afghanistan and spoke at candid length with the military writer Thomas Barnett, who was working on an article for Esquire. When the article was ready to go to the printer Fallon invited an Esquire photographer to Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, to take his picture. War with Iran, yes or no, Barnett wrote, would "all come down to one man"—Fallon. The White House was not happy with Fallon's interference, Barnett reported. Washington rumor said Fallon's time was short. His removal, Barnett predicted, "may well mean that the president and vice-president intend to take military action against Iran before the end of this year...." A week after Barnett's piece appeared in Esquire, Gates announced that Fallon was retiring at his own request. The Esquire article had been the talk of the Pentagon nonstop; leaked stories were coming from all directions. Fallon wasn't just on his way out; Gates said he would be gone by the end of the month.

Fallon's open and outspoken resistance to the idea of war with Iran represents something new and extraordinary—maybe. It is too early to be sure. But beneath the surface of recent statements by Fallon, Gates, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, something large seems to be swelling up—resistance by the Pentagon to passive acceptance of a wider war. To see the shape of the conflict one must first accept the seriousness of both parties—the administration in making its threats to stop Iran's nuclear program, and Pentagon officials when they say a wider war would be practically difficult and strategically unnecessary.

This showdown—if it is truly taking place—has been a long time coming. Ten years ago a young Army major, H.R. McMaster, published a history of American escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. McMaster's argument, stripped to its core, was that against their own best judgment the joint chiefs passively acquiesced to White House pressure to expand the war. Johnson, with his eye on a second term, did not want to be the first American president to lose a war, and the joint chiefs did not want to run their careers aground. Despite the harshness of McMaster's conclusion his book was widely read in the Pentagon and made a deep impression on a generation of rising officers, many of them now of flag rank and in positions of responsibility.[*]

National bankruptcy with or without the reorganization and force majeure of world war is going to prove a wrenching and protracted period in the history of the republic no matter what.