John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MURRAY BREWSTER IN CBC NEWS

 

“Canadian-led peacekeeping mission in Ukraine ‘Plan B’ for Kyiv, official says

“For Ukraine, the preferred option would be a successful outcome to peace talks”

 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ukraine-canada-peacekeeping-1.5343320

 

The Minsk Agreement is ultimately the only way to end this conflict. Minsk says that the breakaway eastern region will rejoin Ukraine but with special status.

The region is completely Russian-speaking, and Ukraine’s last government tried removing rights of Russian-speakers. That’s what started the trouble. The situation somewhat resembles what anyone would expect from Quebec if Ottawa declared English as the language for education and other matters.

There never has been Russian state involvement there except for a great deal of humanitarian and other assistance since Ukraine, under the last government, cut the region off from almost everything, including pensions. Tales of a Russian invasion in Ukraine are simply not true. They are disinformation fantasies. Russia has declined to accept the region into the Russian Federation, despite being asked by them to do so.

Look at what America has been doing in Venezuela, and you will have some idea of what it did in Ukraine in 2014, to topple an elected government whose only sin was good relations with Russia. All the many problems of Ukraine come out of that fact.

The coup destroyed Ukraine’s economy, destroyed important long-term relationships with Russia (the two societies have a closely entwined history going back nearly a thousand years), generated civil war in eastern Ukraine, saw the rise of extremist right-wing forces who now play a role in its government, and put in place a government, Poroshenko’s, which most people there regarded as palpably corrupt.

Russia has always supported the Minsk Agreement for peace. It helped create it. Putin has repeated his complete support many times. Forces inside Ukraine are what prevent that happening. That’s where outside pressure is needed, but none comes. American anti-Russian interests are central to Ukraine’s position. After all, the coup was encouraged precisely to create threatening instability along a major Russian border. Does anything good ever come out of such actions?

Hopes were that Zelensky, a reasonable man who speaks both Russian and Ukrainian, would implement Minsk, but he has not been able to do so. Why? There are several extreme right-wing armed organizations in Ukraine, most notably the Azov Battalion, who intimidate Zelensky and make sure any orders he issues concerning military occupation of certain positions near the breakaway Donbass (eastern Ukraine) region are simply not followed. Minsk requires a series of steps to be taken in preparation for its full implementation, and the Azov Battalion-types are not prepared to allow those steps.

Ukraine’s State-Sponsored “Azov Battalion” Expands Use of Nazi-Inspired Symbols

The Azov Battalion was incorporated, inappropriately, into Ukraine’s national army by the last government, much like having one of those weird private right-wing American militias of the 1970s (eg, the armed Minutemen) incorporated into the American army, thus furnishing them with resources and support. It is one of the groups used in the violent coup of 2014, and it stands ready to repeat its activity if Zeleskey departs from its demands. They make compromise almost impossible.

It is important to understand that the 2014 coup was financed by the United States ($5 billion was allocated), something we know from the overheard words of a high former State Department official, Victoria Nuland. All the Joe and Hunter Biden controversy in our news recently stems from the fact that Joe Biden acted at the time as an American proconsul sent by Obama to the new coup government in Ukraine, offering certain help and making certain demands.

By the way, there are photos of Joe Biden in Ukraine shaking hands warmly with the commander of the Azov Battalion.

It is hard to see a sensible or useful place for Canadian peacekeepers here, but we have a foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, who is very responsive to American policy aims and warmly supported the troubled, coup-installed government of Ukraine that ruled before Zelensky while making many Russophobic remarks.

 

NOTE:

Joe Biden has a long history of scoring presents and privileges for his family in the course of carrying out various government duties – hence, Hunter Biden’s extraordinary board appointment in Ukraine with an income of $50,000 per month in a company and a country he knows absolutely nothing about.

Saying that does not put me in Trump’s camp at all. Trump is exactly the same kind of sleazy operator. He has his daughter and son-in-law sitting at desks in the White House. While they are not receiving government salaries, they are in extremely sensitive positions with top-level security clearance while receiving huge private incomes from Trump and Kushner family enterprises, something I think most people would regard as a serious conflict of interest.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

 

Information reported from northeastern Syria starkly displays the utter cynicism and cruelty of America’s position there.

The commander of [American partner] Syrian Kurdish forces in the area has apparently angrily told the United States, “You are not willing to protect [my] people, but you do not want another force to come and protect us. You have sold us. This is immoral.”

“I need to know if you are capable of protecting my people, of stopping these [Turkish] bombs falling on us or not. I need to know, because if you’re not, I need to make a deal with Russia and [Syria] now and invite their planes to protect this region.”

The Turkish invasion has already killed many hundreds of Syrian Kurds. The Kurds are fighting the invading Turks, but the Kurds are comparatively lightly armed, and Turkey is coming on with fighter planes, tanks, and heavy artillery.

Several vicious incidents are reported of Turkish irregular groups shooting unarmed Kurds, prisoners and a well-known woman politician.

American forces sit back watching while the very people they have been working with, the Syrian Kurds, are bombed and shot by an American ally, Turkey, in an effort to make Turkey happy.

Turkey is being allowed to do just enough killing of Syrian Kurds to reassure itself about its own border security, because, after all, Turkey is a key ally in NATO and one with whom there have been some recent unpleasant disagreements, but don’t let the Syrian Kurds turn to the government of Syria and its Russian ally to fight against invasion from Turkey.

After all, America’s plan for hiving off this chunk of someone else’s country – to weaken Syria for Israel’s benefit, the main purpose of the long ugly proxy war killing half a million in Syria – are being changed only to the extent that a big slice of northeastern Syria will become effectively part of Turkey.

The various public threats the United States has been making against Turkey and sanctions it is calling for are intended only to limit the depth of Turkey’s invasion, not to stop it. They serve also as a public relations exercise so as to not seem to be doing what you are in fact doing.

Trump gets to make noise for the hometown election crowd about withdrawing some American forces while in fact doing virtually nothing, moving a few troops around in order to let Turkey come in and do some killing.

The Syrian Kurds, with whom the United States has been working illegally inside Syria, and whom it refers to as an “ally,” are left to absorb a Turkish invasion of their homes while being told not to seek help elsewhere.

Although it is hard to have too much sympathy for the Syrian Kurds because they have in fact betrayed what was their own country, Syria, by working with America to help break it up.

Such are the glorious realities of America’s fight for freedom in the Middle East.

 

NOTE:

I tend to doubt Trump will have much political success here because his belly-over-the-belt political base, the ones who wear red MAGA hats on shopping trips to Walmart, the border-wall crowd, are not the same people who supported him to get out of the Middle East wars.

He still has done nothing real about America’s vicious, cynical wars.

 

LATE DEVELOPMENT:

Later, the same day I wrote this piece, we have from Aljazeera:

“Syrian government troops will deploy along the border with Turkey to help Kurdish fighters fend off Ankara’s military offensive in northern Syria, the Kurdish-led administration in the region has announced.”

“The move, announced on Sunday, represents a major shift in alliance for Syria’s Kurds and came hours after the United States said it was withdrawing its troops from the area to avoid getting caught in the middle of the fast-escalating conflict.”

John Chuckman

 

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY TOM O’CONNOR IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“One-Third of US Backs Nuclear War on North Korea, Killing One Million”

 

A disturbing new polling study, sponsored in part by “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” found that fully one-third of Americans would support a pre-emptive American nuclear attack on North Korea, even when it involved killing a million innocent people.

Researchers said results confirmed earlier studies showing America “exhibits only limited aversion to nuclear weapons use and a shocking willingness to support the killing of enemy civilians.”

It’s hard to know what to say about such a result, except there are an awful lot of American cold-blooded killers.

But we should recall that we are talking about the only country ever to actually use nuclear weapons. It used them twice, on cities filled with civilians, cities determined to possess no military value as targets.

It was terror in the purest sense of the word, although perhaps no more so than the horrific fire-bombing of Japanese cities conducted by General Curtis LeMay previous to the atomic attack. There was a point reached in America’s bombing campaign when planners not only had no “primary targets” left standing in Japan but ran out of “secondary targets.”

The atomic attack came despite the now well-known fact that Japan had sent out serious feelers about surrendering, asking only that they be allowed to keep their emperor. America rejected that, demanding unconditional surrender.

Of course, after the atomic bombs, America got what it wanted, unconditional surrender. It then allowed Japan to keep its emperor. So, all those people died and America set its terrible precedent over American pride. Japan’s earlier secret feelers about surrender do put the lie to America’s widely-accepted excuse about all its soldiers who would have died invading the Japanese homeland.

LeMay in the early 1960s served as Air Force Chief of Staff and participated in serious planning for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, plans presented to President Kennedy, who afterward told an associate that he left the briefing sick to his stomach.

LeMay was a big advocate of massive bombing in Vietnam. He also advocated bombing the Soviet soldiers present in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, completely unaware that they had been armed with a number of tactical nuclear weapons. Had his advice been taken, there almost certainly would have been a nuclear war in 1962.

He later briefly pursued a political career, running for vice president under notorious segregationist, George Wallace, in 1968.  Such was the kind of man who held a high Pentagon position during the Cold War.

LeMay certainly wasn’t unique, either inside or outside the Pentagon. It is simply a fact that there never has been any notable American shame or regret over its use of atomic weapons.

Indeed, we have the rather unpleasant fact that the Enola Gay, a WWII B-29 bomber used to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on a city, not long ago was carefully restored and put on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington where it is viewed by millions.

This is, after all, a society that has been literally immersed in murderous colonial wars since WWII. Estimates range from about 8 million to 20 million killed aboard – there are even higher estimates – with not one of those wars having anything to do with America’s defense.

And today, week-in, week-out, America’s industrial-scale program of extrajudicial killing carries right on with young buzz-cut people sitting at screens in secret locations playing computer games with the lives of real people. Thousands have been killed without judicial process, just having their names put on a “kill list” by some CIA thug.

It is also a pretty brutal society at home. Police kill an average of three Americans per day, more than any terror group could hope to achieve.

America’s homicide rate is almost five times that of a country like Italy, and substantially higher than a place like Turkey, often popularly regarded in dark terms. It is lower than many countries, but they are mostly places in the Third World.

American prisons are notorious for brutal conditions and for brutal behavior by guards. And more Americans are held in prison than in any other society.

I sometimes reflect on the notion that America’s domestic brutality serves almost as a kind of early training ground for all the future killers who will be needed for tasks around the globe.

Such is the nature of empire. It is not built with decency or compassion or humane values.

________________________

Response to a comment about America having been a nation of killers from the start:

I’m aware of that.

What I am emphasizing is America’s modern-era mass-killing warfare beyond the boundaries of North America.

America, in growing its early empire, was fortunate to have all pretty weak opponents.

An antiquated Spanish Empire, Indigenous people, Mexico, and native Hawaiians.

They were all treated very harshly, but the total numbers were relatively small when compared to Vietnam or the Neocon Wars of the Middle East.

Had Germany, in its march for empire, faced such as those early American opponents rather than the powerful states it opposed, it might well be ruling the world today.

America has always been a bit lucky in its expansion. Fairly weak enemies early on in the march West. Later, a world flattened by WWII which barely touched America.

You might enjoy:

 

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/08/02/john-chuckman-comment-reference-to-americas-current-inability-to-have-intelligent-political-discussion-in-fact-it-is-an-illusion-to-think-things-were-ever-much-different-highlights-of-an-extrem/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SCOOPY WEB

 

“A new art installation at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, called “Above and Beyond,” features over 58,000 replica dog tags — one for each American soldier killed in the Vietnam War.”

_____________

Response to another reader who asked where are the million dog tags for the Vietnamese killed:

 

Indeed, and the number is actually greater.

Total estimated losses for Vietnam are 3 million.

After all, America tried every new filthy idea it could come up with there, from massive carpet bombing to early versions of cluster bombs, to say nothing of napalm.

In the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, somewhere between 20 thousand and 40 thousand alone had their throats cut in the middle of the night by belly-crawling American special forces. These victims were civilians, typically people such as village mayors and other officials. It was an effort to destroy leadership and dispirit the people.

Add to that the horrors of landmines and a sea of Agent Orange left behind to kill and mangle and cause birth defects for decades more.

Of course, another million died in Cambodia’s Killing Fields.

And who was responsible for toppling the neutralist government of Cambodia, a government which remained peaceful despite American pressure, allowing the Khmer Rouge guerillas to take over the country?

You’re right if you guessed the United States with its long series of illegal, secret bombings and mini-invasions (“incursions”).

And after the bloody Khmer Rouge took over and started its slaughter, the United States did absolutely nothing to stop them. Finally, the Vietnamese, despite their own years of immense war suffering, attacked them.

It’s a glorious record for America, to be sure.

One to be proud of. A genuine holocaust begun just 20 years after the Nazi Holocaust.

Certainly, something to commemorate.

It is why I thought the Vietnam War Memorial was remarkably, surprisingly appropriate when it first appeared, a plain dark wall of names sunk into the ground almost as though to commemorate shame. Washington has since managed to spoil the effect with various groups of heroic bronze statues.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN INVESTMENTWATCH

 

“US-China Rivalry Is More Than a Trade War”

 

http://www.investmentwatchblog.com/us-china-rivalry-is-more-than-a-trade-war/

In many respects, a good article.

However, it is more than a little too American in its perspective.

If you have an international problem, it can only be properly discussed, and dealt with, from an international perspective.

That is something too many Americans either do not understand or refuse to understand.

The article looks at China’s great economic outreach programs as something vaguely threatening.

I don’t see it all that way. Everything here can be understood by another perspective.

China is doing marvelous, constructive projects which will better the lives of millions, while the US spends sinful amounts of money bombing people in one part of the world and offering intimidating displays in others.

China is building infrastructure, and on a grand scale, while America lets its infrastructure rot. Bridges count for the long-term future. Bombs and bombast do not. Indeed, they work against the future by squandering resources on the most unproductive investment you can make, a giant military. Everyone needs some military, but when you go beyond a reasonable level, you are literally burning money.

For example, the South China Sea, why is the US, in high imperialist fashion, intent on sending its navy there regularly? Does China send military fleets on displays all around the Gulf of Mexico? Such actions are unmistakable in their meaning, and there is nothing positive about them. Just as the American navy has been busy recently in the Black Sea where it truly has no business beyond intimidating Russia.

There is no good reason for American military behavior. It is a fairly explicit and constant threat to other countries, like China. Not exactly the way to create a better world.

It really is a form of imperialism, of aggression, disguised as disinterested oversight of the sea lanes.

Given all America’s vast economic and financial problems, it would be wise to cut the military – very, very substantially – and quit treating the world’s people as subservient. Focus on improving your country and its competitiveness as China and others do.

As it is, with the Pentagon’s adopted motto of “full-spectrum dominance,” you are committed to the idea of not competing and influencing the world but of trying to dominate it militarily. That cannot be a substitute for the old-fashioned hard and productive work of building things and carrying on trade. Indeed, it implicitly carries the risk of wars in addition to all of its economic emptiness.

America is on a one-way trip to nowhere under current priorities, and loose-cannon Trump only compounds the problems.

He really thinks he can make it 1952 again for America, a time when all America’s competitors were still flattened and American companies and workers had the entire planet as their market.

That is not going to happen again. It was a “one-off” set of circumstances in world history. The unique and fortunate (for Americans) opportunity created a myth in the country, complete with its own accompanying advertising slogan, “the American Dream.”

I find it remarkable how many Americans think that slogan has some kind of substance, some kind of enduring reality. It gets all jumbled up with everything from the Founding Fathers to apple pie, too, like some secular religious set of notions.

But it has no substance. It is just a happy-sounding phrase describing a brief era that is already gone.  It is now a different world altogether, and this world not only includes the resurrected old competitors but many new ones coming along. It just will never be the same again as it was in the postwar era.

“Make America great again” is another empty slogan, wistfully reflecting back on the American Dream myth. Repeating it is a bit like repeating some old verse from the Bible in hopes “God” will come sweeping down out of the sky to your assistance with a chorus of angels singing “God Bless America.”

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO A COLUMN IN THE INDEPENDENT

“Syria is about to experience chaos on a whole new level”

Utter crap propaganda, likely from the Israeli Ministry of Truth or the Pentagon’s Disinformation Division.

The only honest and thoughtful actor in this whole squalid mess is Putin.

Russia’s strikes on America’s covert terrorist allies in the dirty job of destroying Syria mean only now do they face serious force applied specifically to them.

In Iraq, the troops were paid off with Saudi money to run away and leave their tanks behind when faced with nothing more than Japanese pick-up trucks and AK-47s in the hands of rabble.

In Syria, the US has been bombing infrastructure and the desert, and it has been searching for any excuse to repeat what they did in Libya with “a no-fly zone” which was actually an excuse for bombing the crap out of the country.

All the flap about Sarin gas attacks was just one utterly cynical effort to do so. Civilians were killed to create an excuse. The gas was used by America’s maniacs and was supplied by America either directly or indirectly.

But it is too late now to implement such a scheme – that is, unless you want war with Russia – and a few weeks of Putin’s precision air work is going to reduce these cowards before our eyes.

You end the terrors of Syria by attacking what has directly caused them, the maniacs the U.S. has supplied and tolerated, something the United States has only pretended to do.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO THE GUARDIAN

The American Justice Department had every right and reason to pursue the American branch of FIFA.

They have no right to go after Europeans and others.

The fact that Europeans are cooperating in arresting their citizens and sending them to the U.S. to stand trial is just further evidence of Europe’s pathetic acceptance of America’s right to govern Europe.

It is a terrible precedent, setting things up for ever greater intrusions into European affairs.

No one likes bent sports officials, but the issue of American laws applying in Europe is a far greater one than the issue of some bent sports officials.

America is using the public’s instinctive dislike in this matter to further drive its influence and power into Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY AURAL BRAUN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

More intellectual crap from Aural Braun.

Mr Braun is a full-time lobbyist for the interests of the Israeli-U.S. effort to re-shape the planet.

Mr Putin, as one of the true independent-minded statesmen of our time, is of course at odds many times to a dangerous vision of world affairs.
___________________________

“Please, Obama is a joke. He is a complete amateur, never worthy or prepared to be president.”

I wish it were true that Obama’s behavior could be explained by “amateur” status.

But it cannot be.

He came to office with dreams and enthusiasms and some sound thinking, but in the face of the forces which truly govern America, he quietly threw up his hands and has become effectively a hostage.

He undoubtedly feared assassination, but it is not just such a dark threat which likely influenced him.

Day to day, he works with a relatively small group of people – military and intelligence officials, members of the imperious Senate, big money political contributors, including the powerful Israel Lobby – and that group is not friendly to the language of an Obama before election.

Look at any other notable American politician and presidential aspirant, and you see the same thing at work.

Hillary Clinton, over the last 20 years or so, has gone from a rather idealistic person to an unpleasant, acerbic advocate of Imperial America. She has told bald-faced lies in public countless times and uttered words which might have been written by an old crypto-Nazi like Dick Cheney.

Her husband was once a man of some ideals, too, but his two terms in office were marked by not one achievement of any worth, and he became little more than a kind of giant vacuum cleaner for political donations, setting some ghastly precedents like selling nights in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House or pardoning a big-time criminal at the end of his term in exchange for many millions of political dollars.

This is the modern reality of imperial America: elections at the highest level simply do not matter. By the time a politician has managed to scrabble to become a contender, with all the endless secret begging for campaign funds, he or she has become part of the problem, not the solution.

In economics, we speak of barriers to the entry of markets. The American campaign finance system requiring truckloads of private money to run is effectively a barrier to entry in the political market, a barrier against the idealistic or those who would do anything to interfere with America’s entrenched governing establishment: the military-industrial-intelligence complex along with such powerful special interests as the Israel Lobby.

This barrier is reinforced by a duopoly of parties in that market, each being not very different than the other, except in some volatile social interests of no concern to the establishment.

And anyone who even chances to pass over those barriers faces everyday life with some dark and powerful people who will not watch their power diminished.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MICHAEL IGNATIEFF IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Ignatieff yet again proves what a remarkably thoughtless person he is for someone who enjoyed the status of an intellectual concerned with human rights.

But then, even in his old sinecure at Harvard, Ignatieff frequently defended American imperial interests and displayed no concern for America’s increasing violence and authoritarianism in the world.

The horrors in Syria exist for one reason only, and that is America’s effort to determine the future of most of the countries of the Middle East for the benefit of its imperial satrapy in the region, Israel, itself a country which regularly kills, tortures, kidnaps, imprisons, and steals.

Turkey’s behavior in offering the “rebels” refuge and border access and its threats against Syria are all at the behind-the scenes behest of the U.S.

The American Ambassador recently killed in Libya – another American disaster – was involved in smuggling weapons and Islamic fighters into Syria. That’s why no one in Obama’s government can give an honest accounting of the event.

Some of the thugs fighting in Syria are the kind of people the U.S. wouldn’t even admit through its own border, yet it seems perfectly okay for them to go to Syria and murder and destroy.

The hypocrisy and lack of ethics are stunning.

Israel’s murderous thug of a prime minister of course just chuckles at Syria being tied down in such a bloody mess.

The aim here is to destabilize Syria, perhaps dividing it into parts, and removing the Syrian army as a piece on the Middle East chessboard.

The fact is that Assad, like Hussein, provides a secular government in a region torn with religious hostilities. That’s why Islamists hate him. Treatment of women too is better than in many parts of the Middle East.

But none of that counts when the U.S. decides in private that it is time for change in your region of the world.

The country which has killed millions over recent decades now feels entitled to control events anywhere its fancy takes it.

And flacks like Ignatieff – for that is what he is – help form the chorus of support for evil.

He’s trying desperately, I think, to reclaim his sinecure at Harvard.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Mmm, I wonder why the Globe doesn’t advocate this approach to the United States?

After all, not a year goes by the US isn’t ready to start a new war.

And all it does in places like the Middle East is supply weapons and threats against any nation Israel chooses to frown at.

And while China is not a free society, it does not have killer drones patrolling its skies and those of a half dozen others to kill people without charges or judicial procedure of any kind.

And, please remember, for about two centuries, the United States has arrogantly asserted its right to the entire hemisphere to be free of all foreign influences.

What China is doing is no more than – and indeed perhaps a good deal less than – the US would do in a heartbeat were anyone else’s ships to enter the Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of California or the St Lawrence without their approval.

Your editorials in almost all matters anymore too much resemble the Stephen Harper influence – that is, the influence of the Republican right wing.
_______________________________________

Truly, the Globe either needs to upgrade the quality of its editorials or give up the practice of publishing them.

This one, as a number of readers note, not only reflects ignorance of the area and its history, but an attitude of willful ignorance as to what the US is doing in Asia today.

One can only guess that harridan Hillary’s State Department is using the Philippines as stalking horse here.

The United States has long implicitly (in public) claimed the Pacific Ocean as its lake.

That’s what was behind so many events from their constant provocations of rising Japan to the Vietnamese Holocaust.

And Obama’s recent policy assertions about Asia are more of the same.

I’m genuinely concerned that the United States will keep pushing China to the point of war.

That really is how brutally stupid Washington is.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Not too many targets left, in other words.

What a bloody world-class stupidity this operation has been.

America kills and destroys for “anti-Gaddafi” in Libya while it also kills and destroys anti-tyrants themselves in Yemen and Bahrain.

(I wonder how many readers know that the government of Bahrain is actually charging doctors for treating patients because the patients were rebels? Some friend of democracy and human rights that is.)

The only thing which matters in deciding which side to bomb is whether the tyrants toe the American line or not.

And, oh, having substantial oil reserves helps.
_________________________

“Again, Congratulations to the Canadian Airforce and Navy. Their contribution was outstanding in imposing an embargo by sea and air as this conflict took place.”

Oh boy, let’s hear it for a useless contribution to American blood-drenched global imperialism.

I’d say the boys and girls deserve medals.

American medals, that is.
__________________________

“…you ignore the obvious fact that Libyans liberated themselves in this conflict.

“It is all about who has the most ground forces.”

Why do you insist on advertising your ignorance?

The bombardment has been horrific.

At one point Britain actually was running short of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

America used fleets of cruise missiles, B-52s, fighter-jets, and B-2 stealth bombers sent from the United States.

America has destroyed gigantic amounts of infrastructure from airfields to roads to portions of cities.

America has killed thousands of civilians with the bombardment.

Every concentration of the government’s troops was subject to fierce assault plus any civilians nearby.

America has also surreptitiously supplied the rebels with substantial weaponry, and significant special forces – hundreds of murderous thugs – were secreted in to do as many dirty deeds as they could.

The rebels – whatever it is they represent, about which we literally know nothing – basically followed a wall of fire and destruction to claim their prizes.

Even then, the rebels clearly are such a minority they have often failed and close to failed.

I simply cannot conceive how any thinking person can describe the whole ugly effort as the work of the rebels.

Indeed, it is precisely the pattern adopted in Afghanistan where America blew the crap out of anything in doubt while the Northern Alliance advanced on the ground.

Does any sane person doubt that America conquered Afghanistan, or much of it, in this fashion? Or that the existing government figures in Afghanistan serve at America’s pleasure?

What you mistake for arrogance is in fact despair over the lying and cheating and ugliness which dominate world affairs, always pasted over with cheap slogans about freedom and democracy.

Neither of which exists in dozens of places the United States supports and embraces – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Bahrain, and occupied Palestine just for starters.

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY FRANK CHING IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Someone who thought a little more deeply than Frank Ching would know that the United States has absolutely no business in these waters and that over time its presence can only be dangerous.

Much like its continued presence in Korea, this is nothing more than an expression of global imperialism and, in a very real sense, an insult to the peoples of this part of the world who are perfectly capable of settling their own international affairs.

The United States, time and time again, has pushed the limits there in Cold War fashion.

Recall the American spy plane under the great idiot Bush that was brought down in China.

The previous new government of Japan was elected wanting to remove America’s ugly presence in Okinawa – ugly because it includes nuclear weapons aboard ship – but American pressure brought the new leader down.

And readers should know that there is no definitive proof that that South Korean ship was sunk by the North Koreans. It may have been nothing but an accident aboard the ship, afterwards used to stoke up feelings a la “Remember the Maine!”

Indeed, many of North Korea’s extreme behaviors are responses to American provocations never admitted.