John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRESS T V

 

“Trump threatens to quit WHO, calling health body ‘puppet of China”

 

It would be nice to hear prominent Americans – politicians, writers, academics, scientists – speak out about this man and his ravings.

Some do, but remarkably few, I think, considering how serious the situation is.

We have a madman exercising power in the world’s most powerful country. He makes new absurd claims almost daily.

And the truth is, he achieves nothing except to make millions of people in the world miserable, as people in Iran, Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and many other places.

As if there weren’t already enough misery.

And he attacks such an important part of the world’s economy as China at a time of great economic fragility.

His behavior around all aspects of the coronavirus literally is criminal. His delays and blunders have cost many lives in his own country, but he’ll blame it all on China with no evidence at all.

What can one say of a leader who actually attacks the WHO at such a time? A leader who attacks instead of cooperating?

I don’t recall anything quite like it, even in the Cold War.

It is impossible to cite a single worthy accomplishment by Trump, but there is a long list of failures and threats and destructive behaviors. Is that really America’s idea of a leader?

By the way, he has just told the world that he is self-administering the anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a preventive measure.

All experts warn against doing that – the drug has dangerous side-effects and should only be used in a hospital setting, if at all – but here’s the President telling millions that he does, thus effectively endorsing it for them. It is a very good measure of his sense of responsibility.

Just as is the fact that he never puts a mask on. I’ve seen a number of world leaders photographed with face masks on, including the President of China, but far be it from Trump to offer a responsible example to his people.

 

AFTERNOTE:

As I’ve already written, new evidence (dated X-rays) suggests strongly that the coronavirus appeared in France in November, 2019.

That re-inforces previous technical evidence about the origin of the virus having had nothing to do with a bio-lab or even the city of Wuhan.

At some point, it jumped from animals to humans, as viruses often do. All the evidence we have contradicts what Trump keeps yelling about China and its responsibility.

But what are facts to a man spewing hatred?

John Chuckman

COMMENT – IMPORTANT NEW EVIDENCE CONCERNING DATES OF CORONAVIRUS STRIKING EUROPE

 

We have important new evidence about when the coronavirus struck France.

Apparently, there were cases in November, 2019, having nothing to do with China.

If further investigation confirms the existing evidence of dated patient X-rays, all of Trump’s ignorant attacks will be shown for just what they most certainly are, ignorant attacks.

Although I can’t imagine that will stop him, he and his loyalists not being the kind of people who are overly fastidious about proof. In the absence of any achievement in office, Trump’s re-election strategy is set on a bellowing witch hunt about China.

I find that interesting. The original American Cold War witch hunts were the work of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a drunk looking for something to rekindle a declining political career. Trump is a teetotaler, but his short political career has been an unmitigated disaster.

Science before politics, especially the ugly politics of name-calling and witch hunts.

https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/05/breaking-french-doctors-believe-they-may-have-treated-coronavirus-patients-in-november/

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JESUS SILVA IN PRESS T V

 

“Washington targets Venezuela as promoter of terrorism”

“The US government has announced that Venezuela and Cuba along with some other countries have been included in a particular list of nations which Washington believes collaborate with terrorism”

 

My God, what an upside-down world it is.

Venezuela has been the target of a long series of terror attacks, many of them conducted openly by the United States, but here are US officials accusing Venezuela of promoting terror.

Here’s just a portion of recent American activity against Venezuela and its twice-elected government…

Shutting down the country’s electrical grid, several times, spoiling all the food in millions of poor people’s fridges, as well as endangering those dependent on life-saving machines.

Imposing severe sanctions against the health and welfare of millions. Sanctions always disproportionately hurt the poor and vulnerable, and it is important to stress that the way the US uses them, they are simply illegal. They are American laws being applied to people who are not Americans and without the authority of any international organization such as the UN.

Imposing a naval blockade against the same poor people, something which is considered an act of war.

Stealing some of Venezuela’s national assets and turning them over to an unelected man who pretends he is president.

Interfering in the country’s trade and commerce abroad in every way it can think of.

Sending a flotilla of gunboats, destroyers, into the area to intimidate.

Sending a group of private American mercenaries to kidnap or kill the President.

Putting a large bounty on the head of an elected government.

An earlier attempt to kill the President used a drone with explosives.

If that list doesn’t represent authentic terror, then I don’t know what would.

Venezuela has done absolutely nothing a thinking person would regard as terror. No, Venezuela’s “crime” is just peacefully conducting its own affairs with democratic elections and without American approval and supervision.

And just look at the set of unholy messes America’s incompetent government has put itself into. It cannot conduct its own affairs, yet it insists on telling others how to conduct theirs.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LAZARE IN STRATEGIC CULTURE

“From Overstretch to Collapse”

 

“So the collapse intensified, which is why America is now such a helpless giant. A crazy man is at the helm, yet the best Democrats can do is put up a candidate suffering from the early stages of senile dementia, who may be a rapist to boot. No one knows how things will play out from this point on. But two things are clear. One is that the process did not start under Trump, while the other is that it will undoubtedly continue regardless of who wins in November. Once collapse sets in, it’s impossible to stop.”

 

That is the closing paragraph of an article by Daniel Lazare, and I find it quite powerful in the way it brings things together. There is much in the same article with which I disagree, especially his interpretation of the Wars in the Mideast and of the coup in Ukraine. I regard him flatly wrong on those.

But while every writer has his/her agenda, an agenda I may not agree with it, that doesn’t preclude some truths being said along the way. And here is a perfect example.

Incidentally, that observation about agendas is why you cannot flatly condemn anyone for reading a certain writer or publication you know to have a bias or prejudice, maybe even an unacceptable one. Truth is most often found in little nuggets, and that holds for mainstream and alternative publications.

The collapse referred to is America’s imperial collapse, and I do believe that, with each passing day’s events now, the collapse is coming much more rapidly than anyone could have anticipated, and I agree strongly with the observation: “Once collapse sets in, it’s impossible to stop.”

Trump’s total mismanagement of the pandemic only piles on top of his mismanagement of relations with China and with Europe and in the Middle East. It is just one disaster after another, all leaving behind anger and resentment and lack of trust.

I agree it isn’t just Trump. America’s establishment had been headed on this destructive course for some years – under both Obama and Bush Jr – and then Trump jumped onto the stage with his blustering, offensive, and just incompetent ways, and things have started moving considerably faster.

Please note how most of America’s governing elites have made almost no serious effort to restrain or oppose him. The impeachment was about a far less consequential matter than almost every aspect of his foreign policies. He has definitely launched an assault on the foundations of what we know in the world, the set of international trade, diplomatic, and military relationships, almost without opposition.

He’s even at war with Saudi Arabia, the foundation of the American dollar’s special place in the world, a foundation without which much of America’s military and imperial activities would not be possible. The huge global demand to hold American dollars, owing to everyone’s needing some to buy oil, gives the US the exclusive privilege of printing far more dollars than the productive activity of its own economy would warrant and doing so without creating inflation. It has other advantages, such as giving America the ability to pay for many goods and services anywhere in the world with its own currency.

The Saudi situation is a very illustrative one. The Saudis want to increase their market share in the world.  Costly, uncompetitive American shale oil has filled some markets, but that was only possible because OPEC and Russia had held up prices earlier. American shale oil had a free ride. Well, the Saudis really aren’t willing to go on that way. The US shale industry can be largely collapsed in fairly short order with low prices, and both Saudi Arabia and Russia would be happy to see it.

Trump was not even willing to add a meaningful American contribution to the production decreases he was demanding of everyone else so that prices could rise. No, this stable genius wanted the higher prices and he wanted the flourishing American shale industry, wanted them both without any American sacrifice, just by force of his will, but that is not a sustainable outcome, not at all. Even if you cobble together a deal, as they did, it cannot hold because it works against the interests of major players.

Trump’s fixation on high American crude production (consisting heavily of shale oil) is much like his MAGA mantra. He literally believes that through force of will, he can make it be 1959 again for America, a time when America’s conventional crude production was high, just as its production of many manufactured goods it sold all over the world was high. His beliefs around the strength of his will – reflected I believe in the grim and grotesque grimaces we see in so many photos of him – actually somewhat echo those of Germany’s leader of the 1930s who frequently used the expression, “my unshakable will,” and we all know how that story ended.

To get better cooperation from Saudi Arabia, Trump is reported to have quietly threatened to remove America’s military umbrella for the Saudis. Only the other day, some Patriot missile batteries were reported to be leaving the country, likely a tangible demonstration to make the military threat credible.

But making Saudi Arabia vulnerable is not a wise thing to do. Nor is making its temperamental Crown Prince angry. And since we have rumors of a recent coup attempt in the country, Trump is playing with fire.

The de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince, is not a terribly flexible guy either, as his butchery of Jamal Khashoggi and the hefty increase in national beheadings amply demonstrate.

Actually, if that rumored coup attempt involved the US, as some reports suggest, Trump has already played with fire, and the Crown Prince has even more incentive to make changes in the Kingdom’s policies.

Saudi Arabia could reorient its policies and hurt the US. The atomic bomb of such measures would be changing the currency demanded for Saudi oil.

But there are many other measures that might serve Saudi Arabia’s interests and work against what the US regards as its interests, from ending the war in Yemen or ending support for the terrorists in Syria to altering its posture towards Iran, incidentally a country which stopped pricing its crude in dollars a while ago. After all, it is Yemen and Iran cited as the threats to Saudi facilities. That threat could readily be reduced or ended.

Any improved relationship with Iran would contribute to the forces beginning to nudge the US out of the region.

And there is China with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) initiative which could contribute mightily to the Crown Prince’s ambitious development plans for Saudi Arabia. China is ready to partner with anyone, and coming out of the pandemic, it is prepared to make every effort to get its economy humming again. China is an important oil customer too.

Good leadership is indispensable to even keep your place in the world, let alone improve it, and the US simply does not have it. Trump’s incompetence with the only political alternative being pathetic Joe Biden is itself living, breathing evidence of accelerating decline. Political bankruptcy, if you will, to go along with all the other bankruptcies headed its way.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO A (REPRINTED) ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“25 YEARS OF CN: ‘Obama’s Self-Deceit’—Sept. 29, 2015”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/05/08/25-years-of-cn-obamas-self-deceit-sept-29-2015/?unapproved=400210&moderation-hash=c04fb841d8867b4abfc930dd211bdd31#comment-400210

 

Yes, a good piece, vividly recalling what a dishonest man Obama was.

It’s remarkable to me that so many remember him with nostalgia.

In part it was his appealing boyish smile and baritone voice. In part it was a kind of credibility he had gained by becoming the first black President. In part it was the relief everyone had felt seeing the end of George Bush, an embarrassingly ignorant, awkward, and vicious man.

I was taken in by Obama during his first campaign. A guy who sometimes wore sandals and briefly eschewed a dorky American flag pin on his lapel sure caught my attention.

I even started a small Internet tribute site with some extraordinary photos of him I discovered here or there.

But it wasn’t long before I took the site down. Perhaps that experience is why I react strongly against efforts to portray him as an admirable leader.

He bombed people every day of his eight years as President.

Obama overthrew the Qaddafi government in Libya, leaving behind chaos which remains to this day. Qaddafi’s was a government that actually took care of its people with free education and good water and healthcare. He also kept Libya out of wars.

His “sin,” for which he paid with his life and the destruction of his country, was in not adequately toeing the line of American imperial policy for the region.

Obama approved the ugly coup in Ukraine which still causes all kinds of unnecessary grief in the world, and that coup was against a democratically elected President. Indeed, it was under Obama that the whole Russo-phobia business was ignited. He’s the one who started running tanks up to Russia’s borders and creating unnecessary hostilities that fed off of the old Cold War fears, drummed into people’s heads for decades, fears which remain festering to this day.

I have no doubt he was secretly at the center of efforts to undo Trump’s election. Officials like the heads of the FBI and CIA do not speak out, as they did, without the President’s approval. It just does not happen.

Of course, Hillary was a close ally in the effort, keen on anything that explained away her embarrassing election loss. It is easy to say that Trump is such a horrible, incompetent man – and he is horrible and incompetent – that he deserved being unseated with secret plots, but that really is not the way to run a government with at least pretenses to democratic values and rule of law.

Obama supported the ugly, secret war against Syria, a pretend civil war using fake-jihadi mercenaries recruited from many places, a war that has killed almost three-quarters of a million people and destroyed much of one of our most beautiful and historic places. He even had Hillary Clinton running weapons and mercenaries from the smoldering ruins of Libya in a secret effort to introduce them into Syria, generally through Turkey.

Indeed, at one point, Obama talked about his “red line,” the use of chemical weapons by Syria. What he really was doing with those self-righteous words was setting the stage for a faked attack so he would have an excuse to declare a no-fly zone in Syria and bomb the crap out of it, the very approach he had used in Libya. Only Putin’s exceptional statesmanship saved the day for Syria.

By the way, a serious error of Obama’s was underestimating Putin. Obama treated Putin almost with disdain at times, speaking of Russia as producing nothing anyone wanted to buy but oil and gas. Judging from some photos, the two did not get along all that well in private.

The infamous incident at Benghazi, Libya, where an American ambassador was mysteriously killed by thugs – something never explained to Americans – happened as a part of the ambassador’s work on Hillary’s secret project to smuggle weapons and cutthroats into Syria. That is why it could not be explained.

We even know from one of our finest living investigative reporters, Seymour Hersh, that she also had a small amount of Libya’s stock of poison nerve agent shipped for ultimate use in Syria. It was to provide Obama with his “red line.” Qaddafi, just as several Arab leaders had done, kept such stocks as a counter to Israel’s secret nuclear threat.

The same charming Hillary who laughed when Qaddafi died an agonizing death – being bayoneted in the rectum while lying on the ground – “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha!” The words were recorded. It is not a myth that she said that. Just as it is not a myth that she once said of Julian Assange, “Can’t we just drone him or something?” She’s a very enlightened and humane politician, much like Obama but more outspoken.

Obama made minimal progress in repairing the horrors America had inflicted upon Iraq. Years after the “Shock and Awe” [Hitler’s Blitzkrieg concept re branded] delivered by George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, millions of Iraqis still had no electricity and no decent water and no jobs. What had been the most advanced Arab country was a shambles.

Obama maintained America’s unwarranted hostilities against Iran. Later, he distinguished himself once with the nuclear weapons agreement (JCPOA), but that came only after Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, made an approach to talk, Iran suffering under heavy sanctions levied against a nuclear weapons program which in fact never existed.

Obama supported many other bloody adventures, as in Somalia.

He never did anything of consequence to help the Palestinians see even a modicum of justice or relief from brutal abuse.

After all the horrors in the Middle East, Obama spoke, much like an arrogant general, about “now making the pivot to Asia,” which was code for intense new hostilities against China and its interests.

Once he lightly “joked” in a meeting, “Hey, I’m pretty good at this killing stuff!” A rather bizarre sense of humor, to say the least.

Obama holds the distinction of having created an industrial-scale extrajudicial killing system, incinerating people far away who were never legally charged or tried for anything. The method frequently kills bystanders, too, but even the targets are legally guilty of nothing.

Joe Biden was a big advocate for it at the time, perhaps just one of the reasons Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with tasks such as having served as Presidential proconsul in Ukraine to make sure America’s objectives in having staged a coup there against an elected government were adhered to. Biden is just another charmer from America’s supposed party of the Left.

It is notable that Obama never did one meaningful thing to help raise his own people back home, despite having campaigned to them on a “Yes, we can!” theme and often making speeches in the rhythms of traditional black preachers. He created that ugly, costly bureaucratic compromise with the corporate health industry, Obamacare, and that’s as close as he came to helping.

In addition to the immense amount of violence Obama oversaw as President, he had a compulsive need for secrecy and went after whistleblowers with a vengeance.

Poor dear Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under him, an ordeal she almost didn’t survive. Edward Snowden was forced into exile under his watch. John Kiriakou went to prison under him for revealing the CIA’s use of torture. And it was in his time as President that Julian Assange sought asylum from Ecuador.

The tight embrace of secrecy is also seen in the plots against Trump’s election.

The intelligence community’s massive new Utah Data Center, designed to hold frightening amounts of secret data about people everywhere was opened under this President.

I don’t think he did one thing to earn his Nobel Peace Prize. It was awarded in the hope it would encourage and fortify him to go a different direction than George Bush, but it proved a sad, empty hope.

He campaigned on closing down Guantanamo, just one portion of America’s international torture gulag where people were “rendered” by the CIA – that is, kidnaped, flown far away to a “dark site,” and tortured – Gina Haspel, the present head of CIA, having headed one of the sites. Then after Obama was elected, he changed his mind.

A man absolutely as inhumane and brutal as Bush or Trump, judged by his actual deeds, although he never bellowed and used foul language and openly threatened others as Trump does and he never sounded like the moron George Bush is. He carried a somewhat graceful and dignified appearance in public, but appearances can be so deceiving.

And, as you can plainly see in some of his photos and hear from some of his words, he is an extremely arrogant man. The boyish smile was missing more times than not.

Of course, what the details of Obama’s dark work tell us – just as is the case with Trump, from the other end of the American political spectrum, who has flip-flopped numerous times in foreign policy and has kept no campaign promise about the military and wars to speak of – is that American Presidents really do not control foreign policy, do not control the dark work of American empire.

They can perhaps tweak it here or there, they can give it a pleasant or unpleasant public face, but they do not determine it. That is the work of the so-called Deep State, which is just a living reality of the American “republic” with its supposed Constitutional divisions of power.

So, while American Presidents hold, under the Constitution, the title of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, they are simply not free to command them. And while they head the Cabinet, they are not free to command such Deep State forces as the State Department and CIA, organizations which work intimately together in every American embassy in the world, CIA having its own side of the house in all of them and working under State Department cover with phony diplomatic passports.

Those are just part of the results in a country whose power establishment serves the wealthy, using the tools of the military and security services to run a global empire benefiting the wealthy.

In terms of ethical and moral responsibility, the fact that American Presidents do not determine foreign policy doesn’t remove their responsibility for crimes. Obama voluntarily joined the vast imperial machine and served it faithfully, being rewarded at the end of his political career with a fortune worth many tens of millions of dollars, not the kind of money a President earns –  which is precisely four hundred thousand per year plus fifty thousand in expenses – and certainly not what an nontenured young university lecturer in law makes.

All American Presidents of the modern era leave office wealthy. The fact can help assuage a conscience. But I suspect there generally is not much in the way of conscience because it is extreme narcissists and moderate psychopaths who are attracted to run for an office like the contemporary American Presidency, and lack of conscience is a defining characteristic of those psychological conditions.

It’s an immensely long journey from some men in frock coats pledging their sacred honors, but it is the American reality, and we should never confuse American brute power today with charming tales of the Founders.

John Chuckman

COMMENT -THE VERY REAL THREAT OF WAR TRUMP NOW REPRESENTS

 

To bury memories of his own grotesque mismanagement in the pandemic, Trump has opened an intense new verbal assault on China. His earlier attacks on China, although truly motivated by resentment at superior business success and no little tinge of prejudice, at least related superficially to economics and trade, but the new ones are something else entirely.

Trump’s record of ignoring serious advanced warnings about the disease, of belittling its nature for a considerable period, and of then advocating absurd efforts like injecting household disinfectant or heavily using an unproved anti-malarial drug, one with dangerous side effects, have left him looking absurdly incompetent in the eyes of many.  Especially in view of his country’s now running by far the world’s greatest toll of infections and deaths under the watchful eye of “the chosen one,” the unique American “stable genius.”

So, Trump has to create a distraction as he heads towards what in his eyes is the world’s most momentous event, his re-election. He has to generate some heat, some hatred and simmering resentment, because those are the kinds of intense feelings that make people forget inconvenient facts. Hate blurs all details the way a blast furnace melts iron.

New steps have been taken to block American government pension funds from investing in China as well as putting an end to any science grants which support the Wuhan bio-lab. These are unreasonable acts. Investment should go where investors feel it is best to go, and not be restrained by presidential diktats. And science grants are just part of the international system of support and information exchange involved with all top science.

I’ll briefly repeat a bit of what I’ve written before. Many facilities at Wuhan were installed by the French, who also have such a lab. Many of the technical staff at Wuhan were trained in Galveston, Texas, where the US has a facility. Wuhan has been given grants by the US National Institutes of Health and by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Wuhan’s findings are shared with the global virology community.

If anything, the pandemic should stress the immense importance of maintaining such work. Nature is constantly evolving new virus strains, and the only way people can be prepared to deal with them is by maintaining research. Trump’s approach is backward, not only in terms of assuming something for which there is no proof – that the virus came from the Wuhan bio-lab – but also because it goes against an important scientific principle.

Top scientists in the field say that there has never been a release of pathogens from a high-level lab like Wuhan. The labs are designed with many redundant safety features. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control last year closed the American military’s bio-lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, over concern about its waste water treatment, but no release of pathogens was involved.

Remember, absolutely nothing has been proved about the Wuhan lab, nor is it in the least likely anything can be proved. Scientists studying the coronavirus have said that it did not come from a lab but made the kind of jump in nature from animals to humans often seen as viruses evolve.

Only recently, the US Director of National Intelligence said that there was “wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified”

But those unwarranted measures by Trump are nothing compared to other possible activities being discussed. And at this writing a 15-page dossier compiled by intelligence agencies, has been leaked. Use of the word “dossier” is very telling, as in the “Steele Dossier” commissioned privately to defame Trump himself or in Tony Blair’s “dodgy dossier” compiled by British security services to justify the invasion of Iraq. Both the last two were proven frauds. But people trying to do what Trump is aren’t terribly concerned about accuracy. He just needs some red meat to throw to the animals.

Here is a man, demonstrated many times over to have no scientific understanding and little sound knowledge, suddenly telling the world that he knows things they do not. And those things add up to China somehow owing America for all the costs and damages of a new disease. Billions and billions of dollars. We’ve heard mumbling about unilaterally seizing those “damages.” After all, what court would be competent to judge such wild claims?

Certainly, stealing other people’s valuables is nothing new for Trump. We’ve seen him at it, always done under a feeble pretext, in every attempted coup and unwarranted attack on other states. In Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Palestine, and other places.

The idea of invalidating some of China’s vast holding of American T-bills, more than a trillion dollars worth, has been heard – in other words, reneging on your solemn financial obligations to benefit yourself, stealing from your customer’s account at the bank. Also heard is the idea of levying big new punitive tariffs against China, tariffs based on not even a pretense of trade arguments, but simply the claim that America is owed vast sums. Any of the approaches runs counter to international law and good practices. Any of them would further darken what’s left of the honor and credit of the United States.  And any of them would rightly infuriate China.

Any such behavior introduces a gigantic new destabilizing element into international relations. Well, the United States has long done such things, but it does them to relatively weak economies, ones having little influence on the world’s economic and trade affairs, countries such Venezuela or Cuba or even Iran.

But China is something else entirely. Its economy is almost the same size as that of the United States, and by some measures, is indeed already larger. In not many years, it is certain to be larger by every important measure.

Of course, the world’s economy is in a very shaky situation already owing to multiple causes. What kind of mind thinks up new ways to weaken it?  For surely, trying to seriously hurt China, often the world’s engine of economic growth in recent years, is directly attacking the world’s economy. Indeed, while the US is still struggling with the world’s greatest infection of coronavirus, China will be back comparatively to normal, having successfully dealt with the virus, and ready to provide the world economy some stimulus.

It is the same kind of mind that talks about people injecting household sanitizers to fight a virus. Or that takes credit for sweeping achievements that never happened, as millions of Americans supposedly saved by Trump’s (imagined) timely efforts in the pandemic. Or that gives his daughter and her husband – neither of them with any special competence or expertise or even talent – offices with big titles in the White House, with the son-in-law having a special role in the pandemic, an appointment very much in keeping with all of Trump’s dishonesty and bravado and incompetence during the early stages of the pandemic.

Somehow or other, rather than being seen as the disease’s early and rather heroic victim, China is now to be seen as responsible for all the harm done by it, perhaps sharing responsibility with the WHO, the kind of international organization Trump just viscerally dislikes. His reaction to international organizations being a mix of instinctive authoritarianism, hatred of outsiders, and readiness to harm those who believe they know better than he does, even if they clearly do. As well, we have a man with no regard for learning or expertise of almost any description, except for that which manipulates people and takes money from them.

No matter which method Trump fixes on, what he is really trying to do is to steal hundreds of billions of dollars from someone while at the same time heaping them with insults and accusing them of things they didn’t do. China did things right with the outbreak of the virus, as every international expert says. No one did things as badly as Trump’s America. All so that he can be re-elected to inflict still more incompetence and bellowing on the world. Does that sound like a scheme that a proud and ancient society will quietly accept? A remarkably successful society in the modern era, almost the polar opposite of America?

Of course, it isn’t. Trump, being the kind of vicious personality that he is, knows exactly how to inflict hurt and insult on others. That’s just what his kind of morbid personality does. But to believe China will just accept such treatment is to believe a fantasy, an extremely dangerous one.

Trump sharpens his insults with the most insensitive activity in China’s backyard, “freedom of navigation” trips by American warships in waters where China already guarantees all nations freedom of navigation, so long as they follow the basic rules. He adds new provocations about Taiwan, a place that Richard Nixon solemnly pledged America recognizes as an integral part of China, which in fact is just the historical truth, only politics in America having interfered with the fact.

How long before activity on all these fronts leads to war? Calling names. Heavy-duty false accusations. Provocations in China’s territory. And a plan to steal hundreds of billions of dollars. And more effort to undermine China’s remarkable economy at a dangerous time. America is pursuing a reckless course under the generalship of a genuine lunatic. One thinks of General Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s “Doctor Strangelove.”

Trump’s motive is to blame others for upending what he thought was going to be an easy re-election. For that he is willing to do almost anything, ignoring all the world’s many terrible problems.

Mike Pompeo might regard the lying, cheating, and stealing he did in the CIA as amusing and acceptable, as he once not long ago joked about at a university appearance, but applying that sense of values as working principles to China is not going to result in smiles and chuckles.

A figure like Trump is quite capable of calling down Gotterdammerung upon his head, seeing that his fantasies about himself, fantasies of great leadership, are proved just that, fantasies, ridiculous ones, in all the world’s eyes.

We are entering a seriously dangerous period, and the madman in the White House only sees the next six months as a barrier to his re-election that he believes he knows how to overcome. Yes, war would do it. When don’t Americans loyally endorse a president in time of war, even if he is completely wrong as most American presidents have been in their wars? Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and more – you name it. All pointless and destructive but all supported by the people as though it were impossible for Old Glory to do any harm.

 

NOTE:

Just the day after I wrote this, I read an item saying President Xi Jinping’s staff had prepared a memo for him warning of the risk of war from the United States.

 

ADDITIONAL LATER NOTE:

Trump at this writing has called the coronavirus pandemic the worst “attack” his country has ever experienced. He blamed China for not stopping it.

“This is worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center,” Trump said in the White House.

Dangerous words indeed, and as complete a lie as those he offered when he hurled missiles into Syria for a gas attack which never happened or when he assassinated Iran’s national hero, General Soleimani, claiming he had been up to an evil plan when the opposite was true, he was working on a plan towards stability in the region.

 

 

VARIOUS COMMENTS ON TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS

https://wordpress.com/post/chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/19483

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/19469/

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John Chuckman

COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

 

“A Light in the Darkness – the Topic of Nationalism”

 

H G Wells said it best: “Our true nationality is mankind.”

There is nothing less promising for humanity’s future than the re-emergence of nationalism.

Poisonous stuff in almost every aspect.

________________________

Response to another comment

I’m not a New Englander in spirit, as in good fences make good neighbors. It’s a parochial sentiment.

And we don’t have to look as far as Hitler for destructive aspects of nationalism.

Trump does a pretty good job of promoting nastiness and conflict in the world, largely in the name of nationalism and narrow self-interest.

_______________________

Response to a comment saying, “As automation systems get more advanced, it is not a bad idea to have a nation with a slightly smaller homogeneous population.”

I respectfully disagree.

The only homogeneity genuinely needed involves talent, good will, and cooperation.

And Demographic Transition in all advanced countries promises not just mean a slightly smaller population. It promises, without in-migration, a falling population.

A population can only be maintained at a fertility rate of about 2.1, but in much of the advanced world, we see rates more like 1.5. That means declining populations.

And what nations even have homogeneous populations? Virtually none of the traditional “powers” from Germany to the US. None of the smaller traditional states from Sweden to Canada.

China, Russia – sort of. Their populations, in fact, have many kinds of ethnic groups in them, something often not appreciated by those abroad.

The prospects for future job creation are indeed unknown, over some fairly long time horizon. AI will eventually have large impacts, but I think we have to deal with those as they arise, not in some undefined dreamy notions now.

But we know what they have been and what they likely will be over some time once the pandemic is over.

All bets are, of course, off if our current terrible set of problems – disease, economy, finances, aggression, and fear – create a revolutionary storm with some brave new world beyond that we cannot imagine, something not at all impossible.

________________________

Response to another comment:

Yes, I understand what you are saying, and many institutions over certain portions of their history do perform functions outside their primary ones to advance something worthwhile for a whole society. I’m sure it has been so at times for nationalism.

Certain Protestants come to mind concerning education. Because they wanted people to read the Bible for themselves, they boosted the idea of widespread education. But I do not associate Protestants today at all with any progressive cause like that, at least the great bulk of them.

Nationalism today is, to my mind, unpleasantly narrow stuff. I, me, mine. It really is a larger-scale extension of tribalism, which I do not think anyone associates with anything good today, although, thousands of years ago, it undoubtedly served useful purposes.

I very much admire past efforts to create international organizations for trade and other important matters. Many good things happened in the postwar period along those lines.

Many of those organizations and arrangements are now under attack by staunch nationalist types, like Trump. (What an irony that such a hugger-of-his-flag for photo-ops and one who makes many military threats avoided military service, and on the flimsy excuse of bone spurs in a college basketball player!)

In the end, the attacks will only make the world a poorer place. They will also increase the likelihood of conflict. Since Trump’s crowd is deliberately using a kind of hybrid economic warfare to extract advantages for itself, it is busy right now increasing the likelihood of conflict.

Nation-states, too, are haphazardly created over the centuries. There is almost no pattern or consistency, some getting a wonderful natural endowment, and others getting very little indeed. Are international borders and armies to lock that extreme unfairness in for all time? What’s admirable about that?

There are many other matters at work too. All advanced countries have passed through Demographic Transition, and their populations cannot replace themselves without in-migration.

Some advanced countries actually face population decline, as Japan.

So, international migration will be a larger and larger part of things. Changes in climate will also affect these movements. The changes will not be the same in all places, and some populations will need to move. International order and authority will absolutely be required.

There are many other considerations, but I’ll leave it there.

Of course, anything I say is predicated on the current storm of difficulties not turning into a catastrophe, a world-shaking set of events, and I think that is not impossible.

I do think the pandemic, when it is over, may create demand for additional international measures, an international authority around medical matters and warning systems and unified responses and best practices. That would be a very good thing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALBA CIUDAD IN ANTI-EMPIRE

 

“Maduro Says It Costs Venezuela Triple to Buy Virus Test Kits Due to US Sanctions

“Calls on Washington to drop sanction so they can go and buy what’s needed”

 

Nothing better reveals America’s worst character than its behavior towards Iran and Venezuela at a time of great hardship.

It indeed does bring back thoughts of dear old Madeleine Albright, a genuinely hateful creature, speaking callously about the tens of thousands of dead children in Iraq.

By the way, she received the Medal of Freedom just like Joe Biden, who perhaps got it for his advocacy of America’s industrial-scale extrajudicial killing operation or perhaps his glorious work in Ukraine or his enthusiastic support for invading Iraq and killing a million people.

If ever there were something totally misnamed, it is the Medal of Freedom.

The name quite literally has the character of one of Orwell’s Party slogans in “1984.”

JOHN CHUCKMAN

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY BRAD GRIFFIN IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“Trump’s Chumps”

 

https://www.unz.com/article/trumps-chumps/

 

Some strong points here, not all of them, but a number.

“He has been a disappointment on all fronts.”

No statement could be more accurate.

Trump is a failure, but one with a very loud mouth and a rather twisted psychology that magically converts all failures into successes. Nothing factual ever fazes him.

And the ability to just keep going is a great asset in politics, even if it means you keep going to do destructive things. Your actions communicate strength and purpose and determination to ordinary people.

After all, much of the ordinary public literally has no idea what is going on, abroad or at home, so poorly informed are they by the mainline press and the political establishment.

Trump does a daily war dance of self-praise, finding new phrases to whoop and chant, describing his almost complete failure in opposite terms.

But because he is doing, overall, the power establishment’s work – against China, against Iran, against Russia, for Israel, and in Latin America – they not only do not oppose him, they support him. Any opposition is pretty tepid, falling within the generally accepted limits of political rhetoric.

He does his work rudely and utterly without grace.

He wears his ignorance as though it were a finely-tailored suit.

But the power establishment is okay with the grotesque style, so long as they get the results they want. And they do.

The desired results are negative, not positive, achievements.

But that is the essence of imperial America today, to do harm to others in order to improve its own relative standing. It does almost nothing positive anymore anywhere. It threatens friends and foes alike. It destroys international organizations and order. It supports the creation of chaos, as in Syria or Libya or Yemen or Palestine.

The contrast of America’s now-constant threats and hostilities with China’s great Belt and Rail Initiative couldn’t be starker. Or with Putin’s pragmatic “live and let live” philosophy. We see destruction versus creation. Coercion versus cooperation. Ignorance versus information. Darkness versus light.

So, Trump, with all of grotesqueries and lies, provides almost the perfect contemporary President.

Sorry, America, but that is a very great, if ugly, truth.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO AN ARTICLE BY TOM PECK IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘Nigel Farage raved about populism to EU parliament – right after an Auschwitz survivor spoke

‘It was fitting, in a strange way, that he should save his most crass moment till last”

 

Farage can be pretty crass, but much of the time he is something of a showman, a political version of the old music hall comics, and he does amuse a large number of people. After all, he has had a serious effect on the future of about 65 million British people.

The world makes no real progress under leaders like Farage.

Absolutely none.

He represents Nativism or Tribalism.

And there’s lots of that around, but the fact doesn’t make it worthy or admirable any more than other primitive superstitions and beliefs, of which we have many.

Just as we advanced from local village with no real connecting roads in the 16th century to superhighways and fleets of jets connecting everything, so our future in global trade and economics and society is in institutions like the EU, not in a music hall comic waving a plastic British flag.

And by the way, just getting to that Union Jack flag was a long and difficult history, from some tribal Celts conquered by Romans with later incursions of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Norman French. England is a hybrid society, not some purest vision.

Historical change and development don’t just stop at some moment that appeals to some people and stay stuck there.

That’s the view of some religious cultish folks like Mennonites or Amish or Hasidic Jews. It’s wrong for most people and packed with superstition, and it goes absolutely nowhere in terms of progress.

____________________

Response to a comment saying “Always the idiot …”. Supported by many idiots.

Just as Jesus said, “The poor you have with you always”, so with idiots.

It’s just the human condition and why it takes so long to get anything worthwhile done.

____________________

Response to a comment saying, “In the 21st century democracy = populism”

That’s simply not true.

We have very little democracy anywhere, but a great deal of “populism.”

The establishment uses populist movements as tools of control.

Just as Hitler was made possible by bankers and industrialists, both from Germany and America. The Third Reich just would not have existed without them.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON TRUMP’S BIZARRE PEACE PLAN FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

Jerusalem to be Israel’s “undivided” capital, but East Jerusalem is somehow also to be Palestine’s capital, an arrangement which sounds a bit like the Palestinians renting some retail store space in an Israeli Jerusalem shopping mall.

 

Trump’s foolish approach to foreign affairs is repeated in every major initiative he undertakes – North Korea, Iran, China, Venezuela, Syria or Iraq – and it is no less again in his “plan” for Israel and Palestine.

Trump glibly calls the plan “a two-state solution” and “a win-win.”

But how can something be a “two-state solution” when one of the “states” has not even been consulted?

Diplomacy always requires a thorough understanding of both sides in a conflict, listening to each of them about concerns and trying to discover a formula which works for both of them, but this is not what Trump has done. Not at all. Not even a pretense.

We have the plan’s formal announcement made with Trump in the smiling company of the leader of just one of the two ”states,” the one already holding all the power because it occupies the other.

We have the leader of the other “state,” the one being occupied, rejecting a plan he has had no role in creating right after it was announced. Rejecting it entirely.

Indeed, President Abbas said the Palestinians are ready to negotiate with Israel, but only under the auspices of the “Quartet,” a set of international mediators which includes Russia, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union.

The Palestinians will not negotiate in future with only the United States acting as mediator.

Abbas said the only way toward peace is to create a Palestinian state with borders from 1967 – that is, from before Israel’s conquest and occupation in a war – a consistent and fair demand made countless times in the past by many, including a few Israelis genuinely interested in peace, although there are not a great number of those because Israelis generally recognize that they are in control of the situation, and Trump only offers even more control. Israel’s decades of history have produced a national politics located almost exclusively on the Right.

If you look at maps of what Trump is proposing, what you see, unmistakably, is formalized apartheid. See the opening map here: https://mondoweiss.net/2020/01/the-deal-of-the-century-is-apartheid/

The other “state,” the one now occupied, almost resembles an island chain, an archipelago, locked inside the boundaries of the primary “state.”

Every important power applicable to the island-chain “state” is held by the surrounding “state.”

The primary “state” actually gets to expand its territory at the expense of the island-chain ”state.”

The surrounding “state” gets to annex the Jordan Valley and many illegal Jewish communities inside the island-chain “state,” acts effectively fragmenting the island chain further still.

The surrounding “state” holds control of all borders, airspace, underground water, maritime authority, and even radio frequencies.

On the map, you see a geography superficially resembling some North American Indigenous reservations, undoubtedly a model some Americans working on the proposal had in mind.

The North American system of Indigenous reservations very roughly works, although only with many injustices suffered and outbreaks of violence over the years. It works at all largely because of the immense disparities in population size between island-chain and mainland populations.

But the Palestinians have just as large a population – perhaps now even somewhat larger owing to higher birth rates – as the Jewish people of Israel.

Palestinians also have many rights recognized internationally, both by major international organizations and by a great many individual countries. They do not stand completely on their own.

But there is another difference in Trump’s proposal from the structure of North American Indigenous reservations, one you cannot see on a map, and one that is profoundly important.

Residents of North American Indigenous reservations are full citizens of the huge country – the United States or Canada, as the case may be – which surrounds them. Full citizens, and free to travel anywhere.

The Palestinians are not to be citizens of Israel and are to have no rights of any kind there. And the meaning of citizenship even in their own designated areas is to so be so curtailed as to be close to meaningless. They get to vote for a government, their own, which governs almost nothing, and they cannot even freely travel between the broken bits of their island chain.

It is especially in this key detail that Trump’s proposal far more exactly resembles the infamous Bantustans of apartheid South Africa than North American Indigenous reservations.

The one consolation people who are concerned about justice have here is the fact that it was not many years after South Africa vigorously pursued its Bantustan “solution” that the entire apartheid house of cards collapsed from outside pressure.

Israel works very hard at preventing such pressure from abroad developing with its lobbies pressuring legislators to curtail freedom of speech (trying to conflate criticism of the public acts of a well-armed state with the superstitious beliefs of anti-Semitism) and freedom of association (by seriously penalizing advocacy for, or membership in, free-choice boycott movements, the very things that brought an end to South Africa’s once powerful apartheid arrangements). That may work for a time, but it so fundamentally unfair that it cannot provide a lasting foundation for a new apartheid.

It seems to me it would be so much easier for Israel to make a genuine effort at peace with its neighbors, something it has truly never done. All those millions of Palestinians are not going anywhere despite years of dreams and schemes in Israel to see them get up and leave.

ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT NOTE

The iffy provision for East Jerusalem becoming Palestine’s capital applies only “when the Palestinians have taken adequate steps towards becoming self-governing.”

The patronizing qualifier reflects Jared Kushner’s words last year about the Palestinians not being ready for self-government.

The words are certainly in keeping with a sense of Trump’s “plan” having nothing to do with peace. It is about establishing virtually perpetual apartheid.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL NOTE

Well, the mystery of how you can have both an undivided Israeli Jerusalem and a possible future Palestinian capital is solved.

Although Trump speaks of “East Jerusalem,” he is, as in so many matters, simply wrong. What the plan actually promises Palestinians as their capital, provided they earn it, is a place called Abu Dis. It is not part of East Jerusalem, and it is now separated from the Old City by an eight-meter high wall. An illegal one, of course. The place is a suburban village. So, my opening sarcasm about renting space for a capital in a mall may be no exaggeration.

This might represent the plan’s most gratuitous insult because Jerusalem is just as important, sacred, and historic to Palestinians as it is to Israelis, and in fact they have lived there many centuries longer than contemporary Israelis.

But it is hard to think of what could be a greater insult than telling millions of people they are not ready to govern themselves and must earn the right to do so. People who have had a society in the region for centuries before a re-creation of Israel was imposed on them.

If you spoke that way in America about any large group of people – say an ethnic group dominating a city or state – you would be regarded as bigoted and arrogant (as well as wind up in court). Those words, bigoted and arrogant, exactly describe the people promoting Trump’s plan.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GUILLAUME DUROCHER IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“Brexit Happening: Charles de Gaulle, Noted Anglo-Skeptic, Vindicated Beyond the Grave”

“In short, De Gaulle accused the British of being a kind of American Trojan Horse . . . and who could blame him?”

 

In that particular view, De Gaulle was ahead of his time for sure. He was a man with a number of deep insights, including his views on NATO, views which unfortunately Europe has drifted away from.

British membership represented a great strengthening of the EU. But that was never allowed to develop as fully as it should have. Britain’s classic island-bound xenophobia and feelings of special stature owing to its past world empire always were burrs under the saddle.

I believe Britain’s xenophobes and those who still regard Britain as special owing to its history plus a government thoughtless enough to hold a referendum on so complex a matter, David Cameron’s, are directly responsible for BREXIT. I do think Cameron was regretful about his own blundering. After all, it was the Conservatives, under Edward Heath, who struggled to get Britain admitted. And who wants a legacy of having destroyed something important?

In general, the powerful positive effects of a large economic union are things Conservatives tend to value highly. But the “small island” and “great empire” attitudes and feelings always were in conflict with the economic vision.

Europe’s relative decline in the world’s economy – owing largely to the same causes as America’s relative decline, the strong emergence of new competitors – undoubtedly has encouraged Britain’s establishment to want to leave. The EU’s tendency to create elaborate regulations in many aspects of society also has very much played a role. It is an odd tendency given the EU’s lack of cohesiveness in many matters, such as the Euro. Perhaps in part, regulation represents a kind of substitute or ersatz unity.

I’m sure the Conservatives in Britain were quietly encouraged every step of the way by American officials with visions of “the special relationship” coming to a new prominence in the world. Some people in Britain are inordinately and foolishly proud of that ”relationship,” which in reality means little beyond American insider influence, something now likely to much increase as Britain seeks new trade arrangements and a new role in the world, in both of which America must feature large.

America’s own vision of itself has changed over forty years, and all pieces on the gameboard are now used somewhat differently than they were. America, recognizing its own relative decline, is now a decidedly more desperate and aggressive imperial power. And that reality, unfortunately, is what Britain is hitching itself up to. Conservatives in Britain likely view themselves as having a new world importance teamed up with America, but their ability to influence the team will be close to non-existent. They will have traded disliked EU regulation for America’s shameless and destructive bullying, as it now descends literally to terrorizing states it regards as opponents.

Of course, Britain has its own share of bullies, and indeed, it now is led by one. They are the people who see a new role for Britain in the world alongside the United States, playing Robin to America’s Batman.

America is on a tear worldwide to do whatever it can to bolster its imperial status and stop its relative economic decline. It has become frenetic at the effort. And dangerous.

So, Britain’s leaving the EU has, forty years later, become something De Gaulle feared. BREXIT does seem to open a path for other European states with fears and insecurities to launch “leave” movements. The EU is much weakened at a time it needs to be strengthened, and America’s establishment can only try hiding its smile.

The EU always has had the potential to rival and outshine America, but the EU has weakened itself over time by admitting too many countries, and certainly too many of limited economic consequence. There were a few too many visionary views of what the EU could be as it expanded and not enough practical ones.

After all, that’s what NATO is really about, keeping Europe effectively occupied and tied up with many obligations not in its own long-term interest, including obligations to buy American products and support American schemes in other parts of the world.

And the Europeans have for various reasons – from old WWII sentiments to Russo-phobia in former Eastern Bloc states – obligingly gone along. Europe still has some illusions about America, although Trump is certainly working hard to snuff them out. America’s narrow selfishness is entering Europe’s consciousness now, at least in the old and stronger parts of the EU. Some now see what De Gaulle saw.

Divide and conquer is always a principle used by empires abroad.

‘Anyway, Britain’s departure from the European Union opens the way for the Continentals to try, a bit more earnestly, to create a truly sovereign and independent “European Europe.”’

That is an encouraging thought, but there are so many things working against it, and those things certainly include the United States, which never wants to see a united, strong European state emerge as a competitor.

But I think the loss of Britain does represent at least one clear gain for Europe. It now should become easier for Europe to direct more attention towards Russia and China and Eurasia in general, and that is where the future lies.

The United States cannot realistically escape the prison it has constructed for itself with its massive military/security state required for empire, and that prison makes a far more unhappy place than Europe’s regulations.

There is too, unquestionably, a kind of smallness in the American vision to which Britain is attaching itself – ethical, moral, and inspirational smallness – and over the long term, small visions have no power.

ADDED NOTE REGARDING A STRONG STATEMENT MADE BY THE EU’S CHIEF NEGOTIATOR

“EU warns Boris Johnson that trying to use threat of US trade deal in ‘bidding war’ after Brexit will fail”
‘Michel Barnier [EU’s chief negotiator] also suggests UK will never earn the same ‘respect’ from US and China outside EU”

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-us-trade-deal-brexit-trump-eu-michael-barnier-a9302571.htmlhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-us-trade-deal-brexit-trump-eu-michael-barnier-a9302571.html

Michel Barnier’s statement is close to perfect.

I like his “plans for 10 negotiating tables for the huge task ahead,” the fact that ‘border checks on goods will “become the norm” after Brexit,’ and that ‘a no-deal Brexit remained a “risk” at the end of 2020.’

Johnson and some of his gang may well have had intentions here.

After all, Johnson, like Trump, has the personality of a bully, just expressed in the tones of an Eton accent.

Who knows, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. The EU might look a little more attractive after some grueling negotiations and no special gains.

Readers may enjoy some earlier thoughts on the subject:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/11/03/john-chuckman-comment-the-great-often-unseen-danger-of-brexit-a-comprehensive-trade-deal-with-trumps-america-that-would-destroy-many-aspects-of-british-society/

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY GREGORY POLING IN CHECKPOINT ASIA (NOW RENAMED AS ANTI-EMPIRE)

 

“The Pentagon Is Seriously Underestimating the Value of Beijing’s South China Sea Bases”

_____________________

Response to comment saying the author does not give Xi the credit he deserves for being a master planner

Indeed, that is so true.

And it is important to note that the Chinese do not claim exclusive use of waters in the South China Sea.

America’s aggressive “Freedom of Navigation” displays tend to imply that China is interested in limiting passage through the waters, but as with so many claims from the United States anymore – eg, murdering Iran’s General Soleimani was “restoring deterrence” – the words are meaningless, just stuff to blur reality.

Except for foreign warships and regulated economic activities – say, commercial fishing or oil drilling, breaking Chinese regulations – that is not true. China has committed to peace in the region and promised to negotiate all disputes with any neighboring country. It promises to maintain services such as rescue at sea.

This is one of world’s busiest commercial waterways with a third of all the world’s shipping passing through it.

The Chinese are claiming to be owners of two island chains and the resident regulators and defenders of all legitimate activities around them. That is in keeping with some other maritime situations in the world. It is important to have a single legitimate set of rules governing such places.

The Chinese have a couple of thousand years in the region plus documents from the close of WWII giving them authority over islands the Japanese had occupied, the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation. The Spratly and Paracel Islands were occupied by Japan during the war.

China’s activities on the fortified islands very much also reflect concerns for the defence of southern China’s coast. They effectively have moved some coastal defences out to sea, dispersing them, making attack much more difficult for an aggressive United States. I tend to think of the fortified islands as a permanent small fleet of aircraft carriers and multi-function warships.

It is, after all, an outsider to the region, the United States, which maintains an intimidating military presence around China’s maritime perimeter, from the Philippines to South Korea and Japan.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump lauds U.S. economy at Davos as trial set to begin in Washington”

 

It cannot be stressed enough that American impeachment is largely a political act. I’ve written that before, but here is some background to support the claim.

Impeachment was not carefully designed by the Constitution’s authors. They offered only a sketchy outline, perhaps naively believing that the provision would never be required in the brave new world they thought they were creating.

It is in fact just one of many instances where the American Constitution has proved inadequate or outdated in a complex modern world. For it is a world unlike anything the authors could imagine, a point which goes to the difficulty of writing constitutions intended to last for centuries. The Constitution is amendable, but only with much difficulty, a deliberate “safety” feature, but not one well suited to a rapidly changing world.

Its inflexibility in general terms has however never really stopped determined American governments from doing most of the nasty things they want to do. What is the most important part of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, has been ignored or trampled countless times. At least in part that reflects the fact that it costs a lot of money to bring a case before the Supreme Court. That is another of the Constitution’s weaknesses, justice often depends on money.

But it is not just in matters of citizens’ rights that the Constitution is often effectively ignored. American Presidents, now virtually on their own, decide to commit acts of war (the assassination of a foreign leader, for example, or mass missile launches against a country presumed to have crossed some “red line”). Perhaps they briefly consult key members of Congress, but that’s not what the Constitution says you must do for acts of war.

And now, much in the fashion of Roman emperors, American Presidents use Executive Orders to do many of the things they want to do, behavior that is about as far as you can go from the Constitution’s rules. The Founders likely would have been horrified by the term, Executive Order. But, just as with acts of war, the Congress accommodates the President. Much of the “unconstitutional” behavior reflects the fact of America’s global empire and its often exigent needs. It simply is not how the country was designed to operate.

Of course, with a population of more than 330 million and growing, the concept of single set of judges established in Washington near the time of the first American census of 1790, to serve a population of 3.9 million, also has inherent problems. And the world has only grown more litigious and infinitely more complex.

The Founders hoped, perhaps, in a time closely following the Enlightenment with all its new political and scientific attitudes, to create something concise and fundamental in the Constitution – architecture’s Mies van der Rohe’s “less is more” – with no extra baggage, but for various reasons, I believe they did not succeed. Constitutions don’t work quite the same way as general scientific principles. They govern dynamic and growing and changing societies – living things.

Where any rule or process is not precisely defined, an intensely political environment always works to shape and manipulate it. In Washington, everything becomes politicized, literally everything, right down to what in normal life would be dull process, such as budgeting. And so it is with impeachment.

There were no true political parties in early America, but there sure are now. They are gigantic and powerful corporations such as the Founders could not have imagined, taking in vast sums of money, and all of American political life revolves around them.

(Perhaps, more precisely put, that would be all of American political life, including the parties, revolves around money, but that gets us into a different topic, one I’ve discussed elsewhere, but it is again something which was not anticipated.)

It is no coincidence that all the impeachment trials have occurred in the modern era, the earliest being Andrew Johnson in 1868, a few years after the Civil War, a time of great partisanship and party loyalties.

Trump, Clinton, and Nixon (who resigned, under advice, rather than endure a vote) are all in the late modern era. More than one politician remarked that Clinton’s impeachment represented a wish by Republicans to get even over Nixon’s impeachment, an observation which again goes to impeachment’s political nature.

The Founders could not have imagined America’s set of relationships with the world two centuries after their work. That America would come to displace the Redcoats and Hessians who represented in American eyes a global tyranny called the British Parliament. What Trump is accused of having done, and I certainly believe he did, could not even have occurred in early America.

If Impeachment is largely political in nature, claims on all sides can be “right,” and it comes down to who has the votes. There is no precise body of law and only a small, generalized list of charges to which to refer. The Constitution offers as an impeachment “penal code” only the words, “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” with the last part not even defined.

By the way, “all sides being right” rather nicely fits in with America’s prevailing political culture where all sides have their own truths, and there are no verities or universally accepted authorities. There is no truth, only sets of attitudes.

Trump’s just-developed line of defense has been summed up as “abuse of power is not impeachable.” That may even be legally and technically correct. But of course, for the rest of world, it is a ridiculous and dangerous-sounding proposition, especially when it concerns such a powerful country as America, yet some very prominent lawyers in Washington are saying it.

I do think that gives us a terrible insight into what a cloudcuckooland America has become. In the most powerful country in the world, abuse of power may not be considered impeachable.

It’s not just Trump, loud and extremely rude as he is. Others have enabled him, powerful Americans contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to his campaign war chest, which is filled to overflowing for the next election, and tens of millions of ordinary Americans voted for him. America just may be a ruder, more uncouth place than many appreciate.

It does seem the country is almost incapable of rational behavior anymore. The rule of law, that most fundamental building block of all civil society, is ignored by American leaders. Assassinations have become common practice, as have threats and aggressive wars and engineered coups. Sanctions, which are American laws which should apply only to Americans, are applied to all the world’s people, hurting tens of millions of innocents.

Constant lies are required to cover or attempt to explain away all of the criminal behavior. International trade and economic relationships are being destroyed by trying to put America first, ahead of all others. International treaties and agreements are being destroyed (the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, the Outer Space Treaty, and the Open Skies Treaty and Strategic Arms Treaty with Russia are under threat) simply because America does not want to be bound by them. International organizations are being attacked or undermined – the UN (the US owes more than a billion dollars in back dues and often breaks its solemn treaty obligation to issue visas to leaders needing to come to New York), UNESCO (the US simply quit), the ICC (whose judges were openly threatened by a high American official), the WTO, the IJC, the OPCW, etc., etc.

International chaos is being actively promoted by Trump and much of the American political establishment. I only wish an impeachment conviction could halt or seriously impair those efforts, but I fear that it cannot.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Canada calls for an independent criminal investigation into Flight PS752 crash

“Foreign Minister Champagne is in London today meeting with Ukraine, Sweden, Afghanistan and U.K. representatives”

 

Calling for an independent “criminal” investigation here is totally inappropriate.

We didn’t call for that in the many other cases involving militaries and the loss of civilian airliners, including several by the United States’ military and one by Israel’s.

This represents rather shameful service to Trump’s war-like White House, but then that has been a notable and consistent feature of Trudeau’s government, supporting the Trump White House in foreign affairs.

Iran very much is sorry for what happened and is taking all reasonable steps. It has given the black-box data to other interested parties, including Canada.

It would be nice to see some understanding here instead of an effort to whip-up the mob.

It sure ain’t Iran who started all the hostilities in the region.

And this event serves nicely to detract from the fact that the United States publicly murdered 35 people in Iraq, including Iran’s General Soleimani, in the weeks previous. Talk about criminal acts.

_____________________

THIS ADDITIONAL COMMENT WAS REMOVED BY AN EDITOR

Here is something readers should find extremely interesting.

It is written by a former CIA senior analyst.

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/who-targeted-ukraine-airlines-flight-752-iran-shot-it-down-but-there-may-be-more-to-the-story/#comment-3664167

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS

 

“Putin announces constitutional reform in possible bid to hold onto power indefinitely”

 

If we had a guy with Putin’s demonstrated talents – well informed, sound judgment, high intelligence, pragmatism, farsightedness, superb statesmanship – I’d want him to remain in power indefinitely too.

Look what our forms of election have given us in “the West”: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau. Not a serious leader in the bunch.

Not only is there not a serious leader in the bunch, but there are a couple of genuinely dangerous, reckless ones.

I am exaggerating about wanting anyone to stay indefinitely, of course, but just barely, and my basic points are valid. Putin represents an important force for geo-political sanity in our world.

Note that the ultimate intent of Putin’s dramatic reforms is not so clear as this article suggests. We’ll have to wait and see, but I am confident that this remarkable man would do nothing to harm the interests of his country, including its interests after he is gone.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“The West Is Still Buying into Nonsense About Iran’s Regional Influence”

 

I welcome Cockburn’s analysis as a needed corrective to much Western thinking, and I especially like this:

“Much the same nonsense is being uttered today about an Iranian hand being behind anything the west and its allies do not like in the Middle East. When they claim to be targeting Iran, they are in practice targeting the Shia community as a whole – a mistake for which both they and the Shia are likely to pay a high price.”

But I do think many aspects of the Middle East’s religious division are just naturally blurred into politics and geopolitics, and perhaps it is unavoidable.

I regard the Shia-Sunni divide as something akin to the Catholic-Protestant one that dominated Europe from the 16th century.

It permeated all of European politics and generated wars. There was bloodshed for a very long period in Europe, actually a bit of it extending right into the 20th century in places like Northern Ireland.

The division drove all kinds of violence in a number of European countries, including wars of succession and massacres, and it was a key part in Britain’s “Glorious Revolution.”

It played an important role, often now unrecognized, in America’s revolt when Britain put parts of what would become the American Midwest, then regarded as Indian Reserve lands, under the jurisdiction of Quebec Province with the Quebec Act of 1774.

America’s colonials resented the well-intentioned Act deeply, both for cutting off their opportunities to exploit those lands and for putting them under the control of “popery,” a word very much heard then in New England.

So, for Europeans, political and religious matters were largely indistinguishable and remained that way for centuries.

If you understand that history, you do not look at the Muslim world’s situation as anything mysterious or unusual.

It likely reflects a basic division in human psychological make-up when we see vast religious movements divide into factions, just as people divide themselves into political factions. Indeed, in Britain’s early 18^th century Parliament, there were no political parties as we know them, and when they began to emerge, they were called factions.

I think I might identify the Shia a bit with the early Protestants in that some of what they represent is regarded as revolutionary or at least upsetting to the old order.

In any event, a lot of what is said about Muslims in the West is inaccurate and self-serving.

Remember, “the West” is really a global imperial power, the United States, with loyal satraps like Britain or France scurrying along behind.

The primary interest of “the West” in the world at large is control, not understanding or cooperation.

So, the Muslim world’s natural divisions are exploited towards control.

John Chuckman

COMMENT – ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON TRUMP’S IRAN CRISIS AND AMERICAN IMPERIAL DECLINE

 

The American empire has overreached itself in recent decades, in places like Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen and even in Iraq. America has basically lost all of those wars in the sense of having created enduring unstable conditions and great hostilities, not peace or stability and not democratic values. All those places are wrecks with smoldering conflicts continuing and outcomes uncertain. The Neocon Wars of the Middle East have been a disaster, but Trump is closely tuned into the Neocons. He is literally surrounded with them.

Even though America clearly won the Iraq War, a war advocated for directly by Ariel Sharon, with a victory memorialized in the blood of a million Iraqis, it was a kind of technical victory, because the key result was something completely unwanted, that is, greatly strengthening Iran as a regional power. Iraq was a war that should not have been fought, but Washington was incapable of seeing that as a result of both its imperial hubris and its vulnerability to Israel’s tireless efforts to influence. Iraq’s invasion has been called by a number of experts America’s greatest strategic blunder ever.

Just as many Israelis live in a kind of foggy fantasy of sentimental Biblical names and notions combined with efforts to recreate American middle-class urban society in a hostile environment – Ozzie and Harriet on the Desert – all floated on an immense Noah’s Flood of American subsidies, public and private, many of them do not realize the full impact of what they do in the region. They believe America is there to bail them out no matter how badly they behave towards others and create unnecessary hostilities. America can flatten Iraq. American can topple Syria. And America can topple Iran. The thinking is terribly wrong and self-indulgent and dangerous. And people subservient to the Neocons, like Trump, are immersed in it.

Trump now seems perilously close to repeating the mistake of Iraq, only on a far grander scale, with Iran. There are many powerful Israeli interests who want to see America go to war with Iran, something they realize is beyond the capacity of Israel despite its rhetoric and threats. The assassination of General Soleimani seems almost certainly to have been a trap designed for that purpose, and Trump just thoughtlessly walked into it. If Iran had not proceeded in the carefully considered way that it did, giving Trump room to slip out of the trap, and without being humiliated, we would have a big new war.

The set of events carries important lessons. First, there is the remarkable steadiness and rationality displayed by Iran’s leaders. They are responsible for avoiding a gigantic, unnecessary conflict.

Second, I think are the unmistakable signs of American imperial decline. Iraq has asked America to leave. Iran has promised new pressures for America to leave. Syria is also effectively telling the United States to leave. America has been reduced to sophomoric jokes about stealing oil, and its treatment of the Iran nuclear agreement has made its word for many close to worthless. It’s pretty hard to stay in a place where the people don’t want you and where long and costly efforts have yielded little of worth. Especially as the near-term future promises nothing but continued relative economic decline for the United States with the privileged position of the dollar gradually disappearing.

Trump has listened to Israel’s bad advice time after time. And the assassination was just the most explosive instance. You do not increase stability or security with such acts. You actually create instabilities that weren’t there before. They may not all be matters to appear in tomorrow’s headlines, but they are like new fault lines in an earthquake-prone zone.

In the end, despite all the bluster, Trump was unwilling to retaliate against Iran. Of course, Iran made it as easy as possible for him with its orchestrated missile attack, an event perhaps better described as an orchestrated missile demonstration. Trump now looks more ineffectual and less in command than ever. The only people looking to him are special interests in Israel, dangerous ones that view him as a big piñata to be poked at with sticks for gifts, and the degree to which he listens to them measures our risk of war.

Trump is likely aware that Iran holds some important cards. No, Iran cannot possibly defeat the United States in a war, but Iran has never sought a war.

Perhaps I shouldn’t speak of “cannot possibly defeat the United States.” We must never forget what the tough and resourceful people of Vietnam achieved vis-à-vis the United States. Wars can go on for very long periods of time, and sometimes a less wealthy, less complex society is able to absorb the costs and demands better than a wealthier, privileged opponent. There have been other instances of that. Note that the United States has been killing peasants for eighteen years in Afghanistan, and the Taleban still controls major parts of the country, as much or more of it than when America started.

If you invade or attack someone without a clear and powerful purpose, you are condemning yourself to an unhappy future. It’s like trying to pour concrete without a mold. And the United States has done that time after time, confident just in its arrogant sense of overwhelming superiority. It is foolish, and absolutely no one is more subject to the illusion of American superiority and exceptional status than Donald Trump.

First, a war means Iran’s hurling fleets of missiles against Israel. It has the missiles. The missiles are very capable, as has been demonstrated several times. They are highly accurate. Iran has literally thousands at its disposal. Underground bunkers packed with them. So, unavoidably, the reason for starting a war against Iran, Israel’s intense and unwarranted hostility against Iran, will result in large-scale destruction of Israel.

The effort to build a deterrence has been one of Iran’s national projects, especially after the ghastly Iraq-Iran War, 1980-88, inflicted upon it.

That deterrent capacity is why Trump wants to strip Iran of its missiles, demanding, as he does, that missile technology be added to the terms of his notion of a new nuclear agreement. But that is like asking Iran to disarm itself and doing so at gunpoint. It will not happen.

Israel makes a rather compact target, meaning a determined opponent can saturate it. Iran can accurately target most of what is worth targeting in Israel. Israel’s anti-missile defenses would be overwhelmed. Besides past incidents demonstrated those defenses fail in part even under the highly favorable circumstances of a limited number of unsophisticated missiles.

Iran can also do the same thing to a number of American bases in the region.

Places like the Saudi oil facilities and the facilities of the Strait of Hormuz could quickly be rendered totally inoperable, bringing the world’s oil economy to a desperate crisis.

Iran several times has demonstrated how resourceful it can be at unconventional or guerilla operations. Any war with the United States would see these capabilities used fully.

Those and other hard facts do make starting a war with Iran an act of madness.

But if you put yourself into a bad situation deliberately, as Trump does, madness can easily happen.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON THE OUTCOME OF IRAN’S MISSILE STRIKE – ALMOST PLANNED

 

Various bits of information suggest we may have an end, at least for the interim, to the crisis caused by Trump’s stupidly blundering decision to kill Iran’s General Soleimani. They suggest something which seems almost choreographed behind the scenes.

The United States was given advance warning by Iraq of the missile attack, although not provided with the names of the bases to be struck. That allowed Americans to seek safety. It would have been necessary for Iran to warn Iraq ahead since American facilities are generally contained within Iraqi military facilities.

Iran is said to have chosen its targets to avoid American casualties, and aerial photos of the damage suggest missiles with precision guidance were used. Of course, with precision missiles, results just the opposite were possible, so a message was communicated to the United States even if no one was killed.

Reports from Iran say eighty Americans were killed, but governments all make such claims when addressing their own people, especially very angry people.

It is telling that, despite an enormous volume of bluster and threats and crude words, Trump did not launch a counter-attack. He bellowed about additional sanctions, but that has become as regular with him as eating breakfast.

Iran’s President Rouhani said Americans leaving the region would be Iran’s goal in retaliation for the assassination.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei described the missile attacks as “open” and “proportional,” the kind of language used in international law and diplomacy to describe a “legal” armed response, as in self-defense.

Khamenei warned that it would not be the only response. It represented the opening of a long and quieter campaign to kick the United States out of the Middle East, with more responses coming in the weeks ahead.

 

SOME INTERESTING BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT HOW AMERICA ACTUALLY TREATS OTHER COUNTRIES BEHIND THE SCENES WITH EYE-OPENING DETAILS OF TRUMP’S METHODS

 

Iraq’s Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mehdi, who has already resigned his office but serves in an interim capacity until a new appointment is made, has provided some fascinating details about recent relations between Iraq and the United States, the kind of stuff to which the public rarely is exposed.

He said that American infrastructure projects such as electricity grid destroyed in the war were deliberately being left unfinished. America invaded in 2003, and many Iraqis still suffer from the destroyed infrastructure. The United States was demanding one-half of the country’s oil revenue as the price for finishing the work.

The Prime Minister refused, and, instead, went to China and signed an agreement there to have the job finished. Trump called him and demanded he cancel the agreement with China, or Trump would see to it that huge demonstrations were launched in Iraq against the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister again refused, and the promised huge demonstrations did appear.

Trump called again and threatened that Marine snipers on tall buildings would start targeting the crowds and Iraqi security forces. That of course was part of the technique used during the Ukraine coup of 2013-14, which began with protests and waves of shootings in Kiev’s Maidan Square.

The Prime Minister again refused Trump, but then handed in his resignation.

That is the kind of authoritative, first-hand account Americans rarely receive about the activities of their government abroad.

It is shameful. After all, the United States illegally invaded Iraq. It deliberately destroyed the infrastructure. Even in a “legal” war, it is accepted practice for a larger, more powerful victor to pay some reparations so the losing country isn’t left helpless on its back.

But here we are, seventeen years after America’s bloody invasion – in the war and surrounding events, about a million Iraqis were killed and in this once most-advanced country in the Middle East, millions were left without employment and essential services – and not only is the infrastructure still not repaired, but the President of the United States is attempting extortion around finishing it.

He then threatens the country with civil disorder and sniper killings because China has agreed to do the job on terms acceptable to Iraq, China of course, as part of its massive Belt and Road Initiation – the New Silk Road – being ready to undertake infrastructure projects almost anywhere.

Such are the dark inner workings of empire, and I doubt anyone can make a meaningful distinction between them and the former activities of Al Capone in Chicago.

Knowing Trump operates in this way, why would anyone be surprised that he would make a casual decision to kill a famous man regarded as a hero by millions and create havoc?

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The USA’s Slavish Saudi Allegiance Against Iran

“The assassination of a top Iranian general reflects a U.S. foreign policy tied to Saudi interests”

 

I like Craig Murray as a writer, but this piece comes as quite a disappointment.

It focuses on Saudi Arabia as being at the center of America’s hostility towards Iran. Israel gets slight mention.

I believe Mr. Murray has put the cart before the horse.

The attention America lavishes on Saudi Arabia has much to do with Saudi Arabia’s special relations with Israel, relations which have no long history. Saudi Arabia, before 9/11 was the source of a lot of hostility towards Israel, in everything from publications and speeches to support for various groups.

You find none of that now. It began to quiet down after 9/11 when the Saudi Royals realized how vulnerable they were to American invasion, a much more attractive invasion prospect than the hardscrabble land of Afghanistan. America could easily have manipulated facts like the (purported) nationalities of many of the plane hijackers (Saudi) into a reason to invade and steal the greatest quantity of oil ever stolen.

The Crown Prince took the new direction in Saudi international affairs even further. He made it his focus, recognizing opportunities for personal aggrandizement. Nothing good happens to anyone in the Middle East who does not happily support American policy, and that includes supporting America’s privileged imperial colony at the east end of the Mediterranean.

As we’ve seen in the Neocon Wars, those deemed not adequately warm towards Israel tend to get bombed and paved over.

As an interesting side note, Trump, the candidate who sensibly spoke against the wars in the Middle East, has now so completely compromised himself serving Israel’s special interests – interests often in conflict both with America’s own long-term interests and with the rule of international law – that it seems just impossible America can be extricated from the mess. Indeed, we now have the real possibility of the biggest war of all breaking out, and what has happened was completely avoidable.

Just look at Israel making no objection to the biggest arms deal in history recently between the Crown Prince and Trump. That could not have happened years ago. Israel’s influence wouldn’t have allowed the deal even to be proposed. Israel dearly loves the Crown Prince, and that has a lot to do with Trump’s smiling, back-slapping support for the tyrant.

The Crown Prince earned his bloody laurels with projects largely related to Israeli interests, projects such as the terror in Syria, with his generous support of mercenary, fake-jihadi outfits like al-Nusra and ISIS, groups whose main purpose has been to attack governments the United States and Israel wanted hurt.

Genuine jihadi types would, of course, instead be attacking Israel and the corrupt feudal princes of Saudi Arabia, but, somehow, magically, they never do.

Projects like bombing Yemen or arresting the visiting Prime Minister of Lebanon and forcing his resignation. Saudi Arabia frequently finances American schemes in the region, and I’m sure that whenever Netanyahu needs a tidy sum under the table for a dirty project, he has only to ask.

The real reason for Israel’s seething, relentless hatred of Iran comes from the fact that that country, with a population the size of Germany’s, is just naturally at the center of the region’s affairs and arrangements, a position Israel arrogantly regards as its rightful place. After all, it does represent the American empire, doesn’t it?

The immense blunder of America’s Iraq invasion, heavily lobbied for by Israel’s Ariel Sharon, ended up making Iran relatively even more important in the region by eliminating a strong adversary. Saddam Hussein was secular in his viewpoint. Now Iraq is dominated by the politics of a population which is about two-thirds Shia Muslim.

There are influential Israelis who would just love to see America go to war with Iran. Trump’s series of hostilities and humiliations towards Iran for more than a year does tend to work in that direction, or, at least, to create situations where a “happy” accident might happen. Wars do often happen by something being tipped over at a risky moment.

Remember, Iran was the last country listed on the secret Pentagon document General Wesley Clark spoke of seeing years ago, countries that were to be toppled in upcoming years.

The assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani is called an Israeli project by several reliable observers. There is a report that the very target coordinates for the drone were given to its operator by an Israeli. Likely Trump had very little time to make this monumentally stupid decision, having been advised that a brief window of opportunity was open.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON AMERICA’S ACTIONS AGAINST IRAN AND OTHER STATES

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can’t imagine better words to describe Trump’s actions against Iran – all of them, from tearing-up the working international nuclear treaty to imposing war-like sanctions, which indeed hurt millions of children and poor people, and  to threatening with warships and nuclear-capable bombers, and now to assassinating the second-most important man in the country, a national hero, a vicious act that demands a response.

Is it even possible to conceive of a more passionately destructive set of actions, unprovoked and without reason except to satisfy an urge to tell others what to do? How on earth can a nation call itself “great,” as America so frequently does, when that is how it behaves?

In what way did any of it make any part of the world’s people better off or safer? It added only pain and suffering and fear to a great many lives and created threats of war that hadn’t existed. And it hugely decreased the future capacity of the world’s nations to trust the word and good faith of the United States.

Of course, that set of acts is only the worst of a bad lot. There was the desperate attempt to topple a twice-elected government in Venezuela, going to such extremes as turning off everyone’s electricity a couple of times, blockading the country including its receipt of medical necessities, working to collapse its major industries, and literally stealing many of the country’s assets abroad.

Almost at the same time, another coup, a successful one, was staged in Bolivia, toppling a popular, elected government, one elected multiple times.

New threats and warnings were issued to Nicaragua and Cuba, both countries which have suffered horribly under past American belligerence.

A number of other horrors from the past decade go right on generating death and misery, too – misery in the broken ruins of Libya, once the best place in Africa to live with all public amenities from good water to education supplied free, misery in the never-recovered catastrophe of Iraq, in poor Yemen, and in the beautiful land of Syria plagued by paid outsiders, mercenaries, supplied with many terrible weapons, who kill and destroy on a large scale.

And everyone in Ukraine and in the rest of Europe pays a price for America’s coup there – a civil war has killed thousands, the country’s economy collapsed under an incompetent installed government, its population has seriously declined as people leave for jobs elsewhere, huge sets of war-like sanctions have cut billions in healthy trade between Europe and Russia, regular threatening military displays and large-scale exercises are conducted right on Russia’s border – these last supposedly over a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine which never occurred.

The press and political speeches are filled with threatening rhetoric and demands for big new spending on the means of destruction – all in the face of no threat and indeed a situation in Russia everyone in the West would have deliriously cheered back in the 1970s, a reasonable, temperate government ready to do business with anyone and call them “partner.” But Europe and Russia can’t do so basic and necessary a thing as buy-and-sell a commodity like natural gas without immense pressures being brought against them by the United States.

We have a vicious trade war with China, predicated on no more principle than that “We think you’ve been far too successful in your stunning rise [the rise of China being the greatest and most important human achievement of our age], and we want different arrangements which take some of that success away from you, and we’ll hit you with every sanction and tariff we can think of until you give them to us.”

That marks greatness being displayed by America?

There is not one of those activities that the world would not be better off without. Safer, more prosperous, more secure, happier, holding more optimism for the future – in other words, virtually all of the activity abroad by the United States for years represents a dead-weight loss for humanity and the community of nations. That’s quite an achievement. And the cost in dollars has been colossal.

Of course, I blame Trump, but, as I’ve said before, it certainly is not the work of just Trump, as hopeless and vicious and ignorant as he is. There have been no efforts by other branches of America’s government to halt or hinder the craziness. They are all complicit.

Please note, the candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, none of them except one unlikely one, even recognize this terrible problem or how to address it. So, for sure, as is usual in the costly stage shows called American elections, when it’s over, no matter which side wins, you will find the same situation prevailing. Just more rude noise and bellowing with Trump, and less without Trump.

America seeks what is not possible given its relative decline in the face of global growth and change and progress. And it seeks it fired by a burning, fanatical belief that it holds an exceptional place in God’s creation.

I fear that deadly combination of American delusions has the potential to do far greater harm than it already has.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOE LAURIA IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Fear of a Major Mideast War

“Fears of a major war in the Middle East exploded Thursday night with the U.S. assassination of arguably the second most powerful man in Iran” [General Qassem Soleimani] 

 

It appears Trump has given Israel control of some portion of the American military in addition to major parts of Palestine.

This is classic Israeli extrajudicial killing, an Israeli practice for over seventy years (a recent book claimed Israel is responsible for more than 2,700 of them), but now America takes responsibility on its behalf.

Just as with the Neocon Wars, all for Israel’s benefit and all done so that Israel does not have to take direct blame for the immense violence it generates in the region.

Hard to know what Trump’s thinking here is. War before an election does not seem a good idea, especially if you are a candidate who has failed so far to achieve anything of substance around past promises to reduce America’s involvement in Mideast wars.

Remember that a crucial slice of the votes that put the man into office was not from his prime political base, the “pick-up truck and Jesus” set, but from those concerned with peace and better relations with Russia.

But prodding Iran to attack could allow Trump to play commander-in-chief defending the country. And Americans just instinctively support even the worst possible presidents at war. You might call it the George Bush Effect. The frightened puppy grabbing the nearest pantleg after a loud noise.

Of course, now when it comes to campaign contributions from American Oligarchs whose chief political concern is what Israel wants, Trump’s coffers will be overflowing.

I suspect Iran will take its time and carefully plan a response, and that response may not be clear and unambiguous, and it might be multi-faceted and done over time.

The men running Iran are careful men, none of them impetuous. Chess players. The United States has more than forty years of bellowing, open hostility towards the country, and we have not seen Iran’s leaders act foolishly in all that time despite many provocations.

I do not believe Iran will be driven to war – that would be playing the Israeli-American game with Israeli-American rules.

Clandestine and hybrid efforts, that is what Iran is best at. They have serious capabilities these days, and the United States, with all its bases abroad, has great vulnerabilities.

Of course, there’s also the option of Iran’s just leaving the nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) that Trump idiotically tore-up and proceeding quietly with weapons development. Iran, despite Israel’s dishonest claims, never has pursued weapons development, only efficient use of nuclear power and legitimate scientific research. Perhaps it is time to reconsider that policy

Iran has substantial deposits of uranium, and the enriched-uranium bomb is simpler to build than the plutonium bomb. Maybe there is some possibility for covert assistance from North Korea, another country treated like crap by Trump’s Washington Braintrust?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY STEPHEN F. COHEN IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“How Impeachment Is Escalating the New US-Russian Cold War”

 

“Putin wants stability and partners.”

 

A truer statement could not be made.

What is remarkable is that so many prominent Americans could say the opposite.

Of course, if a powerful country is guided by blindness, the risks are clear and they are enormous.

Yet relatively few in America seem to care.

I depart from Cohen’s view that the leadership of Trump – combined with that of Putin – could make a difference. Despite a few early encouraging words about Russia, I just do not see where Trump has provided any leadership.

Putin is a remarkable statesman, but he is in no position to overcome an American establishment hell-bent on opposing every reasonable effort. That’s part of why so much of his attention has been turned toward Asia and the larger world.

Trump’s early encouraging words about Russia only provided a target for America’s Russo-phobia mania, a condition always present in gigantic, self-perpetuating, and scarcely-scrutinized bureaucracies like CIA and the FBI, but something also seized upon since the election by the Democratic Party both to explain its loss and to intimidate future voters.

Induced chaos is nothing new as a means used to gain power. The CIA uses it in virtually all of its coups abroad. So, it should come as no surprise that there are forces, privileged establishment interests, ready to employ the same approach inside the United States, so comfortable have they grown with it.

The trouble is that Trump is simply not a real leader. He is a bully towards opponents and towards the entire world in matters of trade and military policy, but that is not leadership. He himself represents just another form of chaos.

That is the United States’ real problem. It has no leadership, in either party or in the major “organs” of the state, only a pretty ugly class of people – corrupt, privileged, arrogant – who influence the direction of events and feel entitled to tell others how to run their affairs.

The situation very much reflects America’s general relative decline, much resembling that of a decayed once-great merchant family, as a new order in world affairs prepares to make its debut.

I tend to doubt the impeachment will succeed, despite my views that what Trump did very much is inappropriate and that impeachment in America is largely a political act.

But if that proves to be the case, it is no great mercy for the county or the world. It means four more years of a poor leader making great bellowing claims about nothing.

The Democrats, too, are bereft of real leadership in the candidates for the nomination. Some of them are almost ridiculous, much like figures in current popular culture, and none of those with any chance opposes imperial wars and hostility towards Russia.

However, the Democrats, in holding up the indictment (the articles of impeachment), are very much looking for added elements, as those likely to come from scrutiny of Trump’s financial and tax records, should access to them be gained. He is an unscrupulous man, and I have little doubt those records could provide rich veins of impeachment material.

They are likely also looking to other potential high-level insider witnesses to Trump’s shady methods, potential witnesses whom Trump dismissed at various points.

Well, even were the impeachment to succeed, the only gain would be an end to Trump’s glaring, half-lunatic faces and ugly-kid complaining and bellowing. There are no meaningful likely alternatives in the Democratic Party.

 

On Putin, readers may enjoy:

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/08/06/john-chuckman-comment-china-russia-and-the-united-states-in-the-21st-century-some-difficult-and-dangerous-times-ahead-as-the-world-now-rapidly-evolves-in-ways-america-rejects/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/john-chuckman-comment-reflections-on-putin-as-a-leader-and-on-the-world-situation-in-which-he-works/ 

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY KATE NG IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“British warship scrambles to respond to Russian vessel moving into Channel”

“’Leaving our families at this time of year is especially difficult, but national security doesn’t stop for Christmas,’ says ship’s commanding officer”

 

What a truly ridiculous article.

 

“Scrambles to respond”

“Especially hard this time of year”

“Tireless efforts”

 

This was a training ship full of young Russian cadets on a training exercise in a body of water everyone on the planet is entitled to freely enter.

They represent about the same “threat level” as a big gathering of Boy Scouts.

I don’t know about the Royal Navy’s efforts this way historically, but no one would have considered such an event worth reporting before Russo-phobia.

Russo-phobia manufactured and promoted ceaselessly by the United States.

And I guess editors at The Independent feel they must do their loyal bit.

You might call the incident, “Monty Python Takes on The Russian Navy.”
 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ALAN MACLEOD IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“How Journalists Demonize Venezuela’s Government, in Their Own Words”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/20/how-journalists-demonize-venezuelas-government-in-their-own-words/

 

A very interesting piece.

And anyone expects truth in anything from America?

Inside and outside the country, Americans walk through a dense haze of lies.

It resembles a science-fiction tale, but it is real.

It’s what happens when you have an empire instead of a country.