John Chuckman

COMMENT – THE CHILDISH IDEA THAT GLOBALIZATION CAUSED THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AND THAT THE PANDEMIC WILL PUT AN END TO GLOBALIZATION

 

My title is a favorite conceit right now of America’s extreme Right, its super-Patriots, its Nativists, its Know-Nothings. I am sure it is something with which Trump is at least a little comfortable because it supports his poorly-conceived ambitions for America.

But it is ridiculous, both portions of the idea.

Think back to the early days of exploration and discovery, the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries. What made all the vast efforts possible was new technology in the form of sailing ships capable of going thousands of miles over the seas accompanied by the learning and experience of hearty seaman-adventurers. It marked a new epoch in human history, and there was no going back. It is always that way with the great changes technology brings, there is no going back.

Almost as soon as explorers arrived in North and South America, they began transferring diseases in both directions, to the Indigenous people and back to Europe. And with the relatively fragile things early sea-going ships were, there were countless disasters in storms or on unknown shoals with ships going to the bottom and no coast guard to save their crews.

None of that ever truly threatened the new exploration and settlement and trade. No, in just a couple of centuries, we had sprawling colonies of Europeans all over the New World with communities and plantations and governments and institutions. And they made still more discoveries over time – such as new foods and products that Europe hadn’t known, chocolate, maize, potatoes, squashes, certain nuts and berries, tomatoes, tobacco and precious metals and gems. They established new regular trade routes with Europe and new enterprises grew just out of the transportation needs and arrangements. Malaria, Yellow Fever, Smallpox, and a host of other threats, despite creating setbacks, did not halt the progress.

Pandemics are awful things, but I do think we’ve had some extreme and entirely unwarranted speech and writing around this one. People saying things, with no perspective at all, such as doubting whether there will be much international trade and business again.

At another extreme, we have American Nativist types saying, “Hell, I’ll do what I please. I was born free, not to serve government’s grab for more power.” People showing no concern for how their own actions can hurt others and no understanding of the role constraints have often played in their own society. As though there never was in the past such common practices as quarantines, or the extreme practice of demanding part of millions of young men’s lives through the military draft, or experiencing martial law in an emergency.

The fact that there are so many Americans who object to simple and effective measures, such as wearing masks and “social distancing,” tells you something not very pleasant about large portions of the country. Trump and his immediate retinue play to those sentiments by refusing to wear masks. Imagine the Vice President touring a hospital, meeting patients, as he just did, and ignoring the hospital’s rule for wearing a mask? Imagine how many lives Trump might have saved just by setting the example of wearing a mask during his television appearances? His is leadership only to the Wagon Train crowd. And they are not the people who will inherit the earth.

We will get through this. We’ve already seen examples, like China’s immense effort and the far-sighted leadership here and there – I think of Singapore or New Zealand or South Korea. Our news is full of noise from the world’s worst example, the leaderless and willfully stubborn United States, a nation which has a tendency to believe it is the model for all to emulate in any matter.

The virus itself keeps mutating and could well become a more harmless thing to humans. And of course, a vaccine or a new drug treatment, if a vaccine is not possible, will likely be created. Whatever, we will learn to live with it just as we do with so many things, from Malaria to AIDS.

It never has been true that America provides a good model for others to follow, as in the way government is organized. The people who have followed it have generally been under the easy-to-understand illusion that such a wealthy country must be doing things right. The reasons for America’s wealth have little to do with the way its government and institutions are organized, and most of them cannot be duplicated by others. Circumstances of resource endowments, unique historical opportunities, the nature of migrants attracted over the years, and more go into the mix.

If the idea of America being a suitable model for others is not accurate, and it is not, it is even less accurate for the pandemic with all its accompanying side-effects. The President of the United States has frequently resembled a slapstick comedian, like one of the Marx Brothers, but with a super-grimacing face intended to be taken seriously in communicating his self-assumed sheer weightiness. He and his appointees have failed on a scale not seen in many places.

And the failure of so many institutions and organizations inside The United States – from the healthcare system itself to the distribution of vital supplies and the open squabbling among various levels and parts of government – has been monumental, anything but reassuring for the world. Even the country’s military handled the challenge badly, a senior Trump appointee in the Navy, Thomas Modly, traveled half way around the world, spending a quarter of a million dollars, to dismiss a warship’s commander and berate him in front of his crew, a crew, like many in the world, who considered the commander a hero.

The country – its leader and many of its institutions – foolishly ignored a detailed example containing hard-won knowledge from China. Just immense carelessness, ignorance, and arrogance. That has been followed by an organized campaign to accuse and vilify the very people from whom they should have learned, the Chinese.

I do believe that poisonous mix of carelessness and ignorance and arrogance is not unique to Trump. It is part of America’s mainline political culture, its establishment, for example, literally is unable to grasp and accept China’s miraculous rise and accomplishments. Washington, on all sides, is blinded by its own fantasies about itself.

We have a “turn the first victims into villains” campaign the like of whose viciousness I don’t recall even in the Cold War. Inhumanity and callousness in the service of getting a political leg-up with America’s darkest and least educated minds.

I do not see how it is possible to provide a more brain-crushing example of how to do things than cutting the funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a pandemic. That action was intended to raise Trump’s political stature with America’s Know-Nothings – always a fairly sizable group which has over the years provided the human material for everything from private militias and the Klu Klux Klan to Aryan churches and the American Nazi Party – and taking it only emphasized his complete lack of concern with helping anyone except himself.

Trump’s record of decisions shows him literally toying with the health and security of both his own people and the world’s people. Somewhat in the fashion of a sick little boy who enjoys pulling the wings off butterflies to watch them struggle. Who on earth looks to someone like that for leadership? Only the Know-Nothings. The kind of people who confuse brutality with strength.

The re-openings being nudged along by Trump and some state governments are not planned to follow the best medical practices. It is likely they will, in short order, result in a new wave of infections and deaths.

The clear success of other societies in dealing with the crisis and working to share what they have learned greatly enhances their stature in the post-pandemic world. America looks a whole lot smaller, smaller in ability and in morality. Trump and Pompeo are the very worst, but we see so few prominent Americans doing anything to oppose them or to help others.

There should have been near-universal condemnation inside the American political establishment for Trump’s destructive action against WHO, as there should have been for his entire string of ignorant and uncaring statements during the early months of the disease, and for his appalling attack on China – an approach taken both by him and his Secretary of State worthy in every detail of Joseph Goebbels.

That’s not in the least an exaggeration. A lot of filthy, vicious words have been uttered by both men. A crisis for humanity has been reduced to a personal grab for political advantage. A bit like stopping to steal some stuff from a sick or dying man on the street.

Last, I think we must distinguish, many not doing so, between a globalized world, something I argue is inevitable and beneficial, and a globalized world led by America – sometimes called the new World Order or Neo-liberal World Order – something which is not inevitable, not all desirable, and I believe is on its way out.

I am always troubled by that use of “neo-liberal” because I consider myself a classical liberal holding to strong Enlightenment values. The “neo-liberals” really are contemporary global imperialists covered by a dissimulating name. Who could be more harmful and destructive than such American political luminaries as Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or George Bush or John McCain? Lovers of empire and death, each of them.

America’s extreme Right insists on “throwing out the baby out with the bathwater” by echoing a welcome to the end of globalization. They are wrong, of course, but it is just part of the utter confusion that is contemporary America.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRESS TV

 

“How stupid have we been: Trump on US Mid East adventurism”

“We spent 8 trillion dollars in the Middle East, that’s with a “t”,… eight trillion. But if you need to fill a pothole, oh, we can’t do that. How stupid have we been, just stupid!”

 

What he says is, of course, absolutely true, but as so often with Trump, it is confusing and inconsistent.

He’s the one making trouble in the region right now.

What’s he’s done just to Iran is terrible. Iran has hurt no one. Iran has started no wars. Iran was absolutely meeting its obligations under the international nuclear agreement for over four years.

Yet Trump just suddenly ripped up the agreement, started imposing all kinds of (illegal) sanctions, and sent war machines to threaten the country. He then assassinated a national hero, one who had taken no action against America.

Sanctions always, even in normal times, hurt the poor and the weak in a society, the better-off and privileged managing to insulate themselves. That is just what they do anywhere. So, they are reprehensible, but at a time of world pandemic, with Iran being hit hard, it just despicable to keep sanctions on the country.

Trump does all this for one reason only, to please some American oligarchs who, in return, will give his re-election campaign large donations and perhaps other support.

Elections in America are about money, and the country’s foreign policy is essentially for sale. Just an awful state of affairs. A totally corrupt society.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP GIRALDI

 

“A Tale of Two Foreign Policies: The Train-Wreck Abroad Is Bipartisan”

_____________________

Response to a comment saying, “I’ll get you a real third party. We only have one anyway. The property party with two right wings. If our people can return their faith to the source of everything good in our lives, then the notion of the two artificially combating parties will disappear. It’s time to send them both home. And end the show in Washington”

Sorry, but that is dreaming in technicolor.

The fact is the US is pretty much a plutocracy now, and the two parties are heavily supported by that plutocracy.

You cannot even sit down at the card table without a huge stake.

It’s what we call in economics, a barrier to entry.

The many quasi-monopolies and duopolies we see in our economy work the same way, as with gigantic advertising budgets a newcomer cannot hope to match.

A few facts on America’s plutocracy.

The Supreme Court decision that “money is free speech.”

Hillary Clinton burned through 1.2 billion dollars in just one campaign for one person.

Mike Bloomberg spent about $900 million on his recent brief effort for the nomination.

In practical terms, there are no limits on political spending and donating.

And there are no real limits on the work of lobbies for private and special interests.

It has become a standing joke that America has “the best Congress money can buy.”

America’s Frankenstein military/security apparatus is not about defense, at all. It is about the maintenance of global empire. It burns through a trillion dollars a year, and it exists to serve America’s plutocracy and its establishment.

The American tax structure has become terribly bent. It is helping to generate huge disparities, the so-called “one percent”, and support plutocracy.

The main difference between the two parties is the Democrats talk about various domestic social measures.

In all other respects, the parties are identical – in support for the Pentagon/security establishment, support for global empire, and support for almost continuous wars and coups, and both depend on plutocracy for a flow of funds. Voters get no choice at all in such matters.

And the irony for the Democrats is that so long as America burns through a trillion dollars a year for supporting empire – money it doesn’t even have, all borrowed – none of the large social programs can possibly happen.

And who do you think ends up paying for all the interest on all that immense borrowing? It sure ain’t the plutocrats that its expenditure served.

America’s political system is pretty much a rigged game. There’s no serious chance of changing it either, although a catastrophe like we’re now headed into could do that. But they are already talking in Washington of suspending habeas corpus and about which Pentagon general might step in.

Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t even allowed to compete because she questions the wars.

Bernie Sanders has been cheated a second time. He really isn’t a socialist, he’s an FDR progressive. But his being cheated twice by elaborate measures is the perfect example of how risk-averse America’s establishment is.

It ain’t a pretty picture, and the reality always gives me a little chuckle when I read of American officials telling others abroad how they should do things.

By the way, that vast expenditure on empire also gets in the way of improving America’s infrastructure – from schools to bridges.

The genuine way to compete with China is not Trump’s noise and threats and tariffs, it is old-fashioned getting down to work and improving your competitiveness, but America’s establishment isn’t the least interested in doing that. It feels entitled to be number one in everything, and so it just demands it. It’s what Putin accurately describes as “a sense of entitlement.”

In the end, it will get America nowhere, except into trouble. The American Dream was the simple result of having been the last industrial power standing after WWII and having invested heavily for the war.

But those conditions and that era are gone, for good. Others have invested and worked hard, and they do many things better than America does.

After all, do we not see throughout our lives the rise and fall of great firms, of great families? It is no different with empire.

America has been declining in relative terms in the world economy for decades. It is just the way things work. You cannot bully your way back, either, like the big bully in the White House thinks you can.

Pursuing that course is almost certainly going lead to war, and I can’t imagine that any sane person wants that, but to call some leaders in Washington sane is seriously stretching truth.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK COCKBURN

 

“The US Has Faced Decline Before – But Nothing Like What’s to Come”

 

I regard this as one of Mr. Cockburn’s more perceptive columns.

He has definitely captured some important truths here.

They are hard ones for Americans to accept.

I find it remarkable how well China is handling matters like information and assistance to the world.

It comes at a time of tireless misinformation and blundering from American leadership.

And the whole world can plainly see that.

Also, despite all the pain and suffering now and in the coming months, the US busies itself still with pointless, unnecessary hostilities in Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and many other locations, making yet more people more miserable.

By contrast, there’s China offering cooperation, partnership, and help.

Xi’s intelligence and mild manner couldn’t be in more contrast to the grimaces and stream of noisy errors from Trump.

Putin very much also is making an effort abroad but Russia’s resources are considerably less than China’s.

We are fortunate to have two such gifted leaders to help offset some of the chaotic rumblings of Washington.

John Chuckman

EMPIRE OF HATE

 

Trump has begun a new campaign of hatred against China.

It is new only in its intensity and nastiness. Trump from the start has used China politically, accusing it of many evil trade and business practices in an effort to squeeze concessions from it while telling the folks back home he is fighting for them, for more benefits to good old America.

The truth is that the only evil practice of the Chinese has been to outperform and outcompete the United States on many economic and business fronts. You simply are not allowed to do that to the “indispensable” nation, embarrassing its “exceptional” leaders. It’s a form of lèse-majesté.

While China has worked to make itself the world’s factory, turning out almost every conceivable kind of good and machine, sending them, peacefully, everywhere across the seas, America has pretty much stopped making anything except an unholy number of weapons it uses in its ceaseless wars. It sells them, too, as the world’s greatest arms merchant, larger than all the other large ones combined. It sells them in captive markets to allies it pressures into buying them, and it sells them to many of the world’s worst tyrannies who support its policies.

The attack on Huawei has been until now the greatest single campaign in a virtual war of misinformation, unfair pressure, and uncompetitive practices against China – going so far as intimidating allies against using Huawei’s world-beating 5-G technology. But the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic brings a dazzling new opportunity, one much richer in possibilities to whip up fear and hatred than mere suggestions of spying, suggestions always a bit limp since everyone who counts knows America spies on everyone continuously, through the insidious NSA and the American hi-tech and on-line industries.

It is an unexpected political blessing from heaven. Perhaps it’s all those evangelical prayers for him being answered? After all, he is, in his own words, “the chosen one.” It provides the means for that most important task of all, getting himself re-elected. Everything he has ever said or done as President, a great deal of it very shabby, is dedicated to that task. Here is a man, with nothing to say worth hearing and who has done almost nothing worth doing, who insists on staying center-stage. Narcissism is his deepest quality.

Now, it very much appears he’s going to make China and his version of what China is supposed to have done in the pandemic the central focus of his re-election campaign. In brief, he’s saying it is a Chinese disease and that it’s quite possible China created it in a bio-lab and that in any event China has lied every step of the way and failed in its responsibilities to the World Health Organization (WHO), the same WHO Trump has recklessly cut-off from funding at a time of unprecedented world need owing to their asserted complicity and accommodation of China.

It is hard to imagine a more confused and dishonest stitched-together crazy quilt of stories. You might think they would convince few of anything, serving only as further evidence of Trump’s recklessness and viciousness. But, no, remember this is America, a country that has been almost continuously at war for decades without most of the people ever having any idea why they fighting, spending astronomical sums of money to kill people and destroy places they know nothing about.

Truly, anything is possible in America, and its first P. T. Barnum President is fully aware of the fact and ready to use it on a great new purpose, his re-election.

I am being unfair to Barnum who was indeed a grand-scale huckster and is credited with saying “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but he wasn’t foul-mouthed, and there is no evidence that he hated entire classes of people (refugees, many immigrants, Muslims, and those like China who embarrass America by their success) or that he abused tens of millions afflicted with both illness and illegal sanctions (Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and others) or that he carried on killing in any number of places (Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and others) and supported others killing in still other places (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and others) or that he promoted discord and distrust on a vast scale (China, Iran, Russia, and others).

When the United States finally finished its decade-long orgy of killing in Vietnam – having killed an estimated 3 million people and turned that lush country into a landscape of smoldering bomb craters and toxic deposits of Agent Orange and other chemicals – virtually no Americans even understood what it had all been about. Just vague stuff like fighting for democracy (in an artificially-created rump state run by dictators, but dictators loyal to America) and Old Glory, the very kind of stuff Trump likes to bellow about.

And there were great numbers of Americans who believed for many years that the evil Vietnamese communists secretly held still more American prisoners, without ever asking themselves “what would be the sense of a poor country doing that?” Paranoia and superstition held sway, and the believers constituted a large movement, and it even had its own flag, demonstrating convincingly how far Americans will go in their misconceptions and myths. America’s government made no serious effort to correct them because it had its own purposes in harnessing that hate and confusion against Vietnam.

As an aside, the real reason for the Vietnam War is nicely sketched by an anecdote from America’s last truly crass president, Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was given to many obscene behaviors behind the scenes, like carrying on discussions with aides or interviewers while taking down his pants and relieving himself on the toilet with the door wide open. In those days, you could count on the press not to report such things. Once, when asked at a meeting just why America was fighting in Vietnam, Johnson promptly unzipped his pants and pulled out his (ample) penis, pointed to it, and growled something to the effect, “That’s the reason, Son.” (Johnson at least had the one grace of not displaying his crassness to the general public, a quality entirely missing in Trump’s makeup).

So, Trump has very fertile ground for sowing seeds of confusion and hatred and resentment, and sow them he will. It even provides him with a weapon directly against Joe Biden. He can associate Biden with dealings in China and thereby being a kind of shill for the communists. I’m sure we’ll hear the word “appeasement” introduced into the campaign against Biden.

There’s nothing like good old-fashioned fear and uncertainty, as of a dreaded disease, to whip your political constituency to a frenzy. And that kind of stuff will arouse those outside your own natural constituency too. At the same time, there is the added benefit for Trump of diverting public attention from the clearest series of blunders, misdirection, and just plain falsehoods in his own handling of America’s portion of the world crisis.

There is even the added benefit of stirring up America’s large murky pool of fear of foreigners – a theme for him from the beginning with the mater of immigration and refugees and walls – and all the better if they’re foreigners who look different.

Hatred is very elemental. It doesn’t need or seek elaborate explanations. Hitler well understood that, as I think all tyrannical temperaments do, and he used it skillfully as a tool for ruling.

Trump already has an orchestrated effort underway with various officials, including the Pentagon, making ugly assertions or suggestions. The assertions and suggestions will never require any proof – they couldn’t provide any in any case. For effect they just need the fact of high-level officials making them, echoing and re-inforcing each other. It is is enough in a time of fear.

We even have one of Trump’s smarmiest political allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, making loony statements about how China owes us reparations for all the misery and cost they’ve caused. Even if the coronavirus arose in China originally, something still not proved, since when is it a practice to charge nations for diseases which happen to arise within their borders?

The idea is intellectually ridiculous, but to people out of work and maybe losing their homes and afraid, it has an obvious vicious appeal. It’s a well-crafted piece of hate.

It’s the kind of thing you expect from Lindsey Graham, a man who matched John McCain in his unthinking enthusiasm for war and bloodshed and special interests.

 John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ANDRE VLTCHEK IN THE UNZ REVIEW

 

“I Never Saw a World So Fragmented!”

 “Still, they looked, but their brains were not capable of processing what they were being shown. Images and words; these people were conditioned not to comprehend certain types of information [said of some Hong Kong protesters to whom the author spoke, trying to explain to them some of the realities of events going on in other countries].”

https://www.unz.com/avltchek/i-never-saw-a-world-so-fragmented/

 

Fragmentation?

Well, we have several huge, dedicated, extremely well-financed organizations committed to keeping it so.

The State Department, CIA, the Pentagon, and America’s corporate press. They are assisted mightily by their “sister” organizations in American-dominated parts of Europe and Asia.

History does tend to support the view that when fragmented forces of any kind – in war, in politics, in business – are engaged against large, well-organized opposition, they lose.

Many old sayings, such as “Divide and conquer,” have this truth embedded in them. So, the servants and willing helpers of American dominance work hard to keep things fragmented.

I see little opportunity for change in the situation beyond the gradual, inexorable change now underway in the world, the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world, the result of many new competitors arising and the realigning of interests of many older ones in the face of new opportunities and challenges.

Also, there is the rise of new centers of opposition, notably China and Russia. New centers of leadership. Even new technologies play a role in this great transition in world affairs.

America’s own establishment is now unthinkingly contributing to increase the rate of change through its heavy-handed reactions to the emerging order.

Sanctions, tariffs, threats, ultimatums are not the stuff of which to build a brave new world. They confront and attempt to demolish the genuine interests of many others, something that is simply not possible over the long term.

John Chuckman

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

 

“Can allies trust an administration that boasts of using military power to pillage other nations’ resources?”

 

Trump has used his remarks about “liking to steal oil” as a lame-joke way to hide his real purpose. He thinks the poor joke is more acceptable to the world than the truth.

The Syrian war has never been about oil. It has been about destabilizing or toppling a government the United States and its regional friends dislike because it is independent-minded and does not embrace America’s vision for the region. It refuses to take the Pledge of Allegiance.

And Syria has always refused to relinquish the territory Israel has occupied since the 1967 War, the Golan Heights, a territory Israel claims to have annexed against all international law.

With the help of Syria’s allies, the main war, a vicious proxy war using recruited outsiders such as al Nusra and ISIS and others, is now largely over, and the United States did not win.

The effort in Syria’s northeast with the American occupation of the country’s oil fields is about claiming a consolation prize for the larger loss, effectively crippling the Assad government’s future efforts at rebuilding the war-torn country.

Trump, I believe, at one point genuinely wanted to leave Syria altogether, knowing the main war was lost.

But powerful pressure groups in Washington immediately opposed withdrawal. The consolation prize of hurting Syria was demanded. And Trump, focused insanely on getting himself re-elected and on the need for heavy-duty campaign donations, gave them what they wanted. He’s never had any problem with reversing himself on policy if there’s a personal benefit.

The United States is using the notion of keeping the oil from ISIS as an explanation. But it is a feeble explanation because ISIS is not strong in that region, and the unpleasant truth is that the United States has never genuinely fought terror inside Syria.

Not at all. It is ultimately responsible for the terror being there, a responsibility it shares with Israel and Saudi Arabia, originally Turkey, and a few other regional friends. Although I suppose America’s ideal outcome would see the terror groups having achieved their goals in Syria and then be disbanded or destroyed. They are trash to be temporarily used, not allies for the future. Geo-political toilet paper.

The United States has had some conflicts with ISIS, as you’d expect when dealing with such unholy thugs, but the focus of the terrorist groups has always remained toppling or hurting the Syrian state, which just happens to be the aim of America and its close regional friends. They have never attacked the interests that true jihadi types would attack, Israel and the corrupt Saudi Royals.

Over the years, the United States has used the presence of ISIS and others as a convenient excuse to keep troops in various locations and to bomb things in Syria it wanted to bomb. The terrorists have proved quite handy that way.

It has been a very dirty war.

______________________

Just an additional note on the causes of the Syrian War.

The names of the Middle East countries destroyed in a series of wars now often called the Neocon Wars were long ago on an official American government list of seven countries to be toppled over future years. The list was part of a secret Pentagon document.

The list was seen by former General Wesley Clark at the Pentagon not long after 9/11. He has spoken of seeing it several times.

And, remember, Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, spoke of hearing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” at the time of the invasion of Iraq. America, essentially, has long had a secret plan for a kind of vast and bloody urban-renewal project surrounding Israel.

The list was assembled under leading American Neocon Paul Wolfowitz, one of the Pentagon’s highest officials then. Syria was on the list, as was Iran.

Just as the invasion of Iraq was not really about oil, so the hybrid proxy war in Syria was not. By using covert means and proxy forces, Washington avoided another costly invasion like Iraq, something that had created a lot of adverse reaction in the world.

The open and extremely violent invasion of Iraq violated international law, and it offended many, even in friendly nations. So, the approach would not be repeated for other nations on the list.

Iran, with its now demonstrated impressive military capabilities under renewed American belligerence, may just have avoided the fate of the other countries on the Pentagon’s list.  The range and accuracy of Iran’s many missile and other systems have been impressive.

Iran began developing new capabilities as a national project after the long and bloody Iraq-Iran War of the 1980s, a war the United States encouraged and supported, even going so far as supplying Iraq’s Saddam Hussein with deadly chemical weapons to adjust the odds against the forces of Iran’s much greater population. Huge numbers of Iranian soldiers were gassed.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Russia’s 110-Ton Tu-160 Bomber Outran Japan’s F-35s

“The F-35 has a maximum speed of just 1.4 Mach and can’t use it’s afterburners for more than a minute or it starts to melt”

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/russias-110-ton-tu-160-bomber-outran-japans-f-35s/

 

Very interesting anecdote.

I think the many unpleasant aspects of the F-35 almost come to symbolize America’s sad declining state.

All outer gloss, disguising what’s really inside, which is, not much.

Aggressively pushed onto others, every poor ally America having been pressured to buy it to help subsidize its frightening cost.

Unable really to do some of its basic job.

In fact, its basic job never really carefully defined. Is it a fighter-bomber or a fighter-interceptor or still something else?

Of course, when you try being everything, you frequently end up being nothing.

Non-competitive, both in cost and performance.

Extremely costly. Suitable only for a power that can literally print money to pay the bills.

The parallels are striking.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LARRISON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

‘Trump with a Plan to Divorce Syria’s Kurds but Not Her Oil

‘Trump: “I don’t want to leave troops” in Syria except to “secure the oil”’

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/trump-with-a-plan-to-divorce-syrias-kurds-but-not-her-oil/

 

This is not really about oil.

The notion of leaving two hundred American special forces in Syria and perhaps interfering with Syria’s access to its own oil represents a hastily, and badly, conceived scheme to placate Netanyahu and the Israel lobby in the United States for the de facto loss of a long and costly proxy war.

Trump essentially has no foreign policy, policy implying a well-thought out set of goals and strategies. Trump takes whatever steps he thinks will secure his re-election, even when the next step seems to contradict the previous one. That’s all the Syria withdrawal was ever about.

Indeed, it is what drives all his efforts abroad, efforts which may be characterized as being consistent only in their inconsistency.

He isn’t a sound pragmatist and strong logical thinker like Putin. Although you might regard his bending every situation towards his own re-election as a kind of pragmatism, it really is not.

It is chaotic because it depends on Trump’s own faulty and fickle judgment, and it involves no other, larger considerations at all. He sacrifices basic principles in his various lurches and drives, principles such as always respecting allies and always acting so that the world regards America as consistent, stable, and dependable.

He needed a “withdrawal” to try re-securing the support of that portion of 2016 voters who have been alienated from him, the anti-war voters who do not necessarily agree with any of his other belly-over-the belt attitudes, such as the importance of building a costly, cumbersome wall on America’s southern border or the benefits of starting international trade wars.

His natural political base is simply not quite large enough to elect him. He must draw a bit of additional support from somewhere, and the anti-war crowd represents his best possibility.

The Democrats have made no effort to offer the anti-war constituency anything. The few who have are treated as pariahs by members of their own party in a shabby public name-calling spectacle, and they will be prevented from winning the nomination.

After all, the Democratic Party in 2016 displayed to the world just how willing it is to manipulate democratic contests for a pre-determined end, in that case for the nomination of Hillary Clinton over a firebrand challenger.

Interestingly enough, the Democratic Party’s anti-democratic efforts in 2016 ended by getting Trump elected. Sanders would have defeated him handily at that time. Hillary is not a well-liked or trusted figure and has always been a cheerleader for war. She provided Trump with just the opportunity he needed.

If they prevent a thoughtful, articulate anti-war candidate like Tulsi Gabbard from getting the nomination, which they almost certainly will, they will repeat history. Trump will win. That’s why they are becoming serious about impeaching him. As I’ve explained before, impeachment in America always is a political act. It would only be otherwise if a President were caught committing a serious felony or a treasonous act, both quite unlikely.

The withdrawal from Syria deeply conflicts with Netanyahu’s fervently declared wishes. Trump undoubtedly thought he had done enough for Israel in the form of lavish giveaways and favors that he wouldn’t hear any complaints over his relatively minor Syria withdrawal.

But he was wrong. There has been noise and pressure. Netanyahu’s capacity to ask for more of almost anything is virtually limitless.

America’s entire set of efforts in Syria – both covert in supporting jihadi-looking mercenaries and overt in occupying certain areas and doing plenty of bombing while pretending to fight ISIS – has had from the beginning nothing directly to do with oil. Syrian oil only came into play as a way to finance some of the terrorist activity and as something valuable of which to deprive Syria’s government.

American efforts have always been about destabilizing or destroying a government that does not toe its foreign policy line, which of course, would involve Syria’s paying homage to Israel, America’s Middle Eastern privileged special-status colony, as the dominant regional power, just as Saudi Arabia, under its usurper Crown Prince, has now effectively done.

Israel has had a tremendous interest in seeing Syria incapacitated because it wanted not only to secure and legitimize its occupation of the Golan Heights, but even perhaps to grab another slice of Syria, a “buffer zone,” in all the chaos of the long proxy war.

Israel has always hated Assad, again for his independent-mindedness, a leadership characteristic which the long series of Neocon Wars, starting with Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, was intended to uproot throughout the Middle East. Or as the worst American imperialists like to put it, in order to make all the killing and destruction sound wholesome, inducing “the birth of a new Middle East.”

So, Israel is working away on Trump to get what it can out of the general defeat in Syria, and that includes any annoyance and irritation that can possibly be achieved in northeastern Syria.

But the notion of a couple of hundred American special forces hanging around to control Syria’s oil for any period of time seems very far-fetched. Maybe it’s a good measure of just how disillusioned and desperate the people who created seven years of terrible war in Syria are.

There’s no way that Putin, after all his immense effort, is going to watch a reunited Syria be reduced by having its natural resources stripped from it. One way or another, this “plan” will fail, even though it may provide difficulties in the meantime.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MARKO MARJANOVIC IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Syrian Army Enters US/Kurdish-Held Northern Syria to Block Turko-Jihadi Offensive

To do what the Americans won’t”

_____________________________

Response to a comment saying, “Erdogan is about to lose a critical ally (Russia) if this operation persists. I believe a US-led coup against Erdogan is being developed. Russia has caught wind of it and I sense unless Syrian events change, Moscow won’t lift a finger to assist Erdogan.”

It’s impossible at this point to accurately understand the set of real relationships and forces at work here behind the scenes.

First, we have a genuine lunatic in the Oval Office, and one who has failed at almost everything he has tried.

And the (supposedly limited) invasion of northeastern Syria by Turkey, accommodated by American troops stepping aside almost as though by agreement, has now generated dramatic new changes. All American troops are now leaving the area, as are the limited number of other foreign troops, such as the French, Trump had managed previously to dragoon into support. The Syrian army has entered the region to protect the Kurds and oppose Turkey’s invasion. That last important step is the result of an agreement brokered by Putin.

Erdogan, while cunning and gifted in some matters and ruthless, is himself half-mad. Who else builds a thousand-room palace and shoots down a Russian fighter but a madman?

Putin is always thinking. And he uses the weaknesses as well as the strengths of his competitors and associates.

I wouldn’t doubt it at all if more coup plans were being brewed up in Washington, although it’s a little tough with Erdogan having put a good portion of Turkey’s generals and officials in prison, certainly any even suspected of the wrong kind of relationship with Americans, and having taken special measures at key American-Turkish contact points such as the big airbase, following the 2016 coup attempt.

If Putin can get something useful out of Erdogan still, and I think he can, he will protect him from American plots again. After all, that’s what Russia’s S-400 air-defense sale was about, with neither Washington nor Europe being able to turn the air-defense system off (during a coup) as they very much can do with the ones they sell abroad. And besides, Putin is one of the world’s great pragmatists, not anything like Trump who goes around waving his flag in people’s faces and telling everyone publicly just what he thinks of them.

Some have speculated that this whole event represents a clever scheme by Putin and Erdogan to boot the United States out of Syria.

I don’t embrace that, but it certainly isn’t impossible. Upcoming developments will tell us the truth. Putin wants Syrian territorial integrity for a number of reasons. He is restoring the Middle East’s confidence in Russia’s ability to help and to get jobs done, and he’s doing it during a period of people’s losing confidence in America’s dependability. There is also the matter of the future of Russia’s important naval and air bases in Syria being assured.

What Erdogan really hates in Syria is the idea of a Kurd-run entity. He is allergic to Kurds.

Well, you can either fight the entity or its sponsor, which, in this case, is the United States (at least in part on behalf of Israel, someone else Erdogan hates).

With the United States gone, visions of a Kurdish rump state are gone.

This does represent a significant regional defeat for Israel. It regarded the Kurdish rump state as getting at least something out of the larger Syrian proxy war it wanted and assisted, a war which has been lost.

I’m sure Putin is working very hard behind the scenes to have Erdogan halt his invasion. Syria and Russia could placate Erdogan with some special arrangements inside northeastern Syria, removing his concerns about Kurd proximity.

Of course, Erdogan’s concerns may well be, at least in part, excuses for the physical expansion of Turkey. We’ll have to see how hard Erdogan keeps pushing.

He has to recognize the potential for running up against Russian fighter planes and the world’s best anti-aircraft missiles if he puts the Syrians into serious jeopardy or in any way embarrasses Putin. Of course, Russia also has some its remarkable Spetsnaz special forces in Syria. They have been used for gathering a lot of intelligence needed for effective bombing campaigns, ones run a little more conscientiously than some of America’s really destructive efforts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Still others have speculated that the matter reflects a secret agreement between Turkey and the United States, a speculation fed by the timing of Turkey’s entry and America’s withdrawal. It certainly looks suspicious.

Turkey gets to do what it wants, within limits, to the Kurds, and America gets out from Syria altogether under the cover of not wanting to fight with a NATO ally, instead of having to make some big controversial policy announcement about leaving Syria that would anger Israel and its supporters.

I don’t embrace this notion, either, but it certainly is possible.

The idea would appear to be a little short-sighted by not considering Syria’s response and, of course, Russia’s, but being short-sighted is something both Trump and Erdogan have earned sound reputations for.

Russia has brokered the agreement between Syria and the Syrian Kurds, once again raising Russia’s status in the region. Now, if Russia can manage to stop Turkey’s advance by some combination of efforts not including direct conflict with Turkey, its status in the Middle East will be raised still higher, to begin overshadowing that of the United States, the United States having made blunder after blunder in its frantic and destructive Neocon Wars, as recognized by many.

I noted in a comment recently about Russian engineers having built a military-style bridge across the Euphrates River, the boundary for the region with rest of Syria, a bridge capable of supporting armored vehicles. They did so, apparently, in record time. So, it looks as though Putin was putting things together for the return of the Syrian army to the northeast region.

The United States has just announced that it is sending 3,000 troops plus some new missile systems to protect Saudi Arabia. I do think the added American troops and weapons are at least as likely about the Saudi Throne wobbling as any “threat” from Iran. All clear-thinking people know that there is no threat from Iran, unless you insist on regarding Iran’s mere continued existence as a threat.

The Saudi Crown Prince is starting to look as though he’s in real trouble on several fronts.

There’s still that recent, unexplained mystery of the old King’s trusted, loyal, chief bodyguard being murdered in Jeddah. At the same time, there was a huge fire at the new high-speed train station in Jeddah. We’ve not heard another word about that important matter.

Saudi Arabia is for American affairs a key element in the region, and not just for its oil and its support of the petrodollar. It has become an element in America’s brutal efforts to create a new Middle East, one where Israel is comfortably accommodated in its demands and excesses.

That last idea, accommodating Israel, is something that still would not sit well with most Saudis and perhaps some other members of the Royal Family, so the Crown Prince’s very close ties with Israel, something the United States greatly values him for, are not a public bragging point. He has done many things to earn that status with Israel, including his foolish war in Yemen, continuing the years-long Saudi interference in Syria, and generating serious antagonism towards Iran.

The Crown Prince’s special relationship with Israel is what permitted him to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of the latest American weapons, an unprecedented act by an Arab state. But he has used them badly, and he has burned through a lot of money.

He is, in a word, a bungler, an ambitious and ruthless man of no great talent and one with a lot of serious character flaws. Apart from an infamous brutal murder he undoubtedly commissioned, we see a record new rate of executions in Saudi Arabia, his arrogant and wastrel ways, and the Crown Prince is said to have been a regular at Jeffrey Epstein’s sex playground, which almost certainly was an Israeli-supported hi-tech honey-trap for producing lots of compromising photos of influential people.

The Crown Prince’s losing his place, one way or another, would threaten much of what America has ruthlessly worked towards in the region. Of course, from the view of even some inside Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince is regarded as a failure who has spent an awful lot of money achieving nothing but the shame of being successfully counterattacked twice by Yemen’s poor Houthi. The brutal Khashoggi murder, while deliberately overlooked by Trump and others who want to keep their Saudi relationship intact, brought waves of international condemnation.

The Royal Family has lots of Princes, and the current Crown Prince was not first in line. He made a lot of enemies with his clumsy early exploit of locking up a large number of wealthy Princes and making them pay him huge ransoms. Ransoms in the billions. The Crown Prince did effectively seize power, while his father, very old and said to be partly senile, formally remains King, but the usurper has not wielded the power well. He has enemies, and now they have every reason to say he is a failure.

Putin, by the way, is, as I write this, visiting Saudi Arabia and had a meeting with the old King to discuss various kinds of future proposed cooperation. He stays right on top of things.

It is also clear from statements coming out of Iran that that country has found a new sense of self-confidence in its brave efforts to face down America’s reckless assault – Trump’s tearing up an important working treaty, his launching almost a total economic war, and his intimidating Iran militarily with fleets and air power.

Iran’s new weapons have proved extremely effective, causing Saudi Arabia to regard it with new respect and to express a desire to avoid war, something it had seemed earlier rather cavalier about. And Iran is managing to export crude oil by various arrangements and subterfuges.

Trump’s failure in the Middle East has been close to total. His only real success might be said to be relations with Israel, but they only represent his airily giving away things that were not his legally to give, as recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of the legitimacy of Israel’s self-proclaimed annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights.

Other matters we’ve discussed – American troops leaving northeastern Syria, the success and stability of the Saudi Throne, Iran’s new resolve and military pride, America’s declining influence, Russia’s increasing influence – are considered important in Israel, and they represent nothing but failure, viewed in America’s own terms, not in any larger terms of justice and human rights and decency, all of which have absolutely no place in American foreign policy.

Trump, in yet one more of his many clownish flip-flops, has declared suddenly a number of serious punitive measures against Turkey, including a range of sanctions, big new tariffs, and a stop to important trade negotiations, demanding Turkey stop its invasion. If Turkey pays heed, Trump will have done Putin’s task for him.

Indeed, Trump spoke about being prepared to “destroy the Turkish economy,” the kind of violent language of which he is so fond. These measures reflect I think no principles on Trump’s part, but the heavy criticism he has received from fellow Republicans about what he has done in Syria. As I said, Israel cannot be happy, and I’m sure all of their contacts in Congress are hearing about it.

Even people not under the same influences as Republican politicians, people in the region who wanted to see America leave Syria, such as Iran, are not happy about the way Trump managed to do it, causing considerable misery and death (See my last comment, “A STRIKING REMINDER OF THE GLORIOUS REALITIES OF AMERICA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN THE MIDDLE EAST”)

But there is no talk of American forces opposing Turkey. Indeed, the withdrawal of troops goes right ahead. I think Trump views at least one small achievement in “getting out of the Middle East” as essential for his re-election.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Pompeo says Taliban ‘overreached’ in attack that killed American

“President pulls back from planned peace talks with Taliban at Camp David after bombing that killed 12”

 

Overreached? What does that even mean in this context?

Pompeo’s words are as meaningless as they are arrogant.

We get only lunacy upon lunacy from this White House mob.

Just to remind him, you are invaders in that country, not invited guests.

And you’ve just bragged of having killed about a thousand Taliban in the last ten days.

___________________

Response to a comment about American war crimes in Afghanistan:

Oh, there have been many war crimes. I don’t know whether your reference is to the Jamie Doran documentary, “The Convoy of Death,” about the brutal mass murder of about 3,000 Taliban prisoners. These were prisoners for whom America had a direct responsibility.

The prisoners were packed into containers supposedly for transfer to a prison, the containers sealed and loaded onto trucks. As the men later screamed for some air in the blistering heat or water, American soldiers and troops I believe of the ghastly General Dostum, an American ally with a brutal reputation, stopped and shot into the containers until the shouting stopped.

About four days later, when the containers were opened, most of the prisoners were dead. American Special Forces troops ordered the containers brought to a spot in the desert where any living prisoners were shot, and all of the bodies were buried in mass graves.

That happened shortly after the charming Donald Rumsfeld made an angry demand in Washington about large new batches of Taliban prisoners, saying they should either be walled away forever or killed off. He clearly was taken at his word by some American troops and General Dostum’s men.

There was America’s long series of violent house entries, kicking down doors and using stun grenades, holding terrified families, women and children, at gunpoint while the house was searched and any men in it were bound and marched off as prisoners to who knows where? That happened to countless Afghan families. The men, if they survived, were headed for harsh interrogation with torture.

America’s reckless bombing killed thousands of innocent people. Many times, large groups like wedding parties, celebrating outside, were wiped out by American pilots. American soldiers wantonly shot up villages.

The Americans were bored with being stuck in that searingly hot, very unfriendly place with strange-looking people who didn’t speak their language. Very young men from places in America with no exposure to other cultures, with nothing to do much of the time, and with big guns.

The American military is often desperate for bodies and takes what it can get as recruits. That includes people who enjoy cruelty and the chance to kill others with impunity. Young men much like the members of urban street gangs who occupy large portions of American cities. There was plenty of that kind of activity in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

____________________

Response to a comment about having to get out of Afghanistan:

Well, ultimately, yes.

But Washington cannot admit they ever made a mistake, a terrible mistake.

There was never any real reason to invade Afghanistan.

It had no hand in 9/11.

But America was thirsty for blood and revenge after 9/11, and they didn’t really care if they got the right guys or not.

There is no evidence of Taliban involvement in 9/11. None. The Taliban are concerned about their local tribal blood feuds, much like some of those legendary families in the American Ozarks fighting multi-generational feuds such as the Hatfields and McCoys.

The Taliban gave temporary refuge to Osama bin Laden – a Saudi, but, importantly, someone who rather bravely served in the American-supplied opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s – a man seen as a devout Muslim and a hero, and that’s all.

Of course, we’ve never had any proof that even Osama was guilty of anything except disliking the Saudi Royal family and America’s complicity with them. Early on, when America demanded the Taliban government extradite him, the Taliban, in accordance with international law and custom for such requests, asked for some evidence. Washington ignored them and shortly invaded.

The American invasion also ended the Taliban government’s ban on growing opium poppies, something which resulted in flooding world markets with cheap hard drugs and something we suffer from still with all the urban drug-gang shootings over sales turf and unpaid bills.

________________________

I do think it quite possible that, in fact, no meeting with the Taliban was ever going to happen.

Just as in Syria and a couple of other situations, Trump bellows about what he’s going to do, and it all falls through or simply never happens.

Some important officials he has appointed oppose such steps.

He is just a massive pile of conflicting urges, and he makes no consistent sense ever.

______________________

Response to a comment saying, “Remember when Jack Layton wanted to negotiate with the Taliban and everyone (including the media) started calling him Taliban Jack”:

Absolutely. Thanks for the reminder. God, I admired Jack Layton.

Brave and intelligent leaders often get attacked because there are so many people who simply do not understand them.

By the way, concerning Canada’s sad and pointless involvement in Afghanistan, an Ottawa official said in the early days that the troops were going to Afghanistan because “We owed one to the Pentagon.”

He was referring to the fact that Prime Minister Jean Chretien had turned George Bush down on sending some Canadian troops for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Well, you do not turn America down in such matters without hearing back a lot of very unpleasant things.

The Canadian contribution to Afghanistan was something of a “peace offering.”

Some reason to join a war, right? “We owe one to the Pentagon.”

But that so characteristic of the bizarre world America has constructed with its endless wars.

_____________________

Response to a comment:

The Taliban were the official government of the country before America invaded.

They’re not outsiders or invaders, as the United States very much is.

The Taliban are just one of the basic major divisions of Afghan society, a tough, backward, desperately poor, hardscrabble society.

Thinking you could get rid of them is about the equivalent of talking about getting rid of Baptists in South Carolina.

The entire war has been a stupid, destructive, pointless waste.

But that’s just the way they do things in Washington.

Time after time. Place after place.

______________________

Response to a comment:

That phrase you use, “world’s policeman,” does not fit America’s role in the world today. I’m not sure whether it ever did, but it sure does not fit today.

It was meant to sound benign when it was coined. Korea was called a “police action.” After all, with WWII just a few years behind, officials didn’t want to encourage public fears about a new war.

Today, American activities everywhere are aggressive. They’re about telling others what to do and how to do it. And they’re about hurting and killing those America really does not like.

America is an empire, a rather brutal global empire. Not the law-abiding society of a quiet republic looking out at a big, bad world, as it likes to imagine itself.

No one sensibly calls such behavior “policing.”

_______________________

I should have added, importantly, it is an empire in relative decline with the growth of all kinds of competitors that it didn’t have after WWII, its glory days.

Even its reserve-currency dollar, a very great privilege and advantage, is starting to come under threat. It will certainly lose its position in the future. And weaponizing it, as Trump has done with all his illegal enforcement of unreasonable sanctions, if anything, only speeds the day.

In recognition of its relative economic decline and the many competitive changes in the world, America’s establishment has entered now into a ferocious effort to reclaim its unchallenged place of, say, sixty years ago.

They talk in terms of achieving “full-spectrum dominance.” And that’s not only Trump. He’s just the ugly, noisy frontman right now. Republicans and Democrats support this crusade, or it would not happen.

No matter what their varying views on social issues, virtually every one of them supports the American empire. It is what they’ve known all their lives, their careers were built on it, and it is a matter of pride and arrogance, part of Old Glory Patriotism, a powerful secular religious force in the country.

“MAGA” is just Trump’s term for the faded and tattered notion, the “American Dream,” something which arose as a sheer accident of history after WWII when no competitors were left standing and America thrived on selling everything to everyone. It dominated world manufacturing and trade.

But that position cannot be reclaimed. It’s an illusion to think that it can, a dangerous illusion.

Trying to make it happen will yield only angry frustration and angry responses from others. And the natural forces that have been at work reducing America’s relative position are likely to be reinforced by people’s determination to resist being told what to do.

That effort is why we have all the threats and illegal sanctions everywhere. The immense pressures applied to a peaceful China, a peaceful Russia, a peaceful Iran, and others.

We are in a dangerous period, and the United States political system has managed to put genuinely frightening men in charge – angry, intemperate, and even unstable men. Trump. Bolton. Pompeo.

__________________________

Response to a comment about whether there ever even was a Trump deal with the Taliban:

See: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/09/to-leave-afghanistan-just-leave-afghanistan.html#comments

This is from a close observer of events, one who is more often right than wrong in his analysis of world affairs.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Russia Now Resells 66% of Venezuela’s Oil for It, Helping with US Sanctions

“Afraid of sanctions? Buy Venezuelan crude from Rosneft”

 

“My guess is that when the current Rosneft loan to Venezuela is repaid, the two may book another, possibly entirely fictitious loan, just so that the practice may continue”

 

It’s just great to see human ingenuity overcoming blundering imperial stupidity.

This development – along with some others, such as rapidly-developing Russian ties with China, or Russia’s emphasis on import substitution, to say nothing of the fate of the American dollar – I think shows us what unintended consequences heavy-handed sanctions policies can have.

I’m not even considering all the harm done to millions of innocent people by illegal sanctions because those in Washington conducting this “war by another means” just couldn’t care less about them.

But they should care about some of the unintended consequences of sanctions because they are matters that will shift future relationships, alliances, and balances of power.

The fact is that people adapt to adverse conditions over time, whether natural or man-made, always.

That that is ignored by those now trying to run the planet from the Oval Office is just further proof of how foolish and dangerous they really are.

John Chuckman

COMMENTS INSPIRED BY AN ALASTAIR CROOKE PIECE ABOUT AMERICA AND CHINA AND RUSSIA IN THE 21^ST CENTURY

 

[Note to readers: this long piece really is more an essay than a comment. But I have not gone through the effort I always used to do of submitting it to a list of publications. Instead, I’m just posting it here, and I will post it also on my companion site for political essays. I do think it makes some important and timely observations.]

 

I just read an excellent piece by Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat, who often writes excellent pieces which appear in the foreign and alternative presses.

I’m not dealing with his entire thesis here. Just a portion of his piece serves as my take-off point on subject areas in which I have long held an interest

He was writing about what, from many indicators, appears to be a serious new turn in the convictions of Washington’s policymakers.

The convictions are against China and against Russia. The disquieting aspect of his words about China includes the idea that American hostility towards China is becoming something far broader, all-encompassing, and perhaps all-consuming than just the trade war Trump has started.

Indeed, we have the idea that America’s elites are hardening attitudes towards China and coming to a consensus about a new kind of Cold War, one involving hostilities on every front – economic, military, and diplomatic. Some have suggested the war will dominate the 21^st century.

I don’t doubt most of what the article says at all. I’ve written many times about the American establishment’s enduring antipathy towards Russia, the real basis for everything from Russia-gate and baseless accusations about election-tampering to the general Russophobia pervading America and blinding it.

Russia gets in the way and Russia has the capacity to destroy America, so Russia is hated regardless of how it has changed, how it is governed, how its laws operate, and how it behaves. Which last, for the most part, is very admirably, representing such a change from forty years ago that it should astound anyone, but that doesn’t influence the permanent grimaces and pronounced forehead veins of those gathered around huge oak tables in Washington.

Crooke emphasizes, with regard to Russia, the harsh words he heard from one American official about Russia’s need to learn that it has not won the war in Syria and that there’s a lot of trouble ahead if it doesn’t learn that. A claim, of course, for America’s right to use and dispose of other nations, such as Syria, as it pleases. So, just stand aside, don’t get in our way, and shut-up. Even if you are helping your legal ally, we do not recognize your efforts as legitimate because they conflict with our plans

I have no doubt that that is a deep conviction in America’s power establishment. It explains why there was so much covert effort against Trump even after he was legally elected, it being thought at the time that he was not going to support all the establishment’s convictions about Russia and the need for wars in the Middle East. America, a country almost continuously at war, some place or another, since WWII and brimming with homecoming football-game rah-rah pride and enthusiasm about its “boyz” abroad, just does not like looking as though it is losing to anyone.

Even though, in the case of Syria, America has never directly joined the war as it did in Iraq. But the illegal and very bloody American invasion of Iraq generated a lot of criticism and ill-will in the world even from friends. So, in Syria, America has kept to covert activities and supporting proxies – recruited mercenaries disguised as jihadis, fake NGO outfits (such as the “White Helmets”) working to extend the conflict rather than bring peace, and other groups posed as legitimate opposition to a “tyrannical” government (which somehow remains fairly popular, especially with minority religious groups like Christians, and continues to be supported by the armed forces after more than a half dozen years of bitter war) – never once admitting to the true nature of what it is doing, which is to destabilize a government it doesn’t like and perhaps to dismember the country.

America supports the proxies with weapons, intelligence, propaganda, covert special forces advisors, dark-ops, bombing of every description, and Saudi and Gulf states’ money. Plus, it shepherds a little chorus of allies, such as Britain and France, each with its own assigned dark tasks. Such is the real story of the Syrian “civil war.”

And even though America has lost several wars through its insistence on doing things which were better not attempted – its out-and-out defeat in Vietnam, its long pointless stalemate in Afghanistan, and the chaotic messes it made of Libya and Iraq – it not only often still attempts such tasks, it arrogantly and foolishly underestimates its opponents. “After all, we are Americans, entitled to do as we please, anywhere. Little peasants in straw hats or godless ragheads better not get in our way.”

But they do get in the way, and sometimes with great success. It helps, of course, when an American target country has an ally or allies as does Syria. Still, the “we’re Americans” attitude is quite prevalent in the United States, even outside establishment circles. “Exceptionalism” as Putin accurately likes to call it. It’s a result at least in part of constant indoctrination via everything from newspapers and television and Internet news and public affairs to Hollywood movies and magazines.

The public’s embrace of exceptionalism helps the establishment undertake what it views as needed tasks virtually without opposition at home. Just consider, except for one limited, intense period during the decade-long Vietnam War, there has been, and is, effectively no opposition in America to all the nation’s pointless wars. Decade after decade after decade, it’s just an accepted part of what it is to be an American, hearing and reading about foreign wars and interventions in the news.

That American official’s words about Russia thinking it won in Syria would be heavily reinforced by the interests of Israel. As we all know, Israel can make life hell for any American politician who wavers from the true path. And Syria, like Iraq before it, is an Israeli-inspired project, Israel working with America, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, and a couple of others. Part of what America’s Condoleezza Rice arrogantly and brutally referred to as “the birth of a new Middle East,” the screams of tens of thousands of victims representing the “birth pangs.” That’s Washington’s god-like way of looking at human misery, human misery for which it is directly responsible. Not much different than seeing ants being stepped on.

Now, American concern about China’s remarkable rise and its competitiveness have been around for a while. We saw it in many things from annual State Department lists of human rights abuses – wow, talk about sheer hypocrisy – to arguments about China manipulating its currency or engaging in unfair trade practices or stealing intellectual property. The innate cleverness and hard work and organizational skill of the Chinese couldn’t possibly have created what we see. It must be the result of underhandedness, underhandedness especially towards America, the place where all good things originate, of course.

On the economic and trade front, things came to a head recently with Trump’s clumsy revival of the centuries-old concept of Mercantilism – an old and discredited economic-political  philosophy of using protectionism to generate favorable trade balances to increase your own country’s wealth, clearly something not everyone can do at the same time, so it is a philosophy inherently antagonistic – as a way to make America richer, or, as he puts it, “make America great again.”

Trump’s approach to Mercantilism is bullying the other party into making concessions favorable to the United States. So, it is easy to see how this kind of policy is on a continuum with the outbreak of actual hostilities. He uses a major new American government industry in generating and enforcing tariffs and sanctions to create pressure, “maximum pressure,” to obtain a trade treaty, one that according to his thinking, and this where Mercantilism comes in, must be better than balanced between the parties. It must absolutely favor America over China owing to all of China’s past abuses, “taking advantage of” the gentle, uncomplaining giant he believes America has long been.

I won’t run through all the flaws contained in Trump’s thinking. They are many, but just the notion that you can “beggar your neighbor” to make yourself richer is ignorant and dangerous. It is as unthinking as the conviction of the Luddites that they could stop the Industrial Revolution, with all its unwelcome changes in their workplaces, by smashing the new machines. Trump’s views are really that crude.

I suggest China may well just choose to make do, of course having taken serious reprisal measures but forgetting about any agreement with the United States, rather than submit to public pressure and unfair demands.

What Trump does not “get” is that most of China’s modern success is about natural competitiveness, not unfair practices or imagined tricks. China started with a great cost of labor advantage combined with great organizational skills and new, more-enlightened laws governing business, but already it has exploded past those starting advantages to serious technological and scientific competitiveness, what took centuries in Europe’s development. The reason a company like Huawei, some of whose technology is the world’s best of its type, has been under intense American attack is only that and nothing more.

The Communist Party under Mao, while holding the country together through difficult times, was an inhibitor of the country’s advance, much as the Catholic Church once was in Europe. But today’s Chinese Communist Party is something altogether different. It provides intelligent leadership, builds advanced infrastructure on a large scale, supports advanced education, again, on a large scale, generates important new long-term strategic national projects, provides new approaches to national defense – all while cementing national unity and allowing for considerable flexibility in the activities of individual companies.

As just one example of the Chinese government’s efforts, adult literacy rates, since the early stages of the new economic order in the 1980s, have grown at a phenomenal average rate of more than ten-percent per year, bringing them close to those of traditional advanced countries. Remember, this is a vast country with a population about seventeen times the size of Germany’s, one where rural peasants represented a large portion of the population. This is not a government which squanders resources.

And there will no pausing, as immense, government-set, brilliantly-conceived projects proceed in everything from the New Silk Road – something that literally will change the earth’s economic geography – and about 20,000 miles of operating national high-speed rail lines, two-thirds of the entire world’s total and still growing, and a galaxy of hundreds of modern airports built as China prepares to overtake the United States as the world’s largest air-travel market in the next couple of years, to imaginative moon exploration and truly advanced quantum physics work show us. As someone has observed, China now has about eight times the number of students studying science, engineering, and technology in universities as does the United States, just an immense investment in “human capital” for the future.

China has coped well with Trump’s tariffs. They have a national model that combines a powerful, well-informed, stable central authority with freedom for individual firms to adjust as they see appropriate. You must be exceptionally bright, as is Xi, to become the leader of China in recent times. The celebrity and populism and advertising and marketing we see in American politics have little place. It is a powerful state model for the kind of ambitious growth China has experienced and one well suited to any serious challenge such as Trump’s trade war.

Trump started something I believe he cannot win. But going beyond the threadbare limits of Trump, the American establishment, if Alastair Crooke is right, is committing itself to a greater, longer-term battle that it also cannot win. One, importantly, that will chew up immense American resources far better invested elsewhere. And one carrying implicitly the risk of war.

Today, America wastes huge sums on its military and on destructive wars motivated by 19^th century imperial thinking. A major part of the reason that it can manage doing that, despite its immense debts, is the dollar’s special position in the world. But that position is rapidly deteriorating, and making enemies of China and Russia, plus all the pressure America applies now to everyone from the EU, and Germany in particular, to South Korea, plus the abuse of its financial and payments systems for arbitrary domination, as in the cases of Iran or Venezuela or Russia,  are unquestionably speeding the end of the dollar’s privileged reserve-currency role. The process of dethroning the dollar is already well underway. It is not clear just when it will be completed, but it will be completed.

A “weaponized” dollar simply does not provide the convenient medium of exchange people of the world need and want. Quite the opposite, it attempts to thrust politics and arbitrary limits into the world’s transactions. It also generates uncertainty, an enemy of all things financial. A weaponized dollar simply is not sustainable in the long run. As the dollar loses its reserve currency role in the world, America will be left not only without its immense currency-printing privilege but with slovenly habits and attitudes towards spending and debt and investment that it has accumulated over decades.

When it comes to defense, China and Russia each spend a fraction of what America spends, but they spend it wisely without the sense of unlimited resources to which Americans are conditioned, and they are producing impressive results. Russia spends less than a tenth of what America does. China now spends a bit more than a fifth of what America spends.

Both China and Russia have well-stated views on defense spending. Enough is required for the absolutely reliable defense of the homeland and no more. The amounts between them vary because so many of their individual circumstances vary, from physical geography to the current size and shape and state of their armed forces and to the level of mastering various key new technologies to be employed. But both states are committed to the idea of an arms race being wasteful and unnecessary.

The American establishment is, I believe, under the mistaken impression that it can repeat what happened with the Soviet Union during the Ronald Reagan era when immense new spending on exotic arms programs helped weaken the Soviet state as it strove to compete, its socialist system being inherently not as robust or flexible as a market-oriented one.  But that is entirely a wrong view, although of course it provides the Pentagon and defense contractors all kinds of opportunities to expand their empires.

Russia is no longer a socialist economy and neither is China. Despite the name of the Communist Party still being prominent in China, it has morphed into something quite different than what it was decades ago.

Putin especially has been clear about his philosophy of defense spending. Just enough to secure Russia’s very important efforts now underway to expand economic growth and national prosperity. You need peace for growth, and highly focused research efforts over years have given Russia the weapons capable of doing just that.

Weapons to assure the mutual destruction of the United States should it attack, remembering that it is the United States that, more than once in the past, produced detailed and aggressively-promoted plans for a massive nuclear first strike against the former Soviet Union, including all of its cities.

America’s increasingly aggressive pressures are driving Russia and China together, as we have not seen them before, to cooperate on a wide range of matters. Russia, apart from its products and excellent technologies in a number of areas, has the capacity to be a great natural resource provider for China’s ferocious industry, just as it has for Europe, especially for Germany.

Bonds that grow out of natural mutual interests are strong ones, just as antipathies over being told what to do, what and where to buy, and punitive threats are strong, antipathies which Trump and America’s establishment have been working hard in recent years to build.

America keeps putting new pressures on Germany, and the whole EU, with threats of sanctions for Russian natural gas projects, threats of tariffs on German cars, demands about new taxes being laid as by France on Internet commerce, and demands for purchasing overpriced American products from Liquified Natural Gas to F-35 fighter jets. Recent polls show a sizable majority of Germans are for ending sanctions altogether against Russia, sanctions which European governments have accepted in the name of a long-standing alliance. But serious cracks are starting to appear, both because the original purpose of that alliance has faded and because of America’s aggressive new and inappropriate demands. The American-imposed sanctions have cost Europe many billions of dollars of lost sales in everything from agricultural products to industrial machines.

China’s geography-changing New Silk Road is being welcomed in many parts of Europe, and countries are signing on to be a part of it. To some extent, China’s massive efforts on this project can potentially offset some of the effects of the economic collapse towards which America appears to be hurling itself. An important contributing cause of the Great Depression was America’s so-called Smoot-Hawley Tariff. It imposed protectionist policy on much of the world’s trade. Trump’s total effort to control the activities of other nations with tariffs, sanctions, and threats is doing much the same thing.

We do see something large taking form in the world that absolutely is against America’s comfortable, traditional position since WWII, and it is the American establishment’s belligerence itself helping to shape it. The new close ties between Russia and China, a quickly emerging new Eurasian center of finance and other important matters, Europe’s new skepticism about American behavior and intentions, the ties forming from China to Europe with the New Silk Road and other projects such as Chinese construction of nuclear power plants, Russia’s massive new Arctic projects and China’s serious parallel interest including launching its first huge icebreaker, Russia’s emerging Northern Sea shipping route as almost a branch of the Silk Road, China’s diligent efforts at economic relationships with Africa securing supplies of raw materials, American trade with Africa in sharp decline while Chinese trade enjoys healthy growth, the new African Continental Free Trade Area offering new opportunities for China building infrastructure, and new Russian and Chinese economic relationships in Latin America.

It is a greatly changing world, not necessarily hostile, unless you choose to regard it so. And, sadly, America’s power establishment does choose to regard it so. They do not want to give up the privileged position they have enjoyed since the end of WWII, something they fell into by the good fortune of being the last one standing more than inherent skill or superior abilities, but ultimately there is no choice. The stage is set, however, for conflict as America’s establishment fights to retain privilege, using its still mighty military and financial strength in a very uncreative effort to pry advantages from others or simply deprive others of advantages. The more intense this effort becomes, the more motivation there is for a still faster pace of change. And, of course, the greater becomes the risk of war.

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump announces new 10% tariff on another $300B worth of Chinese goods

“Announcement of new tariff starting Sept. 1 sends stocks tumbling”

 

The latest figures show American Net Exports in a serious decline.

That’s the lovely job-creating effects of Trump and his” maximum pressure” tactics in the world.

And of course, his every supporter is paying those tariffs with every visit to Walmart and Costco.

And the stock market is very unhappy.

And desperately, interest rates are being dropped again.

America is literally walking blindly into disaster with this bully who understands nothing about economics or trade.

Or diplomacy.

But you see the blinding effects of American exceptionalism here, on Trump and his supporters. “But we are the best. We must be doing better. Our flag-hugging leader says we are.”

Those are the sounds as America heads for the dumpster and trails much of the world along behind it.

John Chuckman

COMMENT TO A REPORT THAT THE BRITISH NAVY IS RUSHING A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE TO THE PERSIAN GULF AMID GROWING TENSIONS WITH IRAN

This is a very stupid step taken by Britain, sending a nuclear attack submarine to the Gulf. It adds only risk and uncertainty to a dangerous situation, one for which Britain has herself to blame.

Britain’s act of hijacking an Iranian tanker near Spain earlier served no legitimate purpose and represented lawlessness trying to pass for law enforcement.

According to solid information, that act was undertaken at the request of the United States. Nothing like committing piracy at the request of a friend, now, is there? High principles indeed, but such are the times in which we live.

And such a friend! One who ripped up a valid working legal contract – the Iranian international nuclear agreement – which involved the direct interests of seven other nations as signatories, all of whom were just swept aside as though they didn’t matter.

That act of vandalism was followed by the laying on of harsh economic sanctions, pretty much undeclared and illegal acts of war intended to cripple a major economy and hurt its tens of millions of people.

Then we have whole fleets of warships and bombers sent to a place where there is no war, their sole purpose being to intimidate. And during all these hostile acts, we have a series of truly vicious threats coming from a President who freely uses words like “obliterate.”

Well, the British pirating of an Iranian tanker near Spain was yet another log tossed on the flames. Yet when we hear the British government talk about the situation, it’s the Iranians who act badly.

Of course, this all suggests the possibility that the United States may be seeking to provoke Iran into doing something that could be used as a casus belli.

One desperately hopes not. Our Western news sources and politicians continue to minimize the seriousness of starting a war with Iran. Apart from the very real moral and ethical considerations of starting a war against law-abiding people just because you are prejudiced against them, it would be very wise to remember this is no push-over country, as are so many of those the United States chooses to bully and threaten and overthrow. And it has important and powerful friends in Russia and China.

This is a country with a population about the size of Germany’s, a country which has experienced something unlike anything the United States has experienced. It was battle-hardened in a vicious, eight year-long war during the 1980s.

The bloodiness of that war was comparable to parts of WWII in Europe, but the Iranians endured. That was a war the United States secretly encouraged. It even assisted Saddam’s Iraq with intelligence and war materiel.

Saddam used chemical weapons extensively, on an immensely greater scale than the inaccurate claims made about Syria recently, weapons the United States and its allies saw to it that he receive.  They wanted Iran bled.

Because of the awful experience of the Iran-Iraq War and the open and unceasing hostility of the United States for decades, Iran has prepared itself militarily, creating many formidable conventional weapons, including a whole range of missiles.

It has anti-ship missiles lining parts of its shores, and what prize targets a couple of aircraft carriers would make.

We saw the effectiveness of Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles with the downing of America’s largest and most sophisticated drone, a thing the size of an airliner, packed with electronic gear, flying high at night with signals turned off.

We saw the accuracy of Iran’s ground-to-ground missiles a while back when they hit some terrorist mercenaries in Iraq without touching nearby American forces.

What utter insanity it would be to start a war. I feel confident that if it were only up to Iran, there could be no war. It has started no hostilities in its entire modern history, despite being threatened many times and openly attacked more than once. It completely met its obligations under the international nuclear agreement Trump wantonly tore-up.

But it is not just Iran involved, represented as it is by impressive and highly rational figures such as President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif, it is the likes of Bolton and Pompeo and Haspel and Trump and Netanyahu who are involved – violence-prone and dishonest people every one of them.

Elements of the British government, at the time of the piracy near Spain were enmeshed in a political battle for the succession to Theresa May as Prime Minister, and some may have considered it a good show to put on for influencing Conservative Party opinion.

Belligerence is always big in such circles. Just look at Trump. Belligerence is the only act he has in his repertoire.

I don’t blame the Iranians in the least for the actions they’ve taken. They were all in response to things done first to them, and they were all measured and proportionate.

Indeed, in every step responding to American threats, the Iranians have shown admirable restraint. They do just enough to make the United States, and now Britain, understand that they cannot act arbitrarily without consequences.

And doing a tit-for-tat by capturing the British oil tanker in the Strait, an action involving no harm or violence, was about as reasonable as can be expected when someone is dealing with unreasonable people, people who claim higher authority and legitimacy for their acts on no basis whatsoever.

The only thing needed to restore peace in the Gulf is for the United States to withdraw its threatening forces and let the local people go on about their business.

Then, if it really wants to talk to Iran, as it claims it does, it might restore the solemn contract it destroyed, so that Iran feels it comes to the table as an equal national state, not as Czechoslovakia being terrorized by the Third Reich in the Munich Crisis of 1938.

That might just restore some credibility to the United States, too. I don’t know how anyone expects to reach any future agreements with anyone after proving its past word was worthless.

Iran’s Rouhani has hinted at a possible swap of the seized tankers. That sure makes a lot more sense to me than sending a nuclear attack submarine. It points towards where reason is to be found in these matters.

John Chuckman

COMMENT ON STILL MORE LEAKS FROM FORMER BRITISH AMBASSADOR KIM DARROCH’S CONFIDENTIAL NOTES TO HIS GOVERNMENT

 

We have today yet more revelations in leaked documents written as advisory notes to the British government by Sir Kim Darroch, its recent former Ambassador to the United States.

Darroch called Trump’s tearing-up of the Iran nuclear agreement an act of “diplomatic vandalism.” Now, that is a characterization completely on the mark. It is difficult to see what anyone would even find objectionable in it, beyond the fact of its being leaked by someone unknown.

After all, every government in Western Europe and other major states like Russia and China and major world organizations publicly expressed their opposition to Trump’s rash action. All agreed that Iran had kept to its commitments and that the agreement had worked well for about four years.

Darroch went on to explain that tearing up the agreement was done to spite his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Yes, there is no question Trump has been out to destroy or undo everything that he can that was ever done by Barack Obama. He literally hates the man. We’ve seen that in a number of matters, including Obamacare.

But there is another reason for Trump’s dangerous blundering in Iran, a far more powerful one, one completely ignored by Darroch. I’ll come back to it after a few more words about Trump’s loathing for Obama.

I do believe Trump’s hatred for Obama is deeply tinged with racism. I can see no other explanation for it. There simply are no genuine liberal qualities in Obama for anyone on the political right to dislike, but there is the glaring fact of his being the first black president.

No one, examining the record of Obama’s eight years as president, can sensibly accuse him of being a liberal. In anything, except in the occasional vacuous and soon forgotten political speech. I know the Alt-right press regards Obama as a liberal, one of the most hated ever, but it’s a silly accusation from some extreme people. And that crowd, if you read through their stuff on the Internet, oozes with racism.

Obama led eight years of ugly American colonial wars, from invading Libya to getting the endless horrors of Syria going. From secretly supporting a coup to overthrow Egypt’s first-ever democratic government, one to which Israel had taken serious objection, to staging a coup against an elected government in Ukraine and pitching that country into turmoil, including civil war, all for the sake of intimidating Russia. From increasing ugly pressures on Venezuela to starting the tanks rolling up against Russia’s borders, there is no liberalism to be found in Obama’s activities abroad.

At home, we find the same thing. How can a man be regarded as liberal who passed no significant social legislation? And he did absolutely nothing to help his own people, the people to whom he appealed in the rhythms of a black preacher reciting the slogan, “Yes, we can!” He did nothing for the squalid, broken-down realities of vast stretches of urban America. His Obamacare legislation was a nasty, confusing, corporate-serving piece of work that a liberal can find just as hateful as a right-winger.

Further, Obama also did almost nothing to reform a financial system badly in need of reform, a system that had created a disastrous world-affecting financial crash. He signed off on all major military and security legislation. He actually started the shameful American system of extrajudicial killing abroad by hi-tech drone. And it was under Obama that the secretive NSA began expanding into an information-sucking monstrosity with its new constellation of secret buildings packed with super-computers and spying on literally everyone and everything.

Trump’s activities in Iran are about Israel’s interests, as they are communicated and pressed through the many channels of the American Israel lobby. Trump felt afraid and vulnerable about the future of his office at one period, and he turned to some extremely wealthy American oligarchs for support and money. These were men whose most burning concern is Israel, and several of them are on intimate terms with Netanyahu.

I am sure Trump got the support he sought, but all such support comes at a price. Trump’s price is readily seen in a whole series of acts, from putting the American Embassy into Jerusalem to recognizing Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. From appointing a series of extremely ideologically committed men, genuinely fanatical men, like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to important posts to slashing support for a number of organizations whose work in any way supported the Palestinians.

It’s been a dramatic wave of events over a short period, and they reflect no authentic interests of the United States, and they certainly have nothing to do with Obama. They all increase tensions and hostilities and commit the United States to ignoring the rule of law. Matters in Iran are part and parcel of that activity.

Netanyahu has made years of insane claims about Iran and the security of Israel, all of them groundless, none of them supported by any evidence, and, indeed, in a number of cases, being directly contradicted by solid evidence. But he just continues his harangues and crusade against a country that has started absolutely no conflicts in its modern era, a fact, as it happens, totally the opposite of Israel’s own record of close-to continuous war.

Netanyahu has long wanted Iran to be hurt or reduced for the temerity of having some influence in the Middle East. Israel wants all of that influence with no one around to in any way oppose or question it. Netanyahu was intensely busy in just the same way during Obama’s time, but Obama ignored him, which is the only way he ever achieved the nuclear agreement.

Netanyahu also, like Trump, has a deep dislike for Obama. He showed this openly a number of times, coming close to expressions of public contempt. I assume his hatred is based on Obama’s ignoring him over Iran largely, although racism, too, could well play a role. Netanyahu’s Israel has been extremely hostile to black Jews from Africa and to black refugee claims. Netanyahu actually had a scheme to bribe some distant African states to take refugees off Israel’s hands.

At any rate, the shared distaste for Obama only makes the same years-old job of selling the threat Iran is supposed to represent, and there’s no need to sell it to those American oligarchs to whom Trump desperately turned for political help. They are onboard with about every outrageous claim Netanyahu ever made.

We should note that that nuclear agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, and the United States – plus Germany and the European Union. They all still strongly support it, except, of course, for Donald Trump’s United States. Everyone, except Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s United States, agrees that it is a solid agreement and that Iran has conscientiously followed its obligations. All international technical experts and inspectors support that view too.

But along comes Trump suddenly to toss the agreement to the wind, ignoring everyone else. The only people with input and support for his rash behavior are Netanyahu and Trump’s American oligarch political supporters, close friends of Netanyahu.

Essentially, what we have is a man, Trump, who, in the interest of his campaign war chest for the 2020 election or against any attempt at his impeachment before that, is putting the entire world at risk of a serious war. He is threatening and economically crushing a law-abiding nation of more than eighty million souls for no other reason. Millions of ordinary Iranians are hurt by his severe and unwarranted sanctions. As is always the case with sanctions, they hurt mainly ordinary people. They are a blunt instrument, much like massive bombing.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CRAIG MURRAY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“The Simple Explanation for the Betrayal of Britain’s Envoy

“Craig Murray has a strong hunch about why someone would leak Kim Darroch’s scathing comments about Trump”

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/10/the-simple-explanation-for-the-betrayal-of-britains-envoy/?unapproved=374384&moderation-hash=9e2db8191c3309ba52faed708becf841#comment-374384

 

Very interesting little article.

The portrait here of Kim Darroch is so different than what we see in the mainline British press, it is actually a bit startling.

His newspaper portrait in Britain, at least in the press I read, is of an extremely able man, a classy diplomat.

But what we have here is a kind of British Trump, a crude loud-mouth and abusive man.

This is a terrific example of how a story can be made to appear almost unrecognizably different.

The truth? I am not sure when it comes to government and foreign policy anymore we ever get any truth.

Deception and misrepresentation are the norms simply because governments like those of the United States and Britain are engaged full-time in so many dark imperial projects all over the world.

The people never voted for much of what is being done in their name and might well not support much of it, if only they knew.

I’m afraid this is just one more fragment of evidence – along with such matters as what really has happened in Syria, what really is going on with Iran, why the United States never acts to rein in Israel and impose a fair settlement, day-and-night Russophobia, the assault on China, and so much more – telling us what a dreamworld we now live in. Perhaps “nightmare” is a more fitting word than “dream.”

Almost nothing in our press and from our politicians is real anymore. There’s an entire world of government activity that goes unreported and unexamined. If one insists on using the unattractive term “fake news,” – unattractive because of the class of people who regularly use it – its main application should be to Western governments.

Obviously, under such circumstances, references to “democracy” or even “democratic” are meaningless. The people are simply not aware of what their “elected” governments are doing.

Whatever Kim Darroch’s character really is and whatever the motivation for someone leaking his embarrassing past confidential observations of Donald Trump, the observations, of course, remain valid. We know that from the best possible source, our own regular observations.

Trump is indeed an emperor without any clothes. An embarrassingly obvious man in his words and acts. But, as with so many things in Washington, you are really not allowed to say that.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CBC NEWS

 

“Trump’s direct engagement with North Korea is the first big idea on the file in decades

“Much as only President Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump could go to North Korea”

 

Concerning any international issue, it, of course, never hurts to talk.

But what seems so obvious and fitting a concept as talking has never really taken hold in Washington. Never.

Does America talk to Venezuela? Does America talk to Iran? Does America talk to Syria? Does it talk to Cuba? Does America talk to Nicaragua? Does it even talk much with Russia? Or China?

No, America seems to prefer shouting at people, telling them what it wants to see them doing, and very frequently, it threatens them.

It does that not just with its unilaterally-declared opponents – countries regarded as opponents for no other reason than that they follow their own national interests rather than putting America’s first – it does it also with friends and allies, countries like Germany or Turkey or the EU or India.

Such countries receive somewhat less harsh treatment, but they are told what they may buy and from whom, and they are told to enforce the American domestic laws called sanctions as though they had some international legitimacy beyond the threat of military force and financial blackmail used to enforce them, and they are just generally told what is expected of them in a great many matters.

It is arrogant and patronizing behavior, as any impartial witness may plainly see in an instant, but America is used to being arrogant and patronizing on a rather colossal scale, treating whole regions that way, the Middle East being a prime example where not one country does not receive orders and expectations from Washington.

We’re seeing a whole new round of arrogant and patronizing behavior right now with Jared Kushner’s “Deal of the Century” flim-flam marketing operation. The fate of millions of people, held for decades against their will by Israel, enjoying no rights of any kind, not even the right to secure home and farm ownership, and subjected to life-long abuse and harassment with check-points, passes, line-ups, and raids – all offered with a keen eye to making them so miserable they’ll want to leave – is somehow to be settled without so much as consulting them.

It is an operation in which tens of billions of phantom dollars (there being no actual funds held by anyone) from America’s Gulf State tyrant friends are supposed to generate, over a period of many years, a new Palestinian prosperity, without changing any of the realities which now keep Palestinians down.

An operation led by an extremely arrogant man whose very position reflects his father-in-law’s nepotism and distrust of outsiders plus an intimate friendship with the Palestinians’ most vindictive enemy, the current Prime Minister of Israel. Kushner is a man, moreover, possessing absolutely no suitable expertise, education, or experience, and a man who, early on, pronounced from on high that the Palestinians were in fact not ready to govern themselves. Sounds very promising, does it not?

Of course, a great irony of Washington’s ordering other countries about is that so often Washington’s orders are badly misguided and its expectations unrealistic. They prove to be damaging long-term because Washington simply does not understand local realities, realities that will still be there decades later. It refuses to do so if they don’t fit into Washington’s idea of how things should be. It is a form of madness. And of course, repeated enough times, it confirms the old saying about, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

There are many examples. Perhaps the most glaring is Afghanistan and a nearly twenty-year war against the Taliban that has utterly failed. Countless lives and huge amounts of wealth have been squandered on pointless destruction. America never has understood what the Taliban are. They are not “terrorists,” they are not outsiders imposing themselves on others, a role pretty much reserved for America itself. No, they are simply one of the natural divisions in the society. Expecting them to go away is like expecting Baptists or Democrats in America to go away.

And the Taliban had no role in 9/11. They gave refuge to a devout Muslim by the name of Osama bin Laden whose native country, Saudi Arabia, greatly disliked him. When the United States demanded his extradition after 9/11, the Taliban only asked for some evidence, providing credible evidence being a normal part of every proper international extradition request. The United States said no and shortly invaded the place. That is how much sense the war in Afghanistan made from the very start.

America bombed the crap out of the country while its local ally, the clans of the Northern Alliance, traditional opponents of the Taliban, did most of the fighting on the ground. America terrorized countless towns and villages with heavily-armed patrols breaking into homes and removing the men for brutal interrogation, it installed another government, one from members of the Northern Alliance, no more admirable to Western eyes than the Taliban, and it committed, or allowed others to commit, a great many atrocities.

Along the way, in toppling the Taliban government, America released massive new waves of hard drugs into the world, drugs the Taliban had suppressed with its ban on growing opium poppies. The damage of that is felt to this day with large supplies lowering street prices and increasing addictions while urban gang wars are waged over turf, often making news of a weekend’s shooting toll in major American cities resemble reports from a war. A toll of as many as sixty or so shot in one weekend in Chicago, as just one example, has become common.

But did the United States defeat the Taliban? No, they remain a major player with whom the United States only now finally holds serious secret negotiations. Did they even capture bin Laden? No, he was finally murdered years later in Pakistan but even then, only because of a betrayal, not American military or intelligence skill.

Did the United States, after all of that, ever even prove to us that bin Laden was “the mastermind” of 9/11? No, it has never provided genuine evidence of anything, including what actually happened on 9/11. To this day, we honestly do not know. Yet none of that prevented it starting a long and unproductive war, a war it still has not extricated itself from.

(On 9/11 and the lack of any coherent explanation for it, see: https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2016/09/11/john-chuckman-comment-a-survivor-says-even-the-simplest-questions-around-911-have-not-been-answered-by-government-yes-and-some-disturbing-truths-around-those-events-the-saudi-arabian-nonsense/ )

Do we have some sense of déjà vu here, as in going back to the ten-year long mass slaughter in Vietnam which proved only that a poor but determined people can defeat the United States so long as it refrains from using atomic weapons? It certainly threw everything else it had at the Vietnamese, killing an estimated three million of them and leaving their country a nightmare of Agent Orange, landmines, and bomb craters.

That kind of ugly stuff unfortunately characterizes much of the foreign affairs history of the United States since WWII. One colonial war after another, and none of them achieving much except a great deal of death and destruction. Hatreds and hostilities on a grand scale serving no purpose other than to enforce America’s claim to the world that it is free to do as it damn well pleases anywhere.

There are lots of other examples. All the years of severe hostilities and genuine acts of terror against Cuba, and, more than half a century later, these are being stoked up yet again, Washington not able to absorb the fact that what people in other places want to do with their lives and resources may well be at odds with what America demands.

The seventy years of horror in Israel/Palestine provide another example. The United States could have put an end to all of that at any time by declaring proper borders and enforcing them, but it didn’t, and it still doesn’t. It just allows a long and destructive set of hostilities continue unimpeded, every once in a while, dabbling in some kind of silly “peace process” theatrics. In this case, America is involved through the American colonial identity of Israel and what it attempts to do in the Middle East. And America makes sure there are mountains of armaments to do it with.

For some reason Trump has chosen to talk to North Korea, but I’m not sure it has a great deal of meaning. After all, this is Donald Trump we are talking about here.

The same man leaked secret British diplomatic papers have just revealed is viewed as “inept,” “incompetent” and “erratic.” His policies towards Iran are actually called “incoherent.” I think we knew those things before the leak of state papers, but it is still nice to have confirmation.

I do think that apart from talking, Trump has totally failed in North Korea with what he originally aimed for, denuclearization. The North might make some concessions in exchange for American concessions, but it is not going to give up its nukes, and I think America’s establishment may be starting to understand that.

North Korea will not give up on its nukes, especially now that America is seen so clearly as a country which does not honor legal contracts, as in the glaring examples of tearing-up the Iran nuclear agreement and tearing-up the INF Treaty with Russia. That last is a terribly important treaty for Europe to avoid becoming the immediate battleground in a nuclear conflict. What incentive is there for a country like North Korea?

With its well-equipped army on the southern border and its regular war games and with nuclear weapons stashed in Japan and Guam, America represents a serious, ongoing threat to the North, and the North would be foolish to give up all its weapons. The United States has made no concessions to reduce the ever-present threat it represents while making all kinds of extreme demands.

Indeed, I think it is largely the credible nature of the North’s deterrent that saved it from Trump’s initial huge wave of gunboat diplomacy with aircraft carriers and nuclear bombers everywhere, just exactly what we now see arrayed against non-nuclear, law-abiding Iran.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

“Leaking of UK ambassador memos branding Trump White House ‘inept’ investigated by Foreign Office”

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-memos-ambassador-uk-leaked-investigation-sir-kim-darroch-white-house-a8992826.html

(Note that link is to a follow-up article and not to the original)

 

Well, the diplomatic papers might have been secret, but the Ambassador’s observations are shared by millions.

There really are no secrets here.

I am glad to see a British Ambassador offering such accurate analysis to his government, but then why is British foreign policy cast as though the opposite were true?

Criticizing and laughing in private at Trump is not very helpful if you still follow him in all his dangerous blundering as though he really were a leader.

Just who is the bigger fool then?

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LARISON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Trump’s “Maximum Pressure” Blows Up in His Droopy Face

“If Iranians are ever going to talk to the US again they have to restore their leverage first”

 

Yes, who negotiates with a gun to his head? Only someone who is defenseless, but that certainly does not characterize Iran.

By what degradation of language are such proposals as America’s even called “negotiation”?

What we see is an effort to conduct international relations along the lines of the age-old Mafia protection racket: pay-up or something really bad is going to happen to you. That is world leadership in the twenty-first century?

It sets a terrible precedent, just as Trump’s tearing-up a valid, working treaty did. A treaty which involved the interests of a number of other states, none of whom agreed with Trump. The interests of five permanent members of the Security Council plus those of Germany and the EU are involved.

Yet Trump felt entitled just to ride roughshod over all of them?

Imagine a businessman suddenly ripping-up a written, multi-party contract, one already in force and operating smoothly for about four years? Here we see precisely that situation, except the international sphere lacks the courts and law enforcement which protect contracts in any advanced country.

Who can trust the United States? What is its word worth? Very little apparently, which of course only compounds the current situation with Iran, just as it does the one with North Korea. Ultimately, the question arises, who will want to do business with the United States? Given America’s relative economic decline in the world, that is just the opposite of what it should communicate to the world’s people to foster investment and trade.

The attitude which should prevail is the one, ironically, we see in Russia: open for business, reasonable, “right this way, partners.” I say “ironically” because not all that many years ago, Russia was a country understood as understanding none of those things.

Now, it very much is the United States of Donald Trump which understands none of those things.

The author’s points are valid, but there are yet more.

The mob running the White House wants Iran to “throw the kitchen sink” into a new deal. What was a clear nuclear-upgrading treaty should become a “and a number of other things” treaty.

At the very least, they want Iran’s missile technology degraded or removed.

A ridiculous expectation in today’s world of missile defense and satellite launching and ultimately all kinds of important projects in space. Much of future scientific work and even manufacturing will be done in space.

Iran has a lot of smart young educated people who want to pursue careers in science or technology and build companies. Why should they be arbitrarily excluded?

Of course, all the grotesque pressure comes ultimately from Israel, by way of American oligarchs who make massive campaign contributions when their terms are met, and through the dedicated efforts of government-service apparatchiks like Bolton and Pompeo.

Israel has worked tirelessly to hurt Iran as a rival for influence in the region. It has nothing to do with genuine security, as Israel pretends. Non-nuclear countries do not attack nuclear ones, and Iran has committed no aggression of any kind in its modern history.

The only kind of security involved is Israel’s sense of security in doing whatever it pleases to anyone anywhere in the region without effective objection, a miniature replica of America’s global behavior.

In a bitter irony, the invasion and destruction of Iraq, done largely at the behest of Israel (Ariel Sharon was a long and fervent advocate) in a terribly bloody war with at least a million deaths, actually increased Iran’s relative influence in the region. So much for the foresight of those who play with the lives of others as though they were game pieces.

What a way for America to run a country and try running the world – almost rabid efforts at destroying someone’s economy accompanied by grotesque threats and terrible displays of war machines, all reflecting no more worthy purpose than securing campaign contributions and political allies back home. And it comes at the same time America conducts a massive trade war with China and a huge campaign of vilifying Russia and hurting its interests. Then there are the smaller destructive works underway such as those in Venezuela. And all the vast and impetuous mass of sanctions and tariffs involved affect everyone else of consequence too.

The whole crisis further highlights America’s relative decline. The country’s leadership – and it’s not just Trump, although he is by far the loudest and most uncouth – has become openly arbitrary and demanding in efforts to counteract its decline, and no one responds well to that. Iran will certainly resist, assisted, hopefully, by such powerful associates as China and Russia and even India.

But Europe, too, is feeling the unwarranted pressure and the unfairness, the effort to skew the entire planet’s affairs in America’s favor. It is undoubtedly thinking hard about future relations with the United States.

If Trump’s efforts do not lead to war, they may very well lead to international economic collapse with all the tariffs and sanctions and reduced volumes of trade plus the threat to oil transport. But if, somehow, we avoid either of those outcomes, I think there can be no question this impossibly arrogant and ignorant President has effectively “greased the rails” for the emerging multi-polar world, one which effectively will end America’s privileged and much-abused authority.

Trump’s legacy will not have been to “make America great again,” whatever that slogan is supposed to mean, but to speed the very changes in the world to which the slogan was a response

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA

 

“Was South Korea’s Moon the Real Architect of the Historic Trump-Kim DMZ Meeting?

Trump extends White House invitation to Kim, US and North Korea to reopen stalled nuclear talks”

 

https://www.checkpointasia.net/was-south-koreas-moon-the-real-architect-of-the-historic-trump-kim-dmz-meeting/

 

Moon is a bright and capable politician. He seemed to hold extraordinary promise when first elected.

He and Kim alone could likely sort out all their differences, but that is not allowed by the United States which insists on standing at the very center of things.

Moon understands and has used Trump’s vanity, encouraging him to be at the center, to make some progress, slow as it may be.

The photo at the top is highly symbolic. Trump stands at the center, wearing one of his frequently-used unsmiling ogre faces, while the two Korean leaders are smiling and talking to each other in an animated fashion.

Trump’s words, too, are bizarre, as they so often are.

That stuff about no speed and being careful and doing a thorough job represents precisely the opposite of his approach to almost everything.

He is rash, erratic, incomplete in his thinking, not well-informed, and generally has a predetermined goal he wants to impose. He is not a negotiator, whatever illusion of himself he may hold.

He is quite simply the strangest man ever to hold the office of President.

His expression in the photo is one you can find repeated a hundred times over in various international situations. I think of it as his fantasy Mount Rushmore face, the scowl he seems to relish being remembered by, confusing it with a show of strength and determination.

My guess is that ultimately North Korea will not completely denuclearize. Their past experience with America – its horrifying massive bombardment for three solid years in the Korean War, killing twenty percent of the country’s entire population and providing practice for what would be repeated in Vietnam – provides sobering considerations not everyone appreciates.

And America has offered no real incentives of which we are aware, such as reducing its own heavy military presence on the peninsula or reducing its terrible sanctions. Kim is a clever fellow despite his cartoon-character looks. I’m sure he understands the importance of keeping at least part of the arsenal his people have so sacrificed to create, and he understands the game of playing for time. The impetuosity of Trump is just not sustainable for terribly long, and, in the meantime, a little increase in understanding has occurred and Kim and Moon have established a genuine relationship.

The American role in Korea is representative of its role in so many of the world’s affairs. By insisting on putting itself in the middle, it interferes with natural local relationships and inclinations. It adds new demands and attitudes which otherwise would not be present.

It often greatly complicates things by throwing its own interests into the scales. It does not do so in the cause of peace or understanding, but for reasons of control. It often has limited appreciation of local circumstances, insisting instead that the locals embrace its 10,000-mile distant perspective.

America’s new levels of hostility towards Russia and China also complicate things. Russia and China have long supported North Korea’s denuclearization. But today they both have new incentives for not enthusiastically pursuing America’s approach. Why help people who act like your bitter enemies? Why help sick, aggressive creatures like Bolton and Pompeo gain a diplomatic victory raising their stature?

They may even have increased incentives for secretly assisting North Korea in certain ways. They always did in the past maintain their own approaches to North Korea. Perhaps now, they will return somewhat that way. Neither of them has ever had an interest in seeing a collapsed state on its border.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘Donald Trump has given a wild interview to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business, declaring, “Almost all countries in this world take tremendous advantage of the United States, it’s unbelievable!”

‘The president claimed Japan would watch a Third World War “at home on a Sony TV” rather than come to America’s aid (ahead of a trip there for the G20 summit), attacked Twitter, accused retired FBI special counsel Robert Mueller of deleting incriminating Justice Department text messages and said Iran “does not have smart leadership” and is “going down the tubes”.’

 

I do think all of his comments are becoming more and more chaotic.

He seems to be falling apart inside.

I’m not sure from what – fear of impeachment? realization that his noisy threats are being ignored and he’s looking idiotic? growing recognition of his own lack of ability?- but the rambling nature of his words, laced with so much invective and name-calling and so many threats is telling us something.

He insults friend and foe alike, and I’m sure with each passing week, he’s causing all kinds of re-thinks in high places about future relations with America.

This clearly is a man who has soared far above his level of competence.

America has all kinds of serious problems, but he is able to deal with none of them. If anything, he creates new ones.

He reduces the policy of his country, whose flag he loves to be photographed hugging as though it were a woman’s perfumed negligee, in the eyes of the world to a set of vicious schoolboy pranks or skits.

The Legions of Imperial Rome led by Monty Python’s John Cleese, or perhaps Moe of the Three Stooges, in a dark blue business suit with a “power tie.”

John Chuckman

 

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE ON CBC NEWS

 

“Trump threatens ‘obliteration’ should Iran attack ‘anything American’”

 “Iran calls new U.S. sanctions ‘outrageous and idiotic'”

 

And Iran is right.

At a big meeting in Jerusalem involving Russia, the United States, and Israel, Russia revealed that it has additional proof, apart from that already supplied by Iran, that the drone was shot down over Iranian territory.

Since when is it a crime to shoot down a hostile machine, barging into your territory, flying very high up, with its transponder signals turned off, at night, and responding to no attempts at contact?

Moreover, a hostile machine sent by people surrounding you with a naval armada and with nuclear-capable bombers stationed nearby, sent by people who use similar machines, week-in, week-out, to kill innocent people in a dozen places?

America’s behavior is seriously threatening a nation guilty of no illegality and with not a single incident of aggression in its modern history.

And then it just keeps lying about what it’s doing.

____________________

Response to a comment saying if only we didn’t have oil and religious differences endangering us:

Actually, both oil and religious differences have very little to do with this whole affair, which I follow closely.

You left out what is, by far, the biggest problem, American arrogance and exceptionalism in trying to tell everyone on the planet what to do.

Backed up by a Frankenstein military establishment whose budget the country can’t even afford.

__________________

Response to another comment:

Iran has said countless times it never worked towards a bomb.

They are backed by experts from other countries, including experts from the United States.

And no one has been able to contradict them with any real proof, although the loony Netanyahu, who loves war as much as John Bolton, once pretended he had some. It was a shameful fraud, now quite forgotten, even by Netanyahu.

There are important reasons other than weapons for developing some uranium-enrichment technology.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY CAITLIN JOHNSTONE IN SOUTH FRONT

 

“STARVATION SANCTIONS ARE WORSE THAN OVERT WARFARE”

 

Yes, that is a true observation.

Sanctions are characterized by subterfuge. The word “sanctions” sounds so much less brutal than “war.”

It’s rather like the language of war discussed by George Orwell in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language.”

Used as America now uses them, they are completely a form of war, hurting huge populations.

Think of the past and the practice of “starving out” the populations of invested cities.

For example, what Nazi Germany did at Leningrad in WWII, killing roughly a million people over a period.

Now, instead of one technique applied sometimes at specific sites during a war, the United States has developed and generalized the inhumane practice into a new form of war.

And, always keep in mind, sanctions in general hurt and kill almost only civilians, the most ordinary people, the people who cannot protect themselves.

It does not matter what euphemistic-sounding titles the United States applies to each set of newly-published ones, they only have real effect when they hurt civilians.

Just the way America’s other favorite pastime, bombing, does.

But sanctions come without all the noise and with less adverse publicity.

You’d almost think a bunch of old captured Nazi figures, Wernher von Braun types, worked the idea out secretly years ago in a white paper and offered it to their captors as a gift.

 

 

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PATRICK LAWRENCE IN CONSORTIUM NEWS

 

“Regrouping the Nuclear Dealmakers

“There are three good reasons for Iran to go back to the table”

 

I couldn’t agree less.

Go back to the table? That reads like mainstream corporate output.

Iran has done nothing, except lawfully abide by its nuclear agreement for four years, something affirmed by every expert and major country on earth.

The United States arbitrarily ripped up a valid, working international agreement, and did so consulting no one beforehand. Its own major allies do not even accept its action.

The United States also has severely attacked Iran’s economy with sanctions. Severely.

Such sanctions, used frequently now by the United States, are nothing more than coercive efforts to apply American law universally, ignoring local and international laws. It is America ignoring the rule of law, simply the West’s most important civilising principle.

On top of those destructive acts, the United States now has clearly threatened war. The threat, whether intended to actually be carried out or not, is totally in violation of international law.

How does anyone “negotiate” with people who have taken such steps?

What is the meaning of “negotiation” under dire threat?

It’s really an exact repeat of behavior seen in the late 1930s from Germany against states such as Czechoslovakia. Hitler would suddenly throw terrifying rages during talks with high officials and scream the gravest threats, trying to set them completely off balance, to get his way. Sound familiar?

No one should validate that approach to international affairs. It is the very opposite of what the world requires for peace and security and stability. After four years of faithfully abiding by an international agreement, Iran, suddenly, should enter new negotiations, facing new and unrelated demands from an impulsive and dangerous man whose only real motivation, as we shall see, is his own domestic political situation?

What Trump did to create this situation is simple and sleazy. In serious fear of impeachment and other threats to his security in office, he approached some exceedingly wealthy people in the United States for support and reassurance, people whose chief concerns are with other matters.

He received money and support for his re-election in 2020 and for any possible attempt at his impeachment, undoubtedly. Seriously big money.

But he was required to pay a price. That price included ripping-up a valid, working international agreement, appointing frighteningly dangerous men like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to important offices, and being seen as very solicitous of Israel’s views about a country that it has always deeply resented as a competitor for regional influence, Iran.

This is a country that has never represented any real threat to Israel – ever hear of a non-nuclear country attacking a nuclear one? – although Israel has made many threats against it, even once spending a small fortune during Obama’s time planning and preparing for a large surprise (non-nuclear) attack, and Israel has carried out, over the years, a number of murderous dark ops against Iran.

So, the whole world must now pay in fear and apprehension for Trump’s becoming comfortably tucked into office? That really is what America’s ghastly behavior towards Iran represents. The Congress, of course, will not interfere in any matter touching Israel – every successful member of Congress being either already beholden to Israel’s lobby or deeply fearful of offending it – so, it just quietly stands back, allowing Trump his own way, literally, a madman in charge.

And a law-abiding country, one that has never attacked anyone in its entire modern history, Iran, is supposed to validate the vicious prejudices and demands of a country, Israel, that has been almost continuously at war for seventy years? One that has attacked every neighbor that it has, some more than once? One which holds at least five million people as desperate captives and has held them for almost an entire lifetime? One that has an illicit nuclear arsenal and substantial stocks of poison gas? A country that refuses to cooperate with any international arms control and one that stands in violation of dozens of United Nations’ Resolutions and international laws?

Makes sense to me.