Category: War

There are U.S. “advisors” in Ukraine

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

One of the perennial jokes of U.S. foreign policy is that the first U.S. troops to arrive in any foreign theater of conflict are just there as “advisors.” The U.S. intervention in Vietnam started off with just “military advisors” in 1950. Within two and a half decades, some 55,000 American soldiers had returned home in body bags from that tiny war-torn southeast Asian country on the other side of the world.

In recent days, President Joe Biden has made alleged “gaffes” about U.S. troops being present in Ukraine and removing Vladimir Putin from office, prompting administration officials, including secretary of State Antony Blinken, to make hurried correctives on his behalf that neither are official U.S. policy. While it remains unclear as to whether or not the latter is a serious U.S. policy goal, the former “gaffe” is a documented fact. There are in fact U.S. and NATO military personnel present in Ukraine at the moment, but only in a “limited” “advisory” capacity, of course. And they’ve been there since at least January–several weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Eerie echoes of Afghanistan circa late-1970s. The U.S. began supporting mujahadeen resistance to the newly installed Marxist regime in Kabul at that time and lo and behold the Soviets invaded several months after. The U.S. just officially ended its nearly 20-year occupation of Afghanistan last August.

The ability of the U.S. government to convince the vast majority of the American public of a false perception of what they’re really up to never fails to astound. The Biden administration keeps insisting that the direct involvement of U.S. troops in Ukraine is not in the cards, and yet we know for a fact that U.S. and NATO military advisors have been there for at least the past few months. They’re apparently teaching Ukrainian forces how to use all those weapons–including Soviet-made tanks being delivered by NATO allies–that were made possible courtesy of $1 billion—and counting–in U.S. military aid.

But yet we’re supposed to be convinced that Uncle Sam just isn’t doing enough in Ukraine. Never mind that this recent twist of tragic events was catalyzed by the Obama administration’s support for the Euromaidan putsch in Kiev some eight years ago. Never mind that billions of dollars in American military aid has been sent to Ukraine since then. Never mind that the U.S. and NATO are now facilitating weapons transfers to Ukraine. We’re supposed to believe that Washington has been acting with restraint and caution in regards to Russia v. Ukraine for fear of escalating into all out war with nuclear-armed Russia.

But doesn’t it appear more and more as though the opposite is true? The U.S.–which has launched a total of three regime-change and attempted regime-change wars since its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001–appears to be inching closer and closer to a direct military confrontation with Russia. Just as his “gaffe” about U.S. troops in Ukraine turned out to be an absent minded revelation of what was in fact true, perhaps Biden’s “gaffe” about Putin being forced out of power in Moscow will, in due time, turn out to be another slip-of-the-tongue that prematurely revealed the truth regarding Washington’s actual long term goal with regards to Russia.

Ukraine Notes

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

I caught Obama’s former CIA director, Leon Panetta, for a few minutes on CNN late this past week. He said that the U.S. put the kibosh on a proposal to transfer 29 Soviet-era MiG-29s from the Polish to the Ukrainian government as a result of some kind of “miscommunication.” Which is odd, because I had just seen it widely reported that the Pentagon threw cold water on the idea because such a transfer would run a “high risk” of escalating the war. It would directly implicate NATO in an armed conflict with Russia, you see, which is something that Biden has repeatedly stated he is studiously avoiding. (Though maybe he and his old boss should’ve thought through the possible consequences eight years ago when they decided to back the overthrow of the then existing Ukrainian regime for one that they thought they could more effectively control, and then arm that regime to the tune of $2.5 billion so that they could wage war on Ukraine’s Donbas region). We would then be in the World War III scenario that nobody wants: European states joining in the fracas, triggering Article 5, and before you know it, the nuclear-armed U.S. and nuclear-armed Russia are facing off not merely by proxy, as they are now, but directly, mano a mano. Cities of NATO countries then become Russian targets and vice-a-versa.

But I guess that was wrong…? Turns out somebody just didn’t get a memo or something…?

Nonetheless, there are members of the U.S. Congress calling for the enforcement of a no-fly zone over Ukraine, led by my adopted home state’s Republican U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin seems open to the idea as well. To describe these individuals as being in dire need of mental health treatment would be an understatement. Vox explains why.

Pete Quinones recently interviewed Kirill from the podcast Russians With Attitude, who gives his no-nonsense take on the chain of events leading up to the Russian attack on Ukraine. This includes some deep background on the Ukrainian nationalist project as an anti-Russian project dating back to the 19th century and the rivalry between the old Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the ad hoc invention of a “Ukrainian” language.

Michael Malice recently talked to Curtis Yarvin on the Russian-Ukraine war and Yarvin explains that based on an application of classical international law, Putin kinda has a legit beef–the U.S. would certainly take some kind of action if the Russians or the Chinese built military installations and bases in southern Canada or northern Mexico, which is directly analagous to how the U.S. and NATO have been gradually surrounding Russia since the mid-2000s or so. Yarvin, however, believes that Putin has likely miscalculated and is now in way over his head. Nonetheless, recent U.S. economic actions against Russia may lead to the unintended result of “de-dollarizing” the global economy, which would have some pretty serious economic consequences for Americans.

The blog Moon of Alabama recently relayed some disturbing reporting that 450 Islamic radicals have arrived in Ukraine by way of Turkey to fight the Russians. Meanwhile, the Russian government claims that 16,000 fighters from the Middle East have volunteered to go to Ukraine to fight on the side of Russia and the Donbas region. Whether either claim is actually true remains to be seen, in my own humble opinion. The propaganda always comes in hot and heavy from all sides during a war. However, there has just been some recent reporting today that the Russians have struck a complex housing some foreign fighters, killing 35. Perhaps more details on who they were and where they were from will be coming out in the coming days.

Scott Horton’s recent interview with journalist Ann Williamson is a must-listen. She was living and reporting in Russia at the time the USSR imploded. She discusses her testimony before the U.S. senate back in the late 1990s in which she predicted that U.S. ambitions to expand NATO further eastward would yield disastrous results. She wasn’t the only one, of course. A long line of U.S. Russia experts, ranging from the late George Kennan, the architect of the U.S. containment policy toward the USSR during the Cold War, to President Biden’s current CIA director, William Burns, had made similar predictions.

American Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow‘s recent conversation with Tom Woods is also well worth listening to.

Meanwhile, 52% of polled Americans appear to believe that Biden has not acted “forcefully” enough against Russia. This is the kind of poll that is ideally made into the warmongering bullshit that any astute observer has come to expect from Conservatism, Inc. in recent decades. Rather than call out previous Democratic administrations for crafting the foreign policy that has made this whole tragic shit show possible, they would much rather hector the current Democratic occupant of the White House into tangling directly with Russia, which, of course, as previously noted, would mean World War III.

ADDENDUM: Be sure to check out this March 2014 editorial by the late Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, wherein he breaks down the list of neo-Nazis and fascists scattered throughout the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Democrats saw a brown shirt in every closet following Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory, and yet when they’re confronted with evidence of actual Naziism and fascism being the ideological standard of their Ukrainian allies, they barely talk about it. Appalling, but hardly surprising.

Mitch McConnell Ruins My Fun

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

So the U.S. senate has voted against calling witnesses and examining evidence in its trial of Donald Trump. It was a bare majority vote, 51-49, as two Republicans, Susan Collins and bland-flavored-cream-of-wheat king Mitt Romney, joined the Democrats. This effectively brings the senate’s trial to a swift conclusion, of course. The senate is scheduled to vote on Trump’s removal from office on Wednesday, Feb. 5th, which will most likely be of a roughly similar result. Since the constitution calls for two-thirds of the senate to vote to convict in order to remove him, even if those figures are hypothetically reversed (and they won’t be), it’s still not enough to kick Trump out of the White House and replace him with every Democrat’s dream choice, Mike Pence.

Damn. I was so hoping for an all-out trial with the witnesses, the cross-examinations, and the evidence provided by both sides. My God, what a glorious shit-show circus it would have been. All the dirty laundry would very possibly have been aired right out in the nation’s collective front yard. Because if Democrats would have been able to call witnesses and cite evidence, they would have had to allow the Republicans to do the same. And the whole scenario is just the type of conflict-rich arena that Trump thrives in. It would have been a brawl. There was even talk of the Democrats and the GOP negotiating to call in Joe and Hunter Biden for testimony in exchange for disgruntled warmonger and ex-Trump employee John Bolton taking the stand.

Oh, what a glorious battle it would have been.

But, of course, it was never going to happen, as everyone with a fully functioning prefrontal cortex had been saying from the very beginning. (As for myself, I’m just a hopeless romantic.) There was no way Mitch McConnell was going to allow such a circus to take place in the senate during a presidential election year.

And so, my friends, the entire two-party establishment has been saved from yet another spectacle of embarrassment.

Damn it.

Scott Horton and Mark Perry: The Times We Almost Went to War with Iran

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

Scott Horton recently posted an interesting interview with Mark Perry discussing Perry’s recent article at The American Conservative, “1984: The Year America Didn’t Go to War”, and the near-wars with Iran that were narrowly averted. The U.S. and Iran have been tangling for at least 40 years, or rather, 60-plus years if you go all the way back to the CIA-engineered coup against Iranian President Mohammed Mossadegh to have him replaced by the restored Shah, as Horton reminds us. The interview should be listened to and the article should be read.

Perry’s article specifically focuses on the internal debate within the Reagan administration as to how to respond to the bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in October of 1983, which killed 241 Marines. They were deployed as part of a multi-national peacekeeping mission in the midst of Lebanon’s long and bloody civil war. The U.S. concluded that Hezbollah (“the Party of God”)–which was then, as now, an Iranian proxy force–was behind the attack. Then Secretary of State George Schultz demanded retaliation but Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger–who was a veteran of the horrific Battle of Buna during World War II–opposed any U.S. military escalation in the region. Weinberger even went so far as to ignore a direct order from Reagan to launch military strikes on what were believed to be Iranian-connected assets, though he later claimed that he never received any such order. Weinberger, apparently, had been completely opposed to the Marine deployment to Lebanon in the first place, as was his senior military advisor at that time, Colin Powell, a veteran of Vietnam. Weinberger eventually got his way after months of apparently deliberate bureaucratic foot-dragging, with the Marines ultimately restricted to U.S. ships in the Mediterranean.

It’s a surprising and enlightening story that I wasn’t aware of. As Horton and Perry point out, the military leadership in the Pentagon is often far more cautious than the civilian leadership in the State Department when it comes to getting the U.S. into new wars. That has frequently been the case throughout this country’s history.

And that was apparently the case recently when it came time for Trump to decide whether or not to pull the trigger on Iran. The conventional wisdom has it that Trump caught a broadcast by conservative commentator Tucker Carlson denigrating the idea of attacking that country and possibly instigating a whole new war, which supposedly dissuaded Trump from launching any strikes. But Perry reports that it’s far more likely that it was Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff–and who was a commanding officer in the 2003 invasion of Iraq–who convinced Trump not to do it.

In a meeting Gen. Dunford and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had with Trump when he was mulling over possible strikes on Iran, Dunford did what is called “flooding the zone”–“providing volumes of facts and figures that are as likely to delay as inform.” Dunford apparently does that whenever a policy option that he disagrees with has been put on the table, reminiscent of Weinberger’s delay tactics to resist launching attacks in retaliation for the 1983 Marines barracks bombing. And the facts and figures Dunford cited at Trump and Pompeo were apparently not very pretty. Just as Reagan had eventually pulled back the Marines from Beirut, Trump ultimately called off the attack on Iran.

Perry quotes Weinberger as having said, “It is easy to kill people, and that might make some people feel good, but military force must have a purpose, to achieve some end…We never had the fidelity on who perpetrated that horrendous act.”

In one interview some years ago, Perry argued to Weinberger that Reagan’s increasing military budgets would make it far more likely that the U.S. would find itself in the midst of a foreign conflict once again. “You don’t get it,” answered Weinberger. “We’re not buying more guns because we intend to use them, we’re buying more guns so we don’t have to.”

Weinberger should be commended for resisting the pressure to drag America into what would surely have been yet another quagmire of a war, this time in the Middle East, barely a decade after the last Marines and U.S. embassy staff were evacuated from Saigon. His overall attitude toward U.S. military intervention abroad appeared to be that it should be kept to a minimum. If only his successors shared that view, then this country would have been spared a lot of conflict, bloodshed, and expense over the past few decades.

But if Weinberger honestly thought that subsequent U.S. presidents would use the massively built-up military forces that Reagan had bequeathed to them on only very limited small-scale operations, and only when the U.S. was eminently and directly threatened, he was very much in error, as history taught him by the time he passed away in 2006. Reagan’s successors would, in fact, use America’s military might quite liberally and recklessly. Two of them were of Weinberger’s and Reagan’s own party: the George Bushes, Sr. and Jr. George, Sr. would march into Panama based on highly questionable premises within his first year in office, and he would then proceed to contract out the U.S. armed forces on behalf of the sheikhs and emirs of Kuwait and wage war on Iraq.

Bush, Jr., of course, would use the 9/11/01 attacks as not only a pretext to invade and occupy Afghanistan, which continues to drag on eighteen years later, but to continue his father’s war on Iraq as well, overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s regime, which was followed by a long and bloody occupation. And since then, there have been the interventions in Libya, Syria, and now Yemen, in aid of Saudi Arabia’s chosen side in that poor and beleaguered country’s civil war.

“What’s the the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once famously asked Gen. Colin Powell during the 1990s, as the Clinton administration pondered intervening in the Balkans.

Farewell, Justin Raimondo

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

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Justin Raimondo, author and co-founder and longtime editor-in-chief of Antiwar.com, recently lost his battle with cancer at the age of 67.

Raimondo was not exactly a household name. He made an occasional appearance on television and radio, but most people have no idea who he was. And yet he and Antiwar.com have had a profound impact on the popular perception of the many U.S. wars that have been initiated since 9/11/01. His frequent critiques of the American war machine were devoured by a relatively small but dedicated niche audience, whose political views ranged across the entire spectrum from left to right, and who all shared his contempt and disdain for systematic mass murder by the state, and all the deception and convoluted moral gymnastics that go with it.

Those dedicated readers learned much from Raimondo over the years about that small but powerful clique of court intellectuals known as the “neoconservatives,” who acted as the bodyguards of lies to justify the criminal U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the endless U.S. war in Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya and much of Syria, and many other areas of the U.S. government’s lawless foreign policy. Many of those readers then distributed what they learned from Justin far and wide, which undoubtedly helped shape the skepticism of U.S. war and empire that is broadly shared by so many ordinary Americans at the present moment.

I only exchanged the occasional tweet with Raimondo; I never got to meet him, unfortunately. But I always detected a delightfully cantankerous and crotchety personality throughout his voluminous writing. As you read his razor-sharp broadsides at Antiwar.com, you couldn’t help but imagine that he was sitting right there next to you, chain smoking as he explained everything.

Looking at Antiwar.com’s obituary, to say that he was a complicated man containing multitudes would be an understatement.

Born into a Catholic family in Yorktown Heights, NY, he led a childhood so rebellious that he nearly got incarcerated in a mental institution by a prominent psychiatrist who later turned out to be a Soviet spy.

He decided that he was an Objectivist and libertarian at the age of fourteen; he even deigned to pen an article on Objectivism at that tender age, which was published by a New York newspaper. He was thanked for his efforts with a cease-and-desist letter from Ayn Rand’s attorney, which eventually led to him meeting Rand herself. Struck by his youth, she ended up encouraging his passion for writing and urged him to never compromise his vision.

He was a gay libertarian who was a fierce advocate of gay liberation in his youth but then developed some conservative sympathies as he got older, a man who alternatively participated in the presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan. To his many critics, those elements didn’t seem to go together. But those seemingly incongruous pieces do in fact fit when you grasp the strategically evolving nature of how he developed his views. Dismantling the U.S. war machine and achieving liberty were always the foremost goals of his writing, which he largely learned how to do from his early mentor, the late Austrian school libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, who was also a persistent and intransigent opponent of American militarism.

Like Rothbard, Raimondo came to realize that in order to mount an effective challenge to U.S. militarism in the court of public opinion, you’re going to have to make an appeal to the ordinary working class Americans who have been sending their kids into the U.S. armed forces, only to see them return in flag-draped coffins or physically and/or psychologically crippled. In Raimondo’s view, too much of the antiwar movement, historically dominated by the political left since the Vietnam War, had become distracted with lifestyle and group identity politics to the detriment of their antiwar activism. And though politically divergent on many other issues, Nader and Buchanan were both aggressively critical of Uncle Sam’s globally interventionist foreign policy, Buchanan particularly so following the collapse of the USSR and Bush Sr.’s war to save the financial behinds of the emirs and sheiks of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

Raimondo’s reasoning also escaped the comprehension of his critics when it came to his treatment of Donald Trump. Though at first extremely hostile to Trump’s candidacy early in the 2016 election cycle, Raimondo recognized a new opportunity to strike a blow against the U.S. foreign policy establishment after Trump denounced the pretext for the Iraq war as a pack of lies at the GOP South Carolina primary debate in February 2016. He began writing more and more in defense of Trump’s campaign and then his administration, especially when it came to any apparent resistance by Trump to the mandarins of the U.S State Department and the Pentagon.

But it’s not my job or place to offer any apologetics on Raimondo’s behalf, nor do I have any desire to. I didn’t always agree with his observations and interpretations of certain events. In any case, the man wrote quite clearly and articulately on behalf of his own views. My point is only that there was one very important reason for Raimondo’s sympathies with the Trump phenomenon: He saw it as, potentially, a means to an end, that end being a rollback of the U.S. government’s sprawling, globe-spanning machinery of endless war. How correct Raimondo was about that is, in my own humble opinion, debatable. But the fact remains that Trump, though he did ratchet up Barack Obama’s intervention in Yemen, has not exactly turned out to be quite the warmonger that so many of his critics claimed he would be. Despite preceding press coverage to the contrary, it does not look as though there will be any U.S. war on Venezuela anytime soon, and when the hour arrived to strike Iran, Trump called it off at the last minute.

One could easily imagine Raimondo writing similarly in support of Democratic U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard right now due to her own opposition to the U.S. government’s idiotic and pointless regime-change wars.

That’s because ending U.S. foreign wars was always his number one political priority, and he happily took what he could get wherever he could find it, on whatever point of the political spectrum it could be found.

Justin Raimondo spent virtually his entire life fighting for one of the worthiest causes that any American could ever dedicate himself to: the rollback of, with an eye to someday entirely dismantling, Uncle Sam’s massive war machine.

And for that, there is no doubt that St. Peter embraced him upon his arrival at the pearly gates with the following words: “You did good, son. You did real good. Welcome, and enjoy your rest.”

ADDENDUM:

Aside from Anitwar.com’s wonderful obituary (and do read the whole piece to the very end), here are some other tributes to Justin Raimondo from people who knew and worked with him:

“How Justin Raimondo Made Me A Braver Writer” by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos at the American Conservative.

“In Memoriam: Justin Raimondo, 1951-2019” by Edward Welsch at Chronicles, to which Raimondo was a regular contributor for many years.

Scott Horton discusses Justin Raimondo’s legacy with Pete Raymond.

Horton also discusses Raimondo’s legacy with Tom Woods here and the future of Antiwar.com here.

State of War

Posted on by Robert Kaercher

All my bitching about the U.S. government’s completely batshit insane foreign policy over the years has taught me that not many people feel this issue is as urgent as I do. Well OK then. But I’ll still bitch about it, because of all the things that provokes massive outrage, the U.S. government’s slaughtering of people in far-off countries—people and countries most Americans know absolutely nothing about, aside from whatever bullshit or cherry-picked factoids the media feeds them—seems to be what perturbs people in this country the least. I can’t think of a single U.S. war since 1945 that accomplished anything approximating the actual protection of Americans, which means that the U.S. has senselessly slaughtered, or created or contributed to conditions that caused the deaths of, millions of people around the world for absolutely no reason. And the U.S. has squandered, and continues to squander, vast resources that could be far better used at home. Shoring up the unfunded Social Security and Medicare commitments, for which many have already been taxed for the past several decades of their lives, is one example that comes to mind.

But better than my bitching is the 13-minute video above, featuring a handful of members of Congress of both parties who try, usually in vain, to place some constraints on the American war machine. Even trying to pass legislation enforcing the War Powers Act is like pissing in the wind and having your own urine splash back in your face. The congressional leadership of both parties always resort to the most vile, disgusting, Machiavellian tactics to block any kind of War Powers bills or amendments. They LOVE the war machine.

But maybe you don’t give a shit and don’t want to watch it. Fine.

I’ll still be here, bitching as usual.

(Thank you, Antiwar.com.)