Endless War category archive

At Asia Times, Mikhail A Molchanov, a professor of Ukrainian descent at a Canadian university, tries to provide a Russian perspective on the events in Ukraine. Whether or not you find it credible is not the issue; the issue is that there are other ways of interpreting what’s happening there than we are not hearing from our media, whose coverage seems to boil down to “Russia. Bad.”

I urge you to read it.

Here’s a snippet:

By the end of his second term in the office, Putin must have lost all doubt as to the real motivation behind the US championing of “democracy” world-wide – to expand its sphere of influence and prolong its global hegemony while eliminating and weakening potential rivals by all means available, not excluding crude military power. He witnessed, and could not prevent, the unlawful dismemberment of Serbia and the quick recognition that Western powers hastened to grant to the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo.

(snip)

The fact is, no matter how corrupt or weak Ukraine’s Yanukovych is, he remains the democratically elected president deposed in a revolution which had full support of the West from the beginning.

Our media are not known for analytical brilliance or balance as regards foreign policy. They have obediently sold us wars based on lies from the Mexican War on down; just in my lifetime, they led the cheers for the Viet Namese War, the overthrow of Allende in Chile, the Dominican invasion, the Nicaraguan incursions, and the Crusades of George the Worst, just to mention a few.

Grains of salt are wise additions to the news junkie’s diet.

I think John Cole is on to something:

I guess watching the Russians do what they want in Ukraine is how the rest of the world felt when we invaded Iraq.

He is quite correct, but the analogy hardly casts a pleasant light on the reign of George the Worst and on those who readily deferred to his aggressions, now, does it?

These two links help cast some light on what’s going on in Ukraine: Line one and link two.

Aside:

In the part of Delaware where I used to live, there were many Americans of Ukrainian descent. The pastor of the local Ukrainian Orthodox Church–where they had the best pirogies in the world at their bazaar and we attended a service once at which First Son’s girlfriend fainted (the usher came to us quietly and said, “Your daughter’s fainted” only she wasn’t our daughter who was standing next to me) and everyone was very nice, but that’s another story–lived three doors up the street (and he was a heck of a nice fellow).

This gives me no particular insight. It’s just a thing.

What Noz said.

William Pfaff wonders what the United States will leave behind as it winds down in the Middle East.

He is not sanguine.

The American departure will leave behind much carnage and ruin. It will leave America’s largest and most expensive (former) embassy on earth — “bigger than the Vatican City,” we proudly were told, as construction was under way in Baghdad’s Green Zone. It will serve as a monument to American strategic ambition, becoming the American Ozymandias (“look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). Tourists will visit it.

The Army is investigating kickback fraud for recruiting recruits. In a program in which “recruiting assistants” were paid an “incentive” for convincing persons to enlist; the “assistants” used inside information to claim bounties incentive payments for convincing persons they had not convinced.

The program began, natch, in 2005 because the military was having difficulty meeting quotas for cannon-fodder for the wars of George the Worst. Fraud began to be suspected in 2007 and the Army shut the program down in 2011.

From my local rag:

Army criminal investigators are probing the actions of more than 1,200 individuals who collected suspect payouts totaling more than $29 million, according to officials who were briefed on the preliminary findings of the investigation and would discuss them only on the condition of anonymity. More than 200 officers are suspected of involvement, including two generals and dozens of colonels.

The alleged fraud drew in recruiters, soldiers and civilians with ties to the military who submitted, or profited from, false referrals registered on a website run by a marketing firm the Army hired to run the program. Suspects often obtained the names of people who had enlisted from recruiters, claimed them as their referrals, and then kicked back some of the bonus money to the recruiters.

How very free market.

Many more details at the link.

Policy failure complains that President Obama does not support failed policy hard enough.

Via Bob Cesca.

Works on this side of the pond with minimal editing.

Via Mr. Feastingonroadkill.

If you consider the arguments for raining death from the Syrian sky, they pretty much boil down to

“Because somebody should do something.”

Not, I submit, a particularly sound exercise in policy formation.

Via the BooMan.

Don’t go there.

It’s a lose-lose situation, yet another endless war.

Despite the glorious delusions of the war faction (none of whom, it should be noted, would actually be in harm’s way), we are not the Omnipotent States of America.

If the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq and its companion piece in Afghanistan have proved nothing else, they have proved that.

Afterthought:

These folks are always willing freely to sacrifice other persons’ children for their fantasies of potency. Why don’t they just buy themselves some Viagra?

Pah!

Via Balloon Juice.

Gian Gentile assesses the results of the Great and Glorious Patriotic War for a Lie in Iraq and its older cousin in Afghanistan.

Many years ago the British historian and strategist B.H. Liddell Hart pointed out that the object of war should be to produce a “better state of peace.” If that is what earns a war a passing grade, then the United States deserves a failing grade for Afghanistan and Iraq.

During the American occupation in Iraq between 2003 and 2011, as many as 250,000 Iraqis died and 1.4 million were displaced. Nearly 5,000 members of the U.S. military were killed, with many thousands more suffering life-altering wounds.

Read the rest about how we and they were Bush-whacked.

I’m not necessarily a David Sirota fan. I find his work “Sirota-centric.” Nevertheless, I think this interview is worth a listen.

I think that some consideration should be given to the idea that the NSA has managed to convince itself that SIGINT is somehow separate and distinct from spying, as it does not involve secret meetings, drop sites, trench coats, and suicide cyanide capsules.

Fresh Air’s Geoff Nunberg explores the conceptions, misconceptions, and misinformation about “metadata,” in particular statements from James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, that, somehow, metadata isn’t really data.

A nugget:

. . . (C)alling it metadata doesn’t make the process any less intrusive. Tell me where you’ve been and who you’ve been talking to, and I’ll tell you about your politics, your health, your sexual orientation, your finances.

Excerpt:

News is not a game show!

On a more serious note, Juan Cole is also unhappy with the coverage of Snowden.

I have not been flipping out over the recent NSA stories because, as I mentioned, it’s old news. If you didn’t know this was going on, you haven’t been paying attention.

In this video, Alan Grayson falls into the trap of believing some of the more fantastic inferences in some of the news stories (as has most everybody else who doesn’t understand how networks work), particularly the one of confusing SFTP with a “backdoor into a server”; nevertheless, I think that his comments on the the entwining of domestic surveillance and the military establishment are worth a listen.

On Linux Outlaws this week, Fab, whose university training was in Political Science (and whose rants are legendary in the Linux podcasting world), went off on this topic. He had a good handle on the facts, international law, and the implications of this practice, if not on his language.

The relevant portion of the show starts at the 55 minute mark and lasts about half an hour (follow the link to listen; if you do, remember that the language is NSFW and that the standards for “acceptable” profanity in the UK, where Fab resides, differ significantly from those in the US–in particular, the list of the most forbidden words in the UK does not include the most forbidden swear word in the US).

Video via AmericaBlog.