THE WASHINGTON POST ONLY SERVES THE MILITARY’S INTERESTS

In A Biased Somalia Report They Blow Trump’s Troop “Withdrawal” From The Country Out Of Proportion, While Ignoring The Failures Of American’s Intervention There.

The American war in Somalia rarely receives much media coverage, so it was notable that The Washington Post published a long article last week detailing the current American military role in the conflict against the Al Shabaab militia.

The article emphasized the pitfalls of the previous 2020 withdrawal of troops from the country and the greater costs and inefficiencies of using “commuting” troops to support the Somali government from nearby bases in Kenya and Djibouti. It tells the story of how American forces are “scrambling” to recover from the setbacks caused by the withdrawal under Trump without putting the withdrawal in the context of a failed military campaign that had already stretched on for more than a decade.

The wisdom and necessity of the mission in Somalia are never questioned even in passing, and the entire report reads like an exercise in putting the most positive spin on the Biden administration’s decision to send several hundred troops back into Somalia.

What the article never attempts to do is to offer any compelling reasons why American forces should still be involved in a Somali war in 2022 when there is no discernible connection between this conflict and the security of the United States. Ongoing American involvement in Somalia’s war is something that seems to be taken for granted, and the only questions that the article tries to answer are how best to fight the war and how effective local Somali government forces have become.

Bottom line: the Washington Post fails to hold our government accountable for a war it’s been waging unsuccessfully for 15 years. This kind of slack journalism has allowed wars like this one to drag on without end.

Another important omission from the article is any discussion of the legal authority for American military operations in Somalia. Since the Obama administration named Al Shabaab an “associated force” of Al Qaeda, the American regime has worked on the assumption that the 2001 AUMF covers this group. This is an exceptionally weak foundation for a legal justification for using force in Somalia more than twenty years after the original resolution was passed.

Not only does Al Shabaab have nothing to do with the people responsible for planning and carrying out the 9/11 attacks, but the group itself only came into existence years later. Furthermore, it has demonstrated no ability to conduct attacks outside East Africa. The idea that the United States is in any sense defending itself by waging war on Somali militiamen strains credulity past the breaking point. Among other things, the war in Somalia is a cautionary tale of how the 2001 AUMF has become an all-purpose license for war whenever the executive chooses to use it.

Both parties share in the failures of American policy in Somalia. American involvement in the war there stretches back to the Bush administration, and it has deepened over time as the “war on terror” has become an entrenched and routine part of our foreign policy. Trump inherited and escalated the war in Somalia for almost his entire presidency, and it was only at the very end that he ordered approximately eight hundred troops to leave the country. Of course, American involvement in the war did not really end, and the troops simply relocated to bases in neighboring countries.

Even when Trump succeeded in ordering a withdrawal, he was unable to extricate America from the conflict in question. Instead of admitting that the intervention had been unsuccessful, America kept it going by shuttling its forces into the country on a rotating basis. This is the arrangement that the Biden administration ended when the president ordered 450 troops to go back to Somalia on a more permanent basis earlier this year. In one of his only reversals of a Trump policy, Biden opted for the older approach that had already been found wanting.

As Oona Hathaway and Luke Hartig explained earlier this year, the decision to withdraw the troops based in Somalia followed a significant escalation by American forces during the Trump years. The withdrawal was a belated acknowledgment that the intensified campaign against Al Shabaab had not yielded the desired results: “After its stepped up military campaign failed to achieve durable gains and following a last ditch effort to negotiate with al-Shabaab, the Trump administration decided to cuts its losses and withdraw U.S. forces. The Biden administration has decided to re-engage, though currently at a level that leaves the country in a long-term stalemate. Battlefield losses could still degrade al-Shabaab, especially its external operations capabilities, but the larger conflict is likely to remain static.”

During the Trump years, American forces significantly increased the use of airstrikes and drone strikes against supposed Al Shabaab targets. As a recent report from the Dutch peace organization Pax shows, this intensified aerial campaign inflicted serious harm on civilians that were either caught in the crossfire or who were themselves mistakenly targeted. This not only did lasting damage to the communities affected by these strikes, but it also served to benefit Al Shabaab by aiding in the group’s recruiting. This part of the American war in Somalia is barely mentioned in the Post article, and the civilian casualties that it caused are nowhere to be found.

American military involvement in Somalia is relatively small, and that is why it has been able to fly under the radar without much public or Congressional scrutiny for so many years. It is incumbent on journalists and analysts to do more than just ask whether one kind of military footprint is more efficient than another.

On the rare occasions when the war in Somalia does receive coverage, we need reporters to ask why America is persisting with a policy of militarized counterterrorism when it has clearly failed to reduce, much less eliminate, the threat that Al Shabaab poses to Somalia. When it comes to providing stability to Somalia, Hathaway and Hartig note that “the militarized approach that has long dominated U.S. policy toward Somalia appears unlikely to produce” it, and they add that “there’s a strong case that the opposite would prove true.”

Writing for the Quincy Institute in 2020, Elizabeth Shackelford asked the pertinent questions about this policy: “Why is the U.S. military fighting a war there? What U.S. national interest is the war serving? And are America’s actions in Somalia and the region furthering that national interest?” These are the questions that we need our major papers to be asking the administration, which is recommitted to fighting a war that most Americans know little or nothing about. The truth is that there is no American national interest served by fighting in this war, and America keeps fighting it mostly out of habit and inertia.

If the case for American military involvement in Somalia were sound, Congress should be able to debate and vote on it on its own merits. Failing that, America should fully withdraw from this and all other senseless wars once and for all.

THE AMERICAN MILITARY THANKS AND PRAISES RETIRING CNN “JOURNALIST” FOR HER SERVICE

This Clearly Demonstrates That America Does Not Have A “Free And Independent Press” But Simply Has A “Propaganda Ministry.”

The American military has been showering CNN’s retiring Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr with effusive thanks and praise for her lifetime of service, giving some insight into the cozy working relationship between the media and the war machine inside the American empire.

“Today closes a remarkable career for CNN’s Barbara Starr, a leader in the Pentagon Press Corps,” reads a post by the Twitter account for America’s Central Command. “Her aggressive reporting and tireless commitment to the truth brought this Nation closer to its military. She will forever be missed.”

Starr received a standing ovation at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday after Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder sang her praises and thanked her for two decades on the job.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to say farewell to our media colleague, Miss Barbara Starr,” Ryder said. “Barbara has reported for CNN for over 20 years, and has been a fixture in the Pentagon Press Corps, and today marks her final day with CNN after a storied and fully-impressive — excuse me — truly impressive career.”

“So Barbara, on behalf of Secretary of Defense Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Milley and the entire Department of Defense, I would like to extend a special congratulations and thank you for your many years of timely, insightful and important reporting on our nation’s most pressing defense issues,” Ryder continued. “And as someone who has worked with you for many of those last 20 years and someone who has had to take your late-night phone calls and emails and answer your tough, but fair questions, I can say from personal experience that the U.S. public and audiences worldwide have been well served by your in-depth reporting from the Pentagon, your journalistic integrity and your determination to tell the stories of service members worldwide, and to ensure the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve. Congratulations again, and we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.”

“You know Department of Defense better then [sic] most. We will miss you! Thanks for your service to our Democracy! Free Independent Press !”, retired lieutenant general Russel L. Honoré told Starr on Twitter.

There is no clearer sign that America does not have a “free independent press” than for military to be gushing affectionately about the career of a longtime CNN Pentagon correspondent. There is no more disgraceful way for a journalist to retire than with a standing ovation at the Pentagon.

Surely there can be no clearer a mark of journalistic failure than being thanked by the American military for your lifetime of service. If your journalistic relationship with the corrupt and murderous American military was ever anything other than oppositional, and their feelings toward you anything but hostile, it’s because you were never a journalist. You were their PR agent.

And indeed one need only look at Starr’s output over the course of her career to know that this was the case. Watch her uncritically parroting government claims about chemical weapons in Syria. Watch the infomercial-like way she reports on the American “war on terror” activity in the Middle East. Watch her enthusing about what a “win” the capture of Muammar Gaddafi was for the United States. Watch her finger-wagging at the president of the Philippines after he verbally insulted the president of the United States. Compare the way she talks about allegations of Russian war crimes and American war crimes.

“I’ve been listening to her for years, and I can’t recall a single time she wasn’t just reading a Pentagon press release,” tweeted activist Steve Patt.

The American military has such adoration for Barbara Starr because she is a war propagandist, just like the rest of the mainstream western news media who report on American foreign policy. And the Pentagon was joined by Starr’s fellow propagandists in celebrating her storied career.

“You are so well-respected, not only here at CNN but in the broader community of journalists — I know how well-respected you are at the Pentagon,” anchor Erica Hill told Starr on CNN.

“CNN and our viewers have benefited greatly from her truly extraordinary reporting skills and her deep knowledge of the US military, that I truly appreciate as a former CNN correspondent myself,” said CNN’s Wolf Blitzer during his farewell to Starr.

“So well deserved. Barbara was one of the best journalists I worked with at CNN. A Pentagon legend,” tweeted Murdoch pundit Piers Morgan.

This is everything that is wrong with news media in the western world. Journalists are supposed to hold power to account with the light of truth, and that cannot happen if they are building warm, affectionate relationships with the people they’re meant to be aggressively scrutinizing. If the public is getting their information about the workings of the most powerful military force ever assembled by people who are friendly with and sympathetic to that military force, then they cannot possibly be getting accurate information about it. The press cannot possibly be ensuring that “the government and DOD remain transparent and accountable to the taxpayers and the American public they serve.”

And that is of course the point. The mass media of the western world do not exist to inform, they exist to misinform. To create a compliant and obedient populace who doesn’t interfere with the mechanisms of empire or the violence necessary for upholding it. To, as CENTCOM so aptly put it, bring the nation closer to its military.

That was Barbara Starr’s entire job, it will be the job of whoever replaces her, and it will be the job of everyone else in the Pentagon press room with them.

THE AMERICAN MILITARY AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

How Do We Stop The Propaganda Machine From Initiating The Next War Built On Lies From Being Waged?

Because all governments lie and because lies are especially common during war, a healthy democracy must have an outspoken and independent media that challenges and questions authority while informing the public.

But the mainstream media (MSM) in America is neither outspoken nor independent. The MSM in America serves as stenographers to the powerful. Far too often, the American military/government lies and leaks, the MSM believes and repeats.

The result is clear: disastrous wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq) from which little is ever learned, enabled by a media culture that is deeply compromised by, or openly in league with, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC).

Here’s the fundamental issue: We need a skeptical and powerful media to deter the MICC from wars, war profiteering, and folly. The MSM should, and must, serve as a check on the MICC while holding it accountable when it fails. By doing neither, it serves various “big lies,” enabling future abuses of power by the national security state. There is no accountability for failure, so failure is neither punished now nor is it curtailed in the future.

Even when the MICC fails, and since the Vietnam War it has failed frequently, it gets more money. Consider the FY2023 Pentagon budget, which sits at $858 billion, a nearly inconceivable sum and which is roughly $45 billion more than the Biden administration asked for.

The challenge is, how do we stop the next war built on lies from being waged?

Something to ponder: Could a more critical, more courageous, truly independent media have shortened or stopped the Vietnam War? Iraq? Afghanistan?

In his famous speech warning Americans about the MICC in 1961, Eisenhower (Ike) said that only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could guard against the acquisition of power by the MICC. This may indeed be why most citizens are not kept informed or are misinformed about the American military and its wars. It’s hard to act when you’re kept ignorant. You’ll also be reluctant to act when you’re told to defer to the “experts” in the MSM, most of whom are deeply compromised, often by conflicts of interest that are kept hidden from you.

MILITARY MENDACITY

Put simply, the American military, in its upper ranks, lacks honor. What matters most is reputation and budgetary authority. Sharing negative news with the media is the absolute last thing the military wants to do. Surprisingly, most in the MSM are willing to look the other way, assuming they even know of military mendacity and malfeasance.

What this means, essentially, is that the MICC is unaccountable to the people – the very antithesis of democracy.

Three big examples of MICC mendacity: The Pentagon Papers revealed by Daniel Ellsberg during the Vietnam War; the Iraq War and lies about WMD (weapons of mass destruction); and the Afghan War Papers. Even as the American military was losing these three wars, military commanders and government officials spoke publicly and confidently of lights at the end of tunnels, of corners being turned toward victory. (Privately, however, they talked of serious problems and lack of progress.)

The MSM (with notable exceptions) largely repeated the happy-talk lies. Since 9/11, this is unsurprising, since the MSM leans heavily on senior retired military officers, CIA officials, and the like to “interpret” events in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. As journalist David Barstow showed, these “interpreters” were and are fed talking points by the Pentagon. Whatever this is, it’s not honest reporting. It’s not journalism. It’s state propaganda.

It’s not that the American people can’t handle the truth about “their” military. It’s that the MICC prefers to keep a lid on the truth, because the truth is often unfavorable to their positions, power, prestige, and profits.

There are many ways the MICC works with a complicit media (and a compliant Congress) to keep the truth from us.

1. Bad news is not reported. Or it’s classified or otherwise hushed up. Consider the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam or the “collateral murder” video from the Iraq War revealed by Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks.

2. Critical information is omitted. Coverage is edited. Consider the ban on showing flag-draped coffins by the Bush/Cheney administration, or official reports about drone strikes that omitted the true number of civilian/non-combatant casualties.

3. The military has its own PAOs (public affairs offices and officers) who feed news of “progress” and similar “good news” stories to the media. This is also true of the State Department.

4. Ever-present appeals to patriotism and warnings that critical information will give aid and comfort to the enemy. Even worse, portraying critics as pro-Putin, as possible traitors, as in the NBC smear campaign against Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, abetted also by Hillary Clinton.

5. Run-of-the-mill propaganda. Consider, for example, how almost all American sporting events include glowing coverage of the military and veterans. If all military members are “heroes,” how dare we question them! Instead, you’re encouraged to salute smartly and remain silent.

MEDIA COMPLICITY

Why is the MSM so hobbled and often so complicit with the MICC?

1. Intimidation. Critics are punished. Examples include Ashleigh Banfield, Phil Donahue, and Chris Hedges in the early days of the Iraq War. Think of Julian Assange today. Edward Snowden. Daniel Hale. Smart journalists know (or learn) that critics and whistleblowers are punished; cheerleaders are promoted, e.g. Brian Williams, demoted for stolen valor but redeemed for declaring his awe at “the beauty” of American missiles.

2. Ratings/Economics. Recall that MSNBC fired Phil Donahue over concerns that his critical coverage of the Iraq War was turning off viewers, i.e. that the network wasn’t being seen as “patriotic” as rivals like CNN or Fox News, thereby losing market share and money.

3. Embedding Process. Reporters who want to cover war are often embedded with American military units. They come to identify with “their” troops, who, after all, are protecting them from harm. The embedding process forges a sense of dependency and camaraderie that interferes with disinterested and balanced reporting.

4. Reliance on deeply conflicted experts from the MICC instead of independent journalists. Whatever else they are, retired generals and CIA directors are not reporters or journalists.

5. Corporate advertising dollars. Why air a report critical of Boeing or Northrop Grumman when that company is a major advertiser on your network? Why bite the hand that feeds you?

You don’t need a top secret “Mockingbird” project by the CIA to infiltrate and influence the MSM, as we witnessed during the Cold War and Vietnam. Today, the MSM and its owners acquiesce in their own infiltration, hiring retired CIA agents and similar senior government officials to give/sell their “unbiased” opinions.

Again, military contractors pay for ads and sponsor shows on TV. The media is not about to challenge or criticize a big revenue stream. And it’s not always a weapons maker like Boeing or Raytheon. Think of ExxonMobil. Their thirstiest customer is the American military; ExxonMobil is unlikely to support media reports that criticize its biggest customer.

Meanwhile, there are precious few reporters and journalists willing to risk their careers to challenge the MICC. With so-called access journalism, if you reveal uncomfortable facts, you’ll likely lose access to the powerful, alienate your bosses, and probably lose your job.

Food for Thought: Journalists are selected and groomed for compliance to mainstream militarized agendas. They’ve learned and internalized what is acceptable and what isn’t. If they refuse to play along, they’re fired or shunted aside. (See Noam Chomsky and the manufacturing of consent.)

For the American military, full-spectrum dominance includes information and the control of the same, including most especially in America.

A final shocking truth: The American military lost in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere while avoiding responsibility. Indeed, its cultural authority and its command over the media have only grown stronger. Worse, the military promulgates, or goes along with, various stab-in-the-back myths that exculpate itself while mendaciously blaming the few good media outlets for accurate reporting about the MICC’s failings.

A crucial step in preventing future disastrous wars is a media culture that sees the MICC for what it is: a danger to democracy and liberty, as Ike warned us in 1961 in his farewell address. How we get there is a crucial issue; the failures above suggest remedies.

The major networks need to develop their own, independent, journalists who are experts on the military, rather than relying largely on retired military officers and other senior government officials.

We are told that America has independent media rather than state media like China or Russia. Yet, if America had official state media, would its coverage differ from today’s content? The MSM supports state and corporate agendas because that’s how it makes money even as it claims it’s “independent.”

AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOLS ARE BEING INFILTRATED BY MILITARY GROOMERS

Students Across America Are Being Forced Into Military Classes Without The Ability To Avoid The Empire’s Militarism.

A New York Times report has found that enrollment in the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC), a Pentagon-funded program designed to groom children for military service, is increasingly becoming mandatory in American high schools.

“J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines,” the report says. “But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.”

“While Pentagon officials have long insisted that J.R.O.T.C. is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400 million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered J.R.O.T.C.,” the Times reports.

And before you ask, no, the Pentagon’s grooming program is not being forced on kids in Malibu and the Hamptons.

“A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households,” the Times reports, naming Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City, and Mobile, Alabama as cities where high schools are funneling kids into the program en masse.

Defenders of mandatory JROTC enrollment reportedly cite the need to “divert students away from drugs or violence” and “the allure of drugs and gangs” in urban areas, as though corralling them into the single most violent gang on Earth is a deterrence from violence and gangs. Grooming students to go kill foreigners for crude oil is not our idea of a healthy diversion from youthful error.

This would probably be a good time to remind readers that poverty in the United States is one of the Pentagon’s most effective recruiting tools, with Army officials explicitly acknowledging that young people’s inability to afford a college education on their own is responsible for their success in meeting recruitment goals, and lawmakers warn that helping people pay off crushing student debt will hurt recruitment. American military recruiters have an established record of targeting poorer schools, because impoverished communities often see military service as their only chance at upward mobility.

The New York Times describes a cult-like environment in these JROTC programs where “parents in some cities say their children are being forced to put on military uniforms, obey a chain of command and recite patriotic declarations in classes they never wanted to take,” with special textbooks which “at times falsify or downplay the failings of the U.S. government.” And if even The New York Times believes you’re falsifying and downplaying the failings of the American government, it’s got to be pretty bad.

Victims of the military grooming program told the Times that they were put in frequent contact with military recruiters who pushed the idea of enlisting to pay for college, with one student saying a male recruiter “still texts me to this day” even well after graduation.

I’m not sure how American parents could possibly read of such things without being intensely creeped out.

Every day we see conservatives mindlessly bleating about “groomers” in the LGBT community trying to turn children into sexual deviants, claiming kids are being “indoctrinated” in school by learning about gay marriage and respect for trans people, but none of them seem to have any problem with the real-life indoctrination and grooming kids are subjected to by the most murderous and depraved institution in the world.

One of the dumbest things happening in mainstream western political discourse right now is the way conservatives are increasingly framing themselves as society’s last bulwark against the normalization of child molestation, something which has been growing reliably less normalized and more aggressively rejected across the entire political spectrum for generations. But sure, pretend the ideology which wants to drag civilization back to the days of the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and fathers reigning supreme over their household (and everyone in it) are the ones protecting us from the rape of children.

The most consequential groomers of our day are not LGBT people and their allies, but the adults who are grooming children to violently enact the will of the most tyrannical regime on earth with the full support of their government. And yet so far it’s been mostly conservatives who we have seen defending the news of mandatory JROTC enrollment in impoverished neighborhoods. They’re not just fine with this kind of indoctrination, they actively support it. Their afterlife will not be pleasant.

THE PENTAGON HAS FAILED AGAIN AND AGAIN, THIS TIME IT IS IT’S FIFTH AUDIT IN A ROW

If The Defense Department Can’t Keep Its Books Straight, How Can It Be Trusted With A Budget Of More Than $800 Billion Per Year?

The Department of Defense recently revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the American military has the distinction of being the only American government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit.

But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year’s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health, which McCord described as “basically the same picture as last year.”

Given this accounting disaster, it should come as no surprise that the Pentagon has a habit of bad financial math. This is especially true when it comes to estimating the cost of weapons programs.

The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs.

And another major overrun is poised to happen soon, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office.

The Navy plans to expand its ship production in an effort to maintain an edge over China, with a particular focus on a new attack submarine and destroyer ship. The Pentagon has proposed three versions of this plan at an average cost of $27 billion per year between 2023 and 2052, a 10 percent jump from current annual shipbuilding costs.

But the CBO says this is a big underestimate. The independent agency’s math says the average annual cost of this shipbuilding initiative will be over $31 billion, meaning that the Navy is underestimating costs by $120 billion over the program’s life.

As Mark Thompson of the Project on Government Oversight recently noted, these overruns “shouldn’t come as a shock” to anyone who has paid attention to DoD acquisitions in recent years. “But it does suggest a continuing, and stunning, inability by the Navy to get its ducks, and dollars, in a row,” Thompson wrote.

So will the Pentagon manage to get its financial house in order any time soon? It’s possible, if a bit unlikely.

Despite the long odds, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill last year that could help make that happen. The legislation would cut one percent off the top of the budget of any part of the Pentagon that fails an audit. That means that, if the proposal had already passed, 20 of the agency’s 27 auditing units would face a budget cut this year.

Unfortunately, momentum around that bill appears to have fizzled out, leaving the Pentagon’s accountants as the last line of defense. Per Comptroller McCord, the DoD hopes to finally pass an audit by 2027, a mere 14 years after every other agency in the American government blew past that milestone. That may coincide with another historical moment, according to Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers Union.

“[W]e could reach a $1 trillion defense budget five years sooner [than the CBO estimates], in 2027,” Lautz wrote.

AMERICA NEEDS TO STOP INVADING HAITI

A New Intervention By America Or It’s Puppet Regimes Would Be Just As Disastrous As The Previous Ones.

What to do about Haiti?

Its government barely exists, lacking both legitimacy and authority. Gangs have taken over the streets. Food and fuel are in short supply: gas stations only just reopened, two months after criminals seized a critical fuel terminal. The country is suffering from a cholera epidemic. A desperate driver told ABC News: “You don’t have anyone to turn to.”

Once the richest colony in the Western Hemisphere, the brutally oppressed slave population won both freedom and independence in 1804, just a couple decades after the American colonies became a nation. The United States, embarrassed by former slaves ruling themselves, recognized Haiti only in 1862, when slavery was literally under fire in America.

The only other country where slavery was overthrown violently, Haiti found neither peace nor stability. America didn’t help. In 1914 American troops arrived to empty the national bank and returned a year later after the Haitian president was assassinated. American troops finally left in 1934, after having “dissolved Haiti’s parliament at gunpoint, killed thousands of people, controlled its finances for more than 30 years, shipped a big portion of its earnings to bankers in New York and left behind a country so poor that the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived on a diet ‘close to starvation level’.”

In 1994 the Clinton administration went retro, again playing colonial hegemon. America invaded, ousting the ruling junta and reinstating the demagogic president, who had encouraged his followers to “necklace” opponents with flaming tires filled with gasoline. Such was the restoration of “democracy,” with American control giving way to the United Nations, which ended its peacekeeping mission in 2000. Under Amerian and French pressure to step down, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in another coup in 2004, which a former French ambassador indicated was effectively orchestrated by Washington and Paris. (The new government conveniently dropped Aristide’s claims for reparations from France.)

A U.N. mission was established, which ran until 2017. Interrupted by a terrible earthquake in 2010, the occupation was supposed to establish law and order, but instead the outside forces added to the Haitians’ hardships. The occupiers caused a cholera epidemic that killed more than 10,000 people. Sexual abuse, including that of children, also was pervasive.

In July 2021 Haitian President Jovenel Moise was assassinated. The country was left almost leaderless, with four claimants to his job, including two competing prime ministers, two different constitutions, a largely empty legislature for which elections were long overdue, and a supreme court whose head had recently died.

The interim (and wholly illegitimate) government is pushing for allied intervention in some form. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres advocated an international force to back the Haitian National Police. In October America’s U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield announced American support for a U.N. resolution proposing “a limited, carefully scoped, non-UN mission led by a partner country.” The administration, she added, “will work with partners and other Council members to set defined and specific parameters for the mission, and the United States will consider the most effective means to directly support, enable, and resource it.”

Apparently, it would be an unofficial project of the willing, authorized but not managed by the U.N. Who would contribute? America’s role in developing such a resolution suggests the willingness to back it with force. The usual foreign policy suspects in Washington want to send in the American military. In an editorial published the day of Moise’s murder, the Washington Post insisted: “Swift and muscular intervention is needed.”

The editorialists admitted that the previous peacekeeping mission “was a far cry from perfect.” But at least the U.N. brought “a modicum of stability to Haiti…. At this perilous moment, a modicum of stability would be preferable to most other plausible scenarios.”

Only hinted at by the safely P.C. publication was the requirement that such a mission be staffed by…well, you know…people from, uh, countries…whose troops could be trusted. The earlier mission “involved forces from Brazil, Uruguay and other nations,” including the Nepalese, the Post curiously specified, and we know how that turned out. So just make sure the next mission is made up of Americans, French, and Canadians, whom the Post named as obligated to push for such a force. Indeed, the Biden administration reportedly wants Ottawa to take the lead; Canada’s prime minister declared that intervention is necessary “in one way or another.”

Recognizing there is likely to be little public support for the idea, the Post offered an argument of last resort. Sending U.N. troops to Haiti would be worrying, admitted the paper, “But does anyone have a better idea?” A profound and persuasive argument for forcibly occupying another nation, whether its people like it or not.

Other than government officials and commercial elites, most Haitians are skeptical of the proposal. NPR’s Eyder Peralta wrote that “many Haitians express deep distrust of an international troop presence after a history of troubled foreign intervention.” In contrast to the enthusiasm of Post editorial writers, leading Haitians oppose another foreign intervention. Writer and blogger Daniel Larison pointed to an “umbrella coalition of Haitian organizations, The Commission for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis, also known as the Montana Accord, [which] rejected the government’s call for outside military assistance.”

Haitian writer Monique Clesca said, “We do not want U.S. troops, U.S. boots, U.S. uniforms, none of that.” This view is shared by many Haitians who lived through the last foreign deployment and have less than fond memories of the experience. Two Post reporters concluded that the proposal for another foreign intervention “is a divisive and delicate subject here, where the shadow of a long history of destabilizing foreign interventions, including the U.N. mission that introduced cholera, looms large.”

A new peacekeeping mission would not likely be peaceful. Conditions in Port-au-Prince, especially, are shocking. For instance, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations labeled Haiti “a Hobbesian state of nature—Somalia in the Caribbean.” Even as it advocated military intervention, the Post acknowledged: “With gun battles raging in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and cutting off main roads to provincial towns, relief groups have often been stymied in their distribution efforts. Meanwhile, thousands of people, terrified by the gang warfare and an epidemic of kidnappings for ransom, have fled their homes to the countryside.”

Violent but irregular resistance from criminal gangs and other disaffected groups would be likely. Several analysts from Just Security warned: “The gangs are heavily armed and have been fighting street battles in Port-au-Prince neighborhoods regularly for four years. If they decide to engage, they will be doing so on terrain they know, and while they almost certainly will be outgunned in the long run, they can inflict tremendous damage on intervening forces and civilians.”

Indeed, the previous U.N. force engaged gang members, causing substantial civilian casualties. Former human rights lawyer Pooja Bhatia, who investigated the U.N. mission, observed: “We concluded that rather than promoting peace and justice, UN troops helped the police terrorize the poorest quartiers of the capital Port-au-Prince, bastions of support for Aristide. Many civilians alleged that [UN] troops, many of them Brazilian soldiers with experience in ‘cleaning operations’ in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, perpetrated the atrocities themselves.”

Another occupation looks good only compared to the country’s current chaos. Haitians judge proposals by the results of past interventions, though. Last time the U.N. stayed for 13 years, yet four years later public order had entirely dissolved.

Observed Larison:

“The long history of failed and destructive outside interference in Haitian affairs shows that neither the United States nor the UN has the solution to Haiti’s political problems. Each time that outside forces have meddled in the name of helping Haiti, they have reliably made things worse.” In September 2021 the Biden administration’s Special Envoy for Haiti, Daniel Foote, resigned in frustration. His critique of U.S. policy was devastating, contending that “our Haitian friends” need “the opportunity to chart their own course, without international puppeteering and favored candidates.”

Indeed, outside intervention bears much of the blame for current circumstances. Explained Larison: “The current crisis is itself the product of ongoing interference on the part of the U.S. government, which backed former President Jovenel Moïse when he was alive and has been instrumental in keeping Henry in power despite his lack of democratic legitimacy and the broad coalition of Haitians opposed to his continued rule.”

Bhatia related that Henry “has never had any sort of constitutional authority and indeed is implicated in Moïse’s assassination. The people he claims to speak for revile him. His only constituency is outside the country. Over the past 15 months, America has insisted that the opposition, a remarkably broad-based coalition of civil society leaders, activists and popular organizations, negotiate with him.”

The civic group coalition wrote the Biden administration earlier this month:

“We encourage your administration to reflect on the long history of international interventions in Haiti, and how those actions have served to undermine state institutions, democratic norms, and the rule of law. Previous interventions have had a costly human toll, including through rape, sexual exploitation, and extrajudicial killings. As Doctors Without Borders has warned, such an intervention would mean “more bullets, more injuries and more patients”.

Journalist Jonathan M. Katz also highlighted the “vacuum that a century of U.S. invasions, occupations, and interference has left in its wake. Sending an armed force to do battle with one Haitian gang and its sponsors…will do nothing to make Haiti a safer or more stable place for its people to live in the medium or long term.”

Foote concluded: “The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner—again—is impressive. This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results. More negative impacts to Haiti will have calamitous consequences not only in Haiti, but in the U.S. and our neighbors in the hemisphere.”

Of course, failing to act comes with a cost. The focus of American foreign policy, however, is not just whether Haiti would be better off. It is whether Americans would be better off. The solution for neither is another occupation, even if motivated by the best of intentions. In fact, Haiti’s civil society organizations offered the administration a list of measures to “support peacebuilding and equitable development.” That would be a much better approach than continuing to treat Haiti as another social engineering experiment for the American military.

TO THE AMERICAN EMPIRE, UKRAINIANS AND RUSSIANS ARE LAB RATS FOR WEAPONS TESTING

An Article By The NYT Titled “Western Allies Look To Ukraine As A Testing Ground For Weapons” Describes How The Empire Is Using The Proxy War To Test It’s Weapons.

“Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the-art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that Western political officials and military commanders predict could shape warfare for generations to come,” write’s NYT’s Lara Jakes.

Jakes writes that “new advances in technology and training in Ukraine are being closely monitored for the ways they are changing the face of the fight.” These new technological advancements include an information system known as Delta, as well as “remote-controlled boats, anti-drone weapons known as SkyWipers and an updated version of an air-defense system built in Germany that the German military itself has yet to use.”

A former Lithuanian president is quoted as saying, “We’re learning in Ukraine how to fight, and we’re learning how to use our NATO equipment,” adding, “It is shameful for me because Ukrainians are paying with their lives for these exercises for us.”

Yeah, no shit.

At some point The New York Times article was re-titled from “Western Allies Look to Ukraine as a Testing Ground for Weapons” to the slightly less obvious “For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test.”

News that the west is using Ukraine to test weapons systems for future wars aligns with recent comments by the commander of the American nuclear arsenal that the proxy war is a test run for a much bigger conflict that’s on its way.

“This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup,” said America’s STRATCOM head Charles Richard at a naval conference earlier this month. “The big one is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested [in] a long time.”

So in addition to being used to advance longstanding American geostrategic objectives, apparently this war is also being used to sharpen the imperial war machine’s claws for a looming hot war with China and/or Russia. America would certainly have an advantage in military test runs over the years in such a conflict.

As an aside, it’s probably worth noting that all the testing of new western weapons technology would likely explain reports from Ukrainian astronomers that the skies over Kyiv have been “swarming with unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The aforementioned New York Times article quotes Ukrainian vice prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov as saying that the weapons testing he’s seen has convinced him that “the wars of the future will be about maximum drones and minimal humans.”

One of the many reasons America and its complex network of “allies”, partners and assets are always fighting so many wars is because new weapons technology needs to be tested in battle before it can be deemed effective. What this means in practice is using human bodies as test subjects, the way a scientist uses laboratory rats or guinea pigs.

The American empire pretends to care about Ukrainian lives, but in reality it only cares about them to the extent that a researcher cares about his lab rats. And for exactly the same reason.

What could be more sinister than that? Well, the agendas that they are running those tests in preparation for, one might suppose.

AMERICA’S DESPERATE EFFORT TO CONTROL THE WORLD

America Is Driving For War Against China, Not Out Of Strength But Rather From A Fear Of Losing Its Position As The Sole Superpower.

The driving forces are multiple: the United States’ sense of itself as a diminishing global power; the destructive militarism of American capitalism and its “Merchants of Death”; deep-seated historical racism towards China; and an anachronistic American notion of “divine right” to dominate the rest of the globe.

China is not an intrinsic military threat to America. It certainly is a challenge to the United States’ so-called “rules-based order” – which is a euphemism for American domination. Beijing has continually appealed to America to embrace multipolar respect and abandon its Cold War mentality. Yet Washington persists in asserting that China is its biggest long-term threat. The real “threat” is that China’s economic ascent and phenomenal developmental success are exposing the bankruptcy of American capitalism.

Tragically, the European Union seems to be going along with America’s belligerent flow towards China. Although, has German Chancellor Olaf Scholz come to his senses recently after visiting Beijing to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping?

John Pilger warns that if America does not come to terms with the reality of a multipolar world and the genuine equality of nations (as America allegedly professes) then armed conflict with China is on the cards. He also has revealed how Taiwan is being cynically used by America as a provocation towards China by massively arming the island territory and undermining Beijing’s sovereignty. He compares this situation with how Ukraine had been weaponized by America and NATO over the past eight years in order to antagonize Russia.

Maybe, you should start listening to those who will reveal the real world to you. If you do, you might work to try and save it from the end that fast approaches due to America’s foreign policy.

THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX HAS WON AGAIN!

When Both Political Parties Pose As Pro-Military, When Both Are Pro-War, When Both Act As If A New Cold War With China And Russia Is Inevitable, Do Election Results Even Matter?

No matter which party won, the true victor remains the military-industrial-Congressional complex.

To paraphrase Joe Biden, nothing fundamentally changed in the 2022 elections when it comes to colossal military spending, incessant wars and preparations for the same, and non-stop imperialism around the globe. There is no new vision for lower Pentagon spending, for fewer wars and weapons exports, and for a smaller, less domineering, imperial mission.

As General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us in 1961, the military-industrial-Congressional complex represents a disastrous rise of misplaced power that is profoundly anti-democratic. Collectively, we’ve failed to heed Ike’s warning. The result has been one unnecessary and disastrous war after another, even as democracy in America withers. The Vietnam War—disaster. The Iraq War—disaster. The Afghan War—disaster. The War on Terror—disaster. Even the war America ostensibly won, the Cold War against the USSR, is now apparently about to be refought.

Do you suppose we need to refight the Cold War we “won” thirty years ago so we can lose that one too?

With the Democrats doing somewhat better than expected at the polls, war business should continue to grow in Washington, D.C. Most political commentators seem to think this is a good thing, when they think about it at all. Few seem to recall Ike’s warning that a military establishment of vast proportions is antithetical to democracy.

In this election cycle, we have heard nothing about peace. We have heard nothing about strengthening and preserving democracy by downsizing our military and imperial presence around the globe. Not from Democrats and Republicans.

So the winner in 2022 is the same winner as always: the military-industrial-Congressional complex. It’s a sad result to contemplate when you actually think about Veterans Day.

AMERICAN MILITARISM IS IT’S SELF-LICKING BOOT

Bloomberg Says “‘Sloppy’ US Talk On China’s Threat Worries Some Skeptical Experts”, It Reveals The Dangerous Cycle In Which The American Political Establishment Continually Escalates Hostilities With China.

Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow writes:

The hawkish narrative “limits room for maneuver in a crisis,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Any effort to defuse tension could be characterized as “conciliatory or not tough enough,” he said.

China has been consistent on Taiwan and there’s little public evidence to suggest it’s sped up the timeline to take Taiwan, said a former senior American official who worked on China policy but asked not to be identified.

The former official said the hawkish tone in Washington has contributed to a cycle where America makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.

Bloomberg quotes Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, who says this cycle of self-reinforcing escalation could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

We just saw this same self-perpetuating cycle of military escalation exemplified against North Korea, where tensions have again been flaring after a long pause. America and South Korea initiated a provocative military drill designed to menace the DPRK, Pyongyang responded by launching missiles in its own show of strength, and the Pentagon announced an extension of the drills in response to that response.

Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp explains:

“The US and South Korea are extending massive aerial war games after North Korea put on a massive show of force in response to the drills.

Washington and Seoul started their Vigilant Storm exercises on Monday, which were initially scheduled to run 24 hours a day for five days. This year’s Vigilant Storm is the largest-ever iteration of the drills, involving nearly 100 American warplanes and 140 South Korean aircraft, and about 1,600 planned sorties.

Pyongyang made it clear it would respond to the Vigilant Storm drills, and it launched 23 missiles on Wednesday, which is said to be the most North Korea has fired in a single day. North Korea also fired over 100 artillery rounds on the same day and launched six more missiles on Thursday.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the extension of Vigilant Storm after a meeting with his South Korean counterpart, Lee Jong-sup. “I’ve consulted with Minister Lee and we’ve decided to extend Vigilant Storm, which is our long-scheduled combined training exercise, to further bolster our readiness and interoperability,” Austin said.”

“So they launch these war games, provoke a bunch of North Korean missile launches and then say they have to extend the war games because of the missile launches,” tweeted DeCamp.

DeCamp quotes another DPRK official who warns that the extension of the American-ROK war games may provoke further escalations, saying “The irresponsible decision of the US and South Korea is shoving the present situation, caused by provocative military acts of the allied forces, to an uncontrollable phase.”

We’ve been seeing this same cycle repeated year after year: American military expansionism and aggression in a given part of the world receives pushback from the people who live there, and America responds to that pushback with more military expansionism and aggression. The official narrative is that America is responding to unprovoked aggressions from the other side, conveniently omitting its own antecedent aggressions and provocations — a manipulation tactic the media is always happy to facilitate.

In reality it’s not hard to determine who the aggressor is when one party is flying to the other side of the planet to menace the borders and security interests of the other, especially when ramping up militarism in more and more parts of the world facilitates both the American military-industrial complex and the unipolarist objectives of the American empire’s managers. But because the American empire has the most sophisticated narrative control system ever devised, enough people in enough places that matter swallow the official story despite its self-evident absurdity.

A system which perpetuates and exacerbates itself while pretending to solve the problems it creates is often called a self-licking ice cream cone. Because that type of system is promoted by those serving the most powerful and belligerent power structure on earth, one might call American militarism a self-licking boot.

We’ve been watching the self-licking boot of American militarism exemplified for decades in the “war on terror” scam, where American military interventionism destabilizes geostrategically crucial parts of the world and makes the locals who’ve suffered under American bombings want to harm their persecutors, and the response is to ramp up military expansionism in those parts of the world in the name of fighting terrorists and protecting American troops.

We been watching it in Ukraine, where American aggressions provoked an invasion by a government the American empire has long targeted for destruction, and that invasion is now being used to advance longstanding strategic objectives while continually expanding military involvement in the region.

And we’ll be sure to see more and more of it as the America accelerates toward global conflict on two fronts simultaneously while mainstream media pundits cheer it on, despite all available evidence indicating that we are witnessing something profoundly stupid and crazy. The American regime will continue ramping up aggressions against Moscow and Beijing, those governments will respond, and we will be told that America must respond to these outrageous provocations by ramping up aggressions.

Repeat ad nauseum. – Lick, lick.