Afghanistan – praag.org

NATO is the root cause of EU migrant crisis

The scale of the migrant crisis Europe is facing today cannot be understated. It is truly unprecedented. What is habitually understated, however — and in fact almost completely ignored by mainstream media — are the real roots of the crisis, says Danielle Ryan.

The debate around migration into the EU is happening nearly entirely without reference to the causes of the recent influx of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The elephant in the room is NATO and nobody really wants to talk about it.

Hundreds of articles, laden down with numbers and proposals and predictions fail to make any direct link between cause and effect. News anchors sit seemingly baffled, mouths agape, at the apocalyptic-like pictures they are seeing land on their desks, and yet few are willing to draw the appropriate conclusions. But it is such a basic and logical connection that it’s hard to believe it is not being made very loudly and very persistently.

Maybe it’s just that these journalists are so conditioned to framing U.S. and NATO policy in a positive light that the links don’t even really occur to them. Or maybe they’re simply embarrassed and trying to shift focus from their long-recorded support for various military interventions in these countries.

Either way, the result is that the story is framed in such a way that it makes the timing of the crisis sound almost random. We’re witnessing a conversation about how to ‘deal’ with boats full of Libyans making their way across the Mediterranean — as if Libya was a country that had just self-imploded yesterday, and for no discernible reason.

A fierce debate is raging over ‘what to do’ about these migrants — and in a way that’s understandable because that is the more immediate problem — but the debate we really need to be having is about the policies, NATO’s policies, which were the catalyst.

Even if Europe unites in formulating a ‘solution’ to the problem, it will be nothing more than a bandaid fix because it will only deal with symptom. After all, what’s the point in covering your open wound with a bandaid when the guy who cut you is still wielding a knife in the same room? It doesn’t take a genius to work out how that story ends.

Whenever the cause is grudgingly mentioned by the media, it is mentioned briefly and abstractly where the author or anchor might refer to “conflict” or make mention of how violence has “reignited” in these countries in recent years and months.

The editors at the New York Times in particular, are big fans of loading all the blame squarely onto Europe’s shoulders. Here a Times piece argues that the migrant crisis “puts Europe’s policy missteps into focus”. Another piece, from the editorial board, lectures Europe on how to handle the situation.

In April, NATO head Jens Stoltenberg called for a “comprehensive response” to the crisis and promised that NATO would help to stabilize the situation. The alliance’s role in “stabilizing” Afghanistan was part of its broader approach to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, he said.

That is rich coming from the head of a ‘security’ and ‘defensive’ alliance which for years has pursued a policy of offensive destabilization in the very regions which people are fleeing from in their hundreds of thousands. But Stoltenberg’s comments and NATO’s actions are easily decoded by the employment of some basic common sense.

The NATO modus operandi is clear. The pattern, repeated over and over, involves the complete destabilization of a region, to be swiftly followed up with another NATO-led ‘solution’ to the problem. When you couple that with the use of spokespeople who are unashamed to feign ignorance and lie blatantly (Jen Psaki, Marie Harf etc.), and a compliant media that will regurgitate the line without question, this is what you get.

The 2011 NATO intervention in Libya was authorized by the United Nations on “humanitarian” grounds and resulted in the deaths of between 50,000 and 100,000 people and the displacement of 2 million. Very humanitarian.

Similarly, after the U.S.-led campaign to destabilize Syria in an effort to topple Bashar al-Assad, facilitating (and even supporting) the rise of ISIS in the region, a staggering 10 million have been displaced (according to Amnesty International) and European countries are left to help pick up the pieces. Germany, for example, has pledged to resettle 30,000 Syrian refugees. Sweden, a non-NATO nation, has taken in similar numbers.

It should be made clear however, that the numbers European countries have taken or pledged to take pale in comparison to the numbers being hosted in other Middle Eastern countries. Lebanon, for example, is hosting 1.1 million Syrian refugees. Jordan is hosting more than 600,000. Iraq hosts nearly a quarter of a million. Turkey hosts 1.6 million.

There is one country that’s getting off scot-free in all of this — at least on the Syrian front. That country is the United States. The U.S. has taken in less than 900 Syrian refugees after four years of war. American officials have cited “national security” in their explanations for not yet taking more, although they have said they would like to see the number increase.

Maybe this has something to do with it?
Debate not allowed

There is a second media crime flying under the radar here and it is this: In European countries where the massive influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa have caused serious societal divisions, where migrants have failed to assimilate (for a variety of reasons, including both government policies and often radical religious beliefs), Western media will allow no one to talk about it honestly — and woe betide the person who tries.

Take Sweden, where the disease of political correctness is at an even more advanced stage than it is in the rest of Europe. There, any attempt to debate the coherence of a ‘doors wide open’ immigration policy is branded as “racist”. A further irony in the Swedish context, is that the country is facing a housing crisis and has nowhere to put most of the people they are pledging to resettle. There’s some real forward-thinking, common sense policy for you.

This is a dangerous combination for Europe: An unsustainable influx of migrants, foreign policy which ensures its continuation, a docile media, and an epidemic of political correctness which has infected the entire continent.

Media 101 on the migrant crisis: Talk a lot about migrants, don’t mention why they fled and then call anyone who has a problem with it a “racist” — success! Oh, and you get an added bonus if you can somehow link it all to ‘Russian aggression’, Vladimir Putin and NATO as a ‘defensive’ alliance.

Some European countries are taking a more hardline approach and are getting slammed for it. Hungary, for example, is looking at building a barrier wall along its border with Serbia, similar to barriers along the Greek-Turkish and Bulgarian-Turkish borders. Again, this has sparked accusations of xenophobia and racism from media and political quarters.

But that’s part of the game, isn’t it? If NATO’s war supporters can focus the debate around the idea that anyone who wants to address or critically assess immigration policy is “racist” then we won’t have to talk about why the migrants are here in the first place or why they are facing such dire circumstances at home.

Russia Today’s Oksana Boyko tried recently, to broach this topic with Peter Sutherland, the UN’s special representative on international migration and development, but she got nowhere. She argued that the debate around migration into the EU can’t really be had without addressing the essence and heart of the problem, but found that NATO policy is apparently a topic not up for discussion.

Debating Europe’s migrant crisis without acknowledging the context in which it has been created it useless. It would be like asking Americans to debate police brutality without talking about race. The two are inescapably interlinked and any ‘solutions’ that come from an incomplete debate will ultimately fail.

For now though, it seems Europe will continue to debate this humanitarian crisis in terms of ‘what to do’ without addressing the ‘how to stop’ and we’ll keep running around in a vicious circle.

An easier solution, of course, would be for NATO to put an end to its campaign of destabilization in the Middle East and North Africa, but that would require the acceptance and acknowledgement of some very hard truths.

Danielle is an Irish journalist and blogger. She has a degree in Business and German from Trinity College Dublin and studied political reporting at the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism in Washington, DC. Special interests: American politics and foreign policy, US-Russia relations and media bias. Her blog can be found at journalitico.com.

Battle between ISIS and Taliban heat up

Taliban militants detonated explosives and fired rockets in an attempted attack on the Afghan Parliament as lawmakers were preparing to vote on a new defense minister Monday.

A large car bomb exploded near the outer wall of the parliament compound, sending a thick plume of smoke into the sky. Six Taliban fighters then tried to storm inside, said police spokesman Ebadullah Karimi.

Afghan security forces managed to fend off the attackers, who then moved into nearby building, firing rockets and AK-47 machine guns. All six attackers were killed in the ensuing firefight, Karimi said.

Lawmakers told the Afghan broadcaster Tolo TV that they and their colleagues were meeting when a huge explosion blew out windows in the building and gunshots rang out. Government officials ran out of the building, they said.

The members of parliament had assembled for a general meeting at which a confidence vote on Mohammad Masoom Stanikzai, the government’s nominee for defense minister, was to be held.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said on his Twitter account that the group chose to target the parliament on the day of the defense minister vote.

Afghanistan is bracing for an upsurge in violence as spring begins with militants associating themselves with Islamic State.

Islamic State fighters have reportedly attacked a Taliban convoy in the country’s eastern Nangarhar province, killing at least 10 militants.

Many researchers believe it is the beginning of a long and violent battle for Afghanistan’s control.

Isis claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the eastern city of Jalalabad on Saturday, which appears to be the first major attack in Afghanistan by insurgents aligning themselves with the group which has been wreaking havoc across Syria and Iraq.

Siegfried O. Wolf, a South Asia researcher at the University of Heidelberg, believes the ISIS-Taliban battle could be “extremely dangerous for Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

The Afghan Taliban have sent a letter to Islamic State’s leader urging the rival jihadist group to stop recruiting in Afghanistan, saying there is room for only “one flag, one leadership” in their fight to re-establish strict Islamist rule.

The missive comes amid heavy fighting this week in eastern Afghanistan between the Taliban and breakaway factions who now swear allegiance to Islamic State.

Heroin trafficking handed to Islamic State

According to the UN, world heroin production stands at 430-450 tons, of which only 340 tons actually reach the market, the rest being seized or destroyed.

Top heroin producing countries are: Afghanistan (at least 380 tonnes), Myanmar and Laos (at least 50 tonnes).

According to John F. Sopko, the US government’s special inspector general for Afghanistan, the reconstruction efforts undertaken by Afghanistan have collapsed in the face of the continued expansion of drug cultivation drugs and criminal organizations. Afghan farmers reportedly earned some $ 3 billion in 2013.

Since 2010, the Russian authorities have consistently accused NATO of exporting Afghan heroin to Europe.

The switch from using drugs planes run by NATO to those controlled by the Islamic Emirate confirms the links between the two organizations. This came just after President Hamid Karzai left office, September 29, 2014.

The Islamic Emirate uses a cocktails of drugs to condition its fighters according to protocols that appear to have been prescribed by the CIA.

According to the Russian Federal Drug Control Service (FSKN), more than half of the heroin consumed in Europe currently comes from Afghanistan via the Islamic State.

Source: Reseau Voltaire

SA family killed in Afghanistan ahead of NATO donor meeting

The death of a South African father and his two teenage children come in the wake of a secret order that was signed by president Barack Obama just last week to strengthen the combat role of American troops in Afghanistan.

Insurgents have targeted foreign guesthouses, embassy vehicles, US troops and a female member of parliament in recent weeks.

Werner Groenewald, 46, his son Jean-Pierre, 17, and daughter Rode, 15, were killed in Saturday’s attack on the compound of Partnership in Academics and Development (PAD), a small California-based education group.

Obama has secretly signed an order that expands the United States’ direct combat role in Afghanistan throughout 2015, the New York Times reported.

The secret order permits American forces to continue to battle the Taliban and other militants that pose a threat to either the Afghan government or US personnel.

According to the Times, US jets, bombers, and drones will be able to aid ground troops – be they Afghan or US forces – in whatever mission they undertake.

This marks a significant expansion of America’s role in Afghanistan in 2015. The new revelation that the U.S. is quietly planning to increase troop numbers in Afghanistan above publicly pledged levels is just the latest indication that the end of the war is, in fact, nowhere near.

Meanwhile, new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has a much softer position on the US presence in his country compared to his predecessor Hamid Karzai.

Ghani removed restrictions against US airstrikes and joint raids that were implemented by Karzai.

Werner’s wife Hannelie, a doctor, was working at a hospital when the attack began, Hannelie’s sister Riana du Plessis, who is acting as family spokeswoman, told AFP.

Explosions and gunfire erupted for three hours as Afghan elite commandos battled three militants who were eventually killed.

“Their house was burned down,” Ms du Plessis said, speaking in South Africa. “Hannelie went back there this morning to try to recover some of their goods, but there was nothing to recover.

“She lost everything — her children, her husband, her cats, her dogs.” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed on Twitter that the compound was that of a secret Christian missionary group.

According to South African sources the Groenewalds recieved a warning ahead of the attack. The three victims suffered immensely, as they bled to death while being suffocated, the source said.

Werner was previously a Christian pastor in Pretoria, while Hannelie is a qualified doctor who answered the call “to help the sick in Afghanistan”.

Kabul police chief General Zahir Zahir stepped down on Sunday shortly after he confirmed the attack.

The killing of the Groenewald family occured just days ahead of a NATO donor meeting in Brussels and London.

President Ashraf Ghani, who came to power in September after signing a power-sharing deal with his poll rival Abdullah Abdullah.

Ghani was due to give a televised address on Sunday evening to announce that a deal had been reached over cabinet positions in the new government.

Ghani and Abdullah will fly to Brussels on Monday for NATO meetings, and to London on Wednesday for a donor conference designed to showcase the “national unity government” and demonstrate continuing international support for Afghanistan.

American news sources did not disclose the nationality of the Groenewalds.

Fresh war in Afghanistan

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was fired amidst significant foreign-policy leaks on Saturday morning.

The New York Times reported that the United States will expand its mission in Afghanistan in 2015, with US troops participating in direct combat with the Taliban.

This flies in the face of Obama’s very public announcement six months ago in the Rose Garden that US troops in Afghanistan would be shifting into a “training and advisory” role next year.

American airpower will furthermore support Afghan forces. This bombshell was strategically leaked ahead of a holiday week in which Americans will be shopping for bargains in a very bleak economy.

The Afghanistan reversal is a new hawkish posture and Hagel’s departure after he helped to manage a withdrawal from Afghanistan and shrink the Pentagon budget, will be regarded as a logical step.

Obama’s decision, made during a furious White House debate in recent weeks with his senior national security advisers, came over the objection of some of his top civilian aides, who argued that American lives should not be put at risk next year in any operations against the Taliban when Al Qaeda is actually rising in Iraq.

But the military pushed back and curiously Hagel’s departure directly coincides with the new aggressive attack plan for Afghanistan.

ISIS’s rapid emergence, it’s unhindered oil sales and other foreign-policy crises possibly contributed to Hagel’s ouster.

The United States is changing course toward a more aggressive foreign policy: it is recommitting to the war in Afghanistan, which is by far the country’s longest, spanning two two-term presidencies.

The number of troops in Iraq has doubled, and the administration will soon seek an authorization from a Congress that is extremely unlikely to include a provision that outlaws direct combat by US troops, in a distinctly interventionist climate.

America promises endless war

Surprisingly, despite the apparent failure of Iraq and Afghanistan and “strong fiscal constraints,” Washington is still expanding its war plans

The US should get ready for a new era of endless wars, stated Pentagon’s chief Chuck Hagel, noting that “tyranny,” “terrorism,” national security challenges and climate change pose a substantial threat to the US and its allies.

Although the Pentagon’s chief urges to prepare for an endless war, the question remains open if ordinary Americans will support the new doctrine.

More than half of American respondents said that the US had not achieved its goals in both Iraq and Afghanistan, expressing their discontent with US foreign policy, according to the Pew Research poll conducted in the beginning of the 2014. Although 57 percent of US citizens approved the US campaign against Islamic State according to the October poll, 55 percent strongly oppose sending US ground troops to Iraq and Syria.

“I think we are living through one of these historic, defining times. We are seeing a new world order—post-World War II, post-Soviet Union implosion—being built. There are many questions, foremost among the American people: What’s the role of America in this new world that is evolving? Should we have a role? What is appropriate?” said Chuck Hagel, as cited by the Atlantic.

The US Secretary of Defense claims that as the global leader, the US will “continue to grapple with overseas threat for the foreseeable future,” containing international terrorism and tyrannical regimes. “Hagel didn’t seem especially sanguine that it would end anytime soon. In other words: Get used to endless war,” stressed the Atlantic, characterizing the Pentagon’s new doctrine.

Remarkably, practically none of the previous US overseas military campaigns has proved effective. “US soldiers have been laboring under sad paradox: even though the United States enjoys unprecedented global military dominance that should cow enemies mightily, it has found itself in constant combat for longer than ever before in its history, and without much to show for it,” writes Richard K. Betts, the Arnold Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies in the Department of Political Science, in his article “Ending America’s Era of Permanent War” published in Foreign Affairs. The professor points out that of the US military actions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, “only the first can be counted a success.”

Surprisingly, despite the apparent failure of the US military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and “strong fiscal constraints,” Washington is still expanding its war plans. According to the expert, the White House should not cut back its overseas military operations, but prepare for “more action.”

“Frightening challenges in three critical regions are demanding yet more action: Islamic extremists have seized large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria, Russia has intervened in Ukraine, and China is flexing its muscles in East Asia,” stressed Richard K. Betts.

The idea of the US “moral obligation” to meddle into domestic affairs of other countries in order “to set them right” is a “mythological concept,” aimed at justification of American interventionism, contended Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute.

“The idea that the United States must exercise “global leadership” is rationalized by our interventionists as a necessary prerequisite for maintaining some type of “world order,” Mr. Raimondo underscores in his article “Putin’s Complaint: Is Washington a Revisionist Power?”
However, the Pentagon’s “endless war,” cannot last forever, as it is the American taxpayers who pay for the extortionately expensive military operations. For instance, the Afghanistan campaign cost the US “roughly $45 billion a year from 2001 to 2013,” while Iraq cost “about $100 billion a year from 2003 to 2011,” Kenneth M. Pollack, a Senior Fellow at the Brooking Institution and former CIA analyst, noted in his article “An Army to Defeat Assad.”

It should be also noted that the December poll in 2013 carried out by the Pew Research indicated that 52 percent thought the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” The researchers underscore that the tendency demonstrated by the poll reflects a gradual and longstanding decline. According to the October 2014 poll, most Americans consider inequality more dangerous than nuclear weapons, or sectarian religious threats.

The German Card

Top intelligence officers rarely reveal secret strings, pulling the nation’s political mechanism. Publication of a book like The German card. The obscure game of secret services, authored by Gerd-Helmut Komossa (Gerd-Helmut Komossa. DIE DEUTSCHE KARTE. Das verdeckte Spiel der geheimen Dienste. Ares-Verlag, Graz 2007. – 230 S.), is an exceptional occurrence. Raising very sensitive issues, the author appeals to the core of German identity that had been deliberately suppressed for decades by the United States and its allies.

The book is focused on contradictions between the United States and Germany, sometimes very strong but not supposed to be discussed in public. It was published in Austria, and its distribution in Germany may encounter certain difficulties today. Still, the very fact of its appearance indicates that the German intelligence community is increasingly dissatisfied with the role of a vassal of the United States (the definition applied to Europe by Zbigniew Brzezinski), imposed on Western Germany after World War II.

Gerd-Helmut Komossa reveals the uncomfortable truth about the post-war conditions, dictated by the US and its allies. The state treaty, dated May 21, 1949 and classified by BND as top secret, suggests restrictions of state sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany, introduced for a period until 2099. These restrictions include the provision that the winning coalition exercise complete control over Germany’s mass media and communications; that every Federal Chancellor is to sign the so-called Chancellor Act; that the gold reserve of Germany is kept under arrest.

In fact, all the German Chancellors, including the incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel, pay their first foreign visit necessarily to the United States. The whole spectrum of German political parties is supervised by a special Washington-based controlling body, while local US-licensed media serve as a more sophisticated means of brainwashing than the Nazi propagandist machine. Meanwhile, Germany’s territory is still occupied by US troops.

This astonishing picture is not a fancy concoction of a political leftist. It is drawn by a military man whose mind has accumulated the experience of several crucial stages of development of the European civilization and Germany in particular. Gen. (Ret.) Gerd-Helmut Komossa took part in World War II and later in the Cold War. Possessing huge amounts of information, he analyzes the existing mechanisms of global policy with strong criticism.

Joining the Wehrmacht in 1943 as a volunteer, Komossa served at the Eastern front. Between May 1945 and April 1949, he was a prisoner of war. In the USSR, he got acquainted with many Russians who appeared to be quite different from the image imposed by the official Nazi propaganda.

Since 1956, he served in the German Bundeswehr, re-established under certain conditions. The abovementioned secret treaty admitted that the German sovereignty is sufficient for the right to build up military forces. According to the Constitution, the troops of the Federal Republic of Germany are carrying out exceptionally defensive functions. However, the Western coalition was pursuing different goals. It needed an army in new uniforms but with the same skills as the Nazi soldiers, perfectly fighting on land, on sea and in the air, and irrecusably abiding orders. Such a type of soldier was essential not only for the occasion of possible military collision with the Soviet bloc but also for fulfilling global missions. The coalition required at least 500,000 German soldiers. In addition, the newly-built army was supposed to purchase weapons and materiel solely from the United States.

During the last two decades, Washington has been trying to force Germany into military partnership in globalistic control. However, the massive effort to get Germany involved in US operations in Somalia and Bosnia, as well as in campaigns in Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan, has brought about a reverse result, sparking a shift in approach in German strategic circles. The implicit discontent with American policy and essential difference in views on the role of the German people in current history eventually reached a critical dimension.

Since mid-1990s, the attitude of many German military to the United States, and significantly also towards NATO, has essentially changed. Though most of the German officers were not originally inclined against America, a lot of them being educated in the United States, they are now experiencing disappointment and even disgust with Washington’s policies. These officers realize that the hegemonistic policy is destined for destruction of socioeconomic systems of particular nations and whole regions, while the so-called order Washington is trying to impose is just a synonym for chaos.

Gerd-Helmut Komossa, in his former capacity of MAD (Military Counterintelligence) Director, was frequently called “a soldier with political thinking”. Today, he openly denounces the Bundeswehr’s involvement in foreign interventions, referring to the army’s constitutional duties.

Meanwhile, Washington urges Germans to go fighting. Conceding to the pressure, Berlin deployed a contingent of troops to Afghanistan. But even this was not sufficient for NATO bosses. Recently, NATO General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer accused the Bundeswehr of idleness in military operations in the region, and insisted that Germany “increase flexibility” and expand its military mission to the southern regions of Afghanistan.

In his book, Komossa inquires whether the state of affairs when young Germans are recruited in the national army for fulfilling overseas goals for other nations, could be acceptable. The map of operations, supposed to involve German troops, far exceeds the European continent, and has nothing to do with German national interests. “Do Germans expect this from the Bundeswehr? Would they like their soldiers to be called assassins again?” he asks.

However, the United States and its allies don’t care much for moral problems. As the secret treaty is valid until 2099, Germans are supposed to go and fight where they are told to.

The German audience will require certain time to digest the shocking information disclosed by General Komossa. But eventually, the nation with a great cultural and historical tradition will hardly agree to continue tolerating the American loop on its throat for decades more.

The publication of Komossa’s “German Card” is one more proof of the world’s transformation into a multipolar system. It indicates that Germany is likely to achieve complete sovereignty without waiting for eighty years.

Anna Voronova

NATO hit by car bomb in Kabul

A suicide car bomber hit a convoy of NATO forces near the Kabul international airport early on Tuesday, the national news agency Khaama Press has reported.

The report said, citing local security officials, that the suicide bomber detonated a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) near the US embassy on the road leading to the airport.

According to preliminary reports, “at least 13 people were killed or injured after the blast.” Eyewitnesses said several bodies of civilians were left on the street following the attack.

The blast scene has been cordoned off by security officials.

A Taliban militants group has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Praying to the military Moloch

For the past few weeks, the country’s distinct national navel-gazing has shifted to the military. It began with horror stories about the treatment of veterans at Veterans Affairs facilities across the country and has reached a crescendo in the curious case of Taliban hostage Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, exchanged for five fierce-looking Muhammadans from Afghanistan’s Jihad Central.

As to the first: Backlogs, limited services, fewer service providers, substandard treatment, filthy facilities and the ensuing fatalities – these have been features of the VA system for a long time. Pervasive, institutionalized indifference and incompetence are inherent to – and well-documented in – all centrally planned health-care systems. America’s neighbors north of the 48th parallel are forever in search of a panacea for the poxes that plague their single-payer gulag. Although the same problems are beginning to percolate across America’s health-care sector, due to Obamacare regulations and rationing, the misfortunes endured by the military have been elevated above the misery of the multitudes.

We fret and worry over the fate of the 9.3 million veterans who are enrolled in VA health care. Nary is a word said about the consequences of The Affordable Care Act (ACA) to ordinary, elderly Americans – 40 million of whom rely on Medicare. Why so? The military is one powerful interest group. It has formidable cheerleaders among the legislative and the chattering rabble. Even the weakest links in the military-industrial-complex, as the grunts who do the fighting surely are, wield almost as much political clout as the illegal-alien lobby, and are certainly mightier than advocates for the aged.

As the mantra goes, soldiers fighting phantoms in far-flung destinations are “fighting for us, suffering for us, sacrificing for us,” and deserve better than us.

Not that you’d know it, but death panels by any other name are the lot of non-VA patients aged 65 and older. In compliance with ACA-mandated rationing, government planners plan on penalizing hospitals that suffer from an administrative condition the technocrats have termed “excess readmissions.” Deconstructed, this Orwellian doublespeak means the following: Say a lady aged 84 is admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Months later, she is seen at the same facility for a re-occurrence. Given her age, she will likely be readmitted in the future. To avoid Medicare penalties ordered by the ACA for admitting grandma too often, staff now place sickly repeat offenders on what is called (truly) a “frequent flyer list.”

The goal: Keep grandma out even if it kills her.

Grandma may pay with her life for the benefit of sectional interests: 30 million uninsured Americans, including millions of illegal aliens, for whose benefit Obama’s $2 trillion ACA was intended. But who cares? In the mass of competing interests that is America, grandma is never as glamorous as the illegal alien or the grunt – who will often confess, as did Army Sgt. Bergdahl, to having joined the military so as to travel the world, experience different cultures and help peoples more exotic than his own.

At the center of the Bowe Bergdahl contretemps – a story that grows in the telling – was a passion to “learn about other cultures.” This motivated him to join the army. Poor Pashtuns are certainly more interesting than the generic granny from the Midwest. Our soldiers, after all, are groomed as “citizens of the world.” “We pay their wages,” this column ventured in “The International Highway to Hell,” “but their hearts belong in faraway exotic places with which Main Street USA can hardly hope to compete” for their affections.

There’s a problem with the American military’s sentimental flirtation with internationalism: The Constitution these men and women swear to obey brooks none of this stuff!

Who, then, grooms this army of avowed internationalists? Aided by the military’s upper echelons, Uncle Sam does. Commanded constitutionally by the commander in chief, the military does the government’s bidding. Although limited-government advocates refuse to consider the military as a division of Leviathan, it is just that. As was further argued in “Your Government’s Jihadi Protection Program,” “The military works like government, is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small. Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while exempting the military mammoth.”

Better still, if the military is government – and it is – fanatical militarism is a facet of statism. And if the military is government – and it is – then the missions on which the government sends the military must be questioned. An equally distinctive characteristic of the current military statism is to extend the worship of The Man in Uniform to His Mission. We worship the men and women in uniform and their mission without question.

Conservatives question government programs. War is a government program. If they hope to retain a modicum of philosophical integrity, conservatives will have to include a critique of the state’s warfare machine in their case against its welfare apparatus.

The blanket chant – “thank you for your service; thank you for fighting for our freedoms” – is the hallmark of a propagandized people in the grip of fanatical militarism. Even the most irrational person has to recognize how tentative are the ties between “helping” toothless Pashtuns to be more like Americans and protecting Americans like granny.

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Where’s America’s right to referendum, secession?

by Ilana Mercer

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From a node in the neoconservative network, a Fox News studio, Charles Krauthammer has complained about the eviction of the Ukrainian Navy from the city of Sevastopol, where it was headquartered. Not a word did the commentator say about the city’s location: Sevastopol is on the Crimean Peninsula. It would appear that the city now falls within Crimean jurisdiction – starting March 16, the day the people of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine.

By most estimates, between 97 and 93 percent of Crimean voters said yes to a reunion with Russia. High too was voter turnout. McClatchy pegs it at 83 percent of registered voters in Crimea. BBC News was agreed, also reporting a ballot of “more than 80 percent.” Zerohedge.com counted a “paltry” 73 percent turnout, still “higher than every U.S. presidential election since 1900.”

As rocker Ted Nugent might say, the Russians and Crimeans are blood brothers. Nugent got into trouble for using this perfectly proper appellation to describe his affinity for a politician, of all people: Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott. Notwithstanding that in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can land one in hot water – blood brother is a good, if colorful, turn of phrase that denotes fealty between like-minded people. Steeped in state-enforced multiculturalism, America’s deracinated, self-anointed cognoscenti have a hard time grasping the blood-brother connections between the people of Russia and Crimea.

For no apparent reason other than that it is pro-Russian, Americans have reflexively aligned themselves against the swell for secession in southern Ukraine. Separatist referenda in Kosovo, Catalonia, South Sudan and Scotland have been accepted without demur by a political and media establishment unprepared to countenance a similar referendum in Crimea.

Guided by the pack animals of politics and punditry who seldom fail to shed darkness on whatever topic they tackle, a nation that struggles to locate the disputed territories on the map has been convinced of the menace posed by Russia. According to a CNN poll, 69 percent of Americans say they see Russia as a threat. A Rasmussen Report poll indicated that “52 percent support U.S. diplomatic action against Russia over Crimea.”

Helping to drive American Russophobia is the implacable logic exemplified by Bill O’Reilly of “The Factor,” yet another node in the network mentioned. At the suggestion that there are similarities between Russian and American military bellicosity, the TV host foams at the mouth. Fulmination is followed not by argument, but by a form of ad hominem or psychologizing.

It is absolutely verboten on this popular and powerful show to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison – for decades the U.S. has been far more aggressive than Russia in its forays abroad – Bill and his gang “argued” (on March 3) as follows:

President Vladimir Putin is a thug. That’s why his actions can’t be contrasted with the actions of “a good country” like the U.S. By “logical” extension, George Bush and Barack Obama are never to be fingered as thugs.

Why, Billy, some of you will inquire? Is it because these thugs are American? Precisely.

Next, Bill O’Reilly’s mind-reading gifts were galvanized to negate the juxtaposition of the actions on the ground of the Russian and American governments. Putin, it would appear, seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire. On the other hand, the U.S., with a military presence in 148 countries and 900 bases worldwide, has neither sought nor achieved empire status.

Why, Billy, some of you will ask? Is it because the U.S. is a good country? You got it!

Be it in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Japan, Bahrain, Djibouti, South Korea, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and Kuwait – even Aruba, Iceland, Indonesia, Kenya, Norway and Peru – wherever it plants its military boot, a “good country” is never an empire, only a force for good.

Me, O’Reilly would dismiss as “anti-American.” But what of former secretary of state Henry Kissinger? While Kissinger has condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he excoriated “the demonization of Vladimir Putin.” This antipathy “is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” “The United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington,” wrote the statesman in the Washington Post.

Is Henry Kissinger anti-American or simply smarter than some Americans?

At least Secretary of State John Kerry hung on to his sense of humor. “Unless you are the United States of America, you just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” Kerry lectured the congenitally incurious David Gregory, of “Meet the Press.”

I ad-libbed. Except for the first eight words in quotation marks, Secretary Kerry did indeed say the foregoing. Given America’s military record, the missing words are implied.

The O’Reilly school of “thought” could – and does – counteract that Crimea’s vote to join Russia was tainted by fraud. This is certainly possible. Nevertheless, it is none of our business. Americans have their own tyrants to dethrone.

We’re supposed to be the freest people in the world, aren’t we? Is this claim not the moral basis for America’s we-know-best global meddling? But if we Americans are the freest people in the world, where’s our right to a referendum on, say, that “little” legislative “blip” called Obamacare? And if we’re so bleeding free, where’s our right to secede from D.C.?

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Obama comes out against self-determination

By Paul Craig Roberts.

The White House Fool has repeatedly declared erroneously and foolishly that it is “against international law” for Crimea to exercise self-determination. Self-determination, as used by Washington, is a propaganda term that serves Washington’s empire but is not permissible for real people to exercise.

On March 6 Obama telephoned Putin to tell the Russian President again that only Washington has the right to interfere in Ukraine and to insist against all logic that only the “government” in Kiev installed by the Washington-organized coup is “legitimate” and “democratic.”

In other words, the elected government in Crimea pushed by the people in Crimea to give them a vote on their future is “undemocratic” and “illegitimate,” but a non-elected government in Kiev imposed by Washington is the voice of self-determination and legitimacy.

Washington is so arrogant that it never occurs to the hubris-infected fools what the world thinks of Washington’s blatant hypocrisy.

Since the Clinton regime, Washington has done nothing but violate international law–Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Honduras, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia.

Does Russia have an Africa Command? No, but Washington does.

Is Russia surrounding the US with military bases? No, but Washington has used the NATO organization, whose purpose disappeared 23 years ago, to organize western, eastern, and southern Europe into an empire army with forward bases on Russia’s borders. Washington is determined to extend the boundaries of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Georgia in central Asia and to Ukraine on the Black Sea. Both Georgia and Ukraine are former constituent parts of both Russia and the Soviet Union.

Washington is doing the same thing to China and Iran. Washington is working to establish new air and naval bases in Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, with which to block the flow of oil and other resources into China. Iran is surrounded by some 40 US military bases and has US fleets standing off its coastline.

In Washington’s propaganda, this rank militarism is presented as “defending democracy.”

The Russian government continues to act as though Washington’s thrusts at Russia’s independence and strategic interests can be defused with good sense and good will. But Washington has neither.

Since the Clinton regime, Washington has been in the hands of a collection of ideologues who are convinced that the US is “the exceptional indispensable country” with the right to world hegemony. Everything that Washington has done in the 21st century is in pursuit of this goal.

Washington intends to break up the Russian Federation itself. Washington funnels huge sums of money into NGOs inside Russia that serve as Washington Fifth Columns and work hand-in-hand with Washington to discredit Russian free elections, to demonize Putin and the Russian government, to spread anti-Russian propaganda and agitation. It is amazing how many Russians actually believe the Western propaganda.

Washington is also working to isolate China with the Trans-Pacific-Partnership, but at this time is primarily focused on destabilizing and isolating Russia. Washington is desperate to break up the BRICS, the emerging organization of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. With the largest countries and half of the world’s population, the BRICS organization is emerging as a political and economic power, especially with the organization’s plan to cease using the US dollar as reserve currency. Ringing Russia with US missile bases on Russia’s borders impairs Russian sovereignty and independence and, thus, weakens the BRICS as a countervailing power to Washington.

Many have been deceived by Washington’s propaganda. The world is slowly waking up, but is it in time?

The US media and much of Europe’s speak with one voice parroting Washington’s propaganda, demonizing Washington’s targets, and preparing insouciant Western populations for more war. The Western media, like Western governments, is devoid of integrity. Liars and whores rule.

Paul Craig Roberts is an economist and a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. He served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the “Father of Reaganomics”. He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, among others. He has recently published How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds and is coauthor with Lawrence Stratton of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion

The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting, according to a new study by a Harvard researcher.

Washington increased military benefits in late 2001 as the nation went to war, seeking to quickly bolster its talent pool and expand its ranks. Those decisions and the protracted nation-building efforts launched in both countries will generate expenses for years to come, Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor, wrote in the report that was released Thursday.

“As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives,”the report says. “The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”

Bilmes said the United States has spent almost $2 trillion already for the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those costs, she said, are only a fraction of the ultimate price tag. The biggest ongoing expense will be providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans of the two conflicts.

“Historically, the bill for these costs has come due many decades later,” the report says, noting that the peak disbursement of disability payments for America’s warriors in the last century came decades after the conflicts ended. “Payments to Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans are still climbing.”

Spending borrowed money to pay for the wars has also made them more expensive, the study noted. The conflicts have added $2 trillion to America’s debt, representing roughly 20 percent of the debt incurred between 2001 and 2012.

Bilmes’s estimate provides a higher range than another authoritative study on the same issue by Brown University’s Eisenhower Research Project. Brown researchers put the price tag at roughly $4 trillion.

Both figures are dramatically higher than what U.S. officials projected they would spend when they were planning to go to war in Iraq. Stephen Friedman, a senior White House official, left government in 2002 after irking his colleagues by publicly estimating that the Iraq war could end up costing up to $200 billion.

It’s unclear how long Washington will keep paying bills for that conflict, which dragged on for nearly a decade and became deeply unpopular at home and in Iraq. Judging from history, it could take quite awhile. The Associated Press recently found that the federal government is still cutting checks each month to relatives of Civil War veterans nearly 150 years after the end of that war.

Source: newsforage.com

Secession, not convention, offers salvation

by Ilana Mercer

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The healthiest and most intuitive response to deep-seated, irreconcilable unhappiness—political or personal—is not to hold a constitutional convention, Mark Levin, but to leave; to exit the abusive relationship.

It is indeed inexplicable how the famous broadcaster trashes secession but, at the same time, looks to the states for salvation.

To reclaim the republic, Levin and his listeners hold out hope for the atrophied states and their unexercised role in the amendment process, as stipulated in Article V of the Constitution.

Never mind that the states, contrary to the mistaken predictions and hopes of the Constitution makers, have never initiated a constitutional amendment; and never mind that even in the event that the states demand a constitutional convention, there is no mechanism to compel Congress to act.

The great constitutional scholar James McClellan was no “neo-confederate.” Yet even an ardent defender of the Constitution as was McClellan conceded that, sadly, “the Framers relied on the good faith of Congress for the observance of the requirement” and that, when it came to a constitutional convention, “there was no way to force Congress to act.” (“Liberty, Order, And Justice: An Introduction to the Constitutional Principles of American Government,” p. 310.)

Ultimately, the legislatures of two-thirds of the states have to unite to call on Congress to hold a national constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the dead-letter Constitution. Levin and his listeners are deluded if they think that the states, which are hardly bastions of freedom, will unite for this purpose; salvation is more likely to come from dissolving dysfunctional political bonds.

Still, what a force for liberty Levin would be were he a libertarian.

Alas, in one of his magnificent rants against the regime the radio mouth wanted to know why no Democrat had protested Obama’s overweening ways.

This is not quite true. As this column has pointed out, the late, great, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was driven to distraction by Big Man Obama and said as much. Byrd, RIP, was “a stern constitutional scholar who always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House.”

This old Southern gentleman, whom Republicans continually berated for his past indiscretions, warned about Obama’s executive-branch power grab and the extra-constitutional creation of a number of new White-House fiefdoms: on health reform, urban affairs policy, energy and climate change, on and on.

In 2009, “Sen. Byrd issued this warning regarding the procedural shenanigans the Democrats tried to deploy to pass the healthscare bill”:

“I oppose using the budget reconciliation process to pass health care reform and climate change legislation…. As one of the authors of the reconciliation process, I can tell you that the ironclad parliamentary procedures it authorizes were never intended for this purpose.”

The frail senator had taken to the floor of the United States Senate on October 14, 2009, “to discuss the situation in Afghanistan and voice his concerns over the possibility of a major increase in U.S. forces into Afghanistan”:

“General McChrystal, our current military commander in Afghanistan, has requested 30,000-40,000 additional American troops to bolster the more than 65,000 American troops already there. I am not clear as to his reasons and I have many, many questions. What does General McChrystal actually aim to achieve?” “So I am compelled to ask: does it really, really take 100,000 U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden?”

Magnificent too has been liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who has protested the emergence of the Über-Presidency in the person of Barack Obama.

Then there is WND columnist Nat Hentoff. I know not whether he is a Democrat, but Hentoff has long been considered liberal and now labels himself a libertarian. He has accused Obama of “an unprecedented abuse of powers,” calling him the “most un-American president in the nation’s history.”

… The journalist said he doesn’t think any other president has acted so lawlessly as a matter of habit.

“So, if this isn’t a reason for at least the start of an independent investigation that would lead to impeachment, what is?”

Hentoff is baffled that Obama should escape such scrutiny when former President Bill Clinton faced impeachment just for being “a lousy liar.”

A big part of the problem, the journalist believes, is what he calls the utter ignorance of a huge portion of the population, which is not outraged at losing its basic right to be self-governing.

Obama “doesn’t give a damn, because he can get away with whatever he wants.”

And that’s why Hentoff surmised—and Levin would indubitably agree—that this was the worst state the country has ever been in: “Even worse than Woodrow Wilson’s regime, when people could be arrested for speaking German.”

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‘Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world’

Sir Hew Strachan, an expert on the history of war, says that the US president’s strategic failures in Afghanistan and Syria have crippled America’s position in the world.

President Obama is “chronically incapable” of military strategy and falls far short of his predecessor George W. Bush, according to one of Britain’s most senior military advisors.

Sir Hew Strachan, an advisor to the Chief of the Defense Staff, told The Daily Beast that the United States and Britain were guilty of total strategic failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama’s attempts to intervene on behalf of the Syrian rebels “has left them in a far worse position than they were before.”

The extraordinary critique by a leading advisor to the United States’ closest military ally comes days after Obama was undermined by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who questioned the President’s foreign policy decisions and claimed he was deeply suspicious of the military.

Strachan, a current member of the Chief of the Defense Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel, cited the “crazy” handling of the Syrian crisis as the most egregious example of a fundamental collapse in military planning that began in the aftermath of 9/11. “If anything it’s gone backwards instead of forwards, Obama seems to be almost chronically incapable of doing this. Bush may have had totally fanciful political objectives in terms of trying to fight a global War on Terror, which was inherently astrategic, but at least he had a clear sense of what he wanted to do in the world. Obama has no sense of what he wants to do in the world,” he said.

Strachan’s book The Direction of War, which will be published next month, examines the failure of modern political leaders to use strategy to predict and account for the implications of military action. Oxford University’s Professor of the History of War says the lessons learned at the end of the 20th century proved to be damaging at the start of the next. “Using war did deliver. The wars were pretty short, the Falklands, First Gulf War, Kosovo, so people lulled themselves into an expectation that war was simply a continuation of policy and that it was successful. But it hasn’t been since 9/11,” he said.