Tag: war

No Brains In Washington

Washington’s IQ follows the Fed’s interest rate — it is negative. Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations.

Washington’s failures are everywhere visible. We can see the failures in Washington’s wars and in Washington’s approach to China and Russia.

The visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, was scheduled for the week-end following the Pope’s visit to Washington. Was this Washington’s way of demoting China’s status by having its president play second fiddle to the Pope? The President of China is here for week-end news coverage? Why didn’t Obama just tell him to go to hell?

Washington’s cyber incompetence and inability to maintain cyber security is being blamed on China. The day before Xi Jinping’s arrival in Washington, the White House press secretary warmed up President Jinping’s visit by announcing that Obama might threaten China with financial sanctions.

And not to miss an opportunity to threaten or insult the President of China, the US Secretary of Commerce fired off a warning that the Obama regime was too unhappy with China’s business practices for the Chinese president to expect a smooth meeting in Washington.

In contrast, when Obama visited China, the Chinese government treated him with politeness and respect.

China is America’s largest creditor after the Federal Reserve. If the Chinese government were so inclined, China could cause Washington many serious economic, financial, and military problems. Yet China pursues peace while Washington issues threats.

Like China, Russia, too, has a foreign policy independent of Washington’s, and it is the independence of their foreign policies that puts China and Russia on the outs with Washington.

Washington considers countries with independent foreign policies to be threats. Libya, Iraq, and Syria had independent foreign policies. Washington has destroyed two of the three and is working on the third. Iran, Russia, and China have independent foreign policies. Consequently, Washington sees these countries as threats and portrays them to the American people as such.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will meet with Obama next week at the UN meeting in New York. It is a meeting that seems destined to go nowhere. Putin wants to offer Obama Russian help in defeating ISIS, but Obama wants to use ISIS to overthrow Syrian President Assad, install a puppet government, and throw Russia out of its only Mediterranean seaport at Tartus, Syria. Obama wants to press Putin to hand over Russian Crimea and the break-away republics that refuse to submit to the Russophobic government that Washington has installed in Kiev.

Despite Washington’s hostility, Xi Jinping and Putin continue to try to work with Washington even at the risk of being humiliated in the eyes of their peoples. How many slights, accusations, and names (such as “the new Hitler”) can Putin and Xi Jinping accept before losing face at home? How can they lead if their peoples feel the shame inflicted on their leaders by Washington?

Xi Jinping and Putin are clearly men of peace. Are they deluded or are they making every effort to save the world from the final war?

One has to assume that Putin and Xi Jinping are aware of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the basis of US foreign and military policies, but perhaps they cannot believe that anything so audaciously absurd can be real. In brief, the Wolfowitz Doctrine states that Washington’s principal objective is to prevent the rise of countries that could be sufficiently powerful to resist American hegemony. Thus, Washington’s attack on Russia via Ukraine and Washington’s re-militarization of Japan as an instrument against China, despite the strong opposition of 80 percent of the Japanese population.

“Democracy?” “Washington’s hegemony don’t need no stinkin’ democracy,” declares Washington’s puppet ruler of Japan as he, as Washington’s faithful servant, over-rides the vast majority of the Japanese population.

Meanwhile, the real basis of US power—its economy—continues to crumble. Middle class jobs have disappeared by the millions. US infrastructure is crumbling. Young American women, overwhelmed with student debts, rent, and transportation costs, and nothing but lowly-paid part-time jobs, post on Internet sites their pleas to be made mistresses of men with sufficient means to help them with their bills. This is the image of a Third World country.

In 2004 I predicted in a nationally televised conference in Washington, DC, that the US would be a Third World country in 20 years. Noam Chomsky says we are already there now in 2015. Here is a recent quote from Chomsky:

“Look around the country. This country is falling apart. Even when you come back from Argentina to the United States it looks like a third world country, and when you come back from Europe even more so. The infrastructure is collapsing. Nothing works. The transportation system doesn’t work. The health system is a total scandal–twice the per capita cost of other countries and not very good outcomes. Point by point. The schools are declining . . .”

Another indication of a third world country is large inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. According to the CIA itself, the United States now has one of the worst distributions of income of all countries in the world. The distribution of income in the US is worse than in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cote d’Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guinea, Guyana, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, UK, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Yemen.

The concentration of US income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime. I ascribe it to two things. One is the offshoring of American jobs. Offshoring moved high productivity, high-value-added American jobs to countries where the excess supply of labor results in wages well below labor’s contribution to the value of output. The lower labor costs abroad transform what had been higher American wages and salaries and, thereby, US household incomes, into corporate profits, bonuses for corporate executives, and capital gains for shareholders, and in the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that had made the US an “opportunity society.”

The other cause of the extreme inequality that now prevails in the US is what Michael Hudson calls the financialization of the economy that permits banks to redirect income away from driving the economy to the payment of interest in service of debt issued by the banks.

Both of these developments maximize income and wealth for the One Percent at the expense of the population and economy.

As Michael Hudson and I have discovered, neoliberal economics is blind to reality and serves to justify the destruction of the economic prospects of the Western World. It remains to be seen if Russia and China can develop a different economics or whether these rising superpowers will fall victim to the “junk economics” that has destroyed the West. With so many Chinese and Russian economists educated in the US tradition, the prospects of Russia and China might not be any better than ours.

The entire world could go down the tubes together.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Weaponizing Migrants

Europeans ought to be demanding Uncle Sam’s head on a silver platter, and those of their own leaders on pikes.

Thanks to 25 years of lunatic U.S. foreign policy initiatives and relentless military aggressions, the steady drip of illegal immigration into Europe from Africa and the Middle East has become a crisis of refugees.

Not only has the U.S. killed and maimed at least a million people and displaced millions more, it has destroyed the property – water, sanitation and transport systems – that support the networks of trade and commerce essential to the survival of developed human communities.

The U.S. has salted great swaths of the Middle East with the desiccated and irradiated debris of war. Disease and contagions lurk in shadows while the agents of violence march in the noonday sun.

On Thursday last, Nicolas Bonnal, writing for the French website Boulevard Voltaire, reported on an Austrian magazine’s scoop – courtesy of leaks from military intelligence stationed in Vienna – that the U.S. government is paying guides and middlemen who bring migrants to Europe across the Mediterranean Sea. The original Info-Direkt article reported that the guides are well-equipped with technology, and are old hands at working Facebook, Twitter and Skype, as were the agents who instigated the Arab Spring.

With the targets of “color revolutions” having caught on to the CIA’s game of sedition, has inducing mass migrations meant to re-jigger the world so as to better serve their global purposes become the very latest weapon in the U.S. neo-cons’ arsenal?

It’s hard to credit the idea that Hillary Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, didn’t understand the consequences of the “responsibility to protect” attack on Libya she and her foreign policy gal pals cooked up around the boiling cauldron that is U.S. foreign policy.

Muammar Gaddafi himself loudly warned both Italy and France, who so unwisely joined in the U.S.-instigated Libyan melee, of the flood of refugees that would come from toppling his gatekeeper government.

But why would a flood of refugees into Europe interest U.S. policymakers?

Possibly because the U.S.’s many attempts to bait Russia into attacking Ukrainian armed forces and thereby scare up increased Nato funding from the alliance’s membership have proved a risible failure. Flooding Europe with “swarms” of refugees just might convince Europeans that there is a useful purpose an expanding Nato presence could fulfill immediately.

Those same U.S. policymakers are actively working to inundate the U.S. with millions of migrants from Mexico and Central America, another imperial playground, on the flimsy basis of a Barack Obama Executive Order. Eager for a youthful, docile, dependent and cheap population of worker bees, the U.S. federal government is now engaged in draining the last wealth of the American middle class for use in settling and supporting many millions of immigrants, whose children will become the future taxpayers and voters the grotesquely obese federal government requires for its own future survival.

At last then, the long-sought weapons of mass destruction have been located. We can see them clearly now: They are Africa’s and the Middle East’s desperate and dispossessed migrants, and Central America’s young and unwitting illegals, of “the free world’s” creation, and they are on the move.

Source: Anne Williamson lewrockwell.com

Report suggests Russia and NATO are preparing for war

Russia and NATO are actively preparing for war with one another amid the greatest build up of military tension in Europe since the end of the Cold War, a new report says.

Rival exercises by the Russian armed forces and Nato have led to several near-miss incidents that could result in confrontation between the two sides, and leaders need to consider a new arms control treaty to avert the possibility of heightened tensions spilling into war.

The report by the European Leadership Network, a think tank, comes amid the most intense fighting for six months in eastern Ukraine and as Michael Fallon, the defence minister, pledged to expand a British army training mission to Ukraine.

“We do not suggest that the leadership of either side has made a decision to go to war or that a military conflict between the two is inevitable, but that the changed profile of exercises is a fact and it does play a role in sustaining the current climate of tensions in Europe,” the authors write.

The report outlines how both Nato and Russia have primed their forces to respond to an escalation since the Ukraine crisis erupted in early 2014.

The preparations include major military exercises by both Russia and Nato that appear designed exclusively to respond to one another’s capabilities and potential war plans.

”Whilst spokespeople may maintain that these operations are targeted against only hypothetical opponents, the nature and scale of the operations indicate otherwise,” the report writers say.

In March 2015, Russian conducted “snap exercises” that saw 80,000 troops engaged in long-range deployments and simulate combat on a scale that made the United States or Nato the only possibly adversary.

Nato’s exercise “Allied Shield,” in June this year, saw 15,000 allied troops engaged in a series of mock operations including response to a Crimea-style infiltration of irregular forces.

In both cases, the report writers find, the exercises focused on what the two sides perceive to be their most vulnerable areas, with and Nato moving to defend the Baltic States and Russia rushing reinforcements to the Arctic, its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, occupied Crimea, and Sakhalin island in the far east.

Allied Shield also included the first deployment of the Very High Readiness Taskforce, a rapid-reaction unit established at the Nato summit in Wales in 2014 in response to the annexation of Crimea.

The exercise, called ‘Noble Jump’, deployed 2,100 troops in a simulated a response to ‘unattibutable infiltration by an ally by irregular or special forces’ – essentially the scenario seen in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine since Early 2014.

The report recommends improvements in Nato-Russian communication to avert near misses and suggests working on a new arms treaty to restrict the use of conventional forces in Europe.

“If Russia or NATO decides at some point that they want to reduce tensions, showing restraint in terms of size or scenarios used for the exercises might be a good place to start,” the report writers conclude.

Source: The Telegraph

Russians hack US Joint Chiefs of Staff

Investigators say they believe the same Russian hackers that carried out attacks on the White House and State Department last year and the attempted penetration of the Pentagon last month were responsible for a major cyberattack that shut down the Joint Chiefs of Staff email for the past 11 days, The Daily Beast has learned.

In all of the attacks, hackers broke into unclassified email networks by sending legitimate-looking emails than turned out to be malware or “spear phishing” attempts. In April, President Obama’s unclassified emails were among those compromised, along with the State Department.

Ten days before the July 27 hacking of the Joint Staff system, the Pentagon sent an email warning “at least five” DOD computer users had been targeted, which was first reported by The Daily Beast. The notice linked those attacks to penetrations of unclassified networks at the White House and State Department that began last year.

The Joint Chiefs then suffered what one defense official called the “most sophisticated” attack on its unclassified network, one that has shut down communications ever since for the 4,000 employees on the Joint Staff unclassified server.

Source: Daily Beast

Carthage must be destroyed

The Pentagon has released its “National Military Strategy of the United States of America 2015,” June 2015.

The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent. In other words, the norm is dependence on Washington.

Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-power doctrine that declares independence to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions.

The Pentagon’s report defines the foremost “revisionist states” as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. The focus is primarily on Russia.Washington hopes to co-op China, despite the “tension to the Asia-Pacific region” that China’s defense of its sphere of influence, a defense “inconsistent with international law” (this from Washington, the great violator of international law), by turning over what remains of the American consumer market to China. It is not yet certain that Iran has escaped the fate that Washington imposed on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Ukraine, and by complicity Palestine.

The Pentagon report is sufficiently audacious in its hypocrisy, as all statements from Washington are, to declare that Washington and its vassals “support the established institutions and processes dedicated to preventing conflict, respecting sovereignty, and furthering human rights.” This from the military of a government that has invaded, bombed, and overthrown 11 governments since the Clinton regime and is currently working to overthrow governments in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, and Argentina.

In the Pentagon document, Russia is under fire for not acting “in accordance with international norms,” which means Russia is not following Washington’s leadership.

In other words, this is a bullshit report written by neocons in order to foment war with Russia.

Nothing else can be said about the Pentagon report, which justifies war and more war. Without war and conquests, Americans are not safe.

Washington’s view toward Russia is the same as Cato the Elder’s view toward Carthage. Cato the Elder finished his every speech on any subject in the Roman Senate with the statement “Carthage must be destroyed.”

This report tells us that war with Russia is our future unless Russia agrees to become a vassal state like every country in Europe, and Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan. Otherwise, the neoconservatives have decided that it is impossible for Americans to tolerate living with a country that makes decisions independently of Washington. If American cannot be The Uni-Power dictating to the world, better that we are all dead. At least that will show the Russians.

Rise of hypersonic missiles render fleets obsolete

With the rise of hypersonic missiles, fleets have become largely obsolete, reduced as they are to huge sitting ducks. There is simply no defense for a large ship against an incoming MACH5 missile. Carriers can destroy small countries like Libya or Iraq, but not Russia and China.

Hypersonic weapons can achieve speeds over five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5) and they are the latest version of precision guided munitions (PGM) that make up part of the larger family of long-range strike weapons systems.

“Hypersonic weapons add to the complexity and elusiveness of the escalatory dynamics and this is something both sides will need to plan for”, says Eleni G. Ekmektsioglou from the American University’s School of International Service.

In the United States, hypersonic weapons are pursued in the context of the conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) commonly defined by officials as a technology of “high-precision conventional weapons capable of striking a target anywhere in the world within one hour’s time.”

Outside the United States, states such as China or Russia have been pursuing this promising technology in secrecy.

Chinese fears skyrocketed after President Barack Obama’s Prague speech and the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The Chinese understood America’s decreasing reliance on nuclear weapons as being tantamount to a greater reliance on conventional weapons—especially CPGS—where the United States enjoys an undeniable superiority.

Thus, the Chinese regard President Obama’s vision for a nuclear-free world as a trap that aims at containing China’s rise to power, Ekmektsioglou believes.

Russia has built a revolutionary new weapon system that can render enemy satellites and weapons useless.

Its Russian makers say it is a ‘fundamentally new electronic warfare system’ which can be mounted on ground-based as well as air- and sea-borne carriers.

‘The system will target the enemy’s deck-based, tactical, long-range and strategic aircraft, electronic means and suppress foreign military satellites’ radio-electronic equipment,’ Russia’s Radio-Electronic Technologies Group (KRET) Deputy CEO Yuri Mayevsky told Russian news agency TASS.

To comply with international weapons laws, the system will be mounted on ground-based, air-and seaborne carriers and not on satellites.

‘It will fully suppress communications, navigation and target location and the use of high-precision weapons,’ said adviser to the KRET first deputy CEO Vladimir Mikheyev.

The system will be used against cruise missiles and will suppress satellite-based radio location systems.

Putin lifts ban on S-300 missile system supplies to Iran

Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to lift the ban on supplies of S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran.

“The decree cancels the ban from transit through Russia (including by air), transportation outside the territory of Russia to the Islamic Republic of Iran and also handover to the Islamic Republic of Iran outside the territory of Russia with the use of ships and aircraft flying the Russian state flag of the air defense missile systems S-300,” the Kremlin’s press-service has said.

The decree is effective immediately.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is expected to make a statement on the decision to lift the ban soon.

It introduces amendments to the presidential decree of September 22, 2010 on measures for implementing the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1929 of June 9 2010. The sub-item concerning S-300 has been removed from it.

The implementation of the Russian-Iranian contract of 2007 for supplying the S-300 systems was suspended following the introduction of sanctions against Iran in September 2010. Tehran later protested that decision in court.

Shortly after Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu visited Iran last January the US Department of State said that supplies of Russian air defense systems to Iran would be unacceptable. In the meantime, Iran has repeatedly voiced the hope Russia would eventually agree to provide the launchers.

The head of the Rostech corporation, Sergey Chemezov, in February said that Russia had offered Tehran to buy the upgraded system Antey-2500 instead of S-300 and that Iran was still considering that option and remained undecided. The US Department of State said it had no objections to Russia’s alternative proposal to Iran.

S-300 systems (NATO reporting name SA-10 Grumble) are designed to defend major facilities from air attacks. They are considered to be some of the world’s most capable anti-aircraft missile systems.

Meanwhile the Pentagon slammed the Russian move to sell missiles to Iran.

Source: Itar-TASS

US, UK and NATO up the infowar

Documents posted on the web reveal a high-level anti-Russian propaganda war being waged in south and eastern Ukraine by the US, the UK and NATO on behalf of the Kiev Government, using non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as agents.

According to the Drakula blog, the West is raising its game in its campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While it is — on the one hand — pumping up the military volume by moving NATO and US hardware nearer to the Ukraine and Russian borders, it is also playing a hybrid war by pumping funds into an anti-Russian propaganda war.

NATO documents show that a “co-ordination meeting on StratCom training for Ukraine” was held in Riga, Latvia on February 19, 2015 as part of its “on-going capacity building programme”.

StratCom stands for Strategic Communication, which means dealing with the “inability of Ukrainian media to provide sufficient reach for the south/east of the country; vast reach of media originating from Russia; lack of strong Public Broadcaster; lack of success stories; [and] lack of trust of the population of the south/eastern regions in the central government”.

The NATO document reveals the Kiev Government has a “weak Public Affairs capacity” and sets out proposals to counter Russian influence and tackling what it describes as a lack of cross-government work and co-ordination as well as a lack of understanding of the importance of “national narrative”.

Further documents reveal a project run by the UK Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence worth $360,500 with the purpose of: “National reconciliation in Ukraine through effective communication for restoring public trust and empowering of the participatory democracy mechanisms using regional media coverage, counteraction to Russian information influence”.

It outlines a pro-Kiev propaganda battle using Ukrainian agencies including the Ukrainian Institute for International Politics (UIIP); the Analytical Center for Geopolitical Studies ‘Borysfen Intel’ (BI); and the Department of the civil-military cooperation, HQ of the armed forces.

The program involves “resuming the communication and community dialog in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine using international experience shared by UIIP and BI foreign partners; informational support of national reconciliation ideas through broadcasting and media coverage of Eastern and Southern Ukraine regions by new alternative regional mass-media and Internet resources; and decreasing the Russian information influence in Ukraine, discredit of the Russian political and military leaders.”

The revelations will embarrass the US, NATO and UK who have been at pains to denounce Russia for promoting what they call a ‘hybrid war’ in Ukraine.

Source: Sputniknews

Swiss diplomat dissects diverging US, EU interests

It is important to understand that US interests are fundamentally different from those of Europeans, Lena Lio, a former Swiss politician and diplomat, expert on Russian studies, told the newspaper 24 Heures.

The instability in Eastern Europe is beneficial for Washington, as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine will lead to a weak Europe, implying also that mostly white nations will suffer the consequences.

The weak Europe, in turn, cannot pose an economic threat or political competition to the United States. That is one reason why Washington passionately hates “nationalists”, the real backbone of the EU.

If Europe manages to solve its internal problems, it will be a dangerous challenger for the US hegemony, Lio said.

Unable to remain the top dog in international politics, the United States deliberately destabilizes its potential competitors by creating conflicts and fueling existing disputes.

The United States is losing its dominance in the international arena and that is why Washington deliberately tries to destabilize and crush any potential competition.

Most Americans now see Russia – ahead of North Korea, China and Iran – as the US’s public enemy number one and the greatest threat to the US due to a relentless demonization campaign. Americans regard Europeans as “appeasers”.

But the EU has no energy security in the Middle East and North Africa, and without their reliable partner Russia, will have no energy security at all.

The United States can thus no longer remain the only hegemon in the world, the position it has become so used to since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Cold War.

Therefore, unable to stay on the top, the United States uses aggressive style of conducting politics by deliberately damaging relations between other countries, such as fueling disputes between China and Japan, destabilizing Eastern Europe by supporting the conflict in Ukraine, artificially driving down global oil prices and damaging the Russian economy by imposing economic sanctions, said the former Swiss diplomat.

NATO in Europe embodies the ultimate geopolitical existential paradox; an alliance that exists to manage the chaos it perpetuates.

US waging a financial war for imperial ambitions

The United States is waging a finance war against Moscow in a bid to weaken Russia to a point of economic and social destruction, the Austrian Contra magazine said, adding that this campaign goes against the international law, WTO rules and bilateral agreements.

The United States has a wide array of instruments at its disposal. The Austrian magazine named assigning false credit ratings as a prime example.

“Russia’s fundamentals are the best in the world. Not a single (big) state has better fundamentals than Russia.

However, Fitch downgraded it to a 3B rating – just above junk level. The US has the worst fundamentals in the world. But the same rating agency has given it AAA, the best rating possible. It remains a mystery how the rating agency counts that,” the publication said.

The media outlet compared the US to a terrorist state that disregards general code of conduct and acts upon its whims and wishes, forcing other countries to participate. Moreover, Washington threatens any country that has chosen to act independently with war and sanctions.

The US monthly CounterPunch also called American and British imperial ambitions the real challenge to the world.

Any country resisting the American Empire, taking a stand against its hypocrisy, double standards, and complete lack of respect towards other countries and cultures, US monthly CounterPunch reported, suffers from these attacks.

The last year coup in Ukraine was openly supported by the West. US Senator John McCain along with EU representative Catherine Ashton traveled to Ukraine personally to show their support and urge on the protesters in Kiev.

The United States is a global hegemon with over 1,000 military bases and 11 navy battle carrier groups around the world and a military budget that exceeds budgets of all other industrialized nations combined.

The truth is that the challenge facing the world right now is how to deal with the United States and its imperial ambitions, rather than contain a fake Russian threat.

The Ukrainian crisis has once again shown that “we live in a world in which the West’s interests and rights are the only ones deemed legitimate”. The imperial hegemonic agenda of the United States and Britain is the root cause of the crises currently taking place in eastern Ukraine and the Middle East.

American and British hypocrisy knows no borders, the US monthly said. How the United States and Britain who played central roles in diminishing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria into an abyss of carnage and savagery, could then make statements that Putin is a greater threat to Europe than the Islamic State?

France will not send military, arms to Kiev

France has no plans of sending military instructors or delivering equipment to Ukraine as opposed to Great Britain, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that Britain would send instructors to Ukraine to train the country’s military, Sputniknews reported.

“Great Britain has taken a hardline to the situation and is considering a number of measures that you have said [sending military instructors], which Prime Minister David Cameron announced. We have also taken a firm position, but are still pushing for the de-escalation of the conflict,” Fabius said on France Info radio station.

France is party to the Normandy format talks on Ukrainian reconciliation, which also includes Russia, Germany and Ukraine. The most recent Normandy-quartet meeting between foreign ministers took place in Paris on Tuesday.

Kiev authorities repeatedly asked foreign partners for lethal assistance. On Tuesday, Ukrainian Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko said that the United Arab Emirates had agreed to send weapons and military hardware to Ukraine.

A number of European states, including Germany, refused to arm Kiev. The United States, where according to a recent poll by Pew Research Center more than half of the respondents oppose sending weapons to Ukraine, is yet to make a decision on the matter.

War does not love British PM back

UK Prime Minister David Cameron certainly loves war.

But events in Iran, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, show that war does not love Cameron back, making him look rather like a dull schoolyard bully, oblivious to how he has actively contributed to global chaos.

Cameron actively supported the 2011 military operation in Libya. Back in 2011, Cameron visited Tripoli with France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to declare victory over Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in what turned out to be premature celebrations with the “rebels”, now known as ISIS.

In a recent interview however, he declared that Libya shouldn’t become a “safe haven for terrorists”, something that Libya clearly has now achieved with Britain’s meddling.

Cameron was left rather red-faced after ISIS attacks killed Coptic Christians in Libya last week.

In Syria, Cameron also supported arming “rebels” in order to attempt to oust President Bashar Assad.

Cameron, while advocating British attacks against the Syrian government, admitted he was not “100 percent certain” that Assad was behind a recent chemical attack, but that it was “highly likely.”

“This is not like Iraq, what we are seeing in Syria is fundamentally different … We are not invading a country,” he insisted. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

Cameron had been calling for an international rubberstamp from the UN to aid the Syrian “rebels” – aka ISIS – from the early stages of the conflict.

“Every effort should be made to secure a [UN] Security Council Resolution backing military action before any such action is taken,” Cameron said in the speech to the House of Commons in 2013.

But his attempts proved futile, as British MPs effectively ruled out direct involvement in a military campaign in Syria. The Libyan fiasco was apparently still fresh in everyone’s mind.

“Throughout this coalition government, the Conservatives have adopted a less forthright approach to the Middle East conflict, in a way which I believe risks decreasing British influence in the region,” Liberal-Dem coalition partner Nick Clegg then lamented.

Back in 2010, Cameron stated that Iran has a “nuclear weapon,” when asked about why he was backing Turkey’s bid to join the EU. The Mossad, no less, has publicly denied intelligence proving the existence of such a weapon.

Cameron then attempted to pressure the American Congress over sanctions on Iran right ahead of his visit to the US, but Republicans called it an unproductive move.

He responded that Turkey’s accession could “help solve the world’s problems, like the Middle East peace process, like the fact that Iran has got a nuclear weapon.” Perhaps no one had sent him the memo.

With an ugly conflict brewing in Ukraine, Cameron has announced that UK troops will support Kiev with tactical intelligence, training and logistics. The UK will also “be developing infantry program with Ukraine to improve the pure ability of the forces.”

The PM’s most recent warmongering comments come after the Minsk peace talks, in which a ceasefire was agreed upon by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

On top of that, Cameron hawkishly called for more sanctions against Russia, in addition to those implemented during the past year.

He is said to be upset by French and German leaders Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel, who are trying to push for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the conflict.

“We should keep up the pressure [on Russia],” Cameron said, noting that “in this respect the interests of the United Kingdom and democracy do go together.” Vladimir Putin, the most popular president Russia has had in more than a century, was democratically elected, but perhaps Cameron believes “democracy” has several meanings not included in most dictionaries.

State Department’s Nuland wants to ‘fight against the Europeans’

There are increasingly signs that Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande operated behind the backs of the Americans, when they traveled to Minsk last week, in an attempt to reach an agreement between the warring factions.

The 53-year-old European representative of the US government, Victoria Nuland, is responsible for guiding the United States through the Ukraine crisis and solving the problems with Russian President Vladimir Putin. But in the crisis Nuland has herself become a problem.

The American gave an internal briefing to the US delegation at the Munich Security Conference last Friday. She sat on the sixth floor of the Hotel Bayerischer Hof; in the room were perhaps two dozen US diplomats and senators. The German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen had just publicly spoken about the fact that weapon deliveries could serve as an accelerant in eastern Ukraine. The Americans were angry.

According to the German “Bild” newspaper, Nuland said, “We can fight the Europeans.”

According to the report, Nuland called Chancellor Merkel’s trip to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin “Merkel’s Moscow stuff.” The atmosphere heated up; one of the senators was to have ridiculed the German Defense Minister (the “Defeatism Minister”); and made a reference to the Europeans’ “Moscow bullshit”.

The top diplomat Nuland will be considered a potential new Secretary of State. She is married to Robert Kagan, a neo-conservative thinker. Last year he published a text on why America must remain the undisputed leader of the world.

She already managed to make headlines after the Munich Security Conference last year with her somewhat limited mastery of language.

At that time she flew from Munich via Cyprus and Prague to Kiev, and on the way she called Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland dispensed with special security procedures and used her normal mobile phone. So the conversation went unencrypted.

In the evening of February 4, 2014, a four minute and eleven second recording appeared on YouTube. The conversation between the two top diplomats gave a rare glimpse into the world of American diplomacy.

At the end of the call Nuland mentioned a proposal by the US government, meant to outmaneuver the hesitant Europeans, which made her world-​​famous.

Shortly before she had spoken with the United Nations: the United Nations should send an envoy and engage with Ukraine, then the EU would no longer have much to say. “That would be great, I think, to help advance this thing, the UN would advance things,” Nuland said, and then added: “Fuck the EU”.

Source: RussiaInsider

NATO and Europe on diplomatic collision course

The fraught relationship between Russia and the West, which was supposed to improve following an agreement over Ukraine, has descended instead into renewed acrimony after a series of tense military and diplomatic confrontations.

France and Germany, which had brokered the Minsk accord last week, were yesterday trying to hold together the increasingly fragile ceasefire in Ukraine amid reports that fighting was spreading once again.

Kremlin-backed separatists and Cossack fighters triumphantly paraded through Debaltseve, a strategic point they had captured in the past 48 hours, leaving the Atlanticist project to expand NATO into Ukraine in tatters.

Britain, which along with the EU will be strongly criticised by a House of Lords committee today for “sleep-walking into this crisis”, was drawn towards centre-stage after two Russian Bear bombers off the coast of Cornwall – but just outside UK airspace – were met by RAF jets scrambled from their base in Coningsby, Lincolnshire.

The apparent probe of British readiness came soon after the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, accused President Vladimir Putin of a “campaign of destabilisation to the Baltic countries”. The Russian leader, he said, presented “as much of a threat to Europe as ISIS”.

Russian deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Lukashevich declared that Fallon’s war-mongering comments were “already beyond diplomatic ethics”, adding: “The characterisation of Russia is completely intolerable. We will find a way to respond to the comments.”

In London, Rory Stewart, the chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, said the West was on a “political razor-edge”. He urged all British political parties to write into their manifestoes a commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence – as required by Nato. He also asked them to prepare to deal with threats such as cyber-attacks, irregular troops, and propaganda.

The British Government, which is one of the guarantors of the territorial integrity of Ukraine in return for it giving up a nuclear arsenal, is worried that Germany and France may have already recognised separate regions.

“It [the committee] believes that the EU, and by implication the UK, was guilty of sleep-walking into this crisis,” said the committee chairman, Lord Tugendhat. “The lack of robust analytical capacity, in both the UK and the EU, effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.”

An inspection by Dutch military specialists revealed no military activities on the part of Russia in the Rostov region bordering Ukraine, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s International Treaties Implementation Department told RIA Novosti on Friday.

Dutch military experts inspected 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles) in Russia’s Rostov Region bordering Ukraine, Sergei Ryzhkov added.

“The inspection took place in accordance with the Vienna Document and was carried out not only on the ground, but also with the help of helicopters,” Sergei Ryzhkov said.

Dutch military inspected the same area in the Rostov Region bordering Ukraine that Ukrainian specialists chose for inspection earlier.

Kiev authorities and Atlanticists have accused Russia of providing military aid and troops to Donbas militias. Moscow has dismissed the allegations and denied any involvement in the armed conflict in Ukraine.