Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Points Out the Wages of War

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is urging Americans to look into the mirror. Look who we have become. It's not pretty.

Let's take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans, all of us, to re examine our attitudes. We have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination. We've become addicted to comic book Good versus Evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, war on cancer, war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones, and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and juntas and dictators.

None of this has made us safer. And none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, "Is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is that what Americans founders envision?"

Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world, violence has overtaken us in our own nation. It has not come as an invasion. It has come from within. Our bombs, our drones and our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets and schools, or domestic violence in our homes. Waging endless wars abroad we have neglected the foundation of our own well being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war.

What will be the wages of peace?

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Neocons Who Are Being Rewarded for their Iraq 2003 Disgrace.

Some might wonder how it is that so many of our purported leaders who lied us into waging war against Iraq aren't still universally disgraced and ejected from government jobs and public influence. But no, in fact, they were responsible for leading us into war in Ukraine. This list of neocons includes Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and William Kristol.  

Glenn Greenwald recently commented on the bizarre situation that all of these neocons not only remain in power and influential. Even worse, their warmongering views are embraced by modern day Democrats. What follows is the transcript of an excerpt from Glenn's System Update show, Episode 102:

One of the most extraordinary, alarming and baffling developments to witness in American politics is the complete rehabilitation of neoconservatives. Most Americans who know this term first learned of it in 2002 during the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq. The neocons were the most vocal and vehement advocates, not just of the invasion of Iraq, but more importantly, of the warmongering framework undergirding that attack, namely that the world is better off when the United States rules it, and especially the Middle East, through the application of superior military force, in essence, ordering all countries to do the bidding of the United States, always under the threat that failure to obey will result in attacks, invasions, bombings, regime change, coups and much more. This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new.

This imperialistic and militaristic mindset was not exactly new. The U.S. fought wars, imposed tyrannies, and engineered coups all over the world, on every continent, during the Cold War and after but what distinguished neocons from standard warmongers and militarists were two qualities:

First, they have no other politics beyond their quest for endless war. Many neocons in fact began as liberals or even leftists and were willing to morph into anything they needed to be as long as doing so served the only issue they really cared about: placing the US in a state of endless war, almost always fought by other people's families and children rather than their own. Starting with the war in Iraq, a war they were craving and loudly demanding long before the 9/11 attacks – that attack became the pretext for the war in Iraq – they have supported every new and proposed American war since then. "Neocons" is a polite euphemism for "bloodthirsty, sociopathic warmongers."

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Accounting Errors for Ukraine!

Why isn't there a single solitary anti-war voice among Congressional Democrats? Not even among the supposedly far left wing of the Democrats, "The Squad." This is disgraceful. Meanwhile we have rampant drug addiction, homelessness, shitty schools and crumbling infrastructure that is ignored in American cities.

But now, $6.2B of found money will pour into the coffers of American military contractors and their lobbyists. We have an endless military budget to pay for 800 American military bases around the world and for endless war that has increased the risk of annihilating everyone we know in a nuclear holocaust. I'm not making that up. I'm referring to the October 7, 2022 statement by Joe Biden, who admitted that there is a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons being used in the Ukraine war. Biden further stated, "We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

All of this to unnecessarily take sides in a territorial dispute over the Donbass, to maintain our control over Ukraine, a country in which the U.S. deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected leader, in 2014, to install its own puppet leader. Current "foreign policy regarding Ukraine is a neocon wet dream and it offers absolutely no benefit for ordinary Americans.

As Robert Fulghum stated, "It will be a great day when our schools have all the money they need, and our air force has to have a bake-sale to buy a bomber." [More . . . ]

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WaPo’s Concocted Reasons for Fighting Wars That do not Benefit Ordinary Americans

At the Washington Post, Marc Thiessen recently authored "This is the ‘America First’ case for supporting Ukraine." I strenuously disagree with his "facts" and reasoning throughout, but his final five "reasons" are especially bizarre. None of these five reasons justifies U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war. Most glaringly, none of these reasons consider a meaningful cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of ordinary Americans. Further, his "reasons" lead to the bizarre conclusion that the U.S. should instigate and prolong numerous unjust wars that fail to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, a major issue conspicuously ignored by Thiessen. Here are his "reasons" (6-10) for continuing with our warmongering 6-10:

6. "A proving ground for new weapons."

This is a valid reason for indiscriminately going to war!  Yes, indeed.

7. "Arming Ukraine is revitalizing our defense industrial base."

Yes, we need to make sure that weapons manufacturers can afford to pay big salaries to management and to their lobbyists.

8. "The Russian invasion has strengthened U.S. alliances."

Not true if you poll people outside of the readership of U.S. corporate media. And if only there were other better ways to strengthen U.S. alliances other than killing people and blowing up their cities . . .

Further, consider attitudes of people outside of Western countries:

Almost a year after Russia’s war against Ukraine started, it has united the west, according to a 15-country survey – but exposed a widening gulf with the rest of the world that is defining the contours of a future global order.

The study, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) thinktank, surveyed opinions in nine EU member states, including France, Germany and Poland, and in Britain and the US, as well as China, Russia, India and Turkey.

It revealed sharp geographical differences in attitudes to the war, democracy and the global balance of power, the authors said, suggesting Russia’s aggression may be a historic turning point marking the emergence of a “post-western” world order.

“The paradox of the Ukraine war is that the west is both more united, and less influential in the world, than ever before,” said Mark Leonard, the thinktank’s director and a co-author of the report, based on polling carried out last month.

Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, who also worked on the study, called the findings “extremely sobering”.

Consider this graph, which strongly clashes with the prevailing narrative of U.S. elites:

9. "Victory helps prevent nuclear proliferation."

Do you know what else would prevent future nuclear proliferation? Starting a nuclear war. As Joe Biden admitted on October 6, 2022:

In remarks at a reception for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Biden said it was the first time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that there has been a "direct threat" of nuclear weapons’ being used, "if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going.”

“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” he said, offering his bluntest comments about the use of nuclear weapons since Russia invaded Ukraine in February.

Biden admitted that he engaged in this stunningly reckless behavior months before recent days, when  decided to send Abrams tanks and F16's to Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong with this?

10. "Victory in Ukraine is achievable."

Didn't we hear this same claim, year after year, in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? Thiessen presents no factual basis for believing that this specious claim is any more true in the case of Ukraine.

It seems that Thiessen's article was penned by a lobbyist for the military-industrial complex, but it seems like Thiessen would not be the kind of person who would be so incredibly unreflective. For instance, Thiessen wrote candidly about the Durham Report--the headline is "The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI — and the media."  I would now suggest that he soul-search Hillary Clinton campaign's lies about Russian collusion with Trump, something she did to enhance her personal political ambitions. What is the connection to Ukraine? I suggest this. There is a hatred of Russia simmering under the lack of a meaningful national discussion regarding the Ukraine War. That poisoning, I suspect, motivates unreflective articles of the sort Thiessen has just written about the Ukraine war.

For more on the many ways that the Ukraine War fails to serve the interests of ordinary Americans, see this episode of Glenn Greenwald's System Update: Does Endless Spending in Ukraine Cause Deprivations at Home?

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The Insane U.S. Foreign Policy Regarding Ukraine that Has Needlessly Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation

I have encountered many people who have strong opinions about the Ukraine War. Their opinions go something like this:

Putin is Bad. He is Evil Like Hitler. Putin invaded Ukraine. He must be pushed back out. Or else he will invade other countries, just like Hitler did.
No, these are not 8-year olds. They are middle aged adults. They proudly admit to me that they know next to nothing about pre-2022 Ukraine.

Now consider this succinct history of the conflict offered by comedian Dave Smith during an discussion with Joe Rogan:

[T]he list of people with in the government within the national security apparatus, who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There's a lot of really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s. When it first started, at least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton, Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time. They all opposed [NATO expansion] in the strongest possible language, and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.

They were like George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior. There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times, you can find it online. And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is furious. His anger comes through the page when you're reading it, because he's like, What are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you're picking a fight with Russia?. And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia. This was Boris Yeltsin and these aren't the Soviets. These aren't the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? [Kennan] was a cold warrior. He was like, You're throwing away my life's work. And he said, and this was a really a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding and expanding it, and then there will be a Russian reaction. And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn't right. If he wasn't right about that.

[More . . . ]

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