1) Japan was maneuvered into firing the first shot by Roosevelt after he had suspended oil imports and financed Japan’s enemies- among them the brutal Chiang Kai-shek- in China. Parenthetically, it is clear that the US regarded the Japanese threat in purely economic terms- the War Department’s memo warned of dire consequences resulting from the loss of American markets in the Far East. The same applies to Germany. Of course, that would not have been a problem save for the state-enforced regulatory cartelization and tariffs of industry that prevented the prices of goods from falling to the point of market clearance and necessitated the expansion of overseas markets to allow industry to operate at full capacity while retaining monopoly profits. The situation could be resolved by, among other things, dismantling the incipient state-corporate nexus but this would have been unpopular with big business, Roosevelt’s primary constituency. For an excellent treatment of the topic, I recommend the following:

Monopoly Capitalism and Imperialism by Kevin Carson: http://www.mutualist.org/id78.html

The Role of State Monopoly Capitalism in the American Empire by Joseph Stromberg: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_3/15_3_3.pdf

2) The creation of the North-South divide was America’s doing, after the ephemeral Korean People’s Republic was abolished by (American) decree. Due to the intensity of Korean nationalism many in Korea preferred unification- even on the North’s terms.

3) For once, I agree with you.

4) Milosevic was very much a Stalinoid authoritarian of the old school, not the ethnic chauvinist he is depicted as- his electoral platform was one of maintaining the integrity of the old FSRY. The break-up of Yugoslavia and resulting cycle of ethnic violence resulted from Western, particularly European, support for the breakaway states of Slovenia and Croatia, within whom ultranationalist parties were far stronger than in Serbia. The Badington Commission ruled against the right of considerable Serbian minorities within the constituent republics to secede, a ruling that was subsequently upheld after the Yugoslav wars. The result, naturally, was Serbian support for ethnic nationalism within the perpetrator of Srebenica, the Republika Srpska. This is the political context that you elide.

5) Curiously, the US government refused to present Afghanistan with evidence of Bin Laden’s wrongdoing. This could be read multiple ways, but my personal hypothesis is that the 9/11 attacks were conceived and executed by some lower echelon of Al-Qaeda.

6) Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was triggered by the latter’s violation of oil production quotas and the slant-drilling into the Rumaila oil field. The former had a devastating economic impact upon Iraq. The catalyst for the invasion, however, was America’s refusal to take a stance on the issue until the eve of the invasion. While not strictly relevant, it is also worthwhile to note that the US systematically destroyed Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and subjected it to a series of crippling economic sanctions that were directly responsible for the deaths of a million Iraqi children.

So the US definitively occupies the position of “bad guy”. Naturally it does not differ in this respect from any other state, its particular character being determined by its internal structure rather than anything so nebulous as “ideology”.

Peace!

I did find this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya6JfFK_lYQ

but it difficult to make sense of what Paul is trying to say. He seems to be under the impression that the Russians, mimicking the United States, made a “preemptive strike” on Georgia.

Come again?

Dear Friend of Liberty,

I am writing you with very exciting news about the upcoming Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis and I wanted you, one of my strongest supporters, to be among the first to know.

First, I want to again thank you for your thoughts and concern about Carol. I am very happy to say she is doing much better and though I am still very concerned, I am cautiously optimistic of a full recovery.

Now for the news.

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The Georgian sneak attack on Ossetia and the Russians, as well as the Poles getting at least part of the additional remuneration they asked for in return for accepting the missile shield, no doubt adds an important element to the mix.

From past behavior, and despite his incompetent game, Brzezinski is surely ready for more play at the Grand Chessboard with the Russians, if indeed he did not have a role sub rosa in engineering it.

Will this be centrally featured at the Democrat Convention?

If Obama takes him seriously, even just for the purposes of getting elected, the conventions may well be cast, respectively, as Churchill versus John F. Kennedy.

While the electorate sleeps.

Incidentally, has anyone heard anything interesting or unexpected from Ron Paul and the “revolution” recently?

Peace!

At the time of the Georgian sneak attack on Ossetia there were at least twelve hundred US troops in Georgia, mostly acting as trainers and under the cover of NATO. According to Russian news reports some of these have been identified among the Georgian Army dead and some have been captured.

There were also other non-Georgian mercenaries, as the Russians call them, from Ukraine and also from Israel, as Israeli sources themselves have chronicled, crowing about it in fact in the early hours before the Russian counterattack.

After Ivan Susanin above, therefore, there can hardly be any doubt that elements of the US government and military knew about the attack in advance, participated in it, and perhaps even instigated it.

Whether or not Saakashvili is a wild card, there is little doubt that the US had advance knowledge and could have stopped the attack if it wished.

Surely there were also US contingencies for any foreseeable results, including leaving the Georgians in the lurch militarily if they should need actual US intervention to sustain the attack and occupation, and with scenarios like “humanitarian aid” in the aftermath developed ad hoc and later.

That this is all madness on the part of the US is patent. What the method to the madness may be is another question.

The most obvious sign of method is the timing. The Georgians, apparently with US collusion, timed the sneak attack to the opening of the Olympics when Putin and Bush could talk to one another face to face.

This was likely designed on the calculation that Putin might be checked from any immediate response, while the new and tentative president of the Russian Federation would not act on his own.

This in turn was likely toward the end of giving the Georgians enough time for a fait accompli in Ossetia, to be used in later negoiations.

The immediate intervention of Sarkozy with a peace plan in hand may also have been planned in advance, however the Georgian sneak attack developed.

For all that, this answers the question of timing and method only tactically. Strategically one must still ask: why now?

The fingerprints of the Neo-Cons and the Likud are all over the event. But strategically and politically the question is what was so pressing that they do this now, rather than months ago or months from now.

In this context it is almost unavoidable to conclude that the method of the madness strategically and politically involves the upcoming Democrat and Republican convention, and is designed to reformulate the foreign policy context of the presidential election, that is, to lessen the status of Obama and to increase the chances of the Republicans and McCain.

That the Georgian sneak attack backfired is not to the point. That possibility may well have been in the initial equations.

How this will actually influence the conventions and the election is also less important that how it might have been intended to do so.

Just for starters may one suggest that the timing and purpose are deliberately designed to distract the American electorate from the occupation of Iraq and the possibile attack of Israel or the US or both on Iran, and also to keep the Democrats off balance, especially in regard to foreign policy.

The timing in my opinion, therefore, is in effect to expand and enforce a continuation of the policy of having the mainstream media decrease even more day to day coverage of Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.

This does not mean that other aims and purposes are not present. Israel, for example, has been trying to restart a cold war between the US and Russia for some years, and the American military-industrial complex needs an excuse to rebuild and to justify new expenditures on the scale of the obscenely expensive and now obsolete Stealth program.

But that just means that the various lunacies are synergistic.

With Rove and the Neo-Cons about, the timing cannot be considered accidental, and the immediate context politically is surely the conventions and the election.

This may even explain the lapse of Fox in giving both sides of the story, seemingly by accident.

As in much advertising and public relations, what is important is not whether the attention is good or bad, but simply the attention.

With Georgia and Russia in the forefront of the news, Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan go to the far backburners with few, if any, of the audience noticing, and with attention on a whole new set of unexpected issues as potential political hay for the Republicans and in regard to future US foreign policy.