https:\/\/www.apnews.com\/4cef63caf6b34cb796bc4c196d47c143<\/a><\/p>\nNothing about preventing the end of the world, just \u201cyou like stealing money, right Mr. President? Well, that\u2019s what we do here.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Look at the times they said they had<\/em> to do something: overthrow the Taliban, overthrow Saddam, overthrow the Somali ICU, overthrow Gaddafi, overthrow Saleh, (half-assed) overthrow Assad: all that we\u2019ve gotten out of these wars is nothing. No<\/em> actual threat was preempted or prevented. Meanwhile, Ayman al Zawahiri and his men \u2014 the only actual enemies of the American people on earth \u2014 have benefited from every single one of these.<\/p>\nRight now they want trouble with Iran. Which has done exactly what to the U.S. ever, other than overthrow the U.S.-backed dictator (with U.S. permission, in fact, which wasn\u2019t retroactively withdrawn until the few-days-later hostage crisis broke out)? USA still fights directly for Iran\u2019s friends in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/p>\n
Also: Bush took a perfectly awesome<\/em> deal with DPRK, which suspended their nuke program, and instead forced them out of the NPT and into nuclear weapons.<\/p>\nThere is no secret secret that justifies all this bullshit. They don\u2019t know more than you or me about it. Not in any meaningful way. In fact, just think about how much more incentive you have as an outsider to critically evaluate their choices, when they do not. It\u2019s always best for them to truncate or simply ignore the antecedents and go on with the next stupid plan.<\/p>\n
They will always claim that the alternative is worse. Remember when they said \u201cwe can\u2019t leave now, the violence will get worse!\u201d over and over in Iraq War II from 2003-2008, when it was the USA<\/em> that was making the violence worse. Bush had put U.S. forces at the service of the Iran-backed Badr Corps which was cleansing Baghdad of its Sunni Arabs. A million people died. A million. And we don\u2019t know for sure the alternative \u2014 assuming the invasion and toppling of the Baathists, but then immediate withdrawal \u2014 but we do know that Bush removed any incentive for them to compromise, and instead gave them every reason to use and abuse U.S. power against their defeated rivals, which helped create a situation where western Iraq was ungoverned and wide open to takeover by ISIS after Obama\u2019s project to back the terrorists in Syria, as a consolation prize to Saudi after giving Iraq to Iran, blew up so badly into an actual bin Ladenite caliphate for 3 years, until Iraq War III<\/em> was successful in driving them back out again.<\/p>\nPutin has been kissing America\u2019s ass since 2000 and gets nothing but shit for it. We could be friends, if not allies \u2014 not that I\u2019m promoting alliances with anyone, you understand, just sayin\u2019 \u2014 but instead our side is threatening to ratchet things back to where they were in Reagan\u2019s first term when the Cold War threatened to get hot \u2014 hotter than the sun.<\/p>\n
I can\u2019t imagine what holocaust the U.S. has prevented by waging about a fifth of one itself over the last 15 years. Certainly if they have anything approaching a legitimate excuse for all this, the burden must be on them to demonstrate it.<\/p>\n
Read Secrets<\/em> by Daniel Ellsberg, about the intoxicating power \u2014 in more ways than one \u2014 of having insider access to secrets, and the manner in which it prevents broader knowledge and wisdom from ruling the minds of decision makers.<\/p>\nI don\u2019t know how old you are, but in 2002 and early 2003, virtually every claim made by the government about Iraq\u2019s WMD programs were already in dispute, if not completely debunked: eg, the aluminum tubes were reported to be for rockets not centrifuges in a non-existent Iraqi Manhattan Project, in the Washington Post<\/em> by September, 2002. But whenever anyone brought this up, the canned response from TV-enslaved Americans \u2014 like a nation of myna birds or MK-Ultra subjects \u2014 was the same every time: \u201cWell, the president must have secret information that we don\u2019t know about.\u201d<\/p>\nLiterally, that must have been repeated tens of millions of times by millions of Americans. It\u2019s the question-begging fallacy. There must be a good reason for it or they wouldn\u2019t be doing it. Draw your conclusion first, then when no actual information in the world supports it, imagine that there must be some other reason they haven\u2019t bothered to tell us yet.<\/p>\n
But just look what their secret information was: lies picked from the CIA\u2019s trash, lies from Iranian-backed Iraqi exiles, lies from Gen. Clapper\u2019s satellite office, lies cooked up by Ariel Sharon\u2019s own little Office of Special Plans in the Israeli Prime Minister\u2019s office, lies tortured out of Sheik al Libi and Abu Zubaydah pointing the finger at Saddam for training al Qaeda. God-damned lies. That\u2019s why they couldn\u2019t tell us: because their claims could not bear scrutiny. Because they were lies.<\/p>\n
Abandon your false premise that the people who run the U.S. government care about you or this country any more than their sometimes-ally Ayman al Zawahiri does. They don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Best,
\nScott<\/p>\n
Cross-posted at the Libertarian Institute.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris writes: For the last few months I have been battling some cognitive dissonance when making conclusions about the current state of U.S. foreign affairs. Ever since the Ron Paul days of 2008, I have been firm in my conviction that the libertarians are correct in this regard. I think on one hand that despite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-30088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-empire","category-war-party"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30088"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30093,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30088\/revisions\/30093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30088"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=30088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}