Ukraine and General Jack D. Ripper

A decade ago a large group of neconservatives lied us into war. They told us that the war was necessary and that the costs would be minimal. The news media endorsed their every claim and were quick to call all of the skeptics on the left anti-American.
They were wrong in every way. They should have been drummed out of polite society.

Instead they were welcomed into the Democratic Party during the Hillary Clinton campaign. Who could have guessed that this would have negative consequences?
Now, with the war in Ukraine, they are back to telling us that a war with Russia is necessary and that the costs would be acceptable.
The only difference this time is that they are endorsing nuclear war.

It is better for the United States to risk confrontation with belligerent powers when they are in the early stages of ambition and expansion, not after they have already consolidated substantial gains. Russia may possess a fearful nuclear arsenal, but the risk of Moscow using it is not higher now than it would have been in 2008 or 2014, if the West had intervened then. And it has always been extraordinarily small…
A month after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, blood seems to be rushing to all the wrong places across the Commentariat, which has begun in earnest the predictable process of asking the public to dismiss fears of nuclear combat. Headlines of the “We’ll take those odds” variety are springing up everywhere, from the Seattle Times (“Atrocities change the nuclear weapons calculus”) to Radio Free Europe (“Former NATO Commander Says Western Fears Of Nuclear War Are Preventing A Proper Response To Putin”) to Fox (which had on Sean Penn, of all people, to say to Sean Hannity, “Countries that have nuclear weapons can remain intimidated to use them, and we’re seeing that now with our own country”). This is fast becoming a bipartisan consensus. Check out Republican Adam Kinzinger’s recent comment:

Now Biden has accused Russia of "genocide", a condition that pretty much requires a military response.
It's not like the U.S. has ever falsely accused someone of committing genocide before in order to justify an American military response. Like in Kosovo (here and here) or in Libya (here and here).

There is evidence that the U.S. has been much more involved in the war in Ukraine than we've been led to believe, and that the Pentagon is meeting in Ukraine to plan for a long, drawn-out war.
As for those NATO weapons that we are shipping to Ukraine, Russia rightly considers those to be legitimate military targets. So what will be our response when NATO trucks driven by NATO personnel get blown up in Ukraine?

Now Sweden and Finland are making moves toward entering NATO. Sweden doesn't matter that much, but Finland is a HUGE deal. In response Russia has been forced to move military forces to the Finnish border. So much for joining NATO is making Finland safer.

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CB's picture

with Russia for decades. It's been their ultimate raison d'être since they came into existence. I believe they will push to the point of nuclear war rather than lose to Putin.

‘Monumental provocation’: How US and international policy-makers deliberately baited Putin to war

‘The neocons bring chaos, the end of civilization and institutional organized crime which destroys people, civic infrastructure, and culture. They’re like a whirling dervish of demonic force,’ said former Bush official Catherine Austin Fitts.
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[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGq_Xvzn_3I]
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Who is to blame for the present crisis?

For this reason, Dr. Mearsheimer emphasizes that understanding “who caused this disaster is of tremendous importance because it involves assigning blame.” And since this calamity is so very serious, “the question of who caused it and who bears the blame really matters.”
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From the mid-1990’s we have seen a neoconservative U.S. foreign policy establishment intentionally press for policies supporting their agenda of “permanent revolution,” “hard politics” and an imperialism advancing a degenerate, anti-Christian, “progressive” agenda, by any and all means available. These include the elevation, arming, training, and shielding of pagan neo-Nazi war criminals in Ukraine, and the facilitation of ongoing bombardments and false flag attacks against civilian populations.

Catherine Austin Fitts who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, spoke of her experience working with neocons in Washington stating, “It was clear they were looking to get the bit in their teeth and if they got it, they would do any scale [of damage] you can imagine. They would do destruction to the whole planet,” if they were allowed to do so.

In further comments (edited for clarity) she also recalled how “when the Roman Empire conquered, they brought the infrastructure of education, roads, bridges and water systems.”

Comparing this to the record of the neocons in Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, she observed, “what you realize is the neocons bring chaos, the end of civilization and institutional organized crime which destroys people, civic infrastructure, and culture. They’re like a whirling dervish of demonic force.”

With tremendous chutzpah, the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington defied each confirmed warning signal in expanding NATO eastward, ever closer to the border of nuclear-armed Russia, including the “monumental provocation” of slating Ukraine and Georgia to be future members in 2008.

After Putin successfully impeded an escalation of their war for Israeli interests in Syria, with his 2013 intervention, the neocon cabal including Victoria Nuland, other establishment figures, along with their neo-Nazi allies on the ground, were successful at toppling the regime of a democratically elected president in Ukraine. This coup d’état served to exploit ethnic divisions in the country, sow the seeds of civil war and bait Russia to respond.

Since then, according to Karel van Wolfren, “one of the most respected voices in the Netherlands on geopolitics,” Ukraine was changed “from a relatively sovereign country into a country remote controlled by Washington, and in a more direct fashion controlled by the CIA for detailed operations, false flags, [etc.]… I don’t think anything important happened in Ukraine without the consent or the orders of the CIA [and] Washington.”

This would naturally include government bombarding of ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, the escalation of these attacks in January and February of this year, Zelenskyy’s statements announcing policies of “retaking Crimea” and floating the possibility of becoming a nuclear power, along with a continued posture aimed at prolonging the current war into an indefinite future, despite clear prospects for peace.
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"There is evidence that the U.S. has been much more involved in the war in Ukraine than we've been led to believe, and that the Pentagon is meeting in Ukraine to plan for a long, drawn-out war.
As for those NATO weapons that we are shipping to Ukraine, Russia rightly considers those to be legitimate military targets. So what will be our response when NATO trucks driven by NATO personnel get blown up in Ukraine?

Now Sweden and Finland are making moves toward entering NATO. Sweden doesn't matter that much, but Finland is a HUGE deal. In response Russia has been forced to move military forces to the Finnish border. So much for joining NATO is making Finland safer."

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

@Fishtroller 02
Russia needs a way to claim "victory" and save face.
Now is the EXACT worst time to put more NATO on their border.

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CB's picture

@gjohnsit
succeeded in freeing the Donbas. He has already put his nuclear forces on high alert.

NATO poses an existential threat to Russia.

Russia warns Ukraine it might strike Kiev

The Russian military said it could target decision-makers in Kiev if Ukraine continues attempting attacks on Russian soil

Moscow has so far refrained from attacking Ukrainian decision-makers, but if Kiev continues attempts to carry out acts of sabotage or conventional attacks inside Russia, this will change, the Russian Defense Ministry warned on Wednesday.

“We have seen attempts at sabotage and attacks by the Ukrainian military against facilities in Russian territory. If such attempts continue, the Russian Federation’s Armed Forces will strike at the decision-making centers, including Kiev – something we have so far refrained from,” explaned spokesman 2Major-General Igor Konashenkov.
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Russia demands that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two Donbass republics by force.

I wonder what will be revealed after Russia completes the Mariupol operation in the coming days?

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@gjohnsit

and threats to use nukes and not make a sovereign decision to join NATO for their protection?
I think history will look back at all of this and see mostly capitulation by the West and NATO to a man whose mind is captured by the "glory days" of Russia and doesn't care if he brings his own country down as long as he "gets" what he imagines is his.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

Pluto's Republic's picture

@Fishtroller 02

....of their People. That's what good Democracies do.

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@Fishtroller 02
I don't know where to start.

Actually I do know where to start: Let's not threaten and make paranoid the guy with all those nuclear weapons. I think that's the best place to start. Let's not ratchet up tensions even further, because, and this may be me being selfish, I'm not ready to die in a giant ball of fire right now.
Maybe you are, and that's cool and everything. But I have a few more things to do.

Secondly, this isn't 1938. This isn't Munich. While every warmonger in the world tells you that it's always Munich in 1938, it never actually is.
Diplomacy is almost always the best way to go. Finland never felt it necessary to join NATO for all these decades. But now, when the Warsaw Pact is no more, it's suddenly necessary? Bullsh*t.

[edit:] I apologize for the excess of sarcasm. That wasn't necessary.

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@gjohnsit

work in that scenario? He is fixated on the conquering, period. In the meantime, it is Putin's fault that Finland and Sweden are now considering NATO membership. Is it your suggestion that we all just sit tight and hope Putin realizes the errors of his ways? I repeat and will keep saying this...there is nothing that any of the players in all of this have done to justify Putin's war on Ukraine and the wholesale massacre of the Ukrainians. I don't care about 1938. This isn't 1938. This is 2022, and we have an international monster on the march. I haven't seen anything said here that points to solutions for this. Just a lot of historical finger pointing and conspiracy theories. And I have to say that all the great minds of NATO are sure struggling to figure it out too. I personally think that NATO should have figured out how to get some aircraft into Ukraine. It would have helped them tremendously and may have shortened this whole attack. Now, I am fully aware that this is not a popular opinion on this site, but it's also not formulated out of ignorance or "drinking the Kool Aid" as some have suggested, nor am I a Nazi sympathizer, as someone accused me of. I think this whole thing is a unique situation and needs unique solutions. In the meantime we now see the Russian answer to Blackwater, the Wagner Group has a presence in Eastern Ukraine and may have had something to so with the Bucha killings. It's all getting much more complicated and will continue to be so.

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"Without the right to offend, freedom of speech does not exist." Taslima Nasrin

@Fishtroller 02 @Fishtroller 02
that Russia’s incursion was paused several times during the first few weeks of the ‘operation’, specifically to engage in negotiations. These offers to negotiate were instigated by Putin. There was no indication of a willingness to negotiate any substantive matters by Ukraine’s negotiators.

Has Ukraine made any offers to negotiate since then that I may have missed? It takes both sides being willing to discuss concessions for a meaningful negotiation.

[edit to add statement of British mercenary recently captured by Russian forces]
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-da_4ccANE]

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“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024

snoopydawg's picture

@Fishtroller 02

I personally think that NATO should have figured out how to get some aircraft into Ukraine. It would have helped them tremendously and may have shortened this whole attack

Guess you haven’t seen how much military equipment we’ve been sending to Ukraine for the last 8 years? And are still being sent. But if you think that if NATO sends some aircraft to Ukraine that would shorten the war then you might be right. That’s pretty much guaranteeing that nuclear weapons start flying.

As for Putin not picking up the phone and talking to Biden’s mouthpieces he tried doing that for 8 years but was ignored. Minsk agreement remember? And before Russia went in to defend itself against NATO Putin did try to find ways to deescalate the situation. HE WAS IGNORED. This isn’t a war between Ukraine and Russia. It’s a proxy war for all the marbles and which country gets to decide how the game is played. It’s why Biden’s sending in billions upon billions in weapons.

This escalation scenario for Russia, however, risks turning the Ukraine crisis into a new ‘great patriotic war’ – that is, a conflict in which the survival of the nation itself is at stake. Why so? The United States and its allies have made it no secret that they want the war to end in failure for Russia. Some of them would like nothing more than for a military failure to precipitate the downfall of President Putin and the government – even if the only straight-up regime change call was ostensibly a slip of the tongue by US President Joe Biden. This confirms the Kremlin’s long-held suspicions about the true intentions of the West and the goals behind the expansion of NATO.

In conclusion, this means we’re now going into very dangerous territory. The US and its allies could not be clearer that they never wanted peace or compromise and are escalating the situation in Ukraine as a bid to affirm their own geopolitical hegemony over the world, be it against Russia, India, or China. For Russia, this becomes an ever-growing struggle against the Western bid to dominate, coerce, and subjugate their country, with Ukraine as the sacrificial pawn.

You are entitled to your opinion, but not to the facts. If Russia was as bad as you think they are most of Ukraine would be in rubbles and there would be way more civilian deaths.

Russia is trying to end the war that we started 8 years ago without destroying much of the infrastructure. They have said as much. You don’t have to believe that, but it’s what the facts are. Not my facts. The ones you keep ignoring.

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Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?

CB's picture

@Fishtroller 02

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(From your posts here I sincerely doubt that you will even read it)

Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's historic mandate for peace
In 2019, Zelensky was elected on an overwhelming mandate to make peace with Russia. As Stephen F. Cohen warned that year, the US chose to side with Ukraine's far-right and fuel war.

On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).

The House was gearing up to impeach Donald Trump for freezing weapons shipments to Ukraine while pressuring its government to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The Beltway media was consumed with frenzy of a presidency in peril. But Professor Cohen, one of the leading Russia scholars in the United States, was concerned with what the impeachment spectacle in Washington meant for the long-running war between the US-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas.

At that point, Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky was just months into an upstart presidency that he had won on a pledge to end the Donbas conflict. Instead of supporting the Ukrainian leader's peace mandate, Democrats in Congress were impeaching Trump for briefly impeding the flow of weapons that fueled the fight. As his Democratic allies now like to forget, President Obama refused to send these same weapons out of fear of prolonging the war and arming Nazis. By abandoning Obama’s policy, the Democrats, Cohen warned, threaten to sabotage peace and strengthen Ukraine's far-right.

"Zelensky ran as a peace candidate," Cohen explained. "He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin." But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists "have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine."
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In April 2019, Zelensky was elected with an overwhelming 73% of the vote on a promise to turn the tide. In his inaugural address the next month, Zelensky declared that he was "not afraid to lose my own popularity, my ratings," and was "prepared to give up my own position – as long as peace arrives."

But Ukraine's powerful far-right and neo-Nazi militias made clear to Zelensky that reaching peace in the Donbas would have a much higher cost.

"No, he would lose his life," Right Sector co-founder Dmytro Anatoliyovych Yarosh, then the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, responded one week after Zelensky's inaugural speech. "He will hang on some tree on Khreshchatyk - if he betrays Ukraine and those people who died in the Revolution and the War."
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Indeed, on April 5, the Washington Post made clear the prevailing viewpoint in Washington and Brussels: "For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe." While rhetorically claiming to support Ukrainian agency, in reality, the Post added, "there are limits to how many compromises some in NATO will support to win the peace." This is undoubtedly the message being relayed to Zelensky from the White House in what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan described as "near-daily contact" with Zelensky’s team about the negotiations with Russia.

In sabotaging Zelensky's peace mandate to side with the Ukrainian far-right, the US pushed Ukraine into a calamity that Professor Cohen warned about nearly three years ago.

"There were moments in history, political history, when there’s an opportunity that is so good and wise and so often lost, the chance," Cohen told me in October 2019. "So, the chance for Zelensky, the new president who had this very large victory, 70 plus percent to negotiate with Russia an end to that war, it’s got to be seized. And it requires the United States, basically, simply saying to Zelensky, 'Go for it, we’ve got your back.'"

By choosing to ignore the pleas of lonely voices like Cohen to instead have the back of Ukraine's far-right, Washington sabotaged a historic peace mandate and helped provoke a catastrophic war.

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@Fishtroller 02

More tit for tat and then we’re back in the Cuba missile crisis again.

One of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest allies warned NATO on Thursday that if Sweden and Finland joined the U.S.-led military alliance then Russia would deploy nuclear weapons and hypersonic missiles in an exclave in the heart of Europe.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that should Sweden and Finland join NATO then Russia would have to strengthen its land, naval and air forces in the Baltic Sea.

Medvedev also explicitly raised the nuclear threat by saying that there could be no more talk of a "nuclear free" Baltic — where Russia has its Kaliningrad exclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania.

"There can be no more talk of any nuclear-free status for the Baltic — the balance must be restored," said Medvedev, who was Russian president from 2008 to 2012.

Russia has already put its nuclear weapons on standby because we keep doing war games in their backyard and they don’t want to be caught off guard. Besides it was exactly this kind of crap that Russia has said they’ve had enough of. Funny how many countries suddenly feel that they are threatened by Russia when Russia has watched as NATO has moved in next door in so many countries. Russia says that it has the right to self defense.

Biden could be looking for ways to end the conflict between them, but instead he is throwing gas on the situation and he has the blessings from lots of people who should know better.

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Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?

CB's picture

@Fishtroller 02
threatened by Putin's Russia. The originator of this conflict lies with the US and Great Britain which have instigated the escalation of military attacks by Kiev on the Russian speaking civilians of the Donbas since the fall of 2021.

Educate yourself!

The DPR warns about the Ukrainian army’s preparations for sabotage and the resumption of the conflict in the Donbass
22/01/2022

On 19 and 21 January 2022, the DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) People’s Militia reported that it had recorded Ukrainian army preparations to carry out sabotage on the territory of the two People’s Republics, and to actively reignite the Donbass conflict.

As the hysteria over Russia’s upcoming “( imaginary) invasion of Ukraine” continues to grow in the West, the DPR People’s Militia has warned that the Ukrainian army is preparing to reactivate the Donbass conflict with provocations.

Thus, on 19 January 2022, DPR People’s Militia spokesman Eduard Basurin stated that the Republic’s intelligence services had obtained reliable information about the Ukrainian army’s preparation of acts of sabotage, for which Kiev wants to blame the People’s Militia and Russia.
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“Vital infrastructure in Gorlovka, Yassinovataya, Donetsk, Dokuchayevsk and other localities in the immediate vicinity of the line of contact is reportedly targeted. Transformers, water and gas pipes and power lines have been identified as priority targets. There are also plans to carry out a number of terrorist attacks on industrial sites with hazardous chemical production facilities,” added the DPR People’s Militia spokesman.

The ultimate aim of these acts of sabotage would be to blame the DPR people’s militia and the Russian Federation, thanks to videos showing the said sabotage, as well as pseudo confessions from “DPR deserters”.

“It is planned that these actions will be carried out under the guise of soldiers of the DPR people’s militia and special operations forces of the armed forces of the Russian Federation. All actions of the Ukrainian saboteurs will be recorded on video and then presented as evidence to international organisations. In order to implement the above scenario, six sabotage groups were formed within the 8th Special Operations Regiment of the AFU. They were trained by British specialists.
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The DPR People’s Militia has strengthened the protection of the most important infrastructure and asked the citizens of the Republic to be vigilant, and international organisations to pay attention to the criminal actions of Ukraine.

And two days later, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met in Geneva to discuss Russia’s demands for security guarantees, the DPR People’s Militia detailed the Ukrainian army’s preparations that the Republic’s intelligence services had detected.

According to Eduard Basurin, preparations by the Ukrainian army are taking place with a view to reigniting the conflict in the Donbass. The following is a list of the items discovered by the DPR’s intelligence services:

  • – Six Smerch multiple rocket launcher systems (300 mm ammunition) and two Uragan multiple rocket launcher systems (220 mm ammunition) with fragmentation ammunition were unloaded at the Krasnoyarmeysk railway station.
  • – Over the past two weeks, units of the neo-Nazi Right Sector Battalion and snipers from the 74th Reconnaissance Battalion and the SBU’s Alpha Unit have been deployed to the front line in the areas of Shumy, Maryinka, Taramchuk and Chermalyk. Enemy drones also conducted numerous reconnaissance missions along the front line.
  • – Artillery depots in the Kiev-controlled area of the Donbass are being actively replenished with ammunition.
  • – Reinforced training of the Ukrainian army’s NBC units is taking place at the Anadol firing range at the base of the 25th AFU brigade. This information raises fears of a risk of provocations by the Ukrainian army with the chemicals that were delivered at the end of 2021 to Avdeyevka and Krasny Liman.
  • – Recently, NATO countries have been actively sending weapons and military equipment to Ukraine. Within days, nine C-17 aircraft arrived from the UK, delivering more than 460 tons of lethal weapons, including about 1,000 NLAW anti-tank grenade launchers. And contrary to the assertions of NATO countries, which have repeatedly stated that not all the weapons supplied to Ukraine were intended for use in the Donbass, DPR intelligence services have received reliable information about the arrival of a large batch of NLAW anti-tank grenade launchers in the conflict zone, intended to equip the assault groups of the 25th and 95th Airborne Brigades of the AFU, and neo-Nazi battalions, when they attack and seize localities in the DPR and the LPR. These units have been trained in the use of these grenade launchers by British military instructors.

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All of this information, as well as the new delaying tactics of the US, which finally announced that the written version of its position and justifications for Russia’s demands for security guarantees would not be provided this week, as planned, but next week, seems to indicate that Washington is trying to buy time as Kiev prepares to escalate the situation in the Donbass, despite Moscow’s warnings.

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@CB

during the first week of April. It was one of the reasons why Russia went in on the 24th. They had also just found out about the bio labs and plus Zelensky said that he was going to have nukes in Ukraine again. As Russia has stated it was self defense.

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Was Humpty Dumpty pushed?

CB's picture

that goes with the theme of your diary.

SALON - Pimps of war: Neocons who fueled 20 years of carnage in the Middle East are back for more

The warmongering buffoons who drove the U.S. to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan are now eager for war with Russia

The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo-intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.

They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the defense contractors who lavishly fund their think tanks — Project for the New American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, the Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many murderous military interventions go bad. They are immovable props, the parasitic mandarins of power vomited up in the dying days of any empire, including ours, leaping from one self-defeating catastrophe to the next.
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I do not know if these people are stupid or cynical or both. They are lavishly funded by the war industry. They are never dropped from the networks for their repeated idiocy. They rotate in and out of power, parked in places like the Council on Foreign Relations or the Brookings Institution, before being called back into government. They are as welcome in the Obama or Biden White House as the Bush White House. The Cold War, for them, never ended. The world remains binary, us and them, good and evil. They are never held accountable. When one military intervention goes up in flames, they are ready to promote the next. These Dr. Strangeloves, if we don't stop them, will terminate life as we know it on the planet.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@CB C'mon Chris, run for President already!!!

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

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