Us Foreign Policy 24
The Empire Has to Adjust its Policies
The Empire Has to Adjust its Policies
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Quoted by Strategic Culture, Zhang Jiadong, researcher and professor at the Center for American Studies at the Chinese University of Fudan, considers that the United States is learning to cope with its new status through a policy change.
After Donald Trump became President, the internal and foreign policy of he United States has experienced a dramatic turn.
Firstly, Washington has begun to look more closely at its internal affairs promoting the motto “America First” countering its previous policy and its own hegemonic agenda with an emphasis on sovereignty, reciprocity and nationalism.
Secondly, its openness and inclusion are gradually changing towards closedness and narrowness. (Regarding its treaties with China, U.S. behavior has become narrower regarding immigration and the treatment of Chinese expatriates).
Thirdly, Washington has gone from being a promoter of its version of justice in the abstract, to the defense of its interests.
There are those who believe that the United States has always been this way and what has marked the difference is the frankness of its new president. Others think that this is a gradual adjustment and Washington will return to the level of openness and inclusion it has always had.
When World War II ended, the United States was an integral leader. Its GDP represented more than 50 % of the world total, and its manufacturing production was between 60 and 70 % of this.
Militarily, it was stronger than all the other countries put together.
As the scientific and academic elites fled to the United States to seek asylum during the war, the country became –and remains being so– the scientific and academic center of the world.
From a financial point of view, the world’s main financial resources were in the in the hands of the United States.
The United States was considered the leader and liberator of the free world, despite the fact that it was the last important country to join the allied forces in the Second World War to defeat fascism.
Because of this, the U.S. was able to establish a huge hegemonic system. Although the Soviet Union had the capacity to challenge the United States in certain fields, such as the military, the U.S. emerged as the most powerful country in the world in terms of comprehensive national strength.
In the post-Cold War world, the political power of The United States reached its peak after winning the first Gulf War.
The United States almost completely dominated the world under the conditions of a uni-polar world order.
However, everything began to decline after the U.S. suffered serious economic and security setbacks.
The September 11, 2001 attacks showed that their security was not absolute. The 2007 mortgage financial crisis revealed its economic vulnerability, and the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated that the United States needed outside support too.
Due to changes in the world order and its international stature, some U.S. policies that were effective in the past ceased to function. Trade used to be an activity by means of which Washington influenced the domestic and international policies of many countries.
Before China entered the WTO, the US used unilateral most-favored-nation treatment as a lever to influence some of the internal and external policies of China. It can no longer do so.
In the recent trade dispute between China and the U.S., some important steps taken by the U.S. have no longer been allowed by the WTO.
The influence of the United States on the trade of other countries has also shown signs of weakening.
Even in defense, its relative influence has been reduced, and more and more countries are increasingly developing their own sea and air defense capabilities.
During a long period after the Second World War, the United States had held the maritime hegemony. Now, the maritime forces of Asian countries such as China, Japan and India have been strengthened and more coastal States claim rights to their waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Although the United States sea and air forces have not yet been expelled, their freedom to operate out of its territorial waters and airspace has decreased.
With its leadership eroded, the United States has begun to change the nature of its policies and is trying to compensate for its diminished influence through adjustment, harassment and intimidation.
To avoid direct strategic confrontation with Washington some countries make concessions. “But, in the long run, the relations of the US with other countries, including China, will return to the logic of international relations”, according to the prediction of Chinese researcher and professor Zhang Jiadong..
May 6, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting POR ESTO as its source
Empire of Evil
The Empire of Evil Seen From Within
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“It is depressing to observe how the United States of America has become the evil empire. Having served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and in the Central Intelligence Agency for the second half of the Cold War, I had an insider’s viewpoint of how an essentially pragmatic national security policy was being transformed bit by bit into a bipartisan doctrine that featured as a sine qua non global dominance for Washington.
Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed the opportunity to end once and for all the bipolar nuclear confrontation that threatened global annihilation was squandered. Instead, President Bill Clinton chose instead to humiliate and use NATO to contain an already demoralized and effectively leaderless Russia.”
This is what American journalist Philip M. Giraldi writes in an article dated April 18, under the title “Rumors of War: Washington Is Looking for a Fight”.
American Exceptionalism became the battle cry for an increasingly clueless federal government as well as for a media-deluded public. When 9/11 arrived, the country was ready to lash out at the rest of the world. President George W. Bush growled that “There’s a new sheriff in town and you are either with us or against us.”
Afghanistan followed, then Iraq, and, in a spirit of bipartisanship, the Democrats came up with Libya and the first serious engagement in Syria.
In its current manifestation, one finds a United States that threatens Iran on a nearly weekly basis and tears up arms control agreements with Russia while also maintaining deployments of US forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and places like Mali.
Scattered across the globe are 800 American military bases while Washington’s principal enemies du jour Russia and China have, respectively, only one and none.
Venezuela is being threatened with invasion primarily because it is in the western hemisphere and therefore subject to Washington’s claimed pro-consular authority.
Vice President Mike Pence told the United Nations Security Council that the White House will remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, preferably using diplomacy and sanctions, but “all options are on the table.”
Pence warned that Russia and other friends of Maduro need to leave now or face the consequences. Russia has accepted that war is coming. By some estimates, its army is better-equipped and combat-ready than is that of the United States, which spends nearly ten times as much on “defense.”
Never before in my lifetime has the United States been so belligerent, and that in spite of the fact that there is no single enemy or combination of enemies that actually threaten either the geographical United States or a vital interest of the US.
According to Giraldi, Iran is also upgrading its defensive capabilities, which are formidable. Now that Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran, has placed a series of increasingly punitive sanctions on the country, and, most recently, has declared a part of the Iranian military to be a “foreign terrorist organization” and therefore subject to attack by US forces at any time, it is clear that war will be the next step.
In three weeks, the United States will seek to enforce a global ban on any purchases of Iranian oil. A number of countries, including US nominal ally Turkey, have said they will ignore the ban and it will be interesting to see what the US Navy intends to do to enforce it. Or what Iran will do to break the blockade.
But even given all of the horrific decisions being made in the White House, there is one organization that is far crazier and possibly even more dangerous. That is the United States Congress, which is, not surprisingly, a legislative body whose decisions are approved and is viewed positively by only 18 per cent of the American people.
April 19, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
The urgent need for a resistance front
from the left
The urgent need for a resistance front
If democratic forms of government have been subjected to the harshest tests in recent times, nowhere have they been so fiercely attacked and placed in such a serious disruption as in our America.
Author: Raúl Roa García | internet@granma.cu
November 4, 2018 22:11:08
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Peace is the supreme aspiration of the man who feels freedom as an imperative of conscience. Photo: Archive.
If democratic forms of government have been subjected to the harshest tests in recent times, nowhere have they been so ferociously attacked and placed in such a serious disruption as in our America. From south to north, military lodges, lords of the earth, merchants of power, wild oligarchies and big companies, in a sinister consortium, have been abolishing the fundamental freedoms of man and of the citizen, without the UN and the OAS giving them a break, The cynical adulteration of the popular will, or the violent substitution of constitutionally-elected governments by autocracies using typical totalitarian rhetoric, characterize this dramatic process, which threatens to be generalized to the whole continent.
Pseudo-Marxist fifth columnism and imperialist greed today lord it over a beam of invertebrate nations, at the mercy of unscrupulous swords, gamonales, politicians, bankers and businessmen. Scarce governments of popular roots, the majority undermined by administrative corruption, social imbalances, electoral demagoguery and colonial exploitation, complete this gloomy picture. There is no doubt that the fate of democracy is cast. The unavoidable urgency of forming a broad front of resistance to the unbridled aggressiveness of the enemies of popular liberties is obvious.
It is indisputable that the democratic conception of life, society and the state is consubstantial with the spirit and historical development of our peoples; but, no less, that conception is currently threatened by the most regressive and rapacious forces of our time.
The central question to be debated is how to galvanize the democratic regime, to the point of promoting, in the peoples, the passionate determination to defend it, at the price of life, in all contingencies and avatars. A democratic regime without economic content, without a broad social base and without the active participation of the people in the orientation of public power, is a useless piece of junk at this historic juncture of transition. There can be no room for circumlocutions or euphemisms.
The fundamental problem facing democracy at this time is how to organize society without compromising freedom. On a universal level, it is now imperative that democracy clearly distinguishes subjective rights from patrimonial rights. Questions concerning the human person can only be resolved with the “discovery and establishment of a fairer legal structure, which allows the problem to be reduced to its true terms”.
Economic rights can already exist only in function of society. No individual interest, which pretends to oppose the social interest, is legitimate. If we aspire for man to recover his “lost fertility” and to develop, to the full, his aptitudes and powers, it is indispensable to socially discipline things. The task ahead of the democratic movement is extremely complex.
In the particular case of our America, we have to count on what history has given us. In material and cultural terms, much progress has been made so far this century. Considering the process as a whole, we must agree, however, that the economic, social and administrative structure of the Latin American peoples is in need of a substantial transformation. This transformation must go hand in hand with respect for public liberties and an international policy of militant repudiation of all regimes that violate human dignity.
It should be insisted that only through clean elections, administrative honesty, public freedoms, economic welfare, social justice, diffusion of light and consolidation of sovereignty can the representative institutions in this hemisphere be saved. The opportunity is unique to provide content and historical projection to the fight against the American dictatorships.
The American states have acquired the commitment to guarantee freedom and justice to the peoples by signing the Charter of Human Rights in the UN Charter of the Rights and Duties of Man at the IX Inter-American Conference in Bogota.
Peace is the supreme aspiration of the man who feels freedom as an imperative of conscience. The role that the leaders of the working forces will play is of the first line. No one like them will be able to contribute the most urgent and effective formulas for social improvement to strengthen the democratic regime.
Nor can the problem of the industrialization of our America be uncontroversial. Increasing the economic potential of our peoples is one of the most effective means of strengthening and consolidating the democratic regime and of putting at bay the imperialists of every sign and of every bay.
The American states have made a commitment to guarantee freedom and justice to the peoples by signing the Charter of Human Rights in the UN Charter of the Rights and Duties of Man at the IX Inter-American Conference in Bogota.
Peace is the supreme aspiration of the man who feels freedom as an imperative of conscience. The role that the leaders of the working forces will play is of the first line. No one like them will be able to contribute the most urgent and effective formulas for social improvement to strengthen the democratic regime.
The problem of the industrialization of our America cannot be uncontroversial either. Increasing the economic potential of our peoples is one of the most effective means of strengthening and consolidating the democratic regime and of putting at bay the imperialists of every sign and every bay.
The way in which the most developed countries can contribute to this increase in our economic potential must be considered, in the light of this question: could governments that are representative and respectful of public liberties and those that are born of the usurpation of the will of the people and deny their governed the enjoyment of the essential rights of man and of the citizen, be placed on an equal footing with regard to this aid? Nor can the question of the recognition of de facto governments be ignored. On this matter ,there are no guidelines within the inter-American public law, nor unanimity of criteria in the chancelleries.
If democracy needs both America to overcome the deep crisis it is going through, it is essential that the policy of good neighborliness be effectively restored. After the death of Franklyn Delano Roosevelt, on many osions the “good guys have been us and the neighbors them. May the government of the people, by the people and for the people, cease to be the government in the name of the people, without the people and against the people! And may they live on an equal footing, in peace and harmony, the America of Juarez and the America of Lincoln!
(Excerpts taken from the book 15 años después [15 years later], Editorial Librería Selecta, Havana, 1950).
The Decline of U.S. Supremacy
The decline of United States Supremacy
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
There was a moment, between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the Great Recession of 2008, when, in the great United States, optimism about the global spread of US-style liberalism reigned.
It was believed at the time that the United States could use its economic, military, and political superiority to shape a new world order in which their manipulated versions of democracy, human rights, economic interdependence among nations and long-lasting peace would prevail.
During those years, many new members were admitted to NATO and the European Union.
The perspective that Boris Yeltsin’s Russia would become a neoliberal “democracy,” was considered a close possibility. And it was thought that China would be a “responsible” player in the international community.
But now, “we live in a completely different time,” says Stephen Walt in his new book entitled “The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy”, where he analyzes the spirit of today’s times.
The forecasts on the dissipation of the pre-eminence of the United States have become routine. Anti-liberal — left and right wing– parties and movements (many of the latter xenophobic) — have emerged all over Europe. Britain’s departure from the European Union is near.
Globalization is facing a violent reaction and intolerant nationalism is moving forward from Brasilia to Budapest.
Walt’s assessments about the US foreign policy after the Cold War, describe it as “visible failures without great achievements” and consider that, regarding both the general condition of the world, as well as Washington’s status within it, have declined significantly and steadily between 1993 and 2006.”
The liberal internationalist agenda is attractive, but according to Walt it is based on three erroneous assumptions.
(1) The first is that other countries would embrace liberalism mirroring the US style, despite the world’s political and cultural diversity.
(2) The second — which is widely shared by those responsible for U.S. foreign policy and influential members of the media, academia, and think tanks– is that the US could successfully promote democratic policies all over the world thanks to unipolarity. The democracy-building programs of alleged non-governmental organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the US National Fund for Democracy and the International Republican Institute arose from this belief. And when tougher measures are required, the foreign policy establishment considers that the U.S. military strength can defeat despotic regimes, win hearts and minds, and impose democratic policies.
(3) The third assumption underlying liberal internationalism is that the end of the Cold War will end up rendering the political balance of power obsolete, along with spheres of influence, and the nationalism based on blood, soil and faith.
For Walt, these assumptions constitute a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces that shape the world and, therefore, will inevitably lead to failure.
He believes that the madness and fiascos of the last twenty-five years have been a result of the blind commitment of this endogamy system with liberal internationalism: a vision of the world that unites Democrats and Republicans and Liberals and Conservatives alike, and that was adopted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
During these three presidencies, the supposed leader was the United States, which, for reasons of principle and self-interest, had to use its unequal power to spread liberal values all over the world. In practice, this meant designing a world in which the majority of the world’s countries — ideally all—would embrace the US pattern of “democratic” ideals, human rights, global governance, markets and rule of law.
Such an international order would not only preserve the preponderance of the United States but would also be safer. Such a belief has been fundamental for the credo of liberal internationalists because “democracies” do not make war against their peers nor do they massacre their citizens or produce bloodshed and agitation that can culminate in civil wars and broken states.
Despite the billions of dollars spent on its promotion, the US model “democracy” failed in 27 states between 2005 and 2015.
December 6, 2018.
Washington’s Policy Against Venezuela
Washington’s Exhausted Policy Against Venezuela
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“For those who have followed Venezuela closely in recent years, there is an inevitable sense of déjà vu in U.S. foreign policy toward the South American nation, because Washington’s strategy of regime change there is almost identical to the one it has adopted in Latin America on numerous occasions since World War II. It is a strategy that includes the application of economic sanctions, broad support for the opposition, and destabilizing measures to create a degree of human consternation and chaos that justifies a military coup or direct U.S. military intervention.
That is the introduction that Canadian writer and researcher GaryLeech makes to the readers of his most recent essay entitled “Business as Usual: Washington’s Regime Change Strategy in Venezuela” (GreanvillePost, 23/11/2018).
“Because of how well the strategy has worked for the United States for more than half a century, our elected leaders see no reason not to use it with respect to Venezuela. In other words, from Washington’s perspective, their policies of regime change toward Venezuela constitute the coda of a business that is already customary in Latin America,” Leech says.
This strategy of regime change does not take into account whether it is a democratically-elected government or the human rights consequences of such interventions. Virtually all the Latin American governments that the United States has successfully overthrown in the last 65 years had been democratically elected.
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (2004) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2009) have been democratically elected leaders who have been ousted by coups d’état using such methods. Washington pressured all these leaders with economic sanctions and destabilization campaigns that created the economic chaos and humanitarian crises necessary to justify a military solution in their nations.
The common denominator in all these cases has nothing to do with democracy or human rights, but with the fact that the scaled-down governments prioritized the interests of their own people over U.S. provisions.
This was demonstrated by the attitude of CIA director George Tenet during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February 2002, when he declared that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “probably does not have the interests of the United States in mind” and two months later, Washington promoted a military coup that attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan leader.
That was the first of many failed U.S. attempts to overthrow Chavez after his electoral victory in 1998. After that failure, Washington multiplied its efforts to install a government in Caracas with its heart set on the interests of the United States.
It increased support for opposition groups by increasing funds for USAID programs dedicated to the goal of turning the population against the government. Wikileaks published a classified headline sent from the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela to Washington in 2006 that clearly stated that USAID funding for local programs sought to influence community leaders by slowly moving them away from “chavismo” and stated that the embassy’s broader goal should be to “isolate Chávez internationally.”
In 2015, President Obama signed a presidential order designating Venezuela as an “extraordinary threat to national security” and explained that U.S. law requires his administration impose sanctions on detractors of his country. On that basis, two years later, Trump declared that he would not rule out a “military option” against Venezuela.
The major U.S. media have played their propaganda role with a narrative aimed at demonizing a Venezuelan government and calling Chávez and Maduro authoritarian, anti-democratic and even dictatorial. They have also focused their attention on food shortages and an alleged humanitarian crisis that would lead Venezuelans to ignore the extraordinary social advances made in education, housing, poverty reduction, participatory democracy, and to abandon their homeland.
In foreign policy, it reproduces measures successfully implemented in past decades that overthrew governments that did not have “U.S. interests at heart.
The strategy of undermining democracy and imposing economic difficulties to achieve regime change worked in several Latin American countries, but this time, with the Venezuelan people, Washington might have run into the last of their shoes.
November 29, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
What’s Behind the War on China
What’s Behind the War on China
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In geopolitics, it is rare that events are what they seem to be. This is especially true when we look closely at the strange “war” launched by Trump this spring under the guise of a trade war “to make up for the enormous annual deficit in the U.S. trade balance, the most extreme of which is that of China.”
The real motor force for Washington’s tariff war attacks on China can only be understood when we look at it through the prism of the U.S. Administration’s most recent report on the industrial base of US defense industry.
That’s how F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and U.S. professor based in Germany, understands it.
Coming out of the work of a special group charged with it a year ago, by a little-known Presidential Executive Order, the report is a detailed analysis of the sufficiency or incompetence of the industrial supply chain that feeds the vital elements of the U.S. armed forces.
The declassified version of the report cites 300 vulnerabilities or gaps in the nation’s military industrial base. It reveals in great detail that the national economy can no longer provide the basic essentials of national defense as a consequence of globalization and industrial outsourcing.
He details the dramatic shortage of skilled workers in areas such as machining, welding, and engineering. Vital machine-tools are imported, mostly from Germany, a country with which Washington does not have the best relations at present.
Many small suppliers of the main sub-components are specialized from a single source, many of whom are on the verge of insolvency due to U.S. budgetary uncertainties in recent years.
The defense industry depends on China for virtually all of its rare earth metals, as the set of naturally scarce metals that are vital to various technological applications of the military industry are known.
Since the 1980s, domestic metal mining in the United States has virtually collapsed for economic reasons, as suppliers moved to China in search of cheaper sources.
Today, 81% of the rare earth metals needed by military equipment, superconductors, smartphones and other high-tech applications come from China.
The report says that in many cases, the only remaining producer of critical materials is on the verge of shutting down its U.S. factory and importing lower-cost materials from the same foreign producer that forced them to abandon domestic production.
It highlights the alarming potential bottlenecks from dependence on a single source for the propeller shafts of navy ships, cannon towers for tanks, fuel for rockets and space-based infrared detectors for missile defense, among others.
The report is the most comprehensive critical look at the military industrial base that has been made since the early Cold War years in the 1950s. It blames U.S. arms companies for relying on vital components outsourced to China, which it sees as the United States’ greatest strategic threat.
Today Asia produces 90% of the world’s printed circuit boards and half are made in China. Beyond relying almost entirely on Chinese suppliers of rare earth metals, the Department of Defense contracts the acquisition of weapons with the largest consortiums. These in turn subcontract in their supply chain to the most efficient, which are often those of China.
It is claimed that the US defense industry depends on Chinese producers for 100% of its rare earth materials. A report by the Government Accountability Office in 2016 described the issue as fundamental to national security.
The main conclusion of the report is that “China poses a significant and growing risk to the supply of materials considered strategic and critical to U.S. national security.”
This also explains why the focus of the Trump Administration’s current trade war against China is, in fact, to press China to abandon its Made in China 2025 agenda, which aims to bring China to dominate advanced technologies in the coming decades.
The report states that “China’s dominance in the market for rare earth elements illustrates the potentially dangerous interaction between economic aggression against China, guided by strategic industrial policies, vulnerabilities and gaps in the U.S. manufacturing and defense industrial base.”
November 26, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Cure for Terrorism Worse Than the Disease
Cure for Terrorism Only Makes Things Worse
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The “wars against terrorism” waged by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, have caused the death of half a million people, according to a study released by Brown University, which is based in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.
Brown is an important private center of advanced studies and research that is part of the Ivy League. Brown brings together the most accredited and exclusive private universities on the East Coast of the United States, where a high proportion of the political, intellectual, scientific and business leaders of that country graduate.
The surprising new study by Brown University reveals that between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed during the U.S. Wars after September 11, 2011.
The study examined the three “war on terror” conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – the latter as an extension of the Afghan war and the focus of U.S. drone attacks.
The half a million deaths include those of combatants and civilians due to direct fighting and war violence. However, the number could be much higher, given that the study did not take into account the perhaps much higher number of civilians killed by infrastructure damage, such as the disablement of hospitals or water supplies, or other indirect results of war.
Tragically, civilians account for more than 50% of the approximately 500,000 deaths. The study further estimates that both U.S.-backed foreign forces and opposition militants each suffered more than 100,000 deaths.
As for U.S. forces, the report reveals that more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers were killed or injured in the three previously-mentioned conflicts after September 11. This includes 6,951 U.S. military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since U.S. invasions of those countries in 2001 and 2003.
As for the seventeen years of the so-called “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, the study concluded, according to the Voice of America (VOA), that in October 2018 deaths in Afghanistan numbered about 147,000 people, including Afghan security forces, civilians and opposition fighters. The figure also includes the deaths of 6,334 U.S. soldiers and contractors, as well as more than 1,100 allied soldiers.
In particular, Brown University’s study makes explicit reference to attempts by the U.S. government to “paint an optimistic picture” of wars, which has prevented the American public from knowing the true extent of the civilian casualties from the United States and other countries.
A recently-published study entitled Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency denounces the fact that: “Full accounting of the total death toll has been “prohibited by governments interested in painting a promising picture of perfect execution and progress” but also points out that war chaos and inaccessibility of dangerous places prevent narrower, more truthful and accurate accounting.
In fact, the total number of direct deaths in these wars may never be known. For example, tens of thousands of civilians may have died in retaking Mosul and other cities held by the Islamic State (ISIS), but most likely their bodies have not been recovered.
In addition, this figure does not include “indirect deaths”. Indirect damage is damage that occurs when the destruction or damage of wars has long-term consequences for the health of people in war zones. For example, due to disruption of access to food, water, sanitation, electricity or other infrastructure.
Estimates compiled in the past by independent monitoring groups and survey organizations have put the death toll in Iraq at more than one million people.
November 12, 2018.
Trump Could Bring Down the US Empire
Trump Could Bring Down the US Empire
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
More than any other presidency in the modern history of the United States, Donald Trump’s has been a permanent threat of socio-political shipwreck. He has deliberately excited and fuelled conflicts, involving xenophobic and racist currents in society, with an always nasty political discourse. Trump’s eccentricities have been widely highlighted by the press, but his attacks on the U.S. military presence in the world and its commitments to that end have received far less attention.
Such is the essence of an essay by journalist and historian Gareth Porter, published on the website TRUTHDIG.
Trump had come to the White House with a commitment to end U.S. military interventions. This was based on a worldview in which wars for military domination have no place. In the last speech of his victory tour in December 2016, Trump promised: “Let’s stop tearing down foreign regimes that we shouldn’t have been involved with. Instead of investing in wars, we will invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure…”.
At a meeting in the summer of 2017, where Defense Secretary James Mattis defended new military measures against the Islamic State in North Africa, Trump expressed his displeasure at the endless wars and Mattis claimed that “we are doing it to prevent a bomb from exploding in Times Square,” to which Trump replied, furiously, that the same could be said about anything that happened in any country on the planet.
Trump’s national security team was so alarmed by his questioning of military commitments and troop deployments that they invited him to the Pentagon. They were hoping to make him better understand their arguments with the usual rhetoric of the international democratic order based on the rules of globalism.
Ignoring decades of wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Mattis and other high-ranking officials argued that “this order is what has kept the peace for 70 years.” Trump shook his head in disagreement and diverted the discussion to a subject he found particularly irritating: economic and military relations with South Korea. “We spend $3.5 billion a year there to keep troops in South Korea,” complained Trump. “I don’t know why they’re there. Let’s bring them all home!”
In September 2017, while Trump threatened to destroy North Korea in tweets, he privately held an opinion against the presence of troops in South Korea and his determination was to eliminate it, according to Bob Woodward.
Political-diplomatic events with the two Koreas in early 2018 reinforced Trump’s view that U.S. troops should withdraw from there, so he accepted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer to hold a summit.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to study options for the withdrawal of these U.S. troops. That idea was viewed by the media and most of the U.S. national security elite as completely unacceptable. But the Pentagon’s military and intelligence specialists long knew that U.S. troops were not needed to deter North Korea or defend against an attack through the demilitarized zone.
Trump’s willingness to practice personal diplomacy with Kim was driven by his ego, but also by the idea that it would contribute to ending or attenuating the deployment of troops in South Korea. Obviously, such a thing could not happen without a clear rejection of the national security ideology that had dominated Washington’s elites for generations.
Bob Woodward tells in his book “Fear in the White House” that Trump was eager to put an end to the three great wars inherited from Barack Obama: in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, about which he said in July 2017 that he was very tired.
“We should proclaim victory, end wars and bring our troops home,” he said, repeating the political tactic with which Washington covered up its defeat in Vietnam in 1966.
Trump feared he would be held responsible for the consequences of defeat in a war. This was the same fear that had led Lyndon Johnson to abandon his strong resistance to large-scale intervention in Vietnam in mid-1965 and Barack Obama to accept a major escalation in Afghanistan that he had been objecting to.
Trump’s mercantilist worldview poses economic dangers for the United States that may lead him to reject the tactics of multiple permanent wars. But his unorthodox approach has encouraged him to challenge the essential logic of the U.S. military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his administration will surely bring him more struggles over these issues with those in charge of the empire, predicts Gareth Porter in Truthdig.
October 22, 2018.
This article can be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Brazil: Birth of a Monster
Pagina 12 (Argentina)
Birth of a Monster
By Atilio Boron
October 7, 2018
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
[reformatted for web-readability)
In a smelly tavern in the slums of Munich in the first post-war period, a demobilized corporal of the Austrian imperial army – failed as a painter and portraitist – tried to make a living by betting on local drunks that they could not hit him with their spittle from a distance of three meters. If he dodged them, he won; when he didn’t, he had to pay.
Between attempts, he shouted tremendous anti-Semitic insults, cursed Bolsheviks and Spartacists, and promised to eradicate gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews from the face of the earth. All in the midst of the uncontrolled shouting of the clientele gathered there, passing alcohol, and repeating with mockery their sayings while they threw the remains of beer from their cups and threw coins between insults and laughter.
Years later, Adolf Hitler would become, with the same harangues, the leader “of the most cultured people in Europe”, according to Friedrich Engels more than once. Who in those moments – 1920, 21, 23 – was the reason for the cruel sarcasm among the parishioners of the tavern would resurrect as a kind of demigod for the great masses of his country and the very embodiment of the German national spirit.
Bridging the gap, something similar is happening with Jair Bolsonaro, who comfortably leads the polls in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. His reactionary, sexist, homophobic, fascist outbursts and his apology of the gloomy Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964 and his tortures provoked widespread repulsion in society.
For that reason, for two years, his voting intention never exceeded 15 or 18 percent. The polls of the last two weeks, however, show a spectacular growth in his candidacy. The most recent one assigns him 39 percent voting intention. We know that today’s public opinion polls have enormous margins of error. There can also be media operations of the Brazilian bourgeoisie willing to install in Brasilia anyone who prevents the “return of petista populism” to power.
But we also know, as a recent note by Marcelo Zero in Brazil states, that the CIA and its local allies have unleashed an overwhelming avalanche of “fake news” and defamatory news about the candidates of the petista alliance that found fertile ground in the favelas and popular neighborhoods of the big cities of that country.
These sectors were lifted out of extreme poverty and empowered by the administration of Lula and Dilma. But they were not educated politically nor was their territorial organization favored. They remained as masses in availability, as the sociologists of the sixties would say.
Those who are organizing and raising awareness are the evangelical churches with whom Bolsonaro has allied himself, promoting a harsh, hyper-critical conservative discourse about the “disorder” caused by the left in Brazil with its policies of social inclusion, gender, respect for diversity, LGBTI and its “soft hand” with delinquency, its obsession for human rights “only for the criminals”.
One of their means of attracting favelados to the cause of the radical right is to send so-called pollsters to ask them if they would like their son José to be renamed and called María, to exacerbate homophobia. The answer is unanimously negative, and indignant. The former captain’s preaching is clearly in tune with that popular conservatism skillfully stimulated by reaction.
In this ideological climate, his scandalous and violent nonsense, such as Hitler’s, decant as reasonable popular common sense and could catapult a monster like Bolsonaro to the Palace of the Planalto. By the way, as an additional fact, it should be remembered that he promised Donald Trump to authorize the installation of a U.S. military base in Alcántara, something the petite governments refused. If it were to succeed, it would be the beginning of a horrible nightmare, not only for Brazil but for all of Latin America.
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US OKs Interfering in Others’ Elections
US Justifies Interfering in Others’ Elections
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“When we try to manipulate or influence the elections of other nations, or even when we have wanted to overthrow their governments, we have done so in the best interests of the people of those countries.” Such a tender philosophy was the one that James Robert Clapper Jr, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), declared before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C.. Clapper did this on May 8, 2018, with all naturalness, trying to justify Washington’s electoral interference in more than eighty countries.
In the same way, this gentleman expressed himself when he promoted his book Facts and Fears, where he tackles issues such as alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and in the Syrian conflict. In Syria, the United States has been the main support for terrorists seeking to overthrow the legitimate government of that Middle Eastern country.
The interference in the electoral processes of more than eighty countries throughout history was done thinking “in the best interests of the people” of these nations, Clapper reiterated in an interview granted to Bloomberg, when speaking of the American history of interference in the elections of other nations.
Clapper is remembered in his country for hiding the truth about the massive surveillance program developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) before it was brought to light by Edward Snowden.
Certainly, intervention in other people’s electoral processes has long been a recurring component of Washington’s foreign policy.
In Latin America, the expulsion from power of a legitimately-elected president is considered the most condemnable intervention, although they abound, practically, in the history of all the countries in the region. Jacobo Arbenz, in Guatemala; Salvador Allende, in Chile, or Joao Goulart, in Brazil, are just some examples that have preceded in time to the recent Manuel Zelaya in Honduras; Fernando Lugo in Paraguay and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
On a global scale, it is known that, in 1947, the U.S. forced the Italian government to exclude all communists and socialists in the first post-war cabinet in exchange for U.S. economic aid to rebuild Europe destroyed by the World War.
Thereafter, the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) did everything in its power, legally or illegally, to prevent the participation of Communists in the Italian government, while covertly financing Christian Democratic candidates there and elsewhere in Western Europe.
The Italian elections of April 1948 were the first in which the CIA’s intervention in the affairs of another country was felt. Without the CIA, the Italian Communist Party would have won those 1948 elections broadly.
From then on, for decades, whenever the Communists, either in alliance with the Socialists or on their own, threatened an electoral triumph, the United States raised the threat of exclusion from the Marshall Plan to prevent it.
The now-retired intelligence official explains that he wrote the book to inform the public of the “both internal and external” threats facing the United States, and to explain that President Donald Trump is not the problem of the American country, but only the symbol of a broader problem because “the truth is relative.
On February 13, U.S. intelligence directors warned the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that “Russia appears to be preparing to repeat the tricks it unleashed in 2016 as the 2018 midterm elections approach: cyberattacking, filtering, manipulating social networks, and perhaps others.
Days later, special prosecutor Robert Mueller used social networks to formulate accusations against 13 Russians and 3 companies run by a businessman linked to the Kremlin in order to attack Hillary Clinton, support Donald Trump and sow discord.
Most Americans were understandably impacted by what they saw as an unprecedented attack on their political system. However, intelligence veterans and academics who have studied covert operations have a different and rather revealing view.
If any government in the world totally lacks the authority and moral standing to condemn the interference of any nation, powerful or weak, large or small, rich or poor, in the internal affairs of another, that nation is the United States because of its long history of abuses against its enemies as well as its allies.
But for Washington to go out and denounce or protest the interference of any nation in its electoral affairs is simply an insult to the collective intelligence of humanity; an unacceptable shame from any point of view.
October 11, 2018.
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