Australian whistleblower David McBride just made the following statement on Twitter:

“I’ve been asked if I think the invasion of Ukraine is illegal.
My answer is: If we don’t hold our own leaders to account, we can’t hold other leaders to account.
If the law is not applied consistently, it is not the law.
It is simply an excuse we use to target our enemies.
We will pay a heavy price for our hubris of 2003 in the future.
We didn’t just fail to punish Bush and Blair: we rewarded them. We re-elected them. We knighted them.
If you want to see Putin in his true light imagine him landing a jet and then saying ‘Mission Accomplished’.”

As far as I can tell this point is logically unassailable. International law is a meaningless concept when it only applies to people the US power alliance doesn’t like. This point is driven home by the life of McBride himself, whose own government responded to his publicizing suppressed information about war crimes committed by Australian forces in Afghanistan by charging him as a criminal.

Neither George W Bush nor Tony Blair are in prison cells at The Hague where international law says they ought to be. Bush is still painting away from the comfort of his home, issuing proclamations comparing Putin to Hitler and platforming arguments for more interventionism in Ukraine. Blair is still merily warmongering his charred little heart out, saying NATO should not rule out directly attacking Russian forces in what amounts to a call for a thermonuclear world war.

They are free as birds, singing their same old demonic songs from the rooftops.

Tony Blair calls for NATO not to rule out military intervention against Russia in Ukraine

— Sky News (@SkyNews) March 15, 2022

When you point out this obvious plot hole in discussions about the legality of Vladimir Putin’s invasion you’ll often get accused of “whataboutism”, which is a noise that empire loyalists like to make when you have just highlighted damning evidence that their government’s behaviors entirely invalidate their position on an issue. This is not a “whataboutism”; it’s a direct accusation that is completely devastating to the argument being made, because there really is no counter-argument.

The Iraq invasion bypassed the laws and protocols for military action laid out in the founding charter of the United Nations. The current US military occupation of Syria violates international law. International law only exists to the extent to which the nations of the world are willing and able to enforce it, and because of the US empire’s military power — and more importantly because of its narrative control power — this means international law is only ever enforced with the approval of that empire.

This is why the people indicted and detained by the International Criminal Court (ICC) are always from weaker nations — overwhelmingly African — while the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why in 2002 the Bush administration instituted what became known as the “Hague Invasion Act”, saying military force will be used to liberate any US or US-allied military personnel from any ICC attempt to prosecute them for war crimes. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-WWII U.S. president would have been hanged.

This is also why former US National Security Advisor John Bolton once said that the US war machine is “dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply,” which “does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional.”

Bolton would certainly know. In his bloodthirsty push to manufacture consent for the Iraq invasion he spearheaded the removal of the director-general of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), a crucial institution for the enforcement of international law, using measures which included threatening the director-general’s children. The OPCW is now subject to the dictates of the US government, as evidenced by the organisation’s coverup of a 2018 false flag incident in Syria which resulted in airstrikes by the US, UK and France during Bolton’s tenure as a senior Trump advisor.

The US continually works to subvert international law enforcement institutions to advance its own interests. When the US was seeking UN authorization for the Gulf War in 1991, Yemen dared to vote against it, after which a member of the US delegation told Yemen’s ambassador, “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” Yemen lost not just 70 million dollars in US foreign aid but also a valuable labor contract with Saudi Arabia, and a million Yemeni immigrants were sent home by America’s Gulf state allies.

Simple observation of who is subject to international law enforcement and who is not makes it clear that the very concept of international law is now functionally nothing more than a narrative construct that’s used to bludgeon and undermine governments who disobey the US-centralized empire. That’s why in the lead-up to this confrontation with Russia we saw a push among empire managers to swap out the term “international law” with “rules-based international order”, which can mean anything and is entirely up to the interpretation of the world’s dominant power structure.

It is entirely possible that we may see Putin ousted and brought before a war crimes tribunal one day, but that won’t make it valid. You can argue with logical consistency that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is wrong and will have disastrous consequences far beyond the bloodshed it has already inflicted, but what you can’t do with any logical consistency whatsoever is claim that it is illegal. Because there is no authentically enforced framework for such a concept to apply.

As US law professor Dale Carpenter has said, “If citizens cannot trust that laws will be enforced in an evenhanded and honest fashion, they cannot be said to live under the rule of law. Instead, they live under the rule of men corrupted by the law.” This is all the more true of laws which would exist between nations.

You don’t get to make international law meaningless and then claim that an invasion is “illegal”. That’s not a legitimate thing to do. As long as we are living in a Wild West environment created by a murderous globe-spanning empire which benefits from it, claims about the legality of foreign invasions are just empty sounds.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.

You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound.

Before he became Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he responded that “the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say ‘the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,’ it’s simplistic.”

Bolton is now among the “experts” on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You’ll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don’t feel confident talking about something they’ve been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.

Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don’t need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it’s probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.

Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they’re just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called “war on terror”, but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.

the politico reporters snapping off tweets about how “if you haven’t really studied afghanistan, please, you don’t have to tweet about it” are the exact same people who will sell you the next war

— Nathan Bernhardt (@jonbernhardt) August 17, 2021

And the same is true of the other aspects of the status quo power structure: they’re meant to look complicated, but what you actually need to know about them to orient yourself in our world is fairly simple.

The systems of capitalism are very complex by design, and a tremendous amount of thievery happens in those mysterious knowledge gaps on financial and economic matters where only the cleverest manipulators understand what’s going on. But the basics of our problem are quite simple: money rewards and uplifts sociopathy. The more willing you are to do whatever it takes to become wealthy, the wealthier you will be. Those who rise to the top are those who are sufficiently lacking in human empathy to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead.

As a result we’ve had many generations of wealthy sociopaths using their fortunes and clout to influence governmental, media, financial and economic systems in a way that advantages them more and more with each passing year. This is why we are ruled by sociopaths who understand that money is power and power is relative, which means the less money everyone else has the more power they get to have over everyone else. They’ve been widening the wealth gap further and further over the years, a trend they seek to continue with the so-called “Great Reset” you’ve been hearing so much about lately.

You can spend the rest of your life learning to follow the money, studying the dynamics of currency, banking and economics, but what you’ll be learning is more and more details about the way the dynamic I just described is taking place.

Sociopaths rise to the top, the most powerful of whom understand that things like money, governments and the lines drawn between nations are all collective narrative constructs which can be altered in whatever way benefits them and ignored whenever it’s convenient. For this reason controlling the stories the public tell themselves about what’s going on in their world is of paramount importance, which is why so much wealth gets poured into buying up media and media influence in the form of advertising, funding think tanks and NGOs, and buying up politicians with campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative.https://t.co/mkk41xhtZK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 13, 2021

These powerful sociopaths tend to form loose alliances with each other and with the heads of government agencies as often as possible since it’s always easier to move with power than against it. So what you get is an alliance of depraved oligarchs with no loyalty to any nation using powerful governments as tools to bomb, bully and plunder the rest of the world for their own power and profit, and using mass-scale media psyops to keep the public from rising up and stopping them.

And that’s it, really. So simple it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Don’t let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what’s going on in your world. You can see what’s going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become.

Speak. You are infinitely more qualified to comment on the way power is moving in the world than the people who’ve been consistently wrong about everything throughout their entire careers yet remain widely platformed by the oligarchic media. If John Bolton gets a voice, so do you.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

Former National Security Advisor and literal psychopath John Bolton has a new opinion piece out in Foreign Policy titled “‘Bring the Troops Home’ Is a Dream, Not a Strategy”, which should surprise no one and enrage everyone at the same time. The fact that this reptile continues to be elevated on mainstream platforms after consistently revealing himself to be a bloodthirsty liar is all the evidence you need that we are trapped inside a globe-spanning empire fueled by human corpses.

John Bolton has pushed for deranged acts of mass military slaughter at every opportunity. He not only remains one of the only people in the world to continually insist that the Iraq invasion was a great idea, but has actually argued that the destabilization and chaos caused by the invasion cannot be attributed to Bush’s war because you can’t prove that “everything that followed from the fall of Saddam Hussein followed inevitably, solely, and unalterably from the decision to overthrow him.” There are harrowing accounts of Bolton threatening, assaulting and intimidating anyone with less power than him if they got in his way; he once threatened to harm the children of former OPCW Director General Jose Bustani because Bustani was interfering in attempts to manufacture consent for the Iraq war.

In an even remotely sane civilization, such a creature would be driven from every town he entered until he is forced to crawl into a cave for the rest of his miserable life eating bats alone in the darkness. Instead he is given the mainstream spotlight whenever he wishes while truthful and intelligent anti-imperialists are relegated to fringe blogs and podcasts. This would not be the case if we did not live in an empire that is held together by war and war propaganda.

And now look at me, off on a tangent before my article has even begun.

The American people are tired of foreign military engagements. Academics agree, Democrats almost unanimously agree, and even some Republicans agree.

But they are all wrong, writes former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton.https://t.co/hRVZlZfXu4

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) April 20, 2021

Anyway, in his Foreign Policy article Bolton argues that withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan would be a mistake, because it would lead to the nation being overrun by ISIS and al Qaeda.

“If the Taliban return to power in all or most of the country, the almost universal view in Washington today is the near certainty that al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others will resume using Afghanistan as a base of operations,” Bolton writes.

These are very strange words to have to type, but, John Bolton is right. There is a consensus within the hub of the US empire that that is what will happen. You can tell because that’s what the empire’s media have been blaring all year.

In a March article from Vox titled “The best case against withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan”, a senior fellow from the military industrial complex-funded think tank Center for a New American Security named Lisa Curtis explains that withdrawing troops can lead to a disastrous terrorist insurgency that will only result in having to send them back again.

“Let’s look at Iraq,” says Curtis. “When the US withdrew troops, ISIS rose and took over Mosul in 2014. We had to put troops back into Iraq and in even greater numbers, and we had to redouble our efforts to stem the rise of ISIS.”

A Bloomberg article from this month titled “Biden’s Afghan Pullout Is Risky Politics and Geopolitics” conveys the same message:

“And once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan, on grounds that it needs to focus on other priorities, it will inevitably become harder to summon the top-level attention and political will needed to stay on top of emerging threats. This is what happened in Iraq in 2013–2014: Midlevel officials were warning, publicly, that ISIS was on the march, but only after a third of the country had fallen did the issue reach the top of the Barack Obama administration’s agenda.”

A Financial Times article a few days back titled “Biden’s risky Afghanistan withdrawal” says the same:

“Biden himself is well aware of the risks. It was he, in 2011, who took charge of America’s final pullout from Iraq. Within two years US forces were sucked back into the region by the rapid spread of Isis across Iraq and Syria. Then, as now, the temptation to proclaim an end to America’s ‘forever wars’ trumped the benefits of retaining a US footprint to insure against new deterioration.”

Biden’s risky Afghanistan withdrawal https://t.co/2eamGjX3un | opinion

— Financial Times (@FT) April 18, 2021

We hear this same narrative over and over and over again whenever there’s talk about withdrawing US troops from a region, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria: this is going to be Obama’s disastrous Iraq withdrawal all over again. Obama withdrew the troops in the early part of his term, but by 2014 Iraq had become so overrun by Islamic State that they needed to return to fight them off.

This is because it has been Beltway Church doctrine ever since the rise of ISIS that Obama was wrong to withdraw troops from Iraq, and it is Beltway Church doctrine because there was a frenetic push to indoctrinate that narrative into Washington policymakers from day one.

As soon as it became feasible we had malignant warmongers like Dick Cheney penning op-eds about how bad and wrong the troop withdrawal was, effectively screaming “SEE??? It’s ALWAYS wrong to end wars!” to ensure that a reduced global military presence never becomes the new normal for the US empire. From that day onwards Obama’s Iraq withdrawal has been used to hammer home this narrative that withdrawing troops from anywhere is “risky” and irresponsible. There was a manic, almost orgasmic delight among warmongers at the fact that at last, at long long last, they finally had some evidence that scaling back military expansionism is bad.

The problem? It’s bullshit.

It’s bullshit for a couple of reasons, firstly because the US is not withdrawing from Afghanistan; it’s just privatizing the occupation. Mercenaries, special forces, CIA operatives and airstrikes will remain. And that’s assuming there’s even a troop withdrawal at all; as we sit here the US is actually beefing up its military presence in anticipation of Taliban retaliations for remaining in Afghanistan beyond the agreed-upon May 1 deadline, the logic I suppose being something like “We need to add forces to Afghanistan before we leave Afghanistan because we have to kill all the people in Afghanistan who want us to leave Afghanistan before we leave.” In any case the warmongers aren’t actually worried they’ll lose control of Afghanistan, they’re just worried about people becoming too peace-happy; they threw all these melodramatic fits when Trump sought withdrawals that never happened as well.

Secondly, it’s bullshit because the warmongers are lying about why the US re-entered Iraq in 2014.

This is absolutely a big part of the equation in Baghdad.

As one senior Iraqi official put it to me last night: “Remember [Soleimani] was the first to come help us fight ISIS. Without him, Baghdad and Erbil might have fallen.” https://t.co/srjgklk44e

— Katie Bo Williams (@KatieBoWillCNN) January 3, 2020

The US didn’t re-enter Iraq in 2014 to stop ISIS, the US re-entered Iraq in 2014 to stop Qasem Soleimani from stopping ISIS.

This is not a secret. In 2014 the commander of Iran’s Quds Force was already helping to beat back Islamic State in Iraq, and Iraqi officials reminded the world after his assassination last year at the hands of the Trump administration that Soleimani had played a key role in early victories in that fight. Iraq’s Sunni leaders had already been openly saying that they would turn to Iran for help if the US didn’t take the lead in defeating ISIS, and Iran was already demonstrating a willingness to put Soleimani’s notoriously effective fighting forces to work on that endeavor.

If the United States had been a normal country, and not the hub of a globe-spanning empire bent on indefinite global domination, the obvious choice in that moment would have been to let the people in that part of the world sort out their own affairs in whatever way seems best to them. Because the United States is the hub of an empire that cannot tolerate the idea of another power being dominant in an oil-rich region it seeks to control for geostrategic reasons, allowing Iran and Iraq to become allied that closely was unthinkable.

So, as usual, the narrative that westerners were fed about US troops being in the Middle East to “fight terrorists” was a lie. It was about geostrategic control of the world and its resources, just like it always is.

The so-called “war on terror” has never been about defeating violent extremist factions, it’s been about keeping the nations in the region from relying on Iran and its allies to defeat them, and about justifying endless military expansionism in a key geostrategic part of the world. It’s been about ensuring the US power alliance is the dominant military force in the Middle East, not Iran and other unabsorbed powers like Russia and China.

Qasem Soleimani was the best argument against the “war on terror”, and was the leader best suited for bringing the region out of danger from violent extremist factions like ISIS and al Qaeda.

That’s why he is dead now.

Iran’s Qasem Soleimani Is Guiding Iraqi Forces in Fight Against ISIS http://t.co/llLhALofql via @NBCNews pic.twitter.com/ZAdoYjROVS

— chadsdaddy (@chadsdaddy) March 15, 2015

The world does not need the US empire to police it. People can sort out their own problems around the world if they were only allowed to. Iraq and its neighbors can sort out their own problems, as can Afghanistan and its neighbors. The only violence at risk of coming toward America and its easily-defended borders is the direct result of the US empire’s relentless aggression and belligerence that has killed millions and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century. There is no reason we can’t all just let each other be, collaborating and trading in peace without all these invasions, occupations and toppling of sovereign governments.

The empire’s need to control the world’s affairs is like a macrocosm of the human ego, which also exists out of a fear that something bad will happen if I can’t remain in control of it all. But the world is forever out of control, and attempts to reign it in can only lead to disorder and suffering. Our species will not survive if we cannot collectively learn to relinquish the impulse to control, both within and without, and let life dance to its own beat on this beautiful blue world.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

There is indeed nothing unexpected whatsoever in Bolton exceptionably badly written – and yet for that very reason, extremely entertaining – new book. It certainly will go down in history as the worst written, gloriously inept and therefore unconsciously revealing American political memoir since Hillary Clinton’s account of her own hilariously bungled 2016 presidential campaign “What Happened” (which of course should have had a question mark to complete the title as Clinton revealed that she too didn’t have a clue what had really happened and why.).

For just like Clinton, Bolton is a self-absorbed, narcissistic psychopath – always the surest path to power, respect and fawning praise from the media in Washington. And unlike Kevin Spacey’s President Frank Underwood in the Netflix TV series “House of Cards,” he is an entirely unselfconscious and unaware one.

Also like Hillary Clinton (who may yet be elected President of the United States), Bolton brilliantly confirms the legitimacy of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in psychiatry. It is always the most stupid, incompetent and useless people who are the most convinced that they are the most brilliant.

Bolton’s new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” reflects this sublime egotistical and unimaginably narcissistic dream state from beginning to end. No title could be more inappropriate and more hilariously revealing.

For John Bolton, during his 17 months as National Security Adviser to the President of the United States, supposedly one of the most powerful and important positions on the planet, was never in The Room Where It Happened. He wa salways kicked into the nearest convenient toilet – the Room Where It Didn’t Happen. Bolton was only at the center of affairs in his own imagination: In all his career that was the only thing which never faltered, never let him down and never failed him.

But in that other dimension which the rest of humanity frustratingly and inexplicably (to Bolton) calls “The Real World,” it was a very different story.

For no National Security Adviser in U.S. history has been so un-influential and inept, and so cut out from the actual decision-making process as John Bolton.

It is wrong to suggest, as many have done, that Bolton owed his rise primarily to the Israel Lobby and the financial clout of casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Without doubt they both played their part, but Bolton clearly owned his inflated reputation in Trump’s eyes to his endless appearances on the Fox News Channel. If any other human being deserves the primary blame for his bizarre rise, it is clearly the late Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News for 20 years from 1996 to 2016 who promoted him so shamelessly for so long. But even Trump quickly discovered that to be a superficially impressive talking head on a platform dedicated to promoting him, Bolton did not need to actually have a functioning brain.

Bolton’s extraordinary record of unrelieved fiasco, failure and stupidity as national security adviser was clear at the time and his memoir adds nothing new to or surprising to it.

Nor is there anything original or worthwhile in Bolton’s supposedly frank and outspoken endless insults and slanders of Trump’s Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and current incumbent Mike Pompeo. All they reveal is that Bolton was bound to be an utter failure in any position of government because he could not work with or respect anyone and no one could ever trust him.

What this book does do is to reveal the Real John Bolton – an egotistical idiot who imagines that he is always right about everything and that everyone else is unimaginably stupid and inferior to him and therefore always wrong about everything.

In Bolton’s imagination the Room where he is always the Only Room That Matters. He is incapable of realizing that he has always been shunted aside into the nearest convenient lavatory so everyone else can get on with serious business.

Far from being the wisest and shrewdest of policymakers, as Bolton imagines himself to be, the value of his testimony comes because he is so stupid, so innocent and so sublimely unaware of what is really happening.

This extraordinary naiveté is what will make Bolton’s memoir of enduring significance. It is an unintentional comic masterpiece.

A thousand years from now, “The Room Where It Happened” may yet survive as a compelling explanation for why the great world-spanning American Empire collapsed so suddenly. For no society that elevates a figure of such exceptional comic ineptitude to such eminence, after swallowing the fantasy of his supposed “brilliance” for so long can possibly endure.

On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.

“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”

“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.

“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.

“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.

“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.

“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.

“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”

“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”

“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”

I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again:

John Bolton is right.

Bolton is of course not right in his pathetic spin job on the use of lies to promote military agendas, which just looks like a feeble attempt to justify the psychopathic measures he himself took to deceive the world into consenting to the unforgivably evil invasion of Iraq. What he is right about is that conflicts between nations take place in an “anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”

Individual nations have governments with laws that are enforced by those governments. Since we do not have a single unified government for our planet (at least not yet), the interactions between those governments is largely anarchic, and not in a good way.

“International law”, in reality, only meaningfully exists to the extent that the international community is collectively willing to enforce it. In practice what this means is that only nations which have no influence over the dominant narratives in the international community are subject to “international law”.

This is why you will see leaders in African nations sentenced to prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, but the USA can get away with actually sanctioning ICC personnel if they so much as talk about investigating American war crimes and suffer no consequences for it whatsoever. It is also why Noam Chomsky famously said that if the Nuremberg laws had continued to be applied with fairness and consistency, then every post-war US president would have been hanged.

And this is also why so much effort gets poured into controlling the dominant international narrative about nations like Russia which have resisted being absorbed into the US power alliance. If you have the influence and leverage to control what narratives the international community accepts as true about the behavior of a given targeted nation, then you can do things like manufacture international collaboration with aggressive economic sanctions of the sort Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is currently calling for in response to the the completely unsubstantiated narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters bounties to kill occupying forces in Afghanistan.

Sen. Schumer: “We need in this coming defense bill… tough sanctions against Russia.” pic.twitter.com/L3M9hZg0Xm

— The Hill (@thehill) June 28, 2020

In its ongoing slow-motion third world war against nations which refuse to be absorbed into the blob of the US power alliance, this tight empire-like cluster of allies stands everything to gain by doing whatever it takes to undermine and sabotage Russia in an attempt to shove it off the world stage and eliminate the role it plays in opposing that war. Advancing as many narratives as possible about Russia doing nefarious things on the world stage manufactures consent for international collaboration toward that end in the form of economic warfare, proxy conflicts, NATO expansionism and other measures, as well as facilitating a new arms race by killing the last of the US-Russia nuclear treaties and ensuring a continued imperial military presence in Afghanistan.

We haven’t been shown any hard evidence for Russians paying bounties in Afghanistan, and we almost certainly never will be. This doesn’t matter as far as the imperial propagandists are concerned; they know they don’t need actual facts to get this story believed, they just need narrative control. All the propagandists need to do is say over and over again that Russia paid bounties to kill the troops in Afghanistan in an increasingly assertive and authoritative tone, and after awhile people will start assuming it’s true, just because the propagandists have been doing this.

They’ll add new pieces of data to the narrative, none of which will constitute hard proof of their claims, but after enough “bombshell” stories reported in an assertive and ominous tone of voice, people will start assuming it’s a proven fact that Russia paid those bounties. Narrative managers will be able to simply wave their hands at a disparate, unverified cloud of information and proclaim that it is a mountain of evidence and that anyone doubting all this proof must be a kook. (This by the way is a textbook Gish gallop fallacy, where a bunch of individually weak arguments are presented to give the illusion of a single strong case.)

This is all because “international law” only exists in practical terms to the extent that governments around the world agree to pretend it exists. As long as US-centralized empire is able to control the prevailing narrative about what Russia is doing, that empire will be able to continue to use the pretext of “international law” as a bludgeon against its enemies. That’s all we’re really seeing here.

medium.com

Bolton is a dangerous and pathetic creature whose entire life is an example of how incomplete men with a talent for violence can rise in a late-stage cesspit of political corruption.

He is simply someone who has never been in a fight in his life who lusts for the power to kill, main and destroy anyone who dares challenge him. A pathology he’s had the dubious distinction of being able to act out in the real world on more than one occasion.

This will, hopefully, be the last article I write about his cretin because once his last fifteen minutes of fame are used up attacking President Trump in slavish interview after interview supporting his book, Bolton will be finished in Washington D.C.

This book is his gold watch for being a lifelong soldier in the service of the American empire and the neoconservative/neoliberal dream of global conquest. $2 million, a handful of residuals and a final victory lap for a life spent in pursuit of the subjugation of those he considers sub-human.

President Trump’s recent tweet about Bolton is a masterful bit of brevity being the soul of wit.

I gave John Bolton, who was incapable of being Senate confirmed because he was considered a wacko, and was not liked, a chance. I always like hearing differing points of view. He turned out to be grossly incompetent, and a liar. See judge’s opinion. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 22, 2020

And while Bolton spent the balance of his career in D.C. working nominally for Republicans, his lust for war served both parties equally well. That war lust was in service of the empire itself when Bolton was fired, and he turned against President Trump.

He was welcomed as a Hero of the Resistance by Democrats intent on impeaching the President after he was fired last year, one of the few good moments in Trump’s nearly four years at the helm of U.S. foreign policy. Given his involvement with Fiona Hill and Eric Chiaramella, the whistleblower whose testimony created the impeachment charges, Bolton really could be thought of as the architect of that process.

So, it’s no surprise that his book is welcomed as the gossip event of the summer by the media. But remember, this is a guy who refused to testify against Trump for Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff and that’s because he would have never stood up to cross-examination.

This is because, ultimately, John Bolton is a coward. And he’s the worst kind of coward. He’s the kind of man who deals underhandedly while hiding behind rhetoric in controlled environments to pursue his fever dreams of suppressing the Untermensch.

What we know now, thanks to Bolton’s unwillingness to keep his trap shut, is that things were as we suspected while he was in the White House. Every event that occurred was an excuse for Bolton to tell Trump to go to war. And every time Trump was led up to that trough to drink, he backed away causing Bolton’s mustache the worst case of sexual frustration.

Worse than that, Bolton sabotaged any hope of détente with Russia, North Korea and improving the situation in the Middle East. While he was right to hate Jared Kushner’s Deal of the Century for Israel/Palestine, he was instrumental in getting Trump to stay in Syria rather than turn over what’s left of its suppression to the people who actually want it to continue – Israel and Saudi Arabia.

In the end Bolton is really the best example I can come up with for the monolithic thinking that permeates D.C. Despite his best instincts, Trump took Bolton on because the potential talent pool is so thin.

Anyone with original ideas, such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, are more valuable in their current position rather than coming into an administration that is hamstrung by a permanent bureaucracy unwilling to change, or in open revolt.

There’s no profit for them to make the jump even if they wanted to.

This point has been in effect since before Trump took office when he wouldn’t stand behind his first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, who is still embroiled in the worst The Swamp can throw at a person.

Progressives, liberals and anti-imperalists I implore you to stop allying with this creature of The Swamp in his quest to do damage to a president you hate. Because by doing so you are strengthening the very people who are the architects of the empire you believe you are fighting against.

Because that’s who John Bolton wrote this book for.

He didn’t write it for you.

Bolton will ultimately be a foot note in the history books. A man whose only claim to fame was failing to allow a president to make some peace with North Korea and set the U.S. on a path to complete alienation with the rest of the world.

Because of the neoconservatives’ intense war lust, as embodied by Bolton, it pushed Trump, already an arch-mercantilist, even farther along the path of using economic pressure to force change on the world stage.

But, as I’ve been saying for years now, that is a strategy just as ruinous in the long run for the U.S. as Bolton’s cowardice urging use of a military — which he refused to serve in — to do his dirty work for him.

These are both expressions of an empire which refuses to accept that it is in decline. And it has invited the chaos now evident in cities all across the U.S. as our wealth has been squandered on endless wars for regime change overseas while building a regulatory police state at home.

That helped pushed the militarization of our local police, further putting them in conflict with a domestic population growing more desperate and reactionary on both sides of the political aisle.

Bolton’s projection of all the U.S.’s ills onto countries with no real ability to harm us physically ultimately was not only his undoing with Trump but the U.S.’s undoing as a leader of the post-WWII order.

And then there is John Bolton, a frustrated old man who believed he could redeem himself from draft dodging by starting a war with Iran. His golden moment with Trump which really made him look the fool he looks was probably his comment to the North Korean dictator about following the Libya model and what the U.S. did to Gaddafi when he fell out of line.

Bolton is probably the most unremarkable National Security Advisor America has ever had. Trump, to his credit, didn’t take his advice on key matters like Afghanistan, North Korea and, importantly, Iran where the U.S. president was minutes away from pressing the button and starting an all-out war in the Gulf.

What Bolton’s book tells us about the man is that he is a craven, self-serving individual who is only really interested in promoting himself. When the world needed Bolton the most, at the Mueller inquiry, he shied away from the cameras and the publicity and this is what Americans will remember him for.

The chronicles of his book are amusing, but of course are based on a revengeful, spiteful agenda of bringing Trump down, as, unlike others, Bolton chose to specifically publish months before the election, rather than in the weeks after it.

Trump not knowing that the UK was a nuclear power or where Finland was is quite funny, but not really shocking. Bolton of course paints a picture of Trump being a rambunctious cretin who could barely master the remote control on his own gorilla TV console, let alone understand the complexities of a trade agreement with even his most loyal sycophants like Mike Pompeo even writing in a memo that the president was “full of shit”.

All very amusing and which today is accumulating to become an aggregate source of satire probably for the next 30 years as America comes to terms with the fact that the U.S. president has the mental age of a demented primate and is tormented by torrents of insecurity and low self-esteem and can only visually grasp information if it is shaped so as to accentuate his enfeebled personality.

It really is all about Trump. And this is the darker side of the Bolton book which is worrying. Bolton doesn’t really reveal anything shocking, but merely confirms what we’re all really very worried about: Trump really is as self-obsessed like all mad dictators around the world.

And on that subject, the huge let down of the book is how Bolton confirms that the Democrats just stopped short of impeachment being successful if they would have gone the full nine yards and dug deeper. In reality the scandal of the Ukraine affair whereby Trump holds back aid in exchange for political favours was duplicated with other leaders around the world, like Erdogan in Turkey and in particular China. One of the reasons why Trump went to extraordinary lengths initially to speak up for the Chinese is a misunderstanding over whether Xi would help him secure a second term; when it became clear that the Chinese leader had no intention of doing that, and that, in fact, due to corona could barely keep his end of the bargain on the so-called ‘art of the deal’ Trump-China trade deal, then Donald threw a massive tantrum and hit China with sanctions over the very issue which he previously supported, Muslim concentration camps.

Bolton reveals that almost every single decision, no matter how small, were viewed through a tawdry prism of re-election at any cost – with a claim by him that Trump had ideas of running for three terms and was looking at how to re-write the constitution.

But the real stand-off between these two men came on Iran. Bolton obviously wanted a war with Iran after Tehran shot down a 130m dollar U.S. drone. Trump just saw body bags and a thwarted re-election and so the seeds of discourse were sown, which perhaps led to other decision of a similar vain. No one to this day in America can explain Trump pulling out of Afghanistan and making the Taliban – and enemy of 19 years – now a partner in “fighting terrorism”. Perhaps Trump is not merely stupid, which the book asserts quite vociferously, with numerous anecdotes of him failing to grasp simple facts that a high school kid could master, but actually losing his mind. Has dementia set in? The constant confusion in Afghanistan as Trump repeatedly confused the former President with the new one troubled Bolton.

Yet, a big part of painting a picture of Trump being a useful idiot is to promote Bolton as smart and noble, which the reader struggles to swallow in the end. Bolton was in the room where all this happened and didn’t have the balls to stand up to Trump on most of the stupid things Donald did as President. And that has to be a stain on Bolton’s character and something which tarnishes this kiss-and-tell tome. Most people who Trump hires are under-achievers, weak, sycophants who all have one thing in common: corrupt, like Trump himself. The king roach attracts a certain type of weak and delusional understudy whose chief performing skills are to lick boots and occasionally steal the limelight. Some master the art of staying in the job like Pompeo who my sources tell me has ambitions himself in the Oval Office. Read the book, but hold only contempt for Bolton, a fidgeting weasel of no great talent who really managed to achieve nothing while in office and who really should rename the book The room where I watched and did nothing.

As required by law, Bolton’s book was reviewed for classified information starting in December, and when the process was finished it was started all over again, making clear that the tit for tat over the contents was essentially political and unrelated to national security. Having failed to stop the publication, the Trump Justice Department will now move to take away Bolton’s earnings from the book, a tactic that originated back in the 1970s with CIA whistleblower Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval.” Critics of the security review process have noted that when a book says nice things about the government it is rarely interfered with no matter what classified information it might reveal, while a work that is unfriendly can expect to be hammered and delayed by the state secrets bureaucracy.

Why Donald Trump hired leading neoconservative John Bolton in the first place remains somewhat of a mystery, but the most plausible theory is that the number one GOP donor Sheldon Adelson demanded it. Adelson regards Bolton as something of a protégé and was particularly taken by Bolton’s enthusiasm for attacking Iran, something that the Las Vegas casino magnate and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu both passionately desired.

After months of an apparently difficult tenure as National Security Advisor, John Bolton was finally fired from the White House on September 10, 2019, but the post mortem on why it took so long to remove him continued for some time afterwards, with the punditry and media trying to understand exactly what happened and why. Perhaps the most complete explanation for what occurred came from President Donald Trump himself shortly after the fact. He said, in some impromptu comments, that his national security advisor had “…made some very big mistakes when he talked about the Libyan model for Kim Jong Un. That was not a good statement to make. You just take a look at what happened with Gadhafi. That was not a good statement to make. And it set us back.”

Incredible as it may seem, Trump had a point in that Bolton was clearly suggesting that North Korea get rid of its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic benefits, but it was the wrong example to pick as Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi gave up his weapons and was then ousted and brutally killed in a rebel uprising that was supported by Washington. The Bolton analogy, which may have been deliberate attempt to sabotage any rapprochement, made impossible any agreement between Kim and Trump as Kim received the message loud and clear that he might suffer the same fate.

Subsequently, Bolton might have been behind media leaks that scuttled Trump’s plan to meet with Taliban representatives and that also, acting on behalf of Israel, undercut a presidential suggestion that he might meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Trump summed up his disagreements with Bolton by saying that the National Security Advisor “wasn’t getting along” with other administration officials, adding that “Frankly he wanted to do things — not necessarily tougher than me. John’s known as a tough guy. He’s so tough he got us into Iraq. That’s tough. But he’s somebody that I actually had a very good relationship with, but he wasn’t getting along with people in the administration who I consider very important. And you know John wasn’t in line with what we were doing. And actually in some cases he thought it was too tough, what we were doing. Mr. Tough Guy.”

Trump’s final comment on Bolton was that “I’m sure he’ll do whatever he can do to spin it his way,” a throw-away line that pretty much predicted the writing of the book. Bolton has many supporters among hardliners in the GOP and the media as well as among democracy promoting progressive Trump haters and it will be interesting to see what damage can be inflicted on the president’s reelection campaign.

Pre-publication reviews have focused on the takeaways from the book. The most damaging claim appears to be that Donald Trump asked the Chinese government to buy more agricultural products from the U.S. to help American farmers, which the president described as a key constituency for his reelection. Bolton claims that Trump specifically asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy American soybeans and other farm commodities and, as a possible quid pro quo, Trump intervened to reduce some financial penalties imposed on the Chinese telecommunications company ZTE for evading sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

Also concerning China, Bolton asserts that the president encouraged Xi to continue building concentration camps for the Muslim Uighurs, a religious and ethnic minority largely concentrated in the country’s Xinjiang region. The context of the alleged comment is not clear, nor is it easy to imagine how the subject even came up, so the claim might be regarded as exaggerated or even apocryphal. Bolton was not even present when the alleged conversation took place and only learned of it second hand.

Other claims made by Bolton include that Trump didn’t know that Britain was a nuclear power and that Finland is not part of Russia. The book also describes in some detail how Trump spent most of his time in White House intelligence briefings presenting his own views instead of listening to what analysts from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offices had to say.

That Donald Trump was a poor student and is an intellectual lightweight has been noted by many observers. Combining that with his essential lack of curiosity about the world and its peoples means that he does not know much about foreigners and the places they live in. But it is both condescending and somewhat of a cheap trick by Bolton to pillory him for his ignorance.

The media’s vision of the most damaging charge, that Trump colluded with the Chinese, is, quite frankly ridiculous. Buying American agricultural products is in the interest of both farmers and the U.S. economy. Reducing penalties on a major Chinese company as a sweetener and to mitigate bilateral tensions is called diplomacy. Of course, anything a president does with a foreign country will potentially have an impact when reelection time rolls along, but it would be difficult to suggest that Trump did anything wrong.

The Bolton book has also been critiqued by some, including the New York Times, as the exposure of “a president who sees his office as an instrument to advance his own personal and political interests over those of the nation.” Bolton writes how “Throughout my West Wing tenure, Trump wanted to do what he wanted to do, based on what he knew and what he saw as his own best personal interests… I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my tenure that wasn’t driven by re-election calculations.”

Trump is, to be sure, a man who has subordinated the dignity of the office he holds to personal ambition, but he differs more in the pervasiveness of his actions than in the substance. Many other presidents have made many of the same calculations as Trump though they have been more restrained and careful about expressing them.

Finally, a number of editors who have read review copies of the book have observed how badly written and organized it is. If anyone is looking for a real indictment of Donald Trump and all his works, they will not find it in the Bolton book. Apart from the new information it provides, which seems little enough, it would appear to be a waste of $20 to possibly enrich an author who has been promoting and saying “more please” to America’s wars for the past 20 years.

Matt PURPLE

The world of arts and letters is atwitter this week. John Bolton has a new book coming out—provided it can clear the gauntlet of Donald Trump’s censorious rage, that is. Bolton’s tome is called The Room Where It Happened, and despite what the title might suggest, it contains no details about the author’s conception. Rather it’s an insider’s account of Bolton’s time in the Trump administration. Naturally this has elicited fury from Trump, who’s accused Bolton of trying to circumvent the government’s review process for the publication of manuscripts.

The New York Times explains:

The Trump administration sued the former national security adviser John R. Bolton on Tuesday to try to delay publication of his highly anticipated memoir about his time in the White House, saying the book contained classified information that would compromise national security if it became public. …

The Justice Department accused him of short-circuiting a government review that he had agreed to participate in for any eventual manuscript before even accepting the post in 2018.

Mr. Bolton is breaking that agreement, “unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public,” department lawyers wrote in a breach of contract lawsuit against Mr. Bolton filed in federal court in Washington.

The suit could have deeper implications, especially given the inevitable deluge of tell-alls that will gush forth from this administration. If Trump is willing to obstruct Bolton’s book—a step presidents rarely take—it stands to reason he could try to block future memoirs too. It’s an irony so sharp it’ll cut an onion: the fate of government transparency rides with John Bolton.

Yet it’s also impossible not to be overwhelmed by the sheer boredom of it all. Is anything here really surprising? Both men are behaving as they always behave. Trump is being peevish and trying to undermine a subordinate perceived as disloyal. Bolton is being conniving and trying to advance himself and his pro-war agenda. This, of course, is what Bolton always does. It’s why last year he undermined Trump’s call for a withdrawal from Syria, saying the U.S. would first need to guarantee the safety of the Kurds and finish off the Islamic State, conditions that aren’t really achievable. It’s why he more recently contradicted the president on North Korea, saying Pyongyang had no desire to ever give up its nukes. It’s why he left the White House in the first place, angry after Trump had the gall to suggest some sanctions on Iran might be lifted.

Bolton might have been willing to play the lunatic Jeeves to Trump’s rococo Wodehouse. But not if it meant sacrificing his pro-war agenda. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the two men, ultimately different in their international outlooks, parted ways. As for Bolton’s book, it will emerge eventually. But really, what’s the point? Bolton has teased that The Room Where It Happened confirms that Trump attempted to procure dirt from Ukraine on leading Democrats. That’s big news—yet Bolton also declined to testify about it in front of Congress during impeachment hearings, when it might have actually made a difference. Instead he preferred to sell his story. In which case, there’s nothing to see here. Just more career CPR by a war-happy Washington insider.

theamericanconservative.com

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton may have singlehandedly stopped Senate majority Mitch McConnell from simply acquitting Trump in the Senate impeachment trial and adjourning without witnesses or documents. Bolton publicly announced his willingness to testify before the Senate, after having stiffed the House proceedings. And then a manuscript of his forthcoming memoir of his time in the White House mysteriously showed up in the hands of New York Times reporters on the eve of the Senate vote on calling witnesses (Bolton denies leaking the text but says it has been with the NSC since late December).

Noah Weiland of the New York Times reported Jan. 26 that “During a conversation in August with Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolton mentioned his concern over the delay of the $391 million in congressionally appropriated assistance to Ukraine as a deadline neared to send the money. Mr. Trump replied that he preferred sending no assistance to Ukraine until officials had turned over all materials they had about the Russia investigation related to Mr. Biden and supporters of Hillary Clinton in Ukraine.” (These are crazy conspiracy theories Trump has bought into).

Since the Republican defense of Trump had derided the House witnesses as not insiders and insisted that there was no evidence that Trump squeezed Ukraine for his personal gain, Bolton blew a gaping hole in their entire defense case.

So the question is, what are Bolton’s motivations in all this?

He is not a principled person, as some believe, just a very conservative man. He is in his own way as much of an erratic maniac as Trump himself. I wrote last May,

• “Bolton is a sadistic bully who wants to dominate people. He never got to be more than temporary UN ambassador under George W. Bush because he had mercilessly tortured his office staff. Bolton likes to hurt people who are weaker than he. He is not after Iran because he is afraid of it. He is after it because it is one of the last countries in the world still bucking the US power architecture and which is too weak to resist an all-out assault. He wants to see flies walking on the Iranians’ eyeballs and wants even their dogs to be f–ked.

Back in 2005 when Bush tried to slip him in at the UN, people testified against him because of, like, the maniac thing. Time wrote:

“One charge came from Melody Townsel, who dispatched an impassioned e-mail to the committee about her encounters with Bolton while working for a private subcontractor on a 1994 U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) mission in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. Townsel says she wrote a letter to AID officials complaining about the lack of funds for the project from the contractor, a company that had hired Bolton as a lawyer. “Within hours after dispatching that letter,” Townsel told the committee, “my hell began. Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel–throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and generally behaving like a madman … Mr. Bolton then routinely visited [my hotel] to pound on the door and shout threats.” Later, Townsel says, Bolton falsely told AID and other U.S. officials that she was under investigation for misuse of funds.”

He chased her through the halls of a hotel in Kyrgyzstan throwing things at her. And when he could not physically intimidate her, he spread smears against her, saying she was corrupt.”

Bolton was an important part of the Bush Jr. propaganda campaign for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. He has wanted a US war on Iran for twenty years. Really wanting it. Like, waking up every morning and tasting it in his back molars. He is part of the covert MEK (Mojahedin-e Khalq or the People’s Jihadis) network that links the “Marxist-Muslim” organization seeking Iran’s overthrow with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Bolton was very upset that Trump did not bomb Iran last summer after it shot down an unmanned US drone.

So if he is not acting out of principle, what is driving him to intervene against Trump?

Well, it could just be the money. By making himself and his book manuscript central to the Trump impeachment proceedings, he could be trying to transform a minor memoir into a best-seller.

His motives could be more sinister and more consequential, however. What if Bolton is trying to get Trump removed from office? That would imply that he wants a president Pence.

Bolton and Pence are much more in sync than Bolton and Trump. Pence might well take a militarily more aggressive stance against Iran, whereas Trump steps back from the brink of all-out conflict. The very idea would make Bolton’s mouth water so much his mustache would wilt.

Mind you, Trump is fostering war with Iran by his policy of economically blockading it, and is a very dangerous man. But arguably Pence could be more dangerous if he could get in power.

All this isn’t a reason not to impeach and remove Trump. It is a reason to include Pence as a target for impeachment.

juancole.com