By Ramzy BAROUD

Much has been said and written about media bias and double standards in the West’s response to the Russia-Ukraine war, when compared with other wars and military conflicts across the world, especially in the Middle East and the Global South. Less obvious is how such hypocrisy is a reflection of a much larger phenomenon which governs the West’s relationship to war and conflict zones.

Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

On March 19, Iraq commemorated the 19th anniversary of the US invasion which killed, according to modest estimates, over a million Iraqis. The consequences of that war were equally devastating as it destabilized the entire Middle East region, leading to various civil and proxy wars. The Arab world is reeling under that horrific experience to this day.

Also, on March 19, the eleventh anniversary of the NATO war on Libya was commemorated and followed, five days later, by the 23rd anniversary of the NATO war on Yugoslavia. Like every NATO-led war since the inception of the alliance in 1949, these wars resulted in widespread devastation and tragic death tolls.

None of these wars, starting with the NATO intervention in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, have stabilized any of the warring regions. Iraq is still as vulnerable to terrorism and outside military interventions and, in many ways, remains an occupied country. Libya is divided among various warring camps, and a return to civil war remains a real possibility.

Yet, enthusiasm for war remains high, as if over seventy years of failed military interventions have not taught us any meaningful lessons. Daily, news headlines tell us that the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Spain or some other western power have decided to ship a new kind of ‘lethal weapons‘ to Ukraine. Billions of dollars have already been allocated by Western countries to contribute to the war in Ukraine.

In contrast, very little has been done to offer platforms for diplomatic, non-violent solutions. A handful of countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia have offered mediation or insisted on a diplomatic solution to the war, arguing, as China’s foreign ministry reiterated on March 18, that “all sides need to jointly support Russia and Ukraine in having dialogue and negotiation that will produce results and lead to peace.”

Though the violation of the sovereignty of any country is illegal under international law, and is a stark violation of the United Nations Charter, this does not mean that the only solution to violence is counter-violence. This cannot be truer in the case of Russia and Ukraine, as a state of civil war has existed in Eastern Ukraine for eight years, harvesting thousands of lives and depriving whole communities from any sense of peace or security. NATO’s weapons cannot possibly address the root causes of this communal struggle. On the contrary, they can only fuel it further.

If more weapons were the answer, the conflict would have been resolved years ago. According to the BBC, the US has already allocated $2.7bn to Ukraine over the last eight years, long before the current war. This massive arsenal included “anti-tank and anti-armor weapons … US-made sniper (rifles), ammunition and accessories.”

The speed with which additional military aid has poured into Ukraine following the Russian military operations on February 24 is unprecedented in modern history. This raises not only political or legal questions, but moral questions as well – the eagerness to fund war and the lack of enthusiasm to help countries rebuild.

After 21 years of US war and invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in a humanitarian and refugee crisis, Kabul is now largely left on its own. Last September, the UN refugee agency warned that “a major humanitarian crisis is looming in Afghanistan”, yet nothing has been done to address this ‘looming’ crisis, which has greatly worsened since then.

The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Afghani refugees are rarely welcomed in Europe. The same is true for refugees coming from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali and other conflicts that directly or indirectly involved NATO. This hypocrisy is accentuated when we consider international initiatives that aim to support war refugees, or rebuild the economies of war-torn nations.

Compare the lack of enthusiasm in supporting war-torn nations with the West’s unparalleled euphoria in providing weapons to Ukraine. Sadly, it will not be long before the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left their country in recent weeks become a burden on Europe, thus subjected to the same kind of mainstream criticism and far-right attacks.

While it is true that the West’s attitude towards Ukraine is different from its attitude towards victims of western interventions, one has to be careful before supposing that the ‘privileged’ Ukrainains will ultimately be better off than the victims of war throughout the Middle East. As the war drags on, Ukraine will continue to suffer, either the direct impact of the war or the collective trauma that will surely follow. The amassing of NATO weapons in Ukraine, as was the case of Libya, will likely backfire. In Libya, NATO’s weapons fueled the country’s decade long civil war.

Ukraine needs peace and security, not perpetual war that is designed to serve the strategic interests of certain countries or military alliances. Though military invasions must be wholly rejected, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, turning Ukraine into another convenient zone of perpetual geopolitical struggle between NATO and Russia is not the answer.

commondreams.org

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

We hold in our hands vast power to both create and destroy the likes of which has never been seen in history.

Up until the turn of the 20^th century, the only forces capable of wrecking extinction-level havoc onto the biosphere remained comets and asteroids travelling 18 km/second which periodically slammed into the earth every few million years. But with the discovery of atomic decay in the form of fission and also the associated processes of fusion (where lighter isotopes were found to fuse together forming heavier atoms holding masses that were slightly less than the total of the fused atoms), suddenly a new force of destruction was added to the list.

After the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the top secret Manhattan Project with its three nuclear bombs was revealed to a confused Harry Truman who was quick to dump two of them onto a defeated Japan in 1945 establishing a new set of geopolitical rules that would profoundly misshape the 20^th century.

The 14 kiloton bomb “Little Boy” which erupted over Hiroshima killed 140 thousand people instantly, with countless tens of thousands more who died in agony during the weeks and months following the explosion. The bomb that destroyed Nagasaki days later was 23 kilotons.

To put this into perspective, one modern U.S. Ohio Class Submarine travelling in the waters of China’s back yard carries 24 Trident missiles.

Each Trident missile can carry up to 8 nuclear warheads and each warhead utilizing thermonuclear technology packs the equivalent of 475 kilotons of TNT. When all warheads contained on one Trident II missile are added together, a force 253 times more powerful than the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima is unleashed. Although nuclear reduction treaties established since 1991 have reduced the global nuclear stockpiles from 64,000 warheads in 1986 to approximately 20,000 today, the fact Is that over 5000 megatons of nuclear bombs ready to be unleashed still litter the face of the earth.

Throughout the Cold War, scientists on both sides of the iron curtain were directed increasingly to put their creative energy towards the development of ever greater atomic weapons rather than solve world problems which for the most part was always the true purpose of science.

When the MAD doctrine (and a few too many war hawks devoted to computer models instead of human thinking) propelled the world towards a nuclear showdown in October 1962, cooler heads thankfully prevailed. During this period, mature statecraft took the form of backchannel and public dialogue between John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev who agreed upon respecting each others’ security interests with Russia removing its nuclear weapons from Cuba and the U.S.A following suite by removing their nuclear weapons from Turkey soon thereafter.

With this dance with mass death, Kennedy created several precedents for future leaders to learn from starting with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, his call to pull the U.S.A out of an oncoming Vietnam quagmire and launching a beautiful vision for U.S.-Russian joint space program presented to the UN General Assembly in New York on September 20 1963. This was an offer which Khrushchev’s son admitted his father had wished to accept during a 1997 interview, but sadly assassins’ bullets and Cold Warriors devoid of wisdom got in the way of that vision.

We are now sitting on the cusp of the 60^th anniversary of the October Crisis and sadly very few statesmen in today’s U.S.A think on the strategic level of President Kennedy.

NATO has continued to expand across Russia’s soft underbelly in total renunciation of the promises made in 1991 between U.S. delegations and their Russian counterparts. With each new member added to NATO since 1998, a policy of military containment of Russia has been advanced with ever more troops, anti-ballistic missiles and bases installed across former Soviet Nations.

To stop the race towards nuclear annihilation now unfolding over the chaos in Ukraine, it is absolutely requisite that the leadership of the U.S.A and Russia conduct emergency meetings immediately with the intention of resolving the danger of nuclear extinction once and for all.

The way forward is not as difficult and only requires a willingness to compromise on certain actions which have no benefit to anyone. At the top of this list is the need to flush the strange obsession to expand NATO to the detriment of Russian security interests.

If this simple act were accomplished, then getting Russia to extract itself militarily from Ukraine would be no small difficulty.

Beyond simply putting out the immediate fires threatening to engulf our collective home, a longer term plan to avoid future fires from taking hold is also necessary. To this end, cooperation on matters of common interest is vital to establish a new security architecture founded upon firm principles. This means seeking out projects that unite the goals of eastern and western blocks into a common destiny, rather than amplifying divisions of “us” vs “them” with “good guys” invited to democracy summits which exclude nearly half of the worlds’ population.

Like Kennedy’s promotion of U.S.A-Russian scientific cooperation on space development and atomic development, today’s statesmen must discuss such programs as Asteroid Defense (dubbed by Roscosmos’ Dimitry Rogozin as “Strategic Defense of Earth” in 2011), Arctic Development, Bering Strait rail development, and re-forestation of the earth for starters. The Chinese (who are facing no shortage of threats to their security in the Pacific theater) have recently offered the Trans-Atlantic Community the chance to work together on the Belt and Road Initiative which could only benefit humanity as the BRI has already pulled hundreds of millions of souls out of poverty.

What makes these positive steps towards a sustainable global security doctrine so attractive is that they involve re-orienting nuclear science from the perverse path of self-destruction towards the path of creation which this beautiful field of research was always destined to be. The peaceful use of atomic power both in advanced fission reactors, atomic medicine and the long-overdue holy grail of fusion energy provides humanity the master key to do what no other species has been able to do: Break an extinction cycle and end the “four horsemen” of famines, war, disease and ignorance that have plagued humanity since time immemorial.

If humanity is morally fit to survive the current storm, it will be due to the rectification of those fallacious rules underlying geopolitics as have been practiced throughout recent history. Rule by “might makes right” which shaped the pre-nuclear era must finally come to an end, as a new age of “right makes might” must finally be permitted to have its chance in the sun.

Appendix: President Kennedy’s remarks of July 26, 1963:

“A war today or tomorrow, if it led to nuclear war, would not be like any war in history. A full-scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes, with the weapons now in existence, could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors, as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, “the survivors would envy the dead.” For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot even conceive of its horrors. So let us try to turn the world away from war. Let us make the most of this opportunity, and every opportunity, to reduce tension, to slow down the perilous nuclear arms race, and to check the world’s slide toward final annihilation.”

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

Well, there it is for the whole to see. Great expectations and theatrical predictions that Russia would invade Ukraine this week failed spectacularly to materialize.

But the situation is far from funny nor far from the danger of war being yet incited. That’s largely because the United States, from its president and his top officials to an army of ghoulish media pundits, are crying wolf even more hysterically.

The combustible conflict in Ukraine between a U.S.-backed Neofascist regime and Russia-backed separatists is threatening to explode. The provocations are coming from the U.S.-backed side which is armed to the teeth, yet Western media are blaming Russia. The hysterical anti-Russian claims are recklessly driving towards war as the NATO-backed Kiev regime feels emboldened to use military force to settle a civil war. And then, as if to insult common sense and morality, President Joe Biden had the gall this week to talk about “seeking the path of diplomacy” and not harboring any enmity towards Russian people.

Not checked by any sense of shame for having been exposed as fantasists and warmongers, the United States and its British partner, in particular, have doubled down with further lurid claims that Russia is going to invade Ukraine “any day”.

The insanity of the situation is highlighted by the U.S.-armed Ukrainian regime itself rejecting the claims that Russia is planning a military assault. Moscow has also repeatedly and categorically denied it has any intention of attacking its neighbor with whom the country shares centuries of cultural ties and fraternity. Russians and many Ukrainians are united by families, language and religion.

There is no logical or plausible reason articulated by Washington for why Russia would launch an offensive against Ukraine. It has simply been asserted over and over by the U.S., amplified by British lackeys, as well as the dutiful corporate-controlled news media, that Russian troops are preparing to invade Ukraine. Russian troops are in established military bases within Russian territory. If they are on alert in recent months it is because of the madcap, intensified narrative accusing Russia of aggression coming from the U.S. and NATO, who are actually building up offensive forces near Russian borders.

Even when Russian forces were withdrawn this week from Belarus and southern parts of Russia on completion of scheduled military exercises that was not enough to satisfy the U.S. and its partners. President Biden said Russian troops were building up even more to invade Ukraine. His Secretary of State Antony Blinken feverishly warned the UN Security Council that Russia was manufacturing a false-flag provocation to act as a cover for imminent invasion.

In all this delirious disinformation, Moscow has remained steadfast in making its reasonable demand. That is, the need for a long-term security treaty for Europe between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and Russia. There must be eventually a legally binding commitment from the NATO bloc to cease its eastward expansion around Russian territory. That’s what the current crisis is about. Washington and its NATO partners do not want to give Moscow a security guarantee. That’s because for the United States, in particular, NATO is a convenient instrument to harass Russia. Biden’s talk about NATO being defensive and not threatening Russia is absurd given the multiple wars that the U.S. and its NATO instrument have waged in recent years. The entire bloc is an affront to international law and a grave source of global insecurity from its wanton violation of nations’ sovereignty and borders. It also prompted the coup d’état in Kiev in 2014 bringing to power the present Neo-Nazi regime which Western states ludicrously refer to as “democratic” and “sharing our values”.

There is also the U.S. objective of preventing any normalization of relations between Russia and the rest of Europe. That way would lead to greater Eurasian integration and the loss of global hegemonic ambitions in Washington. The Wolfowitz Doctrine (ca. 1992) for maintaining U.S. imperialist power in the post-Cold War world was very much focused on countering Russia, China and Eurasian integration. A specific prize in wrecking this kind of emerging multipolar world order is the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 energy trade between Russia and the European Union.

What we, therefore, see in the current crisis over Ukraine is a premeditated choice to confront Russia and to create a geopolitical rupture. Ukraine is only a pawn in the bigger scheme of U.S. imperial planning. This is what the whole hysterical gaslighting about a Russian invasion is all about. Washington is contriving a crisis to splinter international relations along Cold War lines. It is revanchist, regressive and destructive, not to mention completely anathema in today’s world. But such is Washington’s addiction to fix its supremacist lust. Even though the gambit is running the risk of inciting war in Europe, a war that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.

Countless wars or military interventions by the United States over many decades have been presaged by propaganda stunts and hyper-media psychological operations, quaintly labeled “news reporting”. One notorious example is the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 which the U.S. used to launch its genocidal Vietnam War. Another is the non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction which was used as a fabricated pretext to mount the genocidal U.S.-British war on Iraq. Countless others can be cited, from alleged Soviet infiltration of Central America in the 198os eliciting the deployment of U.S.-trained death squads, to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria during recent years to give cover for American and NATO bombing of that country. Lest we forget, Libya was destroyed in 2011 and its leader Muammar Gaddafi was brutally murdered by a NATO operation based on lies about “protecting human rights”. The people involved in that war crime are active today: President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, among others.

Surely, the biggest global scandal – never reported of course by the Western propaganda “free press” – is the dirty American habit of waging wars based on lies and provocations. Millions of people and dozens of nations have been destroyed based on Washington’s lies.

The U.S. predictions of Russia invading Ukraine this week – and no doubt next week and thereafter continuously, at a theater near you, folks! – fall into the same category of historic propaganda for creating tensions, confrontation and ultimately war.

What is deeply unsettling, however, is the massive, unprecedented supply of U.S. and NATO lethal weaponry piling right now into Ukraine. The anti-Russia Kiev regime is the party that has massed offensive forces on a contact line with the Russian population in southeastern Ukraine. The shelling of civilian areas is escalating in recent days. And yet demonically, the American president is accusing Russia of shelling the area to create a pretext for invasion, and poo-poohing claims of genocide as “Russian propaganda”.

Western media are complicit in selling war propaganda by distorting the danger and falsely attributing the aggression to Russia.

Who has the unparalleled decades-long form for dirty tricks, lies, aggression and wars? Who has the overwhelming geo-strategic motive for perpetrating the current aggression? Ask yourself: why are these questions never asked and never answered in Western media? That’s because the truth would become obvious. The emperor would be seen to be naked with nothing but blood-covered hands.

Soon after the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, David Ignatius, Washington Post columnist and Deep State insider, remarked “The reversals in Afghanistan are confounding for a Biden national security team that has rarely known personal failure (…) These are America’s best and brightest, who came to the messy endgame of the Afghanistan war with spotless résumés.”

Though his criticism of the national security team is understandably guarded, anyone taking a dispassionate look at the establishment liberals who are deemed America’s “best and brightest” in Washington circles would reach the conclusion that they are stronger on slogans than substance, which leads to a disconnect between ideas and implementation, and lack overseas experience: there is only one career diplomat in a senior position on the National Security Council, the director for Africa.

Their ability to display ideological cohesion at the expense of a reflexive process of dialogical thinking is remarkable but not surprising: establishment liberals do see themselves as the centre of political enlightenment. If they appear vainglorious and self-righteous it is because they are part of a power structure that produces and perpetuates these character traits. Those who entertain the possibility of failure are side-lined as bearers of bad news, the centre-stage is reserved for those who project confidence and a sense of moral superiority. As to considering opposing viewpoints, that is entirely optional.

In the same Washington Post article Ignatius observed “Failure can shatter the trust and consensus of any team, and that’s a danger now for the Biden White House. This group has been extraordinarily close and congenial during Biden’s first seven months. But you can already see the first cracks in Fortress Biden.”

Are these the kind of cracks that appear when reality hits delusions, when ‘what is’ collides with ‘what ought to be’, when military logic makes a dent in the fairy tale of a benign power successfully exporting “freedom, democracy and human rights”?

Trained for hybrid warfare, Biden’s aides were suddenly dealing with a conventional military crisis and looked out of their depth. As we have seen, managing a retreat and putting a spin on it require a completely different set of skills.

There is no doubt that the optics of one of the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history damaged the reputation of the U.S. both at home and overseas and that’s why we should expect new and more aggressive initiatives to harden American soft power and tighten control of the narrative through underhand methods.

Carefully crafted narratives are crucial for the U.S. because it is selling the world a failed model of development. Trumpeting it as inclusive, gender equal, green and sustainable is like putting lipstick on a pig, it looks grotesque. Managing perceptions, denigrating alternative civilizational and economic models, and demonizing the competition is no longer working, an increasingly large segment of the world population is developing stronger antibodies to the virus of American propaganda. That’s why traditional soft-power tools — trade, legal standards, technology — are increasingly being used to coerce rather than convince.

After the Afghanistan disaster former French ambassador to Israel, UN and U.S. Gérard Araud shared his dismay on Twitter: “The absence of self-examination in the West is seen elsewhere with disbelief. Wars waged by the West have recently cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians for no result and we still lecture the world about values. Do you have any idea about how we are seen abroad?”

If even allies are growing tired of America’s preaching, guess how it is going down in the rest of the world.

At the end of August, when U.S. allies were weighing what the shambolic, badly-coordinated retreat means for Western power and influence, Biden delivered a speech in which he explained “This decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It is about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.”

His statement signalled the intention to extricate the U.S. army from a war that had exhausted itself, politically, militarily and epistemically, but didn’t suggest that the U.S. will renounce its imperialistic ambitions. In the last twenty years there have been tectonic shifts: cyber, biological, information, cognitive and economic warfare are changing the way wars are being fought. Putting boots on the ground is no longer the best nor the only option to subjugate an adversary.

The reconfiguration of the geopolitical landscape and rapidly changing power relations also required a reassessment of priorities. Now that all eyes are on the Asia-Pacific region the question is whether Biden’s team is the best fit for the challenges U.S. power is facing.

Biden’s closest aides never learned the fundamentals of realpolitik, they hold the belief that liberal values are universally valid and the use of force (rebranded “humanitarian interventionism”) morally motivated. They never doubted that the Western model would conquer the world because they grew up at the end of the Cold War, a time that was indeed characterized by a “unipolar moment”. This period is well and truly over and the Western liberal order in its present form is a fraying system.

While the U.S. allocated resources to the destruction and destabilization of sovereign countries, and ignored the widening income gap at home, their main competitor, China, lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and kept building state-of-the-art infrastructure at home and abroad, that is projects that make a tangible difference in people’s livelihoods. No wonder concealing the truth has become a matter of national security.

Democrats openly admit their intent to co-opt Silicon Valley to police political discourse and silence the bearers of inconvenient truths. They effectively sowed the seeds for a future where everything and everyone can be(come) a national-security threat. Glenn Greenwald revealed that Congressional Democrats have summoned the CEO’s of Google, Facebook and Twitter four times in the last year to demand they censor more political speech. They explicitly threatened the companies with legal and regulatory reprisals if they did not start censoring more. Pulling the plug on dissenting opinions and de-platforming people who challenge the dominant discourse makes a mockery of free speech, one of the rights that the U.S. claims to be defending when it selectively condemns alleged violations of human rights in other countries. Increasing censorship is also an indication that control of the narrative both at home and overseas has become vital for the U.S.

The conviction that “for America, our interests are our values and our values are our interests’’, one of the tenets of NeoCons, has been revamped by the liberal Left to aggressively promote a different kind of values and causes. A sort of symbolic capital that would allow the U.S. to maintain dominance as rights defender while its own constitutional rights are being eroded at home. Moral grandstanding can only compound the hypocrisy, but that is not stopping liberal totalitarians who are trading off freedom of speech for a child’s right to gender self-identification or for a binding gender or race quota on corporate boards.

History shows that declining empires tend to produce incompetent, self-delusional and divisive leaders who unwittingly accelerate the inevitable fall. That’s exactly what seems to be happening now. Not only the radical liberalism embraced by the Biden administration and Western elite has already antagonized millions of Americans leading to social and political polarization, it is also antagonizing foreign leaders, including the leaders of allied countries such as Hungary and Turkey who are being labelled as ‘authoritarian’. As the U.S. system of alliances is becoming increasingly fragile, dogmatic progressives in the current administration look more and more like Aesop’s donkey in a pottery shop, or a bull in a China shop, if you prefer.

The current National Security Council (NSC) is staffed with advisers who are the product of the kind of groupthink that has long been dominant in Anglo-American universities, those madrassas of the liberal Left where debate is stifled by ideological purges. The opinions and worldviews that are shaped and reinforced in these echo chambers are disseminated and amplified by the media and other industries. Countless careers depend on exporting simulacra of freedom, democracy and human rights, not only because these “experts” have internalized a conviction that these immaterial goods possess an intrinsic moral value, but also because the U.S. has little else to offer the world and leverage on, unless you count assured mutual destruction as leverage.

A case in point is The Summit for Democracy that Biden will convene in virtual mode on December 9–10, 2021, while a second meeting will take place a year later. The plan is to bring together over 100 leaders from selected governments (some of the choices have already stirred controversy among democracy advocates) plus various NGOs, activists (regime change actors) and corporations to “rally the nations of the world in defence of democracy globally” and “push back authoritarianism’s advance”, “address and fight corruption”, “advance respect for human rights”.

Though this initiative is mainly a way to strengthen ideological cohesion among allies by appealing to “common values” and conjuring up yet another global threat, namely “authoritarianism”, it effectively divides the international community into two Cold War-style blocks, friends and foes. On one side countries that earned a seal of approval for toeing the line and therefore deserve to be labelled “democratic”; on the other side a basket of deplorables that refuse to recognize the superiority of the U.S. model of governance and civilizing mission. Basically, the politically correct version of neocolonialism.

The Summit for Democracy will take place against the backdrop of AUKUS, the new Anglo-Saxon alliance that effectively joins NATO to the Asia-Pacific through Britain. What is clearly intended as an alliance against China severely damages regional peace and stability, intensifies the arms race, and jeopardizes international efforts against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

On one hand the U.S. is flexing its military muscle, on the other hand is flexing the ideological muscle that, in the intentions of the Summit organizers, will provide the impetus to renew and strengthen the liberal international order that has served U.S. interests since the end of WW2.

The Summit for Democracy may have a higher profile convener than similar events held in the past but its premise sounds just as tone-deaf and over-ambitious. Take for example The Copenhagen Summit for Democracy that was organized in May by the “Alliance of Democracies”, a foundation set up by former NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2017. Its objective was to create a Copenhagen Charter, modelled on the Atlantic Charter, having a Clause 5 similar to NATO’s Article 5, whereby “a state coming under economic attack or facing arbitrary detentions of its citizens due to its democratic or human rights stance could ask for unified support including retaliatory measures of fellow democracies.” This and other creative proposals included in the Copenhagen Charter will likely be rehashed at the Summit to be opened by Biden in December.

Rasmussen too can boast a spotless resume as cheerleader for U.S. global leadership, and that might explain why he seems trapped in a time warp and blind to the actual state of that leadership. If the reader needs further confirmation of Rasmussen’s complicated relationship with reality, here is an excerpt from an article titled ‘The Right Lessons From Afghanistan’ that he wrote for Foreign Affairs a few weeks after the Afghanistan fiasco, “The world should not draw the wrong lessons from Afghanistan. This fiasco was far from inevitable. It would also compound the folly if the world’s developed democracies stopped supporting the quest for freedom and democracy in authoritarian states and war-torn countries. That includes Afghanistan, where the United States and its partners should lend their support to the ongoing resistance efforts to oppose the Taliban.” We all know what happened to those “resistance efforts”, but Rasmussen won’t let reality get in the way of his illusions.

It is unlikely the Summit for Democracy will achieve the unspoken objective of creating an Alliance of Democracies that could bypass the UN Security Council. But it is undeniable that international law has long been under attack and is incrementally replaced with the Atlanticist concept of a “rules-based international system”, which does not have any specific rules but allows the West to violate international law under the pretext of advancing liberal ideals and exporting democracy.

It’s expected that USAID will be called to play a major role at the summit. USAID under Samantha Powers has a seat in the NSC and has been tasked with the mission to “modernize democracy assistance across the board”. This includes “supporting governments to strengthen their cybersecurity, counter disinformation and helping democratic actors defend themselves against digital surveillance, censorship, and repression.” In typical Orwellian doublespeak the U.S. is seeking help by claiming to help. With a military budget already stretched over the limit, enlisting foreign actors (both state and non-state) to do its bidding in the information and cognitive warfare becomes imperative.

NED, USAID, USAGM, “philanthropic” organizations like Open Society Foundations and the Omidyar Network have long been grooming and bankrolling journalists, activists, politicians, various types of influencers and community leaders. Their job is to paint a negative picture of China, Russia and any country resisting U.S. diktats. In Africa, just to mention one of many examples, “independent” journalists are paid to investigate Chinese companies that are involved in mining, construction, energy, infrastructure, loans and environment and portray them as causing harm to communities, environment and workers.

At the beginning of October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken unveiled a new partnership with the OECD in Paris: the overt goal was to combat corruption and promote “high-quality” infrastructure. But the partnership is part of a broader effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The U.S. has also appealed to the G7 and QUAD to provide the financial muscle for its Build Back Better World initiative (BW3), a rehash of Trump’s Blue Dot Network. Since the U.S. and its partners cannot respond to BRI symmetrically — they are unable to match China dollar for dollar, project for project — they are relying on virtue-signalling both as a marketing and bullying tactic. According to this initiative, infrastructure building in developing countries should comply with a certification scheme and lending rules set by the U.S. and its partners, rules that are cloaked in the familiar jargon of social and environmental sustainability, gender equality, and anti-corruption.

In case the competition with China in Asia, Europe and Africa does turn into open confrontation, the U.S. could use the BW3 to increase pressure on investment funds, global financial institutions and insurance companies to discriminate against projects that don’t meet standards set by the U.S. in return for concessions and sweeteners. When Western companies cannot compete fairly with Chinese ones, they can always rely on friendly officials in Washington to rewrite the rules of the game in their favour.

American policymakers seem unable to abandon a Cold War mentality that is essentially utopian in expectations, legalistic in concept, moralistic in the demands it places on others, and self-righteous. Some analysts believe that the source of the problem might be the force of public opinion, deemed emotional, moralistic and binary, the old “Us vs Them.”

Classical international relations theorists have long held the assumption that American public opinion has moralistic tendencies: for liberal idealists the moral foundation of public opinion, mobilized by norm entrepreneurs, opens up the possibility of positive moral action, whereas for realists, the public’s moralism is one of the main reasons why foreign policymaking should be insulated from the pressures of public opinion.

However it is myopic to conceive of public opinion and policymaking as separate entities when in fact they are both shaped by the interests of powerful elites. Public opinion doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is swayed by new and old media that are often controlled by the same interest groups and corporations that fund the think tanks and foundations influencing U.S. foreign policy.

For instance, not only was the collusion and revolving door between government and the tech industry a feature of the Obama administration, it characterizes the Biden administration as well. The transnational interests of these elite groups are usually cloaked in a progressive, inclusive, democratic rhetoric to make their narrow agenda appear big enough so that unsuspecting ordinary people may want to claim ownership and subscribe to it. Corporate interests and national interest are a tangled web no longer subjected to public scrutiny since national level democracy has been hollowed out. When the trilemma of democracy, state, and market becomes irreconcilable, global market players call the shots without democracy or state being able to control them, oversee unceasing technological innovation (including artificial intelligence) or curb the excessive financialization of the economy.

Though U.S. attempts at nation-building result in chaos and misery for local populations, Americans haven’t given up on trying to remake the world in their own distorted image by aggressively promoting their worldviews, exporting a simulacrum of democracy and politicizing human rights issues.

They reject true multilateralism by trying to dominate the international organizations that were created to further cooperation and harmonize national interests. For the corporate donors of both the Democratic and Republican Party other countries’ national interests are a relic of the past that should be done away with. And indeed national interests would hardly be compatible with a world order led by the U.S. in partnership with global stakeholders (global corporations, NGOs, think-tanks, governments, academic institutions, charities, etc.)

These global stakeholders and their political representatives effectively want to replace the modern international system of sovereign states that is enshrined in the United Nations Charter. Under this system, commonly referred to as Westphalian system, states exist within recognised borders, their sovereignty is recognised by others and principles of non-interference are clearly spelled out. Since this model doesn’t allow the government of one nation to impose legislation in another, the U.S. loudly promotes the idea of global governance, under which a global public-private partnership is allowed to create policy initiatives that affect people in every country as national governments implement the recommended policies. Typically this occurs via an intermediary policy distributor, such as the IMF, World Bank, WHO, but many international organizations now play a similar role.

In the Biden administration we see a dangerous convergence of the national security establishment and Silicon Valley tech giants. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both worked for WestExec, the consulting firm that Blinken cofounded with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defence under President Obama. Google hired WestExec to help them land Department of Defense contracts. Google’s former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt made personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense. Schmidt himself was appointed to lead a government panel on artificial intelligence. At least 16 foreign policy positions are occupied by CNAS alumni. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is a bipartisan think tank that receives large contributions directly from defence contractors, Big Tech, U.S. finance giants.

These donors spend considerable resources shaping the intellectual environment, academic research and symposia in order to build consensus around their agenda. The Biden administration also features dozens of officials hailing from the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank set up by John Podesta, a longtime Clintonworld staple, with George Soros’ generous contribution. The ties between Open Society Foundations (OSF) and CAP are so strong that Patrick Gaspard, the former head of OSF, was nominated president and CEO of CAP.

When government becomes the expression of global corporate interests and channels the belief system of a small, privileged elite it can be hard to tell who is leading who, who is really making policy and setting national security strategies and goals.

Biden’s national security team is the product of this corrupt system. Its members may tone down the “freedom, democracy and human rights” rhetoric if it gets in the way of achieving a particular strategic goal, but they won’t abandon it because it has proven to be effective in providing a legitimating frame and moral justification to U.S. hegemony.

If we look at the Roman empire we see how one constant theme was “expand or die”. Expansion isn’t only to be intended as territorial or military. Expanding influence, alliances, the use of Latin, the spread of Roman laws, currency, standards, culture and religion all contributed to the cohesion of the Empire. Given the current constraints to U.S. ambitions — namely the strategic partnership between China and Russia, BRI, the more assertive role played by regional powers, nervousness and conflicting interests among U.S. allies and a large budget deficit — the room for expansion has been considerably reduced. Thus the U.S. is doubling its efforts in areas where it still has room for maneuver.

Biden’s slogan “America is Back” sought to reassure allies but cannot hide the fact that the emperor is naked. Advertisers, politicians and psyops planners are continuously manipulating people into changing their perceptions of reality and making choices that ultimately do not benefit them. But no matter how hard the power-knowledge regimes of Western intellectual production work to conceal the decline, the West no longer dominates the world and the values it advocates are not unanimous, far from it. Labelling governments that don’t embrace liberal values and U.S. standards as “autocratic regimes” is just foolish sloganeering and doesn’t take into account the changing balance of power on the ground. The world is evolving toward a multipolar system and the U.S. had better take notice of it. Those serving in the NSC are still imagining a world that no longer exists, one where America has the power to force other countries into doing its bidding. The current ideological approach blinds pragmatic thinking, thus impeding discussions and negotiations.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Someone should tell the Biden team.

One wonders if Britain’s MI5 chief, Ken McCallum is a real person or some banal technical creation of the boffins of the UK’s home security service. His recent comments about the Taliban giving rogue winnable terrorists around the world a moral boost after the calamity of the U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan not only smacks of ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ but also of paternal baloney nefariously designed to distract the UK’s public attention away from the real issues.

Is McCallum actually the real boss of MI5 or the nerdy, hapless fake chief who is there merely to generate fake news in the UK press?

Writing in the God-awful woke Guardian, he harps on about preventing over thirty UK terror attacks which he admits span over four years, but spectacularly fails to make his assertions stand up. His unsubstantiated article was really just a rant which probably only served his own interests rather than the country’s; it also neatly took a pot shot at Biden without naming the U.S. president which might give us all a hint about the so-called special relationship between the UK and the U.S. being really just a farce, or a cliché used by both sides on special occasions.

But in a period where people are reflecting about Afghanistan and trying to look for lessons learnt, the article was way off the mark for a intelligence chief and raised a number of red flags.

The Americans and the British who followed them got the intel really wrong in Afghanistan as indeed was the case in Iraq. So should we really expect anything from the security services in terms of looking back – and then looking forward? And is there a dark game being played here by the spooks in Britain, using a cavernous and inept media machine to create a smoke screen to the real issues?

How could anyone with any real intellect and understanding of international politics be so stupid? The oversimplification is stunning.

In reality, some pundits might speculate that such media stunts are all about guiding a gullible public away from the difficult-to-chew truth towards the easier-to-swallow perceived truth about U.S. interventionism and the link to homegrown terrorism.

America has failed spectacularly in its military ventures for decades, going back to Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea and Vietnam. It has a short blip in the 90s with the NATO-led air strikes against Serbia and later some success in Kosovo; but a small cabal of foreign hacks have always pointed to the faked attacks on Muslims in Sarajevo which paved the way for NATO getting the green light for the campaign pushed by the odious Madeleine Albright. And in the same period, a U.S.-led UN mission in Somalia in 1993 led to the bungling of a raid supposed to bring a recalcitrant warlord in, but led to the catastrophe of ‘Black Hawk Down’ – which singularly led to Bill Clinton failing to intervene in the Rwandan genocide a year later.

In the 90s there was a false sense of righteousness brought about largely by the Russian withdrawal of Afghanistan. And this has prevailed leading to 2001 when George W Bush sent troops to Afghanistan – by far the biggest failure of U.S. military-led foreign policy ever leading to thousands of lost lives, trillions of dollars of debt and most European leaders scratching their heads in recent weeks wondering if Europe can ever be beguiled into blindly following the U.S. into an intervention ever again, regardless of how shocking the events are which preceded it.

America just can’t help itself in using its force to resolve the illogical outcomes of its befuddled policies. Madeleine Albright once commented in 1998 when she was Secretary of State that “If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us.”

And Britain can’t seem to help itself but to follow Washington wherever it goes. But what the UK spy chief failed, curiously, to point out in his link with the Taliban and UK terror attacks is that it is London which has supported the U.S. in its dirty wars in Syria and Libya which has overwhelmingly led to nearly all of the attacks he claims he is foiling. It was Britain after all who even assisted Libyans living there to get on planes and go to Libya to fight with Al Qaeda to overthrow Gaddafi, before returning only to be welcomed at Heathrow airport by spooks who gave them the nod and the wink. It was also Britain who stood side by side with the U.S. in its sponsoring of Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria who were hilariously called ‘moderates’ just to help British journalists who were camped in Beirut but who ventured into Northern Syria to ‘embed’ with them. There are no moderates anymore in Syria, in case you were wondering. The West has given up its obsession with Assad so the need to blur the lines is no longer necessary. Dirty wars though, which involve terrorists being paid hard cash by the U.S. and UK, will no doubt continue as long as a naïve public laps up all those terribly insightful articles in the Guardian and assumes them to be genuine. And how is it that the home security boss seems to be an expert on Afghanistan, to the point where he is almost preparing the British public for British soldiers to return there at some point?

It would be easy to blame Donald Trump for the disarray in the transatlantic alliance, but twenty-five years of American exceptionalism is the real culprit.  The aggressive expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Clinton and Bush administrations over the objections of our West European allies began a period of discontinuity that still exists.  Bush deepened the disarray in 2002 with his “axis of evil” speech that set the stage for the invasion of Iraq.  Bush and Barack Obama considered Afghanistan the “good war,” which brought two full decades of chaos throughout Southwest Asia.  President Joe Biden contributed to the fault lines within the transatlantic alliance with his failure to consult our allies on the Afghan withdrawal.

A constant feature of the disharmony between the United States and Europe is Washington’s obsession with the use of force against so-called “rogue” states in the Third World.  The past five U.S. administrations, including Biden’s, don’t know the difference between a “rogue” state and a “failed” state.  The hegemonists in the Bush administration were obsessed with the notion of rogue states, the so-called “axis of evil” that included Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.  Then-Senator Hillary Clinton supported Bush’s rhetoric by emphasizing that “every nation has to be either with us, or against us,” which channeled such Cold Warriors as the Dulles brothers in the 1950s or the brothers Rostow and Bundy in the 1960s.

U.S. and Israeli military force has created havoc the world over.  The removal of Saddam Hussein led to the creation of the Islamic State; Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to the creation of Hezbollah; U.S. intervention in Afghanistan led to the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks and greater violence; the use of force in Libya in 2011 led to chaos in North Africa.  U.S. wars since 9/11 have cost trillions of dollars and have led to tens of millions of refugees, which has fostered dangerous nationalism in European politics.  There have been thousands of U.S. combatant deaths in the wars since 9/11, thousands of severely wounded survivors, thousands of suicides by veterans and active-duty personnel, and tens of thousands of civilian fatalities.

If decision making had been left to the professional military, the United States would not have gone to war in backwaters such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where more than 60,000 Americans died.  Our “best and brightest,” paraphrasing David Halberstam, sent us into those godforsaken places.  It is typically civilians who believe that military force can solve geopolitical problems; general officers often know better.

Conversely, the Pentagon has become too prominent in decision making in part due to the vacuum of power created by the decline of the Department of State and a generation of weak Foreign Service Officers.  Ryan Crocker served as ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Kuwait; he is a competent bureaucrat.  He is also an excellent example of the State Department’s irrelevance.  He argued in the New York Times that our Afghan withdrawal was due to a lack of “strategic patience.”  A twenty-year commitment to a Southwest Asian country with no strategic relevance to the United States wasn’t good enough for Ambassador Crocker. (In a Washington Post oped, George Will similarly called Biden’s decision “wobbly” and “impulsive.”)

Crocker argues that in 2001 the “Taliban chose to fight instead” of handing over al Qaeda’s leadership.  In actual fact, the turning point in Afghanistan took place twenty years ago when we allowed Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora because of the Bush administration’s deceitful preoccupation with Iraq and its unwillingness to allow Taliban representation at the Bonn Conference in 2001.  When members of the Taliban surrendered, we imprisoned them at Bagram and Guantanamo, instead of coopting them for a possible future role in an Afghan government.  U.S. administrations have lied to the American public ever since about the war effort.  We’ve been negotiating secretly with the Taliban with one foot out the door, yet Crocker didn’t realize until recently that the Doha talks were not “peace negotiations,” but “surrender talks.”  We lost, Ambassador Crocker.  Your charge that Biden lacks the “ability to lead our nation as commander in chief” is outrageous.

Crocker’s unrestrained observations are matched on the military side by General David Petraeus who assured President Obama that our military mission was making progress in Afghanistan and continues to argue that the United States should have maintained a military presence there.  Petraeus believes a policy that had the “Afghans doing the fighting on the front lines and the United States providing assistance from the air would have been sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.”  Petraeus fails to recognize the limits of the Afghan military (which folded rapidly) and the role of airpower in dealing with an insurgency, often killing more civilians than combatants.

Petraeus concludes that a continued U.S. presence would  “roll back some of the Taliban gains in recent years.” This is the same four-star general who told the Bush and Obama administrations that the Taliban were merely “accidental guerrillas” who would eventually realign and join the Afghan government.  The inability of the Pentagon to recognize the Taliban’s discipline and cohesion was central to our failure in Afghanistan. Crocker and Petraeus are perfect examples of the hubris that got the United States into a feckless twenty-year war; yet my favorite neocon, Robert Kagan, was given three pages in Sunday’s Washington Post to argue that hubris played no part in getting us into Afghanistan.

I don’t recall Ambassador Crocker or General Petraeus ever citing the CIA’s torture regime in Afghanistan; the civilian deaths from our drone strikes; the narco-state that Afghanistan became under the Karzai regime; or the incredible corruption that dominated life in Kabul.  General Douglas Lute, who coordinated strategy for Afghanistan in Obama’s National Security Council, got it right: “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan.   We didn’t know what we were doing.”

Sadly, the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan puts the Biden administration on the defensive, assuring a continuation of a military psychosis that will stymie efforts to reduce the U.S. military presence overseas or the use of force, let alone the bloated U.S. defense budget.  The continuation of Bush’s “global war on terror” will hinder bipartisan congressional efforts to repeal the authorizations in 1991 and 2002 to use force against Saddam Hussein’s regime and to limit the war powers of the White House.  Congress also must reexamine the 2001 authorization to greenlight the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, the legal foundation for hostilities against multiple terrorist organizations.  The chaotic withdrawal operation complicates these tasks.

Finally, U.S. national security officials must learn the difference between rogue states and failed states.  The use of military force against failed states such as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya typically finds the United States fighting without allies, let alone an allied government.  Genuine experts on Iraq at the State Department and CIA were pessimistic about the war effort because they knew that Iraq was a house of cards and that the removal of Saddam Hussein would bring down the entire apparatus, which is what transpired.  Biden’s critics are already treating the Taliban as heading a rogue state, although its leadership has no interests beyond its own borders.

European security officials have had greater tolerance for the ayatollahs in Iran or the Islamists throughout the Middle East and often argued against U.S. use of force in their failed states.  But successive U.S. administrations have pursued the notion of “perfect security” ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  U.S. leaders mendaciously hide their decision making failures from the American public and exaggerate threats to justify policies that rely on increased defense spending and use of force.

Vice President Joe Biden warned President Barack Obama in 2009 not to get “boxed in” by the military.  Unfortunately, there does not appear to be anyone in his administration to encourage President Biden to stop the “forever wars” of the past thirty years.  A single suicide bomber should not stop the United States from debating the mistakes that were made in using force in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Cold War warriors in and out of government are already arguing that the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan allows the United States to direct its planning and materiel toward countering Chinese power across Asia.  Cold War hysteria remains alive and well.

counterpunch.org

Sunday’s news reports that the Biden Administration mistakenly killed nine members of one Afghan family, including six children, in “retaliation” for last week’s suicide attack which killed 13 US servicemembers, is a sad and sick epitaph on the 20 year Afghanistan war.

Promising to “get tough” on ISIS, which suddenly re-emerged to take responsibility for the suicide attack, the most expensive military and intelligence apparatus on earth appears to have gotten it wrong. Again.

Interventionists love to pretend they care about girls and women in Afghanistan, but it is in reality a desperate attempt to continue the 20-year US occupation. If we leave, they say, girls and women will be discriminated against by the Taliban.

It’s hard to imagine a discrimination worse than being incinerated by a drone strike, but these “collateral damage” attacks over the past 20 years have killed scores of civilians. Just like on Sunday.

That’s the worst part of this whole terrible war: day-after-day for twenty years civilians were killed because of the “noble” effort to re-make Afghanistan in the image of the United States. But the media and the warmongers who call the shots in government – and the “private” military-industrial sector – could not have cared less. Who recalls a single report on how many civilians were just “collateral damage” in the futile US war?

Sadly these children killed on Sunday, two of them reportedly just two years old, have been the ones forced to pay the price for a failed and bloody US foreign policy.

Yes, the whole exit from Afghanistan has been a debacle. Biden, but especially his military planners and incompetent advisors, deserves much of what has been piled onto him this past week or so about this incompetence.

Maybe if Biden’s Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs’ Chairman had spent a bit more time planning the Afghan exit and a lot less time obsessing on how to turn the US military into a laboratory for cultural Marxism, we might have actually had a workable plan.

We know that actual experts like Col. Douglas Macgregor did have a plan to get out that would have spared innocent lives. But because this decorated US Army veteran was “tainted” by his service in the previous administration – service that was solely focused on how to get out of Afghanistan safely – he would not be consulted by the Pentagon’s “woke” top military brass.

Trump also should share some of the blame currently being showered on Biden. He wanted to get out years ago, but never had the courage to stand up to the also incompetent generals and “experts” he foolishly hired to advise him.

Similarly, many conservatives (especially neoconservatives) are desperate to attack Biden not for how he got out of Afghanistan, but for the fact that he is getting us out of Afghanistan.

That tells you all you need to know about how profitable war is to the warmongers.

I’ve always said, “we just marched in, we can just march out,” and I stand by that view. Yes, you can “just march out” of these idiotic interventions…but you do need a map!

ronpaulinstitute.org

Nation-building in Afghanistan arrived in 2001. Western interventions into the old Eastern bloc in the 1980s and early 1990s had been spectacularly effective in destroying the old social and institutional order; but equally spectacular in failing to replace imploded societies with fresh institutions.  The threat from ‘failed states’ became the new mantra, and Afghanistan – in the wake of the destruction wrought post-9/11 – therefore necessitated external intervention.  Weak and failed states were the spawning ground for terrorism and its threat to the ‘global order’, it was said. It was in Afghanistan that a new liberal world vision was to be stood-up.

At another level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to our wider future. Funds poured in: Buildings were thrown up, and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process.  Big data, AI and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics, were to topple old ‘stodgy’ ideas.  Military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations, were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal.

This was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical, and scientific way of understanding war and nation-building would be able to mobilize reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so create a post-modern society, out of a complex tribal one, with its own storied history.

The ‘new’ arrived, as it were, in a succession of NGO boxes marked ‘pop-up modernity’.  The 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke, of course, had already warned in Reflections on the Revolution in France, as he witnessed the Jacobins tearing down their old order: “that it is with infinite caution” that anyone should pull down or replace structures that have served society well over the ages.  But this managerial technocracy had little time for old ‘stodgy’ ideas.

But, what last week’s fall of the western instituted regime so clearly revealed is that today’s managerial class, consumed by the notion of technocracy as the only means of effecting functional rule birthed instead, something thoroughly rotten – “data-driven defeat”, as one U.S. Afghan veteran described it – so rotten, that it collapsed in a matter of days. On the extended blunders of the “system” in Afghanistan, he writes:

“A retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected,[that]  “collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.” That “system” is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure.

“This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and sta­tistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures”.

Whatever was not corrupt before America arrived, became corrupt in the maelstrom of that $2 Trillion of American money showered on the project. American soldiers, arms manufacturers, globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, peacekeepers, counter-insurgency theorists and lawyers – all made their fortunes.

The flaw was that Afghanistan as a liberal progressive vision was a hoax in the first place: Afghanistan was invaded, and occupied, because of its geography. It was the ideal platform from which to perturb Central Asia, and thus unsettle Russia and China.

No one was truly committed because there was really no longer any Afghanistan to commit to. Whomsoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Ghani regime collapsed in a matter of days, because it was ‘never there’ to begin with: A Potemkin Village, whose role lay in perpetuating a fiction, or rather the myth of America’s Grand Vision of itself as the shaper and guardian of ‘our’ global future.

The true gravity for America and Europe of the present psychological ‘moment’ is not only that nation-building, as a project intended to stand up liberal values been revealed as having ‘achieved nothing’, but Afghanistan débacle has underlined the limitations to technical managerialism in way that is impossible to miss.

The gravity of America’s present psychological ‘moment’ – the implosion of Kabul – was well articulated when Robert Kagan argued earlier, that the ‘global values’ project (however tenuous its basis in reality) nonetheless has become essential to preserving ‘democracy’ at home:  For, he suggests, an America that retreats from global hegemony, would no longer possess the domestic group solidarity to preserve America as ‘idea’, at home, either.

What Kagan is saying here is important – It may constitute the true cost of the Afghanistan débacle. Every élite class advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating myths can take many forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted, or lose their credibility – when people no longer believe in the narrative, or the claims which underpin that political ‘idea’ – then it is ‘game over’.

Swedish intellectual, Malcolm Kyeyune writes that we may be “witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades”:

“Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs visibly have been multiplying over many years. When Michael Gove said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss”.

There is therefore, little mystery as to why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. Not only did the project per se lack legitimacy for Afghans, but that aura of claimed expertise, of technological inevitability that has protected the élite managerial class, has been exposed by the sheer dysfunctionality on display, as the West frantically flees Kabul. And it is precisely how it has ended that has really drawn back the curtain, and shown the world the rot festering beneath.

When the legitimating claim is used up, and people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular élite, Kyeyune writes, becomes a foregone conclusion.

After the US troop withdrawal established conclusively that the Afghan “government” they’d spent twenty years pretending to nation build with was essentially a work of fiction, thus proving to the world that they’ve been lying to us this entire time about the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, you might expect those who helped pave the way for that disastrous occupation to be very quiet at this point in history.

But, far from being silent and slithering under a rock to wait for the sweet embrace of death, these creatures have instead been loudly and shamelessly outspoken.

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has posted a lengthy essay by the former Prime Minister who led the United Kingdom into two of the most unconscionable military interventions in living memory. Blair criticizes the withdrawal as having been done out of “obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending ‘the forever wars’,” bloviating about “Radical Islam,” and asking, “has the West lost its strategic will?”

Read Tony Blair’s article on Afghanistan and what needs to happen next.https://t.co/WLy5UcxMpU

— Tony Blair Institute (@InstituteGC) August 22, 2021

It’s essentially a 2,750-word temper tantrum, authored by the same man who fed the British people this load of horse shit after 9/11:

The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.

This is a moment to seize. The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

Blair promised that by helping the Bush administration usher in an unprecedented new era of military expansionism they could seize this unfortunate event to “re-order the world” in a way that would benefit all the world’s most unfortunate people. Mountains of corpses and tens of millions of refugees later it is clear to anyone with functioning gray matter that this was all a pack of lies.

And now, like any sociopath whose reputation is under threat, Blair has begun narrative managing.

Tony Blair is paid around £1m a year as an international advisor to an organisation called the Mubadala Development Fund in the UAE

It has been reported that Mubadala has been developing a plan to mine US$1 trillion worth of resources in Afghanistan.

Skin in the game?

— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) August 22, 2021

Tony Blair is being paid £9m to advise the Saudi Arabian government. Yesterday the Saudis blew up a bus full of schoolchildren in Yemen. Reports suggest at least 29 children died. That works out at about £300,000 per child. Who says crime doesn’t pay? https://t.co/hi4m5H79Bj

— Frank Owen’s Legendary Paintbrush 🟨🟥 (@WarmongerHodges) August 10, 2018

This is also why George W Bush has released his own statement through his own institution. It’s also why Bush-era neocons like Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton are doing media tours condemning the withdrawal, and why Bill Kristol, whose neoconservative influence played a key role in the Bush administration’s military expansionism, is now promoting the arming of proxy forces against the Taliban. They’re narrative managing.

They’re narrative managing because they’ve been proven wrong, and because history will remember them as men who were proven wrong. Their claims that a massive increase in military interventionism would benefit the people of the world have been clearly and indisputably shown to have been false from top to bottom, so now they’re just men who helped murder millions of human beings.

It’s about preserving their reputations and their legacies. No no, we’re not mass murdering war criminals, we are visionaries. If we would have just remained in Afghanistan another twenty years, history would have vindicated us. If we would have just killed more people in Iraq, it would be a paradise right now. The catastrophe cannot possibly be the fault of the people directly responsible for orchestrating it. It’s got to be the fault of the officials who inherited it. It’s the fault of the ungrateful inhabitants of the nations we graciously invaded. It’s the people and their imbecilic desire to end “the forever wars”.

But of course it’s their fault. None of this needed to be this way, it was made this way by stupid people with no functioning empathy centers. They can try to re-frame and spin it however they like, but history will remember them for the monsters they are. The saner our society becomes, the more unforgiving our memory of their crimes will be.

caityjohnstone.medium.com