The Washington Post has a new article out bemoaning the fact that Russian military commanders are declining calls from the Pentagon to discuss their operations in Ukraine (I dunno guys, might have something to do with the fact that the US is sharing extensive military intelligence on exactly those operations directly with the Ukrainian government). Tucked all the way down in the eighteenth paragraph of the article, we find a much more interesting revelation: that Washington’s top diplomat has made no attempt to contact his counterpart in Moscow since the war began on the 24th of February.

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken has not attempted any conversations with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, since the start of the conflict, according to U.S. officials,” The Washington Post reports.

So the US government is continuing its policy of refusing to attempt any high-level diplomatic resolutions to this war despite its public hand-wringing about the horrific violence that’s being inflicted upon the people of Ukraine. This revelation fits nicely with a recent report by Bloomberg’s Niall Ferguson that sources in the US and UK governments have told him the real goal of western powers in this conflict is not to negotiate peace or end the war quickly, but to prolong it in order “bleed Putin” and achieve regime change in Moscow.

The amazing part of this column is that U.S. officials are saying out loud that they want the war to last in order to “bleed Putin”. They don’t care a fig about Ukraine. It stands completely alone (and Zelenskiy knows it, btw). https://t.co/NBOKvmT63K

— Leonid Bershidskiy (@Bershidsky) March 22, 2022

Building on an earlier report from The New York Times that the Biden administration “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire,” Ferguson writes that he has reached the conclusion that “the U.S. intends to keep this war going,” and says he has other sources to corroborate this:

“The only end game now,” a senior administration official was heard to say at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it. Seeing Russia get cut off will not look like a good vector and they’ll have to re-evaluate the Sino-Russia axis. All this is to say that democracy and the West may well look back on this as a pivotal strengthening moment.”

I gather that senior British figures are talking in similar terms. There is a belief that “the U.K.’s №1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin.” Again and again, I hear such language. It helps explain, among other things, the lack of any diplomatic effort by the U.S. to secure a cease-fire. It also explains the readiness of President Joe Biden to call Putin a war criminal.

Earlier this month when The Intercept’s Ryan Grim was able to get a word in edgewise at a White House press briefing amid the throngs of mass media reporters demanding to know why Biden still hasn’t started World War 3, Press Secretary Jen Psaki gave a very revealing answer.

“So, aside from the request for weapons, President Zelensky has also requested that the US be more involved in negotiations toward a peaceful resolution to the war. What is the U.S. doing to push those negotiations forward?” asked Grim.

“Well, one of the steps we’ve taken — a significant one — is to be the largest provider of military and humanitarian and economic assistance in the world, to put them in a greater position of strength as they go into these negotiations,” Psaki answered, completely dodging the question of whether the US was actually doing anything to help negotiate peace.

This is wild pic.twitter.com/CNZZ1wVzcz

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 16, 2022

As we’ve discussed previously, the US government has a well-documented history of working to draw Moscow into costly military quagmires with the goal of preoccupying its military forces and draining its coffers. Former US officials are on record publicly boasting about having done so in both Afghanistan and Syria. This is an agenda geared toward sapping the Russian government, manufacturing international consent for unprecedented acts of economic warfare designed (though perhaps ineptly) to crush the Russian economy, to foment discord and rebellion, and ultimately to effect regime change in Moscow.

The US empire doesn’t care about Ukrainian lives, and it’s insulting that its operatives continually pretend to. The empire will happily feed every man, woman and child in the entire nation into the mouth of this war if it means unseating a disobedient leader from a nuclear-armed seat of power which has become unacceptably cozy with Beijing and intolerably comfortable with intervening against US imperial agendas. And all the Ukrainian-flag-waving propagandized westerners with their #StandWithUkraine Instagram activism and blue and yellow profile pics will cheer for it every step of the way.

I hope this brutal proxy war ends and peace comes to Ukraine very quickly. But from what we’re seeing today there appears to be an immense globe-spanning power structure holding its foot against the door of the only exit from this horror.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

The Biden administration and the mainstream media are trumpeting a Russian effort to create allies in Latin America, America’s backyard.  This is part of the U.S. propaganda campaign against Moscow.  Last week, the press spokesman for the Department of State (DoS), Ned Price, gratuitously invoked the Monroe Doctrine against Russian involvement in Latin America, warning that the United States would “respond swiftly and decisively.”  In so doing, Price inadvertently and implicitly begged the question of how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s defense of its western border differs from U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

First, some particulars.  The mainstream media, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, are exaggerating Russian diplomatic efforts in South America, describing normal diplomatic activity as a frenzied campaign to increase influence in Washington’s backyard.  In the only evidence theTimes could produce, the article said that Putin “spoke” to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for the first time since 2014; “called” the leaders of Cuba and Venezuela; “hosted” the president of Argentina; and “scheduled” a meeting with Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro.  The Times concluded that these contacts were proof of Putin’s efforts to “build on ties that go back to the Cold War and shed light on the global nature of his ambitions.”  Total boilerplate!!

A day later, the Post—playing catch-up—castigated Bolsonaro for bringing “Latin America’s largest and most powerful country into an embrace with one of the United States’ greatest foreign adversaries.”  Like the Times, the Post maligned Putin’s “gambit to forge stronger relationships in Latin America, far from Russia’s traditional sphere of influence.”  The Post concluded that Putin was successfully “outflanking the West’s attempts to isolate his country.”  U.S. officials have contributed to this propaganda campaign with charges of Russian online influence operations to sow unrest in South America.  Again, no evidence was produced.

In distorting normal diplomatic activity that presented no threat to the United States, the mainstream media was carrying propaganda water for the Biden administration.  But there was one newsworthy aspect of this activity as a result of the Times’ efforts to create out of whole cloth the possibility of Putin taking the opportunity to provide “military support” or deploy “weapons in the region.”  The Times falsely linked Putin’s personal diplomacy to the possibility of putting “military infrastructure” in Venezuela or Cuba.  No evidence of such activity was offered; there is none and Latin American analysts pooh-poohed the notion of Russia deploying weapons across the region.

Nevertheless, this conjecture came up in a DoS press conference and Price, instead of dodging the issue, threatened a swift and decisive U.S. response.  In so doing, he opened the door to a discussion of whether Putin had legitimate reasons for wanted to control the deployment of modern Western weaponry, including a sophisticated air defense system in Poland and Romania, where there are U.S. bases.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken begged some questions of his own on February 18, when he spoke to the United Nations about the evidence of Russian invasion plans. Senior European officials have expressed frustration with Blinken’s remarks because he didn’t share specific intelligence, let alone sources and methods.  After all, it was nearly 20 years ago—February 2003—when another secretary of state, Colin Powell, made a case for war against Iraq by offering two dozen false allegations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  Powell purposely placed two leading U.S. intelligence officials behind him—Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and CIA director George Tenet, who played major roles in the politicization of intelligence regarding Iraq. Presumably Blinken and CIA director William Burns, the former deputy secretary of state, remember the setback to U.S. credibility from the politicization of intelligence and the deceitful speech from a once respected American official.

I’ve never been sure about the lessons of history, but since we only have the history of the past to go on, it may be a good time to reprise U.S. historical responses to foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere.  The Cuban missile crisis is well known to most.  Less well known is the German campaign in 1916-1917 to entice the Mexican government into a war with the United States.  German Foreign Secretary Alfred Zimmermann sent his telegram to Mexico with the assistance of the American embassy in Berlin because of Britain’s control of cable traffic in Europe.  The “Zimmermann telegram” became a major element In President Woodrow Wilson’s address to a special session of Congress in April 1917 to demand a declaration of war.

Before we mindlessly expanded NATO twenty-five years ago, it would have been helpful if the Clinton administration had remembered the history of the Monroe Doctrine as well as the history of Russian and Soviet efforts to safeguard their sensitive borders in the European theatre and Central Asia.  Ironically, the Cold War began to recede in the early 1980s when the United States deployed Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe, but the Soviets responded with diplomacy rather than deployments of their own.  The short time-to-target Pershing II presented a serious vulnerability problem for Soviet strategic forces and its early warning systems.

The United States (and the world) were lucky that a Soviet leadership—not only Mikhail Gorbachev but Yuri Andropov as well—realized the need to end the missile race in Europe, and accept an arms control treaty that eliminated intermediate-range missiles in the European theatre.  The Kremlin could have added to their own SS-20 force of intermediate-range missiles, but they chose not to.  The INF Treaty to eliminate intermediate-range missiles led to the resignations of two important Cold Warriors, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle.

Conversely, the deployment of Western weaponry in East Europe has created the conditions for a renewed Cold War between the United States and Russia.  Putin has responsibility for encircling a defenseless Ukraine with unthinkable force, but the United States is responsible for repudiating an understanding in 1990 to resist deploying military force in East Europe and expanding a NATO organization with former members of the Warsaw Pact as well as former Soviet republics.  We believe that Putin is seeking to undo the European security order with his policy of military coercion.  The Russians believe that we destroyed the European security order with the expansion of NATO, which threatens to place the fifth NATO state on Russia’s border.

If war ensues, there will be a great deal of blame to assign to both sides.  Like World War I, no one really wants war in Europe, but no statesman has emerged to invoke diplomacy to maintain the peace.

counterpunch.org

By Daniel MCADAMS

It is so rare to see an actual journalist rather than a regime stenographer in the U.S. mainstream media that there really needs to be a federal “endangered species” protection designation. In this case it would be AP’s Matt Lee, their diplomatic affairs correspondent, who’s been around the block many times and whose reputation is that he takes no crap from flacks regardless of party. Imagine that!

So in Thursday’s State Department brief, spokesman Ned Price was given the unenviable task of dressing up the Administration’s latest offering of bovine excrement and selling it as a gourmet dip. At issue was a “leaked” story in the Washington Post – ahem -that Russia is planning an elaborate video fabrication of a Ukrainian attack on eastern Ukraine to serve as a false flag to justify a Russian incursion into Ukraine.

This after a month or so of the U.S. Administration insisting that a Russian invasion of Ukraine was “imminent.” It was a claim dramatically refuted by none other than the one political leader who on paper would benefit most from such a narrative –  the Ukrainian president himself – who told Biden on a phone call to go take his meds and stop fear-mongering about a Russian invasion of Ukraine!

So a new threat needed to be cooked up in the bowels of Foggy Bottom and Langley.

Enter Ned Price from the State Department, who had the thankless task today of selling the hollow narrative that U.S. intelligence had uncovered a fantastical plot by the Russians to bring in crisis actors and fake bodies to sell a false narrative to justify their no longer “imminent” invasion of Ukraine.

Reminder that this State Department spokesman, Ned Price, is former CIA

The CIA, which brought us hits like WMDs, Russiagate, and Havana Syndrome, is now claiming Russia will do a crazy false-flag op, and you have to believe them, with zero evidence, because the US gov’t says so https://t.co/LG6m29zq3L pic.twitter.com/En3rq9mlxw

— Benjamin Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 4, 2022

The whole thing is reminiscent of the Obama Administration’s absurd suggestion that the attack on the U.S. CIA installation in Benghazi, Libya, was motivated by a laughable anti-Muslim video (instead of a U.S. arms deal gone wrong, as Sen. Paul uncovered).

Price’s pathetic talking point was this: we are declassifying intelligence information that Russia is about to release a fake video of a Ukrainian attack on Donbas as a false flag to open the door to Russian involvement.

Here’s a summary of what followed [Full transcript here]:

AP’s Matt Lee replied with a question any normal journalist would ask before our current era: “OK, but what evidence do you have that this is indeed the case?”

Ned: “Well that’s it – my ‘declassified’ claim that Russia is about to do it.”

Matt Lee: “Well, that’s not ‘declassified’ information, that’s just you claiming it. Surely you understand the difference. I mean, crisis actors, fake dead bodies – that’s Alex Jones territory.”

Ned: “You are a Russian propagandist.”

Yes this is the Reader’s Digest version, but essentially this is what took place in the extraordinary State Dept. briefing on Thursday. [Price told Lee: “If you doubt the credibility of the U.S. government, of the British government of other governments and wanna, you know, find solace in information that the Russians are putting out, that’s for you to do.”]

The U.S. government’s position position is that if you ask for any evidence of a U.S. government claim … you are a Putin agent!

Our friend, the analyst, Caitlin Johnstone also perfectly captures the absurdity of the Biden claims in this thread:

I’m declassifying evidence that Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland. Are you ready? Here it is:

Nigeria is planning a false flag operation in Switzerland.

The evidence is me asserting it. If you doubt this evidence, you’re a propagandist for Nigeria.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) February 4, 2022

But as the bipartisan support for bovine excrement continues to pollute the barnyard, at least we can thank Matt Lee from otherwise odious AP for refusing to thrust his chip into the Biden dip…

Daniel McAdams is executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

This article is from the Ron Paul Institute.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

Transcript of exchange between Price and Lee.

QUESTION: Thanks. Okay, well, that’s quite a mouthful there. So you said “actions such as these suggest otherwise” – suggest meaning that they suggest they’re not interested in talks and they’re going to go ahead with some kind of a – what action are you talking about?

MR PRICE: One, the actions I have just pointed to, the fact –

QUESTION: What action? What —

MR PRICE: The fact that Russia continues to engage in disinformation campaigns.

QUESTION: Well no, you’ve made an allegation that they might do that. Have they actually done it?

MR PRICE: What we know, Matt, is what we – what I have just said, that they have engaged in this activity, in this planning activity —

QUESTION: Well, engage in what – hold on a second. What activity?

MR PRICE: But let me – let me – because obviously this is not – this is not the first time we’ve made these reports public. You’ll remember that just a few weeks ago –

QUESTION: I’m sorry, made what report public?

MR PRICE: If you let me finish, I will tell you what report we made public.

QUESTION: Okay.

MR PRICE: We told you a few weeks ago that we have information indicating Russia also has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine. So that, Matt, to your question, is an action that Russia has already taken.

QUESTION: No, it’s an action that you say that they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. And I’m going to get to the next question here, which is: What is the evidence that they – I mean, this is – like, crisis actors? Really? This is like Alex Jones territory you’re getting into now. What evidence do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making?

MR PRICE: Matt, this is derived from information known to the U.S. Government, intelligence information that we have declassified. I think you know —

QUESTION: Okay, well, where is it? Where is this information?

MR PRICE: It is intelligence information that we have declassified.

QUESTION: Well, where is it? Where is the declassified information?

MR PRICE: I just delivered it.

QUESTION: No, you made a series of allegations and statements —

MR PRICE: Would you like us to print out the topper? Because you will see a transcript of this briefing that you can print out for yourself.

QUESTION: But that’s not evidence, Ned. That’s you saying it. That’s not evidence. I’m sorry.

MR PRICE: What would you like, Matt?

QUESTION: I would like to see some proof that you – that you can show that —

MR PRICE: Matt, you have been —

QUESTION: — that shows that the Russians are doing this.

MR PRICE: You —

QUESTION: Ned, I’ve been doing this for a long time, as you know.

MR PRICE: I know. That was my point. You have been doing this for quite a while.

QUESTION: I have.

MR PRICE: You know that when we declassify intelligence, we do so in a means —

QUESTION: That’s right. And I remember WMDs in Iraq, and I —

MR PRICE: — we do so with an eye to protecting sources and methods.

QUESTION: And I remember that Kabul was not going to fall. I remember a lot of things. So where is the declassified information other than you coming out here and saying it?

MR PRICE: Matt, I’m sorry you don’t like the format, but we have —

QUESTION: It’s not the format. It’s the content.

MR PRICE: I’m sorry you don’t like the content. I’m sorry you —

QUESTION: It’s not that I don’t like it or —

MR PRICE: I’m sorry you are doubting the information that is in the possession of the U.S. Government.

QUESTION: No, I —

MR PRICE: What I’m telling you is that this is information that’s available to us. We are making it available to you in order – for a couple reasons. One is to attempt to deter the Russians from going ahead with this activity. Two, in the event we’re not able to do that, in the event the Russians do go ahead with this, to make it clear as day, to lay bare the fact that this has always been an attempt on the part of the Russian Federation to fabricate a pretext.

QUESTION: Yes, but you don’t have any evidence to back it up other than what you’re saying. It’s like you’re saying, “We think – we have information the Russians may do this,” but you won’t tell us what the information is. And then when you’re asked —

MR PRICE: Well, that is the idea behind deterrence, Matt. That is the idea behind deterrence.

QUESTION: When you’re asked – and when you’re asked —

MR PRICE: It is our hope that the Russians don’t go forward with this.

QUESTION: And when you’re asked what the information is, you say, “I just gave it to you.” But that’s not what —

MR PRICE: You seem not to understand —

QUESTION: That’s not the way it works.

MR PRICE: You seem not to understand the idea of deterrence.

QUESTION: No, no, no, Ned. You don’t – you seem not to understand the idea of —

MR PRICE: We are trying to deter the Russians from moving forward with this type of activity. That is why we are making it public today. If the Russians don’t go forward with this, that is not ipso facto an indication that they never had plans to do so.

QUESTION: But then it’s unprovable. I mean, my God, what is the evidence that you have that suggests that the Russians are even planning this?

MR PRICE: Matt, you —

QUESTION: I mean, I’m not saying that they’re not. But you just come out and say this and expect us just to believe it without you showing a shred of evidence that it’s actually true – other than when I ask or when anyone else asks what’s the information, you said, well, I just gave it to you, which was just you making a statement.

MR PRICE: Matt, you said yourself you’ve been in this business for quite a long time. You know that when we make information – intelligence information public we do so in a way that protects sensitive sources and methods. You also know that we do so – we declassify information – only when we’re confident in that information.

QUESTION: But Ned, you haven’t given any information.

MR PRICE: If you doubt – if you doubt the credibility of the U.S. Government, of the British Government, of other governments, and want to find solace in information that the Russians are putting out —

QUESTION: Solace?

MR PRICE: — that is for you to do.

QUESTION: I don’t want – I’m not asking what the Russian Government is putting out. And what do you – what is that supposed to mean? ….

consortiumnews.com

While the people of Afghanistan are in a state of fear of the Taliban who now control the capital, major cities and countryside after the U.S. and NATO occupation of 20 years, please pardon my personal observances of some of my experiences during 16 years in the U.S. diplomatic corps and opening and closing U.S. embassies in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and the effects on the civilian populations of the countries involved.

In December 2001, I was a part of a very small team from the U.S. Department of State who were sent to Kabul to reopen the U.S. embassy.  It had been closed for 12 years following the Soviet exodus from Afghanistan and the subsequent civil war between the warlord militias who fought to gain land and influence.  The U.S. had sent CIA paramilitary and some U.S. Army Special Forces into Afghanistan in October 2001 to chase down Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda after the events of 9/11.

Now, 20 years later, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Afghans and a few thousands of international military including the U.S., the U.S. and its NATO partners are exiting Afghanistan under a pitiful agreement brokered during the Trump administration by Zalmay Khalizad, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and now special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, himself an Afghan who came to the U.S. as a teenager.

The deal with the Taliban sold out the government of Afghanistan and ended up with the release of 6,000 Taliban prisoners for an agreement that the Taliban would not fire on U.S. military during its departure from Afghanistan. No deal was struck for power-sharing or any other aspect that could have put the government of Afghanistan on a strong negotiating footing.

After undercutting the Afghan government, the U.S. is now left without any leverage over the Taliban and is facing the rapid takeover of the country as many of the 300,000 Afghan personnel trained by the U.S. and NATO militaries surrender to the Taliban or return to the warlord militias from which they came.

Zalmay Khalilzad, left, the U.S. envoy, signs off on peace deal with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a Taliban leader, in Doha, Qatar, Feb. 29, 2020. (State Department)

I was told when I arrived in Afghanistan that there is a time-honored tradition of changing sides depending on who has more personnel and firepower, and to live to fight another day. We are definitely seeing that now. Today we see that the president of the country, Ashraf Ghani, has fled to a neighboring country. [The Taliban have taken over the country and declared victory.]  I met Ghani when he arrived in Afghanistan as a private citizen in January 2002, just coming from lengthy employment with the World Bank. He was minister of finance for a period during the administrations of Hamid Karzai.

Five thousand U.S. military are arriving in Kabul to protect the international airport as over 4,000 U.S. government and contract employees leave.  U.S. State Department Spokesperson Ned Price on Aug. 12 said that it is “not an abandonment, not an evacuation, not a wholesale withdrawal, but is a reduction in the size of our civilian footprint.” A skeleton staff may remain in Kabul to keep the U.S. embassy nominally “open.”   Despite what the State Department calls it, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S. on Aug. 13 called U.S. actions “an abandonment.”

U.S. embassy personnel have destroyed sensitive documents as they prepare to leave Afghanistan.  U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is attempting to extract a commitment from the Taliban that they will not attempt to take over the extensive U.S. embassy compound “if it ever wants to receive foreign aid.”

Evacuation of Sierra Leone in 1997

May 30, 1997: Evacuees from Freetown, Sierra Leone, are escorted across the flight deck of the USS Kearsarge. (DoD)

While there was no U.S. military involvement in Sierra Leone’s civil war, the U.S. embassy had been the backstop of gunfire as the nearby State House was taken by the rebels.  Ninety windows were blown out of the embassy and the rebels made attempts to come into several embassy properties but were talked out of entering by our brave local employees.

The UN envoy, the British high commissioner and I, as charge d’affairs of the U.S. embassy, had discussions with the leadership of the coup about their giving up the coup in exchange for the government meeting several demands. But we were told by our higher-ups to stop discussions and prepare for evacuation as they had received indications that we might be kidnapped if we continued the talks.

That began the rapid organization to prepare for closing the embassy in just a few days.  The U.S. military sent the huge amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge for the main evacuation.

May 24, 2017: The USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor. (U.S. Marine Corps, Gabby Petticrew)

The Kearsarge had been offshore Zaire for possible evacuation of Americans from that country so we had to wait for the main evacuation for the Kearsarge to arrive. We put some embassy family members on a chartered flight arranged by the British embassy. But over the next three days we evacuated over 2,500 persons, including many U.S. embassy local employees, by helicopter from a U.S.-military-secured hotel to the Kearsarge, by then several miles offshore.

Thousands of Sierra Leonean citizens gathered at the hotel hoping they could be evacuated, but the decision in Washington was that the U.S. could not evacuate all of them. They were on their own to get to neighboring countries if they wanted to flee from the violent coup makers.

The embassy remained closed for one year until a Nigerian military force pushed the coup makers off the peninsula on which the capital was located. The U.S. embassy was closed six months later when rebel groups again came into the city.  Peace in Sierra Leone was finally achieved with the introduction of 18,000 United Nations sponsored military units that stayed in the country for several years.

Back to Afghanistan

May 30, 2011: Memorial Day at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. (S.K. Vemmer, State Department, Wikimediia Commons)

Back to Afghanistan. I was in Kabul in December 2001 on the small team that reopened the U.S. embassy.  I stayed for about six months.  We never dreamed the U.S. would stay in Afghanistan for 20 years.  In fact, our initial cables back to Washington predicted we should do what the U.S. intended to do in a short time as foreign militaries in Afghanistan, no matter the rationale for their presence, eventually were pushed out by Afghans.

Possible Retaliation

U.S. officials are very well aware that local citizens who work with the U.S. military are endangering themselves and their families when the U.S. departs.  The U.S. wars in Viet Nam, Iraq, Somalia have seen retaliation against persons who have worked with U.S. forces, but the protection of those persons is never considered in the decision making of sending U.S. military into a situation much less during the fast withdrawal of forces.  After 20 years in Afghanistan, it is estimated that 50,000 persons are eligible for some type of U.S. visa.

Retaliation by the Taliban against Afghan national military and national police forces trained by the U.S. and NATO were expected and have occurred. Afghan military units are surrendering to the Taliban in hopes they will not be killed in the time-honored tradition of recognizing that the opposing forces have more personnel and weaponry and surrendering to save your life.

Government forces on the borders of Afghanistan have surrendered in droves.  From May 1-27, at least 26 outposts and bases in four provinces — Laghman, Baghlan, Wardak and Ghazni — surrendered after the Taliban used village elders to deliver to outposts messages to surrender or be killed.

However, surrendering does not work for all units. In July, 22 Afghan Special Forces commandos, including the son of an Afghan general, were executed by Taliban as they were surrendering. 

The executions by the Taliban remind me of 2001 when General Abdul Rashid and U.S. forces took Taliban prisoners from Sheberghan prison and executed them in the desert as documented in the 2002 film:  Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death.  Memories in Afghanistan are long and retaliation is a given.

I don’t think the Taliban will take over the U.S. embassy compound as the Taliban wants international aid. And I suspect the U.S. will have a substantial military force inside the embassy to protect it.  There were already 90 marines inside and I think many of the 5,000 will go into the compound to protect the facility as seeing the facility overrun would not be what any administration wants to have seen.

Warlords & Their Militias: Same Story 20 Years Later

Atta Mohammad, on right, in March 2010 meeting with German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. (DoD, Daniel Stevenson)

Dostum was the warlord whose militias killed over 3,000 Taliban and other prisoners from Sheberghan prison by shooting into containers that contained the prisoners and then burying their bodies in the desert.  Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death documents these murders, which will be a basis for retaliation by the Taliban against Dostum and his militia 20 years later.

Similar Taliban retaliation should be expected by the Taliban against warlord Ismail Khan who has ruled the Herat region on the border with Iran for over 20 years. Khan was captured in Herat several days ago.

Presidential Palace in Kabul

President Palace in Kabul where the U.S.-Afghanistan joint declaration announcement ceremony was held on Feb. 29, 2020. (DoD, Nicole Mejia)

Today we know the Taliban have entered the presidential palace from which Ghani recently fled. The TV images of the Taliban in the palace remind me of when I first went to the palace in 2001 when Hamid Karzai invited us to stay for lunch-a pilaf. (It was the first hot meal we had had in Afghanistan. Before we got our little stove working in the bunker, and we were doing take-out from a restaurant owned by the brother of one of our embassy employees.)

The paintings in palace were being retouched after a protective overlay of paint on images that the Taliban would have destroyed.

A few weeks later, I was in the National Museum when statues and figures were returned by museum employees who had taken them to their homes or had buried them to protect them from destruction — as the Taliban had blown up the iconic massive Buddha statues in Bamiyan when they took into power in 1996.

Impact on Women in Afghanistan

Kabul, July 16, 2002. (U.S. National Archives)

We all are very concerned about the plight of women under another Taliban rule.  While tens of thousands of Afghans were killed and hundreds of thousands were wounded by the violence of the U.S./NATO military operations after Al Qaeda was forced out of Afghanistan, the occupation did provide some positive aspects for the role of women:

-By 2018, 3,135 functional health facilities were created, giving 87 percent of Afghan people access to a medical facility within two hours’ distance.

-By 2017, 33 percent of girls were in primary school, up from 10 percent in 2003.

-By 2017, 39 percent of young women had secondary education, up from 6 percent in 2003.

-By 2017, 3.5 million Afghan girls were in school, with 100,000 studying in universities

-By 2017, women’s life expectancy had risen to 66 from 56 in 2001.

-In 2015, childbirth mortality was 396 per 100,000 live births, down from 1,100 per 100,000 live births in 2000.

-By 2020, 21 percent of Afghan civil servants were women (compared with almost none during the Taliban years), 16 percent of them in senior management levels; 27 percent of Afghan members of parliament were women.

But according to a Brookings report, gains have been unequal, applying more to urban girls and women. In the rural areas where 76 percent of Afghan women live,  particularly in Pashtun areas but also among other rural minority ethnic groups, actual life has not changed much from the Taliban era. Women still depend on men in their families to give them permission to access health care, attend school, and work.

Most importantly, many Afghan men remain deeply conservative. A study showed that only 15 percent of Afghan men think women should be allowed to work outside of their home after marriage, and 66 percent of men complain Afghan women now have too many rights.  Families allow girls to have a primary or secondary education — up to puberty — and then will proceed with arranged marriages. Even if a young woman is granted permission to attend a university by her male guardian, her father or future husband may not permit her to work after graduation. Rural women said that the Taliban reduced sexual predation and robberies that debilitated their lives and most Afghan women in rural areas continue to be covered with the burqa.

consortiumnews.com

Whenever one gets into discussions about the decline of America’s ability to positively influence developments around the world a number of issues tend to surface. First is the hubristic claim by successive presidents that the United States is somehow “exceptional” as a polity while also serving as the world’s only superpower and also the anointed Leader of the Free World, whatever that is supposed to mean. Some critics of the status quo also have been willing to look a bit deeper, recognizing that it is the policies being pursued by the White House and Congress that are out of sync with what is actually happening in Asia, Africa and Latin America, being more driven by establishing acceptable narratives than by genuine interests.

The problem starts at the top. One can hardly have a great deal of respect for presidents who appointed neocon or neoliberal ideologues Condoleezza Rice, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Mike Pompeo or current incumbent Tony Blinken as Secretaries of State, but when all is said and done the area where the U.S. fails is most egregiously is in the personnel it actually sends overseas. It has far more non-professional ambassadors than any other country in the world. Does the American public know, for example, that fully 44% of American Ambassadors sent overseas under Donald Trump were political appointees, whose sole distinction in many cases is that they contributed large sums of money to the Republican National Committee? Though such individuals can sometimes turn out to be surprisingly effective, many frequently know nothing of the country that they have been assigned to and do not speak the local language. To cite my own experience, in my 21 years as an intelligence officer spent mostly in Europe I did not once work for an ambassador who was a Foreign Service Officer career diplomat and few of the political appointees I knew never bothered to learn the local language.

Part of the problem is that many U.S. ambassadors do not know what their job consists of. Ambassadors have existed since the time of the ancient Greeks. They were from the beginning granted a special immunity which enabled them to talk to enemy spokesmen to attempt to resolve issues without resort to arms. In the modern context, Ambassadors are sent to reside in foreign capitals to provide some measure of protection for traveling citizens and also to defend other perceived national interests. Ambassadors are not soldiers, nor are they necessarily the parties of government that ultimately make decisions on what to do when dealing with a foreign nation. They are there to provide a mechanism for exchanging views to create a dialogue while at the same time working with foreign governments to avoid conflict, whether over trade or politics. They should be bridge-builders who explain how American politics function, how the American government works, and at the same time educate Americans on how the country they are based in sees the United States.

By all these metrics, the U.S. diplomatic effort has been a failure and, at the end of the day, the United States taxpayer spends astonishing sums of money to support its global representational and security structures that provide little in return, rarely experiencing any notable successes and watching the reputation of the U.S. decline due to sheer ineptness. In my experience, the worst U.S. Ambassadors tend to be academics, which brings us to Michael McFaul, who served as Ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama from 2012-2014.

To be sure, viewing Russia as an enemy is a bipartisan impulse among the Washington political class. The neoconservatives and their neoliberal allies have both long been dreaming of regime change for Moscow, either because it is perceived as a threat or as an unacceptable autocracy. Given that, the appointment of Stanford Academic and Russia expert McFaul as Ambassador was intended to “reset” the bilateral relationship while also pushing the democracy promotion agenda and confronting various aspects of the domestic policies of the Vladimir Putin government that were considered unacceptable, to include the treatment of homosexuals. Pursuing that end, McFaul made a point of openly meeting with the political opposition in Russia. He thereby antagonized the officials in the government that he should have been working with to bring about acceptable change to such an extent that his term of office became untenable and he was an embarrassing failure.

But now McFaul has turned the usual Washington trick, converting failure into personal success. He is a regular go-to guy when Democrats either in Congress or in the White House need expert testimony on Russia and he is reliably a passionate supporter of the largely unsustainable Russiagate tale and all that implies. He is again a tenured professor at Stanford, where another top government failure Condi Rice, she of “mushroom cloud” fame, serves as Director of the Hoover Institution.

McFaul was recently bothered by what he described as an anonymous presumed “Russian troll” attack on twitter which had referred to his failure as Ambassador to Russia. This is how he responded: “I have a job for life at the best university in the world. I live in a giant house in paradise. I make close to a million dollars a year. I have adoring fans on tv and half a million followers on twitter 99% who also admire me. I’m doing just fine without a damn visa from Russia. And I am not afraid to tweet under my own name. I feel sorry for people like you who aren’t brave enough to do so.”

Not surprisingly, McFaul’s message, which was replayed in a number of places on the internet, struck many as a bit over the top, dripping with entitlement and self-esteem coming from someone who had been given an important government job and had only succeeded in making matters worse. He responded to the criticism by tweeting an addendum: “I wrote than message in a private channel. I did not expect it to be published. But it was still a mistake, I apologize. It was arrogant and idiotic. A swarm of Russian trolls was accusing me of failure, and I responded in a most unprofessional way. Explanation, not excuse.”

Well, it’s nice to hear an apology for a change from anyone associated with the United States government, but the point is that McFaul is symptomatic of much of what is wrong in terms of how the White House makes policy impulsively and appoints poorly informed ideologues to implement what has been decided. McFaul is not unique. President Donald Trump certainly set a precedent in providing a whole group of incompetents to support the clueless Mike Pompeo at State, to include Nikki Haley at the United Nations, Rick Grenell in Germany, David Friedman in Israel, and the ubiquitous John Bolton at the National Security Council. It is almost as if in the area of foreign policy, the United States government as it is currently configured is designed to fail.

The solution is obvious. The United States desperately needs a foreign policy that is based on genuine national interests. It needs to stop rewarding political donors and needs also to send people as Ambassadors who are sensitive to the culture and red lines existing in the countries where they are posted. That doesn’t mean approving what others do, but it does mean listening to what they have to say. If one wants to restore America’s credibility and its reputation, examining the McFaul experience in Russia should be an excellent learning tool and taking steps so as not to repeat that failure would be a good place to start.

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a blistering condemnation of China this week, accusing it of conducting massive cyberattacks against America and its allies.

“The United States and countries around the world are holding the People’s Republic of China (PRC) accountable for its pattern of irresponsible, disruptive, and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace, which poses a major threat to our economic and national security,” said the top U.S. diplomat in an unprecedented statement.

Significantly, the grave accusations against China were coordinated with U.S. allies in the Five Eyes intelligence group – including Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Beijing dismissed the cyberattack claims as a “huge lie” orchestrated by Washington to stir up “major conflict among countries”. It is notable that similar accusations have been leveled against Russia which is alleged to be a base for cybercrime gangs to extort Western infrastructure companies. It is all part of Washington’s new Cold War agenda to polarize the world into enemy camps.

When Blinken follows through with calls on “our partners and allies to promote responsible state behavior in cyberspace, counter cybercrime, and oppose digital authoritarianism” it is obvious that what Washington is seeking to achieve is the isolation and undermining of China (and Russia).

If China can be smeared as a cyber felon then that serves to scupper Beijing’s strategic ambitions of promoting trade and investment deals under the rubric of its global Belt and Road Initiative. Washington is trying to discredit China as a worthy international partner in its constructing swathes of social infrastructure to developing new-generation telecommunication networks.

The Biden administration has disclosed its priority focus on hampering China as the number one geopolitical rival. The Biden White House is going all out to cleave strategic partnership between the European Union and China. When those two signed a major trade and investment accord at the end of last year, the incoming Biden administration was palpably vexed by the prospect.

Washington’s moves have ever since been about derailing that EU-China deal. It may be posited that Biden is prepared to forgo American objections to Germany’s energy trade with Russia in order to keep Berlin in play for challenging Beijing. China’s rise as an economic superpower is perceived as the “greatest threat” to U.S. global dominance.

So much of American rhetoric is self-projection of its own guilt over malign conduct. Washington accuses China and Russia – with negligible evidence – of cybercrime, espionage and hacking when it is the biggest proven perpetrator. Likewise, Washington accuses its rivals of waging “hybrid warfare”. That too is just another look in the mirror.

Blinken’s foray into alleged China cybercrime this week can be seen as a global front to slander and damage Beijing. But in the arsenal of American hybrid warfare, there are national-level forays to sabotage China’s interests. The sum total is aimed at disrupting the ambitious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. The BRI was launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping and in a short span, it has grown to fuel economic development in over 100 nations, ranging from Southeast Asia to Africa, and from Europe to Latin America. Washington is livid with envy. Talking points often accuse China of using development as a debt trap. But, on balance, the giant investment and economic planning for “people-centered” development do seem to have been a tremendous and, for the most part, welcome success.

China, Russia and Southeast Asia have become a vital engine for the global economy over the next century. Each nation in Eurasia is an important node in the multipolar firmament which is challenging the U.S.-dominated Western order. It is in this context that the United States has taken to destabilizing countries as a way to thwart the China-led BRI and its global juggernaut.

Analysts point to growing U.S. support for political opposition groups in Southeast Asia, such as in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, in conjunction with Western media flagging allegations of human rights violations. Each of these nations has seen colossal investment from China in infrastructure projects to facilitate regional trade and transport. They are key nodes in expanding the China-led BRI.

Wendy Sherman, Blinken’s deputy at the State Department, signaled the U.S. agenda when she arrived in Cambodia last month for what was seen as the most important visit so far to Southeast Asia by the Biden administration.

Sherman’s visit can be viewed as an overture by the United States to disrupt China’s longtime partnership in Cambodia. She claimed that China’s construction projects at the deepwater port city of Sihanoukville were a cover for building a military naval base. China and the Cambodian government reject that claim. They say the development is part of a trade and transport plan to boost Cambodia’s logistical network with the region. Since Beijing launched its BRI projects in 2013, Cambodia was an early participant among Southeast Asian nations and has accrued major economic successes.

The American diplomat “urged Cambodia’s leadership to maintain an independent and balanced foreign policy in the best interests of the Cambodian people.” In other words, this was Washington telling Cambodia to curb its strategic economic partnership with China.

Sherman also notified the Cambodian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen that her visit included holding meetings with opposition figures whom Phnom Penh accuse of being sponsored by U.S. government-linked foundations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The NED has been a major backer of “color revolutions” in various countries which critics say is a polite term for Washington-designated “regime change”.

It takes quite a brass neck for a senior U.S. government representative to fly into a foreign country that has strong political ties with China and then to proceed to lecture the leaders of that country that Washington disapproves of economic partnership with Beijing, and by way of threatening future trouble the U.S. official makes it clear that she is communicating with American-sponsored opposition groups.

Washington’s overarching motive and objective are to try to stymie China’s global economic growth and its strategic partnerships. On one level, the American tactic is a country-by-country effort to unravel BRI as seen in Sherman’s audacious visit to Cambodia. At another level, there is a full-on effort to smear and isolate China internationally as a cyber rogue state and human rights pariah with dubious allegations of genocide against its Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.

China’s vastness as an economic power and its indispensable integration as a global partner with so many nations will not allow the American tactics to work so easily. However, in that case, the upshot of frustration for Washington may lead to direct confrontation with Beijing.

The Biden administration, heavily influenced by the radical progressive wing of the Democratic Party, has given U.S. diplomatic missions the authority to raise the standards of fiercely politicized domestic movements, even as a group of Republicans attempt to halt the political circus.

In honor of June ‘Pride month,’ 30 action-packed days of politically charged charades, parades and hefty corporate sponsorship devoted to coddling sexual lifestyles, the Biden administration has authorized U.S. ambassadors to fly the rainbow-colored LGBTQ+ emblem alongside Old Glory.

“The Department has committed to increasing U.S. engagement on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI+) human rights issues abroad,” Anthony J. Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, wrote in a press statement.

Aside from the political firestorm that such procedure has sparked back home (a group of House Republicans have responded by introducing the “Only Old Glory Act,” which would prohibit any standard besides the American flag from appearing at U.S. embassies), it has opened the door to some jarring and unprecedented spectacles overseas.

Does anything capture the crumbling sign of these degenerate times more succinctly than the LGBTQ+ flag being displayed at the U.S. embassy to the Vatican?

The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See celebrates #PrideMonth with the Pride flag on display during the month of June. The United States respects the dignity and equality of LGBTQI+ people. LGBTQI+ rights are human rights. pic.twitter.com/Xentlnr16E

— U.S. in Holy See (@USinHolySee) June 1, 2021

Had Pope Francis and the Holy See been taken aback by the White House’s display of sex-drenched virtue signaling, which has not been replicated in other far less tolerant places, incidentally, like Saudi Arabia or Indonesia, he could have simply invited the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican for some explanation. The gesture may have gone far at convincing the flock that Francis is not attempting to convert the ultra-conservative Vatican to more liberal ways, as many now fear. Yet nothing of the sort happened. Perhaps the reason is that Francis, much like the Democratic leader Joe Biden, just the second Commander-in-Chief in U.S. history to be Catholic, has fallen under the sway of his own so-called ‘gay lobby,’ which is said to exist as an influential force behind the Vatican walls.

But the issue at hand is no longer just a matter of ‘gay rights.’ The LGBTQ+ movement, which has a direct impact on the lives of children and minors, has radically transformed the conversation about alternative sexual lifestyles. The U.S. public school system is now teaching elementary grade students about transgenderism, while ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’ – which is exactly what it sounds like, men dressed in drag reading sexually laced stories to small children – has become a nationwide event inside of taxpayer supported libraries.

Meanwhile, the American Medical Association (AMA) has recently lectured state governors to “stop interfering in health care of transgender children,” and to veto state legislation that would prohibit “medically necessary” gender transition-related care for minor patients, calling such efforts “a dangerous intrusion into the practice of medicine.”

The rainbow flag is not the only politically charged symbol being put on display at U.S. embassies. On May 25, the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) standard has also taken up residency at several diplomatic missions around the world.

“The Department supports the use of the term ‘Black Lives Matter’ in messaging content, speeches, and other diplomatic engagements with foreign audiences to advance racial equity and access to justice on May 25 and beyond,” an internal declassified message from the Secretary of State’s office reads.

Had this radical social justice group been a squeaky clean organization, which it is certainly not, that still would not give the Democratic Party the right to promote it from U.S. diplomatic missions. Only the American flag, which is representative of all Americans, should have that honor. Unfortunately, an argument on behalf of ‘simple’ patriotism will never satisfy the radical progressives, who actually view the traditions and history of the nation as the root of the problem.

US embassies in Spain, Greece, Cambodia and more flying BLM flags today pic.twitter.com/3vndqBYZtN

— AntifaBook.com (@JackPosobiec) May 25, 2021

What is so disturbing about the BLM movement is how it is perfectly wedded to the tenets of critical race theory (CRT), an ideology that says ‘white supremacy’ manifests itself in Western society through abstract and improvable notions such as ‘white privilege’ and latent racism. Ignoring the tremendous progress that has been made on the civil rights front over the last 70 years, this ideology, which is being taught to employees at government institutions, public schools and corporations, among other places, wishes to supplant the understandable concept of ‘equality’ with that of ‘equity;’ the former means that everyone has the opportunity to succeed, while the latter means that everyone receives an equal portion of the rewards. If that rings of Marxism, it’s no accident. CRT is a gnarled branch from the tree of Marxist thinking that has substituted class warfare for racial strife.

In fact, talk about ‘systemic racism’ is not unlike the transgender section of the rainbow flag that says something exists without the slightest amount of biological proof; feelings and emotions trump scientific inquiry and anyone who expresses skepticism is branded a hater and quickly cancelled into oblivion.

What all of this proves is that issues related to race and sex in the United States has become, especially in the last several years, fiercely contested political ground that shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Thus, the spectacle of U.S. embassies raising the flags to these political movements not only triggers the conservatives in the United States, it must seem utterly baffling to host governments where the embassies are located. The problem with police violence, not to mention out of control crime rates, is a phenomenon almost entirely unique to the American experience. Thus, to see ‘Black Lives Matter’ banners in foreign capitals will probably elicit more confusion than compassion.

Meanwhile, the hyper-sexualization of the U.S. youth, complete with grade-school lectures on subjects totally beyond their comprehension, is also partially symptomatic of the medical industry’s desire to create yet another ‘consumer niche.’ This one comes replete with indoctrinated children confused about their sexuality and gender, thanks in no small part to the work of the entertainment, social media, and medical industries – who will feel the need to sign up for a lifetime of pricey ‘treatments,’ including puberty blockers, hormones and possibly irreversible surgery. There’s an entire world of impressionable youth out there, extremely susceptible to ideas regarding their self-identity and self-esteem, especially in their formative years. Yet the LGBTQ+ community has absolutely no desire to shield minors from their sex-drenched messages, but rather immerse them in it from every available media. Just ask Desmond is Amazing, the “10-year-old drag kid shaping the youth of drag youth.”

Desmond Is Amazing is the future and we’re here for it pic.twitter.com/jTWm1rRull

— Mashable (@mashable) November 3, 2019

Perhaps the most important question with regards to using U.S. embassies as political message boards is: when does it stop? Assuming that the Republicans will one day control the White House again, will they gleefully seek retribution, perhaps letting the National Rifle Association fly its colors in the name of ‘safety and security’ for an entire month? Or how about a new take on the Black Lives Matter motto, like maybe ‘Unborn Lives Matter’, in a nod to the millions of abortions that take place every day around the globe? One can readily imagine the serious problems this will create.

In any case, the White House, regardless as to what party is in power, must resist the temptation to hoist these troublesome false flags, which do nothing to promote international diplomacy, but in fact make it that much harder to achieve. Attempts to get cheap political brownie points back home by interfering in the sensitive working of diplomatic missions is a disgraceful act and should end once and for all.

That the United States likes to use expressions like “shock and awe” or “maximum pressure” would rather suggest that there is a psychopath working in the White House basement whose full-time job is to come up with pithy one-liners to somehow euphemize government bad behavior. The expressions hardly mean anything in and of themselves apart from “tough talk” but they do serve as an alternative to having to admit in plain language to the killing of millions of people since the Global War on Terror began in 2001. “Millions?” one might skeptically ask. Yes, millions if one includes all those killed directly or indirectly as a result of the wars. Direct victims of the violence number at least 157,000 in Afghanistan, 182,000 in Iraq, 400,000 in Syria and 25,000 in Libya. And if you want to go back a few years three million Vietnamese died in 1964-1975 while 2.5 million civilians were killed in Korea. And even in the “Good War” World War 2 there were unnecessary incidents to include the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 105,000, the firebombing of Tokyo adding another 97,000, and the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden that together killed 45,000.

An estimated ten million more civilians have been displaced from their homes since 2001, creating refugee crises in both Europe and the Americas, while trillions of dollars have also been wasted or “misplaced” by the geniuses at the Pentagon and in Congress. And some might reasonably argue that the violence taking place all around the world has also been internalized in the U.S., with mass murders surfacing in the news media every few days. Some argue that the United States has nearly always been at war since its founding, which would be true, but it is also correct to note that the nature of America’s lethal engagement with the rest of the world has changed in the past twenty years. Old wars were fought to expand territory and trade or to acquire colonies for the same purpose, meaning they were intended to increase one’s power and wealth. Since 9/11, however, the wars are being fought seemingly without any real identifiable objective while also inflicting significant losses in relative wealth and power on the United States.

The fundamental problem is that the United States is being led by a political and financial elite that has completely bought into a radical view that Americans have a “manifest destiny” to create an international order that is both plausibly democratic and rules-based that would as the theory goes benefit everyone. This is, of course, nonsense as the United States itself is becoming increasingly totalitarian while it also nurtures in its bosom anti-democratic states like Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The elite that might be blamed for many of the missteps of the past twenty years includes both liberals and conservatives, all of whom for one reason or another embrace America’s mission. There is, for example, little to differentiate the world views of Donald Trump appointees Mike Pompeo and John Bolton from those of the current foreign policy incumbent Tony Blinken, as all three men believe that the use of force is the completely acceptable ultimate response to recalcitrant nations and leaders.

Blinken shares the very same trait visible in Pompeo and Bolton, that they actually radiate a sense of moral superiority while implementing policies that result in the pointless deaths of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands and even millions of innocents. They occupy the bully pulpit as they sanctimoniously call for action regarding their “noble cause” of making the rest of the world both look like America while also deferring to Washington for direction and guidance.

Tony Blinken is not surprisingly a protégé of Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who famously cackled that “it was worth it” when asked about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to U.S. enforced sanctions on food and medicine. Somehow it seems that whenever one turns over a rock in the Democratic Party up pops someone connected with the Clintons. Blinken recently produced and tweeted out a bizarre video that attempts to explain the real “humanity” behind the current Syrian policy, which he helped to define and initiate working closely with Joe Biden while serving under President Barack Obama. It is a sanctions-plus military intervention construct that has, inevitably, resulted in the deaths and the displacements into Europe and the Middle East. The policy was from the beginning clearly intended to bring about “regime change” in Damascus even though the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad in no way threatened the United States.

Blinken tweeted: “When I think of the suffering of the Syrian people, including Syrian children, I think of my own two children. How could we not take action to help them? Our common humanity demands it. Shame on us if we don’t. We have to find a way to do something to take action to help people.” Blinken fails to mention that the blood of the Syrian children is largely on his hands, particularly as the U.S. and Israel effectively turned loose and otherwise supported the terrorist and separatist groups that killed so many Syrian civilians while also destroying entire towns, religious centers and many irreplaceable relics of the country’s history.

So Blinken is really a good guy, thinking about his own kids while mourning the deaths of so many Syrian boys and girls? No. If he really wanted to help those children, he would have announced that U.S. troops will be withdrawn from Syria immediately. He would have lifted sanctions on the country so that it can begin serious reconstruction, together with restoring access to food and needed medicines. He did nothing of the sort and clearly is fully on board with the agenda set over the past ten years by the neocons and their Israeli masters plus the “democracy promotion” at all costs wing in his own party.

And the real problem is that Syria is not alone. Blinken and his cohorts are also encouraging Ukraine’s irredentism which is close to bringing on a war with Russia while also poking China over Taiwan. And then there is also Venezuela which appears to need a regime change and the perennial problem with Iran. And Afghanistan? Blinken should realize that all the deaths of the children that so concern him could be avoided if he and those pulling his strings would adopt a more modest agenda and stay at home. We have enough problems in the United States, but then again, the hubris which has created a pointless foreign policy would likely be channeled to drive still more of the destructive impulses that are turning the country into a collective of hostile enclaves.

Like proverbial bad pennies, the neocon imperialists who plagued the Barack Obama administration have turned up in force in Joe Biden’s State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has given more than winks and nods to the dastardly duo of Victoria Nuland, slated to become Blinken’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three position at the State Department, and Samantha Power, nominated to become the Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Nuland and Power both have problematic spouses who do not fail to offer their imperialistic opinions regardless of the appearance of conflicts-of-interest. Nuland’s husband is the claptrappy neocon warmonger Robert Kagan, someone who has never failed to urge to prod the United States into wars that only benefit Israel. Power’s husband is the totally creepy Cass Sunstein, who served as Obama’s White House “information czar” and advocated government infiltration of non-governmental organizations and news media outlets to wage psychological warfare campaigns.

True to form, Blinken’s State Department has already come to the aid of Venezuela’s right-wing self-appointed “opposition leader” Juan Guaido, whose actual constituency is found in the wealthy gated communities of Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates in south Florida and not in the barrios of Caracas or Maracaibo.

Blinken and his team of old school yanqui imperialists have also criticized the constitutional and judicially-warranted detention of former interim president Jeanine Áñez, who became president in 2019 after the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government of President Evo Morales was overthrown in a Central Intelligence Agency-inspired and -directed military coup. The far-right forces backing Áñez were roundly defeated in the October 2020 election that swept MAS and Morales’s chosen presidential candidate, Luis Arce, back into power. It seems that for Blinken and his ilk, a decisive victory in an election only applies to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, not to Arce and MAS in Bolivia.

It should be recalled that while Blinken was national security adviser to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration, every sort of deception and trickery was used by the CIA to depose Morales in Bolivia and President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. In fact, the Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, claimed its first Latin American political victim when a CIA coup was launched against progressive President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras. Today, Honduras is ruled by a right-wing kleptocratic narco-president, Juan Orlando Hernández, whose brother, Tony Hernández, is currently serving life in federal prison in the United States for drug trafficking. For the likes of Blinken, Power, Nuland, and former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice, who currently serves as “domestic policy adviser” to Biden, suppression of progressive governments and support for right-wing dictators and autocrats have always been the preferred foreign policy, particularly for the Western Hemisphere. For example, while the Biden administration remains quiet on right-wing regimes in Central America that are responsible for the outflow of thousands of beleaguered Mayan Indians to the southern U.S. border with Mexico, it has announced that Trump era sanctions on 24 Nicaraguan government officials, including President Daniel Ortega’s wife and Nicaragua’s vice president, Rosario Murillo, as well as three of their sons – Laureano, Rafael, and Juan Carlos – will continue.

Biden’s Western Hemisphere foreign policy is not much different from that of Obama’s. Biden and Brazilian far-right, Adolf Hitler-loving, and Covid pandemic-denying President Jair Bolsonaro are said to have struck a deal on environmental protection of the Amazon Basin ahead of an April 22 global climate change virtual summit called by the White House. A coalition of 198 Brazilian NGOs, representing environmental, indigenous rights, and other groups, has appealed to Biden not to engage in any rain forest protection agreement with the untrustworthy Bolsonaro. The Brazilian president has repeatedly advocated the wholesale deforestation of the Amazon region. Meanwhile, while Biden urges Americans to maintain Covid public health measures, Bolsonaro continues to downplay the virus threat as Brazil’s overall death count approaches that of the United States.

Blinken’s State Department has been relatively quiet on the Northern Triangle of Central America fascist troika of Presidents Orlando of Honduras, Alejandro Giammattei of Guatemala, and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Instead of pressuring these fascistas to democratize and stop their genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples of their nations, Biden told Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador that he would pump $4 billion into supposed “assistance” to those countries to stop the flow of migrants. Biden is repeating the same old American gambits of the past. Any U.S. assistance to kleptocratic countries like those of the Northern Triangle has and will line the pockets of their corrupt leaders. Flush with U.S. aid cash, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador will be sure to grant contracts to greedy Israeli counter-insurgency contractors always at the ready to commit more human rights abuses against the workers, students, and indigenous peoples of Central America.

Biden is also in no hurry to reverse the freeze imposed by Donald Trump on U.S.-Cuban relations. Biden, whose policy toward Cuba represents a fossilized relic of the Cold War, intends to maintain Trump’s freeze on U.S. commercial, trade, and tourism relations with Cuba. Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, a Jewish Cuban-American expatriate, is expected to reach out to right-wing Cuban-Americans in south Florida in order to ensure Democratic Party inroads in the 2022 and 2024 U.S. elections. Therefore, even restoring the status quo ante established by Barack Obama is off-the-table for Biden, Blinken, and Mayorkas. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Cuban-American and ethically-challenged Democrat Bob Menendez, has stated there will be no normalization of pre-Trump relations with Cuba until his “regime change” whims are satisfied. Regurgitating typical right-wing Cuban-American drivel, Mayorkas has proclaimed after he was announced as the new Homeland Security Secretary, “I have been nominated to be the DHS Secretary and oversee the protection of all Americans and those who flee persecution in search of a better life for themselves and their loved ones.” The last part of that statement was directed toward the solidly Republican bloc of moneyed Cuban, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Bolivian interests in south Florida.

While Blinken hurls his neocon invectives at Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he remains silent on the repeated foot-dragging by embattled and highly unpopular right-wing Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on implementing a new Constitution to replace that put into place in 1973 by the fascist military dictator General Augusto Pinochet. The current Chilean Constitution is courtesy of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy “Svengali,” the duplicitous Henry Kissinger, an individual who obviously shares Blinken’s taste for “realpolitik” adventurism on a global scale.

While Blinken has weighed in on the domestic politics of Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, he has had no comment on the anti-constitutional moves by Colombian far-right authoritarian President Ivan Duque, the front man for that nation’s Medellin narcotics cartel. It would also come as no surprise if Blinken, Nuland, and Power have quietly buttressed the candidacy of right-wing banker, Guillermo Lasso, who is running against the progressive socialist candidate Andrés Arauz, the protegé of former president Rafael Correa. Blinken can be expected to question the results of the April 11 if Lasso cries fraud in the event of an Arauz victory. Conversely, Blinken will remain silent if Lasso wins and Arauz cries foul. That has always been the nature of U.S. Western Hemisphere policy, regardless of what party controls the White House.